epiScope

Mission

Local health care providers share expertise in Rwanda
By Christina Rohn
Petosky (MI) News-Review
April 15, 2008

Harbor Springs residents Dr. Louis Zako, a retired family physician, and his wife, Mary Jane, a retired nurse practitioner, recently got an opportunity to share their medical expertise with the people of Rwanda.

The couple, along with two other doctors and a nurse from the United States, traveled together on a medical mission to Rwanda from March 24 through April 9 under the auspices of the Anglican Mission in the Americas.

The Zakos, who are members of the New Life Anglican Church in Petoskey, said they have always wanted to visit a third-world country, but chose to travel to Rwanda because of its spiritual ties to them.

“Our church is part of the national church called the Anglican Mission in the Americas and our seven bishops are under the supervision of an arch bishop in Rwanda,” Louis said. “We could have gone to any third-world country, but Rwanda’s special because that’s where our spiritual leaders are.”

It's all here ...

Refuge

Rwandan archbishop visits Anglican Mission church
By CAROLYN CLICK
The State
Feb. 18, 2008

The Anglican Archbishop of Rwanda, who has served as a refuge for conservative American Anglicans and Episcopalians, told a congregation Sunday that while he is tired of church politics he remains committed to a vision of the Gospel that would end what he calls “spiritual terrorism.”

“God is changing the world and he is changing the church,” said the Most Rev. Emmanuel Kolini, who delivered the sermon at Columbia’s Church of the Apostles and spoke to parishioners at a lunch afterwards. “Because the world is lost. It is godless.”

The congregation, which meets at the State Museum, is one of five Anglican Mission in America churches in South Carolina. Four of the five are Anglican mission plants, operating under Kolini’s authority as Episcopal primate of Rwanda. The fifth, All Saints Church on Pawleys Island, split off from the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina and is now part of the AMIA.

It’s all here …

Panel Examines Lives of Gays in Africa
By Scott Levi
Columbia Spectator
FEBRUARY 18, 2008

Emmanuel Kamau of Nairobi, Kenya began receiving death threats after his church expelled him for publicizing his homosexuality.

As part of a panel at Riverside Church on Sunday afternoon, Kamau and others offered American audience members firsthand accounts highlighting the plight of gay and lesbian Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa. While several of the issues discussed resembled those faced by homosexuals in New York, the panelists stressed the problems unique to post-colonial Africa.

“We are part and parcel of the Church,” said Davis Mac-Iyalla of Nigeria, director of Changing Attitude Nigeria. As one of the three who spoke about individual experiences as a devout Christian specifically in Kenya and Nigeria, he criticized the Anglican Church for what he saw as exploitation of the pulpit “to attack the gay community.”

It’s all here …

Calm after the storm

Bishop sees unity among area Episcopal churches
Saturday, February 16, 2008
By KRISTEN CAMPBELL
Religion Editor

Since the election of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and a female presiding bishop in 2006, reports of dissension and division within the Episcopal Church and its parent body, the Anglican Communion, has been prevalent.

Such unrest isn't unfamiliar to Episcopalians along the Gulf Coast.

Several years ago, parishioners of a handful of congregations in the Pensacola, Fla.-based Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast -- including what's now Christ Church Cathedral in Mobile -- left the Episcopal Church. In 2006, Daphne's Church of the Apostles, started as an Episcopal mission congregation, dissolved its ties to the area diocese.

It’s all here …

Breakaway

Episcopal parish breaking from US church
Group relocating in Marlborough
By Michael Paulson
The Boston Globe
October 25, 2007

A conservative Episcopal parish in Marlborough is bolting the denomination, in the latest indication that even in liberal Massachusetts the Episcopal Church is losing congregations over its support for gay rights.

Holy Trinity Church in Marlborough is leaving behind its building, renting space in a nearby Methodist church, and affiliating with the Anglican Mission in the Americas, which is overseen by the Episcopal Church of Rwanda.

The small Marlborough congregation, with about 70 active members, is following a national trend in which conservative Episcopal congregations are leaving the Episcopal Church USA to affiliate with theologically like-minded Anglican provinces in Africa.

It’s all here …

Church divide over gays has a global audience

As the Anglican debate plays out, other denominations seek guidance for similar battles in their futures.
By Rebecca Trounson
Los Angeles Times
October 13, 2007

As Episcopalians and Anglicans wait to see if their fractious global fellowship will splinter or hold together in a long-running conflict over homosexuality and the Bible, other denominations are watching nervously.

The same or related issues are roiling many denominations, especially such mainline Protestant churches as Evangelical Lutherans, Presbyterians and Methodists. And many church leaders and scholars predict that the way these questions play out in the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion will hold lessons for them all.

