What if Jesus were living in today’s society, observing the teachings of churches?

The Rev. David Dingwall leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment.

“I wonder if Jesus would recognize much of what is being said and done in his name,” he said. “Some of it, he would say, ‘Yes. You get it.’ But certainly not everything.”

Soft-spoken, with a depth of thought, an easy laugh and prone to toying with his moustache when formulating an idea, the pastor of St. Paul’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in downtown Ocean City said he believes Jesus was militant, a radical, intensely political, but not violent. Jesus issued an invitation — experience a new way of life.

It can be summarized by reading The Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the fifth chapter of the Biblical book of Matthew, one of the gospels.

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The Cathedral of St. James will host a Eucharist and reception to honor the Bishop for this special occasion tonight at 7 p.m. Congratulations to him and the diocese.

I found an invitation to the event here.

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he Spirit of holiness, which one begs might be poured forth anew, is the guarantee to be able to live the vocation one has received in “holiness” and, at the same time, the condition of the very possibility to be “faithful to the ministry”. Faithfulness is the wonderful meeting of the faithful freedom of God and the created but wounded freedom of man, which, however, through the power of the Spirit, becomes sacramentally capable “to be to others a model of right conduct”. Far from reducing the ministerial priesthood to a moralistic category, such an exhortation shows the “fullness” of life: a life which is really thus is a life that is integrally Christian.

The Priest, clothed with the Spirit of the Almighty Father, is called to “guide” the journey of sanctification of the people entrusted to him by teaching and the celebration of the sacraments and, above all, with his own life, with the certainty that this is the only end for which the priest himself exists: Paradise!

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A joyful and adventurous leader has taken the helm of St. Basil’s Episcopal Church.

The Rev. Debora Jennings will miss climbing Mt. Ranier, but she looks forward to discovering the beauty of eastern Oklahoma and capturing it with her camera.

Coming from the Lower Yakima Valley in Washington, the grandmother said the university here was a big draw for her. She’s taught a number of courses, including speech, interpersonal and intercultural communication, and rhetoric, and lectured in sociology, psychology and religious studies.

The local congregation had been without a clergy for a number of years and was hungry for a full-time clergy who would help them focus on mission and ministry.

“The people here in Tahlequah are very hospitable and the people in the congregation very welcoming,” she said.

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To watch Capuchin Father James Stump at work is to see a Christ-centered “ministry of presence” in action as a daily routine.

A chaplain at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto, Father Stump makes his rounds with one purpose in mind: to invite sick and wounded veterans to encounter the living Christ.

Father Stump is quick in his step and quick with a joke as he goes about his work.

Accompanied by a reporter on one of his recent rounds, he joked to a Marine on the move down the hallway in a wheelchair to “watch the speed limit.” They chatted about the Marine’s spinal reconstruction surgery. But in a moment, without a break in the informality, the priest prayed over the patient and asked that Jesus “show his face to you, have mercy on you.”

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Until a few weeks ago, the Rev. Gail Sowell was pastor at two Lutheran churches in the small Wisconsin town of Edgar. That was before members of both congregations jumped headfirst into the simmering debate over gay clergy in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

“It was pretty gruesome,” Sowell said, recalling shouting matches inside the sanctuary; the mass resignation of one church’s council, save one member; even whispers around town that she was a lesbian. “For the record, I’m not,” she said.

When the smoke cleared, the congregation at St. John Lutheran Church narrowly voted to not leave the ELCA. Across town at Peace Lutheran, they voted to leave and fired Sowell. “Fortunately, I’m thick-skinned,” she said.

Not all ELCA congregations have seen that level of turbulence over the ELCA’s decision last August to allow pastors in committed same-sex relationships to serve openly. But by most accounts, it has been a confusing and murky time in the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination.

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No formal response is expected from the UK to the Pope’s offer of a Personal Ordinariate to Anglican groups until after the General Synod meet­ing in July, it emerged this week.

