Many years ago I lived in a town where there was a very active church indeed. Outside this church was an enormous noticeboard. It seemed every moment of the week was taken up by activity and I have no doubt it was a very good church ...and loving parish. And yet that notice board used to worry me and it still does. It seems to me it speaks of an idea of the church which supposes that the church is about human beings doing things. When you looked at that church you would have thought, what a lot of things they do there. But I'm still wondering if anyone ever asked, does God do things here? It seemed to be just a slight risk that there was hardly any room in the week for God to find his way in among all these activities.
...When you come through that door … perhaps it should not be with the thought, what must I do. First be the thought what is Jesus doing here, how do I become part of it. Perhaps we should come into this church as we step into the sea or a swimming pool. Here I step into the ocean of Jesus praying, Jesus alive, Jesus mediating with the Father. Perhaps just as I learned to swim I can be carried along by the depth of the prayer with Jesus...
...We go out having listened to the word and celebrated the sacrament and we begin to hear something else in the world, we being to hear the words and the prayer of Jesus, we begin to see the love of Jesus around us. And we ask the same question we ask when we come through that door, how do I join in. How in he world around how do I cast myself into the flood of action that is Jesus' life and work with him in the world.
Who knows whether we will make a success of it or not. And yet that prayer that life goes on. St Paul is very realistic about this. He knows that some of what we build will not be worth saving in God's eyes. Some of it is in gold and silver and some of it is in hay and straw. Yet God's work goes on and God's foundation is never destroyed.
My hope and my prayer for this church and congregation is this: may it be a place about which people say, Jesus is alive there. ..And may the notice board outside never be too crowded. I know some of you want to fill this good activity for the sake of God. But I know too that you will want to leave space for God to work himself and God to be honored !
ASUNCION, Paraguay - Paraguay's president-elect has received unprecedented permission from the pope to resign as bishop, the papal nuncio said Wednesday, ending a dispute over Fernando Lugo's priestly status. Church officials earlier insisted that Lugo, 57, would always be a bishop under church law.
"This is the first case within the church in which a bishop receives a dispensation," Nuncio Orlando Antonini said at a news conference. "Yes, there have been many other priests the pope has left in the status of layman, but never a member of the hierarchy until today."
Lugo also made history with April's presidential election victory, which ended the 61-year rule of the Colorado Party in Paraguay. The former "bishop of the poor" takes office on Aug. 15.
"It's a great pain for the church to lose a bishop, a priest whom we tried to dissuade from the political option up to the last day of his election campaign," Antonini said. "But the Holy Father recognized that he was elected by the majority of the people to lead Paraguay for the next five years."
Italian nuns set up inflatable church to save the souls of beach goers. The 100-foot-long church will be set up on Saturday and is to be manned by a team of priests waiting to hear confession, give mass and sing holy music.
"There will be four or five people singing, with music about God," said Chiara Facci from the Catholic group Sentinelli del Mattino, which is putting up the blow-up church. A night-time mass, competing with the more worldly attractions of local night clubs and bars, will take place between 10pm and 1am.
The Catholic church is trying to counteract the holiday effect of the Italian summer, when large cities empty and holidaymakers head for the beach. With businesses already suffering the holiday effect, churches want to make sure the travelling faithful do not leave their sense of piety and devotion at home.
The inflatable church is not the only such effort. Near Naples a group of nuns have relocated to beach cabins to help tourists say the rosary with an altar set up between tents. "The concept of a beach-convent is something that is appreciated by vacationers and the nuns themselves," said priest Antonio Rungi.
An Episcopal Church conference on Hispanic and Latino ministry underway this week near Atlanta has gathered more than 200 people from diverse Spanish-speaking communities in eight countries to share in the challenges and blessings of their ministries and chart a course for continued growth.
"A New Dawn -- Nuevo Amanecer -- Together We Grow and Are Strengthened," represents the first time in six years that Episcopalians engaged in Hispanic and Latino ministries have come together. The entire program is offered in Spanish, with English translation available throughout.
At the opening Eucharist June 30, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori encouraged participants to examine "Why are we here? What is our mission? What is our vocation as Christian brothers and sisters?" And she reminded them, "Jesus' ministry belongs to all people who are baptized, not just bishops and clergy."
