Episcopal Café has drawn attention in ABC’s visitors to Canada on “aberrations south of the border” to a report in the Anglican Journal on the recent visit to Canada of “two pastoral visitors from the U.K. who were deputized by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams”. They were Bishop Chad Gandiya of Harare, Zimbabwe, and Bishop Colin Bennetts, the retired bishop of Coventry.
Rather surprisingly, the visitors appear to have included remarks in their report about a country they were not visiting, the USA. According to the Journal:
The visitors said they were also reminded frequently by bishops that “Canada is not the USA.” While the United States is seen as a melting pot culture where religious and ethnic groups are synthesized into “Americans,” Canadians “genuinely value and seek to live with diversity.” Differences between the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church were underscored, including the area of Christology. “We sensed that in Canada there was a general consensus on the nature of orthodoxy, with fewer extreme views of the kind that have led to some of the aberrations south of the border,” the report said. “Even the bishops who were strongly progressive in the matter of same-sex blessings insisted that they stood firmly within the creedal mainstream.” This, the report said, is “an encouraging sign that it allows for a more obviously Christ-centred approach to issues that currently divide the Communion, to say nothing of the wider church.”
Now read this article about the skills of Bishop Bennetts as a “bridge-builder”, Conflict resolution expert sent to observe at HOB.
198 CommentsAlthough he is now Hunkering down in the snow? Alan Wilson wrote last Sunday about the Rule of St Benedict, see It’s not what you say….
Giles Fraser wrote in the Church Times about Football in the wilds of Yemen.
John Cottingham writes in The Times that Our restless quest for God is a search for home.
David Bryant writes in the Guardian that A religion that is based on a code of moral injunctions should be approached warily.
Cif belief asked What are you frightened of this year? to which David Walker replied Spiders and authoritarianism and Mark Dowd replied The Pope’s visit.
Fulcrum published a sermon by Graham Kings on The Holy Spirit and the Magi.
12 CommentsThe outline agenda for next month’s meeting of General Synod is now available online and is copied below.
Note: In the agenda DSM stands for Diocesan Synod Motion, and PMM for Private Member’s Motion. The texts of the private members’ motions are online.
GENERAL SYNOD: FEBRUARY 2010
Outline Agenda
Monday 8 February
Afternoon
[ 2-4pm: Meetings of the House of Clergy and House of Laity ]
Tuesday 9 February
Morning
Afternoon
Wednesday 10 February
Morning
Afternoon
Thursday 11 February
Morning
Afternoon
Friday 12 February
Morning
Amended again Monday afternoon
My report in last week’s Church Times on the December debate in the House of Lords, can be now be read at Religion is more than this, say peers.
The consideration of the Equality Bill will resume next week, when the House of Lords considers the bill in Committee. The following five dates have been allocated: Monday 11 Jan, Wednesday 13 Jan, Tuesday 19 Jan, Monday 25 Jan, Wednesday 27 January.
Numerous amendments have been proposed, see the new marshalled list of amendments to be moved in committee, starting here.
Monday And now this revised marshalled list starting here.
The Conservative party spokesperson, Baroness Varsi, together with Baroness O’Cathain, Lord Anderson of Swansea, and the Bishop of Winchester have put down an amendment to strike out the whole of the new definition of the purposes of organised religion. Amendment 100. The latter three have also put down an amendment to remove the word “proportionate” in paragraphs 5 and 6 of Schedule 9 clause 2. Amendments 98, 99
Baroness Varsi and Baroness Morris have also put down an amendment which would remove the word “philosophical” from the definition of “belief”. Amendment 20
The Bishop of Winchester had put down an amendment dealing with religious marriages and gender reassignment discrimination. This is not in the current list because it has been withdrawn for redrafting.I am told it will be resubmitted shortly.
The Bishop of Chester has put down an amendment to insert the words “under medical supervision” into the definition of gender reassignment. Amendment 10
Baroness Turner of Camden has put down amendments to ensure that the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 will have to be read in light of Schedule 9 (3). Amendments 124, 125 and 137
She has also put down amendments:
– to modify paragraph 8 so that it reads (addition in bold):
Employment is for the purposes of an organised religion only if the purpose of the employment wholly or mainly involves—
Amendment 100
– to qualify Clause 3 of Schedule 9 (Other requirements relating to religion or belief) to add:
(d) A is not operating as a public authority, on behalf of a public authority or operating in relation to a contract with public authorities.”
