ViaMedia

Category: Culture and Faith

  • Being Invisible While Anglicans Debate Marrying Same-Sex Couples

    by Savitri Hensman, author of  “Sexuality, Struggle and Saintliness” and LGBTI+ equality activist, writer and involvement coordinator

    In February 2023, the Church of England’s General Synod voted to welcome a proposal by bishops for optional prayers for blessing same-sex couples, though weddings were not on offer. Also a much-criticised document which was used to ban married gays from ministry – Issues in Human Sexuality – was to be scrapped. This was a modest but significant step towards greater inclusion of LGBTQI+ people, though far from enough (1).

    There were strong negative reactions from those most opposed to change, in the UK and parts of the wider Anglican Communion; the Communion had been mentioned at various points in the debate, mainly with regard to the hazards of moving forward. Church of England leaders were accused of putting Western cultural above biblical values and some challenged the Archbishop of Canterbury’s fitness to chair the Communion, though many think existing structures outdated in any case. Following Synod, at an Anglican Consultative Council gathering in Ghana, Justin Welby made a rather defensive speech, criticising secular British culture and MPs’ warnings about parliamentary consequences if equal marriage in church did not go ahead, but indicating that those in favour of greater inclusion also sought to follow Scripture.

    In recent debates, LGBTQI+ people of Global Majority Heritage (GMH) have, I think, been mainly invisible, except occasionally as victims of (now and then protestors against) homophobia and transphobia (2). This seems strange, partly because there are a lot of us, who may be affected in multiple ways by the changes which are proposed or resisted. What is more, some have influenced shifts in churches and society. Each has a unique experience and perspective; the dangers of sweeping generalisations about categories of humans should, by this point in history, be clear. However, there may be areas of common ground among many, if not all.

    I am a British Sri Lankan lesbian, born and baptised in what was then Ceylon. I arrived in this country in the ‘60s as a small child but remained a citizen for the first three decades or so of my life and am still connected. My late partner was of Jamaican descent, my family and friends are from diverse backgrounds. My late parents were active in Asian and wider Southern theological circles. I agree with some “conservatives” that many affirming Church of England members underestimate the importance of the Anglican Communion – but I draw entirely different conclusions.

    Like Anderson Jeremiah, the Communion I know is far from homogenous. And, echoing Jarel Robinson-Brown, the notion of a “liberal” West pitted against a “traditionalist” South is simply untrue, though slavery and colonialism alongside other kinds of injustice have influenced patterns of oppression and resistance.

    With some Synod speakers, I fear for Nigerian Anglicans’ safety. But many already face horrific violence because they are LGBTQI+ or on religious grounds, despite church leaders there inflaming hatred of LGBTQI+ people and bishops here repeatedly stalling moves towards inclusion. Murderous fundamentalists will keep persecuting Christians while this bolsters their own power. Given my own island’s blood-soaked recent history, I understand concerns about increasing the vulnerability of those for whom one cares. Yet, as also pointed out at Synod, some of those seeking affirmation of their love are themselves refugees. And I believe that consistently upholding compassion and human rights for all, and challenging fundamentalism and inequality, offers the best hope of overcoming violent division.

    Justice, mercy, human and Divine love

    In the mid-twentieth century, Lambeth Conference gatherings proclaimed that all people were equally the objects of God’s love and urged support for human rights; affirmed that all Scripture must be interpreted in the light of Christ; and acknowledged “our debt to the host of devoted scholars who, worshipping the God of Truth, have enriched and deepened our understanding of the Bible, not least by facing with intellectual integrity the questions raised by modern knowledge”.

    Such ideas did not simply emerge from an enlightened (or degenerate) West. Struggles against slavery and colonialism, as well as the Holocaust, had helped to demonstrate the dangers of treating some people as less than fully human, while rebels across the world strove for freedom, humanity and greater equality. And a version of Christianity distorted by the interests, and norms, of the rich and powerful in the West had been deeply damaging, though the Good News sometimes shone through nevertheless. Diversity in sexuality and gender identity in some countries was sometimes seen as a sign of heathen backwardness.

    Sometimes biblical passages were used to “prove” God’s backing for inequity or even cruelty, ignoring the Bible’s broader emphasis on justice and mercy and God’s presence in and with the marginalised, as well as Jesus’ bold challenge to religious leaders who disregarded human need and emphasis on the law of love. At the same time, “reason” and “experience” were also sometimes harnessed in oppressive ways, a reminder of the risks of over-confidence that one possesses the full truth. Narrow nationalism and uncritical allegiance to the state has also often been disastrous.

    I remember how, in South Africa and the USA, numerous supporters of racist segregation were convinced this reflected their faithfulness to the Bible. Selective use of Scripture and tradition was also used to underpin economic oppression and women’s subjugation – and, evidence increasingly indicated, not offering LGBTQI+ people the same opportunities to grow spiritually in faithful, self-giving relationships. When I was young, organisations such as the World Council of Churches and Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians helped create space for anti-racist and more broadly liberatory theology to be shared and developed.

    In different parts of the South, churches took varying paths, especially when social tensions heightened and scapegoating intensified. As in the West, bishops did not represent everyone, though there have been inspirational figures like Desmond Tutu. Sometimes anti-LGBTQI+ laws and norms left over from colonial times were enforced with fresh vigour, at times with backing from institutional churches. Yet creative thinking has also gone on, often exploring how to respond to God’s call, amidst multiple inequalities and divisions, to build a world where all are valued.

