Archives

By Chuck Collins www.virtueonline.org January 13, 2025 Lex orandi, lex credendi - the law of prayer is the law of believing. It’s an ancient saying that dates back to the 5th century (Prosper of Aquitaine) that’s used to show the connection between what we pray and what we believe. But it has been retooled in modern times to justify our designer liturgical appetites.  This has long been the case in mainline denominations who institutionally have weak or no credendi, except “what feels right.” And sadly, the Anglican Church in North America seems to be heading in the same direction. When our worship language and practices do not line up with our theology (Thirty-nine Articles, the Homilies, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer), when we define ourselves in conciliar terms (Anglo-catholics, charismatics, and evangelicals gathering in one boat with fingers secretly crossed) rather than in theological and confessional ways, the friction this makes indicates a very unsettled and unsure future.  Erik Erickson wrote of an awkward psychosocial stage that adolescents go through in the process of discovering who they are. As a new denomination, the ACNA is stuck in that preteen stage having to make some adult decisions about our future. It maybe sounds confusing, but it’s really simple: a choice between two ways. Either we stick to a conciliar (a big boat) understanding of Anglican identity that we received from our dead parents and slug our way through the fog and this present time of indisposition, or we reinvest in what has defined Anglicans and catholic Christians for many centuries. The first option makes theology a radically secondary matter for the sake of unity focused around our disdain for homosexual marriage and, for some, women priests. The latter moves us theologically towards permanent Anglican identity grounded in a Reformation tradition that is thoroughly biblical, theologically confessional and reformed, liturgically beautiful, and pastorally generous. If we take the “conciliar road,” as Archbishop Duncan urged us to do at the 2008 GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem, we need to do something with those nagging Anglican formularies. We can ignore them like many already do, or we can dispose of them in more official ways. For example, we could write a new catechism and Prayer Book to reflect a happy meeting place for all Anglican expressions - oops, that’s what we’ve been doing for ten years! We could also rewrite our Constitution and Canons to eliminate the historic Anglican formularies as our theological standard and try to persuade our GAFCON partners to do the same.  This would work if it didn’t look to be as “progressive” as those nasty folks we left. If the conciliar road is our way, we have to retire the Articles of Religion in some way, especially those particularly irritating ones that state that the corrupted nature of everyone and our opposition to Pelagianism, that speaks of the church and its traditions as subordinate to Holy Scripture and the councils having erred at times in matters of faith, that predestination is an unspeakable sweet comfort for godly persons as the Bible says, that there are two sacraments which communicate God’s grace to those who, with faith, receive the same, and that Anglican worship and ceremonial will be guided by the one overriding rubric of justification by grace through faith alone. If we can’t shelf the formularies because we don’t want to appear progressive like our foes, then I have a modest proposal, that we add a 40th Article: “Anyone who does not subscribe to the forgoing may change any to suit their personal aesthetic tastes. This applies to individuals, churches, and whole dioceses.” The alternative of course, is to revisit and rediscover our historic landmarks, the old paths. This means allowing our theology to guide our worship and our personal aesthetic preferences - credendi leading orandi. Even though most American Anglicans are functionally Lutheran (or even Roman Catholic without the word “transubstantiation”), I hold out hope that we can recapture a historic Anglican understanding of the sacraments whereby God-given grace is received by God-given faith, that honors God as the consecrator of the bread and wine not some priest intermediary saying and doing magical things for the people. And even though we are inclined institutionally to put the ancient undivided church over Holy Scripture or to consider the Bible as a product of the church, it’s not too late to cede to the God-inspired revelation of God to his people. It’s not too late for bishops to authorize worship that brings us each time to the glorious doctrine of justification by grace through faith in Christ, rather than allowing each priest and each church to do whatever they want. The Episcopal Church has already determined its fate, but not so the ACNA. This is the time to repent and return to our first love. The direction we are facing is not good, but there’s nothing that says we can’t challenge and change the course. Pray for our bishops that we will see again the beauty of our confessional identity that’s rooted in the ultimate authority of the Bible. Enkindle in them and in us a love for true doctrine (2 Timothy 4:3). Give us all a love for those who have not yet believed the gospel of God’s unstoppable and unconditional love. Lex orandi lex credendi, indeed!, with unity that comes from a right understanding of God and a love for his people! Dean Chuck Collins is a Reformed Anglican theologian

By Gavin Ashenden  CHRISTIAN TODAY 11 January 2025   Justin Welby addressing the Church of England Synod. (Photo: Church of England) Monday 6 January marked the last working day of Justin Welby as Archbishop Canterbury. His resignation was forced on him after his failure to act competently in the oversight of a devastating sexual abuse scandal. But it would be unfair to take that single act of incompetence and use it as a lens to judge his entire performance as Archbishop. Tragic though the end of his tenure was, we need to look at the other elements of the way he held office in order to assess it fairly.   There are four areas in which an archbishop needs to be competent in order to justify that existence: parish, province, communion and country. As regards the parish, ecclesially the C of E has always embodied two theologies it holds in tension: congregationalism - the priority of the parish on one hand; and episcopacy - the authority of the bishop on the other. The Archbishop of Canterbury has to find a way of balancing this contradiction, and at the same time motivate and enable the flourishing of parish churches and communities. This balance has always been very difficult to achieve.   As senior Archbishop he has to try to hold together and facilitate the two Provinces and the bureaucratic machinery which serves the Church as an organisation. Most people don't understand that the institution is organically so complex that the normal levers of management you might expect hardly exist. Welby set himself the task of creating them in order to control the organisation better. It didn't work.   The international Anglican Communion is chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury by historic right. He is chairman of the forty two autonomous provinces of the Anglican Communion, and needs to be able hold them together in the absence of any concept of authority. The provinces were just about to pass a historic resolution repudiating his right of chairmanship and replacing it with an election instead, that he would have lost.   The Archbishop needs also to be able to connect with the nation, the majority of whom have no allegiance to the faith or the Church by exemplifying the best and truest aspects of Christianity. Despite his platform at both the royal funeral and coronation, the nation never took him to its heart. Sadly for Welby, nowadays appearance counts for a good deal. Michael Ramsey and Rowan Williams at least looked like different versions of what people hoped an archbishop should look like - and looking as though you are suited for the role has become an even more important aspect of functionality in an age where image plays such a powerful part in our assessment of things.   It wasn't Justin Welby's fault that he looked like a slightly crumpled, middle-ranking bank branch manager, but neither did it help inspire confidence or affection. Welby's predecessors during the last century all excelled in at least one of these four areas. Tragically, Welby failed in all four.   