The College meets January 27th
Dear Heavenly Father,
Dare we despise the day of small beginnings? We thank You for inauspicious beginnings. We thank You that there is no tragedy You cannot redeem. We are grateful that Your thoughts are not our thoughts and Your ways are not our ways. We look to you in glad expectation. We look to You in joy.
We know that You have saved and that You will continue to save. We claim the salvation, the healing, and the love of Your Son Jesus. He is the balm of Gilead. May He so completely fill the hearts of the College of Bishops of the Church of England that His light will blaze forth across England.
Don’t pass them by, Lord. Show Yourself strong on behalf of the church. Take their small beginnings and bless them.
Amen.

Read it all and there are more prayers here

Four bishops and a retired civil servant shut away in a palace, talking about human sexuality ”” it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But the resulting Pilling Report is, in spite of 200 pages’ worth of double entendres, neither funny nor enlightening.

It has been clear ever since the Lambeth conference in 1998, which contained the ponderous resolution that ”˜we commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons’, that the Anglican church’s position has been to agree not to agree on the issue. From the Jeffrey John affair to the debate over gay marriage, the church has handled the question like a whoopee cushion at a vicar’s tea party ”” with a mixture of bemusement and embarrassment.

Having spent many months interviewing everyone from the Society of Ordained Scientists to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, Sir Joseph Pilling’s report comes up with the less than profound conclusion that the issue requires the church to have a ”˜facilitated conversation’.

Read it all.

I wanted to contact you all following Lambeth Palace’s announcement today that the Bishop of Dover is to take temporary responsibility for episcopal oversight of the Channel Islands. This follows a proposal I took to the Archbishop of Canterbury last year, which has now been supported and implemented by Archbishop Justin and his colleagues and which also has the backing of representatives from the Islands.

It will be evident to a number of you that, what began as an important and ongoing safeguarding matter in Jersey last year has steadily become complicated by a range of political and legal issues. The safeguarding investigations will, of course, continue and I hope in time we will benefit from improvements to our policies to help vulnerable people in the Islands and across the Diocese. Nevertheless, I am all too conscious of the additional, fundamental issues that have been raised and I believe they also warrant urgent and full attention. Equally I believe that the best way of achieving the reconciliation that we all want is for me to step back for now from the tensions that have arisen and allow for fresh, external input. I am very grateful therefore that Bishop Trevor is able to devote the time to take on this role, on a temporary basis, bringing with him knowledge of the Channel Islands as a former Bishop of Basingstoke.

Read it all.

The Bishop of Dover, the Rt Revd Trevor Willmott, is to assume interim episcopal oversight of the work of the Church of England in the Channel Islands on behalf of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom the Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Revd Tim Dakin, delegated the oversight of the Islands.

The interim arrangement, which has the fullest support of the Bishop of Winchester, will be in place within a matter of weeks. The reports commissioned by the Bishop of Winchester, being conducted by Dame Heather Steel and Bishop John Gladwin in relation to safeguarding issues, will be completed in due course.

Read it all.

I have signed the Time to Change pledge to end the stigma attached to mental illness. I encourage you to join this campaign in the UK, or similar campaigns where you live. Like many of you, I have been close to a number of people who have struggled with poor mental health. I became my late father’s carer in the last years of his life. It was only then that I recognised how we had colluded as a family in not knowing about his mental state for years. He was relatively well supported; but this did not prevent his early death as a result of the physical consequences of his struggle with life.

Research reveals that nine out of ten people in Britain who live with some form of mental illness are stigmatised. As if the illness were not enough to cope with, they are penalised in the workplace and over welfare benefits. They are shunned and laughed at. Worse still, moral blame is still applied to those living with persistent mental illness. We are frightened of it because it is so close to us and any one of us call fall prone to it in some form. It is also scary that, while there can be periods of recovery in any illness, the condition itself may well be chronic and incurable.

Understandably, we all dread that prospect for ourselves or for our loved ones; but it does not follow that we should blame sufferers for reminding us of their need. The media do not help. Of course, it is a tragedy if a psychotic person becomes dangerous and does serious harm to another person. The way that this is often reported suggests that people with mental health needs are likely to be dangerous. The sad truth is that most of those who suffer psychosis, or clinical depression or severe bi-polar illness are only likely to be a danger to themselves as they feel they can no longer endure the isolation and pain.

