Author Archives: David

Primate Linda Nicholls prays for the peace of Jerusalem…. sort of

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The Primate starts out with this:

To seek the prosperity of Jerusalem is to seek a just and lasting peace that recognizes the rights of both Palestinians and Israelis—Christians, Jews and Muslims—in this land.

A statement that is designed to sound high-minded, right thinking – virtuous. Who, after all, doesn’t want lasting peace and justice in the Middle East?

Regrettably, it doesn’t end there. Nicholls goes on to prove a point that I’ve thought for a while: it is impossible not to take a side in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The difference between those who take sides is this:

Those who side with Israel admit it. I am one of them because Israel, the only democratic, free, civilised country in the region, is in a conflict with a group of people who will not stop attacking it until it ceases to exist. It has an obligation to protect its citizens and it is doing so.

Those who side against Israel pretend to be impartial, but they are not. This is a deceit that becomes transparently obvious as soon as they voice their opinions. Or, if they are clerics, threaten to pray for justice.

This is the duplicitous camp into which Nicholls has placed herself. She would like us to believe she is above the conflict, an impartial ecclesiastical arbiter unmoved by bias or irrational animus: in other words, a typical liberal. But her words betray her:

Request the implementation of UN resolutions 242 (1967), 338 (1973), 194 (1948)

Call for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories and the end of illegal Israeli settlements

Call Israel, as an occupying power, to respect the 4th Geneva Convention

Request measures by the Palestinian Authority to reduce poverty and unemployment, and to improve services to Palestinians

Recognize the city of Jerusalem as a shared holy place for Christians, Muslims and Jews

Recognize the need for trade between Palestine and Canada

The unbearable incoherence of the Church of England

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The Church of England is cheering on the UK’s banning of conversion therapy:

The General Synod has voted overwhelmingly to reject coercive Conversion Therapies so we welcome the Government’s commitment to explore these matters further with a view to enshrining that position in law.

Notice that the word “coercive” has been slipped in, whereas the Queen’s speech left it out:

Measures will be brought forward to address racial and ethnic disparities and ban conversion therapy.

I’m sure that no one is under any illusion that, once the law has passed, the banning of conversion therapy will be confined to the coercive variety. If that were so, there would be no need for a new law: it is already illegal to coerce someone into being something she is not by kidnapping her, confining her and subjecting her to uninvited brainwashing.

Come to think of it, that is a moderately accurate description of what we are doing to our children in school: brainwashing them into believing that boys can be girls and vice-versa. This non-binary conversion therapy is a heinous corruption of innocence that the church should be denouncing but isn’t.

Once the law is passed it will be illegal for a person who experiences unwanted same-sex attraction to seek help in combatting it. The best she can hope for from the Anglican church is to have it affirmed.

The church’s incoherence intensifies on reading the motion agreed by General Synod in July 2017:

That this Synod: (a) endorse the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy in the UK of November 2015, signed by The Royal College of Psychiatrists and others, that the practice of gay conversion therapy has no place in the modern world, is unethical, potentially harmful and not supported by evidence; and 3 (b) call upon the Church to be sensitive to, and to listen to, contemporary expressions of gender identity; (c) and call on the government to ban the practice of Conversion Therapy.

Note that there is no mention of coercion. Moreover, the church is going to listen to contemporary expressions of gender identity. That means the church will nod sympathetically when a man comes to a priest to declare he is a woman, is taking hormones to grow breasts and will soon have surgery to remove the parts God gave him but are now unwanted. In short, the church will approve his conversion therapy.

No wonder no one takes the church seriously.

Anglicans on the trailing edge

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The Anglican Church of Canada has largely abandoned thousands of years of Biblical wisdom, tradition and theology in favour of the latest secular fads.

So far, we have galloped through gay equality, global warming, fossil fuel divestment, Indigenous rights, transgender mayhem, obsessive/compulsive pronoun selection disorder, ancestor condemnation, Israel excoriation, to arrive finally, panting with exhaustion, at Dismantling Systemic Racism. This week, at least. Next week a new fad will undoubtedly assault the malleable affections of our senior Anglican clerics.

