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.
At the moment I am very aware of how books have changed me and my relationship with myself, my sexuality, the Church of England, Christianity, and God, half-way though Diarmaid MacCulloch’s recently published Lower than the Angels; A History of Sex and Christianity. It was the phrase “the divine relationship, an audacious transformation” that unlocked the door to an idea I’ve been struggling to develop for several weeks.
From my perspective, we are all compromised by the difficulty we have in freeing ourselves from the corporate, systemic, abusive, unhealthy, persistently homophobic culture of the Church of England. We are all implicated in some way by our inability to confront ‘our’ Church when she is so obviously in a deeply unhealthy state. Numbers are in free fall and people leave or avoid the Church not because they know in detail what the culture is like from the top down but because the Church, national and local, does not communicate a healthy understanding and vision of life, life in all its fulness. From both sides, conservative and progressive, there is a sense of desperation and a depressive mood. Defusing the sexuality debate, healthy as it might be, isn’t a remotely adequate initiative.
How the heck do we get to the end of LLF? Something is required that is more than simply defusing the Sexuality Debate and the Anglican Culture War that we are living with. In my spiritual life, it became more and more obvious to me that I had to do the work myself, to work on myself. Resolving the Church of England’s conflicts over sexuality and gender is still going to take a long time because we are not sufficiently investing in ourselves and developing the conceptual, prophetic, visionary, emotional, theological and spiritual resources necessary for our mutual cosmic salvation.
My faith is of the variety Tim Chesterton identifies as bog-standard Anglicanism in a recent Thinking Anglicans comment. This blog is offered to all “progressive” Church of England people and groups. It is in this bog-standard openness that my personal deep truths and values, inspired by Jesus, the Bible, God and the Holy Spirit, are somehow embedded and expressed, in a Church that was once fluid, open, permissive, generous, adventurous, and broad. But this model is being actively displaced and superseded by a model imposed by the institution and local congregations by the desperate need for survival. They are required to achieve by growth by any means, fuelled by financial resources not available to those pursuing bog-standard Anglicanism – because bog-standard Anglicanism is too radical and scares the horses.
This is a highly personal reflection from a prejudiced position. I’m looking for depth, reflection, contemporary awareness of theology, justice, intelligence, awareness, stillness, contemplation, beauty, goodness, love and wisdom. I have come to the conclusion that the Holy Spirit is failing to update the software and hardware operating systems of faith within the Church of England is supposed to operate and be inspired by.
A Sunday morning energised and enlivened by a new book by Diarmaid MacCulloch providing ammunition for someone campaigning for a healthy, fully inclusive church. Diarmaid MacCulloch has provided us, LGBTQIA+ people and allies, and the Church itself, with a new resource, a resource that is almost certainly more authoritative and healthy than the Living in Love and Faith book, an egregious book that panders to conservative evangelicals, he says. Diarmaid and the book, Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, are the subjects of an article in today’s Observer Review where it is described as “an incendiary new book that challenges centuries of fakery, abuse and homophobia.”
I visit churches in the hope of finding inspiration and wisdom, of finding something, anything, that communicates the essence of Christian love, truth and faith as I have experienced and known it through earlier periods of my life. There have been notably few places where love, God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love, is the first truth the church wants to communicate.
Last week an idea came to me. I should do some theology on the Unadulterated Love blog. One morning when I was meditating, the story in Luke’s gospel came to mind, of the boy Jesus in the temple, aged twelve, gone missing. Luke’s Gospel points out the necessity of the hidden years of Jesus’ childhood and adolescence, that he might grow strong in the full experience of a human nature; thus he might be able to bring the Spirit of God into immediate contact with every human area. From the age of twelve, Jesus grew in all ways – physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually – for the work that lay ahead of him – he advanced in wisdom.
