How, across the CofE, do we further develop and embed these qualities - deep trust in God of human experience and bodies and emotions, God of the revelation to which all reflective and completive and intuitive people are open?
A homophobic Church or a Church free from homophobia?
Changing Attitude – campaigning against the hostile, abusive, prejudiced and homophobic god of the CEEC
The desolation of the Church of England
In the period of my lifetime, I have witnessed a movement in church and society from reliance on interior to exterior authority. This movement has happened because of changes that have taken place that have increased human anxiety and insecurity at the same time as we have become more scientific, more aware, more person-centred, more able, potentially, to diagnose and heal physical and emotional disturbances to our bodies and psyches. Externalised authority and awareness has become dominant in the Christian Church today over and against our internal intuition and wisdom.
Which God?
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.
The God I Never Believed In
I have never believed in the God believed in by the Church of England Evangelical Council, the HTB hierarchy and the Anglican Global South majority – never. After seventy years in which time our ideas about God have continued to evolve, the regressive, authoritarian, dogmatic, supposedly orthodox, traditional theology and teaching still dominates the conservative evangelical mindset of the Church of England Evangelical Council and the Global South majority of the Anglican Communion.
Transformational Christian Life
Institutional religions and the institutional Church are finding this evolutionary step, the call to listen to everything until it all belongs together and we are part of it, very difficult to imagine, let alone adjust to and integrate in its teaching and practice. Sexuality, gender, inequality, economic injustice, the climate crisis, how people function and malfunction, emotionally, physically and spiritually, the well-being of our planet and environment, globalisation, artificial intelligence and the manipulation of what we take to be reality, dysfunctional political and spiritual leadership, are all requiring us to make sometimes massive adjustments to our lives in faith.
Easter Day 2024 – Freud and Christianity
Any authoritarian system of morals, whether it ascribes authority to God or the Church (or the Bible), if it is accepted uncritically, depends on the Super-ego. It is opposed to the Christian principle of using eyes and ears to learn for oneself. Both Ego and Super-ego must grow up and forsake infantile fixations.
Good Friday 2024 – the erosion of spiritual energy in the CofE
The mood, the environment, the culture of the Church of England in the decade from my teenage years (the nineteen sixties, by when I’d known I was gay for five years) to the nineteen nineties, was a good place in which to be gay. The whole of my being, my intuitive, experiential, feeling, creative, idealistic, introverted self, discovered that I was in a gay friendly environment despite that me also knowing that homosexuality was taboo and disapproved of by God. I now live in a spiritually depleted, hostile environment of endless battles, reports, reboots and ‘process’.
The Zone of Interest – ways of thinking about God
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.