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2001-183

News Briefs

First Canadian Anglican diocese will go bankrupt October 15

     (ENS) The first diocese in the Anglican Church of Canada to go bankrupt as 
the result of lawsuits filed by indigenous peoples who said that they were abused 
in church-run residential schools will be the Diocese of Cariboo in British 
Columbia.

     "It is our intention that on October 15 our diocese will cease to operate," 
said Bishop Jim Cruickshank at the beginning of the church's General Synod 
meeting in Waterloo, Ontario. "We will formally wind up our affairs in October." 

     Archbishop Michael Peers, in his presidential address, asked delegates to 
the General Synod to consider ways to continue the church's ministries if the 
national jurisdiction also faced bankruptcy by the end of the year. "Never before 
have we contemplated a possibility such as the one we are now facing," he said. 
"We need to make decisions about our future. We are in a place where that feels 
enormously perilous."

     The Diocese of Cariboo has depleted its resources coping with lawsuits 
brought by indigenous people who were sexually assaulted as children in a 
residential school by a man who was subsequently convicted of the crimes. 
Churches operated the schools as agents of the government, which is also 
defending itself against lawsuits. 

     The diocese is seeking legal advice on whether it will be necessary to sell 
parish properties to settle its debts after it goes bankrupt. The national church 
is spending about $100,000 a month to deal with the 1,195 lawsuits it is facing. 
Its remaining $3 million in assets and an additional $6 million in endowment 
funds may be liquidated in order to pay claims. The only relief would be a quick 
agreement by the Canadian government to assume most of the church's liabilities 
resulting from the suits, but church leaders involved in the negotiations charge 
that the government is not acting in good faith.

     

Zimbabwe bans participation of churches in voter education

     (ENI) Facing presidential elections scheduled for next spring, the 
government of Zimbabwe has announced that it intends to ban churches, aid 
agencies and civic organizations from participating in voter education efforts. 
Those activities would be limited to the government-appointed Electoral 
Supervisory Commission and political parties only. The government accuses 
churches and civic groups of using money from foreign sources to campaign for 
political parties they favor.

     "It is not only the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] that are being 
used in this game," said Information Minister Jonathan Moyo. "Some churches have 
also joined the fray, invoking the name of God, making God partisan and turning 
the Bible into a political manifesto, using foreign money to subvert our hard won 
independence under the guise of voter education."

     The policy seems aimed at the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association, the 
Zimbabwe Council of Churches, the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, and 
the Legal Resources Foundation. They have been laying plans for a coordinated 
voter education campaign, as they had prior to the parliamentary election in 
June, 2000.

     

Former President Jimmy Carter proposes moderate Baptist alliance

      (ENI) Former US President Jimmy Carter, who broke ranks last year with the 
increasingly conservative Southern Baptist Convention, is calling on moderate 
Baptists in this country and Europe to form a new alliance.

     Speaking to the annual gathering of a prominent moderate Baptist group, the 
Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), Carter said it was time they joined with 
other groups in a loose coalition to cooperate on education and mission projects. 
He said that he intended to host two meetings of moderate Baptist leaders at the 
Carter Center in Atlanta in an effort to determine how the alliance might take 
shape. It would not be a new denomination, he pointed out, but rather a 
partnership in which the different participants would retain their identities.

     A "partnership model" would be ideal for giving local churches more 
responsibility, Carter said in interviews with the press, and was also suited to 
a time when denominational identity was becoming less important for many in the 
US.

     In recent years the Southern Baptist Convention has issued declarations 
calling for women to "submit graciously" to their husbands. It is also opposed to 
the ordination of women as clergy. Carter said that such actions violated the 
"basic premises" of his Christian faith. Expressing hopes that the controversies 
in the denomination would diminish, he admitted that he had concluded it was best 
that moderates and conservatives "go our separate ways."

     

Lutheran synod discuss evangelism, full communion and sexuality

     (ELCA) As 45 of the 65 synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 
(ELCA) completed their annual assemblies in June, the most common subjects 
addressed were evangelism, implementation of a full communion agreement with the 
Episcopal Church, and issues related to sexuality.

     At least 16 synods adopted resolutions, or memorials, related to evangelism. 
They will go to Churchwide Assembly when it meets August 8-14 in Indianapolis. 
The memorials call on the denomination to focus on mission, asking the presiding 
bishop to establish a "blue ribbon" task force to develop a "comprehensive 
evangelism strategy."

     At least six synods adopted a memorial, "Called to Freedom," calling for the 
assembly to pass constitutional amendments to accommodate church leaders who 
cannot accept some of the provisions of the full communion agreement between the 
ELCA and the Episcopal Church which went into effect in January. Opponents say 
the agreement, Called to Common Mission, threatens some aspects of Lutheran 
identity and gives more power to the role of bishops. CCM requires that bishops 
preside at all ordinations of clergy, eliminating a practice that allowed bishops 
to assign other clergy to preside at ordinations.

     The Churchwide Assembly will vote on a proposed bylaw that would allow a 
synodical bishop, under certain circumstances, to preside at an ordination. At 
least seven synod assemblies urged the assembly to adopt the bylaw while others 
strongly opposed it.

     Addressing some of the most contentious sexuality issues, the Greater 
Milwaukee Synod adopted a resolution supporting clergy and congregations that 
seek to bless same-gender relationships and it affirmed its welcome of gay and 
lesbian people. The synod voted in 2000 not to discipline pastors and parishes 
that blessed same-gender relationships. While the ELCA has no formal policy on 
the issue, its Conference of Bishops said in 1993 that it did not approve.

     The Metropolitan DC Synod is asking for a rite of blessing and affirms its 
support of clergy who participate but South Dakota affirmed its conviction that 
sex is a gift from God reserved exclusively in marriage between a man and a woman 
and that those who are not married are called to sexual abstinence.

     

Internet holds promise as a voice for the world's poor, communications congress 
told

     (ENI) New communications technologies hold "a tremendous potential to 
reshape media power relations, taking a large measure of power out of the hands 
of government censors and the hands of commercial gatekeepers" and giving it back 
to the poor of the world, according to a speaker at the third congress of the 
World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) meeting in the Netherlands 
the first week in July.

     The Internet may offer the poor a unique opportunity to make their voices 
heard in "the global conversation," said Anuradha Vittachi, director of a London-
based foundation supporting democratic media development. She argued that the 
Internet offered "a change of direction in the flow of information," crucial for 
building grassroots democracy.

     "When citizens are the media, with all their multi-truth diversity, the 
professional media will finally have to shed their arrogance and become no longer 
top-down disseminators of north-centric truths, but rather the servants of the 
public that they should always have been," she said at the congress that drew 250 
participants from 83 countries.

     She deplored the fact that nine out of 10 people in the world have no access 
to the Internet, calling it "an abuse of human rights for the voices of the 
majority of the world's poor to go unheard."

     Christians committed to justice and reconciliation should not cede 
cyberspace to the conservatives, said Dr. Anne Foerst, professor of computer 
science and theology at St. Bonaventure University in the US. "When you search 
the Internet for Christian websites, what you usually find is the Christian 
right, because they have put so much money into website development." She added, 
"The technology of the web is so utterly democratic that if we get our act together 
we can change a lot."

     Foerst also warned that the Internet is not objective, that "every single site
 has been written by people with a specific intention. We have to be careful 
not to mythologize the web as a source of absolute authority and truth."