Referring to the ordination of Gene Robinson and the behaviour of the American Episcopal Church, Dr Jensen says in this month’s Melbourne Anglican newspaper: “If we are talking about schism and the break up of the Communion – that’s where it starts and that’s where the responsibility is.”

This is just too simple.

If there is a break-up of the Anglican Communion, then Dr Jensen and the bishops who attended the GAFCON alternative Lambeth, must take some responsibility. There is blood on their hands.

The dual issues of gay priests and female bishops are tearing the Church apart and, indeed, threaten the very viability of Lambeth.

But what do we have?

The Vicar General of Melbourne, Bishop Paul White, writing to all Melbourne clergy, before leaving for Lambeth, said it would be “premature to comment on reports of division in the global Anglican Church”.

This is unhelpful and demonstrates a singular lack of leadership. The Anglican Church is broken and some would argue its very existence is terminal.

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Jeffrey Steenson’s decision to leave his post as an Episcopal bishop in New Mexico last year came with a steep price.

The former Bishop Steenson, a married father of three who will become a Roman Catholic priest later this year, said his lifestyle was “nothing to complain about.” Along with other perks, he left a $100,000-a-year salary for a pay cut of $75,000.

“It’s a very big step. All the things you took for granted are gone,” said Mr. Steenson, who laughed about his change in financial fortune.

“And if your identity was shaped as a [Episcopal] priest or bishop, that has to be unmade and redone again. That’s a big thing. But I feel being in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church is worth those sacrifices.”

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(Press Release)

The congregation of Christ Church, An Anglican Community for the Four Corners, has unanimously affirmed its vestry’s decision to come under the spiritual oversight of the Anglican Church of Uganda. Bishop John Guernsey of Dale City, Virginia, will serve as the new bishop for Christ Church.

Christ Church joins the former Bishop of the Diocese of the Rio Grande, The Rt. Rev. Terence Kelshaw, the Church of the Epiphany in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and St. Peters Anglican Church in Fort Collins, Colorado, in recently coming under the oversight of the Church of Uganda.

Christ Church was established in February 2007 by a significant core of lay leaders, formerly with St. John’s Episcopal Church, Farmington, New Mexico. By March of that year, other lay leaders, vestry members and the pastoral staff from St. John’s Episcopal Church joined this core group. The Rev. Carl Brenner, Rector of St. John’s Church for almost eight years, was called as Sr. Pastor for Christ Church in July of 2007. Deborah Gregory, former Minister of Worship for St. John’s, was also called to serve as the Lay Pastor for Worship and Administration at Christ Church.

While oversight by the Province of Uganda is considered temporary until an orthodox structure for Anglicans is formed in the United States, Christ Church is eager to build an even stronger partnership with the Church of Uganda.

Along with the churches from Fort Collins and Cloudcroft, Christ Church has been teamed with the Karamoja Diocese in Moroto, Uganda. The poverty and strife of the area provide many opportunities for Christ Church to give support to this host diocese. Yet Christ Church members know they will receive far more in the exchange.

Six members of Christ Church traveled to Uganda on a Solar Light Mission’s trip in August of 2005. They were immediately captivated by the joy of Ugandan Christians, who transcend lives of poverty and disease through a vibrant faith that they quickly share with everyone they meet. That faith is based on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and the hope and guidance of Holy Scripture as God’s inspired word for the life and ministry of the Church.

Although the parish leadership is seeking property to establish a physical presence in the community, Christ Church has found a temporary home at Maranatha Fellowship Church, 618 West Arrington, Farmington. Services are being held at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday evenings in the Anglican tradition, with a twist that involves strong lay participation and contemporary praise and worship. For more information regarding the ministry of Christ Church, please contact us by email at christchurch4corners [at] mail [dot] com

A Youtube Video, three cheers for the Anglican Church of Canada for providing this.

A month after emerging victorious from the bruising Democratic nominating contest, some of Barack Obama’s glow may be fading. In the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, the Illinois senator leads Republican nominee John McCain by just 3 percentage points, 44 percent to 41 percent. The statistical dead heat is a marked change from last month’s NEWSWEEK Poll, where Obama led McCain by 15 points, 51 percent to 36 percent.

Obama’s rapid drop comes at a strategically challenging moment for the Democratic candidate. Having vanquished Hillary Clinton in early June, Obama quickly went about repositioning himself for a general-election audience–an unpleasant task for any nominee emerging from the pander-heavy primary contests and particularly for a candidate who’d slogged through a vigorous primary challenge in most every contest from January until June. Obama’s reversal on FISA legislation, his support of faith-based initiatives and his decision to opt out of the campaign public-financing system left him open to charges he was a flip-flopper. In the new poll, 53 percent of voters (and 50 percent of former Hillary Clinton supporters) believe that Obama has changed his position on key issues in order to gain political advantage.

