Christopher Howse writes in the Telegraph about Rowan Williams visiting Westminster Cathedral yesterday: Williams harks back to Anselm. (The BBC also carries a report on this visit, Archbishops pray for tsunami dead.)
In the Guardian the godslot is written by John Newbury The Christian centre cannot hold.
The Bishop of Colombo in Sri Lanka, Duleep de Chickera writes in The Times about the tsunami disaster: Our solidarity after the tsunami shows the way to a lasting peace. Part of this reads:
“What have you to say about the kingdom of God?” ( “now” clearly implied) was the question fired at me by a Buddhist from a leading local NGO as soon as I sat down next to him at a lecture in Colombo. This forthright (theological) question centres on God in the tsunami. For the churches of South Asia, steeped in poverty — and within living memory of dominant colonial Christianity — the “vulnerable God” theory is relevant.
A powerful dominant God is distasteful and alien to the poor and powerless. Much more, the “vulnerable God” theory flows very much from the text as well. The incarnation clearly conveys a God of love who deliberately takes on vulnerability to identify and save.
As waves ravaged humans, the vulnerability of this creator God of both waves and humans was sensed in the deafening silence. God is love and the freedom that love confers imposes inherent restrictions on controls on all creation. Human relationships, between parent and child or among spouses, bears this out. So the loving, liberator, parent God who was not in the wind, earthquake and fire was certainly not in the tsunami.
The vulnerable God however is not a passive God. This distinction is essential for faith to be kept. To borrow a phrase from Bishop Geoffrey Rowell’s recent pastoral letter to his diocese, this God is an insider. In Christ God took human form to stand with humans in our suffering and loss. The incarnation is historical fact as well as a telescope into the ways of the same God in past and future history. As God was in the historical incarnation, so God has been with those who suffer grief and loss. This God invites God’s people to do and become likewise.
The usually gentle waves of the sea are soothing to tired Asian feet that stand in poverty and bear an immense burden. The vulnerable servant Lord touched and washed feet. This was more than an act of humility. This was an enacted parable highlighting that relevant ministry begins from where people are placed — where they stand — and addresses suffering.
Large killer waves destroy all within their path. Dominance, whether in our theologies about God, leadership, aid or attitudes, is anti-Christ and counter productive to peace, justice and reconciliation. The way forward for all, South Asians who grieve as well as the world at large, is mutually to touch and wash each other’s feet.
Also in The Times Michael Binyon writes about The struggle to keep the faith in Bethlehem.
0 CommentsTwo items of interest relating to the articles following the tragedy.
First, the letters column of the Sunday Telegraph on 9 January was full of reactions to the newspaper’s handling of the RW article.
Second, the Independent on Monday, had this review of how the religious press had covered the Asian tragedy.
This describes how the Church Times was able to scoop most of its competition, because it did not – like most religious weeklies – combine any issues over the holiday season:
0 CommentsThe Anglican Church Times, which publishes a day later than the majority of the religious weeklies, was even sharper. An enterprising reporter’s calls to Sri Lanka on 28 December meant that when editor Paul Handley returned to work the following morning, he was able to throw out much of what had been prepared previously and run prominently in his 31 December issue Rachel Harden’s story about how churches had become sanctuary for some of the homeless.
Handley was ahead of everyone else in the field by also running, in the same issue, an editorial on the religious implications of the catastrophe. “Christian belief needs to embrace phenomena of this kind, and hold fast to faith in the God of compassion, even when the world seems to have destruction built into it.”
Paul Handley, editor of the Church Times, writes in today’s Independent under the title Faith & Reason: Where was God on Boxing Day? With the drowned – and the saved.
Charles Moore writes in the Telegraph about Why God is to be found in the terror of the tsunami
(he says in passing that “Dr Williams’s piece has been unfairly maligned: most of it seemed to me true and subtle”)
Christopher Howse in the same paper asks Will cathedrals pay the price? which discusses cathedral admission charges and is in effect a review article about this book by Trevor Beeson.
In the Guardian Giles Fraser writes that God is not the puppet master.
The Times carries an article by Michael Bourdeaux concerning the Ukraine: Independent churches win new respect
And Jonathan Sacks writes that God asks us not to understand but to heal.
Update
Not from the papers, but from the BBC, the Joan Bakewell interview of Tom Wright is now available as a transcript.
The Spectator magazine has this feature article about Rowan Williams, written by AN Wilson:
Holy sage
(and continued on page 2). The entire article should be read, but here is one quotation:
0 CommentsIn spite of what some Christians today believe, the future of Christianity does not depend upon what a few bigots on the one hand, and a few homosexual enthusiasts and their friends on the other, believe about same-sex unions. It really does not.
The loudest critics come from some little enclave within the Church — whether ‘high’ or ‘low’ — where they are so busy with their church hobby and so smugly certain of their own rectitude that they have managed to overlook a rather obvious fact. Their churches, such as Holy Trinity Brompton or St Helen’s Bishopsgate might be full to the rafters on Sunday mornings, but the numbers who enjoy their particular form of holy club are a tiny minority of the population of this planet. Rowan Williams is sufficiently intelligent and normal to be aware that in the West, being religious these days is, outside America, very distinctly odd, and trying to defend Christianity against the whole ethos of materialism and scientific rationalism which most intelligent people take for granted is a more than intellectual task. We might very well be living in Christianity’s last days. Many of us who go to church do so a little wistfully, knowing that, unlike Rowan Williams, we do not believe in the ways which our ancestors did. ‘Our prayers so languid and our faith so dim’ is one of the few lines of a hymn which we could sing with gusto. ‘Fightings within and fears without’ might be another.
Tom Wright has written in a local newspaper the Northern Echo about Cracking the Christmas code
Giles Fraser has written in the Guardian that Empires prefer a baby and the cross to the adult Jesus
and Stephen Bates ( with a little help from Jim Rosenthal) has profiled Saint Nicholas
Bishop, legend, saint, fairy story, retail therapist, and film star … How did a pile of bones in an Italian basilica become the soft drink-swigging patron saint of brides, and our last remaining link with the original meaning of Christmas?
John Bell writes in the Independent
At Christmas we can dream and imagine how the future should be
But this year, I sense a new affection displacing seasonal cynicism. I don’t believe that the fascination with Christmas is simply a reminiscence project, a season dip into sentimentality or (depending on the carol concert) banality. Rather, I suspect that in the retelling and rehearing of the Christmas narratives, there is some latent yet profound hope stirred within us. Increasingly the skies above us are associated with dread as much as beauty. This is the result of being exposed to almost weekly conjectures about the state of the ozone layer or the discharging of carbon dioxide. Might it not be that deep in our hearts we want to believe that the air above us is a place for angel-song and celestial harmony, and that somehow ecology has to do with cosmic praise as well as freedom from pollution?
The Telegraph leader column is titled The disarming paradox of the child Emmanuel
In The Times Geza Vermes asks When you strip away all the pious fiction, what is left of the real Jesus? He says in part:
The ingredients of Jesus’s religion were enthusiasm, urgency, compassion and love. He cherished children, the sick and the despised. In his eyes, the return of a stray lamb to the sheepfold, the repentance of a tax collector or a harlot, caused more joy in heaven than the prosaic virtue of 99 just men.
Because of His healings, many saw in Jesus the Messiah, triumphant over Rome and establisher of everlasting peace. Yet he had no political ambition. Rumours that He might be the Christ were nevertheless spreading and contributed to His downfall. His tragic end was precipitated by an unpremeditated act in the Temple. The noisy business transacted by the merchants of sacrificial animals and the moneychangers so outraged the rural holy man that He overturned their tables and violently expelled them. He thus created a fracas in the sanctuary of the overcrowded city before Passover and alerted the priests.
So the Temple authorities, the official guardians of peace, saw in Jesus a potential threat to order. They had to intervene promptly. Nevertheless even in those circumstances, the Jewish leadership preferred to pass the ultimate responsibility to the cruel Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who condemned Jesus to death. He was crucified before Passover probably in AD30 because in the eyes of officialdom, Roman and Jewish, He had done the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Just as the New Testament had prefaced the biography of Jesus by the joyful prologue of the Nativity, it also appended an epilogue to the tragedy of the Cross, the glorious hymn of the Resurrection. Indeed, Jesus had made such a profound impact on His apostles that they attributed to the power of His name the continued success of their charismatic activity. So Jesus rose from the dead in the hearts of His disciples and He lives on as long as the Christian Church endures.
Also in The Times Simon Jenkins writes about stained glass in Marvel at Heaven’s doorway and there is a leader entitled Have faith which ends:
5 CommentsToday, perhaps, faith comes less easily to most than it once did. There is more competition for attention and, in the West, we seem to have more power to choose and a greater range of choices. What does it say about human nature that so many choices impoverish the spirit?