The task was never going to be an easy one. The Church of England is an organisation like no other. It is immensely complex, lacking all kinds of instrumentation for governance. It is the hybrid to beat all hybrids. It was born as an organic compromise of different political and theological parties and groups coming together to keep at bay the alternatives they all feared more than they feared each other. Holding it together meant finding some kind of working balance for the successors of the Puritans (evangelicals), the Sacramental nostalgics (Anglo-Catholics), and the spiritually-minded socialists (liberals).   It used to be that they took turns under the protective patronage of their respective archbishops. But rather to everyone's surprise, that game has changed over the last 30 years. The culture has redefined everyone's allegiance in the Church just as much as elsewhere. The shadows of the Reformation battles have grown suddenly dim as a new shift of conceptual tectonic plates reconfigures Western society.   The advent of feminism and following quickly afterwards, the attempt to legitimise same-sex relationships not only divided secular society but also split all the tribes that constituted the historic Anglican factions. Welby kept up the appearance of neutrality for a while, but it seems as if his patience suddenly snapped. And that snapping took place months before personal debacles. Conservatives see his abandoning of historic Christian ethics as the metaphysical cause of his downfall. Whether that is true or not, it is the case that after that public gesture of impatience with the Biblical position - when Welby suddenly came off the fence and came out in personal favour of the legitimisation of homosexual relationships - his demise followed swiftly.   Welby presided over a sudden shift in theological and ideological culture that changed the shape of the tribal equilibrium in the Church of England. In fact, it was during the last 30 years that the landscape of theological and philosophical conflict embodied in the Reformation and its aftermath, changed profoundly and dramatically. It was no longer a matter of Protestant versus Catholic so much as progressive versus non-progressive.   One of the primary responsibilities of the Archbishop of Canterbury was to hold together both the Church of England, but also the Anglican Communion which emerged from the evangelisation of the British Empire. Despite his own profound personal preferences, Rowan Williams managed to hold the warring factions together with a skilful chairmanship that practised a diplomatic inaction.   Welby lacked both the intelligence and the diplomatic stature of Rowan Williams. He was unable to hide his preference for the progressive sexual agenda of the liberal faction. Where Williams took the trouble to ensure the episcopacy represented all the constituencies of the Church, under Welby only theological look-a-likes stood much chance of preferment. He was ideologically tribal before he was pastorally competent.   Perhaps the welfare of the parishes were a sign of his greatest failure. Under his tenure the parishes felt ignored, demoted and demoralised. It wasn't just the mountain of red tape that imposed impossible safeguarding burdens on elderly ladies who turned up to implement the flower rota, or churchwardens who became overwhelmed by bureaucratic overkill - as did their clergy.   Parishes were wholly demoralised on a series of fronts, when for example they found themselves robbed of their own capacity to make decisions for their own survival. They became unable, for example, to install new boilers to replace brown ones to keep people warm during evensong in winter, because the institutional bureaucracy had committed to an ecological Net Zero and re-written the rules to impose it.   Faced with the enormous difficulties of raising enough money to repair the roof, the infrastructure and pay for pastoral ministry, the pensioners on whom the church depends - the average age of congregations being about 70, the parishes were demoralised once again. Justin Welby dramatically and publicly committed himself to spending the investment resources of the Church Commissioners on the sixth generation descendants of slaves in reparation. It didn't matter that academic historians pointed out that the Church had, in fact, not benefited directly from slave income at all. The exercise turned out to be more about virtue signalling and the woke revisionist rewriting of history, without regard either to whether reparation should be done, or could be done.   Then there is Welby's appointment itself as Archbishop of Canterbury, following a startlingly and somewhat incomprehensible rapidity of promotion, which included very little parish experience. It was the product of a change in fashion driven by the former human resources admin from British Gas who became secretary to the Crown Appointments Commission. Instead of appointing experienced parish clergy balanced by spiritually-minded academics to the episcopate, a decision was made to exclusively appoint middle-managers who had experience in the business world before ordination.   It is certainly true that organisation with the internal contradictions of the Church of England is impossible to manage. The contradiction is that it is effectively driven by the parish, while at the same time being cosmetically directed from the episcopate. This has always been an almost impossible balance to maintain constructively, but under Welby, the balance was destroyed completely. He tried to create the levers of control and management efficiency that the business model might suggest, but they proved counter-productive by moralising, and diminishing the integrity and morale of the parish. Towards the end of his tenure, Welby even saw the rise of the Save the Parish movement. It was a grassroots movement directed by some extremely competent people who were afraid that Welby's managerial blinkeredness was going to destroy the very raison d'etre of the Church of England.   In the area of representing Anglicans in the public space to the rest of the population, and the interests of the rest of the population to the Church of England Welby opted for the easiest and most destructive course. He used the House of Lords as a soapbox for left-wing progressive politically-correct views and, his critics claimed, vacuous political propaganda.   He might have got away with this had he been representing the Anglican mind in the country. But endless social surveys showed that the people in the pews were by a large majority committed to looking at the world through centrist or conservative lenses. They were badly alienated from Welby and the rest of the episcopate who were speaking as if they were paid up members of the Labour party. Only one single bishop spoke in favour of Brexit for example.   As many critics pointed out, this wasn't just a disparity between the people in the pews and the managers. Neither Welby, nor his fellow bishops, managed to talk much about God or Jesus or discipleship, or the Kingdom of Heaven or redemption in the House of Lords. They stuck to socialism.   If you employ a manager to manage the Church and he fails to manage, the consequences are bound to be bad. The Smyth abuse case was a terrible tragedy. All Welby's inept managerial instincts might have been redeemed by just dealing with that one crisis well. Instead, he ignored the victims, allowed subordinates to kick the can down the road, appeared to be covering for his own culture, and forgot that justice delayed is justice denied.   Although he attempted to present his resignation as taking a bullet for the team and resigning on behalf of the whole inept, safeguarding incompetence of the Church of England, it remains a fact that he was personally responsible. He knew about the crisis from the 1980s. And so, when the facts first appeared over his desk, at a point where he had institutional responsibility, no excuse exists for his inactivity. Yet his tone deaf speech in the House of Lord displayed his moral and existential deafness in a way that many found profoundly offensive.   As just one example of his flawed moral judgement, people pointed to his support of Paula Vennells for the bishopric of London. It beggared belief in the judgement of many that a woman who not only had no experience of ministry in the parishes, but had failed catastrophically in institutional management - and as it turned out, proved to be unkind, incompetent and unaccountable - could be his preferred candidate to become bishop of London.   Welby failed the parishes by demoralising them, he failed the Anglican Communion by being unable to restrain his progressive partisanship, he failed the organisation by 'doing management' badly, and he failed the country by offering it socialism instead of Christianity. He is probably the worst Archbishop of Canterbury in living memory. Only historians are equipped to judge whether he was the worst Archbishop of all time.   Gavin Ashenden is Associate Editor of the The Catholic Herald and a former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II.

