The Church cannot heal this crisis of betrayal

A statement from Archbishop Henry Orombi, published today in the London Times:

I love the Lord Jesus Christ, and I love the Anglican Communion. So, why did the bishops of the Church of Uganda and I decide not to attend the present Lambeth Conference? Because we love the Lord Jesus Christ and because we love the Anglican Communion…

The crisis in the Communion is serious; our commitment to biblical and historic faith and mission are serious; and we want to be taken seriously. In 2003 the Episcopal Church in America consecrated as bishop a man living in an active homosexual relationship. This unilateral and unbiblical action was directly contrary to a resolution of the 1998 Lambeth Conference.

I participated in that conference and we overwhelmingly resolved that “homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture” and the conference “cannot advise the legitimising of same-sex unions”. As a result, the 2003 action of the American Church plunged the Anglican Communion into a crisis that, as the primates of the Anglican Communion said in 2003, “tore the very fabric of our communion at its deepest level”. The crisis is about authority—biblical authority and ecclesiastical authority.

The American decision disregarded biblical authority by violating clear biblical teaching against homosexual behaviour. For this reason, the Church of Uganda and other Anglican provinces broke communion with the Episcopal Church in America in 2003, and we continue in that state of broken communion today…

If a whole province, such as the Episcopal Church, acts contrary to God’s word and the consensus of the communion, who in the Anglican Communion has the authority to discipline that erring province?

We in the Global South believed the Primates’ Meeting had this authority—the 1988 Lambeth Conference urged the Primates’ Meeting to “exercise an enhanced responsibility in offering guidance on doctrinal, moral and pastoral matters” and the 1998 Lambeth Conference reaffirmed this. So, it was appropriate, after the American decision in 2003, that the Archbishop of Canterbury convened an emergency meeting of the primates to address the biblical and ecclesiastical crisis into which the Americans had plunged the Anglican Communion. The primates, including the American primate, unanimously advised that the consecration should not proceed. Nonetheless, two weeks later, the primate in America presided at the consecration as bishop of a man living in a same-sex relationship. This was a deep betrayal.

Since that meeting there have been numerous other “betrayals” to the extent that it is now hard to believe that the leadership in the American Church means what it says. They say that they are not authorising blessings of same-sex unions, yet we read newspaper reports of them. Two American bishops have even presided at such services of blessings. Bishops have written diocesan policies on the blessings of same-sex unions. It is simply untrue to say they have not been authorised.

That such blessings continue and seem to be increasing hardly demonstrates “regret”, let alone repentance, on the part of the American Church. So, when the Archbishop of Canterbury invited these American bishops to participate in the Lambeth Conference, against the recommendations of the Windsor Report and the Primates’ Meeting, and in the face of the unrelenting commitment of the American Church to bless sinful behaviour, we were stunned. Further betrayal. It was clear to me and to our House of Bishops that the Instruments of Communion had utterly failed us.

Anglicans may say there are four “Instruments of Communion,” (the Archbishop of Canterbury; the Lambeth Conference; the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting). But de facto, there is only one—the Archbishop of Canterbury. The peculiar thing is that this one man, who is at the centre of the communion’s structures, is not even elected by his peers. Even the Pope is elected by his peers, but what Anglicans have is a man appointed by a secular government. Over the past five years, we have come to see this as a remnant of British colonialism, and it is not serving us well. The spiritual leadership of a global communion of independent and autonomous provinces should not be reduced to one man appointed by a secular government.

It is important that our decision not to attend this Lambeth Conference is not misunderstood as withdrawing from the Anglican Communion. On the contrary, our decision reflects the depth of our concern and the sober realisation that the present structures are not capable of addressing the crisis. How can we go to Holy Communion, sit in Bible study groups, and share meals together, pretending that everything is OK?, that we are still in fellowship with the persistent violators of biblical teaching and of Lambeth resolutions?

The Bible says: “Can two walk together unless they are agreed?” The Archbishop of Canterbury has asked us to “wait for each other”. But how is it possible when we are not travelling in the same direction? The Church of Uganda takes its Anglican identity and the future hope of the global Anglican Communion very seriously. We love the Lord Jesus Christ, and we love the Anglican Communion. Lord, have mercy upon us.

The entire statement from Archbishop Orombi may be found here.

Anglicans likely to sidestep decision on gays

From the Toronto Globe & Mail:

Although today is billed as global Anglicanism’s high-noon shootout over homosexuality, the issue likely will get sidestepped again, exasperating both conservative and liberal Canadians who belong to the world’s third-largest Christian church and are fed up with the dispute…

But they are to pass no resolutions, make no declarations. Rather they are to be limited to “reflections” on a proposal from the church’s spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, to create a “pastoral forum” for the 77-million-member church, the mandate of which would be to keep the homosexual debate frozen in place and prohibited from going anywhere.

The document handed out to bishops outlining the forum’s creation also proposed that the Anglican Communion’s 38 autonomous national and regional churches (called provinces) observe three moratoriums—on blessing same-sex unions, consecrating gay clergy in partnered relationships and poaching clergy and congregations across provincial boundaries who become disaffected from their bishops. The proposals would be decided upon, or more likely once again be creatively deferred, at next May’s meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, a sort of executive body of the world church.

The document was immediately dismissed by opposing factions in the Canadian church—with two million census adherents—as pointless, useless and retrograde. Michael Ingham, bishop of the greater Vancouver diocese of New Westminster, said he came to the Lambeth Conference hoping to take back something of value. “Unfortunately, the document handed out today is a non-starter where I live,” he said.

Along with the U.S. Episcopal (Anglican) Church which five years ago consecrated a bishop living in a homosexual relationship, Bishop Ingham has attracted heated criticism, largely from Anglicanism global South, since his decision to authorize the blessing in churches of same-sex unions. Conservative Anglicans say homosexuality is prohibited by the Bible. About a third of the communion’s bishops say they are boycotting Lambeth because of the presence of some Canadian and U.S. bishops.

Bishop Ingham called the document punitive and antithetical to the notion of communal inclusiveness. “If this becomes the position of the Communion, it will put the Anglican Church of Canada in the position of having to support and defend irrational prejudice and bigotry in the eyes of our nation.”

Rev. Ed Hird, an Anglican priest who left the Diocese of New Westminster and the Anglican Church of Canada along with most of his congregation over same-sex blessings and joined the orthodox Anglican Coalition in Canada, said the proposals put before the Lambeth Conference would resolve nothing. “The provisions aren’t enforceable,” he said. “The problems will just continue on. It would be a lot more helpful to have clarity.” Both sides are morally committed to their position, and to avoid acknowledging that only makes matters worse, he said.

The whole article is here.

Lambeth: Tuesday afternoon 7-29-08

Reflections on the Lambeth Conference, 29 July, by Todd Wetzel of Anglicans United:

There are a number of serious and deeply held misconceptions operative throughout the conference.

One, stated by the Windsor Continuation Group, “the proliferation of ad hoc Episcopal and archiespiscopal ministries cannot be maintained within a global Communion.” Translation: Communion leadership is angry with Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria, the Southern Cone et al., for consecrating bishops and charging them with the development of their missionary outreach in the States and Canada.

No one adds to this condemnation a simple statement of fact that these actions were taken because the Communion stood by and did nothing substantive while abusive actions against believing clergy and parishes (now whole dioceses) on the American shores continued. In the light of the Episcopal Church’s escalating abuse, they choose not to simply stand by in the face of Canterbury’s weak (no matter how well intended) response. Their intervention has put lifeboats in the turbulent waters at no small cost to themselves. And, Christians under siege in the Episcopal Church, are heading for those lifeboats in ever increasing numbers.

I am reminded of the story of the Good Samaritan. Good upstanding representatives of the Communion passed by the one beset by thieves and robbers. They were in a hurry to carry on carrying on. Perhaps they would form a committee to investigate later. Fortunately, others in the Communion, willing to risk becoming outcast themselves, stopped by and sought to give aid.

Two, the word “inclusive” has completely replaced an older and historically more familiar word “comprehensive” which, frankly, is the familiar word one used to describe a far healthier Anglicanism. The two words are not synonymous. The latter word, “comprehensive” is associated with a saying attributed to Augustine: “Unity in essentials, freedom in non-essentials and charity in all things.” This springs from a clear sense of what constituted the essentials—a clear statement of essentials in the 39 Articles and a transparent identity.

“Inclusivity”, on the other hand springs from the opposite: the lack of a clearly understood center and a fluid identity. We Americans defined the meaning of the word when, in the late ’90s, the Episcopal Church, fully present at the Righter trial, found that it had no “core” doctrine. It is this ethos of “inclusivity” to which the Episcopal Church is now so aggressively seeking to convert the Communion. It argues against discipline. Leadership mitigates against statements of doctrine. While that same leadership seldom hesitates to use the power of money to work its will. Curiously, that same “inclusivity” is being used to drive out the opposition.

There is an old story about an emperor and a town. Americans considering themselves proper Anglicans in their dress and demeanor parade about. Other members of the Communion fawn upon them and cheer them on. But there is a still small voice being uttered in this the Lambeth Conference: “They have no clothes!” Take away the money and the political power and there is no longer anything there!

Three, the Global Anglican South Conference, is spoken of with disdain. Attempts are afoot to redefine the “Global South” thereby excluding GAFCON’s leadership. True, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said that he is pained by their absence as do other bishops but it seems only to echo an earlier statement from the Episcopal House of Bishops who, when asked to repent of their actions said, “We’re sorry you’re upset.” No real regret there (let alone repentance). And, in the case of Rowan Williams his pain could have only evolved as a consequence of his own actions (or non actions).

The Global South, fearing that Lambeth would speak much and yet remain unwilling to discipline a stubbornly willful and recalcitrant Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada, fearing yet a further diminishment of the Christian Witness of the Communion, decided to stop wringing its hands and crying unfair. In short, in the face of constant jawboning, and leadership failure, the Global South, representing the rapidly growing Anglican areas of witness in Africa, Asia, the Global South and the mission efforts in America stopped reacting and seized the initiative. GAFCON affirmed Anglican orthodoxy in its “Declaration,” communicating clearly a way forward in its statement.

Even with the absence of over two hundred bishops of strongly Christian persuasion, there are still a good many orthodox and evangelical bishops here. Though by and large of more moderate persuasion than those of the Global South, they may graciously find the resolve to take leadership in this Lambeth Conference. What a wonder it would be to see something like the clarity of GAFCON’s “Jerusalem Statement” coming from Canterbury. Sadly I’m not sure if even this would be enough to hold the Communion together.

My guess would be that if anything positive comes out of this Lambeth Conference it will largely be because the Global South stopped reacting and clearly stated, “Here we stand, we can do no other!”

Anglicans to halt gay bishop consecrations and same-sex blessings

Ruth Gledhill of the London Times reports from the Lambeth Conference:

A new pastoral forum is to be set up to bring rebel provinces into line in the Anglican Communion. The 650 bishops meeting at the Lambeth Conference in Kent debated proposals yesterday for a body headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that would prevent any more consecrations of gay bishops or same-sex blessings. The forum will also clamp down on “cross-border interventions” such as those where conservative bishops from Africa have consecrated bishops to pastor congregations in the United States.

The document says the forum is needed because repeated requests for moratoria on gay consecrations, same-sex blessings and cross-border interventions have not been heeded. It says: “The failure to respond presents us with a situation where, if the three moratoria are not observed, the [Anglican] Communion is likely to fracture.” The document proposes the forum as a “key mechanism to achieve reconciliation”.

The plan was drawn up by a group of bishops at the conference, who say in the document: “We believe that the pastoral forum should be empowered to act in the Anglican Communion in a rapid manner to emerging threats to its life.” It warns that a “proliferation” of ad hoc episcopal ministries such as those put in place by conservatives cannot be maintained. It calls for all existing ministries already set up to be placed “in trust” in order to be reconciled back into their original provinces.

The document says the moratoria asked for on a number of previous occasions are to be understood as “retrospective”. The strong implication of this is that the openly-gay Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, must resign if the Anglican church is to survive as one body. However, this is not stated explicitly and conservatives criticised the document as lacking teeth.

You can read her full report here.

London Times Cryptic Crossword for 27 July

Here is the latest cryptic crossword from the London Sunday Times. Just click on it to come up with the full-sized version.

Stephen Colbert on the Lambeth Conference

Stephen asks New York Times journalist Laurie Goodstein why Anglicans can't just ordain gay priests and then not talk about it—like the Catholics.



It’s actually not a bad interview. I love the part about “internicene conflict” towards the beginning.

Churches retool mission trips

This is part of a much longer (constructive) critique of short-term mission trips, which appeared in the Washington Post earlier this month (and in one of our local papers this morning!):

To make missionary work more meaningful, some churches are taking a different approach. In response to the criticism, a growing number of churches and agencies that put together short-term trips are revamping their programs and establishing new standards. For the past four years, for example, the Fairfax Presbyterian youths have stayed closer to home, in places such as Welch, West Va.; Lansing, Mich., and Philadelphia. Last week, a team of 44 were in St. Petersburg, Fla., to clean and paint low-income homes, assist the homeless and volunteer at a free health clinic.

Senior Pastor Henry G. Brinton said the church realized that the teens could do just as much good working close by as far away. “It became too hard to justify the expense of flying the kids overseas,” Brinton said. “If you’re going to paint a church, you can do that in Florida as easily as you can in Mexico.”

Fairfax Community Church is repositioning its mission trips “to get away from the vacation-with-a-purpose, large groups going somewhere to build something” focus, said Alan MacDonald, the church’s pastor of global engagement. The church is sending out smaller teams of experts to work on projects with partner churches. For example, it is sending information technology professionals who are fluent in Spanish to a church in the Dominican Republic to train members in computer skills so they can get better jobs, MacDonald said.

McLean Bible Church, which sends about 35 short-term mission teams out each year, is training its team leaders to approach short-term missions with a “learner’s mentality”, to be respectful of the culture or group the team will be serving, said Kailea Hunt, director of global impact for the church.

Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine, is adopting much the same approach in a curriculum for short-term missionaries and their host organizations. Andy Crouch, an editor who is working on the project, said it came about as the result of complaints he heard from churches and nonprofit groups in foreign countries that host American short-term missionaries. “We hope that when they land on the ground, they will be more prepared to listen well to their hosts and learn from their hosts what is really helpful to be doing,” Crouch said. The curriculum, for example, warns missionaries to think about their attire in conservative countries and what kind of message they're sending when they bring expensive cameras and other electronics to poverty-stricken villages.

Despite the concerns with trips abroad, their popularity is soaring. Some groups go as far away as China, Thailand and Russia. From a few hundred in the 1960s, the trips have proliferated in recent years. A Princeton University study found that 1.6 million people took short-term mission trips—an average of eight days—in 2005. Estimates of the money spent on these trips is upward of $2.4 billion a year. Vacation destinations are especially popular: Recent research has found that the Bahamas receives one short-term missionary for every 15 residents.

At the same time, the number of long-term American missionaries, who go abroad from several years to a lifetime, has fallen, according to a Wheaton College study done last year. The short-term mission trip is a “huge phenomenon that seems to be gaining in momentum rather than waning,” said David Livermore, executive director of the Global Learning Center at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, who studies the trend.

Participants care for orphans, hold Bible classes, evangelize, paint homes and churches, and help AIDS patients, among other tasks. But research has found that the trips tend to have few long-term effects on the local people or on the mission travelers. Some projects take away work from local people, are unnecessary and sometimes dangerous.

If you want to read it all, go here.