The case for appreciating what a religious dimension can bring has, of course, been made more difficult in a world scarred by fundamentalist violence and blinkered zealotry. But it was just such a world into which Jesus was born. And His message has endured, while the fanatics of His time have become history’s footnotes. It is paradoxical indeed that a message of love, which survived centuries of hate, is now in danger of being lost through mere indifference and self-absorption. Our culture would lose so much if what we owe to faith became forgotten. That is why we are glad to say to all our readers, whatever their beliefs, that we firmly hope the spirit of Christmas is with them.
Update Sunday
Richard Harries writes in the Observer that We should not fear religion
Religion is now a major player on the world stage in a way that was scarcely conceivable 30 years ago. In both the Islamic world and the Bush White House religion is impinging on public policy. In the 1960s sociologists believed that the world was in the grip of an irreversible process of secularisation – though they could not account for the United States, at once the most modern and one of the most religious countries in the world.
Now sociologists are drawn to the opposite conclusion: the more modern the world gets the more religious it becomes. It has been well said that whereas the major conflicts of the twentieth century were ideological, those of the twenty-first century will be to do with identity in which religion is a key element. Globalisation draws people out of their village communities, where they had an assured place and identity, into sprawling urban areas making goods for the Western market. There, gravitating to the mosque or church, they find their identity in relation to their religion…
Today Saturday, David Hope writes in the Guardian about Christmas celebrated in styles
One of the first things I did, having been enthroned in early December as Archbishop of York in York Minster, was to attend the nativity play in the primary school of my home village, Bishopthorpe. The contrast could not have been greater…
…In contrast to the grandeur of the Minster I have usually sought to visit a parish church in the diocese for midnight mass – sometimes a church without a vicar or indeed a church that would not in the normal course of events expect the Archbishop.
Next year it will be a parish church – St Margaret’s Ilkley and that will be very different again. But then, while it has been an enormous privilege to have been able to experience the sheer beauty and wonder of Christmas celebrated in the way I have described, the place and manner of the celebration of Christ’s birth is in the end of little relevance.
For the one single fact which underlies and which is fundamental to any Christian celebration, however grand or humble the setting, is the stupendous fact of God coming to us and among us in Jesus Christ.
For in the stable we witness what the poet Christopher Smart described as the “magnitude of meekness”, the hospitality of the God who welcomes any and all who seek – the God who is constantly inviting us to work with him in His loving purposes for the establishing of His kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven – a kingdom of righteousness, justice and peace for the peoples of the entire world.
In The Times Geoffrey Rowell writes about The meaning at the very heart of Christmas. An extract:
0 CommentsFor Christians every Sunday is a feast of the Resurrection, and every Christian festival is always an Easter festival — and that includes Christmas. The Annunciation of Gabriel to Mary, the village girl of Nazareth, that she is to become the bearer of the Son of God, is a moment of new creation. So too is the birth at Bethlehem, and that is all fulfilled in the new life which bursts from the grave at Easter, a life in which through his life-giving Spirit we share. So the Christmas collect speaks both of the birth at Bethlehem, and of our new birth — of our being made God’s children by adoption and grace by the same life-giving Spirit which overshadowed the Blessed Virgin at the Incarnation. Christ went, as Bishop Lancelot Andrewes liked to say, “to the very ground-sill of our nature”. The God who comes among us is a God who empties Himself, pours himself out in love, comes down to the lowest part of our need, framed, formed, and fashioned as an unborn child, and then weak, helpless and dependent in the muck and mire of the manger, whose pricking straw is seen by St Bernard as foreshadowing the piercing nails of the Cross.
Christmas celebrates and challenges. At its heart is the overwhelming mystery of a God who stoops to us in the most amazing humility, revealing and disclosing Himself in the most human language, that of a human life. St John speaks of “the Word made flesh”, the Logos, or Divine Reason by which all things were ordered being made in our likeness. In that we behold the glory of God, and see and know what God is like, what is the source and origin of all that is, and the end and goal of our human life. That love “so amazing, so divine” is the truth we celebrate at Christmas.
‘Bush is back’ — Brian Draper at LICC writes about this week’s news from the USA.
Bush is back. And many Christians are rejoicing. The president’s thinking is driven both by a theology of personal morality, and the conviction that he and his country can act globally and unilaterally, on God’s behalf, for good.