Read it all.

The Church of England has been accused of scoring an “extraordinary” own goal spending hundreds of thousands of pounds buying a house for a bishop so he would not live in the grandeur of a medieval palace.

The Church Commissioners, the Church’s property arm, announced last month that the next bishop of Bath and Wells will not live in the 800-year-old palace occupied by his predecessors.

Instead, the Rt Rev Peter Hancock will be housed in a property outside Wells offering greater “privacy” and which would be more “conducive to effective ministry and mission”.

Read it all.

Fasting is not just physically demanding. It’s also psychologically tough, says the Anglican Bishop of Manchester, the Right Reverend David Walker, who has drunk only tea and water one day a week during lent for the last decade.

“The night before you start, you think: ‘How am I going to get through the day?'” says Bishop Walker. But it’s never as bad as you expect, he adds.

The key thing is to make sure you’re busy at normal mealtimes, he says. The body is conditioned to want food according to a routine.

Read it all.

Sir Edward Leigh, MP for Gainsborough, said family breakdown had become a “modern plague”.

He blamed a “conspiracy of silence” perpetrated by the Church, the BBC, Parliament and the Press that discouraged people from speaking up for marriage. It has left hundreds of thousands of children “living a tragic life,” he said.

“In our permissive society a view has grown up that people are happiest if they are totally liberated. It is about ”˜me’,” he said. “We are told Britain has changed and we have to accept it but don’t we have a responsibility to speak out for what’s right?”

Read it all.

Something is going right with the British economy, and Chancellor George Osborne is keen to take the credit, “The plan is working”, he announced a few days ago in a speech in the West Midlands. But for many of those I meet, as I visit church supported projects across the Diocese of Manchester, if the plan really is working, then it’s the wrong plan.

I can offer one cheer for the chancellor. The figures for non-welfare related public spending grew year on year under the previous government in a quite unprecedented fashion, one that could only ever be sustained by a continuous rise in national wealth. Once the banker led scandals of six years ago broke, and plunged much of the globe into deep recession, that was never going to remain affordable. Deep cuts in public expenditure became inevitable; someone would have to bear the brunt. As the chancellor said this week, there are no easy answers; tough decisions still need to be made. In an economy that can never be trusted to grow consistently it is fair to say that the proportion of national income spent by government will need at some stage to return to something closer to the historic post-war average. Whether it should be falling so quickly, and whether Mr Osborne has in his head a long term target for it rather lower than the norm, are matters worthy of public debate.

I can raise a rather bigger cheer for British workers and their employers. Unlike many previous recessions this one was not a result of a systemic lack of international competitiveness. And so the solution didn’t have to be, and wasn’t, mass unemployment. A combination of loss of overtime, shorter working hours, miniscule pay increases and early retirement has allowed many British families to tighten their belts and survive. The independent decisions of the Bank of England to keep interest rates, and thereby mortgage payments, low have played an important part too. All of this has placed the nation in a better state of readiness to expand output now that the global economic climate is becoming warmer.

Read it all.

A Church of England spokesman said that the baptism service used would be decided by the priest, in consultation with the family.

He said the new wording was the third revision of the baptism service in 30 years.

He said the current service had been in use since Easter 1998 and the wording had been amended by general synod in 2000 and in 2005.

Read it all.

Since at least the 1970s there has been a fashion in the Church of England to minimise depth and mystery in its worship because of the alleged need to make its services ”˜accessible’.

The new alternative service for baptism, which has been sent for trial, continues this trend. Instead of explaining what baptism means and what the various parts of the service signify, its solution is to do away with key elements of the service altogether!

From ancient times, the structure of the service has included the renunciation of sin, the world and the devil and the turning to Christ as Lord and Saviour.

Read it all from the Mail on Sunday.

On the alternative so-called baptismal rite – the salient questions are:

1. Why is it so semi-Pelagian when it claims to be about grace? “Will you help them?” It’s wet… and not in the water sense!

2. Where is the sense of their own pilgrimage which was expressed in “walk with them in the way of Christ?”

3. Where is the truth that we are rebels against God expressed?

4. Where is repentance from sin?

Read it all.

