But not everyone did know.

One of the most striking things about the recent meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council was that many of those present did not immediately know what any of these local cultural signifiers meant at all.

Over the course of the week, things became a bit clearer, not least through the Council being able to hear the extraordinary testimony of Richard Moore in Derry. After walking the walls and seeing the layout  of the place, the Council listened with rapt attention to Richard’s story of having been blinded by a rubber bullet fired by a British soldier when he was 10 years old and of subsequently forgiving the soldier and then searching him out both to express that forgiveness and ultimately befriend him.

Reconciliation does not come cheap in Northern Ireland and this and other stories of the Troubles formed the backdrop to an extraordinary week of conversation about the Anglican Communion.

Before saying anything about the divisions of the Anglican Communion, it is perhaps worth saying that I came away from the meeting of the 19th Anglican Consultative Council with a deep sense of awe and wonder in relation to the Anglican Communion. I know friends who think of it as being a relic of the past, a distraction from current mission and little more than the Commonwealth (another creaking institution that is difficult to define) at prayer. However, I return from Belfast rejoicing in what God is doing throughout the Anglican Communion and nothing had really prepared me for the onslaught of great stories and deep, deep connections that I witnessed through being a delegate at the ACC.

The Anglican Communion turns out to be both bigger and smaller than you think. Simultaneously.

I travelled four hours in relative comfort to be in Belfast. Some had travelled through war zones. I have relative peace and plenty in living out my life as a Scottish Episcopalian. Some come from communities that are hungry. I come from a place where the faith has been present for centuries. The diocese I come from was founded considerably before there was any thought of a bishop or archbishop at Canterbury. Others came from churches that have only joined the Anglican Communion during my lifetime. Some of us come from places where churches are in decline. Others come from places racing to plant enough churches to cope with the growth in faith that they are seeing. “The age of multiplication is not over, Kelvin” I was told by someone whose job included planning the planting of 2000 churches over the next 3 years.

Such conversations blow your mind. They expand your imagination and go beyond any experience of the church you could imagine. Take a view of the church to an ACC meeting and you have to  be prepared for it to be expanded beyond your wildest dreams.

But then go to an ACC meeting and you find yourself sitting at tables of people drawn from across the Anglican World and immediately the conversations start and you realise that you are already deeply connected. I found myself looking across one of those tables at a Malaysian Bishop who happened also to be someone that I knew from his time training and serving in Scotland as a younger man. I found myself in conversation with someone from South America about a priest that I worked with for three years who had served previously in Buenos Aires. Was it possible that we had both known the same priest mentor in our younger days? At the ACC it was not only possible, it was inevitable.

The bonds of affection that people talk about in the Anglican Communion are real – I’ve always known that. But an ACC meeting is a meeting of people who come together and discover just how deep those bonds are and I was moved in my soul again and again to discover myriad connections to places all over the world that I had either forgotten about or not quite realised existed. In all those places the church is alive and people are praying daily. Sometimes they pray for me.

Last week I found myself praying with Irish friends for Ireland, praying with the Bishop of Amazonia for the Amazon, praying with people from island nations on the far side of the world about the climate crisis and praying with the Archbishop of Jerusalem for peace. Those prayers have faces now. Faces that I won’t easily forget.

The prayers and the conversations permeate the business at an ACC. They are meant to and they do – but we were there to do serious business and to have conversations which will help to shape Anglicanism for the next few years.

The primary business was a consideration of a set of something called the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals. These had been put together by something called IASCUFO – the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order. This is a very learned group of academics and thinkers who had tried to put together a way forward for the Communion.

One of the most striking things about the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals was how much they acknowledged divisions in the communion and how little they addressed the cause of those divisions. More than one person spoke to me, days into Council, to express surprise that they had just discovered that the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals were related at all to the divisions about human sexuality that have surfaced in recent years in the Communion. This was not clear from the text. Rather like those who came to Belfast and heard talks about the Troubles without realising initially that the Troubles had anything to do with religion, there were people at this council who took quite a while to understand that these proposals, which would have changed the Anglican Communion significantly had anything to do with the main presenting issue in our difficulties.

It was also not really very clear to the Council that these Proposals would help very much at all. It was clear fairly early on that these proposals were not something that the Council was in any mood to adopt or to pass. One sticking point was a proposal to change the definition of the Anglican Communion from one which acknowledges communion with the See of Canterbury as being a defining factor into us becoming a communion of churches which “have a historic link to the See of Canterbury”. Such a change was relatively easy for some. For those of us who come from churches which don’t have a historic connection with the See of Canterbury in the sense of being founded by missionaries from England, that change rather stuck in the throat. In the end, the Council wasn’t terribly minded to move in that direction. Nor was it minded to move towards a rotating presidency of the Anglican Consultative Council. Council members seemed to prefer a more informal way of the Archbishop of Canterbury sharing in leadership in the Communion to a formal change in structure.

Overall the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals received a welcome which could only be described as lukewarm. Those who had prepared them were warmly thanked for their work and they will inform further discussion. However, it is fairly obvious that these proposals are not going to fix the divisions in the Communion and ACC-19 wasn’t minded to do much with them other than commend them for discussion. Notably, I think, it chose to commend them for discussion in member churches but did not pass a resolution asking those churches to report back to the next ACC.

It was striking how generous the conversations about these proposals were. This ACC was a Council which acknowledged real divisions but which was not characterised by bitter conflict.

