The world needs to understand that the situation that we now confront is not primarily about structure or conferences but about irreconcilable truth claims. It is worth remembering that in the Biblical narratives religious structures have often been the enemy of revealed truth. When these structures become obstacles, YHWH, in his own way and at a time of his own choosing removed them and brought His people back to Himself. Of course there is value to preserving Anglican structures but we must never do so at the expense of the people for whom our Lord Jesus the Christ gave his life.

Until the Communion summons the courage to tackle that issue headlong and resolve it we can do no other than provide for those who cry out to us. It is our earnest prayer that repentance and reconciliation will make this a temporary arrangement. One thing is clear we will not abandon our friends.

When we met in Dar es Salaam, after a great deal of effort, we suggested a way forward that had the support of all those present ”“ including the Presiding Bishop of TEC. The House of Bishops and Executive Committee of The Episcopal Church quickly rejected this proposal on the grounds that it apparently violated their canons. We now have a counter proposal from TEC and yet there is no indication that it will meet the needs of those for whom it is supposedly designed. This endless series of proposals and counter proposals continues with no apparent conclusion in sight. Sadly, it is becoming increasingly clear that the only acceptable end as far as TEC is concerned is the full capitulation of any who would stand in opposition to their biblically incompatible innovations- this we will never do. There is a way forward – we have written and spoken repeatedly about it ”“ the time for action is now.

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The Bishop of Peterborough, Rt Rev Ian Cundy has been diagnosed with cancer.

Mr Cundy, who has been the city’s bishop since 1996, is suffering from mesothelioma ”“ a rare cancer of the lung cavity.

His office has said that the cancer has been caught at an early stage, and medical experts were hopeful the Bishop will be able to continue with his duties after a short course of treatment.

He has been unwell since the summer, forcing him to cancel a number of public engagements.

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In the original article:

During the question-and-answer period, he [referring to Bishop Salmon] denied that he had ordered diocesan clergy to refrain from praying for Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori during the Prayers of the People, despite more than one participant saying their rectors had told them he had.

After Salmon left to go to another appointment, one participant, to murmurs of assent, said that Salmon’s statement was part of a pattern in which “we’re told all sorts of things and then the bishop denies that it’s true.”

That section is now gone, however.

Ralph Webb has some comments on this here.

From here:

”˜Bishop Yamoyam is still seriously ill in the Intensive Care Unit in the United States. The Presiding Bishop returned yesterday and gave us all the news that at the moment Bp Miguel seems to be paralysed down one side of his body. I met with Bp Miguels wife yesterday, and she now has her passport and will be flying out to the US on the next available flight along with their daughter who is a nurse. They are grateful for the prayers of everyone concerned. We are organising special prayer meetings here in the National Office and I know that others are being organised in churches across the Philippines’

You need to guess the top 5 American cities before you look.

She spent years as an outspoken antiabortion activist, and that cause remains dear to her. But these days, Karen Swallow Prior has a new passion: animal welfare.

She wasn’t sure, at first, that advocating for God’s four-legged creatures would go over well on the campus of Liberty University, a fundamentalist Baptist institution founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Among the Liberty faculty — and conservative evangelicals in general — the animal-rights movement is often disdained as a secular, liberal cause.

But activists have been working with increasing intensity to shed that image. They’re lecturing in Quaker meetinghouses and Episcopal churches, setting up websites that post Scripture alongside recipes for vegan soup — and using biblical language to promote political initiatives, such as laws mandating bigger cages for pregnant pigs.

On Wednesday, clergy from 20 faith traditions — including Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic — will sign a statement declaring a moral duty to treat animals with respect. At a ceremony in Washington, they will call on all people of faith to stop wearing fur, reduce meat consumption, and buy only from farms with humane practices. The Best Friends Animal Society, which brought the group together, plans to recruit volunteers to bring that message into at least 2,000 congregations nationwide.

At Liberty University, meanwhile, Prior took a risk: She wrote an editorial for this month’s university journal declaring animal welfare an evangelical concern. She pointed out that the abolitionist William Wilberforce, an evangelical hero of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, pushed for laws to protect animals from human cruelty. And she said there was “ample biblical support” for continuing such activism today.

To Prior’s surprise, she’s gotten plenty of praise on and around Liberty’s campus in Lynchburg, Va. Her pastor has even asked her to lecture on the topic at Bible study.

