Anglican Samizdat

It’s “Lover” and, having just discovered it, he can’t leave it alone. It gets five mentions here and  two in this lugubrious impersonation of Marvin the Robot ushering the new year, wherein the Fred-Marvin Cyborg looks forward to yet more justice, peace and reconciliation. But very little joy.

Still, the bundle of misery hasn’t much to look forward to in 2012 other than his pretend church plummeting to new depths of inclusion fuelled irrelevance and derision.

From here:

Going to church at Christmas may have been good for the soul, but scientists have discovered that it may also be good for the body.

Researchers found that attending services lowers blood pressure – and the more often you go the lower it becomes.

Unless, that is, you belong to the Anglican Church of Canada and are an unwitting recipient of the Anglican Journal, in which case, if you are a Christian, articles like this will undoubtedly increase your blood pressure:

As for the New Testament, Spong rejects the 4th-century Augustinian interpretation of Christ the Redeemer of sinners. Christ should be reconstrued not as “the divine invader but as the human life who broke through consciousness to a new level of understanding, and people perceive that as the presence of God in him. A hundred years from now I’m quite sure that view will be almost universal.”

In his non-theistic universe, Christianity is about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. “I am tired of seeing the Bible being used, as it has been throughout history, to legitimize slavery and segregation, to subdue women, to punish homosexuals, to justify war and to oppose family planning and birth control.” For him, that is a perversion and travesty that must be challenged and changed.

From here:

Lutheran-Anglican-Episcopal meeting a sign of hope for the church.
Lutheran, Anglican and Episcopal leaders from the United States and Canada met in December to explore new possibilities for working together and to deepen their sense of unity for doing God’s work in the world. In a report issued from their meeting, the leaders stated that their conversation and work together “are hopeful signs for the church.”

“There was truly a spirit of Advent expectant hope as we met to pray and plan for greater cooperation in ministry and mission,” said ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson of the meeting.

North American Anglican and Lutheran denominations have largely abandoned historic Christianity and, consequently, are spiralling rapidly into oblivion as their congregations flee the transparently bogus religion of inclusivity that is now marketed by both organisations.

Thus, in a last ditch effort to create an illusion of vitality, they have decided to join forces in a koinonia of the wishy-washy hoping, presumably, that by increasing the volume of lemmings hurtling off the cliff, the meaningless squealing of those yet to hit the water will be sustained a little longer.

According to the WHO:

• HIV/AIDS kills 1.78 million people per year.
• Diarrhoeal disease kills 2.46 million people per year, many of them children and is easily treatable.

Guess which gets a day dedicated to it? The former: World Aids Day is coming up on December 1^st.

Guess which disease the Anglican Church of Canada has taken upon itself to enshrine in liturgy? I know, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel: Aids.

Guess the reason for this – choose one of the following:

• The Anglican Church of Canada is more interested in sexually transmitted diseases than other diseases that kill more people, especially if the other diseases involve diarrhoea. That is because sex is a part of the Anglican spiritual journey and diarrhoea is just yucky.
• The Anglican Church of Canada is obsessed with the Anglican spiritual journey, therefore it is obsessed with sex. At the outer reaches of the Anglican spiritual journey we find homosexual sex. So it is particularly obsessed with that.
• The Anglican Church of Canada has so many homosexual priests that their interest in Aids is really the expression of a desire for self-preservation: homosexual sex is still the preferred way to contract Aids.
• All of the above.

From here:

Hitchhiking priests are common in Cuba. Cars are expensive and hard to acquire, so ministers must get creative with parish visits. Some spend hours on local transit. Some spend precious pesos on taxis. Others hitch rides and some just walk.

[….]

Motorcycles are a great help to these travelling ministers. That’s why the outgoing General Secretary, Archdeacon Michael Pollesel, decided to raise money to buy one  instead of accepting a retirement gift when he left General Synod this fall.

That was very decent of Archdeacon Michael Pollesel. It’s a shame, though, that it probably won’t make him ponder the question why, in the Cuban socialist paradise, most people can’t afford to buy a car and why the Anglican Church of Canada is working so strenuously to turn Canada into an equally impoverished Arcadian collective.

And who will buy Fred Hiltz a motorbike if they succeed?

From here:

The Anglican Church of Canada is making progress toward overcoming a longstanding negative stereotype and becoming an effective partner in preventing suicide.

It’s about time the ACoC did something to reduce the existential angst afflicting the ranks of Canadian Anglicans.

Unfortunately, the article fails to mention exactly when the ACoC will be firing its bishops, closing its doors and turning the lights out.

The Journal calls ANiC parishioners Anglicans. It has to be a typo.

A group of Anglicans from St. John’s Shaughnessy in Vancouver, the largest of four dissident parishes in the diocese of New Westminster, will begin Sunday services at Oakridge Adventist Church beginning  Sept. 25.

From here:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has expressed hope that the Fresh Expressions initiative will flourish in the Anglican Church of Canada as it has in the Church of England.

[....]

Fresh Expressions “encourages new forms of church for a fast changing world, working with Christians from a variety of denominations and traditions,” according to the Fresh Expressions U.K. website.

The question is, fresh expressions of what? The fact that heretical dioceses like Niagara and New Westminster have launched into Fresh Expressions is hardly reassuring.  Both dioceses are willing to try anything to boost their flagging numbers but a fresh expression of diocesan baloney isn’t likely to help.

While on the subject of baloney, here is Rowan Williams explaining what Fresh Expressions is all about. Among other things it invites us “to explore one another” – anything to get people in the door.

You can read about the other seven, predictably prosaic, myths in an article by the Diocese of Toronto’s Director of Stewardship here (page 4).

The eighth myth is much more interesting:

Myth: You can expect parishioners to pay for and maintain the buildings they worship in.

Truth: In every case where congregations have had sufficiently strong theological differences with their dioceses that they realigned with another Anglican province while still hoping to use their buildings, the dioceses have gone to court to establish that they, the dioceses are the legal owners. So far the dioceses have been largely successful.

Yet, even though they claim to own the buildings, Anglican dioceses contribute nothing to their maintenance or the initial cost of building them. You can only con people for so long: no amount of weeping and wailing by stewardship directors is going to squeeze more cash out of people who have already forked out millions of dollars to pay for something they thought was theirs but, according to a spiteful, hypocritical, grasping national church can be taken from them at any time.

Welcome to the Anglican Church of Canada, the Ponzi religion.

An acquaintance of my wife was talking to her about her church, a prominent Anglican parish in Oakville, and about how unhappy she was that it was watering down the Gospel: it is promoting Chrislam, among other things.

She isn’t the type of person to make a fuss, complain or confront the church’s leaders; at some point she will just quietly leave.

And that’s how Anglican inclusion works. Anyone who actually believes that Christianity is true – is a Christian, in other words – is made to feel so uncomfortable at the onslaught of syncretic babble that flows so effortlessly from the pulpit, that their distress compels them to depart.

What is left is an exclusive club of likeminded zealots with little left to celebrate other than the self-congratulatory myopia so characteristic of those who pride themselves on their tolerance.