Tag Archives: Anglican Church of Canada

Fred Hiltz in a Four-Way

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With three clerical ladies. I don’t know who in Anglican PR land came up with this pithy epithet but, whoever you are, please stop. You are making my job much harder.

The heads of North American Anglican and Lutheran churches are combining their efforts when issuing things like pastoral letters in cases of continental calamities.

The issuing of natural disaster pastoral letters is of such import that their combining will undoubtedly send transcendent ripples of well-being wafting through the entire eco-system. Future generations will declare that this was moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. Really.

From here:

Hiltz-LadiesThe heads of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC), the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) have agreed to co-ordinate their responses to “events that transcend” their borders, such as natural disasters.

They could, for instance, issue a joint pastoral letter in response to a natural calamity

[….]

Leaders of the four churches reached this agreement when they met for a day and a half of informal talks last December in Winnipeg. Since 2010, the heads of these four churches have met for informal talks, “becoming colloquially known as the Four-Way“, said Myers.

Anglican Church of Canada marriage canon commission formed

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Fred Hiltz has assembled the commission that will seek “broad consultation” for introducing a synod motion to change the marriage canon to include same-sex marriage. They will pay particular attention to:

a) the Solemn Declaration in relation to this matter;

b) the immunity under the civil law and the Human Rights Codes of the various Provinces and Territories within Canada of those bishops, dioceses and priests who refuse to participate in or authorize the marriage of same-sex couples on the basis of conscience; and

c) a biblical and theological rationale for this change in teaching on the nature of Christian marriage.

Notice in particular point c): it does not ask whether there is a “biblical and theological rationale for this change in teaching”, that is taken for granted. The commission is expect to come up with a rationale whether it is there or not. The members of the commission are:

Canon Robert Falby (Chair)
Dr. Patricia Bays
The Very Rev. Kevin Dixon
The Rev. Dr. Paul Friesen
The Rev. Canon Paul Jennings
Dr. Stephen Martin
The Rt. Rev. Linda Nicholls
The Most Rev. John Privett

I don’t see any conservatives in evidence. It seems fairly clear that after a couple of years of nugatory “broad consultation” by the regular morosophs, there will be a motion before Synod 2016 to change the marriage canon.

Archbishop Fred Hiltz has a new year’s message

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And it’s all about unity. The emphasis is on unity between Anglicans and Lutherans, a swarming of likeminded lemmings, pooling their suicidal impulses in the hope that the first over the cliff may provide a soft landing for those who follow.

What Hiltz fails to acknowledge in his message is that for all the talk of unity, the Anglican Church of Canada under his leadership has been, along with TEC, the most effective instigator of disunity since the reformation. Millions of Anglicans have broken communion with the ACoC over its determination to remake marriage in the image of the unrestrained impulses of its homosexual clergy.

Conversations, are not going to solve this; only repentance will, but that appears to be an entirely alien concept in Western Anglicanism.

From here:

Hiltz also recounts how blessed the churches were to have guests from the Anglican Communion, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Council of Churches, and their two American sister churches at Joint Assembly.

“They reminded us of the challenge that our relationship holds,” says Hiltz, “and the hope and potential for similar conversations in other churches around the world… in the interest of Christian unity.”

Anglican Church of Canada plans to attract more people by lowering the entry requirements

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From here:

What should church hospitality look like? Is “hospitality” enough?

The church has wrestled with these questions for some time, and recently in response to “open table”—the practice of welcoming unbaptised people to participate in the Eucharist.

At the spring 2012 meeting of the House of Bishops, the bishops opted for a broader conversation, moving from discussing open table exclusively to a conversation on hospitality and how it connects to discipleship.

The bishops asked the Primate, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, to set up a task force to examine the issue. The Primate defined the task with two questions: Are there any limits to the church’s hospitality to the unbaptised? How can the church’s hospitality to the unbaptised be part of making disciples?

The fallacy in this is that it presupposes eager hordes whose longing to participate in the Eucharist is thwarted only by the fact that they have not managed to get around to being baptised. All we have to do is tell them they needn’t bother with baptism and churches will be filled to overflowing. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that if a person doesn’t want to be baptised, he is unlikely to want to be part of the  Eucharist.

The church has been trying for some time to attract people by telling them it doesn’t matter what they believe or how they behave – a strategy which has reinforced the conviction that the church can’t have much to offer if it is so easy to be a part of.

Offering the Eucharist to the unbaptised in the hope that they will accept the invitation is the lunacy of repeating the same thing while expecting a different result.

The Anglican Church of Canada does a Hunger Games Eucharist

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The Hunger Games, from which the book gets its title, is a fictitious annual event in which one boy and one girl aged 12–18 are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle to the death. The book was inspired by gladiatorial games and reality TV.

While some think there is Christian symbolism in the book, I think the connection is somewhat tenuous.

The transcendent having been carefully excised from Anglican Church of Canada’s gospel, it – ever striving to be relevant – sees the temporal battle between the poor and wealthy in the book as a fitting centrepiece for a Eucharist.

What next after the U2charist and the Hunger Games Eucharist? I’m surprised we haven’t already seen a Matrix Eucharist, a Harry Potter Eucharist and a Hobbit Eucharist. There is still time.

From here:

About 130 young people gathered in a heavily fortified bank vault in the depths of the ‘Diefenbunker’ near Carp, Ont., on Nov. 17, 2013. They were there for a Eucharist and sermon comparing the pacifism of Christ and the “redemptive violence” of the bestselling novel and movie The Hunger Games.

The once-secret underground bunker near Carp, Ont., was built more than 50 years ago to protect the Canadian government from nuclear attack.

“The Hunger Games is a book about juxtaposition,” said the Rev. Monique Stone, organizer of the service and incumbent of the Anglican Parish of Huntley, in her sermon. “It’s a book in which we see a community in dire poverty pushed up against a community of privilege­—in which we hear about a community that is starving, and [another] that has so much excess that at times they actually want to make themselves sick so they can fit in more food.”

Two Anglican Church of Canada bishops attended GAFCON

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Bishop David Parsons and Bishop Darren McCartney from the Diocese of the Arctic attended the recent GAFCON conference. Since it hints at betrayal of the ACoC’s culturally inspired faux-gospel of indiscriminate inclusion and woolly diversity, this has created “a lot of angst and frustration.” If the ACoC’s tacit demotion of Jesus from God Incarnate to Middle Eastern social worker is not recanted, perhaps it is also a harbinger of the future defection of an entire ACoC diocese.

From the December Anglican Journal describing events at the October house of bishops meeting (not online yet):

News that Bishops David Parsons and Darren McCartney of the Diocese of the Arctic attended the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in Nairobi in the hopes of creating partnerships to help with the diocese’s debt crisis and shortage of priests met with some consternation. “As one of our bishops put it, when the stated purpose of GAFCON is evangelistic revival in the life of the church, who could argue with that? But when there’s another kind of agenda going on that says the church in the West or North America preaches a false gospel…. then that creates a lot of angst and frustration,” said Hiltz.

As the Anglican World Turns

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In 2007, the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada decided that blessing same sex unions is consistent with the core doctrine of The Anglican Church of Canada. I’m not sure I could present a convincing argument against that: the core doctrine of the ACoC meandered away from Biblical truth a few decades ago, so embracing something explicitly forbidden in the Bible fit’s quite comfortably within the increasingly porous confines of what passes for core doctrine in the ACoC.

Still, resolution A186 provoked considerable debate, much of it bitter. As a result, the 2010 General Synod, rather than restarting the debate on same-sex unions and their place within the ACoC, came up instead with a sexuality discernment statement. In seven paragraphs, it manages to use “conversations” six times, “dialogue” six times, “discernment” six times, “diverse” and its variations four times and “transparency” twice; “Christ” was mentioned twice as well, but I expect that was an oversight. “Sex”, ostensibly what the document was about, was mentioned just once, thus confirming the obvious: the statement was prophetic propaganda from the ACoC’s department of missional disinformation. It was designed to obfuscate and divert attention away from the issue.

The 2013 General Synod unravelled much of the sterling work of its predecessor. Resolution C003 asked the Council of General Synod to go a significant step further than same-sex blessings and “prepare and present a motion at General Synod 2016 to change Canon XXI on Marriage to allow the marriage of same sex couples” (my emphasis).

At the recent COGS meeting, Fred Hiltz said:

When Resolution C003 passed, “the truce was broken and once again we find ourselves in the midst of chaos,” Hiltz quoted these bishops as having said.

The chaos was always there even though the 2010 GS tried to pretend otherwise; a few members of COGS, heads firmly in the sand, wish to return to the halcyon days of 2010 Anglican fence-sitting:

[s]ome wondered whether there was a way to “come up with a neutral recommendation” at General Synod.

Like it or not, same-sex marriage is coming to the Anglican Church of Canada eventually. There are only two ways of stopping it: the ACoC ceases to exist before it summons the backbone to announce a decision or God decides it is worth saving after all and brings repentance to its clergy.

Fred Hiltz soft pedals changes to the marriage canon that will allow same-sex marriage

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It’s nothing to worry about because: there can be no final decision before 2019 and who knows what could happen by then – Hiltz could retire, Jesus could return (a real shock to the ACoC, since it believes in the parousia as fervently as I believe in unicorns); other parts of the communion will be “consulted” (and ignored if they disagree); it will be discussed in dioceses (over and over and over again until the opposition weaken from exhaustion).

Anyway, no priest who is indifferent to his career prospects will be compelled to perform same sex marriages.

From here:

That question might be particularly relevant when it comes to controversial matters such as the resolution passed by General Synod in Ottawa, which asks the Council of General Synod to draft a motion to be considered by the next General Synod, when it meets in 2016, to amend the marriage canon to allow same-sex couples to marry, with a conscience clause that gives any clergy, bishop, congregation or diocese that objects the option of not participating. The primate said he had heard from bishops across the theological spectrum that they had experienced “a sense of peace” about the issue after General Synod 2010 published its pastoral statement, following its meeting in Halifax, which they did not experience after the resolution was passed this summer in Ottawa.

The issue is not for the House of Bishops to resolve; it is a matter for the Council of General Synod and the order of bishops in General Synod, Hiltz acknowledged, but he said he opened the discussion with the bishops, understanding that there are tensions and concerns around the issue.

“There’s been a huge effort in the life of the church to talk about this as a pastoral response, not a change of doctrine, and now it feels like the ground has shifted,” Hiltz said. The change to a question of doctrine creates difficulties in dioceses where bishops “have worked really hard to hold all voices and all people together,” and where some people are asking how this shift happened. The motion, he noted, came from individual members of General Synod, not the Council of General Synod or a diocese.

While the issue has been divisive, the primate said he did not have a sense of lines hardening within the House of Bishops. “We reminded one another that, because it is a doctrinal matter, it will take two successive general synods to do anything in terms of a final decision anyway, and between the first and second reading it would be discussed in provinces and dioceses.” The bishops considered the international reaction and said, “we ought not have this conversation in isolation, that we should be consulting with other parts of the Communion,” said Hiltz, who will relay the bishops’ input to CoGS.

The decline of The Episcopal Church

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From here:

Episcopal Church down 24% in ten years

Baptized membership in the Episcopal Church of the USA declined by 29,679 in 2012 to 2,066,710, the Episcopal Church reported on 31 October 2013.

Statistics released by national church showed Average Sunday Attendance declined steadily across [t]he church as well 2.6 per cent in 2012, with 679,923 Episcopalians in church on Sundays.

At least TEC publishes up to date statistics, which is more than can be said for the Anglican Church of Canada whose last published number was in 2007. Then there  were 545,957 people on parish rolls.

If the ratio of church attendees to “membership” is the same in Canada as it is in the US, there would have been 179,613 people attending ACoC churches in 2007; fewer today, of course.

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.