Updated Sunday
official summary of business
Thursday morning
Thursday afternoon
Speech on draft safeguarding legislation by Geoffrey Tattersall
Speech on the report on mission and growth in the rural church by the Bishop of Knaresborough
Press reports
BBC Funeral law change voted through by Church of England
Ruth Gledhill Christian Today Suicides can receive Anglican funerals, says General Synod
No sin, no devil: Church of England debates its baptismal liturgy
update
Synod votes to allow suicides to receive Anglican funerals.
262 for 5 against and 6 abstentions … who in the name of Christian compassion are the eleven who couldn’t bring themselves to support this motion?
I should like to commend the changes made on both the burial of those who have committed suicide and the liturgy for baptism. They reflect, in different ways, the spirit of love and compassion for each other enjoined upon us by Christ’s teachings and are a reflection of the presence of the Holy Spirit which we are assured is always with us. They also reflect two other aspects of today’s Church, perhaps equally apposite; one is the existence of an apparently total communication breakdown between top and bottom, exemplified by the Archbishop of York’s comments on the burial of suicides.… Read more »
The mother of a fairly significant playwright told me 20 yrs ago that her grandchild had not been baptised because her son and his wife picked up the BCP and read their son had been ” conceived and born in sin”..How many BCP baptisms take place now, I wonder?
Well I abstained. I have conducted the funeral of someone who committed suicide, as we are already allowed to do. The motion states, ‘to amend Canon B 38 so as to allow those who have taken their own life, whatever the circumstances, to be buried in accordance with the rites of the Church of England’. If someone came to me, saying that there was nothing wrong with them, but they didn’t want to be a burden on anyone in the future, and they were going to Dignitas next week, and they wanted to discuss the funeral with me, then I… Read more »
Regarding services for the baptising of infants, I’d note that in the Bible it is God who is referred to as “Saviour” far more than Jesus. And what does trusting in Jesus “as Lord” really mean to many who are welcomed to Baptism? I’d be happy just to use the fine, first half of the BCP service, followed by the baptising, omitting all the questions and certainly any reference to the “Devil” (belief in whom was understandable in our Lord’s day but no longer). Using wonderful words, the BCP happily associates infant baptism – christening – with our Lord’s welcoming… Read more »
If I was a member of the Church of England I’d be interested in more conversions, not just more baptisms. Jesus did not make conversions easy; he made them hard. I have no nostalgia for the days when we used to get dozens of requests for ‘christenings’ a year, very few of whom ever darkened the doors of the church again. The early church preached the gospel and then, when people said ‘what must be do?’ brought up faith and baptism. By contrast, conventional Anglicanism gets asked about baptism in isolation and trie valiantly to sneak in a watered-down version… Read more »
Whether all Evangelical expressions ‘of the gospel’ are in fact ‘ the true gospel’, at all, is (to be) contested.
Much of it is mere ‘Convertianity’ and lacks spiritual and intellectual clout imho.
Laurie, no doubt all expressions of the gospel fall short in one way or another. I’m not sure whether my own would qualify as ‘evangelical’ or not; it tends to take Mark 1:14-20 as its inspiration.