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Author: Helen King

  • Time for the Church to Take Transparency Seriously

    Dr Sharon Jagger is a researcher and lecturer in Religion at York St. John University

    As a feminist researcher, I have spent several years exploring the experiences of women priests in the Church of England. It has been my privilege to talk in depth with 27 ordained women, at different stages of their careers and from different traditions in the Church. Through their experiences I have learned a great deal about women’s relationship not just with the priesthood but also with the institution of the Church.

    Perhaps you feel that this topic is over, and that – given the Church’s need to provide serious responses to institutional racism and calls for equality and inclusion for LGBTQ+ people – we should just move on. The Church of England settled on a structural compromise allowing two positions to be supported: we are ordaining increasing numbers of women, and at the same time structurally accommodating those who oppose women in the priesthood. This may seem like a contradiction, but after 30 years the worms are safely in their cans.

    But my research shows that women priests still face significant challenges and barriers in the Church because of their gender. The structural arrangements put in place in 1992 were flagged at the early stages of their implementation as unsatisfactory and discriminatory (see Monica Furlong’s edited book, Act of Synod, Act of Folly). The structure that limits women’s ordained ministry in the Church was agreed to be open ended and even permanent, but it by no means provides a resolution. The debate is merely in stasis.

    Most parishes support women’s ordained ministry, but some remain unable to accept women priests or bishops, and are led by male clergy who believe the priesthood is a male role. The Church has formal arrangements that allow such parishes, for theological reasons, to request oversight from gender traditional bishops and make a case for male-only priestly ministry (these arrangements were updated in 2014 when women were able to become bishops). After consultation, Parochial Church Councils (PCCs) may vote on a resolution like: ‘This PCC requests, on grounds of theological conviction, that arrangements be made for it in accordance with the House of Bishops’ Declaration on the Ministry of Bishops and Priests’. The number of parishes with such resolutions currently stands at 590 (figures are for 2021), a steady increase on previous years.

    These arrangements may be well-known to some but they are not well understood across the Church. My research also suggests there is a ‘quietness’ around the continuing division on women in the priesthood – a silence partly guided by the notions of ‘good disagreement’ and ‘mutual flourishing’. Whilst I argue there is a need for the Church to re-consider its arrangements because of the harm done to women in the priesthood, a more specific and urgent problem has developed.

    A recent Twitter thread has highlighted – not for the first time – the ongoing concern over lack of transparency in parishes that have voted for the above resolution. This conversation caught my interest because it chimes with stories ordained women shared with me in my research. The Twitter post argues that a significant number of churchgoers are unaware of their own church’s position regarding women’s priestly ministry, since it is not always made public on websites and through other communications. Newcomers may not be made aware of the views held by the leadership, and how that affects practices in their church. Indeed, they may not even realise that divisions in the Church regarding women’s ordination still remain.

    My research confirms there is often a lack of transparency. One ordained woman told me a painful story about her journey to priesthood that stalled late in the process when she learned that the vicar of the church where she worshipped was a member of Forward in Faith (an umbrella organisation that opposes women’s priesthood), and would not support her vocation. Despite this knowledge being crucial for her formation and the discernment and selection process, as she pursued her call to the ministry there was never any explicit explanation given by her vicar of his theological objections to women’s ordination. This silence meant she had to start the process again, after joining a different church which wholeheartedly supported the ordination of women. Such practices do not conform with the Church’s 2014 commitment, that ‘the Church of England is now fully committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all, without reference to gender.’ (Guiding Principle 1)

    To complicate and expand this further, even ordained women do not always know where male colleagues stand. Another woman priest I interviewed describes one clergy colleague who does not accept the priesthood of women as ‘wonderful’ and ‘supportive’, but that ‘you would know nothing of the position he takes from anything he says or does.’

    This avoidance of openly discussing theological views and policies on women’s ministry may be a lingering legacy of the division women’s ordination caused in 1992, when the Synod finally voted in its favour by the tiniest of margins in the House of Laity. An Anglo-Catholic woman priest, another interviewee in my research, believes there remains unresolved division that still causes anxiety, resulting in withdrawal and reluctance to continue the debate on both sides. She says:

    People tend to be quite quiet about it because the experience of women’s ordination was quite traumatic, whichever side you were on . . . only talking about things obliquely . . . rather than open debate. Or you know only after the third gin and tonic . . . It’s both a curse and a blessing.

    The quietness is a blessing because it allows women clergy to get on with their ministry without being the perpetual focus of disagreement. But it is a curse because the current arrangements become crystallised without proper scrutiny, discrimination is hidden, and women may feel unsure of their status in parts of the Church. Not knowing whether a church or its leadership oppose women’s ordination is disempowering. It restricts agency and it disrupts an individual’s ability to choose an appropriate worship environment. I speak from experience: it is a shock to learn by chance that the church leader expected to have a hand in your human flourishing believes your gender determines what you can and cannot do and makes decisions accordingly. Lack of transparency is fundamentally unethical.

    The Twitter thread goes on to suggest some solutions: Parishes that vote for the above resolution should publish their position clearly and visibly on their websites, and the Church should publish its own easily accessible national list. Some of this information is available in various places on the internet. Forward in Faith, for example, provides a list of parishes it supports in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. But one must know where to look and be aware that even though there is little open debate, there are places in the Church where women’s ordination is not accepted.

    Theological beliefs that exclude women from leadership and ordained ministry profoundly affect women’s material, emotional, relational, psychological and spiritual experiences of church life. Transparency is the very least the Church should require where beliefs about gender, and policies and practices that flow from these beliefs, curtail women’s futures and their flourishing.

     

     

     

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  • Young Adults – The Missing Generation?

    by Annika Mathews, former Church of England Youth Council member and rep on General Synod

    Hi there, young adult Anglican speaking. Who’s that you ask? It’s me, but not just me, as there’s quite a number of us actually if you look more closely! We may seem like a ‘missing generation’ in the Church, but we do exist (including on ‘Anglican Twitter’). You’ll find several of us in the big resource churches or town centre churches which offer not just activities but also pastoral care tailored to us and our needs. Some smaller churches have some young adults too, but many lack 18-35 year olds. The national Vision and Strategy project quite rightly prioritises under-18s and their voices are starting to be heard; see the recent press release on this work given to the House of Bishops) But I believe that the 18-35 age range are just as important to engage, not least as emerging leaders in Church and society with much to contribute in action and word. Some of us will have recently come to faith and need adequate opportunities for discipleship and fellowship.

