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.
There is something very unpleasant going on in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion since 1998 that leaves me feeling increasingly conflicted and abused emotionally and spiritually – assaulted by dogma and doctrine and a cruel, ruthless God. This is where the rich, creative, inspiring Christian heritage of my first five decades has brought me; deep disagreement about my sexuality, my priesthood, my membership of the Church of England, my theology and my spiritual vision. It has become more and more difficult to live with this - and it gets worse.
Conservatives claim that declining numbers in progressive congregations are the result of progressive, non-Biblical, non-orthodox, non-traditional, non-creedal formulations of Christianity. I claim that declining numbers are due to people abandoning the Church because people think traditional theologies are no longer believable.
The Christian Church needs to engage with the question: “In what ways did Jesus rely on the contemporary orthodox, traditional Jewish teaching and doctrine contained in the Hebrew scriptures and worship and in what ways did he challenge them?” More importantly, it needs to understand what “life in all its fullness” means in reality for every human being and learn how to live and communicate this transformational truth.
We may think that there is just one version of Christianity that we who are Anglicans share with every denomination and all Christians. Not so - we are living with many versions of Christianity, not just within the variety of denominations, but within each denomination and within the Church of England. Within the church there is an invisible, underground, disconnected, boundary-crossing set of people who are letting go of orthodoxy and dogma. In my dreams this group will reach a critical mass as the reality of the ways in which people are reconfiguring faith becomes more widely known. It’s the great secret of the current decade that dare not speak its name, though it has been emerging for decades.
