The Anglican Church of Canada has a $600,000 deficit, churches are closing, buildings are being sold, and employees are being laid-off. Even the Anglican Book Centre is no more.

All this leads the ACoC’s general secretary, Michael Thompson to muse that “God is putting something new in the church.” Yes, he is: judgement.

Michael Thompson turned up at St. Hilda’s one Sunday a number of years ago; he was supposed to dissuade us from fleeing the Diocese of Niagara. He wasn’t entirely successful and, although I thought he was a nice enough well-intentioned fellow, he flatly admitted he didn’t quite know what he believed and he envied us our “certainty”.

To put it another way: he is an amiable but clueless cove; that’s how he ended up as general secretary to the ACoC.

From here:

Amid the fiscal challenges facing General Synod, Archdeacon Michael Thompson urged Anglicans “to be patient and kind with ourselves in this time of transition and transformation.”

“God is putting something new in the church,” Thompson told the Council of General Synod at its meeting Nov. 15 to 18.

Reflecting on his first year as general secretary of the Anglican Church of Canada, Thompson noted the “change in ecosystem of the way the church lives.” He likened it to the trail that he and his wife hike near Lake Superior, where land burnt by a forest fire is now home to healthy blueberry bushes. Could the church adapt to a similar challenge? he wondered. “We don’t have trees anymore, so God doesn’t expect us to be in the lumber business,” he said. “Can we figure out what to do with the blueberries?”

The national church is “being called by God into a bunch of new futures, not just one,” said Thompson, adding the goal is to discover what ministries it is being called to develop.