eChurch Blog

I’m on a bit of a roll with the Anglican suggestions for Lent this week:-

Carbon fasting for Lent?

The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, and the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, are among those calling for a carbon fast for Lent

Cross-post from David over at Anglican Samizdat:-

Anglican bishops suggest we turn off our iPods for Lent. I didn’t think the average bishop knew what an iPod was:

The bishops of Liverpool and London have called on us to give up our iPods for Lent, which starts today, Ash Wednesday. That’s a sacrifice of which most of us, of a certain age, can heartily approve, since we don’t actually own iPods. But we might wonder what the point of it all is.

It’s appears to be one of the Church of England’s seasonal flurries of post-modern rubrics, like being told which carols are politically incorrect at the start of Advent. When it comes to Lent, we’re cutomarily told that it’s about a whole lot more than giving up booze and chocolate, that we should take up worthwhile activities too and, in the techno age, that some central Church Deep Thought will text us a daily scriptural bon mot if we just ask for it.

And where could that glimpse lead? One destination could be a church like mine, where this evening the choir will sing Allegri’s Miserere, its repeated soprano refrain like an angel’s wail from heaven and the transcendental beauty and spiritual re-assurance of which moves the undistracted listener to tears. It’s certainly worth turning your iPod off for.

Unless, like me, you have Allegri’s Miserere on your iPod; that is worth turing your iPod on for.

Turning off your iPod during Lent is all part of the CofE’s batty bishops contingent Carbon Fast plan. It includes not flushing the toilet – something that fits nicely with no iPod since you won’t be tempted to sit listening to Allegri’s Miserere while sitting on a pile of unflushed poop.

Another suggestion from our technically astute bishops is to:

Eat by candlelight. How many rooms do you light in the evenings? Turn out the lights and have a meal by candlelight.

which will fill the air with benzene, styrene, toluene, acetone and particulate matter. At least it will take everyone’s mind off the unflushed toilets.

I do like the idea of the carbon averse bishops being as disconnected from the Internet as they are from reality, though; perhaps they should also switch their microphones off while delivering sermons.

And now for something a little more sensible from our Lutheran brother over at CyberBrethren:-

Prayer of the Church – Ash Wednesday

Almighty and everlasting God, Your people come to You with weeping and mourning over all our sins, yet we give You thanks that You are gracious and merciful to us. Grant to us Your Holy Spirit that our hearts may be contrite, our faith steadfast and immovable, and our hope built securely upon Your cross.

We praise You for all Your loving care over our lives; for Your Word which accomplishes Your purpose and manifests Your saving glory to the whole world; for those who bring Your Word to us–all pastors, missionaries, church workers and church leaders. Keep us in Your Word that we may rightly divide Your Law and Gospel and hold fast to the doctrine of the apostles all our days.

We remember before You those who stand against Your Word and the reign of Your kingdom–both among the nations and their leaders, and those who have closed off their hearts to the voice of Your mercy. Bring them to repentance, and restore all those who have fallen away or been overcome by error.

We pray for good weather and good harvest, for good government and good leaders, for good schools and good teachers, for good service from those in the armed services of our nation, police, firefighters, medical and emergency personnel. Protect us against all enemies and from natural and man-made disasters.

We invite You into the homes where Your people dwell that they may be places of blessing and faith and love. Help husbands and wives to live in holy love and to be faithful in the vows and promises they have made. Bless the children in these homes that they may grow up to know You and to love You. Be with the widowed, the families broken by divorce, and the orphans.

We ask You, O Lord, to teach our hearts gratitude for all Your gifts and generosity toward those in need. Help us to support the poor, to feed the hungry, to assist the unemployed and to care for the hurting. We pray [especially for . . . names of the sick and those in need] that the suffering may find relief, the sick may find healing, the mourning may find comfort, and the dying may find peace in the arms of Jesus Christ, our Savior.

