Bishop Alan’s Blog

Pentecost: Fire lights on Babel Tower

2013-05-19T10:51:00.003+01:00

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs...

What emerges from Acts 2 is the original Multinational — founded on absolute Equality, universal in scope, affirming particularity, non-Imperialistic (but welcoming to Roman tourists like anyone else), minimally and functionally hierarchical but inwardly driven by the Spirit. What’s wrong with that?

Sadly this simple vision conflicts with some dirty little habits:

Inequality
usually expressed as the feeling of entitlement you find in racists, bigots and sexual predators of all stripes, mild and strong, ancient and modern. It’s all about power, not sex.
Narrow Tribalism
even the corruption of the Pentecostal Community into a tribe. The idea was that all instincts of particularity that used to express themselves over and against each other should become a symphony of disparates. The Church’s calling was to transcend tribalism, not become a specialist faith group that revels in its habits and routines and, literally, idolises its particularity.
Homogenisation
because birds of a feather flock together. The herd instinct turns in on itself and opts for safety in numbers, the tyranny of the tidy-minded, groupthink and doubletalk. The Institution takes itself far to seriously. The Sprit is subjected to the letter of the law, bureaucratised and neutered

Perhaps the big crises the Church faces are not intractable issues in themselves, but the inevitable result of losing touch with its roots. The outward and inward predicaments the Church faces often draw out instinctive pragmatic love, especially at street level. Difference is no more than an invitation to love even enemies.

Sadly, the same predicaments also produce flashes of inequality, bigotry and discrimination, imperialism, institutional inertia, complacency and self-obsession. Beware the leaven of the Pharisees says Jesus. “Be watchful of yourselves, whitewashed tombs, brood of vipers!”

We can't fix the problems beyond us, but we can attend to the rot within us and among us. Then, in the light of such repentance, we could look outward in the light of all we had learnt and, in Wendell Berry’s unforgettable phrase, Practice Resurrection. Who knows? Engaging and transformative vision could go viral as it did on the streets of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost.

Starting here. Couldn’t it?

Kismet

2013-04-13T10:02:00.003+01:00

2014: Oh dear, Oh dear. We failed to heed the warning the Faith and Order Commission of the Church of England gave us, and now look what’s happening

Gay Marriage: Must Try Harder

2013-04-10T07:14:00.000+01:00

The Lion has Roared. The faith and order commission of the General Synod, no less, has uttered its mind on marriage equality.

Marriage is the faithful committed permanent and legally sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman central to the stability and health of human society

What would happen if we simply substituted "between two people"?

Well, very little has happened, actually, in jurisdictions that have done that.

Belgium remains, after ten years, a drably conventional place, where people are married and given in marriage.

In Belgium, Gay people are not forced to marry people of the opposite sex and pretend to be what they are not. A small number of them choose a life of marital commitment together. Er, that’s it.

But apparently this is what will happen in the UK:

When marriage is spoken of unclearly or misleadingly it distorts the way couples try to conduct their relationships and makes for frustration and disappointment. The reality of marriage between one man and one woman will not disappear as a result of any legislative change, for God has given us this gift and it will remain part of our created human endowment. The disciplines of living in it may become more difficult to acquire and the path to fulfillment in marriage and in other relationships more difficult to find.

Really? How would that be? Has anyone ever met any couple to whom this happened?

I agree that broadening access to marriage to include gay people and abolishing the unclarity inherent in forcing them to pretend to be heterosexual in order to get married can only reduce confusion, frustration and disappointment all round.

Nobody is proposing gay relationships should be substituted for straight ones, merely treated equally.

Paragraph 8 is pure waffle:

The marvelous ordering of the created world has not lost its force for a generation made more aware than before by discoveries in physics and biology of the dynamic unfolding of the universe, the interplay between innovation and constancy, variation and intelligibility.

If the author of paragraph 26 which states “persons are not asexual” were to explore discoveries in biology they would learn that a tiny proportion, up to 1% of the population are, actually, asexual.

Paragraph 29 makes a clear and helpful claim that

In God's image we bring spiritual creativity to our natural endowment without denying or overthrowing it.

One would expect the author to recognise that for some people their natural endowment is gay. Someone in favour of equal marriage would agree. But hang on, the report goes on to imply that only heterosexuality is, actually, natural.

This is the crux of the argument and exposes its genteel homophobic assumptions. If gayness may be regarded, as a matter of fact, as part of the natural order, the whole argument of this paper works in the opposite direction to what it intended. It does not speak for all Christians, as it claims to, because many Christians do not regard gay people as in any way inferior.
The conviction they are equal arises from primary gospel values.

Whilst agreeing with 95% of what is said in this report about marriage, the whole thing unravels as an argument against marriage equality the moment one accepts that gay people are not freaks, crooks, or straight people being naughty. If you believe they are any or all of these things, most of its arguments stack up against equal marriage. If you don’t, they actually stack up in favour.

I recently met a Lesbian in church who was telling me that her worst experience of Church had been when it posed as the source of some cheesy form of pastoral care whilst continuing its essentially homophobic stance towards her personally.

Thus I quake in my boots when I read in the accompanying press release

this report also underlines the role of the Church in seeking to provide care, prayer, and compassion for those who, for whatever reason, are unable to receive the gift of marriage in the form that the Church has understood it and continues to uphold.

Many of my gay friends will find this tendentious statement wildly patronising and offensive. Offers of comfort from the very people whose homophobia caused the pain in the first place will not be received easily. If the Church wants to provide compassion, it can stop talking about gay people and start talking with them. It can demonstrate the genuinness of its care by ceasing to belittle and patronise them and start taking them seriously. If it wants to pray with them, this institution which cheerfully blesses nuclear submarines, hamsters and buckets of cement can start blessing their often stunning relationships.

Persecution, Paranoia and Pluralism for Pot-Plants

2013-03-30T13:08:00.001Z

Holy Saturday brings what the Daily Mail calls an Astonishing attack on the Prime Minister by Lord Carey. I was not astonished. The timing is plainly the Daily Mail’s, to embarrass the government as much as possible. Apparently two thirds of Christians now feel they are a persecuted minority — or at least they did fifteen months ago when the fieldwork for this survey was conducted.

Since almost 60% of the population self-identified as Christians in the 2011 census, it's hard to see how the basic maths of this notion could possibly be substantiated. There are Christians in some parts of Africa and the Muslim world, for example, who actually do experience persecution. This does not consist of some politicians, including Christian politicians, disagreeing with them, but losing jobs, homes and freedom. Any comparison with them seems, to put it mildly, tacky.

Apparently UK persecution consists of having to tolerate the fact that many people don’t share their narrow interpretation of the Bible, including many if not most other Christians.

So what basis could there be for the factually tendentious feeling that Christians are persecuted in the UK? Perhaps top-shelf reactionary religion, in itself, can engender its own nightmares. I turned to the memoirs of Frank Schaeffer, talking about the anxieties of his Fundamentalist childhood:

We Schaeffers never compromised. At times it seemed that only God knew how important we were, how right, how pure.

But isolation and rejection by “The World” only confirmed our self-importance.

The sense of being like the tribes of Israel wandering the desert, with enemies on all sides, was the underlying reality of my childhood.

I think it was shared by my three sisters... Susan took grim satisfaction at the looming damnation of just about everyone but us. Debby wept and redoubled her efforts. Priscilla got nervous and threw up. I hid.

Conservative Christians are people of high integrity and seriousness. I believe them when they say they do experience marginalisation. In the good old days their social mores, backed by the criminal law and psychiatric practice, absolutely ruled the roost.

Cultural development since 1945, for better or worse, has left many conventionally minded Christians dazed and confused. A character in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger says of her father — “Poor Daddy. He’s a pot-plant left over from the Edwardian high summer who can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more.”

Where does this marginalisation leave them? basically in the same position as the rest of the population. Conservative Christians have a right to hold and express their views and be heard with respect like anyone else. That does not require everyone else to agree with them. Some people, most people, including other Christians, may well disagree with them. Nor does their right to be heard give them moral high ground from which to curtail the rights and dignities of others. They simply have to take their chances with everybody else,a nd be judged on the merits of their case.

That is not persecution. It’s reality. It’s Democracy.

