Anglican Samizdat

From the CBC:

A Christian student suspended from a high school in Nova Scotia for sporting a T-shirt with the slogan “Life is wasted without Jesus” vows to wear it when he returns to class next week.

William Swinimer, who’s in Grade 12, was suspended from Forest Heights Community School in Chester Basin in Lunenburg County for five days. He’s due to return to class on Monday.

The devout Christian says the T-shirt is an expression of his beliefs, and he won’t stop wearing it.

[….]

Nancy Pynch-Worthylake, board superintendent, said some students and teachers found the T-shirt offensive.

“When one is able or others are able to interpret it as, ‘If you don’t share my belief then your life is wasted,’ that can be interpreted by some as being inappropriate,” she said.

I wonder how the delicate students, whose fragile sensibilities were offended by a slogan they were free to ignore, will cope when they enter the big bad world of business with all its slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Perhaps they will all become teachers and retain the luxury of being easily offended.

I also wonder what the reaction would have been to this t-shirt:

St. John’s Shaughnessy prides itself on being an inclusive church and it has posted sermons for those who wish to experience the very best of edifying inclusion. Funnily enough, the parish has blocked my IP address from accessing the sermons – I have no idea why – and there is a stern warning that they have been copyrighted by the Anglican Church of Canada.

Although I was deeply hurt by this exclusion, I persevered through the tears and, after 30 seconds of diligent exertion, managed to access the sermons from Belgium – or was it Russia? I forget now.

Here is one of the more interesting sermons by the Ven. Andrew Pike. In it, he laments his loneliness  – not surprising, having just lost 850 parishioners – and goes on to confess that he doesn’t fully understand what he is doing. The choir, on hearing this, breaks in with an anthem to help him out.

From here:

Doris Rosado watches her teenage daughters, Ninette and Kiara Mongrut, get the numbers “666” tattooed on their wrists, beaming with pride. The number typically conjures up biblical symbolism tied to the Antichrist, but this St. Catharines, Ont., family belongs to a obscure Christian sect for which “666” is a positive symbol of their group’s messianic leader.

“They wanted to do it,” Ms. Rosado, 45, said at the St. Catharines tattoo parlour where her daughters were inked. “But now it’s more important because we’re counting down… I’m so proud.”

For this family, and other members of Growing in Grace International, these tattoos are a way of demonstrating their faith as true believers of Jose de Luis de Jesus — who they fervently believe is the second coming of Jesus Christ — before a day of reckoning they believe will wipe out most of humanity.

[…..]

To spread the word, Growing in Grace put up billboards in Toronto this week featuring Mr. de Jesus.

“That day, the body of Jose de Luis de Jesus, who is a human like you and me, his flesh is going to be immortal…. He’s going to be living forever. And that will happen to him, but also his followers.”

But, said Mr. Poessy: “All those that are not believers are going to be destroyed.”

Growing in Grace International is not the first to prognosticate that the so-called end of the world will come this year. The Mayan calendar famously picks Dec. 21, 2012.

But Mr. de Jesus also predicts that the “transformation” will endow him, and his loyal followers, with superpowers, such as the ability to fly and walk through walls, said Axel Cooley, the bishop’s daughter.

This is, to use a tired cliché, a win-win situation: if Mr. de Jesus is wrong – and I can’t see how a man careless enough to glue two of his fingers to his forehead could be right about the end of the world – we’ll all still be around on July 1^st and his followers will be lined up to have their tattoos removed. If he is right, destruction is a more appetising prospect than seeing Mr. de Jesus flying and walking through walls.

The added benefit to his being wrong is that, on July 1^st, we can all enjoy watching him try out his newly acquired superpowers.

Steven Schuh, an openly gay member of St. John’s Shaughnessy, believes it is time for the Diocese of New Westminster to remove all restrictions on blessing same-sex unions. That isn’t particularly surprising.

He goes on to make a few extravagantly misguided claims:

That General Synod has approved the local option for same-sex blessings. The human sexuality statement which emerged from the 2010 General Synod did nothing of the sort. It said: “At this time, however, we are not prepared to make a legislative decision” and waffled about “generous pastoral responses” and “mutual accountability”. Had it approved the local option, the ACoC would have received a perfunctory slap on the wrist from Lambeth, something Fred Hiltz seemed keen to avoid.

That there has been “healing within our own diocese”, a statement which demonstrates an obdurate disregard for the reality that the diocese evicted 850 conservatives from the parish Schuh attends in order to house 13 – healed, one presumes – liberals.

From here (page 13):

Fortunately, the rationale on which the moratorium was originally argued has now been largely addressed:

• Although it took far longer than expected, the General Synod has settled — albeit sheepishly — the question about jurisdictional authority. Local option is now standard issue.

• Our willingness to pause, to hold back for a season, also signalled to skeptical friends in the wider Anglican Communion that we really had been listening and considering other perspectives all along. Other jurisdictions are now debating the same issues.

• And most importantly, we created space for healing within our own diocese. Seven years ago I supported the moratorium solely out of respect for conservative friends in the diocese who were sticking with us through tough times. By God’s grace we’ve endured, and together we’re demonstrating our shared respect for one another’s principled convictions and our commitment to continuing the journey together.

So the moratorium has served its intended purpose, and we’re a stronger Anglican family for it. And it’s now time to remove the training wheels. It’s time to lift the moratorium and allow all parishes and priests to follow the Spirit in their ministry of blessing in the world, even as our diocese discerned the call ten years ago this month. No turning back, no turning back.

And, surprise, surprise, when the production opens in Christ Church Cathedral in May, the diocese will “dare the audience to consider Christ anew” by having a female Jesus and portraying the crucifixion as a regrettable episode of school bullying taken a step too far. This article goes on to speculate that the “production of Godspell will instigate fresh thinking in those who come to see it.” Not really, it’s entirely predictable.

Was the crucifixion of Christ a supreme act of bullying? Godspell Director, Rev. Andrew Halladay and Director of Music, Rev. David Taylor believe that Jesus was bullied. Bullying is a hot topic — not just in Canada — but also around the world. In March, both the Liberals and the Conservatives introduced bills meant to influence the way that Canadian educators deal with bullies in our schools.

What does it mean to have the role of Jesus played by a woman? By casting theological student Clare Morgan as Jesus, Halladay and Taylor break from the typical Godspell formula. The role of the typical Godspell Jesus is difficult to fill. The role requires a male soprano. When Halladay and Taylor began casting their Godspell, they already considered inviting a woman to play Jesus — to honor the talent that confronted them and to dare the audience to consider Christ anew.

“Hello, I’m Jerry and I’m an atheist.” Nothing unusual about that, you might think – other than the fact that when Jerry drifted from Christianity to disbelieving in hell to universalism to God is our inner dialogue, to atheism, he was a Pentecostal minister.

Since he wasn’t an Anglican minister, this presented Jerry with a bit of a dilemma which, on hearing of his new-found lack of faith, his congregation helped him resolve by firing him.

From there, he fell into the welcoming arms of The Clergy Project, a “confidential online community for active and former clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs”: TCP, the spiritual formulation, guaranteed to disinfect the bacteria of Faith, Hope and Charity from contaminated souls.

Having come out, Jerry has been photographed with Richard Dawkins and become executive director of Recovering from Religion; that’s about as transcendent as it gets for an atheist.

A brief perusal of this clip will confirm that, although Jerry has abandoned Pentecostalism, it hasn’t entirely abandoned him: his intonation, gestures and stagecraft are all standard Pentecostal minister fare. I was expecting a “preach it, brother” from the audience; Jerry needs to attend a few more Reason Rallies to purge the remnants of what used to intoxicate him from his system.

From here:

In the span of just a few months, Jerry DeWitt went from a respected pastor with a vibrant congregation to an atheist without a job.

