Tag Archives: Anglican Church of Canada

The Anglican Church of Canada starts wobbling on the Marriage Canon decision

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Although the Canadian house of bishops have tried to squash a resolution to change the marriage canon to allow same-sex couples to marry, it seems it yet lives. From this communique, it is clear that liberals in the ACoC have not given up.

Michael Thompson, General Secretary of the General Synod, spoke to any possible confusion about the responsibility of the CoGS to forward a resolution for the consideration of General Synod. “C003 was clear in requiring that a resolution proposing a change to the Marriage Canon to accommodate same-sex marriage be placed before General Synod in 2016. CoGS established a commission – chaired by the late Canon Robert Falby – to bring a report to the church. The Council of General Synod has received the report, This Holy Estate. It includes a draft resolution, the text of which will be reviewed by the Council of General Synod at its meeting that begins next Thursday, March 10.”

Dean Peter Wall of the Diocese of Niagara, co-chair of the Planning and Agenda Team for the Council, noted that he is asking members of the Planning and Agenda team to convene by teleconference to develop a process by which CoGS might engage the communication from the House of Bishops. In his additional role as Chair of the General Synod Planning Committee, Wall also affirmed that all the members of the General Synod, including the Order of Bishops, will be asked to listen to one another with care in preparing to address the resolution. “I do not believe that the work of the General Synod can be pre-empted by a meeting of the House of Bishops alone. It is when they meet as the Order of Bishops, in conversation with the Orders of Clergy and Laity, that bishops participate in the shared responsibility of all members of the General Synod to take a decision on this matter.”

 

Anglican Church of Canada backs away from Marriage Canon change

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It appears that a change to the Marriage Canon to allow marrying same-sex couples is unlikely to get the votes it would need from bishops at the next General Synod in July this year.

Bishops who support the change are mortified and devastated but conversations will continue – when do they not? – and “other options for honouring and fully embracing committed, faithful same-sex relationships” will be explored.

I’m quite surprised.

From here:

In our exploration of these differences it became clear to us that the draft resolution to change the Marriage Canon to accommodate the marriage of same-sex partners is not likely to pass in the Order of Bishops by the canonical requirement of a 2/3rds majority in each Order. Some of us talked of being mortified and devastated by this realisation. We feel obliged to share this with the Council of General Synod as they give consideration to the process for handling this resolution at General Synod. We have grappled with this issue for three meetings of the House, and we feel a responsibility to convey our inability to come to a common mind in discerning what the Spirit is saying to the Church. We share this out of respect for the considerable work that the Church has invested in preparing to debate this motion at General Synod. We continue to wonder whether a legislative procedure is the most helpful way of dealing with these matters.

We have been conscious that the presence of this motion has brought distress to some, and we acknowledge the deep pain that our statement will cause both within and beyond the Church. And we are all saddened that we do not seem capable of unity on this issue. Nevertheless we are committed to work toward the deeper unity for which Christ died, and we pray daily that God would mend our divisions. Our hope is not in ourselves, but in Christ, and so we are committed to staying together that we might witness the miracle of our healing.

In our deliberations, we affirmed a commitment to continuing conversations and engagement with the Report of the Commission on the Marriage Canon, and to achieving the greatest pastoral generosity possible. There is a desire among us to explore other options for honouring and fully embracing committed, faithful same-sex relationships. We will also engage Indigenous and minority cultural perspectives in our Anglican family in our understanding of marriage.

Ashes to go – supersize that for me and add some fries

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Many Anglican Church of Canada parishes have jumped on the bandwagon of offering passersby in the street ashes on the forehead; it’s called ashes to go. For those who doubt the validity or efficacy of such antics – it has at least partially satiated the ACoC’s craving for relevance: it has its own hashtag, #ashestogo

AtoG

Much as I favour taking the Gospel out of church buildings to the world, I suspect this is more a case of turning a liturgical expression of our faith into buskers disguised as Nazgûl performing street theatre, having first carefully emptied it of all meaning lest it cause offence.

Anglican Church of Canada to use indaba groups for same-sex blessing vote

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The whole idea of the indaba groups is to create a climate of respect during which delegates put on a display of hugging, crying and earnest pondering while, in the background, there are secret machinations to pass the same-sex marriage motion and once again bamboozle the few remaining hapless conservatives still clinging to risible notion that the ACoC bears a passing resemblance to a Christian church.

From here:

Council of General Synod (CoGS) has stressed that delegates to the 2016 General Synod need space, time, and appropriate preparation in order to keep discussions around same-sex marriage from becoming antagonistic.

“The use of an indaba process or a Sacred Circle type of process is going to create a climate of respect,” said Don Wilson, of the ecclesiastical province of British Columbia. “There is a view of some that the revisionists are heretical and the traditionalists are stuck in the past, and if we can get beyond that and into a kind of respect, it could smooth things out.” (Indaba is a Zulu word for decision-making by consensus. The Indigenous Sacred Circle often involves the process of talking circles.)

