The head of the Scottish Episcopal Church says the Church is “deeply distressed” at the offence caused by the reading of a passage from the Koran in a Glasgow cathedral.
The comments of the Church Primus, the Most Rev David Chillingworth, follow criticism that Islamic verses were read during an Epiphany service.
In his blog, he also condemned the abuse received by St Mary’s Cathedral.
Police are investigating offensive online messages aimed at the church.

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“The decisions which have led to the situation in St Mary’s Cathedral are a matter for the Provost and the Cathedral community but the Scottish Episcopal Church is deeply distressed at the widespread offence which has been caused. We also deeply regret the widespread abuse which has been received by the Cathedral community.

“In response to what has happened at the Cathedral, the Scottish Episcopal Church will bring together all those who are involved in the development of interfaith relations. Our intention will be as a Church to explore how, particularly in the area of worship, this work can be carried forward in ways which will command respect. Our desire is that this should be a worthy expression of the reconciliation to which all Christians are called.”

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The Bishop of Chelmsford, Stephen Cottrell, has been named as the favourite to succeed Richard Chartres as Bishop of London.

Cottrell is 3/1 favourite with bookmakers William Hill for the Church of England’s third most senior job after Archbishop of Canterbury and York.

Although the formal appointments process has not yet begun, his name is increasingly being spoken of in Church circles as someone with the experience and charisma to lead the Church of England’s fastest-growing, most diverse and most complex diocese.

Read it all from Christian Today.

The uncertainty and turmoil caused by Brexit could prove worthwhile if it acts as a catalyst in the redistribution of power and wealth to the North, a leading figure in the church has claimed.

According to the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, last year’s vote presents politicians with a fresh opportunity to boost prosperity in the region ”“ and to avoid deepening division across the country. The intervention from the senior clergyman comes amid growing concerns about the impact of Brexit on the North’s economy, following reports that the region is twice as dependant on EU trade as other parts of the UK.

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The Archbishop of York is set see how heavenly food is produced during a tour of North Yorkshire.

Dr John Sentamu will embark on a mission in the Northern Ryedale deanery from Friday, which will see him visit a number of places including Michelin-star The Star Inn, at Harome, near Helmsley, over the following three days.

The mission is the first in a series which will see the Archbishop go back on the road to visit all 21 deaneries in the Diocese of York over the next two years.

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A total of 41 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds said Britain has “no specific religious identity” in a ComRes poll published to launch the new Faith Research Centre in Westminster.

And a third of 25 to 34-year-olds believed the same, the poll of 2,048 adults found.

Millennials, born between 1980 and 2000, had an entirely different perspective on how religious Britain is compared to the over 55s and pensioners.

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The financial troubles at Peter­borough Cathedral should not be used as “a stick to beat the rest of the cathedrals with”, the Dean of Lichfield, the Very Revd Adrian Dorber, has declared.

Dean Dorber was reacting to a suggestion, published last week by the Bishop of Peterborough, the Rt Revd Donald Allister, that the independence of cathedrals posed “serious risks” to the reputation of the Church.

The comment came at the end of a legal charge by the Bishop after his visitation of Peterborough Cathed­ral. This was prompted by the dis­covery, in July, of a cashflow crisis at the cathedral, which meant that staff were in imminent danger of not being paid….A loan was secured from the Church Commissioners, but it was an­­nounced at the same time that the Dean, the Very Revd Charles Taylor, was resigning.

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The body of Archbishop Brown Turei, one of three leaders of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, is to lie in state at Kauaetangohia Marae near the northernmost point of East Cape for two nights before his funeral on Saturday.

Brown Turei died surrounded by his family and loved ones in Gisborne Hospital on Monday, aged 92.

He was ordained a deacon in 1949 and a priest the following year.

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Bishops have painted a hopeful picture of a post-Brexit Britain in their New Year messages.

