Bishops, clergy and lay members of the General Synod will vote on whether to demand that the state broadcaster explain why its coverage of Christianity on television has declined so steeply in recent years.
Output has fallen from 177 hours of religious programming on BBC television in 1987-88 to 155 hours in 2007-08, while the number of general programmes has doubled.
A key debate on women bishops has been delayed until the summer after the Church of England received an “avalanche” of submissions about the subject, it was announced today.
The Church said more than 100 submissions had been received by a legislative drafting group working on the issue of women bishops.
It had been hoped that the legislation could be debated by the General Synod, the church’s ruling body, meeting in London next month but this will not now take place until it meets at York in July.
A Church of England bishop has warned that the former Archbishop of Canterbury’s call for new limits on immigration would “play into the hands of racists”.
The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Right Rev John Packer, is the latest Anglican cleric to criticise Lord Carey of Clifton after he said in an article in The Times that he feared the present levels of immigration threatened “the very ethos or the DNA of our nation”.
Lord Carey is a member of the crossparty parliamentary group on balanced migration, which last week urged the political parties to make a commitment to keeping Britain’s population below 70 million.
THE draft legislation on women bishops will not be coming before the General Synod for debate next month as scheduled. Instead, the revision committee is expected still to be working on it after Easter. It will not now be debated till July.
In February last year, the Synod asked the revision committee to consider the arrangements, embodied in a statutory code of practice, for those opposed in conscience to women bishops.
At its October 2009 meeting, however, it appeared to move away from the code of practice, and voted for “the vesting by statute of certain functions in bishops with a special responsibility for those with conÂscientious difficulties”. The options of an alternative diocese or a regisÂtered society for objectors were ruled out, but it appears there was no vote on the adoption of the simplest form of legislation without a statutory code of practice.
The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, said the country must never again repeat the multicultural experiment of recent decades.
He also called for an end to the segregation of Muslims in British cities, which he warned provides a breeding ground for extremists.
The bishop made his strongly-worded comments after Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, backed a campaign by the cross-party Balanced Immigration Group to stop Britain’s population reaching 70 million.
Britain might soon have its first female Anglican bishop, serving the 38,000-member Scottish Episcopal Church, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
The Rev. Alison Peden, 57, is one of three candidates for the post of bishop of Glasgow and Galloway. The election is scheduled for Jan. 16.
Observers say that if Peden is elected it is likely to increase pressure on the neighbouring (Anglican) Church of England to allow the appointment of women bishops.
Congratulations on being amongst the 13% of people in Britain going to church this Christmas morning. That’s nearly 8 million people, but according to a news report earlier this month the average British Christmas today goes a bit differently. A survey across 4000 families showed the following average timings for Christmas Day. 8.19 ”“ open presents (it used to be 5.30 in ours); 8.39 ”“ first bite of chocolate; 9.57 ”“ first family row; 11.48 ”“ first alcoholic drink; 3.24 ”“ Christmas dinner (I thought it was just vicars!); 4.58 ”“ first person falls asleep. And so on.
It’s all very family-centred. We do our best to be together on Christmas day, even if there are lots of family tensions around. And the whole advertising of Christmas is predicated on the image of happy families gathered around the dining table or the Christmas tree. But there’s another side to Christmas. 50,000 young people will be ‘homeless’ at Christmas, having left home or been thrown out of home for a whole range of dysfunctionalities. The number of Big Issue sellers in Oxford city centre yesterday told its own story too. The other side of Christmas is homelessness.
But that’s part of the Christmas story too. The well-worn Christmas narrative tells of a God who lets himself be homeless in a fragile world. There are two expressions of that homelessness. The first is the picture we’re all used to of a vulnerable family for whom there’s no room at the inn, and who have to be packed off to the stable round the back. Of course, we don’t know that it was a stable ”“ it’s the Nativity plays that say that, the gospels don’t. It’s most likely that the place was a cave behind a house or an inn. Indeed the Greek word used for inn ‘kataluma’ usually refers to the upper guest room of a family house. It may be that there was no room for Mary because it was a family house (Joseph’s family perhaps) and the room was already full because of other family visitors who’d come for the census. Mary therefore had to go to the warm cave at the back of the house where the animals were kept. So it’s a cave, not a stable, that we see under the Church of the Nativity today.
But whatever the actual place, there was no room in the ‘kataluma’, the ordinary, civilized places. Jesus was homeless.
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.
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.
The Right Reverend and Right Honourable Monsignor Graham Leonard, who died on January 6 aged 88, was the most senior Anglican churchman to convert to the Roman Catholic Church since the Reformation.
During 10 years as Bishop of London, the third most senior see in the Church of England, he proved a controversial figure because of his strong conservative views on most aspects of faith, morals and Church order at a time when there were proposals for many changes in all Churches.
