Sing a New Song: Portraits of Canada's Crusading Bishops.

A.J. Pell is editor of the Canadian Evangelical Review and an instructor
of Liturgy, Anglican Studies Program, Regent College, Vancouver.

To begin, Julie Ferguson’s choice of “Canada’s crusading bishops” is really “British Columbia’s crusading bishops.” That correction aside, this book is a very readable account of the lives of four west coast Anglican bishops and the issues they faced/are facing during their episcopacies. George Hills, the first Anglican bishop in today’s British Columbia, is long dead. David Somerville and Douglas Hambidge are long retired, but still alive; Somerville is 94 and Hambidge is 82. Michael Ingham is still alive and in office, having been born in 1949.

In the case of Hills, the issues of his episcopacy were the equality of blacks in places of public worship and the defence of canon law in a dispute which led to the beginning of the Reformed Episcopal Church in the west. Somerville was a leader in the structural reform of the Anglican Church of Canada and the ordination of women. The advocacy of and support for justice for First Nations peoples in British Columbia, particularly for the Nisga’a who adopted him, was the issue on which Hambidge stepped to the fore. Ingham’s time in office, from his consecration in 1994 to the present, has been marked by his advocacy of and work for the Parliament of World Religions and the United Religious Initiative on one hand, and homosexual and lesbian issues, particularly the blessing of same-sex unions, on the other.

Unlike the artist who paints a portrait without “corrections” by the subject, these portraits of the three living subjects were reviewed by those subjects, who “checked their sections for mistakes and omissions.” The result of this methodology becomes problematic in the section on Ingham, where many knowledgeable Anglicans from all sides of the same-sex blessing issue will be surprised by the increasing polemical tone as that section approaches its conclusion. That takes the form of the advocacy of one partisan position rather than the communication of proven facts. Perhaps, in another decade or two, another author will write a more balanced account of Ingham’s episcopacy without the harsh tone his strongest critics would wish or the too-easy hero worship of his present admirers.