The Episcopal Church is an institution in long term systemic decline. Just take a look at the 1997-2007 change in membership numbers documented here or really read thoughtfully the State of the Church report (especially the charts, page 14, page 17, etc.) there.

So: Where is the strategic discussion of evangelism and church growth? A parish involved in healthy evangelism has three things: a good newcomers ministry, a good ministry to the unchurched, and a ministry to the lapsed. In most Episcopal churches if you are very blessed you will find a somewhat adequate newcomer ministry. That is all. What about the unchurched? What about church planting?–KSH

Because of political turmoil in Honduras following the arrest of President Manuel Zelaya, members of St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Killeen have canceled their annual medical mission trip to the Central American country.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, issued a statement last week requesting that people avoid all nonessential travel to the region.

On June 28, soldiers ousted the democratically elected Zelaya before an unpopular constitution referendum went to a vote. The referendum could have allowed the president to run for a second term, which is forbidden by the Honduran constitution. Zelaya, forced into exile in Costa Rica, vowed to stay in power.

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Some conservatives who stayed with the Episcopal Church even though they disagreed on gay bishops and blessing same-sex marriage are concerned that sexuality issues interfere with the church’s missions and development in Third World countries. Since 2003, some African and South American Anglican archbishops have refused to take communion with Episcopal Church leaders or partner with the church on projects.

“There is a whole swath of the Episcopal Church struggling to make their way forward to do missions and the work of the church,” says Kendall Harmon, canon theologian for the Diocese of South Carolina.

He opposes gay bishops and gay blessings, but Harmon calls the current moratoriums a “fig leaf” that should be lifted so the church can be “honest” about its theological direction.

Still, both efforts may stall, says supporter Jim Naughton, canon for communications for the Diocese of Washington, D.C

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Watch it all courtesy of Stephen Sizer.

The Diocese of Virginia reports…that Bishop Peter James Lee recalled the Rev’d Lauren Stanley from her missionary position in the Diocese of Renk in the Sudan following a request from the Archbishop of the Sudan for her removal last March.

The Diocese in an official statement released today stated that the Archbishop of Sudan, the Most Rev. Dr. Daniel Deng Bul Yak, requested that she be removed from her position after her public comments at the most recent Annual Council of the Diocese of Virginia “were deemed offensive to partners of the Diocese in the Episcopal Church of Sudan.”

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We stand by the Prayer-book and by the church as that book gives it to us.–We teach the faith of the creeds. We set forth the church as catholic, as the creeds teach us.

We celebrate the holy sacrament with a reverent and proper ritual, well recognized as lawful and which is actually the use in numbers of our churches here. We sympathize with all that is true in the great catholic revival of to-day. I…speak after no consultation with the men in the field and with no other authority than that of being their fellow worker. I do not think they would disavow this, if this be “ritualism.”

To me the services at St. John’s seem cold and stiff. We walk in the fetters of Western ideas and formulas unsuited to an Asiatic nation. To their minds our services must seem cold. To their minds used to the outward expression of religious sentiments an ornate ritual which we could not use would seem inexpressive, and the scanty symbolism which we actually offer must be greatly inadequate. [Other missions far outstripping ours in results have no ritual whatever, showing conclusively that it is the gospel that is wanted and not ritual.]

It is time that the church should cease speaking of high and low and all that, and set itself to the task of converting China.

—F.R. Graves in a Letter to the Southern Churchman, September 15, 1883; emphasis mine

This Monday, January 26th will mark the anniversary of my consecration. I have been here for a year and have now visited every parish at least once and all but a few of the missions of the diocese. It has been, for Allison and me, a year of total immersion. Or to mix the metaphor, when people have asked if it has been a steep learning curve I’ve answered, “No, not really-it has been a vertical ascent.”

It would have been challenging in a normal year of diocesan and church life. But when one considers we hosted the Presiding Bishop and several of her staff less than a month after my consecration, engaging in a challenging but, I believe, hospitable dialogue; I attended two gatherings of the House of Bishops where former bishops under whom I’ve served were deposed, and at each I spoke and wrote against their deposition; I attended the GAFCON gathering in Jerusalem, as well as participated at the once in-a-decade Lambeth Conference with its related events this summer; three diocesan conventions voted to join a fourth diocese in leaving The Episcopal Church and two of these departing dioceses I have served for 27 years of my ordained ministry, and many of the priests and deacons I’ve worked beside have subsequently been deposed; an aspiring new province in North America known as the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) has emerged; and the dissolving of the Anglican Communion Network (with whom many in this diocese have been substantially linked) is charted for the mid-point of this present year. This brings the picture of a constantly changing landscape to mind as a descriptive and understated metaphor. These are indeed hinge times and this for me has been a baptism of fire. Yet as I write this I am not discouraged-rather I believe I have seen more clearly in recent days the path we are called to take.

