An inauspicious day to elect an archbishop

I’m not sure today is the most auspicious day they could have picked for Justin Welby’s “election” as Archbishop of Canterbury. (I’m not sure who “they” are, but I assume someone actually chose it.)

Perhaps they have an ironic sense of humour, or are simply offering a gloomy prognostication.

But today is the anniversary of the execution (for many Anglican catholics the martyrdom) of William Laud, taken to the chopping block on this day in 1645. His offence: to oppose the Puritans’ zeal for their vision of a biblical church (i.e. run their way) with his own firm belief in episcopal power (especially his own) and more traditionally catholic and dignified worship.

His Puritan enemies couldn’t legally find him guilty of a capital offence however hard they tried (arrogance, insensitivity and pig-headness being lesser sins), but decided to pass a bill in Parliament condemning him to death anyway.

I’m sure Justin Welby will be glad that their successors today don’t wield the same power in Parliament. At least he gets a firm reminder of what could lie ahead of him, and just how far some zealous evangelicals will go to promote their understanding of the love of God.

Sorry, who is this George Carey?

This is a purely accidental post. I was pondering the pace of change in our society, and particularly the way in which the Church of England over the last 25 years has gone from being too far ahead of society in accepting gay people to some way behind it.

While hunting the date of the notorious “Pulpit poofs can stay” Sun headline (November 1987 since you ask – and memorialised by Tom Robinson in the Winter of 89 version of Glad to be Gay), I came across this excellent obituary of Robert Runcie by Andrew Brown, which I don’t recall having read before.

Buried in it is this little gem:

It’s said that when George Carey was announced as his successor, Runcie had to look him up in Crockford’s to discover his qualifications. I’m sorry I never asked him whether the story was true. He might have told me, which I suppose is why I was too delicate to ask.

In future, when I hear Lord Carey advising Justin Welby in the pages of the press, as he has been wont to do for Williams these past ten years, I shall remember that bit of gossip with pleasure.

St Gregory and the ordination of women

Today the Church remembers two of the Cappadocian fathers, SS Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus. (The third, S Gregory of Nyssa is remembered in July alongside his sister S Macrina.) Between them they established the foundations of Trinitarian grammar.

I just want to note one single quotation from S Gregory, in his letter to Cledonius against the teachings of Appolinarius.

For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.
Letter 101. 

It has seemed to me for a very long time that Gregory’s maxim, if we take it seriously, points inexorably towards women being able to be ordained.

Either Christ assumes human nature, or he assumes some differentiated male nature, however that night be conceived. If the latter then a christological understanding of women’s salvation is problematised to the point of landing up in heresy land.

However, if in becoming human, the Son of God becomes like his human siblings in every way that matters respecting their humanity (see Heb 2:17) then it is (again according to Hebrews) that common non-gender specific humanity which qualifies him for priesthood. 

The logic that follows from that is that those who stand in persona Christi at the altar representing his priesthood in the life of the church are qualified to be so called in the first place by their humanity, which God in Christ has made the common ground of salvation.

And so S Gregory helps us ground the ordination of women in the theological heart of a traditional doctrine of salvation.

Wibble: Welby is not a magic wand

Blackadder Goes Forth did a good job of satirising the already well discredited  rhetoric of “one more push”. But while I hate to start the new year on a cynical note, or indeed by sticking pencils up my nose, I wonder whether I hear echoes of it in church initiatives and episcopal speeches.

There are several available (broad-brush stroke) diagnoses of the relationship between our church and society. Some seem drawn from an uncritical reading of the deuteronomistic history as if Job had never been written nor the Messiah crucified. Others, including the work of respected historians like Callum Brown, see secularisation as an abrupt and recent development.

The corollary of the second, and often seemingly the first also, is that transformation, revival, the re-sacralization of society can all be achieved with short-term strategies, prayer, good leadership and a right and proper confidence in the gospel. These are the attitudes that leave me hearing the rhetoric of “one more push”. While I would love to sign up to the idea, I simply don’t see things that way, and I don’t think its just my innate pessimism which makes me say “Wibble”.

