The publication of the communiqué from the recent London meeting of the GAFCON Primates’ Council (report, page 1) marks a further development of what is termed a “movement” within Anglicanism. The development is particularly significant because of the impetus given to the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) and because of the formation of a secretariat. One thus sees three strands to this formalised, traditional Anglican movement: first, a Primates’ Council; second, a wider body (the FCA) which is open to membership of individuals, Churches, dioceses, provinces and parachurch organisations; and third, a secretariat. A further and most significant aspect of the GAFCON Primates’ communiqué is the reference to the possible formation of a province in North America for the Common Cause Partnership. This would very probably have serious funding implications for The Episcopal Church, USA and possibly also for the Anglican Communion itself and its Communion-wide organisations.

All of this witnesses to a structured Anglican realignment, although the GAFCON constituency remains in communion with the See of Canterbury. However, what is happening all round is certainly not bringing everyone together and, as we know, there are those bishops now who simply will not receive Holy Communion with fellow bishops. Nor does the proposal to have an Anglican Covenant fare well in the GAFCON Primates’ communiqué.

The fact of the matter, however, is that the traditionalist point of view in relation to same-sex relationships – and that, after all, is the real presenting issue leading to all of this confusion – is eminently reasonable and, indeed, eminently traditional and scriptural, but it is unfortunate that the GAFCON Primates use somewhat emotive language in their communiqué (e.g. “sinful practices”), however justifiable they may consider such terminology to be. Yet the 1998 Lambeth I.10 resolution did call for sensitivity, and effectively calling good people sinners is not a sensitive approach. That, however, is not the core issue. The core issue for Anglicans is that the consecration of bishops and the ordination of clergy in active same-sex relationships and public rites of blessing of same-sex relationships are all simply so lacking in consensus within Anglicanism that we have come to this very sorry pass, which has witnessed a Lambeth Conference boycotted by one-fifth to one quarter of those bishops invited. Unity-in-diversity just cannot cope in this case.

Read it all.

After decades of soaring growth, the phenomenon of Protestant megachurches ”” behemoths of belief where 2,000 to 20,000 or more people attend weekend worship ”” may be stalled.

And Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., the granddaddy of “seeker-sensitive” megachurches geared to attract the spiritually curious, is on a mission to rev the engines.

Read it all.

SanDiegoAnglicans has the goods.

Rod Dreher points us to this fascinating comment from John on Patrick Deneen’s blog:

The result–I live in a great neighborhood where I walk my kids to school and myself to work, but I have to drive to buy food, clothing, or gasoline. Church is 20 minutes away. When I tell people from the suburbs where I live, I am greeted with shock and misplaced pity.

I bring all this up to say that the Republican party, for whom I have voted most of the time, is the chief culprit in supporting an economic system that is the enemy of real places that are inhabited by people with roots in that place.

The dilemma for me is that the other side is not much better. If Republicans are guilty of bleeding traditional culture to death through their mindless support for the “global economy”, more oil drilling and the exurbs, Democrats seem to be militantly in favor of destroying that same culture albeit for different reasons.

I have real problems with some of the reasons that McCain nominated Palin (her inexperience, the loose ends that she has in Alaska, her lifelong membership in the NRA), but when those who identified themselves as liberal commentators mocked her family size, her pro-life stance, her faith, and her small-town origins, it touched a nerve. So much so that I will probably be voting for John McCain in the fall, despite the fact that I share most of Patrick’s concerns about the McCain/Palin ticket.

I am beginning to think that those of us who value places and connection and an unhurried family life are pretty rare or too silent. We have no natural political allies and we are unlikely to get any soon.

Read it all.

In response to a lawsuit led by one of its parishes, the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh has agreed to have a court-appointed neutral party inventory all of its property and assets as it prepares for a final vote on seceding from the Episcopal Church.

The agreement between representatives of the diocese and Calvary Episcopal Church, Shadyside, came after a hearing yesterday before Joseph M. James, president judge of Common Pleas Court. In 2005, he oversaw a settlement after Calvary sued the diocese to prevent the transfer of property from the denomination to individual parishes.