As I process the experience of going to ACC-19 as one of the delegates from Scotland, there are a number of themes which race around in my mind.

One of them is that I think that there is quite urgent work for the Communion to do in trying to understand why different churches have made different choices about the propriety of blessing or marrying same-sex couples. I don’t think that at the moment there is much scope for the Communion coming to one view about this matter. There is going to be no great declaration that this matter has been resolved by the development of a doctrinal statement about this that everyone is going to gleefully sign up to. However, there is much work to be done in trying to understand ourselves and trying to understand why we come to different conclusions whilst holding the same bible in our hands. This is a rich theological vein to mine.

Related to this is a discussion about what it means to address postcolonial issues. There was some suggestion that the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals were there to address a postcolonial church. I don’t believe that they did do this.

By a long way, my strongest recollection in this area came when someone asked for a definition of what postcolonialism meant. Without a moment’s hesitation, a male, white bishop from the Church of England stepped up to a microphone and answered the question in a way which brought the conversation to a close. The truth is, I don’t think that I’ve ever been in a more interesting group of people who might have answered that question with theological rigour, personal experience and deep reflection on trying to live in a broken world. To put it simply and bluntly, I’d like to hear all of  those who were in that room answer the question of what postcolonialism is and to be able to listen gently to one another in trying to articulate their answers.

Coming from Scotland, a land which both benefited from and led the expansion of the British Empire and which also has a powerful myth of being colonised by England, there is much to think about on our doorstep. At an ACC, our doorstep is the world. My hope is that this question is not lost at subsequent Council meetings.

A further reflection from me is that the idea of being in degrees of communion (or being in impaired communion) is one that needs a good deal more thinking about. I realised during my week in Belfast that it is a phrase that means very different things to different people. We don’t have the idea of being in impaired communion within the polity of the Scottish Episcopal Church. I learned last week that there are plenty of other churches that don’t have this idea within them either. However it is the very stuff that the Church of England is built from. One way of seeing the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals is to see them as somehow taking the deeply flawed (some would say heretical) theology that one can be in impaired communion within your own church and make it normative in the Anglican Communion. The Church of England may think it is acceptable to have dioceses in which bishops are not in full communion with their clergy or indeed with one another – it is quite another thing to get people who don’t have this idea to think that it is in any way a force for good. I’m glad that ACC-19 had no enthusiasm for this way of thinking. So far as I can see the words “being in impaired communion” within a church are little more than a euphemism for denying the legitimacy of ordained women. Many from around the Communion had not grasped that this is the reality of the Church of England.

As I reflect on these conversations, it is my hope that the Church of England will become more like the other churches of the Anglican Communion. That is a far better thing to hope for than that the Anglican Communion should become like the Church of England.

Perish the thought!

The Anglican Consultative Council is an overwhelming thing to belong to for the week it meets. It is bewildering, frustrating and utterly wonderful and it will take this participant some time to think through what it means to be part of a global church of such exuberant and vibrant life.

There is a huge pressure on all the Instruments of Communion within Anglicanism to hold things together. That pressure exhibits itself as a drive to find consensus even in the most difficult of times. This ACC did manage to agree a substantive resolution by a huge majority. No-one got everything they wanted. No-one actually needed to get everything they would have wanted.

My overriding sense of the end of ACC-19 was that the bonds of affection were deep and had been deeply renewed by the experience. We all loved one another. And there is no new schism to be had this time.

That might be as good as it ever gets.

And I thank God for it – for all of it.

I have a much better sense of what all of it looks like now than I did before I went.

God bless us one and all.

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“And lo, after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of Decline had ravaged the Church of God,  there appeared on the horizon the Four Horsemen of Growth. They stalked the land offering terrifying hope, and succour to the needy”.

There are only a limited number of ways that a church can grow. These apply both to denominations as well as to local churches.

Last week I was at the General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church where we were asked to engage with the idea of becoming a growing church.

So far as I can see there are only four major ways in which this can happen. The Four Horsemen of Growth have names. They are Immigration, Conversion, Assimilation and Procreation.

They do not always arrive individually or sequentially. They tend to arrive in one another’s company. They are social. They are amiable. They enjoy one another’s company.

The pathway to becoming a growing church is not one that is simple. It is not a trivial task to bring this about either in a local church or in a denomination. And I think that it is important to get to know the Four Horsemen of Growth and to become their friends.

One of the first things that I would say about this is that I am talking about visible, measurable numerical growth. Yes, I believe that spiritual growth matters. Yes, I believe that serving the needy matters. But sometimes we do need to talk about actual numerical growth and decline in the life of the church. I sit with groups regularly who have to decide where best to spend the resources at our disposal. As I do so, I bear in mind other forms of growth but I am aware that spiritual growth and other non-numerical forms of growth will be wiped out without thinking a little bit about how churches can or can’t grow numerically.

When thinking about this in my context, the first thing that people need to do is to put on their Hats of Holy Humility and take a long hard look at church statistics. They offer little for our comfort. This is not to say that there isn’t hope. There is hope and it is important to be able to identify where it is hiding and bring it out into the open. The reality though for my denomination is that it has been declining at a fairly steady rate since the 1920s. The patterns of decline that I live amongst were already in place long before I was born and long before I joined the church. Shifting them is not a trivial task or a quick fix. The most likely thing is that those patterns are here to stay.

