Anglican Mainstream

18/04/2023

King Alfred School
-safe wholesome Christian education, no gender ideology
-Classical curriculum (essentially old Eton!)
-100 GBP/ week
-Dudley, West Midlands

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM5UtNHJ23E

NEW CHRISTIAN SCHOOL SEEKS STAFF

The King Alfred School is a new independent Christian school founded by parents who wanted a Christian education for their children. Like King Alfred in his own day we would like to see a revival of Christian education in England. We wish to serve local families by offering affordable, high quality education to prepare children to live virtuous lives.

The school strives to offer a small and friendly environment where students’ talents can be nurtured. We wish to pass on to our children the rich cultural heritage of the Christian West.

We aspire to graduate students who are knowledgeable individuals with the ability to think logically and independently. Our goal is to help raise up young men and women who are well rounded and equipped to succeed in the wider world.

The school has two vacancies for primary school teachers who share our passion for classical education and the Great Books of the Western Canon.

To apply please request an application form at [email protected] or visit our website at thekingalfredschool.co.uk

18/04/2023

FREE CHURCH OF ENGLAND EXPANDS MISSION EFFORTS WITH NORTHERN CHURCH PLANTING APPOINTMENT

The Free Church of England (FCE) is widening its missionary engagement in its Northern Diocese. It has appointed Rev Matthew Frith (sic) to lead church planting across the diocese, which covers the north of England and the Isle of Man.

The FCE said his appointment as diocesan church planter “marks the beginning of a new season of missionary endeavour and adventure for the Northern Diocese as the diocese seeks to play its part in the evangelisation of the north, the revitalisation of the Church, and the transformation of communities”.

Rev Frith grew up in West Yorkshire and spent many years church planting in Carlisle as well as leading pioneer ministry networks across northern England.

Prior to joining the FCE, Frith had served in full-time ordained ministry in the Church of England since 2009. He left the Church of England because of its increasingly liberal position on s*xuality.

by Chris Ward, Christian Today

Read more: https://anglicanmainstream.org/free-church-of-england-expands-mission-efforts-with-northern-church-planting-appointment/

18/04/2023

UNBAKING THE GENDERBREAD PERSON

When it comes to gender identity theory — the idea that humans have an innate, immutable concept of gender that may or may not align with their s*x — many people, including me, started with acceptance as a first principle. We thought that when people told us who they were, we should believe them. By the time we started to think more critically about the broader effects of this doctrine, we realised that dissent had been rebadged as blasphemy, and that the harms of this new belief system surrounded us. Male rapists were transferring to female prisons, crisis services had become mixed-s*x, male athletes were winning women’s medals and young people’s bodies were being irreversibly harmed.

For many children, first contact with these ideas is in school. Government guidance on what to teach regarding gender identity, and how to handle demands that pupils should be allowed to “transition”, has been delayed for years. As pressure increased from concerned parents and school leaders fearful of legal action no matter what course they choose, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, promised to publish guidance in time for the summer term, which starts today. The guidance is now expected by May half term. And this is where the next lines in the increasingly fraught battle between proponents and opponents of gender ideology will be drawn.

Schools often witness clusters of close friends starting to identify out of their s*x. They are places where, without carefully managed policies, explorations of identity can be made concrete and safeguarding may fall down. Many are spaces in which decisions about gender are made without parents’ consent or even knowledge. Some place girls in boys’ changing rooms or boys on girls’ sports teams. Often, they teach the “genderbread” person, which places gender identity on continuums of “man-ness” and “woman-ness”. Genderbread lesson plans are steeped in gender stereotypes, describing man-ness norms like “strong-willed, logical, athletic” and a “leader, builder, protector,” and woman-ness ones like “empathetic, sensitive, caring” and “teacher, caretaker, supporter”. These are direct quotes.

by Matilda Gosling, Artillery Row

Read more: https://anglicanmainstream.org/unbaking-the-genderbread-person/

18/04/2023

ORTHODOX ANGLICANS MEET IN RWANDA TO DISCUSS THEIR FUTURE IN THE COMMUNION

Tonight, the fourth Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) begins in Kigali, Rwanda. Around 1,300 bishops, clergy and lay people have travelled from the four corners of the earth to the heart of Africa to celebrate the good news of Jesus Christ, and to consider the future of the Anglican Communion.

While not the largest, this conference has the potential to be the most significant Gafcon* gathering yet. In the past, many members of the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans (GSFA) have not attended, but this time the senior leaders of both organisations will be meeting to take counsel with one another before and during the five-day event. The Archbishop of Canterbury is not invited.

