The latest newsletter of inclusivechurch.net is now online.
Note that the day of action is Tuesday 10 February:
1.30 pm – Handing of petition to Archbishop
Our petition, signed by 8,500 individuals and 100 PCCs, will be received by Chris Smith, chief of staff at Lambeth Palace, on behalf of the Archbishop. Assemble outside Church House, Great Smith Street, Westminster from 1.15 pm. We are looking for a professional photographer to record the event – please contact mvernon@dircon.co.uk if you can help.
7.30 pm – Eucharist
On the eve of the General Synod’s Sexuality debate at St Matthew’s Church, Great Peter Street, Westminster. The celebrant will be Rev’d Dr Giles Fraser, chair of inclusivechurch.net. The preacher will be Revd Canon Dr Marilyn McCord Adams, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University and Canon of Christ Church.
I 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mission imperatives, when the richer dioceses (mine included) are no longer receiving any central support that can be withdrawn to fund them.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 CommentsThe General Synod of the Church of England meets in London from 9 to 13 February 2004. This is the first synod session since Thinking Anglicans began.
We want to stimulate discussion here about some of the major topics to be debated: these are summarised for example in the Church Times Heavy agenda and serious issues facing General Synod
“RADICAL DEBATES on the future of the Church, the shape of dioceses, and how best to spend the Church Commissioners’ money will be on the agenda for the General Synod when it meets next month. The Synod meets at Church House, Westminster, from 9-13 February.
There will also be debates on human sexuality, the Doctrine Commission’s report on “time, power, sex and money”, cohabitation, HIV/AIDS (when Synod will be addressed by the Secretary of State for Overseas Development, Hilary Benn), asylum-seekers, and ARCIC conversations with the Roman Catholic Church.
The new Common Worship Ordinal will be before the Synod for the first time, as well as other liturgy, and a large amount of routine legislation. Such a heavy agenda is the result of the Synod deciding to have only two sessions a year instead of the former three, said the secretary general, William Fittall, on Monday.”
Peter Owen has listed all the documents that have been issued in preparation for the session, with links to quite a number that are now available online. Also, I have listed all the news stories available online from the British press about the forthcoming session, and during the synod I will continue to list them daily.
Please join in.
0 Commentsjust thinking…
The potentially global reach of the internet is still quite limited in practice. In November 2003, less than 11% of the world’s population had internet access. 62% of North Americans and 28% of Europeans (58% in the UK) were internet users, while in Africa only 1% of the population had access. In two major African countries with significant Anglican populations, Nigeria and Uganda, the figures were only 0.1% and 0.2%. Within Latin America and the Caribbean the average was 7%, in Asia 6%, Oceania 2%, and in the Middle East 5%, although there were very wide variations between individual countries. The UK had the fifth highest number (34 million) of internet users in the world, after the USA (185 million), China, Japan, and Germany.
The reduction of this global “digital divide” is a major challenge which the United Nations and the International Telecommunications Union is trying to meet. Seven of the ten countries with the largest Christian populations, i.e. Brazil, Mexico, China, Russia, The Philippines, India and Nigeria have low figures for internet use.
Christian usage of the internet reflects the restricted geography of internet users. North American Christians currently dominate, with other English-speaking countries coming second, non-anglophone Western Europeans third, and the Global South is scarcely represented as yet. This balance will not change much over the next decade unless the global “digital divide” is significantly closed. It is not surprising therefore that so far the major Christian voices on the internet use the English language and reflect the theological balance of American Christianity, with strong representation of protestant and often conservative viewpoints. Thinking Anglicans is a small effort to redress this imbalance.
The most detailed survey so far of religious internet use is a 2001 survey of North Americans (see CyberFaith: How Americans Pursue Religion Online for details) which found that 3 million people a day (and in total 28 million Americans) had used the internet to get religious and spiritual information. This was a quarter of all American users and interestingly that was more people than had used internet dating services. 91% of them were Christians, compared to 71% of the American population.