But let us grab hold of a bit of hope before thinking about the names of the Four Horsemen of Growth.

There is something that I think need to be said clearly and unambiguously. This is that church growth is possible both in individual local congregations and also in denominations. My own congregation is bigger than it was 20 years ago when I came here. Significantly so. I can easily name other churches that have grown over a timescale of decades. Ps and Gs Church in Edinburgh and St Mungo’s, Balerno are two within my own denomination that have stories to tell about how they grew significantly. Note that those of us who do have those stories to tell also have stories to tell about how difficult things have been since the pandemic and would probably all note that it is too soon to say what the effect of that major disruption has been. But there are signs of hope in individual congregations even since that time too.

I rejoice that there is obvious renewal and measurable growth at my neighbouring Episcopal congregation – St Bride’s, Kelvinside. (Which isn’t in Kelvinside for reasons involving a traction engine). I know of other churches in this diocese that are talking about growth as something that they are experiencing too. St Oswald’s in Maybole is another one with a story to tell.  And there are others too.

I can see growth in congregations of different sizes and which worship in different ways.

When we think about denominations, I am aware of confidence in at least some parts of the Free Church of Scotland. I am aware of significant interest in Orthodoxy too though that remains relatively small when looking at the bigger picture of faith patterns in this country.

I have a fairly fundamental belief that it might be important to listen to the voices of those who can speak confidently about their congregations growing.

I also have a fairly fundamental belief that where there is weekly worship in which people encounter God in a way that is transformative for their lives and meet clergy whom they would like to spend an hour a week with then growth is very likely to happen.

This is one of the reasons why I always want to talk about worship and clergy whenever we have conversations about growth and mission and all that stuff. Some people really don’t want to talk about those things. But I know that I do.

But where revival comes, how does it come?

Well that brings us to the Four Horsemen of Growth.

Let us deal with them one by one and name their names.

Firstly the Horseman of Immigration.

One of the ways in which churches can sometimes grow is through the movement of people from one place to another. This is not a growth in the number of Christians in the world but it can look encouraging locally.

There have been historic attempts to harness the horse belonging to this horseman but not always successfully. In this diocese there was a huge effort put into building churches for immigrants to the area from Northern Ireland. (Several were not that far from me, particular the church in Anderson built to serve the docks). Scottish Episcopalians spent quite a lot of money putting up churches to welcome these workers new to the area. However, these workers new to the area seem to have preferred the  rather more reformed charms of the plain local Kirk to the exotica of Scottish Episcopalianism. Most of these churches are now long gone. It was a bold attempt to do something and we should be bold in our doings. In the long term though, the demographic changes didn’t lead to lasting change.

However, more recently, there have been hugely positive  changes to some local churches in which the Horseman of Immigration has played his part.

In my own congregation, Anglicans from Africa – particularly from Nigeria have arrived and enriched our experience of church hugely.

Even more recently, there have been arrivals from Iran who have become beloved members of our local fellowship.

Our life is greatly for the better for those who have arrived from afar.

Here in the West End of Glasgow it often feels as though we are our own Anglican Communion with people present from India, South Africa, Japan, Canada, Mexico, the USA and West Africa.

The Horseman of Immigration is our friend in these parts.

Some of those arriving in my own congregation from both near and afar though have not always been Christians, never mind Anglican Christians.

Their arrival is due to the work of the Holy Spirit stirring up their hearts at the prompting of the Horseman of Conversion.

Conversions still happen. I see them fairly regularly. This is a surprise to many people.

A couple of years ago I started to notice an interesting change in the pattern of people being baptised here. For what I suspect was the first time in the modern history of this congregation, the number of people being baptised as adults (or at least as children who could answer for themselves) was greater than the number of children being baptised as babies. I suspect that it is possible that we’ll soon see a year when all the baptisms here are of those who can answer for themselves.

People still choose Christianity as a way of life. People still choose Christ. People still find themselves, sometimes to their surprise, looking to the church to find spiritual nourishment and a way of living.

I can easily point to people who have arrived from other countries who have wanted to explore the faith of the country in which they have found themselves. (The Horsemen of Immigration and Conversion are the best of friends). I can also point to people engaging through online encounters with the church finding that they have faith where previously they had none. It used to be that I knew more people who had tried yoga, Buddhist practice and various new age expressions of faith before pitching up here. I still encounter them but now I find myself meeting people who arrive having tried to find a thoughtful way of living through exploring philosophy but now find themselves looking for something more.

The Horseman of Conversion is surprisingly active these days and has not grown nearly as old and weary as some would suspect.

Trotting next into view is the big, bold Horseman of Assimilation. He’s the one about whom we most rarely speak.

This aspect of Church growth (again not the building up of Christianity but of local expressions of the church) is all about people having been brought up or having encountered other expressions of Christian faith and finding themselves drawn towards a new one.

Here at St Mary’s the Horseman of Assimilation has blessed us with many joys over the years.

When we do our Rough Guide to St Mary’s afternoon, something we do every three or four months, we find that most people who come to it do not have much of  a background in Episcopalianism or Anglicanism. We also find that they are astonished to discover that people such as themselves make up the majority of the congregation. And when we tell them that this is also the experience of most of the clergy that they encounter including the Provost and the Vice Provost, they fall off their chairs in amazement. (Well, they teeter on the edge of their chairs in amazement but I exaggerate a little for comedic and holy effect – comedy and holiness being a pair of friends that we may explore more in another post).

