Anglican Network in Canada

Mission
Home  Christianity  Find a church  Donate  Contact us  ARDFC  Log-in  Blog


  About ANiC

  Who we are
  Theological stand
  Our priorities
  ANiC parishes
  Leadership & Staff
  Synods & Governance
  Financial management
  Our Province
  About Anglicanism
  Our genesis
  Our position on …
  Job opportunities

  News

  Events

  Ministries

  Clergy resources

  Parish resources

  Other resources

  Membership

  Affiliations

  Orthodoxy – the sacrifice at the altar of inclusivity
 
    

Submitted to the Anglican Journal, December 2007

G.K. Chesterton wrote “people have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe. There is never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It is sanity and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.”
(1)

It is strikingly ironic that in the column next to the call of the editor of the Anglican Journal for more insightful commentary on the same sex blessing issue and the schism that has struck the Anglican Church of Canada, stands a letter from one Canon Kevin Arndt. He wrote that “what makes the Anglican Church a great and time-tested, long-standing Church is that it is compassionate, inclusive, respectful, theologically broad and ever faithful to the vision of the beloved community that Jesus initiated.”

He may be describing how the church once was, but the reality of the Anglican Church in Canada and much of the Western world today reveals that what is described by Canon Arndt is a Potemkin village, a mere simulacrum of what was once a great church. The truth is that while orthodox Anglicans are called to show compassion, inclusivity and respectfulness toward the views and attitudes of those who seek to revise the centuries of belief upon which our creeds and our faith are founded, the revisionists can attack, deride and even ostracize the orthodox with impunity.

My recent experience in a small liberal parish in the Diocese of British Columbia serves as an illustration. My wife and I joined the parish a year ago in September after our retirement. We had been members of an orthodox parish in our previous city for more than 25 years. Much was made by parishioners and the clergy in our new parish of what a welcoming congregation we were joining. Aware of serious health issues I was facing, I was assured that the rector and many parishioners “would be there for me”.

The parish was more a Martha than a Mary community. Much good work was being done for the needy, the homeless and the poor. The welcoming physical setting of the place resembled a well-appointed restaurant, with crisp linen, efficient waiters and lovely looking menus, but the truth was there was no kitchen and the patrons were being starved of any spiritual nourishment. Sermons made scant reference to the scripture, bibles were absent from the pews, and the rector actively discouraged the growth of small bible study groups.

Concerned by what seemed some confused theology espoused by the rector in his Christmas Eve sermon, I asked to meet with him to gain more insight into his thinking and beliefs. In particular I wanted him to unbundle for me the meaning of statements in his homily such as “this is a night of strangeness. Savour your unfathomable strangeness. Experience your complexity and improbability.”

I also needed help with his assertion that “we live in a time of crippling certainties. Warring polarized factions who know they are right and everyone else is wrong. The greatest threat to civility and ultimately to civilization, is an excess of certitude.” How can you be so sure, seemed to me the obvious question to ask him?

Out of this meeting I learned he did not believe in the divinity of Christ, he did not believe in the Atonement, he did not believe Jesus was the “truth the way and the life”. He told me he sympathized with and had no answer for those who concluded Christ could not have come to the earth with the intention of dying for our sins on the cross, since after all any God who would sentence his son to such a fate would be guilty of cosmic child abuse. He opined that only his being caught up in a volatile political situation in Palestine caused Christ's untimely death.

Despite now being aware of our rector's stunning lack of understanding of Scripture, we chose to stay. Importantly for us, my wife's 89-year-old mother had attended the church for 35 years, her father was buried there, and we had made friends there. Every Sunday the intercessory prayers called upon us to pray to God to help us to maintain unity amidst our diversity. We chose to see if this inclusivity could be acted out in real life.

Unaccustomed as we were to playing the role of Stepford wives, we did on two occasions write to the rector and once to him and his wardens, to express our concern over issues we thought important to the life and vibrancy of our parish and the larger church. The issues did not seem controversial or schismatic to us nor did we imagine how any reasonable person, even if they disagreed with us, could interpret a desire for their advancement within the parish as anything other than well intended. The issues were a call for more exegetical preaching, bibles in the pews, support for small bible studies, an open and fair dialogue within the parish on the issue of same sex blessings and the authority of scripture and less emphasis on secular issues and more on scripture.