One of the problems with all this is the puzzling question of why the keepers of our moral boundaries do not notice all these abject ethical failures before the secular world points them out? Could it be because, having abandoned the faith once handed down, the Anglican Church of Canada finds itself wandering aimlessly in a wasteland of witless ideas, staggering helplessly from one stupidity to the next? Yes.

Thus, we have the Council of General Synod busily engaged in Dismantling Racism:

In its latest meeting, the general secretary said, CoGS had been challenged to learn how to see something that is very obvious for people not in the dominant culture, but which may be less so for those in the dominant culture: the reality of racism. “We had some very moving revelations of those realities,” Perry said of Saturday’s panel discussion on dismantling racism. “I hope that we will all learn how to see those very difficult realities so that we can address them effectively.”

CoGS has also been invited to see what God has been doing in the pandemic, he added, “in ways that perhaps we’ve not been open to seeing because we’ve been tied up just trying to get through it.” Perry described Surprised by the Spirit as an invitation to the Anglican Church of Canada “to see what God is doing and will be doing.”

I think I have seen what God is doing: He is dismantling the Anglican Church of Canada.

St. Alban’s Ottawa is too inclusive

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St. Alban’s Anglican Church in Ottawa used to house a thriving orthodox congregation that left the Anglican Church of Canada to join ANiC in 2008. A small, less than entirely orthodox ACoC congregation now meets in the building. Naturally, they pride themselves on their commitment to inclusion:

It is the policy of the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa that no one be excluded from any ministry or leadership position, including ordination, on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. All are welcome in our Spirit-Led, Christ-Centred, Contemporary Urban Church.

It is, therefore, a source of considerable embarrassment to have to admit that the notorious racist, colonizer and misogynist Sir John A. Macdonald used to attend the church. To make atonement, the parish is displaying a page of self-flagellation, Uriah Heep humility, and faux remorse on behalf of their ancestors’ flagrantly wicked wrong-inclusion.

Read all about it here:

Sir John A. Macdonald and his wife, Agnes Bernard of Jamaica, were early parishioners of St. Albans. While Sir John A. Macdonald is rightly remembered as the first Prime Minister of Canada, he is also remembered by First Nations as an architect of the residential schools, and by Métis for the execution of Louis Riel. Many decisions integral to Canadian nation building undermined the rights and needs of Indigenous peoples, who were the first to make this land their home.

[…..]

St. Albans is the oldest Anglican church building in downtown Ottawa, and we are proud of our Church’s longstanding commitment to inclusion. As Ottawa’s first free church, parishioners of St. Albans did not have to pay for the right to sit in a pew; Sir John A. Macdonald and other government leaders and officials worshipped alongside carpenters and labourers. However, we are not proud of the dispossession, mistreatment and exclusion of Indigenous peoples in Canada, and we acknowledge and repent of our sins in that regard. Through our prayers and our actions, we are working towards reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. We invite you to join us on this journey.

Pastor arrested for inciting church attendance

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No, not in China, in Alberta.

Pastor Artur Pawlowski has been arrested for inciting people to attend church.

It took a heavily armed squad of brave police officers to subdue the dangerous ecclesiastical criminal who can be seen in the video below in his Sunday best being made to kneel on a wet motorway.

Luckily, the constabulary was fully masked up – as North Americans like to say just to irritate me – to protect themselves from any deadly projectile sneezing that the unmasked pastor may have secretly weaponised. It goes without saying that if the pastor had had the forethought to wield a Black Lives Matter placard, it would be the police who would be kneeling on the wet tarmac.

Prior to this, Pastor Artur had not endeared himself to the local constabulary. He tossed them out of his church, hurling the epithet “gestapo” at them. Not at all inclusive but, then, they were trying to shut down his church service and only the most intrepid or foolhardy will interrupt a preacher when he is in full swing.

I make no claim that the Pastor was right to continue church services in person – my church isn’t – but the police cannot imagine that this episode will do anything but heap ridicule and derision on any attempt to maintain the illusion that their job is to serve and protect. As PR people like to say: “the optics are bad.”

