The Principal of Pusey House, Oxford, the Revd Jonathan Baker, is to resign as a Freemason after being encouraged by the Archbishop of Canterbury to reconsider his membership before his consecration as the next Bishop of Ebbsfleet.

It was announced earlier this month…that Mr Baker would be one of the two new Provincial Episcopal Visitors, to replace Mgr Andrew Burnham, a leader of the RC Ordinariate, who seceded in January.

Mr Baker, who recently served as an Assistant Grand Chaplain to the Freemasons, posted a statement on the Ebbsfleet website last Friday, the day when he was contacted by a Sunday newspaper. He said that he had joined as a lay undergraduate in Oxford, and had found it to be “an organisation admirably committed to community life and involvement with a record of charitable giving second to none, especially among, for example, unfashionable areas of medical research”.

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Around the world, entire nations are losing their Christian identity. Countries that once spread the Gospel world-wide now see missionaries coming to them. Many churches, once full on Sunday mornings, are now shuttered or used by another religion or remodeled as museums and homes. In America, Christianity’s influence on society is less and less recognizable. In this crucial hour, Christ’s imperative to “hold fast the profession of our faith” is even more urgent.

Hold Fast: An Urgent Call to the Western Church features the preaching and teaching of Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, someone who’s shared the Gospel around the world despite countless challenges.

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The proposed women bishops’ legislation provides “adequate provision” for those unable to accept the ministry of women, the Bishop of Dover has said.

Speaking to members of the Canterbury Diocesan Synod who voted in favour of the suggested legislation on women bishops at the weekend, Bishop Trevor Willmott said that for a long time God had been calling women to share in ordained ministry.

However, traditionalists in the Church say that Bishop Willmott has been steadfast in refusing to even listen to their objections….

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Bishop Michael’s homily focused on the Resurrection narratives (noting his early sighting of a Pittsburgh road sign proclaiming Resurrection Avenue – “you can’t get better than that!”) Calling the post-Resurrection appearances “spine-tingling” and “out of this world, in every sense of that term”, he expressed his puzzlement as to why the Apostle Thomas has had such an unfavorable press, given that he is a model for Christians and Christian community. It is he who acknowledges Jesus with the stunning declaration “My Lord and My God”. From Thomas, members of the Church – and future clergy – should learn to point always to Jesus and our Lord’s encounter with Thomas may be understood in liturgical terms, as both acknowledgment and acclamation.

Bishop Michael decried the tendency of contemporary evangelical revivalism to emphasize the person making the decision to accept Christ, almost to a Pelagian level, when the truth is that such decisions can only be a response to God’s choosing and calling. Everyone will have a different story – as it should be – and the call of today’s graduating class has been tested and matured and will now be evidenced in ministry. Companionship – not just of God but of mentors – will be important on their present journey.

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Leaders of non-Christian faith groups should be invited to sit alongside bishops in the House of Lords, a historian who contributed to a commission on reform of the Second Chamber has suggested.

Writing in the Church Times today, John F. H. Smith, an architec­tural historian who made a sub­mission to the Royal Commis­sion on the Reform of the House of Lords, argues that, although bishops should re­main “in the majority”, “an interdenominational and inter­faith college” would “broaden faith repres­en­tation”.

“Religious leaders would, there­fore, continue to widen debate by bringing moral and philosophical perspectives to stand alongside the political, economic, and financial judgements of other groups,” he writes.

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The Don’t Cut Us Out campaign supporters will address West Sussex county councillors, urging them to change their minds over cuts.

And supporting them in a letter to councillors are Bishop John Hind of Chichester and Bishop Mark Sowerby of Horsham.

In their letter ahead of the debate on the petition against cuts in a full council meeting, the bishops address councillors.

They want councillors to “work with petitioners properly to examine and review alternatives to the changes in eligibility for care and the cuts to day care; and that the current rapid implementation of these changes be paused while reflection and scrutiny on the way ahead take place.”

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Downing Street has…announced the appointment of the Reverend Jonathan Baker as Bishop of Ebbsfleet and the Reverend Norman Banks as the Bishop of Richborough, both of whom will be consecrated at a service at Southwark Cathedral on 16th June.

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There are two false ideas from which we must guard ourselves. The first, prevalent among some diplomats and politicians, is that an improved economic situation will deal with extreme forms of Islamism. While it is true that an adverse economic situation affects the recruitment of the young to radical causes, we must not ignore the ideological bases of such movements. It can also be shown that these arise and flourish as much in oil-rich states as in poorer ones. We need to engage with ideologies themselves in terms of their relationship to Islam’s foundational texts, to history, to traditional forms of decision-making and governance and to the present beliefs and values of the international community of nations.

