Letters from 2
to 8 February 2009
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Well, at least
Dunkirk isn't Tyburn
Thank goodness
that all the battles over religion, High Church, Low Church, Prayer
books, etc have all been fought and (hopefully) won. Somehow, I don't
see myself in the place of Mr. Ridley, having courage as I light a flame
that will not be put out. The religious wars are now confined to trying
to stem the wholesale retreat from the Dunkirk of Anglicanism, which
is a battlefield that people of my stripe feel a lot more easier on.
It's an interesting
question that we Christians would have to ask ourselves: How many of
us would have died for whatever our honestly held beliefs would have
been in those days?
Obi Udeariry
St. Andrew's Aladinma
Owerri, NIGERIA
netwalker55@yahoo.es
2 February 2009
Merci beaucoup,
Madame Coffin!
Thank
you for noting the extraordinary ministry of Margaret Coffin and
the fund that continues her work. Since
1999, the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe has been creating
bilingual selections of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Your readers
will find information on these at http://www.tec-europe.org/about/prayerbook.html
Thousands of
people around the world have found these books very useful. Without
the support of the Margaret Coffin Prayer Book Society, however, these
innovative and useful tools for prayer and ministry would not have come
into being.
The people of
the Convocation and I will always be grateful to the Margaret Coffin
Prayer Book Society — and to its founder — for enabling
us to create Prayer Books in French, Italian, Spanish and German. More
translations are under discussion, as well as second and third editions.
Along with the myriad recipients of Margaret Coffin's largesse, and
that of her fund, we in Europe will be forever grateful.
Pierre Whalon
Bishop in charge
Convocation
of Episcopal Churches in Europe
Paris, FRANCE
bishop@tec-europe.org
3 February 2009
Margaret, +Sam,
and Scotland, tra la
Musing
on your story about Margaret Coffin, Loyalists, and Non-Jurors,
the story of the first American Episcopal Bishop Samuel Seabury
came to mind, which seems to tie all this together.
Seabury, like
many CofE clergy in the colonies, felt strongly bound by the ordination
oath of fealty to the Crown. He served as a chaplain to the British
forces during the Revolution, but after independence remained
with his parish in Connecticut. Dispatched to England after Independence
to be made a bishop and unable to be consecrated,
because he could not be 'an officer
of the Crown', he was encouraged to seek consecration in Scotland.
The bishops of
the Scottish Episcopal Church were both descendants of the non-jurors
and non-established (since the Established Church of Scotland was Presbyterian).
So Seabury was consecrated in Scotland and was committed to bring the
new church in America the Eucharistic Liturgy of the Scottish
Prayerbook, which had been crafted by William
Laud during the reign of Charles I, returning to essence of the original
Eucharistic Rite of the 1549 Prayerbook of Thomas Cranmer, including
the double epiclesis and the Prayer of Oblation in the Prayer of Consecration.
This liturgical
tradition has continued in the Episcopal Church through the new Eucharistic
Prayers included in the 1979 Prayerbook. With the consecration of a
bishop in the independent Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA, along
with the non-estalished Episcopal Church of Scotland, both in Communion
with the Archbishop of Canterbury the Anglican Communion was born,
as the Scottish Church often proudly
claims. Parliament subsequently was able to pass legislation permitting
the English bishops to consecrate two additional American Episcopalians
as bishops, thus permitting the new American church to confer the Apostolic
Succession independently.
The
establishment of a continuing American Anglican ecclesiastical polity
in the new nation and the creation of an Anglican Communion seem to
bring together the themes of loyalists and non-jurors in a rather fascinating
way.
Franklin KLine
St. Louis, Missouri, USA
franklin.kline@sbcglobal.net
3 February 2009
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