The   Holy VVVrinity ˙ Herald       May 2007

 

The Vicar’s Voice @

Easter Day has passed and Low Sunday was not too low this year.* We are blessed to have Boyd and Barbara Ruffner back in the family.  We have all missed them. *  I would like to take a moment to thank Pat Ward for her hard and wonderful work in producing the H.T. Newsletter.  It looks great and is a great communicator. * Carol Morris is going to conduct the Sunday morning Bible Class for the next few months and will be concentrating on the readings for the day. *  I would like for all of you to consider taking an active part in the Liturgy of the Church.  What can you do?  Altar Guild, Lay Reader, Lector, Lay Eucharistic Minister, Acolyte, Usher.  You name it.  Please see me if you are interested in joining any of these functions.  * Please make your plans to be at St. Mark’s, Honey Grove on April 29th at 4:00pm for Eucharist.  Fr. Ray Jennison, who was Priest-in-Charge there for a number of years, is going to preach the sermon.  We will have Sung Morning Prayer at Holy Trinity that Sunday.  You may come to both services, and I hope you will. We want to show the people of Honey Grove and the surrounding area that the Episcopal is still alive in Fannin County.  Let’s all show up to let them know that the Episcopal Church is well also.  Fr. Bill+

Easter Sunday

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Easter

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Palm 

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SPIRITUAL REFLECTION: By Frank Hegedus - April 8, 2007 - Easter Day - Year C [RCL]

Acts 10:34-43; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; John 20:1-18 or Luke 24:1-12

Easter moves around a lot from year to year. Unlike Christmas, which always falls on December twenty-fifth, no matter the day of the week or the number of shopping days since Thanksgiving, Easter can fall on most any Sunday between March twenty-second and April twenty-fifth. There is, in fact, an entire section of the Book of Common Prayer devoted to finding the date of Easter Sunday in any given year. There you will read about golden numbers and Sunday letters, astronomical and ecclesiastical equinoxes, and the phases of the moon -- all of which are critical in determining when exactly it is that we celebrate the feast of the Lord's Resurrection. In fact, the dating of Easter was one of the earliest controversies to face the early English Church and incipient Anglican community long before the time of Henry VIII.

 

Parish Website: www.holytrinitybonham.org

New on the website are the March and April 2007 newsletters, more pictures, and an observer’s comments about the 2006 Dallas Diocesan Convention, a guide to the liturgy of the Mass, a description of the servers of the Mass, Vestry members and members of the Altar Guild, Daughters of the King, and lots more.  Email your late-breaking news to Gary Vernon, our webmaster at webmaster@mail.holytrinitybonham.org  and to the newsletter editor, Pat Ward at HOLYTRNTYEDITOR@aol.com.

 

Vestry Report@

Your Senior and Junior Wardens have been busy at work this month but many others have been taking up the slack and assisting in keeping things moving along.  Ron informed me last Sunday that the plumbing replacement under the Parish House is finished.  We have also now replaced the lettering on the East side of the church building but are still working on getting the lettering on the sign that Jim and Carol Morris put up and placing a sign in front of the Parish House to make our location more visible for drivers.  I saw a notice this Sunday of an upcoming May Evangelism 101 seminar.  Some of us attended this seminar a few years ago and found it very informative and I encourage anyone who has the time to attend.

 V Yours in Christ,

     Gary Vernon, Senior Warden

 

Community Outreach:

CPR Class: Saturday, May 19th

The 6-8 hours class will be limited to 8 people.  Teenagers and their friends are welcome and encouraged to get this life-saving skill. Both child and adult CPR will be certified. Please sign the notice in the Parish House or contact me at HOLYTRNTYEDITOR@aol.com if you are interested in getting your certification in CPR. When we fill a class, I will schedule with the instructor. Membership at Holy Trinity is not a requirement.

 

Sharing:  Magazines, good movies

Magazines:  Smithsonian, Texas Monthly, Readers Digest, Home and Garden, Scientific American, Flying, National Geographic, Texas Highways, “D”, “O”, People, Country Living, Home & Garden, hobby or travel related journals and others. We’ve all seen them on the rack with a ‘headline’ of an article we’d like to read but don’t want to pay $5.95 (or more) for it just for that one article or recipe or decorating article.

