"Share the Bread"

I have just started a new blog that I hope all of you will check out. It is called "Share the Bread" and it is the blog of the Evangelism Commission of the Diocese of Bethlehem. I am very excited about it.

Bethlehem in Hebrew means "house of bread" and we croutons (as we call ourselves) are committed to sharing Good News. Our mission statement is "Live God's love: tell what you have seen and heard."

The purpose of "Share the Bread" is to share and live God's love by telling, showing and pointing to what we have seen and heard.

We believe that every Christian is called to share Good News. Our job is to equip the equippers--the congregations, clergy and laity--of the diocese to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ in northeast Pennsylvania and all around the world.

"Share the Bread" will highlight both the work of the diocese in evangelism and also share ideas, resources, articles, news stories and discussion starters so that you may become a more proficient and eager sharer of the bread of life.

Our Commission's mission statement is also a prayer, the collect for evangelism written by our Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Paul Marshall.

Holy God, your Son called us to wrap the whole world in your saving embrace. By your Holy Spirit give us compassion, purpose and energy to invite into your Church those who do not yet know the transforming power of your love. We ask this through Him who has brought us from darkness to light, your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We will soon be launching on ChurchPost a corresponding e-newsletter also called "Share the Bread" which will highlight articles, activities, tips and news of evangelism ministries within the diocese.

One of our goals as the Evangelism Commission is to bring timely, relevant and useful training and teaching on evangelism as close as possible to the congregations that need it. I think this blog and the accompanying newsletter will help us do that.

So far, here is what we have posted:

• "Beating the Boundaries". About our upcoming Evangelism/Stewardship workshop on April 25th with Terry Parsons.
• I am Episcopalian: Announcing the new microsite containing short videos of people "sharing their deep, personal connections to the big, wide, vibrant church that we are."
• Kingston: A sign of Faith: An account of the experience of Grace Church, Kingston, PA as they utilize a digital billboard to advertise their church, particularly this last Ash Wednesday.
• Unbinding the Gospel Project. This last convention, we gave every parish and every priest a copy of the book Unbinding the Gospel, with the goal that every parish undertake a study of that book. Here is an update of the project and news of interactive on-line group initiated by the UBG Project.
• A Refreshing Welcome: A fun piece about how two New Orleans churches found a way to use their rest rooms to market their churches during this past Mardi Gras.

Come and join us as we "Share the Bread."

"40"

I am Episcopalian

Welcome to I am Episcopalian, launched this Ash Wednesday 2009, the beginning of Lent.

The Episcopal Church is a big, colorful, vibrant church. We hope you will see that in the wide spectrum of its members represented here on this site.

In our Church you may touch ancient traditions and experience intelligent inquiry. It is an expansive Church, a loving Church, with strong ties to our roots as a nation. We are a thoughtful, inquiring, freedom-loving and welcoming body, and we thrive not only in the U.S., but also throughout Latin America, Asia and Europe.

Learn more here.

Why the wheels fell off

The following is a brief explanation, made as simple as one could make it, of why we are in a global recession. It was presented by Andreas Whittam Smith, who holds the title of First Church Estates Commissioner to the General Synod of the Church of England.



No, he was not driving the car, nor did he loosen the bolts to illustrate what he meant. What he did do was write the following paper. Of course, it is written from the English perspective, but I think everything in it applies to our experience as well. It well worth the read.

A brief account of the financial crisis

By Andreas Whittam Smith, First Church Estates Commissioner

The deep recession now under way differs in two respects from anything we have experienced in our lifetimes:

1. It is totally global in nature. It affects both the West and the rest of the world. I emphasise this aspect because there is a tendency in Britain to think that it is only the US and Europe that are facing difficulties. Thirty years of globalisation means that every country, from China to the tiniest African state, is caught up in it.
2. Its proximate cause is a sudden withdrawal of credit by banks that has reduced business activity. This crisis developed spontaneously and was not the result of direct action by governments to cool their economies as has often happened in the past.

The over-trading by the banks that created simultaneous bubbles in housing, in consumer credit and in the financial industry itself – driven by greed - finally collapsed under its own weight in the second half of 2007. These booms were not confined to the West. There have been unsustainable rises in residential property values all over the world – from the United States and Britain to Eastern Europe and from India to Thailand and Vietnam.

Governments unwittingly created the conditions under which unbridled speculation could race ahead. Two policy changes have proved to be highly significant. In a pattern that repeats itself in this story, they were expected at the time to bring large benefits to the world economy and have done so; their perverse consequences have arisen only recently:

1. The first was the removal of external barriers to trade. The promotion of free trade through international agreements began soon after the end of World War II. In the 1930s, protectionism had prolonged the Great Depression. In contrast free trade benefits developed and developing countries alike. Each undertakes those activities in which it has an advantage. This expansion of free trade was a continuous process and a succession of free trade pacts was still being signed in the 1990s.
2. The second was the lowering of internal barriers to trade, or deregulation by another name, comprising the removal, reduction, and simplification of restrictions on business and individuals. Promoted originally by Mrs. Thatcher and President Reagan from 1980 onward, a wide variety of businesses in many countries benefited including banking. The rationale was similar to that put forward to support free trade – that fewer and simpler regulations would lead to a raised level of competitiveness and thus bring higher productivity, more efficiency and lower prices overall.

