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Last Tango in Canterbury? * CofE Evangelicals Rejoice in Synod Election Results * CofE Bishop George Bell was a Pedophile * PB Curry's Mother Influenced by C.S. Lewis * Nashotah House Sees a Ghost * TSM Sees Big Gains in Enrollment

"The Church of England is not in terminal decline despite its past and current failures. The dead wood is being pruned, and the new shoots that are growing up in its place will bear plenty of fruit if they are watered well and allowed to flourish. As we have seen time and again, God refuses to let his church slip away. The Church of England is not dying--it is regenerating." --- Gillian Scott

"The base measure of dialogue in America today is to grant respect to the legitimacy of all positions at all times, no matter how absurd, amoral, or ill-informed, so long as they are popular and acceptable and favored by the majority of Tweeted responses." --- Ben Domenech

"Why should they be impartial? What is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope?" --- G. K. Chesterton

"Jesus confronted evil. Jesus was a witness to the truth of God. Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father except by me" (John 14:6). Jesus said, "I am the light of the world. He who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life" (John 8:12). Jesus said, "My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you" (John 15:12). That is no relative truth. It is either true or not. If it is true then it is true for all people, everywhere, for all time." --- Ted Schroder

"I think the one thing missing from the [Roman Catholic] Synod is a prophetic voice-- a prophetic voice where we just call the sin a sin like John the Baptist. But this is a pastoral synod, so we're talking in terms of pastoral, like what can we do and this and that. But then he came back to his prophetic point again and said, 'But I don't think pastoral is the best way to be prophetic.'' --- Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of South Africa

"God's full revelation. We have much more to learn, but God has no more to reveal than he has revealed in Jesus Christ." --- John R.W. Stott

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
www.virtueonline.org
October 23, 2015

Will it be the last tango in Canterbury for the Anglican Communion next January? Issues that have divided the Anglican Communion have persisted for nearly three decades, and the Archbishop of Canterbury does not want to leave a divided Communion to his successor.

In Cairo this past week, some 13 GAFCON archbishops heeded Archbishop Justin Welby's call to attend next year. However, they made it quite clear that ACNA Archbishop Foley Beach will come as a fully recognized Anglican archbishop and the ACNA should be acknowledged as a full partner province of the Anglican Communion.

In Cairo, Welby was greeted warmly by the orthodox wing of the Communion, but he made no comment on the actions of the GAFCON archbishops. Archbishop Foley Beach told VOL that he was warmly greeted by Welby without the ABC giving any signals that he would now or in the foreseeable future recognize the ACNA as a full partner province or Beach as a full partner archbishop recognized by the Anglican Communion.

In that event, such a decision would have to go through the Anglican Communion Office and into the hands of its General Secretary, Josiah Fearon. It is by no means certain that that would support such a decision since the ACO's biggest paymaster is the American Episcopal Church. Josiah Fearon would never bite the hands that feed him. Both TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada are decidedly opposed to any form of recognition by Canterbury. Notably absent from the primates' meeting in Cairo was Nigerian Archbishop Nicholas Okoh. That speaks volumes.

You can read a number of stories on this game-changing event in today's digest.

*****

Conservative evangelicals in the Church of England had every reason to rejoice this week when they celebrated the election of the three leaders of the "living out" community to the General Synod of the Church of England.

Here's why. Dr. Sean Doherty, who lectures in Christian ethics at the evangelical St. Mellitus College in London, topped the clergy poll in the London diocese. Also elected were Rev. Sam Allbery, Associate Minister of St. Mary's Church, Maidenhead and the author of Is God Anti-Gay?, and Ed Shaw, Associate pastor at Emmanuel Bristol.

All three experience same-sex attraction but live out a lifestyle in which they consciously "help Christian brothers and sisters who experience same-sex attraction stay faithful to biblical teaching on sexual ethics and flourish at the same time."

What a smack in the face for the Rev. Colin Coward and Changing Attitude, the openly gay CofE organization that has been trying for more than a decade to change the church's teaching on sexuality and get a bishop or two to either roll over or come out of the closet. No bishops have done either, leaving CA (which is a clone of Integrity, the unofficial pansexual American Episcopal organization), whistling Dixie.

This is also a wake-up call to Archbishop Justin Welby, who has waffled on the issue (and now won't even talk about it). Well, now he has not one but THREE same-sex attracted but faithful gay men on Synod who not only obey the teaching of Scripture by not acting out same-sex attraction but have actually married women and now have families! What a blow to sodomy that is. You can read the full story in today's digest.

*****

There's an interesting interview with the incoming Episcopal Presiding Bishop Michael Curry by someone called Hazliansyah at https://treeangle.co.id/ The Episcopal Church's First Black Head -- and Its 'Tortuous' Path Toward Integration. Of course, the article focuses mostly on race, Curry being black and all. But here's an interesting tidbit buried in the story:

"His mother, who grew up Baptist, switched to the Episcopal Church after she read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. His father, who was a licensed Baptist pastor and came from a line of Baptist preachers, followed her."

So this begs the question as to why Curry doesn't agree with Lewis on such hot button issues as sexuality. It was Lewis who famously wrote in his book Christian Behaviour, "Either sex between a man and a woman in marriage or total abstinence." Must have slipped by the new incoming boss of TEC.

*****

Global South Archbishops beware. Church of England Bishop Graham Kings is coming your way with reconciliation talk in the air aimed at your theologians. The bishop is starting his global quest to heal the rifts in the Anglican Communion at the request of the Archbishop of Canterbury as the ABC's Mission Theologian. His task? Reach out to the church's Global South and talk up the necessity to stay in the Communion with endless talk of reconciliation.

The Rt. Rev. Dr. Graham Kings was formally installed as the first ever Mission Theologian for the Anglican Communion on a rainy Sunday last month, shortly before the Archbishop of Canterbury summoned the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion for crisis talks. A poignant if low-key ceremony took place at Canterbury Cathedral.

The subtext is that Kings's role might help to heal gaping rifts in the Communion, so long as they can all agree that sodomy is right, not wrong or something we can all live with if we keep talking endlessly about reconciliation. Of course, his job could be moot after January if the whole Communion happens to blow up if fabled reconciliation talks fail. Archbishop Welby is pulling out all the stops with theologians, reconcilers, Indaba procurers, facilitators, the ACO office heavies and anybody else he can find to keep the Communion together.

*****

A couple of interesting news items from two of The Episcopal Church's most conservative seminaries-- Nashotah House and Trinity School for Ministry.

A strong but unseasonably warm breeze gusts through the Nashotah House Cemetery one morning in late October. Apparently the House has its very own ghost.

The leaves shiver in the wind. A shadow dressed in a black cassock wanders slowly, eternally, through the gravestones, his head bent toward the inscriptions marking each plot. He appears to be reading all the names and epigraphs on the headstones, or perhaps searching for one that isn't there: his own.

The wind stirs again. The leaves, some just beginning to explode with the colors of autumn, quiver. The shadow disappears.

Around the seminary this apparition is not an anomaly. He has a name and a history, and people have been talking about him for more than 100 years.

The ghost is called the Black Monk. According to legend, Daniel Pope was a priest who was murdered by his wife in 1852 to accommodate an affair she was having with another man. Pope was hanged by his wife, but the death was ruled a suicide--a repugnant sin--so Pope's body was not allowed to be buried in the consecrated grounds of the cemetery at Our Lady of Spring Bank Cistercian, where he served.

Nashotah House was nearby, but Pope was not allowed to be buried in hallowed ground there, either. His tombstone stands to this day but is isolated from the other graves at the seminary.

On her deathbed, the legend goes, Pope's wife confessed to her crime. The priests, horrified at their mistake, exhumed Pope's grave, but they found his casket empty. Now, 163 years later, Pope's ghost is said to appear every Halloween and wander the cemetery in search of what should have been his final resting place.

Newspaper articles dating back to 1902 detail various ghost sightings and supernatural experiences. One story claims that spirits were fluttering about the seminary's halls in 1876 on the day one of the school's founders, James Lloyd Breck, was buried.