Nearly 300 of us gathered yesterday (Saturday 4th January) at St John’s Church, Somersham on the Cambridgeshire fen-edge to give thanks for the life of the Revd John Galbraith Graham MBE, better known world-wide as “Araucaria”, the premier crossword-setter in the English language. John had asked me to look after the service, and I am most grateful to everyone who lent a hand in arranging, speaking, making music, providing refreshments, and everything else that helped make it a very special occasion. A number of people asked for the text of my homily, so I now reproduce it here.

I’ve always enjoyed crosswords, as many of you here today do, and like so many others I’ve turned to Araucaria to put a smile on my face, though (tell it not in Gath, or at least in Libertarian company such as this) I also wrestle the Listener to the ground each week in what is probably a futile attempt to prove that my little grey cells are in still in functioning order.

So imagine the extra wide smile on my face when I discovered five years ago that the said Araucaria was no other than the Revd John Galbraith Graham whose name was hiding innocently and without fanfare in the list of retired clergy of my new diocese, and who was despite his advancing years making a valuable contribution to the ministry here in Somersham.

Read it all.

In other words in that Bethlehem stable, not only are people visiting Jesus, but God is visiting us. He no longer just speaks through the prophets. Now he steps onto the stage himself, and not just to visit, but to redeem.
An ancient nativity play has the child Jesus standing in the middle of the stage with an angel approaching him from either side. One angel offers him a gorgeous bouquet of roses, the other a crown of thorns. For a moment the child hesitates. He fingers the petals of the roses, enjoys their fragrance, and then with a tiny sigh, he takes the crown of thorns.

Read it all.

The divine strategy is different. God so loved the world that he was generous. When he communicated he did so in person. He came not as a celestial CEO with a shower of inter-galactic memos but as a child. Jesus Christ is the human face of God. He embodies God’s plan for the spiritual evolution of the human race.

A baby seems to be no threat and can melt and disarm the toughest herder and the most politique wise man. For some of course a baby is a provocation which excites and releases their inner destructiveness and cruelty. The birth of Jesus was rapidly followed by the massacre of the innocents because Herod may have understood better than anyone the real threat posed by this particular child.

The birth of Jesus Christ is part of God’s plan to draw us into his generous self-giving, a way in which the more we give ourselves away the more we discover our true selves; the more we are equipped to build together a civilisation of love and a little taste of Heaven here on Earth. Government which enforces obedience to regulation in this world of ours is a necessity. Jesus Christ not only points the way to the future, but in solidarity with him we are opened up to the Holy Spirit who is at work bringing God’s plan for the spiritual evolution of the world and its people to completion.

Read it all.

There are the two dozen Church of England Bishops, and the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, who enjoy reserved places denied Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and those of other faiths and none.

Nor can we ignore the 92 hereditary peers, survivors of Tony Blair’s cull, selected from the Dukes and Earls to sustain feudal bloodlines.

The Establishment guards its perks with a ferocity sadly lacking when it comes to austerity and the Bedroom Tax.

Read it all.

Graham has been Rector and Lecturer of Hexham since 2004. In that time, the congregation has grown and links have been developed to support an area of regeneration and a domestic violence charity, to open a foodbank for West Northumberland, and provide 2000 children visiting the Abbey each year with tailor made activity days linked to the National Curriculum.

The Abbey has recently reunited its former monastic buildings taken from it by Henry VIII, and having raised £3.2m is currently developing a new visitor centre, refectory, education rooms and meeting spaces.

Before moving to Hexham, Graham was vicar of a parish in Middlesbrough which is in one of England’s 2% most deprived communities, where he chaired the neighbourhood management group and developed an innovative arts based project to divert young people from crime.

Alongside his parish work, Graham currently chairs the Northeast Forestry and Woodlands Advisory Committee of the Forestry Commission, and is a Secretary of State appointee on the Northumberland National Park Authority. He has served as Area Dean while at Hexham.

