The Secrets of the Holy Grail by Maurice Gray
A book that reveals ail the secrets of Christianity, the true origins of the Church. The secret of the Virgin Birth, the secret of the Resurrection, the hidden code in the Bible, and the origins of the miracles and parables. With many proofs from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Buddhist writings show Christianity to be a Buddhist Church.
Published 1st Sep 2009 and available from Larners of Holt, Graves Convenience Stores Briston, M & M Butchers Melton Constable. Price £4.50
Lies, damned lies and…
As this issue of NEW DIRECTIONS went to press, the Church of England published its provisional attendance statistics for 2008 (why does it take them so long?). There was ail the predictable spin, aimed at masking the overall decline, and naturally our attention was drawn by the Spin-Revs to such rays of hope as might be gleaned from what is in all conscience a most depressing picture. 30DAYS spotted one intriguing point, though, which leads seamlessly to the following Q & A:
Q: What do the dioceses of Rochester, St Edmundsbury & Ipswich, Sodor & Man, Truro and York have in common?
A: Each of them recorded no change at all in Adult Average Sunday Attendance between 2007 and 2008!
Now, of course, that cannot (one assumes) be true. The reason the figures look the way they do is that they are ail rounded to the nearest 100 – with the result that there is of course no way of telling whether these five dioceses should be counted alongside the 8 dioceses which bucked the trend and thoughtlessly grew, or the 31 – yes, 31 – which went with the flow and shrank. Clarification from the Statistics Unit at Church House is not necessarily expected.
And another thing…
Reviewing the attendance figures, thinktank Ekklesia commented: figures also show changing patterns of attendance. People continue to attend church on other days than Sunday. For every 50 people attending church or cathedrals on a typical Sunday, another 10 attend during the -week and an extra 37 in total over a month.’ Well, yes, but… the $64,000 question to which 30DAYS has never seen an answer is whether one daily communicant is actually counted for these purposes as six weekday worshipers. Again,though, clarification is not particularly expected.
NFN?
The group of unlikely-named individuals who review books for this august journal must be slipping. How else can one explain the failure to feature this blockbuster, recently advertised in the Fakenham Sun?
Mind you, if the book is as illiterate as the advert, its chances of being the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book this year are probably slim.
Cheers!
The Rt Revd Bob Gillies, the Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney, has accused the Benedictine monks who produce Buckfast Tonic Wine of ‘betraying Christian values’. Apparently, the drink has been mentioned in no less than 5,000 crime reports by Strathclyde Police in the past three years.
During that period the Buckfast bottle was used as a weapon on 114 occasions and apparently 54% of ‘dangerous litter’ found on Scottish housing estates is broken Buckfast bottles. Sales of the drink have doubled in the past five years to £37 million, and more than half is sold north of the Border. It is estimated that Scots spend £50,000 a day on the drink.
The recipe is attributed to the original French monks who settled at the Devon abbey in the 1880s and mixed imported base wines from Spain with tonic ingredients, with theresult that a 75cl bottle of the wine has 15 per cent alcohol by volume and contains many times the amount of caffeine found in a can of Coca-Cola. Asked if the monks should accept any kind of moral responsibility, Jim Wilson, of J. Chandler & Co., the drink’s distributor, said: ‘No, they produce a good product. I drink it. Now, if I thought there was something wrong with it, would I drink it?’ Of course, the entire problem could have been solved just 48 hours before this story broke in The Times, if only Bishop Gillies’ friends in the diocese of Glasgow & Galloway – covering the Strathclyde region – had had the common sense to elect that nice Canon Alison Peden as their new bishop.
St Agnes to the fore!
South London life in the Ordinariate may turn out to be just a touch different, if the Parish of St Agnes, Kennington Park is anything to go by. In an exciting departure from tradition, the Epiphany Pew Sheet gave a whole new meaning to the Prayer over the Gifts:
‘Lord, accept the offering of your Church; not golf, frankincense and myrrh, but the sacrifice and food they symbolize…’
And finally
Much sympathy to the Catholic Church of The Good Shepherd, Mytholmroyd, near Halifax in West Yorkshire, on the recent theft of an undisclosed sum of money.
No doubt parishioners thought security would be much improved by the installation of closed-circuit television – but sadly the thief had it away with the camera as well!
Copy for 30 Days should reach the FiFoffice by the 10th day of the month:
30days@forwardinfaith.com