The Parochial Report Membership and Attendance Totals for 2009 have been posted to the Episcopal Church website, available here: http://generalconvention.org/gc/parochial_reports

The report was posted by the Rev. Canon Dr. Gregory Straub, Secretary of Executive Council, in accordance to Canon I.6.1 (listed below)

The figures are based on the information submitted by congregations and dioceses through the annual Parochial Report. The report was prepared by C. Kirk Hadaway, Ph.D., Officer for Congregational Research.

Reflective of members in both domestic and foreign dioceses, the report shows 2,175,616 baptized members of The Episcopal Church for 2009, with an Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) of 724,789.

In an accompanying report of Episcopal Domestic Fast Facts 2009 (not inclusive of any of the non-United States-based dioceses), the largest ASA was posted as the Cathedral of St Peter & St Paul in Washington DC (Washington National Cathedral) with 1667. The largest active membership was noted as St. Martin’s, Houston TX (Diocese of Texas) with 8,311 members.
Canon 6:

CANON 6: Of the Mode of Securing an Accurate View of the State of This Church

Sec. 1. A report of every Parish and other Congregation of this Church shall be prepared annually for the year ending December 31 preceding, in the form authorized by the Executive Council and approved by the Committee on the State of the Church, and shall be filed not later than March 1 with the Bishop of the Diocese, or, where there is no Bishop, with the ecclesiastical authority of the Diocese. The Bishop or the ecclesiastical authority, as the case may be, shall keep a copy and submit the report to the Executive Council not later than May 1. In every Parish and other Congregation the preparation and filing of this report shall be the joint duty of the Rector or Member of the Clergy in charge thereof and the lay leadership; and before the filing thereof the report shall be approved by the Vestry or bishop’s committee or mission council. This report shall include the following information:

(1) the number of baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and burials during the year; the total number of baptized members, the total number of communicants in good standing, and the total number of communicants in good standing under 16 years of age.

(2) a summary of all the receipts and expenditures, from whatever source derived and for whatever purpose used.

(3) such other relevant information as is needed to secure accurate view of the state of this Church, as required by the approved form.

The Episcopal Church welcomes all who worship Jesus Christ in 109 dioceses and three regional areas in 16 nations. The Episcopal Church is a member province of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Check them out carefully.

In Israel, where modernity coexists uneasily with tradition, hand-wringing about the country’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish minority is a national pastime. Cloistered in poor towns and neighborhoods, exempted from conscription into the military and surviving largely off government handouts, the black-hatted ultra-Orthodox, known as Haredim, have long vexed more secular Israelis. Now, in the wake of an Israeli Supreme Court decision, this perennial tension has escalated to new heights.

The immediate issue is a decades-old state policy of providing stipends to students who attend religious schools, called yeshivas. In June, the court declared those stipends illegal, citing discrimination against secular university students who don’t qualify for such assistance. Last month, however, ultra-Orthodox lawmakers introduced a bill to reinstate the stipend. “The state sees a great importance in encouraging Torah study,” says their proposal.

Opposition to the bill is fierce, as many Israelis believe that decades of welfare and draft exemptions have created a cycle of poverty and dependence among Haredim. “If they want to live in a ghetto, fine, but why should the state pay for it?” Yossi Sarid, a former education minister, told the Associated Press. The controversy has triggered street protests across Israel, and threatens to topple the coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Perhaps if ordinary people were publicly Catholic or Christian in their daily lives and online, that would dispel some of the stereotypes and make the civic discourse on faith more fruitful, more authentic, more varied or nuanced. I spoke to one Catholic woman who told me she viewed her Facebook profile as an “apostolate.” She shares musings about her love of the church right alongside her love of kickboxing. The transition, for her, was seamless. She is not aggressive in her posts, but it’s clear that she is deeply committed to her local parish.

If you find my page on Facebook, it will not take you long to discover that I am Catholic, but I do sympathize with friends who are reluctant to make such electronic declarations of faith. Surely it is not ideal to “discuss” religion or politics in the decidedly anti-Socratic setting that is Facebook. Still, when religion is one of the few things that remain private in our carefully constructed, very public, online universe, then religious voices at the extremes will profile us all.

