Category Archives: Fred Hiltz

Fred Hiltz asks for prayer and hopes for openness at the Primates’ gathering

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The gathering of Anglican Primates in Canterbury is due to begin on Monday. While the GAFCON primates have been clear that they expect TEC and the ACoC to repent of their blessing and marrying of same-sex couples, Canada’s Primate, Fred Hiltz, sees a need for “mutual openness” and a

need to confess any and all ‘uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbours and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us,’” quoting from the Book of Alternative Services’ Litany of Penitence for Ash Wednesday.

We can only hope Hiltz takes his own advice since ACNA’s Foley Beach will be present, as will ANiC’s Moderator, Charlie Masters; the first day could easily be filled with nothing but Hiltz confessing uncharitable thoughts.

Let us, as Hiltz suggests, pray: that attempts to bamboozle or divide the GAFCON Primates would be thwarted; that truth will take precedence over phony unity; that loyalty to Jesus will be set above loyalty to an institution; that something will finally be settled, even if it’s merely a formal recognition that we now have two denominations with two gospels, worshipping two different gods.

Primate Fred Hiltz pledges to lower immortality rates in 2016

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C.S. Lewis, in his essay The Weight of Glory, pointed out:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

The Anglican Church of Canada has been uncomfortable with this and other transcendent aspects of Christianity for years, so it has been labouring tirelessly to divert attention away from troubling ideas such as miracles, the final destination of man’s immortal soul, substitutionary atonement and so on, preferring, instead, to concentrate on social work, left-wing political agitation and, of course, sex.

Now, in what must be a major theological breakthrough for 2016, the Anglican Church of Canada has announced that it has found a way to reduce immortality – perhaps, eventually to banish it completely. As Fred Hiltz points out in his New Year’s Day sermon, the plan is to start with eroding the immortality of pregnant women:

This major initiative reflects a commitment to several of the Sustainable Development Goals including a lowering of the immortality rates among pregnant women.

Fred Hiltz attempts a Primates’ Meeting pre-emptive deflection manoeuvre

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Will it work? I doubt it.

Fred Hiltz would like the main discussion items at the January Primates’ meeting to be poverty, refugees, and global warming; in other words, temporal items, woes which inspire church enthusiasm of a magnitude overshadowed only by its inability to remedy them.

As much as Hiltz would like to avoid any discussion of disciplining TEC and the ACoC over their same-sex marriage preoccupation, squirm as he might, I am sure that the GAFCON primates will not let him get away with it.

From here:

A number of primates within the Anglican Communion are pushing for a Primates’ Meeting agenda that “reflects not only concerns within the domestic life of the church, but around the urgent issues within our common humanity,” said Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada.

Returning from his December 9 meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, Hiltz said he was informed by Welby that this particular call “is not coming from just certain parts of the Communion—it’s coming from every part of the Communion.”

While Hiltz acknowledged that issues around same-sex marriages will be an important topic of conversation at the meeting, he said he has encouraged Welby to make sure that the meeting’s agenda tackles important issues affecting the church and the world.

Earlier, Hiltz identified poverty, the global refugee crisis and climate change as key concerns for churches.

In an interview with the Anglican Journal, Hiltz said he was pleased with how receptive Welby was to this message. “He’s very open to that, and he said that a lot of the primates are calling for an agenda that reflects both.”

Hiltz also said that after his meeting with Welby, he came away “encouraged by his [Welby’s] clarity in terms of what the Primates’ Meeting is and what it’s not.”

The Primates’ Meeting “is not a decision-making body—it’s a body for people that come together to pray and discuss and discern and offer some guidance. We don’t make resolutions,” Hiltz said.

Since it was announced that Archbishop Foley Beach, the leader of the breakaway Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), would be present for the first part of the meeting, Hiltz said there has been concern in some quarters over whether or not attempts will be made to confront The Episcopal Church (TEC) over its decision this year to allow same-sex marriages. But Hiltz said Welby was quite clear that the meeting would not exclude any of the primates of churches that are members of the Anglican Communion.

“His principle is one of full inclusion of all the primates. I think he will encourage, and if need be, challenge, the primates to uphold that principle,” Hiltz said.

The meeting—scheduled Jan. 11-16, 2016—will be the first to be hosted by Welby since he was enthroned in 2013. The primates last met in Dublin in 2011, a meeting attended by only 23 or the 38 primates.

Hiltz said he believes part of the difficulty in getting the primates to meet arose from different understandings of the role of the Primates’ Meeting among the other instruments of the Communion. What began as a way for primates to meet for “friendly conversation” has been pushed in a more disciplinary direction, Hiltz said, which has led to some distorted understandings of how much authority primates actually have over the wider Communion.

“Within the Communion, as the Primates’ Meeting, we are called to a servant role, in terms of how we speak of, support and model servant leadership in the spirit of God’s mission,” he noted. “We’re servants of the churches in which we minister…we are called to be servants, not rulers.”

Fred Hiltz to protest climate change

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By burning jet fuel.

From here:

The United Nations climate change conference – Cop21 – begins next week in Paris, and there will be a large Anglican and ecumenical presence at the two-week event to lobby for a fair deal for the world’s poorest people – those most affected by catastrophic changes in the world’s climate……..

The Anglican presence will be headed by two primates: Archbishop Thabo Makgoba from the Anglican Church of Southern Africa; and Archbishop Fred Hiltz, Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Canada.

Fred Hiltz: Surprised by Hope

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As I was reading the article below, I had one eye and ear trained on CNN, listening to the unfolding terror crisis in Paris. In a juxtaposition that strains the boundaries of opposites, while France has just closed its borders, has imposed the first curfew since 1944 and has declared a state of emergency, Fred Hiltz, because a liberal government that plans to absorb 25,000 Middle-Eastern migrants by Christmas – sorry, Holiday Season – has been elected, is overcome with hope for the future.

From here:

While seeming to disavow any political partisanship, Hiltz said the new federal government also gave him much hope for the future.

“I’m not a politician—you all know that—but I tell you, this is a time of hope for this country,” he said. The Liberal government, he said, appears to have social priorities much in line with those of the church, as even some new departmental names seem to suggest—the former Department of Immigration and Citizenship will now be known as the Department of Citizenship, Refugees and Immigration. He applauded, too, the naming of an Aboriginal woman, Jody Wilson-Raybould, as the country’s new justice minister and attorney general.

“If that’s not hope, I don’t know what is,” Hiltz said of Wilson-Raybould’s appointment.

“I’m not wearing red today, but I think there is in this country a hopefulness that we’ve not seen for some time,” he said. The new cabinet seemed to collectively include a great deal of “respect, and proven expertise, and experience and abiding passion for community development, foreign aid and global concerns,” he added. “We actually as a country have some recovering to do with respect to our place among the nations, and I think there’s a time of hope that is before us.”

Apparently, there is “synergy” between the Liberals and the Anglican Church of Canada; who would have guessed that?

While Hiltz and Johnson, like many other church leaders, remained non-partisan throughout the long campaign—focusing instead on the issues they would like to see dealt with, such as poverty, reconciliation and environmental stewardship—the Anglican church’s special advisor for government relations, the Rev. Laurette Glasgow, noted that there is “a greater synergy between the priorities of our church and those of the incoming government” than there has been in recent years.

“Synergy”, as I am sure you know, means:

the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects

In this context, synergy is a good thing: the combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects means that the ACoC and Liberal Party will be mutually hastening each other into oblivion more quickly than each could alone. That’s the optimist in me speaking: try as I might, I don’t really suppose the ACoC has the wherewithal to pull the Liberal Party down the Ecclesiastical toilet after it.

Hiltz goes on to note that:

despite the considerable sensitivity of the issue and the difficulty the church has had in the past coming to decisions around sexuality, he was optimistic about the discussions around the marriage canon expected at the General Synod next summer……

“I am uneasy with the rhetoric in the Communion that talks about how fragile the Communion is, or how broken it is—that’s not my read.”

At least Hiltz is consistent in his misreading of reality.

