The current generation of school-age students spend more time online than any other. But what happens when they are asked to live and interact without mobile phones and with limited internet for a few months?
At the Mountain School in rural Vermont, 45 students from across the US find out each term what life is like without the technological advantages offered by their life at home.
Almighty God, who in thy love didst give to thy servant Nicholas of Myra a perpetual name for deeds of kindness on land and sea: Grant, we pray thee, that thy Church may never cease to work for the happiness of children, the safety of sailors, the relief of the poor, and the help of those tossed by tempests of doubt or grief; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
O thou, who hast foretold that thou wilt return to judgment in an hour that we are not aware of, grant us grace to watch and pray always, that whether thou shalt come at even, or at midnight, or in the morning, we may be found among the number of those servants who shall be blessed in watching for their Lord, to whom be all glory now and for evermore.
Grant, O Lord, that we who once again prepare for the commemoration of the coming of thy Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, may so direct our hearts to the fulfillment of thy law, that he may now accept our hosannas, and in the life to come receive us in the heavenly Sion; where with thee and the Holy Ghost he liveth and reigneth, ever one God, world without end.
–Richard Acland
Welcome one another, therefore, as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Therefore I will praise thee among the Gentiles, and sing to thy name”; and again it is said, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people”; and again, “Praise the Lord, all Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him”; and further Isaiah says, “The root of Jesse shall come, he who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles hope.” May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.
–Romans 15:7-13
“Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?”[says the spirit character in the sceme]
“Well, that is a plan. I am perfectly ready to consider it. Of course I should require some assurances … I should want a guarantee that you are taking me to a place where I shall find a wider sphere of usefulness-and scope for the talents that God has given me-and an atmosphere of free inquiry-in short, all that one means by civilization and-er-the spiritual life.”[responds the ghost character in the scene]
“No,” said the other. “I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness: you are not needed there at all. No scope for your talents: only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God.”
“Ah, but we must all interpret those beautiful words in our own way! For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? Trove all things’ . . . to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”
“If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.”
“But you must feel yourself that there is something stifling about the idea of finality? Stagnation, my dear boy, what is more soul-destroying than stagnation?”
“You think that, because hitherto you have experienced truth only with the abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom. Your thirst shall be quenched.”
“Well, really, you know, I am not aware of a thirst for some ready-made truth which puts an end to intellectual activity in the way you seem to be describing. Will it leave me the free play of Mind, Dick? I must insist on that, you know.”
“Free, as a man is free to drink while he is drinking. He is not free still to be dry.” The Ghost seemed to think for a moment. “I can make nothing of that idea,” it said.
“Listen!” said the White Spirit. “Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now.”
“Ah, but when I became a man I put away childish things.”
“You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.”
“If we cannot be reverent, there is at least no need to be obscene. The suggestion that I should return at my age to the mere factual inquisitiveness of boyhood strikes me as preposterous. In any case, that question-and-answer conception of thought only applies to matters of fact. Religious and speculative questions are surely on a different level.”
“We know nothing of religion here: we think only of Christ. We know nothing of speculation. Come and see. I will bring you to Eternal Fact, the Father of all other facthood.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter Five (my emphasis)
St. Paul expected his hearers to be moved. He so believed in his preaching that he knew it was ‘the power of God unto salvation.’ This expectation is a very real part of the presentation of the gospel. It is a form of faith. A mere preaching which is not accompanied by the expectation of faith, is not a true preaching of the gospel, because faith is a part of the gospel.
–Roland Allen Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962), p.74, also quoted by yours truly in this morning’s sermon
When an IBM computer program called Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, wise folk opined that since chess was just a game of logic, this was neither significant nor surprising. Mastering the subtleties of human language, including similes, puns and humor, would remain far beyond the reach of a computer.
Last year another IBM program, Watson, triumphed at just these challenges by winning “Jeopardy!” (Sample achievement: Watson worked out that a long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping was a “meringue harangue.”) So is it time to take seriously the prospect of artificial intelligence emulating human abilities?
Yes, argues the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil in his new book “How to Create a Mind.” Mr. Kurzweil reckons that a full understanding and simulation of the human brain is a lot closer than most people think. Since he has a more impressive track record of predicting technological progress than most, he deserves to be heard.
