Category: Church

Michael Spenser is concerned that the Chinese church is vulnerable to the ‘Prosperity Gospel’

The Prosperity Gospelâ?¦.

A) is the presumption that God wants us to be rich.

B) is the assumption that the blessings of the Gospel are a guarantee of material and financial blessings now. (The mediation of Jesus makes all blessing possible, but it does not guarantee wealth or health, etc.)

C) is a denial and replacement of the true meaning of â??give us this day our daily bread.â??

D) is the replacement of the true Gospel of Jesus Christ as taught in the New Testament with a method that causes God to bestow material and financial blessings on anyone who uses the method.

Why does the Prosperity Gospel appeal to American Christians?

a) American Christians are focused on money as a symbol of the â??good life.â??
b) American Christians tend to focus on God as a problem solver above any other role.
c) American Christians have a strong preference for legalism and transactionalism.

Cultural factors cause some groups of the historically poor and economically disenfranchised to be very open the the Prosperity message.

Michael Spenser Monitor China

Cardinal Walter Kasper has been talking about the October 2007 Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, held in Ravenna, and explaining what’s left in the process of achieving full unity.

The breakthrough, he said, was that “the Orthodox agreed to speak about the universal level – because before there were some who denied that there could even be institutional structures on the universal level. The second point is that we agreed that at the universal level there is a primate. It was clear that there is only one candidate for this post, that is the Bishop of Rome, because according to the old order – ‘taxis’ in Greek – of the Church of the first millennium the see of Rome is the first among them.
“Whereas the Orthodox must clarify more deeply the question of ‘primacy, ‘protos,’ on the universal level, we Catholics have to reflect more clearly on the problem of synodality and conciliarity, especially on the universal level,” he said.

‘So we do not want to impose the system which today is in the Latin Church on the Orthodox Churches. In the case of the restoration of full communion, a new form of the exercise of the primacy needs to be found for the Orthodox Churches.’

Zenit

The head of the Anglican church in Europe, Dr Geoffrey Rowell, was locked out of six churches in Turkey by their congregations after his controversial decision to ordain a local convert to the priesthood.

In an unprecedented step and amid fears that the ordination would endanger the lives of congregants in the mainly Muslim country, furious Christians denied the bishop access to any of his own churches to conduct the ceremony at the weekend. He was forced to carry out the ordination in a small Calvinist chapel in Istanbul.

It was the first time in the 430-year history of the Church of England in Turkey that a sitting bishop has faced such protests. A heady mix of nationalism, anti-western sentiment and Islamic extremism has resulted in Turkey’s tiny Christian community being increasingly targeted.

Bishop locked out of churches over Turkish priest

Today is the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul and also the feast of Saint Gregory Nazianzus

At his birth we duly kept Festival, both I, the leader of the Feast, and you, and all that is in the world and above the world. With the Star we ran, and with the Magi we worshipped, and with the Shepherds we were illuminated, and with the Angels we glorified Him, and with Simeon we took Him up in our arms, and with Anna the aged and chaste we made our responsive confession. And thanks be to Him who came to His own in the guise of a stranger, because He glorified the stranger. Now, we come to another action of Christ, and another mystery. I cannot restrain my pleasure; I am rapt into God.

Almost like John I proclaim good tidings; for though I be not a Forerunner, yet am I from the desert. Christ is illumined, let us shine forth with Him. Christ is baptized, let us descend with Him that we may also ascend with Him. Jesus is baptized; but who is He, and by whom is He baptized, and at what time? He is the All-pure; and He is baptized by John; and the time is the beginning of His miracles. What are we to learn and to be taught by this? To purify ourselves first; to be lowly minded; and to preach only in maturity both of spiritual and bodily stature.

Oration on the Holy Lights (XIV)

The saints are there to do us good. Let’s get to know them. Many thanks to Wikipedia contributors to the saints pages, list of saints, chronological list and links to calendars.

Now I’d like a single ecumenical saint-a-day calendar please.

This is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2008

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is an expression of the ecumenical movement – a worldwide movement among Christians to heal the divisions within the Church; to promote dialogues among churches and Christian communities; and to encourage Christians everywhere to better understand and reflect the implications of “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” Each year from January 18 – 25, Christians are encouraged to pray together as a sign of the unity that is already theirs in Christ and that that unity will become complete.

Here are some very considerable resources, giving the background to the week, and a form of worship for each day of the week, from the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, jointly produced with the World Council of Churches Faith and Order

6.9.2 The Church needs children present in its worship, as patterns of discipleship, as reminders that we come into the presence of God not through our own deserving, but because we are creatures of God’s creation. But children also need to be present in worship because it is the locus of Christian formation. Worship is fundamental if children are to grow in the knowledge and love of God.

Christian formation is lifelong, and it begins in infancy; children who are excluded from worship suffer significant deprivation. Of course, we can make up for experiences missed in childhood, but it is hard work. We know that in many areas of experience, learning in childhood is much easier than later in life: this applies in worship no less than in learning a language. The language, gesture and attitudes which facilitate both our worship and our growth in faith are acquired most easily in childhood, and what is learnt then forms the foundation on which all subsequent learning is to be built. It is constantly necessary to challenge the prevailing misapprehension that children do not ‘understand’ what is happening in worship, and that education for worship is a top-down didactic exercise.

Transforming Worship: Report of the Liturgical Commission

In the not so distant past, I attended a Mass. It was a typical parish Mass. There was a choir in the back, there were Eucharistic ministers, there were lay lectors, there were altar servers. There was laity galore.