With considerable skill in the realm of Church politics, he also led an effective assault in the House of Lords on the 1988 Education Reform Bill, which secured the strengthening of the place of religious education in schools. He checked plans to unite the Church of England and the Methodists, and ensured that the formal ban on divorced people being remarried in church was maintained.
I am looking forward to the Christmas festival more than usually this year. Some times in the past it has been obscured by the light pollution from which we suffer in great cities during the season of getting and spending. This year we have been forced to face up to the darkness in this very perilous world and as a result it is perhaps easier to see the star which leads us to the significance of the birth of Christ. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.
The Copenhagen Conference, as I speak, is drawing to its inconclusive end, promising further negotiations. The wisdom of the world has been on display with its sectarian mentality. It has helped me to see freshly once again the astonishing and dangerous generosity in the Christmas story. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. The messenger of God comes to Mary and instead of replying that the promised god-send did not fit in with her own life plan, she said “Behold the hand maid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word”.
The sectarian mentality and the frequent lack of interest in anything that was “not invented here” are huge obstacles on the road to God’s future for the world. Dante the great poet of the Christian West, at the end of his Divine comedy, describes that future as “all the scattered leaves of the universe bound by love in one volume”. The Church is called to be the transforming community created by the generosity of God working to open a fissure in the world so that God’s future can enter in. This is why we pray “thy kingdom come” to open up the present to God’s end time.
The adorable baby becomes one of the group of young people who hangs around on street corners, gathering with friends in a public place for safety but unnerving others in the neighbourhood and we do not always find it easy to see that young person as the infinitely precious and infinitely adorable person that they once were.
The adorable baby ends up as a child imprisoned in a detention centre – separated from her mother in a dawn raid just because her mother is seeking sanctuary in our country. We seem to have forgotten how infinitely adorable and infinitely precious those children once were
The adorable baby even in this country ends up living in poverty. Close to home in Sunderland over 50% of children are living in poverty. Many in the Council and elsewhere are working hard to do something about it. But somehow it has happened and I am left wondering whether if we had continued to see those children as infinitely adorable and infinitely precious things might be different
The Christmas story is a story of a baby – a baby who is most certainly infinitely precious and infinitely adorable to Mary and Joseph and for Christians the world over rightly adorable and rightly precious because he is God come to share our human life. But the real point of the story is not that the baby is infinitely precious but that we are infinitely precious.
The Christmas message is supposed to be “good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.” How, though, is this credible amidst such encircling economic and eco-gloom?
The Copenhagen Conference has ended somewhat inconclusively. The prospect of a binding and ambitious agreement on reducing carbon emissions seems itself to have been reduced to a prelude for further negotiations. How the human race is collectively to face the reality of climate change in the 21st century remains troublingly unclear.
Yet the decisive action that Copenhagen had promised, but ultimately has failed to deliver, cannot be avoided forever. The Christian community is being recalled by this crisis to a more genuinely Biblical view of creation and our place within it. It is clear that the effects of climate change will be felt first by some of the most vulnerable communities in the world and those least able to bear the costs of adaptation….
Given the sea of troubles with which we are faced ”“ at home and elsewhere ”“ what can we look forward to as we face 2010? First, we need to accept that the financial and political crises are not primarily about the failure of procedures and regulation. The angst about the war in Afghanistan, similarly, is not just about the sad loss of life. The broader problem is that there has been the loss of a common narrative, a story which underpins our national life. In the past, this was provided by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, derived from the Bible. This narrative has been at the root of those values which we regard as particularly British, whether to do with the dignity of the human person, with fundamental freedoms of belief, speech and assembly, or with equality ”“ which is not about “sameness”, but a recognition of the image of God in others.
This tradition has also provided us with the virtues for which we have looked in vain in our economic and political leaders. The best of British business and politics has been characterised by a sense ”“ largely derived from the Bible’s teachings ”“ of responsibility, of trust, justice, fairness and truth-telling. In recent years, these virtues have been jettisoned, so that we can be more “competitive” in a cut-throat world, or engage in a more adversarial form of politics. We, and the generations to follow, will have to live with the consequences of this dissolution of a moral and spiritual framework for our common life.
From beginning to end this was a work of love, by the God whose very being is love, who created us in love for himself, and who in love stoops down to the very lowest part of our need. As another poet, Christopher Smart, puts it:
God all bounteous, all creative,
Whom no ills from good dissuade,
Is incarnate, and a native,
Of the very world he made!
