Sundays @ 7 Now at Holy Trinity!

Sundays @ 7 now calls Holy Trinity Episcopal Church “home.” Holy Trinity is located at 1832 W. Dean Avenue in West Central Spokane and is the oldest, continuously-active Christian church in Spokane.

Keep Holy Trinity and its people in your prayers as they endeavor to undergo a total restart in the face of changing demographics and complex neighborhood issues. Come and join us as together we figure out what it means to be “church” in this time and this place. Get involved and help lead us into our next stage of life and service in West Central. See you there!

 

This Just In: “You reap what you sow!”

Ya know, I’m all for folks asking tough questions and coming up with even tougher answers, assuming this process of questioning and answering comes with enough humility to consider that other faithful Christians just might be doing the same kind of tough questioning and answering themselves — all the while claiming Jesus as Lord.

As some of you may know, this epistemological humility — not to mention Christian charity — has been missing from much recent conversation in The Episcopal Church, and from both sides of the aisle. The difference, however, is that some folks have decided that TEC no longer holds a valid claim to communion with Canterbury — that is, TEC has “walked away from the Anglican Communion.” Those who believe this to be true — predominantly from the more socially and theologically conservative side of the aisle — have decided that, in order for them to remain in communion with Canterbury, they must jump ship from TEC and hope to be picked up by the passing ships of other boundary-jumping bishops from around the globe. Most have been successful in this effort — being rescued by the likes of Uganda, Nigeria, and Recife (Brazil). Strangely enough, though, this emergence of trans-geographic dioceses has created its own tangled mess. Seems the schismatics are beginning to recognize the fruits of division — confusion, indirection, and fear.

One wonders how Archbishop Kolini of Rwanda can, with any integrity, suggest that there’s a unity which transcends ecclesial structure — the unity of ‘mission’ — our common concern for the world in which we live. If I understand our Christian unity correctly — and I’m open to being corrected here — it is rooted in the “gift” of unity we receive as baptized members of the Body of Christ — the unity of being “One in the Spirit” — what Anglicanism refers to as “communion.” They both work together — you can’t really choose one and not the other. Believe it or not, though, that’s just what the likes of CANA, ACN, AAC, and AMiA have done. They’ve chosen to abort the fundamental reality of our unity in Christ, and are attempting, now, to take the high road of Mission in Christ’s Name. Eventually — and you can count on this — some group among the schismatics will decide that a historically excluded group is worthy of affirmation and care, and some other group among the schismatics will disagree. Because they don’t agree on the trajectory of God’s love for the world — and because they’ve demonstrated a lack of belief and commitment to our spiritual unity in the Body of Christ — they will choose to further sever ties with each other, and further divide the Body they so strongly profess to care for.

How do you feel about worshiping in a church with people whose beliefs and/or behaviors you disagree with? Have you experienced this? How have you dealt with it before? Are there limits to your willingness to “stick together”? How do your understandings of God and Church play into it?

Read on, and see what you think. Peace, Paul

Jacksonville (Fla.) Times-Union
Jan. 20, 2007

Anglicans raise questions of unity

By JEFF BRUMLEY
The Times-Union
The Anglican conference concluding today in Jacksonville was described as Christian unity in action.
About 1,300 to 1,600 participants of the Anglican Mission in America conference shared a zeal for spreading the gospel and a repulsion from the Episcopal Church’s growing acceptance of openly gay clergy
and same-sex blessings.

But between workshops on topics like church planting and creating effective children’s ministries, the buzz among vendors’ tables and coffee kiosks often centered on where the whole Anglican experiment
in America is headed. With about a dozen national organizations representing Anglicans who have quit the Episcopal Church, plus nearly as many foreign bishops overseeing parishes in the U.S., many worry the movement is becoming irreparably fragmented. “It’s all part of the balkanization of the Episcopal Church,” said David Virtue of Virtueonline.org, an Internet-based Anglican news and commentary site that boasts 4 million readers.

