I was speaking at a Methodist clergy gathering when a pastor told me that at first the hotel had not been excited about hosting the group, since its members weren’t going to run up any kind of bar bill. But then the hotel manager noted that they had more than made that up in how much was spent on dessert. The Methodists were welcome there anytime.

In my own denomination, the United Church of Christ, the clergy do their best not to leave those poor bartenders disappointed. It’s not that we like to drink, of course. It’s an economic justice issue. And we order dessert, too. Anything for the Lord.

Someone once said that when the Baptists come to town, the bars are empty but the liquor stores do very well. When the Episcopalians come to town, I suspect they’re both happy. Though maybe not the dessert makers: Episcopal clergy seem to be skinnier than the rest of us, and much better dressed in their clergy shirts and clerical collars. Plus, black is slimming….

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It was a blessing for me to encounter the theologian Austin Farrer a year before his sudden death. With him, I was one handshake away from his friends Tolkien, Lewis, and Sayers. In reflecting on natural disasters and God’s action in the world, he said with stark realism that in an earthquake, God’s will is that the elements of the Earth’s crust should behave in accordance with their nature. He was speaking of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, which killed about the same number of people counted so far in devastated Haiti. Most were killed in churches on All Saints Day, which gave license to rationalists of the “Enlightenment” to mock the doctrine of a good God. Atheists can suddenly pretend to be theologians puzzled by the contradictory behavior of a benevolent God. On the other extreme, doltish TV evangelists summon a half-baked Calvinism to say that people who get hit hard deserve it.

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Pope Benedict XVI has a new commandment for priests struggling to get their message across: Go forth and blog.

The pope, whose own presence on the Web has heavily grown in recent years, urged priests on Saturday to use all multimedia tools at their disposal to preach the Gospel and engage in dialogue with people of other religions and cultures.

And just using e-mail or surfing the Web is often not enough: Priests should use cutting-edge technologies to express themselves and lead their communities, Benedict said in a message released by the Vatican.

“The spread of multimedia communications and its rich ‘menu of options’ might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web,” but priests are “challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources,” he said.

Read it all.

The argument for direct ordination meets its biggest challenge, I think, on grounds of tradition, which are strong. In contrast, “it works for me” is prone to counter-examples of “it doesn’t work for me,” “this other way could work for me,” and “if transitional ordination is your call, that’s great, but it isn’t mine.”

Read it all.

“Why are clergy the worst dressed people in church?” said a lay friend of mine the other day. “I know they shouldn’t try to be too transcendent, but do they have to dress aiming to look like hobos?” he said.

It got me thinking. I must say I think he’s onto something. Commonly, but not always I am pleased to say, in my experience the clergy dress worse than the lay people. Not as a question of casual versus formal. There is a way of dressing casual that looks really good. There is a way that looks positively daggy and scruffy.

I wonder why this is. I guess one of the reasons is that overall now we are a much more informal society and that means that a Sunday best really doesn’t exist. A good guide is to just look at television. The Sunday presenters are dressed more casually than the weekday ones, and that should be a model, of course, to the clergy if they are not wearing more formal robes. Although there is a way of dressing casually which looks quite smart, there is a way of dressing casually that looks like you just don’t care.

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Meanwhile, California’s largest cash crop is being largely ignored in the frenzied search for politically-viable revenue. The state’s marijuana yield is conservatively valued at $14 billion annually ”“ nearly double the combined value of our vegetable and grape crops. The state Board of Equalization estimates that taxing adult marijuana consumption like alcohol would generate $1.4 billion in new revenue for the state. While that’s only a modest contribution toward our fiscal woes, it’s one more incentive to end decades of failed marijuana prohibition. In fact, the financial and human price that we currently pay for criminalizing pot is far too high.

California, which decriminalized low-level marijuana possession in 1975, arrested more than 78,000 people for marijuana offenses last year alone, a nearly 30 percent increase since 2005. Of those arrested, four out of five were for simple possession, and one in five was a child under the age of 18. Police disproportionately arrest young people of color, many of whom permanently enter the criminal justice system and suffer severe limitations to their educational and employment opportunities.

