Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Our next meeting on Sunday 18th March

All are warmly welcome to the second of our Lent meetings on Sunday 18th March. As before, the meeting place is in Christ Church Cathedral (635 Ste Catherine West), between 5 and 5.15pm. You are of course also warmly welcome at Choral Evensong at 4pm. The reason for meeting in this way is to avoid the necessity of having security at the usual entrance to Fulford Hall. If you are delayed and arrive after the Cathedral is closed, you could call me on 514 847 1316.

At the meeting last Sunday groups defined questions we might discuss this next week. I have brought them together in four sets, and I suggest that we begin this Sunday’s meeting again in groups, each group tackling whichever one of the sets of questions they choose. After a suitable time we will share our findings in the whole group, and then finish with informal discussion over a light supper. As part of our process is to encourage discussion and inter-reaction, I will suggest that we try to form into different groupings.

The following are the questions arising from last week.


Immediate tasks
Do we need to respond to the communiqué of the Primates meeting? How?
What is the most effective way of getting our message out?
Do we believe a covenant is necessary?

Medium term possibilities
What do individuals, small groups want to do?
How can we organize to have numbers and resistance.
How can we deal with undue taking of authority by the Primates?
How much power will we allow the structures to have over us?
Are we witnessing a stealthy take-over by well organized, well funded right wing groups?
How can we become an effective cross-Canada network?

Longer term goals
Do we have a shared vision?
What should our vision be?
What do we want our church to look like in five years time?

Scripture, authority and Interpretation
What is the authority of Scripture?
What is the role of modern scriptural scholarship in reconciling extreme positions?
How can we be honest in Scriptural interpretation?
How do we promote better biblical Scholarship?

13 comments:

Earl A. Love said...

Great groupings of questions! I'd like to be in the first group. I believe we should respond to the primates' communiqué. Perhaps as an article/letter in the Montreal Anglican with a copy to the editors of the Montreal media (in both official languages of course) and other suggestions we come up with on Sunday.

From what I understand to date, I am afraid of the Covenant. I don't like to see the right-wing get more power than they already have. It should be voted against at General Synod in June.

Look forward to our discussions on Sunday.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Beth said...

I agree with you, Earl. Maybe we should also consider sending some members of our group to this upcoming conference on strategy for Synod:

http://www.wholemessage.ca/

Anonymous said...

Good idea Beth. I know of some who are already planning to go. Where is everyone - working!?:)

Anonymous said...

How does one post books to the site? I'd like to post some Karen Armstrong, Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, and John Selby Spong.

Anonymous said...

oh - anonymous is Earl - i can't seem to get my password, etc. rite.

Beth said...

Earl, you can send the book notes to me and I'll put them up on the website. For now, I'm managing the technical side of the website but maybe Michael will take it over eventually. If you want to write a little blurb about each book that would be great.

Blogger is a pain about posting our identities - the deleted comment above was me, because I couldn't get it to work either! You can email me at cassandra dot beth at gmail dot home, obviously replacing the "dots."

Anonymous said...

Hi Beth!

cassandra.beth@gmail.home

doesn't work. Are you the Beth of Beth and Jonathon I met a few weeks ago?

Earl

Beth said...

Yes, it's the same Beth. I typed the address wrong - sorry - it should be gmail dot COM. (If you click on the blue underlined "beth" and follow the link, you'll find out more about me than you probably want to know! Another email address is on my blog, too.)

I don't know why the new Blogger interface is so difficult about comments - they must be getting a lot of complaints.

Anonymous said...

Helo: This is Michael Pitts trying an experiment. I think it may be a question of clicking on the right radio button. I suspect the default (Google Blogger) only works if you have a google account. Lets see if it accept this.

Anonymous said...

Michael Pitts again
Ok. I used the "other" button for that and it worked. Now I am trying the "anonymous" button. Neither of these require you to supply an address.

Anonymous said...

So are we the only three alive?

Anonymous said...

Just to let you know, I have put a link to the "Anglicans Really Alive" webpage on the Cathedral's main page... Let me know if you also want a link in the same place to this blog. I thought it might be better initally if poeple got to the blog via the website.