CHURCH GROUPS AGAINST ANGLICAN COVENANT

From Ekklesia:

Two major Church of England groups, Inclusive Church and Modern Church, have joined together to campaign against the proposed Anglican Covenant.

In November 2010 the Church of England’s General Synod will be asked to approve the Covenant, which has emerged from attempts by the Archbishop of Canterbury and others to resolve the wrangling in the Anglican Communion over sexuality, authority and related issues - and from the lobbying of conservative hardliners, say critics.

The Covenant was first proposed by the Windsor Report in 2004 to put pressure on the North American churches, after a diocese in the USA had elected an openly gay bishop and a diocese in Canada had approved a same-sex blessing service.

"Many Synod members do not realise it, but it could be the biggest change to the Church since the Reformation," say Inclusive Church and Modern Church (formerly the Modern Churchpersons Union).

The groups charge that the Church of England, if it signs, will become subordinate to a bureaucratic structure and will thereby become more centralised, dogmatic, backward-facing, inward looking and clerically dominated.

Here's the pdf link to text of the ad in the ChurchTimes.

How anyone expects that the Anglican Draft Covenant, or as someone in the comments at Thinking Anglicans called it, the Daft Covenant, will serve to bring the members of the Anglican Communion together is beyond me. The ratification of the Covenant will enable any province to accuse another of breaking the terms of the Covenant. The accusations will need to be addressed by whatever powers are assigned to the task, and it seems to me that the result will be endless wrangling about whether a province is assigned a place in first tier membership, second tier membership, or banished from the Communion altogether.

Modern Church provides excellent background information on the proposed Covenant here.

UPDATE: Credit where credit due. It seems that Tobias Haller coined the phrase "Daft Anglican Covenant" in the comments to this post at Thinking Anglicans from 2007:

Perhaps what is really needed is a Daft Anglican Covenant. ;-)

Posted by: Tobias Haller on Friday, 30 November 2007 at 8:55pm GMT

I should have known Tobias was the clever (or guilty?) author. How has so apt a phrase remained hidden for years? No matter. I shall do my best to make it famous.

UPDATE 2 CORRECTION: Tobias Haller is not the clever (guilty?) party.

At Ship of Fools:

Maleveque said: Posted 18 June, 2007 17:48
I really, really don't want a covenant. Covenant churches prescribe particular belief in a way that I find oppressive. If it happens, I don't know that I'll stay - and I am such a die-hard Episcopalian that I don't know where I'd go.
Anne L.
ps - am I the only one whose aged eyes read "Daft Anglican Covenant"?

Thanks to John Chilton and Ann Fontaine for the correction.

I may have the attribution right now, unless I receive a reference to an earlier use of the phrase.

UPDATE 3: As of this moment, Tobias Haller gets credit for the first publication of The Daft Anglican Covenant.

Further updates may follow.

MALCOLM+ ON THE COVENANT - A FABLE

Malcolm+ at Simple Massing Priest shares an Aesop fable with us, which works well as we consider the Anglican Daft Covenant.

Count me amongst the resisting frogs. I'm just saying.

CLINT SAYS HE'S SORRY AND WILL RESIGN

From Pink News:

The US school board official who wrote on his Facebook page that “queers” and “fags” should kill themselves says he will resign.

Clint McCance, who is the vice-president of the Midland school district in Arkansas , said last night he was sorry for his “hurtful” remarks.

Speaking to the openly gay journalist Anderson Cooper on his 360 CNN programme, he said: “My posts I made that were very hurtful, very ignorant in nature. Looking back on it right now and getting to, you know, scrutinise my own self and what I did. It’s horrible. And what I wrote was horrible.”

Yes, your comments were despicable, Clint. The Midland School Board is well rid of you. Perhaps if your example doesn't teach a few other bigots to rethink their hateful attitudes, it will serve to suggest that they should keep their hateful opinions private, so that the rest of us, especially the most vulnerable amongst us, won't be plagued by them.

Thanks to Cathy for the link.

JESUS AND MO AND MORE

Click on the picture for the larger view.

From Jesus and Mo.

Quite often, I post "Jesus and Mo" comic strips, not simply because I think they're funny, but because the comics make me think about my faith and my church from a different perspective.

Today, John Chilton at The Lead links to the reports of a recent study by Empty Tomb Inc, which shows that charitable giving to religious organizations, such as the Salvation Army and World Vision, has increased, even as giving to Protestant churches has fallen. Why?

From Grand Rapids Press:

A new book, “The State of Church Giving,” says congregations have waning influence among charitable causes because their focus now seems to be on institutional maintenance rather than spreading the gospel and healing the world.

Ronsvalle called the findings “unintended side effects of the ‘seeker’ mentality” that creates a consumer mindset within U.S. churches, one that says “‘We’re here to serve you,’ not ‘We’re here to transform you into somebody who serves others.’”

