Heh. Re the NPR story, Kendall Harmon calls Rev. Jan Nunley's summation (that only a tiny # of Episcopal parishes are attempting to leave/have left, for "Africa"), "tired".

Pity Kendall: I suppose that to hold one's fingers in one's ears, going LA-LA-LA-LA to block out the Truth, IS rather tiring! ;-)

They're going to have to do a lot better than fewer than 1% of congregations to become the official Anglican presence in USA!

The UK report showed the importance of welfare services from the churches, and this will add to their popularity along with a different culture of believing. It does not transfer, it can only be small and sectarian in the US and Europe and such as Australia and New Zealand.

Heh. Re the NPR story, Kendall Harmon calls Rev. Jan Nunley's summation (that only a tiny # of Episcopal parishes are attempting to leave/have left, for "Africa"), "tired".

Pity Kendall: I suppose that to hold one's fingers in one's ears, going LA-LA-LA-LA to block out the Truth, IS rather tiring! ;-)

Posted by: JCF on Monday, 3 September 2007 at 7:30pm BST

I notice Kendall has 'closed off' two current gay stories or will only take comments by email -- if at all.

Is this control-geakery ?

Another wing-nut vitriolic in Virginia; how revolutionary. Are there going to be throngs of Episcopalians in a stampeding to the door to get out of the American church so they can hear what they can get in any Assembly of God hell-fire sermon? I doubt it.

From K. Harmon: "the number of parishes springing up of people who wish to be Anglicans but do not wish to be associated with TEC"

Wow! I see a lot of that here in the Shenandoah Valley - many Baptists, Mennonites, Methodists, Church of the Brethren, previously unchurched - all demanding to be Anglicans but not TEC.

Sure.

Springing up like mushrooms.

Maybe that's what K. Harmon has been consuming.

Sacred mushrooms.

Now NP will accuse me of promoting sacred mushrooms.

Be at peace. I only eat non-hallucegenic [sp?] 'shrooms - sauted in nice butter and served on toast.

I wonder if the current African archbishops will some day be seen in the same light as Governor George Wallace in the history of civil rights in America. Or will they be the churchmen who condemned Galileo? Time does not stand still, not for the church, not for the Akinolites.

Cynthia - I am trying to take a TA break until we have real news at the end of the month...but since you mention me, I though I should respond....and since you give a little recipe, I shall try that too!

As to your point, sure, the "orthodox" Anglicans in TEC(USA) are a minority because "conservatives" have been leaving for decades (a mistake we have not made in England!!) ....but then liberal views of the current leadership of TEC(USA) represent a small minority in the AC and the Network etc are very mainstream.....so, who should the AC partner with in the US? I suspect we will pick those who have not "torn the fabric of the communion" and who are willing to be loyal to agreed Anglican positions on the presenting issues - willing to change positions first, not act against the requests of most of the AC and still claim to be "in communion" with everyone

NP writes - “we will pick up….” Is that “we“, NP and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the “Windsor-compliant” Primates. How self-important and grandiose are you going to become?

It can’t be you and the “Windsor-compliant” Primates because following the ordination last weekend in Uganda, there are no longer ANY global south “Windsor-compliant” Primates.

The "orthodox" Anglicans in TEC(USA) are a minority because they’re a minority, NP. There is no other reason.

“Mainstream” in England is anything but mainstream.

Conservatives in England haven’t been leaving. Many have become more open and generous towards those with whom they formerly disagreed. At that moment they cease to be regarded as proper conservatives. I suspect that in fact, those who are conservative according to your definition have fallen in number.

The non-Windsor-compliant, fractious global south minority - that’s what we’re dealing with - Primates and bishops who are declaring themselves out of communion. The Episcopal Church hasn’t declared itself out of communion, NP, but fragments of Provinces in the global south, lower case.

I am a loyal Anglican. The majority of members of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church are loyal Anglicans. The secessionists? Are just that - seceding. They are tearing the fabric aggressively. They are not loyal Anglicans.

Enjoy the rest of you TA break, NP, and prepare for more bad news for yourself and your conservative co-conspirators at the end of the month.

