Read it all also.

Read it all.

Increasing percentages of the population around us don’t know who we are or why we exist. We need to find new ways of telling the old, old story ”“ ways that are congruent with the joys and challenges of the people and societies around us.

This kind of recontextualizing of the gospel is (and has been) necessary in every age, since the first apostles. The Samaritan woman went home from her water break with Jesus to tell her friends and neighbors about the person she had just encountered (John 4). She didn’t hang around the well waiting for them to show up. She didn’t write a tract and post it next to the bucket. She didn’t even produce a drama to tell the story. She went and found her friends and told her own story.

There is an urgent need for Episcopalians to learn and try new ways of evangelism. Most of them begin by telling our own stories or providing opportunities for others to tell theirs. One of my favorite images of the latter comes from Nelle Morton, which she calls “hearing others into speech” (The Journey is Home, Beacon, 1985). An intrinsic part of our task is to provide opportunities where others can feel safe enough to begin to share their questions and fears and stories about God. Increasingly that’s being done by going out into the community, rather than waiting for people to come to church.

Read it all.

My point is not that we shouldn’t be good stewards of the earth. We ought to be. The problem is that for two years running, green politics has eclipsed any mention of the whole pattern of human sin and redemption that forms the core of orthodox Christian belief. What we are seeing is the creation of a new, green religion, under the rubric of Christianity. Christianity includes Schori’s concern for the earth. The question is whether Schori’s green religion includes Christianity, with its broader sense of human sin and disability and its willingness to discuss how sin separates people from God.

The New Testament does not read, “God so tolerated the world that he sent his only begotten son.” The word is “loved.” That love did not include tolerating sinful conduct, but rather the destruction of sin as a barrier to God, so that human beings could become capable of love. By substituting tolerance and inclusivity for love, and largely ignoring sin as a problem, the Episcopal church is creating another “Christianity,” and another reality.

I am afraid the new Episcopal Church will replace the sometimes angry and urgent Jesus of the Bible, who invited his followers to take up their crosses and follow him, with an idea of general benevolence and personal holiness. Jesus will be portrayed as a pop-culture Buddha. I hope this doesn’t happen. Although a Roman Catholic, I was more involved in my wife’s Episcopal Church, over the last decade, than my own, and I learned to value the Episcopal Church’s contribution to the world. I am afraid it will turn into what Flannery O’Connor, in The Violent Bear It Away, called the church without Christ, “where the lame don’t walk, the blind don’t see, and what’s dead stays that way.”

Read it all.

Each Anglican province is autonomous, limiting the power of Williams and other Anglican leaders to police the communion. In fact, earlier this month, Episcopalians in Los Angeles openly defied Williams by electing an open lesbian, the Rev. Mary Glasspool, as an assistant bishop.

Since then, Williams and an international panel of Anglican leaders have asked the Episcopal Church to “exercise restraint” by not confirming Glasspool’s election. In addition, the Anglican Communion’s Standing Committee on Friday asked Episcopalians to exercise “gracious restraint” with respect to “actions that endanger the unity of the Anglican Communion.”

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who generally supports gay rights in the church, sits on the 15-member Standing Committee, but it is not known whether she supports the statement. A spokeswoman for Jefferts Schori said on Tuesday that “as agreed upon by the Standing Committee, the details of the conversations of the meeting are considered private.”

Read it all.

…true encouragement comes from honesty before God and self and the strength of purpose to serve in the face of disappointment or uncertainty. Or so it should. I know a young person who sneered at the faith of an Episcopalian ”“ a more conservative person ”“ who chose to leave TEC for another set of ecclesial structures. “You would do such a thing”, this young person said to him: “yours is the generation, after all, who invented no-fault divorce”. In fact, in this case, the complaint was less directed at a purported hypocrite, than at what he perceived to be the witness of an impotent God, unable to garner the sacrificial steadiness of His adherents. But either way, faith is scandalized by those who do not have the strength, nor certainly seek the strength, to stand in the face of upheaval.

I will come back to this at the close of my remarks: honesty need be neither angry, miserable, nor defeatist. It should be the seed for hope, because it is the first and necessary turn to God who alone saves.

