“Although the Anglican Communion has its various formed galaxies, or Churches, it is increasingly full of vacuous space and meaningless drivel in between and within. The distance between one galaxy and another is growing at an ever more rapid rate. Indeed the galaxies are becoming more incoherent themselves and could spiral into oblivion.”
Anglican Journal: Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said he has requested Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to facilitate a meeting
In our Gospel today Jesus only gives the right to confront another member of the church if that member has sinned against you — you personally. He gives no general authority to Christians to judge the behavior of others with whom they disagree about anything. In fact, Jesus teaches exactly the opposite: Do not judge.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has accused the Anglican church of allowing its “obsession” with homosexuality to come before real action on world poverty. “God is weeping” to see such a focus on sexuality and the Church is “quite rightly” seen by many as irrelevant on the issue of poverty, he said.
Riazat Butt, religion correspondent for the Guardian, wrote a column for the Church Times, reprinted today at Thinking Anglicans, in which she requests that people honor her Ramadan-season request with “by refraining from publishing stories about gay bishops during the hours of sunrise and sunset.”
Riazat Butt of the Guardian has written a brief article about Bishop John Bryson Chane’s column on the Lambeth Conference that appeared on the Cafe earlier this week.
The bishops of the US diocese of Bethlehem and the Sudanese diocese of Kajo-Keji have issued a statement reiterating their intention to continue working together in mission and evangelism in spite of concerns raised as a result of the Archbishop of Sudan’s statement at Lambeth criticizing the Episcopal Church in the US.
“The evangelical side of Anglicanism is leading us more and more toward a form of Christianity which is simply another variant of fundamentalist Islam. This is most evident in the insistence on treating the scriptures as the centre of faith rather than the living Lord Jesus Christ …. and on the inability to articulate Christian moral positions that may be distinctly different from the taboos of Islamic and animist culture.
What holds Anglicans together, I learned in confirmation class, is not set doctrine but common worship, though of course we are always in conversation about doctrine and tradition. That has been what I’ve understood about being Anglican, and that’s been my experience at worship. So some of what’s coming out of Lambeth about being “more like a church” seems so befuddling.
Bishop Michael Ingham, whose diocese – New Westminster – voted to allow same-sex blessings in 2002, reacted strongly to the Windsor Continuation Group’s proposals for retrospective moratoria, describing it as “an old-world institutional response to a new-world reality in which people are being set free from hatred and violence.”