“Because of our unique witness and commitment to introducing our students to the historic English choral tradition, with its rich and varied approach to change-ringing, the gift of these magnificent bells will enhance our work and common life together,” said Canon Joseph A. Kucharski, professor of church music.
Change-ringing is common in England, where there are more than 5,000 towers, but there are fewer than 50 such towers in the United States.
A new text for the Catholic Mass which integrates centuries old Anglican prayers into the Roman Rite was officially introduced in a London church on Thursday.
The new liturgy, known as the Ordinariate Use, has been devised for the personal ordinariates ”“ the structures set up by Benedict XVI to allow Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Pope, while preserving elements of their distinctive Anglican liturgical and pastoral traditions.
The Mass, at the church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory, Warwick Street, was celebrated by the leader ”“ or Ordinary ”“ of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, Monsignor Keith Newton. It was offered in honour of the patron of the Ordinariate, Blessed John Henry Newman, whose feast was on October 9.
David Mukuba Gitari, first Bishop of the Diocese of Mount Kenya East (1975-1997) and Archbishop of Kenya (1997-2002), died in hospital in Nairobi on 30 September, 2013 aged 76. David Gitari was one of the first post-colonial global African Christian leaders. He was born to Samuel and Jesse Mukuba in 1937. Samuel was the first person to evangelise the area where his fifth child would be bishop decades later. David as a child was too small to be allowed to enrol at school at the age of 6. He was also sent home from teachers training college at the age of 17 because he could not reach the blackboard. He was a leader in the Kenya Students Christian Fellowship and, encouraged by the late Oliver Barclay, trained in theology through IFES at Tyndale Hall, Bristol, in 1965. He became a travelling secretary for the Pan African Fellowship of Evangelical Students in East and Central Africa. In 1971 he became General Secretary of the Bible Society of Kenya. He came to prominence in Kenya in 1975 when he gave a series of six Bible expositions on the State-run Voice of Kenya radio in the five-minute “Lift up your hearts” slot before the 7am news. A leading member of Parliament, JM Kariuki had been found murdered in a thicket in the Ngong Hills. Gitari expounded Genesis 4 on Cain’s murder of Abel.
He was ”˜carpeted’ by VoK and told his sermons had been disturbing. Gitari replied that the gospel of Jesus Christ is very disturbing, especially to sinners. Biblical Exposition Biblical exposition set the pattern for his preaching, proclaiming orthodox Christian faith to the whole of society and the powers that be.
Read it all from the Church of England Newspaper.
Holy God, no one is excluded from thy love; and thy truth transformeth the minds of all who seek thee: As thy servant Philip was led to embrace the fullness of thy salvation and to bring the stranger to Baptism, so grant unto us all the grace to be heralds of the Gospel, proclaiming thy love in Jesus Christ our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Kenyan Archbishop David Gitari was one of the most influential and theologically astute Bishops in the Anglican Communion. His sermons, expounding the Scriptures, combined challenges to personal conversion with prophetic denunciations of local and national injustices.
He held a high doctrine of the authority and power of God’s Word in the Bible and applied it with shrewd and brave political acumen, reading the signs of the times and warning about hinges of history. In 1988 his courageous sermons led the national critique of replacing the secret ballot with voting by queuing up behind photos of candidates. He survived an assassination attempt on his life in April 1989.
At the 1988 Lambeth Conference, he chaired the resolutions committee and gave a paper on Evangelization and Culture; just before the 1998 Lambeth Conference, he received an honorary DD from the University of Kent and the opening Eucharist of the conference was the Kenyan Service of Holy Communion, which he inspired and shaped as the innovative chair of the Liturgical Commission.
there are 15 slides in all–check them out (and note there is an autoplay slideshow option).
The death [of the] Archbishop (Emeritus) brings into focus the role of the church in community empowerment and mobilization. In the history of the Bible whenever God anointed a king, he also anointed a prophet; King Saul had Prophet Samuel while King David had Prophet Nathan. These two institutions worked hand in hand also ensuring that the leadership was held to account. Even today, God continues to call leaders into both offices. The late Archbishop Gitari was the Nathan and the Samuel of our time. He was called at a time when the government of the day needed to be put into check.
