Almighty God, by whose Spirit the Scriptures were opened to thy servant Roland Allen, so that he might lead many to know, live and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ: Give us grace to follow his example, that the variety of those to whom we reach out in love may receive thy saving Word and witness in their own languages and cultures to thy glorious Name; through Jesus Christ, thy Word made flesh, who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer; 2 from the end of the earth I call to thee, when my heart is faint. Lead thou me to the rock that is higher than I; 3 for thou art my refuge, a strong tower against the enemy

O Almighty God, who on the day of Pentecost didst send the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, to abide in thy Church unto the end: Bestow upon us, and upon all thy faithful people, his manifold gifts of grace; that with minds enlightened by his truth and hearts purified by his presence, we may day by day be strengthened with power in the inward man; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who, with thee and the same Spirit, liveth and reigneth one God world without end.

BALLARAT’S Anglican Bishop has taken leave and may step down from his post, according to a media report.

The Age reported this week that Bishop Michael Hough had taken sick leave for a month.

While he is away, Bishop Hough has appointed a Melbourne assistant bishop, Philip Huggins, as vicar-general of the diocese.

The development comes less than two weeks before the Anglican diocesan synod in Portland.

Read it all.

An Anglican church has been set up in a Shropshire town once described as “Godless” for having among the lowest-recorded church attendances in Britain.

For the past 18 months Christians have been worshipping in Lawley School in Telford, a town with fewer than one in 100 regular church-goers in 2005.

The primary school-based church has now been recognised by the Church of England as the River Community Church.

Read it all.

The Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion, has written to those Episcopalians serving on the communion’s ecumenical dialogues informing them that their memberships have been discontinued.

The decision is likely to affect five Episcopal Church members serving on Anglican dialogues with the Lutheran, Methodist and Orthodox churches, as well as one member of the Inter-Anglican Standing Committee on Unity, Faith and Order, who has been invited to serve as a consultant.

Read it all.

How often do soldiers returning after seeing combat in Iraq and Afghanistan develop mental disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression?

A new study funded by the U.S. Army finds 8 to 14 percent of infantry soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan return seriously disabled by mental health problems. Between 23 and 31 percent return with some impairment.

Read it all.

We are drifting. We take comfort in bits of good news, but we are in dangerous waters; the Great Recession is being starkly revealed as a global crisis with the US, the traditional engine of recovery, sputtering on every cylinder. The US government responded with dramatic financial support by transferring money to the household sector. But outside of these transfers the personal income of Americans is still declining; the residential market remains stagnant at best; consumer growth is nominal. The only real energy in the economy has come from the cessation of inventory liquidation, which is now the main factor in rising industrial output and any modest improvement in the economy.

The mood of US households is despondent. In May only 11.3 per cent believed they would see their income rise in the following six months, while 16.6 per cent thought they would see it decline. This is the first time in over four decades that more people believe they will be worse off than better. Any massive fiscal and monetary stimulus that might reverse the trend is likely to be politically unsustainable given the growing concern over the exploding national deficit.

Wherever you look the scene is bleak. Leading economic indicators fell in April ”“ unusual at such an early stage in the up-cycle. Jobless claims were up by 25,000 to 471,000. And up again above expectations in the first three weeks of May ”“ raising the four-week moving average to a level consistent with 100,000, or more, net job losses. For the past several months, claims have been nowhere near the levels of 400,000 and less that in the past were consistent with sustained job creation. We are not enjoying the normal cycle of economic improvement.

Read it all.

Last Thursday I sent letters to members of the Inter Anglican ecumenical dialogues who are from the Episcopal Church informing them that their membership of these dialogues has been discontinued. In doing so I want to emphasise again as I did in those letters the exceptional service of each and every person to that important work and to acknowledge without exception the enormous contribution each person has made.

I have also written to the person from the Episcopal Church who is a member of the Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO), withdrawing that person’s membership and inviting her to serve as a Consultant to that body.

I have written to the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada to ask whether its General Synod or House of Bishops has formally adopted policies that breach the second moratorium in the Windsor Report, authorising public rites of same-sex blessing.