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Leaders of the world’s biggest economies agreed on Friday to curb “persistently large imbalances” in saving and spending but deferred until next year tough decisions on how to identify and fix them.

The agreement, the culmination of a two-day summit meeting of leaders of the Group of 20 industrialized and emerging powers, fell short of initial American demands for numerical targets on trade surpluses and deficits. But it reflected a consensus that longstanding economic patterns ”” in particular, the United States consuming too much, and China too little ”” were no longer sustainable.

President Obama called the agreement significant, even if not as dramatic or far-reaching as the one that emerged from the first G-20 leaders’ meeting in 2008, when nations came together quickly amid fears of a global meltdown.

“Instead of hitting home runs, sometimes we’re going to hit singles,” Mr. Obama said. “But they’re really important singles.”

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The Archbishop of Canterbury has proposed suspending the Primates Meeting””the fourth ”˜instrument of unity’ in the Anglican Communion””in favour of holding multiple small group gatherings of like minded archbishops.

In a letter to the primates dated Oct 7, Dr. Rowan Williams suggested that given the “number of difficult conversations” and the threat of a boycott of its meetings, a regime of separate but equal facilitated small groups sessions might better serve the primates’ “diverse” perspectives and forestall the substantial “damage” to the communion a full-fledged boycott would entail.

Dr. Williams also called for a reform of the structure of the meetings, suggesting that an elected standing committee be created and the powers and responsibility of the meeting of the communion’s 38 archbishops, presiding bishops and moderators be delineated.

Lambeth Palace did not respond to a request for clarification about the Oct 7 letter, while a spokesman for the Anglican Consultative Council said it could not address the question of a potential boycott as “the content of correspondence between the Primates and the Archbishop of Canterbury is private.”

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After months of speculation over their future, two Provincial Episcopal Visitors (PEVs) ”” the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Revd Andrew Burnham, and the Bishop of Rich­borough, the Rt Revd Keith Newton ”” announced this week that they are resigning to take up the Pope’s offer of joining the Ordinariate.

They will be accompanied by the Bishop of Fulham, the Rt Revd John Broadhurst, who had announced his intention to enter the Ordinariate at Forward in Faith’s National As­sembly last month… and two retired bishops, the Rt Revd Edwin Barnes, a former Bishop of Richborough, and the Rt Revd David Silk, a former Bishop of Ballarat in Australia, now an hon­orary assistant bishop in the diocese of Exeter.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was “with regret” that he had accepted the two PEVs’, or flying bishops’, resignations. He wished them well in their next stage of ministry, and thanked them for their service in the Church of England. He confirmed that he would “set in train the process for filling the vacant sees” of both flying bishops.

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To return to the thesis, [environmental concern].. is just one example of where faith communities can play a critically important role in our democracy. It is not enough to lay out a case in cold fact. It requires, as Martin Luther King Jr. understood, an appeal to the heart and soul of the individual. This is the sphere in which faith moves.

Faith can be the impetus which moves grand, national debates and changes minds. But this cannot happen unless we allow for that voice in our public realm. The strict separation of church and state as codified in the U.S. constitution was never intended to deny the voice of faith in public, but to prevent potentates like George III from dictating how and in what manner one should worship. In Canada, that formal separation has never existed. Rather, we seek to protect all forms of worship in the framework of a culture of pluralism.

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Anglican Bishop of Egbu Diocese, near Owerri, Prof. Emmanuel Iheagwam, has expressed worry over the high rate of insecurity in the South East particularly the spate of kidnapping and violence, describing it as an embarrassment to Ndigbo.

Addressing [the] Anglican faithful, most of them priests, the laity, and the women’s guide at the church third session of the fifth Synod at the Umualum, Nekede, near Owerri on Monday, Iheagwam lamented that the perpetrators of the crime have no limits as they now abduct priests in sacred/hallowed institutions like in church, doctors in their theatres and so on.

Though, he expressed happiness that the crime has reduced drastically recently in the zone, the bishop warned some of the fleeing criminals to repent and confess their sins and turn to God before God’s judgment befalls them.

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The head of the World Council of Churches has affirmed its ties with the U.S. National Council of Churches, praising churches in the United States for “bringing change and reformation in this sinful world”.