We beg You to keep us from being distracted by the things of this world, to keep us from being overcome by the chances and changes of this mortal life, and to be firmly anchored in the arms of Your mercy and grace in Jesus Christ. As He came among us to walk in holy life to the suffering of the cross, help us as we walk with Him in this Lenten journey, that we may learn to trust in Him evermore and to rejoice in what He has accomplished for us and for our salvation.

We look forward to the day when all our troubles and trials will be ended and we shall dwell in Your presence forevermore. Until that day comes, keep us faithful and guard us against all our enemies. And when that day comes, O Lord, receive us into the fellowship of all Your saints, in the blessed reunion with those who have gone before us with the sign of faith and now rest from their labors; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, to whom be glory and honor, now and forevermore.
Amen.

Source: LCMS Commission on Worship

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Chavah Messianic Internet Radio

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I must admit this one beggars belief:-

Revd. Fr. Edward Tomlinson

Every now and then something happens which allows us to discern how things actually are as opposed to how they are intended to appear. If you want clarification of where modern liberal theology actually leads then ponder this extraordinary news item. Is this not a slipping of the mask exposing a terrible, scandalous truth within Protestantism? I refer to the complete abandonment of faith which leads the Protestant church in Holland to proclaim, without irony, that atheism is no bar to Holy orders!!! Remind me again…what exactly are priests for?

Am I alone in finding it absurd that the hierarchy of any Christian church should consider atheism a valid belief system for its clergy?!! If it were the plot of a novel you would discount it as utterly stupid. Is this not a real case of a wolf dressed up in sheep’s clothing? At least Woggler has the integrity to be a real atheist rather than one dressed up in the vestments of faith.

Not that the problem is uniquely Dutch. Here in England I raised awareness of a priest with similar disregard for Christian faith and also wrote to his Bishop. Despite providing clear evidence that the man does not believe in miracles, the Virgin birth, the resurrection or the reality of sin, nothing whatsoever was done by the Church of England hierarchy. Indeed his blasphemous pamphlets continue to be published via the church website. I can only conclude that the present House of Bishops is in full sympathy with the Dutch church elders who made this most incredulous statement:

“The ideas of Hendrikse (atheism) are theologically not new, and are in keeping with the liberal tradition that is an integral part of our church,”

Here then is the slip of the mask. We have churches run by people who support heresy and show little passion for authentic Christian faith. And note that whilst the Dutch atheist and his English counterpart remain assured of a future within their prospective churches, we who are Anglo-Catholic are being bundled out of the back door simply for upholding what the Church has always taught. The paradox is complete then- atheism is no longer a bar to holy orders within liberal Western Christendom but orthodox faith is. And they wonder why the ordinariate has some of us genuinely interested!

Unbelievable!

Only a matter of time:-

Telegraph:-

Forward in Faith Australia, part of the Anglo-Catholic group that also has members in Britain and America, is setting up a working party guided by a Catholic bishop to work out how its followers can cross over to Rome.

It is believed to be the first group within the Anglican church to accept Pope Benedict XVI’s unprecedented offer for disaffected members of the Communion to convert en masse while retaining parts of their spiritual heritage.

So far only the Traditional Anglican Communion, which has already broken away from the 70 million-strong Anglican Communion, has declared that its members will become Catholics under the Apostolic Constitution.

The Rt Rev David Robarts OAM, chairman of FIF Australia, said members of the association felt excluded by the Anglican Church in Australia, which had not provided them with a bishop to champion their conservative views on homosexuality and women bishops.

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There has even been some intrigue:-

Guardian:-

An extraordinary correspondence has fallen into my hands showing some of the detail of the Anglo-Catholic intrigues about their departure from the Church of England. It shows the Anglican “flying bishop” of Ebbsfleet, Andrew Burnham, conspiring with a sympathetic Roman Catholic bishop in Australia to work behind the back of the Catholic bishops here. He talks about his “cloak and dagger” correspondence with a sympathiser in the Vatican, and suggests that he can write personally to Pope Benedict XVI to smooth things over if his correspondent is caught. This may come as news to the pope.

