When Grace Church finished the most recent phase of work on the Saving Grace project, a decision was made to leave more than 20 electronic monitors embedded in the walls to measure and record any movement. Our engineers felt that, barring a seismic event, the building would be stable and safe to occupy until the next phase of work could begin to address the structural issues in the clerestory walls ”“ the walls supported by the columns that run down both sides of the nave. Unfortunately, a seismic event in Virginia on August 23 appears to have affected the building.

On Friday, September 2, one of the electronic monitors showed significant movement. Monitor No. 19 is positioned to measure the thickness of the clerestory wall. Over a period of about 7 hours, the wall became measurably thicker. What this indicates is that the bricks that make up the wall are separating from each other, or “delaminating.” Should that process continue or speed up, it could cause the wall to fail.

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The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington is donating $25,000 to help repair the Washington National Cathedral, which sustained millions of dollars in damage in the earthquake that rocked the East Coast on Aug. 23.
“The National Cathedral holds a special place in the hearts of all of us in Washington,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington.

“So many recognize it as a national house of prayer, and indeed its magnificent Gothic spires are a reminder of our constant need to raise our hearts in prayer to God in the midst of all our daily preoccupations.”

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The parish self-description from their website is:

We are an inclusive, welcoming community with a historic and ongoing commitment to outreach, traditional worship and music shaped by our Anglo-Catholic heritage, and a growing number of children.

.In a recent newsletter rector Elizabeth Randall says:

With the Bishop’s permission and by resolution of the vestry, St. Andrew’s is now a parish where the blessing of same-gender relationships may take place. Blessings are available to active members of the parish, and will use the liturgy provided by the diocese. Couples who are interested in seeking a blessing should contact the rector. Many thanks to the vestry task force who guided our discernment process, and to all those who told their stories and offered their views during this time. This is an important milestone in the life of our community, and I am grateful to share this moment with you.

From here:

The mission of St. James Episcopal Church, Knoxville, is “to feed and tend God’s sheep,” a ministry we attempt to live out day by day.It means nourishing our own parishioners through our vibrant liturgy, our rector’s learned, inspirational preaching, and our 30-member choir’s glorious singing.
It means raising up mature Christians through Christian formation classes on Sunday, as well as weekly Disciple groups.

It means building community at St. James through our Wednesday fellowship dinners and the meetings of our ECW and Daughters of the King, our Men’s Group, our Episcopal Peace Fellowship, and many other groups.

Having been fed ourselves, we are able to help the transitional neighborhood–and world–around us, whether through our Doorstep Ministry’s daily gifts of food or our Helping Hands Food Pantry’s distributions of non-perishable food to more than a hundred people every other Saturday, through our Mobile Meals volunteers or Appalachian Resource Team workers, through our Career Closet, which provides interview clothes to job-seeking women, or through the countless, often anonymous, charitable acts of our members.

To walk into our nave or parish hall is to enter a community that embraces both the Gospel call to personal transformation and the Gospel command to bring God’s kingdom to the world in which we live. Any day of the week you are likely to see this lively process of feeding and being fed under way at St. James Church.

Also, you may explore the parish’s website there.

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Historic churches in Washington, Maryland and Virginia were among buildings with the most serious damage after the unusual Aug. 23 magnitude 5.8 earthquake shook the region.

The temblor could be felt as far away as Detroit, north of Toronto and into Florida.

The archdioceses of Washington and Baltimore each reported damage to several churches. But in the Diocese of Richmond, Va., where the quake was centered near the town of Mineral, that town’s St. Jude Church had the only reported damage in the diocese, and that was relatively minor, according to its pastor, Father Michael Duffy.

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The central tower on the Washington National Cathedral””the highest point in Washington, D.C.””suffered serious damage from the 5.8-magnitude earthquake that shook the East Coast Tuesday. No one was injured.

The earthquake knocked off the cross-shaped finial stones on three of the four pinnacles that jut out from the top of the tower. The top of one pinnacle is leaning inward. Yellow police tape was roped across trees in front of the Cathedral and a steady trickle of gawkers stared up at the damaged 300-foot tower.

“At first I thought it felt something like a big wind,” Samuel Lloyd, dean of the cathedral, said in an interview. “Then I realized that nothing was blowing, but there was a rattling and a shaking everywhere.”

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Deep in America’s heartland, a Reform synagogue, a nondenominational mosque and an… [Episcopal] church are all putting down roots on a 37-acre tract of land that once belonged to a Jewish country club. A body of water called Hell Creek runs through the development, over which the faith groups plan to build “Heaven’s Bridge.”

