A member of Council stated her desire to seek clarity from the Presiding Bishop about her remarks on Sunday on church governance. She noted that the Presiding Bishop’s remarks were taken by some to diminish the role of deputies in the widest governance of the church. The Presiding Bishop explained that she was not questioning the need for the House of Deputies nor diminishing their governance role, and that she views the natural tension between the two houses as healthy and necessary. She said that her larger concern was that leaders in the church ”“ bishops, clergy and laity ”“ not be afraid of exploring ways to respond to changing circumstances in a nimble way, that we “choose life” and find ways to insure that our governance enables that, and does not get in the way of it.

Out of that conversation came a renewed commitment to talk openly with one another, to challenge one another, and to trust that we all ”“ whatever our roles — are acting out of good motives.

We then heard a report from the Joint Standing Committee for Finances for Mission (FFM) about issues related to the budget. Committee Chair Del Glover explained that FFM’s work is to make sure we have the resources to do mission, and that the more clarity we have on mission, the better decisions we can make. Council adopted the budget.

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The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council began its three-day fall meeting here Oct. 23 with an agenda that includes consideration of a Church Center 2011 budget that is five percent lower than the version adopted by General Convention in 2009.

Revenue in the proposed reduced budget is $2.1 million less than originally projected, with income from dioceses projected at $682,946 less than expected. The revenue reductions come “as a result of an unpredictable delayed payment by one diocese,” as well as major cuts in Church Center spending that also will result in less revenue, according to a memo to council members from the church’s Finance Office. The specific diocese has not yet been disclosed.

Total revenue is projected to be $37,147,458, while total expenses are budgeted at $36,966,829.

Read it all.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori challenged the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council Oct. 24 to avoid “committing suicide by governance.”

Jefferts Schori said that the council and the church face a “life-or-death decision,” describing life as “a renewed and continually renewing focus on mission” and death as “an appeal to old ways and to internal focus” which devotes ever-greater resources to the institution and its internal conflicts.

“We need some structural change across the Episcopal Church,” she said. “Almost everywhere I go I hear dioceses wrestling with this; dioceses addressing what they often think of as their own governance handcuffs, the structures that are preventing them from moving more flexibly into a more open future.”

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…the first dean of St. Matthew’s Cathedral, the Very Rev. Hudson Stuck, was well versed in the precedents of church history. “For consider that every organized diocese is essentially an independent, autonomous portion of the church, having all that is necessary for a church,” he wrote in 1895. Statements like this were not made to defeat a “national church,” as none existed then on the terms we now see being proposed. They were made out of enthusiasm for spreading the gospel, because Dallas was complete as a diocese and so suited for the challenge. To quote the Rt. Rev. James Stanton, sixth Bishop of Dallas, sovereignty in the context that Stuck and Garrett used it did not mean going it alone. Garrett made this clear when he said that the “fullness of the apostolic power, to which I have referred again and again as the great deposit of authority, resides not in each individual bishop, but in the complete apostolic college. It resides in the whole body of bishops.”

The revisions to Title IV enacted by General Convention at Anaheim in 2009 turn the principles of the founders of the Diocese of Dallas and those of the entire Episcopal Church on their head. As neatly summarized in the excellent article on this subject written by Alan Runyan and Mark McCall, these amendments inflict a broad range of damage that should be of grave concern to Episcopalians across the entire political spectrum. They enable a bishop (and the presiding bishop) not only to serve as policeman writing the citation, but also to sit as a member of the three-person board (or grand jury) that will be appointed to replace a duly elected standing committee.

Any resemblance to due process as we understand it in this country has been eliminated from Title IV, including protection of ordained clergy against self-incrimination. Clergy must now “testify and cooperate”; they must “self-report” an offense; and they will no longer hear Miranda warnings. As rewritten, Title IV works to the advantage of those who currently hold authority within TEC. With a change in regime, however, it could easily become an instrument of control by those they oppose. Good law should serve all parties, not simply whichever group may be in power.