Good Friday: Into the Vortex

2013-03-29T12:41:00.001Z

Good Friday. As he leaves the upper room, the Gospels suggest, Christ allows himself to fall into a swirling vortex of cause and effect over which nobody can have an
y control. The King of the Jews gives himself up into the hands of his enemies. He surrenders to an overwhelming chain of events.
The disciples, the priests, the procurator, the soldiers all think at different times that they are driving the story, but they are wrong. Nobody fetches up in this story where they want to be, but the faith says that everybody ends up where they need to be.

Good Friday is a good day to explore Rachel Mann’s new book, Dazzling Darkness. It’s beautifully written, easy to read but not an easy read. Rachel bears profound personal testimony to her adventures, struggles and falls on the edge of gender, identity, and illness. She tells the story with severe realism. She embraces faith in community not as the resolution of all doubts and loss, but as a state of being lost and found all at once, work in progress. Her narrative does not blink at the tragic dimension of living on the outside, but embraces it in the hope of a better resurrection.

The edge, the liminal zone, is where that resurrection happens — not the reversal of death, because the most identifiable thing about Jesus’ risen body are the scars, the marks of embracing not evading death, of having been sucked into the vortex and out another side that is infinite.

It may be that what makes organised institutions of faith difficult for so many people today is not their eternal tendency to take themselves too seriously — something Jesus experienced, at whose hands he suffered. That’s always been part of the mix.

But the punters have rumbled the fact that neat, Pooterish, God-in-a-box Moralism, however convinced it may be of its own consistency and worth, is a poor substitute for life in all its fulness. Part of that fulness is loss, pain and uncertainty, as well as hope, beauty and joy.

This is a book to read and re-read. I have a bad habit of underlining potentially helpful sections of books I read on the Kindle. I found myself underlining most of some chapters of this one. Rachel’s a poet as well as a philosopher by instinct and training, and it shows. So I leave the last word for today
to her:

In Jesus Christ, God embraces human life and shows us — in the dark night of rejection, of unjust violence, of the loss of his friends as they run away, and most particularly in the Cross — the mystery of hope and love. And most of all of forgiveness....
If the Christian life is about participating in the Divine Comedy, the actual living of it so often has the character of tragedy. And in the tragedy lie the pity, the hope, the weight, and, sometimes, the beauty.

Note 1: American Gothic Christmas by GarRobMil of the Independents

Note 2: Kindle users need to download Rachel's book as a MobiPocket edition from here, then transfer it directly by wire (i.e. as a private publication) to their reader.

Good Friday Music: Sung Text in Context

2013-03-29T11:04:00.003Z

One Big Plug from a serendipitous holy week: John Butt’s Dunedin Consort Bach St John Passion, just published, represents a significant trend in the presentation of passion music.

This recording recreates the Passion as liturgy, not concert performance. It draws together organ pieces, supplemental congregational singing, collects and responses, and even a sermon from 1720 downloadable from the publisher's website. Recordings on original instruments have a potential for their own silly fundamentalism. If anyone wants to give me a concert Steinway for Easter I won't be putting it on the fire. Great music works in all kinds of media. There is a whole voodoo of pitch and temperament that is best avoided by all except professors of the subject.

A whole liturgical approach does, however, invite anyone with a heart to feel afresh the impact of the whole text in context. I was stunned to hear the dark and stormy opening chorus (Herr, unser Herrscher, dessen Ruhm in allen Landen herrlich ist!) framed, astonishingly, by Buxtehude’s F Sharp Minor prelude (BuxWV 146). It works.

This approach requires small consorts and choirs on something like an eighteenth century scale. Doing this not only makes runs more nimble and passionate, but sings on various levels. Soloists’ recitative tells the tale. Arias provide relief, interpreting and inviting possible responses. Choruses play group roles and provide reaction shots. Single line chorales represent the congregations at Leipzig in the 1720’s, marking major points of transition and a frame on which to hang the whole and tie it together.

The point of listening to a Passion is to be drawn, mentally and spiritually, to the different roles in the drama, entering each to some extent. We are fleeing confused disciples, we are Peter the Impulsive, Judas the Betrayer, Caiaphas the professional holy Joe, Pilate, the overpromoted Coward. We play all these parts at different times in different contexts. All call for Grace. Each, in the course of the drama, meet Christ's searching understanding compassion. The possibility of that meeting is also potential for healing and hope.

Why not this year? Why not me? Why not you?

Frankie and Benny — Popes, Profs and Pragmatics.

2013-03-14T08:52:00.000Z

Hope springs eternal in Rome, with prayers and good wishes from around the world. I felt a big flutter of positive energy, watching Pope Francis’ first hour in his new job. He seemed immensely calm but warm, centred in the moment and modest. I can’t imagine him in Mister Punch Prada gear, a plus point for me and future Vatican tourists who might otherwise not be able to tell which man in a white cassock was which.

It looks as though there will be no confusing them. Circumstantially, people feel more at ease with an all-rounder. Historians may look out for signs of transition from the rule of an intellectual to that of a perfectly educated and intelligent man who seems confident, relaxed and centred in the moment.

Intellectual giants always, usually unintentionally, intimidate others. Nobody loves a Big Brain Alien. More significantly, Intellectuals inhabit a large room stocked with big ideas, that can become their primary reality.
To someone with a powerful electric screwdriver every protusion is a screw. This can deliver quick results with some protrusions, but others, like nails and boils, remain stubbornly resistant.

Intellectual giants see the progress of the world as the evolution of big ideas. A process of syllogism, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, drives their big brainy world, the one that really matters. Other people start from the other end and deal with their in-trays in more pedestrian but effective ways. Things move on because they were dealt with, and everyone else feels life is more than an eternal seminar group.

To intellectual giants, issues arising from changing sexual mores are challenges to sources of authority, revisionist mountains made of molehills, waves beating against the rocks of the eternal shore. The progress of civilisation is at stake. To a priest struggling with imposed celibacy, or a young lad contemplating hanging himself from very shame, all the Big Ideas around this mean nothing, nor to the millions whose gut instincts drive them, often unwittingly, one way or the other. Failure to see this whole picture holistically makes the puzzle impossible.

It would not surprise me if the new Pope's dogmatic beliefs were basically to the right in terms of issues, but I would expect him to be less imprisoned by them. A leader with a strong sense of pragmatic reality and faith that is concrete rather than abstract, shrewd rather than subtle, could do much good. The honeymoon will be over soon enough.

I’m trying to enjoy it hopefully, and the parallel process that is unfolding in the Church of England...

Cyril says: Beware Percentages, my Son

2013-03-11T14:34:00.001Z

Cyril Badger, wily Reading parishioner (RIP1989) once warned me about the dangers of income comparisons based on percentages. Back in the sixties, said Cyril, it suited everyone to pretend percentages were the best way to rate pay increases. Managers liked them because they were simple and worked across the board. Trades Union leaders liked them because they appeared fair but preserved differentials.

The fact is, said Cyril, you can only understand any percentage if you ask “... of what?”

So let's just apply the Cyril test to the concept of fairness proposed by the government.

Let's imagine you're a cabinet minister with an income of £134,565. You spend modestly on heating and food every year and “fair” austerity conditions are applied to you — a 1% pay rise every year, in the face of 4% rises in basics. This year you spend £14,000 on food and heating (bear in mind you have more than one property to heat) with £120,565 for everything else, including tax. After five years your income is £140,028, and Inflation has raised your spending on food and heat to £16,378. This leaves £123, 650 for everything else — actually, just over a 2% rise in spending money! O Joy! And if that's not enough, you can easily increase your earnings with non-exec directorships and other casual earnings.

Let’s apply the same calculation to a single parent on minimum wage with two children and top up benefits. This produces £12,000 a year, of which she spends £1,100 on heat and £7,800 on food. This leaves £3,100 for everything else. Now apply “fairness.” After five years she has £12,487 of income, spending, £10,411 for essentials, leaving £2,075 for everything else. Oh dear. That’s a cut of 30% in money available for everything else.

Finally, consider a pensioner couple with a very small private pension funded from savings. Now they live on £8,000 a year, spending £750 on heating and £2,800 on food. This leaves £4,550 for the rest, including rent. Let’s apply a bit of “fairness.” After five years on the same assumptions, their income is £8,324, with £877 to spend on heating and £3,275 on food. This leaves £4,171 for everything else, a 10% cut.

