The Anglican Network in Canada – a great burden lifted
by Chris Sugden in Evangelicals Now April 2009
Canadians are not to be confused with citizens of the USA. Many are descended from those British colonists, and their church descends from the many clergy, who wished to remain loyal to the British crown after 1776 and fled north to put the protection of the great lakes between them and the rebels. Citizens of the USA were “patriots”, Canadians were “loyalists”. Their “Britishness” is perhaps revealed in continuance of a sense of deference to the established order.
One Canadian Anglican clergyman has suggested to me that this meant that therefore the direction of the leadership of the Anglican Church of Canada in taking forward same-sex blessings and related issues was more readily accepted and followed by the rank and file in the church than it would be south of the border.
The Anglican Network in Canada (www.anglicannetwork.ca) numbers 3 bishops, 28 parishes, 62 priests, 11 deacons and a Sunday attendance of around 3500, larger than 13 of the 31 dioceses of the Anglican Church of Canada. The Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) on a good day claims 70,000 in its pews.
Most of the population of Canada lives within 100 miles of the US border. Canada stretches 3170 miles from Vancouver in the west to St John’s in the East and takes 11 days to cover driving at 8 hours a day. In between are the vast prairies, where winter temperatures fall to minus 40 degrees centigrade, where clergy will drive for two or three hours in each direction to take a service or a home fellowship. Yet many of these small communities have a church. And it has a church because early on the Anglican Church selected people from local communities to be ordained as clergy.
The 76 clergy, including four archdeacons and the three bishops, of the Anglican Network in Canada met in the first week of March for their fourth annual clergy retreat at a beautiful retreat centre just inside the USA south of Vancouver. They came from across Canada. Many had been part of the Network for just over a year. Some had joined in the last few months when their churches had voted to leave the ACoC. Had it been a painful experience? Those I spoke with said it had been just the opposite – a sense that a great burden had been lifted from their shoulders in dealing with a church that was well on the way to apostasy. It was such a new experience for them to attend a clergy retreat where they were not intimidated into silence for fear of what people might say from the front, or might say about them in response to their straightforward biblical faith.
A significant strength to this movement is St John’s Church Shaughnessy where a succession of evangelical pastors – Harry Robinson, now retired, Steve James, now a vicar in Manchester and now David Short from Australia – have not only built up a congregation of 700, but trained young people in leading churches and church plants so that many of these orthodox clergy are people who at some stage have been through St Johns. A teacher at St Johns for over 20 years has been Dr Jim Packer. While he was a great loss to Evangelical Anglicans in England when he migrated to teach in Vancouver, it can now be seen that God had his purpose in placing him at a strategic situation for when this crisis developed.
The Anglican Network in Canada, whose bishops and clergy hold the licence of Presiding Bishop Greg Venables, of the Province of the Southern Cone, will form part of the new Anglican Church in North America which has formally announced that its constituent assembly will take place in Texas from June 22-25, just prior to the General Convention of TEC which will also be attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Prior to that, beginning on May 25, a court hearing is slated where the ownership of church properties in Vancouver, including the multi-million pound property of St John’s Shaughnessy will be contested.
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