    Following God, not culture

    When I came to Britain, men could be jailed for gay relationships. GMH people in the West, and ethnic minorities in Sri Lanka, have often faced prejudice from neighbours and mistreatment from the state.

    Cultures and states do not deserve absolute allegiance, though God can sometimes work through these. The liberatory thread running through the Bible, despite human fallibility, offers more; and openness to the Spirit in seeking a more loving, merciful world. LGBTQI+ GMH Christians, among others, have useful insights to offer.

     

    References

    (1)Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex – but please note that this term is used broadly for a range of people who, across cultures and history as well as on an individual basis, might describe themselves in varying ways, some of which might not be easily translated into English.

    (2) This may include people of African, Asian and Latin American descent or descended from the original peoples of North America or Australasia, who make up most of the world’s population. Some people prefer other terms, such as ‘people of colour’. On various aspects of diversity, I am fairly flexible about the terms or sets of initials used to describe me, if not too rude!

     

  • This is No Time for a Soft Drink!

    by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham and Trustee of the Ozanne Foundation, and Rt Revd Dr Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham

    Since the Gloucester Report of 1979 there have been many special C of E consultations on homosexuality. Each had its finer points and limitations.

    The latest, Living in Love and Faith, included some moving testimony for anyone who had not actually ever met a gay person before, if indeed there is anyone like that out there. It also proposed some excellent Pastoral Principles for difficult conversations in Church, that would work as well for an argument with the choir as a discussion of sexuality. Good fruitful conversations “acknowledge prejudice, speak into silence, address ignorance, cast out fear, admit hypocrisy and pay attention to power.”

    Has the LLF process actually done these things? And if it has, why has its rollout been so scrappy and contentious? Perhaps the honest result was too hot to handle, and the only way the bishops thought they could keep control of their emerging situation was to come up with a fudge. The problem with fudge is that it’s ambrosia to fudge lovers, but an improbable solution to a war between diabetics and sugar junkies. The bishops’ cunning plan might just annoy everyone equally on all sides, and land them up where they started.

    Perhaps there’s something about the whole way marriage equality has been framed in the Church of England that has trapped it in a destructive infinite monkey cage? Wittgenstein said the reason his early work stalled and led nowhere was that “a picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” The fantasies and fictions the Church of England has indulged in for years about marriage may have driven a self-destructive narrative to vanishing point. Jesus’ paradigm for marriage has been treated as though it were a definition for all time, and it can’t bear the weight.

    Step outside the ecclesiastical goldfish bowl and an entirely different perspective dawns. The wreck and the pottery diver who looked as though he was perpetually sitting on the toilet are only pretend — decoration to make the fish think they were living au naturel not in a tank.

    Last Thursday at the Oxford Union, three bishops spoke in support of the motion that “this house supports same sex marriage in the Church.” Despite the President’s best endeavours, no Catholic or Anglican bishop could be found to speak against. Of course not. Who would want to go down as “the homophobic bishop”? The Union needed to supply two opposition speakers who made it plain they did support same sex marriage, but wanted the motion voted down on the technicality that people should not expect to get married in Church any more than get a driving licence there. Two speakers sincerely believed gay marriage was wrong. One told us that God was discriminatory and sent those who follow the Bishop of London to hell. The other took us back to Nazi Germany, like Basil Fawlty when a guest complained about a prawn cocktail. The motion was carried by 181 votes to 41. It would seem that gay marriage is unthinkable for people who believe there is something wrong with being gay, but for those who see it as a natural aspect of being human it was obvious.

    This being the case, the only choice for a solution now, even a provisional one, would be to facilitate mutual understanding and tolerance, along the lines of the Archbishop’s observation at Lambeth last year that there are churches who could not survive if they didn’t conduct same sex weddings, whilst others could not survive if they did.

    But this is where the Pastoral Principle of paying attention to power kicks in. There is an extraordinary imbalance in the way power is being used here. Some gay people want to marry on conscience grounds, whilst others object, also from conscience. Much as those supporting equal marriage would like it to be allowed in church, they realise this would be intolerable to some who oppose it. Of course nobody would ever be forced to conduct a same sex wedding. What couple would want that anyway? That is an acceptable compromise. St Paul commends such an approach in Romans 14. However, this understanding is not reciprocated. Not only do opponents find it intolerable to conduct gay weddings in Church, but they insist on blocking anyone else from doing that. Thus they hijack the integrity of those with whom they disagree, often deploying threats of schism and bankruptcy which feel like blackmail.

    So what about synod this week?

    Whatever happens the bishops, leading from behind the sofa, have engineered a situation where it matters very little what the synod actually thinks. Perhaps everybody can agree, after more than 44 years of discussion about homosexuality, that the least satisfactory thing to do now would be to kick the can further down the road yet again. There’s a sense that the bishops now know the right thing to do, but feel they can only manage what is politically expedient. Some might call that a failure of leadership, what the RAF used to call “lack of moral fibre”.

    The spectre of disestablishment hovers over the whole debate. Hensley Henson is said to have observed to a former Archbishop of Canterbury after the 1928 Prayer Book debacle, “I imagine your Grace has found that a lifetime habit of steering around difficulties rather than facing them has scarce prepared you for such a time as this.”

    Back to the future?