“The ‘old world’ of Europe brought the teaching of Martin Luther; you had the Baptist leader and visionary dreamer of a new future, Martin Luther King,” WCC general secretary the Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit said on 11 November at the NCC’s centennial ecumenical gathering in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The WCC leader noted that the rest of the world has often criticised U.S. dominance in the 20th century, a period sometimes called the “American century”. But the Norwegian Lutheran cleric said the century would also be noted for the role of the U.S. churches in the development of the international ecumenical movement.

“This needs to be recalled at a time when you and also many others in the world are aware of less beneficial effects of the American century on others in the world,” said Tveit.

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O loving God, who orderest all things by thine unerring wisdom and unbounded love: Grant us in all things to see thy hand; that, following the example and teaching of thy servant Charles Simeon, we may walk with Christ in all simplicity, and serve thee with a quiet and contented mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

O God, whose truth is hidden from the wise and prudent, and revealed to babes: Grant us pure and childlike hearts, that being taught of thy Spirit we may know the things which belong to our peace and to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures. Know this, my beloved brethren. Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God.

–James 1:16-20

Regarding the resignations of Bishops Andrew Burnham, Keith Newton, John Broadhurst, Edwin Barnes, and David Silk – it is with thanksgiving that we recognize their faithful witness and service to Forward in Faith and the Anglican Communion in upholding the historic Catholic faith. We assure them of our gratitude and our prayers that God will bless and guide them in their future ministries. We pray that the Holy Spirit will provide discernment and guidance to our Forward in Faith brothers and sisters during this time of transition.

As our beloved brothers in Christ embark on their new chapter of ministry, Forward in Faith North America will remain an Anglican ministry, committed to upholding the historic, catholic faith of the church among its members and its affiliated parishes and jurisdictions.

Since its split from Rome (in a messy row about King Henry VIII’s divorce in 1529) the Anglican church has evolved into a curious hybrid. It tries to be both Catholic and Reformed (Protestant). Its adherents include people who believe every word in the Bible is true, modernists who consider it a collection of inspiring fables, and traditionalists who cherish archaic English.

One exotic bit of that ecclesiological cocktail is shrinking. Five bishops from the Anglo-Catholic strain in the Church of England (dubbed “smells and bells” for its love of incense and ritual) are leaving to join the Ordinariate. This is a new outfit set up by Pope Benedict XVI for Anglicans unable to accept their church’s decision this year to let women be bishops.

The move follows a crisis in the early 1990s over ordaining women priests, which Anglo-Catholics saw as dooming their hope for eventual unity with the (male-only) Roman Catholic priesthood. Around 500 Anglican priests switched to Rome then. Others decided to stay in the Church of England, in a parallel set-up led by “flying bishops”. This lot, concentrated in 363 of the church’s 13,000 parishes, bemoan its unilateral approach to theology and intolerance of minorities.

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Conflicts between the Episcopal Church and many in the Anglican Communion who reject same-sex unions and gay clergy, [Jefferts] Schori said, have eased in the past two years.

The Episcopal Church is even in conversation with more Anglicans around the world than it was a decade ago, she said. “The conflict has been an encouragement and an invitation to deeper dialogue and conversation.”

Whether the larger Anglican Communion eventually will accept the Episcopal Church’s approach isn’t clear.

“It takes a long time for people’s prejudices and people’s justifications for things we think are wrong to be overturned,” she said. “My hope is that eventually people will come to understand human sexuality in a broader context.”

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The Standing Committee of the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee announced a slate of 4 nominees for the diocese’s fourth bishop today, Thursday, November 11, during a joint meeting with the Search/Nominating Committee at the Diocesan House in Knoxville, Tennessee.

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Fashion dominates the world of evangelical Christianity and its therapeutic penumbra. The Crystal Cathedral, that glitzy architectural marvel, has become a 1980s nostalgia item. Now Rick Warren is the anointed leader of America’s “People of Faith” and, for the time being, Orange county crowds are flocking to Saddleback’s dull preaching halls.

But there is nothing new under the sun. Saddleback and the Crystal Cathedral, Willow Creek and all the other evangelical megachurches that have had their time in the sun sell the same product: mind-power through talk-magic, which in secular packaging is just what all the innumerable therapies and self-help programmes on the market promise.

