A pastor of a large and dynamic congregation recently told me that church membership was for his congregation a “largely outdated concept.” The church, he suggested, had become a more fluid place, where lifelong commitment to a specific body of believers was not central. He was convinced that the church could be a loving, vibrant, whole community without an emphasis on membership.
Canon Gideon has turned personal suffering into a religious message of hope and courage and has matched it with constructive action that has provided inspiration and help to so many who have fallen victim to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
The ad states: “Suppose you spent $1 million every single day starting from the day Jesus was born — and kept spending through today. A million dollars a day for more than 2,000 years. You would still have spent less money than Congress just did.” To which the response can only be,: And your point is?
Bishop Suheil S. Dawani, the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, met with members of Congress earlier this week. The members are traveling in Israel and will
With the downturn in the economy people are struggling to learn how to manage their finances in a new and difficult setting. A somewhat surprising turn of events has significant numbers turning to their local churches to find support and advice.
We have heard from a pair of well-placed and unrelated sources that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, may be coming to the General Convention
Representative of the Anglican Communion churches in the Americas will be gathering next week to share with each other what they are doing in mission in this hemisphere and to see how they might most effectively cooperate with each other.
Members of Fred Phelps’ church, Westboro Baptist Church, were barred from traveling to Great Britain yesterday effectively blocking their plans to protest at British school production of the Laramie Project.
As the crises intensify, those who have will be tempted to hold on to what they have, become less generous and ignore even more the realities of the weak and vulnerable. So we pray that you do not lead them into that temptation but deliver them from their selfish tendencies and endow them with changed attitudes and new lenses through which to view the world.
The nation’s largest Lutheran denomination will consider allowing individual congregations to choose whether to allow gays and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as clergy, an attempt to avoid the sort of infighting that has threatened to tear other churches apart.