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Hallo again to all.

This week we launch the first postings in our Vacancies Centre, which we told you about last week. We're delighted at the first week's crop of 20 advertisements from seven countries and perhaps even more delighted that these adverts were not all from London or New Jersey. There will be a new batch every week and advertising will be entirely free until the end of March.

Much of the joy of working on Anglicans Online comes from the opportunity to visit, online, Anglicans and Anglican churches all over the world. From little wooden buildings in rural Australia to gleaming cathedrals in urban North America, we all worship the same God. Anglicans Online is sponsored by the Society of Archbishop Justus, whose motto is 'Unus Panis, Unum Corpus', from I Corinthians 10:17. We are all one body, because we all share one bread, one cup.

The church did not make the world into a global village. Technology did that. Aeroplanes, telephones, computers, television, and radio all contributed. And, like it or not, the church is global. For two millennia people who shared one bread and one cup—but were a village apart—were very unlikely to meet one another. Only in the last decade or two has it become likely that someone in Zambia will meet and start an online conversation with someone in Northumbria. We imagine that it's just a matter of time until someone tries a teleconferenced concelebration, with priests in two parts of the globe speaking in unison to a Body of Christ that is divided between the two locations. So many of our expectations are, well, parochial, but the world is becoming so global.

In this week's News Centre are many reminders of that. The meeting of US bishops in Texas included visitors from Nigeria, Jerusalem, and South Africa. Imagine wanting to do that even 30 years ago, let alone 300 years ago. But perhaps the most fascinating evidence of the global nature of the church? The report that a rector in Michigan has been suspended for allegedly plagiarising his sermons from the internet. Assuming that this is not just a trick like the arrest of famous gangster Al Capone on charges of tax evasion, we wonder how many of the sermons preached around the globe in the last 500 years were original. Modern search engines can quickly find almost any public document, so you can decide for yourself what is copied from where. The global nature of the church and the worldwide reach of information now make it possible to find a thousand sermons at a moment's notice, but also to discover when two of them look the same. We think that sometimes it is better not to know, but, like eating the apple in Eden, once our eyes are open they are open, and we must live with the consequences. There are no secrets in the global village, and either everyone must start needing fewer secrets, or everyone must become more tolerant of others' presumed misdeeds which previously they could not have known about.

Continue the worldwide tour in our New This Week section, where there are new listings from parish churches in four continents. And the recent arrival of a web site for the Diocese of Long Island in the USA leaves in that high-tech country only Eastern Oregon, Navajoland, and Rochester without web sites. Some things are changeless the world over: there is more of Lent before Holy Week and Easter Week. So we will again remind you of our Lent and Holy Week resources.

See you next week.


Cynthia McFarland cmcf@anglicansonline.org	Brian Reid reid@anglicansonline.org

Last updated: 17 March 2002
URL: http://anglicansonline.org/