The creation of a second Anglican church in America for conservative Episcopalians angered by the liberal drift of their denomination has drawn high praise from the members of a Vero Beach church who attended the new denomination’s founding convocation in Texas this week.

“I’ve been waiting 30 years for this moment,” said Judy Stull of Christ Church in Vero Beach, one of ten members of the church’s delegation to the Anglican Church in North America founding convocation held June 22-25 at St. Vincent’s Cathedral in Bedford, Texas.

Formed in 2007 after the clergy and a majority of the members of Trinity Episcopal Church in Vero Beach withdrew from the Diocese of Central Florida, the new church meets in the former Indian River County Tax Assessor’s Office in Majestic Plaza off U.S. 1 in Vero Beach. The 500-member church is one of 700 congregations comprising 100,000 former Episcopalians in the U.S. and Canada that make up the ACNA.

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The rest of the world does not care if Anglicans cannot play nicely with others who like to identify themselves as fellow Anglicans. What the world around us cares about is whether or not we care about the world around us.

The proposed covenant does pay lip service to rightful concern for the needs of the wider world. But it is preoccupied with encouraging, then enforcing, uniformity. It’s time we refuse to be distracted with this covenant nonsense. The Church of England seems constitutionally incapable of leading on this edge; but the Episcopal Church can and should set the pace and lead the way back to mission.

The Episcopal Church, as well as the Anglican Church of Canada, is capable of leading the communion back to its roots, its “Anglican roots” if you must: a collegial fellowship of independent churches, working and praying interdependently to bring Christ to the wider world around us, and to find Christ there waiting for us.

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In a Texas cathedral where the liturgical nuances of Anglo-Catholicism mingled with the joyous shouts of Pentecostalism, Archbishop-elect Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh called together a body representing 100,000 people who had left the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada.

Yesterday they adopted the constitution of the new Anglican Church in North America, which they hope will eventually be recognized as a province of the 80 million-member global Anglican Communion. The 2.1 million-member Episcopal Church is the U.S. province of the communion.

“There is a great reformation of the Christian Church under way. We North American Anglicans are in the midst of it,” their new archbishop told a standing-room only crowd gathered in St. Vincent Cathedral in Bedford, Texas. It was the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth which, like the Diocese of Pittsburgh, had broken with the Episcopal Church, taking the majority of its parishes with it.

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With nearly half of all marriages in the U.S. ending in divorce, why do we still insist on tying the knot? As she ends her 20-year marriage, The Atlantic contributor Sandra Tsing Loh posits that the idea of lifelong wedded bliss has become obsolete….

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If recent trends are any guide, many Church of England parishes will have been cheered by higher attendances at Easter services. The last published statistics for 2006/7 show rises of 7 and 5 per cent in church going at Christmas and Easter.

But these figures are just about the only signs of hope for the church and certainly not the first green shoots of a revival. Other statistics make for gloomy reading.

Annual decline in Sunday attendance is running at around 1 per cent. At this rate it is hard to see the church surviving for more than 30 years though few of its leaders are prepared to face that possibility.

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Anglican Primate Dr Rowan Williams led a service of the Eucharist at a special Songs of Praise outside the city’s cathedral on Saturday evening.

He said that a number of events over the weekend were “hugely encouraging” and showed a strong church community.

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“It started on a very casual basis — run things by each other,” he said.
He felt as if he had found a confidant.
“When you live in the zone of politics, you can’t ever let your guard down. You can’t ever say, ‘What do you think, what do you think?’ There was this zone of protectiveness. She lived thousands of miles away, and I was up here, and you could throw an idea out and vise versa.
“We developed a remarkable friendship over those eight years. About a year ago, it sparked into something more than that.”

—South Carolina’s Governor this week in his explanation of the affair.This was also quoted in this morning’s sermon by yours truly–KSH.

Listen to them both. In the second one we learn that the Episcopal Church has “long held” a belief in the three legs [which itself is wrong] of Scripture, tradition and “continuing revelation”(!) [More Adult Education needed anyone?].

Why is NPR using the wrong nomenclature of Episcopals? Ugh–KSH.

The Rev. Bob Deshaies never dated while growing up in Waterbury, Conn. He went to a Catholic high school seminary, then a Catholic college, then a major seminary. “You’d be giving up your ministry for a cheap piece of fluff,” his spiritual director told him.

