Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, shaper of the Anglican Way

-an article for the Light Magazine

By Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

If you have ever been to a wedding service, you can thank Archbishop Thomas Cranmer for his contribution of these new words:  ‘to love and to cherish.’ Cranmer beautifully translated from the Latin Sarum rite these now familiar vows: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us depart.”  He had a liturgical gift, a poetic ability to develop English-language worship services, marriage services, and funeral services that still speak to people over five hundred years later. 

Cranmer birthed an English Reformation that was not only the via media (middle way) between Catholic and Protestant, but also the via media between Luther and Calvin.  Cranmer was not the first Archbishop of Canterbury, but rather the 67^th and the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury. As of today we have had 105 Archbishops of Canterbury. The Anglican Church was not created by Cranmer, but rather reformed and renewed. He has been described as the most mysterious person in the English Reformation.

Born in 1489 at Aslockton Nottinghamshire, he was sent at age 14 to Jesus College, Cambridge after the death of his father.  During his Master's degree, Cranmer studied the Renaissance humanists, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Erasmus. Shortly after receiving his Master of Arts degree in 1515, he was elected to a Fellowship of Jesus College. Many are unaware that Cranmer had initially been kicked out of Cambridge University in 1515 for the ‘sin’ of getting married.  To support his new wife, he worked as a reader at Buckingham Hall in Cambridge.  After his first wife Joan died in childbirth, all was forgiven and Cranmer was allowed to return as a lecturer at Jesus College in Cambridge.  In 1520, Cranmer was ordained as an Anglican priest.  Continuing his studies, he received his Doctor of Divinity in 1526.  Cranmer was a brilliant scholar who read not only Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but also French, German and Italian.  As one of the most learned men of his age, he had a private library larger than the Cambridge Library, with nearly all the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers.

King Henry 8^th, who needed a divorce in order to marry Anne Boleyn, liked Cranmer’s idea of consulting with leading European university theologians. After unsuccessfully appealing to Rome, Cranmer was appointed the resident ambassador at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.  While negotiating in 1532 with the Lutherans on behalf of King Henry 8^th, Cranmer married his second wife, Margaret, the niece of the famous Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander. Unexpectedly, King Henry 8^th chose Cranmer as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, a position in which he served for twenty-three years.  With the implicit knowledge of Henry 8^th, Margaret was smuggled into England. King Henry 8^th kept changing his mind about whether clergy could be married, so Margaret was smuggled back to Germany when it was too dangerous.  Given King Henry 8^th’s extreme volatility, it was a miracle that Cranmer survived, especially with so many enemies seeking to take him out.  In 1543, Henry 8^th denounced Cranmer as ‘the greatest heretic in Kent’, alluding to his secret marriage, and allowed the opponents to charge Cranmer with heresy. Then he put Cranmer in charge of the investigation, after personally giving him his royal signet ring of protection.  After Edward 6^th became the next King, Margaret was allowed to openly be Cranmer’s wife with their two children Margaret and Thomas. 

Cranmer wrote the English Prayer Book in two versions, 1549 and 1552, the first one more catholic, the second more protestant.  He brought change slowly and cautiously.  The compulsory usage of the new English Prayer Book, however, resulted in a Prayer Book rebellion in Devon and Cornwall where Cornish was spoken rather than English.  Queen Elizabeth, after the death of her sister Queen Mary in 1558, combined her late godfather’s two prayer books into one: “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life (1549); Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving (1552).” Cranmer affirmed the presence of Jesus by the Holy Spirit in Holy Communion, which must be fed on in the heart by faith with thanksgiving: “Doth not God’s Word teach a true presence of Jesus Christ in the sacrament is a spiritual presence?”

                In the Prayer Book, Cranmer restored the giving of both bread and wine to the congregation, not just the clergy. He also wrote a healing service in the Prayer Book, focused directly in praying to Christ, rather than to the saints. Cranmer wrote 25 of the 70 collect prayers in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. This helped people meditate on the Word of God, ‘to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest his Word.’ Professor Simeon Zahl of Cambridge recently described Cranmer’s Prayer Book as a ‘technology of the heart’ that helps us psychologically experience the consolation of the Holy Spirit. 

Cranmer wrote the preface for the Great Bible, the first English bible ever used in English Churches, an adaptation of William Coverdale’s translation. To protect the bible, it was chained to the lectern desk.

