eChurch Blog

A transcript of the Archbishop’s video message is below:

After several years of work, the proposed covenant for the Anglican Communion has now reached its final form and is being distributed to the provinces for discussion, and I hope it will be adopted by as many provinces as possible.

It’s quite important in this process to remember what the Covenant is and what it isn’t, what it’s meant to achieve, and what it’s not going to achieve.  It’s not going to solve all our problems, it’s not going to be a constitution, and it’s certainly not going to be a penal code for punishing people who don’t comply. But what it does represent is this: in recent years in the Anglican family, we’ve discovered that our relations with each other as local churches have often been strained, that we haven’t learned to trust one another as perhaps we should, that we really need to build relationships, and we need to have a sense that we are responsible to one another and responsible for each other.  In other words, what we need is something that will help us know where we stand together, and help us also intensify our fellowship and our trust.

The covenant text sets out the basis on which the Anglican family works and prays and lives and hopes.  The bulk of the text identifies what we hold in common, the ground on which we stand as Anglicans.  It’s about the gift we’ve been given as a Church and the gift we’ve been given specifically as the Anglican Communion.  All those things we give thanks for, we affirm together, and we resolve together to safeguard and to honour.

The last bit of the Covenant text is the one thats perhaps been the most controversial, because that’s where we spell out what happens if relationships fail or break down.  It doesn’t set out, as I’ve already said, a procedure for punishments and sanctions.  It does try and sort out how we will discern the nature of our disagreement, how important is it? How divisive does it have to be? Is it a Communion breaking issue that’s in question – or is it something we can learn to live with? And so in these sections of the covenant what we’re trying to do is simply to give a practical, sensible and Christian way of dealing with our conflicts, recognising that they’re always going to be there.

So what happens next?  This Covenant is being sent to all the member Churches of the Anglican Communion.  Each church will, within its own processes, decide how to handle it, and by the next meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in three years time we hope that many provinces will already have said yes to this and adopted it into their own understanding and identity. Clearly the process won’t all be over by then, but we’re hoping to see some enthusiasm, some general adoption of the principles.  We hope to see a new kind of relationship emerging.  We hope to see people agreeing to these ways of resolving our conflicts.

Beyond that, what’s going to happen? It’s hard to say as yet, but the Covenant text itself does make it clear that at some point it’ll be open to other bodies, other Ecclesial bodies as they’re called, other Churches and communities to adopt this Covenant, and be considered for incorporation into the Anglican Communion.  Meanwhile, it’s open to anybody that wishes to affirm the principles of the Covenant – to say that this is what they wish to live with.

So in the next few years we expect to see quite a bit of activity around this.  We hope, as I’ve said, that many provinces will feel able to adopt this.  We hope that many other bodies will affirm the vision that’s set out here, and that in the long run this will actually help us to become more of a communion – more responsible for each other, presenting to the world a face of mutual understanding, patience, charity and gratitude for one another.  In other words, we hope and pray that the Covenant for the Anglican Communion will be a truly effective tool for witness and mission in our world.

The full text of the Anglican Communion Covenant can be found at:

http://www.aco.org/commission/covenant/final/text.cfm

Gosh check out the dreary top religion stories for 2009 over at the Telegraph:

Following a year of turmoil in the worldwide Anglican Communion over women bishops and homosexuality, over the past 12 months most of the newsworthy events seem to have involved the Roman Catholic Church and Britain.

Anyway, at least we have man-made global warming to cheer us all up:-

Watts Up With That – Deja Vu from the Met Office?

Disgusting. I have actually blogged about this so called ‘declaration’ before, here, but before you go on to read this, or the below article from CBN, check out the link below to get some perspective on this issue and see where the real problems lie for Palestinian Christians.

Palestinian Christians Suffer Persecution Under the Palestinian Authority

CBN

JERUSALEM, Israel – A handful of anti-Israel Palestinian Christian leaders are taking advantage of the Christmas season to call for a boycott against Israel and are calling on Christians worldwide to treat the Jewish state like the former apartheid regime in South Africa.

The initiative called “Kairos Palestine-2009: A moment of truth” was authored by a number of prominent clergymen in Jerusalem. It declares that as Palestinian Christians the “military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity”.

According to a report in the Egyptian-based al-Ahram weekly, these Palestinian Christians launched the campaign to enlist the support of Christians worldwide to end what they call “the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.”