Other more recent accounts related the stories of a seminarian's daughter who saw a ghost walking toward her in a hallway in 1983 and who twice saw the shadow of a person who wasn't really there. Tales from 1990 describe apparitions wandering past students strolling through campus. The ghosts passed through them, the students said, as if they were composed of nothing but air.

Rocco Medina, the Nashotah House maintenance director, said that the school property looks creepiest at night, when some areas of the campus are engulfed in darkness.

The feelings of dread even extend below ground, where a network of tunnels, cramped and dust-ridden, connects various campus buildings.

"You wouldn't want to get stuck down here," Medina said during a recent tour. Then, as if to emphasize his point, he turned off a light inside the tunnel and plunged the corridor back into darkness.

There's different but perhaps more upbeat news from TSM in Ambridge, PA. While nearly all of TEC's seminaries are suffering from low intake of qualified students, financial problems, and bad theology, TSM is on a roll.

The Rev. Dr. Justyn Terry, Dean and President, reports that TSM has 41 new students beginning their studies on campus, the largest class in over 10 years, representing 19 states or countries. This growth is due in part to an increase in available scholarship funds, allowing the institution to offer more scholarships to more qualified students.

"We have also grown in what we have to offer the Church," writes Terry. "This year we began Spanish speaking Anglican and Episcopal congregations. 2015 also saw the start of our Master of Divinity Presbyterian track as we partner with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church."

*****

New Zealand Anglicans and Methodists eye closer ties, say reports out of Aotearoa. Methodist Minister Bob Sidal, his wife Lay Minister Morven Sidal, and acting Anglican Archdeacon of South Canterbury Reverend Jill Maslin all agree that working closer is beneficial.

The Anglican and Methodist churches are in talks, which could bring them closer than ever.

The two were working on equal recognition of each other's ordained clergy and had discussed their relationship at an annual meeting between the two churches in Auckland in September.

John Wesley founded Methodism with parishioners from the Anglican Church in the 18th century.

Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that ecumenism of this sort is like two drunks walking down Oxford Circus each holding desperately on to the other to stay up. If one falls, they both go down together . . .

*****

More pedophile clergy who managed to conceal their crimes for decades are being exposed for crimes they committed.

The worst and most prominent this week was the exposure of Bishop George Bell.

The Church has acknowledged that this man who was revered as a peacemaker--and granted the closest thing Anglicanism has to a saint's day--was a pedophile. He was once touted to be an ideal Archbishop of Canterbury by former Archbishop Rowan Williams.

Bell, who was bishop of Chichester for 30 years until his death in 1958, sexually assaulted a child who is still alive in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The Church of England issued an apology to the surviving victim, who wished to remain anonymous and has asked even for their gender not to be disclosed. A legal claim for compensation was also settled.

The victim first came forward in 1995, but the complaint was effectively ignored by the then Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, who died in 2009.

It was not until the victim contacted the office of the current Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, two years ago that the allegations were finally investigated properly.

Bell is the second bishop from the Diocese of Chichester to have been acknowledged as a sexual predator, just over two weeks after Peter Ball, the former Bishop of Lewes, was jailed for abusing 19 young men.

From Australia comes word that the former Anglican Bishop of Grafton, Keith Slater, has been stripped of any standing within the church over his handling of allegations of abuse at the North Coast Children's Home.

Slater was Bishop of Grafton for 10 years until his resignation in May of 2013. He quit the post after admitting he put the finances of the church ahead of the interests of 40 victims.

The victims were men and women who had been sexually, physically, and or psychologically abused at the North Coast Children's Home in Lismore between the 1940s and the 1980s.

A compensation battle was settled in 2007 for 38 of the victims.

Earlier this year, a former Registrar of the Diocese, Patrick Comben, was also removed from holy orders over the same issue.

*****

The former Bishop of Rochester, Dr. Michael Nazir Ali, spoke in London recently on "Extremism, Then and Now, Global and Local, and What We Can Do About It." He was appointed to a 20-member panel that included the Home Secretary. He urged hospitality and engagement as a better response to tolerance, which he disavowed.

"Tolerance" had led to the failed policy of multiculturalism and the emergence of ghettoes, said Nazir Ali. "It is better to require people to learn English than spend public money printing leaflets in seventeen languages. Muslims must decide the terms on which they would live here with freedom of belief. The question will then have to be faced whether sharia should become part of public law. If not, then sharia itself would require them to emigrate."