He gave refuge to many European Protestant scholars like Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Bernardino Ochino who were invited to teach at English universities.  In March 1552, Cranmer invited the foremost Continental reformers, Heinrich Bullinger, John Calvin, and Philip Melanchthon to come to England and to participate in an interdenominational council. Sadly, none were able to come.

The death of 15-year-old King Edward 6^th from tuberculosis left a leadership vacuum. First cousin Lady Jane Gray only lasted as a Protestant Queen for nine days.  Then Mary was made Queen, and Imprisoned Cranmer for over two years. He was charged by Mary with sedition, treason, and heresy.  During that time, she burned over 300 protestants at the stake, giving her the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’, the same as the drink.  Forced to watch the burning of his two fellow bishops Latimer and Ridley, Cranmer renounced the prayer book six times before he was burned at the stake. 

Was Cranmer a weak-willed, flipflopping, compromiser, or was his real issue his strong allegiance to obey the King/Queen?  Was this what caused him to recant the Prayer Book? Was he much like the Apostle Peter who denied Jesus three times, yet turned back and helped others? (Luke 22:32)

In his final sermon, he renounced his renunciation, before being rushed off to be burnt at the stake at the same location as his fellow Protestant Bishops Ridley and Latimer. As he was being burnt, he intentionally put his right hand in the fire so that it would be burnt first: “And forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, it shall first be burned…”  Cranmer's death was immortalized in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, placed beside the Bible by Queen Elizabeth the First in every English Cathedral. The Anglican Communion commemorates Thomas Cranmer as a Reformation Martyr on 21 March, the anniversary of his death.

As he was being burned at the stake, he prayed: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Cranmer finished well on a fiery stake, faithful to God at the end, despite his vacillating.  Perhaps this is a hopeful metaphor for the struggles of contemporary Anglicanism.  May the rediscovery of Cranmer help both Anglican Christians and the wider Christian community to also finish well.

Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird

 

CS Lewis: Waking up to the Father’s Love

Previously published in the Feb 2020 Light Magazine article

By Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird

Have you or your parents ever treated education as more important than family? CS (Jack) Lewis and his father Albert were like ships passing in the night, not knowing how to connect.  Being very close to his calm, cheerful mother, her sudden death from cancer left ten-year old Lewis feeling like the mythical Atlantis was sinking.  Jack’s mother Flora Hamilton, who tutored him in Latin and French, was brilliant, earning an honors degree in mathematics at Queens University in Belfast.  Her father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been Anglican (Church of Ireland) clergy, the latter being a bishop. As a child, Jack shared his mother’s strong faith.  It was like God had died with his mother’s tragic death.

Jack’s secure Irish childhood dissolved into a nightmare of six years of painful residential school living in England.  He later commented that English accents at the boarding school sounded to his childhood ears like some strange demonic chatter. Both Jack and his older brother Warren were traumatized by a brutal schoolmaster at their first boarding school Wynard in Watford. Jack called Wynard “Belsen” after the Nazi concentration camp.  A few months before Jack’s death in 1963, he stated that after fifty years of struggling, he had finally forgiven the headmaster Capron who had so damaged his earliest boyhood. In a letter to a young person, Lewis wrote “I was in three schools (all boarding schools) of which two were very horrid.  I never hated anything so much, not even the front-line trenches in World War I.  Indeed, the story is far too horrid to tell anyone of your age.”  Jack’s second residential school Malvern was rife with bullying and sexual abuse. After Jack threatened to shoot himself, his dad relocated him to Great Bookham, Surrey, to be taught by a private tutor William Kirkpatrick who had trained for the ordained ministry in Ireland. Kirkpatrick, as an ardent atheist, was portrayed in Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength as MacPhee, a humourless, freethinking Ulsterman.

