Episcopal News and Current Events -- News About T.E.C. and ECUSA

Peter Akinola, Archbishop in Nigeria Continues Defiance Toward ECUSA-

2007-05-16T20:50:00.000-07:00

Despite requests by our Presiding Bishop and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Peter Akinola plods along, disrupting our churches ...

Anglican church turmoil over gay issues deepens
By Michael Conlon

An African archbishop's defiant intervention in the U.S. Episcopal Church has sent new shock waves through a global Anglican church already badly divided and facing possible schism over gay issues.

Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria kept up his high profile attack this week, saying the leadership of the U.S. branch of the Worldwide Anglican Communion was "insulting and condescending" to the church at large.

"The decisions, actions, defiance and continuing intransigence of the Episcopal Church are at the heart of our crisis," he told Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and titular leader of the 77-million-member global church.

"They are determined to pursue their own unbiblical agenda and exacerbate our current divisions," he said in a letter to Williams, who had asked him to stay out of the United States and not participate in a ceremony last Saturday in Virginia.
Akinola ignored the plea from Williams and an earlier one from the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori. He carried out the ceremony in which Bishop Martyn Minns, an Episcopalian, was installed as head of a new Nigerian-based church branch designed as a refuge for orthodox American believers.

The 2.4 million-member Episcopal Church has been splintered since 2003, when it consecrated Gene Robinson of New Hampshire as the first openly gay bishop in more than 450 years of Anglican church history.

Some congregations have already placed themselves under the jurisdiction of conservative bishops in Africa and elsewhere. The Episcopal Church has said that only 45 out of more than 7,400 congregations have voted to break away.

Akinola is a defender of traditional Christianity and a leader of the Anglican Communion's "Global South," churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America that now account for half of the world's Anglican church membership.

NO STRONG CENTRAL AUTHORITY

Akinola's action "seems to lay out a claim that he has a better sense than the Archbishop of Canterbury, and that's a bold claim," said Mark Sisk, the Episcopal Bishop of New York.
Last week's events are more than just another tremor on an existing fault line, Sisk said in an interview, and what may be very significant is that the Archbishop of Canterbury tried to stop Akinola.

His is "a new public voice in this and welcome from my prospective," Sisk said.
Williams earlier agreed to come to the United States in September to meet with the Episcopal bishops when they again meet to wrestle with such issues as gay bishops and the blessing of same-sex unions -- both of which are opposed by the Anglican church at large.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, Anglicans are organized more as a federation of national churches without hierarchical lines of authority. It would be hard to say that Akinola's action is unprecedented, added the Rev. Ian Douglas, professor of world mission and global Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass.

Over the years, he said, bishops have often taken "personal initiative" trying to balance "the relation between their own church and their roles and responsibilities, interests and concerns in the wider Anglican Communion," he told Reuters.

"That's not an easy negotiation," he added. "We're trying to hold together two realities that just by definition have tension -- the local and the global."
There is no "strong central agency that has the authority and the power to compel anything across the Communion. ... We are neither as centralized as the Roman Catholic Church nor as de-centralized" as some others, he added.

The conservative American Anglican Council called last week's development "a high point in North American Anglicanism."

"The energy and zeal of the Church of Nigeria have come to the U.S. ... and we pray that the result will be a re-strengthening of the historic, biblical Anglican faith in this nation after decades of accelerating moral and theological decline in the Episcopal Church," said Canon David Anderson, a leader of the group.
Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited.

New York Times Recent Advertisement

2007-05-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

This message appeared last weekend in the New York Times.

The Episcopal Church-Marking a Milestone, Moving Forward

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Somewhere near you, there's a blue-and-white sign bearing the familiar slogan: The Episcopal Church Welcomes You .. It represents some 7,400 congregations that trace their beginnings in North America to a small but hopeful group of English Christians who arrived May 14, 1607 at a place they called Jamestown - the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

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You may know us as Washington's monumental National Cathedral, site of historic services and ceremonies, or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, still unfinished, but already the largest cathedral in the world.

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But the Episcopal Church is also Boston's Old North Church, founded in 1723 and made famous by serving as the beacon for Paul Revere's revolution-spurring "midnight ride." And Philadelphia's Christ Church, home parish of 15 signers of the Declaration of Independence, host to the first General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1785.

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It's Trinity Parish on Wall Street in New York, formed in 1698, and St. Paul's Chapel just down the street, frequented by George Washington and the spiritual healing center of Ground Zero since September 11, 2001.

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It's also Epiphany Church in Los Angeles, where Cesar Chavez rallied the United Farm workers. And Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Cumberland, Maryland, whose basement was a major stop on the Underground Railroad to freedom for enslaved African-Americans. And St. John's Church in Greenwich Village, a meeting place for gay and lesbian action following the 1969 Stonewall uprising.

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It's a parish in Iowa. A campus ministry in Georgia. A mission in Dinetah - the Navajo Reservation. A cathedral in Utah. Even a house church in Vermont.

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Wherever you find us, you'll find the Book of Common Prayer and a Christian faith that honors and engages the Bible, the tradition of the Church, and God-given human reason. Joined in prayer, you'll find people with many points of view - Christians who are progressive, moderate, and conservative - yet who value the diversity of their faith community.

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That's a heritage drawn from our deep roots in nearly 2,000 years of English Christianity, and shared by a worldwide Anglican Communion that unites nearly 80 million people in 164 countries through prayer and ministries committed to caring for "the least of these," as Jesus commanded, by reducing poverty, disease, and oppression.

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Episcopalians struggle with the same issues that trouble all people of faith: how to interpret an ancient faith for today ... how to maintain the integrity of tradition while reaching out to a hurting world ... how to disagree and yet love and respect one another.

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Occasionally those struggles make the news. People find they can no longer walk with us on their journey, and may be called to a different spiritual home. Some later make their way back, and find they are welcomed with open arms.

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Despite the headlines, the Episcopal Church keeps moving forward in mission - in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, as well as congregations in Belgium, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guam, Haiti, Honduras, Italy, Micronesia, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Taiwan, Venezuela, and the Virgin Islands.

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We're committed to a transformed world, as Jesus taught: a world of justice, peace, wholeness, and holy living. We've grown a lot in 400 years, since that 1607 worship service from the Book of Common Prayer was held in Jamestown-inside and out.

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Come see for yourself. Come and visit. .. come and explore ... come and grow.

My Simple Ministry

2007-04-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

It has been awhile since I updated you on our CUFF dinners each Thursday night, so I thought this would be a good time to do so.

Our 'free supper' for the entire community each Thursday night (well, most Thursday nights, 49 weeks this year) is called CUFF _C_hristians _U_nited in _F_eeding _F_riends is a way we at Epiphany Church serve our community. Every Thursday night between 5:30 and 7:00 PM anyone in town is invited to come by our fellowship hall for a free supper. Tonight we had chicken and noodles, mashed potatoes and salad. Just walk in, get a plate of food and sit down to visit with neighbors. Normally we have been 80-100 visitors; tonight we had 103 'through the front door', not including the kitchen help preparing the dinner, etc. There are a lot of older people come to the free dinner, and quite a few younger people as well; mothers with their kids, teenagers and street people.

The menus vary from one week to the next. Sometimes we have spaghetti, other times meatloaf or similar. My part in this ministry is to act as greeter at the front door, keeping track of the number of visitors and telling them 'welcome to Epiphany!'
Also, I unlock the door when it is time to let them in to eat, and see to it the building is locked up and secure when everyone is leaving. Based on what I see from week to week, I am certain the Thursday night suppers are the one and _only_ decent meal many of our visitors receive in a week. I say this since our community is sort of financially depressed anyway, as is much of rural southeast Kansas. We do these CUFF dinners each week in cooperation with other churches in Independence, including Saint Andrews Catholic Church, the First United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Zion Lutheran Church, the First Christian (Disciples of Christ) Church, and the Southern Baptist Church.

Whenever you are in our town, Independence, Kansas on Thursday evening, do stop in to say hello, please.

Patrick Townson

Prayer Vigil on Account of Virginia Tech Shootings

2007-04-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

Prayer vigil planned for KU Canterbury Tuesday evening

In response to the shooting deaths today at Virginia Tech, the campus ministry program of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas will offer a prayer vigil Tuesday, April 17 at 8 p.m. at Canterbury House at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. The house is located at 1116 Louisiana Street.

Participating will be Kansas Bishop Dean E. Wolfe, student peer ministers, and campus missioners the Rev. Craig Loya and the Rev. Susan Terry.

All members of the diocese, and the public, are invited to attend.

Student peer ministers at the Episcopal campus ministry at Kansas State University will take the lead in coming days in organizing an on-going response by college students across the diocese, reaching out especially to Episcopal students at Virginia Tech.

Bishop Wolfe has asked that all parishes and members of the diocese offer special prayers this week and this coming Sunday on behalf of those killed and injured and their families, and for all those in the Virginia Tech community affected by this tragedy.

Bishop, campus ministers offer prayers, pledge of support

The people, clergy and bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kansas offer our fervent prayers for the students, faculty and staff members of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, in Blacksburg, Va., in this time of shock and grief.

We are deeply saddened by the senseless acts of violence that have occurred on the Virginia Tech campus. We grieve with the friends, families and teachers of those who have died and those who are hospitalized. We pray that God’s healing peace will enfold the Virginia Tech community in the midst of their loss and lead them to an awareness of God’s presence in the midst of unspeakable tragedy.

We who work in campus ministries treasure the relationships formed on our college campuses, the gifts shared by all members of our schools and the unique communities that grow out of our times of prayer and fellowship together.

In addition to our prayers, we offer whatever other help the people at Virginia Tech may need from us now and in the days ahead. And we pray that God’s powerful presence will enable all of us on college campuses to combat the darkness of violence with the light of God’s love.

In Christ,

The Right Reverend Dean E. Wolfe, Ninth Bishop

The Reverend Craig Loya, Campus Missioner

The Reverend Susan Terry, Campus Missioner

Deacon Stephen Segebrecht, Chairperson, Higher Education Committee

The Episcopal Diocese of Kansas

Episcopal Campus Ministry Reaches Out in Response to Shootings

2007-04-16T19:57:00.000-07:00

By Mary Frances Schjonberg April 16, 2007
[Episcopal News Service] Members of the Canterbury House Episcopal ministry on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University plan to gather on the evening of April 18 for a memorial and healing service, following an April 16 shooting spree at the school which is being called the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

The Rev. Elizabeth Morgan, interim rector of Christ Episcopal Church, Blacksburg, Virginia, said she was able to check on the small number of students who live at the Canterbury House and all are accounted for.

"They're fine," she told ENS.

A gunman opened fire in a dorm and classroom at Virginia Tech, killing 32 people and wounding another 24 before he was killed, according to the Washington Post.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said that the people of the Episcopal Church are shocked and saddened by the shootings at Virginia Tech. "We hold in our prayers the students, faculty, and staff of that institution, their families, and all affected by today's events," she said "As we begin to confront this senseless loss, we will continue to pray for all who grieve and search for understanding."

"Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions," Virginia Tech president Charles Steger said at a news conference. "The university is shocked and indeed horrified that this would befall us."

The university reported shootings at opposite sides of the 2,600-acre campus, beginning at about 7:15 a.m. at West Ambler Johnston, a co-ed residence hall that houses 895 people, and continuing about two hours later at Norris Hall, an engineering building.

One student was killed in a dorm and the others were killed in the classroom, according to Virginia Tech Police Chief W.R. Flinchum.

After the shootings, all entrances to the campus were closed and classes canceled through Tuesday.

A service of Evening Prayer in remembrance of the deaths and injuries from the shootings was planned for 6 p.m. April 16 at St. John's Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Virginia.

The Canterbury Fellowship ministry on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg is part of Christ Church's outreach work.

Morgan said the town was virtually locked down after the shootings. She and her staff could hear the wail of sirens all morning but "now it's deadly silent."

The AP reported that students on campus communicated via cell phones and the internet while the shooting was going on.

Morgan said residents had some trouble communicating as telephones, especially cellular phones, were experiencing service trouble. The problems could have been due to the high winds of a nor'easter storm that began hitting the east coast of the United States on April 15 and continued into April 16. Morgan reported that medical-evacuation helicopters were grounded because of the winds.

The Christ Church staff held a prayer vigil shortly after the shootings and the church is open now for prayer -- 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. -- for the rest of the week. A sign on door of the sanctuary says "Please enter to pray."

Morgan said she anticipates an ecumenical response by the area's faith communities, but it is still too early to know what shape that service will take.

"Two of our area clergy are police chaplains but we haven't heard from them yet," she told Christie Wills, minister of communication for the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia. "I expect that we will wait on planning any services until we hear from them and find out what community services may be held."

Virginia Tech said it plans a convocation ceremony April 17.

Scott Russell, Christ Church's associate rector and campus chaplain, is in Germany and won't be back until April 18, Morgan said.

She told Wills she has made it known that Canterbury House is open and available for meals, companionship and counseling for anyone.

Wills reported to the diocese's clergy via email that there may be a need for additional clergy to help with counseling/ pastoral visits later in the week.

Bishop Neff Powell is on sabbatical and Wills reported that he has been in touch about the shootings.

A New Episcopal Web Site ... Take a Look!

2007-03-24T21:57:00.000-07:00

A new, church maintained web site of interest went on line in the past couple days: It is called Episcopal Life Online and I hope you will check it out soon and see what you think!

And don't forget, try to get to church over this weekend. Here in our town, we not only worship on Sunday morning, of course but during Lent we also have Sunday evening services in cooperation with other churches (of our basic beliefs) here as well. Over the six weeks of Lent this year, we have variously had services at 7 PM on Sunday evening at the Disciples of Christ Church, our own Epiphany Episcopal Church of course, St. Andrews Roman Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church and (tonight) at the Presbyterian Church. And next week, being Palm Sunday we are going to have a community Palm Sunday evening service at Riverside Park here in Independence. These well attended Sunday evening services are an excellent opportunity for fellowship as well, with refreshments served afterword.

At tonight's service at the Presbyterian Church, our guest preacher will be from St. Andrew's Catholic Church, and the music will be provided by own Epiphany Choir. So, if you see this in time, please get over and join us! 5th and Maple Streets at the Presbyterian Church, 7 PM.

Speaking of ecumenical community events each week, I have been working with six or eight churches in town (the ones mentioned above, and a couple of others each week on our Thursday evening free community suppers. Every Thursday night (with a very few exceptions) we have a dinner -- Christians United in Feeding Friends -- (CUFF) for anyone who wishes to attend. The dinner is always in the fellowship hall at our Church of the Epiphany, Episcopal and although we will NOT have a dinner on Maundy Thursday, we have it almost every other week. Just show up, get a plate of food and a beverage, sit down and talk to friends, etc. Typically we have 60-80 visitors for dinner and we might as well put a plate on for you as well. 6 PM to 7 PM ... at 400 East Maple Street (4th and Maple just west of the church building itself.) Look for the old guy standing in front welcoming the visitors each week; that's me!

PAT

Newton and Wilberforce; Two Forces to Reckon With

2007-03-20T00:21:00.000-07:00

The Germans have a wonderful word: Ohrwurm — literally, ear-worm — for a tune you cannot get out of your head. Recently, my Ohrwurm has been “Amazing Grace”: “I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.” My family is sick of me singing it at top volume.

“Amazing Grace” was written by John Newton, along with other hymns, such as “Glorious things of thee are spoken” and “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds”. As we shall often hear in this abolition-anniversary year, Newton was a slave-trader who had a conversion to Evangelical Christianity during a sea storm in 1748, and eventually set about arguing for the emancipation of slaves. “Amazing Grace” has been one of the anthems of Christian defiance ever since.

Yet what is gob-smacking about Newton is what a nasty piece of work he once was. The idea that the author of “Amazing Grace” raped his slaves has been a conceptual Ohrwurm for me ever since I found it out. Indeed, Newton’s conversion might have stopped him from swearing and drinking, but he continued to trade in slaves for six more years.

As Stephen Tomkins puts it in his new biography of Wilberforce, who was inspired by Newton, he “would read the Bible and pray for an hour or two, leading services for the crew, while his human cargo lay or sat hunched and chained under their feet”. It is astonishing to us, but the truth is that many Christians supported slavery because it was there in the plain meaning of scripture.

In fact, one of the biggest proponents of slavery in the 1800's was the Protestant Episcopal Church. Remind me to tell you about the Epiphany Church in Philadelphia in the 1850's -- if you have not already read the story in a much earlier blog entry here. Dudley Tyng, their rector was a fierce abolishonist who fought frequently with members of his vestry about the 'slavery question' in the 1850's. He and several members of his congregation removed themselves at a Sunday "Evening Prayer" meeting at the church, and voted to start the "Church of the Ascension" as they walked out and stood on the front steps at Epiphany.

Slavery was given foundational justification in the book of Genesis, the curse of Ham condemning Ham’s descendants to perpetual captivity. It would have been seen as what contemporary Evangelicals call “a creation ordinance”.

The New Testament enthusiastically takes up this theme, for example in Paul’s first letter to Timothy: “Let as many slaves as are under the yoke count their own master worthy of all honour, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, but rather do them service.”

What was deeply courageous about the Newtons and Wilberforces of the 18th century is that they fought their society’s prejudice, as well as the uncritical biblical theology that reflected it.

The idea that we might bask in the memory of these campaigners, without reflecting that there may be similar challenges for contemporary Christians, is to be radical 200 years too late. No: the spirit of “I was blind, but now I see” has a new challenge. And there are arguments within the life of the church today where we need to apply it.

NB: My mention of Epiphany Church above is simply used as an illustration, as I am not permitted by the vestry to speak nor write about Church of the Epiphany in Independence, Kansas.

PAT

Exactly Which Traditions to You Want to Follow?

2007-03-15T23:41:00.000-07:00

Let's be honest: This is about sex

So what did you do in your bedroom last night?

For all the wrong reasons, that question seems to be at the heart of the disputes that are threatening to tear apart not just the Episcopal Church of the United States, but also the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part.

Anglican leaders from around the world met last month in Tanzania, and their final communique signals a huge, continuing fight over, yes, sadly, what people are doing in their bedrooms.

Of course, the communique certainly doesn't ask that question, in just those words; that would be quite rude! Its focus is on power and authority and who can tell whom what and, most confusing of all, claims about respecting traditions and defending orthodoxy.

Many of us in the Communion are confused, and we want to ask two questions of our leaders:

Exactly WHICH tradition are you defending?

Exactly WHICH orthodoxy do you wish to uphold?

