Bishop secures release of 25 Prisoners

The Bishop, Diocese of Kaduna Anglican Communion, Most Reverend Josiah Idowu-fearon, yesterday secured the release of 25 prison inmates from Kaduna Central Prison as part of activities marking his 25th anniversary as Bishop of Anglican Communion.

Responding to questions from newsmen who accompanied him to the prison shortly after securing the inmates’ freedom, Bishop Idowu-Fearon said a total of 25 inmates with minor offences who could not pay their fine options of N10,000.00 each will eventually be released.

However, the lucky inmates were not released immediately because according to the Deputy Comptroller –In- Charge, Kaduna Central Prison, Yunusa Ibraheem, "€œCourts are on strike, so they have to wait until the courts call off the strike to enable us complete the necessary procedures in releasing them"€.

Bishop Idowu-Fearon further explained that, “The diocese of Kaduna Anglican Communion decided to celebrate my 25th year as Bishop in the Church of God, Anglican Communion.

As part of the celebration, we have to come to Kaduna Prison where we have a ministry, and we are partnering with the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) in giving IT education to the inmates.

And on getting to the prison, the staff gave us a surprise by putting up a novelty football match. between the staff and the inmates, and also by giving us the opportunity to worship together with the inmates.

So for us it is a special treat, not for the inmates, but for us, we really appreciate and we feel honoured.

The committee decided to pay the fines of N10,000.00 each for 25 inmates with minor offences so that they will be able to regain their freedom.

€œWe were able to pay N250,000.00 in total for the 25 of them, but since courts are still on strike, the processes of releasing them cannot be completed, so as soon as the courts call off the strike, these inmates will be able to regain their freedom.

We want to be releasing inmates every year because as men and women of God, that is our job. These inmates are of minor offences.

My charge to them is for them to put into practice the discipline that has been instilled in them in the prison, and also some of the skills they have acquired like tailoring, car washing, carpentry etc, they should make use of them judiciously.

€œWe hope to assist some of them with equipment like sewing machines so that the freedom they will secure will be of great benefit to them without staying idle.

He however charged the inmates while awaiting their freedom not to ever engage in the act that brought them to the prison, charging them to be of good behaviour and engage themselves in activities that will better their lives, that of their families and the country at large.

The A 61 Autoroute to be widened - Chaos ahead?

The A 61 autoroute between Carcassonne and Narbonne is a notorious bottleneck, especially when travelling east due to the fairly steep hills and slow moving lorries, or in summer the huge volume of traffic. 

Now Vinci, the operator of this autoroute, has announced that it will widen the carriageway to three lanes between Lézignan and Narbonne, starting the work in 2016. 

The cost is estimated at € 250 million and the work should create a further 20,000 jobs during the construction period.

Thanks to Network News

Video on the subject of real Christian unity

Message from Roger: - concerning a Video on the subject of real Christian unity 

Some friends from Simply Church recently sent me a video 

(Click here to access the video). 

It's about the hopeful signs now for real Christian unity, with some very interesting words from Pope Francis. It's quite long, over half an hour, but I found it well worth watching and recommend it to you.

Bishop's 2015 Lent Appeal

Message from Barbara

The Lent Lunches raised 539.50€, and the money has been sent to the Bishop's Lent Appeal, Hestia.

Barbara

"Hestia”, is a hostel for unaccompanied minor refugees in Athens. Children who have fled their homes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa are being held in prison conditions because there is nowhere else for them to go, and Greece has no money to care for them.

Hestia, which means "home", is a hostel provided by "Apostoli”, a social action charity operating under the auspices of the Greek Orthodox Church. 

Click here for full details of the Bishop's Lent Appeal

Update on Restos du Coeur 2015 national collection

This year, 67,600 volunteers and more than 700 business partners took part in the national collection on behalf of the Restos du Coeur. The volunteers many of them students, collected dried and tinned foodstuffs at more than 6,000 supermarkets across France over the weekend of the 6th/7th February 2015. These products will be critical to the ability of Restos du Coeur to help vulnerable people in 2015 and into 2016.

The foodstuffs collected included canned vegetables / meat / fish, and ready meals, along with baby and hygiene products.

Last year, the national collection allowed Restos du Coeur to serve more than 6 million meals to the neediest people. The number of guests visiting their distribution centres on a regular basis has stabilised at around one million persons.