Read the whole article.

Warning: this article’s content may not be suitable for some blog readers.

n his remarkable twenty-year career as a New York Times business journalist, Kurt Eichenwald has seen himself as a kind of crusader””shedding light on the world’s dark places, uncovering wrongdoing, bringing criminals to account. Lately, however, the pursuer feels like the pursued. “I had no idea of what I was taking on. I had no idea of the magnitude of the evil of these people,” he tells me. “This is an organized-crime business, these are people””we’re not talking about people with an affinity for Scotch””they spend their days talking and living and breathing the sexual issues of children.”

Two years ago, Eichenwald wrote a sensational front-page story in the New York Times about Justin Berry, a teenage pornography star who ran an enormously lucrative business from his room while his mother thought he was doing homework. The article resulted in congressional hearings, arrests, book-and-movie interest, and an Oprah episode. Eichenwald followed that first story with disturbing reports about illegal child-modeling Websites and self-help chat rooms where child molesters perfect their strategies. The Berry piece was impressive in its vividness. Law-enforcement agencies seized upon it as the definitive word about a sordid, teeming underworld, and parents inclined to worry about the dangers of the Internet were given reason to worry much more.

As much as the stories provided a window into a seldom-seen world, they also raised troubling questions about how they were reported””and ultimately about the man who reported them. To start with, Eichenwald made himself a character in the story about Berry””highly unusual for the New York Times. The reporter appeared as a savior, working to win Berry’s trust and finally rescuing him from the business he’d fallen into and delivering him back to his religious faith. But once Eichenwald became part of the story, others began to ask questions: Why would a Times reporter believe he should go into the rescuing business? And how had he accomplished what he’d accomplished? (Reporting on child pornography is inherently difficult, because looking at the images themselves is illegal, even for a journalist.) And behind those questions is a more fundamental one: What drives the people who fill these roles, criminal and pursuer, obsessive fan and obsessive foe?

With the country’s vexed relationship to youthful sexuality as the backdrop, Eichenwald’s stories, hectoring as they were about the evils they were uncovering, had a kind of prurient power that is undeniably related to the power of pornography. The cure and the disease are impossible to separate.

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Russell Crowe, who is 43, says he’s planning to be baptized. “I’d like to do it this year,” the Oscar-winning actor tells Men’s Journal. “My mom and dad decided to let my brother and me make our own decisions about God when we got to the right age. I started thinking recently, `If I believe it is important to baptize my kids, why not me?”’

Crowe says the baptism will take place in the Byzantine chapel he built at his country ranch in Australia for his wedding to Danielle Spencer in 2003. The couple have two sons, 3-year-old Charlie and 1-year-old Tennyson.

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“We are creating stages for people to perform on in some way, but it’s a very scripted and considered display,” he said. “Cooking could be a display, for example, with your partner watching you from the bedroom.”

He talked about tuning the privacy of each room, using shades or scrims to have larger or smaller openings, as you would change the aperture of a camera. “So if you don’t want your partner to see you shaving your legs in the shower,” he said, “you can pull the shade.”

Like the clothes Marc Jacobs designed for his own label and for Vuitton this fall ”” skirts bunched into the waistbands of pantyhose at the back, see-through dresses with bras and panties sewn onto them ”” Graft’s peekaboo interiors are a sly commentary on a culture that continues to find new ways to display ever more intimate, and mundane, details of domestic life. In a YouTube world, one’s home is no longer one’s private retreat: it’s just a container for the webcam.

In New York City, where the streetscape is being systematically remade by glassy towers like the W, which have been spreading like kudzu in the seven years since the first two terrarium-like Richard Meier buildings went up on the West Side Highway, the lives of the inhabitants are increasingly on exhibit, like the performance art wherein the artists “live” in a gallery for 24 hours and you get to watch them napping or brushing their teeth.

It’s not always a pretty picture.

In September, Curbed, the feisty New York City real estate blog, posted a photograph of a newly completed, glass-walled condo building on East 13th Street. You could see right into the apartments, which looked most like messy dorm rooms. It was a grubby retort to the marketing hoo-ha that surrounds these now ubiquitous buildings and trumpets a sleekly attractive lifestyle accessorized by midcentury modern furniture and designer clothing. There were unmade beds jammed right up against the glass, mangled paper Venetian shades, a towel over a chair.