Calvary has led a minority of parishes that oppose Bishop Robert Duncan’s plan to leave the U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion and realign with the more conservative Anglican Province of the Southern Cone in South America over concerns about doctrine and sexual ethics. A final vote is set for Oct. 4.

Read it all.

The gun-toting, right-to-life populism (government is the problem, not the solution) that will be espoused by the McCain-Palin ticket will, I think, prove to be very well-received in rural areas of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nevada, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, southern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia.

Am I worried? You bet. We Democrats tend to be very urban-centric in our strategies, focusing on metro areas (cities and suburbs) that absolutely contain the most registered voters in the majority of these states.

However, and ironically because of the power of the change message this time around, I believe rural areas, especially in swing states, will play a disproportionately large role in determining the outcome of this election.

For the past 28 years, my wife and I have had a house in Oconto County, a rural area about an hour and 15 minutes north of Green Bay, home to a lot of blue-collar workers and farmers, most of whom hunt and fish avidly and would consider themselves populists. I could be wrong, but I’m guessing McCain-Palin will be extraordinarily popular in Oconto and counties just like it across Wisconsin and other states.

Read it all from Sunday’s Chicago Tribune.

Is there somewhere on earth where the Sunday afternoons are so interminably long that ones life would be more enhanced by reading in detail the Reflections on the Lambeth Conference 2008 than by, say, watching another re-run of The Great Escape or re-attempting a Sudoku puzzle? Perhaps there is, but for most of us life is too short for me to recommend the exercise.

What was the Lambeth Conference convened to achieve? The answer is: nothing. Remember, with the exception of the very first (and with interruptions for world wars), Lambeth Conferences have occurred decennially. They are held because it is time to hold one, not (essentially) because there is something that needs to be done which only a gathering of Anglican bishops from all the corners of the globe can achieve.

Thus, despite the acknowledgement within the Reflections document itself that the Anglican Communion is in crisis’, it was possible to organize this conference with the express intention of avoiding confronting the issue. Behind the scenes, of course, the intention was that by avoiding confrontation, a resolution of sorts could be approached, since keeping everyone together would further establish the status quo as de facto policy.

Publicly, the means to this end was a bastardized African import, the so-called indaba groups. These, one suspects, as much resembled the real thing as village-hall yoga does the Indian mystic tradition. Historically, an indaba is a meeting of Africans, not Anglican bishops, and brings with it the assumptions of African, not western liberal, culture, one of which is not ‘constantly avoiding confronting the issue’ (thus, from an old ANC Daily Briefing on the internet: ‘Sport and Recreation Minister Ngconde Balfour has called a one-day indaba to thrash out the problems plaguing professional boxing in South Africa’). The organizers of the Lambeth Conference adopted the term indaba because it sounded good, but used it for their own ends.

And now a Conference called for no particular reason, holding meetings designed to reach no particular conclusions, has produced not a report but a series of reflections.
Having decided to decide nothing, it appears that the Conference felt it must comment on everything. Thus the reader who is willing may wade through pages of good intentions about good causes ranging from disaster relief to carbon footprints. Yet, of course, nothing is (nor could be) specific; not even the Gospel which, it is claimed, lies at the heart of the Communion’s concept of mission. In reality, as we know, there is no shared concept of ‘Gospel’ across the Anglican Communion, and so in matters of religion specifically there can be no shared concept of ministry. (Indeed, I amused myself with the thought that the Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, who addressed the Conference on the authority of Scripture, would have held that almost none of the delegates were gospel preachers’ in his own terms – certainly not Dr Rowan Williams, who has his own peculiar take on the topic.)

Moving beyond matters of doctrine, however, the Reflections unabashedly define the social mission of the Anglican Communion in terms of fulfilling the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. (Quite what would happen to the mission of the Church were these goals to be achieved does not seem to have crossed anyone’s mind).
But what about the elephant in the living room – the crisis in the Communion which prompted so many bishops not even to attend? Thanks to the process set up by the Conference organizers, the elephant is, of course, admired from every angle, but remember, there is no intention to remove it from the room. The last Lambeth Conference spoke clearly and concisely on the subject; yet we have been reminded by both words and deeds that such pronouncements have no binding force (despite the Conference being acknowledged as one of the instruments of the Communion, para. 136).