"The struggle going on inside the Anglican Communion. . . is not peculiar to Anglicanism," Sister Joan Chittister, a Roman Catholic nun, wrote in a recent column in the National Catholic Reporter newspaper. "The issue is in the air we breathe. The Anglicans simply got there earlier than most."

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Rift between Peoria-based Diocese of Quincy and The Episcopal Church likely would lead to property dispute
By MICHAEL MILLER
Peoria (IL) Journal Star
October 14, 2007

PEORIA - The Episcopal Diocese of Quincy's struggle with The Episcopal Church may continue with a dispute over semantics and end with a dispute over property.

When the diocese's annual synod meets Friday and Saturday in Moline, resolutions that could drastically alter Quincy's affiliation with The Episcopal Church may be considered.

If diocesan leaders express their intent to affiliate with a different province or Anglican organization, it will raise the technical question of whether an entire Episcopal diocese can leave TEC.

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Episcopalians now face a reunited opposition
De-Balkanizing the Anglican traditionalists
David C. Steinmetz
Orlando Sentinel
October 14, 2007

Anglicans don't do schism well. Schism is a split in the structure of the church and Anglicans (also known in this country as Episcopalians) do it badly.

Which is surprising, considering that Anglicans are famous for doing things well, or at least doing them with an enviable sense of style. But when it comes to schism (arguably America's favorite indoor ecclesiastical sport), most Anglicans are embarrassingly clumsy.

They are, for one thing, prone to splinter. Rather than rally around a single standard and build a viable group of dissenters who can survive and prosper, Anglicans have preferred to split into several tiny, non-viable groups that are barely visible and hardly missed.

Until recently, fragmentation seemed to be the strategy du jour of traditionalists in the current Anglican crisis. This crisis was precipitated by the decision of the Episcopal Church to consecrate a divorced non-celibate gay man as the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire and to allow the blessing of same-sex unions. A minority of Episcopalians in the U.S. and a majority of Anglicans worldwide disagreed strongly with this decision and set about to scupper it.

It’s all here …

Josiah Idowu-Fearon: At the heart of two flashpoints
Rod Dreher
Dallas Morning News
October 14, 2007

With the worldwide Anglican Communion on the verge of disintegration over the issue of homosexuality, and increasingly violent tension between Muslims and Christians in the Third World, Josiah Idowu-Fearon, who was born in 1949, labors at the center of these two global religious flashpoints.

As the outgoing Anglican archbishop of Nigeria's Kaduna state, he oversees a Christian flock in a traditionally Muslim region where thousands have died in interreligious strife there. An academically trained Koranic scholar, Archbishop Josiah works with Muslim leaders to avoid communal violence and paper over differences. But as a top leader in the booming and theologically conservative Anglican church in Nigeria, whose numbers dwarf its sister Episcopal Church in the United States, the prelate speaks out against Western attempts, particularly among liberal Anglicans, to modernize traditional Christian teaching about human sexuality. It's a conflict that he says is not really about sex, but about the nature of religious authority.

Archbishop Josiah recently spent a few days in Dallas as the guest of the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation. He sat down for an interview with Points, excerpts of which follow:

It’s all here …

Historic Church Votes to Leave Episcopal Roots
October 14, 2007

A historic Savannah church is breaking its ties with the Episcopal Church. This morning, 87% of the congregation of Christ Church voted they would now become part of the Anglican Communion.

Christ Church has met in Savannah as an Episcopal Church for 274 years; however, over the last 30 years, church leaders say several hundred churches around the country are starting to feel that the Episcopal Church has abandoned them and their beliefs.

"Over the past 30 years, there has been a slow devaluation of scripture in the church," said Steve Dantin, senior warden of the vestry of Christ Church. "We're now facing questions about the actual unique Deity of Jesus Christ and those are the real issues at hand."

It’s all here …

CCP

Groups Plan New Branch to Represent Anglicanism
By NEELA BANERJEE
New York Times
September 30, 2007

Bishops from 13 Anglican and Episcopal groups in North America announced Friday that they had formed a partnership as the first step to creating a rival to the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

The announcement by the group, the Common Cause Partnership, marks a widening of the fissures within the Episcopal Church and in the greater communion over the church’s liberal stance on homosexuality.

Earlier in the week in New Orleans, the bishops of the Episcopal Church defied a directive by leaders of the Anglican Communion asking them to set up an alternate structure for conservative churches, to stop consecrating openly gay and lesbian bishops and to ban the blessing of same-sex unions.