Amendment 101A
Lord Alli has put down amendments:
– to allow civil partnerships to take place on religious premises Amendment 119A
– to delete the clause in Schedule 9 paragraph 2(4) which reads “(f) a requirement related to sexual orientation.” i.e. the transposition of the 2003 SO Regulations paragraph 7(3). Amendment 97E
Lord MacKay of Clashfern has put down this amendment:
“Conscientious objection
Nothing in this Act shall have the effect of requiring a person (A) to provide a good or service to a person (B) when doing so has the effect of making A complicit with an action to which A has a genuine conscientious objection.”
Amendment 57A
Michael Foster MP Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Equalities has today announced that the Government will propose an amendment:
16 CommentsContrary to some reports over the weekend, the Equality Bill will still allow churches to hire only male clergy and will let faith-based charities continue to recruit people of the same faith where this is a requirement of the job, such as care staff who may also be asked to pray with the people they look after. We have been absolutely clear on this throughout the Bill’s passage, but as there has been some misunderstanding around our intentions we will amend the Bill to make this clear beyond doubt.
Updated Friday morning
Malcolm whose earlier article at Simple Massing Priest The Anglican Covenant and Democratic Centralism was listed only in the comments on my previous roundup, has written again, this one is titled Rowan and the real revisionists.
Neal Michell has written Is the Anglican Covenant Non-Anglican? at Covenant.
Leander Harding has written Commentary on the Anglican Covenant 2009.
Ruth Gledhill has interviewed Gregory Cameron, see Confidence in the Covenant? at Religious Intelligence and also Church of England to consider communion with conservatives in US at The Times together with General Synod to be asked to recognise ACNA.
Retired archbishop Moses Tay doesn’t think much of the Covenant, see Anglican Covenant ‘Whitewashes’ Denomination’s Immorality: Retired Archbishop exclusively in the Christian Post.
In a related matter, Kenneth Kearon has provided an explanation of the current legal status of the Constitution of the Anglican Consultative Council. See this article at Episcopal Café Anglican Constitution is what it seems to be and also this note from Lionel Deimel Communion Transparency, Take 3.
Addition
Scott Gunn has published Anglican Communion woes? Be not afraid.
The Private Members’ Motion relating to ACNA can be found here. Scroll up for an explanation of how motions get selected for debate.
57 CommentsUpdated Saturday morning
John Denham announced yesterday the names of 13 new faith advisers who “will act as a ‘sounding board’ to advise on effective engagement with faith communities, and the impact of Communities and Local Government policy on faith communities.”
Read the full press release here.
The members of the panel are:
So far, there appear to be no newspaper reports of this.
Update
Heresy Corner has collected biographical information about the panel members, see The God Squad.
1 CommentThe former Bishop of London, Graham Leonard, died on Wednesday.
Telegraph The Rt Rev Mgr Graham Leonard
Guardian Alan Webster Monsignor Graham Leonard obituary
The Times The Right Rev Mgr Graham Leonard: Bishop of London, 1981-91
34 CommentsIn his brief and brilliant poem T S Eliot traces the path of the Magi, through “the very dead of winter” facing hazards, challenges and portents on the road to their destination as witnesses of the newborn Christ. But as so often with Eliot, it’s the twist in the final few lines that takes the reader off into a new and hitherto unexplored dimension. For, whereas Matthew simply tells us that they made their way home by a different route, Eliot makes us listen to the elderly traveller reflect on life after Epiphany:
…this birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Eliot’s insight is that, no matter how hard or arduous the journey to a religious experience may be, the greater challenge lies in living in the light of that experience afterwards, among people who haven’t shared it and cannot understand it. It’s a thesis borne out by statistical surveys which invariably show a majority of respondents are able to identify something that has happened to them that they would classify as a religious experience, and yet in most cases they haven’t found a way of integrating it into the rest of their lives.
