Excerpts from the U.S. Episcopal Church News Category:
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House of Deputies president calls church to ‘courageous change’

By ENS staff, May 05, 2011 [Episcopal News Service] Episcopal Church House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson told audiences at Episcopal Divinity School May 5 that “the church is stuck in an organizational model” with “a bureaucracy with rules, roles, and relationships that we accept as our social reality.”

“The church needs to be a movement. Right now we are an organization. We have a critical mass of 2 million ministers,” Anderson said during the 2011 Kellogg Lectures.

Her lectures, collectively titled “Courageous Change: What it takes, and how it happens,” combined multimedia with her words. Sean McConnell,… Continue reading

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Presiding bishop’s 2011 Easter message

[Episcopal News Service] The Resurrection must be understood in significantly different images and metaphors in the southern hemisphere, when Easter always arrives in the transition from summer to winter.  Even as a hard, hard winter lingers on in northern climes, with unaccustomed April snow in many places, we yearn for the new life we know is waiting around the corner.  As Christians, we’re meant to have the same hunger for the new creation emerging all around us.
 
We can see the broken places of our world either as complete and utter disaster, or as seedbeds — graves,… Continue reading

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Deputies leave historic meeting eager to discuss same-gender blessings with wider church

General Convention 2012 will consider Episcopal Church’s next steps

By Mary Frances Schjonberg, March 21, 2011

[Episcopal News Service – Atlanta] Nearly 200 members of the Episcopal Church House of Deputies left a historic March 18-19 churchwide consultation on same-gender blessings here promising to tell their colleagues and their dioceses about the work they did in preparation for the 2012 General Convention.

The Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music invited one lay and one clergy deputy from each of the church’s 109 dioceses and three regional areas to hear about… Continue reading

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Deputies gather for historic consultation on same-gender blessings

Churchwide consultation comes in anticipation of 2012 convention

By Mary Frances Schjonberg, March 18, 2011

[Episcopal News Service -- Atlanta] In a historic meeting, nearly 200 Episcopal Church General Convention deputies gathered here March 18 to begin a churchwide consultation on same-gender blessings.

The Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music invited one lay and one clergy deputy from each of the church’s 109 dioceses and three regional areas to hear about and reflect on its work to date on the mandate given to it in General Convention 2009 Continue reading

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What is a “vital small congregation?”

 

By Bob Honeychurch

They gather every week, just as they have done for over seventy-five years now. Different generations have come and gone, although the city in which they find themselves looks different than when their church was founded. What started as a church comprised almost exclusively of families whose backgrounds were from England and northern Europe has changed.

Now they are more diverse; they look a lot like the people they are called to serve. In those seventy-five years, although they have never grown larger than about forty people on a typical Sunday morning, they have remained a… Continue reading

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