For many years the leaders of Gafcon and GSFA have been very clear that they could not follow the Archbishop of Canterbury’s plan to “walk together” with Provinces such as The Episcopal Church USA, Scottish Episcopal Church and New Zealand, who have walked away from the historic, catholic teaching of the church. They have, however, disagreed on strategy.

While not leaving the Anglican Communion, Gafcon has chosen to stay away from the various Primates Meetings and last summer’s Lambeth Conference. GSFA chose to attend and explain their concerns, while making it clear that they were not “walking together”.

The recent decision of the bishops of the Church of England to commend the blessing of couples in committed, faithful relationships other than heteros*xual marriage, is in the words of Archbishop Foley Beach, Chair of the Gafcon Primates Council, “shredding the last remaining fragile fabric of the Anglican Communion.”

by Susie Leafe, Christian Today

Read more: https://anglicanmainstream.org/orthodox-anglicans-meet-in-rwanda-to-discuss-their-future-in-the-communion/

18/04/2023

BRITISH SCHOOLS CAPITULATE TO GENDER IDEOLOGY

Asleep at the Wheel, a damning report from Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank based in London, has revealed the majority of Britain’s secondary schools are exposing children to hard-line gender ideology without parental consent. Under the Freedom of Information Act, Policy Exchange asked 304 random secondary schools in England to clarify their policies on gender, with specific reference to self-identification, transitioning, toilets and changing rooms, teaching, and parental notification. Of the 154 schools to reply, the key findings were as follows:

Only 28% of schools inform parents immediately when a child discloses feelings of ‘gender distress.’
Four in ten schools operate policies of gender self-identification.
At least 28% of schools are not maintaining single s*x toilets, 19% are not maintaining single-s*x changing rooms, and 60% are allowing children to participate in sports with the opposite s*x.
69% of schools are requiring other children to affirm a ‘gender-distressed’ child’s new identity.
72% of schools are teaching that people have a gender identity that may be different from their biological s*x.
25% of schools are teaching that some people or children may be born in the wrong body.
30% of schools are teaching pupils that a person who self-identifies as a man or a woman should be treated as a man or woman in all circumstances, even if this does not match their biological s*x.

This is particularly concerning in the case of parental consent, as it appears almost three-quarters of schools are either misinterpreting the law, or are guilty of over-reach in their loco parentis duties:

The Children Act of 1989 states explicitly that parental involvement in the life of their child is paramount. No other body is to assume parental responsibility for a child unless the court intervenes. The law is clear that parental involvement in a child’s life should be prioritised.

By Frank Haviland, European Conservative

Read more: https://anglicanmainstream.org/british-schools-capitulate-to-gender-ideology/

18/04/2023

FEMALE TEACHER FORCED TO APOLOGISE TO PUPILS FOR SAYING ‘GOOD AFTERNOON, GIRLS’

A teacher claims she was left ‘humiliated’ after being ordered to apologise to 11-year-olds at a private girls’ school – for calling them girls. Bosses at the £20,000-a-year school told the woman to deliver the mea culpa after her class complained that she had said ‘good afternoon, girls’ at the start of a lesson, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

After being told by the pupils that ‘not everyone here identifies as female’, she arrived in class the following day to find they had pointedly written their names and pronouns on the board, including one who used they/them.

They also held a lunchtime protest after she refused to acknowledge their demands.

Last night, the philosophy and religious education teacher spoke of her belief that she was ‘managed out’ by senior staff at the prestigious institution, which is part of the independent Girls’ Day School Trust, but only after she was forced to publicly apologise.

The woman, who gave evidence last week to an ongoing review into child and adolescent gender dysphoria care, led by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, said the problems began in May 2021 after some Year 7 students complained when she greeted the class with ‘good afternoon, girls.’

After being told that not everyone identified as female, one pupil stood up and challenged her to ‘acknowledge’ their pronouns.

But the teacher, who has requested anonymity to protect the pupils, replied that if their pronouns differed from their biological s*x, she would need to involve parents.

The teacher then said she sought guidance from the head of year about what to do if a pupil was experiencing gender dysphoria – a term used to describe a mismatch between biological s*x and gender.

But her superior allegedly told her she had no knowledge of the terminology or whether any communications had been had with parents on the issue.

The students then held a lunchtime protest against the teacher – and she said senior staff appeared to side with them.

‘I was told that they made placards with slogans on such as ‘Trans lives matter’,’ she said.

