Wikio - Top Blogs - Religion and belief

Saturday 17 March 2012

One week in the Church: steps forward and back

Most of this week has, for me, been taken up with training. Part one of an excellent Training Incumbents course took place over three days at our Diocesan House of Retreat at Pleshey. In addition to the opportunity to share the experience of the other incumbents on the course it was great to find that the Church of England is finally applying good practice in assessment and supervision to the training of curates in a more rigorous and comprehensive way than was the case during my curacy rather less than ten years ago. There is still fine tuning to be done on the systems currently in use and we had some honest and straight debate on those issues but the developments which have been made are significant.

From Pleshey I went to City Temple for a seminar on Social Enterprise Leadership entitled Doing Business, Doing Good organised by Jubilee +. Once again, it was interesting and encouraging to see the Church understanding and applying good practice in ways which complement our mission and ministry.

Aspects of the Bible narrative which have economic implications were summarised by Martin Charlesworth from the Genesis commands for cultivation and development through understandings of land ownership among the people of Israel in the Promised Land to Jesus' disciples sharing a common purse and business support for mission in the Early Church. Two excellent Social Enterprise case studies were provided in Create and The Grow Organisation.

Lord Wei argued that Social Enterprises help build kingdom values by: creating the conditions for systemic change through serving those in need; enabling people of peace to come into the kingdom; and enabling God to call those who come to choose what they can do to change society. Collaborative capitalism involves reducing our obligations and the cost of living in order to generate a greater surplus to invest in the kingdom economy. He spoke about work with churches in Shoreditch, with which he is involved, as a kingdom colony where churches are taking it in turns to launch social enterprises and create incubator spaces for social enterprises.

In my view, these are examples of the Church gradually getting it right, both in the way we develop our own ministers and in the way we minister within our current culture. We are simultaneously surrounded too by examples of the Church continuing to get it wrong in both respects.

The decision of Rowan Williams to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of 2012 raises in several different respects the issue of how we work and treat each other as ministers within the Church. Several different commentators have noted that the tragedy of his time as Archbishop was that he "allowed himself to be bullied into asking Jeffrey John to withdraw his name as a candidate for the Bishop of Reading after a worldwide storm broke when the appointment of a gay man as a bishop was announced." This was the point from which, as Giles Fraser notes

"whilst his instincts may have been gay friendly, his increasing appreciation that the African church was dead against any accommodation with homosexuality made him side with the conservatives. He wanted a global Anglican community built around core values. And so, in effect, he became a split personality – with Williams the man at odds with Williams the archbishop."

What he has done, as the Church Mouse has written, is to demonstrate a "model of servant leadership, suppressing his own personal opinions to allow a consensus from the wider church to emerge" and has had, as a result, to endure "disgraceful behaviour from individuals and churches who have failed to show a fraction of the grace as members of the Church that Rowan has in leading it." Few Archbishops, Giles Fraser has written, "have had to face such sustained invective and vitriol."

Church Mouse sums it up well:

"Liberals felt let down that he didn't stand up for the views he expressed prior to his appointment. Conservatives felt that he allowed the church to drift in a liberal direction, further from their view of sound Biblical teaching. Both should now simply thank him for his undoubted humble service and total commitment during an utterly bruising ten years, and offering their prayers for the future."

As Rowan said, in the interview he gave following his announcement, the worst aspect of the job "is the sense that there are some conflicts that won't go away, however long you struggle with them." The gay issue which has bedevilled his time as Archbishop is, of course, centre stage once again through the Government's consultation on equal civil marriage and the significant Church campaign to oppose the Government's legislative plans. Jeffery John appears to have made some apposite comments on this campaign in an interview with The Times.

It seems to me, that the Biblical basis claimed for marriage by those opposing the legislation is based primarily on traditional assumptions made about the meaning of passages. The narratives in the Bible seem to me essentially to accept whatever model of marriage was common in society at the time as normative. So, when polygamy was normal and accepted in society, this was not critiqued by those writing what has since been understood as scripture and similarly when monogamy became the dominant model that was also accepted and not critiqued. On this basis, it seems to me, to be an entirely Biblical position to suggest that the definition of marriage is something which is socially determined and something which can and does change.

Genesis 2. 24, which is often cited as a divine warrent for the traditional definition of marriage in our culture and within the Church, makes no mention of marriage at all and thereby leaves completely open the nature of the relationship between the man and the woman beyond the man leaving his parents and having sex with the woman. When this verse is cited as giving the divine warrent to marriage being only between a man and a woman, that view is being read into the text by those who are assuming that that is what God thinks and wants. The text, as text, simply does not say that.

The result, as Jeffery John appears to have said, is that:

“In the Church of England we readily bless the second, and even third marriages of couples who never darken our doors, yet we reject hundreds of our own faithful clergy and lay people who long to bring their love and commitment before God and ask his blessing ... Many ... people of goodwill who instinctively expect the Church to uphold justice and truth are scandalised when it so obviously does not."

Do to others as you would have them do to you
Love your neighbour as you love yourself
Access for All
No ‘No Irish, Blacks or Dogs’
Food for need, not for greed
Marriage for gay, as for straight
Break the glass ceiling for women
Love your neighbour as you love yourself
Do to others as you would have them do to you

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Madness - One Step Beyond.

No comments: