St Francis Estes Park

12/23/2021

Christmas Eve, December 25, 2021, services will be at 5:30 pm and 11:00 pm. All are welcome! Merry Christmas!

12/04/2020

Father Dennis Ryan has started a blog on our new website! Check back for posts. We hope you enjoy!

We’re happy that you have found us and would like to share a bit about our St. Francis parish. This past year has been a period of transition, challenge and hopefulness. On October 26, 2019, Father Dennis Ryan was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Owen R. Williams, Bishop Ordinary of the Dioces...

10/25/2020

Because of the evacuation caused by the East Troublesome fire to the west of Estes Park we will not be holding live services on Sunday, October 25. However, we will hold a service via Zoom at 10 am. All who would like to attend please send an email to [email protected] by 9:45 am and we will send you the link to the Zoom meeting where we will hold the service.

Please continue to pray for the firefighters protecting our community and all evacuees.

08/17/2018

Today in the Gospel we hear how the publican was justified by his confession of sin. The story always reminds me of a saying which comes from St Nilus: The beginning of salvation is the condemnation of self.

That explains the mirror on the front of the pew-sheet. For if we look honestly at ourselves in the light of God’s Holy Law, the commandments of which the collect speaks, we will see how much we need to condemn ourselves.

This condemnation is not something negative; or, rather, it is the start of something positive. As so often we must destroy before we create—remove the weeds before we cultivate a garden, crack a few eggs before we bake a cake, chisel away at the stone before we produce a statue.

In this connection, I recall some words of Newman:

O that we might take that simple view of things, as to feel that the one thing which lies before us is to please God. … What gain is it to be applauded, courted, admired, followed, compared with this one aim, of ‘not being disobedient to the heavenly vision?

In other words, what really benefits us is not selfishness, but selflessness, the love of God to the exclusion of all else; or, better, to the transformation of all else

08/17/2018

It is required first of all of a steward that he be found faithful. Thus the Epistle to the Ephesians. And stewards we are, people to whom something has been entrusted, the deposit of faith, the teaching of the Church, the teaching of Christ. So be faithful! Be faithful, and what? We have this promise of Jesus Christ: Be faithful unto death and I will give to thee a crown of everlasting life.

Yes indeed! May that crown be ours, the crown of joy and rejoicing which the Lord will give at His appearing to those who have kept the faith, those who have lived the faith.

May the Most Blessed Mother of God, the Virgo fidelis, the faithful virgin, she who believed, as the scripture calls her, Luke 1, 45, he pisteusasa, may she obtain this grace for us from her Divine Son, that with her and with all the saints we may meet again before His Throne and rejoice with Him eternally: He Who with His Father and with the Holy Ghost is One God, Living and True, to Whom belongs all praise and all glory now and for ever and ever, Amen

08/17/2018

To study the Bible, to study tradition, does not make you a Christian. You can know in depth about the Bible, about the Fathers, but that does not do you any good unless you are living the Bible, unless you embrace with your heart and not just your mind the things which the Fathers teach. For Christianity is not a doctrine, but a life, the life of God in the soul of man, as the Scottish writer Henry Scougal so beautifully expresses it. The Life of the Spirit Who inspired the scriptures, the Life of the Spirit Who guided the Fathers: that Life must be the Life that we are living, led by the same Holy Spirit.

And this, dear brothers and sisters, this is what I want my last words from this pulpit to be, my last words ‘as an Anglican to Anglicans:’ if I may quote Newman’s phrase: Walk in the Spirit! Follow the Spirit! Obey the Spirit! Be faithful to what He has revealed and taught and preserved to and by and in the Church. Be like the Marines: semper fi. Semper fideles. Always faithful.

08/16/2018

Much less can you understand the Bible without tradition. If you study anything, you need a guide. For example, to study a language you need a dictionary and a grammar. And it is the same with the Bible. As the Ethiopian asked St Philip in Acts 8, How can I understand what it says, unless someone show me?’
So the Bible needs Tradition. But Tradition needs the Bible. Or, we may say, Tradition is the Bible, the Bible read, the Bible interpreted, the Bible lived within the context of the church. What do the Fathers do, the writers of the early church, those who followed after the apostles? A huge part of their work is the explanation of the Bible, commentaries on this book, homilies on that. And thus tradition is not opposed to scripture, but forms a unity with it.

08/16/2018

Much less can you understand the Bible without tradition. If you study anything, you need a guide. For example, to study a language you need a dictionary and a grammar. And it is the same with the Bible. As the Ethiopian asked St Philip in Acts 8, How can I understand what it says, unless someone show me?’
So the Bible needs Tradition. But Tradition needs the Bible. Or, we may say, Tradition is the Bible, the Bible read, the Bible interpreted, the Bible lived within the context of the church. What do the Fathers do, the writers of the early church, those who followed after the apostles? A huge part of their work is the explanation of the Bible, commentaries on this book, homilies on that. And thus tradition is not opposed to scripture, but forms a unity with it

08/15/2018

Since the time of the so-called Reformation, tradition has become a dirty word for many Christians. It is a word which, for example, we hardly ever find in Anglicanism prior to the nineteenth-century. The reason is that many people somehow believed that tradition was opposed to scripture, scripture which was seen as the sole authority in matters of faith. In fact, many Anglicans adopted the slogan of continental Protestantism, sola scriptura, scripture alone. Chillingworth, for example, William Chillingworth, the seventeenth-century Anglican divine, had these words engraved on his tombstone: ‘The Bible, and the Bible alone, is the religion of Protestants.’

And that is why there are so many protestants! So many sects and denominations constantly multiplying, and yet each proclaiming that it and it alone follows the teaching of the Bible. And the reason for this multiplicity of sects is simply this: each interprets the Bible in their own way, whereas, in fact, the Bible cannot be divorced from the church in which and by which and for which it was written. Without the church we would not even know what the Bible is – in early times some people rejected the Book of Revelation, others the epistle to the Hebrews, some people accepted a third letter to the Corinthians, others claimed as scripture the epistle of Barnabas. So, you cannot begin, even, to have the Bible without tradition to tell you what the Bible is.

08/14/2018

Our faith, thus, is not something that we make up and devise according to our own ideas, our own inclinations. Such a faith is, in fact, counterfeit, such a faith is a lie, such a faith is that of the pharisee in this morning’s Gospel, puffed up with pride, for what is more prideful than this, putting oneself before the church and its tradition, putting oneself before the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth?
By contrast, the person who submits to the tradition of the church, that person is like the publican, lowly and humble, submitting to what has been taught from the beginning and preserved throughout the ages, the deposit of faith, as St Paul calls it, the faith entrusted to us to keep and guard and preach and live.

08/13/2018

‘That which I have received, I now pass on to you.’
Than these words of St Paul in this morning’s epistle there is no better motto for the priest, no better program for him to pursue in his ministry.
For Christianity is in its very essence a tradition, that, as St Irenaeus defined it in the second century, that which the apostles received from Christ Himself, and which elder succeeded by elder – that is, bishop succeeded by bishop - has guarded in the church. And this is what the Lord Himself has shown us, when, after His Resurrection, He sent His disciples out saying: ‘Go and teach all nations, teaching them to observe whatever I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always, until the end of the ages.’
With us how? With us by His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth which leads and guides the church continually, preserving and upholding her in the truth, in the tradition delivered by Christ to the apostles and which they in turn passed on.