ViaMedia

Year: 2018

  • Church on the Ropes…

    by the Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge

    IICSA

    We are just a couple of weeks into what will be many months of painful interrogation of the Church of England’s safeguarding record by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), and already some outlines of what we must come to expect are becoming clear.  The press commentary is likely to focus – rightly – on issues of personal responsibility: who knew what, what action did they take, what were their priorities, where did they place child safety in relation to institutional reputation, and so on.  But a vital subsidiary theme will be information – what kind of records were kept, how was information handled, what should be done with confidential information, and so on.

    Anyone who has troubled to look at the IICSA website will be astonished not only at the rapidity with which testimony is being transcribed and indexed (presumably audio transcription software is being used, but it must be of a very high quality), but at its sheer volume.  When the hearings on the Church of England are finished, what will be in the public domain will provide a remarkable, completely unprecedented insight into the intimate workings of parts of the Church.  Usually the records of near-contemporary developments and situations are on restricted access, under a thirty-year rule – a bane for historians like me, but obviously necessary to protect individuals in contexts in which the implications of complex decision-making processes may still be unfolding.  Here it is all going to be on view, with facts, allegations, personal views or prejudices, insights into how decisions were actually taken, supposition, all mixed up together.  It is already, I would argue, a formidable archive of events and opinions in the public domain, so far bearing specifically on the recent history of the diocese of Chichester.

    It is much too early to draw any firm conclusions from what has been revealed, but when you read about the uncertainty with which church people faced allegations of abuse against colleagues, and made catastrophic decisions based on their assumption of essential goodness, it is hard – at least to me – to avoid thinking that too much discretion has been given to church leaders in the past, and that mandatory reporting of allegations of abuse is the way forward.  I can see that there are all sorts of drawbacks to going down that road, not least that some people might be put off registering suspicions by the thought that the implications of doing so will be so serious for the people concerned.  But there is a remorseless logic about the evidence being presented to IICSA: if there is a possibility that abuse is taking place, or a risk that it may do so in the future, then we cannot afford to balance probabilities when a child’s welfare might be at stake.

    But there are two particularly tricky questions to which we’re going to have to give some thought.  One concerns data retention.  Here two contradictory pressures are bearing in on the Church.  One is the development of personal data regulation, soon to hit us in accelerated form through the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation coming into force shortly.  According to that, essentially organizations are going to have work on the assumption that individuals have a ‘right to be forgotten’ – they can demand the erasure of personal data.  Organizations will have to justify data retention, at risk of heavy fines.  The other is the need to keep full, accurate records of allegations made against individuals, with their correlative circumstances.  Anyone who has been involved in pursuing disciplinary matters within an organization will probably know the immense frustration of being told ‘such and such a meeting took place’, only to find no permanent record of it.  The right to be forgotten, but the need to record accurately and permanently.  How will these things be reconciled, especially by small, poorly-funded organizations, by local churches and charities, for example?

    And the second question concerns the long-term effect of having a vast archive of material in the public domain that essentially presents the bleakest possible account of the internal workings of the Church over the last three or four decades.  It will not be possible to ignore all this material.  Nor should it be.  But there will be little else available of such granularity and scale to balance out the account.  So how will we assess the modern Church of England in the future?  From the point of view of safeguarding and child protection, of course, it is absolutely vital that the woeful failures of process and intention should be exposed, and practical solutions adopted to prevent such things happening again.  But are the failures all there is to say about the Church?  Is the modern history of the Church simply a catalogue of catastrophe?

    I don’t believe so.  But it is going to be an uphill struggle to make that case.  It was a brave and, I think, laudable decision to volunteer the Church of England as a first substantial test-case for IICSA – better to make a clean breast of things, and face the storm early.  But that doesn’t in any way ease the challenge of acknowledging the extraordinary efforts church people do make to live out their faith and to help others.  Churches somehow have to hold in view a double truth, with equal vehemence on both sides – they fail frequently and have to face bravely and openly the possibility that even the most seemingly ‘nice’ people are capable of great harm, and that nonetheless most people in the Church live out their lives with conviction and integrity as they try to follow the gospel.  That’s a very difficult balancing act.  And for a long time the news will all seem to run one way.

    We are on the ropes!

     

  • The Slow Death of Patriarchy

    by Jayne Ozanne, Director of Ozanne Foundation and Editor of ViaMedia.News

    Hartley_Bishop09207-920x486

    On International Women’s Day 2018 we learnt the sad reality that nearly two-thirds of women have experienced sexism in Church, with over half citing “institutional sexism” as being the primary reason for blocking their progress and “being all that they are called to be”.[1]

    On the very same day we heard the Counsel to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse quote from a statement by Roger Meekings (who produced the 2009 report into known cases of abusers in the diocese), that: “The dominant or prevailing culture of the Diocese of Chichester with regard to women may have had a significant influence” in regard to safeguarding.[2]

    Indeed, only a few days earlier we heard a former diocesan safeguarding officer, Shirley Hosgood, suggest that safeguarding in the Chichester diocese was “impeded in part by tensions over authority arising between senior male clergy and female lay church officers, including herself.”[3]

    These are shocking indictments for a 21st century Church in modern day Europe.

