Lemuel Haynes’s pastoral career spanned forty years. He began his life of Christian service as a founding member and supply pastor to the church in Middle Granville, Massachusetts. He served in Middle Granville for five years, then received ordination from the Association of Ministers in Litchfield County, Connecticut. Haynes completed his ordination in 1785 while serving a church in Torrington, Connecticut. However, despite his evident prowess as a preacher, he was never offered the pastorate of that church due to racial prejudice and resentment among some churches in the area. In 1783 Haynes met and married twenty-year-old Elizabeth Babbit, a young white schoolteacher and a member of the Middle Granville congregation. The couple bore ten chil­dren between 1785 and 1805.

On March 28, 1788 Haynes left the Torrington congregation and accepted a call to pastor the west parish of Rutland, Vermont, where he served the all-white congregation for thirty years—a relationship between pastor and congregation rare in Haynes’s time and in ours both for its length and for its racial dynamic. During his stay in Rutland, the church grew in membership from forty-two congregants to about three hundred and fifty as Haynes modeled pastoral devotedness and fidelity to the people in his charge. He also emerged as a defender of Calvinistic orthodoxy, opposing the encroachment of Arminianism, universalism, and other errors.

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From here (Motion 12 on page 5):

PRIVATE MEMBER’S MOTION
Proposer: Dr Leo Kilroy
Seconder:
Rev Brian O’Rourke
Notwithstanding the diversity of conviction regarding human sexuality, and in order to maintain the unity of the Church of Ireland, the General Synod

A. Acknowledges the injury felt by members of the Church who enter into loving, committed and legally-recognised, same-sex relationships, due to the absence of provision for them to mark that key moment in their lives publicly and prayerfully in Church.
and

B. Respectfully requests the House of Bishops to investigate a means to develop sensitive, local pastoral arrangements for public prayer and thanksgiving with same-sex couples at these key moments in their lives, and to present their ideas to General Synod 2018, with a view to making proposals at General Synod 2019.

The development of any such pastoral arrangements should not infringe Canon 31 and the facilitation of such arrangements would not impair the communion between an individual
bishop or diocese with any other bishop or diocese of the Church of Ireland.

Take those elite-class Wives. Liberals typically assume the 1% consists of striped-pants tycoons off the Monopoly board who reliably vote Republican and want to cram retrograde religious ideas down people’s throats. In fact, as social scientists (Charles Murray in “Coming Apart”) and political analysts (Michael Barone, writing recently for the Capital Research Center) have observed, it’s the Democratic Party that’s the party of the 1%: the tech and finance billionaires, the media and entertainment moguls who cluster in expensive ZIP Codes around metropolitan Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Washington.

Those folks aren’t known for their church-going, and they vote in favor of liberal social and economic causes from abortion and immigration rights to sustainable energy to higher taxes. They contribute heavily to political campaign, and with their upper-middle-class epigones they run the culture, deciding who gets banned on Twitter, which kinds of “diversity” are allowed on campuses, and what television programs we’ll be allowed to see. Today’s overclass Wives typically hold Ivy League degrees, “lean in” to high-status careers, and stand with Planned Parenthood.

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How far does Theresa May resemble Margaret Thatcher? As is pointed out by a new book on political leaders and faith, “both were Oxford-educated, both were/are renowned for their appetite for hard work and both were/are practising Christians.”

But the book, “The Mighty and the Almighty”, produced by Theos, a think-tank, also insists that the religious backgrounds of those two Conservative prime ministers were very different. In fact, “their Christianity divides [them] at least as much as it unites them.”

The Thatcher-May comparison is one of the most interesting features of an edited volume which dissects the religious lives of 24 present or recent heads of government, ranging from the Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan to Ireland’s Mary McAleese.

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The daughters of a long-time member of a displaced local congregation say they are disappointed by the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles’ decision to reject their request to hold their mother’s funeral service at their former church home.

Nancy Knight, who has been a member of St. James the Great Episcopal since 1956, died of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease April 7, her daughter Ellen Knight Gordon said Monday. She was 86.

The family told their pastor, the Rev. Cindy Voorhees, that they wanted to honor Knight’s wishes by holding her service at the church, where she had served as a volunteer for about 60 years. Three weeks after they made that request, the family heard from the diocese through an email: “This is not going to work.”

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Just a day after the English Book of Common Prayer was first used in Sampford Courtenay, Devon, on Whitsunday in 1549, an angry mob appeared at the church door. They demanded that the elderly rector reconsider using the new liturgy. Somewhat sheepishly, one imagines, he decided to don his popish vestments and revert to saying the Latin mass.

That village protest was the first of a series of English uprisings in Norfolk, Oxfordshire and the south-west, which led to perhaps 10,000 deaths as King Edward VI’s regime suppressed dissent. It would be a mistake to think that the English Reformation was mostly peaceful, with beheadings and burnings confined to a small and fervent elite.

The historiography of Tudor England usually focuses on the monarchs’ Reformation: how the state imposed religious change on the nation. Shelves groan with royal histories, but new accounts of how the ordinary English felt, objected to and imbibed it all are much more scarce. On the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation, Peter Marshall has written a fine history of a momentous time as seen from the bottom up, drawing on a wide range of primary sources and his evident scholarship.

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Yesterday we visited St Paul’s Anglican Church in Amman, Jordan. It is an extraordinary place – a congregation made up of Jordanians, a few Egyptians, some Syrians (though many of these have been resettled) and Iraqi refugees.

It was their stories which I found especially moving. The intense suffering of Iraqi Christians does not end when they leave Iraq. As I listened, there was this awful sense of lives torn apart.
People are divided from their children and families and have no idea what will happen. One woman has children in both Germany and the Netherlands, but has been refused entry to both so she doesn’t know when or if they will ever be reunited.

Young men are vulnerable to being recruited to extremist causes because their community and networks have been stripped away.
One man told me he has no hope at all. He said he is caught between Islamic State, the government and NGOs who further discriminate against him because he is a Christian.

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Isolation is of particular concern for children on the autism spectrum, who may have difficulty making friends and are prone to bullying, often leading to mental health issues.

One study indicated that 63 per cent of children on the spectrum had been bullied in their lifetime, with 38 per cent bullied in the past month.

Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organisation behind Sesame Street, states that bullying was a key motivator for the introduction of Julia.

It also claims that nearly every family is affected by autism in some way.

In Australia, it is estimated that one in 100 people (around 230,000) have an autism spectrum disorder, while in the United States, this figure sits at around one in 68 people.

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O Lord Jesus Christ, who didst build thy Church upon the rock, that even the gates of hell might not prevail against it: Have mercy on the churches of this land, and especially upon our own parish church in which we serve. Make the worship of thy people acceptable in thy sight; sweeten our fellowship with brotherly love; and unite us in a continuous, bold and effective witness to our parish, for the spread of thy kingdom and the glory of thy name (slightly edited).

A John R W Stott #Prayer 4 the day 'Have mercy on the churches of this land, +especially upon our own parish church' https://t.co/RMnzbth73e pic.twitter.com/FQ6tY8EGAQ

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) May 3, 2017

Do not forsake me, O LORD! O my God, be not far from me! Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salvation!

–Psalm 38:21-22