Daily Prayer

The C of E website is very helpful for those wanting to use an authorised form of Morning or Evening Prayer. It includes both Common Worship and The Book of Common Prayer and the appropriate seasonal material, Collects etc. and the lectionary readigs are automatically included. Instead of Daily Prayer, The Lectionary and Bible and a good deal of flicking about and bookmarks and so on, all you need is this one website. Fantastic. Now all we need is free wireless access in our churches! :)

Feasts

The principal Feasts which are to be observed in the Church of England are:

Christmas Day
Epiphany
the Annuniation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Easter Day
Ascension Day
Whitsunday or Pentecost
Trinity Sunday
All Saints' Day

(Canon B6.2)

The Holy Communion shall be celebrated in every parish church at least on all Sundays and principal Feast Days, and on Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday.

(Canon B14)

The Missionary Society of Saint Wilfrid and Saint Hilda

has been launched by some catholic Anglican bishops including (from my part of the world) the Bishop of Chichester, the Bishop of Horham and Bishop Lindsey Urwin. It will be very interesting to see how it develops.

Is the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans / FCA UK which came out of the GAFCON movement an evangelical equivalent?

There seems to be a lack of English Evangelical Bishops seeking to make a similar kind of provision?

In fact, who are the English Evangelical Bishops who are opposed to the consecration of women to the Episcopate? And even if some are in favour of it, what provision will be made for their evangelical brothers and sisters and friends who up with this can not put?

Or maybe the good old C of E itself might yet do something adequate?

Worth knowing

Before, God-willing, I become an Incumbent, I think I might re-read The Canons of the Church of England. There's lots of interesting useful stuff worth knowing. For example, B20.2 Of the musicians and music of the Church is quite helpful:

Where there is an organist, choirmaster or director of music the minister shall pay due heed to his advice and assistance in the choosing of chants, hymns, anthems, and other settings, and in the ordering of the music of the church; but at all times the final responsibility and decision in these matters rests with the minister.

A Pure Virgin

The Collect for Christmas Day speaks of the Lord Jesus "born of a pure virgin".

Almighty God,you have given us your only-begotten Sont o take our
nature upon himand as at this time to be born of a pure virgin:grant that we,
who have been born againand made your children by adoption and grace,may daily
be renewed by your Holy Spirit;through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,who is
alive and reigns with you,in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for
ever.

You shouldn't take this to mean that Mary was absolutely pure: she was a sinner saved by grace just like the rest of us.

And nor should you think that virginity is necessarily or especially pure. You can be a slutty virgin or a pure husband. In life-long heterosexual marriage (the only kind of marriage there is, by the way) one can enjoy pure sex.

Green Belt

Apparently "Bishop" Gene Robinson and the Lesbian and Gay "Christian" Movement (LGCM) will be pushing practicing homosexuality as a legitimate Christian lifestyle at Green Belt. Anglican Mainstream are protesting. The Church Mission Society (CMS) who are "associates" of the festival say they are unhappy and support Lambeth 1.10, which I found heartening. The ABC who is a Patron of Green Belt has not commented to my knowledge. (CEN, p3)

York church celebrates medieval mass

The Church of England Newspaper (CEN) reports in brief on p3 that All Saints North Street, York was packed out for The Mass of Our Lady which has not been celebrated since 1558. They fail to mention that it is presumably completely illegal?

Rod Liddle on the C of E and Islam

In an article in the Spectator dated Tues 7^th April, Rod Liddle argues that the C of E has accommodated itself far too much to pleasing society at large and has sold out to modern liberalism, current political fashions and multiculturalism. It’s horray for the Bishop of Rochester and for the Bishop of London and boo to the Bishops of Oxford and Manchester and the ABC.

The C of E has forgotten its purpose. Why, exactly, does it exist?

Rod Liddle offers an Easter message to the leaders of the Church, who have ditched its traditions and reduced it to a sort of superannuated ad-hoc branch of social services. It has lost all sense of mission and direction. Whatever happened to muscular Christianity?

…

We do not hear very much from the Church of England about the plight of Christians, and particularly Anglicans, in hostile foreign environments. Under the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the church does not like to make too much of a fuss about murdered priests in the Sudan, the constant fears of samizdat believers in Riyadh, the continued state persecution in Turkey, the perpetual discrimination in Indonesia and Malaysia and Bangladesh. Or about the Punjabi Christian dragged before a court in Pakistan accused of having sent a blasphemous message on his mobile phone, the Muslim hordes screaming for the death sentence outside the court. The thousands of Christians in Bauchi, Nigeria, watching their homes burned to the ground and their leaders attacked by, again, Muslim mobs. The beatings and murders in liberated — yea, praise the lord! — Afghanistan. We don’t hear much about that stuff from anyone, be it the BBC, our politicians or most notably the Church of England.

You might expect the C of E to feel at least a little bit uncomfortable that Anglicans were being strung up or burned alive in the middle east and elsewhere. But it does not seem to be an enormous issue for the prelates. The problem being that it would bring Rowan, and the church, into conflict with the very Islamists with whom they are thoroughly enjoying their important ‘inter-faith dialogues’, by which they seem to set so much store. These inter-faith dialogues have never, ever, to my knowledge, touched upon Islamic persecution of Christians: all the traffic is in the other direction, and the Church of England thinks it is all going swimmingly.

The C of E is very pleased and proud of its inter-faith dialogues — largely, I suppose, because when conducting them it always adopts a strategy of total capitulation, much as it does before any and every assault upon its ideology, be it from Islam or from the decadent depredations of modern Britain.

There may be another reason for Nazir-Ali’s Lenten undertaking, then. It may be that he is sick to the back teeth of the leadership of the Church of England. He has not said that he is, but he is a polite and affable chap apparently. But he has had this to say recently; he has lamented a ‘gradual loss of identity and cohesiveness in (British) society’ which he feels is down to the abandonment of biblical values. He thinks that we reside in a ‘values vacuum’. He has also complained that British people suffer from a ‘historical amnesia’ — by which he means that we prostrate ourselves to apologise for slavery while forgetting that we also ended slavery, while the Africans cheerfully continued with it.

We forget to celebrate our tolerance and diversity, our willingness to allow the freedom of speech and the freedom of worship. Nazir-Ali concluded by saying: ‘The church is seen simply as the religious aspect of society, there to endorse any change which politicians deem fit to impose upon the public.’ You could not get a better description of the Church of England today, I would argue. It is a church which has manipulated itself into a position whereby it can accommodate any adjustment to its own faith and ideology in order to make sure that it is in step with what it believes to be popular thinking.

…

But that is the view the Church of England, or much of it, has of itself these days. As a sort of superannuated ad-hoc branch of social services: non-judgmental, non-partisan, wholly secular, not Christian at all really, when it comes down to it.