Bishop Michael Ingham’s farewell sermon

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Michael Ingham preached his last synod sermon at the recent Diocese of New Westminster synod.

If reports on the diocesan website are to be believed, it was greeted with adulation:

When he finished his remarks, the prolonged standing ovation partly answered his challenge.

In the sermon he likened the court battles in which he participated and appeared to be only too eager to fight, to “crucifixion”:

I had never been trained in seminary to spend two days on a witness stand in the Supreme Court of British Columbia.

And yet now, twenty years later, many things have changed for the better. We know the word Indaba; we understand something of the depth and complexity of dialogue; we have with us a new friend and companion, Bishop Tengatenga, who has traveled all the way from Africa to build new bridges between the Church in the North and the Church in the South. Out of crucifixion is coming new life.

Having won the court battles and, therefore, not actually having to sacrifice any buildings, Ingham goes on to note that buildings are really not that important after all:

we have a great treasure: it is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a treasure worth far more than all the things we want to cling on to: our buildings, our properties

In spite of the mass exodus of conservatives from the diocese, it is apparent that not all malcontents have fled; murmurings of discontent at the diocese being little more than an ecclesiastical CRA must be rife since Ingham took the opportunity to deny it:

the Diocese” is all of us here. It’s not a group of people somewhere else. It’s not a taxation centre that robs us of our few remaining pennies.

It is only fair to give a departing bishop the last cliché sequence, so here it is; I trust it will move you as much as it moved me:

I realized how insightful and articulate I used to be! But it wasn’t just an exercise in nostalgia. I wanted to see how far we have come, and how much we have remained the same. It’s always a matter of both, not one or the other. We’ve come a long way, but there are miles to go.

Adherents of the religion of peace after midday prayers

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It’s a mistake trying to go against the flow in a narrow Jerusalem street after Muslims emerge from their midday prayers.

As the imam helpfully pointed out to me: “you should not be here”; I expect this was a rare example of a non seeker-friendly mosque, though:

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This cutie made up for it:

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Welcome to the Holy City, beware of pickpockets

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These were the words our guide used to greet us as we entered Jerusalem.

Although my pockets were not picked, the greeting proved to be an apt metaphor. Were I not a Christian before I arrived in Jerusalem, much of what I saw would probably have put me off religion – any religion – for the foreseeable future.

It wasn’t just the heaving crowds (although more on that later) or the blistering heat or even the money changers, street merchants and beggars: it was the duplication.

There are two tombs of Christ along with their accompanying Golgothas and gardens of Gethsemane. The Catholic version was ornate and surrounded by the devout touching and kissing various parts of of the paraphernalia while kneeling or lying prostrate. The second version was situated at a cliff face that has the appearance of a skull – Golgotha. Our Jewish guide at this site was an evangelical Christian who made the most of his audience of tourists by preaching the Gospel to them – rather effectively. I asked him which site he thought was authentic; he replied that he thought his was but that it didn’t really matter since Christ was risen and was his Saviour: a good answer.

In order to get close enough to a popular artifact in order to touch, kiss or, in my case photograph it, one must engage in a good deal of Christian shoving and elbowing; “blessed are the meek” won’t disperse the seething mass of sweaty humanity between you and the sacred object. No amount of practice at Christian shrines, though, can prepare one for the trauma of attempting to travel against the flow of hundreds of Muslim men on a narrow street spewing forth from a mosque after midday prayers.

The street belonged to the released prayers who, in their haste to depart the mosque, knocked all aside. I was fortunate enough to come face to face with the imam; he showed no less enthusiasm for removing himself from the mosque as quickly as he could. “You should not be here” he shouted in my face; “perhaps you should go back and pray some more”, I replied. Regrettably he was swept away in the chaos, so our dialogue was prematurely cut short.

Kibbutz

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Last week we spent a night at a Kibbutz, the Kibbutz Lavi to be precise. Before arriving I laboured under the misapprehension that accommodation at a Kibbutz would fall, on a scale of luxury that stretches between a Bedouin tent and a youth hostel, somewhere close to the former. Not at all! The place was more like a Holiday Inn.

It was staffed by Kibbutz members one of whom gave a talk on Kibbutz life in the evening. Although many Kibbutzim have strayed from the founders’ ideals, the one I was at hadn’t, I was assured. The young man delivering the talk was a zealot; he waxed lyrical about the life and only became a trifle testy after some probing questions. Members’ incomes are placed into a pool from which the expenses of the Kibbutz are paid; each member is given pocket money to meet his “needs”. Needs are not self defined as far as I could tell. Many Kibbutzim are run on non-religious lines, but not Lavi; it adheres to Judaism – it practices a type of Kosher Communism.

