This evening I'm writing and posting a spur-of-the-moment blog arguing that nothing is going to change, despite the serious nature of the failures reported yesterday, because something is far, far more seriously wrong with the basic fabric of the Church - what it claims to believe about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Bible - the fundamentals of our faith. A new movement is required.
I’m offering ideas in this blog that will be manna to some, anathema to others, and difficult to process for others. I will expand these ideas in subsequent blogs. My ideas and thought processes develop every day. I insist on ninety minutes of silence, reflection, deep presence and meditation every morning and into the silence and stillness, unbidden, ideas flow. I offer these ideas to you knowing they may take time to process – weeks and years and possibly decades. I’m dreaming of a huge change in where our attention is focused as Christians.
Last Wednesday, 15 January 2025, two serendipitous events occurred. First, Thinking Anglicans listed just two opinion articles, one by Gilo for ViaMedia and one by me for Unadulterated Love. A conversation developed between us and others posting comments. The second event occurred later that morning. I came across the latest podcast by Sam Howsen, a conversation with Robert Thompson delving into the challenges facing the Church of England under a new Archbishop. Sam and Gilo are both contributing in their own very particular ways to living and imagining and exploring themselves and their life experience in the context of Christianity and I am a fellow traveller and seeker with them.
I think the Church of England is in crisis. I think the contemporary ideas held by the Church, the “theologies”, the ideas about and metaphors for and images of and awareness of the God it claims corporately to worship have become grossly inadequate and dangerously flawed. The result of this systemic incompetence are the gross failures of safeguarding and the deep malaise of abuse and the inability of the Church of England to recognise and face up to the abuse that is now a dominant narrative in the Church.
It’s not the doctrine of marriage that needs our primary attention, It’s the doctrine of God. That’s why I keep asking the question – what kind of God? I won’t stop asking the question. I believe it is fundamental to what we seek and that by which we are drawn – the mystery of love – what this mystery of love is and why we fall into it.
The toxic culture of prejudice and abuse affected by public school pathology and an addiction to substitutionary atonement theology advocated by conservative evangelicals is not going to be overcome until the Church of England Synod and in particular the House of Bishops and the Archbishops’ Council are shaken into a radically changed attitude in their understanding, teaching, practice, liturgy, doctrine and corporate life leading to a dramatic change in C of E culture and teaching.
A sequence of three events in the last three weeks has conspired to create turmoil in the Church of England resulting in a crisis that will be difficult to resolve. As a result of our contemporary inability to talk openly and honestly about the God we do and don’t believe in it may well be almost impossible to agree the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury. The next Archbishop will need to have the most remarkable and combined gifts of courage, vision, prophecy, awareness and resolve.