    At diocesan level, the picture is mixed. Some dioceses have very good provision for young people, including youth councils; for example, Worcester.  Vocationally, things are better. The ministry experience scheme runs for 18-30s and a few new monastic communities, such as the Tree of Life in Leicester, have been a success.

    Nationally, the situation is bleaker. The Church of England lags behind other denominations. Alongside their national engagement with young people, the Catholics have many religious communities holding events for young adults. The United Reformed Church, Orthodox and Pentecostal churches all organise national events for young people. The Methodists have a team engaging with young adults and asking their opinions on aspects of church life, including at their Conference. They run a popular annual event, 3Generate, for young people as well as supporting events like Cliff Fest.

    Yet the C of E used to have a Youth Council (CEYC). Known as its ‘best kept secret’, it was shut down a few years ago, though its memory lives on in this webpage. You can read more about that in the excellent article by Ed Cox here. CEYC had some good support (mostly by Mary Hawes, National Children and Youth Adviser and a few others in the Education Department), but was not allowed to advertise its events through main church comms and the allocated budget was limited.

    As a result, its reach was regrettably small, although like others I benefitted hugely from my time on it. I only found it by chance after seeing an advert for General Synod observers and duly being selected. I then ended up standing as a Youth Rep and joining the core team. Both being on Synod and attending the CEYC residentials helped broaden my knowledge of the diversity within the Church of England and enabled me to worship with and learn from those within completely different traditions to those I was used to. Most importantly, it gave me other young adults to worship with and connect to, as my ‘home’ church at the time had hardly any.

    Although it was never enabled to reach its full potential, the Youth Council occupied an important space in and outside the Church. I gained in leadership and speaking skills and my first months on the Youth Council solidified my desire to be confirmed. Others who attended found or fulfilled their vocational calling in a multitude of directions; some are now clergy. It gave young people a voice at General Synod through elected reps and also had a connection to some other denominations through event exchanges as well as a space on the British Youth Council. Most importantly, the events were run for young people by young people in a peer-for-peer model. With its demise, no national engagement with young people currently takes place.

    A new conference model similar to the Methodists’ provision for young people was briefly proposed but Covid and the restructuring of the NCIs ended that. When the youth reps left at the end of the quinquennium, there was a clear change in the responses given at Synod to questions about provision for young people in Synod representation and beyond. Compare the response to Question 1 from a Synod session in November 2020 (Q1) and those given to Questions 42 and 43 in February 2022. While a few young adults have been elected by dioceses, there are no youth reps anymore on Synod. Yet the Spirit is stirring. The Anglican Communion have just launched the Young Adult Theology project. A small group of young adult Anglicans in the UK meet, network and worship together occasionally online. There is a long running (though invite-only) group for Young Priest Theologians.

    The 2030 Vision and Strategy process includes the decision to ‘grow younger and more diverse’ so there is still some hope that the missing generation will not be forgotten but will be properly included in Church of England structures and decision making, not only as a tokenistic add-on or as staged representatives in church campaigns or staged photo opportunities, as sometimes feels the case (my photo was used to promote the Synod election campaign). Though there has been some great work done by those in the Education Department collating written responses from teenagers at schools on their hopes for the Church, and a few young people joined a fringe group to present their ideas at the February 2022 Synod, it is time to take things up a level and provide more opportunities for young people to interact with the rest of the Church at different levels of its structures (following appropriate safeguarding measures of course). The restructuring of the NCIs meant the loss of two jobs directly connected to young people: will there now be action by the national Church, as well by dioceses and parishes, to engage with young adults? We need to support ideas financially from a marketing and comms perspective to successfully reach the right people. One good place to start is through the National Church connecting more with chaplaincies at universities and colleges.

    National initiatives to engage young adults could include coordinating regional days for Anglicans from different church traditions to come together for fellowship and worship; organising or at least facilitating a pilgrimage or trip to a holy site, either in the UK or abroad – to a retreat house, Taizé or the Holy Land; a presence at Christian festivals like Greenbelt; and more observer and participatory opportunities for young adults on national Church bodies. In particular we need an accessible online space to advertise opportunities for young adult Anglicans; for example, chances to apply to be part of Churches Together Forum, or to steward at World Council of Churches events. I was fortunate to have these opportunities through becoming known on General Synod, but it shouldn’t only be ‘who you know’ which opens doors to these oportunities. We need inclusion, not exclusion. Including all young people (across a whole diversity of identities, a true representation of the body of Christ) is of paramount importance.

    Young people need to be seen as a priority now, valued for their gifts and personalities as well as the prophetic voice they bring to the Church. It will be too late when the Church realises that a dearth of under-35s now will spell a dent in the coffers of parish funds in 20 years’ time.

    Young adult Anglicans exist, and we are watching. We are already joining in with what’s happening on the ground and are keen to partner with the rest of the Church in broadening its reach to more millennials and Gen Z and amplifying their voices and participation in the Church. SOS. Church, listen and respond with urgency now!

     

     

     

  • Arguing with a Madman? Cranks, Trolls, Consistency, and ‘Come off it’

    by Sophie Grace Chappell, Professor of Philosophy at The Open University. Her two most recent books are Songs For Winter Rain, a poetry collection, and Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience.