The God whom we know and worship and adore is not a distant God, not a God of ideas and abstractions, but a God who comes to us as one of us, who comes among us in the fragility of an unborn life, beginning as we begin as those formed in the hiddenness of our mother’s wombs ”“ which is why Christians can never be casual about caring for that unborn life, can never treat abortion as no more than a matter of choice. God identifies with us from the very beginning, going, as Bishop Lancelot Andrewes once said, ”˜to the very ground-sill of our nature.’ St Paul wrote to the Christians of Corinth of how for Christians the power of God was know most paradoxically in the weakness of the cross, the crucified God was the one who saved ”“ yet that foolishness of God, that weakness of God, is already there at Bethlehem in the child laid in the pricking straw of the manger, which devout Christians saw as foreshadowing the sharpness of the crown of thorns of the crucified.
Christmas speaks to us of a God who is love totally and completely, a God who loves us so recklessly and in so overwhelming a fashion, that he comes down to the lowest part of our need. He speaks to us as one of us, as our flesh and blood, which is why St John sums up the mystery of the incarnation as ”˜the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. And St John goes on to say that in that total self-giving of love, ”˜we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.’ No wonder the shepherds on the cold hills outside Bethlehem were startled by the angelic armies of heaven singing ”˜Glory to God in the highest, and one earth peace goodwill towards men!’ If that is indeed the truth of the God who made the vastness of the universe, and the richness of creation, and who also made you and me, every human being, in the image and likeness of his love, then to live by and from that love and grace which came to us at Bethlehem to take us by the hand, is to live by that which alone can sustain us and transform us, and transform the whole world, into that new creation which is our end, our purpose, and our very being. This is indeed our story and our song; this is our life and our mission to the world; this is the love we are called to live; and this is the eternal life which here and now we are given, as the Child of Bethlehem feeds us with his own life in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. ”˜O come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord!’
It is in that faith and love that I wish you the true and joy and blessing of Christmas.
The Anglican Bishop of Salisbury has backed a move aimed at supporting mutuals and credit unions.
The Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies and Credit Unions Bill introduced in the House of Lords by Labour peer Lord Tomlinson would reform the regulations governing the sector.
Bishop David Stancliffe said: “The reality is that there is a big gulf between those who have access to credit and those who do not. We need to support this timely Bill.
“With the mainstream banking sector in some disrepute, customers need a reliable and honest home for their money.
As the Anglican Communion has developed in recent years there has not been a parallel development of a framework to address together a response to problems which arise in relationships between the member Churches. The Covenant puts forward such a framework, faithful to Anglican ecclesiology, within which a response to tensions can be discerned and articulated. At present, as no such mechanism exists, it has led to serious threats to the unity and integrity of the Communion.
The draft gives considerable prominence to the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion which can make recommendations concerning the relational consequences resulting from actions by individual member Churches. It can make requests to Churches to defer certain actions, for instance. However, it will still be up to each member Church to decide how to be guided by any specific recommendations which may come from the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion, thereby respecting the treasured autonomy of the Provinces.
The Bishop of Guilford, the Rt Rev Christopher Hill has been elected vice-president of the Conference of European Churches (CEC).
On Dec 16 the CEC Central Committee elected Bishop Hill and the Rev. Cordelia Kopsch of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany (EKD) as its vice presidents, and Metropolitan Emmanuel of France as president of the fellowship of 120 Orthodox, Protestant and Anglican churches in Europe.
The Taliban is a destructive force of darkness, said the former Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, putting him at odds with the new Bishop to the Forces, Dr Stephen Venner, who appeared to defend the Taliban this week.
In Standpoint magazine, Bishop Nazir-Ali writes: “Any abandonment of Afghanistan, at this stage, will create exactly the kind of chaos in which these movements flourish. It will, once again, bring about the conditions where the Taliban will return the country to the darkest night and also remove any incentive for Pakistan to engage with its own extremist groups, at least in the border areas.
“We should not underestimate its [radical Islam’s] capacity for disruption and destruction and its desire to remake the world in its own image. In the face of such an ideology, the international community must not lose its nerve. Any withdrawal from a political, military and even intellectual engagement will be seen as capitulation.”
Bishop Venner later apologised for his comment, saying it was ”one small phrase in quite a long interview” intended to suggest that not all members of the Taliban were ”equally evil”.
He told the BBC: ”If that has caused offence, I am deeply grieved by it because that’s the very last thing that I would want to do.”
The bishop also issued a statement condemning the Taliban’s tactics and expressing his backing for UK forces.
The Rt Rev Stephen Venner called for a more sympathetic approach to the Islamic fundamentalists.
The Church of England’s Bishop to the Forces said it would be harder to reach a peaceful solution to the war if the insurgents were portrayed too negatively.
His comments in an interview with The Daily Telegraph came as the Prime Minister visited Afghanistan and claimed that the Taliban was fighting a “guerrilla war” aimed at causing “maximum damage”.
High-speed broadband will become almost as basic a telephone line in the near future, the Anglican Bishop of Manchester has predicted.
Bishop Nigel McCulloch described as “rather too modest” the Government’s target of getting superfast broadband to 90 per cent of homes in the next eight years.
