January 2021 Archives - Faith Tides

Coping with COVID: St. Peter, Comox

Glenn Lawson — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 19:05:34 +0000

The pandemic has made it challenging to maintain churches everywhere. That is especially true for smaller parishes in our diocese. In the next issues we will hear from several voices about that challenge. This month: St. Peter, Comox, a parish with about 200 active members. The annual budget passed at the annual vestry meeting was […]

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Personnel Updates – January 2021

Faith Tides — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 19:01:51 +0000

Elaine Julian has been appointed interim minister to St. Columba, Port Hardy, by the United Church of Canada. Elizabeth Barnard (née Welch) has resigned as incumbent to St George in Cadboro Bay, effective December 31, 2020. Heather Robinson has been appointed interim priest-in-charge at St Philip by-the-Sea, Lantzville, beginning December 7, 2020, for the period […]

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Dorcas ministry ships parcels

Alice Trueman — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 18:58:25 +0000

The Dorcas outreach ministry run by the Anglican Church Women of our diocese has long sent Christmas parcels of new clothing and necessities, first to the Anglican missions in the Caledonia region and then to the Diocese of Caledonia, a practice ongoing since before 1860. In early years, the bales went north by ship to […]

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Connecting religion with a need for justice

Elaine Julian — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 18:57:41 +0000

I was born and raised in small-town southern Alberta, with a United Church minister for a father and a United Church minister’s daughter for a mother. Both my father and grandfather were strong “social gospel” ministers and so I grew up connecting religion with the need to work for justice. I moved away from the […]

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A brief encounter

Herbert O’Driscoll — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 18:49:51 +0000

By late afternoon he came down out of the hills to a wooded valley. He noticed that the forest floor was tinder dry. Even this far north the drought had the region in its grip. After a while he came to a cluster of makeshift huts. He saw a woman gathering twigs. He stopped because […]

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A New Year’s Prediction

Christopher Page — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 18:34:19 +0000

Meeting challenges with tenacity and grace The beginning of a new year is often a time when prophets dust off their skills and try to peer into the future to predict what may lie ahead. But who could possibly have predicted at the beginning of 2020, that we would be in the place we find […]

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Pandemic offers launchpad for message

Alastair Singh-McCollum — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 18:24:04 +0000

St. John the Divine, Victoria, began this pandemic like many other Christian communities, taking a reactive rather than a proactive approach to using technology in order to try and maintain some sense of ‘normalcy’ in the strange times we found ourselves in. Our services, initially broadcast live through Facebook and YouTube, soon became Zoom meetings […]

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How is our diocesan vision functioning?

Brendon Neilson — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 18:13:05 +0000

Over the last couple of months, I have been reflecting with the diocesan council on the state of the vision. Our collective intention to be a renewed people with renewed hearts and renewed spirits has been with us in some form since 2014. It is worthwhile doing some reflection together on how we are doing on this journey of renewal. Before […]

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Kudos to stellar synod staff

Ansley Tucker — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 14:22:51 +0000

It is often said that ministry is like an iceberg: 90 per cent of it is beneath the surface. In my role as diocesan administrator, I have come to believe that the same is true of the work of our synod office staff. Over the past nine months, I have had the opportunity to observe […]

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