Rector’s Annual Report, 2019
Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2019 (in pdf format).
The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2018 can be accessed via this page.
Rector’s Annual Report for 2019
February 9th, 2020
“Go ye also into the vineyard”
The transitions from one season of the Church Year to another and even from one Sunday to the next are intriguing and instructive. They remind us of the necessity of the patterns and rhythms that belong to spiritual life and to the importance of regular worship, week in and week out. That sense of regularity and commitment has often been a challenge and a problem for the institutional churches, particularly in our rural parishes but also in our towns and cities. At issue is any sense of clarity and commitment to what the Church is and teaches. It remains the principal problem with respect to church attendance and, consequently, to the very existence of the institutional church in the form of parishes and dioceses.
For more than fifty years, parishes and dioceses have had to deal not only with that challenge but with a more modern problem, the re-defining of the churches as franchises of a centralized bureaucracy both at the diocesan level and in terms of the national churches. This ‘model’ replaces the idea of doctrinal unity grounded in the teachings embodied in liturgy and worship with conformity, first, to the ever-changing mantras and agendas of technocratic culture, and, secondly, to the excessive burdens of a form of taxation that support centralized bureaucracies at the expense of the very existence of parishes themselves. Salvation by allotment alone is simply death by parochial suicide. In other words, faith is defined more in terms of belonging to the institutional structures and the finances required to maintain them than to the principles of Faith belonging to our history and theology. Belonging trumps believing.
While recognizing that polity – the order of the Church – is part of Christian identity since the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” is an article of Faith, the fatal subordination of parishes to the unrelenting financial demands of the centralized bureaucracies of the diocesan and national churches results in the unsurprising yet demoralizing collapse of Parishes and, by extension and consequence, to the diocesan and national structures themselves. This faux corporate model imitates the secular corporate culture of big business (i.e. Bishops as CEOs) but the model betrays the corporate life of faith centered on worship and service. And it is, quite simply, unsustainable. Having bled the Parishes to death, it is not surprising that the national church now forecasts that not much will be left of the Anglican Church by 2040. It is, sadly, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Needless to say, at Christ Church we remain committed to the principles of the Faith that belong to our corporate identity as “an integral portion of the One Body of Christ” united “in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” expressed so wonderfully in the Solemn Declaration of 1893 which references clearly the Scriptures, the Creeds, and the “undisputed Ecumenical Councils” as the ground and basis of doctrine and spiritual life. That includes as well our commitment to ‘Bishops’ and to the diocese and the national churches even in their confusions, knowing that “they may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God,” as Article XXI of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion pertinently puts it. In short, we recognize not the infallibility of the Church in its polity and structures but its fallibility, “wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture” (Art. XXI, BCP, p. 707).
As such we have tried to be faithful to what properly belongs to our corporate life without compromising the existence of the Parish to the demands of the diocesan and national churches and their agendas. What the Church is and teaches is not found in the pronouncements of Bishops and Synods both of which are properly subject to those same principles of the Faith that have been received in our Anglican polity.
