There is no need for a “Flying Bishop” for Welsh traditionalists, the Archbishop of Wales told members of the church’s Governing Body last week, as the pastoral care offered by the current bishop’s bench is sufficient to meet the needs of all Welsh Anglicans.

Responding to a question from a member of the Governing Body during is April 22 session in Llandudno, Dr. Barry Morgan said the bishops were offering “pastoral and sacramental care to every member of the Church in Wales, without exception.”

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(ACNS) More than 30 bishops from around the Anglican Communion joined the Archbishop of Wales and the Archbishop of Canterbury to consecrate two new Welsh bishops at Llandaff Cathedral on Saturday afternoon (April 4).

Gregory Cameron, 49, was consecrated 76th Bishop of St Asaph. He follows Bishop John Davies who retired at the end of last year. He was previously Deputy Secretary General of the Anglican Communion Office and prior to that was chaplain to Dr Rowan Williams when he was Archbishop of Wales.

David Wilbourne, 53, was consecrated Assistant Bishop of Llandaff.

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They have raised more than £1,000 for a mobile dental clinic delivering frontline medical aid around the bombed out streets of Gaza. The clinic, which has been funded totally by the Church in Wales since 2000, is part of the work of family health centres in Gaza run by the Near East Council of Churches.

Members of the Young Muslim Community Organisation in Newport, South Wales, held a bazaar to raise money following an appeal by the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, for urgent aid for the work of the NECC clinics. The appeal was intensified after a direct missile attack destroyed one of the family centres in Shij’ia last month.

Ifthir Ahmed, chair of the YMCO, said the group was pleased to support a Welsh appeal for humanitarian aid.

He said, “We read about the destruction of the family clinic and the invaluable service the mobile dental clinic provides for so many people in the strip. We felt that some of the money we raised had to go to this very noble cause.

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The Rev Canon Gregory Cameron, 49, who is Deputy Secretary General of the Anglican Communion Office in London, was chosen by members of the Electoral College of the Church in Wales meeting at St Asaph Cathedral.

The announcement was made by the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, at the west door of the cathedral on the first day of the meeting.

Canon Gregory Cameron will be the 76th Bishop of St Asaph, an area covering the north-east corner of Wales ”“ the counties of Conwy and Flintshire, Wrexham county borough, the eastern part of Merioneth in Gwynedd, Denbighshire and part of northern Powys. His election follows the retirement in December of the Rt Rev John Davies who served as Bishop of the diocese from 1999.

A Welshman who was ordained in the Diocese of Monmouth, Mr Cameron has been involved in the ecumenical relations of the Anglican Communion at global level for the past five years. Previously, he served as Chaplain to the Archbishop of Wales, then Dr Rowan Williams.

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The Archdeacon of Cardigan, the Venerable Andrew John, is the Bishop Elect of the Diocese of Bangor.

The announcement was made this afternoon by the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, at the west door of Bangor Cathedral on the third and final day of the meeting of the Electoral College.

The election follows the death of the Rt Rev Anthony Crockett in June, who served as bishop of the diocese from 2004. The new bishop will be the 81st Bishop of Bangor, serving an area stretching across north-west Wales from Holyhead to Llanidloes.

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The Church in Wales will not appoint a new “flying bishop” for traditionalists, Archbishop Barry Morgan said on Sept 17, saying the position was no longer necessary nor was such a post consistent with Anglican ecclesiology. Those opposed to the ordination of women still had a place with the Church in Wales, he said and asked traditionalists to trust the bishops to look after their interests.

The decision comes as a repudiation of the work of Dr Rowan Williams, traditionalists charged, as the former Bishop of Monmouth was instrumental in creating the post of “flying bishop” 12 years ago, and marks a hardening of positions in the Welsh Church.

Traditionalist leaders took little comfort from the bishops’ assurances of continued support. The Rev Alan Rabjohns, Chairman of Credo Cymru, Forward in Faith Wales said “this is a disappointing and sad statement.”

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While we have always have our historic formularies and creeds, the Church has needed from time to time to restate again her position on issues affecting our common life. In the 1998 Lambeth, one of the issues was our Church position on the family. And if Lambeth 2008 is anything to go by, that mind remains.

If so, why can’t we submit ourselves to this discipline and mutual accountability as minimally expressed through the Windsor-proposed Covenant process (as a solution to the crisis and help the Communion to deal with future similar ones)? If being part of the wider (global and by far, much larger in some parts) Communion is to mean anything, why can’t each Province choose to stand together on this? And we have not even begin to mention our relationships with our ecumenical partners and what these recent innovations will do to our long held ”˜Via Media’ role.

We have come thus far in affirming the Windsor Report (and the ”˜process,’ which in the opinion of some, weakens the report). Whether quick or otherwise, the crisis needs fixing.

We pray that the Covenant Design Group and various Communion bodies will not blink.

