HALIFAX – As synod draws to a close, I find myself wondering what it was all for. After so many words, motions, resolutions, procedures, discernments, presentations and earnest ponderings, I am beginning to understand the impulse that drives some to enter a silent monastic order.

What has been achieved and what will happen next?

The sexuality resolution, when it finally arrived, was sufficiently woolly to allow the blessing of same-sex unions to continue informally, while avoiding – for the moment at least –censure from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Those who set unity above all saw it as a masterpiece of Anglican compromise, conservative and liberal zealots as an exercise in dissembling.

In order to remain solvent, the national church will cut its budget, lay off staff and dioceses will continue to close and consolidate parishes, selling church buildings to almost anyone who will buy them. The next Anglican General synod will take place in 2013 – if the church can afford it. The cost of this synod, excluding airfares, webcasting, building space and internal media coverage was around $900 per person, totalling $360,000.

The Anglican Covenant – the document that is supposed to prevent Anglican provinces from making radical decisions unilaterally – will be studied for three to six years. The Secretary General of the Anglican Communion confided to me that “things move slowly in the Anglican world”. I likened it to an Entmoot: he didn’t laugh. How many people will still be regularly attending an Anglican Church in six years is anyone’s guess. Mine is that it will be significantly less than today’s 325,000.

One of the notable things about this synod was who wasn’t there. There was little interest from the secular press, visitors were sparse and blog comments were at nothing like the levels seen for the Synod of 2007. Even big name Anglicans like Katherine Jefferts-Schori (from the US Episcopal Church) attracted only a motley bunch of specialty Anglican journalists. For the most part, the secular press was absent.

The church is trying to use social networking to spread its message, so it had a twitter account where a dedicated tweeter typed in endless 140 character messages to edify the curious. There were 114 followers, a half of which were probably already attending synod. To put this in perspective, Stephen Fry has 1,550,779 followers – and he doesn’t even talk about sex all the time.

Why is this? It’s because most people no longer care what the Anglican Church does – whether it is blessing same sex marriages or demanding an end to global warming. The Anglican Church spends much of its time questioning the faith that has shaped not only it, but the last 2000 years of Western civilisation. To fill the void, it has idolatrised “inclusion”, thereby alienating to the point of exclusion many who are determined to hold fast to orthodox Christianity. The church’s quest for relevance has become an accommodation to secular culture and it now finds itself in a market where it cannot and never will be able to effectively compete.

At synod I met and enjoyed the company of a number of people with whom I agreed. A few of them were from the Zacchaeus Fellowship, a group of Anglicans who help gay men and women resist acting upon – and in many cases reverse – unwanted same-sex attractions. In spite of the fact that gay advocacy voices are often heard in plenary sessions, the Zacchaeus group was not invited to speak at any of the plenary sessions. In fact, they have never been invited to speak at any plenary meeting at any synod: it’s hard not to conclude that, in spite of the nautical theme for synod, most of the rigging was in the choice of speakers.

Of course, I met far more people with whom I disagreed. Nevertheless, they were all gracious and friendly, even after reading some of the articles I had written. I am grateful to the synod staff, clergy and delegates for making me feel “included” and, to allay any suspicions of friends at home, no, I am not suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

This article is also on Holy Post and Eternity Magazine

One of the motions before synod this morning was C011:

Request that all Dioceses, ACIP, Military Ordinariate, and Religious Orders engage in theological and scriptural study of human sexuality in the coming triennium.

The ACoC, as Fred Hiltz keeps reminding us, has been studying sex (not doing it, Anglicans are dying out, remember) for about 50 years, so a decision to spend few more years pondering gender plumbing is hardly surprising. In fact, the only way to surprise an Anglican synod would be to propose a motion that recommended all studies on sex stop. That didn’t happen.

Unsurprisingly, a bright spark from the Diocese of Montreal wanted to add “in conversation with gay and lesbian voices” to the motion; few would have the temerity to object. The trouble came when a second amendment was requested: to add “ex-gay voices”, too. After all, there are people in the church who have overcome their same-sex attraction.

The owner of the first amendment did not want his bit sullied with “ex-gays”, though, so he referred to “so-called ex-gays” in his plea to defeat the second amendment. The only people upset by this were the ex-gays and their friends – I scarcely think anyone else noticed. However, I would dearly like to have witnessed the hysterical screeching that a reference to “so-called gays” would have provoked. Very similar to drawing a cartoon of Mohammed on the wall of the Badshahi Mosque in Pakistan, I should think.

I found myself quite irritated by the spectacle, but I am consoling myself with the prospect of calling the ACoC a “so-called church” until my nerves are soothed.

One of the frustrations of Synod Press conferences is the rigid control of the questions and answers: rejoinders are impossible –  “yes, but” dies in the larynx before being given the chance to escape. I wanted to ask Katherine Jefferts-Schori why she keeps invoking the “Spirit” and what she means by it.

In my Christian life, I come from a charismatic-Anglican background. In the full flush of the charismatic renewal in the late 70s and early 80’s the Holy Spirit was, we thought, active, real and a Person of the Trinity whose presence could be experienced in worship and prayer. We didn’t care much that our diocese and the national church had little interest in the Holy Spirit: we ignored them and they consoled themselves with the comforting rumour that we were closet snake-handlers.

How things have changed. Now it is impossible to read or hear more than 2 sentences from Anglican leaders without hearing, the Spirit says this and the Spirit says that. I have an uneasy feeling that the word has been misappropriated, stolen, hijacked, misused, sullied and misapplied.

I overhead one clerical gentleman yakking away saying how much he was looking forward to synod and seeing how the Spirit was going to work in the discussions. Having already seen some of the discussions, I had to suppress the impulse to ask him, “what spirit are you talking about?”