    (in view of the House of Bishops apparently pushing on with yet another working party on trans people and gender identity, here is a further extract from Professor Chappell’s forthcoming book, Trans Figured; original posting here)

    This no-debate demand is often misunderstood as a refusal to engage in philosophical argument. That is a misunderstanding, and the reasons why it is a misunderstanding go rather deep. G.K.Chesterton says this (Orthodoxy p.32 (New York: Lane, 1909)):

    If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

    There is a scene in the fine 2016 film Denial that makes a rather similar point to Chesterton’s. Deborah Lipstadt and her lawyers are constructing their defence against a libel action brought by the Holocaust denier David Irving. To show, against Irving, that there was (alas) nothing fake about the Nazis’ mass murders in 1941-1945, Lipstadt wants to go into the witness box herself, and she wants Holocaust survivors to testify too.

    Her lawyers dissuade her. It is not that she and the survivors do not have a convincing story, and one that any decent interlocutor would be ashamed and embarrassed to deny, dispute, or question. The point is that Irving will not be convinced—nor ashamed, nor embarrassed—to carry on with an aggressive and sceptical cross-examination of old-age pensioners who have lived out the rest of their lives in the shadow of the hellish nightmare of Auschwitz. In Wittgenstein’s famous phrase, “See how much stage-setting” must already be in place before a “rational debate” can even begin. It is very difficult to discuss proofs of the reality of the Holocaust with people who will not accept the same standards of proof as any reasonable person accepts in any other debate, and who are not ashamed to browbeat, jeer, and heckle old and frail survivors of the worst genocide in human history.

    Just this lack of epistemic responsibility—and of shame—is all too evident in all too many people who come at transgender people and their allies waving the much-misused banner of “free and open debate”; as for example when those campaigners complain that they themselves are being “silenced” by harassment and mockery and intimidation, but are entirely happy to harass and mock and intimidate anyone who tries even to run a conference that they don’t like the look of; or when their immediate response to the harrowing statistics for transgender suicide and transgender assault is not to express sympathy and solidarity, but to cast doubt on the reliability of those statistics; or as when supposedly respectable journalists and academics are perfectly happy to promulgate bizarre myths about “transgenderism being bankrolled by Jewish billionaires”—myths that strikingly close the gap between transphobia and anti-semitism, and sometimes between both of those and conspiracy theories like Q-Anon as well.

    Such claims get us into the territory of what Rai Gaita calls “the crank”:

    “Cranks” is an interesting word… it is not just a term of abuse. It refers to someone who has so radically lost his capacity for judgement that his views are not even worth considering. Like those who are severely mentally ill, the most interesting thing about cranks—about what makes someone a crank—does not show itself when they declaim what they believe. It does so when they do not rule certain things out of consideration. They suffer from something far more serious than ignorance. Knowledge and understanding—and therefore, all serious radical critique—depend upon the exercise of sound judgement about what counts as evidence, about when authorities can be relied upon, when they are justifiably discredited, and so on… Reason is not what determines what it is to be “in touch with reality”. Rather, being in touch with reality is a condition for the sober exercise of those critical concepts which mark our sense of what it is to think well or badly, concepts whose proper application is what we call the exercise of “reason”.[1]

    Among other things, Gaita is writing here about how we should do philosophy—a question on which I have myself learned a great deal from him. I am almost echoing Gaita when I say that I think philosophy should not be a bureaucratic pigeonhole within a university’s administrative structure, kept “pure” of “non-philosophical” material by vigilant gatekeeping (and outgrouping). Rather philosophy should be a loose-bordered range of inquiries that are kept rigorous, maybe even a little bit austere, by the rather different but very much complementary requirements of two things: first of logic, and secondly of a grown-up, and open-minded, and kind, and humane, and humorous, and inquisitive, and un-fanatical, and tolerant, and mature—and sensible—sensibility.

    So there are two kinds of quality-controlling challenge in particular that philosophers should push each other hard with. One is “That is logically inconsistent”, the other is “Come off it”. In the academy today, partly because of the bureaucratic pressure to mark research territory, we hear plenty about inconsistency, but rather less about “Come off it”. In an age of perversely brilliant research programmes, for example about whether we’re living in a computer simulation—and also, in an age of conspiracy theories, many of which are, among other things, transphobic—“Come off it” is an important challenge too.

    “Come off it” matters both within and beyond philosophy. In both cases, another way to put it is, quite often, “Do not feed the trolls.” And that is, unfortunately, something we very often have good reason to say in the case of “debates” about transgender.

     

    [1] Gaita, A Common Humanity pp.160, 165-6. Gaita too quotes Chesterton. For my review of Gaita’s fine book, see Mind 2002, 411-413.

  • Hanging in Love and Faith

    Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby is Chaplain, Fellow and Dean of Welfare of Corpus Christi College, Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford, and a member of the General Synod of the Church of England.

    At the beginning of May, Mark Chapman wrote a piece for this blog about how theological understandings of natural law have shaped the church’s view of sexuality far more than readings of biblical texts and provided valuable historical context as to why that is significant to our present debates. Like Mark, I served on the History Work Stream of Living in Love and Faith and agree with his assessment that, in the end, the discipline of history has largely been marginalized from the LLF final material. There is much that is good about LLF, but there remains an underlying assumption concerning the continuity of Christian belief about human sexuality until, well, this thing called Modernity happened and disrupted the common doctrinal framework. As Helen King, another colleague from that History Work Stream commented on the Shared Conversations process which preceded LLF, “it was clear that history only began in the 1960s”.

    The History Work Stream was a diverse group in terms of our views, but we all agreed historical contexts matter and set ourselves an initial task of writing short papers exploring case studies of when “the church changed its mind” about something “big”. As a historian of the English Long Reformation, I chose clerical marriage. What might surprise some readers is that, after the Reformation, church and state continued to maintain that celibacy was the “ideal” state for the clergy. Clerical marriage was not a positive good, but pragmatic because some clergy just couldn’t keep their cassocks on; it was better to let them marry in order to regulate their sexual urges. To many Tudors, clergy marriage, as it said now of same sex partnerships, fell short of the “ideal”.  (You can find my fuller argument on the LLF Hub.)