The more conservative Anglican leaders claim that homosexuality is sinful, specifically anathemized in the Bible, and that anyone who engages in homosexual activity is a sinner of such great import that he or she can not be either a priest or a bishop of the Church. This, these leaders say, is so important that it is worth breaking up the centuries-old Anglican Communion.

But which doctrine, which principle that forms the basis of our belief in and understanding of God, is challenged by sexual orientation? The Church has no doctrine on sexuality because we do not know God through God's sexual orientation or God's sexual activity. We have no idea if God is gay or whatever, although I personally feel God is far above and beyond all that. So to make sexuality a primary reason for breaking up the Episcopal Church in this country, or the worldwide Communion, makes no sense to many of us; for us, sexuality is NOT a doctrinal issue, it is a CULTURAL issue. And if sexuality is not a doctrinal issue, it cannot represent orthodoxy, so what is being defended?

Some congregations and dioceses in the United States have said that the argument over sexuality is so important that they no longer wish to be under the authority of bishops in this country with whom they disagree on this issue. Those congregations and dioceses have asked for, and in some cases received, different leadership from outside the United States.

Those actions also are confusing. It has been the recognized tradition throughout Christianity since the 4th century that bishops are limited by their own geographical boundaries. This limit was so important in the early Church that bishops at first the Council of Nicea (325 AD) and then the Council of Constantinople (381 AD) said that "bishops are not to go beyond their diocese to churches lying outside their bounds, nor bring confusion on the churches; ... and let not bishops go beyond their diocese for ordination or any other ecclesiastical ministrations, unless they be invited." That last part, about invitation, is important, because it has been understood since those two Councils that the invitations could come ONLY from the area bishop, and not from any other leaders.

Again, many of us are confused: If the communique truly represents tradition and orthodoxy, how is it that both tradition and orthodoxy can be overturned so easily? Respect for geographic boundaries is one of the oldest tenets of the Church; overturning it now seems arbitrary at best.

Then there is the issue of communion, of the Lord's Supper, which Anglicans call Eucharist, meaning "thanksgiving."

One-fifth of the primates, the provincial leaders, present at the Tanzania meetings refused to share in the Eucharist with American Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, claiming that to do so "would be a violation of Scriptural teaching and the traditional Anglican understanding." Even at the last minute -- as Eucharist was in progress -- these gentlemen were individually approached, almost begged, as it were, "Will you please come to the table and share with the others of us present?" ... But they would have none of it.

In refusing to share the bread and wine together in the service, those seven primates actually BROKE traditional Anglican understanding, which says that the efficacy, the effectiveness, of the sacrament does not depend on either the person administering it or the person receiving it. That understanding began with Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century and was refined by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. The former wrote that the sacrament does not depend on the righteousness of the person distributing it. The latter wrote that the sacrament "is not wrought by the righteousness of either the celebrant or the recipient, but by the power of God."

Which is why so many of us are confused. By refusing to take communion together, the primates overturned centuries of tradition as well as doctrine.

Leaving many of us to ask, again: What is being defended here?

And finally, many in the American church are wondering about the ultimatum that has been issued by the primates, an ultimatum that basically orders American bishops to reject gays and lesbians, as well as orders congregations and dioceses in dispute over property issues to end all litigation. Where is our sister Katherine going to lead us? Will she stand up for, and defend all of us in the church?

The confusion here has nothing to do with the sexuality dispute. Our confusion is over those geographic boundaries, the ones that have been so important to the historic Church for 16 centuries (well preceding the founding of the Anglican Communion). When bishops from other dioceses and provinces tell bishops here that the latter must do what the former says, it breaks all traditions, all doctrines and all orthodoxy.

The ultimatum also presents the American Church with a huge problem: By demanding that American bishops make these decisions, the primates ignore the fact that the American Church is governed NOT by the bishops but by the General Convention, which is made up of laity, deacons, priests AND bishops. The latter cannot decide unilaterally for the rest of the Church. For the primates to ignore this fact is to ignore, once again, the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, which proclaimed that "it is evident that the synod of every province will administer the affairs of that particular province."

This is why so many of us are confused: Everything we have been taught over the centuries about tradition and orthodoxy and doctrine is being overturned by this worldwide dispute. We no longer know WHICH tradition to follow, WHICH orthodoxy to defend, WHICH doctrine to believe. Our international leaders are offering us conflicting instructions, and we in the pews are left to figure it out on our own.

That this dispute within the Anglican Communion is huge and of great importance is obvious. The issue of sexuality looms large over all that we do, and there is severe disagreement on what God wants us to do, because sexuality, with all its permutations, goes to the very heart of who we are as human beings.

But if we are going to argue over it, could we at least be honest and admit that the real question here is not about the orthodoxy of the faith, it is not about the tradition of the faith, it is not about the doctrines of the faith?

Could we at least admit that this is, indeed, a cultural dispute? This is about some people who believe there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, and some who believe that it is a sin. This is about who will lead a Communion that for centuries was dominated by Westerners, who tend to be seen as liberal, and non-Westerners, who tend to be seen as conservative. This is about territory, history, culture and personal beliefs.

It is not, in the eyes of many of us, both in the United States and overseas, a dispute about God or our faith.

When spiritual leaders get together and focus almost exclusively on issues of sexuality, practically ignoring the needs of the millions in this world who are starving spiritually, physically and emotionally, it is obvious to the rest of us that our leaders really only have one question in mind:

What exactly did you do in your bedroom last night?

A Conversation Between the Church and Our Presiding Bishop

2007-03-03T17:52:00.000-08:00

From Trinity Church Wall Street a message from our Presiding Bishop Katherine discusses her response to the Primates at the African meeting during February. This webcast and future messages from Trinity-Wall Street come to us through a very generous grant from Trinity Church's webcasting department. This is a one hour question and answer session with our Presiding Bishop. I urge everyone -- gay or straight -- to watch this telecast, as I believe it will influence our church for many years to come.

Please watch it
HERE

We are told this is but the first in a series of 'Conversations With the Church' and our Presiding Bishop. I hope there will be many more to come. This conversation, which included emails from church members and telephone calls was very interesting!

Thank you Trinity, for making it available to all!

PAT

Did You 'Choose This Day'? The last of the Anglican videos

2007-02-23T12:23:00.000-08:00

Now, this weekend, here are the two final videos in the series by the more conservative Anglicans on the topic "Choose This Day":

The first brings the speaker of the day, Reverend Leslie Fairfield to discuss the religious/theological confusion of the fourth century, and Nicea.
See video here

And the second video deals with Anne Askew: Protestant Martyr". View it also
here.

The Anglicans began this discussion with their original video 'Choose This Day' but they swapped that out for the video we watched here several weeks ago; the one where the narrator began by dramatically cutting verses of scripture out of the Bible he said we Episcopalians no longer wished to observe. The difficulty with that video, as I perceived it, was that one of the Anglican spokespersons in it was a (gasp!) female person (a rector in Washington State) and I am sure we all know what Saint Paul had to say about women in positions of leadership and instruction in the church ... a BIG No-No! But we have that 'original video' from the conservative Anglicans to wrap up this series. View that (original) first video
Here

Starting next week, because of a grant from Trinity Church-Wall Street I will be presenting 'regular' church services each week from Trinity Church for your viewing. I regret I was unable to find a single rector in my own diocese who was able to cooperate with my request for tapes of their Sunday services. But, the very generous Episcopalians of Trinity-Wall Street came to the rescue. These are the good folks who also supply us with their weekly televised meditations, and with television and radio productions of their choir and organ. Stay tuned to our blog, much excitement and inspiration to follow each week!

But to answer my original question: Yes, I have chosen this day, to remain an Episcopalian, as we have always known the term. Episcopalian and proud of it! And I hope you chose to join me!

PAT

Let's Be Honest: What Did You do in Your Bedroom Last Night?

2007-02-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

By Lauren R. Stanley

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

(MCT)

So what did you do in your bedroom last night?

For all the wrong reasons, that question seems to be at the heart of the disputes that are threatening to tear apart not just the Episcopal Church of the Unites States, but also the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part.

Anglican leaders from around the world met last week in Tanzania, and their final communique signals a huge, continuing fight over, yes, sadly, what people are doing in their bedrooms.

Of course, the communique certainly doesn't ask that question; its focus is on power and authority and who can tell whom what and, most confusing of all, claims about respecting traditions and defending orthodoxy.

Many of us in the Communion are confused, and we want to ask two questions of our leaders:

Exactly WHICH tradition are you defending?

Exactly WHICH orthodoxy do you wish to uphold?

The more conservative Anglican leaders claim that homosexuality is sinful, specifically anathemized in the Bible, and that anyone who engages in homosexual activity is a sinner of such great import that he or she can not be either a priest or a bishop of the Church. This, these leaders say, is so important that it is worth breaking up the centuries-old Anglican Communion.

But which doctrine, which principle that forms the basis of our belief in and understanding of God, is challenged by sexual orientation? The Church has no doctrine on sexuality because we do not know God through God's sexual orientation or God's sexual activity. So to make sexuality a primary reason for breaking up the Episcopal Church in this country, or the worldwide Communion, makes no sense to many of us; for us, sexuality is NOT a doctrinal issue, it is a CULTURAL issue. And if sexuality is not a doctrinal issue, it cannot represent orthodoxy, so what is being defended?

Some congregations and dioceses in the United States have said that the argument over sexuality is so important that they no longer wish to be under the authority of bishops in this country with whom they disagree on this issue. Those congregations and dioceses have asked for, and in some cases received, different leadership from outside the United States.

Those actions also are confusing. It has been the recognized tradition throughout Christianity since the 4th century that bishops are limited by their own geographical boundaries. This limit was so important in the early Church that bishops at first the Council of Nicea (325 AD) and then the Council of Constantinople (381 AD) said that "bishops are not to go beyond their diocese to churches lying outside their bounds, nor bring confusion on the churches; ... and let not bishops go beyond their diocese for ordination or any other ecclesiastical ministrations, unless they be invited." That last part, about invitation, is important, because it has been understood since those two Councils that the invitations could come ONLY from the area bishop, and not from any other leaders.

Again, many of us are confused: If the communique truly represents tradition and orthodoxy, how is it that both tradition and orthodoxy can be overturned so easily? Respect for geographic boundaries is one of the oldest tenets of the Church; overturning it now seems arbitrary at best.

Then there is the issue of communion, of the Lord's Supper, which Anglicans call Eucharist, meaning "thanksgiving."

One-fifth of the primates, the provincial leaders, present at the Tanzania meetings refused to share in the Eucharist with American Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, claiming that to do so "would be a violation of Scriptural teaching and the traditional Anglican understanding."

In refusing to share the bread and wine together in the service, those seven primates actually BROKE traditional Anglican understanding, which says that the efficacy, the effectiveness, of the sacrament does not depend on either the person administering it or the person receiving it. That understanding began with Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century and was refined by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. The former wrote that the sacrament does not depend on the righteousness of the person distributing it. The latter wrote that the sacrament "is not wrought by the righteousness of either the celebrant or the recipient, but by the power of God."

Which is why so many of us are confused. By refusing to take communion together, the primates overturned centuries of tradition as well as doctrine.

Leaving many of us to ask, again: What is being defended here?

And finally, many in the American church are wondering about the ultimatum that has been issued by the primates, an ultimatum that basically orders American bishops to reject gays and lesbians, as well as orders congregations and dioceses in dispute over property issues to end all litigation.

The confusion here has nothing to do with the sexuality dispute. Our confusion is over those geographic boundaries, the ones that have been so important to the historic Church for 16 centuries (well preceding the founding of the Anglican Communion). When bishops from other dioceses and provinces tell bishops here that the latter must do what the former says, it breaks all traditions, all doctrines and all orthodoxy.

The ultimatum also presents the American Church with a huge problem: By demanding that American bishops make these decisions, the primates ignore the fact that the American Church is governed NOT by the bishops but by the General Convention, which is made up of laity, deacons, priests AND bishops. The latter cannot decide unilaterally for the rest of the Church. For the primates to ignore this fact is to ignore, once again, the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, which proclaimed that "it is evident that the synod of every province will administer the affairs of that particular province."

This is why so many of us are confused: Everything we have been taught over the centuries about tradition and orthodoxy and doctrine is being overturned by this worldwide dispute. We no longer know WHICH tradition to follow, WHICH orthodoxy to defend, WHICH doctrine to believe. Our international leaders are offering us conflicting instructions, and we in the pews are left to figure it out on our own.

That this dispute within the Anglican Communion is huge and of great importance is obvious. The issue of sexuality looms large over all that we do, and there is severe disagreement on what God wants us to do, because sexuality, with all its permutations, goes to the very heart of who we are as human beings.

But if we are going to argue over it, could we at least be honest and admit that the real question here is not about the orthodoxy of the faith, it is not about the tradition of the faith, it is not about the doctrines of the faith?

Could we at least admit that this is, indeed, a cultural dispute? This is about some people who believe there is nothing wrong with homosexuality, and some who believe that it is a sin. This is about who will lead a Communion that for centuries was dominated by Westerners, who tend to be seen as liberal, and non-Westerners, who tend to be seen as conservative. This is about territory, history, culture and personal beliefs.

It is not, in the eyes of many of us, both in the United States and overseas, a dispute about God or our faith.

When spiritual leaders get together and focus almost exclusively on issues of sexuality, practically ignoring the needs of the millions in this world who are starving spiritually, physically and emotionally, it is obvious to the rest of us that our leaders really only have one question in mind:

What exactly did you do in your bedroom last night?

© 2007, McClatchy-Tribune News Service

We React to Anglican Ruling

2007-02-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

U.S. Episcopalians react to church ruling
Los Angeles Times

By Rebecca Trounson and Louis Sahagun

February 20, 2007

Each party in this conflict is asked to consider the good faith of the other, to consider that the weakness or sensitivity of the other is of significant import, and therefore to fast for a season
With pain, joy, anger and in some cases, relief, Episcopalians across the nation reacted Tuesday to a stern directive from Anglican leaders that the American wing of the church refrain from sanctioning blessings for same-sex unions and take other steps to heal tensions that may yet splinter the global Anglican Communion. In a crucial meeting in Tanzania that ended Monday, Anglican leaders gave the U.S. Episcopal Church until Sept. 30 to state unequivocally that its bishops will not authorize blessings for homosexual couples and will stop consecrating gay bishops.
The three dozen Anglican leaders, or primates, also set up a special council and vicar to oversee, at least temporarily, conservative American dioceses that have rebelled against the Episcopal Church's relatively liberal views on homosexuality and Scriptural teachings. Many conservatives said they were happy that the primates had given the divided U.S. branch of the church an ultimatum; many liberals expressed sadness.

Others wondered if the demands made this week would push the historic Anglican Church, founded by King Henry VIII of England after he broke with Catholicism, toward a schism - or help save it from such a fate. 'No one should underestimate the depth of the divisions,' said John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in Washington, D.C.

'Looking at the subtext here, you can see the threat if a resolution isn't found. But at the same time, there appears to be a real effort not to have that happen,' Green said. Conflict between liberal and orthodox church members in the United States and abroad reached crisis in 2003 when the Episcopal Church consecrated its first gay bishop.

The tensions with conservatives grew last year when the American church elected a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, as presiding bishop.

Late Tuesday, after her return to the United States from Dar es Salaam, Jefferts Schori released a statement asking church members for patience and understanding as they - and the institution itself - seek solutions to the thorny issues before them. The text appears HERE .

Here is an audio message from our Presiding Bishop on this topic.
In calm, measured language, Jefferts Schori noted that the Tanzania meeting's final communique had made requests not just of the U.S. church, but of conservative bishops outside the United States, who have taken dissenting Episcopal parishes and dioceses under their auspices. They were asked to refrain from that practice. 'Each party in this conflict is asked to consider the good faith of the other, to consider that the weakness or sensitivity of the other is of significant import, and therefore to fast for a season,' Jefferts Schori wrote. Not all seemed inclined to obey the request to pause.

At Pasadena's All Saints Episcopal Church, an influential, liberal congregation, the Rev. Ed Bacon said his church would still bless same-sex unions. 'We have many people very concerned about whether All Saints will be intimidated by this, but we will continue our ministry with pastoral care, compassion and justice,' Bacon said.

On the other side, the Rev. Praveen Bunyan, whose St. James Church of Newport Beach broke away from the U.S. church in 2004 to join an Anglican province in Uganda, said he was encouraged to see the primates 'give the Episcopal Church one last chance to turn around.' 'These are heavy, serious times, and we are not jumping up and down screaming, 'Hoorah for our side!' ' said Bunyan, who was reached by telephone in Uganda. 'The primates are consistent with the authority and clear teachings given to us in Scripture. If there is no consistency in Scripture, then there is no consistency with God.' Others said the sight this week of a small group of theologically conservative African leaders giving the U.S. church what many viewed as an ultimatum raised broad and troubling questions about power and authority in the Anglican Communion.

'This isn't fundamentally about sexuality or the place of gays and lesbians in the church,' said the Rev. Ian T. Douglas, a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass.

'It's more about questions of identity and authority in a church that has moved from a monocultural Anglo-American alliance' to a church membership and power shifting to Africa, Asia and elsewhere. The recent meeting, he said, laid bare the deep divisions in Anglicanism between those who place power and authority in the hands of its bishops and those who prefer a more democratic, consultative church. Meanwhile, many on both sides of the issues appeared to be questioning the role in the widening dispute of the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglican Communion's spiritual leader. Bill Countryman, a professor of the New Testament at Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, expressed concern about Williams' response to the more conservative primates, men Countryman described as 'bullies.' 'Rowan hasn't done much of anything, and no one can figure out why,' said Countryman, who is openly gay.

The Rev. Van McCalister, a spokesman for the Fresno-based conservative San Joaquin Diocese, which is trying to move away from the Episcopal Church, expressed similar concerns.

'Both sides are asking where Rowan Williams is in all this' McCalister said. * rebecca.trounson@latimes.com louis.sahagun@latimes.com Times staff writer K. Connie Kang contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2007 Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved.

Jefferts Schori Asks Church Members for Patience

2007-02-20T22:25:00.000-08:00

Episcopal leader asks for time
By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer

The head of the Episcopal Church asked church members for patience Tuesday after fellow Anglican leaders demanded the U.S. denomination step back from its support of gays or risk losing its full membership in the world Anglican fellowship.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said in a statement that Anglican leaders are asking all sides in the fight over the Bible and sexuality to "forbear for a season" until the 77 million-member Anglican Communion can forge a compromise.

"Each party in this conflict is asked to consider the good faith of the other," Jefferts Schori said. "Each is asked to discipline itself for the sake of the greater whole."

