The three approaches set out by the Legislative Drafting Group are:

Ӣ The simplest national statutory approach with no binding national arrangements;

Ӣ Legislation that would provide some basis for special arrangements for those unable to receive the ministry of women bishops, such arrangements to be made within the present structures of the Church of England;

Ӣ Legislation that would create new structures within the Church of England for those unable to receive the ministry of women bishops.

The Group does not offer a recommendation of its own but analyses the pros and cons of each approach, identifying, where relevant, various sub options.

Read the whole summary and download and read the whole report.

THE Church of England’s youngest bishop assumed his new role when he was consecrated in York Minster.

The Right Rev Mark Davies has been appointed to the landmark post at the age of just 45 and became the new Suffragan, or assistant, Bishop of Middleton in the Diocese of Manchester during a ceremony overseen by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu.

Dr Sentamu also consecrated his own chaplain, the Right Rev Robert Paterson, who now becomes the new Bishop of Sodor and Man based on the Isle of Man. He succeeds the Right Rev Graeme Knowles.

A third clergyman, the Right Rev Chris Edmondson, was consecrated during the ceremony on Friday as the new Suffragan Bishop of Bolton, succeeding the Right Rev David Gillett.

Read the whole article.

It was very satisfying to hear a Church of England Bishop boldly and fearlessly state that the Resurrection is unquestionably central to the Christian faith. AND it must be properly understood not as “life after death” for Christ but as a Resurrected Body which is the beginning of our Resurrection.

He was asked about the Anglican Communion and Lambeth. He said (briefly as time was late) that he feels we have moved from “1 Corinthians to 2 Corinthians” by which he meant (as I understood him) that it is time for Rowan Williams to reassert his apostolic authority over the straying churches. Not sure exactly how or what this means, but nonetheless he is planning to attend Lambeth with that message.

I can’t help but think of how often Christians say things critical of people who “live in an ivory tower” of intellectualism, implying that people who spend years of their life researching are somehow ignoring ministry. Yet after they emerge from their studies and start sharing their insights, they are Rock Stars. N.T. Wright, fortunately, uses his gifts to equip the whole body of Christ, rather than simply exploring theoretical questions. However, it took him years of study to get where he is. I think we need to do a better job of encouraging (and funding) young scholars and trusting their work as faithfulness to their calling. Who knows what future N.T. Wrights are out there? It may take them literally decades to be ready to break it down for us, but it will be worth it. Lets be on the lookout for opportunities to support young scholars.

Read it all.

Third, however, all this has come about not least because Paul has written a painful letter (2.3f.). This too is of course historically controversial: is the ‘painful letter’ 1 Corinthians itself, or is it one of the somewhat disjointed sections of 2 Corinthians itself, perhaps chapters 10-13? I am cautiously with those who think that it is a letter written between the two epistles, and now lost, but that doesn’t take away from the remarkable relevance of 2 Corinthians for our present moment. When the Archbishop issued his invitations, he made it clear as I said that their basis was Windsor and the Covenant as the tools to shape our future common life. That invitation was issued only three months after the remarkable joint statement from the Primates issued in Tanzania in February 2007. After a summer and autumn of various tangled and unsatisfactory events, the Archbishop then wrote an Advent pastoral letter in which he reiterated the terms of his initial invitation and declared that he would be writing to those bishops who might be thought particularly unsympathetic to Windsor and the Covenant to ask them whether they were really prepared to build on this dual foundation. Those letters, I understand, are in the post as we speak, written with apostolic pain and heart-searching but also with apostolic necessity. I am well aware that many will say this is far too little, far too late – just as many others will be livid to think that the Archbishop, having already not invited Gene Robinson to Lambeth, should be suggesting that some others might absent themselves as well. But this is what he promised he would do, and he is doing it. If I know anything about anything, I know that he deserves our prayers at this most difficult and fraught moment in the run-up to Lambeth itself.