The second false idea, espoused by most Muslims and some Christian leaders involved in dialogue with Islam, is that a true Islamic state will, by its very nature, “protect” non-Muslims. I am sorry to have to say that history does not suggest that such will be the case. There have, undoubtedly, been periods of tolerance when Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians and others have been able to contribute to the Islamic societies in which they have lived. The structured discrimination and injustice of the dhimma, however, has always prevented their full participation and has, indeed, led to periodic persecution and violence. We must be very careful about using terms like “protection” in this context as it can be seen as a translation of dhimma. Whatever the history, non-Muslims in the Islamic world today wish to be free citizens with equal rights under the law and not dhimmas.

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Consider the following scenario. A group of IRA terrorists carry out a bombing raid in London. People are killed and wounded. The group escapes, first to Ireland, then to the United States, where they disappear into the sympathetic hinterland of a country where IRA leaders have in the past been welcomed at the White House. Britain cannot extradite them, because of the gross imbalance of the relevant treaty. So far, this is not far from the truth.

But now imagine that the British government, seeing the murderers escape justice, sends an aircraft carrier (always supposing we’ve still got any) to the Nova Scotia coast. From there, unannounced, two helicopters fly in under the radar to the Boston suburb where the terrorists are holed up. They carry out a daring raid, killing the (unarmed) leaders and making their escape. Westminster celebrates; Washington is furious.

What’s the difference between this and the recent events in Pakistan? Answer: American exceptionalism. America is allowed to do it, but the rest of us are not. By what right? Who says?…

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Speaking to The Church of England Newspaper about his retirement, announced last October, the Rt Rev Michael Scott-Joynt said that more work needed be done in encouraging young men and women away from well-paid City jobs to roles which society really needs, such as being a priest, teacher or nurse.

In addition, the Bishop said that in looking back on his years in General Synod and in the House of Lords he said he regretted much of the arguing about gender and sexuality issues but believed he was there for a purpose to defend a conservative position.

He also said the Church of England should not “slither off” and become like the majority of the US Episcopal Church, which would be the end of the Church of England.

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Go here then click on the “Latest programme in full” link to launch the audio player. It starts at about 1:49 in, and lasts about 2 minutes. Bishop James references Augustine, the challenge of understanding evil, and the Easter season.

As the reality of God has faded from so many lives in the West, there has been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life. This is to load our partner with too great a burden. We are all incomplete: we all need the love which is secure, rather than oppressive, we need mutual forgiveness, to thrive.

As we move towards our partner in love, following the example of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit is quickened within us and can increasingly fill our lives with light. This leads to a family life which offers the best conditions in which the next generation can practise and exchange those gifts which can overcome fear and division and incubate the coming world of the Spirit, whose fruits are love and joy and peace.

I pray that all of us present and the many millions watching this ceremony and sharing in your joy today, will do everything in our power to support and uphold you in your new life. And I pray that God will bless you in the way of life that you have chosen….

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The reality which is the resurrection cannot simply be “known” from within the old world of decay and denial, of tyrants and torture, of disobedience and death. But that’s the point. The resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event within the present world, though it is that as well; it is the defining, central event of the new creation, the world which is being born with Jesus.

If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing which involves us in new ways, an epistemology which draws out from us not just the cool appraisal of detached quasi-historical or scientific research, but the whole-person engagement for which the best shorthand is “love.”

That is why, although the historical arguments for Jesus’s bodily resurrection are truly strong, we must never suppose that they will do more than bring people to the very questions faced by Peter, or Thomas, or Paul: the questions of faith, hope and love.

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Jesus of Nazareth was certainly dead by the Friday evening; Roman soldiers were professional killers and wouldn’t have allowed a not-quite-dead rebel leader to stay that way for long. When the first Christians told the story of what happened next, they were not saying: “I think he’s still with us in a spiritual sense” or “I think he’s gone to heaven”. All these have been suggested by people who have lost their historical and theological nerve.

The historian must explain why Christianity got going in the first place, why it hailed Jesus as Messiah despite His execution (He hadn’t defeated the pagans, or rebuilt the Temple, or brought justice and peace to the world, all of which a Messiah should have done), and why the early Christian movement took the shape that it did. The only explanation that will fit the evidence is the one the early Christians insisted upon – He really had been raised from the dead. His body was not just reanimated. It was transformed, so that it was no longer subject to sickness and death.

Let’s be clear: the stories are not about someone coming back into the present mode of life. They are about someone going on into a new sort of existence, still emphatically bodily, if anything, more so. When St Paul speaks of a “spiritual” resurrection body, he doesn’t mean “non-material”, like a ghost. “Spiritual” is the sort of Greek word that tells you,not what something is made of, but what is animating it. The risen Jesus had a physical body animated by God’s life-giving Spirit. Yes, says St Paul, that same Spirit is at work in us, and will have the same effect – and in the whole world.