So no matter what the indaba groups may have shared or the Reflections may reflect, only the pathologically optimistic will suppose anything is going to deter the western churches from promoting and supporting the revisionist agenda. As many have noted, the dominant voice on campus, other than the bishops themselves, was that of the many pro-LGBT groups, not only in the market-place but via a daily ‘newspaper’.

What fewer seem yet to have noticed is that, as defined in the Reflections, one of the three ‘moratoria’ on actions currently ‘dividing’ the Communion would require sanctions against the Church of England itself, namely ‘Episcopal ordinations of partnered homosexual people’ [para. 131]. These are, of course, entirely permissible within the law of the land and the guidelines set out in the 2005 statement by the House of Bishops on Civil Partnerships: ‘The House of Bishops does not regard entering into a civil partnership [with someone of the same sex] as intrinsically incompatible with holy orders’ [para. 19]. True, the statement goes on to say that this is ‘provided the person concerned is willing to give assurances to his or her bishop that the relationship is consistent with the standards for the clergy set out in Issues in Human Sexuality (i.e. is sexually celibate).’
However, the Reflections clearly need to be more careful on this issue at least. And in any case, the latitude exercised by some English bishops in refusing, as the Bishop of Chelmsford puts it, ‘to engage in intrusive behaviour into the private lives of their clergy’ means that the conditions of the moratoria are almost certainly being breached in the English Provinces.

In any case, we keep returning to the question of whether anything coming out of this Lambeth Conference can add to what has gone before or to what is currently in process. Remarks contained in the Reflections suggest anxieties about the Instruments of Communion, a lack of confidence in the Windsor Process, suspicion about the Covenant (specifically when it comes to any disciplinary process) and a determination that the proposed Pastoral Forum should be toothless – a ‘pastoral’ body without legal powers acting solely at the discretion of the Primate of the Province concerned.

One is reminded finally (and ironically) of Oscar Wilde’s dictum: ‘The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say’ Sadly, we may modify his final comment about the House of Commons to read: ‘the Lambeth Reflections has nothing to say and says it.’

–This article appears in the September 2008 edition of New Directions magazine, page 10

Rocco describes what happened this past Sunday:

Bishop Robert Morlino of Madison told his usual Sunday-morning crowd that, having seen the [Meet the Press] program just prior to the liturgy, he was shelving his prepared preach to address the theme of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Delaware senator “as Catholics.”

“You can see I’m worked up about this,” the Wisconsin prelate — like Biden, a son of Scranton — said during his weekly 11am Mass at St Patrick’s parish in the heart of the “People’s Republic.”

It is an mp3 file and the homily is about 15 minutes long (hat tip: Rocco).

Update: A brief biography of the bishop is here.

September 6, 2008: Internet security officials just got another shock, when a British survey of network administrators (the people who run the networks, and Internet access, in large companies) revealed that 88 percent admitted they would take company Internet secrets (passwords, system layout and the like) with them if they were ever suddenly fired.

Read it all.

The London Stock Exchange yesterday suffered a seizure, blacking out as a result of a computer glitch on a critical day in the world’s stock markets. Across the Atlantic, Wall Street burst into life thanks to the government rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the companies that ultimately fund most American mortgages.
Little over a year ago, New York worried that London was set to leave it behind. These days, it is the City that eyes Wall Street with creeping envy. For America’s handling of the credit crunch has been in stark contrast to Britain’s approach. When the inter-bank markets froze last summer, the US Federal Reserve made cash much more freely available to the banks; the Bank of England, both in word and deed, was more measured. When the economy started to slow, the Fed slashed interest rates despite worldwide concerns about inflation; the Bank has held steady. When Bear Stearns faltered, the Fed orchestrated a weekend firesale; the Bank, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority spent nearly five months reversing into the nationalisation of Northern Rock. And when the housing market and the financial system were in danger, Washington stepped in to take control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; Downing Street announced a stamp duty holiday. On each occasion, America has chosen pragmatism over principle, decisiveness over dither.

The US and the UK are, of course, very different economies. The policy options available to London and Washington differ too. But America has responded to the financial turmoil in marked contrast to the UK and, so far, with more success: the dollar has strengthened against the pound and the US has avoided recession.

Read it all.

