The American Anglican Council

Dear Friends in Christ,

As Christians, we are living in tumultuous times: old things, some of which were good, are passing away, and new things, some of which are frightening, are coming upon us. Many of us are asking what this means, and how we should live in the midst of this turmoil. What should we accept, what should we fight, and if the latter, how militantly should we conduct the fight? The changes fall into two broad categories – spiritual/religious and secular/civil, so most people are feeling the stress of change from two directions at once.

In the spiritual realm, we are seeing old churches fall into apostasy, marching straight to the gates of Hell in full formal attire. Things that were taught us from the church’s nursery through confirmation and ordination are now discarded by some church leaders. Is Jesus the Christ the only begotten Son of God, the Way, the Truth and the Life, or is he just one of several valid ways to find the “god presence?” I stand by what I was taught, by what I have lived in this teaching of Christ, and the truth that has flowed from it, and I will not budge.

Did Jesus die on the cross in my place? Did he give his life for me and you and the person down the street that I don’t like too much, so that the penalty for our sins will not have a death claim on our eternal souls? I do believe this, and it has changed how I treat other people, especially those I don’t like. To love Jesus, to follow Jesus, means that one’s character, one’s actions, one’s passions are reshaped and molded invisibly, perhaps supernaturally, but discernibly nevertheless.

Other aspects of spiritual change have been the importation into the church of sexual standards and behavior not in agreement with the Word of God. The list is long enough – Christian church leaders with multiple divorces, remarriages and infidelities; the increasing acceptance of homosexuality and related same-sex unions and marriage; and the increasing disintegration of heterosexual marriage and couples living together without marriage. Added to that are the instances where women wish to have children although there is no husband, so they use various means to begin their pregnancy, and raise their child as a single parent.Many circumstances, often heart-breaking, can cause a parent of either gender to be the sole provider and nurturer in child raising, and it is clear how hard this is, and how much they need a helping hand rather than extra criticism. Still, it is God’s best plan that children be raised in a stable, loving, two-parent home where the child learns directly from spiritually and emotionally healthy parents what it means to be a man or a woman. If you have such a family, and you know of a child in a single parent family, why not include the parent and child in some of your family outings or celebrations? Children need good models, especially in this changing and uncertain world.

In reality, I think the sexual issues taken by themselves are tertiary, and the uniqueness of Christ and the authority of Holy Scripture are primary issues, but somehow all these issues seem to be inextricably linked together. The changes in sexual standards mean that Holy Matrimony is under assault both in and out of the church.

In the secular/civil arena, legislation being offered by CONSERVATIVE party leaders in the UK would FORCE all clergy in England to officiate at gay and lesbian civil unions in their churches or be severely punished. Unless we fight vigorously, this will come to North America as well, perhaps in Canada first. Be aware of where your candidates for governmental office stand, and hold them accountable for what they do after they are elected.

Many of our members in the church, perhaps nearly all of us, are in some way suffering from the bursting of the Western economic bubble, with many unemployed or under-employed, many who have lost their homes to foreclosure and many who have seen the value of their homes steeply decline. The Book of Proverbs is full of financial admonitions that we have forgotten to our great cost.

But in the midst of the civil and religious chaos of this world, there are some things I am sure of: I am clear about God and what He is up to, and I want to be a vital part of what God is doing, even in the face of adversity from a world gone crazy. I believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to shape culture and society, not the other way around, and we must keep working on that. Whether we finish this earthly life wealthy or financially impoverished, let us stay the Gospel course to the end, participating with Jesus Christ in His and our Heavenly Father’s business of grace, forgiveness and restoration.

May God bless you in all your steps that keep pace with Him,

+David

By Peter Hitchens, Mailonline

[...]  The American philosopher William Lane Craig had offered to debate Richard Dawkins’s book ‘The God Delusion’ with its author, in his home town (and mine) . Dawkins is around, because he has his own event in another Oxford location on Friday. But despite being in the midst of promoting a new book, Dawkins refused to come. He came up with a series of silly excuses, none of which holds water. And an empty chair was provided for him at the Sheldonian on Tuesday evening, in case he changed his mind and – yes – to mock him for his absence. Details of this controversy are all over the web, and I was impressed by the behaviour of another Oxford atheist, Daniel Came, who said Dawkins should have turned up, and had the guts to be there himself . I might say that I thought his contribution was serious, thoughtful and properly modest about the limits of what we can know. The bumptiousness and raillery of Dawkins and some other anti-God preachers was entirely absent from his discourse, and it was all the better for it.

[...]  Many of you will know that in his failure to face William Lane Craig, Professor Dawkins was not alone. Several other members of Britain’s Atheist Premier League found themselves unable or unwilling (or both) to take him on.

