The essential digital accompaniment to the Church of England’s Lectionary of daily readings and services is now available as an app for iPad.
The new Lectionary app provides the Common Worship lectionary readings in full with live links to Bible passages in the New Revised Standard Version.
[Justin] Welby listened intently to the rituals, his poker face a picture of both concentration and concern. “Do not be quick to anger, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools,” came advice from the Bible ”” not unlike Williams’ parting advice last year that his successor would need “the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros.”
Stepping out of a medieval court inside the cathedral and into the bright sunshine of the London cold, Welby was asked by reporters about his and the church’s position regarding a contentious bill in Parliament to allow same-sex marriage.
While sticking to the church’s position that marriage is a sacred union between a man and a woman, he told a BBC reporter: “The government wants it. We think there are issues around the way it’s going forward. But it’s not a collision course. … We’ve made our views clear and I’m very much with the House of Bishops on this. They have made their views clear.”
It’s official: We can now call Justin Portal Welby the Archbishop of Canterbury. On Monday St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was the scene of a confirmation ritual begun in the fourth century. Welby is the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury.
When George L. Carey was confirmed in office in 1991 the venue was the crypt of St. Mary le Bow in Eastcheap in the City of London. Apart from members of the church court comprising a handful of bishops, the Dean of Canterbury plus lawyers, attending were immediate family and a handful of observers.
In 2002 Rowan Williams rang changes. He moved the event to St. Paul’s where the court was located at the high altar. To see the action clearly people sitting under the famous St. Paul’s dome would have needed opera glasses. To improve viewing this time round the proceedings were located further forward around the nave altar.
Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, told the Most Rev Justin Welby, that he would lead the Church of England amid an age of seemingly unprecedented selfishness ”“ in a society obsessed with individualism and rights.
The New Archbishop was also formally charged with the task of providing “a voice for faith” in the face of attempts to marginalise religion.
The 57-year-old former oil executive’s election as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury was confirmed in a ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
In his address, Gray also announced a discernment process which congregations may voluntarily enter in order to gain his permission to bless same gender unions. He compared his process to the one implemented by the Bishop of Texas.
While a general ban on the blessing of same gender unions remains in place, he will allow congregations which self-select and undergo a thorough process to move toward blessings of same gender unions.
Clergy and vestry ”“ the elected lay leaders of a local congregation ”“ will be free to enter into a process of prayer and study on the matter. They will be asked to submit the design and results of their study and also to explain to the Bishop how the blessing of same gender unions would enhance the congregation’s missional efforts. He said he would also require those congregations discerning such a call to describe how they would prepare couples for the blessing liturgy. Congregations would also be required to report back on their experience in time for the 2015 General Convention.
The candles of Candlemas refer to the words of Simeon, and, as the historian Eamon Duffy has pointed out, the sermon that the parishioners would have heard on this great feast day would most likely have mentioned that the candle is in a way like Jesus himself: the wax, wick and flame being like his body, soul and divinity.
In the Lady Chapel of Winchester cathedral, one of the wall panels painted in grisaille shows a woman asleep in church but holding a candle. This illustrates a story in the bestselling Golden Legend (famous for 200 years before Caxton printed it) of a woman who missed the Candlemas procession but dreamt of the saints in heaven taking part in the festal liturgy. An angel gave the dreamer a candle, which she found in her grasp when she awoke.
The story shows how the thoughts of lay people at church in the 15th century were in two places apart from their immediate surroundings.
Update: We are told the bishop will use his address to the annual council tonight at 8:00pm to announce that he will allow same-sex blessings under a plan similar to the one in the Diocese of Texas. Parishes wishing to perform same-sex blessings will need their vestries to pass a resolution, which the rector may present to the bishop, who will have the final decision.
St. David’s Episcopal Church in Austin will bless a same-sex couple next month, possibly becoming the first Episcopal church in Texas to perform the groundbreaking liturgical rite….
Texas does not recognize same-sex unions, and the Episcopal Church stressed that the new rite does not “create or solemnize” any marriage, civil union or legal relationship.
Episcopal churches must request permission from the bishop and then complete a study program to offer same-sex blessings, according to Carol Barnwell, a spokeswoman for the Episcopal Diocese of Texas.
Barnwell said the bishop authorized St. David’s and St. Stephen’s to first offer the rite to see what the church could learn about improving the process through their experiences. She said she expected only about a handful of Episcopal churches, out of 153 in the diocese, will request permission to perform the ceremony.
At 87, the Rev. C.T. Vivian can still recall the moment, decades after the height of the civil rights movement.
As he stood to conclude a meeting in his Atlanta home, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. joined his activist colleagues in song, his eyes closed, rocking back and forth on his heels.
