From here:
Stephen Lyon began the day by sharing with the Standing Committee that the Bible in the Life of the Church’s project stage will come to an end in 2016. He hoped the project would leave the Communion a legacy of “a toolkit to do the Bible better”.
An anonymous source has informed AS that the primary “do the Bible better” item in the toolkit will be a pair of TEC supplied and paid for rainbow tinted glasses.
From here (page 5):
The Anglican Church of Canada has a number of ecumenical partners. One, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, has become a full communion partner with which we enjoy a full and mutual recognition of ministry and sacraments. With others, like the Roman Catholic Church and the United Church of Canada, we’re still on that journey—an admittedly longer one.
To be an ecumenical partner means to repent of our divisions and to understand them as a scandalous contradiction of the will of Christ. It means to fervently desire reconciliation with the churches from which we are separated, and to manifest this desire in prayer, dialogue and action.
To be an ecumenical partner also means recognizing that the other with whom you are seeking to reconcile demonstrates signs of the Holy Spirit at work, even if you are in disagreement about some significant issues.
It’s far from clear that ACNA yet manifests these qualities of an ecumenical partner. Its repentance is, according to its constitution, limited to “things done and left undone that have contributed to or tolerated the rise of false teaching” in the Anglican churches from which it has chosen to walk apart.
It’s still in a legal fight over property with two dioceses in the United States. It seeks recognition as a new North American province of the Anglican Communion without desiring reconciliation with those already existing.
I suspect what is really troubling Bruce Myers is not so much the division in North American Anglicanism but the fact that ANCA has made it so conspicuous. The division existed for decades before the final split occurred; while it was hidden, conservatives could be safely ignored. By making the split so blatant, ACNA has clearly said in action and word that the Anglican Church of Canada and TEC are guilty of “false teaching”; their religion does not meet the standards needed to be called Christian. It is, at best, sub-Christian.
A liberal like Myers is tolerant of just about anything other than being firmly told he is wrong. The desire for reconciliation is little more than carefully disguised insecurity.
To illustrate the point: a number of years ago when a vote for same sex-blessings passed in the Diocese of Niagara, a number of clergy voiced their opposition and walked out. A liberal priest rose to his feet and spluttered indignantly that those walking out were declaring by their action that he was not a Christian. That wasn’t the intention, but the question is: why was he so desperate for the approval of those whose theology he had spent years despising? There is no insecurity quite as profound as liberal insecurity.
Myers wants affirmation not reconciliation.
Merry Christmas, Archdeacon.
Just as shamans used to prance around to induce rain, so the modern equivalent – Anglican Bishops – are fasting to induce cooling. Even granting the truth of anthropogenic global warming, since China’s production of one new coal-fired power plant per week is unlikely to be slowed by a few fasting bishops – many of whom are secret admirers of the socialist paradise – I am confident that the new shamans will be as effective as their progenitors.
From here:
The Bishop of Salisbury is praying and fasting today, and on the first day of every month, for a meaningful and fair agreement at next year’s UN climate talks.
[….]
“Christians in this country have been encouraged to join in by Operation Noah. At this time next year, negotiators from around the world will gather for another round of UN climate talks in Paris, at which it is vital to make progress. That’s why I’m asking people to join in praying and fasting about climate change.”
It’s uncommon for an Anglican bishop to say something clear. When one does, my conviction that most Western Anglican bishops are working hard to hasten the demise of the religion they have vowed to defend is rarely disabused.
From here:
The former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, has said readings from the Koran should feature in the next Coronation, when Prince Charles succeeds to the Throne.
Here is the interview:
Whenever the words “bishops” and “dialogue” appear in the same sentence, it is likely that something fishy is going on. In this case, Western bishops are having conversations with African bishops to convert them to the fashionable foibles of contemporary Western Anglicanism. The hors d’oeuvre is same-sex blessings with, no doubt, the suggestion that there are many paths to God and Jesus isn’t really unique to follow.
Toronto archbishop Colin Johnson was there to lead the neo-colonial charge:
The Consultation of Anglican Bishops in Dialogue
The consultation began at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, when the Anglican Communion was split over issues of same-sex unions and larger questions of Scriptural interpretation.
At this conference Archbishop Colin Johnson of Toronto and the Rev. Canon Dr. Isaac Kawuki Mukasa, a Ugandan-Canadian now on staff with General Synod, began conversations with African bishops. Interested African dioceses started theological correspondence with Canadian counterparts, first on human sexuality and then mission.
The chairman of the GAFCON Primates’ Council, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, seeing through the ecclesiastical murk, denounced the Canadian funded propaganda exercise as a sham.
Canada figured prominently in the second half of the archbishop’s letter, as he condemned as a sham the Anglican Church of Canada’s Bishops in Consultation initiative. Underwritten by the Canadian church and supported at its last meeting in Coventry in May 2014 by the Archbishop of Canterbury and his Director of Reconciliation, the Rev. Canon David Porter. Begun in 2010 and funded by the Canadian Church, the gatherings have brought together Canadian, American and African bishops to discuss the divisions within the church, with an eye towards achieving institutional unity while permitting a degree of latitude of doctrinal positions on issues ranging from sexual ethics, Christology, universalism and soteriology.