In her sermon, preached in Spanish, Jefferts Schori used Old and New Testament lessons for the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul. Both readings use shepherds and sheep as metaphors to convey the vision of God, she said. And the vision of God "involves caring for all of the sheep, which means offering justice for all.
"It is our role, our work, to raise a strong voice in the wilderness," she said. "Only with a strong voice will we be able to challenge injustice."
Pastoral care is one of the more urgent topics being discussed. With tougher immigration laws being implemented in various parts of the country, a great deal of Hispanic and Latino ministry involves people who are feeling the pain of families torn apart by a legal system that's not as tolerant as it once was.
"Families are being divided because in the same family some are residents and some are not," said Soto.
"What is the church called to do?" Soto said. "The great Anglican theologian Richard Hooker told us to look to scripture, tradition and reason. The Hebrew scripture says the alien shall be as a citizen; the alien shall be given food and treated as if born here. We are too far from that concept. We are Episcopalians, and we have made the promise that we will treat every human being with dignity."
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“remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.
Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, can be regarded as the "pope," or at least the symbol of unity, of Orthodox Christianity. The denomination's 300 million or so adherents make it the second-largest body of Christians in the world, after Roman Catholicism. The 67-year-old Bartholomew also represents one of Christianity's most ancient branches as the latest in a line of 270 archbishops of his city -- modern Istanbul -- that traces itself back to the apostle St. Andrew, brother of St. Peter, in a part of the world where the Christian faith has existed since New Testament times.
In December 2006, Bartholomew, patriarch since 1991, was thrust under the world-wide media spotlight when he celebrated the Orthodox Divine Liturgy with Pope Benedict XVI. The two met in the tiny Church of St. George in the equally tiny patriarchal compound in Istanbul, all that remains of an Eastern Christian civilization on the Bosporus so glistening and powerful that for more than 1,500 years Constantinople called itself the "new Rome."
Now Bartholomew has a forthcoming book, in English, "Encountering the Mystery: Perennial Values of the Orthodox Church" (Random House). It purports to be a primer to Orthodoxy, with short chapters on ritual, theology, icons and so forth. What it really is, perhaps inadvertently, is a telling glimpse into the mindset of a church that, venerable and spiritually appealing though it may be, is in a state of crisis. And the book reveals the jarringly secular-sounding ideological positions its leader seemingly feels compelled to take in order to cultivate the sympathy of a Western European political order that is at best indifferent to Christianity.
The Orthodox community, rooted mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe, is in "apparently irreversible demographic decline," as religious historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2006, thanks to falling birthrates, cultural secularization, turf battles between the various ethnically focused Orthodox churches, and past communist ravages. The historic Christian communities in the Islamic-dominated world -- some Orthodox -- have fared even worse, their numbers reduced as members frantically immigrate to the West under pressure from terrorism, persecution and religious discrimination. The historic fate of Christianity in Islamic-majority lands has been cultural annihilation, whether gradual over the centuries or, as in recent decades, swift.
Nowhere does the plight of Christians look so pitiful as in Turkey, nominally secular but 99% Muslim. At the turn of the 20th century, some 500,000 Orthodox Christians, mostly ethnic Greeks, lived in Constantinople, where they constituted half the city's residents, and millions more resided elsewhere in what is now Turkey. Today, Bartholomew has only about 4,000 mostly elderly fellow believers (2,000 in Istanbul) left in Turkey's 71 million-plus population. The quasi-militaristic regime of Kemal Ataturk that supplanted the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s forcibly Westernized the country's institutions but also made Islam an essential component of the Turkish national identity that it relentlessly promoted.
"Kemalist ideology regarded Christianity as Greek and thus foreign," says Greek Orthodox writer Joshua Treviño. The result was a series of official and unofficial ethnic cleansings, population transfers, massacres and pogroms in Turkey, such as the wholesale destruction of Orthodox churches in 1955. The murders of a Catholic priest in 2006 and of an Armenian Christian journalist and three evangelicals, two of whom were Turkish converts, in 2007, together with threats and assaults against other Christian clergy by ultra-nationalists and Islamic militants, indicate that such anti-Christian animus is far from dead. Furthermore, the current government refuses to allow the reopening of Turkey's sole Greek Orthodox seminary, closed in 1971, which means that there have been no replacements for Turkey's aging Orthodox priests and -- since Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a Turkish citizen -- no likely replacement for Bartholomew himself, whose death may well mean the extinction of his 2,000-year-old see.
