LOUISVILLE -- A church court has concluded that Pittsburgh Presbytery cannot "elevate" language from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Constitution to make compliance with ordination standards "essential" and that it must apply the guidelines to ministerial candidates on an individual basis.
The May 16 ruling by the Permanent Judicial Commission (PJC) of the Synod of the Trinity followed a two-day hearing in Camp Hill, Pa., regarding a resolution that Pittsburgh Presbytery adopted on Oct. 12, 2006.
The presbytery's resolution called compliance with the PC(USA)'s ordination standards from the Book of Order, which require chastity in singleness or fidelity in heterosexual marriage, an "essential of Reformed polity." It stated that no exceptions would be permitted within the jurisdiction of Pittsburgh Presbytery.
This ruling runs contrary to one handed down March 20 by the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Synod of Alaska-Northwest.
SEOUL, South Korea -- At least 365 ministers, elders and missionaries of the Presbyterian Church of Korea (PCK) have shaved off their hair to protest a controversial revision to South Korea's law regulating private schools.
Joan S. Gray, moderator of the 217th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), learned of the ongoing outcry surrounding the reform bill during a recent visit here. The PCK and other private school owners have staged campaigns to stop the measure while threatening to close down schools.
The revised law requires private schools from elementary to university level to fill 25 percent of their boards of directors with outsiders who are unrelated to the institutions.
The aim, supporters say, is to produce more transparency in management and reduce corruption among those who control the schools.
©2007. Used by permission.
LOUISVILLE -- Conversations are under way with three of the five multinational companies targeted by the denomination's Mission Responsibility Through Investment committee -- three years after a decision by the 216th General Assembly to use shareholder pressure to reform corporate behavior that supports the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"Basically, the Assembly acknowledged there are legitimate issues here," said Bill Somplatsky-Jarman, who staffs MRTI's work, referring to actions taken by the 2006 Assembly that modified language in the original action, calling for investment in "peaceful pursuits" and specifically expanded its mandate to study corporate involvement in Gaza, historically Palestinian East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israel.
The original language called for a process of phased, selective divestment of companies who profit from Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY -- More than 360 Christian leaders from 60+ countries participated in the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE) Bi-Annual International Leadership Meeting, a week-long planning session that ended here June 22. The meeting was an opportunity for leaders to pray, plan, and work together toward Lausanne III: Cape Town 2010, the Third International Congress on World Evangelization to be held October 16-25, 2010.
The Budapest meeting of global Lausanne leadership discussed the potential barriers and opportunities of global evangelization, and how the Church can share the hope of the Gospel to every nation on earth. The Rev. S. Douglas (Doug) Birdsall, LCWE Executive Chair, urged the leaders to work together for the cause of Christ, "Because there is so much at stake. The task is bigger and the urgency more obvious."
The Simple Way, an inner city Philadelphia community center, was destroyed by fire early in the morning of June 20. The seven-alarm fire consumed an abandoned warehouse in the Kensington neighborhood, the Simple Way Community Center on Potter Street, as well as at least eight nearby homes. More than 100 people were evacuated.
There were no casualties; all affected residents reached safety.
Eight families are now homeless, many having lost their automobiles as well. Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, a resident and leader of the community center, lost all his possessions to the fire.
For further information, as well as information for making donations, go to www.thesimpleway.org.
National and international tributes to Ruth Bell Graham since her death June 14 include the remembrances of a retired Presbyterian couple in Stone Mountain, Ga., G. Thompson "Tommy" Brown and his wife, Mardia Hooper Brown. "We knew and loved her. She was always cheerful," he says.
Cologne, Germany, 13 June (ENI)--The leader of a major grouping of African churches has expressed outrage at human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, and has urged the world to help resolve the political crisis in the southern African country.
'What is happening in Zimbabwe is an embarrassment even to us as Africans,' said the Rev. Mvume Dandala, general secretary of the Nairobi-based All Africa Conference of Churches, during a recent Protestant convention called the Kirchentag, held in Cologne in western Germany.
Rome, 14 June (ENI)--A Christian leader from Iraq has warned that Christianity may disappear from his country if no action is taken to stem the hardships faced by this minority community in the predominantly Muslim country.
'Members of all religions - including both Islam and Christianity - are suffering now in my country but Christians as a minority are in greater danger of seeing their historic churches disappear,' said Archbishop Jules Mikhael Al-Jamil, the Rome representative of the Syrian Catholic Church.
