1. A team of up to 10 people met twice a day in New Plymouth to pray for the General Synod. Thank you to those of you who could not be present but prayed in support also.
   
2. Despite the Conservative / Orthodox voice speaking and voting against motion 29, the motion was passed by a majority at the General Synod on the 9th May 2018.
   
3. Bishops may, when asked, agree to clergy blessing same gender couples who have had civil union or civil marriage services.
4. The question of ordination was left deliberately vague and some Bishops will take that to mean that they can ordain someone in a same sex relationship who has been through a blessing service.
5. Despite this AFFIRM will remain as part of this Church and continue to bring our voice to any future debates.
6. The AFFIRM submission for new Christian Communities to be established has been accepted 
7. Most importantly any Parish that joins the Community will be assured that future clergy appointments to that Parish MUST have the same theology as the Parish when it joined the Christian Community.
8. A Constitution for the Christian Communities, already in draft form, is being completed.
9. The motion from Auckland to review Christian Marriage was defeated.
10. We will be sending more detailed information on 6 and 7 above shortly outlining where we go from here.
    
11. We will be calling meetings of the various AFFIRM groups around the country in the next few weeks to share in detail what AFFIRM will be doing.
12. In the meantime, if you have any comments or questions please feel free to contact Paul Williamson, Lorraine or Pete Lloyd.
13. It is of the utmost importance that we now turn our focus to how to reach this Nation for Christ and the Church. We know that this is at the top of the agenda for all of us. AFFIRM will now be able to focus on this and the Christian Community network will provide a strong new platform to unite and resource parishes in this mission.

The AFFIRM Team
11 May 2018

A series of talks given by Tim Harris, Assistant Bishop of Adelaide, at the AFFIRM Conference in August 2017:    
(Click on the titles to download the PDFs.)

1. Messy relationships: the way of Christ, and the righteous faith concerns of the Pharisees
   
2. The Gospel and One People of God: Paul and mission in Rome
   
3. Testing the spirits: 1 John 4 and the two key questions of faith
   

Response to the Interim Report of the Working Group I’m not certain whether this “accommodation” is “beautiful” or not. It is certainly an accommodation. That is to say, it is an organizational, and therefore political, solution to a perceived human problem. And as such, it might indeed have much to commend it (e.g. Orders of Consecrated Life; Respectful Climate). Whether it is also an appropriate and due Church solution - that is something else again, entirely.

Former NZCMS National Director Rev Michael Lawrence writes:
A Long Look Back...
Two important issues regarding family life in Aotearoa New Zealand arise out of Motion 30, and the “A Way Forward”, “He Anga Whakamua”, “Na Sala ki Liu” Working Group Report.  Firstly, the re-definition of marriage and secondly, and consequentially, the birth or the adoption of children into a same-sex marriage.
"The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward” is a statement attributed to Winston Churchill and it is an appropriate guideline as the Anglican Church steps into the future.

ACNS, by Gavin Drake

The provincial synod of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa has voted against the introduction of blessing services for same-sex marriages. The motion, from the Diocese of Saldanha Bay, required a simple majority in all three houses of the synod (laity, clergy and bishops) along with an overall two-thirds majority of the whole synod. But it was rejected in all three houses and failed to get anywhere near the two-thirds overall majority.
Full article

In the latest issue of Latimer Focus, the magazine of the Latimer Fellowship (an Affiliate of AFFIRM), Michael Hewit (former Executive Officer of AFFIRM) has written an article about the recent past and current experience of what was the West Hamilton Parish.

The article can be found at http://www.latimer.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/Issue-36-West-Hamilton-pari....

By Philip Jenkins 

I have been writing about mainstream and fringe scholarship, and defending the sometimes unpopular idea of mainstream orthodoxy, or the scholarly consensus.
Blogging on any religious topic invites wacky comments and responses. As one example of many, I had a commenter not long ago who asserted that most of what Christians believed about their origins was utterly wrong. Way back in the third century BC, he said, the cult of the Egyptian god Serapis prefigured most features of Christianity, including the name: even at that very early date, his followers were allegedly called “Christians.” Christianity, in fact, was a myth built on that older Egyptian religion. That whole Serapis/Christ nonsense is widespread around the Internet, with quite a few Youtube contributions. Just Google “Christos Ptolemy Serapis” and see how many rabbit holes you vanish into. In some manifestations, not all, it gets into weird Afrocentric and anti-Jewish mythologies.

I challenged the original poster by asking how many real books or sources he could cite to support this idea, not counting self-published stuff, and answer came there none. These days, you can find that information quite easily from Amazon, besides library catalogues and journal databases. My argument was simple. An idea or theory does not deserve to be taken seriously unless and until it acquires at least some coverage by accredited experts in the field. That might take the form of published books with major presses, whether trade or academic, or in reputable academic journals.

Scholarship is what scholars do, and if they don’t do it, it’s not scholarship.

For the complete article go to http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2015/05/outliers-and-iconoclasts