Archbishop of Armagh Richard Clarke said he believes that Dr Welby will “evaluate the situation” before confirming a date for the next Lambeth Conference which is due to be held in 2018.

Dr Clarke told The Irish Catholic that Archbishop Welby is still a relatively short time in office and that he needed some time to hear the views of the different Provinces about “what kind of Lambeth do we want, what would be appropriate.”

He said: “I think Archbishop Welby, like the good hard-headed businessman that he was, is taking a step back, trying to survey the scene, and seeing what is the best way for us to take counsel together and in what format.

“He is not a man who is going to be wrong-footed, nor is he going to be frog-marched,” Dr Clarke said.

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“At my age, [Armagh] didn’t seem an obvious career opportunity” he chuckles, and one is left with the impression that having lost Linda, his wife, and mother of their two grown-up children, after a long illness in 2009, he would have remained content in Meath and Kildare until perhaps retiring in his late sixties.

He would have been expected to maintain his sustained ecumenical outreach and perhaps to have increasingly indulged his love for writing about theology and history, having written three books already, including A Whisper of God (Columba 2006).

But now, health permitting, he can remain in the top post in the Church of Ireland until he is 75. While there is little time for writing and scholarship, there are even greater opportunities for ecumenical endeavour for a Church leader who trained as an historian at Trinity College Dublin and as a theologian at King’s College London.

His role involves doing three jobs: being diocesan bishop in Armagh where he doesn’t have an assistant bishop, being a national Church leader/Primate of All-Ireland and being an Anglican bigwig, one of 38 Primates in the worldwide Anglican Communion.

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The Rt. Rev. Ken Clarke, retired bishop of the Diocese of Kilmore, Elphin and Ardagh and now President of SAMS””Ireland will be the speaker at this fall’s annual Clergy Conference at St. Christopher. He is the author of Going for Growth: Learning from Peter (IVP). A contagious teacher, he led the Daily Bible Studies at last year’s New Wineskins Conference.

You may read the agenda there.

(Blog readers are asked to note that “the newspaper is editorially independent of the Church of Ireland, the views expressed in the newspaper, including editorial comment, not necessarily reflecting official Church of Ireland policy.”)–KSH.

ORDER & TIMING OF TOPICS

The Anglican Communion, 00:00-02:22;

Anglicans/Episcopalians in North America, 02:22-04.45;

The Lambeth Conference, 04:45-05:40;

Payday lenders & Wonga, 05:40-08:33;

The Media, 08:33-10:00;

European Court of Human Rights & Human Rights issues, 10:00-13:07;

ISIL & Iraq situation, 13:07-17:10;

Northern Ireland political situation, 17:10-18:47;

Doubt in the Christian life, 18:47-end.

Read and listen to it all.

…I want to pick two challenges in our environment in these islands, but generally across Europe and North America. Two challenges which undermine the presuppositions on which we depend as Christians to give us a common language to address the challenges of our society. The first is the challenge of economic idolatry. It has always existed, but the potential of global markets and the impact of technology has reached a level which, as you in this island know better than most, can hide the contingency of life, so that everyone thinks that everything will always get better, and then, as all idols do, topple and betray its worshippers more quickly and severely than at any time in history.

The second challenge, made far more dangerous by the impact of the first, is an incapacity to cope with difference, with diversity, a sense that you win or you lose, but you cannot co-exist. That, again, is something that is made worse by technology because our differences are brought face to face with us in a way that they never have been before in our history. . . And here, in Northern Ireland, that, too, that challenge of the incapacity to live with one another, is something which you have learned, that you go on learning, and in your resolution of it have much to teach the world, because in so many provinces of the Anglican Communion which we have visited around the world over the last 18 months, 32 others, in the places where there is war and struggle, Northern Ireland is seen as a beacon of light and hope, a place which can face deep-set historic division and turn from it. And it is symbolic and significant that Canon David Porter, Director of Reconciliation at Lambeth, and known to many of you, who is here this evening, is from Northern Ireland.

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For the first time in the history of Belfast, Choral Evensong or Sung Compline will be sung in the city every night with the exception of Saturday.

St Anne’s Cathedral’s weekly Choral Services recommenced after the summer break on 8 September with Sung Compline at 5.30pm on Monday and Choral Evensong at the same time on Wednesday.

On 18 September, Thursday Choral Evensong will be introduced, continuing every Thursday thereafter. On Culture Night, Friday 19 September, the 5.30pm service will also be sung, continuing on Fridays throughout the school term. And after Christmas St Anne’s will also offer a Sung Compline on a Tuesday.

The Dean of Belfast, the Very Rev John Mann, said: ”˜This is the first time ever, as far as I am aware, that any church in Belfast has had a Choral Evening Service every day with the exception of Saturday, which I don’t think we will be able to manage. All of the Cathedral choirs will be taking part with different sections singing on different nights. The clergy will have more singing to do too!’