The Australian bishop, Peter Elliott, is himself an Anglican convert, and is in charge of the pope’s outreach to Anglican opponents of women priests in Australia. Most of these are grouped in a body called the Traditional Anglican Communion, which claims to have half a million members world wide: Burnham warns Bishop Elliott against complete confidence in their leader, Archbishop Hepworth (“clearly a charming man … but not everything he says … synchronises fully with what we know from other sources”).

But the passage which will cause discomfort in this country is this:

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Damian Thompson has been covering these developments:-

Revealed: Anglo-Catholic bishop in talks with CDF to stop English bishops ‘smothering’ Pope’s Anglican plan

The Anglican exodus begins…

There will be plenty of pundits commenting on all of this over the next few days, which I’ll add here if there is anything interesting or unexpected. The main question will be if this decision by Forward in Faith (oz) prompts others to do likewise. Time for folks to show their cards methinks.

Science and Religion Today:-

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom: You might have seen news reports about a recent study showing that religious people are no healthier than nonreligious people. The cynical among you might be wondering what on earth is going on here, given that other studies have shown the opposite! A classic example of scientists proving whatever they want to, perhaps?

Well, no. There’s a good reason that this study has found something different, and that’s because it’s not asking quite the same question.

You see, working out the relationship between religion and health is actually quite complicated. If you take the straightforward approach, the answer is clear: Religious people are unhealthier and die younger than the nonreligious.

The reason for that is obvious. Religious people tend to be poorer and less well educated. As a result, most studies try to work out whether religious people are healthier after adjusting for these differences.

So the key question boils down to this: Which differences should you adjust for? Your decision will affect the answer you get.

Most studies adjust for basic demographic factors. Older people and women are more likely to be religious, and both these factors affect your chances of heart attacks. Most studies also adjust for education and income level.

The rationale is our old friend, the arrow of causality. While being older might cause you to be more religious, being religious doesn’t cause you to be older! But there are also a host of lifestyle factors that make heart disease more likely (smoking, lack of exercise, overeating). Here’s where it starts to get more difficult because religion could definitely cause you to be a nonsmoker.

Many studies adjust for these lifestyle factors. But you can go a step further—and that’s what they did in this study.

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I know I harped on about this yesterday, but everywhere I look today, Lent is being hijacked into a gaia festival….by the church!

LONDON (Reuters Life!) – British church leaders are encouraging people to give up their iPods for Lent, instead of more traditional vices such as chocolate, to help save the planet.

Courant – ‘Carbon Fast’ An Option For Observers Of Lent

Tearfund – Cut carbon emissions during Lent, urges Tearfund and Senior Bishops.

Ireland Online – Church leaders in the UK are encouraging people to give up their iPods rather than chocolate for Lent to help save the planet.

C of E – In prison, on the road, carbon fasting, appeals, lectures and books – these are just some of the ways the Church of England is marking Lent 2010 across the country.

Telegraph – Church leaders are urging people to give up iPods rather than chocolate this Lent as part of a ‘technology fast’ to save the planet as well as our souls.

Is it just me, or does anyone else feel unsettled by all of this?

I would say it’s just me, but at least I know I have one comrade in David over at Anglican Samizdat.

Gosh this gets worse and worse. This is a cross-post from BeneDiction Blogs and is a follow-on from a previous post, relating to the Arrest of 10 U.S. Baptists for their ‘Orphan Rescue’ Attempt in Haiti recently.

“The world must think we’re the stupidest hicks in the world.”

That statement was made by Sean Lankford,  father and husband of two of the 10 Southern Baptist Church do-gooders imprisoned in Haiti, charged with criminal association and child kidnapping.

I don’t know what the world thinks, but this time the families  of the US do-gooders sitting in a Haitian jail are in the spotlight for making a poor choice.

Turns out the guy they hired in the Dominican Republic to represent the Americans charged with criminal conspiracy  has a criminal record in the US and is wanted on human smuggling charges in El Salvador. His wife has been convicted in the human smuggling case and is in a Salvador jail.