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The appellate justices who will decide whether the U.S. Episcopal Church or the breakaway Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin owns the diocese’s church properties on Wednesday appeared uncertain about the court’s authority to rule on the issue.
“We are involved in a very confusing question of power of the church versus power of the court,” said 5th District Court of Appeal Justice Dennis Cornell, who repeatedly compared the schism between the two church groups to the Civil War.
Justice James Ardaiz also acknowledged the case was “confusing.”

Read it all.

“Whether a target’s on my back or not on my back is not my chief concern,” [Bishop Mark Lawrence] said. “I believe we should get on with the mission to which God has called us in the Anglican Communion.”

The bishop said that energy for mission is moving away from institutions, whether the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Communion’s Instruments of Unity, and toward more direct relationships, such as the diocese’s new arrangement to welcome the Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, the retired Bishop of Rochester, England, as “visiting bishop in South Carolina for Anglican Communion Development.”

“Out of these relationships, I believe, the solutions will emerge,” Bishop Lawrence said. “We’re living in a world in which inhibitions and depositions can intrude into a vision.”

Lawrence added that he does not see himself as violating his ordination vows to conform to the doctrine and discipline of the church. Instead, he said, bishops who approve unconstitutional canons or who revise church teaching on sexual morality have violated their vows.

“We’re increasingly in a world in which people expect a bishop to swear fealty to every resolution of General Convention, regardless of its theological foundations,” he said.

Read it all.

A group of young adults are living at Christ Church on Broadway but working in the city that surrounds it, extending the tradition of service on which the parish was founded in 1854.

The new program is called St. Hilda’s House, and Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori will dedicate it at a High Mass at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.

The seven first-year interns are volunteering at St. Martin de Porres Academy, Christian Community Action, the Your Place youth center at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Chapel on the Green, Community Soup Kitchen and Christ Church, serving lunch, coordinating volunteers, leading after-school teen activities and holding Bible study.

Most, but not all, are considering becoming priests.

Read it all.

Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, chief pastor of the world’s 2.4 million Episcopalians, downplayed the schism that has rocked the church over its liberal views on homosexuality and gay clergy, and emphasized the importance of mission and ministry both at home and abroad.

“We need to speak the good news where people can hear it,” said Jefferts Schori, who planned to visit some of the local diocese’s poverty ministries – The Gathering meal program, the Red Door clothing ministry and an indigent burial program – during her stay.

“One of my jobs is to tell the story of the good works being done here,” she said in brief remarks to local media at the diocese’s All Saints Cathedral downtown.

Read it all.

Jefferts Schori’s stop in Shepherdstown ended a three-church pilgrimage to the Mountain State. She also visited Christ Church in Fairmont, W.Va., and St. Luke’s on Wheeling Island.

She said that during a dinner at Christ Church, paper stars were passed out inviting those eating to write notes to its rector, who is facing cancer surgery. The woman turned 29 Saturday and the congregation had seen her only once since she became ill in May, Jefferts Schori said.

“At some point … a parishioner stood up and offered a lament … ”˜Why is this vibrant young woman so terribly sick? Why has our shepherd been taken away?’” Jefferts Schori said during her sermon.

“Questions like those haunt all of us at some time or other,” she said. “That lament is universal. Why can’t we fix it? Oh, God, why?”

Read it all.

While the expectation of visitation is referenced in a canonical change since Dawley’s work, the Constitution nowhere authorizes such action. Furthermore, the lack of juridical powers remains directly and unambiguously supported by our Constitution. Thus the constitutional and polity concerns, among others, I had upon discovering that the presiding bishop’s chancellor had retained in South Carolina an attorney who presented himself as “South Carolina counsel for the Episcopal Church.” Her lack of juridical powers within an independent diocese made the hiring of an attorney without my permission an unconstitutional act. The stated defense for this incursion was the protection of church property to the point of choosing the coercive power of civil courts as the best way to resolve challenges TEC faces over profound questions of doctrine, morality and discipline, regardless of local issues or the decisions of the diocesan ecclesiastical authority.

