Anglicans and Lutherans join forces
From here:
Inter-church communion the norm in future, predicts primate.
Holding aloft a spade with a bright green pointed blade, Archbishop Fred Hiltz delivered a stirring May Day sermon at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Buffalo, N.Y. The service was one of two Canada-U.S. border services, the other in Fort Erie, Ont., celebrating a decade of full communion between Anglicans and Lutherans…..
In Canada, full communion is already manifest in a number of ways. “The National Bishop [Susan Johnson] and I speak with one another every month,” said Archbishop Hiltz. “We share joint messages for Christmas and Easter and release joint statements on many issues, most recently on poverty and homelessness in Canada.”
The two churches held the first joint meeting of their respective governing councils in April and are developing a theme for the joint meeting of the National Convention and General Synod in July 2013 in Ottawa.
While interdenominational cooperation between Christian churches is a commendable endeavour, this particular excursion into ecumenical harmony has more the flavour of two waning liberal-to the-point-of no-longer-being-Christian-churches pooling their diminishing resources in an effort to stay afloat in the face of plummeting attendance and income.
Good for them: may they sink together.
Protecting our right not to be given a Bible
The Waterloo Region District School Board voted to let Gideons International in Canada distribute Bibles to Grade 5 students.
Predictably, amongst the first to protest this distribution of Bibles in schools was Rev. Rick Pryce, a pastor for the uber-liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. As he points out:
“In this country we are supposed to protect the vulnerable and impressionable from abuse from pressure. And the Gideon’s Bible is clearly designed to turn the kids who read it into Christians.”
Obviously the last thing the pastor of an ersatz Christian church wants is to convince impressionable children to become Christians by encouraging them to read a Bible. That would be exploiting the vulnerable; perish the thought.
The “mission statement” of the particular parish that Pryce pastors carefully avoids anything crass like bringing people to Christ or making disciples; instead we have the insipid:
St Philip’s strives to be a caring and friendly church, for all people. Through our worshipping, learning and serving others, we believe that God will show his love to the world.
No doubt this is supposed to be a model of bland inoffensiveness: it is an offence to the Gospel, though.
What do liberal denominations have in common?
They hate being hit where it hurts: in the pocketbook. By toying with heresy, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is on the same Gaderene slide to oblivion as the ACoC and TEC. This doesn’t seem to bother Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, their chap in charge, that much though, as long as people keep giving their money:
“My heart aches when I hear ELCA members express a feeling of abandonment because of the decisions on human sexuality taken by our church-wide Assembly. I am deeply concerned when ELCA members and congregations are being encouraged to signal that disagreement by withholding financial support…”
In the same way, nothing gets Anglican Primate Fred Hiltz salivating quite as profusely as the prospect of raking in buckets of cash:
