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Please see the GAFCon website for some excellent additional news.
Pilgrims Go to Mount of Olives, Gethsemane
Nearly 30 tour buses carried the Global Anglican Future Conference’s 1,200 pilgrims to the Mount of Olives early on Monday, June 23.
Pilgrims worshipped, prayed together, and had their picture taken overlooking Old Jerusalem across the Kidron Valley. (Photos can be ordered in the foyer.)
The Rev. David Pileggi, rector of Christ Church, Jerusalem, reminded pilgrims that it was on the Mount of Olives, which separates Jerusalem from the desert, that Jesus wept over the city. Pilgrims then took time to pray for their own cities, provinces, dioceses and congregations.
Pilgrims also walked down the valley slope to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus wrestled with God’s will and was arrested the night before his crucifixion.
Do you want to be healed?
Speaking in the Communion service on Monday, Archbishop Henry Orombi (Uganda) likened the Church to the paralytic languishing by the pool near the Sheep Gate in the biblical account in John 5.
“Like that paralytic at the pool,” he said, “the Church is living but is powerless… The Lord is asking us the same question, ‘Do you want to be healed?’” Orombi urged the 1000-strong GAFCON pilgrims to ask God for healing for ourselves and for our church.
The Gospel and Secularism
Dr. Os Guinness, noted lecturer, academic and author told pilgrims during his lecture on Monday, the “the whole modern world represents the greatest opportunity for the Gospel since the apostles. It also represents the greatest challenge to the Gospel since the apostles”.
“Never under-estimate the profound anti-Christian assumptions of secularity,” said Guinness. “Never have evangelicals had higher, sharper views of the authority of scripture, but never has evangelical behavior been more chaotic and permissive than it is today…” said Guinness.
Those who choose to look to contemporary culture to guide their faith decisions, lose the authority of scripture and “cut themselves off from Christianity around the world,” said Guinness.
“I would say to you from the bottom of my hearts sisters and brothers, dare to look at the full challenge of the secular world. But when you have [looked], have faith in God, have no fear.”
Quotes from Canadian GAFCon delegates
My hope and prayer is that GAFCON will advance Christ’s Kingdom by promoting unity, mission, and realignment among faithful Anglicans around the world.
George Egerton
My prayer for our time in Jerusalem is first for each participant, be they Primatial, Ordained or Lay, to have a holy encounter with the living God. I hope that we can see, hear and feel His presence as we worship, pray, fellowship and deliberate together about the future of this communion that God has called us into. I am personally praying for this conference to be the beginning of an awesome revival and reformation in the Anglican Church, for the Holy spirit to be so present and so active in our midst that we can do naught but fall on our faces before Him in humility and thanksgiving. That is the seed and the foundation for any decisions that we might make towards reformation
The Rev Barclay Mayo
Quote from GAFCon Leader
What the Americans did in 2003 and what the Canadians did was to rip the communion. If we're talking about schism and the breakup of the communion – that's where it starts and that is where the responsibility is. What GAFCON is doing is saying that given that new state of affairs, how now can we live together and how can we sustain the highest level of communion and work well together...
I am looking forward to an extraordinarily interesting and rather exciting conference….
I… wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury just a couple of weeks ago to assure him of my prayers for Lambeth and for the successful outcome of the Lambeth conference and he has now written to me and assured me of his prayers for us and his prayers for a successful outcome of this conference as well. So I think that's worth knowing when we talk a great deal about things like schism and so forth.
Archbishop Peter Jensen, Diocese of Sydney, Australia
From news conference, Thursday, 19 June 2008
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