Diocese of Niagara seminar: Ten Simple Things to Improve Your Parish Income

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The Diocese of Niagara is holding a seminar entitled: Ten Simple Things to Improve Your Parish Income. It includes the following, but notably absent is preach the Gospel:

Rejuvenate your Stewardship Team
Simmer your Stewardship all year long
Frame your Narrative Budget [what on earth does that mean?]

Build on Strengths
De-mystify DMM
Advocacy – Our Biggest Need

Try Something Different
Challenge the Money Myths
Run a “Thirteenth Month” Campaign

Get Insights
Healthy Parish Checklist
Parish Giving Analysis

Encourage Clergy
Effective stewardship announcements
45 Scriptural Resources about Stewardship

Also absent is the number one strategy: sue churches that used to be part of the diocese so you can sell the buildings they paid for.

The inclusive Anglican church

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Let’s include everyone!

The Episcopal Church must open its doors to become more inclusive and find ways to make itself relevant beyond Sunday mornings, its presiding bishop said Friday as she prepared to take part in the Diocese of Milwaukee’s annual convention.

Let’s include atheists, paedophiles, pagans, neo-pagans, Muslims, Universalists, Druids and polyamorists. Oh, hang on, we already do: we make them bishops.

The Anglican Church of Canada desperately seeking cash

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The ACoC is running out of money, so it is giving the Health and Wealth gospel a shot; being effete liberal elitists, their stewardship mavens call it a theology of abundance, though:

“This is stewardship, not fundraising” is something I have heard often during the past 15 years as a stewardship teacher. However, as a once-upon-a-time development director for a most-worthy-cause non-profit organization, I know that large gifts always have a spiritual component….

That being said, the Symposium on the Spirituality of Philanthropy presented by the Office of Mission Funding of the Episcopal Church in late September was a first, and frankly long overdue. The 64 participants, representing 31 dioceses and eight provinces of the Episcopal Church, as well as the Anglican Church of Canada, filled the Episcopal Church Center’s chapel to hear four presentations that combined the theology of abundance with highly practical approaches to making the “ask” for a major gift.

Diocese of Montreal gains new staff member: author of “Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints”

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From here (page 12):

A scholar who once served as dean of students at Concordia University is joined the staff of St. Matthias’ Church in Westmount, effective September 19. Don Boisvert is in his final year of study at the Montreal Diocesan Theological College and is completing his “in-ministry” requirement for graduation. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa and two books and several scholarly articles to his credit.

Born in the United States of French-Canadian parents, he studied for several years at a Roman Catholic seminary and is still on the faculty at Concordia. He specializes in the history of Christianity, religion and sexuality and religion in Canada. He was received into the Anglican Church of Canada last year and is married to Gaston Lamontagne, his partner for 34 years.

“Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints” is Boisvert’s attempt to see the traditional saints through a haze of homoeroticism:

he constructs an image of a perfectly shaped, highly eroticized male body ascribed to each of the saints. This imagined saintly body is repeatedly described as “beautiful,” “erotic,” “titillating,” “handsome,” “bare-chested,” “naked” or “semi-naked,” “muscular,” “glorious,” “ragged” and endowed with “perfection,” “virile masculinity,” “masculine strength,” etc. More often than not, the saints of old appear in a body conforming to the modern norm for gay beauty.

And we mustn’t leave out his homoerotic fantasies of Jesus:

Though Boisvert imagines Jesus to be a “handsome man,” “caring and attentive, sensitive yet principled” and working “bare-chested in the burning sun” (p. 180), he is attracted also to the “broken body” of Christ. The crucified Jesus (a “handsomely glorious body of Jesus [hanging] from the cross” (p. 171)) “elicits strong feelings of comfort and passive submission, the male docile and compliant body.” Yet, this submissiveness is immediately complemented by the symbol of the “lion” with its “brute aggressive force, the male as dominant energy and the definite top” (p. 170). Not surprisingly, the “fully male, genitally endowed” sculpture of Michelangelo’s Risen Christ, with its “muscular arms, thighs and buttocks” (p. 177), commands Boisvert’s admiration.

Just what the Anglican Church of Canada needs on staff: a homosexual, “married” to a man, who is so immersed in his twisted little world of gay sex that, when he writes a book about Jesus and the saints, he cannot see beyond the end of his genitals.

Pornographic Jesus art attacked with crowbar

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From here:

A Montana woman is alleged to have driven 1,500 kilometres from Montana to a museum in Loveland, Colo., so she could rip up a controversial piece of art featuring Jesus.

Kathleen Folden, a 56-year-old truck driver, is charged with criminal mischief in the case.

The collage by Enrique Chagoila has been denounced by church members as obscene as it includes a head of Jesus and a woman’s body engaged in a sex act.

In my opinion, it’s rather sad taking away people’s freedom to see the art,” Corey said.

Chagoya, a Stanford University professor who created the work, titled The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals, denied the work suggests Jesus having sex.

His 12-panel lithograph is a collage that includes comic book characters, Mexican pornography, Mayan symbols and a skeleton with a pope’s hat.

“What I’m trying to express is the corruption of the spiritual by the church,” Chagoya said.

He said the decision not to display the work again amounts to suppression of art.

In his eagerness to “express the corruption of the spiritual by the church”, what Chagoya has missed is the fact that Folden drove all the way from Montana to express the spiritualisation of corruption by artists, an expression that is, itself, art and, by Chagoya’s own lights, not only permissible, but virtuous.

It’s disappointing to see Chagoya trying to suppress the work of a fellow artist.

Toronto Archbishop Colin Johnson has the bloat

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That is because he has been living on a food bank diet for a few days. His reason for doing this is to convince the Canadian government, the second most inefficient institution in the Milky Way – first place is still held by the Anglican Church of Canada – to do something about the hungry.

The laughable conceit that politicians will listen to the protestations of an Anglican bishop when no-one else in the country does, is not untypical of the aggrandising self-importance which, even without fatty food, contributes mightily to ecclesiastical bloat.

Still, he probably has done some good: a thoroughly bloated archbishop will have less energy to devote to his usual busy schedule of peddling socialist twaddle.

From here:

TORONTO – Archbishop Colin Johnson can’t come up with a response when asked if he had a favourite meal this week.

For three days, the chief pastor of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto joined hundreds of Canadians who took on the challenge of eating only the provisions equivalent to those handed out by a food bank….

Johnson said he wasn’t hungry over the three days but felt stuffed at some times and bloated because the food was bulky.

UK: Making fun of people having sex in public is now a hate crime

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From here:

Police have been ordered to stop anyone taking in part in illegal outdoor sex being abused or verbally taunted as it can cause them to suffer post traumatic stress.

An extraordinary new Hate Crime Guidance Manual has been handed to officers telling them to arrest anyone suspected of committing a hate crime against those engaged in ‘dogging’.

I suppose that means we can only make fun of bishops as long as they are not having sex in public; that’s going to put a cramp in my style.

Late term abortion in Canada

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From here (my emphasis):

The lack of detailed reporting by hospitals and clinics means that the Statistics Canada numbers for second and third trimester abortions represent a fraction of the total. In the report to Canadian Physicians for Life, Statistics Canada has information on gestational age for 36,874 abortions, only about one third of the total. If that one-third paints an accurate reflection of all the abortions performed, we have a fairly high number of abortions that occur after the first trimester, information that most people in Canada have never heard.

Here’s what the report shows: There were 31,994 first trimester abortions, or 87% of the 36,874 that included gestational age in their report. There were 4,479 abortions performed between 13 and 20 weeks gestation. The Canadian Medical Association considers 20 weeks to be the point of viability, that is, the point at which babies can survive outside the womb. After the 20 week period, there were 401 abortions, 366 between 21 and 24 weeks, 18 between 25 and 28 weeks, 12 between 29 and 32 weeks and 5 abortions reported at 33+ weeks.

Keep in mind, if this pattern applies to the over 60,000 abortions for which there is no gestational information, it means there were about 1,200 post-viability abortions in Canada in 2004, with more than 100 in the third trimester and 15 in the final six weeks of pregnancy.

It is true that every abortion, no matter at what stage it occurs, destroys a tiny human being. Each one also coarsens our society’s view of human life and increases our tolerance for the brutality of abortion. Two decades ago, about 98% of abortions occurred in the first trimester, when women and men could be convinced the embryo was a “clump of cells.” Now a growing number of women are choosing abortion when they can feel their baby move and they know with certainty that this is a tiny human being. Just as disturbing, there are doctors willing to take these lives.

Where is the outcry against this from protestant mainline churches?