© Ecumenical News International
New York -- The Christian Reformed Church, one of the North American branches of the Protestant Reformed tradition, has voted to allow the ordination of women after almost four decades of discussion on the issue.
'I've worked and prayed for this moment for years,' said the Rev. George
Vander Weit, an advocate of women's ordination in the denomination. 'I think [this proposal] gives us space.'
The June 12 decision was made at the denomination's annual synod meeting in Grand Rapids, Mich. A day later, the synod voted to allow women as delegates to the denomination's synod.
RICHMOND -- Is there a future for ministry in the liberal church? That question was on the mind of about a hundred Presbyterians who gathered on May 18 at Union Theological Seminary-Presbyterian School of Christian Education to bid farewell to Douglas Ottati, one of its professors of theology. After 30 years at the school, he is leaving to accept appointment to the faculty of Davidson College in North Carolina. In his honor, the seminary quickly organized a symposium to discuss a topic closely identified with Ottati's teaching.
Liberal theology appears to be on the wane, as acknowledged in the title of Ottati's most recent book, Theology for Liberal Christians and Other Endangered Species.
Lectures on the future of liberal theology were presented by three individuals followed by brief responses by six others.
RICHMOND -- Union Theological Seminary-PSCE student, Jessica Tate, will receive the 2007 David H.C. Read Preacher/Scholar Award, it was announced today. The..
Edinburgh, 21 May (ENI)--Ecclesiastical history has been made in the Scottish capital with the Church of Scotland welcoming leaders of the Free Church of Scotland to its 2007 General Assembly that was officially opened by Prince Andrew, a son of British Queen Elizabeth II.
'I think this is a tremendous thing,' said the new moderator of the Church of Scotland, the Rev. Sheilagh Kesting, who made church unity the theme of her sermon at St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh. 'I don't think that any of us guessed that we would be able to do such a thing but we have been meeting for a couple of years and it became clear that there were areas where we could say we have common ground.'
Cologne, Germany, 7 June (ENI)--Christians need to acknowledge the violence they used in the past in oppressing other faiths, the head of the World Council of Churches has said at Germany's biggest Protestant gathering.
'If we do not own up to this history, turn around and repent, this part of our past will always haunt the relationships among us and with people of other faiths,' WCC general secretary, the Rev. Samuel Kobia, said on 7 June. He was speaking at the Kirchentag, a Protestant church convention taking place in Cologne from 6 to 10 June.
Kobia, a Methodist from Kenya, was giving a keynote lecture on 'Religions living together'.
Led by the Holy Spirit and guided by a unanimous vote of its ruling elders and deacons, the members of Memorial Park Church of McCandless have voted to ask Pittsburgh Presbytery to dismiss it from the Presbyterian Church (USA) to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. On Sunday, June 3 at 10 a.m. with over 1,200 people in attendance during the worship service and congregational meeting, 1051 members voted with 951 voting in favor (91.1%); 93 voting not in favor (8.9%); 4 abstained and 3 ballots were disallowed by the members of Pittsburgh Presbytery overseeing the voting process. With a better than 91% vote the congregation of Memorial Park Presbyterian Church has formally requested the dismissal.
The Permanent Judicial Commission (GA-PJC) of the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), has handed down a landmark ruling in the process of determining a case to be moot. In George R. Stewart vs. Mission Presbytery, the GA-PJC ruled in favor of the presbytery in its request to drop the case since the substance of the complaint was no longer an issue. Nevertheless, Stewart's essential complaint was upheld by the GA-PJC.
Because of accounting errors, the Mission Initiative: Joining Hearts & Hands campaign https://www.pcusa.org/joiningheartsandhands/ has overstated the amount of pledges it has received..
c. 2007 Religion News Service
The Southern Baptist Convention, with some 16.2 million members on the books, claims to be the nation's largest Protestant denomination. But the Rev. Thomas Ascol believes the active membership is really a fraction of that.
Ascol, pastor of the 230-member Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral,
Fla., points to a church report showing that only 6 million Southern Baptists attend church on an average Sunday. "The reality is, the FBI couldn't find half of those (members) if they had to," said Ascol, who asserts his own congregation attendance swells to at least 350 every Sunday.
Ascol plans to bring a resolution to the denomination's annual meeting June 12-13 in San Antonio, calling for "integrity in the way we regard our membership rolls in our churches and also in the way we report statistics."
