Canadian bishops from the Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada have written an open letter insisting that the government pay everyone a ‘basic income’ whether they work or not.

Where is the money going to come from? They don’t say: presumably from people who are working. Why work if you are paid not to work? They don’t say, although they are probably suffering from the woolly liberal delusion that people are innately good and will naturally want to work to support those who find laziness too tempting to resist – like me.

What is really behind this? I expect they are all afraid of losing their jobs and have an uneasy feeling that they would be unemployable in any other profession.

A Public Letter on Guaranteed Basic Income

By General Synod Communications on May 3, 2020

Dear Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister Morneau:

Subject: COVID-19 Pandemic – Guaranteed Basic Income

We write from across our country – from the tundra of the high Arctic, the out-ports of the Atlantic coast, from French and English speaking Canada, from urban to rural, the Prairies, the Rockies and coastal mountains and from the Pacific coast; we write as Indigenous people and as non-Indigenous. We write from across denominational traditions. As bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada we write, compelled by our shared faith convictions and moral obligation to care for the human condition of all.

Although we represent great diversity, we write to you because we are united, and morally bound in a singular message: Canada needs Guaranteed Basic Income for all. We need it today.

The Anglican Church of Canada receives 90% of its income from voluntary donations from dioceses. For the 10 years between 2007 and 2017, this income was quite stable. Since then it has been sinking rapidly:

This graph does not take into account the additional and inevitable loss of income due to the closure of all Canadian church buildings.

The solution, we are told, is not repentance and a change of direction, but more conversations:

In response to the financial presentation, Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, told CoGS, “The reality is that we need a conversation…with the Council of General Synod, with the House of Bishops, with dioceses.” Citing, among other things, the trends of decreasing giving and attendance in Anglican churches, Nicholls added the conversation would require “transparency and frankness.”

It’s tempting to speculate on whether the ACoC will survive the year of the virus. I suspect some dioceses won’t.

The Anglican Church of Canada is groping to find the reason for the catastrophic decline in attendance revealed by recently published statistics. Unsurprisingly, none of the clergy seem able to grasp the obvious: no one is interested in what the ACoC has to say because it has become transparently clear to all but the most gullible that it no longer believes in what it is peddling.

Rev. Alison Hari-Singh has added her voice to those looking for a culprit responsible for the ACoC’s near-death experience. Science, immigrants and scandal are easy targets even if they have, for some strange reason, concentrated their malign efforts mostly on Anglican and other mainline denominations.

What is the solution? Well, we have to “reimagine” God, his attributes and our faith. Of course, by doing so, we will end up with an imaginary god – which was what brought things to this sorry state in the first place.

From here:

We must reimagine the entire edifice of our faith, including what we mean by “God” and divine attributes of sovereignty, providence and love that we so often instinctively depend on. In short, we must embrace a radical theology of risk, unhindered by suspicion and fear of the unknown. We cannot be afraid of what Peter Berger called “the heretical imperative.” What will happen when we undertake together this fundamental reimagination? Our liturgies will become more creative. Our mission—our love for the world—will be intensified. Our imitation of Jesus will be palpable.

Recent attendance statistics from the Anglican Church of Canada predict that it will cease to exist by 2040.

Understandably, this has spread consternation amongst the clergy; no one likes to be unemployed.

The new Primate, Linda Nicholls, sees this as a “wake-up call” and asks, “what might need to be tried” to reverse the decline? I would be tempted to suggest “Christianity” if I thought it would fall on any but deaf ears.

“I don’t think they’re a surprise to anybody,” Nicholls said of the statistics in an interview with the Anglican Journal. “Anybody who’s been in the church in the pews, or as a priest, or as a deacon or a bishop has known that this decline has been happening. We see it every Sunday, we see it in lots of ways. “I think it is a wake-up call…. If people are not coming to the church and finding a place of hope and good news, then we have to ask, ‘How are we presenting that hope and good news to this current generation and time? And what might need to be tried?”

Nicholls muses that part of the problem is the “general zeitgeist”, an observation that might have some merit were it not for the fact that the ACoC has utterly capitulated to the zeitgeist: the two are marching in lockstep. In spite of the church’s eagerness to oblige, potential customers have little reason to turn to the church to have their chosen pronouns affirmed, their gender reassignment baptised or their drag attire sprinkled with holy water.

Laughably,  Michael Thompson general secretary of General Synod, put his finger on the problem without noticing he had done so. When the church busied itself with saving souls, ignoring social justice fads, parishes were full to overflowing. “Things are quite different now”, he tells us: now we hear about nothing but social justice and the pews are empty. This, he tells us is a “change for the better”.

Introducing Elliot’s presentation to CoGS, Thompson said he believed Canadian Anglicans should look at the numerical decline of their church’s membership in the context of other changes for the better.

The London, Ont., church in which he started worshipping in 1968, Thompson said, “while not filled to the point of discomfort, was full.” On the other hand, he added, “in all of the years that I attended that church…in all of the years I had attended church before then, and in all of the years that I attended church until I was in my 20s, I never once heard a sermon that made reference to God’s justice.”

He continued, “I never once heard anybody tell me about the residential schools. I never heard anything about the responsibility of the people of God to respect the dignity of every human being. It’s not that people didn’t care about those things, but those things were not tip-of-the-tongue discourse in the life of the church in which I was formed. Things are quite different now.”

In much the same vein, Nicholls has decided that the church’s main job is to fight racism. To give her credit, by 2040 she will have succeeded in completely expunging racism from the church:

The Anglican Church of Canada’s new primate says she hopes her communion can begin to fight racism within the church and society.

The Anglican Church of Canada is shrivelling faster than a slug in a bucket of salt.

As this article notes, churches are not only closing but merging. In Nova Scotia, for example, four churches have shrunk to one:

A far more common practice for congregations struggling with mounting financial obligations, aging buildings, or dipping attendance numbers is the church merger. In recent years, many Anglican churches around the country have joined congregations with others nearby, or even with local Lutheran churches. In the diocese of Qu’Appelle, a merger has been proposed that would see seven churches in the Regina area possibly amalgamated into a single congregation.

In August of this year, the parish of St. Martin’s in Chester Basin, N.S., merged its four congregations into a single church: Grace Anglican Church.

How to be positive about this? Call it the opposite of what it is! Church Planting is a scheme where a church multiplies and expands into areas where it hitherto had no presence. In one deft flourish of Doublethink, the Anglican Church of Canada has rebranded its radical contraction as “Church Planting”:

While the Anglican Church of Canada has very few home churches, Paulsen says that it is a growing category in other Christian denominations, along with church plants and new monastic-style intentional communities—or a hybrid of all three, like the communities of the Move In Movement. She even notes a case of a Baptist church in the state of Washington planting an Anglican church inside an Anglican building.

“[Church planters] are actually really interested in some things that Anglicans have to offer,” she says. “They don’t really need our buildings, but what they like is…our broad orthodoxy. They like that we’re creedal, they like that we are part of a worldwide communion. They like that we have a deep historical rootedness.”