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"Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for Me?"
Jeremiah 32:27 NKJV
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Bishop Anderson and Canon Ashey
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Bishop Anderson and Canon Ashey are on well-deserved vacations with their families this week and will not post articles today.
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Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
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 By Robert Lundy
Communications Officer
American Anglican Council
The other day I posted on the American Anglican Council's Facebook page the definition of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and was surprised by the number of people who reused that information and shared it on their own Facebook profile. Now the AAC's social media pull is not the same as a Lady Gaga or a Justin Bieber (even if their stock is inflated). However, 20 "shares" and multiple comments, some negative, were enough to make me think the topic struck a nerve and would be good for further discussion. So...what in the world is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD)? When I first heard the term I thought it was something I was supposed to have read years ago in Philosophy 1000 at the University of Georgia.
The term comes from the book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (2005) by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton and describes the sort of working theology that many young Americans have:
1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
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3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
Before I attempt to dive in to this, please take a look at what someone with more experience has to say about it. Canon David Charney is the youth minister at Christ Church, Atlanta, GA, and he addressed this topic during one of our Sure Foundation seminars:
After I realized that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism wasn't something I missed in philosophy class, my next thought was that it did describe the theology of some Christians I knew and, given the increasing difficulty of distinguishing those who claim to be Christian from those who don't, it seemed that MTD might have hit the nail on the head in pointing out a major challenge for Christianity in the West...
Read the entire article here.
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TEC Bishop Dan Martins speaks up: St Paul, A Slave Girl, the Holy Spirit, and the Presiding Bishop
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Source: Dan Martins blog
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Bishop Martins
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May 24, 2013
...To call Bishop Jefferts Schori's exegesis of Acts 16 "strained" or "eccentric" is too mild. It is utterly bizarre. But others have done an adequate job fisking the sermon. I'm going to cut right to what seems to me a rather larger and more fundamental issue, which is the duty of all Christians, but particularly those in ordained leadership, to operate from within the tradition, as an insider looking out, and not from a critical distance, as an outsider looking in. The Christian tradition (a term I use in what I think is an Eastern Orthodox sense, inclusive of scripture, liturgy, ascesis, and the mainstream of theology) is certainly an appropriate object of critical inquiry by detached outsiders, whether sympathetic or hostile. But such critical inquiry is not in the remit of a bishop; in fact, bishops pretty much surrender the option of engaging in that sort of work the moment they are consecrated. A bishop is, by definition, by job description, thoroughly a conservative, operating as a custodian of the tradition and articulating an insider's point of view. Is there room on the margins for prophetic voices that challenge the establishment, speaking words of truth and justice? Yes, there certainly is room for those voices. But they are not the voices of bishops. It is, rather, the job of bishops, speaking as consummate insiders, to equip the baptized faithful to listen to the voices from the margins and discern between true prophets and false ones....
The rest of the article may be found here.
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No Truth Without Love, No Love Without Truth: The Church's Great Challenge
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Source: Albert Mohler blog
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Dr Mohler
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May 30, 2013
By Dr Albert Mohler
The church's engagement with the culture involves a host of issues, controversies, and decisions-but no issue defines our current cultural crisis as clearly as homosexuality. Some churches and denominations have capitulated to the demands of the homosexual rights movement, and now accept homosexuality as a fully valid lifestyle.
Other denominations are tottering on the brink, and without a massive conservative resistance, they are almost certain to abandon biblical truth and bless what the Bible condemns. Within a few short years, a major dividing line has become evident - with those churches endorsing homosexuality on one side, and those stubbornly resisting the cultural tide on the other....
Our churches must teach the basics of biblical morality to Christians who will otherwise never know that the Bible prescribes a model for sexual relationships. Young people must be told the truth about homosexuality - and taught to esteem marriage as God's intention for human sexual relatedness....
Courage is far too rare in many Christian circles. This explains the surrender of so many denominations, seminaries, and churches to the homosexual agenda. But no surrender on this issue would have been possible, if the authority of Scripture had not already been undermined. And yet, even as courage is required, the times call for another Christian virtue as well - compassion.
The tragic fact is that every congregation is almost certain to include persons struggling with homosexual desire or even involved in homosexual acts. Outside the walls of the church, homosexuals are waiting to see if the Christian church has anything more to say, after we declare that homosexuality is a sin. Liberal churches have redefined compassion to mean that the church changes its message to meet modern demands.
