A continuation of this interview.

David: My Christian background is one of charismatic Anglicanism. During the late 70s and early 80s when some parishes were experiencing renewal, the Holy Spirit was given a lot of attention. During that period our diocese and national church never mentioned the Holy Spirit. Now you don’t hear 2 sentences without someone saying “the Spirit is leading us to….” or “the Spirit is working in…..”. Is this the same Spirit?

Bishop William: (laughs) Well, yes. If you take that point one step further, the challenge for the Canadian church is this: are we so spiritually arrogant, that we would say, we here in Canada, as Anglicans, who are a tiny minority within the Anglican Communion and an even tinier minority within worldwide Christendom, are we so spiritually arrogant that we think the Holy Spirit is only speaking to us, but is not speaking to the rest of the Anglican family and to Roman Catholics and to orthodox Christians? If the Spirit’s speaking, I’m pretty sure he’s speaking to all of us. It takes humility to be able to say, I’m not at the centre of the universe. That’s why St. Paul cautions to test the spirits, because people can confuse what they emotionally want, they can confuse that with the Holy Spirit – and you can’t argue, because the Holy Spirit is calling me to do that.

David: Katherine Jefferts-Schori’s Pentecost letter said “we’re hearing different messages from the Spirit”; it strikes me that you can’t hear different messages: you may be mishearing, but there are no different messages.

Bishop William: I would say there aren’t.

David: You may not want to answer this. I dug some ASA number out from various places: in 1961 there were about 1.2 million people attending, in 2001, 625,000 and, there is no official figure for 2009, but there was an article in the Journal that said in 2009, the number of people attending church more than twice a month had fallen to 325,000. Is the Anglican Church of Canada going to survive?

Bishop William: This is something I’ve thought about a lot. I don’t think we’re going to survive unless we start dealing seriously with why that decline is happening and we’ve done a very good job of ducking that issue. We haven’t really taken a hard look at what’s causing it, instead we try to react to it. I’ve had 20 years in the civil service when working as a non-stipendiary priest, and one of the things that I learned is that when people are faced with a problem, they very often jump to solutions without stopping and really ensuring they understand what the nature of the problem is.

I hear some echoes of that here. When I joined the church, back in the 60s, already people were seeing the beginning of decline.   The cry was, “there are no young people in the parishes” and right away the jump was, if we update the prayer book, they’ll come; if we have a new hymn book, they’ll come. So those became huge issues. Then it was, if we ordain women – those things may all have been good, but they missed the point as to why people were starting to drift away. The church, at that point, was already starting to lose its focus in terms of theologically engaging society on a variety of moral issues.

Now we’re in an even worse space and what do we hear talked about here: we need a new prayer book because the BAS rites are stale, they’re out of date. There is some magical thinking going on that, if we do that, it’s going to solve the problem. It’ll only solve the problem if that’s the reason people aren’t coming – and I don’t think that’s the reason they aren’t coming. Our message is confused, we are not teaching people, we’re not giving them something substantive, and we’re not teaching the people who still are there how to engage, how to share their faith. It’s become too unfocussed.

David: So it’s not going to survive unless we see some radical changes to address the real problem.

Bishop William: Yes. All the governance change that’s being talked about, it’s not going to make a difference. In fact, I think, quite the contrary, I think it’s going to hasten the decline: if you have three years in a diocese that doesn’t have a seat at the table in COGS, people are pretty quickly going to say, “We’ve been disenfranchised. Why do we want to support this organisation?” all the rationale in the world is not going to counter that.

David: One of the things that liberals are inclined to believe is that there are many paths to God and we happen to be on one of them. The problem with that, if you’re trying to keep the church alive, is that, if we’re fading away, there is absolutely no reason to resist that fading, other than to preserve clergy pensions – because there are many other paths to God. So liberalism is a self-defeating version of Christianity.

Bishop William: I would agree. It doesn’t make sense. But the one element I appreciate is that there have been times in the church’s history when we’ve had a triumphalist attitude which has been unbecoming for Christians because it wasn’t the attitude of our Lord. I have no problems, though with saying, “Jesus Christ is the Way – he’s the one Way.” Everything else is up to God; I don’t presume to judge others, but as a Christian I’m convicted and I’m called to preach Christ as the Way. But to do it in a way that’s respectful. A number of the great church fathers demonstrated that quite well. [David – even St. Paul did – the unknown god] – yes. But we ought not to be shying away from it, otherwise how do you make believers of all nations.

David: Do you think “inclusivity” has been turned into an idol?

Bishop William: The problem with inclusivity is that it’s come to be one of those words that automatically has a lot of emotional and intellectual baggage attached to it. On the one hand, I’d say I’m all for an inclusive church, and by that I mean the Gospel is there for everybody: we are all sinners. But if inclusivity means I can do anything I want and nobody’s got a right to chastise me, or correct me, I’m sorry, that doesn’t line up with anything I see in the Bible – Old testament or New Testament. Paul certainly was chastised when he was knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus. Because what Paul was doing was wrong. So “inclusive” in the way it’s sometimes used would have Paul continue slaughtering the Christian. That wouldn’t make sense.

