Tag Archives: Barmy Anglicans

Manchester Cathedral embraces tarot cards and fire breathing vicars

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From here:

Manchester Cathedral is to host a ‘new age’ festival featuring tarot card readers, crystal healers and ‘dream interpretation’.

Local Anglican leaders have agreed to throw open the doors of the historic cathedral in a bid to embrace alternative forms of Christianity.

Fortune tellers, meditation experts and traditional healers will fill the pews during the day-long festival in May. The Bishop of Manchester, Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, said he wanted to celebrate ‘all forms of spirituality’.

The Spirit of Life festival on May 2 will also feature stalls and workshops on angels, prayer bead-making and massage.

Fire-breathing vicar Rev Andy Salmon, of Sacred Trinity Church and St Philip with St Stephen in Salford, will also perform.

Where are the dancing bears, and ritual voodoo sacrifices you are probably thinking.

Is it any wonder the Anglican Church has become a universal laughing stock as it self-parodies its former seriousness by solemnly pondering the virtues of sodomy, opening its places of worship to practitioners of the occult, employing fire-breathing performing vicars and calling the whole mish-mash a celebration of ‘all forms of spirituality’.

One can only hope that someone brings a Koran and the fire-breathing vicar ignites it in a Koran flambé.

 

 

The message of the Green Church

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Mankind has instigated a rebellion against God. God is righteous and, therefore, punishes sin and rewards goodness. He is also merciful, so he sent his Son to absorb the punishment that we deserve so that we don’t have to. We are still free to accept the punishment instead if we choose – à la Dawkins and Hitchens. The church’s job is to tell people this.

If true, it’s the single most important thing a person can be told. Anglicans believe that it’s true.

Well, maybe not: the Anglican Church of Canada would prefer to tell people about green churches instead.

The Anglican Church of Canada is taking steps towards a green revolution it hopes will sweep across 1,700 parishes nationwide.

The Partners in Mission and Eco-justice (PIMEJ) of General Synod will launch a national database this year to provide information on eco-friendly and energy-efficient Canadian Anglican parishes, including how they became green. It is hoped that sharing their stories will help other parishes to do the same.

“We want to celebrate and reward parishes [which] have accomplished reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ken Gray, a member of PIMEJ and the Canadian church representative to the Anglican Communion Environment Network………………..

The secularization of Canada has also meant that “the place of the church in economic and political discourse is probably quite different that what it was in the 1970s,”said Gray. “We need to be innovative in our justice advocacy…”

Anglican clergyman is reluctant to define Anglicanism

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From here:

The prospect of something codified and named Anglicanism I find unsettling. Roman Catholicism provides an ecclesial authoritarian structure and demands subservient obedience from its adherents. Protestantism provides several forms of confessional authoritarianism, requiring subservience to refined interpretations of scripture and doctrine. Biblical Fundamentalism, of course, comes across as absolutely absolute in its biblical interpretations, that is, according to whomever the pastor or preacher may be. What is disturbing is the concept of subservience to humanly contrived authorities that seem to me to be the antithesis of the liberation and freedom that is the gospel (good news) of God’s redemption through Jesus Christ who we know as Saviour and Lord.

This comes as no surprise, since once you codify – systematise or define – what Anglicanism is, you also define  what it isn’t; and that would exclude many Western Anglicans: to be Anglican requires a person at least to be a Christian.

Canon Gordon Baker seems to think that the Bible is a human contrivance and is disturbed by those who think it isn’t. Although he claims to know Jesus as Saviour and Lord, I can’t help wondering where his knowledge comes from since he doesn’t accept Biblical accounts as fundamental and absolute.

The truth is, his “liberation” is the familiar antinomian bad news of “if it feels good, do it”.

The little flowers of St. Clitheroe

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Unlike St. Francis of Assisi, Anglican priests don’t have to take a vow of poverty. In fact there is at least one Anglican priest who is struggling to make ends meet on a monthly pension of $25,637.08 and believes she is entitled to $33,644.21 a month. It’s understandable: Rev. Clitheroe has a standard of living to maintain – the one she became accustomed to while earning $2.2 million per year working for Hydro One.