At the end of a summit Monday in Tanzania, which Jefferts Schori attended, Anglican leaders demanded that the Episcopal Church unequivocally bar official prayers for gay couples and the consecration of more gay bishops by Sept. 30 or risk its status in the communion.

Tension over sexuality has been simmering for years among the Anglican churches, but the Episcopal Church caused an uproar in 2003 in the communion by consecrating the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Supporters of ordaining gays believe biblical teachings on justice and inclusion should take precedence. Advocates for gay Christians say the demands amount to bigotry: Some have suggested the church should simply leave the communion.

The San Francisco-based Diocese of California, which blesses same-gender couples, said Tuesday that the church should not "compromise the essentials of our theology or our polity."

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the spiritual head of the Anglican family, has been struggling ever since Robinson's consecration to keep Anglicans unified.

Anglican leaders also suggested creating a special vicar for the minority of Episcopalians who reject the authority of Jefferts Schori, who supports gay relationships.

Jefferts Schori noted in her statement that the U.S. church has tended to focus on the suffering of gays and lesbians, which has been considered a rejection of traditional understanding of sexual morality in "other parts of the global church."

"Both parties hold positions that can be defended by appeal to our Anglican sources of authority — Scripture, tradition and reason," she said.

But she cautioned that a "single-minded" focus from either side will ultimately hurt the church.

Already, the rift has taken a toll.

An estimated 45 U.S. parishes out of nearly 7,200 have broken away and affiliated with conservative Anglican churches overseas. Two prominent Virginia parishes, along with several smaller churches, have gone much further — joining the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a rival U.S. church network created by Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola. Six U.S. dioceses have rejected Jefferts Schori's leadership.

____

On the net:

Episcopal Church

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press.

Your Individual Choice is Critical (Video presentation)

2007-02-17T23:09:00.000-08:00

Here is this week's video presentation from the Anglican Communion Network,
CLICK HERE TO SEE IT .

Canon Kendall Harmon and Rev. Leslie Fairfield discuss choices you need to make. I promised my conservative Anglican friends I would present this every week for several Sundays.

Think about it this way: just as I (and hopefully you and others) strongly hold to the belief that the Episcopal side of this debate is correct, and that the conservatives are in error, they also feel strongly about the matter. And if I honestly felt it would matter, I'd be the first gay person to tender my own resignation to my local parish, if only to bring peace to the demonination once again.

Next Sunday's video will be the end of these weekly programs.

PAT

Dr. Williams Suggests Idea of Split Into Different Sections

2007-02-16T13:56:00.000-08:00

Archbishop raises idea of split

The Anglican Church could be split into different sections in a bid to resolve the row over homosexuality, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.
Dr Rowan Williams favours exploring a system of "associated" Churches which would not have the same constitution as the rest of the Anglican Communion.

The 2003 consecration of openly-gay Gene Robinson as bishop in the US has angered conservatives in the Communion.

Dr Williams said there was no way the Anglican Church could remain unchanged.

He has suggested the Anglican Communion, which is the loose network of individual Anglican Churches around the world, could be divided into "associated" and "constituent" provinces.

The Churches in the 70 million-strong communion would make a formal commitment to each other in the form of a "covenant".

However, those unwilling to join the covenant could choose to become "associated", which would recognise their historic links with the rest of the Church, but allow them to have different constitutional structures.

Dr Williams likened it to the relationship between the Church of England and the Methodist Church.

"There is no way in which the Anglican Communion can remain unchanged by what is happening at the moment," he said, in a reflection to Anglicans around the world.

"Neither the liberal nor the conservative can simply appeal to a historic identity that doesn't correspond with where we now are."

Bishop's dispute:

According to conservatives, the liberal US Episcopal Church has refused to come into line with the conservative majority in the Anglican Church over homosexuality. The Americans claim the same thing about the other (largely African) side, saying "They refuse to see our side of it."

The election of Bishop Robinson was criticised by conservative elements in the church, particularly in Africa.

There have also been disagreements surrounding church blessings for same-sex couples.

A meeting of the Anglican primates early next year will discuss the way forward for the church on the issue of homosexuality.

Story in the BBC News here

Copyright BBC MMVII

But Conservatives Still Not Happy; they Suffer a Setback

2007-02-16T13:26:00.000-08:00

Setback for Church conservatives

Conservative Anglican archbishops have suffered a rebuff in their efforts to expel the US Episcopal Church over its liberal stance on homosexuality.

A report drawn up for church leaders meeting in Tanzania concludes that the US Church has largely met demands for it to conform with orthodox teaching.

The crisis began years ago but had been largely on a back burner and ignored; when the US Church decided to ordain an openly-gay bishop, in 2003 and a female presiding bishop last year; the crisis could no longer be ignored, thought the conservatives.

BBC Religious Affairs correspondent Robert Piggott says the report's conclusions will be hotly disputed.

The US Church had agreed rather half-heartedly to meet the demands, he says, fuelling the determination of conservative churches to severely discipline and expel them.

He adds that it is somewhat surprising that the specially-commissioned report has judged the response to be generally in accord with Anglican orthodoxy.

The demands included:

An apology for the original decision to ordain openly-gay Gene Robinson in 2003;

A promise not to repeat the action;

An end to church blessings for same-sex couples;

Despite the report finding in the Episcopal Church's favour, there is scope for further division at the Tanzania meeting, our correspondent says.

Conservative archbishops were due to put forward their plan for a parallel church in the US, under its own bishop, to cater for traditionalists who have broken away from the Episcopal Church.

Such an organisation could attract disgruntled traditionalists from other sections of the Anglican Church outside the US, and could eventually rival the main Church, our correspondent says.

Read the entire report from the BBC here

Our Presiding Bishop Met With Boycott at Meeting

2007-02-16T11:56:00.000-08:00

By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY, Associated Press Writer

Seven conservative Anglican leaders refused Friday to take Holy Communion with the head of the U.S. branch of the church, who supports ordaining gays and blessing same-sex unions, as the fellowship struggles to avert a split. As the Eucharist was being served, the seven were approached one by one, respectfully, and invited still again to join the others at the altar, but they continued to refuse.

The boycott came at the six-day meeting of leaders of the 77-million-member Anglican Communion.

"We are unable to come to the Holy Table with the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church because to do so would be a violation of Scriptural teaching and the traditional Anglican understanding," the archbishops said in a posting on the Church of Nigeria Web site. Bishop Jefferts Schori appeared discouraged, but remained prayerful as she was approached with the meal.

The primates, or Anglican leaders, belong to a group known as the Global South — theologically conservative bishops from Africa and elsewhere who have joined forces to expand their influence within the communion and counter liberal-leaning Anglicans.

"This deliberate action is a poignant reminder of the brokenness of the Anglican Communion," according to the statement from the group; "This is deliberate, this is willful."

It is not the first time conservative archbishops refused Holy Communion with an Episcopal leader. At a 2005 summit in Northern Ireland, more than a dozen archbishops would not attend daily Eucharist with then Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold.

Jim Naughton, canon for communications at the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., which accepts gay relationships, criticized the archbishops for making a sacrament a point of protest.

"Imagine if every believer, everywhere insisted on knowing the views of every other worshipper in a church on all the hot-button issues of our time before they would agree to go to Eucharist," Naughton said. "When you don't attend a Eucharist because you disagree with the views of the people who are attending with you, you make it seem that the Eucharist is about you. It is not about you. It is about God; its about His son."

Splits between Anglicans have been growing for years, but reached a crisis in 2003 when the Episcopal Church consecrated its first gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. The problems mounted last year with the election of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who is the first female head of the U.S. church and the first elected female leader of an Anglican province.

"I am certain, knowing Bishop Jefferts Schori, that she continues to listen carefully to the concerns of all her fellow primates," said Robert Williams, an aide to Jefferts Schori, without commenting directly on the boycott. He said Jefferts Schori was unlikely to comment because she is honoring an agreement with primates not to discuss details of the private conference.

The protest by the Global South bishops came one day after an Anglican committee released a report saying the Episcopal Church had fulfilled two of three requests of Anglican leaders to heal rifts created by Robinson's confirmation. The report was seen as favorable to the U.S. church. Conservatives criticized the committee's conclusion as dangerously misguided.

Supporters of ordaining gays believe the Bible's social justice teachings take precedence over its view of sexuality. Most Anglicans outside the United States believe gay relationships are sinful.

There is no formal structure for expulsion from the Anglican Communion.

Conservative Anglicans have formed a rival network in the U.S., under the leadership of Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who has called the acceptance of gay relationships a "satanic attack" on the church. Akinola was among those who refused to attend Eucharist with Jefferts Schori.

The Anglican Communion is the world's third-largest Christian body behind the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches. The Anglican fellowship was founded in the 16th century by King Henry VIII and spread worldwide by the British Empire.

AP Religion Writer Rachel Zoll contributed to this report from New York.

Places to visit on the Net:

The Episcopal Church

The Church of Nigeria

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press.

Archbishop Faces Boycott; Schism Seems More Likely Than Ever!

2007-02-14T21:50:00.000-08:00

Archbishop faces boycott at gay summit
Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has flown nearly 5,000 miles to attend the controversial Anglican summit on gays in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

But the Ugandan-born Archbishop could tomorrow find himself “excluded” from the meeting after protests from African and Asian archbishops representing the conservative Global South.

The meeting, which begins tomorrow and lasts until Monday is crucial for the future of the Anglican Communion, facing a schism over the gay issue.

On Friday, the primates will debate a new document, an Anglican Covenant, designed to set out a framework of faith and unity to avoid future schismatic actions.

Each of the 38 provinces is normally permitted one primate at the meeting.

Although the Archbishop of York is technically Primate of England, he has never before been invited to be part of the Primates’ Meeting, one of the three “instruments of communion” of the worldwide Anglican Church. The Church of England is represented by Dr Rowan Williams, Primate of All-England and “focus for unity” of the Church.

But officials in the Anglican Communion decreed that this week Dr Sentamu should for the first time be allowed to accompany Dr Williams to Dar es Salaam, to represent the Church of England and free up the Archbishop of Canterbury to chair the meeting.

His presence was, however, never put to a vote and the African primates say they should have been consulted before Dr Sentamu was included.

Although he is regarded in England as a charismatic and orthodox Christian, Global South leaders suspect Dr Sentamu of being a closet liberal who would resist the disciplining of the pro-gay US Episcopalians.

As a former judge who on several occasions outwitted the dictator Idi Amin at risk of his own life, Dr Sentamu is also one of the best legal brains in the Anglican Church. He is deemed by insiders to be skilled at getting “results”.

The African primates have written personally to Dr Williams protesting against Dr Sentamu’s presence. The Archbishop of Canterbury replied that it was not a problem and argued that it had been done by the book.

It is highly unlikely that Dr Williams will countenance the humiliation of Dr Sentamu being expelled from the meeting, and insiders in Tanzania were last night predicting a deal would be done.

Significantly, the leader of the Global South primates, the Archbishop of Nigeria, Dr Peter Akinola, yesterday flew in an extra archbishop of his own, Nicholas Okoh, Archbishop of Bendel. He is one of the nine archbishops in the Anglican Church of Nigeria and has nine dioceses in his province. Before his ordination, Archbishop Okoh was a colonel in the Nigerian army.

Dr Akinola could demand that Dr Sentamu be permitted to stay only if Archbishop Okoh be given a seat at the primates’ table. There could even be a deal over the US Primate, Katharine Jefferts Schori. Dr Akinola will almost certainly not countenance them both being at the meeting unless Archbishop Okoh is also there.

Archbishop Okoh could then be expected to bring all his strategic military expertise to bear in the battle over gays that will dominate the Primates’ Meeting. Without some kind of deal being cut, the meeting is at risk of a walk-out by the Global South.

Dr Williams, meanwhile, has his own “nuclear option”, insiders said. In a recent document, The Road to Lambeth, the Global South Primates said that they will not attend the Lambeth Conference if the US Church’s gay bishop Gene Robinson and those who consecrated him are not disciplined and if they are invited to Lambeth.

The Lambeth Conference traditionally happens every ten years. But although the University of Kent has been booked, it is understood that Dr Williams is prepared to postpone the Lambeth Conference and hold a “covenantal assembly” instead.

Bishops, clergy and laity from around the communion would be invited to attend, to discuss whether they can continue to live together under the banner of the Anglican Covenant document to be revealed on Friday.

Hardliners from the orthodox camp want the Episcopal Church expelled. Others want a “two-province solution” with the conservatives in the US and the liberals in separate churches, with their own archbishops.

One difficulty the entire church is having to come to terms with, though, is that if the US is expelled, the whole edifice could crumble. It is cash from the Episcopal Church that keeps the show on the road. Kick out the Episcopalians, most of the money will dry up.

Anglican Communion Meeting in Africa This Week

2007-02-13T20:46:00.000-08:00

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania (UPI) — Leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion are gathering in Africa to determine if the member churches can remain together.

The group, which is composed of national churches, is headed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. He called the meeting Wednesday a difficult and important encounter, The Christian Science Monitor reports.

The most difficult issue confronting the church is homosexuality, especially the ordination of gay priests and bishops. Member churches are split on the issue and there is a major fissure between conservative African churches, especially the Nigerian church, and more liberal ones, especially the Episcopal Church in the United States.

Archbishop Peter Akinola, head of the Nigerian church, has said he will not meet with Katharine Jefferts Schori, the newly elected presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States. Akinola is spearheading an effort to create a separate organization for conservative Episcopalians.

This week's conference prepares for the 2008 Lambeth Conference, when delegates from around the world hold a once-a-decade meeting in London.

Copyright © 2007 by United Press International

Gay Sex Fuels Anglican Brawl

2007-02-13T20:25:00.001-08:00

Gay sex fuels Anglican brawl
Stewart Who
13 February, 2007

Rumblings of a ‘schism’ have plagued the Anglican Church ever since election of the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, in 2003. The liberals who support the timely election have spent the past few years been deflecting the curses of those who feel it’s in contravention to the teachings of the Bible.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been a bipartisan wader in this spiritual river of discontent. He's optimistically hoped, and no doubt prayed, to save the 78 million-strong worldwide Anglican communion from cracking like a big,God-shaped egg.

Unfortunately, it looks like Anglican omlette will be on the menu as Rowan Williams prepares to fly to Tanzania for a meeting of the church's primates. Judging by the pre-meet sword rattling, the summit is unlikely to be a cheery picnic

The summit will take place from 14-19 February, with the controversial Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA (ECUSA), Katharine Jefferts Schori also set to take part in talks.

Bishop Schori, who leads the 2.4-million members of the ECUSA, has enraged Anglican leaders across the world by openly offering her support for same-sex unions, as well as declaring in one interview that she does not believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to God.

This admirable woman has created such uproar since her installment last year,that approximately 250 ECUSA member churches have left her leadership, and many outraged traditionalists have even threatened to blank her at the upcoming summit.

Oddly enough, even those who’re only vaguely familiar with the teachings of Jesus would understand which side The Son of God would support. Clue: Jesus always loved and embraced the underdog and had little time for hypocritical Church leaders.

If we are to believe the Bible, Jesus never once mentioned homosexuality, lesbians, female bishops or gay marriage.

Archbishops, particularly those from Africa, want the liberal American Church to be divorced from the Anglican Communion because they've embraced gay relationships.

The Rt Reverend Michael Scott-Joynt, Bishop of Winchester, wrote in the Church of England Newspaper at the weekend that if Presiding Bishop Schori is allowed to attend,
"I am in no doubt that this would destroy the authority of the communion ... the Episcopal Church and its new presiding bishop are increasingly departing from basic Christian belief in the lordship and uniqueness of Christ."

Liberal Christians and atheist critics point out that until the evangelicals adopt slaves, stone adulterers to death, give up shellfish, ban garments with more than one fabric, sell their daughters into slavery and forbid women to teach, -- all of which the Bible addresses explicitly -- they should stop taking the Bible so literally.

If they were really sincere and in awe of the Bible, they would go ahead and do all of the latter, in open defiance of our laws proscribing them and happily suffer imprisonment as martyrs for their religion.

In reality, most of modern society understands that many of these rules of religions, specifically those on homosexuality have to be sensibly sidelined as they predate scientific knowledge.

Religions can provide many wise suggestions for living a life considerate of others, and provide comfort and social opportunities for those who need them, without any need to constantly foster hatred of gays and lesbians.

Last month, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu shone some much-needed wisdom into the raging debate.

During the World Social Forum (WSF) in Nairobi last month he said: "I am deeply, deeply distressed that in the face of the most horrendous problems - we've got poverty, we've got conflict and war, we've got HIV/AIDS - and what do we concentrate on? We concentrate on what you are doing in bed.”
=========================================
[Editor's Note: Its not that the conservative Christians are taking the Bible all that literally, except when it suits their convenience to do so. Their posture seems to be "Don't blame us; blame the Bible and blame God; He said it." What I found rather amazing was the Episcopal Church in Washington State (up in the northwest corner of the state) which has recently 'divorced' or removed itself from ECUSA for the 'usual reasons' of late. The conservative Anglicans used that church and its rector in one of its videos (we will see it here on this web site in about two or three weeks) and she proclaimed proudly how "all they wanted to do was follow the Bible (which by implication the ECUSA is _not_ doing) and that was the reason they split to go on their own." That rector, by coincidence, happens to be a _female_ person. If they like reading the Bible so much, I have to wonder why they are overlooking the admonitions of Saint Paul about not allowing women to instruct men or speak with authority in the church. Just wondering .... the Bible says NOTHING about homosexuality, but at least it does forbid women from instructing the members of a church. Just wondering ...

PAT]

A Very Sad Weekend; Two More Churches Leaving and New Videos From Anglicans

2007-02-10T12:46:00.000-08:00

The two following items in the blog today tell about two additional churches which have decided to walk on thier own: a church in Montgomery, Alabama and a church in Atlanta, Georgia. In the Atlanta situation, members of the church decided to split from the Diocese on account of the 'usual' complaints of late.

In the Montgomery, Alabama situation, _most_ of the members of the church elected to quit going there, causing a drop in attendance to just _ten_ people at their final service on January 28. With only ten active members (the others had left with their pastor (again, the 'usual' situation) some time previously. The remaining ten people said they could no longer pay the utility bills nor the insurance required to have the building remain open. The local bishop said he hopes to re-open the church and restart services at some future time. Please read all the blog items for February 10 and earlier.

This sort of thing scares me greatly about our own Diocese and Parish; I am afraid of something like this happening here.