".... who should the AC partner with in the US? I suspect we will pick those who have not "torn the fabric of the communion" and who are willing to be loyal to agreed Anglican positions on the presenting issues - willing to change positions first, not act against the requests of most of the AC and still claim to be "in communion" with everyone."

A couple of of days back, you commented on people who "only [make] progress when they face reality and leave their fantasy world." Make good use of your month off, NP.

Colin says "Enjoy the rest of you TA break, NP, and prepare for more bad news " and the rabbitalso accuses me of being in fantasy land........

Colin - this "bad news" you hope I will be getting.....will it be like Dromantine, TWR or the Tanzania Communique?

I am prepared for dear old Rowan to act in a way consistent with his actions in the last 4 years of disruption by those within TEC who would sacrifice the unity of the AC for the sake of the agenda.....the ABC is not one of them if we look at what he has actually done.....aks Jeffrey John, if you do not believe me

Hey, NP, how about letting us know what "booming" London evo parish you attend?

Kurt - Mynster and others worked that out long ago

You heard of HTB?

"Another wing-nut vitriolic in Virginia.."

If Curtis means this as a reference to John Guernsey, I have to differ, although I disagree with John on all the issues.

The Spotsyltuckian, who knows John, wrote about him here the other day, and I would like to add my observations now.

I, too, know John. He is highly intelligent, highly educated, and without peer as the the most charismatic preacher I have ever heard. He virtually creates an alternate reality when he preaches. Afterward, I have found myself thinking, "What the hell was that?" and, upon reflection, have found his points questionable, but there is no doubting that he keeps your attention.

Equally, he is charming. His hail-fellow-well-met manner makes you feel that you are the most interesting and delightful person he has ever met. In his presence, you feel witty and insightful - or, perhaps whatever you particularly want to feel - I have a feeling he has the ability to reflect back to you what you want.

But however charismatic and however charming, he will not generally be told anything. Beware holding a contradictory opinion. He will not abuse you - he will simply become a wall you cannot breach. He will generally decline discussion, or if that is not possible, he will bring his considerable debating skills into play along with a cool manner which says that he knows what is true and right and - you simply don't.

He was not always so "conservative." After serving as Associate Rector at Christ Church, Alexandria, Virginia, for about 2 years, he moved, in about 1981, to his current position at All Saints, Dale City, Virginia, a semi-rural parish.

It seems to me that it was here that he began to take on a new style, and I believe that it marks him in some ways as more of a follower than a leader.

If you drive around that area, you see many churches, and advertisements for churches, and they are generally very conservative, Evangelistic, possibly fundamentalist. I think that John has an instinct to be at the head of things (perhaps otherwise known as "ambition") and that in this social environment he saw which side his bread was buttered on. I think that he is a leader - but only after discerning where his particular flock is willing to be led. In this, he has been very successful.

Hmmm the church medical clinics are bearing up to sixty percent of the medical caseloads in Uganda - a demonstration that perhaps the con-evo dissing of MDG's (so common to so many who post on con-evo realignment blogs) is a bit out of step with Ugandan church life?

In any case, dear Bishop Guernsey, the fire and fruits of religious-ethical transformation - not to mention modern empirical data transformations? - have already been seeping and sweeping through so much of TEC in the last four to five decades that it could institutionally lay aside its traditionalistic prejudices and falsehoods preached in keeping with familiar negative beliefs about queer folks. New Hampshire could discern a bishop among its known clergy, all thanks to this revival. This shift is marvelous in our eyes and surely it is the Lord's doing that we should correct our institutional church life errors in such a relatively short span of a few decades of careful, critical consideration of a wide range of new and old evidence, testing both new and old claims in human sexuality.

Try wearing the Uganda shoe on the other foot: We have no prejudices against con-evo realignment believers as such, since we are all imperfect sinners, imperfect pilgrims - though con-evo folks often leave for a nearby mega-church where they can revel in numbers, like family members at a PFLAG convention. The exclusive internationalist campaign for Anglican institutional police power over the rest of us simply will not do, however, because you see we DO embrace our queer friends and family members in keeping with their demonstrated positive abilities to lead life pretty much like everybody else, if not often with remarkable grace and excellence in particular cases.