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.

Fred Hiltz presented with “Homeless Jesus replica”

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From here:

Primate receives Homeless Jesus replica

Amidst the presentations and discussions, Council of General Synod (CoGS) also included a moment of giving when Andy Seal, director of Augsburg Fortress Canada, presented Archbishop Fred Hiltz with a miniature replica of Canadian artist Timothy Schmalz’s widely acclaimed Homeless Jesus sculpture.

When I first saw the sculptor’s name, I read it as “Schmaltz”, probably because his statue brought to mind the ubiquitous sentimental plastic Marys for sale in Lourdes. It is only fitting that a Jesus replica – homeless or otherwise – be presented to the head of the Anglican Church of Canada whose object of worship has become – a Jesus replica.

Canadian Primate says 2018 Lambeth unlikely

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Justin Welby doesn’t want to hold another Lambeth conference only to discover a large number of bishops absenting themselves because they are upset with the presence of the Anglican Church of Canada and TEC; both provinces have wandered away from received Christian truth according to Primates from the Global South. As a result, Justin Welby is meeting with the Primates, ostensibly to listen to their concerns, and, no doubt, to try and convince them to show up.

Fred Hiltz thinks this is “okay”; anyone adept at reading between the lines will notice a concealed “just” in front of the “okay”. Hiltz isn’t very happy about it: it isn’t “okay” at all. The reason is simple enough: the Global South Primates have little use for the obfuscating tactics of Western Anglicanism: Indabas, the listening process, holy listening, facilitated conversations and other such claptrap. They will tell Welby exactly what they think of TEC’s and the ACoC’s elevation of homo-erotic gratification to the status of holy  – and it won’t be pretty.

Reading what Hiltz said gives the impression that Welby and Hiltz are simpatico – I hesitate to imply that Welby is in the pocket of the North American Primates. The Global South and Hiltz are, of course, antipathetic, if not downright mutually hostile.

Hiltz said that sort of consultation is “okay,” but noted that it is a change from the way the meeting has been called in the past. “He may want to style it so that it is the Archbishop of Canterbury in consultation with and support of the primates, but historically it is the Archbishop that convenes a Lambeth Conference, and then people decide whether they will come or not, including some primates.”

Fred Hiltz thinks the terrorist attacks should prompt us to strengthen our ties to other faiths

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He is specifically thinking of reaching out to Muslims; I expect that surprises you. Not to convert them to Christianity – perish the thought – but to assure them that we are all still good ecumenical pals and that the notion that Islam has anything to do with these terrorist attacks never crossed our minds.

From here:

When asked about the role of the church in situations of national tragedy, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said that the churches’ primary response must be to call the nation to prayer. He went on to note that in this particular situation, churches should also strengthen ties to other faiths. “I think there is an opportunity for churches to reach out to people of other faith traditions…I think lots of Muslims are feeling pretty vulnerable right now.”

[…]

The Muslim Council of Greater Hamilton has invited grieving members of the community to come to any of their mosques on Friday to hear sermons in honour of Cirillo.

I assume Fred Hiltz will be there.

Justin Welby to meet with Fred Hiltz

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From here:

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and his wife, Caroline, are expected to arrive in Canada on Monday, April 7, for a “ personal, pastoral visit,” with Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada.

The brief visit is a part of Welby’s personal commitment to visit the primates (senior archbishops) of the Anglican Communion, to meet them and learn about their provinces prior to the next meeting of all the primates.

If a prior meeting is anything to go by, what Welby learns from Hiltz is going to be slightly one-sided: the lawsuits, the attempts to intimidate conservative clergy, the inhibiting of clergy and the acquisition of buildings will, I am sure, all be glossed over.

[Welby] has said that his visits are aimed at fostering friendship and “mutual understanding.”

And here is the fundamental problem: there is already mutual understanding. Conservative Christians understand the Anglican Church of Canada so well that most of them have left. The Anglican Church of Canada understands that conservative Anglicans who have left are engaging in unfair competition by preaching the genuine Christian Gospel. What more is there to understand?