What is the difficult thing to speak, honestly? It is this: the Episcopal Church, as it has been known through the past two centuries, is no more, in any substantive sense. TEC is simply no longer the church filled with even the strength of purpose we saw only 10 years ago ”“ yes, even then, a church with a good deal of vital diversity and disagreement; but a seeming sense of restraint over pressing these in ways that overwhelmed witness and mission. And as a result, even then, it was church that was growing in outreach and faith. That church, shimmering still with some of the vibrancy of love spent for the Gospel seen140 years before, even 90 years before, is now gone. And TEC will not survive in any real continuity with this past and its gifts.

This is something we must face. To be sure, I am not speaking here of this or that diocese or bishop or congregation or clergy person within TEC: there are many through whose service the Gospel shines bright and the witness of the Kingdom flourishes. I am speaking of an institution as a whole ”“ not even in terms of its legal corporation, but in terms of its character and Christian substance given flesh in the Spirit’s mission.

Read it all carefully.

I want to stress, please, that people in the comments interact with what Ephraim is arguing for and actually saying. Comments not doing so will be dispacted into the ether. Many thanks–KSH.

Scientists have an obligation to “tell the truth they know,” the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop recently told a forum at MIT in Cambridge, and they should keep in mind the average person’s unasked question about their research: “What difference does that make for me?”

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori cited controversial areas of current research””bio-fuel crops, stem cell science, women’s cancer screening””with human and environmental interconnections and consequences.

“The very passion that is expressed in these discussions is an indication of the greater need for the scientific community’s engagement with the larger society. None of us can hide behind the technical work and leave the ethical work to other experts,” she said.

Read it all.

One bishop spoke deliberately, professorially, with flashes of droll humor and poetic phrasing. The other told stories from his long ministerial career, rounding them off with insights into Christian faith and practice.

But what had been billed as a debate between the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, and the Rev. William Frey, retired Episcopal bishop of Colorado, yielded much common ground and no outright conflict on the identity and meaning of Jesus.

“I heard a great deal of convergence,” Frey said afterward.

Read it all.

The Episcopal Church is the Anglican body in the United States. In 2003, it caused an uproar by consecrating its first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

The following year, Anglican leaders asked the Episcopal Church to hold off on electing another gay bishop while they tried to prevent a permanent break in the fellowship.

But in July, the U.S. church’s top policy making body affirmed that gay and lesbian priests were eligible to become bishops despite pressure from other Anglicans.

The Archbishop of Canterbury called for gracious restraint on the matter, but Jefferts Schori said Saturday that “there was never any time frame attached to that request.”

[Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori] added that she didn’t know whether six years was long enough to wait but “the church is in the process of discerning that.”

Read it all.

Guests:

Rt. Rev J. Jon Bruno, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles

Rev. Canon Mary D. Glasspool, Suffragan bisop-elect, Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles

Rev. Canon Diane M. Jardine Bruce, Suffragan bishop-elect, Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles

Listen to it all.

We congratulate you and the people of the Episcopal Church on the electoral process which has led to the election of the Revd Canon Diane Jardine Bruce and the Revd Canon Mary Douglas Glasspool as Suffragan Bishops of the Diocese of Los Angeles. We are aware that the process was carried out with great care and prayer, as will the decisions of Bishops and Standing Committees who consider whether to confirm the elections. We wish the elected candidates all joy in their ministries and assure them of our prayers.

The Anglican and Episcopalian tradition is, at its best, one which celebrates the breadth of human experience and welcomes the many ways in which we, as Christians, try to live out our vocations under God. We are therefore deeply sorry that the reaction from the Church of England to the election of Mary Glasspool has been at best grudging and at worst actively negative.

While it gives us no pleasure to dissociate ourselves from the sentiments expressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose wisdom in so many areas we deeply respect, we greatly regret the tone and content of his response, particularly in the context of his failure to make any comment on the seriously oppressive legislation being proposed in Uganda.

Read it all.

