ViaMedia

Year: 2019

  • A Special Place in Hell….and the Road to Heaven

    by the Rt Revd David Walker, Bishop of Manchester

    david-walker

    In perhaps the most metaphysical intervention of the Brexit debate thus far, suddenly Hell has become part of the debate. It arrived with the suggestion from one European leader that it contains a special place for those who advocate solutions without sufficient planning. Maybe the next stage of the negotiations will be to determine whether the infernal realm can simultaneously have a frictionless border with both the EU and UK. But, at least, it got me thinking about Hell.

    Contrary to the famous quote from Jean-Paul Sartre, Hell is not, as far as I would see it, other people. Hell is the absence of others, the absence of friends and companions, and of God. Hell is to be isolated, alone, cut adrift from the rest of eternity, with only ones own demons for company. Heaven, by contrast, is the place of intimacy, of being known as one truly is, and yet accepted and loved by both God and our companions. In Heaven we shall nurse no shameful secrets, all shall be understood and forgiven.

    Apologies if that all sounds a bit abstract, but it’s something that affects how I behave here and now. I need it to maintain my Christian values in the teeth of a culture of individualism that tries to make everything about “me”. The more I submit to that societal norm, viewing everything from the perspective of my rights, my aspirations, and my ability to choose and enforce my understanding of myself over against any other, the more it feels I am preparing myself for the loneliness of Hell rather than the intimacy of Heaven. In Hell, mine is the only and unchallengeable perspective.

    In this sense, a lot of what currently passes for political discourse in Britain, including Brexit, is pretty hellish. And sadly, many religious debates are conducted in a tone not much better. But it doesn’t have to be like that. I was recently in a small meeting, dealing with a conflicted issue, where we laughed and cried, shared pain and hurt and hope, and emerged with a way forward that none of us could have imagined an hour and a half earlier. That was truly heavenly. Nor was it unique. Again and again, I find that when I, and others, move away from defensive positions, and try to see things through other eyes, something marvellous happens.

    Especially as a person of privilege, I am having to learn that the pathway to Heaven is not found by seeking my own rights and flourishing, let alone the interests of my own tribes and factions, but by attending to the needs and nurture of those who are deeply different from me. To do so is not to abandon the belongings and affiliations that sustain me and my kind, but to enrich them, and me, through a wider empathy.

    Thirty years ago, I began my journey into Franciscan community. We’re a mixed bunch, one that cuts across age, class, gender, background and personality, as well as most of the major divisions in churchmanship and theological stance. My vows commit me not merely to follow the example of Francis in my own private fashion, but to journey alongside my brothers and sisters within the Order. The fact that perhaps the only common characteristic of Franciscans is a never articulated belief that being well organised is a sin, simply adds to the challenge of rubbing along together.

    The original disciples whom Jesus gathered around himself were a similarly unlikely group, diverse and prone to dispute. Yet I wonder whether the fact that we have only partial and contradictory lists of their names, men and women, is because it is what they are together that matters far more than their individuality. Modern minds want to distinguish Peter from Thomas, James from John, in ways perhaps inimical to the gospel. Jesus, after all, sent them out in pairs, never alone.

    It wasn’t of course Sartre who said that Hell was other people, it was one of the three main characters in his play, No Exit. Sentenced to share eternity in a room, it is their inability to move beyond their own self centred perspectives, and to see their companions as anything beyond instruments for their own use, that makes each other’s presence torture. The self obsession that has been at the heart of their earthly lives has become their condemnation.

    The life long Christian process of sanctification is about rejecting that road to Hell and instead finding our belonging, our true identity, through the intimacy of membership in the Body of Christ. That is the road to Heaven.

  • Elephants, Penguins, Procreation & Japanese Knotweed

    by Dr Meg Warner, Old Testament Theologian, Member of General Synod and author of Abraham

    Meg Warner

    Last week’s edition of the Church Times (1/2/2019) ‘balanced’ a report of Dr Christina Beardsley’s decision to leave the Church of England’s sexuality project (‘Living in Love and Faith’) with a report on a new book by Dr Martin Davie, theological consultant to the Church of England Evangelical Council, Glorify God in your Body. Dr Davie is a senior and respected evangelical commentator, having been theological consultant to the House of Bishops and co-author of A Companion to Some issues in human sexuality.

    Davie writes:

    “As something created by God, marriage is not subject to change until his eternal kingdom comes. This means that, in spite of prevailing contemporary feeling, a relationship between two people of the same sex, intrinsically closed to procreation, cannot be a marriage any more than a triangle can have a fourth corner, a truth can be a lie, or an elephant can be a penguin.” (Italics added, p. 154)

    As an Australian, Davie’s use of ‘intrinsically’ inevitably, and depressingly, reminds me of the infamous comment of a Sydney priest that one could “no more consecrate a woman than a meat pie”.

    A Facebook comment about the article described these views as ‘tragically misguided but pernicious’ and suggested that they ‘should be taken seriously in the same way that a gardener would take an outbreak of Japanese knotweed seriously’.