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Jesus dies. His lifeless body is taken down from the cross. Painters and sculptors have strained their every nerve to portray the sorrow of Mary holding her lifeless son in her arms, as mothers today in Baghdad hold with the same anguish the bodies of their children. On Holy Saturday, or Easter Eve, God is dead, entering into the nothingness of human dying. The source of all being, the One who framed the vastness and the microscopic patterning of the Universe, the delicacy of petals and the scent of thyme, the musician’s melodies and the lover’s heart, is one with us in our mortality. In Jesus, God knows our dying from the inside.

–”“The Rt. Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Rowell

Thousands of families who attend church to secure places at popular Church of England schools face being denied entry under radical plans revealed today to overhaul admissions.

The C of E is drastically revising its guidelines to limit the number of places offered to those from church backgrounds….

The Bishop of Oxford, the Right Rev John Pritchard, chairman of the C of E’s board of education, said schools should end the bias towards children from religious homes even if it lowers academic results. He said: “Every school will have a policy that [it] has a proportion of places for church youngsters … what I would be saying is that number ought to be minimised because our primary function and our privilege is to serve the wider community.

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This week, the plots hatched behind closed doors in the Vatican last year will be played out in the open as the former bishops lead dozens of clergy and hundreds of worshippers in taking up this historic offer.

They will be confirmed in services that will mark a significant watershed in the Anglican Church’s long-running battle over moves to allow women to become bishops.

It represents a new beginning for those entering the Catholic Church, but their departure has deeply wounded the Church of England, which is already riven by bitter rows over gay clergy, and now faces an exodus of traditionalists.

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The appointment of the Revd Nicholas Holtam as the next Bishop of Salisbury is a regrettable and retrograde step. In his public ministry Mr Holtam has actively promoted erroneous teaching on the issue of human sexuality, which puts him at odds with the declared mind of the House of Bishops, the General Synod of the Church of England and the 1998 Lambeth Conference, makes him unfit for ministry in the Church of England let alone as a Bishop. In particular, like many in the Church, he has been unwilling to accept the clear teaching of Scripture on the proper place of sexual union.

He has likewise supported those in this country and elsewhere seeking to undermine what is collectively recognized as Biblical teaching on sexual morality….

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New guidance aimed at preventing sham marriages in the Church of England is being sent to clergy and legal officers by the House of Bishops. The guidance has been agreed with the UK Border Agency and was today approved by Immigration Minister Damian Green.

“The House of Bishops is clear,” said the Rt Rev John Packer, Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, “that the office of Holy Matrimony must not be misused by those who have no intention of contracting a genuine marriage but merely a sham marriage. The purpose of this guidance and direction from the Bishops to the clergy and to those responsible for the grant of common licences is, therefore, to prevent the contracting of sham marriages in the Church of England.”

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Despite the obvious difficulties this entailed, therefore, the Church of England sought until recently to adhere strictly to Jesus teaching, as regards both its members generally and its ministers in particular ”” a stance reflected precisely in the absence until now of specific guidance regarding the appointment of bishops.

For some people, therefore, the proposed consecration of Nicholas Holtam is a serious challenge to Church order. And indeed it may be ”” but the extent to which this is so clearly depends on the circumstances of his wife’s divorce….

However, there is another, and just as pressing, reason why the nomination of Mr Holtam causes difficulty for traditionalists. In 2005, at the height of the controversy over his consecration, Mr Holtam invited Bishop Gene Robinson to St Martin-in-the-Fields…

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A vicar described as a “rising star” in the Church of England is to become the first clergyman married to a divorcee to be made a bishop, it was announced today.

The Rev Nicholas Holtam, vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, central London, has been approved by the Queen to take up the post of Bishop of Salisbury.

The clergyman was strongly tipped for promotion after the General Synod of the Church of England paved the way earlier this year for the first divorced and remarried clergy to be consecrated as bishops.

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All ecclesiology is about our belonging together, and our belonging together in Christ. The great images of the Church in the New Testament ”” the people of God, the vine and the branches, the living temple, the Body of Christ ”” all point in their different ways to the fact that to share in the redeemed life of the new creation is not something anyone of us can do alone, either as an individual or as a group or province. To be in Christ is to be bound together in mutual responsibility and interdependence.