While church spending on operations has fallen 15 percent since 1968, the amount spent on benevolence has dropped 47 percent.

Lots of food for thought here. The costs of health care and energy hit congregational budgets particularly hard, and I'm not pointing a finger in this post. I don't have solutions to offer, either, but I foresee great changes approaching in how we do church, and we'd do well to be prepared for the changes, rather than be blindsided by them. However, I think we've seen enough already, and if we are blindsided, then the fault is ours because we look away from the reality.

AUSTIN AND HIS EPISCOPUMPKIN

Austin Hays carved the pumpkin. He is a member of The Episcopal Church of St. Simon & St. Jude in Irmo, South Carolina, which has had a pumpkin patch for 17 years.

H/T to John Chilton at The Lead.

FRIDAY JOKE

A Doctor was addressing a large audience in Tampa.

'The material we put into our stomachs is enough to have killed most of us sitting here, years ago. Red meat is awful. Soft drinks corrode your stomach lining. Chinese food is loaded with MSG. High fat diets can be disastrous, and none of us realizes the long-term harm caused by the germs in our drinking water. However, there is one thing that is the most dangerous of all and we all have eaten, or will eat it. Can anyone here tell me what food it is that causes the most grief and suffering for years after eating it?'

After several seconds of quiet, a 75-year-old man in the front row raised his hand, and softly said, 'Wedding Cake.'

Don't blame me. Blame Doug.

TIMELY WITCH

Have a happy

~doug~

SIGN THE PETITION TO NBC ABOUT KETK

From Courage Campaign:

Demand that NBC Universal take action to end its affiliation with KETK now
KETK-NBC news anchors ask: “Will the acceptance of homosexuality in this society be the downfall of America?”

Yes, that was a question actually posed to viewers by a Texas-based NBC affiliate TV station, both on the air and online. But it didn’t end there. The station then went on to broadcast responses from viewers -- some of the most vitriolic attacks on LGBT people that you will ever ear on a network affiliate.

The video is shocking. But the lack of response from NBC Universal -- KETK's parent network -- is even more shocking. That's why we need you to watch the video now and then sign our petition to NBC Universal executives Jeff Zucker and Steve Burke asking them to end NBC's affiliate relationship with KETK immediately:

We are shocked by the segment aired on KETK-NBC in Texas in which the anchors asked viewers if the acceptance of gays would lead to the "downfall of America." As President of NBC Universal, we demand that you take action now to end your affiliate relationship with KETK immediately.

Please add your name now to this urgent petition to NBC Universal executives Jeff Zucker and Steve Burke:

I should post the video, but it's ugly, and I couldn't bring myself to do so. Please go to Courage Campaign and watch over there and sign the petition.

AND EVEN MORE COLLECTOR BOOKS

 

This Marcy? I hope not. She's frightening. What about the children?

 

Gilbert is sweet. I don't know about the baseball cap. Gilbert may need advice from some of his friends with better fashion sense.

 

I'm beginning to wonder if there are any other kind.

 

What IS it? I don't have the answer.

 

And now for something completely different.

Note: I will never forgive MadPriest for introducing me to Little Marcy.

HOW TO MOUNT A COUP

In his post titled "How to mount a successful coup in Anglicanism" at Not the Same Stream Paul Bagshaw reminds us that there have always been theological conflicts in the church. I offer 1 Corinthians 1:10-17 as an example of an early controversy amongst Christians:

Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. What I mean is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’, or ‘I belong to Apollos’, or ‘I belong to Cephas’, or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.

We Christians quarreled amongst ourselves from earliest days. We quarreled throughout our history over two thousand years. In the midst of our present Anglican controversies, Paul reminds us that it was ever thus.

Along with being ever-present, church conflicts are complicated. In five sections and a conclusion, Paul explores both the distinctive and the common characteristics of church conflicts as related to the present controversy in the Anglican Communion.

Since Paul's words on the second characteristic of staging a coup struck me with force, I quote them here.

Second, select your focal point
Because of this complexity, the occasion of conflict is often a relatively small matter, perhaps the actions or teaching of a particular individual. Conflicts take the form of synecdoche in which small matters encapsulate and represent much greater underlying differences.

Homosexuality is a synecdoche for the big things in conflict. It was deliberately chosen (at least in the UK) as a battle ground because it united conservatives, and especially evangelical conservatives, who had been deeply divided over the ordination of women. It is an emblematic issue of the US's culture wars.

I'm not just now learning of the complexity of conflicts and that what we see on the surface does not tell the whole story, but I had an "Ah ha!" moment when I read Paul's words. The strands came together in my mind in relation to the Anglican conflicts as they had not previously, and I said, "Oh yes!".

Now please read the post in its entirety.