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Canon Kearon is Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, a position he has held since 2005. Born in 1953, Canon Kearon is a native of Dublin. Educated at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), he served his curacy in All Saints Raheny and St John’s Coolock, before becoming Dean of Residence at TCD in 1984, a position he held until 1990. He was Rector of the Parish of Tullow (Dublin) from 1991 to 1999 after which he became Director of the Irish School of Ecumenics (1999”“2005). Dr Kearon is a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral Dublin and an Honorary Provincial Canon of Canterbury Cathedral, St Paul’s Cathedral London and St George’s Cathedral Jerusalem.

The Most Revd Dr Michael Jackson, Archbishop of Dublin, said, ”˜Canon Kearon has expressed his delight at returning to work in Ireland and his intention to serve the people of Limerick and Killaloe and the communities of which they are a part. I have known Canon Kearon for many years and have always appreciated his personal friendship. I wish Kenneth and Jennifer all that is best within the love of God in their time in Limerick and Killaloe.’

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”˜On behalf of the people of the Church of Ireland I ask God’s blessing and every happiness for Cardinal Seán Brady in his forthcoming retirement. He has been a good friend to successive Archbishops of Armagh and to the wider Church of Ireland throughout his archiepiscopate, and we are grateful to him for this unaffected generosity of spirit. And, on a personal note, I wish to thank Seán for real kindness and warm friendship over many years. We all hope that he will enjoy both true fulfilment and good health in the years ahead.

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This week’s retirement of Pastor James McConnell after some 57 years in the Whitewell Ministries raises the question as to what happens to institutions once the main figure has gone….

In the Church of Ireland, a minister can stay in a parish as long as she or he desires, barring misbehaviour. However, an incumbent can be plucked out very quickly to higher office.

Perhaps the moral of all this is to recognise the reality of life, retirement, frailty and death, and to conclude that, however big or small a leading Church figure may be in his or her day, no individual is bigger than the church itself.

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The Church of Ireland Bishop of Down and Dromore, Harold Miller, called for a united effort to help Christians in the war-torn country.

“It’s really very important for the world at large to be supportive of Christians in Iraq,” he said. “Christianity has been in Iraq for a very long time and what I have observed is that people are now being beheaded for their faith.

“The main Christian town has had most Christians expelled from it, like they did with Jewish people during the Nazi era.

“They are marking the houses of all the Christians with the letter ‘N’ because it comes from following Jesus of Nazareth. It’s profoundly shocking.”

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The Most Revd Clarke said: “One of the most perplexing aspects of the intervention of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, into the debate in England on the side of assisted dying was that a fundamental Christian tenet ”“ that our life on earth is not our property to do with as we choose ”“ appeared to have eluded him entirely.

“Much therefore depends on how we understand the significance of earthly life.

“If life is simply a personal commodity…then life is disposable, entirely at the will of the individual ”˜possessor’. This is clearly not the Christian perspective and, even for the non-believer, it is not an automatic understanding of the significance of life.”

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Killucan, Co Westmeath, Parish Registers (1696”“1786)

Drogheda, Co Louth, St Peter’s Parish registers (1702”“1900)

Taughboyne Union Registers, Co Donegal, (Taughboyne, All Saints’ Newtowncunningham, Killea & Craigdoonish)
(1820 ”“ 1900)…

Check it out.

War must always represent the abject failure of humanity, the head of the Anglican church in Ireland has said. Archbishop of Armagh Dr Richard Clarke said commemoration of the first World War could not be spiritually separated from carnage in Gaza and other contemporary trouble spots.

He addressed a Belfast service marking Britain’s declaration of hostilities against Germany. The Duke of York read a lesson and lit a candle.

“War must always represent the abject failure of the human spirit and of humanity itself,” Dr Clarke said. “It can never be other and we should never pretend it is other.”

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In the Great War, we see heroism and cruelty standing side by side, we see cynical disillusionment and moral determination intertwining, and we see hope and despair in equal measure, and on every side. This was the first time that the weaponry of war could be fully industrialised and it was, also for the first time, that the phrase ”˜total war’ was coined to indicate that civilians were to be regarded as being as much part of the war as the military.

But there are of course also the myths to be debunked. It was not only foot soldiers who died in battle. Indeed, if one was an officer, one’s chances of dying on the western front were fifty percent greater than for those in other ranks. The British generals were for the most part not the total incompetents they are presented as being in popular mythology. Many of them too died in battle; they were not relaxing in beautiful chateaus miles behind the front lines. And personally I can well remember as a child knowing a number of veterans of the First World War whose memories of the conflict were not uniformly terrible.