Finally for today, we have another video in our weekly series during January and February from the Anglican Communion Network, on the theme 'Choose This Day'. This latest video deals with the 'Non-Negotiables of Our Faith'. You can watch this latest video offering HERE

Do you rememeber the Bible story about King Solomon and the two ladies who brought before him the little baby; each woman claimed it was her own child; the king, in his wisdom said the solution I think best is to cut the baby in half; each woman will get half a child. The one woman thought that fair; the other woman (whose child it really was) realized the action would kill the baby entirely; so she told the king she would just give up the child entirely to the other woman. "Let her have the child so it will live ..." . This is truly becoming a very dreadful situation for all of us.

PAT

An Atlanta Church Also Decides to Abandon ECUSA

2007-02-10T12:34:00.000-08:00

Atlanta area church votes to leave Episcopal denomination
Gay bishop ‘a symptom’ of larger schism, leader says
By RYAN LEE | Feb 9, 3:35 PM

A conservative Peachtree City church voted to break away from the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta this week over objections to what it considers the Episcopal Church’s increasing liberal theology, including its acceptance of gay clergy.

Peachtree City’s St. Andrew’s in-the-Pines Episcopal Church voted to succeed from the Episcopal denomination this week in order to join the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a division of the church led by anti-gay Archbishop Peter Akinola.

Congregants of the St. Andrew’s in-the-Pines Episcopal Church voted 145-67 during a special meeting Feb. 4 to leave the Episcopal Church (U.S.A.) and join the more conservative Convocation of Anglicans in North America. The Peachtree City church will now be known as St. Andrew’s in-the-Pines Anglican Church, said Dave Wardell, the church’s senior warden.

“It’s been a situation brewing for quite some time,” Wardell said of the split. “It’s a revisionist vs. traditional battle.”

The Atlanta diocese plans to fight the church's departure.

"Let me say at the onset that St. Andrew’s-in-the-Pines Episcopal Church will continue to be affiliated with the Diocese of Atlanta, although some of its members might choose to leave," Atlanta Bishop J. Neil Alexander wrote to parishioners.

Dozens of conservative American Episcopal parishes have departed from the Episcopal Church since 2003, when V. Gene Robinson, who is gay, was elected as the bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire. Like St. Andrew’s in Peachtree City, many of those congregations have joined the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, which is the American branch of the Anglican Church of Nigeria.

The leader of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, Archbishop Peter Akinola, has raised international eyebrows for his extreme views toward homosexuality, including calling the ordination of gay clergy “an attack on the church of God — a satanic attack on God’s church.”

St. Andrew’s in Peachtree City now considers its domestic leader to be Bishop Martyn Minns, whose Virginia-based church split from the Episcopal Church just last December. Wardell and other former Episcopalians succeeding from the church insist the schism is not simply about gay issues or Robinson’s ordination.

“That’s a symptom of it,” Wardell said of the gay bishop. “We really are firmly saying that’s not the issue, it’s a symptom of the issue. It’s about the relative reinterpretation of scripture — that’s what it all boils down to.”

The Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta attempted to thwart the succession at St. Andrew’s, according to literature sent out by the congregation. The two sides are gearing up for a battle over who controls the property St. Andrew’s is housed in, but Wardell said he hopes litigation can be avoided.

“I would consider them [leaders of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta] active revisionists,” Wardell said. “We don’t recognize the diocese of Atlanta as a
governing authority anymore.”

An Alabama Church Closes its Doors

2007-02-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

Episcopal church split over gay bishop ends services in Ala.
2/9/2007, 1:37 p.m. ET
The Associated Press

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — A church that lost much of its congregation when Episcopal leaders ordained the denomination's first openly gay bishop is closing after Sunday attendance fell to fewer than 10 people.

Christ the Redeemer Episcopal Church opened 26 years ago, but it never recovered from the split that occurred when its pastor resigned and formed his own church in opposition to the ordination of Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire in 2003.

The church held its final service on Jan. 28, but Alabama Bishop Henry Parsley said he hoped to start another congregation in the building in the future.

"The Episcopal church has a number of gifts to offer and preach Christ's love," Parsley told the Montgomery Advertiser in a story Friday. "With the right priest and finances, we'll be able to have another thriving Episcopal congregation in Montgomery in God's good time."

The church's former minister, Doug McCurry, resigned in 2005 over Robinson's ordination by the Episcopal Church USA, and nearly 90 percent of the congregation left with him. Other congregations also have left, and many aligned themselves with more conservative Anglican groups.

McCurry started his own church, the Legacy Anglican Church, and the congregation at Christ the Redeemer went from 175 to 40. The church brought in a new rector, John Paul Thompson, in September 2005.

A founding member of Christ the Redeemer, attorney Julian McPhillips, said Thompson wasn't suited to be rector of a church trying to regroup and grow.

"He was a good fellow with a good heart, but he was fresh out of seminary and had communication problems," McPhillips said.

Parsley said Christ the Redeemer folded because the congregation was too small to continue regular services. Church member Dollar McLemore said the congregation no longer had the finances to continue. The building has been leased to Montgomery Montessori school and the Korean Methodist Church.
___

Information from: Montgomery Advertiser, http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com

Kendall Harmon: What's Really at Stake (3rd Video from AAC)

2007-02-03T23:15:00.000-08:00

This week, our video presentation from the American Anglican Council features as speaker Reverend Kendall Harmon, a Canon, and officer in the AAC and ACN. He will speak on the topic "Whats Really at Stake" (or The Iceberg). Harmon will explain how what we see and hear in Sunday services in the Episcopal Church are really just a front for other things under the water.

I have stated before that I do not personally agree with these more conservative Episcopalians on their dislike for the more liberal teachings of our church. I still do not agree with them; particularly, their dislike for the gay lifestyle, of which I am a member. Watch this latest video HERE

Videos for the next two weeks (put on display each Sunday) will be "Heresy Against Worship" (again by Dr. Harmon) then the week following the "Lambeth Quadrilateral" and the "Basic Non-Negotiable Tenets of Our Faith" with Reverend Leslie P. Fairfield.

You can see the earlier segments of this Anglican presentation by scrolling downward through our previous messages. I am still an Episcopalian, (ECUSA) and proud to be so. I hope you feel the same way!

For the Bible Tells Me So; Bishop Robinson at the Sundance Film Festival

2007-01-28T21:06:00.000-08:00

At The Center Of The Divide
Hartford Courant

By JOEL LANG

January 23, 2007

You've been demonized by so many. ... How do you help me to not demonize others?
Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop at the center of the rift over homosexuality that has led some Virginia parishes to align themselves with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, stopped in Hartford Monday to deliver a message of reconciliation for the church and some news about himself.
'I believe with my whole heart that the Archbishop of Nigeria [Peter Akinola] and I are going to be in heaven together. And we're going to get along together, because God won't have it any other way. So we better start practicing now,' Robinson said at a luncheon attended by a dozen local church leaders at Real Art Ways.

He was responding to a plea from The Very Rev. Mark Pendleton, dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford, who told Robinson, 'You've been demonized by so many. ... How do you help me to not demonize others?'

Looking at ease in gray slacks and a blue fleece vest worn unzipped over a burgundy shirt, Robinson, 59, said he received 500 to 600 e-mails a day, both angry and supportive, after he was elected Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, the event that ignited revolts by some conservative parishes, including a group known as the Connecticut Six.

'I think everybody is doing the best we can. We're all trying to figure life out,' Robinson said.

'The thing that has sustained me through all this is God has seemed so very close that prayer has seemed almost redundant. ... Sometimes God calms the storm and sometimes God lets the storm rage, and calms the child.'

Personally, 'I couldn't be happier. I think that's the best revenge,' he said.

He said his 15,000-member diocese was healthy, but the news he seemed most eager to relay was that immediately after the luncheon he was leaving for the Sundance Film Festival, where a documentary film, featuring his story and those of four other gay families, has been nominated for a grand jury prize.

Titled 'For the Bible Tells Me So,' it is about families split by their beliefs about homosexuality and Scripture. He said his own parents talked more openly to the filmmaker than they had to him after his own announcement at age 39 that he was gay and getting divorced.

At the end of the luncheon, Robinson hugged the host, Bishop John Selders of the Amistad United Church of Christ, and said, 'If I miss my plane to Sundance, I'm going to hold you all responsible.'

In an interview before the luncheon, sitting on the edge of the stage in the Real Art Ways cinema, Robinson said the media has exaggerated the strength and importance of the small minority of parishes at odds with the national church's liberal stance on homosexuality.

The parishes are 'seeking to get themselves recognized as the true expression of Anglicanism in this country and not inconsequentially get the Episcopal Church - I don't know what the word is - unrecognized as that legitimate expression. And I think they are using more conservative churches around the globe to support that claim,' he said.

'In a world facing 40 million people dying of AIDS and an increasing gap between rich and poor, this seems like a waste of our time and energy, debating the rightness and wrongness of gay and lesbian people and their relationships,' he said.

'I think it breaks God's heart that we would be focusing on such an internal issue, instead of focusing upon the world which, as I understand it, Jesus called us to.'

Robinson said the division over homosexuality is not much different from an earlier split over ordaining women priests.

'Let's face it, I believe God is doing a new thing in the world. I don't just see civil forces at work in terms of increasing acceptance of gay and lesbian people. I see God's hand at work there, and I believe we are joining God in that work in terms of this debate within the church,' he said.

New York or Nigeria; Which do We Choose?

2007-01-28T20:39:00.000-08:00

Not long ago, the "enemy du jour" stalking traditional Christian denominations was "creeping congregationalism."
That meant the tendency of congregations to function independently of traditional denominational standards or structures. Conservatives in the Episcopal Church, for example, lamented the loss of cohesion or what they called "catholicity."

Then the denomination, with significant cohesion, made some decisions the conservatives didn't like, and suddenly they are demanding their own form of congregationalism, claiming they have the right to leave the national church and to take their property with them. And they demand a choice as to which "catholicity" they recognize: Nigeria or New York.

In other words, in this argument, as in most religious arguments, the issue is rarely higher-order concerns like Scripture, tradition or reason.
The issue tends to be the lower-order concern of willfulness: We want what we want, and we will do anything to get it, even quoting Scriptures we never read before if they make our case, or making common cause with a bishop in Nigeria whose existence previously meant nothing to us.

Consider the "victim role." Some people or groups are indeed victims, and they deserve justice.

But even when doors open, tables turn and balances shift, it's difficult to stop using guilt, shame and remembered grievances to get one's way.

We know this behavior well, of course, for we use it all the time. It's the "law of the sandbox": If high morality works, use it.

If a threat of parental intervention works, use it. In conflicts, the air rings with cries of "no fair," "you're mean," "I'll call my mother," and "God will get you." When those fail, on comes violence.

I suggest we drop the hypocrisy of sandbox bullying. Let's just name it. I want one thing, you want another, so how are we going to work it out? Power plays aren't about principle or holiness. They are about power.

A good example is immigration. Some cite America's ideal of receiving the world's oppressed and desperate; others cite an ideal of the rule of law.

Both are worthy ideals. Economic arguments cut both directions. So do faith arguments. Some see a racial bias against immigrants of color; some deny that.

The fact of the matter is that we disagree, and whatever the basis of our disagreements - principle, economic calculation or bigotry - they won't be resolved by dueling ideals or dueling analyses or dueling vigilantes.

Disagreements can only be resolved by cutting through the smoke and asking, What is truly at stake? And how are we going to work this out?

Working it out, in turn, means looking for compromise - never easy when feelings have been ratcheted up by bullying based on alleged principle. It means accepting the other as having a reasonable viewpoint and a right to express it - not easy when the other has been demonized.

And it means considering the wisdom of not deciding; that is, not needing to enforce a single path. That's not easy, either, when all paths but one's own have been labeled sinful or unpatriotic.

I think that's one reason Jesus taught about wealth and power, not about doctrine or law. Forming right-opinion is easy work, and arguing on the basis of right-opinion can become a cheap smokescreen.

Willfulness comes down to power, so let's deal with power.

In a democracy, power should be allocated by law and votes, not by sandbox bullying. In a Christian environment, power should be allocated by love and sacrifice, not by sandbox bullying.

The problem isn't disagreement. The problem is sandbox bullying.

Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, "Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask," was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is
HERE

You are Called to Make a Difference (2nd Video)

2007-01-28T16:23:00.000-08:00

Last week I began here with a series of videos from the American Anglican Council on the general theme 'Choose This Day'. These short videos are prepared by AAC and ACN (Anglican Communion Network). The speakers include Bishop Robert Duncan, and others who (in general) disagree with the direction the Episcopal Church has taken in recent years. I -- for one -- disagree with the posture of these men, but I think we as Christians and Episcopalians are called upon to examine all the evidence presented and _then_ decide what to do and where to go.

This second presentation is entitled 'You are Called to Make a Difference' and you can view it HERE . This week's speaker is Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, PA. Please watch and listen carefully. Future presentations will be given by Kendall Harmon, a canon and scholar in the Episcopal Church, whose web-blogs appear in our links on this page. If you missed last week's presentation outlining some of the complaints about ECUSA by these men, I suggest you view it first. (Look at the entries from several days back, entitled 'Choose This Day'.

I will again insist that as an Episcopalian who also happens to be gay, I am quite happy and content where I am. Our church teaches from the Bible -- God's Word -- and I find nothing in God's Word which specifically deals with homosexuality. Others will disagree with me, of course. Anyway, check out this second in a series of videos from AAC. Let's try and be fair with them, and at least listen to their messages.

PAT

The Shame of Our Schism and Divorce

2007-01-20T22:40:00.000-08:00

Split in Episcopal Church should sadden all of Christian family
Friday, January 19, 2007
JO BAILEY WELLS

The news of schism in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia is sad for Christians everywhere, regardless of denomination or persuasion.

One of the wardens of The Falls Church put it well: There is a death in the family. As a part of the family — as a Christian and, moreover, as an Anglican — I am in mourning.

In December, two of the oldest, largest and wealthiest congregations in Virginia voted to leave the Episcopal Church and affiliate with the Anglican Province of Nigeria, with whom they share similar convictions concerning God’s revelation in Scripture. The move is measured (they are remaining within the Anglican Communion) and provisional (leaving the way open, in theory, for reconciliation). Still, they propose serving under the authority of a Nigerian archbishop 5,000 miles away.

The conversations that have unfolded within the Anglican Communion since the consecration of a practicing homosexual as bishop of New Hampshire continue to be misunderstood by both liberals and conservatives. Taught by Thomas Jefferson to claim an inalienable right to liberty in all religious matters, American Anglicans on both sides seem to find defending their autonomy more urgent than defending the "communities of discernment" and "global interdependence" characteristic of Anglicanism.

The ordination of Gene Robinson was viewed in some parts of the Anglican Communion as a case of ecclesiastical imperialism by the American left. Now, the departure of some churches from the Episcopal fold is seen as a corresponding act of congregational imperialism. Even the conservatives are proving themselves liberals, in a sense, deep down: more committed to their consciences and convictions — to being "right" — than to the wider body of the church in which they find themselves.

Is it not time to stop fighting the American War of Independence? This is not an issue of whether Americans should be able to run their own affairs; it is about whether American Christians need Christians in the rest of the world to help them find ways of talking to one another. Autonomy exercised at the level of government in 1776 was liberating; autonomy exercised today by people of faith in communion together feels more like oppression.

What is at stake in the contemporary situation is not principally a view about homosexuality. What is at stake is the question of whether one small branch of American Protestants can find the generosity to continue in common life together — or whether, when faced with internal disagreement, they choose to go separate ways. Are Episcopalians more committed to their opinions than to their brothers and sisters, those to whom they are bonded in baptism, at home and abroad? I fear so, just like so many other Protestants of the past 400 years. I had thought Anglicans were different. In my distress, I recall the words of the French poet Charles Peguy describing the Day of Judgment: "What will Jesus say to us if we go to him without the others? "

Of course, members of the conservative Virginia parishes would bring to Jesus’ attention the Nigerian Anglicans with whom they are affiliating. The remaining Episcopalians might point to the gay people their churches have welcomed. But it is the more costly engagement between brothers and sisters who find it hard to live together and eat together — yet continue to work together and break bread together — that constitutes the calling of the church.

All parties in this crisis speak of the cost of conscience, even though the cost bears so much more heavily on more impoverished communities of faith elsewhere in the world.

Whatever happened to the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, patience, gentleness? Couldn’t we have waited together, perhaps cried together, certainly argued together, but kept on worshipping together for a little longer?

The Rev. Jo Bailey Wells is associate professor of the practice of Christian ministry and Bible and director of Anglican studies at Duke University’s Divinity School.

Sermons and Talks from American Anglican Council

2007-01-20T20:57:00.000-08:00

In this absolutely wicked winter weather here in s.e. Kansas this year, getting to church once or twice each week has been extremely difficult. It occurs to me I am not the only person who misses church when attendance is difficult. So to partially compensate for this,I decided to bring some Anglican thinking to your computer weekly for the rest of the winter months.

To do this, I found an interesting series of videos from two sources: The American Anglican Council and the Anglican Communion Network. Now to be totally honest with you, I disagree very strongly with ACN and AAC on a few topics, not the least of which is their dislike of homosexuality as a valid lifestyle choice. Three of their spokespersons are the Reverend Doctor Kendall Harmon, and Rt. Reverend Robert Duncan, Bishop in Pittsburgh, PA and Reverend Leslie P. Fairfield.

But, there are many Episcopalians who very much admire these men for the stances they have taken regards the Episcopal Church and its current stance on social issues versus the way the Episcopal Church used to be. So I am going to present a series of video documentaries the AAC prepared. These documentaries are, frankly biased toward the 'Anglican viewpoint' and whether you enjoy listening to these speakers or are quite angry about the way they have encouraged -- in my opinion --
wholesale abandonment of ECUSA, please join me in viewing these documentaries each week for the rest of January and all of February.

Although as noted, I strongly disagree with some of their sentiment, we are, as Episcopalians and Christians called to listen to, and enter into dialog with, our more conservative brothers. Now, let us give our attention to the first in a continuing series (at least six or eight weeks) of messages on the general topic 'Choose This Day'. Future talks in this series include next week's presentation 'You are Called to Make a Difference' with the speaker being Robert Duncan, then the following week a presentation called 'The Iceberg' (What's Really at Stake') with Kendall Harmon.

Quite obviously, these messages are NOT the opinions of the Episcopal Church, USA, but I think it is only fair that we hear what these gentlemen have to say. This week's video HERE

Atheists: The Bigots' Friends

2007-01-16T18:51:00.000-08:00

By Giles Fraiser
Vicar of Putney

Atheists: the bigots' friends.
Most Christians back gay rights - and to claim otherwise only boosts the fundamentalists.