He did not hesitate to boldly criticize the government from the pulpit along with fellow clergymen such as Reverend Dr. Timothy Njoya, late Bishop Henry Okullu and late Bishop Alexander Muge. He carried the hearts of many Kenyans and was never afraid to speak his mind when the government went wrong. As such he was a true defender of democracy and a man who stood his ground on what he saw as oppressive and dictatorial leadership.
In a further sign of fracture in the Episcopal Church over the ordination of an openly gay bishop, thousands of conservative American Anglicans rallied here on Tuesday at a conference that advocated radically reorganizing church authority.
The meeting, called by the orthodox American Anglican Council a week before an emergency meeting of Anglican leaders in London to avert a worldwide schism, circulated a draft ”call to action” urging the parent church to ”create a new alignment for Anglicanism in North America.”
Denouncing the House of Bishops for backing the ordination in June of a gay man, the Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire, the Rev. David H. Roseberry, rector of Christ Church in nearby Plano, said, ”The Episcopal Church has begun a wayward drift that will distort the Anglican community.”
Augustine Thompson’s new biography is a model of all that is best in a work of this kind. It is compellingly and lucidly written, accessible both to the interested layperson as well as the scholar. This is the first critical biography of Francis by an English-speaking scholar; the other two biographies that can be described as critical are by an Italian and Frenchman. The book is divided into two parts: the biography and an examination of the sources. In a biography of this intricacy, this is the best way of organizing the work.
Thompson’s biography is now the place to begin for anyone who wants to understand Francis, his life, and the subsequent development of devotion to him, and it is not soon to be bettered.
Michael Robson has given us a helpful collection of essays, divided into two sections. The first section concerns Francis, his writings, his relationship to Clare, and the emergence of the movement. There is even a chapter on “Francis and creation,” which traces Franciscan reflection on the subject as far as Angela of Foligno. The second section collects essays that range through many aspects of the Franciscan heritage in the Church. Anglicans will welcome especially “The ecumenical appeal of Francis” by Petà Dunstan, a leading scholar of Anglican religious life.
Most high, omnipotent, good Lord, grant unto thy people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this world; that, following the way of blessed Francis, we may for love of thee delight in thy whole creation with perfectness of joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
‘When I say I’m a church recorder, people often look blank,” says Adrian Parker. “Others,” he adds with a chuckle, “seem to think I’m some sort of senior judge.”
It is a confusing moniker. When I first heard it, it conjured up an image of recorder players lining up alongside the choir in the church stalls. “I suppose there are worse titles,” concedes another of their number, Matt Smith, “but at least it intrigues people and that gets them asking more about what we do.”
Parker and Smith are both church recorders in the King’s Lynn area of north Norfolk. What they actually do is volunteer one morning a week to go along to a local historic church (of which Norfolk boasts more than its fair share) and compile for posterity a complete inventory in words and pictures of its fabric and internal furnishings.
Archbishop Justin said today: “David Gitari was an Archbishop of great courage who preached the Word of God steadfastly, both in season and out of season. He was a gifted and committed servant of the church who served our Lord Jesus Christ faithfully. He had an enormous vision for development and for social justice and was not afraid to promote change, always reminding the church to retain a critical distance from political power. His concern for prayer and promoting love and harmony has continued to the end of his life through his welcoming of so many to the Philadelphia Guesthouse near Mount Kenya. He will be remembered with much affection and admiration around the Anglican Communion. His family and the whole Anglican Church of Kenya are in our prayers.” – See more at: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/5146/archbishop-justins-tribute-to-archbishop-david-gitari-1937-2013#sthash.YOCA3vdC.dpuf
O God, who by the teaching of thy faithful servant and bishop Remigius didst turn the nation of the Franks from vain idolatry to the worship of thee, the true and living God, in the fullness of the catholic faith; Grant that we who glory in the name of Christian may show forth our faith in worthy deeds; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Born on September 16, 1937 Gitari attended the famous Kangaru High School in Embu before attending the University of Nairobi for a Bachelor of Arts degree and was ordained to priesthood in 1972.
