For more than 120 years an area the size of Europe has been known as the African Free State, the Belgian Congo, Zaire, and today the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Stretching from the Atlantic coast to the borders of Uganda and Rwanda and Tanzania in the east and Sudan and Angola to the north and south, this nearly ungovernable territory is home to a multitude of tribes and languages, huge potential of human talent, intelligence and imagination and vast natural resources.

Why, then, is such a wonderful part of God’s creation the subject of Joseph Conrad’s ominous novel The Heart of Darkness (1899)?

The even more crucial question is why over a hundred years later, as Andrew Mitchell MP reported in this Agenda column on November 28, is the Eastern DRC still “a humanitarian catastrophe”?

A very hearty amen to this final question. It remains a matter for daily prayer. Read it all.

Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor rejected the Anglican bishops views on BBC Radio Four’s Today Programme, suggesting they were playing a “blame game.”

Instead of blaming the Government for materialism and social problems, the cardinal said that responsibility should be shared more widely. Ordinary people and churchmen also bear some of the blame, he said.

“If we are going to accuse people of immorality it is much further than the Government, it is the whole country,” Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said. “I am not too happy with the blame game because if we say that there has to be a “conversion”, then I always start with myself.”

Read it all.

Then, hardly a day later, the Church of England let it be known that it intends to press ahead with the introduction of women bishops , while providing “complementary” male bishops for those clergy who are opposed to the change.

This issue of women’s episcopacy has in the recent past excited extreme passions. But the responses from either end of the divide to yesterday’s news smacked not so much of conflict and schism, as weary resignation. There was, inevitably, some grumpiness from both the women’s campaign and traditionalists over the working details, but neither seems likely to throw their prayer books out of their prams.

Both these events ”“ the bishops’ attack on Government policy and the proposed provisions for women bishops ”“ are good news for the Church of England. Actually, they are very good news, because they reflect valuable aspects of our national, established Church that many of us feared we were losing.

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Not since the days of Margaret Thatcher has the Church of England attacked a Government with such sustained venom. Over the weekend a phalanx of Bishops preached variations on an identical theme. The Bishop of Manchester, Nigel McCullough, described the New Labour administration as “morally corrupt… beguiled by money. The Government believes that money can answer all of the problems and has encouraged greed and a love of money that the Bible says is the root of all evil.”

The Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, fulminated that “While the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. When a big bank or car company goes bankrupt, it gets bailed out, but no one seems to be bailing out the ordinary people who are losing their jobs.” From the more prosperous Home Counties the Bishop of Winchester, Michael Scott-Joynt, declaimed that “The Government hasn’t done anything like enough to help those less well-off, particularly in terms of tax redistribution.”

Read it all.

The Church of England last night tried to avoid a split by watering down its plans for the consecration of women bishops, granting an opt-out to parishioners who refuse to accept the spiritual authority of female clergy.

Under the church’s proposals, parishes could bypass women bishops and women priests by taking their leadership from specially consecrated male “complementary” bishops.

Parents could elect to have their children confirmed and baptised by male clergy while congregations could seek to have sacraments and other divine service removed from the responsibility of a female bishop.

Read it all.

There are five linked documents to ponder–read them all.

The General Synod will have its first opportunity to consider draft legislation enabling women to become bishops in the Church of England in February, having given in principle agreement to the shape of the legislative package in July. The Legislative Drafting Group on Women in the Episcopate, chaired by the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Manchester, has today published its further report and drafts of a Measure and associated Amending Canon, together with an illustrative draft Code of Practice and an Explanatory Memorandum.

“We have published our further report at the earliest opportunity to give everyone the chance to study it before debate. We finished our discussions only just before Christmas,” said the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Manchester.

Read it all.

The Church of England has reached an historic agreement on the consecration of women bishops.

After years of struggle to avoid schism, bishops have agreed a formula that enshrines the principle of equality for male and female bishops while appeasing opponents of women’s ordination. The first women bishops could take their place in the Church of England within three years.

The deal, published in a new report yesterday, provides for a class of “complementary” traditionalist bishop for parishes that refuse to accept a woman diocesan bishop. Such “flying” bishops would have to abide by the authority of the woman bishop, according to the accompanying code of practice.

Read it all.

The government has rejected criticism by five Anglican bishops who questioned the morality of its policies.

The Bishops of Durham, Winchester, Hulme, Manchester and Carlisle accused ministers of failing to tackle poverty and pressuring people to get into debt.

But Cabinet Office Minister Liam Byrne said Labour had fought hard to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

And Labour MP Sir Stuart Bell, who represents the Church in the Commons, called the bishops’ claims “nonsense”.