I like to think that what is in the poem isn’t just Eliot’s Christian insight but something of his quintessentially Anglican identity. Here was a man who spent many years in the office of churchwarden, a position less associated with theophanies than with the challenge of ensuring good order and that the practicalities of church life are given due attention. In my years as a parish priest I found that a high proportion of those who came to join us were not new-born Christians, fresh from some profound conversion experience, but men and women who had come to faith elsewhere, often in more evangelical or Pentecostal gatherings, and had, after a short while, found little there that enabled them to live in the world as it is; nothing that could sustain them once Epiphany was over.
To be Anglican is not to disregard or downplay religious experiences. I know in my own life how important are both the occasions when I receive an intense experience of God and the daily sense of his quiet presence beside me and within me as I encounter him in contemplative prayer. But being Anglican is so much more; it’s about being resourced, equipped and encouraged to live a Christian life that is fully incarnated into a world which operates according to significantly different values. The work I do, nationally and locally, to promote high standards in equality and diversity practice, and my involvements with the Housing Association movement are as much what it is to be Anglican as my attendance at public worship and, as a bishop, my role as Eucharistic President.
And so I delight that the Church of England calendar now has the post Epiphany season running all the way through to Candlemas on February 2nd. But I do slightly wonder why so many of the Sunday lections for the next few weeks are about the miraculous, when, as Eliot has told us, that’s the easy bit, it’s after the journey is over that the real challenges arise.
David Walker is Bishop of Dudley in the Diocese of Worcester
4 CommentsThe way the stories of the nativity are told, they are full of journeys. There is Mary’s trip to see Elizabeth for companionship in pregnancy, the journey to Bethlehem to be registered and for the infant to be born, the journey to Egypt to escape Herod and later on to Nazareth to keep below the political horizon, and of course the journey of the magi to find the holy child.
And our stories are often full of journeys at this time of year. In our case, my son’s arrival from Germany was delayed by 20 hours and Air France lost his luggage for 10 days. Numerous family members across three generations came to visit from York and Lancashire, and this year the accounts of their travels were coloured with anxiety about the weather. And today, all my sisters and I are meeting in Lancashire to discuss the care of our elderly mother, though I will be travelling furthest for this occasion. And there will be similar accounts of the journeys made by you and yours over the holiday period, which will take in every detail of what went wrong or the signs of grace and blessing that made them a joy. On the whole, these are not life-changing journeys, though you can’t always know when you are setting off which trips will change things for ever and which will merely take you to another place.
The image of the journey is much used as a metaphor for the life of faith and for life in general. I have myself given sermons on the spiritual journey at this time of year. There are times when the metaphor works really well. I can remember a long wait once at Amsterdam airport, reflecting on how life is like waiting for the next plane. But the metaphor does have its limitations, and I would say on the whole that it is over-used and risks becoming a cliché. It becomes a problem as an image when one feels stuck and the sense that we should be going somewhere in our faith becomes another stick to beat oneself with. It is a problem, too, for people whose spirituality is centred on stability, on staying in one place and experiencing the height and the depth of that domain. It is a problem also because it tends to be used about my spiritual journey, rather than about the shared experience of a community.
It seems likely that different personality types respond more favourably to different images of the spiritual life, perhaps to artistic images such as a dance, for instance, or a picture or a symphony. Another series of helpful images centres on growth, seeds, trees, blossom and fruit.
The metaphor matters because it helps to shape the way you make sense of your experience. I have travelled with the spiritual journey metaphor for a long time, but I am beginning to feel that it won’t do any more. My hope for this new year is that I can find a new way to conceptualise my relationship with God and my calling to serve and that it becomes a little less about me.
Meg Gilley is a parish priest working in former pit villages in County Durham.
2 CommentsThe latest text of the Anglican Covenant is linked from this earlier article.
Responses from Provinces to Section 4 of the Ridley Cambridge Draft of the Anglican Covenant are in a PDF, here.
This week’s Church Times summarises the story, see Pat Ashworth Anglican Churches sent final text of Covenant — ‘not a penal code’.
Responses to the final version are varied. Here is a selection:
Living Church
Catholic Voices: Four Responses to the Covenant (Graham Kings, Josiah Idowu-Fearon, Tony Clavier, Richard Kew) and also The Covenant and the Fullness of Time (Peter Carrell). Also Essential Aspects (Christopher Wells) and Editorial: To Arrive Where We Started.