The important thing about this is that what Craig does is simple. He uses philosophical logic, and a considerable knowledge of physics, to expose the shallowness of Dawkins’s arguments. I would imagine that an equally serious Atheist philosopher would be able to give him a run for his money, but Dawkins isn’t that. He would have been embarrassingly out of his depth.

For what Craig achieves is this. He simply retakes an important piece of ground that Christianity lost through laziness and cowardice, rather than because it lacked the weapons to defend it.

He doesn’t (in my view) achieve total victory over the unbelievers. He simply says : ‘In this logic, which you cannot deny, and in this science, which you cannot deny either, it is clear that there is plenty of room for the possibility that God exists and made the universe’. No scientifically literate person, who is informed and can argue logically, can in truth say that he is wrong.

The trouble is that so many ‘official’ Christians have more or less conceded this ground, not being very firm believers themselves, and lacking Craig’s training in logic and science.

Read here

By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonlione.org

VOL: Dear Lord. Things are rough all over.I don’t need to tell you how bad things really are. Can they get any worse, probably, but I would like to ask you a few questions, if you would indulge me.

GOD: Fire away.

VOL: Look, we are losing the culture wars over pansexuality in The Episcopal Church. Heaven knows (if you’ll pardon the pun) but many of us have been hammering home your Word on the subject for quite a while now, but we don’t seem to be getting anywhere. In short, we’re losing.

The Episcopal Church has active homosexual and lesbian laity, priests and bishops and, well, it’s a huge mess. TEC is also exporting its culture wars into the Global South. We need help. Throw us a bone here.

GOD: What sort of bone would you like me to throw you exactly?

VOL: You could remove some of these idiots who are destroying YOUR church.

GOD: You mean knock them off…a heart attack here and there, a nasty terminal cancer… that sort of thing.

VOL: Precisely. Out with the old in with the new young orthodox faithful…the real promise keepers.

GOD: And what makes you think that getting rid of the revisionists, as you call them, will automatically mean that the good guys will prevail?

VOL: Can things get any worse…?

GOD: Of course they can. Has it occurred to you that I am letting evil run its course? You yourself publish statistics saying The Episcopal Church won’t be around in a quarter of a century. What about the death of a denomination don’t you understand?

VOL: Agreed, but in the meantime, a lot of people are getting hurt, tossed out of their parishes, losing jobs, salaries, pensions etc.

GOD: I am aware of all that, even more so than you. I never promised anybody a rose garden. In fact, I said if you follow me, you would have to take up your cross and follow me. My Word is full of words like faithfulness, obedience (even unto death), so what about that don’t YOU understand?

VOL: It’s a huge price to pay. Every day I get stories coming into my e-mail telling me of the hardships people and priests are facing. It’s heart-breaking stuff.

GOD: And you don’t think I know this?

VOL: Of course you do. But we are ONLY HUMAN and frankly it sucks.

GOD: Of course pain sucks as you so indelicately put it. And you might clean up your language.

VOL: Sorry, Lord.

GOD: I caught you reading the Book of Hebrews the other day. You read over and over about certain early martyrs of the church who had been “sawn in half” and “suffered unto blood”, but you have not so suffered. The only bloodletting I have seen in your life has been under anesthesia surrounded by doctors and nurses who saved your sorry life in rather pristine conditions…

VOL: Got it. So what do we do?

GOD: What I have told Christians of every age and generation to do. Be faithful, stop complaining and get on with the biz. I have laid out my plans for you and my church (and it IS mine not yours). All you are called upon to do is to follow them. Being my disciple means being obedient and to keep fighting the good fight and to press on (with all your might) regardless of what you see on the surface. You don’t see the whole picture. I do. You recently wrote that there were more worshipping Christians in China than in all of Europe put together…could you have written THAT five years ago?

VOL: I guess not.

GOD: Look at what I am doing in Africa and Asia and Latin America. Half of Brazil will be evangelical Christians in a decade or so. My word is going forth in Africa in a way that the early missionaries who went there, ministered briefly and then died of Malaria would be ecstatic over. Tens of millions of Africans have discovered my Son in the last decade…in your lifetime. Whole centuries have gone by with very little witness. You are seeing a veritable explosion of the faith around the world. I have put you in the driver’s seat to watch and report.

VOL: I hear you.

GOD: Good. Then leave the results to me; they’re none of your business. TEC is history, the final chapters are being written. I may even let you live long enough to see it fold. In the meantime I have told you what to do. Do it.

Over the course of writing my latest set of articles on the doctrinal positions of the new Presiding Bishop, I’ve collected quite a large body of her interviews, sermons, and articles. The following is a summary of what I have found. I’ve already published some of the material below under other titles, but this is the first time I’ve put it all together in a cohesive summary.