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As home prices continue to decline and loan defaults mount, U.S. regulators are bracing for dozens of American banks to fail over the next year.

But after a large mortgage lender in California collapsed late Friday, Wall Street analysts began posing two crucial questions: Just how many banks might falter? And, more urgently, which one could be next?

The nation’s banks are in far less danger than they were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when more than 1,000 federally insured institutions went under during the savings-and-loan crisis. The debacle, the greatest collapse of American financial institutions since the Depression, prompted a government bailout that cost taxpayers about $125 billion.

But the troubles are growing so rapidly at some small and midsize banks that as many as 150 out of the 7,500 banks nationwide could fail over the next 12 to 18 months, analysts say. Other lenders are likely to shut branches or seek mergers.

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Ten kilometres above the earth, the Pope delivered a message to the people of Sydney: the world is God’s creation and humanity needs to safeguard it against the ravages of climate change.

His message, unexpected and delivered in Italian, called for a spiritual response to the environmental crisis and asked Catholics – especially young people – to find “a way of living, a style of life that eases the problems caused to the environment”.

“We need to rediscover our earth in the face of our God and creator and to re-find our responsibilities in front of our maker and the creatures of the earth he has placed in our hands in trust,” he said.

“We need to reawaken our conscience ”¦ I want to give impulse to rediscovering our responsibilities and to finding an ethical way to change our way of life and ways to respond to these great challenges.”

Read it all.

The first starts about 45 second in and is on the recent vote of General Synod, it includes comments from David Banting and David Holding.

The second starts just past 29 minutes in and has Trevor Barnes having a conversation with women bishops Victoria Matthews, Kate Waynick, Geralyn Wolf, and Sue Moxley.

The third starts about 34 1/2 minutes in and is a conversation with Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales.

The fourth starts a little past 38 1/2 minutes in and is a conversation with the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, Andrew Burnham

Start listening by clicking here.

I believe in the living God. Now, that may not seem like a surprising statement for a bishop of the church to make – but as we approach the Lambeth conference of bishops, it may be a crucial belief to reaffirm.

The debate raging in the Anglican communion over the place of women and gays in the life and ministry of the church, and the name-calling about who does and does not accept the authority of scripture, belies a much deeper question: did God stop revealing God’s self with the closing of the canon of scripture at the end of the first century, or has God continued to be self-revelatory through history, and right into the present?

My conservative brothers and sisters seem to argue that God revealed everything to us in scripture. Ever since, it has simply been our difficult but straightforward task to conform ourselves to God’s will revealed there and to repent when we are unable or unwilling to do so.

For me, there is something static and lifeless in such a view of God. Could it be that even the Bible is too small a box in which to enclose God?

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The openly gay bishop whose consecration led to the crisis over sexuality in the Anglican Communion has accused his evangelical opponents of “idolatry”.

The Bishop of New Hampshire, the Right Rev Gene Robinson, is to defy the Archbishop of Canterbury by turning up uninvited at Canterbury for the Lambeth conference this week.

The Times has learnt that the crisis is likely to worsen, whatever is decided at the conference, because the Episcopal Church of the US plans to overturn its pledge not to consecrate any more openly gay or lesbian bishops.

The US church, which will dominate the conference with 125 bishops attending, is expected then to elect rapidly and consecrate a further five or six such bishops.

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Canon Andrew Knight of Swansea and Canon Tudor Griffiths of Deeside were among five clergy who said in a statement yesterday the appointment of a bishop in a gay relationship could be “church-breaking”.

They said: “The innovation of the American and Canadian Anglicans in the area of teaching on sexuality has already caused enormous damage to their churches. If the Church in Wales were to follow the line indicated by the Archbishop, the same disastrous results could be expected here.

“It is a question of whether the church will or will not remain faithful to the whole teaching of scripture and Christian tradition. The ordination of persons in same-sex relations is, therefore, an issue of church-breaking significance.”

Canon Knight said: “While I am sure the Archbishop is entitled to his own opinions, it does raise the question about how far he represents us all and provides a focus for our unity… I’m not sure what the Archbishop of Wales thinks he’s doing ”“ whether he’s simply wrong about where he feels the community is on that issue, or whether he’s trying to start something.”

The Rev Lorraine Cavanagh, Anglican chaplain to Cardiff University, stressed that Dr Morgan’s comments should not be taken out of context.