On Monday, dozens of churches, both Church of England and Roman Catholic, opened their doors for a day of prayer about the Pope’s offer. The invitation was extended last autumn to groups of Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church while pre­serving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony (News, 23 October 2009).

The Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Revd Andrew Burnham, had asked members of Forward in Faith, and others, to make Monday, the feast of the Chair of St Peter, “an opportun­ity to reflect, pray, and discern the way forward for each of us, our priests and our parishes”. But on his website he said that the day would not be “a day of decision”.

After the General Synod post­poned until its July sessions the revision stage of the legislation for women bishops, it is thought that most traditionalists will wait until after that debate before react­ing to the Pope’s offer. This means that they will participate actively in elections for the new Synod, which take place during the summer.

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Let us also make this reality a practical factor in our life: if this is how it is, a priest must really be a man of God, he must know God intimately and know him in communion with Christ and so we must live this communion; and the celebration of Holy Mass, the prayer of the Breviary, all our personal prayers are elements of being with God, of being men of God. Our being, our life and our heart must be fixed in God, in this point from which we must not stir. This is achieved and reinforced day after day with short prayers in which we reconnect with God and become, increasingly, men of God who live in his communion and can thus speak of God and lead people to God.

The other element is that the priest must be man, human in all senses. That is, he must live true humanity, true humanism; he must be educated, have a human formation, human virtues; he must develop his intelligence, his will, his sentiments, his affections; he must be a true man, a man according to the will of the Creator, of the Redeemer, for we know that the human being is wounded and the question of “what man is” is obscured by the event of sin that hurt human nature even to the quick.

Thus people say: “he lied” “it is human”; “he stole” “it is human”; but this is not really being human. Human means being generous, being good, being a just person, it means true prudence and wisdom. Therefore emerging with Christ’s help from this dark area in our nature so as to succeed in being truly human in the image of God is a lifelong process that must begin in our training for the priesthood. It must subsequently be achieved, however, and continue as long as we live. I think that basically these two things go hand in hand: being of God and with God and being true man, in the true sense meant by the Creator when he formed this creature that we are.

To be man: the Letter to the Hebrews stresses our humanity; we find this surprising for it says: “He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness” (5:2). And then even more forcefully “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear” (5:7).

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Lately in the Prayers of the People you may have heard us praying for Paul and Cheryl Minor of All Saints, Belmont. They are the Reverends Mr. and Mrs. Paul and Cheryl Minor, the Co-Rectors of All Saints Episcopal Church in Belmont, Massachusetts. We are praying for this couple and their church as we begin to create a Resolution #3 relationship with them and All Saints. Resolution #3 was one of the resolutions passed at our Diocesan Special Convention back in October of last year. That resolution encouraged us to form pastoral relationships with parishes and dioceses, both domestic and foreign to aid and support them as God forms a new Global Anglicanism. Many are paying a high price to defend and proclaim the orthodox faith, the Good News of Salvation bought for us by the Blood of Jesus Christ. Just as some are dying for their faith in parts of the world, Paul and Cheryl are paying a high price to proclaim Jesus as Savior and Lord. Paul has just been restored to active sacramental ministry after being inhibited for two years by Bishop Shaw of the Diocese of Massachusetts. The power of the church has always been built on the blood, the hardships of the martyrs. I pray the hardships the Minor’s are enduring may inspire you in your own faith and growth.

—Arthur Jenkins

With bank bailouts and executive bonuses in the headlines, it’s hard to find the connection between banking and ethics.

But it’s an argument that Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC ”” one of the biggest banks in the world ”” makes in his new book about banking: Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World.

Green is also an ordained priest in the Church of England. In his book, he proposes a “new capitalism” that brings good business and good ethics together. He says moral and spiritual values should take precedence over immediate profit.

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Prentice Dean will be ordained as a Catholic priest on Monday ”” while his wife watches.

The former Episcopal priest and father of two will become the first married priest in the Nashville diocese.

He resigned from the Episcopal Church because he thought the denomination had moved away from traditional Christianity. He converted to Catholicism five years ago, and, after Monday, he’ll be celebrating Mass, hearing confessions and handling all the responsibilities of a priest.