    Davie impliedly asserts that procreation is an essential element of marriage, thereby apparently excluding not only same-sex couples, but also the medically infertile and those over a certain age (like my husband and me) from marriage. (Elsewhere in his book [Page 74] he does distinguish between these categories, describing age and infertility as ‘accidental factors’ that do not invalidate marriage and contrasting them with sex, that does. He unfortunately does not offer any justification for making this distinction.)

    Although in the quote above Davie appeals to natural law, elsewhere he cites the Bible extensively.  What does the Bible, then, have to say about marriage and procreation? And to what extent does it mandate that marriage is ‘for’ the begetting of children?

    The short, and surprising, answer is that the Bible doesn’t link the two explicitly at all. Nowhere does the Bible say that procreation is an integral element of marriage.

    The link between marriage and procreation is often traced back to the beginning of Genesis. Procreation is a theme of Genesis 1 and marriage of Genesis 2. However, as has often been observed, Genesis 1 doesn’t mention marriage and Genesis 2 doesn’t mention procreation. True, Jesus alluded to both Genesis 1 and 2 in his discussion of marriage and divorce (Matt 19:4-6; Mk 10:7-9), but he didn’t link marriage and procreation either.

    Procreation is foregrounded strongly in Genesis 1. In verse 28 God blesses the first humans and says, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…’. This is God’s first instruction and first blessing. It is tempting to interpret it as a special, central, divine imperative for humans. It is, however, made also to animals and birds (verse 22) and there is no requirement for humans to marry first, any more that there is a requirement for animals or birds to marry.

    A quite different divine imperative, or ‘vocation’, is introduced in Genesis 2. We tend to think of Genesis 2 as a story about the creation of women and men, but human beings are not its primary focus. The primary focus of Genesis 2 is the earth, and the problem that drives the narrative in Genesis 2 concerns it; on the day when God began to create, there was nothing growing in the earth (ha-adamah in Hebrew). This problem had two causes. The first was that God hadn’t yet made it rain, and the second was that there was nobody to ‘till’ or ‘serve’ the earth. So God made a garden, with a stream to irrigate it, and a human being or ‘earth creature’ (ha-adam) to be its gardener.

    Then God, surprisingly, noticed that something in the garden was ‘not good’. I say ‘surprisingly’, because in Genesis 1 God had pronounced everything in creation to be ‘good’ or ‘very good’. The ‘not good’ thing in Genesis 2 was that the human being was alone (Gen 2:18). So, after some initial false starts, God made another human being, a woman (ishshah), to be a ‘helper’ with the adam. Note that she was not created primarily to bring the adam (who only now is identified as a male human [ish], signifying the beginnings of gender) companionship or to have his children, but to ‘help’ him in his vocation of serving the earth. (Note, too, that the Hebrew word ezer [‘helper’] doesn’t imply subordination – it is often used to describe God as our helper, eg. Psalms 10:14, 30:10, 54:4.)[See Footnote]

    Even if Genesis 2 tells us something about marriage, it does not tell us that marriage is for having children. The first responsibility of men and women, says Genesis 2, is to care for God’s creation. We (anthropocentric creatures that we are) think the story is all about us. It is not. It is about the earth first.

    Dr Davie’s assertion that procreative capacity is an essential element of marriage is not only misguided – it is against the ‘plain meaning of Scripture’. It does not ‘rightly explain the word of truth’ (2 Tim 2:15), but is pernicious in that it, like knotweed, restricts and stifles growth of the other. By insisting that Genesis 2 means what it does not say – that marriage can only be between a man and a woman for the procreation of children (pp. 52-56) – Davie ignores precisely the thing that the Scriptures do say – that it is not good for humans to be alone – and so proceeds, determined to make ‘aloneness’ – the very thing that God says is not good – the lot of same-sex couples.

    Japanese knotweed does terrible things to gardens and needs rooting out. We are all called to be gardeners.

    [FOOTNOTE] In Davie’s argument he makes much of English translations of Gen 2:18, such as the NIV, that have God say that he will make a ‘fit’ partner for the first human being. This is not a good translation of the Hebrew, which doesn’t include any kind of qualitative qualifier. The Hebrew phrase that I have translated ‘helper’ is structured on two Hebrew roots, ezer (help) and neged (in front of, or opposite). This second root, neged, has become central to tensions between interpretations of Gen 2:18 by readers from different traditions. Evangelical commentators are more likely to assert that the word has a sense of complementarity about it (therefore mandating opposite-sex marriage), while others are likely to argue that neged more often has a simple spacial meaning (in other words, that it means ‘opposite’ in the sense that two people standing face-to-face are opposite, or in front of, one another but does not imply anything necessarily complementary about the people themselves).

    Post Script – Dr Martin Davie has written a reply to Dr Meg Warner’s post, which is available here. 

     

  • Living in Love & Faith – The Challenge of Getting Heard

    by the Revd Marcus Green, Rector of Steeple Aston, author of The Possibility of Difference and Member of the Living in Love and Faith Project.

    Marcus Green

    It was with enormous sadness that I read of the Revd Dr Christina Beardsley’s decision to leave the House of Bishops’ Living in Love and Faith project in her comment piece in last Friday’s Church Times.

    Sadness, but understanding, and gratitude especially for her challenge over the roles of power, the parish and practical theology.