How to make a muddle of the Resurrection

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All it requires is an Anglican archbishop.

Here is Archbishop Linda Nicholls taking a simple historical fact and miring it in mushy obfuscation.

This starts well but quickly descends in treacly vagueness:

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the event that defines Christian faith. It is the unique event that affirms Jesus’s identity; and confirms, with power, all that Jesus taught about the love of God. It changes everything for the disciples, who must reframe all they expected through the lens that God is acting in life and even through death into new life. Without the resurrection, as St. Paul says in 1 Cor 15:13-14, 19, our faith is useless and we are to be pitied. With the resurrection we enter the lifegiving possibilities that God opens to us through Jesus Christ in every situation and moment of our lives. We share in the resurrection as the principle of God’s life in and through us.

[……..}

The gift of the resurrection of Jesus is the promise that—whether embraced slowly or quickly—the power of God’s love is stronger than the pain, sin and sorrows of what we see. Since Jesus lives, we will too, by entering into the reality that God is both with us now and waiting for us in the future, even if that future looks very different from what we have known in the past.

After emerging coughing from the fog of “entering into the reality that God is both with us now and waiting for us in the future, even if that future looks very different from what we have known in the past”, I consoled myself with the thought that I am a simple soul and, as such, merely cling to the hope that Jesus came back to life along with a real, improved body as evidence that he had overcome sin and death and reconciled us to the Father. Not only that, He a demonstrated that we, too, will rise from death with real bodies to join him. Just like it says in 1 Cor 15:13ff in the bits that Nicholls missed out.

“Take your vaccine” says the World Council of Churches

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Before I start, let me be clear: I am not trying to convince anyone not to take a vaccine. The choice is yours and I have no wish to influence anyone.

The WCC, however, does think it’s the church’s job to convince people to be vaccinated:

Is the new term for clergy “faith actors”? I didn’t know that. We can only assume it’s because Christian clergy see themselves as thespians playing a role rather than the genuine article.

We all suffer from a fatal disease. It’s called “sin”. There is no vaccine against it. The solution is Jesus. The church has forgotten that that is its primary message.

Bishops do strange things sometimes

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Sam Rose, Bishop of the Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador is sleeping on the floor of his art studio to end furniture poverty. I didn’t know furniture poverty was a thing.

I have no objection to this if it makes the bishop feel better. Once he has furniture poverty under control, I hope he addresses art studio poverty; I wouldn’t mind having one.

Anglican Primate offers prayers of thanksgiving to St. Pfizer

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It was only a matter of time before the latest religion – the Cult of the Covid Vaccinated – was appropriated by the Anglican Church. Primate Linda Nicholls experienced a flood of emotion when she was injected with her first dose of Pfizer. I suppose we could call this cultural appropriation. She makes no mention of tongues of fire or a rushing wind, but she is probably just being modestly reticent in the Anglican fashion.

Since Nicholls feels guilty under the burden of her vaccine inequitable western white privilege, there was no vaccine selfie. Apparently, battling vaccine inequity has become one of our baptismal promises.

Nicholls warns us that rumours and misinformation are rampant. I have to agree with her on that. For example, just the other day, I overheard someone make the preposterous assertion that the organisation Nicholls runs is a church!

From here:

The gift of a COVID vaccination

Last week, I received my first vaccine dose for the novel coronavirus. As I did, I felt a flood of emotions.

A vaccine is a promise for a future without all of the restrictions we may be living under, so I was delighted and relieved at taking this first step. But even in that moment, I felt guilty that I have this privilege and sense of security, in a world where many may never see a COVID vaccination at all, or at least not for several years.

While some countries desperately seek access to the vaccines, there is resistance among some Canadians to receiving it and, in the midst of anxiety and fear, rumours and misinformation are rampant. Every day of life contains risks. There are no guarantees in any part of our lives, so we work to reduce the risks and make the world as safe as possible for ourselves and all of our neighbours. This requires trust in those to whom we have committed the work of protecting public health and a willingness to work with them to follow protocols.