News Round Up Archbishop
- difficult days ahead
"It
is my hope that the church in
Dr Williams said that the effects of recent developments at the ECUSA General Convention were being felt throughout the Communion and there was a need for the Primates to meet to consider them. "I am clear that the anxieties caused by recent developments have reached the point where we will need to sit down and discuss their consequences. I hope that in our deliberations we will find that there are ways forward in this situation which can preserve our respect for one another and for the bonds that unite us. "I hope we can use the time between now and then to reflect, to pray, to consult and to take counsel." Power, money, sex and time Being human demands greater wisdom in handling power, money, sex and time. People and societies urgently need to develop greater wisdom if they are to understand what it is to be human in the face of today's pressures and modern science. What is now possible or at least thinkable was not possible at the time traditional doctrines were being developed, says the Doctrine Commission in its latest report, ‘Being human: a Christian understanding of personhood illustrated with reference to power, money, sex and time’. The Commission chose to write about power, money, sex and time 'both because nobody can be a human being today without developing a wise way of understanding and coping with these realities, and because of the wider implications which wisdom in those areas might have for other aspects of human being in this new time'. "Powerful forces converge and conflict in the spheres of power, money, sex and time - the stakes are very high," says the report Being human. "Unless these forces are understood and responded to with insight and good sense then individuals and whole families, communities, nations and regions - ultimately human life itself - are at risk. Lack of wisdom and understanding damages or destroys people, societies, and the natural ecology that sustains life." On power, the report says: "We want to say that the God who gives us life, the 'God of power and might', draws us into a surprising and adventurous refashioning of what it might mean for us to exercise God-given powers of body, mind and spirit. We are not left at the mercy of what the concept of power has become in western thought - an ominous, looming and predominantly negative idea." On money, the Commission wants "to raise alertness to Jesus' teaching that it is impossible to serve God and Mammon, specifically in the context of what money has become in the modern world. When a human invention with many positive features becomes a mostly invisible controlling force in our lives, then it is time for the wise to take notice". On sex, the report says: "The basic thing to be learnt is that it is created to be 'a whole-person relationship of love and loyalty involving body and self'. We teach a realism about the goodness and joy of sex together with the ways it can go wrong. This is set in the context of God's engagement with the world, and especially the encompassing reality of that engagement: the covenant relationship with God, other people and creation." Time is the most abstract and difficult topic tackled by the Doctrine Commission, which draws attention to 'the radicality of the project of living in and with time as a good gift of God to us in creation'. "Far from being a 'spare time' activity, in a life dominated by clocks," says Being human, "worship opens us out onto the 'time of our lives', creating and nurturing habits of life in attentiveness and joy. There is here, we believe, a wisdom to be absorbed by means of what we call 'the temporal virtues': patience and faithfulness, forgiveness and gratitude, alertness and rest, repentance and hope, and wisdom and improvisation." In tackling these specific subjects, the Commission also tries to commend an approach to being human which is more widely relevant, particularly in light of scientific advances. "The basic datum which all the traditions of theological anthropology presupposed," says the report, "was that being conceived was a kind of lottery, the results of which one simply had to accept. But it is that 'given' which has been taken away. The question now is, is there any reason why we should not improve on the results of the accidents of conception?" Being human: a Christian understanding of personhood illustrated with reference to power, money, sex and time is published by Church House Publishing, price £9.95 and is available from all Christian bookshops and Church House Bookshop, 31 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BN, tel. 020-7898 1305, e mail bookshop@c-of-e.org.uk, or on the web at: www.chbookshop.co.uk (mail order available). Christians do have more ‘luck’, survey reveals Christians lead ‘luckier’ lives and cope better with ill fortune, according to the results of the first experiment to examine the relationship between religious belief and ‘luck’. The experiment, carried out by The Luck Factor, The Church of England Newspaper and The Methodist Recorder, found that Christians are more likely to chat to strangers, meditate or enjoy a time of quiet, expect others to be pleasant, and believe that negative events will eventually work out for the best. In the experiment Christians strongly endorsed the statement ‘I sometimes chat to strangers when standing in a supermarket or bank line’, a result which suggests that Christians are more ‘outgoing than most’, explained psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman of The Luck Factor, a study of the scientific reasons behind why some people seem luckier than others. “This is likely to result in them having more ‘lucky’ encounters than others,” and they connected well with the people around them,” he said. Professor Wiseman also said that the Christians’ expectation of others to be ‘pleasant, friendly and helpful’ become “a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Also, as Christians strongly agreed with the statement that ‘negative events will work out well for me in the long run”, “This suggests that Christians are more likely than others to be able to cope well with adversity. In short, the results suggest that a Christian’s beliefs and overall lifestyle will have a significant effect on the factors that go into having a ‘lucky’ life. The Professor has concluded that religious beliefs can “help people encounter more seemingly ‘lucky’ life events, and cope with apparent ill-fortune.” CMS calls for help in fighting the Lord’s Army The
Church Mission Society has launched a campaign to break
the international silence and failure to take action over
the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern The
charity says that thousands of abducted children have
been abandoned to a 17-year-old ordeal at the hands of
the vicious cult. 800,000 people northern CMS has
therefore hosted a six-week national tour by the Bishop
of Kitgum, the Rt Rev Benjamin Ojwang, who began by
delivering a petition to Meet a friend at the airport Friends
International, an evangelical ministry working with
international students, is running its Meet and Greet
welcome scheme at
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