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BeliefWatch: Anglican Angst
By Matthew Philips
Newsweek

Oct. 8, 2007 issue - What happens when the Archbishop of Canterbury and 150 Episcopal bishops meet in New Orleans to talk about gay rights? Predictably (temporizing is an Anglican hallmark), it's hard to tell. Despite heaps of press over a meeting last week in which the Episcopal House of Bishops was to clarify its views on homosexuality, the outcome remains fuzzy. Did they, as The New York Times reported, reject orders from conservatives to stop consecrating gay and lesbian bishops and blessing same-sex unions, thus sealing the fate of a fracturing church? Or did they, according to USA Today, make concessions to those demands and preserve the united of the worldwide Anglican Communion? It depends on whom you ask.

It’s all here … and a big epiScope Amen to Mr. Philips’ final sentence: “Doing the work of the Gospel, it seems safe to say, is more productive than debating it.”

Episcopalians plan to leave denomination
By Julia Duin
The Washington Times
September 29, 2007

Fifty-one Anglican and Episcopal bishops announced plans yesterday to form a separate Anglican province in North America within 15 months, giving disaffected Episcopalians a chance to flee their increasingly liberal denomination.

The Common Cause partnership, which includes bishops from several Episcopal dioceses and leaders of nine Anglican organizations, met yesterday in Pittsburgh. The leaders represent 600 congregations and more than 100,000 people.

The bishops said they will meet in December to put together an office staff for a 39th province of the 77-million-member Anglican Communion.

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INTERVIEW: Bishop Robert Duncan
September 28, 2007
Religion and Ethics Newsweekly
Episode no. 1104

Kim Lawton's September 27, 2007 interview with Bishop Robert Duncan of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh:

Q: What did you think of the final document the House of Bishops meeting in New Orleans produced?

A: The final document from NO was very much what the HOB has said before, and it revealed the commitment of the American church to continue on its move forward in terms of the innovations in faith and order. It did acknowledge the trouble in the communion and the pain that the American church has caused. It did maybe slow things down a little bit, but it's not going to change the direction, and clearly in New Orleans as there has been for some while there really are two churches under one roof and those two churches are one that is moving in a way with the culture and with secular society, moving toward embrace of the culture itself, and the other is moving in a direction -- I mean we are trying to stand where we've always stood. That's the reality. So that's New Orleans, but that's old news.

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When splitting is right decision
Area churches weighing controversial issues
Johnstown (PA) Tribune-Democrat
September 28, 2007

On Oct. 31, 1517, a monk named Martin Luther posted on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church in Germany his list of 95 areas of disagreement with the Catholic church.

That act was a key moment in a division of the church in Europe that eventually led to the formation of Protestantism and new denominations of believers. Obviously, the Catholic church continued, even as groups splintered off and went their own way.

Religion can be a contentious and divisive undertaking. People sometimes disagree, quite passionately, about fundamental principles, or how those beliefs should be incorporated into lives and traditions.

That’s when changes happen.

It’s all here …

DIVIDED FLOCK

Episcopal Church Dissidents Seek Authority Overseas
Amid Rift Over Gays, Conservatives Go Global;
Bishops Made in Africa
By ANDREW HIGGINS
Wall Street Journal
September 20, 2007; Page A1

MBARARA, Uganda -- The Rev. John Guernsey, rector of a church in a middle-class Virginia suburb, stood early this month before thousands of Africans here on a rickety, ribbon-bedecked podium. Clutching a wooden staff in his left hand, he shouted in Runyankole, a local tribal language: "Mukama Asimwe!" -- Praise the Lord!

Mr. Guernsey, 54 years old, had reason to rejoice. A defector from America's Episcopal Church, he had just been made a bishop -- by the Church of Uganda.

"I had no idea that this is what God had in store for me," said the bespectacled Virginia priest after a five-hour consecration ceremony in Mbarara, a Ugandan district best known for its long-horned cattle.

Mr. Guernsey represents a religious byproduct of globalization: A small but growing number of Christians in North America are turning to developing countries in Africa and elsewhere for spiritual direction. Some priests call the phenomenon "theological offshoring." They are looking to Africa and other poor lands not just for inspiration but, in a very literal way, they are moving their theological base offshore.

It’s all here … http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119023295621032668.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Anglican schism?

Archbishop Rowan Williams strives to preserve the communion
By JOHN WILKINS
National Catholic Reporter
Issue Date:  September 14, 2007

On Sept. 3 Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams came back from study leave to face the music. The primate of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion does not want to go down in history as the archbishop who presided over the disintegration of that communion. So far, against the odds, he has held together this worldwide grouping of 38 self-governing provinces counting more than 70 million Christians. He has sought to make space for all contending parties to be heard: notably the “inclusive” liberals led by the American Anglicans of the Episcopal church, who in 2003 ordained as bishop a divorced man, Gene Robinson, now living with a gay partner, and, at the other end of the spectrum, the conservative evangelicals, especially those of the “Global South” -- the expanding Anglican churches of the Third World, above all in Africa -- who have accused the North Americans of “following another religion.” A crunch is approaching at the end of September, when the Episcopal church has been asked to declare that it will no longer bring forward candidates for the episcopate who are living in same-sex unions, and that no bishop will authorize same-sex blessings.