Yet any Christian who worries — as many do — about the past and future consequences of this combination is now faced with a choice.
Either they surrender to the sense of disempowerment that swept both coasts of America and much of the world on Wednesday. Or, more positively, they seize the opportunity to ensure that practical theology is not monopolised by the Religious Right for the next four years.
Continue reading at LICC to see Draper’s response to President Bush’s re-election.
2 CommentsThinking Anglicans writer Tom Ambrose gives his first thoughts on the Windsor Report:
Reading the foreword to the report, I feel that a greater sense of perspective is needed. The Church has always faced controversy, and to single out the issue of the ordination of women as the only point of disagreement prior to issues about homosexuality is singularly unfortunate. The great hymn ‘The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord’ was written at a time of particularly bitter disagreement in the 19th century, when a split in the church seemed almost inevitable. The arguments of those days were more closely related to doctrine than any of the current problems.
The report acknowledges that the teaching of the church is based on scripture, tradition and reason. We cannot take these in isolation, and assume that the passages in the Bible which refer to homosexual activity can simply be quoted as being incontrovertible and uncontroversial. To do that would be to lapse into fundamentalism.
There are still Christians today who might think that looking for Noah’s Ark is a legitimate way of ‘proving’ scripture. Some attempt to demonstrate, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that the world was made in six days. Some people deny that evolution could take place. Their motivation is largely to demonstrate the inerrancy of scripture, and hence its right to be regarded as the only test for Christian belief and teaching.
The issues about creation are not trivial. They underlie all that we understand about God’s work, and hence have a bearing on issues regarding our redemption. Reading the scriptures in isolation is not enough, for insights are available to us today which were not known in biblical times.
Views on homosexuality have changed massively in recent years. When I was an undergraduate, a fellow student was sent down after being convicted of having sex with another man. Today, discrimination against homosexual people is outlawed in most European countries (though the churches have asked to opt out!)
But we are not going to assume that there will be uniformity across the globe in the way that societies regard what they may see as sexual offences. Where people can be put to death for adultery, sexual activity between people of the same sex will always be frowned upon.
In Britain, we expect people of all faiths to observe the law which says marriages must be monogamous. In other countries, it may be permitted for men to take more than one wife. Similarly, in countries where homosexual activity is frowned upon, it would not be understood if Christians campaigned for greater tolerance. The reaction would be as uncomprehending as the reaction might be here if Muslims demanded the right to polygamy.
In such a world, there is no going back on the decision to consecrate Gene Robinson in the USA, and no going forward in Uganda or Pakistan to the acceptance of gay clergy. The responses from ECUSA and from other parts of the Anglican Communion have underlined this. It would be naïve to assume that a consensus can be achieved. In all of this, the one redeeming feature may be that it accepts that there are differences of opinion which are genuinely held by Christian people.
5 CommentsThinking Anglicans writer David Walker offers a first view on the Windsor Report.
Twenty four hours into reading and reflecting on the Windsor Report I guess I feel ready to give it a small but heartfelt cheer.
I say small, not because it doesn’t agree completely with my own position — I wouldn’t expect it to — but because its publication means once again that some of my fellow Christians will experience its words as licensing a rejection of their deepest selves and beliefs. No matter how lightly we tread, we are treading on people’s souls, and that should always be done with both reluctance and genuine sadness.
But I am cheered.
I’m cheered firstly because a group as diverse as the Commission has been able to sign up, unanimously, to a report that offers a middle way between papal centralism and unfettered localism. I pray that the members of the Commission will each now take responsibility for holding those whose views they represent to the process it sets out.
I’m cheered because homosexuality is recognised as only one presenting problem. The Report notes that the work of engaging with it as an issue is still at an early stage. Rather than seek to answer the questions posed by sexuality (which was never its brief) Windsor maps out structures that will be (must be) equally important in holding any other local church to account should it seek to develop in ways that are both novel and unacceptable to the wider Communion. It is particularly timely in setting a context in which the response to any moves towards Lay Presidency at the Eucharist must be formed. I pray however that the Report will in itself forestall any such moves.
I’m cheered because the Report works hard to be even handed in the criticism it offers to those who have offended the wider Communion — whether it be through participating in a consecration, authorising a public rite or usurping another province or bishop’s proper authority. There is one small lapse in the logic in this respect. All are called to express their regret; all are called to desist from repeating the offending action; but curiously only the first two appear to be invited to withdraw from unspecified church councils until they do so. In practice this may be a moot point if expressions of regret come quickly and from all sides. I pray that they will do so.
