Author Archives: David

Bishop Logan McMenamie to retire

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Logan McMenamie, the bishop of B.C. is due to retire. He has gained the interest of the secular press by championing same-sex marriage and the fact that he was the first B.C. bishop to march in a gay pride parade. His prancing in the pride parade has won secular approval; that doesn’t mean God is impressed.

From here:

An Anglican bishop known for his progressive attitude towards reconciliation and the LGBTQ community is retiring after six years of leadership.

[…..]

McMenamie became known for talking openly about the Anglican Church’s history in colonization and future role in reconciliation, but he also stood up for the rights of LGBTQ people. In 2018 the Anglican Church of Canada struck down same-sex marriage, but responded to public outcry by allowing local dioceses to make choices for their own jurisdictions.

In 2018, McMenamie was the only bishop in Western Canada to approve same-sex marriages.

“My motivation was I thought that we should have marriage in the church, and that marriage should be for everybody,” he says. “It shouldn’t be restricted in any way.”

McMenamie says acknowledging LGBTQ rights, like reconciliation, is about choosing to live well together.

The Anglican Church of Canada extinction event

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Recent attendance statistics from the Anglican Church of Canada predict that it will cease to exist by 2040.

Understandably, this has spread consternation amongst the clergy; no one likes to be unemployed.

The new Primate, Linda Nicholls, sees this as a “wake-up call” and asks, “what might need to be tried” to reverse the decline? I would be tempted to suggest “Christianity” if I thought it would fall on any but deaf ears.

“I don’t think they’re a surprise to anybody,” Nicholls said of the statistics in an interview with the Anglican Journal. “Anybody who’s been in the church in the pews, or as a priest, or as a deacon or a bishop has known that this decline has been happening. We see it every Sunday, we see it in lots of ways. “I think it is a wake-up call…. If people are not coming to the church and finding a place of hope and good news, then we have to ask, ‘How are we presenting that hope and good news to this current generation and time? And what might need to be tried?”

Nicholls muses that part of the problem is the “general zeitgeist”, an observation that might have some merit were it not for the fact that the ACoC has utterly capitulated to the zeitgeist: the two are marching in lockstep. In spite of the church’s eagerness to oblige, potential customers have little reason to turn to the church to have their chosen pronouns affirmed, their gender reassignment baptised or their drag attire sprinkled with holy water.

Laughably,  Michael Thompson general secretary of General Synod, put his finger on the problem without noticing he had done so. When the church busied itself with saving souls, ignoring social justice fads, parishes were full to overflowing. “Things are quite different now”, he tells us: now we hear about nothing but social justice and the pews are empty. This, he tells us is a “change for the better”.

Introducing Elliot’s presentation to CoGS, Thompson said he believed Canadian Anglicans should look at the numerical decline of their church’s membership in the context of other changes for the better.

The London, Ont., church in which he started worshipping in 1968, Thompson said, “while not filled to the point of discomfort, was full.” On the other hand, he added, “in all of the years that I attended that church…in all of the years I had attended church before then, and in all of the years that I attended church until I was in my 20s, I never once heard a sermon that made reference to God’s justice.”

He continued, “I never once heard anybody tell me about the residential schools. I never heard anything about the responsibility of the people of God to respect the dignity of every human being. It’s not that people didn’t care about those things, but those things were not tip-of-the-tongue discourse in the life of the church in which I was formed. Things are quite different now.”

In much the same vein, Nicholls has decided that the church’s main job is to fight racism. To give her credit, by 2040 she will have succeeded in completely expunging racism from the church:

The Anglican Church of Canada’s new primate says she hopes her communion can begin to fight racism within the church and society.

Anglican Ministry of Truth does Church Planting

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The Anglican Church of Canada is shrivelling faster than a slug in a bucket of salt.