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Some of us who attended the 1998 Lambeth Conference were not looking forward very much, if I am honest, to the one in 2008. The 1998 Conference, although it produced a lot of useful documents on mission, unity and human rights and a whole range of other subjects, fell apart on the issue of human sexuality towards the end of the Conference. The plenary dealing with Human Sexuality was the only one that refused to accept a report from a group that had been discussing the issue for three weeks and insisted on altering it, thus losing the balance of that carefully crafted document. The result was a bad tempered debate that soured everything. In reality, the issue of human sexuality had simmered under the surface of the 1998 Conference from the outset and that shows that it isn’t just the consecration of Gene Robinson or public rites of same sex blessings in Canada that are wholly responsible for the present crisis in the Communion. Throughout the ’98 Conference groups met in secret on and off campus, pursuing their own particular views on human sexuality and briefing against each other, so that when it actually came to the Resolutions, there was bound to be a conflagration and indeed, there was.

From the outset, the 2008 Conference ”“ the 14th Lambeth Conference to be held, did not appear to have a dangerous under-current simmering beneath the surface. Everyone knew of GAFCON’s meeting, i.e. the meeting of around 200 bishops who had refused the Archbishop’s invitation to Lambeth and who met in Jerusalem beforehand. Everyone knew that Gene Robinson had not been invited; everyone knew that there were different views on sexuality, and everyone knew about the events that had taken place since ’98, yet there seemed to be a genuine desire on the part of everyone to engage constructively with those holding different views. Admittedly 200 Bishops were absent mainly from Africa, one or two from England and Australia but that too needs to be seen in perspective. Uganda was the only Province not to be represented by a bishop and some of the African Bishops had come under intense pressure from their Primates not to come, even though some of them wanted to. (This tells you something about the power of Primates in some Provinces of the Communion and why some of them fail to understand why the whole Communion does not fall into line when they speak).

It helped to know, of course, that nothing would be decided at this Conference ”“ no Resolutions would be passed as has happened at most Lambeth Conferences. It was a return to the intention of the first Lambeth Conference called in 1867 by Archbishop Longley for brotherly counselling and conferring in response to a crisis caused by the Bishop of Natal who believed in a non literal interpretation of the Scriptures….

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FORMER archaeologist John Wyn Evans has been flung into the frontline of the Anglican Communion as the new Bishop of St Davids.

The 61-year-old was shocked at his elevation, which followed the resignation of Carl Cooper after intense speculation about his personal life.

He takes the helm of the ancient diocese at a time when the future of Anglicanism is shrouded in uncertainty.

Disputes over scriptural authority and sexuality have sparked fierce confrontations between traditionalists and liberals.

The Governing Body of the Church in Wales meets today in Lampeter. Every member knows the Church in Wales has the potential to trigger an earthquake in the Communion next month if high-profile celibate gay Dean of St Albans Jeffrey John is named as the next Bishop of Bangor.

But while the crises in Angli-canism have made headlines, churches face the deeper challenge of connecting with an increasingly secular society.

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(ACNS) The man in charge of one of the country’s best loved landmarks and the cradle of Christianity in Wales was elected as the new Bishop of St Davids.

The Dean of St Davids Cathedral, the Very Reverend John Wyn Evans, was elected as the 128th bishop of the diocese by the Electoral College of the Church in Wales, at a “lock in ” meeting at the cathedral.

The election took place following the resignation of the former bishop, Rt Rev Carl Cooper, in May, who was bishop from 2002.

The Very Rev John Wyn Evans (known as Wyn), 61, has served as Dean for the past 14 years, during which time he was the driving force behind the £5.5m Cathedral restoration project, which included the acclaimed rebuilding and expansion of the historic cloisters area, and has secured the future of the building for generations to come.

He said he was stunned but honoured to have been elected bishop of the diocese in which he has served since his ordination. He said, “We are fortunate that Bishop Carl gave the diocese a sense of purpose and direction which I look forward to continuing.”

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THE new Bishop of St David’s has this evening been named as the Very Rev Wyn Evans, the current Dean of St David’s.

After less than a day locked inside St David’s Cathedral, 46 members of the Church in Wales named Rev Evans as their choice.

There was said to be “strong support” for the decision.

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Members of the Church in Wales may be anxious not to exacerbate existing tensions over the issue. A senior source close to the election told The Times: “One member of the college is going to put Jeffrey John’s name forward. It will be a very close thing.”

Another Church in Wales insider said: “He has a good pastoral record. He might well be considered.”

The Rev Giles Fraser, Vicar of St Mary’s Putney, a friend of Dr John and founder of the Inclusive Church lobby that champions the gay cause, said: “Jeffrey John would make an absolutely splendid bishop. This is not before time. This is a man who does not contravene the guidelines on human sexuality at all.”

But in a joint statement, Canon Chris Sugden and Philip Giddings, of Anglican Mainstream, the conservative lobby set up in response to Dr John’s appointment to Reading, said: “If he is being nominated to a Welsh episcopate, the obstacles remain the same as to his previous candidacies for senior appointments.”

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Update: Peter Ould has important thoughts on this here.

Here is one:

Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales: “I think people have realised that there are not going to be any resolutions and some feel frustrated and wanted some kind of definitive statements to take home with them. Part of what this process is about is listening to different viewpoints. The drafters of the covenant will revise the covenant in the light of these. It’s the only sensible way. It may seem a long drawn-out process but it will go to the Anglican Consultative Council and then come back to the provinces who will then decide if it is acceptable to them or not. There is no point in submitting it to churches now, who will tear it apart. The Windsor Continuation group has involved listening to the reactions to the proposals and it will go away and these further suggestions will be brought to the Anglican Consultative Council and then go to the provinces.”

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The first starts about 45 second in and is on the recent vote of General Synod, it includes comments from David Banting and David Holding.

The second starts just past 29 minutes in and has Trevor Barnes having a conversation with women bishops Victoria Matthews, Kate Waynick, Geralyn Wolf, and Sue Moxley.

The third starts about 34 1/2 minutes in and is a conversation with Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales.

The fourth starts a little past 38 1/2 minutes in and is a conversation with the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, Andrew Burnham

Start listening by clicking here.

Canon Andrew Knight of Swansea and Canon Tudor Griffiths of Deeside were among five clergy who said in a statement yesterday the appointment of a bishop in a gay relationship could be “church-breaking”.

They said: “The innovation of the American and Canadian Anglicans in the area of teaching on sexuality has already caused enormous damage to their churches. If the Church in Wales were to follow the line indicated by the Archbishop, the same disastrous results could be expected here.

“It is a question of whether the church will or will not remain faithful to the whole teaching of scripture and Christian tradition. The ordination of persons in same-sex relations is, therefore, an issue of church-breaking significance.”

Canon Knight said: “While I am sure the Archbishop is entitled to his own opinions, it does raise the question about how far he represents us all and provides a focus for our unity… I’m not sure what the Archbishop of Wales thinks he’s doing ”“ whether he’s simply wrong about where he feels the community is on that issue, or whether he’s trying to start something.”

The Rev Lorraine Cavanagh, Anglican chaplain to Cardiff University, stressed that Dr Morgan’s comments should not be taken out of context.

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Dr [Barry] Morgan said the consecration of a gay bishop would no problem to him, although it might be for his church, and he would “alert” fellow leaders.

He said: “If I thought that a person who had been nominated was an excellent candidate in every other way and that he was in a faithful relationship – for me personally that would not present a problem.

“But of course it might present a problem for my church and I would have to alert the electoral college to that,” Dr Morgan added.

Bishop Robinson has been excluded from the Lambeth Conference, held every 10 years, but will be in Canterbury at the same time.

He is due to speak at St Mary’s Church in Putney, west London, on Sunday.

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The Archbishop of Wales has denounced the pace of the devolution of law-making authority from Westminster to the Welsh Assembly as “tortuous and convoluted,” telling the BBC it would be “immoral” for the Assembly not to be granted further legal powers soon.

Archbishop Barry Morgan’s comments to the Good Evening Wales programme followed a ceremony at Windsor Castle where the Queen approved the transfer of new powers to the Welsh Assembly. The authority to enact laws assisting those with special learning needs was approved on April 9 and is the first of 10 orders ranging from mental health services to fire safety slated for devolution under the 2006 Government of Wales Act.

Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan said the ceremony marked “a little bit of Welsh history” as for “the first time in 500 years the people of Wales are now able to create laws to help improve their day-to-day lives.”

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WELSH vicars today called for couples to be able to get married in the Anglican church of their choice in Wales.

Yesterday it was announced that a Parliamentary committee is expected to give the go-ahead for engaged couples to get married anywhere in England, where they have lived for six months, or where their parents or grandparents were married.

But because the Church in Wales is disestablished, the marriage rules will not be relaxed in Wales.

As a result, couples in Wales are denied the same degree of matrimonial choice as those living a few miles over the border.

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THE question of women bishops will inevitably come back, the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, said, after the prospect of women bishops in the Church in Wales received an indefinite setback on Wednesday of last week.

The House of Clergy in the Governing Body lacked a two-thirds majority in their favour. The House of Bishops was unanimously in favour of the Bill to enable women to be ordained as bishops, and the Laity voted for it 52-19, but in the House of Clergy the voting was 27 for and 18 against, which was just 60 per cent in favour.

The Bill had been published in July 2007, and a select committee had been established to consider amendments from the dioceses, of which 12 had been included in their report to the Governing Body meeting in Lampeter last week. At the start of the debate, however, all but the select committee’s own two amendments had been withdrawn.