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Gov. Martin O’Malley tapped a former U.S. attorney general yesterday to lead a panel examining Maryland’s death penalty, opening another chapter in the state’s long-running legal and political drama over the issue.

Benjamin R. Civiletti, who served under President Jimmy Carter from 1979 to 1981, was introduced at an Annapolis news conference along with others chosen by O’Malley (D) and legislative leaders to serve on the 23-member Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment, which the General Assembly created this year.

The diverse group — which includes law-enforcement officials, religious leaders and family members of murder victims — is expected to make recommendations to the legislature before it reconvenes in January, and death penalty opponents try for the third year in a row since O’Malley’s arrival to abolish capital punishment.

“I think the legislature will be very interested in hearing from this commission,” said O’Malley, who has urged a deeply divided legislature to replace the death penalty with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Death penalty proponents did not criticize the commission directly yesterday but suggested that its aim was transparent.

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GAFCON has been viewed in numerous media reports as an anti-homosexual movement. Is that the case?

In the media there is usually a desire to boil everything down to a couple of attention-grabbing sound bites. And sex and money are the two things that grab people’s attention the fastest. Certainly there is a factor of human sexuality among the issues that are before the Anglican Communion. But they are not primary. They are secondary at best. The primary issues have to do with other questions: Who is Jesus Christ? What did he really do? Was his death really necessary? Did he really rise from the dead? And what authority does he have over men and women today?

And then there is the issue of Holy Scripture. One American bishop has been widely quoted as saying, “The Church wrote the Bible and the Church can rewrite the Bible.” That point of view would represent a number of TEC bishops, although most might be wise enough not to say it so clearly.

On the other hand we have the New Testament scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is God-breathed.” There’s a world of difference between those two statements. A big part of the Anglican Communion has chosen to line up with the Episcopal Church, believing that Jesus is optional and that the Bible can be reformulated to suit the culture. That said, it should surprise no one that difficulties arise in determining what is a proper sexual standard.

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Read it all by following the link on each day on the calendar.

BJK: What does GAFCON mean for the Lambeth Conference? What about the Covenant process?

GR+: The question, in my mind, and I am speaking as an individual, is how much value does the Windsor Report hold today? Two years after General Convention 2006, where we failed miserably to respond to the Windsor Report, in an adequate fashion, (B003 was not an adequate response by any means), a number of the signatories from the House of Bishops, stated they didn’t intend to comply by it. By the recent actions of the three bishops in California, you can see that is the case. They have already given the green light to their clergy to perform same-sex blessings, without the consent of the wider Communion. Obviously, they don’t intend to comply. If TEC has no intention to comply with the Windsor Report then whatever input TEC has in the Covenant process is going to be just as miserable. By the time the Covenant is agreed upon, if it is ever agreed upon by TEC, it will not be the same instrument that it started out to be. Therefore, I don’t see any value in the Windsor Report or the Covenant at this point. I know the draft will be discussed at General Convention, and I am a deputy, as I was in 2006. After seeing how the convention dealt with the Windsor Report, I can’t imagine that the Covenant will get a better reception.

BJK: What is the next step for the Diocese of Western Louisiana and Grace Church?

GR+: Our Diocesan Convention meets in October and I sit on the executive council of the diocese. The Bishop has told me personally that after Lambeth, the executive council will meet in August. He will then give us his opinion concerning where things are and the options we have for the diocese. It is his desire that IF the diocese chooses to do something that we do it as a whole. I would also prefer that. Being realistic, whatever decision the diocese makes, if we decide to move as a diocese, there will be certain clergy, parishes, and laypeople who will want to remain in TEC. Likewise, if we don’t move as a diocese, there will be clergy, parishes, and lay people who don’t want to stay. That will be a reality after October. The bishop is wise enough, and intelligent enough, to know that is going to happen. No matter what happens at the convention in October, someone will not be happy. There is going to be movement, but the question is where.

Read it all (hat tip: Brad Drell).

There is nowhere for Muslims to pray at McGill; the Montreal university shut the prayer room three years ago, arguing religious space has no place on a secular campus.

But at the University of Toronto, Muslims and anyone else who wants to pray between class can choose from among more than eight prayer rooms, including four at the airy new Multi-Faith Centre, where religion fuels discussions on everything from politics and peace to love potions. A potluck this spring called Faith, Food and Fornication let students sample aphrodisiacs from various traditions, “but we drew the line at Viagra,” quipped campus diversity officer Nouman Ashraf.

From no prayer room to a full assortment, from halal sausage stands to women-only swim times, Canadian universities are grappling in often starkly different ways with the growing religious diversity of their students.