As this article notes, churches are not only closing but merging. In Nova Scotia, for example, four churches have shrunk to one:

A far more common practice for congregations struggling with mounting financial obligations, aging buildings, or dipping attendance numbers is the church merger. In recent years, many Anglican churches around the country have joined congregations with others nearby, or even with local Lutheran churches. In the diocese of Qu’Appelle, a merger has been proposed that would see seven churches in the Regina area possibly amalgamated into a single congregation.

In August of this year, the parish of St. Martin’s in Chester Basin, N.S., merged its four congregations into a single church: Grace Anglican Church.

How to be positive about this? Call it the opposite of what it is! Church Planting is a scheme where a church multiplies and expands into areas where it hitherto had no presence. In one deft flourish of Doublethink, the Anglican Church of Canada has rebranded its radical contraction as “Church Planting”:

While the Anglican Church of Canada has very few home churches, Paulsen says that it is a growing category in other Christian denominations, along with church plants and new monastic-style intentional communities—or a hybrid of all three, like the communities of the Move In Movement. She even notes a case of a Baptist church in the state of Washington planting an Anglican church inside an Anglican building.

“[Church planters] are actually really interested in some things that Anglicans have to offer,” she says. “They don’t really need our buildings, but what they like is…our broad orthodoxy. They like that we’re creedal, they like that we are part of a worldwide communion. They like that we have a deep historical rootedness.”

Anglican diocese appoints a climate-care animator

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Rev. Mark Nichols is the new climate-care animator in the Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador. I’ve no idea what that means, but it conjures up an image of a puppeteer pulling the strings of a Greta doll to entertain those who have lost their faith in everything except contemporary superstitions.  Maybe that’s just me, though.

It’s heartening to know that someone finally has the solution to global warming: animate climate care. Why did no one think of that before?
From here:

Anglican Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador creates new position for climate-care animator

“If there’s one thing that really angers me, it’s social injustice,” Nichols said.

“I really see the environmental side of it, the creation-care side of it, as part of that. The people that bear the burden for (climate change) are the world’s poor, the elderly, people in developing nations and our children.”

Recently, Bishop Geoff Peddle of the Anglican Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador announced Nichols would undertake a new part-time role with the diocese — a position they call creation-care animator.

The Rev. tips his hand later in the article: Mankind is not the pinnacle of God’s creation, the Earth is, inanimate, though it may be. Unapologetic Gaia worship.

He says that for too long humans have been anthropocentric, thinking of themselves as the most important thing on the planet.

“The church is being called to … look at a creation-centric way of being,” he says.

“I often say to people, we need the Earth, but the Earth really doesn’t need us. … We need to improve that relationship we have with the rest of creation.”

Diocese of Toronto waves goodbye to objective reality

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The Diocese of Toronto has decided to proceed with same-sex marriage even though the vote to change the Marriage Canon to permit such marriages was defeated at general synod.

In a masterstroke of ingenuity, the diocese has found a way to get around this inconvenient obstacle. We don’t have to change the marriage canon; all we must do is reinterpret it to mean something other than what is clearly stated in the canon.

The diocese has entered the murky realm of post-truth ecclesiology.

From here (my emphasis):

From this sharing and listening, we will gather what we’ve heard into our diocese’s message for the Council of General
Synod when it meets on Nov. 23-25, and to General Synod itself.
This is what we are considering:
• Declare that Canon XXI (On Marriage in the Church) applies to all persons who are duly qualified by civil law
to enter into marriage. (This is an interpretation of the Canon, not a change to the Canon.)
• Change wording to be gender neutral (i.e. “the parties to the marriage”).
• Opt-in process. (Noting that no cleric is required to marry anyone.)
• Must be authorized by the diocesan
bishop.

St. John’s, Shaughnessy fills pews with witches, warlocks, vampires, ghosts and demons

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Ever since the Diocese of New Westminster evicted the orthodox congregation of St. John’s, Shaughnessy, the place has been like an empty mausoleum.

Since the diocese can’t fill the pews with Christians, it is filling them with witches, warlock and demons instead. There’s a metaphor begging to be interpreted here.

