Anglican Church of Canada’s income spirals downwards

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The Anglican Church of Canada receives 90% of its income from voluntary donations from dioceses. For the 10 years between 2007 and 2017, this income was quite stable. Since then it has been sinking rapidly:

This graph does not take into account the additional and inevitable loss of income due to the closure of all Canadian church buildings.

The solution, we are told, is not repentance and a change of direction, but more conversations:

In response to the financial presentation, Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, told CoGS, “The reality is that we need a conversation…with the Council of General Synod, with the House of Bishops, with dioceses.” Citing, among other things, the trends of decreasing giving and attendance in Anglican churches, Nicholls added the conversation would require “transparency and frankness.”

It’s tempting to speculate on whether the ACoC will survive the year of the virus. I suspect some dioceses won’t.

And now for something completely different: an Anglican bishop who believes in the Resurrection

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When I first read this story, naturally I suspected that it was a creation of Titania McGrath; it all seemed so implausible.

Bishop Joey Royal is a Canadian Anglican bishop who believes in the physical resurrection of Jesus – and he is still employed! The catch is, he was sent to live in the Arctic.

Read the whole thing here, bearing in mind it still could be an elaborate prank:

For all the talk of mystery and meaning, what a non-bodily resurrection offers is ultimately despair. It is a “gospel” emptied of good news, an exhortation to try hard so you too can have powerful, transformative experiences. Stripped bare of its extravagant rhetoric, it arrives at the same place as the so-called Prosperity Gospel. The latter says “have enough faith and God will make you rich”; the former says “have enough faith and God will make you feel good.” The difference is that one promises material comfort and the other psychological comfort. Both are religious philosophies developed by, and for, wealthy people who are searching for some way to transcend the ennui of their secular lives. Unfortunately, it’s all smoke and mirrors, destined to be discarded when disappointment inevitably arrives.

To all that I say, “No thanks.” If the dead aren’t raised, then our faith is in vain, and we may as well find another cause to which we can commit our lives. But if the dead are raised, and Jesus is the forerunner in resurrection life, then our hope is sturdy, because Jesus has defeated Satan and disarmed the powers of death and sin. That means that our bodily existence—with all the accompanying wreckage and failure and vulnerability and unrealized hopes—are caught up in, and find ultimate meaning in, the reality of the empty tomb. Put simply, we don’t have to have powerful religious experiences, because we have new life, available now and to be completed on the Last Day.

Don’t buy the counterfeits. Christ is risen! And because of that we can rise too.

Make Canada cold again

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Yesterday was earth day, the day batty Anglicans try to convince us that nature is on our side, if only we would leave it alone.

April in Oakville has been colder than usual this year; it snowed a few days ago. It’s not cold enough for Anglicans, though:

Just to reinforce the virtues of freezing to death, these two Anglican ladies want us to stop using the only resource we have that prevents Canadians turning into winter pillars of ice: fossil fuels:

No wonder so many secularists regard Christians as irrational crackpots: many of us are.

From here:

The global climate emergency has reached a new level of public awareness in recent years, spurred by phenomena such as the Fridays for Future movement—youth climate strikes—led by Greta Thunberg. Recently, scientists cited climate change as a factor in the unprecedented intensity of bushfires in Australia in 2019-20.

In the face of this crisis, Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, has called on the church to take action on climate change, calling stewardship of the earth and the care of creation “a core responsibility of our faith.” The primate compares concern of young people for the future of their planet with the fear of nuclear annihilation she experienced growing up during the Cold War.

“The question,” she asks, “is how do we proclaim that vision of creation as a gift of God that we are called to steward and that we should be at the very forefront of those that are fighting for it?”

Archbishop Melissa Skelton to retire

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The Diocese of New Westminster’s Bishop Melissa Skelton will be retiring in 2021.

Her tenure was not as divisive or tumultuous as her predecessor, Michael Ingham but that isn’t saying much, since his contribution to the fracture of the Anglican communion, while not singlehanded, was energetic and indispensable.

Skelton supported all the usual causes, most of which bore little relation to the religion that is responsible for paying her salary. Here she is, for example, wearing a pussyhat. Purple, not pink, as befitting the dignity of her calling as a bishop.

From here:

Greetings, People of the Diocese of New Westminster

When I first became the Bishop of the Diocese, I reminded all of you that, on account of Provincial Canons specifying that bishops must retire by age 70, I would have seven years to serve as your bishop. I turn 70 years of age in mid-March of 2021, and with a mixture of sadness about leaving as well as excitement for the future of this Diocese, I inform you that I am calling for the election of a Bishop Coadjutor for the Diocese of New Westminster on October 3, 2020.

Justin Welby worries about post pestilence inequality

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He’s right to, of course. Once Corona virus infections have subsided, some people will be dead and others alive. It doesn’t get much more inequitable than that.

Even worse, some who are dead will find themselves in paradise and some in a place where global warming has reached a diabolical crescendo.

Neither of these are important enough to concern Justin Welby, though. He is concentrating on what matters most: money, who has it and who doesn’t. And no wonder! The archbishop of Canterbury lives at Lambeth Palace: the clue to what that looks like can be found in the second word. Here it is, a modest little place for the main Anglican representative of the religion started by the fellow reputed to have said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Which goes to show that in a post-pestilence Welbyian utopia, some archbishops would be more equal than others.

From here:

The archbishop of Canterbury has said inequalities must be addressed or even eliminated once the current “pestilence” is over.

Speaking on Easter Sunday on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, Justin Welby said there was a “huge, huge danger” of the coronavirus pandemic exacerbating inequality, but “that is our choice as a nation and as a world”.

