Anglican Mainstream responds to election of Canon Mary Glasspool as Suffragan Bishop of Los Angeles

December 6th, 2009

We are saddened but not surprised by this announcement from TEC. Unless their diocesan bishops and their standing committees decline to endorse the election, it will confirm that TEC have no intention of respecting the mind of the Communion and halting their current trajectory. That is why tens of thousands of Anglicans, in order to witness to the Communion's common basis of faith, and particularly biblical teaching on Christian marriage, have had to leave TEC and form the Anglican Church of North America. For any who doubted whether that action was justified TEC's latest announcement, made in full knowledge of its negative effect on the Communion's Covenant process, will confirm that TEC, rather than wanting to remain within the Communion's bonds of affection, is determined to walk away and follow its own path.

Dr Philip Giddings (Convenor)

Canon Chris Sugden (Secretary)

Anglican Mainstream Here
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An Appropriate Reading for Today

From the Gospel reading for the Second Sunday in Advent:

“There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. Men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.” (The Holy Bible : New International Version. Lk 21:25-26)
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Rift flares after US Episcopal Church elects [second] gay bishop

Ed: The theological Elvis has left the ecclesiological building.

A diocese in Los Angeles has elected only the second openly gay bishop in the global Anglican Church, reigniting an issue that has caused deep division.

Rev Mary Glasspool, from Baltimore, was elected assistant bishop, although she needs a majority of national Episcopal Church heads to back her consecration.

The election of the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, six years ago created a massive rift.

Traditionalists have already expressed opposition to the latest election. Read more
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Tory Muslim peer Baroness Warsi pelted with eggs

Eggs are thrown at the Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action, Baroness Warsi, when she visited Luton.

Baroness Warsi was taking part in a walkabout in the Muslim Bury Park area of Luton when she was confronted by a group of protesters.

The male protesters accused her of not being a proper Muslim and supporting the death of Muslims in Afghanistan. See here
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Christian loses sex therapy case

Ed: Another Revelation 13:17 moment.

A relationship counsellor from Bristol who refused to offer sex therapy to gay couples has lost his appeal for unfair dismissal.

Christian Gary MacFarlane, 47, was sacked by marriage guidance service Relate after he said he could not do anything to promote gay sex.

Mr MacFarlane, who is a former church elder, was appealing on the grounds of religious discrimination.

He alleged Relate had refused to accommodate his religious beliefs. Read more


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London Gay Men's Chorus Mayor's choice for Carols at Southwark Cathedral

Ed: The photo says it all

"The London Gay Men's Chorus is delighted to have been invited to perform once again at The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall. Come and join in the merriment as they sing both Christmas favourites and extracts from their show Singderella. The gentlemen of the Chorus have been extraordinarily busy this year with a concert in Helsinki, being a host choir for the Various Voices festival, their sold out Edinburgh Fringe show Oklahomo, a summer concert at the Shaw Theatre, their Christmas Show at Cadogan Hall, and performing as the chosen choir for the Mayor of London's Christmas Carol Concert at Southwark Cathedral." See here

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The crisis in Anglicanism threatens its position in national life

[...] The congregation is falling away almost as quickly as the money. Thirty years ago 11 per cent of the UK population went to church and the average age of the flock was 37. Today, only 6 per cent are regular observers and the average age is 51. With the Anglican Church in a state of decline, troubles are piling up in battalions. The divisive issues of the ordination of women as bishops and the rights of homosexual clergy are making Anglo-Catholics susceptible to the inveigling of Rome. The Roman Catholic Church’s apostolic constitution has set out the terms whereby Anglo-Catholics would be permitted to become Roman Catholics without giving up their liturgies.

Now that 8.5 per cent of Anglican clergy jobs are expected to disappear over the next five years, the very question of the Church of England’s role in the nation’s affairs is at issue. There is still a case for the Church to be the spiritual witness to moments of temporal national communion but the privilege of establishment becomes much harder to defend when the congregation is thinning out and the Church cannot pay the bills. The Anglican Church faces a dilemma analogous to that of the BBC. It needs a wide scope to justify its position of national privilege and yet its future as an organisation may lie as the provider of a smaller, niche product. Read more
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Cutbacks contribute to impression of ‘dying and divided church’

The lopsided church of St Vincent has stood in the village of Littlebourne since the 13th century, in the diocese of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Its 87 regular worshippers, mostly retired or nearing retirement, managed to raise £50,000 last year through coffee mornings and cake sales. Of that, more than £34,000 went to the diocese to help to pay for clergy and clergy pensions.