At the same time I have written to the Primate of the Southern Cone, whose interventions in other provinces are referred to in the Windsor Continuation Group Report asking him for clarification as to the current state of his interventions into other provinces.

These are the actions which flow immediately from the Archbishop’s Pentecost Letter.

Read it all.

Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday that Britain’s financial situation was “even worse than we thought” and that the country would have to make savage spending cuts to bring its swelling deficit under control.

Stern and grim-faced in a speech in Milton Keynes, just north of London, Mr. Cameron said, “How we deal with these things will affect our economy, our society ”” indeed our whole way of life.”

“The decisions we make will affect every single person in our country,” he said. “And the effects of those decisions will stay with us for years, perhaps decades, to come.”

Mr. Cameron said that at more than 11 percent, Britain’s budget deficit was the largest ever faced by the country in peacetime. But he warned that the structural deficit was more worrisome. Britain currently owes a total of more than $1.12 trillion , he said, and in five years will owe nearly double that if nothing is done now.

Read it all.

When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it.

Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up.

“I stood up from my desk and said, ”˜Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.”

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing.

Read it all.

Fourteen members of All Saints Anglican Church were confirmed recently during a Sunday service at the church in Peachtree City.

The Right Reverend David Anderson of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America conducted the confirmation rite with Michael Fry, rector at All Saints, assisting.

Read it all.

Bruce Waltke built a national reputation teaching the Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) for more than 20 years. But in March, when he seemed to challenge evangelicals in a video interview to consider the possibility of evolution or risk being seen as a “cult,” Waltke’s scholarly life exploded.

Seminary administrators asked Waltke to have the video removed from the website of BioLogos, a nonprofit promoting the integration of Christianity and science. Waltke promptly did so, but the video already had kicked up controversy. In early April, the renowned scholar resigned from RTS’s Orlando campus.

Waltke’s video addressed the barriers evangelicals face in considering the possibility of evolution, a process he believes is guided and sustained by God. Waltke said that “if the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult ”¦ some odd group that is not really interacting with the world.”

My Old Testament Professor for two years when I began graduate school in a land far away a long time ago, and one of God’s great saints. Read it all–KSH.

(Please note the headline above is the one given to this piece today in the local paper in the op-ed section–KSH).

“The United States faces a fundamental disconnect between the services that people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those services,” Douglas Elmendorf, director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, writes in a May 17 blog post.

Addressing the current tax and spending gap to make fiscal policy sustainable is “an urgent task for policy makers,” Elmendorf says.

Read it all.

(ACNS) Three new videos from the Edinburgh 2010 world missionary conference are available here.

Anglicans attending the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh say it is set to be a crucial moment for global Christianity.

The Rt Revd Mark McDonald, Canada’s first National Indigenous Bishop, said the conference was giving people a real sense of the trajectory of God’s future for the church. “I expect a Christian identity to emerge out of this conference that will transcend what we’ve been before. This is really about building the relationships that will carry the worldwide church to a new level.”

Read the whole thing.

We are grateful that the Presiding Bishop has sought to ground her appeal to diversity and new truth in a public message available for the Church’s evaluation and testing. It explains what kind of vision for the Episcopal Church she is seeking to defend. On the one hand, she believes the Holy Spirit has spoken in truthful and special (timely) ways to those who share this view in TEC. On the other hand, she believes diversity on this matter is equally a gifting warranted by the pentecostal event, explaining why the majority of the Anglican Communion and the vast preponderance of Christians worldwide (including the saints numbered on another shore) attended and attend to different Holy Spirit guidance and a different confession of God the Holy Spirit, “who spake by the prophets”¦who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.” Her remarks help frame the matter in clear ways, which we can only pray is itself a gift of God the Holy Spirit, whose vocation is to glorify Christ and convict the world in respect of him. St Paul reveals that appeals to the Spirit and the Spirit’s manifestation required testing in the earliest Christian Churches, especially those with large gentile numbers. Discerning the work and person of God the Holy Spirit was necessary and was an evangelical challenge.