His father Albert was so swallowed in grief and self-pity that he pushed his two sons away physically and emotionally. Being afraid of his father as a child, CS Lewis described his dad as a man with “a bad temper, very sensible, nice when not in a bad temper.” His father’s emotional ups and downs taught Jack a distrust of emotions that would stay with him throughout his life.  He called his father’s family “true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, rhetorical” people who moved quickly from laughter to wrath to tenderness, but with no gift for steady contentment.  His father, who dreamed of becoming an MP, instead served as a prosecuting solicitor in the Belfast police court.  Swallowed by his work, Jack’s father was sometimes cold, remote, distracted, and morose.  He had a tendency to cross-examine his sons as if they were on trial.  Jack learned to pretend, avoid and lie to his dad to keep him happy.  His father, said Jack, “could never empty, or silence, his own mind to make room for an alien thought.” His dad’s life was so orderly one could set a clock by his schedule.  When away from his job, he became fidgety and bored, eager to return to his legal responsibilities. Jack was so alienated from his father that he missed how much he was like his dad.  With swift imaginative minds and resounding voices, they both could persuasively make intricate arguments.  Jack and his dad shared a delightful sense of humour.  Albert’s sons claimed that their dad was the best storyteller in the world as he loved to act out the character parts. 

His father was very strong on regular church attendance as the right thing to do, but never explained to his sons why.  Religion was very private. On Sunday Dec 6th 1914, Jack a confirmed atheist was confirmed in the Church of Ireland in order to avoid a fight with his dad, “one of the worse acts of his life”.  Jack later commented, “Cowardice drove me into hypocrisy and hypocrisy into blasphemy.” At age seventeen, C.S. Lewis explained bluntly to a Christian friend he’d known since childhood, “I believe in no religion.  There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint, Christianity is not even the best.” One of his prep school friends described Jack as a “riotously amusing atheist.” As a teenager, he resented God for not existing, and for creating such a flawed world.  Just after World War I, Lewis, a wounded veteran, boasted that during his time in the trenches, he “never sank so low as to pray.” To a friend about the same time, he said “You take too many things for granted.  You can’t start with God. I don’t accept God!” 

After ending up in hospital on April 15th 1918 from WWI shrapnel injuries, Lewis wrote his father Albert, saying “I know that you will come and see me…(I was) “never before so eager to cling to every bit of our old home life and see you…Please God, I shall do better in the future.  Come and see me.” His dad however stayed in Ireland, refusing to change his busy work schedule.  In October 1918, after successive requests for his father to visit him in hospital, CS Lewis wrote his dad saying “It is four months now since I returned from France, and my friends laughingly say that ‘my father in Ireland’ is a mythical creation.” The father wound and resulting emotional cutoff became ever deeper.

While teaching at Oxford, Jack kept running into Christians, like JRR Tolkien, who persuaded him that Christianity is a true myth, a real story grounded in history.  Jack’s atheist background helped him reach out to spiritual seekers through books and BBC radio. His voice became the most widely recognized in Britain after that of Winston Churchill. His books, which still sell six million copies a year, led him to become one of the most influential voices in contemporary Christianity.  The late Chuck Colson, converted by Lewis’ book Mere Christianity, contended that Lewis is ‘a true prophet for our post-modern age.’ As one of the few Christians read extensively by non-christians, he became known as the Apostle to the skeptics. 

Was it a mere coincidence that CS Lewis turned to God in the very summer of his father’s death?  In August 1929, Lewis went to Belfast to visit his seriously ill father, bringing significant family reconciliation.  Lewis said that his dad was taking his cancer surgery ‘like a hero.’ After his dad’s death, Lewis commented, “As times goes on, the thing that emerges is that, whatever else he was, he was a terrific personality…how he filled a room.  How hard it was to realize that physically he was not a big man.” Lewis deeply regretted how insensitively he had treated his dad.  How might CS Lewis’ restoration to his father’s love inspire us to deeper family reconciliation in 2020?
Click to view the first article in a three-part series on CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.

Rev. Dr. Ed and Janice Hird

-co-authors of the new novel Blue Sky

All You Need is Love: The Beatles Fifty Years Later -HIRD

By Rev. Dr. Ed Hird

One of the most enjoyable books that I have recently read is Mark Lewisohn’s biography The Beatles: All These Years, Vol. 1: Tune In.  Lewisohn’s book gave me new insights into what made these four unknown Liverpuddlians into the unforgettable Beatles.  I had no idea that the Beatles were originally a Skiffle band modeled after the No. 1 Skiffle artist Lonnie Donegan, who sold over a million copies of ‘Rock Island Line’.  Paul McCartney commented: "(Donegan) was the first person we had heard of from Britain to get to the coveted No. 1 in the charts, and we studied his records avidly. We all bought guitars to be in a skiffle group. He was the man."  Skiffle music, using guitars, washboards and the tea-chest bass, was big in North America in the 1940s.   In the 1950s, there were around 40,000 UK Skiffle bands.  The Skiffle bands became so popular that you couldn’t purchase a guitar in the UK.  John Lennon’s first guitar had to be shipped from Durban, South Africa, where Skiffle and Rock had not yet caught on.[1]  His Aunt Mimi, who raised John, ironically said: "The guitar's all right for a hobby but it won't earn you any money."[2]

