Many years ago when I was working in New York I found myself on a bus with a friend, arguing about religion.  We had known each other since we were children in Hawaii; she was an atheist, or maybe an agnostic (I was never really sure), I was Roman Catholic, and religion had always been a strange area of silence and even strain between us, one of the few things we rarely talked about during slumber parties or after-school walks to the ice cream store.  And now here we were in our twenties, living in New York, starting our adult lives, and she wanted to know why I still went to church every Sunday.  I felt curiously shy and inarticulate, trying to talk about my faith in front of this person I had known for most of my life.

Image courtesy of bbc.co.uk/radio4

But she continued to push, asking me to explain…

Missioners from the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri in Lui, southern Sudan.

Eight missioners from the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri are spending Christmas working in southern Sudan, and sending news of their travels home via blogs and video.

The team arrived in Lui - Missouri’s sister diocese for nearly three years - arrived in Lui on December 15, and will return on January 8.

The purpose of the trip, according to a press release,

• a medical assessment for ongoing health care support in the Diocese of Lui;
• assist in the set-up of a grinding mill operation, which the Missouri Diocese is helping to fund through a United Thank Offering Grant of $19,000;
• explore parish-to-parish relationships between Missouri and Lui congregations; and
• further establish infrastructure (buildings and technology) in Lui.

In three years, the Missouri Diocese has drilled six deep water wells in Lui, with plans to drill three more - at $17,000 a piece - next year.

The missioners:

• The Rev. Emily Bloemker, a senior…

The following prayer was part of a story from the Anglican Communion News Service sent to me by a friend. It can be found online at on the Prayers for Today section of the Church of England’s website and has been viewed more than 8000 times since it was published in September.

Lord God, we live in disturbing days:
across the world,
prices rise,
debts increase,
banks collapse,
jobs are taken away,
and fragile security is under threat.
Loving God, meet us in our fear and hear our prayer:
be a tower of strength amidst the shifting sands,
and a light in the darkness;
help us receive your gift of peace,
and fix our hearts where true joys are to be found,
in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The ANS article also includes the following figures:

Web users looking for support during the current financial situation have boosted traffic to a Church of England website section focusing on debt advice by over 70 per cent, and increased…

“I ask you to go back to your countries and I ask you to ask your governments and I ask you to ask all of civil society to tell people that on September 25 we have got to make good the promises that have been made, redeem the pledges that have been promised, make good the Millennium Development Goals that are not being met.”

So said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to the Anglican Communion bishops and others who participated in the Walk of Witness during this summer’s Lambeth Conference, according to an article in Episcopal Life Online. The Walk was a way to draw attention to the issue of extreme poverty around the world, and to remind the media and all who were following the Conference about the UN’s Millennium Development Goals and our church’s commitment to them.

If you don’t know about the Millennium Development Goals, by all means click…

The Irish Times is reporting that “a conciliatory statement is expected at the end of the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury,”which concludes today. Others are predicting that the whole endeavor will have been a waste or even a sham, a kind of desperate stall for time. The British paper the Telegraph has a particularly depressing article out today, found here, about bishops pressuring “the Archbishop of Canterbury to declare a split in the Anglican Communion for the sake of orthodox Christianity.”

For my own part, I am sure only that it will take time, perhaps a very long time, to understand with any clarity the actual results of the Lambeth Conference. It is almost unAmerican to spend two weeks following an event and not have some definite sense of resolution or closure when it is over. Who won? Who lost? What was the score? Can we give it “two thumbs up”? Our usual…

We’re falling apart at the seams. That would be the general impression I get of the Anglican Communion in most media reports of the last several years.

Not that I’m blaming the media, mind you. The conflicts within the Anglican Communion are real, painful, and profound. And of course priests and bishops and lay people who are all storming around and slamming doors behind them like one big dysfunctional family make good press. So be it.

The war drums (or death knells, depending upon whom you read) seemed to get louder and louder in the weeks leading up to the Lambeth Conference. Lambeth is a once-a-decade gathering of Anglican leaders (archbishops, bishops, and presiding bishops from around the globe), and the conference received oodles of press attention from the moment it was announced. The stories that streamed forth about the fractious, potentially schismatic state of the third largest Christian group in the world…

I was listening to a piece on NPR’s Morning Edition about the wedding of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon when the following lines caught my attention:

Outside City Hall, hundreds of supporters and some opponents of gay marriage gathered. Those protesting carried signs that said “Re-criminalize Sodomy” and “God Hates Lying Sinners.”

Ugh. I hardly know what to do with such language. “God hates lying sinners.” Really? Even if I could accept that all gay couples who choose to marry in a legal ceremony are “lying sinners” (and, let me be clear, I find that assertion scandalous), how does one justify saying that God hates anyone? Where is the charity, not to mention the humility and compassion, that Christians claim as the hallmarks of their faith?

I recognize that that protester and his sign are not a fair representation of all or even most people who oppose gay marriage. The sad truth is…