Read my regular column, "The various ways of Scripture," in the magazine of St. Peter and Paul's Anglican Church Ottawa:

 

 

On leaving the Anglican Church of Canada and Realigning with the Anglican Network in Canada / the Anglican Church of North America

 

Many people still ask: "Why have you made this decision to leave the Anglican Church of Canada and to join the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC) and thus the Anglican Church of North America?" I have expressed some of those reasons in my sermon "Good Shepherd / Bad Shepherds," preached at the ordination of David Robinson to the priesthood, St. Alban's Anglican Church Ottawa, June 19, 2010. The reasons have also been expressed eloquently in the words of another priest who has made the same decision, the Rev. Robert Guiness, formerly of St. Stephen's (Montreal) and Little Trinity (Toronto). Finally, it needs to be noted that other, significant voices have responded to the situation in the Anglican world and the growing liberalism that haunts the non-Catholic and Orthodox churches of the world. For example:

 

Metropolitan Hilarion: "The dialogue with liberal Anglicans is over"

"Liberal tendencies in Protestant and Anglican communities present a challenge to those Christians and churches that have remained faithful to Gospel principles in doctrine, church order and morality. ... Our Church must sever its relations with those churches and communities that trample on the principles of Christian ethics and traditional morals. Here we uphold a firm stand based on Holy Scripture." Read more: HERE.

  

Philip Rieff: Protestant liberalism and the "deathworks"

"Churchly Protestantism ... [has broken] up into small, charismatically led, mental health cults engaged in the testing of spiritual tonics for failing nerves.  ...  The theology of the Creative Person ... forms the central pillar of the huge and variegated growth we know today as Protestant theology." (The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud, 109, 114)

 

"Liberalism has turned tragedy and transgression, pagan and Christian, into the biggest con game in the Western town.  ...  My work is a counterattack upon the objective intention of the deathworks that ... are milestones on the road to a culture that does not imagine itself on any road to truth." (Sacred Order/Social Order, Volume 1: My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of Aesthetics and Authority,72, 96).   See also Rieff's Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us.

  

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Previous ministry

From 1976-1981, I worked as a French-language counselor for an evangelistic ministry in Toronto. From 1981-1986, I taught in a variety of Evangelical churches in the region of Barcelona, Spain and sought ways to support education within Spanish Evangelical churches. (That work is now being continued under the excellent leadership of Dr. Pedro Zamora, director of SEUT.) During those same years (1981-1986), I also taught at the Institute of Fundamental Theology, San Franciso de Borja (SJ), just outside of Barcelona.

 

In 1987, I was ordained a deacon in Christ's Holy Catholic Church on the feast of Pentecost (St. James Anglican Church, Kingston, Ontario), and in 1988 I was ordained a priest on Palm Sunday (Cathedral Church of St. George, Kingston, Ontario). From 1987-2007 I was honourary assistant in the parish of Saint Mark the Evangelist (Anglican) Church in the Diocese of Ottawa and from 1996-2007 was also Scholar-in-Residence there.

 

On February 24, 2008, I was appointed "St. George's Scholar" at St. George's Anglican Church (Anglican Network in Canada). On October 6, 2008, I was licensed as a priest in the Anglican Network in Canada, a member of the Anglican Church in North America, serving at St. George's. On March 1, 2011, St. George's Anglican Church Ottawa officially changed its name to St. Peter and Paul's Anglican Church Ottawa.