It’s possible that what drives Warren is the opportunity not just to lead American Evangelicalism but also to reshape it as a broad-based postpartisan movement, as focused on challenges abroad as Graham’s was on the crisis within. But it’s still unclear whether Warren’s many spheres of activity, his seemingly genetic disposition to multitask will sap his energy and influence rather than enhance them. Trouble recently popped up in the form of an “Evangelical Manifesto” that expressed several New Evangelicalism principles he has come to support. Despite having helped launch the document and claiming to still agree with it, he declined to sign it, saying it was released before consensus could develop for it. Warren’s retreat made it easier for old-line conservatives to dismiss it. It would indubitably have fared better had he applied his networking skills.

“The only worry one might have about Rick Warren,” says Michael Cromartie, a prominent Washington Evangelical with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “is that he gets so many balls going up in the air that one might ask, ‘Does he have enough hands to catch them?'” Warren has clearly heard this before. “God has given me the ability to manage my time pretty well,” he says. “I can handle a lot of balls.” Everything he does, he claims, feeds everything else. “I’m a door opener and a bridge builder,” he insists. “If I weren’t doing it, I’d be dead and in my grave.”

An argument can be made that Warren’s career has always been a California freeway, navigated at full speed with panache. But there is bound to come a moment when even a man with a racing brain can’t keep up with all his options and must define himself more closely in order to do things right. Inevitably, that point will follow a great new opportunity, like the presidential forum and the possibilities it embodies. I ask Warren what Bible verse he will take into the forum, and he quotes David’s words after God has secured his position as the King of Israel ”” “Who am I, O Sovereign Lord, and what is my family, that you have brought me so far?” ”” and David’s subsequent realization that God did it for the sake of His word and according to His will. It is a humble response, one that puts Warren’s elevation, like David’s, in the Deity’s hands. But as Warren knows and David’s kingship abundantly proved, it can be after the coronation that the complications really set in.

Read it carefully and read it all.

There were 1,148 lay and clergy participants – including 291 bishops – from among many faithful Anglican Christians who still look at the Bible as the Word of God, not just a ‘primary source’, as some are led to believe by liberal revisionist theology. Gafcon believes that Anglicanism has a bright future for as long as we are obedient to the Lord’s Great Commission “to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching and training them to observe what the Lord commands.”(Matt 28:16-20; Eph.2:20). Gafcon is a movement in the Spirit and a fellowship of confessing Anglicans. Please read the statement on the Global Anglican Future. There is nothing divisive about it. The Global South and the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa are affiliated to it. Pray that the unity of the church be preserved. “Can the two walk together, unless they are agreed?” (Amos 3:3). Continue to pray for Lambeth so that we may have common mind in obedience to God’s written Holy Word in all our deliberations. Lambeth is not only about the issue of homosexuality, it is also about how the poor are held ransom as the rich dictate terms and power, in order to continue to subdue the colonized with shackles of hunger, want and misery. It is my wish to remind you that what the heart loves, the will chooses and the mind justifies. May God’s kingdom come, and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Read it all.

An earlier column talked about several converging crises–energy, economy and environment. Since then the price of gas has gone down! Proof that I was wrong. Not!

As a nation we are so shell-shocked by the energy crisis that we think a 10-cent reduction in the price of gas is a big break, forgetting that less than a year ago we were paying under $3 a gallon.

I see churches adapting to these three interrelated crises in several ways:

–Redefinition of “church.” Church will no longer be the place we go. Church will be the people we share faith with. Churches will still meet together for worship at a central time and location, but that will become secondary to the ministry performed during the week. Church buildings will become the resource hub in community ministry, like the old Celtic Christian abbeys. Church impact will replace church attendance as the new metric.

–Restructuring of church operations. Due to the high cost of fuel and a struggling economy, churches will become smaller, more agile and less expensive to operate than in the past. Churches will need to provide direct relief to individuals and families with meal programs, shelters, clothing, job training, and more.

Read it all.

Joe Hoagland was born with a rare heart condition that had forced him to spend much of his first three years of life in hospitals. After a series of open-heart surgeries, Joe seemed to be doing better, but the last surgery to repair a graft on his heart resulted in a stroke. The stroke put him in an eight-day coma and left him paralyzed on one side and unable to see out of one eye.