    What is even more shocking, however, is that for many of us this is not news at all!  Quite frankly, we have been aware of this for years, and yet relatively little has been done to address it.

    This begs the question “Why?”

    Why has the Church, unlike any other public institution been allowed to continue with such deference to a patriarchal way of being – in a way unlike any other?  It seems even more unfathomable when we reflect on the fact that over 65% of the UK Church are female[4].

    I have a rather uncomfortable suggestion to make….

    Maybe it is in part because over 65% of the UK Church are female!

    You see, an organisation with such a strong bias towards female members is likely to actively attract male leaders who, let’s face it, like to be in dominant positions of authority over women.  For those who believe in a male headship model, this type of institution is a dream!  The Church can provide a place, unlike any other, with lots of subservient women just sitting there waiting to be lead.  Many of these women have imbibed a message of male headship without even questioning it, underpinned with teachings enforcing God as “Father” and Jesus as “male” without any counter teachings of female narratives, such as Wisdom being referred to as “female”.

    Controversial as I know this sounds, I can’t help feeling that one of the reasons we are where we are today is because of our desire to perpetuate an unhealthy co-dependent relationship between those with a pathological need to lead with those with a pathological need to follow.

    The problem is that ultimately co-dependency always bears bad fruit – and it is this we are finally being forced to recognise now.  The most tragic of which appears to be coming out in the IICSA hearings, where the concerns of a female safeguarding officers appear not have been heeded.

    Thank goodness there are now those who are actively looking to address this disastrous imbalance within the Church – but it will take more than a few senior female appointments to do so.

    Whilst the appointment of Bishop Sarah Mullally to the third most senior position in the Church of England is a welcome start, it will require a determined change of heart by all those within the Church – both lay and ordained – for the over-riding culture to be changed in the longer term.

    And for that we need to address the underlying power issues, and that requires thousands of men (who love being in charge) to be willing to relinquish their power.  A first step would at least be to recognise the barrier that they have been to the mutual flourishing of their fellow Christians.

    Yes, of course there are issues of theology at stake here, but that too can be a smoke screen for a more imbedded misogynistic culture that has been allowed to continue unchecked.

    So how do we help facilitate this change?

    My proposal would be for a formal act of repentance and contrition by the Church for the significant harm that has been done by institutional sexism – which has constantly preferred men over women.  In this season of Lent, let us look to recognise and repent of the flawed teachings that have sought to subjugate women and keep them from fulfilling their God-given callings.

    “But what about the Five Guiding Principles?” I hear people cry. “Would such an act be consistent with that?!”

    My firm answer is “Absolutely, yes!”  In fact, without it, we cannot hope to truly embrace the Five Guiding Principles as there has yet to be any formal recognition that a significant part of the Body of Christ has, for far too long, been purposefully kept from flourishing.

    So, Church, are we prepared to finally recognise the damage that our sexist teachings have wreaked over the years?  Are we willing to repent and commit ourselves – at every level of the Church – to a new way of thinking, that values the gifts and callings of all?

    Will we call out bad behaviour when we see it?  Will we challenge sexist attitudes when we encounter them?  Will we speak out when we see female colleagues treated as “less than”?

    For Christ’s sake, I hope so, as then future generations of women may finally begin to flourish!

     

    [1] “Minding The Gap” research report, Page 12-13, issued by Sophia Network March 8th 2018

    [2] Day 3 of IICSA inquiry

    [3] Church Times, March 9th 2018

    [4] “Minding The Gap” research report, Page 6, issued by Sophia Network March 8th 2018

  • Divine Headship Meets Woman Bishop

    by the Very Revd Dr David Ison, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral

    David ison 2

    I’ll be taking part later this week in the ceremony at which Bishop Sarah Mullally will become the first woman Bishop of London, 24 years on from the first ordinations of women as priests. Most of us in London are looking forward to working with her in living and sharing the Christian Gospel in this city.

    And there’s an opportunity and a challenge here; how to hold together as a diocese in a Church which affirms that women can truly be bishops, and that its members can believe that they can’t.

    Anglo-Catholics who don’t accept women as priests or bishops do this because much of the rest of the Church of God  (in particular the Roman Catholic Church) does not: if that church did, however, most of them would. But there’s a particular problem for conservative evangelicals: thus the organisation Reform believes in ‘The unique value of women’s ministry in the local congregation but also the divine order of male headship, which makes the headship of women as priests in charge, incumbents, dignitaries and bishops inappropriate.’

    I grew up as a Christian in a lively conservative evangelical church on the edge of London, whose vicar is a lovely fellow-member of General Synod for whom I have great respect, who is a long-term member of Reform, which was started in 1993 following the passing of legislation allowing women to be ordained priests. He’s written an article about Reform in this month’s edition of New Directions magazine, on the occasion of Reform’s 25th anniversary.