Florida’s Supreme Court on Wednesday tossed out two statewide ballot initiatives aimed at ending a longstanding ban on public funding for religious institutions, drawing praise from church-state watchdogs.

Civil liberties groups had filed suit to remove the amendments headed for the November ballot, which sought to rewrite the state constitution to allow church groups to participate in government programs, and pave the way for school voucher programs.

A lower court had upheld the initiatives in an Aug. 4 decision.

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The Justice Department has quietly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, for a possible antitrust challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising.

Mr. Litvack’s hiring is the strongest signal yet that the U.S. is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo Inc. The two companies combined would account for more than 80% of U.S. online-search ads.

Google shares tumbled 5.5%, or $24.30, to $419.95 in 4 p.m. trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market, while Yahoo shares were up 18 cents to $18.26.

For weeks, U.S. lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing subpoenas for documents to support a challenge to the deal, lawyers close to the review said. Such efforts don’t always mean a case will be brought, however.

Read it all.

“I think this is a bigger financial crisis…Instead of nationalizing an industry like the S&L industry, we’ve effectively nationalized the mortgage market.”

—Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com

MR. BROKAW: Two weeks ago I interviewed Senator Nancy Pelosi–she’s the speaker of the House, obviously–when she was in Denver. When Barack Obama appeared before Rick Warren, he was asked a simple question: When does life begin? And he said at that time that it was above his pay grade. That was the essence of his question. When I asked the speaker what advice she would give him about when life began, she said the church has struggled with this issue for a long time, especially in the last 50 years or so. Her archbishop and others across the country had a very strong refutation to her views on all this; I guess the strongest probably came from Edward Cardinal Egan, who’s the Archbishop of New York. He said, “Anyone who dares to defend that they may be legitimately killed because another human being `chooses’ to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.” Those are very strong words. If Senator Obama comes to you and says, “When does life begin? Help me out here, Joe,” as a Roman Catholic, what would you say to him?

SEN. BIDEN: I’d say, “Look, I know when it begins for me.” It’s a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I’m prepared to accept the teachings of my church. But let me tell you. There are an awful lot of people of great confessional faiths–Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others–who have a different view. They believe in God as strongly as I do. They’re intensely as religious as I am religious. They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they have differing views as to when life–I’m prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception. But that is my judgment. For me to impose that judgment on everyone else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems to me is inappropriate in a pluralistic society. And I know you get the push back, “Well, what about fascism?” Everybody, you know, you going to say fascism’s all right? Fascism isn’t a matter of faith. No decent religious person thinks fascism is a good idea.

Read it all (there is a video link available for those who desire it also).

The Vatican has ordered an outspoken Bloc Québécois MP to quit his seat in the House of Commons and return to his job as a Roman Catholic priest.

Rev. Raymond Gravel said the decision was due to a backlash in English Canada over his “misinterpreted” comments on abortion, but that he had no choice but to follow his original calling.

“My first mission in life is to be a priest, not to be in politics,” he said in an interview.

Father Gravel, 55, is a former prostitute who became a priest in his mid-20s. He worked on behalf of the poor and the elderly after being elected to the House of Commons in a 2006 by-election in the Quebec riding of Repentigny.

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The bishop’s article purports not to take sides in the dispute that is threatening to split the Anglican Communion. But such ”˜neutrality’ is not what it seems. What the Guardian has done with the piece is not fair, but nor is it entirely scurrilous. It represents the kind of over-simplification that nonetheless identifies the main ”˜cash value’ of what is being said. The 1991 report Issues in Human Sexuality essentially reaffirmed traditional Christian teaching, but it allowed for a freedom-of-conscience exception for lay-people who sincerely believe that it is God’s call to them to be in a homosexual sexual relationship. The press had no interest in the reaffirmation of traditional Christian teaching: the ”˜cash value’ of this was that the Church of England was giving approval to homosexual sexual relationships. The 2005 pastoral statement from the House of Bishops of the Church of England on Civil Partnerships, while on the surface of it much more restrictive, has in the public perception – and arguably in actual practice – done for the clergy what Issues in Human Sexuality did for the laity.

