#ecclesiology — Public Fediverse posts

#1279 John Warner-Davies (ed) - Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association, Vol XVII, No 73, April 1985. The British Records Association, London.

#Archives #Archivists #BritishRecordsAssociation #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#1279 John Warner-Davies (ed) - Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association, Vol XVII, No 73, April 1985. The British Records Association, London.

#Archives #Archivists #BritishRecordsAssociation #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#1279 John Warner-Davies (ed) - Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association, Vol XVII, No 73, April 1985. The British Records Association, London.

#Archives #Archivists #BritishRecordsAssociation #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#1279 John Warner-Davies (ed) - Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association, Vol XVII, No 73, April 1985. The British Records Association, London.

#Archives #Archivists #BritishRecordsAssociation #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#1279 John Warner-Davies (ed) - Archives: The Journal of the British Records Association, Vol XVII, No 73, April 1985. The British Records Association, London.

#Archives #Archivists #BritishRecordsAssociation #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#LGBTQ English #Wikipedia deletion alert

Could you save this LGBTQ related #English Wikipedia article from deletion?

Inclusive church
* Churches that recognize LGBTQ+ equality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_church
Discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Inclusive_church

#Inclusive #Ecclesiology #LGBTQ

#LGBTQ English #Wikipedia deletion alert

Could you save this LGBTQ related #English Wikipedia article from deletion?

Inclusive church
* Churches that recognize LGBTQ+ equality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_church
Discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Inclusive_church

#Inclusive #Ecclesiology #LGBTQ

#LGBTQ English #Wikipedia deletion alert

Could you save this LGBTQ related #English Wikipedia article from deletion?

Inclusive church
* Churches that recognize LGBTQ+ equality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_church
Discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Inclusive_church

#Inclusive #Ecclesiology #LGBTQ

#LGBTQ English #Wikipedia deletion alert

Could you save this LGBTQ related #English Wikipedia article from deletion?

Inclusive church
* Churches that recognize LGBTQ+ equality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_church
Discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Inclusive_church

#Inclusive #Ecclesiology #LGBTQ

#LGBTQ English #Wikipedia deletion alert

Could you save this LGBTQ related #English Wikipedia article from deletion?

Inclusive church
* Churches that recognize LGBTQ+ equality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_church
Discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Inclusive_church

#Inclusive #Ecclesiology #LGBTQ

Excommunicate Me

Excommunicate me, then.
Ring the bell if you have one. Draw the line in ash. Nail the notice to the chapel door. Speak my name in the flat voice reserved for weather, death, and disappointment. Tell the saints to avert their eyes. Tell the children not to ask questions. Tell the old women in the kitchen to lower their voices when I pass. I have grown used to doors closing with the gentleness of those who think themselves righteous.

Excommunicate me for loving too widely, for asking where the missing ones went, for lingering too long at the edge of the map where the heretics, addicts, doubters, dissidents, and queer-eyed prophets make their fires at night. Excommunicate me for saying that Christ still wanders there, coat smelling of smoke, hands warm from other people’s wounds. Excommunicate me for suspecting that the kingdom keeps being born in places your committees have not approved.

Cast me out for refusing to confuse your fences with holiness.
Cast me out for noticing how often your purity is purchased with somebody else’s loneliness.
Cast me out for believing that a table is still a table even when the wrong people find bread there first.

I know how this works. First comes the sorrowful meeting. Then the careful language. Then the phrases dressed in prayer like soldiers dressed in hymnals. We say discernment when we mean fear. We say order when we mean control. We say peace when we mean silence from those already bruised. We say love while measuring who may enter it. We say truth with our arms folded.

Excommunicate me because I cannot keep pretending that the wound in the Body is healed by cutting off another limb.

I have seen too much of the outside to fear it now. I have seen the banished making soup for one another. I have seen the condemned share coats in winter. I have seen those denied the sacraments become sacraments for each other: bread in famine, oil in sickness, a hand on the shoulder in the long vestibule of grief. I have heard better theology whispered on back steps than shouted from polished pulpits. I have watched the Spirit climb out the stained-glass window and go where she is not expected.

Excommunicate me, and I will go down among the unclaimed.
I will kneel beside the ones your footnotes could not save.
I will keep company with the mothers whose prayers embarrassed you, the children whose questions outgrew your answers, the men who wept when they were told to be strong, the women who spoke and were called dangerous, the wanderers who could not make your narrow gate into a home.

And if you shut me out from your sanctuary, I will make a sanctuary of the road.
If you deny me your blessing, I will learn the blessing of crows at morning, of rain on rusted tin, of strangers who still know how to share fire.
If you call me lost, I will answer that some of us were never meant to be found by empires.

Do not threaten me with the outer dark.
I have met God there.

Not the tidy god of minutes and motions, not the well-behaved deity who always sides with the CEO, but the God who haunts the threshold, who leaves the ninety-nine to go where the crying is, who touches the unclean and is not diminished, who slips through locked doors and still carries wounds, who keeps raising what the pious have buried.