In the Rowan Williams-Katherine Jefferts-Schori duelling Pentecost letters pantomime, KJS says

[T]he Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree….

The Episcopal Church has spent nearly 50 years listening to and for the Spirit in these matters. While it is clear that not all within this Church have heard the same message, the current developments do represent a widening understanding.

Note that KJS does not say that some (or even all) in the church have misheard the message that the Spirit is speaking, rather that the Church has not heard the same message, implying that the Spirit is disseminating contradictory messages to different people.

This is not the Holy Spirit, nor the Holy Spirit’s message; if those doing the listening are fortunate, it is merely the meanderings of their collective unconscious.

One of the questions asked of Secretary General, Canon Kenneth Kearon yesterday was whether the 3 moratoria are seen as morally equivalent. Specifically, are cross border interventions and the blessing of same sex unions equally bad; Fred Hiltz in his presidential address was quite clear that the “havoc” is being caused by the cross-border interventions.

Kearon’s answer was that there was no moral equivalence, but both are equally damaging and so both had to stop.

Whatever one’s view of which is worse or more destructive, what is being missed in this approach is the chronology or which is the cause and which the effect. Remove the cause and you remove the effect; remove the effect and the cause remains. Remove same-sex blessings (cause) and cross-border interventions would stop. Remove the cross-border interventions (effect) and same sex blessings would remain.

It may appear to be, though. For example, synod has scheduled six sessions on “sexuality discernment” – church-speak for deciding whether to bless same-sex unions – yet only two sessions on financial management. This may not be an ideal allocation of time, considering the demise of the Anglican Church is being hastened by a lack of cash as much as by an excess of prurience.

In an attempt to address its financial embarrassment, the Anglican Church of Canada has sought corporate sponsors to help pay for synod; the degree of sponsorship peaks at the “visionary” level which, for $30,000 will not only buy you tasteful Anglican advertising, but a private lunch with Primate Fred Hiltz. Although this is an enticement that few could resist, I haven’t seen many corporate logos in evidence at synod; come to think of it, I haven’t seen any. It can’t be merely coincidental that the Director of Philanthropy, whose idea it was, has just resigned.

Luckily for the church, a number of generous bequests in 2009 balanced the budget; dead Anglicans won’t keep the church afloat for long, though, so the living are also being vigorously exhorted to part with their money.

I was delighted to be invited to participate in some of the press conferences that have take place at noon each day. On Friday I was introduced to the refined art of advanced ecclesiastical sophistry by Archbishop Hiltz who expounded on which of the following circumstances would break the moratorium imposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury on same-sex blessings (yes, I know I am going on about sex again, but I just can’t get away from it). Here are the circumstances and the answers:

Synod passes a motion that approves same-sex blessings. This would break the moratorium.
Synod passes a motion that allows dioceses to decide for themselves whether to conduct same-sex blessings. This would break the moratorium.
Synod passes no motion, but continues to ignore dioceses that are already blessing same-sex unions and those who are about to start. This would not break the moratorium.

The distinguishing feature of the last option is that it is not “formal”; the fact that what should not happen is happening is immaterial so long as it is happening informally. A secular equivalent would be a loose association of astute crooks committing uncoordinated burglaries, emboldened by the certain knowledge that the informality of their crimes insulates them from prosecution.

In another press conference, Suheil Dawani, Bishop of Jerusalem unintentionally illustrated part of the malaise afflicting the Anglican Church. In his address he eloquently spoke of his efforts to mediate between warring factions in the Middle-East; he expressed his distress at the fact that Christians are a diminishing two percent of the population. In the interview afterwards I asked him whether he is trying to replenish the dwindling Christian population by making new Christians – by converting Muslims, for instance. “No”, he said, “we are not evangelical; we are just trying to preserve the ‘living stones’ (Christians) already there.” For a liberal – and to be invited to speak at an Anglican General Synod, that’s what you have to be – this makes perfect sense. Liberals tend to believe that Christianity is one of many paths that lead to God. The good bishop could not quite see that his liberalism is chipping its way through the branch on which he is perched: if Christianity is not unique, if it has no truth to offer that is inaccessible to other religions, there isn’t too much point in keeping Anglicanism, synods, dioceses, parishes or even bishops on artificial life support. What reason could there be, other than nostalgia, for not letting this particular path fade gracefully away?

Speaking of fading away, synod is not quite at the half way point and my ability – or perhaps willingness – to concentrate seems to be decreasing as the talking increases. And Anglicans do like to talk. Still, there’s plenty more to come on “sexuality discernment”; that should liven everything up.

A slightly condensed version of this article can be found at the National Post. Also on Eternity Magazine.

“It is what it is”.

The depth of its iniquity lays not only in its inane tautology, but in the diversionary tactic that normally accompanies its use. You can see a prime specimen here, perpetrated by Primate Fred Hiltz. In this case, the church is obviously breaking the moratorium on same-sex blessings because they are actually occurring. But since the House of Bishops has not officially sanctioned them (nor has it censured those who conduct them), the blatant contradiction between claiming the moratorium is not broken – while brazenly breaking it – becomes an “it is what it is” phenomenon, designed to divert attention from the crass lie.

Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, noted that in Canada, several dioceses either allow same-sex blessing rites or are considering it, subject to a decision arising from this General Synod. Despite these developments, he said, the Canadian House of Bishops’ October 2008 statement still stands. It affirms a continued moratorium on same-sex blessings while recognizing that it would be difficult for some dioceses to implement it.

“We’ve not revisited or altered that statement as a House,” noted Archbishop Hiltz. “It is what it is.” And while the landscape has changed, he said, “what we’re keeping is a plan for us to continue to walk together and pray together.”