Lift up our hearts, we beseech thee, O Christ, above the false show of things, above fear, above laziness, above selfishness and covetousness, above custom and fashion, up to the everlasting truth and order that thou art; that so we may live joyfully and freely, in faithful trust that thou art our Saviour, our example, and our friend, both now and for evermore.
–Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)
[Katharine] Jefferts Schori has made no public response to the lawsuit, and her office has referred reporters to the Diocese of Nevada. Perspectives, a weblog published by the Episcopal Church, has reprinted the statements by Edwards.
These responses are “sadly predictable, woefully inadequate and painfully self serving,” said David Clohessy, executive director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
“They’re focusing on protecting their reputations, not on protecting our children,” Clohessy told The Living Church July 11. “It’s terribly sad to see Nevada’s bishop defending his boss and her public image instead of helping the police charge a child molesting cleric.”
Bishop Joe Binzer worked in the business world for a decade before entering the seminary and in June became the region’s highest-ranking Catholic leader behind Archbishop Dennis Schnurr.
The former accountant, whose style is a combination of good-natured priest and meticulous organizer, has for years relied on his analytical skills, as well as his faith, to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the church.
His business now is saving souls, but Binzer remains a clear-eyed pragmatist when it comes to doing his job and solving tough problems.
The Russian writer, Dostoyevsky, was sometimes very critical of western culture, of our attempt to secure ourselves behind our knowledge, behind our technology, and we could add another word, that Dostoyevsky didn’t know: behind our ”˜growth’ ”“ are we planting seeds for growth or merely weeds? He thought that we had lost our feeling for Christ. He claimed that we no longer, as he put it, ’asked the heart for advice’.
Here at the start of the 21st century we should listen to that criticism. There is no doubt that even only 30 years ago many people thought that religion would soon be a thing of the past ”“ we would outgrow it. Like a scorched plant it would wither and die as we moved into a post-secular existence. There are many things on the move at present in the thoughts and lives of modern man. But we must also acknowledge and accept our history ”“ as well as one another’s histories, for then the walls come tumbling down, as we learn to listen and live alongside our neighbours ”“ including our new, strange, neighbours.
Not for one second do I believe that there is any point in going back and finding cover behind the thick walls of dogmatic church teachings. Nor can we further any understanding of faith or the church by hiding behind an anxious defence of the Bible, and outdated view of gender roles or an unrealistic view of freer sexual morals. We must not make faith into a ghetto. We must not withdraw and just sit and talk among ourselves! We must be the seed that falls on fertile ground. not the seed that has no root and lasts only a short time.
Jamie Stutler grew up in a very traditional church background ”“ a formal worship experience typical among Episcopalians. Quiet and contemplative, he enjoys retreating with members of the Cistercian monastic order, taking walks, hiking and spending time outdoors.
Yet inspiration to start a contemporary service at St. Clement’s Episcopal in Canton, where he’s been the rector since 2004, came from a rather lively group: the 50-70 kids who attend Vacation Bible School each year.
Major [David] Bowlus is part of a cohort of military chaplains who have gone through the same kind of multiple deployments as American soldiers in nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and suffered similar emotional aftershocks.
“I found myself at a crossroads of giving and pouring out and having to find a way to refill my reservoir,” Major Bowlus said in an interview last month, recalling his lowest ebb. He continued a few moments later: “I realized my passion for God and my love for people was waning. I cared, but I didn’t care as much as when I first went in. I was lovingly going through the motions.”
Major Bowlus’s challenges, his struggle and his ultimate recovery ”” to the point that he now instructs chaplains at the military’s school for them at Fort Jackson ”” exemplify the experiences of his peers. And it sets this group of military chaplains apart from their predecessors in the Vietnam War era, the last period of sustained American combat overseas.
The Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd, , former rector of Trinity Church in Copley Square, is returning to Boston after spending nearly seven years as dean of the National Cathedral in Washington.
Respected for major fund-raising efforts and for leading Trinity Church through a 25 percent growth in membership during his 12-year tenure there, Lloyd’s decision to return, announced yesterday, pleased his former congregation.
