|
Oh, the tension. Oh, the hostility. Oh, the anxiety. Last night I attended a meeting of the Parkdale Deanery...for those of you unfamiliar with Anglican Church of Canada polity, the basic divisions of ecclesial organization tend to be parish, deanery, diocese, national church. The deanery is based on geography...in a geographically widespread diocese it's nice to be able to meet and discuss things with other parishes that actually share your situation. For instance - Parkdale is urban, part of Toronto. It's rather run-down and no longer as overwhelmingly Anglican as it once was. We have a very different situation from parishes up in tiny Buttonville. Anyhow, the Parkdale Deanery has had a bit of a chip on its shoulder lately. The current bishop of TO is seen (perhaps accurately, or perhaps as a result of poor PR) as a parish-closer. People see him as a bottom-line-only CEO who wants to eliminate small and struggling parishes. So when his subordinate bishop (an "area bishop") called a meeting about the vision for ministry in Parkdale, everyone came assuming he was going to close their parish. The bishop never said the word "close," yet people were standing up to argue against closings. A wise old Canon of the Niagara diocese taught us all about this sort of anxiety. When someone is fearful or angry at one person, they tend to shift that anxiety onto someone handy...in this case the Parkdale churches are afraid of the situation, but since none of them seem to know how to overcome the changing demographics and it all seems so impossible they displace their anxiety onto the bishops. Call it transference, call it displaced anger, whatever...it's perfect triangulation. That's a simplistic description, but it's accurate. It's what I saw in the room last night, and I think it's what stands between the Parkdale Deanery and actual progress. If we could stop pegging our anxiety on the bishops we might be able to see new ways of doing things and find that the purple shirts are actually there to help us. Or maybe they do want to close us all. Who knows? All I do know is that my own anxieties lie elsewhere, with the papers I have to write! |