Cryptic Crossword Solution for 20 July

Here is my proposal for last Sunday’s cryptic:

Homosexual bishops face Anglican Church ban

Here is a report from the London Telegraph of some of the most recent developments at the Lambeth Conference.

Homosexual clergy will be barred from becoming bishops in the Anglican communion under controversial new plans backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Liberals will be warned that they face being expelled from the heart of Anglicanism unless they respect the ban, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

The American church caused deep divisions between conservatives and liberals when it consecrated Gene Robinson as the first openly homosexual Anglican bishop in 2003. There have been reports that it is prepared to consecrate more gay bishops while the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, told this newspaper that he would be willing to do the same.

The proposal to ban future consecrations is the most significant move yet over the issue. The paper, which was commissioned by Dr Rowan Williams, will be debated by 650 bishops tomorrow at the Lambeth conference in Canterbury… It is set to start the first real clash of the conference, with liberal bishops expected to fight any attempt to restrict their autonomy. However, Dr Williams is determined to impose tighter governance of the Anglican Communion to try and hold it together.

The paper, “How do we get from here to there?”, stresses that it is vital that an Anglican Covenant be agreed so that churches around the world are mutually accountable and united by a common set of beliefs. This must happen as soon as possible, it says, to prevent further haemorrhaging of the Anglican Communion over the issue of homosexual clergy.

Until a consensus is reached, the American and Canadian churches must refrain from consecrating more homosexual bishops and carrying out blessing services for same-sex couples, the paper says. If they do not, they will face being pushed to the margins of the communion and find themselves excluded from the councils that are central to the governance of the Church.

The African churches, which oppose having practising homosexuals in the clergy, will be told that they must stop intervening in the affairs of other churches as their actions are deepening the rift. Nigerian and Ugandan archbishops have taken control of dozens of parishes in America and Canada opposed to a liberal agenda.

The paper from the Windsor Continuation Group is central to the stance that Dr Williams would like the conference to take. If the conference agrees to the recommendations, it will give him a mandate to exclude rebel churches. As well as the covenant, Dr Williams has argued for new canon laws, which would govern how bishops and clergy acted. “We need ways of knowing who is supposed to do this or that and who is entitled to do this or that, so that we can act economically and purposefully, instead of being frustrated by a chaotic variety of expectations and recriminations,” says the archbishop.

Bishops have already called for the establishment of an Anglican faith and order commission to give “guidance” on issues such as same-sex blessings and homosexual ordinations. The introduction of a covenant and canon law would be further steps on the path to a more concrete notion of Anglican identity and limits on what is acceptable behaviour, following the more centralised model of the Catholic Church.

The whole article is here.

Common Cause Partnership seeks provincial recognition

The Anglican Communion Network published this statement yesterday:

We, as the Bishops and elected leaders of the Common Cause Partnership (CCP) are deeply grateful for the Jerusalem Declaration. It describes a hopeful, global Anglican future, rooted in scripture and the authentic Anglican way of faith and practice. We joyfully welcome the words of the GAFCON statement that it is now time ‘for the federation currently known as the Common Cause Partnership to be recognized by the Primates Council.’

The intention of the CCP Executive Committee is to petition the Primates Council for recognition of the CCP as the North American Province of GAFCON on the basis of the Common Cause Partnership Articles, Theological Statement, and Covenant Declaration, and to ask that the CCP Moderator be seated in the Primates Council.

We accept the call to build the Common Cause Partnership into a truly unified body of Anglicans. We are committed to that call. Over the past months, we have worked together, increasing the number of partners and authorizing committees and task groups for Mission, Education, Governance, Prayer Book & Liturgy, the Episcopate, and Ecumenical Relations. The Executive Committee is meeting regularly to carry forward the particulars of this call. The CCP Council will meet December 1–3, 2008.

The full media release is here.

Archbishop: Communion Faith and Order Commission Gains Momentum

From the Living Church news service:

If the Anglican Communion is to survive, another Instrument of Unity may need to be created, according to a paper prepared by the Windsor Continuation Group.

“We commend the suggestion for the setting up of an Anglican Communion Faith and Order Commission that could give guidance on the ecclesiological issues raised by our current ‘crisis’,” the group wrote in a working paper distributed on July 25.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams established the six-member group earlier this year to help implement some of the longer-term recommendations made in the Windsor Report. Archbishop Williams said the plan was a very preliminary one, but that it seemed to have broad support among bishops during a Lambeth Conference media briefing this afternoon.

“There is a strong feeling that we need another kind of structure in the Communion that will be a ‘clearinghouse,’ as I want to put it, for some of these issues, and I think there is quite a head of steam behind that,” he said. “I’m actually quite enthusiastic about that.

“It’s not as if we can just coexist without any impact on one another as Anglican churches,” Archbishop Williams continued. “There have to be protocols and conventions by which we recognize one another as churches. The difficulties that we currently face have a lot to do with that recognition.”

Archbishop Clive Handford, former primate of Jerusalem and the Middle East, is the chair of the group. During a July 22 Lambeth Conference media briefing, Archbishop Handford described a three-stage role that the Windsor Continuation Group is expected to play during the Lambeth Conference, which ends Aug. 3.

“It is rightly said that we are an inclusive Communion,” he said. “‘All are welcome’ is not the same as ‘anything goes’.”

After the conclusion of the bishop’s retreat, the Windsor Continuation Group distributed a four-page paper, which was described to the press as a background “reflection” on the state of the Communion. The paper was meant to spark a discussion, which occurred on Wednesday afternoon. More than 20 bishops spoke, including Bishop John Chane of Washington.

During a July 23 media briefing, Bishop Chane said he cautioned other conference participants “not to throw the baby out with the bathwater” and raised concerns about the way that the primates’ meeting had functioned recently. He also said the number of Episcopalians uncomfortable with The Episcopal Church’s to perform same-sex marriages and consecrate a partnered homosexual as bishop was a very small but vocal minority.

The paper proposing the Faith and Order Commission arose out of the July 23 hearing. In addition to proposing a new instrument of unity, the provisional paper released today also questioned the usefulness of the Anglican Consultative Council as it is currently configured.

“There are questions about whether a body meeting every three years, with a rapidly changing membership, not necessarily located within the central structures of their own provinces, can fulfill adequately the tasks presently given to it,” the paper stated. “Not all believe that a representative body is the best way to express the contribution of the whole people of God at a worldwide level. There are many ways in which the voice of the whole body can be heard: diocesan and provincial synods, networks, dialogues and commissions.”

The concluding work of the Windsor Continuation Group will involve trying to come to some consensus about where the bishops as the Lambeth Conference think the Anglican Communion should be headed. Archbishop Handford cautioned against expecting an immediate solution by the end of this conference. “This isn’t a quick fix,” he said. “Dialogue is [the] key.”

Archbishop confirms church’s anti-gay sex stance

Lambeth Conference news from Ruth Gledhill of the London Times:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has continued his quest for Anglican unity with a strong statement against living in sin and gay sex. Dr Williams said: “I do not believe that sex outside marriage is as God purposes it.” And he said he remained “committed” to the Church’s official stance against gay sex, which aims to preserve Biblical norms…

Asked what his message was to those who had chosen not to attend the conference, Dr Williams said he was “sorry” they were not present. “I think that the great pity is that to have those voices in the discussions as we have conceived it, would have been, I think, for everybody, a healing and helpful thing, but also a difficult one. “Are we heading for schism? Well let’s see. If it is the end of the Anglican Communion I do not think anyone has told most of the people here.”

He was speaking as the Church of England’s Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement distributed copies at the Lambeth Conference of his 1989 essay The Body’s Grace at the conference, in which he adopted a liberal stance towards homosexual love, arguing that the Bible did not necessarily legislate only for “reproductive sex”…

The Archbishop’s move from a liberal to conservative stance will be reinforced tomorrow when bishops are given the “observations document” of an internal church group set up to resolve the crisis. The Windsor Continuation Group was formed at the start of this year to take forward the proposals of an earlier report, which called on the US church to roll back its liberal agenda. The report also urged conservative provinces of Africa and Asia to desist from boundary crossing.

A source said the follow-up document, which will be finished and published in full at the end of the year, contained a “sober realism” about the crisis threatening to split the Anglican Church. The new document is expected to be equally critical of conservative primates who are “poaching” evangelical congregations from the US church by illicitly consecrating of bishops to serve them.

Liberals in The Episcopal Church, which prompted the crisis with the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson in 2003, are determined to engineer a backtracking on its commitment not to consecrate any more gay bishops when the next General Convention meets in the summer of 2009. But tomorrow’s document will spell out in clear terms the disastrous consequences should The Episcopal Church take that direction.

Already, the 230 bishops boycotting the conference have organised their own rival meeting held in Jerusalem last month and set up their alternative Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. Bishops in the centre fear that any failure to stem the liberal agenda could result in a permanent schism, with the new fellowship providing a home for conservative rebels.

Conference organisers are appealing for funds from around the Communion to rescue them from a financial black hole. The bishops’ conference has cost £4.4 million to organise and the spouses' conference £1.2 million, and the figures do not even include travel costs, being paid for by individual dioceses and provinces. Organisers are still £1 million short.

You can read her full report here.

Fourth-century vellum Bible’s dispersed sections together online

News from the National Post (Canada):

One of the world’s oldest Bibles, discovered in Egypt in the 19th century, can be read online this week. The Codex Sinaiticus, which dates from the fourth century, is one of the two most ancient copies of the entire Bible in Greek (the other is the Codex Vaticanus). The manuscript was uncovered by a German scholar in St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai desert. Much of it, written on 350 pages of vellum, ended up in St. Petersburg. In the 1930s, most of this treasure trove was sold by Stalin to the British Museum in London, although 40 pages were bought by Leipzig University. Yet more pages were found in the 1970s in a walled-up room in the monastery. More than 100 pages, those from Leipzig and 67 from the British Museum, will be available at codex-sinaiticus.net.

The web site is scheduled to go live tomorrow, 24 July. Wikipedia has an interesting article about Codex Sinaiticus here.

Tuesday news from the Lambeth Conference

Here is a summary of some of yesterday’s Lambeth Conference events, from Anglican Mainstream.

There was a gathering on Tuesday afternoon of 150 – 200 orthodox bishops at which among others Bishop Michael Scott-Joynt of Winchester, Bishop Tom Wright of Durham, and Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh spoke. It should not be forgotten that on September 20 the House of Bishops of TEC will be voting on whether to depose him. It must feel odd for him and his wife Nara to be on campus for three weeks with those seeking to remove him.

The press are beginning to take matters into their own hands. Told that they could not have an interview in the press schedule with the Archbishop of Sudan, they went ahead and organised their own press conference in which everyone got to ask the questions they wanted to.

The Sudanese statement has taken the conference by surprise: first the TEC rushed a spokesperson into the press room after the Archbishop had spoken. After all TEC bishops were with the Sudanese bishops at Salisbury for the pre-Lambeth conference. Second, the Archbishop was asked directly by one man (not on the press corps) if a particular American bishop on campus had written the statement for them. He was given a flat no. The Archbishop does have an earned Ph.D by the way. Third the Archbishop of the Sudan was very direct: Gene Robinson should resign and his consecrators should confess their wrongdoing to the conference. That for him is the way to save the Anglican Communion.

The Windsor Continuation Group has produced its first set of observations and is due to bring another set on “Where should we be?” on Wednesday. On Monday they will present “How do we get from here to there?” The final Indaba on Saturday August 2nd will focus on this issue, and written summaries of the responses from the Indaba will be given to the WCG who will meet in late 2008. They will report to the Archbishop of Canterbury as planning takes place for the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Jamaica in 2009. Who are missing from this scenario? The Primates’ Meeting…

There was more to applaud in the presentation on Tuesday night from Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, Rome who for ten years was Archbishop of Bombay. He began his presentation on Mission, Social Justice and Evangelisation by saying that “The theme of evangelisation must be considered in the wider context of spiritual combat. If this context is ignored in favour of a myopic world-vision, Christ’s salvation will be conveniently dismissed as irrelevant” He traced the themes of combat in scripture through Ephesians 6 and saw it present today in the “hideous anti-God monster or secularism, spiritual indifference, and relativism. He affirmed the uniqueness of Christ and the universality of his salvation quoting Acts 4:12 and Philippians 2 10-11.

The complete report is here. For the full text of Cardian Dias’ presentation, go here.

The Archbishop of Sudan speaks out

Cherie Wetzel of Anglican Mainstream reports from the Lambeth Conference:

We have just had a briefing with the Archbishop of the Sudan, the Most Reverend Dr. Daniel Deng Bul. He informed the press room this morning that he would come and speak with us, since the Anglican Communion News Bureau running this conference, would not schedule a time for him to address the press…

“Gene Robinson should resign for the sake of the Church and the entire Anglican Communion. We are pleading with them (the others at this conference) for the Anglican World, to not throw that away. We do not want to throw any people away, either. But we are here to determine how to remain united. That begins with forgiving one another for errors made. Gene Robinson is an error. The American church has not admitted they are wrong and we cannot forgive them until they do.

“I do not see a way out of these problems with the Indaba groups. The main issues have not been touched. 300 bishops are not here because of Gene Robinson. Can he not resign to allow them to come? Why has he not done that? … Let the Anglican world be united and be a normal, respected Christian body. We have not punished the American church yet. We are asking them to repent. I am talking about the institutional church in America, no specific bishops. I am here to speak within the House. I cannot be silent on this issue…” When asked what would happen to the Communion if Robinson did not resign, the archbishop continued, “I cannot predict what will happen if he will not resign.”

Ruth Gledhill of the Times of London asked the archbishop who would pay for this conference, reportedly 2.6 million pounds in debt at this minute, and not able to pay for this by the parishes in the Church of England, if the American church was not invited. He replied very gently, “Issues of faith cannot be mixed with materialism.” …

“The culture does not change the Bible; the Bible changes the culture. Cultures that do not approve of the Bible are left out of the Church’s life; people who do not believe in the Bible are left out of our churches. The American church is saying that God made a mistake. He made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Adam.

“We will not talk to Gene Robinson or listen to him or his testimony. He has to confess, receive forgiveness and leave. Then we will talk. You cannot bring the listening to gay people to our Communion. People who do not believe in the Bible are left out of our churches, not invited in to tell us why they don’t believe.

“I have just come from a meeting of the African and Global South bishops who are here. There were almost 200 bishops there. They support the statement my Church made yesterday. That’s 17 provinces. The Authority of the Bible is always the same. You cannot pull a line out or add a line to it. That brings you a curse. We are saying no. You are wrong.”

Cherie concludes her report, “We are not alone!” Praise God that that is so—and pray that more orthodox bishops will speak publicly, and work to move the conference in a godly direction. Her full report is here—and you can read Ruth Gledhill’s similar story here.

Bishop John Howe writes from Lambeth

Kendall Harmon is publishing Bishop John Howe’s reports from Lambeth on his TitusOneNine website. Here are some excerpts from his most recent letter:

After the second day of “Indaba” groups, there seems to be an incipient revolt stirring among us. Many of the Africans are saying, “This isn’t ‘Indaba’ at all! First of all, we are not a village, and we don’t know each other. And secondly, we are not attempting to solve a problem; we are talking in small groups about minor issues of little consequence.”