People come to us from other churches. They tend to be looking for a relatively small number of things. They are looking for worship that makes them feel more alive and which allows them to experience joy and which will provide a comfort for their sorrows when comfort is needed. A big signifier of that is the musical life of the congregation but it isn’t the only signifier by any means. They are also looking for an open, inclusive and welcoming ethos. Here and hereabouts this tends to be signified to them by an explicit acknowledgement of LGBT equality and of women and men having equality of opportunity and practice in the congregation and in our denomination. They are also looking for a faith that is neither represented by finger-wagging nor an anything-goes free for all. In some things we are in the middle of the road and in others we are very much on one side of the road and not the other. And people know what they are looking for. If they don’t find what they are looking for here, I’m very happy to help them find it elsewhere. There will be plenty more people in this world who are looking for what happens here.

The Horseman of Assimilation is nudging people our way all the time. But we don’t talk about it much and in my denomination we are a little afraid of making it clear that those who have first encountered God in other churches are welcome to bide with us whenever they want to walk through the door.

The Horseman of Assimilation may find his work easier to do now that ecumenism is changing from the expectations of the 1970s to something fresh and new. In the past it was harder to keep company with this horseman because lots of people thought that denominational boundaries and distinctions were going to melt inevitably away leaving some kind of new uniting church that would hold everyone together. This hasn’t happened and the expectation that it will is on our rear horizon not the one that is in front of us.

And so finally we come to the Horseman of Procreation.

We can grow the church by having children and bringing them up in such a way that they find faith compelling in later life. This is not a short term strategy for growth!

Many of our expectations about growth depend on this Horseman. Many of these expectations will not be met in our lifetime.

I found myself looking around at the General Synod and wondering how many of those present would be able to engage meaningfully with embracing this Horseman of Growth as the major driving force behind real growth in the congregations that they come from. I have a feeling that the Horseman of Procreation has his work cut out amongst us at this time. Contraception has made his work a little harder. Modern ways of being men, women and other people have made his life a little more complicated. But he’s still at work. Children are still born. Children are still baptised. And in churches which draw them into active participation in the liturgical life of the congregation, children are part of God’s bountiful growth.

So there we are. Four Horsemen of Growth whom we should befriend, as they befriend and help one another. If I’ve missed any other means of growth out, I’d be interested to hear about it.

And when we talk about becoming a growing church again, though some of them may seem to be in the distance, I’d like us to be talking about which of the Horsemen of Growth we see galloping  enthusiastically towards us.

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Once I would have thought that these things didn’t matter. Right now I think they matter very much.

A Note on Holy Week

During Holy Week, there will be readings from the Passion narratives from the gospels, as has been the custom for Christians throughout the centuries. These texts need to be read carefully and thoughtfully. The term ‘the Jews’ in the Passion readings applies to particular individuals and not to the whole Jewish people.

There is some debate amongst scholars as to how the words which have been translated as “the Jews” should now be translated. Some would translate them as “the Judeans”. Others would retain the traditional reading whilst acknowledging the harm that has been caused by the ways in which these words have been used.

Whichever translation is used for individual words in the Passion Reading, Christians need to be aware that Holy Week has historically been a time of increased antisemitism and of antagonism and violence towards Jewish people. This is a matter of repentance for Christians.

References in the scriptures and in the hymns and prayers to those who accused Christ or killed Christ are references to historical figures. These people do not represent the Jewish people or Judaism.

At a time of increased antisemitism in the world, some verses in the Scriptures may be better dealt with in thoughtful study and reflection rather than the drama of public liturgy.

Members of the Christian community are invited during this week to think of the times when we have turned against Christ and to reflect on the possibility that had we been present at the time, that perhaps we would have found ourselves to be amongst those who called for him to be crucified.

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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

From time to time, every couple of years or so, someone decides that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good cathedral, must be in want of a man.

Now, I am not in principle opposed to this idea. Though the practicalities of making such a thing happen have always eluded me.

“Ah” they say with some enthusiasm, “what apps are you on?” And they proceed to list a bewildering number of apps that I could download onto my phone in order to seal the deal.

I am not on any apps, I explain. I’ve never been convinced that they would work for me.

“Oh no!” they cry, “you need to be on an app. That’s how it works for everyone these days, even people like you.”

Reader, I have never been brave enough to enquire what, “people like you” actually means.

But we go through the whole pantomime again. They show me some app on their phone and get me to download one to mine. “Put a smile on your face” they say as they take my picture. A few dozen intrusive questions later and lo and behold, it is serving me up other people’s profiles.

And I look. And I am encouraged to swipe. Right for any possibles. Left for any impossibles.

And it tends to be left, left, left, left. And then I get fed up and very quickly delete the app and proclaim this will never work for me.

I heard an interesting statistic recently – it was that someone had measured one of the apps and the

average time that people took to reject someone was 3.2 seconds. On the other hand, if they were interested in someone they tended to linger for about two and a half minutes thinking about it before swiping right.

Let us turn our thoughts to our first reading this morning. Where we find the Lord our God in an interesting mood.

Saul the king has died. In the end, the project of making him the King of Israel hadn’t ended well. Samuel the prophet grieves the way it all ended, no doubt carrying the despair of the people with him.

Come on says the Lord. Put a smile on your face and let’s be going. You need to find a new man. A new man to anoint as King. And off they go to the home of Jesse the Bethlehemite to assess the possibilities.

And I’ve always thought that this passage is one of those in the bible that has inherent comedy written right into it. The whole process is genuinely funny.

Along comes the first candidate. He’s a maybe thinks Samuel but the Lord has better ideas. No, swipe left on that one he says. He’s not the one.

We’re looking for someone who is lovely on the inside remember, not just someone who looks good.

And along comes another son. No, says the Lord. I don’t fancy this one’s chances. And tells to swipe left and dismiss him.

And so it goes on. One after another, a parade of possibilities. But none cut the mustard.

But there’s just one left. The youngest. Who just happens to be ruddy and handsome and has beautiful eyes.

Hey ho, says the Lord and lingers, I’m sure of it for 2.5 minutes before telling Samuel that this one, this must be the one. And the choice is made.

What are the qualities that we look for in someone, either as a partner or as a leader.

It seems to me that that question of what we are looking for in our leaders is central to a series of overlapping crises that beset our modern life.

For what it is worth, I think we are capable of getting into incredible muddles when trying to choose religious leaders. But the kind of person and the kind of leadership we want in our common political life is simply something we no longer agree on.

I want someone with integrity, who tells the truth and who looks out for those who need to be looked out for. I want leaders who hear the call of peace more clearly than the siren voices who cry out for war and vengeance. I want those who govern and guide to be wise, knowledgeable and in it for the common good and not individual gain.

In both politics and religion I have met many such people. But I have come to the reluctant conclusion that those values are less shared universally than they have ever been in my lifetime.

And this is partly what has led us into a world where oligarchs and autocrats (religious and secular) hold sway. And war seems an inevitable consequence of broken systems and human greed.

As it happens, I am not a pacifist. I think that some things are worth fighting for. However, it is probably worth saying publicly that the most prominent war we hear of in these days seems to have neither legal basis nor any moral justification. It is war for war’s sake. A tool of chaos where no-one knows the long term consequences.

Those of us who life in democracies who wish for something different have much to think about and much of it will bring us no comfort.

Peace, it seems, must be built.

Decency must be argued for and cannot be assumed.

And I want leaders who talk about the wellbeing of all rather than the enrichment of the few.

I come to those views from a religious perspective. But I think I have common cause with many others.

My faith gives me hope in a time where hope seems scarce.

My faith gives me hope because my conviction is very deep that God cares not only for the few, nor even for the many but for all.

Notwithstanding the comic story that we read of God (through a strangely confident Samuel) rejecting one person after another until he got to the most handsome one… notwithstanding the exitance of that story. I believe without any doubt at all that everyone is included in the love of God, everyone deserves the

peace of God and everyone should expect nothing less than all the blessings of God.

For God swipes right on everyone. God choses each of us.

Whatever our profile looks like.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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As a priest, the presumption is generally made that I’m against it for religious reasons. Recent aggressive campaigning by those in favour of allowing doctors to help people to end their lives has been relentlessly dismissive of religious reasons for being against it. As though religious people have no consciences worth respecting, no bodies of their own, no pain and no right to be heard.

The truth is, though I am very obviously religious, I do not have any religious reasons for objecting to the proposed law in principle but the longer that I’ve spent time with those who are actually dying the more I find myself unable to support a change in the law. My concerns are not religious but practical.

For a long time I was fairly uncommitted in this debate. My tendency would be to think that the alleviation of pain was the ultimate goal for anyone at the end of life and to take the view that preventing pain might well be a justification for allowing someone to end their life early.

More recently though experience has suggested to me that the question is a good deal more complicated than that. And so I find that I’ve changed my mind. From being moderately supportive of a change in the law, I now find myself fully opposed to the new legislation.

I remember the day when I changed my mind very well too. I had been called to the deathbed of someone whom I did not know. Before I could get into the room with the dying person, their family met me in the corridor. They asked me whether I could help them as things were very difficult.

“We were just wondering whether you could ask the doctors to speed things up a bit.”

I replied that I couldn’t as the law wouldn’t allow such a thing. And I asked why. What was it? Did they need me to help them to speak to the doctors about trying to get some better pain regulation?

“No” came the answer, “No – the thing is we’ve a skiing holiday booked and we leave on Monday – we just need this to be over so we can get away”.

That was the moment that I realised that not everyone dies with people close to them who have their best interests at heart.

Those who are dying are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. They are losing their power to make independent choices. They are vulnerable to the attitudes of everyone they encounter. And almost everyone whom they encounter may have a financial or other interest not only in their death but in its timing.

Spending time with the dying, I’ve also realised that those at the end of life are particularly vulnerable to societal assumptions about being a burden and causing a fuss.

Increasingly, funeral directors are making good money from ghoulishly promoting Direct Cremations – the disposing of bodies without ceremony or the presence of loved ones. To do so, they repeat again and again in their advertising, suggests that it is better to face death without causing a fuss.

Yet everyone who grieves knows that death in itself is disruptive. Death and grief change lives. They are not to be dismissed. No amount of trying not to cause a fuss changes that.

It has all made me realise that when I die, I want everyone to know that I want plenty of fuss. Fuss is how we show one another that we love them.

The desire to cause others no fuss at all though is one of the greatest pressures that the dying feel.

