From the Globe and Mail:

Michael Valpy.

The Anglican Church in Canada – once as powerful in the nation’s secular life as it was in its soul – may be only a generation away from extinction, says a just-published assessment of the church’s future.

The report, prepared for the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia, calls Canada a post-Christian society in which Anglicanism is declining faster than any other denomination. It says the church has been “moved to the far margins of public life.”

According to the report, the diocese – “like most across Canada” – is in crisis. The report repeats, without qualification or question, the results of a controversial study presented to Anglican bishops five years ago that said that at the present rate of decline – a loss of 13,000 members per year – only one Anglican would be left in Canada by 2061.

It points out that just half a century ago, 40 per cent of Vancouver Island’s population was Anglican; now the figure is 1.2 per cent. Nationally, between 1961 and 2001, the church lost 53 per cent of its membership, declining to 642,000 from 1.36 million. Between 1991 and 2001 alone, it declined by 20 per cent.

Regular attendance is declining at all Canadian Christian churches, except for the Roman Catholic Church, whose small increase is attributed to immigration.

The B.C. diocesan report tells Anglicans on Vancouver Island and the adjacent Gulf Islands – which the diocese covers – that 19 of their 54 churches should be closed, with another 11 put on death watch, and that two more should not have their priests replaced when they move on or retire.

The remaining congregations have been told to abandon their sedate, clubby Anglican culture and get their behinds off pews to evangelize in shopping malls, homes and workplaces.

“The status quo is not an option,” the report says. With a preponderance of Anglicans being 60 or older, the church is “one generation away from extinction,” it says.

“The unchurched are not coming to us. Lapsed Anglicans are not coming back in sufficient numbers.”

Two things have caught up with the Anglican Church of Canada and will be the cause of its final undoing:

1. The ACoC, as this report suggests, is beset by a clubby Anglican culture. This kept people coming back for more bazaars, rummage sales, ladies teas and church dances 50 years ago, but now there are more enticing alternatives. Telling aging congregations to get their behinds off pews to evangelize isn’t going to help much because they have no good news to tell: it has been purged by increasingly liberal and unbelieving clergy.
2. Those who contribute a substantial amount of money to the church each week are orthodox Christians who believe in giving a percentage of their income back to God. Such people have been thoroughly alienated by the ACoC’s increasingly radical anti-Christian liberalism, so they are leaving either individually or as entire parishes. Soon there will be no-one left willing to give money to the ACoC.

“The status quo is not an option” is being chanted as a remedial mantra in numerous dioceses. In truth, those shouting it the loudest are the ones most determined to continue doing more of what has brought the ACoC to its present sorry state; a contemporary application of Exodus 10:20a; perhaps.

Rowan Williams, in his Presidential Address, postulates that our Anglican troubles are caused by seeing in only two dimensions; so, put on those polarised lenses, stare at the screen, and prepare to be amazed:

Earlier I mentioned ‘three-dimensionality’.  Seeing something in three dimensions is seeing that I can’t see everything at once: what’s in front of me is not just the surface I see in this particular moment.  So seeing in three dimensions requires us to take time with what we see.

Until Rowan attempted to explain it, I thought I understood seeing in three dimensions; never mind, if Rowan is seeing that I can’t see everything at once it’s probably only because he forgot his 3D glasses. And, of course, seeing in three dimensions requires us to take time with what we see means we have to take time into consideration and see in four dimensions, which will require a tinfoil hat in addition to the 3D glasses  – see?

John Bowen has written an article about The Meeting House, why it is so successful and why Anglicans find that so irritating.

Some, of course, would think that 8,000 people showing up for worship, even in a cinema, would naturally be a good thing. What could there possibly be to criticise? Well, for a start, from an Anglican point-of-view, it is not liturgical worship. There is a lot of singing (led by a local worship band), followed by a pastoral prayer and announcements, and then a 45-minute sermon, broadcast on the big screen from the church’s headquarters in Oakville. Then we go home. So there is no liturgical shape or content to the service. Neither is the service (usually) Eucharistic. I was there once when there was a Eucharist, but it was in the last five minutes, tacked on at the end almost as an afterthought, and again with virtually no liturgical framework.

But, if we are honest, there is one thing that irritates us more than all of these combined: it is that The Meeting House is successful. Successful in attracting people—a lot of people, and a lot of young people at that—successful in holding on to (not all but many) of them, and successful in opening and filling new churches. If there is one thing that rankles with us, it is that kind of success.

He goes on to enumerate the aspects of the Meeting House that Anglican parishes might consider emulating in order to grow: use leadership gifts wisely; Christian education; home groups; rented worship space; discourage spectator Christianity; humility.

As is usually the case in this kind of analysis, two important points are missing:

1. The meeting House actually believes what it is peddling. There is no Anglican dithering about the meaning of the concepts of Resurrection, substitutionary atonement, the divinity and uniqueness of Christ, the sinfulness of man, the reality of salvation, heaven and hell. The Anglican Church of Canada has for the most part abandoned this Gospel.
2. The reason the Meeting House wants to draw in people is because of point 1, not because it wants to get bigger. The Anglican Church of Canada wants to draw in people in order to get bigger so that it can continue its middle-class social club.

In its more earnest moments the ACoC does engage in its favourite pipe-dream of immanentising the eschaton and it even hires people to help.

Rachel Jordan has some advice for Christians who believe that someone else is going to build the kingdom of God here on Earth. “There isn’t a Plan B – you’re it,” she says. “You are the people God has chosen to be his agents right here, right now.”

