Christ Church Notes
Week of Sunday, June 28, 2015
CCBNY New Front Steps
We love the progress of CCBNY's new front steps. Come see them for yourself on Sunday at the 9 am service!
June 2015 Spire
Click here to download a pdf of the June 2015 Spire. To read the Spire online, click here.
LGBT & Friends Fellowship Potluck Cancelled
Reminder that the LGBT & Friends Fellowship Potluck is cancelled this weekend. We will reschedule for a better time for most members. Happy Pride to all: LGBT and allies alike!
Summer Sunday Short Series - Begins July 12th
Many Episcopalians are proud of the increasing inclusiveness of their denomination. The first woman priest was ordained in 1974, the first woman Bishop elected in 1989, and the first woman Primate for the entire denomination was elected in 2006. Similarly with LGBT Christians. As early as 1976, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church declared that “homosexual persons are children of God who have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral concern and care of the Church.” The first openly gay Bishop was elected in 2003. And although many Episcopal clergy had already performed house blessings for gay couples, the General Convention authorized in 2012 a provisional rite of blessing for same-gender relationships. In the Diocese of New York clergy are permitted to perform same-gender marriages.
Although these steps forward may seem straightforward and clear cut to us, none of them came without struggle, prayer, reflection, study and hard work.
To help us explore the “whys” and “why nots”, and to help us appreciate the tremendous dialogue and theology behind these many changes, we have L. William Countryman’s Dirt, Greed & Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today. Countryman, an Episcopal educator at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, first explored these issues in 1985, but the Sunday Short Series will use his revised version of 2007. In both, he identifies Jewish, and later Christian, views on “property” and “purity,” especially the former, as being determinative.
July 12: Israel’s Basic Concept of Purity, pp. 17-64.
July 19: Women and Children as Property in Judaism and Christianity, pp. 144-184, 215-228.
July 26: Purity and Christianity, pp. 65-123.
August 2: New Testament Sexual Ethics and Today’s World, pp. 230- 283.
Please remember in your prayers
Scott Castle, Layton, Mary Beth Blom, Barbara Behrens, Dave, Toni, Ethan, Barbara McKinnon, Matthew Groban, Eleanor, Jan Pierce, Kris, Kevin Cook, Lucy Shively, Judith
Prayer intentions will remain listed for three weeks unless otherwise requested.