The ten worshippers in the neighbouring church of Stodmarsh, also under the cure of the Rev John Allan, raised nearly £5,000, of which a quarter went to the diocese. The other two parishes in the benefice, Ickham and Wickhambreaux, with only 35 worshippers between them, raised £25,000 and contributed £11,000 in quota.

It costs about £40,000 a year to “run” a stipendiary parish priest in the Church of England. As the combined quota of the four parishes came to more than £50,000, worshippers assumed that when Mr Allan announced that he had to retire next January because of ill health, they would be given a replacement. But instead, they claim that they have been advised that even if they raised £1 million, they would not get another full-time priest.

They are to be given instead a “house-for-duty” priest, an unpaid part-timer. In return for free accommodation in the vicarage, he will work three days a week. Read more
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Church of England set to lose a tenth of its clergy in five years

The Church of England is facing the loss of as many as one in ten paid clergy in the next five years and internal documents seen by The Times admit that the traditional model of a vicar in every parish is over.

The credit crunch and a pension funding crisis have left dioceses facing massive restructuring programmes. Church statistics show that between 2000 and 2013 stipendiary or paid clergy numbers will have fallen by nearly a quarter.

According to figures on the Church of England website, there will be an 8.3 per cent decrease in paid clergy in the next four years, from 8,400 this year to 7,700 in to 2013. This represents a 22.5 per cent decrease since 2000. If this trend continues in just over 50 years there will be no full-time paid clergy left in Britain’s 13,000 parishes serving 16,000 churches.

Jobs will instead be filled by unpaid part-timers, giving rise to fears about the quality of parish ministry. Combined with a big reduction in churchgoing, the figures will add weight to the campaign for disestablishment. Read more
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Teenage boys to learn how to respect women in drive to tackle violence

A generation of youths who do not know how to treat women are to be targeted in a drive to tackle violence and abuse in teenage relationships, the Government announced today.

The campaign could also involve children as young as 5 being taught about “gender equality” as part of personal, social and health education that, from 2011, is to be a compulsory part of the national curriculum. Rules are also to be produced for how teachers should tackle “sexist, sexual and transphobic” bullying.

A strategy to tackle violence against women and girls published yesterday highlights the need for “attitudinal” change among teenagers in relationships. The move follows growing concern that some teenage boys are mistreating girls with verbal abuse, physical attacks and attempts to coerce them into having sex.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Reaching teenagers who are embarking on early relationships to challenge their perceptions of what constitutes a healthy relationship is vital to preventing violence against women and girls.” Read more
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Russian faith leaders call for calm as murdered priest is buried

A murdered Russian Orthodox priest was laid to rest in Moscow yesterday, amid fears of rising religious tensions between Christians and Muslims in the country. Father Daniil Sysoyev was shot dead inside his own church last week, in a killing that many suspect was by Islamic radicals.

Father Sysoyev was a controversial figure, even within the Orthodox Church. He was an active missionary, attempting to convert Muslims to Orthodoxy, and authored a number of books, including one warning Russian women against marrying Muslim men. He also posted a series of online sermons on YouTube dissecting the Islamic faith and making several incendiary claims about the religion.

Late last Thursday night, after the evening service, an intruder burst into Father Sysoyev's small church, located in a drab Moscow suburb. The killer was wearing a surgical mask, brandishing a pistol, and demanded to know where Sysoyev was. When the priest emerged, he was shot twice, in the head and neck, and later died in hospital. Read more
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Martin Amis: the sexual revolution killed my sister Sally

The author's younger sister died in 2000, aged 46, after suffering for years from alcoholism and depression.

Amis said she had been crushed by the pressures he felt women had been subjected to ever since the idea of sex before marriage became the norm.

Society was still dealing with the fallout, he said, but women usually fared worse than men.

He said: "It's astonishingly difficult to find a decent deal between men and women and we haven't found it yet."

While women enjoyed more freedom than they did before 1970, he said, they were also more liable to suffer from the pressures the revolution exerted on them.

Sally could not cope with the sexual liberation it granted her, said Amis, 60.

"She was pathologically promiscuous," he told the Richmond Book Now Festival.

"She really had the mental age of 12 or 13 and I think she was terrified. I think what she was doing was seeking protection from men, but it went the other way, she was often beaten up, abused and she simply used herself up."

In the 1980s she married a wine merchant twice her age but the union lasted only six months. She had a baby daughter from another relationship Catherine, whom she gave up for adoption. In 1994 she suffered a stroke and the following year their father Kingsley Amis died, from which she never recovered.

