The Anglican diocese of Quebec is “teetering on the verge of extinction” as parish finances continue to collapse and the number of parishioners dwindles.
This doom-and-gloom message was delivered to the recent Canadian House of Bishops meeting here by Bishop Dennis Drainville, who declared that he could possibly be “the last bishop of Quebec.”
Bishop Drainville urged the House of Bishops to have a “new vision” and to look at how “old relationships and structures” can be changed to respond to the needs of the times….
Quebec will not be the only diocese to falter, he warned. “There will be many other dioceses that will fail.”
The Diocese of Quebec has the odds stacked against it. On top of the usual problems of the Anglican Church in Canada – an aging demographic, a dwindling number of worshippers, lack of funding and critical mass – it is a Christendom-era remnant of an English elite that has pretty much vanished from modern Quebec society except from certain Anglo pockets. I just wonder if when our bishops talk about a “new vision” they have in mind the Christian gospel. In those Anglican/mainstream churches I’ve seen in Canada which have a healthy demographic and growing congregations, the “new vision” is a triune gospel which preaches the supremacy of Christ the Son of God who redeems his people from sin and calls them into new life.
The Diocese of Québec is largely responsible for its own difficulties, but will undoubtedly continue to misunderstand the situation as being the result exclusively of declining Anglo demographics. That’s a reasonable explanation — after all, the younger Anglo population of Québec has been draining west for decades — but only on the surface.
The probably-fatal flaw was to align the Diocese quite publicly with a totally unrealistic Anglo political movement at least two generations out of date; a movement hearkening back to the 1920s when Anglos more of less ran things in Québec.
They did this during the first Sovereignty Referendum in the spring of 1980 and went so far as to “most strongly urge” every Anglican parish to hold an Anglo-patriotic rally (masquerading as a worship service) for the ‘No’ side shortly before the vote.
The Diocese of Québec actively rejected outreach to the French-speaking majority, taking the position that “these aren’t our people.” Twenty years ago the Diocese did not even have prayer books available in French, and the few clergy who wished to do anything in the language had to use the French edition of the [i]American[/i] BCP.
Most unfortunately, all this unfolded at a time when many Québecois had left Rome and were hungering for something much more evangelical. That need was eventually met by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but the Anglicans could easily have been the ones had they directed their effort towards evangelism instead of anachronistic ethnic politics.
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
I understand that even the RC church in Quebec considers itself to now been in need of re-missioning given the large numbers of RCs that no longer attend church. I don’t find it at all surprising that the Anglicans there would be having similar, if not greater difficulties.
Sowing, reaping, etc…
The RC church in Québec was a particularly special case, having been entrained quite closely with the entire [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Duplessis]Duplessis ‘dictatorship'[/url] characterised as it was by the padlocking of uncooperative businesses, the use of troops to quell union actions, and so on. Once people threw off the RC church and its oppression — priests were called [i]corneils noirs[/i] … black crows — they could not run far enough, fast enough.
The Anglican Church in Québec had a fantastic opportunity for more than a generation, and they squandered it completely.