Letters from 20 to 26
August 2007
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A very long margin
What marriage would last very long in which a husband or wife invited
others (even if they were relatives of the family) into the matrimonial home to tell lies about his or her spouse?
When the Church, which is the bride of Christ, allows its pulpits
to be used by people who teach that Jesus isn't Lord and that He isn't Saviour either, that is surely what is going on.
Bishop Spong is free to propogate his theories that there is no personal
God; and no atonement, in the public square, and try to sell as many books as he likes.
But what church which took its responsibility to care for its members,
and its relationship with Christ seriously could allow him to teach?
Your editorial (perhaps carelessly) asserts Dr Jensen has banned Spong
from entering churches in the Diocese of Sydney. Not at all! Merely from teaching in them.
If a bishop's oath to banish false doctrine means anything, then it
required Dr Jensen to do this.
Is it any wonder that of the 23 Australian dioceses, Sydney is, by
a very long margin, the most youthful, vital and growing?
Alan Dungey
St. John the Baptist Old Cathedral
Kalgoorlie, WA, Australia
20 August 2007
A very long time ago
This morning the
Bishop of Maine, Chilton R. Knudsen, led Morning Prayer from the 1559 Book of Common Prayer at the commemoration of what was
certainly one
of the first Anglican services in the New World. The Popham Colony in
Phippsburg, Maine was settled 400 years ago in August 1607, and Church of England services were held there while the King James
Bible was still in production and James I was newly King of England. Winters there at the mouth of the Kennebec River proved
to be harsher than the settlers had ever imagined, and a year later they went home full of recommendations for how better to
try again at colonizing this harsh but promising land (such as "Build farther inland." Sometimes we forget just how young was
the Church of England when its prayer book and liturgy began to travel around the world to places like this, remote but not at
all God-forsaken.
Bishop Knudsen did a superb job of reading the ancient type faces,
and all of us who were there felt drawn across the centuries in kinship with the Anglican settlers whose faith in God was one
of the few forces helping keep them alive in a nightmare winter. It was close to 200 years later when the colonies got
their first bishop and the church could start thinking of itself as being something beyond just a mission of the Church of England.
But two or three had gathered in God's name, so God was there. Today God's eternal nature was palpable.
Arletta Spinney
Popham Chapel
Phippsburg, Maine, USA
26 August 2007
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