Category Archives: Anglican Church of Canada

The Diocese of BC in a death spiral

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The Diocese of BC published some interesting numbers recently:

Out of a total of 55 parishes:
25 are in decline
15 are in growth
3 joined ANiC
2 are flat
9 are unknown
1 was recently closed

40 parishes ran a deficit and 6 a surplus (the rest are ANiC, closed or unknown)

In 2008, there were:Add an Image
Baptisms: 123 or  2.6 per church
Marriages: 78 or 1.6 per church
Funerals: 342 or 7.2 per church
Children and Youth: 652 or 13.8 per church

Total Average Sunday Attendance in 2008 was 3,856. 82 or per church (47 parishes)
Total Average Sunday Attendance in 2007 was 4,955. 95 or per church (52 parishes)
Total Average Sunday Attendance in 2001 was 6544. 107 or per church (61 parishes)

If this were a business rather than an old-boys club, the CEO would have been fired – admittedly with an obscene bonus – his henchmen replaced and the corridors of power swept clean. As it is James Cowan is still firmly at the helm steaming full speed ahead into the waters of further inclusion and diversity. After all, if he opens the doors wide enough, people will come, surely; or escape – one of the two, anyway.

The Anglican Church of Canada has a Director of Philanthropy

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The word “philanthropy” is derived from Greek, philanthropos, meaning “to love people”.

The word was favoured in the Hellenistic period by pagan moralists and is normally used now to describe the humanitarian act of giving a significant sum of money to a worthy cause by a person who owns an unusually large quantity of it. Thus, Bill Gates qualifies as a philanthropist since he donates some of his personal fortune to good works, whereas Bono does not since he devotes much of his spare time preaching at others in the hope of making philanthropists of them.

In contrast, 2 Cor 9:7, God loves a cheerful giver uses dotēs for giver; the emphasis is as much on the giver as the recipient. Everyone should give, no matter how small the gift. The theme of giving is a ubiquitous one in the Bible: as God has given to us, so we should give back to God and to others. The lesson of the widow’s mite (Mark 12: 41-44) is that the smallest gift given sacrificially is of more significance than largesse born of abundance.

Philanthropy is an entirely different kettle of fish: it originated in the pagan world and has been adopted by modern humanism; what matters is how much is given – the bigger the better. It is not a particularly Christian concept; this is probably seen as an advantage by the Anglican Church of Canada who, no doubt, would find a biblically inspired title such as Director of Tithing cringingly embarrassing. Director of Philanthropy, however, is rather cool in a Bono sort of way:

Holland Lee Hendrix, who has served as chief advancement officer at Hampshire College in Massachusetts and as president of the New York-based Union Theological Seminary, has been named executive director of philanthropy, a new position created by General Synod.

Archdeacon Michael Pollesel, general secretary of the national office in Toronto, said that Mr. Hendrix “brings to the position all the needed gifts and skills to help the Anglican Church of Canada achieve a level of financial stability that will enable it to carry out the vital mission and ministry to which we are called in this new era.”

Fred Hiltz does the Middle East

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And I am sure that no-one is surprised to discover that, according to him, it is infested with Israeli occupiers:

Q: Can you describe what it was like to visit Gaza?

A: It was a bit unnerving going through a checkpoint to show your passport and to answer questions as to why you’re there, how long you’re going to be there and where you’re going while you’re there and what time you’re leaving… What’s unnerving about that is that there’s a kind of tenseness in the checkpoint. We’re not accustomed, for instance, to seeing soldiers standing all over the place with machine guns and their hands on the gun at all times…We went in by car and not a lot of vehicles go through Gaza like that. A lot stand in long lines and wait to be processed before they’re given permission to enter and then they walk through the security or checkpoint.

Take a trip to Paris sometime, Fred; there you will see pimply teenagers guarding the Eiffel tower with machine guns:

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That is because they want to prevent people from blowing it up; get it, Fred?

