All Saints’ Pasadena Responds to MPAC Controversy

on December 5, 2012
All Saints' Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California is one of the more prominent parishes in the Episcopal Church, well known for its liberal political advocacy.
All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California is one of the more prominent parishes in the Episcopal Church, well known for its liberal political advocacy.

For those that missed it, IRD writer Ryan Mauro recently authored a piece in which he criticized the decision of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California to host the upcoming December 15 convention of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Mauro cites connections between MPAC and Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood as a basis for his concerns, and chalks up All Saints’ hospitality to naïveté. The Muslim public policy organization lists this as the first time a major Muslim group of its kind has been hosted by a Christian church for a convention.

While hosting MPAC may be a first, political engagement is not new territory for All Saints’, a prominent liberal parish that regularly engages in political causes and offers an “advocacy membership” for non-Christians and others who decide not to join the church as members, but wish to affiliate themselves with the parish’s political activities.

Following publication of the article, All Saints’ and MPAC quickly called a news conference for December 6 to refute coming “under attack from right-wing extremists,” with the “attack” apparently consisting solely of publication of Mauro’s article and a series of emails received by church staff. Similarly, Mauro appeared December 5th opposite MPAC President Salam Al-Marayati on Southern California Public Radio’s Airtalk program to discuss the controversy. That segment can be accessed here and consists of Mauro citing connections between MPAC and Islamist groups, while Al-Marayati decries the national security analyst as “hateful” and displaying “Islamophobia” for doing so, and broadly waves away Mauro’s reporting as “lies” without directly engaging it.

On December 2, All Saints’ Rector Ed Bacon briefly addressed the controversy in a sermon in which he offers a curious redefinition of the Holy Spirit and advised parishioners to be aware of inherited narratives that are “toxic, suffocating, unsustainable for the health of the individual or for the larger human family.” Bacon places criticism of MPAC squarely among these narratives, explaining that “God’s revolution” is “the end of the toxic narrative that too many of our religions have promulgated and that is, that in order to become a part of my religion, you have to hate someone else in another religion or you have to hate somebody else in another category.”

“Every time we become more conscious or aware or awake, we discover that we have a soul which is our deepest self, and the discovery of our soul gives us access to a larger knowing beyond ourselves, and if we obey the voice of our soul, if we obey our consciousness, our awareness will become a very wise teacher of soul wisdom and will teach us deep within ourselves,” Bacon sermonized. “Some people call it the “inner witness” and this witness is what Christians have called the ‘Holy Spirit.’”

The All Saints’ pastor asserts that this “Consciousness. Awareness. Soul. The Holy Spirit,” is saying “Jesus is not the exclusive Son of God. Jesus is the inclusive Son of God revealing what is always true everywhere and all the time that God’s compassion includes everyone, and that Christianity is the exclusive religion. Christianity is the inclusive religion that embraces everyone with compassion.”

“This light, this awareness, this alertness sometimes needs to be used as an armor to protect our souls,” Bacon continues. Citing the upcoming All Saints’-hosted MPAC convention as “an historic moment,” Bacon invites the congregation to participate.

“Make sure you come ready for the Holy Spirit to stretch your soul so that you have more compassion and inter-connectivity with other human beings across boundaries than you’ve ever had before. And also know that that’s going to be armor of light because we’ve begun to receive some of the most vile, vituperative, ugly, mean-spirited email correspondence I’ve ever read in all of my life, talking about All Saints participating in terrorism by being hospitable to Muslims. But that’s our calling.”

Bacon promises that those who practice “soul-expanding waking up” will be “ready to receive the mystery of God made flesh because we will have understood God inside our flesh. God made flesh not only in a baby, but in our very lives in our journey of casting off the narratives of darkness and putting on the armor and narratives and new stories of God’s light and love and new world.”

  1. Comment by Donnie on December 6, 2012 at 10:53 am

    I often suspect liberal “pastors” of being under demonic influence. This does nothing to abate that hunch.

  2. Comment by Ben Welliver on December 6, 2012 at 9:54 pm

    Considering that the fiercest hatred of Christian conservatives comes not from agnostics or atheists, but from liberal “Christians,” I can see why you would think that.

    Btw, if you read 1 John (the epistle, that is), you’ll notice that it uses “Antichrists,” plural.

  3. Comment by Donnie on December 6, 2012 at 11:20 pm

    I often say that some of God’s greatest enemies (and Satan’s best friends) are in pulpits. Seriously, the coming antichrist (or antichrists) will need churches to spread his message.

    Many liberal denominations deny the physical resurrection of Jesus. That alone makes them suspect and apostate.

  4. Comment by J S Lang on December 10, 2012 at 7:30 pm

    I think there was one survey that showed only about 46 percent of lay Episcopalians believe in the resurrection of Jesus and the virgin birth. Those beliefs were, in the not so distant past, considered integral parts of the Christian creed – non-negotiables. If the survey is right, that means more than half of Episcopalians don’t even fit the traditional definition of “Christian.” If I were guessing, I’d say there is even less belief among the clergy than the laity – something that C. S. Lewis observed back in the 1940s.

  5. Pingback by THE BLAZE by TIFFANY GABBAY « How Did We Get Here on December 22, 2012 at 8:44 pm

    […] All Saints’ Pasadena Responds to MPAC Controversy (juicyecumenism.com) […]

  6. Comment by Abdullah on October 18, 2013 at 12:14 pm

    Asalamalaykum/Hello my name is Abdullah,

    I was born a Muslim and my grandmother placed me into the church as a young boy. I followed Christianity from the age of 6yrs old to about 14 yrs., old.
    After that I pretty much gave up on religion and just went astray in this world. I am now 48yrs old day before yesterday. I accepted ISLAM about 3.5 years ago now as the continuation of the 2 other main religions God has given mankind ,1)Judaism, 2)Christianity. 3) ISLAM,

    I felt in my heart that I was a god fearing young man and I so love the Lord. What Islam has taught me is nothing short of something’s that I was already taught as a Christian. But as a Christian we fail to continue to read and learn of what was yet to come for mankind.

    Islam gives mankind that clarity, that certainness of the truth and it confirms what we know and adds clarity to what is confusing in all religions per say.
    I encourage all people who believe that there is a God to be open minded and show compassion to each other despite our differences in religion and welcome Muslims into your church and love us and we love you. And that’s how we show our God and the world we want change and we want forgiveness from our god and it shows we are trying to gain what God wants to give each and everyone of us.
    Which is Mercy upon us all who believe and the reward for that is a beautiful life in this world and in the hereafter, please lets love each other lets come together and unite as a people and as God would want us too unite.

    Lets Love each other and be kind to each other and worship together as one people under the eyes of God, we can do it we all have it within ourselves to overcome Satan and all the cover up and confusing ways we have of worshipping GOD, please lets come together, Abdullah Muhammed Abdullah.

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