    This month is LGBT History Month. The church school next door to my rectory has a display about it in the entrance hall to the school. LGBT History is an interesting phenomenon: there are people and movements that have affected us all, and there are moments in our personal histories that our entirely ours, and yet remarkably common to most of us.

    One time, I was invited to take part in a conversation with my bishop about the situation of gay people in our diocese. At the last minute, arrangements were changed, and I’m afraid I sent a pretty bad-tempered email off to the bishop because of the way it all happened. The problem, I said, was that accepting the invitation in the first place was hard: we’ve all heard so many words before, and so few of those words have actually meant anything. When more words are spoken, we don’t hear the new ones in a vacuum and take them as if on their own merit: we hear a lot of history. And so I said to my bishop that when an invitation gets taken back at the last minute, that’s not a small thing that happens without context. Such a decision happens in the midst of a whole load of other noise – noise which makes any kind of understanding really hard.

    I told you I was bad-tempered! Fortunately I have a very generous bishop…

    One gay friend of mine asked me, why do you endlessly put yourself through these things? We know that in the end the value our lives is going to be decided by a bunch of straight folk anyway.

    It’s like we all get locked into the endless cycle of Steve Turner’s poem, ‘History Lesson’:

    History repeats itself.

    Has to.

    No-one listens.

    Every LGBT+ person I know has felt both the the black humour and the painful truth of this little gem. Regularly.

    And yet…

    And yet, when it comes to LGBT History – as for Christina and Living in Love and Faith – we all have to decide for ourselves where the line gets drawn on how many times we can personally cope with the endless repetition of hurt and opportunity and hope and disappointment that comes our way.

    Because the truth is, that every now and then there are moments of change.

    Every now and then the cycle is disrupted and all the pain was worthwhile.

    Just occasionally LGBT History shows us that laws get re-written, lives get re-evaluated, prejudice gets punctured and people win – even if just for a moment.

    I’m a recent addition to the membership of the Living in Love & Faith Project; I have no crystal ball, so I can’t say how it will all work out. I do know that for those of us who love the Church and want to see things change for the blessing of people and the glory of God, we’re unlikely to see everything we want by 2020. There’s a lot of straight folk still making decisions about the value of our lives!

    But every voice that has been in the room, and every voice that has had to struggle to find a hearing, and every person that has risked yet another wound has played a vital part in creating the possibility that this too might just be such a moment of change. And if not, that others might build on it, and from it create something else.

    Every voice in every parish, on every PCC, in every rectory, at every diocesan synod, calling for recognition and fairness and equality plays its part in a story that will end in all God’s people being seen to be gloriously, truly, wonderfully and fully human together. I want my friends’ kids to grow up in a different world and a different Church than I grew up in. So I fully understand why Christina has ended her involvement in Living in Love and Faith, but I am carrying on just in case this is something where I can help add a crack to a mould that needs to break. And if I and others need to leave at some point too, I guess we’ll join Christina in whatever else we can do so that at some point History doesn’t have to repeat itself because someone does listen.

    And something wonderful happens.

    Now, as I said, I don’t have a crystal ball, so I have no idea when that will be. But in Jesus we worship a rising kind of God, so though I don’t know when it will be, one thing I am sure of is –

    It will be.

  • A Trans Priest’s Response to the “Harmful” Open Letter

    by the Revd Dr Tina Beardsley, retired healthcare Chaplain, researcher and co-author of This is My Body and Transfaith

    tinabeardsley

    As I write this I’m on my way to Basingstoke to give an after-dinner talk to the Southern Federation of the National Association of Funeral Directors. They’ve invited me to address how to ensure a deceased trans person has the funeral they would have wanted. The reason for the invitation, sadly, is that some trans people don’t.

    Just occasionally, the deceased’s family refuses to honour their loved one’s transition. At the funeral the deceased is referred to by the name they were given when they were born, not the name they adopted at transition. This is known as “dead-naming” but can happen to trans people in life as well of course.

    At these funerals the deceased is referred to by the pronouns applicable to their birth-assigned gender, not the pronouns appropriate to their transition. This is called “mis-gendering” and again that doesn’t just happen at funerals. It can happen to trans people in life. Like dead-naming it’s considered extremely disrespectful.

    Trans people can take steps when alive to prevent this from happening. Should it happen, a memorial service can be arranged at a later date when the person can be remembered in their integrity. What pleases me is that funeral staff, like many professionals, are keen to be informed about trans people and our needs.

    Trans awareness training, usually led by trans people, is standard nowadays in most educational and professional settings. Would that it were a higher priority in clergy training. Reading the recent Response to the Church of England’s House of Bishops’ Guidance on using the Affirmation of Baptismal Faith it seems that many clergy have much to learn.

    I wonder if readers of the Response have noticed that it never once speaks of trans people – the term that trans people themselves usually prefer. Instead, it begins with the term ‘gender dysphoria’, a medical diagnosis that describes the distress that some but not all trans people experience. The medicalisation of trans people, which began in the early twentieth century, made hormonal and surgical transition possible.

