Author Archives: David

Anglican priest and imam officiate at a wedding

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More inclusion from the Anglican Church of Canada: Rev. Dwayne Bos and Imam Suleyman Demiray officiated at a wedding between a Christian and a Muslim. Apparently, the precedent for this was set some time ago when the Church married a Christian to a Wiccan. The Anglican Church of Canada is easing its way into Chrislam via Wicca, a belief system which already strongly resembles that of the ACoC.

The imam recited a passage from the Al-Fatiha in the Quran, not to be confused with the Quran 8:12 passage which invites Mohammed’s followers to behead the infidel – a bit of a downer just before the honeymoon.

Read all about it here:

History was made this summer at Canadian Forces Base Borden, Ont., with a unique interfaith wedding, the officiating clerics say.

On August 29, Capt. Georgette Mink, a physiotherapist in the Canadian military, was married to Ahmad Osman, a soldier in the Lebanese army. Although technically a Christian marriage, it was attended by representatives from both the Christian and Muslim religions, and was followed by a Muslim blessing of the couple.

Capt. the Rev. Dwayne Bos, the Anglican padre who officiated, said he believes other weddings may have been done in the Canadian military involving Christians and non-Christians—he has heard of some involving one Wiccan partner, for example. But the fact that clerics from both faith traditions co-performed the liturgy made this one unique, he said.

“From what we understand and know, this would be the first one of this type that’s ever been done in the Canadian Forces,” he said.

Bishop Michael Bird spent over $1 million suing ANiC parishes

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I had not seen the cost to the Diocese of Niagara of its litigation until this article about Bird appeared in the Anglican Journal. I imagine the diocese views it as money well spent since the sale and demolishing of St. Hilda’s church and rectory alone netted them $2.6 million; and who cares about 1 Corinthians 6:1 when what really counts is at stake?

“Just prior to my becoming bishop, three parishes voted to walk away from the diocese of Niagara,” Bird said in an interview with the Anglican Journal. “There was a subsequent fourth one some months after…that.” What he needed to do, he said, was to draw “a good group of people around the episcopal office.”

Protracted and sometimes rancorous legal battles over the ownership of properties followed. The costs of these battles—which Bird said ran upwards of $1 million—were compounded by the recession of 2008, which drove the diocese into serious financial difficulties.

The Diocese of Huron hates fossil fuels

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Cheap energy produced by fossil fuels has given us better medicines, cleaner water, warmer homes, cheaper and more plentiful food, more leisure time and a longer lifespan. It also provided the means of producing the clothes and glasses the young ladies below are wearing, the sign that they are holding and the dentistry that permits them to display their toothy grins with such aplomb.

The Diocese of Huron wants to divest from fossil fuels; Canon Linda Nixon from that diocese is the one on the left brandishing the sign.

Climate-justice-march-FB-BB

The sign isn’t completely inaccurate: if she had her way it certainly would endanger our grandchildren.

The Diocese of Niagara continues to endear itself to the community

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The Diocese of Niagara Living the Vision in Guelph.

From here:

Last Saturday’s feature on the Ethiopian congregation in Breslau was heartwarming.

Not only did the Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church consider fellow Christians seeking worship space as worthy purchasers, they actually donated the church that they no longer use to a congregation without a place to call home.

What generosity of spirit, what kindness and forethought, what admirable consideration for the entire community.

Such selfless motivation is sorely lacking in the saga of the former St. Matthias Church property in Guelph, which is owned by the Anglican Diocese of Niagara. In this case, the diocese outright refused a $1.2-million purchase offer from a local congregation for the redundant Anglican Church at Kortright and Edinburgh roads. Rather, they continue to favour a bidder who proposes to demolish the church and replace it with high-density housing.

Anglican claims of putting ministry ahead of money ring hollow when you see the opportunities the Lutherans (and some other denominations) create for other faith groups.

Why is it so difficult for the Anglican diocese to see through the shallow advice they are being given? Why advocate mercenary practices that preclude serious offers from other congregations because they cannot compete with developers?

This is exactly what is happening here in spite of community objections, in spite of Guelph city council questioning the entire process, in spite of a developer using the Ontario Municipal Board process to get its own way.

What a sad commentary on the state of affairs in the Anglican Church.

Anglican Hell hath no fury at all

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I would be interested to know how many Anglican Church of Canada clergy believe in the reality of Hell. I suspect the number is very small.

When Hell is expunged from Christianity, there is no longer any need for a Saviour since there is nothing to save us from; sins are neither judged nor punished, so Jesus didn’t need to take them upon himself and die for them. Since Jesus didn’t die for our sins, he wouldn’t need to be God incarnate, physically resurrected, born of a virgin or sinless. Perhaps, as Anglican priest manqué, Tom Harpur suggests, Jesus never actually existed. As you can see, without Hell, the whole thing falls apart – just like the ACoC. Not to worry, though, there is still social justice.