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org January 6, 2025   To no one’s surprise there was virtually no good religious news stories this past year.   Most of it was bad, even repellent.   Highlighting the year’s top Anglican news was the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby over the cover-up and concealment of an evangelical layman’s sadistic behavior with more than 100 young men across two continents. Welby took responsibility and exited himself from Lambeth Palace.   A former archbishop, George Carey also got caught in the safeguarding net and tossed in his Permission to Officiate (PTO) and exited the pulpit. Another archbishop, John Sentamu of York had already resigned over similar charges and the push is now on for Stephen Cottrell, the present Archbishop of York to step down over failed safeguarding issues.   As the Mother Church fades into the sunset, the good news is that the Global South continues to rise, and its leadership strengthens by the day, inevitably pushing the Church of England to the margins. The CofE is facing death by a thousand cuts, more spiritually devastating than a layman’s cane.   The worldwide persecution of Christians continues apace with no sign of it letting up any time soon. Islam remains the single most persecuting religion in the world, happy to kill Christians while screaming Islamophobia at anyone who dare accuse them of murder.   Nigeria is the biggest killing ground of Christians today, say TCT reports, with thousands of Christians dying for their faith at the hands of Fulani tribesmen and Boko Haram. Still and all the Anglican Church continues to grow with an estimated 20 million Nigerian Anglicans, making it the largest province in the Anglican communion.   The sun is setting on Western Anglicanism, with the Anglican Church of Canada, by its own admission, roiling in its death throes. The Episcopal Church is watching as dioceses are forced to merge just to stay afloat as congregations shrink, with aging Episcopalians and their checkbooks close as they head to columbarium’s.   There are fewer fulltime opportunities for rectors, with seminaries offering free education to draw in hopeful candidates for ministry. Part time rectors, second career priests look to be the church’s future with shriveling congregations.   TEC got a new presiding bishop, in the person of Archbishop Sean Rowe, a young management wonk who promises to clean house and trim the budget to meet the church’s growing need to conserve rather than spend.   He also appeared ready to wade into the waters of Title IV, the disciplinary canons of the church and promptly fired some of the worst offenders in a  house cleaning effort to correct the neglect the church had become famous for. Anglican Watch, a feisty but unofficial watchdog of the Episcopal Church complained mightily that the intake officers sandbagged complaints against bishops, refused to provide a pastoral response to complainants, ignored requirements to provide notice of the right of complainants whose complaints were dismissed at intake to appeal, acted with indifference to the needs of complainants and refused to act when bishops’ diocesan ignored the provisions of Title IV. The hope is that Rowe will correct all this.   The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) also got a new archbishop in the person of Bishop Steve Wood , a capable man who had proven himself as a bishop, church growth specialist and Covid survivor. Archbishop Foley Beach, his predecessor, will be a hard act to follow. He brilliantly wended his way through the political machinations of the communion and came out mostly unscathed.   ACNA will need to navigate its identity in the coming months. Will it be the three streams of former Archbishop Bob Duncan, Anglo-Catholicism or the reform theology of Thomas Cranmer? Women’s ordination will continue to hang like a Damoclean sword over the church as both sides threaten to split the fledgling denomination over the issue.   In early speeches, Wood pressed the case for evangelism and discipleship, hoping to push the church to new levels, post Covid. But with 50 million dechurched Americans having fled the church over the last 25 years, pulling them back in is going to be difficult. Apathy, sexual abuse, homosexual approval, failed secularism, cultural Marxism have emptied the churches with little sign that people are prepared to trust the institutional church ever again. Even the Roman Catholic Church took big hits; with revelations of sodomite cliques in the Vatican, homosexual cardinals and priests abusing others with their homosexual behavior? with the church buoyed only by immigration from South America.   While 4,500 churches closed, 3,000 churches opened new doors in America, with the hope that small, vibrant, evangelical start-up churches will be America’s future. First generation breakaway denominations are also showing promise including Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists, to name just a few.   Mega church leaders fell out of pulpits into strange beds at an alarming rate, leaving tens of thousands of bewildered and betrayed believers empty handed.  Dr. J.I. Packer’s observation that American Christianity was 3000 miles wide and half an inch deep, rang eerily true.   Homosexuality split the third largest church in America – The United Methodist Church - with over 7600 churches leaving the denomination for the newly formed Global Methodist Church. 2024 has undoubtedly been the most consequential year yet for the Global Methodist Church, said observers.   Even the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant group, shrank in 2023. A quarter million people left, continuing its downward slide. The SBC’s 2024 Annual Church Profile, showed that membership dropped to 12.9 million members, the lowest since the late 1970s. Having peaked at 16.3 million in 2006, membership has been in decline ever since, with nearly 3.5 million members in total lost.   Nones, people without religion, but vaguely spiritual are now the single biggest group in America, numbering 28 percent of the population with Catholics running at 23 percent and evangelical Protestants running at 24 percent.   A small band of atheists and ex-atheists emerged onto the scene declaring their love for cultural Christianity, not quite so convinced that peace on earth is possible without reference to a deity. The triumph of transcendence over immanence caught the attention of people like Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson to name but two cultural icons that ruffled secular feathers in their respective countries.   “Christian America ” saw hope for a better nation and future, and voted in Donald Trump with the hope that he will turn the cultural Marxist tide with reduced abortion and better times for all. Hope is in the air, but the jury is still out.   END

COMMENTARY by David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org January 10, 2025   By any measurable standard, the Church of England is a spent force.   While all the appearances of vitality are still in place - two archbishops, the Lord’s Spiritual, the money, the power, (but with increasingly less prestige); the CofE on the global Anglican stage is no longer relevant.   That a dozen or more global, mainly Africa archbishops who represent nearly 80 percent of the communion no longer recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury as primus inter pares, or even as their spiritual leader, speaks volumes.   Church of England archbishops, guilty of failing to safeguard the church from predatory priests and laity are falling out ecclesiastical windows like bad fruit off a tree. Justin Welby, George Carey, John Sentamu have all gone and by any measure so should Stephen Cottrell, probably the worst offender of all if the stories of his failed safeguarding are true. But he loves the power, as he steps in to temporarily take over now that Welby is out the door. The smell and lure of power is far too enticing to listen to naysayers who believe he should go.   He's a little man with the enigmatic smile of a cottonmouth snake let loose in a country garden; Cottrell will charm his way into his new job trying to please everybody, but in the end pleasing nobody. Mercifully his tenure will be short-lived as the church seeks a permanent replacement for Welby.   The British are masters at saying nothing brilliantly. No nation on earth can take the English language to heights of obfuscation like the British. For example, Archbishop Cottrell can take the word discipleship (a favorite word of his) and twist it in any direction he wants it to go and fudge it. He can make it mean whatever he wants it to mean, and people will nod wisely as though they understood and approved what he was talking about.   Under his watch an avowed “married” homosexual Dean took charge of Canterbury Cathedral, the most iconic cathedral in the Anglican communion. How does he reconcile his notion of “discipleship” with such a call? Such putrefaction ascended to the nostrils of God. I doubt one GAFCON archbishop would ever darken the doors of Canterbury Cathedral again, and would probably demand an exorcism before they did.   He is on record as saying that while the Archbishop of Canterbury won’t bless gay marriages, he will.   Buggery on Saturday night and breaking bread on Sunday morning, hardly fits the New Testament definition of discipleship or the profile of godly behavior.   Martyn Percy, the former Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, where he had been the dean for eight years, when he stepped down after an acrimonious dispute with the college lasting four years wrote; “The Church of England must die a natural death — then rise again.”   “With Justin Welby gone as Archbishop of Canterbury and soon to be forgotten, the Church has lessons to learn. Archbishops of Canterbury are expendable and rarely memorable. Before the Reformation, 16 were canonised. Nowadays, they might get a seat in the House of Lords upon retirement. So, with Welby gone and soon to be forgotten, what are the lessons to be learnt?”   Percy cited Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Becket and Cardinal Reginald Pole as examples of expendable archbishops.   Percy said Welby’s resignation points to a much deeper malaise for the Church of England. “This is not so much a church in crisis as a body nearing the end of its natural life. Like all organic bodies, institutions have a lifespan too; death is a normal part of the existential cycle. If there is to be a resurrection — not just endless attempts at resuscitation and rejuvenation — death must be embraced. The church preaches this. It must live it too.”   One could of course, accuse Percy of sour grapes based on his personal experience, but he has a point.   “The Church of England continues to live and flourish locally. All life is there, and that is truly hopeful. However, as a national hierarchical institution and international denomination, it has reached an advanced state of decay. Avoiding death only means that the Church of England will spend more time in a self-imposed purgatory of painful palliative stasis.”   The church needs an Archbishop of Canterbury who recognizes that less will be more in the future. Cutting back on the hierarchy and top-down management of churches — “heavy pruning”, to borrow a phrase from Jesus’s teaching — might let in some much-needed light and air for local recovery and growth at ground level, says Percy.   Sadly, when you have entrenched sin, recovery is not possible. Jesus himself affirmed the binary nature of sexuality, assuming the inseparability and distinction of biological sex. To deliberately go against the binary nature of sexuality is to break the moral law. The Church of England will never rise again. It’s spiritually impossible. The same can be said for The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. Both institutions are dying.   No amount of prayer, false compassion, pastoral care, depth-inspiring spirituality and theological nous will change the direction and inevitable death of the church.   Percy says what the church needs is a new realism in the next archbishop. But realism about what exactly? “The Church of England does not need another rallying call for revival. The people’s hopes in the pews rest on an authentic and honest candidate who does not deny reality.” But honest revival, honest repentance is the only way forward, but there is very little evidence that will take place. If it didn’t happen under an “evangelical” like Welby what makes one think it will happen under a progressive? Impossible.   An article in The Living Church had these lines: “Underlying the appointment is a sobering reality. The Church of England continues to struggle. Its worshiping numbers remain below pre-COVID levels, ordinand numbers are greatly diminished, and the finances of many dioceses and parishes are precarious. The church is tearing itself apart on safeguarding, in which the balance between sufficient accountability for past failings and avoiding a culture of blame is proving to be difficult to strike.   “To make matters worse, not only is there a widening theological gulf between liberals and conservatives emerging through LLF, but there also appears to a mismatch between the composition of the College and the House of Bishops, which are majority liberal, and the larger Anglican churches, which are young, evangelical, and conversative.”   There you have it. In time GAFCON and GSFA will be the two arms of a single communion aided by the ACNA.   The Church of England is dead, all it needs now is a decent burial, but it might be difficult to find an archbishop to preside at the funeral. Perhaps the Archbishop of Nigeria might do the honors.   END

CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE ZONES By Mary Ann Mueller VOL Special Correspondent www.virtueonline.org January 9, 2025   St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Altadena — GONE! Altadena Community Church in Altadena — GONE! Altadena United Methodist Church in Altadena — GONE! Community United Methodist Church in Pacific Palisades — Gone! Pasadena Jewish Temple in Pasadena — GONE! Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Pacific Palisades — GONE! Kinneloa Church of Christ in Pasadena — GONE! Masjid Al Taqwa Mosque in Altadena — GONE! St. Matthew’s Episcopal School in Pacific Palisades — GONE! St. Mark's Episcopal School in Altadena — GONE! St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church twin rectories in Pacific Palisades — GONE! St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Pacific Palisades — Damaged! Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church in Pacific Palisades — Damaged! Corpus Christi Catholic School in Pacific Palisades — Damaged! Thomas the Apostle Episcopal Church in  Hollywood — Threatened! St. Stephen’s Episcopal  Church in Hollywood — Threatened! St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Studio City — Threatened! All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena — Evacuation Center! St. Paul’s Commons Episcopal Retreat Center in Echo Park — Evacuation Center! It all started at 10:30 Tuesday (Jan. 7) morning with a small fire on Palisades Drive in Pacific Palisades. The fire department was not able to contain it quickly enough as the Santa Ana winds whipped up spreading hot embers across the street and across town.   Twenty-four hours later one fire had become five separate ongoing fires chewing through thousands of acres destroying everything in their paths — homes, multimillion dollar mansions, historic landmarks, businesses, stores, eateries, libraries, retirement centers, schools and even houses of worship:  Catholic … Protestant … Jewish … Islamic …   One of the fire-destroyed churches is St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Altadena.  The Episcopal church building made it unscathed through Tuesday night.  But it did not survive Wednesday.  Fire surrounded it before dawn broke.   “It is with a broken heart that I share with you the news that our church building is lost,” St. Mark's rector the Rev. Carri Grindon posted on Facebook Wednesday. “It caught fire at around 6:30 this morning, and is gone.”   She also noted that several members of her congregation also lost their homes to the  raging out of control fire.   The Palisades Fire, fueled by 100 mph Santa Ana wind gusts, shot hot embers into the air that were sometimes blown miles away thus seeding new blazes. The Eaton Fire started at 6 pm Tuesday evening followed by the Hurst Fire at 10 pm.   The explosion of the Palisades Fire prompted immediate evacuations. Residents fled the flames choking the escape routes creating gridlock. People left their cars in the streets and ran for their lives, many with just the clothes on their backs.  To clear a path for fire equipment to get in, fire officials brought in bulldozers to push the abandoned cars out of the way to make room for emergency crews to get through.   By nightfall power was out.  It was the leaping yellow and orange flames which lit up the night sky not street lamps or porch lights.   The Woodley Fire started just before dawn on Wednesday (Jan. 8) with the Lidia Fire being torched by 1 pm.   Along the way blowing sparks were igniting other fires but they were quickly suppressed so that they could not get a foothold and spread. Those small ember brush fires were: the Bert Fire, the Gulch Fire, the Olivas Fire, the Tyler Fire, and the Riverbed Fire.   By daybreak Wednesday officials were finally able to get enough natural light to see what was burned, is still burning, what was left standing, and what was in the fire’s path.   The early Wednesday morning tally showed that more than one thousand buildings were either reduced to rubble and smoldering ruins, or heavily fire damaged. At least two were dead and others injured.  So much damage was wrought in less than 24 hours. The death toll increased to five by nightfall.  Los Angeles County is the most populated county in the United States with 9.6 million people. More than 100,000 Californians had to out run the encroaching flames including several residents of retirement or assisted living communities. One such community which executed its predawn evacuation plan was the MonteCedre, an Episcopal facility in Altadena.   Two hundred residents safely fled the encroaching flames. However, the historic Scripps Home Gloria Cottage, located on MonteCedre's property,  succumbed to the blaze. Yet it seems the primary MonteCedre structures survived.   The MonteCedro is managed by Episcopal Community and Services for Seniors (ECS) which has been serving the church since 1923.   MonteCedro is one of four ECS senior communities. The other three are: the Canterbury in Rancho Palos Verdes; the Covington in Aliso Viejo; and Twelve Oaks in Glendale, which is currently undergoing redevelopment and is scheduled to reopen for residents in 2028.   By 7 pm Wednesday evening, as the Santa Ana winds again picked up, the Sunset Fire had started and was heading to the Hollywood Hills. It would be another long agonizing night of firefighting, fear, worry, escape, and prayer.   “God of the sun and the sea, the rains and the winds, bear all our neighbors through this stormy night and throw a veil of protection over those battling these wildfires under the worst possible conditions. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” Bishop John Taylor (VII Los Angeles) posted on Facebook Tuesday. “May our God in Christ be with you, tonight and always.” In the deepening darkness another overnight fire was sparked, the Sunswept Fire, but firefighters were able to quell that blaze before it spread.   When the sun rose for a second time on Thursday (Jan. 9) the runaway wildfires had destroyed more than 2,000 — and counting — structures.   Thursday morning weary firefighters were still in a losing battle against the unrelenting forces of nature — wind and fire. Reinforcements are being sent in from neighboring states and the California National Guard has been activated to join the fight.   Thursday as the Santa Ana winds died down there was some suppression progress being made on the smaller fires. However, the area is still under red flag warnings on into the weekend. But for the most part there is zero percent containment of the largest and still growing fires.   Mary Ann Mueller is a journalist living in Texas.  She is a regular contributor to VirtueOnline