Anglicanism: getting along is more important than truth

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The Anglican Church of Canada is a sorry mess. This article in the Journal exemplifies the muddled floundering of the adherents of Rowan’s middle way. Cultural dogma sets simpering conviviality on an entirely higher plane than truth and Anglicans, being suckers for cultural conformity, will do just about anything to get along with each other. When antagonists become friends, nothing has been accomplished other than – friendship; if the friendship is regarded as progress, it has displaced truth and is little better than stomach heaving niceness.

Agree to disagree and move on, a twenty-something youth representative from the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) board of directors suggested recently. Continue the discussion but don’t let it get in the way of moving forward, he advised.

That’s the same conclusion Canon Harold Munn reached after a year of lunch conversations with a colleague on the other side of the same-sex blessings fence. Try as he might, Mr. Munn simply could not budge his lunch-mate’s position. One incredible thing did happen however: the two men came to understand each other’s point of view and out of mutual respect, a friendship grew.

It’s not consensus, granted, but it’s progress. Out of the rut. And it may provide us with a model of how we can proceed. Because outside the doors of the Anglican Church of Canada and indeed, across the Anglican Communion, the world is changing. And while we’ve been driving back and forth on the same old issues, the ranks of Anglicans in the pews have plummeted to an all-time low.

Forgiving other people’s enemies is easy

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As Stephen Hough notes in the Telegraph:

The whole world is buzzing again about Lockerbie, and in particular about the early release from prison of convicted terrorist, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

I watched the BBC programme Newsnight on Thursday last week and heard the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill’s statement and subsequent interview with Gavin Esler.  Something struck me instantly which I’ve not yet read in any of the other reports flooding the media at this difficult time: the profound Christian overtones of MacAskill’s words – “compassion … compunction … mercy”.  I think what he did was a mistake, but perhaps for different reasons than some other commentators.  The problem here is that, theologically speaking, we can only forgive someone who offends (sins against) us.  “Forgive your enemies” … not your neighbour’s enemies: “If someone asks for your coat give them your tunic as well” … but not Mr Jones’s tunic.

The same tendency is seen – ironically enough – in churches, many of whom are preoccupied with giving grovelling apologies on behalf of their forebears. Anglican Church of Canada Primate, Fred Hiltz loves to apologise for sins he did not commit  hoping, one assumes, that it will divert attention from those he did. The compassion he shows for Indigenous Canadians is apparently boundless. In contrast, the rapacious greed he exhibits in the various lawsuits in which the ACoC is engaged in its attempt to grab property, is also boundless.

The United Church of Canada: united in leftist bias

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I’m not picking particularly on the United Church; the following applies equally to other mainline denominations:

On June 16, North Korean Christian Ri Hyon-ok was publicly executed for the crime of distributing Bibles. As her parents, husband and children were forced to look on, the 33-year-old mother was shot in front of a crowd in the northwestern city of Ryongchon. Her grieving and distraught family were then packed off to a prison camp.

Curiously, the United Church of Canada (UCC) — a nominally Christian organization — failed even to mention the Pyongyang regime’s systematic persecution of its co-religionists, including the murder of Ms. Ri, during its national conference last week. Instead, the UCC devoted hours to discussing of alleged crimes by the Jewish state of Israel against Palestinians.

Last month, a Muslim mob in the northeastern Pakistan town of Gorja heard rumours that a Koran had been defaced during a Christian wedding ceremony. Officials investigating that subsequent riots could find no evidence of such a blasphemy, but that did not stop a mob of thousands of Muslims from burning more than 50 homes and a church in the Christian section of Gorja. At least 14 Christians were killed in the rampage, including one woman and three children who were burned alive in their homes.

Did the UCC pass a resolution (or even just introduce one) condemning such medieval attitudes and behaviours? After all, the Gorja riot amounted to an angry crowd branding a woman a witch and burning her at the stake in pre-Renaissance Europe — 14 times over. If Christians or Jews were alleged to have carried out such barbarism, the social justice councils of the United Church would undoubtedly have condemned them. Why then so silent when the victims are fellow Christians and their murderers Muslims?