  • Emerging Adults: A Priority for the Churches

    by Rebecca Glover, Digital Communications Coordinator at Youth for Christ. Her first degree is in Youth Work, Communities, and Practical Theology

    Picture this. You are nineteen years old, too old for the youth group now. You have spent the last few years leaving the main church service part way through to join the other young people in a programme aimed specifically at those at your age stage. You have learnt key Biblical stories as well as practical life lessons through a varied mixture of role play, discussion, reading, activities and games. There have been leaders around you whose specific job has been, at the most basic level, to take an interest in you. But more than that, these people have been around to mentor you, grow you, and facilitate these learnings.

    However, now you are an adult, so you stay in the main service with the rest of the adults. The preacher today is providing practical application for the Scripture, but they keep mentioning jobs and family. You are a student; you’re not yet sure what you want to do for a long term career, and you don’t have a spouse or children. In fact, your parents and siblings are over one hundred miles away, back in your hometown. Ahh home. It’s okay; “I can make this message transferable to my own life, fill in the gaps”, you think to yourself.

    Throughout the sermon, there have been a couple of references to popular culture… in the eighties, that is, so these references have gone straight over your head. The sermon is 50 minutes long – almost as long as tomorrow’s morning lecture – so you sit and listen, trying to take notes. But you miss the games and the discussion, even if you were beginning to feel a bit too old for it.

    Eventually you stand to sing the final song and you enjoy the lyrics; perhaps you recognise one of the choruses from a psalm you read. But these songs don’t sound much like the music you listen to outside of church, and you are not sure what some of the lyrics mean. Never mind, you make a mental note to Google ‘cherubim and seraphim’ later.

    Everyone gets up to mingle with their coffees and teas in hand, but you feel somewhat out of place. You try to wiggle yourself into circles, but you end up saying the same things – what you’re studying, where you’re from – and can’t relate to what everyone else is chattering about. There are not many people your age or at your stage; not like when you were in youth group.

    This was similar to my experience of church as an emerging adult. Too old for the youth group but feeling too young, too out of place really to feel part of ‘adult church’. Some recent stats show that I wasn’t alone in this feeling.

    For example, YouGov has carried out a range of surveys on whether Britons believe in a god or in a spiritual greater power. The 2022 figures gave 39% saying they did not believe in either. And it’s the younger generations who are most likely to think there are no greater forces out there. The Evangelical Alliance says “the Church is missing a generation of young adults from our congregations” and, in 2018, as part of its ‘Young Adults Conversation’, employed for the first time a Head of Missions to Young Adults.

    My own contribution to these discussions has been to write a Grove booklet, entitled How to Engage Emerging Adults in Church. That phrase, “emerging adults”, is widely discussed, but generally means about the ages of 18-25.

    It’s short – just 27 pages – but explores the key themes of emerging adult engagement. First of all, attraction, and briefly whether it’s okay to be attracted to a church; we need to have that conversation about church as part of consumer culture. Secondly, I look at creating community, including inviting emerging adults to serve and join small groups. Thirdly, I discuss critical mass: it’s important that emerging adults see that there are people like them. They need to belong, and I suggest producing for them a Freshers’ Guide. Before concluding (I’ll leave that part for you to read yourself!), I explore intentionality, and how youth workers, pastors, and the church alike need to take responsibility.

    I’ve included case studies, statistics and guides, as well as an ecclesiology based on the first church in Acts, and vision based on Ephesians 1.

    This booklet is based on my dissertation, and I used the same title for that. I chose it because this was my lived experience as an emerging adult, and I felt I had something to say on the matter; stories to tell, pointers to give, questions to ask. So often, I think, the church notices they are missing a demographic (often those under 25), and instead of asking people in that age group what would attract and engage them, they come up with their own ideas during their members’ meetings. I suppose that’s better than not noticing at all, or not doing anything about it. Perhaps you’re in this position now? If you’re looking at how to engage emerging adults, may I ask that you ask emerging adults? My booklet doesn’t provide all the answers, but I hope that it begins a conversation, asks the right questions, and points you in the right direction.

     

  • Unity and the Myth of Neutrality

    by the Revd Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow at Girton College Cambridge, and Assistant Curate, St John the Divine, Kennington

    There is no such thing as ‘neutral’ when it comes to our treatment of other people.

    This is, of course, an obvious truth – one accepted for generations and across thousands of different particular circumstances. Refusing to take a position when it comes to the dignity of others is not morally neutral – it comes with a moral cost. Silence in the face of oppression is complicity.

    Yet this seems to be something that people in the church – whether bishops, other clergy, or lay people – seem far too often to be unable or unwilling to accept. For years, with a few notable exceptions, the church has lagged behind in matters of social justice – acting not as a spur to change or even issuing a call to action, but instead bringing up the rear. Yet we have told ourselves, far too often, that to take a position instead and risk losing ‘neutrality’ is to do a disservice to our role in the world. We convince ourselves that silence is a moral good – often in the name of ‘unity’. Indeed, we convince ourselves that neutrality is possible.

    There is so much wrong with this position that it seems almost embarrassing to engage with it. Taking a step back and looking in at the church from the outside, it becomes increasingly clear why nobody wants to hear anything from us. It is not only our open hostility to things the world takes as read that makes us irrelevant. Our ‘neutrality’ on matters of human dignity entirely compromises our ability to speak out and be listened to as well.

    Silence is one end of the spectrum. A refusal to say anything, of course, is nonetheless a very clear statement. Silence means ‘we don’t have your back, and we draw an equivalence between “both sides”’. It means ‘we don’t care enough about you to stand up for you’. It means ‘you don’t matter’. It means ‘we will protect the institution of the church whilst using you as collateral’.