    But the therapeutic consensus today is that being trans is a human variation, not a pathology. This is the position of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care (Version 7). This document is the gold standard in the field, but again never mentioned in this Response. The recent UK consultation on the Gender Recognition Act 2004 took place precisely because the medical model – which often stigmatised trans people, as if they had a mental health problem – is no longer considered appropriate.

    It is simply untrue, as the Response claims, that ‘the evidence [about gender dysphoria] from the medical and social sciences is often conflicting’. If it were, the NHS would not have been enabling trans people to transition for the past half century. Nor would the UK therapeutic bodies have signed the Memorandum of Understanding (Version 2), opposing conversion therapy (which advises trans people not to transition or, if they have, to de-transition) for trans people.

    Signatories to the Response need to be aware that such advice is proposed or implied in some of the resources appended to the Response, and that the majority of healthcare professionals consider it not just ineffective, but potentially harmful.

    The Response then refers to ‘controversial new theories about the relationship between biological sex and gender and the social meaning of gender’ and their links to gender dysphoria, but since it doesn’t define these theories it’s hard to grasp the point being made here.

    The next paragraph says that ‘many ordinary parents and teachers’ are expressing concern about these new theories. No evidence is provided that this is the case, nor is it any clearer what the theories might be and whether they are relevant to the spiritual care of trans people, which was the subject of the Bishops’ Pastoral Guidance.

    The Response then raises the spectre of the premature introduction of under-researched interventions but presumably is not referring to the care of trans people: Magnus Hirschfeld’s magisterial study of trans people appeared in 1910; Harry Benjamin’s pioneering use of cross-gender hormones began in the late 1940s; surgery has been available in the UK’s NHS from the early 1970s.

    Astonishingly, the Response states that, ‘our guiding principle should be “first do no harm’’’, when the uncertainty it is promoting about trans people’s experience and treatment would itself be regarded as harmful by professionals in the field. I’m presuming that the Response was not discussed with the senior gender identity specialists at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.

    The House of Bishops are then described as ‘well-intentioned’ in issuing Guidance that is said to lack ‘serious theological analysis to address the philosophical, anthropological and social issues in public discourse.’ Here and elsewhere there is a problematising of trans people, contrary to the spirit of the Blackburn Motion which led to the Guidance and passed in General Synod with a huge majority.

    At Point 4 the drafters are keen to uphold what they refer to as ‘sexual dimorphism’. Leaving aside their claim that this is ‘an almost universal biological reality’ I’m struck by the sentence which precedes it: ‘the possibility of celebrating gender transition appears to be based on the rejection of physical differentiation between male and female’. Trans people who transition are not rejecting the differences between male and female. It’s simply that our experience is different from people – the majority – whose gender identity and birth sex align. Trans people’s experience should not be construed as undermining other people’s reality simply because it’s different.

    Last Sunday I joined my ninety-two year old mother at her church where the vicar, who is Evangelical, was the preacher. His theme was unity not uniformity. He reminded us how the variety of nature and people shows God’s love for diversity. We, he observed, try to play down diversity and make everyone the same, whereas God rejoices in it. Then he added, very movingly I thought, that God’s love alone can hold all our rich variety together.

    Photo by CHRISTAHOLKA2015@TWILIGHTPEOPLE.COM

     

     

     

     

  • Transphobic Letters, Mansplaining & Male Violence.

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

    Rosie Haarper

    How many more ways can some Christians find to express their bigotry and judgementalism?

    I spent last Saturday morning on a study day, working at the development of the Oxford Diocesan Vision trying to find ways of communicating the love of God to this generation. I then open the paper on Sunday morning to see the nation being treated to an open letter to the Bishops which is a  hopeless expression of transphobia. How long can I go on telling people that I’m ‘not that kind of Christian’?

    Of course, as with all religious sexism and homophobia the denial is total.

    It’s renamed as being faithful to God’s word. Frankly I’m done with colluding with that game. Let’s simply name it. And let’s not spiritualise it. In our society there is plenty of pernicious prejudice, so of course it will be in the Church too.

    The letter in The Times, signed by over 1500 people however led me to a darker place. A place that we really must not talk about. In essence it was a violent document. I guess I wasn’t that surprised because it had all the classic trademarks – soapy Christian words of pseudo acceptance and compassion masking the fact that they were using their power to try and force the Bishops, who had gently and pastorally reached a good place, to backtrack. Assuming rights over other people’s conscience is both cruel, and, when it takes away people’s identity a form of violation – or violence. As I scrolled down the list of signatories I saw that the vast majority were male. I did a rough trawl through the names and it seems that between 3- 4% of the clergy were women.

    So yes, the letter was a trigger. We need to talk about male violence. We are just not allowed to talk about it.

    One of my Christmas break reads was Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit. In the opening essay she does a sparkling romp through ‘mansplaining’. Ha! So true, so very true.  The guts of the book is the the essay The Longest War. She is very clear: ‘Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.’ She goes on to look at the horrifying level of violence in the world; rape, murder, and of course warfare. She then examines the ways in which we try to understand what is going on. We talk about growing up in poverty, but women are poor too. We talk about exposure to tobacco in the womb, but the girl babies don’t grow up to be rapists. In the US we talk about the availability of guns, but they are available to everyone and  90% of murder is committed by men. We search for reasons and many might be valid enough, but none address the simple fact that almost all the violence in the world is male.