Fantastical as it sounds, this interfaith campus is currently in the works in Omaha, Neb. Slated for completion in 2014, the Tri-Faith Initiative is an experiment in religious coexistence in a city better known as a hub of corn-fed conservatism.

“The only other place where such a thing exists is Jerusalem,” said Dr. Syed Mohiuddin, chairman of the Creighton University School of Medicine. Mohiuddin’s organization, the American Institute of Islamic Studies and Culture, is building a mosque on the campus. “Jerusalem is so important to these three faiths. We are sort of reproducing that model.”

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…the implication that Jesus is making [in Matthew 11] by calling his yoke “easy” and burden “light” is that we are, all of us, apart from him, striving under a cruel yoke and a crushing burden. And maybe one way to say that, and to see it, is to say ”“ as Jesus elsewhere did ”“ that knowing the truth will set us free, and that lies, falsehoods, not only deceive, they enslave.

But to make any sense of that, we have to understand what freedom is. Our modern, evolved notion of freedom is largely, I think almost exclusively, negative. It is always freedom from something: freedom from moral or legal restraint, freedom from limit, from being told what to do. So, it’s “Keep your laws off my body,” or, “The government can’t make me buy health insurance,” to choose left and right examples.

But there is another and older idea of freedom. It conceives of freedom as a positive capability. It is freedom for. It has to do with understanding what sort of a creature I am, and then the pursuit of those good things to which my being, my nature, is ordered.

In other words, a fish is not more free if it decides to forsake the limits of water and flop up on the dock and go for a stroll; it is decidedly less so.

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The ministry called Joseph’s Promise, inspired by the…scriptures, cannot be explained without introducing William, an inmate at Lieber Correctional Institution, who received a life sentence two decades ago. Many years ago, William gave his life to Christ and has since faithfully served as a Chaplain’s assistant at Lieber.

A few years ago Tom Blazer, a member of Church of the Holy Cross, Sullivan’s Island, renewed his relationship with William, his boyhood friend. at some point William told tom that he was troubled by what happened to
inmates’ remains when they died.

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Never underestimate the power of a well-told story.

The Rev. Adam Bartholomew was converted to biblical storytelling when the Rev. Thomas Boomershine asked him to serve as his audience while he prepared an audiotape of Mark’s Passion narrative as part of his dissertation at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where both were students in the 1970s. First Boomershine read the narrative. Then he told it.

“I was absolutely astonished at the difference. That converted me,” said Bartholomew, a former United Church of Christ minister and now Episcopal priest-in-charge at Church of the Ascension in Mount Vernon, New York .

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With its twin towers standing tall above Pearl Street at Division Avenue, the church is built with limestone taken from the Grand River bed and the building is the largest stone structure in continuous use within the city, according to facilities manager David Hawley.

St. Mark’s history parallels the growth of the city around it. The parish was formally organized in 1836; barely 10 years after Louis Campau first hauled his canoe ashore on the west bank of the Grand River at an Indian village near the “grand rapids.”

“On the face of it, most people aren’t aware just how old that building is,” Barr said. “Not many people off the street have ever really thought about it.”

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Both men are religious — [Joseph] Eppink is Episcopalian, [Ralph] Panelli is Roman Catholic — so a church wedding was necessary for them.

The couple booked the First Lutheran Church in Albany, Babcock’s place of worship. They said they would have loved to have the ceremony in Eppink’s church, but Bishop William Love of the Albany Episcopal Diocese has barred priests from participating in same-sex marriage ceremonies. The congregation supports the couple. The Sunday after the law was passed, “We had a coffee hour in front of the church, and there was this huge cheer from people. The church, the parish, they’re all very excited,” Eppink said.

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The response of parishioners to the bishop’s letter was low key at Saint Eustace Episcopal Church in Lake Placid.

“I think they’re just digesting it,” the Rev. Brock Baker said. “For our parish, it is not a great controversial issue for us. I think it will continue to be a topic.”

The future of marriage for gay and lesbian Episcopalians in the Diocese of Albany is uncertain.

“It’s too new right now,” the Rev. Colin Belton of Trinity Episcopal Church in Plattsburgh said. “There’s canon law we have to follow. Bishop Love has stated the diocesan position. That’s where we stand. It’s really too soon to say much more than that.”

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The murders, beatings and state-sanctioned violence suffered by Anglicans in Harare under the Mugabe regime are akin to the discomforts faced by Episcopalians loyal to the national Church who reside in dioceses that have departed for the Anglican Church in North America.

