Friday miscellanies

A few notes of interest on this Friday:

-- I didn't know about the GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem, made up of conservative Anglican bishops, until a friend told me about it at a wedding reception last weekend. GAFCON stands for Global Anglican Future Conference, and it is being attended by a lot of African bishops who will not attend the upcoming, once-per-decade Lambeth Conference later this year. (The New York Times has an informative article about it here.) I will be curious to read about what influence GAFCON will have on Lambeth later this year, but I cannot imagine that such a meeting is going for the long-term unity of the Anglican Communion. Even if schism is not what they are intending, holding such a large gathering in the way that they are certainly has schismatic overtones. Daniel McClain Hixon has started blogging about GAFCON, so check in on his Gloria Deo blog in the coming days to see what he has to say about it.

-- Luke Wetzel at the It's a Mad Mission ... Sign Me Up blog alerted me to Adam Hamilton's new project of planning to visit every Annual Conference in order to do training sessions in leadership, preaching, and evangelism over the next six or seven years. Adam tells about the plan on his own blog in this post. For those of you who don't know, Adam is the pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, one of the largest churches in the entire connection. (You can read his bio at the church's website here.) He is a great pastor within the UMC, and I think he does as good a job as anyone at showing how megachurches can be a positive force in the larger church. He's also written a number of books that have been influential over the past few years. This new project is one of the most interesting things I've ever seen him attempt, in that he is essentially seeking to exercise the teaching office connection-wide - a role that has historically been reserved for bishops. (Luke Wetzel deals with this issue explicitly in his blog post, pointing out that Adam's references to Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke suggest that his desire to exercise a general superintendency over the church is evident.) This could clearly be controversial. Regardless, I'm glad he's doing it and I hope every Annual Conference will invite him to attend. Our actual bishops do wonderful ministry, but by and large the structure of the church is such that they have to spend almost all their time administrating and very little time actually teaching. Perhaps Adam can offer a different model of episcopal leadership that will open up new possibilities for us. That alone would be sufficient fruit of his new project, but I suspect it will do a lot more good than just that.

-- That sleepy-looking cat over on the right-hand side of this post is Lulu. She may be one of the gentlest, most docile creatures God has ever put on this earth. But Emily and I have discovered something new and quite shocking about her in the past few weeks: She is a holy terror on the mole population of our backyard. Since the weather has started really getting warm, we haven't had a week go by without Lulu dispatching a mole or two. Since she has been raised by people from her kittenhood, she has no idea what to do with them once she kills them. But the ancient wildcat instinct she carries around deep inside of her is plenty to cause her to dispense justice on the little critters when she can get her paws on them. The upside: We have no more mole tracks in our yard. So I guess she's finally earning her Cat Chow.