Fourth, we have seen, predictably but sadly, the rise of the super-apostles, who have wanted everything to be cut and dried in ways for which our existing polity simply did not, and does not, allow. Please note, I do not for one moment underestimate the awful situation that many of our American and Canadian friends have found themselves in, vilified, attacked and undermined by ecclesiastical authority figures who seem to have lost all grip on the gospel of Jesus Christ and to be eager only for lawsuits and property squabbles. I pray daily for many friends over there who are in intolerable situations and I don’t underestimate the pressures and strains. But I do have to say, as well, that these situations have been exploited by those who have long wanted to shift the balance of power in the Anglican Communion and who have used this awful situation as an opportunity to do so. And now, just as the super-apostles were conveying the message to Paul that if he wanted to return to Corinth he’d need letters of recommendation, we are told that, if we want to go on being thought of as evangelicals, we should withdraw from Lambeth and join the super-gathering which, though not officially, is clearly designed as an alternative, and which of course hands an apparent moral victory to those who can cheerfully wave goodbye to the ‘secessionists’. I have written about this elsewhere, and it is of course a very sad situation which none of us (I trust) would wish but which seems to be worsening by the day.

Read it all–my emphasis (Hat tip: Babyblue).

A gay couple’s church blessing has been blocked because the ceremony “looked too much like a wedding”.

Paul Sewell, 41, and Andy Nicholson, 42 from Metheringham had planned a civil ceremony and then wanted a blessing in their local church in Dunston.

But the service was cancelled after a small service of friendship prayers grew to a 150-guest celebration.

The Bishop of Lincoln, The Right Reverend John Saxbee, said a parish church was not an appropriate venue.

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The poet-priest R. S. Thomas asked why God appeared so frequently in his poems, responded simply: “I believe in God.” Pressed about what sort of God he meant, Thomas replied: “He’s a poet who sang Creation and He’s also an intellect with an ultra-mathematical mind, who formed the entire Universe in it. The answer is in a chapter of Augustine’s Confessions where it says, ”˜They all cried out with one voice, He made us’.”

For the Christian this God does not remain unknown, but has revealed Himself to us in Jesus Christ, in the characteristic way in which persons make themselves known to us, not as ideas and abstractions, not as collections of atoms and molecules, or the patterns of energy of sub-atomic particles, but as persons with a capacity for love and relationship. Love always involves both faith and hope. Without this trio there would be no human life as we know it.

That reality points us to the God who made us, and whose being and action the Christian creeds confess, as one who is a communion of love, and life, and relationship, the source of our being, the ground of our knowing, the goal of our living. To say Credo ”” I believe ”” is to open ourselves to the deepest possibility of our lives. As the great preacher St John Chrysostom said: “Let us then draw Him to ourselves, and invite him to aid us in the attempt, and let us contribute our share ”” goodwill, I mean, and energy. For He will not require anything further, but if He can meet with this only, He will confer all that is his part.”

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[Bishop Tom] Wright has deep family roots in the Durham area, which from the 14th to the mid-19th century was ruled by the prince-bishops; in medieval times they had the right to mint their own coins and raise armies. Today’s incumbent may not have wanted to fight this last battle, but there are plenty for which he is ready. One, in particular, will have evangelicals itching to draw swords. “The massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of western liberalism has a lot to answer for,” he thunders in his new book. “The nihilism to which secularism has given birth leaves many with no reason for living.” The bishop would like to see nothing less than an end to the Enlightenment split between religion and politics.

“There is a Christian view of politics,” he says after lunch at a fish restaurant by the coast, “and whether or not the government knows it, it has a God-given duty to bring wise order and to facilitate human flourishing.” The Church does not just have a right to comment on whether ministers are failing in their divine task, he argues. “To try to shut us up, to say, ‘You keep off the patch'” is “totalitarian”. So, no apologies for his Easter Sunday sermon on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, in which he criticised the government for “pushing through, hard and fast, legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby” whose aims are a “1984-style world” where “we create our own utopia by our own efforts, particularly our science and technology”.

“Using what is in effect live human tissue for experimental purposes is not a frontier we think people ought to cross,” he says, “and we’re going to go on saying that. The more of these moral frontiers a government crosses, the more it owes to citizens to make a space for conscience, not just in voting but in how scientists and doctors carry this work out. To think that the Church should not be involved in politics is to say: ‘Here are some areas of crucial concern for human flourishing, but the Church is not allowed to address these matters of public debate.’ I think that’s ridiculous.”

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Yates’s years as Bishop of Gloucester, 1975-91, showed him to be a leader who could persuade people to think for themselves and face the reality of a changing world. He would not allow members of staff meetings, diocesan synods or parochial church councils to get away with pious platitudes. His own faith was well tested and he was convinced that the divine was at work in the world as it is. It was significant that when the ordination of women came to be decided in the General Synod in 1992 the lay vote from Gloucester was the highest in favour for any English diocese. He was not a campaigner, but an intelligent persuader. This was noticed when he later presented church views to Douglas Hurd at the Home Office.

The lay people of the diocese found him accessible, willing to listen, ask questions, argue and reach agreements. In 1991 he set out his policy in a visitation charge, Treasure in Earthen Vessels, that was witty and well researched. He delighted the parishes by saying: “Whenever I come back to the diocese from some meeting in London the feeling I have is that I am coming from the less real to the more real Church.” He likened its middle-of-the-road Anglican attitudes to “the back wheel of a bicycle: it does not wobble about as much as the front wheel, but it gets there almost as quickly”.

He did not hesitate to criticise and his comments, firm though tolerant, were shrewd and compelling. He noticed especially the “massive if slow and silent slide . . . especially among the young, away from the Christian words and images through which most of us learnt our Christian faith”. He pleaded that the parochial church councils should not lose touch with the realities of national, local and personal life, or be taken over by money or administrative questions. He criticised churches that had no access for the disabled, gave warning against excessive rigidity in doctrine and commended the saying “we should believe more and more about less and less”. He aimed at an ecumenical and less authoritarian Church. He urged the Church “to travel light, unencumbered as far as possible by dogmatic or liturgical baggage acquired centuries ago”. He sought a more human Church that proclaimed a gospel of costly self-giving on behalf of the poor and powerless.

Read it all.

David Aaronovitch, using the pulpit of his column, challenged me to justify an “outrageous claim” that I made in my Easter sermon. I said that there was a “militantly atheist and secularist lobby” that believes that “we have the right to kill… surplus old people”. He replied that it was simply not true.

But there is clearly a strong body of opinion – part of a larger, albeit unorganised, secularising or atheist agenda – pressing in this direction. Such an agenda doesn’t need protest marches. It has powerful politicians and journalists presenting the case.

Lord Joffe’s “assisted dying” Bill, rejected by the Lords last year, was, at one level, about “voluntary euthanasia”. The normal word for that is, of course, suicide. But his Bill was about those too ill to achieve that unaided – it was proposing not just “voluntary dying” but “lawful killing” by people enlisted by the patient. You can’t reduce this, as Mr Aaronovitch implied, to “people having a right to end their own lives”. The question is, do other people have the right to help them do so? Those who support this Bill reckoned they do.

He might want to come back at me on two other counts. First, I said “old” people. But clearly young people, too, suffer debilitating and incurable diseases. Reports from the Netherlands suggest that moves are being made to extend the euthanasia protocol to cover new-born children.

Read it all.

At one level, of course, the continued puzzlement of the disciples is a mark of the story’s authenticity. If someone had been making it all up a generation later, as many have suggested, they would hardly have had such a muddle going on. More particularly, nobody would have made up the remarkable detail of the cloth around Jesus’ head, folded up in a place by itself, or the even more extraordinary fact that Jesus is not immediately recognised, either here, or in the evening on the road to Emmaus, or the later time, cooking breakfast by the shore. The first Christians weren’t prepared for what actually happened. Nobody could have been. As one leading agnostic scholar has put it, it looks as though they were struggling to describe something for which they didn’t have adequate language.