2. Marcionism:

Marcion (excommunicated 144 AD) imagined a god whose character was wholly love and grace. This god, revealed primarily in the New Testament, stood opposed to the god of law revealed primarily in the Old Testament. Using the concepts of “love” and “grace” as normative criteria Marcion argued that the Church must systematically remove those books and passages from the canon that do not fit. The true canon, in other words, would be determined by Marcion’s re-imaged conceptualization of the divine.

In the same way the Presiding Bishop explicitly privileges certain sections of the scriptures over and above others, based on her own predetermined “image” of the divine.

Here is one example from an article she wrote in the fall of 2003 for her diocesan newsletter.

KJS: As Anglicans, we have always asserted that we listen to three primary sources of authority to scripture, to tradition, and to reason. The debate which has risen to the level of the Anglican primates has its roots in putting different emphasis on those three sources of authority. The Episcopal Church’s General Convention acted last summer out of a sense that reason and a broad reading of the Great Commandment required a different conclusion about matters of homosexuality than did strict adherence to seven passages in scripture which seem to speak against it. The other wing of the church says that those seven passages have ultimate authority, and therefore “we will obey the Bible.”

The “Great Commandment” is her criterion for determining the authority and relevance of the rest of scripture because it (the Great Commandment) is consistent with her personal construct or image of God; an “image” formed by “reason” apart from God’s own self-revelation.

Chris Sugden  Evangelicals Now  November 2011

Are we currently seeing at least two Anglican Communions emerge, one led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the other headed by the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church based on a different conception of Christian faith?

Members of The Episcopal Church  (TEC) made a presentation at the International Anglican Liturgical Conference at Canterbury in August where they role-played what a blessing of a same-sex union in church would look like.

TEC is courting the Anglican Church in Southern Africa.

The Presiding Bishop of TEC, Katharine Jefferts Schori addressed the Synod of Bishops of ACSA in Johannesburg on 26 and 27 September.  She spoke of the experience of colonialism and the colonial church in North America.  She was asked by the Bishop of Pretoria about consecrating actively gay bishops.  She said it was the in conformity with TEC canons and she was very sorry. She then left for the airport.

Speaking about the colonial history of ECUSA indicates the importance of resisting colonialism.  The Theological Education in the Anglican Communion programme run from the Anglican Consultative Council presents orthodox Anglican theology in Africa as the legacy of colonial theological imposition designed to pacify the natives. Is the implication that TEC is the vanguard of theological independence and liberty now as it was in 1776?

Some in ACSA were offended by this invitation since Katharine Schori has consecrated a Lesbian Bishop, declared Jesus not to be the only Saviour, sold a church to the Muslims rather than to orthodox Anglicans and presides over a process by which orthodox congregations are deprived of their churches and clergy of their livelihoods.

The process of approving Pastoral Guidelines in the Church of Southern Africa for those in same-sex unions has also begun. The Archbishop of Cape Town wrote to his church about “the development of Pastoral Guidelines in relation to the same-gender civil unions for which South African legislation now provides. Following requests to the Bishops for advice in relation to the pastoral care of people in such unions, and their families, the Synod of Bishops has, over several meetings, produced a document reflecting our common mind on this very sensitive issue.”

Here we see, as in the UK, a process by which the law of the state is used by the Church to accept that the fact of same sex couples in parishes changes pastoral policy, while avoiding doctrinal debates and undermining the doctrine of marriage.

Some may ask what is the problem with blessing this expression of love between one person and another?  Surely God is love.  But the question is what is proper and appropriate love, and what is its legitimate expression?

Same-sex partnerships have now become a defining issue for the church. On the one hand is affirmation of the human desire for love and faithfulness in which God is to be seen. This is a contemporary expression of panentheism – “God-in-everything” in which we are to approve of everything that appears to be good.

On the other hand is the need to have an external point of reference by which to judge issues of truth and goodness.  This is witnessed to in the word or text of tradition. We have literally two religions.

The problem we face is that Rowan Williams is trying to hold on to both positions. He is clear on the liberal side but vague about the external point of reference where he needs to have a much higher view of scripture.

FCA Southern Africa is happy to announce that it will host discussion days:

Human Rights, the Bible and AIDS.

St Martin’s, Bergvliet on Wednesday 2 November From 9am to 4pm.       for planning purposes please register here.

St Agnes Kloof on Friday 4th November 2011, From 9am to 4pm.             for planning purposes please register here

The Christian Family.

A Morning of Teaching on “The Christian Family”  - Dr Vinay Samuel and Dr Chris Sugden.