Accompanying the photo was a report of a sighting of a guy in boxer shorts doing push-ups. “Doesn’t the first condo association meeting need to include a window coverings workshop?” the post wondered plaintively.

Read it all and please take the time to look at the picture of the building.

Evangelical conflict on the topic was obvious in reader response to the Instone Brewer essay. Initially the mail was heavily negative. The most stinging broadside was a column by John Piper, a respected theological conservative, that called the essay not just weak but “tragic.” The magazine’s editor in chief, David Neff, felt the need to explain online that “Instone-Brewer’s article did not… give people carte blanche on divorce.” The mail eventually leveled off at 60% negative to 40% positive.

Still, the controversy suggests that even the country’s most rule-bound Christians will search for a fresh understanding of scripture when it seems unjust to them. The implications? Flexibility on divorce may mean that evangelicals could also rethink their position on such things as gay marriage, as a generation of Christians far more accepting of homosexuality begins to move into power. (The ever-active Barna folks have found that 57% of “born-again” Christians age 16-29 criticize their own church for being “anti-homosexual.”) It could also give heart to a certain twice-divorced former New York mayor who is running for President and seeking the conservative vote. But that may be pushing things a bit.

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Later, [Charles] Bennison did not prevent his brother’s ordination, his later request to be reinstated after renouncing his orders in 1977, or his transfer between two California dioceses, according to the Episcopal committee.

John Bennison was forced to leave the priesthood in 2006 when news of his abuse was made public, according to Episcopal News Service.

A trial date for Bishop Bennison has not yet been set. He will be paid in the meantime, ENS reported.

Meanwhile, the Diocese of Pittsburgh disregarded a warning from Schori and took a big step out the door of the Episcopal Church, declaring itself at odds with the denomination’s more liberal view of Scripture and homosexuality and paving the way to join a more conservative Anglican branch.

By a tally of 227 to 82, lay and ordained delegates to Pittsburgh’s annual convention on Friday (Nov. 2) voted to change their diocese’s constitution, removing language that requires “accession” to the national church.

“As a diocese we have come to a fork in the road,” Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan told delegates on Friday. “Indeed, it has become clear that our understandings are not only different, but mutually exclusive, even destructive to one another.”

Read it all.

Download it and read it all. The election is scheduled for November 10th..

Prayer said, Scripture read, birthday song happily sung, the Rev. Roger Marsh has a message for his team. Stay on track.

“Be kind, courteous and respectful toward each other,” he says. “Keep in mind that we’re out here with a task, and that is to share the Lord.”

The pastor leads a parting prayer. Then it’s off to work, off to the multitudes swarming at Texas Motor Speedway.

Speedway officials estimate this weekend’s racing triple-header, peaking with Sunday’s Dickies 500 race, will draw 400,000 fans to the Tarrant County oval.

And as always, Dr. Marsh and his fellow volunteers of Texas Alliance Raceway Ministries are there to lend a hand, offer support and spread the word.

Read it all.

First, many of those who have found that they cannot continue in The Episcopal Church are people who find much catholic ritual, including vestments, unacceptable. The so-called “low-church” view of ritual and vesting is sufficient and the regalia of catholicity is anathema to many of the acronym-related crowd. I hoped there were no spies in church that Sunday. Had it not been for the progressive liturgical movement, the priest would not have been so arrayed that Sunday morning.

Then I knew that she had employed the New International Version for scripture readings. The very fact that this is allowed rubrically over the historic King James is a sign that The Episcopal Church progressives sought to broaden our experiences in hearing the scriptures.

Finally, a woman at the altar was a testimony that progressive visionaries reread the scriptures and found that indeed Paul may have just meant that in Christ there “is no male or female.” And so I fear for all my female priest friends, that they may find themselves the focus of inattention at best and defrocking at worst as much of emerging Anglicanism is not favorable to female priests. It happens, I know, for an ordained Southern Baptist friend of mine was recently sent a letter telling her that her ordination from some 20 years ago was no longer valid.

And I fear as well that those who are faithful saints in the acronym crowd will not succumb to the works-centered righteousness of fundamentalism. Newfound power can corrupt just as much as long-held power. And those who think they stand may need to watch, lest they fall. So my fear is for those who have reaped the benefits of progressive visionary thinking and praying and acting as well as for those who, ignoring previous progressive visionary thinking and praying and acting, are acting out of a non-Anglican ethos and are falling headlong into an individualistic congregationalism with bishops.

