Father C. Says It Ain’t So. (Part 1)

In the comments to yesterday’s post someone thoughtfully posted a link to a very silly newsletter published by someone in Wisconsin who’s clearly spent waaayyyy too long trapped in their cabin this past winter.

Now I realize we do indeed find ourselves in alarming times, but let's not forget that in any other spiritual climate people would be as dismissive of the claims in this amusing tract as folks were when little Jimmy Dees ran off to found his Anglican Orthodox church in 1967. Sure, this earth-shaking event may have led to the foundation of world-famous one-parish ministry in Fiji - but let’s face it: you’ve probably never lost sleep worrying that this astonishingly renowned movement of the Spirit is going destroy the church into which you were called. Nor, I dare say, you haven’t given the Church of England (Continuing) any thought since the fuss at their inception in 1994. Still, don’t feel bad about it; despite their catchy name nobody else has either. Meanwhile let’s not forget the tremendous ramifications of the Free of Church of England’s departure in 1844. Although that’s probably been a little harder to appreciate given their own internal division – the The Evangelical Connexion
of the Free Church of England otherwise called The Reformed Episcopal Church (try squeezing that into the little space after “Religion” next time there’s a census). Nor have we considered 1783, when The Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion left. And no, that's not somewhere frequented by upper-class English politicians craving to be spanked by matrons in pantaloons; it's a church, and its founders once thought it would soon supersede the apostate abomination of Anglicanism from which loyalty to the truths of Scripture forced them to depart.

My dear sinners, these cataclysmic departures in the Anglicanism’s past not withstanding, if nothing else I ever teach you penetrates the miasma of your spirit, then at least may this gem of truth bring a sparkle to the darkness of your ignorance: there may well one day be a 39th Province, but it’s not going to be North America, and it’s never going to be presided over by little layman Bobby Duncan.

Not now, not soon, not ever.

Certainly countless enthusiastic types who really shouldn’t be allowed near desktop-publishing software will produce mountains of .pdf files to the contrary, in which they will make ever-increasingly fabulous claims about their “Primate-elect” being on the brink of Lambeth recognition, but let me once again assure you: they're wasting their time.

How do I know this, I hear you ask? The short answer, which I give to my parishioners, is that God told me. Yet for you, my beloved virtual-Catechists, I intend to spend the next few days explaining my reasons in more detail – after all, do you think if God really did tell me the future I’d waste my time pestering Him about the Communion when He could save me the hours I have to spend each week studying the form guide and doping horses?

I’m Father Christian and I teach the Bible.