Read it all.

The Rt Rev Graham Dow, the Bishop of Carlisle, and the Rt Rev Michael Scott-Joynt, the Bishop of Winchester, said Labour deserved credit for some past achievements but it was struggling to balance its conscience with the pressure to win the next election.

“I agree with the Conservatives that the breakdown of the family is a crucial element in the difficulties of our present society,” said Bishop Dow.

“The Government hasn’t given sufficient support to that because it is scared of losing votes.” He argued that Labour’s failure to back marriage and its “insistence on supporting every choice of lifestyle” had had a negative effect on society. “I think Labour has got tired,” he said. Bishop Scott-Joynt said: “The Government hasn’t done anything like enough to help those less well off, particularly in terms of tax redistribution. There also has been the disaster of the 10p tax.

“It is imperative that this Government help the poorer people and hold the hard-hit communities in its sights, but it seems to have its eye on re-election instead.”

Read the whole article.

The regular suggestion that baling out countries will lead them to misbehave again won’t work, either. That might be true of some banks and businesses. It isn’t true of countries like Tanzania, who, after debt remission, have experienced the joy of developing education, medicine and other essentials ”“ in fact, of building a new home.

We don’t just need, in other words, to ”˜turn the economy round’, and get it back to where it was before. We need to turn it inside out. The Christmas message suggests that it’s time for a major, global rethink about the multiple, interlocking problems we can no longer ignore. And about the many-sided, but essentially coherent, proposals that flow directly from the Baby at Bethlehem, demanding to be worked out at street level.

The God who became homeless at Christmas longs to transform this muddled old world into a place where all can be at home at last. That’s what Jesus taught us to pray for.

Read it all.

The Rt Rev John Packer, the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, and the Rt Rev Jonathan Gledhill, the Bishop of Lichfield, accused Parliament of becoming increasingly liberal and unchristian, and said that breaking the relationship would bring greater independence.

The bishops are the most senior ecclesiastical figures to support Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who said earlier this month that a separation of church and state would not be “the end of the world”.

There is already growing pressure among Labour MPs for the Government to press ahead with disestablishment. Three former cabinet members said they backed the idea and it is clear that many senior figures within the Church would not oppose such a move.

Read it all.

St Luke tells us at the end of his story of the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem that his mother Mary ‘kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.’ (Luke 2.19) This is what as Christians we do year by year, as, in the familiar words of Bishop Phillips Brooks’ much loved Christmas hymn, ‘the dark night wakes, the Glory breaks, and Christmas comes once more.’ The Greek word which St Luke uses to speak of Mary’s deep and reflective meditation is sumballo, from which we get our word ‘symbol’. Mary both keeps and holds on to the amazing and overwhelming reality of God’s action and presence in and through her motherhood, and imaginatively reflects upon it, going deeper and deeper into the meaning of what this birth and this child, of which she is so intimately a part, is about. She ‘ponders in her heart’, and the heart in the Bible is not primarily the place of feeling, but of willing and of choosing. Her deep reflection is to shape her life, and brings her to the foot of the cross, and to be part of the worshipping and expectant community, as Luke tells us in Acts, awaiting the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost.
The angel had said to Mary in the moment of annunciation that ‘the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you’ and therefore the child she was to bear would be called ‘the Son of God.’ And so Mary became, in the words of another ancient Christian hymn, ‘the gate of Heaven’s High Lord, the door through which the Light has poured.’ When Jacob in the ancient story in Genesis lay down in a desert place and dreamed of a ladder set between heaven and earth with the angels of God ascending and descending upon it, he woke up exclaiming, ‘this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!’ if this was true of the place of Jacob’s dream, even more is it true of the Mother of the Lord and Christian devotion has not hesitated to speak of Mary as the temple of God, the ark of the covenant, and the gate of heaven.

Mary, the ‘Christ-bearer’ reflected deeply and imaginatively on what Jesus meant, and she has been seen as an image, a picture of the church, which likewise reflects on and lives out the meaning of the God who so comes among us. The great movements of renewal in Christian history have come about through a return to what the Scriptures tell us. We have to realise over and over again how great and how overwhelming is the reality of God’s love which always comes down to the lowest part of our need, as it came in Mary’s child at Bethlehem.