Worse still, the spunky toddler who had bravely battled his ailments until then became demoralized. His spirit seemingly broken, Joe sank into a deep depression. Afraid of his doctors and unwilling to participate in efforts at physical therapy, Joe grew listless, losing interest even in his favorite toys. Doctors advised [his mother] Deena to consider placing her son in a full-time center for rehabilitation and therapy. Deena refused.

Now, hoever, Joe Hoagland is fully functioning and healthy. How did he recover? Guess first and then read the rest of the story to get the answer (pages 4-5), and yes, this, too was quoted in this morning’s sermon.

During his years as premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev denounced many of the policies and atrocities of Joseph Stalin. Once, as he censured Stalin in a public meeting, Khrushchev was interrupted by a shout from a heckler in the audience. “You were one of Stalin’s colleagues. Why didn’t you stop him?” “Who said that?” roared Khrushchev. An agonizing silence followed as nobody in the room dared move a muscle. Then Khrushchev replied quietly, “Now you know why.”

–Quoted by yours truly in this morning’s sermon on the gospel for today, Matthew 14:22-33

A £1.2m deficit in the recent Lambeth Conference’s budget will be discussed on Monday by the committee that manages the Church of England’s assets.

A boycott of the conference by more than a quarter of bishops over the issue of homosexuality is thought to be partly responsible.

The Church’s main executive body, the Archbishops’ Council, has already agreed to pay half the shortfall.

Now Church Commissioners will decide how to meet the rest of the costs.

Read it all.

What exactly do we mean when we say that the Sun has got his hat on? It is, to my mind, an immensely rich and in many ways hugely meaningful image, from which many useful issues not only have arisen, but will continue to arise. Some of these issues concern hats, and their role in today’s multicultural society; others concern the Sun, and its continuing importance and validity for all our citizens, regardless of race or creed, in this, the 21st century. I trust that a fuller exegesis of this remarkable lyric can and will offer a vast amount to, as it were, “chew on”.

Read it all.

I suppose some will argue that we did not do anything at the Lambeth Conference, but then, that is really the point. Many of us came to do something, whether to restate norms strongly, to break new ground, to create new forms and structures for the Anglican Communion, to force others to their knees in repentance and contrition, to make someone come to our way of seeing things, or to win over those we consider the others. Yet that is what happened at the last Lambeth Conference in 1998, and we walked away with a document that all of us have wanted to use as a club on the head of someone else, or a theological straight-jacket to confine another’s thinking. We left that conference with seething anger or smug self-righteousness. Like Naomi, in the book of Ruth at the time of the loss of all the men in her life, the loss of her present happiness and her future security, we wanted to say, “Call me not Naomi, call me mara,” (which means “bitter”). In 1998, we set up rules with the expectation of obedience, but we did not deepen what we have come to call “the bonds of affection” with the hope of commitment to God and to each other by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

There are times in the lives of us human beings when our drive to do something betrays our impatience, our strong wills, and our inability to listen to and be transformed by the Holy Spirit.

In preparation for this Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury reminded us repeatedly that we were not going to be doing any legislation, building any structures, voting anything into or out of existence. Archbishop Rowan invited us to come together to pray, to listen to scripture and to each other and to the movement of the Holy Spirit among us. He himself refrained from giving us a direction. Instead, he began with five meditations on the nature and dimensions of episcopacy and episcopal ministry, and in his Presidential Addresses he laid out a framework, describing how he sees us and the Anglican Communion-our cracks and warts, our behaviors and attitudes, and the wide range of our theological thinking on the issues du jour, namely homosexuality and incursions by one bishop or province into another bishop’s diocese and jurisdiction. Each day we met in bible study for an hour and a quarter, focusing on the great I AM passages in the gospel of St. John: living water, bread, shepherd, the way, the truth and the life, and the resurrection, to name a number of them. In our sharing, we talked about our personal lives and ministries, the different dimensions of our faith, the things we hold dear. We kept returning to the text, especially to the person of Jesus and how he spoke about himself and particularly how he treated others. Again and again, we saw him exercise the same patience and warmth and hospitality to those who were blind or deaf to him and his work, to those who found faith, and to those who tried repeatedly to trip him up and plot against him. He only withdrew when people started picking up rocks with which to stone him.

Read it all.

The point that interests me is why he continues and whether what we see is peculiarly religious behaviour. It’s just possible that it is not. What the Archbishop is holding on to is the idea that we can’t have ideas alone. They are always part of a conversation within a particular community, and sometimes the things that we get from that community are more important than any particular idea. In his case, as a Christian, who believes that the church (in some sense) is a means for God’s purpose in the world, he has to think that connection with it is a vital part of what he is called to do.