Then he met Deborah Cabral, a youth worker at a parish in Worcester, Mass. He got to know her first as a co-worker, then as a friend, then as a girlfriend. That meeting in 1985, and the relationship that followed, led into marriage, then out of the Catholic priesthood and into the Episcopal Church within two years, preceding Alberto Cutié by two decades.

“When you meet a woman who opens up your heart and soul, it’s mind-shattering,” says Deshaies, now rector at St. Benedict’s Episcopal Church in Plantation. “It got me to rethink everything.”

Cutié’s exit from Catholic ranks, and his wedding at an Episcopal church this past Friday, have highlighted the issue of priests who are involved with women ”” relationships kept in the shadows by the requirement of celibacy.

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To be or not to be? More pertinently: is it a decision for the individual or the state? While suicide is legal in Britain, helping someone to die is not. In the past seven years, 115 Britons have travelled with the help of relatives and friends to the Swiss euthanasia clinic Dignitas to end their lives. Most were suffering from terminal conditions such as cancer and motor neurone disease, but last week it was revealed a small number had chronic but non-life-threatening conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis. Yet no one has ever been prosecuted.

The House of Lords debates an amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill this week which seeks to set out the circumstances in which it would be legal to help someone to end their lives.

Debbie Purdy supports the amendment. A multiple sclerosis sufferer, she wants clarification of the circumstances under which her husband, and others like him, would be prosecuted if he helps her to end her life. Michael Wenham, who suffers from motor neurone disease, opposes it. The Independent on Sunday asked them to debate the issue via email….

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Sitting inside the Church of the Holy Cross, the smell of the Episcopal church’s history hangs in the air above the 140-year-old pews. Light pours in through the stained glass windows, illuminating the sanctuary. While the church is filled with history and church relics more than a century old, it is the memories of loyal congregants that truly bring the spirit of the church to life.

Sunday, nearly 140 years after the church was built and consecrated in 1870, Holy Cross will hold its final service. Church vestry voted on May 17 to terminate its status as a parish. Though the decision was difficult for many of the vestry members to make, they deemed it necessary due to the 60-member congregation’s dwindling budget.

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South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford considered resigning from office after his extramarital affair came to light, the Republican revealed Sunday in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press.

But Sanford, who hasn’t spoken publicly since Friday, said he spoke with close spiritual and political associates who advised him to fight to restore the public’s ”” and his family’s ”” trust in him.

“Resigning would be the easiest thing to do,” he said.

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Wow. Amazing.

Update:Brazil wins 3-2. Brazil had too much speed and skill and the U.S. still lacks sufficient depth, but at least we are improving–KSH.

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Doctors are demanding that NHS staff be given a right to discuss spiritual issues with patients as well as being allowed to offer to pray for them.

Medics will tell the British Medical Association conference this week that staff should not be disciplined as long as they handle the issue sensitively.

The doctors said recent cases where health workers had got into trouble were making people fearful.

But atheists said it was wrong to mix religion and health care.

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The Fuzzy math behind the Massachusetts universal healthcare law is starting to add up – just as Washington studies the law as a possible model for the nation.

Because of a recession-related drop in state revenues and a surge in enrollment by the recently unemployed, the truth is emerging at an inconvenient time. Massachusetts doesn’t have enough money to pay for the coverage envisioned by the law.

In June, state officials announced they are cutting $100 million from Commonwealth Care, which subsidizes premiums for needy residents. The poorest residents, along with the newest – legal immigrants – will take the hit.

This outcome is not surprising, but it is instructive as President Obama pushes for a national healthcare plan.

The figure then being projected for this year was above the $1,000bn mark for the first time. But in the few short months since, the number has rocketed much further ”“ to $1,800bn (£1,106bn, €1,291bn) or 13 per cent of gross domestic product.

The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan watchdog, forecasts that the US will post deficits in excess of a trillion dollars in each of the next 10 years. Even on its relatively optimistic assumptions for economic growth, moreover, the CBO predicts national debt will double to 82 per cent of GDP in the next decade ”“ a level not seen since the second world war.