    Let’s take another case – surely one of greater moral consequence than marriage: is it moral for the state, after a judicial process, to take a life? We don’t know how this question would break down among current members of the General Synod, but anyone upholding “traditional Christian teaching” would, by that reasoning, favour its re-introduction in the UK. Christian thinkers as diverse as St Paul, Aquinas and Calvin can be enlisted in its defence. Article 37 of the 39 Articles of the Church of England (1563), to which all ordained ministers of the Established Church assent, states that “the Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences”. Anglicans were not alone. In 1566 the Council of Trent of the Roman Catholic Church reaffirmed the morality of the death penalty: “the just use of this power [capital punishment], far from involving the crime of murder, is an act of paramount obedience to Commandment which prohibits murder”.  In the hothouse of sixteenth-century Europe, on this issue at least, there was consensus between the mega-churches, although even then there were voices of dissent amongst radical Protestants, which only united Roman Catholics and mainstream Protestants in persecuting them. Looking back, it is a pretty uncomfortable example of ecumenical convergence.

    In the twentieth century, a substantial sea change for Anglicans and other Christians occurred. In 1958, the General Convention of the American Episcopal Church passed a resolution urging its abolition – a moral question that is still dreadfully live for Episcopalians over sixty years later. Three decades later the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference also voted for abolition; given the number of countries in the world which still retain capital punishment, a Lambeth Conference might want to revisit the question. In 1995, John Paul II hedged his bets and rather than declaring an absolute ban argued that execution should only be used “in cases of absolute necessity”, maintaining (optimistically) that because of the progress in penal systems, “such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent”. However, in 2018, Pope Francis pronounced an absolute prohibition on capital punishment as a violation of the dignity of the human person in Catholic teaching, putting him at odds with countries such as the US, China, and Nigeria as well as with laity and clergy of his own church.

    In Britain, as with the abolition of the trade in human beings, non-conformist Christians led the charge against hanging. But even the bishops of the Established Church could be converted and play a part via their seats in the House of Lords. In 1948, only one bishop, George Bell of Chichester, clearly supported abolition in the Lords; in 1956 eight bishops voted for suspension and one against.  In the 1960s, nineteen bishops voted for abolition and only one against. How do we account for this episcopal “change of mind” on such a “big” moral question? In his essay “God and the Gallows” (2004), the distinguished historian Hugh McLeod suggested that the twentieth century saw a move away from a theology of salvation based on understanding the cross as punishment for sin to an incarnational emphasis on God becoming human in Christ. It strengthened the view that all human life was sacred, and by the 1960s this soteriology was reflected on the episcopal bench. In other words, punishment was no longer key to the narrative of human salvation. McLeod also argues that British Christians who considered all parts of the Bible ‘equally authoritative’ and took a literalist approach displayed the strongest support for the death penalty prior to its abolition in 1965.

    2025 will be only the sixtieth anniversary of the abolition of capital punishment in Britain – less than a lifetime ago.  It was a momentous moral achievement in which the leaders of the Church of England, by and large, followed from behind rather than led from the front.  Sound familiar?

  • ‘Resource Churches’: When Planting Becomes Colonialism

    by the Revd Robert Thompson, Vicar St Mary’s, Kilburn & St James’, West Hampstead; host of Open Table, London; member of General Synod

    Robert Thompson

    For those of us who come from the island of Ireland, the language of plants and planting, on the face of it a lovely horticultural metaphor, has a morally problematic dark side. The plantation of Ulster, and of other parts of Ireland, was a colonial endeavour. It involved the resettlement of my own English and Scottish ancestors and was characterised by, at the least, the appropriation of the land of the Irish, and at worst a violent hostility towards them that too often resulted in death. The present, continuing, sectarian divisions of the north of Ireland are a direct result of this form of planting.

    As the Vicar of a parish which has a UKME/GMH majority congregation, I have also become acutely aware of how this same rhetoric of planting was operative in the colonisation of Caribbean islands. Here, much more problematically, most of the indigenous peoples were either murdered or died of imported European diseases. The combination of both these resulted in what can only be described as genocide. Here too the land was parcelled out to the incoming settlers as large ‘plantations’ but, worse than in Ireland, the human labour for these estates came from Africa in chains on slave ships. People made in God’s image were reduced by the people of Christian nations, including the church and missionary agencies, to capital and commodity, to be owned, bought, sold and killed at whim. The history of colonialism also has on-going consequences in the global distribution of wealth and racism.

    In the contemporary Church, we have come to use the horticultural imagery of planting, and to practise it, without much critical reflection either on the language itself or on its practice. As the panacea for our falling numbers we are now are wedded to a ‘mixed ecology’ of church, of which planting forms a major part, as the basis of our future mission. So-called ‘Resource Churches’ are a major strand of this mixed ecology. But many of us have come to the lived realisation that here, too, the seemingly benign language that oozes notions of practical support is not the reality on the ground.

    It was to unmask this contradiction that I recently tweeted:

    “Resource Churches” what a misnomer! “And so Jesus told them a parable: Vicar alone on housing estate parish writes to neighbouring Resource Church, with 13 full time staff, 4 being clergy, 5 times over a year to ask for help with accounts & position of treasurer. No reply….Bishop calls housing estate vicar this week to say Resource Church Vicar would like to ‘church plant’ into housing estate parish & church building. Housing estate Vicar says to bishop “You can tell Resource Church Vicar to go f**k themselves.” Let them with ears to hear, hear!”

    I then further retweeted the original post by saying:

    And how many Resource Churches have a woman, UKME/GMH or LGBTQIA+ person or someone living with a disability or a chronic health condition as Vicar? Of initial 19 in @dioceseoflondon only 1 has a UKME Vicar, 1 now (but not originally) has a woman & as for the other E&D markers…

    My purpose in these posts was to problematise the naïve notion that a ‘mixed ecology’ church is not already a ‘mixed ecclesiology church’ in which we have created a form of neo-liberal, competitive capitalism as the precarious foundation (built on sand) of our ‘common’ life together. I wanted to indicate that, just as in our colonial history, the lived effects of so-called church planting and resource churches are based on a binary opposition of some forms of church to others. Just as in the plantations of Ireland and the Caribbean, this ‘othering’ has deathly consequences for those who are forcibly, without any real consultation and with the blunt instrument of a Bishop’s Mission Order, resettled or displaced.