Something like this has to be the position of anyone who is aware that they are part of any kind of intellectual and cultural tradition. Even when we disagree with old ideas, we do so in the belief that the people we admire and have learned from would agree with us if only they could have had our experiences. In some fairly limited areas this is actually more or less true. Scientists, for example, can be brought round by new experiments to change their minds about scientific facts, though on matters of the heart, or of politics, they can be just as stupid and illogical as everyone else.

But in those parts of life which aren’t susceptible to clear and simple demonstrations, we have to face the possibility that people we love and admire really can sincerely disagree with us. The only alternative ”“ though I agree that it is a very popular one ”“ is to demonise entirely everyone who disagrees. But anyone who is not prepared to do that may one day find themselves in a position almost as grotesque and as humiliating as Williams’, though not, perhaps, on this particular subject.

Read it all.

(ACNS) The 2008 Lambeth Conference involved the participation of some 680 bishops and 3000 participants overall. From Cathedral to parishes and volunteers all over the UK, support for 2008 meeting was indeed generous.

With a budget of £5.6 million, and in common with previous Conferences, the projection of a deficit in the immediate period following the Conference was always recognised. For an international conference on this scale and taking into account the places from which the participants travelled, England continues to be the most economical place to hold such a gathering and a university campus the most financially viable.

Successful fund raising has been taking place as planned, before, during and following the Conference, including raising bursaries for the participation of almost 40% of the bishops from developing countries.

Bishops were notified of the current financial position during the conference, and the possibility raised with them that there might have to be further approaches for assistance with the costs of the Conference at this stage, the shortfall in funding is unclear as bills come in to be settled, but it is likely to be approaching £1 million.

The shortfall is being addressed as agreed by the continuing fund raising programme, and we are grateful for the assistance of the Archbishop’s Council of the Church of England in supporting the cash flow of the Conference company as the fundraising continues around the Communion.

The Revd Canon Kenneth Kearon
Secretary General, The Anglican Communion,
Director, The Lambeth Company

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

From the start, the Edwards scandal has belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer has done all the significant reporting on it — reporting that turns out to be largely correct — and bloggers and online commentators have refused to let the story sputter into oblivion.

Slate’s Mickey Kaus has been foremost among the latter, alternately analyzing and speculating on the Enquirer’s reporting and ridiculing the mainstream media for a fastidiousness that has seemed, from the start, wholly absurd. Like other commentators, he repeatedly alleged that a double standard that favored Democrats applied to the story. Like the Enquirer’s reporting, the special-treatment charge is largely true, as anyone who recalls the media frenzy over conservative commentator and former Cabinet secretary William Bennett’s high-stakes gambling would agree.

Read it all.

Bishops of the Anglican Communion, a confederation of churches with roots in the Church of England, held their once-a-decade meeting recently and managed to avert a long-predicted schism over homosexuality. Although 200 conservative bishops boycotted the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, England, other conservatives showed up and joined their liberal counterparts in soul-searching sessions inspired by the Zulu indaba, or tribal conference.

Still, tensions were evident between liberal bishops from North America and conservative ones from the “Global South.” The archbishop of Sudan demanded the resignation of Gene Robinson, the openly gay New Hampshire bishop whose ordination in 2003 was the casus belli of the crisis. A female bishop from the United States suggested that “many of our bishops come from places where it is culturally accepted to beat your wife.”

Read it all.

But the forms and structures of the various provinces of the Anglican communion have diverged significantly, in ways that challenge those ancient ties to England and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Those provinces are the result of evangelism tied to colonial structures, whether of Britain or her former colonies, and that colonial history has still to be unpacked and assessed. The present attempts to manage conflict in the communion through a renewed focus on structural ties to old or new authorities have generated significant resistance, both from provinces who largely absented themselves from Lambeth and from dissenting voices among the attending bishops.

The Anglican communion’s present reality reflects a struggle to grow into a new level of maturity, like that of adult siblings in a much-conflicted family. As we continue to wrestle, sufficient space and respect for the differing gifts of the siblings just might lead to greater maturity in relationship. This will require greater self-definition as well as decreased reactivity. Jesus’ own example in relationships with his opponents and with his disciples will be instructive.

Read it all.

