{"id":2807,"date":"2009-02-15T18:00:43","date_gmt":"2009-02-15T23:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anglicansamizdat.wordpress.com\/?p=2807"},"modified":"2009-02-15T18:00:43","modified_gmt":"2009-02-15T23:00:43","slug":"st-hildas-anic-our-one-year-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/st-hildas-anic-our-one-year-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"St. Hilda's ANiC: our one year anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was one year ago that St. Hilda’s voted to come under the Episcopal oversight<\/a> of Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Province of the Southern Cone. We had a cake this morning to celebrate.\"Add<\/p>\n

Our realigning unleashed a series of actions<\/a> by the Diocese of Niagara that included firing the rector, demanding the building keys, freezing our bank account and taking St. Hilda’s to court.<\/p>\n

Bishop Michael Bird threw things in frustration, John Page, the diocesan lawyer, hurled abuse during discovery meetings, and court appearances were disagreeably frequent.<\/p>\n

During this time, St. Hilda’s web site<\/a> peaked at 6000 hits per day and overall had 340,000 hits in 2008. The rector of St. Hilda’s, Rev. Paul Charbonneau appeared in a large colour photo on the front page of the National Post; we received hundreds of emails of support from all over the world – and even from parishioners in local Anglican churches.<\/p>\n

None of this has been particularly easy: the pastor was fired and former colleagues shun him. Each week we have to pay to rent the gym in a local school; the chairs and sound equipment have to be set up and torn down. A series of ‘priests in charge’ have been installed in the building by the diocese and have brought with them a dribble of people from other Oakville parishes to create the illusion of a real diocesan congregation. They complain a lot.<\/p>\n

To this day, the diocese has refused to share in building expenses or to negotiate – as was ordered by the court.<\/p>\n

Standing up for something you believe in can end up being quite inconvenient.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was one year ago that St. Hilda’s voted to come under the Episcopal oversight of Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Province of the Southern Cone. We had a cake this morning to celebrate. Our realigning unleashed a series of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[2111],"class_list":["post-2807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diocese-of-niagara","tag-diocese-of-niagara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2807\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}