Anglican Mainstream

From The Christian Challenge

The 640,000-member Anglican Church of Canada (ACC) remains roiled over the issue of same-sex unions, with a fifth diocese recently endorsing them, and an ACC panel planning for changes to allow gay "marriage."

Meanwhile, legal actions continue against congregations and clergy that have left the ACC over the sexuality issue, with property decisions starting to turn against the seceded faithful.

There was a hilltop experience for the latter, though, as they soaked up the presence and support of Southern Cone Archbishop Gregory Venables at a late April gathering of some 350 persons in the Vancouver area. There, Venables commissioned two ex-ACC bishops and licensed some 35 priests and deacons to win souls for Christ under his oversight in a country that (as one report put it) "is fast becoming secularized and post-Christian."

It was confirmation that the conservatives had indeed found a refuge outside the ACC, linked to the Argentina-based Southern Cone and thus part of the Anglican Communion. It was also the culmination of a six-year struggle that began when the Diocese of New Westminster (Vancouver) introduced same-sex blessings in the ACC. The diocesan, Bishop Michael Ingham, has so far permitted gay blessings at eight out of 67 New Westminster parishes that wanted them. It was, to conservatives, a glaring sign of increasingly liberal attitudes in the Canadian Church that were leading away from historic Christianity.

Since then, cultural pressure has been brought to bear, as Canada legalized homosexual "marriage." The ACC’s General Synod last year narrowly defeated a move to authorize the blessing of homosexual unions, but said that such blessings do not conflict with "core" doctrine. And Canadian bishops kept in place a policy billed as debarring gay blessings or weddings in the ACC, but which allows prayers for a civilly-married homosexual couple’s relationship during a Eucharist service.

More recently, three more dioceses, Ottawa, Montreal and Niagara, voted in favor of blessing civilly-undertaken same-sex marriages, and a fourth, Huron, has lately joined them. In all four cases the diocesan bishops say they are consulting more widely before implementing the decisions (which probably means they will lay low until after this summer’s Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops).

In May, the ACC’s Council of General Synod started the ball rolling toward what may be a vote in the 2010 session of the Synod on altering the ACC’s canons to allow for homosexual marriage in the church.

THE LATEST ROUND of defections from the ACC – the church suffered losses some years ago to the Continuing Church and more recently to the Rwandan-backed Anglican Mission in the Americas – began late last year, as two retired ACC bishops, Donald Harvey (Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador) and Malcolm Harding (Brandon), relinquished their ACC licenses and came under the oversight of Archbishop Venables and the Southern Cone province.

Under those auspices, the two this year began providing oversight for a budding ecclesial structure launched by the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC) that has so far taken in 16 congregations and some 35 clergy, with more expected in the coming months. (According to Anglican Mainstream, the ANiC churches together have more members than 16 of the ACC’s 31 dioceses.) Five of the ANiC congregations were already outside the ACC, one is a new church plant, and ten others came from the ACC, including the 700-strong St. John’s Shaughnessy in Vancouver, which had been the ACC’s largest congregation; all ten hoped to retain their buildings.

As with most similar arrangements made by foreign provinces to minister to ex-Episcopalians, the "cover" the Southern Cone is offering for the ANiC is intended to be a temporary stopgap that allows faithful Canadian Anglicans who disagree with their national province to stay in the Communion "until the situation is resolved," Archbishop Venables said.

Liberal Reprisals

In responding to the departures, liberal ACC bishops have largely adopted the style of U.S. counterparts, initiating or threatening disciplinary actions or property lawsuits against ex-ACC clergy and congregations.

New Westminster’s Bishop Ingham slapped the 11 realigned clergy in his diocese – including renowned Evangelical Dr. J.I. Packer, 81, who is honorary assistant at St. John’s Shaughnessy – with inhibition notices. On April 21, the nine accused priests, responding to charges leveled at them by Ingham, denied abandoning "the ministry to which we were ordained," or leaving the ACC for another body. Saying, however, that Bishop Ingham and his diocese had departed from historic Anglican teaching and practice, the priests relinquished the licenses they held from Ingham to continue their ministry within the Southern Cone-linked ANiC. The two deacons signed a similar statement.

BUT OF COURSE, IT’S NOT OVER. Ingham thinks the transfer to another Anglican province amounts to "schism," and signaled in May that he will come after the property of the four realigned congregations in his diocese. What’s more, he has threatened to charge all former diocesan clergy remaining in their seceded parishes with trespassing.

Meanwhile, other property battles have already gotten underway. In the suit brought by the Diocese of Niagara against its three seceded southern Ontario parishes – St. George’s, Lowville; St. Hilda’s, Oakville; and Good Shepherd, St. Catharine’s – Judge Jane Milanetti initially let stand a ruling from another Superior Court judge that allowed the majority congregations to retain sole custody of their property for the time being.

But in early May the same judge ordered the three parishes to share their building facilities with the ACC diocese until a final decision is reached as to who is legally entitled to the property – a process that could take up to a decade.

Judge Milanetti’s order gave the diocese and any parishioners still loyal to it access to the buildings between 7 and 10 a.m. on Sundays. In the case of two of the parishes, though, no members dissented from the votes to leave the ACC; there are no remnant ACC congregations. And in all three cases any who might have remained loyal to the ACC have available to them several "highly suitable" alternate parishes in the immediate vicinity of the contested churches, said the ANiC. The Network said an earlier attempt at a sharing arrangement at the three parishes had very unhappy results.

Faced with a limited-time option to appeal Judge Milanetti’s decision, the three Niagara congregations decided instead to begin worshiping temporarily in secular meeting spaces.

A SIMILAR, BUT HARSHER scenario has unfolded in the Diocese of British Columbia. After an April 5 B.C. Supreme Court order for the diocese to allow the clergy and people of the seceded St. Mary of the Incarnation (Metchosin), on Vancouver Island, back into their building, a judge of the same court ruled in May that St. Mary’s must hand over its building to the diocese pending a trial to determine property ownership.

What makes the decision more incomprehensible for the conservatives is that, though the some 225-member St. Mary’s has two church buildings, a larger structure that accommodates up to 230 persons, and a smaller heritage building that houses 90 persons, and a parish hall, Justice Marion Allan decided that the diocese should have exclusive possession of all properties. However, only 14 members of the parish dissented from the move to the Southern Cone, while 105 voted in favor. This means that, on Sundays, 14 people will use the main church building, and a second building will remain empty, while the bulk of the congregation is "completely displaced" on Sundays as well as weekdays, when members are usually involved in various ministries and mission activities, the ANiC said.

The St. Mary’s majority planned an appeal of the court ruling, according to ANiC Chancellor Cheryl Chang. She acknowledged the validity of conservative fears, though, that the B.C. Supreme Court decision, if not overturned, "sets a precedent that will be…applied in other jurisdictions arguing essentially the same set of facts," and leave other ex-ACC faithful without places to worship.

The Faithful Rally In Vancouver

The slings and arrows of Anglican realignment seemed to pale, though, when some 350 ANiC adherents, poised to make a new start for the gospel in fresh spiritual pastures, gathered to welcome Archbishop Venables at South Delta Baptist Church, Vancouver, on April 25-26.

In a joyful Eucharist concluding the meeting, Venables commissioned the two bishops and licensed 34 ex-ACC clergy to serve under his authority. Dr. Packer’s relicensing, in particular, was a moving and historic moment for the modest multiple author who is a longtime warrior for the historic faith. Time magazine recently named Packer one of the planet’s 25 most influential Evangelicals.

Bishops Harvey, Moderator of the ANiC, and Harding, Suffragan for the Network, both made solemn promises to uphold the doctrine and discipline of the Church and to defend its historic faith.

Harvey said it was a day of grief that the faithful had had to take the action they did, and of joy over a sense of new birth. "It is also the beginning of being able to offer similar hope to Anglicans across the country," he said.

Venables, 58, denied accusations that the ANiC meeting represented a "schism," since "schism is over secondary issues…What we have is separation over truth," he said. On that point, he believes the Communion is sadly "in the early stages of divorce."

But he urged his Canadian flock, which includes a significant contingent of expatriate Chinese Anglicans, to get going on their mission. "You have been commissioned, which means you are accountable," he said.

There should be no "sheep stealing, but let us reach out, plant churches, and do what the whole Anglican Communion has needed to do for the last 100 years, and re-establish catechesis to adults," Dr. Packer told the ANiC gathering.

Opening his English Standard Version of the Bible, of which he was chief editor, Packer read out passages from 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, in which the apostle Paul compares "men who lie with men" to drunkards, thieves, slanderers and adulterers, none of whom will enter the kingdom of heaven.

"That’s a very solemn apostolic warning," said Packer, professor of theology at Regent College in Vancouver, who is best known for his 1973 book, Knowing God. The Bible teaches that people who feel erotic attractions to people of the same gender are called by God to avoid such sexual relationships, he said. He termed the blessings that many ACC bishops are prepared to give to homosexual couples as well as the bishops’ openness to diverse ways of interpreting the Bible as "persistent unrepentant doctrinal disorder."

Packer asserted at a news conference that, in a situation wherein doctrinal and moral heresy are approved, there must be the possibility for realignment of the faithful. Therefore he saw the breach of the "principle of geographical exclusiveness" – what has also been called unauthorized boundary-crossing – as a regrettable necessity.

Any such notion is, of course, resisted by ACC Archbishop Fred Hiltz, who made his complaints on that topic known in an 11th-hour plea to Venables not to enter his territory to attend the Vancouver meeting. See more on this subject in the following story. n

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