‘Before the end of the week I was in some sort of disciplinary process and the head of year was telling me I had to apologise to the girls.’

by Sanchez Manning, Mailonline

Read more: https://anglicanmainstream.org/female-teacher-forced-to-apologise-to-pupils-for-saying-good-afternoon-girls/

18/04/2023

A PUBLIC SERVANT STOOD UP FOR SEX-BASED RIGHTS AT A GENDER WORKSHOP—AND PAID THE PRICE

In a recorded DEI session on ‘Trans Inclusion,‘ activist Adrienne Smith told the dissenting staff member, ‘I’m past the point of seeking a respectful debate.’ If you’re a white-collar Canadian, chances are good that you’ve received workplace lectures on the subject of “decolonization”—a vaguely defined project aimed at “deconstructing colonial ideologies of the superiority and privilege of Western thought.” It’s a decidedly cultish pedagogical genre that I’ve come to know well, because exasperated workers often send me screenshots and recordings from their training sessions. Since raising complaints about these materials internally would risk career-threatening accusations of “white fragility” and such, leaking them to journalists is seen by many employees as the only viable option.

[…] Earlier this year, I received more documents pertaining to the Office of the Ombudsperson, the most interesting of which involved another over-the-top all-staff Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) workshop—this one on the topic of “challenges facing transgender and gender non-conforming people.” The presenter, Vancouver lawyer Adrienne Smith, is a well-known activist in this area, having helped lead the campaign to strip public funding from a local women’s shelter on the basis of its refusal to let biological males work as rape-crisis counsellors.

Smith’s November 3rd, 2021 presentation to the Office of the Ombudsperson, a recording of which was made available to Quillette, contained the expected admonitions about respecting pronoun preferences. A brief section on as*xuality included a tip not to say things like “that celebrity is hot,” since such a comment “implies that you would like to have s*x with that celebrity—you have suddenly just alienated all your ace [i.e., as*xual] staff.” This being Canada, there were also references to the “Two-Spirit” component of what our governments now refer to as the 2SLGBTQI+ community; as well as the related (and highly dubious) claim that human s*xual dimorphism is an “imaginary” artifact of the West’s “colonized binary.”

Much of the presented material was autobiographical, with Smith variously self-describing as q***r; AFAB [assigned female at birth]; trans; non-binary; a woman (for purposes of accessing female-specific community programming); “masculine-centered” in regard to both gender expression and “romantic orientation”; and an “aunticle” to several “niblings” (a non-binary neologism indicating nieces and nephews).

Smith offered parenting advice, too. The aforementioned niblings’ evolution into “Disney-princess little girls” “hurts my heart,” Smith told the audience, while also conceding that “our commitment to gender-neutral parenting means that [this] needs to be okay.” When it comes to boys, Smith opined, a family’s “tickle trunk needs to have a tutu for everybody.”

Smith described life in Canada as treacherous for trans people, due to what was described as an omnipresent threat of misgendering, harassment, and even lethal transphobic violence. This point was dramatized by mention of the “hundreds” of trans people whom Smith described as being killed every year (this presumably being a reference to globally aggregated statistics, since no trans person is known to have been killed in Canada since 2019).

by Jonathan Kay, Quillette

Read more: https://anglicanmainstream.org/a-public-servant-stood-up-for-s*x-based-rights-at-a-gender-workshop-and-paid-the-price/

18/04/2023

CHRIST VERSUS THE SCAREMONGERS

WHEN Jesus’s first followers went into lockdown on the evening of the first Easter Sunday, the Lord did the very opposite of subjecting them to a campaign of fear. The Book of Common Prayer’s Gospel reading for today, the first Sunday after Easter, describes Jesus’s disciples hiding in a locked room for fear of the 1st century Jewish religious leaders who had handed him over to the political power of the Romans to be crucified:

‘Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord.

‘Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained’ (John 20v19-23, King James Version).

The Apostle John, who was in the room, witnessed and experienced Jesus’s transformation of his disciples’ fear into joy with the visible physical evidence of his resurrection from the dead. When he showed them his hands through which Roman soldiers had driven the nails that had impaled him to the cross and his side into which a soldier had thrust a spear causing a flow of blood and water from Jesus’s body (John 19v34), the disciples knew that the Lord had risen.

by Julian Mann, TCW

Read more: https://anglicanmainstream.org/christ-versus-the-scaremongers/

18/04/2023

HOW THE TRANS LOBBY HIJACKED THE CENSUS

A badly worded question on s*x and gender identity has produced some utterly absurd statistics. Did you know that one in every 67 Muslims in England and Wales identifies as transgender? Or that the London borough of Newham has a higher proportion of trans people than Brighton, the UK’s LGBT capital? Or how about the fact that non-native English speakers are five times more likely to be transgender than native speakers?