The negative consequences arose as follows:

1. As far as free trade is concerned, industrial groups in recent years have used it to move work from their own countries to less developed countries in order to cut costs. At the same time poorer countries, having signed up to free trade in the expectation that it would bring jobs, have been forced in return to deregulate their capital markets. This was the bargain. The new arrangements have precipitated a dramatic increase in capital flows. Higher output in Asian countries, in oil exporters and in other developing countries created excess savings that flowed into the financial markets of the industrialized West. Jobs have been going one way and savings the other. And it is these excess savings deployed by the banks that have created financial bubbles.
2. Deregulation of the banks removed restrictions on what activities they could undertake. As a matter of fact, contrary to what many suppose, it didn’t weaken prudential regulation as such. Prudential regulation specifies how much capital banks should hold to support a given volume of lending. The most striking aspect of banking deregulation in Britain was that building societies, mutual organisations, could transform themselves into shareholder owned banks specialising in mortgage lending as well as in providing other financial services previously forbidden to them. They did not make a success of their new freedom. Every building society that demutualised has either been taken over by a bigger bank or rescued by the Government. None has remained independent. Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley are examples.

Meanwhile the banks had invented a business technique that improved the workings of financial markets but, like free trade and deregulation, it had a dark side. Towards the end of the 1980s banks learnt to take the individual loans they had made, each underpinned by a legal agreement between the bank and the borrower, and combine them together so that the bundle became a security that could be traded. The process is known as securitisation. It started with mortgage loans extended to homebuyers. The banks would place these packages into specially created companies or trusts, not subject to prudential regulation, which new investors would be invited to finance in return for the interest that the underlying loan agreements provided. In this way the banks could clear their books of their old loans and then make fresh commitments, earn fresh fees and finally repeat the process all over again. The advantage was that risks were widely dispersed.

As a matter of fact, the unregulated bodies were still engaged in banking even though it was never described as such. For they borrowed short-term in order to finance longer-term business. This was shadow banking, more akin to nineteenth century practice than late twentieth century. The ratio of borrowing to capital supporting the loans was often well beyond best practice. It was legal only in the sense that ways of avoiding tax are legal until the Government closes the loophole. While it lasted the banks had found a way of escaping prudential regulation. They exploited the gap.

Ten years later, in the late 1990s, the banks devised a second method of removing risk from their books and freeing up reserves. Credit default swaps were invented. A third party would assume the risk of a debt going sour and in exchange would receive regular payments, similar to insurance premiums, from the bank concerned. Again on first appearance credit default swaps seemed like an excellent idea. They were an additional way of cutting risk up into small pieces and spreading it widely. Banks became enthusiastic consumers of credit insurance, as did the investors buying the loans that banks were securitizing.

Once more problems appeared. The idea got about that, paradoxically, risk was nothing to worry about. It could be split up, passed on, sold off.
Rather than being placed at the centre of financial transactions, where it ought to be, risk was banished to the sidelines. It was a detail that could easily be handled. At the same time, banks became careless about the standing of the counterparties to whom they were handing off risk. The USA’s biggest insurance company, AIG, had to be bailed out by American taxpayers after it had defaulted on $14 billion worth of credit default swaps it had made to investment banks, insurance companies and scores of financial entities.

Consider then where we had got to by 2003. The excess savings of vigorous Asian economies, oil producers and other developing countries that had flowed into Western banks had pushed interest rates to very low levels. Globalisation had removed bargaining power from workers in the West with the result that inflation was only a percentage point or two per annum. In real terms interest rates were more or less zero. For banks, in other words, money was free. Furthermore now that loans could be securitised and removed from banks’ books so that they no longer needed the backing of their capital, lending activity had begun to appear costless. In addition, lending had acquired the extra virtue of appearing riskless because credit insurance would ensure that others would bear the cost of defaults. The upshot was clear. When money is free, and lending is costless and riskless, the rational lender will keep on lending until there is no one left to lend to.

To reach this Eldorado, the means were at hand. Automated credit scoring speeded up the processing of applications for loans. Trimming back on documentation brought more borrowers into the fold. A proliferation of products offering credit on easy terms was devised. Moreover it didn’t seem to matter if such hastily written business wasn’t always of a high quality. After all the loans were to be packaged up and sold on. In other words, the banks originating the loans would have no stake in the borrower’s continued solvency. At the same time, pay levels in the financial services industry were topped up with bonus schemes that gave very high rewards to those managers who could ‘shift product’. New borrowing was piled on old borrowing, risk on risk.

Whereas the sum of all financial assets – stocks, bonds, loans, mortgages and the like, which are claims on real things – used to be about equal to the total of the world’s output of goods and services, by 2007 financial assets were approaching four times global output. In 1990, only 33 countries had financial assets whose value exceeded that of their respective outputs. By 2006, this number had more than doubled to 72 countries. Brazil, Russia, India and China were among those with financial assets worth far more than their gross national products.

