The Saddest Statement Ever Made About a Church

The Anglican Church of Canada chose to allow itself to be taken over by secular liberalism and radical feminism during the past 50 years or so and now it is dying. Here is a story on how merging dioceses is the new money-saving trend to delay closing the doors for a few more years.

Aging congregations and falling attendance may force the mergers of the dioceses of Montreal and Quebec, the Montreal Anglican reports. The diocesan newspaper said the bishops, clergy and lay leaders of the two dioceses were considering proposals that would begin a “process of discernment toward a fuller partnership as diocesan institutional churches.”

In November 2009 Bishop Barry Clarke of Montreal, Bishop Dennis Drainville of Quebec, Archdeacon Janet Griffith Johnson of Montreal, and Archdeacon Garth Bulmer of Quebec met to craft a two year “discernment process.” An agreement between the two dioceses dated Dec 17 proposed a joint committee to look into “opportunities and obstacles to partnership” between the two dioceses.

Last year Bishop Drainville told the Canadian House of Bishops his diocese was “teetering on the verge of extinction.” Of the diocese’s 82 congregations, 50 were childless and 35 congregations had an average age of 75. These graying congregations often had no more than 10 people in church on Sundays, he said. “The critical mass isn’t there, there’s no money anymore,” he said.

Between 1961 and 2001 the Anglican Church of Canada lost 53 per cent of its members, with numbers declining from 1.36 million to 642,000. The rate of decline has increased in recent years, according to an independent report given to the Canadian House of Bishops in 2006 by retired marketing expert Keith McKerracher. The church has not released detailed statistics on attendance and membership for the last ten years.

After the report’s release, McKerracher said, “My point to the bishops was: Hey listen, guys, we’re declining much faster than any other church. We’re losing 12,836 Anglicans a year. That’s 2 percent a year. If you draw a line on the graph, there’ll only be one person left in the Canadian Anglican church by 2061.”

This whole story is sad; God's judgment falls on liberalism, secularism and the embrace of immorality. But possibly the saddest sentence in the whole article is: "Of the diocese’s 82 congregations, 50 were childless and 35 congregations had an average age of 75."

Childless? My mind goes to Abraham and Sarah and to Hannah and to the immense sadness of infertile couples down through the ages. In the OT, the child symbolized the continuation of life, hope for the future and ultimately God's Messianic promise of redemption. For a Church to be childless seems like a horrible curse - a writing of "Ichabod" over the door of that house. The Ark of the LORD has been taken into captivity by the Philistines and the Glory has departed.

Now we must watch to see what the Lord will raise up to be a witness to Himself in the place of the dying, heretical, apostate Anglican Church of Canada.

The Comforting Doctrine of Hell

The problem of why God allows bad things to happen to good people is a common preoccupation of comfortable, modern Westerners. Associated with this presumption that God owes us health, wealth and comfort is a distaste for the ideas of judgment, eternal punishment and hell. For comfortable, well-off people, the idea of hell is a problem. We ask "How could a loving God eternally punish people in hell? How is that consistent with His goodness?"

On the other hand, for people who are being oppressed and killed by lawless megalomaniacs, the idea of hell takes on a different hue. For them, the problem of evil consists of wondering why the evil ones get away with it while the righteous and innocent suffer so horrendously. For people in such a situation, the idea that God is Just and though His judgment may be delayed it is nonetheless certain, is a great comfort. If we can but endure a little while, we will see the justice of the Righteous God.

The real problem of evil is why God allows evil to run rampant throughout His creation without so much as lifting a finger to stop it. The question is: "Is this a moral universe under the government of a good and wise Creator or is it the product of random chance and thus meaningless?" If there is no judgment of evil and reward of good, then this universe resembles more closely the chaotic and meaningless universe of modern materialistic Darwinism than the cosmos pictured in historic Christianity.

If there is no hell or judgment, then this life is just a meaningless succession of random events including horrifically evil ones from which God apparently is either unwilling or unable to rescue us. But the Day of Judgment is a symbol of the sovereignty of God and the ultimate meaningfulness of the creation. For those who suffer the predations of the wicked, hell is a highly comforting doctrine.

By comparison, the Marxist Utopian classless society somewhere far off in the future is just pie in the sky by and by and the Progressivist vision of an eternally improving world is utterly meaningless to me here and now.

