Welcome to St Philip's

The Anglican Church of St Philip's O'Connor, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Services on Sunday: Holy Communion 8am and 10am. Wednesday 10am

Priest:(the Rev'd) Rob Lamerton. Ph 62478004, Fax 62307775
PO Box 6022 O'Connor 2602
Wardens 2005: Chris Cheah, Janine Studholme, Devin Combs Bowles

Our Vision is to be a Christian, caring community
which embraces and honours difference
and offers a place to celebrate and grow spiritually.


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What does it mean to be an Anglican?


First, some links:

http://www.stpat.net/pass.html From the USA; how to pass as an episcopalian. (a U.S. Anglican).
The guide starts: "The first things other protestants notice about Episcopal worship services are our brief exercise periods or "Holy Aerobics." We stand at times, we kneel at others, and sometimes we even bow, genuflect and cross ourselves like Roman Catholics. Practices vary from church to church, and even among individual parishioners. If you stand when others kneel or don't bow when others do, most everybody will simply think, "that's the way he or she does it at their home Parish." No problem… In other words, just relax feel at home with us!"

and a new one from the Bishop of California:
http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/001126.html

An article on Anglicanism from St Matthew-in-the-city, Auckland, New Zealand:
http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/anglicanism.htm

An article from the USA on the divisions in the Anglican church. "Gay and lesbian issues serve, instead, as a smokescreen for the primary tensions concerning exclusion and power. The "homosexuality agenda," as conservatives call it, is used as a divide-and-conquer tactic, sometimes setting people of color against one another and confusing progressives as to who their allies are." Enlightening comments on the Episcopalian Church in the USA.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/21350/ originally from www.thewitness.org.

Official Anglican comment can be found at the Anglican News Service.

(359) 11-April-2005 — Further theological education resources — Anglican Communion Office:
"Further resources linked to theological education have recently been added to the web site administered by TEAC (Theological Education for the Anglican Communion) — the Anglican Primates Theological Education Working Group. These include a lecture on theological education delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Centre for Anglican Communion Studies in Selly Oak, Birmingham, England, November 2004, and suggested reading material for lay people wishing to explore their faith and their understanding of what it means to be an Anglican. See the TEAC website www.anglicancommunion.org/teac"

And from Melbourne http://www.media.anglican.com.au/ another source of Anglican news.

From Bishop George, on the local diocesan web site: inclusion, not exclusion

Interesting interview with Archbishop Frank Griswold (ex-Primate of the USA Epsicopalian Church) http://belief.net/story/162/story_16282.html
He says that the present controversy in the Anglican communion is more to do with right wing groups trying to get control of the generally more liberal episcopalian church in the USA. They are well funded and influence other parts of the world.

An article from Graham Downie published in The Canberra Times 12th August 2006; an interview with Jane Shaw, the first female dean of divinity at New College, Oxford.

Anglican crisis about power not sexuality

Religion Reporter GRAHAM DOWNIE speaks to Jane Shaw, the first female dean of divinity, chaplain and fellow of New College, Oxford University.

THE CRISIS in the Anglican communion is not over whether women could be bishops, nor is it over homosexuality — it is over authority and power, says Jane Shaw.

She is a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU. Her research project is "Remembering Octavia: the biography of a modern female messiah and her followers". The biography is of a woman who founded a "very unusual religious community" in 1919 in England.

Shaw says the crisis over power, about who gets the Anglican franchise, divides roughly along conservative and liberal lines and to some degree geographically.

"It divides on the things that have been a crisis during modernity about how you read scripture and where your authority is. How do you understand tradition? Do you admit that you allow ongoing revelation and the work of the Holy Spirit? Do you admit you allow people's experience to come into this?"

She has no sympathy whatsoever for the view that scripture says men should have authority over women: It is bad exegesis. It is just bad reading of the scripture."

Supporting her view she quotes from scripture, "Both men and women are made in the image and likeness of God."

She says human beings have gifts and people should be appointed or elected to certain jobs in the church according to their gifts, not according to their gender or race.

She does not want to be a bishop but says, I would like women to be bishops on equal terms with men. I think the Church of England will do it in the next decade. How we do it is the key thing. I suspect once the Church of England has done it, others will get less nervous."

She does not believe general acceptance of female bishops depends on the Church of England's agreeing, but says this will help. "I do think if the Church of England does it, it will be a good signal."

Though the US, Canada and New Zealand are the only provinces which have ordained women as bishops, she says there are many which theoretically could have female bishops. "All kinds of cultural things move in to stop women seeming right for that kind of oversight."

The decision, when it comes, should not have any major impact on relationships with the Catholic Church because it does not recognise Anglican orders. Acceptance of female bishops could possibly help the communion's relationship with some Protestant churches.