Here is an interview with a clergyman who isn’t at all interested in being saved from Hell:

I came to be passionate about justice through Jesus, as I was introduced to him by figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Desmond Tutu. They introduced me to a Jesus that I wanted to give my life too – not because if I didn’t I would go to hell, but because he was showing a way of life that was life, that was truth! When I hang out with my homeless friends, when I engage in social action, to me it is like a spiritual practice, I feel closer to Jesus.

I trust everyone has noticed my restraint in not making any cheap jokes about how the ACoC has invented – or “reimagined”, to use the in vogue non-word – its own particularly torturous version of hell: sitting through an ACoC sermon.

The new Bishop of Montreal wants to make the church relevant

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Bishop Mary Irwin-Gibson is the new bishop of the Diocese of Montreal, a diocese whose membership has plummeted from 93,000 in 1960 to 11,000 in 2015.

How does she intend to make the diocese “relevant”? Well, she is going to carpet bomb the diocese with clichés. We have: “think outside the box” – a phrase I’ve heard used by witless business executives hundreds of times when they have run out of ideas – “build up their [the clergy’s] sense of engagement” and ….. wait for it, “make ministry viable and sustainable”. She does mention “sharing the Gospel”, which is odd since I’d have thought it too far inside the box to be worthy of attention. She is a liberal, so it is probably a gospel of the viable and sustainable rather than the real thing.

Needless to say, she has no “problem with same-sex marriage”.

From here:

Irwin-Gibson, 59, said there are no easy answers on how to ensure the viability of Anglicanism in Quebec but she is up for the challenge.

With fewer than 11,000 members in the Montreal diocese, down from about 93,000 in 1960, the denomination faces an uncertain future.

“Often we get stuck in the patterns of how we’ve been doing it,” said Irwin-Gibson, who replaces retiring bishop Barry Clarke.

[….]

Irwin-Gibson acknowledged the challenges are daunting but said she is ready to think outside the box to keep the Anglican Church relevant, even if the model of a traditional church and full-time priest in every parish is no longer possible.

“How do we do ministry in a meaningful way without the model of some old guy (who) lives in the house next door?” she asked.

“My goal is to encourage the clergy, to build up their sense of engagement, to … make ministry viable and sustainable for the next generation,” said Irwin-Gibson, whose last posting was Kingston, Ont., where she was the dean of St. George’s Cathedral for six years.

Fred Hiltz looks forward to reconciliation at the Primates’ meeting

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Fred Hiltz’s reaction – his public one, at least – to Archbishop Foley Beach’s attending the Primates’ meeting next January was a hope that he could converse his way into “reconciliation” with ACNA. To put it another way: he wants to have yet another shot at bamboozling the naïve fundamentalist conservatives that their liberal brethren don’t have horns after all.

“Reconciliation” the Hiltz way is for ACNA to peacefully co-exist with those who are in the process of draining the meaning out of marriage, who deny that Jesus is man’s only means of salvation, who have replaced the Gospel with Marxist flavoured social action, who believe the church’s primary calling is to the temporal rather than the eternal and who value money and survival over truth and integrity.

GAFCON and ACNA can only reconcile with TEC and the ACoC if both repudiate their false teaching, an event that is unlikely to occur this side of the apocalypse.

If Hiltz truly wants to reconcile, he could, as a gesture of good faith, give ANiC parishes their buildings back.

From here:

The Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Most Revd Archbishop Fred Hiltz, welcomed the meeting as “a good thing”. Speaking on Tuesday, he described the decision to invite ACNA — it is understood that the representative will be present for one day, before the formal meeting gets under way — as “an opportunity for some conversation, in the ultimate hope that we might be able to find a way forward towards reconciliation”.

Personally, I would like to see a repetition of the dramatic but, alas, unsuccessful attempt at the 1998 Lambeth conference by Nigeria’s Bishop Emmanuel Chukwuma to exorcise demons of homosexuality from Rev. Richard Kirker through the unsolicited laying on of hands. That might be too much to hope for.

Marriage Canon Machinations

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The Anglican Church of Canada’s commission on the marriage canon has produced its report. Insomniacs may find relief from their suffering by reading all 65 pages here.

The commission had no intention – and was never asked – to determine whether same-sex marriage is in accord with God’s intent for marriage as revealed in the Bible. Instead, it worked diligently to demonstrate that same-sex marriage is “theologically possible”:

It is, he added, one of three “logical possibilities” being put forward by the commission, and something of a middle way between the other two. The other two possibilities, according to the report, are, on the one hand, to see same-sex marriages as an “undifferentiated” form of Christian marriage, essentially identical to heterosexual marriages; and, on the other, to see them as “blessed partnerships” rather than covenants before God.

The commission said it arrived at a conclusion that it is “theologically possible to extend the marriage canon to include same-sex couples, without thereby diminishing, damaging, or curtailing the rich theological implications of marriage as traditionally understood.”

The idea appears to be to remove the boundaries that presently constrain marriage without changing the definition of marriage. It doesn’t take much effort to realise that this is a clumsy sleight of hand. There is nothing that is not to a large extent defined by its boundaries; remove them and you are left with – as in music when everyone plays any note they want no matter how irrelevant – nothing but noise:

Nicholls also stressed that the report does not suggest ways of changing the definition of marriage as it is currently laid out in church law. Rather, it is looking at changing those parts of the marriage canon that restrict marriage to male-female relationships.