But this problem isn’t confined to the first century. Ever since then, people have tried to squash the Easter message into conventional boxes that it just won’t fit. There was a classic example in the Times on Good Friday (I know I probably shouldn’t have been reading a Murdoch paper on a holy day, but there you are). In a first leader entitled ”˜Universal Truths’, the writer suggested that the Easter message is one that everyone can sign up to. ”˜Good Friday,’ it says, ”˜commemorates sacrifice, the giving of oneself as a martyr for the love of others, so Easter is the achievement of victory through suffering.’ ”˜These,’ the writer goes on, ”˜are universal spiritual truths. And the more interaction acquaints those of different faiths with the beliefs of others, the clearer is the common acceptance of these truths.’ So, in conclusion, ”˜The Easter message draws the devout together’ (presumably the devout of all religions). ”˜From suffering, goodness can triumph. Death is not final.’ And then, a grand and woefully misleading last sentence: ”˜That is what all faiths in Britain can proclaim and where they can come together this weekend.’

Well, sorry. Of course we must work to find common ground and common purpose with those of all faiths and none. I found myself on a platform in Sunderland not long ago with the deputy chairman of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, discussing these very things. The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently asked me to join a small group working to take forward the discussion of the Open Letter from leading Muslims to the Pope, entitled ”˜A Common Word’. These things matter enormously.

But you don’t achieve anything by downgrading the unique message of Easter.

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Because the newly public message which is the good news of Easter is at one and the same time so obvious ”“ the message of new creation, which answers the deepest longings of the whole cosmos ”“ and so utterly unexpected that if we are to announce God in public in these terms, as Paul did so spectacularly at Athens, we need the preceding private stillness to rinse our minds out of preconceived notions and make ready for God’s startling new world. Note, by the way, that it is the public truth of Easter ”“ the dangerous, strikingly political truth that the living God is remaking the world and claiming full sovereignty over it ”“ that has been for two hundred years the real objection, in western thinking, to the notion that Jesus rose bodily from the tomb. Western thought has wanted to keep Christianity as private truth only, to turn the Lion of Judah into a tame pussy-cat, an elegant and inoffensive, if occasionally mysterious, addition to the family circle.

And part of the point of where we are today, culturally, socially, politically and religiously, is that we don’t have that option any more. We face a dangerous and deeply challenging future in the next few years, as the demons we’ve unleashed in the Middle East are not going to go back into their bag, as the ecological nightmares we’ve created take their toll, as the people who make money by looking after our money have now lost their own money and perhaps ours as well, as our cultural and artistic worlds flail around trying to catch the beauty and sorrow of the world and often turning them into ugliness and trivia. And we whose lives and thinking and praying and preaching are rooted in and shaped by these great four days ”“ we who stand up dangerously before God and one another and say we are ready to hear and obey his call once more ”“ we have to learn what it means to announce the public truth of Easter, consequent upon the public truth of Good Friday and itself shaped by it (as the mark of the nails bear witness), as the good news of God for all the world, not just for those who meet behind locked doors. Every eye shall see him, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn as they realise the public truth of his Easter victory. But we can only learn that in the quiet privacy around the Lord’s Table, and the humble stillness where we lay aside our own agendas, our own temperamental preferences, in the darkness of Holy Saturday. When we say Yes to the questions we shall be asked in a few minutes’ time, we are saying Yes to this rhythm, this shaping, of our private devotion to our Lord, our private waiting on him in the silence, in order to say Yes as well to this rhythm, this shaping, of our public ministry, our living out of the gospel before the principalities and powers, our working with the grain of the world where we can and against the grain of the world where we must.

Read it all.

The Situation on the ground for voluntary organisations working with families is “chaotic”, the Bishop of Southwark has said.

He highlighted problems faced by the organisations during a debate on “strengthening families, community cohesion and social action” in the House of Lords on Thursday, February 28.

The Rt Rev Tom Butler said funding continuity was one of the particular issues leading to uncertainty.

He said Christian organisations, such as Welcare in his diocese, are “committed to supporting families through prayer, pastoral care and in other practical ways ”” and through the provision of education”.

Bishop Butler told peers: “I wish to focus on the delivery of family care at local borough level, for here ”” despite what were well intentioned changes in the delivery of services ”” it is our experience that the current situation on the ground is chaotic.”

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The Government has failed to find a vision for the country and has not built a cohesive society, the Archbishop of York has claimed.

Dr John Sentamu said that racism had been allowed to flourish and that Britain was no longer the “great nation” it once had been. Instead, it was a nation in crisis. “Britain is in a very, very uncomfortable place,” he said.