    Yet silence is only one part of the problem. Alleged neutrality is, in a sense, far more pernicious. And that false sense of neutrality seeps into every aspect of church life. We have seen it in the ‘both-side-ism’ of Living in Love and Faith, and we see it still in the conflation of the vulnerability of LGBTQI people with the vulnerability of those taking a self-professed conservative viewpoint. We see it in false equivalence between the ‘concern’ to keep conservatives in the church and the need to be ‘pastorally sensitive’ to LGBTQI people. Enough with the patronising claptrap. Enough with the falsehoods. We are barred from ministry; our loves are called ‘ungodly and devilish’; our lives are pruriently pored over; we are condemned to second-rate tolerance – at best. We are bleeding LGBTQI people from our church. There is no equivalence here – we don’t want to push anyone away from the Table, we simply want to take our rightful place, each of us created in the image of God just as much as straight people. We want the church to see what is already blessed by God.

    Yet within the church, we have departed so far from the reality of life that people live day to day that we have created our own ‘churchy’ culture that replaces real life with cis, heterosexualist fantasy. And far too many of us participate in it, LGBTQI or otherwise. We give it credence – we tell ourselves and each other how ‘brave’ it is for bishops and others to speak out in even lukewarm terms about LGBTQI people. We dance around ‘the issue’, and we ‘keep our heads down’ so as not to cause trouble.

    One of the most depressing things I’ve noticed in recent weeks is how many self-identifying LGBTQI clergy – and, worse, our allies – seem to have been conditioned into believing that the most we should hope for is the scraps under the Table. I have sat with clergy who fear being ‘too pro-same-sex marriage’ despite living with their partner, who have bought so heavily into the need for ‘balance’ and ‘neutrality’ that they are willing to disown the love of their life in the process. I have been told it’s a ‘step too far’, and that ‘well, we have managed OK’. ‘I’m not sure the church is in that place just yet.’ ‘These things move in long time frames.’ ‘We need some more theology’. ‘Let’s not rock the boat too much’.

    It’s about time to take the blinkers off. The life-giving power of the Gospel is not about ‘privately managing’. ‘We’ might have managed so far, but since when has the church been a church for those already in the institution, those already in the know who can have a ever-so-secret civil partnership ceremony in church, against the rules but allowed with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge. How have we gotten ourselves to a place where we – as LGBTQI clergy and those who profess to be our allies – will not be honest? Much criticism has been levelled at the bishops – and much of that is entirely valid – yet where is the ground-swell of truth-telling from clergy on the front line? Why are we so timid? Have we really drunk the ‘unity’ Kool-Aid, a ‘unity’ that is simply a false neutrality that tramples over queer people in the process?

    The time has come for us to get off the fence – bishops, clergy, laity – everyone. The time has come for us to stop pretending there is something called ‘neutral’, and to call it out. There is nothing neutral about the current position of the Church of England as pertains to LGBTQI people – nothing whatsoever. In refusing to bless our relationships, it says there is nothing good in them – that we are unable to reflect the love of God in the same way that heterosexuals are. It says that we are somehow, innately, disordered. We are ‘less than’. Our love and its human expression is something that needs to be ‘excused’, something we should be slightly embarrassed about.

    There is no neutral position on same-sex relationships – but there is cowardice. And it needs to be called out – in bishops, in clergy, in laity – in ourselves. Yet we continue to let people get away with it. We tolerate their warm words that lead to no action. We nod when we hear talk of ‘unity’, buying into the absurd suggestion that bishops create it and that Christ demands it at any cost – even the lives of LGBTQI young people. We call people supportive who won’t lift a finger to actually support us. We keep quiet in order to ‘keep the peace’. We deny the image of God in others – and far too often ourselves as well.

    No more of this nonsense. It is time for the cycle to be broken. Our mission, our faith, our truth, our love, our relationships, our whole being depends on us loosening the shackles that continue to bind us, and our minds. The church can – must, surely – start to say what we believe it should say. But it’s not going to do it on its own – and if, as members of this church, we aren’t willing to play our part, then what are we for?

    The Archbishop of Canterbury, and other bishops, may be willing to continue to construct the alternative reality of ‘neutrality’ and silence when it comes to the human dignity of LGBTQI people, but we do not have to accept this as the only way. It is not. It has never been so, whatever we have become used to believing that we believe. Rather, let us become the church he speaks of – excepting this issue – as wanting to become:

    ‘We acted rightly, we spoke clearly, and we loved generously and we believed faithfully’.

    It is high time that this became true for our approach to LGBTQI people, our lives and loves, just as much as it is for anything else. To refuse to make it so is surely to cavort and collude with faithlessness, dishonesty and – ultimately – oppression.

    If you sit on the fence too long, it becomes rather uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s time to offer a reminder of that simple fact – and time for the church to become the beacon of hope it is called to be.

  • Mutual Flourishing or Repeating Our Mistakes? A Response to Together in Love and Faith

    Mutual Flourishing or Repeating Our Mistakes? A Response to Together in Love and Faith

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

    I was delighted to read the proposals from the Bishop of Oxford summarised  in the Church Times (4 November) and to hear him speak about them further on Radio 4 (details of all media engagements here). I had begun to fear that the Church would remain too timid publicly to extend to those in same sex relationships the love and welcome extended to those in heterosexual relationships.