Read it all.

the bishops may also want to consider the significant omissions of fact in the PR’s revision of Anglican history since 1998:

that the issue dominated the 1998 Conference because of the threatened actions of the North American churches;
that Resolution I.10 was approved by a vast majority of bishops and continues to be held as normative by virtually all the churches of the Global South;
that the primary ground of the resolution was fidelity to Scripture, and several additional resolutions affirmed this point;
that the North American churches followed through on their threat with the consecration of Gene Robinson despite repeated warnings from various Instruments; and the more “collegial” atmosphere at Lambeth 2008 was purchased at the expense of 280 bishops being absent from Lambeth 2008.
It is astonishing that the PR in fact lacks any reference to The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada.

The Church of England’s bishops may wish to consider these omissions of fact, and, by contrast, the recitation of the actual history of the failure of the Instruments of Communion to discipline the North American churches that repeatedly breached Lambeth Resolution 1.10 (1998) in the last 15 years – a recitation which can be found in the October 26 Nairobi Communique and in other communications from Global South Anglican leaders.

Read it all.

On Sunday 1 December, St George’s Anglican Church in Berlin celebrated the 10th anniversary of the restoration of regular services in central Berlin (Mitte).

The first St George’s in the city was built in 1885 under the patronage of the Crown Princess of Germany, Victoria (eldest daughter of Queen Victoria) who was married to the future Kaiser Friedrich III. It was the only Anglican Church in Germany to remain open during World War I, as the Kaiser was the Church’s Patron. It was closed in the Second World War and hit by allied bombing 24 Nov 1943 and the remains were pulled down by the East Berlin authorities. After World War II, new St George’s, a garrison Church, was built in the British sector. In 1994 the new St George’s became a civilian congregation of the Diocese.

Read it all and check out the pictures as well.

The next Bishop of Bath and Wells has been announced. The announcement from Downing Street was made at 9am and confirms the next Bishop of Bath and Wells will be the Rt Revd Peter Hancock. His current role is Bishop of Basingstoke in the Diocese of Winchester, which he has held since September 2010.

Bishop Peter says he is “delighted” at the prospect of becoming the 79th Bishop of Bath and Wells.

Before his ordination to the episcopate, Bishop Peter served two curacies before serving as a parish priest for 13 years in the Diocese of Portsmouth. Later he became Archdeacon of the Meon – a position he held for 11 years.

Read it all.

Guernsey will not be “forced” into any relationship change with the Anglican Church, the island’s Dean has said.

It follows questions raised over the relationship between Jersey and the Diocese of Winchester after a review of how an abuse complaint was handled.

Guernsey’s Anglican Dean the Very Reverend Canon Paul Mellor, said it was not clear if any changes would be made.

Read it all.

The House of Bishops of the Church of England met for two days in York on December 9 and December 10. This meeting was the first at which 8 women regional representatives attended the meeting as participant observers with the same rights as Provincial Episcopal Visitors.

Over its meeting the House covered a wide range of business including discussion of women in the episcopate, the Pilling report, the approval of experimental liturgy for Baptism, changes to legislative approaches on Safeguarding and discussion of the Anglican-Methodist covenant.

Read it all.

The House of Bishops of the Church of England has today welcomed eight women as participant observers to its meetings. The welcome follows the election of the eight senior women clergy from regions across the country.

In February of this year the House decided that until such time as there are six female members of the House, following the admission of women to the episcopate, a number of senior women clergy should be given the right to attend and speak at meetings of the House as participant observers. The necessary change to the House’s Standing Orders was made in May.

Read it all.

…in any case in which you take the view that you are required by local law to disobey me, or defy my requests, you may not elect to follow the local law rather than fulfil your duty of obedience to me.

Whatever the local law may seek to impose on you, you may not agree to follow it where my lawful requirements require you to do otherwise.

Read it all the latest in this bizarre saga.

The Church of England witnessed a change of heart last month when the General Synod debated legislation to allow women to be consecrated as Bishops. With the closest indication yet that there could be a change in the law in 2014, Debbie Waite spoke to some of the county’s female clergy about life in a man’s world….

Read it all.

Update: The Oxford Mail also has an editorial on this matter there.

In particular, in the light of the Dissenting Statement, we express the following concerns about aspects of the Report:

Although the church’s teaching is upheld, its theological and biblical basis is not clearly articulated and there appears to be a willingness to separate teaching and practice in a way which threatens incoherence and charges of hypocrisy.