Good Friday Sermon - 2009

Here are the sermon notes I provided for the congregation from the sermon I preached today at the Good Friday Service. I have been wrestling with issues surrounding the doctrine of penal substitution since I taught a 4000 level seminar course "God, Violence and the Atonement" a couple of years ago. I have sought to listen carefully to criticism of the penal substitutionary view of the atonement from feminist, liberal, emergent and non-Christian sources. After reading a dozen books or so books and thinking about it for about three years, I have come to a position of peace with regard to the whole issue. Penal substitution does not say everything there is to say about the meaning of the cross and it does not exhaust the teaching of the NT on the cross, but it is an indispensable element of an orthodox doctrine of the atonement. The Church must not follow the culture into oblivion, but be a sign of contradiction on this matter. Sin, judgment and atonement are of central importance in the preaching of the Gospel.

The Doctrine of the Atonement as the Basis of Christian Worship
Dr. Craig Carter - Westney Heights Baptist Church - Good Friday, 2009

Introduction - Is it possible to be “too atonement-centered?”

I. Is the Atonement Out-dated?
There are a number of Evangelicals who are wavering on the importance of the atoning death of Christ as the basis for forgiveness of the sin that separates us from God. (eg. Alan Mann, Atonement for a ‘Sinless Society’).

He argues that the post-modern self of the modern world has constructed a narrative to explain the nature of reality in which the concept of sin as breaking God’s law & thus incurring moral guilt no longer makes sense.

Mann quotes another author who says that Christians have allowed the biblical concept of sin as broken relationships to be reduced to sins, that is, to guilty thoughts, words and deeds, especially of the sexual variety. Sin has been reduced to what could be termed a “petty moralizing.” He says that we need to stop talking about: “sinners,” “guilt,” “forgiveness,” “separation,” & “judgment, and talk instead about “persons,” “relationships,” “acceptance,” & “openness to the other.”

II. Two Explanations of the Meaning of the Cross
There are two main explanations of the meaning of the cross:

1. Traditional Evangelical preaching on the cross emphasized Jesus dying in our place bearing our sins and making possible our forgiveness. (Rom. 3:22b-26)

2. Traditional liberal preaching on the cross emphasized the death of Christ as God demonstrating His love for us. (Rom. 5:8)

Now, what is confusing here is that both ways of preaching the cross are true unless the second way chooses to deny the truth inherent in the first way. And this is exactly what is happening in certain circles of the Church today.

To say that we are sinners under God's wrath does not in any way diminish God's love for us. The whole point is that it is guilty, condemned sinners that God loves, not pretty good people who deserve to be loved - or at least tolerated. The wonder of the cross is how God's wrath and love come together and how love emerges triumphant, but only because God has taken his own wrath upon himself.

III. The Rejection of the Penal-Substitutionary Doctrine of the Atonement
Many Evangelicals and many popular authors who are being read by Evangelicals today are attacking what is known as the penal-substitutionary doctrine of the atonement, eg. Steve Chalke:

“The cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse – a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith.” (The Lost Message of Jesus)

“Though the sheer bluntness of my imagery shocked some, I contend that, in truth, it represents nothing more than a stark unmasking of what I understand to be the violent, pre-Christian thinking behind the popular theory of penal substitutionary atonement.” (The Atonement Debate, 34)

Three things hang together in this debate: sin as law-breaking, moral guilt as a result of sin, and penal substitution. If you deny any one of the three, you deny them all implicitly.

IV. The Gospel is A Call to Repentance and Faith
There is mystery in the cross. We can never hope to understand it totally. But the NT does make it clear that we are sinners lost without God and without hope in the world.

The liberal, heretical version of the Gospel, as taught in Liberal Protestantism, is the so-called “gospel of inclusion.” It starts with the idea that God loves everyone as they are and so preaching the gospel means calling everyone into one big inclusive tent where they do not have to repent or change. All they have to do is celebrate their diversity, accept each other unconditionally and pat themselves on the back for being so open-minded.

· Forget sin - that is just old-fashioned mythological baggage
· Forget about guilt – there is no such thing as guilt, just guilt feelings that can gotten rid of in therapy
· Forget about repentance – that is just Fundamentalism

But the true Gospel is all about confessing our sin, repenting & believing in Christ’s atoning death as our hope.

Conclusion - The Fathers of the Church, in meditating on John 19:35, understood the water and the blood as symbols of Baptism and Eucharist. As we come to the Eucharist, (the word means "thanksgiving") we come as sinners saved by grace, as those who have been bought with a price, the precious blood of Christ shed for us. Let us truly be thankful.