Those who argue for a second type of Anglican communion have a misunderstanding about what the communion already is. Since its inception in the 19th century, it has been a fairly loose group.

"Attempts in the late 19th century to make it more hardened, as a meeting which would make binding decisions on all of the communion, were resisted. So we are a loose grouping in which each province (normally country) has always had autonomy. But it just so happens that the conservatives haven't liked some of the autonomy expressed by some parts of some provinces."

On why the church was hung up on homosexuality, she says, "I don't understand it at all. I have asked a lot of conservatives, why, if you are not insecure about your own sexuality, are you so hung up about this? The answer I have been given is that they fear that people who are not abiding by a very particular set of sexual ethics will go to hell."

Biblical references to homosexuality do not mean what is understood in 2006. "But conservatives, who are making this fuss, choose not to read scripture in that light."

But the same churches have accepted divorce, though Jesus is very explicit in saying you cannot have divorce. "Why there is so much cultural anxiety about sexuality is a mystery to me,'' she says.

As a historian she is interested in some of the early gospels which were not included in the Bible.

"I don't react with any great surprise because I know those things are there. They are interesting and I read them as an historian. They tell us something about what those communities' preoccupations were.

The Gospel of Mary, for example, depicts the male disciples as unsure about what to do after Jesus' ascension. "Mary Magdalene is the one who galvanises the male disciples into action when they are being pretty useless. But then, Peter has a temper tantrum."

It might be assumed the community in which that was written was witnessing a power struggle about whether men or women should be in charge.

These gospels tell something about the human nature of early communities, particularly that they had some of the same arguments as the church today. She does not believe these writings should be included in the canon.

"But I am a Christian historian and I am interested in any evidence that tells us what our forebears were doing and arguing about."

Shaw was born in Norwich, England . "I grew up there in a very interesting community which was originally a monastic foundation, founded in 1249."

Her father, a layman, was the master. It was an ideal community for about 120 elderly people.

"So I grew up in a 15th-century house, with its own chapel and cloisters. So the fact that I am both a historian and priest is entirely traceable back to my youth."

When aged 16 she felt a call to the priesthood. That was 1979 - the year the Movement for the Ordination of Women was founded in England.

As an undergraduate at Oxford University, she was much more involved in that movement than in her studies.

I read history there on the side," she says.

Then to Harvard Divinity School where she took a master's degree in theology, then to the University of California where she completed a doctorate in history.

"By serendipity or grace I ended up living and teaching at the Episcopal Seminary, which in a way is where I got formed for ordination, though during that time, I was not on the ordination track."

In 1994, when women were first ordained in the Church of England, she returned to Oxford to teach.

She was ordained deacon in 1997 and priest in 1998.

After ordination she continued teaching full-time while also working at the university church as a curate.

In 2001 she became the first female dean of divinity at New College in its 627-year history.

from The Canberra Times, Saturday, August 12th, 2006

This article from England shows the quirky face of Anglicanism, with a warning of the troubled times that we live in. It is a reaction to the decisions of a meeting of the Primates of the Anglican Communion in Armagh, in February 2005. I received it in an email from the changing attitude mailing list.

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005

A schism that threatens us all
Rowan Williams must confront those who would destroy the liberal traditions of Anglicanism
Will Hutton
The Observer
Sunday February 27, 2005

The genius of the Anglican Church has been the depth of its embedded tolerance. Walk into any one of its churches that stud our cities, towns and villages and you can almost smell the reflective friendliness seeping out of the walls. This is a church that since Henry VIII' s break with Rome has been squaring biblical injunction with the way the English actually live their lives, throwing the mantle of Christian solidarity around believers, half-believers and sceptics alike. As a national church, its job is to include and tolerate us all; it is everyone's friend in need.

Except now it is losing its way — and the English are on the point of losing part of the alchemy that makes us what we are. The church, confronting endlessly declining congregations in what seems less and less a Christian country, is suffering a crisis of confidence so severe that it has lost touch with its mission. You can't include and tolerate if the mass of English count themselves out of the whole exercise, forcing the church into apparent marginalisation. Better become the evangelist of high-octane faith. At least then, if you go down, you go down fighting.

Evangelists have steadily increased their influence in church affairs; on one count, they now constitute a majority of its governing synod. But evangelism is a minority preoccupation and is forcing Anglicanism to detach itself from its old, inclusive role, transforming the church into something it's not.

Last week's anguished debates among the church's leading primates over its attitude towards homosexuality, leading to the invitation to the Americans and Canadian wings of the church to withdraw from its governing councils for three years to reflect on changing their liberal minds and reversing commitments they have made (they won't, can't and shouldn't), portend the schism that generations have wanted to avoid.