But the impression I took away with me – after an hour and a half – was the person of the priest. His voice echoed in my ears, his presence dominated my memory of that time. He introduced the Mass, he explained things, there was an RCIA rite, so he explained that, he preached a 25 minute homily, and at the end of Mass, after the lector ran through 6 announcements, he stood and added two rather lengthy announcements of his own.

I’m not kidding when I say that my reaction, at one point was, If you want to turn around, face the crucifix and whisper for a while, THAT WOULD BE FINE WITH ME. PLEASE. FEEL FREE.

It’s possible for a priest to allow his own personality to be subsumed into the liturgical rites as they are presently constructed. I’ve seen it done, often. But the opposite temptation is intensely evident in the present structure, and it seems to me to be a temptation that is not necessarily succumbed to out of ego – there is just a space and an expectation there that the priest’s personality is an essential element of the liturgy – if you read articles on this from the 70’s, it’s very clearly stated. Personally, the pressure involved in that seems unimaginable and exhausting to me.

Amy Welbourn A brief note on clericalism

+?ARTHOLOMEW

By the grace of God
Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome
And Ecumenical Patriarch

To the Plenitude of the Church
Grace, mercy and peace
From the savior Christ born in Bethlehem

Christ is born, glorify Him;
Christ comes from heaven, meet Him.

Beloved brothers and children in the Lord,

It is with great joy that our Church calls us to glorify God for His loving and personal presence on earth of Christ in divino-human hypostasis, being one of the three persons of the Holy Trinity.

We must, therefore, examine very carefully the true and life-giving significance of the incarnation of the Son and Word of God. For, first, it reveals to humanity that God is personal and is made manifest to us as personal, just as He has also created us as persons; second, it reveals to us that God embraces us with His love. These two events, the personhood and love of God, express fundamental truths of our faith, which of course we have heard about many times. Nevertheless, their impact upon our lives is not as great as it should be, inasmuch as many of us do neither experience Christ’s brotherhood and His boundless love for us in a personal way, nor do we in turn return our love to Christ in order that, by sharing in His love, we may also share by grace in His other properties.

If others – who have not known Christ and, as a result, drown in their search for an impersonal being that they perceive as divine – are somewhat justified, we Orthodox Christians are not at all justified in pursuing such ways that lead to an impasse. For, instead of seeking God as person and approaching Him in the one who approach us, namely Jesus Christ, these deceived people desperately strive to become divine through their own powers, like Adam thought he could achieve by obeying the evil spirit. However, the true and personal God, who is known only through Jesus Christ – the one born in a manger out of love for us – promised us adoption and return to the bosom of the Father, as well as deification by grace through Christ. It is only through Christ that one may fulfill the universal human desire to transcend the corruption and isolation of an existence without love and the cultivation of communion among divine and human persons in love, which leads to eternity and incorruption.

Christians shape the liturgy, but the liturgy shapes Christians.

The classical model of formation, paideia, understood formation to be the drawing out of the person. Placed alongside the Christian experience of vocation, it can be seen in terms of our becoming, in community with others and in communion with God, the person that God is calling us to be. In baptism we are made a child of God; in giving ourselves to praise we discover something of the liberty of the children of God, and through Christ’s self-gift at communion, we again ‘become what we receive’ (Augustine of Hippo). This is why worship is the most intense, though not the exclusive locus of Christian formation, and for this reason liturgical formation and education should be given the highest priority within a ‘learning church’. The desired outcome of a programme of liturgical formation is a closer engagement of worshippers in the liturgy of the Church, and its corollary is the realization of the expectation that liturgy will transform us.

Transforming Worship: Report of the Liturgical Commission

These three ecclesiologies are, in order of their historical appearance, riteâ??based ecclesiologies (Catholic), confessional ecclesiologies (Protestant), and ethnically based ecclesiologies (Orthodox).

These three ecclesiologies, are essentially of the same nature: that is, they are established according to aggressive, almost militant, principles. Moreover, they have dominated Church life since their appearance and also determined the statutory texts that regulate the existence and functioning of all Churches since that day.

We are now in a position to reâ??examine the causes that brought about these ecclesiological deviations. While very different in their origin and outlook, they resemble one another, and also continue to coexist, though without creating any communion or unity between them. A key common denominator is what I shall call â??coâ??territoralityâ??, i.e.: separate Churches sharing the same territory. This is an extremely serious problem found throughout the second millennium â?? the same millennium that has faced numerous insoluble issues of an exclusively ecclesiological nature. By contrast, the first millennium, which had to deal with Christological issues, resolved most of them. In other words, when Christological problems appeared during the first millennium, the
Church was able to engage with them and resolve them in a conciliar manner, but we have not been able to do the same with the
ecclesiological problems that have arisen in the second millennium.

These three divergent ecclesiologies, which developed from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, have essentially led the Church into a postâ??ecclesiological age, in which we now live. We seek superficial solutions, whether through Councils like Vatican II, which proposed an increase in ecumenism, or through increasing efforts to federalise the Protestant Churches, or even by the fruitless attempt to summon a panâ??Orthodox Council, which has been in preparation, to no avail, for almost half a century. It is certain that the true solution will neither be ritualist, nor ecumenist, nor confessional, nor federal â?? and it will certainly not be ethnic and multiâ??jurisdictional. It can only be ecclesiological and canonical, and this is perhaps why it seems to be so distant (if not utopian) in todayâ??s age of of Christian modernism that remains woefully nonâ??ecclesiological and multiâ??jurisdictional.

Archimandrite Grogorios Our ‘Post-Ecclesiological’ Age