The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu (himself an African, I believe from Uganda) is reported to have said, “If Indaba is such a great idea, why is Africa in such a mess?” There seems to be the beginning of some rumbling that we need to get to a decision-making moment in the life of the Conference…

I also had a brief conversation with the Russian Orthodox Bishop who is in my Bible Study (and Indaba Group). I asked him two questions. First, how have things changed for the Church, and for you, since the dismantling of the Soviet Union? “Drastically! Before there were 6,000 parishes in my area, today over 30,000. Before there were 18 monasteries, today over 750. Today I am free to teach religion in the public schools.” Secondly, we in the West were often told that the Soviet government used to place its own people in positions of authority in the Orthodox Church. Was that true? “Yes, but we always knew who those persons were. Usually they were placed there so that, after a time, they could publicly renounce the Faith and embrace atheism.”

I think that if God isn’t finished with the Russian Orthodox, he may not be finished with the Anglican Communion, either!

Let us hope and pray that that is so. Nevertheless it should be noted that the attack on the Russian Church was from a hostile government from the outside, under which circumstances the church often finds itself being strengthened. The attack on the Anglican Communion is from within. His whole email is posted here.

US Bishops drop bid to have Robinson admitted to Lambeth Conference

From George Conger of Religious Intelligence:

The push to seat Gene Robinson at Lambeth Conference failed yesterday after the American bishops declined to force the issue. At their July 21 provincial meeting at the Lambeth Conference the American bishops declined to take action on a request by liberal members of their caucus to ask the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, to seat the New Hampshire bishop.

Bishops attending the closed meeting tell ReligiousIntelligence.com that some bishops pushed for Bishop Robinson to be extended an invitation. There followed a substantive discussion of the Robinson issue with several bishops expressing their anger and hurt over his exclusion. However, the American leadership declined to take up the issue and a growing number of bishops appear to be distancing themselves from the controversial New Hampshire cleric in a bid to avoid conflict with the conference organizers.

Bishop Robinson was forbidden to attend the meeting of his own House of Bishops, writing on his blog the conference organizers do not consider the American meeting to be a meeting of the American House of Bishops but a meeting of American bishops at Lambeth…

Asked why the consecrators of Bishop Robinson were present even though the Windsor Report recommended their withdrawal from the international councils of the church, Dr Williams replied, that the “difficulty that I faced and some others faced was of those who consecrated Gene Robinson some or a number later expressed a wish that they hadn’t, some are retired and of course a great many American bishops have come into office since then.”

The “American House of Bishops corporately asked for forgiveness for offense caused last year. Now you’ll remember that I circulated to all the provinces last year with a request as to whether people thought this was a satisfactory response to the concerns expressed and you’ll be aware that the Joint Standing Committee and 50 percent plus or more of the provinces said well that’s probably all right.”

This response was the “basis for saying I don’t think I want to go down the list of consecrators and say yes no or possibly and the House of Bishops said something corporately which not everyone thought was adequate, but many did and that was the basis on which I worked with that one,” Dr Williams said.

At a Monday press briefing, the Bishop of Indianapolis declined to elaborate on the American meeting, saying the discussions were “not intended to be shared. Whatever information you need to know about Gene Robinson will be provided by one source,” Bishop Cate Waynick said. The bishop declined to name that source, however. The Bishop of West Tennessee, the Rt Rev Don Johnson however confirmed the issue had been raised, but “no topic was discussed in any depth.”

One bishop told us that the provincial meeting was very much like recent meetings of the House of Bishops, with the issue of Gene Robinson, and disquiet with the proposed Anglican Covenant generating a great deal of passion from some speakers. However, he added that the majority of American bishops appeared to be tiring of the focus on the travails of the Bishop of New Hampshire, and were not yet prepared to buck the Archbishop of Canterbury on this topic.

My own read of this is that, while it may appear to be good news on the surface, the revisionist bishops are simply biding their time, perhaps until after Lambeth, to pursue their agenda. The whole article is here.

A double-scoped vision of religion and liberalism

This op-ed piece by James Carroll, a journalist with the Boston Globe, offers an interesting perspective on what is unfolding in the Anglican Communion:

The story of the Anglican communion, in a dynamic largely shaped by the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, is as moving as it is instructive… Over the last 50 years, the Episcopal Church has been a very model of how a conservative institution can progressively evolve step by step—beginning with the social justice witness of figures like bishops James Pike and Paul Moore, continuing with the ordination of women in the 1970s, the affirmation of gay relationships in the 1980s, the 2003 consecration as bishop of New Hampshire the openly gay priest V. Gene Robinson, and the election two years ago as presiding bishop of Katharine Jefferts Schori. At each point in this progression, some Episcopalians protested, but few defected.

Anglican churches in Canada and England have more or less followed the liberalizing American lead. Anglican churches elsewhere have more or less resisted - as is seen at Lambeth, where prominent boycotters especially include Africans. Ironically, Anglican prelates from former outposts of the British Empire see their rejection of theological liberalism as post-colonial independence, but it shores up a Eurocentric and triumphalist orthodoxy that was key to colonialism in the first place.

Despite such resistance, and a much touted nostalgia for “unity”, it is clear that mainstream Anglicanism, represented by the large majority of bishops who chose Lambeth over Jerusalem, is responding as positively as it can to the broader trends toward equality, tolerance, and democratization that challenge every traditional society. Those who reject such trends may or may not break with the Anglican communion, but that is not the most important question…

As journalists worry about reliability of information and analysis, some religious people wonder how the rational element in faith can be preserved in an age of cultic enthusiasm. As conservative corporate interests take ownership of old and new media outlets, reactionary fundamentalists occupy more and more of the religious landscape—leaving adrift critically minded news consumers and believers alike.

The Anglican communion is moving forward with one eye on this uncertain terrain, and one eye on what the biblical tradition actually reveals. The religious imagination is at stake—and more. Those who value faith, and those who value secular liberalism, might profitably set sight along the scope of this two-eyed vision, wishing Lambeth well.

Clearly this article presents one point of view. While conservatives may not like it (especially for its appalling theology and one-sided view of history), I don’t think it’s that far off the mark in representing what many think today. The question remains as to just how far the trajectory he describes will take us—and when it ceases to be identifiably Christian. You can read it all here.

Church crisis: Simmering dissent, pleas for unity as Anglicans meet

This coverage from The Guardian on the Lambeth opening ceremonies is ominous:

… At his presidential address later in the day, Williams addressed the devastating impact of these problems. “We all know we stand in the middle of one of the most severe challenges to have faced the Anglican family in its history,” he said. “We cannot ignore the fact that what is seen to be a new doctrine and policy about same-sex relations is causing pain and perplexity.”

Speaking in the large blue tent that is the centrepiece of the conference, he talked about the Global Anglican Future Conference, which was launched last month in response to the perceived liberal drift to accommodate conservative churches and their congregations. “We cannot ignore the pressures created by new structures that are being improvised in reaction to this, pressures that are very visibility in the form of irregular patterns of ministry across historic boundaries,” he said…

A unifying document, the Anglican Covenant, would set out the loyalty and bonds of affection governing relationships between churches. Such a covenant would, however, carry the weight of an international obligation and prevent churches pressing ahead with unilateral innovations. He said the document would not be a means of excluding the “difficult or rebellious” but would intensify existing relations. “Whatever the popular perception, the options before us are not irreparable schism or forced assimilation,” he said.

However, the rift could not be ignored in the morning sermon. The Bishop of Colombo, the Right Rev Duleep de Chickara, who was invited to preach by Williams, told the congregation: “The reality is that we are a wounded communion. Some of us are not here and that is an indication that all is not well. Certainly the crisis is complex. It is not a crisis that can be resolved instantly and the journey ahead is a long and arduous one.” In a plea for unity, he said: “We are united in spite of the fact we are different; in Christ we are equal. There is enough to go around if none will be greedy. Here my sisters and brothers is an insight of what the church is called to be: an inclusive communion where there is space for everyone and anyone, regardless of colour, gender, sexual orientation, ability.”

The day began with a number of English bishops attending services elsewhere, and some overseas archbishops refusing to take holy communion in solidarity with the 230 churchmen who snubbed Williams’ invitation. But the 90-minute sermon confirmed the liberal direction of the Anglican Communion and was the strongest sign yet that the US Episcopal Church would not be punished for consecrating Robinson. The liberal tone of the sermon, and its insistence on inclusivity and equality, upset some in the pews as did the more multicultural, politically correct aspects of the service…

Despite some dissent, most delegates remained upbeat. The presiding bishop of the US Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts-Schori, said it was a “wonderful” sermon. “It’s what the church is today,” she said. “It is inclusive—even those who don’t agree with the message, it includes them too.”

“Sure you’re included—but on our terms, and you’d better understand it.” You can read the whole thing here.

Gay bishop’s row ‘like Iraq war’

More from Bishop Tom Wright, this time in the London Times:

One of the Church of England’s most senior bishops has compared the consecration of a gay bishop in America to the invasion of Iraq. Tom Wright, the bishop of Durham and the fourth most senior in the English hierarchy, said both events showed Americans were prepared to act “how they please” with disregard for the rest of the world…

Wright’s comments came at the Lambeth conference, the 10-yearly meeting of Anglican bishops, being held in Canterbury. Wright, who represents moderate conservative clerics who, rather than schism, want provision within the church for conservatives opposed to gay clergy and women bishops, said: “George Bush said he was going to invade Iraq. Everyone told him not to because there would be consequences, but he did it anyway.

“The Americans floated the balloon in 2003 when they consecrated Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. They knew exactly what they were doing then and they know exactly what they are doing now. They knew it would be unacceptable to the majority of the Communion. They are doing exactly as they please.” He continued: “Either the rest of the world caves in or someone has to stand up to them.” …

Last night, the Vatican warned the Church of England that the dispute over gay ordination posed a “grave challenge to the hope for full and visible unity” between the churches. It came in a letter from Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, secretary of state at the Vatican, ranked second only to the Pope.

The original article is here.

Anglican communion a ‘train wreck’, says bishop

From The Telegraph:

The Rt Rev Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, has revealed that there is deep unease over the future of the communion and an atmosphere of mutual suspicion among bishops… Bishop Wright, a senior figure in the Church hierarchy, expressed concern that the summit was lacking direction and admitted that the Anglican Church was in a mess. “All sorts of forces have built up over the years in the communion through misunderstanding and people doing things differently without really consulting,” he said. “Sooner or later this was all going to meet and hit the buffers. It’s been like a slow-moving train wreck.”

The bishop, who is highly respected and a close friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury, told The Sunday Telegraph that the presence of American bishops involved in the consecration of Gene Robinson, the first openly homosexual Anglican bishop, was proving divisive. “A lot of people here have a lot of questions about why the American bishops are here,” he said. “Those questions are in the room.” …

Organisers have drawn up an agenda lacking any major votes or debates in the hope that it will limit conflict. But Bishop Wright said that there was mistrust between the different factions over who was going to make the next significant move. “It’s like a very odd game of cards,” he said. “We’re all being very civil and talking politely, but people are wondering who is going to play which card next and hence what responses may be possible.”

Bishop Wright added that the summit was lacking direction and questioned how effective it would be. “There’s a sense that we’re all not quite sure where this is going. That’s the mood of the conference. It is gloriously confusing at the moment and slightly worrying in that one has no idea what’s actually going on.”

The bishops will spend the majority of the next two weeks in private “indaba” groups—modelled on the consultations held between Zulus. “It’s impossible to see how this is likely to play out,” said Bishop Wright. “It’ll be 40 people around a table for two hours. Three minutes each and that’s your two hours gone.”

Dr Williams has admitted that the crises in the “wounded” Church are not likely to be resolved by the conference, but he is keen to gain support for an “Anglican covenant” which could act as a rule book of beliefs that can unify the Church. Bishop Wright stressed that the adoption of the covenant would be a “hugely important” breakthrough. However, the chances of its succeeding look bleak after leaders of the Global Anglican Future conference—a breakaway movement—attacked the role of Dr Williams yesterday.

The entire article is here.

London Times Cryptic Crossword for 20 July

Here is this week’s puzzler from the London Times. Click on the image to come up with the full-sized printable version.

Cryptic Crossword Solution for 13 July

Here is my proposed solution to last Sunday’s brain teaser:

“Imperial Pluralism”

Leander Harding critiques recent comments by the Bishop of Washington:

This protest against certainty claims the moral high ground and sounds on the surface as though it is based on a generous tolerance. This supposed moral protest in the name of tolerance needs to be unmasked as exactly the opposite, the dismissive and marginalizing rhetoric of the powerful who seek to protect their own agenda from critique on the grounds of any transcendent authority. It is precisely an attempt to force your beliefs on others before any argument is engaged by virtue of the way in which the rules of discussion are established. It is saying, in effect, ” before we talk you must agree that your beliefs and values are the sort of thing that I say they are and I say they can never be more than one opinion among others. If we are to talk, you must give up all your truth claims before you come to the table. With regard to the rules of the table, I will be the final referee.”

Lesslie Newbigin has brought forward a devastating critique of this pretended stance of tolerance. Newbigin identifies one of the foundational myths of contemporary pluralism in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. A group of blind men so the story goes are exploring an elephant by touch. One feels the tail and says the elephant is like a rope and one feels the leg and says the elephant is like a tree and one feels the ear and says the elephant is like a large leaf. Each has a piece of the truth. No one of them has it all. To apply the parable to our current controversy, many in The Episcopal Church see the protest of traditionalist Anglicans as an attempt by one of the blind men to make his perspective the one authoritative perspective and thus a power play and an immoral case of over-reaching.

Lesslie Newbigin points out that there is a problem with this parable… The teller of the parable adopts the pose of tolerance but this is surface camouflage behind which the King asserts the right to relativize and marginalize all other claims to truth but his own. Of this Newbigin says, “In a pluralist society such as ours … any claim to announce the truth about God and his purpose for the world, is liable to be dismissed as ignorant, arrogant, dogmatic. We have no reason to be frightened of this accusation. It itself rests on assumptions which are open to radical criticisms, but which are not criticized because they are part of the reigning plausibility structure.” (The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, page 10.)

Bishop Chane’s protest sounds high minded and tolerant but it is in reality the rhetoric of the despot who is beyond rebuke… Having once dismissed his opponents, Bishop Chane will immediately turn and announce his agenda for revision of the inherited moral teaching of the church as a “Gospel imperative”. Now the question is this: to whom shall we turn when issues are disputed; to the whole Christian dogmatic and moral tradition of the last 2000 years or to the dogmas of skepticism and nihilism of the current Western intellectual elites?

You can find his whole argument here.

Archbishop of Canterbury faces calls to stop American clergy defecting

A report from the Telegraph:

The Archbishop of Canterbury will be told this week to stop conservative clergy leaving their national churches and becoming bishops in other countries. Dr Rowan Williams is to be lobbied by liberals who are dominating the ten-yearly Lambeth Conference, because more than 200 traditionalist bishops have boycotted the gathering as a result of divisions on gay clergy and women bishops.

He will be told that the process of conservative American clergy opting out of their national body and becoming bishops in African and South American churches goes against tradition and must be stopped. Dr Williams will also be urged to prevent orthodox Anglicans, who believe the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong, from setting up a new province in North America to rival the Episcopal Church of the USA, which triggered the current crisis by electing the first openly gay bishop in the worldwide Communion.

The Most Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, has vowed to ask Dr Williams “to encourage other parts of the Communion to cease their incursions” while they are together at Lambeth. She said: “It’s totally opposed to a traditional Christian understanding of how bishops relate to each other. That’s the biggest difficulty. They’re setting up as something else in the same geographical territory.” …

Dr Williams has already described the solutions offered by Gafcon as “problematic”. But conservatives say they intend to remain within the Anglican Communion regardless of what Dr Williams and Dr Jefferts Schori say about their new structures and the adoption of American parishes by Global South churches.