So, right off the back of the envelope, fair is fair. But it's a lot more fair if you're a Tory minister where tightening the belt involves limiting yourself to a 2% rise in spending money. It’s less fair if you're a pensioner couple facing a 10% cut, or a mother of two facing a 30% cut. Of course it will affect your children. How could it not?

The reasons bishops have said what they have is Maths, not Marxism. Go figure. I'd love to see a better model than the back of my envelope including housing costs, if anyone out there knows of one...

As to the feckless poor hypothesis, kudos to the Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed Churches for producing a report, the Lies we tell ourselves that introduces a note of reality to the discussion.

Misérables Britanniques?

2013-03-10T14:55:00.004Z

Led by the Childrens' Society, bishops and church leaders criticise proposals to limit universal credit way below the rate of inflation for the next few years.

The fact is, Food and fuel prices have rocketed, and look set to continue to do so. There is no way that what is proposed can do anything but produce more pauper children.

Softball Soggy Liberals feel that penalising the poor is unfair, and Hardball Neocons that the poor should get on their bikes. I’m with the softball soggies on this one.

Some suggest there is a huge number of feckless poor on the fiddle who need to be busted to make the system pay. It's essential to prosecute welfare fraud, but the amount of money involved, in proportion to the whole system, is utterly miniscule. Rattling sabres may make hardball neocons feel better, but the sober fact is there’s almost no money to be got from this source.

Nobody can doubt the wisdom of simplifying the tax and welfare system, nor the need to spend wisely in lean times, but anything that increases child poverty feels all wrong. Does it make any economic sense?

I have a general notion of some of the bigger picture that could undermine attempts at welfare reform. Please put me right on any material facts I am misapprehending here, as well as anything I've missed, but...

Inequality costs money
Since the 1980’s most Western countries have seen major increases in inequality, largely driven by Neocon economics. In countries that have followed this path, surprisingly perhaps, growth rates have now fallen dramatically, leading to stagnation. Why will more of the same produce different results?
Grass Roots matter
The economy is series of interconnected local, regional and national systems. Concentrating wealth in a few hands at the top drains it from local economies where the poor spend more on basic goods and services. Inequality increases all kinds of social ills that load the welfare budget. The rich spend more, but mostly in more boutique ways. Regional decay costs the welfare system massive amounts of money.
Trickle Down is Tosh
Our fastest industrial growth last century actually coincided with the most redistributive phase of UK fiscal policy. The growing economies of the postwar years invested heavily the kind of proportions we spend on financial services in infrastructure, social services and R and D.
There have to be Limits to Debt
One thing the poor spend a lot of money on is debt, sometimes at outrageous thousand percent rates of interest. The government should be congratulated for at last making serious noises about payday loans, but this issue is only the tip of an iceberg.
Everybody can't be an estate agent.
Somebody has to design and make stuff. Not all education spending produces wealth. We have not, in fact, regressed to pre-industrial levels of demand for manufactured goods. It's just that other people make everything. The pathetic decay of British manufacturing, along with genuine polytechnic education and apprenticeships, has weakened the whole economy.
Houses are only worth what people can pay.
The UK has for many years sucked much popular personal wealth into a house price bubble. This makes people feel wealthier than they are, and parks money that could usefully be invested otherwise in bricks and mortar. House building is a good infrastructure in which to invest, but only up to a point. Soaring housing costs mean soaring housing benefit costs. High house prices also gum up labour markets.
Penalising saving impoverishes everyone.
Like the Victorian economy, postwar booming economies encouraged savings, sometimes as a hangover from wartime loan schemes. The UK has long been a terrible place for savers, and this impoverishes our local economies. For years we have reported high interest rates as bad news. Even in housing this wasn't the whole story, as most building societies had more savers than borrowers. Of course people haven’t got savings. For years savers have been penalised. This also loads cost the welfare system in the end.
When is a job a real job?
Low wage economies create a large number of jobs, but if these “jobs” do not pay enough for people to become substantial taxpayers in their own right the welfare system simply becomes a subsidy to inefficient employers. High debt low wage inhibits organic economic growth. High skill, large added value, leads to higher wages. Well it does for bankers — why not for everyone else?
Broad based investment in real activity produces wealth.
Investment decisions are made by a limited number of financial institutions, not a host of small investors as in the UK’s boom days. What need for sensible investment decisions when you can screw 28%APR out of the public with minimum lending rate at half a percent with credit cards? What sensible activity could generate such money for old rope? Meanwhile, grass roots businesses are short of money, and many fail in the UK because they just don't get off the ground. Additionally, as we have seen, running the consumer economy on debt not savings enriches financial institutions in ways that end up costing the welfare system serious money.
Class costs money
Another effect of increasing inequality in the past twenty years in Britain has been a decrease in social mobility. Whatever one makes of this politically, it undoubtedly wastes the talents of people whom in earlier ages would have had more opportunity to better themselves. Squeezing the bottom locks people even more deeply into a static social order. That dampens aspiration and increases welfare dependency.

What is needed is a far clearer view of the difference between productive investment and subsidising failure.

Chickens are coming home to roost on forty years of supply-side economic liberalism. We need to understand where we are and why in the broadest terms before developing policy.

Failing an understanding of the bigger picture it makes little sense to lock large numbers, especially children and the vulnerable fixed-income elderly, even further into poverty. Simply lashing out at the poorest and most vulnerable is a shoddy way to save money, and unlikely to prove effective.

Dear Justin...

2013-03-04T19:48:00.001Z

Canon Rosie Harper wrote a letter to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, commissioned by the BBC radio 4 Sunday Programme, 3rd March 2013:

Firstly, take good care of yourself and your family. Everyone will expect you to be superman, but it is God’s job to build her church, and she has called you to a specific role because of your particular gifts. Trust that calling- have the courage to be yourself. The more your role and your true self are aligned the greater the chance that the church will rediscover its own integrity.

So what about the mess? The clock is ticking. We only have a little time left to reclaim our heritage as church for the whole nation. There is such a massive disconnect between our obsessions and the big needs and concerns of people in this country. Surely your first and most important task is to recast the church for everyone, not just for the various special interest groups within the institution. Be a real prophet. Talk about the stuff that matters:

How can faith be good news in a recession?
What are the deep values about the way we use money?
How might we give a decent education to all our children?
How are we going to feed the world?
Can we take good care of our elderly?

People long to engage with that big stuff, but don’t think the church has anything to offer them.

Well — you can guess what I’m going to say next...

How can our society take us seriously when all they experience about us is so negative? The reaction when the women bishop’s vote failed in November showed starkly that it isn’t acceptable to discriminate against women.

Nor is it possible to have any credibility if the CofE continues to speak about gay people as if they were a problem. The post-bag I’ve had from anti-gay Christians has been vomit inducing and utterly shameful. How can we prevent the church from becoming the last bastion for homophobia in our society?

These matters of justice and equality are surely make or break. Each of us stands fully equal before God and if we preach otherwise we have no gospel to proclaim. But if we get it right then we can become a church that is as much at home in the real world as Jesus was. We need to be passionate about hope and transformation.

It’s going to take a major shift in thinking and behaving. Let’s be less defensive, less afraid of risk. Let’s be poetic and dream some dreams for the nation. Let’s have a bit of faith and commit to growth and change. Not tomorrow. Today.

Of Camp Fires and Wagon Wheels

2013-03-03T14:48:00.002Z

The wagon train had come far. Over forty wagons bore a ragbag of settlers — immigrants most of them — with their children, animals and treasures, family Bibles, traveling essentials, to build a new life. Wagons snaked across the arid wastes of the great Alkali Plain towards crags and outlandish rock formations out West. Never before had the settlers seen such things, but hope of a new life overcame fear of the unknown as they pressed on.

Such travelers are inherently independent, often unruly, a rabble with mixed and often contradictory motives, dreams and capacities.

All that drew them on together was hope of a better life.

Each night the wagons circled round and lit a campfire. This prevented the animals running away, and kept the wagons safe from marauding beasts and occasional native American raiding parties.

