Bishop Jane Alexander is resigning

Posted on by
4

After years of working for IBM, I noticed that when executives were fired the favourite euphemism used was “so and so is seeking employment opportunities elsewhere”. When minions were fired, they were aiding in “right-sizing”. A manager who had no minions was a “free floating apex” who would soon be floating out the door.

Church euphemisms bandied around at such times include “prayerful discernment”, “a change coming”, “calling me out”, “called into places and called out of places”.

And they are all here. Not that I am hinting that Alexander was fired: you can’t fire a bishop. If you could there wouldn’t be any. She has probably just finished reading the Anglican Church attendance statistics.

Bishop Jane Alexander, bishop of the diocese of Edmonton, says she will be stepping down from her position July 31, with “no idea” what she will be doing next.

“I have no need to say, ‘What’s the next big thing?’ The big thing is always just serving Jesus wherever he puts you,” says Alexander. “So, I know that’s what I’ll be called to do, but what that looks like? I have no idea.”

Alexander announced her resignation in a letter January 26.

In an interview with the Journal, Alexander said that she had been feeling a change coming for a while. “Sometimes I think we think of discernment as something that happens once and then we go, ‘There, you’re done.’ But that’s never been my experience of it. I think we get called into places and called out of places, and I was aware…easily a year ago, that something different was changing…. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m actually being called out of diocesan episcopal ministry.”

Church of England can’t decide when to have sex

Posted on by
2

The Church of England, having issued a statement saying that sexual activity is only permissible between a married man and woman, has suddenly realised that it has been too decisive. Too binary. Too hurtful. Too divisive. Too Christian.

As a result, a week later, after the inevitable howls of protest, archbishops Welby and Sentamu have issued an apology, dripping with all the right words like “build bridges”, “difficult conversations” and “discern the way forward”.

Apparently, along with the usual sexual befuddlement, the archbishops have “questions of human identity”: they still don’t know who they are. There must be a pill for that.

How could any sane organisation issue two statements, ostensibly from the same individuals, one week apart that completely contradict each other? Unless they are trying to illustrate Mark 3:25. Of course Jesus was talking about Satan in that passage, not archbishops. Although the distinction is diminishing as the years go by.

We as Archbishops, alongside the bishops of the Church of England, apologise and take responsibility for releasing a statement last week which we acknowledge has jeopardised trust. We are very sorry and recognise the division and hurt this has caused.

At our meeting of the College of Bishops of the Church of England this week we continued our commitment to the Living in Love and Faith project which is about questions of human identity, sexuality and marriage. This process is intended to help us all to build bridges that will enable the difficult conversations that are necessary as, together, we discern the way forward for the Church of England.

The Most Rev Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

The Most Rev John Sentamu, Archbishop of York

Bishop of Niagara has the solution to church decline

Posted on by
16

In an open letter to her flock, Susan Bell, bishop of the Diocese of Niagara has set a record for the most italicised words ever to appear in a diocesan epistle. She used those italics to emphasis that the prediction that her denomination will cease to exist by 2040 is a call, not to hand-wringing, but to fighting a “climate crisis”. In doing so we will be “working to establish the kingdom of God”.

The message was delivered to the bishop by a beatific vision of St. Greta of Thunberg, patron saint of the church of the immaculate imminent extinction.

From here:

I want to talk to you about the future; and about some intimations about what we might be being called to – and maybe what we’re being called away from.  All of that is much more interesting than the hand-wringing of recent weeks.

Is this a crisis?  Yes.  A holy one, I believe.  The question is, how do we respond?  Well we are Christ-followers and so I’d humbly suggest that we need to do just that:  follow Jesus and listen for God’s voice to guide us.

I am firmly of the belief that God has gifted us with this time.  I am not being Pollyanna.  I mean this.  We have come to the end of a time in which the Church was a dominant force in our culture.  That is an undisputed fact.  And yet not one that should make us despair.  We’ve had a good run.

But I also believe that we are being called to deep engagement with our faith and simultaneously, and our behavior as a culture.  As an example, take the climate crisis.  What does the mission of God look like in the light of that?  If, as N.T. Wright has recently written, New Testament Christians believed that in Jesus the Christ, God was bringing earth and heaven together, “making creation new, restoring the world from all its pathologies,” then working to establish the kingdom of God is rightly the work of all believers.  This sounds to me like a robust mandate for a theology which will support bold and sustained Christian action to address the climate crisis.

This is a recovery of a strong Christology, which leads to a renewed sense of both Christ’s work among humanity and a template for our own Christian vocations.

Bishop of Huron sees battling global warming as his top priority

Posted on by
2

Since the Anglican Church of Canada has given up on the idea of saving people from roasting in hell, it has taken up the task of saving them from roasting on earth.

“Consumers in the Hands of an Angry Gaia” doesn’t have the same resonance or weight as the original but neither does the purveyor of the message, Robert Todd Townshend, the new bishop of the Diocese of Huron.

Townshend has declared, in a diarrhoetic flood of stale platitudes, that a “push for greater environmental action may mark his tenure”. It will probably be more of a stain than a mark.

From here:

Reverend Canon Robert Todd Townshend is hoping to bring an environmental focus and action on climate change to Anglican churches across its Southwestern Ontario diocese.

Townshend was ordained Bishop of the Huron Diocese on Saturday afternoon, drawing about 1,000 people to St. Paul’s Cathedral on Richmond Street in downntown London.

After the ordination, Townshend reflected on the global climate change crisis and how faith can serve as a call to action, he said.

“The environmental movement has revived the biblical idea of us as stewards of the Earth, which is in every major religion because God is the creator,” Townshend said.

“I consider it an emergency,” he said of climate change. “If we call something a crisis for too long it is not considered urgent, but this is the most urgent thing.”

The Huron Diocese has always shown the ability to adapt and change as times demand and the push for greater environmental action may mark his tenure, he added.

“It will take a big movement of people, of political will. It’s crucial.”

Townshend becomes the 14th Bishop, succeeding Linda Nicholls, who was elected the head of the Anglican Church of Canada in July.

Anglican global warming hypocrisy

Posted on by
2

Justin Welby was in Jordan recently at a Primates’ meeting. One of his more ambitious items on the agenda was a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from Anglican division over the nature of human sexuality to the far more important topic of climate change (née global warming). After all, the weather is far more interesting than sex to most Anglicans.

From here:

Speaking to reporters at the end of a three-day Primates’ meeting in Jordan, the Most Rev Justin Welby said he wanted to see the Anglican Communion begin to focus instead “on those things that affect the world, be that climate change, conflict, the need for the Church to be confident in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, carrying it out into the world … [and] safeguarding”.

And here:

We heard about and commend the work of the Anglican Environmental Network, noting that climate change is not a future threat but, for many in the world today, a present, lived reality;

Where does the hypocrisy come in, you might ask? First of all, the Primates didn’t hold a Skype meeting, they all flew to Jordan on carbon spewing jets.

Second, rather more importantly since plastic pollution does seem to be a genuine problem, the attendees had plastic water bottles on their tables when they could have used filtered tap water:

Still, hypocrisy is as old as humanity and an inevitable byproduct of something in which the church has ceased to believe: original sin. So to find it in the church isn’t particularly surprising. Nor is it surprising that no one is at all interested in what Welby and his Primates have to say for themselves.

Anglican Church of Canada reimagines God

Posted on by
8

The Anglican Church of Canada is groping to find the reason for the catastrophic decline in attendance revealed by recently published statistics. Unsurprisingly, none of the clergy seem able to grasp the obvious: no one is interested in what the ACoC has to say because it has become transparently clear to all but the most gullible that it no longer believes in what it is peddling.

Rev. Alison Hari-Singh has added her voice to those looking for a culprit responsible for the ACoC’s near-death experience. Science, immigrants and scandal are easy targets even if they have, for some strange reason, concentrated their malign efforts mostly on Anglican and other mainline denominations.

What is the solution? Well, we have to “reimagine” God, his attributes and our faith. Of course, by doing so, we will end up with an imaginary god – which was what brought things to this sorry state in the first place.

From here:

We must reimagine the entire edifice of our faith, including what we mean by “God” and divine attributes of sovereignty, providence and love that we so often instinctively depend on. In short, we must embrace a radical theology of risk, unhindered by suspicion and fear of the unknown. We cannot be afraid of what Peter Berger called “the heretical imperative.” What will happen when we undertake together this fundamental reimagination? Our liturgies will become more creative. Our mission—our love for the world—will be intensified. Our imitation of Jesus will be palpable.

To be, or to self define, that is the question

Posted on by
3

In the continuing assault on objective reality, just as gender is now determined by feelings rather than chromosomes, race is subject to self-declaration rather than ancestry.

Such subjective relativism has even infected otherwise sensible evangelicals who appear to think it is more significant for a bishop to self-define as an evangelical than just be one.

At one end of the spectrum, some will point to the tremendous opportunities for evangelicals: the resources being released for church planting, the numbers of Bishops who self-define as evangelical, new initiatives such as ‘Thy Kingdom Come’, the historic advantages of the parish system and the theologically orthodox formularies.

This is the fruition of Sartre’s contention that since – supposedly – God does not exist, our existence precedes our essence. In other words, we were not in the mind of God before we came to be, so we have no predetermined essential nature other than that which we create subjectively for ourselves. What an odd malady to infest the church.

Bishop Logan McMenamie to retire

Posted on by
24

Logan McMenamie, the bishop of B.C. is due to retire. He has gained the interest of the secular press by championing same-sex marriage and the fact that he was the first B.C. bishop to march in a gay pride parade. His prancing in the pride parade has won secular approval; that doesn’t mean God is impressed.

