CHRISTIANS are meant to engage crisis as opportunity, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, Dr Katharine Jefferts Schori, told its triennial General Convention in California on Tuesday.
In a strong opening address, which emphasised putting essential things first, she warned that underlying all the debates on the needs of the poorest and the inclusion of those who did not have full access to the Church, was “the reality that we do not have the same financial resources to address them that we had three years ago ”” that is another kind of crisis, both local and global.”
The overarching connection in the crises facing the Church had to do with “the great Western heresy ”” that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God”, she warned. “It is caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in a place that only God can occupy, at the centre of existence, as the ground of all being.”
[blockquote] Recent tensions over human sexuality could be calmer if the Anglican Communion understood that bishops were not the sole deciders in the Episcopal Church, where lay people and clergy had the upper hand, observed the Bishop of Northern Zambia, the Rt Revd Albert Chama, on the first day of the meeting.[/blockquote]
The laity made me do it! You know that has a nice ring to it.
Found the cure for the “Mrs. Schori” blues: playing “There is no other Name,” by Robin Mark, over and over and over again on iTunes.
“CHRISTIANS are meant to engage crisis as opportunity, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, Dr Katharine Jefferts Schori, told its triennial General Convention in California on Tuesday.”
Now, where have I heard that phrase recently? Oh yes, Rahm Emanuel!
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If there were any, any chance of the slightest movement towards ‘reconciliation’ this statement by Schori has coldly quenched it.
TEC is now and formally a non-Christian church, not simply a progressive or liberal church. What are those Christians who remain in TEC to do faced with this stark heretical rejection of everything the Scriptures tell us? It will be an awful dilemma for them to wake up and find themselves in a truly unitarian church.
But it is OK to put me and my words in place of the Word of God.