The whole story is here.

Kendall Harmon comments:

So, let us get this straight. None of these transfers to other Provinces in the Anglican Communion would be occurring if the Episcopal Church had not done in 2003 what the Anglican Communion in many different ways asked the Episcopal Church not to do. And, of course, what they did was against tradition.

Also, during the 2003 debate, any outside urging or attempted persusasion, or, even more strongly, intervention by Anglican authorities was seen to be an inappropriate transgression of provincial “autonomy”.

Now, however, that something is happening that the Episcopal Church leadership does not like, what is said leadership doing? Appealing to tradition, and asking for outside influence and intervention from Anglican Communion authorities. Got it? Pot, please meet kettle—

News from Lambeth

From Riazat Butt of the Guardian:

At the Lambeth conference, few are bemoaning the absence of traditionalist Africans—except journalists scuttling around to make bricks out of hay—and the Americans are left calling the shots and, boy, are they doing it with gusto.

Not content with bringing a battalion of pro-gay lobbyists to the sprawling University of Kent campus, the efficient US episcopal machine is also churning out daily—informal—briefings on what the mood is like and what is being said by whom. Think of it as a bishop a day keeps the schism away.

They are also blogging as if their lives depended on it. It’s great for gossip-starved media, but bad news for organisers who were praying for a non-eventful event. There are some African churchmen who have defied their boycott, but there is a case for strength in numbers. The absentees have inadequate representation at the conference, but they could have made their voices heard had they bitten the bullet and come to Canterbury.

Bishop Gene Robinson is not invited, but he is coming anyway, ensuring that his viewpoint and beliefs remain at the forefront of people’s minds. At Gafcon, the African bishops were with likeminded individuals, effectively preaching to the converted, but at Lambeth there are far more hearts and minds to be won. There is still time.

From Cherie Wetzel, of Anglicans United:

Our planning for these events may look amateurish when compared to the elaborate plans and opportunities for free food and discussion provided by Integrity, Claim the Blessing and the Lesbian/Gay Christian Movement. These folks are here in full force, and are running some type of informational event every day. Poster boy Gene Robinson is also here. Bishop Tom Ely of Vermont is having two sessions where he discusses the polity of the Episcopal Church and explains to everyone how Robinson was duly elected (read, and deserves to be seated at this conference.) These polity sessions are followed by “meet Gene” sessions. These events, labeled “fringe events” are all held after 8:00 PM in different rooms around the University. We will watch them and report. Clearly, the American bishops will come in droves; but no one can presume how the rest of the Communion will respond.

Some would say there was little reason for optimism. We learned yesterday that The Rt. Rev. John-David Schofield’s invitation was withdrawn last week, as were the invitations of two bishops from Recife, Brazil. All three are now under the Most Rev. Greg Venables of the Southern Cone. It seems that they, like the “irregularly consecrated bishops of CANA and the AMiA” in the states, will not be recognized. This leaves little doubt about the future for other clergy and bishops who leave TEC and hope to remain part of the Communion. It looks like any intervention into another Province will be denied acceptance, be they priests, parishes or dioceses transferring to a foreign bishop. Those whose only desire was to remain Anglican within the Communion now stand outside those vast boundaries.

This decision alone may be enough to force schism.

For months, the question of Schofield’s invitation has floated through the blogs. Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori pressed for the withdrawal of this invitation shortly after the House of Bishops deposed Bishop Schofield last March. It was not withdrawn. We may never know who exerted the leverage to finally dislodge this bishop; he is not here.

The full report is here.

And from Anglican Mainstream:

It is already rumoured that TEC bishops are planning a popular move among the indaba groups to call for Gene Robinson to be seated as a full member of the conference…

Moreover, a bishop from Canada has said freely that once Lambeth is over the Canadian church will be moving forward apace with same-sex blessings etc. This gives substance to the observation that there is denial in what looks to be a potentially schizophrenic conference. Everyone knows that the North American lobbies are determined to have their agenda affirmed. However, all the processes of the conference in plenary addresses and small discussion groups mean that there is no place for the whole conference to hear itself think and address this elephant in the room.

The rest is here.

More bishops for fewer parishioners

Here is further evidence of “Newton’s inverse law of episcopal effectiveness”. (See my entry of 11 July.) These statistics, which relate to England only, but I believe could be applied almost anywhere in the western world, are from the London Times:


Theo Hobson, author of Against Establishment: An Anglican Polemic, who drew up the graph, writes,

In the experience of the Church of England, bishops are hardly the key to religious renewal. The number of bishops has more than doubled in the past century, and Anglican allegiance has more than halved. Maybe bishops put the English off their religion…

Amid all the media coverage that the Anglican bishops receive, we should remember that their claim to represent British Christians is dubious. The truth is that the majority find bishops a turn-off, and are detached from the institutional Church. In the 2001 Census, 72 per cent of Britons identified themselves as Christian - even though only about 7 per cent regularly attend church (of any denomination). For many of us, bishops represent a pre-modern form of Christianity, rooted in nostalgia for a powerful, authoritarian Church. They are not the means to a renewal of Christian culture in Britain - rather they stand in the way, perpetuating the impression that this religion is wedded to illiberalism.

You can find the whole article here.

Enlightened American Episcopalianism

Thank you, Chris Seitz of the Anglican Communion Institute, for this insightful and telling condemnation of U.S. Episcopal Church “progressivism”:

Progressive American Episcopal leadership understands itself as enlightened… Progressive American Episcopalians, ironically, like to condemn American overreaching and boorishness (so they see it) in all sorts of ways in the political arena, but do not see the degree to which an enlightened, confident, indeed superior view of their own knowledge in the matter of human sexuality is simply assumed as self-evidently correct.

This supreme self-confidence can be seen in the public statements of Gene Robinson and the Presiding Bishop, and those who support and defend them. When it comes to those who do not share these views—whether inside the American region, or in the Global South, or in the Church of England—two stances are possible. One is aggressively to condemn a ‘homophobia’ that is perceived as running riot, and so to deride and challenge with all vigor interventions into the US from those in these unenlightened regions. The other is to treat those who are not enlightened in these matters of human sexuality and the interpretation of the Bible with kindness and condescension, on the view that just associating with them for a sufficiently long period of time will show them the errors of their ways. Should they leave, that is another way to keep the movement going forward and so no great loss. (Maybe later they will see and return)…

Traditional Anglican teaching on the Bible and human sexuality, even granting a range of traditional views on exegesis and interpretation, is not in any position of authority or antecedence, so far as enlightened Episcopalianism is concerned. At most it is quaint and out of date, and need not be taken seriously except as one of several post-modern options. The idea of a range of catholic and traditional understandings of the interpretation of scripture, outside of which there is error and misjudgment, is not possible for even the most generous enlightened Episcopalian. All interpretations are more or less valid, because the truth of the matter is that in the area of human sexuality, anecdote and personal experience are the only arbiters. That is what enlightenment in the nature of the case means. Something is unequivocally true because progressive Episcopalians know this is the case. Everyone else is either an opponent, or someone lacking the proper time spent with the enlightened ones, or is ignorant and culturally backward. But an enlightened progressive will not usually deliver this last verdict publicly because it is more congenial to defer to post-modern accounts of everything being a possible interpretation, or the view that ‘enlightenment’ comes through shared experience and just more time with the knowledgeable ones…

Enlightened Christianity is in the nature of the case a minority view, because the enlightened are onto something new, something that may be widely represented in the culture but which was never able to be squared with the vast preponderance of Christians in the world, never before and not now. Americans understand themselves as on the forefront. To understand enlightened American Episcopalianism it is crucial to come to terms with what it means to know something is true whether anyone knew this before, and whether now it can be said to characterize what Christians have received as true. Enlightened believers do not receive things as true, they know things based upon personal experience of a very circumscribed sort…

As we approach the Lambeth Conference it is crucial to understand that enlightened American Episcopalianism is entering a field where what it knows as true could come into conflict. Could, because it is entering a field of play where it is a large group but is not really on its home team pitch. In order properly to engage the enlightened Episcopalian it is imperative that one understand how entrenched this self-understanding is, and how very domineering it is. It speaks of spending a lot of time together, ‘getting to know Gene’, but the awareness is meant to benefit the cause of enlightenment and never any other way. It may appear that one is just listening and adding things up and dividing by what is put out there, but that is not the way the enlightened Episcopalian thinks. The Bible is capable of myriad interpretations, but there is only one interpretation of the truth when it comes to this view of ‘endless deferral of truth’ interpretation, and only one never-deferred interpretation of the truth when it comes to human sexuality. If things do not go well, enlightened Episcopalians will simply have their views confirmed, and will return and carry on because they are right.

Consider this quote from Bishop Chane in today’s Guardian. “I think it’s really very dangerous when someone stands up and says: ‘I have the way and I have the truth and I know how to interpret holy scripture and you are following what is the right way,’” he said. “It’s really very, very dangerous and I think it’s demonic.”

Enlightened Episcopalians condemn interpretation of scripture when it indicates something like received truth, and deference to long-standing catholic teaching based upon this. Chane claims such views are totalitarian, but then he simply assumes his own view is unequivocally true and so declares the scriptural-catholic teaching ‘demonic’, caricaturing the claims of those who hold it. This is the position of enlightened American Episcopalianism: it knows the truth through enlightenment, and all appeals to received truth and catholic deference to this are to come under domination of the Enlightened view. It speaks in terms it knows well (superior knowledge) and projects this onto opponents, but at issue is the nature of the knowledge of God’s word and will for the Church. Enlightened Episcopalians know what is true by personal claim. American enlightened Episcopalians are right because they are on the cutting edge, at the forefront, whilst the rest of the world lags behind and must be instructed.

At issue is whether the rest of the Anglican world will recognize how entrenched and domineering this view is, where it is held, and so allow it to go its own confident way, detached from the burden of mutual subjection in Christ. Enlightened Episcopalians can wait out a lot of things, but maybe it would be best if they waited out the unenlightened rest of the Communion within the region of their own self-confidence and superior knowledge. What would be the harm in that? It is hard to see why enlightened Episcopalianism would object to this, except for the fact that it would expose just how singular and uncooperative they really are. But enlightenment thinking has before had to bear this burden and it ought not to begrudge that now.

You can read his whole article here.

Bishops ‘weakening body of Christ’ in row over gays and women

Ruth Gledhill of the London Times reports:

Conservative bishops have been accused of breaching their duties and damaging the welfare of Christians as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, fights back against his critics. Anglican bishops arriving for the Lambeth Conference yesterday were told to stop their backstabbing and in-fighting if they were not to “weaken the body of Christ”.

A background paper distributed to 650 bishops and archbishops attending the ten-yearly conference in Canterbury told them to remember that their relationships with each other were “fragile and tainted by sin”. Anglican rows over ordaining gay priests and women bishops were damaging for “all the baptised”, it said. But the most stinging criticism was for conservative bishops, of whom 230, mainly from Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, are boycotting Lambeth.

The paper, commissioned by Dr Williams, made clear that bishops who had transgressed diocesan and provincial boundaries in search of “orthodox” primacy were considered guilty of undermining collegiality. An even worse sin, it suggested, was boycotting the conference.

The warning was published in the Lambeth Reader, a document intended only for delegates but seen by The Times. “Given the present state of the Anglican Communion it is the special collegial responsibility of the bishop to be at prayer for and with fellow colleagues,” the paper said. “This is particularly relevant for those bishops who are in conflict with one another. Their failure to attend fervently to this ordinal vow weakens the body of Christ for which they have responsibility. This in turn weakens the bonds that all the baptised share with one another.”

The paper, written by the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, represents the start of the fightback by Dr Williams, who has been accused of showing inadequate leadership. His strategy at Lambeth has been to draw up an agenda devoid of controversy to avoid further splits and to use allies in a counter-attack based on theology and tradition.

It concedes that there are occasions when a church “falls out of sympathy” with its bishop on matters of doctrine and conduct. But it demands that the ease of modern communication and travel does not excuse choosing a leader in another province to become “chief pastor”. This is a reference to the 300 US parishes that have sought oversight from provinces including Southern Cone, Rwanda, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya.

The Right Rev Errol Brooks, Bishop of North Eastern Caribbean and Aruba in the West Indies, defended the conservative stance. He said: “On issues of homosexuality, people make choices but they should not try to foist these on others. Homosexuals are God's children. We have to love them. But when they have made certain choices that are not in keeping with biblical ethic, we have to try and see if we can come to some common ground.”

Dr Chris Sugden, executive secretary of the Anglican Mainstream lobby group, criticised the paper as inadequate. He said: “This is incomplete in its presentation of the New Testament teaching of what bishops should do in the case of continual, systematic teaching of false doctrine.”

Aha! So now the truth is out. Flagrantly transgressing the teaching of Scripture, the traditions of the church, and the Anglican Communion’s own agreed statements does not constitute schism, but giving pastoral care and oversight to orthodox believers does. This latest volley in the Anglican wars cannot possibly help to mend the rift and can only makes things worse. On the other hand, this new clarity may be for the best in the long run.

Protecting extremist moderation

More from the National Post, this time an op-ed piece by journalist Michael Coren:

The glimmering paradox of the [Anglican] church is that it guards its ostensible moderation with a grim determination, as so many orthodox Christian believers can testify. They have been persecuted in Canada and beyond for two decades by the liberal hierarchy, and it is only now, after so many attacks, that they are fighting back to the point of separation…

Liberal Anglicans call for radical change abroad and progressive policies at home but refuse to deal in a Christian manner with those closest to them. This certainly applies to the way “traditionalist” Anglicans are treated by the liberal majority in the Anglican synod and in various dioceses, particularly in Canada. (“Traditionalist”, by the way, is something of a misnomer. It describes contemporary Anglicans, often extremely modern in their form of worship and politics and with large and growing congregations, who simply believe in the basic tenets of Christ’s teaching. In other words, they’re Christians.)

Nor should we ignore the implicit racism of this church founded by Anglo-Saxons for Anglo-Saxons. Empire extended the denomination to Africa and Asia, where the vast majority of Anglicans now reside. Indeed there are more Anglicans in Nigeria alone than in Canada, Britain and the U.S. combined. These black and brown members, however, are overwhelmingly orthodox. As such, they are often treated by the wealthy, liberal church in the West as being—according to one bishop who spoke to me at a pre-Lambeth conference in Kent, England, last week—“naughty and somewhat ungrateful children”.

Hardly surprising, in that at the last synod of this church we heard some extraordinary comments from British and North American bishops about “primitive” and “superstitious” believers from the Third World. They were described thus because they opposed the ordination of homosexuals to the ministry. Something to do with that Bible thing apparently.

None of which speaks of a middle-of-the-road organization, anxious to bend and adapt so as to please all and offend few. More like yet another liberal body vehemently intolerant of anything and anybody it sees as refusing to tolerate its extremist moderation. Watch out for those cucumber sandwiches, vicar, they may be laced with poison.

The whole article is here.

A better way to ask the big questions

From the National Post (Canada): Raymond de Souza (a Roman Catholic priest) compares and contrasts the approaches of Pope Benedict and Archbishop Rowan Williams to Christian faith.

Leaving aside the substantive issues involved, the confluence of [World Youth Day in Sydney] with Lambeth 2008 provides a glimpse into the options available to global Christianity in the 21st century, whether the particular configurations be Catholic, Anglican or otherwise.