In the high summer of 2007, the first cracks appeared in the great edifice of credit that had gradually been built up over twenty years. The beginnings of a decline in US property prices were the cause. The most over-geared borrowers were asked to repay their loans. They became forced sellers. This produced a triple whammy effect. As asset prices had fallen, borrowers made losses. If they couldn’t fully repay their loans and went bankrupt, the banks that had financed them likewise suffered. At the same time, the values of similar assets had been put under pressure. This meant that the credit standing of fresh ranks of borrowers had been damaged. As a result a further cohort was forced to go through the same process with the same results. And then there followed another cohort and another cohort and so on.

Some 18 months since it began, this de-leveraging process is still under way and, if anything, gains in momentum. It is a doomsday machine. In my view, it explains almost everything: -

a. Why property prices continue to fall
b. Why any gains in stock market prices are quickly swamped by fresh selling
c. Why the banks find there is no end to the losses that they are incurring and that they thus constantly need re-financing
d. Why banks remain terrified and will engage in fresh lending only if the government forces them to do so or if it removes the risk.

The recession will continue until this process is over.

You can find the paper here or here.

On the way to God

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori answers the question "Why should I be an Episcopalian?"



Here she answers the question "Is the only way to God through Jesus?"



The answer she gives in the second video is very much like the answer I have given to the very same question asked of me in both public settings like this and one on one. Jefferts Schori says that to limit a persons salvation to a particular faith statement is to limit the possibility of grace.

The way I would say it is to say God's sovereignty is such that God can do whatever God pleases whenever and however God pleases, and the way God works is far above my--and our--understanding. Christians understand that we are separated from God by sin, that God made us in God's image and blessed us, but that we have gone far away from what God made us to be. I would say that through Jesus' incarnation, his death on the cross and resurrection, we have been rescued from our captivity and the way to God has been opened. The incarnation, passion and resurrection also shows us Christians that God is not only concerned with our souls or spirits, but is concerned with all of us and all of creation and that in Christ God is renewing and restoring all things. Pentecost shows us that God has given us a role in the renewal and restoration of God's people. Our Prayer Book says in the Catechism that "the mission of the church is retore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ." (p. 855)

So, as Bishop Jefferts Schori has said, God has made promises and they are being kept. God has restored and is restoring humanity and creation to our place of blessedness. God has given us a role and a task in caring for God's people and creation.

There are two things I would add to her answer: if a person asked me to tell them Good News of God in Jesus Christ, I would do it and I would invite them to make room in their lives and heart, to explore and experience the love of God in Christ Jesus. Second, I would echo what the Bishop said, it is essential that we Christians demonstrate the love of God in how we live and how we are with people. In the Diocese of Bethlehem we say "Share God's love: tell what you have seen and heard."

President Obama's story is a good example of someone telling what he has seen and heard. His is a story that I have found echoed in parishioners, co-workers, friends and acquaintances over and over again. He said at the National Prayer Breakfast last week:

I was not raised in a particularly religious household. I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist, grandparents who were non-practicing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was skeptical of organized religion, even as she was the kindest, most spiritual person I’ve ever known. She was the one who taught me as a child to love, and to understand, and to do unto others as I would want done.

I didn’t become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck – no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God’s spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose – His purpose.

Christians often put conditions on God's activity. It is natural and everyone does it. After all, God is a tad bigger and a tad more complex than we are. The problem comes when we use God--our limited image of God-- to reinforce our fears or when we assume that God can only work in everybody else exactly the way God works with us. 

People are seeking love, hope, meaning, direction, connection and purpose. Another way of saying that is that people seek salvation. Our call and our challenge is to both offer Good News--to be, in our words and actions, ambassadors for Christ--while at the same time allowing God's Spirit to work without constraint or condition.

Or as Father Matthew says:

Truck Day, 2009

If you are looking for a sure sign of spring, there is something more reliable than ground hogs and as welcome as the first crocus. And that is Truck Day at Fenway Park!

This is when the moving vans are loaded with the gear, exercise equipment and stuff needed for Spring Training in Fort Myers.

The Globe said it best: "Sorry Punxsutawney Phil and your six-more-weeks-of-winter prediction, but if you live in New England and are a fan of Red Sox, a sure sign of spring has arrived -- Truck Day!"

Here are some key Sox spring training dates that are just around the corner:

Feb. 12 — Reporting day for Red Sox pitchers and catchers
Feb. 14 — First workout for Red Sox pitchers and catchers
Feb. 16 — Reporting day for Red Sox positional players
Feb. 18 — First Red Sox full-squad workout
Feb. 25 — Red Sox spring training games begin

There is probably no [blank].

MadPriest in running a bus slogan contest.

In England, Wales and Scotland, a group of atheists bought ad space on buses and bus shelters saying "there is probably no God. Now stop worrying and start enjoying your life."

It was a only a matter of time before Christian groups starting fighting back with ads of their own. Come to think of it, it was only a matter of time before some parody appeared.

Go here and see how your own ideas look on a bus ad. The essential formula is this: