Posted on 05/12/2006 5:30:58 PM PDT by sionnsar
Churches that practice infant baptism generally have some kind of confirmation procedure so that people can assent to what their parents agreed to at their baptism. I suppose that confirmation is still a rather involved process in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. When I was confirmation age in the Episcopal Church, it also took a good deal of time.
When I decided to actually get confirmed in my early 30's, the whole thing took about three days and I don't know if it even takes that long anymore. Now something called the Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission would like to do away with confirmation altogether:
Baptism represents full initiation into the church and is the sole basis of Anglican unity, the council of the Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission (APLM) said in a newly released statement.
“The DaySpring Statement,” released May 12 by the APLM, affirms resolutions from the dioceses of California, Connecticut, and Northern Michigan that also describe baptism as full initiation into the church. APLM members in those dioceses proposed the resolutions, which say that baptism “shall be the only membership requirement (other than any age limitation) for eligibility for licensing to office.”The resolutions on baptism from the three dioceses ask that General Convention amend Canon III.4 (Of Licensed Ministries) to reflect this emphasis on baptism. The canon currently says that a candidate for ordination must be a “confirmed adult communicant in good standing.”
You get two guesses why they're proposing this but you're only going to need one.
The APLM’s most pointed amendments would affirm public blessings for gay couples and reject the commission’s call for “extreme caution” in electing or consecrating bishops “whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church.”
The commission’s Resolution A162 affirms “the need to maintain a breadth of private responses to situations of individual pastoral care for gay and lesbian Christians in this Church.”
“We recommend the deletion of the words ‘private’ and ‘individual’ within the first resolve as keeping that language could lead to the creation of private rites and a culture of secrecy,” the APLM council said.
The council recommended dropping the commission’s language that calls on bishops not to authorize public blessings for gay couples and to express regret for authorizing them in the past.
In rejecting the proposed caution regarding new bishops, the APLM repeats its emphasis on baptism as the basis of all Christian unity.
“Consistency and faithfulness to our baptismal theology would call for refraining from baptizing, communing, confirming, receiving, licensing as Title III ministers, as well as ordaining to the diaconate, priesthood and episcopacy ‘any person living openly in a same-gender union,’ or anyone ‘whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider Church,’” the council writes. “While this would be logically consistent, it would be counter to resolution A167 and the previous actions of General Conventions over the past 30 years.”
Baptism seems to be the ground these people mean to fight on. Not surprising, I guess, since it's all the ground they've got left.
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. "Churches that practice infant baptism generally have some kind of confirmation procedure so that people can assent to what their parents agreed to at their baptism. I suppose that confirmation is still a rather involved process in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches."
Chrismation (confirmation) is performed at the same time as baptism in Orthodoxy (as is "First Communion).
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