That mutual responsibility and interdependence is expressed through the structures of the Church which flow from our common baptism and our common participation in the Eucharist. We belong to each other and what one does affects all. The four marks or notes of the Church ”” unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity ”” are all outworkings of this “belonging together.” They are expressions of the “belonging togetherness” ”” the communion, the fellowship, the koinonia, of the Holy Spirit, or, to use an image from today’s world, the internet of the Holy Spirit. In a divided Church seeking unity we have learned to be sensitive to how we tell our history, and how we can go back behind statements and understandings coming from past battles and entrenched positions, to learn what we share in common. The ecumenical dialogues have produced remarkable convergences and agreements in the statements of the ARCIC dialogues and the recent report of the Anglican-Orthodox dialogue, The Church of the Triune God.

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Herewith the BBC description of this section:

After 24 people died following two days of protests in Afghanistan in the wake of the burning of a copy of the Koran by a fundamentalist Christian church in Florida, William talks to Joel C Hunter, a pastor in Florida and a leader within the National Association of Evangelicals, to ask him how he reacted to the news that a pastor had burned a Koran.

William also reflects on the violence in Afghanistan which resulted from the Koran burning with the former bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, and he is joined by historian and analyst Professor Iftikhar Malik from Bath Spa University, to discuss what role the Taliban is thought to have played in these events.

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The Bishop of Burnley wants to increase the number of churches in Lancashire taking part in Back to Church Sunday.

Last year only 33 of the 250 churches in the Blackburn Diocese took part in the initiative, aimed at getting former parishioners back into the pews.

The Right Reverend John Goddard also called for more of the Christian denominations to join the celebration.

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While most Christian ministers’ earliest influences are religious mentors and the Bible, Michael Hill’s involved rock music.

That’s what first impressed the Rev. Dr. Frank Larisey, pastor of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Orangeburg, about the current Bishop of Bristol, England.
“When he was about 17 or 18, he was in a band that opened for The Who,” Larisey said. “He was a good lead guitarist.”

The man who Larisey calls “one of the best speakers I’ve heard in my life” will bring his message, “What Happens When You Get It?” to the Church of the Redeemer beginning with a potluck dinner at 7 p.m. Friday, April 1. Hill will also give the sermon during the 8 and 10:30 a.m. worship services Sunday, April 3.

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The Bishop of Exeter, the Rt Revd Michael Langrish, has warned that interfaith relations may be harmed by the “unfolding events” in Libya.

Speaking in the House of Lords on Monday, the Bishop asked whether the Leader of the Lords, Lord Strath­clyde, shared his “concern that in an increasingly volatile region there are already those who for their own ends are using somewhat inflammatory language and trying to construct a reli­gious narrative around these un­folding events.

“In this account, a vulnerable Is­lamic population is being subjected to an opportunistic attack by a power­ful Christian West. Not only does such a narrative have the power to destab­il­ise the wider Middle East region, but it could impact very negatively on community relations in this country.”

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Archbishop Bernard Longley and Bishop David Urquhart, the Anglican Bishop of Birmingham held a dialogue last night to inaugurate the five 2011 Edward Cadbury Lectures on the topical theme “Parables for the City”, under the auspices of the School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, at the University of Birmingham.

There was standing room only with students and others sitting on the floor in the lecture room at the Department of Theology and Religion in the European Research Institute Building, yesterday at the start of the open and free admission lecture series.

The Anglican Bishop of Lahore, Pakistan, was among those present for the hour-long lecture. Bishop Alexander John Malik is on a visit to England at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to take part in special services for the Pakistan Cabinet Minister of Religious Minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, who was brutally murdered for his Catholic faith on 2 March 2011.

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… I have had one churchwarden who tells me he is definitely going to leave. We wish them well but I hope most people will wait until the final vote in Synod before making up their mind because there is still everything to play for and pray for.

Of course there is also two-way traffic between us and Rome. We regularly receive Roman Catholics into our congregations and ministry. Maybe we should set up our own Ordinariat for people coming in the opposite direction!

My other hope is that clergy or groups of laity who are seriously thinking of making a move to Rome should contact a member of the Bishop’s Staff and arrange a visit to the PCC by one of us; because not everything you read in the press is quite true or accurate and some congregations have not been well advised on this topic.

Certainly now is not the time to weaken the place of the Christian faith, and the Church of England in particular in our nation. It is quite moving to realise, as I did again this week, that our parliament does nothing without prayer, and that getting on for half the members turning up for prayer each day particularly in the House of Lords; is quite something.

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The Pope has honoured three former Anglican bishops, the first members of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, with the title of monsignor.

Fr Keith Newton, the leader of the Ordinariate who has most of the functions of a bishop, and Fr John Broadhurst, the former Bishop of Fulham, have been granted the papal award of Apostolic Pronotary, the highest ecclesial title for non-bishops. Fr Andrew Burnham, the former Bishop of Ebbsfleet, has been granted the papal award of Prelate of Honour, and is therefore also a monsignor.

The three men became the first clergy of the world’s first personal ordinariate set up for groups of former Anglicans as a result of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus in January.

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