[DEBORAH] POTTER: At Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, parishioners are training to become caregivers.

STEPHEN MINISTRY TRAINEE: The key thing that I saw is you leaned into her. You engaged her and told her, “I’m listening to you.”

post03-stephenministriesPOTTER: They’re learning to be Stephen ministers, named for Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr who cared for the poor. Parishioners are recruited and interviewed by the pastor, then trained to offer one-to-one care to people in and around their congregation. They commit to be available as needed for two years, but many serve longer. Pam Montgomery has been involved for two decades, balancing Stephen Ministry with responsibilities at home. But sometimes the caregiver is the one who needs care.

PAM MONTGOMERY (Stephen Minister): This is my dad and my mom.

POTTER: Seven years ago, Pam’s father died of cancer. Just two weeks later she lost her grandmother. As she grappled with her grief, a friend surprised her with a suggestion: What if Pam herself asked for a Stephen minister?

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Last year more than 100 foreign delegations and governments visited Helsinki, hoping to learn the secret of their schools’ success.

In 2006, Finland’s pupils scored the highest average results in science and reading in the whole of the developed world. In the OECD’s exams for 15 year-olds, known as PISA, they also came second in maths, beaten only by teenagers in South Korea.

This isn’t a one-off: in previous PISA tests Finland also came out top.

The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.

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The Episcopal Church, like other mainline Protestant denominations, is not immune from the seismic political, sociological and economic shifts happening today. Most of us are experiencing “a time of no longer and a time of not yet”–an era of rapid, complex change; chronic anxiety; and heightened ambiguity. The comfort of the familiar is fading, and the movement toward an unknown future can feel terrifying.

In times like these, Christians expect religious leadership to help bridge the gap between the ideal and the real, and to equip followers to live out the Gospel in an environment of extreme polarities, i.e., poverty and wealth, insularity and inclusiveness, hostility and hospitality, homogeneity and diversity. The call “to love our neighbors as ourselves” is being drowned out by a barrage of shrill and hate-filled rhetoric. The distance between what Christians profess to believe and what they do seems wider than ever, creating a gap of dysfunction. There are few trusted religious leaders in the public square, whose rational voices, theological gravitas and moral authority can quell the incivility, incendiary rhetoric, and growing intolerance of differences. At a time when the leadership of the church is most needed, there is silence.

The mainline churches are finding themselves on the margins, declining in membership and donations. Some are in the grip of unresolved conflicts and divisions; others are locked in scandal. The main mission is hostage to a host of distracting issues. In short, the church is experiencing a crisis of leadership.

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MacPherson and Harbin’s relationship was the first same-sex union blessed by the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio since Bishop Thomas E. Breidenthal lifted the ban on such ceremonies a week ago.

The men, who live in German Village and started dating in 1975, cannot be legally married in Ohio. And the Episcopal Church does not marry same-sex couples.

MacPherson, 59, and Harbin, 56, would like the civil benefit of marriage someday, they said. But yesterday, they sought their church’s blessing, that their relationship is holy and of God.

Theirs has been a “covenant relationship” – unbreakable – since 1979, in their estimation. But they never had a ceremony with loved ones to mark the relationship. They wanted to do that with a congregation that made them feel welcome when they weren’t sure church could be a haven for gay people. St. Stephen’s, on Ohio State University’s campus, was.

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Richard Dawkins, the atheist campaigner and evolutionist, is planning to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested when he comes to Britain later this year for “crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, are seeking advice from human rights lawyers as to what legal action can be taken against the pope over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

It emerged this weekend that in 1985 when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases, the pope signed a letter arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys.

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All of us are struggling with what it means to live in a world of contradictions and competing claims. It’s a legitimate struggle for any democracy. But in our questions about private conscience there is nothing to be gained by treating religious convictions as alien values. Our equalities debates and laws should create spaces in which faith flourishes, influencing private behaviour as well as contributing to public benefit.

Society simply cannot afford to dislodge faith, for there is nothing intrinsically intolerant about religiously motivated services in public care or education. But religious exemption should never be a blanket for public intolerance. Properly scrutinised it’s as valid as the legal caveats offered to doctors who act in accordance with their conscience.

And people of faith who demand exemptions from laws to which others are subjected should not regard this simply as a right. In effect its a sharp reminder that faith has an enormous responsibility to bring dimensions of well-being because of the values we bring to people of all faiths and none.

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That Sunday morning the two apostles, Peter and John and before them the pious women with the Magdalene, reached this very tomb. Great was their amazement at seeing the stone rolled away form the mouth of the tomb. Even greater was their distress at not finding the Lord’s body there.

Who had dared to remove that huge stone?

