A brief introduction to the present (2005) situation and update on the Essentials movement.

Today, I was asked to briefly describe, assuming no prior knowledge, how we got to the present situation in the Anglican Church of Canada. In brief, we have been suspended from several of the councils of the Worldwide Anglican Communion, with the reasonable threat of expulsion because our national General Synod in 2005 voted to affirm the sanctity of same sex unions. Both our Archbishop and our two bishops spoke in opposition.

As with so many things in the Anglican Church, roots come from Victorian England, when belief and practice of Christianity in England was almost universal, and meals would seldom commence without prayer from the lowest to the highest. The Anglican Church was rediscovering monastic orders, the Pentecostal gift of tongues, increasing complexity in the communion service and both the use of modern instruments like the trombone and the ministry to the poor through the Salvation Army and the Church army.

England’s two ancient universities, Oxford and Cambridge, needless to say, came up with two different answers to the question how to distinguish what was good from what was bad in the church?. The Oxford answer was prayer and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, checked by conscience, while the Cambridge answer was that, as the bible was the word of God, nothing that was not in it should be entertained.

This is, of course, a gross generalisation, but Cambridge is the site of the clear, gospel stand of Eric Lidell and the theme of the film "Chariots of Fire". In Cambridge the gospel was well understood even when rejected.The discovers of DNA, Watson and Crich; the writers of Monty Python, John Cleese, Douglas Adams and Graham Chapman; and the spy ring that gave the communists the jet engine and the atomic bomb were all Cambridge men and the gospel they ridiculed was clearly orthodox Christianity.

But Oxford was different, and its theology colleges, as well as giving the dirtiest hockey team my father ever met in his hockey career, came up with liberal theology or thinking man’s theology. But to give the mind the authority over scripture, is to give the keys of the minivan to the ten year old. A generation that disbelieved the gospel but loved the church, its ceromonies and traditions, proved capable of seducing a few orthodox believers but utterly incapable of coverting any one to their beliefs. It is worth noting that its Oxford opponents, C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkein, came out of the language and not the theology departments.

When I came to Saskatchewan, 21 years ago I asked whether this practice had come here and was told no although it was on the coast. Research in the diocesan library showed that there had been interest in these theories in the period just after the Great War but not since. In 1994, due to the growth of liberal Christianity in the church and long before the issue of same sex unions came to the fore, the Essentials movement was established, but we have had a healthy ability to blur the edges until…

....there came the issue which divides. Should same sex unions be blessed in the church? The power of this question is that it only allows for two answers, yes or no, and no fine gradations in between. If you accepted that the bible was not the authority the answer would be yes, and if you accepted it was the authority the answer would be no, always.

Where are the homosexuals? In the cities,and in much the same circles that anglicans move in, in arts and environmental concerns, and in the care of the dying. In a large but mostly empty building, especially if most of the ethnic group it was built to serve have moved away, and particularly if you receive grants from government as a historic building, and especially if you already know the gay community through funerals or through arts activities like concerts, the pressures to conform to society are great, and only to be withstood if there are firm roots in historic Christianity. Above all, both the Anglican and the gay communities value what can only be described as "niceness" in the nicest possible way, and have sexual views and practices that mistify many and appal others.

As with the issue of residencial schools, pious platitudes about the importance of the Southern church had been made, and now were to be tested. It was obvious to almost all, on every side of the debate, that marriage/unions needed to be decided centrally, because it was clearly impossible to be married/united in Christchurch, Vancouver, but not united in Christchurch, New Zealand.Homosexuality was an important part of preChristian culture in East Africa and perceived as a major cause of AIDS. The church in Africa and Australia had largely rejected liberal Christianity, and grown to such an extent that most Anglicans now celebrate Christmas in heat rather than snow. In 1997, at the Lambeth conference, clear indications of what would be acceptable were given; now, when those lines were crossed in the big cities of North America, the rule of Grey haired white guys with English accent and education like me would be challenged.