Tag Archives: Global Warming

Anglicans in heat

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What happens when a church ceases to believe in the transcendent, in heaven, in hell, when its god shrinks to manageable dimensions, when the hereafter is less important than the here-and-now?

It becomes obsessed – in those rare moments when it isn’t exploring the nether regions of homoerotic fantasies – with climate change.

Saving souls from overheating now is more important than in eternity.

As the headline trumpets: “Climate change tops agenda at WCC Assembly, say Canadian delegates”.

From the Journal:

Climate change tops agenda at WCC Assembly, say Canadian delegates

The top concern of this year’s World Council of Churches (WCC) Assembly was unquestionably climate change, says Canon Scott Sharman, the Anglican Church of Canada’s animator for ecumenical and interfaith relations.

The assembly also released statements on issues of reconciliation and unity, the war between Russia and Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Palestine. But Sharman says the amount of discussion on climate change; the way it cropped up throughout plenary sessions on other topics, like racism and Indigenous issues; and even a march for environmental justice organized by delegates to the assembly all served to stress one central theme. In the words of a statement the WCC delegates released on the meeting’s last day, “We are running out of time. This Assembly is the last chance we have to act together to prevent the planet from becoming uninhabitable. In particular, no further delay is possible if we are to have any chance of staying within the safer limit of +1.5°C global warming and of avoiding vastly more catastrophic climate change.”

With the WCC only meeting every eight years, says Sharman, he and other attendees felt a sense of urgency to come together on an effective response.

Greening Niagara becomes Climate Justice Niagara

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This is a sensible move: the church I attended before the diocese bulldozed it was becoming increasingly green, mainly because there was mold growing in the carpet. The epithet “Climate Justice” is sufficiently stern to discourage unwanted verdant foliage in the dampest of church carpets.

As the document below tells us, sin and separation from God are not the most important issues facing us today, climate change is. The good news is that the mere renaming of “Greening Niagara” to “Climate Justice Niagara” is going to change all that. In fact, as I type this, I feel the cool winds of Justice blowing from the diocesan cathedral in Hamilton. Or maybe winter is coming.

I admit, I did learn one useful thing from the article below: God, on the advice of the Anglican Church of Canada, has abandoned transcendence, left heaven, and now lives on earth with us – “Sadly and tragically our common home with God is in poor health and in steep decline”. A bit like Laben’s household gods Rachel stole and hid in  her camel’s saddle.

From here:

Our common home is also God’s own house, permeated by the Spirit of God from the dawn of creation, where the Son of God pitched his tent in the supreme event of the incarnation. (Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam)

Introducing Climate Justice Niagara (CJN), formerly known as Greening Niagara, with a new and broader focus and mandate about the most important issue facing us  today — climate change! Sadly and tragically our common home with God is in poor health and in steep decline. But God made us stewards and protectors of the earth. The Gospel calls us to challenge and change the unjust structures in society that oppress and marginalize people, including the injustices that contribute to the climate crisis. In that call we find a building block of Niagara’s Mission Action Plan: “Prioritize social justice action with an emphasis on environmental justice.”

Anglican Foundation of Canada to spend $50,000 to make the earth cooler

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If you have any ideas that have not yet occurred to any of the 85,000 environmental scientists working on reversing anthropogenic global warming, then the Anglican Church of Canada will give you – 20 of you – $2500 each.

My submission is to ban Anglican Church of Canada sermons: the reduction in hot air would probably catapult us into the next ice age.

When I saw the submission date, the obvious thought occurred to me. I quickly came to my senses and discarded it, since the Anglican Foundation of Canada has no sense of humour or of the ridiculous and is blissfully oblivious of the irony that, even though it can’t solve its own problems, it thinks it can solve everybody else’s.

Bishop of Niagara has the solution to church decline

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In an open letter to her flock, Susan Bell, bishop of the Diocese of Niagara has set a record for the most italicised words ever to appear in a diocesan epistle. She used those italics to emphasis that the prediction that her denomination will cease to exist by 2040 is a call, not to hand-wringing, but to fighting a “climate crisis”. In doing so we will be “working to establish the kingdom of God”.

The message was delivered to the bishop by a beatific vision of St. Greta of Thunberg, patron saint of the church of the immaculate imminent extinction.

From here:

I want to talk to you about the future; and about some intimations about what we might be being called to – and maybe what we’re being called away from.  All of that is much more interesting than the hand-wringing of recent weeks.

Is this a crisis?  Yes.  A holy one, I believe.  The question is, how do we respond?  Well we are Christ-followers and so I’d humbly suggest that we need to do just that:  follow Jesus and listen for God’s voice to guide us.

I am firmly of the belief that God has gifted us with this time.  I am not being Pollyanna.  I mean this.  We have come to the end of a time in which the Church was a dominant force in our culture.  That is an undisputed fact.  And yet not one that should make us despair.  We’ve had a good run.

But I also believe that we are being called to deep engagement with our faith and simultaneously, and our behavior as a culture.  As an example, take the climate crisis.  What does the mission of God look like in the light of that?  If, as N.T. Wright has recently written, New Testament Christians believed that in Jesus the Christ, God was bringing earth and heaven together, “making creation new, restoring the world from all its pathologies,” then working to establish the kingdom of God is rightly the work of all believers.  This sounds to me like a robust mandate for a theology which will support bold and sustained Christian action to address the climate crisis.

This is a recovery of a strong Christology, which leads to a renewed sense of both Christ’s work among humanity and a template for our own Christian vocations.

Bishop of Huron sees battling global warming as his top priority

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Since the Anglican Church of Canada has given up on the idea of saving people from roasting in hell, it has taken up the task of saving them from roasting on earth.

“Consumers in the Hands of an Angry Gaia” doesn’t have the same resonance or weight as the original but neither does the purveyor of the message, Robert Todd Townshend, the new bishop of the Diocese of Huron.

Townshend has declared, in a diarrhoetic flood of stale platitudes, that a “push for greater environmental action may mark his tenure”. It will probably be more of a stain than a mark.

From here:

Reverend Canon Robert Todd Townshend is hoping to bring an environmental focus and action on climate change to Anglican churches across its Southwestern Ontario diocese.

Townshend was ordained Bishop of the Huron Diocese on Saturday afternoon, drawing about 1,000 people to St. Paul’s Cathedral on Richmond Street in downntown London.

After the ordination, Townshend reflected on the global climate change crisis and how faith can serve as a call to action, he said.

“The environmental movement has revived the biblical idea of us as stewards of the Earth, which is in every major religion because God is the creator,” Townshend said.

“I consider it an emergency,” he said of climate change. “If we call something a crisis for too long it is not considered urgent, but this is the most urgent thing.”

The Huron Diocese has always shown the ability to adapt and change as times demand and the push for greater environmental action may mark his tenure, he added.

“It will take a big movement of people, of political will. It’s crucial.”

Townshend becomes the 14th Bishop, succeeding Linda Nicholls, who was elected the head of the Anglican Church of Canada in July.

Anglican diocese appoints a climate-care animator

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Rev. Mark Nichols is the new climate-care animator in the Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador. I’ve no idea what that means, but it conjures up an image of a puppeteer pulling the strings of a Greta doll to entertain those who have lost their faith in everything except contemporary superstitions.  Maybe that’s just me, though.

It’s heartening to know that someone finally has the solution to global warming: animate climate care. Why did no one think of that before?
From here:

Anglican Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador creates new position for climate-care animator

“If there’s one thing that really angers me, it’s social injustice,” Nichols said.

“I really see the environmental side of it, the creation-care side of it, as part of that. The people that bear the burden for (climate change) are the world’s poor, the elderly, people in developing nations and our children.”

Recently, Bishop Geoff Peddle of the Anglican Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador announced Nichols would undertake a new part-time role with the diocese — a position they call creation-care animator.

The Rev. tips his hand later in the article: Mankind is not the pinnacle of God’s creation, the Earth is, inanimate, though it may be. Unapologetic Gaia worship.

He says that for too long humans have been anthropocentric, thinking of themselves as the most important thing on the planet.

“The church is being called to … look at a creation-centric way of being,” he says.

“I often say to people, we need the Earth, but the Earth really doesn’t need us. … We need to improve that relationship we have with the rest of creation.”

It’s hotter than Hades down here

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A few years ago, I was chatting about Hell with a friend of one of our children. At the time he was at Oxford studying for a doctorate in theology. We were talking about Hell because he had come to the conclusion that it is empty – of humanity, at least. His reasoning was that once a dead person is confronted by God, the experience would so overwhelm him that he would be unable to do anything other than accept the salvation through Jesus that would still be on offer.

I countered with the objection that by doing this, God would be taking from us his most precious and mysterious gift: our free will. If, after death, we are not permitted to reject God, what meaning is there for those who, in life, accepted him? What of a Christopher Hitchens who saw God as a celestial dictator and wanted no part of him or his heaven? Since the friend is much cleverer than I, I also threw in a few tidbits about free-will from Dostoevsky in the hope that an appeal to authority might deliver at least a wounding blow.

He didn’t appear too wounded when he left, and I have no idea who won the argument or whether it merely ended up as an example of good disagreement. Perhaps not the latter since I privately concluded that he had succumbed to an overdose of liberal wish-fulfillment that would not serve him well outside of the foggy heights of academia.

Our encounter did illuminate one curious thing about today’s church, particularly the Anglican church. I used to think that Anglicans had altogether abandoned the transcendent, preferring to dwell in the temporal, the here and now. That isn’t quite accurate. The church has been replacing the numinous with shabby worldly substitutes for years. Sex instead of the mystical, utopia instead of heaven, socialism instead of charity.

And, of course, global warming instead of Hell.

The Diocese of Bristol and Swindon is right into the swing of things: the diocese has  declared a Climate Emergency. Clergy and laity are doing their bit to save us from the fires of earthly Gehenna by brandishing signs with intense liturgical piety. You can see the fervour in their expressions.

From here:

The Diocese of Bristol and Swindon has declared a climate emergency after a unanimous vote at its last meeting.

In response to the emergency, the Diocese aims to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2030 and has an ambitious policy to help achieve this goal.

It is the first diocese in the Church of England to announce this aim, with others expected to do so over the coming months.

Bishop of Bristol Viv Faull said: “Care for God’s creation is key to our Christian faith. Climate change hits our poorest global neighbours first and worst, exacerbating migration, conflict over resources and the spread of disease.

Bishop Susan Bell is doing more to respond to climate crisis

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That means she is throwing away her iPhone which is made in China, the most profusive polluter on the planet.

Just joking, that would be going too far.

From here:

Although the climate crisis is not news, nor our lack of a speedy and effective response, the rising voices of our young people demanding that we take action on the most pressing issue of our time is striking.  I cannot help but respond to the urgency that is being expressed in the climate strikes, inspired by Greta Thunberg, happening around the world this week, including here in our own diocese.

[…]

The Anglican Church of Canada recognizes that there is a climate emergency and we are called to do more to live up to our responsibility as the protectors and of God’s earth.

A church climate strike

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St. Nics in Durham, UK is going on a climate strike apparently. For a church, I’m not sure what that entails but perhaps the vicar will stop preaching sermons, so it won’t be an entirely bad thing.

It’s also rebelling against impending extinction, which is odd for a church since, if humanity is about to become extinct, the eschaton and Jesus’ return must be upon us, an event which should be the cause of rejoicing.

On the other hand, St. Nics having lost all sense of the transcendent may, in a fit of temporal desperation, just be jumping on the fashionable Thunberg bandwagon.