In a meeting chaired by Rehman Chishti, MP for Gillingham and Rainham (and who is also a Muslim), Bishop Nazir-Ali set the issue of extremism in a historical and global context. It is an ideological form of Islam which seeks to build an economic and social program irrespective of time and place. Thus there are no purely local Muslim issues. Their goal is to reconquer lands lost to Islam: the Iberian peninsula, Eastern Europe, the Holy Land, and India. To this end, a global movement is recruiting Jihadists to a global cause. The ideology should not be confused with the conditions under which people are being recruited.

Contradicting secularists who argue that religion is a source of conflict, the bishop claimed that religion has been a source for cohesion, bringing ways of living and order to society, as well as allowing ordinary people to challenge the "powers that be" through its prophetic role.

He contested the view that democracy alone would bring the required changes to the Middle East by recalling that democracies had also needed Magna Carta and Bills of Rights to prevent tyranny by the majority and to ensure both common citizen's and basic human rights for all. The "dhimmi" status of non-Muslims and sharia do not deliver those.

Islamicism therefore needs to be brought to the bar of accountability of world opinion and human rights. Nazir-Ali is not interested in "kissy-kissy dialogue." Therefore, the reopened British Embassy in Tehran should focus on human rights issues and not just the end of sanctions and the nuclear deal; Pakistan needs to appreciate that the Prophet of Islam himself forgave those who insulted him and reassess its apostasy law; the President of the United States needs to reassess the free pass he gives to Saudi Arabia on the issue of human rights by waiving any report to the U.S. Center for Religious Freedom. Saudi Arabia allows no churches, no crosses, and no bibles.

A counter-narrative to Islamicism is needed from within Islam. Such a narrative should adapt its teachings to local situations. Thin, so-called British values are not enough. Additionally, Emergency Detention Orders must only be given for reasons recognized in international law, such as incitement to violence or discrimination against an individual or group, or subverting the basis of national life (which used to be known as treason).

*****

The Episcopal Church in South Carolina doesn't seem to know when to quit. They have filed yet another Notice of Appeal with the Fourth Circuit Court. (My attorney tells me this is their final shot at Bishop Mark Lawrence and the real Diocese of South Carolina.)

Attorneys for Bishop Charles G. vonRosenberg filed a notice in federal court of an appeal to the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The notice would seek to overturn a federal judge's decision to abstain and stay the federal false-advertising lawsuit against the bishop of a breakaway group.

The lawsuit, vonRosenberg v. Lawrence, was filed in March 2013, a few months after Mark Lawrence and a breakaway group announced they were leaving The Episcopal Church. The suit involves a claim of false advertising under the federal Lanham Act. Bishop vonRosenberg is the only bishop recognized by The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion as bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina. By continuing to represent himself as bishop of the diocese, Mark Lawrence is committing false advertising, the lawsuit says. Read more about the case here.

In September, U. S. District Court Judge C. Weston Houck issued a stay in the case, delaying his ruling until the final outcome of a separate state lawsuit that is now before the South Carolina Supreme Court.

Judge Houck had initially granted a motion to abstain from the case, citing the pending state lawsuit. On appeal, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court found that the judge applied the wrong legal standard in deciding to abstain and should have followed the principles set forth in the Colorado River Water Conservation District v. United States decision, which says the court may abstain only in "exceptional" circumstances.

In his order on September 22nd, Judge Houck said that the case does present the exceptional circumstances necessary for him to defer to the state courts on the matter.

The state litigation involves a suit filed by the breakaway group against The Episcopal Church and its local diocese, The Episcopal Church in South Carolina, over control of the assets and identity of the diocese. An appeal in that case is currently before the South Carolina Supreme Court. Oral arguments were heard September 23rd, and a ruling could come at any time.

*****

Maybe it's not news any more, but the liberal United Church of Canada, the country's largest Protestant denomination, elected a lesbian minister as its moderator today. She is Rev. Jordan Cantwell of Saskatchewan.