California spends hundreds of millions of dollars to enforce marijuana prohibition. While law enforcement focuses ever-increasing resources on arresting marijuana users, there were 185,173 reported violent crimes in California in 2008, but only 125,235 violent crime arrests. Where are our priorities?

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And so to you, beloved of God at the church of the Good Shepherd:

The apostolic ministry has lost standing in the Episcopal Church, even in Virginia where it used to be very highly valued. Here in this parish, however, you have responded to it, and that is a cause for great thanksgiving and great hope. There is no greater need in the church today than that of feeding the flock with the full, concrete, biblical, Trinitarian content of the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified and risen. Ross Wright has spent his entire life studying that full content. In your embrace of him to be your rector, you have an idea of what you are receiving, and that is therefore part of your calling also, your service also. That reception of the gospel translates into the good works that identify Christ’s life in the world. Christ’s life, not ours. The transcendent power belongs to God and not to you, to God and not to me, to God and not to Ross.

It will cost Ross a good deal to bring you this message week in and week out, as it costs every parish priest, but you will receive life from it. The transcendent power of God is defined by Paul in Romans as the power that raises the dead and calls into existence the things that do not yet exist (Romans :17). And as you receive that divine life, you will be moved, invigorated, and sustained by it. It will send you out to serve his needy, broken, suffering world””the world for which he poured out his life, the world for which he gave himself in surpassing love, for which he conquered death, and for which he came again in the fulness of his resurrection power to bear you up in all your trials and bring you into his everlasting kingdom.

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You’d think being a wife, mother, author and blogger would be enough to keep someone busy.

But not the Very Rev. Katherine Bingham Moorehead, who will be installed today as dean of St. John’s Cathedral and the Jacksonville-based Episcopal Diocese of Florida.

As dean, she’ll oversee the 1,500-member cathedral parish and serve as Bishop Samuel Johnson Howard’s second-in-command of a diocese of 77 congregations in 25 North Florida counties.

As the cathedral’s first female dean, she’ll also be hitting the Internet and pavement to promote existing cathedral ministries to the homeless and other needy people, expanding educational offerings and working with city officials to revitalize the urban core.

Read it all.

Update: Some statistics on the Cathedral are here.

The season of Epiphany is about journeys. I love the story of Nevill Mott, Master of Caius College, Cambridge and former Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol. He was on a train from London to Bristol when he simultaneously remembered three things: first, he was no longer Professor of Physics at Bristol but at Cambridge; second, he had gone to London by car and not by train; and third, he had been accompanied by his wife.

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One of six nominees to become the ninth Bishop of Wyoming has identified tensions related to the diocese’s program of mutual ministry.

The Rev. John Sheridan Smylie, rector of St. Mark’s, Casper, described a sense that rector-led congregations receive more diocesan support than those that stress mutual ministry.

“I believe the current structure spreads our Ministry developers very thin and may leave them vulnerable to burnout,” Fr. Smylie wrote in a profile document [PDF] distributed by the diocese.

“Rector-led congregations, while being important to the strength of the diocese and to the diocesan budget, have not received as much attention as Mutual Ministry congregations over the past decade,” Fr. Smiley added. “Since coming to Wyoming, I have sought to serve as a bridge between Rector-led congregations and mutual ministry congregations.”

Read it all.

The Bishop of Ripon & Leeds, the Rt Revd John Packer, has rejected claims by the Unite trade union that bullying among the clergy is “rife”.

The allegation is based on figures released by the union, which says it deals with 150 cases of bullying among the clergy a year. Unite currently has 2500 members in its faith-workers branch, the majority of whom are ministers of religion.

Last month, the union backed the Revd Mark Sharpe in his case against the diocese of Worcester. Mr Sharpe said that he had been the victim of a four-year campaign of harassment in the Teme Valley South benefice (News, 18/25 December). Unite described the benefice as “toxic” (see below).

Rachael Maskell, a national officer at Unite, said that cases of bullying among the clergy they were dealing with were becoming nastier, “to the point of criminal activity.

Read the whole article.