    He and I would (I think) agree on the core message of the Christian gospel, and disagree on some of the ways in which that works out in practice. We would agree on the authority of Scripture, but not on all the ways in which Scripture is interpreted and used. Both of us would regard ourselves as working at being faithful disciples of Jesus Christ our Saviour, and have questions about how the other is doing that. And I want to pose a particular question which this raises, as we move to having a woman bishop in London as a practical reality rather than a theoretical possibility.

    In the Reform statement above, it looks like the word inappropriate really means ‘just plain wrong, but we don’t want to make it a resigning matter’.  After all, most clergy can avoid working under the authority of women – until they become their archdeacons or bishops, of course, and in London this will now be a reality for all clergy in the diocese, whether they choose to admit it or not. How they will respond with integrity will be an important test of the Five Principles by which the Church of England has agreed to order its divided life on this issue.

    But the phrase that really needs to be questioned here is the divine order of male headship. The use of that adjective divine seems as inappropriate as in the phrase ‘the divine right of kings’.  Referring to a divine order of male headship claims that God has ordained that men will hold authority, headship, over other men and all women, and that this is therefore not a human choice but a divine command.

    Remember that people went to their deaths or left the Church of England over the biblically sanctioned doctrine of the Christian monarch being anointed by God as His representative on earth. The Book of Common Prayer still prays for the personal government of the king – or queen, which is curious if divine order requires male headship. But in an age of universal education, when autocratic force has been replaced by democratic government, who now believes in ‘the divine right of kings’? We have to be very cautious about appropriating God inappropriately, to give sanction to human rather than divine will.

    Unlike ‘the divine right of kings’, parts of the Church uphold the assertion of the divine order of male headship, leading in some instances to inappropriate conduct in relation to women incumbents and other women clergy, and to the necessity for institutionalised discrimination against them in the name of safeguarding the conscience of others. Women still bear the cost of men insisting that only they should be in authority. And Bishop Sarah in London will have to work with those who will not accept her spiritual authority, on the grounds of divine order, simply because she is a woman.

    Those who argue for male headship do so on the grounds of particular scriptures. But note the conclusion of Dr Ian Paul in his 2011 Grove Booklet Women in Authority: The Key Biblical Texts. After looking at the most commonly used verses, he concludes that they do not support the divine order of male headship, but rather that they emphasise the interdependence of men and women in church leadership. He says:  ‘On a personal note, engaging again with these texts has been a challenging and transforming experience for me…. I have been struck afresh by the radically egalitarian and counter-cultural nature of what Scripture says about gender, and the challenge to the church to be constantly reformed and reshaped by Scripture’s perspective, even if that means letting go of cherished traditions of interpretation.’

    Reading one booklet doesn’t usually change people’s minds, when their view is supported by a whole tradition of church teaching and practice, though writing the booklet caused Dr Paul to change his. But to call male headship a ‘divine order’ when Scripture is not clear that it is, and when we believe in God who is neither male nor female, is to overstate the case – and is itself inappropriate.   As is disassociating ourselves from our Christian sisters and brothers with whom we disagree.

    Dr Paul clearly states that in scripture the issue of headship is different from that of same-sex relationships. But the issue remains of how with regard to that issue, as with headship and in other areas of Christian disagreement, Christians with different views are going to be open to welcome and challenge and transformation of ourselves and each other, unless we engage in depth with one another and refrain from referring to what we currently believe as divine.

    There’s a spectrum even of evangelical thinking on these issues, not because some are ‘revisionists’ or ‘liberals’, but because like Dr Paul they have been challenged by Scripture and the Holy Spirit to be re-formed in their thinking, in all sincerity: and understanding that those with different views are still committed disciples of Jesus Christ will help us to listen more closely to what God is saying – to each of us.

    All of this is part of the richness and diversity of the Church, where we need each other’s perspectives to be continually semper reformanda, as the New Directions article notes, always reforming, always being renewed by God; as we also need the Catholic emphasis on sacraments and depth of prayer, and the Anglican application of reason.

    We need different perspectives because all of us have a view which we think is the right one: a view which is built, not only (and not necessarily) on encounter with God in Scripture and the Spirit, but which is also derived and maintained from a whole range of other sources; from what our parents and friends and teachers thought and think, to our life experience and our cultural context, including our own psychological make-up.

    From metrosexual London to rural Africa, all of us need challenging by the understanding and experience of God which our fellow-Christians have to share, and to be enriched by it. But in order to have both challenge and growth, we need to listen to one another, and not live, as we tend, to in separate worlds where people with different views in a diocese or in General Synod don’t have dialogue in depth with each other about what we have in common and why we disagree.

    Let’s see if in the Diocese of London it can be different.

  • Disgrace by Association

    by the Revd Canon Anna Norman-Walker, Rector of Streatham and past member of General Synod
    Anna Norman-Walker

    On Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago the Diocesan Bishop called: he lives in my Parish, and invited me to accompany him on a visit to our local Oxfam shop on the Streatham High Road. He wanted to offer a word of kindness and affirmation to our Oxfam volunteers in the wake of the recent Oxfam Scandal. The response of the staff moved me; they were genuinely touched by the visit and readily opened up about the impact the headlines had had on them.  The deputy manager described her sadness and how she, and others had felt something of the disgrace of the scandal ‘by association’, despite being entirely disconnected from it at a personal and high street level.