“In the middle of all our discussions at synod, where would Jesus be?” asked Canterbury in his sermon last week at York Minster. “He will be all over the place. Where will Jesus be? In whose company? The company of those who feel lost; have lost; and who are just beginning to see that lostness is the beginning of wisdom.”

There is something to that, of course, as it is not for us to know the inscrutable designs of Providence. Yet there is also in Canterbury’s approach something unsettling, if indeed unsettled-ness is the route to discerning the Lord’s will for us. Those with a more exacting approach to the scriptures—Archbishop Jensen among them—would note that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, not lostness.

In advance of his arrival in Australia, Benedict released a message to Australians, offering a rather different approach to those young people who are asking themselves the deeper questions of life. “Where can we look for answers?” Benedict asks. “The Spirit points us towards the way that leads to life, to love and to truth. The Spirit points us towards Jesus Christ. In him we find the answers that we are seeking, we find the goals that are truly worth living for, we find the strength to pursue the path that will bring about a better world.”

Of course, Canterbury would agree that in Jesus Christ we find the answer to every question—as would anyone who believes that Jesus Christ is Lord. Yet the two approaches remain different. Does the spiritual life pose questions that have no definitive answers, in which we experience the limits of our knowledge as a threshold across which lies the unfathomable mystery of God? Or does the life of faith reveal to us truths that, while always beyond our capacity to comprehend, grant us certain knowledge of things that we can know to be true—things about ourselves, about the world we live in and about God? You will find Catholics and Anglicans with both approaches, but it is fair to say that the latter approach characterizes the Catholic disposition at the beginning of the 21st century, while the former is more Anglican.

I like to tell my own students back home that while many good questions are difficult to answer, the mark of a good question is that it leads to an important answer. Questions which don’t lead to answers at all may be intellectually intriguing, but provide no foundation upon which to anchor a truth, build a philosophy or establish a mission in life. In Sydney, whether it be the Anglican archbishop or the Catholic pope and his young pilgrims, it is answers that are being sought, with confidence that answers are to be found.

You can find the whole article here.

Man falls during prayer, sues for $2.5 million

I am hard pressed to figure out how to categorize this news item from KansasCity.com. Is it comedy? Or is it tragedy? It certainly demonstrates how our modern spirit of litigiousness has infected even the body of Christ.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. | A man says he was so consumed by the spirit of God that he fell and hit his head while worshiping. Now he wants Lakewind Church to pay $2.5 million for medical bills, lost income, and pain and suffering.

Matt Lincoln says he is suing after the church’s insurance company denied his claim for medical bills. The 57-year-old has had two surgeries since the June 2007 injury but still feels pain in his back and legs. He says he was asking God to have “a real experience” while praying.

Lincoln says he has fallen from the force of the spirit before but has always been caught by someone. Lawyers for the church say other congregants saw him on the floor laughing after his fall. They say he failed to look out for his own safety.

“No Condemnation” (2)

Here is the second half of that sermon:

Little did either of the two brothers have any idea of the consequence of what they had done. Esau had a full stomach. Jacob had become the heir to the family fortune. But that scene would come back to haunt them again and again, as the animosity between them grew into full-fledged vengeance and the threat of murder; and one dark night Jacob would find himself alone and unable to sleep, cowering in fear of what his powerful brother was going do to him.

In subsequent generations the hostility between Israel (the descendants of Jacob) and Edom (the descendants of Esau) would only grow worse. In Moses’ time, as the people of Israel made their way back towards the Promised Land, the Edomites refused to allow them to cross their territory. This led to continued wars and retribution for centuries—right to the time of Nebuchadnezzar, when the kingdom of Edom took advantage of the Babylonian sweep of the region to slaughter and plunder their distant cousins, the Jews.

In a later generation still, it is a descendant of the Edomites, Herod the Great, who orders the slaughter of innocent children in Bethlehem. And in turn it is his son, another Herod, who has John the Baptist beheaded, and who, though not directly responsible for the death of Jesus, joins in mocking and humiliating him on his way to the cross.

“Thus Esau despised his birthright.” The author of Genesis matter-of-factly tells us. And there follow nearly two thousand years of consequences. Who ever would have thought…? Yet on a smaller scale I see this same principle being worked out again and again in people’s lives. Well do I remember a woman who lived what was probably the most secretive life I have ever seen. Only years later did I discover that her secrecy was really a cloak to hide an intolerable burden of guilt that she had carried around with her for more than a generation. Another woman continued to be haunted by the way she treated her mother at the time of her high school graduation, forty years after the event.

In his book Guilt and Grace Swiss physician Paul Tournier relates case after case of men and women who lived their whole lives unable to escape the consequences of something they may have done at an earlier time in their lives. Reflecting on the unending parade of such people who have come through his office, he writes,

Complexes, secret imaginations, temptations, vain and unconfessable dreams, a whole world of impulses more or less conscious, often of no clear form develop within us. They defy the censorship of our will, as we realize with confusion. It is another self which lives within us, which we cannot stifle…

What Tournier describes does not sound altogether different from what we read in last week’s epistle, from the seventh chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans:

I do not understand my own actions [he confesses]. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do… So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

Who among us has not shared this anguish? Of course there are all kind of things people do in their attempts to escape it. They receive psychiatry; they engage in philanthropy and acts of selflessness; they delve into asceticism; they numb themselves with alcohol and drugs; they immerse themselves in hedonism; they may go as far as suicide. Some even try religion. Yet there seems to be nothing that can enable them to escape. They have been tried, sentenced, condemned and punished by a jury of one—their own heart within them. With Paul they cry aloud, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

In the midst of this bleak picture there is good news. It comes to us again from St Paul, not in last Sunday’s reading but today’s. I cannot say the words without chills running down my spine: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

What Paul is telling us is that Jesus Christ has done for us what we (or anyone else in all the world) could never do for ourselves. At the time it must have seemed that he too was a victim of unalterable consequences. That must have been the way it appeared to Esau’s descendant Herod as he watched the bruised and humiliated Galilean walk from his court on the way to his death. In spite of all the miracles, all the idealism of his teaching, all the cheering of the crowds, the wheel of karma had taken him too.

Yet it was on the cross, as he hung utterly powerless even to swat a fly that might have landed on his face, that Jesus brought that seemingly all-powerful, unstoppable wheel to a grinding halt. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” declares St Paul.

Paul Tournier reflects,

So from one end of the Bible to the other, we constantly witness the same paradoxical happening. The guilt that men are never able to efface, in spite of sacrifices, penance, remorse and vain regrets, God himself wipes away… But the wonderful announcement of God’s free grace, which effaces guilt, runs up against the intuition which every man has, that a price must be paid. The reply which comes is the supreme message of the Bible; it is God himself who pays, God himself has paid the price once for all, and the most costly that could be paid—his own death, in Jesus Christ, on the cross.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Because of what Jesus has done for you and for me on the cross, and through faith in him, we need no longer be victims of the events of the past. He has set us free from the law of sin and death. That doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to do things that we regret. But it does mean that they no longer have the final say in our lives.

At morning and evening prayer in the old Book of Common Prayer we used to confess that “we have left undone those things that we ought to have done, and we have done those things that we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us…” As we look at our own lives and our own past, may we recognize that we bow before a God of infinite mercy and grace, who has done what we could never do for ourselves. And may you know within your heart, in spite of all that might want to tell you otherwise, that truly “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”.

Heavenly Father,
we cannot praise you enough,
that in the mystery of your love,
you have reached down to us in your Son
and given him to die for our sins on the cross:
help us to know in the depths of our hearts
that there is therefore now no condemnation
for those who are in Christ Jesus,
and so to live as those who have been set free,
for the glory of your name.

“No Condemnation”

This is the first half of my sermon from this past Sunday:

You probably didn’t notice his obituary. I’m not even sure that it appeared in the local newspapers. But in April of this year the world said goodbye to Edward Norton Lorenz. And who, you may ask, was Edward Norton Lorenz? Lorenz was a meteorologist who developed a mathematical model for the way air moves in the atmosphere. One day, while using a numerical computer model to rerun a weather prediction, he took a shortcut and entered the decimal .506 rather than the full .506127. To his surprise, he came up with a completely different weather scenario. Several years later he published his findings using the now famous query, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”

The lesson he learned was that all actions—even the most seemingly insignificant ones—have their consequences. And sometimes those consequences can be altogether out of proportion to the original action. Most of us are probably familiar with the six-hundred-year-old rhyme that tells how “the kingdom was lost for want of a nail”:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For want of a horse the rider was lost,
For want of a rider the battle was lost,
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

I often think that we have a version of that same principle expressed in Scripture, in the warning that accompanies the second of the Ten Commandments. Do you remember how it goes—about the children being punished for the iniquity of their parents to the third and fourth generation of those who reject the Lord, but of his showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love him and keep his commandments?

It seems a dire admonition, almost like karma—that somehow through the actions of the past we can be made victims of a cruel and unbending fate, as though strapped to an enormous flywheel spinning out of control.

In a sense, when we look at this morning’s reading from the Old Testament, what we have before us is the gentlest flapping of the butterfly’s wing. After twenty years of childlessness, Isaac and Rebekah become the proud parents of twins. Even during the pregnancy we hear adumbrations of future tragedy. The twins wrestle within Rebekah’s womb, and the Lord tells of an enduring rivalry that will follow. At the time of birth, the younger twin is born grasping at the older one’s heel. Perhaps no one thought very much of it at the time, but the name that was given to him, “Jacob”, from the word haqeb, “heel”, would be a lifelong reminder of the peculiar circumstances of his birth.

The scene swiftly moves to their youth. Esau was a strapping, outdoors kind of guy, “a skillful hunter, a man of the field”, as the Bible describes him. Jacob, on the other hand, was more of a mama’s boy, who preferred to spend his time indoors—in the kitchen of all places.

That was how Jacob developed the reputation of being something of an amateur chef. Esau could smell the delicious blend of aromas that Jacob was cooking up one day as he made his way, sweaty and dirty, in from his work in the fields. “I’m famished,” he bellowed. “Give me some of that red stuff.”

Now whether this was the moment that Jacob had been waiting for, or whether it was just an idea that popped into his mind, we don’t know. But something made Jacob hesitate before he dipped his ladle into the stew. “How about a trade,” he said to Esau, as he leaned over the steaming cauldron, “your birthright for a helping of my stew?” “I’m so hungry right now I would be willing to give just about anything,” replied the older brother. “Then give me your word of honor—now,” said Jacob, as he tasted a sample of the stew for himself. “OK, OK, it’s a deal,” gasped Esau. You could practically see the saliva running down from the corners of his mouth. And in a moment he was sitting in front of a heaping bowl of Jacob’s tasty concoction, scarfing it down as though there were no tomorrow.

As the Bible writer lets down the curtain on this little vignette from the life of Jacob and Esau, he comments, “Thus Esau despised his birthright.” Three little words in Hebrew, yet they fall with devastating power. “Thus Esau despised his birthright.” The butterfly had flapped its wing.

The 50 most influential figures in the Anglican Church

On the eve of the Lambeth Conference of Bishops The Telegraph has compiled a list of the men and women they believe to be the top movers and shakers in the Anglican Communion:

A panel of experts has voted for who they think are making the biggest impact, both in making the headlines, and working behind the scenes. This list sheds light on those who have played a role in shaping the Church, both locally and internationally, and will be involved in how it evolves out of the current crisis.

They range from archbishops and bishops to theologians and academics, including figures from both sides of the divide and those who have tried to heal the rift. In a sign of the increasing importance of the internet in turning local issues into global ones, the list includes some of the bloggers who have chronicled the fallout over gay clergy and women bishops around the world.

These are the 50 names who will play a key role in this historic period in the life of the Anglican communion, many of whom will feature prominently at this summer’s conference, which happens only once every 10 years and has never been so eagerly anticipated.

The top ten (relatively predictably) are: Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury; Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the US; Peter Akinola, Primate of Nigeria; Gene Robinson Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire; Henry Orombi, Archbishop of Uganda; Desmond Tutu, retired Archbishop of Cape Town; Greg Venables, Presiding Bishop of the Southern Cone; Peter Jensen, Archbishop of Sydney; Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester; and John Sentamu, Archbishop of York. You can check out the whole list here. There are some interesting inclusions. Sadly some key figures will not be present at Lambeth. Not to be outdone, The Guardian has published its own list of six “main players at the Lambeth Conference” here.

Robinson accuses opponents of ‘idolatry’

It seems that Gene Robinson is drawing more attention than the Lambeth Conference itself. According to this account by Ruth Gledhill of the London Times, things do not bode well for the latter, or for the Anglican Communion:

The openly gay bishop whose consecration led to the crisis over sexuality in the Anglican Communion has accused his evangelical opponents of “idolatry”. The Bishop of New Hampshire, the Right Rev Gene Robinson, is to defy the Archbishop of Canterbury by turning up uninvited at Canterbury for the Lambeth conference this week.

The Times has learnt that the crisis is likely to worsen, whatever is decided at the conference, because the Episcopal Church of the US plans to overturn its pledge not to consecrate any more openly gay or lesbian bishops. The US church, which will dominate the conference with 125 bishops attending, is expected then to elect rapidly and consecrate a further five or six such bishops.

The 700 invited bishops, reduced in number because 200 Africans and Asians are boycotting the conference in protest at gay ordination, are to spend nearly the entire three weeks sequestered in private “indaba” groups at which they will pray, “share” and learn to love each other more. Yesterday it became clear that Dr Rowan Williams's efforts to secure unity, by eschewing controversy, were doomed.

A hectic round of media interviews by Bishop Robinson ensured that the issue of gays and Anglicans remained top of the news agenda, where it is likely to stay for the next three weeks of the conference. Six US bishops, including the Right Rev John Chane of Washington, are backing a move to bring hundreds more gay and lesbian clergy and lay people uninvited to the conference…

Bishop Robinson was also backed by the US church’s Presiding Bishop, the Most Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori, who preached at Salisbury Cathedral, where the Dean, the Very Rev June Osborne, is among the favourites to become the Church of England’s first woman bishop. Bishop Jefferts Schori called for a “softening of hearts”. She said: “God’s grace and favour still falls on people some societies find inappropriate ... Many supposedly Christian nations find it difficult to treat immigrants as worthy recipients of full Christian welcome and hospitality. We often see the same attitudes toward gay people. At times we’ve treated the mentally disabled with equal disdain.”

I’d love to know where the rumor about the election of 5 or 6 more practicing gay bishops came from, and how it is substantiated. Katharine Jefferts Schori becomes more prepsterous each time she opens her mouth. I wonder how gay people take to being compared with the mentally disabled! Ruth Gledhill’s whole article is here.

The Bishop of Durham writes to his clergy about Lambeth

Here is what Bishop Tom Wright has written to his clergy less than a week in advance of the Lambeth Conference:

As I write, the bishops we are hosting in this diocese are arriving and being welcomed. I do hope that all who can do so will give them a great sense of how special they are and how privileged we are to meet them. They come from vastly different places—imagine the contrasts between the Yukon and Lesotho, between Texas and Tanzania, between Australia and Chile!—but are all leaders and shepherds of God’s people in challenging times. Please pray for and with them and let them know that you will be continuing to pray in the next three weeks.

