Written by The Rev. Bill & Dana Henry
God loves marriage. How do we know this? Because marriage between a man and a woman was God’s idea and his gift to us, it mirrors the relationship between Christ and the Church, and Jesus gave his first sign, his initial miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Our Anglican service of Holy Matrimony affirms this truth in the opening sentences where we read these familiar and beautiful words.
One of the most important and challenging roles for clergy is the preparation of couples for Christian marriage.
Archbishop Beach asked the Bishops of the Anglican Church in North America to highlight marriage in our dioceses this year. As a way of doing that, I’ve asked a group of folks to reflect on what the marriage rite in our new prayer book teaches us about the covenant couples make on their wedding day.
I grew up in an isolated village in Guatemala. Back then, our mail was brought to us twice a week by a man walking across the Cuchumutanes Mountain range to get to us. Urgent communication came to our door as a telegram, sent by Morse code to the local post office. Personal notes and letters, rare though they were, were treasures of gold, savored and saved. To get medical help of any kind, we had to leave the village and drive a day to the “city,” presuming the one-lane mountain dirt roads were passable and not covered by a landslide.
Late last summer, I wrote to our vestry at Christ the Redeemer Anglican Church, “I have just gotten off the phone with the Rev. Anita Lovell senior pastor of our neighbors around the corner at Mt. Olive Baptist Church. She has invited us to come over to her church for a joint worship service at 10:45 am on October 29. She will lead worship and I will preach.
By The Leadership of Reconciliation Anglican Church
Jerusalem’s rich religious history and its well preserved archaeological record provided a poignant backdrop to GAFCON 2018. The final conference picture of almost 2000 delegates from around the globe gathered as one body on the Temple Steps in the Old City is a beautiful pictorial summary of the gathering (See photo on page 2). It is also a reminder of the meeting’s location: Jerusalem. The city figures large in seemingly everything, which prompted this columnist to do a bit of Biblical story checking.
The slogan, “Think Globally, Act Locally”, was coined in 1970 by a leader of the environmental movement. It was meant to get people thinking about the effect their actions had on a global scale and encouraged them to do good things for the environment in their own homes and communities.
Cultivating a desire and calling to pray for the world either individually or corporately can be a challenging endeavor, especially when it comes to finding quality information in this saturated marketplace of ideas. To that end, we recommend the prayer resources by Operation World, Operation World: The Definitive Prayer Guide to Every Nation and Pray for the World (an abridged version). Operation World is both the organization that researches and writes the books and the name of the flagship prayer handbook; all titles are published by InterVarsity Press.
