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.
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.
Jesus was processing his life of human experience and emotions and relationships with exactly the same resources as you and I process our lives and experience. One difference between us (not the difference between divine and human nature) is that our experience, if we are Christians, is processed through the constructs of theology and faith that evolved following Jesus’ death and have been evolving ever since. We are programmed in a way Jesus wasn’t.
We are living at a time of crisis, globally and individually. The crises are multiple: climate, ecosystem, political, economic, spiritual, religious, refugee, health, housing, pollution. Every member of the human race is at risk of being affected by and infected by this systemic state of crisis – emotionally, intellectually, physically and spiritually. In the Church of England, the drama last week about the sacking of the members of the Independent Safeguarding Group manifests the total mess that is safeguarding policy and practice in the Church of England. The Church is directly affected by the unhealthy magical thinking that is a normative part of today’s Christian teaching and thinking.
The Rev Ian Paul, member of the Archbishops’ Council, General Synod, and a leading conservative voice told students at an Oxford Union debate on Thursday that allowing gay clergy to marry would amount to state interference in religion reminiscent of Nazi Germany. He provided the evidence that underpins my conclusion that there is no relationship between faith in the Mystery named God, a mystery manifest in the life and teaching of Jesus and experienced mystically in the essence and energy of unconditional, infinite, intimate love.
I anticipate that the work undertaken by the College and House of Bishops, integral to the Living in Love and Faith process and to the outcome at General Synod in February 2023, will be judged “incompetent, ineffective and unfit for purpose. This will be a tragic end to what has in many ways been an effective exercise. I hope I will be proved wrong, too pessimistic, but Church that is unable to ensure that its safeguarding practice is so inadequate is unlikely to produce proposals that are adequate to the most basic of LGBTQIA+ expectations.
Do gay people contaminate the Church of England? This question has been haunting me since I learnt yesterday that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York seem to have accepted the resignation of the Revd Andrew Hammond, Chaplain at St John’s College, Cambridge, openly gay and appointed as chaplain to the General Synod by the Archbishops last year. Andrew offered his resignation as a result of homophobic reactions to his contribution to the act of worship at Synod on Tuesday morning, part of an act of worship themed round humility. Andrew’s key point was that humility is the opposite of the sin of pride. The Gay Pride movement is using the word as the opposite of a sin that produces humiliation and shame.
In 1957, aged nearly 12, I knew with an arrogant conviction that if God disapproved of me loving another boy, then God was wrong and I was right. I knew I was right to trust my feelings and physical desire for intimacy and love. I trusted my intuition, my awareness of who I am. I have had to learn again to trust the arrogant wisdom of my youthful self. Today I am still learning to trust and listen to my contemporary self, my body and feelings, and the energy within.
In a letter to the Next Steps Group Changing Attitude England proposes that as soon as possible, in order to allow a truly radically inclusive discussion of the LLF process, its outcome and its next steps, six members of the LGBTQIA+ community should be appointed to the House of Bishops and to the Next Steps Group.
The Iwerne Trust produced many of the most prominent Evangelical Christian leaders, people associated with Reformed theology in the Church of England over the past 40 years. At the heart of the Iwerne philosophy was a brand of wholehearted, sacrificial, masculine Christianity maintained by a detailed programme of supervision. Its origins lie in the toxic culture created by the founder of the Iwerne network, Eric Nash. John Smyth’s regime of abuse continues to affect the culture of today’s Church of England. The powerful theology and culture of the movement is being leveraged in contemporary debates on gender and sexuality. It is abusive.