Cantwell is following in the footsteps of Rev. Gary Paterson, of St. Andrew's Wesley United Church in downtown Vancouver. Paterson is married to Tim Stevenson, a Vancouver city councillor who is also a clergyman.

When Paterson was elected three years ago, he became the world's first homosexual leader of a major Christian denomination. Most Christian denominations, and the majority of other global religions, do not allow openly homosexual clergy.

After impressing the delegates to the convention in Newfoundland, Rev. Cantwell emerged as the winner on the fifth ballot. (Rev. John Young, a professor of church history from the Maritimes, came in second for the second time in a row.)

*****

Evangelicals in the U. S. are stepping back from support of the death penalty. The National Association of Evangelicals has released a statement that changes--somewhat--its formerly pro-death-sentence stance, recognizing that many of the millions of members of "more than 45,000 local churches from nearly 40 different denominations" it represents are still in favor of it. At the same time, the statement recognizes that the justice system is imperfect, as evidenced in eyewitness error, coerced confessions, prosecutorial misconduct, racial disparities, incompetent counsel, inadequate instruction to juries, judges who override juries that do not vote for the death penalty, and improper sentencing of those who lack the mental capacity to understand their crime.

The Washington Post reports:

The board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals approved a resolution that changes its 1973 resolution that favored the death penalty, the group announced Monday.

While the new resolution, which is now the standing policy of the NAE, does not reverse its earlier position, it acknowledges evangelicals who oppose the death penalty.

Jonathan Merritt responds to the statement in Religion New Service ("Thank God: Evangelicals shrink back from support of death penalty"):

Publicly acknowledging disagreement on a matter isn't exactly visionary. But it is a step in the right direction. Before now, the organization's standing resolution on the matter supported capital punishment as a deterrent for violent criminals and called on lawmakers to reinstatement it in places where it had been outlawed. The NAE's capital punishment resolution is a hopeful sign that evangelicals are catching up to the rest of America.

According to statistics cited by the Post and by the Christian Science Monitor, a sizable majority of white evangelical Protestants (71 percent) support the death penalty, according to a March 2015 survey from the Pew Research Center. That support, however, has dropped from 77 percent in 2011. Overall, the 2015 survey suggests 56 percent of Americans support the death penalty, a drop from 78 percent in 1996.

Evangelicals have served as an important constituency for some political leaders. As an umbrella group for many evangelical denominations, the NAE can serve as a barometer for where evangelicals stand on some issues.

*****

PORN and what to do about it: Playboy magazine has apparently decided to no longer run frontal nudity of women. It has dropped in circulation from 5 million to 800,000, citing the fact that porn is too readily available online, so it will now concentrate on less skin exposure and more on serious articles. It is too soon to say if this will work. Meanwhile, in a byline story in today's digest, culture writer and Anglican Mike McManus takes up the subject of pornography and wants politicians to make it a campaign issue.

"Where Do Candidates Stand on Pornography," he asks? Porn is involved in half of all divorces, he writes, yet there has been no vigorous prosecution of pornographers for three decades.

Patrick Trueman, President of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told McManus, "Pornography is now a public health crisis, and every family in America has been harmed by it, or is concerned about the potential harm. What other crisis has affected so many people than this one?"

He stated that "more than half of the marriages that break up in America are caused in part by pornography." He is right. Multiple studies report that between 56% and 58% of divorces involve the addiction of one spouse to hard core pornography.

He added, "The destruction of about 650,000 marriages a year is clear evidence that Trueman is correct in asserting that "Pornography is now a public health crisis." You can read his and Albert Mohler's article in today's digest.

*****

Life Now Has a Price Tag, writes Allan Haley of Anglican Curmudgeon. It has now come to this. The price for human fetal parts and tissue ranges from $30 to $100 per specimen. The price for one of the largest-ever-seen bull elephants in Africa is $60,000. All life now has its price, from the tiniest specimen to the largest.

For God, the price was infinite. He gave up his only Son to pay it--for our sake. But Man, driven by Satan's lusts, now cheapens it. In doing so, he mocks the unfathomable worth of Christ's sacrifice, and the caverns of Hell rock with scorn. This is a sin-sick world. May we yet repent of this madness. And may God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.

*****

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In Christ,

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