True Anglican Blog

Might there be some Episcopal clergy who are in the search process, willing to consider the frigid state of South Dakota? [Brrrr] . . . But take note the beautiful pictures on Tim’s blog. I myself have been running by the river amongst the red-winged blackbirds in that state and it is lovely.

Check out the whole post:

The Rev. Canon David Hussey is clergy deployment officer. He notes the following current openings:

Trinity, Pierre, where Bishop John Tarrant was most recently Rector. Pierre is the State Capitol. It is a small city of about 10,000. The parish has excellent facilities and good ecumenical relationships, including a Wednesday night youth program shared by a surprising array of denominations. Good interfaith support system. Also good collaborative ministry with Reservation congregations. (This position is on the national positions open bulletin).

Also on the bulletin is a full time Vicar for the Yankton Reservation Mission, based in Wagner. The needs on specific Reservations are often in flux, so check the bulletin for the most current expectation of the position.

Here in Sioux Falls, a bi-vocational Anglo-Catholic Vicar is sought for Church of the Holy Apostles.

The awe in the individual’s approach to Holy Communion which characterised both the Tractarians and Evangelicals of old stands in contrast to the ease with which our congregations come tripping to the altar week by week. . . . I suggest that we should read and ponder the long Exhortation in the Communion service, which brings home how the reception of Communion is dreadful as well as precious, and reminds us of the need for confession of sin and the possibility of the ‘benefit of absolution’.

Archbishop Michael Ramsey

It’s a powerful question.

Here Mark Driscoll poses it to the great R.C. Sproul. Go see the video or watch below.

The answer Sproul gives is exactly the fundamental issue we’ve been drawing to our readers’ attention at Stand Firm for a long time now.

Three House Democrats are ripping a proposed tax on stock transactions, even as the idea gains traction among Democrats desperate to fund jobs creation….

“Proponents of a transaction tax argue that a small 0.25 percent tax on stocks would be paid for by the highly paid financial traders and would not affect most Americans. This is simply not true. A tax on stock transactions would affect every single person who owns and invests in stocks from small business owners to senior citizens,” the letter said.

Read it all.

Yes, there’s no doubt about it. People are just strange. They take up strange interests. They do strange things for strange reasons. What a piece of work man is!

Here’s a reason why one man decided to sketch historic trees, taken from The Ancient Tree Forum, which is strange and beautiful as well:

Yan Lee is a native of China, where he received his degree in geology at the University of Nanging. In the small northern town where he worked, there were few trees except the two on the river bank. He came to think of them as an “affectionate couple”, standing side by side. Unfortunately these trees died due to salt water incursion. Their death affected the artist greatly, and he regretted that he did not draw them before they died.

Here is one of my favorite watercolors from the Ancient Tree Forum website.

Here’s the Fairlop Oak — be sure to click to enlarge the image.

Here is one of my favorites from Yan Lee, in Charleston.

And here is another in College Station in Texas — simply gorgeous lines.

Ruth Gledhill of the Times Online on the clergy allocation and funding issue in the COE:

Last week I went to a special parochial church council meeting in Littlebourne, Kent, in the diocese of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The benefice of four churches, one with just ten worshippers, somehow manages to raise £80,000-plus each year of which they give more than £50,000 to the diocese as combined quota payments. It costs the diocese about £40,000 to maintain the Rector, the Rev John Allan. When he retires, this hard-working, successful benefice, albeit with congregations of mostly elderly or retired people, will instead be given a part-time, unpaid ‘house-for-duty’ priest. Apparently, they have been told, they will not be given their own priest ever again, ‘even if you raise £1 million.’

A fascinating article from The Ugley Vicar about clergy allocation and church funding over in the COE — something that is increasingly becoming a conflict in dioceses over here in TEC as funding is radically declining as well. Over in these parts, the theory and practice is based on assumed decline. Bishops and many clergy have essentially decided that parishes in rural areas simply are not going to grow and therefore much prattling about “Total Ministry” is occurring as a blind.

Make sure you read the entire piece from which the below is excerpted.

The Times on Saturday chose to run with the ‘news’ that the number of stipendiary Anglican clergy is in decline. According to their article, the Church of England will lose “as many as one in ten paid clergy in the next five years”.

Of course, for many Anglicans, this is not news at all, especially if they are in rural areas (which means anywhere outside an urban environment). Typically, rural ‘parishes’ now consist of agglomerations of individual parishes, even into double figures. Recently I met a clergywoman from Norfolk looking after no less than fifteen. And the number of parishes involved is no guarantee of a full-time minister. In our local area another clergywoman is overseeing five parishes whilst holding down a part-time diocesan post.

Typically, urban churches tend to be protected from such amalgamations by the size of their populations. In our diocese, the ‘cap’ is now something like 3,000 people per full-time minister, which means that most urban parishes are safe —for the time being. However, the ‘cap’ is constantly increasing, so that eventually even the urban parishes will have to be merged.

There are, however, two schools of thought as to why this situation has come about and continues to worsen. The official line is that this is essentially a matter recruitment. The Times quotes a typical (though anonymous) church spokesman saying that, “The bigger pressure is the really quite encouraging number of ordinations is not as big as the number of those retiring.”

But this is slightly misleading, for the ‘encouraging number’ of ordinands includes an increasing proportion of part-timers. Moreover, when the difference between part and full-time clergy is taken into account, a significant demographic variation emerges. Amongst the part-timers, a disproportionate number are female, over forty, training on part-time courses. Amongst the full-timers, a disproportionate number are male, under forty, and training on full-time courses at evangelical colleges.

There is thus a correlation between the intended work-pattern and what might be called the ‘socio-theological’ profile of the candidate.
And this hints at another, alternative, explanation of the decline in clergy numbers, which is that it reflects a fiscally-constrained, socio-theological agenda. In other words, those running the Church of England are planning for a declining workforce on the principle that, whilst it is all they believe we can afford, they also do not believe it particularly matters for the overall ministry of the church.

This was a fascinating little local article about education and manufacturing and preparation of students, demonstrating yet again that public education’s role has been grossly inflated, and thus it is little wonder that the constant cry of public schools is to also have more money.

The educators were also told in no uncertain terms that many of our young people are not measuring up – lacking basic education, interpersonal skills, proper attire, and sometimes, appropriate hygiene to make it through the interview process.

If public schools are responsible to make certain kids have proper attire, appropriate hygiene, and interpersonal skills than they are doomed to fail no matter how much money they receive. Public schools are not equipped to develop those things. There’s only one unit that is so equipped, or will be so equipped in the future, and that’s the family.

I just felt like reminding everyone of what truly great writing actually looks like.

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night
by Snoopy
Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out!

A door slammed. The maid screamed.

Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!

While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Part II
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.

At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.

Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?

The intern frowned.

“Stampede!” the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch was saved.

The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. he had learned about medicine, but more importantly, he had learned something about life.

THE END

Authored by Charles M. Schulz

What is scary [about the story of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan] is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.

Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.

Read it all.