Giles Fraser has invited the Bishop of New Hampshire (Gene Robinson) to preach this summer during the Lambeth Conference, to which +Gene is not invited. Recently the Archbishop of Canterbury has made it clear that Bishop Robinson does not have his permission to preach from pulpits in the English church.

Giles has written a column challenging the Archbishop's actions by reminding us all that this is not the first time that such bans have been issued. Maude Royden, a popular woman speaker was banned from speaking from the pulpits of England in the early 20th century because of her gender. An English priest defied the ban.

From Giles' column:

"The Rector was defiant. He closed the church — putting up the notice of prohibition — and invited the worshippers to gather in the parish hall instead. Nine hundred people tried to get in. A petition was organised and sent to the Bishop: ‘When an evangelist so plainly called by God is harassed and impeded by those who should be her chiefest upholders and strengtheners, we feel the time for silent acquiescence is past.’

Conservative voices complained at the presence of ‘ecclesiastical Bolshevists’, and that a woman giving a sermon to men was radical feminism gone mad.

Giles points out the connections between then and now:

The contemporary parallels are depressing. I have invited the Bishop of New Hampshire, the Rt Revd Gene Robinson, to preach at St Mary’s, Putney. There are no legal impediments to this. But the powers that be want this to happen ‘after the service’ or ‘in the church hall’. Apparently, a few bars on the organ, or the gap between the church and the church hall are sufficient prophylactics to protect the sanctuary from the profanity of being a woman or being gay. What sort of crazy theology is that?"

Read his full essay here.

Two related items this morning from Episcopal Life Online.

In Myanmar, Episcopal Relief and Development responds to Cyclone Nargis - Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD) is responding to Cyclone Nargis and providing churches and individuals with an opportunity to help those affected by the deadly disaster.
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ERD has established relationships with local partners in Myanmar to get assistance quickly to many of the most vulnerable people.
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Churches can use a downloadable bulletin insert, to inform and encourage members to help.

To help people affected by the cyclone in Myanmar, make a donation to ERD's "Myanmar & Cyclone Response" online here, or by calling 1-800-334-7626, ext. 5129. Gifts can be mailed to: Episcopal Relief and Development "Myanmar & Cyclone Response" P.O. Box 7058, Merrifield, VA 22116-7058.

Presiding Bishop urges congressional defeat, presidential veto of Farm Bill - She writes,

As we are learning more each day about the widening food crisis around the world and the deepening economic problems threatening the poor and those living on the margins at home, it is fundamentally wrong for Congressional leaders to seek passage of a farm bill that harms American family farmers and significantly exacerbates poverty and suffering around the world.
[...]
This week, after months of closed-door negotiations, House and Senate leaders unveiled a package that corrects none of the significant inequities in the current system and, remarkably, goes further than current law in exacerbating human need around the world. Particularly at a time when American attention is focused on the international food crisis, the farm bill "compromise" announced by House and Senate leadership is a moral failure of the highest order.

"This bill increases subsidies to farmers at a time of record farm income," Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said. The negotiators "have done a disservice to taxpayers."
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supports the bill. Congressional leaders plan to bring it to the House and Senate floors next week for votes that could test the depth of support for it.

The package, the product of weeks of closed-door bargaining, is stuffed with plums for key constituencies.
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[A]dministration officials cited a number of problems, including new protections for sugar beet and sugar cane growers that will require the government to buy excess quantities of Mexican sugar and resell it to ethanol plants at a loss.

CNN has VIDEO on the story of Dr. Rusty Newman, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Snellville, Georgia, who is offering a chance at free gas for those who attend an upcoming revival.

Stephen Colbert is advocating free gas for all:

And, last, a story on free gas where "free" takes the verb form.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Tim Townsend of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discusses the difficulties in covering religion during a polarized time. His description of his run in with the proprietor of Little Green Footballs will sound familiar to anyone who remembers a certain Anglican blog defending its right to discuss whether they would "waste a bullet" on the Presiding Bishop.