She died of an unspecified infection in November 2000 after five days in intensive care. Read more
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Leading article: Heavy hand of Rome

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has travelled to Rome to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the late Dutch Cardinal Johannes Willebrands, a campaigner for the unification of Christianity. But when Dr Williams holds a private meeting with Pope Benedict XVI today, the mood is likely to be one of animosity, rather than ecumenicism.

Last month saw one of the most divisive acts by the Catholic Church in decades. The Pope unveiled an "apostolic constitution" which would allow practising Anglicans to join the Catholic Church. Under the new arrangement, Rome would even admit married Church of England clergy and allow entire congregations to continue using their traditional liturgy and prayer book. The Archbishop has been quietly criticising the Catholic move in recent days. But behind closed doors he ought to be more direct.

The Vatican claims that the invitation was entirely a response to requests from disgruntled Anglicans to be allowed to join the Catholic communion. But this affair looks more like an attempt by Vatican conservatives to exploit tensions within the Anglican Church over women bishops and gay priests for their own gain.

Tellingly, the Vatican's Council for Christian Unity played no part in devising the new arrangements. And Dr Williams was not informed of Rome's intentions until virtually the last minute. This whole business has served to undermine the Archbishop's authority in the midst of a bitter struggle for the very future of Anglicanism. Dr Williams should tell the Pontiff that there is nothing ecumenical about trying to poach congregations. And he should make clear that talks on a closer union of Anglicanism and Catholicism cannot continue while Rome engages in such unilateral power grabs. Read more
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Public faces of Richard Dawkins' atheism campaign were ... devout Christian children

(Ed: Reminds me of the 'Polish spitfire' chosen for the BNP publicity campaign.)

The two children chosen to front Richard Dawkins’ latest assault on God could not look more free of the misery with which he associates religious baggage.

With the slogan “Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself”, the two children, their hair flying and with broad grins, seem to be the perfect advertisement for the new atheism being promoted by Professor Dawkins and the British Humanist Association.

Except that they are about as far from atheism as it is possible to be. The Times can reveal that Charlotte, 8, and Ollie, 7, are from one of Britain’s most devout Christian families.

Their father, Brad Mason, is something of a celebrity within evangelical circles as the drummer for the popular Christian musician Noel Richards.

Mr Mason has been supplementing his income for years by giving photographs to agencies who sell them on to newspapers and advertising campaigns.

“It is quite funny because obviously they were searching for images of children that looked happy and free. They happened to choose children who are Christian. It is ironic. The humanists obviously did not know the background of these children.” Read more
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Atheist author Philip Pullman writes alternative ending for Jesus in Bible

Ed: May we now look forward to a Christian publishing "His Dark Materials" with an alternative plot? Thought not.

The writer has penned an alternative Bible passage imagining a different fate for Christ, who was executed by the Romans.

"He has written what would have happened if Jesus had had a fair trial," a friend told The Daily Telegraph's Mandrake column. Read more

"He knows it will be controversial, but he has some serious points to make."
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Churches head for a showdown in Rome

The Archbishop of Westminster has blamed Church of England bishops for keeping their leader in the dark about the Pope’s attempts to entice Anglicans to Rome.

The Most Rev Vincent Nichols, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, said that it had been the “duty” of the Anglicans involved in the talks to keep their primate informed about the Pope’s plans to admit thousands of opponents of women priests.

The Archbishop was defending the Pope against accusations of discourtesy after he failed to alert the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, of the proposals for an Apostolic Constitution, or decree to set up a new Anglican ordinariate. The announcement was sprung on a distressed Dr Williams last month with barely two weeks’ notice.

He was speaking before Dr Williams’s first visit to Rome to see Benedict XVI since the norms for the new ordinariate were published. Read more
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Churchwarden resigns over BNP membership

A BNP member has resigned as a churchwarden after his political views were deemed to be "incompatible" with Christianity.

David North said he was forced to quit his post at St Thomas of Canterbury Church, in Frisby on the Wreake, near Melton, because of his openly-held support for the BNP. The Diocese of Leicester said it simply "pointed out" his views were incompatible with those of the church.

Mr North, of Frisby, said: "After 60 years service to my church at Frisby, I feel very let down to be asked to resign as churchwarden of some 15 years in two stints, having done nothing illegal whatsoever, only to be asked to resign because I'm a member of the BNP. As far as I can tell, I have done nothing wrong. To be asked to resign reasonably forcefully after 60 years' service – it hurts."

Mr North, who has spent the past 15 years serving as a warden, stepped down three weeks ago.