In the US, where school psychologists are almost as common as school nurses, we are obsessed with talk therapies because they are in fact ecumenical and secularised versions of evangelical Christianity, our old time religion. Twelve-step programmes, beginning with Alcoholics Anonymous, appropriated the conversion scenario of revivalism, eliminating references to Jesus in favour of appeals to a generic “higher power”. Later self-help programmes and therapies dispensed with supernatural intermediaries altogether. Learning the right tricks and gimmicks, thinking the right thoughts and acquiring the proper attitudes would directly, by a law of nature, make good things happen for you.

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Of all the absurdities to emerge from the government’s never-ending bailout of the U.S. financial system, here’s a new one that’s hard to top: The government, through Freddie Mac, in effect is now suing itself.

Never let it be said that Bailout Nation doesn’t have a sense of humor. It would be only a slight hyperbole to say this may be the stupidest lawsuit ever.

Here’s what happened. In July the Internal Revenue Service told Freddie Mac, the congressionally chartered housing financier, that it owed $3 billion of back taxes and penalties for the years 1998 through 2005. Rather than pay up, the McLean, Virginia-based company sued the IRS on Oct. 22 in U.S. Tax Court to contest its claims.

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Since June, the 29-year-old [Cherish Cornish] has lived on the fifth floor of a temporary housing facility run by Father Bill’s & MainSpring, a private nonprofit group in Brockton, Mass. Cornish lives in one of five rooms reserved for homeless female veterans. She’s struggling to make a life for herself after the military.

“When I joined the Army, I was barely 20 years old,” Cornish says with a Southern accent, a legacy of years growing up in Texas. “I come out, and I’m 23, and so I just kind of came of age in the military. I wind up on my own again in an apartment. It’s the first time I’ve had to pay rent since I was a teenager. It’s the first time I had to pay a light bill ”” pretty much ever ”” and all these responsibilities and budgeting and stuff that I’d really never had to deal with in the military.”

There are other complications. Cornish suffers from PTSD. It took the VA several years to diagnose her. Cornish believes her trauma stems from her service in Iraq. She was a transmission specialist working at isolated outposts monitoring and intercepting radio communications. Still, she thinks she lucked out, because often she’d just miss getting physically hurt.

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Clayton Kendrick-Holmes, football coach at SUNY Maritime College and a graduate of the Naval Academy and a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve, soon will be deployed to Afghanistan. This is part of his story.

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With wars continuing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number of military veterans grows every Veterans Day. Commentator Forrest Brandt served in an earlier conflict ”” he was with the 1st Infantry Division in Lai Khe, Vietnam, from 1968-69.

Brandt, now a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves and an adjunct professor at Northern Kentucky University, wrote about the day he came home, July 18, 1969.

You need to listen to it all, all the music as well as the narration.

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

—Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae (1872-1918). It is just so moving and powerful you find yourself coming back to it again and again–KSH.

P.S. the circumstances which led to the poem are well worth remembering:

It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915 and to the war in general. McCrea had spent seventeen days treating injured men — Canadians, British, French, and Germans in the Ypres salient. McCrae later wrote: “I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days… Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done.” The next day McCrae witnessed the burial of a good friend, Lieut. Alexis Helmer. Later that day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the field dressing station, McCrea composed the poem. A young NCO, delivering mail, watched him write it. When McCrae finished writing, he took his mail from the soldier and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the Sergeant-major. Cyril Allinson was moved by what he read: “The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.” Colonel McCrae was dissatisfied with the poem, and tossed it away. A fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915. For his contributions as a surgeon, the main street in Wimereaux is named “Rue McCrae”.

There is a fabulous resource for this courtesy of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. There are many themes from which to choose, and various letters to see the text of and listen to. Take a moment a drink at least one in, and, if you have a moment, tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Today, some officers warn that an army of nation-builders would lose its edge at conventional warfare. But in keeping with the founders’ belief that the soldier’s role was to build, not just to destroy, we need our own multipurpose military ”” an Army and Marine Corps with duties that extend far beyond winning tank battles or artillery duels against enemy states, or even fighting at all. And just as in Jefferson’s time, West Point in the 21st century should supply a nation-builder’s education, and we should encourage its efforts to emphasize in its curriculum the study of foreign languages and cultures.