We none of us know ‘how Lambeth will work out’. There are huge issues on the table, as we all know. The unity of God’s people is massively important in the New Testament, far more so than the western church has often realised. But it is never ‘unity at any price’. The ideal of Anglican comprehensiveness has meant seriously different things at different times and places; I hope we won’t be bombarded with people suggesting that Richard Hooker and the Elizabethan church believed that ‘anything goes’. Why would they have taken so much trouble over the Articles and the Prayer Book? It isn’t enough to say, with any new proposal on any topic, ‘we Anglicans are called to live with difference’. The question is, as I have said a thousand times, how do we tell the difference between the differences we can live with and the differences we can’t live with? The quest for an authentically biblical and Anglican comprehensiveness that will take us forward into this new century in worship, mission and ministry is what the Windsor Report and the Covenant Proposals are all about, and those are the markers that Archbishop Rowan has said, several times, must pave the way ahead.

It isn’t yet clear to me how the day-to-day process of the Conference will enable the mind of the church to emerge clearly on these complex issues. We need not only wisdom in discussing the actual subjects on the table—of which there are many (see the website, www.LambethConference.org for full details) but for wisdom in knowing how to have the key discussions both inside and outside the official sessions. Please join me and millions round the world in praying for all of this, that we may not be derailed by urgent or angry voices from whatever angle, but together may find the way of wisdom, of holiness, of mission and above all of love.

The bulk of his letter is actually taken up with reflections on the recent Church of England General Synod. You can find it here.

Calgary bishop cites discrimination against Christians

This piece of news today appeared on the Roman Catholic site Zenit. I notice that so far it has not been picked up by any of the secular media, even though the letter was written a week ago.

The [Roman Catholic] bishop of Calgary has asked the premier of Alberta to repeal a section of the territory’s Human Rights Act, citing that it has been used to discriminate against Christians. In a letter dated July 6, Bishop Frederick Henry informed Premier Ed Stelmach that the situation concerning Christians is “continuing to deteriorate across our country and the various levels of governments are seemingly nonresponsive”…

The bishop cited several examples of how this section has been used against Christians, including the April ruling of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal that ordered an evangelical Christian charity, Christian Horizons, to abolish its morality code and provide its employees anti-discriminatory training. The charity was additionally told to pay Connie Heritz $23,000 for firing her after she violated the morality code, which she freely and knowingly signed.

“Every religious institution should have the jurisdictional independence to determine its own confessions, doctrines and ordinances, including conditions of employment,” said Bishop Henry. The bishop also cited the May ruling of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal that found a Regina marriage commissioner, Orville Nichols, guilty of discrimination after he refused to marry a same-sex couple. The commissioner was ordered to pay $2,500 to the gay couple, who he had referred to another marriage commissioner.

“The conflict between social pressure and the demands of right conscience can lead to the dilemma either of abandoning a profession or of compromising one's convictions,” wrote bishop Henry. “Faced with that tension, despite the ruling of the commission, we must remember that there is a middle path which opens up before workers who are faithful to their conscience. It is the path of conscientious objection, which ought to be respected by all, especially legislators. “Every person has the right to have their religious beliefs reasonably accommodated.”

The bishop then cited a third example from May, in which the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal fined pastor Stephen Boissoin $7,000 for a 2002 letter on homosexuality he sent to the Red Deer Advocate, the newspaper of the central Alberta town of Red Deer. In the letter to the editor he referred to Biblical passages on homosexuality, and cited the extra health risks of the homosexual lifestyle. Boissoin was the executive director of the Christian Coalition at the time. Soon after the letter was published, a gay teen was attacked. Red Deer schoolteacher Darren Lund filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission stating that the letter had provoked the attack.

In addition to the fines, Boissoin and the coalition were also ordered to stop publishing in all forms of media any “disparaging remarks” about homosexuals, and apologize to Lund. With the ruling, said Bishop Henry, “the tribunal effectively stripped Boissoin of his right to freedom of speech”. “This is tantamount to ruling out honest debate and a plurality of views in the public sphere lest someone be offended by a differing viewpoint,” he added.

“We have talked enough,” the bishop continued. “It is time to repeal Section 3 ... of the Alberta Human Rights Act and to protect the rights of religious freedom. Every person has the right to make public statements and participate in public debate on religious grounds.”

I am impressed that the bishop does not restrict himself to the abuse of Roman Catholics by human rights tribunals, but seeks to defend all Christians. The full text of the bishop’s excellent letter may be found here. The Stephen Boissoin story is covered elsewhere on this blog.

An Open Letter to the Bishops Gathering at Lambeth

This document, written by Epraim Radner, a member of the Covenant Design Group, was made public on the Anglican Communion Institute website today:

I write to urge you to prayerful action in the face of widespread concerns that the upcoming Lambeth Conference will prove not only wholly irrelevant to the needs of our common life, but perhaps also the last such conference that our Communion will engage. Yet, in large measure, God has placed these matters in your hands. Although I am not privy to the planning, the intentions, and the ordering of the Conference, there are clear signs that the Conference runs the risk of failing to face and respond faithfully to the needs of God’s people within our Communion and her churches…

I am well aware that the Lambeth Conference itself has long proclaimed that it is not a “synod” in some technical sense, granted the canonical powers to legislate for its member churches. But, with these canonical constraints granted, it remains a fact that the Lambeth Conference is the one gathering of Anglican bishops; and if it is your mind, guided by the Holy Spirit, that is spoken and heard, what we have called a “moral authority” will be understood, and rightly so, by the people as an authoritative voice, equivalent to any synod or council within our tradition. As I have argued before, Lambeth “can be what it wants to be”, that is, if the will of the bishops is joined by a divine grace to speak as one. And you are called so to speak (1 Cor. 1:10).

I am also aware that there is a deliberate desire at this decade’s conference to avoid a focus upon parliamentary debate and resolutions, and instead focus upon common discussion, listening, and prayer. This is as it should be: for what council of bishops could ever speak faithfully unless its words emerged from a mind submitted to and brought together in the Spirit of Christ Jesus? And how shall this happen but through the gathering in prayer in the example of the first Apostles?

But if this prayerful reflection does not, in this time, give rise to a common resolution regarding the responsibilities of your own pastoral office and the ordering of our common life, such devoted intentions will have been wasted, perhaps culpably so.

The Moment We Face

Your responsibility is shaped, in part, by the times we are in. For we are facing the most perilous crisis in our life as a Communion and as members of it, that we have ever faced… Nothing in the past compares with the sheer extent of the threat to Anglican existence that we now face, as the Communion looks into permanent and multiple fracture, and local churches do the same in the wake of already grievous divisions…

Within the United States in particular—and now I speak of my own church—the future of Anglicanism looks grim. On the one side stands the national office of the Episcopal Church, supported by many bishops and dioceses, that has flouted the traditional teachings of the Church, rejected the pleas and recommendations of the Communion, and engaged in formal and informal processes of bullying, denigrating, and smearing those who disagree. On the other side are traditionalist bishops, dioceses, and congregations, the most formally organized of which (e.g. the Common Cause groups) are moving in a direction of denominationalist marginalization. Whatever GAFCON’s hopes may contain for the broader world, the context and dynamics of American religion mean that any movement determined by autonomous structures will be swallowed up by sectarian identities. What are American Anglicans to do who remain committed to the Anglican Communion’s vocation of unity-in-council for the sake of the Gospel? If the Lambeth Conference cannot take it upon itself to act with clarity and evangelical coherence in the face of the threats to our common life, you abandon us.

What you are called to do

You must pray, you must reflect, you must listen. You must also act. Let me suggest four central actions you must come to a common mind about. In all these cases I use the term “must”, not because I am absolutely certain of these matters, but because I believe that God is indeed calling you to act, and this belief is buttressed by the discernment of countless others around the Communion.

1. You must state clearly that the actions of TEC as an official body, and of certain Canadian dioceses, are unacceptable to you as bishops of the Communion. And you must decide, resolutely, that those bishops from these churches who are in agreement to press forward in ways the Communion has now clearly and consistently repudiated no longer partake in your common councils…

2. You must call back into your midst those who have stayed away from this Conference, not simply as a sign of continued fellowship, but in order to meet face to face again to resolve and heal the breaches that are widening among you month by month…

3. You must come to a common and directive mind on how you will recognize and work with those Anglicans in North America especially—bishops, dioceses, congregations, and clergy – who have remained faithful and wish to remain faithful to the common agreements of our life in the past and those upon which you are ready to embark…

4. I pray that you will state clearly your commitment to the expeditious formulation and application of an Anglican Communion Covenant, one that will be faithful, concrete and adaptable to the mission entrusted to us…

How can you accomplish this?

The grave concern that many of us have is that your conference will come and go without any of these matters being dealt with straightforwardly and positively. We know that there are many among you even who do not believe that your conference should be dealing with such matters, and would like the format of your meeting to exclude any decisions.

I cannot say what formal means are open to you. But I can say this: you are bishops of this church, you are gathering in the great name of Jesus Christ, and you are called to be faithful stewards of the mysteries entrusted to you (1 Cor. 4;1). In such a posture you have no choice but to be courageous and call for the work that needs to be done, and then do it, whether the conference seeks your counsel or not. You are Esthers before the king, come for such a time as this (Est. 4:13-14). And as Augustine notes, it is up to God to change the king’s heart, not you: yours is to witness faithfully. You must find a way to bring these matters before your colleagues; you must press them with vigor, charity, and focus; you must be untiring and hopeful that God will bless your testimony. If not you, who shall it be? The Church of Christ depends upon her Lord; but He has called you to be His servants in His mission.

My good bishops: we pray for you ceaselessly; we seek the blessing of the Lord Jesus upon you; we yearn in the Spirit, often in ways we cannot express, for the healing of our church and the life of our mission together. May God himself be your strength and your guide.

I highly recommend that you take the time to give a careful reading to his whole submission, which you may find here.

London Times Cryptic Crossword for 13 July

Here is the Sunday London Times cryptic crossword puzzle for this week. Click on it to come up with the full-sized version.

Cryptic Crossword Solution for 6 July

Here is my proposal for last Sunday’s London Times cryptic crossword puzzle:

45 minutes of hell in Kenya: B.C. woman forgives attackers

This harrowing story appeared in Canadian newspapers today:

Eloise Bergman was taking a hot bath Wednesday in her Kenyan home when she looked up to see five men, each clutching machetes and clubs in their hands. “I thought this must be a joke so I said can you please pass me my clothes?” the 66-year-old, originally from Vernon, BC, said in a telephone interview Friday from a Nairobi hospital room. “They raised their machetes and told me to get out of the tub. They wouldn’t give me any clothes.”

The men took Eloise’s hands and tightly tied one with a black cellphone adapter cord and the other with a cord from her husband’s electric shaver. Then Eloise, naked and dripping wet, was forced to stand up so the men, all local Kenyans in their 20s, could rape her. Three of them did. The attack lasted a horrifying 45 minutes…

The whole time, she did not utter a single word except whisper 'Jesus' over and over under her breath. After the men were done, they punched Eloise in her private parts, choked her three times and cut her with their machetes. Her jaw was broken. She needed 35 stitches to close the cuts on her face.

Seven people—five men and two women—have been arrested in connection with the brutal attacks on the Bergmans. Two of the men taken into custody have been identified as the Canadians’ security guards, hired in the last three weeks to protect the couple at night. Eloise and John, 70, had recently moved into their own house on a gated farm in Kenya, where they grow food for local children. They were working with the non-profit organization Hope for the Nations, based in Kelowna, B.C.

The retired pair had moved to Africa to help widows and orphans in the city of Kitale and help refugees who had fled a political crisis. They had been living in Kenya for four months when the brutal home invasion occurred.

Eloise said after she was attacked, the suspects demanded her car keys. She was then forced to lie down on the floor and was covered with blankets and a mattress. That’s where she lay, waiting to hear the thieves start her car and drive into the distance before she got up and cut her bonds loose with a pair of cosmetics scissors to search for her husband, who she hadn’t seen since the attack started. With a thin blanket draped around her body, she ran out into the yard, calling his name. Eventually, she found him lying in the bushes, his arms and legs broken. His head, slashed by the machetes.

What followed, Eloise said, was “miraculous”. The car she thought the thieves had driven away was still sitting in her driveway. They had crashed it into a tree and fled. The petite Eloise dragged her husband, by then a “dead weight” into the car…

It took her three tries to get the car moving. Eloise had to ram through the gates surrounding her farm to drive for help, 20 minutes away. It was only when they arrived at a nearby hospital in Kitale that night that she realized how seriously injured her husband was. The assailants had struck John’s skull, jaw, arm, knee and leg with clubs. He also had been severely cut with machetes. He needed so many stitches to his face that the doctors “lost count”, Eloise said. She said John will need to undergo four major surgeries. Both will need extensive medical procedures to fix their broken jaws.

Despite this terrifying ordeal, she and John have no plans to return home to Canada. This crisis has given her more strength to help those in need, Eloise said. “Today in my hospital room, an Ethiopian young girl came in and she just started crying. We both cried together because she had gone through the same thing (rapes) too,” she said…

In the end, the thieves stole laptops, cameras, clothes and as much as $5,000 in cash, money that was supposed to go to African orphans. All of it has since been recovered. Nonetheless, Eloise said one of the first things she and her husband want to do once they fully recover is to visit their assailants. “When I woke up this morning, I was picturing the time will come when John and I are physically well again,” she said. “It’s in both of our hearts to go to the prison and tell them about our forgiveness.”

You can read it all here.

A response to +Durham from a Yank

This response to Bishop Tom Wright’s reflections on GAFCon, by Craig Goodman, appeared on StandFirm today:

… First, I am sure you are quite right that the situations in America and England are not comparable. In any case, I have no knowledge of the CoE situation (beyond the generally sensationalistic public press) and have no expertise to comment on it.

But there is from an American point of view an aspect of the Current Unpleasantness that you have overlooked. You quite rightly underline, at several points, the dreadful situation in America, but you don’t seem to appreciate its pressing character for those involved. A decade is a short time in ecclesiological development—as it is a vanishing nanosecond in geological time—but to a congregant it is, for example, the crucial period to educate a child, from the ages of six to sixteen, say—and for this particular child, those years will never come again…

The situation in America is not merely disgraceful, as you say, but also both catastrophic and urgent. There is a point at which you must either jump from the burning building or resign yourself to a fiery death; you cannot wait any longer for a committee report.

But as to GAFCon: I have personally defended ++Rowan against what I saw as unfair and oversimplified accusations, on the Web and elsewhere, for years. I have defended the Windsor Report, even when it somehow morphed in Episcopal jargon into the Windsor “Process”, and I have posted any number of blog comments urging patience and allowing Communion processes to work themselves out. But what has been clearly demonstrated over the last few years is that all Communion processes—woolly and typically Anglican as they are—depend ultimately on the Archbishop of Canterbury for their enforcement. Yes, indeed, as ++Rowan has maintained, authority in Anglicanism is conciliar. But unless the Archbishop is willing to take concrete—and inherently unpleasant—steps to enforce legitimate conciliar decisions, authority becomes not conciliar but nonexistent. Dromantine and Dar both provided demonstrable conciliarity and conclusions which called for concrete action vis-a-vis the American churches; in both cases these conclusions were undermined—gratuitously and transparently—by the official organs of the Communion.

If decisive action to require specific guarantees from the North American churches had been taken immediately upon issuance of the Dromantine communiqué, we would not be where we are. If decisive action to implement the structures proposed at Dar es Salaam had been taken immediately, whatever obscure plot you discern to take over the Communion would not have gathered sufficient support to progress. But we are where we are; and although it is pointless and uncharitable to assign blame on the basis of “what might have been”, it nonetheless appears that the last clear chance (borrowing a concept from American automobile-accident insurance) to avoid this catastrophe was clearly in the hands of the Archbishop.