 

Charlene Dalton and Pat Ward are initiating a “Magazine Rack” where you can bring the most recent 2-3 magazines that are gathering dust on your coffee table to share with others. This is not a library. You aren’t required to bring them back and you should not expect to get back the ones you bring. At the end of every month, we will donate the oldest magazines to the nursing and retirement homes or the prisons with the labels torn off or obscured.

               

Altar Guild Service:

MAY 2007: 5/6 Irete Perdue, 5/13 Mary Jo Barbee, 5/20          Charlene Dalton, 5/27 Beverly & David Rainbolt

JUNE 2007: 6/03 Pam Walker, 6/10 Michael-David Risser-Gant, 6/17 Jean Whitlock, 6/24 Irete Perdue

 

Communicants Profiles: Father Bill and Charlene Dalton

After retirement in 2002, the Daltons moved from Dallas and remodeled a hundred-year old house in Bonham, which coincidentally has a history connected to Holy Trinity Church. They transferred membership from Church of the Incarnation and previously were members of St. Michael’s and All Angels.

Fr. Bill was born and spent his childhood in St. Louis, Mo.

               

After serving in the Korean War, Fr. Bill attended and graduated from North Texas University. He felt a calling to the ministry soon thereafter and attended Episcopal Theological Seminary in Kentucky. This is how he met Fr. Kershaw and Peggy. After finishing seminary, he decided the timing wasn’t right for the priesthood. He worked in management positions in retailing, such as Sears, Sanger-Harris, James K. Wilson, for a number of years. After this, he opened his original Great Earth Vitamin Store on Main St. in Dallas in 1984. Soon thereafter, he opened a store on Lemmon Ave. and the third on Northwest Hwy. and Midway Road. He sold his last store in 1999.

               

Charlene is a native of Comanche and Duncan Oklahoma. As a teenager, she worked at Titche-Goettinger in the advertising dept. and then worked several years at the old Glenn Advertising Agency, located in Republic Bank Towers. Feeling the need to devote more time to family, she went to work for family physician, Gerald D. Long, M.D., and worked as his assistant until his retirement.  In 1981, she began work with Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. at age 43, and believes she was the OLDEST telephone new hire ever employed!  She was lucky enough to outlast the downsizing and finally after 20+ years, she retired from AT&T. in 2002.

               

The Daltons have 5 children (Rozan, Karen, Jenny, Mark Shane and Kim, a terrific son-in-law Mike Chisholm) and 10 grandchildren (Zachary, Amanda and grandson-in-law Matt, Ryan, Maggie, Andrew, Sean, Michael, Bonnie, Nickolas, and Sarah). Sean has 2 daughters, Tiana and Emma. All children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in North Texas – mostly in the Dallas Area. Kim, Bonnie and Zachary live in Bonham. We get together fairly often and enjoy family dinners, especially during the holidays and for birthdays when possible.

 

Since moving to Bonham, Fr. Bill has been an active volunteer at the Fannin County Community Ministries and a member of the Ministerial Alliance.  Charlene has been a Fannin County CASA volunteer since 2002.

 

On September 18, 2004 Fr. Bill was ordained by Bishop Stanton and since that time he has been the Vicar of Bonham.

 

Church of the Holy Trinity Story – Part II

(from “Where All Past Years Are by Tom Scott, 1996”)

 

The Missing Cornerstone (or is it?)

Tom Scott spent ten years searching for and researching all available documentation of the early years of Holy Trinity prior to publishing his papers for the 110th anniversary of the church. The scarcity of records and other sources of information caused him to look in every nook and cranny in the church and parish house, even in the attic. He found a record that was numbered #1 on the flyleaf but was dated 1892, several years after the formation of Trinity Episcopal church in Bonham. In a news article dated 1947 on the 71st anniversary of the church, he found reason to believe that information about the founders of the church were placed in a cornerstone when it was dedicated in 1881, but the fate of the cornerstone is unknown. Did someone rescue the materials in the cornerstone from the fire in 1961? Or did they somehow manage to remove the cornerstone and take it somewhere for safekeeping? Or, when the debris from the fire was removed, did a contractor who didn’t recognize the cornerstone haul it to a landfill somewhere?

 

The Bonham newspaper, May 13, 1881, reported that the cornerstone of the “new” Episcopal Church was laid by Bishop Garrett. The contents of the cornerstone were reported to have been a Bible, Prayer Book, church Journal of the Northeast Department of Texas, copies of The Bonham News, the Bonham Advocate, Sherman Courier-Chronicle and the Fort Worth Churchman, a list of state and county officials, a history of the Episcopal Church in Bonham from the date of the first service by Bishop Gregg and a history of the church written by then Rector Dr. T.B. Lawson, a photograph of Rev. S.T. Lord and several small coins of the United States. There is a white marble cornerstone presently at Holy Trinity, on top of which sits the church bell which was installed during the tenure of Father Richard Morgan (1953).