Members who shirk work are subjected to “peer pressure” and, although any member can leave, generally they are not thrown out for misbehaving.

I can’t say it doesn’t work, since our stay was as enjoyable as it would have been at any good hotel. Concessions have been made to Capitalism, though: for example, our speaker was the lawyer for the Kibbutz, a sure sign of collaboration.

And the Kibbutz could not operate as it does without the underpinnings of a Capitalist system to provide people to sell to. Not unlike a pacifist living peacefully in a society rendered safe because it employes soldiers.

The Anglican Church of Canada wants the government to take action on the Middle East

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Arabs constitute around 24% of Israel’s population. They are Israeli citizens, can vote and have all the rights of any other citizen. Minarets punctuate the landscape of Israel; no city is without them.

I asked our Jewish guide what he thought about the fact that Israel’s tolerance of Muslims was not reciprocated in Islamic nations. He said: “you can’t expect this world to be balanced.” “No, I suppose not” I replied.

While we are on the subject of unbalanced views on Israel, the Anglican Church of Canada is asking the Canadian Government to do something about the Middle East. I expect Stephen Harper wishes he had thought of that.

From here:

Archbishop Fred Hiltz, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, has joined other leaders of the Canadian Council of Churches in calling the Canadian government to respond to crises in the Middle East.
In a May 17 letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the 24 leaders of CCC member churches outlined their concerns and recommendations:

“We are concerned about the continuing humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Syria; the uncertainty and turmoil with democratic transitions in Egypt; the unresolved decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the rising tensions and stresses within and between various countries in the region.”

They encourage the government to take action, including robust response to the needs of displaced peoples, leadership in the area of human rights, and assistance for churches as they “work with local peacemakers and providers of humanitarian assistance in the region.”

The road to Damascus

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I just came across this:

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has denounced the Apostle Paul as mean-spirited and bigoted for having released a slave girl from demonic bondage as reported in Acts 16:16-34 .

Just prior to this unfortunate encounter I was travelling on the road to Damascus musing on Paul’s more providential encounter.

Call me a blind optimist if you must but, as an experiment, I would like to set the Presiding Bishop and numerous other Anglican bishops – who shall remain nameless – on this road of destiny, point them in the right direction and tell them to start walking. It could work, couldn’t it?

There is a lot more traffic these days, of course.

A report on Anglican Church of Canada membership

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Although the “Working Paper – Anglican Church of Canada Statistics” report is from 2010, I hadn’t seen it before. The numbers only extend to 2001 and the numbers are mostly for “membership” in the ACoC and so are far higher than those actually attending church. In 2001 the number of “identifiable givers” stood at just over 200,000; this number is probably closer to the average Sunday attendance at that time. The whole report is worth a look:

ACoC mrmbers

 

We begin our discussion by looking at the national membership of the Anglican Church of Canada after World War II. The membership of the Anglican Church (Figure 1) rose steadily in the immediate post-war period. Starting at just under 1 million members (983,779) in 1948, the earliest year after the war for which we have such figures, membership grew over the next decade and stood at 1,300,029 a decade later (1958). The rate of growth over this ten year period was very high, a remarkable 32% increase. Membership continued to grow consistently for several years after 1958, reaching 1,361,463 members in 1962. Membership then dropped slightly to 1,356,424 in 1963, but rebounded the next year in 1964 to reach a peak of 1,365,313. This was to be, though no one could have predicted this at the time, a record high, one that the Anglican Church would never come close to achieving again.

After reaching a peak in 1964, a significantly different trend emerges as membership moved into steady decline. The initial decline was notably steep. By 1968 Anglican membership had declined to 1,173,519 – a decline of almost 200,000 members in a three year period. In just three years, almost 15% of the church’s membership had vanished from its rolls. There was a small rebound in 1968, as there would be at various times in later years, but the downward trend after 1964 is notable. By 1978 the Anglican church membership had not only fallen below 1 million members, it had also fallen below its membership level of thirty years previously (1948). There was a brief increase in the late 1980s, but this did not reverse the overall trend. By 2001, the last year the church reported such figures, Anglican membership had fallen to 641,845. To put this in perspective – membership was less than half of what it had been at its peak. And, of course, the overall Canadian population had been increasing in this period, with the national population increasing by just over 60% from 1961 through to 2001, that is from 18,236,247 people in 1961 to 29,639,030 in 2001.

I couldn’t resist plugging the numbers from the graph above into a spreadsheet and extrapolating the decline to find the year when membership reaches zero:

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Fred Hiltz silences bishops with civility

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It isn’t easy to stop bishops talking, but Primate Fred Hiltz has found a new weapon to wield in the ceaseless struggle to silence garrulous bishops: he is compelling them to be nice to each other, thus leaving them with nothing whatsoever to say.

