Thursday, November 10, 2011
New appointment to key role
So when I said I was visiting St John's College on Tuesday two days ago what I was actually doing was going for a job interview there. As interviewer (one of a group of five), not interviewee. At the end of the interviews we reached a decision which I felt very good about. Today, wheels turning quickly, the appointment of the new Dean of the College of the Southern Cross (or Tikanga Pakeha part of St John's College) has been announced. The Dean will be Helen-Ann Hartley. Her bio has a few details which I might get wrong if I work from memory, so head to Taonga to read it all, to say nothing of reading about her in the New Yorker.
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4 comments:
Liberal catholicism (or maybe catholic liberalism) with a feminist edge may reflect where a lot of the hierarchy in NZ Anglicanism are, but you have to wonder whether it has the spark to inspire the church to mission or the light to attract the unconverted. The US, Canada and UK experience of remorseless decline give us pause to wonder.
Most churchgoers in the Anglican Anglosphere are already middle-aged and older women.
Martin
Thanks a lot, Peter, for doing your bit to help in the appointment of a recognised woman theologian to the important post of Dean of the College of the Southern Cross - part of St.John's College, Auckland - our major Anglican theological institute in Aotearoa/New Zealand & Pacifica.
Martin's put-down of this exciting new appointment in ACANZP will not surprise anyone following his anti-liberal stance on this blog. The rest of us will rejoice that the Holy Spirit has moved the hearts and minds of the appointing authorities to employ the learned pastoral and teaching skills of Dr.Hartley - a woman with a great provenance in the service of the C. of E. - into the team of the Faculty at St.John's.
Dr. Hartley will no doubt be a welcome addition to the staff, and a worthy teaching successor to former staff members like Dr.Janet Crawford, who, very likely, would share her aims and objectives for the future of St.John's College, as a training establishment for the priesthood - of both women and men.
“Liberal catholicism (or maybe catholic liberalism) with a feminist edge may reflect where a lot of the hierarchy in NZ Anglicanism are, but you have to wonder whether it has the spark to inspire the church to mission or the light to attract the unconverted. The US, Canada and UK experience of remorseless decline give us pause to wonder.”—Martin
The “remorseless decline” affects ALL DENOMINATIONS in these countries, Martin. It affects the conservative denominations that you favor, just as much as it affects the liberals that you so obviously despise.
It’s an accelerating cultural paradigm shift in the West, my friend. Here in America, even the Southern Baptists (who have always been well known for artificially inflating their membership figures, anyway) have acknowledged steep declines over the past years—unprecedented admissions for them. The 1950s world appears to have been a fluke in more than one aspect—both regarding widespread church attendance as well as widespread material prosperity.
In particular, surveys show that young people, who have grown up under the example of con evo reaction these past 35 years, are generally turned off toward ALL religious systems. The American fundagelicals have succeeded in reversing the much-touted “American exceptionalism” to the post-WWII European secular trends that so many Christians lamented 50 or 60 years ago. We are now much more like the Europeans in this regard. Of course, there continue to be local pockets of widespread church attendance like the 1950s (fragments of the South and Southwest come to mind) but much of this often reflects in-migration of populations from other parts of the country and abroad, rather than local indigenous growth.
Christianity is losing its relevance to most people in the West. Our job should be to re-build the Church to deal with the new secular age, not simply lament our declining influence from some mythical “Golden Age.”
Kurt Hill
Enjoying the peak fall foliage
In Brooklyn, NY
Thanks for that reality check, Kurt.
Perhaps one of the reasons people are not attracted to Christian Churches is our failure to live up to the advise of Jesus "They will know you are my disciples by your LOVE'
(Not by your self-righteousness!)
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