Word: bishops
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...U.S.A. Weeping, he explained that the church's attitude toward gays, which he termed its "immoral crisis," had led him to "the conclusion that I can no longer serve the Lord as an Episcopal priest." Instead, he would begin two new alliances: one with Frank Lyons, the conservative Anglican Bishop of Bolivia, enabling Beach to end-run the Episcopal American hierarchy in favor of its parent Anglicanism; and the other as pastor of a brand-new church--largely financed, it was later announced, by businessman Clyde Strickland, who would donate $100,000 and 10 acres worth $770,000. This...
...breakups are alike, and Beach's split with St. Alban's has its singular aspects. (There was no squabble over common assets, for one thing.) But it may also be predictive. In electing the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, an actively gay man, as a bishop in 2003, the Episcopal Church U.S.A. placed itself at the excruciating center of American mainline Christianity's struggles over homosexuality and at odds with much of the international Anglican Communion to which it belongs. In mid-October the communion will publish a task-force report expected to address the effect of Robinson's election...
...Civil funerals aren't new. They've been happening in Australia since the mid 1970s and for almost as long in New Zealand. But the proportion of people choosing them is growing fast. Acknowledging "a massive cultural shift" toward secularity in urban Australia, the Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, Rob Forsyth, predicts secular and religious funerals "will eventually reach a point of equilibrium." While that's probably some years away in most Australian and New Zealand cities and not even close in the bush, celebrants in the more liberal centers of Melbourne and Auckland already conduct substantially more than half...
...MOST AFFECTED BY THE PROTESTANT SWOON? Primarily the more liberal mainline denominations like United Methodists, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Episcopal Church. "We are losing our own children," says Kenneth Carder, Bishop of the Methodists' Mississippi Conference. But even some evangelical growth is tapering: the 16.3 million-member Southern Baptist Convention has conceded a drop-off in Sunday school enrollment...
...work is involved with the comforting constancy of "hatch, match and despatch," as Bishop Wilmot likes to call it. Out on the Eyre Highway, isolation has taken its toll on the young station and roadhouse workers to whom Murray also ministers. "A lot of people think they're going out there to get away, but they take their problems with them," he says, "and a lot of them don't last terribly long. There's not much to do in places like Cocklebiddy, and a lot of people turn to alcohol." As with the stranded motorists he regularly finds...