The Anglican Church of Canada is going broke, Primate calls it a teaching moment

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But what is it trying to teach? Fred Hiltz seems to think that structural changes are the answer, while Dennis Drainville wants to “focus on mission” – although by “mission”, he means more vigorous leftist political agitation rather than the saving of souls.

James Cowan wants to “view the challenges as an opportunity”, a sure sign that he was asleep for most of the meeting.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that perhaps the malady is a consequence of the beliefs of the Anglican Church of Canada not the inadequacy of its structures, programs or bogus “missions”.

If what most of the church leadership believes is nonsense – and it is – why would God bless the church, why would people give it money and why does it deserve to survive?

From here:

Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, kicked off the fall meeting (Nov. 15-18) of the Council of General Synod (CoGS) in Mississauga, Ont. by urging members to view declining revenues and a looming budget shortfall as a “teaching moment handed to us by God.”

What’s needed now, said Hiltz is “transformational change.” He called on members to find “the courage to let go of our deep attachments to old ways and structures” and to “dare to imagine new scenarios.” In recent years, the church has attempted to effect change but “the structures don’t really look very different,” Hiltz noted.

CoGS members are being asked to discuss ideas that support priorities set out in the church’s 10-year strategic plan, Vision 2019. These priorities include envisioning a more streamlined structure for General Synod. The work being done at CoGS is part of a series of discussions that will take place over the next eight months leading up to General Synod 2013 in July. In January, Hiltz is convening a national consultation in Toronto to look at the future of church.

In its written report to CoGS, the financial management committee (FMC) has stressed that “revenues have been declining more rapidly than expected” and as a result, anticipated deficits for 2013 and beyond “have materialized much earlier than expected.”  This weekend, CoGS will be asked to approve a 2013 budget with a proposed deficit of $513,000.

Rob Dickson, FMC chair, cited declining membership as a factor for the deficit. Diocesan giving has been declining annually at an average rate of 3%, said Dickson, adding that capital fundraising initiatives undertaken by the national office in partnership with dioceses are “not a quick fix.”

 

What the Primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria will not be a part of

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Archbishop Nicholas Okoh, eschewing Continuing Indabas, The Listening Process, Diversity, Inclusion, Telling our Stories, Deepness, and Conversations, does something profoundly jarring: he lets Justin Welby know exactly where he stands.

From here:

But speaking on the BBC, Nigerian Anglican leader Nicholas Okah made it clear how he views the road ahead.

“The homosexual agenda that is being promoted here and there in the church, and by different governments here and there, if that is the agenda he is coming to promote, of course we will not be part of it,” said Okah.

Omnishambles is the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year

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From here:

Take a word meaning “all” and add it to a word meaning “mess” and you have Britain’s word of the year, as chosen by the Oxford University Press: omnishambles.

It’s a noun, informal, that refers to “a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations,” according to the lexicographers.

It’s a word with which Archbishop Justin Welby should familiarise himself as soon as possible.

Justin Welby intends to listen attentively to the “LGBT communities”

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A community is either a group of people living near one another or a group of people with the same interests. Since lesbians are interested in women, homosexuals are interested in men, bisexuals are interested in both and transsexuals are confused about who they are interested in, that amounts to four “communities”. He seems to have forgotten that the sexual deviancy alphabet has gone forth and multiplied to include at least LGBTQQIP,  Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Pansexual; by this time next year there will undoubtedly be more. Where will he find the time to listen to them all?

And what about the heterosexual “community”? Will he listen to them? Probably not; no-one listens to them.

I suspect “LGBT communities” was a circumlocutory way of saying Changing Attitude.

It would have been far more interesting, refreshing and radical if he had announced that he wants to listen attentively to same-sex attracted individuals who are attempting – with little help from the church – to resist the attraction. Too much to hope for, I suppose.

From here:

On another divisive issue within the faith, he said that there must be “no truck with any form of homophobia, in any part of the church” while seeming to acknowledge the difficulty that view causes foreign adherents.

“What the church does here deeply affects the already greatly suffering churches in places I’ve mentioned like Nigeria,” he said. “I support the House of Bishops’ statement in the summer in answer to the government’s consultation on same-sex marriage. But I also know I need to listen very attentively to the LGBT communities, and examine my own thinking carefully and prayerfully.”

 

St. John’s Shaughnessy is only attracting 40 people to its main Sunday service

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The church building will hold over 800 people and before the Diocese of New Westminster acquired ownership of it, over 800 people attended the church.

