Tag Archives: bishops gone wild

The Church of England, putting its money where its mouth isn’t

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The refined art of Anglican hypocrisy:

After what it must have deemed a decent interval since triggering a furore over its attack on traders and bankers as “robbers and assassins” last year, the Church of England is shamelessly seeking more yield.

Just to refresh your memory, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Church, last September said it was right to ban short selling, while John Sentamu, archbishop of York, called traders who cashed in on falling prices “bank robbers and asset strippers“.

But the Church Commissioners had a tough year in 2008, as the Church’s total assets dropped from £5.7bn to £4.4bn, a 23 per cent fall over the period. Clearly, faith alone was not enough.

As the FT’s People column reports on Wednesday in an appropriately headlined piece “God meets Joy”, the Church of England has appointed fund manager Tom Joy to run its £4.4bn investment portfolio from a “very strong field of more than 70 applicants”.

Tom Joy of RMB Asset Management manages hedge funds which – you guessed it – employ as one of its techniques, asset stripping short selling.

In commenting upon the appointment of Joy a spokesman noted:

The spokesman added that belief in God wasn’t a necessary requirement for someone to take up the job.

This is entirely understandable,  since one does not have to believe in God to take up the job of Anglican bishop either.

An agnostic bishop in the Anglican Church

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Only one, I expect you are thinking; well, only one that has come out:

Richard Holloway says the worldwide Anglican Church has made room for “happy clapping” evangelicals, bells-and-smells Catholics, women priests and, in the United States, openly gay clergy and even practitioners of other faiths. So surely, he argues, it can find room for people like him – Christians who don’t believe in God.

Holloway, contrary to popular belief, has not left the Episcopal Church, as Scottish Anglicanism is known. He may have taken early retirement as Bishop of Edinburgh but the writer remains an ordained priest and consecrated bishop, who still preaches from the pulpit, performs baptisms and weddings and even presides at communion.

“I had a crisis in 1998 and I was in a kind of internal exile for a bit,” he told the Herald yesterday, while en route to Sydney, where he is a speaker at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

“I am in a slightly mellower place with the church right now. I’ve still got my pilot’s licence, so to speak. They didn’t take it away from me.”

But Holloway has abandoned his belief in – or at least certainty about – God and the afterlife, and is now known as a “Christian agnostic”.

“I am not trying to persuade people in the church to adopt my angle,” he insists. “I just want space enough to be honest about my own convictions. The congregation I belong to in Edinburgh knows my position and is hospitable enough to include me.”

And inclusion is what it’s all about, after all.

The resonance with prevailing cultural conceits is evident: Richard wants space to be honest, the honesty is simply an angle and he has no interest in proselytising his particular angle. There is, of course, plenty of space in the Anglican church – mainly because there are plenty of other places other than churches where agnostics can congregate on Sunday; the question is, why doesn’t the retired bishop join them?

I have to give the man full marks for honesty, though: he admits he doesn’t believe in God, an afterlife, Jesus’ divinity, thinks the Eucharist is art and the church a social club. The average Canadian bishop believes as much but doesn’t have the guts to openly admit it.

24

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10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. (Season Opener)
Terrorists known cryptically as TEC-ACoC take hostages in Jamaica.

12:00 a.m. -1:00 a.m.
Hostages are identified: Truth; Gospel; Honesty; Integrity (the original one).

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Terrorists assail hostages with a newly developed mind-numbing bio-weapon: the Indaba. Civilians all over the Island are wailing and clutching at their heads.

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Counter-terrorists are dispatched from far flung reaches of Christendom with a single purpose: rescue the hostages.

3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Terrorists and Counter-terrorists do battle; Indabas are wielded to dreadful effect. The carnage is terrible.

4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Counter-terrorists wheel in the big gun: the Fourth Moratorium.

5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
The Fourth Moratorium suffers defeat through trickery and sleight of hand. One of the counter-terrorists, although he speaks 5 languages, didn’t know what “litigation” means and no-one bothered to explain it.

6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Counter-terrorists wheel in the other big gun: Section 4 of “The Covenant”.

7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Battle rages around Section 4; the Indabas go at it hammer and tongs decimating all in their path.

8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Section 4 falls.

9:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.
Terrorists counter attack with Resolution A.

10:00 p.m. – 1:00 a.m. (Mid-Season Cliffhanger)
Resolution A suffers apparent defeat but is actually smuggled out of the room and secreted in Resolution C which has disguised itself as Resolution B.

1:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m.
Resolution C calls for the hostages to remain in terrorist custody until they die from too much conversation.

2:00 a.m. – 3:00 a.m.
Arch-terrorist Rowan the Enforcer deploys the ultimate weapon: he speaks.

3:00 a.m. – 4:00 a.m.
It is all too much after the Indaba attack: terrorists and counter-terrorists alike writhe on the floor in agony. Some bite off their own tongues. Rowan the enforcer smiles benignly

4:00 a.m. – 5:00 a.m.
A temporary truce is called while all descend on the local population to pillage their food supplies.

5:00 a.m. – 6:00 a.m.
Back at it. Stunned journalists try to make sense of the carnage.

6:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m.
Truth; Gospel; Honesty; Integrity are battered and still hostage.

7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m.
The terrorists have won: the hostages will be subject to extreme interrogation techniques to break down their resistance – dialogue, group discernment and if all else fails, the Listening Process, said to be capable of boring the balls off a buffalo in 30 seconds.

8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. (Season Finale)
The terrorists begin to write accounts of the battle that make them appear like the good-guys. Everyone goes home wondering what just happened.

