News feeds

In the five years since it launched, the Diocese of Ankole’s Savings and Credit Cooperative Society has continued to grow.

Christians in Asia are praying for the success of talks involving the leaders of North and South Korea, which are due to take place tomorrow.

A priceless relic of the patron saint of Dublin will be returned to Christ Church Cathedral in the city tonight, six years after it was stolen.

During lent our family was engaged in an unusual devotion. Not a devotional, but an act of devotion. Christ and his mission was certainly at the heart of it all, but rather than giving something up we took something on. And it ended up being much bigger than we ever imagined. This lent we were devoted to learning the flags of the world.

It all started when our six-year-old son William, decided to support the NZCMS Valentine’s appeal. Rather than taking the easy way out and washing the car so he could buy a $10 Bible for the Philippines, William was dead set on raising $200 for a sewing machine to help women in South Asia. $200 is a lot of money for a six-year-old boy to find. Even I was a little daunted!  

In our dining room, next to the NZCMS Mission Partner profiles, is a huge map of the world bordered by National flags. William was able to recognise about ten, so we decided that would form the basis of his fundraising efforts. He would then raise the money he needed by asking people to sponsor him for every flag he correctly identified on a Facebook live feed to be run on Easter Sunday. And so William’s ‘Flag-a-thon’ was born. This was a journey William drove himself. He asked us daily to practice flags with him and would also spend his own time going over the flags again and again. We started with an initial batch of around 50 flags and gradually began to add more and more in. Our final number of flags – some National, some Territories, some Protectorates – was a total of 216.

During the six weeks, we spent learning the flags William and I had some amazing conversations about the impact a sewing machine would have on the life of a woman and her family. I’m not sure it’s normal to talk about the intergenerational impact of empowering women, female social status in Islam, or the radical Christian idea that men and women are created to be complementary and equal with a boy still in his first years at primary school, but these are some of the places this journey took us.

Why this interest in mission from a boy who is usually talking non-stop about Pokémon, Beyblades and Fantastic Mr Fox? Well, we’re a family who keeps Mission Partners at the forefront of our prayer time. We aren’t as diligent as we’d like, but NZCMS Prayer Fuel is an important feature of our daily prayer. We summarise the prayer requests for our children, William and Amelia (4). They both know the names of our Mission Partners and where they’re serving. We’ve been fortunate to have some of them over for meals, to hear their stories and learn more about what God is doing through them overseas. So the driver for William’s fundraising was that constant awareness of who our Mission Partners were and how they were sharing the Good News of Jesus.

On the big day, Easter Sunday, William correctly identified 214 of 216 flags, raising a total of $2701.02. That’s not a typo. Two thousand, seven hundred and one dollar and two cents!

So what have we learned on this journey? Firstly, God is gracious and works through surprising people. People from all parts of our lives were inspired and encouraged by William’s heart for the women he wanted to help. Even people who don’t know Jesus got right behind his fundraising efforts.
Secondly, God blesses those who labor for him. William worked hard and saw an amazing result (Proverbs 14:23). We’re thankful for the way God has used William to teach us to trust Him more and to show how He abundantly blesses and inspires others for the work of the Gospel.

 

William and his family came into the NZCMS office to hand us the money he had raised in cash. Have a look at some of the photos of this visit below. 

 

 

2017 Human Rights Award by WACC and Signis goes to Dieudo Hamadi’s “Maman Colonelle”, a documentary about sexual violence.

The British government has announced an annual memorial day in honour of a teenager who was killed in a racist attack 25 years ago.

“Tragedy has struck our city today”, Archbishop Colin Johnson said after 10 people were killed and 15 injured in an attack in Toronto.

Pro-LGBT Anglicans are hitting back at suggestions the Church of England's gay-friendly sister church in America could be booted out of the global Anglican Communion over its stance on same-sex weddings.

Harry Faarley. Christian Today. 24 April 2018

A record number of emergency supplies were handed out by food banks in the past year, research has revealed.

Mail online from Press Asociation. 24 April 2018

by Matthew Cullinan Hoffman, LifeSite:

An incredulous and outraged Christiane Amanpour warned Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta on Friday that “you’re going to get yourself into trouble,” following his strong repudiation of the LGBT political agenda in a CNN interview with the journalist.

After Kenyatta made it clear to Amanpour that Kenyan society rejects homosexual behavior and has no interest in establishing “rights” for the practice of sodomy, Amanpour took off her glasses, and, shaking her head, began to scold Kenyatta.

“You’re going to get yourself into trouble, because what you’ve categorically just stated is that this is not an issue for us, for the Kenyan people, and you don’t think that the idea of their privacy, their equality, their rights, is important!” Amanpour told Kenyatta. “This is a global issue right now.”