One Christian leader in Jerusalem, who monitors the situation for Arab Christians here, told CBN News that it’s not clear how many of the local Arab Christians these leaders actually represent.

“It’s a real shame for Arab Christians in the land that this handful of Arab clerics [is] exploiting Christmas to promote radical political views,” said the leader who asked not to be named.

The document does not mention Muslim persecution of Christians in the Palestinian areas.

Human rights experts say that Palestinian Christians are often afraid to accuse their Muslim neighbors of abuses. But many say that Christians are often threatened. In the Gaza Strip two years ago, a Palestinian Bible Society worker was kidnapped and murdered allegedly for refusing to convert to Islam.

Israel Today

Since Israel’s rebirth over 60 years ago there has been a fear that God-fearing Israeli Jews would refuse military orders if they in any way violated God’s Word.

For the most part, such situations have never arisen. But with the recent uprooting of Jews from areas of the Land of Israel, and fears that those evacuations will be repeated, a number of rabbis are reminding young soldiers that their loyalty to God and His Word trumps their loyalty to the state and its army.

“Loyalty to God stands before any other loyalty,” said the heads of Israel’s hesder yeshivas in a joint statement. The hesder yeshivas follow the Orthodox Zionist strain of Judaism, which views military service in the Israeli army as religious duty. The hesder yeshivas have an agreement with the army under which their students spend half of their national service time studying, and the other half serving in combat units.

Last week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak caused an uproary when he officially cut ties to the hesder yeshiva in the Samarian Jewish community of Har Bracha after its head, Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, urged all young Israeli soldiers to not violate God’s Word by participating in future expulsions of Jews from their homes.

In their statement, released ahead of a gathering of the Union of Hesder Yeshivot on Sunday, the heads of the other 61 hesder yeshivas backed Melamed and warned that “the army is being used for purposes unrelated to defending Israel, which are opposed to the will of God.”

Many Israeli political and religious figures are urging Barak to reconcile with Melamed and the hesder yeshiva movement to avoid further dividing Israeli society down religious lines and creating a situation where religious soldiers feel outcast and eventually turn their backs on the IDF.

BikyaMasyr

An Egyptian-Christian blogger has been denied release by Egypt’s ministry of interior, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) reported on Wednesday. The move comes after Egyptian courts have called for his release on a previous three occasions, but the ministry continues to issue arrest warrants that keep Hani Nazeer Aziz in jail.

Aziz blogs on Karz al-Hob, which, according to ANHRI, was removed from the Internet by Egyptian authorities following a crackdown of bloggers in October 2008.

ANHRI says Aziz was arrested under the pretext of the emergency law, “without any charge or crime since October 2008? and “has been issued a fourth release decision by State Security Court, after lawyers of ANHRI’s freedom of expression legal aid unit submitted a memorandum to the court detailing how security forces kidnapped Hani’s brothers as hostage until he would turn himself in.”

The Cairo-based rights group says that the blogger has committed no crime and should be released. They added that a church leader had helped security “to get hold of Hani in October 2008,” when the blogger was arrested and taken to the infamous Borg al-Arab prison.

According to ANHRI, the Christian blogger has been subjected to a series of violations since he was detained over one year ago. ANHRI, in a press statement listed the abuses against Aziz: “abduction of his brothers; threatening to arrest his sisters; Church cleric cooperating with security against him; detaining him as a criminal rather than a political prisoner; pressuring him to convert to Islam to be released; forcing him to tell the password of his blog, which was then erased by state security; preventing ANHRI lawyers from visiting him; and security declining on the implementation of four judicial decisions to release him.”

ANHRI condemned the actions of the government, saying, “the Egyptian interior minister, being responsible for the state security department, ought to feel proud that his men are so shielded off from accountability and punishment, and that judiciary independence has become a meaningless slogan that some officials use to deceive the public opinion in Egypt.”

It added that these types of cases, similar in nature to Aziz’s and “other prisoners of conscience as well as victims of impunity in Egypt, will be the living proof of the lies of the Egyptian government in Geneva during the presentation of Egypt’s report on human rights conditions in Egypt during the last four years.”