Anglican Communion Institute
Committing to the Anglican Covenant:An analysis by the Anglican Communion Institute and also Ephraim Radner The New Season: The Emerging Shape of Anglican Mission
A.S. Haley Common Sense and the Covenant
Bishop Chris Epting An Improved Anglican Covenant
Bosco Peters Anglican Covenant – partly used
Jim Stockton Bad Fruit from Bad Seed
Adrian Worsfold Anglicanism gives way to Democratic Centralism and also Authority to the Standing Committee!
Mark Harris Coal in your Christmas Stocking? One lump or two?
Tobias Haller Incarnation (?)
Jim Naughton What are the consequences of not signing the covenant?
And, linked earlier, but repeated for convenience, Giles Fraser Covenant fatalism (almost).
118 CommentsWe need social networking, but more of it should be in the real world rather than online, writes Julia Neuberger in the Guardian.
Richard Moth writes in The Times about Serving in Afghanistan with a true spirit of self-giving.
You can read and watch The Archbishop of Canterbury’s New Year Message.
Giles Fraser writes in the Church Times about Covenant fatalism (almost). (TA will have a roundup of reactions to the final Anglican Covenant proposal soon.)
Pat Ashworth wrote in the previous edition of the Church Times about diocesan missioners. See Taking stock and doing something.
In that issue, Peter Thompson wrote that The Noughties live up to their name.
And today Andrew Brown writes in the Guardian about Leicester. See Here, everyone is a minority.
18 CommentsThirty-five years ago, Cambridge opened new worlds to me — I used to think 1 January was New Year’s Day, Hogmanay in Scotland. The Cambridge University Diary, however, designated the day thus: CIRCUMCISION: University LIbrary closed to readers. A good day to stay out of the stacks, then. And what an embarrassing, not quite Anglo-Saxon thing ‘Circumcision’ sounds like! Messy, painful, foreign.
Up to 1752, new year in England, for most legal and general purposes, had been the Annunciation — Lady Day, 25 March, nine months before Christmas (geddit?). In a Christian scheme of time, the good news of the Incarnation made an appropriate start to the year. After 1753 it still did, but New Year’s Day, by default, became the Circumcision. Now we start each new year of grace with a liturgical reminder of Jesus’s location within the old law of … er, grace or works?
The old law was, in fact, a law of grace, not a simple game of works. God gave circumcision as a sign of his favour towards his people, their specialness (to use a rather cheesy term) and their identity. It was a way of personalising their belonging and identity by expressing it in an individual’s flesh. It was some of the troops who turned the observance of circumcision into a legalistic game of Brownie Points, and when they did this they were going beyond the original intentions of its Framer.
This matters, partly as a matter of good theology, but also because historically whenever Christians have rejected their Jewish roots, it has done them no good and cursed them and all the world, shamefully. Supersessionist fantasy leads directly to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the ghetto, ultimately the gas chamber. From Marcion to the Eisenach Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, be very afraid when Christians start trying to slew off their Jewish roots.
Anyway, the relationship between grace and works is actually rather interesting. Any fool can play one off against the other, indeed most fools do. Either we are home and dry, or we have to work our socks off to attain our heavenly home. But what if the truth was not either, or neither, but, simultaneously, both? Get out of jail free, and then work your freedom as vigorously and in as disciplined a way as if you still had to work your passage, but freely this time?
I’m fascinated by the way that when you lay before Christians, in a descriptive rather than loaded way, the dozen or so classic theories of atonement in the New Testament, people of all stripes, including many who often major in their sermons on one simple theory full stop, tend to end up choosing two, not one.
Furthermore if you put down the theories on two cards, one labelled ‘get out of jail free’ and the other ‘work out your salvation with fear and trembling’, usually they choose one from each card. Why not? The ability to walk down the sidewalk and chew gum simultaneously is a virtue, not a limitation.
So the Circumcision is not a feast of legalism, or a reminder of grace. Legalism is always bad news, and pure antinomianism is always fantasy. The Brownie Point circuits are too profoundly hardwired into human nature for this to be otherwise. Rather the Circumcision is a time to celebrate the joy of both/and theology — like light as wave and packet, life in Christ gloriously free and also infinitely challenged.
A secure identity, and everything to live for. Happy New Year!
Alan Wilson is area Bishop of Buckingham in the diocese of Oxford.
15 Comments