Amanpour told Kenyatta that Kenya’s law prohibiting sodomy is a “holdover” from “colonial Victorian” law, and claimed that homosexuals “just want to have equal rights the same privacy and equality as all other Kenyans do.” She then asked, “Is that something you aspire to for your country?”

Read here

 

Archiepiscopal Integrity, Orthodox Anglicans gathering in Oxford, & Gafcon’s women bishops question. Anglican Unscripted with Kevin Kallsen and Bishop Gavin Ashenden.

from Voice for Justice UK:

Following our recent blog ‘The ideological insanity of state control’, we have been inundated with requests for a petition calling for a ban on contraceptive implants for underage girls.

Please sign our new petition to the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care

http://www.citizengo.org/en/signit/160969/view

Stop promotion of underage sex.
Ban contraceptive implants for underage girls.

Recent figures released by NHS Digital and reported in the national press  (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5614063/Contraceptive-implants-given-girls-young-12-NHS.html#ixzz5Cp9mdRKm), reveal that in the past two years 10,593 contraceptive implants have been given to schoolgirls below the age of 15 – some even as young as 12 – without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

This is wrong at a number of levels:

1.    Although sexual activity from puberty onwards has become common, the legal age for consent in this country remains 16, which means that sex below this age is a criminal offence.  The policy of giving contraceptive implants to underage girls, without their parents’ knowledge or consent, is therefore encouragement to commit a criminal offence.

2.    Underage sexual activity exposes children to a range of STIs, currently already at epidemic levels amongst young people.  Many of these infections (such as gonorrhoea) are becoming increasingly untreatable, and some are life threatening.

3.    Short of disease, there are a variety of highly unpleasant side effects resulting from hormonal manipulation, ranging from weight gain and acne to the risk of adult infertility and embolism.

4.   The long-term effects of such intervention are still unknown, but there is already established susceptibility to adult infertility (mentioned above) and cancer.

5.  Rendering girls ‘infertile’ for a period of up to three years can only increase their susceptibility to sexual abuse and exploitation, leaving predators free to rape them without fear of repercussions.  This in turn means that identifying child victims and acting to keep them safe will become far more difficult.  All of which has justly led to this policy being called State facilitation of rape.

At every level this is wrong.   Children can never ‘belong’ to the State, and they should not be subjected to State sexualisation programmes designed to justify adult proclivities and desires.

FACT : Parents have a right and duty to protect their child.

FACT :   Children’s brains are not fully developed until the age of 25.  They lack the emotional and intellectual maturity to make life-changing decisions.
CONCLUSION :   Parents must be fully informed and consulted on all decisions affecting the future development and welfare of their children. They, and they alone, have the right and duty to make such decisions on their child’s behalf.

For all these reasons, we call for a total ban on the insertion of contraceptive implants in underage girls without their parents’ knowledge and written consent.

Sign petition here:  http://www.citizengo.org/en/signit/160969/view

by Robert Gagnon, The Federalist:

Read the bill. There is no religious exemption. There is no restriction to mental health professionals. This is not simply a ‘gay conversion ban.’

If you haven’t already lost significant respect for Snopes as an impartial fact-checker, its analysis of a bill that bans all transactions involved in stating Christian beliefs about homosexual behavior should. That bill passed 50-18 on April 19 and is being considered in the state senate. Snopes’ insistence that California Assembly Bill 2943 would not result in the Bible being banned in California is akin to Snopes calling “demonstrably and clearly false” the claim that Joseph Stalin killed everyone around him.

True, Stalin did not kill “all” around him. Indeed, so far as we know he never personally killed anyone. But he did have a great many people killed (estimates indicate that he was responsible for the deaths of 20 to 25 million people), sent many others to the Gulag, and generally terrorized both his own country and Eastern Europe for decades.

Sure, it is virtually impossible that California will immediately attempt to ban the sale of the Bible itself. Not even the hard Left in California has that kind of chutzpah. But citations of Bible verses in the context of declaring homosexual practice and transgenderism to be morally debased could indeed get one into serious trouble with the law if it comes in the context of selling or advertising a product or service. Here are the problems with Snopes’s case.

Read here

 

by Pete Baklinski, LifeSite:

Dean Bailey, 50, is not afraid to tell anyone he is living proof that ‘sexual orientation’ can in fact be changed. But he prefers to use the word ‘restored’ rather than ‘changed.’

Bailey remembers how from an early age he felt different from other boys. He felt he did not fit in and thought of himself as awkward, out of place. He remembers never feeling treasured or affirmed by his dad who was an alcoholic and who consumed pornography. Bailey believes this began a pattern of turning to other males to find the affirmation he never received from his dad.