A little over a year after we had begun to attend the parish, we experienced what might best be described as an ecclesiastical drive by shooting. We were asked to attend a meeting of the Wardens and the Archdeacon of the diocese. Only after some probing by me was the purpose of the meeting partially revealed. We were told the parties wished to discuss a recent letter my wife had written in which she criticized the rector's use of an illustration of how unsuccessful Christ might be as a parish priest, to elicit a laugh from the congregation.

The Archdeacon read to us a letter signed by him and the Wardens. Since neither of us is blind or illiterate it seems there was no purpose in this formality. Yet, I was reminded of my days as a litigation lawyer. The less competent the judge, the higher he sought to position himself and wrap himself in the trappings of his judicial power to deliver yet another error strewn judgment.

If he could have found a dais from which to deliver his judgment I am certain the Archdeacon would have availed himself. Without a trace of irony, the Archdeacon started by telling us that the letter and the meeting were both in the spirit of Matthew 18:15-16. The letter went on to tell us that we had been accused, tried and convicted of conduct that was “vexatious or conduct that is known or ought reasonably be known to be unwelcome”, and that our behaviour had “the effect of undermining, intimidating, humiliating, or demeaning the rector.” The rector felt “unsafe” and was no longer able to offer us pastoral ministry.

Aware of the passage and its teaching of how Christian brothers and sisters are to act when one has sinned against the other, we were initially puzzled that if it was the rector we had sinned against, why wasn't he here?

Neither the rector nor anyone on his behalf had ever expressed any concerns to us over our behaviour, and as the offending behaviour was conceded to be a handful of letters and emails written over the space of a year to the rector and once to the rector and his Wardens, it seemed obvious to us that Matthew 18:15 first commanded the rector to tell us of our fault and to win us over. It was only if that failed that a second attempt with two or three witnesses should be made and ultimately the matter was to be brought before the whole church community before we should be turned away as unrepentant sinners, if found to be so.

You can imagine our shock when the letter went on to tell us we had not only been accused of the sin of harassment against our rector, but we had now been found guilty and the sentence was imposed upon us before the letter ended. We asked the Archdeacon and Wardens why the steps so clearly set out in the Matthew passage had been skipped. Our question was met with blank looks. The Archdeacon seemed surprised that we knew the passage. It wasn't clear to us that the Wardens understood the import of the passage. If they did, why had they consented to its utter misapplication?

My wife was asked to resign from parish council, and we were asked to leave the parish. Like the prisoner offered the choice between the scimitar and the pistol as punishment for his refusal to denounce his faith, we were told it might be possible for us to remain in the congregation if we offered an apology to the rector and to demonstrate by our actions that the apology was genuine and heartfelt. At the conclusion of the meeting we were told by the Rector's Warden that the rector and his wife did not wish us to call them, write to them, email them, or come near their property. In the circumstances we chose to shake the dust off our sandals and leave the parish.

If at parish council meetings, offering opinions that diverge from the liberal mainstream and questioning whether it was a wise use of the time and resources of the parish to ask parish council members, at the church's expense, to rent Al Gore's polemical An
Inconvenient Truth constitutes harassment, then we stand convicted. If having the temerity to request an interview with the rector to understand what underpins his theology and standing up to the rector as he aggressively, falsely and publicly accused me of wanting to foment division within the parish is harassment, we stand convicted. If speaking out in favour of having more bible study groups in the parish, furnishing the pews with Bibles, and informing the rector he is out to lunch when he preaches a false gospel or is apostate when he shows irreverence to Christ in a sermon is harassment, we stand convicted.

Holding orthodox beliefs in the current climate and culture in our country and in the Anglican Church of Canada is highly dangerous. There is no place in most congregations for living out the kind of unity T.S. Eliot wrote about when he said, “Christendom should be one … but within that unity there should be an endless conflict between ideas - for it is only by the struggle against constantly appearing false ideas that the truth is enlarged and clarified, and in the conflict with heresy that orthodoxy is developed to meet the needs of the time.”