Perhaps the Roman soldiers? Surely not! A stunt like that would have certainly cost them their lives. The chief priests? Impossible! It was just these men who had demanded Jesus’ crucifixion. The apostles? No, since they were cowering and hidden! The pious women, then? But how could a few women lacking in physical strength move a rock that only several robust men could have handled?

For a few instants, the two apostles stood facing and wondering at the empty tomb, with its funeral cloth and wrappings. Up to then they had not yet understood the Scriptures. But there they began to remember the words that Our Lord himself had spoken to them when he was still and alive and which the very angels had communicated to the pious women: “He is not here, for he has been raised just as he said” (Mt 28:06). These words were confirmed shortly after by the numerous apparitions of Christ, who desired to show himself alive to his disciples, strengthening them in their faith in Him, who died and rose again: “Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself” (Lk 24:39).

We, bishops, priests and faithful, men and women, young and old from all Churches and from all peoples, have the privilege of standing today before this same empty tomb with a different emotion, with great amazement, surrounded by a cloud of so many witnesses who at that time and throughout history have witnessed to the truth of the Resurrection, giving their very lives for Christ.

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How do we know all this? How can this dying be at the centre of our Christian faith? Only because the Cross is seen in the light of Easter. The Gospels do not end with the cry of dereliction, and the limp and tortured body taken from the Cross and laid hastily in a tomb. If the stone rolled across the entrance to that tomb had sealed the story of Jesus as well as his lifeless body, there would be no Christian gospel, no good news of salvation, no church.

On Easter morning, ”˜on the first day of the week, just as the sun was rising’ the tomb is found empty. Why? Because resurrection, the new creation, has happened. In a multitude of mysterious encounters that new life is found to be victorious and triumphant. ”˜He is not here, he is risen.’ The Risen Christ speaks to a grief-stricken Mary Magdalene, and calls her by name; he walks as a stranger with sorrowing disciples, and their hearts burn within them. He makes himself known in the breaking of bread. He bursts through the imprisoning walls of grief and fear to speak the word of peace ”“ the peace which is the harmony of the new creation, a peace which passes all understanding. New life ripples out from the empty tomb in a transforming tsunami of love.

Love’s redeeming work is done,
Fought the fight the battle won,
Lo our sun’s eclipse is o’er,
Lo he sets in blood no more.
”˜The Prince of Life who died, reigns immortal!’

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In the Charleston area, where history runs deep, a church has to be pretty old to register on the “Wow Meter.”

Johns Island Presbyterian Church is one of the oldest in the Lowcountry, established 57 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and 13 years before George Washington was born.

This year, the congregation marks its 300th anniversary. Amazingly, the original church building, a simple, white, wooden building in the Colonial meeting house style, still stands. It has no steeple or bell tower, no stained glass, no fancy organ, no ornate columns or interior art.

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The danger now is red ink, not Redcoats.

In recent years, a modern-day Paul Revere has been found in David Walker, the former U.S. Comptroller General, who has been visiting every state to warn of the consequences of the nation’s fiscal course.

The majority of our representatives have, so far, closed their ears to the message.

But on Wednesday, Mr. Walker’s warnings were echoed by the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, who stepped out of character to alert Americans in plain language:

“To avoid large and ultimately unsustainable budget deficits, the nation will ultimately have to choose among higher taxes, modifications to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, less spending on everything else from education to defense, or some combination of the above….”

Read it carefully and read it all.

Here is one:

The track marks of the Pope’s tanks are still visible on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lawn after the former’s invitation to disaffected Anglican priests to convert to Rome. Now that Rome is in turmoil, it is time for the archbishop to invite Roman Catholics who despair of their church’s hubris over child abuse to move to Canterbury.

Then the archbishop should move to canonise that most saintly of Englishmen, John Henry Newman, and claim him once again for England.

Peter Inson
Colchester, Essex

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We have put ourselves in a position in which we cannot discriminate between religions and between religious practices; even joking may be against the law now. Not taking religion very seriously ourselves, we failed until recently to understand that others do and do not consider it a private matter. At the same time, we seem to be in a state of cultural moral funk, in which even the Archbishop of Canterbury could recommend that aspects of sharia should be incorporated into English law and then wonder at the fury he aroused.

Beyond a certain point in a liberal society, religious tolerance is a loss of moral nerve.

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Even as prospects for the American economy brighten, consumers are about to face a new financial burden: a sustained period of rising interest rates.

That, economists say, is the inevitable outcome of the nation’s ballooning debt and the renewed prospect of inflation as the economy recovers from the depths of the recent recession.

