The Guardian has published several letters in response to the article by Simon Jenkins that I linked to a week ago.
Saving churches from decay should be a national responsibility
“Readers take issue with an article by Simon Jenkins in which he suggests that local authorities should step in to fund churches”
Kirk Petersen The Living Church GAFCON Meeting Could Reshape the Anglican Communion
Helen King sharedconversations Revenge of the Sticky Notes
I agree with the letter that pubs have a similar claim for support as churches. Many country pubs are centuries old and provide a valuable meeting point.
Whether one agrees or not with that sentiment, I think the argument is fatal to any proposal that CofE churches alone should benefit from local authority support.
Thank you, Kate, and I’ll lift a pint (half liter?) to that comment about the function of pubs as well.
From Petersen’s article:
“The Church of England is listed as the largest province, with 26 million members, ahead of the Church of Nigeria with 18 million. But the Church of England statistics include millions of people who were baptized into the state religion but who rarely if ever attend services.”
Why not make the same distinction with Nigeria (or any other GAFCON) province? How many of its 18 million presumed members attend services regularly, if at all?
It is my understanding that Nigerians can “belong” to more than one parish; therefore that individual is counted twice.
Africa is a real mess statistically difficult to understand. Once a then young doctor whom volunteered for an RC Mission in Mozambique told me that it was common practice there for certain individuals to be simultaneously part of the Roman Church, the Muslim community and some sort of Protestantism, including some Anglicans!… Why? Because that way they’d to receive food from each denomination’s Missionaries at a given day: Muslim at Friday, Catholic at Saturday afternoon and Protestant at Sunday morning for example. Unique condition: To attend a religious service led by the Mission’s leader of that faith at the day… Read more »
I don’t know about Mozambique, but it’s impossible to know with any precision how many people live in Nigeria (without a census for many years), let alone how many of these identify as Anglican. The 18 million is highly unlikely, an exaggerated claim pulled out of the air as far as I can tell. The only evidence that is ever given for it is the World Christian Encyclopaedia/Database figures, but their figures are themselves based on unevidenced (and rather round) numbers provided by The Church of Nigeria. Best evidence (using a variety of general population surveys) suggests that those identifying with… Read more »
I have only skimmed the overly long article from The Living Church. It appears to be another chronicle about sex, schism, and sin. One may conclude that in The Anglican Communion the mortal sin of the former outweighs by far the more venial sin of the latter. It occurs to me that conservative Christians in western liberal democracies have made and continue to make, by way of a negative social feed back loop, a great contribution to the advancement of GLBTQ2S rights. By harping on certain forms of sexual expression as a ‘sin’ and one ‘against nature’, while unable to… Read more »
‘in Canada the ACNA crowd could meet in your proverbial phone booth.’
Christ the King church here in Edmonton definitely would not fit into any phone booth I’ve ever seen. They might even be too big for a metaphorical phone booth.
Could they fit in a Tardis? Lol. The ACNA-Anglican Network in Canada group here, the only one in Nova Scotia, meets in one of the tiny old redundant buildings we sold them. Last I heard, the only one in the neighboring diocese of Fredericton meets in a restaurant. I’m standing by my point about their cultural influence. Besides, what would Jesus do but engage in a little hyperbole to make a point.
Communion Partner Bishops who signed the 29 March statement agreeing with the GSFA: The Rt. Rev. Lloyd Allen Bishop of Honduras The Rt. Rev. Stephen Andrews Principal of Wycliffe College The Rt. Rev. John Bauerschmidt Bishop of Tennessee The Rt. Rev. Gregory O. Brewer Bishop of Central Florida The Rt. Rev. Brian K. Burgess Bishop of Springfield The Rt. Rev. David Greenwood Bishop of Athabasca The Rt. Rev. Michael Hawkins Bishop of Saskatchewan The Rt. Rev. Fraser Lawton Assistant Bishop of Dallas The Rt. Rev. Lucy Netser Bishop Suffragan of the Arctic The Rt. Rev. Moises Quezada Mota Bishop of… Read more »
https://communionpartners.org/communion-partner-response-to-church-of-england-decision-march-29-2023/
Usual episcopal suspects from Canada. I’m surprised there are not a few more. There are other voices in The Communion. “Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, released a statement Jan. 20 affirming the dignity of LGBTQ+ people and their place in the church after a controversial recommendation by Church of England bishops on same-sex marriage. ”
https://anglicanjournal.com/primate-affirms-dignity-of-lgbtq-people-after-church-of-england-marriage-report/
Yes, but this is irrelevant, as we were discussing the ACNA, not the communion partners.