He isn’t a lawyer,  isn’t a representative of the Jewish community in the Dominican Republic, wasn’t in the US military and US officials deny he ever worked undercover in any human smuggling operations in the US.

He  went into hiding when the New York Times broke the story Thursday that he wasn’t who he represented himself as.  His real name is Jorge Anibal Torres Puello and he may have inserted himself into this case because of his possible ties to Laura Silsby.

He falsely portrayed himself as a lawyer in the Dominican Republic. He wrongly claimed to be the leader of the country’s Sephardic Jewish community. And he initially told reporters he had never been to El Salvador, but now says he has deep connections to the Central American country, including five children there.

Arrest warrants identify him as Jorge Anibal Torres Puello. Around Santo Domingo he was also known as Jorge Torres, Yoram Torres and Jorge Migdal.

The Americans in Haiti, detained for allegedly trying to take 33 children out of the country without proper documents after the earthquake, knew him as Jorge Puello.

Puello says his role in the case is as a misunderstood do-gooder who volunteered to help the detained Americans after reading about their case on the Internet.

The Idaho Statesman says Puello didn’t work for Central Baptist Church in Idaho.

Torres Puello told reporters that the Central Valley Baptist Church hired him. But pastors Clint Henry and Drew Ham said otherwise Saturday.

“Puello contacted the church and was among many names given to the family in their hour of need,” Henry said via e-mail.

“Puello does not work for the church,” Ham said. “He was brought on as legal counsel by some of the families.”

Torres Puello called the church to offer his services two days after the arrest, The New York Times reported. After failing to contact any of the approved lawyers provided by the U.S. embassy, two relatives called and accepted Torres Puello’s offers of pro-bono assistance, the Times quoted lawyer Terry Michaelson saying.

Sean Lankford of Meridian, whose wife and daughter are being held in Haiti, also told The Associated Press that Torres Puello first contacted relatives by calling the church.

“He helped us find the lawyer we have now. He helped us gather evidence. Before him, we really were having a hard time finding anyone at all” to represent the church workers in Haiti, said Lankford.

More at the blog Haiti Vox.

The Daily Bastardette has more on Puello, including a tie in to Canada with a letter of introduction from a synagogue when he called himself Jorge Torres. He says he spent 18 months in a Canadian jail.

Silsby and Puello may be tied in through Dominican real estate deals, and he may have received up to 40 thousand dollars from the US  families/churches, who it now appears got themselves involved with a human trafficker.
Here is the Interpol alert.

It is believed the imprisoned Southern Baptists will be given a provisional release until their trial.

Polycarp has also picked up on this:-

Lawyer for Baptists in Haiti Needs a Lawyer

Firstly this from Biased BBC:-

Ray Gosling – BBC Hero

I see that BBC presenter Ray Gosling has been talking about how he smothered his gay lover who was dying from Aids. The BBC is enthusiastic about supporting “mercy killings” and this story is simply an extension of this narrative. I do not doubt the pain Mr Gosling and his lover went through but in the final analysis, smothering another human to death is a crime and it is a disgrace that the BBC chooses to portray this in the most sympathetic manner possible. What is your view?

And now this from Cranmer:-

Ray Gosling must be arrested for murder

The BBC reports that veteran broadcaster Ray Gosling has confessed to the murder of another man in a hospital.

With no regret or remorse, the Nottingham-based film-maker said: “I killed someone once… He’d been my lover and he got Aids.”

It was done, he said, after doctors told him that there was ‘nothing further that could be done for him’.

He suggests that the doctors knew what he had done, but ‘nothing more was said’.

Well, it’s time to lift the lid. Either ‘mercy killing’ is legal or it isn’t. Either ‘mercy killing’ is murder or it isn’t.

I personally found this article from Jonathan Chaplin over at the Guardian, – which challenges Jonathan Bartley’s (Ekklesia) stance on churches and the so called “equality bill” – very compelling indeed.

