Diocese of Niagara: 2013 financial update

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From here:

Regarding financial resources, Budget Chair Andrew Clinkard reported that “the diocesan financial position continues to get healthier.” He pointed out the diocese has not used their “interest bearing credit line” since March of this year, the “long term debt from parishes has been reduced by $179,000.00 and “we are anticipating an operating surplus for 2013.”

What Clinkard omitted from this rosy assessment was mentioning the influx of cash the diocese received from selling St. Hilda’s church building and rectory.

The rectory sold for $650,0000 and the church building for $2,250,000 (note: I have changed this to an exact number), making the debt reduction of $179,000.00 appear rather less impressive.

Church without God

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A Church of England parish is hosting The Sunday Assembly, whose vision is: “a godless congregation in every town, city and village that wants one.”

From here:

_70838730_sunday_sanderson_croppedSt John the Evangelist in Leeds can rarely have hosted such an ungodly meeting.

The Sunday Assembly – dedicated to providing “the best of church but without God” – was on the latest stop of its UK tour.

Spilling out through the open door of the 400-year-old church came voices united in a rendering of Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.

Inside, a couple of hundred people – average age about 35 – clapped rhythmically, swaying in the venerable pews.

[….]

The event is a brazen copy of a church service.

As well as emotional and uplifting songs, there was a talk from a woman who had turned her life around by volunteering, another from a scientist about the human propensity to misperceive reality and a minute’s silent reflection.

During a rendering of Dire Straits’ Walk Of Life a collection was taken.

“We both wanted to do something like church but without God and we just nicked the order of service,” admits Mr Jones.

A Church of England vicar was in attendance to pick up tips for developing a nuanced view to the more crass beliefs of Christianity, stumbling blocks such as the Virgin Birth and Resurrection:

Canon Adrian Alker’s job is to attract people like Andy to the Church of England by fostering imaginative new ways for it to practise and explain Anglican Christianity.

He accepted that many in the Church’s target audience have become disenchanted with what they perceive to be compulsory but dubious doctrines – such as a belief in the birth of Jesus to a virgin and that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead.

Canon Alker said the answer was not for the Church to place less emphasis on God, but actually to make more effort to explain a more nuanced idea of what God was.

“I think doctrine does develop,” he said. “It wasn’t born in Palestine 2,000 years ago. I think there should be open discussion, and [there] often is, about these core elements of the Christian faith.”

Canon Adrian Alker doesn’t seem to realise that we have already tried that in Canada. The Sunday Assembly bears an eerie resemblance to – not just a tofu hamburger – the Anglican Church of Canada. It:

  • Has no doctrine.
  • Is radically inclusive. Everyone is welcome, regardless of their beliefs – this is a place of love that is open and accepting.
  • We won’t tell you how to live, but will try to help you do it as well as you can.
  • Most of all, have fun, be nice and join in.

I’ve got you under my skin

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I recently attended two funerals which, while making passing references to Christianity, were more cultish new-age productions than anything else. The first was conducted in a Diocese of Niagara church. The priest, whose studious efforts to avoid mentioning God were subverted only by his being compelled to do so by the funeral liturgy, buoyed by years of theological training, concentrated his potent expository talent on how the deceased would live on in each of our hearts.

The second was conducted by a lady cleric of indeterminate denomination; she did mention God and Jesus but only as an afterthought when not waxing eloquent on the cosmic life force in which, apparently, we are all adrift as we journey together, wafting through the spiritual ether like itinerant milkweed seeds never able to settle long enough to germinate.

Neither mentioned the resurrection of Jesus or our hope of resurrection. Without the resurrection we are still in our sins, there is no reconciliation with God, no hope and no coherent meaning to our lives.

So how does the contemporary pagan gain comfort after losing a loved one? By having the ashes of the dearly departed tattooed into his skin; how else?

Trish Rodgers filled a small bottle cap with her dead aunt’s ashes and emptied it into a vial of black ink. In her apartment, the tattoo artist used the combination of human remains and tattoo pigment to draw the outline of a rose into her cousin’s shoulder.

At that point, this was a practice that only tattoo artists used amongst themselves, Ms. Rodgers says. But since that evening in 2008, it has garnered attention of sociologists across the world and Canadian tattoo parlours are seeing requests for the procedure grow.

