An Interview with Georgette Forney: Lambeth, GAFCON, Bishops & The Great Divide

From Sarah Hey at Stand Firm:

Yesterday while at the Marketplace I went by the Anglicans For Life booth. Unlike many of the bishops I have spoken with -- and as you will hear from the interview -- Georgette was on a high, having had a very successful two-week stint at the Marketplace. The comparison between meeting the many allies around the world at the Lambeth Conference and, oh, say, The Episcopal Church's General Convention is indeed stark.

Listen to the audio to hear more about the successes of her work at the Marketplace, as well as her analysis of the Anglican Communion as seen through the eyes of a pro-life warrior.

Check it out!

Update from AnglicanTV

From Kevin at AnglicanTV:

Because AnglicanTV is considered hostile press by TEC and the Church of England, I am not likely to be videotaping many press conferences or plenary meetings. The vast majority of my video taping will be in interview format.

I won't arrive in Canterbury until Friday, so I have some time to schedule interviews before I arrive. So far I have around a dozen interviews with different Bishops and Archbishops scheduled -- however I would love to open up my schedule to your ideas.

If there is someone you want me to interview while I am at Canterbury please post it in to comments below. If you have the contact information for the "victim", please forward that to anglicantv@gmail.com (don't put contact info in the comments post please).

Virtue Exclusive: Interview with Bishop Keith Ackerman, Quincy

From Virtue Online:

On the eve of the decennial Lambeth Conference, VirtueOnline spoke with the Anglo-Catholic Bishop of Quincy, the Rt. Rev. Keith Ackerman in Canterbury to gauge his reaction and opinion as to what has been taking place in The Episcopal Church, the Church of England and what, if anything he expects to see will come from this Conference of some 600 bishops. Bishop Ackerman is also president of Forward in Faith, North America.

VOL: How many bishops are left in The Episcopal Church that refuses to ordain women to the priesthood?

Ackerman: Just two, Bishop Jack Iker of Ft. Worth and me.

VOL: Bishop John-David Schofield has left TEC and it would appear that both the dioceses of Ft. Worth and Quincy are a vote away from leaving. Is this inevitable?

Ackerman: It is probably inevitable.

VOL: Last week The Church of England synod voted to ordain women bishops with no provision for its traditionalist wing to continue to have a place at the table without seriously compromising themselves. In your opinion what is their future?

Ackerman: The C of E has always been 20 to 30 years behind the United States, and we are already witnessing within England a similar phenomenon that has resulted in continuing churches formally or informally applying to Rome moving to Eastern Orthodoxy and or attempting to create a separate province. My hope is that the phenomenal division and hemorrhaging that has taken place in TEC will be an example that the English will look at very carefully as they consider their future. . .

Read it all.

+KJS: Helping poor trumps "being right"

From an interview with +Katharine Jefferts Schori by Peter Smith, The Courier-Journal (Louisville) - also participating in the interview was Bishop Ted Gulick of the Diocese of Kentucky. [boldface mine]:

. . . Q. You have spoken about the Millennium Development Goals (targeting extreme global poverty) as a point of church unity. Why is it that the bishops from some of the countries that would seem to be the beneficiaries of this point of unity the most -- such as Uganda and Nigeria -- why are they the ones saying that we have to have unity in this other area (of sexual morals) as well. Do you think you're missing something or that they're missing something?

Jefferts Schori: Well, different people prioritize the world in different ways. Some people believe that being right is the most important thing in the world. Others think that feeding people is more important. But if you're hungry, your political party doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

Q. Do you feel that's what's motivating this?

Jefferts Schori: I think it's a piece of it. I think a piece of it also is really wrapped up in colonialism. This communion needs to have that conversation, and we have not done it. We're seeing evidence of continuing colonial attitudes around the communion (which developed alongside the expansion of the British empire). We see reverse colonialism. We see neo-colonialism. And we don't examine it. We're still treating each other as commodities in many, many different ways.

Q. Can you break that down? Who's being colonial?

Jefferts Schori: It goes in many directions. It's multi-layered. There's a colonial aspect to the establishment of congregations of the Church of Bolivia in Kentucky. We are being colonized. There is a reverse colonialism in some of the interactions between people in this church and people in the church in Africa. There is I think a neo-colonial aspect in the way in which some factions in this church are exploiting people in other parts of the communion. Those are challenging things to talk about, but it's a part of discovering our own sinfulness.

Q. I've also heard it said that the Western churches, with a very gay-friendly agenda, are once again importing Western ideas onto countries that don't want these ideas, that that's an aspect of colonialism.