I am not particularly averse to the idea that people should be paid at their market value – which means, in practice, for as much as they can get; but in this case, the reason given for needing the extra money bears all the authenticity of an airport stray begging for cash for a ticket to return to his pining wife and children: “Her mother is not well, and her husband has not been well. . . . She’s the sole breadwinner in the family and has been for years.’’

Any vestige of sympathy I may have felt for an Anglican priest living on a mere $25,637.08 per month – ok, I didn’t actually feel any – quickly evaporated on reading that.

From here:

Eleanor Clitheroe, the ousted CEO of Hydro One who is seeking an increase in her hefty government pension, is a sole breadwinner supporting ailing relatives, including her husband, her lawyer says.

Clitheroe, now an Anglican priest, is fighting the provincial government in Ontario’s Court of Appeal. The province believes her monthly pension should be $25,637.08 but Clitheroe, who made $2.2 million in 2001 in her final full year with Hydro One, is seeking $33,644.21 a month.

Clitheroe argues her Charter rights to liberty and security of the person were violated by Bill 80, passed by the Legislature in June 2002. The bill, brought in to curtail large compensation packages for senior management, imposed a maximum on amounts that Hydro One officers, including Clitheroe, could claim as a supplementary pension.

The legislation says Hydro pensions are not to exceed what would be paid to employees under a registered and supplementary pension plan.

Clitheroe has declined to speak publicly about her case, and wasn’t in court Tuesday.

But outside court her lawyer, Alan Lenczner, offered an explanation for why she wants to pad her pension.

“Her mother is not well, and her husband has not been well. . . . She’s the sole breadwinner in the family and has been for years,’’ Lenczner said.

Anglican Earth Day Daftness

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It must be a comfort to Roman Catholic priests to know that if their theology becomes so outré that they are ejected from the Catholic Church, there will still be a home for them in Anglicanism. Mathew Fox, an ex Roman Catholic, is an Anglican priest in TEC where he feels quite at home; he pioneered the Techno Cosmic Mass:

An Episcopal priest and theologian who popularized the rave-like “Techno Cosmic Mass” and advocated goddess worship recently led a seminar on mysticism and Earth spirituality to coincide with Earth Day.

Warning that environmental degradation caused by raging against “Gaia” had to cease, the Rev. Matthew Fox made frequent references to “the Goddess” and the divine feminine during his environmentally-themed lecture and workshop, “Earth Spirituality and the Mystical Tradition.” The event was held in April at the Unitarian Universalist Church in the Washington suburb of Rockville, Maryland, and sponsored by the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation.

Fox’s seminar was a melding of Celtic spirituality, goddess worship, panentheism (which posits that God interpenetrates every part of nature, but also transcends nature), environmental activism, and a political rejection of American “empire,” peppered sporadically with digs against the Vatican. Making references to Christian mystics like Hildegard of Bingen alongside pagan deities and the animal world, Fox comfortably oscillated between threats to polar bears and the oppression patriarchy when expressing his views on the natural world.

Having children is equivalent to stealing says the Anglican Church

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The Anglican Church in Australia has decided that having children is bad for the environment, breaks the eighth commandment and is the equivalent of stealing.

Thus the Anglican Church soldiers on in its never-flagging efforts to devolve into an obscure, laughable and deranged eco-cult.

The Anglican Church wants Australians to have fewer children and has urged the federal government to scrap the baby bonus and cut immigration levels.

The General Synod of the Anglican Church has issued a warning that current rates of population growth are unsustainable and potentially out of step with church doctrine – including the eighth commandment ”thou shall not steal”.

In a significant intervention, the Anglican Public Affairs Commission has also warned concerned Christians that remaining silent ”is little different from supporting further overpopulation and ecological degradation”.

”Out of care for the whole Creation, particularly the poorest of humanity and the life forms who cannot speak for themselves … it is not responsible to stand by and remain silent,” a discussion paper by the commission warns.