Bishop-elect Glasspool’s election comes two days after Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told an Atlanta radio station that there were no contradiction between the Episcopal Church’s 2006 pledge to abide by the Communion’s ban on consecrating gay bishops and actually electing gay bishops.

The 2009 vote by the Church’s General Convention was not “a reversal” of the moratorium, she said, as the canons had “for a long time said that the discernment process is open to any baptized person,” she told National Public Radio.

“The door has been open for many years” for gay and lesbian bishops, the presiding bishop said, confirming that she would go ahead with the consecration of a lesbian or gay bishop.

During the debate on resolution D025 at the July General Convention, the bishops noted there was a distinction between intentions and actions, with the moratorium being broken when the Episcopal Church consecrated a new gay bishop. Bishop Jefferts Schori said that was “my understanding of it. We have been asked to exercise restraint, and we have done so.”

“Effectively a moratorium remains until it is ended,” she later said on July 18.

Read the whole article.

NPR: So the bottom line is it fair to say that at least the door has been opened for gay and lesbian bishops in addition to Bishop Robinson.

KJS: The door has been open for many years.

NPR: So if an openly gay or lesbian person were to make it through to the stage where he or she could be consecrated bishop you would go ahead with that.

KJS: It is my duty, my canonical duty as Presiding Bishop, to take order for the consecration of a bishop whose election has been affirmed by the consent process.

NPR: The Archbishop of Canterbury said that we need to have a real thorough exploration of all of this and we need to have a wider consent within the communion in order to go ahead with either the consecration of gay bishops or blessings of gay unions. He said that does not exist in the communion right now. How do you feel about that?

KJS: The conversations been going on in The Episcopal Church for 45 years. The reality is that same-sex unions are blessed in many churches of the Anglican Communion. Not just in the United States or Canada, but in the Church of England. Not officially but that is reality.

NPR: Do you think there is scriptural basis for what the convention did and what is it.

KJS: The scriptural basis for what the convention affirmed about our discernment process is that each human being is made in the image of God.

Read it all (I posted the audio link a while back).

Check it out.

How do we encounter the poor? Are they simply the recipients of our unwanted clothing or our spare change, forgotten until we are confronted by a Salvation Army bell-ringer or a donation-collection truck?

Jesus called the poor blessed because they more readily recognize and receive the kingdom of heaven. People who are the most vulnerable often discover that what they need can only come from God.

Each meeting with shelter or a meal or the kindness of a stranger can be seen as divine providence.

Read it all.

The Rt. Rev. Mark MacDonald has questioned Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s assertion that he must renounce his orders as a bishop of the Episcopal Church because of his ministry in Canada.

The former Bishop of Alaska and Assistant Bishop of Navajoland now serves as the Anglican Church of Canada’s National Indigenous Bishop.

Bishop MacDonald told The Living Church he was “shocked and surprised” by the Presiding Bishop’s remarks on his ministry, adding that he has “written to her asking for clarification.”

“I am on loan to the Anglican Church of Canada under the PB’s supervision. I have an unofficial position, with no set authority or jurisdiction,” he said.

Read it all.

Hundreds of worshippers packed into Sacramento’s Trinity Cathedral on Sunday morning to hear the nation’s leader of the Episcopal Church talk about the need to embrace change.

“Changing isn’t the problem,” said Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori in her message. “Our fear and anxiety about it is.”

Jefferts Schori spoke to a supportive and welcoming crowd. After all, she interned at the midtown cathedral 16 years ago. Sunday she returned to deliver a message of hope and change for the Episcopal Church that has been marked by controversy in recent years.

Read the whole article.

During the forum after the service, Jefferts Schori discussed the Vatican’s recent decision to establish a formal structure for disaffected Anglicans. The move makes it easier for traditionalist Anglicans unhappy with the church’s embrace of gay and female clergy to enter communion with Rome while retaining certain liturgical traditions.

It’s a bigger issue in England than the United States, where traditional Episcopalians have already formed conservative structures and are thus unlikely to seek communion with Rome. And, Jefferts Schori said, provisions allowing Anglicans to join the Roman Catholic Church already existed, with four ”Anglican Use” congregations operating in the United States.