Jefferts Schori: That could be said. I don't think there's a great push to impose, even within this (American) church, the idea that (any particular) congregation must provide blessing for same-sex unions. That's not part of the conversation. It's a matter of making it available.

Gulick: I think Katharine's right on that. In the late 1980s, when I as a straight white male suddenly found in Newport News, Va. (where Gulick was then a pastor), in the early moments of the AIDS crisis, I started having deep conversations with persons who were affected by that illness. I woke up to what I think was my own personal clarity, that certain expressions of same-sex attraction are fundamental to certain people's being. I have never in 30 years wanted to inflict that perspective on an Africa bishop, and I've been in conversation with hundreds of African bishops. It's my own insight. I talk to them about how I came to believe that. I would never presume that my relationship with my companion bishop in Rwanda is dependent on his believing that. It's an absurd thing to say that. ... I don't know any colleague in the House of Bishops that has ever done that or wants to do that.

Jefferts Schori: It's a red herring. Even Gene Robinson is not doing that. He's not going to Africa insisting that they change their way of dealing with people, except to remind people of what Lambeth has said repeatedly, that all persons are deserving of human dignity and civil rights, and pastoral care. (Lambeth, the once-a-decade summit of Anglican bishops, declared in 1998 that homosexuality was "incompatible with Scripture" while calling on "all our people to minister pastorally and sensitively to all irrespective of sexual orientation.")

Q. The Episcopal Church, like other mainline denominations is losing members and attendance. What's going wrong, and what can the church do about it?

Jefferts Schori: I'm not sure if it's a matter of things going wrong. It's a re-examination across our culture of the sources of authority. There are people in this culture who cannot live with an understanding that says, "The way I interpret a book that was written nearly 2,000 years ago is the way you must believe. You can't question that. You can't offer another interpretation. You must take it the way I see it." The Reformation was about inviting people into conversation with that text. That produces a variety of interpretations. Anglicanism has always said that variety is important to the health of the body. Re-examination of authority is challenging the church as well.

We're a far less clerical institution than we were 50 years ago. That's a piece of it. We're rediscovering the fact that all baptized persons are called into ministry and not just the people wearing funny clothes, and that daily living is where we need God. That's where Jesus calls us into ministry.

Read it all.

Stand Firm: Reviewing Friday’s Meeting with Bishop Stanton: A Few Notes & Analyses

From Sarah Hey at Stand Firm, a talk with Bishop Stanton of the Diocese of Dallas:

. . .Bishop Stanton spoke about the three hour time period from around 9:30 a.m onward, both the events and his interpretation of them. Amongst the presentations by the guests from the Joint Standing Committee, the two that stood out for him were Archbishop Mouneer Anis's and Archbishop Aspinall's. Anis was "very direct" and, he thought, not well received, though there was polite applause. Aspinall was "quite clear" -- he urged that everyone read the Dar es Salaam communique carefully, not as a threat, but to note the questions which were phrased in a particular way. All of the guest speakers seemed to try to be respectful and non-confrontational.

The most challenging words from the Archbishop of Canterbury were the questions he raised about the role of bishops in their vocation to preserve the unity of the church. One of Bishop Stanton's insights about Rowan William's words at this visit was that they seemed very similar -- a "replay of the comments" in "The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today" of last year.

Throughout the two days, Bishop Stanton noted, Archbishop Williams was very quiet, listening a lot. "The one surprising thing for all the buildup to this meeting was that we actually heard from him very little. I was surprised that there wasn't more direct interchange."

I also asked Bishop Stanton about the Episcopal Visitor's plan in which he has been asked to participate. He used an interesting parallel to explain what he felt like when he was asked. It reminded him of being asked to participate in last year's New York meeting with Kenneth Kearon, Presiding Bishop elect Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, Bishop Iker, and others at the Church Pension Group offices on Fifth Avenue in New York. Although he had not thought much would be accomplished, he was willing to participate when asked. "There was nothing to be lost from talking through it" and that is what he did last year. He felt the same way about the Episcopal Visitor's request -- that he was always willing to consider the option and listen to the plan.

I asked Bishop Stanton what he thought the attitude was of the House of Bishops as a whole during the past two days. He did not believe that anything had changed from any of the positions -- "it's what it has been" and "I don't think any minds were changed or a new understanding was reached.". . .

Read it all.

Ruth Gledhill talks to Archbishop Akinola

From Ruth Gledhill at the Times Online:

. . . Dr Akinola, who heads the Global South group of Anglican provinces from Asia, Africa and Latin America, said the Anglican Church worldwide was in a state of “broken communion”.

