Category Archives: Anglican Church of Canada

The reason people are leaving the Anglican Church of Canada

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The Anglican Church of Canada is very shy about how many people attend its churches on a Sunday: there have been no attendance statistics since 2001. Even in 2001 or in prior years, the average Sunday attendance is not mentioned, rather the total members on the parish roll is given. Since I still receive a paper copy of the Niagara Anglican – a moment in the month that I have come to cherish – I have an uneasy suspicion that I am still on the “parish roll” of a Diocese of Niagara church.

The figures are almost certainly inflated, perhaps grossly inflated.

According to statistics published here, in 2001 there were 641,845 people on parish rolls. The total number of clergy was 3591.

In 1961, the church’s heyday, there were 1,320,649 on the parish rolls and 2380 clergy.

I’m surprised no-one has noticed this before, but, as the number of clergy increased by 150%, the number of laity decreased by 211%. Church membership is varying inversely to the number of clergy: far be it from me to concoct a spurious causal relationship, but it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the clergy are driving out the laity.

This isn’t as surprising as it first might seem. If orthodox faith is to be found in an Anglican Church of Canada parish, the last place I would expect to find it would be in the clergy; lay people in numerous parishes are busy praying for the conversion of their leaders. Seminaries churn out sceptics rather than Christians, bishops complete the process by weeding out candidates whose faith miraculously emerges intact from seminary and, of course, scour the continent for “married” gay candidates in order to solidify their credentials as non-homophobic.

What’s the solution? Fire all the clergy – beginning with the bishops – and start again with missionary priests from Africa.

Ottawa axes non-Christian prison chaplains

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As this article notes, “Prisoners of minority faiths in federal penitentiaries will have to turn to Christian ministers in 2013.”

Anglican priest, Rev. David Price is unhappy with that since, horror of horrors, wiccans could be converted to Christianity. Where is the diversity and inclusion in that?

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has announced the cancellation of the contracts of all part-time non-Christian chaplains ministering in federal prisons across Canada. The cuts take effect as of the end of March 2013.

After that date, penitentiary inmates of minority faiths, from Buddhists to Wiccans, will have to rely on full-time Christian chaplains for interfaith services, religious counsel and spiritual guidance.

“I could never pretend to be Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Sikh and tend to the spiritual needs of all these different people,” says the Rev. David Price, an Anglican priest in Agassiz, B.C., who spent many years as a prison chaplain in the west. In his view, prison chaplains are essential and cost-effective “midwives” who help offenders give birth to new selves and new lives before they are released back into society.

Anglican Church of Canada: $900k in debt, treasurer resigns, seeks new treasurer who “sees change as an opportunity”

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Looking for someone keen to see impending bankruptcy as an opportunity, to “pick up the challenge.” Anyone?

From here:

With the prospect of a 2012 budget deficit of $900,000 looming large, General Synod is on the hunt for a new treasurer to replace Michele George, who resigned Oct. 1.

According to Rob Dickson, chair of the search committee, the treasurer must be someone who sees change as an opportunity. “We’re in turbulent times and we need somebody who is keen to pick up that challenge,” Dickson told the Anglican Journal.

Diocese of Rupert’s Land supports healthcare for refugees

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The headline of this article from the Journal declares: “Rupert’s Land goes to bat for refugees”. Good for Rupert’s Land, you might think: they are paying the healthcare costs for some refugees.

Not at all. The Diocese of Rupert’s Land isn’t spending money to improve refugee healthcare, it’s spending it on suing the federal government to compel it to use everyone else’s money to pay for refugee healthcare. To rub salt in the wound, the healthcare is better than that enjoyed by the taxpayers from whom the federal government collects the money.

This is the Anglican Church of Canada’s charitable giving modus operandi: don’t spend money on helping people when you can sue someone else to make them do it instead.

Federal cuts to refugee health care will deter church groups from sponsoring refugees, Anglican Church of Canada officials have warned. “Clearly, it would cut down on the number of refugees that we are able to accept because church groups just don’t have the resources to pay [for medical care],” said Bishop Don Phillips of the diocese of Rupert’s Land, where more than 2,000 refugees have been sponsored.

Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, and Adele Finney, executive director of the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, have expressed “deep concern” about the cuts to the Interim Federal Health program. Previously, private sponsors assumed the cost of food, shelter and transportation for a year, while the government provided health care. Under the revised rules, which took effect June 30, church-sponsored refugees will no longer have access to government-funded health care.

On June 26, the diocese of Rupert’s Land and the Hospitality House Refugee Ministry, which sponsors refugees with funds from the Anglican diocese of Rupert’s Land and the Roman Catholic Archepiscopal Corporation of Winnipeg, announced plans to file a lawsuit against the federal government.

 

Anglican Church of Canada’s 7 eastern dioceses may be condensed to 3

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In order to save costs, the dioceses of Montreal, Quebec, Fredericton, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, Western Newfoundland, Central Newfoundland, and Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador may be reduced to just three dioceses, the synod of the ecclesiastical province of Canada has announced.

Such is the desperation of the ecclesiastical province of Canada, that its metropolitan, Archbishop Claude Miller, sees no point in denying the inevitable comparison to deckchairs aboard the Titanic. Rather, he is portraying the Titanic’s maiden voyage as one of promise and opportunity because a remnant was saved. I expect the Titanic’s passengers would have derived considerable consolation from that thought had it been shared with them as they boarded. Small wonder things are falling apart in the Anglican Church of Canada, considering the tenuous grip on reality of those at the helm.

From here:

Archbishop Miller admitted that some critics compare the church’s discussions about change to “just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” However, in his presidential address to synod members, the metropolitan noted that the doomed ship’s story isn’t entirely about unredeemed loss.

The Titanic’s maiden voyage was “a journey with a promise and opportunity for a new life for most of the passengers on board,” the archbishop said. “Not all died in that tragedy. Sometimes we forget that a remnant was saved and realized that hope. Amid the tragedies and tests of this life there is much hope and reason to give thanks.”

Anglican Church of Canada $900,000 in the red mid 2012

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From here:

MONTREAL-Despite efforts to balance its budget the national synod of the Anglican Church of Canada was running about $900,000 in the red at the end of the second quarter of 2012, the primate of the church, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, says.

He told representatives of eastern Canada dioceses Friday that the shortfall was due mainly to revenues lower than anticipated from dioceses. This was despite impressive efforts by some diocese to grapple with their own financial challenges and the decision of some diocese able to do so to voluntarily increase their contributions to the national church.

“The General Synod is struggling financially and if the truth be known we have been on this trajectory for a long time,” he told the synod of the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada, made up of seven dioceses in Atlantic Canada and Quebec. After slipping into “a dangerous tendency of deficit budgeting” it had been seeking to balance its budget through austerities including a 25 per cent reduction in national staff in the last three years, while at the same time seeking to re-focus its activities on mission.

Archbishop Claude Miller of Fredericton seems to have cottoned on to the idea that the financial plight of the Anglican Church of Canada is a result of following false gods. I think he has missed the mark on which false gods and who is following them, though. In his view, they are governments, money, possessions, knowledge, industry, commerce, even entertainment and sports. But they are the false gods of the unsaved; there is no real surprise in that. While it’s hard to keep up with the ever broadening plethora of false gods that the church has taken into its bosom, it seems clear that an, admittedly, non-exhaustive list would include: utopianism, socialism, homosexuality, gender ambiguity, inclusion, temporality rather than transcendence, diversity, eco-religion, aboriginal superstition and general new-age mumbo-jumbo.

 “We have put our faith in other gods for our security and salvation: governments, money, possessions, knowledge, industry, commerce, even entertainment and sports. Witness the Sabbath day and the parking lots of churches versus the parking lots of the shopping malls. Where our treasure is, we find our hearts.”

Fortunately, Primate Fred Hiltz has the situation under control and has issued a memo to calm nervous staff: apparently, the remedy for the church’s financial embarrassment is enshrined in “pruning” and “Vision 2019”.

I want to assure you that in my remarks I said nothing about cuts to programs or staff. I simply made reference to our obligation for careful attention to “pruning” that may need to be considered. In reality we find ourselves in a deficit position and the worry that comes with it at this time each year.

In my remarks I also said that by 2016 the structures of the General Synod will look “very different”. That friends is not breaking news! The need to do this work is enshrined in Vision 2019 (practice #1-Creating Structures that work now for God’s mission) General Synod Resolution A111, the resolution of the November 2011 meeting of CoGS and the focus of conversations at the Spring 2012 meeting of CoGS and those we will have at the upcoming meeting in November.

Same-sex couples on the increase, Anglican Church of Canada rejoices

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The Anglican Church of Canada has ruptured itself over the issue of blessing same-sex couples and, by doing so, has staked its future on attracting some of them to replace the conventional families who have fled its heretical clutches.

The ACoC is in luck: Statistics Canada has reported a 42% increase in same-sex couples over the last five years.

Unhappily for the ACoC, the percentage of same-sex couples is still only at 0.69% of the total number of couples. How many of them attend an Anglican church I wonder? Not many, and most of those who do are employed by the church as priests.

From here:

The face of the Canadian family is changing.

There are more common-law couples, single parents and same-sex couples heading households than ever before, according to the latest data released Sept. 19 from Statistics Canada’s 2011 Census of Population.

And while the traditional family structure—mother, father and children—still accounts for two-thirds of all Canadian families, the number of traditional families as a proportion of all families declined from 2006 to 2011.

The census counted a total of 9,389,700 families in 2011. Of these, 67 per cent consisted of married couples, down from 70.5 per cent a decade ago. In contrast, common-law couples increased by 13.9 per cent in 2011 and single-parent families rose by 8.0 per cent that same year.

The number of same-sex married couples “nearly tripled” between 2006 and 2011—the five year period following the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada. The census counted 64,575 same-sex couple families in 2011, an increase of 42.4 per cent from 2006. (Statistics Canada later stated that the number of same-sex married couples may have been overestimated by as many as 4,500.)

Anglican Church of Canada archives threatened by budget cuts

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This is a shame, since the archives are just about the only parts of the Anglican Church of Canada worth preserving.

From here:

Church and secular archivists across Canada fear that funding cuts to Library and Archives Canada (LAC) will severely restrict their ability to acquire, preserve and make accessible the precious original documents that chronicle our history.

This mandate, legislated under the Library and Archives Canada Act, is considered equivalent to that of the U.S. Library of Congress or the British Library. “This constitutes an attack on one of Canada’s most important cultural institutions,” said James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) in a press release. Staff at our national archives and library are the stewards of our collective memory.”

[….]

“The impact on the local archival work of the Anglican church will be devastating,” says Nancy Hurn, General Synod archivist.

 

Anglican Church of Canada demographics

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The Anglican Journal conducted a survey to find out who is reading the paper. The age of those who read the Journal and who are, therefore, interested in the Anglican Church of Canada’s version of Christianity is revealing. You can view all the results here. These are the age groupings:

 

Let’s make the not unreasonable assumption that the age demographics of those who read the Journal are an accurate reflection of the age of church attendees. If we do, it means that unless things change and the church manages to attract younger people, in around 20 years, there will be 42% fewer Anglicans, in 30 years 72% fewer and in 40 years 94% fewer. That’s assuming the 6% currently between ages 18 to 49 don’t leave in the meantime.

The average Sunday attendance in the Anglican Church of Canada is around 320,000. If the above figures are any indication, in 40 years the average attendance will be 19,200.

Dancing with the bishops

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Anglican Primate Fred Hiltz and Lutheran Bishop Susan Johnson attest that the Anglican Church of Canada and the  Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada are simpatico  by giving a demonstration of ballroom dancing during the Eucharist.

I don’t know about you, but I find this Anglican-Lutheran mating ritual very moving – although, if Fred must clap, I do wish he’d learn to clap off the beat..