When a new outgoing boy began to attend school when Bailey was in grade three, he remembers trying hard to become the boy’s friend. It was during a sleepover at the boy’s house that Bailey was introduced to sexual play, including streaking and oral copulation. The experience not only robbed him of his childhood innocence, but awakened in him a sense of sexual curiosity.

Read here

 

by Mike Gascoigne, UKIP Daily:

I first came across a condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) when I read something about a man who had an accident and hit his head and became unconscious, and when he came round in hospital he fell out of bed because he tried to throw away his leg, not realising that it was attached to his body.

This is a rare condition that affects some people, not just survivors of accidents. They refuse to believe that an arm or a leg is part of their body and want to have it amputated, or they want to become blind or deaf. They may refer to themselves as “transabled”, which means they are transitioning to disabled, a condition similar to transgender which also involves destructive treatments and physical mutilation.

People who are transabled do not consider themselves to be mentally ill. They believe that they are suffering from discrimination because they have difficulty finding a doctor who is prepared to amputate the unwanted body part. The doctors won’t cooperate, they have sworn an oath to “do no harm” and refuse to amputate healthy limbs or deprive people of their sensory functions.

This is one of the most bizarre and unusual examples of the battle of rights that goes on in many other situations, where one person asserts their right to a product or service and somebody else asserts their right to decline it. A more common example is homosexual activists demanding that someone should bake a cake in support of gay marriage, or otherwise submit to a coercive process that involves giving their approval to something that they find illogical.

The reason why we exist in this world is that two people, male and female, combined their complementary halves of a reproductive system to create a whole system, capable of creating new life. This is why we celebrate marriage because the union of male and female gives us hope for the future.

The combination of male and male, or female and female, might be fun for the people who are inclined that way, but for society, it’s as meaningless as a car with two engines and no wheels. Wedding invitations are sent out to friends and relatives who feel obliged to accept because it’s about “equality” and if they turn it down they will be called “homophobes” and “bigots”. They are expected to celebrate a union that offers no prospects of a new generation, not because one or both members of the happy couple are infertile, but because they are not male and female.

Read here

 

Bishop Julip Muray has been setting out his hopes and vision after he was elected the new Primate of the province of Central America.

Anglicans around the world are joining in a movement of discipleship, equipping each other to spread the power of the Gospel.

John Sentamu has said that the Macpherson report which concluded the police were 'institutionally racist' following the murder of Stephen Lawrence 25 years ago yesterday needs to be 'revisited' by every police force to prevent ongoing failures

James MacIntyre. Christian Today. 23 April 2018

In this guest blog from Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, reflects on the UK's future trading relationships with some of the world's poorest countries.

Traidcraft Exchange website. No date

from One Body One Faith:

OneBodyOneFaith has sent a strongly-worded letter to William Nye after the emergence late last week of a letter he wrote last October to The Episcopal Church, on behalf of the Archbishops’ Council.  Whilst acknowledging that he wrote only on behalf of members of the Council, of which he’s Secretary General, the wider membership of the Church of England will inevitably be associated by implication with his words – words which again more treat loving, committed same-sex couples as a ‘problem’ or an ‘issue’, not real people, created in the image of God.

OneBody wants to send a clear message to Mr Nye, and the wider Communion:  not in our name.

The letter, signed by Canon Peter Leonard, OneBody’s Chair, and Tracey Byrne, Chief Executive, and copied to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and Archbishop Josiah Atkins Idowu-Fearon, Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, reads as follows:

Dear Mr Nye,

You will be aware that your previously undisclosed letter to The Episcopal Church has been met with anger, frustration and disappointment by many across the Church of England, on whose behalf you presume to speak.  We wish to add the voices of our members to those calling for a more courageous, just and Christ-like response to what has become – we wish it were not so – the issue on which many will judge our church, and find it sorely wanting.

Your letter raises a wide range of issues – about governance and accountability, about process, about how the Holy Spirit might move in the lives and structures of the Body of Christ across generations and nations, about simple pastoral care and concern for those who don’t fit the received ‘norms’ we’ve imposed on people down the years.  In particular, your focus on procreation seems to ride roughshod over all those who have ever known the anguish of unwanted childnessness, or the loss of a pregnancy.  To them, and to all who bear the human costs of your carefully chosen words, we say: not in our name.

Perhaps we should share something of the response of LGBT people to the developments in TEC, since our voices so often seem absent in your pronouncements. We saw in ECUSA’s brave and costly decision some hope that change might come for us too.  We saw our brothers and sisters listening intently to the Spirit speaking through the Body – and having listened, acting with courage, integrity and the determination to keep walking with Christ and with one another.   And if it should prove impossible, to know that walking with Christ is our highest calling.

Read here