This would push the US close to the chronic debt levels seen in Japan and Italy. “People used to talk about America’s long-term fiscal crisis,” says Douglas Elmendorf, head of the CBO. “That crisis is now.”

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President Barack Obama’s drive to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system may be back on track thanks to Senate efforts to cut the price tag to $1 trillion, but a bipartisan deal on the sweeping proposal still is far from certain.

Obama wants changes that rein in the escalating costs of healthcare in the United States and bring insurance to most of the 46 million Americans who currently lack it.

He also wants a bill that the Democrats who control Congress and the Republican minority can support to give a bipartisan stamp of approval to his top legislative priority.

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Please welcome the 39th province of the Anglican Communion, the Anglican Church in North America. “Formal recognition awaits,” writes Ruth Gledhill, but the head of the ACNA, Archbishop Robert Duncan, is in talks with Rowan Williams and the new province is already in full communion with 30 million Anglicans around the world.

Great news, eh? Funny that it took Anglicanism 400 years to establish a presence in North America, but better late than never….

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Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult–once we truly understand and accept it–then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share.

–M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (Touchstone, 1978 original), p.15, and quoted in this morning’s sermon by yours truly

Last of the True Believers?

By risking his popularity now, Mark Sanford may be quite popular in 2012

–From the April 25, 2009 Newsweek (article entitled Mark Sanford: Last Conservative Standing?)

The decision to cease the newsprint edition of United Church News was made on March 20 by the board of directors of the Office of General Ministries (OGM), which has been struggling with skyrocketing costs for the newspaper’s production. Postage and printing costs have more than doubled during the past five years, with costs now surpassing $125,000 per issue.

The National edition will publish one more issue in September. The Conference editions ”” or “wrap arounds” ”” ended with the April edition, although Conferences were offered the opportunity to print one additional issue if willing to share the costs equally with the UCC’s National setting.

“This was a difficult decision for board members, because it was rooted in significant financial angst,” said the Rev. J. Bennett Guess, the UCC’s communications director and a former editor of United Church News. “But it also paves the way for the development of an expanded online news portal and, most likely, a new and different print publication for the United Church of Christ.”

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”¦Sustained discussion of the human propensity towards self-deception has all but disappeared from twentieth-century analyses of the spiritual life. There are, of course, still specialists in philosophy and psychology working out the details. But, for most of us, self-deception simply doesn’t jump immediately to mind as an explanation of our experience. We rarely think of it. Lots of people I talk to have never so much as considered the possibility that they’ve fallen prey to it in any significant way. One is reminded here of the haunting suggestion in Bishop Butler’s tenth sermon that “those who have never had any suspicion of, who have never made allowances for this weakness in themselves, who have never (if I may be allowed such a manner of speaking) caught themselves in it, may almost take it for granted that they have been very much misled by it.”

— Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: The Role of Self-deception in Christian Living (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), p, 7

The human mind is not only, as Calvin has said, a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears the first in order to escape God, the second in order to escape anxiety; and there is a relation between the two. For facing the God who is really God means facing also the absolute threat of nonbeing. The “naked absolute” (to use a phrase of Luther’s) produces “naked anxiety”; for it is the extinction of every finite self-affirmation, and not a possible object of fear and courage….But ultimately the attempts to transform anxiety into fear are vain. The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.

–Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1st edition 1952, 2nd edition 2000), p.39

Three main problems face the newly formed ACNA, and they are all formidable. All of them in a sense limit the ability of ACNA to break free of its emotional and psychological attachment to that which has brought them to this point. The first revolves around property disputes. I wrote to bishops and deputies to General Convention today suggesting that a trust or trusts be formed to administer disputed property and to enter into temporary agreements in cases in which a vast majority of parishioners in such properties wish no longer to be in TEC, negotiating leases, shared arrangements and creative solutions to take these disputes out of the secular courts. I was not encouraged by the responses I received, most of which accused those leaving us off stealing property or of being so bigoted against gay and lesbians that in justice they should be shunned. Justice, I am told, trumps charity.

The second problem revolves around the language used to depose bishops and other clergy who have joined ACNA which, if language means anything at all, purports to laicise such clergy rather than merely to desprive them of the right to exercise ministry in Provinces in which they have no desire to exercise ministry.