    The responses from a myriad of clergy and laity to my social media posts ‘parabalising’ the effects of ecclesial planting and resourcing show that these are experienced by many of us in our day to day ministry as a form of colonialism. This colonialism is leading to the breakdown of what has been established ecclesiology of the Church of England as well as trust between us.

    Don’t get me wrong! I am not anti-evangelism, or anti-church planting, so long as they use models of partnership ‘with’ and are contextually intelligent. I am not anti-New Worshipping Communities or anti-Fresh Expressions, or anything else that helps in the living out of the gospel of Jesus Christ and Christ’s proclamation and embodiment of the justice and peace of God’s Reign. But what I, and many, are increasingly deeply concerned about is the ways in which this now happens in parallel and deeply sectarian tracks, in competition not only with parishes, but with other emerging expressions of church. This has created situations in which some clergy and people are completely under-resourced, whilst others have a cup that overflows. As one person on a thread said, these are not ‘Resource Churches’ but ‘Resourced Churches’ pumped and primed with money from the Strategic Development Fund whilst parishes are expected to give, give, give to the diocese with little in return.

    I make this critique not so much as the ‘liberal Catholic’ that many might label me, but as a person formed in conservative and charismatic evangelicalism. I hold, within myself and in my own faith development, the tension of the unity of the church. Biblically, therefore, for me, what is most blatantly contrary to the teaching of Christ and that of Paul are the ways in which church planting and resourcing are pretty well always practised within sectarian silos, leading to economic injustices within the church, and overwork, mental health challenges and burn-out for many.

    The effect of the Save the Parish movement and the election of many of who support it to General Synod has rather focussed this debate. The disillusionment and anger of the many clergy who contacted me indicates that what happened in Winchester could potentially happen in very many dioceses very soon.  To save us from such a breakdown on a national scale, it is time for the present colonialist model of planting and resourcing to stop. It should be replaced by biblical economic fairness. As another contributor to a thread said:

    a modest distribution of SDF funds amongst a single deanery rather than a single ‘resource’ church could revolutionise each church’s potential for mission, and let’s not lose sight of the most important thing: ensure they are solvent. A comparatively minor cash injection would enable struggling churches to renovate, complete minor re-ordering, sort out any problems with the ‘show’ and make money. Which is what we all serve, after all.

    When the rich get rich and the poor get poorer, we are called to practice Jubilee.

     

  • Sharing in Privilege: Black and Collared

    by Revd Dr Augustine Tanner-Ihm, Team Curate at St James & Emmanuel, Didsbury, Manchester and winner of the 2020 Theology Slam

    During theological college, no one told me how differently I would be treated after I was ordained. As a Black man, I’m used to people seeing me as a threat to them. In stores personnel follow me around, walking next to cars people quickly lock their doors or if I’m near a white women she’ll clutch her handbag closer, thinking I’m going to rob her. I have become accustomed to being served the very last at bars and restaurants (I sure miss the app service!). Also, I have become accustomed to people thinking I’m not very clever and assuming I must be from a broken family and community background. Because I look this way, this has been my lived experience and probably the lived experience of many more people that share my amount of melanin.

    But ordination.

    At theological college, wearing clerical clothing was always associated with your church tradition. Even during the theological formation process, clothing seemed mostly pointless. We talked about whether it’s contextual for the setting and about its role for women in showing they are leaders in the parish; but that was all.  At no point duing our practical and theological formation did anyone explain how we would be treated as Black or Brown ministers. Maybe because there weren’t any black staff until my last few months of ordination training. And maybe because for my entire time at theological college there was no mention of how Black and Asian ministers experience different things. I don’t blame the leaders and tutors for not introducing us to these multicultural dynamics because their white worldview and their mostly white ministry were just not affected. Even though I trained at three theological colleges from a diverse range of Church Traditions, this never came up. But as a student, it affects me.

    On 4 July 2021, I was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England. I could finally wear the collar to show that I’m a member of the clergy. Within the first week of walking around the parish and the community of Manchester, I noticed something. When I waited in the bus queue, people let me on first. Instead of merely practising social distancing, people smiled at me and then looked down to the floor. Older white people gave me respect and instead of me calling Black aunts and uncles aunts and uncles, most of them treated me like an elder because of this ontological change. I never knew this ontological change would give me the parts of the experiences that my white siblings experience their entire life. My parish is mostly white professional people and the staff, besides one amazing Iranian woman, is white. Therefore, there just wasn’t anyone to tell me anything different about what would happen.

    My grandfather used to tell me all the time about how he was called a ‘boy’ by white folks his entire life. I remember telling him it’s different now. People don’t say that anymore. He told me it wasn’t different; even if people don’t say boy, their intent is still boy and not man. All my Baptist grandfather wanted is to be treated like a man: a man who worked hard and took care of 11 children, who owned his own business and house. But he never received the respect he deserved which manifested into distrust, disdain and hate for white people. Because of the life experiences I had, and my theological framework, I didn’t have the same valid feelings my grandfather had for white people. Ordination has changed me, or I should say it has changed the way people see me. I feel a little more comfortable going to the shop or going into a room with all middle-class white men because the collar has given me authority, gained me respect, because it signifies something. I’m not just another negro (as some would say) but I’m ‘Father’. I’m not a boy but a man. Sadly, it took a thin white collar to go from boy to man.

    I often wonder how many others experience this sort of change within their ministry. Who can help me understand; who can help with this theological and practical reflection? In my diocese, I have been blessed to have three UKME senior leaders. All are amazing priests and disciples of Jesus.  One leader directed me to reflect on the Biblical teachings of Peter. Therefore, I read and read and read 1st Peter and began to see that, as I continue in ministry, I cannot allow the collar to become my overall identity, but should allow wholeness and holiness to be what I strive for. Some may argue there is no separation but only semantics. But Archbishop Stephen always reminds us of our first call: to be disciples of the one who has died, who rose and who is coming back again. And as Saint Peter tells us, we are to be holy for he is holy. And that’s our call.