Theologically conservative Episcopalians left the denomination after 2003 when an openly gay priest was elected the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire. In doing so, they sought oversight from like-minded Anglican bishops in places like Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. On the First Coast [sic], former Episcopalians from more than a dozen congregations have accepted oversight from bishops in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Brazil.

Meanwhile, at least 10 national Anglican organizations have been formed, including the Anglican Communion Network, the American Anglican Council, the Anglican Province of America and the Anglican Mission in America. Some fear the longer congregations are led by different foreign dioceses, the harder it will eventually become to draw them together under a common banner.

Anglican parishes are stuck in a “survival mode” as long as that fragmented state exists, said the Rev. Jim McCaslin, a priest who led All Souls in Mandarin out of the Episcopal Church and into a Ugandan diocese in 2006. The church also is one of about 20 in the Anglican Alliance of North Florida, and McCaslin is the leader of Anglican Communion Network congregations in the region. It is crucial that the communion’s world leaders create a new hierarchical structure for Anglicans in the U.S. and Canada – hopefully during their triennial meeting next month in Tanzania, McCaslin said. “If they don’t, that leaves you with a fractured church with unity in the gospel but no structural unity,” he said.

Such a new organization could exist beside the Episcopal Church within the Anglican Communion, Virtue and some priests at the convention said. But some of the overseas archbishops attending the Jacksonville conference hinted that Anglicans in America may have to adjust their expectations.

“To me, structure is the wrong way, the wrong direction,” Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, founder of the Anglican Mission in America, told the Times-Union. Kolini said he believes an important kind of unity already exists – that which unites Christians from different denominations in fighting problems such as AIDS.

The Rev. Sam Pascoe, rector of the Kolini-led Grace Anglican Church in Orange Park, said a new denomination is necessary eventually. Otherwise “it’s just complete disintegration and everyone goes their own way and you end up with hundreds of different jurisdictions,” Pascoe said.

 

Politics and Faith

Now that the gears of the political machine have shifted once again — from election to installation — it’s worth paying close attention to the language of public perception and opinion.  I’m especially cognizant, here, of the PR gymnastics our new Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, is training for.  In a recent news article about her celebration party in D.C., one of Pelosi’s PR strategists noted how important it will be to frame her public image as a loving, East Coast grandmother before her political opposition is able to frame her as a  radical, California feminist.  How strange, I thought, that she couldn’t possibly be framed positively as both. 

So, too, with Sen. Barack Obama, who’s quietly waging his own PR battle over his choice to be honest and transparent, in his first book, about his drug use as a young person.  Some criticize his former indiscretion.  Others praise his openness.

So all this got me to wondering, once again, how it is that faithful Christians are to wade through this barrage of PR strategy?  On what bases are we to select our elected leaders, given the manipulation of their public images, both for and against?  

What values do you look for in your elected leadership?

What kind of character do you look for?

What issues are the most important to you as a person of faith? 

 

3000 and counting

What are folks doing to commemorate this horrific landmark?  What are folks doing to creatively and sensitively express support and concern for our soldiers, while at the same time attempting to speak a prophetic and constructive word about the sacrificial witness of Jesus, whose violent death on the cross was to be forever, for you and for me, God’s definitive ‘no’ to our preponderance to agitate and escalate the cycle of violence — inner-personally and inter-personally, locally and globally?

I know and trust that we share a fundamental vocation as Christians here in this time and place to bear witness to God — shining light in the darkness.  What it will look like for us, I don’t really know. But I think it’s time we start thinking and acting like we believe God actually has something to say about the state of the world we live in. How shall we live? What shall we do? Who’s active on this in Spokane? How can we support and encourage each other? 

 

Washington Post Article: What say ye?

Episcopalians Against Equality, By Harold MeyersonWednesday, December 20, 2006; A23

Don’t look now, but Virginia is seceding again.