I remember when my older sister Ginny bought her first Beatles record in 1963.  Listening to this strange new sound, I wondered what all the fuss was about.  Before I knew it, I too was singing “All you need is love.”   Little did I know that I was in the middle of a cultural and musical revolution. 

Lewisohn showed how each of the Beatles came from very difficult family backgrounds.  The Beatles were raised in mixed Catholic/Protestant families, except for Ringo who was raised in a Protestant family.  Church did not have a huge impact on the Beatles, though they sang in the early days at church fairs.  John Lennon was fascinated throughout his life by crucifixes, the greatest symbol of God’s love.  George Harrison said: "The only thing that came across to me in the church was these oil paintings of Christ struggling up the hill with the cross on his back. I thought, 'There's something going on here.'”[3]  Paul McCartney failed an audition to become a choirboy at the Anglican Cathedral through deliberately cracking his voice. Paul also abandoned music lessons after four or five weeks, when he was given homework.[4] 

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?, the Bible asks.  Can anything good come out of Liverpool?, many asked.  Liverpool, the birthplace of the Beatles had been devastated by the World War II bombing.  Poverty was rampant.  Black soot covered everywhere.  Fifty thousand Liverpool houses had no bathroom or inside toilet.  Youth unemployment was higher in Liverpool than anywhere else outside of London.  Violent youth gangs controlled the streets.  Almost one-third of the population, 200,000 people, left Liverpool looking for a better life.  In 1962, the UK Home Office report identified Liverpool as England 's worst for drunkenness with arrests.[5]

 John Lennon was known as a Teddy Boy, and seen by some as a delinquent.  Lewisohn said that “John Lennon could be a horrible drunk, shedding the humour that vitally checked his roughest edges to become verbally abusive and physically aggressive, an unadulterated, obnoxious pain in the backside.”[6]  His girlfriend Cynthia Powell said of John, "His attitude was extremely 'Don't look at me’---but he wanted to be loved."[7] "We knew we could make it," said John. "We dreamed of being the British Elvis Presleys, and we believed it."[8]

Richy Starkey, later Ringo Starr, was the last one to join the Beatles.  At age six, he was in a near fatal coma for ten weeks and a year in hospital after contracting peritonitis.  Ringo experienced a further long spell in hospital at age fourteen, after pleurisy turned into tuberculosis.[9]  Ringo’s health challenges led him on a lifelong search for love and for God.

For several years, the Beatles remained undiscovered.  Thanks to the influence of Chuck Berry, the Beatles morphed from Skiffle to Rock. John Lennon said of Berry "He's the greatest rock 'n roll poet. When I hear rock, good rock of the caliber of Chuck Berry, I just fall apart and have no other interest in life. The world could be ending if the rock 'n roll's playing.  It's a disease of mine."[10]  Their biggest break happened when the Beatles began to play extensively in Hamburg, Germany.  Lewisohn calculated that the total time spent onstage on their first two German visits was 918 hours: "the equivalent of 612 90-minute shows  in just 27 weeks." As the most experienced rock band at the time, says Lewisohn, Hamburg toughened their voices, seasoned their characters, enriched their personalities and strengthened their voices.[11]

Virtually all of the early Beatle songs were about searching for love.  When the single Love Me Do came out in 1962, said Ringo, “the whole of Liverpool went out and bought it en masse. They were proud of it: a group from Liverpool. It was fantastic.”[12] From there, their fame exploded through the UK and around the world.  Recently Ringo at the Grammy Museum in LA, admitted: “I have found God...I stepped off the path there for many years and found my way [back] onto it, thank God."  Finding God has enabled Ringo to give up his sixty-cigarettes a day and move away from alcohol and drug abuse: "I feel the older I get, the more I’m learning to handle life. Being on this quest for a long time, it's all about finding yourself.”[13]  Ringo discovered that the love of God changes everything.  Because God is love, all we need is love.