He married Grace Wanjiru on March 31, 1966 and God blessed them with three children.
Gitari was the third primate and Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya from 1997 to 2002 and at the same time, Bishop of the Diocese of Nairobi.
It’s a grand opening three months in the making. The city’s oldest church welcomed parishioners back inside this weekend.
Gigi Barnett reports the Old St. Paul’s Church has a brand new look.
Trumpets marked the occasion at Old St. Paul’s Church in the heart of Baltimore. After three months of renovations, the city’s first and oldest church reopened this weekend.
When I was a small boy, I attended church every Sunday at a big Gothic Presbyterian bastion in Chicago. The preaching was powerful and the music was great. But for me, the most awesome moment in the morning service was the offertory, when twelve solemn, frock-coated ushers marched in lock-step down the main aisle to receive the brass plates for collecting the offering. These men, so serious about their business of serving the Lord in this magnificent house of worship, were the business and professional leaders of Chicago. One of the twelve ushers was a man named Frank Loesch. He was not a very imposing looking man, but in Chicago he was a living legend, for he was the man who had stood up to Al Capone. In the prohibition years, Capone’s rule was absolute. The local and state police and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation were afraid to oppose him. But singlehandedly, Frank Loesch, as a Christina layman and without any government support, organized the Chicago Crime Commission, a group of citizens who were determined to take Mr. Capone to court and put him away. During the months that the Crime Commission met, Frank Loesch’s life was in constant danger. There were threats on the lives of his family and friends. But he never wavered. Ultimately he won the case against Capone and was the instrument for removing this blight from the city of Chicago. Frank Loesch had risked his life to live out his faith. Each Sunday at this point of the service, my father, a Chicago businessman himself, never failed to poke me and silently point to Frank Loesch with pride. Sometime I’d catch a tear in my father’s eye. For my dad and for all of us this was and is what authentic living is all about.
–Bruce Larson, There’s a Lot More to Health than Not Being Sick (Garden Grove, California: Cathedral Press, 1981), pp. 55-56 and also quoted by yours truly in yesterday’s sermon
…lastly, if I want another argument to make you good soldiers, remember your Captain, the Captain whose wounded hands and pierced feet are tokens of His love to you. Redeemed from going down tothe pit, what can you do sufficiently to show your gratitude? Assured of eternal Glory by-and-by, how can you sufficiently prove that you feel your indebtedness? Up, I pray you! By Him whose eyes are like a flame of fire, and yet were wet with tears””by Him on whose head are many crowns, and who yet wore the crown of thorns””by Him who is King of kings and Lord of lords, and yet bowed His head to death for you””resolve that to life’s latest breath you will spend and be spent for His praise. The Lord grant that there may be many such in this Church””good sold iers of Jesus Christ.
Read it all (cited by yours truly in yesterday’s sermon).
Something extraordinary is happening in English churches. Imagine you arrived at an unfamiliar church just as the service was starting and you heard: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid”¦” Right, you’d think, CofE, Book of Common Prayer.
But this is the beginning of a Catholic Mass, a Roman Catholic Mass. It is a liturgy approved by the Pope, and it takes lumps of the Holy Communion service from the 1662 Prayer Book. I find the general effect pleasing but distinctly unsettling.
Two questions arise, depending on the direction from which one is coming. A member of the Church of England might wonder why Catholics should want to use the Book of Common Prayer compiled by Archbishop Cranmer (pictured here in 1546). A Catholic might ask: but is it the Mass?
O everlasting God, who hast ordained and constituted the ministries of angels and men in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant that, as thy holy angels always serve and worship thee in heaven, so by thy appointment they may help and defend us on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The Presiding Bishop’s job — and future reputation — is, in effect, on the line. She and her personal Chancellor have been so identified with the litigation agenda of ECUSA (because they run that agenda without interference from anyone else in the entire Church) that they are taking a hit, so to speak, on account of the reversals which that agenda has recently suffered in Texas (Fort Worth), Illinois (Quincy), South Carolina, and yes – let it be said — in San Joaquin (even though there is as yet no final judgment there, ECUSA faces a decidedly uphill battle to convince the California court that its canons allow it to take the property of the withdrawing diocese).