By Tom Sutcliffe
I voted for women priests in 1992 and I am in principle keen that we should have women bishops in the Church of England. But I voted against the Measure being proposed for final approval yesterday. I had two main reasons for voting no.
It simply is not true that it made appropriate provisions for the two minorities of less than a third of Church members who cannot accept the ordination or consecration of women as being consistent with their understanding of scripture and tradition. It may well be that traditionalist Anglo-Catholics could have lived awkwardly with the Measure as proposed had it got through. But conservative evangelicals would have been severely affected and in an impossible position.
People seem to have forgotten the promises that were made to the minority that their integrity would not be challenged as fully-fledged and authentic members of the CofE during the current and ongoing “period of reception” of the whole issue of ordaining and consecrating women. It would have been disastrous for a Church to flagrantly over-ride assurances it once gave.
Q. Transgendered Husband: I believe transgendered people should be treated with the same respect and imbued with the same rights as cisgendered people. I have always felt this way, and I have several transgendered friends. Then my husband, whom I love very much, told me he wants to become a woman””or, she has always felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body, and if she doesn’t begin transitioning, she will be emotionally crippled. Initially, I promised to remain married to her during her transition and for some time afterward, to give our marriage a chance to adjust to her transition and sex change. It has been three months, and as much as I love my husband, I am miserable. To a certain extent, my love for my husband is rooted in his manhood. The more my husband transitions into becoming a woman, the less romantic love I feel for her. I just don’t think I can remain her wife. I am heartbroken and feel as though I am a widow, which sounds so dramatic. My husband is emotionally fragile right now, because she’s lost some important people to her because of her transition. Everyone commends me for supporting her and sticking with our marriage, so I feel like a fraud now too. She loves me so much; I cannot imagine how to tell her I want a divorce, that she has lost me because she is transgendered. Or is it better to be a bad person and leave? And yes, I am seeing a counselor.
Read it all to see her answer.
I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.
And he said to his disciples, “Temptations to sin are sure to come; but woe to him by whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. Take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this sycamine tree, ‘Be rooted up, and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. “Will any one of you, who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep, say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and sit down at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and gird yourself and serve me, till I eat and drink; and afterward you shall eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.'”
–Luke 17:1-10
He stood for many years alone””he was long opposed, ridiculed, shunned””his doctrines were misrepresented””his little peculiarities of voice and manner were satirized””disturbances were frequently raised in his church or he was a person not taken into account, nor considered in the light of a regular clergyman in the church.
–as quoted in William Carus, Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Charles Simeon (New York: Robert Carter, 1848), p.39
Listen to it all (6 minutes).
You can listen to this talk given at St James Cathedral, Toronto on this link and read the sermon notes below
In 2006, I returned to Burundi, Africa, where I had worked for the church 20 years earlier. They had just come out of 13 years of their own civil war, far bloodier than anything in England in the 17th century, with hundreds of thousands of persons killed. At one point, I had a conversation with a group of Christians: “what was the safest church to be a member of during the civil war?”, I asked them. “The Anglican Church”, they replied. That’s where you had the greatest chance of survival. And why was that? Their answers were complicated. Still, one of the central reasons, they all agreed, was the BCP: their literally translated Kirundi version of the 1662 English prayerbook. “We all prayed together”, they said. Across the country, across regions and ethnic groups and hillsides and political affiliations: we all heard the same things, received the same things, prayed the same things. Killing each other didn’t fit the way we prayed…….
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The Book of Common Prayer: St. James Cathedral, October 14th 2012
A sermon on the BCP is almost a self-contradiction; and most likely thin gruel in any case. It’s like going to lecture on the exciting joys of model-boat construction. Sermons are in any case usually about things we can think of ”“ ideas, propositions, doctrines, inspiring stories. Oddly enough, Anglicanism has very few of these at the center of its life ”“ as we well know: no big Confessions; no magisterial theologians to pore over; no dogmatics to argue about and to preach on point by point. And while we have our heroines and heroes, they have not started mass movements, or overturned tyrannical regimes or single-handedly brought hope to the hopeless.
