Church STORY
TIME: Remembering the Church’s story as a New Year
begins The
story of the Church over the past 2,000 years is as
complex and exciting as the Old Testament stories. People
learn about God, turn away from God, and come back to God.
There are mysteries, wars, divisions, heroes and
heroines, romance, horror and drama. Theologians
write millions of words to explain scripture. It
is a story that takes us from Pentecost and the age of
Apostles through the Church fathers such as St Ignatius,
the Creeds and all the debates around them, right up to
the time of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Billy Graham and Mother
Teresa. St Augustine of Hippo is part of it; so are
Thomas Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, Michelangelo and John
Milton. So
also are the crusades, the Inquisition, the Reformation,
the division between Eastern and Western churches, and
the translation of the Bible into 1,900 languages. Humanity
evolves, Christianity evolves. For Church history
is a story in itself, telling the tale of humanity’s
path towards God and all stumbling and wrong turnings
taken along the way. Each century could be a
chapter where we meet different characters and hear how
they moved the story along. It
is a story without an ending, only a number of beginnings.
It mirrors the development of human spirituality. Throughout,
the written words of scripture, of hymns and liturgy
emerge, as do church rules, guidance, beliefs and
promises, and the spoken words of prayer, preaching and
the Eucharist. Once
upon a time: over the past months we have explored ways
in which story captures our imagination and nurtures our
faith. And we ourselves are an ongoing part of that
story of God’s love for the world, shown to us in
Jesus the Christ. In following him as disciples, we
continue to live that story today. Acts
For Today: ‘The Growing Church in the Acts of the
Apostles’ No.
1: 'We
have to learn what it means to be a church on the margins
rather than at the centre, to operate as a movement
rather than an institution, and to become unconventional
and surprising rather than predictable' (Stuart Murray). By
looking at the church in Acts we can see vital ways in
which today’s church can become more of a movement
rather than an institution. The first Christians saw
themselves as agents of the missio dei, being sent out by
God to live and proclaim his kingdom and Christ's
lordship to the world. Therefore, the life of their
church was shaped by its mission, rather than the other
way round, as we see today!! The
UP:
Worship ‘they
continued to meet together at the temple courts, and
broke bread in their homes’ IN:
Community ‘all
the believers were together and had everything in common’ OUT:
‘they
gave to everyone as they had need and enjoyed the favour
of all the people’ Significantly,
as a result of this balance the church grew spontaneously:
‘the Lord added to their number daily those who were
being saved’ (47). Therefore,
for growing churches today we need to maintain an
emphasis on each one of these three directions in our
church life. In terms of our own church, are we achieving
such a balance? Where are our strengths, and what aspects
do we need to be developing? Standing
with the Peace-makers British
Christians are working for peace between They
are taking part in the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme
in This
year twelve people from Some
Ecumenical Accompaniers take turns in watching the gates
which give farmers limited access to fields in the area.
“Before we arrived,” said John Lynes, “the
Israeli security guards often hassled the farmers. These
fields are their daily livelihood… Palestinians are
glad to have the EAs with them as we certainly reduce the
likelihood and level of potential violence. We also use
our contacts with media and human rights organisations to
share information and apply indirect pressure on the
Israeli Defence Force.” Protection
through presence is one of the main objectives of these
brave volunteers who put themselves potentially in harm’s
way. They also support acts of non-violent
resistance alongside Christian and Muslim Palestinians
and Israeli peace activists. In addition, they engage in
public policy advocacy and report violations of human
rights. “Israelis
are barred from entering the Palestinian towns to see
what is happening,” Katharine Maycock, a former
accompanier, said. “They live with the real fear
that a bus may explode anywhere and at any time. They don’t
know that half the Palestinians live on food assistance
because of imposed closures. Equally, many Palestinians
are unaware that 100,000 Israeli families will soon fall
under the poverty level, due to cutbacks on welfare
spending. Yet the terror felt in Tel Aviv or Anyone
wanting to have more information or make a donation
should write to Laura Stagnaro, EAPPI, Freepost, Friends
House, The
If
you should find the perfect church If
you should find the perfect church If
you should find the perfect church But
since no perfect church exists, Of
course it’s not the perfect church, What
fools we are to flee the past (from
The Virger) 'Where