BTW, Fraser Lawton (who is an old friend of mine and preached at my induction at St. Margaret’s in 2000, long before he was bishop of Athabasca) is now serving as a parish priest in Dallas. Also, Michael Hawkins is about to step down as Bishop of Saskatchewan due to his continued struggles with long Covid.
That’s a bit brusque.
The entire point was that focusing on ACNA misunderstands the scope of the conservative group siding with GSFA.
Yes, I know your BTW. My wife is from Dallas and I was Canon Theologian there. George Sumner is an old Yale friend, the present Diocesan. Stephen Andrews is the Head where I am I Senior Research Professor.
How this group will fare in the context of present struggles is more up in the air given global Anglican shifts.
May God bless you and bring Easter joy.
Why is it brusque? The discussion was about the size of ACNA. Presumably the communion partners are not part of ACNA.
And I apologise if I presumed you were from somewhere else and had no knowledge of Canada, but really, pseudonyms don’t help.
Maybe wise not to presume.
The discussion is not about ACNA only. It is about GAFCON. It is about GSFA.
Have a peaceful day.
OK, I’m done here. My comment to which you were responding was a reply to Rod Gillis concerning ACNA. Rod and I were not talking about any wider conservative groupings. You chose to divert our conversation.
‘Maybe wise not to presume.’ May also be more helpful to be more specific about your identity than simply ‘Anglican Priest’.
Stepping out now.
Tim, if you click on the ‘about tab’ on their website from Simon Sarmiento’s link, you will read that they are members of The Anglican Communion. They are supporters of the Anglican Covenant and dogmatically opposed to same sex marriage. ‘Anglican Priest’, our American friend at Wycliffe, has opined about both positions here at TA for a long time. No conversation like the present to put them in the window. ‘Communion Partners’ are so well known that I’d never heard of them until yesterday’s posts here. The position of the Canadian signatories, however, is well known and nothing new. Lots… Read more »
Thank you Rod and Tim. The whole notion of ‘Communion Partners’ is a quite ridiculous one. It is deliberately chosen as a title to suggest that other Bishops in ECUSA are not communion partners. Anglican Priest, aka Christopher Seitz, has indeed opined that the Covenant is the only way forward. I asked a question of the Archbishop of Canterbury at General Synod some years ago after a Primates meeting and he confirmed that the thing was dead. The whole aim of ACNA, GAFCON and GSFA is to exclude from the Communion those who are not considered orthodox on a single… Read more »
‘Anglican Priest, aka Christopher Seitz’
Ah – so that’s who he is!!!
These kinds of arrangements are bit of a public posturing gimmick. ‘Communion Partners’ has a grandiose flare to it, no? Like Anglican Church of North America, or docs with names like ‘Jerusalem Declaration’. Has a codicil been added to the Book of Acts? Lol. Common practice for lobby groups to over inflate their hand. I try not confuse a phalange of clergymen with the finger of God.
I know who the communion partners are. I do not, however, know who ‘Anglican Priest’ is, and apparently, in his/her mind, I am responsible for that ignorance, not him/her.
Rhetorical criticism of his posts was a dead give away, even before the biography. Nothing like a game of clue, eh?
So much stress and strain.
my unreserved apologies to the Rod, Tim, Andrew trio.
easter joy He is Risen!
Christopher Seitz
I thought you’d stopped your ACNA apologetics here years ago!
I am in TEC and PTO in the CofE. The ACI opposed the logic of ACNA. The paper trail is long. That was a decade ago.
We were on the side of GSFA and also the Communion Partner movement.
Just so the record is clear.
Have a great day Jo B.
Oh, my God, forget those on ACNA!… They’re a somewhat 20 years old Church and their website is stating on their main page they have a team investigating one of their Bishops whom, no matter the strange Ecclesial words there, is being fired!… Again: Some 10 years ago they claimed 150k adherents in 1500 Parishes, then they claimed 135k on 1350 Parishes; now it is 122k in 974 Parishes! They’re slowly growing as some of them say in the social media!… Notable growth!… I imagine the current state of the art on the Episcopal Church if they have followed those… Read more »
Thanks. The point at the tail end of my original comment was to put ACNA in perspective in Canada, countering their rather grandiose claim to be ‘continent wide’ with the admittedly sarcastic phone booth turn of phrase. The Living Church article references an ACNA membership of 122,000 in three countries. However they have only one diocese in Canada, styled the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC). ANiC claims only 88 parishes in the entire country of Canada with a membership of 5,500 and claimed average Sunday attendance of 2400 (twenty four hundred) nationally. In the area bounded by my entire diocese,… Read more »
ACNA is very tight-lipped about their numbers. What %age of female priests? Apparently they don’t keep data on that. How many parishes have female rectors? No one knows. Did they grow or shrink during Covid? No one was counting. Are women being ordained to the priesthood? Never any reporting about ordinations. Youngsters and teens? No idea how many. Lots of bishops, to be sure.