By Campbell Campbell-Jack https://possil.wordpress.com/2024/12/30/we-christians-are-exiles-in-a-collapsing-world/ January 6, 2025 Christianity was fundamental to the development of the West. It provided the forms of thought without which those institutions defining the West would likely never have emerged. Those institutions such as the rule of law, democracy, capitalism, science, education and the family, are  being undermined by the progressive left today.   The Enlightenment and its commitment to bare rationality which did so much to undermine Christianity is now being undermined by the deconstruction of post-modernism and its successors. As a consequence, the West is adrift without a coherent guiding principle.   Britain was once a country based, however imperfectly, on Christian principles, those principles have been deliberately abandoned in favour of secular ideals. At present we are in the uncomfortable transition period between a consciously Christian nation and a consciously pagan one which will be totally unable to resist the demands of an increasingly confident and aggressive Islam.   We increasingly speak of broken Britain. Wherever we look we see our institutions floundering and social cohesion fracturing. The police have lost their way. A police force with an abysmal record in crime fighting focuses on the language used in tweets. Obedient to our progressive politicians the police have initiated anti-thought-crime strategies against people who, concerned by the mass murder of babies, have the temerity to pray silently near abortion clinics   The NHS supposedly the envy of the world and employing nearly 1.5 million people, demands a higher proportion of government spending than anything else and delivers sub-standard medical results. Typical of progressive priorities the Guardian boasted that the NHS  ‘performed better than its counterparts on fairness, ease of access and administrative efficiency’ before admitting that ‘outcomes for people with potentially fatal diseases fell short of those in western Europe and Australia.’   A two tier judiciary is destroying trust in law and order. David Spring, a 61-year-old retired train driver was sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment for nothing more than making ‘gestures’ at the police and chanting ribald songs about ‘Who the [expletive] is Allah’. Meanwhile Gabriel Abdullah who terrorised staff at a kosher supermarket in Golders Green demanding to know their views on Israel and Palestine as he threatened them with a large knife, was given a suspended sentence.   The harshness with which the Southport rioters were treated demonstrates the establishment’s fear of the white working class. The establishment refused to acknowledge that they were facing a genuinely spontaneous and uncoordinated reaction from people who had had enough of having their concerns over uncontrolled immigration being ignored by the political class. The anger of the white indigenous working class was blamed on a fictional far-right. There is no organised political far right, yet the bogy man of the English Defence League which ceased to exist ten years previously was trotted out by a complicit mainstream media.   These examples illustrate the social consequences flowing from an absence of political and spiritual leadership. Our political parties and churches fly under false colours. The Conservatives conserve nothing, Labour are interested in the workers only at election time, and the Liberal Democrats are anything but liberal or democratic.   The leadership of the mainstream churches has been taken over by progressives who are frankly embarrassed by the claims of Christ. He is too divisive, saying you must be born again (John 3:3) and making claims to be the only way of salvation (John 14:4). As for the apostle’s saying there is no other name given by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12), that politically incorrect preaching is seen as insulting to other faiths. For the mainstream church hierarchies the bureaucratic management of institutional decline has replaced evangelism as a priority.   The mainstream denominations have reduced the once omnipotent and compassionate Lord God Almighty of the Bible to the level of a political activist, moralising self-help guru, or doddering grandfather existing only to approve of whatever his grandchildren get up to. Is it any wonder that people refuse to listen to such churches.   It is doubtful that the man in the street would be able to recognise Christianity as the single most important element in the creation of Western civilisation. Due to the abject failure of the church people today are dangerously ignorant about their own heritage. Just as fish cannot see the water in which they swim, so Westerners cannot see and value their Christian heritage and its benefits.   The West does not have the stomach or the self-belief to defeat that which is now in our midst. It will be a long, slow crumbling, but the West will fall. It might take 50 years or 100 years but the trends are clear; it is inevitable. One day decent unbelievers will regret their complacency when they find themselves getting what they wanted: a new age unhampered by Christianity.   Christians in the West are a rapidly shrinking minority. To face the future we must accept that Christians are outsiders and stop caring about what others think of us. The norms of secular society are not our norms. We must accept that we Christians are living as exiles in this world (I Peter 1:1), and that means we must live with far greater spiritual discipline.   This involves more than praying and immersing ourselves in Scripture, although these are vital. Spiritual discipline means radically reordering our lives, being a creative minority who centre their lives on Christ alone. This entails going it on our own, networking to create our own responses to need, all the way from education of the young to care of the elderly. Creative Christian response to need must surely be better than reliance on a faceless bureaucracy.   Christians need to live in such a way that we preserve the faith for future generations, or our great- grandchildren will despise us. Despite a grim immediate prognosis we can look forward with confidence, Christianity has a God who knew the way out of the grave. First published in TCW Defending Freedom

By Bill Muehlenberg https://billmuehlenberg.com/ 4, 2025 What we must know about harmful gender ideology: Whenever you want to dehumanise and control groups of people, a major tactic is to get them out of sight and out of mind. Make them invisible, in other words. We have certainly done that with the unborn as we kill them in the millions.   We have done it with Blacks in the past. More recently we do it with groups that we want to pretend just don’t exist. Ex-homosexuals is a classic case in point. And now, hot on their heels, ex-trans people (detransitioners) is the latest group that we want to keep invisible.   So many of our progressive elites, politicians, media outlets, academics and others want to pretend that there is no such thing as a person who once transitioned but now deeply regrets it. The mantra of our leftist overlords is that transition is always good, and there can be no other direction to take. They have fully bought the lies of the trans lobby, and countless people are now suffering as a result, including so many grieving mothers and fathers.   The truth is, de-transitioning is now a major growth area. More and more people who first thought that the trans agenda would solve all their problems are realising that it was all an appalling lie, and it simply has made matters worse.   But still, countless kids are being led down this garden path, a one-way-ticket to a life of turmoil and misery – for child and parent alike. One of the latest resources discussing all this is the new book edited by Kirralie Smith, Devastated: How Gender Ideology is Tearing Australian Families Apart (Gender Awareness Australia, 2024).   Smith heads up Binary, an Australian-based ministry devoted to taking on the trans behemoth and helping people who are being harmed by it. The book features nine moving personal stories of those who have been so very badly damaged by trans ideology.   She introduces the issue, presents the stories, and then offers some concluding chapters. A slim book – just 164 pages – it packs a punch. Because most our leaders and elites, along with most of the mainstream media, do not want you to hear stories like this, it is so very important that Kirralie has put this book together.   As she says in the Introduction:   Already transgender regret is a growing phenomenon. As children captured by the ideology become adults they realise how deficient they are due to medicalized interventions that have stunted their growth and left them scarred and life-long medical dependents.   It is criminal and sad beyond words.   The growing number of devastated and abandoned young adults must cause us to sit up and take notice. There will only be more as the years pass and more children reach adulthood.   Lying to children or to anyone in fact, is not kind. It is cruel to deceive already confused people into believing they can achieve the impossible. Pronouns and name changes will not change a person’s sex. Costumes, makeup and hairstyles are simply appropriations of stereotypes. Becoming a lifelong medical patient, reliance on drugs and very risky surgical procedures will not turn the male into a female or a female into a male.   It is devastating to families and children that activists have succeeded in convincing legislators that these lies will result in freedom. They never will. Only the truth will set them free. (p. 10)   Devastated, How gender ideology is tearing Australian families apart by Smith, Kirralie (Author) Amazon logo The stories she shares are utterly heartbreaking. How we as a society could have allowed our children to be abused and harmed for life is something we should never have allowed.   Tara’s story is representative of so many devastated parents. She says, “both my daughters have fallen victim to the modern mania of transgenderism. The last three years have been a plodding kind of hell lit by spotlights of hope.” (p. 63)   She also writes:   Scared and confused though we were, my husband and I did our best to keep our heads and to be supportive. In the privacy of our bedroom, we held each other and whispered our confused theories. What was happening to Grace? A lovely young girl who had been luxuriating in the sun in a gingham one-piece bathing suit only a few months earlier.   Grace shaved off her long blonde hair and adopted a skater-boi style. She tore everything out of her room and threw away almost all records of herself as a child. She sought to lay a fresh path in the future by destroying evidence of her past. She declared her birth name to be a ‘dead name’. She threw out all her clothes and replaced them with men’s clothes. She adopted a deep voice and would swagger about. She would man-spread when she sat down…. (p. 66)   She concludes her piece this way:   Activists are pushing a narrative that failing to affirm a child’s brand-new gender identity constitutes child abuse. This narrative is being used as grounds by trans-activists (who have infiltrated Social Services) to seize confused children from loving homes.   And so, unfortunately, you must minimally affirm your daughter lest you lose her entirely.    I use my daughters’ chosen names when addressing them and do my best with the linguistic gymnastics that are their chosen pronouns. In return, my daughters have agreed not to pursue chemical or surgical gender transition while living at home.   These boundaries take away the grounds for the State to seize them. They concede enough ground to my daughters to keep them safe, and give them time to think.   Once again, self-appointed experts working for the State are deeming mothers ‘unfit’ and seizing their children.   