“There is a balm in Gilead,” they sang, “to make the wounded whole.”
When I started reading the coverage, I wanted to know if the teams in our major newsrooms realized that this symbolic action was a typical Episcopal-Anglican story, one with implications at the local, national and global levels. I also wondered if journalists would consider the ecumenical impact of this decision, in terms of the cathedral’s relationships with larger bodies of American believers ”” such as Catholics, evangelicals, charismatics, etc. Who knows, there was even a chance that journalists might interview one or two important religious leaders who opposed this action.
Hey, it could happen.
But don’t hold your breath.
Saint Margaret’s Anglican Episcopal Church, Budapest, has begun offering Anglican worship in English at Svábhegy in the beautiful Buda Hills on the first Sunday of each month….
Read it all and enjoy the picture.
Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone is in London for meetings Jan. 16-18 on developing an historic new liturgy for members of the Anglican Church who are choosing to come into communion with the Roman Catholic Church under an initiative by Pope Benedict XVI.
The archbishop is a member of the Subcommission on the Liturgy for the Anglican Ordinariates, a Vatican advisory group that is in the second year of a three-year effort to create proposals for final action by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Divine Worship. Archbishop Cordileone contributes canon law expertise to the group, which includes other prelates as well as expert advisers.
David Bains, a religion professor at Samford University in Alabama who has researched and written extensively about the cathedral, said the church’s leaders have worked for years to balance serving their congregation in the nation’s capital, where gay marriage has been legal since 2009, and being a beacon for Episcopalians across the country….
In almost three decades as dean of the cathedral, he said, the Rev. Francis B. Sayre Jr. sermonized until his retirement in 1978 on subjects such as racial injustice and the Vietnam War. More recently, the Rev. Gary Hall, current dean of the cathedral, declared that “enough is enough” after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in December, and said it was time for the church to take up the issue of gun control.
“This current action, however, is probably the most potentially divisive act the cathedral’s leadership has taken in its history,” Mr. Bains said.
Bishop Michael L. Vono of the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande, which includes El Paso, said the liturgy is an issue of human dignity that breaks barriers for the gay community.
“I’m very positive about it,” he said. “We live in an age where there is still a lot of judgment, still a lot of discrimination that happens within Christianity. We exclude people that are not like ourselves.
“So this may be the Jesus thing to do in our age because Jesus forced the issue that no one is rejected by God and that all people are loved. And if you have two responsible people, whether heterosexual or gay, who love in a Christian way — which is responsibly and exclusively monogamous and help each other and forgive each other — what more can we ask for?”
“Monks are just a joke,” sighs Father Stephen. “In the modern mind, it’s just fat friars in brown habits with white cords around their waists.” There’s some truth in the words of this slim Benedictine, who is sporting a white habit and brown leather belt. We don’t notice the jeans peeping out from underneath until he points them out, but they are the kind of trivial curiosity some secular visitors focus on when they come to the Subiaco Benedictine monastery of Prinknash Abbey, deep in the rolling green countryside of Gloucestershire. Yet in recent years, the comedy element has begun to subside and the outside world has started taking monasticism seriously again.
Organised religion has lost its central place in most European countries, but it has not necessarily been replaced by atheism. The confused majority is “spiritual but not religious”, hungry for alternatives to the perceived materialism of modern life. “The more we’re distracted by stuff,” suggests Father Stephen, “the more we’re also attracted by what we’re missing.”
Read it all [or if that link causes difficulty, please try there].
(ACNS) West Africa’s new archbishop , the Most Revd Solomon Tilewa Johnson [in an interview this week] explained that one major priority was responding to issues of “abject poverty”, which is perhaps to be expected considering the countries that comprise the Anglican Province of West Africa: Cameroon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
More surprising, however, was a priority to retain congregants who might be tempted away to non-Anglican churches by newer forms of praise and worship. “We all have our priorities and the key issues for us in West Africa as far as I can see is the threat posed to us by the new churches for example,” he said.
Set 1: Liturgy and Church Music
Limited Resources: A printed one-volume annotated Bible; a printed 1979 Book of Common Prayer; a printed Book of Occasional Services; a printed Lesser Feasts and Fasts; the printed Enriching Our Worship volumes; a printed Holy Women, Holy Men; and printed authorized Episcopal hymnals. NO electronic or Internet resources.
Create a liturgy for a nature-oriented event in your pastoral context. You may imagine any such situation: for example, the planting or harvesting of crops, the blessing of a fishing fleet, the planting of a community garden, the reclaiming of land after a natural disaster, or the blessing of animals.
