Author Archives: David

Anglican Church of Canada attendance decline

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In 2023, Christmas and Easter attendance was down 20 and 26 percent respectively compared to 2017, and up 50 and 41 percent from the 2020 and 2021 COVID panic years.

Average Sunday attendance fell by 9 percent in 2023.

You can read more in this article which attempts to grope for strands of optimism amid the gathering gloom.

The odd thing is that the ACoC is more preoccupied with attendance numbers than it is the number of people who, though its ministry, have become Christians.

Could it have something to do with money, salary and pensions?

According to data available as this issue was being prepared, attendance at Anglican Church of Canada Easter and Christmas services rose by 41 and 50 per cent respectively in 2023, even while average Sunday attendance fell by nine per cent over the same period—substantially faster than the decline of about 2.5 per cent per year before the pandemic, says the church’s statistics officer, Canon Neil Elliot.

Attendance statistics for 2023 are the most recent available as it typically takes dioceses some time to gather, consolidate and report data from all of their parishes. Even so, only 26 of 30 dioceses had reported their 2023 attendance numbers as of early January. Where data were not available, Elliot used 2022 numbers to complete the picture, meaning the numbers may be different in the final tally.

The figures for Christmas and Easter, Elliot says, are still 20 and 26 per cent below 2017 levels, suggesting the bounce-back has not reversed the overall trend of decline. Still, they represent more of a recovery than he had expected from the pandemic-era low points of 2020 and 2021. When he released the 2022 statistics, Elliot said he thought it was unlikely the church would see much more of an increase in attendance, as it seemed safe to assume that people who wanted to return to church after COVID-19 shutdowns had done so. But the surprising increase in holy day attendance in 2023, he says, is evidence the church remains in an unpredictable time.

St. Alban’s and chaos in Sandy Hill

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In 2008, St. Alban’s church in downtown Ottawa voted to join the Anglican Network in Canada, at which point the building was turned over to the Anglican Church of Canada.

The church runs Centre 454 for homeless people, a program that was started in 1979. Now the residents of the Sandy Hill neighbourhood are “urging the city to cut off funding for a drop-in centre they blame for sowing fear and chaos”.

The city is considering moving it elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if the church survives if its funding and raison d’être are removed.

From here:

St. Alban’s rector Rev. Michael Garner said the centre first opened in the church in 1979, relocated to Murray Street, and then returned to the King Edward site around 2012.

It was bursting with activity when CBC visited on Wednesday. Young said demand has doubled in the past year.

“The need is increasing,” she said. “Abject poverty, lack of affordable housing, increased cost of food, a very toxic drug supply are some of the things that are contributing to some of the behaviours that are more visible, because more people are suffering.”

But for four neighbours who appeared at a city budget meeting on Tuesday, those behaviours are intolerable. They blamed Centre 454 for a wave of theft, violence and intimidation that has left them terrified. They said the centre’s clients harass and threaten them, break into their properties, defecate in their gardens and use drugs on their laneways.

Sandy Hill resident Susan Khazaeli said Centre 454 staff are unresponsive to the community’s concerns and take no accountability for their clients once they walk out the door.

“Centre 454 is responsible for endangering the welfare and security of everyone near it,” she told council’s community services committee. “I am begging everyone here to defund this service. It does not belong here.”

Handel’s Queer Messiah

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It took Handel a mere three or four weeks to compose his masterpiece, Messiah.

It’s taken 280 years to make a mockery of it.

London’s Foundling Museum, an enterprise dedicated to being a force for change, is celebrating Christmas with A Queer Georgian Yuletide: Handel’s Queer Messiah, an evening of intellectually-informed fun. Rather like a root canal without anaesthetic.

The Foundling Museum is funded by the UK government, the Arts Council England and takes its inspiration from the Lord of the Flies, Prince of Demons.