“The reaction that I’ve seen has been overwhelmingly positive,’’ said Robert Cowden III, senior warden of Trinity’s vestry, who oversees finances and church property. “Sam was much beloved and respected when he was here before.’’
The questions arose after a plaintiff listed as John Doe 181 filed a lawsuit June 22 against Conception Abbey, a Roman Catholic monastery in Missouri, where Parry was a monk in the1980s and directed a choir. The plaintiff, now an adult, alleges that Parry had sexual contact with him during a 1987 summer choir camp at the abbey.
The suit also alleges that Parry engaged in inappropriate relationships with other youth in their late teens both at the abbey and while he attended St. John’s School of Theology in Collegeville, Minnesota. The suits claims that “Parry was a known serial child predator who had sexually abused numerous students” before he assaulted the defendant.
The Presiding Bishop’s office has refused to respond to questions about her alleged violations of Episcopal Church canon law, stating they do not comment on litigation. However, an investigation by The Church of England Newspaper suggests there is a prima facie case that the Presiding Bishop also violated rules she put in place in the Diocese of Nevada governing clergy sexual misconduct when she received the Rev Bede Parry into the priesthood in 2004.
The Presiding Bishop’s silence and the subsequent uproar comes as the Church’s new disciplinary canons came into effect on July 1, making her liable for ecclesiastical discipline for her actions as Bishop of Nevada. It also raises questions about the fairness of the clergy sexual abuse rules, as the canons presume that change of life and rehabilitation are impossible for those who have committed sexual sins.
A statement issued by the Nevada diocese after the lawsuit was filed raised more questions than it answered, according to victims’ advocates, and said nothing of Jefferts Schori’s role in the matter.
“Parishioners deserve the whole truth about why (she) kept silent about Parry’s crimes and why she ordained him,” said David Clohessy, national director the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
“Many church officials, not just Catholic bishops, fixate on self-preservation rather than on preventing abuse and healing victims and exposing the truth,” he said.
The Bishop of Lichfield’s plan to shorten services might make them more palatable, but at what cost?
The Rt Rev Jonathan Gledhill, the Bishop of Lichfield, said worship has become too complicated and time-consuming, leaving people who are not regular churchgoers feeling confused and excluded.
He said that services have become too long, recommending clergy should aim to keep them to no more than 50 minutes and make sure they are careful not to preach for too long.
…some of our churches don’t have a weekly Communion at 10 o’clock. And I think that even the greatest enthusiast would admit that there have been losses as well as gains in this great change which has happened over the last 60 years.
The first loss is length. Morning Prayer used to last 50 minutes with a good sermon; Family Services only 45 minutes. But a sung Eucharist can take anything from an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half ”“ especially if there is a Confirmation added in. Sometimes I find myself thinking that this is a good way of saying “Go away” to young people who come to visit us.
The second loss is simplicity….
With [Will] Willimon set to retire as bishop in 2012 (he plans to return to teaching at Duke Divinity School), it is appropriate to consider how the Willimon experiment in the episcopacy has turned out. As one might expect, it has not been business as usual.
Willimon has used his authority to “decimate the career ladder,” as one pastor told me. In the process he has alienated many pastors in the North Alabama Conference. He has promoted younger clergy deemed to be more talented over those with more seniority. He has streamlined some meetings and eliminated others. “I got annual conference down to two days,” he boasts (it had previously lasted four and a half days). And he has made accountability a hallmark term.
Accountability, in this case, mainly means that every congregation’s weekly numbers for giving, attendance, hours of service, and professions of faith are posted online for all the world””and the rest of the conference””to see. They appear on a page on the conference website called the North Alabama Dashboard. These statistics become one source of input for decisions on pastoral appointments. What looks to some like a call for public accountability looks to others like an act of public shaming. For critics, the Dashboard seems to treat the dynamics of church life like so many hamburgers sold.