I sense that the initial onslaught of defectors from TEC beefed up ACNA numbers initially. That flight is over. They seem to have an endless supply of money. I wonder where that is coming from.
Right. Far as I can tell, despite pretentious claims about ‘North America’, ACNA is largely a U.S. show, funding included. Numbers are indeed hard to come by. Those I referenced, the only ones I could find, I got from Wikipedia (link). Scroll down to ANiC which is their diocese in Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dioceses_of_the_Anglican_Church_in_North_America
The numbers I referenced for the Anglican Church of Canada are the most recent available from National Office updated to Dec. 2019 , so pre-pandemic.
https://www.anglican.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017-ACC-Stats.pdf
I will always remain in full communion with the Canadian Church.
Blessings Rod! I am now in Southeast Mexico.
Thanks. I recall we had a chance to meet in person a few years ago at the funeral for Archdeacon Weldon Smith, at St. Mary’s in Glace Bay–the home parish for both Weldon and I. Weldon was my archdeacon when I went to my first parish of Neil’s Harbour. He was a great friend and support during my time later as Archdeacon of Cape Breton and rector of St. John’s, North Sydney where you would later be rector. I hope all goes well for you in Mexico. The local church here is constantly challenged by demographic decline at every index.… Read more »
It seems odd that GAFCON should choose white men to lead them, it would be fascinating to understand the groupthink there.
The article in the Guardian is the real crisis in the CofE, with most of those communities far removed from the endless social media inspired church politics. What is the real answer to a collection of dying buildings and dwindling Christian communities? How are the dioceses to fund them and honestly do they even want to?
Yes indeed. However, the dioceses (DBFs) are separate trusts from the PCCs. The trustees of the DBFs have no fiduciary or other responsibility to the PCCs, which are supposed to fund themselves. The trustees of the DBFs do, however, have a fiduciary obligation to maximise the assets of the DBF (circumstances permitting). It can therefore be seen at once that the interests of the trustees of the PCCs and the interests of the trustees are misaligned, if not in conflict. Likewise, the trustees of the Church Commissioners are only obliged to cover the pay and rations of the bishops and… Read more »
Sorry, that should read “It can therefore be seen at once that the interests of the the PCCs and the interests of the DBFs are misaligned, if not in conflict.” The other thing I should add is that the bishops are paid by the Commissioners. When consecrated, they promise on oath to “profess and promise all due reverence and obedience” to the relevant archbishop. They also promise to “correct and punish” malfeasance within their diocese. Crucially, however, they do not promise to care for their diocese or its constituent parishes. As trustees or directors of the applicable DBF, they have… Read more »
It’s not just the lack of a viable congregation but also a lack of clergy willing to work in parishes. I was speaking to the patron of a prestigious parish on the edge of the Cotswolds that is on its fourth advertisement for a new incumbent with no applications forthcoming. There are many factors at play in the CofE’s state of entropy.
Thank you, Froghole. for the benefit of those of us who are a bit dim, might you be able to link to your alternative, please?
I am thousands of kilometers from the UK and its decaying buildings from a wide variety of backgrounds that are in serious need of repair lest they be lost. I appreciated the letter writers to The Guardian that it’s all fine and dandy to ask for local governments to support repairing churches, but the local governments already have their own financial issues and competing local structures to support. Old pubs were mentioned, which if I may say so, are at least as great as being local meeting-places and social institutions as churches, and a little ethyl alcohol has probably enhanced… Read more »
The letter writers to the Guardian don’t say anything of the sort. You are confusing the views of Simon Jenkins, a journalist and writer with a special interest and indeed a love of England’s churches and cathedrals, but himself an avowed atheist. Paradoxically he has written extensively about both, his best-seller book “England’s one thousand best churches” being an example. It’s a complex subject and no one can possibly seriously suggest that local authorities should assume responsibility for England’s priceless mediaeval churches – there are thousands of them! – and not solely for financial reasons. As Froghole has pointed out… Read more »
I quoted directly from the first letter in the Guardian letters:
“There will be no voluntary ‘church tax’. Saving the nation’s heritage is a national responsibility.”
The language in our government system doesn’t equate to yours. Local government in England would mean State or even County in the US. National would mean the Federal Central Government. Put very simply, ‘national’ has almost the opposite meaning to ‘local’! So that letter writer was, as I quoted, making exactly the same point as Froghole.
