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"Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds His people, from this time forth and forever." Psalm 125:1-2 NKJV
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Message from Bishop David Anderson
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Bishop Anderson
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Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ Jesus, As I write this Weekly AAC Update, Canon Phil Ashey is leading about 90 representatives of 25 Reformed Episcopal Church congregations in a Sure Foundation seminar. Sure Foundation is designed to bring practical information, technique and procedure to the leaders in the local church to help them grow and fulfill their parish's mission and ministry. One of the topics that is offered under the Sure Foundation umbrella is called "Plateaued and Perplexed." In addition, the AAC offers a program called the Clergy Leadership Training Institute or CLTI, which meets with small groups of clergy over several years to assist clergy in recovering the excitement in their ministry and provide them with resources to have new energy and direction in their work. These programs can be provided for congregations and priests in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) as well as the Episcopal Church (TEC). We have picked up news from the Christian Broadcast Network (CBN) that the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA) on Jan. 27 covered a story about Egyptian Christians being deported from their village. A brief excerpt from their report follows: A Muslim barber named Toemah in the village of El-Ameriya alleged that a 34-year old Coptic tailor named Mourad Samy Guirgis had several illicit photos of a Muslim woman on his cell phone. Salafists and various Islamist groups urged Muslims to take action against the offending Christian.
Violence quickly followed as 5,000 Muslim villagers went on a rampage, burning and pillaging the homes and shops of innocent Coptics. This reportedly occurred even though the accused man turned himself in to police and no photos were found on his phone. Many of the 62 Coptic families fled for their lives.
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After Coptics endure such attacks, their leaders usually attend 'reconciliation meetings' with Muslim elders. When the Christians of El-Ameriya recently attended one such meeting, Muslims demanded the eviction of all Coptic residents of the village because 'Muslim honor had been damaged.'
Muslim honor indeed. In this case, any lie by any Muslim becomes the reason and license for wholesale burning, looting, and killing of Christian Copts. They do it out of pure hate learned from their weekly teachings on Islam, encouraged by the fact that they can do it and get away with it. Read the whole article here.
While our US President thinks that the "Arab Spring" has been such a wonderful thing, the situation for Christians has actually gone from bad to worse. Does the President and the Secretary of State care? Apparently not enough. Pray for our brothers and sisters whose spiritual line goes straight back to the Apostolic age when the Christian faith was taken to Egypt from Jerusalem.
And speaking of the the difficulty in getting the current US Administration to care about people of faith (unless they are Muslims) we see that President Obama has modified his demand of religious organizations that they provide insurance for employees which covers reproductive procedures contrary to Roman Catholic established doctrine. The President, facing a fire storm of criticism, modified his demand such that the insurance companies that provide insurance to the religious organizations have to provide the birth control services for free, and the religious organization doesn't have to pay for it. This is nonsense, and supposes that all of us are stupid and can't see through this. The insurance companies are going to build into their rate structure the cost of providing the required birth control coverage; they don't give anything away for free. Thus the Catholic Church organizations will have to pay the insurance bill, which, although it technically doesn't specify birth control coverage, the insurance company will have to provide to the employee upon request.
Although as Anglicans we generally don't have a problem with most birth control practices, the AAC is appalled at the brazen, roughshod antics of this administration and its anti-faith bias. Christians of many stripes in the USA are waking up to the dangerous precedent that President Obama is trying to create and some are seeing a potential cause for civil disobedience. There is an article on evangelical leaders calling for significant push-back to the government at this link.
There is no aspect of our Christian faith that those who are hostile to Biblical faith won't try to destroy or neutralize; it just takes time and opportunity. Obama is using this birth control issue as the tip of the splitting wedge, to try to pry Christians' belief and practice apart. We must not let him succeed or our Anglican faith will perish in the same bonfire the administration is setting for the Catholic Church. Rick Warren gets it, Chuck Colson gets it, and it's time you and I get it and stand arm in arm with our Roman brothers and sisters.
And what are our public schools doing for the students who hold to a Christian faith? Making them sing songs in Urdu that praise Allah, but of course forbidding even the thought of Muslim students being forced to sing Christian songs praising Jesus Christ. Go here and read about this further step to shove Christians' faith to one side in favor of the exotic, in this case Islam. Why aren't these educators being sued by the ACLU? Maybe Christian lawyers need to defend this student who left the choir rather than violate his Christian faith.
I grieve that these times are so perilous to our people and faith, but I do give thanks to Jesus Christ that he has counted us worthy to be his foot soldiers in this time of crisis, and always remember I John 4:4 - "...greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world."
