Here I am, posting another blog dealing with the Church of England in crisis when I really want to be writing about the far more critical existential crisis going on moment, of which this week’s events are but one element. There needs to be a far, far more radical transformation of the life and culture of the Church of England, a movement developing in the root, seeing and feeling the essence of unconditional love.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Recent comments on the Thinking Anglicans website made very dogmatic assertions about doctrine in the Church of England. There is another, entirely different basis on which faith can be formed, a path that subtly infused my consciousness, creating freedom. Love is the essence. God is love. Love changes everything. St John got it. Jesus got it. The Christian teachers and writers and theologians who inspired and enthused and infused me got it.
I would like to be part of a Church that is evolving spiritually, theologically and culturally, intentionally responding to the movements of our time: the climate crisis, poverty, war, abuse, the transformation of the place of minorities and those against whom prejudice is expressed. I would like a Church that is growing, maturing, overcoming prejudice, committed to radical new Christian inclusion more than it is committed to growth in numbers and income – AND is committing resources to this ambitious Christian vision.