    Looking at the first four of +Steven’s proposals in Together in Love and Faith, the second is to give “freedom of conscience to clergy and ordinands to order their relationships appropriately”. This would at last allow us to move on from the 1991 Issues in Human Sexuality document which was only prepared as a “discussion document” but which subsequently – and astonishingly – acquired the status of “holy writ”, even though the Preface stated “We cannot expect all to agree with our conclusions”. Yet when, in July 2022, Revd Mae Christie asked the question at General Synod, “When and by what mechanism was Issues in Human Sexuality formally written into the Selection Criterion of the Church of England?”, she received the following reply from the Bishop of Chester in his capacity of Chair of the Ministry Council:

    We do not have a record of the date or the mechanism by which Issues in Human Sexuality was formally written into the former Selection Criteria. Unfortunately, since the information is not readily available it could not be obtained within the time-frame available for responding to Synod questions.

    I was a founder member of Inclusive Church in the wake of the Jeffrey John debacle in Oxford diocese before the days of civil partnerships and same sex marriages. The “freedom of conscience” which +Steven is now proposing was the hallmark of our endeavours and, over two decades later, we have made no progress to date. I had rather feared that such a provision had been lost entirely in the pressure to regularise same sex marriage.

    Looking at +Steven’s proposals 1-4 together, I am taking it that clergy should be among those who are able to turn to the Church to solemnise their own same sex marriages in Church. I am not quite sure that this is crystal clear.

    However, there may also be a legal difficulty with the proposal for solemnising singe sex marriages in Church, whether for clergy couples or lay, which only rarely enters into LLF discussions. The CofE website Your Church Wedding makes clear that “Although same-sex marriage legislation has changed, it remains the case that it is not legally possible for same-sex couples to marry in the Church of England”.

    The reason for this prohibition is that, in 2013, when the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act was enacted, the then-Archbishops (Williams and Sentamu) were so bitterly opposed to it that the Government went massively out of its way to appease them by including a “quadruple lock”. This was intended to “safeguard” the CofE against any attempt by any future Government to unscramble the legislation to allow such marriages in CofE Churches. Savi Hensman has discussed this on the Equal website.

    Bishop Steven’s proposals 5-7 are a different matter; they concern the provision of a platform for those clergy who oppose single sex marriage in approximately the same way as has been done for those who opposed the ordination and consecration of women. I am afraid my sympathies lie with the suffragans in the Oxford Diocese who are not in agreement with this, because that framework has at its heart a central dilemma. While the Five Guiding Principles state that “the Church of England is fully and unequivocally committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all, without reference to gender”, at the same time they make “pastoral and sacramental provision for the minority within the Church of England who are unable to receive the ministry of women bishops or priests”. How is it possible to do both? More than that, this arrangement apparently allows the Church to “maintain the highest possible degree of communion and [also, and at the same time, contributes] to mutual flourishing” (House of Bishops Declaration 2014; GS Misc 1077). Whether Synod would be prepared to accept such a flawed notion a second time remains to be seen.

    Another aspect of this arrangement in relation to women as priests and bishops is that it did not emanate from the Church in the first place but very definitely was imposed upon the Church by Parliament in 1992; Judith Maltby’s 2011 chapter in Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby and William Whyte (eds) Established Church: Past, Present and Future explains this. Having been established in 1992 this arrangement was, in effect, replicated in 2014.

    By 2014, however, the attitude of Parliament was totally different. It was the Government, rather than the Church, which introduced the Lords Spiritual (Women) Bill in 2014. This was specifically to allow new women bishops to leapfrog over their male counterparts in order to speed up the process of appointing women to the House of Lords. Indeed, debates in both Houses reflected their view that discrimination against women was not to be tolerated any longer in the Mother of Parliaments. All indications are that nowadays Parliament is as opposed to discrimination on these grounds as it is to discrimination against women.

    On the Sunday programme on 20 November, Ben Bradshaw, MP assured listeners that Parliament could well take an interest in the matter of gay clergy and laity if the Established Church continues to remain out of step with the people of this land. Mr Bradshaw was a very effective Parliamentary operator on the matter of women bishops and I am sure he would be as effective this time.

    Further, these arrangements in respect of women have allowed pockets of discrimination and, in some cases, bullying and downright rudeness to persist, which grieve and may damage all women (lay and ordained) who experience and even hear about them. This is why a mediation service had to be set up. Those who are “unable to receive the ministry of women as priests or bishops” can still be elected to the Crown Nominations Commission, there to impede the nomination of women as Diocesans. If similar arrangements persist, the same discrimination would be likely to occur in respect of those candidates in civil partnerships and same sex marriages.

    I would beg the Bishop of Oxford to bow to what seems to be the majority view in his own Diocesan House of Bishops and not to propose another fault line which will involve many of the same people and parishes and is likely to have many of the same effects. He might also reflect upon the costs of supporting specific bishops for the relatively few parishes which are already provided with Episcopal Oversight in these straitened times.

    Finally, the Established Church should perhaps be asking itself whether it can yet again propose a framework which would rely on carve-outs from one of the most important and effective pieces of legislation in recent times, The Equality Act (2010). It might also bear in mind that discrimination of any kind is essentially against the tenets of our Christian beliefs as has been made abundantly clear in the recent work on race and disability, for example. The Church perhaps needs to examine the justification for continuing to go out of its way to facilitate discrimination on grounds of either gender or sexuality.

    The first four proposals from +Steven are permissive rather than directive; that should offer latitude enough.