It’s all here …

The Anglican crisis in brief

At stake: Unity of the Anglican Communion, an affiliation of 38 self-governing provinces, including the Episcopal church in the United States and the Anglican church of Canada.

Major threat: Severance of links between the churches of the communion. Separatist pressure groups in the Global North, especially within the Episcopal church in the United States and the Church of England, are using the primates of the Global South, notably in Africa, as their agents.

It’s all here …

Anglicans Turn Inside Out
Episcopal renewal group's new strategy divides conservatives.
Sheryl Henderson Blunt
Christianity Today
9/11/2007

Since its founding in 2004, the Anglican Communion Network (ACN) has worked for renewal within the Episcopal Church. Now it is focused on getting conservatives out and keeping them united.

At a July meeting in London with members of the Global South steering committee, Bishop Robert Duncan, moderator of ACN, said he and three other American bishops were asked whether they believed the Episcopal Church (TEC) could be turned back toward orthodoxy. "All of us registered our assessment that the answer to that question was no," he said.

It’s all here …

Race relations

Anglicans Reject Western Accusations of Rebellion
Rwanda News Agency/Agence Rwandaise d'Information (Kigali)
14 August 2007

The Anglican Church in Rwanda and Africa will not be bullied into keeping quiet about the non biblical behaviors of the American and European churches, a senior bishop has said.

Bishop John Rucahana - Anglican head of the Shyira Diocese said the current disagreements in the Anglican Church were caused by the ordination of the homosexual bishops by the American Episcopal Church. Rucahana said this was against the teachings of the holly bible.

It's all here ...

Instrument of disunity

Bishops to Boycott Anglican Conference
Rwanda News Agency/Agence Rwandaise d'Information (Kigali)
28 June 2007
Kigali

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Honourable Rowan Williams invited some Rwandan Anglican Bishops to the Lambeth (UK) Conference 2008, but the Rwandan clergy have "unanimously" decided to boycott the conference, RNA has established.

According to a communiqué from the Episcopal Church of Rwanda, the manner in which the invitations by Archbishop Williams to the bishops of Rwanda were issued is "divisive" as some of "our bishops were not invited".

The Lambeth Conference 2008 will take place on the campus of the University of Kent in Canterbury, from July 16 to August 4, 2008.

Archbishop Williams invited one section of the bishops in Rwanda and left out others because apparently they do not have similar approaches to Anglican faith.

It’s all here …

Counting the cost

Breakaway churches struggle to raise legal funds

By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 26, 2007

Eleven Virginia churches being sued by the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia for leaving the denomination with their property last year have set a goal of raising a combined $3 million to $5 million for their pooled legal expenses.

But an informal poll by The Washington Times revealed that more than half of these churches can't afford to give funds or have made no plans to do so.

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More U.S. Episcopalians Look Abroad Amid Rift

I'm really sorry to see how this story turned out; Alan Cooperman is usually a more careful reporter than this.

Overseas Prelates Lead 200 to 250 Congregations

By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 17, 2007; A03

The Anglican archbishop of Rwanda was first, then his counterpart in Nigeria. Now Kenya's Anglican archbishop is taking a group of U.S. churches under his authority, and Uganda's archbishop may be next.

African and, to a lesser extent, Southeast Asian and Latin American prelates are racing to appoint American bishops and to assume jurisdiction over congregations that are leaving the Episcopal Church, particularly since its consecration of a gay bishop in New Hampshire in 2003.

So far, the heads, or primates, of Anglican provinces overseas have taken under their wings 200 to 250 of the more than 7,000 congregations in the Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of Anglicanism. Among their gains are some large and wealthy congregations -- including several in Northern Virginia -- that bring international prestige and a steady stream of donations.

It’s all here … and here's the problem.

Carving

Anglican Kenyans name U.S. bishop
By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 16, 2007

The Anglican Province of Kenya has appointed its own bishop to oversee about 30 churches in the United States -- the third such effort by conservative African bishops to carve out pieces of the U.S. Episcopal Church.

Canon Bill Atwood, 57, of Carollton, Texas, will be consecrated a suffragan bishop at All Saints Cathedral in Nairobi on Aug. 30, joining several other American bishops overseeing former Episcopal parishes now affiliated with the Anglican provinces of Rwanda and Nigeria.

"We are just working as rescuers," Kenyan Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi said yesterday, referring to conservatives distressed by liberal trends in the Episcopal Church. "We needed someone there [in America] who understands their culture. I am not there for name and fame and to build myself."

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