your treasure is, there your heart will be also.' Late
last year, the Archbishop of Canterbury addressed a
service at Westminster Abbey that marked the 300th
anniversary of Queen Anne's Bounty. Money and the
Church of England is an issue very much on people’s
minds at present, and so we offer here some extracts from
Dr Rowan Williams’ address. Queen
Anne's Bounty was established in order to help the Church
of England to be holy. An extravagant statement? No,
because it was a move to assist the church to be itself. The
situation that prevailed at the beginning of the
eighteenth century was more chaotic and unjust than we
can easily imagine: a good study for anyone who thinks
that our current financial anxieties are uniquely awful... The
Church of England had been stripped of its assets by
greedy monarchs and gentry ever since the first days of
the Reformation. … clergy were forced into pluralism
or into secular trade to stay afloat, or were at the
mercy of unscrupulous patrons… Queen
Anne began to make it possible for the Church to
understand itself properly again; to make its own
decisions about doctrine and pastoral deployment, to
regain self-respect as a supernaturally grounded body,
not a badly funded department of state. The
Church very slowly recovered some sense that to put
wealth at the service of the most needy was a central
aspect of the gospel vision. Without all this, holiness,
corporate holiness for the community, could not be
realised. Without
Queen Anne's Bounty and all that flowed from it,
including the final merging into the Church
Commissioners, the Church of England would have been
stuck with the arbitrary, uneven and distorted patterns
imposed by both local and national rapacity. Where
your treasure is...The Church's disposal of its resources
is about where its heart is, now as much as three hundred
years ago. And if we ask now what the priorities should
be… the answer is pretty clear. The
calling is to assist the Church to be itself, to be holy.
And the means for realising this holiness is to do with
freeing the Church - freeing it to shape its future and
to reveal its character as Christ's Body by a more
generous and just distribution of resources. The
successors of Queen Anne's Governors are now asking, more
boldly and clearly than perhaps ever before, how this is
to be made a reality. But
they cannot answer such a question unless the entire
Church of England moves into a deeper awareness of the
kind of Christian community it believes that God wants it
to be. The
Church Commissioners are the people to whom the
particular ministry has been given of realising the
vision that the Church has of its future. And the Church
at large needs, I suspect, to catch up here. There
is still in many quarters an assumption that the
Commissioners are little more than managers of funds,
who, like a lot of such people, dislike accountability…
But if there were ever any truth in that rather bleak
picture,… things have undoubtedly moved on in recent
years. The
question from the Commissioners is more and more
insistently, 'How can we serve the Church of the future?'
And, as I have said, that can only be answered if English Anglicans
overall have a clearer picture of that Church. What
might such a picture look like? … the trends that
are gathering force are these. We
know that our much loved and treasured parochial system
is not equipped to meet all the challenges of young,
mobile populations, whose patterns of life and work are
not those of their parents' and grandparents' generations.
We
need to ask what resources can be put at the service of
new things – not just in the form of supplementary
funding for parish ministry but in the shape of seed
money for mission initiatives. The
Commissioners' commitment to 'the cure of souls in
parishes' will need to be understood generously and
imaginatively - though we should be idiots if we
attempted to reinvent the wheel, or to tear up our
history and leave the front line of parish ministry exposed
or neglected. It
is for dioceses to think creatively about how to connect
the old and the new, to encourage traditional parishes to
share prayer and energy with new initiatives in church
life, and above all to help break down the perennial
suspicion between the historic mainstream and the risk-taking
innovators. And
that other aspect of Queen Anne's concern, the rectifying
of injustice between rich and poor communities in the
Church, is also a contemporary priority. Formulae are
hard to devise, and constantly subject to revision;
… and some will rightly ask questions about the
effects of appearing to penalise the growing and
flourishing churches. But
ultimately, we cannot pretend to be living as the Body of
Christ if we do not constantly scrutinise what we have
that can and should be at the service of others… Our
treasure is, by most of the contemporary world's
standards, modest, but it is real and effective matter
for God to use. Queen Anne knew that the Church needed
such treasure… Our prayer today is that the
Commissioners and all who serve the Church's
housekeeping, its oikonomia as the Greeks said, may have
a heart ready to follow the vision Christ is teaching us.
