Life As Performance Art 35

There is a lot of agonizing going on right now among Anglicans about how to fill our pews with the bums of the faithful. I suppose that I might have written that a bit more elegantly, but we'll go with this metaphor anyway. I have never liked this idea, nor the Come Back To Church Sundays, nor the other mission efforts of getting those backsides onto sanctified wood. Even now, at my parish church, there is at times subtle and palpable pressure for us to invite people along with us on Sundays. This is something I have simply never done, and likely never am going to do. If someone actually would like to visit church with me, well, of course I am going to make them very welcome, and also with the expectation that others in the church are also going to welcome them. But I refuse to proselytize. Not even in that subtle, insinuating, underhanded and passive-aggressive and cowardly style that is oh, so typically Anglican. Hmm...Maybe, Gentle Reader, you are already getting an idea of why I don't invite people to the Anglican Church. And, seriously, we are not all like that, at least not as individuals. In terms of the collective personality of Anglicanism and the bloated bureaucracy that runs the church, my opinions aren't quite so charitable. I will also take issue here with the bloated salaries of overpaid clergy and bishops, and should there be any wonder that they are going to piously whimper about not having enough money for the real work of the church, which involves feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and housing the homeless? But they love to overpay their clergy, since Anglicans tend to be wealthy (though some, like me, are poorer than church mice). They want their priests and bishops to be able to enjoy the quality and style of life to which the average parishioner is accustomed. So they can fill their homes with the same lovely antiques and art, so they can live in similar big lovely homes on beautifully landscaped properties, so they can enjoy the same luxury vacations and Caribbean and Mediterranean cruises, so they can dine in the same lovely and expensive restaurants. And I should be expected to invite a friend or coworker, likely as poor as I am, into that kind of ambience of wealth and privilege? To encounter the same Jesus Christ, who became very poor for us. Oh, yes, Gentle Reader, I do get it. I do really get it! There is a kind of chronic mental torpor involved here that really prevents the faithful from seeing just what they are doing to the name of the Saviour who hung naked on a cross for us. I was chatting over coffee with two of them the other day. A lovely elderly couple, West Side Gentry for years. And it was really difficult to help them wrap their heads around the concept that most of our local homeless population are indeed as local as much they are homeless. That it has been this nonsensical propaganda, likely fuelled by the BC Liberal Party when they were in power and those who voted for them, that that is why we have an epidemic of homelessness in Vancouver. Not because of international money laundering, not because of unchecked developer greed, and certainly not because of the loathsome and poor-bashing policies that they enacted in 2002 or so that kicked already vulnerable people off of social assistance and onto the pavement, thus escalating our homelessness stats by four hundred percent, and it is still getting worse. I will begin to invite people to my church, when it is clear that we really are willing to risk enough of our wealth, comfort and privilege to truly honour the Second Person of the Godhead who became poor for all of us. Until then, I will simply direct them to Jesus in whatever way they choose to conceive and embrace him. Church can come later, once they are able to fathom the hypocrisy.