This is a profound overreach of the presiding bishop’s authority. Though certainly there are many within TEC who strongly disagree with my theological commitments, or my vigorous statements of how TEC continues to tear the fabric of the Anglican Communion, the thing we are confronting now is of a different nature. It is a challenge to our polity: Of how for 200 years the Episcopal Church has carried out its mission and ministry. It is one of the ironies of this time that the Diocese of South Carolina, which has been one of the more serious critics of the “national” church, should be among those defending the polity of TEC and its Constitution. But history is full of such paradoxes.

In protecting our independence as a diocese in TEC, in protecting the diocesan bishop’s authority to shepherd the parishes and missions of the diocese, and in defending the bishop and, in his absence, the standing committee as the ecclesiastical authority, we are in fact defending how TEC has done its work since its conception.

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When the Anglican Communion started to unravel in 2007, following the Archbishop of Canterbury’s unexplained decision to invite the American bishops to Lambeth 2008, even before the deadline for their compliance with certain restraints imposed by the primates, and the subsequent attempt to pretend that the ‘deadline’ was nothing of the kind, Bishop Mouneer [Anis] stood out as someone who was not prepared to break with the central organs of the Communion.

Unlike many other primates from the developing world, he continued to believe that the processes envisaged by the Windsor Report (2004) and the proposed Anglican Covenant, sponsored by the Archbishop of Canterbury as the answer to the Communion’s incoherence as an ecclesial body, were good and necessary solutions to the church’s problems. Accused of being naive by some of those who went on to form the FCA, Bishop Mouneer stuck by Rowan Williams and became one of his strongest backers. His public statements are full of praise for him and often quote him at some length, a degree of devotion which must make him virtually unique in the Anglican world.

Alas, Bishop Mouneer’s reward for this extraordinary loyalty has been meagre. At one point he specifically asked the ACC to hold back on a statement it was going to issue because he was on a pastoral visit elsewhere in the Middle East and would not have time to consider it until his return to Cairo. He was ignored, and the ACC went ahead without him, making only the shortest of apologies when it realised that it had caused offence. Dr. Williams, who seems to have all the time in the world for Ms Schori, never rushed off to Cairo or showed any public concern for Bishop Mouneer’s position. He could not ignore the bishop’s resignation of course, but his official statement was perfunctory in the extreme and betrayed no sign of any sympathy for the reasons which compelled him to leave.

Bishop Mouneer could easily have camouflaged his resignation in the way that people often do. He could have pleaded the burdens of office or the dangers of stress and ill health. He might even have said that it was time for someone else to take his place, and pretended that he was stepping down in order to give others a chance. He did none of those things.

Instead, he told the truth….

Read it all.

(Via email and with permission–KSH).

The federal lawsuit filed against me by the Schori-led group for trademark infringement is both preposterous and vindictive.

It’s preposterous because a “minority faction” ”“ in the words of the mandamus opinion from the Fort Worth Court of Appeals ”“ is trying to get a different result in federal court from the state court ruling, which clearly stated that their lead counsel do not represent the diocese, and the minority faction does not have authority to act for the diocese.

Having been heavily out-voted at our diocesan conventions in November 2007 and again in 2008, the minority group left the diocese, yet is trying a hostile takeover of the diocese through the courts. They filed a lawsuit in state court in Tarrant County in April 2009 claiming to be the diocese. In June of this year the state appellate court found that the attorneys hired by this minority faction cannot represent the diocese. The state court lawsuit includes the two trademarks, namely the name and seal of the diocese.
Having struck out at the diocesan convention and struck out at the state court level, the minority faction filed this new lawsuit in federal court over the same trademarks as in the state court case. It looks like they are shopping for a new judge. As to whether this new case will be a “game changer,” we are confident that the minority faction will not be any more successful in federal court than they have been in state court.

