The retired cathedral dean who has served for 17 summers at St. Ann’s in Kennebunkport recounted the how the elder President Bush recently skydived onto the chapel lawn to celebrate his 85th birthday. While waiting Mrs. Bush apparently quipped to the warden, “Well, if something goes wrong, at least we won’t have to take him far.”
As the [confirmands] came up for confirmation by the Bishop a couple of ladies were taken aside and questioned as to whether they were co-habiting. When this was established they stood aside whilst the confirmation continued. A marriage service was then arranged for six couples, partners were summoned (two were not at the church), and the six couples wound up in front of the Bishop.
The Bishop of Durham wants to short-circuit the Archbishop’s timetable. He wants a decision about who is in and out of the Communion to be made NOW, not postponed until the end of 2009 when Section 4 of the Covenant is finalised (para 19).
Perhaps because TEC is a small church compared with some others, and perhaps because it’s had to forge its identity in a much more competitive arena than the C of E with its historic privileges and relationship with the State, TEC appears to me to have imbibed the breadth, the diversity and the challenge of Jesus Christ to bring the Gospel to ALL people.
Now that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has slapped my church’s wrists for refusing to marginalize gays and has threatened to have us become second-class citizens in the Anglican Communion, I say this to Archbishop Williams: The Episcopal Church has a life. – Tom Ehrich
The Guardian asks: After Rowan’s long letter about the “futures” of Anglicanism, after all the meetings, resolutions, papers and blogs, “”what difference will any of this make?” They asked four Anglicans, two English, one African and one American, for answers.
Not a moment too soon, bloggers and activists in England are expressing reservations about Rowan Williams’ proposed Anglican Covenant. Andrew Brown’s column for the Guardian’s web site is the most recent installment.
The proposed Anglican Covenant would be an out of the ordinary device that would completely alienate the Church of England from the culture it serves. Justice for gay people would continue to be won, step by step, in English society, but the churches would become an anachronism living in their own ghetto of bigotry.
In Anglicanism, however, the joys of common prayer and community spirit are replaced by ideology. This Anglican Church is a new invention, a global piece of post-colonial hubris, driven by those who feel that a Church that is genuinely Catholic must have outposts throughout the world.
There are a couple of pieces in the Guardian today asking about why the idea of schism in the Anglican Communion is too awful to conceive, or if it did happen, what the practical consequences would be.