     

  • Real Presence in Sex and Sacrament

    Real Presence in Sex and Sacrament

    by Jessica Martin, Canon Residentiary at Ely Cathedral. Her book Holiness and Desire (Canterbury Press, 2020) explored the relationship between human and divine desire in an age of commodification. The concerns of this article were first explored in the 2021 Bampton Lectures (https://www.theology.oxford.ac.uk,/article/bampton-lectures-11 ) and are explored in The Eucharist in Four Dimensions (Canterbury Press, summer 2023).

    The pandemic and its lockdowns has had one strange effect for sacramental Christians.  It has destabilised the awkward theological truce on the eucharist. In Anglicanism, the range of sacramental understanding has long embraced the widest possible range of positions, from memorialism (“Do this in remembrance of me”) to Real Presence. Our liturgies (from 1549 onwards) gesture towards both and land on neither. The rise both of ecumenism and the parish communion movement have made too much theological clarity undesirable. So we look away, do what we do, and hope the Holy Spirit will supply all deficiencies.

    Until, that is, lockdowns forced us to think about it. The eucharist moved online. In the absence of either bread or bodies, in what lay the transforming work of the sacrament? The question became urgent, for a time, much discussed – even within Roman Catholic circles where sacramental orthodoxy is less commodious. The urgency has diminished as people have returned to physical worship, with real bread and even (for some) real wine, but not because the question is answered. Rather, it has made a wider question more visible.

    Because, even with restored physical freedoms, we inhabit an image-dominated digital world anyway. Those images hover between and across the boundary between the fully fictive and the representatively ‘real’, blurring the distinction between thought and the material world – just as the more evasive of our sacramental liturgies do.

    Even in secular encounter we do not seem to know what constitutes a present, unambiguous action, as distinct from reflecting or representing an action (itself perhaps ‘unreal’) that took place elsewhere. So business meetings online may be ‘real’ meetings taking real-world decisions; but other forms of online encounter claim a freedom from real-world consequences by defining the online world as closer to thought than to action. In such a definition, online speech should have no real-world outworkings, and online images of events no weighty, real-world counterparts. In fact, truth and fakery merge in the online world of represented things – and the shadowlands between the two contain monsters more powerful than they claim.

    Meanwhile, sacramental action (in person or online) has at its centre a presence-in-absence, Jesus. That presence-in-absence, the reality of Jesus at the heart of the eucharist, both underpins and fiercely divides our collective understanding of what counts as ‘real’. How significant is ‘the material’ to this?

    Is the Real what happens in the transformed believing heart, the bread no more than a materialised idea? Or does the Real lie, not in the bread as bread, but in the performative power of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper: ‘this is my Body: do this in remembrance of me’? In this reading, repeating the divine command within the liturgy gives the words their power to transform what the bread is, from one substance to another. And, in those cases, place, and even time, might not be important. As long as the words were said, and the person listening were participating in the rite at which they were said, any bread might do. (Theological opinions on this differ; but in practice, many eat bread at home at the point of reception onscreen, even when watching a recording of a service celebrated at some other time and in, of course, another place)

    Finally, the bread itself may, within that divinely performative liturgical event made by the priest at a particular place and time, be so fused with the absent body of Jesus as to allow no gap at all between the materiality of one and the Real Presence of the other. In such a case an online eucharist, for the one watching, is not a eucharist at which she can receive.

    The historic divisions on eucharistic theology underpinning these different positions have had a profound influence on our modern assumptions about the reality status of represented things. That’s too long a story for this article. But we can see how it has come to matter by comparing two activities that are not as different as they seem: the holy Sacrament, and sex.

    Sex and sacrament both assume a real encounter with an Other. Yet, for both, though the realness of the encounter is in some sense guaranteed by the sensory apprehension of a material thing (bread, a body), online that material thing must also be, as material, absent. It is represented.  How far that representation is presence depends on the reality-status accorded to it.

    In the online world, representation is the only presence. Online, the sacrament hopes against hope to convince its participants of the reality status of its representative actions. Sex, on the other hand, is the activity of all activities most represented digitally. It is the focus of the most intense interest and engagement – and of the most contempt and exploitation. Taking the porn industry, for example – the internet’s biggest sexual expression – it is highly reliant on maintaining a boundary between the fictive and the real, because its imaginings are so frequently violent. Just one true example: when 14-year old Rose found video of her real rape by older men online (under the tag ‘teen getting destroyed’) her challenge to the platform, Pornhub, was ignored until she had the bright idea of writing to them, not as herself, but as a lawyer – at which point the platform took that video down. But it blended unnoticeably with the mass of other content similarly tagged: ‘extreme teen abuse’; ‘teen abused while sleeping’. When Pornhub was challenged about providing such content at all, it took refuge in the idea of representation as a form of thought: ‘We allow all forms of sexual expression that follow our Terms of Use, and while some people may find these fantasies inappropriate, they do appeal to many people around the world and are protected by various freedom of speech laws’.

    There are many, many Roses – and the boundary’s permeability is also porn’s great promise for its users. Imagining something might be true is the point – transforming, or corrupting – of fantasy. For, at some level, all digital encounter piggybacks on the idea of having reality status, however deniable.

    And, in all digital encounter, the ‘real presence’ experience is actually very elusive. In online sacrament as in online sex, the watcher may conclude, at the end, that the Other they sought was no more than a chimera, an ephemeral set of internal brain-to-body responses, with no ‘real’ meeting here to walk the heart into knowledge – heavenly or horrifying, transcendent or disappointed, all fading into the shadows from which it came.