They argue that to tell a homosexual he is a sinner is uncompassionate and intolerant. This is like arguing that a physician is intolerant because he tells a patient she has cancer. But, in the culture of political correctness, this argument holds a powerful attraction. Biblical Christians know that compassion requires telling the truth, and refusing to call sin something sinless. To hide or deny the sinfulness of sin is to lie, and there is no compassion in such a deadly deception.
True compassion demands speaking the truth in love - and there is the problem. Far too often, our courage is more evident than our compassion. In far too many cases, the options seem reduced to these - liberal churches preaching love without truth, and conservative churches preaching truth without love....
The rest of the article may be found here.
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England: Church Society calls on House of Lords to put the brakes on Same Sex Marriage Bill
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Source: Anglican Mainstream  May 29, 2013 Church Society Press ReleaseLee Gatiss, Director of Church Society, has written to the Lords Spiritual to express concern about the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill which will be debated in the House of Lords next week. The debate may focus on the notions of 'rights' and 'equality.' As Christians, we support and should defend the legal equality (properly defined) of all those who experience same sex attraction, and recognise them as made in the image of God. What this Bill would actually achieve,however, is not a great advance for minority rights but a fundamentally-flawed redefinition of a basic institution for every single one of us. The formularies of our church and the law of the land define and recognise marriage as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others for as long as they both shall live. It was designed thus by God to be a picture of the relationship between Christ and his people. It has been thus since the creation of the world. The new definition proposed by the Government removes the requirement for consummation from our legal understanding of marriage, and tampers with the very idea of faithfulness in what it says about adultery. It unravels something inexpressibly precious which societies at all times and in all places have perceived as unique and essential. Moreover, the Bill does not merely 'open up' marriage to a new group of people, as many are portraying it. Rather, it enforces and compels everyone in our country to hastily accept the creation of an entirely new socio-legal structure for all of us, which possesses neither an underlying consensual basis or a democratic mandate, and is actually only sought by a small minority of the gay community.... The rest of the article may be found here. Back to top
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Pro-marriage revolution building in France: up to 1 million march
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Source: LifeSiteNews  May 28, 2013 By Jeanne Smits The French have done it again. Two weeks after same-sex "marriage" became legal, the odds seemed against a major turnout for the latest national demonstration against the new law. And the minister of the Interior, Manuel Valls, certainly did his best to discourage would-be participants from joining the march: all day Saturday, he sent out alarming messages on television and on the radio warning that in view of expected violence families with children would do best to stay at home. But on Sunday, organizers estimated that up to a million people marched from three different points in Paris towards the Invalides, including large numbers of young people and families with children and babies in push-cars.... The rest of the article may be found here.
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First Asian Bishop for South America
| Source: Church of England Newspaper via George Conger blog
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Bishop Samuel
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May 26, 2013
By George Conger
A missionary from the diocese of Singapore has been consecrated as Bishop of Bolivia.
Last week's consecration of Archdeacon Raphael Samuel at Cristo Luz del Mundo church in Santa Cruz marks the first time an Asian missionary has been consecrated for the Church in South America, highlighting the changing relationships within the Anglican Communion.
On 12 May the Presiding Bishop of the Southern Cone of the Americas, the Rt Rev Tito Zavala consecrated Archdeacon Samuel as Bishop in succession to the Rt Rev Frank Lyons, who last year was translated as assistant bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh in the ACNA.
The election of Archdeacon Raphael Samuel as the Bishop of Bolivia represents a landmark in church missions in that he is the first Asian missionary to be consecrated bishop in the Spanish speaking Anglican world....
The rest of the article may be found here.
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Vatican prelate tells UN: 100,000 Christians killed for faith every year
| Source: LifeSiteNews
May 29, 2013
By Thaddeus Baklinski
GENEVA - During a presentation at a UN conference in Geneva this week, a top Vatican official said that "credible research" has reached the "shocking" conclusion that an estimated "more than 100,000 Christians are violently killed because of some relation to their faith every year."
At the 23rd Session of the Human Rights Council Interactive Dialogue on May 27, Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, said that the Holy See is "deeply concerned" over increasing violations of religious freedom. Archbishop Tomasi pointed to systematic attacks on Christian communities in regions of the world such as Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and the increasing marginalization of Christians in western societies....
The rest of the article may be found here.
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