Religious internet users appear to differ from many secular communities in that they do not use the internet much to find a new religious organisation to join, but rather to connect better with the one to which they already belong. Their most popular uses of the internet were to discover more information about their own faith, or about social issues, to email prayer requests, to download religious music, or to buy books or other religious materials. Nearly one-third subscribed to one or more electronic mailing lists of a religious kind. A majority had a favourite website affiliated with their own religious denominational group.
There are huge opportunities for Christians to promote the Kingdom of God via the internet. Thus far only a small proportion of Christian internet effort has been directed to evangelism: spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ to those who have never heard it. Much energy goes to nurture existing Christians in their faith, which is valuable. But far too much internet time is wasted in disedifying wrangles between Christians. This does nothing to further the Gospel, and leaves the potential of the internet for Christianity unfulfilled.
2 CommentsThe Washington Post has revealed details of the plot by the American Anglican Council for the Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes to supplant ECUSA as the globally-recognised Anglican jurisdiction in the USA.
Plan to Supplant Episcopal Church USA Is Revealed
Episcopalians who oppose the consecration of a gay bishop are preparing to engage in widespread disobedience to church law in 2004, according to a confidential document outlining their strategy.
The document makes clear that despite their public denials of any plan to break away from the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church USA, leaders of the traditionalist camp intend to severely challenge the authority of Episcopal bishops, and expect that both civil lawsuits and ecclesiastical charges against dissenting priests will result.
The full text of the strategy document described in the article can be found here.
Update: for follow-up press coverage on this, and other regular reports of Anglican news, go here
1 Commentjust thinking…
Matthew’s gospel concludes with a worldwide vision for the Christian message — ‘Go, and make disciples of all the nations’. The evangelist celebrates the universal vision first given by Israel’s prophets to the exiles returning from captivity. Matthew responds to Isaiah’s cry ‘Arise, shine, for your light has come’ by telling us that the first worshippers of the infant messiah are foreigners, magi from the East.
The gospel is written for Jews who are being awakened to the challenge of bringing the Christian faith to other cultures. Jewish dietary laws and distinctive dress would not be sustained within a faith which sought to be universal. Perhaps also the threat of persecution under the Roman Empire might have made it inadvisable for believers to parade their faith too publicly by sporting distinctive clothes.
One legacy is that there is no distinctive Christian dress code required by all, akin to the Sikh turban, or the Jewish skull cap. Within Britain we can also point to the fact that for those who want to retain a dress code which identifies their faith, this is accommodated to the extent of allowing Sikh men on motorcycles to wear a turban in place of a crash helmet. The law clearly shows that although the majority see no necessity for a religious dress code, the wishes of those who find this an essential expression of their faith are respected.
The present controversies about dress codes seem to show that the Christian community in many places has little understanding of the value placed on such rules by peoples of other faiths. It is significant that it was the Protestant President of Germany who made the point that ‘If one bans the headscarf in schools as a religious symbol, it is difficult to defend the monk’s habit.’ The comment is a two edged sword. Is he defending distinctive religious dress in a country that has a large Catholic population, or attacking Catholics as well as Muslims?
It is dangerous territory in Germany. Banning Jews from wearing skull caps would be almost as much an act of anti-Semitism as it was to insist that in Nazi Germany they should wear a Star of David. But it is unthinkable that the Pope, on a visit to Germany, would not wear his white cassock. Perhaps the President was saying that this line of argument had no future.
It is easy to caricature the Muslim headscarf as being a sign of the repression of women, or a political statement. Perhaps the opposite view should be heard — in many schools it would be far preferable if all girls dressed more discreetly, instead of following the pressure of advertising to flaunt their sexuality at increasingly earlier ages. Isn’t the modest dress of Muslim girls far more appropriate school wear than the revealing outfits of others? Isn’t there a value for the headscarf wearer in displaying a public sign that she belongs to a faith which prizes faithful marriage above casual sex?
At this time when we celebrate the visit of the magi from the East, we should be building a society which welcomes cultural diversity and allows people freedom of religious expression. With diversity, they bring precious gifts.