“We’re not the spirituality police,” said Ashraf, “and we’re not taking a stand in favour of one religion by providing space for worship. But we recognize religion is part of many students’ identity so we don’t make them check that at the campus gate.”

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A leading Anglican gay bishop has described the Archbishop of Canterbury’s position in the church as ‘almost untenable’.

The Right Reverend Gene Robinson, the American churchman whose appointment as a bishop triggered a devastating split among Anglican leaders, said that Dr Rowan Williams now faces condemnation whichever way he turns.

But he insisted he had great sympathy with the embattled Archbishop and pledged to support his efforts to keep the warring sister churches of the Church of England together in the 400-year-old Anglican network.

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Listen to it all (about 11 1/2 minutes total).

Tradition-minded church leaders who want the Anglican family to stay together despite its rifts will attend. They will undoubtedly ask Jefferts Schori about complaints that the 2.2 million-member U.S. church is mistreating its conservative minority.

Of the tensions within the American church, Jefferts Schori said “we’ve attempted to deal with it in the Christian community” but haven’t always been successful.

Although the exact figure is in dispute, Episcopal officials say that fewer than 100 of the more than 7,000 U.S. Episcopal parishes have voted to split off since Robinson was elected.

The entire Diocese of San Joaquin, based in Fresno, California, voted to withdraw from the denomination, and the Diocese of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, is poised to do the same this fall.

The national church is suing to retain hold of the San Joaquin diocese and its many millions of dollars in property. Another lawsuit is moving through the courts over 11 breakaway churches in Virginia. Critics have called the legal fights “un-Christian” and have asked Episcopal leaders to halt the lawsuits.

But Jefferts Schori said, “We really don’t have the authority or the moral right to give away those gifts that have been given by generations past and for the benefit of generations now and the benefit of generations to come.”

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You will know the results of the debate and vote on the admission of women to the episcopate which took place at the General Synod meeting in York last Monday. Those who are, for theological reasons, opposed to the ordination of women as priests and bishops have consistently asked for the creation of a structure in the Church within which we could worship with integrity and our parishes would be able to flourish. Despite strong support from both the Archbishops of Canterbury and York this has been resolutely denied. The Synod voted to move forward with legislation to allow women to be consecrated to the episcopate with a ”˜Code of Practice’ to deal with those who cannot accept this break with 2000 years of tradition. We have always said that such a code would not provide us with what we need. It could not provide a framework for any long term future where congregations could gather round a bishop whose orders were assured nor one within which we could encourage men to hear God’s call to priestly ministry. It would simply allow us to avail ourselves of a male bishop when he was needed for a liturgical celebration and would be little more than a form of pastoral care until our understanding of Holy Orders had died out or been forced out of the Church. The present Act of Synod will be rescinded together with the opportunity of passing resolutions A and B. In short it would no longer be legitimate to hold the view that women cannot be priests and bishops in the Church of England. Strangely it will continue to be a Church where you can dissent from articles of the Creed. I could not serve as a bishop in such a Church with any integrity.

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Here is one:

Peter Beckwith, Episcopal Bishop of Springfield, Illinois

My hope is that those in attendance will recognise the seriousness of the crisis which has been allowed to envelop the Anglican Communion, and deal with the elephant dominating our living room. The Global Anglican Future conference has described the situation for most Anglicans worldwide and addressed it. What it has said, and with which I concur, is that faithful, orthodox Anglicans will not continue to abide any further the current agenda set by the Episcopal Church (TEC) and the Anglican Church of Canada and supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury through what many see as his acquiescence and benign leadership. I do not expect much to come of the conference. The process model appears very similar to what TEC’s House of Bishops has used for years which has fostered dysfunctional inefficiency, chaos, non-productivity and spiritual bankruptcy.

I believe if the first Lambeth conference had the same proposed agenda and process as projected for 2008, there very well might not have been a second Lambeth conference or even an Anglican Communion today.

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There had been 103 Archbishops of Canterbury before Dr Rowan Williams arrived at the ultimate seat of Anglican power, yet few can have presided over more turbulent times.
From women bishops to gay clergy, it has been the scholarly Archbishop to whom people have looked for guidance and leadership as the warring factions have warned repeatedly that the Church would split.

However, while he may hold the greatest sway in theory, a panel of experts – enlisted by The Sunday Telegraph – argued that to claim he is the most influential figure in the Anglican communion is no longer a foregone conclusion, and that the Lambeth Conference, which opens on Wednesday, will test that claim to its limit.

In drawing up The Lambeth Power List, they said that Dr Williams has been buffeted from one side by the liberal actions of the American Church, led by Katharine Jefferts Schori, and the reactionary zeal of the Africans, led by Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, on the other.

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