Media atheists are fast becoming the new best friends of fundamentalist Christians. For every time they write about religion they are doing very effective PR for a fundamentalist worldview. Many of the propositions that fundamentalists are keen to sell the public are oft-repeated corner-stones of the media atheist's philosophy of religion.

Both partners in this unholy alliance agree that fundamentalist religion is the real thing and that more reflective and socially progressive versions of faith are pale imitations, counterfeits even. This endorsement is of enormous help to fundamentalists. What they are really threatened by is not aggressive atheism - indeed that helps secure a sense of persecution that is essential to group solidarity - but the sort of robustly self-critical faith that knows the Bible and the church's traditions, and can challenge bad religion on its own terms. Fundamentalists hate what they see as the enemy within. And by refusing to acknowledge any variegation in Christian thought, media atheists play right into their hands.
Fundamentalism was invented only in the 20th century. None the less, in their struggle for secular values, commentators such as Polly Toynbee are effectively handing fundamentalists the title of official opposition. In the context of the fight to extend anti-discrimination legislation to homosexuals, that's a dangerous gift. For it grants the fundamentalist's worldview unwarranted extra lobbying power with government.
Many Christians don't believe homosexuality is a sin. Far from it. We think it's a gift of God - a means by which many show love and commitment and compassion. This is not an eccentric view within the church. It's also the view of the Archbishop of Canterbury, though, admittedly, he is insufficiently bold in expressing it. Indeed, a great many Christians are deeply committed to the sexual-orientation legislation. They would have no truck with those who want to ban homosexuals from Christian boarding houses or classrooms. But bigots who dress up in the clothing of faith are being encouraged by media atheists in the view that orthodox biblical Christianity is intrinsically anti-gay. That's rubbish. And the only people who benefit from this line of argument are the religious gay-bashers.
Ignoring the fact that Christianity invented secularism, on these pages last week Toynbee described the row over sexual orientation regulations as "a mighty test of strength between the religious and the secular". Christians of the loony right will have been nodding their heads in agreement. For the more fundamentalists can set up the disagreements concerning religion in terms of a Manichean struggle between the forces of God and "atheistic secularists", the more troops they can summon to the defence of conservative Christianity.

The media generally made a great deal of Christians protesting outside parliament against the passage of anti-discrimination legislation through the Lords. And it was easy to be left with the misleading impression that all Christians oppose it. Not a bit of it. As the editorial in this week's Church Times, effectively the Church of England's trade paper, rightly complains, the "broad support for the Equality Act from the Church of England and the Board of Deputies of British Jews has been drowned out by a small group of conservative Christians". It goes on to point out that "mainstream Churches do not share the views of the protesters, and the majority of Christians will have no truck with discrimination on grounds of this kind". And thank God for that.·

(Dr Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney and a lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford )
giles.fraser@btinternet.com

The Church Can Live With Homosexual Sinners the Way it Lives With Other Kinds of Sinners

2007-01-06T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Church Can Live With Homosexual Sinners The Way It Lives With Other Kinds Of Sinners
Argues William Weston, a sociology professor and moderate Democrat: "The Bible says homosexual practice is a sin. On this the conservatives are right. But some conservatives go way overboard in saying that it is among the worst of sins. I think homosexuality is a sin like divorce, not a sin like sacrificing children to idols. The Bible strongly condemns divorce, and Jesus does so most of all. The Presbyterian Church had a significant debate about how to deal with the biblical condemnation of divorce, and changed its position in the middle of the last century. Divorce is no longer a bar to being a minister or elder.The church did not change its teaching that divorce is a sin. Each divorce is a tragedy, to be regretted and repented of. But sometimes, the church concluded, it is the least-bad option available to a person or a couple. They are enjoined to repent, and sin no more. They may even remarry in the church, and serve in all its offices. By making this pastoral accommodation to divorce, the church is not saying that divorce is a private matter, or just another lifestyle choice that is as good as any other. Some people may even be born with very difficult personalities, but I have never heard the argument that such people have a natural inclination to divorce, and therefore ought to act on their inclination. I believe the church could accommodate homosexual practice in the same way that it has accommodated divorce, without abandoning its standards. The church should promote and develop ways to help people work around their inclination to homosexual practice, just as the church promotes and develops many pastoral strategies to help people work around their inclination to divorce. The successful ministries that help people deal with their homosexual inclinations don't try to change peoples' orientations so much as help them to work around their inclinations successfully."

Book Review: Misquoting Jesus (written by Bart Ehrman)

2007-01-05T22:23:00.000-08:00

Misquoting Jesus
The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
By Bart D. Ehrman

Price: $24.95
On Sale: 11/1/2005
Formats: Hardcover | Trade PB

When world-class biblical scholar Bart Ehrman first began to study the texts of the Bible in their original languages he was startled to discover the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations that had been made by earlier translators. In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman tells the story behind the mistakes and changes that ancient scribes made to the New Testament and shows the great impact they had upon the Bible we use today. He frames his account with personal reflections on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once ultraconservative views of the Bible.

Since the advent of the printing press and the accurate reproduction of texts, most people have assumed that when they read the New Testament they are reading an exact copy of Jesus's words or Saint Paul's writings. And yet, for almost fifteen hundred years these manuscripts were hand copied by scribes who were deeply influenced by the cultural, theological, and political disputes of their day. Both mistakes and intentional changes abound in the surviving manuscripts, making the original words difficult to reconstruct. For the first time, Ehrman reveals where and why these changes were made and how scholars go about reconstructing the original words of the New Testament as closely as possible.

Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our cherished biblical stories and widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes -- alterations that dramatically affected all subsequent versions of the Bible.

About the Author:
Bart D. Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an authority on the history of the New Testament, the early church, and the life of Jesus. He has taped several highly popular lecture series for the Teaching Company and is the author of Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew and Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Well worth a read, IMO.

PAT

Northern California Parish Chooses to Leave Us Also

2006-12-30T18:52:00.000-08:00

Another Nor Cal Parish Splits From Episcopal Church Over Gays
12.30.06

By Anthony Cuesta

An Episcopal church near San Francisco has become the latest parish to break away from the national church over gay marriage.
According to the Associated Press, members of St. John's Episcopal Church in Petaluma voted to formalize the congregation's split from the Episcopal Church - the U.S. wing of the 77 million-member Anglican family - on Dec. 17.

"The Bible has already spoken regarding homosexuality, and it says it is sinful behavior," said the Rev. David Miller, rector of the congregation some 40 miles north of San Francisco, reports the AP.

Miller’s feelings are largely based on the 2003 ordination of a gay priest -- Gene Robinson -- as the bishop of New Hampshire. The decision to ordain Robinson, who lives with his partner, sent tremors throughout the 77 million-member Anglican Communion, of which the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church is a part.

Miller called the vote for separation "overwhelming," but did not say what percentage of the church's 240 members approved the break, reports the AP.

The Presiding Bishop of the 2.3 million-member U.S. denomination, Katharine Jefferts Schori, supports progressive views on women priests and same-sex marriage.

But the Petaluma Rosa parish is one of numerous churches seeking to circumvent the U.S. branch in favor of direct representation in England or another more traditional national church abroad.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the 240-member Petaluma church also has officially changed its name to St. John's Anglican Church, a reflection of its intent to align with Anglican Communion churches outside the United States.

Earlier this month, the conservative Diocese of San Joaquin took what Bishop John-David Schofield called a first step toward a formal break with the national church in voting to affirm its membership in the worldwide Anglican Communion.

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence, rector of an Episcopal congregation in nearby Santa Rosa, said he was saddened by the parish's decision.

"Jesus had nothing to say about homosexuality," Lawrence told the AP.

Episcopalians Fighting Against Equality

2006-12-29T18:53:00.000-08:00

Episcopalians against equality
By Harold Meyerson
Special to The Washington Post

Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated:12/20/2006 07:57:27 PM MST

WASHINGTON - Don't look now, but Virginia is seceding again.
On Sunday nine Episcopal parishes in Virginia, including the one where George Washington served as a vestryman, announced that they had voted to up and leave the U.S. Episcopal Church to protest its increasingly equal treatment of homosexuals.
In 2003 an overwhelming majority of the nation's Episcopal bishops ratified the selection of a gay bishop by the New Hampshire diocese. This past June the church's general convention elevated Nevada Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to the post of presiding U.S. bishop. Jefferts Schori is the first woman to head a national branch of the Anglican Church. Worse yet, she has allowed the blessing of same-sex couples within her diocese (which includes the ever theologically innovative Las Vegas).
Whether it was the thought of a woman presiding over God's own country club or of gays snuggling under its eaves, it was all too much for a distinct minority of Episcopalians. The dissident parishes in the Virginia diocese contain only about 5 percent of the state's parishioners. But it's the church the defectors have latched on to that makes this schism news.
In slamming the door on their American co-religionists, the two largest parishes, which are in Fairfax City and Falls Church, also announced their affiliation with the Episcopal Church of Nigeria. The presiding Nigerian archbishop, Peter Akinola, promotes legislation in his country that would forbid gays and lesbians to form organizations or to eat together in restaurants and that would send them to jail for indulging in same-gender sexual activity. Akinola's agenda so touched the hearts of the Northern Virginia faithful that they anointed him, rather than Jefferts Schori, as their bishop.
Peer pressure played a role, too. Explaining the decision to leave the American church, Vicki Robb, a Fairfax parishioner and Alexandria public relations exec, said that the church's leftward drift has made it "kind of embarrassing when you tell people that you're Episcopal." It must be a relief to finally have an archbishop who doesn't pussyfoot around when gays threaten to dine in public.
The alliance of the Fairfax Phobics with Archbishop Restaurant Monitor is just the latest chapter in the global revolt against modernity and equality and, more specifically, in the formation of the Orthodox International. The OI unites frequently fundamentalist believers of often opposed faiths in common fear and loathing of challenges to ancient tribal norms. It has featured such moving tableaus as the coming together in the spring of 2005 of Israel's chief rabbis, the deputy mufti of Jerusalem, and leaders of Catholic and Armenian churches, burying ancient enmities to jointly condemn a gay pride festival. The OI's founding father was none other than Pope John Paul II, who spent much time and energy endeavoring to reconcile various orthodox Christian religions and whose ecumenism prompted him to warn the Anglicans not to ordain gay priests.
John Paul also sought to build his church in nations of the developing world where traditional morality and bigotry, most especially on matters sexual, were in greater supply than in secular Europe and the increasingly egalitarian United States, and more in sync with the Catholic Church's inimitable backwardness. Now America's schismatic Episcopalians are following in his footsteps - traditionalists of the two great Western hierarchical Christian churches searching the globe for sufficiently benighted bishops.
In recent years Anglican churches have experienced their greatest growth in the developing world, which could tilt the entire global Anglican Communion toward more traditionalist norms. Only 13 of the 38 national churches within the communion ordain women as priests; only three - the United States, New Zealand and Canada - ordain women as bishops.
The American church, by contrast, has largely paralleled the transformation of Rockefeller Republicans into liberal, Democratic secularists. The old joke of New York politicos was that Jews had the incomes of Episcopalians but voted like Puerto Ricans. Now it's the Episcopal prelates who are voting like Puerto Ricans, or, more precisely, like liberal Jews. Some traditionalists fear the church isn't really theistic anymore. The comforting middle ground of the church of yore - affirming the equality of some, not discussing the equality of others - has eroded as the demands of women and gays and lesbians could no longer be dismissed.
The irony is that the Episcopal Church owes its existence directly to the American Revolution; it broke away from the Church of England during the war and was reborn as a distinctly American entity between 1784 and 1789. Fully two-thirds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were active or (like Washington) nominal Anglicans, and, having repudiated the political authority of the king of England, they could scarcely have gone on affirming his ecclesiastical authority.
The founders of the church believed, within the context of their time, that all men were created equal. Today's defectors have thought it over in the context of our own time, and decided that they're not. ---
Meyerson is editor-at-large of American Prospect and the L.A. Weekly.

Christmas Present for the Rogue Episcopalians: Bishop Should Lock and Chain the Doors

2006-12-23T23:22:00.000-08:00

Give rogue Episcopal churches a present: Padlocks and chains

Date published: 12/23/2006

IS IT REALLY so upsetting that a few intolerant people are leaving the Episcopal Church in Virginia? Do those of us who love our church and its inclusion of humanity's most vulnerable in our focus of faith really want to waste time on those who take a "holier than thou" stance like the Pharisees whom Jesus condemned? Is it not the case that whatever you do for the least of humanity, you do for Him?

Do we want to give any credence to people who wave the Bible, citing Leviticus' prohibitions on male homosexuality while ignoring the Leviticus passage that permits slave owning and slave trading?

Here we sit in Virginia where the ground is soaked with blood over slavery, whose proponents cited biblical law, but we evidently didn't learn a thing. Apparently, in Virginia, the will of God is still whatever fulfills your political agenda.

Just as Americans came to understand that human slavery was evil as we developed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, some people, like the old Pharisees, cannot come to understand that homosexuals are the way they are because of a biological imperative. The term relating to this imperative is "androgen insufficiency." Homosexual practices have been documented in some 1,500 species in the natural world. Nature is chock-full of homosexuality. While homosexuality is not the "norm" in nature, it is normal in nature.

Next, I imagine, these Pharisaic holy ones are going to tell us that God did not create the homosexual part of the natural world--the devil did.

During a public ministry of sorts to protect gay people from being victimized because of their sexuality, I came to see them as human just like me--just with a different sexual orientation. I also found some aspects of gay behavior troublesome. The promiscuity of many gay men clearly is not good for them or for our culture. Promiscuity spreads disease, and in today's world of jet travel, disease flies at nearly the speed of sound.

No one in the Episcopal Church is saying, "Be promiscuous." Just the opposite: We are saying that a long-term, monogamous union is better for you and better for our culture regardless of your sexual orientation.

And bang that Bible all you want, but it does not specifically prohibit female homosexuality unless you want to twist the words of Saint Paul's "soft ones" to mean lesbians.

So Bishop Peter Lee of the Diocese of Virginia faces a dilemma regarding the church property of the apostate congregations. As a layperson who loves the church and especially its tolerance in the spirit of Jesus, as well as a security professional, my recommendation to him is this: Padlock the doors and hire security people to keep them locked.

The ground on which the breakaway churches sits is contaminated spiritually, so close those churches for good. Sell the property and use the funds to build new churches and consecrate the new ground.

Exactly Who is Peter J. Akinola?

2006-12-23T19:45:00.000-08:00

Who is Archbishop Akinola?

Please read this analysis of the man who purports to speak for Anglicans in the United States. For a slightly different point of view, I also suggest that you read this report, as well.

By JOEY DiGUGLIELMO

Archbishop Peter Akinola, head of the Anglican Church in Africa, is considered by many to be a controversial, anti-gay figure. But who is he and are leaders of the Virginia churches now aligned with him downplaying Akinola’s gay views to make the religious leader more palatable to U.S. critics of the split?

Akinola has raised international eyebrows for his uber-conservative views of homosexuality. When the Church of England proposed ordaining a gay bishop, Akinola called it “an attack on the church of God — a Satanic attack on God’s church.”

And during the buildup to the Episcopal Church USA’s ordination of Gene Robinson, Akinola said, “I cannot think of how a man in his senses would be having a sexual relationship with another man. Even in the world of animals, dogs, cows, lions, we don’t hear of such things.”

He supports a proposed anti-gay bill in Nigeria that would make it illegal for gays to assemble publicly or to petition the government. The measure would also make it illegal to join gay organizations, read gay-themed literature, watch gay TV shows or films and visit gay web sites. The bill would even bar gays from dining together in restaurants. Homosexual sex is already illegal in Nigeria, punishable by jail in the south, which is predominantly Christian. In the mostly Muslim northern region, gay sex is punishable by death.

Akinola was ordained a priest in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, in 1979. He became a bishop in 1989 and an archbishop in 1997. He was made a primate of the Nigerian Anglican Church in 2000 and was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential Personalities of the World” this year. He also is chair of the 37 million-member Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa.

His harsh denunciation of all things gay is striking in its contrast to the views of Rev. Martyn Minns, the priest in charge of Truro Church in Virginia and a bishop now serving under Akinola through the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA).

The big question, then, is why the U.S. churches disenchanted with the Episcopal Church USA would want to align with Akinola and his Nigerian branch of Anglicanism.

Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, said it’s important to consider Akinola’s cultural context and church history.

Though Akinola’s anti-gay edicts may sound harsh to Western ears, Jenkins says they’re not unusual.

“The majority of African and even Asian bishops are pretty much on the same page with him on that,” Jenkins said. “They might disagree about a lot of other things, but on the issue of homosexuality, they’re very much in agreement.”

Apart from homosexuality, Akinola’s church appeals to disenchanted Episcopal churches for two basic reasons, Jenkins said: the astounding success of his evangelical efforts (which has tripled membership to about 18 million in Nigeria from the late 1970s until now) and the historical church ties the worldwide Anglican church claims.

Evangelical Christianity is certainly alive and well in America in various denominations but CANA is appealing because it claims its ancestry back to Christ’s apostles, something U.S. evangelical churches can’t do.

“They look at it as going from being on a dying branch to going back to the trunk,” Jenkins says of the disenchanted Episcopalians.

And while Minns couches his traditional biblical views on gays in gentler ways than Akinola, they essentially share the same theology, that homosexual sex is biblically forbidden and thus sinful.

Elizabeth Perry contributed to this report.

Episcopalians in Virginia Feel Abandoned, Sorrowful

2006-12-20T11:31:00.000-08:00

'Large, viable remnant' wants to continue as Episcopal congregation
Determination to move forward outweighs sadness

By Mary Frances Schjonberg
Tuesday, December 19, 2006

St. Stephens Church Heathsville

[Episcopal News Service] The 30 or so members of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Heathsville, Virginia, who opposed a recent vote by the majority of the congregation and the rector to join the Anglican Church of Nigeria say they want to continue as the Episcopal presence in their community.
"We are prepared to continue to operate St. Stephen's as an Episcopal Church, and I think we have people who will agree to accept leadership positions and to continue to carry on the work of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church," said Dawn Mahaffey, one of the people who voted against what some members are calling "the secession."

Sandra Kirkpatrick referred to that slowly organizing group as a "large, viable remnant."

Their determination comes not without some pain.

"Two of the speakers who wished to secede from the Episcopal Church told those of us sitting in the congregation that if we voted 'no' we were imperiling our immortal souls, and that was hard to hear," said Kirkpatrick, describing a discussion held during the week before the voting began. "This was said lovingly by people who have been my friends – dear friends – for over 10 years but they are very, very, very convinced that they are dong the right thing in leaving the Episcopal Church and they are acting genuinely worried about those of us who are not."