May our Lord bless and sustain us with his presence and spirit in all that we do, and may all that we do warrant that attention.
+David
The Rt. Rev. David C. Anderson, Sr.
President and CEO, American Anglican Council
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Chaplain's Corner
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 By The Rev. Canon Phil Ashey
Chief Operating and Development Officer, American Anglican Council
Canon Ashey is leading a Sure Foundation seminar and will not write a message this week.
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Prepared remarks for the Washington state legislature hearings on the definition of marriage
| Source: Ruth Institute
January 30, 2012
Delivered January 23, 2012 in Olympia, Washington
by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I am here today to address those of you who have already made up your minds to redefine marriage. History will not be kind to you. Previous generations of social experimenters have caused unimaginable misery for millions of people. Particular people advocated the policies that led to today's 50% divorce rate and 40% out of wedlock childbearing rate. None of these people has ever been held accountable.
I am here today to hold you to account, for the predictable harms you have already caused and will continue to cause by redefining marriage.
Let me remind you of the essential public purpose of marriage. Marriage attaches mothers and fathers to their children, and to one another. Once you replace that essential public purpose with inessential, even frivolous private purposes, marriage will not be able to do its job. But children will still need secure attachments to their mothers and fathers, a need which will go unfulfilled.
You are redefining parenthood, as a side effect of redefining marriage, without even considering what you are about to do. Until now, marriage makes legal parenthood track biological parenthood. The legal presumption of paternity means that children born to a married woman are presumed to be the children of her husband. With this legal rule, and the social practice of sexual exclusivity, marriage attaches children to their biological parents.
Same sex couples of course, do not procreate together. "Marriage equality" requires a slippery move from "presumption of paternity" to the gender neutral "presumption of parentage." This sleight of hand transforms parenthood. The same sex partner of a biological parent is never the other biological parent. Rather than attaching children to their biological parents, same sex marriage is the vehicle that separates children from a parent.
No longer will the law hold that children need a mother and a father. Under the inspiration and guidance of people like you in other states, courts are saying silly things like, "the traditional notion that children need a mother and a father to be raised into healthy, well-adjusted adults is based more on stereotype than anything else."[1]
This statement made by the Iowa Supreme Court in Varnum v Brien, is false as a general statement. Mountains of data show that children do need their mothers and their fathers,[2] and that children care deeply about biological connections.[3] The gay community is not responsible for today's generation of fatherless children. But they will be responsible for the next such generation.
And don't tell me that we already have lots of children unattached to their parents. We should be taking steps to place responsible limits on things like divorce, rather than careening headlong into further and more institutionalized injustices to children....
The rest of the article may be found here.
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NYC: Court grants temporary hold on church evictions
| Source: OneNewsNow
February 16, 2012
By Fred Jackson
Lawyers for churches facing eviction from being allowed to meet in New York schools have won at least a temporary reprieve.
Alliance Defense Fund says the temporary restraining order is in effect for 10 days while the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York more fully considers constitutional arguments about the city's unique-in-the-nation prohibition on worship services in vacant public school buildings on weekends....
Many New York City churchgoers have been protesting the city's plans to evict them  ever since the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the case on free-speech grounds on December 5, 2011. A bill that would compel the city's Department of Education to allow the worship services passed the state senate this month and is awaiting action by the state assembly.
"This order from the court in no way should stop efforts by the New York Legislature to overturn this policy," Lorence explained. "The courts have consistently ruled that the Constitution does not require New York City to ban religious worship services, so the city or the state legislature is free to repeal the policy."
The rest of the article may be found here.
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| Presiding bishop's Lent message: Jefferts Schori calls for focus on Millennium Development Goals | Source: Episcopal News Service
February 16, 2012
Lent Message 2012
I greet you at the beginning of Lent.
In this year I'm going to invite you to think about the ancient traditions of preparing in
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Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori
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solidarity with candidates for baptism, to think about the old disciplines of prayer and fasting and alms-giving and study, through the focus on those beyond our communities, in the developing world, who live in abject poverty.
I invite you to use the Millennium Development Goals as your focus for Lenten study and discipline and prayer and fasting this year. I'm going to remind you that the Millennium Development Goals are about healing the worst of the world's hunger. They're about seeing that all children get access to primary education. They're about empowering women. They're about attending to issues of maternal health and child mortality. They're about attending to issues of communicable disease like AIDS and malaria and tuberculosis. They're about environmentally sustainable development, seeing that people have access to clean water and sanitation and that the conditions in slums are alleviated. And finally, they are about aid, foreign aid. They're about trade relationships, and they're about building partnerships for sustainable development in this world....
Read the entire message here.