My concluding comment to both the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops at Lambeth is this. “Holding paradoxes in appropriate tension” – which is the call from Lambeth 2008 – may be a useful process in certain domains. Our understanding of the behaviour of light in contemporary physics is one such. But to ask Athanasius or the Cappadocians of the 4th C, and now the Anglican Communion of the 21st C, to stay in formal fellowship with those whose beliefs and practices are “essentially” contradictory and not merely complementary (as are the two contemporary models regarding light) is itself anathema – as many a Church Council canon has affirmed. At root, the traditional logic that undergirded the idea of comprehensiveness is no longer the contemporary logic that is driving the call for inclusivity, in all manner of spheres. It is therefore a “catastrophic failure of leadership” (Nelson Mandela), I submit, to permit, let alone to foster, the continuation of such an incoherent form of Communion as is now the result of Lambeth 2008.

This comment is not born of frustration or fear. Nor does it try to preempt what may or may not happen at the next ACC meeting in May 2009 re the proposed Covenant, nor the extended probable scenarios beforehand via the Primates or thereafter via all the provinces. On the contrary, it has grown itself from a fellowship that is quintessentially Anglican, a process of broad conversation and engagement, pastoral and intellectual, local and international, with the living and the dead, over 25 years, coram Deo. It comes, as with Archbishop Orombi, out of “love [of] the Lord Jesus Christ, and … love [of] the Anglican Communion”. Such love comes too with a final concern: “For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:31).

Read it all.

Makes a Cub’s fan’s heart glad–watch it all.

Mr. Cosby’s appearance in the predominantly black neighborhood was to encourage residents to enroll in Baltimore City Community College. During a nearly hour-long speech, Mr. Cosby said it’s never too late for high school dropouts to improve.

“There’s no love out there,” Mr. Cosby said of the street life. “The only thing out there is how to write your entrance exam to jail. We’ve got to teach. The church is open. Go on in.”

Mr. Cosby has been the source of controversy when he has addressed mostly black audiences. His criticisms of men fathering children out of wedlock have been called divisive. He spent most of his Baltimore speech, however, imploring his audience to seek self-improvement and to build pride within their community.

Young people of St. Ambrose said Mr. Cosby’s message of hope at St. Ambrose could be a catalyst for change.

“It means a lot for someone that popular,” said Maulana Waters, 15, “to come out and speak to regular people like us.”

Read it all.

Dr [Tom] Wright said: “At this stage it is very important that we focus on what Lambeth did and not what what happened eight years ago.”

He said Lambeth had been successful in taking forward the Covenant process and the conference had achieved its objectives.

He said: “People can make political capital out of anything. Lambeth was a great achievement and we must build on that.”

Read it all.

Reports came in from Lambeth that a number of TEC revisionist bishops were spreading misinformation in their Indaba groups about the state of litigation in the United States. Their claim was that the orthodox churches and dioceses “were suing them,” and the blame was really to be put on the orthodox. This is untrue, but it has been proven that if a lie is told often enough, people begin to believe there is something to it. Let us look at a few examples of lawsuits in the US.

In California, the bishop of Los Angeles is suing the orthodox churches, as is also the case in the diocese of San Diego. The Los Angeles orthodox churches won in the lower court and were reversed in a Court of Appeals, and the case is now before the California Supreme Court. The point to take away is that Bishop J. Jon Bruno initiated the lawsuit, demanding even the children’s Sunday School crayons (no, I am not joking, you can read it in the public record), and for anyone, especially a California bishop, to assert that they were sued first is a deliberate untruth.

In Virginia, Bishop Peter Lee had worked out an arbitration procedure that would have allowed the churches and the diocese to negotiate an agreed-upon settlement and avoid litigation. The churches proceeded with their parish votes and the registration of the vote tallies with the local Court Houses, as per the 1867 Virginia law that applied to church splits. When the TEC Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori heard about it, she advised Bishop Lee that “there is a new sheriff in town.” Lee was told that if he didn’t sue the churches, TEC would sue him. Bishop Lee uncharacteristically buckled under the pressure, and without advance notice, launched the lawsuits. For him to say that the Virginia churches sued him would be a gross violation of the truth also.

Somewhere in the United States, a parish may have asked for a declaratory judgment to settle issues of property title, or may have, once they were sued, filed a counter suit in defense, but it has been the model of the orthodox churches not to use the courts to attack bishops, dioceses, or TEC. The very aggressive stance that TEC has taken was first formulated by leadership within the Presbyterian Church in the US, and it appears that TEC Chancellor David Booth Beers is following the Presbyterian game plan to a “P.”

