Anglican global warming hypocrisy

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

Anglican diocese appoints a climate-care animator

Rev. Mark Nichols is the new climate-care animator in the Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador. I’ve no idea what that means, but it conjures up an image of a puppeteer pulling the strings of a Greta doll to entertain those who have lost their faith in everything except contemporary superstitions.  Maybe that’s just me, though.

It’s heartening to know that someone finally has the solution to global warming: animate climate care. Why did no one think of that before?
From here:

Anglican Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador creates new position for climate-care animator

“If there’s one thing that really angers me, it’s social injustice,” Nichols said.

“I really see the environmental side of it, the creation-care side of it, as part of that. The people that bear the burden for (climate change) are the world’s poor, the elderly, people in developing nations and our children.”

Recently, Bishop Geoff Peddle of the Anglican Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador announced Nichols would undertake a new part-time role with the diocese — a position they call creation-care animator.

The Rev. tips his hand later in the article: Mankind is not the pinnacle of God’s creation, the Earth is, inanimate, though it may be. Unapologetic Gaia worship.

He says that for too long humans have been anthropocentric, thinking of themselves as the most important thing on the planet.

“The church is being called to … look at a creation-centric way of being,” he says.

“I often say to people, we need the Earth, but the Earth really doesn’t need us. … We need to improve that relationship we have with the rest of creation.”

Diocese of Toronto waves goodbye to objective reality

The Diocese of Toronto has decided to proceed with same-sex marriage even though the vote to change the Marriage Canon to permit such marriages was defeated at general synod.

In a masterstroke of ingenuity, the diocese has found a way to get around this inconvenient obstacle. We don’t have to change the marriage canon; all we must do is reinterpret it to mean something other than what is clearly stated in the canon.

The diocese has entered the murky realm of post-truth ecclesiology.

From here (my emphasis):

From this sharing and listening, we will gather what we’ve heard into our diocese’s message for the Council of General
Synod when it meets on Nov. 23-25, and to General Synod itself.
This is what we are considering:
• Declare that Canon XXI (On Marriage in the Church) applies to all persons who are duly qualified by civil law
to enter into marriage. (This is an interpretation of the Canon, not a change to the Canon.)
• Change wording to be gender neutral (i.e. “the parties to the marriage”).
• Opt-in process. (Noting that no cleric is required to marry anyone.)
• Must be authorized by the diocesan
bishop.

St. John’s, Shaughnessy fills pews with witches, warlocks, vampires, ghosts and demons

Ever since the Diocese of New Westminster evicted the orthodox congregation of St. John’s, Shaughnessy, the place has been like an empty mausoleum.

Since the diocese can’t fill the pews with Christians, it is filling them with witches, warlock and demons instead. There’s a metaphor begging to be interpreted here.

From here:

The 14th Annual Hallowe’en Organ Spooktacular
Witches, warlocks, vampires, ghosts, demons and more populated the pews of St. John’s, Shaughnessy (SJS) the evening of October 25, 2019 for the Royal Canadian College of Organists (RCCO) 14th Annual Vancouver Hallowe’en Concert.

Diocese of Niagara sings a new song

The theme of the 2019 diocesan synod was “Sing A New Song”. Most of the items in the bishop’s charge fell rather short of being either new or worth singing about. For example, ever eager to jump on the latest thinly disguised vacuous Gaia worship bandwagon, the diocese has declared:

a climate emergency and [is] urging advocacy and action to address it

If that doesn’t stimulate your vocal cords, perhaps this will:

expressing a steadfast solidarity with the local and global LGBTQ2S+ community, affirming the prophetic witness of Bishop Michael Bird and Bishop Susan Bell, and receiving the affirmations contained with the “Word to the Church”

Susan Bell doesn’t have much of a prophetic witness act to follow, since Michael Bird’s prophetic abilities didn’t manage rise to the level of dismal failure represented by CNN’s attempt to predict the outcome of the 2016 US election.

I expect what the article meant to say was: “affirming the woke witness of Bishop Michael Bird and Bishop Susan Bell”.