22.ix.02.
Primate Michael
Peers and
Members of the Canadian House of Bishops
Anglican Church of Canada
600 Jarvis Street,
ON M4Y 2J6
Dear Members of
the Canadian House of Bishops,
The Situation of Holy Trinity, Vancouver,
my Parish
I write as a member since
1986 of Holy Trinity, Vancouver.
By way of introduction, and so as to demonstrate that I do not write without
authority, here is something in the way of personal details:–
I
grew up in
My
spouse, who holds five Oxbridge degrees, is a distinguished Byzantinist and a
world-famous Russianist. He has always given me unstinting academic and
spiritual support. He taught in Canadian universities for over thirty years.
For most of that time he taught in and presided over the Department which gave
Michael Peers his first degree. He has served as Rector’s Warden, Assistant
People’s Warden, and People’s Warden at Holy Trinity. Together we joined
For
my own spirituality, I cannot do better than to send you the enclosed sermon
and recent testimony.[1] I do not ask anyone to suffer with or
for Christ more than I have, or without His grace.
To turn to our more recent
record:–
I
have gone to Synod for Holy Trinity very frequently. I spoke and voted on the
then Motion 9 in 1998. It was I who asked publicly, in the midst of that
climactic debate, the framers of the motion (which was most significantly
emended at Synod itself so as to drop the allusion to “full inclusion”, alias
admission to ordination and church salaries) to explain precisely what they
meant by “blessing” and “union”. I said that I could not vote in an informed
way on something so unclear: did the Church have available, in tubs, vats etc.,
some gloppy substance called “God’s blessing”, which it could pour out at will
on things and people? What precisely constituted same-sex “union”, in respect
of both men and women? We were all promised an answer before the vote, but we
proceeded to the vote with none having been forthcoming. I have still heard
none from any Diocesan quarter.
After
that Synod I was asked by the Rector and Parish Council to pen a letter of
protest on behalf of the Parish. This I append.[2] It is
important to note that we received no reasoned response, nor were any of our
pointers apparently taken up in the subsequent Diocesan so-called study
process. My spouse and I engaged as fully as possible in that process. At this
date, and in view of the kind of claims now being made in international fora
about its thoroughness, we need to say that it greatly lacked integrity, both
intellectual and spiritual. The impression was left on untutored lay people
that Scripture was so ambiguous that the only Christian course was to do the
‘loving’ i.e. tolerant thing; tradition, from the Fathers on, was not
investigated, but seemed to have come to mean “what I and my friends think
nowadays”; and we were not permitted to apply Scripture, tradition or reason to
the thinking of the Lesbian and Gay Voices. Again I append the Holy Trinity
Questions[3] which were both invited and carefully
prepared, but effectively screened out of the actual discussion as it was
handled.
I
injected into the Process the technical paper of which I enclose a copy with
introduction.[4] Nobody ever asked me to speak to
this, or to explain more obscure points to any confused by it. I do not believe
that it ever went further than the inner group of facilitators. Nobody appears
to have noted the integrated approach to Scripture or, most central of all, the
argument about what must have been the Lord’s teaching and example. At no stage
did we at Holy Trinity hear any cogent theological argument in favour of
innovation in sex-ethics.
I
have been a co-signatory with James Packer and Don Lewis of the enclosed Open
Letter.[5] We represented respectively Doctrine,
Church History and Biblical Philology.
Last
June my spouse and I felt constrained to write to the Parish in terms of the
enclosed letter.[6]
A
fortnight ago my spouse and I proposed and seconded the second and third
motions passed at our recent vestry, and which you have in your hands. We
introduced the second as follows:–
‘Our diocesan bishop has stated
that he will not be party to balkanising the Diocese, or weakening the
Episcopate. It seems to the two of us perfectly clear that he has done both
very thoroughly, single-handed and without any help from any particular cleric
or Parish.
We now have a situation in which
what is right in one Parish is wrong in another, clergy and laity may be
disciplined for some reasons here but not there, some of us proclaim that the
Holy Spirit is “the Lord, the giver of life”, while others wish to privilege
one particular form of vice, some seek to defend young people from corruption,
while others want Christian parents to bring their growing boy or girl to their
friendly neighbourhood Anglican priest to be ‘turned’. Further afield, people
will be getting ordained in this Diocese and floating about the world whose
ordination and ministry will not be portable to the rest of the Anglican
Communion, unless you count one other Diocese in this country, and a couple in
the USA.
As for the Episcopate, it has been
weakened to the point where it has become a laughing-stock. It has lost
authority because it appears to be subject to none. Christian man shall not
live by Scripture, tradition and reason alone, but by every word which
proceedeth out of Synod Office. Clergy have been threatened on the grounds that
they wish to remain faithful to their ordination vows.