    Whenever I go near this subject the first response I get is ‘but men suffer from  violence too. Not all domestic violence is on women.’ This is true. Although most of the violence men experience is by other men, in domestic violence there are appalling examples of violence by women. On the whole however, the relatively small number of cases tend to result in less severe injuries, or, very occasionally in murder after years and years of abuse by the male partner.

    Thankfully most men are not violent in an extreme way. I know, love and admire many men that I feel safe with. Even they however would mostly buy into the suggestion for example, that football is a healthy way for men and boys to subjugate their latent violence.

    I think what I want to say is that if we think we have a gospel that is worth preaching then it has to face this most fundamental issue and have something transformative to say about it. If we imagine we are going to change to world by working out if God wants gay people to sleep with one another we are seriously down a blind alley. Ask any decent human being ‘what is their deepest wish for this world?’ and it always has to be peace. An end to violence; between individuals, between tribes, between nations.

    That is exactly what the cross is about. Jesus was taken to the place of the utmost violence and made the choice of sacrifice and love. The potential for transforming the world lies in that choice. It is there, and maybe only there that hope can be found.

    I used to wonder why God didn’t enter the world as a woman, but now I see. Jesus had to be male. As a man, hanging on the cross, forgiving those who visited violence on God he was truly able to embody a different way.

    I wish I knew how to inject some urgency into this matter. Elaine Storkey, in her tough and timely book Scars across Humanity points to the source of hope: ‘the Christian faith offers a biblical framework for understanding it (male violence)  and the power of God’s love to combat it’ (although the word combat is itself a violent word) and she ends her book with book with this plea: ‘Ending the violence is urgent. The scars across humanity are deep. It is time to join the healing and the work of restorative justice.’

    Amen sister!

  • The First Signs of Spring?

    by the Revd Andrew Foreshew-Cain, former Member of General Synod

    andrew f cain

    As it write this piece I am sitting in our house in the Peak District with snow swirling down from a rather leaden sky. Those of you who know me at all well will know that I have a passionate dislike for snow. It represents everything that I loathe about winter.

    It’s pretty, I admit, but I really struggle with winter.  I don’t like the cold, I really don’t like the dark and I particularly dislike the cold, dark and the wet together.  ‘Why did you move up a mountain in the north?’ you might well ask. A very good question but none the less for me winter has it all, and it is not a happy place.

    But the other day, on Blue Monday whilst planting some trees in the garden I was delighted to see snowdrops in full bloom.  I spent some time just looking at their perfectly formed, resilient beauty.  I love snowdrops, they are a sign of hope, that winter is on its way out and that better times are on their way. They made me smile and lifted a little of the gloom that usually occupies me in January.

    I am beginning to feel a bit like that about the Churches and the cold, dark winter that has enfolded its LGBTI members for so long.  I think that there are signs of hope all around us, if we have the eyes to see.

    My attention was first caught properly by the Oxford Bishops letter, and its clear restatement of what is after all just official policy of the Church of England.  Now, I know that there has been some criticism of it and what it says shouldn’t really need saying.  But it does, and its commitment to compassion, contemplation and courage, along with listening to the experience of LGBTI people is, I think, profoundly hopefully.  A green shoot of hope amidst the cold.

    I even think that the reaction to it from those who struggle with the idea of freedom of conscience on issues of sexuality is positive because so much of it clearly comes from a recognition that the narrative is changing.  That letter from just over 100 clergy, (it is worth noting the research on how many of them are retired, working in a very restricted number of parishes or not actually working in Church of England parishes but in para-organisations often funded from overseas) is explicit in that their main concern is over the ‘direction of travel’ and the letter is a recognition, I think,  that they are no longer controlling the narrative and that the ground is shifting.

    I was also encouraged, you’ll be surprised to hear, when last week I read the questions currently being asked of a carefully selected group of people on behalf of the Pastoral Advisory Group that is part of the Living in Love and Faith process. Now, I don’t think that the resources that Living in Love and Faith will produce next year are going to be spectacularly innovative, surprising or represent a significant change in the *public* thinking of the House of Bishops.  That is just too much to ask.  I also am a little frustrated with the underlying assumption that none of us has thought about these issues, read any resources or prayed over scripture and that we are waiting patiently for the Bishops to tell us how to do it.

    But it is interesting that the Bishops seem to have abandoned the initial idea that they would produce a Teaching Document that we would gratefully receive and instead are producing something that is explicitly intended to encourage people to think for themselves. Anglicans, of course, have a great tradition of that, and every movement towards greater inclusion has come about because that is exactly what people did for themselves, often in the face of bitter institutional opposition.

    ‘The Bishops of the Church of England want these materials to be useful in a way that transforms how we relate to these questions as well as to each other and deepens our understanding of the Christian faith’.  I think that these words are yet another sign of hope, another green shoot.  It’s clear that the Bishops are finally recognising that they cannot control what is happening, that as Peter Leonard said in his recent piece for Via Media ‘Those who would seek to exclude and reject are now in the minority and those who would seek to include and affirm make up the majority.’ The Bishops are beginning to accommodate themselves to the change that is happening all around them.