Mahaffey said she does "truly love" the family she has at St. Stephen's.

"This is not personal. These people have been my family, and I, and I don't think any of the others that have come to me, would harbor any evil feelings toward our fellow parishioners," she said. "This has been an issue around leadership and it's just been the way in which it has been handled. I don't think it's been done in a kind and equitable and fair way."

She called the actions of the vestry and the rector, the Rev. Jeffrey Cerar, "divisive, irresponsible and manipulative."

At that meeting to discuss the resolutions, Margaret Cox, a St. Stephen's member whose husband was rector from 1967 to 1972, said that a resolution to take possession of the St. Stephen's property "sounds like taking something that does not belong to you." She reiterated a number of the bequests and gifts given to the parish through the years, adding that "none of us owns this property; we only hold it in trust."

Meade Kilduff, who was baptized at St. Stephen's on December 28, 1918, told the same meeting that she liked the liturgy, the Episcopal Church's history and tradition and the ways the Bible is emphasized "again and again."

"Last but not least I like the inclusiveness of our church. It is our gem," she said. "I want to assure you, there is at St. Stephen's a loyal and substantial group of communicants committed to staying at St. Stephen's as an Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Virginia."

Cox and Kilduff were part of a contingent that re-built St. Stephen's congregation after it dwindled to about 24 communicants in the 1970s, following a dispute with the diocese about vestry elections, Kirkpatrick said.

"Now these ladies, they're ready to do it again," she said. "There is a very staunch core of older people who don't want this to happen."

St. Stephen's is one of eight Diocese of Virginia congregations in which a majority of members announced December 17 that they were severing ties with the Episcopal Church and aligning themselves with Anglicans in either Nigeria or Uganda. More information about the Virginia votes is available here.

Heathsville is the county seat of Northumberland County in what is known as the Northern Neck of Virginia, a peninsula that borders the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers and the Chesapeake Bay. While the jurisdiction known as the Parish of St. Stephen's dates to the 1650s, the congregation of St. Stephen's was formed in the 1880s and, according to the church's website, "struggled for decades to keep the church open."

Mahaffey said there will be a meeting later this week to determine who is involved and what exactly they want to do.

The Diocese of Virginia issued a statement December 18 saying it plans to offer "every encouragement to establish structures necessary for their continuity as the Episcopal Church." Meanwhile, the statement said, the departing and remaining members of all eight congregations have agreed to a 30-day "standstill" during which no actions will be taken concerning church property.

A 40-day discernment period that led up to the vote felt like a "force-feeding" on the part of the vestry, Kirkpatrick said. However, the effort backfired in one small group as the members "managed to get into a serious discussion of what we wanted as Episcopalians, what we felt about our church and where our spiritual journeys had led us."

"At the end of this 40-day discernment period we had discovered each other," she said "We had found that there were enough of us that really cared to remain Episcopalians and really cared about being an Episcopal Church presence in Heathsville that we were ready to go to the consider expense of time, money and emotion to try and do this, as opposed to just going elsewhere, which would be very, very easy to do."

Both Mahaffey and Kirkpatrick said that the decision at the 2003 General Convention to consent to the election of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire prompted a change in the attitude of St. Stephen's leadership, which only got more determined with time.

Mahaffey said that Cerar initially said at a congregational meeting late in 2003 that he would try to work within the framework of the Episcopal Church to make changes but that he would leave if he felt he could not continue in the church. He said at that meeting that if he left and if others joined him, they would not attempt to take over St. Stephen's property, she said.

In December 2003, Kirkpatrick said, a vestry survey showed that the majority of St. Stephen's members wanted to remain in the Episcopal Church.

However, Mahaffey recalled, the perceived failings of the Episcopal Church "became the topic of his sermons from that point forward. It did not matter what the liturgy was for any given Sunday or what the Gospel was, there was always a way to bring the topic around to that issue. We very often got the message that the Episcopal Church had sinned and needed to be repentant."

"It got to the point that our needs for pastoral oversight and ministry were not being met because of the single-minded focus on this issue. We were not hearing the Word and how that was applicable in our daily lives. I don't think we were being ministered to in all of our needs."

There was a "steady outgo of people who found this message intolerable," Kirkpatrick said, and a "steady influx" of people who approved of the leadership's position.

"Everyone down here knew that St. Stephen's was taking this stance," she said.

Mahaffey said the growing disaffection with the Episcopal Church "has been very well staged."

"I think it has been sold to the congregation," she said. "Three years of hearing it week after week after week."

The issue of homosexuality was the "precipitating event but it has gone so far beyond that that I haven't even heard that mentioned in probably the last year," Kirkpatrick said. "The first year it was an issue, but not since. It has been: 'We know the truth and we are telling it to you. If you don't accept this truth then you really don't belong here."

"It is biblical inerrancy – taking the Bible seriously as a primary source, taking the Bible literally in a lot of cases. There's very much been from the pulpit and from everyone connected with the leaving-the-Episcopal-Church-side that there is one way, there is one truth and that they know what that one way and that one truth is… that anyone [who] believes, says, [or] accepts the idea that anyone could find truth in a religious life any way except through Jesus Christ in this particular narrow revelation of him is not a Christian."

Because many members left St. Stephen's or didn't attend frequently, some of them were declared ineligible to vote on either December 10 or December 17, including Mahaffey's 21-year-old son.

Acknowledging that the pressures of college and work also kept him away, Mahaffey said her son asked her a year ago: "Why would I want to sit there and have to listen to being indoctrinated into leaving something that I believe in?"

It is painful, she said, to have this example set for him.

Some have also questioned the ability of the parish's leadership to hold the vote on two different days. Kirkpatrick said that many people pushed to have the ballot boxes secured during the intervening days and they were in fact held in the evidence room of the county courthouse. A local paper featured a picture of the boxes being brought back to the church on December 17.

After the vote was announced that day, Kirkpatrick said the rector told the meeting that "he hoped that we continue as a congregation, and that he wanted very much to be a pastor to everyone, whether they voted yes or no, but that those of us who voted no should submit to the will of the majority who had decided to leave the church."

Mahaffey said she's disappointed that the dispute came down to the vote, which was 132-33 in favor of severing ties and 94-37 in favor of trying to retain the church property. Those who opposed either motion are not unanimous in their opinions about the Episcopal Church, she said.

"The bottom line of all of us that we can agree on is that it's not worth what's going on here," she said.

When she moved to the area, Kirkpatrick, who has been an Episcopalian for about 55 years, said she knew she was "more liberal in my theology" than many of the friends she made.

"But we have all this time been a wonderful church where we might not agree about things but we could talk about them, and grow and learn from each other," she said. "I have grown a great deal here and I am very, very grateful for the spiritual experience that I had at St. Stephen's before all this happened."

Mahaffey agreed that St. Stephen's has "good, loving people."

"In many ways I feel that the back of St. Stephen's has been broken and that neither side is going to be whole. We are now a broken church. We are a broken parish. We are a broken family," she said. "It could have all been prevented had what was promised to us in 2003 come to fruition: that we work within the framework of the church to affect change with things that we disagree . . . Now we're all going to have to find a way to heal – both sides. But there is a loyal following of Episcopalians at St. Stephen's and we don't want to be forgotten."

-- The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is national correspondent for the Episcopal News Service

Peter Akinola, Archbishop in Nigeria - Bigot or Savior?

2006-12-20T11:23:00.000-08:00

Profile: Archbishop Peter Akinola

Archbishop Akinola says God chose him to protect the scriptures
Peter Akinola, 63, leads 37 million Anglicans as chair of the Anglican Church in Africa.
As head of the fastest growing part of the Anglican communion, he is becoming an increasingly important figure.

His growing influence is largely due to his conservative stance on gay marriage, a position that appeals to his African congregation.

Recently, two of the oldest and largest church congregations in the US voted to bring themselves under his authority.

On Sunday, 90% of members of Truro Church and Falls Church in Northern Virginia voted to leave the American Episcopal church, amid a row over the ordination of gay priests.

'Creeping in'

Archbishop Akinola - a man known for his outspoken views on homosexuality - says he is thankful to God over the decision.

The Church of Nigeria has a well known position on this matter

Archbishop Peter Akinola

"Once there's a crack in the wall, you are likely to have all sorts creeping in" he told the BBC News website in Abuja.

"When we began to notice these cracks a few years back, we did try as much as humanly possible under God to patch up these cracks," he added.

But, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (Ecusa) refused to back down.

"Since the leadership of the church in America keeps doing everything we thought they would not do, those who don't agree with them have chosen to go where they want to go and I thank God," he said.

New template

A father of six, he describes himself as "an ordinary pastor in the church of God" but chosen by God to protect the scriptures.

Never the one to shy away from controversy, Bishop Akinola's strong views and public criticism of government policies quickly made him popular among Nigerian Christians and led to his election as head of the powerful Christian Association of Nigeria, an umbrella organisation for all Nigerian christian groups.

Born in Abeaokuta in south-western Nigeria in 1944, Mr Akinola is popular for his unique understanding of African cultures which he always related with parallels from the Bible's Old Testament.

Abeokuta was the birth place of another promient Anglican cleric, Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a former slave who became Nigeria's first indigenous Anglican bishop. Loved and respected by his Anglican congregation and other Christian bodies in the country, Mr Akinola is a staunch supporter of Nigeria's anti-graft agency which has been criticised for its alleged "selective" fight against corruption.

However, some within the Anglican Church say he is backed by conservative bishops and theologians who seek to dominate the Anglican Church in America.

"I object to that very strongly and I condemn with every nerve in my body such insinuations," the archbishop told the BBC angrily.

"The Church of Nigeria has a well known position on this matter," he added, while accusing Ecusa of denying the authority and supremacy of the scripture.

He said the American church was trying to create a new religious template and expecting everybody to log on to that template.

"The liturgy of the church and the scripture on which we base our practices and beliefs do not agree with gay marriage and we cannot accept it," he stated categorically.

Growing power

Called a bigot by some in the Anglican Church, his attitudes nonetheless represent a deep-rooted conservative tradition in African Christianity that is flourishing and growing.

Contrast that with declining congregations in the West and you begin to see why he is such an important figure, says the BBC's religious affairs reporter, Rahul Tandon.

Initially he proposed that Nigerians in America who oppose what they see as the Episcopal Church's liberal attitude could join a branch of his church in the US.

Now it seems some US congregations are keen to do the same.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will be watching with some concern, our correspondent says.

Peter Akinola's growing power could well lead to a schism within the Anglican communion, he says.

An Innocents' Guide to Things Anglican in USA

2006-12-14T22:46:00.000-08:00

Jonathan has done an excellent story in the Daily Telegraph, a follow to the other Jonathan's offering in the Sunday. I mentioned this story to my newsdesk this week, who groaned. "Schism mark 27? No thank you. Can't you give us more on the Bishop of Southwark?" One problem I believe is that people might be confused by who is who, which covenant is which, what separates the AAC from the ACC (quite a lot), Nigeria from the US. (Ok, well maybe people are not confused about that last one.) In any case, the latest schism with all its ramifications can be followed with links on Thinking Anglicans. The response from Inclusive Church is up there too.

What this latest story does perhaps reflect is that the obsession with TEC is something of a diversion. Schism, if it happens, will happen here first, in the CofE. Even so, I don't believe it will be a full-blooded schism, although it might well be full-bloodied. But this could be one unexpected consequence of the opposition to women priests that led to the Act of Synod. A precedent of alternative oversight has been set which it will be difficult for the Archbishop of Canterbury to ignore. Another thing that cannot be ignored is that the evangelical constituency is large and getting bigger all the time. It has grown beyond what the liberals of the last century ever imagined it could. Analysis by Peter Brierley of his English Church Census shows that in the Church of England, evangelical churches make up 26 per cent of the total, actual worshippers make up 34 per cent and of the largest churches with a membership of more than 350, 83 per cent are evangelical.

Anyway, if you are not confused by the whole scene, I certainly am. So I asked a friend to compile an "idiot's guide" to the conservative scene in the US for me. He politely sent back what he called an "innocent's guide". So here it is.

The innocent's guide to US orthodox Anglicans.

The Episcopal Church – TEC. This was formerly known as ECUSA, the Episcopal Church of the United States of America. The name change this year was because it has members and dioceses in 18 nations in the Americas, and even a jurisdiction in Europe which overlaps with the Church of England Diocese of Europe. Some see wider ambitions in the name change.

The Anglican Communion Network. This is a coalition of eight dioceses within TEC, whose bishops and conventions have rejected the direction that ECUSA is taking, and claim to be the ones who are faithful to the title deeds of ECUSA. They have appealed to the Primates of the Anglican Communion for alternative oversight to that of TEC. They have not left TEC because if they do they fear law suits for their property.

Overseas Jurisdictions. Parishes outside these eight dioceses have appealed to archbishops and bishops in Africa and Latin America to give them oversight. They have left ECUSA, and in many cases their property, salaries and pension arrangements. They receive oversight from overseas. They form a convocation linked with the ACN. They have no bishop in America.

The Anglican Mission in America. This began in 1992 when Charles Murphy and John Rodgers were consecrated bishop in Singapore by the Archbishop of South East Asia, Moses Tay, and the Archbishop of Rwanda, Emmanuel Kolini. They sit in the House of Bishops of the Church of Rwanda. They oversee churches which have decided they cannot in conscience be identified with ECUSA. These churches have left their buildings. The priests have left their salaries and their pension arrangements behind. "They express joy at being free of the church arguments over homosexuality in order to get on with the task of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ," says my source. About 100 churches belong to the Mission. They hold an annual conference in January, attended by a number of Anglican Primates.

Convocation of Anglicans in North America. This is under the jurisdiction of Peter Akinola's Church of Nigeria which consecrated Bishop Martyn Minns to be a bishop in America for them. Their initial constituency is congregations of Nigerian Anglicans in North America. But other large churches outside the Anglican Communion Network dioceses are voting on whether to join them. (Truro, The Fall’s Church, All Saints' in the Diocese of Virginia).

All these four groups have formed a movement called Common Cause, to work together on issues which they hold in common.

The Common Cause movement also includes some older continuing Anglican churches such as The Reformed Episcopal Church, formed in the 1870s, which are Anglican Churches not currently in formal communion with Canterbury.

All the above are churches which have bishops and a formal ecclesiastical structure. There are also movements which embrace people who belong in one or other of these structures.

These are Forward in Faith, and the AAC. These act as advocacy and activist groups advising and supporting parishes and persons who are seeking to be biblically orthodox. They are not formal ecclesiastical structures.

Best blog sites representing the debates around these groups are on the Classical Anglican site. They include Lord Carey's son Andrew, and Kendall Harmon's widely-read TitusOneNine. Another must read for this constituency is Matt Kennedy's exhaustive StandFirm, always with interesting comments. And then there is the distinctively personal but well-informed blog of Peter Ould, whose vidcast on Katharine Schori, below, will give you a good idea of how things stand between her and the US conservatives at present. Anglican Mainstream also documents events worldwide, including the US. And AAC also has a terrific blog.

If anyone can send me a similar guide to the other side, I'll post that too. And the same goes for the conservative and liberal scenes in the UK.

Trinity Church Choir and Handel's Messiah

2006-12-11T23:36:00.000-08:00

In our video on demand section (see right column about half way down page) I have installed a most interesting video of the choir and orchestra of Trinity Church Wall Street, New York performing some excerpts of Messiah by George Frederic Handel in its December 2005 performance. I hope you will enjoy the choir and orchestra, and the commentary by the director. You know, its really great to be involved with the Episcopal Church because of its tradition of great music.

PAT

Virginia Episcopalians Joining San Joaquin in Leaving Us

2006-12-04T19:36:00.001-08:00

There may be some big changes ahead for two Virginia Episcopalian churches. In response to openly gay Bishop Gene Robinson's 2003 ascension in New Hampshire, officals in Virginia are considering breaking away from the American branch of the Anglican Church. Rather than associating with what they feel to be too liberal a church, leaders from The Falls Church, in the City of Falls Church, and Truro Church, in Fairfax City are looking to affiliate themselves with the religion's Nigerian branch.

The Washington Post reports:

If the votes at The Falls Church and Truro succeed, as their leaders predict, the 3,000 active members of the two churches would join a new, Fairfax-based organization that answers to Nigerian Archbishop Peter J. Akinola, leader of the 17 million-member Nigerian church and an advocate of jailing gays. The new group hopes to become a U.S.-based denomination for orthodox Episcopalians.

You may remember that Akinola's a virulently outspoken opponent of gays, spouting some of pretty vile anti-gay rhetoric, such as called queers "a cancerous lump in the body [which] should be excised if it has defied every known cure." (That is just plain crude and rude. But we always knew many of the people in Africa were sort of backward anyway ... )

Worth a combined $25 million, the churches risk losing everything if they split. It's also worth noting that our first President, Mr. George Washington, practiced at the Fairfax church. Upon hearing of the vote, Washington promptly turned over in his grave.

Let's pray for them and pray for our PB as she attempts to put it all back together again.

PAT

San Joaquin Diocese Decides to Abandon Us

2006-12-04T18:48:00.000-08:00

This very sad report from California reached me earlier today ... how can a Bishop simply walk away with an entire diocese from our church? I do not know about others of our faith, but I intend to REMAIN EPISCOPAL as the majority of the church members in San Joaquin, California apparently intend to do. Please join me in prayer for this errant bishop and those who chose to walk with him. PAT

San Joaquin convention seeks to sever diocese from Episcopal Church
Presiding Bishop, deputies' president respond to 'extracanonical' actions

By Mary Frances Schjonberg
Monday, December 04, 2006

[Episcopal News Service] The Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop and the President of its House of Deputies both said on December 4 they deplore the action taken two days earlier by the Diocese of San Joaquin, effectively repudiating its membership in the Episcopal Church.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said in a statement that she "laments" the move and is working with others to respond to "these extracanonical actions."

"Our task as the Episcopal Church is God's mission of reconciling the world, and actions such as this distract and detract from that mission," she said.

Jefferts Schori said in her statement that she also "deeply" laments the "pain, confusion, and suffering visited on loyal members of the Episcopal Church within the Diocese of San Joaquin," and wants them "to know of my prayers and the prayers of many, many others."

House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson expressed similar concerns.

"I am saddened by the actions of the bishop and the convention in the Diocese of San Joaquin," she said. "In my mind's eye, I can see the faces of the deputies from the diocese and I wonder how they must be feeling. In the diocese there must be a mix of emotions present. Surely the people are not all of one mind."

