United Nations, Hear Our Prayer

It seems that the Episcopal Church has released a “stations of the MDGs.” For the uninitiated, the MDG’s are the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. And yes, the “stations” part is modeled after the traditional Stations of the Cross. Normally, something like the “stations of the MDG’s” would simply be an exercise in bad liturgy and hokey social justice activities, except the Episcopalians promoting them specifically want them used in place of the Stations of the Cross.

I want to approach this issue fairly and recognize that there are many Episcopalians who are tying to remain faithful to Scripture and tradition. But, when I hear about actions like this, it just makes me wonder what is left of the Christian identity of the Episcopal Church. Sure, the MDG’s, as long as they are not implemented in a liberal fashion, are perfectly acceptable and even beneficial. And, doing the Stations of the Cross during Lent and Holy Week is not a dogmatic command, but still. “Stations of the MDG’s” during Holy Week in place of the Stations of the Cross just seems trivial and tacky and demonstrates how some in the Episcopal Church (and admittedly elsewhere including our own Church) have little use for Jesus Christ.

For a copy of the service, go here (warning .doc file)

This entry was posted on January 24, 2008 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Anglican and Episcopal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “United Nations, Hear Our Prayer”

  1. Fr. J. Says:
    January 25, 2008 at 4:52 am

    This would be utterly appalling if it just weren’t so silly. Poverty is a terrible and serious problem which will never be solved by poster sized paper stations with the MDG’s printed on them. At best this is a valiant effort to draw attention away from the person of Christ in his passion and death for our salvation during Holy Week.

    If we look at Mother Teresa who did more to ease human suffering than any Anglican program in history, we see that it was precisely her constant meditation on Christ dying on the cross and calling out “I thirst” that drove her ministry and that of her order today. She was very clear in stating that she saught to relief the suffering of the person of Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor. Episcopalians would do well to dust off their Stations of the Cross and recommit to serving HIM.

  2. A Simple Sinner Says:
    January 25, 2008 at 10:15 am

    There was a photograph I had seen of Episcopalian bishops and ministers celebrating a service underneath a banner of the MDGs…

    The Episcopalians get more column inches & bandwidth than they deserve. Honestly, it is just embarassing…

    Their membership is shrinking (if you can find 500,000 in all the parishes on Sunday, I would eat my hat) and their future is to be clergy club for second-career, divorced women and activist gay clergy… While they hemorage members, the numer of clergy continues to increase, and do so appreciably!

    In 1994, when the Episcopal Church claimed it had 2.5 million members and 7,413 churches, it had 14,645 clergy, 170 members per cleric.

    In 2005, they claimed to have 2.2 million members and 7,155 churches, served by 17,817 clergy, (or 122 members per cleric.)

    Now those numbers are from 2005!

    Sorting through the numbers isn’t easy… There are lies, damned lies, statistics and then ecclesial statistics! But the chances are, that today the ratio of clergy to active members is much closer to 1:50.

    (see http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2610)

    They have been in decline for a good long time…

    PECUSA (as it was then called) had 3,615,643 in the year 1965 when the population of the US was 194,302,963 or 1.86% of the population. Had those numbers remained constant with population growth, there would be 5.58M Episcoplalians today.

    A more vexing and probably far more important number to consider over the ASA, Women’s ordination, ordinand age or seminary attendence is one you seldome hear: Birthrates.

    How many infant baptisms?

    Without babies you are left with a church chock-full-o’ middle-aged second career clergy women and elderly clerics in small chapels with more people at the altar than coming to it.

    When the last Episcopal layman dies, he is going to get one hell of a knock down, drag out, show-stopping funeral.

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