As the Bill was defeated in only one House, it could come back at any time, Dr Morgan said, “but there is no point in bringing it back to the Governing Body in two or three years just for it to be defeated again; so we need to take stock.”

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The Church in Wales … voted not to consecrate women bishops. The motion, proposed by Archbishop Dr Barry Morgan, fell by three votes. In the laity it was 52-19, in the clergy 27-18. It fell after the amendments that would have offered alternative oversight for the clergy opponents also failed. Canon Mary Stallard, chaplain to the bishop of St Asaph and pictured on the far right of this picture, said: ‘The moment will come back. We are very disappointed. It is not totally unexpected. But we are looking forward to bringing it back. This issue will not be ignored.’

Read it all and Archbishop Barry Morgan’s piece in the Guardian is here also.

In his sermon at Llandaff Cathedral on Easter Sunday, Dr Barry Morgan says, “There isn’t one story of Jesus in the New Testament but four, since each evangelist uses the events of Jesus’ life to make his own particular point. Nor do we have just one story of the appearance of Jesus after his resurrection, but many different stories. The Gospel writers emphasise different aspects of the significance of Jesus, so that the question to ask, is not did the events in these stories happen exactly in this way but what truths are they trying to convey?” Another important perspective we need in order to grasp the meaning of the stories is the historical one, he says.

“The New Testament has layers and layers of meaning ”“ it tries to convey truth through stories that are subtle, deep and many layered. Very often to understand them, you need to know something about the Jewish background against which they were written and also about the Old Testament.”

Dr Morgan takes St John’s story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus outside the tomb in the garden on the first day of the week after his resurrection to illustrate his point. It’s a story, he says, which can be read as a straight historical account ”“ Mary meets the risen Jesus. But its true significance is that God through Jesus reverses the fall of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis.

“Here in St John, Jesus is the new Adam. Here is a new creation. Here through the person of Jesus, men and women can be recreated, transformed, redeemed. In the person of the risen Jesus, God becomes close and familiar once more as he calls Mary by name. Whereas through the fall, humanity had become estranged from God, now in Jesus, God has drawn close. This story is also about the reversal of death. Jesus has burst through death to God’s new life. Mary mistakes him for the gardener and of course he is the gardener, but not in the sense Mary means it, but because He is the Creator of the garden ”“ referred to in Genesis.”Finally, he concludes, the stories need to be seen from the perspective of faith as well as reason.

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To have a coherent and rational debate about the tenets of the Christianity is perfectly natural. To have a virulent, almost irrational attack upon it claiming that what is being said is self evidently true is dangerous, not just because it refuses to allow any contrary viewpoint but also because it affects the public perception of religion. It leads, for example, to local authorities calling Christmas ”˜Winterval’, to hospitals removing all Christian symbols from hospital chapels, or to schools refusing to put on nativity plays, or allowing children to send Christmas cards with a Christian message, or airlines refusing staff the freedom to wear a cross round their necks.

All of this is what I would call the new ”˜fundamentalism’ of our age and any kind of fundamentalism, be it Biblical, atheistic or Islamic, is dangerous, because it allows no room for disagreement, for doubt, for debate, for discussion. It leads to the language of expulsion and exclusivity, of extremism and polarisation, and the claim that because God is on our side, He is not on yours.

Contrast all that with the message of the angel to the shepherds in the nativity story in St Luke’s Gospel, “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all people”. It is a message of joy and good news for everyone
”“ no one is excluded, everyone is embraced, from the shepherds, who would have been seen as nobodies by respectable Jewish society, to the magi – Gentiles, who would have been strangers in the land.

The Gospel writers make the point that Jesus is the focus of all God’s promises and purposes from the beginning of creation. God is not exclusive, he is on the side of the whole of humanity with all its variety.

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An interesting read.

Alwyn Rice Jones’s time as Archbishop of Wales involved big changes in the Church. Having once failed to get the ordination of women as priests through the governing body, he brought it back in 1996 when it was approved and, unlike in England, no clergy left the Church in Wales. He also steered through the legislation for the remarriage of divorcees in church.

A theological liberal, Jones was a committed ecumenist. While a priest at Porthmadog he developed close relations with the Roman Catholic Church and was secretary of the Gwynedd Ecumenical Forum. From 1985 to 1987 he was the chairman of the Commission of Covenanting Churches in Wales. He steered a Bill through the governing body for the creation of local ecumenical projects and became chairman of the religious advisory committee for the Welsh-language TV channel.

He was committed to social justice and was not afraid of political issues. He condemned the bombing of Kos-ovo and was a strong supporter of devolution and the creation of the National Assembly of Wales. A year after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, he wrote to his clergy saying that he thought too much was being made of her status. He left it to the discretion of his clergy as to whether prayers should be said on the anniversary of her death.

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