Hat tip: Religion News Service Blog

NBC's summary of the interview is here.

In today's Nashville Tennessean, Beverly Keel tells the story of the Rev. Becca Stevens, the Episcopal chaplain at Vanderbilt University, and rector of St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, who has financed Magdalene, a ministry for women with a history of prostitution and addiction, by founding Thistle Farm, a successful line of bath and body products:

"Without drugs I couldn't sleep. The marijuana and whiskey helped me to not think about the rapes and the beatings because of prostitution. I am so happy that you've come to hear about my life of sorrow…."

The letter was one of many thank-yous the Rev. Becca Stevens read after traveling with six Nashvillians to meet with 42 women in Rwanda, a country in east-central Africa that suffered war and genocide in the mid-1990s.

Read it all, as well as a previous story about Stevens, who is being honored tonight at Nashville's 37th annual Human Relations Awards dinner at Loews Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel. She's also got a page devoted to her work in the women's ministries section of the Episcopal Church's Web site.

If you are going to be in the Washington D. C. area on June 7, please join us at the Diocese of Washington's Evangelism Conference, featuring a keynote presentation by Brian McLaren, who gave a preview of his presentation in an interview with the Washington Window. You can register here.

The conference is being held at the 4-H Youth Conference Center, 7100 Connecticut Avenue, Chevy Chase, MD, and registration begins at 9 a. m.

The conference also will feature a workshop on personal faith sharing led by the Revs. Heather Kirk-Davidoff and Nancy Wood-Lyczak, authors of Talking Faith: An Eight-Part Study on Growing and Sharing Your Faith, and a how-to session on parish communications and marketing, led by Carol Barnwell, director of communications for the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. Carol is also a member of the Cafe's editorial board.

We promise not to go all PBS on you and raise money 'round the clock, but it is the fund raising season, and we ask your support of our work here on the Café.

As we mentioned in an early posting:

The Diocese of Washington provided what might be called our start-up capital, but we no longer draw on its budget. As we’d like to redesign the home page of the Café and several of the blog pages (so that all of features and recent postings are visible at a glance) and as we’d like to throw you all a party at General Convention in 2009, we could use a little financial help.

Please consider making a donation to the 2008 Bishop’s Appeal, and marking your contribution “Episcopal Café.” You can do the job here.

Updated Thursday morning and again Thursday afternoon and Friday morning

AP - Many veteran Christian activists on the right side of the political spectrum do not support the declaration. James Dobson, founder of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, reviewed the document and was invited to sign it, but did not, said Gary Schneeberger, a spokesman for Dobson. Dobson consulted the group's board of directors — a common practice — and the board agreed he shouldn't sign "due to myriad concerns about the effort," Schneeberger said.

Dallas Morning News - There's an unusually high ration [ratio?] of meat-to-bun in this one, whether you agree with it or not.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State - Adopting the language of right-wing Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, they warn against the “partisans of a naked public square, those who would make all religious expression private and keep the public square secular.” This strikes me as completely bogus. Christopher Hitchens does not have a multi-million-dollar broadcasting empire or an army of devoted Irreligious Left followers. Sam Harris heads no Anti-Christian Coalition with chapters around the country seeking to block religious voters from going to the polls. Religious persons freely speak out on public affairs in this country, and there is no serious effort to stop them.

CBN News - Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America told CBN News the authors of the manifesto were definitely trying to distance themselves from the religious right. "Basically, they were saying 'those of you who care about abortion, who care about homosexuality, who care about the family disintegrating don't speak for us, because we are too intellectual, we are too sophisticated to be concerned about those kinds of things.'"

Reuters - Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said of the statement: "It's a sign of maturation of the evangelical movement ... It's an important theological document but it will have limited political influence because it is making a essentially a theological argument.

World Magazine - the timing of the document's Washington, D.C., release, during the "home stretch" of the presidential primary season, caused some journalists at the event to suggest that claim was disingenuous. [The Washington Times' Julia Duin asked about the timing. Her coverage is here.]

