Category: General

Are Ordinations Too Elaborate?

This was originally published in the NECA (National Episcopal Clergy Association newsletter.) I understand the editor got hate mail about it from at least one bishop famous for an emphasis on lay ministry. It also touches on the discussion below

Are Ordinations and Celebrations of the New Ministry Too Elaborate?

There is a criticism which is often heard in our church these days that ordinations are too elaborate. The ceremonies and festivities that surround an ordination or the celebration of a new ministry are thought to imply an inappropriate significance for Holy Orders. If I may put words in the mouths of the critics, the complaint is that,”After all, baptism is the central and most important fact of Christian life. It is through baptism that one becomes a Christian and through baptism that the church reconstitutes its life. The ministry of the baptized is the fundamental ministry, and the ministry of the ordained is to be servants of the servants of God. By elaborate ordinations and celebrations of new ministry we give the impression that Ordination is more important than baptism, that the clergy are the real Christians. Our ordination and institution ceremonies reinforce an outmoded clericalism, have distasteful overtones of authoritarianism, and undermine the ministry of the laity. Look at the Celebration of New Ministry in the Prayer Book. The people give the new priest a Bible, stoles, Prayer Books. In the end nothing is left. Everything has been given away.”

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The Power And Dignity Of The Priesthood

This was published in an edition of the Sewanee Theological Review devoted to ministry. It touches on the discussion on this site about the priesthood.

The Power and Dignity of the Priesthood

A Talk given at the Annual Meeting of The Society for the Increase of the Ministry
At Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, November I, 1995, By the Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

Copyright © 1994

Much has been written about the perception of a crisis in the priesthood. The Cornerstone Project was developed by the Episcopal Church Foundation in order to help strengthen ordained leadership at a time when clergy are reporting themselves to be discouraged, confused and highly stressed. One of the most recent findings of the Cornerstone Project is that the parish priests in the project had difficulty articulating a theology of priesthood. The staff found that the priests in the project could discuss theological readings with competence but that when they spoke about their parish ministries they did not tend to speak in theological categories. I was one of a group of clergy, theologians and Cornerstone staff who attended a conference at the College of Preachers in June of 1995 to attempt to understand the meaning of this finding and to suggest a course of action. The thoughts that I am going to share with you tonight represent my contribution to that discussion.

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Bishop Tom Wright On Just About Everything

Tonight, in the first of a new series of ‘Belief’, I’m in conversation with the Right Reverend Tom Wright who since 2003 has been Bishop of Durham. Before that, he was successively Dean of Lichfield and Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey. But well before that, he spent the first 20 years of his ordained life in academic positions, including 5 years at McGill University in Canada. He’s written over 30 books, most recently ‘The Resurrection of the Son of God’. Primarily, his scholarly reputation rests on a sustained study of the 2 figures at the heart of the Christian Gospel – Jesus and Paul. He’s a conservative in matters of doctrine, and regarded as the most senior Anglican Evangelical. At a time of much division around the subject of homosexual clergy, he’s had a place on the Eames Commission, deputed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to find a way of reconciling the warring factions within the Anglican communion.

BBC News, Joan Bakewell talks with Bishop Tom Wright.

The Passion And Parenthood

This was originally published in a Godly Play newsletter.

The Passion Of Jesus Christ
And The Passion Of Parenthood

The sacrifice of Christ is pondered in endless books and hymns and works of art. It is a “big story” generating much wonder and wondering. There is at least one part of it that I think I understand. I believe that at the heart of the sacrifice of Jesus is the suffering of rejected love, which the saviour meets with an unswerving passion.

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Theodicy

The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to “powers” and “principalities”–spiritual and terrestrial–alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him–”He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not”–and his appearance within “this cosmos” is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.

David B Hart, Tremors of Doubt
Thanks to Titsusonenine.

A Call For An Extensive Poll Of Episcopalians

Titusonenine has a good story about research Bill Sachs of ECF has done on reaction to GC 2003.

I have suggested repeatedly in various settings that the Episcopal Church Foundation, because it is an independent foundation with a research arm, conduct a carefully composed and extensive poll aimed at finding out what the sentiment in the pews really is on the issue. The point is not to vote on the truth but to give leaders on all sides of the question an accurate reading on where the people actually are. My ancedotal experience is that in my parish both strong proponents and strong opponents consistently overestimate the strength of their party in the parish, underestimate the size of what is inadequately described as the undecided party and routinely misidentify where other people in the parish are on the topic. One of the most hilarious experiences I have had is a forum where two different parishioners were irate with me, one for being an opponent of GC 2003 and one for not being a strong enough opponent of GC2003. They each interspersed their remarks with expressions of total agreement with each other and each to this day operates with the illusion that the other is on her “side.” It would sober up everyone and positively affect the debate to have an accurate take on where the people in the pews really are.

Leave a comment if you think this is a good idea.

Christ And Nothing By Orthodox Theologian David B. Hart

As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism.

David B. Hart, Christ and Nothing

Thanks to titusonenine for reminding me about this profound and poignant article.

Should We Support Gay Marriage? NO

by Wolfhart Pannenberg
from Good News Magazine
Thanks To Pastor Eric Swenson

Can love ever be sinful? The entire tradition of Christian doctrine teaches that there is such a thing as inverted, perverted love. Human beings are created for love, as creatures of the God who is Love. And yet that divine appointment is corrupted whenever people turn away from God or love other things more than God.

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