The shift is sure to come as a shock to consumers whose spending habits were shaped by a historic 30-year decline in the cost of borrowing.

“Americans have assumed the roller coaster goes one way,” said Bill Gross, whose investment firm, Pimco, has taken part in a broad sell-off of government debt, which has pushed up interest rates. “It’s been a great thrill as rates descended, but now we face an extended climb.”

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[ROCCO] PALMO: Well, this is easily the most significant appointment that the Vatican has made in the U.S. in the last 25 years. I mean, first off, L.A. is, by far, the largest diocese, five million Catholics. But Archbishop Gomez now essentially becomes someone who’s able to reach half of American Catholics, Hispanics, in a way that no leader of the American church has been able to do before.

[AUDIE] CORNISH: Right. Hispanics make up more than half of that diocese alone.

PALMO: Seventy percent, actually. It’s a staggering number. But Hispanics are also half of other major archdioceses like New York, Chicago, Atlanta, which is a rising diocese in the South. It’s been a staggering shift in the life of the American church.

CORNISH: So, what does this appointment tell us about the state of relations between the Vatican and the Latino community in the U.S.?

PALMO: Well, as I said to a family the other day, I think they just got a lot warmer.

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Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.”

–John 14:5,6

The Rev. Canon Mary Douglas Glasspool, a priest of the Diocese of Maryland and a partnered gay woman, was elected to serve as a bishop suffragan in the Diocese of Los Angeles in December 2009. The consent process, a 120-day period, requires the receipt of consents from majorities of the Standing Committees throughout the Episcopal Church and from the Church’s bishops with jurisdiction. On March 17, just before the opening of the House of Bishops meeting at Camp Allen, Texas, the presiding bishop’s office announced that Canon Glasspool had received the number of consents required to proceed with her ordination and consecration as a bishop.

Along with several other bishops, I had been delaying my vote until the House of Bishops meeting so that we might confer with one another as to the implications of this episcopal election. As consent is a responsibility upon all diocesan bishops, I then sent in my ballot even though the process had already been decided. Understandably, the diocesan offices have received numerous inquiries as to how I voted. I write this to announce my decision for this particular process and to say something about what this means (and doesn’t mean) for my leadership in the Diocese of Virginia.

Bishop-elect Glasspool’s election has been both a source of celebration and of alarm for many in our diocese, just as in the Episcopal Church and our wider Anglican Communion. In my judgment, both “sides” make compelling arguments and have quite legitimate concerns. Personally, I am more torn by this decision than by any other decision I’ve yet faced, whether as priest or bishop. After deep prayer and thought, I voted to decline consent to the ordination of Bishop-elect Glasspool. This is not to reflect on Bishop-elect Glasspool herself (who, by all accounts, is indeed highly qualified and well suited for the ministry of bishop) but rather is about the circumstances of this case.

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We acknowledged that the issues that divide our beloved Communion are far from settled and that the election of the Reverend Mary Glasspool, a partnered lesbian, as a Bishop in Los Angeles in The Episcopal Church (TEC), makes clear to all that the American Episcopal Church leadership has formally committed itself to a pattern of life which is contrary to Scripture.

This action also makes clear that any pretence that there has been a season of gracious restraint in the Communion has come to an end. Now is the time for all orthodox biblical Anglicans, both in the USA and around the world, to demonstrate a clear and unambiguous stand for the historic faith and their refusal to participate in the direction and unbiblical practice and agenda of TEC.

We recognise that the current strategy in the Anglican Communion to strengthen structures by committee and commission has proved ineffective. Indeed we believe that the current structures have lost integrity and relevance. We believe that it is only by a theologically grounded, biblically shaped reformation such as the one called for by the Jerusalem Declaration that God¹s Kingdom will advance. The Anglican Communion will only be able to fulfill its gospel mandate if it understands itself to be a community gathered around a confession of faith rather than an organisation that has its primary focus on institutional loyalty.

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Read it all and see what you make of the links.

Elevating [Michael] Barlowe, currently head of congregational ministries for the Diocese of California, also might exacerbate tensions over homosexuality in the worldwide Anglican Communion, the Church of England’s umbrella organization that includes the Episcopal Church. Several African dioceses, opposed to gay clergy, have split with the Communion and formed a new denomination, which has attracted a handful of Episcopal churches in the United States.

Picking a gay bishop also would not likely endear the diocese to Utah’s dominant Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was among Prop 8’s strongest supporters.

“There are a lot of theological issues that divide our churches and [homosexuality] is certainly one of them,” Ric Tanner said. “Perhaps the best way to work toward understanding is to be engaged in conversation with views different than ours. That’s true of both groups.”

