Canadian parishes quit Church: CEN 10.10.08 p 6.

Two more Ontario parishes have voted to quit the Anglican Church of Canada and join the breakaway Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC). At parish meetings on Oct 4, St Peter’s Church in Hamilton seceded from the Diocese of Niagara and St George’s in Ottawa quit the Diocese of Ottawa to come under the episcopal oversight of ANiC Bishop Donald Harvey and Presiding Bishop Gregory Venables of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.

Parish electors voted 130 to 27 at St George’s, and 42 to 1 at St Peter’s to approve secession.

“It is a great joy to welcome the people of St George’s and St Peter’s into a faithfully Anglican and unabashedly Christian organization,” said the Ven. Charlie Masters of ANiC. “By aligning with the Anglican Network in Canada, they join a growing movement of Anglicans throughout North America seeking to remain in the mainstream of global and historic Anglicanism.”

With last week’s secession of St Aidan’s in the Diocese of Huron to ANiC, the breakaway group under the metropolitan authority of Bishop Venables now numbers 21 parishes across Canada.
However it was “the Canadian church or parts of it that have broken away,” not St Peter’s, parish rector the Rev. Canon Sandra Copland said. “We are aligning with the worldwide Anglican church,” she explained.

The Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Archbishop Fred Hiltz has denounced the defections of parishes to ANiC, accusing Bishop Venables of overstepping the mark in providing episcopal support for distressed conservatives, and called for an end to the cross border raids. His oversight for embattled conservatives would end, Bishop Venables has explained, only when the underlying issues that caused the defections have been resolved.