Did anyone understand that? It doesn’t matter: what is important is the violence, blood, gore, torture, screaming and the fact that 24 will be returning for another season next year.

Allow me to introduce my Church, the Entity

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The  ACoC house of bishops loves, with gracious restraint, to take a dig at ANiC. Here is the first one, wherein ANiC is not only an Entity, but an Entity that is given to Self Identification. The intent of using the word entity is to emphasise that the ACoC views ANiC as separate from the Anglican Communion, even though it isn’t; and self identify implies an identity that is not recognised by others – whereas ANiC is recognised by the majority of the world’s Anglicans.

In response to a call for clarification of the status of entities who self identify as being Anglican, it was noted that the Archbishop of Canterbury has stated in writing that his office and the Anglican Communion Office recognize one ecclesial body in Canada as a constitutive member of the Communion, The Anglican Church of Canada. We affirm this statement. We cherish our Communion with the See of Canterbury and remain committed to the life and witness of the Anglican Communion in the service of the Gospel.

Dig number two is:

The House, responding to a question from the National Cursillo Secretariat, discussed the relationship with the Anglican Network in Canada, particularly as it related to leadership in Cursillo. It was noted that diocesan bishops have the authority to decide who may serve on Cursillo leadership teams. The House, with regret, is of the opinion that clergy and laity who are members of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANIC) should not be given permission to exercise a leadership role in the Cursillo Movement of the Anglican Church of Canada.

An act of pettiness odd in its particular singling out of Cursillo.  Although I am not too familiar with Cursillo, my understanding is that other denominations are routinely allowed lead Cursillo groups.

These messages brought to you by the Ministry of Inclusion at the Anglican Church of Canada.

Doing the Indaba in the Diocese of Toronto

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In January 2009, Colin Johnson, bishop of Toronto decided to go ahead with same-sex blessings in some of the parishes in his diocese.

On the face of it, this seemed like an odd decision since the Toronto synod is coming up in May: why not wait for a decision on this from synod?

It seems that the May synod will be using the same contention-defusing technique that Rowan Williams pioneered at Lambeth: the Indaba group:

For the first time, synod will use the indaba process for its discussions. Indaba is a Zulu word meaning “one agenda meeting” or gathering for purposeful discussion. Groups of 35 to 40 people discuss a single issue. Everyone is given a chance to speak. There is an attempt to find a common mind or common story that everyone is able to tell when they leave.

Colin Johnson is not in the least ashamed of the fact that he has no intention of allowing a vote on the issue that is on everyone’s mind; he boasts:

My expectation for the May synod is that, except for a few formalities, there will be no motions. We’ll deal with legislative matters when synod meets again in November. This does not mean that the May synod will be insignificant!

So we’re not avoiding decisions at the May synod; rather, we’re expanding opportunities for people to participate in shaping the way we live together in the church.

True enough, Johnson is not avoiding decisions: they’ve already been made.

Rowan offers advice to the BBC: the pot calling the kettle black

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Rowan on ignoring Christians:

Dr Rowan Williams had a meeting at Lambeth Palace with director general Mark Thompson in which he said the corporation should not ignore its Christian audience.

The talks came at a time when some senior figures are worried about signs that the BBC is more interested in promoting minority faiths than in broadcasting Christian programming or teachings.

Rowan is an expert in this area: he himself is well versed in ignoring his Christian audience, preferring, instead, to pontificate on the virtues of sharia law, the evils of global warming and who to blame for the financial crisis.

Clearly what is needed at the BBC is a series of Indaba groups to continue the conversation and listening. As they discern their way forward. Rowan could lead it.

Canadian Primate, Fred Hiltz, immanentising the eschaton

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There are a couple of significant things about this clip from Fred Hiltz:

First, he tells us that mission for Anglicans is not just about personal salvation. Having been a Canadian Anglican for over 30 years, were it not for the fact that I am a member of an evangelical parish, I could easily have missed the point that the Anglican mission is about personal salvation in any way whatsoever.

Second, Fred goes on to tell us that the Anglican mission is about much more than personal salvation and a relationship with Jesus: it is about transforming society to come under the just reign of God – a similar kind of theocratic utopianism to which Islam aspires.

I think Fred has neatly summed up one of the quintessential errors of the Anglican Church of Canada: for years the church has been focussing most of its energy on the “much more than that” rather than the apparently lesser issue of a person’s salvation. The perfect, just reign of God is going to come when Jesus returns but not before; it is a Christian’s duty to try to do what is right and to work justly in society, but placing this above salvation means setting the temporal above the eternal and making an idol of it.

As C. S. Lewis said in his wonderful essay, The Weight of Glory:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization-these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit-immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

There isn’t much more than that.

Anglicans win Demented Priest Award

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The informative Muslims Against Sharia site has a variety of awards it bestows upon deserving contenders. One is the Demented Priest Award; Anglicans will be proud to know that two of their own are the latest recipients of this prestigious accolade.

Rowan Williams for his groundbreaking work on explaining to Britons why Sharia law is inevitable in the land of the Crusaders and Katherine Jefferts-Schori for her tireless support of Islamofascism.

The only disappointment here is the sad lack of recognition for the efforts of Canadian Fred Hiltz;  never mind Fred, with a bit of work and a lot of concentration, I’m sure you will do better next time.

Diocese of Niagara: what are the "priests in charge" in charge of exactly?

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The diocese of Niagara has appointed “priests in charge” of the three ANiC parishes that have left the diocese. But, since there are almost no people left in the diocesan version of the parishes, just what are the priests in charge of?

Bruce Willis provides the clue: