While many Anglicans worldwide are now occupied with understanding what orthodoxy demands of them, the balance are otherwise occupied.

While playing a fanciful dirge at the funeral of failed ecumenism, Anglican Bishop John Chapman sticks a knife in it just to make sure it is really dead.

Anglican Bishop John Chapman is allowing an Ottawa church to offer blessings for same-sex couples who are already civilly married.

“My intention is to embrace a liturgical process that will not discriminate between members of the church on the basis of sexual orientation,” Chapman told a congregation Thursday night at the beginning of the diocese’s annual synod. “This will be Ottawa’s offering to the ongoing discernment that is happening throughout the Anglican Church of Canada.”

Indeed that coffin has been nailed shut. How is ecumenism possible with a group that doesn’t actually believe in anything definite? How do you convince a boulder happily rolling down a mountain that it should be going the other way? You can’t. It is Sisyphus in reverse.

A generation and half has been convinced of the notion that ecumenism is not really about convincing like-minded Christians that one side or the other is right, but rather that we are all wrong.

Alas, ecumenism not seeking the fullness of truth will always, at the last, die of malnourishment. Sugary platitudes do not sustain. Rising in its place is a robust ecumenism focused on truth and unity.

Ecumenism is dead. Long live ecumenism.