I’m cheered because there is the opportunity for Anglicans of all types to spend the next few years working on what unites us rather than divides us. Formulating a Covenant and bolstering our Instruments of Unity may not be as exciting for the media as a battle over sexuality, but it’s where I would much rather be.
Where division occurs, the Report is clear that we go forward by using our time-honoured structures. The provision for those who feel alienated from their parent diocese or province is to be worked at together across the divisions. Any extended oversight is to be a last resort, and is described as “conditional”, “temporary” and “delegated”” — much closer to the Resolution C route familiar and largely accepted (or at least tolerated) in England than a formal separation. In particular the proposals set out by ECUSA are commended as “entirely reasonable”. All of this would seem directly applicable to the present Church of England debate about the ordination of Women to the Episcopate. Indeed it would be contradictory were the C of E to endorse Windsor but follow a very different route over this specific issue.
Finally, I am glad to note that the Report retains its even-handedness over dissent. The proposals offered are just as applicable to a liberal minority in a conservative diocese or province as they are to a conservative minority in a more liberal setting. There can be no monopoly over conscientious dissent, and the Report leaves us with a framework that will continue to allow the prophetic tradition to operate within the church in whichever direction the Spirit may take it.
A cheer then, not of triumph for one cause or another in a deeply divided debate, but for a way forward that uses Anglican structures and polity to address an Anglican problem. And that offers us all a way of remaining authentically Anglican.
3 CommentsAnglican Mainstream the conservative evangelical campaign organisation has changed its mind about the acceptability of Jeffrey John’s appointment as a cathedral dean. (Earlier it had issued this statement.)
Yesterday, it issued a Press Release and a Full Text of Response.
Other extreme evangelical groups have also issued statements:
Church of England Evangelical Council
Reform
Church Society (Note: this is a pdf file; an html copy for TA readers is here.
Church Society has also issued a more detailed document, also as a pdf file, but similarly archived here.
As this campaign appears to be based on what was said in St Albans on Monday, here are the detailed links to transcripts of the event:
Statements made at press conference, Monday April 19th
Extracts from press conference: ‘gay marriages’
And for completeness, here is the letter sent by the Bishop of St Albans to all his clergy (including David Phillips) and the diocesan announcement of responses to the appointment from diocesan officials and others.
0 CommentsRichard Thomas, the Oxford Diocese Director of Communication writes about the new venture:
One of the defining features of our culture is the desire to self-resource. And the internet is probably the ultimate expression of that self-resourcing. I seek the resources I need for my holiday, my banking, and my insurance on-line. I even buy my books and my wine that way. This change has affected the way that many of us think about our belonging. No longer do we belong to an organisation or an institution in order to serve that organisation or institution. We look to it to serve us. Instead of being contributors to our communities, we are consumers of them. This may be a key distinction between Grace Davie’s ‘believers’, and her ‘belongers’. It may well be that participant members of Churches remain participants, regardless of the difficulties of participation, because they have a well developed sense of the importance of the institution for the maintenance and transmission of the faith. And it may be that the increasing failure to participate is a direct result of a loss of faith in such institutions as places that are effective in their key tasks, and that make demands on us that do not contribute either to mission or personal growth.
This is not necessarily a good thing. It may not be a healthy thing. But it is happening, and if the Christian Church is to be truly incarnational, it cannot simply decry what is, and become fruitlessly self-absorbed in what might be.
So it should be no surprise to discover that there are some people, maybe more than a few, who want to be part of a Christian community, to commit themselves to one another in prayer, in learning, and in social action, without the hassle and clutter of participation in the local parish church. We could, of course, simply respond by saying that the Church is, above all things, a sacramental community where meeting together is of the essence of what we are.
But if that was the sum of our response, we would merely add to the number of people that we fail to reach, and increase the number of people that we alienate because we want them to be other than what they are.
6 CommentsIn January, the Church Times carried a two-part feature article by Theo Hobson which is now online.
Part 1: Don’t call us evangelicals
Part 2: When the world is our parish . . .
These articles make interesting reading in conjunction with the book, Mission Shaped Church which is to be the basis for a General Synod debate next week.
Theo Hobson talked to a wide range of people including Nicky Gumbel, Mark Oakley, Grace Davie, Rob Gillion, Dave Tomlinson, and Si Jones.