In a wide-ranging speech on the country’s “broken society”, the Ugandan-born archbishop called for Britain to regain the values of “mission and enterprise” that had made it so effective when it had an empire.

His comments follow weeks of debate between political and religious leaders over the impact of multiculturalism on Britain, which has centered on claims from fellow senior bishops that the country has no-go areas for non-Muslims and will adopt aspects of Islamic sharia law in due course.
The criticism from the Church of England’s second most senior figure will come as a blow to Gordon Brown, who yesterday, at Labour’s spring conference, vowed to build “the Britain of our dreams” and a country where “security and opportunity for all is within our grasp”.
Dr Sentamu said that it had suffered from a loss of identity, which had made it less able to welcome immigrants and had deepened tensions between communities.

Read it all.

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In his first interview since his controversial comments, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali vows not to be forced into silence

His claim that Islamic extremism has turned some parts of Britain into “no-go” areas for non-Muslims led to fierce rows between political and religious leaders over the impact of multiculturalism on this country.

Those comments were followed soon after by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s suggestion that the adoption of aspects of sharia law in Britain was “unavoidable”.

The bishops’ views in The Sunday Telegraph sparked a storm of criticism and raised questions over the role of the Church in society but, most seriously for Dr Nazir-Ali, led to threats that he and his family would be harmed.

Yet, in his first interview since the sinister calls were made to his home, the Bishop of Rochester remains steadfastly defiant. He will not be silenced. “I believe people should not be prevented from speaking out,” he says. “The issue had to be raised. There are times when Christian leaders have to speak out.”

Read it all.

We think it is important to let you know our reasons for not acceding to your request, and also to make them public since your letter is public. We have a number of concerns.

First, the Lambeth Conference is not a two hour seminar discussing a contentious issue. It is three weeks in which we bishops and our wives are called to share together our lives, our prayer, our bible study, our meals, our worship and the Lord’s Supper, to be a family together.

You will know that some of us have not been able to take communion with the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church since February 2005, – a period of about three years. The reason is that TEC took an action to consecrate Gene Robinson as Bishop in 2003 contrary to the resolution of the Lambeth Conference, an action of which they have not repented. The consecrators of Gene Robinson have all been invited to Lambeth, contrary to the statement of the Windsor Report (para 134) that members of the Episcopal Church should “consider in all conscience whether they should withdraw themselves from representative functions in the Anglican Communion”.

You will know that some of those who objected to this consecration in the United States and have made arrangements for orthodox oversight from other provinces including ours have been charged with abandonment of communion. Their congregations have either forfeited or are being sued for their properties by the very bishops with whom you wish us to share Christian family fellowship for three weeks.

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THE Archbishop of York has appealed for funds for humanitarian relief in Kenya.

Dr Sentamu, addressing the General Synod on Wednesday after his visit to Kenya last week, said that there had been progress in talks between the two main parties, at odds since the disputed December election. But after more than 1000 people had been killed, and 300,000 forced from their homes by the fighting, humanitarian relief was a top priority.

As part of the response, Dr Sentamu told Synod that he and the Archbishop of Canterbury were setting up a special fund, together with the Church Mission Society.

“In the many camps, I saw people with broken limbs and other physical injuries, and many who had been terribly traumatised. One woman had lost her mind, because she saw her husband hacked to death in front of her children.”

he Church was seen by President Kibaki and the Opposition leader, Raila Odinga, as vital in humanitarian relief, peace-building, and reconciliation, he said.

Read it all.

T

The astonishing misrepresentation of Archbishop Rowan in virtually all newspapers over the last few days, and the scorn and anger which this has fueled, have caused many people within the church to ask what on earth is going on. The issues are complex, but let me try to highlight the key points.

Obviously it would be good for people to read the whole lecture, which is available on line at his website together with further clarification. There is an excellent summary and discussion of the whole issue by Andrew Goddard available on the Fulcrum website.