On Sunday nine Episcopal parishes in Virginia, including the one where George Washington served as a vestryman, announced that they had voted to up and leave the U.S. Episcopal Church to protest its increasingly equal treatment of homosexuals.

In 2003 an overwhelming majority of the nation’s Episcopal bishops ratified the selection of a gay bishop by the New Hampshire diocese.

This past June the church’s general convention elevated Nevada Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to the post of presiding U.S. bishop. Jefferts Schori is the first woman to head a national branch of the Anglican Church. Worse yet, she has allowed the blessing of same-sex couples within her diocese (which includes the ever theologically innovative Las Vegas).

Whether it was the thought of a woman presiding over God’s own country club or of gays snuggling under its eaves, it was all too much for a distinct minority of Episcopalians. The dissident parishes in the Virginia diocese contain only about 5 percent of the state’s parishioners. But it’s the church the defectors have latched on to that makes this schism news.

In slamming the door on their American co-religionists, the two largest parishes, which are in Fairfax City and Falls Church, also announced their affiliation with the Episcopal Church of Nigeria. The presiding Nigerian archbishop, Peter Akinola, promotes legislation in his country that would forbid gays and lesbians to form organizations or to eat together in restaurants and that would send them to jail for indulging in same-gender sexual activity. Akinola’s agenda so touched the hearts of the Northern Virginia faithful that they anointed him, rather than Jefferts Schori, as their bishop.

Peer pressure played a role, too. Explaining the decision to leave the American church, Vicki Robb, a Fairfax parishioner and Alexandria public relations exec, told The Post’s Bill Turque and Michelle Boorstein that the church’s leftward drift has made it “kind of embarrassing when you tell people that you’re Episcopal.” It must be a relief to finally have an archbishop who doesn’t pussyfoot around when gays threaten to dine in public.

The alliance of the Fairfax Phobics with Archbishop Restaurant Monitor is just the latest chapter in the global revolt against modernity and equality and, more specifically, in the formation of the Orthodox International. The OI unites frequently fundamentalist believers of often opposed faiths in common fear and loathing of challenges to ancient tribal norms. It has featured such moving tableaus as the coming together in the spring of 2005 of Israel’s chief rabbis, the deputy mufti of Jerusalem, and leaders of Catholic and Armenian churches, burying ancient enmities to jointly condemn a gay pride festival. The OI’s founding father was none other than Pope John Paul II, who spent much time and energy endeavoring to reconcile various orthodox Christian religions and whose ecumenism prompted him to warn the Anglicans not to ordain gay priests.

John Paul also sought to build his church in nations of the developing world where traditional morality and bigotry, most especially on matters sexual, were in greater supply than in secular Europe and the increasingly egalitarian United States, and more in sync with the Catholic Church’s inimitable backwardness. Now America’s schismatic Episcopalians are following in his footsteps — traditionalists of the two great Western hierarchical Christian churches searching the globe for sufficiently benighted bishops.

In recent years Anglican churches have experienced their greatest growth in the developing world, which could tilt the entire global Anglican Communion toward more traditionalist norms. Only 13 of the

38 national churches within the communion ordain women as priests; only three — the United States, New Zealand and Canada — ordain women as bishops.

The American church, by contrast, has largely paralleled the transformation of Rockefeller Republicans into liberal, Democratic secularists. The old joke of New York politicos was that Jews had the incomes of Episcopalians but voted like Puerto Ricans. Now it’s the Episcopal prelates who are voting like Puerto Ricans, or, more precisely, like liberal Jews. Some traditionalists fear the church isn’t really theistic anymore. The comforting middle ground of the church of yore — affirming the equality of some, not discussing the equality of others — has eroded as the demands of women and gays and lesbians could no longer be dismissed.