These are some of the statistics that have emerged from the 2021 Census for England and Wales, which was published in January this year. If they sound a little off to you, you’re not alone. Experts have raised serious concerns about the validity of these findings.

The 2021 Census was the first ever to collect data on gender identity. It found the total number of trans people in England and Wales to be 262,000 – that’s 0.5 per cent of the population. For reference, that’s roughly the same proportion of the population that is Jewish.

The problem seems to stem from the wording of the question. Respondents were asked: ‘Is the gender you identify with the same as your s*x registered at birth?’ It’s not difficult to see how the question might trip someone up, especially those who are not au fait with gender-identity ideology or whose first language is not English.

Indeed, English proficiency seems to have been a key driver in how people answered the question. According to the Census, non-native English speakers make up a whopping 29 per cent of the transgender population, despite being only 10 per cent of the broader population. Similarly, in Newham, east London – top of the list for the proportion of trans people – almost half of the population was born outside the UK. The London borough of Brent, which is said to have the second-highest trans population after Newham, is 56 per cent foreign-born.

This week, the Office for Statistics Regulation announced that it would look into the data. The Office for National Statistics (ONS), which runs the Census, has also admitted it is ‘possible’ that the gender-identity question was misinterpreted by respondents. Michael Biggs, a sociology professor at the University of Oxford, summed it up well when he said that the authors of the Census ‘never thought about how a Bangladeshi grandmother or a Hungarian plumber will think about this question’.

So, how did the ONS, the UK’s leading statistical agency, get it so wrong? The influence of Stonewall and other LGBT lobby groups is not hard to detect here.

by Lauren Smith, spiked

Read more: https://anglicanmainstream.org/how-the-trans-lobby-hijacked-the-census/

18/04/2023

CORONATION AN ‘OPPORTUNITY TO DEDICATE THE REIGN OF CHARLES TO GOD’, SAYS ANGLICAN WRITER

The coming coronation of King Charles at Westminster Abbey is “a wonderful underlining of the legitimacy of his reign and a prayerful opportunity to dedicate his reign to God”, according to the author of a new study guide for clergy.

No details of the order of the coronation service on 6 May have been released, but they are expected to replicate ancient ceremonies dating back over one thousand years of English history, described in the guide, called ‘The Theological Significance of the Coronation’.

“I’m looking forward to seeing what’s going to be in the rite,” commented Rev Canon William Gulliford, vicar of St Mark’s Church in Regent’s Park in London, who wrote the guide, which draws on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

“Obviously there’s amnesia in the last 70 years, other than that people have visited the crown jewels and will have some sense that they are used in some way. This needs interpreting and explaining”, he told Premier Christian News.

from Premier

Read more: https://anglicanmainstream.org/coronation-an-opportunity-to-dedicate-the-reign-of-charles-to-god-says-anglican-writer/

18/04/2023

ACADEMIC SPEAKS OUT ON FREE SPEECH AND TREATMENT OF MARRIAGE

Dr James Orr, an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University and a renowned commentator on social policy and political philosophy, joined us for an enlightening discussion on protecting rights and laws around free speech. You can listen to our discussion here.

In 2016, Dr Orr advocated for a Bill of Rights to protect freedom of speech in the UK, ensuring supporters of beliefs like marriage between a man and woman could express their views without being subjected to a judge’s opinion. However, he now advises caution in pursuing such legislation.

He explains that “structural weaknesses” in rights-based legislation can result in a “ranking exercise” where courts must determine if one person’s right to express their belief in real marriage outweighs another’s right not to be offended.

Reflecting on the proposed ban on so-called conversion therapy, Dr Orr warns that the notion of ‘harm’ can be “weaponised” when the word is understood in psychological rather than physical terms.

by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage:

Read and watch video here
https://mailchi.mp/c4m/academic-speaks-out-on-free-speech-and-treatment-of-marriage?e=8364d4599b

18/04/2023

NEW CHRISTIAN SCHOOL SEEKS STAFF

The King Alfred School is a new independent Christian school founded by parents who wanted a Christian education for their children. Like King Alfred in his own day we would like to see a revival of Christian education in England. We wish to serve local families by offering affordable, high quality education to prepare children to live virtuous lives.

The school strives to offer a small and friendly environment where students’ talents can be nurtured. We wish to pass on to our children the rich cultural heritage of the Christian West.

We aspire to graduate students who are knowledgeable individuals with the ability to think logically and independently. Our goal is to help raise up young men and women who are well rounded and equipped to succeed in the wider world.

The school has two vacancies for primary school teachers who share our passion for classical education and the Great Books of the Western Canon.

To apply please request an application form at [email protected] or visit our website at thekingalfredschool.co.uk