The troops from America’s farming heartlands who are helping Afghans build greenhouses, grow cops and better feed cattle are not losing their identity as warriors ”” they’re following in the footsteps of our earliest soldiers.

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Governor of Nations, our Strength and Shield:
we give you thanks for the devotion and courage
of all those who have offered military service for this country:

For those who have fought for freedom; for those who laid down their lives for others;
for those who have borne suffering of mind or of body;
for those who have brought their best gifts to times of need.

On our behalf they have entered into danger,
endured separation from those they love,
labored long hours, and borne hardship in war and in peacetime.

Lift up by your mighty Presence those who are now at war;
encourage and heal those in hospitals
or mending their wounds at home;
guard those in any need or trouble;
hold safely in your hands all military families;
and bring the returning troops to joyful reunion
and tranquil life at home;

Give to us, your people, grateful hearts
and a united will to honor these men and women
and hold them always in our love and our prayers;
until your world is perfected in peace
through Jesus Christ our Savior.

–The Rev. Jennifer Phillips

I watched the flag pass by one day,
It fluttered in the breeze;
A young Marine saluted it,
And then he stood at ease.

I looked at him in uniform,
So young, so tall, so proud;
With hair cut square and eyes alert,
He’d stand out in any crowd.

I thought… how many men like him
Had fallen through the years?
How many died on foreign soil?
How many mothers’ tears?

How many pilots’ planes shot down
How many died at sea
How many foxholes were soldiers’ graves
No, Freedom is not Free.

I heard the sound of Taps one night,
When everything was still;
I listened to the bugler play,
And felt a sudden chill;

I wondered just how many times
That Taps had meant “Amen”
When a flag had draped a coffin
Of a brother or a friend;

I thought of all the children,
Of the mothers and the wives,
Of fathers, sons and husbands.
With interrupted lives.

I thought about a graveyard
At the bottom of the sea,
Of unmarked graves in Arlington.
No. Freedom is not Free!

“When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say, For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today”

— On many memorials to the dead in war worldwide, as for example that for the British 2nd Division at Kohima, India; there is a debate about its precise origins in terms of who first penned the lines

In a world tormented by tension and the possibilities of conflict, we meet in a quiet commemoration of an historic day of peace. In an age that threatens the survival of freedom, we join together to honor those who made our freedom possible. The resolution of the Congress which first proclaimed Armistice Day, described November 11, 1918, as the end of “the most destructive, sanguinary and far-reaching war in the history of human annals.” That resolution expressed the hope that the First World War would be, in truth, the war to end all wars. It suggested that those men who had died had therefore not given their lives in vain.

It is a tragic fact that these hopes have not been fulfilled, that wars still more destructive and still more sanguinary followed, that man’s capacity to devise new ways of killing his fellow men have far outstripped his capacity to live in peace with his fellow men.Some might say, therefore, that this day has lost its meaning, that the shadow of the new and deadly weapons have robbed this day of its great value, that whatever name we now give this day, whatever flags we fly or prayers we utter, it is too late to honor those who died before, and too soon to promise the living an end to organized death.

But let us not forget that November 11, 1918, signified a beginning, as well as an end. “The purpose of all war,” said Augustine, “is peace.” The First World War produced man’s first great effort in recent times to solve by international cooperation the problems of war. That experiment continues in our present day — still imperfect, still short of its responsibilities, but it does offer a hope that some day nations can live in harmony.

For our part, we shall achieve that peace only with patience and perseverance and courage — the patience and perseverance necessary to work with allies of diverse interests but common goals, the courage necessary over a long period of time to overcome…[a skilled adversary].

Do please take a guess as to who it is, then click and read it all.

On Dec. 23, 1777, Gen. George Washington wrote from Valley Forge to the Continental Congress: “I am now convinced, beyond a doubt that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place in that line, this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.”

Yet the general and his army somehow endured despite continued supply shortfalls, eventually triumphing over what was then regarded as the world’s most awesome military force.

In the nearly 233 years since that fateful day when the creation of our nation hung in the balance on the cold ground of Pennsylvania, America’s military has bravely and effectively taken on many additional challenges, including today’s protracted missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Along the ever-perilous, often-glorious way, our warriors’ enemies, battlegrounds, weapons and objectives have changed. Yet their valiant service has remained an inspiring constant.

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