AAC EDITOR'S NOTE: In light of the Presiding Bishop's message for Lent and its focus on the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals, we would like to highlight this insightful booklet by Marguerite Peeters. Specifically, Peeters suggests that Christians should wary of substituting the Millennium Development Goals and other inventions of the post-modern worldview - the new "global ethic" - for the actual Gospel and the Christian worldview.
With Ms. Peeters' permission, an excerpt from her booklet "The new global ethic: challenges for the Church" is below. You may find the full text here. Also, consider purchasing a more in-depth analysis from her website here.
....We are, as Jesus says it, in the world but not of the world. Yet the reality is that all over the world, Christians are tempted, often out of ignorance, to mistake the paradigms and values of the global ethic for the social doctrine of the Church, "culturally sensitive approaches" for the respect of culture, the "equity principle" of the new ethic for the Judeo-Christian concept of justice, "awareness-raising" and "sensitization" for the moral and theological education of conscience, "gender mainstreaming" and "women's empowerment" for the Judeo-Christian teaching on the equal dignity of man and woman, "positive living" for living with theological hope, the arbitrary "freedom to choose" for freedom in Christ, human dignity for the eternal law written in the heart of man, "reproductive health" for healthy procreation, "safe motherhood" for healthy mothers and children (whether born or unborn), "behavior change" campaigns (that are geared towards the use of contraception and condoms) for education to abstinence and fidelity, "human rights", "entitlements" and "nondiscrimination" for the good tidings of God's merciful love, the agenda of UN conferences and of the Millennium Development Goals for an integral development respectful of people's values and cultures - and so on.
Christians sometimes fail to distinguish the new, constructed, allegedly "holistic" ethical system from God's holistic and eternal design of salvation, not realizing that the two logics lead in different directions. They are implied in countless partnerships, the drivers of which are agents of the global ethic. The Church must have self-respect and keep her independence from the radical agenda. A vital line separates the post-Christian humanism of the global ethic from a genuine and complete Christian humanism driven by salvation in Christ and promoted by the Church. In practice, this line no longer clearly appears. To recover Christian identity, disentangle it from ambivalent agendas is an urgent task for the Church.
Confusing the Christian kerygma and the global ethic carries a double danger. First, the new concepts tend to occupy the space that should be occupied by evangelization. Christians preach human rights, sustainability and the Millennium Development Goals instead of preaching the gospel. Little by little, they are seduced by secular values and lose their Christian identity. Didn't John Paul II, in Redemptoris Missio, speak about the "gradual secularization of salvation"?
Secondly, if Christian leaders use the concepts of the new ethic without explicitly clarifying what distinguishes them from the social doctrine of the Church and from the gospel, as is often the case, the faithful will be at a loss and will tend not to discern the difference. The resulting confusion may lead the Christian flock to a gradual erosion of the faith....
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Albany, NY - TEC parishes seek DEPO
| Source: Times Union
February 10, 2012
By Kenneth C. Crowe II
ALBANY - At least three parishes are exploring a move that would release them from
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Bishop Love
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pastoral oversight by the conservative Episcopal Diocese of Albany. They are contemplating what the church calls "Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight," known by its acronym of DEPO, which was formalized in 2004 as a response to conservative parishes' reactions to the ordination of gay clergy and other issues related to sexuality.
"Initially DEPO was designed to deal with theologically conservative parishes that are located in more theologically minded liberal dioceses," Bishop William H. Love said Friday.
"The reverse is occurring in the Diocese of Albany. Albany has been a traditionally conservative theological diocese," the bishop said.
Love said the diocese first met in December with clergy and parish representatives to discuss this situation. The parishes would remain within the jurisdiction of the Albany diocese, but pastoral care of the Albany parishes could possibly be delegated to the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York, which is based in Syracuse....
The rest of the article may be found here.
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Bolly installed as Archbishop in South East Asia
| Source: Borneo Post
February 13, 2012
by Jonathan Chia
KUCHING: Bishop of the Diocese of Kuching the Most Reverend Datuk Bolly Lapok was
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Borneo Post photo
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officially installed as the fourth Archbishop of the Province of the Anglican Church in South East Asia at an elaborate ceremony in St Thomas' Cathedral here yesterday. Bolly, who is the first Sarawakian ever to hold the post, succeeds Bishop of Singapore the Most Reverend Dr John Chew.
With his installation as the Archbishop of the Province of the Anglican Church in South East Asia, Bolly becomes one of the 38 Primates in the worldwide Anglican communion. The solemn ceremony was attended by over 2,000 Anglicans, including guests from England, Australia, Canada, the US, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India and the Philippines....
The rest of the article may be found here.
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