Please help us keep our kids safe from harm. Radical gender theory confers no benefits on vulnerable children and poses huge risks to their mental health. (p. 71)   The first story found in the book, and the longest, involves someone I happen to know. Her story has been featured elsewhere, and what she says needs to be heard. Tess and her husband lived a normal life with their daughter and son, but things went off the rails early on in the daughter’s teen years.   First, she revealed that she had been raped by a boy she was hanging around with; then she announced that she was a lesbian; and then she declared that she was really a boy, not a girl, and transitioning was the way forward. All this occurred in a relatively short period of time.   You really have to read the entire 44-page story. The hell this family has been through seems unimaginable to most of us. The entire family was turned upside down. And then there were the police and other authorities continuously siding with the confused daughter against the parents.   At one point the police confiscated the daughter’s diary which described the initial rape, and when the father tried to get it back, he was told it was destroyed! Just one brief quote from Tess: “I couldn’t believe what he was telling me! How could the police destroy evidence into the rape of a minor…? A wave of emotions coursed through me that I just couldn’t control. I started sobbing…” (p. 41)   The whole thing was an utter nightmare, with tears and anguish almost a daily outcome of this diabolical situation. The chapter ends with these tragic words:   It’s been almost 4 years since I spoke to my daughter. I miss her every day. I missed the person she was and the relationship we had. I mourn for the loss of the relationship with her sibling, I mourn for the experiences she has missed and will never get back and I worry constantly for her health and mental wellbeing. I ache to hug her. I ache to listen to her laugh. Parenting was never meant to be this difficult or this crazy. What I do know is that I’ll never stop fighting to protect all the people being harmed by this dreadful agenda. What the professionals, activists, and the children themselves forget is to never get between a mother and her young (regardless of age, our protective instincts will always be there), and that when hopefully these lost youth realise they’ve made a massive mistake, it won’t be the medical professionals or the activists or their glitter families that will be there to help them. It will be the mums and dads waiting to help them heal. (pp. 60-61)   Closing chapters written by Kirralie examine various issues, including how so much of the media is complicit in pushing radical trans activism. The penultimate chapter speaks about “Resources for families”. In it she says this:   Despite the pressure and misinformation, its vital parents understand that having compassion doesn’t have to mean 100 per cent agreeing with their beliefs, or condoning their behaviour.   Many de-transitioners (former trans-identifying people) caution parents of gender dysphoric children against simply presenting scientific facts and arguments about biological sex. While truth is certainly on your side, there are complex layers underlying the gender issue meaning a guns-blazing approach is likely to drive them further down the ideological hole.   It’s important to prioritise building a quality relationship with your child and moving the conversation away from gender and transitioning as much as it’s possible. Remember that studies show around 90 per cent of children will grow out of their gender dysphoria if left to go through normal puberty.   Many young women who were caught up in the transgender craze in their teenage years describe body image issues, unrealistic expectations of womanhood, and the hypersexualized culture as contributing factors that led to their trans identity. Parents play an important role in combating these negative cultural messages and engaging in constructive conversations around some of these damaging lies they may be believing. Flaunting your body and liking ‘girly things’ do not make a woman, nor do muscles and cars make a man. Gender ideology is purely based on stereotypes and denies the beautiful diversity of character and temperament of males and females. (pp. 153-154)   Her closing words in her final chapter are also worth sharing:   We must offer support, compassion and hope to those impacted by gender ideology. Nearly everyone has a story of someone they know who has been captured by gender ideology. So many sad stories based on false narratives and promises that cannot possibly be realised.   We can all be a part of the change and influence our culture for good. Anytime someone tries to silence you, remember these stories. Stand firm, speak up and speak loudly for those whose voice has been stolen from them.   Truth, reality and evidence-based science will prevail. It is just a matter of time and a commitment from each one of us to stay the course. (p. 164)

Welby’s tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury will end after an evensong service in Lambeth Palace By Kaya Burgess, Religious Affairs Correspondent THE TIMES January 05 2025 Justin Welby will lay down his crozier to bring his tenure as archbishop to a close Justin Welby will not be able to officiate as a priest after he steps down as Archbishop of Canterbury on Monday unless he seeks special permission from a bishop, under church rules. Welby’s tenure as the 105th archbishop formally comes to a close at the end of Monday, the feast of Epiphany in the Christian calendar. On Tuesday his duties will pass to the Archbishop of York, the Most Rev Stephen Cottrell, who will act as a caretaker. The outgoing archbishop, who was forced to resign after criticism over his handling of abuse allegations, will spend Monday privately at Lambeth Palace. He is due to attend a lunchtime Eucharist at the palace chapel and will take part in an evensong service at the end of the day. At this service, he will lay down his crozier, the hooked staff carried by bishops, a symbolic gesture that will bring his 11-year tenure to an end. Welby spent his final Christmas as archbishop privately with family, and did not deliver his usual Christmas Day sermon in Canterbury Cathedral or broadcast his usual New Year’s Day message via the BBC. Most of his archiepiscopal duties will pass to Cottrell while some will be taken on by the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Sarah Mullally. His duties in the Diocese of Canterbury will pass to the Bishop of Dover, the Right Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin. They will also take up these duties on Tuesday. When a priest leaves office or retires, they may not officiate at services or act as a priest unless they have been granted permission to officiate by a bishop. This allows them to carry out priestly duties in that bishop’s diocese. Welby will therefore not be able to officiate as a priest after Monday. A source said that he would not “immediately or automatically” be granted permission to officiate, but could apply “following a period of discernment … in conjunction with a diocesan bishop”. Welby was criticised for how he dealt with allegations of abuse by John Smyth, who beat boys It remains to be seen whether any bishop would grant Welby this permission so soon after his resignation over a safeguarding scandal. Welby’s resignation came after he faced criticism in a report by Keith Makin, a former social services director, over how he and other senior church leaders handled allegations of abuse against John Smyth, a Christian barrister who beat boys. Welby was assured by colleagues that police had been informed, but was criticised for not doing more to ensure Smyth was being robustly investigated and brought to justice. The report alleged that a number of other priests, not including Welby, knew a significant amount about Smyth’s abuse for decades but did not report him. Many of these individuals have since had their permission to officiate suspended pending further investigations. It is not known where Welby and his family will live after leaving Lambeth Palace, though they are understood to have a home in France. Cottrell will still be based as Bishopthorpe Palace in York. Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, will take over Welby’s duties until a replacement is appointed The process to appoint his successor has already begun, with members set to be elected to the highly confidential Crown Nominations Commission. Its 17-strong committee, led by a former head of MI5, will draw up a longlist and a shortlist, and conduct interviews, all behind closed doors. A name is not due to be announced until the autumn. Cottrell will perform the duties of the Archbishop of Canterbury until then, but at 66 he is considered too close to the retirement age of 70 to be in the running for the job permanently. He has so far ridden out a storm of calls for his own resignation, after fierce criticism over his own handling of sexual and domestic abuse cases that were brought to his attention in the past. Gavin Drake, a former General Synod member who has campaigned for the church to overhaul its safeguarding policies, said: “Victims and survivors of church-related abuse, and those who advocate for them, know all too well just how deeply involved Cottrell is in the mismanagement of safeguarding fiascos.” Welby was not considered a frontrunner to be Archbishop of Canterbury when Lord Williams of Oystermouth announced his retirement in 2012, meaning that the next appointee may also be a surprise. The Bishop of Leicester, the Right Rev Martyn Snow, and the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, the Right Rev Paul Williams, have been touted as possible candidates. Both hail from the more conservative wing of the church. The Iranian-born Bishop of Chelmsford, the Right Rev Guli Francis-Dehqani, has also been hailed as a possible first female archbishop, though it is feared that some parts of the global communion would not welcome a woman as the spiritual head of the world’s 85 million Anglicans. Mullally has also been touted as a potential candidate, as has the Bishop of Norwich, the Right Rev Graham Usher