Excommunicate me for this: I no longer believe belonging is yours to ration.
I no longer believe grace requires your seal.
I no longer believe heaven trembles when your vote is taken.
The veil was torn without your permission, and it has never been properly mended.

So do it.
Write me out.
Strike my name from the roll.
Erase me from the minutes.
Tell yourselves the garden is safer now that one more wild thing has been removed.

But listen: roots work in secret. Seeds pass through the beaks of birds and are planted in their shit. Wind ignores decrees. What you cast out does not always die. Sometimes it takes hold beyond the wall and flowers in the rubble, and those passing by say, I did not know beauty could grow here.

Excommunicate me, then.
I will go with Christ among the cast out.
I will go where the lepers still ring their bells, where the scapegoats stagger into the wilderness, where the rejected stone waits in the dust.
And when at last you come looking for God, breathless with your censures, your keys jangling at your side, do not be surprised to find us already inside the feast, the doors flung wide, the music loud, the wounded laughing, and every empty place at the table set for one more.

Autocephaly and the Age of Polarization

Autocephaly means “self-headed.” In the life of the church, it refers to a body that governs itself rather than being ruled by a higher authority elsewhere. In its proper sense, it is not necessarily rebellion, and it is not the same thing as schism. It can be a way of honoring local history, local language, local suffering, and local responsibility. A people may need space to pray, discern, and order their common life without being managed by a distant power that neither knows them nor loves them well.

There is something good in that. Not all unity is holy. Sometimes what is called unity is actually domination. Sometimes centralization silences the weak, flattens the local, and blesses the priorities of empire. In such cases, a measure of self-rule can be a form of dignity. It can protect a people from being absorbed into somebody else’s story. It can allow faith to be spoken in a native tongue, clothed in local memory, and embodied in forms that are truly rooted rather than imposed.

Yet every good thing casts a shadow.

What begins as the rightful desire not to be ruled can become the unrighteous desire not to be related. What begins as self-governance can harden into self-enclosure. In a polarized age, that danger is everywhere.

Communities wounded by neglect or control often retreat into their own certainty. They do not merely seek freedom; they begin to seek purity. They define themselves not only by what they are, but by what they are not. They become “self-headed” in the deepest and most dangerous sense: accountable to no one beyond themselves.

Then autocephaly becomes more than a church structure. It becomes a spiritual condition.

We can see this far beyond ecclesial debates. Political tribes become autocephalous. Media ecosystems become autocephalous. Families, congregations, movements, and even individuals become autocephalous. Each claims its own authority, its own facts, its own moral universe. Each comes to believe that dependence is weakness and mutual correction is betrayal. The result is not healthy difference within a living body, but a scattering of severed heads, each insisting it alone can see.

Modern polarization feeds on this instinct. People feel unheard, misrepresented, and overruled, so they gather with those who share their grievance. At first this may be a necessary act of survival. There are times when people truly must withdraw from abusive systems.

There are times when a community must say, “We cannot remain under this yoke.” But the wound that gives birth to separation can also become the justification for permanent alienation. The memory of harm becomes the theology of exclusion.

And here the church must be careful.

Christian faith is not a celebration of either domination or isolation. The body of Christ is neither a machine controlled from above nor a pile of disconnected parts. It is one body with many members, each distinct, each necessary, none sufficient unto itself. The hand is not the foot. The eye is not the ear.

Yet none can say to another, “I have no need of you.” The danger of our age is that we have become very skilled at saying precisely that.

So, the question is not whether local integrity matters. It does. The question is whether local integrity can remain joined to communion.

Can a people govern themselves without idolizing themselves? Can they protect their own life without imagining that all truth now resides only within their border? Can they remember that self-rule is a discipline of responsibility, not a license for self-absolutizing?

These are not only questions for Orthodox churches. They are questions for all of us. They are questions for congregations that split, for denominations that fracture, for parties that demonize, for citizens who sort themselves into mutually hostile worlds. They are questions for every person tempted to confuse conviction with closure.

Perhaps the deepest Christian word against polarization is not uniformity but communion.

Communion does not erase difference. It does not demand silence about injustice. It does not ask the wounded to pretend they have not been wounded. But it does insist that the goal of freedom is not merely separation. The goal is reconciled life. The goal is a community in which truth can be spoken, dignity honored, wrongs confessed, and relationship restored without coercion.

In that sense, the lesson of autocephaly for our time is double-edged. It reminds us that no community should be crushed under distant domination. But it also warns us that self-governance without shared life can become another captivity. We may escape the tyranny of others only to enthrone the tyranny of ourselves.

The church, if it is to speak faithfully in an age of polarization, must resist both temptations. It must reject false unity built on control, and false freedom built on estrangement. It must become a people capable of bearing difference without making an idol of division. It must learn again how to be many members with one life.

For the great question of our age is not simply who will rule. It is whether we still desire to belong to one another at all.

