c. 2008 Religion News Service

Evangelist Billy Graham returns home from the hospital

(RNS) Evangelist Billy Graham returned home Tuesday (Feb. 19) after undergoing a procedure to relieve pressure in his brain.

Graham, 89, underwent the elective procedure on Feb. 13 at Missions Hospitals in Asheville, N.C. Physicians said he was progressing well after they replaced a valve for a shunt that regulates the pressure within his brain.

Graham has hydrocephalus, or a buildup of fluid on the brain that can cause symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease. He recently had experienced more intense symptoms, which led to his hospital stay.

During his time in the hospital, Graham was visited by three of his children who live near his Montreat, N.C., home and received a phone call from President Bush.

In the winter 2008 newsletter of her AnGeL Ministries, daughter and Bible teacher Anne Graham Lotz included her father among the prayer requests she sent to her supporters.

“For Daddy’s comfort in Mother’s absence, and for his spiritual strength to faithfully live out this year … when he turns 90 … to the glory of God,” she wrote.

Graham’s wife, Ruth, died last June at the age of 87.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Anglican Church of Canada facing defections over gay blessings

TORONTO (RNS) Seven congregations have cut ties with the Anglican Church of Canada because of theological differences on blessing same-sex unions and related issues, adding to a wave of conservative defections.

And the head of one breakaway group predicts more are on the way.

Last weekend (Feb. 15-17), seven parishes voted to leave the national church to join with a South American archbishop.

Six Anglican parishes in Ontario, eight in British Columbia and three in Alberta have decided to operate outside the Anglican Church of Canada and join the recently formed Anglican Network in Canada, which holds more traditional views.

Of the 17 dissenting congregations and parishes, 10 have voted to align themselves with the Anglican Communion’s more orthodox Province of the Southern Cone, which covers most of South America.

“I’m quite confident that this is just a beginning,” Bishop Donald Harvey, moderator of the recently formed Anglican Network in Canada, told reporters.

Harvey said the breakaway parishes seek a “haven” under the jurisdiction of the South American archbishop, Gregory Venables.

Vianney Carriere, a spokesman for the Anglican Church of Canada, noted that despite the recent departures, almost 2,300 congregations remain in the national church.

The Canadian church’s top governing body decided last June that blessing same-sex marriages does not violate basic church doctrine, prompting anger among conservative congregations.

Canada’s bishops have decided to continue a moratorium on same-sex marriages, however. Some local parishes and dioceses are blessing the unions anyway.

Meanwhile, the dissenting churches are being asked to hand over the keys to their buildings or face legal action to have them removed from the properties.

“If they don’t turn in the keys, we are planning to go and physically try to take possession of the parishes by showing up and asking them for the keys,” the Rev. Richard Jones, an official in the Diocese of Niagara, told the Toronto Star.

_ Ron Csillag

The Nazarene Church passes 1 million member mark in world missions

(RNS) The Nazarene Church says it has documented more than 1 million members outside of North America for the first time since it was founded in 1908.

“For the first time in our 100-year history, the 1 million member mark was exceeded, a record gain in membership was recorded, and a single year record of new Nazarenes was received into church membership,” said Nazarene General Superintendent James H. Diehl

Total membership in the Kansas City, Mo.-based denomination “world mission” areas was recorded at 1,077,822. In the 1980s there were only 181,000 members, according to the church. This year marked the largest recorded net gain in membership since 2005, with 108,553 new members, the church reported.

Over the past 10 years, membership in the Pentecostal Nazarene church increased by 73 percent in the “world mission” areas, which include Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico and Latin America. The Church of the Nazarene has about 640,000 members in North America, according to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches.

_ Brittani Hamm

Founding president of leading theological union dies

(RNS) John Dillenberger, a leading Protestant theologian who was instrumental in founding the ecumenical Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,Calif., died Feb. 7. He was 89.

He died at his home in the San Francisco Bay area due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to GTU.

Dillenberger left his mark in 1962 by helping create the independent Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, a cluster of nine theology graduate schools and seminaries. He was GTU’s dean and first president from 1963 to 1971, and spent another seven years there as a professor of historical theology.

Dillenberger was a Lutheran intrigued by religious art and church history. Born in 1918 in St. Louis, Mo., and raised in rural Illinois, he earned a divinity degree in 1943 from New York City’s Union Theological Seminary before serving as a Navy chaplain during World War II.

After graduate school, Dillenberger spent 14 years teaching theology. His Protestant-focused books include titles such as “Theology of Artistic Sensibilities, Images and Relics” and “Visual Arts and Christianity in America.”

“He had an uncanny ability to understand the relations of quality scholarship on the one hand (and) the sense of what the public needed for religious discourse, ” said current GTU president James Donahue.

Donahue added that Dillenberger, “was always at the helm when there was a need to translate religious needs and learning.”

_ David Finnigan

Quote of the Day: David Lapp, student at the King’s College in New York City

(RNS) “I realize that New Yorkers aren’t as crazy as I was always told they are, and they can learn that evangelicals aren’t as crazy as Pat Robertson makes us seem.”

_ David Lapp, a student at the King’s College, an evangelical school located in the Empire State Building. He was quoted by the Washington Post about his efforts to start conversations with strangers in New York City (Feb. 20).

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