Instead, we have a BCP. And it is its 350th anniversary ”“ that is, from its 1662 classic edition ”“ that we celebrate today. Originally composed, edited and rendered into English in the mid 16th century by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, the BCP became the single most identifying and formative tool of the English Reformation and subsequent Anglicanism. The 1662 edition , which was not much different from its earlier16th-century form, embodied a renewal of the established Church of England after a period of bloody civil wars and religious turmoil. It was a sign of rediscovered civic stability. Although it was revised here and there, the 1662 edition has furthermore been or formed the primary basis of every Anglican prayerbook around the world, to the recent present.
Is all this “inspiring”? I don’t know. But it is important. In 2006, I returned to Burundi, Africa, where I had worked for the church 20 years earlier. They had just come out of 13 years of their own civil war, far bloodier than anything in England in the 17th century, with hundreds of thousands of persons killed. At one point, I had a conversation with a group of Christians: “what was the safest church to be a member of during the civil war?”, I asked them. “The Anglican Church”, they replied. That’s where you had the greatest chance of survival. And why was that? Their answers were complicated. Still, one of the central reasons, they all agreed, was the BCP: their literally translated Kirundi version of the 1662 English prayerbook. “We all prayed together”, they said. Across the country, across regions and ethnic groups and hillsides and political affiliations: we all heard the same things, received the same things, prayed the same things. Killing each other didn’t fit the way we prayed, as it did in other churches.
And we too have the BCP: which means we pray. And in this, we are doing something, as it were, not simply thinking something or thinking about something.
Now I can try to explain a little what we are doing. But, it’s like talking about singing. It’s fairly pointless unless you sing or take in the singing of someone else, participate in it. The good part of it is that we are singing here, as it were; that is, we are praying. So whatever it is I have to say, it will speak to a fact we already engage, not to someone’s idea about something none of us knows.
So let us start right there: what are we doing, now?
We are gathered here to celebrate the divine life shared ”“ the life, death, and resurrection ”“ of Jesus Christ. We are also celebrating the Book of Common Prayer; but the only reason we would do this, here in this cathedral, is because the BCP itself is somehow a gracious servant of the life of Christ Jesus . For which we give thanks; and whose service of Christ’s life we are called ourselves to cherish, to uphold, to further. Of course! But how?
Let me divide it all too neatly into three actions: exposure, reception, and conformance.
First of all, as we worship according to the BCP, we are exposed. “Exposure”, is the first action.
You could also call this “offering”, as in self-offering. But I want to make clear that the praying we are doing in the BCP is not the offering of a gift to God: it is the baring of our souls to God’s own self-giving to us. The offering of “ourselves, our souls and bodies” that the BCP mentions as being so central to our worship, is one of exposed proximity ”“ of coming to stand before something in all of our nakedness.
Standing before what? or who? God, of course. As the Letter to the Hebrews today says: here draw we ourselves near “to the throne of grace”, in the most awesome and majestic language possible.
And drawing near, we are being laid bare, you see; “before him” ”“ the living and active Word ”“ “no creature is hidden”, Hebrews says; our hearts are uncovered, the deepest ligatures of our beings are unraveled, and the hidden is brought into the light. We are laid bare, just so that the Word might do its work on us.
And what the BCP gives us, first and foremost of all, are the words Scripture before which we stand, exposed. The words of the Word, you could say ”“ psalms, the law, the prophets, the Gospels. These are just the things that Jesus referred to with the disicples having met some of them on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection: “these are my words which I spoke to you”, he say, “while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled” ”“ and so he taught them (Lk. 24:27, 44f.). So he did them, and us.
Abp. Cranmer’s systematic lectionary for the people, around which the BCP was structured and through which daily and weekly the entire Bible was read in public, was truly a “reforming” enterprise that changed the way Christians related to the Scriptures. There it was: the words of the Word spoken to each of us, every day, every week, from Genesis to Revelation; and we standing before them, opened! And not only the lectionary; the entire BCP, in its prayers and canticles, is suffused with Scriptural quotation, reference, and allusion. “You are turning the Bible into your own prayers!”, the Puritans complained, worried that the distinction between God’s words and our own was somehow getting lost in this steady tide of Scripture pounding against our spirits, through which the BCP fundamentally does its work.
But that was the point: the words of the Word must become our words too. Exposure.
