WestonWilliams.com

Prayer should be brief and pure, unless it happens to be lengthened by an impulse or inspiration of divine grace.

The Episcopal church has taken a beating in recent years regarding the ordination of an open and practicing homosexual. Compounding this problem is the great amount of diversity inside the Episcopal church, which is causing great divisions. A new divide could be on the horizon with Episcopal priest Ann Holmes Redding and her recent conversion to Islam.
Perhaps conversion is too strong a word, it implies a turning from one stance to another, but according to her own statements she is both a Muslim and a Christian. She attends Saturday prayer services at a local mosque and then dons her priestly collar to offer Christian church services on Sunday mornings. While many are perplexed, her present Bishop Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner recently stated that, he finds the interfaith possibilities exciting. But I believe that there is still hope that the Episcopals may make a stand as the Bishop of Redding’s ordaining body has taken Redding’s collar for a year to evaluate this entire fiasco.
Christians aren’t the only ones evaluating this, recently on CNN a Muslim cleric was discussing how from his religion’s view you could not be both. How right he is! This is not an issue of openness or tolerance, to accept both is to reject both and become nothing. For if you accept both, you must reject their teachings on critical issues such as Christ. The Christian believes that salvation comes from the physical resurrection of Christ, while the Muslim holds that he was simply a great teacher. Muslims holds to essentially a works based religion, specifically the faithful attain salvation by adherence to the five pillars of Islam. Still another difference is the nature of God. Christians believe in the Trinity (or Triune God) while Islam vehemently rejects this as polytheism and worship Allah only.
It is time for the Episcopal church to take a stand. They need to reject the acceptance of both beliefs or join the modern unitarian church movement. If they can not stand as a church then they should change their name to the Episcopal Center for Spirituality and continue to explore the melding of opposing beliefs into nothing.

A good Bible dictionary is a great asset for studying scripture. In someways it beats the internet because of the pictures and quality of the articles! I love looking at pictures of things that the Bible talks about, it really helps the text to come alive. Below I’ve created some links to a few of the better Bible dictionaries, most of them you can actually preview on Amazon and see which one you like best.

Besides the Bible there is nothing more essential to good study than a concordance. You need a concordance in order to be able to search the whole counsel of God regarding a particular subject. I’ve just put up a Bible search tool in the menus on the right, you can search Crosswalk’s Bible from here just like we did in our session. For those of you who are interested in purchasing a concordance any Christian bookstore carries them as well as Amazon, I’ve placed links to some better concordances below.