Monthly Archives: November 2022

A climate change Advent

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The two most important events in human history are God’s arrival on earth in human form as a baby at Christmas and his bodily resurrection at Easter.

During Advent, we await an event whose transcendent significance changes every life it truly touches, not just for a lifetime, but for eternity.

How can one possibly reduce this to the mundane, the humdrum, the here-and now? Impossible for most, I should think. But not for an Anglican bishop. Here we have the bishop of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador, Sam Rose (he/him) tagging Advent with Climate Change.

He is quoting bishop Nicholas Holtam (sadly lacking pronouns) who, we can only assume, also spends his time diligently reducing Christianity to temporal trifles. He warns anyone willing to listen (almost no one): “We can run headlong into disaster”. And who better to know than Anglican bishops who have had so much experience running their own churches headlong into disaster?

Diocese of Niagara church attendance down by 35-50%, revenue down 23%

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The reduction in church attendance was announced by Bishop Susan Bell at the recent Diocese of Niagara synod. She noted that she could “feel the anxiety in the room”.

Read it all here:

For instance: and let me clear—what follows is not to deny our recent experience, but it does put it in necessary context. We are all concerned about attendance: through the necessary closure period, we faced some attrition—through death, movement, and attenuation of relationship. All unfortunate; mostly all unavoidable. But fact, nonetheless. Anecdotally, where we stand mid-pandemic, is that our people have returned at a rate of 50-65% generally. I know there are places where the figure is lower or higher but this seems to be the average, if slow, trend.

Even worse:

We have experienced some worrying attrition in our stewardship as well. Our diocesan revenue is forecast to be down about 23% in 2023

Never fear, the diocese has a Mission Action Plan, the latest in a long line of meaningless cliché-ridden banalities designed to bore parishioners to the point where they open their wallets to make it stop.

Keeping abreast of other news

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It takes a lot for Oakville to make the headlines in international news.

And in September 2022 there was, indeed, a lot on display in a local high school. A transgender teacher, who seems to want to give a new slant to the “T” in transgender, appeared on Snapchat wearing giant prosthetic breasts.

Unsurprisingly, many parents were not happy about this: there were protests, demands that the teacher be fired, and claims the teacher is sexualizing children.

The Halton School Board has been deflecting all demands that they do something about this – enforce a dress code, for example. Now, finally, the Board has come up with an answer: they can’t do anything because it would violate Canada’s Human Rights Code, it would be discriminatory and non-inclusive. And the board might get sued.

Is this all an elaborate hoax, as some think? An ingenious advertisement promoting home-schooling? Or a sign that our civilisation is flushing itself down the toilet with ever increasing vigour and enthusiasm?

Read it all here:

Many challenges face employers wanting to implement staff dress codes and chances are, should they try, the policy would fail.

That was the bottom line as Sari Taha, the Halton District School Board’s superintendent of human resources, described for trustees the legal complexities in instituting a staff dress code, at the Nov. 9 meeting of the board.

Motivating trustees to seek clarification on such a policy was the global uproar and parental outrage that followed an Oakville transgender high school teacher’s overtly sexual classroom attire. One of the strongest complaints from the community was the board’s lack of a dress code for staff.

There are major challenges the board would face in instituting a dress code: the dress code must be compliant with the Human Rights Code; and dress codes adversely impact women and other groups disproportionately, often leading to discrimination claims and rendering policies unenforceable, he said.

Canadian Primate claims Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda have separated from the Anglican Communion

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Archbishop Linda Nicholls stated in an email to the Anglican Journal that provinces that did not attend the latest Lambeth conference have “separated from the Anglican Communion”.

Does she mean by this that Anglicans in Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda are fake Anglicans, pale imitations of the genuine article?

When Canadian Anglicans left the Anglican Church of Canada for the Southern Cone and later formed ANiC, this was the claim explicitly made by ACoC clergy, so it is not unreasonable to conclude that Nicholls it is implying this. The fact that the provinces that did not attend Lambeth have full, vibrant churches while liberal western Anglicanism is little more than a twitching corpse whose nervous system is still functioning but has disconnected from any resemblance of sentience does not bother the archbishop. One almost gets the impression she is glad to see the back of these troublesome conservative provinces.

The other interpretation is that liberal western Anglicanism “separated from the Anglican Communion” some years ago by abandoning orthodox Christianity. Not only is it an Anglican fake, but a Christian fake.

From here:

The Anglican churches in Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda have effectively separated from the Anglican Communion by refusing to participate in the Lambeth Conference, says Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada.

Like many other Canadian bishops, however, Nicholls also says she left this summer’s meeting in Lambeth, U.K. with a prevailing sense of hope for the future of the Communion.

About 650 bishops attended this summer’s Lambeth Conference, a gathering of Anglican bishops from around the world which last met in 2008. Much media coverage of the conference focused on disagreement over same-sex marriage, particularly after primates of Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda refused to attend in protest at the invitation of bishops in same-sex unions. The same three provinces had already boycotted the 2008 gathering—attending a meeting of conservative bishops, the Global Anglican Futures Conference, in Jerusalem instead—as well as the meeting of Anglican Communion primates in March 2022.

Reached via email, Nicholls said the Lambeth boycott is a sign those provinces have left the global grouping of Anglican churches.

“Some have already indicated by their non-participation that they have separated from the Anglican Communion,” she said, confirming she meant the provinces of Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda. “Others continue to participate despite disagreement and I see that continuing into the future.”