Blog Introduction

Hello and welcome to my blog. Thanks for dropping in for a look. This blog is being created as part of my Sabbatical project and trip which will take place during the summer of 2012 with a prepatory trip in 2011. My name is Stephen London and I am a priest in the Diocese of Edmonton. In our Diocese we are lucky to have the possibility of a Sabbatical every seven years, and it is just about time for me. Yea! The bishop has approved my proposal and even given tentative approval to some of the funding. Yea again!

The Sabbatical plan is very simple. My wife, kids and I are going to travel across eastern Canada as well as a separate trip through Alberta and Saskatchewan to discover the history and present day expressions of the current Anglican Church of Canada. I am hoping for a real road trip adventure with the idea that we will videotape it all and create a documentary about what Anglicanism looked like 300 years ago and what it looks like today.

Our idea is that over two trips we will travel through Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, PEI, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland searching out the historically interesting places as well as the currently vibrant churches across parts of Western and Eastern Canada. We are going to write ahead to churches asking if we can videotape parts of their services and life together as well as hoping that there will be people who would be willing to be interviewed on tape about their stories and lives as Anglicans today. The church today obviously lives in a much different place in history than when it was first created and I am interested in exploring where there is continuity and where it has changed. It is my belief that the Holy Spirit is alive and well in the Anglican Church of Canada in many different forms. This is not to deny that there are lots of problems and challenges in the Anglican Church. Far from it! But I would love to see it all and document as much as I can. The other part of this trip is exploring the possibility of creating a collaborative work of art created by Anglicans across the country where we travel that can be displayed. But this has not yet been worked out.

Obviously such a trip does not start two years from now. It starts now. I have a lot of reading and exploring to do before we even get started. That is where this blog come in. It will be my tool to record all of my reading, thoughts and discoveries leading up to my trip and then we will blog the trip as we go. I realize that this might be read only by a few close friends but I am still very excited about this. I do hope there will be more. I am hoping that this blog will be interesting to people who are interested in the history of Canada and the history of the Anglican Church in particular, as well as explorations of current news stories around this topic, explorations of the challenges in the Anglican church as well as bits of Canadiana thrown in. The whole idea is to capture something of the spirit of ACC. Also, if you can suggest any must see parishes that we have to visit or the whole trip would be worthless, I would love the suggestion! Anyway, thanks for stopping by.

Following is an edited version of what I gave the Bishop:

Sabbatical Proposal for Stephen London

Objective:

My sabbatical objective is to make a series of short educational documentaries exploring and celebrating the history and present day spirit of the Anglican Church of Canada as well as exploring the diversity of what Anglicanism looks like in Canada.

Explanation:

I am relatively new to the Anglican Church of Canada (ACC), and for a long time I have had a desire to see and learn much more about the church in which I am a priest. I would love to have a chance to not just read about both of them but to really see and explore them. Added to this are my educational passions which are history (Church and Secular) and the theological questions around how Christian faith is enculturated and contextualized in particular places and times. My thought was that I could combine all of this in a cross country tour of eastern Canada documenting our travels, learnings and interviews in a blog as well as the short documentaries.

When:

The main portion of the sabbatical will take place over two months in the summer of 2012. However, the preparation for the sabbatical will take place over the two years leading up to it. Plus we are contemplating doing a practice run in the summer of 2011 through the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Overview:

Our MO will be something as follows. Having researched the area ahead of time we will travel to the historically interesting spots and churches along the way to piece together the history of the various regions. We are hoping to write to significant churches ahead of time to see if they will let us videotape some of their worship and have some people who would be willing to be interviewed for the project. We would like to have some people talk to us on video about the history of their region and how that is a part of the life of the church today. Our real anticipation and passion here is to find that the Spirit of God is alive and thriving in these churches and we would love to see what it looks like and to show it to others. We are hoping that this part will be an encouragement to anyone who sees the documentaries.

The sharing part will be two fold: First, I am thinking that I would like to keep a conversational blog about all of my reading about the history of the church in the lead up to the trip and then while on the trip and day by day account of the trip. The second part is that we are thinking about creating three hour long movies about our trip divided into regions. We would have one on the church in upper and Lower Canada, one on Atlantic Canada and then one of the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. (If we have as much fun doing this as I think we will then perhaps there might be future ones on BC and then the North. But this is outside of the scope of the present project.)

Technical Issues:

My goal for the documentary is that it will be a quality amateur production. Obviously the two significant issues here are that we only have limited resources and we are not trained in the art of documentary production. However, I am excited to learn about it over the next two years. I plan on taking a class on making movies. As well, we already have video editing software on our computer that we are already learning on. Also I am hoping that I can get some advice from various people who have more knowledge than I. My idea is to make some practice projects to work out the bugs and then to have a trial run during the summer of 2011 in Saskatchewan and Alberta. This is so that by the time we leave for the official trip I will have had several productions under my belt.

Educational component:

A large chunk of this will have to take place before the trip. My idea is to study quite a bit about the history of Canada and the ACC so that I would be fairly knowledgeable about the subject. I have already accumulated several histories of both. However, my hope is that the reading will be only a part of the educational component. I am really hoping that in traveling and interviewing Anglicans from across Canada will lead to surprising and unpredictable insights. It will be a much better video if it does!