The Rev. Dr. Ed Hird, Rector

St. Simon’s Church North Vancouver

Anglican Mission in Canada

http://stsimonschurch.ca

-recently published in the Deep  Cove Crier  

p.s.My new book RESTORING HEALTH: BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT as of yesterday is now available online ... Reply w/#AmazonCart to add this http://www.amazon.com/dp/097820221X/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_awdo_qcKdub1N3Z3XZ via @amazon

 In order to obtain a copy of the book ‘Battle for the Soul of Canada’, please send a $18.50 cheque to ‘ED HIRD’, #1008-555 West 28th Street, North Vancouver, BC V7N 2J7. For mailing the book to the USA, please send $20.00 USD. This can also be done by PAYPALusing the e-mailed_hird@telus.net . Be sure to list your mailing address. The Battle for the Soul of Canada e-book can be obtained for $9.99 CDN/USD.

-Click to download a complimentary PDF copy of the Battle for the Soul study guide : Seeking God’s Solution for a Spirit-Filled Canada

[1] Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles: All These Years, Vol. 1: Tune In (Crown Archetype, New York, NY, 2013), p. 115.

[2] Lewisohn, p. 224.

[3] Lewisohn, p. 65.

[4] Lewisohn, p. 62.

[5] Lewisohn, p. 738.

[6] Lewisohn, p. 162.

[7] Lewisohn, p. 228.

[8] Lewisohn, p. 537.

[9] Lewisohn, p. 453.

[10]  Lewisohn, p. 169.

[11] Lewisohn, p. 398, John Harris,

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/02/beatles-tune-in-mark-lewisohn-review

[12] Lewisohn, p. 720.

[13] Andrew Hough, The Telegraph, Feb 3rd 2010, “The Beatles’ drummer Ringo Starr admits: ‘I have found God’,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/the-beatles/7142630/The-Beatles-drummer-Ringo-Starr-admits-I-have-found-God.html

Preface to my soon-to-be-published sequel "Restoring Health: body, mind and spirit' -HIRD

Preface

We have all been painfully stuck.  Being at a key transition-point in our lives, we do not know how to move forward, finding ourselves immobilized.[i] I have been there many times.  My perfectionism makes it worse.   A key turning point for me was when as I attended a Leadership Conference at the University of Kent in England.[ii]  Walking into a seminar, God ‘whispered’ to me that I would be receiving a message. The Rev Freda Meadows suddenly called me out of the crowd and gave me a specific prophetic message, saying:

You don’t need to run in keeping up with others.  Enter into God’s rest.  Keep your eye on the finishing line which is Him.  You will be moving into new things, having words of knowledge. You will be gifted in this area.  You are in an apprenticeship time at present.  You will disciple others.  You are a man of God’s Word, things of the Kingdom. You are a person of vision, a long-range visionary.  God is going to put you in a key place and you will find yourself training and discipling others.[iii]

I had no idea how powerfully God was going to use the 1998 Pre-Lambeth Leadership Conference.  Most of us as North American Anglicans were still stuck in the ‘inside strategy’ mindset.  Being conflict-avoiders, we were going to ‘fix’ the North American Anglican churches while still inside the old institution.  This virus of institutionalism can slip inside the mind of even the most sincere believer, turning us toxic.  It is so easy to become the hollow, stuffed men of TS Eliot’s poem: “We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men Leaning together...”[iv]  We Canadians were still quite ‘gung-ho’ at the Canterbury Leadership Conference, but the Americans were unusually quiet. They lacked their usual American ‘get-up-and-go’ attitude.  When Americans go quiet, you can tell that something is up.

At the official Canadian night, Bishop Eddie Marsh of Central   Newfoundland invited the Americans to come up and share.  I will never forget how our American colleagues Bishop Alex Dickson and Dr. (now Bishop) John Rodgers stood up and repented to our African colleagues for the shame that the USA had brought on the Anglican Church, and for Bishop John Spong’s castigating African Anglicans as just one step out of animism and witchcraft.[v] 

“(Bishop Spong) has insulted you.  We are ashamed for him; we are ashamed for ourselves.  We ask your forgiveness and we assure you that he does not speak for us.”[vi] 

Hundreds of African bishops and clergy spontaneously flocked forward and hugged the Americans, weeping and declaring God’s forgiveness.  Todd Wetzel of Anglicans United said that ‘this was one of the American Church’s finest moments in decades.’  This prophetic action of repentance and forgiveness was a new beginning for Anglican Christians around the world.