After the Prime Minister’s declaration that Article 50 will be triggered in March, so that Britain can leave the EU in March 2019, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his message, spoke of a “tough cam­paign” that had “left divisions”, but argued that reconciliation was pos­sible: “I know that if we look at our roots, our culture, and our history in the Christian tradition . . . we will find a path towards reconciling the differences that have divided us.”

The message, filmed in Coventry, celebrated the welcome given to refugees in the city

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Thirteen leading international asset owners and five asset managers with over £2 trillion under management launched the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI) today to better understand how the transition to a low-carbon economy affects their investments. The TPI will assess how individual companies are positioning themselves for the transition to a low-carbon economy through a public, transparent online tool. The heads of funds involved launched the Initiative this morning at the opening of the stock market at the London Stock Exchange.

The Initiative has been led by the Church of England’s National Investing Bodies and the Environment Agency Pension Fund in partnership with the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics. Data has been provided by FTSE Russell.

Preliminary assessments released today include the oil and gas and electricity utilities sectors. As part of a phased rollout, management quality and carbon performance assessments of additional sectors and individual companies will follow in the coming months.

Read it all from the C of E.

The flaw in his approach is that while the Muslims who chose the reading seem to have been only too aware of the differences, and chose to declare them in their Koranic reading during the Christian worship, the Provost, on the other hand, appears to have been unaware.

When asked if he had known what the passage of the Koran said about Jesus, how it denied what Christians hold central to their faith, he “declined to comment further”.

This was not, then, “a dialogue about the ways we differ”. It was not even a strategy of parity. If there had been a conversation in which he had said, “Let us insert into each other’s worship and prayers readings from our sacred scriptures which confront and contradict each others’ faith”, how would the Islamic community have responded? We will never know, because the exercise was not actually the one he claimed it to be.

Read it all from Gavin Ashenden.

Since it was finally completed in the fourteenth century, the tower of the Priory of St Mary Overie, later the Parish Church of Saviour and now the Cathedral for the Diocese of Southwark, stood high above the surrounding community on the south bank of the Thames. It was the ”˜Shard’ of its day, an architectural presence in this busy, congested, exciting district of London. Within the tower, bells were hung, the first ring associated with the marriage in the Priory Church of King James I of Scots to Joan Beaufort, niece of the then Bishop of Winchester, Cardinal Beaufort on 12 February 1424. The bells rang out to call people to prayer, to mark the joyous and the sad occasions of life, to warn and to welcome. In the eighteenth century the ring of twelve was consolidated in the way that we have come to know the ring. Now in the twenty-first century it has been our privilege to undertake much needed work on the bells to ensure that they ring loud and clear for future generations.

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Photos from @Southwarkcathed Blessing of the Bells https://t.co/Y3NJqil1ds pic.twitter.com/3n3TlPMe8x

— Southwark Diocese (@SouthwarkCofE) January 10, 2017

”˜Tim, there’s a priest at the door.’ She gripped her hands in front of her sweatshirt, balling her fists into her stomach. ”˜He wants to know if you want to speak with him.’

Tim laboured to chew and swallow the food in his mouth. ”˜A priest?’

”˜From the Church of England.’ Tim’s father and I checked each other’s faces for comprehension. Only Tim intuited immediately why a priest had come calling.

”˜No.’ Tim shook his head. ”˜Please tell him no.’

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The death has taken place of the Very Reverend Victor Griffin, former dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Dean Griffin died in the early hours of Wednesday in Limavady, Co Derry, where he had been living in retirement.
Dean Griffin was involved with the anti-apartheid movement and protested at Lansdowne Road against a visiting Springboks rugby team. He also helped to organise the peace train to Northern Ireland. He was also part of the Dublin Crisis Conference when Dublin Corporation ”“ now Dublin City Council ”“ planned “to resettle the Liberties with large highways, with large office blocks and large car parks: the unholy trinity”. He was opposed to the idea, saying “it would all end in tears”. He later recalled that it did.
Dean Griffin was the author of a number of books including Anglican and Irish: What We Believe (1976), Mark of Protest (1993), Enough Religion to Make Us Hate (2002) and A Short Catechism of basic Church Teaching (2007).