— Jason Byassee, “The bishop’s dashboard,” in a recent Christian Century
[Josh Carney]…serves as teaching pastor at University Baptist Church, about a mile from Baylor’s campus….
What are overchurched college students like? What challenges do they pose for ministry?
They’re students who went to church their whole life without really knowing why. It seems we have a lot of students who were either taught good theology but had no praxis to accompany it or vice versa. When people are exposed to the repetition of liturgy””and all churches have some kind of liturgy””without understanding why, they often get frustrated or lose interest.
What has the transition toward more age diversity been like? Any bumps?
It’s been exciting. My heartbeat is for families, and as this group grows it presents an opportunity to get to know and love more people. The major hurdle has to do with congregational identity. An increase in families means a need for more resources for them, and when we shift resources we make statements about mission and identity. We are trying to figure out who we are in a way that both affirms the historical and makes room for the new.
A recent lawsuit filed in Missouri over child molestation and abuse charges against a Catholic monastery there contains allegations which, if proved, raise troubling questions about the conduct of ECUSA’s Presiding Bishop when she was the Bishop of Nevada from 2000 until her election to the national post in 2006. The lawsuit alleges that one of the abbey’s Benedictine monks, Bede Parry, molested the plaintiff and several other young men over a five-year period between 1982 and 1987 while they sang in the Abbey Choir, of which Parry was the director….When the facts of the abuse came out in 1987, Parry left the monastery for a course of treatment, and then used his position as a Catholic priest to work at a variety of Catholic and Lutheran parishes in the southwest.
In 2000, Parry apparently applied to join another Catholic monastery, and underwent psychological testing and evaluation. “The results of this testing revealed that Fr. Parry was a sexual abuser who had the proclivity to reoffend with minors,” the lawsuit alleges. Instead of joining the monastery, Parry was hired as the music director at All Saints Episcopal Church, in Las Vegas, where Jefferts Schori was the diocesan. (She did not need to be consulted about his hiring, and Parry now says that he did not disclose the test results to the clergy at All Saints.)
The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has declined to respond to questions concerning her ordination to the priesthood of a paedophile. Her silence has prompted questions from liberals and conservatives in the church about what she knew of the Rev. Bede Parry’s confessed abuse of boys, and when she knew it.
Reading Ordinariate leader Father David Elliott was anointed by the Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth the Right Rev Crispian Hollis at St John’s Cathedral, Portsmouth, on Saturday.
Father David is among the first wave of clerics joining a global break away to Catholicism, spurred on by Pope Benedict XVI’s offer to accommodate Anglicans within the Roman Catholic Church through the English Ordinariate – a group for Church of England traditionalists wishing to switch allegiance while retaining some of their Anglican traditions.
Evangelical leader Leith Anderson has announced plans to retire as senior pastor of his Eden Prairie, Minn., megachurch””where GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty is a parishioner.
Anderson will end his 35-year pastoral leadership of the 5,000-member Wooddale Church at the end of the year. He will continue his role as president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
Friday marked a new day for the Rev. Bryan O’Carroll and for St. George’s Episcopal Church.
It was O’Carroll’s first day on the job as pastor — not just at St. George’s, but at any congregation.
Maybe that’s not so remarkable in itself. Every minister has to start somewhere. But consider that O’Carroll, who formerly managed his family’s business, Blue Line Inc. in Sarasota, came to…[ordination] late.
Watch it all (video lasts 2 3/4 minutes)–KSH.
Over 100 clergy and lay leaders attended the second offering of “The Future and Your Church” workshop, June 2, at the Church of the Redeemer, Orangeburg. They heard about the changing societal landscape churches face and what they can do to fulfill the gospel-mandate to make disciples while stemming the tide of declining church attendance and involvement.
“The world isn’t the way it used to be,” said the Very Rev. John Burwell, Rector of the Church of the Holy Cross, Sullivan’s Island and Daniel Island, during a presentation in which he used visuals to illustrate changes in culture. “What people want from their church is different. If we want our churches to thrive we can’t do things the way we used to do them.”
