Food banks are an important hunger ministry, but according to a story in the New York Times, they are facing food shortages caused by shifts in supply and demand, and the way food markets handle their surpluses are wreaking havoc on their ability to feed the hungry. The market forces creating the shortages are being wrought by rising energy prices and housing costs.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has released a statement on the predicament of Gillian Gibbons, the schoolteacher who allowed a class of children in Khartoum to name a Teddy Bear Mohammed, only to face prosecution and conviction for doing so.
Identity. Mission. Organization. These are the three things that Episcopal News Service is reporting are being addressed in an interim report issued by the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church. The report addresses concerns about the decline in attendance and participation in the church, a trend that is affecting all the mainline denominations in one form or another.
This is the fourth year that the Episcopal Diocese of Washington has offered its online Advent Calendar. Each day starting tomorrow, a new link becomes available, each featuring a daily meditation, giving opportunity or pieces from the National Cathedral’s crèche exhibit. This year, however, there’s a new kind of file hiding under the windows: podcasts.
The Primate and Metropolitans of the Anglican Church of Canada have released their promised pastoral statement on the recent incursions into their province by bishops
The Anglican Church of Ireland’s General Synod has published an alternative form of an Anglican Covenant. The Irish province accepts the need for a covenant, it does not find the present form helpful. The Covenant as they propose it calls on the Anglican provinces to recognize the moral authority of the “Instruments of Communion” while making clear they have no juridical authority over the provinces.
The Bishop and people of the Diocese of Minnesota commissioned a study group and asked them to look hard at the present state of the diocese and its immediate future. The answer they found is not a happy one. But they have developed a plan to respond to what they found.
Starting in 2006 a number of clergy and congregations began to push back against the increasing commercialization of Christmas by inviting their members to consider giving gifts to charity instead. In the first year hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised. This year, about 491 churches from 10 nations have joined the conspiracy, says Jeanne McKinley, who directs the program from Imago Dei Community with her husband Rick.
It takes two to bicker. Is there a creative way for those loyal to the Episcopal Church to unilaterally stop bickering with those trying to tear it apart? What would that look like on the national, diocesan, and congregational levels? What should it look like?
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, says that churches need to be brave, imaginative and honest in the fight against the spread of HIV and Aids. In a message for World Aids Day, issued for the first time as a video available on the internet on YouTube, Williams described as ‘a scandal’ the limited access to drugs and treatment in deprived parts of the world.