The deficit is due to market losses.

The Anglican Church used to be known as the conservative party at prayer, now it is the communist party at smudging.

The ACoC likes to waft an aroma of socialist egalitarianism heavenward in clouds of smudging fumes, but it still loves money and, even though it pretends to emulate the homeless man/God who had nowhere to lay his head, it just can’t stop loving money and the means of making more of it.

To that end, in 2021 it had $27,790,616 invested in Cash, Equities, Alternative Investments and Real Estate.

To paper a veneer of pious poverty over this, the Diocese of Toronto displays a statue of homeless Panhandler Jesus outside one of its churches. It makes Toronto’s homeless population feel so much better.

But back to the thing the ACoC isn’t interested in: money.

Last year’s global market decline left the church’s national office with a budget deficit of $1.55 million at the end of 2022. The treasurer explains more here. Do I see a tear in her eye?

Investment losses from last year’s global market decline left the church’s national office with a budget deficit of $1.55 million at the end of 2022, a financial statement released to General Synod shows.

The deficit occurred despite an operational surplus of $346,000. Total revenue for General Synod in 2022 was $9.75 million, down by more than $37,900 from the previous year. Expenses were $9.40 million, or $882,000 higher than last year.

In the financial management committee’s report to General Synod June 30, treasurer and CFO Amal Attia said investment losses, however, made “that surplus a deficit and that is as a result of the nosedive that the entire investment portfolio [took] for everybody.” Investment losses of $1.77 million and a $250,000 provision for potential legal settlements left the budget awash in red ink, despite more than $123,000 in undesignated legacies. Market losses from unrealized investments, Attia added, were “not anything in our control.”

Stock and other investment markets around the world experienced declines in 2022 due to a number of factors going back to the economic recession that followed the COVID-19 pandemic, which later resulted in soaring inflation and global supply chain problems. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 also cause.

Perhaps “incantations” would be a better word.

The Anglican Church of Canada has added some new incantations to its website:

The Pastoral Liturgies for Journeys of Gender Affirmation and Transition is now there.

And, for all of you who like to announce your pronouns, there is the Inclusive Language Liturgical Psalter, where God has been robbed of his.

I have little doubt that there will be almost no demand for the above, but I expect this one to be in constant use: The Deconsecration of a Sacred Space.

The decline was 10% per year for 2020 and 2021. 2022 may not be much better since the two dioceses (Kootenay and Fredericton) that have produced data show an attendance decline of 32% and 37% from 2019 to 2022.

Christmas and Easter attendance for those two dioceses was down almost 50%.

It’s just as well the bishops are concentrating all their efforts on reversing this trend by authorising transgender liturgies.

The report is here and the Journal article is here.

Data for 2021 confirm attendance in the Anglican Church of Canada declined by about 10 per cent that year, after a similar drop in 2020, the church’s statistics officer says, while preliminary findings from 2022 suggest it continued in a steep decline into the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

In 2019, statistics officer Canon Neil Elliot released a report that described a downward trend of 2.5 per cent per year—a rate that would see the church’s membership depleted entirely by 2040 if it continued. An update with data from 2020 showed the downward trend had accelerated to about 10 per cent that year, with data that was preliminary at the time suggesting a similar rate of decline for 2021. The latest numbers confirm the latter, Elliot says. 

It’s hard to view the determination of Western Anglicanism to impose its obsessive adoration of homosexuality on African churches as anything other than neo-colonialism.

Yet, the enduring talent of liberal clergy to see everything backwards Through the Looking-Glass results in twisting reality such that “colonialism is largely responsible for the negative attitude toward homosexuality”.

Read it all here:

Colonalism’s legacy seen in marriage debate

Raphael Hess is the Bishop of South Africa’s diocese of Saldanha Bay and describes himself as “coloured,” a term used in South Africa which means he has both Black and white ancestry. His diocese is in the minority in South Africa, having come out in favour of same-sex marriage. It’s a stance Hess describes as honouring, respecting and endorsing it while waiting for the rest of the province to do the same.

He says colonialism is largely responsible for the negative attitude toward homosexuality across Africa. “To reduce it to that only would be to simplify the issue. But certainly we inherit our laws from our colonial past because we’ve been taught that that is wrong … In Africa, those laws are still on our statute books. They weren’t invented by us.”