  • Clericalist Individualism? Power, Abuse and Transformation

    by Ruth Harley, a curate in the Diocese of Oxford, and co-author of “Being Interrupted: Re-imagining The Church’s Mission From The Outside, In” (SCM Press, 2020), whose research interests focus around feminist ecclesiology and questions about how power is understood and used within the church.

    Immersing myself in the transcripts of the IICSA Anglican Hearings as the basis of my MA dissertation has been by turns frustrating, infuriating, terrifying, upsetting and enraging. But it has also been very enlightening. Much here tells us deep and uncomfortable truths about the church: who we are, how we fail and how we handle failure, what and whom we prioritise and at what cost. IICSA’s October 2020 report, at the very least, should be compulsory reading for anyone with any measure of responsibility or authority within the church.

    The primary outcomes from the IICSA process must, of course, be centred around safeguarding, and around the needs and voices of survivors of abuse, far too often side-lined and retraumatised by the church. There is a very real need for repentance in response to IICSA’s findings: for a willingness to confront the ways in which the church has too often been a safer place for abusers than for their victims, and a willingness to invest not only money and resources, but also our time, care and attention into the radical changes which are needed.

    But the impact of the IICSA findings extends far beyond their specific scope. The Anglican Hearings have been an apocalyptic event in the life of the Church of England (and, to a lesser extent, the Church in Wales), both in the sense that they were devastating, and in the literal sense of the term ‘apocalypse’ – that which reveals. IICSA has revealed the devastating extent of abuse in the church. It has revealed some of the systemic and cultural flaws which have led to the church becoming a place where abuse can thrive, where the reputation of the institution and powerful individuals within it are prioritised at the expense of victims and survivors of abuse, with those who report abuse ignored, stigmatised and re-abused by the very people and systems supposed to protect them.

    IICSA has also revealed something about what the church is, and how power is understood and (mis)used within the body of Christ. One of the factors I identified in my research into the ecclesiologies expressed during the Anglican Hearings was something I have termed ‘clericalist individualism’.

    It’s well documented that clericalism is part of the mechanism by which clergy who abuse can go unchallenged; see for example Rosie Harper and Alan Wilson’s To Heal and Not to Hurt and Gilo and Janet Fife’s Letters to a Broken Church. A culture of ‘Father knows best’ is not one in which transparency and mutual accountability can flourish. But, deeply intertwined with that clericalism, there’s a kind of individualism which sees significant information and decision-making – in short, significant power – rest with individuals (often, though not always, ordained) in ways which both render those individuals unaccountable, and obscure or distort the proper nature of the church as an interdependent body, characterised by mutuality. This clericalist individualism is not a problem of ‘the top’: it’s a danger at every ‘level’ of the hierarchical structure, from home groups, to the parish, the diocese, and the national church.

    The apocalyptic revelation of the church’s failings which IICSA provides may not seem like any ground for hope. But we are a church which both preaches and (at its best) lives resurrection: life which emerges out of death and trauma, and meets us on the road in unexpected ways. In revealing the sins which beset the church God is, I believe, doing a new thing, calling us to a new understanding of who we are and what it means to be church.

    And it starts with power. Naming, confronting and repenting of all the ways in which power is used in the church to silence, oppress and abuse. And then daring to believe that another way is possible. Resources within and beyond the church’s traditions can help us with that re-imagining. For over half a century, feminist theologians have been calling the church to renounce hierarchical power – ‘power over’ – and embrace a different kind of power, rooted in mutuality, relationship and solidarity – ‘power with’ and, as laid out in Anna Mercedes’ book of the same title, Power For.[1]

    It is a call which the church has so far largely chosen to ignore and suppress.  But as we confront the endemic nature of abuse within the church, and as we wrestle too with the ways in which oppression (on grounds of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and more) thrives within the body of Christ, it is a call which has never been more urgent. God, whose way is love and whose work in Jesus Christ is the work of liberation, is calling us, the church, to embrace the revelatory work of the Holy Spirit in our midst, and to step into new ways of understanding how power can and should function in the church, so that we can grow more fully into the body we are called together to be: characterised by mutuality, interdependence, honesty and accountability and – above all – love.

    It would be all too easy to tell ourselves that abuse of power is something that happens ‘over there’ – only within ‘the hierarchy’, or only in churches ‘not like ours’. That is a comforting but dangerous lie. In any culture in which abuse flourishes, an underpinning myth is that “it could never happen here”. It could. It has. It does and it will. And each of us who are members with one another of the body of Christ have a responsibility to do the work which is required to make that body a safe and supportive church where all can flourish.

     

    [1] Letty Russell’s Church in the Round offers a more general feminist model of church based on mutuality and interdependence.

  • When is a Week not a Week?

    by the Rev Kat Campion-Spall, Associate Vicar at St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol and Dean of Women’s Ministry

     

    How long is a week? We all know that sometimes time seems to rush past and it is Saturday evening again with most of the jobs we had hoped to do still on a “to be done” list. Weeks during lockdown sometimes seemed to be endless, especially with active children desperate to get out and meet friends. But how many days are there in a week? The Church of England doesn’t seem to be able to come up with a consistent answer to that basic question.

    Seven? Apparently not. Try scanning the end pages of the Church Times, and looking at the part-time incumbencies advertised there. A post described as ‘two-thirds’ which turns out to mean Sunday + 3.5 days, with no mention of remuneration. Another advertised for 4 days including Sunday, for half a stipend plus a house. A ‘half-time’ post: Sunday + 3 other days. Other advertisements offering a 0.5 stipend don’t commit to a number of days, but the job description would be almost impossible even for a full-time incumbent. It’s not transparent, it’s not consistent, it’s often mathematically impossible, and it doesn’t seem to allow for any days off! The Church of England announces that more women than men are being selected for ordination training, but that is not the whole story: these “part-time” roles impact on women much more than on men.