The lawsuit is vindictive because it is aimed personally at me, as an individual. I do not use the trademarks personally ”“ the diocese uses them! Even the minority faction acknowledges this when they say the diocese has used the marks since 1983. I have used the marks ever since I was consecrated bishop of the diocese in 1993, and I continue to hold that office. This is only one more indication of how angry the minority faction is at having lost the convention votes and left the diocese.

The question still remains: Why would they not accept our offer to transfer title of their property to them and avoid all this costly litigation?

–(The Rt. Rev.) Jack Leo Iker is Bishop of Fort Worth

Despite tragic violence and discouraging developments, there are signs of hope. Majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians still support a two-state solution. Arab states have declared their commitment to peace in the Arab Peace Initiative. There are U.S. diplomatic efforts to restart Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Lebanese negotiations for peace. Official and informal negotiations have produced the outlines of concrete compromises for resolving the conflict, including the final status issues: borders and security, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem. Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders both here and in the region reject the killing of innocents, support a just peace, and believe sustained negotiations are the only path to peace.

As we said two years ago, there is a real danger that cynicism will replace hope and that people will give up on peace. With the resumption of direct negotiations, clarity is demanded. So let us be clear. As religious leaders, we remain firmly committed to a two-state solution to the conflict as the only viable way forward. We believe that concerted, sustained U.S. leadership for peace is essential. And we know that time is not on the side of peace, that delay is not an option.

The path to peace shuns violence and embraces dialogue. This path demands reciprocal steps that build confidence. This path can lead to a future of two states, Israel and a viable, independent Palestine, living side by side in peace with security and dignity for both peoples, stability in the region, and a comprehensive peace between Israel and all her Arab neighbors.

Read it all.

Saying that they are people of hope who “refuse … to give in to cynicism or despair,” a group of interfaith leaders delivered a declaration to the White House and State Department Sept. 29 uniting in support of “active, fair, and firm U.S. leadership for Arab-Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was among the 28 Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders who signed the statement.

Alexander D. Baumgarten, director of government relations for the Episcopal Church, represented Jefferts Schori at the meeting with General James Jones, United States national security adviser, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Read it all.

The revisions to the disciplinary section of the Canons (“Title IV”) proposed at Anaheim in 2009 lived up to Bishop Jefferts Schori’s prediction: with very little time to consider their sweeping nature, and with no line-by-line comparison of what was being changed made available to them (contrary to what the Canons themselves require), the deputies enacted changes the full scope of which no one — not even those who had labored for years to draft them — grasped. The extent of the disciplinary powers over other bishops alone which the new Canons give to the Presiding Bishop transform her — in contrast to what tradition and ECUSA’s Constitution say — into a full-fledged metropolitan. Consider just these points (see this paper for the full details):

* Currently, if the Presiding Bishop wants to bring charges against another bishop, she has to send a written presentation of just the facts, without any editorializing, to an independent “Title IV Review Committee” consisting of bishops, clergy and laity. Under the new Canons, the Presiding Bishop is empowered to refer, “in any form”, information about any offense she thinks “may” have been committed to an “Intake Officer”, whom she alone appoints.
* Currently, the Title IV Review Committee screens and evaluates each potential charge against a bishop. Under the new Title IV, the Presiding Bishop, along with her appointed “Intake Officer”, have two out of the three votes on the “Review Committee” which now screens the charges.
* Currently, the Presiding Bishop may inhibit a bishop only if the Title IV Review Committee decides to present charges, and only if a majority of all the members of the affected diocesan Standing Committee consent. Under the new Title IV, the Presiding Bishop may act alone, and out of the blue, to inhibit a fellow bishop (the word “inhibit” has been replaced by the term “place restrictions on the exercise of the ministry” of a bishop).
* Currently, any inhibition is “temporary”, and is “an extraordinary remedy, to be used sparingly and limited to preventing immediate and irreparable harm to individuals or to the good order of the Church.” Under the new Title IV there are no such limitations on its use — restrictions may be imposed for any duration, and for any reason(s) the Presiding Bishop, in her sole judgment, thinks are sufficient.

