On Sunday, May 13, Yates preached through Romans 8 during The Falls Church congregation’s last service, urging his congregation to be patient during the coming period of inconvenience. “Some of you will find this inconvenience annoying, upsetting, and you just don’t want to mess with it,” Yates told the congregation. “We have to ask the question, ‘Will we be committed to Christ and committed to our church?'” He read Thomas Paine’s famous passage on “sunshine patriots” written during the Revolutionary War. “I don’t want to be a sunshine Christian,” Yates said. “Will you commit yourself now to no complaining? No grumbling?”‰…”‰If we’re going to navigate truly big challenges that we may face one day, let’s face this one without complaint.”

At the service, five babies and one father were baptized. The congregation sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” belting the line, “Let goods and kindred go”‰…” One of the clergy prayed for the Episcopal congregation, that it care for “this consecrated place” and preach the gospel. Grown men cried during the last song, “In Christ Alone,” as everyone lifted their arms in the air.

Jim Long, who has attended The Falls Church since 1988, stacked chairs at the end of the service and shrugged when I asked whether he was sad about leaving. One difference he saw was that in these new rotating meeting places, he would have more chairs to set up for the service, and then take down at the end of the service. “Life will go on, we’ll just be in a different building,” he assessed.

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The recession ended and the recovery began in June, 2009. It’s an ugly third birthday for the labor market

More than 7 million U.S. jobs disappeared during the recession. Fewer than 3 million have been added in the recovery. And the rate of job growth has been falling lately; in May, the economy added just 69,000 jobs. That’s not even enough to keep up with population growth.

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The euro faces ‘disintegration’ unless European governments do much more to work together, the European Commission has warned.

Olli Rehn, the economics commissioner, gave the warning as Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, criticised national leaders for a “lack of action” to help the single currency out of its crisis.

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The United States economy gained a net 69,000 jobs in May, the Labor Department said Friday, a dismal showing that reflected mounting evidence of a global slowdown. The unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent in April, but largely because more people began looking for work.

The report, which came in at less than half what analysts had expected and was the lowest number of net jobs created in a year, was potentially devastating for President Obama as he faces reelection and creates increased pressure on the Federal Reserve to expand its stimulus campaign.

As the third disappointing performance by the job market in three months, for many it served as confirmation that the economic recovery has once again lost momentum.

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Speaking to the BBC’s Newsnight, Dr Rowan Williams raised concerns about the gap between rich and poor and the lack of cultural cohesion in the UK….

“There have been moments in the last decade and more when, perhaps, we might have been able to take a different line,” he said.

He was referring to the way the British think and feel as a society and told Newsnight’s Stephen Smith that British society had “put up the shutters” and retreated into “corporate paranoia” in the wake of terrorist threats.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury is urging the people of Britain to pop into a church or cathedral to say thanks for the Queen and her Diamond Jubilee.

Speaking on Radio 2’s Pause For Thought… Dr Rowan Williams said he hoped this weekend’s Jubilee celebrations would give people the “chance to get in touch with the background of their lives, the big context, the things that make this the sort of world it is and give us the sort of values we have”.

Dr Williams, who retires at the end of the year, said: “I hope the Jubilee prompts us to see what we can do to get back in touch with the big background picture. Like the monarchy ”” it’s still there, and it still means something, and dropping into a church or a cathedral is a good way of connecting with it, and perhaps saying thanks ”” for the Queen and the Jubilee and for lots more besides.”

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It seems to me that what her importance has been for most people in this country has been as a sign of stability, a sign of some kind of security. And that wouldn’t have happened had she not been so profoundly committed at every point, so intelligently committed to understanding the society she was in, working with the flow of the changes that have taken place. To have someone who has been a symbol, a sign of stability through all that period is really a rather exceptional gift. Her role in the Commonwealth is not the least important part of that. I think she has reminded us that we in the United Kingdom are part of a worldwide fellowship. That’s not the least of the lessons she has shared with us, and again, the change that she has helped to happen from Empire to Commonwealth while yet retaining that sense of fellowship and family between nations.
Part of the regular rhythm of life as Archbishop is that I see The Queen privately, just one to one, perhaps once or twice a year. I have really valued those meetings because she is always extremely well informed about issues concerning the Church – extremely supportive and full of perception. She’s seen lots of archbishops come and go, she’s seen prime ministers come and go, so she knows something of the pressures of the job. And I’ve always found it really refreshing to be able to talk with her about these questions, to get her perspective – purely personally, I’ve felt very strongly supported there. I’ve felt she’s understood the difficulties when there have been quite trying events and episodes in my own life as Archbishop. She has been unfailingly kind, understanding and supportive, and I value that enormously.