    A House for Duty post which comes with nothing but that house, and which expects working on Sundays and two or three other days, may be useful for a priest entering retirement with a pension, but anyone under pensionable age will lose pension contributions in such a role. Women clergy are nearly twice as likely as men to be ordained as an SSM (Self Supporting Minister), roles which usually have no kind of remuneration. Two-thirds of women are over 40 when they begin training; nearly 40% who started last September were over 50. Whatever their experience, and whatever the reason for not offering, or being selected, for ordination when younger, this group will usually only be considered for SSM posts. Dioceses differ in the proportion of women who are in such posts; could this be to do with differing attitudes among senior staff towards enabling women to balance ministry with family commitments?

    But there is a growing need for properly paid part-time posts, particularly for the younger women who the Church of England says it wants to attract. Nationally, in the general workforce, in 2020 38% of women in employment were working part-time, many as a considered choice, compared with 13% of men. Yet in the Church of England, only around 15% of women and 6% of men are in part-time stipendiary roles. While examples of flexibility and good practice exist, it seems that the challenges of planning a fair and workable package, usually including housing, often mean that part-time is put in the “too complicated” box, so part-time roles are rare and, where they are offered, can lead to bad practice.

    In my role as Dean of Women’s Ministry, I have heard too many stories from my own diocese and further afield of women who went through discernment for ordination at a time in their lives when they didn’t want or couldn’t manage a full-time post, and so to enable them to have the part-time roles they need, have been pushed into self-supporting ministry which isn’t really what they want, and which does not always allow them to develop the ministry they have the potential to offer.

    There’s the half-time vicar who wasn’t told until she’d started that she had to pay the rent on half the vicarage. There’s the priest who took a half-time chaplaincy post and then looked into an additional half-time parish post to discover there literally were not enough days in the week for her to do both. There’s the vicar with a young family who moved from a full-time stipendiary role to a house for duty post as a way of working part-time, which means she misses out on potentially a decade’s worth of pension contributions despite being in work. And the vicar in her fifties whose peers in other professions were dropping down to 4-day weeks to enjoy a more balanced life, who simply didn’t see that option in the church and so left ministry.

    We know that there are going to be changes in how ministry, both stipendiary and SSM, will have to be organised in the coming years. We also know that a healthy church will need to attract and retain a diverse range of clergy. Until we have cracked a transparent, consistent and fair way of remunerating part-time roles, we won’t be attracting and retaining those clergy for whom full-time doesn’t work: many of them, women.

  • Being a Gay Christian and an Ordinand in the Church in Wales

    by Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor in Ancient History at Cardiff University and an ordinand in the Church in Wales

    ‘I do not think that others who have gone before you perjured themselves, and I do not believe when your time comes that you will perjure yourself either.’ These words were spoken to me about a month ago by the Bishop of Llandaff when she met with me to iron out the details of the training I will undertake on my route to ordination as a priest in the Church in Wales. Bishop June Osborne was referring to my championing of the sacraments and the pledge I will have to take to respect and uphold them when my ordination ceremony takes place.

    You see, I am a gay Christian man who is legally married to another gay Christian man. We have been married for a decade and, in fact, our marriage did receive a blessing from a priest-cum-friend who, having done the deed, turned to our wedding guests and stated boldly, ‘Never let anyone tell you that what you have witnessed here today is not sanctified by God through his love for this couple.’ Our marriage would not have felt real without that blessing, without having God’s presence with us at that time and forever as we live our married life together. God is part of our family; He is in our home, and we carry Him in our hearts and try to do what He would have us do as much as we can.

    So, the Bishop of Llandaff was right: I will not perjure myself when I take the ordination vow to uphold Christian marriage, for I feel that in my daily life, every single day, I uphold that sacred institution. I have never struggled with my sexuality. I was aware of being ‘gay’ – whatever that means, for believe me, gentle readers, there is no limit to the cosmic-sized definition of that tiny little word – from a young age. But I was also acutely aware of being loved by God. Sure, did I not sing about it at the top of my voice at every Sunday School? “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

    Karl Barth famously stated that in that line was a summation of all the years of hard work he had put into his theology. I believed it then and I believe it now, although after 54 years on this earth, and having given a lot of thought to whom I am and how God moves in my life, I found another scriptural mantra: ‘I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made’. Let’s put that verse into the context of Psalm 139 and as you read it think about how God has made you His own bespoke creation too. I am no better than you; you are no worse than me; we are created as one-off pieces of humanity. Let’s think about how the Psalmist puts it then:

    You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.
    You know when I sit and when I rise;
    you perceive my thoughts from afar.
    You discern my going out and my lying down;
    you are familiar with all my ways.
    Before a word is on my tongue
    you, Lord, know it completely.
    You hem me in behind and before,
    and you lay your hand upon me.
    Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
    too lofty for me to attain.
    Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?
    If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
    If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
    even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.
    If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
    and the light become night around me,”
    even the darkness will not be dark to you;
    the night will shine like the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.
    For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
    I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
    My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
    Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.

    God has made me – and you – to be exactly who we should be. God didn’t make a mistake when he made me and somehow placed that ‘gay gene’ in me. It was His plan from the beginning – because ‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made’. The ‘thing’ that is particular to you, is your God-given ‘thing’. And sure, we have many faults and many things to put right – the bad behaviours we have picked up on the path of life – but the essence of you is crafted, specially, singularly, by God for you.

    I once heard Archbishop Rowan Williams talk about the late, great Archbishop Desmond Tutu: ‘Archbishop Tutu was the best at being Archbishop Tutu that Archbishop Tutu could ever be.’ I have confidence that I can be the best that I can be because God made me to be me. People who scorn me, mock me, deride me because of my ‘gayness’ (again, whatever that means or however that manifests itself), simply do not see that I am ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ – maybe because, sadly, they have not seen yet how ‘fearfully and wonderfully’ they are made too. I pray to God that may open their eyes to show them how differently special they are to Him too.

    It is with confidence that I take the next step towards my ordination. When God is for us, who can be against us, right? And although there will be dissenting voices, I have no doubt, am putting my feet onto a path paved with godliness – for I have every trust in the Church in Wales, the most liberal, accepting, (and yes, let’s admit it) Christian of the Anglican Churches of the UK. Last year, the Church in Wales took the decision to allow for church blessings of gay marriages. The Church also repented of its persecution of gay and other minority people over the centuries. The Church in Wales’ decision is a visionary step forward and the Church in Wales, I predict, will soon sanction gay marriages in church. This is why I am proud to be a member of the Church in Wales and why I want to work for it and in it: it is progressive.

    Do not think all is sweetness and light here in Wales though. Some conservative churchgoers in Wales – heck, some clergy – will find what I have written here heretical, ungodly even. There is a vocal, vicious, group of internet Church in Wales ‘Christians’ who have already condemned several out gay men and women clergy as ‘decadent’, ‘unnatural’, and ‘perverse’. I’m sure I will be a target for their vitriol too. But they are far from Christ and I pray that they may find Him in their hearts. Bishop June, who is a great support to gay Christians, as she is to all Christians (after all, we approach the faith from many angles), said to me, ‘you might want to think about being prepared to defend yourself.’ I am as grateful for her wisdom and her frankness as I am for her championship.

    So, I’ve thought long and hard about my position of defence. And to be honest, it really doesn’t get better than this: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so’.

     

  • Women Bishops: The Legacy of Baroness Howe of Idlicote (8 February 1932-22 March 2022)

    by April Alexander, member of General Synod 2000-2021; Church Commissioner 2008-2018; member of Crown Nominations Commission 2013-2018

     

    Obituaries to Lady Howe saluted her well-known feminism, but few mentioned her Anglicanism.  For those of us who have worked for the ordination of women, however, Elspeth Howe is remembered with love and gratitude because, as a vice-president of WATCH (Women and the Church), she voiced in the House of Lords our joys and fears over the Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure (2014) and the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015.

    It is timely to look again at those joys and fears to see whether they have been realised.

    After the failure in the House of Laity in General Synod of the original 2012 Measure to allow women to be consecrated as bishops, in 2014 there was a determination not to allow the new and revised Measure to stumble at any point. It was Elspeth Howe who nevertheless asked further questions which forced the Archbishop of Canterbury (in 2013, Rowan Williams had been succeeded by Justin Welby) to address the rather embarrassing truth that discrimination against women would survive despite the indications to the contrary; indeed, such discrimination is actually embedded in the 2014 legislation and Guidance.

    To this day, parishes who want to may request from their Diocesan bishop – whether female or male – the episcopal oversight of an alternative bishop who will ‘protect’ the parish from ever having an ‘unacceptable’ Diocesan. In her speech to the House of Lords on 14 October 2014, Lady Howe asked whether the reverse would be the case. She pointed out that there were already parishes with a woman priest serving under a bishop who did not recognise her orders, and asked whether such a parish would be able to request the oversight of an inclusive bishop. The truthful answer would have been a plain ‘No’, as we have seen during the years since, but it was a fudge.

    Lady Howe also asked for reassurance that, despite all-encompassing nature of Clause 2 of the Measure, it was only the protected characteristic of gender from the Equality Act 2010 which would be overridden and not those characteristics relating to sexuality, marital status and so on. The Archbishop of Canterbury replied:

    As a matter of policy, the House of Bishops has advised that those in parochial appointments should act as though the [Equality] Act applied [to all protected characteristics other than gender]. This change is not a cloak for discrimination on sexuality, marital status, marital history or, for that matter, age (Hansard October 2014).

    This is also the answer I had been given in General Synod in July 2014 by the Chief Legal Adviser to the General Synod.  However, by the time she died, Lady Howe would have been forgiven for wondering why the debate on sexuality rumbles on, eight years after such a clear assurance, given in the House of Lords, by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Four months later, in February 2015, Baroness Howe spoke in the debate on the Lords Spiritual (Women) Bill which should have enabled new women bishops to ‘leapfrog’ over their male colleagues in being appointed to the Lords. In the event, of course, there have never been enough women to fill the places, and the provision lapses in 2025. She said:

    Given the great pleasure of seeing the first female bishop consecrated in the Church of England recently, it was sad to see that within a week the underlying divisions within the Church of England had begun to emerge once again…In October last year I asked the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury in this House whether archbishops would continue to consecrate all bishops in their respective Provinces. From his response and further debate in the other place I understood

    ‘that in the normal course of events, archbishops will consecrate all bishops but … there will be circumstances when an archbishop is ill or overseas’ (Commons 20/10/14; col 724).

    Then, he might delegate.

    Yet only one week after the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York (John Sentamu) had consecrated the first female bishop through the laying on of hands, he chose not to put his hands on the new Bishop of Burnley, although he was present at the time. He invited, as noble Lords will know, other bishops who were ‘acceptable’ to the new bishop to lay on hands in his place. There were only three such bishops. Thus, the contrast between the two services in that sense could not have been greater.

    This is still an important matter…. The archbishops [later] issued a statement that they would take each consecration on a case-by-case basis. Put simply, there are those in the Church of England who hold that once a bishop has laid hands on a female priest in ordination or on a female bishop in consecration he is no longer acceptable to consecrate members of the self-styled ‘traditional Catholic’ wing of the church. This is a notion of ‘taint’, however it is described by those who propose it.

    We should not forget that it has been a source of anguish among all women in the Church since alternative arrangements were introduced for ordination under the Act of Synod 1993.

    Readers should be aware that that the assurance quoted here by Lady Howe did not survive the passage of time. Citing not just the pandemic, but also ‘awareness of the sad reality that not all in the Church of England agree on issues of ordination’, the Archbishops issued another statement five years later on 20 July 2020. Rather than consecrating all bishops, they stated,

    We have agreed that the Metropolitan will normally ask another bishop to be the chief consecrator…From now on the Archbishops will ask three bishops to lay on hands with other bishops present and associating with the ordination but not in fact laying on their hands.

    From re-reading these debates, it is clear that assurances given even in the House of Lords, and even by the Archbishop of Canterbury, can turn out to be less than durable.

    What is also crystal clear is that Elspeth Howe had just the words to express the frustration and disappointment of the vast majority of women who had worked so hard for this legislation but who had no voice of their own in the legislature.

    May she rest in peace.