The emphasis on the qualities of a relationship without clear reference to the gift of marriage fails to do justice to Scripture and tradition in relation to both sexual same-sex relationships and heterosexual cohabitation (para 148).

The recommendation “to mark the formation of a permanent same sex relationship in a public service” and to leave the form of this to the discretion of the parish priest risks undermining the unity of the church’s teaching and practice and our ecclesiology.

Read it all.

The report is by the church’s Working Group on Sexuality chaired by Sir Joseph Pilling, a retired civil servant, whose resumé includes leading the challenging Northern Ireland Office. There was every indication that release of the report was accelerated because leaks had begun to appear in the media and on weblogs. One blogger posted a summary of the report’s main conclusions two weeks ago, which turned out to be largely correct.

The Pilling Report takes a stance very similar to a policy recently approved in the Church of Scotland. It does not recommend centrally approved services to celebrate same-sex unions but it paves the way for clergy to arrange services in their parishes. It recommends, further, that in the next two years the Church undertake comprehensive facilitated conversations.

The language of the report is careful and tentative. That is not how the media saw it, however, and immediately the headlines said the Church of England was poised to bless same-sex marriage. The report speaks of the need for “pastoral accommodation.” Nor indeed does it speak of “blessing” gay marriages, even though this is the preferred term by the media.

Read it all.

We are concerned that the media is already focussing on the proposal in recommendations 16 and 17 for permitting public services “to mark the formation of a permanent same sex relationship”, including potentially same-sex civil marriages. The CEEC’s St Matthias Day Statement of 2012, which we submitted in evidence to the Pilling Group, sets out clearly why we believe this would mark a departure from biblical truth and Anglican teaching. It concludes by stating that “Redefining marriage to include same-sex relationships or affirming or blessing sexual activity outside marriage is contrary to God’s word. When a church does either of these things it therefore becomes difficult to recognise it as part of the visible Church of Christ”. The fact that such recommendations can be made is, we believe, a surface sign that there are deeper and more serious flaws in the report as a whole.

It is clear that the Church of England is going to face difficult discussions and decisions about human sexuality in the coming year. We look to our bishops, individually and corporately, to be faithful to Scripture, to continue upholding the practice of the Anglican Communion as set out in Lambeth I.10, and to encourage all their clergy and people to do the same.

Read it all.

In our submission to the Review Group we said the need for a radical change in Christian attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGB&T) people is now urgent. We asked whether the members of the review group are going to advocate that the Church of England recognises the reality of the presence of LGB&T people in the Church or whether they are going to maintain the present culture of secrecy, denial of reality, suppression of identity and the unhealthy attitudes in which many LGB&T Christians remain trapped.

This report does not herald radical change and does not therefore fulfil the expectations of Changing Attitude. There are no practical proposals which will begin to dismantle the present culture of secrecy, denial of reality, suppression of identity and the maintenance of unhealthy attitudes. The group has met people and listened and the unhealthy attitudes remain unchanged as the report demonstrates….

Changing Attitude is disappointed that the Report deals so superficially with transgender (198) and intersex people (197) despite having received a submission from the Sibyls. Changing Attitude England and other LGB&T Christian organizations also identified the need to address transgender and intersex experience and expectations in our submissions. The reality of transgender and intersex experience is directly relevant to the question asked in paragraphs 195/6 ”“ are human beings sexually dimorphic, and in paragraphs 199/200 ”“ is sexual attraction fixed and immutable.

Read it all.

My first reaction to seeing the Pilling Report was disbelief that in the twenty first century any church could put out a report on human sexuality written by a group that appears to have consisted of 8 men and 2 women and expect it to be taken as a serious contribution to the subject….

The notion that marriage is the only way that sexually active people express themselves is surely just one of many strands in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, aimed at the ability to control knowledge of the paternity of children. Its predominance has come about in cultural settings and for cultural reasons that do not always have a great deal to do with faith or with the teachings of Jesus or interpretation of the whole spectrum of biblical, rabbinic and apocryphal texts.

The report, then, is interesting for two reasons. It is the first time that such a report by a Church of England working party contains an open acknowledgement that, where there is a massive shift in social perception such that a practice or set of practices that were previously not acceptable have come to be seen not only as acceptable, but as desirable, then this can leave the church with a problem if it does not listen and engage.

Read it all.