During an interview for the Jubilate Deo with Joy Hunter in late 2007, shortly before I arrived in South Carolina, she asked, “Do you have a vision for how to proceed?” I said, “Stay close to God, meet often with the clergy, and love the people-then we’ll talk about vision.” I must say given the time demands I have had to scratch and claw for the space to stay close to God, and by his grace I believe I have-or rather he has kept me there in spite of myself. As for meeting often with the clergy, it has been more difficult than I anticipated, but I haven’t abandoned the commitment. I just could not have imagined the number of people who would want to meet with me and for reasons I could not have anticipated. In parish ministry I usually found the challenge was moving from prioritizing my schedule to scheduling my priorities. But this past year it often seemed I’ve been scheduled by other’s priorities and I’ve been left to scramble for time to even discover what my priorities should be. As for loving the people, yes I do and mostly have! So now, after a year, it is time to talk about vision.

Let’s begin with a question I asked myself before God in prayer. “What should a diocese do and more specifically-what should the Diocese of South Carolina do?”
.I believe we are to help shape the future of Anglicanism in the 21st Century through mutually enriching missional relationships with dioceses and provinces of the Anglican Communion (Romans 1:11-12; 2 Corinthians 9:1-15), and through modeling a responsible autonomy and inter-provincial accountability (Philippians 2:1-5; Ephesians 4:1-6) for the sake of Jesus Christ, his Kingdom and his Church.

We are to proclaim the gospel and make disciples for Jesus Christ and God the Father in the power of the Spirit who become responsible members of local parishes or missions and witness to the transforming power of Jesus Christ in their personal and corporate context. The diocesan structures and staff are to do this, specifically, by assisting our existing congregations so that they may grow in numerical and spiritual vitality and plant new congregations within the diocese in places where the church is inadequately present.

I have heard it said, and I believe it to be true, that one ought to be able to summarize one’s vision in a statement that can fit on a t-shirt. My summary of this, put succinctly is, God has called us-To Make Biblical Anglicans for a Global Age. This has been extremely focusing for me as I have met recently with the staff in making financial decisions, some of which have been difficult because of the need to cut back our diocesan budget due to loss of investment income as well as tightening budgets in some of our parishes. More importantly it has given clarity to how I foresee reshaping Diocesan Council and its various committees. As we draw closer to Diocesan Convention I plan to meet with clericus gatherings to begin to unfold how I see this vision implemented through strategy and from strategy to structure and from structure to involvement. I’ll be writing and talking about this often in the days and weeks ahead.

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it’s Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa….

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This past summer, from evangelical churches nationwide, more than one million of the faithful departed for the mission field, taking up Jesus’ “Great Commission” to “go and make disciples of all nations.” The churchgoers hoped to convert souls, establish churches and meet other human needs. But they did not intend to serve for years or whole lifetimes, like such pioneers as Jim Elliott, who was killed in Ecuador in 1956 evangelizing to native people; or Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission; or even the awful fictional caricatures of African missionaries in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “The Poisonwood Bible.” These new missionaries came home after only a week or two.

Short-term mission trips to Africa, South America and Southeast Asia have become very popular in the past few years. They are a keystone strategy of evangelical pastor Rick Warren’s plans to help Rwanda. These trips, like Christian missionary endeavors overall, encompass a wide variety of activities, from evangelization and “church planting” to health care and economic development. The billion-dollar question, however, is whether they’re worth the cost. Are short-term missions the best way to achieve the goals of Christians? Critics argue that sightseeing often takes up too much of the itinerary, leading some to call short-termers “vacationaries.”

It’s hard to judge the fairness of this characterization, since almost no one runs the numbers. Estimates of how much churches spend on short-term missions go as high as $4 billion a year, according to the Capital Research Center. The literature is sparse, most of it focusing on the spiritual aspects, for the missionaries themselves. And these aspects are sometimes oversold.

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I am writing to share with you the news that I have been invited (and have accepted) the invitation to take up a key mission post for South America with South American Mission Society (SAMS)/Church Mission Society (CMS). SAMS and CMS are currently finalizing integration talks that may well lead to the formation of a single organization of both of these mission agencies. Their final decisions are expected by early December, after which I will become either Director for South America in the newly-integrated society or Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for a continuing SAMS.

