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Showing posts from July, 2010

Baptist Bishops?

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According to a report in the Boston Globe , increasing numbers of Baptist pastors -- particularly Black Baptists -- are retrieving the signs of the episcopate from the long-locked treasure chest of Church history and beginning to talk about the importance of the apostolic succession. So, just as Anglicans around the world are trashing the episcopate after 450 years of trying to preserve it, Baptists are dusting it off again. Curiouser and curiouser.

Weirder and Weirder, But It Makes Sense in a Twisted Anglican Way

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From Damian Thompson in the Daily Telegraph I thought this was a spoof at first, but it seems not: a General Synod working party is exploring whether the Church of England’s male bishops can join religious orders previously reserved for women. In other words, become Anglican nuns. As usual, the Synod’s topsy-turvy ecclesiology is a mystery to me, but I gather that the idea is that bishops would be entitled to take vows in orders of nuns so that they can provide special episcopal oversight to the sisters. It’s a typically ingenious Anglican response to the forthcoming ordination of women bishops. “There will be jokes about bishops in wimples, but having bishop-nuns would introduce a degree of mutual cooperation that could make the introduction of women bishops much smoother,” says my Synod source. And just when I thought things couldn’t get any weirder, I learn the identity of the bishop who is rumoured to have volunteered to take nun’s vows: the Rt Rev Nick Baines, Bishop of Croydo