Our public witness as Anglicans
has been divided and undermined in this Diocese. The message we now deliver is
that there is an open invitation to every sexual predator, to
In effect we of Holy Trinity
shall be asking the House of Bishops to rescue us. Whether this is achieved by
retractation or by resignation I leave to the [heavenly] Management. We shall
be saying that here in New West the hungry sheep look up and are not fed, and
they [the Bishops] need to supply us with a mature pastor. We need leadership
capable of rising above the level of habitually playing the enfant terrible.
We shall be asking them whether as Anglicans we have one church in this
country, or merely a collection of autonomous Dioceses, one church worldwide,
or a patchwork of national movements. Whatever the legalities of the situation,
the House of Bishops certainly have the moral authority to act for us; and it
is hard to see how the need for such action could be more urgent than it is.
To speak personally, after a
quarter of a century of struggle, public and private, against the great evil of
the official baptising of homosexual practice in the church of Jesus Christ,
and the consequent ruinous division and scandal to outsiders, it matters
desperately to me to be able to remain in the church of my birth and baptism: I
have been battle-weary for years, and speaking like this today may well be my
last throw. Nearly 42 years ago my spouse-to-be was confirmed, having been a
Methodist. I am frankly tired of apologising to him for the spiritual abuse
which I seem nowadays to have involved him in. I need to live and die somewhere
where I see and hear that there is spiritual reality, and am taught that it is
possible to be fruitful, loving and joyful while living with many unfulfilled
desires.’
And the third motion like this:–
‘The intent of this
motion is that we should refrain from taking any decisive action until the
House of Bishops of our national church has had a chance to say or do something
with regard to the pickle that our diocese has got itself into.
There are two assumptions behind this motion.
One is that, as things stand at present, we have to choose between accepting
the “conscience clause” offered by Bishop Ingham or, on the other hand, joining
the Anglican Communion in New Westminster. And one reason for the present
Motion 3 is that the Bishops may open up a third possible course of action.
The other assumption is that the House of
Bishops will take action. There are two main reasons why they must do so. In
the first place, our diocese is deliberately contravening the Guidelines issued
by the Canadian bishops with regard to this matter in 1979 and essentially
confirmed in 1997. Michael Ingham, when he was a candidate for the bishopric,
promised that, while he would work to change these Guidelines, he would not contravene
them. He has now announced his intention of breaking that promise. Can our
bishops simply let that pass?
In the second place, both the outgoing and the
incoming Archbishops of Canterbury have recognised that the action of our
diocese has damaged the “sacramental unity” of the worldwide communion. In
fact, one does not have to be an archbishop to see that schism is being
promoted by what, during our summer travels, I was not pleased to hear called
“the diocese of
These, then, are
the reasons why our national House of Bishops can be confidently expected to do
something. I wish to propose (by Motion 3) that we at Holy Trinity do not
ourselves take any decisive action until we see what the bishops have done.’
Persistently
the baptising of what is essentially the vice of a powerful group of men has
been represented as a justice issue, the ordination of members of my own sex,
however exemplary, being used, most offensively, as a stalking-horse. I have
not held since my feminist early twenties that there was a ‘right’ to
ordination for anyone; and certainly Jesus did not hang on His Cross so that
any one of us should think it our right to live as we please. For further and
very extensive writing on this whole topic, including my long and
many-segmented Dialogue with the late Hugh Dempster of this Diocese, some may
wish to open up my Website and download material from there.
In
this Diocese and Parish we are so sorely in need of a senior pastor that I must
add this personal appeal to that of the Parish itself. It seems to me that real
bishops have a duty of care, not only to the lower clergy, but to the laity,
and not only to both these groups, but to one another. It will be wholly
inadequate for you to say to us or to the world, “Everybody’s out of step
except our Johnny!”. Will you care for Michael, so that he may care better for
us?
I am
by now very tired in every way: I need all the help I can get in fulfilling my
confirmation vow “manfully to fight under His [Christ’s] banner, against sin,
the world and the devil, and to continue Christ’s soldier and servant until my
life’s end”. Shortly before your next meeting I expect to undergo a radical
operation for renal cancer. I hope to wake up from this, and to a better
Anglican world than I have lived in for too many years. I want no detailed
answer to this long letter; a brief formal acknowledgement will suffice. The
real answer will I trust come in the form of decisive action.
“Save,
Lord, by love or fear.”
Yours respectfully,
Priscilla Turner
Dr. P.D.M. Turner, BA, MA (Cantab.), MA, DPhil (Oxon.)
Encll.
Cc.:
His Grace the Lord Archbishop of
The Wardens of Holy Trinity, Vancouver
Conference on The Issue, NWNet.org
The ACiNW