Though the resolution that brought the issue before General Synod ultimately requires delegates to give either a “yes” or a “no,” CoGS has vowed to make the conversation leading up to that vote as non-adversarial as possible.

Stop offering insincere prayers for Paris

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If a person prays for the victims of an atrocity yet continues to act in a way that is likely to cause a repeat of the atrocity, then the prayer is a lie and God is being treated as a fool.

Here is Canada’s effort:

In Canada, the Council of the General Synod paused its Friday evening meeting as news of the attacks filtered through. Archbishop Fred Hiltz led prayers for those affected by the tragedy.

Yet, the ACoC and Hiltz are delighted with the election of a new Liberal government, a government whose campaign platform included withdrawing from the fight against ISIS and the accepting of 25,000 Syrian migrants into Canada by Christmas – a volume that would make adequate security screening impossible.

So, Canadian bishops: either shut up with the hypocritical prayers or stop your support for a government and policies that will inevitably result in yet more victims, more bishops babbling like pagans and more vain, empty, repetitious prattling disguised as prayer.

Dean Peter Wall makes Joke of the Week

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He reckons that TEC envies the Anglican Church of Canada its ability to bring churches together. This is after the ACoC was instrumental in causing a rift in the Anglican Communion that will probably be permanent and after driving dozens of ANiC parishes first out of the ACoC and then out of their buildings.

Twit

Of course, TEC has lost some of its lawsuits with dissenting parishes, whereas the ACoC has won all of its lawsuits. Perhaps that is the nimbleness that is really the object of TEC’s envy.

Anglican Church of Canada fined for unsafe work environment

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From here:

The Sorrento Centre Anglican Church of Canada was fined $14,384 for allowing workers to be in an area where there was damaged and exposed asbestos without using adequate personal protective equipment or safe work procedures.

“The firm should first have ensured that all friable (easily crumbled) asbestos-containing materials were removed or enclosed so as to prevent the release of asbestos fibres,” reads a recently released WorkSafe B.C. report. “These designated high-risk violations may have exposed workers to asbestos, a known carcinogen.”

The church has filed a notice of appeal, but the Sorrento Centre representative dealing with the matter was out of the office and not available for comment Wednesday.

The ACoC has not yet been fined for exposing parishioners to an unsafe worship environment, something that happens almost every Sunday in most parishes. A good start would be to issue earplugs at the door to render the social justice sermon gibberish inaudible.

The time for dialogue is over

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In a recent pastoral letter, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, Primate of Kenya and Chairman of the GAFCON Primates Council said:

My experience of this new wineskin in North America brought home to me just how much is at stake when the Primates of the Communion meet in Canterbury at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury next January. I believe this will be an historic meeting unlike anything that has gone before. There is now a shared realisation that the time for dialogue is over and there must be a decision that will settle the future direction of the Communion and free us from being dragged down by controversy and confusion.

The Anglican Church of Canada has set up a Commission consisting of theologians, bishops and laity to initiate a broad consultation on how to interpret “the time for dialogue is over” in the light of cultural context while leaving a generous space for deep disagreement. And even mutual criticism.

We all understand, of course, that the one thing it cannot mean is that there really will be no more dialogue because dialogue is all that is left in Western Anglicanism.

Preliminary findings of the Commission lean towards the Post-Modernist Redaction hermeneutic, where “is over” is a later addition caused by cosmic ray induced bit errors in the memory hosting the original document. The reading should be: “the time for dialogue!”

The Commission will recommend a conscience clause for clergy who wish to exercise the deeply unAnglican option of shutting up.

United Church of Christ and Canada to pool their ineffectiveness

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Apparently, there will be a great deal of living into things; always a bad sign.

From here:

The United Church of Christ and The United Church of Canada have both formalized a full communion agreement in a worship service at St. Andrew’s United Church, Niagara Falls, Ontario.

Through the agreement, the U.S. and Canadian-based churches, both members of the World Council of Churches, agreed to “commit to living into a common vision of ministry and mission together.”

On Oct. 17 they “committed to exploring the possibilities of this full communion relationship, and to finding ways of living into deeper, fuller expressions of witness that will strengthen the Church as we learn and grow together.”

The important similarities between the two denominations are that they have both displaced the Gospel with obsessive social action, same sex-marriage, gender confusion and an openness so vast that all meaning has dissipated. A marriage of convenience, made in hell:

There are similarities between the two churches in their commitment to social justice and commitment to inclusion of diversity in sexual and gender identities, in disabilities, in theological openness and expression.

The painful Anglican Church of Canada

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In an uncharacteristic flash of insight, the Anglican Church of Canada’s bishops have realised that overturning 2000 years of Biblical teaching on marriage by merely voting to do so, might not be what God wants. That doesn’t mean they won’t do it, of course: the few tenacious conservatives remaining in the ACoC haven’t felt enough pain yet.

From here:

The Bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada say that they recognise the “deep pain” that will be caused by next year’s General Synod vote on allowing same-sex marriage in Church; and question whether the Synod’s parliamentary-style procedures are “the most helpful way to discern the mind of the Church, or of the Spirit, in this matter.”