Many years ago J.B. Phillips, one of the first translators of the Bible into contemporary English, wrote a book with the title, Your God is too small. He was right then, and is right now. Our human tendency is to domesticate God, to make God in our own image, to shape him by the culture and expectations of our own day, But the Gospel message of Christmas ”“ and of Good Friday and Easter from which that Christmas message is inseparable ”“ is of a love that goes to the uttermost and will never let us down and will never let us go. This is the ‘amazing grace’ of Evangelical conversion; this is the same grace which we receive and adore in the holy and blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist. As John Betjeman put it simply, ‘God was man in Palestine, and lives today in Bread and Wine’ ”“ and so in our hearts, in our willing and our choosing, in our transformed lives as we like Mary live out our vocation as ‘Christ-bearers’. St John said of the Word of God who became flesh, that the light shone in the darkness and the darkness was not able to overwhelm it, to snuff it out. The light of Christ in us is to shine in the darkness ”“ the darkness of human fear, and violence, and the sinful distortions of deception and betrayal. At Christmas we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, God with us, God in the muck and the mess (and the stench) of a stable at Bethlehem; God as a fragile, new-born child laid in the pricking straw of a rough feeding-trough; God in the mess of our world, a world both beautiful and distorted. At Christmas also we celebrate our own new birth, the Christ born in us. And so we rightly sing and pray:

O holy child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin, and enter in,
Be born in us today.
May the God who came to us at Bethlehem to take us by the hand, surround you and renew you with his love, and light, and grace, that you, like blessed Mary, may know his peace and joy this Christmas and in the year ahead.

With every blessing,

–(The Rt. Rev.) Geoffrey Rowell

Bishop John Packer said he agreed “in principle” he agreed with the proposal to move the education provision over to local authorities.

But he added: “My fear, however, is that it will be underfunded and that because it is hidden away from the general population of those local authorities, not much pressure will be put on them actually to achieve the aims that are to be expressed in the Bill.

“I hope that there will be particular expression of the ways in which we can provide support and encouragement for young offenders.

Read it all.

Q My guest on Belief today is a religious figure, who’s featured prominently in the news throughout 2008. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s comments since the start of the year have startled many with their outspokenness. He spoke of ”˜no go’ areas, where extremists made non-Muslims unwelcome. He also spoke out against some of the current leadership of the Anglican Communion, siding with its traditional wing, and going as far as to boycott the Lambeth Conference, which every ten years brings the Anglican bishops to Canterbury. He speaks out because he sees the liberal leadership of the Church deviating from its age-old Christian faith and values.
As the youngest ever Anglican bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali was only thirty-five years old when he was appointed Bishop of Raiwind in his native Pakistan. In 1987 the then Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie invited him to set up, ironically enough, the Lambeth Conference for the following year. Michael Nazir-Ali became Bishop of Rochester in 1994, the first non-white diocesan bishop in the Church of England. He’s a Fellow of both his Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and Visiting Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Greenwich.
From 1997 until 2003, he chaired the Ethics and Law Committee of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. He is also a lover of cricket. Let’s start with cricket bishop, because I understand your sons cheer for England and you cheer for Pakistan.
A Well yes, and my wife supports the underdog, so we failed at the Tebbit test comprehensively in all sorts of ways.

Read it all on Ruth Gledhill’s blog.

His outspoken views on gay rights and the integration of Muslim communities have attracted vitriolic criticism and even earned him death threats from outside the Church of England.

Now the controversial Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, 59, has found himself the target of a scatological attack by an aide in the offices of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.

A confidential document sent from Lambeth Palace to No 10 Downing Street and the Church of England’s 43 diocesan bishops included the unclerical word “arsehole” appended to the name of Dr Nazir-Ali, Britain’s most senior Asian Anglican.

Read it all.

A discussion on the sensitive topic has been tabled for the next meeting of the Church of England’s governing body amid fears that some clergy are ignoring their traditional missionary role.

Some members of the General Synod believe Christ ordered all Christians to recruit nonbelievers and followers of other faiths, and they want to see how many bishops and vicars agree with this view.

Among the speakers is likely to be the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, who earlier this year warned that Church leaders had “gone too far” in their sensitivity towards Muslims and were not doing enough to spread the word of God.

At the end of the debate at next February’s Synod meeting in London, bishops, clergy and lay members will vote on whether bishops should report to the Synod on “their understanding of the uniqueness of Christ in multi-faith Britain”, and give examples of how the gospel should be shared.

Read it all.

The document has been strongly criticised by the Bishop of Swindon, Dr Lee Rayfield, the Church of England’s spokesman on ethics, for its lack of theological rigour. While expressing understanding of Roman Catholic hesi­tancy over some things, he described it as “very poor” on Wednesday, and expressed concern for the pastoral consequences of any future disen­gagement of the Roman Catholic hierarchy with the issues.

Dr Rayfield said: “From my perspective ”” and I would imagine a large number of other Christians ”” this new communication will come as a disappointment, but not a surprise.

“This instruction fails to engage adequately with the issues raised by assisted reproduction and its associated techniques at a number of levels. It worries me that there are assertions in it, for example about IVF and intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection, which simply do not bear the weight of theological or ethical scrutiny, even from within the absolutist standpoint taken by the Roman Catholic Church.”

Read it all.

In 1992 Bailey became the Suffragan Bishop of Dunwich in the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. During that time he was chairman of the finance committee of the Church’s Advisory Board of Ministry, dealing with the funding of ordination training.

His stay in Suffolk was brief, and in 1995 he became Bishop of Derby. The diocese, as well as containing rural areas, included considerable industrial activity and a large immigrant community. He made an immediate impact and one part of his programme was to visit pubs and nightclubs in the city centre. He helped to establish the Derby multifaith centre and was a governor of Derby University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Bailey was known as a pastoral and caring bishop who remembered people’s names and mixed with all ages and faiths. On the national scene he was for three years the chairman of the Churches Main Committee, which acts as a liaison group between all the churches and government departments. During his time in Derby, he was also Clerk to the Closet, a role that involves advising the Queen about the appointment of her Honorary Chaplains. For this work he was appointed a KCVO. He was a member of the House of Lords from 1999 to 2005. He retired to Gloucestershire, where he was an assistant bishop and served on the Gloucester Police Authority.

Read it all.

The deaths of young soldiers in Afghanistan and the assisted suicide of young and old that are making the headlines put dying on to the front pages of our minds.

I remember an Army Chaplain who’d served in the Falklands War telling me he’d spent the long sea voyage south preparing his troops mentally and spiritually for the possibility that some might die. And some did.

But what struck me about Jeremy Taylor’s book was the desire that we might die well and happily and that was written in an age when people did die younger and without the palliative care so available to us. By contrast today death at whatever age always seems a tragic event, almost unnatural, as if it were a failure of modern medicine. Yet even in our time we share Taylor’s hope of dying well. It’s that hope on which the whole Hospice movement has been built.

Read it all.

A number of archbishops and bishops, most recently Wallace Benn, have reflected on the credit crunch and the present economic crisis, for such it most certainly is. Apart from the inability of the press to report points clearly, what also emerges is the backlash from the liberal economic establishment at interference in their domain.

Wallace Benn questions whether it is their domain. He quotes a reliable source who says you cannot serve God and Mammon. Of course, Christ’s words cut through our whole culture at many different levels, but they are intensely relevant to what is now going on. These commentators need to be held to account for their pathetic response and their failure to address the Christian point of these remarks.

The Adam Smith Institute comments: “Many people who have not worshipped materialism have seen their lives made poorer”. Precisely. Since the Bible points out a hundred times or more that the innocent suffer from evil, that point is hardly news from the Adam Smith Institute or the Daily Mail. What they fail to add is that the present suffering of those who have lost jobs or savings is not caused by the messenger, in this case Wallace Benn, but by the financial sector running on the principles of the Adam Smith Institute.

Read it all.

It will be much more difficult for clergy from foreign churches to be brought into this country under new immigration laws, the Anglican Bishop of Ripon and Leeds has warned.

Bishop John Packer has criticised the Government’s new scheme, which is aimed at tightening immigration controls and allowing the implementation of the points-based system.

Under the new system immigrants from outside the European Union can enter under one of five new tiers, depending on their skills and occupation.

“The restriction on charitable and religious workers will affect how people of faith from other countries come here and experience and contribute to the life of faith in this country,” Bishop Packer during a debate on the new rules in the House of Lords.

Read it all.

Mugabe and his corrupt regime must go. Lord Acton said: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ How can anyone share power in a thoroughly corrupt regime?

The sterility of the power-sharing agreement can be seen through this broken land where its people die from eating anthrax-infected cattle or from starvation. Where sewers are open and there is no running water in towns hospitals any longer. A place where there is no electricity to operate the most basic services. A land where cholera is claiming more lives by the day.

The time has come for the international community to recognise that the power-sharing deal signed in September is dead. The impasse within the South African-sponsored negotiations between the MDC and Zanu PF has been sustained by a Mugabe regime which is unwilling to give up power and refuses to recognise the rule of law.

Read it all.

Read it all.

The Bishop of Reading urges everyone to ask themselves, ‘what do I really want for Christmas?’

The Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury launched a website for Advent encouraging people to think about the true meaning of the holiday and reflect on the birth of Christ.

