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General Assembly Session 12 July 2024
I posted the appointments from the 2024 Church of God General Assembly a few days ago. Unfortunately it’s harder to obtain the final results of the agenda items. This is sort of the hard way to get those but following is a video of the General Assembly portion of the 2024 General Assembly.
At the start of the video is the last part of an interview with Patty Nichols, a long time friend and Army chaplain. I got to know her and her husband Jimmy (now a retired Army chaplain) during my years of working for the Church of God Chaplains Commission. I also got to know their mothers in later years. They are great people.
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Prayer for Social Media
As we head into the final stretch of our Presidential election and we brace to hit the wall, an old prayer that may have seemed quaint back in the day has certainly made a comeback in relevance, in this case the Collect for Peace from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. You can see it above. The idea that we need defence from “all assaults of our enemies” is certainly relevant these days; Cranmer and the divines of yore were on to something.
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Church of God 2024 General Assembly Elections and Appointments
You can view the list here.
As I noted in my post It’s That Time Again: Reflections on the 2024 Church of God General Council Agenda, I stated that the most intense focus would be on the appointments, especially the Executive Committee, which is why the appointments are published first. I think the best way to describe the way the elections came out is “safe.” They avoided some potentially controversial people in a General Assembly that some (including myself) felt was pivotal in the life of our church.
I’ve known most of these men either from my time in the International Offices or, in the case of Mark Williams, from my years at the North Cleveland Church of God, where he was my pastor. Both he and his wife Sandra Kay were attentive participants in the series which started as Liturgy, Pentecost, Wesley and the Book of Common Prayer, Part I: What is a Liturgy? Losing him as pastor is personally painful for me and my wife, but given the nature of our system is it is the best for them and for our church. With all that I think we have a good Executive Committee.
It is interesting to note that our new General Overseer/Presiding Bishop, Gary Lewis, is first generation in his family to be in the Church of God (his wife Lori is fourth, which was doubtless helpful.) It’s a sign that we are open to the people we reach out to, and that’s not always the case with some evangelical groups.
I followed both General Council and General Assembly as closely as I could. When I get of the final results on the outcome of the agenda, I will post that as well.
May God bless our church, its leadership and its laity as we move forward.
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St. Augustine on the Literal Meaning of Genesis–Science Meets Faith
It’s interesting to note that, in this passage at least, Augustine bases his reticence on insisting on a literal six-day creation based on the fact that it would be an embarrassment! In our day, where too many Christians (especially Evangelicals) are in “play up to the world” mode, one would think that this argument would be in vogue, but we don’t see it explicitly put that way very much.
As noted in my post Why Evangelicals Don’t Read Philo Judaeus, at least some of classical antiquity had been teed up to the idea that the creation was completed in more than six twenty-four hour days (and back then the hours weren’t even fixed!) Moreover Augustine’s idea of “literal” was typically Patristic in that it included the allegorical, analogical or typological meaning, something I’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog.
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The Creator of “Egos Inflatable to Any Size” Has Passed On
Dr. Ron Gilbert of Cleveland, longtime educator and award-winning videographer, passed away peacefully on July 1, 2024, in a Chattanooga hospital with his loving wife, Cheryl, and his children by his side. He was 74.
Long time readers of this site will remember my post Egos Inflatable to Any Size: The ACNA-AMiA Fiasco (and other posts like it.) There I noted the following, where I didn’t mention him by name:
“Professor Shagnasty” (Ron Gilbert) going after “egos inflatable to any size” at one of our meetings. For me, a humorous way of looking at this is to recall a comedy routine in our own church by a Lee University faculty member (who is, BTW, now a part of a Charismatic Anglican church). He describes an “Inflatable Camp Meeting” which is like these inflatable playgrounds. It includes, of course, campground, chairs, and stage. On that stage are “general officials” who, in the routine, have “egos inflatable to any size”! (Little wonder he had to make an exit from the church! Long time readers will note that I have used this illustration before, in this situation and others).
Perhaps he’ll put together an “Inflatable Cathedral”. Sad to say, the egos will be there as well. They certainly have been up to now in the real thing.
Ron was a gifted communicator, but I’m not sure ACNA’s prelates would have been better prepared for this than our Church of God ones were.
Both the Pentecostal and Anglican worlds were blessed by his presence; his Celebration of Life Service is below.
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The Promise and Perils of the ACNA-RCC Dialogue
In a historic step, the Vatican is working toward “full communion” with conservative Anglicans by recognizing Anglican holy orders and churches without requiring “amalgamation or conversion.”
The union will be based on a Malta II proposal presented by the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA), that revives the Malta I report agreed upon by Pope Paul VI and archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Michael Ramsey in 1966.
In my post Book Review: Trevor Gervase Jalland’s The Church and the Papacy, I note the following:
Unless you figure that Protestant and Orthodox churches will simply roll the Roman Catholics–and in some places like Latin America that’s a possibility–sooner or later some accommodation with the See of Peter needs to be considered, or at least the obstacles to that accommodation need to be dispassionately discussed.