Since the 1980s, the Roman Catholic Church has allowed former Episcopal priests, like Dean, to be ordained under a special provision. Church leaders say the provision is an act of grace toward converts. But some wonder why that same grace isn’t extended to former Catholic priests who left the ministry to marry.

Right now, about 100 married former Episcopal priests have been ordained. Still, the vast majority of the more than 40,000 priests in the United States are celibate.

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One pulpit, shared by two part-time ministers who happen to be married.

The temporary arrangement has been the answer to a prayer for Christ Episcopal Church, whose members had been searching for a part-time priest to lead them spiritually without strapping them financially.

For the Revs. Randall Balmer and Catharine Randall, whose careers as college professors, writers and public speakers keep them plenty busy, the arrangement with this small but devoted congregation satisfies a spiritual need the couple have longed to fill.

“What is so great about it is immediately, they understood that we were a team … working together,” said Balmer, a prize-winning historian who has written a dozen books on faith and religion and is professor of American religious history at Barnard College in New York City and a visiting professor at Dartmouth College. “I love being a professor and a priest. For me, one informs the other.”

“It’s wonderful; I’m so happy,” said Catharine Randall, a professor of French at Fordham University in New York and the author of eight scholarly books and several articles and publications related to religion and spirituality.

Read it all from the front page of today’s Hartford Courant.

On Monday, Anglo-Catholics across England will be holding a day of prayer to help their bishops, clergy and laity decide how to respond to the Pope’s provision of a self-governing Ordinariate for former Anglicans.

Many members of our Church will be praying with them; in Oxford, Anglicans are joining the members of the Oratory for a Holy Hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament.

There is a lot to pray about, and a lot to pray for. Anglo-Catholics interested in the Holy Father’s offer will be praying for gifts of discernment not only for themselves but for their fellow Anglican Catholics and Catholic Anglicans. (The two terms are not quite interchangeable, which gives you some idea of the complexity of the situation.)

But I’m guessing that top of the list of requests to the Almighty will be for the Catholic Church, in consultation with the Anglo-Catholic leaders, to get it right.

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The Anglican Church in Canada is updating how it trains priests so they can minister to everyone from Bay Street stockbrokers to Baffin Island Inuit.

Ottawa Bishop John Chapman, who is leading the initiative, believes a savvier clergy would help bridge the church’s current bitter divisions over issues such as gay priests.

“The genius of the Anglican Church has been its capacity to live in difference,” Chapman said in an interview.

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A time to reflect, to make personal sacrifices, to add discipline to life and to help others in need ”¦ all are goals of the Lenten season, which gets under way today.

Lent is a 40-day period in the Christian religion that leads from Ash Wednesday to Easter, which this year is on April 4. Local religious leaders will encourage followers in the next few weeks to practice self-discipline and engage in prayerful thought.

“We’re in a time of an economic crisis, two wars and much stress,” said Bishop Christopher Epting of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Davenport. “I’ll remind the congregation of their own spiritual basics, alms-giving responsibilities, and the need to fast to remind themselves of people in need.”

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Two Anglican bishops on Tuesday sustained serious injuries in a motor accident on Kampala-Fort Portal Road, which also claimed the wife of one of them.

The bishops were travelling to attend the burial of their colleague, the Bishop of Rwenzori Diocese Patrick Kyaligonza who also died in an accident last week about eight kilometers from the spot where the two bishops got an accident.

Bishops Daniel Gimadu of North Mbale Diocese and Augustine Salimo of Sebei Diocese sustained injuries on the heads after their driver failed to negotiate a bend and the car overturned several times, according to the police.

Perepetua Gimadu died on the way to Fort Portal Referral Hospital.

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A nationwide atheist group is asking religious leaders to take Jesus’ advice and render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s — especially when it comes to taking the federal tax break on their housing.

The Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation says the housing exemption gives churches an unfair advantage because they can compensate their leaders with tax-free housing. Other nonprofits, such as the foundation, can’t do that. So it’s suing the federal government to outlaw the housing allowance.

“We think the law is rotten at the core,” said co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor. “It is not constitutional, it is not fair, and it is not necessary.”

But the exemption’s supporters point to a similar court dispute in 2002 that went nowhere after Congress almost unanimously rushed to save the housing break.

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A self-proclaimed atheist can continue to serve as a local pastor of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, and will not be disciplined for his controversial position on how to describe God.

A special assembly of Zierikzee, a regional church body tasked with investigating the theological statements of Pastor Klaas Hendrikse, said on Feb. 3 that its work is completed.

The decision to allow Hendrikse to continue working as a pastor followed the advice of a panel that said the pastor’s views “are not of sufficient weight to damage the foundations of the church.”

“The ideas of Hendrikse are theologically not new, and are in keeping with the liberal tradition that is an integral part of our church,” the special panel concluded.

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1) Some of you insist this provision is not for England. Then why did the Pope specifically request the English hierarchy to welcome us, stating that we have something to offer as well as receive?

2) Might this distinct gift we bring with us be the reason for not simply being subsumed into the larger body? Certainly my church would offer a very distinct Eastward facing, biretta-wearing Solemn Mass which is very different to the modern rite at the other end of town.

3) Many of us have not already come accross because we were tending to our flock. I could never have individually converted as it felt like an act of escape. This however feels like an act of exodus which allows me to prepare the people and bring them with me, should we decide to accept the offer. That is tremendously exciting but also very, very scary. Rejection on the other side would be hugely damaging ”“please welcome us. We have not been loved for a very long time and may need some TLC and patience.

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Leading conservative clergy have declared their support for a motion at this week’s General Synod which would ally the Church with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).

This was formed in opposition to the consecration of Gene Robinson, the first openly homosexual bishop, and the actions of liberals in the Episcopal Church of the US, which is the official Anglican body.

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The Rev. Billy Graham was named by U.S. pastors as the country’s most influential living preacher, according to a recent survey by LifeWay Research.

The study, conducted last November, interviewed more than 1,000 Protestant pastors by telephone. The participants were asked to “name the top three living Christian preachers that most influence you.”

Graham was cited as most influential by 21 percent of clergy, followed by pastor and author Charles Swindoll, at 8 percent. Charles Stanley, senior pastor of First Baptist Church, Atlanta, and Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., followed closely behind Swindoll with 7 percent of the vote each.

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Father Michael Harper, who died on January 6 aged 78, was for 30 years leader of the Charismatic movement in the Church of England, and his influence extended to many other parts of the world and to several other Churches.

He left the Anglican Church in 1995 however after its decision to ordain women priests. Received into the Antiochian Orthodox Church, he became Dean of its communities in the United Kingdom and Ireland and held the office of archpriest.

Harper embraced the Anglican evangelical tradition following an intense conversion experience while attending a service in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge during his first undergraduate year at the university. He decided to seek Holy Orders, and spent six years as a curate at All Souls, Langham Place, in London’s West End; the rector there, John Stott, was leading the revival of evangelicalism in the Church of England.

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Those who minister the Word of God must be well prepared, and the “cultural dimension” of faith needs to be cultivated, says Benedict XVI.

The Pope affirmed this today when he reflected on the life and teaching of St. Dominic Guzmán during the general audience in Paul VI Hall. He noted “the great contribution made by St. Dominic to the renewal of the Church in the Middle Ages.”

The Holy Father emphasized the saint’s insistence on being well educated and prepared for the apostolate.

Benedict XVI took up this exhortation, urging everyone, “pastors and laity, to cultivate this ‘cultural dimension’ of faith, so that the beauty of the Christian truth can be better understood and faith can be truly nourished, reinforced and also defended. In this Year for Priests, I invite seminarians and priests to appreciate the spiritual value of study.

“The quality of the priestly ministry depends also on the generosity with which one applies oneself to the study of revealed truths.”