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In Book 10 of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Adam asks the question so many of his descendants have asked: why should the lives of billions be blighted because of a sin he, not they, committed? (“Ah, why should all mankind / For one man’s fault”¦ be condemned?”) He answers himself immediately: “But from me what can proceed, / But all corrupt, both Mind and Will depraved?” Adam’s Original Sin is like an inherited virus. Although those who are born with it are technically innocent of the crime ”“ they did not eat of the forbidden tree ”“ its effects rage in their blood and disorder their actions.

God, of course, could have restored them to spiritual health, but instead, Paul tells us in Romans, he “gave them over” to their “reprobate minds” and to the urging of their depraved wills. Because they are naturally “filled with all unrighteousness,” unrighteous deeds are what they will perform: “fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness . . . envy, murder . . . deceit, malignity.” “There is none righteous,” Paul declares, “no, not one.”

It follows, then (at least from these assumptions), that the presence of evil in the world cannot be traced back to God, who opened up the possibility of its emergence by granting his creatures free will but is not responsible for what they, in the person of their progenitor Adam, freely chose to do.

What Milton and Paul offer (not as collaborators of course, but as participants in the same tradition) is a solution to the central problem of theodicy ”“ the existence of suffering and evil in a world presided over by an all powerful and benevolent deity. The occurrence of catastrophes natural (hurricanes, droughts, disease) and unnatural (the Holocaust ) always revives the problem and provokes anguished discussion of it. The conviction, held by some, that the problem is intractable leads to the conclusion that there is no God, a conclusion reached gleefully by the authors of books like “The God Delusion,” “God Is Not Great” and “The End of Faith.”

Now two new books (to be published in the coming months) renew the debate. Their authors come from opposite directions ”“ one from theism to agnosticism, the other from atheism to theism ”“ but they meet, or rather cross paths, on the subject of suffering and evil.

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Delegates to convention in the Diocese of Rochester passed a resolution affirming that standing committees and bishops with jurisdiction are not bound by any extra-canonical restraints””including but not limited to the restraints set forth in Resolution B033 passed by the 75th General Convention””when considering consents to the ordination of any candidate to the episcopate. The resolution is intended to be submitted to the 76th General Convention in 2009.

Convention met Nov. 2-3 at the Hyatt Regency in Rochester.

The last convention address for Bishop Jack McKelvey took the form of a video presentation that celebrated many of the people, places and ministries he has encountered. Bishop McKelvey will retire next spring after eight years of service in Rochester and 16 as a bishop.

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Check it out.

The average age of people enrolled in the seminaries associated with the Episcopal Church continues to range from the high 30s to the mid 40s.

Episcopal News Service contacted all 11 seminaries this fall, asking them for specific information about their incoming classes, as well as their student bodies as a whole. Not all of the information requested is compiled in the same way from seminary to seminary, and thus apples-to-apples comparisons are not always possible.

It is also worth noting that most seminaries now offer degree and certificate programs beyond the traditional Master of Divinity degree sought by most people in the ordination process.

Most seminaries showed enrollments ranging near to what they had experienced in recent years. Whether male or female students form the majority varies from seminary to seminary.

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Read it carefully and read it all.

Americans are concerned about Iran’s nuclear program but split on whether military action should be undertaken if diplomacy and economic sanctions fail to stop it, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.

The findings underscore public concern about an Iranian threat and a partisan divide over how to respond. Iran has emerged as a key issue in the presidential race, especially among Democrats.

While 46% of those surveyed say military action should be taken either now or if diplomacy fails, 45% rule it out in any case. Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to endorse taking military steps.

“If you had more follow-on questions ”” on what if the military action was unilateral, (for instance) ”” then support would tend to diminish,” says Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. “But it does indicate that approximately half of Americans are concerned enough that they would at least seriously consider it, and that’s worth noting.”

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The best way to give people a sense of where they stand is to lay out some data. Every three years the Federal Reserve Board conducts a national survey that tracks the financial health of American households.

The Fed slices and dices this stuff with the vigor of an Iron Chef; the result is a rich, if dry, array of offerings on household net worth, pension and income levels, plus other demographic side dishes.