The irony is that the Episcopal Church owes its existence directly to the American Revolution; it broke away from the Church of England during the war and was reborn as a distinctly American entity between 1784 and 1789. Fully two-thirds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were active or (like Washington) nominal Anglicans, and, having repudiated the political authority of the king of England, they could scarcely have gone on affirming his ecclesiastical authority.

The founders of the church believed, within the context of their time, that all men were created equal. Today’s defectors have thought it over in the context of our own time, and decided that they’re not.

meyersonh@washpost.com

What do you think?  Is this article fair?  What’s it missing, if anything?

 

Headlines: U.S. Catholic bishops, Baptists specify policy on gays

Strangely enough, right there, side-by-side on page A4 of the 11/15/06 Spokesman-Review — two articles reporting on two denominations’ moves this week to further limit the dignity and humanity of glbt individuals — many of whom are also our glbt brothers and sisters in Christ. 

The Baptist State Convention of North Carolina has so concerned itself with the glbt “issue” that it has actually voted to alter its polity — moving from a primarily congregational model in which independent member churches support each other and consult with each other about matters of faith and doctrine to a new model in which independent member churches can actually be excluded from what has heretofore been a freewill sharing of common life.  Remorseful, I’m sure, convention spokesman Norman Jameson said, “It’s not something that we wanted to do, but homosexuality is the only sin that has its own advocacy group.”  What about the ‘judgment group’?  Lest we feel too proud of ourselves, there are those in the Anglican Communion who are making moves to shift our polity in similar fashion.  God help us.

And the US/RC Bishop’s Conference has produced a formal statement on homosexuality in the Church, “Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination,” which they describe as “positive, pastoral, and welcoming” in its tone and pastoral trajectory toward the glbt community, whose sexuality the statement refers to as “disordered.”  Bishop Arthur Serratelli from NJ, wishing to calm the hearts and minds of those who might find this whole notion offensive, noted that “Its [the document's] starting point is the intrinsic human dignity of every person and God’s love for every person.”  Not only do several RC glbt advocacy groups think this is “flat-out wrong,” but so do I, personally.  Were I to perfect Bp. Serratelli’s comments, I would add that, in fact, the document’s starting point is the much-debated (and fundamentally flawed) notion of “natural law” in which it is presumed that all “natural” (i.e. “good”) sex is only and always pro-creative — and never simply for human joy and pleasure.  The bishops are simply speaking from within their Thomist paradigm of “right order,” from whose perspective homosexual sex is clearly “disordered” b/c it can never result in procreation.  From the same sheet of music (at least they’re trying to be consistent here), the bishops also issued a statement condemning “safe sex” (i.e. contraception-aided) for the same reason as noted above.  Note, however, the subtle difference in nuance – whether it’s a reporting inaccuracy or not, I don’t know: The bishops are “telling gays to be celibate,” while they’re “encouraging [straight] Catholics to obey the church’s widely ignored ban on artificial contraception.”  Fascinating — hurtful — expected.  At least all parties concerned have been directed to “examine their consciences to decide if they are worthy of receiving Holy Communion.”  Fortunately, we Episcopalians (at least Rite I Episcopalians) already know we aren’t “worthy,” and we tell God we know this and in so doing tell God and ourselves that we know it isn’t about us and our “unworthiness” but about the immeasureable mercy and love of our God. 

Let’s keep our RC and Baptist brothers and sisters in our prayers this week, as well as our glbt brothers and sisters in whatever spiritual home they find themselves.  May we all find God’s Will and Way forward and, if possible, find ourselves denigrating fewer and fewer people along the way.

 

Daily Ruminations

The saints are what they are, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else.  It gives them a clarity of compassion that can find good in the most terrible criminals.  It delivers them from the burden of judging others, condemning other men.  It teaches them to bring the good out of others by compassion, mercy and pardon.  A man becomes a saint not by conviction that he is better than sinners but by the realization that he is one of them, and that all together need the mercy of God!                                         Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Who are the saints in your life?  What makes them so?  How have they affected your life of faith?