The two churches have a long history of losing members to each other, she added: ”The road between Rome and Canterbury is pretty well-traveled.”

Jefferts Schori said the Episcopal Church also continues its decades-long debate on homosexuality. As Bishop of Nevada, she supported the Diocese of New Hampshire when it elected Gene Robinson — a gay man in a long-term relationship — as bishop.

Robertson ”is not the only gay-partnered bishop,” she said. ”He’s the only one who’s open about it.”

Read it all.

The Episcopal Church loses about 19,000 members a year because more of them die than are baptized into the church, Jefferts Schori said. The average Episcopalian is about 57 years old. The average age American is 37, she said.

“Fifty-seven-year-olds don’t produce a lot of children,” Jefferts Schori said. “But, there are lots and lots of communities and populations among us that are growing.”

Younger generations don’t know what the church has to offer, she said, adding that it’s going to take Episcopalians to become more passionate about ministry to attract new people.

“How are they going to find out if we don’t tell them?” she asked.

Read it all

For what may be the first time in nearly two centuries, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church will visit St. Stephen’s Pro-Cathedral Wednesday, spending time at outreach ministries in the afternoon and giving a sermon at an evening service followed by a brief reception and a question-and-answer session.

“We have gone through our archives, and this is the fist time we can find that a presiding bishop has visited St. Stephen’s in about 190 years,” said St. Stephen’s pastor, the Rev. Daniel Gunn. “The last one here was Bishop William White, who consecrated the first St. Stephen’s.” According to the Episcopal Church Web site, White was the first Presiding Bishop, in 1789.

The presiding bishop is “chief pastor” for the Episcopal Church’s 110 dioceses in 16 countries, elected to a nine-year term by the bishops and lay and clergy deputies, according Bill Lewellis, communications minister for the Diocese of Bethlehem, which includes St. Stephen’s. Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori was elected in 2006, the first woman to hold the office, and this is her first visit to this diocese, Lewellis said. She will also be in Bethlehem Monday, Lebanon Tuesday and Scranton Thursday.

Read it all.

We should point out that you were deposed from ministry of the Episcopal Church by the presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, after you threatened to have your diocese in Pittsburgh secede.

That was a year ago, but what’s interesting is that virtually no one in the Anglican world accepted that sentence. Within two weeks of being deposed, I was received at Lambeth Palace in London by the archbishop of Canterbury, who continues to consider me a bishop.

Bishop Schori heads the Episcopal Church in this country, and you opposed her election in 2006?

She was the least qualified, the least experienced, of the candidates, but I hoped that what she would bring if she were elected was the kind of grace that women often bring. She turned out to be far harder, far less willing to bend or compromise, than any of the men.

Read it all.

Her election came three decades after the Episcopal Church allowed women to become priests and bishops, the first of whom was consecrated in 1989.

Jefferts Schori and her husband, Richard Miles Schori, a retired mathematician (topologist), were married in 1979. They have one daughter, who is a pilot and captain in the Air Force.

As the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop, Jefferts Schori inherited oversight of a denomination rent by differences over the ordination of women, openly gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex unions.

The 2003 election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man in a committed relationship, as bishop of New Hampshire — with Jefferts Schori voting in favor — a rift widened between the Episcopal Church and parts of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Read it all.

I know from speaking with Bishop Ackerman that he sent the Presiding Bishop a handwritten letter merely asking to have his credentials transferred to the Diocese of Bolivia. He said that he had no intention of renouncing his orders and that, while he intends to assist Bishop Lyons in work in Bolivia, he also wished to remain available to assist bishops in the United States, as requested.

The Presiding Bishop says that “…there is no provision for transferring a bishop to another province.” But that is not true.

Read it all.

Anglicans have never claimed to base their decisions solely on the Bible, [Katharine] Jefferts Schori said. “We start there, but that’s not the only piece we bring to our decision-making.”

The few biblical passages about same-sex relationships may be talking about exploitive relationships, she said. “Jesus doesn’t say anything about same-sex relationships of the kind the church is talking about.”

