Tag Archives: Diocese of New Westminster

Anglican cognitive inclusivity

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Anglican clergy love meaningless clichés: their judicious deployment helps prevent sceptical laypeople from pinning down the actual beliefs of their shepherds. Slipperiness is everything. Here is a new one from the Diocese of New Westminster: cognitive inclusivity.

Anglicans with $30 whose inclusion is suffering from depleted cognition can go here to have it recharged:

Plenary speaker Bishop Melissa Skelton, Anglican Diocese of New Westminster, Anglican Church of Canada, will help us explore the liturgical experience of reverence.

Four workshops will explore justice and holy in our music, worship and community organizing, cognitive inclusivity, and hospitality.

St. Anselm’s and the Future of Environmentalism

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The Diocese of New Westminster’s St. Anselm’s is hosting the talk by the CEO of the David Suzuki foundation. A discussion more pertinent to the church would have been one that probed the future of Canterbury approved Canadian Anglicanism. The answer might have proved too unsettling; as it is, the David Suzuki representative should feel right at home since Suzuki, in his autobiography (pp. 391), notes: “I have been an atheist all my adult life”Peter Robinson Talk 8.5 x 11

Fairy tales and the gay man’s journey

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“Fairy tales and the gay man’s journey” is a five week Pride event put on by the Diocese of New Westminster’s Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral. It will be led by Holy Trinity’s rector, who is himself gay, Rev. Dale Yardy. As the invitation says:

HTC-pride-post-image-v2-1024x600Join us for a five week journey as we listen to, and unpack through small group reflection and conversation, the wisdom and spirituality of five beloved fairytales as applied to the gay man’s journey.

Rev. Yardy explains more in this CBC interview. Apparently, it has a lot to do with the ugly duckling feeling alienated and excluded: it’s an LGBT metaphor – I bet no-one saw that coming. Just to be clear: it has nothing to do with the word “fairy”.

Let there be light. Pink light

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The Diocese of New Westminster held its annual Gay Pride Day Holy Eucharist last weekend, complete with a rainbow candle holder and over 100 people in attendance, not one of whom noticed the oxymoron contained within “Gay Pride Day Holy Eucharist”.

Reverend Laurel Dykstra – please note my restraint in saying nothing about the reverend’s surname – was not only the preacher at the service but organised the Anglican contingent at the Pride parade later in the day:

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The marching Anglicans felt right at home with polyamorists:

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Sin City Fetishists:

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Justin Trudeau:

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And a plausible candidate for the next bishop:

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I am unclear as to whether the Sin City Fetishists participated in the Holy Eucharist or not.

Rev. Dykstra chose to preach on Genesis 32: 22-31, Jacob wrestling with the angel. I am sure that you are well aware that Jacob’s homoerotic wrestling with the angel until he received a blessing is a prophetic foretelling of the struggle between gay Anglicans and the church: the wrestling will continue until a blessing is obtained. What else could it possibly mean?

From here:

Let there Be Light

The 6th Annual Gay Pride Day Holy Eucharist took place on the Sunday of the second long weekend of the summer, August 3, 2014, again at Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver.

As has now become traditional at this liturgy, after the processional hymn (for 2014 it was Morning Has Broken led by harpist/vocalist Clare Morgan) and the Dean’s welcome the Service of Light is offered. The presider opens with these words:

“The lighting of a candle is a simple act yet becomes a powerful sign. For when we don’t have the words or don’t know how to pray, a small candle burning brightly expresses our prayer that is always with us – and becomes more powerful with each candle lit.”

Two candles on the Altar and six candles on a rainbow candle holder placed on the Altar were lit: in the face of fear; in the face of violence; in an age of AIDS; for hope; for healing; for courage; for community and for resurrection.

As a buffer between the Eucharist and the Raunch, a “complimentary continental brunch prepared and served by members of the Christ Church Cathedral faith community” was offered before the march. How civilised. How Anglican.

St. Matthew’s Abbotsford is going through a bumpy patch

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In 2011 the 500 member congregation of St. Matthew’s Abbotsford was ejected from its building by the Diocese of New Westminster.

In 2012, the rector of the diocese of New Westminster’s version of the parish, Rev Allen Doerksen, declared that one day the church will become self-sustaining. That day has not yet arrived: the parish is still being funded by the diocese and is now going through a bumpy patch.

What’s more, the church’s furnaces need replacing so, to avoid a bumpy cold patch, the parish is asking the Diocese of New Westminster for $150,000 to fix them.

