The meeting in Egypt has issued a communique, entitled A Third Trumpet from the South: Trumpet III The Third Anglican Global South to South Encounter Red Sea (Egypt), 25-30 October 2005
You can find copies of this document either here or here or here. No doubt copies of it will be sent to other agencies in due course. The original PDF file seems to be available only from the AAC.
Update Monday morning
The communique has now appeared on the Anglican Communion News Service: The Third Anglican Global South to South Encounter.
First press reports on this:
Reuters Conservative Anglicans warn liberal churches in West
Associated Press Anglicans: N. American Church Too Liberal
Back in August, an analysis of the bishops’ Pastoral Statement, written by Andrew Goddard, was published in the Church of England Newspaper but not on their website: The Civil Partnership Act and the Church of England. This escaped my attention at the time.
51 CommentsThe only substantive report so far from the Anglican meeting there is this one from Reuters:
Rowan urges split church to keep talking
Alister McGrath writes in The Times about atheism: The Enlightenment is over, and atheism has lost its moral cutting edge.
Paul Oestreicher writes in the Guardian about the rebuilding of Dresden’s cathedral.
Christopher Howse summarises what Rowan Williams said to Mary Midgley about Gaia in a dialogue at St Paul’s Cathedral in Living on the skin of Gaia (you can read more about the book here).
Those who found Rowan Williams’ remarks about Islam in the context of Richard Hooker interesting may also find this critique by Colin Chapman of last summer’s Spectator article on Islam of interest: An Open Letter to Patrick Sookhdeo, while Madeleine Bunting has an interview today in the Guardian with Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Speaking of Williams and Hooker, Graham Kings’ review of Anglican Identities has been republished:‘Passionate Patience’.
0 CommentsThere has been an ominous development in the Nigerians criticise Akinola story: see this report from Changing Attitude:
Changing Attitude Nigeria members held by police.
The figures for diocesan voting turnout published by the Church Times last week have been analysed.
In summary, less than 61% of the eligible clergy, and less than 49% of the eligible laity bothered to vote at all. There is a wide variation between dioceses but there is no significant correlation between the clergy turnout and the lay turnout in the same diocese.
The highest clergy turnout was in Derby (77.2%), and the lowest was in Oxford (48.4%).
The highest laity turnout was in Rochester (63.9%) and the lowest was in Worcester (37.4%).
These figures exclude results not made available to the Church Times, namely Europe, Guildford, and Winchester. Also the Bath & Wells laity election was declared void and will be rerun, and the Clergy election in Sodor & Man was uncontested.
The total number of eligible voters included in this analysis was: Clergy 12,264; Laity 25,333.
The full table of figures is now available here.
0 CommentsAnother long but very worthwhile lecture. Rowan Williams delivered the The Richard Hooker Lecture at the Temple Church yesterday.
Richard Hooker (c1554-1600): The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity Revisited.
10 CommentsTwo articles on Monday in the Washington Post discuss homosexuality in Africa.
Nigerian Churches Tell West to Practice What It Preached on Gays
includes some quotes from Archbishop Akinola.
A companion piece is Namibia Chips Away at African Taboos on Homosexuality
27 CommentsScripture and Sexuality – our commitment to listening and learning is the title of a major lecture delivered yesterday by the Archbishop of Wales, Barry Morgan. Here’s how it starts:
Few people doubt that the 1998 Lambeth Resolution on Human Sexuality – Lambeth 1 10 as it has come to be known has not had a profound effect on the Anglican Communion. In fact you could be pardoned for thinking that the Anglican Communion since then has not been interested in any other topic, since it has dominated the Agendas of Provinces, meetings of Primates and of the Anglican Consultative Council. The ordination of a practising homosexual as a Bishop in the USA and the blessing of same sex relationships in Canada might not have had the repercussions they have had, if the Lambeth Conference in 1998 had not had such an acrimonious debate about sexuality. What I would like to do in this lecture is to look at Lambeth 1 10 and ask why this resolution rather than any other has caused such problems, for after all there were 63 pages of resolutions at the 1998 Lambeth Conference.