    Spring is coming – but before it does the Churches need to do some deep and prayerful thinking.

    We need to think carefully about how we are going to live alongside the minority who in good conscience will find this hard.  There is a proper debate to be had as to how we protect the vulnerable from harm and ensure that the young are protected from views and actions that damage their mental health and well-being. We need to develop procedures, practises and disciplines that allow for the expression of more conservative points of view whilst ensuring that we aren’t compromising on Safeguarding.  Those of us who are progressive will also need to learn to accept that there will always be some who are not ‘on a journey’ and will always want to refuse to worship alongside us, pray with us and accept our ministry. That has been my direct experience, and it hurts.

    But if we want to hold as much of the Churches together then we are going to have to think about these things, and very probably wait a bit for the fulfilment of our hopes until we sort this out.

    Poetry is all the rage at the moment it seems, so I thought I would finish with a poem

    Snowdrops are not innocent:
    They fight for what they win.
    Beauty’s what comes out:
    Blind energy goes in.

    from J. B. Pick’s “The Well” (Drumlins, 1988)

     

     

     

     

  • IICSA – Holding the Past to Account?

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

    Jeremy Morris

    Now that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has held its preliminary hearing into the next cycle of material coming forward from Church of England institutions, we can look forward – if that is the right term – to further painful examination and analysis in July, when the full hearing takes place.

    Looking through the published transcript of the preliminary hearing, available in full on the IICSA website, it’s clear that the implicit methodology of the hearing will include attention to questions that are essentially historical ones.  In using that word ‘historical’ I don’t mean that they’re far in the past and therefore have a limited bearing on the present – far from it.  You’ve only got to look at the continuing distress of those affected to grasp that, in terms of their impact and the damage they cause, these are present and ongoing matters.  What I mean is that the attention of the inquiry will have to include considering what were the processes and standards of safeguarding in place officially at the time when the various allegations of abuse and institutional failure at issue happened, how they compared with those of other professions or with best practice at the time, and whether – probably the key question – responsible individuals failed to observe the processes and standards in place, or whether the Church and its institutions corporately were at fault for failing to follow contemporary best practice.

    In looking at these matters, the inquiry will have to concern itself to some degree with comparisons between the present and the past, albeit a very recent past.  This is just a specific example of a general issue affecting all such inquiries into the iniquities of the past, of course.  And it leads to a predictably sensitive and acute question – can you judge the behaviour and attitudes of the past (even the recent past) by the standards of the present?  Can you hold the past to account?

    A lot of nonsense is written about this, probably to try to defend the indefensible.  It seems to me that, for a start, there’s an obvious distinction between things that were accepted as wrong at the time they happened just as they are today, but which may have been ignored or covered up, and things (this holds particularly for attitudes I suppose) which we’d now regard as unacceptable but which were widely thought to be harmless or just eccentric or humorous at the time.   The recent death of Windsor Davies, star of the 1970s sitcom ‘It ain’t half hot, Mum’, has evoked memories of a time when mainstream family comedy was shot through with attitudes that today would be regarded as abhorrent.

    How this distinction applies in practice might seem a straightforward matter, and on the whole I think it probably is.  Child sexual abuse falls into the first category, obviously.  A great deal of what passed for popular humour a generation ago might fall into the latter – jokes that we’d now see as obviously sexist or racist, for example, were commonly accepted as harmless in the 1970s and 1980s.

    But there are some grey areas, even so, which can make the matter of holding the past to account a tricky one.

    The distinction certainly isn’t, for example, a simple fault line between actions and words.  Just as some forms of humour were beyond the pale and widely condemned even at the time, some actions in the past were unacceptable to many, but only partially so, and it’s unclear how widely they were criticized.

    Back in the eighties, I was slapped on the bottom on several different occasions by a clergyman at the church I attended.  I was taken aback, a bit shocked even, but I was unsure what to think.  It was in the presence of his partner.  Was it simply playful?  Was it a kind of advance?  It was certainly unwelcome.  But I didn’t say anything at the time, and now realize I probably should have done.  I think I rather minimized the matter, assuming most people would go for the ‘he’s just being light-hearted’ line and it wasn’t worth making a fuss.  Also, I rather liked him, and didn’t want to make things difficult.  A common enough reaction, as I realize!  But looking back, it’s significant I remember distinctly each occasion, and the very fact that I didn’t want it to happen and that it was a repeated pattern puts it in a different light today.

    And this gets more complicated still when we try to take into account the processes by which things in the first category, things which were clearly wrong and widely accepted as such, were handled at the time.  Sometimes – these occasions seem depressingly rare – they were publicly exposed or condemned, or taken to the police perhaps, with definite consequences for the perpetrator.

    But quite often we seem to be dealing with situations in which the processes used were thoroughly inadequate to the nature of the abuse.  And here the distinction between individual culpability and systemic or institutional failure is not at all clear, partly because standards of safeguarding have changed.  What if someone in a position of authority thought they were taking firm action to stop something happening again, by perhaps warning others and moving the perpetrator on from a particular job, or making sure they never worked in that capacity again?  What if – at the time – it was widely thought that this was the way to deal with bad situations?  What if, by their lights, they were taking appropriate action according to the advice they received?