On the other hand I do see some long term trajectories and transformations in patterns of thought, technological change, and social organisation which have contributed over several centuries to bringing us where we are now. Some of those changes have been inspired by Christians, not least the Protestant Reformation. Some might be contested, although I think there is merit in the view that modern science was built initially on a Christian bedrock of understanding the world as creation. Other intellectual trends have been decidedly anti-Christian, and often, particularly, more deliberately anti-catholic. 

I don’t want to make this solely about intellectual trajectories: arguably social and technological change is more significant for the wider culture: from the growth of the guilds changing the economy of the late mediaeval city to the rise of the nation state, from the invention of printing to the globalised world of the internet, from the expansion of the world in 1492 to the incomprehensible vastness of a 13.7 billion year old cosmos; all these and many more shape a long-term context.

Nor do I want to pin the blame on a moment of “fall”, as Radical Orthodoxy does for poor Duns Scotus. Identifying single underlying causes for blame is another route to identifying a quick fix for revival. Although I’m no sociological expert nor any great intellect, I read the history of intellectual and social change as far more complex, interlocking and unintentional in its development 

I find myself, then, at the start of the new year, worried among other things at the hopes and expectation being heaped on our new archbishop, as though he will help us the find the right strategy for that “one more push”. I think that short-term hope is an illusion, and that Justin Welby must resist the illusion of initiatives. The challenge for the church is a long-term one for which we need to lay down some building blocks for a more distant future.

For me that means encouraging at least some of the conversations I suggested 6 months ago. But I think it also means giving thought to how we can develop sustainable communities for the practice of prayer, worship and charity that resist the myths of the autonomous individual and her less intellectual companion the modern consumer. And I think it means nurturing and developing people in all walks of life and intellectual endeavour, who can give us the confidence that all truth is God’s truth, and lay the foundations for a future and more God-shaped intellectual climate to grow and flourish.

What would disestablishment mean?

One question quite frequently raised in the aftermath of General Synod’s inability to agree legislation making women eligible for episcopal orders is that of disestablishment. Some are proposing removing bishops from the Lords; others are protesting about the naked Erastianism of Parliament telling Synod to get with the programme.

I’m pondering what in practice disestablishment might mean. I don’t see the Welsh situation as a precedent, since it was cocooned in the established churches of the greater part of the state (England and Scotland).

In a nutshell, the vision behind establishment was that the Crown in Parliament governed her subjects under God, entrusting the charge for their spiritual peace to the bishops and clergy and their temporal peace to the magistrates.

Historically that was probably a late mediaeval polity which was being applied to an early modern nation. (Theologically the kindest thing that can be said about it is that it was a seriously over-realized eschatology.) It is unsurprising that it failed early on, yet was sufficiently substantial for everyone to act as if had succeeded. Over the succeeding centuries Parliament removed one legislative slice of the salami after another, until today it is at least as much illusion as substance.

However, the tendrils of establishment are wrapped around a great many things, and to talk of disestablishment is to ask which ones definitely need to be cut away. Essentially it would seem the answer must include those which presume the Church of England has a unique place in the constitution, and conversely those which presume being an English citizen is to be a member of the Church of England.

I think that list would have to include removing the following:

1. the place of the Crown as Supreme Governor and Defender of the Faith, and instead giving the monarch and consort the right to make any faith commitment or none.
2. the ex-offcio presence of bishops in the House of Lords, the provision of an Anglican Speaker’s chaplain, and Anglican prayers before each parliamentary session
3. any presumption of Anglican (perhaps Christian) chaplaincy in the Armed Forces, prisons and  hospitals, together with compulsory church parade etc.
4. any presumption of Anglican (perhaps Christian) leadership on national occasions such as Remembrance Sunday and royal events.
5. the right of any person to be baptized or married in their parish church solely by virtue of residence in the locality rather than membership of the church
6. the right of any person to be buried in the churchyard of the parish where they die

Are there other things which are essential to undoing the compact of establishment which treats an English citizen as a member  of the English Church, or are some of these not as essential as I think they are?

Update

As Cranmer reminded me on Twitter, I have somehow ignored the elephant in the room. Surely any move to disestablishment would also need a negotiated property settlement: to whom do the church buildings belong?

What the synod vote means to one “ordinary churchgoer”

This morning I received an email from a parishioner, which I’ve now received permission to quote. It seems to me to illustrate precisely why we are not in the same place after the vote as we were before it.

I am very disappointed and also surprised at the news about women bishops.

I am sorry about the women who for now at least will not become bishops, regret the loss of value that they could no doubt bring to the Church and feel that the lack of diversity at this level is a big mistake.  But these are not the main reason why I am so upset about this.

It now seems that the Church of England does not care at all how it portrays itself to the public at large.  How can it wonder why congregations are declining and no-one new comes along to services to what appears to be an introverted, closed shop, stuck in the past which only hits the media when there is yet another internal dissent.

Earlier this year I attended a funeral service and memorial where apart from the priest, the only churchgoers in the congregation were the bereaved husband, the churchwarden and me. It was clear that everyone there found it a most uncomfortable experience, they did not know what to do, where to sit or how to participate.  As we left the church a conversation started amongst those present about their other experiences of Church.  It was clear that most had some degree of belief and had on similar occasions of distress found comfort from the Church but despite that, no-one present would ever consider going along to a service.  It was almost an irrelevance in their lives. 

I worry that with the kind of voting system that lead to yesterday’s decision this neutral position of irrelevance could move to a much more negative view from the general public.

As an ordinary member of what is probably a fairly typical parish, I never recall being asked for an opinion on women bishops so assume that there is no mechanism within the Church for people like me to vote on matters of this kind.  Is this correct and should it be so? 

I appreciate the need to be inclusive of different views and beliefs but surely there is a serious risk that with so much focus on what appears to be a minority, there is no energy left to concentrate on what is really important for the Church and its place in the wider community.

How can an ordinary Churchgoers like me get my voice heard to try to bring about change, not only when the next vote on women Bishops takes place, but also to encourage other moves towards a more relevant Church of England?

I have responded as best I can, but I thought it worth publishing without further comment from me.

The Synod is broken

Whenever anyone has asked me this past year  what the result of the Synod vote on enabling women to become bishops, my reply has been “I think there’s just enough against to block it.” And so it has proved to be.

It’s important to note that, however it is being reported,  the Synod – far less the Church of England  – has not voted against women bishops. It has voted in favour of them: bishops 44-3, clergy 144-45, laity 132-74, making a grand total of 320 for and 122 against. In the dioceses, 42 synods voted in favour and 2 against. In every other sector of our society this is what is known as a landslide.

So no, the vote was not lost, but the majority was insufficient in one house to reach the high bar set to make change possible.

My problem is not with the high bar of itself: there’s nothing wrong in building in a bias towards safeguarding tradition in the church of all places, or in working for something closer to consensus, or in trying to safeguard the minority position.

My problem is more that I gravely doubt the house of laity is representative. (I’m not sure about the clergy either, but at least most of those elected are relatively likely to be known in some way to their electors.) I leave aside the need to have a substantial amount of time to give up days at a stretch, or the inclination to obsess about church politics, neither of which seem to me characteristic of many in our congregations. I note rather the odd nature of the electorate.

General Synod members are elected  by their Deanery Synods. If you went up to a randomly chosen member of any congregation and asked them “who represents you on deanery synod”, far less “who represents you on General Synod”, I would be surprised if they could give a full and accurate answer to the question. The elected, especially in the house of laity, are seriously disconnected from their electors and therefore not properly accountable. (I can never recall a deanery synod member being asked, or volunteering, which General Synod members they voted for.) As a result, the noisy tend to get elected, because they come with some level of name recognition by people who rarely attend hustings, and may themselves have been voted onto their deanery synods because no-one else was standing.

Now, of course, I might be wrong about  all of this. But it seems to me that what makes this vote today so depressing is not simply the result, it’s that it has revealed (again) the unrepresentative nature of the system. We need a more connected electorate if we are to be sure the vote of the Synod represents (whether for good or ill) the “mind of the Church” rather than the power of the activists and lobbyists.

Five conversations for a declining church

Since David Keen’s very pertinent post last week drawing attention to the statistical realities, I’ve been pondering a list of the big conversations the Church of England really ought to be having with itself, its friends and often the wider society.

I’m not wedded to any of these as essential or likely to provide easy answers. Nor have I signed on in blood to any particular solution. I’m more throwing out some ideas for big conversations with some illustrative points along the way. All of them have all sorts of ramifications and caveats that a more careful post on any would acknowledge and discuss.

Conversation 1 – Establishment
This is one of those questions where the time is probably never right, and the ramifications broader and deeper than they seem. However, creeping disestablishment can only get so far before what is left begins to seem strange if not absurd. Establishment was based on the never quite realised aspiration that the country was a theopolitical unity, and to be a subject of the monarch was to be an adherent to the monarch’s religion. It never quite worked, but as recent debates over the presence of bishops in the Lords have shown, it is now more delusion than aspiration. On the other hand, what seems odd at the level of national politics seems much more natural at the local level, where the same national unity gives rights of marriage and burial in the parish church by virtue of residence nor religion. It’s an exploration that needs to happen more generally, and not just the next time an apparent last ditch comes along.

Conversation 2 – Buildings
It seems to me that for many parishes everything is driven out by the costs and energies absorbed by maintaining often very beautiful and ancient buildings. Having just spent two and half years going through the processes need to demolish an unused and dangerously dilapidated chapel of rest, I’m appalled by the cumbersome mechanisms involved. I’d like to see some serious discussion about new legislation allowing church buildings to be handed over to community trusts, and the church becoming one organisation that rents the buildings as required within in some kind of statutory framework which acknowledges their history and tradition appropriately. Then, if a community didn’t want to take ownership of a building the church no longer wanted or could afford to maintain, such a refusal would become prima facie evidence of “no pastoral need” allowing redundancy to be fast-tracked.

Conversation 3 – Clergy
The declining number of stipendiary clergy was at the heart of David’s post, and it seems that for a very long time this has been a problem where nearly everyone has colluded in pretending it’s not that bad. (PS – developing lay ministries is an ongoing conversation, not one that’s being avoided, so it’s not included here.) So, with monotonous regularity, one pastoral reorganisation succeeds another. Any energy left over from dealing with buildings is dissipated in trying to concoct schemes that persuade parishes that, while they are getting less of a share in a vicar than they were before, and paying more for the privilege, they are at least getting a fair share that is possibly slightly better than the one next door. There are now so few stipendiary clergy that it might be time to ask

1. whether we should plan for non-stipendiary ministry being the normal exercise of a priestly vocation and see stipendiary ministry as more strategic, focused on big churches (e.g. minsters, church-planting and mission centres and cathedrals) as area deans, as some specialist ministries and so on
2. whether that means seeing stipendiary and non-stipendiary ministries alike as something people can move in and out of (often from one to the other), and change the stipend to a salary which allows either the purchase of housing, or (as appropriate) the paying of rent for church owned property.

Conversation 4 – Education
It seems to me that there simply aren’t enough Christian teachers (not all of whom wish to work in church schools) to maintain a living and dynamic Christian ethos in most of our church schools that is organic, natural and life-changing rather than another curricular structure providing boxes to be ticked. Moreover, the vast majority of church primary (or first) school pupils don’t have church secondaries to go to. Dare I suggest that despite the good intentions of so many, the system always runs the risk of suggesting God is a good story for small children, but can be left behind as you learn more about the world?
Church schools are actually quite expensive for the church. Either we need to do better with fewer schools and look more like the Roman Catholic model, or decide to rethink the church’s involvement in education well beyond school ethos. Too much of the education system is justified by economic competition rather than human development, and Ofsted tick- boxes produce a examination sausage machine instead of the nurturing of individual ability, the love of learning or the pursuit of truth. Sticking a spiritual patina on that system and then speaking of the celebration of Christian values may not commend those values too well.

Conversation 5 – Vision and communication
Whatever else our language about God is saying, it is also articulating a vision of what it means to be human. I suspect that not only is the question “what does it mean to be human?” going to become more and more important for society, it’s going to become more contested. The danger is that – as in debates over sexuality – the church will be heard only saying “no” to debates that other people have started. I think we need to be much more active in developing our own vision, and starting our own debates, rather than simply responding to a narrow field of sex, abortion and euthanasia. It is interesting, isn’t it, that no-one questions the way a magazine called the “Economist” can address every area of life, but most would laugh at the pretensions of a similar style of magazine called the “Theologian”.
Sharing a vision for being human (and what it means to live wisely) as more than either academic luxury, or in-house conversation purely with ourselves, will, I think, demand the church to take all forms of media more seriously. I’m not suggesting a proliferation of PR people, but asking whether churches need to foster vocations to screen-writing and sharp documentary work, to new media networking and inventive programme making. In most respects the media is not just the Areopagus of the age, but the only public square we still share. If we have a real vision of humanity to share, could we talk about how to do it creatively, and not wait until someone else’s story puts us defensively on the spot.

I’ve no idea how much mileage there is in any of these, or how much I will have changed my mind by next week on any of them, but I think there’re at least one or two conversation starters in that ragbag selection of opinions.

Have you got a serious doubt problem?

This is brilliant, and catches it exactly.

Anglicans and the authority of scripture

This is not quite a post about a few current difficulties, although I shall begin with someone who was rather obsessed by present Anglican divisions and divisiveness. Combative and confrontational, this priest challenged his bishop (whom he suspected of dangerously liberal tendencies) to say whether he really believed in the authority of scripture.

The bishop, rather than engage in confrontation, mildly remarked “Well, it’s the only book I read twice a day”. That was, I think, a very Anglican answer. It located authority in actual practice, rather than dealing with it as an abstract theological position; and it placed the answer firmly in both liturgical tradition, and a framework of the legal canons of the church.

Although the canons are observed by many clergy with (shall we say) creative flexibility, they enjoin the clergy to say morning and evening prayer daily. Those offices (if the traditional provision is being followed) revolve around the praying of the psalms and the reading of the rest of the scriptures.

From Cranmer’s day until relatively recent decades that meant praying the whole psalter once a month, reading the Old Testament and Apocrypha / Deuterocanonical books ion their entirety once a year, and the New Testament twice a year. While that was legally enjoined on the clergy, Cranmer’s expectation (shared with his successors) was that some laity at least would join in what was meant to be public worship. Today’s lectionaries are less comprehensive, but still extensive. (I for one regret, for example, the way they have pandered to some evangelicals’ pan-Protestantism by providing “safe” alternatives to the deuterocanonical readings.)

The expectation of liturgical practice needs to be set alongside the sixth of the 39 articles, which is on scripture. There, in relation to the Apocrypha, it says that “the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine”.

In saying that, it seems to make a distinction between two types of authority. There is the sort of authority attributed with certainty to the books of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, which the official Church acknowledges in establishing doctrine. No-one should imagine that Henry VIII, or Cranmer himself, or their respective successors, would have tolerated the idea that anyone could use scripture to establish doctrine. In the words of the monarch’s declaration “if any publick Reader in either of Our Universities [there can be only two!!] shall affix any new sense to any Article … he … shall be liable to Our displeasure, and the Church’s censure … and We shall see there shall be due Execution upon them.”

That kind of application or use of the authority of scripture was even less open to the ordinary priest or lay person. The Church under the Monarch-in-Parliament taught you what doctrine was authorised by Holy Scripture, and to venture your own opinion was divisive, contumacious, spiritually arrogant, theologically wrong and quite possibly treasonous.

But the other kind of authority, which included not only the undisputed canon but the fuzzy edges of the deutero-canon, was exercised by priest and people praying the words of scripture in psalm and canticle, and reading, hearing and pondering the whole sweep of the Bible’s story year by year as a story directed to shaping Christian living and drawing the Christian and the church into the worship of God, so that (as the regular use of penitence and exhortation reminded them) they might learn the way of repentance, conversion of life, and holiness.

The key thought of “the authority of scripture” was the power the story had to inform prayer and shape imagination, to provide exemplar and encouragement, and to help put their lives’ journey into the context of the journey of God’s people from creation to final fulfilment by way of the cross.

The authority of a story (and most of scripture is story) is often subtle, frequently a long-term project, and nurtured by repetition and slow digestion. It is about the reshaping of how we see ourselves and our lives by forming our mental world, and populating it with the images, examples and friends who open new possibilities to us, as well as warning us away from bad ideas and foolish practices (of which there are more than a few in the Bible). Our interplay with those stories is rarely unequivocal, but often complex, and we may well reshape and reconfigure the stories as we go.

First and foremost, though, it is precisely by reading scripture, regularly more than occasionally, sequentially rather than selectively, and when directed to worship – penitence and prayer, lament and praise – rather than information gathering and study, that we really come to give it authority over our lives. For then it works beneath the surface of the psyche as well, with id as much as ego, and with heart as well as mind.