God's Politics (Jim Wallis) - We have a serious image problem. People think that we should stand for the same things as Jesus did. So it's time to change the image.

The FundamentaList (Sarah Posner) - And even though it appears to chastise both conservative and progressive evangelicals equally for such politicizing of issues (if someone can tell me who those progressive evangelicals are, that would be mighty interesting), it's the right that has taken umbrage at its exclusion from the drafting process. People close to the writing process have told me that no one was excluded, but another person with knowledge of it interpreted it as a rebuke of the tactics and tenor of the culture wars. I'll have more later in the day over at TAPPED. [That was earlier in the day. It's late evening and there's nothing at TAPPED yet.]

Updates (latest last):

Ethics Daily

Robert Parham of the Baptist Center for Ethics said several signers of the declaration should confess their own involvement in political activity they now condemn.

"Those who claim to want to recover the word evangelical played a nasty role in creating political fundamentalism, advancing the anti-everything public image that conservative evangelicals rightfully have, fostering the cultural narrative that GOP stands for God's Only Party and truncating the biblical witness' moral agenda to a few so-called non-negotiable issues," Parham said.

Parham said some signers, like steering committee member Timothy George of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, "helped the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention which strengthened Christian Right and its agenda of dominion and theocracy."

David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, worked over a decade at SBC-related Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Union University in an era when Southern Baptists earned reputation as one of the most stalwart defenders of the Republican Party. Since joining the faculty of a moderate seminary associated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Gushee has moved away from fundamentalists on some issues like torture and global warming.

Parham said others signers, like Liberty Theological Seminary President Ergun Caner, "have helped to spread a mean-spirited anti-Islamic fear." Caner's book, Unveiling Islam, was cited as the source for former SBC President Jerry Vines' 2002 statement describing Islam's founding prophet "a demon-possessed pedophile."

Caner stood by Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell until Falwell's death last May. In 2005 Caner lionized old-guard SBC leaders like Adrian Rogers and Jimmy Draper, who helped build bridges between Southern Baptists and the Religious Right in the "conservative resurgence" movement launched in 1979.

By one Internet account Caner "brought the house down" with a statement aimed at supporting President Bush during a 2006 sermon at First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Ga., a prominent SBC church whose pastor, Johnny Hunt, is reportedly running for SBC president this year.

[The article contains more of the same kinds of instances for signers from the left and the right.]

Wall Street Journal (Alan Jacobs) - Once all the self-description is out of the way, it turns out that the heart of the document is a kind of urgent appeal: Please don't call us fundamentalists or confuse us with them. This strikes me as a regrettable tack.... At the bottom of page 15, these words appear: "The Evangelical soul is not for sale." This is what is called "burying the lead."

Updated Thursday afternoon and evening

Ruth Gledhill writing in The Times:

A lack of funds from the collection plate to support the Christian infrastructure, including church upkeep and ministers’ pay and pensions, will force church closures as ageing congregations die.

In contrast, the number of actively religious Muslims will have increased from about one million today to 1.96 million in 2035.

According to Religious Trends, a comprehensive statistical analysis of religious practice in Britain, published by Christian Research, even Hindus will come close to outnumbering churchgoers within a generation. The forecast to 2050 shows churchgoing in Britain declining to 899,000 while the active Hindu population, now at nearly 400,000, will have more than doubled to 855,000. By 2050 there will be 2,660,000 active Muslims in Britain - nearly three times the number of Sunday churchgoers.

The research is based on analysis of membership and attendance of all the religious bodies in Britain, including a church census in 2005.
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Only in the large, evangelical churches of the Baptist and independent denominations is there resistance to the trend, but many of these churches also show some decline. One small area of growth is in Northern Ireland, where the enthusiasm of Pentecostals and other independents has led to a slight increase in numbers of churches - a trend expected to continue to 2050. The three growing denominations are the Orthodox, Pentecostals and smaller denominations, all dependent to a degree on immigration.