From here:

The 14th Annual Hallowe’en Organ Spooktacular
Witches, warlocks, vampires, ghosts, demons and more populated the pews of St. John’s, Shaughnessy (SJS) the evening of October 25, 2019 for the Royal Canadian College of Organists (RCCO) 14th Annual Vancouver Hallowe’en Concert.

Diocese of Niagara sings a new song

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The theme of the 2019 diocesan synod was “Sing A New Song”. Most of the items in the bishop’s charge fell rather short of being either new or worth singing about. For example, ever eager to jump on the latest thinly disguised vacuous Gaia worship bandwagon, the diocese has declared:

a climate emergency and [is] urging advocacy and action to address it

If that doesn’t stimulate your vocal cords, perhaps this will:

expressing a steadfast solidarity with the local and global LGBTQ2S+ community, affirming the prophetic witness of Bishop Michael Bird and Bishop Susan Bell, and receiving the affirmations contained with the “Word to the Church”

Susan Bell doesn’t have much of a prophetic witness act to follow, since Michael Bird’s prophetic abilities didn’t manage rise to the level of dismal failure represented by CNN’s attempt to predict the outcome of the 2016 US election.

I expect what the article meant to say was: “affirming the woke witness of Bishop Michael Bird and Bishop Susan Bell”.

O come let us adore Him

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A merry and blessed Christmas to all.

A few carols played by me:

 

I dreamed a dream and I thought it true

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I’m not much given to visions or the dreaming of visions, but I did have this dream some time ago.

In my teens I enjoyed dabbling with electronics. I would take radios and TVs apart either to fix them or see how they worked.

I had fixed a wireless and left it outside its cabinet at the side of my bed. Plugged in. The mains supply in the UK is 240V, much more robust than the anaemic North American 120V. Upon awakening, I reached down to turn on my masterpiece of renovation only to discover I had unwittingly grasped the 240V input terminal to the power transformer.

I don’t recommend you try this for yourself but, if you do, you will discover that your hand will seem to stick to the point of electrical contact while every muscle in your body spasms and shrieks at you in the utmost agony. Needless to say I survived, in spite of my attempt to invent the ultimate alarm clock. My first activity of the morning was to put the cabinet back on the wireless.

This brings me to the dream. Even though my conscious mind had long forgotten the incident, much as my hand had stuck to the electrical terminal, my unconscious was still grasping, or in the grasp of my adolescent electrocution. 60 years later I dreamt about it. There was one thing different in the dream version, though: I heard a voice say “you have one more second of conscious life left to you, then your self-awareness will be obliterated for ever.” I awoke in a panic.

Even though it was a dream, the idea of annihilation filled me with the utmost terror, more so than any of the other options – even judgement and condemnation. Perhaps I feel this way because I am an unrepentant egotist unwilling to let go of my inner dross. Or perhaps annihilationism isn’t as kind an option as some might like to think.

The Diocese of Niagara is keeping Gaia in Christmas

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The Diocese of Niagara is promoting The Order of the Sacred Earth this Christmas. The idea is to take a vow to become “the best lover and defender of Mother Earth that I can be”.

We are assured that this is not a new religion and, since whole exercise exudes the aroma of pagan fertility rites, it’s hard to disagree: it’s an old one that has been regurgitated, then puréed and seasoned by sprinkling it with enough 21st century banalities to make it appealing to the modern palate. Another thing we can agree on is that it has nothing to do with Christianity. Just like the Diocese of Niagara.

From the diocesan web site:

ORDER OF THE SACRED EARTH
Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, Jennifer Berit Listug (Monkfish Book Publishing Company 2018)
Fox writes that the world does not need another religion or even a reshuffling of our old religions. He says, “What it needs is a new Order.” He describes this Order as a community and movement of people [no matter what their background] to share a sacred vow to preserve Mother Earth and become the best lovers and defenders they can be on behalf of Mother Earth. A post-denominational Order and a post-religious Order – therefore a Spiritual order!