A spokeswoman for the Diocese of Leicester said: "It was pointed out to Mr North that membership of the BNP is incompatible with being a practising Christian. This is the Bishop's complete stance on it. We received a letter from Mr North telling us he had resigned. We did not ask him to but he had been under a lot of pressure. The pastor is not able to kick out a churchwarden, but it can be pointed out that he must make a choice between the BNP and the Church. Members of the congregation can be a member of the BNP but he held an office in the church and was representing us both legally and professionally." Read more
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Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again

[...] As children and teenagers, the ex-jihadis felt Britain was a valueless vacuum, where they were floating free of any identity.

Ed Husain, a former leader of HT, says: "On a basic level, we didn't know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of a group – but who was our group?" They were lost in liberalism, beached between two unreachable identities – their parents', and their country's. They knew nothing of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the other places they were constantly told to "go home" to by racists.

Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democratic identity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation.

"Nobody ever said – you're equal to us, you're one of us, and we'll hold you to the same standards," says Husain. "Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?"

Without an identity, they created their own. It was fierce and pure and violent, and it admitted no doubt. Read more
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Latest press release from Revision Committee on Women in the Episcopate

The Revision Committee met for its third scheduled meeting yesterday (13 November) since 8 October (see earlier statement: http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr9509.html). It concluded a substantial exploration of ways in which the draft legislation could be amended to enable certain functions to be vested by statute in bishops who would provide oversight for those unable to receive the episcopal and/or priestly ministry of women.

After much discussion, the members of the Committee were unable to identify a basis for specifying particular functions for vesting which commanded sufficient support both from those in favour of the ordination of women as bishops and those unable to support that development. As a result all of the proposals for vesting particular functions by statute were defeated.

The effect of the Committee’s decision is therefore that such arrangements as are made for those unable to receive the episcopal ministry of women will need to be by way of delegation from the diocesan bishop rather than vesting.

There remain important issues for the Committee to determine at its forthcoming meetings over the shape of the proposed legislation in the light of this decision, in particular whether to retain a statutory code of practice or adopt the simplest possible legislation. Read more
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'Sinister link' between Darwin and high-school killings by nihilistic teenagers

Kind of fits in with the hagiolatry of Darwin by the media that I mentioned here.

[...] In America, where Darwin’s writings on morality and race have come under particularly intense critical scrutiny because of the enduring creationist debate, he has been accused of fostering moral nihilism and scientific racism, and even of promoting an ethic that found its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. Most startling of all, a connection has now been drawn between Darwin’s theories and a rash of school shootings. In April, 1,000 people gathered at sunset in Littleton, Colorado, to commemorate the victims of the Columbine high school massacre, 10 years on. Darrell Scott, whose daughter Rachel was the first of the 13 children to be murdered, and whose son Craig narrowly escaped being shot, cannot understand why so little attention has been paid to the motivation of the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and their interest in Charles Darwin’s ideas. “Harris wore a ‘Natural Selection’ T-shirt on the day of the killings. They made remarks on video about helping out the process of natural selection by eliminating the weak. They also professed that they had evolved to a higher level than their classmates. I was amazed at the frequent references to evolution, and that the press completely ignored that aspect of the tapes.”

Much of the evidence remains sealed under a court order issued to minimise the risk of copycat killings, but from those documents that are in the public domain, it is clear that Eric Harris fantasised about putting everyone into a violent computer game that only the fittest could survive. And, like Darwin himself, he noted how vaccination might be interfering with nature’s weeding process. In his rantings Harris said he wished there were no vaccines, or even warning labels on dangerous goods, “and let natural selection take its course. All the fat, ugly, retarded, crippled dumbass, stupid f***heads in the world would die… Maybe then the human race can actually be proud of itself”.

As the attorney for the families of six of the students killed at Columbine, the Denver lawyer Barry Arrington has come across more in a similar vein. “I read through every single page of Eric Harris’s journals; I listened to all of the audio tapes and watched the videotapes… It became evident to me that Harris consciously saw his actions as logically arising from what he had learnt about evolution. Darwinism served as his personal intellectual rationale for what he did. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Harris was a worshipper of Darwin and saw himself as acting on Darwinian principles.”

In 2007, detectives following up a tip-off about a planned school shooting in Pennsylvania discovered that their suspect often logged on to a social networking site called Natural Selection’s Army and a number of related chatrooms that were later tagged by the media as the “cyber school for killers”. These sites were quickly shut down by their service providers, but today “Natural Selection” is the name of a popular computer game in which competing teams attempt to annihilate one another — a sign that Darwin’s term is still associated by many teenagers with sudden and extreme violence. Read more
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