Why The Meeting House irritates Anglicans

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John Bowen has written an article about The Meeting House, why it is so successful and why Anglicans find that so irritating.

Some, of course, would think that 8,000 people showing up for worship, even in a cinema, would naturally be a good thing. What could there possibly be to criticise? Well, for a start, from an Anglican point-of-view, it is not liturgical worship. There is a lot of singing (led by a local worship band), followed by a pastoral prayer and announcements, and then a 45-minute sermon, broadcast on the big screen from the church’s headquarters in Oakville. Then we go home. So there is no liturgical shape or content to the service. Neither is the service (usually) Eucharistic. I was there once when there was a Eucharist, but it was in the last five minutes, tacked on at the end almost as an afterthought, and again with virtually no liturgical framework.

But, if we are honest, there is one thing that irritates us more than all of these combined: it is that The Meeting House is successful. Successful in attracting people—a lot of people, and a lot of young people at that—successful in holding on to (not all but many) of them, and successful in opening and filling new churches. If there is one thing that rankles with us, it is that kind of success.

He goes on to enumerate the aspects of the Meeting House that Anglican parishes might consider emulating in order to grow: use leadership gifts wisely; Christian education; home groups; rented worship space; discourage spectator Christianity; humility.

As is usually the case in this kind of analysis, two important points are missing:

  1. The meeting House actually believes what it is peddling. There is no Anglican dithering about the meaning of the concepts of Resurrection, substitutionary atonement, the divinity and uniqueness of Christ, the sinfulness of man, the reality of salvation, heaven and hell. The Anglican Church of Canada has for the most part abandoned this Gospel.
  2. The reason the Meeting House wants to draw in people is because of point 1, not because it wants to get bigger. The Anglican Church of Canada wants to draw in people in order to get bigger so that it can continue its middle-class social club.

In its more earnest moments the ACoC does engage in its favourite pipe-dream of immanentising the eschaton and it even hires people to help.

Rachel Jordan has some advice for Christians who believe that someone else is going to build the kingdom of God here on Earth. “There isn’t a Plan B – you’re it,” she says. “You are the people God has chosen to be his agents right here, right now.”

It still has nothing to do with the Gospel.

Rowan Williams and the middle ground

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In his Presidential Address, Rowan Williams has said something to upset just about everyone. I think he deserves credit since his seems to be such an effortless gift; others of us have to work at it.

Liberals are upset because Rowan is still not “fully including” homosexuals in the life of the Anglican church, even though he did issue a rather grovelling apology – perhaps what was missing was an obsequious Obama Bow™.

Conservatives will be upset because, among other things, he seems to think that TEC and the ACoC have exercised genuine restraint, because he jumbles together outside intervention and litigation as if they were equivalent wrongs and because he still doesn’t get it: the ACoC and TEC have become sub-Christian institutions.

Such is the problem of trying to find middle ground when there really isn’t any.  Rowan Williams might be able to thrive in the effete, refined halls of academia but he is quite incapable of leading the Anglican communion to anywhere but ruin.

Africagate

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The global warming debacle continues with an admission of yet another climate hoax:

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed ‘Glaciergate’ by commentators.

I suppose one good thing about all this is that it should lay to rest the absurd canard that scientists are above corruption, pristinely objective, fastidiously apolitical and immune to the myriad frailties that assail mere mortals. Scientists are just as untrustworthy as everyone else.

The quantum phone

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I remember sometime in the early 1980s John Bothwell, then Bishop of Niagara, writing an article in the – by today’s measure – much thicker Niagara Anglican denouncing the frivolity of fibre optic research, since its only application appeared to be in decorative lamps. Bothwell was, of course, almost as ignorant of technology as he was of theology, so he was quite shocked when someone pointed out that fibre optics made his phone work.

The clergy – bishops in particular – seem to be natural Luddites and so, had Bothwell heard of quantum physics, he would have had no use for it either. Today his phone probably has chips in it, so now quantum mechanics is making his phone work; and will soon make it work better:Add an Image

Handheld devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm’s material that exploits a quantum physics trick.

The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied.

A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the “Quantum Tunnelling Composite”.

The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets.

In January, Japanese touch-screen maker Nissha also licensed the approach from Yorkshire-based Peratech, who make the composite material QTC.

However, as part of the licensing agreements, Peratech could not reveal the phone, gaming, and device makers that could soon be using the technology to bring pressure sensitivity to a raft of new devices.

Quantum mace

The composite works by using spiky conducting nanoparticles, similar to tiny medieval maces, dispersed evenly in a polymer.

None of these spiky balls actually touch, but the closer they get to each other, the more likely they are to undergo a quantum physics phenomenon known as tunnelling.

Tunnelling is one of several effects in quantum mechanics that defies explanation in terms of the “classical” physics that preceded it.

Simply put, quantum mechanics says that there is a tiny probability that a particle shot at a wall will pass through it in an effect known as tunnelling.

Similarly, the material that surrounds the spiky balls acts like a wall to electric current. But as the balls draw closer together, when squashed or deformed by a finger’s pressure, the probability of a charge tunnelling through increases.

The net result is that pressing harder on the material leads to a smooth increase in the current through it.

Victoria for Pope

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But first Canterbury:

Canada’s leading female Anglican cleric has courted controversy at a major church conference in Britain by predicting the eventual rise of a woman as archbishop of Canterbury.

“The signposts are pointing in one direction,” former Edmonton Bishop Victoria Matthews told Reuters yesterday during a global gathering of Anglican bishops at the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference. “I would be very surprised if it wasn’t accepted worldwide.”

Bishop Matthews, whose selection in February as the bishop of Christchurch, New Zealand, sparked an uproar among conservative Anglicans in that country, also shot back at Vatican officials who have complained the Church of England’s July 8 decision to begin appointing female bishops poses “a further obstacle for reconciliation” between Catholics and Anglicans.

“With the greatest respect, the Vatican has to understand the Anglican Communion is not synonymous with the Church of England,” Bishop Matthews said in the interview. “The Anglican Communion has had women in the episcopate for about 20 years. They really need to do their homework and realize that the communion is 38 provinces and not one with satellites. That is a pretty significant error.”

And here she is, prepared and ready.

James Cameron, Avatar Aeolist

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Add an ImageI took my mother to see Titanic when it came out. As soon as the first actor spoke, I knew it was a mistake: my mother at the time was in her late 70s, but her mind was – I was going to say the equal of a 20 year old’s – when idling, the equal of the combined mental capacity of fifteen average 20 year olds concentrating hard. She liked her films to contain interesting dialogue, a commodity that had been thoroughly expunged from Titanic.

So my expectations from James Cameron’s latest attempt to turn the graphics backdrop of Far Cry 2 into a film were low. I watched it this evening and was not disappointed; my mother, were she still with us, would not have approved.

Leaving aside the inevitable demonising of the military, large corporations and industry, the lionising of noble savages in ecstatic pantheistic harmony with their computer game vegetation – all of which are irritating enough in their own right – the dialogue was so mind-numbingly trite, it make Titanic look like Proust.

For those who are interested and want to save 3 hours, the story is: nasty men want a rare mineral that is under the noble savages’ village. Nasty men try to kill noble savages to get rare mineral; some enlightened scientists and a crippled soldier help the noble savages drive out the evil humans with bows and arrows and send them back to their own planet which is not green; in fact Gaia earth is dead. Finis.

And it was very long.

Other than that, I enjoyed it from the professional perspective of marvelling at how many hours it took to render so many pixels for so little edification.

Burqa Bandits

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It was only a matter of time:

Two burqa-wearing robbers have held up a French post office using a handgun concealed beneath an Islamic-style full veil, court officials said.

Officials said postal office staff let the pair through the security double doors of the banking branch near Paris, believing them to be veil-wearing Muslim women.

What is needed is an Islamic equivalent of Burn Your Bra: Burn Your Burqa. It could raise money to buy vitamin D for all burqa beleaguered ladies who never feel sun on their skin.

Who are the real Anglicans?

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When I became a Christian, the final decision was simple. I felt like the thief on the cross with nothing to offer but sin, no recourse to good works to fall back on and, thus, no hope of earned salvation. I knew I was doomed without the only salvation that was on offer – the one from Jesus. There were no trappings, no liturgical requirements, no formularies, rituals or recitations, just a “remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

In the current Anglican strife, what has become apparent is the desperation of each party to be included in the category “Anglican” while convincing everyone that the opposition should not. It is so pervasive that it raises the suspicion that being Anglican is more important than being Christian – perhaps because Anglicanism as it is practised in the West has become a buffer against the exigencies of real Christianity.

The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada are determined that the ACNA not be recognised by the Archbishop of Canterbury and they are busy trying to sabotage the private member’s motion asking the CofE to recognise the ACNA. Such recognition would help confirm the “Anglicanism” of the ACNA, a confirmation TEC and  the ACoC are determined to derail at all costs.

For my part, I think the meanderings of Rowan Williams have the aroma of an institution long dead and now in an advanced state of decay; the vitality in the institutional Anglican Church is centred in Africa where to be Anglican also means to be Christian.

A similar parochial obsession is in evidence in the Archbishop of York’s declaring that ex-Anglicans who join the Roman Catholic Church as part of the Pope’s Ordinariate Scheme will not be “proper Catholics” – a contention roundly repudiated by at least some Catholics – as if such a thing bore the weight of eternal significance.

To solve the “who are the real Anglicans” problem, it might be best for Christian Anglicans to leave Western Anglicanism to bury its dead and take a new name: Aflicans, perhaps.

So who are the real Anglicans? Who cares.