First, the lecture which Rowan gave was the start of a series organized by and for the legal profession, about the nature of law. He was not making a public statement about his belief in Jesus (people have asked me ”˜why doesn’t he speak about Jesus?’ and the answer is ”˜he does, a great deal of the time, but this wasn’t that sort of occasion’). He was addressing some of the most serious and far-reaching questions which face us both in Britain and throughout western culture, and was doing so with the sensitivity and intellectual rigor which the occasion, and his audience, rightly demanded. We should be grateful that we have an Archbishop capable of such work, not demand that his every word be instantly comprehensible by the casual uninformed onlooker. If I ask someone to fix my car, or my computer, I don’t expect to understand everything they say about the technicalities; rather, I’m glad someone out there knows what’s going on and can do what’s necessary.

Second, the fundamental issue he was addressing is the relation between the law of the land and the religious conscience of the citizen…

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I’ve often heard people say, “I’m going to heaven soon, and I won’t need this stupid body there, thank goodness.’ That’s a very damaging distortion, all the more so for being unintentional.

TIME: How so? It seems like a typical sentiment.

[Bishop of Durham Tom] Wright: There are several important respects in which it’s unsupported by the New Testament. First, the timing. In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state. St. Paul is very clear that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead already, but that nobody else has yet. Secondly, our physical state. The New Testament says that when Christ does return, the dead will experience a whole new life: not just our soul, but our bodies. And finally, the location. At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, “Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven.” It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.

TIME: Is there anything more in the Bible about the period between death and the resurrection of the dead?

Wright: We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish text from about the same time as Jesus, says “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,” and that seems like a poetic way to put the Christian understanding, as well.

TIME: But it’s not where the real action is, so to speak?

Wright: No. Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I’ve called the life after life after death ”” in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth.

Read it all.

English law is rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and, in particular, our notions of human freedoms derive from that tradition. In my view, it would be simply impossible to introduce a tradition, like Sharia, into this corpus without fundamentally affecting its integrity.

The Sharia is not a generalised collection of dispositions. It is articulated in highly concrete codes called fiqh. It would have to be one or the other, or all, of these which would have to be recognised. All of these schools would be in tension with the English legal tradition on questions like monogamy, provisions for divorce, the rights of women, custody of children, laws of inheritance and of evidence. This is not to mention the relation of freedom to belief and of expression to provisions for blasphemy and apostasy.

We should learn from the debate on this question which recently took place in Canada. Here it was mainly Muslim women’s group that succeeded in preventing the application of Islamic law in matrimonial matters. The importance of a single law for all was strongly re-affirmed.

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THE Archbishop of York, Dr Sentamu, was due to fly out to the troubled country of Kenya last night for a four-day visit, with the encouragement of the Archbishop of Kenya, the Most Revd Benjamin Nzimbi. The trip has two purposes: to be a fact-finding visit, and an expression of solidarity with, and prayer for, the Kenyan people.

The visit was arranged after a long phone conversation with Archbishop Nzimbi, when it was agreed that it would be helpful. Church leaders in Kenya still appear to be at odds about the best way forward in the conflict.

The Bishop of Mbeere, the Rt Revd Gideon Ireri, in eastern Kenya, told Ecumenical News International on Tuesday that he had serious concerns that the Church was not speaking with one voice.

A delegation from the World Council of Churches in Kenya said this week that political leaders in Kenya believed that the Church there had taken a partisan approach, and were not keen that it should be involved in the mediating process.

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But the landscape is changing. Many leading evangelicals have begun to voice concern. Caring for God’s creation is becoming a political issue, especially among younger evangelicals.

In Orlando I took part in a seminar on faith and the environment. The host was Joel Hunter, pastor of a mega-church. It holds 3,500 and they fill it five times on a Sunday. There, defying all prejudice, were the local Catholic bishop, imam and rabbi discovering common ground from their sacred texts about caring for God’s earth.

Evangelicals make up one of the largest voting blocs in the electorate and the Democrats know that they have to get a sizable slice of it if they’re to make it to the White House. All the Democratic candidates have signed up to the climate change agenda. Significantly, it is Mike Huckabee, the surprise candidate among the Republicans, who’s the first to register his interest in this issue.

On Super Tuesday when the voters go to the polls they’ll be sending some of the candidates into the political wilderness. However, it is the outcome of the election in November which will determine whether planet Earth will join them in the desert.

