They've started up again...

For the past few weeks things have been pretty quite on the Sydney Anglican diocese front: it's been as if they've been letting the world catch up to them in the pompous hypocrite stakes.

Unfortunately the calm has well and truly ended: Archbishop Jensen has issued a statement so breath-taking that I can't even bring myself to link to it. Off-Topic Allowed provide a link and a critique that helps fend off the inevitable depression which follows reading it. Personally I don't know which is more disturbing: that someone proclaiming themselves to be a Christian can come out with such idiocy - or that he obviously actually believes his own drivel.

Hot on his heels comes the Archbishop's little brother and Dean, Phillip who's been working hard to show the media he's just as crazy: today's Sydney Morning Herald features a front page article detailing his latest efforts at side-lining the Cathedral's internationally recognised choir and organist.

In an attempt to defend the Family Firm, an unnamed Cathedral spokesman is reported as telling the paper "The wide range of music being heard at the cathedral is in keeping with a wider range of people now coming through the cathedral doors." What forgets to mention is that while the range may be wider (something friends of mine who've been involved with the Cathedral congregation for a great many years strongly dispute) it's also smaller. and many of those now attending followed Jensen from his previous parish. Perhaps this isn't mentioned because somewhere in the Bible it says any drop in congregation size is only relevant if it occurs in "liberal" churches?

It's not all bad news, though. The spokesman (it's always a man with these clowns - the sky could fall down if they let a mere woman speak on their behalf) continued by citing as proof of the Jensen regime's relevance "the appointment of the cathedral's first 'jazz catechist'." So despite more than a quarter of Sydney's youth having no dedicated outreach workers, we've now got someone "working to reach out to Sydney's jazz community".

Of course this couldn't have anything to do with fact that most of the kids studying jazz at the conservatorium come from Sydney's white-bread Anglican heartland, could it? And please tell me it's just coincidence that a large part of this "outreach" involves presenting "Bible studies" to that same group of kids? Many of whom also come from some of the diocese's most doctrinaire parishes?

No of course it doesn't. Sure countless more kids are into hip-hop and dance, and we're doing everything in our power to ignore and/or alienate them - but hey: it's not as if they're white or anything. And isn't jazz the first thing that comes to everybody's mind when they think of Sydney?

Excuse me: I've got to go and change my son's nappy. At least what's in there isn't pretending to be something else.