Whenever I slip these tidbits into cocktail party chatter, people are surprised to realize how little money it takes to win a gold star from the Fed. If you and yours are bringing in $40,000 a year, you’re doing better than half the households in America.

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It was “business as usual” at the convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania on November 3, just hours before the inhibition of its bishop, Charles E. Bennison, took effect.

In the only direct reference from the podium at Philadelphia Cathedral to Bennison’s suspension, diocesan Chancellor William Bullitt told clergy and lay delegates that as of 12:01 a.m. November 4 Bennison was barred from all canonical, episcopal and ministerial functions indefinitely. In his brief statement, Bullitt said the diocesan standing committee would become the ecclesiastical authority on November 4 and that it will appoint a bishop to conduct future ordinations, confirmations and parish visitations until the Court for the Trial of a Bishop determines Bennison’s fate.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori announced the inhibition, with the concurrence of the standing committee, on October 31 after an investigation concluded there was ample evidence for a trial to proceed.

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Do you find yourself going online more and more? You’re not alone.

Four out of five U.S. adults go online now, according to a new Harris Poll.

The survey, which polled 2,062 adults in July and October, found that 79 percent of adults — about 178 million — go online, spending an average 11 hours a week on the Internet.

“We’re up to almost 80 of adults who now are online, or are somehow gaining access to the Internet. That’s a pretty impressive figure,” said Regina Corso, director of the Harris Poll.

The results reflect a steady rise since 2000, when 57 percent of adults polled said they went online. In 2006, the number was 77 percent.

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By a vote of 299-79, clergy and lay delegates voted to approve an amended resolution calling for the 2008 Lambeth Conference to be postponed “until the listening process is more complete.”

This resolution was submitted by Bishop Suffragan Nedi Rivera after convention began. The wording of the resolution will comprise the text of a letter sent to Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori over the signature of bishops Greg Rickel and Rivera. This letter is to serve as the input requested by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who asked for advice from the House of Bishops on how to respond to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has asked the primates for their advice as he weighs a decision on the House of Bishops “response ”˜to questions and concerns raised by our Anglican Communion partners’.”

The text approved by the convention said, “We are leery about using the occasion of the [2008 Lambeth] Conference to present a Covenant that is exclusionary, that centralizes authority, or that adds to the core doctrine of our faith. The cost of holding the Lambeth Conference under the present circumstances is disproportionate to its benefits, and the good we can do elsewhere in the mission of the church.”

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Meanwhile, there was a general consensus that the bishops’ pastoral statement, issued last April, was useful, said Bishop Spence. Some liberals find it attractive as it permits them to celebrate a church service with a civilly-married gay couple; some conservatives appreciate the fact that it does not allow same-sex weddings or blessings and, in essence, continues a moratorium on blessing ceremonies first imposed by the bishops in 2005. (New Westminster responded to the moratorium by limiting blessings to eight parishes that had requested permission earlier.)

Integrity, a support group for gay Anglicans, wrote to Archbishop Hiltz asking that the house of bishops lift the moratorium. He said after the closed session that his response to Integrity will be that “the position of the house as outlined in the pastoral statement remains.” The bishops did not “entertain any changes” in it, he said.

In terms of consultation, bishops Barry Clarke of Montreal and John Chapman of Ottawa each said they have not yet reached a decision on how they will act upon the votes of their synods. “It was useful to have a conversation with dioceses in the same position,” said Bishop Chapman, who added he wanted to see the decisions of the diocese of Niagara, whose Nov. 16-17 synod was scheduled to vote on the blessings issue. “I don’t want to act alone, but I don’t think I’ll need to. There is movement in the church (toward further acceptance of gay people); there is no going back.”

In open session, bishops discussed the reactions in several dioceses to the General Synod votes last June that said same-sex blessings do not contravene core church doctrine but declined to affirm dioceses’ authority to offer them. Reaction was fairly quiet in Western Newfoundland, Brandon (Manitoba) and Calgary, said their respective bishops, Percy Coffin, Jim Njegovan and Derek Hoskin.

Bishop Jim Cowan said seven priests in his diocese of British Columbia, angered that they may not offer same-sex blessings, signed a petition asking to have their permission to officiate at weddings withdrawn from the diocese and will make other provisions for marriages to take place at their churches.

Read it all.