Nonetheless, Bartholomew devotes the bulk of his book to anything but the mortal threat to his own religion in his own country. High on his list of favorite topics, most with only a tangential relationship to Orthodoxy, is the environment. He has won the nickname "the Green Patriarch" for the decade or so he has preached the ecological gospel, largely to liberal secular audiences in the West. "Encountering the Mystery" is in large part a collection of eco-friendly platitudes about global warming ("At stake is not just our ability to live in a sustainable way but our very survival") and globalization, adorned with a bit of theological window-dressing, that today's secular progressives love to read.
On first reading, this exercise in fiddling while the new Rome burns seems pathetic, presenting a picture of a church leader so intimidated by his country's Islamic majority that he cannot speak up for his dwindling flock even as its members are murdered at his doorstep. Bartholomew's book presents an eerie mirror image of the concerns of aging, culturally exhausted, post-Christian Western Europe, happy to blather on at conferences about carbon emissions and diversity but unwilling to confront its own demographic crisis in the face of youthful, rapidly growing and culturally antagonistic Muslim populations. The suicide of the West meets the homicide of the East.
On the other hand, Bartholomew's "green" crusade across Western Europe may actually represent a shrewd last-ditch effort to secure a visible profile and powerful protectors for his beleaguered church. The patriarch has been an incessant lobbyist for Turkey's admission to the European Union, and his hope has been that the EU will condition Turkey's entry on greater religious freedoms for all faiths.
Orthodox Christianity is not dead yet. Its famous monastery on Mount Athos in Greece has enjoyed new growth recently, and in America some Orthodox churches are drawing converts attracted by the glorious liturgy and ancient traditions. It is unfortunate that Orthodoxy's spiritual leader feels compelled to position the Orthodox with a Western Europe that is, in fact, spiritually dead.
Ms. Allen is the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus."
Toronto Church is First Anglican Parish in Canada to Approve Weddings for HomosexualsTORONTO, January 15, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Toronto's Church of the Holy Trinity has presented a direct challenge to the leaders of the Anglican Church of Canada by voting to hold weddings for same sex couples.
Their statement says, "Holy Trinity will continue to exercise its conscience and bless same-sex unions and marry same-sex couples." While Holy Trinity has been conducting blessing ceremonies for some time, Rev. Jim Ferry, a preist at Holy Trinity clarified, "We also intend, when the opportunity arises, to take the next step, which is a (same-sex) marriage ceremony."
Ferry also claimed that numerous other parishes across Canada are "quietly" conducting same-sex blessings. "We're not the only ones," he said yesterday, according to the Ottawa Citizen. "There are other parishes across the country who have been quietly going ahead and doing same-sex blessings. They're in the major urban centres, wherever there's a significant population of gay and lesbian people."
...While four Canadian Anglican dioceses (Niagara, Ottawa, Montreal and New Westminster, BC) have voted to allow ministers to conduct blessing ceremonies, Holy Trinity has defied the doctrine and normative procedures of its own church by not only endorsing gay marriage, but doing so without seeking the permission of its bishop.
Last week Archbishop Fred Hiltz said in a letter addressed to his clergy, "It is important to note that the Anglican Church of Canada has not altered its doctrine of marriage as outlined in our prayer books and canons," but hedged that statement with the qualification that Canadian Anglicans "live in a country where the federal government in 2005 approved legislation that allows the marriage of same-gender couples."
The Anglican Church of Canada, which is holding its annual synod in Winnipeg this week, will be considering a resolution that would allow individual congregations to decide for themselves whether or not to bless gay 'marriages', but not in fact to 'marry' same-sex couples. The worldwide Anglican Church is currently deeply divided over the issues of ordaining homosexual clergy and same-sex marriage.
A new survey of U.S. adults who don't go to church, even on holidays, finds 72% say "God, a higher or supreme being, actually exists." But just as many (72%) also say the church is "full of hypocrites."... 44% agree with the statement "Christians get on my nerves."