Read it all.

But the ultimate value of Lambeth””and indeed the continued unity of the communion””may depend on new instruments that Williams alluded to in his formal speeches to the bishops. One is a proposed Pastoral Forum, which would enforce a moratorium not only on all actions relating to the hot-button sexual issues but also on the creation of new jurisdictions within the territories of already existing ones. The other is a long-standing proposal for a new “Covenant for the Communion,” an explicit statement of beliefs that all practicing Anglicans would presumably have to sign on to.

But conservative Anglicans say they see nothing new in these proposals and furthermore doubt that they would be enforced any more vigorously than the existing instruments are. “I would say what Lambeth is doing is far too little and far too late,” says Martyn Minns, missionary bishop of the breakaway Convocation of Anglicans in North America. Liberals have their own reservations. Robinson, a conspicuous presence on the fringes of the conference, to which he was not invited, says that the loose Anglican confederation with its tradition of tolerating divergent views is in no need of fixing “with either a covenant or a Pastoral Forum or anything of the sort.” And calling the various proposals a “series of big ‘ifs,’ ” Jefferts Schori says that the Episcopal Church “will continue to define itself through its legislative processes.”

Even church-watchers who were impressed by what they heard about the collegial quality of the Lambeth Conference fear that it only papered over the differences. “I was encouraged by the personal relationships formed by the bishops,” says the Rev. Frank Kirkpatrick, author of The Episcopal Church in Crisis and a professor of religion at Trinity College in Connecticut. “But I’m not sure Lambeth resolved anything.”

Read it all.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY): Well, I think the big news from the meeting was that there wasn’t any big news. A lot of people feared that there might be some kind of an actual split at this meeting. That didn’t happen. About a third of the bishops boycotted. That did have an impact, but there wasn’t any big explosion. They’re still hanging together, but this sort of uneasy stalemate continues.

[Bob] ABERNETHY: And what does the stalemate mean for the typical American Episcopal parish?

LAWTON: Well, not much in the short term. There are — the majority of the worldwide Anglican Communion is upset that the U.S. elected a gay bishop, that same-sex blessings occur inside some Episcopal churches. The Communion would like that to stop. But the bishops that are doing that in the U.S. say, “We’re not going to stop.” The majority of the Communion is not happy that some Americans have said, “We don’t want to be part of the Episcopal Church,” and so they’re affiliating with these African churches in some cases. The Communion says well, we don’t like that, that isn’t done in the Anglican Communion. That should stop. But it probably will continue. And so the question is, can all of this still happen within one Anglican umbrella?

Read or watch it all.

For five years, conservative Episcopalians eager to escape their liberal American church have been building ties with African Anglicans half a world away.

But they have few connections with black Americans in their own back yard, say black Episcopal bishops gathered here for a once-a-decade meeting of Anglican prelates.

“It’s something that I like to point out,” said the Bishop Eugene Sutton,the first black Episcopal bishop in Maryland, “the historical anomaly of dioceses that have nothing to do with the black community going all the way to Africa to make these relationships.”

Moreover, Sutton and other black bishops here say that the use of Scripture to reject homosexuality in the Anglican Communion evokes previous eras’ Biblically based arguments in support of slavery and racism.

African prelates, however, reject that argument, and American conservatives say it is shared theology — not race — that motivates their alliances.

“This is just another revisionist attempt to use anything to undermine the orthodox position of the church and spread the agenda of inclusiveness,” said the Right Rev. Peter Beckwith, the conservative bishop of Springfield, Ill.

Read it all–one I did not get around to posting until now, as it is ever thus. Interestingly, I did just notice now that this article is in today’s Washington Post–KSH.

Here is one:

Peter Forster, Bishop of Chester
The conference was an effective if low-key holding operation, which brought home to those in North America and elsewhere the depth of disunity which their actions were causing. Only future events will show whether the tide can be fully turned towards increased unity ”” and truth. There were some excellent plenary addresses and visiting lecturers. The highlights, as ever, were in the shared meals and conversations, and in new friendships.

Read them all.

These views are not surprising and they are not new. I refer interested readers first to this Telegraph article (and please note the date–July 2001). Second, there is the full text of his essay entitled The Body’s Grace.