This is a landmark moment. Even five years ago, I would have been confident that, one way or another, the Anglican Church would keep together over the issue; that the tolerance in its genes would win out and that the church, as it has in the past, would find a way of squaring the Bible with the way we live now. Such confidence is impossible today.

Archbishop Rowan Williams looks and sounds agonised. It is less than three years since, as Archbishop of Wales, he warned that the church could not accept stable same-sex relationships for the laity without one day accepting them for the clergy and that the Bible did not overtly outlaw committed same-sex partnerships. It was the authentic voice of the tolerant Church of England trying to come to terms with today's sexual and social reality. Yet now he finds himself as the prelate overseeing the gradual division of the Anglican communion, desperately playing for time in the hope that something will come up.

Secularists find it hard to grasp the magnitude of what's at stake. The communion isn't just a word; it's the ethic of unity between God and church that for believers validates the whole point of the church's existence. Schism is the devil's work. Yet the auguries are that Williams's temporising will bring no relief. While the church is trapped in a discourse redolent of medieval witch-hunts and exorcism, the real world is moving on.

Only last December, the government legislated one its most progressive, if unsung, initiatives, a framework of law for civil partnerships including same-sex relationships. Gays who want to live together now have a legal framework in which they can sort out pension entitlements, insurance claims and all the other intricacies of living together on the same terms as heterosexuals. It's a vital reform.

But it does mean that month by month the church is going to face a steady build up of requests for its priests to bless the partnerships. Its evangelical wing wants to make no concession; the Bible damns homosexuality or, at least, the disputed translations do. For them, the church's job is uncompromisingly to bring the word of God to the fallen and through their adhesion to all its tenets to achieve salvation — and that means the repudiation of homosexuality.

For the true Anglican, however, the reflex response is very different. These are flesh-and-blood human beings attempting to find fulfilment and mutual love in a civil partnership; an inclusive church cannot refuse them Christ's benediction if they want it and nothing in the Bible excludes it doing so.

Williams, a reflex Anglican and deep Christian, has to tolerate and include evangelicals as the valid Christian tradition they represent, but he has to insist that they cannot rule the roost. They would turn the church into an intolerant, right-wing, homophobic sect, a road that will lead inexorably to disestablishment, self-reinforcing marginalisation, poverty and an end not just to the church's Christian influence on national life but the crucial example it affords other faith communities who want the same privileges.

A free society can't stop the establishment of, say, Muslim schools; but it can insist that, as with Church of England schools, their curriculum is liberal rather than narrow, anti-scientific and sexist. But the church's capacity to retain its breadth of appeal, liberalism and tolerance on which such an example hangs, depends in turn on its capacity to resist the dominance of evangelism — and it is losing the fight.

Part of its weakness is the potency of the evangelical, 'let's at least assert Christian values' in this pagan-society argument. But the bigger story is the contemporary defensiveness of liberalism in all its guises. Williams should offer more committed leadership, but then so should Lord Falconer and Charles Clarke on issues of criminal justice and new anti-terrorism laws; so should Blair and Straw over respecting international law; so should employer bodies and unions over immigration; so should Ruth Kelly over attempting more parity of esteem between academic and vocational education. Liberal leadership in almost every sphere is insecure and un-surefooted.

There is a lack of conviction in the notions of progress and advance. Because so much seems to be exposed to unsettling change, values that promote it, such as tolerance, openness, respect for diversity and insistence on equality before the law, are seen as accelerating the processes that are destabilising old certainties.

Pace Hillaire Belloc, we want to hold on to Nurse for fear of something worse. The truth is very different. The best way to react to change is to embrace it with our values intact. The best response to terrorism is to sustain our faith in the judicial process along with no detention without trial.

The best response to immigration is not to panic about the threat of the 'other'. The best Church of England is one that stays true to its tradition of inclusion and tolerance. To surrender all this because of so-called 'legitimate' concerns about security, identity or the real meaning of the Bible will be to change England into something it is not. We will not like the results. Liberals have to hold the line across the entire front, the Church of England included.

Anglican Links

http://anglicansonline.org/index.html

Anglican Cycle of Prayer

and Australia:
http://anglicansonline.org/world/aus.html (St Philip's is on this page)

pdf files are read with the free reader available at
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

Old "calendars":
| Advent Calendar 2003 | Advent Calendar 2004 | Lenten Calendar 2004 | Lenten Calendar 2005 |
Advent Calendar 2005 | Lenten Calendar 2006 | Advent Calendar 2006 | Lent 2007 | Advent 2007 | Lent 2005/8



St Philip's Archives are off this site and indexed at http://www.tip.net.au/~lindafrd/StPipsArchive/Archive_index.html