Nora Carmi, a Palestinian Christian peace activist, came to Canada with a challenge for churches to “dare to tell the truth” about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and to “stand with those who are oppressed.”
Dressed in black with a silver cross at her throat, Carmi, 64, visited the national office of the Anglican Church of Canada at the beginning of her 12-day speaking tour. She was hosted by Canadian Friends of Sabeel, an ecumenical liberation theology movement and a long-time partner.
“Oppression against the Palestinians includes violation of all forms of rights,” Carmi said in an interview. “Access to sites of worship, revoking residency rights, denying family reunification—everything that is basically human is being denied at this point to the Palestinian people.”
There are some aspects of the truth that Nora Carmi isn’t daring to tell, though. Things like: Israel is the only true democracy in a region awash with despots who routinely proclaim that Israel shouldn’t exist; if Israel stopped defending itself and relied on the good will of its neighbours, it would cease to exist; Palestinians Arabs constitute 20% of the population of Israel and according to polls, most would prefer to live in a Jewish than a Palestinian state.
Let’s hope that Canadian churches do “dare to tell the truth” about Israel.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (WCCO) – The reverend of a St. Paul church says he needs to raise $200,000 to pay off a church loan after most of his followers left because of his support for gay marriage.
The Rev. Oliver White runs Grace Community United Church of Christ in St. Paul. The 69-year-old said he needs to raise the money by June 30.
“We lost our income when we lost a number of people from our congregation.” White said.
White said two-thirds of his followers left after he said he supported same-sex marriage, and said he was against the marriage amendment that will be up for a vote in November.
Surely the answer for Rev. Oliver White is that all the gay people flooding to his church to get married will join his congregation, tithe, and fill his coffers to overflowing. That should work.
Doc Watson, a great guitar player has died at 89. He was one of a number of guitarists whose playing I tried to copy while in university; it was a distraction from the main business of going to parties and chasing girls.
The Anglican Church of Canada needs more clarity around what the “relational consequences” would be for not adopting the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant.
The solution is obvious: just like the moratorium on same-sex blessings, agree to it on paper and ignore it in practise.
Although a comprehensive study guide on the covenant was prepared and recommended for Canadian Anglicans, “there’s not much interest in discussing it,” reported members of one CoGS discussion group. “We’re not sure why,” they added.
Obviously CoGS needs to get in touch with its feelings. Or perhaps the problem is that many ACoC priests are too in touch with their feelings and are fiercely opposed to something that threatens to curtail their expeditions into the increasingly familiar territory of homoeroticism.
The real reason comes at the end of the article: the church wants to engage in a little prophetic social justice making by waiting to see what TEC does.
The Episcopal Church in the U.S. will consider the covenant at its General Convention this July. The Anglican Church of Canada will decide whether to adopt or reject it at General Synod 2013.
Today was our last Sunday worshipping in the building that has been known as “St. Hilda’s” for the last 53 years. A negotiated settlement with the Diocese of Niagara will result in the building being turned over to the diocese on June 1st. It was an emotional morning; there were many eyes that were not entirely dry – except for the men, of course. Here are some photos (view them all here):
Gathering:
The new building is that way:
People – the real “St. Hilda’s” – leave for the last time after we have sung “When the music fades, all is stripped away, and I simply come”.Notice the stunningly beautiful guitar to the right:
The new place – which is air conditioned and has much better toilets:
Two eminent artists eating. Shot with the magical 50mmL at f1.2:
Another at f1.2. Father Jack (St. Hilda’s previous rector) with my daughter:
Emerging from daylong discussions on May 25 about the future of the Anglican Church of Canada, members of the Council of General Synod (CoGS) appeared to lack ideas about what the next steps should be.
In fact, members expressed feeling “overwhelmed” by the question of how to renew church structures.
Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said that instead of hearing new ideas, he heard a lot of familiar ones following reports coming out of small group discussion. Further, he said he wasn’t convinced that members were grasping the urgency of our situation.
I have a new idea for the Anglican Church of Canada: give Christianity a try.
What won’t work is more of the same nonsense as typified by the questions CoGS was asked to ponder:
* How might God be using the current financial situation of General Synod to tell us about our future in carrying out Vision 2019?
* What might the Holy Spirit be telling us about ourselves as we grapple with the complexities of our current governance and structural challenges?
* How might Jesus be leading us on a journey of spiritual renewal through the presence of indigenous peoples among us, and their witness in the Mississauga Declaration.