In a (rather desperate, and, some would say) clumsy attempt to protect her prerogatives on the litigation front, the Presiding Bishop (and, as always, her personal Chancellor, whose law firm earns millions each year from the Presiding Bishop’s continuing patronage) asked the “Ecclesiology Committee” to deliver a counter to the “Bishops’ Statement on Polity” promulgated by the Anglican Communion Institute and the Communion Partner Bishops within ECUSA….
That Committee (with membership as noted above) obediently came forth with just such a “Statement”, and presented it to the assembled bishops in Nashville. Wonder of wonders, however — what seemed likely as a rubber stamp of 815’s current litigation claims devolved into a rejection of the Committee’s paper. That rejection was based chiefly on the bishops’ reluctance to submit themselves or their dioceses, by a simple resolution, to any claim of metropolitan authority — but it was also based on their own personal knowledge of the Church’s historical polity.
This sure is matter of love; but came there any good to us by it? There did. For our conception being the root as it were, the very groundsill of our nature; that He might go to the root and repair of our nature from the very foundation, thither He went; that what had been there defiled and decayed by the first Adam, might by the Second be cleansed and set right again. That had our conception been stained, by Him therefore, primum ante omnia,to be restored again. He was not idle all the time He was an embyro all the nine months He was in the womb; but then and there He even ate out the core of corruption that cleft to our nature and us, and made both us and it an unpleasing object in the sight of God.
And what came of this? We who were abhorred by God, filii irae was our title, were by this means made beloved in Him. He cannot, we may be sure, account evil of that nature, that is now become the nature of His own SonNHis now no less than ours. Nay farther, given this privilege to the children of such as are in Him, though but of one parent believing, that they are not as the seed of two infidels, but are in a degree holy, eo ipso; and have a farther right to the laver of regeneration, to sanctify them throughout by the renewing of the Holy Ghost. This honour is to us by the dishonour of Him; this the good by Christ an embyro.
–From a sermon preached before King James, at Whitehall, on Sunday, the Twenty-fifth of December, 1614
Almighty God, who gavest thy servant Lancelot Andrewes the gift of thy holy Spirit and made him a man of prayer and a faithful pastor of thy people: Perfect in us what is lacking of thy gifts, of faith, to increase it, of hope, to establish it, of love, to kindle it, that we may live in the life of thy grace and glory; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Time flies whether you are having fun or not.
A row of clock-shaped tombstones in Milford Community Cemetery brings the point home, a different hour represented on each one. Southern Delaware cemeteries have an equal mix of history and mystery. Small and large, they are worth visiting.
The peaceful churchyard at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Lewes is the final resting place of some of Delaware’s earliest residents, among them Maulls, Virdens, Cullens and Paynters. Thanks to the Lewes Historical Society, the rich history of Delaware cemeteries is well documented and takes little effort to experience and enjoy.
O God, whose blessed Son became poor that we through his poverty might be rich: Deliver us, we pray thee, from an inordinate love of this world, that inspired by the devotion of thy servant Sergius of Moscow, we may serve thee with singleness of heart, and attain to the riches of the age to come; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
(Please note: you can see basic information about this conference there)–KSH.
Toronto: The Archbishop of Canterbury has laid out his vision for a reformed and renewed Anglican Communion during an address delivered last week at Wycliffe College of the University of Toronto.
The Anglican way forward was through a church whose mission and message had a concrete impact on the real world of modern men and women. But this church was not merely a vehicle for good works, but one that took a wholly Christ-centered approach to theology and was grounded entirely in the New Testament.
In an unscripted address via Skype to the “Back to the Anglican Future: The Toronto Congress 1963 and the Future of Global Communion” Conference held on 18 September 2013 Archbishop Welby acknowledged the impact of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideal of the Church as “Christ existing as community” as his guide.
