laudable Practice

On this Thanksgiving Day in Canada, laudable Practice turns to an Autumn day in 1820, as - according to an 1851 account of the journey - the Rev'd John West, appointed by the Church Missionary Society, set out for the territory then known as Rupert's Land (now southern Manitoba and parts of eastern Saskatchewan): It was in the autumn of the year 1820 that a little boat of birch-rind might have been seen to leave York Fort, on the western side of Hudson's Bay and after coasting for a while along the shore, enter one of the rivers that flow from the interior. There was nothing in this circumstance to attract the attention of a casual observer - similar boats were continually arriving at, and departing from, the fort during the few bright months of summer and early autumn; this canoe was, as usual, manned by natives, and, as was frequently the case, an European gentleman was sitting at the stern. But if any of God's own people had seen that boat depart, they would have w...

At the Coronation of His Majesty the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury said this prayer over the oil with which the King was to be anointed: Blessed art thou, Sovereign God, upholding with thy grace all who are called to thy service. Thy prophets of old anointed priests and kings to serve in thy name and in the fullness of time thine only Son was anointed by the Holy Spirit to be the Christ, the Saviour and Servant of all. By the power of the same Spirit, grant that this holy oil may be for thy servant Charles a sign of joy and gladness; that as King he may know the abundance of thy grace and the power of thy mercy, and that we may be made a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for thine own possession. Is this Christian Nationalism? On Sunday 10th November this year, Remembrance Sunday, the Bishop of London will lead the nation in Christian prayer , before the Royal Family, representatives of the Government and Parliament, the Armed Forces, and ex-servicemen's organisations...

Members of the General Synod heard a debate brought by Burnley vicar Father Alex Frost, calling on the Church of England to be 'bold and ambitious' in its work to attract people from working class backgrounds to lay and ordained vocations ... He said ... "On the ground, in working class communities, there is some wonderful and outstanding work going on, that is fighting injustice, that is saving lives through foodbanks and community projects, that is educating children and standing up for the most vulnerable people in our society." Backing the debate brought by Fr Frost, the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said there were many 'inbuilt prejudices and barriers' to welcoming people from outside the Church ... "There are so many – in our system – inbuilt prejudices and barriers and cultural difficulties," he said ... Bishop Mark Tanner, Chair of the Church of England’s Ministry Development Board, welcoming the debate, emphasised that vocations wer...

It is bad enough that the Netflix drama 'Adolescence' is  driving government policy in the United Kingdom. To have it also proposed as a reason to determine the Church of England's approach to holy orders was, however, rather unexpected. The drama - note, not a documentary, despite the views of the Prime Minister - was invoked by the Area Bishop of Croydon, Dr Rosemarie Mallett, launching a campaign by the pressure group Women And The Church (WATCH) to repeal the Church of England's provisions for those opposed to the ordination of women. Most strikingly, the Bishop urged that the ordination of women should be understood as a means of pursuing a progressive agenda in the culture wars: I think in honesty we also thought that as society changed and as views became more open-minded among growing numbers of younger men and women, the culture of the Church would change like the culture of the wider society. No one really saw that there was an underlying trend even then, g...

Having offered robust critiques of advanced Anglo-catholicism and neo-Puritan Evangelicalism, William Connor Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, in his 1872 primary visitation charge , turns his attention to "a third School of thought", the liberal stream within the Church of England. He described this stream as those who declared that "if the Church is to remain established she must learn to be less dogmatic, and to put herself more in accord with the 'liberal and enlightened spirit of the age'": And though we should be as far as possible from charging all of this School of thought with aiming at these results, yet we cannot fail to see amongst them tendencies in this direction - demands, for instance, for the abolition of all doctrinal tests for admission to the ministry of our Church; complaints of the too dogmatic character of our Creeds; proposals for the admission of any one and every one, schismatic, heretic, or unbeliever to her pulpits, or to a share in ...

As Bishop Budde reached the conclusion of her sermon at the Inauguration service of prayer in the National Cathedral she said: Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy. The unborn children of our land should have their dignity recognised as those created in the image of God. Our God teaches us that we are to cherish life in the womb, for we were all once carried in our mothers' wombs. The unborn child should find welcome and compassion. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen. Of course, this was not what Bishop Budde said in her sermon. If she had said this, the adulation heaped upon her by progressives - religious...

... thriving into a new reality. Of all the phrases that might be employed to describe the situation of the contemporary Anglican Church of Canada, this is not - how can we express this charitably? - the first that comes to mind.  The phrase is found in a Covenant  (the online journal of The Living Church ) article by Emilie Smith, a priest in the ACoC, responding to David Goodhew's analysis of the woeful situation faced by Canadian Anglicanism. Goodhew, quite rightly, starkly states this is not decline. It is very much worse: First, this is not a church “in decline” or “close to collapse.” This is what collapse looks like. Ecclesial collapse includes large falls in attendance and financial woes. But these are lagging indicators. The key metrics are the numbers of those being baptized and whether a denomination has a healthy age profile, rather than one in which the bulk of congregations are of a certain age. By these indicators, ACoC has already collapsed. It is far too con...

In theological college in the late 1990s, you could have divided the student body into three groupings: those of us who looked to Rowan Williams, those who looked to John Stott, and those (a minority) who looked to Bishop John Shelby Spong. For those of who did not look to Spong, his writings and pronouncements exercised a not insignificant influence, for we often defined ourselves against his views. His recent death, therefore, brought to my mind the debates of theological college in those years, the times since then when I have invoked his name to represent a stream of theology with which I deeply disagree, and the passage of the years. The thoughts below are not intended in any way to represent a meaningful assessment of the works and thought of Bishop Spong.  They are, rather, a means of assisting me to organise my thoughts on how a Bishop and theologian with whom I profoundly disagreed, particularly on Creedal matters, helped to shape my thinking. And, now in my early 50s, the...