Now, under the liberal regime of Bishop Michael Ingham, around 40 people are attending. Rev. Michael Fuller announced the number in his November 4th sermon:

Justin Welby’s assessment of Rowan Williams

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From here:

I want to say at once that one of the biggest challenges is to follow a man who I believe will be recognised as one of the greatest Archbishops of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

He is some one with a deep love for Jesus Christ, an infectious spirituality, extraordinary integrity and holiness, immense personal moral and physical courage, and of course one of the world’s principal theologians and philosophers.

To be fully serious, the church world wide owes him a great debt, more than it knows, and I shall be continuing to seek his advice and wisdom. I can only wish him, Jane and the family a wonderful end to his time at Canterbury and joy in their new roles.

One can only hope that he was simply being polite.

The new Archbishop of Canterbury

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As of this writing, it hasn’t been officially announced, but it seems reasonably certain that the Bishop of Durham, Justin Welby is to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

Welby was baptised at Holy Trinity Brompton, is supposedly a charismatic evangelical and, having been in  business rather than academia, unlike his predecessor has his feet planted firmly on the ground. It is even possible to understand what he says without getting a headache.

All this seems like good news for theologically conservative Christians.

Yet, during his tenure as Dean of Liverpool, he authorised John Lennon’s atheist dirge, “Imagine” to be played on the church bells and gave his blessing to the Night of the Living Dead Halloween service.

While speaking to the TEC house of bishops in March 2012, he proclaimed himself disabused of the “myth that TEC is only liberal” and his enthusiasm for Indabas, either of which are enough to convict him of naivety, obsequiousness or both.

Giles Fraser likes him – not a good sign – and tells us that Welby thinks the Occupy movement was on to something and, in keeping with the Church of England’s obsession with rich bankers, is sitting on a commission to sort out corruption in the banking industry. Welby is a firm believer in “systemic or corporate sin”, a notion that, for a Christian, I think is rather peculiar insofar as the idea of Jesus dying for the sins of the Bank of England seems to me to be derisory.

The BBC informs us that, while Welby has defended the church’s right to oppose same sex marriage, “he has also been keen to accommodate opposing views expressed from a position of deeply held faith” – it doesn’t matter how wrong you are as long as you sincerely believe you are right, type of accommodation. Not a particularly encouraging thought for ACNA and ANiC who decided that the consecrating of a homosexual bishop and the blessing of same sex unions were not things that could be accommodated.

The harshest words I have seen in the mainstream media have come from a retired priest, Peter Mullen, who is convinced that Welby is one of the “Left-wing modernisers, devotees of all the secular fads such as diversity, social cohesion, political correctness and, of course, apostles of that sublime superstition, global warming.”

Time will tell, but on the face of it, it seems unlikely that those of us in North America who have left TEC and the ACoC will find a staunch ally in Welby. His speciality seems to be Reconciliation; the problem is, until there is repentance, a change of heart in at least one of the parties, it’s difficult to see how reconciliation is possible no matter how gifted the reconciler.

There is at least some good news: there are subtle intimations that the new Archbishop of Canterbury is a Christian.

Bishop Sue Moxley tries to add to the Five Marks of Mission

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At the meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in New Zealand, she wanted to add a sixth: “to advance peace, eliminate violence and reconcile all.”

You can always count on a Canadian bishop to come up with something sufficiently nebulously utopian that no-one can openly disagree with it. And why would they? Everyone is secretly convinced that, being manifestly unattainable, it will make few demands, yet it will distract from the more tangible woes of the Anglican Communion; and that’s what the meeting is all about, after all.  The motion was defeated, but the substance was tacked on to number four which now reads:

To seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation.

Now, to paraphrase Ps 46:9, we can expect wars to cease to the ends of the earth, the bow will be broken, the spear shattered and the oceans will stop rising. Oh, hang on, that last bit has already been done.

Still, I’m very glad we are left with only five marks of mission; mainly because I think Fatuous Five has a better ring to it than Scelestious Six.

Farewell USA

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I know it’s a cliché, but a democracy does get the government it deserves and, apparently, what the US deserves is a con man who has convinced the gullible that he can give them what they want: unlimited, unearned, undeserved hand-outs. God’s punishment to the Romans in Romans 1 was not to rain down fire from heaven, but to allow them to have what they wanted unfettered by God’s restraining morality; here we go again.

Not to worry, though: the fall of a civilisation is a reminder for Christians that we live in two kingdoms, the more important of which is a kingdom that can never be shaken: the kingdom of God.