Many thanks for this. One of the leitmotifs of Jenkins’s journalistic career has been that centralisation is a Bad Thing, and that subsidiarity is a Good Thing. He presumably drank deep from the quaint well of E. F. Schumacher’s thinking in the 1970s. Therefore, pressing the liability for parish churches onto parish councils must, ergo, be a Good Thing. He has repeatedly railed, perhaps with some justice, against the fiscal corset which central government imposes upon local authorities, and yet when I challenged him verbally in conversation about the future of parish churches, he appeared to be quite defensive about… Read more »
“…considering the United Kingdom is becoming more and more secular, saving church structures, unless local people come up with a creative secular use, may be way down the list.” Locally, a major United Methodist congregation has sold their (very large) building to a group of local citizens who operate it as a “civic center”, with the space used for weekly meetings for clubs and organizations like AA. Part of the structure is rented permanently to a community theater (and has been since before the church sold the building) and others are used as rehearsal and concert space (Including the former… Read more »
“GSFA, which has not previously held global meetings on the scale of GAFCON, is preparing “for our first GSFA Assembly under our Covenantal Structure (Cairo, 2019), which will be from 28th-31st May 2024 in Cairo.”
I continue to be curious about this. What are the GSFA doing inventing a Covenantal Structure when the Anglican Communion as a majority has been clear that they are not satisfied with a Covenant – or at least any draft that has so far been produced?
Clearly this is just one more indication that GSFA has no intention to try to resolve its differences with the rest of the Anglican Communion and will, in the end, go its own way.
More to the point, I think all these international conferences are far more about the importance of the church and those attending than the glorification of God. I include Lambeth Conference in that.
Kate. I attended the Lambeth conference and despite some of the painful struggles in it I honestly found it the most extraordinary experiences of the church of Christ I will ever have. So I really struggle with your comment here.
All the “conferences” are about pretending to be Roman Catholic. The Lambeth one just the friendlier face than GAFCON, but both labour under the misguided belief that Anglicanism today operates as a “Communion” and decisions can be made to bind all members. The only positive in GAFCON is that at least it’s honest in trying to insist on agreed theology, it has however failed to do this.
One of the things I really struggle with here on TA is the sweeping statements, especially the statements of judgement, that try to make reality out to be far more black and white than it actually is. Are human beings flawed? Yes, they are. Are Christians included in that? Yes, they are. Does that mean that those Christians aren’t also sincerely trying to glorify God in their daily lives? I don’t believe so.
Me too, Tim C. I’ve been guilty myself in times past of sweeping statement disease and I regret that. I have no excuse though I can offer a reason (one of several doubtless). Before I retired a parishioner though not a churchgoer came to collect a copy of her marriage certificate and in the course of conversation told me that it had taken her about seven years for the anger at her son’s death to begin to dissipate. That is my ongoing experience since our catastrophe in 2015. As always we display so much of our trials through what we… Read more »
So, taking the GAFCON statements as primary evidence, what in there do you think shows that the primary purpose is the glorification of the Lord and not church politics?
I have nothing to say about GAFCON. But I have dear friends who were at Lambeth, and I think it’s a slander to claim that they were there for self-glorification and church politics. You don’t have a window into their hearts. Aslan doesn’t tell us other people’s stories.
You are putting words into my mouth. I said nothing about individual attendees, I spoke of the esse of the conference itself and I think that unarguably was political in nature.
I wasn’t a participant at the conference and as far as I know, neither were you. My information about it is from people who were participants at the conference. Yours?
Listening in to a bit of GAFCON/ Kigali I am saddened at the bitter invective towards +Justin and the C of E. I can see little chance of reconciliation.
Yes. Reconciliation is not on their agenda.
What majority has rejected the covenant? I’d be curious of your assertion. Perhaps you mean, “when the CofE did not approve a covenant, and Rowan Williams stepped down, a good number of provinces did not go through a process of evaluation.”
The GSFA isn’t inventing a process so much as continuing one and seeing whether it is viable in the light of the present circumstances. This includes the ABC stating he would like to see what the mind of the provinces/primates is in respect of his role. I suspect his personal position is quite close to that of the GSFA.
Deciding not to continue a process is tantamount to rejecting it.
Having watched Justin Welby at the 2017 General Synod and seeing his response to the Inclusive Church meeting immediately before it, I suspect the personal position of Justin Welby is a great deal closer to the ECUSA than it is to the GSFA. His statements at the Lambeth Conference last year would also suggest the same.
I should add that the letters page from the Guardian features very aptly a photograph of the church of St Peter at Great Birch, Essex. There lies a very, very protracted tale: http://www.birchandlayer.org.uk/birchchurch/ The church is in an area which was afflicted by earthquake in 1884, and by recurrent subsidence issues. It is this which caused the loss of Langenhoe (now a vacant space amongst trees, though accessible) and Virley (now part of a private garden), and the closure last year of the charming church of Little Wigborough. It also caused the loss of the old church at Layer Breton,… Read more »