”Unless we take account of the needs of future life on Earth, there is a case that we break the eighth commandment – ‘Thou shall not steal’.”

The discussion paper, prepared in March, claims that federal government financial incentives encouraging childbirth should be scrapped and replaced with improved support for parents, such as leave.

300 Anglican clergy in the UK doubt God’s existence

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And that was in 2005.

A report produced 5 years ago by the University of Bangor found that 300 clergymen in the Church of England doubt that God exists. That makes about as much sense as a carpenter disbelieving in the existence of trees; you might think that 300 out of 9000 isn’t bad – unless you happen to be in one of atheist-priest’s parishes, of course. The CofE fares much worse when it comes to Christian beliefs, with 1800 clergy disbelieving in the bodily resurrection of Christ and 3600 disbelieving in the Virgin Birth. That means, in 2005, at least 3600 CofE clergymen routinely and publically lied every Sunday when reciting the creed.

For those who think the current trials afflicting the Anglican church are about nothing but sex, these figures should serve as a salutary reminder that a disturbingly large number of Anglican priests in the UK do not believe in what they are peddling.

Things are far worse in Canada, of course: the Anglican Church of Canada makes the Church of England look like a hotbed of fundamentalism.

The report, published on the eve of the General Synod, refers to “very fragile faultlines along which the Church of England could be torn apart”. Congregations are much more conservative than most of the comparatively liberal clergy preaching to them.

The report says that if committed Anglicans are clear about one thing it is the existence of God: 97 per cent have no hesitation in affirming His existence. Yet, it continues, one in 33 clerics doubts the existence of God. If reflected throughout the Church’s 9,000 clergy the finding would mean that nearly 300 Church of England clergy are uncertain that God exists.

Equal numbers of clergy and laity, eight out of ten, believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ but more laity than clergy believe in the Virgin Birth — 62 per cent compared with 60 per cent — and in the miracle where Jesus turned water into wine — 65 per cent compared with 61 per cent. The biggest division comes over the issue of homosexuality. One third of clergy are in favour of the ordination of practising homosexuals as priests, compared with one quarter of laity. Nearly one third of clergy also support the ordination of gay bishops, but among the laity this falls to fewer than one fifth

Selected heresies from the Diocese of Niagara

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Plucked fresh from the May Niagara Anglican:

Jesus is not God:

St. George’s, Guelph, is a free thinking church, where dissent from the faith is permitted, if not encouraged. Everything is open to debate, including the divinity of Christ and the Trinity.

Man is not sinful:

Reservations of St. Augustine’s theology, especially that part which described “humankind as a mass of corruption and sin, or looked upon the world as irredeemably evil.”

The Good News is temporal and unrelated to Jesus atoning for our sins, salvation or eternal life:

“To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom”…. The Marks of Mission invite the church to begin our ministry where Jesus began his, with proclamation that another way—the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God, a New Creation—has become an available choice within history, and not just a hope for the eternal future.

Jesus is not unique; all religions lead to the same place:

Who’s in charge? No one person or religion, and that’s fine. Let’s work with other religions as a global force doing God’s work and let’s allow our traditional rivalries to die away……

Recently a cartoon was printed of a wall dividing a dry desert from a luscious garden with every fruit tree imaginable in it. In the wall were two gateways; one with “Right Religion” over it, the other with “Wrong Religion.” Everyone, of all races and tribes were clamoring to enter the one marked “Right Religion,” but no one the one labeled “Wrong Religion.” Above were God and some angels. The caption read, “It’s too bad that they just don’t get it.”

Jesus was a heretic and but a caricature of God:

But we do see Jesus, the greatest heretic of all time, but the truest manifestation, or caricature, of God we’ve got, or will ever get.

Faith is shaped not by objective truth, but by experience:

There’s no part of the faith that’s so sacrosanct that it cannot, or should not, be questioned, pulled apart, and put back together again. Faith is not like the multiplication tables. We may question whether six times seven is the same as seven times six, which equals forty two; but it won’t change, no matter how we look at it.