    There is no doubt that the behaviour of Oxfam workers in Haiti was deplorable, the subsequent management of reputational damage disgraceful, and the offering of a ‘dignified exit’ from the organisation to those responsible at the time entirely unacceptable.

    I could not help but draw parallels with my own experience of priestly ministry. As I sat in the cinema watching the quite brilliant film ‘Three Billboards outside Epping Missouri’ I squirmed during a scene where the local priest visits the home of an angry grieving woman and is balled out by her because of the organisation he represented:

    “You’ve got your colours, you’ve got your clubhouse, you’re, for want of a better word, a gang. And if you’re upstairs smoking a pipe and reading a bible while one of your fellow gang members is downstairs f*cking an altar boy then, Father, you’re culpable. Cos you joined the gang, man. And I don’t care if you never did shit or you never saw shit or you never heard shit. You joined the gang. You’re culpable.”

    A little cheer rippled through the cinema as the monologue ended that night in the cinema and for a moment I shared in the experience of ‘disgrace by association’.

    The cost to Oxfam is yet to be fully measured; 1,200 people have cancelled their donations and a cry has gone out to withdraw the 32 million pounds of government funding given to support the charities international work. This is a pity, because those who ultimately suffer are those in most need in the world. What perhaps needs to be more urgently addressed is the issue of accountability for those who work in the name of any organisation, and especially those who claim altruistic values.

    There will always be an appetite for celebrating a fall from grace of those who have set out to ‘do good’ and the Oxfam story has done nothing to quench the cynicism that exists especially within the media. Andrew Mc Leod in the Daily Mail writes “ jobs in international aid attract pedophiles and other predators who benefit from the power the aid industry confers upon them”.

    The same might be said of the Church  of course, given our historic case list.

    Which is why safeguarding, safer recruitment, the holding accountable of those who cross lines, must our very highest priorities. We need to learn to say sorry, even for those things of which we had no personal involvement. We did, after all ‘join the gang’.

    Lent is a season of repentance and it leads us to the Cross; it is here that we meet our ‘gang leader’ who is prepared to bear the shame of ‘disgrace by association’ with all humanity, despite the many dreadful things we are capable of doing and so should we.

    We must not however, lose sight of the fact that on the ground every day, all over the world people are living out the values of the founding men and women of Oxfam faithfully and they are making a tremendous difference.

    In the same way disciples of Jesus Christ are following in their saviour’s footsteps and as they do glimpses of his hope filled kingdom are made known.

    These are things that corrosive cynicism will never destroy and the reason why those of us who are serving ‘gang members’ of Oxfam, the Church, or any other organisation seeking to do good, can and must press on.

  • “There are No “Problems” – There are Simply People!”

    by the Revd Canon Giles Goddard, Chair of the Human Sexuality Group on General Synod

    Archbishop

    ‘There are no problems here, there are simply people’ said the Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of last February’s debate at General Synod. Readers of this blog will be well aware of the debate: the Bishops’ report on Marriage and Same-Sex relationships. The debate was only a year ago – feels to me like another eon!

    It was, for me, very refreshing to hear the Archbishop moving the conversation forward within the C of E. For too long, LGBTI+ Christians have been seen as a problem to be solved –  both by the senior hierarchy within the church and by conservative Christians who have often embraced ethically unacceptable approaches such as conversion therapy.

    I’ve been involved in these conversations for over thirty years, during which time the debate has gradually morphed;  in the late 1980’s we used to have secret meetings at which people would arrive incognito, with private circulation lists and real fear amongst attenders. Even amongst those who supported us, there was absolutely no doubt that we represented problems to be solved, and there was invariably tension and anger present in the room whenever LGBTI+ issues were discussed.

    So the openness and the cross-church engagement which we are now experiencing, and the time and energy going into finding a way forward together – not just among those who want change but also among many who take a conservative position– are very refreshing. And energising.

    Today I have a collision of ideas.

    The readings set for today are Genesis 17.1-7 and Mark 8.31-38. The liberals among you may need reminding that these are  the renaming of Abram to Abraham and the giving of the covenant by God to him and Sarah, and the Markan call for us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Christ.

    I have also reread, recently, the wonderful book by Lewis Hyde: The Gift – the ‘classic exploration of the value of giving over receiving.’ It has become clear to me recently that the self-giving love of Jesus at the heart of Christianity is not only right at the heart of our faith but should also be right at the heart of our practice as Christians.

    Seems to me that our primary calling is to enable God’s love to be given into the situations in which we find ourselves, so the question we are called to ask is  not ‘what’s in this situation for me, how can I benefit from it?’ but ‘what’s in this situation for other people? How can I ensure that they benefit from it? What can I offer them, as a symbol or sign of God’s love for the world?’

    In other words, there are no problems here, there are simply people.