The trick appears to be to convince them to engage in “quiet and theological reflection”: the bishops are locked in separate soundproof rooms where, no matter how well projected and resonant their battology, they cannot be heard.

Anyone who has had to listen to an ACoC bishop preach a sermon would applaud this effort.

The primate is concerned that this may inhibit the bishops from making “clear, public statements to the church” – something that last occurred by accident in 1945.

From here:

The latter, a twice-yearly gathering of Canadian Anglican bishops is one of the livelier meetings the Primate chairs. The house has seen hot conflict over theological issues, especially same-sex blessings and scriptural interpretation.

Hiltz has worked to cool the mood. As chair and liturgical leader, he’s given the bishops more time for quiet and theological reflection. He’s said his goal is to ensure that bishops do not leave these meetings more tired than when they came.

Yet some view this new civility as a kind of “silencing,” says Hiltz. Heading into a new triennium, he wonders how the bishops should balance personal reflection with the need to discuss hard topics and make clear, public statements to the church.

Game of Thrones

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From here:

In Game of Thrones we’re shown a world of medieval technology, accoutrement, and honorifics, but without chivalry (some lame pretense is made here and there, but it plays no part even in the life of the nobility, and the tale is told solely through their eyes) because there is no Christ to inspire it and no Church to encourage it. The denizens of the land claim a belief, of whatever sort, in “the gods,” who are never specified, whose mythology is never told, and of whom worship seems virtually nonexistent. The latter is the one significant breach with real-world paganism, which always involved true belief and often extravagant liturgics. There is also (as there was with Rome) a most implausible dearth of numinous awe for the natural world. One may have to pledge one’s son in marriage to the daughter of the castle-holder controlling a vital river crossing in order to get one’s army across, but of the necessity of offering a she-goat or woodcock to the river god himself in order to be granted safe passage there is nary a trace.

This is a significant oversight and makes the world a more modern one that the filmmakers should be comfortable with. Nevertheless, we are presented a generally accurate (for Hollywood) portrayal of what theologian David Bentley Hart calls the “glorious sadness” of ancient paganism in which life was short, or at least wildly precarious, and relatively meaningless while it lasted, and death both all too common and all too horrid to contemplate. Pleasures were to be grasped in whatever form they may be readily at hand, and whether they involved cruelty or kindness was a matter of relative taste. Joy may flit briefly by, but only in such a manner and measure as to enhance the agony of its loss and the poignancy of its ephemerality.

We in fact, live — and have lived — in a world significantly shorn of such things. Christ has come, hence the actual medieval world was very different from its portrayal in Game of Thrones. We do not fear death — or indeed life — as our pagan forbears did. We in the West have inhabited a world steeped in divine transcendence, with the clear moral order and attendant theological virtues of faith, hope, and love as the concomitant of God’s self-revelation and Christ’s sacrifice. Atheism in our day is seldom if ever properly Nietzschean — it’s more a form of cafeteria Christianity, the selections of which simply do not include God or Christ. The generally pathetic efforts to revive paganism are far too hopeful and, well, Christian, to be of any real account. (Not that the occult is benign: 1 Peter calls Satan a “ravening and roaring lion” against whose attacks we must vigilantly guard.).

Why should Christians watch Game of Thrones? There’s no necessity, and some will find the gratuitous sex and violence dangerous and damaging. It’s not for all. By God’s grace the world remains Christ-haunted; faith, hope, and love, when they are not subsumed into wastes of superstition, optimism, and sentimentality, still signify. And yet we live in another dark and superstitious time in which virtue increasingly lingers as a vestigial effluvium, while transcendence is ignored or positively rejected. Seeing the hopelessness and savagery of what this age threatens to become may serve to shake us from our torpor.

I have read the first three instalments of Game of Thrones and have watched the TV adaptation; perhaps it’s because I occasionally doze off in front of the TV, but I have no idea how someone viewing the series keeps track of everything without having read the books.

Fantasy and science fiction used to be mercifully devoid of the pornographic extravagances of other modern fiction; no longer, it seems. The Game of Thrones novels aren’t particularly well written so they can’t lay claim to the literary pretensions of, say, Henry Miller: nor can excursions into the titillative be a striving for realism – this is fantasy, after all. The reason is probably the usual one: an attempt to be different from what came before with the inevitable result of a monotonous conformity to the scribbling of the author’s contemporaries.

The novels do tell an interesting story, though, so I will probably find myself reading the fourth volume at some point.