10 CommentsI think it was a 1960’s pop song that contained the line, “There are more questions than answers”. To the philosopher it opens up the exciting prospect of never coming to the end of our search for knowledge. To the bureaucrat it suggests the importance of stretching the few answers we have to cover as many disparate questions as possible. I fear that the Review of Church Commissioners Spending comes well into that second category.
Some of the questions (and I include those that are implicit as well as the explicit) are important and timely. It is legitimate to ask whether funds are being spent in the most effective way, rather than just continue with current practice. It is vital for every level of the church to seek ways in which it can top slice or earmark money for clear mission (as opposed to maintenance) imperatives. And it is important to cast a particularly questioning gaze over areas of expenditure that seem to grow year on year.
But there are other questions that seem to lurk behind this paper. I fear that the biggest has not been tackled head on in the way that it needed to be. This is the issue of how to continue to reallocate funds, to poorer dioceses as well as to mission imperatives, when the richer dioceses (mine included) are no longer receiving any central support that can be withdrawn to fund them. It is entirely consistent with our ecclesiology (and a parallel of what happens between parishes in any individual diocese) to begin to ask those with greater means to contribute to a Mutual Support Fund. We’ve talked about it enough over recent years. It now needs action.
Unwilling to tackle that question, the report inevitably thrashes around for economies to make here and there. It lets itself get drawn into a wholly separate set of issues about how, and how generously, bishops and cathedrals should be supported from national funds. And even reaches the shores of the debate about whether the Church of England has the right number of bishops in the correct places. These are legitimate questions for someone to ask, but they don’t fit here and now. The review of the Dioceses Measure provides the opportunity for creating the correct structure to ask what we need to about episcopal deployment. The Mellows report has already pronounced on bishops’ costs.
Attempting to answer those questions here leaves us with a mess. The ministry of bishops and cathedrals is set up as in opposition to money for mission. I would argue strongly that bishops (and suffragan bishops every bit as much as diocesans) are one of the more effective missionary tools that the church has. I set the challenge of the Christian faith before “those who are not, or not yet, our members” (to quote our diocesan strap-line) far more now than I ever could as a parish priest. Our cathedral attracts many times the number of visitors as any parish church in the diocese, and it speaks to them through its music, architecture and liturgy as well as through the exhibitions and special events that run through the year. Church statistics show cathedrals as one of the few classes of churches that are consistently growing at present. To imply, however tangentially, that these mission centres are some sort of historic drain on the real work that goes on in parishes, is obnoxious.
Along the way we lose a consistent pillar of Church of England ecclesiology – that no minister is directly dependent financially upon his or her congregation. Bishops and cathedral clergy hold a teaching office. The freedom to exercise that office without undue influence lies in being paid by a level further up the ladder.
I suspect that the report is at its weakest when it seems to be asking itself, “What can we get through Synod?” and comes up with the idea that diocesan bishops and deans, relatively better represented on General Synod, might be persuaded to support a proposal that exempts them by targeting canons residentiary and suffragans. It may still be in living memory that one diocesan explained to his new colleague, “When I’m out of the diocese you’re me. When I’m in the diocese you’re nobody,” but it ill befits a Synod that will debate a report authored by the Bishop of Maidstone to contend that suffragans are a diocesan resource whilst diocesans are national. Our work is collegial, both within and beyond the dioceses where our sees are located. The national work I do with organisations as diverse as Housing Justice and the Community Fund, the work I have taken on at the behest of Lambeth and Synod, and my regional responsibilities in the West Midlands overlap with those of my colleagues to provide a range of mission and ministry to the whole church and whole nation.
Finally, we need to remember that what is proposed here doesn’t bring in or save a single pound coin. At the best we will be asking parishes to pay more Share in order to absorb the expenditure transferred to them. Rather worse is the risk that we will succumb to the temptation of shunting costs and simply identify some of what we already do as “mission”. Worst of all is my suspicion that the centralising influences in the church might wish to welcome me to the Decade of Filling in Mission Fund Application Forms.
As the late, great Douglas Adams showed, when we try to boil down a series of big, disparate questions to a single, clear answer we are liable to get something as appropriate and practical as “42”.
0 CommentsPaul Vallely, associate editor of the Independent, has a major interview in today’s paper with Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham.