John and Acts provide the record given to the church so that the Holy Spirit’s work might be recognised, adjudicated, and confessed. The Holy Spirit’s deliverances are those of the Risen and Ascended Christ, in agreement with the providential will of the Father as expressed in the Law and the Prophets, whose subject matter is Christ, latent and now patent (St Augustine). The Presiding Bishop’s account of the Spirit as bringing a truth without prior testimony or dominical warrant, which at the same time gives rise to diversity as a pentecostal gift, diverges in extreme ways from the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles. It is a teaching lacking continuity and agreement with the witness of Christians in our present day, in the worldwide body, and because without biblical warrant, it is also nowhere attested in the history of the church’s teaching.

We conclude this teaching comes from a conviction already held, independently of what is customarily sought in respect of a warrant of God the Holy Spirit (see the Catechism of the BCP), because of cultural assumptions about the intentions of sexual activity in our age and because TEC has already acted on these.

Read it carefully and read it all.

The alternative theory is that the Anglican Communion is already entirely and irrevocably broken. The ’deep tearing’ of the ’fabric of communion’ which was warned about by the Primates in 2003 has taken placed unnoticed by an easily distracted media. Traditionalist Anglicans might have expected action to be taken in the wake of the Windsor Report and the call for a withdrawal of the American and Canadian Church’s from the counsels of the Communion. In contrast, their place at the table has been cemented. The Episcopal Church has two members on the newly styled Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion, all of its bishops bar one were invited to the Lambeth Conference. While it is true that an Anglican Covenant (if it is ever adopted by a majority of Provinces) might resolve future problems, it has no chance of resolving this one.

One-third of Anglican bishops refused the Archbishop’s invitation to attend the 2008 Lambeth Conference, it can no longer be pretended that there is a common Anglican ministry interchangeable throughout the world, and two Global South Primates have themselves stepped down from the Anglican Standing Committee. The only action which appears to have been taken in response to the consecration of Gene Robinson is the deliberate downgrading of the Primates’ Meeting to a committee which now meets irregularly and is ignored by its convenor.

While it is true that the demise of the Anglican Communion has been attended by no burial rites, or funeral orations, but make no mistake it is dead. Of course, there are still relationships throughout the world between Anglican Provinces, but the Anglican Communion as it was before the momentous events of 2003, is simply ”˜no more’. To echo the surrealist words of Monty Python, “It is a dead parrot.”

–Andrew Carey, Church of England Newspaper, May 20, 2010

Take a careful look (a 51 page pdf) (please note that I highly recommend you begin by perusing the table of contents found on pages 50-51 of the download [and listed on the pages as pages 45 and 46]–KSH).

The Middle East has a special place in the hearts of all Christians, since it was there that God first made himself known to our fathers in faith. From the time when Abraham set out from Ur of the Chaldeans in obedience to the Lord’s call, right up until the death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s saving work was accomplished through particular individuals and peoples in your homelands. Since then, the message of the Gospel has spread all over the world, but Christians everywhere continue to look to the Middle East with special reverence, on account of the prophets and patriarchs, apostles and martyrs to whom we owe so much, the men and women who heard God’s word, bore witness to it, and handed it on to us who belong to the great family of the Church.

The Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, convened at your request, will attempt to deepen the bonds of communion between the members of your local Churches, and the communion of these churches with each other and with the universal Church. The Assembly also aims to encourage you in the witness of your faith in Christ in those countries where the faith was born and from where it spread. It is also known that some of you have endured great hardships due to the current situation in the region. The Special Assembly is an opportunity for Christians from the rest of the world to offer spiritual support and solidarity to their brothers and sisters in the Middle East. This is an opportunity to highlight the significant value of the Christian presence and witness in countries of the Bible, not only for the Christian community worldwide, but also for your neighbours and fellow citizens. You are help the common good in countless ways, for example through education, health care and social assistance, and you work to build society. You want to live in peace and harmony with your Jew and Muslim neighbours. Often, you act as peacemakers in the difficult process of reconciliation. You deserve recognition for the invaluable role you fill. This is my serious hope that your rights are increasingly respected, including the right to freedom of worship and religious freedom, and that you will never again suffer discrimination of any kind.