Two graphs to illustrate the post below re: TEC Domestic Dioceses’ decline in membership and ASA since 2000:

Note: the scale on the Y-axes above (verticle axes) is compressed. They do not begin at 0. Thus the decline appears much steeper than if the starting point at the bottom was 0. See the comments for my justification for preparing it this way. The increased rate of decline from 2003 onwards is real however, as is shown in the following graph re: percentage change. (Which has an accurate Y-scale).

Update: Oops. The Y axis on the second graph should be labeled “% change”, not “members”. Sorry we didn’t catch that before we posted it.

[b]Update 2:[/b] By request we’ve uploaded our original Excel spreadsheet with the relevant data from which we created the graphs. You can find it here: http://kendallharmon.net/t19/media/TEC_2000-2006.xls

A friend recently asked us what TEC’s decline in membership and ASA (average Sunday attendance) in recent years meant on a daily basis. We’ve had a few minutes to crunch some numbers. (The 2006 TEC domestic data is still rough as exact diocese by diocese figures have not yet been released. We’re using 2006 figures for Provinces 1-8 with 2005 figures for Haiti, Dominican Republic, Taiwan, Micronesia and the Churches in Europe subtracted out). For 2000 and 2005 data we’ve used official TEC data found here.

2000 TEC Domestic Membership: 2,329,045
2006 estimated Domestic Membership: 2,156,043

membership loss in 6 years: 173,002 (-7.4%, a loss of 1.2% per year)

This equates to an average loss of 28,834 members per year (or losing a diocese the size of the diocese of Ohio per year)

This also equates to losing an average of 79 members PER DAY.
(The median parish in TEC had 174 members in 2005. So this equates to losing an average parish every two – three days for 6 years.)

2000 TEC Domestic ASA: 856,579
2006 estimated Domestic ASA: 764,660

ASA loss in 6 years: 91,919 (-10.7%, a loss of 1.8% per year)

ASA loss per year: 15,320,
This is 15,000+ attendees lost every year for 6 years, which is equivalent to losing the diocese of Southwest Florida or Central Florida every year. (They ranked 13th and 14th in TEC in 2005)

ASA loss per day: 42 attendees.
The 2005 median ASA is 74 attendees, so this means losing an average congregation of worshippers every 2 days for 6 years.

And the loss rate since 2003 has only accelerated:

2002 domestic membership (using 2002 as it is the year prior to the disaster of GC03): 2,320,221
2006 estimated domestic membership: 2,156,043

2002 – 2006 membership loss: 164,178 in 4 years. (-7.1%, a loss of 1.8% per year)

loss per year: 41,045 (equivalent to losing a diocese the size of Chicago or Washington (in the top 15 among domestic dioceses, every year — less than 15 domestic dioceses had 40,000+ members in 2005)

loss per day: 112 members (losing an entire parish every 1.5 days)

2002 TEC Domestic ASA: 846,640
2006 estimated Domestic ASA: 764,660

Total ASA loss in 4 years: 81,980 (-9.7%, a loss of 2.4% per year)

loss per year: 20,495
This is equivalent to losing a diocese almost the size of Los Angeles or Connecticut every single year. These are the fifth and sixth largest dioceses in terms of ASA. Only 6 ECUSA dioceses out of 100 domestic dioceses have total ASA of 20,000 or more.

ASA loss per day: 56
equals losing an “average” congregation (weekly attendance) every 1.5 days.

Of course we’ll update and verify this analysis when official diocesan data comes out
— elfgirl

As I feared might happen, your friendly diocesan convention news elf (me) has been super-swamped with her real job and ministry responsibilities of late, and so hasn’t been following the diocesan convention news much at all. Sorry about that. (Kendall’s been doing a pretty good job, covering the news, however. So, I think we’ll keep him on the payroll! 😉 ) But the following picture from the diocese of Michigan’s diocesan convention just couldn’t be ignored and pulled this elf out of self-imposed blogging exile, if just for a few minutes…

The caption reads: “Bishop Wendell Gibbs led the Diocesan Convention worship on Saturday, October 27.”

The accompanying story is here along with full coverage of the convention resolutions, the bishop’s address, etc.

The Bible is filled with stories of major environmental changes, like floods, droughts and desertification, often shown as God’s righteous punishment for human misdeeds. In these stories, some scientists see a chance to understand a little more about the world. They have searched for the scientific truth behind such stories as Noah’s flood.

Listen to it all.