If it were the case that all people had access to the finest palliative care at the end of their lives and were all surrounded by those who had their best interests at heart in institutions where there is no financial pressure on managers and medics then I might be able to get to a position where I might support the assisted dying proposals.

However, we don’t live or die in that world. And until then, the best way to assist people to die is by investing in those studying pain management, better funding hospitals and hospices and by listening to the stories of those who sit alongside those who are dying.

I’ve sat in those rooms many times.

All of us should be in the presence of those who love and care for us when we die. Not all of us will be. The law, as it stands, is the best way to protect the interests of all of us when we die. For these reasons, I hope that our parliamentarians have the courage to vote no when the final vote is taken on this bill. It is legislation that would fundamentally change the relationship between the individual and the state.

The principle of alleviating pain is a godly one but the reality is that the devil is in all manner of practical detail.

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• Good results for Nigel Farage following the English local elections in May. Terrible results for Conservative Party.

Exactly what happened. YES

• No progress towards the marriage of same-sex couples in the Church of England

Exactly what happened. Indeed, I think things may have gone into reverse. YES

• Turbulent year for WordPress, which powers about half of the internet.

The year began with Automattic dramatically cutting its contribution to development leading to stagnation in development and much acrimony. Subsequently restored. Deep divisions remain about Gutenberg. I’m claiming this as a YES.

• 2025 will be the hottest year on record.

Final figures yet to be calibrated but all reports indicate that this, unfortunately is a YES.

• No trade deal for UK with US. Increasing talk of re-aligning economy closer to EU.

Well, there was a trade deal in May called the Economic Prosperity Deal but it doesn’t seem to much and some of the basics have already been reversed. I suppose I have to be honest and say I didn’t get this quite right so it is a NO. But…

• Ceasefire in Russia-Ukraine war but no long term solution.

Hard to assess this one. No long term solution, certainly. There have been a series of ceasefires proposed but none seems really to have been fully implemented. Partial YES.

• “Assisted Dying” aka doctor assisted suicide becomes legal in at least one of the jurisdictions of the British Isles.

I have to put this down as a  NO  as it completed its parliamentary journey in the Isle of Man but hasn’t received Royal Assent yet, so not technically legal.

• Turbulent year for economy but stock market higher at end of year than beginning. (FTSE currently at 8,173)

Stock market at 9,931 today and there was quite a lot of volatility in the first part of the year. So this one is a YES.

• There will be fewer Commonwealth Realms (ie countries which share the monarchy) by the end of 2025 than there are now.

This one is a NO though there has been significant progress in that direction in Jamaica and moves that way in Grenada.

• Philip Mountstephen.

Well, I was pushing Philip Mounstephen’s name as he appeared to be the only senior bishop in the C of E who actually believed the [absurd] position of the C of E bishops on same-sex relationships. But it is a NO – nothing significant to report.

So – five and a half out of ten this year. Not as good as some years. A couple of near misses.

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The first time that I encountered ChatGPT was three years ago when I was staying in a seminary in the USA. It was a place dedicated to teaching theology and particularly to training Episcopal clergy.
The ChatGPT preview release was let loose on the world on 30 November 2022, so I must have discovered it very early on. AI has moved on significantly since then but at the time one could use it to render a piece of text in the voice of someone well-known. The entertainment at mealtimes was to give it a well-known piece of the Bible such as Psalm 23 and get it to rewrite the text in the voice of a well-known American politician.

The Lord is my shepherd — a truly incredible shepherd, by the way, the best. Nobody shepherds like He does!
I’m not going to want; I’ve got everything I need. Believe me!

This seemed very entertaining to the students though I suspect that the joke may not be quite so entertaining these days.

ChatGPT seemed an incredible plaything. A novelty. A curiosity. A wonderful new internet gewgaw.

Three years on and a lot of development later, AI has changed a lot even if people haven’t yet moved on quite so much and many are still using it primarily as a novelty. You can still ask ChatGPT to translate bits of the Bible into the voice of someone else. It still seems remarkable to many that a machine can write anything at all.

The primary thing that people think of when they think of text-based AI is still the creation of written material in response to some kind of prompt though there are vastly more interesting things that one can do with AI than you could back in the olden days of December 2022.

There have been a number of surveys released this year which focus on the use of AI by preachers and I thought that it might be interesting to mull over a few questions in order to think about the ethics of using AI in sermon generation.

The obvious question is perhaps the least interesting though I’m not 100% sure that it has a clear answer.

Is it ethical to preach a sermon generated by AI rather than something that you’ve thought up yourself?

I think many people might initially answer this question in the negative and be fairly sure that this isn’t OK. However, I find myself remembering being trained by clerics when I was first ordained and clearly remember being told – “If you find you don’t have a sermon of your own, then preach someone else’s”. In the intervening years, the internet has come of age and that has complicated this question. There are sites dedicated to providing sermons for particular Sundays. I sometimes read a few sermons by other people on a particular text before settling myself down to write one of my own. I suspect most people would think that was absolutely fine ethically – indeed it falls well within the learning and study that clerics are all supposed to pursue.

Would I lift an idea from someone else’s sermon?

Yes, absolutely.

You get to know the preachers who inspire you. I would pay particular tribute to the preaching of Fr Grant Gallup who, when he was alive preached audacious sermons. I think it is a positive good to catch hold of things that inspire you and let them inform your own thinking.

But would I lift a paragraph from someone else’s sermon?