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He was ordained in 1991 and served for 4 years as curate of All Saints, Crowborough in Chichester diocese. He and Heather then left to move to Sydney Australia, as Mike took up a post as Junior Lecturer at Moore Theological College. While there he also did research for an MTh, with a dissertation on the concept of truth in John’s Gospel, and made many friends.

I first met Mike in 1998 when he returned to the UK to be a research fellow at Oak Hill Theological College in London. Some of his lectures were quite stretching (such as this one, and this one which he contributed to The Theologian journal), and I never understood his compulsive need to talk about Arsenal football club and include diagrams or witty quotes in all of his handouts! But he was a good friend and a mentor. We met up weekly to read the Bible and pray together during a year when I was doing MPhil research in the Old Testament, and we’d occasionally pore over the Septuagint or a Latin Church Father, or he’d advise me about college committees he had gotten me involved with. Always with at least one cup of coffee (and occasionally with a glass of something different).

Mike’s PhD from Kings College, London (completed in 2004) was on the eternal relation between God the Father and God the Son in selected patristic theologians and John’s Gospel, which highlights his interest in integrating systematic, historical, and biblical theology. Much of this work made it into his most recent publication Your Will Be Done: Exploring Eternal Subordination, Divine Monarchy and Divine Humility. He was keen to encourage Christians to engage more carefully in systematic theology, which he saw as something of a weakness in evangelical circles. In a helpful talk from 2006, for example, he examined the biblical foundations of systematics and outlined a biblical method of engaging in it, which many found persuasive.

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(Oak Hill College)

Being opposed is not fun. It does not lift our spirits. And when, as you have in South Africa, you spent decades and decades facing an atrocious and deeply evil ideology of apartheid, even a trace of wrongdoing brings back the taste of injustice. One thinks, “Perhaps we are simply going round the circle again.”

Yet we are not.

A New Year reminds us that history is not circular. It is not endless repetition, but linear: a story written by God in the colours and characters of human beings. A story that has a beginning, a middle and an end ”“ it ends in triumph. Even if we struggle and suffer along the way, we know that because God raised Christ from the dead, we will see the victory of Jesus Christ and share in his perfect Kingdom.

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But Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester condemned the reading and called for discipline against those involved.

“The authorities of the Scottish Episcopal Church should immediately repudiate this ill-advised invitation,” he said in a statement.

He also called for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to publicly distance the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion from the event.

” Christians should know what their fellow citizens believe and this can include reading the Qur’an for themselves, whether in the original or in translation. This is not, however, the same thing as having it read in Church in the context of public worship,” he said.

Read it all from Christian Today.

[The] Right Reverend Dr Jacob Ayeebo, Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Tamale has bemoaned the current situation where faith was becoming insignificant to growing numbers of people in society.

He said “Growing numbers of people are less interested in spiritual principles and more desirous of learning pragmatic solutions for life”.

He said most teenagers prioritised education, career development, friendships, and travel, adding “Among adults, the areas of growing importance are lifestyle comfort, success and personal achievements”.

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…this obsession with things which are ”˜less than God’ is rooted in a more profound malaise ”“ the House of Bishops is not spiritually serious. By this I mean to say that they don’t seem to believe that the substance of Christianity is a matter of eternal life and death. The House of Bishops seems to be filled with just the same sort of social justice pleading that a liberal atheist would be perfectly at home with, with the consequence that the Bishops sound just like every other well-meaning middle class worrier….

The Bishops, in other words, seem to embody the cultural cringe that most Christians in England suffer from ”“ that feeling when you are a reasonably intelligent and committed believer, but in mixed company refrain from mentioning anything to do with Christian faith for fear of causing offence, or, worse, being mistaken for a fundamentalist. The trouble is that the Bishops are there precisely to articulate the Christian faith in the public sphere and ”“ surely! ”“ to run the risk of offending when they do.