Original Source: EZGToons

Previous Post:-

The Copenhagen climate summit has brought with it an outpouring of opinions and a planetary law imposing China’s one-child policy on all nations is what is needed, according Diane Francis

(CNA).- With the close of the Copenhagen summit on climate change, demographics expert Steven W. Mosher has warned that blaming overpopulation for global warming is “unscientific” and “dangerous.” “The people of China have paid dearly for their leader’s obsession with driving down the birthrate, and now we hear anti-population extremists at Copenhagen advocating a China-like one-child policy for the entire world,” Mosher said in a Thursday press release.

Mosher, president of the Virginia-based Population Research Institute (PRI), is an expert on China’s one-child policy. He has witnessed forced abortions and forced sterilizations performed on pregnant women in China.

“Population extremists speak of a world in danger from exploding population. But one wonders what ‘world they are talking about.”

He said that at present “tremendous strides” have been made to produce more food from less land and to set aside land for nature preserves. Mosher also cited population statistics which show birth rates plummeting and population growth plateauing.

“The demographic collapse of the developed world is the real inconvenient truth,” Mosher commented, predicting that much of the developing world will follow the same path.

“We would be better served holding summits on these matters if we want to stave off economic and societal collapse. Climate change can wait. Providing for the future by providing the next generation cannot. Weather fluctuations or not, we should have more children, not fewer.”

Good old Biased BBC

The BBC gave the Irish sex abuse cases top billing

They even made a Vatican-driven reorganisation of the Irish Catholic Church the main item on Radio Four news a fortnight later.

Yesterday the resignation of a bishop made the PM news, with interviews and a correspondent report. Three online news items.

You’d almost think Ireland hadn’t been an independent nation for the past 90-odd years.

Yet coverage of the Irish budget, which made such a contrast to Alistair Darling’s earlier statement, was almost non-existent.

Most odd.

Read More

And yesterday the BBC made the silly row over a church billboard from New Zealand top billing. The BBC, always striving to show the positive side of the church man-made global warming.

Unholy row over New Zealand Mary and Joseph billboard

Very encouraging blog post by Arthur Sido over at “the voice of one crying out in suburbia” blog. Hat-tip Polycarp.

Here is a snippet, but do hop over and read the whole article:-

If Europe and even America wants to make it more costly to be disciple of Christ, to enact a real cost for those who name the Name of Jesus, I say go for it. Let us winnow out the false professors and the religious and make them make a stand instead of sitting in comfort in church on Sunday morning. The church does not flourish where life is easy and religion doubly so. It grows best under persecution, it flourishes with the blood of martyrs. Bring on persecution because that is when you will really see revival, real revival that doesn’t happen in a tent on schedule. Persecution is not a curse to be feared, it is a blessing.

Read All

Great article from Mariette Ulrich over at MercatorNet covering climate change as the new religion. Bill Muehlenberg has also written on climate change today and well worth a read.

Last week I watched a videotaped press conference put on at Copenhagen by a group called Climate Justice Fast! CJF is an international movement of hunger strikers motivated by their concerns over climate change as well as the disparity between developed and developing nations. Some participants began fasting on November 6, taking only salt supplements and water, and plan to conclude when the Copenhagen summit closes—if they don’t die of starvation or cardiac arrest first.

A young hunger striker from Sweden, Sara Svenson, gave her personal testimony. Much as I admired her grit in fasting for a month already, I found much of what she said amusing, especially her predictions about life in the “sustainable future”: lots of love, happiness, free time, and dancing in the grass. We would be in heaven, if only we could escape illness, death, mosquitoes and taxes. But we in the decadent west shall definitely not escape taxes, not when CJF is demanding US$195 billion per year in funding for developing nations, and perhaps more at home, in order to underwrite the wholesale lifestyle changes we will be expected to embrace.

The CJF homepage sports a quotation from Martin Luther King: “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.” Agreed. I applaud climate-change adherents for their zeal, for I too hold religious convictions. But I think theirs are misguided, since, in many cases, they seem more willing to kill others (before birth or on their sickbeds) than themselves, or prevent them from being conceived in the first place. It has been suggested that the entire world needs to adopt China’s one-child policy in order to save the earth.

It is more than a little surprising to witness the religious fervour gripping many heretofore cynical and secular Europeans and North Americans on account of an unproven theory of future global climatological disaster. Watching Miss Svenson on the CJF video illustrated how quietly extreme some of these believers are. Here was no fanatical animal rights activist blowing up a lab, or nutty logging protestor strapping himself to an ancient tree: this was a nice, girl-next-door type who, if she adheres to the principles on the CJF website, is willing to die for her cause.

