A sensible move indeed. Blessings this Holy Week!

The previous Bishop allowed a colony of Sydney to develop within Christchurch diocese. It will be interesting to see how this group react, given the fact that they are against womens headship as much as homosexuality.

It was also interesting to listen to the talks of the Study Day held in Sydney about the crisis in the Anglican Communion. ( Link Anglican Church League).

There is a most interesting talk by the Dean of studies at Moore College. He gives an interesting account of the " liberalisation " of Anglicanism and even includes the Anglo-catholic subversion of the Oxford movement. That should please Iker and Schofield at GAFCON. He also steers away from the women's ordination issue, as he obviously does not want to upset Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda..and of course Doctor Nazir Ali.

I seem to recall reading all the conservative comments which tried to cast deep shadows of doubt upon the confirmability of this new bishop for NZ. Can those believers have under-estimated the welcome across NZ differences that is built into their cultural pluralities? Is NZ a lesson for all of us in peace, and welcome across differences? Is this province, lesser according to some conservative yardsticks, really a potential blessing and example to the rest of us?

Looking forward to that part of the ongoing journey, then. I hope KJS and VM get to have a restful, leisurely coffee together some day, all away from the hubbub of the realignment campaign.

Just heard Wally Behan , vicar of ChCh largest Evangelical Parish ( cong 340 plus) give a sermon avilable on St john's anglican evangelical Church web site )...He tellingly states "what has happened in Canada will happen here."

"He tellingly states "what has happened in Canada will happen here.""

Why? Because they have chosen Victoria Matthews as their bishop, thus they have allowed an evil Canadian liberal pagan into the diocese? If so, that just shows his ignorance. Bp. Matthews is no liberal, is in fact quite theologically knowledgable AND orthodox, if you want to use that word. She is hardly a wolf in sheep's clothing, so not a good place on which to build one's fear mongering. Besides, what actually HAS happened in Canada? To hear him talk, we're having orgies on the altar or something. I am in Canada. I am in Don Harvey's old diocese, his old parish, actually. What I see is conservatives misrepresenting the facts and even lying outright about what's happened. One source claimed that our Bp. Pittman required his priests to accept same sex marriage or leave the diocese, which is utterly untrue! I suspect stories of the poor suffering "orthodox" being persecuted by the evil "liberals" have the same reliability as the things being said about Bp. Pittman, which is to say no reliability at all. And one bishop, after his diocese voted THREE TIMES to accept SSBs, felt he couldn't ignore the voice of his people a third time. THE SKY IS FALLING!! A few other dioceses have said they see no bar to SSBs, but their bishops have not acted. So what's the big crisis in Canada? The one thing that IS happening in Canada, indeed around the world, is scare mongering and far worse by angry loud conservatives upset over no longer having their traditional power. God help NZ if that is what's coming to them from Canada. It is most unChristian behaviour after all.

Oh, and Ford, did you hear the latest conservative one about Anglicans in Canada becoming unitarian? A conservative friend of mine told us about a service in Canada on Easter that didn't mention Christ at all.

Ren, we didn't mention him either. Recent snowstorms have so restricted the supply of goat's blood and raisin cakes that after we managed to stock those Essentials, we barely had enough time to dance around naked and draw down the moon, let alone celebrate the Equinox, sorry, Easter.