All we have ever mostly really said about con-evo points of view in USA at least is that - often - they decline to read peer-reviewed science very accurately or very consistently - almost as a matter of faith and of intentional theological method. And this tilts them towards repeating familiar cul de sacs of theological thinking which we identify, thanks to an accurate history of mistake that believers made in the past relative to inconvenient empirical discoveries, not to mention the surprise of God's witness among the Gentiles - like Jesus' healing of the centurion's beloved houseboy, and the members of Cornelius' household in Acts upon whom the Holy Spirit fell without asking the Jerusalem Church first in a grand council.

Is this what you mean?
http://www.htb.org.uk/history

Actually, this is more my type:
http://www.allsaintsmargaretstreet.org.uk/

Oh good grief, Holy Trinity Brompton, we should have known.

If the world needed more Baptist-lite churches, I suppose we could use them as a model, but there are more than enough of non-Anglican fundamentalist churches to suit that spectrum of Christianity.

I have found many other wonderful London parishes to use during my business and vacation trips to London, but I also know that we need "different strokes for different folks," and that what turns me off may turn some on. Therefore, live and let live in Christian charity.

I just will not stand by while some disgruntled ultraorthodox try to convert the entire Anglican Communion into a Calvinist body.

This is encouraging. From the HTB web site :-

Justice. Mercy. Humility.

HTB and Alpha International are core members of Micah Challenge UK. Micah Challenge is an international coalition of Christian organisations and churches, uniting Christians to follow God's call to defend the rights of the poor. Nicky Gumbel is on the Council of Reference.

Despite the gains made by Make Poverty History in 2005, today more than a billion people remain trapped in a state of absolute poverty. Micah Challenge UK seeks to build on the momentum created by Make Poverty History, to continue to press the UK government to do more to alleviate poverty and deal with its causes.

Micah Challenge has two key aims:

Aim 1: To galvanise Christians in the UK towards greater practical and political engagement with the issues and injustice of poverty.
Aim 2: To unite Christians to ensure the UK honours its commitments to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

"You heard of HTB?"

...the previous vicar of which, Sandy Millar, was consecrated Ugandan Bishop of Mission for the London Diocese.

The pieces of the jigsaw are beginning to fit together.

Sandy Millar's consecration was a very odd affair. Do you know which is his own Diocese in Uganda, and how often he is there for confirmations and ordinations etc.?
I am surprised NP is from HTB as she comes across as not quite as broad-minded as some of them can be.

In that part of the world, I'd rather go to 112 Palace Gardens Terrace any time (the other end of the Kensington area, at Notting Hill Gate).

Mynsterpreost said to me, a large church in the London area. Holy Trinity Brompton was the obvious one, but too obvious. It's a bit like claiming to go to a progressive church in London, when you mean St James Piccadilly.

These churches are all about urban specialisation, even Kensington Unitarians because there are others with other biases available not so far away. The result is that these specialised outfits are magnets for far and wide, supported by the public transport system. It is more to do with sociology or religion and sociology of geography, just as is the case for those crowds in Uganda.

"In his presence, you feel witty and insightful - or, perhaps whatever you particularly want to feel - I have a feeling he has the ability to reflect back to you what you want."

I'm afraid this sounds like a diagnosis.

"I'm afraid this sounds like a diagnosis."

I don't quite take your meaning, Göran, but I meant that John Guernsey has "charm," which is very hard to resist, but which is not paired with real openness to those he charms. He is not really interested in your views: he has the Answers (or so his whole manner implies) and should you disagree, well, there is simply no point in discussion.

As I said, it is my opinion that he cannot do other than lead large numbers, but that having gotten stuck in a small parish in a conservative/Evangelical/fundamentalist area, he -perhaps unconsciously - took on the coloration of his surroundings, in order to find followers. I think it entirely possible that if his early and continuing rectorship had been located in a progressive area, he might well have developed a different theology than the one he has espoused. (He was considered for posts such as Dean of the Cathedral in Sacramento, and was a candidate for Bishop of Colorado. Nothing came of these, and at a certain point, he "pledged the rest of my ministry" to All Saints, Dale City - and has expanded his activities to organizations such as the American Anglican Council, of which he was a founding member, and, as we know to other rebel organizations within, and then without, TEC.)