Third, I remind readers of this Time Magazine interview (July 2007):

Isn’t the Scripture straightforward on homosexuality?
It’s impossible to get from Scripture anything straightforwardly positive about same-sex relationships. So if there were any other way of approaching it, you’d have to go back to the first principle of human relationships. Those theologians who’ve defended same-sex relationships from the Christian point of view in recent decades have said you’ve got to look at whether a same-sex relationship is capable of something at the level of neutral self-giving that a marriage ought to exemplify. And then ask, is that what Scripture is talking about? That’s the area of dispute.

You yourself once thought it possible that same-sex relationships might be legitimate in God’s eyes.
Yes, I argued that in 1987. I still think that the points I made there and the questions I raised were worth making as part of the ongoing discussion. I’m not recanting. But those were ideas put forward as part of a theological discussion. I’m now in a position where I’m bound to say the teaching of the Church is this, the consensus is this. We have not changed our minds corporately. It’s not for me to exploit my position to push a change.

Finally, there was a very long interview with Dr. Williams on February 12, 2003 in the Daily Telegraph by Charles Moore and Jonathan Petre which included this section:

Q: What are you going to do when the Bishop of New Westminster in Canada issues his rite of same-sex blessing?
A: I don’t think this kind of thing is something that any diocese can declare on its own. It does raise quite large doctrinal questions which are not best dealt with on a local basis.
Q: Given that he has said that he is going to do it, what will you do?
A: The Province of Canada will obviously have to face these questions in the first wave, and then it is probably something that the primates of the Communion will have to discuss.
Q: Apart from that unity point, what is your own view of same-sex blessings?
A: I’ve never licenced one or performed one because I believe that there are significantly serious questions about how that is to be distinguished from marriage not to rush into the innovation. So it is very complex and I don’t have a quick answer.
Q: How will you deal with bishops or clergy in this country who do undertake them?
A: I can only speak with past experience. When I have encountered cases where a cleric has performed a same-sex blessing I have said that this must not happen again. Anything that is done in the name of the Church must be something done by more than just an individual.

For reasons I will never understand I cannot find a working url for this latter interview (yes, I tried the Telegraph site and numerous other approaches) so if any of you can and could plass it along I would be very grateful–KSH

In response to the recent coverage of the correspondence dated back to 2000, the Archbishop Canterbury has made the following statement:

In the light of recent reports based on private correspondence from eight years ago, I wish to make it plain that, as I have consistently said, I accept Resolution I.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference as stating the position of the worldwide Anglican Communion on issues of sexual ethics and thus as providing the authoritative basis on which I as Archbishop speak on such questions.

That Resolution also recognises the need for continuing study and discussion on the matter. In the past, as a professional theologian, I have made some contributions to such study. But obviously, no individual’s speculations about this have any authority of themselves. Our Anglican Church has never exercised close control over what individual theologians may say. However, like any church, it has the right to declare what may be said in its name as official doctrine and to define the limits of legitimate practice. As Archbishop I understand my responsibility to be to the declared teaching of the church I serve, and thus to discourage any developments that might imply that the position and convictions of the worldwide Communion have changed.

Sir, As bishops in the Church of England, we wish to protest in the strongest possible terms at what we regard as a gross misrepresentation of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

First, your front-page story (August 7) and the further material inside were presented as though he had just made a fresh statement, whereas the letters now leaked were written, in a private and personal context, between seven and eight years ago (this only became apparent six paragraphs into the report). One can only wonder at the motives behind releasing, and highlighting, these letters at this precise moment ”“ and at the way in which some churchmen are seeking to make capital of them as though they were ”˜news’.

Second, Dr Williams did not say ”˜gay sex is good as marriage’ (your front-page headline) or ”˜equivalent to marriage’ (your inside headline). In his first letter, he concluded that a same-sex relationship ”˜might . . . reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage’. This proposal (whether or not one agrees with it, as many of us do not) is far more cautious in content, and tentative in tone, than is implied by both the articles and the headlines. In the second letter, Dr Williams stresses that same-sex relationships are not the same as marriage, ”˜because marriage has other dimensions to do with children and society’.