LifeWay Research, the research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, based in Nashville, conducted the survey of 1,402 "unchurched" adults last spring and summer. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The survey defines "unchurched" as people who had not attended a religious service in a church, synagogue or mosque at any time in the past six months.
Many of the unchurched are shaky on Christian basics, says LifeWay Research director Ed Stetzer. Just 52% agree on the essential Christian belief that "Jesus died and came back to life." And 61% say the God of the Bible is "no different from the gods or spiritual beings depicted by world religions such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.," although Buddhist philosophy has no god and Hindus worship many.
Non-churchgoers "lean to a generic god that fits into every imaginable religious system, even when (systems) contradict one another," ...Most of the unchurched (86%) say they believe they can have a "good relationship with God without belonging to a church." And 79% say "Christianity today is more about organized religion than loving God and loving people."
But despite respondents' critical views of organized religion, Stetzer is optimistic. He cites the finding that 78% would "be willing to listen" to someone tell "what he or she believed about Christianity."
They already know believers — 89% of the unchurched have at least one close friend who is Christian, Stetzer noted. And 71% agreed that "believing in Jesus makes a positive difference in a person's life."
IKITSUKI ISLAND, Japan (Reuters) - One by one, the sacred relics -- a medal of the Virgin Mary, a crucifix and other revered objects -- are taken from a cupboard and placed on an altar for a Christmas Eve rite passed down through centuries from Japan's earliest Christians. Then, kneeling in the simple hall built where martyrs are said to have been burned on this tiny, remote island 400 years ago, five elders murmur chants as they bow and make the sign of the cross. The kimono-clad deacons are descendants of "Kakure Kirishitan," or Hidden Christians, who kept their religion alive on Ikitsuki and in other isolated pockets of Japan during 250 years of suppression, adapting their rites to the demands of secrecy and blending them with local beliefs.
First brought to Japan by Portuguese missionaries in 1549, Christianity was banned a few decades later in 1614, initiating a period of bloody persecution that forced the faithful to choose between martyrdom or hiding their beliefs. Medals or hanging scrolls depicting saints and martyrs, often with Japanese features, were hidden in cupboards as "nando-gami" ("gods in the closet") and only taken out on special days. In an apparent echo of the bread and wine of the Eucharist, elders still share sashimi and sake as part of the Christmas Eve and other ceremonies. Huge "mochi" rice cakes adorn the altar. Transmitted orally and in secret, Latin "oratio" chants, "orasho" in Japanese, lost all but symbolic meaning.
"They preserved the style and form of the Christianity that they inherited, but the teachings were no longer from the Bible and changed into respect for local martyrs, so in that sense it can be seen as a Japanese ethnic religion," said Shigeo Nakazono, curator of an island museum who has studied the "Kakure Kirishitan" for years.
When Roman Catholic missionaries returned with the lifting of the ban in 1873, some Japanese Christians accepted their teachings, but others clung to what they saw as the true faith of their fathers. "'Gotanjo' is the day of Christ's birth. That's no different from Christianity," said Yasutaka Toriyama, 68, who holds the hereditary position of "gobanyaku," or head of a household that traditionally held a group's relics, such as scrolls or medals.
"But while ours is a religion that believes in Mary and Christ, we also believe that our ancestors who suffered persecution are gods."
WASHINGTON -- Hispanics are returning to the Democratic Party after several years of drifting toward the Republicans, with many saying Bush administration policies have been harmful to their community, a poll showed Thursday. By 57 percent to 23 percent, more Hispanic registered voters say they favor Democrats than Republicans, according to a survey by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center.
The survey found that among Hispanic registered voters:
• Forty-one percent said Bush administration policies have been harmful to Hispanics, 16 percent said they have been helpful and 33 percent said they have not had much impact.
• Forty-four percent said Democrats have more concern for Hispanics, 8 percent chose Republicans and another 41 percent said there is no difference.
• Forty-one percent said Democrats do a better job of handling illegal immigration, 14 percent named the GOP and 26 percent said neither.
Among Hispanics who are registered Democrats, 59 percent said they want Hillary Clinton to be their party's presidential candidate, followed by 15 percent who prefer Barack Obama. Among Hispanic Republicans, Rudy Giuliani leads Fred Thompson, 35 percent to 13 percent...