Please read it carefully, follow all the links, and read it all.

“We wish to call to your attention the recent actions … which we believe are accelerating the process of alienation and disassociation of the Diocese of South Carolina from the Episcopal Church,” the [Episcopal] Forum [of South Carolina] wrote in a letter to the Executive Council and House of Bishops.

Diocese officials say the resolutions, if approved, would assert the authority of Scripture and be a step toward realizing a vision of “Making Biblical Anglicans for a Global Age.”

Bishop Mark Lawrence said the Forum was resorting to fear tactics.

“With this latest attack, the Episcopal Forum continues its weary institutional approach to God, as if you can keep people in a church by fear.” Lawrence said. “What we are seeking to do in the Diocese of South Carolina is to hold fast to the best of our Episcopal heritage while sharing Christ’s transforming freedom to the needs of people today.”

Read it all.

Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson and Executive Council member Rosalie Simmonds Ballentine have issued a letter to the church calling for study on the Anglican Covenant.

“We strongly urge every congregation in this Church to engage in discussion of the proposed Covenant at some time in the coming two years,” the letter states.

Read it all.

Frank Kirkpatrick, professor of religion at Trinity College, wrote in a survey article in 2008 that “there were, as of December [2007], 55 [Episcopal Church] property disputes in one state or another of resolution around the country.” (You may find a listing of those lawsuits in this post from August 2008, and see also the latest report from the American Anglican Council.) Of those fifty-five lawsuits, I estimate that ECUSA itself was a party to about half of them. Thus from the five lawsuits to which it was a party as Bishop Griswold ended his term in November 2006 (the Pawley’s Island case in South Carolina, the three Los Angeles lawsuits, and a case involving St. James Church in Elmhurst, in the Diocese of Long Island), the number increased by five times in the first full year of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s term.

Under Bishop Jefferts Schori, ECUSA did not just passively stand by as the property disputes emerged, and allow the diocese involved to carry the laboring oar. It aggressively prosecuted the cases in both California and Virginia, joined in filings in Connecticut, Georgia and New York (where it intervened as the DFMS against St. Andrew’s, in Syracuse, and filed an amicus brief in this case in New York’s highest court), became enmeshed in additional litigation in San Diego and Colorado, and threatened litigation against the dioceses of San Joaquin, Fort Worth and Quincy if they dared to withdraw from the Church. (The latter two threats were issued by the Presiding Bishop’s Chancellor on his own initiative, as discussed in this earlier post.)

There are no records in the minutes of the Executive Council during this period to show that it was ever consulted before any of these multiple filings in the name of the Church took place; as quoted in the previous post, the Presiding Bishop held the view that only she personally, and neither the Council, nor even General Convention, had any authority over litigation. Thus she simply gave her Chancellor free rein — and ECUSA’s legal bills began to mount exponentially.

Read it all (and please note it is part of a series all parts of which need to be perused).

In a recent webcast, [Presiding Bishop Katharine] Jefferts Schori was asked if she was trying to shore up support from other provinces before the meeting. “That was certainly not the intent,” she answered. “It may have been a byproduct.”

“We have partners all across the Anglican Communion,” Jefferts Schori continued. “These visits had been set up some time ago, well before the timing of the Standing Committee meeting was known, basically as a way of building relationships between our respective provinces.”

Read it all.

Read it all.

Read it all and please note it also includes a section on the recent ACC Standing Committee meeting and related matters.

The search for dignity is work that all members of Christ’s body share. We’re invited to join the band of prophets, share the meal and drink the cup. It can be dangerous work, but most prophets I know are also filled with joy. Prophets generally decide that it’s not worth living in a system without dignity. Better to lose that life, and exchange it for one that builds up, because we lose our own dignity when we tolerate indignity for some.

