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LLF at General Synod: Pyrrhic victory lessons from women bishops

 —  James Oakley

The General Synod of the Church of England meets from today (13th November 2023) until Wednesday 15th. The November session doesn't happen every year (often General Synod only meets in February and July), and has partly been scheduled this year to give space to debate the next stages of Living in Love and Faith, and Prayers in Love and Faith.

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Prayers of Love and Faith: Bishops agree next steps to bring to Synod

 —  James Oakley

The Church of England issued a press release last night, following on from the House of Bishops meeting to discuss how the project of "Living in Love and Faith" would be taken forwards at the November meeting of General Synod.

Let me be clear. This is the worst possible outcome.

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Handwritten sermon notes

 —  James Oakley

What notes do you preach from?

It's a question young, aspiring preachers often ask of those who have been preaching for longer. That's because people want to know the "right" answer to that question. In particular, people often ask: Do you preach from a full script, or from notes?

No right answer

There is no right answer, because it will vary according to your personality, context, and the kind of talk or sermon you're delivering.

In every sermon, you're wanting to aim at two things.

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How to: Set up MinIO with apache2 reverse proxy

 —  James Oakley

"MinIO is a high-performance, S3 compatible object store." So says their homepage.

In brief, it's a self-hosted suite of tools to let you run your own storage server that is fully compatible with the Amazon S3 standards. They have a free version licenced under GNU ACPL v3, and a commercial supported version with their own licence.

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Stephen Cottrell: Disagree as siblings not enemies?

 —  James Oakley

In his presidential address to the July 2023 General Synod, Stephen Cottrell appealed to members of the Synod to debate and disagree not as enemies, but as siblings. On the face of it, this seems such an obvious and charitable standard to hold out, that it's hard to disagree with him. But we need to look more closely at what he's actually asking the Synod to do. This is not quite as smooth-running as it sounds.

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