By Chuck Collins www.virtueonline.org January 6, 2025 Twelve-year old Princess Elizabeth gave her stepmother, Katherine Parr, an extraordinary new year’s present December 30, 1545. It was a small book covered in blue silk that she hand-embroidered with two red and silver initials: HR and KP (Henry Rex and Katherine Parr). The book was a long letter that she wrote in French to Katherine along with her own translation of the first chapter of John Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion.   This was the first translation of the 1541 French edition of the Institutes, and only one of two translations of any of Calvin’s writings known in England before the end of the reign of King Henry VIII in 1547. The year before her new year’s gift to Katherine was her translation of Marguerite d’Angoulême’s A Godly Medytacyon of the Christian Sowle , what propagandist John Bale called: “a godly Protestant manifesto.” Young Elizabeth’s tutors were humanist evangelicals, so it was no accident that her studies included languages and the new religion that was gaining popularity in England. But translating the Swiss reformer into English as a gift for her queen mother in the last years of King Henry’s life was daring and tricky. She wanted to show her love and appreciation to Katherine who had supported her and who was a quiet evangelical (Protestant) herself, without raising the ire of her Catholic and intractable father.   Walking this delicate road, Elizabeth didn’t mention Calvin or the title of his work anywhere in her letter or in the translation, describing him only as “my author,” and near the end of her letter she described the translation as “a little book whose thesis or subject, Saint Paul said, surpasses the capacity of every creature.” Clearly this gift was more than a classroom assignment; it shows Elizabeth’s incredible intellect and her sympathetic leanings towards Protestantism.   When that twelve-year old grew up, Elizabeth developed a discrete and sometimes undefined view of Protestantism. As Queen of England and Ireland for 44 years, Elizabeth was mostly interested in keeping peace in the realm between moderate Protestants who supported the 1559 Prayer Book and the more vociferous nonconformist Puritans who were sure that its reforms didn’t go far enough. In 1550 the Protestant Bishop John Hooper wrote the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger that Elizabeth was “inflamed with the same zeal for the religion of Christ” as that of her brother Edward VI.   In her personal Bible the queen inscribed in the flyleaf: “I walke many times in the pleasaunt fieldes of the holye scriptures, Where I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning: Eate the[m] by reading: Chawe the[m] by musing.” Her appointment of three decidedly Protestant Archbishops of Canterbury shows her commitment to a church that is thoroughly biblical, theologically reformed and confessional, pastorally generous, and liturgically beautiful. There is no reason to doubt Elizabeth’s essential and unwavering Protestantism, and her personal commitment to the historic Anglican formularies: the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion (1571), the Book of Common Prayer (1559 and 1662), and the Edwardian and Elizabethan books of Homilies. This became known as the the famous “Elizabethan Settlement.” On the other hand she was religiously complicated; she said and did some things that had some Protestants scratching their heads. For example, she strongly believed that clergy should remain celibate (although she never enforced this), she kept a crucifix in her private chapel for devotion, ordered the use of the prescribed homilies (written sermons) and forbade the popular “exercises of prophesying” where clergy gathered to hear sermons and pray for one another, and she opposed the Calvinistic Lambeth Articles (1595), either because her view on predestination was more moderate (like Article 17 of the Thirty-nine Articles) or because she was upset with Archbishop Whitgift for introducing them without her approval. Commenting on Elizabeth’s religion as Queen and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, historian Diarmaid MacCulloch said: “Sometimes she has been seen as a Henrician Catholic, pushed into a more Protestant settlement by those around her. This is a clear mistake. Elizabeth was an evangelical, but of a distinctive and (in the conditions of the late 1550s) an extremely old-fashion variety. She disliked the marriage of clergy and enjoyed more ceremonial and decoration in worship than her half-brother would have considered tolerable. If we want to place her beliefs, we should do so not at the court of Edward, but at the court of Henry VIII and Catherine Parr in the mid-1540s. This was the era when Elizabeth had first been given a role of dignity, when she became one of the elite of children who enjoyed an exceptional rich and privileged education."   Reformation scholar Roland Bainton wrote, “If there be any who doubt the sincerity of her religious sentiment let them ponder this her private prayer”: “This God of my life and life of my soul, the King of all comfort, is my only refuge. For his sake therefore, to who thou hast given all power, and wilt deny no petition, hear my prayers. Turn thy face from my sins (O Lord) and thine eyes to they handiwork. Create a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me. Order my steps in thy word, that no wickedness have dominion over me, make me obedient to thy will, and delight in thy law. Grant me grace to live godly and to govern justly: that so living to please thee and reigning to serve thee I may even glorify thee, the Father of all goodness and mercy.”   Dean Chuck Collins is a Reform theologian and blogger

COMMENTARY By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org   January 1, 2025   Amichai Chikli, minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, publicly reprimanded Pope Francis for his part in a recent display portraying Jesus as a Palestinian Arab and lectured the pope on the Jewishness of Jesus.   There is no other way to understand the decision to present his image in a cradle, wrapped in a keffiyeh,” Chikli chided. “Had this been a one-time matter, I would not have written. However, just a few weeks before this strange and false homage, in a more severe expression, you echoed the new blood libel, insinuating that the State of Israel ‘might be’ committing genocide in Gaza.”   “It is a well-known fact that Jesus was born to a Jewish mother, lived as a Jew, and died as a Jew,” Chikli wrote in a three-page missive. He cited Matthew’s gospel, reminding Francis of the “well-known fact” that “Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea.”   Increasingly Francis is coming across as a liberal Protestant wrapped in papal garb stuck in a literal and theological wheelchair. His comments about other religions of equal standing with Christianity and downplaying the uniqueness of Christ shocked conservative Catholics, while the growing infiltration of homosexuality in the Vatican is equally shocking to millions of orthodox Catholics, especially at a time when sexual abuse is so rampant. Increasingly homosexuality in the Vatican is dominating the headlines.   Chikli quotes other biblical texts reiterating to Francis the significance of “Bethlehem” and “Judah” in Jewish history. He notes that Bethlehem is both the city of Rachel’s death and David’s birth, explaining that Rachel is Israel’s matriarch and David is Israel’s archetypal king.   “It is also a well-known fact that the term ‘Jew’ originates from Judah, the fourth son of Leah, from whom the Tribe of Judah descended,” the minister pointed out.   Chikli proceeded to give the pope a lesson in Roman history and the empire’s attempts “to eradicate the connection between the Jews and Judah; one of the most prominent of these was Emperor Hadrian.” He records details of Titus’s destruction of the Second Temple and the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which resulted in the massacre of 580,000 Jews.   “Hadrian was not satisfied with the physical destruction of the Jewish settlement; he anticipated the future, to the day when the Jews would seek to return to Judea. Therefore, he renamed the province of Judea ‘Syria Palestina,’ after the Philistines, the arch-enemy of Israel,” he writes, explaining the origin of the name “Palestine.”   In a dig at Francis, Chikli also notes that the pope can verify the evidence for himself by driving just “13 minutes by car from St. Peter’s Basilica” and examining the Arch of Titus with its depiction of Israel’s conquest and humiliation by the Romans.   Perhaps Francis should take a course in Biblical history and theology to freshen up these embarrassing moments.   THE GENOCIDE BLOOD LIBEL   Referring to the pope’s recent comments calling for an investigation into the alleged genocide in Gaza, reported by The Stream, the minister contends: “This is a desperate and disgusting attempt to rewrite history.”   “As a nation that lost six million of its sons and daughters in the Holocaust, we are especially sensitive to the trivialization of the term ‘genocide’ — a trivialization that is dangerously close to Holocaust denial,” he notes.   Chikli details how the term “genocide” can be aptly applied to Nazi Germany, which “for the first time in the history of nations, set as its ultimate goal the complete annihilation of an unarmed people with whom it had no conflict, and most of whom were not even living in its territory.   “Let us recall that between the Jews, who made up less than 1% of the population of Germany in the 1930s, and the Germans, there had been no prior violent, territorial, religious, or political conflict,” he notes. Recalling the “sickening strategy” of the “Final Solution,” the minister cites as one example the Treblinka death camp, where 845,000 Jews from Poland, including children and elderly people, were murdered in gas chambers and then dumped into execution pits, concluding: “This is what genocide looks like.”    “The Vatican’s silence during those dark days of the Shoah is still deafening,” he writes, asking Francis to “clarify your stand regarding the genocide blood libel against the Jewish state,” a “new blood libel” recently promoted against Israel by the human rights organization Amnesty International.   Chikli concludes by drawing Francis’s attention to the 60th anniversary of the Nostra Aetate Declaration from the Second Vatican Council, which will be celebrated in 2025. The declaration announced that God's eternal covenant with the Jewish people is still in force: "God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle".  This marked a “significant milestone in the relationship between the Jewish people and Christianity,” he maintains, noting that Francis is known to be “a close friend of the Jewish people.”   The Vatican has maintained a diplomatic silence on the minister’s letter, with neither Vatican News nor Avvenire, the Italian bishops’ media, reporting on it.   In response, the pope has doubled down on Israel since Chikli’s letter, twice in public remarks last weekend accusing the Jewish state of massacring children in Gaza.   From this writer’s perspective, the so-called Vicar of Christ on earth is little more than a failed cleric falling for all the prejudiced statements of the UN and its antisemitic secretary-general.   Dr. Jules Gomes of The Stream contributed to this story.