The attempt to keep the opposed views all at the table together in the name of the higher value of unity is admirable when the matters in dispute are not of core importance, or when it is not yet clear whether they are of core importance. But in relation to ethical matters the attempt to keep the conversation going over an extended period is to give victory to the most libertarian of the options under consideration, and especially so when the forces of politically correctness in the wider culture are all aligned with the most libertarian view. We would not countenance a protracted period of consultation ”“ with its implicit weakening of the force of existing guidelines ”“ if the issue at stake was, say, compulsory euthanasia of the over-sixties in view of the effect of population growth on the ecology of the planet. While there is always an important place for debate about how ethical principles are to be applied in practice to complex situations, there is no weight of moral conviction behind views that need to be endlessly questioned.

There is always a danger that Christian groups are only reflecting the values of their contexts; and there is always a need for Christian groups to clarify their values in relation to their contexts. In relation to questions of homosexual sexual practice the Bible both engages with and transcends its larger social context. Its guidance in this area is clear and it is equally clear that it treats the matter as one of profound importance. Listening to the experience of gays and lesbians, Christians or not, will always be important. So will valuing them as people, drawing close to them, extending compassion to and giving all practical support. But we do no kindness to anyone (homosexuals included) or to our society at large, if we allow ourselves to drift away from traditional Christian sexual morality.

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Members of the diocese of the Yukon, meeting in Whitehorse on May 31, failed to elect a new bishop, and Archbishop Terrence Buckle said he would postpone his retirement and remain in office.

Archbishop Buckle, who is 67, had said earlier this year that he would retire at the end of 2008. Canadian Anglican bishops generally retire before or at the age of 70.

Through seven rounds of voting, the 35 delegates assembled at Christ Church Cathedral were not able to give any of the five candidates the required simple majority in each of the two houses of clergy and laity as well as an overall two-thirds majority.

Read it all.

In Pittsburgh, in any case, the situation is markedly different. For many months “remaining Episcopal” diocesan officers, clergy, and lay leaders from across the spectrum of diocesan theological diversity and representing all the regions of the diocese, have been working together in the context of “Across the Aisle” conversations to establish plans for an orderly and canonical reorganization of the Diocese of Pittsburgh of the Episcopal Church, should the constitutional amendment concerning realignment be approved at the October 4 convention. These preparations have been taking place transparently, not secretly. Importantly, the leadership of the Episcopal Church has been apprised of these preparations and has indicated a commitment to support the local initiatives for canonical transition.

Despite rumors and anxieties that have moved through the diocese in the past few months, the Presiding Bishop and other leadership of the Episcopal Church have clearly indicated that they do not wish to improvise extra-canonical solutions when canonical solutions are possible, as they most certainly are here. This is an important point, as our clergy, vestries, and congregations seek to discern the best way forward. Ecclesiastical “martial law” is not going to be declared in Pittsburgh, armies of occupation will not descend upon us, and decisions about episcopal leadership and other matters of governance will be made by the clergy and laity of the remaining diocese ourselves, in an orderly, canonical process.

For us in Pittsburgh, as for our brothers and sisters in San Joaquin, remaining-Episcopal or realigning, the future is in many ways a mystery. We have problems to address on both sides of that dividing line, and among the members on both sides, that are going to be challenging. My sense is that in San Joaquin what began as sometimes unsettling and experimental improvisation is now gradually settling into a more orderly pattern of life and ministry, the California courts gradually sorting out the various legal concerns involved–and that as both we in Pittsburgh and the leadership of the Episcopal Church have learned from the experience of the San Joaquin transition, the prospects for a successful transition here have significantly improved.

Read it all.

Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules.

The effort by the Arizona-based legal consortium is designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.

“For so long, there has been this cloud of intimidation over the church,” ADF attorney Erik Stanley said. “It is the job of the pastors of America to debate the proper role of church in society. It’s not for the government to mandate the role of church in society.”

Yet an opposing collection of Christian and Jewish clergy will petition the IRS today to stop the protest before it starts, calling the ADF’s “Pulpit Initiative” an assault on the rule of law and the separation of church and state.

Backed by three former top IRS officials, the group also wants the IRS to determine whether the nonprofit ADF is risking its own tax-exempt status by organizing an “inappropriate, unethical and illegal” series of political endorsements.

Read it all.