Last week I went to a special parochial church council meeting in Littlebourne, Kent, in the diocese of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The benefice of four churches, one with just ten worshippers, somehow manages to raise £80,000-plus each year of which they give more than £50,000 to the diocese as combined quota payments. It costs the diocese about £40,000 to maintain the Rector, the Rev John Allan. When he retires, this hard-working, successful benefice, albeit with congregations of mostly elderly or retired people, will instead be given a part-time, unpaid 'house-for-duty' priest. Apparently, they have been told, they will not be given their own priest ever again, 'even if you raise £1 million.'
Read this in conjunction with the Ugley Vicar’s article and all becomes clear.
What really breaks my heart is that my family roots go deep in this part of Kent, and to think of these churches being without clegy is really hard to take.
So what is to stop the church in question from simply keeping its quota payment, and hiring its own minister? It seems they are being used as a milch cow until such time as they are no longer financially viable. But people despise being put in that position. It’s little better than serfdom. I can’t believe they will voluntarily contribute large amounts of money to sustain the incomes of the very people who would use them in such a way.
carl
In a nutshell, the NPP suggests that:
1. the Judaism of Paul’s day was not a religion of self-righteousness that taught salvation by merit;
2. Paul’s argument with the Judaizers was not about a “works-righteousness” view of salvation, over against the Christian view of salvation by grace;
3. Instead, Paul’s concern was for the status of Gentiles in the church;
4. So justification is more about ecclesiology than soteriology, more about who is part of the covenant community and what are its boundary markers than about how a person stands before God.Thus the NPP on Paul purports to help us:
1. better understand Paul and the early church in their original context,
2. vindicate Paul and early Christianity from the charge of anti-Semitism;
3. clip the Gordian knot of theological impasse between Catholic and Protestant interpreters of Paul; and
4. articulate an understanding of justification that has inherent social dimensions and thus secure a better theological foundation for social justice and ecumenism among evangelical interpreters of the Scriptures; among other things.
carl
Gaaah! Perhaps a friendly moderator could delete the inadvertent post [3] above. It doesn’t belong on this thread.
carl