COMMENTARY   By David W. Virtue DD www.virtueonline.org December 31, 2024   They have healed the wound of my people lightly - Jer. 8:11   Globally, evangelicals in the Anglican communion have taken a huge beating. They have been scorned and derided as lacking diversity and inclusion. Progressives charge them with using Scripture to “gay-bash” while steadfastly refusing to believe that God has changed his mind to “widen His mercy” to include “committed” same-sex relationships which now meet His approval.   God has finally flipped the bird to straight white and black marriages and installed a new sexual sheriff with more inclusive views.   Evangelicals get bad press from the MSM because of their stand, whether it’s a Christian baker who refuses to bake a cake for two queers who want to get married, or African archbishops who believe the Bible, brought to them by Anglican missionaries a century ago, definitively repudiates both homosexuality and polygamy.   Before he fell from grace, Archbishop Justin Welby was well known for phoning African primates when he thought their nations were showing a jaundiced eye to sodomy, only to discover that in many cases their culture had no known word for “homosexuality.” All the while the West was buying African leaders’ acquiescence on the issue.   The Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion (EFAC) leaders note two things in their response to the IASCUFO Nairobi-Cairo proposals. The first was the anachronism of colonial era structures for the Anglican Communion when the vast majority of active members are now found in the Global South; and secondly the broken and impaired relationships of communion which have arisen due to doctrinal differences, especially having to do with biblical anthropology and marriage.   The unspoken aspect to all this (though it was blurted out by the late  Bishop of Newark John Shelby Spong at Lambeth ‘98,) is that Africans have a primitive form of religion that is superstitious, defying both science and modern scholarship.   The EFAC leaders noted that while the issue has been in contention for several decades it has heightened since the Bishops and General Synod of the Church of England opened the way for the blessing of same sex relationships in 2023.   All this makes clear that earlier attempts to reform the Instruments by seeking moratoria, repentance, and renewed covenantal affirmations and commitments have not succeeded.   The American Episcopal Church paved the way for this rebellion against the moral order resulting in a split in that church and the formation of the Anglican Church in North America, with some 30 dioceses having their own archbishop, whom Justin Welby steadfastly refused to recognize.   Recognizing the tragic failure in theology and discipline, the EFAC leaders say they welcome the work of GSFA and GAFCON to reset the Communion and create structures which can enable full communion to continue between churches and faithful Anglicans based on Catholic and Apostolic faith and order.   A new twist will only heighten tensions. The Church’s evangelicals are seeking their own archbishops over a “de facto parallel province” to prevent a split over the blessing of same-sex partnerships. That may be the only way to preserve the fig-leaf of community.   The Rev Canon John Dunnett, director of the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC), an influential conservative group, is among those calling for a “de facto parallel province” to be created within the church, grouping together parishes that oppose last year’s move to allow priests to bless the unions of gay couples.   If it were legally enshrined as an official province, it “would have to have an archbishop” to oversee it, Dunnett said.   This would be in addition to the archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, whose provinces cover southern and northern England.   Divisions over gay rights extend to the highest levels of the church. Twelve dissenting bishops went public last year to declare they were “unable to support the collective decision” made by the House of Bishops to approve blessing gay couples who are married or are in civil partnerships.   The CEEC forms part of a conservative umbrella group called the Alliance, which counts 2,000 priests as supporters.   The Alliance, consisting of 2,000 priests as supporters issued a warning that if there is “further departure from the church’s doctrine” on sex and marriage, they “will have no choice but rapidly to establish what would in effect be a new de facto ‘parallel province’ within the Church of England”, which would require “oversight from bishops who remain faithful to orthodox teaching on marriage and sexuality”.   As EFAC leaders bishops Stephen Hale and Keith Sinclair noted; “it is vital that in ongoing reflection on our calling as the Church, the state of the Communion, and the report’s proposals to find a new way forward, that we are not found to come under the Lord’s judgment through the prophet Jeremiah: ‘they have healed the wound of my people lightly’ (8:11).   END

THE CITY OF MAN AGAINST THE CITY OF GOD   by David G. Duggan ©  Special to Virtueonline www.virtueonline.org December 26, 2024   Though I live in a city housing millions of souls, the pandemic, its crime and politics of unmatched corruption have largely robbed it of the vibe of city life. Crowds are shunning the downtown, remote workers don’t pack the public transit, and despite the holiday lights, the art, shopping, sports and entertainment venues don’t draw the suburbanites from their manicured lawns. It doesn’t help that its sports teams are beyond lousy.   For thousands of years, Christians and Jews have worshiped in cities. Perhaps not a requirement of the faith, cities create the critical mass and stark contrast of wealth and poverty, aloneness and congestion, sacred and profane. Mere blocks from cathedrals lie red-light districts, mere steps from high-end retailers beggars stick their hands out, and pickpockets are always prowling the streets and subways.   Though raised in rural Judea, Jesus spent about a third of his ministry in cities, principally Jerusalem, but also Capernaum and the Decapolis. He used cities as examples of places of sin worthy of redemption as a hen gathers her brood. Sometimes the crowds in the cities Jesus visited were so packed that the lame and the halt hoped simply to touch his garment to be healed. Their faith was rewarded.    Why God has chosen cities as recipients of His grace may seem incongruous. His initial call was to Abram to leave Ur, the largest city of Mesopotamia, and go to the Canaan wilderness, some 700 miles to the west. God later appeared to Moses in the wilderness and He used Moses to lead His people into the desert. After Nebuchadnezzar had leveled Jerusalem, the Israelites were exiled to Babylon where they were a religious minority. One might think that God was telling His people: “Forget this fascination with crowds and temples, walled enclosures and sentries. Stick to your roots as farmers and shepherds. There you will see my abundance and mercy.”   Yet the Israelites rebuilt the holy city when they were released from exile, and for 2,500 years ever since then, through the destruction of Jerusalem, the sack of Rome, the Black Death and plagues and pandemics, the faith has persisted in cities. Despite the crime and the grime, the poverty and the alienation, cities create the means of God’s mercy to shine through the winter darkness.    David Duggan is a retired attorney living in Chicago.