The third is the problematic relationship between ACNA and the Instruments of Unity of the Anglican Communion which has exported American problems worldwide and threatens to destroy the unity of the entire Communion. If indeed the Communion comes apart because of what has happened here, ACNA will, whether it deserves to be blamed or not, bear a good deal of responsibility for a tragic schism, a responsibility in which it will ironically, be accused of sharing responsibility with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, to what extent perhaps is a judgment differently assessed by people on differing sides of this tragedy.

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Sadly, many people are going to hear this [news of a recent survey showing many religious groups losing ground] and bemoan the losing of a Christian America. Regrettably, too many people are going to be so caught up in their political agendas that they miss what this means for real Christianity. Unfortunately, so many people are going to view this as Christians losing the fight for a Christian nation that they will forget God never asked us to produce a Christian nation. He asked us to get the message of forgiveness and freedom to one more person.

With that in mind, this doesn’t mean we’re losing the battle. Rather, it means the fields are more white than they’ve been in a long time. There are more people who aren’t religious. That means there are more people who are going to be recognizing something is missing, even if they aren’t going to be completely up front about it.

I remember the story of two shoe salesmen who were sent into a tribal country to try to expand sales. The first called home and said, “I’ve got bad news. We’ve made a big mistake. Nobody here wears shoes. I’m coming home.” The second one called back and said, “I’ve got great news. Nobody here wears shoes. Everyone is a potential customer. Send more shoes.”

Which salesman are you?

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If Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy, then Bedford is no Congress of St. Louis.

The 1977 gathering and its Affirmation were about sharply defining doctrine, with continuity both back to the origins of the Church of England, and setting a precedent for decades if not centuries to come. This week’s gathering was about fuzzing theological differences between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, while reassuring both parties that the ACNA is no TEC.

It’s possible that more truth, clarity and courage will be forthcoming, but right now I don’t have reason to be optimistic. If he wants to connect to those American Christians who believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church, Metropolitan Jonah still has a few dozen Schism I bishops yet to meet. Perhaps it’s time for the Congress of St. Louis/Schism I crowd to convene their own media event. If the Metropolitan isn’t available, they could invite Cardinal Kasper.

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Dr. Stephen Gregory Weed Andrews will be consecreated as the 10th bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Algoma on Monday.

The Consecration Service will take place at St. Luke’s Cathedral in Sault Ste. Marie beginning at 1 p. m.

Bishops from across Canada, as well as lay and clergy representatives from the Diocese of Algoma will attend.

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The fact that Jackson managed to fritter away the majority of the money he earned beggars belief. He could never make up what he had lost through a new record deal, not with the music business in such reduced circumstances and his value to sponsors diminished by his court appearances. Therefore the only route open to him was the hardest one, the concert stage.

Just as his hits were the biggest ones, his disasters weren’t modest either. He never had the strong management figure that stars depend on to tell them something approaching the truth. There was something heavy-handed and needy about his demands, like his latter-day refusal to do anything unless he could be billed as “King of Pop”, a title surely cooked up in a marketing meeting. Having his giant effigy towed down the Thames on a barge in 1995 was the kind of thing a smart handler would have vetoed.

Everything he did had to be the most extreme, the most expensive and the most likely to expose him to ridicule if it went wrong. A strong manager would have suggested that there were better ways to feel your way back into live work than a 50-night residency at a London venue. There was smart money on saying that the ridiculously ambitious run of physically demanding shows was never going to happen, that the postponement was going to turn into a cancellation, probably pursued by lawyers. It didn’t turn out that way.

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Democrats narrowly passed historic climate and energy legislation Friday evening that would transform the country’s economy and industrial landscape.

But the all-hands-on-deck effort to protect politically vulnerable Democrats by corralling the minimum number of votes to pass the bill, 219-212, proves that there are limits to President Barack Obama’s ability to use his popularity to push through his legislative agenda. Forty-four Democrats voted against the bill, while just eight Republicans crossed the aisle to back it.

Despite the tough path to passage, the legislation is a significant win for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) and the bill’s two main sponsors ”“ House Energy and Commerce committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-Ca.) and Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey (D) ”“ who modified the bill again and again to get skeptical members from the Rust Belt, the oil-producing southeast and rural Midwest to back the legislation.

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