No, I don’t think I would, though I have come across people who do. (And I’ve known people do it with things I’ve written).

I remember once assessing someone for a job and looking at some of the sermons that he had been preaching. Something didn’t seem quite right about them. A little clever googling revealed that he was simply lifting sermons wholesale from one particular preacher from the other side of the world and preaching them as though they were his own. “And that reminds me of something that happened to me this week…” falls a little flat when you know that the same thing happened word for word to someone else three years ago in the lectionary cycle.

I never outed him as stealing ideas from someone else. But there was no chance of him getting the job.

I’m not convinced that it is ethical to preach someone else’s words verbatim in a sermon.

AI raises whole new questions beyond that though.

It is more or less ethical to lift a paragraph from a sermon that no human being ever wrote?

I think that’s a complicated question and is made even more complicated for me by my knowing that some AI engines have been trained on my own sermons.

Indeed, one of my tests when looking at a new AI tool is sometimes to ask it to write a sermon in the voice and style of Kelvin Holdsworth on the Bible passages for a particular set of Bible readings. This test, which I have to acknowledge I’m rather pleased with myself for devising certainly sorts out the AI sheep from the AI goats.

I did it recently with one engine and it produced this paragraph:

“It reminds me of the week before my mother-in-law comes to visit. You know the drill. It doesn’t matter if the house is generally tidy; you go into a state of panic. You’re not just cleaning the surfaces; you’re clearing the cupboards and organising the spice rack. Why? Because you’re trying to create a perfect space for a very important guest. You want the place to look like your best self, a version of reality that lasts exactly as long as the visit.”

Now there’s no risk in my stealing anything from this at all. It doesn’t sound like my spoken style and anyone who has ever shared an office with me knows that tidiness isn’t necessarily next to provostness. The really exciting thing, I thought, was the appearance of a mother-in-law. I rather like the idea that in some alternative cyberspace I’m tidy, happily married and have a well-organised spice rack.

Here, in the real world alas, things are different.

However, I asked another AI engine to come up with a sermon in my style and the more I read, the more I realised that it had been trained on my own sermons, most of which have been freely available online for the last 25 years or so. Here’s a fragment that I asked it to generate for a sermon in my voice for Midnight Mass.

“And so we come here at midnight—a time for secrets, hushed voices, and the honest acknowledgement that the world is not always as we wish it to be. Midnight is truthful. It exposes our longings. It meets us without the polite veneer we put on during the day. Midnight Mass is the Church daring to say: God meets us in the dark.”

It isn’t better than me and the middle sentences are a bit vapid. But there’s an idea in there at the end that I could have come up with and could have preached. And maybe, who knows yet, maybe I will.

So it is ethical to preach a sermon that is generated from an AI engine that has been trained on one’s own voice?

That’s a really complicated question and worth a good deal of pondering. And it is a very different question from those facing authors who make a living from their work.

As I try to think about the ethics of where the words come from there will always be people who tell me that nothing ethical comes from AI because of the world’s resources of power and water that are consumed in their production. I get it. But people have frequently taken to social media to make that point to me without acknowledging the irony of doing so. We are living beyond our means environmentally in so many areas of life. Yes, AI contributes negatively to this. But I don’t think that fact is going to put it back in its box.

At the moment I’ve never read a sermon from an AI engine that I think is better than any that I could have written. However, I suspect that in a year’s time I won’t be able to make that claim.

So, is it AI generated sermons from me from now on?

No actually. But primarily because I enjoy the writing. Wrestling with the ideas, thinking about the scripture and pondering where the world is at gives me life and I suspect that ultimately those listening to sermons can tell whether there’s life and spirit in them. And being a preacher who does grapple with the text is part of who I think I am and part of what I think the church has formed me to do.

Are there easy ethical answers to AI related questions for preachers? I don’t think so. And I think that’s what makes those questions so very interesting.

Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/hand-of-a-person-and-a-bionic-hand-6153343/

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A long time ago, back in the mists of nearly twenty years ago, I started to think that it was important that there was a liturgical celebration of creation. I thought long and hard about it and decided that instead of celebrating that modern invention the Harvest Festival, we would celebrate Creation instead, rolling a sense of thanksgiving into that but praying too for the wellbeing of the created world.

That is the way that it has been for quite a while now. We usually keep it on the first Sunday in October, around the time of the Feast of St Francis. We even sometimes throw in an animal blessing service that weekend, despite the fact that Francis himself wouldn’t allow members of his order to keep pets.

As time has gone on, the climate crisis has become more obvious to more people and the churches have been looking for ways to think about creation. Thus the idea of Creationtide – a month long celebration of creation has started to be marked in different ways in different churches.

Now, I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to churches declaring new seasons. When the Church of England and those who follow its mysterious ways decided that Kingdom Season was a thing, I wasn’t impressed. Similarly, when in the Scottish Episcopal Church, the bishops started talking about a Season of Christian Living or a Season of Discipleship I was more inclined to be a disinterested observer than an active participant. The biggest problem, it always seemed to me, with new Seasons in the Calendar was that the worldwide church hadn’t made its mind up.

And yes, I know that there are those who will think that it is odd that I thought we could move ahead with the marriages of same-sex couples or the ordination of priests who happen to be women without the enthusiastic agreement of the whole church but that we couldn’t have a new season without universal agreement but there we are. We all have our red lines.