Anderson -- elected in 2006 to lead the church's clergy and lay deputies representing each of the Episcopal Church's 110 dioceses -- said that those who claim "I have no need of you" bear "a huge burden."

"I pray that Episcopalians in the Diocese of San Joaquin know they are held closely in prayer by me and many of their brothers and sisters across the Episcopal Church," she said.

Meeting during its 47th annual Convention December 1-2, the diocese approved the first reading of four constitutional amendments which would remove references to the Episcopal Church, make the Standing Committee the ecclesiastical authority in the absence of any sitting bishops, put all diocesan trust funds under the control of the bishop, and permit the diocese unilaterally to extend itself beyond its current geographic boundaries.

The constitutional amendments will not take effect until a second vote is taken at another annual convention meeting, scheduled for October 2007. The second reading will require a two-thirds majority in order for the amendments to pass, according to the release.

Jefferts Schori noted in her statement that if the amendments pass their second reading, they effectively violate the requirements of the Episcopal Church's Constitution and Canons. Article V, Section 1 says that a diocese's constitution must include "an unqualified accession" to the constitution and canons of the Episcopal Church.

The convention also passed a resolution directing the bishop, council, and standing committee "to assess the means of our affiliation with a recognized Ecclesiastical structure of the Anglican Communion," and bring the next convention a "detailed plan for the preservation of our relationship with the Anglican Communion."

The only constitutional amendment described in a diocesan news release issued December 2 and posted on the diocese's website was a change to Article II of its constitution. The change would identify the diocese specifically as a "constituent member of the Anglican Communion and in full communion with the See of Canterbury."

In a vote by orders, 68 of the clergy voted in favor of the amendment, while 16 were opposed. The lay delegates voted 108 in favor, with 12 opposed to the amendment to Article II, according to the news release.

The other three proposed amendments passed by similar margins.

"Official observers" were present from dissident congregations in other California dioceses, including St. John's Anglican Church, Fallbrook; St. Anne's Church, Oceanside; St. James' Church, Newport Beach; St. Luke's of the Mountains Anglican Church in La Crescenta; St. Jude's Church, Burbank; and the Western Convocation of the Anglican Communion Network, based in Long Beach. The observers stood applauding when the constitutional amendment expanding the boundaries of the diocese passed.

"This amending process is the first step in the removal from our Constitution of any reference to the Episcopal Church because – in our opinion – they have decided to walk apart from the Anglican Communion," Schofield said in his convention address.

Schofield said that since the 1974 irregular ordinations of 11 women deacons as Episcopal priests, "many voices familiar to you [have] withstood the erosion of faith, the lowering of the standards of morality, and the unilateral action of the Episcopal Church." Schofield is one of only three remaining diocesan bishops who oppose the ordination of women as priests and bishops in the Episcopal Church. He also opposes the 2003 election of a gay bishop in New Hampshire.

But not all agreed with the convention's action. In a written message to the gathering, Maria Rivera, daughter of the late Bishop Victor M. Rivera, third bishop of San Joaquin, told the convention that "wrenching this Diocese from its mother church accomplishes no spiritual goal that cannot be achieved in less violent and more Christian ways."

The Rev. Rick Matters, rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Lodi, California, said that members of the diocese who disagree with the convention's choices are "optimistic and prayerful and wearied by the spiritual violence, and the spiritual battle we've undertaken."

"We are remaining faithful to Jesus Christ from within the Episcopal expression of the faith," Matters said. "The posturing out here is a false choice: you choose Jesus or you choose the Episcopal Church, you choose scriptural witness or you abandon that and go with the Presiding Bishop and the House of Bishops. We deny that false dichotomy."

The group Remain Episcopal is making plans as well, he said. "We're going to have a plan of how to maintain this diocese – those of us who want to continue in the Episcopal Church," Matters said.

Matters said that in pre-convention meetings Schofield told the diocese's deaneries that in November he signed a "pledge of allegiance" to six Anglican Communion bishops, including Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola and Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone (South America), who addressed the convention Eucharist by an internet downlink.

"He is now taking orders from them in terms of how to leave and separate from the Episcopal Church and how to realign," Matters said, adding that Schofield told the meetings that those bishops were setting the timetable for such a move and determining who would be involved.

The convention's actions occurred just after an exchange of letters between Jefferts Schori and Schofield. On November 20, the Presiding Bishop sent Schofield a letter, telling him that if he disagrees with the policy of the church "the more honorable course would be to renounce your orders in this Church and seek a home elsewhere."

She warned in the letter that his public assertion that he must violate his vows "puts many, many people at hazard of profound spiritual violence."

On November 28, Schofield replied that, because she had not issued him an ultimatum but instead offered "further discussion which could possibly lead to some degree of reconciliation," he would not move up the date of the 2007—unless she or anyone else charges him with violating his ordination vows to uphold the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal Church. Nevertheless, he told Jefferts Schori, he believes "the Episcopal Church, as an institution, is walking a path of apostasy and those faithful to God's Word are forced to make painful choices."

The Diocese of San Joaquin comprises about 10,000 Episcopalians worshipping in 48 congregations.

Presiding Bishop's Statement on World AIDS Day

2006-11-29T22:22:00.000-08:00

December 1, 2006

'Words, words, words won't help us in our fight against the pandemic. Now is the time for action.'

As people across the world pause to commemorate another World AIDS Day, my mind is drawn to these words, spoken by my brother Archbishop, Njongonkulu Ndungane of Cape Town, earlier this year at the United Nations High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS.

My purpose in writing on World AIDS Day, then, is not simply to add more words to a debate that is already long on rhetoric but short on action. Rather, I hope my words will remind Episcopalians that our voices if united as ONE can make a critical difference in the fight to rid the world of a pandemic that claims the lives of 8,000 of God's people each day, destabilizes entire regions, and keeps hundreds
of millions of people living in extreme poverty.

On this World AIDS Day, I urge all Episcopalians to join the 'One Episcopalian' campaign, a unique partnership between the Episcopal Church and One: The Campaign to Make Poverty History. By becoming a One Episcopalian, you can unite your voice with more than 2.4 million Americans who are working, One by One, to create a world free of AIDS and deadly poverty. You can sign up online at
www.episcopalchurch.org/ONE, and it takes less than One minute.

The resources and strategies for preventing HIV and treating AIDS are fully within humanity's reach. Mobilization of resources by the United States and other countries over the past four years has increased treatment rates more than eight-fold in Africa and brought new hope to millions of people. Still, HIV-prevention efforts lag as infection rates continue to rise in many of the world's hardest hit regions. At least 4.3 million new infections occurred in the past year alone, with more than six in ten coming in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In order to turn the tide, governments must put full resources behind efforts like the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Moreover, existing programs have to be continually adapted to ensure that they are as dynamic as possible in meeting the needs of local communities. Most importantly, prevention and treatment efforts must be combined with efforts to fight poverty, empower women, and build the
sustainable communities envisioned by the Millennium Development Goals.

2007 promises to be a significant year as both the U.S. Congress and the international community will face key decisions in the fight against AIDS and poverty worldwide. More than ever, the voices of
citizens like us will be critical, and by joining the ONE Episcopalian Campaign, we can ensure that our voices are heard.

On Sunday, Christians around the world will enter into Advent, the season of preparation for the great feast of the Incarnation. Our belief that, in order to redeem the world, God put aside all heavenly glory to make his dwelling in our midst - challenges us to carry our worship of God out of our churches and homes and into the world around us. May the Child of Bethlehem, the tiny and vulnerable One in whom all the fullness of God is pleased to dwell, inspire us anew to worship him in the world by working to end HIV/AIDS and build a creation that truly shows forth the glory of God.

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

A Bit More Early History of Epiphany and St. Paul's in Coffeyville

2006-11-29T21:12:00.000-08:00

The first dozen years of our parish in s.e. Kansas (1872-1884), we shared priests-in-common with Coffeyville our neighboring community to the south. We attribute our founding to The Reverend Archibald Beatty, who met with a group of interested persons to form Friends of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Independence, Kansas on April 22, 1872.

St. Paul's Church in Coffeyville [which had been founded in 1869 by Colonel Coffey] was also started by Reverend Beatty, whom they have described in their historical documents as a missioner. Reverend Beatty served Coffeyville for two years in 1872-73.

But St. Paul's says that Reverend Levi Holden was their first full time vicar between 1873-76.

Our historical records show that Levi Holden was our second full time pastor, between 1876-78. Apparently, Reverend Holden left Coffeyville and 'came north' to Independence that year to stay with us for a couple years.

Then, Reverend Beatty returned to Epiphany in Independence for another year in 1878-79. In 1879-1880, Reverend Charles H. Canfield -- whom our records indicate was a missioner -- served Independence in that capacity, however St. Paul's records in Coffeyville show 'Reverend C.H. Canfield' was the rector there between 1878 and 1881. Apparently Reverend Canfield did 'double duty' during much of that time serving both Independence and Coffeyville.

On the first meeting of Epiphany Parish in April, 1872, Bishop Vail attended services, administered confirmation to a small class, and conferred with the newly formed Vestry regards other duties for Father Beatty. Father Beatty would be given a salary of $500.00 per year, and his duties would include missoner work in Neodesha, Elk City, Fredonia, and Coffeyville (my emphasis).

Reverend Beatty was primarily employed as a chaplain for the Santa Fe Railroad while all this was going on. Santa Fe, then as now, ran passenger trains from a terminal in Chicago, Illinois to the west coast, passing through Topeka, Kansas en-route. (Thus the name, 'Atchison [Kansas], Topeka [Kansas] and Santa Fe [New Mexico] Railroad'. Its a good thing Father Beatty had some other source of income (the railroad). Southeast Kansas was /still is a very rural area and we were not able to pay him all that well. Plus which, in 1873 his rectory burned to the ground, and among other tragedies for the Beatty family, an epidemic of Spiral Menengitis spread through town and affected one of the children.

Then November 23, 1879 through February, 1880, Reverend C. H. Canfield took charge of Epiphany Parish in Independence. He is listed as the third rector at St.Paul's in Coffeyville, 1878-1881.

Coffeyville then had a succession of pastors over the next twenty years through the early years of the twentieth century while Epiphany/Independence was essentially dormant. Arthur S. Freese, the pastor at St. Paul's in Coffeyville, 1903-1908 took on Independence as one of his responsibilities in 1903 for about one year.

Then, as you know, if you have been following this blog for a few months now, 1904 saw a renaissance at Epiphany Church in Independence, and lots of very nice, very major changes. But just as Epiphany and Ascension Church (Neodesha) have much in common from our early years, so does Epiphany and St. Paul's in Coffeyville. Where we were incorporated in 1873, St. Paul's was incorporated in 1878 and Neodesha in about 1900. St. Paul's opened their 'new' building at 7th and Elm in Coffeyville in 1912, Ascension in Neodesha opened their 'new' building in 1904 and of course we at Epiphany opened our new building in 1924-28 at 4th and Maple Streets in Independence.

When an Archbishop Stands up to an Airline

2006-11-29T21:08:00.000-08:00

Rome/London: Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has frequently felt impotent in the face of a divided and troublesome Church congregation he leads. On Friday, however, he proved he was a force to be reckoned with when he stepped into the row over whether a British Airways check-in worker could wear a crucifix on a necklace at work.

Speaking in Rome, where he had met the Pope, Dr. Williams said consultations had begun on a possible disinvestment of BA shares. A few hours later, faced with the possible sale of the Church's £10.25 million-worth shares in British Airways and the lingering possibility of a boycott, the U.K.'s flag carrier suddenly announced a review of its 34-page uniform policy, saying it was "unfairly accused" of being anti-Christian.

Dr. Williams spoke with fervour, declaring that, if the airline felt the cross was a source of offence, then he himself would find that fact to be "deeply offensive."

The Church's Ethical Investment Advisory Group, which advises its investment bodies, contacted BA shortly after Dr. Williams's comments and sent a letter to chief executive Willie Walsh requesting a meeting.

Nadia Eweida will hear next month the outcome of an appeal against the company's decision that she cannot openly wear a crucifix on a necklace at work. Ms. Eweida, 55, has refused to go back to her job at Heathrow Airport.

Mr. Walsh did not suggest she would be able to wear her necklace, but said: "Our staff has suggested that we allow the wearing of religious symbols as small lapel badges. This will be considered..."

Dr. Williams is not only leader of the Church of England, but also of the 77 million-strong worldwide Anglican community. If the Church of England sold its shares — small in comparison with the £5.6 billion stock market value of BA — it might have a passing effect on BA's share price. But an Anglican boycott could damage sales and angry customers had been contacting the airline.

Asked at a Rome press conference if he would support a boycott, Dr. Williams noted the dispute had erupted after his own flight to Rome on BA had been booked. "I have a responsibility for the proper use of the resources of staff and money and reorganising at short notice expensively and complicatedly didn't seem to me a responsible use of them," he said.

But then he added: "I'm actually consulting with others in the Church of England about our whole attitude to BA in which, as you know, we have some financial investment. And that's a question that's already been raised for discussion with the Church Commissioners in London."

The Church owns around £10.25 million shares through its church commissioners body, which owns £9 million, and the pension fund which owns £1.25 million.

The Archbishop said: "People of any faith should have the right to display the signs of their faiths in public."

Dr. Williams had clearly made the best use of his time in the air. "It is just perhaps worth noting with some irony," he said, "that amongst the duty-free jewellery items for sale are some crosses."

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

© Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu

Arson Suspected in Church Blaze

2006-11-29T21:06:00.000-08:00

Officials say Topeka church fire was arson

BY JOHN HANNA
Associated Press

TOPEKA - Arson was the cause of a Friday morning fire that gutted the interior of a Topeka church, including its sanctuary, a local official said.

Authorities estimated damage to St. David's Episcopal Church at between $2.5 million and $3 million, though its walls and most of its roof were intact after firefighters from five engine companies subdued the blaze.

No injuries were reported, but the congregation faces rebuilding the church.

"Fire officials have determined this to be an arson fire," said Greg Bailey, the local fire marshal, declining to give more details because an investigation was continuing.

Church and fire department officials said the fire might have started in a chapel and spread through the adjacent, larger main sanctuary.

Authorities' conclusion that the blaze was no accident stunned church members.

"We're processing the information," said Margaret Telthorst, the head of the church's governing council. "We're grieving, and we're comforting each other."

She wouldn't speculate on who might have set the fire. "Every organization is going to have people who disagree with it, but there's nothing we can even begin to speculate about," she said.

The church, founded in 1953, has 600 to 700 members and is among Kansas' 10 largest Episcopal parishes.

"We may be experiencing a total loss here," said Dean Wolfe, the Episcopal bishop for Kansas. "It's more substantial than we originally thought."

Wolfe and the Rev. Don Davidson, the church's rector, said several area churches from different denominations immediately offered the use of their buildings. St. David's, which normally has services at 8 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., plans to have its Sunday service at 1:30 p.m. at a nearby Lutheran church.

The Episcopal church moved its offices to a nearby vacant home it owns.

Davidson said the loss is difficult for church members because the building is where important events in their lives, including marriages and funerals, occur.

The church's chapel normally is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The blaze was reported to Topeka firefighters shortly after 5 a.m., and they had it under control within the hour, though it wasn't reported as fully out for several more hours.

Our New Presiding Bishop Takes Charge

2006-11-29T21:01:00.000-08:00

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached at her November 4 investiture service, which was set in the context of Holy Eucharist at Washington National Cathedral. The full text of Jefferts Schori's sermon follows:

Investiture
4 November 2006
National Cathedral

Where is home for you? How would you define your home? A friend in Nevada said to me just before I left that he had thought I would only leave Nevada to go home, and in his mind, that meant Oregon. But in the six years I spent there, Nevada became home. The state song is even called, "Home means Nevada." And for a place filled with folk who have come from elsewhere, that is quite remarkable – all sorts and conditions of rootless people trying to grow new roots in the desert.

So where is home for you? Des Moines or Anchorage or Taipei or San Salvador or Port au Prince?

What makes it home? Familiar landscape, a quality of life, or the presence of particular people?

Some people who engage this journey we call Christianity discover that home is found on the road, whether literally the restless travel that occupies some of us, or the hodos that is the Way of following the one we call the Christ. The home we ultimately seek is found in relationship with creator, with redeemer, with spirit. When Augustine says "our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee, O Lord" he means that our natural home is in God.

The great journey stories of the Hebrew Bible begin with leaving our home in Eden, they tell of wandering for a very long time in search of a new home in the land of promise, and they tell later of returning home from exile. And eventually Israel begins to realize that they are meant to build a home that will draw all the nations to Mount Zion. Isaiah's great vision of a thanksgiving feast on a mountain, to which the whole world is invited, is part of that initial discovery of a universal home-building mission, meant for all. Jesus' inauguration and incarnation of the heavenly banquet is about a home that does not depend on place, but on community gathered in the conscious presence of God.

In Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost said that "home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in." We all ache for a community that will take us in, with all our warts and quirks and petty meannesses – and yet they still celebrate when they see us coming! That vision of homegoing and homecoming that underlies our deepest spiritual yearnings is also the job assignment each one of us gets in baptism – go home, and while you're at it, help to build a home for everyone else on earth. For none of us can truly find our rest in God until all of our brothers and sisters have also been welcomed home like the prodigal.

There's a wonderful Hebrew word for that vision and work – shalom. It doesn't just mean the sort of peace that comes when we're no longer at war. It's that rich and multihued vision of a world where no one goes hungry because everyone is invited to a seat at the groaning board, it's a vision of a world where no one is sick or in prison because all sorts of disease have been healed, it's a vision of a world where every human being has the capacity to use every good gift that God has given, it is a vision of a world where no one enjoys abundance at the expense of another, it's a vision of a world where all enjoy Sabbath rest in the conscious presence of God. Shalom means that all human beings live together as siblings, at peace with one another and with God, and in right relationship with all of the rest of creation. It is that vision of the lion lying down with the lamb and the small child playing over the den of the adder, where the specter of death no longer holds sway. It is that vision to which Jesus points when he says, "today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." To say "shalom" is to know our own place and to invite and affirm the place of all of the rest of creation, once more at home in God.

You and I have been invited into that ministry of global peace-making that makes a place and affirms a welcome for all of God's creatures. But more than welcome, that ministry invites all to feast until they are filled with God's abundance. God has spoken that dream in our hearts – through the prophets, through the patriarchs and the mystics, in human flesh in Jesus, and in each one of us at baptism. All are welcome, all are fed, all are satisfied, all are healed of the wounds and lessenings that are part of the not-yet-ness of creation.