We live in a real world and sometimes it’s difficult to discern what is Godly and what is not, what is good and what is evil. To suggest that we need to be inclusive and loving sometimes means we should never exercise judgement. I’ve got three kids; raising kids taught me that you love them all even when they’re being little turkeys, but parents have to exercise judgement because sometimes their kids do bad things, injurious things. An inclusive church that doesn’t understand that is peddling a fraud.

David: I’ll make this the last one. Although no-one wants to come out and say it, I suspect that many clergy in leadership don’t mean the same thing as I do when using certain words. The Resurrection, for example, they will say things like, “why didn’t people recognise him”, “did he really walk through walls”, “it all depends what you mean by the Resurrection” and so on [bishop – would you want to buy a used car from someone like that] – they are slippery. Have I got that wrong?

Bishop William: I think you’re right. That’s part of the why the church can’t do good evangelism. We want to qualify everything, let’s not say anything that might be offensive, let’s not say anything that might appear mediaeval. Let’s not say anything that doesn’t sound scientific. The problem is, when you go down that road, you end up not being able to say anything; and I understand the pressures that are there on clergy and bishops not to ever say anything particularly declarative about their faith because you know, as soon as you do, somebody’s going to smack you on the side of the head for doing it. But part of being a leader is being prepared to stand up and take a position. I regularly sit down and go through the consecration service for a bishop, particularly when I’m under pressure to conform to what is politically correct – I look through the service, and I remind myself, “what is it I was called to do, what is it any bishop is called to do”. We’re called to teach the faith of the church – not what we want the church’s faith to be, but what is the church’s faith. We’re called to uphold the discipline and the unity of the church; that goes with leadership.

If you’ve got an organisation that is chaotically spinning off in all  directions, you’ve failed as a leader. We’ve got a church that is madly spinning off in all directions; I think that represents a failure of leadership over decades. It’s a corporate failure. One of the things that I learned early on, as a priest, was there was a blessing in being a working priest – I had a secular job – because I never fell into talking church-speak. When I talked to people on Sundays or other church activities, I was using the same language as during the week. People who live within the culture of the church often forget how to talk plainly to people. Even I sometimes sit and I think, I’ve got a graduate degree in theology, and I have a hard time figuring out what is being said sometimes. [David – imagine how I feel] There’s something wrong with that, because we should be able to  articulate the faith in a way that somebody who’s got no education can hear the gospel. Jesus did it. If our church is not able to raise up people to lead ministry and testify to their faith and explain and teach in a way that is comprehensible, then we deserve to die because we’ve failed.

David: I swear this will be the last question. Clearly you take positions that are unlikely to be popular in the national church: do you get a lot of flak?

Bishop William: I don’t get a lot of flak; what I get is a lot of being ignored. People are very good at going through the motions [David- you are the ignored token conservative, perhaps?] – yes. Except that I’m not the only conservative in the house. Part of it is that I think it is really hard for some people to deal with me. I have a great deal of difficulty going along with something just because it’s the expedient thing to do. I was taught, if you believe something, you need to translate that belief into action. So to do things that confuse the message of what I believe –that’s very, very difficult for me. But if you don’t like it, then you shouldn’t be doing the job.

The part that’s unfortunate – and I say this not for myself, but for a number of other people- as much as we talk about being welcoming and inclusive etc. Over the last many years, I’ve seen the pain and the anguish that orthodox Anglicans have experienced, where they’ve been made to feel silly, or just reactive, and nobody has actually looked at how deeply they’ve been hurt by some of the things that have gone on. And they’re just dismissed. When bishops say something like, “if you don’t like the changes that are going on in the church, then leave.” How could any bishop ever say something like that?

That’s the part that I’ve found, probably the hardest – I’ve seen a number of good friends who have left [David – the Anglican church completely?] – yes. And bishop Harvey was a good friend and a guide to me when I joined the HOB, I see him as someone who has been a man of incredible courage, and I know that it hurt him so deeply to be forced by conscience to do what he did. And there was nothing from this side: it was – “you’ve got a problem… too bad”. There was no sense of, my gosh, what have we done wrong, that a man of that calibre would feel he had to do what he did. We haven’t done that, and that, to me, is one of the great sins that we’re going to pay for.

David: I’ve heard intimations of remarks like: “ well, now they’re gone we can get on with what we were intending to do all along”

Bishop William: Yes, I think there tends to be that kind of attitude in some quarters. At the same time, God has raised up some Godly new bishops in the church – and I don’t use that phrase lightly. They are really trying to be faithful and to do the right thing. What will happen? I don’t know.

David: Bishop, thank you very much for your time and candour.