Guardian:-

At the beginning of the week Jonathan Bartley argued here – as he routinely does via his Christian think-tank Ekklesia – against recognising churches’ legal right to hire staff according to their own beliefs. He didn’t frame it in that unflattering way, of course. Instead he tried to justify the significant curtailment of corporate religious freedom his view implies by appealing to an unanswerable claim: that Christian love mandates treating people inclusively, with equal regard.

Well he’s right about that. But he simply bypasses the question of what equal regard actually means in practice. A moment’s thought reveals that equal regard can’t possibly mean treating every individual identically. Jesus certainly wasn’t being very “inclusive” in castigating the oppressive religious leaders of his time as “whitewashed sepulchres”, or turfing out the corrupt money-changers from the temple. Acts of justice are acts of discrimination and exclusion. Anti-racist laws rightly exclude racist behaviour: that’s their particular way of showing equal regard – love – to people of colour.

A coherent idea of discrimination requires a substantive account of justice, and that includes defining what legitimate rights individuals and organisations actually possess. All British citizens properly possess the prima facie individual right not to be discriminated against – in matters like employment, housing and social services – on grounds of race, gender or sexual orientation. This is because these involuntary markers of identity are completely irrelevant to such matters. I said “prima facie” because even here there exist widely recognised and uncontroversial exceptions, often arising from the rights of organisations. A rape crisis centre surely has the right to discriminate against men when hiring its counselling staff (perhaps any staff). An African-Caribbean community centre obviously can’t be compelled by law to hire a white guy like me as its director. The Labour party is evidently entitled to discriminate on ideological grounds in hiring its research staff.

These are all examples of what the law calls a “genuine occupational requirement” (GOR). The idea is simple and compelling: every independent civil society organisation has a prima facie right to maintain its identity and mission by hiring staff who will support the distinctive purposes of the organisation and uphold its raison d’être. This isn’t a “privilege”, as is often tendentiously suggested, but merely a condition of meaningful self-government. Why then cry foul when religious organisations exercise their right to invoke the GOR provision? Why single them out and deny them the same rights enjoyed by others? Yet when they claim such a right, critics like Bartley routinely accuse them of seeking to claim “the right to discriminate”. But this is nothing more than a rhetorical ploy concealing a conceptual sleight of hand. Of course churches are defending their right to discriminate in hiring, but this is nothing other than the right his own organisation would claim if a militant atheist sued Ekklesia for refusing to hire her.

Bartley is fully entitled to argue that, from a Christian point of view, churches should not restrict staff positions to those who, for example, maintain traditional views of sexual ethics. That’s an argument to be conducted within (or at least addressed to) the churches. But he is not entitled to call upon coercive law to force churches to conform to his views of sexual ethics – getting the state to succeed where he has failed. It’s incredible that such a position should be advanced in pursuit of the principle of equal regard.

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This violence will not end until Islamic extremism has “cleansed” Iraq of all Christians and Jews. What a bloody mess, most Christians have already fled Iraq. Will this make it into mainstream Western news, normally it doesn’t.

PTINews

Mosul (Iraq), Feb 16 (AFP) Gunmen killed two Christian shop owners in separate attacks within 24 hours in Iraq’s northern city of Mosul, police said as the community’s leaders hit out at the violence.

Greengrocer Fatukhi Munir, an Assyrian Catholic, was gunned down inside his shop in a drive-by shooting late yesterday in western Mosul’s Sahaba district, police said.

Armed assailants also killed Rayan Salem Elias, a Chaldean Christian who ran a business dealing in a traditional meat dish, outside his home in the city’s east on Sunday.

“The Christian minority has become an issue in the elections, as it always is before the elections,” said Hazem Girgis, a deacon at an Orthodox church in the town centre.

“Two Christians have been killed since the start of the campaign,” which opened on Friday, said Girgis. “We are terrified… and the security forces are not able to offer us any security.

UPDATE:-

AFP – MOSUL, Iraq — A Christian student was shot dead and another wounded in Mosul on Tuesday, taking to three the number of Christians killed in the restive northern city in as many days, Iraqi police said.