Jefferts Schori also drew fire during and after the General Convention for her sermon denouncing “the great Western heresy” that people can be saved as individuals. Salvation happens within a community, she said.

She defended herself on Friday.

“People took it out of context,” Jefferts Schori said. “You can’t be in a right relationship with God without being in a right relationship with your neighbor.”

But she declined to say people can’t be in a right relationship with God without being in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, she said. “God is at work in the lives of people who are not consciously Christian.”

Read it all.

I read a fascinating book recently that touches on several of these themes: The Friend by Alan Bray, University of Chicago Press, 2003 (there is a paperback edition from 2006). Bray explores the history of friendship in Europe and the British Isles from the 11th century into the 19th and points to the ways in which public and private concepts of friendship historically have varied from our own.

In earlier centuries, friendship had public expectation and meaning that often was rooted in a shared baptismal bond. Members of the body of Christ had a duty to each other, and such duty might be more strongly recognized through vows said at the door of the church and then sealed in the Eucharist.

The peace we share in church today is often a pale imitation of such a deeply meant promise to uphold the other, even in the face of potentially competing claims. It is that willingness to stand together in difficulty that we are continually challenged to relearn.

Bray’s explication is academic and carefully dispassionate, but it has a number of surprises. He documents vowed friendships, sealed in church, between men and a few between women. The vows they made to each other usually were made at the church door, as was similarly the custom for those entering marriage, and then followed by Eucharist in the church. The process of making those vows was in the English vernacular called “wedding,” and the result in the context of vowed friends was sometimes termed “wedded brothers.”

Read it all.

A statement issued by the Presiding Bishop’s office said that the opinion was “particularly disappointing in the light of the long struggle in which the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of South Carolina have worked cooperatively to preserve the property of this parish for the mission of the church and the diocese.”

“Time has not permitted a careful analysis of the opinion or of the options that confront the church and the diocese at this point,” the statement said.

South Carolina Bishop Mark Lawrence said that “there’s a long wisdom of tradition in the scriptures, and counsel in the book of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to keep silent and a time to speak, and as picked up in the letter of James, where James says, ‘Know this my beloved brothers and sisters, let everyone be quick to hear and slow to speak.’ I believe this is such a time.”

Read it all.

We are committed to Jesus Christ and also to The Episcopal Church and we rejoice in its rich historic, authentic tradition of worship, outreach, and evangelistic mission while also seeking to be a place where all are welcome to worship the Lord and grow in grace.

However, recent actions in some portions of the church have raised great concerns for us. Specifically the actions of the 76th General Convention in resolutions D025 and C056 which we believe do not serve the Church well, especially in the wider context of our relationship to The Anglican Communion. While we understand that we represent a congregation with varying opinions on issues of sexuality, we also believe these resolutions open the door to innovations, which are not in concert with the majority of the Church and certainly The Communion. We are concerned that the passing of these resolutions will continue to strain our international relationships and we believe that they encourage an ethical stance, which is contrary to scripture. For these reasons we reject them.

We are also concerned with opening remarks made by The Presiding Bishop at the General Convention. We find her statement that the “great western heresy (is that) we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be right with God” extremely troubling. We have read the full text of her speech and while we appreciate her emphasis on exercising our faith in right relationship, we believe her statement about individual salvation to be wrong, and we reject it.

Read it all.

I have now to affirm once again my opposition to schism as a method of affording protection to those whose beliefs and ideals were normal in the recent past. The unwillingness of our church to adopt unusual methods to afford safe haven to a disenfranchised and impotent minority, because TEC is governed by a “winner take all” form of governance is in itself a scandal. A simple expedient of the English “flying bishops” idea, adopted by a church which has a real claim to historic and unique territorial diocesan integrity, a system adopted to preserve unity, in that it was rejected by our “denominational” church, only underlines the stubborn and “conservative” policy of our majoritarian leadership. The simple adoption of protective measures to afford a safe haven for those who cannot in conscience submit to current TEC policies would have trumped schismatic schemes which have led to our present divisions. Our church would be lauded for its tolerance and comprehension while free to pursue the ideals of the majority. What would have emerged would have been “comprehension” tailored to years of conflict.