So we come to our second action in the BCP: Receiving. The Scriptures of God ”“ the Word spoken to us ”“ is not only spoken but somehow made a part of us, somehow penetrates within us. That is at the center of the BCP’s action. We sit and listen; we kneel and repeat; we stand and utter forth ”“ these words, over and over. That is the effect of the formal ordering of BCP’s worship in its “iterated” force: bit by bit, over time, the words crack open the conscience and the mind and heart; weekly, yearly, over a lifetime ”“ for the BCP is a life-time’s work, not a moment’s — the ordering of time finally drills itself into a focus on the one act of self-giving that is Jesus Christ: and this is given in the Holy Communion. Here, not simply is the Last Supper remembered, and a few words from the Gospels repeated, but the entire Scriptures are summarized from creation to fall to promise to incarnation and sacrifice to resurrection and Spirit, to Church and eternity.
And we should be clear: one does communion; one does it for the sake of receiving the Word’s own self-offering to us. One exposes oneself to the Word; one lets it make its way within us, and then, only then, does one receive it, like the ground that is prepared for the sowing of God’s seed (Mark 4). It’s a wonderful reality: the Word in its words prepares us for its own reception.
And so to the third action of the BCP’s worship that serves the life of Christ in our midst: conforming.
This one is perhaps the greatest challenge to our age’s expectations and wills, but also the greatest gift. “Conformance” or “conformity”: the word means to take on the form of another, or (and “and”), to take this shape on together with another person. It’s a word with a very specific set of connotations for Anglicans in the late 16th and later 17th centuries: conforming to the laws, to the usage of the Church in worship, yes; but more deeply, conforming to the words of the Word, and doing so together ”“ being “conformist” in a modern sense, “like everyone else”, but actually with everyone else: living in the Word with others. That is the BCP’s version of “conformism”.
The BCP doesn’t itself actually use the word “conform” in this regard (although writers like Coverdale and then Hooker do). But it does speak very frequently of two things that it links: “gathering together” and using the “forms” of the Prayerbook itself. We are always “formed together”; and that forming is ultimately given in forms of “unity” and “concord” and “peace” and finally, of course, the “form of God”, the servant who is Christ. If everyone is exposed together to the two-edged sword of the Word; if everyone endures it sufficiently together to let it pierce and penetrate, listening to its repeated approaches; if everyone is thus one, then together the form of Christ is discerned within the forms of the words of the Word. So that the Lord speaks to the Rich Young Man today, not to me or to you, not just this day or this moment, but to us He speaks these words, together, yesterday and today and tomorrow ”“ no one rises up and leaves, or if they do, there is another day, another prayer, another time for the words of the Word — for together then and now and again and again, we listen ”“ “,,, if you would be perfect, sell it all and follow me!…” we respond, we pray these words, for we are still here for those who could not hear but now return ”“ then, yes, conformation, conformance, becomes a gift of the Lord. We need each other in this hearing and doing!
Exposure, reception, conformance. That’s the gift the Barundi Anglicans were able to identify to some extent as central to life. Concretely, and also deeply, eternally. And we should celebrate that as we do today; and also care about it.
Everything I’ve just said may lead you, as it does me, to resist multiple revisions of the Prayer Book, or multiple options within it ”“ Form I or Form II, Eucharistic Prayer 4 or 6, A, B, D, and so on. No, conformance implies a basic conformity. But I actually think that ”“ and history bears this out ”“ there is enormous roominess within the conforming body of Christ: BCP culture over the centuries, as we know, offered extraordinary scope in intellectual engagement. From Cranmer to John Donne to Isaac Newton to Hannah More and William Wilberforce, to Evelyn Underhill and Dorothy Sayers to Desmond Tutu. Not merely because of the permissiveness of formalism, has this been the case, but because of the fact that the Word is itself , in the words of Gregory the Great, “like a river, broad and deep, shallow enough here for the lamb to go wading, but deep enough there for the elephant to swim” (Moralia, dedicatory epistle). But we must go to the river together, and delve into its current over the course of our lives one with another. And that is the BCP’s great virtue: it guides and guards us into the river of God’s Word with a steady hand.
And to it, the BCP, let me apply the words of Psalm 90 today: “prosper” or establish thou the work of our hands, establish thou it ”“ that is, our coming to your Word, our receiving of it, our conformance to its grace and truth.
