The Anglican Network in Canada - a great burden lifted

[...] The 76 clergy, including four archdeacons and the three bishops, of the Anglican Network in Canada met in the first week of March for their fourth annual clergy retreat at a beautiful retreat centre just inside the USA south of Vancouver. They came from across Canada. Many had been part of the Network for just over a year. Some had joined in the last few months when their churches had voted to leave the ACoC. Had it been a painful experience? Those I spoke with said it had been just the opposite - a sense that a great burden had been lifted from their shoulders in dealing with a church that was well on the way to apostasy. It was such a new experience for them to attend a clergy retreat where they were not intimidated into silence for fear of what people might say from the front, or might say about them in response to their straightforward biblical faith.

A significant strength to this movement is St John’s Church Shaughnessy where a succession of evangelical pastors - Harry Robinson, now retired, Steve James, now a vicar in Manchester and now David Short from Australia - have not only built up a congregation of 700, but trained young people in leading churches and church plants so that many of these orthodox clergy are people who at some stage have been through St Johns. A teacher at St Johns for over 20 years has been Dr Jim Packer. While he was a great loss to Evangelical Anglicans in England when he migrated to teach in Vancouver, it can now be seen that God had his purpose in placing him at a strategic situation for when this crisis developed. Read more

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