That is not the euphemism used in Bishop Susan Bell’s charge to synod, of course; nevertheless, that’s what it is. Or it could be Church Closures, Sales and Demolitions.
From here (my emphasis):
I think I am also beginning to see a general loosening of our love affair with bricks and mortar: The property we own as a Diocese is a strategic asset, it’s true. But perhaps not in the ways we used to think about it. The fact is, churches have life cycles. They were and are planted according to key demographics, they have a beginning to their life, a middle and an end. The truth is, very few churches live for a century and fewer still live to see two – unless it is this venerable and beautiful cathedral that we are meeting in today. Parishes and church buildings are meant to spring up where the mission fields are. And when it is very clear that they have come to the end of their life cycle it is incumbent on us – the stewards of those resources – to redeploy those assets as needed for a new mission field – as intended by their founders: Christians who gave money to the church to be the church.
This is an important thing for us to understand. It is not good Christian practice for us to hold buildings hostage to our desires to hold on to worldly things. It is good Christian practice to make disciples and to preach the Gospel to the whole of creation. So, we are called to go where the mission field is. We will become a planting church once again. And what does that look like in this time? It looks like understanding the needs of new housing surveys; of underserviced inner-city neighbourhoods; strategic small-town locations. These are some of the contexts that we are learning about and planning to engage.
And to better ascertain how best to deploy our precious building resources I have asked Mr. Terry Charters to lead a new committee that will work with our Secretary of Synod and Treasurer on our property portfolio to best and most strategically maintain, sell, re-purpose, rent or restore property based on the best analysis we have available of demographics. This will also include a focus on our continuing plans for the revitalization of Cathedral Place – on which he’ll report later in the course of Synod. This group will also have the aim of searching for reliable community partnerships and for income generation plans to support sustainability but also to underwrite future mission and ministry in this diocese. This is the job of tilling the soil and planting seeds for the next season of our beloved church.
And to go with this new committee, I’ve also conferred on Terry the title of Honorary Lay Canon of Christ’s Church Cathedral. We are greatly indebted to him for his many hours of specialized and valuable ministry among us and look forward to all that he has to share with us in the coming years. We’ll have a service of installation for him and Canon Jody early in the New Year.
“I think I am also beginning to see a general loosening of our love affair with bricks and mortar” Going to allow “continuing anglican” congregations to keep their properties, then?
What rogues these thieves are! Forcing out the believers, then running down the ruins to provide themselves a nice lifestyle.
In the predator-prey aspect of The World of Equity Investment this is known as asset stripping.
If the object of the exercise wasn’t always to empty out the young families, that certainly has been the effect. We see the same in New West. Ordinary people see no reason to get up on Sundays, work and give money, when there is no support for their sustaining a marriage, bringing up children and testifying to JC in everyday life.
The technique was first honed in the UCC, and its operation witnessed by me at first hand in the West End of Vancouver where land is the most valuable of any in this country. I quote from a late 1980s letter to my mother (I was briefly an ‘adherent’, invited in to build them a literature programme):–
“The conservative minister who succeeded my favourite Australian at ‘our’ United church is in bad trouble. One Sunday recently, quietly preaching his way through the Ecumenical Lectionary, and minding his own business to the extent that it never crossed his mind that his new organist/choirmaster and new choir members were militant ‘gays’, he was startled when they all stalked out as he spoke against loose living. Guess who was carpeted in Presbytery for failure to carry out “policy”, got a heart-attack and a breakdown, and had to take extended sick leave? This happened just as the Council (of Christian Churches of which I was President), writing polite enquiries under our mutual fraternal accountability clause, was being assured in writing that nothing had changed in the UCC since the 1988 General Council of that church.
His predecessor has moved to Athabasca. He got tired after years of being urged by the ‘hotbed’ presbytery to go to the VST for “further education”. His people there were profoundly disturbed by recent developments. To a recent statement that it was time that the UCC gave up the naïve mistake of divinising Jesus, though they did not know Arius from Adam, they responded with a resounding “No!” He and his people are now going Reformed.”
The presbytery completed the spiritual demolition of this congregation by putting in a lesbian minister. This faithful, prayerful, supernaturalist fellowship of bourgeois Canadians ceased to worship in the church they had paid to build, and the site was sold to a developer. The buildings were then demolished in favour of a high-rise.
Sometime in the late ’80s, at a moderately conservative Anglican church I attended at the time, a rather more conservative lay member (who was quite a polymath, he later did a missionary stint in China at some risk to himself) delivered a homily on traditional Christian sexual morality and how it was being undermined, and in some cases just blown to bits, by modernist trends. He included in his list of warnings (at the time) recent changes in the United Church of Canada, and I recall vividly a prophetic alarm:
” Where the United Church goes, the Anglican will likely follow. ”
Back then I thought he was being a bit dramatic and hyperbolic, in a way that did not match what I knew of his character and his educational and career achievements. Now, having myself been forced to resign by conscience a few years ago from a Warden position of another Anglican congregation due to its silence on, and hence tacit compliance with, the ACoC General Synod revision of the Marriage Canon (the priest left some months later, stating he was leaving the ACoC), I reallise he was being prescient in a way that did match his character, education, and achievements.
I’m sure that examples of this sort of experience of ‘inclusivity’ could be multiplied.
We do have African and Asian bishops who may yet save us. But individual churches sitting on valuable land in this country may still go under in the interim. This evil may take as long to be fought out as Arianism. And cost as much.
Yep, Tiko Kerr even did a painting of that lovely church in the West End. Couldn’t save it though. Now the land is gone and it can’t be replaced. Here is the article about Kerr’s painting. It was originally a Presbyterian Church that became part of the UCC.
https://westendneighbours.wordpress.com/archives/west-end-collection/tiko-kerr-st-johns-church/
I guess they just couldn’t find enough people to fill those pews, in the midst of one of the most heavily populated neighbourhoods in the country. Meanwhile, in the general area, Coastal, Westside, and others seem to be doing just fine.