This summary of the situation in Harare from Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori came in an August 2 report released by the Episcopal News Service (ENS) summarizing her trip to Central Africa. Her remarks are similar to claims made at the Jamaica meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in 2009. However, in Kingston delegates from the Global South rejected the Presiding Bishop’s attempt to cloak the Episcopal Church with the victim’s mantle, arguing in the United States it was the Episcopal Church who was the aggressor in its legal battles….

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On a recent hot Sunday morning, 73 people sat down to worship at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church with the Revs. Don Baxter and Melissa Adzima.

Fans circulated air in the sanctuary where, not too long ago, regular attendance was hitting a high around 40, maybe 50 on a good day.

“We’re hoping to get 100 people by Christmas,” Adzima said.

The growth at the Millcreek Township church has followed the start of a redevelopment led by the youngest bishop in the Episcopal Church. He’s created a three-member leadership team at St. Mark’s that includes one of the youngest Episcopal priests.

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For Christ Church in Hudson, the split came from within. Half the congregation left in 2003 after an openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, was ordained in New Hampshire. They set up a new church across town, Holy Trinity Anglican.

At the same time, entire congregations of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Akron and St. Luke’s in Fairlawn left the Diocese of Ohio. The pastor of St. Luke’s, Mike Kraynak says Robinson’s ordination was one of several concerns.

“One thing I believe is really tragic is the gay community gets blamed sometimes because it makes headlines — that this separation is about homosexuality. Our decision to leave the Episcopal Church was really a result of several decades of drifting apart of theological understandings, such as the divinity of Christ, or the nature of salvation”¦”

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… membership has always gone up and down, and in recent years has waned to the point that no more than 10 people show up on any given Sunday.

None of the remaining members even live in Wellsburg anymore, [Senior Warden Lois] Barton said.

The church hasn’t had its own pastor in years and shares a priest with a cluster of Episcopal churches in the area.

The remaining members finally made the painful decision to dissolve the church. The building will remain the property of the Central Episcopal Diocese of New York, which will decide its fate, Barton said.

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Check it out if you are so inclined.

The Rev. Mark Lewis is married. He also wants to become a Catholic priest. Lewis is the rector of St. Luke’s in Bladensburg, the first [Episcopal]… parish in the U.S. to seek to become Catholic under Anglicanorum coetibus, a process outlined by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 that allows groups of Anglicans to join the Roman Catholic Church without discarding their liturgical heritage. Raised Episcopalian, the 52-year-old Lewis entered the ministry 10 years ago and has two grown children. He will become Catholic with his parish in October.

Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?

Obviously, I am of the Catholic faith. Even as Episcopalians, we believed we were Catholic Christians. The Episcopal Church is a very broad church. In it you can have very evangelical people, and in it you can also have very high church Anglo-Catholics, of which I was one.

Why did you and your church convert?

I teach Catholic theology to my people. Once the apostolic constitution was announced, it opened a door that had previously been closed to us. I didn’t really want to sway them with my excitement, so we looked at it together: “Is this something that is really of interest to us?” We looked at the difference between being a Catholic in the Anglican tradition, and being a Catholic in the Roman tradition. And we realized as a church that we needed to be in communion with the Church of Rome.

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For the Episcopal Church, questions about homosexuality and same-gender relationships came to a head with the election of the Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson. In a controversial move in 2003, Robinson made history as the first openly gay priest to become a bishop in his church.

“It was like a lightning bolt hitting in the middle of the living room,” said Rev. Maureen Doherty, an Episcopal priest and a campus minister at the University of Northern Iowa.

Since then, a lot has changed in her church and in her state. After Iowa removed barriers in 2009 that had kept same-sex couples from marrying, Doherty, a lesbian, wed her partner. Doherty now has permission from her bishop to wed other same-sex couples whereas before, she was limited to offering a blessing.

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The ongoing struggle to get young people in the pews at churches across Brooklyn is motivating some clergy in the Diocese of Long Island to develop new ministries that challenge the popular way of how churches reach out to 20-somethings.

Predominate tactics — a rock band, projector screens and altars stripped of traditional decors — have failed to resonate with 20-somethings. Instead, it’s the traditional aspects of the Episcopal faith and its liturgy that young people are now drawn to, clergy say.

The Rev. Robert Griffith, who has been working with St. Paul’s Church in Carroll Gardens, has created an initiative called Imago Dei, or Image of God, that is working to understand the Millennial Generation — those born after 1980 — and its views of faith in hopes of devising new ways to bringing them closer to Jesus Christ.

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Listen to it all if you so desire. Please note that in the second section of the sermon I give a description of the eruption of Mount Saint Helen’s in 1980 in Washington State but I slip up and described it as something else.

