I have been struggling for some days to find an introduction to, a way in to write about the ideas I want to describe in this blog. Today, the Rochester Diocesan Synod motion and the exchange of letters between the diocesan bishop, the chairs of the Houses of Laity and Clergy and the Archbishops’ Council in the person of the Secretary General, William Nye have provided me with the starting point I need.
Rochester Diocesan Synod passed a motion of no confidence in the Archbishops’ Council on 10 December 2024. There is no mention of God in the motion or the correspondence. Implicit in the motion and correspondence is that there is a God and that all these people engaged in Diocesan and General Synods and the Archbishops’ Council believe in God, are involved in the work of God and are active for God – it’s taken for granted – of course. But which God is being taken for granted, what version of the Christian God underpins the intrinsic assumptions of all those involved?
It's obvious, isn’t it? It’s the God in whom we believe whose fundamentals are set out in the dogmas and doctrines and creeds of the Church of England and found in the language and intrinsic theology of Common Worship. In this specific motion and exchange of letters it’s the God of compassion who cares about the safety, health and well-being of people and how they are treated in Church and society, the God for whom the victims of abuse and the systemic abuse of people in the Church being uncovered by various reports and personal accounts is a special concern. But the institutional bodies and levers of the Church seem to be unaware of how deeply infected the Church has become by abusive and incompetent leaders and pastors, leading to the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, calls for the resignation of the Archbishop of York and others, and questions about the competence of the God who has allowed this crisis to develop.
Church 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.
This is an outrageously extravagant claim for me to make. How do I explain and justify my view? I think the God of the Church of England as now enshrined in Common Worship, in the theologies of the last decade of the twentieth century, in the Archbishops and House of Bishops, the Archbishops’ Council and the General Synod and the cultures of Church House and Lambeth Palace all contribute, collusively, to a corporate awareness (or lack of awareness) of God that is unhealthy and results in infantile, abusive teaching and practice.
If the liturgy of the Church encapsulates the teaching and theology of the Church, then it is a teaching oblivious to the many visionary movements that characterised the second half of the twentieth century and continue to infuse many Christians today – Christians who often find themselves in a liminal space in relationship to the institution. Some parishes and individual clergy model beacons of courage, vision, prophecy, inspiration and hope within today’s church, but they are rare followers of the energies inspiring women, black and brown, LGBTQIA+, disabled, justice-seekers, homeless, refugees, climate-crisis prophets, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic visionaries and prophets drawing on womanist, black, gay, queer, sexually and gender diverse images and language.
Forty-five years ago, newly ordained, a parish priest, I was drawing on a range of resources to enrich the language of the Alternative Service Book. The ASB was, for me, a huge advance on the BCP, on Series 1 and Series 2, but it was still woefully inadequate. I used material from the St Hilda Community prayer book , Jim Cotter, Taize, Iona, and other Anglican Provinces. When I left parish ministry, Common Worship hadn’t been formulated. It is a depressingly regressive resource, open to infinite possibilities but embodying language and metaphors about God that I was rejecting in the 1950s.
The contemporary Church of England failed to incorporate in its approved liturgies the ideas and images of God that I was searching for in the 1950s. It has now become systemically incapable of letting go of ideas, images, language and theologies about God that have been inadequate and obsolete for me for seventy years. Today’s God-ideas were rapidly becoming archaic back then, ideas about the God I didn’t believe in and believe in even less now – a God out of time, characteristic of past ages and understandings, pre-Enlightenment, pre-Industrial Revolution, pre-Darwin and Freud and Einstein, pre-the Big Bang and the Climate Crisis. We have become imprisoned in the conservative evangelical matrix, required to assent to a supposedly Biblical orthodox and literal, traditional and fundamentalist eighteenth and nineteenth century God, a God who ceased to exist long ago.
When I wondered who might provide me with the language and ideas and authority to describe what I wanted to say in the vlog, I turned to Richard Holloway, prophet, visionary, poet, theologian and risk taker, and found in his writings what I was seeking.
In the introduction to Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe (2020) Richard writes:
“I am not sure I do accept God, or how God has been traditionally defined or understood. That’s one prong of my dilemma. But the other is that, unlike Ivan Karamazov, I find myself unable to tear up the ticket of my membership in one of the communities that worships the God I don’t think I believe in – the Christian Church.”
I’m half-way through what I want to write this week. I’m tired, exhausted still by the evil bug that laid me low on New Year’s Day that I’m just about recovered from. I will continue in a second blog to be published this week, and more blogs in the weeks and months to come.