I was struck today to hear him on the radio say that, in being consecrated in Uganda, he was "being carried on the faith of the people." I think he may have said more than he knew.

And yes, I guess that does sound like a diagnosis.

I hadn't worked out it was HTB, but it comes as no surprise. Explains the Alpha fixation etc - but how unoriginal, a bit like eating at MacDonald's.

According to Anglican Mainstream. Rwanda has now "elected" three more bishops for AMiA because of the great success of their mission.

Is this keeping up with the Joneses? Is it an attempt to devalue the episcopal currency, or to pad out the voting figures? (The threat to pass the Reform Bill in 1832 by creating enough votes in the Lords to do it springs to mind...) Talk about more chiefs than Indians.

Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat.

I am grateful to Bishop Orama of Nigeria who has clarified for us all what it means to be a Biblical Christian and what it means to be a faithful Anglican. It all comes down to believing that "Homosexuality and lesbianism are inhuman. Those who practice them are insane, satanic, and are not fit to live because they are rebels to God's purpose for man.''

There. Now we have it. Now we understand Moses and the Prophets, and know why Jesus died on the cross. Now we know that Cranmer and Hooker and Temple were trying to teach us. So good to have that made clear, at last. JNW

The point about Holy Trinity Brompton is that it is, as you said this morning, McDonaldisation of religion (you said it better - I thought you were writing something relating to Ritzer's book and then there is one I have by John Drane, quite famous, the McDonaldization of the Church (2000). What the Church offers is something manufactured, bite-size, digested, never deviates, never out of expectation, apparently reliable, the pure modernist product, and capitalist to the core. It is epitomised by the Alpha course, a product and a process, all worked out, marketed and copyrighted, as if religion can be copyrighted.

Some were just saying in the pub yesterday that the McDonalds' burgers always come in some flavouring or setting because they burgers won't stand up for themselves. They were comparing in this context the difference John Smiths' smooth and Timothy Taylor Landlord. Landlord is the better drink, but as a real ale it is variable, so some people want the reliable always the same John Smiths Smooth. Religion should be more like the Timothy Taylor Landlord, because life is like this - sometimes the relationship with the Christian message given and received is nothing much, because it doesn't relate, and other times something is said that is rich and full of impact, which is rather different and better than hearing the same as expected hand-us-down manufactured message.

Unfortunately being the driver I had grape juice in the first put and coffees in the second. But then I'm odd anyway.

"It is epitomised by the Alpha course"

Precisely. I cringe every time I see Alpha advertised on a bus stop. Now, I'm an aging socialist, after my fashion, but I see the marketting industry as the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: it is the engine that drives the consumerism that makes Western society the consumer of a hugely disproportionate share of the world's resources, for a start. To see the Church putting Herself in league with this is, for me, a good example of our selling out to the world. Christianity is a product to be marketted. The success of the campaign is measured in the returns of "bums in pews". It is an unconscious accomodation to the mindset of the market, and of course, is vigourously defended by those who practice it because they measure success in terms of "souls saved" as though Christianity is some sort of business transaction. Also, to recognize that they are selling out to the world would, in many instances, mean they would have to stop hurling that charge at everyone else.

Ford - I'd like to speak with you in another context as an "aging socialist" from Newfoundland. Could you email me at iona@accesscomm.ca

My discussions with pro-Alpha types on this critical (consumerist) point tends to be met with 'ends justifying means' comments. It doesn't go down too well when I remind them the same justification lies behind the excesses of the Inquisition

"'ends justifying means'"

So, it's OK to sell out to the world if you are valiantly engaged in saving souls from the condemnation of God, but not if you are valiantly engaged in trying to show those same souls that God actually loves them. My, sometime, I'd like to converse with these people. Or maybe not. These are the same people who believe it is loving to say to someone "You are an evil rebel against God, a cancer on the Body of Christ, deserve to be thrown in jail where you might be killed, are likely a child molestor, and God hates you, but He will love you if you abase yourself and acknowledge that all the things you grew up being told about how evil and sick you are and which took you years to get over are actually true." "Oh such love, such wonderous love, the love of God to me." (Anybody recognize that?)