But Barlowe’s sexuality may not matter to the 6,000 members of Utah’s Episcopal Church, which is on record supporting the ordination of gay and lesbian priests in committed relationships, Tanner said. At the denomination’s triennial meeting in Los Angeles last summer, the diocese sided with the majority in making the office of bishop open to all ordained persons, regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation.

Read the whole article.

“We’ve only had 10 bishops in 143 years,” said Bishop Irish in a prepared statement. “I am delighted to see this slate of extremely gifted finalists and feel a sense of vision and strong leadership that any one of these priests will prayerfully serve the Episcopal Church in Utah.”

The finalists include the Rev. Canon Michael Barlowe, canon for Congregational Ministries in the Diocese of California; the Rev. Canon Scott B. Hayashi, canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Chicago; the Rev. Canon Juan Andrés Quevedo-Boscho, rector of the Church of the Redeemer in the Diocese of Long Island; and the Rev. Canon Mary C.M. Sulerud, canon for Deployment and Vocational Ministries in the Diocese of Washington, D.C.

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…Krzyzewski likes to think of himself as more than just a coach to his players. He takes pride in the high graduation rate of his players and keeps in contact with them even after they graduate.

And while Krzyzewski’s own personal faith plays a role in how he coaches, he is very careful not to impose his beliefs on his players.

“Not every kid I coach is Catholic. They use a different street to get there than the Catholic streets sometimes. But there is a core set of values and principles that you try to teach although you don’t teach it as religion like honesty and acceptance of responsibility, just being a good person. Faith is about living the good life and helping one another, which is teamwork,” he says.

Many of his former players, such as Grant Hill of the Orlando Magic, hold their former coach in very high regard. When interviewed about Krzyzewski by Time magazine, Hill said Coach K was a lot like a parent to the players. “There’s six inches between patting on the back and patting on the butt. And as a parent, he did both and did it well, “Hill said.

And Krzyzewski has experience at being a parent. He and Mickie have three daughters: Debbie Savarino, Lindy Frasher and Jamie Spatola. They also have four grandchildren:Joey, Michael, Carlyn and Emilia Savarino. In June 2004, Coach K and Mickie celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary by renewing their vows in Duke’s chapel.

This story from 2006 is well worth the time–read it all.

The Vatican spokesman strongly defended Pope Benedict XVI as a credible leader on the issue of priestly sex abuse, saying the pope’s respect for truth and transparency stand against the “criticism and unfounded insinuations” of recent weeks.

The spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, said in a lengthy commentary April 9 that the recent disclosures of past cases of abuse of minors by priests had demonstrated that the wounds in the church run deep, and require greater pastoral attention.

But he said the church was taking the correct approach by reaching out to victims, strengthening its own procedures against offenders, encouraging cooperation with civil authorities and improving the screening of priesthood candidates.

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From Damian Thompson–read it all.

The future Pope Benedict XVI, dealing with a request to defrock a child-molesting priest in California, was handling it as a dismissal from the priesthood ”” not an abuse case ”” and acted “expeditiously” by the standards of the time, a Vatican lawyer said in a statement released Saturday.

The Vatican issued the remarks a day after reports emerged that Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, signed a letter to the priest’s bishop saying the matter needed more time and that the “good of the Universal Church” had to be taken into account. It took two years for the man, the Rev. Stephen Kiesle, to be removed from the priesthood.

The bishop, John S. Cummins, wrote to Pope John Paul II in 1981, saying that the priest had been criminally charged with molesting six boys ages 11 to 13 several years earlier and that he was asking to be dismissed. He wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger at least three more times, to provide information and check on the case’s status.

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When he was in charge of the office of church discipline, the future Pope Benedict XVI was slow to respond to a request to be defrocked by an East Bay priest who had pleaded no contest to lewd conduct charges.

In 1985, four years after the Vatican learned of Stephen Kiesle’s request to leave the priesthood, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote to Oakland Bishop John Cummins asking for more time to consider the matter.

Kiesle, who had served in several East Bay parishes, pleaded no contest in 1978 to lewd conduct for tying up and molesting two boys at Our Lady of the Rosary parish in Union City, where he was a teacher and priest.

Read the whole article.

The priest, convicted of tying up and abusing two young boys in a California church rectory, wanted to leave the ministry.

But in 1985, four years after the priest and his bishop first asked that he be defrocked, the future Pope Benedict XVI, then a top Vatican official, signed a letter saying that the case needed more time and that “the good of the Universal Church” had to be considered in the final decision, according to church documents released through lawsuits.

That decision did not come for two more years, the sort of delay that is fueling a renewed sexual abuse scandal in the church that has focused on whether the future pope moved quickly enough to remove known pedophiles from the priesthood, despite pleas from American bishops.