DeWitt, 42, is the first “graduate” of The Clergy Project, a program supported by several atheist organizations that assists pastors who have lost their faith to “come out” as atheists to family, friends, congregations and communities.

DeWitt, who lives in Southern Louisiana, went public last October when he posted a picture of himself with the prominent and polarizing atheist Richard Dawkins, snapped at a meeting of atheists and other “freethinkers” in Houston.

According to this:

The Anglican Communion faces a shortage of qualified communicators, according to an international Working Group on communications. The group — consisting of communications professionals from five continents — concluded that the Communion life was at risk of being detrimentally affected by some Provinces’ inability to source and share their news and stories widely.

Ironically, the article that bemoans the “shortage of qualified communicators” goes on to exhort the church to start “communicating proactively as well as reactively”, a phrase whose clichéd vacuity appealed to illiterate corporate managers for a season, after which, around the turn of the last century, mercy prevailed and it was put out of its misery .

Perhaps the Anglican Communion in the West should be grateful that its inability to communicate means that not many of its parishioners know what is really going on.

He comes to this conclusion:

The Ecumenical Call discusses the justifiable use of armed force, and concludes “there are extreme circumstances where, as the last resort and the lesser evil, the lawful use of armed force may become necessary.” This is a difficult conclusion for many Christians, and yet it would reflect the broad views of Canadian Anglicans as expressed in these official statements through the years.

A clear and consistent pattern of belief is evident in the documents surveyed here. Violence and war are incompatible with Christ’s teaching. Christian responsibility is to build up communities of peace founded upon justice for all people and for the earth itself. Peacemaking and reconciliation are at the heart of the Christian gospel.

I would have thought that the violent death of God’s son offered as a propitiation for the sins of the world is at the “heart of the Christian gospel”, rather than the polysemous vagueness of “peacemaking and reconciliation”. But, then, I’m not an Anglican bishop.

The pentagon urged him not to and the fire department fined him $271 because he did not have the “required authorization to burn books”.

The big questions are: how much does a permit from the Gainesville Fire Rescue to burn books cost, how many do they issue per year, does the permit include permission to burn Korans and once the fell deed was accomplished did the fire department treat the ashes with the respect they deserve or did they fail to flush them down the toilet? And would they have issued a $271 fine to an atheist burning a Bible?

From here:

About 20 people gathered for the ceremony outside the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., during which Jones demanded the release of Youcef Nadarkhani, an Iranian pastor, currently in jail for apostasy after converting from Islam to Christianity.

Moments after the burning, the Gainesville Fire Rescue issued a citation against the church, claiming it did not have the required authorization to burn books.

The church will be fined $271, including court costs, fire chief Gene Prince told the newspaper.

Anglican Church of Canada archdeacon, the Venerable M. Edward Simonton, has been in India and, in his peripatetic meandering, bumped into a number of transvestites: Hijra, some of whom, in their enthusiasm to embrace their inner woman, have had their penis, testicles and scrotum removed. Coming, as he does, from the Diocese of Montreal, the worthy archdeacon understandably felt quite at home in this milieu.

Would we not have “a different church” if we hired transvestites “to give blessings on a Sunday” he muses? Not that much different, surely.

From here:

Anyway, it just goes to show how different the world can be. A transvestite in Western culture would never be treated with religious awe let alone respect. I need not mention the history of persecution by western religions. I will also not get into Jungian concepts of the Sacred Hermaphrodite in pagan and classical religion but simple point out that the concept of a third gender is common to most cultures. Just not ours.

Still wouldn’t it be a different church if instead of persecuting transvestites we hired them to give blessings on a Sunday? And, hey, no jokes about men already dressing up in coloured ‘dresses’ every week to do just this! I know that transvestites are not the same as drag queens (the later are entertainers) but my mind immediately jumps to finale of Pricilla Queen of the Desert (the depictions are of indigenous Australian animals and the Sydney opera house). There are few church services I have been to that could not have benefitted immensely from a drag queen blessing thrown in at some point.