The captain had some responsibility, but little rank to pull. His role was largely confined to getting everyone moving in the morning and selecting when and where to camp come nightfall.

Cap’n Carey, moon-faced and avuncular, always dreamt of the clipped lawns, neat spires and town halls of his native New England. A large gold watch dangled on his rotund frontage, and gave him some air of authority. Strangers could think him self-important, but his friends knew this to be wrong. “We're building a nation” he used to say. “We're official.”

The Cap’n had official symbols painted on every wagon. They didn't particularly scare off the beasts or Indians, but they helped him feel more at home. Much of his energy went into the Wagon Train Committee. The task of the WTC was to keep everything orderly and official and minimise trouble. Few settlers knew who was on the committee or what they did, but its very existence made everything official, along with the Postal Service roundels, especially to committee members around their own campfire in the evenings.

Captain Williams was more a poet than a Captain. But his dreams were so powerful, his words so beautiful, that he had seemed just the man to lead a journey to the Unknown. The evenings seemed timeless as the settlers whiled away nights under the stars of heaven telling stories, comparing their family Bibles, and playing the guitar not very well.

Their own campfire songs became, increasingly, enticing. What with those and the occasional sausage sizzle, the settlers stayed up so late talking that the last thing they felt like any morning was saddling up or moving on, so they began not to. They say a diet of beans makes the cowboys gassy. Campfire talk got animated, contentious even. The cut of the women's bonnets and occasional line-dancing indiscretions became major topics for debate.

Some said the campfire was going down. Every now and then coffee dregs landed on red embers with a menacing hiss, but life could be worse. Was it weeks, months, or even years that settlers sat in a circle of wagons, by night telling tales, mostly about themselves, and by day snoozing.

Maybe this was the new world, thought some, whilst others became restless. Most settlers forgot how to saddle up or shoot and their spirited campfire discussions said less and less about the journey, the geography, or even the horses.

In the end even the Cap’n had enough and signed off. All that remained were the embers of the fire, some creaky old wagons, a few family treasures, and ancient rock formations all around.

Over to You, Cap’n Welby. Over to us, too? Can those ancient rock formations reignite the passion to journey?

My Marriage Equality Postbag

2013-02-15T10:55:00.000Z

Since coming out on this subject I have received many messages of all kinds — not mainly about marriage but about church people's attitudes to homosexuality. What’s the score?

just over 500 messages of one sort or another, pretty much all so far as I can tell from Christians of one sort or another. This implies that most others in society have moved on from fretting about this subject, if not to full acceptance, to an acknowledgment that gay people are just people like them, and what people get up to in bed is their own business.
about 80% have been supportive. These include some 20-30 deeply personal testimonies from gay couples, telling of love and faithfulness, sometimes against terrible odds over many years. Legal recognition will not make these relationships stronger, but it will de-stigmatise them. Among practising Christians, I have received “Don’t tell my vicar, but...” and “not in my name” messages that imply a need for more openness, confidence and honesty, especially where clergy have attempted to whip others into shape behind a conventional party line. It is inaccurate to characterize all Evangelical Christians as anti. Many of them are far more thoughtful, nuanced and conflicted, with a strong Evangelical instinct that is not about last ditching a particular interpretation of the Bible but striving to be good news to real people. The vast majority of local Churches are personally welcoming to all.
Of the 20% agin, about 90% can only be seen as expressions of crude prejudice and bigotry. The phrase “I am not homophobic, but...” sees to mean “soft or hard homophobic statement ahoy! But don't pick me up on it.” Some of these comments are more genteel than others. I have been told that gay people are lice, animals, insects, should be aborted before birth, disgusting, perverted, sexually voracious, mass murderers and sub-human — all these for just being gay. So whether you like your prejudice genteel, hypocritical, or crude, there’s a carousel of possibilities out there... It is simply false to claim there is no homophobia in the Church. There is plenty of it, apparently, and if Church leaders do not wake up and act to tackle it, the Church will become, even more than it already is, a last ditch for soft or hard prejudice that has now faded elsewhere in society.
Another anti trope has been “Bishop you are trying to be kind, but you are encouraging BUGGERY!!!” (the last word underlined in green biro till it goes through the paper.) A fair number of otherwise inoffensive Church people insist on defining gay people by what they imagine they get up to in bed, with a prurience and obsessionality that is disturbing.
Within the 10% of 20% more reflective unfavourable comment, I have made new friends, and discovered a capacity to engage with this among Christians, however reluctantly, that is impressive. Some messages were initially very hostile and angry with me. When I engaged with them on one positive point about which we might agree, the façade crumbled and we were able to have interesting and fruitful conversations. It can be done.
I have enjoyed about half a dozen really thoughtful, helpful and reflective conversations with very Conservative Evangelical Christians — nuggets of gold amidst a steaming pile of more general railing and abuse.

One lay comment sticks in my mind. The gentleman pointed out that a positive sense about homosexuality has been building in British society since the 1920’s. The resulting tsunami arrived in the 1990’s in the fields of education, culture media and sport, public life, the law, the military (in which he had been a senior officer), the police. In each of these areas of national life the overwhelming, when it came, was sudden and, surprisingly, almost entirely benign. The Church had parked itself in a siding in the 1990’s, and everyone else, as he put it, was somewhere round Birmingham by now.

The bishops, I was told, had simply taken the easiest way out — try to agree with everyone as much as possible, make generally safe noises about change, be nice to individual gay people whilst constructing fences against their full acceptance, humour reactionaries under a banner of inclusivity, generally treating past certainties as though they still applied as much as possible. As a military man he could say you cannot run any institution, least of all a Church, on niceness, evasion, pusillanimity, cowardice and hypocrisy. That’s one military view, anyway.

I think I am coming towards some general conclusions about the basic subject for most of my correspondents — gayness not marriage:

I have during this time returned to my college notes of the tiny number of Bible passages that could possibly bear directly on this subject. Many (many? there are only 5 anyway) are not entirely clear in their meaning, and none are entirely obvious for interpretation and application. I was very struck by a day I spent studying Leviticus in Hebrew in depth with various rabbinic commentaries, by the depth and subtlety of the text exposed by those formed within it rather than constructing a chain of sound bites from it that just happen to reinforce their basic instincts. There is a crying need for more rigorous reading of the text where homophobic readings used to be adequate to the needs of a homophobic society, with whose norms they easily conformed.
Christianity thrives as good news in the real world. This is not a job for school certificate Biology. Concepts of “natural” and “un-natural” are very fundamental to where people position themselves about homosexuality. There seem to be two basic perceptions from which everything else flows. As clearly and charitably as I can put it
Either
Homosexuality is a phenomenon against nature, and defies Creation and/or evolution
Or
Homosexuality is a phenomenon within nature, and thus part of Creation and/or evolution

Notoriously, perhaps, the vast majority of people in this country have moved since the 1920’s from the first position towards a more or less grudging conviction of the second. As the first position fades with the generations, simply asserting it louder is in fact driving change forward faster.

In that sense, supporters of marriage equality should welcome every one of the prejudiced comments they receive. The matter speaks for itself. A fair number of MP’s who were wavering on the brink of voting for last week’s bill were certainly influenced to do so by sheer horror at some of the bigoted nonsense they received under a “Christian” label.

I’m with Tutu. Encouraging the Church to be more aligned with the point of the Bible and less hung up about particular interpretations of its small print should be doable, especially as most Church members are there already. For them being a Christian is about loving God and your neighbour as yourself, not culture wars. That’s the good news.

Desmond Tutu:

The Jesus I worship is not likely to collaborate with those who vilify and persecute an already oppressed minority. I myself could not have opposed the injustice of penalizing people for something about which they could do nothing -- their race -- and then have kept quiet as women were being penalized for something they could do nothing about -- their gender; hence my support for the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate. Equally, I cannot keep quiet while people are being penalized for something about which they can do nothing -- their sexuality. To discriminate against our sisters and brothers who are lesbian or gay on grounds of their sexual orientation for me is as totally unacceptable and unjust as apartheid ever was.

The bad news is that, as a matter of shameful fact, the Church does appear to contain noisy minorities of homophobes and bigots who use verses from the Bible as a collection of soundbites to validate their disgust, and it will have to work consciously to prevent itself it becoming their last ditch.