0 Commentsjust thinking…
My first reaction to the celebration of New Year is to retreat into the role my family describe as “Grumpy Old Man”. As a morning person I dislike the effort to keep awake well past my bedtime in order to simply watch some figures change on a clock — and I resent the expectation that I should do so with a show of bonhomie. I bemoan the way that New Year so quickly takes over from Christmas in the entertainment schedules that determine our popular culture; though I recognise that it allows broadcasters and journalists to put their compilation pieces together before December 25th, and go home to their families. Climbing fully onto my GOM soapbox I suspect that New Year bears blame for pushing the celebration of Christmas into Advent.
So is there anything positive I want to say about this commemoration? Well, yes there is. And it comes in the form of a plea that (as the current adage goes) we do what it says on the tin and let New Year’s celebrations be primarily a celebration in anticipation of the year to come.
Liturgically we make that point by beginning our year on the day when the church remembers the Circumcision of Christ. Efforts to re-brand the feast as “The Naming of Jesus” simply miss the point. Christ is not the last person whose circumcision gets recorded in the bible; that honour goes to Timothy. But he is the last whose circumcision is recorded as other than a piece of political expediency. Just as by his death he will destroy death, so with his circumcision the scripture looks back at the tradition into which he has been born, in order to move beyond it. Our challenge is not to forget the past, but it is also to try not to live in it either.
In different times the church will express this “future weighted balance” in different ways. In my own diocese of Worcester part of it is through our strategic plan, Looking to the Future. It isn’t a clever title, it doesn’t mean to be, but it does seek to determine an orientation towards the church we are, by God’s lead, becoming, rather than what we may formerly have been.
Back in our BC (before children) era Sue and I enjoyed long distance walking holidays. On a trek of well over a hundred miles the landmarks and staging posts became important. Be they natural, like rivers and mountain tops, or of human construction, towns and motorways, they punctuated the journey. They provided space to rest, to look back, and to look ahead. They were the places where we ate and drank, both to replenish our bodies after exertion and to build up energy for the next stage. There was a balance between what had gone before and what was to come, but the tilting of that balance was always towards the way ahead, and the ultimate destination that lay there. New Year is such a staging post, and it calls us to glance both forward and back, but then to set our feet firmly on the path ahead.
So amid all the other ideas you may have about New Year Resolutions let me suggest one more. When you catch yourself looking back in 2004, do so first in thankfulness for the good, then briefly in penitence for the bad. And then take that remembrance and let it strengthen you to face the year ahead, and embrace the new that it will bring.
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.
just thinking…
Headlong into Christmas we all seem to rush, but it is still advent and the hurry, whilst certainly to do with preparation, has little to do with penance. It might not have been the kind of preparation John the Baptist had in mind when he told people, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’. What preparation though would he be demanding of us today?
John challenged people to prepare themselves but also to look around at those in need and help them. Who are those most in need in our midst? Surely no one these days actually has nothing. Social security provides a safety net. The homeless shelters take people in, and feed them, and even help with clothing. But, do you know, there are actually those who have nothing. There are even people whom the shelters will not take at all? There are those in Britain, not just in major towns and cities but in your town on your streets, on your doorsteps who actually have nothing, not even food, and are hungry?
These people are asylum seekers. They have committed no criminal act. Routinely now, those who through no fault of their own, did not know that they had to claim asylum the moment they got to immigration control, but only found out even an hour later are denied all benefits. They are also prevented from working so they cannot earn their keep, as many would happily do. And these are not economic migrants, they are almost all from countries with which we have either been to war, or which have massive abuses of human rights. (Otherwise we would expect to see many more from the poorer African countries.) Many come highly educated, as many as 30% actually have a degree. In many cases, they cannot even be returned to their countries of origin, because it is not safe to send people back to places like Zimbabwe, Somalia, and Iraq. Their basic human rights were denied them in their home countries and they come here and find that they denied them here as well.
They are expected to have perfect knowledge of how the asylum system works here, before they arrive, even if English is not their first language — not that it gets explained to them at any stage.
So we have people now, without benefits, without work and without shelter, because the shelters only take in those for whom the state will pay for a bed, i.e. people who are British. We have managed to create a whole new underclass in our society, and one which generally gets nothing but vilification and blame from the media, as if they did not already have enough with which to cope.
So if you ask me what I think John the Baptist would be saying, I think he would be talking to us about asylum seekers. We might want to recall that Christ himself was a refugee in Egypt, that his family were even visitors to the town where he was born. And are we not to treat every asylum seeker, every refugee as Christ?
