Colin Coward
Changing Attitude, Human Connection and ...

There is something missing in the public conversation about human connection and community identified by Catharine Viner in a recent Guardian article. I observe that human connection and community are also missing in the Church of England. Discovering this essence would be a valuable outcome of changing attitudes, helping people develop lives well-lived and enriching all our lives, engaging with unadulterated love and living life in all its fulness.

Changing Attitude, Human Connection and Community and Unadulterated Love

vision

I Had A Dream

I Had A Dream

I had a long, vivid dream two weeks ago.

It was a dream about my experience of visiting churches and what I find. I’m engaged in conversations with various friends about the state of the Church today. A small core understand my awareness and ideas. The majority do not. When I engage people in conversation, they struggle to comprehend what I’m saying.

What I am not finding is a clear awareness that life in all its fullness is the essence of healthy, flourishing Christian life, fuelled by unconditional, infinite, intimate love, goodness, wisdom, and truth.

A Brief Very Personal Survey of Global Challenges on the Anniversary of 9/11

A Brief Very Personal Survey of Global Challenges on the Anniversary of 9/11

I’m trying to map the many dimensions of change and concern that impact my life every day. I want to change and expand and bring into conscious awareness the multiple challenges confronting us, here and now, in space and time, stories for me as an individual, for humankind corporately and for the Anglican Christian community of which I am a member.

God talk – the Church of England in crisis

God talk – the Church of England in crisis

I think the Church of England is in crisis. I think the contemporary ideas held by the Church, the “theologies”, the ideas about and metaphors for and images of and awareness of the God it claims corporately to worship have become grossly inadequate and dangerously flawed. The result of this systemic incompetence are the gross failures of safeguarding and the deep malaise of abuse and the inability of the Church of England to recognise and face up to the abuse that is now a dominant narrative in the Church.

It’s the Church of England’s doctrine of God that requires our primary attention

It’s the Church of England’s doctrine of God that requires our primary attention

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.

The past, the present and the future Church of England

The past, the present and the future Church of England

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.

‘Valuing all God’s children – including trans people!

‘Valuing all God’s children – including trans people!

Trans people will be participating in the Changing Attitude England’s conversation at St Andrew’s Short Street, Waterloo on 2nd March as we pursue the ‘deeply Christian’ vision of ‘Life in all its fullness’, by which we mean, at the very least, ‘treating each person as a unique individual of inherent worth.’

Healthy contemporary evolutionary Christian vision, theology and practice

Healthy contemporary evolutionary Christian vision, theology and practice

What are the elements of a Christian community, cell, gathering or congregation needed to create a seamless, healthy, spiritual, deeply relational, visionary, Christ-like movement? What does life in all its fullness look like and how do we assemble a model of Christian life and theology based on this, working to achieve this?

What kind of God?

What kind of God?

In September, five members of Changing Attitude England met in a London garden one afternoon to explore our beliefs about God. I had circulated a position paper beforehand setting out my thoughts as a framework for our conversation. The five of us who met in the garden, plus one, wish to extend the conversation we began by organising an open event on 2nd March 2024 at St Andrew’s Short Street, Waterloo from 10.00 to 16.00 when we hope many of you will bring your own experience to the gathering, exploring our understandings of God in our human awareness and vision raised by the question What kind of God do we believe in?