It was (or should have been) obvious years ago that the same tensions evident in the North American churches were present—though perhaps less evident—in the Church of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury has consistently declined to take any real steps to resolve these tensions, probably because they involve irreconcilable differences and thus any effective resolution would involve not discussion but simply and unavoidably canning some clergy—inherently unpleasant. So we continue to temporize, confident that God or Jeeves will pull things out all right in the end…

And what on earth lead you to think that, once the fire had been left alone to spread in North America, it would not jump the Atlantic?

I think the author makes some very cogent points. You can read it all here.

Some Data on the Relative Number of Bishops per Province

I have often expounded on Newton’s inverse law of episcopal effectiveness: that is, that, as a general rule, the ratio of bishops to “people” in any diocese or province is inversely proportional to the effectiveness of its ministry. So I was very interested when Kendall Harmon published this chart yesterday on TitusOneNine:


A few of things need to be said by way of commentary.

(1) With reference to the Church of England: generously, its membership might be 10% of the 25,000,000 claimed here, which puts it just after Canada and the USA in terms of the ratio of bishops to people (1/25,000), and makes it more like 3% than 30% of the Anglican Communion.
(2) The real horror story comes with the tiny provinces of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, where some dioceses have fewer constituents than a medium-sized parish.
(3) What does this say about the various Anglican groups that have split from the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada in recent years, where the ratio is considerably higher, perhaps more like 1/2500? More reason to pray that this is a temporary, holding situation.

The original World Council of Churches statistics on which this is based may be found here.

Women, Men, and the Church

This is what I have written for the next edition of our church newsletter:

As I write, a debate is raging in England over the role of women in the church. After more than a decade of discussion and debate, the General Synod has agreed that women are eligible to be ordained as bishops.

This has been a reality on this continent for many years. But in England the press are reporting that as many as 1300 clergy are threatening to leave the Anglican Church over the issue. Of course there is nothing the media like better than a good fight, and the numbers may prove to be much smaller than that. Nevertheless the issue has resulted in serious acrimony, and we need to pray for healing and a softening of positions on both sides.

Earlier this year Messiah’s vestry also spent a good deal of time discussing this same issue. Not that anyone was about to consecrate a bishop! The issue for us was whether to list ourselves as an “egalitarian church”: that is, a church where “spiritual gifts of women and men are to be recognized, developed and used in serving and teaching ministries at all levels of involvement”, where “public recognition is to be given to both women and men who exercise ministries of service and leadership” and which “will dissociate itself from worldly or pagan devices designed to make women feel inferior for being female”.

Our concern was to reflect, in a formal manner as a parish, a truly biblical and God-honoring approach to this important subject. Certainly a single newsletter article cannot give anything like adequate coverage to the vestry discussions—and even less so to what the Bible has to say on the matter.

While much attention is given to the passages of Scripture that appear to give women an inferior role, we do well to begin by looking at its central themes and overall direction, and only after that to examine specific cases.

Reading the Old Testament more than three hundred years ago, for example, Matthew Henry saw in the story of the creation of Eve, “that the woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal to him…” And of course from there follow the accounts of remarkable women such as Sarah, Deborah, Ruth, Hannah, and Esther, to name but a few, whose pivotal place in the unfolding of salvation history is undisputed.

When we come to the gospels, we see Jesus treating women with a respect that was uncommon, if not altogether non-existent, in the ancient world. Just think of his conversations with woman at the well, the Canaanite woman who pleaded on behalf of her demon-possessed daughter, Mary and Martha, and even the woman caught in adultery. Think of his parables, where women are invariably depicted as positive examples (not so with men!). And think of the fact that the first people to bear the good news of Jesus’ resurrection were women.

In the epistles, we are introduced to a community where “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. And, while there are verses that adjure women to be silent and not to teach, I would argue that these are not programmatic, but are intended to address specific situations that had arisen in Ephesus and Corinth. Overall, in the nascent church we find women taking their place next to men as equal partners, possibly even to the rank of apostle (see Romans 16:7).

I recognize that Christians have legitimate differences over this matter, and that my interpretation of Scripture is not the only one. Yet I do believe that our identifying ourselves as a church where women and men are equal partners in the gospel of transformation through Christ can only strengthen our witness to it.

The Anglicans at GAFCON: What Happened in Jerusalem

I just came across this insightful article by Jordan Hayden, which appeared in First Things earlier this week:

Even before it began, the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON, as its organizers called it) was dismissed as a failed attempt at schism—and hailed as a triumphant new beginning—for the long-troubled Anglican Communion. In fact, however, it’s too soon to tell which it will be, even now that the conference has finished…

What happened in Jerusalem can be summed up under several headings. The conference was primarily attended by conservative Anglicans—from Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, West Africa, Tanzania, the Southern Cone, and the Sydney diocese of Australia, as well as by several conservative bishops from the American, Canadian, and English churches. In both numbers and influence, GAFCON was heavily but not exclusively African—leadership was assumed by primates such as Peter Akinola of Nigeria and Henry Orombi of Uganda, but the popular Australian evangelical archbishop Peter Jensen, among others, also exercised influence. The overall impression of many attendees was one of fellowship, resolve, and worship—in sharp contrast to the contentiousness and broken fellowship that has characterized many gatherings of Anglican leadership in the recent past.

The conference was also markedly evangelical. The theological documents produced by the conference (such as “The Way, The Truth, and the Life”) were all firmly set within the evangelical wing of Anglicanism. The perspicuity, divine inspiration, and self-interpreting nature of Scripture were recurrent themes; GAFCON attendees saw themselves as forthrightly standing up for the clarity of “God’s word written” and the paramount necessity of the Church’s obedience to it. Those of a more Catholic Anglican persuasion may legitimately worry if they have been left out of GAFCON’s vision of orthodoxy. While some Anglo-Catholics were indeed present, such as Bishop Jack Iker of the Fort Worth diocese, they were a decided and evident minority.

As for GAFCON’s enemies, little doubt was left that the attendees of the conference intend to drive away the errant doctrines of theological liberalism from the Anglican Communion, and are prepared to act independently of Canterbury and the formal structures of Anglicanism. The final statement cited “three undeniable facts” as the root of the crisis facing global Anglicanism: first, the promotion of a “different gospel” (read: defiance of Scripture and acceptance of theological pluralism) contrary to apostolic teaching; second, the broken communion brought upon the Anglican Communion by the preaching of this false gospel (particularly with regard to the American and Canadian churches’ acceptance of same-sex unions and the American church’s elevation of an actively gay man, Gene Robinson, to the episcopacy); and third, the “manifest failure” of the existing structures of Anglicanism to do anything about it.

More positively, the GAFCON statement spelled out fourteen “tenets of orthodoxy,” which they regard as foundational to orthodox Anglican theology. Dedication to the gospel of Christ and subscription to the Holy Scriptures as “the Word of God written,” containing “all things necessary for salvation,” come first, along with the need to interpret the Scriptures with due respect for Church tradition and the “rule of faith” expressed by the first four ecumenical councils and the three historic creeds. (Here, Anglo-Catholics have something to cheer about.) …

The Thirty-Nine Articles have not been strictly and uniformly enforced in the Anglican world for quite some time. In the American church, they are included in the prayer book only as historical documents. Re-establishing a reality that has simply not existed in Anglicanism since the nineteenth century will be, to put it mildly, difficult.

Recourse to the 1662 prayer book will also be tricky: Would the American prayer book of 1979 be judged a sufficient adaptation? If not, would the old 1928 book do? Finally, to make recognition of holy orders and Episcopal jurisdiction dependent upon orthodox faith and practice is of course absolutely necessary, but more than a bit difficult to pull off in practice. Who is orthodox, and who is to say? Arguably, this question goes to the heart of the entire Anglican controversy.

The GAFCON answer to this question seems to be a revived and reinforced confessionalism, based on the Thirty-Nine Articles and the fourteen tenets of the Jerusalem Declaration. As the statement makes patently clear, the GAFCON Anglicans have little confidence that the existing structures of Anglicanism can be trusted to judge in matters of orthodoxy and Church discipline. GAFCON asked that its new fellowship of confessing Anglicans be headed by a Primates’ Council, whose function will be to “authenticate and recognize confessing Anglican jurisdictions, clergy, and congregations”— whether they are in full communion with Canterbury or not…

Already, the GAFCON statement envisions the creation of a new orthodox American province parallel to the Episcopal Church. But as both Rowan Williams and N.T. Wright have pointed out, there remain a number of unquestionably orthodox American dioceses that have not signaled any intention of leaving the Episcopal Church. Are they to be replaced? Are they still authentically Anglican? Who is to say?

These difficult questions are at the heart of the entire present struggle over the soul of Anglicanism. Orthodox critics of GAFCON such as Williams and Wright—along with theologians such as Chris Seitz, Ephraim Radner, Philip Turner, and primates such as Drexel Gomez of the West Indies—argue that sufficient answers cannot come from ad hoc interventions and councils. They must come instead by reforming Anglicanism from within. These critics stake their hopes on the proposed Anglican Covenant, due to be discussed at Lambeth next week, the principal goal of which is to arrive at a mutually agreed-upon method for deciding disputed matters with reference to substantive and coherent theological criteria.

Unfortunately, it is not clear that Lambeth and the other existing structures of Anglicanism can accomplish any such thing. Many hope so, against great odds, and not a few continue to work and pray that it might. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, one of the Church of England’s leading thinkers, said at GAFCON that Anglicanism, if it is to be an effective confessing church, needs also to be a “conciliar church … to have councils at every level, including worldwide, that are authoritative, that can make decisions that stick.” Orthodox Anglicans going to Lambeth agree; that is why they are going, and that is why they have placed their hopes in the proposed Anglican Covenant. If they do not succeed, the GAFCON fellowship will almost assuredly step in to fill the gap, as a new confessional church in the evangelical Anglican tradition. Anglicanism will not be what it used to be, and some will argue that it no longer genuinely exists.

It might be too much to say that a good Lambeth could save Anglicanism from such a fate, but it is probably not too much to say that a Lambeth gone wrong could render such schism unavoidable. Certainly it is not too much to predict that faithful Anglicans everywhere will be working, watching, and praying for guidance.

You can find the whole article here.

The GAFCON Movement and the Anglican Communion

Andrew Goddard of Fulcrum (an English Anglican evangelical centrist group) assesses GAFCon. These are his concluding remarks:

The gathering at GAFCON was clearly experienced by those present as a powerful movement of the Spirit. However, as the experience of the American church shows, a claim that the Spirit has led a large body of laity, clergy and bishops to act in a certain way does not in itself validate their actions.

There are already positive results and hopeful signs in terms of GAFCON’s commitment to the Anglican Communion and its reform, its desire to work together with others committed to traditional Anglican doctrine, and its passion for holistic global mission. These are great gifts it is offering to the wider church but gifts which it needs to recognise are found across the Communion. It is this failure to recognise that GAFCON shares some of the failings of the wider Communion and the wider Communion shares some of the strengths of GAFCON that is undoubtedly behind concerns that reform might only be acceptable on its own terms and that people will be excluded if they are critical of aspects of GAFCON’s working.

The next crucial stage in the movement is clearly the outworking of the new fellowship—both internally as regards its structures and in its relationship to those Anglicans who will not join it even though most of them share its passions and concerns.

Many of those at GAFCON have sadly decided they cannot in conscience participate in the Lambeth Conference or had that decision taken by others and imposed on them. Nevertheless, continued conversations between GAFCON and the wider Communion are vital. Thankfully, some GAFCON bishops will be there. They will hopefully be encouraged and able to share with their fellow bishops some of their own hopes and fears and listen and respond to others’ reactions to GAFCON.

The answers the fellowship develops to the practical questions raised above in relation to the “how?” question are vital. They will also likely in large part depend on the actions of Lambeth and the Instruments. The ball is therefore now in the court of Lambeth and the Archbishop of Canterbury. They must consider how they will relate to GAFCON and whether they can offer a more constructive and truly conciliar way of addressing the questions we face. In particular these are the urgent questions concerning reform of the Instruments, the need for an Anglican Covenant, and the necessity (perhaps the fruit of the Windsor Continuation Group) for a clearer and more decisive Communion response to those bishops and churches who continue determinedly to reject the Communion’s repeated requests for restraint and repentance since the last Lambeth conference.

Instant reactions to GAFCON are, sadly, in our day and age necessary and inevitable. This is especially so when its proponents, warning against delay, call on people and congregations to take a stand and make what they describe as fundamental choices in the face of what they portray as a false gospel. There are, however, high levels of fear, anger and past hurts on all sides in the current climate and the power of the existing political alliances and prejudices surrounding GAFCON cannot be denied. These factors—together with the complexity of the current situation-mean it is vitally important that GAFCON’s proposals and reactions to them do not get so fixed that they fuel further breaches in bonds of affection. All of us—from individuals and parishes being urged to sign up in support of GAFCON to the hundreds of Anglican bishops gathering later this month at Lambeth—need time for prayerful discernment as to what God is saying and doing in these tumultuous times and what part GAFCON plays in his reshaping of Anglicanism.

2000 years ago, there were various movements for the renewal of God’s people which appeared in the Holy Land and caused quite a storm. Many more such movements—some still celebrated, others long-forgotten—have arisen there and in other places in the centuries since. Whatever our instant reactions to GAFCON—whether positive or negative or simply confused—we may do well in coming weeks and months not to rush to definitive judgment. We perhaps could do best at this stage to recall the cautionary words of a leading teacher of the law in response to one such strange movement of the first-century—“Men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men.” Why? Because “if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God”.

His whole paper may be found here. It has many excellent insights and is well worth the read.

Further Thoughts on GAFCON and related matters

Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, offers some further reflections on GAFCon, largely in response to the follow-up meeting held at All Souls Church, Langham Place, in London:

… And now to discover that our great Jim Packer is being persecuted by a wicked liberal bishop in Canada—well, clearly it’s time to man the barricades! Why can’t the Anglican Communion do something to help this wonderful man?