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The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, is under police protection after he and his family received death threats over his claim that parts of Britain had become “no-go areas” for non-Muslims.

The Bishop is also facing anger from the most senior members of the Church of England hierarchy for his comments on Islam.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has made Islam a priority of his archiepiscopate and set up a Muslim-Christian forum to promote relations between the faiths in 2006. One senior cleric told The Times yesterday: “The Bishop of Rochester is in effect threatening to undo everything we have done.”

The cleric said that some congregations in cities such as Leicester, where interfaith work was a priority, were increasingly wary of donating money towards this work. Church leaders in towns with a large Muslim population were anxious that relations with their neighbours were being undermined.

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Take the time to watch it all.

The media have reported what they think is depressing news for Anglicans in England. First came the announcement that Tony Blair has been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Then statistics showed that in 2006 the numbers of people in England attending Roman Catholic worship had exceeded those attending Anglican worship for the first time since the Reformation. And I’ve lost count of the number of times I hear remarks in the media about how mainstream churches in the UK have “lost it”, or are in “terminal decline.”

Now in part we only have ourselves to blame. We English Anglicans are extraordinarily good at talking down our church. It’s frightening to ask yourself: how often have I been in a conversation with non-churchgoers during which I’ve criticized “the Diocese” or “the Evangelicals” or “the Prayer Book groupies” – or simply failed to use the opportunity to say what I really value about my church and my faith? And we are incomprehensibly obsessed with sex – or at least that’s the impression we often give. Perhaps we’ve never really got over the fact that one of our founders (Henry VIII) had serious marital problems.

But all this is light years away from the real purpose and vision of our church, which is to proclaim and celebrate what God has done and is doing for us in Jesus Christ, who died for us and now lives and reigns as lord and king. There’s a crucial moment in Matthew’s Gospel when Peter (rather reluctantly) gets out of the boat and walks towards Jesus on the water. At first he stays upright; “but when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened” and begins to sink. And Jesus both rescues and rebukes him, saying “you of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:30-31). Notice two things: first, Peter is able to walk on water for as long as he focuses single-mindedly on Jesus. The moment he gets worried about the wind (or gay bishops, or the parish share), he starts to sink. Secondly, the word translated “doubt” really means “look in two different directions at once.”

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Today Christians celebrate the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. It is an unusual feast, for it is not an anniversary of the death, or martyrdom, of a saint but a commemoration of a “turning around” of one of the great teachers and thinkers of the Christian world.

St Luke records in the Acts of the Apostles how Saul, the strictest of Pharisees, was journeying to Damascus to persecute and put to death Christians, the followers of a new way, which he regarded as heretical. They had to be stamped out because they were leading the people of God astray. Suddenly, on the Damascus road, a blinding light from Heaven overwhelmed Saul, the blinding light which in the Jewish tradition was the shekinah, the dazzling glory of God. He falls to the ground and asks “who are you Lord?” To which the answer comes: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” There, at the very centre of the glory of God, is the One whose followers Saul had come to Damascus to root out. Blinded and overwhelmed by this experience, Saul is led stumbling into Damascus. There, a Christian disciple, Ananias, comes in obedience to find the persecutor, and lays hands on him that Saul may receive his sight again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.

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ST PAUL, facing shipwreck off Malta, spotted the soldiers getting into a small boat to rescue themselves. “Unless these men stay in the ship,” he said to the centurion, “you cannot be saved.”

A similar urgent plea must now be addressed to those who, envisaging the imminent break-up of the good ship Anglican, are getting into a lifeboat called GAFCON, leaving the rest of us to face the future without them.

I have shared the frustration of the past five years, both in the United States and around the world. I have often wished that the Windsor report could have provided a more solid and speedy resolution. But the ship hasn’t sunk yet.

The rationale of GAFCON (the Global Anglican Future Conference) is: “The Communion is finished; nothing new can happen; it’s time to split.” No mention is made of the Windsor report, the proposed Anglican Covenant, or, indeed, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advent letter, insisting as it does on scriptural authority, which GAFCON seems to regard as its monopoly.

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For those of you who are following the South Carolina Convention.