The crisis is particularly acute for Methodists and Presbyterians, as many worshippers are aged over 65. The report predicts that these churches might well have merged with others by 2030. “The primary cause of the decrease in attendance is that people are simply dying off,” the report says.

By 2050 there will be just 3,600 churchgoing Methodists left in Britain, Christian Research predicts. Anglicans will be down to 87,800, Catholics to 101,700, Presbyterians to 4,400, Baptists to 123,000 and independents to 168,000.

The national breakdown shows similar declines across England, Wales and Scotland. Churchgoing across all denominations in England will fall from about 3 million today to about 700,000 in 2050. In Wales it will tumble from 200,000 to 42,000 and in Scotland, from 550,000 to 140,000. The figures take into account the recent boost to Catholicism from the number of Polish immigrants to Britain, particularly in Scotland.

The report predicts that by 2030, when Dr Rowan Williams’s successor as Archbishop of Cantebury will be approaching retirement, there could be just 350,000 people attending just 10,000 Anglican churches, with an average of 35 worshippers each. The next Archbishop after that could find his position “totally nonviable”, the report says, with just 180,000 worshippers in 6,000 churches by 2040.

The Church of England moved to discredit the research last night, criticising its methodology and saying the results were "flawed and dangerously misleading".

A C of E spokesman said: "These sorts of statistics, based on dubious presumptions, do no one of any faith any favours.

"Faith communities are not in competition and simplistic research like this is misleading and unhelpful."

The research does not compare like with like, according to the spokesman. The number of practising Muslims, for instance, is based on the number of people who said they were active in the 2001 census.

If the same process were applied to Christians it would give a figure of 20 million active churchgoers, according to Church House, the headquarters of the C of E.

The study used the number of adults on the Church's parish-based formal voting lists as the sole measure of its active "members".

This omitted large numbers who worship every week and are involved in their churches in other ways, according to Church House.

The Rev Lynda Barley, head of research and statistics for the Archbishops' Council, said last night: "There are more than 1.7 million people worshipping in a Church of England church or cathedral each month, a figure which is 30 per cent higher than the electoral roll figures and has remained stable since 2000.

"More are involved in fresh expressions of church and chaplaincies across the country and we have no reason to believe that this will drop significantly in the next decade.

"These statistics are incomplete and represent only a partial picture of religious trends in Britain today."

The Daily Telegraph, which recently brusquely sacked its former religious correspondent Jonathan Petre at a few moments' notice after 23 years on the paper, as well as his partner, Sarah Womack, the paper's social affairs correspondent, has announced that it has appointed a real-life reverend to succeed him: George Pitcher, curate of St Bride's church in Fleet Street. Pitcher, a bit of an Anglican leftie who was once of the Observer until he saw the light, told PR Week last year that he was "somebody of the journalistic tribe who is not going to blush when someone says bugger".

The curate of St Bride's church in Fleet Street, the spiritual home of printing and the media, has been appointed religion editor for the Telegraph titles.

George Pitcher, the former industrial editor of the Observer and co-founder of PR firm Luther Pendragon, will be part of an "integrated religious affairs team" across the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, and telegraph.co.uk.

Gledhill's piece raised the question of church finances. See Pitcher's informative article on that subject here.

Thursday afternoon update

Thinking Anglicans has an extensive roundup including, a statement from the Church of England, and a post by Stephen Brown who reminds us, "One of the rituals of the Christian year [in the UK] is the publication of a report from the evangelical outfit Christian Research suggesting that Christianity is doomed."

Check out Thinking Anglicans for more links.

Last but not least, "Benita Hewitt [the new director of Christian Research Association, whose Religious Trends have been quoted] describes the article as very misleading. Church attendance once a week is compared to mosque attendance once a year, and no allowance has been made for once a month, once a year, midweek and FX church attendance." See also Christian Research's own numbers contradicting the Times here. (With thanks once more to Thinking Anglicans.)