Taking on the Vatican at cricket

The original article appeared on the BBC website - Click here for the original posting

The Vatican is not traditionally known as a hotbed of cricketing talent, so a team in holy orders shouldn't prove too much for a touring XI of authors from the UK, should it? Not so, as the historian Tom Holland recounts. 

"Quo vadis?" As we rattled over the flagstones of the Appian Way, the ancient road that leads south out of Rome, our driver pointed to the words emblazoned on a restaurant awning. "It means, 'Where are you going?'"

I knew the story. "Quo vadis?" was what St Peter was supposed to have said when, fleeing the emperor Nero's persecution, he had met the risen Christ on the Appian Way. "I am going to Rome," Jesus had answered, "there to be crucified again." Peter, shamed by his master's example, had turned back. Arrested, he had been martyred in the Vatican. Catholic tradition commemorates him as Rome's first bishop - the first Pope.

Two-thousand years on, and the Appian Way, with its legend of Peter meeting Christ, and all the various churches and catacombs that line it, is a place sacred to Christians from across the world. Now, though, it has a new claim to fame. I had come with 10 other middle-aged Englishmen on a short visit to Rome that was to culminate in a field just off the ancient road.

Already, on our trip, we had attended a homily by the Pope, shared a mass in a crypt beneath St Peter's, and been hosted to lunch by the Pontifical College. All these experiences, though, were mere warm-up's - antipasti to the main course. Two days after our arrival in Rome, I and my fellow travellers were off to the Appian Way on a most improbable mission - to play the Vatican at cricket.

The author prepares to take on the Vatican

It was a return match. The previous summer, the Vatican cricket team had come to the UK on their first ever tour, a visit that had culminated in an inter-faith clash against the Anglican Church. The team to which I belong, the Authors XI, had played one of the warm-up matches. We had lost off the last ball. Now we had our chance for revenge.

As we arrived at the hippodrome which hosts the Vatican's cricket pitch, I had to pinch myself. In the distance I could see the Alban Hills, where the ancestors of Romulus had lived before the founding of Rome, and the Pope has his summer residence. The view could hardly have been more Italian. Yet there I was, in whites and cap, preparing to take part in the most English of sports.

Except that cricket is no longer exclusively - or even principally - an English sport. The Vatican team included a single priest from the UK, but otherwise consisted entirely of young and alarmingly fit-looking seminarians from the Indian subcontinent.

Walking from the bus to the makeshift hut which served the ground as a pavilion, I spoke to one of them. Aamir Bhatti, the Vatican's wicketkeeper, was from Karachi in Pakistan. He was in his fourth year at the Pontifical Seminary, he told me, and in another couple of years would be returning to his home country as a priest.

And might he be heading there before that, I asked, on a Vatican cricket tour? He smiled. "I would love to," he said. "It would be a first step of friendship - and a testimony to our faith."

So might a Victorian have spoken. In Britain, the association between sport and godliness is no longer all it used to be, but in St Peter's, it still has considerable purchase.

Father Eamonn O'Higgins, the manager of the Vatican cricket team, and its chaplain, confirmed for me that the football-loving Holy Father had readily given them his blessing. Pope Francis had sat for a photo with the touring party to play the Church of England, and even signed their bats.

Cricket was believed by the Vatican to be a part of God's purpose. The tour of the UK had been used by the Catholic and Anglican authorities to promote the Global Freedom Network, a joint initiative against slavery and people trafficking. Looking to the future, Father Eamonn shared his wicketkeeper's hope that cricket might provide the Vatican with "a bridge of friendship" to the Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists of the subcontinent.

 

The opposition: St Peter's CC, with Pope Francis

"Quo vadis?" Sitting on the outfield, watching as our batsmen slumped to ignominious defeat against the bowling of assorted Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan seminarians, I suspected that I was watching the future of the Catholic Church.

Its gaze, at the dawning of the third Christian millennium, is firmly set on Asia - and unlike St Peter fleeing Rome down the Appian Way, it would seem to have no intention of running away from the challenge.