Archbishop Wabukala wrote: “For instance, the ‘Bishops in Dialogue’ group after their Coventry meeting earlier this year claimed that we must maintain visible unity despite everything because ‘now we see through a glass, darkly’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). In other words, things will only become clear in heaven. This is a bad mistake. It is true that there is much about our future state that we do not yet understand, but God has given us the inspired Scriptures as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path (Ps.119:105). Our future hope cannot be turned into an excuse for compromise or silence when Scripture is clear. For Anglicans the collegial mind of the Communion on sexuality and Scripture remains the orthodox position as strongly reaffirmed by the 1998 Lambeth Conference which continues to call us to obedience and pastoral responsibility. Dialogue is no substitute for doctrine.”
Ironically, as the Anglican Church of Canada’s denunciation of the Doctrine of Discovery escalates in righteous vehemence, so does its attempt to impose Anglican Western values – none of which have much to do with Christianity – on African Anglicans.
A conjoining of the likeminded, a consolidation of withering, a pooling of unbelief, a unified witness of doubt to an indifferent world, a belated smokescreen to conceal decades of intellectual inbreeding.
Or, perhaps, a desperate attempt to endure for a few more years.
The article below makes it clear that this has nothing to do with survival; nothing at all.
The Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) have approved in principle a plan to hold a second joint assembly in 2019.
[…]
Hiltz said the report [a report from the Joint Anglican and Lutheran Commission] emphasized the point that for the majority of those ministries, the choice to work together was made from “a position of strength for common witness,” not from a survivalist point of view.
I have thought for some time that the doctrinal meanderings of the Anglican Church of Canada owed more to hallucinogens than hermeneutics; my suspicions have now been confirmed.
In its fevered denunciations of the Doctrine of Discovery, the ACoC has sought inspiration from – not the cross, that would be too obvious – but from the medicine wheel:
Finlay and Wesley reported that the commission began to develop a theological reflection on the Doctrine of Discovery, its continuing impact and ways that it might be dismantled. Secondly, members discussed “what reconciliation looks like in parishes and communities, particularly around the understanding of healing and wholeness and the Circle of Life,” which Wesley explained is a part of the teachings of the medicine wheel.
For sceptics who think I am making up the magic mushroom aspect of the ACoC’s delirium, look here:
The space where you take your trip [the magic mushroom trip] is not only important, but also magical; it is possible to design this symbolically by putting an object in the four corners, a kind of watchtower. Native Americans also frequently make a circle or a medicine-wheel; this is also a kind of screen, meant to keep the `good’ energy inside and to lock out evil energy.
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.
Today, most people think that Christianity is a collection of antique superstitions no longer fit to be taken seriously by anyone whose reasoning faculties are intact.
This is not true, of course. Christianity is perfectly rational: it has its own set of presuppositions, none of which are less plausible than an atheist’s presumption that God does not exist. The Anglican Church of Canada has its heart set on changing all that: it is busy polluting the elegant inner coherence of Christian belief with vacuous rites whose meaning would stretch the credulity of anyone but an ACoC priest beyond the breaking point.
From here:
As we gathered in the chapel to celebrate Eucharist, our friend and colleague Barbara was preparing to smudge the altar. In attempting to light her sweetgrass braid from the altar candle, she held it too close to the flame and for a moment too long, and the flame sputtered and died.
Well, one of the very best things about extinguishing beeswax candles, as many of us know, is the rich honey scent that the smoke carries across a space as it disperses from the tiny flame into the wide world and then vanishes.
It turns out that at the moment that Barbara’s sweetgrass braid put out the flame, an ember appeared on its tip. Its smoldering smoke joined that of the spreading honey-scented beeswax as Barbara slowly circled the altar. The blending of smoke from sweetgrass and smoke from beeswax filled the space with what you might call a providential aroma; both sweetgrass and beeswax were there, but so was something else, something at once brand new and ancient, the aroma of encounter, partnership, hope.
More like the stink of nonsense.
I could talk at length about whether TEC’s shift from Gaia worship to Allah worship represents a drifting away from the manic inclusion that grips the imagination of its hierarchy – but I won’t. I will simply note that, while the place was chock-a-block with people whose religion denies the deity of Jesus, the only person to be ejected was a woman who affirmed it.
From here:
In a corner of Washington National Cathedral, several hundred Muslim worshipers and other invited guests gathered Friday afternoon for a first-ever recitation of weekly Muslim prayers at the iconic Christian sanctuary and to hear leaders of both faiths call for religious unity in the face of extremist violence and hate.
[….]
the carefully scripted ceremony was marred once when one well-dressed, middle-age woman in the audience suddenly rose and began shouting that “America was founded on Christian principles. . . . Leave our church alone!” She was swiftly ushered out by security aides, and the service continued.