The Reverend Dr Ephraim Radner is Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto
The reported confirmation of the Bishop Welby’s appointment as 105th Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the 77 million strong Anglican Communion will be seen as a meteoric rise in the career of the clergyman, who marks the first anniversary of his enthronement as Bishop of Durham later this month.
The Eton-educated bishop worked in the oil industry for 11 years before leaving to train for the Anglican priesthood. He was first ordained as a deacon in 1992.
“I was unable to get away from a sense of God calling,” he said in an interview.
He said therefore, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his garden; and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.” And again he said, “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” He went on his way through towns and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem. And some one said to him, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And he said to them, “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. When once the householder has risen up and shut the door, you will begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us.’ He will answer you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’ But he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from; depart from me, all you workers of iniquity!’ There you will weep and gnash your teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves thrust out. And men will come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in the kingdom of God. And behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”
–Luke 18:18-30
When I am afraid, I put my trust in thee. In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust without a fear. What can flesh do to me?
–Psalm 56:3-4
You’ve heard about Mitt Romney’s problems with the women’s vote, the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the union vote and the young Democrats vote. But there’s one major voting group that’s fallen off the map since the primaries.
The evangelical vote.
When Mitt Romney’s 2012 candidacy was gaining traction in the primaries, the conventional wisdom instantly conveyed that the evangelical vote, skeptical of Mormonism, would sink him.
What if in Ohio next week the opposite is true? There and in other swing states””Wisconsin, Iowa, North Carolina, Florida””the evangelical vote is flying beneath the media’s radar. It’s a lot of voters not to notice. In the 2008 presidential vote, they were 30% of the vote in Ohio, 31% in Iowa and 26% in Wisconsin….
Widespread gas shortages stirred fears among residents and disrupted some rescue and emergency services on Thursday as the New York region struggled to return to a semblance of normalcy after being ravaged by Hurricane Sandy.
Tiny increments of progress ”” some subway and bus lines were back in service ”” were overshadowed by new estimates of the storm’s financial cost, struggles to restore power, and by the discovery of more bodies in flooded communities.
The lines of cars waiting for gas at a Sunoco here ran in three directions: a mile-long line up the Garden State Parkway, a half-mile line along Vauxhall Road, and another, including a fleet of mail trucks that needed to refuel before resuming their rounds, snaking through a back entrance. The scene was being replayed across the state as drivers waited in lines that ran hundreds of vehicles deep, requiring state troopers and local police to protect against exploding tempers.
“No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a bushel, but on a stand, that those who enter may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body; when your eye is sound, your whole body is full of light; but when it is not sound, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.”
–Luke 11:33-36
It’s easy to place these folks within the ranks of the “spiritual but not religious” whom Lillian Daniel likes to scold. There’s some truth to this: to the extent that my hippie-Marine friend has any kind of spiritual practice, it’s tied up with the yoga she teaches. The English woman derives more meaning from U2 lyrics than scripture, a habit I dare not tease her about for fear of having something thrown at my head.
We are also told, particularly by committed atheists, that the nones represent the rise of a post- or even anti-religious society. There’s some truth to this as well, but only some. Of my five closest friends from high school, only one would attend a church if he could find one that suited him nearby. Yet four of them wanted me to officiate at their weddings. (The other got married before I entered ministry.) Only one is antipathetic to faith; the others simply shrug their shoulders at it. Yet they””and all the others I have mentioned””would have no qualms about claiming me as their pastor, as though that were some kind of subversive triumph. Perhaps I should cut down on the swearing.
Finally, we often hear that the nones are people who have left””or been pushed out of”” organized religion….
O Heavenly Father, who hast taught us to show forth thy praise in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs: So fill us, we pray thee, with thy Spirit that we may make melody to thee both in our hearts and with our lives, evermore giving thee thanks for all things, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.
–Frank Colquhoun (1909-1997)
Usually full time workers are understood to be those employed 35 hours a week or more–but this has now shifted. The key section of the law may be found here:
[Section 1513](4) Full-time employee
(A) In general
The term “full-time employee” means, with respect to any month, an employee who is employed on average at least 30 hours of service per week.