Sport in the Vatican

• Pope John Paul II (a goalkeeper in his youth) established a Vatican sport department in 2004 with the intention of "reinvigorating the tradition (of sport) within the Christian community"
• As well as a cricket club, Vatican City has its own football team, although it is one of only nine sovereign states in the world not recognised by Fifa (interestingly, the UK is among the others)
• Pope Francis remains a fan of San Lorenzo, the Buenos Aires football team he has supported since childhood

Heard the one about the comedy vicar?

By John Bingham, Religious Affairs Editor of Daily Telegraph.

Click here for original article

Laughter in the aisles: an annual 

church service for clowns Photo: Reuters

Perhaps it is just one of those jokes which has got lost in translation - from the original Aramaic.

Many of Jesus’s best-known lines - such as the remark about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God - could have been intended as jokes, it has been claimed.

The suggestion came as clergy were invited to take part in stand-up comedy training to liven up their Sunday sermons.

Priests and lay preachers are being offered coaching in everything from overcoming nerves to comic improvisation techniques as part of an effort to help the church cast off its po-faced image and entice people back to services.

Bentley Browning, a stand-up comic who regularly impersonates David Cameron, has been invited to run sessions for clergy at a clerical gathering in London next month.

Clergy are to be put through their paces and offered the chance to perform to their peers on stage at the ExCeL conference centre in east London at the Christian Resources Exhibition, a massive annual trade-fair for all things ecclesiastical.

Clergy are to be put through their paces and offered the chance to perform to their peers on stage at the ExCeL conference centre in east London at the Christian Resources Exhibition, a massive annual trade-fair for all things ecclesiastical.

Mr Browning, who runs stand-up sessions for a string of major companies as part of corporate team-building exercises and away-days, has also recently been invited by a handful of Church of England dioceses including Canterbury to train clergy to introduce comedy into their messages.

The Church of England’s conversion to comedy comes as the Roman Catholic Church also attempts to introduce more light-hearted elements to formal services. Earlier this week Pope Francis warned priests against delivering “boring” homilies.

Mr Browning, a vicar’s son, said that many of the clergy had displayed an unexpected comic talent, occasionally even straying into risqué territory, but too rarely display their humorous side in the pulpit.

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I decided to start doing this because I did a survey and asked what people think about sermons,” he said.

“Half of them said they were boring, the other half said they were very boring.”

But he argued that the accounts of Jesus’s public ministry showed evidence of similar communication techniques as those deployed by stand-up comedians.

“Many suggest his allusion to a camel going through the eye of a needle would have been construed as a quip,” he said.

“It uses a technique, exaggeration … that’s just classic Monty Pythonesque exaggeration.

“I think there is a lot more humour in the Bible than people might think.”

The Rev Cindy Kent, vicar of from St John the Apostle, Whetstone, London – one of those who has signed up for the course, which has been dubbed “Stand Up for Jesus” – agreed.

“Jesus must have used humour and he is the best role model of how to tell a story,” she said.

Rev Kent, a former pop singer and a presenter on Premier Radio, had her first go at comedy with an appearance in a BBC show Vicars Telling Jokes last year. She made a quip about seeing the face of Jesus in a slice of toast but telling a neighbour who replied: “I can’t believe it’s not Buddha.”

“I was thrilled when the BBC asked me to take part but terrified at the same time - It's one thing to tell a joke to a friend - or friends - but it's quite another to do it on the telly, to a potential audience of thousands,” she said.

Clerical corkers:

Biblical subjects might not seem an obvious source of comic inspiration but here are 10 top favourite (loosely) scriptural jokes from the organisers of the Christian Resources Exhibition:

• So what if I can't spell Armageddon - it isn't the end of the world

• What kind of man was Boaz before he got married? Ruthless

• Don't let your worries get the best of you: Moses started out as a basket case.

• How do we know Moses wore a wig? Because sometimes he was seen with Aaron and sometimes he wasn't

• How do we know Samson was a comedian? Because he was the only biblical character to bring the house down

• Why didn't they play cards on the Ark? Because Noah was standing on the deck

• Why did they throw Joseph in the pit? There was no room in the gallery

• Who was the greatest financier in the Bible? Noah. He floated his stock while everyone else was in liquidation

• Who was the largest woman in the bible? The woman of Samaria

• Who was the greatest female financier in the Bible? Pharaoh's daughter. She went down to the Nile and drew out a little prophet