News Briefs
Episcopal News Service. July 10, 2001 [2001-183]
First Canadian Anglican diocese will go bankrupt October 15
(ENS) The first diocese in the Anglican Church of Canada to go bankrupt as the result of lawsuits filed by indigenous peoples who said that they were abused in church-run residential schools will be the Diocese of Cariboo in British Columbia.
"It is our intention that on October 15 our diocese will cease to operate," said Bishop Jim Cruickshank at the beginning of the church's General Synod meeting in Waterloo, Ontario. "We will formally wind up our affairs in October."
Archbishop Michael Peers, in his presidential address, asked delegates to the General Synod to consider ways to continue the church's ministries if the national jurisdiction also faced bankruptcy by the end of the year. "Never before have we contemplated a possibility such as the one we are now facing," he said. "We need to make decisions about our future. We are in a place where that feels enormously perilous."
The Diocese of Cariboo has depleted its resources coping with lawsuits brought by indigenous people who were sexually assaulted as children in a residential school by a man who was subsequently convicted of the crimes. Churches operated the schools as agents of the government, which is also defending itself against lawsuits.
The diocese is seeking legal advice on whether it will be necessary to sell parish properties to settle its debts after it goes bankrupt. The national church is spending about $100,000 a month to deal with the 1,195 lawsuits it is facing. Its remaining $3 million in assets and an additional $6 million in endowment funds may be liquidated in order to pay claims. The only relief would be a quick agreement by the Canadian government to assume most of the church's liabilities resulting from the suits, but church leaders involved in the negotiations charge that the government is not acting in good faith.
Zimbabwe bans participation of churches in voter education
(ENI) Facing presidential elections scheduled for next spring, the government of Zimbabwe has announced that it intends to ban churches, aid agencies and civic organizations from participating in voter education efforts. Those activities would be limited to the government-appointed Electoral Supervisory Commission and political parties only. The government accuses churches and civic groups of using money from foreign sources to campaign for political parties they favor.
"It is not only the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] that are being used in this game," said Information Minister Jonathan Moyo. "Some churches have also joined the fray, invoking the name of God, making God partisan and turning the Bible into a political manifesto, using foreign money to subvert our hard won independence under the guise of voter education."
The policy seems aimed at the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association, the Zimbabwe Council of Churches, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, and the Legal Resources Foundation. They have been laying plans for a coordinated voter education campaign, as they had prior to the parliamentary election in June, 2000.
Former President Jimmy Carter proposes moderate Baptist alliance
(ENI) Former US President Jimmy Carter, who broke ranks last year with the increasingly conservative Southern Baptist Convention, is calling on moderate Baptists in this country and Europe to form a new alliance.
Speaking to the annual gathering of a prominent moderate Baptist group, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), Carter said it was time they joined with other groups in a loose coalition to cooperate on education and mission projects. He said that he intended to host two meetings of moderate Baptist leaders at the Carter Center in Atlanta in an effort to determine how the alliance might take shape. It would not be a new denomination, he pointed out, but rather a partnership in which the different participants would retain their identities.
A "partnership model" would be ideal for giving local churches more responsibility, Carter said in interviews with the press, and was also suited to a time when denominational identity was becoming less important for many in the US.
In recent years the Southern Baptist Convention has issued declarations calling for women to "submit graciously" to their husbands. It is also opposed to the ordination of women as clergy. Carter said that such actions violated the "basic premises" of his Christian faith. Expressing hopes that the controversies in the denomination would diminish, he admitted that he had concluded it was best that moderates and conservatives "go our separate ways."
Lutheran synod discuss evangelism, full communion and sexuality
(ELCA) As 45 of the 65 synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) completed their annual assemblies in June, the most common subjects addressed were evangelism, implementation of a full communion agreement with the Episcopal Church, and issues related to sexuality.
At least 16 synods adopted resolutions, or memorials, related to evangelism. They will go to Churchwide Assembly when it meets August 8-14 in Indianapolis. The memorials call on the denomination to focus on mission, asking the presiding bishop to establish a "blue ribbon" task force to develop a "comprehensive evangelism strategy."
At least six synods adopted a memorial, "Called to Freedom," calling for the assembly to pass constitutional amendments to accommodate church leaders who cannot accept some of the provisions of the full communion agreement between the ELCA and the Episcopal Church which went into effect in January.
Opponents say the agreement, Called to Common Mission, threatens some aspects of Lutheran identity and gives more power to the role of bishops. CCM requires that bishops preside at all ordinations of clergy, eliminating a practice that allowed bishops to assign other clergy to preside at ordinations.
The Churchwide Assembly will vote on a proposed by-law that would allow a synodical bishop, under certain circumstances, to preside at an ordination. At least seven synod assemblies urged the assembly to adopt the bylaw while others strongly opposed it.
Addressing some of the most contentious sexuality issues, the Greater Milwaukee Synod adopted a resolution supporting clergy and congregations that seek to bless same-gender relationships and it affirmed its welcome of gay and lesbian people. The synod voted in 2000 not to discipline pastors and parishes that blessed same-gender relationships. While the ELCA has no formal policy on the issue, its Conference of Bishops said in 1993 that it did not approve.
The Metropolitan DC Synod is asking for a rite of blessing and affirms its support of clergy who participate but South Dakota affirmed its conviction that sex is a gift from God reserved exclusively in marriage between a man and a woman and that those who are not married are called to sexual abstinence.
Internet holds promise as a voice for the world's poor, communications congress told
(ENI) New communications technologies hold "a tremendous potential to reshape media power relations, taking a large measure of power out of the hands of government censors and the hands of commercial gatekeepers" and giving it back to the poor of the world, according to a speaker at the third congress of the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) meeting in the Netherlands the first week in July.
The Internet may offer the poor a unique opportunity to make their voices heard in "the global conversation," said Anuradha Vittachi, director of a London-based foundation supporting democratic media development. She argued that the Internet offered "a change of direction in the flow of information," crucial for building grassroots democracy.
"When citizens are the media, with all their multi-truth diversity, the professional media will finally have to shed their arrogance and become no longer top-down disseminators of north-centric truths, but rather the servants of the public that they should always have been," she said at the congress that drew 250 participants from 83 countries.
She deplored the fact that nine out of 10 people in the world have no access to the Internet, calling it "an abuse of human rights for the voices of the majority of the world's poor to go unheard."
Christians committed to justice and reconciliation should not cede cyberspace to the conservatives, said Dr. Anne Foerst, professor of computer science and theology at St. Bonaventure University in the US. "When you search the Internet for Christian websites, what you usually find is the Christian right, because they have put so much money into website development." She added, "The technology of the web is so utterly democratic that if we get our act together we can change a lot."
Foerst also warned that the Internet is not objective, that "every single site has been written by people with a specific intention. We have to be careful not to mythologize the web as a source of absolute authority and truth."