Archbishop
urges: Secular States need to be comfortable with public
faith The
Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has said
that secular states need to be more comfortable with
public and outward displays of religious conviction. Delivering
the Chatham Lecture in "Increasingly
what we see, in the actual policies of some states and in
the rhetoric of the political classes in other states, is
a presumption that the rational secular state is menaced
by the public or communal expression of religious
loyalty,” said Dr Williams. “It
is not a matter of one sacred order (empire or nation
state or religio-political unit) facing a rival, but of a
sense that the public space of society is necessarily
secular - that is, necessarily a place in which no local
or sectional symbolic activity is permissible." Setting
the argument both in the historical context of religious
conflicts and also the current debate about Islam, Dr
Williams cautions against accepting the notion that
religion has a negative effect on the life of the state. Hostility
comes from fear, he argues, and the state needs to accept
that religious belief is neither a rival loyalty nor
simply a matter of personal conviction. In dealing with
the religious element, the state inevitably becomes
involved in the rights of whole communities who have
their own part to play in decision-making. Religion's
value to the state comes in bringing its perspectives to
that process. Faith
communities, he argues, have to construct 'alternative
possibilities' within the body politic: "...the
Church as a political agent has to be a community capable
of telling its own story… While not a simple rival
to the secular state, it will inevitably raise questions
about how the secular state thinks of loyalty and indeed
of social unity or cohesion." Dr
Williams concluded: "We do not have to be
bound by the mythology of purely private
conviction and public neutrality and... the future
of religious communities in modern society should show us
some ways forward that do not deliver us either into
theocracy or into an entirely naked public space." How
do we find the next Archbishop of The
selection process for the next Archbishop of York is
underway. Here’s how it works: The
Archbishop of York is appointed by the Sovereign on the
advice of the Prime Minister, as with the appointment of
any diocesan bishop. The same procedures of consultation
within the Church of England are followed in making this
appointment as when any diocesan see falls vacant with
wider consultations to take account of the Archbishop's
national role. The
Vacancy-in-See Committee of the Diocese of York meets to
identify the needs of the diocese and to elect six of
their number to serve on the Crown Nominations Commission.
The Vacancy-in-See committee is a standing committee
elected by the members of the The
Prime Minister's Appointments Secretary and the
Archbishops' Secretary for Appointments conduct
consultations within the diocese, the Information
from the diocesan statement of needs and the secretaries'
consultations is used to form a picture of the demands of
the archiepiscopate and the type of person best suited to
match its needs. This information is used by the Crown
Nominations Commission as it considers whom it wishes to
put forward to the Prime Minister. The
Commission meets together for a period of work, prayer
and discussion to consider who best meets the needs of
the role. At
the end of the meeting, members vote in a secret ballot
to identify two individuals to put forward to the Prime
Minister. When the two names have been identified, a
further vote is taken, again by secret ballot, in order
to allow the Commission to express a preference between
them, should it wish to do so. The
Prime Minister may select the first of the two names put
to him (assuming that the Commission has expressed a
preference between the two names put forward); or he may
select the second; or he may ask the Commission to re-consider
and submit further names (in which case the Commission
would need to meet again). Once the Prime Minister has
reached his decision he commends the candidate to the
Queen. It
will be a number of months before this work is completed
and the next Archbishop of York can be named. Women
Bishops in the Church of England? Women
Bishops in the Church of England?, the report of the
House of Bishops' Working Party on Women in the
Episcopate, was published late last year. The General
Synod will discuss the report in February. Women
Bishops in the Church of England? is a survey of the
theological issues the Church needs to consider as it
decides whether or not to ordain women bishops. The
important theological issues covered by the Rochester
Report will be debated by the Synod in February. The
Synod will also have the opportunity, on the basis of a
motion from the House of Bishops, to consider what the
next steps should be. Synod
will be invited to agree that, following a period of
reflection, there should be a decision at the July Synod
on whether to embark on the process of removing the legal
obstacles to ordaining women as bishops The
members of the Working Party, women and men, represent a
wide range of views, and in the course of its meetings,
the Working Party heard evidence from representative
groups and individuals and received some 500 items of
written evidence. In
its task it has borne three key questions in mind: *
Would it be right in principle for women to be bishops? *
If the answer is 'yes', is this the right time for the
Church of England to ordain women bishops? *
If it is the right time, how should women bishops be
introduced and what provisions should be made for those
conscientiously unable to accept their ministry? Women
Bishops in the Church of England? examines the
fundamental issues that the Church will need to bear in
mind as it seeks to reach a decision. It goes back to the
Bible itself and to the role of bishops in the The
chapter that looks at the options facing the Church does
not come down in favour of any one of them. Rather it
focuses on the issues that need to be addressed in
preparation for the debate and leaves it to Synod to
decide the way ahead. Women
Bishops in the Church of England? Church House
Publishing, £12.99, is available from all Christian
bookshops and Church House Bookshop at www.chbookshop.co.uk |