From here:

An Anglican bishop known for his progressive attitude towards reconciliation and the LGBTQ community is retiring after six years of leadership.

[…..]

McMenamie became known for talking openly about the Anglican Church’s history in colonization and future role in reconciliation, but he also stood up for the rights of LGBTQ people. In 2018 the Anglican Church of Canada struck down same-sex marriage, but responded to public outcry by allowing local dioceses to make choices for their own jurisdictions.

In 2018, McMenamie was the only bishop in Western Canada to approve same-sex marriages.

“My motivation was I thought that we should have marriage in the church, and that marriage should be for everybody,” he says. “It shouldn’t be restricted in any way.”

McMenamie says acknowledging LGBTQ rights, like reconciliation, is about choosing to live well together.

The Anglican Church of Canada extinction event

Posted on by
9

Recent attendance statistics from the Anglican Church of Canada predict that it will cease to exist by 2040.

Understandably, this has spread consternation amongst the clergy; no one likes to be unemployed.

The new Primate, Linda Nicholls, sees this as a “wake-up call” and asks, “what might need to be tried” to reverse the decline? I would be tempted to suggest “Christianity” if I thought it would fall on any but deaf ears.

“I don’t think they’re a surprise to anybody,” Nicholls said of the statistics in an interview with the Anglican Journal. “Anybody who’s been in the church in the pews, or as a priest, or as a deacon or a bishop has known that this decline has been happening. We see it every Sunday, we see it in lots of ways. “I think it is a wake-up call…. If people are not coming to the church and finding a place of hope and good news, then we have to ask, ‘How are we presenting that hope and good news to this current generation and time? And what might need to be tried?”

Nicholls muses that part of the problem is the “general zeitgeist”, an observation that might have some merit were it not for the fact that the ACoC has utterly capitulated to the zeitgeist: the two are marching in lockstep. In spite of the church’s eagerness to oblige, potential customers have little reason to turn to the church to have their chosen pronouns affirmed, their gender reassignment baptised or their drag attire sprinkled with holy water.

Laughably,  Michael Thompson general secretary of General Synod, put his finger on the problem without noticing he had done so. When the church busied itself with saving souls, ignoring social justice fads, parishes were full to overflowing. “Things are quite different now”, he tells us: now we hear about nothing but social justice and the pews are empty. This, he tells us is a “change for the better”.

Introducing Elliot’s presentation to CoGS, Thompson said he believed Canadian Anglicans should look at the numerical decline of their church’s membership in the context of other changes for the better.

The London, Ont., church in which he started worshipping in 1968, Thompson said, “while not filled to the point of discomfort, was full.” On the other hand, he added, “in all of the years that I attended that church…in all of the years I had attended church before then, and in all of the years that I attended church until I was in my 20s, I never once heard a sermon that made reference to God’s justice.”

He continued, “I never once heard anybody tell me about the residential schools. I never heard anything about the responsibility of the people of God to respect the dignity of every human being. It’s not that people didn’t care about those things, but those things were not tip-of-the-tongue discourse in the life of the church in which I was formed. Things are quite different now.”

In much the same vein, Nicholls has decided that the church’s main job is to fight racism. To give her credit, by 2040 she will have succeeded in completely expunging racism from the church:

The Anglican Church of Canada’s new primate says she hopes her communion can begin to fight racism within the church and society.

Anglican Ministry of Truth does Church Planting

Posted on by
2

The Anglican Church of Canada is shrivelling faster than a slug in a bucket of salt.

As this article notes, churches are not only closing but merging. In Nova Scotia, for example, four churches have shrunk to one:

A far more common practice for congregations struggling with mounting financial obligations, aging buildings, or dipping attendance numbers is the church merger. In recent years, many Anglican churches around the country have joined congregations with others nearby, or even with local Lutheran churches. In the diocese of Qu’Appelle, a merger has been proposed that would see seven churches in the Regina area possibly amalgamated into a single congregation.

In August of this year, the parish of St. Martin’s in Chester Basin, N.S., merged its four congregations into a single church: Grace Anglican Church.

How to be positive about this? Call it the opposite of what it is! Church Planting is a scheme where a church multiplies and expands into areas where it hitherto had no presence. In one deft flourish of Doublethink, the Anglican Church of Canada has rebranded its radical contraction as “Church Planting”:

While the Anglican Church of Canada has very few home churches, Paulsen says that it is a growing category in other Christian denominations, along with church plants and new monastic-style intentional communities—or a hybrid of all three, like the communities of the Move In Movement. She even notes a case of a Baptist church in the state of Washington planting an Anglican church inside an Anglican building.

“[Church planters] are actually really interested in some things that Anglicans have to offer,” she says. “They don’t really need our buildings, but what they like is…our broad orthodoxy. They like that we’re creedal, they like that we are part of a worldwide communion. They like that we have a deep historical rootedness.”