Saturday 6 November at Durban North. 9am to 12 noon.                         for planning purposes please register here

Luke Moon

Abandoning biblical sexual teaching is an “act of justice”

On Oct 12, Nobel Laureate and retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa defended the Presbyterian Church (USA) decision to accommodate the ordination of practicing homosexuals. In an open letter to Stated Clerk Rev. Grayde Parsons, Archbishop Tutu wrote: “It is incumbent upon all of God’s children to speak out against injustice. It is sometimes equally important to speak in solidarity when justice has been done. For that reason I am writing to affirm my belief that in making room in your constitution for gay and lesbian Christians to be ordained as church leaders, you have accomplished an act of justice.”

Source..

The African Christian Church has grown phenomenally in the last century, from 10 million at the beginning ofthe twentieth century to over 360 million today.

It faces many challenges – obvious ones in the fields of economics and governance, others from the impact of globalization and global youth culture on traditional structures of marriage and family, and the pressure of secular human rights activists. There is also the need to counter the attraction of the prosperity gospel, while all the time exemplifying servant hearted leadership.

The Kenyan Anglican Church has an impressive track record of engaging fully in issues of Religion and Public Policy. The leadership of Archbishop David Gitari in resisting the one party state and abolition of the secret ballot played an important role in the maturing of the Kenyan democracy.

The current Archbishop and Primate of the Anglican Church of Kenya (ACK) is Archbishop Eliud Wabulaka. For many years he was chair of the National Council of Churches. He has played key roles in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan and in the development of the new Kenyan Constitution. He is also the chairman of the GAFCON Primates Council and ordained three clergy from England for the Anglican Mission in England.

Archbishop Wabukala wishes to train the Anglican Church in Kenya and assist other African Anglicans in developing a biblically informed Christian mind in response to the challenges facing the church. Most theological seminaries in Africa have converted themselves to universities producing professionals in different fields for the fast growing economies of East Africa. Archbishop Wabukala is keen on developing St Julian’s Centre, Limuru, as a key theological training resource for the region.

The ACK has an important physical resource in St Julian’s. At its Twentieth Ordinary Session on 30th September 2011, the Provincial Synod affirmed a five year plan to upgrade the facilities at St Julian’s and Archbishop Wabukala is seeking to make it a training and resource centre for the many very active groups in the Kenyan Church to root their activity and policy in biblical and Anglican understanding.

He has invited the Rev Charles and Mrs Gillian Raven to come and assist him in developing training programmes at St Julian’s early in 2012. The Centre has accommodation for a Director which will be contributed.

Charles was ordained in 1988 and for the last ten years he, with Gillian, has led Christ Church Wyre Forest, an Anglican Congregation near Kidderminster. His background is in the banking sector and Gillian is an environmental educationalist.

In recent years Charles has been a member of the GAFCON Theological Resource group which produced “Being Faithful: a commentary on the Jerusalem Statement.” (Latimer Trust 2009) He is the director of SPREAD, the Society for the Promotion of Reformed Evangelical Anglican Doctrine and writes a regular reflection on events in the Anglican Communion. His book ‘Shadow Gospel: Rowan Williams and the Anglican Communion Crisis’ (Latimer Trust 2010) has been welcomed by orthodox Anglicans throughout the Communion and he has made a substantial contribution to ‘Church, Women Bishops and Provision’ (Latimer Trust 2011).

The centre is located in an attractive setting and consists of a farmhouse and buildings with purpose built African style accommodation. There is scope for providing theological and other resources to Church groups, groups of Christian professionals, and senior church executives to support their own meetings and provide specifically tailored programmes.

This work will enable strategic links to be established with other theological training institutions, through which suitable literature can be disseminated, as well as encouraging African writers and theologians to address African theological issues.

This work will be a contribution of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (UK and Ireland), which is linked to the GAFCON Primates Council, to the work of the Council and its chairman. This will also enable the Churches of East Africa and beyond to draw more effectively on the resources of reflection and scholarship from the Anglican Church in the UK, which faces similar challenges.

This project has the support of Crosslinks Mission Society, Reform and the Latimer Trust and we are writing to invite you to partner this development in prayer and with your financial support for Charles and Gillian’s salary and expenses for the initial three year period. The estimated annual budget, including pension contributions, is £24,500.

Charitable Gifts can be made through the Anglican Mainstream web site http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/, marked for the Ravens’ support.

We warmly commend this to you.

Rev Paul Perkin, Chair of theFellowship of Confessing Anglicans (UK and Ireland)

Canon Dr Chris Sugden, Secretary of the Fellowship ofConfessing Anglicans (UK and Ireland)

Bishop John Ellison, AnglicanMission in England Panel of Bishops

Canon Andy Lines, Director, Crosslinks Mission Society

Rev Rod Thomas , Chairman,Reform

Rev Mark Burkill, Chairman, Latimer Trust

Read also: British Vicar to Head Gafcon/FCA Office in Nairobi from Virtueonline