In response to the website, Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, the Bishop of Reading, said he thinks that rushing through Christmas without thinking about the essential meaning is a trap most Christians get caught in. Getting caught up in the traditions and festivities that come along with Christmas make it hard to focus attention on the true purpose.

“Christmas carols would be a good example,” he said. “I love singing Christmas carols but it feels like we start singing them in October and a bit of ancient Christian wisdom would be the balance between the feast and the fast.”

Read it all.

The British economy should balance a free market approach to private enterprise with state control of the production of goods and services, the Bishop of Liverpool told the BCSC conference.

The “market is not God” Bishop James Jones told the 2,800 delegates attending the commercial property association meeting at the Liverpool Arena on Nov 11. “A balance between laissez-faire capitalism and the rule of the state is needed,” he said.

Bishop Jones’ questioning of the assumptions of the free market system follows statements made by bishops from across the Anglican Communion in the wake of the global financial collapse while the Archbishops of York and Canterbury have voiced strong critiques of the international financial system.

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Proponents of women bishops now face a threat as serious as any ever faced before — from those opposed to females in mitres — according to a leading campaigner for their ordination.

The claim comes from Christina Rees who heads WATCH, the Women and the Church movement, and is a prominent member of the General Synod.

Ms Rees voices the claim in a letter sent to networks of clergy and laity, a copy of which has been seen by The Church of England Newspaper.

In the letter, which takes a swipe at traditionalist Anglicans opposed to women priests and bishops, she declares: “It is our opinion that we now face a threat as serious as any we have faced before in the long journey towards women’s full inclusion in the ordained ministries of the Church of England.”

And she claims: “Even at this eleventh hour, those who oppose ordaining women are summoning all their strength to delay, distort and subvert the will of the General Synod as expressed in the debates over the past few years.”

Read it all.

In a speech to conservative evangelicals, who debated proposals for a new “church within a church”, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali said that there has been a lack of discipline.

Traditionalists have been upset that the Episcopal Church escaped punishment despite consecrating Gene Robinson as Anglicanism’s first openly gay bishop.

The Bishop of Rochester told clergy that the new movement was equivalent to the Reformation in the sixteenth century, which led to the establishment of the Church of England.

He said that the Church has become too “wishy-washy” and urged evangelicals to stand against the liberal agenda.

“No Church can be effective without discipline,” said Dr Nazir-Ali.

Read it all.

The first invitation to the Lambeth Conference was given by Archbp. Rowan in May 07. The invitation included the bishops of TEC (except Gene Robinson or those consecrated under the jurisdiction of African provinces to serve in the US with disaffected parishes from TEC). The Windsor process set up to identify what was at stake in the Anglican communion after that consecration in 2003, and how the Communion should respond was still ongoing as TEC had been given until 30 Sept to intimate whether they would be complying with the requests made of them by the Primates meeting which had taken place in Dar es salaam in Feb. They and had not yet done so. Would an invitation to Lambeth before that date be like a letting off the hook? What would the impact of the invitation be in other parts of the Communion. The answer soon came.

The Archbishop of Uganda declared that those who consecrated Gene Robinson, and had not repented or apologised for that consecration, were just as responsible for the breach in the Communion as Gene Robinson himself, and if those TEC bishops were to attend Lambeth neither he nor the other bishops of Uganda would be coming.

Vinay Samuel in his recent address to the Reform Conference identifies this moment, this invitation given to the TEC, as being the trigger for GAFCON. I think he is right about that. At GAFCON in my conversations with African Bishops, this was the moment when they became convinced that nothing would be done to discipline TEC. From then on, other provinces declared they would not be coming to Lambeth.

Read it all.

Most Reverend and Right Reverend Fathers in God,

Tomorrow [today on the time of posting] you will meet as a House of Bishops to discuss the current state of the Church of England and, particularly, the decision made at General Synod over the summer. As young people training for the ministerial priesthood in the Church of England we have attempted to put into words our concerns and anxieties about the future, and to offer you, in some small way, an insight into our hopes and fears for, potentially, forty years of ordained ministry.

The decision by General Synod in July to consider a Code of Practice, rather than structural alternatives, presents a significant problem for those who are opposed to the ordination of women. Many of this integrity have suggested that it is “too soon to give up” and that something effective can come from the next Group of Sessions. We fear this is unlikely. If the Church of England chooses not to provide appropriate structural solutions, as this resolution by General Synod would seem to indicate, it would be foolhardy – and even disingenuous – to continue to prepare for a life of ordained ministry in the Church of England.

Read it carefully and read it all.