Evidently people in both the ACNA and the RCC have been thinking along these lines. As someone who has experienced both the Anglican and Roman Catholic worlds, I find myself with mixed feelings about this whole adventure.
The biggest plus is that it would put some Anglicans on par with the Orthodox, i.e., a church with the apostolic succession and valid sacraments and orders but not in formal union with Rome. I say “some” because, although the model for this is a sixty-year old protocol between Rome and Canterbury, the latter is conspicuously absent from the process. The biggest obstacle is women in the episcopate, which affects the apostolic succession. Since this is extending to GAFCON, how the RCC plans to deal with provinces like Kenya and South Sudan is hard to know at this point. Doing this, however, would undo one of the RCC’s least thought out self-inflicted wounds–denying the validity of Anglican orders.
Doing just this is a major step forward and would go a long way for the unity of Christianity. But there are perils for both sides.
Let’s start with the Anglicans. Ever since the days of Richard Hurrell Froude (I personally find his brother William of greater interest) there has always been the desire within parts of Anglicanism–translated into practice–of being “more catholic than the Pope.” This strikes me as an attempt to “keep up with the Joneses” without realising that we just might be the Joneses! The most tragic occurrence of this in the history of the church is the Old Believers controversy. Although I doubt the Anglo-Catholics have the fires at the ready, they may move (and some are moving) in the direction of things such as the Marian devotions, the merit system of grace, the Immaculate Conception, purgatory and of course the Catholic concept of the priesthood, which appeals to the authoritarian streak. I honestly don’t think that the cause of Christ or the progress of the Church are served by these things, and some of us have lived through a Roman Catholicism where they were virtually absent.
The Roman Catholics have their problems, too. If there’s one thing the current Occupant of the See of Peter hates more than anything, it’s people who are more Catholic than he is, and by that I’m referring to the Trads. It’s possible that he sees the ACNA as yet another dumping ground (along with the SSPX) for these people, whom he has set to drive out of the Church. Driving out dedicated people isn’t new to the RCC, but it is always harmful. (For a church like the ACNA which is having trouble digesting the exvangelicals, this has both promise and peril.) But we should realise that this Occupant, like his counterpart at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, won’t last forever. The ACNA has had its taste of a white-knuckle conclave, but it will pale besides the next one in Rome. The RCC has trashed the reputation it has amongst more traditionally minded Protestants as a “safe haven,” this will certainly affect any ACNA-RCC relationship going forward.
As I said in my book review, the core problem is this:
What Christianity needs is leadership which is committed to transmitting the paradosis of the Apostles without expanding it.
I’d like to think that this union would be a step towards that, but I’m not counting on it.
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The Ghosts of Gothard and the Headship Charismatics Still Haunt the ACNA
The new Most Rev. Steve Wood’s home diocese’s position on WO bears that out:
Bishop Wood’s position is more nuanced. The Anglican Diocese of the Carolinas Policy for Women in Order has supported the ordination of women as deacons and priests in the church, with the provision that women may not serve in the office of rector...
Alice Linsley a cultural anthropologist, former Episcopal priest who renounced her orders as a priest after extensive biblical scholarship, told VOL that the weird constraints placed on ordained women in Bishop Steve Wood’s diocese are the result of an unbiblical doctrine called “male headship.”
“Both women and men can be in authority, but not serve in the same roles. In the biblical texts, women of authority are not named as frequently as men of authority simply because the Hebrew were a caste of ruler-priests and women never served as priests. To be right believing means to uphold the received tradition in full. That tradition never involved females at the altar or men in the birthing chamber. Women and men have different roles in God’s plan and design.”
If you hear anyone talking about headship in a Christian church, you can be sure that the ultimate source of that is the one and only Bill Gothard, who made it a cornerstone of his teaching in the 1970’s. It’s been taken up in unlikely places like the Southern Baptist Convention. It was also the wellspring for the “Shepherding Movement” amongst Charismatics (Catholic and Protestant) in the same era, and that got a smackdown from none other than Pat Robertson. But the itch to be “in authority” has if anything gotten worse since that time, as evidenced by the NAR and even the ACNA’s decidedly undemocratic structure.
The most serious problem is that, in a chruch with an episcopal structure like the ACNA, the whole concept of the priesthood that goes with this is unBiblical. The desire to be a “fourth Rome” surfaces in things such as the conclave they recently had. I think some of the motivation for that stems from the idea that “the Episcopal church apostacised, the RCC didn’t,” but some of us saw the likes of the current Occupant coming.
The quoted article also notes the following:
There were Hebrew women of authority. Line of descent was traced through high-status wives, especially the cousin brides. Residential arrangements included neolocal, avunculocal, matrilocal, and patrilocal, and the biblical data reveals that the responsibilities and rights of males and females were balanced, yet distinct.
As a Palm Beacher, the whole concept of “high-status wives” ordering around men of lower status is a natural one. Pity the thought that the ACNA is that bourgeois!
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 