Holy Land Christians call for protest…

Against the Muslim  persecution of Christians in Palestine?

Don’t be silly. The protest is against something much more important, something discriminatory: Israeli travel permits for Easter.

Christians call for protest against Israeli travel permits for Easter.

Holy Land Christians are calling on their religious leaders to protest against the travel permit system imposed by Israel during Easter celebrations.

The situation is complicated in 2010 by the overlapping of Easter with the Jewish feast of the Passover.

“Any system which assigns entry permits to Easter celebrations necessarily denies the rest of the faithful their rights of participation in these religious events,” they wrote in a letter that has been circulated during the month of March.

Some 103 Christian lay leaders and 21 Christian organizations of all denominations, including the Near East Council of Churches, Gaza and Department of Service to Palestinian Refugees, Sabeel, the YMCA-Jerusalem, Bethlehem Bible College, Norwegian Church Aid and Arab Orthodox Society, signed the document.

Like all West Bank Palestinians, Christians must have permits to travel to Jerusalem.

“This is further proof of the inherently discriminatory nature of the denial of the basic rights to religious observance”.

9 thoughts on “Holy Land Christians call for protest…

  1. Speaking out against the illegal fencing in of Palestinian Christians and the impeding thereof from attending Divine Services during the Paschal Triduum? Shame! Anglican leaders should stop wasting their time with such trivialities and devote themselves to serious and godly work like … the mountain of legal paperwork resulting from local congregations trying to take the silver with them? Oh no, you complained about that too. The five marks of mission? No, the disdain was evident there too. Looks like you’ve decided that anything the Anglican Church does is ridiculous by virtue of who is doing it and are determined to complain no matter what we do.

  2. To elaborate a little:

    At St. Hilda’s the “silver” comment has literal application: The diocesan priest-in-charge insisted that communion vessels be given to him. The communion vessels in question were purchased by members of the congregation – who moved to ANiC – for use by the congregation. The building ownership question still has to be settled by the courts.

    The ACoC constantly exhibits an anti-Israel bias; that’s what this post was about.

    I don’t think I have said much about the five marks of mission, but since you brought it up, the social justice part is used as an excuse to continue the ACoC’s left wing political agenda and the gospel part is pretty meaningless since the ACoC has lost sight of what the Gospel is.

    As for me being determined to complain about whatever the ACoC does: there is a lot to complain about. And it is a fertile ground for ridicule: for example, the priest in BC who thinks the doctrine of original sin is obsolete.

  3. It seems that most people in civil politics have an anti-Palestinian bias, and I don’t see the harm in balancing that out a little. As Christians we can surely agree that both “sides” have behaved deplorably at times. In either case, it’s a bit rich to complain about insufficient seriousness when the hierarchy devotes their time to “fluffy” issues, and then find a way to complain when they turn their gaze to pressing current issues. That’s what I mean by a determination to complain: you’ve made up your mind that nothing ++Fred et. al. can do will satisfy you, so it’s disingenuous to blame them for your own self-fulfilling prophecy. We get it. You think the ACoC is a Gospel-devoid pit of mire. So stop yacking about it and leave already.

    It’s just a bit bemusing for me looking at the Continuum and realignment blogospheres. The former have the integrity to more or less ignore recent developments in the church they left, whereas we seem to be all you lot can talk about! It’s flattering, but a bit exasperating too. And with respect to Fr Dunwoody, he is not the Anglican Church of Canada, whose teaching on original sin remains unchanged. Nor is Bishop Ingham, for that matter. But the great apostasy is the driving myth behind the realignment movement, even if there’s only anecdotal evidence for it. (I’m still waiting to see the official statement of General Synod disavowing the authority of Scripture that I assume must have been issued given all the fuss here).

  4. Geoff (#5), heresies would not flourish if they were stated bluntly and in contradiction to orthodox doctrine. A good heresy always represents a subtle twisting of the truth. Study church history.

    I’m sure the time is coming when the ACoC will be largely ignored – as you wish. I’m a member of a large PCA church and I never hear any mention of the PCUSA.

  5. Geoff [#5],

    In either case, it’s a bit rich to complain about insufficient seriousness when the hierarchy devotes their time to “fluffy” issues, and then find a way to complain when they turn their gaze to pressing current issues.

    You seem to have missed the point: having to get a travel permit to attend a service is a “fluffy issue” compared to the persecution Christians suffer in the Palestinian territories.

    You think the ACoC is a Gospel-devoid pit of mire. So stop yacking about it and leave already.

    That would be no fun, now, would it?

  6. Warren #6: except that in this case they aren’t being stated any way – bluntly or otherwise – by those in a position to state them. Heterodox clerics are nothing new in Anglicanism, nor is reticence about pursuing discipline (even perhaps in some cases where it would be well-advised). But the Network conceit has been to act as if these things just started, that the “Canterbury Communion” was orthodox before but has since ceased to be. Since none of the parties involved were alive for the Colenso case, though, it’s hard to know what mythical golden era they mean for us to be hearkening back to, where there were no poorly-executed liturgies, theologically questionable clergy, or sexually active gay bishops. (Indeed, given the concentration of “happy-clappy” evangelicals in the ANiC it would seem they’re not faring much better on the first two points than we are).

    A little while ago I perused the documents ACNA came out with to explain the “decay” in the ACoC. As I suspected it was largely a discrete collection of (admittedly often dodgy) written or verbal statements from individual clergy and prelates. But creating a whole new church because one doesn’t happen to like same-sex blessings would be petty, hence the need to spin out such anomalies as have always afflicted us into some brand new paradigm shift away from Biblical theology on the part of the ACoC as a whole.

  7. Geoff (#8), I don’t speak for the ANiC or ACNA; I just speak for myself. My hunch is that theological deterioration in the ACoC began well over a hundred years ago – influenced heavily by prominent liberal theologians of the day (and going back into the 1800s). I have no doubt that Anglican seminaries have been teaching ideas and doctrines for many decades that I would find unacceptable. However, once you control the seminaries you can typically gain control of a denomination – it just takes a while. Failure to give some profs, who are now likely long dead, the boot doubtlessly contributed greatly to where the ACoC is today.

    As I said elsewhere recently, if the ACoC did a sudden about face on SSBs it wouldn’t make a whit of diffence to me. SSBs are just a superficial manifestation of much deeper and long-standing problems.

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