What the Bishops have failed to do is articulate a coherent narrative, not about what Christianity is in general and as a whole, but what Christianity means for the English people at this point in our national life.

Read it all (emphasis mine).

When the early Christians wrote about Jesus, this was the story they believed themselves to be telling. They didn’t see him as simply a teacher, a moral example, or even as one who saved people from a doomed world. They told his story as the point where the dark forces of chaos converged, in the cynical politics of Herod and Pilate, the bitter fanaticism of the Pharisees, the wild shrieks of diseased souls, the sudden storms on the lake. They invite us to see his death on the analogy of Jonah’s being thrown into the sea, there to be swallowed by the monster called Death. They insist that in this death God has taken upon Himself the full force of the world’s evil. As a sign of that, the final book of the Bible declares that in the new world, now already begun with his resurrection, there will be no more sea.

Saying this precisely does not give Christian theology an easy explanation (“Oh, that’s all right then”) for the continuing presence of evil in the world. On the contrary, it tells a story about Jesus’s own sense of abandonment, and thereby encourages us to embrace the same sense of helpless involvement in the sorrow of the world, as the means by which the world is to be healed. Those who work for justice, reconciliation and peace will know that sense, and perhaps, occasionally, that healing.

This isn’t the kind of answer that the Enlightenment wanted. But maybe, as we launch into the deep waters of another new year, it is the kind of vocation we ought to embrace in place of shallow analysis and shrill reaction.

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And even because this day He took not the angels’ nature upon Him, but took our nature in “the seed of Abraham,” therefore hold we this day as a high feast; therefore meet we thus every year in a holy assembly, upon us a dignity which upon the angels He bestowed not. That He, as in the chapter before the Apostle setteth Him forth, That is, “the brightness of His Father’s glory, the very character of His substance, the Heir of all things, by Whom He made the world;” He, when both needed it His taking upon Him their nature and both stood before Him, men and Angels, “the Angels He took not,” but men “He took;” was made Man, was not made an Angel; that is, did more for them than He did for the Angels of Heaven.

Elsewhere the Apostle doth deliver this very point positively, and that, not without some vehemency; “Without all question great is the mystery of godliness: God is manifested in the flesh.” Which is in effect the same that is here said, but that here it is delivered by way of comparison; for this speech is evidently a comparison. If he had thus set it down, “Our nature He took,” that had been positive; but setting it down thus, “Ours He took, the Angels He took not,” it is certainly comparative.

…Now the masters of speech tell us that there is power in the positive if it be given forth with an earnest asseveration, but nothing to that that is in the comparative. It is nothing so full to say, “I will never forget you,” as thus to say it; “Can a mother forget the child of her own womb? Well, if she can, yet will not I forget you.” Nothing so forcible to say thus, “I will hold my word with you,” as thus, “Heaven and earth shall pass, but My word shall not pass.” The comparative expressing is without all question more significant; and this here is such. Theirs, the Angels, nusquam, “at no hand He took, but ours He did.

–From a Christmas sermon in 1605.

A prayer for the #NewYear ahead. We would like to wish everyone a very happy 2017! pic.twitter.com/yfH4pUzkvt

— Church of England (@c_of_e) December 31, 2016

Out of the thousand things which follow directly from this reading of John, I choose three as particularly urgent.

First, John’s view of the incarnation, of the Word becoming flesh, strikes at the very root of that liberal denial which characterised mainstream theology thirty years ago and whose long-term effects are with us still. I grew up hearing lectures and sermons which declared that the idea of God becoming human was a category mistake. No human being could actually be divine; Jesus must therefore have been simply a human being, albeit no doubt (the wonderful patronizing pat on the head of the headmaster to the little boy) a very brilliant one. Phew; that’s all right then; he points to God but he isn’t actually God. And a generation later, but growing straight out of that school of thought, I have had a clergyman writing to me this week to say that the church doesn’t know anything for certain, so what’s all the fuss about? Remove the enfleshed and speaking Word from the centre of your theology, and gradually the whole thing will unravel until all you’re left with is the theological equivalent of the grin on the Cheshire Cat, a relativism whose only moral principle is that there are no moral principles; no words of judgment because nothing is really wrong except saying that things are wrong, no words of mercy because, if you’re all right as you are, you don’t need mercy, merely ”˜affirmation’….

