Delaware’s first civil union was blessed at Trinity Episcopal Church in Wilmington. Some readers may recognize the Rev. Patricia Downing in the photograph accompanying this
When it comes to religious faith, Latinos seek symbols, religious language, expressions of popular piety, basic doctrines, biblical teachings and a practical understanding of their relationship with God. They want to understand church as a community they can belong to, not just as an “institution.”
We will understand with deeper urgency that if we don’t attract more people to the Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Church will wither and die. Or maybe we will just occupy ourselves in arguments. Because we are, at the moment, a church of more hat than cattle, and we didn’t get that way by accident.
There’s no question the worldview of most younger Christians already differs from previous generations regarding social justice, cultural engagement and politics. The next issue of probable divergence? The conflict in Israel and Palestine.
So if you were a rector, or the leader of an Episcopal congregation, this is the kind of story you’d want written about you and your church. It appeared in the Newark Star Ledger. Of course, you need to have a ministry that justifies the story.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s role in accepting a former Catholic monk who had sexually abused children into the Episcopal Church was far and away the most closely followed news story on Episcopal Cafe in 2011.
The Very Rev. Thomas Ferguson, Dean of Bexley Hall Seminary does a nice job of gently expressing concern and dampening some of the hype surrounding the “ordinariate” that the Roman Catholic Church has created to welcome disaffected Anglicans.
Once we think we fully understand a definition, we fill the air with the aerosol mist of a spray can chock full of of the delusion of control.
That day I preached that we were celebrating the name of Jesus, Yeshua, an ordinary enough Jewish name in First Century occupied Israel, but a name that carried an astonishing promise, “God saves.” “Saves from what?” I asked with probably too evident feeling.
After this there was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a