He said the crisis arose from the “intransigence and obstinacy” of The Episcopal Church in the US, which had pursued a liberal line on same-sex blessings and the consecration in 2003 of the openly gay bishop Gene Robinson. “They were warned not to do this,” he said. “Now province after province has declared a state of broken communion with them.”. . .

Read it all.

AnglicanTV interviews Dr. Stephen Noll

Kevin was busy in Uganda! Check out his interview with Dr. Stephen Noll of Uganda Christian University.

Filmed at Uganda Christian University
September 3, 2007

'Is our society broken? Yes, I think it is'

From the Telegraph (U.K.), an interview with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury:

. . . "Is our society broken? I think it is," he says. "We are in a phase of our culture where the fragmentation of society is far more obvious. It's not just families, it is different ethnic communities and economic groups. We talk about access and equality the whole time, but in practice we all seem to live very segregated lives.". . .

. . . Broadcasters, he argues, are contributing to the moral decline. "There is a gladiatorial streak in the entertainment business now where increasingly humiliation is the way forward. That worries me, there is a kind of sadism that can't be good for us. It is the building-up and the pulling-down of contestants, it is pushing people into situations where they expose their vulnerability, encouraging a culture of shamelessness."

One of the Archbishop's key concerns is how the society we live in is damaging children. "What is lacking in children's lives is space. They are pressed into a testing culture, or even into a gang culture, they are bullied and manipulated until they fit in, they never have any time to develop in their own space."

He understands the urge to join a gang. "A lot of it is yearning for love, they want to fit in, if their families are as chaotic as some of them are, gangs give them a sense of belonging."

But he says pushy parents who rush children between ballet and violin lessons are suffocating their offspring too. "Children live crowded lives, we're not making their lives easy by pressurising them, whether it's the claustrophobia of gang culture or the claustrophobia of intense achievement in middle-class areas."

Another concern is the paranoia surrounding children. "We have got obsessional about paedophiles," he says. "A generation ago people would have smiled rather wryly about a scoutmaster or a schoolteacher caught in some improper activity, now we know the damage. I doubt that there are more people with perversions, we are just more aware of it. That is right but unfortunately it also carries the wrong kind of awareness and people have become overprotective towards children, they are stifling them in a different way.". . .

. . . When we ask whether [the Archbishop] thinks a Presbyterian Prime Minister will be different to a high Anglican, he says: "The kind of political culture that Gordon Brown has come through is a bit more austere and values-oriented. He has a real level of emotional commitment about global poverty. I'm pleased that one of the first things he did was to reverse the legislation about gambling, and the hint that they might be looking again at 24-hour drinking."

Now he hopes Mr Brown will reduce the abortion time limit. "The nation generally is getting more unhappy about the high level of abortion in this country, people are not happy about abortion as a back-stop to contraception," he says.

The Government needs to enforce strict controls on stem cell research too. "I can't come to terms with the idea of a human individual being created for a purpose," he says.

And he intends to speak out on euthanasia. "I'm against it - morally and religiously because I don't believe any of us has the liberty to determine the day of our death, and practically because almost all forms of legislation for assisted dying open the door to unjust and destructive pressures on people."

We have spent so long discussing the morality of politics that we have barely touched on the politics of the Church. Why is it so obsessed by gay priests?

"I don't think it's just an obsession with sex," he sighs. "It's about the authority of the Bible.

"Generally we're seeing a reworking of that - it's an area of real anxiety and for some people this is a step too far."

He does not know if he can stop the church breaking apart. "I hope it won't," he says. I'm working very hard to stop that happening.". . .

Read it all.

Archbishop Orombi talks to AnglicanTV (and others)

After the consecration of Bishop Guernsey, Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi of Uganda held an informal press conference/interview with the International press. Kevin Kallsen of AnglicanTV was joined by the BBC and the Wall Street Journal.

Go AnglicanTV here to see it.

Also, see here the interview I did with the Archbishop in May for AnglicanTV when he was visiting in southern California.

Canon Kendall Harmon on leadership

Be sure to check out Sarah Hey's (of Stand Firm fame) five-part series on leadership with Canon Kendall Harmon (of TitusOneNine fame) now posted at AnglicanTV. Each part is around 15 minutes. Enjoy!

There are no words. . .

Check out a recent interview that Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori did with Bill Moyers (and check out the write-up and comments at Stand Firm). There is nothing more for me to say.