    Yet both sex and sacrament, across the centuries, have made very similar kinds of claims to be an irreducible encounter – an encounter of transforming power, to which no calculable value can be assigned. ‘If one offered for love all the wealth of one’s house, it would be utterly scorned’ writes the Bible’s erotic poet (Song of Songs, 8.7). The parallels between meeting God and meeting a lover run throughout humanity’s long history of desire, which is why the reading history of Song of Songs has as much in it about God as about sex. Now that sex is, in almost all its forms, so fully transactional – whether in swiping right, or in matching identity-statuses, or in becoming product as one consumes product technologically – so that only friendship is left as the great desideratum – it is curious to remember a history where human desire, in some circumstances, had no price-tag to it.

    This old-fashioned characterisation of desire as literally a priceless quality asks of us another question about its expression online. Because the online medium is not simply a transparent, neutral means for access to experience that would otherwise be remote or inaccessible.  Sex and sacrament, in fact, share the same difficulties with the platform: that the ’free’ digital experience automatically monetizes ‘presence’ for gain.

    So it’s not good enough to treat the online medium as a fully transparent open window onto experience, as unambiguous in the nature of its seeing as the corporeal gaze of the human eye. Online seeing is an inexplicit transaction to which the seer assents simply by entering the portal. The ‘free’ model for internet encounter, based on the harvesting of customer data, was not an inevitable market model for online presence, but it has become so. It is the dominant mode for all non-physical encounter. And the point about it is that it requires the one who sees to be both consumer and consumed, without ever quite telling its users that the stuff of their lives are its ongoing and continual price. That is why a corporation can peddle the cruel and violent destruction of the young and the corruption of all whose desires are stirred by it, and call it business-as-usual. Just people thinking stuff they would think anyway, monetized. So they say.

    And this medium – the speeded up, logical end of a society based upon consumption – is the one into which we have decided to put a most sacred ritual at the centre of which is a body broken and consumed.

    When communion re-enacts, in symbol and in narrative, the consumption of a body, it does this out of a conviction that eating people is wrong. Deathly wrong. ‘Their throat is an open sepulchre’ writes the psalmist of the wicked, ‘eating up my people as it were bread’ (Psalms 14 and 53). Jesus (who thought through the language of the psalms), said to his companions, ‘take; eat; this is my body’.  He knew what he was doing when he asked people to eat him as if he were bread.

    His offer: take me as a sacrifice, in exchange for every act of devouring the human race ever has or ever could make. Take, break and consume me, just as you take, break and consume each other in the commonplace voracity of the world, but learn that my ordinary act of sacrifice is of infinite value because I am also the infinite God. Devour me, in order to be freed of the appalling consequences of your devourings of each other.  Eat me, to enter, however briefly, into a world where your needy emptiness no longer drives you to prey upon those around you, freed from the cruelty of your being by the constant gift of my self.

    I am not sure that we meant to place the holy eucharist inside the temple to the marketplace gods; but we did. We put it there for consumption (along with a lot of the Church’s other highly marketised ‘missional’ activity).  Perhaps by doing it we have become subversives on the marketplace gods’ territory. Or perhaps we are the subverted. The internet is a strange platform upon which to choose to place the ritual that reverses all other greeds.

    It might be the boldest thing we could do – placing communion in the heart of all commodification. Or it could be the silliest choice, the most foolhardy. Are we blaspheming? Or are we, urgently hungry, sick of gobbling shadows, filling ourselves with the bread of the Presence?

    I don’t know the answer. We took the eucharist online at a tricky time, for terribly practical, sensible reasons – and we are still doing it, because otherwise, in our world dominated by online representation, we feel our physical expressions to be ephemeral, powerless, invisible. If we are not on the internet, we think we are not really present at all.

    And – however our merciful God might redeem our terrible choices –  there’s something very, very wrong about that.

     

     

  • Thirty Years On

    by Rev Martine Oborne, recently appointed Chair of WATCH (Women and the Church), a group that works for gender equality in the Church of England

    Thirty years ago, in 1992, I was appointed to the main board of an investment bank in the City called Rothschilds. I was 34 and the youngest woman to have been made a Director in the firm.

    At the same time, a battle was being fought in the Church of England to dismantle the legislation that blocked women from becoming priests. I was almost unaware of this at the time because I had largely given up going to church and would barely have called myself a Christian. Nonetheless, as I look back on 1992 today, I think how I might have been in the thick of that battle if I had stuck firm to the calling I had first received as a child – that God wanted me to be a vicar in his church.

    I didn’t come from a churchgoing family, but my parents sent me and my sister to Sunday School to get us out of the house so that they could have ‘a bit of time to themselves’ (whatever that meant!). And I became a very spiritual child, praying, reading my Bible, enjoying being in Church, watching my vicar Father Stephen and feeling that one day I might grow up and do the things he did. Lighting candles, reading from scripture, talking about God and chatting to old ladies.

    One day at school when I was about ten, my teacher started asking the class what we wanted to be when we grew up. One kid said an astronaut, another said Prime Minister, another said a film star and so on. But, when it got to me, I blurted out that I wanted to be a vicar. This was greeted with much laughter from my friends.  And then my teacher said, ‘Well, you can’t do that, Martine – they don’t have women vicars.’ And, at that, the whole class collapsed into fits of mirth while I just sat there feeling an idiot.

    I felt not only stupid but also confused.  It was the late 1960s and brave women were battling to breakdown discrimination in all areas of the public sphere.  And they were succeeding.  So why was it that I could not be a vicar, just because I had been born female?

