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When Jesus was baptized, a voice came from heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
Matthew 3:16.17

 Before I came to the Church of the Good Shepherd in 1997, I had served as Associate Priest at the Church of St. Augustine of Canterbury in Leaside.  The incumbent, the Rev. John Hill, had a special interest in restoring the rite of baptism.  In 1994 he published a manual entitled Into the Household of God.
            Leaside and Mount Dennis are very different neighborhoods, but nothing prepared me for the attrition of those I have baptized here, both children and adults.  Only a handful are still with us. 
            In the preface of his book John Hill wrote:

“Over the past centuries baptism has become so marginalized that its increasingly schrivelled ritual came to bear little resemblance to the symbolic vigour of its origins.”

            Here at the Good Shepherd we use the baptismal rite from the BAS, just as we did at St. Augustines’s, so we cannot blame the disappearance of those baptized here on the shrivelled ritual of the Prayer Book’s Ministration of Holy Baptism.  The problem is the decline of our church, especially in the inner city, and there is no magic answer to this problem, which  all the churches in the Central Etobicoke-Weston Conversation are facing. 
            I joined the Conversation last April in the hope of entering into a partnership with St. David’s Church, and now Bishop Poole has endorsed this initiative.  I do not know what this may lead to, but I think that when fellow Anglicans get to know each other and to discuss the problems and hopes which they share, only good things can happen. 
            In the January 21 issue of the Globe and Mail there is a piece about the diocesan consultant Simon Bell entitled, Keep the Faith or Pull the Plug?  Which troubled churches can survive and which should be put out of their misery?
            Bishop Spong has taught us the mantra “Change or Die,” but change into what?  Familiarity is said to breed contempt, and I think our eagerness to get rid of whatever is familiar in our tradition, whether the Book of Common Prayer or the King James Bible, has made us embarrassed to wear our hearts on our sleeves and to treasure the precious gifts which our tradition has given us.
            Is it not a sin against the holy spirit, as well as an act of corporate suicide, to disdain these gifts?

January 20, 2008

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