I hadn’t had any contact at all with royalty before coming into this job. I didn’t know what to expect, really. I found in The Queen someone who can be friendly, who can be informal, who can be extremely funny in private (and not everybody appreciates just how funny she can be), who is quite prepared to tease and to be teased, and who, while retaining her dignity always, doesn’t stand on her dignity in a conversation.

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In a letter published in The Times on Monday, the Revd Jean Mayland, a long-time campaigner on women’s ordination, said that, given the second amendment, the Bishops “now leave us no choice but to vote this whole Measure down”.

The committee of WATCH met on Saturday. On Monday, it said in a statement that it was “unanimous in its serious concern” about the second amendment, “and is there­fore con­sulting further about how to proceed as we approach General Synod in July”.

The Group for Rescinding the Act of Synod said on Tuesday that the Bishops had pushed “the Draft Measure beyond an acceptable level of generosity and compromise”.

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Britons are preparing for four days of celebrations to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s 60 years on the throne, highlighting the monarchy’s recovery in popularity since the death of Princess Diana in 1997.

The four-day Diamond Jubilee weekend was launched today when HMS Diamond, a Royal Navy warship, gave a 21-gun salute as it arrived at Portsmouth Harbour. The celebrations get under way tomorrow when the queen, 86, attends the Derby, the highlight of the flat horse-racing season. It will culminate on June 5 with a day of pageantry including a service of thanksgiving at St. Paul’s Cathedral in central London, when Britons will enjoy an extra public holiday.

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Do not miss this, especially the obstacles she herself has had to overcome in her own life.

Demand remains for people with complex skills, like software engineering or the ability to read X-rays. There is also demand for people to take jobs that require less skill, like cleaning and waiting tables. It’s the jobs in the middle that are being squeezed ”“ sales, administration, assembly positions, for example.

Economists have a term for this phenomenon: labor polarization.

“What’s happening is we’re getting jobs at both ends of the spectrum,” says Howard Rosen, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

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In the 1990s, the term “digital divide” emerged to describe technology’s haves and have-nots. It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.

Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide. But they have created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government now wants to fix.

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.

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Almighty and everlasting God, who didst find thy martyr Justin wandering from teacher to teacher, seeking the true God, and didst reveal to him the sublime wisdom of thine eternal Word: Grant that all who seek thee, or a deeper knowledge of thee, may find and be found by thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

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.

But I trust in thee, O LORD, I say, “Thou art my God.” My times are in thy hand….

Psalm 31:14,15a

At the request of the 2010 General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada, and with the agreement of the United Church’s Theology and Inter-Church Inter-Faith Committee, this latest series of talks is focusing on “the doctrinal identities of the two churches and the implications of this for the lives of the churches””including understandings of sacraments and orders of ministry.”

The current phase builds on six years of formal conversations, which concluded in 2009. The results of these discussions were reported in Drawing from the Same Well: The St. Brigid Report.

“The first meeting of this new round was very encouraging,” says Myers. “Both churches have appointed outstanding individuals who are both steeped in their own church’s tradition and also open to real dialogue. During that first gathering, I think we were reminded that despite our differences, there is still so much more that we have in common as churches and as followers of Christ, and that the things that unite us are far greater in number and importance than those things that divide us.”

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Andrew Atagotaaluk will retire as bishop of the diocese of the Arctic at the end of the year, after holding the post for 10 years. Atagotaaluk was the first Inuk to serve as bishop of the diocese.

The election will take place as part of the Arctic diocese’s synod in Iqaluit. The Anglican diocese of the Arctic includes N.W.T., Nunavut and Nunavik.

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The Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr Philip Freier, has finished a whirlwind four-day trip to central Victoria.

The Archbishop yesterday met clergy and various leaders in Bendigo.

“Part of my role as the Archbishop of Melbourne is to have a relationship with the other Anglican diocese in Victoria,” he said.

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