When I was 21 I spent a long holiday hitch-hiking to Nepal. While I was there, I received a letter from a fellow undergraduate who had given up his teenage ambition to become an architect, for the sake of the Gospel. He hadn’t intended to get married ”” he thought that he could be more dedicated as a single man ”” but he wrote that if he did, he’d want a wife who was prepared “to give up her career as I have mine”.

And yes, since you ask, it did put me off. I fancied him rotten, but I was passionately committed to my future as an actor. A few weeks later he persuaded me to change my mind, and the following summer, just before we married, he put himself forward for ordination in the Church of England.

There was never any doubt, in his mind or mine, that this was a sacrifice ”” if a joyful, willing one. When I asked my husband, years ago, if he thought that I ought to consider ordination too and he said, certainly not, one in the family was quite enough, I couldn’t have been more relieved.

Read it all.

A bishop is among the 150 clergy and ministers who have sought protection with the trade union Unite from what it describes as a culture of bullying in the established Church.

Most of those who have sought help are in the Church of England but Roman Catholic priests, rabbis and imams have also joined Unite, according to Rachael Maskell, national officer for the union’s faith workers’ branch.

The union, which has set up a special helpline for priests intimidated by their bishops or congregations, is reviewing its clergy caseload as part of its campaign for full employment rights for clergy.

Read it all.

A body is found along a lonely stretch of the Parks Highway at four in the morning. A man discovers his wife at home, who had just committed suicide. A woman, holding a gun threateningly, is shot dead by Alaska State Troopers.

Who do you call when tragedy strikes? In each of these cases, along with the Alaska State Troopers, Father Bill Fournier responded in his new volunteer capacity as a chaplain serving with the troopers.

“We get called mostly for incidents which involve death,” said Father Fournier, “and our role is two-fold. We minister to the troopers themselves, and we support the troopers in ministering to the people who have been affected.”

In addition to his chaplain duties, the priest with a sense of humor and an infectious laugh is also pastor of the 800-family Sacred Heart Church in Wasilla and the chancellor of the Archdiocese of Anchorage.

Read it all.

9. What was your major in college?

Psychology and English

10. What book is on your nightstand?

“A Prayer for Owen Meany,” by John Irving

11. What is your favorite comfort food?

Roast chicken

12. How did you meet your spouse?

In Spanish 201 at the University of Alabama.

Read it all.

As this debate moves toward conclusion, it is crucial that we remember why we’re trying to provide quality, affordable health care to Virginia’s families. In March 2009, the Episcopal Church published its position on health reform in a booklet titled “Promoting Health Care for All.” The booklet was circulated by the Episcopal Public Policy Network, and includes this quote from the Book of Common Prayer:

“Almighty and most merciful God, we remember before you all poor and neglected persons whom it would be easy for us to forget: the homeless and the destitute, the old and the sick, and all who have none to care for them. Help us to heal those who are broken in body and spirit, and to turn their sorrow into joy. Grant this, Father, for the love of your Son, who for our sake became poor, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

But the Episcopal Church is not alone. In June 2009 other Christians have also declared that health reform was an urgent priority in a press release: “The health of our neighbors and the wholeness of the nation now require that all segments of our society join in finding a solution to this national challenge.”

Recently, the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia supported a resolution reiterating “the Gospel message of concern for others which extends to concern for their physical health as well as spiritual well being.”

Read it all.

“I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither. I would ask that they do not steal from small, family businesses but from national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.”

With those words, [Tim] Jones set off a firestorm of criticism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, rebuked Jones, saying the priest ought to know right from wrong.

“His concern for the least well-off is admirable, but his remedy is both misguided and foolish.”

Jones’ words bring to mind a different time when Victor Hugo wrote “Les Miserables” in 1862. The main character, Jean Valjean, was pursued by a police inspector for stealing a loaf of bread for his starving family. Hugo’s contemporary, Charles Dickens, wrote about his disgust of poverty in such works as “Oliver Twist.” Dealing with wretched poverty and breaking the law to alleviate it seemed to be characteristics of the Victorian age.

But as Carey points out, that time is not now.