Read it all.

IT’S a $2.6 trillion mystery.

That’s the amount that foreign banks and other financial companies have lent to public and private institutions in Greece, Spain and Portugal, three countries so mired in economic troubles that analysts and investors assume that a significant portion of that mountain of debt may never be repaid.

The problem is, alas, that no one ”” not investors, not regulators, not even bankers themselves ”” knows exactly which banks are sitting on the biggest stockpiles of rotting loans within that pile. And doubt, as it always does during economic crises, has made Europe’s already vulnerable financial system occasionally appear to seize up. Early last month, in an indication of just how dangerous the situation had become, European banks ”” which appear to hold more than half of that $2.6 trillion in debt ”” nearly stopped lending money to one another.

Now, with government resources strained and confidence in European economies eroding, some analysts say the Continent’s banks have to come clean with a transparent and rigorous accounting of their woes. Until then, they say, nobody will be able to wrestle effectively with Europe’s mounting problems.

“The marketplace knows very little about where the real risks are parked,” says Nicolas Véron, an economist at Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels. “That is exactly the problem. As long as there is no semblance of clarity, trust will not return to the banking system.”

Read it all.

As oil continued to pour into the Gulf of Mexico on a recent Saturday, Jennifer Wilkerson spent three hours on the phone talking about life after petroleum.

For Mrs. Wilkerson, 33, a moderate Democrat from Oakton, Va., who designs computer interfaces, the spill reinforced what she had been obsessing over for more than a year ”” that oil use was outstripping the world’s supply. She worried about what would come after: maybe food shortages, a collapse of the economy, a breakdown of civil order. Her call was part of a telephone course about how to live through it all.

In bleak times, there is a boom in doom.

Americans have long been fascinated by disaster scenarios, from the population explosion to the cold war to global warming. These days the doomers, as Mrs. Wilkerson jokingly calls herself and likeminded others, have a new focus: peak oil. They argue that oil supplies peaked as early as 2008 and will decline rapidly, taking the economy with them.

Read it all.

My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!

–Galatians 4:19

O God, we have known and believed the love that thou hast for us. May we, by dwelling in love, dwell in thee, and thou in us. Teach us, O heavenly Father, the love wherewith thou hast loved us; fashion us, O blessed Lord, after thine own example of love; shed abroad, O thou Holy Spirit of love, the love of God and man in our hearts. For thy name’s sake.

–Henry Alford

The Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) has pulled back from full membership in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and has asked to be affiliated with the breakaway province in formation as an ACNA “Ministry Partner.” The announcement weakens the third province movement in the United States and Canada, but will not likely prove to be fatal its supporters say.

On May 18 Archbishop Robert Duncan of the ACNA and Bishop Chuck Murphy of the AMiA, also known as the Anglican Mission, released separate statements saying the downgrading of the AMiA’s relationship with the ACNA would take affect following the group’s June bishops meeting.

Bishop Don Harvey of the Anglican Network in Canada, a diocese of the ACNA, stated that he did “not see this as good news, in fact it is a sad development in many ways.”

Read it all (subscription required).

(ACNS) Members of the worldwide Anglican Communion are working together on a project to discover what the Bible tells the church about saving the planet from environmental damage.

The Bible in the Life of the Church project manager, Stephen Lyon, said that World Environment Day was the perfect moment to reveal that the first issue under discussion would be the Environment.

“We are already seeing the impact of climate change, particularly in the developing world,” he said. “Most Anglicans live in countries like India and Nigeria that will be worst hit by greater flooding, or diminishing levels of potable water.

“All faiths have a duty to protect the environment, for themselves and others. Our particular tradition, Anglicanism, has enshrined the need to protect our world in its mission statement The Five Marks of Mission*. This is one of the reasons why we have picked this issue””to ensure that all Anglicans everywhere realise the biblical imperative to protect and sustain God’s creation.

Read it all.