    So I am starting to wonder, tentatively, if there isn’t the possibility of reframing the current debate over LGBTI+ inclusion.  I wonder if there isn’t the possibility of seeing those to whom we are traditionally opposed as a gift. And whether we aren’t called to try to be gifts, ourselves.

    Perhaps we, who want change, are offering the gift of encouraging the church to reflect on the nature of a good response to the inclusive challenge of the Gospel.  Perhaps those who resist change are offering the gift of encouraging the church to be thankful for the constancy and strength of its traditional witness. And perhaps, together, we can model a generous reflection of God’s self-giving love here in England. Maybe there is the possibility of a mutual exchange of grace.

    Pie in the sky? Perhaps. Or perhaps, a faint image of something which might be possible. With God’s help.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Is the Church of England Guilty of Ageism?

    by the Revd Canon Prof James Woodward, Principal of Sarum College, Salisbury

    James Woodward

    “It has been widely said that whatever many may say about the future, it is ours – not only that it may happen to us, but it is in part made by us”    (Dr Ethel Andurus, Social Activist 1844 – 1967)

     “To deny old age is to invite anarchy into our lives.”

    The World Health Organisation defines Ageism as the “stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination against people based on their age”. Given the subjectivity of the ways in which we construct our attitudes and the way they shape action it is difficult to know how widespread ageism is. There is, however, a persistence in our negative visualisation and stereotypes surrounding the older person, which cumulatively has the potential to have significantly harmful effects on older adults.

    In my pastoral experience of listening carefully to older people, I have come to understand how ageism for older adults is an everyday challenge. Sadly this is particularly the case in religious institutions and communities where there might be anxiety about decline and particular perceptions about the predominance of older people in such places. There is well-documented evidence that older people are overlooked for employment, restricted from social services and stereotyped in the media. In the light of this we might conclude that ageism marginalises and excludes older people in their communities.

    Although there is substantial evidence about the many contributions that older people make to their societies, they are frequently stereotyped as dependent, frail, out of touch, or a burden. These ageist attitudes limit older people’s freedom to live the lives they choose and our capacity to capitalise on the great human capacity that older people represent.

    When we consider the diversity of human life and its flourishing we rightly celebrate the fact that there is no typical older person. Older age is characterised by great diversity. Some 80-year-olds have levels of physical and mental capacity that compare favourably with 20-year-olds. Others of the same age may require extensive care and support. We might ask how we work together to improve the functional ability of all older people.

    This diversity in older age is not random. A large proportion of the diversity in capacity and circumstance observed in older age is the result of the cumulative impact of advantage and disadvantage across people’s lives. The physical and social environments in which we live are powerful influences on our flourishing. The relationships we have with our environments are shaped by factors such as the family we were born into, our sex, our ethnicity, and financial resources. Equality, justice and a commitment to reducing such inequities amidst diversity of choice and opportunity must form part of our desire to root out age discrimination. If flourishing and justice are linked then we hold onto the fact that  older people with the greatest health-related needs often have the least economic and social resources available to meet them.

    In some organisations, but particularly the churches, there can be a tendency to stereotype older people as being resistant to change, lacking creativity, overcautious, slow in judgement making, uninterested in change and difficult to motivate into different ways of looking at life and especially the inner life of the soul. These attitudes formed the basis of age related discrimination.

    In the stereotyping of older people as fixed within a paradigm of diminishment and decline we should be aware that only a small proportion of older people are dependent on others for care. In fact, older people make many contributions to their families and societies. Contributions older people make through taxation, consumer spending and other economically valuable activities were worth nearly GBP 40 billion more than expenditure on them through pensions, welfare and health care combined.

    Ageist prejudice can involve the expression of derogatory attitudes, which may then lead to the use of discriminatory behaviour. Stereotyping and prejudice against different groups in society does not take the same form. Age-based prejudice and stereotyping usually involves older or younger people being pitied, marginalized, or patronized. This is described as “benevolent prejudice” because the tendency to pity is linked to seeing older or younger people as “friendly” but “incompetent.” The perception of incompetence means older people can be seen as “not up to the job” or “a menace on the roads,” when there is little or exaggerated evidence to support this. Prejudice also leads to assumptions that it is “natural” for older people to have lower expectations, reduced choice and control, and less account taken of their views

    We have acknowledge that a persuasive ageism exists in both Church and society. There are forces that combine to keep older people on the margins, to make them redundant, useless, a statistic to be feared as part of the picture of decline. We need to ask why we have so few positive images of ageing or perhaps ask how we might nurture and generate a range of positive images that allow us to see how older people might liberate us into a different perspective on living flourishing and faith.

    Some years ago an Archbishop of Canterbury was asked in a media interview to describe how he saw the Church today. He said he hoped that the Church would grow progressively younger. The Church today seemed to him rather like a very old grandmother, who sat by the chimney-breast muttering to herself, ignored by the rest of the family and out of touch with its culture.  This image could be said to be typical of the Churches ageism, with which we collude. We seem unable to embrace and affirm an all-age Church, within which older people are valued partners. Taken further we might ask what older people might have to teach us about the shape and practice of faith. The question, in the light of our awareness of ageism and stereotyping is whether in our processes of reflection about age we see older people as a resource rather than a problem.