Bishop Lawrence told of the disturbing decline in average median Sunday church attendance in the Episcopal Church, from 74 in 2002 to 66 in 2009. “That statistic is stunning,” he said. “It used to be that a typical Episcopal congregation of 70 could afford a full-time clergy person…but because of demographics that’s becoming increasingly difficult. When you can’t afford a full time priest a church begins to just maintain. We work to keep the doors open, so someone’s here to bury me.”
For years, Guy Erwin worked toward becoming a Lutheran minister, knowing the whole time his church wouldn’t ordain him because he is gay.
Now Erwin, 53, is one of two California Lutheran University professors who were ordained recently because the Lutheran and Episcopal churches changed their policies on ordaining [non-celibate] gay and lesbian clergy.
“I had thought, ‘Maybe it’s too late for me,'” said Erwin, who was ordained at CLU in May. “But my friends said, ‘The church has been calling you all these years.’ It has ended up being a point of great joy.”
“The results of this testing revealed that Fr. Parry was a sexual abuser who had the proclivity to reoffend with minors,” the lawsuit said, adding that the results were provided to the abbey, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas and the Diocese of Nevada. Parry began working as music director at All Saints in 2000.[[Katharine] Jefferts Schori was consecrated Bishop of Nevada in 2001.
Parry said he felt called back to priestly ministry when an opening arose at All Saints’ Church.
“I talked to the bishop, and she accepted me,” he told The Kansas City Star. “And I told her at the time that there was an incident of sexual misconduct at Conception Abbey in ’87. The Episcopal Church doesn’t have a ”˜one strike and you’re out’ policy, so it didn’t seem like I was any particular threat. She said she’d have to check the canons, and she did.”
The Hudson-based spokesman for a local clergy sex abuse survivors group has taken Dubuque Archbishop Jerome Hanus to task for his handling 24 years ago of a former Catholic monk, as recounted in a new Missouri lawsuit.
Hanus is not named as a defendant in that lawsuit.
In the suit, filed in Nodaway County, Mo., a plaintiff named as “John Doe 181” said he was sexually molested as a minor while at a choir camp in 1987 at Conception Abbey Inc., a Benedictine abbey in Missouri and the suit’s sole defendant, by a Father Bede Parry.
The Rev. Christopher Young lovedcats ”“ so much that when the rector at one church announced that no staffers should feed the stray cats, Young snuck across the street regularly to put cat food in a nearby parking lot.
At his apartment, located near Sanford’s Lake Monroe, “Father Chris” was also famous for feeding the ducks. When management asked him to stop because the ducks were making such a mess on the complex grounds, it was too late. The ducks already knew where he lived.
“They would come up and knock on his sliding glass door” with their beaks, said his friend Ruth McDonald.
The Rev. Canon Carol L. Wade, former canon precentor at the National Cathedral in Washington, will be the new dean and rector at Lexington’s historic Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral. She is the first woman to hold either position at the downtown church.
Wade will assume her new duties in September. Her selection was announced at both worship services at Christ Church on Sunday.
“I am overjoyed,” Wade said in a telephone interview. “I cannot tell you how much I look forward to partnering with the wonderfully gifted people at the cathedral and working with the diocese, the people of Lexington and beyond.
In other words, our competition is hell. Hell is at work wherever the will of God is defied.
Every time a little child is left unloved, unwanted, uneducated, unnoticed. Every time a marriage ends. Every time racial differences divide a street or a city or a church. Every time money gets worshipped or hoarded. Every time a lie gets told. Every time generations get separated. Every time a workplace becomes de-humanizing. When families get broken up. When virtue gets torn down. When sinful habits create a lives of shame or a culture of shamelessness. When faith gets undermined and hope gets lost and people get trashed. That’s when hell is prevailing.
It is not acceptable to Jesus that hell prevail. Your job is not to meet a budget, run a program, fill a building, or maintain the status quo. Your job is to put hell out of business.
Read it all (used this one in adult Sunday school this morning–KSH).