1. In a well-organized essay of approximately 750 words:
A. Give the pastoral reason for the rite;
B. Explain the theological understanding of creation that informs your liturgical design.
2. In another essay of approximately 750 words:
A. Outline the celebration, explaining why you structured it this way and why you chose the liturgical texts, readings and music, showing how your choices conform to the rubrics of the liturgical books listed above;
B. Describe the roles of the members of the congregation, including the liturgical leaders;
C. Describe the liturgical choreography (the movement of the assembly, including the liturgical ministers) and the use of space.
A move by the Anglican Diocese of B.C. to allow the blessing of married homosexual couples is only a small step, says a University of Victoria political scientist.
Janni Aragon, who has a special interest in gender issues, said for the church to bless couples but not perform or bless their marriages is not enough.
“What you see is some softening of church attitudes to acknowledge these people exist, but to say, ”˜;We are going to sanctify them but not their marriage’ is just hair-splitting,” Aragon said Monday.
The announcement comes six months after the General Convention of the Episcopal Church approved a liturgy enabling priests to bless same-sex relationships with the approval of their bishops. The blessings are allowed both in states where same-sex marriages are legal or, as in the case of New Mexico, where they are not.
“It’s not a marriage in any way,” Vono said in an interview Sunday. “It’s not a legal marriage. It’s not a marriage in the church. This is a recognition of a commitment, which is a covenant, of two people who vow to live their lives in a monogamous relationship.”
The Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande includes close to 60 congregations in New Mexico and part of western Texas.
The trust and conviction behind these pastoral guidelines reflect the belief that the faithful, loving, and lifelong union of two persons of the same sex is capable of signifying the unconditional and never-failing love of God in Christ. I have come to both trust and believe that such unions can be sources and signs of grace and reconciliation not only for the church and the world, but also for a faithful couple seeking a covenanted spiritual life together in Christ. All baptized persons who confess the faith of Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior appropriately need to be surrounded by the prayers, witness, love, and fellowship of the Christian community. The body of Christ is one in witness to the Church’s baptismal promises. Diversity of perspectives and contrary mindedness on any particular contemporary or historic church issue does not divide us, but rather reveals the unique Christian charisma of our oneness in Christ within our diversity. As St. Paul teaches, the body can only function as wholeness within its unique differences.
For more than a century an historic shift and change, not unlike others in Church History in discerning Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, intentionally has been under way. Holy Scripture and human sciences have been in serious dialogue in addressing the mystery of human nature, human relationships, and the moral and ethical dignity of Christian intimate behaviors. The blessing of same-sex unions represents a shift from centuries of what the church and various societies in their cultural contexts have judged to be unacceptable. Yet, as we are all well aware, there have been several other highly historic controversial shifts in our church and world culture. In hindsight, these shifts have come to be seen as faithful responses to a deepening understanding and revelation of what it means to be human. These shifts revealed how God in Christ is reflected in loving human relationships and in community.
Anglican parishes on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands can now seek permission to formally bless married homosexual couples.
Bishop James Cowan of the Diocese of British Columbia, in a letter dated Thursday, announced the creation of guidelines and a rite to be used in the blessing of same-sex unions. The guidelines and rites took effect Jan. 1.
“It is my hope that those who now have this opportunity open to them may use it as an aid in their growth in Christ and His love for the world in which we live,” wrote Cowan.
The letter affects the 45 parishes with about 10,000 members in what, for historical reasons, is called the Diocese of British Columbia, although it only includes Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands.
Cecil F. Alexander wrote a number of hymn texts on articles of the Apostles’ Creed. This text, whose biblical source is Genesis 1:31 (“and God saw all that he had made, and it was very good”), is Alexander’s explanation of the Creed’s phrase “Maker of heaven and earth.” The text was first published in her Hymns for Little Children (1848) in seven stanzas, one of which was:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate
Read it all and then listen to it all.
Watch and listen to it all.
A Berliner and longtime member of St. Mary’s church choir, Christian Beier attempts to explain the mystique and tradition behind this piece of music….
“It makes Christmas Christmas,” he adds with a chuckle.
But as gorgeous as the music is for Beier, the core of this yearly event is something deeper.
“It is getting into some dialogue with God. It is being moved by whatever is around us,” he says.
Read or listen to it all (audio for this highly encouraged).
The words:
O magnum mysterium, et admirable sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, jacentum in praesepio!
Beata Virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Christum. Alleluia!
O great mystery, and wondrous sacrament, that animals should see the newborn Lord, lying in their manger!
Blessed is the Virgin whose womb was worthy to bear the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!
Just oh so uplifting–KSH.
Wonderful stuff!
Listen to it all.