There is a passage in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited where Charles is short of money and appeals to his father. This is his father’s reply:
“Well, I’m the worst person to come to for advice. I’ve never been ‘short’ as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke?” (Snuffle.) “On the rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that.”
Let’s just say that the Diocese of Niagara is in Queer Street and leave it at that.
Except Peter Wall, the cathedral rector, has a vested interest in keeping the place and his job running a little longer.
It isn’t often I find myself in agreement with Wall, but one thing he said in the article below rings true: “God is not inside that building”. No indeed, he was driven out decades ago.
Wall’s solution to the steady exodus of Christians from the diocese is more innovation, in spite of the fact that innovation – a euphemism for excursions into radical heresy – is what drove the faithful out of the diocese in the first place.
Perhaps this is the real reason Bishop Michael Bird has quit. He wants to leave before all the money is gone.
In Hamilton, the Anglican Church is especially eager to capitalize on capitalist culture. It recently invested in a major renovation at Church of the Ascension, relocating the kitchen, offices and hall to the church proper, so it could sever or lease the rest of the 160-year-old Forest Avenue building. Ten blocks away, at Christ’s Church Cathedral on James North, plans for a new development are also under way.
“We can’t afford to maintain this place forever on the amount of money it’s costing us,” says the Very Rev. Peter Wall, the cathedral rector and dean of the Anglican Diocese of Niagara. “The only way we can do that is to do something that contributes to the sustainability of this place and allows us to have a greater impact on the community.”
Very Rev. Peter Wall, Cathedral Rector, Christ’s Church Cathedral
Since Wall arrived at the Cathedral in 1998, the number of Anglicans in the Hamilton area has declined more than 23 per cent. His church alone has lost about 50 families in the past 30 years.
Though Wall is mum on the details of the development, he says he’s committed to maintaining the integrity of the mid-19th century gothic cathedral — a soaring stone structure with heritage designation inside and out. Still, the church must innovate if it wants to survive.
“God is not inside that building,” he says. “We don’t have to tiptoe in and say, ‘where is he?’ and look under all the pews.
“That’s bad religion, that’s hocus-pocus, that’s nonsense. And that’s what killed the church.”
These men were never more than a gang of thieves. They stole what they could not keep, and lied as they did so. They lined their own pockets from the endowments set up by those they robbed; but they contributed nothing but emptiness. They were nothing; and to nothing they return.
A wonderful quote and very apt!
The Diocese of Niagara like the current primate and his apostate colleagues within the ACoC have virtually destroyed any genuine faith in our Lord and Saviour and continue in their deceptive ways with the result that many orthodox Christians have fallen into their trap believing that having a purple shirt and white collar is the only requirement of a so-called bishop. Clearly the Scripture standard is much higher and does not include a purple shirt or white collar. They have abandoned the vows made both at their ordination and also consecration and can no longer be called Christian.
“That’s bad religion, that’s hocus-pocus, that’s nonsense. And that’s what killed the church.” Physician, heal thyself. BTW, I’m here in Zambia at Trans-Africa Christian University teaching apologetics to 4th year students this week and next. Please pray for this event. Africa is absolutely alive to God, and alive to his Spirit. His presence is palpable.
What killed the church was the abandonment of the gospel that brings the church into being.
If you want to “kill a church”, elevate heretics to positions of leadership. Not merely men who are not Christian by any measure given by St. Paul, but men who are foolish, intellectually unformed, and radically disconnected from the long history of the Ark of God as it has floated down the centuries. Ensure that such men respect nothing but the here and now. The radical and the hip. Make sure they are eternal rebels.
Then let them smash every doctrine and transform worship of the Most High God into a carnival atmosphere of folly, spiritualism, and political agitation disguised as social mysticism. Finally, watch as they chase away the faithful, sell the heritage entrusted to them, and frantically thrash around for techniques, formulas and methodologies to grow numbers – anything, that is, but the preaching and living of what the angel of Revelation calls “the eternal gospel”.
Pity the poor sinner, earnestly seeking for salvation, who falls into the clutches of such men (and women). For as our Lord said of the Pharisees, they make their converts a “two-fold child of hell”. St. Jude warns that such false teachers are destined to be “wandering stars for whom the blackest of darkness is reserved forever”.