Bishop Charlie Masters talks about the Diocese of Niagara

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At GAFCON 2, Bishop Charlie Masters discussed how ANiC priests were treated by their former church.

During the legal proceedings between the Diocese of Niagara and ANiC, the diocesan lawyer asked ANiC’s lawyer: “What has your client done which has caused my client, the Diocese of Niagara, to hate them [the ANiC priests] so much”. The answer is pretty simple: power doesn’t like to be defied.

 

You can see the entire video here.

Celebrating the Day of the Dead in the Diocese of New Westminster

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Rather than celebrate All Souls’ Day, St. John the Divine, perhaps in recognition of the state of its diocese, is celebrating the Day of the Dead by singing and dancing to – what else – Grateful Dead songs:

What is the Day of the Dead, All Souls Day, “El dia de los Gospel and Grateful Dead Nov 2muertos” November 2? It is a holiday that celebrates friends and family members who have died. It is celebrated in Spain, Brazil and Mexico and in cultures around the world with festivals and parades, sugar skulls and marigolds and favourite foods and beverages of the departed and visiting graves with these as gifts. It is the perfect occasion for St John’s to welcome the wider community to an evening of reflections by Pitman Potter, singing Grateful Dead songs with FOMO and friends, dancing together in spirit, and raising money for The Helping Hands Society.

The above description seeks to amalgamate the Day of the Dead and All Souls’ Day – yet another Anglican attempt at via media, I suppose. They are, however, quite different: All Souls Day is a commemoration of the faithful departed (surely there must be some in the diocese) while the Day of the Dead celebrations:

can be traced back to a precolumbian past. Catrinas_2Rituals celebrating the deaths of ancestors had been observed by these civilizations perhaps for as long as 2,500–3,000 years. In the pre-Hispanic era skulls were commonly kept as trophies and displayed during the rituals to symbolize death and rebirth.

The festival that became the modern Day of the Dead fell in the ninth month of the Aztec calendar, about the beginning of August, and was celebrated for an entire month. The festivities were dedicated to the goddess known as the “Lady of the Dead”, corresponding to the modern Catrina.

Archbishop of Canterbury wants industry to show generosity

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From here:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has criticised energy companies for imposing huge price rises that will hammer struggling families.

Justin Welby said power giants had a ‘massive’ moral duty beyond squeezing customers for maximum profit, and challenged the firms to justify their huge increases in bills.

The Archbishop, himself a former oil executive, said he understood the anger over apparently ‘inexplicable’ rises and called on the companies ‘to behave with generosity and not merely to maximise opportunity’.

Whatever next? Justin Welby exhorting the Anglican Church of Canada ‘to behave with generosity’ and stop suing congregations and individuals in order to acquire their assets? Probably not.

Justin Welby at GAFCON

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Justin Welby refuses to take sides. He is continuing in the vein of Rowan Williams by attempting to maintain the fiction that the worldwide Anglican Communion has not already split, that Western Anglicanism’s god of self-gratification – preferably obtained through homoeroticism – can somehow be reconciled with the Cross. It can’t.

Perhaps what is worst of all is that Welby views the division in worldwide Anglicanism as something bad which should be resisted, rather than what it actually is: God separating the faithful from the unfaithful.

Read it all here (my emphasis):

“There is a need for new structures in the Anglican Communion, “the archbishop said, adding the issues that divide us are “simple and complicated.”

To address them “we need a new way of being in communion, not the colonial structures” of the past, he said. But it was unclear as to what the solution was as each province offered its own solution to the problem, yet “we must find a way to live together, so the world will see” Jesus is Lord.

The Anglican world must be a sign to the world of the power of Christ and must engage in a deliberate program of “witness, worship, evangelism, and a passion for the Holy Spirit.”

“The more seriously we take the Bible” the more effectively we will be able to deal with our divisions, he said.

Thanks for the prayers

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Thanks to all who prayed for my attendance at the Examinations for Discovery yesterday. I had been sternly instructed not to “engage” with my questioner – that’s lawyer-speak for argue.

My lawyer tells me I managed to confine myself to just a couple of “engagements”; if that is not a testimony to the power of prayer, I don’t know what is.