The surprising thing about the Season of Creation though it that it is attracting considerable interest across different denominations. Churches of the Orthodox tradition, Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism are all pondering what it means to keep a season or a feast meditating on creation. Significant elements of the world church do seem, this time, to be on their way to creating a new season or feast.

I’d be happy with a feast rather than a season, but that’s not the principle point that I’m interested in right now.

The thing that bothers me more than anything about this isn’t the intention to mark Creation in the calendar. It is how we mark it and what we say about it.

In particular, it troubles me considerably that the language that we use to mark the feast might be contributing to damaging ways of thinking about the created order in the face of the climate crisis. Our words form our thoughts and I’m not convinced that declaring a Season of Creation without thinking hard about what words we will use is really going to help.

I struggle most with the notion that it is a positive thing for human beings to be seen as Stewards of Creation. This idea inhabits many modern liturgies.

We currently have the following as a prayer offered for experimental use during the Season of Creation.

God give you grace to be faithful stewards of Creation,
rejoicing that you are made in God’s image,
and seeking justice for those who do not share in the earth’s bounty,
and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
be upon you, and remain with you always. Amen.

This is by no means unusual. The idea that we should become better stewards of creation comes at us in hymns and in prayers and, I suspect, in sermons preached around this time.

The trouble is, I think that human beings being stewards of creation is part of what has got us into the mess we are in globally.

It posits a God who has gone away, leaving creation to be managed (stewarded) by human beings.

Firstly I don’t think that God has gone away. And secondly, the trouble with a management model is that it imagines our role in creation to be primarily that of taming it, controlling it. It is as though we are here to turn creation into a park fit to live in.

That very idea of human beings being created themselves in order to manage the rest of creation seems to me to be deeply problematic. It puts human beings at the centre of the created order when all that we can see around us tells us that this is not so. Who stewarded the dinosaurs? Who stewards Alpha Centauri?

Placing ourselves at the centre of how we think about the world isn’t surprising. It may even, with a little side order of repentance be something that is forgivable. I think therefore I am very quickly turns into I think therefore I am right here at the centre of things and morphs into I think therefore I am in charge, all too easily.

Here in the Scottish Episcopal Church we’ve also been experimenting with the idea of being “priests to creation”.

…you formed humanity in your own image,
and entrusted us with the priesthood of your Creation.

It is a poetic image which comes from some serious theology but it is theology that predates the Climate Crisis.

And anyway, I have more of a sense that creation is a priest to me, mediating my relationship with God than that I am a priest to creation, somehow standing between the created order and divine love.

Creation is not ours to tame. The stewarding and priestly metaphors lead directly into a control mentality. And the outworkings of that are all too evident. At least one of the leaders of a political party in the UK came away from the Triumpian Banquet this week convinced that the best way forward was to extract all our oil and all our gas from the North Sea and use it. Note the possessive adjective used – our. In the face of the Climate Crisis, oil of ours might well take us closer to our destruction.

Deep inside, I think that most Christians know that Creation is not ours to tame.

There are currently many Christians coming on pilgrimage to Scotland. (When Jerusalem is closed, Iona is open). Many of them come via the church I serve either on their way to Iona or on their way back.

There is a sense when you talk to them that they have an instinctive urge to get to a place where human beings have not tamed the created order. As though God will speak to them there. I have many problems with that as I think that God is as present in the city as in the country and in the New World just as much as the Old. However, that sense of the goodness of creation being found in the wilderness is instinctive in the minds of many of the pilgrims that I meet.

Kierkegaard asked himself whether he should choose the monastery or the deer park – piety or pleasure. Our choice lies in whether we choose to see God in the crashing waves, the raging of the volcano and the struggle between the predator and their prey or whether we can only imagine God at work in some place where the wilderness has been tamed.

We may have been created for a garden and we may end up destined for a garden of delights, but here, out of Eden, we neither live in parkland nor are called to tame, pillage or plunder the world around us.

That notion of stewardship is trouble for it doesn’t allow us to think of ourselves as inherently creatures within creation. It always calls us to manage, interfere and control. It brings with it mentalities of harm.

Jesus has harsh words to say about stewards. They are seldom, in his thought world intrinsically good.

In Scotland, we use other vocabulary for stewards. Both in terms of managing highland estates or in terms of how we manage shared buildings in cities, the steward is called the factor. Factors are often disliked and often mistrusted. They are simply there to manage and steward property on behalf of others who are either absent or unable able to exercise the level of control that is needed to cope with property.

Such an image is a terrible one for how we think about creation.

Somehow we need language that stops us from thinking that human beings are in charge.

Should we pray, “God give you the grace to be faithful factors of Creation?”

Everyone who has ever had a factor will think we should not.

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• Are other faiths experiencing something similar – it wouldn’t particularly surprise me if that was true?
• If other faiths are experiencing it, which ones are experiencing it? Specifically, is the current yearning for something to live by bringing people more to organised forms of religion, which each have their systems, narratives and beliefs, rather than more do-it-yourself forms of faith which are more about picking what you need from a set of spiritual practices?
• Is this longterm, or is it just a flash in the post-pandemic pan? 
• I see this happening in urban liberal, liturgical churches. But that’s because I’m the Provost of St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow. Where else is it happening and what are the common themes?
• What new resources do we need to help people to find a Christian way of living in a world which seems so angry, violent and out of control?

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