He added: “The next wave coming is the economic one … We have a choice there as a nation and as a society and as a world. Do we take hold of our destiny and make sure the differences are mitigated, abolished where possible – or do we just let things happen, do we let the market rule, in which case there will be enormous suffering.”

Resurrecting the Anglican way: myth, confusion, uncertainty and doubt

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The point about the Resurrection of Jesus is that by any normal standards it is so preposterous that it cannot possibly have happened. Unless God himself intervened and made it happen. There is no half-measure that will soften the absurdity of the claim: it doesn’t help to say Jesus was partly resurrected, “spiritually” resurrected, resurrected as a myth or resurrected as some quasi-mystical Jungian inner resurrection.

It is entirely binary, either/or. One moment there was a corpse, the next a living Jesus in a real body. Either believe it or don’t but, for God’s sake – and I mean that literally – don’t turn it into a watery imitation of what it claims to be. Like this:

Confusion about the resurrection continues to this day. I think that many of the original chronicles were essentially myths created by the first believers to help them make sense of events beyond human explanation. Their uncertainty is probably best summed up in a comment by one of the men at dinner in Emmaus—“We had hoped,” he said, “that he might have been the one who would redeem Israel.” But at this point, obviously, that hope was fragile.

Jesus makes an attempt to explain how his passion and death had long been intimated in the Hebrew scriptures; but even then, he is met by hesitant disbelief.

It took time and spiritual discernment for the early Christian community to come to experience the meaning, if not the actuality, of Jesus’ reappearance.

Eventually, however, “The Lord is risen; he is risen indeed!” became an experiential truth, a claim that many would make personally. Still later came the conviction that everyone could experience a personal resurrection just like Jesus. What started as a claim from a few confused people matured into a global confession of faith.

Recognizing how the reality of “resurrection” burst upon a perplexed group should remind us that there will always be stages of doubt as well as conviction. I continue to evolve in my own discernment of what it all means.

Episcopal Church task force uncovers the true definition of “evangelism”

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Some years ago, the Diocese of Niagara had a Decade of Evangelism. Having a decade of something – it doesn’t really matter what – is something Anglican bishops do every so often to create the illusion that they are men of action not just men wearing tea cosies.

There was, indeed, frenzied activity in the diocese during those ten years. Clergy held meetings, led task-forces and gathered focus groups. To decide on how to define “evangelism”. Alas, after ten long arduous years, the worthy clerics still couldn’t agree, so the project was abandoned.

Not so in The Episcopal Church!

Canon Stephanie Spellers, the canon to the presiding bishop for evangelism, reconciliation and creation care has come up with this:

The definition of Episcopal evangelism—we submit it to anybody else who [needs] another way of understanding evangelism. We worked hard on this, too! There was a whole task force! What we came to was: “Evangelism is a spiritual practice where we seek, name and celebrate Jesus’s loving presence in the stories of all people, then invite everyone to more.”

This is so deep, I feel I must repeat it: “Evangelism is a spiritual practice where we seek, name and celebrate Jesus’s loving presence in the stories of all people, then invite everyone to more.” More what? Whose story? Richard Dawkins’ story? We should invite everyone to more atheism? You see the problem.

In case anyone is developing the impression that Spellers is just another crackpot canon, take a look at these profound pearls that dripped effortlessly from her lips:

But no, for certainly most Episcopalians, we can say “the ‘e’ word.” People are like, “Can’t you use a different word?” and we’re like, “No! Actually we can’t!”

[….]

For instance, a lot of people think, we don’t do that. You know, that Episcopalians don’t do that, that that’s what evangelical Christians do. And we’re like, how did you get here?

Anyone with that kind of teenage talent for using “like” as punctuation obviously has something so important percolating in her skull, that it bubbles out unfiltered by the narrow confines of grammar and basic vocabulary.

I’m not a canon, so I don’t have all the disadvantages of Anglican seminary training, but how about this:

Evangelism: the proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ: that he, the sinless Son of God took our sin upon himself when he died on the cross, suffering the punishment we deserve. Through his atoning sacrifice and resurrection, we are offered the free gift of eternal life and reconciliation with God the Father. And that only took me ten seconds.

Anglicans turning to Buddhism for Lenten inspiration

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A little while ago – before this current unpleasantness – I visited China for a couple of weeks. In my wanderings, I encountered a number of Buddhist temples filled with worshippers on their knees, faces to the ground in front of ugly giant Buddha statues. Don’t let anyone try to convince you that idol worship is no more in the 21st century.

As I’m sure you know, Buddhism teaches that we keep being reborn until we learn our lesson and reach the state of nirvana, a state of nothingness. The lesson we have to learn is that living is suffering, to free ourselves from suffering we must free ourselves from emotion and desire and thus become – nothing.  Superstitious balderdash and, consequently, most appealing to contemporary Anglicans.

From here:

“The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience,” says the Dalai Lama. “We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we have the ability to create more joy.”

As we wrap up our Lenten self-assessments—especially in the time of COVID-19—we need to be intentional that such inner appraisal is reframed from self-centredness to attention toward the circumstances of others. Many sincere Christians have foundered on the rocky shores of unproductive guilt over their own private demons. The Dalai Lama keeps repeating that unhealthy attention to our weaknesses will not enhance our inner values, nor will it make us better people. In fact, the reverse may be true. “Giving up” things that we know are not good for us may actually expand our negative cravings and make things worse.

[….]

Behind the words of this Buddhist seer I begin to hear the haunting words of Jesus, and my Lenten spiritual journey has been doubly-blessed. Perhaps, as Holy Week approaches, you might consider his words and be blessed, as well.