The journey down to Antioch and back to Jerusalem led our ancestors to discover that one’s own dignity is mixed up with that of every other human being, and indeed all of creation. James made the same discovery. The work of the cross is the most life-giving journey we know. Are you ready, willing, and able?

Read it all (Word document).

Women should be represented at all levels of the church, the most powerful Anglican in the US has said during a visit to Wales.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, has been a personal guest of Archbishop of Wales Barry Morgan, whose conviction that church leadership should not be a male-only preserve she shares.

The US church’s support for bishops in homosexual relationships has sparked conflict with traditionalists and the communion, which has adherents in more than 160 countries, is threatened with schism.

Read it all.

….the whole question of diversity and communion more broadly has been a consistent Anglican concern, at least since the late 18th-century English bishops required of the nascent Episcopal Church that she reorder her Prayer Book (e.g. replacing those parts stricken from the Americans’ proposed version of the Apostles’ Creed), if she wished to have her ministers and bishops “recognized” through a process of continuous succession with the English Church. It was still a question when the first Lambeth Conference met and resolved that “it is necessary that [newer Anglican churches] receive and maintain without alteration the standards of faith and doctrine as now in use in [the Church of England]”, echoing in this instance TEC’s initial commitments from 1786. The bishops then explained that, nevertheless, “each province should have the right to make such adaptations and additions to the services of the Church as its peculiar circumstances may require”. Immediately, however, the bishops noted a proviso, “that no change or addition be made inconsistent with the spirit and principles of the Book of Common Prayer”, a standard that, if rather loose, at least pointed to a text. Further, the bishops insisted more concretely, “that all such changes be liable to revision by any synod of the Anglican Communion in which the said province shall be represented”. And here, obviously, “representation” is not viewed as a veto power for one’s own interests, but rather as a participatory role bounded by unitive action.

One can argue whether this Lambeth resolution was consistently followed through in a strict sense. And so, with respect to the broader diversity-unity question, the Communion has tended to address difficult issues on this score as they have arisen, rather than through a strict censorial mechanism, whether constitutional or confessional. But does this lack of a defined template that can measure when diversity becomes “too much”, or when the “recognizable becomes unrecognizable” indicate that in fact there is no means of discernment at all? Certainly not, since the dynamic of recognition ”“ unity and separation ”” has performed this task quite adequately: when one church is no longer recognized as representing other Anglicans before the world, diversity has exceeded the measure of unity.

And, indeed, if the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, based on whatever means by which he has made this determination (in this case, years of consultation) no longer recognizes TEC as representative of the Communion that ”“ for TEC and many other Anglican churches ”“ is substantively defined by their bonds with him, then it is a simple descriptive fact that TEC’s particular convictions have undercut common Communion commitments. There is not some other mechanism that awaits application to reveal this fact. Indeed, the claim made by the Presiding Bishop that a Covenant is needed first before this can be done, ”” and therefore it cannot be done now ”” only underscores TEC’s choice to move to the side of previously acknowledged means of discernment regarding appropriate Christian diversity with the Communion, and to claim a kind of Communion chaos on this matter that even more desperately seeks some kind of covenantal resolution.

Finally, what are we to make of the fact that the Presiding Bishop and other leaders of TEC have long sought to undercut the strength of local diversity within the American Church ”“ there are vast swaths of no-go zones in TEC for traditional and conservative Episcopal clergy and scholars, imposed quite consciously by bishops and the committees they lead? Or that they have now put in place disciplinary canons (the revised Title IV rules) that would give the Presiding Bishop the arguably unconstitutional power to inhibit fellow bishops without prior consultative permission? None of this suggests a stable understanding of the relationship between diversity and Christian unity, despite claims to the contrary in her Pastoral Letter. While the diversity-unity question deserves (and has received) significant Scriptural and theological scrutiny, its practical import is nonetheless contained within these kinds of “actions”, as Lund put it: one judges the character of a tree of unity by its fruit, if always somewhat retrospectively.