If you really want to help, if you really want to make a difference, then that would involve sharing money perhaps, but more importantly time, that is — getting involved directly; helping groups to distribute food, to dispense advice. But perhaps most important way of all, the way everyone can help them, is by not judging them before they have met them, and attempting to see behind the headlines, the rhetoric and the tinsel to see what life is really like for those who are marginalised on your streets this Advent and Christmastide.
And the latest news from the streets… the government want to take away Christ from his asylum seeking family — all for his own good you understand, because otherwise he would be destitute, too. And immediately with birth we see crucifixion as well.
1 Comment‘Go on, ask him for something this Christmas’ says the Churches’ Christmas advert.
The baby Jesus, dressed in an unlikely Santa suit, rather than the traditional swaddling clothes makes us think, and will probably cause anguish and confusion to the parents of thousands of children. The Christmas poster from the Church’s Advertising Network has again prompted all kinds of disapproval. Even the least of the criticism complains about the apparent desecration of a beautiful old master picture of the nativity.
But it does its job. It was intended to surprise, and, with gentle irony, make people think about what we have done to the festival which marks the birth of God’s Son. The meaning can be distorted or lost in all the events and all the products which claim the title of “Christmas” but have little to do with the Christian celebration of the incarnation.
The poster, of course, just adds to the confusion. But it’s only intended to point people to the places where the real message of Christmas is proclaimed — in churches of all denominations throughout the land, all marking Christmas in their own special ways.
All churches acknowledge that Christmas began with the best Christmas present in history, God’s greatest gift to the world.
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
So, for the real message and meaning of Christmas, celebrated in carols, in scripture, in teaching, in drama and liturgy, come to church, and have a real Christmas. Ask him for something.
0 CommentsTwo weeks ago, the Church Times paper edition’s web page contained an article by Sarah Meyrick, about various new web-based British church organizations, which mentioned Thinking Anglicans. This is now on the CT website.
To read the whole article, follow this link and scroll down to Partaking or plotting?
The portion about Thinking Anglicans is reproduced below.
As Sarah concludes:
All these websites give people at the grassroots a chance to track events as they unfold, and to explore tricky issues with an audience far wider than could have been dreamt of in pre-web days. For the movers and shakers, they are a means of taking the temperature of the Anglican Church at a time of turmoil.
At its best, the internet provides a way of fostering community and broadening the horizons of its users; at its worst, it allows people to become narrower in outlook and to plot damage. I suspect the outcome in this case lies in how much – if at all – the different networks communicate with each other.
So here are links to the other sites she mentions:
www.inclusivechurch.net
www.anglican-mainstream.net
www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk
www.biblicalliberal.com
Having lived for ten years in the North-East of England, I returned to Dublin (which I had left in 1990) just over three years ago. The Dublin I had left was really still a provincial town, and its inhabitants lacked the self-assured arrogance of those of some capital cities. But its community was also still far from being at ease in the modern world: the 1980s were marked in many ways by very public struggles in which the Roman Catholic church fought, and generally vanquished, what people elsewhere took for granted: contraception, divorce, homosexuality.
When I returned I encountered a very different city, and a very different country. The demure city whose pulse was hardly in evidence has become an in-your-face, secular, materialistic community. Churches in urban parishes which had attracted 90 per cent of the population to their Masses are now lucky if the get 10 per cent. A new RC archbishop feels the obvious need to begin his prelature by offering apologies to all and sundry on behalf of his church.
Anglicans have been beneficiaries, to some extent. For the first time in over a century or so the Church of Ireland is growing, and in some parishes it is growing fast. Young affluent-looking families (who will often still be declaring they are ‘Catholic’ on the census form) make the Anglican cathedral or parish church their spiritual home. And why? Because, as one said recently in a TV interview, ‘here is a denomination which understands the new millennium and can combine the spirit of the new age with the best of the old tradition’. And another said that ‘Anglicans manage to be religious without being obviously unreasonable’.