He had no truck with American abstinence. “God invented cream. Furthermore, having made us in his image, he means us to share his delight in its excellence,” he wrote. He liked a drink or two as well: a married couple’s half-bottle amid meatloaf and brawling children was one of the “cheerful minor lubrications” of the “sandy gears of life”. But modern-day Americans, he wrote glumly, “drink the way we exercise: too little and too hard….”
…[He also] had no time for strict scorekeeping, in the kitchen or anywhere else. Grace, not willpower, dealt with sin: Jesus came to save the world, not to judge it. Showy piety, legalism and quietism were all abominations, almost as much as the cheap oil and harsh flavours of phoney ethnic food.
His own scorecard had some blots. Divorce from the mother of his six children cost him his parish on Long Island and his post as dean of an …[Episcopal] seminary. His 27 books (mostly on theology) and cookery columns only partly filled the gap. But there were worse things than being poor, he wrote, such as losing sight of the greatness of small things. At a posh church in East Hampton, he started his sermon by burning a $20 bill, with the words: “I have just defied your God.”
A priest has been appointed to look into the possible canonisation of G. K. Chesterton, the writer known for the Father Brown stories. The move has reopened the debate over his alleged anti-Semitism.
The Bishop of Northampton, the Right Rev Peter Doyle, has appointed Canon John Udris to carry out a fact-finding exercise to consider the possibility of opening a “cause” for Chesterton.
The writer, who died in 1936, lived in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, which is part of the Northampton diocese. Like Cardinal Newman, he was a convert from Anglicanism. He smoked cigars and was an accomplished journalist.
Read it all (subscription required).
A festival in celebration of Christian apologist and Chronicles of Narnia author CS Lewis is underway in Oxford.
The CS Lewis Jubilee Festival is taking place over four days to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the writer’s death.
The festival has been organised by Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, where Lewis worshipped for some 30 years and is buried.
When the Russian Orthodox Church is in the news, which has been quite often of late, the image that comes to mind is of an army of archbishops and abbots, commanded by Patriarch Kirill I, operating in conspiracy with the country’s authoritarian rulers in the Kremlin. This is not without reason. The church’s conservative clerics have, in fact, given their support to the government’s most polarizing recent laws, including the jailing of three members of Pussy Riot for offending believers’ religious sensibilities, legislation proscribing “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” and the institution of a limit of three legal marriages per Russian, to discourage divorce.
But to conclude that the Russian Orthodox Church is nothing more than a bastion of extreme conservatives is to miss the many ways that change is being forced upon it. In some sense, the church’s ultraconservatism is on the wane — for confirmation, one need only look to what’s happening among the laity, rather than to the very top of the church’s hierarchy. Devout Orthodox Christian journalists, academics, and political scientists — as well as free-thinking priests — are becoming increasingly assertive as alternative spokespeople for their faith. This burgeoning Orthodox intelligentsia is already posing a challenge to the conservative church hierarchy and, by extension, to Vladimir Putin’s regime.
This is not the first time that the church has produced prominent dissident intellectuals….
The second half of the afternoon was owned by the House of Bishops Ecclesiology Committee. Most of the bishops were not aware there was even such a thing as an HOB Ecclesiology Committee, and my impression was that most had not read the “primer” on ecclesiology that the committee had prepared and which was shared with bishops barely a week ago. This document sets forth an understanding of Episcopal Church polity that runs counter to that articulated by the Bishops’ Statement on Polity, a 2009 document to which I and my Communion Partner colleagues are committed. After some opening remarks by committee chair Pierre Whalon, TEC in Europe, we were turned loose for table discussions. When we reconvened and feedback was solicited, there was a consistent theme of discomfort with the notion–whether set forth historically or theologically–that General Convention has metropolitical authority, that we have eschewed having an archbishop, but that General Convention is, in fact, our archbishop. There were several other technical and historical errors that were pointed out as well. So my sense is that this document has effectively been re-referred to the committee that produced it, and that we will probably hear from them again down the road sometime.