What should be the ecclesial consequences for Anglican churches that have consciously rejected the “mind of the Communion” during this past decade? Many have waited a long time for Archbishop Rowan Williams to spell out his own views. Since 2007 he has openly talked of the costs involved in going one’s own way, however conscientiously, in opposition to the formally stated teachings of the Communion on the matter of sexual behavior and other key matters of doctrine and discipline. But what costs? The archbishop’s Pentecost letter has now begun the formal process of both laying out and setting in motion these consequences. This alone makes the letter significant.

Until this point, the archbishop has steadfastly followed two tracks in responding to the divisions of the Communion. First, he has formally initiated and supported Communion-based processes of consultation and evaluation leading out of the 2004 Windsor Report. By and large, and based on commonly accepted standards of doctrine and discipline around the Communion, these have consistently pressed for Anglican churches around the world to adopt and enforce moratoria on the consecration of partnered homosexual bishops, on the affirmation and permission of same-sex blessings or marriages, and on the cross-jurisdictional interference of bishops in the dioceses or provinces of another church. Through the Instruments of Communion ”” the Primates’ Meeting, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Lambeth Conference ”” as well as through representative commissions like the Windsor Continuation Group, the acceptability of this track has been reiterated over and over. Yet, for all that, there has never really been stable resolution emerging from these repeated requests for moratoria.

The archbishop’s second track has been to champion the Anglican Covenant….

Read it all.

Declining revenue from dioceses and decisions made by the Council of General Synod (CoGS), will result in a cut of about $1.1 million in 2011 from the Church’s current $10 million budget.

This message was delivered to General Synod delegates on Sat. Jun. 5 by Michele George, treasurer of the Anglican Church of Canada. Monica Patten, chair of the financial management and development committee (FMDC), and George briefed General Synod delegates on the current state of planning for the 2011 budget.

The cuts will affect programs and staff at the church’s national office in Toronto. Fixed costs for running the national office (“Church House”) as well as grants to the Council of the North, which total approximately $3 million annually, will not be touched. All cuts will come out of the $7 million operating budget remaining, explained George.

Read the whole.

Terrorism and federal government debt tie as the most worrisome issues to Americans when they consider threats to the future wellbeing of the U.S. Four in 10 Americans call each an “extremely serious” threat, with healthcare costs ranking a close third.

Read it all.

On Sunday, the 66th anniversary of D-Day, many Americans will remember the day when Allied forces penetrated Nazi-occupied Western Europe in a massive, coordinated effort that eventually turned the war against Germany.

But the remaining members of the “Greatest Generation,” especially those who fought in World War II, may recall the moment in more visceral, less sweeping, ways: words spoken to a dying friend, a mother’s care package full of sweets and shoe polish, the heavy smell of blood and bodies, shrapnel piercing skin.

Seated this many years later at Arlington Park racetrack in Illinois, Dick Duchossois struggles to explain the lingering mix of pride and horror from his service in World War II.

“Most people don’t understand,” said Duchossois, 88. “D-Day was very pivotal to the entire war, but you lost so many of your friends and the people close to you ”¦ and you remember those things. It scares you to even think about it.”

Read it all.

According to the General Social Survey, 15 percent of U.S. households were mixed-faith in 1988. That number rose to 25 percent by 2006, and the increase shows no signs of slowing. The American Religious Identification Survey of 2001 reported that 27 percent of Jews, 23 percent of Catholics, 39 percent of Buddhists, 18 percent of Baptists, 21 percent of Muslims and 12 percent of Mormons were then married to a spouse with a different religious identification. If you want to see what the future holds, note this: Less than a quarter of the 18- to 23-year-old respondents in the National Study of Youth and Religion think it’s important to marry someone of the same faith.

In some ways, more interfaith marriage is good for civic life. Such unions bring extended families from diverse backgrounds into close contact. There is nothing like marriage between different groups to make society more integrated and more tolerant. As recent research by Harvard professor Robert Putnam has shown, the more Americans get to know people of other faiths, the more they seem to like them.

But the effects on the marriages themselves can be tragic — it is an open secret among academics that tsk-tsking grandmothers may be right. According to calculations based on the American Religious Identification Survey of 2001, people who had been in mixed-religion marriages were three times more likely to be divorced or separated than those who were in same-religion marriages.

Read it all.