That homecoming of shalom is both destination and journey. We cannot embark on the journey without some vision of where we are going, even though we may not reach it this side of the grave. We are really charged with seeing everyplace and all places as home, and living in a way that makes that true for every other creature on the planet. None of us can be fully at home, at rest, enjoying shalom, unless all the world is as well. Shalom is the fruit of living that dream. We live in a day where there is a concrete possibility of making that dream reality for the most destitute, forgotten, and ignored of our fellow travelers – for the castaways, for those in peril or just barely afloat on life's restless sea.

This church has said that our larger vision will be framed and shaped in the coming years by the vision of shalom embedded in the Millennium Development Goals – a world where the hungry are fed, the ill are healed, the young educated, women and men treated equally, and where all have access to clean water and adequate sanitation, basic health care, and the promise of development that does not endanger the rest of creation. That vision of abundant life is achievable in our own day, but only with the passionate commitment of each and every one of us. It is God's vision of homecoming for all humanity. [Applause]

The ability of any of us to enjoy shalom depends on the health of our neighbors. If some do not have the opportunity for health or wholeness, then none of us can enjoy true and perfect holiness. The writer of Ephesians implores us to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace – to be at one in God's shalom. That is our baptismal task and hope, and unless each of the members of the body enjoys shalom we shall not live as one. That dream of God, that word of God spoken in each one of us at baptism also speaks hope of its realization.

The health of our neighbors, in its broadest understanding, is the mission that God has given us. We cannot love God if we fail to love our neighbors into a more whole and holy state of life. If some in this church feel wounded by recent decisions, then our salvation, our health as a body is at some hazard, and it becomes the duty of all of us to seek healing and wholeness. As long as children live exposed on the streets, while seniors go without food to pay for life-sustaining drugs, wherever peoples are sickened by industrial waste, the body suffers, and none of us can say we have finally come home.

What keeps us from the tireless search for that vision of shalom? There are probably only two answers, and they are connected – apathy and fear. One is the unwillingness to acknowledge the pain of other people, the other is an unwillingness to acknowledge that pain with enough courage to act. The cure for each is a deep and abiding hope. If God in Jesus has made captivity captive, has taken fear hostage, it is for the liberation and flourishing of hope. Augustine said that as Christians, we are prisoners of hope – a ridiculously assertive hope, a hope that unflinchingly assails the doors of heaven, a hope that will not cease until that dream of God has swallowed up death forever, a hope that has the audacity to join Jesus in saying, "today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

And how shall that scripture be fulfilled in our hearing? In the will to make peace with one who disdains our theological position – for his has merit, too, as the fruit of faithfulness. In the courage to challenge our legislators to make poverty history, to fund AIDS work in Africa, and the distribution of anti-malarial mosquito nets, and primary schools where all children are welcomed. In the will to look within our own hearts and confront the shadows that darken the dream that God has planted there.

That scripture is fulfilled each time we reach beyond our narrow self-interest to call another home.

That scripture is fulfilled in ways both small and large, in acts of individuals and of nations, whenever we seek the good of the other, ifor our own good and final homecoming is wrapped up in that.

God has spoken that dream in us, let us rejoice! Let us join the raucous throngs in creation, the sea creatures and the geological features who leap for joy at the vision of all creation restored, restored to proper relationship, to all creation come home at last. May that scripture be fulfilled in our hearing and in our doing.

Shalom, chaverim, shalom, my friends, shalom.

[Congregation responded: Shalom]

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church

Remembering Rita, A Year Later; Episcopalians Continue to Help

2006-09-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

www.episcopalchurch.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By: Mary Frances Schjonberg
Posted: Thursday, September 21, 2006

A year ago this week, the Gulf Coast of the United States received the second of the 2005 hurricane season's two-fisted punch.
Coming less than a month after Hurricane Katrina, Rita grazed the Florida Keys and Cuba as a category 2 hurricane on September 21 and made landfall between Sabine Pass, Texas, and Johnson's Bayou, Louisiana, on September 24 as a category 3 hurricane with winds clocked at 115 mph.

More than 100 people were killed by Rita and the storm's aftermath.

The storm destroyed homes, businesses, and the economy of several coastal communities in Louisiana, including those in the areas of Vermilion, Creole, Cameron, and Port Lafourche. Thousands of houses were swept away and local industries, especially shrimping and oyster farming, were devastated. The hurricane destroyed the town of Cameron and destroyed or damaged many homes beyond repair in Abbeville and Sulphur. It is estimated that Rita's assault resulted in 8.7 million cubic yards of debris.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported Rita's storm surge reached 15 feet at the Cameron Parish shoreline and up to 12 feet at the Vermilion Parish coastline and at St. Mary Parish near Louisa, along the southwestern Louisiana coastline. The surge also swamped areas of the southeastern coastline that had been devastated by Katrina.

More than 365,000 Louisiana households and businesses registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for help as a result of Hurricane Rita. More than 110,000 registered in Calcasieu Parish and nearly 18,000 in Vermilion Parish. The combination of Katrina and Rita prompted what some called the largest national housing crisis since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

The Episcopal Church has been deeply involved in the work of the past year as the Gulf Coast began to recover from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In states that were reeling from the devastation caused about a month earlier by Hurricane Katrina, evacuations were ordered and Episcopal Relief Development (ERD) prepared to assist the areas likely to be damaged by Rita's force before the storm hit.

In the very early days of the aftermath, ERD partnered with the Diocese of Western Louisiana to assist parishes reaching out to displaced people in the region, to supply food and shelter, and to prepare for involvement in programs for trauma counseling, psychosocial care, and help with the unmet needs of vulnerable populations.

ERD also assisted with evacuation and relocation expenses, and helped in coordinating the diocese's disaster recovery activities and work with a coordinator to organize collection and relief points in the Lake Charles and Acadiana convocations, which includes the Vermilion parish and the area near Abbeville and Sulphur.

ERD pledged early on to work with diocesan partners to develop a long-term, comprehensive rehabilitation program to help communities affected by both hurricanes.

More information about the work of ERD and Episcopal Migration Ministries is available at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_77345_ENG_HTM.htm, http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_69050_ENG_HTM.htm, http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_69050_ENG_HTM.htm, http://www.er-d.org/newsroom_64626_ENG_HTM.htm

On September 22, 2005, the bishop and several staff members of the Diocese of Texas evacuated their homes and offices in Houston in advance of Rita's landfall and relocated to Camp Allen, the diocesan conference center in Navasota, Texas. Camp Allen also housed residents of the diocesan nursing home and another nursing home, and many others took refuge there as well.

Then archdeacon, now Bishop Suffragan-elect Dena Harrison relocated to Austin with backup files for the diocesan office. The diocesan offices told congregations to do the same: secure their documents and historic valuables and follow local authorities' evacuation instructions.

All roads leading out of Houston became snarled with evacuees, some of whom had to abandon cars that had run out of gas. Carol Barnwell, diocesan communication director, reported that it took three-and-a-half hours to travel 26 miles. The usual four-hour drive to Dallas was more than 10 hours, Barnwell said.

The neighboring diocese of West Texas offered to house evacuees in the face of Rita's approach.

Forty-eight hours after Rita hit, Diocese of Western Louisiana Bishop Bruce MacPherson wrote to the diocese praising the "witness of Christian care and concern, and for the outpouring of support across the diocese as people from within the Diocese of Western Louisiana came north seeking a place to stay, and in their midst, Katrina evacuees that had begun to go home, found themselves returning to the many places of shelter being provided to those who came from the Dioceses of Louisiana and Mississippi."

"A major difference in our ability to care for all who came this time, was the fact that we ourselves had been struck and our infrastructure wounded," he wrote. "Power resources failed along with telephone systems across the affected areas, which were almost statewide now as a result of the two storms. This was further complicated by the failure of our water systems across the central part of the diocese, an area that has literally housed thousands of evacuees."

MacPherson spent two days trying to contact the diocese's clergy, and reported locating them all. "As I made contact with the last person this day, and having found him two states east of here, I stated I truly understood Jesus' parable about the lost coin, for he and his family were my lost coin," he wrote.

In Rita's aftermath, the Diocese of Texas began working with outreach coordinators around the diocese to get help to where it was needed. In one instance, Harrison drove in the middle of the night to meet the senior warden of a parish to deliver a check. They met at an abandoned gas station several miles outside of town since there was no way to drive into town.

Help came for individual parishes as well. For instance, St. Martin's Episcopal Church in suburban Houston raised more than $300,000 for hurricane relief in the days after Katrina and Rita, according to Sally Harvin, the parish's volunteer outreach coordinator.

The parish was immediately able to help ten families get back on their feet by helping them find work, pay bills and purchase cars. A number of parishioners "adopted" family members last Christmas and gave them gifts, Harvin said.

In the midst of St. Martin's initial work, a container of supplies arrived from the Seattle Supersonics and the WNBA Seattle Storm. The two professional basketball franchises had donated money and supplies, and coordinated donations from their fans. Harvin said she was never quite sure how the parish was chosen to receive one of the five containers the teams shipped to the Gulf Coast, but outreach volunteers put the supplies to good use. At one point, Harvin loaded up her SUV and headed to St. John's in Silsbee, in hard-hit southeast Texas, near Beaumont, where she dropped off cleaning supplies and other necessities.

All told, the parish was able to help 145 household consisting of about 400 people, she said.

While St. Martin's parishioners did much for the victims of Katrina and Rita, Harvin said they also had some experiences that will further the church's mission in the future. "We raised up a lot of new volunteers," she said. Those volunteers and the work they have done were recognized during worship services on September 17.

Some of those volunteers are now trained as case managers who are forming what the parish is calling the Community of Compassion.

"It has definitely made our members more sensitive to help in times of need," she said. "It's hard to say just where it's going, but it's still going."

© 2004, The Episcopal Church, USA. Episcopal News Service content may be reprinted without permission as long as credit is given to ENS.

2006-09-21T13:43:00.000-07:00

This report comes to us from Sorrels DeWoody, a long-time member of Epiphany Church (and my ride home most Sundays after the coffee hour). Thank you, Sorrels, for this great contribution. PAT

Don't start reading this one until you've got more than 3 or 4 minutes to just "scan" over it. It deserves some time for reflection.

I envy Kevin. My brother Kevin thinks God lives under his bed. At least that's what I heard him say one night.

He was praying out loud in his dark bedroom, and I stopped to listen, "Are you there, God?" he said. "Where are you? Oh, I see. Under the bed..."

I giggled softly and tiptoed off to my own room. Kevin's unique perspectives are often a source of amusement. But that night something else lingered long after the humor. I realized for the first time the very different world Kevin lives in. He was born 30 years ago, mentally disabled as a result of difficulties during labor. Apart from his size (he's 6-foot-2), there are few ways in which he is an adult. He easons and communicates with the capabilities of a 7-year-old, and he always will. He will probably always believe that God lives under his bed, that Santa Claus is the one who fills the space under our tree every Christmas and that airplanes stay up in the sky because angels carry them.

I remember wondering if Kevin realizes he is different.

Is he ever dissatisfied with his monotonous life?

Up before dawn each day, off to work at a workshop for the disabled, home to walk our cocker spaniel, return to eat his favorite macaroni-and-cheese for dinner, and later to bed.

The only variation in the entire scheme is laundry, when he hovers excitedly over the washing machine like a mother with her newborn child.

He does not seem dissatisfied.

He lopes out to the bus every morning at 7:05, eager for a day of simple work.

He wrings his hands excitedly while the water boils on the stove before dinner, and he stays up late twice a week to gather our dirty laundry for his next day's laundry chores.

And Saturdays-oh, the bliss of Saturdays! That's the day my Dad takes Kevin to the airport to have a soft drink, watch the planes land, and speculate loudly on the destination of each passenger inside.

"That one's goin' to Chi-car-go!" Kevin shouts as he claps his hands.

His anticipation is so great he can hardly sleep on Friday nights.

And so goes his world of daily rituals and weekend field trips.

He doesn't know what it means to be discontent.

His life is simple.

He will never know the entanglements of wealth of power, and he does not care what brand of clothing he wears or what kind of food he eats. His needs have always been met, and he never worries that one day they may not be.

His hands are diligent. Kevin is never so happy as when he is working.

When he unloads the dishwasher or vacuums the carpet, his heart is completely in it.

He does not shrink from a job when it is begun, and he does not leave a job until it is finished. But when his tasks are done, Kevin knows how to relax.

He is not obsessed with his work or the work of others. His heart is pure.

He still believes everyone tells the truth, promises must be kept, and when you are wrong, you apologize instead of argue.

Free from pride and unconcerned with appearances, Kevin is not afraid to cry when he is hurt, angry or sorry. He is always transparent, always sincere. And he trusts God.

Not confined by intellectual reasoning, when he comes to Christ, he comes as a child. Kevin seems to know God - to really be friends with Him in a way that is difficult for an "educated" person to grasp. God seems like his closest companion.

In my moments of doubt and frustrations with my Christianity I envy the security Kevin has in his simple faith. It is then that I am most willing to admit that he has some divine knowledge that rises above my mortal questions.

It is then I realize that perhaps he is not the one with the handicap. I am.
My obligations, my fear, my pride, my circumstances - they all become disabilities when I do not trust them to God's care.

Who knows if Kevin comprehends things I can never learn? After all, he hasspent his whole life in that kind of innocence, praying after dark and soaking up the goodness and love of God.

And one day, when the mysteries of heaven are opened, and we are all amazed at how close God really is to our hearts, I'll realize that God heard the simple prayers of a boy who believed that God lived under his bed.

Kevin won't be surprised at all!

When you receive this, say a prayer. That's all you have to do. There is nothing attached. This is powerful.

FRIENDS ARE ANGELS WHO LIFT US TO OUR FEET WHEN OUR WINGS HAVE TROUBLE REMEMBERING HOW TO FLY.

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." (Eleanor Roosevelt)

"When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things will happen: there will be something solid for you to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly." (Patrick Overton)

IRS Goes After Liberal California Church

2006-09-21T13:13:00.000-07:00

PlanetOut Network

SUMMARY: All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, famous for championing gay rights and opposing the Iraq war, is in danger of losing its tax-exempt status.

With the campaign season in full swing, a liberal Pasadena, Calif., church is locked an escalating dispute with the IRS over an anti-war sermon -- delivered two days before the 2004 presidential election -- that could cost the congregation its tax-exempt status.

Religious leaders on both the right and left are watching closely, afraid the confrontation at All Saints Church in this Los Angeles suburb will compromise their ability to speak out on issues of moral importance such as abortion and same-sex marriage during the midterm elections.

Under federal tax law, church officials can legally discuss politics, but to retain tax-exempt status, they cannot endorse candidates or parties. Most who do so receive a warning.

According to the IRS, the only church ever to be stripped of its tax-exempt status for partisan politicking was the Church at Pierce Creek near Binghamton, N.Y., which was penalized in 1995 after running full-page newspaper ads against Bill Clinton during the 1992 election season.

Before this fall's congressional races, the IRS warned that it would be scrutinizing churches and charities -- important platforms, particularly for Republicans -- for unlawful political activity.

All Saints is an Episcopalian church of about 3,500 -- the largest west of the Mississippi -- and has long had a reputation for liberal social activism among its largely affluent, Democratic-leaning membership.

During World War II, its rector spoke out against the internment of Japanese-Americans. The Rev. George Regas, who headed the church for 28 years before retiring in 1995, was well-known for opposing the Vietnam War, championing female clergy and supporting gays in the church.

The dispute centers on a sermon titled "If Jesus Debated Sen. Kerry and President Bush'' that Regas delivered as a guest pastor. Though he did not endorse a candidate, he said Jesus would condemn the Iraq war and Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war.

"I believe Jesus would say to Bush and Kerry: 'War is itself the most extreme form of terrorism. President Bush, you have not made dramatically clear what have been the human consequences of the war in Iraq,' " Regas said, according to a transcript.

The IRS reprimanded the church in June 2005 and asked that it promise to be more careful. Church officials refused.

Last week, the IRS demanded documents and an interview with the rector by the end of the month. Church officials will probably fight the action, said the rector, the Rev. Ed Bacon. That would mean the IRS would have to ask for a hearing before a judge.

"You can't talk about the love of the neighbor without talking about public policy," Bacon said.

Pastors elsewhere echoed those sentiments.

In South Dakota, where citizens in November will vote on the nation's most restrictive abortion law, preachers have taken classes to avoid breaking federal law.

"I would think that that speech should not be censored and neither should ours," said the Rev. Ron Traub of the Pasadena case.

Traub, senior pastor at the First Assembly of God in Sioux Falls, S.D., said he never mentions candidates by name but tells his congregation to vote for the abortion ban and for politicians who espouse the church's values.

"When the IRS comes into my pulpit and tells me I cannot speak on issues, on spiritual and moral issues, I believe my congregation will be willing to stand with me and say, 'If you want to take away our IRS status, go ahead, "' he said. "The only approval that we need is the approval of God."

Steve Miller, commissioner of the IRS tax-exempt and government entities division, would not comment on the specifics of the investigation but denied the agency had any partisan agenda.

"It's a delicate area, there's no question," Miller said. "But we are not trying to curtail people's right to speak."

Miller said the agency completed investigations of 90 tax-exempt churches and charities in 2004 and found wrongdoing in 70 percent of the cases. Four -- none of them churches -- lost their tax-exempt status. In 2005, the agency began audits of 70 churches and charities and has 40 cases pending so far this year.

Earlier this year, IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson promised more robust enforcement.

In recent years, Republicans in particular have teamed with conservative evangelical leaders to motivate would-be voters, a strategy credited with helping President Bush win re-election. Intensified IRS enforcement could erode the relationship between religious and political leaders, according to some political strategists.

"The IRS action will hinder the ability of some of the churches to make their lists available, to make their pulpits available, to make their sanctuaries available," said Democratic strategist Donna Brazile.

Others say the All Saints case will barely affect politicians' use of churches.

All Saints has been known as "a headquarters for political activity'' since the 1970s, said Steve Frank, a GOP consultant who organizes churches for political campaigns. The IRS is probably using the sermon as an excuse to investigate the church's expenditures, Frank said.

"It's not a question of the IRS going after one ideology. They're going after anybody that violates the law," he said. "The reality is it doesn't stop a minister from teaching . . . what they believe is the truth within the Bible."(Gillian Flaccus, AP)

Copyright 2006 Associated Press.

This New Blog Replaces Old Blog

2006-09-21T12:09:00.000-07:00

This new blog is to replace the older 'EpiphanyChurch@135' blog, effective today. Go to epiphanychurch135.blogspot.com to read those entries.