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Almighty God, who didst rescue Samuel Ajayi Crowther from slavery, sent him to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ to his people in Nigeria, and made him the first bishop from the people of West Africa: Grant that those who follow in his steps may reap what he has sown and find abundant help for the harvest; through him who took upon himself the form of a slave that we might be free, the same Jesus Christ; who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The first ever African Anglican Archbishop, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, of Nigeria. pic.twitter.com/VV9DHkFKoR

— Noel Nyasha (@NoelNyasha) December 16, 2015

To give shape and meaning to life we need to inhabit narratives capacious enough to permit development and to accommodate new themes. Not only stories are needed but communities to inhabit them. We all need somewhere we belong and where membership gives us dignity and something to live up to….

God so loved the world that he was generous and gave himself to us in the person of the infant Jesus whose destiny was not command and control but to love his enemies into loving. We no longer regard Caesar as god and the coming of the Christ-child has also changed our picture of God and reveals a generous God who does not in his heart of hearts resemble Caesar.

And so the wise men significantly “departed into their own country another way”.

A genuine encounter with the Christ-child, an infant born in a stable to an ordinary mother in a far off province of the Empire, may not on the surface seem very earth-shaking but in reality it changes everything.

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The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Glenn Davies, has highlighted the importance of truth in public life and pointed to the truth of Jesus, in his annual Christmas message….

“In the Bible, God is called the God of truth. The apostle John describes Jesus as ”˜the Word become flesh’ who came to earth and lived among us. He said, ”˜We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.’ From politics to personal life, what more do we want for Christmas than people who will tell us the truth?” the Archbishop said.

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Listen to it all.

I can bring it so neare; but onely the worthy hearer, and the worthy receiver, can call this Lord this Jesus, this Christ, Immanuel God with us; onely that virgin soule, devirginated in the blood of Adam but restored in the blood of the Lambe hath this Ecce, this testimony, this assurance, that God is with him; they that have this Ecce, this testimony, in a rectified conscience, are Godfathers to this child Jesus and may call him Immanuel God with us for as no man can deceive God, so God can deceive no man; God cannot live in the darke himself neither can he leave those who are his in the darke: If he be with thee he will make thee see that he is with thee and never goe out of thy sight, till he have brought thee, where thou canst never goe out of his.

–John Donne (1572-1631), Preached at St. Pauls, upon Christmas Day, in the Evening, 1624

The future of the partially-demolished earthquake-ravaged cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, remains uncertain after an expected pre-Christmas announcement was delayed. Cathedral and diocesan officials had wanted to demolish the remains of the building, which was severely damaged in the 2011 earthquake, and build a new cathedral. But a series of legal and political challenges followed from opponents who are pushing for the previous building to be effectively restored.

In January, a New Zealand government-appointed mediator, Miriam Dean QC, said that restoration work could lead to a new building which was “indistinguishable” from the one that was all-but destroyed by the earthquake. But she said that the “costly and risky project” would be significantly more expensive and take much longer to build than a contemporary replacement.

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Churches, parishes, and indi­viduals will be urged next spring to join a global disinvestment mobil­isa­tion to end the dependence on fossil fuels.

The campaign Bright Now will launch the event next May to increase pressure on big investors to move their money away from coal, oil, and gas producers into green-energy technologies.

The campaign, which is run by a Christian charity that campaigns on climate change, Operation Noah, is putting together a resource for churches on how they can disinvest from fossil fuels and reinvest in renewable energy.

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