    I don’t have an answer to these questions, and I’m not looking for a way of exonerating anyone.  But I do have two comments, which to some extent cut across each other.  One is that, by my reckoning, it’s an awful long time we’ve been talking about child abuse and other forms of sexual and domestic abuse – well over thirty years.  The Orkney case of alleged ritual abuse, for example, may have been effectively disproved (or at least called into question), but it came at a time of growing public awareness of abuse, and that was nearly thirty years ago.  Churches were already aware of the potential scale of these problems back in the 1980s – indeed the Catholic Church in Ireland was taking out insurance against claims over thirty years ago.  So the argument that people weren’t aware of these things, or didn’t take them so seriously, can certainly be pushed too far.

    The other comment is that the suggestion that ‘standards and processes were different then’ can be put to the test historically.  It ought to be possible to review just what was expected of people in positions of authority by way of safeguarding anything up to thirty or forty years ago, with examples of good practice then, and some attention to the norms and values which guided the processes (even if utterly inadequate) in place, and also to the changing language of safeguarding.  This is the stuff of good historical work, looking at relevant documents, interviewing people who were alive then (including survivors as well as figures of authority, and even perpetrators), rooting particular directions and ideas in the broader assumptions of the time about harm, family life, intimacy, and so on.

    I know this is in part what IICSA hopes to do.  Good luck to them!

     

     

     

     

  • The Power of Grass Roots Rebellion

    by the Revd Canon Peter Leonard, Chair of One Body One Faith and Acting Dean of Portsmouth Cathedral

    peter leonard

    I was very touched by the recent news report about the exchange of love letters between two soldiers in the second World War.

    It is both moving and defiant, particularly the line “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all our letters could be published in the future in a more enlightened time. Then all the world could see how in love we are.” Two men very much in love and despite the oppression they faced daring to think about a time when love such a theirs could be shared openly. They refused to be victims. A victim is someone who has come to feel helpless and passive in the face of misfortune or ill-treatment. This definition can apply to the LGBT+ community who dare to express a Christian faith or seek to follow God’s call on their lives and yet find themselves excluded and rejected by churches of all denominations.

    Despite this in his book Our Witness: The Unheard Stories of LGBT+ Christians, Brandan Robertson quotes research that in 2015 a poll showed that while every major demographic of Christians was in decline, one of the few areas where there was a steady increase in identification as Christian was among the LGBT+ community – that does not seem like a community of victims to me?  In this country there was a dramatic moment at General Synod in February 2017 when the House of Bishops report GS2055 was rejected by synod as a wholly inadequate response to the process of shared conversations which had taken place. OneBodyOneFaith, of which I have the privilege of being Chair of Trustees, campaigned for this under the slogan “We will work with you but we won’t wait for you”. At the time this struck me as a deeply significant statement. It claims the ground and makes it clear that we won’t be victims.

    It is easy to hear negative statements being made about LGBT+ Christian’s, to see people excluded from churches because of their sexuality, to see empty statements made with no action to back them up and to remain on the side lines shouting at the mean churches for how we are being treated. That kind of action traps us in victim mode.

    However whilst the Baptist Union or the Methodist Conference or the General Synod of the Church of England may be procrastinating about the issue of sexuality or setting up yet more groups to think some more about it, the majority of churches are getting on with it. And by getting on with it I mean recognising that LGBT+ Christians bring gifts and skills and blessings to church communities. That they can be included and affirmed not because these churches feel they must, or even because they want all people to feel welcomed but because including LGBT+ Christians is good for the church!

    Those of us who identify as LGBT+ don’t need to be victims. This is our story, this is our faith, this is our God and we can legitimately claim the ground. God is working in us and through us in so many ways. There are many churches where this is not the case but increasingly it seems to me that the landscape has changed. Those who would seek to exclude and reject are now in the minority and those who would seek to include and affirm make up the majority.

    Local church communities are where change will happen. If you consider the big shifts in history, the fall of the Berlin wall or the end of communism, it happens because people at a grass roots level realise that they are not victims or powerless but that the minority who are trying to keep them there through abuse of power or fear are just that – a minority and that if we decide to live and believe differently then change happens. Churches are living and believing differently, indeed many have for a very long time!

    If we look at the life of Christ, he didn’t seek to convert Pontius Pilate or Caiaphas and force a revolution from above but began a new way of living with a few fisherman, persuading and not forcing. That process has been going on from an LGBT+ perspective for many, many years and we have many people to thank for that. So when the Baptist Union refuse to ordain someone because they are in a same sex marriage, when the Church of England publishes a timetable for Living in Love and Faith which looks as if it is kicking the can of sexuality further down the road or trying to avoid the issue we don’t need to become victims again, we simply claim the ground.

    We will work with you but we won’t wait for you.

    Central church structures may not have provided official liturgies for blessing same sex relationships but plenty of local churches do it and have liturgies.

    We will work with you but we won’t wait for you.

    Central church structures may not have produced a liturgy to mark a gender transition but resources are available and local churches have used them.