Third, the Archbishop has said repeatedly, as he did in one of the letters, that there is a difference between ”˜thinking aloud’ as a theologian and the task of a bishop (let alone an Archbishop) to uphold the church’s teaching. He has regularly insisted, as he did in his closing address at Lambeth, that the church is right to have a basic ”˜unwillingness to change what has been received in faith from scripture and tradition.’ He has spoken out frequently against the ”˜foot-in-the-door’ tactic of divisive innovation such as the consecration of the present Bishop of New Hampshire. As he said in that same closing address, ”˜the practice and public language of the Church act always as a reminder that the onus of proof is on those who seek a new understanding’. Nor, despite regular accusations, is this prioritising of the bishop’s task mere pragmatism or the pursuit of a ”˜quixotic goal’ of Anglican unity. It expresses what Jesus himself taught: the fundamental and deeply biblical teaching on the vital importance of church unity and of working for that unity by humility and mutual submission.

Read it carefully and read it all.

The once-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops from around the world, which was branded an “expensive exercise in futility” when it finished on Sunday with no agreement over the divisive issue of homosexuality, cost almost £6million to stage.

Most of the money was spent on hiring the University of Kent campus in Canterbury for three weeks, and for providing food and transport for the 670 prelates and their spouses.

But the Lambeth Company, the arm of the 80 million-strong Anglican Communion that runs the conference, urgently needs to raise at least another £1m.

To help pay its bills, it was disclosed yesterday that the Archbishops’ Council, part of the Church of England, has provided the organisers with an interest-free £600,000 loan after holding an emergency meeting.

Read it all.

Question: We’re hearing that the Lambeth Conference ended up over 2 million pounds in debt. Has the American church been asked to help foot that bill? And if so, will we?

KJS: My understanding is that the conference is a million pounds in debt. Or two million dollars…uh…or short fall. Yes we’ve been asked and the bishops of this church responded in ways that would provide bursaries for those unable to attend as scholarship assistance. I believe there..that the Archbishop of Canterbury has expressed a desire to come to the United States and uh…do some fund raising work and we have certainly offered our assistance in that…when he would like to do that.

–The Presiding Bishop in a webcast yesterday with the Presiding Bishop and Bishop Mark Sisk on the Lambeth Conference

We were told that we were to treat the Conference as a pilgrimage, and it did have such a feel, but for me it was like being involved in the pilgrimage of the life cycle of the butterfly, egg, larva, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly. The conference for me felt like the chrysalis stage. The caterpillar entering this stage spins thread around itself which hardens into a protective shell. On the campus of the University of Kent, we were in just such a protective shell, with the world and its pressures and reporters kept at bay.

Inside the chrysalis shell the caterpillar turns into a soft, squidgy jelly like blob. Its structures soften and dissolve and something new begins to appear. And then the miracle occurs, out of this soft, squidgy confusing, not now, not ‘yetness’, the body of the beautiful butterfly is formed and in the fullness of time, breaks out and flies.

At Canterbury the Anglican Church allowed itself to risk being changed through the liquid of conversation and challenge across cultures and beliefs. It’s not at all certain that minds were altered but positions might have been softened and if so there’s a chance that something beautiful might emerge in the future which is nothing quite like we’ve known so far. The Anglican Communion might yet fly anew better fit for purpose.

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One of the most important dissenting voices in China today belongs to Peter Zhao, a Communist Party member and adviser to the Chinese Central Committee. Mr. Zhao is among a group of Chinese intellectuals who look to the West to find the key to economic success. Mr. Zhao in particular believes that Christianity and the ethical system based upon its teachings are the reason that Western countries dominate the global economy. “The strong U.S. economy is just on the surface,” he says. “The backbone is the moral foundation.”

Without a unifying moral system enforced by common values, Mr. Zhao argues, there can be no real trust between people. Without faith among business partners and between management and shareholders, only the threat of the law can keep people honest. “There are problems of corruption emerging. . . . There is concern about whether China’s market economy will ever become a sound market economy.”

Mr. Zhao has made his case in both popular and academic publications in the past several years, publishing more than 200 articles — for instance, “Market Economies With Churches and Market Economies Without Churches” — explaining how Christianity leads to long-term growth. “From the ancient time till now everybody wants to make more money,” Mr. Zhao told me. “But from history we see only Christians have a continuous nonstop creative spirit and the spirit for innovation.”

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LIBERALS are fond of brow-beating the Churches about sectarianism and disunity. These twin evils, they say with some justification, are harmful to society because they set one group against another and because sectarianism is, at the very least, uncivil.

It now transpires that all this liberal bleating about sectarianism and disunity was exactly that, bleating. But it was also hypocritical because when it suits their agenda liberals are very inclined to use sectarian language of their own and have no hesitation adding to the already deep divisions between the Churches.

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