Monday morning, May 25, a trial begins that will make history in Canada with reverberations for the worldwide Anglican Communion. Four Anglican congregations here in the Vancouver area have petitioned the Supreme Court of British Columbia to rule on who are and who aren’t the genuine trustees of their buildings and property.
Now, I doubt this will really have that great a ripple effect on the Anglican Communion as a whole; while this is a new thing for Canada, it’s been going on for a while in the US, where Episcopal congregations have been seceding left, right and sideways for years now. Still, it’s a very big deal for Canada, indeed, and it will be very interesting to see how it plays out.
Why have they done so? They have done so because their bishop, Michael Ingham, has told them as clergy and as congregations that he wants them to obey him and the local synod or get out. Obey on what? Well, depending on whom you ask, that’s a matter that is either simple or complicated. You can read what the main dissenting church says about the matter here, and read what the diocesan authorities say here (about same-sex blessings, the precipitating factor) and here (on the court case).
The church Dr. Stackhouse references is St. John’s Shaughnessy, which was the home church for a fair number of folks I knew during my time at Regent; it’s a significant church as Vancouver churches go. It’s also staunchly orthodox and (in my knowledge of it) gospel-centered, which is why so many folks I knew attended there, including Dr. J. I. Packer and at least one Presbyterian minister.
The headlines on this one will no doubt focus on homosexuality, but the issues run a lot broader and deeper. For one thing, the problems with Bishop Ingham’s theology are far broader than one issue, as St. John’s statement points out:
The core issue is a deeply profound theological difference in the understanding and interpretation of scripture and what it means to be “Anglican”. It is clear that the Diocesan leadership [i.e., the bishop and his minions] no longer believes, adheres to and or seeks to preserve the core doctrines of the Anglican Christian faith, such as the uniqueness of Jesus, the physical resurrection, and the authority of Scripture, or the accepted teachings of the Anglican Communion.
For another, this isn’t just about Bishop Ingham’s theology, but also about the bishop himself. As St. John’s notes, the four churches that have gone to court have done so not on their own initiative but in defense against the rapacity of the diocese.
Over the last ten years, the leadership of St. John’s has been working through local, national and international processes to resolve this issue. There has been no resolution that would keep St. John’s in communion with the world wide Anglican Church for this generation and the next. We have sought mediated solutions but none has proved successful. In August 2008, after the Diocese of New Westminster sought to seize the property and replace the clergy and trustees at St. Matthew’s Abbotsford and St. Matthias & St. Luke, the trustees of these churches, along with St. John’s Shaughnessy and Church of the Good Shepherd, were forced to go to the courts for clarification. This decision, as with all the decisions related to this matter in the last 10 years, was done after much prayer and the reviewing of alternatives. It was not done in haste.
Anyone who’s paid attention to the way in which Bishop Ingham runs the Diocese of New Westminster will be unsurprised by this. I had a number of friends at Regent who were trying to work their way through the Anglican ordination process, and the bishop was a problem for all of them—not just for reasons of differing theology, though that certainly didn’t help, but also due to the way he treated people. He showed, let’s just say, a very high sense of his own position and the dignities due him as a consequence; I also got the impression that he was a real micromanager and very controlling, though I can’t say that with certainty. He is certainlynot one to respond to disagreement with grace, as those who disagree with him have discovered.