Jonathan Draper Afterthoughts A sermon for Midnight Mass
Tricia Gates Brown Episcopal Café The subversive, confrontational, emboldening stories of Christmas
Ysenda Maxtone Graham The Spectator Mission impossible? The C of E’s attempt to woo new members
“The church-will-see-me-out brigade’s attitude is not going to work for much longer”
Jayne Ozanne ViaMedia.News Spiritual Blindness & the Root of Fear
Martin Sewell Archbishop Cranmer The Church of England is a compromised and compromising church – thank God!
Jeremy:
Deuteronomy 19, 15:
A single witness will not suffice to convict anyone of a crime or offence of any kind; whatever the misdemeanour, the evidence of two witnesses or three is required to sustain the charge.
Natural justice which the law of the United Kingdom upholds.
I have to agree with Martin Sewell. A compromising church that includes diverse theologies and emphases opens the way for more dependence on grace, and the need to grow beyond our own stockades, and acknowledge difference, and become more than we would have remained in splendid and ideologically pure isolation. I believe the Church of England has its own distinctive history and chrism. It is a catholic church as well as a protestant church. And I think our differences challenge us, rather than schisming because of ideological differences, to hold together in love, and seek one another’s flourishing. I truly… Read more »
I couldn’t agree more with Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s perceptive assertion that many of us in the CofE fear an “evangelical takeover” with the obsession with management-speak and the fact that ” much-vaunted new funds are not promoting quiet, self-effacing ‘Catholic’-style worship; they’re promoting centres for instant conversion and worship songs” In a desperate attempt to get “bums on pews”, the current leadership is changing the nature of the national church promoting a religion anathema to the English people. I am one of those who “would prefer the church to die — literally — than turn into a shallow, self-satisfied members’… Read more »
The Spectator article is based on a over-simplified premise and a caricature of evangelicalism. Our Diocese, Bath and Wells, has just been approved for some of the church growth funding. A major priority is deprived parishes, so the bid for a share of the resources from our neck of the woods (which has a conservative evangelical rural dean) is for a mission priest in an urban Anglo-Catholic parish. The vicar has seen his church steadily growing after decades of decline, and seems to be able to hold a thoroughly Catholic view of worship together with a robust commitment to mission.… Read more »