Updated to add link to official summary
Updated Tuesday night and Wednesday morning
General Synod – summary of business Tuesday 12th July 2011 AM
Synod ended its meeting in York at lunchtime today.
The Archbishop of Canterbury gave a presidential statement about Christians in the Holy Land: Archbishop launches appeal for Christians in the Holy Land, and showed this video: Christians in the Holy Land Conference 2011.
Riazat Butt of The Guardian has blogged the final day.
Tim Ross writes in The Telegraph Christians should learn how to be a ‘minority’ from Muslims, bishop says
This refers to the Bishop of Bradford, who responds on his blog with Minority matters.
The Star has Church could train clergy.
Ekklesia has C of E seeks to change ‘pale, male and stale’ leadership.
Ruth Gledhill has written this blog article about Monday’s motion on elections to the House of Laity: General Synod in York: Church of England votes for fairer votes [also online here].
Tuesday night update
Tim Ross in The Telegraph News of the World: Church of England retains stake in Murdoch empire
Press Association Bishop: Apply values to all lessons
Wednesday morning update
Tim Ross in The Telegraph Ageing Church of England ‘will be dead in 20 years’
Martha Linden in The Independent Church of England faces extinction, says cleric
So the Church of England will be extinct in 20 years time as we will all be dead? In the meantime the Bishop of Southwell wories about the teaching of maths.
Fiddling while Rome burns, come to mind.
First Estates Church Commissioner Andreas Whittam Smith on News Corp: “I feel that a premature sale of News Corp and BSkyB might just be simply very bad timing. I don’t argue with anything that anybody is saying about them but I think it must be possible that News Corp will get rid of its entire British holdings, of newspapers that is, and that if it is to do so, first of all the problem would have vanished if you like from the point of view of the parent company and for us as investors, and the shares will certainly bounce… Read more »
I think it is fairly obvious that ALL branches of organized religion or the Institutional Church have lost members due to the hypocrisy of the various leaders. All congregations have their large and small numbers at various times as their histories change. It is no longer acceptable for the hierarchy or leadership people in the various religions to put other human beings down, for whatever their bigoted reasons. I am not worried about numbers. I worry about those human beings who are hungry and disenfranchised.
In western Europe all the traditional churches whether conservative or liberal are losing members at a dramatic rate. The catholic church is near collapse in many western European countries. An interesting survey revealed that people abandon the chuch not because they are too conservative or too liberal but for intellectual reasons and because they feel let down by God. In other words because they can find no rational or experiential reason to believe in God. If the church wishes to grow it must therefore address this above all.
Frankly, and as much as I’ll be blasted out the door for it, the churches talk *way* too much about God and *way* too little about Humanity. You can join a lot more dramatic and entertaining faiths that offer up sacrifices and worship abjectly at the foot of an idol, but ours is the only one in which God lives among and through us and requires our cooperation and “assistance,” so to speak, in manifesting directly in human existence. We’ve heard the story, and, in liturgical churches, hear it regularly. Time to stop counting angels on the heads of pins,… Read more »
There have been a lot of silly ‘below-the-line’ remarks about Paul Butler’s comments on Maths teaching, even by the lavishly silly standards of the Telegraph. Some people choose to see this as emblematic of why the Church is allegedly in decline. On the contrary, I see it as a fine suggestion of the way the Church faces challenges from a godless, violent, and graspingly materialistic culture in every area of our social life. Making concessions to that culture is a large part of the problem facing the Church of England (it might be argued that being an established church does… Read more »
Maths is capitalist? With recent experience of teaching the subject, can I make it clear that financial maths forms a small proportion of one of the five strands of the subject in the National Curriculum. I used to teach this topic with four aims in view: (1) helping my students to understand on a basic level issues like tax and interest, which they are likely to have to face in our society whether Bishop Butler likes it or not (2) approaching the latter topic of interest particularly in terms of credit cards, mortgages, debt, leading to a critical discussion of… Read more »
Yes Ex Revd, you’ve got to worry about the lack of mathematical understanding amongst the ranks of the bishops when we have the Bishop of Norwich get into an awful muddle on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day recently: “I imagine Archimedes got into a bath with too much water – very dangerous. If some of it hadn’t slopped over the side, he wouldn’t have worked out that the ‘WEIGHT’ of a body immersed in fluid is equal to the ‘WEIGHT’ of what it displaces. Eureka moments happen when risks are taken.” So a pebble weighs the same as… Read more »
Does anyone else find it a bit disturbing that these bishops feel that their (seriously questionably, in my opinion) moral authority somehow makes them, magically, an authority on all subjects and qualified to speak out?
Is it really hubris, or have they simply succumbed to the siren-song of media fame, unable to keep their mouths closed when a microphone is shoved under them?