I am convinced that we are not to despise prophecy, and that the prophetic gift is still in operation today.  Prophecy does not just address the global picture.  It can also address our personal situations, even regarding writing a book.  Through prayer, I have received very clear direction about the topic of this current book.[vii]   Pushing through our toxic stuckness is key to restoring health, and key to strengthening a new generation of healthy leaders.

The purpose of prophecy is to encourage, build, and strengthen.[viii]  Yes, all prophecies have to be tested.  As children of the New Covenant, we only prophesy in part.[ix]  Prophecies help me push through my ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’.  In the 21^st century, a sensitive use of the gifts of prophecy and exhortation will be essential to getting unstuck, to becoming a healthier and more Christlike leader.  As Paul said to Timothy, by following prophecies made about us, we leaders more effectively ‘fight the good fight’ and live out our daily lives.[x]  Out of these prophetic encounters, I have become convinced that North America desperately needs to recover from its toxicity, and that the key to restoring its health is found in strengthening  a new generation of holistically healthy leaders, as illustrated in the person of Titus. 

The Rev. Dr. Ed Hird, Rector
BSW, MDiv, DMin
St. Simon's Church North Vancouver
Anglican Mission in Canada

p.s. In order to obtain a copy of the book ‘Battle for the Soul of Canada’, please send a $18.50 cheque to ‘ED HIRD’, #1008-555 West 28th Street, North Vancouver, BC V7N 2J7. For mailing the book to the USA, please send $20.00 USD. This can also be done by PAYPALusing the e-mailed_hird@telus.net . Be sure to list your mailing address. The Battle for the Soul of Canada e-book can be obtained for $9.99 CDN/USD.

-Click to download a complimentary PDF copy of the Battle for the Soul study guide : Seeking God’s Solution for a Spirit-Filled Canada

---

[i] Terry B Walling, Stuck!, (ChurchSmart Resources, 2008),  p. XIII “Without transitions, and the paradigm shifts that occur, Christ followers would stay stuck!”,

[ii] This Pre-Lambeth Leadership Conference was jointly sponsored by Anglican Renewal Ministries/ARM and SOMA/Sharing of Ministries Abroad.  I was serving as the Chair of ARM Canada.

[iii] Freda Meadows ministers with the International New Wine Director Rev Bruce Collins  http://www.new-wine.org; Ten years later, the Rev Freda gave further insight into the 1998 Canterbury prophecy, saying:

“...the underlying thrust was to trust God for the outcome of the plans He had in using you.  While you were to do all that was necessary, it was not for you to try and make anything happen.  But you were to follow the Lord's leading using the gifts and skills He gave in the best way you knew and through what you had learned as your experience grew.”

[iv] http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/

[v]  “African Christians? They're just a step up from witchcraft: What Bishop Spong had to say about his fellow Christians, John Spong interviewed by Andrew Carey, Church of England Newspaper, July 10^th 1998.  Newspaper & Andrew Carey. "They've moved out of animism into a very superstitious kind of Christianity. They've yet to face the intellectual revolution of Copernicus and Einstein that we've had to face in the developing world. That's just not on their radar screen."

[vi] Doug LeBlanc, Lambeth, 1998, “Episcopal Dissidenta, African Allies”, Dr Miranda Hassett, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,  http://anglicanhistory.org/academic/hassett2004.pdf

[vii] On October 17th Wednesday 2008 while at the Anglican Coalition Clergy Retreat at Cedar Springs, I received a distinct impression from the Lord while in deep quiet group prayer: “Yes, it is Titus.”  While attending the Henry Wright ‘Be in Health’ conference, I heard a still small voice saying: “Write 3rd book on Titus for North American Audience.”

[viii] 1 Corinthians 14:3

[ix]  1st Thessalonians 5: 19-21: Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; do not treat prophecies with contempt. Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil.; 1 Corinthians 13:9.

[x] 1 Timothy 1:18, 4:14