EDINBURGH (ENI) -- The leader of the biggest Protestant church in Scotland has paid tribute to British Prime Minister Tony Blair for his role in the Northern Ireland peace process but criticized him for supporting United States foreign policy.
"Tony Blair's achievement in leading the United Kingdom for ten years is remarkable," said the moderator of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, the Rev. Alan McDonald, after Blair's May 10 announcement that he would step down as prime minister in June.
LOUISVILLE -- Two volunteers from a faith-based humanitarian group, who were cleared of human-smuggling charges last year, have won a human rights award for their work assisting distressed migrants along the Arizona-Mexico border.
Shanti A. Sellz and Daniel M. Strauss, along with desert-aid group No More Deaths, received the Oscar Romero Award for Human Rights at a ceremony in Houston on April 22.
Presbyterian leaders in Arizona were instrumental in helping to establish the three-year-old Tucson-based No More Deaths, which is led and supported by Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) members and congregations. The group provides food, water, and basic medical care to illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico into the United States through Arizona's treacherous desert borderlands.
Recently I received an e-mail asking for prayer for a friend I had not seen in a long time. Jerry had routine hip replacement surgery and seemed to be doing fine. Two days later he had a massive stroke and was taken to a hospital intensive care unit in critical condition. After I tracked down his wife and son (they had moved since we had talked last), we had a prayer together over our cell phones. It seemed like the natural thing to do.
Afterwards, I remembered questions that my parishioners sometimes ask, "Does it do any good to pray for friends or members by long distance? Why do we pray for people overseas whom we do not know? How can such remote prayers be effective?"
CHICAGO (RNS) -- A coalition of faith-based groups on May 9 launched a "New Sanctuary Movement" to provide shelter for illegal immigrants and boost support for immigration reform.
By connecting immigrants who are facing deportation orders with host sanctuaries, the movement aims to provide a broad range of support for these families. Unlike their counterparts in the original 1980s Sanctuary Movement, many of today's immigrants have a physical shelter but still need financial, legal, and spiritual support.
Paris, 22 May (ENI)--Two French Protestant churches have agreed to start discussions with the aim of creating a united denomination by 2013 bringing together Reformed and Lutheran Christians.
'The French religious landscape has become very complex', said the Rev. Marcel Manoël, president of the national council of the Reformed Church of France (ERF). 'That complexity makes communication difficult.'
A joint 17-20 May meeting of the ERF synod and that of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of France (EELF) in Montbéliard in eastern France voted almost unanimously to start a three-year process of discussions at the local level about the idea of unification, before proceeding to the next step.
London, 23 May (ENI)--Openly-gay US Bishop Gene Robinson, whose 2003 consecration sparked controversy in the worldwide Anglican Communion, has not been issued with a formal invitation to attend the 2008 Lambeth Conference of the world's Anglican bishops.
A spokesperson for Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the head of the Anglican Communion, confirmed to Ecumenical News International that Robinson was one of several bishops omitted so far from 800 invitations sent out electronically to attend the once-every-ten-year gathering.
In a letter to Anglican bishops released on 22 May, Williams said: 'I have reserved the right to withhold or withdraw invitations from bishops whose appointments, actions or manner of life have caused exceptionally serious divisions or scandals within the Communion.'
New York, 24 May (ENI)--Muslims in the United States appear to have been largely assimilated into the broader US society, finds a new survey which also reports that nearly eight in 10 Muslim Americans overwhelmingly condemn the practice of suicide bombings.
Still, the survey released this week by the Pew Research Center found that about a quarter of young Muslim Americans feel there are times when such bombings can be justified.
Nonetheless, the picture painted of the survey - said to be the first comprehensive, national survey of Muslim Americans - finds that they are relatively happy in the United States and feel more a part of US society than Muslims who have emigrated to Europe feel about living in their countries.
Lusaka, 25 May (ENI)--Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa is refusing to heed calls by the country's Roman Catholic bishops to break an impasse over changes to the country's constitution, which they see as vital to avoid a future confrontation in the southern African country.
After the bishops in mid-May made their appeals, Mwanaswa urged Zambians to ignore calls for demonstrations over the constitution-making process describing them as 'a sheer waste of time and resources'.
'The people of Zambia have spoken; they want a new constitution before the 2011 presidential and parliamentary elections,' said a statement signed by Archbishop Telesphore George Mpundu of Lusaka, the president of the Zambia Episcopal Conference.
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