Maybe that’s too rosy a picture, and maybe the more familiar pattern of decline will return. But I don’t believe that a born-again dogmatism — whatever its direction — is a likely agent of continuing growth. Fundamentalists comfort those who cannot quite face the world as it is; but most people whose main instinct these days is to give religion a miss will run a mile if they sense a dogma around the corner. We need to speak a different language — still capable of being expressed in thees and thous, by the way — which engages the mind, refreshes the senses and shows the way forward.
3 CommentsA little over a year ago I began to learn bellringing. The bells at our church had been largely silent for several years, and a group of us decided that if we wanted them rung we would have to learn to ring them ourselves. Under the expert guidance of ringers from a neighbouring parish we started to learn the ropes.
This is no easy thing. As the bell turns full-circle on its wheel the rope goes up and down at a tremendous speed and the beginner has to learn to grab it and release it as it flies past, to pull it at the right time by just the right amount, and to feel what the bell mechanism is doing fifty feet above. This must be done for the safety of the beginner, of the other ringers, and to prevent damage to the bell and its mechanism.
After a few weeks practice this all begins to come together, and you can start to ring the bell properly. Now you must learn to ring with others, hearing the other bells as you ring, so that the church bells sound out together, calling people to worship God, or singing joyously in celebration, or sorrowfully at a funeral. Then the bells speak loud and clear, knowing their place among the other bells, singing harmoniously as they weave complex patterns to and fro.
When we try to follow the teachings that we find in the bible and in the traditions of the Church we can follow a similar path. Here there is a complex of ideas, underpinned by some simple principles, and we have to use the skills that God gives us to understand how to apply these concepts. It is not enough simply to pull on a bell-rope and expect to be able to ring a peal of bells — it takes practice, skill and co-ordination. Similarly we strive to deepen our understanding of our faith, and of the words of the bible, and to work out what we are called to do, and how to do it. The message of the bible is not always simple and its application to the world is not always clear-cut, and if we think it is then we risk becoming at best a clanging noise, and at worst a danger to ourselves and others, as when a ringer loses control of the bell-rope.
But when we have begun to understand the good news of the kingdom of God then we can sing out harmoniously, and proclaim the theme loudly, clearly and joyfully to the world.
0 CommentsTwo 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.
Awaiting licensing to a new post, there is one bonus, as I sit amongst the detritus of moving house — I don’t have to preach on Sunday, the day we mark as ‘Christ the King’. I always find these weeks before Advent, which we now call the Kingdom season, difficult. The words given to us to use in worship and in our lectionary readings are distinctly triumphalist. They speak of majesty, power, grandeur, force. How do they fit with the gospel theme of a world turned upside down, a world where the priorities are quite other? The contrast seems all the more striking this year, when the immediately preceding Sundays gave us a whole series of readings from Mark, in which we are told that the first shall be last and the last first.
But perhaps I should regret not preaching this Sunday, and trying to work out my ambivalence about the Church’s season in the light of current events. News coverage this week has been dominated by the state visit of the president of the United States. George Bush’s visit has been an extraordinary mixture of pomp and security. He has been entertained at Buckingham Palace, and protected by enormous numbers of police and security officers; he has addressed the political elite, travelled in a limousine with doors five inches thick, and reviewed a traditional guard of honour. Majesty, power, grandeur, and force.
My questioning is not about the character of American foreign policy under this president, or even about the extent and limits of American power; it runs deeper than that. It is about how the Christian tradition views power and all its trappings. In celebrating Christ the King, it is not enough to imagine a purely virtuous superpower, engaged in promoting universal well-being by using the traditional levers of force and influence. We are called, I think, to something much more radical, to re-imagining the nature and uses of dominion, to losing the triumphalism, and seeking out what it might mean for the last indeed to be first.
2 CommentsSaturday and Sunday additions below
The Archbishop of Canterbury has issued a statement concerning today’s bombings in Istanbul, which you can read here.
The Diocese in Europe has also issued a statement concerning this, which you can read here.
Update
The Church Times has a news story, on the web but not in the paper edition,
Chaplain comforts Istanbul bereaved.
This is the title of the new book published last week by Church House Publishing. The book, prepared by a committee of four bishops, is commended to the Church for study by the House of Bishops of the Church of England. I commented briefly about it when it was published.