It still has nothing to do with the Gospel.

According to John Broadhurst, the Bishop of Fulham.

I had no idea I was participating in an experiment.  I can only assume that we in Canada were the part of the experiment devised to test how long it would take a province to collapse if the leadership were infiltrated by a large number of heretics.

Now we know.

In his Presidential Address, Rowan Williams has said something to upset just about everyone. I think he deserves credit since his seems to be such an effortless gift; others of us have to work at it.

Liberals are upset because Rowan is still not “fully including” homosexuals in the life of the Anglican church, even though he did issue a rather grovelling apology – perhaps what was missing was an obsequious Obama Bow™.

Conservatives will be upset because, among other things, he seems to think that TEC and the ACoC have exercised genuine restraint, because he jumbles together outside intervention and litigation as if they were equivalent wrongs and because he still doesn’t get it: the ACoC and TEC have become sub-Christian institutions.

Such is the problem of trying to find middle ground when there really isn’t any.  Rowan Williams might be able to thrive in the effete, refined halls of academia but he is quite incapable of leading the Anglican communion to anywhere but ruin.

Is apparently not a Photoshop creation:

The global warming debacle continues with an admission of yet another climate hoax:

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed ‘Glaciergate’ by commentators.

I suppose one good thing about all this is that it should lay to rest the absurd canard that scientists are above corruption, pristinely objective, fastidiously apolitical and immune to the myriad frailties that assail mere mortals. Scientists are just as untrustworthy as everyone else.

I remember sometime in the early 1980s John Bothwell, then Bishop of Niagara, writing an article in the – by today’s measure – much thicker Niagara Anglican denouncing the frivolity of fibre optic research, since its only application appeared to be in decorative lamps. Bothwell was, of course, almost as ignorant of technology as he was of theology, so he was quite shocked when someone pointed out that fibre optics made his phone work.

The clergy – bishops in particular – seem to be natural Luddites and so, had Bothwell heard of quantum physics, he would have had no use for it either. Today his phone probably has chips in it, so now quantum mechanics is making his phone work; and will soon make it work better:

Handheld devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm’s material that exploits a quantum physics trick.

The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied.

A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the “Quantum Tunnelling Composite”.

The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets.

In January, Japanese touch-screen maker Nissha also licensed the approach from Yorkshire-based Peratech, who make the composite material QTC.

However, as part of the licensing agreements, Peratech could not reveal the phone, gaming, and device makers that could soon be using the technology to bring pressure sensitivity to a raft of new devices.

Quantum mace

The composite works by using spiky conducting nanoparticles, similar to tiny medieval maces, dispersed evenly in a polymer.

None of these spiky balls actually touch, but the closer they get to each other, the more likely they are to undergo a quantum physics phenomenon known as tunnelling.

Tunnelling is one of several effects in quantum mechanics that defies explanation in terms of the “classical” physics that preceded it.

Simply put, quantum mechanics says that there is a tiny probability that a particle shot at a wall will pass through it in an effect known as tunnelling.

Similarly, the material that surrounds the spiky balls acts like a wall to electric current. But as the balls draw closer together, when squashed or deformed by a finger’s pressure, the probability of a charge tunnelling through increases.

The net result is that pressing harder on the material leads to a smooth increase in the current through it.

But first Canterbury:

Canada’s leading female Anglican cleric has courted controversy at a major church conference in Britain by predicting the eventual rise of a woman as archbishop of Canterbury.

“The signposts are pointing in one direction,” former Edmonton Bishop Victoria Matthews told Reuters yesterday during a global gathering of Anglican bishops at the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference. “I would be very surprised if it wasn’t accepted worldwide.”

Bishop Matthews, whose selection in February as the bishop of Christchurch, New Zealand, sparked an uproar among conservative Anglicans in that country, also shot back at Vatican officials who have complained the Church of England’s July 8 decision to begin appointing female bishops poses “a further obstacle for reconciliation” between Catholics and Anglicans.

“With the greatest respect, the Vatican has to understand the Anglican Communion is not synonymous with the Church of England,” Bishop Matthews said in the interview. “The Anglican Communion has had women in the episcopate for about 20 years. They really need to do their homework and realize that the communion is 38 provinces and not one with satellites. That is a pretty significant error.”

And here she is, prepared and ready.

I took my mother to see Titanic when it came out. As soon as the first actor spoke, I knew it was a mistake: my mother at the time was in her late 70s, but her mind was – I was going to say the equal of a 20 year old’s – when idling, the equal of the combined mental capacity of fifteen average 20 year olds concentrating hard. She liked her films to contain interesting dialogue, a commodity that had been thoroughly expunged from Titanic.

So my expectations from James Cameron’s latest attempt to turn the graphics backdrop of Far Cry 2 into a film were low. I watched it this evening and was not disappointed; my mother, were she still with us, would not have approved.

Leaving aside the inevitable demonising of the military, large corporations and industry, the lionising of noble savages in ecstatic pantheistic harmony with their computer game vegetation – all of which are irritating enough in their own right – the dialogue was so mind-numbingly trite, it make Titanic look like Proust.

For those who are interested and want to save 3 hours, the story is: nasty men want a rare mineral that is under the noble savages’ village. Nasty men try to kill noble savages to get rare mineral; some enlightened scientists and a crippled soldier help the noble savages drive out the evil humans with bows and arrows and send them back to their own planet which is not green; in fact Gaia earth is dead. Finis.

And it was very long.

Other than that, I enjoyed it from the professional perspective of marvelling at how many hours it took to render so many pixels for so little edification.