It’s an extended read, but well worth it.
8 CommentsUpdate Thursday The Guardian today carries a news report by Stephen Bates on this, see Church rift deepens over gay bishop’s visit.
The London Diocesan Evangelical Fellowship Committee has sent a letter to DEF members, which criticises the plans for the Changing Attitude service described here.
The full text of this letter can be found below the fold.
67 CommentsThe Guardian has now published on its website the Face to Faith column by Giles Fraser that was in the Saturday paper with the strapline:
Secularists who dismiss Christianity as the choice of the stupid should turn their critical gaze a little closer to home…
Here’s a part of it:
While the ordinary atheist remains indifferent to religion and all its ways, the born-again atheist has adopted the worst arrogance of Christian fundamentalists – just in negative.
Part of the problem is that many born-again atheists remain trapped in a 19th-century time warp, reheating the standard refutations of religious belief based on a form of rationalism that harks back to an era of fob-watches and long sideburns. One Oxford don has called the website of the National Secular Society a “museum of modernity, untroubled by the awkward rise of postmodernity”. Ignoring the fact that at least three generations of thought have challenged an uncritical faith in rationality, the society continues to build its temples to reason, deaf to claims that it is building on sand.
This commitment to Victorian philosophy turns to farce when campaigning secularists describe themselves as freethinkers. In truth, atheism is about as alternative as Rod Stewart. The joke is that many who were converted at university via Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene think of themselves as agents of some subversive counterculturalism. This is ridiculous to Da Vinci Code proportions. Contemporary atheism is mainstream stuff. As John Updike put it: “Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.”
(More about the “Secularist of the Year” award mentioned can be found here)
24 CommentsThe BBC Sunday programme had a piece on this. Ed Stourton interviews Stephen Bates, mostly about Abp Akinola. Mention is also made of the Civil Partnership Act and the CofE response.
0 CommentsGlobal South
Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury will be in Egypt this week, talking to a meeting of the group of Anglican Churches known as Global South. But one of them, the church of Nigeria, has just changed its constitution to remove references to the see of Canterbury as the focus for Anglican unity. It is another chapter in the long-running saga of Anglican travails over the issue of homosexuality.
Listen (4m 15s) (Real audio)
After the Living Church published on 19 October a news report, Via Media Groups Mobilize for the ‘Day After’, the American Anglican Council got very excited about a document that came its way which was a partial rough draft of some minutes from a Via Media USA steering committee meeting. Curiously, the particular organisation discussed in this draft, the NACDAP, hasn’t yet shown any reaction at all.
Update Monday 24 Oct the NACDAP has now published this response: Network responds to “worst-case scenario” and reprinted the original document on its own website.
The author of the draft has issued a personal response which is reproduced here below the fold.
The silliness of all this is discussed by Mark Harris in this blog item, The AAC and the Via Media Memo: Lots of Noise and Smoke, and Certainly Paranoia.
Very sensible comments about it were made by Dale Rye on titusonenine which you can read here and here.
33 CommentsFirst, two journals have reviewed the same book today: Earthly Powers: religion and politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War by Michael Burleigh.
Diarmaid MacCulloch reviews it in the Guardian Holy and profane
Owen Chadwick reviews it in the Tablet The idolatry of nationhood
Second, in the godslots, we have
Christopher Howse in the Telegraph writing about Cherie’s love of Chesterton
Bernard Crick in the Guardian saying that This age of fanaticism is no time for non-believers to make enemies
and Roderick Strange in The Times By loving our enemies we come as close as we can to God’s perfection.
The October Fulcrum newsletter is by Francis Bridger and is entitled The Anglican Communion and the Evangelical Centre. This reflects on the recent Eames lectures.
And here is the speech that Rowan Williams delivered earlier this month at the confirmation of the election of John Sentamu as Archbishop of York.