As Mike Sherlock notes:
…any employer in his right mind would [look at the new definition of full time worker and] reduce the hours someone worked from say 34 to something like 25 or 28, just to make sure the average hours worked was under 30.
If a lot of corporations did that, and a lot people had reduced hours, then corporations would have had to hire more workers to keep the same total number of hours.
Indeed there was a massive surge in part-time employment (+582,000) in October…
You can read the rest here and there is more there.
Grant, we beseech thee, O God, that after the example of thy servant James the Just, brother of our Lord, thy Church may give itself continually to prayer and to the reconciliation of all who are at variance and enmity; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and ever.
Downtown Seattle’s Daniels Recital Hall, with its soaring Beaux Arts dome, intricate woodwork and stained glass, is about to become a church again. The developer who saved it from the wrecking ball has signed a long-term lease with Mars Hill Downtown Seattle, a resolutely evangelical congregation that has been worshiping in a former nightclub since its founding in 2008. With 1,500 members, the congregation outgrew its old, less-than-ideal quarters, where for a time the congregants used exotic dancers’ cages as coat racks.
Christians in Seattle aren’t alone in wanting to reclaim the heart of their city as a place for worship. Though the American evangelical movement is often stereotyped as rural and provincial, it has actually had its greatest success in the suburbs and exurbs, where entrepreneurial pastors found cheap land and plentiful parking to build the “megachurches” of the past generation””think Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., seating capacity over 7,000.
But a new generation of church founders believes that city centers will be the beachhead of a new evangelization.
The commitment of most Anglicans to the ordained ministry of women rests on the conviction that what I have just summarised makes it inconsistent to exclude in principle any baptised person from the possibility of ordained ministry. And to take the further step of advocating the ordination or consecration of women as bishops is to recognise that the public role of embodying the priestly vocation of the Church can’t be subdivided into self-contained jobs, but is in some sense organically unified, in time and space. Ordained ministry is one connected reality, realised in diverse ways. The earliest Christian generations reserved the Latin and Greek words for ”˜priest’ to refer to bishops, because they saw bishops as the human source and focus for this ministry of reminding the Church of what it is. The idea that there is a class of presbyters (or indeed deacons) who cannot be bishops is an odd one in this context, and one that is hard to rationalise exclusively on biblical or patristic grounds.
If that is correct, a Church that ordains women as priests but not as bishops is stuck with a real anomaly, one which introduces an unclarity into what we are saying about baptism and about the absorption of the Church in the priestly self-giving of Jesus Christ. Wanting to move beyond this anomaly is not a sign of giving in to secular egalitarianism ”“ though we must be honest and admit that without secular feminism we might never have seen the urgency of this or the inconsistency of our previous position.
Rectifying the anomaly is, we believe, good news in a range of ways.
I keep the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also dwells secure. For thou dost not give me up to Sheol, or let thy godly one see the Pit. Thou dost show me the path of life; in thy presence there is fulness of joy, in thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.
–Psalm 16:8-11
(Please note the above title is taken from the newspaper website–KSH).
Mormon doctrine is quite different from historic Christian orthodoxy on the Incarnation, the origins of Jesus’ divinity, his relationship to the Father, the Trinity, monotheism, human nature, and the creation of this cosmos.
These differences must not be ignored or minimized. The Mormon views of Jesus and God are different from those of the classic Christianity. Therefore it can be said with accuracy that the Mormon Jesus and the Mormon godhead are not the ones which the mainstream Christian churches have been pointing to for 2000 years.
But if we should not ignore the differences, we must also not ignore the overlap between Mormon views and mainstream Christian views. For one thing, Mormons insist they believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord.
During the service a group of four women chained themselves to the pulpit and shouted out a list of grievances against St Paul’s as well as reading part of the bible. The Dean of St Paul’s, The Very Reverend Dr David Ison, who was about to preach, allowed them to speak, following which the rest of the service continued without interruption.
Afterwards the Dean said: “After working constructively together with Occupy Faith on this act of worship, we regret the abuse of the Cathedral’s hospitality and its daily worship. We also disagree with the way in which some protesters are continuing to pursue the agenda of conflict with St Paul’s, rather than consulting with us about how together we might better achieve the reforms which many people including Occupy are looking for.”