As others have observed, belief in cataclysmic climate change has all the earmarks of a world religion — except a name. Environmentalism? Too vague, too 1980’s. After encountering a certain term repeatedly in my reading, I have decided to call the institutional expression of this faith The Climate Change Church of Settled-Science.

Consider the climate creed. It has rigid dogma and sacred writ, the latter including even “long lost” and missing texts in the form of destroyed and suppressed emails, data, and/or doctored computer codes and models. It has prophets and predictions. It attracts the unwavering faith of true believers, provoking them to asceticism (fasting, sacrifice, even unto martyrdom—at least in theory) and filling them with joy and euphoria in the belief that they are “doing the right thing”. It inspires a fervent desire to spread the word and make others see the light; it condemns sin and calls for conversion to a strict lifestyle code — or punishment for those who do not believe, do not obey, do not comply. And, of course, it is an established religion, or aspires to be one, with the state as the enforcer of its doctrines and codes.

The creed has its heretics: scientists who question the dogma are ostracized, vilified, silenced, excommunicated. It has its atheists, although the label “deniers” is currently more popular. Some CCC of SS true believers feel that deniers ought to be treated with the same scorn and censure as Holocaust deniers; others have suggested that climate-change dissenters ought to be charged with treason. (Against what or whom? The world? Mother Earth?)

The CCC of SS has its list of sins: some acts are intrinsically evil: driving an SUV, using incandescent light bulbs, having more than one child. Some acts are righteous: recycling, buying locally grown food, cleaning your bathroom sink with vinegar. Others, such as air travel, are sinful for some (ordinary people who just want to visit their relatives once a year) but not for others (climate change advocates who need to fly –weekly– to spread the Word.) Some sins can be mitigated by the purchase of indulgences in the form of carbon credits/offsets.

And then there is Copenhagen 15: the Immaculate Convention. Delegates have been demanding the “most rapid possible transition”, if not a hard line against dissenters. Perhaps we will soon see the inception of the Danish Inquisition. (I do hope it involves pastry.)

Mother Earth makes a convenient deity, but as for an earthly messiah, no one has yet ascended the mount. Al Gore’s lyrical effusions have spoken of a “shepherd.” Could it be he? In practical terms, the CCC of SS doesn’t have one saviour; it has many. Consider this quotation from a London Telegraph report on the eve of the summit:

In Copenhagen there was a humbler note among some delegates. “If we fail, one reason could be our overconfidence,” said Simron Jit Singh, of the Institute of Social Ecology. “Because we are here, talking in a group of people who probably agree with each other, we can be blinded to the challenges of the other side. We feel that we are the good guys, the selfless saviours, and they are the bad guys.”

I think that was a genuine attempt at realism and humility, but this religion, like all others, has its arrogant and pharisaical elements. The Telegraph headline and intro says it all:

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges. Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

Presumably, Miss Svenson would not approve, although I’m sure she did not walk or cycle from Sweden. She insisted in her CJF testimony: “To stop climate change and create a sustainable and just world will require total commitment from every individual on earth.”

And there’s the rub: who defines “total commitment”? Where do liberty and personal autonomy give way to totalitarianism? It seems to be a case of “global governance” vs. various countries’ constitutional rights to liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and security of the person.

For how many decades did secular humanists say things like: “Don’t force your morality on me,” or “Keep your laws off my body.” Now, many of these same humanists are firm climate creed believers and they see nothing wrong with enforcing their political, social, and consumer morality on those who do not share their beliefs. They literally want to control how, what and where we eat, dress, drive, build and heat our homes; even what kinds of light bulbs and toilet tissue we use.

Climate change research may have begun as science, but it has long since morphed into religious belief: let us not be deceitful, coy or self-delusional on that score. I don’t particularly object to its being a religion. Man has free will and in the Western world, we (allegedly) have freedom of religion, though victims of various human rights inquis- er, commissions would beg to differ. In Canada, those calling for separation of church and state have claimed that “freedom of religion” should include “freedom from religion”. In the case of the Climate Change Church of Settled-Science, I couldn’t agree more.

Mariette Ulrich is a freelance writer living in Canada. She blogs at Dumb Old Housewives.