The short answer, of course, is that the UCC is more concerned with fashionably left-wing causes such as multiculturalism than it is about ending persecution per se. It is far more concerned for advancing political correctness than spreading or even defending its own faith.

Lefty intellectual fashion is always one-sided to the point of being blind.

None of this is surprising, of course; the United Church having long ago abandoned the Gospel, lost interest in the kingdom of God in favour of the kingdom of this world and its god.

To bring this back to Anglicanism, it would be shocking if Anglican Primate, Fred Hiltz could spare a moment from criticising Israel, to condemn Christian persecution in Cuba; but he does enjoy vacationing there, so it is unlikely:

Last December, Gilianys Rodriguez, wife of a popular evangelical pastor in Cuba, was beaten in the street. Her baby miscarried as a result. The attack was believed to have been carried out with the sanction of Cuban authorities because Ms. Rodriguez’s husband had helped form a new interdenominational network of preachers and congregations dissatisfied with having to operate through the government-approved Cuban Council of Churches.

The Anglican Church of Canada and gaseous emissions

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If there’s one thing that gets Anglicans excited it’s global warming: apparently there isn’t much time left:

Climate change, caused by increasing greenhouse gases, has become the defining environmental, economic and social issue of the 21st century. It has now been established that the safe threshold of carbon dioxide concentration (350 parts per million, ppm) has been exceeded, with the current value of 390 ppm and rising. Unless halted through dramatic action,  ‘runaway’ climate change will threaten the well-being and possibly the survival of our planet.

Global warming may be the only sin left in Anglican dogma, but not all scientists agree that it is man-made:

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia’s best-known and most notorious academic.

Plimer, you see, is an unremitting critic of “anthropogenic global warming” — man-made climate change to you and me — and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

Some scientists, on the other hand, are not swayed by Plimer and put much of the blame for global warming on cow flatulence:

Livestock-rearing generates more greenhouse gases than transportation according to a new report from the United Nations (U.N.), which adds that improved production methods could go a long way towards cutting emissions of gases responsible for global warming.

This marginalising of the bovine community must be countered by humanity acknowledging its own culpability in the over-production of methane; I am looking forward to our bishops taking the lead in repenting of their unrelenting turgidity.

Which brings me to what I truly believe would be an appropriate theme song for the Anglican Church of Canada’s General Synod in 2010; it could be led by the 3 cantors:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gonYvy53-6g]

The problem in the ACoC is that male bishops don’t know what it’s like to be a woman – yet

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The ACoC is run by a bunch of mealy-mouthed spoilsports, so it doesn’t let me post to its Vision 2019 discussion; this comment from a female Anglican priest contains too much promise to overlook, though:

My church is lost in childish arguments and tantrums, in upholstering the pews, in excluding those who are different, in protecting the status quo.  The male bishops of the church have no clue what it is like to be a woman, either lay or ordained, in the church today. They are afraid of change, of losing their power and of letting the Gospel of love lose in the world.  I weep for the church which is so far from where Jesus calls us to be.

in excluding those who are different. So true.

The male bishops of the church have no clue what it is like to be a woman. My dear lady priest, give it time; once we are over the homosexual bishop hurdle, I’m sure a few of the more enterprising pointy hats will start having sex change operations, then they will know.

They are afraid of change, of losing their power and of letting the Gospel of love lose in the world. The ACoC has given up on the real Gospel, preferring to concentrate on sexual perversion and leftist politics instead. The ACoC – far from being afraid – has caused their “gospel of love” to lose: to the world – which, oddly enough, has a clearer view of reality than the average bishop – this false “gospel” is spotted immediately for an imposter – an abject loser.

We will simplify our church buildings.  Get rid of the buildings that drag us down and use up our resources.  We don’t need them.

I agree, you don’t need them: please forward your opinion to Michaels Bird and Ingham.