(Part III: continued next month)

 

& What we are:

   One holy, catholic and apostolic church…- Part II

   (excerpt from “A People Called Episcopalians by Rev. Dr. John H. Westerhoff:

     1998”)

 

“Anglicans contend that the Scriptures were intended to be interpreted and reinterpreted over and over again in the light of contemporary knowledge and experience within a believing and worshiping community, open to the leading of God’s Spirit into new truth. Scripture, reason and tradition has become the hallmark of our unique Anglican understanding of authority. While maintaining that the Scriptures provide us with a unifying plumb line, Anglicans are willing to live with diverse and changing interpretations, rather than infallible certainty and binding prescriptions for all times. It is that authoritative source that has aided Anglicans to maintain unity through the centuries. However, it is necessary to acknowledge that today there are some Episcopalians who appear to be unaware of this understanding of authority and others unwilling to accept it; many more do not agree on how this historic Anglican understanding of authority functions, especially in terms of the Scriptures, when discerning the mind and will of God”.

 

(excerpts and references from “Episcopal Life Online”

   (http://www.episcopalchurch.org/elife)  

 

If you wish subscribed, email to join-enslist@epicom.org  and include "subscribe" in the subject line.

 

It is difficult if not impossible to be unaware at some level of consciousness of the controversy in which the Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Communion is currently embroiled over the issues of interpretation of the Scripture regarding homosexuality and the issue of same-sex relationships and marriages and their place within our communion, and between our Presiding Bishop, the EC-USA Diocese(s) and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The website captioned above is a source of the most current, indeed almost hourly, report of the events unfolding on these and other issues of national and international interest.  After being told by the Archbishop while in Tanzania that he would be “too busy” to meet with Presiding Bishop Jefferts on the issues dividing the EC-USA and the Anglican Communion, and later that he did not plan to meet with the EC-USA House of Bishops, the Archbishop announced while he was meeting with the House of Bishops in the Canadian Province last week that he would, indeed, meet with them in New Orleans at their annual meeting this September.

 

On the day this newsletter is being written, less than an hour ago from this moment, Presiding Bishop Jefferts issued a mandate urging Episcopalians to extend our Christian “hospitality” to “minister(sic) to illegal immigrants, despite any laws that would criminalize such assistance.”

 

On the Dallas Diocese website Bishop Stanton’s comments and guidance on the affairs and issues are posted at http://www.episcopal-dallas.org/bishop2.html.                 

               

Some DEFINITIONS and PROTOCOLS that will become more and more important as we all become major figures in decisions being made on our behalf and ultimately by each of us in the coming months and near future:

 

·         POLITY - a particular form of government that exists within a state or an institution

·         The Episcopal Church – USA is governed by the General Convention which meets every three years. The Agenda of General Convention includes matters of canon law, policy and program, questions of theology and ethics, and foundational issues such as the content of the Prayer Book and Hymnal.

·          Delegates sit in two legislative bodies. Legislation may originate in either house, but approval must come from both houses with a majority of both lay and clergy necessary in the House of Deputies.

·         House of Bishops composed of all living bishops and chaired by the Presiding Bishop who is elected by the         House with the consent of the House of Deputies and

·         House of Deputies composed of not more than four elected clergy and not more than four elected lay persons from each Diocese, chaired by a lay or clerical President.

·         Executive Council - meets three or four times each year between Conventions to conduct the business of the Church. A forty-five member body, it consists of the Presiding Bishop as President and Chair, the President of the House of Deputies as vice-chair, a treasurer, the secretary of General Convention and a group of elected lay and ordained members who are divided into a number of Standing Commissions (liturgical, ecumenical relations, health, peach and justice, evangelism, stewardship, etc.).

·         DIOCESE – THE FUNDAMENTAL UNIT OF THE CHURCH, FORMED WITH THE CONSENT OF THE GENERAL CONVENTION.

·         PARISH  – subordinate to the Diocese and may only call itself “Episcopal” if it is in union with the Bishop and the Diocese. A Parish is served by a Rector appointed by the Bishop and is a self-supporting congregation which contributes proportionally to the ministry of the Diocese.