In a debate on the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Lords, Bishop McCulloch also suggested the “bar has been set too low in terms of universal connection speed”.
The Government is planning to impose a 50p per month tax on phone lines to pay for the role out of broadband in hard-to-reach areas.
A Church of England with women bishops will force more and more people to leave, a leading traditionalist has controversially forecast.
After the departure of Anglo-Catholics, the next group to have to go could be the conservative evangelicals.
The grim picture of a future church lacking the historic Anglican qualities of tolerance, inclusiveness and comprehensiveness is painted by Canon Nicholas Turner of the Bradford diocese in the Advent issue of NewsRound, the Bradford diocesan magazine.
In a hard-hitting think-piece headed Part of what we mean by Unity, Canon Turner, 58, commenting on Pope Benedict’s offer to Anglicans of a “personal ordinariate,” says the approach from “the first among bishops…must not be ignored”.
The whole Church of England must commit itself to reducing its carbon footprint by over 45 per cent by 2025, according to a leading diocesan bishop.
Church schools must also become “eco-schools” by 2015 and all parishes should be required to produce carbon and energy reports every year, he says.
The three-pronged demand comes from the Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, in a think piece in the December issue of Crux, the Manchester diocesan monthly.
Confrontation is threatened by traditionalists in response to the latest news from the Revision Committee on Women in the Episcopate which has ruled out the structural changes demanded by those opposed to women bishops.
After its third meeting, the Committee said it was “unable to identify a basis for specifying particular functions for vesting which commanded sufficient support both from those in favour of the ordination of women as bishops and those unable to support that development. As a result all of the proposals for vesting particular functions by statute were defeated.
“The effect of the Committee’s decision is therefore that such arrangements as are made for those unable to receive the episcopal ministry of women will need to be by way of delegation from the diocesan bishop rather than vesting.”
Eric Kemp was not only the longest serving diocesan bishop of recent times but also the last “old-style” Anglican bishop who, once enthroned in his cathedral and ensconced in his palace, could retain his see for life. For centuries bishops were allowed, indeed expected, to hold their sees far into old age and die in office. Since 1975 the Church of England has required bishops to retire at 70, but the legislation did not apply to those already in post.
With the retirement of David Sheppard from Liverpool in 1997, Kemp alone remained. Hence it was something of an irony that Kemp, one of the Church’s leading canon lawyers and someone who played a large part in the revision of Anglican canon law, became the last vestige of the older order. He was Bishop of Chichester for 27 years from 1974 until 2001, 16 of them beyond the new retirement age, during which his contribution to the diocese, the Church of England and the wider Church was a particularly distinguished one.
Popular Christmas carols are ‘nonsense’ and have turned the birth of Jesus Christ into a fairy story, according to a respected bishop.
In a new book on the festive period, The Right Reverend Nick Baines, the Bishop of Croydon, claims some of the nation’s favourite carols are ’embarrassing’ and ‘inaccurate’.
He says the songs encourage people to believe that the story of Christ’s birth is as fictitious as Father Christmas or a pantomime story.
Carol lovers, however, defended the traditional songs and say they help people to look beyond a ‘commercialised’ Christmas.
Good morning. What I have been asked to do this morning is to report on where we are at this point of time in the Anglican Communion. It’s a fairly complicated picture so I hope I will be given the gift of clarity as I talk to you about this. Since the last time I reported to Synod on these matters, six things have happened. I want to delineate those six things and comment on them and then conclude by talking about a situation which at the moment is absolutely no threat to the Uganda Link but is a potential cause of difficulty in relation to our relationships with the Church of Uganda.
The Rt Rev Jonathan Gledhill, the Bishop of Lichfield, told worshippers to wear crosses or fish symbols to demonstrate that Christmas is a religious holiday.
He also criticised “politically-correct” companies and local councils who sought to make the period a secular celebration.
Bishop Gledhill said: “Companies’ sacking those who want to wear a cross or fish lapel badge and councils rebranding Christmas out of fear of offending ethnic minorities are decisions made out of sheer ignorance.
“I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing if in December all Christians wore a fish badge or cross necklace and sent out a loud message that Christians aren’t going to disappear quietly from the Christmas market place.”
It is important in the light of some awkward feelings, particularly about the way the news of the Apostolic Constitution was handled, that the Pope and Archbishop restated their intent to continue and consolidate the ecumenical relations between our Churches and drew attention to the preparatory work presently under way for the next phase of the ARCIC official dialogue.
I will be in Rome this week for the Informal Talks between the Vatican and the Anglican Communion. These annual, official, in camera conversations cover our shared agenda as Churches, including our formal ecumenical instruments, ARCIC (the theological dialogue) and IARCCUM (the commission on mission and unity) and other aspects of our joint international relations. The recent private conversations between His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI and His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury appear to have set the tone for fruitful working meetings this week.