1 CommentThe Diocese of London has issued this announcement:
Preb Sandy Millar to become a Bishop
Bishop of London hails the appointment as ‘a very welcome step’
The Most Rev’d Henry Luke Orombi, Archbishop of Uganda, with the August 2004 consent of the House of Bishops of the Church of Uganda, appointed a priest of the Church of England, the Rev’d Prebendary Sandy Millar, as Assistant Bishop in the Church of Uganda. He will be consecrated in Uganda on 27th November 2005.
Bishop-elect Millar will be licensed to act as a Bishop in Mission in the London Diocese using his wide experience as a church planter and growth practitioner…
This story goes back a full year and more, see CEN from September 2004, Sandy Millar proposed as ‘missionary bishop’ or Church Times Millar’s tale is not confirmed.
Read the full press release for all the details. But note in particular the following excerpts:
28 Comments“…This step has been taken with the full support and encouragement of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The two Archbishops were in touch by letter about the proposal in 2004. The consecration of Prebendary Millar with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury could not be more different from the intrusions into the affairs of other provinces which formed part of the agenda for the Windsor Commission. Unsanctioned intrusions lead to fragmentation. This step by contrast recognises the reality of a wired up world in a way that promotes closer communion. The particular circumstances of this appointment make it very unlikely that it will establish a precedent…
“…Sandy will of course continue to respond to invitations as he does now but to suggest [as some people have done] that he might become a standard bearer for Church of England dissidents in other Dioceses is to misunderstand the man and to misunderstand the disciplines under which bishops in our church operate…
Global South:
Williams heads for summit as South splits over Brazil by Pat Ashworth
Pittsburgh:
Seceders cannot take buildings, court rules by Pat Ashworth
Anglican Mainstream leaders wrote this letter to the House of Bishops of the CofE. And another one, apparently on 3 October. Anyway, they got a reply from the secretary of the HoB, which they have published. It can be read here. It should be read in full, but does contain the following key paragraphs:
13 CommentsIn relation to the church’s room for manoeuvre in relation to the law there were two separate issues. The first is whether it would have been legally possible for the Church to have made registering a civil partnership incompatible with being in Holy Orders. The second concerns the changes to various references to ‘spouse’ in church legislation (for example on pensions).
On the first, the answer is that there will no doubt be denominations or faith groups who will regard being in a civil partnership as intrinsically incompatible with membership of their ordained ministries. That is the position of the Roman Catholic Church. The law does not preclude that approach where the prohibition is based on doctrine or religious conviction. For the reasons set out above, however, civil partnerships do not necessarily involve activity contrary to the teaching of the Church of England (as contained, for example, in the 1987 Synod motion). The bishops did not, therefore think it warranted to seek to impose a prohibition.
Archbishop Eames has issued this statement:
(also available on ACNS)
Statement from Archbishop Eames regarding the current debate within the Anglican Communion
4 CommentsThe Most Reverend Dr Robin Eames, Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, issued the following statement this morning regarding the current debate within the Anglican Communion:
“The current debate within the Anglican Communion is a theological debate and I find myself very disturbed by any speculation around the role that money may play in determining outcomes. Such speculation makes genuine communication difficult. I feel that when money or assistance is raised in any part of the Anglican Communion and offered for use where it may extend Christ’s kingdom, it should be offered and accepted in those terms alone.
“I in no way question the sincerity and integrity of the leaders of the Global South. As they are well aware, I have personally endeavoured at all times to maintain and understand the integrity of their argument. I categorically state I have never believed that any financial offer was accepted by any of those who represent the Global South on any other than terms of Christian outreach. I have communicated this response to Archbishop Akinola this morning.”
The Guardian carries a report by Stephen Bates concerning the forthcoming visit to England by the Bishop of New Hampshire: Williams may meet gay US bishop during London trip.
The visit details can be found here at the website of Changing Attitude which is observing its 10th anniversary on the weekend of 5/6 November.
12 CommentsEkklesia is this week running a blog-type discussion with Stephen Bates of the Guardian answering questions from the public. You can see it all here.
The occasion for this is the publication of the paperback edition of A Church at War.
0 Comments