Instead TEC has asked the secular State by its courts to adjudicate not only property disputes but explicitly in is pleadings the doctrinal and structural ethos of what it means to be an Anglican in America.

Read it all.

In response to the criticism directed at her General Convention Opening Address, Katharine Jefferts Schori has published an explanation of what she said. “Apparently I wasn’t clear”. Whether her explanation clarifies what she originally said, or obsfuscates it, is a question that different people will answer in different ways. Some will think that this what she meant all along. Others will wonder whether she has not snatched up the fig leaf of orthodoxy to cover up her heterodox teaching.

What she meant to say, she now says, is that “we give evidence of our relationship with God in how we treat our neighbors, nearby and far away. Salvation is a gift from God, not something we can earn by our works, but neither is salvation assured by words alone.” That’s unexceptionable so far as it goes. Doubts, however, remain, and not inconsequential ones. Classical Anglican doctrine could not have talked about good works as she does (at length) without clarifying their relationship with individual faith (see the Articles of Religion XI-XIV). It insisted that there is no right relationship (justification) of the individual with God without faith, and that there are no good works of neighbourly love without individual faith either. Without faith, our good works turn into Pelagian works-righteousness – which do not restore us to right relationship with our neighbour, or to God. Yet Jefferts Schori can only repeat her negative account of individualism, and on the relation of faith to justification and good works she is strikingly silent. She disclaims Pelagian works-righteousness ”“ “salvation is a gift of God” ”“ but given that she cannot say how that grace operates through the faith of the individual, there is nothing in her theology to prevent a collapse into it. She can issue a further clarification, if she wishes, explaining that she is in favour of justifying faith too (though this would involve backtracking on her “individualism is heresy” theme): but the lacuna is troubling. If you are striving to assure critics of your doctrinal orthodoxy, how do you ”˜overlook’ faith?

Moreover, classical Anglicanism would also have said that faith has a doctrinal content. Schori seems unable to speak of doctrine in positive terms ”“ only the comment about the insufficiency of “words alone”. Even her doctrinal affirmations have an oddly tentative ring. “We anticipate the restoration of all creation to right relationship, and we proclaim that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection made that possible in a new way.” Does this mean that restoration was possible in another way? Or that it is only a possibility? And just how does “Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection” make this possible? We can read a classical account of the atonement into that phrase, but we have no reason to do so. Many do not. Perhaps she is once more being “unclear”? She concludes with another unimpeachable platitude, that salvation “is a mystery. It’s hard to pin down or talk about.” That’s a cheap exit. The Biblical concept of “mystery” does not mean “vague” or “ambiguous”.

As an effort to set to rest the doctrinal anxieties of her critics, Ms. Jefferts Schori’s response is remarkably ineffective. It leaves us with a choice of conclusions: either she is not capable of the requisite theological clarity, or she really does not want to be clear. Given a bishop’s role as teacher of the faith and focus of unity, neither conclusion is re-assuring.

–The Rev. Gavin Dunbar is rector, Saint John’s, Savannah, Georgia

This paper examines whether the Presiding Bishop is authorized to initiate and conduct recent property litigation and finds no source for such authority in the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church. Arguments based on a presumed equivalence of the roles of the Presiding Bishop and Executive Council to those of a corporate CEO and board of directors are found not to be valid. The paper also examines claims that pursuit of litigation is necessitated by fiduciary duty. It concludes that no convincing case has been made that this is so. First, no person is under a fiduciary duty to undertake something that has not been authorized. Putting aside the issue of authorization, several factors relevant to a proper fiduciary duty analysis suggest refraining from litigation such as has been commenced against disaffiliating dioceses. In this connection, relevant fiduciary duties are not limited to those that may be owed to TEC as an organization, but also include duties owed to its member dioceses. Claims that a member diocese cannot disaffiliate and retain ownership of its property implicate the latter set of duties. The paper presents a case that the duties to dioceses include duties to those that have withdrawn because the claims against them are based on alleged consequences of their having been dioceses of TEC rather than the actions of an unaffiliated third party.

Read it all.