CANADA: ORTHODOX PARISHES NERVOUS ABOUT FUTURE. CRAWLEY SAYS "GET OUT"

ORTHODOX PARISHES NERVOUS FOR THE FUTURE

re being pushed to the sides and really encouraged to leave. Frank Stirk BC CW correspondent

NORTH VANCOUVER, B.C. All that effectively prevents New Westminster bishop Michael Ingham from re-asserting control over the dissident parishes in his Anglican diocese are their orthodox priests, says Leslie Bentley, media spokesperson for the Anglican Communion in New Westminster (ACiNW).

Under this system and this bishop, our future of being able to continue on as orthodox Anglican churches is only as long as our current sitting rectors [remain in place], she warns.

Bentley believes that if any of them should resign or retire, Ingham will do exactly the same as what he is already doing in St. Martin declare an emergency and put in place priests and lay leaders who are loyal to him and his liberal theology.

It makes the rest of us nervous, she says. Bishop Ingham wouldn t let us have an orthodox minister. And even if he did, Bentley adds, it would be highly unlikely that any orthodox Anglican would want to serve under Ingham. It would be a career-destroying move. At St. Martin s, parishioners were told last month that Ingham had instructed his three bishop s wardens the lay leaders he had appointed under Canon 15 to begin the process of finding the parish a new permanent priest.

And despite the congregation having voted overwhelmingly to the contrary, the wardens also decided to resume sending the church s annual dues to the diocese.

We want to move ahead and get a wonderful new priest and the only way to do that is to go through the diocese and pay our assessments, warden Lindsay Buchanan told the Vancouver Sun.

Buchanan was one of two elected wardens that Ingham kept in place after he imposed Canon 15. Yet even she describes St. Martin a conservative parish looking for a conservative priest who would refuse to bless same-sex couples.

According to diocesan spokesman Neale Adams, Ingham is fully prepared to honour St. Martin s wishes on this issue. The bishop far from being the gay rights zealot that some have pictured him as being continues to appoint conservative priests to conservative parishes, as he feels he ought, he said in the Sun.

But as parish spokesperson Linda Taunton notes, with Canon 15 still in effect, the choice of a new priest is ultimately out of their hands.

Bishop Ingham is running the church, even though the bishop s wardens are there, she says. The wardens do look for and get direction from him. Bentley says conservative Anglicans elsewhere in Canada are naïve if they think that what is unfolding in New Westminster will never happen to them.

This is becoming a battle about whether or not there s going to be any room for orthodoxy within the Anglican Church of Canada, she says.

If the evangelicals, the Anglo-Catholics and the orthodox Anglicans can get sidelined here, it could happen anywhere. The fact is we re being pushed to the sides and really encouraged to leave.

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