Read it all.

A local group representing the national Episcopal Church has hit a legal snag in its attempt to take control of the property of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.

The 2nd Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the group’s attorneys, who filed a lawsuit on behalf of “The Corporation” and “The Fort Worth Diocese,” cannot represent those entities because the entities are also associated with Bishop Jack Iker, the defendant in the lawsuit.

The appellate court noted that there is only one corporation and diocese, which both sides are staking claim to.

Read it all.

The Anglican churches in Australia and New Zealand are hosting Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori for an informal two-week visit to the two provinces.

“I’m to speak with people there about their conversations around human sexuality and also about their missionary development work — not in the sense of finances but in the sense of leadership development and theological education,” Jefferts Schori told members of Executive Council during their June 16-18 meeting in Maryland. “We’re also going to have a conversation about the work that they’re doing around the Millennium Development Goals, and, obviously, our relationships within the Anglican Communion.”

Neva Rae Fox, the Episcopal Church’s program officer for public affairs, said the trip, which has been in the planning stages for more than a year, is all about building relationships.

Read it all.

Dear Friends,

Some of you may have heard that on a recent visit to England, +Katharine Jefferts-Schori was asked to verify her orders of ordination and asked not to wear her miter. As you know, I am here on a partnership visit in the Diocese of Gloucester. Attached is a greeting and explanation from Bishop Michael regarding our own correspondence with Lambeth Palace, hopefully clarifying a policy that has been in place but not enforced. The incident with +Katharine was of course exacerbated by +Rowan’s Pentecost letter and +Katharine’s response. I must say that I have not met anyone here that is happy with +Rowan’s letter and the actions that it announced; but…rather many are embarrassed and upset.

As you will see from an update that Celeste Ventura and Channing Smith will send shortly, we are having a wonderful time in Gloucester being treated very well and shown great hospitality. There are no major issues regarding the wearing of my miter or being a woman bishop, although of course there are those who do not approve of women’s ordination. It is a very live issue here and there are lots of feelings and emotions as the Church of England approaches another vote, hopefully towards women in the episcopate, in just a few weeks.

Read it all and read the letter from the Bishop of Gloucester also.

In her recent address to the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Presiding Bishop used the same list that she used in Southwark, but began her address to another “Episcopal Church” by defending the use of the name “The” Episcopal Church: “we’ve struggled with what to call ourselves because ECUSA is not accurate.” In fact, the official name of TEC as designated in its constitution is“The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, otherwise known as The Episcopal Church (which name is hereby recognized as also designating the Church).” She also stated that the Churches in Europe were “rapidly becoming indigenized.” The data show that they have declined 13% since 2003 from an ASA of 1500 to 1302.

TEC is not, of course, the only “international” church in the Anglican Communion. Others include the West Indies, Central America, Southern Cone, Ireland, West Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa, Indian Ocean, Jerusalem and the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia.

But the most international of all Anglican churches remains the Church of England. In addition to churches extra-provincial to Canterbury in Spain, Portugal, Bermuda, Ceylon and the Falkland Islands, the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe includes parishes or missions in forty-three countries with a weekly attendance of 12,600.

Read it all.

“The Episcopal Church is vibrantly engaged in missions in most places that I go. It is not growing numerically in most parts of the United States, but it is growing in most of our overseas dioceses,” Schori told WRAL’s David Crabtree.

Read it all and follow the link to the whole interview.

Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia media officer Lloyd Ashton said she was a controversial visitor. “Nobody makes any bones about the fact that she does represent tension. From the outset, her visit has always been intended as low key, informal and unofficial.

“There is not going to be an endorsement of where the…[Episcopal] Church is going. We have got our own process, we are working through that and it will be at least two years before that is complete.

“We are not hiding it, but neither are we exacerbating any tensions by making a statement … It is an acknowledgement that there are sensitivities both ways.”

Read it all.