When I created the Unadulterated Love website I described it as the dreaming of a Christian contemplative activist. I outlined my Christian faith in three brief statements:
God’s love is infinite, intimate and unconditional
God’s loving, infinite, intimate, unconditional energy is woven seamlessly through the fabric of all creation - the natural world is infused with the love of God
We are loved by God infinitely, intimately and unconditionally
Those three statements still describe my Christian faith. It is the presence of God’s infinite, intimate, unconditional love woven through the fabric of creation, a love infused in the natural world, that I open myself to every morning when I meditate. It is this presence that I am conscious of when I reflect on the condition of the Church of England today. It is this awareness of God by which I evaluate what is going on in the Church. It is essential for my health, mental, spiritual and physical that I live each day immersed as far as possible in this awareness of God and it is this awareness that fuels my thoughts that are turned into blogs. It is why I keep returning to the same fundamental question – what kind of God do we believe in? Or to put it another way – what is God like?
We have great difficulty in the twenty-first century Church of England talking about what God is like. We talk about many other matters, driven by the Living in Love and Faith process and now, the Makin Review. God gets a mention in passing but we are not talking about the kind of God we might believe in who encourages people to develop the unhealthy theological and Biblical fundamentals that underpin abusive personalities like Peter Ball and John Smyth or the systemic prejudice against women and LGBTQIA+ people held by some in our Church.
The state of health of the CofE
I am struck by those who have commented on the ill-state of health of the Church of England following the publication of the Makin Review and the Archbishop’s resignation.
Martine Oborne in a recent blog for Watch says: “we need to start treating all people equally, including addressing sexism and the ongoing institutional discrimination against women that exists in our Church.” Misogyny and patriarchy are alive and all too active in the so-called theologies of Conservative Evangelicals enshrining male privilege in ‘complementarianism’ and ‘headship theology’. Their claim that God made men to lead and women to submit to male leadership is used to justify coercive control and the abuse of women.
Gavin Drake in an open letter writes that the Archbishops’ Council and the National Safeguarding Team continue to re-abuse victims and survivors and silence those who speak out. The bishops are protected by a system that is unfit for purpose. The coverage of the Makin Report has shed light on the Church of England’s safeguarding failures, but it is a very small light and there is much more to be revealed.
Froghole (in a comment on Thinking Anglicans) says he has attended services at a little over 7,000 churches in every part of the country and it is apparent that the Church is in terminal decline practically everywhere. The Church now has the support of less than 1% of the coming generation; little more than 0.5 million are active members of the CofE and they are mostly elderly people in a rapidly growing and diverse population. Few of the investments in mission undertaken during the Welby years have worked adequately relative to the costs incurred.
Giles Fraser refers to a lecture delivered to the Clergy Support Trust in October by Dr Liz Graveling, senior researcher for clergy wellbeing at the Church of England. She said that more than one in five clergy is clinically depressed; one in three is mildly depressed. Giles says clergy are isolated, demoralised and knackered. Under Welby’s tenure, the Church has reinvented itself as a top-down bureaucracy. Welby took his big business experience, allied it to his very particular evangelical zeal, and set out to impose it on the rest of us. We are now the little people fronting a burgeoning machine of impenetrable complexity. It is called Vision and Strategy and comes with a whole new grammar of administrative Christianity we are now expected to know by heart.
Institutional misogyny, patriarchy and sexism, products of headship theology, homophobia and transphobia, racism, the abuse of victims and survivors, the failures of safeguarding, terminal decline of numbers, clinical depression among clergy and top-down bureaucracy are dominant characteristics of today’s Church.
Giles reminds me that traditionally, one of the best things about the Church of England has been its ability to include people from an astonishingly wide spectrum of theological opinion but he warns that this level of diversity is now a problem. A diverse Church must welcome equally LGBTQIA+ people, women, black and brown people, those with disabilities.
Immanent and transcendent presence
Giles is also alert to the tension between the immanent and the transcendent in Christian life and spirituality. He believes the pendulum has swung too much in favour of the immanent in recent decades towards “Jesus the social activist, the friendly listening ear, the comforting presence.” He says we need to reclaim “the difficult mysterious Jesus, the otherness of Jesus, the cosmic Jesus.” Both dimensions are essential, says Giles, for the revolution that unseated Welby to keep going.
Those who have followed my writings and blogging from the early years of Changing Attitude founded in 1995 to the years of the Unadulterated Love blog following retirement in 2015 will know that I have pursued a campaign vision in which I have set out to hold together the essences of immanent and transcendent experience and practice. I don’t think the Church has got the balance of the two wrong. I think the Church has lost the wisdom and knowledge necessary to I think the Church of England as institution fails to get Jesus the social activist almost entirely, worships a Jesus who is far too sanitised and comfortable, has a superficial understanding of the cosmic Christ and neglects Giles’s difficult, mysterious Jesus, who is for me integral to our being and woven through the fabric of creation.
The resources and language of Common Worship are inadequate. The activities of progressives are inadequate. The processes of the House of Bishops, The Archbishops’ Council, the National Safeguarding Team, the official Vision and Strategy, the functioning of Church House and the CofE bureaucracy, all are inadequate. We are trying to repair a massive breach in the Church’s awareness of God. The repair work will take great courage and vision. Changing the marriage Canon or the marriage doctrine of the Church of England will repair one immensely important tear in the fabric, but it will have little or no effect until we start to address the major holes in our vision of God. Anglican Mainstream published a book “Repair the Tear” in 2004 responding to the Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion. The tear they wanted to repair was their identification of a “current sickness stemming from a departure in some form from Scripture.” Twenty years later the tear hasn’t been repaired nor the dynamics resolved.
There are many people doing good, Christ-like things in the Church of England, but the vision of the Church, national and local, isn’t adequate to the unhealthy condition in which the Church finds itself, nor of the condition of our planet’s biosphere and economic, political. Psychological, emotional and spiritual health.
It’s possible that nothing much can be done to rescue Christianity at the moment from the Christian Church’s failure to recognise and identify the elements of theology and belief, once accepted but now hostile to the evolution of a faith that is healthy and creative and nourishes and enriches our awareness of the divine essence and presence in all creation, the essence, the seamless, sacred energy within all creation and all life and every human being. We the human species have to learn to see beyond, beyond differences of colour and gender, sexuality and religion, ethnic background and cultural traditions, aware of our global
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.