A TABLED RESOLUTION

It being Church of England Synod and all that...

"Becoming Christ-like swings on keeping close to Christ himself, being part of his living body. This means constantly coming close to his bread-body lying on the table as his breathing-body standing around the table. The table of Christ demands that we grow up, and growing up means learning to live with those we find awkward and uncongenial as well as those we warm to naturally. It means living in a community where we don't always get our own way." -- David Wood, writing in Fear or Freedom?

[The picture is the former mural from Santa Maria de Los Angeles, Managua, Nicaragua.]

Ekklesia - Ekklesia is a progressive UK think tank on theology and public life StumbleUpon Favorites submitted by Wilbau.

A VOICE FOR TRUTH

I'm really sad to hear of the death of veteran correspondent Charles Wheeler - though, as they say, he had "a good innings", and contributed more to the integrity of reporting and journalism than almost anyone else in Britain over the past six decades. That his demise became news on 4 July, given his long years in Washington, seems strangely appropriate. BBC Radio 4 will be paying tribute with a special 45-minute programme, Charles Wheeler In His Own Words at 1100 BST on Saturday, 5 July 2008 or afterwards for a week at the Listen Again page.

ACTING IN GOOD FAITH

Responding to the broader concern attached to a high court judgement issued on 2 July 2008 ('Faith Schools judgment fails to consider human rights angle'), Simon Barrow, co-director of the religion and society think-tank Ekklesia, commented: "It is time that both religious communities and government were more direct in tackling the issue of discrimination in admissions and employment in faith schools, with a view to eliminating such practices." Our concern about this is theologically grounded. What message does this kind of thing send out to people looking for integrity, love and fairness from Christians and other people of faith?

Responding to the broader concern attached to a high court judgement issued on 2 July 2008 ('Faith Schools judgment fails to consider human rights angle'), Simon Barrow, co-director of the religion and society think-tank Ekklesia, ...

Discrimination in religious schools Responding to a high court judgement issued on 2 July 2008 (see 'Faith Schools judgment fails to consider human rights angle'), Simon Barrow, co-director of the UK religion and society think-tank E 30 Jun 2008 Comment on 'Bad Faith' faith schools report Responding to today's report 'Bad Faith' by Cristina Odone for the Centre for Policy Studies, Jonathan Bartley, director of the religious thinktank Ekklesia said:

Responding to a high court judgement issued on 2 July 2008 (see 'Faith Schools judgment fails to consider human rights angle'), Simon Barrow, co-director of the UK religion and society think-tank E.

LIMITS TO 'THE POLITICAL'

Without doubt, I am a 'political animal'. Always have been. But political processes can easily become overbearing, distorting, disconnected and over-determining of the many features of life that they touch upon. In my latest Wardman Wire 'Thinking Aloud' column, which I have entitled 'The Limits of Politics' , I explore how and why the church might play some role in generating alternatives in this area. There's also an anecdote about Nelson Mandela at the 9th WCC Assembly in Harare ten years ago, illustrating my point that "grace as well as power is needed to triumph over injustice, and to hold on to the vulnerable dream that a different world is possible."

He claims he was “violently ejected” from All Soul’s after what the left-wing Christian think-tank Ekklesia refers to as “seeking to mount a protest against a hardline Anglican group”. In other word, after invading the meeting and ...

According to Jonathan Bartley, co-director of research for the religious think tank Ekklesia, the Anglican Church has much less of a top-down structure than the Catholic Church, which now has more practising followers in Britain. ...

A divisive row over homosexuality and women bishops has left the worldwide Anglican Communion facing one of its worst ever crises, to the point where there is talk of an irrevocable schism. "The crisis is unprecedented since the Reformation devastated the Roman Catholic Church in England in the 16th century," The Times said Tuesday in a front-page article on a threat by 1,300 clergy to quit over women bishops. And on Sunday after a conference in Jerusalem, some 300 conservative bishops and archb

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According to Jonathan Bartley, co-director of research for the religious think tank Ekklesia, the Anglican Church has much less of a top-down structure than the Catholic Church, which now has more practicing followers in Britain. ...

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?

Deep disagreements between followers of Christ over the nature and mission of the church are not new. In fact the recent goings on in Jerusalem may remind us of the Council that Acts of the Apostles records as the first in the early Christian movement's history. It came up with a classic Anglican-style fudge (which was at the same time rather radical), unlike the Anglican one held last week, ironically enough. Here is my recent sermon tackling these issues for the Feast of St Peter and St Paul: Whose mission is it anyway?

Whose mission is it anyway? Some section of the Anglican Communion are convinced that only their narrow vision of what is permissible in faithfulness to the Christian message is adequate, says Simon Barrow. But they are confounded by the biblical texts they claim loyalty to. The Simon Barrow Column 19 Jun 2008 Why we need a prince of Peace Why Prince William should carve out a new role for himself as peacemaker. As the recent focus on the growing death toll in Afghanistan brings into s

MEET THE COTTAGERS

Meanwhile, the nascent Fellowship of Confressing Anglicans hasn't quite made its acronym stick on the net yet. If you Google FOCA you get a whole variety of intriguing alternative possibilities, including cuddly seals (very, very cute and quite unschismatic-looking), an appealing holiday destination in France, and the Federation of Cottagers' Associations in Ontario, which to those who believe that Canadian Anglicanism has now been irreversibly taken over by a "gay mafia" may sound rather more sinister than it actually is.

WILL WILLIAMS HEAD FOCA OFF?

Sorry, couldn't resist that one. Nor could Andrew Brown, I see. I am travelling at the moment, and so only logging in fitfully (yes, it does happen), but I see that Riazat Butt writing on the front page of the Guardian this morning, no less, reports an "unusually robust" response from Lambeth to the declaration from GAFCON - one that Theo Hobson describes as more of a coup than a schism: an observation which is both politically true and theologically literate... it seems that most people who use the latter term have nary a clue as to what it really means, assuming it just to be a synonym for 'split', when historically it has referred to a major uprooting of the tradition, not simply a division within a denomination (which, in the case of Anglicanism, has never claimed the kind of permanency that would be necessary to make sense of this kind of description).
That said, there are many evangelicals (including some quite conservative ones) who are unhappy with the attempted putsch, so while Theo is right on one paradigm, he is in danger of succumbing to another mistaken one. Anyway, it is all rather unpleasant and diversionary to the major challenge Christianity faces in an era where a top-down, institutional version of church is being threatened as never before. In all this, a certain kind of bogus anti-colonialism has arisen, where the abuse of power and attempts to impose a new version of the old imperial order is disguised with guilt-tripping rhetoric about liberation. About which more, later.

The Centre for Policy Studies, a British think tank, issued a controversial report (full text) this week titled: In Bad Faith: The New Betrayal of Faith Schools. The report's author, Christina Odone, concludes in her 41-page report: Faith schools have been wrongly attacked for the wrong reasons. Political positioning has led the Minister of Education to denounce these schools. In so doing, he was stoking and validating a smear campaign, orchestrated by a strident secularist lobby, that has long

The Centre for Policy Studies, a British think tank, issued a controversial report (full text) this week titled: In Bad Faith: The New Betrayal of Faith Schools. The report's author, Christina Odone, concludes in her 41-page report: ...

But new research from the religion and society think-tank Ekklesia suggests that those who want to keep the church defined by very narrow parameters are straying from well established Christian tradition. ...