A chink in the walls of Kafka’s Castle?

2013-01-06T12:18:00.002Z

Headlines scream that the Church of England has “lifted its moratorium on appointing bishops in civil partnerships.”

One can only speculate about the intentions of those who did this deed, but they do not appear to have expected a vigorous media response. It may be that they were quite unaware that they were doing anything of great significance.

They weren’t.

Whoever the framer of this tweak was, he almost certainly thought it a minor administrative tidy-up, bringing policy for bishops and clergy into line.

It could, perhaps, be intended to protect the institution from legal challenge. It could even, who knows, impart a shred of alignment into official opposition to equal marriage. This has seen bishops trumpeting a strange, new-found, enthusiasm for civil partnerships that they never certainly never showed when they were voting like cattle (only +Richard Harries didn’t) for an amendment to wreck the original legislation.

No individual is willing put their signature on the new policy, so there can no personal animus in those who say they look like confused and anxious landlubbers trying not to rock the boat so hard they almost capsize it. They'd be better off to conquer their fear of the unknown gay forces of nature enough to hoist the sails like every other boat on the river has done in the past thirty years.

This change leaves intact all fictions and fantasies of a new and unique approch — “Do ask, Do tell — but only if you're gay.” This has been honoured more in the breach, mostly because it is impracticable, tacky and discriminatory.

All that has changed is a grudging recognition of civil partnerships for celibates. The headlines have, however, stimulated vigorous kicking and screaming by people. Lynette Burrows on yesterdays PM programme (18 minutes in) shared with the nation her “instinct that people like me have which is revulsion” about gay people. The role of the Church, she implies, is to validate her instinctive disgust, which she imagines is shared by everybody.

I almost crashed the car as I heard her speak. Usually people with such views are careful to preface homophobic or racist comments by saying they are not being homophobic or racist. Years ago, somebody told me they were not, of course, being racist then explained that black people were "deteriating" her community by being black, and who would not feel sorry for the children of racially mixed marriages? By this diseased scale, there was a magnificent honesty about Lynette Burrows’ views, however revolting.

At least she was expressing what this argument is actually all about. Dread of a notional gay tsunami is driven at a level way beneath that at which rational discussion is possible. Fear, disgust and revulsion have indeed characterised societal responses to gay people, right up to the late twentieth century. The Church can, and must do better than that, or it simply debases itself into a bunker for bigots, where they can feel comfortable about their abnormal revulsions.

Corrupting the Church into a vehicle for disgust against any group of people on the grounds of how they are created is unspeakably wrong-headed. The witness of the Bible and history is that the Church’s purpose is the precise opposite — to embrace all people in a redeemed humanity that embraces every particularity God has created.

As to the chances of a bishop in a civil partnership, Kafka fans may see this announcement as an anonymous note to the surveyor at the inn, K. (or shall we call him J.?) removing another notional barrier to his invitation to dine in the Count’s Castle. Experience of what happens next, as well as the mystifactious manner of its delivery, will not cause anyone's heart to flutter too wildly.

But here, below the fold as it were, is a plot summary of The Castle that resonates with people journeying towards a church that practices what it preaches about equality. It is richly reflected in this, and other recent anonymous announcements bearing the "Church of England” moniker: I dream of the day it won’t be. For now, Enjoy!

The Council Chairman informs J. that, through a mix up in communication between the castle and the village, he was erroneously requested but, trying to accommodate J., the Council Chairman offers him a position in the service of the school teacher as a caretaker. Meanwhile, J., unfamiliar with the customs, bureaucracy and processes of the village, continues to attempt to reach the official Klamm, which is considered a strong taboo to the villagers.

The villagers hold the officials and the castle in the highest regard... Even though they do attempt to appear to know what the officials do, the actions of the officials are never explained; they simply defend it as being absurd any other way.

A number of assumptions and justifications about the functions of the officials and their dealings are enumerated through lengthy monologues by villagers. Everyone appears to have an explanation for the officials' actions that appear to be founded on assumptions and gossip. The descriptions given by the townspeople often contradict themselves by having very different features and routines within a single person's description, but they do not try to hide the ambiguity; instead, they praise it as any other action or feature of an official should be praised.

One of the more obvious contradictions between the "official word" and the village conception is the dissertation by the secretary Erlanger on Frieda's required return to service as a barmaid. J. is the only villager that knows that the request is being forced by the castle (even though Frieda may be the genesis with no consideration of the inhabitants of the village.

The castle is the ultimate bureaucracy with copious paperwork that the bureaucracy maintains is "flawless". This flawlessness is, of course, a lie; it is a flaw in the paperwork that has brought J. to the village in the first place.

Other system failures are occasionally referred to. J. witnesses a flagrant misprocessing after his nighttime interrogation by Erlanger as a servant destroys paperwork when he cannot determine who the recipient should be.

The castle's occupants appear to be all adult men and there is little reference to the castle other than to its bureaucratic functions. Particular functions of the officials are never specified. The officials that are discussed have one or more secretaries that do their work in their village. Although the officials come to the village, they do not interact with the villagers unless they need female companionship...

“Etcetera, Etcetera,” as the King of Siam used to say. How long, O Lord?

Time Passing, beloved...

2013-01-01T14:50:00.000Z

Midnight on 31 December 2012. People have been ringing bells here to mark significant milestones for centuries. Out with the old, and in with the new. With 8 heavy bells, 7 enthusiastic beginners (out of 10 who hadn't touched a bell a year ago), and 3 experienced ringers, it's a bit clangy and it wasn't quite possible to ring out the old year muffled, but all eight rang in the new year for the first time in ages — congratulations to Lucy and friends!

The Oxford Companion to Music calls Change ringing, an almost uniquely English phenomenon, the "application of mathematics to the making of a merry noise.” It implies that in the mind of God time is ordered, and history is the working out through fallible people of a deeper purpose. Realising this sets us free from fear that change would induce in us if all we had to go on was our own bewilderment and anxiety, extrapolated by mere logic. Beyond optimism or pessimism, Christians are called to live fully in the world, watchful of the signs of the times, as we wait in joyful hope for the fulfillment of God's grand design, through and in all all things — including us.

Incarnation and Life

2012-12-25T08:29:00.001Z

In theology and life what must change and what can’t? The circumstances of our real lives, and our understanding of them and ourselves continually develop in the hand of God as history reveals the highlights and shadows of a human condition that is beautiful but also tragic.

In this world, only Jesus himself is eternal in his humanity and divinity, Alpha and Omega. Everything else is relative.

The datum point for it all, however, for disciples of Jesus, is what goes on in the stable — God with us, completely divine and completely human. Jesus’ divinity was easy to grasp as an idea. It’s his humanity that caused all the trouble in the early Church, and still does. Being carried away by thoughts of Jesus’ divinity readily turned him into a superhero, a hybrid, a freak. Making him more than human actually made him less than human, a storybook figure, a plaster saint, or ghost, or an alien visitor.

I wonder if we could grasp the reality of God who comes among us saying, as the motto of St Bartholomew’s hospital has it, “nihil humanum alienum a me puto” (I think nothing human alien to me), a lot of our most intractable moral and theological conundra could be re-framed in a positive and practical light. If Christ were less of a freak, our neighbour might also be as mysterious but less threatening and more lovable. Our Gospel might be good news, not just theory.

What we need isn’t some elaborate new theory to explain our contentious issues themselves, but a vision of what it means to be truly human that is as accepting as that of God himself, refreshed by our core tradition, courageous enough to take it fully seriously in our real circumstances today.

Happy Christmas!

Christmas: On Getting Stuck in

2012-12-22T14:22:00.001Z

Christianity isn’t about stopping the world and getting off, however tempting the prospect, but the exact opposite. At times I would gladly shoot whoever invented the world “Secular.” It seems to be the catch-all term to enable religious people to sidestep, if not condemn, anything they want a God-shaped excuse to opt out of. This fuels the kind of terribly important Dreamworks that enabled the Levite and the Priest in Jesus’ parable to step over a heap of bloody rags in the road and walk on by. They weren’t nasty, or the faintest bit ignorant about the law of love in the Hebrew Scriptures — they just had better things to do. God isn’t an excuse to opt out. If we get the logic of the Incarnation, he’s our reason to get stuck in.