As the scandal has deepened, the pope’s defenders have said that, well before he was elected pope in 2005, he grew ever more concerned about sexual abuse and weeding out pedophile priests. But the case of the California priest, the Rev. Stephen Kiesle, and the trail of documents first reported on Friday by The Associated Press, shows, in this period at least, little urgency.

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The future Pope Benedict XVI resisted pleas to defrock a California priest with a record of sexually molesting children, citing concerns including “the good of the universal church,” according to a 1985 letter bearing his signature.

The correspondence, obtained by The Associated Press, is the strongest challenge yet to the Vatican’s insistence that Benedict played no role in blocking the removal of pedophile priests during his years as head of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal watchdog office. The letter, signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was typed in Latin and is part of years of correspondence between the diocese of Oakland and the Vatican about the proposed defrocking of the Rev. Stephen Kiesle, who pleaded no contest to misdemeanors involving child molestation in 1978.

Read it all. This one ran on the front page of the local paper here this morning; I would be interested if that also happened with your local paper if you know–KSH..

Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great” and “How the Mighty Fall,” celebrates a different sort of leader. He’s found that many of the reliably successful leaders combine “extreme personal humility with intense professional will.”

Alongside the boardroom lion model of leadership, you can imagine a humble hound model. The humble hound leader thinks less about her mental strengths than about her weaknesses. She knows her performance slips when she has to handle more than one problem at a time, so she turns off her phone and e-mail while making decisions. She knows she has a bias for caution, so she writes a memo advocating the more daring option before writing another advocating the most safe. She knows she is bad at prediction, so she follows Peter Drucker’s old advice: After each decision, she writes a memo about what she expects to happen. Nine months later, she’ll read it to discover how far off she was.

In short, she spends a lot of time on metacognition ”” thinking about her thinking ”” and then building external scaffolding devices to compensate for her weaknesses.

She believes we only progress through a series of regulated errors. Every move is a partial failure, to be corrected by the next one. Even walking involves shifting your weight off-balance and then compensating with the next step.

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From here:

At our convention in November 2009, I announced my intention to permit the blessing of same-gender unions in the Diocese of Southern Ohio, beginning in Easter of 2010. At that time, I named a task force of clergy and laity whom I asked to assist me in working out the procedures and requirements related to this policy. Here, once again, are the members of the task force: The Rev, Douglas Argue, The Rev. Trevor Babb, The Rev. William Carroll, Joe Dehner, Esq., The Rev. Pam Elwell, The Rev. George Hill, Nanci Koepke, The Rev. Eileen O’Reilly, Dr. Gail Payne, Dr. Don Reed, Dr. Marti Rideout, A. J Stack, and Lisa Wharton, Esq.

As I said at the time, this was not a collection of people who were necessarily eager to see Southern Ohio move in the direction of same-gender unions. Some were; some weren’t. Once gathered, however, they dug into the hard questions with great courage and mutual respect.

This group has gone far beyond my initial request in stating the theological convictions that underlie the policy, in developing a rite of blessing for trial use, and in providing web and print resources for congregational and individual study. I am extremely grateful for their work ”“ not only for its outcome, which will contribute significantly to the Episcopal Church’s reflection on same-gender unions, but also for the charity, honesty and devotion to the Gospel that was so beautifully modeled in their conversations with one another.

The Rt. Rev. Thomas E. Breidenthal
Bishop, Diocese of Southern Ohio

Read it all and follow all the links–KSH.

In “Two Lives,” his memoir of his great uncle and aunt, Vikram Seth reproduces extracts from the 1893 Jewish Prayer Book of a Berlin synagogue, at the end of which is a brief appendix on fundamentals of Jewish morality.

This says that “Judaism teaches: the Unity of Mankind. It commands us therefore to love our neighbor, to protect our neighbor and his rights, to be aware of his honor, to honor his beliefs, and to assuage his sorrow. Judaism calls upon us through work, through the love of truth, through modesty, through amicability, through moral rectitude, and through obedience to authority, to further the wellbeing of our neighbors, to seek the good of our fatherland, and to bring about the loving fellowship of all mankind.”

Given what would happen in that German fatherland within a half-century, the reference to “obedience to authority” makes painful reading. Assimilated Berlin Jews of this period were patriotic to a fault. A happier phrasing would have been, “through questioning of authority.” Truth and questioning are inseparable, as the terrible price of German obedience showed.

But taken as a whole, these reflections on the contribution of Jewish ethics to the “loving fellowship of mankind” make uplifting reading at a time of renewal. Amicability, for one, is a neglected virtue.

Read it all.