Anglican Church of Canada statement on the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury

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Here it is:

We have seen the news that the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has resigned, having acknowledged personal and institutional responsibility in relation to “the long-maintained conspiracy of silence about the heinous abuses of John Smyth” that had been exposed by the Makin Review. Our hearts break for the children and young people who were abused by Smyth and further victimized by the lack of meaningful action on the part of the church.

In 2022, the Archbishop of Canterbury visited Canada to listen to residential school survivors and to issue apologies for the church’s role in the abuses at residential schools. We mourn that today’s news will add to the pain of survivors, and we hold them in our prayers.

The Anglican Church of Canada is committed to continuing the work needed to make the church a safe place for all, in keeping with our baptismal covenant to respect the dignity of every human being. We pray for the humility, courage and wisdom needed for this all-important work.

It’s difficult to miss the irony that Welby “visited Canada to listen to residential school survivors”, an alleged scandal that he was not tangled up in, yet failed to meet with victims of a scandal he was.

Note this tweet from the Anglican Survivors Group. Note in particular the word “lie”:

Justin Welby’s other problem

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As bad as the Justin Welby/John Smyth scandal is, a survey at YouGov illustrates what might be an even bigger problem for the Church of England: 42% of the population has never heard of Justin Welby.

What can this mean other than  an indicator of how utterly irrelevent the church has become to almost half the people in the UK?

 

The fall of Justin Welby

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Justin Welby has resigned over the John Smyth sex, physical and psychological abuse scandal. Welby was not directly involved in the abuse but he knew about it and almost certainly covered it up to protect the institution and his cronies, although he has denied the cover-up and pleaded incompetence instead.

Other heads in the Church of England should probably roll but the ecclesiastical old boys’ network is undoubtedly circling the wagons.

Much as I have disagreed with Welby’s performance during his tenure, I feel rather sorry for the man. Based on his experience as an oil executive, he has tried to run the church as a business, and it hasn’t worked because the church is not a business.

Welby tried to bring reconciliation between irreconcilable parties by telling each what they wanted to hear, earning him the mantle of hypocrite rather than reconciler.

Who will go – and deserves to go – next, I wonder. The Pope?

From here:

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion, resigned Tuesday after an investigation found that he failed to tell police about serial physical and sexual abuse by a volunteer at Christian summer camps as soon as he became aware of it.

Pressure on Welby had been building since Thursday, when release of the inquiry’s findings kindled anger about a lack of accountability at the highest reaches of the church.

“It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024,” Welby said in the statement announcing his resignation. “I believe that stepping aside is in the best interests of the Church of England, which I dearly love and which I have been honored to serve.”

Helen-Ann Hartley, the bishop of Newcastle, said Monday that Welby’s position was “untenable” after some members of the church’s national assembly started a petition calling on him to step down because he had “lost the confidence of his clergy.”

But the strongest outcry had come from the victims of the late John Smyth, a prominent attorney who abused teenage boys and young men at Christian summer camps in Britain, Zimbabwe and South Africa over five decades. Andrew Morse, who was repeatedly beaten by Smyth over a period of five years, said that resigning was a chance for Welby to start repairing the damage caused by the church’s handling of historical abuse cases more broadly.

Anglican Church of Canada predicted to collapse by 2029

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In 2006 the Anglican Church of Canada predicted that it was losing members so fast that it would cease to exist in 2061. By 2019 the loss had accelerated enough to move the extinction event  to 2040.

Now total collapse might be as soon as 2029.

The Council of General Synod met on November 8th 2024 to discuss its first love: money or the lack thereof. The synod treasurer lamented that money is running out so fast that they would “not be here in 2029”.

To counter this, CoGS will “make long-term financial plans”. Rather like a business, albeit an incompetent one.

What it won’t do, I suspect, is abandon heresy, repent and turn back to the gospel.

From here:

Attia’s spoke to CoGS on the first day of its fall meeting, which runs Nov. 8-Nov. 10. Much of the day’s conversation was about money, as well as the shape the church’s future governance structures will take as it finds itself, as Archbishop Anne Germond, acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada said in her opening remarks, “at a crossroads.”

It is difficult to make projections about what future years will look like based on existing trends, Attia told CoGS, as those decisions will depend on uncertain factors like investment income and parish donations from which dioceses draw their contributions to General Synod as well as uncertain outcomes of decisions already made, such as the plan to share office space with the United and Presbyterian churches. But the general trend in revenue is negative, she said. The church’s average annual revenue from diocesan proportional giving shrank by about $2 million dollars between 2018 and 2024 according to numbers she presented, while inflation has raised costs across the board.

Revenue, she said, is declining $200,000 to $250,000 per year, and if she were to provide forecasts based on this and estimated expenses for 2026 through 2029, she would be “painting a gloomy, gloomy picture.

“I [would be] basically telling you guys we would not be here in 2029,” she said.

Anglican and Lutheran leaders call for Israel to stop fighting

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Again.

Happily, no one cares what Anglican leaders think about wars being fought in the Middle East. The only thing that stirs less interest in the general populace is what Anglican leaders think about religion.

I can’t bring myself to use the word ceasefire, since a ceasefire is not what Germond and Johnson want. They want Israel to stop fighting, at which point Hamas, Hezbollah and the IDF will join hands around the campfire and sing All You Need is Love.

From here:

Dear Prime Minister:

It has now been more than a year since the horrifying Hamas attack on Israel. Violence has continued with the decimation of Gaza by Israeli bombing and increasing settler attacks on Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank. In recent days, open hostilities in the region have expanded to include Lebanon, Yemen and Iran. Our hearts break at the horrific suffering and rising death toll caused by these armed conflicts.

We continue our call for a full and sustained ceasefire, for the release of all captives, for the immediate flow of life-saving food, water, aid, fuel and humanitarian assistance for the millions of Gazans suffering at this time, for an end to all arms transfers to Israel, and the end of occupation. We continue our call on leaders to lay down weapons and to work for a just and lasting regional peace.

We express our disappointment that Canada abstained from the September 18, 2024 United Nations motion calling on Israel to end its “unlawful presence” in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. We believe it is only through an end to the occupation and a just, comprehensive and lasting peace settlement that the security of both Palestinians and Israelis can be assured.

We call on the Government of Canada to diligently support all provisions of international law and a rules-based world order. Failure to consistently support international law allows the powerful to act with impunity, causing great suffering to the most vulnerable, marginalized and powerless people globally.

We continue to pray for an end to suffering—remembering in our prayers all who have died on all sides of the conflict, hostages and their families, those maimed and injured, all who have lost their homes and those who have not been able to move to safety—and for the opening of a humanitarian corridor into Gaza and a peaceful solution to this war.

Sincerely,

Rev. Susan Johnson
National Bishop, Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada

The Most Rev. Anne Germond
Acting Primate, Anglican Church of Canada

The crumbling of the Anglican Church of Canada

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The Anglican Church of Canada is not just crumbling from within, its buildings are also falling apart.

The external decay is a fitting metaphor for the spiritual malaise that afflicts the bishops and clergy whose main preoccupation seems to be to avoid Christianity at all costs. The buildings are empty shells, devoid of purpose, meaning and significance; no wonder they are collapsing.

The Journal articles here and here, lament the loss of historic buildings rather than the loss of the ideas and faith that inspired them.

The destruction by fire of St. Anne’s Anglican Church in Toronto last June underscores risks faced by aging churches across Canada, an architectural historian says—and the country could face significant loss of cultural heritage in the years to come.

Peter Coffman, a Carleton University art and architectural history professor who specializes in Canadian Gothic Revival buildings, says many churches are in danger of being destroyed or collapsing. As their congregations shrink, so does the money to pay for their maintenance and preservation.

Canada’s loss of its historic churches is likely to be a protracted process, he says.