A cathedral dean rarely chooses to return to a former parish as priest-in-charge, but for the Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III that transition was an answer to prayer. Lloyd, dean of Washington National Cathedral since 2005, will return in October to Trinity Church, Boston, where he was rector from 1993 to 2005.

“My fundamental calling is as a priest ”” a preacher and teacher and pastor,” he said. “And the decision for me was to let go of this large, complex, exciting place” and to focus on a pastoral ministry. While he said that returning to his former parish “was a surprise” and “not part of the plan,” the possibility began to emerge as he thought about and prayed about his perceived calling to return to parish ministry.

“I’m not in this business to step up,” he said. “Every step has been to ask what with my gifts I’m being called to do.”

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New York–After same-sex marriage becomes legal here on July 24, gay priests with partners in the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island will head to the altar. They have to. Their bishop set a nine-month deadline for them to marry or stop living together.

Next door, meanwhile, the Episcopal bishop of New York says he also expects gay clergy in committed relationships to wed “in due course.” Still, this longtime supporter of gay rights says churches in his diocese are off limits for gay weddings until he receives clearer liturgical guidance from the national denomination.

As more states legalize same-sex marriage, religious groups with ambiguous policies on homosexuality are divided over whether they should allow the ceremonies in local congregations. The decision is especially complex in the mainline Protestant denominations that have yet to fully resolve their disagreements over the Bible and homosexuality. Many have taken steps toward acceptance of gay ordination and same-gender couples without changing the official definition of marriage in church constitutions and canons. With the exception of the United Church of Christ, which approved gay marriage six years ago, none of the larger mainline churches has a national liturgy for same-sex weddings or even blessing ceremonies.

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The former rector of All Saints Church in Las Vegas, Fr. Eldwin Lovelady told CEN that during the five years Fr. [Bede] Parry was his assistant “I found him to be faithful to his priestly ministry, a wonderful pastoral presence to me and to members of the parish, and a friend.”

In an apparent contradiction to the bishop’s claim that restrictions were placed on Fr. Parry’s ministry and the “reasons for it conveyed” by Bishop Jefferts Schori to his supervisors, Fr. Lovelady said he “never had even the smallest hint of any kind of inappropriate behavior, or any inclination to such. I was not aware of anything in his past and now that I’ve been made aware of these allegations, I have not changed my opinion about Bede in any way and if I were still in the diocese of Nevada, I would be supporting him.”

Bishop Edwards’ claim the diocese did not receive the 2000 psychological profile of Fr. Parry is at odds, as he notes, with the claim made in a lawsuit filed last month in Missouri, which stated the Episcopal Diocese was given a copy of the report. However, the bishop’s further contention that any psychological profile conducted in 2000 that indicated a predilection for abuse would be “dubious” as such tests would not be developed until “20 years later” appears to be a misstatement.

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Here is a little of my personal history and reflections. I am at a point in my own journey where I find myself reflecting deeply on how God is calling us to be church. When I went to Divinity School or seminary, the model was to have a seminary trained priest for each congregation. Even in those days, there were congregations who had to share in yoked ministries or in clusters. When the Bishop of North Dakota asked me in the mid-80’s, to work with him in ministry development, a new vision opened for me. Now I believe what we are doing is part of a larger thing that God is doing. In the last few years there has been considerable talk about emergent church, sometimes called emerging church, as well as talk about the Missional Church. As I read and talk with people, my sense is that all of this is part of a broader movement led by the Spirit that is affecting Christian churches. Changes are occurring in the Anglican Communion, as well as in other branches of the Christian Church. I believe what we are doing in Total or Shared Ministry is part of this broader movement.

I believe that this is all about transformation initiated by God and led by the Holy Spirit.

First, I want to mention the terms we use in Minnesota. We use the terms “Total Ministry” and “Shared Ministry,” and while they are very similar, there is a little difference in connotation. When all this was getting started in Minnesota back in the ”˜90’s, the term Total Ministry was used. When Total Ministry got started, it was in small congregations who no longer had a vicar or rector. Then several years ago, St. Luke’s in Hastings came along as a new variation. They had had a full time rector but because of economic factors, they could not afford that model any more. Their rector agreed to go to half time and they called a ministry team to work with her. They decided the term Shared Ministry worked better for them because it indicated that they had a half time rector who shared the ministry with the team, and then by extension, all the baptized in the congregation. Whether we call it Total Ministry or Shared Ministry, most of what I have to say today applies equally to both. The process of how it works is pretty much the same either way.

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