Available Light

I was intrigued to read Bosco Peter's Liturgy website this morning and see this post . Basically Bosco is saying that Anglican Priests serving in Co-operating Parishes (those in which several denominations join together as one congregation) give precedent for people who wish to circumvent the constitution of the Anglican church by, for example, performing a blessing service for a same sex couple. As bishop my heart sinks a little when Bosco opens this can of worms - or more exactly draws attention to a can of worms that has been open since the early 1970s - but as a priest and a Christian and a human being I loudly applaud him. My first two parishes (Waihao and St. Francis', Hillcrest) were both Cooperating Parishes combining Presbyterian, Anglican and Methodist elements in one church. At a congregational, everyday level these worked pretty well. At an administrative level they were a nightmare, and my failure to live with the difficulties imposed on us by our parent denom...

The Joint Regional Committee is not my favourite institution. JRC is the body which administers co-operative ventures , which is the New Zealand term for interdemoninational churches. I have served in two such churches and have consequently attended many JRC meetings, which all seem to suffer from the same malaise: they take the most sluggish, bureaucratic bits of each of the participating denominations, mix 'em up and make a whole new brew whose complexity and turgidity is positively Byzantine. So you might imagine that I was not looking forward to last night which was my first attendance at a JRC as Bishop. I wasn't. But I was pleasantly surprised. Very pleasantly surprised in fact. The purpose of the meeting was to receive a review of the Brockville Community Church, which is the small ecumenical church set in a suburb high on a hill on the outskirts of Dunedin. The church building is unprepossessing, to say the least. The people work in the sorts of places where at the en...