Back to the Garden

Last week, the Anglican Church of Canada was rocked by a report that the last member would leave the church by 2040. Decline in church membership is nothing new to Anglican Church of Canada. There has been a steady decline in this denomination since our apogee in 1961, decreasing from 1.2 million adherents to just over 300k today. But for a denomination that was the third largest in Canada for most of its history, it is difficult to come to terms with the news that the institution will flatline within a generation if nothing changes. Of course, this report is, at least in part, a trick of how statistical modelling works. It is unlikely that many of the young families who still call Anglicanism home will somehow disappear in the next 20 years, but given that the overall demographic of the denomination skews elderly, it is not preposterous to suppose that many parishes will be closing their doors in the coming years. As a postulant for ordination in priestly ministry, and a PhD stud...

Locus iste a Deo factus est,  inaestimabile sacramentum, irreprehensibilis est. This place was made by God, a priceless sacrament; it is without reproach. This text, set to music by Anton Bruckner in the 19th century for the dedication of a German cathedral is forever associated, in my mind, with the memory of Dr. Henry Schellenberg. I met Henry in 2010 when I auditioned to sing in the Providence University Chamber Choir. One of the first songs we learned was "Locus Iste" - a choir favourite that we would sing regularly for the rest of the time I was with the group. I love this text. It is simple, short, and elegant. I even scrawled the Latin text on the foundation of the new building that my church constructed around the end of 2014. The text names an irreducible truth about the goodness of materiality and the importance of discrete places in our lives as embodied humans and the varied relationships we have in these discrete places with God. Yet in ord...

Over a hundred years ago, Canada and the United States began setting aside large tracts of land as parks. The parks movement was largely inspired by the writings of American transcendentalist conservationists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Particularly in the work of John Muir, the “pristine, untrammelled” wilderness of the Sierra Mountains represented a cathedral of nature. A place where, due to its supposed distance from the effects of fallen humankind, shards of edenic innocence had been preserved. The first national park was created at Yellowstone in 1872. Soon there came to be a philosophical divide in this burgeoning ecological movement. Some believed, as Muir did, that the land set aside in the parks should be “preserved” for their transcendent and aesthetic, as well as their ecological value. Others believed that careful, limited resource management could be attempted within the parks including allowing grazing animals, limited forestry, and in some cases, limited mining oper...

*** Speaking of the Anglican church, this past Monday, my bishop issued an open letter on climate change. That letter began thusly: “The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently said that “As Christians we’re called to protect God's creation, and the billions of people whose lives are at risk”. Speaking about climate-related migration he said “In the past…civilisations have…risen and fallen, as a result of movements of people. What we are seeing in climate change is something that will move people on a scale that we have never dreamt of in the history of human kind." We do not all assess the scientific evidence concerning the climate crisis in the same way. But as a public leader and as your chief pastor I cannot in good conscience ask you to ignore that evidence. I am deeply troubled by the climate crisis, as a great many, perhaps as most, of you are. I know that you are gravely concerned for the suffering of millions of people already caused by climate crisis, especially...

Intro One of the many peculiar graces of my upbringing was the opportunity to grow up in a community that put a high value on reading the Bible. Now, keep in mind, I grew up in a pretty small town, and there weren’t a lot of things to do, but I remember one evening being invited over to my friend’s house where we sat around in a circle and read through the 4 gospels aloud out of a chronological bible my one friend had. Who does that kind of thing? Well, we did. You see, one of the programs our church offered was something called “Bible Quizzing,” and yes, it’s exactly as nerdy as it sounds. Essentially, we were given portions of the new testament every year that we were supposed to memorize. Every week we would learn a new chapter of the material and then every few months we would get together with teams from other churches all across the Prairies for Quiz Meets where we would be tested on our bible memorization. The “game” aspect of quizzing was sort of like “Reach for the Top.” T...

Intro I must begin tonight with a confession - I’m afraid of the book of Romans. It’s not that I dislike St. Paul or anything like that, it’s just that somewhere along the way during my theological education I got the impression that the book of Romans makes Protestants go crazy. I am and always have been, an evangelical, so my first introduction to this book was through something called the “Romans Road”  - a proselytizing tool that somebody tried and failed to teach me at various points in my youth. To be fair, as a simple bible Christian, I was frankly a little concerned by the notion that the whole gospel could be reduced to a string of verses from one book of the Bible, so I didn’t try too hard to figure out what they were talking about. When I got to Providence, I discovered more evidence that my distrust of Romans was well founded. As every good evangelical does, I entered my reactionary catholic phase, and was deeply suspicious of all things “Protestant,” so imagine ...