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  • Synod Decisions
  • Praying together using prayers a millennium old
  • Creation Season
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The seasons are turning, and in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia Anglicans are making a number of church decisions - we need to take care that they are good decisions; or we might need to go back to the drawing board and start afresh from the ground up.

In the wider church, we are conscious of our responsibility for creation, for the environment, for our planet. This season is a good time to highlight that.

As always, we are drawn (together) into God's life - the collect is a genre of prayer that reminds us of this and facilitates that.

I'm pleased with the interest in the facebook liturgy page associated with the Liturgy web - it now has over 20,000 likes.

As always there are lots of resources on the regularly-updated Liturgy website that can help us individually and in our communities. Let us also pray for each other.

Anyone can sign up here to receive emails.
Rev. Bosco Peters

Synod Decisions

In the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, General Synod Te Hinota Whanui is asking diocesan synods and hui amorangi to assent to a series of statutes.

A lot of our decisions are confused and confusing. If you are involved in this decision-making process, you need to be clear in your voting.

Here are conversations about these decisions:
Synod Decisions
and
The Alternative Eucharist’s Alternative

In summary: New Zealand’s Anglican agreements are difficult to find – and when you find them there is disagreement about what we have agreed to. They are confused and confusing. At first blush, the agreements give a semblance of being carefully thought through, with a plethora of legal-sounding “Whereas” clauses, and so forth. But the statutes we are being asked to assent to increase the sense of confusion and “all the people doing what is right in their own eyes”.

Ancient Collects Reworked


It is great, week by week, to explore prayers that we have been praying for well over a thousand years. Here's the prayer for last Sunday and this week. You will notice, the title of this email is taken from this prayer. 

Let us pray (in silence) [that what is good within us may flourish]

Pause

Faithful God,
source of all good,
graft in our hearts the love of your name,
and bind us more closely to you
so that you nourish the goodness you sow in us
and, by your watchful care,
you tend and guard the good you have nourished;
through Jesus Christ
who is alive with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

Creation Season

In the month of September, and concluding on the feast of St Francis on October 4, many people focus on creation. For Christians, creation is not merely an academic discussion about evolution or not – it is now, much more, seen as an essential part of mission, in partnership with others who share concern for “our common home”.

It is possible to remain committed to the three year lectionary (RC) and its derivative, the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL).

You can find a "creation reading" of our shared biblical texts here (we are in Year B).

The additional value of using the agreed, shared texts of our three-year lectionary, rather than abandoning the lectionary to pick other, “convenient”, creation proof-texts using a concordance, is that by staying with the lectionary texts we demonstrate that creation is an integral thread woven through the whole Bible.
Celebrating Eucharist is a free online guidebook to contemporary worship with resources you can use or adapt. It can also be used in discussion groups as well as individual reflection.

The Online Chapel is also a place to go for prayer and reflection.

Please pray for all who are part of the community around this website. And know there are people committed to praying for you.

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Copyright © 2018 Rev. Bosco Peters, All rights reserved.


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