Conflict between ideas in the current climate in the ACC is met with the blunt hammer of false accusations, with the creation of labels depicting the faithful as schismatic, and characterizing rescue missions by orthodox primates as assaults on the authority and traditions of the Anglican Church of Canada.

Clergy like our former rector have completely subverted the purpose of their calling, which is to feed, guard and protect their sheep. Only through the study of and reflection upon God's Word revealed, and through the intervention of Grace can we be saved. Instead, the Word is hidden or misrepresented and the church's mission is described as one of reconciling God to the world, making Him relevant to our modern and enlightened world, stressing reason as the most critical factor in revealing God's purposes.

As Flannery O'Connor wrote, “the very notion of God's existence is not emotionally satisfactory anymore for great numbers of people, which does not mean that God ceases to exist---the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.” The Christian message of our sinfulness and of our dependence for salvation on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God made man, is a hard message and one that has ceased to be proclaimed in too many of our churches.

God is seen to be love, and hence we are taught that we must love one another and not judge one another, leaving that only to God. Many modern “progressive” Anglicans appear to forget that there are in fact two Great Commandments (Matt.22:30-51). Love of God is first and foremost and the second "is like unto it" but it is second. As J.I. Packer has written, love of God must be the first thing throughout our lives, and the other gods the world throws up for us such as money, work, fame, sex, power, pleasure, good causes, must not be allowed to replace the Love of God.

Hand in hand with the love of God is to be our love for our neighbour, but we must not lose sight of the ascendancy of the love of God. To love God is to surrender our desires for our own pleasures and submit them to Him, whose love for us was so great that he sent his Son to die for us.

If our experience is any indicator, it is clear with respect to its attitude toward and treatment of orthodox Anglicans, that there is no compassion, no true inclusivity, no respectfulness and no commitment to being theologically broad in the Anglican Church of Canada as it is presently constituted.

The Anglican Church of Canada like its southern sister the Episcopal Church has concluded that “the old order where spiritual control had as its final source and sanction the doctrine of grace” (2), is to be replaced with a new order. In this new paradigm “limitless choice and uninhibited self expression must of necessity progressively conclude that all things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as Nature, that we are our own creations.” (3)

This new order spawned the movement that has convinced the majority of Anglicans in Canada that the blessing of same sex unions is a justice issue and not a spiritual one. The leadership of the church has failed to defend the faithful against the encroachment of the “rights” movement so prevalent in our secular society. In doing so it has lost sight of the fact that at the individual level, justice should limit desires that are in themselves insatiable and impose upon them the law of measure. The church leaders have failed to see that the social justice movement arose because individuals lost their inner strength. Only by looking to “the hills from where does (our) help come” (4) can this strength be restored.

W.G Sebald wrote “we take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious” (5). Over the past 25 years or more our theological schools have triggered such slight inner adjustments in the hearts and minds of those who become licensed priests in the Anglican Church. The reliability of Scripture is called into question as an inexorable spread of scriptural ignorance advances even to our universities.

Deprived of the confidence that their faith should supply, these priests become insecure in the presence of those in their congregation who remind them of the need to look to Scripture as the source of God's Word. Some of them become bishops and now equipped with the ecclesiastical powers conferred upon them wreak even more havoc upon the faithful.

This havoc has created the humanly irremediable division in the Anglican Communion. What people must realize however is that this split is not caused by the same sex blessing issue, which is only a symptom of a much deeper malaise that has gripped our church and our culture.

The sooner the ecclesiastical powers follow the example of Gamaliel (6) the better. For if the plans and undertakings of those who have been labelled schismatics are of man, they will fail, but if they are of God they will not be overthrown.

Ben Buan
Mill Bay, Vancouver Island, BC


(1) Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
(2) Democracy and Leadership, Irving Babbitt
(3) First Things June/July 2004, David B. Hart
(4) Psalm 121:1
(5) Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
(6) Acts 5:33-39



... back to "For the record" main page
... back to "Documents of interest" main page
 


               

Anglican Network in Canada | Box 1013 | Burlington | ON | Canada | L7R 4L8 | Tel.: 1-866-351-2642 | Anglican Network email contact

Registered Canadian Charity Number: 861 091 981 RR 0001