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A[n] [Anglican] priest from York has been criticised by police for “highly irresponsible” comments in a sermon advising desperate people to shoplift.Father Tim Jones, 41, claimed on Sunday that stealing from large national chains was sometimes the best option open to vulnerable people.

He added that it was far better for people desperate during the recession to shoplift than turn to “prostitution, mugging or burglary”….

Delivering his Nativity message at St Lawrence C of E Church in York, Father Jones told the congregation: “My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift.

“I would ask that they do not steal from small family businesses, but from large national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.

Read it all and there is more there.

This Christmas, a new priest will be leading the mass at Christ Church in Hamilton. The Rev. Patrick Gray started his new job as Priest-in-Charge at Christ Church in Hamilton on Oct. 1. The former rector of Christ Church, Jurgen Liias, was called to the rector position at the Christ the Redeemer Anglican Church in Danvers.

Gray comes to Christ Church from seven years as associate rector of the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill in Boston. Gray conveys the qualities of youth and energy, drawing people in with his smile and comfortable friendliness. His office, still in a state of transition, has the rare addition of a dove named Lovey-Dovey.

“She was in training to be a carrier pigeon,” explained Gray, “but she got lost and we adopted her.”

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Americans’ views of the “honesty and ethics” of clergy have hit a 32-year low, with just half rating their moral caliber as high or very high, according to Gallup’s annual Honesty and Ethics Ratings of Professions survey.

The reason for the decline from 56 percent last year to 50 percent in 2009 is “unclear,” according to a Gallup news release, which also noted that “now the clergy’s ratings are below where they were earlier this decade” at the height of the Catholic Church’s clergy abuse scandal.

Barbara Dorris, outreach coordinator for the Chicago-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, attributed the drop to ripple effects from seven years of negative press surrounding predatory priests.

Read the whole thing.

Which minister of God would tolerate any hindrance to the flow of thanksgiving/offering procession during any service or special church event?

This was the challenge the then Vicar of the All Saints Church (Anglican Communion), Ojuelegba, Surulere Lagos, Reverend Caleb Mmaduoma, now Bishop of Ideato Diocese, had 14 years ago.

What started as one young boy’s spirit filled dance to the offering box, whenever the church’s band started rendering exhilarating praise and worship songs during offering or thanks giving period, later became a teething problem which many parishioners had wanted to be done without.

From being a one man’s dance show to the offering box, many other boys joined the dance train and looked up to every Sunday or church event to pour their sorrow and joy to the Lord through their slow paced gyrating dance steps.

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What kind of personal pain would cause a 42-year-old pastor to abandon his family, his calling and even life itself? Members of a Baptist church in Hickory, North Carolina, are asking that question after their pastor committed suicide in his parked car in September.

Those who counsel pastors say Christian culture, especially southern evangelicalism, creates the perfect environment for depression. Pastors suffer in silence, unwilling or unable to seek help or even talk about it. Sometimes they leave the ministry. Occasionally the result is the unthinkable.

Experts say clergy suicide is a rare outcome to a common problem. But Baptists in the Carolinas are soul searching after a spate of suicides and suicide attempts by pastors. In addition to the recent suicide of David Treadway, two pastors in North Carolina attempted suicide and three in South Carolina died by suicide, all in the past four years.

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Father David Waller, of St Saviour’s CofE Church, in Markhouse Road, Walthamstow, said the announcement that … [an Episcopal leader in maryland] could become the denomination’s first openly gay female bishop does not sit comfortably with all members of the Anglican church.

The Reverend Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England, has urged the Episcopal Church USA not to allow her ordination.

Fr Waller said: “The issue about how the Anglican community relates to one another and to others is important.

“The more it fragments, the more it becomes a different church. All these divisions make it difficult to engage in conversations with other churches. If Anglicans have such a broad spectrum, their identity can become blurred.”

Read it all and please note the correction on where Mary Glasspool currently serves.