For all of this, however, the 1914”“18 War undoubtedly changed the history of the twentieth century. Three European empires had disappeared by the end of the War in 1918, and we can also trace to this war the beginnings of the sunset on a fourth empire, the British Empire. Also emerging from the Great War are the seeds of the development of two ”˜super”“powers’ ”“ the United States of America and Soviet Russia ”“ that would come to dominate the world for almost half a century after the ending of the Second World War, that further titanic war that in many respects cannot be totally separated from the First. The course of history changed, brutally, dramatically and forever.

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The Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh Dr Richard Clarke says the Anglican Church must take a long-term approach to its mission in Ireland over the next twenty years which should be based on reality rather than wishful thinking.

The Primate made the comments as the results of a parish-based census, commissioned by the General Synod in 2012 and carried out last November, were released.

The survey shows that average attendance at worship on a ”˜usual’ Sunday was 58,000 people ”“ 15 per cent of those reporting as Church of Ireland in the 2011 national Censuses.

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The inaugural Ecumenical Bible Week takes place from June 8 to15, starting on Pentecost Sunday. This new initiative, involving all the main churches, is a different kind of celebration. It is not a congress or an assembly but a series of events which will move around Dublin and the wider area.

With a highly ecumenical engagement, this new initiative has great potential for the coming together of Christians from all backgrounds around the Word of God which we all share.

The Ecumenical Bible Week is a direct fruit of the International Eucharistic Congress of 2012. If it proves a success, it may become an annual event. The churches and movements involved so far are: Scripture Union, the Evangelical Alliance, the Orthodox Church, the Church of Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church, the Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church.

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Manchester Diocese has over 140 women serving as clergy in the Church. Some were among the first to be ordained priest in 1994.

Bishop Pat said: “It is such a privilege to be invited to speak at such an auspicious occasion as this. It is amazing how, twenty years later, we have taken so much for granted, and it is good on occasion to look back and see how far we have come.

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The 2014 General Synod of the Church of Ireland opened in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, at 10.00 am today (Thursday May 8) with an act of worship led by the Bishop of Meath and Kildare, the Most Revd Pat Storey. During the worship she prayed for the release of the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls.

In his presidential address the Most Revd Dr Richard Clarke, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland focused on ”˜Freely you have received, freely give’ (Matthew Chapter 10 v.8), speaking of the ”˜Church as an organism that is characterised by its giving nature; its people who are characterised by being giving people’. Archbishop Clarke will also stress that ”˜All life is a gift of God; it is never a commodity’. He said: ”˜”¦one of the aspects of modern culture I most fear is that we have turned all human life into a commodity. The very beginnings of life and the end of life on earth are gift, never to be treated as anything less.’

The Archbishop asked questions about society’s priorities ”“ in relation in particular to poverty and foodbanks and in funding for hospice provision ”“ and also encouraged people to consider fostering children in need and urge church members to consider being blood donors and to sign up for organ transplant at death, ”˜as an opportunity for giving to others’, and as promoted by the Flesh and Blood ”“ ”˜FAB’ ”“ campaign.

Check out all the links there and you can find the speeches here.

Bishop Lawrence welcomed Bishop Ferran Glenfield, of Kilmore, Elphin and Ardaugh (Ireland) to the Diocese of South Carolina recently. Bishop Glenfield has been visiting with The Cross, Bluffton, in their continuing ministry partnership. Bishop Glenfield succeeds Bishop Ken Clarke, who is now Director of SAMS Ireland. From left to right, Bishop Mark Lawrence, the Very Rev. Chuck Owens and Bishop Glenfield.

A large congregation gathered in St Eunan’s Cathedral in Raphoe on Saturday 3 May for the installation of the new Dean, Canon Arthur Barrett.

Dean Barrett was joined by his wife Brigid, his family and many friends. As well as many from the diocese of Derry and Raphoe there was a strong representation from his former parish of Rossory. People had also travelled from as far afield as Dublin for the Service.

The preacher at the Service was Archbishop David Chillingworth, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Following the installation there were refreshments and speeches of welcome in the modern parish hall.

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A service to mark the 20th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide will take place on Monday 7 April at 7.30 p.m. in St Anne’s Cathedral Belfast. The speaker will be the Presbyterian Moderator, The Rt Revd Dr Rob Craig.

The Revd Canon Jerome Munyangaju, Rector of Killyleagh, who ”“ along with the Dean of St Anne’s, the Very Revd John Mann ”“ will also participate in the service, said in advance of it: ”˜This year, the 7th of April marks the commemoration of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. This 20th anniversary is an important occasion on which we remember over a million lives brutally lost in just 100 days. Their cries should have been answered, yet the international community, aware of the desperate situation, chose not to intervene. The country and its people have scarring memories of the violent killings, pain and trauma. Kwibuka (remembering) of our past helps toward the healing of our future….