Tom Wright: It’s not a question of left and right, says the combative priest who opposes the war in Iraq and gay bishops is there until it disappears into the paid archive.
There is also a front page (broadsheet edition at least) news story to lead readers to the interview Bishop attacks Blair as ‘white vigilante’ which concentrates on one aspect of the interview only.
There is also an editorial about the bishop and his views, which is unfortunately available only to paid subscribers. This also deals mainly with the UK political aspects, but not entirely. Here are some extracts.
Support for the Church of England came today from an unexpected quarter: the editorial column of The Observer newspaper. In Faith values the leader writer refers to the major feature story by Rachel Cooke on the cover page of the Review section, The sleek shall inherit the Church which reviews the current state of the CofE.
Part of the editorial:
2 CommentsSome three million people will file into the pews of the Church of England at some stage this Christmas – three times as many as on a normal Sunday. It may be only 5 per cent of the population, but in a secular age in which Christian faith appears so out of fashion it is remarkable how well the numbers hold up every year. Christmas remains a time when the story of birth and redemption retains a remarkable hold on our collective imagination.
…People do not have to accept every canon of the Church’s creed to be impressed by its core spirit of radical toleration – a continuing gift to our national culture. Some of the millions in church this weekend will not be attending because they are regular practising Christians. Rather they come because they feel the spiritual dimension of Christmas should be acknowledged and they know this radically tolerant church will welcome them, even if they don’t turn up again until next Christmas.
Such tolerance, though, is under siege. It is even attacked by evangelists within the Church who see it as too accommodating to what they portray as amoral trends in civil society, such as homosexuality. It is regrettable for both believer and non-believer that such trends tend more towards the Old Testament age of retribution, revenge and intolerance that threatens our modern plural and largely secular society.
… If we all could subscribe to greater tolerance, it’s hard to dispute that the world would be a better place. If Christmas can help that message alone, it is more than worth its keep.
Two weeks ago, Paul Vallely the associate editor of the Independent newspaper and regular contributor to the Church Times published this comment piece: A suitable case for treatment? in which he considers the benefits to society of reorientating Christians.
2 CommentsI would not set myself up as a medical specialist on the subject – to borrow a phrase from the Bishop of Chester – but it is clear that some people who feel themselves to be religious can, with psychiatric help, reorientate themselves. Being a Christian is now a curable condition.
There are those deluded folk who assume that Christianity is not a lifestyle choice, but a gift from the Almighty. I want to help them on this. Modern mental-health care has a number of techniques, including aversion therapy, which can significantly reduce religious cravings, or, at least, stop people acting on them in a way that is unnatural.
Several additional articles published last month are now available.
Searing pain of an honest meeting by Barry Morgan
Do we really believe in the Bible? by Philip Giddings
We are not the architects of divison by Michael Ingham
The Quadrilateral is not enough by Michael Nazir-Ali
It will be hard to disentangle by John Rees
The Guardian Rowan plea for unity over gay bishop and What they said about…Bishop Gene Robinson
The Independent Anglicans sever ties amid gay bishop fury
The Telegraph Day the Church split and Lambeth’s fragile peace shattered and African Anglicans fear cost of split
The Times World’s churches cut links over gay bishop and ‘Lost sheep’ start to desert liberal churches
Also The Times has this leader On the brink Anglicans should still strive to avert a schism
The BBC African Church anger over gay bishop links also to video report
Also on the BBC Alex Kirby has this opinion article, Split church hopes to muddle on.
The Independent on Sunday prints Tom Butler: Today’s Bishop is a gay divorcee. We may not like it but is it worth a schism? by the Bishop of Southwark. This paper also has a news story, Gay bishop in disruption scare.
The Observer claims in Williams set to condemn gay bishop that Rowan Williams will issue “a strongly worded statement attacking the consecration of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire within the next 24 hours.”
1 CommentThe Times has A. C. Grayling writing on Schisms, The reason of things;
The threatened schism within Anglicanism turns on a scriptural teaching which some Anglicans are not minded to defy, namely, the proscription of homosexuality in Leviticus xviii, 22. Here schism seems to be the right answer, for a church which does not accept gay people fully seems well worth schisming from.
The Telegraph has a leader Christian disunity which regrets the forthcoming consecration:
0 CommentsIt will be as historic an event for the Anglican Communion as the hurling of anathemas between Michael Cerularius and Cardinal Humbert was for the universal Church in 1054, when Latins and Greeks broke into open schism.