·         A Mission (aka “aided Parish”) is a congregation that receives financial aid from the Diocese. Their clergy leader, appointed by the Bishop, is called a Vicar. However, throughout the Anglican Communion, the Priest in charge of a Parish is also called a Vicar (from the Latin for “substitute).

·         BISHOP – the chief pastor of the Diocese and every parish or mission within its physical jurisdiction, elected by the Diocesan meeting, serving for life or until age 72.

·         SUFFROGAN BISHOP – a Bishop subordinate to the Bishop and dedicated to assisting (elected)

·         ASSISTING BISHOP – a Bishop no longer active in a Diocese assigned to assist the active Bishops (appointed)

·         BISHOP COADJUTOR – assists the Bishop until the Bishop retires and who then becomes Bishop of the Diocese (elected)

·         RECTOR – appointed by the Bishop to serve as his/her representative in each Parish or Mission

·         DEACONS – assigned by the Bishop to a parish for liturgical purposes; may be “transitional” and studying for ordination

·         DIOCESAN COUNCIL (aka Convention) – chaired by the Bishop and held annually to conduct the business of the Diocese, attended by all clergy resident in the Diocese and a designated number of lay persons elected by a Parish.

·         EXECUTIVE BOARD – a body of lay and clerical members serving the Council between annual meetings to oversee the program of the Diocese

·         STANDING COMMITTEE- Lay and clerical members serving the Diocese as a committee of advice and consent to the Bishop to approve of all persons to be ordained, consent to the consecration of a Bishop in another Diocese, approve the sale of church properties, and in a case where there is no Bishop, to act as the Diocese’s ecclesiastical authority.

·         CONVOCATIONS (aka Deaneries) – chaired by a Parish priest appointed by the Bishop to be its Dean who also acts as a consultant for the Bishop.

·         CLERGY – Priest or Vicar - are members of the Diocese, not members of a congregation and are placed in a Parish by the Bishop as his representative and to serve at his will. Clergy are only licensed to function sacramentally in one Parish in one Diocese but may be licensed by a Bishop of another Diocese for a particular sacramental purpose. Clergy from Parishes may serve sacramentally in another Parish if invited by the Rector or Vicar to do so. Clergy of other Christian churches may only assist an Episcopal priest, for example at a wedding or baptism, but only at the invitation of the Parish priest.  The Vicar’s job is to guide the conduct of the Parish under the pastoral direction and leadership of the Bishop, responsible for worship and music, Christian education, church school curriculum and teachers. He/she is also responsible for the presentation of persons for baptism, confirmation, marriage and stewardship education. The Rector or Vicar has jurisdiction over every aspect of Parish life except the economic. They can call other clergy to assist in their ministry to the Parish, but when he/she leaves,  his assistant clergy are to resign.

·         VESTRY – the governing body of a Parish, presided over by the Rector, has jurisdiction for the economic and business aspects of Parish life. All Parish property is held in trust by the vestry who controls the property and is responsible for its maintenance and upkeep for the Diocese and secure it against alienation from the Diocese. Two members of the Vestry are Wardens charged with providing all things necessary for worship, maintenance of the building(s), keeping the Parish Register, and acting as Ecclesiastical authority in the absence of a Rector. The size of the Vestry is authorized by Diocesan canon and is responsible for hiring (and firing) a Rector approved by the Bishop. The Senior Warden is often selected by the Rector. The Junior Warden is elected by the Vestry. The Vestry elects a clerk and a treasurer, neither of whom needs to be a member of the Vestry.

·         MEMBER – A baptized person listed in a Parish Registry.

·         COMMUNICANT – A Member of the Episcopal church who is over the age of 16 and who participates in the Eucharist at least three times a year. A Communicant is considered “in good standing” who participates regularly in the Eucharist and other activities of the Parish including making an annual pledge. It is necessary to be a Confirmed member or Communicant, at least 18 years of age and “in good standing” to be elected to the Vestry.

·         LAY PERSON – Communicants “in good standing” authorized by the Bishop to administrate a Parish without a Vicar and to assist the Vicar with the Eucharist, to take communion to shut-ins, and as catechists.  Lay persons appointed by the Vicar may serve as lectors or intercessors.

 

June Newsletter deadline: May 20, 2007

Send news and bios to HOLYTRNTYEDITOR@aol.com

Pat Ward, 353 PR 207, Ivanhoe, TX 75447

FAX: 903-664-2244