On a Day some say the world was going to end, this seemed a reasonable message for Radio Christmas. It’s a great project run by Dunc Dyason every two years in Amersham, that brings together young people to run their own radio station at Christmas, in aid of Street Kids in Guatamala; and this is what I said:

Beam me down, Scotty...

2012-12-09T10:50:00.000Z

Apparently the whole Church of England (actually an Archbishop's Council staffer called, perhaps, Fred Bloggs — s/he didn't say) now officially believes in “Complemetarity”

One implication of this, for Fred anyway, and s/he says for Lucy and me, is that our gay married friends, simply by being married, are actually diluting our very happy marriage of 27 years, like damp rot in the basement.

We may not realise this is happening but that’s how the blighters operate and hey! the imperceptibility only goes to prove it cannot be explained. It’s a mystery.

Complementarity is in danger of a bad press, possibly because of the Sydney Three Card Trick:

All are Equal, of course
Women are different from men, thus... (Here comes the Queen of Hearts...)
Subservience is not inequality after all. It’s only a difference. It’s complementarity. Anyone who says otherwise is collapsing gender identity. (Hot Dog!)

Could there be mileage, however, in another vision of complementarity?

Genesis does imply God makes people for other people, to find part of the meaning of their lives in relationship to significant others. Is there a (non three card trick) complementarity that might wash?

We have to begin with a basic concept of what it means to be human.

If, in biological naïvité, we assume a simple “Janet and John” sexual binarism, Complementarity means conventional geometry is part of the way we are made. Scotty would agree — “ye canna change the laws o’ physics” or in this case, o’ Biology. If you really believe this, and you are correct, why worry about gay marriage? Once enacted, it will peter out anyway when people try it and discover it conflicts with the basic way they are made. They will receive in their own bodies the reward of their actions, as someone once said.

But what if the Laws o’ Biology are actually rather subtle and complex? If you discover that God has actually made people with all kinds of grayscale, you would expect people to interact personally and reveal all kinds of complementarities in a broad spectrum of ways germane to who they are. This makes all kinds of complementarity possible. True Complementarity is not a batch concept but a customised, contextualised, lived reality. If so, same sex married couples, like everybody else, receive in their bodies the reward of their actions — as much happily ever after, or not, as heterosexual couples.

Which model is truer? There’s only one way to find out...

Furthermore, if the laws of Biology (or Creation) are complex not binary, knowing what we do about the way human beings are made, it is not good to fly in the face of the purposes of Creation by forcing people with minority identities to act as though they are something they are not. That would be as morally questionable and damaging to the institution of marriage as, say, forcing everyone in a society to get married, regardless of their intentions.

So does it all come down to anthropological truth? How wise,as well as inevitable, is it that Bible characters simply absorbed and developed marriage lore contextually, yielding no fewer than seven different geometries of marriage? Should we not do the same thing? Whatever hufflepuff the “Church of England” (aka Fred Bloggs in Church House) or anybody else puts into this debate on any side, actually, the truth is mighty and will prevail.

“Ye canna change the laws of Anthropology.” In the final analysis, was Scotty right?

Discuss?

Church & State: Another fine mess?

2012-11-26T09:26:00.005Z

The parliamentary reaction to this week’s synod vote tells a powerful tale. Wearing his Garrick Club tie, the Second Church Estates Commissioner answered questions from MP's, all of whom expressed amazement and moral repugnance about the official and institutionalised sexism of the Established Church. (note to overseas readers — The Garrick Club is an exclusive Gentleman's club in the West End).

The Garrick Club Tie Gaffe (if such it was) underlined an important aspect of the problem: the Church claims to be far more than a private organisation like a golf club, masonic lodge, or Gentleman's London hang-out. It claims to be good news for everyone, and the fury of our legislators when they see it acting as though it were a private club, disconnected from society, was unmistakable.

In our present context it appears that institutionalized sexism undermines everything. If a vicar smacked his children publicly, it would radically undermine their moral authority. Saying that corporal punishment was in the Bible, as it is, or parents had a duty to discipline their children, or that it was a matter of sincere conviction that children should be beaten for their own good, would only squander more moral authority.

This is not Guardian reading political liberalism. All theology and ethics are contextual — they only mean anything, as with all aspects of the Word, when they take flesh. A society populated by people bearing the consciousness and identity our great grandmothers had wouldn't find this question urgent, but ours does. This is an assertion of realism not liberalism.

In the light of several conversations this week all round, the realisation is creeping over me, like cold water in a hot bath, that when everything contingent has been talked out, this does all boil down to sex discrimination, no more, no less. Discriminatory is as discriminatory does. We're not fooling anyone, not even ourselves any more by pretending otherwise. The failure of any male headship argument to register in the House of Commons debate implies that, politically speaking, those who hold new model Complementarian views would be better off explaining the moral value of that particular kind of discrimination than pretending it is not what it manifestly is.

Look, nobody actually believes “men are the same as women.” The question is why should we impose an artificial difference on men and women that renders women permanently subordinate? It hasn’t always been so, even in our tradition. In the Bronze Age, Deborah Judged Israel, and that was OK. Unlike possessing a womb, subordination of women is not inevitable or, these days, generally desirable. New model Complementarianism as expressed last week is an elaborate three card trick. You begin by saying (1) everyone is equal, then (2) that they're different, then (How do they do that? watch out for the Queen of Hearts) (3) it's OK if woman are subordinated because that's a difference. Innit. Ah but you see, it's precisely the subordination that isn't equal, or acceptable to our MP's. They think it's inequality. Because it is.

Another trope that's been doing the rounds is about the state imposing its standards on the Church. This happens all the time when churches are forced to conform to the Charities Act, or fire regulations, or the National Insurance Act.

St Paul met this challenge in Romans 13. When he told the Christians to obey the civil power because it does not wield the sword in vain to accomplish right he was talking about Nero. The man who executed him. But he believed what he said.

Look, if sex discrimination is actually wrong in our context (and all moral convictions can only be formulated or expressed contextually), than for the state to stop it is no more questionable than the state preventing the Church discriminating racially, or beating children, or owning slaves. Those last two, incidentally, also came with a rich Biblical pedigree, in the days they were morally acceptable enough for the largest slave owner in England was the Society for the Propogation of the Gospel. They may have been OK then, but now they are not.

People ask, can't we all just forget this stuff and preach the gospel? It's a lovely thought, but what this parliamentary debate makes clear is that if part of the "Gospel" is treating women as subordinate, incapable of offering service as they are gifted by virtue of their sex alone, it's bad news to the people it is trying to reach, not gospel. Most people hold that sex discrimination is wrong in the Church or anywhere else not because they are wild left Guardian readers or secularists (though they could be either or both of those things), but as the natural consequence of their deep moral convictions, their Gospel as they have received it.

Change comes in such matters not by compulsion, but by a vision. That is how St Peter, on the roof at Caesarea, acquired a new approach to living by Kosher laws. Change will come from a bigger vision of humanity, in which gender is not a means to impose artificial limitations on people, either the body of the Church, or the world, or gifted and called individuals, but rather an aspect of being the way God creates us and equips us to be good news to the whole creation.

Whatever the procedural arcana of the General Synod, politically well-informed people are now saying it's probably a one-clause measure within two years or curtains for the establishment. The Church would lose its implicit broad spectrum engagement with public life but, trying to look on the bright side, could design a catchy club tie for itself.

Things to Come?

2012-11-20T18:17:00.000Z

On Cliffs and Hanging

2012-11-20T08:13:00.000Z

So this is what the Game show hosts call “Make-up-your-mind time.” For once, the Guardian and the Telegraph agree — this is Decision-Day. Like everyone on all sides, I’m praying. On days like this the Church chances the notion that the rather slippery and elusive concept of God’s will can emerge and take flesh. The risk is real, both that it will and that it won‘t. I read again what I’ve said on this blog about women and the episcopate. Back in July 2008, it struck me that the mountain those opposed to this had to climb was to come up with some way their sticking points, however irrational, could be positive and missional — good news. This has not happened, perhaps because it could not be done.

