After an almost decade-long rift among Anglicans that led to a breakaway group trying and failing to gain control of a Windsor church, Rev. Robert Bennett says the diocese is ready to move on and “regrow.”
Bennett, the bishop of Huron, conducted a healing mass at St. Aidan’s on Sunday along with seven local Anglican priests.
“This is a time where we’re just celebrating hopefully a new beginning,” he said before mass. “People have to get on with things.”
I’m sorry, but I seem to have missed the part where this was a “healing Mass.” The bow was pulled, the arrow released, but now nowhere in sight.
And (this sounds a little snarky) if I were the bishop those loose circulus bands would quite distracting.
As much as I sympathize with those who exit in Canada and the US, I can’t help but think of our Lord’s urging, nay, command!, to his followers whose shirts have been taken that they hand over their jackets as well. It’s a pretty straightforward application to the situation of congregations leaving a diocese, i.e., that they should hand over the church keys and begin worshipping in the nearest school gym or storefront. What a remarkable witness it would have been if so many big congregations had done that in the first place rather than engage, or be engaged, in litigation, thus squandering loads of cash that could have been spent for the Kingdom. To paraphrase what he said to the rich young man, “Let go of all your worldly goods and follow me.”
RE: “What a remarkable witness it would have been if so many big congregations had done that in the first place rather than engage, or be engaged, in litigation, thus squandering loads of cash that could have been spent for the Kingdom.”
Since Ian+ is propagating his usual and oft-commented philosophy, I’ll propagate mine.
It is a wonderful witness to see Christians fighting for their property in the state courts against people who clearly have demonstrated that they do not believe the Gospel. The material world is important, we’re not gnostics, and far better that the visible symbols of the Christian faith not fall into the hands of those who merely ape the Christian faith in order to lure in the unsuspecting searcher.
Not only that, but those who have rejected the Christian Gospel have spent money as well — which means less money for the dying organism to spend on further fakery and facades.
When a growing organization spends money, money returns. When a dying organization spends money, money departs.
It’s all good and God bless those Canadian Anglicans who appealed to the secular courts as St. Paul once did. They are citizens, and despite how things turned out, they received far more justice and fair play in the hands of the secular authorities than in the hands of the fakers.