LONDON (RNS) — Responding to growing concern about the kinds of priests the Church of England is attracting, Anglican leaders are considering expanding its assessments of clergy candidates to include more rigorous psychological testing. Anxiety about the quality of those who aspire to become clergy is rooted in the series of child sex abuse scandals that have emerged from Anglicanism’s mother church over the past 20 years. In testimony given last March to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse — the public body set up to investigate abuse in many organizations, including churches — Bishop of Chichester Martin Warner said his diocese could use psychological testing of ordinands to assess whether they are suitable. He said the testing is “something we will be starting later this year.” Last week, Julian Hubbard, director of the Church of England’s Ministry Division, said in a statement, “This has been given added focus by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and the … [Read more...]

(RNS) —Documents filed with the United Methodist Church’s top court are shedding first light on specifics of long-awaited proposals to avoid schism in the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The three plans were published Tuesday (July 17) as part of the docket for the United Methodist Church Judicial Council’s October meeting. The denomination’s Council of Bishops is asking its top court for a decision on whether those plans and related petitions are constitutional. “We are asking for this so that we can gain greater clarity about constitutional issues within the three plans, and in service to and support of the delegations, who will do extremely important work in a very limited amount of time,” Bishop Kenneth H. Carter, president of the Council of Bishops, said in a written statement last week. The Rev. Maidstone Mulenga, director of communications for the Council of Bishops, described the request in an email as “a pre-emptive move by the … [Read more...]

(RNS) — There’s a moment near the beginning of the documentary film “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” — as the trolley that transported millions of children to the Neighborhood of Make Believe is taken out of its box and Fred Rogers’ familiar sneakers are set next to a bench — when Margy Whitmer muses on the success of the show she produced for many years. “We had a director who once said to me, if you take all of the elements that make good television and do the exact opposite, you have ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’: low production values, simple set, an unlikely star,” she said. “Yet it worked, because it was saying something really important.” The same might be said of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” itself. Over the weekend, the film, having expanded to 893 screens across the country, topped the $10 million mark at the box office, passing “RBG,” a documentary about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to become the highest-grossing documentary of the year, according to … [Read more...]

AUSTIN, Texas (RNS) — Same-sex couples will now be able to marry in their home parish even if their local bishop has moral objections to gay marriage, Episcopal Church leaders decided on Friday (July 13). Meeting in Austin at their triennial convention, the House of Bishops and House of Deputies, the bicameral governing body of the church, approved the controversial resolution after days of debate. Under the new rule, couples can request gender-neutral marriage rites, which were approved for trial use at the church’s 2015 convention, in the church where they worship. Even if the local bishop opposes same-sex weddings, the priest of the parish can still conduct the ceremony, requesting “pastoral support” from a bishop in another diocese if necessary. Currently, eight of the United States’ 101 Episcopal dioceses — Albany, N.Y.; Central Florida; Dallas; Florida; North Dakota; Springfield, Ill.; Tennessee; and the Virgin Islands — do not authorize the liturgies. Bishop Lawrence … [Read more...]

PARIS (RNS) — If you’re a Protestant married to a Catholic in Germany, you might be able to receive Communion along with your spouse in the Catholic Church. Then again, you may not be welcome to do so, or you could find yourself simply unsure. This confusing situation, created by a proposed change to the tradition that the Catholic Eucharist was “for Catholics only,” leaves German Catholicism caught between its majority’s desire for a relaxation of the rules — a view shared by Pope Francis — and the limits to change in the world’s largest church. In February, the German Catholic bishops approved draft guidelines for priests on when they may distribute Catholic Communion to Protestants attending Mass, signaling a new openness. But the guidelines immediately sparked a tussle between reformers and conservatives and surprising flip-flops from the Vatican. Since then, some dioceses have reflected the new attitude toward inter-Communion on their official websites. Other churches … [Read more...]

(RNS) — “Everywhere I go, people talk about the Enneagram,” said Ian Morgan Cron, co-author with Suzanne Stabile of “The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery.” The book has sold more than 165,000 copies since its release in 2016 from Christian publisher InterVarsity Press. Cron has also spun off a successful podcast, Typology, which has grown to more than 300,000 downloads a month. Full disclosure: I edited “The Road Back to You,” and I am even more fascinated by the Enneagram now than I was then. I first discovered the personality typing system some years before, when some pastor friends sat me down to explain how helpful this system had been for them in their ministry as well as in personal matters, like parenting their inscrutable teenagers. “So it’s just a personality test?” I asked. I have since learned that referring to the Enneagram as “just” a personality test is to its aficionados like calling Beyoncé “just” a singer. It is a personality test, but … [Read more...]