Since then, considerable ingenuity has gone into attempts to square the circle between justice and voodoo, almost successfully at times. We nearly discovered Schrödinger’s Cat with a Hat — she both is and is not a bishop depending on whether the box is open. Along the way many have said “there is no doubt this will happen — the only question is how.” They are probably correct, politically, but it doesn’t help to have lost focus on why and what it could mean to have women in the episcopate. Also, there's a danger that this way of speaking has created an illusion that any institution can stagger on for ever finessing the detail without losing something of the plot.

On offer is a considerable, almost fatal, compromise of principle, but most progress in the world is made crabwise. Looking at the big picture, it would be tragic to waste another seven years on this issue, and, given the sheer quanitity of thought and prayer that has gone into the present sticky compromise that’s on offer, the idea that one more wee heave will dissolve the knot is purest moonshine. Permitting blacks to sit on white beaches may leave a vestige of apartheid. It may be less good than abolishing white beaches. But it’s progress. MLK said, “The time is always right to do what is right.”

If not now, when?

So Long, Mr Nibbles

2012-11-19T16:08:00.001Z

Dr Robyn Skinner, psychotherapist, once had a patient with a most annoying habit. He always brought along a stuffed toy rabbit, a mysterious authority figure that was assiduously consulted before any critical decision. The presence of Mr Nibbles was lucrative for Dr Skynner, but seriously inhibited progress with the gentleman’s condition. Theological discussions involve sensitive personal matters, and participants often bring along their stuffed rabbits — mystery authority figures.

Anglicans have three particular bunnies.

There’s a Vatican Gold one —

“we’d love to, but what would the Pope say?” Well, the real Pope has always shot straight from the hip about womens’ ordination. He abominates it lock stock and barrel. He even came up with the ordinariate, a tiny but perfectly formed exercise in what Southern Baptists call sheep stealing, that leaves no room for doubt.

There’s the Biblical Literalist one —

Oh, we all know God didn’t do the job in seven literal days, but the nursery narrative says could have, and we want to play safe. On gender equality most people know the score. The most avid “complementarians” do allow their wives to bob and cut their hair, to speak about faith, except in Church, to lead teams containing men. They’re part of a Church whose supreme governor is a woman. The English settled the real issue about whether women could ever, as a matter of Creation ordinance, hold positions of authority over men back in 1569, and it’s generally worked out fine since.

Finally there’s the dog eared old rabbit called “nice.”

All manner of murder and mayhem, backstabbing and worse, go on at the Vicarage. Only we must be nice about it. In fact, none of us are as nice as we like to think we are, but the pretence continues in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary if only we behave well. Nice is full of “yes, buts.” I first encountered it in the form “We’d love to have a Cheshire home in the town, but we can’t let people in wheelchairs dent our property values.” yes, But... It’s anything but nice. And in present circumstances another canter round the paddock for this question is anything but nice.

This week the General Synod reaches a final vote. Stuffed rabbits sometimes help make it possible to talk together along the way, but they can't help with final decisions. Best vote according to your positive convictions, one way or the other. If you believe women cannot be bishops, you couldn’t live with yourself if you voted any way but against. Nobody would expect otherwise. But the reverse is also true for those who do believe women can be called by God to the episcopate.

It makes no sense at all to anyone to consult any stuffed rabbits any more. Everyone has compromised, including those who believe in a non discriminatory church. The idea that another trip around the gasworks on this subject will deliver traditionalists anything better in eight years’ time seems, frankly, insane. That could only happen if a new synod represents a final retreat into the ghetto, because the direction of travel on planet earth is plain as a pikestaff, and it's the other way.

After years of trying out every conceivable permutation a compromise has been reached that leaves almost everybody unsatisfied. The only process grounds left involve the notion that a statutory instrument is too far short of a statute to protect people — a somewhat top shelf legal concept that is simply untrue in any other area of life.

Time to leave Mr Nibbles out of it and vote according to conviction. Time to move on.

The Last Voter in England?

2012-11-15T09:01:00.001Z

Thursday 15 November, and Election fever grips the Land. Three cheerful tellers sit behind a table in our village hall like the wise old monkeys they probably are, as the People Decide. The girls and boys in political rosettes have stayed away, I notice. Or maybe the Three Wise Ones are political, but hiding it in the interests of Police Impartiality.

The UK Police and Crime Commissioner race is on, and so’s the Kettle.

This is British democracy at its glorious best and awful worst.

I'm a congenital Voter, Me.

Like them or hate them, you can't complain about them if you didn't bother to elect them, say I.

There's enough mitteleuropean blood in my veins from my parents’ generation to appreciate a country where you can vote.

The more of this sort of thing we do, the more we may get a taste for it and build a more participative intelligent democracy. That’s my fantasy, anyway.

So why are some 80% of the voters likely to sit this one out?

Well, for a start, nobody really knows what the hell it’s supposed to be about. In the bad old days you elected a council, and they put people on a governance authority for your local police. It was a bit of British great and good stitch up, but by and large it worked. Jolly PC49’s gave kiddies the time of day, the beer stayed warm, England lost the Test Match, and old maids cycled safely to early communion through autumn mists.

Many suspect this whole thing ain’t broke, and this is just £75m going on another lame stunt by our leaders to convince us they believe in democracy and so should we. They could be right, but...

For seconds, there's little to argue about from a strictly party political point of view, until someone is crazy enough to start a political party dedicated to sacking police officers, penny pinching myopia, mind-numbind levels of bureaucracy, letting fraudsters get away with it, and rewarding Thieves with knighthoods.

No party believes in that prospectus. But they all implement it anyway. So where’s the choice? And why have a Party political beauty contest about it?

Finally, few of the candidates are known across the area they will represent. High deposits and the lack of a mailshot are said to have stacked the odds against independents before they got out of the starting gate. So perhaps this is a referendum on whether you want to vote for party candidates or independents. For all we know some of both are completely crazy, but what do we know? They are all going to reduce bureaucracy, put more officers on the beat, catch crooks, save money and generally make us feel good. They’ll get us Police who are Judge Dredd, George Dixon and Inspector Morse rolled into one.

So what’s not to like? Vote early, vote often, as they used to say in northern Ireland. I managed the first, and felt pretty damn smug about it for at least ten minutes. Next step in my democracy rollout — a directly elected General Synod.

And a (Blindfolded) Child shall lead them?

2012-11-09T07:30:00.000Z

Everybody knows the name of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and today could be the day they can stop pretending they don’t. If Dr Justin Welby succeeds in leading the Church beyond stale navel-gazing, an appearance on Question Time might be thought a suitable, even compelling, way for the next but one Archbishop to introduce themselves to the nation, rather than an embarrassing distraction from vital ecclesiastical business.

Justin comes to the role with high hopes and fears riding on the decision of the committee that selected him. Have they done better than a blindfolded child? Many feel that more of the same is unsustainable, and long for clarity and hope. Beyond ecclesiastical office politics, it’s time for an outward facing holy pragmatism that has the guts to align itself with its own values.

It is may well have been wise to have gone for more than a caretaker candidate, and one who represents some very interesting firsts. Justin will be the first archbishop to have come to living faith on an Alpha Course, the first to have had a substantial career doing something else before ordination, the first in a very long time to have been a Cathedral Dean, and the first Old Etonian ABC since 1862. He could be the last who had to be male.

Three immense challenges to get real face the Church of England

Jesus taught his followers to study the signs of the times, to be alert and watchful, to remember that the last would be first and the first last — It’s time for the dear old C of E to get real. English society has changed, and those who minister to it cannot assume the kind of effortless superiority in posessing the moral high ground our parents and grandparents could. Everyone is a volunteer now. The Church can only give a lead if it is willing to try understand the moral instincts of the people it seeks to serve. Like St Paul, it can appeal openly to the conscience of all, but not if all the energy is wasted kicking and screaming about the impossibility of change.

