Tag Archives: Anglican Church of Canada

Impeccable timing from the Anglican Church of Canada

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Fred Hiltz is busy trying to organise a prayer vigil for Theresa Spence’s meeting with Stephen Harper. It includes the inevitable attempt to cajole God with native voodoo: there are prayers “based on the colours of the medicine wheel”.

Unfortunately, Theresa Spence has decided not to attend. Apparently it’s because the Governor General, David Johnston, won’t be there – not just spite to make Fred Hiltz look foolish.

Spence has already written to Buckingham Palace and I imagine that, if David Johnston does buckle to pressure, Spence will want the Queen there too – I’m sure the Anglican Church of Canada can supply one if ER can’t make it.

Fred will, no doubt, be offering fervent thanks to Grandmother Moon if the meeting actually happens and Spence’s imminent starvation is averted.

From here:

Ali Symons, Anglican Church of Canada January 09, 2013.
Archbishop Fred Hiltz, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, and National Indigenous Anglican Bishop Mark MacDonald are calling for a prayer vigil in support of the meeting of national Indigenous leaders with Prime Minister Stephen Harper Jan. 11.

[….]

Prayer resources for a vigil are also available online, including Honouring the Four Directions, the Great Thanksgiving of the Haudenosaunee, and the Athabascan Litany.

 

Anglicans and Lutherans join forces to produce a report

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From here:

For this purpose, the report identifies a number of recommendations for concrete diaconal action at local, regional or global level. These include ways in which the churches could do more together at all levels for disaster relief, in advocating on issues relating to climate change, illegitimate debt, HIV and AIDS and other pressing social concerns.

The articles fails to make any mention of God, Jesus, evangelism or the Christian hope in the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.

Although I’m sure the actual report is full of profound insights into things transcendent, the ACNS prefers to concentrate on the temporal: disaster relief – a noble campaign to resuscitate Western Anglicanism; illegitimate debt – the Anglican Church of Canada’s 2013 budget; climate change – the fear that the terrestrial dwelling of North American clerics could become as hot as their eternal resting place; and HIV/AIDS, – an attempt to protract the earthly sojourn of Canadian Anglican clergy, who are now almost all gay.

Anglican Journal to be editorless, left wafting hither and thither on a miasma of politically correct religiosity

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The current Anglican Journal editor, Kristin Jenkins – whom I met briefly in 2010 and rather liked in spite of our radically different perspectives – is abandoning the Anglican Journal to the tender mercies of Paul Feheley.

In the face of certain cuts for Anglican Journal staff, one can hardly blame her.

As the article below notes, the budget for the Journal will be more conservative; what is left unsaid is that the content will undoubtedly be less conservative – you may think that an impossibility, but with a herculean effort from the stragglers still employed by the paper, I am certain a way will be found.

From here:

Following the resignation of Editor Kristin Jenkins, the Anglican Journal will adopt an interim management structure and not hire a new editor until late 2013 at the earliest. Sam Carriere, director of Communications and Information Resources and Resources for Mission, shared this news with General Synod staff on Dec. 13.

Editor since 2009, Ms. Jenkins will leave the Anglican Journal on Jan. 7, 2013 to become director of advancement at Albert College in Belleville, Ont.

“It is my feeling, supported by advice I have sought and received, that I should not engage in a formal search and hiring process for an editor of the Anglican Journal until next year’s restructuring work is behind us, at the earliest,” said Mr. Carriere in an email to staff.

In November, the Council of General Synod passed a transitional budget for 2013 and agreed to establish a more conservative budget for 2014 in response to declining revenues. Throughout the next year, General Synod leadership will consider ways to restructure the national office, including the Anglican Journal.

 

Fred Hiltz meets with Justin Welby and warns him about ACNA

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Hiltz-WelbyOne of Fred Hiltz’s recurring nightmares is that Canterbury recognises ANCA and ANiC, making ACNA an official North American Anglican province with ANiC as one of its dioceses. In order to forestall this calamity, Hiltz has taken his “ongoing concern” to Justin Welby.

It’s worth noting that a contributing factor to the judge’s decision to award the ANiC church buildings to the Diocese of New Westminster was that they are held in trust for “Anglican worship”. By the judge’s reasoning, since the ACoC is the only recognised Anglican Church in Canada, Anglican worship and doctrine, no matter how perversely bizarre, is set by it and no-one else.

If ACNA is recognised by Canterbury, it would mean that the beloved nonsense emanating from Hiltz’s beloved church would no longer be the sole official measure of Canadian Anglicanism.

Welby, apparently, is “very appreciative” of ACoC contributions to the Anglican communion. Things like the pioneering work on suing Christians, ejecting them from their buildings, inhibiting world famous theologians such as J. I. Packer, filling the ranks of its clergy with partnered homosexuals and performing the Vagina Monologues in a cathedral.

There aren’t many Anglican Provinces that can make those claims.

From here:

The leader of the Anglican Church of Canada has emerged from his Dec. 6 meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury-elect, Justin Welby, feeling “very optimistic about his leadership.”

Archbishop Fred Hitz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, noted Welby’s “extensive ministry of reconciliation” and told the Journal that, “I get is a sense that he wants to be personally pro-active to build relations.

[….]

During his meeting with Welby, Hiltz said he mentioned ongoing concern about efforts by the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) to be recognized by the Church of England. Composed of Anglicans who have left the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church in the U.S., ACNA describes itself as “an emerging Province in the global Anglican Communion.”

Hiltz said he requested that if bodies of the Church of England are to meet with representatives of ACNA, “in fairness, they should also meet with us to get a better picture.” Welby was “very appreciative” of the place of the Anglican Church of Canada in the Communion and the contributions it has been able to make, added Hiltz.

 

Dean Peter Elliot appointed to TEC special task force for church structural reform

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It seems that The Episcopal Church, in the name of diversity, wants to “include some persons with critical distance from the Church’s institutional leadership” on its task force. Other than Michael Ingham, I can’t think of anyone less distanced from TEC’s leadership. Peter Elliot is extremely liberal, a partnered homosexual and at the forefront of the Anglican Church of Canada’s rush to become an exclusive church for the alphabet soup community.

From here:

In addition, two partners from other Anglican Communion provinces have been appointed: the Very Rev. Peter Elliott of the Anglican Church of Canada, dean of the Diocese of New Westminster and rector of Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver; and the Rev. Sathianathan Clarke, Th.D., of the Church of South India, who is the Bishop Sundo Kim Chair in World Christianity and professor of theology, culture and mission at Wesley Theological Seminary.
Resolution C095
According to resolution C095, “The membership of the Task Force shall reflect the diversity of the Church, and shall include some persons with critical distance from the Church’s institutional leadership.”

Are there any big deals left in the Anglican Church of Canada?

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A bishop announcing that he believes in the virgin birth and the physical resurrection of Christ would stretch my credulity; a lesbian priest married to another woman would merely be par for the course.

From here:

Football star’s mom, a lesbian priest, no big deal in Anglicanism.

Sports reporters preparing for the Grey Cup game on Sunday could hardly believe it this week when Calgary Stampeders star Jon Cornish revealed his mother, a veteran Anglican priest, has a “wife.”

But stories like that of Rev. Margaret Cornish, who has been vicar of St. Alban’s Church in Richmond for almost seven years, are becoming commonplace in liberal Christian churches in Canada and the United States.

There are hundreds of women in the ministry in the Anglican Church and United Church of Canada who have either always been in lesbian relationships or have moved into them in their middle years.

As of this writing, St. Alban’s website is down, but the cached version of its welcome page contains the words “inclusive” and “diversity” – enough to confirm a lingering suspicion that the fictitious bishop of the first paragraph would not feel at home there.

Putting something new in the Anglican Church of Canada

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The Anglican Church of Canada has a $600,000 deficit, churches are closing, buildings are being sold, and employees are being laid-off. Even the Anglican Book Centre is no more.

All this leads the ACoC’s general secretary, Michael Thompson to muse that “God is putting something new in the church.” Yes, he is: judgement.

Michael Thompson turned up at St. Hilda’s one Sunday a number of years ago; he was supposed to dissuade us from fleeing the Diocese of Niagara. He wasn’t entirely successful and, although I thought he was a nice enough well-intentioned fellow, he flatly admitted he didn’t quite know what he believed and he envied us our “certainty”.

To put it another way: he is an amiable but clueless cove; that’s how he ended up as general secretary to the ACoC.

From here:

Amid the fiscal challenges facing General Synod, Archdeacon Michael Thompson urged Anglicans “to be patient and kind with ourselves in this time of transition and transformation.”

“God is putting something new in the church,” Thompson told the Council of General Synod at its meeting Nov. 15 to 18.

Reflecting on his first year as general secretary of the Anglican Church of Canada, Thompson noted the “change in ecosystem of the way the church lives.” He likened it to the trail that he and his wife hike near Lake Superior, where land burnt by a forest fire is now home to healthy blueberry bushes. Could the church adapt to a similar challenge? he wondered. “We don’t have trees anymore, so God doesn’t expect us to be in the lumber business,” he said. “Can we figure out what to do with the blueberries?”

The national church is “being called by God into a bunch of new futures, not just one,” said Thompson, adding the goal is to discover what ministries it is being called to develop.

 

Canada’s “poor” getting richer

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Just as a BA failed in Britain used to be the equivalent of a BA with honours in India, being poor in Canada is the equivalent of extravagant wealth in the Sudan.

As it happens, though, even the “poor” in Canada are much better off than they were 20 years ago.

 

Read more about it here.

If this this continues, the Anglican Church will lose its one of its main raison d’etres: advocating on behalf of the poor. All it will have left is global warming. And that is on thin ice.

Anglican Church of Canada’s third quarter deficit is $680,000

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Not even sitting in a sacred circle could console members of the Council of General Synod as they pondered their growing deficit: there was even talk of layoffs. Compassionate layoffs. A layoff that is “done with compassion, understanding, kindness and thankfulness” is one where the person being laid off has the compassion not to swear at his superior, the understanding that there is nothing he can do, the kindness not to sue the church for wrongful dismissal and the thankfulness that his impending unemployment is contributing to the financial well-being of his former employer.

Luckily for CoGS the Rev. Dr. Christopher Duraisingh, professor at Episcopal Divinity School, was on hand to explain that:

Jesus’s baptism was not baptism for forgiveness of sins, but an identity marker as being enlisted in the kingdom of God’s movement. We’ve turned baptism into sin-management rite. We need to put our baptism in line with Jesus’s baptism.

Perhaps it’s my not being a Rev. Dr. professor that prevents from me seeing this as anything other than a restatement of Pelagianism – the heresy that Man is born without original sin. To “put our baptism in line with Jesus’s baptism”, we would have to be sinless as he was.

Duraisingh went on to opine that “COGS must be like a midwife as this movement is born”. I fear that the only movement being born in the Anglican Church of Canada, is one that bears less resemblance to a movement of the Spirit than it does to a movement of the bowels.

The Anglican Church of Canada is going broke, Primate calls it a teaching moment

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But what is it trying to teach? Fred Hiltz seems to think that structural changes are the answer, while Dennis Drainville wants to “focus on mission” – although by “mission”, he means more vigorous leftist political agitation rather than the saving of souls.

James Cowan wants to “view the challenges as an opportunity”, a sure sign that he was asleep for most of the meeting.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that perhaps the malady is a consequence of the beliefs of the Anglican Church of Canada not the inadequacy of its structures, programs or bogus “missions”.

If what most of the church leadership believes is nonsense – and it is – why would God bless the church, why would people give it money and why does it deserve to survive?

From here:

Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, kicked off the fall meeting (Nov. 15-18) of the Council of General Synod (CoGS) in Mississauga, Ont. by urging members to view declining revenues and a looming budget shortfall as a “teaching moment handed to us by God.”

What’s needed now, said Hiltz is “transformational change.” He called on members to find “the courage to let go of our deep attachments to old ways and structures” and to “dare to imagine new scenarios.” In recent years, the church has attempted to effect change but “the structures don’t really look very different,” Hiltz noted.

CoGS members are being asked to discuss ideas that support priorities set out in the church’s 10-year strategic plan, Vision 2019. These priorities include envisioning a more streamlined structure for General Synod. The work being done at CoGS is part of a series of discussions that will take place over the next eight months leading up to General Synod 2013 in July. In January, Hiltz is convening a national consultation in Toronto to look at the future of church.

In its written report to CoGS, the financial management committee (FMC) has stressed that “revenues have been declining more rapidly than expected” and as a result, anticipated deficits for 2013 and beyond “have materialized much earlier than expected.”  This weekend, CoGS will be asked to approve a 2013 budget with a proposed deficit of $513,000.

Rob Dickson, FMC chair, cited declining membership as a factor for the deficit. Diocesan giving has been declining annually at an average rate of 3%, said Dickson, adding that capital fundraising initiatives undertaken by the national office in partnership with dioceses are “not a quick fix.”