The key thing to understand about this book is that it is a study guide, it does not set out to be an expression of any new opinions, by bishops or by anybody else. Rather, it aims to state a full range of existing opinions on the subject, so that they can all be studied.
Here is the official publishers blurb for the book.
Here is the Church Times digest of the book.
You can download the front matter and Chapter 1 of the book from the CHP website as a pdf file. You can also download the first two chapters of the short accompanying booklet, A Companion to Some Issues in Human Sexuality, with study material for individuals and groups.
Today the Church Times carried this comment on the book by Giles Fraser, Let’s be realistic about sex.
Thinking Anglicans hopes to publish other comments and reflections on the book when people have had time to read it.
Getting to the end
The hardest sentence to write of this article has been this one. Where to begin? What bearing to set off in? The start is determined by the end. I need to know where I want to go, so that I can point myself in the right direction.
For me this isn?t just part of the struggle of writing articles, it is central to the way I live as a Christian. I believe in a God of purpose and of destiny. A God who has clear ends in mind, and who calls me to journey with him towards our final destination. The question of discipleship is one of discovering where I think I am being led, and then trying to take the next step in that direction. Believing, as firmly as I can manage, that God himself will help me to take it. It?s a way of being Christian that makes the basic ethical question one of asking whether a particular action (or inaction) is likely to work towards the fulfilment of the divine purpose, or against it.
The clues to this destination come supremely in the bible, especially in the teachings of Jesus. Sometimes they are called the ?Kingdom of God? or ?Heaven?. They offer a glimpse of an existence characterised by complete intimacy with God, love, and forgiveness. In heaven there will be no more oppression, injustice or prejudice. In Christ there is, we are reminded, neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. The Kingdom we are told is breaking in even here and now. And it does so when we act in ways that show we are trying to live in it already.
The scriptures give us much more than a glimpse of the destination. They offer the reflections and experiences of others who have sought to make the same journey. As my uncle taught me years ago, ?Learn from other people?s mistakes. You?ll never have time to make them all for yourself.? St Paul in particular gives us lists of the types of behaviour that may help or hinder us on the way.
In the immediate post Vatican II era Roman Catholics built up the image of the ?pilgrim church?. And it is one that has stuck with me ever since. It keeps me from imagining, in some post-modern or ?new age? sense that the only journey is my personal one. My journey is part of the journey of the church, which in turn is part of the journey of the whole creation towards God. Again Paul?s letters provide some wonderful insights into the many ways in which the church lost the path, even in those immediate post-Easter years. And I often find comfort in them when we mess things up today ? the comfort of knowing there never was a golden age.
Because the journey is not simply a personal one, the creation itself matters, and matters deeply. I find myself in direct opposition to those Christians who deduce from their belief in the imminent return of Jesus that we should use up the Earth?s resources, or even hasten the destruction that the scriptures suggest will herald the end time. Rather the whole creation is being shaped by God to achieve its ultimate fulfilment in him. It is not a rejection of the doctrine of the fall, but a belief that God works to restore the fallen, rather than just to pluck brands from the burning. But that does mean that I part company, and pretty firmly, with those of my colleagues who base their theology on what one recently referred to as the ?utter depravity? of our fallen state. And in terms of the subjects that are most controversial in the church at present the primary question I take to the scriptures, reason and tradition is to ask what effect the love two men or women have for each other has on their and our ultimate destiny. Is it something that condemns to hell, or that will need to be discarded on the road to heaven? Or is it part of them that will travel with them and us to God?s Kingdom?
I?ve just about completed my journey through this article. I?ve got to where I wanted to get, and said what I wanted to say. But like most good journeys I?ve found something new on the way. It has struck me how the way I live my faith resonates with how I deal with a new computer or piece of software. In both cases looking for a book of instructions comes last on the list, after I?ve worked out what it?s meant to do and tried to get it to do it. And possibly followed the examples of more experienced friends. So if you?re one of those who reads the manual thoroughly first, and memorises as many rules as you can then it’s highly likely the way we encapsulate our faith is different too. And in that diversity is God?s glory.
1 CommentSeveral 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