The Church needs to get real about its own mission and recover the kind of “red letter” Christianity most often found in the local Church. Its priority has to enacting the things Jesus actually commanded. Notably these did not include keeping gays in the closet, or money safe in one's best hanky, or ensuring males only rule the roost. Jesus’ commands are not discussion starters. They are meant to be a way of life, including, to take some glaringly obvious examples,

Love God wholeheartedly and your neighbour as yourself.
Do unto others what you would have them do to you.
Judge not that ye be not judged.
Examine the plank in your own eye before you remove the speck from someone else’s.
Do not compete for the best places at parties.
Pray in secret not for show
Openness — let your light so shine before people... as a city on a hill, a lamp on a stand
Watch for the signs of the times
Let your yes be yes and your no no — anything else comes from the evil one.
Do not treat people with partiality, for God is no respected of persons
Equality— you have one Father and you are all sisters and brothers

Karl Barth preached with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. In 1963 he said this advice dated back 40 years. Now, sadly you may say, we are simply not living in 1923 any more. Newspapers are a small niche in a complex media scene. More significantly, social media are bringing in a new assumptions about democracy, personal connectedness, openness and availability. In this new world, as Forrest Gump used to say, stupid is as stupid does. The only way not to look silly is not to do silly things. Saying nothing makes you invisible. Living in such a world should not be an impossible challenge to people who say they hold themselves accountable to a God unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid. Many of them have embraced the reality of such a world, but far too many are still wedded to the old rules about privacy, privilege, deference and social hypocrisy.

As Justin takes on this challenge, to which nobody could imagine themselves equal, let’s pray he remembers God made him the person he is by grace, and he cannot achieve whatever the Lord was thinking of in bringing him here by losing his identity in the role. He’s got to find a way to be himself in his new post. His lack of experience of conventional “cake or death” Anglicanism may be his greatest asset. Who knows? We could be in for renewal and hope after all, God willing.

How to Change Your Vicar (Part Two)

2012-09-02T21:47:00.004+01:00

Clergy have all kinds of unusual talents. Vicars have managed to combine ministry with keeping bees, woodcarving, climbing the Himalayas, even inventing submarine detection equipment.

Some clergy have Really Useful collateral skills — playing the guitar, journalism, fundraising, stage magic for school assemblies.

Second Last Thing
My second piece of advice is for people who believe there may be a capability issue with their vicar. For this to go anywhere formally, it should normally relate to what incumbents are actually there to do. A hymn writing, guitar playing or beekeeping fail is bad news. But it’s unlikely to support capability proceedings.

What are parish clergy actually there to do? What fails really count? The answer lies in Canon C24 of the Church of England. Such is the variety of circumstances in which clergy work that these norms are indicative, taken in context, not exhaustive and literally applied. Bear in mind that nobody scores 100% in any or all areas, but these are their core functions.

Prayer
Maintaining a pattern of prayer in the parish, traditionally understood as drawn from the Daily Office — the prayers of the whole Church provided for in Prayer Book and Common Worship.
Celebration of Holy Communion
They should provide for the regular celebration of Holy Communion, especially on Sundays and Holy Days.
Preach
Clergy should provide for regular preaching in the Churches for which they are responsible.
Teach
Clergy should teach, both adults and children, being willing to visit schools when invited
Present candidates for Confirmation
having prepared them for discipleship within the life of the Church.
Visit
both the sick and housebound, and make themselves available for spiritual counsel and advice.
Consult with a Parochial Church Council
about matters of general concern and importance to the parish. This should meet at least four times a year.
Arrange substitutes
when unable to perform their basic duties themselves

You might react to this list in various ways — where are the targets? Where are Performance Indicators? You may indeed see praying, leading Sacraments, preaching and teaching as less than vital functions for the Church compared to other things. Yet these are still the primary activities clergy are there to enable in the Parish. Why no KPI’s? Well one reason is that clergy do have tremendous liberty to approach these tasks according to conscience and personal conviction. Imposing on the consciences of clergy is likely to induce more losses than gains. The breadth of the working space clergy have is not always ideally used. The besetting sin of clergy, however, is far more often overwork than laziness.

So, secondly...
If you are thinking of Capability, relate your concerns to what Vicars are actually there to do.

How to Change Your Vicar (Part One)

2012-08-23T15:56:00.000+01:00

Not quite Jack Lemmon’s problem, but parish life feels like that sometimes. Just as in marriages, all of us need to remember we are all limited in various ways, and need each other to stay grounded and sane, but don’t always realise how much.

Lord Runcie, when Bishop of St Albans, once stopped in a village to congratulate the butcher, as one pig man to another, on a superb carcase hanging outside.

“You can have it,” quoth the latter, “if you get rid of our Vicar!”

About four or five times a year somebody comes to see me wondering if that is where they are with their vicar. I have got into the way of suggesting a list of Four Last Things to remember before consigning an apparently unsatsfactory vicar to the Dustbin of History. Remembering these helps you achieve something worthwhile for everybody, and, I hope, prevents the Sermon on the Mount flying out the window early on.

First Last Thing
Everybody has rights and responsibilities equally, and needs to work out in their own mind what kind of a problem this really is. This is a very useful discipline because the sensible thing to do will depend directly on which of the following five options you believe best describes what is going on:

Is the vicar doing something seriously, measurably, wrong?
I don’t mean everyday common or garden workaday faults of omission or commission, however annoying, but something serious that would in any other sphere of work get somebody sacked?
If so, the Clergy Discipline Measure is the way to go. It is a major legal procedure because it can potentially deprive someone of the work and home, but sometimes it is the right tool.
Is the vicar not up to the job?
If somebody tells you they are up to the job of being a parish priest, they are a fool or a liar. But is there some major and necessary area of work in which they continually fall short? To give na example, not being terribly good at chairing meetings is an occupational hazard fr many vicars. But not holding more than 4 PCC meetings a year, or failing to conduct an APCM, is a problem. By the same token some sermons are better than others, but failure to show up in Church or ever preach could be evidence of incapacity.
If so, there are formal procedures that cover what HR people call “capability”, depending on the terms of your vicar's work (Common Tenure or Freehold). The first stage is to log the critical incidents involved fairly and accurately, bearing in mind that they could be required for tribunal proceedings.
Is this really all about relationships?
It usually is. It is a truth generally acknowledged in every field of human endeavor, but especially in one in which sensitivities are raised as they are in religion, that not everybody can work fruitfully with everybody else. This is acutely uncomfortable, but as long as people are honest about it, there’s no shame in acknowledging the fact. By dint of personality some vicars are more able to making and sustaining relationships than others — many spiritually minded people are introverts, and it is not given to every vicar to be a Butlin’s Redcoat. Others are extraverts, and may seem brash and rude. Many vicars’ first reactions to having a fault pointed out is to blame theselves, whilst others “have many faults, but being wrong isn’t one of them.”
If so, we maintain a network of conciliators trained by Bridgebuilders. They and others can offer their services. But beware. In mediation what you really want is usually what you end up stuck with. No mediator can magic a situation better unless people actually want to be reconciled.
What capacity does the whole system of the parish have to transact its business?
Like families, parishes have different capacities to get along. This isn’t either surprising or insoluble. In fact the vast majority of the skills needed in this area are trainable. Are there repeating patterns in recent history? Is there a feeling of “something in the water?” To what extent is your vicar (or someone else) a lightning conductor for the feelings of others? Or not? the key diagnostic feature is bad communication, I find.
If so, we have a Parish Development Adviser and other consultants who can observe and then help people be more aware of the snags and opportunities of life and work together and, even more importantly, help them to deliver on their good intentions.
Is the problem just one of those things?
before I am buried under a hail of “you just don’t understand,” this does happen. It happens in medical diagnostics, it happens with the ministry of deliverance, it happens all over. It’s what happens when the computer helpline tells you to unplug the machine, count to five and plug it in again. People, vicars as well as lay volunteers can flourish in some positions and not in others and even, on occasion reinvent themselves. But to do so they need honest feedback, clear communication, and confidence in God, their calling and themselves. Backing them into a corner and beating them with rubber hoses may make some people feel better, but it rarely achieves anything in the greater scheme of things and sometimes rubs the ash into the carpet something wicked.
If so, don’t make a drama out of a crisis. Many of our parishes survived the black death, so this is probably a passing cloud by comparison. Assess the strengths of everyone in the situation giving rise to concern, and see if you can think of a way they could bring out the best not the worst in each other. With some idea of that we will know how to deploy Psychotherapists, CBT counsellors, Team consultants, Work coaches, the whole gang.

So, First and Foremost...
Work out what kind of problem the evidence indicates this actually is!