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Deirdre Lyons, Pearse’s wife and director of Alltech’s corporate image, is spearheading plans to renovate the building, which is surrounded by 300,000 graves, including that of Pearse Lyons’ grandfather, John Hubert Lyons.

“I’m working with a historic preservation architect and a team to restore it to its former glory,” Deirdre Lyons said. The building hasn’t been a church in decades and most recently was a lighting store, so it is in pretty sad shape, she said. Half the steeple and the stained glass windows are gone.

Alltech paid about $900,000 for the building, plus about $45,000 to the Church of Ireland to release the site from covenants that would have prevented the sale or use of alcohol.

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Church leaders are encouraging politicians to sustain the momentum and energy generated by the Haass talks.

In a joint statement from the leaders of the Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodist Churches together with the Irish Council of Churches they applaud the ”˜strenuous and sincere efforts put in by all involved in seeking to find solutions to some of the most contentious issues we face’.

They also recognise the ”˜profoundly challenging’ nature of the issues to be addressed but firmly believe that ”˜a peaceful and reconciled society is possible’.

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The Church of Ireland has “no current plans” to follow the example of Anglican church leaders in England and introduce a devil-free version of the traditional baptism service.

In the new wording, currently being-road tested in 400 parishes across the water, parents and godparents are being asked if they “reject evil, and all its many forms, and all empty promises”. In the traditional version, they are asked if they “reject the devil and all rebellion against God”.

The move follows a motion brought to the church’s General Synod from the a group of clergy in Liverpool, who sought to alter the baptism service to include “culturally appropriate and accessible language”.

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The UK and Ireland’s first woman bishop has been consecrated by the Anglican Church at a service in Dublin on Saturday.

The Reverend Pat Storey, a rector in Londonderry, was appointed in September.

She was elected by the Church of Ireland as Bishop of Meath and Kildare, in the Republic of Ireland.

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A senior figure in the Church of Ireland has criticized members of his own church for being dismissive of Catholics.

Anglican Archbishop Michael Jackson of Dublin also said his members needed to be kinder to fellow Protestants who had married Catholics.

Referring to a recent political debate on abortion, Archbishop Jackson said, “I remember earlier this year the deeply pejorative remarks I heard directed against the Roman Catholic Church by members of these dioceses to me because of its stance and principle on abortion.

“The comments were conversational but it was, more than anything, the assumption of an entitlement to be dismissive more than the criticism of content of the other tradition that came across as instinctive,” he said, writing in The Irish Times newspaper.

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The first and most important identity for any of us is that each of us is a child of God, created by him and made in his image and likeness. This is crucially important in the way we live, in how we respond to God and in how we treat each and every other person. If we get this wrong, and regard any of our other identities as of more significance, we are simply a danger to ourselves and other people. If we believe that we are each made in God’s image and likeness we can never treat any other person with anything less than dignity. If we do not get this right, everything else will be wrong in our lives. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of Britain, once wrote that it is indeed difficult to see the image of God in those who are not in our image. Yet it is essential that we should do it.

A second primary identity for us is that we are disciples of Jesus Christ. We are disciples which means “learners”, never smug, never totally satisfied with ourselves, never judgmental of others, sometimes falling but nevertheless being picked up and gently placed on our feet again by a loving Lord. An identity that could be summed up as “following, learning, growing, and telling of Christ”. It is to this area that I will be devoting much of the content of my “roadshows” around the diocese next month.
These are the two identities that we should place above all else ”“ made in God’s image and likeness, and our discipleship of Jesus Christ. Anything that takes their place is simply idolatrous.

There is a third identity which should never be confused with those of which I have spoken but which nevertheless should mould how we live in the service of Jesus Christ. We are members of a particular Christian tradition and we should feel confidence although never arrogance in this identity. T

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The married mother of two, who grew up in Belfast, said she was both “excited and daunted” by the historic appointment.

“I have had an extraordinarily happy experience in St Augustine’s and in this wonderful city, which I will be sad to leave,” she said.

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The Church of Ireland has appointed its first ever woman bishop as the new Bishop of Meath and Kildare.

Fifty-three-year-old Revd Pat (Patricia) Storey is married with two adult children and is currently Rector of St Augustine’s Parish in Derry.

She succeeds the Church of Ireland Primate, Archbishop Richard Clarke of Armagh, in the role.

Responding to the news, Archbishop Clarke said he was “certain that her ministry in the Dioceses of Meath and Kildare and the wider Church will be a blessing to many.”

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Mark Durkan recalled his days as a minister in the Executive during the debate on same-sex marriage.

“Under powers that came from the old position of Lord Lieutenant General in Ireland from the 17th century, I had to sign if a new Church of Ireland church was created,” he told MPs.

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