That is the very question I have asked myself–not only in relation to Jim Packer faced with the Diocese of New Westminster (i.e. Vancouver), but in relation to many of my close friends in various dire situations in the United States and in other parts of Canada as well. I want to assure such friends, many of whom are in regular email correspondence with me, that nothing I have said takes away at all from my strong and consistent support for them, my prayers for them, my desire that a solution be found to the appalling situation that so many have faced, AND (please note) a lot of hard work, necessarily behind the scenes, on their behalf. It is simply untrue to suggest that I and others have done nothing to help the beleaguered orthodox in America; I call to witness the vitriol I have received from revisionist journalists on several occasions over the last few years! I have taught and lectured in the USA many times over many years (to the point where some of my detractors sneer at me for it). I am very well aware, as many in England are not, of the almost incredible situations that people face for the sole crime of continuing to preach and teach the orthodox faith in Jesus Christ as the true and only Saviour, the final revelation of the one true God, and the standards of behaviour which Christians around the world have taught, and tried to live up to, for 2000 years. Since this is my own position, too, and since I do not regard the recent innovations in the USA and Canada as ‘allowable local options’, or as ‘secondary matters’ upon which we can ‘agree to differ’, I continue to stand where I have always stood, that is, shoulder to shoulder with those in the USA who have suffered much for the sake of their allegiance to this same gospel and standard of behaviour. I fully agree with those who say that the innovations which came to their head in 2003 are the symptom of a much deeper doctrinal and spiritual malaise, and that it is tragic that this has been allowed to develop in North America in particular (though elsewhere as well to a lesser extent) to the point where things that two generations ago were unthinkable to almost any Christians anywhere in the world are now not only thinkable but taught as necessary doctrines to be enforced (without irony; but then apart from Stephen Colbert there doesn’t seem to be that much irony in North America just now) with the full rigour of canonical and legal processes which were designed to protect, not to attack or undermine, biblical and theological orthodoxy. All this I have taken for granted. Those who know me personally have not, I think, ever doubted that this is where I stand…

When I hear Peter Jensen say that ‘we are not self-selected; we are God-selected, because we are based on the word of God’; when I hear beloved and respected Jim Packer say that the ‘Jerusalem Declaration’ should be the basis of a new covenant to which all English bishops will be required to sign up; when I hear Vinay Samuel, one of the sharpest minds in the whole GAFCON movement, saying (unless he was misreported) that ‘we are not breaking away from the Anglican Communion–we ARE the Anglican Communion’; and when I see Bishop John Rodgers of AMiA saying that ‘we are the true and faithful Anglicans … the true representatives of the Anglican Communion’–then it is time for someone, and it might as well be an old-fashioned Bible-believing evangelical like me, to stand up and say , with usual English understatement, ‘hold on, this seems to be somewhat over the top’. Just as the ‘covenant for the Church of England’ bore all the marks of sloppy thinking and hasty drafting, so the ‘Jerusalem Declaration’, though affirming more or less the doctrines that I myself have spent my whole adult life affirming and teaching, bears all the marks of similar haste. In addition to its embarrassingly obvious weaknesses, it has smuggled in, alongside the doctrinal affirmations, various open-ended formulae which basically mean ‘We will decide who’s in this new club and who’s out of it, and if we decide you’re out we claim the right to plant new churches in your territory, “authorize” them, and send in bishops to look after them’. This is not a ‘suspicious’ reading; it is more or less exactly what the text says. And I say to my fellow evangelicals in the Church of England: do not be taken in by this. This is not the answer. There are good answers to such problems as we face and this is not among them. There is such a thing, alive and well in our church, as sound, lively, wise biblical teaching and preaching. America may need drastic action: we most certainly do not. This is why I spoke in my radio interview of GAFCON taking a global sledgehammer to crack the American nut…

I am grateful for the many affirmations I have had of friendship, prayer and support at this extremely difficult time. I ask those who have jumped to the wrong conclusions about what I wrote and said to ponder carefully the radically different situations that exist in different parts of the world, to look beyond their own horizons and see that what they are eager to embrace as a solution to their own pressing difficulties may well create other difficulties in other countries. Yes, we need to solve the American and Canadian problems. Yes, we need the wonderful and exuberant African energy as we take forward God’s mission in the next generation. But no, GAFCON is not the answer. Especially not here in England.

I am grateful for Bishop Wright’s sensitivity to the intolerable state of the Episcopal Church in the United States. At the same time there can be no doubt that he is correct in what he says about the differences in the situation in each country. Somehow GAFCon and/or the Anglican Communion have to realize that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to what is happening, and work on some kind of focused response. The establishment of an alternative province in the USA and Canada? The full text of his comments is here.

The Lambeth Conference, the Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Communion

You may have noticed a complete lack of Anglican news on this blog for the past week, since the Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem. It has been intentional. We need time to distance ourselves and to reflect with some degree of emerging objectivity. Now the Lambeth Conference of bishops is on the near horizon, and in anticipation of it, a constructive contribution from the Anglican Communion Institute:

If the work of the Lambeth Conference is in fact to strengthen rather than weaken the Communion in the days and years to come, we are firmly convinced that the bishops there assembled must find ways to address in a constructive manner several key issues.

First and foremost among these is the already announced intention of a significant number of bishops within TEC to allow clergy within their dioceses to bless unions between members of the same gender. This course of action is patently contrary to Lambeth resolution 1:10, the Windsor Report, the Dar as Salaam Communiqué, and the positions of all the Instruments of Communion. Further, the dioceses in question are well known, having made their intentions quite public. To ignore what can only be understood as defiance of the mind of the Communion will serve only to increase the jurisdictional battles now being waged. It will also weaken both the credibility and moral authority of the Lambeth Conference of Bishops and the integrity of the Anglican Communion as a whole.

A second issue that requires immediate attention is the vulnerable state of those Anglo Catholic dioceses and parishes in TEC that do not believe that the ordination of women is in accord with catholic tradition…

A third issue that can be ignored only to the peril of all is the way in which the Primates of the Communion are to assume the enhanced responsibility the Lambeth Conference has assigned them in cases where problems arise within a Province that the Province itself seems unable to resolve. The creation of a self-selected ‘Primates Council’ at the recent GAFCON conference makes it plain that although an important responsibility has been assigned the Meeting of Primates, adequate means for its fulfillment have not been provided. Frustration with the good working of the Primates Meeting has occasioned the development of an alternative whose existence, charge, and viability are all in doubt…

Finally, there is the matter of the proposed covenant. Though GAFCON did not address the covenant at its recent gathering, leaders of the fellowship (Archbishops Akinola, Kolini, and Venables) previously have joined with Archbishops Chew and Anis in support of a covenant that “is in line with our common classical Anglican heritage of biblical, historical and reformed formularies of faith and ecclesiology”. The covenant thus seems a promising way ahead for all…

Many have said that the Lambeth Conference will simply reveal the imminent dissolution of Anglicanism as a worldwide Communion. However, as the recent GAFCON conference has shown, the sort of face-to-face conversation for which the upcoming conference is designed can, despite internal divisions, produce real results. If the issues noted above are addressed with courage, honesty, and charity, there is good reason to believe that the Anglican Communion can emerge from this difficult season with greater clarity and strength.

You can find the whole article here.

The real story behind the gay pride issue at St. Joan

This article by Katherine Kersten, which appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, seems refreshingly counter-cultural:

Last week, controversy erupted when Archbishop John Nienstedt informed St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Minneapolis that it could not hold a gay pride prayer service in its sanctuary. The service—held for several years in conjunction with the annual Twin Cities Gay Pride festival—celebrates the gay identity.

In response, organizers moved the celebration outside the church. One gay activist attended in what must have struck him as a clown’s outfit, given the occasion—the robes of an archbishop, miter and all. David McCaffrey of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities (CPCSM) condemned what he called Nienstedt’s “reign of homophobic hatred”. In an e-mail to the group’s members, he characterized the archbishop’s decision as “yet another volley of dehumanizing spiritual violence directed at GLBT persons and their families”.

Clearly, there is hatred here. But it is not coming from the Catholic Church. Rather, it’s a tool of those who are trying to compel the church to conform to their personal demands with caricatures and public mockery.

Opponents charge that the church does not welcome gays. They point to the fact that the archdiocese won’t sponsor a gay pride prayer service as evidence. But the truth is different: The church welcomes everyone. Far from rejecting gays as sinners, Christianity teaches that all human beings are sinners. In fact, it maintains, it is precisely because we are sinners that we need the Christian message…

The controversy at St. Joan of Arc is part of a larger picture. When the gay rights movement emerged several decades ago, its leaders asked only for tolerance—a live-and-let-live attitude on the part of the larger society. Today, the movement increasingly demands both approval of and conformity to its creed. More and more, it labels all dissent—even that based on religious conviction—as “hateful”.

Secular institutions have largely acquiesced. The church alone perseveres in the conviction that human sexuality has a larger purpose. That is why it is now a central battlefront in this crusade.

I highly recommend reading the whole of this article, which I think is one of the most insightful I have seen in the secular media. You can find it, along with more than 200 responses, here.

London Times Cryptic Crossword for 6 July

Here is the latest cryptic crossword puzzle from the Sunday London Times. You can click on it to come up with a full-sized version.

The man who speaks in anagrams

This just happened to be on TV while I was uploading the cryptic crossword solution. I couldn’t hold back from posting it, as it seemed too appropriate for words:



Thank you, Monty Python!

Cryptic Crossword Solution for 29 June

Here is the official solution to last Sunday’s London Times cryptic:

How to Pick a President

This excellent article by Daniel Taylor and Mark McCloskey, both of St Paul, appeared in the June issue of Christianity Today. It seemed appropriate to post on the eve of the 4th of July.

There is nothing ordinary about being a President. Politicians are public performers, playing always to the watchful electorate. So look at what they did and how they conducted their lives before they went on the political stage. And look at what they do when they hope no one is looking after they are in office. It speaks well of Barack Obama that he worked extensively with the poor before he ran for office… And almost no one, including political opponents, questions the significance of John McCain’s courage and service to his country in the prison cells of North Vietnam. It may, however, also say something that Al Gore, as Vice President, was shown to contribute almost nothing to charitable causes out of his own pocket until he needed to position himself for a run for the presidency.

Look also for any record of willingness to speak and act from conviction when doing so has threatened their careers or self-interest. (It was said of George Marshall of Marshall Plan fame that “he told the truth even when it hurt his cause”.) That is, where have they shown moral courage? … One should not evaluate these things only in terms of whether you agree with their positions or not, but also in terms of whether they are capable of doing what is broadly unpopular (not just unpopular with their political opponents) if they believe it is right.

Explore also how they treat their opponents. Are critics seen as people to dialogue with, work with, and perhaps even learn from, or as enemies to be destroyed? How inclined are they to vilify, demonize, and use dirty tricks? How often are they intellectually dishonest or jingoistic (for instance, any claim that automatically links opposition to a war to lack of patriotism)? Johnson and Nixon are the negative poster boys here, with both Reagan and Carter getting high marks for largely refusing to engage in slash-and-burn politics. Obama and McCain claim to be able to heal divisions and work with political opponents, but we need to look closely to see if their legislative records support such claims.

Consider also how they respond to getting or losing power. Lincoln pointed out, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Or take it away. Virtuous leaders hold on to power loosely. They share it easily. They encourage it in others. They see it as invested in healthy institutions, not in themselves personally. Unvirtuous, and therefore dangerous, leaders accumulate power for themselves (and their causes), use it to intimidate and manipulate, to reward and punish, and never release it voluntarily. Lyndon Johnson’s abusive use of power as a Senator—in which he made loyalty to himself more important than either morality or ideology—hurt the nation.

Yet another place to look is how candidates have dealt with adversity in their own lives. McCain survived torture with his honor intact (even while admitting he sometimes broke under torture), G. W. Bush had the fortitude and spiritual resources to defeat alcoholism. Franklin Roosevelt overcame the effects of polio. But of course all candidates have failures in their lives, too. If a candidate is given to private anger and pettiness, or has a history of broken personal relationships, does that tell us absolutely nothing about what kind of leader he or she might be? Is that none of our business, as some would say, or very much our business if that candidate is asking to be President?

The issue is not that candidates have failures, but how they have dealt with those failures. For they are certain to have public failures while in office. If in private life they run from failure or cover it up or rationalize it, are they not likely to do the same in public life? The goal of seeking virtuous people for high office is not to find perfect people, but to find people with the greatest potential to provide, despite their acknowledged limitations (humility being a prudent quality in a leader), the kind of leadership a community needs to flourish. We are not looking for saints to lead us, but we should be looking for people trying to live virtuously and largely succeeding.

It matters little that people will not agree exactly on a list of key virtues. The question of what virtues are most important, and how they should be defined and expressed, should be a fruitful part of an ongoing discussion. But it matters greatly that such a discussion take place. Recent polls indicate a broad recognition that we have a virtue deficit in this country and in its leaders that makes budget deficits pale in importance.

When we are choosing someone to lead us, we do best to look for a “good human being”. Such a person is not likely to be moralistic or pious or politically correct. But he or she needs to be virtuous. Because, over time, nations flourish only to the degree that their collective virtue sustains.

These are just the final few paragraphs of quite a lengthy discussion, which you can find here. I am thrilled that Dan Taylor will be coming to Messiah in October to address this topic in a series of adult education forums.

A very sad footnote to Canada Day

I did not feel at all proud to be a Canadian when I learned this news yesterday:

Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who single-handedly brought abortion rights to the national agenda when he opened an illegal abortion clinic in Montreal in 1969, was named a member of the Order of Canada yesterday. “I’m very pleased,” said his daughter, Goldie Morgentaler. Dr. Morgentaler could not be reached for comment.

Dr. Morgentaler’s fight to legalize abortion culminated in the landmark R v. Morgentaler ruling, in which the Supreme Court struck down the anti-abortion provisions of the Criminal Code on the grounds that they violated a woman’s constitutional right to “security of person”.

The decision to make Dr. Morgentaler a member of the Order of Canada was praised by abortion rights groups. “It’s not that Dr. Morgentaler needs that honour—we need to recognize his achievements,” said Maria Corsillo, manager of the Scott abortion clinic in Toronto. “This is a person who has single-handedly changed our country so that we are one of the few countries that absolutely recognizes women as full and equal human beings,” she said. “I think that anyone, however they feel about abortion, has to recognize that Dr. Morgentaler has given every single person in this country the right to have his or her own feelings about that.”

Anti-abortion groups that have opposed all nominations of Dr. Morgentaler to the Order were unimpressed by yesterday’s announcement. “The controversy is that they would even consider giving Henry Morgentaler the Order of Canada,” said Mary Ellen Douglas, national organizer of the Campaign Life Coalition. “I think it’s a terrible thing to do,” she said. “The announcement on Canada Day makes it doubly despicable,” she said.

Faytene Kryskow, director of the non-partisan, non-denominational group Motivated Young People for a Strong Canada, said “there is strong evidence that this man is not a hero in the eyes of many Canadians. Why is it that there is such an aggressive push to honour (him) with the highest level of civilian honour in Canada, when the largest non-governmental event in the nation on Parliament Hill this year so far was the March for Life?” she asked.

In fact I felt sickened, and hang my head in shame. “Dr” Morgentaler is a cynical, cruel man who has snubbed his nose at the Hippocratic Oath and both directly and indirectly been responsible for the merciless slaughter of thousands of defenseless unborn children. You can find more of the story here. For another Canadian blogger’s reaction, click here.

The latest buzz from Canada

It’s Canada Day, so I thought I’d include a news item from my home and native land:

Motorists in New Brunswick are hearing a little less buzzing in their ears Tuesday. The RCMP say that 98 per cent of 12 million angry bees that escaped Monday onto a small portion of the Trans Canada Highway near St. Leonard, N.B., have been recovered.

The bees were being transported in 335 crates and were on their way home to Ontario when the truck carrying them flipped its load, spilling them onto the highway. The honeybees had been used in New Brunswick to pollinate the province’s blueberry crop.

The missing bees were re-loaded onto another truck around 1:30 a.m. local time. They’re now making a beeline back to Ontario, RCMP Sgt. Derek Strong said Tuesday. He added that there are still 100,000 bees at large and the prospect of recovering them is unlikely.

Strong said the warning issued Monday for people with bee allergies to stay away from the area remains in effect. “I think people still need to be careful,” he said. “There’s no question about it. It would be a tragedy if something happened.” Strong said there were no serious injuries have been reported although a reporter trying to get a clip of the bees buzzing, suffered 15 stings.

Two professional beekeepers will remain in the town for the next few days. “The bee company has left two beekeepers in St. Leonard in case there are complaints about bees gathering somewhere,” Strong said. “There is a plan for the bees. The driver of the truck was not injured during the accident and police say no charges will be laid.

All four lanes of the Trans Canada Highway near St. Leonard, about 235 kilometres northwest of Fredericton, have been re-opened. The honeybees had been used in New Brunswick to pollinate the province’s blueberry crop.

Source: canada.com