”¢ Scriptural Authority. This is such a comprehensive dimension of our present crisis in the church that one hardly knows where to begin. But one can hardly do better than St. Ambrose’s statement that “the whole of Holy Scripture be a feast for the soul.” How seldom one hears upon us who are bishops in Tec such glowing statements about the Bible. In my experience all too many of our bishops and priests seem to mine the scriptures for minerals to use in vain idolatries. There is too little confidence expressed in its trustworthiness; the authority and uniqueness of revelation. Indeed, as J.V. Langmead-Casserly once put it, “We have developed a method of studying the Word of God from which a Word of God never comes.” Too often supposed conundrums or difficulties are brought up, seemingly in order to detract from traditional understandings, never considering the damage to the faithful’s trust in God and his Word. Ridiculous arguments such as shellfish and mixed fabrics are dragged out (long reconciled by the Fathers of the Church, as well as the Anglican Reformers) in order to confuse the ill-taught or the untutored in theology. And those who are intellectually sophisticated, schooled in many academic disciplines, but dreadfully untaught in the Bible and theology, are, through little fault of their own, except for naively trusting generations of slothful priests and bishops, are led astray. We must be willing to speak out against this.

—South Carolina Bishop Mark Lawrence in his special clergy day address earlier this year

The Rev. Marcus Kaiser will be ordained a priest on Saturday, December 5 at a service beginning at 11 a.m. at Holy Comforter, Sumter, the wonderful parish where I served my curacy.

In the field of investment the man who is reliably wrong is a twisted genius. A good return is possible if the investor can do the precise opposite of everything that he recommends. The Church Commissioners, the asset managers for the Church of England, have a claim on the title of anti-investors supreme. Stung by sinking the lottery plate into property at the top of the market, they switched heavily into equities just as the long boom came to an end.

The result is a severe depletion of the Church’s pension fund at a time when retired clergy are living longer than ever. The clergy live in tied accommodation and earn only a small stipend, which makes reforming their fixed-benefit scheme difficult. As the task force established by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York concluded: “A guaranteed pension and access to affordable retirement housing have come to be seen as important ingredients of the compact.”

The fund is therefore in a parlous state.

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The Church of England is facing the loss of as many as one in ten paid clergy in the next five years and internal documents seen by The Times admit that the traditional model of a vicar in every parish is over.

The credit crunch and a pension funding crisis have left dioceses facing massive restructuring programmes. Church statistics show that between 2000 and 2013 stipendiary or paid clergy numbers will have fallen by nearly a quarter.

According to figures on the Church of England website, there will be an 8.3 per cent decrease in paid clergy in the next four years, from 8,400 this year to 7,700 in to 2013. This represents a 22.5 per cent decrease since 2000.

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Jon Snow talks to Colm O’Gorman, the Executive Director of Amnesty International in Ireland, who was a victim of sexual abuse perpetrated by a Catholic priest as a teenager.

The video link is provided–some 10 1/2 minutes. Watch it all.

The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland connived with the authorities in a cover-up spanning decades to shield paedophile priests from prosecution, an official report concluded yesterday. Hundreds of crimes against children were not reported as the four archbishops of the Archdiocese of Dublin remained wedded to the “maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church and the preservation of its assets”.

Instead, the church hierarchy shuffled the sex offenders from parish to parish, allowing them to continue to prey on victims. In some cases paedophile priests were even promoted. The 750-page report by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse on the Dublin archdiocese ”” the second significant inquiry this year to expose appalling levels of sexual abuse of minors in Ireland under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church ”” said that it had uncovered a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy throughout the period that it investigated between 1975 and 2004.

It said that the State had helped to create the culture of cover-up and that senior police officers regarded priests as “outside their remit”.

“The State authorities facilitated that cover-up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all and allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes,” it concluded.

Read the whole article.

The report states that the Commission has no doubt that clerical child abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other church authorities.

It states that the structures and rules of the church facilitated that cover-up. It also says that State authorities facilitated the cover up by allowing the church to be beyond the reach of the law.

It claims that the welfare of children, which should have been the first priority, was not even a factor considered in the early days by State and church authorities.

The preservation of the good name, status and assets of church institutions was the first priority, according to the report, which states that priests were seen as the most important members of the institution.

The Commission says that it has identified 320 people who complained of child sexual abuse during the period 1975-2004.

Read it all and make sure to follow all the links.