#1179 Christine North (ed) - Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, New Series II, Vol II, Part 1. Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro, 1994.

#Cornwall #Kernow #ChristineNorth #RoyalInstitutionOfCornwall #Archives #WilliamBorlase #PlaceNames #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#1179 Christine North (ed) - Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, New Series II, Vol II, Part 1. Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro, 1994.

#Cornwall #Kernow #ChristineNorth #RoyalInstitutionOfCornwall #Archives #WilliamBorlase #PlaceNames #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#1179 Christine North (ed) - Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, New Series II, Vol II, Part 1. Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro, 1994.

#Cornwall #Kernow #ChristineNorth #RoyalInstitutionOfCornwall #Archives #WilliamBorlase #PlaceNames #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#1179 Christine North (ed) - Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, New Series II, Vol II, Part 1. Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro, 1994.

#Cornwall #Kernow #ChristineNorth #RoyalInstitutionOfCornwall #Archives #WilliamBorlase #PlaceNames #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#1179 Christine North (ed) - Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, New Series II, Vol II, Part 1. Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro, 1994.

#Cornwall #Kernow #ChristineNorth #RoyalInstitutionOfCornwall #Archives #WilliamBorlase #PlaceNames #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#1149 John Buller - Statistical Account of the Parish of St. Just, in Penwith, in the County of Cornwall: With some Notice of its Ecclesiastical and Druidical Antiquities. Dyllansow Truran, Redruth, 1983, 1st Dyllansow edition, facsimile reprint of 1842 edition.

#JohnBuller #StJust #StJustInPenwith #Cornwall #Archaeology #Ecclesiology #Antiquities #BookOfTheDay

The Ecclesiological Investigations Unit of the AAR invites papers on:

1) Ecclesiologies of Freedom. How does churchly existence intersect with human #Freedom?

2) The #Ecclesiology of Project 2025 and similar versions worldwide. #Project2025

3) #Deconversion or #Conversion to "None". What makes people "deconvert" or reject religious institutional affiliation?

Check it all out!

@theology
@theologidons
@religion
@religidons
@histodons
@history

https://papers.aarweb.org/group/14897

I wrote this six years ago. Much of what I feared then has already come to pass, and it's getting worse day by day.
https://khanya.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/third-world-africa-again/
#orthodox #disunity #disintegration #ecclesiology

#682 A Warm Welcome to One and All: Kenwyn Parish Church, Kenwyn, Truro and All Saints' Church, Highertown, Truro. Kenwyn Parish Church and All Saints' Church Highertown, Truro, 1984, 1st edition. #Truro #Kenwyn #Highertown #Cornwall #Ecclesiology #Churches #BookOfTheDay

#667 C.A. Ralegh Radford et al (eds) - Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, New Series, Vol III, Part 4. Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro, 1960. #Cornwall #Kernow #CARaleghRadford #AKHamiltonJenkin #HLDouch #CharlesHenderson #RoyalInstitutionOfCornwall #Archaeology #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#650 C.A. Ralegh Radford et al (eds) - Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, New Series, Vol III, Part 2. Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro, 1958. #Cornwall #Kernow #CARaleghRadford #AKHamiltonJenkin #HLDouch #CharlesHenderson #RoyalInstitutionOfCornwall #Archaeology #Ecclesiology #BookOfTheDay

#492 Joyce Baylay - A Short History of The Church of St Andrew, Stratton, Cornwall. Bude Printing Co Ltd, Holsworthy, 1971, 2nd edition. #JoyceBaylay #Stratton #Cornwall #Ecclesiology #Churches #BookOfTheDay

#487 John Buller - Statistical Account of the Parish of St Just, in Penwith, in the County of Cornwall: With some Notice of its Ecclesiastical and Druidical Antiquities. R.D. Rodda, Penzance, 1842, 1st Edition. #JohnBuller #StJust #StJustInPenwith #Cornwall #Archaeology #Ecclesiology #Antiquities #BookOfTheDay

#453 Charles Thomas (as Cornubiensis) - Cornish Chapel Stories. Summaries and Plain Digits, St Clement, 2008, 1st Edition. #CharlesThomas #Cornwall #Methodism #Ecclesiology #Humour #BookOfTheDay

I welcome everyone to check out my book chapter on #decoloniality and #Reformed #ecclesiology in the edited volume, *Decolonial Horizons: Reshaping Synodality, Mission, and Social Justice*. @theologidons #theology @religion https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-44843-0_2

#313 S.V. Daniell - The Story of Cornwall's Churches. Tor Mark Press, Truro, c.1975, 1st edition. #Cornwall #Kernow #Churches #Ecclesiology #SVDaniell #TorMarkPress #BookOfTheDay

‘So the question we are really asking is, What can we do about race and racism in American culture and keep all THIS (gesturing toward the magnificent,vaulted, neo-gothic sanctuary)? The answer, my brothers and sisters, is NOTHING.’
—Will Campbell, Riverside Church, NYC 1984

#willcampbell #racism #church #ecclesiology #reconciliation