Both St. Matthew’s Abbotsford and St. John’s Shaughnessy – which is bleeding $20,000 per month – were kept on artificial life-support by Bishop Michael Ingham to demonstrate to the world that the diocese’s ersatz Christianity works. It doesn’t. The new bishop, Melissa Skelton, will have some difficult decisions to make soon; before the diocese starts going through a bumpy patch.

Diocese of New Westminster church insufficiently inclusive to embrace crap

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From here:

garbage-1A church in New Westminster hopes the fear of god will scare off illegal dumpers.

After years of dealing with unwanted refuse, St. Barnabas’ Anglican church has erected a sign that reads “Do not drop your crap here. God.”

The deluge of theological crap descending steadily from its diocese seems to bother St. Barnabas much less, however.

The Diocese of New Westminster sells a church to make way for a mosque

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The diocese sold St. Richard’s Anglican Church to the North Vancouver Islamic Association for $3.05 million as a site for the Ar-Rahman mosque.

After selling a church to a competing religion, the next obvious step for members of the diocese is to start attending the mosque. After all, all religions are equally valid; there are many ways to God; we don’t want to exclude anyone; everyone knows Michael Ingham’s book should have been titled “Mosques of the Spirit”.

3 Women's Prayer RoomFrom here:

On Sunday March 30th, forty-five Anglicans and Lutherans were guests at Masjid Ar-Ramnan, the mosque in the former St. Richard’s building in North Vancouver. As part of a North Vancouver Lenten Visiting Program “Who is my neighbour?”

Bishop Melissa Skelton: it’s a thing called discernment

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Skelton was recently interviewed by the CBC (listen here, March 18 starting at 2:17:00). Her appointment as bishop, she tells us, was the result of “a thing called discernment”; nothing to do with a thing called career advancement ambition. Well, she didn’t actually make the latter remark.

In the interview, she states once again that she is fully supportive of the blessing of same-sex unions and that there is no longer much of a wedge between those who support same-sex unions and those who don’t. She has reached this conclusion by listening; to whom, I wonder? Obviously not to those who left the diocese over the issue.

Losing the majority of those with whom one disagrees and calling it “healing” would, in the secular realm, be a thing called spin. In the Diocese of New Westminster where selective listening is such a refined art, it’s a thing called discernment.

Diocese of New Westminster and Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver have “dialogue”

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The Diocese of New Westminster, having been instrumental in shattering what is left of unity in the Anglican Communion, is now desperately seeking it in the most unlikely place: the diocese is busy trying to find commonality with Roman Catholicism. It is only fitting that it is basing these conversations on a missive from ARCIC since, as former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, has pointed out, ARCIC is irrelevant to most Christians.

The Diocese of New Westminster: blazing new trails through the wilderness of the irrelevant.

From here:

Meet Your Relatives – Grassroots Ecumenism
100 clergy and lay attend the first of three Anglican – Roman Catholic Dialogue events

On Sunday the 26th of January nearly 100 clergy and laity gathered at Saint Helen’s Roman Catholic Parish in Burnaby for the first of three sessions entitled ‘Meet Your Relatives: Grassroots Ecumenism’. This event has arisen after the clergy of the Archdiocese of Vancouver (Roman Catholic) and the Diocese of New Westminster (Anglican) met for a study day two years ago. The ecumenical officers and committees of the two dioceses were charged with crafting an event for laity and clergy to build upon the success of the clergy day.

[…..]

Their conversations have been based on ‘Growing Together in Unity and Mission’, a statement of the international Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. [ARCIC]

New Diocese of New Westminster bishop to do problem diagnosis

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The Diocese of New Westminster’s new bishop, Rev. Melissa Skelton, is aware that her new diocese has a few problems:

How much work do you have to do in healing the effects of the same-sex union issue?

In my first year, that’s something I’ve got to figure out. I’ve heard there’s still a sense of hurt and difficulty in parishes around that. I have an organization development background, and I think the first thing one does in any kind of organization development work is what, in some ways, is called diagnosis.

To help with the “diagnosis” I’d like to point out: the blessing of same-sex unions in the Diocese of New Westminster precipitated a split in the Anglican Church of Canada, a split which has made a significant contribution to worldwide Anglican schism; the loss of thousands of Canadian Anglicans to ANiC; the loss of the largest congregation in Canada; acrimonious lawsuits; a substantial loss of revenue for the ACoC; the firing of clergy – including the world’s best known Anglican evangelical theologian – by the diocese; and the unedifying spectacle of ACoC bishops and clergy behaving like spoiled children who don’t get their own way.

Still, I expect all that is pretty obvious to someone with an “organization development background”; enjoy your new organization and keep us all posted on how the healing is going.