    We might want to take a different view as we take stock of the age-profile of our communities, with a view to celebrating the contribution that older people make to the life of both Church and society. Consider who holds positions of responsibility. Reflect on the hidden work of care — unpaid care of older family members, the love and encouragement of grandparents, and the acts of kindness expressed by neighbours who have time to consider the little things that help life along, such as shopping, advice about heating, benefits, or a difficult letter. Go further, and see these people, grey and slower as they may be, in the time-line of the past decades of your church, and imagine their sustaining presence amid all the changing fortunes of history.

    Age can be a wise and challenging teacher. Older people can show how little time we give, in all our bureaucracy and busyness, to consider what substance and depth mean in being human. It is no accident that older people become more spiritual, and that they can help us to perceive that age is essentially a spiritual task.

    How might the Churches work together in moving age, older people, and our responsibility to them further up the political agenda? How can those with the power to engage with ageism deal with the impoverishment of living that some older people embrace?  We might act as advocates for older people in helping them to negotiate the complex world of health and social services. All Churches should help people to voice their concerns to professionals.  We can ask those who set policy how older people might enjoy all the benefits of a modern society. In this way, we can ensure that the needs of older people are moved up the political agenda.

  • America is a Gun – A Reflection

    by the Revd Dr Hayley Matthews, Director of Lay Training, Leeds Diocese

    hayley

    Currently doing the social media rounds, this poem manages to grasp in very simple terms the horror the ‘developed West’ feels at the recent shooting in yet another American High School.  This time Florida has been the target, but there is no rhyme or reason as to when or where the next shooting might take place. In the past, copycat incidents have swiftly followed such brutal acts of wanton slaughter.  We dare to hope; please God, not this time.

    Watching news coverage of parents running towards their still-living children, sobbing with relief, can only be juxtaposed with the unseen, unheard chasm of grief from those having to grasp that their beloved daughters and sons, who left home that morning with a snark or a smile, were never to be warm in their arms again.

    Still, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution continues to be used to ratify an individual’s right to keep and bear firearms in a piece of legislation dating back to 1791: ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’  Although the Amendment is still regularly scrutinized by the US judiciary as state after state finds due cause to reverse banns on this or that weapon, it is only ever to release further opportunity to ‘bear arms’ never to revisit the crystal clear connection between cause and effect, and the impact that those rights have against the rights of US citizens to live without fear of mass murder, or being able to send their children to school or college without fear that an unstable teenager has weapons beyond their capacity be it emotional, psychological or biological, acute or chronic.

    All other civilized governments have prioritised the risk to life over the freedom to defend oneself using firearms; when will the Second Amendment be overruled by a Twenty-Eighth Amendment? It is prima facie that when legislation is drawn up to protect one right that does not give it the power to override any other part of the legislation. The Equality Act 2010 gives seven protected characteristics two of which are faith and sexuality – one cannot and does not trump the other in the sense that one can only exercise one’s faith or inclusivity providing it does not infringe on the other’s human rights. For America, constitutionally The Declaration states ‘that all [men] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ – inherent rights that are divinely sanctioned for each individual, not within the ken of the state to either endow or withhold.

    Such freedom is indeed the divine gift to us all, the right to behave and decide as we please. To choose life. To choose love. To choose the greater good even if we ourselves don’t quite get what we want. The theologian Matthew Fox puts it like this, in every day in every way we should ask ourselves, ‘do you create or do you destroy?’ because every word or deed is either one movement or the other. There is no neutral, innocuous act.

    It strikes me in the week that St Valentine was remembered on the same day as people had their foreheads Ashed to mark the beginning of the Lenten season of repentance that we have lost our sense of the life-and-death nature of sin and the acts that rupture relationships as each child at the springtime of their life was senselessly torn from parents who wanted only their best.  We have mistaken the divine gift of freedom and the freedom to love others with the toxicity of need; wanting our needs met, wanting our way, wanting love, wanting that trophy on the wall, wanting to annihilate others in our own anger that our needs have not been met as we would have wished them to be; wanting to be loved and wanting to control who does that loving and how.

    St Valentine was martyred for refusing to deny his love for God; his was not a romantic life or death just as Jesus offers up His life beginning with a solitary forty day fast in a desert that forces Him to face up to the call upon His life which will lead Him to crucifixion – a kenotic outpouring of love that will liberate millions generation after generation continuing on today and no doubt, long into our future. Love is not always the easy path that says yes to what we want. For those parents whose children have been senselessly murdered the depth of their love will now become the depth of their despair as they will walk through the barren desert of grief seeking the strength to transform the chaos of these events into new, liberating life. They will need to make a conscious decision to choose life again. To choose love. To choose to create. To find a way to manifest liberation for all those for whom these events have been eternally life-changing. A Twenty-Eighth Amendment, perhaps, that reminds us all of the divine right of teenagers to study for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

  • Know Your Enemies

    by the Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge

    Jeremy Morris

    I’m always sceptical of sentences that begin with some such phrase as ‘history teaches us that…’  It’s not that history doesn’t teach us things.  But what it teaches is complicated, and almost always not simply transferable from one situation in the past to the present.  It’s not possible to lift ‘answers’ from the past to the questions of the present.  But it is possible to develop an awareness about ourselves now from study of the past.  As a historian, I find myself time and again returning to the dictum ‘Know your enemies’ – that is, don’t just caricature and malign a position with which you disagree, but really get to grips with it, and understand it from within.  See what its assumptions are and what its logic is – all the better prepared will you be to criticize and counter its arguments.

    Practical examples of this are easy to come by, if sometimes apparently shocking.  Don’t just call people racist – try to understand why they think what they think, how they have come to see their identity in a certain way, what they think is lacking in others, and so on.  Don’t just demonize Trump or his supporters – try to work out their griefs, their rage, their ambition, and perhaps even their ideals.  Don’t just assume that all those who defend the gender pay gap, or who fail to protect women adequately in public life, are simply spineless or bigots (I know it’s tempting…) – try to grasp the intricate and often hidden operations of power and prejudice.

    Trying to do this with people with whom we disagree in the Church is a trickier matter than you might think.  I suspect that’s because we can all too easily confuse our own good intentions – or at least, our belief in our good intentions – with an unwillingness to face head-on dissenting voices with which we strongly disagree.  People bound together by a belief in a God of love may, paradoxically, find it harder to understand the hostility and disagreement of others, than those unencumbered by any prior moral or religious commitment.

    I’m often struck by that thought when I consider the current ethical conflicts in the Church.  Military strategists often talk about ‘asymmetrical conflict’, in which there is a disparity in power or strength between two sides, perhaps through one side’s technological superiority, or its numbers, or its financial muscle, and so on.  But this asymmetry need not be a simple one-sidedness: it might, for example, encompass technological superiority on one side (‘smart’ bombs?) with low-level but deadly weapons (suicide vests?) on the other.

    Almost all the Church divisions and disagreements I can think of are essentially asymmetrical.  Take attitudes to homosexuality.  On one side, there are people who might well accept that some people are gay, by nature as it were, but who argue that sexual relationships ought to be, by divine command, restricted to married heterosexual couples.  For them, homosexual sex is essentially a moral matter, for it is a falling short of what God intends for us.  For others, on the contrary, our humanity consists in welcoming and affirming what God has made possible in human nature and society: to condemn homosexual sex is itself to fall short of God’s love for all.  These two positions may profess Christian faith and seem to be in disagreement about one, identifiable thing – homosexual sex – but their disagreement is asymmetrical: they disagree on different grounds, and for different reasons, and with different consequences, and they are unlikely ever to find any final reconciliation.

    When moral and religious conflicts are asymmetrical, it is very difficult to see how there could ever be an end to the argument.  Of course, in practice one position might die in the course of time – practically what happened, for example, to arguments against evolution on this side of the Atlantic.  Is that what might happen to traditionalist arguments over sexuality?  Or one side might effectively crush the opposition – out-shout and out-publish it, defeat it in assembly, drive out its proponents from their positions, and so on.  Could that one day happen in the Church of England?  Neither outcome seems likely.  But what does not seem to be in prospect is some kind of unifying, transcending position – a position which all concerned will recognize and accept, so that their disagreements will come to be seen as minor or unimportant wrangles and their opposing positions will be drawn together and mutually affirmed in some all-encompassing synthesis.

    That’s why the talk of ‘agreeing to disagree’ in the end can be a kind of illusion – if, that is, we think that simply saying that is enough to allow us all to live together in peace.  We can live together in courtesy, but there’s always an implicit and unresolved tension.  For those who oppose homosexual sex, it would be a fatal moral compromise.  And for those who do not, although they may think it is easy to welcome ‘in love’ those who oppose them on this matter, in practice what they are asking is that their opponents fail to carry through the natural conclusions of their moral disapproval.

    So we ought to be clear that there is no united way forward on this, as perhaps on other conflicted issues.  All there can be – at least as a bare minimum – is a set of operational rules, or courtesies, by which we try to contain the explosive consequences of our own disagreements, and work together, despite our clear differences, in the hope that some greater wisdom might ultimately emerge, and we will eventually come to see our own and others’ views differently.  That has to be done out of utter conviction in the truth of the position we defend – in other words, it has to be done as we try to convince our opponents they are wrong –  but with the open and honest commitment to ‘know our enemies’ as best as we can.

  • Is Organised Religion Inherently Abusive?

    by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham and Member of the General Synod
    Rosie Haarper

    Time to think about General Synod. I always find it a very complex experience, and working through last week has been made even more challenging because of the Oxfam issue. The actress Minnie Driver resigned as an Oxfam Ambassador not because of the abuse that has been happening which she named as abhorrent, but because of the way the Oxfam failed to respond adequately. Their deputy chief executive Penny Laurence resigned saying that she was ashamed and took full responsibility.

    So I have to face the scary question: Is it right to stay within the  institution of a church which treats its weakest with such disdain?

    In his excellent booklet ‘We asked for Bread but you gave us Stones’  Andrew Graystone quotes our Archbishop: ‘The silencing of abuse victims is itself a form of abuse as bad if not worse than the first betrayal’. Yet, on Saturday morning we were given a presentation which began with edited quotes from survivors some of whom were sitting in the gallery and were more than capable of speaking for themselves and could quite easily have been invited to do so. We then heard how much more brown stuff was going to come our way in the next months, and how we now have upgraded process and resource to meet these challenges. It was admitted that the bit we hadn’t yet got right was the response to survivors. I sincerely believe Archbishop Justin when he says ‘The victims are the people we care about most. They really, really matter.’ The truth is that we are nowhere near making that the way we actually respond.

    What if it is impossible? More than that. What if the whole idea of The Church of England as a spiritual rather than a cultural institution is smoke and mirrors?

    When you walk round Church House during Synod its very quickly apparent that there is no such thing as ‘General Synod’. It’s a collection of different groups and individuals who form coalitions of convenience  on certain issues and will go back to their home churches and do pretty much what they want to do anyway. I sometimes sit next to people whose God is so radically different that I am not at all sure it’s the same God.

    As part of national identity the Church of England still resonates, and we have Royal weddings and babies on the way, but I wonder how things will change with the death of the Queen. Our historic buildings of course and the glory of a special but niche form of Church music are culturally deep, but can you organize what goes on in people’s hearts?

    The response from the Evangelical Alliance to the recent CDM judgement on Tim Davis which upheld allegations of spiritual abuse shines a light on this. There is a way of doing organized religion where the leaders feel entitled to tell people they don’t even know how God wants them to live their lives. Even if you thought God worked in that way, the potential for confusing your own opinions with those of God is vast and has often led to abuse.

    It’s been nagging at me over the past few months. Is there something inherently abusive about organized, institutional religion?

    Think of the philosophical illustration about the Prince and the peasant girl. He fell in love with her, but disguised himself as a peasant because he knew that the only love he wanted from her was that freely given. He could not and would not order her to love him. Once organized religion moves from the functional and cultural it steps into a space in  people’s life of faith where power and control have no right to be. Worse than that we start making judgments about the depth and validity of other people’s faith.

    Jesus related to people through acts of love and through open questions. His tough words are mostly reserved for the professional guardians of the faith.

    The antidote to General Synod  for me is to get back to the local. People pitch up for all sorts of reasons and I don’t judge any of them. People share their stories of faith if they choose to and help each other along the way. They are bound together by friendship and acts of kindness far more than by theology, and so they find God far more though love than through judgement.

    That is how I answer the question about staying. Sit light to the institutional stuff but try to help, and hold the local and personal as most precious.

  • Valuing People with Downs Syndrome – A Place to Start

    by the Rt Revd Dr David Walker, Bishop of Manchester

    david-walker

    For five years, in my time as a parish priest, my default activity for a Tuesday afternoon was to visit what was called an Adult Training Centre. The adults being trained had a number of conditions, including Autism and Downs Syndrome, that impacted on their abilities to learn and to retain knowledge. The centre laid on a mixture of general life skills and, for those able to manage them, particular pieces of industrial training – assembling plugs and the like. I was Industrial Chaplain in the town, and the places fascinated me by the ways it both resembled and differed from the other establishments I visited on my rounds. I was struck by how little money and status mattered to the lives of the trainees relationships were clearly far more important and required the greater effort. And there was a refreshing willingness to see dependence not as a failure but a natural framework within which life should be lived to the full.

    During my time there, a small number began to come to church, and the rest of our congregations discovered how to support and sustain them. And then the most exciting thing of all happened. Two of the trainees had developed a deepening relationship. I was asked to marry them. With help from social workers and the Housing Association I was on the board of, we discovered how living with appropriate support, in their own terraced house, would work. I’ve forgotten many of the hundreds of weddings I’ve taken, but this one sticks. I’ve never known hymns sung so joyfully, or a congregation so clear in its delight for the couple.

    I know that I learned things from those five years, meeting regularly with people who were all too readily written off by society, that I could never have gleaned from books and lectures. I don’t idealise them, they were as capable of sins and misdemeanours as any of us. But their perspective on life, borne out of living with their particular conditions, was different, refreshingly so; it changed mine forever. Not least it played a part in my emerging call to be a Franciscan.

    So, as I prepare for three days of General Synod in London, I have just one small quibble with the ordering of the business. Whilst I can see the value of scheduling a debate about valuing people with Downs Syndrome as a positive note to end on, I think it would have made an even better place to begin. To start by recognising and affirming the contribution made to God’s Kingdom, Christ’s Church and society at large, by a group who cannot be corralled into the usual tribal patterns of church life, would have set a tone for the following debates. It would have been a powerful reminder that our being one in Christ crosses bridges that span our very genetic makeup. It might have enabled us to see more clearly that other differences are equally subservient to that core identity; the lesson I was taught so generously thirty years ago.