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You’ve seen them, maybe you’re one of them: pastors who must be in touch at all times. The cell phone is either in use or strapped handily onto the belt, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice. It’s best as a Blackberry or Treo, so it can vibrate every ten minutes with news of new messages. And just in case those fail, a beeper should be handy. You can never be too wired.

I can understand why some professions would cause one to need to be accessible 100 percent of the time: firefighters, psychologists with mentally ill patients and…plumbers come to mind. But why pastors? Certainly on large church staffs it’s a venerable practice to have one of the pastors on-call at all times in case of emergency. But I worry when I see wired pastors, ubiquitous as they are at church conventions and gatherings of clergy. I fear they conflate importance with accessibility, as if being incommunicado even briefly will lead to spiritual crisis. Must we be like other professions””doctors or financiers””and have a loop around our ear at all times? Or does pastoral wiring suggest anew the loss of confidence of the clergy vocation?

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[The] Rev. Asman, of Santa Barbara’s Trinity Episcopal Church, and Rabbi Gross-Schaefer, of the Community Shul of Montecito and Santa Barbara, annunciated their support for women’s rights and asserted that being religious and being pro-choice are not always mutually exclusive.

Declaring himself a “progressive religious activist,” Asman critiqued the health care bill’s anti-abortion amendment. “God is grieved by this amendment,” he said. Asman went on to say that he feared the “tragic consequences of a pre-Roe world.”

Gross-Schaefer””who for 28 years has been a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, a Catholic institution””was equally supportive of a woman’s right to choose, declaring that abortion was “not a concept of murder whatsoever” given that the “fetus not a separate human being””not until a head emerges.” He said that as “a very religious person, I have to be pro-choice.”

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When a San Francisco nonprofit was pushing a controversial California bill last year to remove the restrictions on energy that residents can generate from solar and wind systems, the group needed supporters.

So it turned to an ordained minister named Sally Bingham.

“We have very few voices that are embraced by all levels of society as moral arbitrators,” says Adam Browning, executive director of the nonprofit, Vote Solar Initiative. “But Sally speaks with moral authority.”

As the environmental minister at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, Ms. Bingham is sought after by more than just Vote Solar. Other environmental groups and political leaders are also reaching out to the 67-year-old, who operates a nonprofit interfaith environmental outreach group dubbed the Regeneration Project out of a modest office in the city’s Financial District.

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A Senior cleric in a northern diocese of England has taken Government minister Harriet Harman to task for her attack on the “traditional family”.

The broadside at the Minister for Women and Equality, who voiced the attack last year, is delivered by the Rector of St John the Baptist church, Chester, the Rev David Chesters.

In the January issue of Phoenix, his parish magazine, the married 64-year-old rector says: “As I write this…Harriet Harman is having a go at the ‘traditional family.’ ”

But it is “this type of family that has moulded a people and a faith over hundreds of years,” protests Fr Chesters who, ordained in 2004, has been at St John’s – Chester’s original cathedral – since 2006.

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A short while ago, I had a conversation with a friend who is going through ”˜Continuing Ministerial Education’ ””what use to be called Post-Ordination Training, or ”˜Potty’ by some wit. He had phoned me to express his concern at what seemed to be the message coming from diocesan management about the future of Anglican ministry, which envisaged significant changes in the nature and deployment of clergy.

That conversation has left me musing on what the church might look like in a decade or two, but also on the whole approach of the church’s ”˜managers’ ””its leaders and policy makers ””to issues which affect ministry at the ”˜grass roots’.

Behind this current thinking is a recent diocesan report which confronts the declining numbers of stipendiary clergy with proposals for a decreasing deployment of full-time clergy in the parishes. (This, of course, is not being driven by money ””it is simply a lack of people coming forward, let the reader understand.)

The clergyperson of the future will thus need to be, above all, a team leader, since he or she will be in no position to do personally the work that used to be presumed of clergy in the past. Only such team players will be affordable as stipendiary clergy. The individual ”˜specialists’, apparently, will have to work on a self-supporting basis.

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