The Anglican Church of Canada has ruptured itself over the issue of blessing same-sex couples and, by doing so, has staked its future on attracting some of them to replace the conventional families who have fled its heretical clutches.
The ACoC is in luck: Statistics Canada has reported a 42% increase in same-sex couples over the last five years.
Unhappily for the ACoC, the percentage of same-sex couples is still only at 0.69% of the total number of couples. How many of them attend an Anglican church I wonder? Not many, and most of those who do are employed by the church as priests.
From here:
The face of the Canadian family is changing.
There are more common-law couples, single parents and same-sex couples heading households than ever before, according to the latest data released Sept. 19 from Statistics Canada’s 2011 Census of Population.
And while the traditional family structure—mother, father and children—still accounts for two-thirds of all Canadian families, the number of traditional families as a proportion of all families declined from 2006 to 2011.
The census counted a total of 9,389,700 families in 2011. Of these, 67 per cent consisted of married couples, down from 70.5 per cent a decade ago. In contrast, common-law couples increased by 13.9 per cent in 2011 and single-parent families rose by 8.0 per cent that same year.
The number of same-sex married couples “nearly tripled” between 2006 and 2011—the five year period following the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada. The census counted 64,575 same-sex couple families in 2011, an increase of 42.4 per cent from 2006. (Statistics Canada later stated that the number of same-sex married couples may have been overestimated by as many as 4,500.)
Hardly surprising when the ‘culture’ is nothing but advertising for the lifestyle. Also, you can forget employment if you’re not zealously pc and can’t tick at least one ‘diversity’ box.
Same sex room mates in college dorms are listed as homosexual. Who knew!
Hello Jim
Is this true? If so than this would be a blatent scewing of the numbers, perhaps to promote a political/homosexual agenda.
I would love to know how many same-sex couples the ELCIC has blessed since the convention decided to destroy the church two summers ago.
For many years, the backbone of the Lutheran church was Scandinavian pietism especially in the west and in rural areas, making up well over half of the church. At its worst, it could reduce itself to legalism. At its best, it was a very warm spirituality with a strong emphasis on having a visible Christian lifestyle. It was they who supported our missionaries, our bible camps, our schools and although somewhat anti-clerical, the majority of our pastors came out of that tradition, most going from high school to bible school, university and then seminary, being in their late 20s when they accepted their first call.
Now the leadership has become politically correct and no longer pietistic. They aggressively pushed aside the pietists often with overt support of our bishops. Sadly, although they now control the church, the political correct and tree huggers are not the ones supporting our missionaries, our bible-camps or our schools. The ELCIC now has no foreign missionaries. Our bible camps are operating at less than 1/2 capacity. Our bible schools are either independant or are moving that direction, breaking affilation with the national church. Only snobby and affluent Luther college will remain by the end of the decade. I heard that the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon had one new Lutheran student enrol this fall… yes ONE. In 1981 there were over twenty. Our pastors are now middle-aged divorced women with eating disorders or pastors on their second or third or fourth careers who are near retirement age before they accept their first call.
The only thing our bishops are doing are trying to keep their jobs and pensions as they jet-set around from one photo op to the next. They send letters of warning out to pastors who passionately speak out against these trends.
Am I angry? You bet I am.
Someone must have said somewhere on this site before, Lutheran Farmer — and I will say it again, just in case — that for all the alienating of faithful parishioners that both the ACofC and other increasingly leftist churches have done in the past decade or more, I don’t see or hear of masses of their ideological buddies in our society coming in to re-fill the pews and overflow the collection plates. In other words, their friends on the Left, whom they have sacrified their churches and their faith to please, have not turned out in any great committed hordes to support them instead.
I happened to be in the Montreal Anglican Cathedral for a Sunday service a few years ago (wondering before I went in why they didn’t do something to move along the scores of drug-users all over the church grounds), and though it seems this parish has a strong predilection for gay clergy, there were fairly few parishioners to be seen, right smack in the middle of a major downtown area. If they had been counting on the Montreal urban gay community to support them once the faithful left, it did not look to me as if that was happening. But, as someone pointed out to me, the parish had a re-development deal that added a shopping centre parking garage and some new office towers to their property some time ago, which was apparently lucrative. Not all such property re-development deals for churches, by far, work out to be so successful for them in terms of new revenue, but it appears that the Montreal deal was. So am I reading things into it by thinking that they can just thumb their noses now at anyone who questions what they are doing?
Jim – I read that too – that people living as room mates of the same sex were listed as homosexual couples. My son was sharing a house with a male friend at the time of this census. I guess that makes them married!
Everything — and I do mean everything — has to be sexualized and politicized these days. Very few people these days, it seems, can conceive of life framed through any other lens.
Yes, the sexualization is constantly being ramped up but, really, to non-erotic effect. Hence the need to pile on. Young women dress like street walkers [young men like adolescent slobs] but, for all the skin being bared, are strangely de-sexualized. ‘Alphabetised,’ commercialised, tattooed robots just aren’t sexy.
The same is true for the politization. People identify with and are presumptuous on the basis of political ideology. But, if you engage them, you’ll find them frighteningly ill-informed and what passes for political discourse is quite primitive. I think this is in line with how the culture is almost all advertising now, and in that totemistic.
Most of the people you describe will be able to use the left-wing buzzwords of the day with aplomb, and know enough to show a Green allegiance and a Pro-abortion allegiance, and talk about how great it is that Obama got elected. They are adept at using the ultra-feminist slant and the diversity slant. On cue, they will sneer at any mention of the suburbs, or on bringing up one’s daughter as a lady. There is a whole list of both sins and virtues in the left-wing ideology/religion that an adherent is supposed to show they know. It’s a badge of belonging to the “cool” group.
But try to delve into the history of ideas with them, or even broadly debate these issues, and they fall apart. I tried to counter an anti-semitic remark once, only to find that the speaker couldn’t place the Holocaust in its time period, date-wise, and had no idea that Israel existed as one of the ancient cultures. Whew! Where do you even start when you try to have a conversation like that?