FOODBANKS and charities have replaced social security and Universal Credit as the last line of defence in the cost-of-living crisis, but the faith and voluntary sectors are themselves in a precarious state, says an 89-page report from the religion-and- society think tank Theos, published on Monday.

In a foreword to the report, A Torn Safety Net: How the cost of living crisis threatens its own last line of defence, the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams write that compassion is not running out, but that money is, to the extent that some who have donated to foodbanks are now themselves relying on them.

They warn: “The shocking reality is that this winter, we are likely to see charities being forced to stop feeding the hungry so they can help the starving, cut back on support to the poorly housed so they can focus on the fast rising numbers of homeless, and give up on helping the down-at-heel because their priority has to be the destitute.”

The report was written by Hannah Rich and informed by a series of 48 interviews, conducted between January and August this year, in Cornwall, Glasgow, Wolverhampton, and the London Borough of Newham. It speaks of a real danger that churches and other faith groups will close “because they cannot afford to keep the lights on or find enough volunteers to sustain their social action”.

Read it all.

Charities may have to stop helping hungry and homeless, as they are struggling themselves, @Theosthinktank reports https://t.co/zTqYRwdLPp

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) November 7, 2022

It was a great privilege to journey from Oxford to Yorkshire last Friday (21 October) to witness the consecration of two of our distinguished Wycliffe Hall alumni as new Anglican bishops. There was a buzz of excitement in the air at the inauguration of their new ministries, and exhilaration at the gospel bonds which draw together the global Anglican family. In a variation to the usual liturgy, the new bishops were doffed on the head with a Bible and exhorted, “Remember that you are always under the Word of God.” We weren’t gathered, however, in the Gothic glories of York Minster, but in a converted warehouse on an industrial estate in Hull, lent for the occasion by a local Vineyard church. This was not the Church of England, but a much younger ministry, the Anglican Network in Europe.

Global leaders in the Anglican Communion, associated with Gafcon, gave the consecration their full backing. Archbishop Laurent Mbanda (primate of Rwanda) preached the consecration sermon, on the Great Commission in Matthew 28, while Archbishop Henry Ndukuba (primate of Nigeria) presided at Holy Communion. They both declined invitations to the Lambeth Conference in summer 2022, but believed this event sufficiently important to make the long trek to Hull. There were also video greetings from Archbishop Stephen Kaziimba (primate of Uganda), Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit (primate of Kenya), and Archbishop James Wong (primate of the Indian Ocean), among others. The chief consecrator was Archbishop Foley Beach of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), chair of the Gafcon primates’ council. Other bishops joining the consecration were Jay Behan (New Zealand), Julian Dobbs (USA), Charlie Masters (Canada), and Owen Nwokolo (Nigeria). These are impressive Anglican leaders, people of wisdom and stature. The platform was a wonderful global array.

The Gafcon movement brings together a multiplicity of Anglican theologies, from high church catholics to low church evangelicals. On this occasion, Archbishop Beach agreed to tone down the usual ritualistic frills, for the sake of evangelical sensibilities. There were no large pectoral crosses, or episcopal rings, and not a mitre in sight. The liturgy was taken not from ACNA’s 2019 prayer book but from Church Society’s 1994 English prayer book, though Beach did smuggle in one sacerdotal ritual during the Veni Creator Spiritus, by anointing the new bishops’ hands with oil – likely to give English evangelicals palpitations, and not in the published liturgy! Clergy in the congregation were asked to wear their dog collars, which was visually impressive, though it was strange to see Church of England evangelicals in collars that they would never normally wear on Sunday. Gafcon celebrations often embrace this incongruous mix of theological cultures from different sides of the globe, jostling together in kaleidoscopic union.

Read it all.

Post Edited: New Anglican Bishops for England and Europe https://t.co/Od19p0YDsm

— Dr Ian Paul (@Psephizo) November 7, 2022

Gordon Fee once told his students on the first day of a New Testament class at Wheaton College that they would—someday—come across a headline saying “Gordon Fee Is Dead.”

Then, instead of handing out the syllabus like a normal professor, he led the class in Charles Wesley’s hymn, “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

Fee, a widely influential New Testament teacher who believed that reading the Bible, teaching the Bible, and interpreting the Bible should bring people into an encounter with a living God, described himself as a “scholar on fire.” He died on Tuesday at the age of 88—although, as those who encountered him in the classroom or in his many books know, that’s not how he would have described it.

Fee co-wrote How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth with Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary colleague Douglas Stuart in the early 1980s. The book is now in its fourth edition and has sold around 1 million copies, becoming for many the standard text on the best way to approach Scripture. Fee also wrote a widely used handbook on biblical interpretation, several well-regarded commentaries on New Testament epistles, and groundbreaking academic research on the place of the Holy Spirit in the life and work of the Apostle Paul.

Read it all.

Died: Gordon Fee, Who Taught Evangelicals to Read the Bible ‘For All Its Worth’ https://t.co/w5PDj9OAQm via @CTmagazine

— Andrea Palpant Dilley (@AndreaPalpant) October 27, 2022

“Our imaginations are involved in every area of our lives, in everything we do or say or are. It is no wonder that God is so intent upon recapturing them. Therefore, we must seek to understand the imagination biblically, that is, Christ-centeredly.

The imagination is the bridge between the heart and the mind, integrating both, allowing us to think/understand with our hearts and feel/emote with our minds. It is a vehicle for truth. Through the use of images, metaphors, stories and paradoxes that demand our attention, it calls for our interaction. The imagination is a powerful means for communicating truths about God, and so God shows an awesome regard for the imagination in His word.

Because we are called to creativity, a working, gut-level understanding of the imagination is vital. It can be our greatest strength or our greatest weakness. To harness the imagination, or better yet, to bring it under submission to Christ is something about which we don’t talk or pray or do enough.”

–Michael Card Scribbling in the Sand: Christ and Creativity (Downer’s Grove, Ill., InterVarsity Press, 2022), quoted by yours truly in a sermon yesterday

O Lord our God, who dost call whom thou willest and send them whither thou choosest: We thank thee for sending thy servant Willibrord to be an apostle to the Low Countries, to turn them from the worship of idols to serve thee, the living God; and we entreat thee to preserve us from the temptation to exchange the perfect freedom of thy service for servitude to false gods and to idols of our own devising; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Grant us, O Lord, the faith that rests not on signs and wonders but on thy love and faithfulness; that obedient to thy word and trusting in thy promises, we may know thy peace and healing power, both in our hearts and in our homes; for the honour of thy holy name.

He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

When one of those who sat at table with him heard this, he said to him, “Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God!” But he said to him, “A man once gave a great banquet, and invited many; and at the time for the banquet he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come; for all is now ready.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it; I pray you, have me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to examine them; I pray you, have me excused.’ And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’ So the servant came and reported this to his master. Then the householder in anger said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and maimed and blind and lame.’ And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges, and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste my banquet.’”

–Luke 14:12-24