“We’re talking about the same vows, the same purpose, and the same definition of marriage. None of that has changed,” said Nicholls.

The assurances made to conservatives during the 2004 General Synod that same-sex blessings would not lead to same-sex marriage were, as anyone with any sense knew, barefaced lies:

Given that the Canadian church already affirmed the “integrity and sanctity” of homosexual relationships at its General Synod in 2004, the commission said its report accepted that the current definition of marriage could be expanded to include same-sex couples.

Fred Hiltz is worried that the church might “come apart over this”. Perhaps Hiltz has had no access to the Internet for the last 10 years and is unaware that the church “came apart” over this quite some time ago. There were even lawsuits; did no one tell him?

Does it keep me awake at night? Yes, it sure does. I do not want to see the church divide over this. The St. Michael Report used the helpful language of “core doctrine” and other kinds of doctrine. Core doctrine meaning the kind that’s reflected in the creeds of the church. They [Primate’s Theological Commission members] said, in the St. Michael Report, that they didn’t believe the blessing of same-sex unions was a communion-dividing issue. I kind of think about that language still, at the back of my mind. I would hope that the church would not come apart over this.

The ”conscience clause” that permits clergy to opt out of marrying same-sex couples could, of course, be challenged in a civil court. Supposedly, the clause would hold:

The chancellor of CoGS, Canon David Jones, noted the “extraordinarily credible” legal opinion quoted in the report, suggesting that invoking the conscience clause could withstand legal challenge.

The question is, if a priest is sued for refusing to marry a same-sex couple, would the Anglican Church of Canada spend the money necessary to defend him? I would not count on it. Dean Peter Wall from the liberal-extremist Diocese of Niagara is already muttering against the conscience clause:

Dean Peter Wall of the diocese of Niagara felt that the conscience clause goes too far.

“The drafters of the resolution were very generous—I think to a fault—with their interpretation of the word ‘congregation.’” He said, explaining that the Anglican Church “has always been based on synodical and episcopal leadership and direction,” and that he is “concerned about congregationalism,” and the possibility of an individual church telling its priest whom he or she can or cannot marry.

If voters fall obediently into line with current prejudices – theological possibilities, to use ecclesiastical jargon – the marriage canon will be changed at the 2019 General Synod, by which time no one outside and few inside the church – other than gay clergy and a handful of octogenarian conservatives – will care.

The real refugee crisis

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From Canon Andrew White. Read it all here:

In a scathing statement, Canon White has now slammed Europe for its response to the migrant crisis. He says it is wrong to focus resources on those already in Europe, when those in real need are the ones left behind.

“I am disappointed by Europe’s response to the refugee crisis,” he said “Not enough is being done to help the most vulnerable, particularly those who have fled religious persecution.

“My charity is providing food, shelter and medicine for hundreds of Iraqi refugee families who have fled ISIS and are now in Jordan. Some have walked across the desert to find safety, with little more than the clothes on their backs.

“When I see angry young men clashing with border police in Hungary and demanding to be let into other EU countries, I feel that the wrong people are at the front of the queue.

“Europe needs to distinguish between those who are looking for a better life and those who are running for their lives, otherwise we risk failing those who need our help the most.

“I would like to see more being done for the thousands of refugees, particularly Iraqi refugees, who are stranded in Jordan and other countries without any hope for the future.”

[…..]

“I can confirm that it is not just displaced people who are fleeing,” he said. “Priests tell me that there are also people who aren’t too badly off financially, people who work at banks for example, who are leaving. People who don’t really need to leave. They feel that a window of opportunity has opened up and they fear this window will soon close so they take advantage of it. Meanwhile, those who are poorer aren’t even considering leaving. Everyone is losing out. Those who are most able are leaving and they are the only ones who could rebuild all that has been destroyed in recent years.”

[….]

“If you resist the easy option taken by the chattering classes who claim the moral high ground by insisting on open borders, you can see that European policy is the result of moral confusion,” he wrote.

“Let’s take the ‘duty of rescue’, which is official Europe’s rationale for fishing people out of the sea. People have a right to dream of a life in Europe, but Europe has a moral obligation to rescue, not to make dreams come true.

“What does rescue imply and to whom does it apply? Just being poor does not make someone eligible for being ‘rescued’ by a life in Europe. Mass poverty has to be tackled, but the only way it can be done is for poor countries to catch up with the rich ones. There are ways in which we can help that process, but encouraging the mass emigration of their most enterprising young people is not one of them.”

We have the same problem in Canada. Rather than vigorously attacking the problem – ISIS – we react to the undeniably sad photo of a dead toddler with a predictable, sticky sentimentality that does more to stimulate our feelings of self-righteousness than aid those who actually deserve our help – persecuted Christians. Churches are, of course, among the worst offenders.

If you would like to donate money to help the real refugees, here is one place to do that.