    We will work with you but we won’t wait for you.

    Central church structures may ignore the many LGBT+ Christians they have in their congregations but up and down the country these same LGBT+ Christians are blessing communities through Open Table events, Christians at Pride and traditional congregations.

    Change happens at a grass roots level – a form of ecclesiastical disobedience – much like Jesus and his disciples.

    Yes there is a cost and sadly it is the same people who are still paying the cost but I am reminded of what Jesus said in Matthew 5:

    10 ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11 ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

    We are persecuted because what we are doing is prophetic, it is a bringing in of God’s kingdom of justice and mercy and love, it is God’s work and far from being victims, even if it feels like it and the cost is high, we are in fact prophets and followers of the way of Christ. Far from including us, the Church needs us.

     

     

  • Are We to be Doomed by Intransigence?

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

    Jayne Ozanne new

    Whether or not Albert Einstein actually said “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result” I think we can all agree that in the most part this sentiment holds true.

    That said, perhaps a better, more accurate saying actually might be “if you want a different result then you have to try a different approach”.

    Certainly President Trump and the Democrats could learn this, and arguably Theresa May and her Brexit deal too (we’ll find out soon enough!).

    One thing is clear though, simply repeating the same rhetoric over and over again is not likely to unlock any deadlock or move people nearer to finding a solution that is acceptable to the majority.

    While many would love for the content of what is being said in various key debates to change, the first thing that normally needs to be addressed is that of the debate’s tone.  Hence the constant talk of “good disagreement” – not as an endpoint, but as a way of working together towards trying to find one.

    Anyone who heard President Trump lambasting the Democrats for not agreeing on his demands for a border wall, and laying the blame for any deaths of children in custody firmly at their feet, will understand I am sure what I mean.

    He has stormed out of meetings, he has shouted at reporters, he has made what many would see as outrageous claims – but the one thing he has not done is modelled any form of “good disagreement”.  Or compromise.  For to do so would be seen as weakness, or so it seems he believes.

    This is “stubborn hard man” diplomacy – which most of us learnt earlier in our childhood rarely works.

    Intransigence it seems can be rather infectious, affecting both sides of the pond.  Indeed, our very own Prime Minister has been accused of the same tactic.

    However, at least in her case she has brokered a deal with all 27 EU nations, and appears to be trying to address some of the concerns expressed over the backstop.  Perhaps most importantly, her tone – whilst firm – has been far more respectful and as such a much better model of “good disagreement”.   Who can forget her willingness to sit, listen and answer hours of questions in the chamber back in mid-December – a model that perhaps her counterpart in the US would do well to heed?

    Intransigence, of course, is not the sole purview of politicians.

    We see it constantly in various polarised debates across society – not least in matters concerning the sexuality debate within the Church.

    I would suggest we had a perfect example of it last week.

    A letter signed by some 100+ clergy within a large diocese of over 1500 clergy, which criticised their bishop for a letter he himself had sent a few months before.  Their complaint?  That he had failed to mention things that they felt he should have said, and that he had said things that they felt he should not have said (despite it being completely in line with the current House of Bishops guidelines).  Their “overriding concern”, or so they said, was that it implied a certain “direction of travel” in the diocese – even though it was a direction that the Archbishops themselves had committed the whole Church to undertake.

    Ironically it beautifully proved why the bishop’s letter was needed in the first place!

    Of course the hard truth is that their letter said nothing new.  It was the same intransigence that we have seen throughout this whole debate.  Yet again they chose to ignore the fact that – as the House of Bishops have themselves stated – there is a wide body of opinion on this matter.  Yet again they failed to engage with the critical issue of pastoral care for the LGBTI community and the significant harm that has been caused by their teaching.  Yet again they threatened to go elsewhere if their demands weren’t met.

    What struck me most however was the letter’s tone.

    It’s a tone that many are now becoming all too familiar with.

    It’s a tone that has the veneer of seeming gracious and kind, yet has veiled threats at its heart.  An iron fist in a velvet glove.  “Stubborn hardman diplomacy” that gets us nowhere.

    It’s a standoff.

    Or should I say a very Mexican standoff?

    Where (according to Wikipedia) “no strategy exists that allows any party to achieve victory. As a result, all participants need to maintain the strategic tension, which remains unresolved until some outside event makes it possible to resolve it.”

    So what could this outside event look like I wonder?

    Well, it’s very difficult to speak for either the US or UK situations, but I wonder whether in the Church it will be when the congregations of these clergy start to stand up to them and say “Not in my name!”

    Ideally of course they would follow this up with action – such as choosing to stop their financial assistance, and perhaps instead divert it to an inclusive church organisation.

    The good news is that we know that there is an inevitably about this particular “standoff”.  For research has shown there is a younger generation of Christians that are growing older by the year who hold a completely different view on this issue to their older leaders.

    It is purely a matter of time.

    Sadly there is the burning question about how many lives will be traumatised before this time comes to pass…but the answer to that is of course in our hands.

    My answer to the very Mexican standoff that we are currently experiencing is therefore that we pray that the voices of those in the pews will become louder over the year ahead, and that they will vote with either their feet or their wallet against letters sent in their name.