Hallo again to all.

Thank you for letting us take time off last week to bail out water, empty the rotted food out of our powerless refrigerators, and pray for the many whose lives weren't just disrupted but damaged or ended by what ended up being called a 'minor hurricane'. We know that you granted us that respite, because here you are back this week, reading what remains the oldest and most global Anglican presence on the internet.

One of us, who lives far away from any hurricanes and wasn't directly affected by them, attended a village street party last weekend. In the USA they're called 'block parties' and in Amsterdam they are called 'straatfeesten'. Neighbors who almost never see one another gather in a public street that has been cordoned off for the occasion and stocked with food and drink and entertainment. It being a street, there's nowhere in particular to sit, so people mingle and talk. Our AO staffer indeed mingled and talked. And listened.

At the street party, the AO staff person was carrying, very prominently, an Anglicans Online messenger bag, in the hopes that it would invite conversation about things Anglican or, as a very long shot, Anglicans Online. Not surprisingly, no one at this street party seems to have heard of Anglicans Online. More surprisingly, no one seemed to react to the word 'Anglican' so prominently displayed. After a while, an Australian chap came up and said 'Anglican, eh?' We talked.

This was a university village, and he was a short-term visiting scholar from Wagga Wagga, in New South Wales. Very shortly into the conversation he asked us if we'd seen Muriel Porter's new book Sydney Anglicans and the Threat to World Anglicanism. We hadn't, and once we recovered from the shock of meeting at a street party someone who knew what the word 'Anglican' meant, we had a pleasant chat with him about it.

Muriel Porter is not known for being an admirer of Sydney Anglicans, but her writing is clear and logical even if you believe that her logic is flawed. So we thought we'd use the magic of e-books to buy a copy and read it and decide for ourselves what to think. We can't imagine that this book would be of interest to anyone who hasn't been following the ongoing saga of Sydney Anglicanism and knows the players and the politics, but we wish her and her publisher well.

Longtime readers of Anglicans Online will know that periodically we look into the past at conflicts within Anglicanism to remind you that political feuds are nothing new in the Anglican world and that we are not living in the time of the Anglican Apocalypse. After all, the larger society in which the Anglican world is embedded has little knowledge of and little interest in any church but has, simultaneously, absorbed much of the Church into its collective subconscious. Having royal weddings in the Church of England be televised helps people remember that. Come to think of it, most Christian weddings in English use language from the Book of Common Prayer regardless of the denomination of the officiant, but it is rarely noticed by the wedding party.

Almost by definition, the Church will survive. In what form, we'll have to wait and see. There are two essays linked in our 'Worth Noting' section this week that, when you read them, will help you agree with us on that. There will be tumultuous changes; perhaps the Diocese of Sydney will secede or collapse or declare its independence or declare something else or start selling 'Holier than thou' T-shirts. When you read the essay by Dick Gross in our Worth Noting section you will be reminded that God has ways of sneaking into the hearts of people who are least expecting it, and when you read the essay by Tom Wright, you'll probably agree that the Holy Spirit doesn't really care that for a century one diocese or another acted more Presbyterian than Anglican or painted women clergy green with white stripes. So we lost a century here and there. Big deal: God will make another one.

See you next week.

All of us at Anglicans Online

4 September 2011
http://anglicansonline.org

*Wondering about our movie poster featuring John William Colenso? You can read an overview of him here and more about him here.