Some bright spark thought the church should “clearly and proactively articulate its unique mission and ministry”. Leaving aside the obvious thought that anyone who uses the word “proactive” is mentally constipated, it goes without saying that a church that has no “unique mission and ministry” is wasting its time trying to find ways to articulate it.
It all ended in a sacred circle in which the obstinately blinkered Colin Johnson declared that the church “is not any more broken than it ever was”. He said much the same in 2008 when parishes started leaving the ACoC; then there were 19 ANiC parishes, now there are 47. The ACoC is running out of money. No-one knows what to do. CoGS is “overwhelmed”. The situation, according the primate, Fred Hiltz, is “urgent”. Crisis? What crisis?
RALEIGH, North Carolina — A North Carolina group said it plans to hold a public protest on Sunday to denounce a Baptist minister’s anti-gay and lesbian sermon that has drawn hundreds of thousands of views on the Internet.
Pastor Charles Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina told his congregation during a May 13 sermon that the Bible and God opposed homosexuality and that gay and lesbian people should be put in concentration camps.
“Build a great big large fence 50 or 100 miles long,” Worley said according to the video posted on YouTube. “Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. Have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. You know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”
I would like to make a few points about this:
First, Pastor Charles Worley seems to have missed one of the main features of Christianity: God loves everyone so much that he sent his only Son to die on the cross to atone for our sins. That includes the sin of homosexual sex.
Second, we as Christians are called to love as God loves; that includes homosexuals who indulge in same-sex activities. Loving a person means befriending them, accepting them, caring for them, treating them with dignity and wishing the best for them. At the same time, loving a person is not to condone – or bless – something that we believe is sinful; that is because repeated sin for which there has been no repentance destroys a person. How can you claim to love someone while approving of what will be their eternal undoing?
Third, if sinners are to be corralled behind an electric fence, we will all find ourselves there since we are all sinners. This is a basic tenet of Christianity; how a pastor can miss it is beyond me. Homosexual sex may be distasteful to heterosexuals but as a sin it is no more or less abhorrent that a whole catalogue of other sins, a catalogue that includes envy, greed, idolatry, gossip, jealousy, heterosexual fornication and so on. C. S. Lewis made the point (exactly where escapes me for the moment) that the most pernicious sins are the less visible internal ones that are thoroughly ingrained in our souls – like pride. Pastor Charles Worley could benefit by ruminating on that.
Fourth, the Bible tells us that homosexual acts are sinful. It does not tell us that being attracted to someone of the same sex is sinful any more than it tells us being attracted to someone of the opposite sex to whom we are not married is. Sinfulness is existential: it all depends on what you do with the attraction, whether you resist temptation or cave in to it.
Fifth, pastors like Charles Worley give Christianity a bad name and are an embarrassment to Christians whose intellect is still intact.
People applying for Canadian citizenship must now provide “objective evidence” that they can not only read, but actually communicate in English or French. If they don’t have a diploma from an English or French school, they will have to either pass a language test or take government-approved language classes.
By that measure, Rowan Williams would be denied Canadian citizenship.
Some time ago an earnest young man knocked on my door to ask me if I would like to make a contribution to Amnesty International; and wouldn’t I like to see George Bush arrested when he arrived in Canada.
I rendered the hapless fellow speechless by informing him that Amnesty International was just beneath the Ku Klux Klan in the list of organisations to which I was likely to give money and that the only thing I really have against George Bush is that he didn’t waterboard enough terrorists.
I had to help the reeling cove back down my front steps.
As an organization, Amnesty International is hard to please. Very hard.
You thought your parents were demanding, your boss unreasonable and your spouse unrealistic? They’re the picture of tolerance next to Amnesty, buddy. On his best day ever, Jesus couldn’t please these people.
The latest report, issued Wednesday, makes clear that the world has let Amnesty down. Again. The world — yes, the whole thing, all seven billion of us — is a constant disappointment to the people at Amnesty International, who just can’t figure out why we can’t measure up to a few simple rules.
The United Nations is denounced as essentially useless because it hasn’t managed to halt the bloodshed in Syria. Canada is condemned because we didn’t arrest George W. Bush when we had the chance. It has no time for the United States, because it keeps using drones to kill terrorists, without asking permission. The raid that finally ended the life of Osama bin Laden was illegal. Israel is, as always, a favourite target, accused of continuing its brutal treatment of Palestinians, and imposing a “blockade” of Gaza and its 1.6 million residents. Mexico makes the list for failing to protect human rights in its war against drugs. Even Switzerland gets a cuffing for its treatment of asylum-seekers, especially a pair of Nigerians who were treated badly when they landed in the country.