CMS has a very exciting vision for worldwide mission in the Anglican Communion and SAMS will complete the vision with the South American contribution. SAMS administratively has been scattered around England and this move would consolidate all the staff at the CMS headquarters in Oxford. The long term vision is to enable a South American mission office which would coordinate mission work in, from and to South America. Obviously my history with SAMS both in Argentina and Spain (now 18 years ago) and my experience on the SAMS USA board will be very useful.

So, apart from the excitement of a new challenge, why am I leaving Pittsburgh now? One thing I need to be very clear about is that my decision does not reflect any change of heart regarding realignment or my confidence in the vision and leadership of the diocese. Most of you will know of the birth of our first granddaughter in December 2007. Sophie is certainly a major pull for both Catherine and me; we would love to be nearer the family to be able to support them. It is an added bonus that our son, Joel, and his wife Sarah, live in Oxford, at least until he finishes his doctoral studies.

Read it all.

(ENS)

The first large-scale gathering in the Anglican Churches of the Americas will be a February 2009 conference on “mutual responsibility and mission.”

The organizers hope the gathering will help “to continue to celebrate our relationships through friendship, prayer, common worship, and to focus on God’s common mission in the world,” according to the draft of a “save the date” letter.

The conference will take place during the week of February 22 in San Juan, Costa Rica. Exact dates during that week are still to be determined.

“I would hope that the Anglican Churches in the Americas can come to a common understanding of our mission work together going forward from the conference,” House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson recently told ENS.

Anderson is one of the group’s organizers. The other is Francisco de Assis da Silva, provincial secretary of the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil.

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During three beautiful Virginia spring days in April over 30 individuals representing 26 organizations gathered to network around global mission. This event, sponsored by the Anglican Communion Network’s Anglican Global Mission Partners (AGMP) initiative, brought together churches, dioceses, jurisdictions (such as the Reformed Episcopal Church), seminaries, and other organizations. All those present are focused on helping the church to send missionaries, interns, and teams, grow in mission understanding, and reach out across the globe sharing the Gospel in word and deed. The Falls Church graciously hosted this Annual Meeting of the AGMP.

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The pillar that continually returns as obviously of greatest importance to Sanneh is that of “translatability.” Some readers may wonder what more there is to say that Sanneh has not already said in his pathbreaking academic study Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Orbis, 1989) and more recently in a cheeky volume of self-interrogation, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Eerdmans, 2003). Yet this theme is so important for what Sanneh believes about the nature of God, about human cultures under God, and about Christianity as an intrinsically world religion that he continues to find new meaning in the process by which the scriptures””and then the whole of Christian faith””move from one language-culture-mental framework to another.

Sanneh writes that God exists “at the center of the universe of cultures, implying equality among cultures and the necessarily relative status of cultures vis-à-vis the truth of God.” Translatability shows why “no culture is so advanced and so superior that it can claim exclusive access or advantage to the truth of God, and none so marginal and remote that it can be excluded.” It takes flesh in “the ethical monotheism Christianity inherited from Judaism” in such a way that it “accords value to culture but rejects cultural idolatry.” And it shows why “in any language the Bible is not literal; its message affirms all languages to be worthy, though not exclusive, of divine communication.” If the faith embodied in Jesus Christ resounds in its essence “with the idioms and styles of new converts,” it was then inevitable that Christianity would become “multilingual and multicultural.” Sanneh has previously faced the question of whether one activity can bear all of this interpretive weight. This book provides his most convincing answer.

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George Harley was a medical doctor from the USA who went as a missionary to Liberia with his pregnant wife. He had obtained his medical degree from Yale University and his Ph.D. in tropical diseases from the University of London. He served in a remote jungle area, which he reached after walking seventeen days with his pregnant wife. After five years there no one had responded to the gospel. Every week they met for worship, and the people were invited to come, but no African joined them. Then his son died. He himself had to make the coffin and carry it to the place of burial. He was all alone there except for one African who had come to help him.

As Harley was shoveling soil onto the casket, he was overcome with grief, and he buried his head in the fresh dirt and sobbed. The African who was watching all this raised the doctor’s head by the hair and looked into his face for a long time. Then he ran into the village crying, “White man, white man, he cry like one of us.” At the following Sunday service the place was packed with Africans.

Harley served in Liberia for thirty-five years. His achievements in numerous fields are amazing. He produced the first accurate map of Liberia. He was given the highest award Liberia could bestow. But before all that he had to give his son. When a bishop from his Methodist denomination pointed that out to him, his response, referring to God, was, “he had a boy too, you know.”

–From Ajith Fernando, The Call to Joy and Pain: Embracing Suffering in Your Ministry (Crossway, 2007), pp.96-97; and brought to mind because Bishop Mark Lawrence related this story in yesterday’s confirmation sermon at Christ Saint Paul’s, Yonges Island, South Carolina