    I began to wonder what my calling might be.  In my mid teens I had a time of worrying that I might be called to be a second Virgin Mary and I remember praying that God would send a dream to my mum, rather than to my boyfriend, to explain what was going on.

    But I guess, in all seriousness, this was the start of my giving up on my calling, setting aside the foolish things of my childhood and seeking other paths in life.  I got a place at Oxford, a job in the City and good things followed – a nice home, a family and a rewarding career where I was valued and treated as an equal alongside my mostly male colleagues.

    I started going back to church in my mid thirties to get the children into the local church primary school and I thought I could then drift away again after this mission had been accomplished.  But God took the opportunity to renew my faith and my calling and I discovered that, thanks to the persistence and sacrifice of brave women and men like those at MOW (The Movement for the Ordination of Women), women could become priests and vicars.

    That was, therefore, the beginning of a journey that finds me now happily serving as the vicar of a small parish in West London, doing all the things that Father Stephen had done many years ago.

    End of happy story, yes?  But also no.

    Because, although I am a vicar in the Church of England, I am not a vicar on the same terms as I would be if I were a man.  Although almost every Anglican in the land has wanted ministry in the Church to be equally open to men and women from the 1970s onwards, there have been certain small powerful groups within the Church that have resisted this vigorously and viciously.  This meant that legal provisions were made in the 1990s to allow parishes, if they wanted, to say no to women priests.  And then later, in 2014, when the barriers were removed that had prevented women priests from becoming bishops, new legislation enabled ‘flying bishops’ to be appointed so that parishes, if they wanted, could say no to women bishops.

    So I serve in a church where parishes can still advertise for a new vicar and ask for men only to apply, where bishops who are women are required to delegate their authority of oversight to male bishops for some of their parishes, where some of my colleagues espouse a theology that says God created men to lead and women to be led, and where some of my colleagues believe I am not actually a priest (that my ordination was invalid.)  And the official position of the Church is that we want these people, with the theologies that underpin their positions, to flourish.

    But hang on a second, I hear you say.  Isn’t this kind of discrimination illegal in the UK today under The Equality Act 2010?  And the answer is that yes it would be – except the Church of England has exemptions under that legislation which allow it to discriminate.

    OK, you might say.  But people like bishops who hold public office can’t be exempted under the Act.  And that’s true, which means that women bishops should operate on precisely the same terms as men bishops.  But in 2014 the Church got an amendment to the legislation saying that, for the purposes of the Act, bishops do not hold ‘public office.’  Which is somewhat extraordinary, since twenty six of them sit in the House of Lords.

    So what on earth is going on?  How can we be in 2022 and the national Church is still discriminating against women, who represent about two thirds of their congregations and half the population?

    The arguments boil down to largely two things: one, those who say we can’t have women priests because the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t allow them; two, those who say God created men, and only men, to be in charge and the Bible attests to this.

    I can’t get into the response to all this in this short post.  Suffice it to say that the arguments and theology have been hotly contested over the years and millions of words have been written.  But the Church’s legislative council, General Synod, came to the conclusion that there is no theological basis for women to be prohibited from being priests or bishops.  Which should have been an end to the matter, as the purpose of such councils is to resolve theological disputes and make decisions to bring unity and then allow the Church to move forward.  When the apostles Paul and Peter in the early Church debated whether Gentile Christians needed to be circumcised or not, they came to a conclusion and special provisions were not made for dissenters.  Nonetheless, two thousand years later, special provisions were made for those who continue to say no to women priests and bishops.  And, because of these provisions, the old discredited arguments and theologies not only continue, but are often seen on a par with the arguments and theology underpinning the validity of women’s ministry.

    My personal belief is that we are a separate Church from the Roman Catholic Church and can make our own decisions on women’s ministry, as we have on many other areas of doctrine such as allowing priests to be married.  And I believe that God created humankind in his image, in his image he created us, male and female – as we read in the first chapter of Genesis.  So that we do not reflect that image of God when men and women are not equal in the Church.

    The women and men behind the Movement for the Ordination of Women did great work back in the 1990s and earlier, and we have so much to thank them for.  But the work for equality for women in the Church is not done.  This is why I have accepted the role of Chair at WATCH (Women and the Church), which campaigned for women bishops and now seeks equality for all in our national Church.  I hope and pray that, in my lifetime, I will not only see the Church give up its exemptions from UK equalities legislation but also come to truly value women, both ordained and lay, and lament how it has treated us in the past.

    Please join WATCH here to help.

     

  • Just Housing: A Christian Vision

    Just Housing: A Christian Vision

    by the Rt Revd Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, diocesan Bishop of Chelmsford and lead Bishop for Housing in the Church of England

    As a sign of how important the housing crisis is to the leaders of the Church, last year the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed me as the first Bishop for Housing in the Church of England.

    Although I have no expertise in housing, I know something of what it is to be homeless. I arrived in Britain in 1980 as a 13-year-old refugee, following the impact of the Islamic Revolution in my home country of Iran. Having left with no more than a suitcase each, my family and I were welcomed here and were offered housing in a theological college and then a vacant vicarage. That stability gave us a base and the stability from which we were able to start building new lives.

    40 years later I am responsible for making sure the recommendations of ‘Coming Home’, the report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Housing, Church and Community, are taken forward.

    This is a daunting challenge, but what motivates me is that I’m passionate about the church being involved in working for greater social justice. Since 8 million people in England are living in overcrowded, unaffordable or unsuitable housing (which in turn leads to many other social problems), it seems to me there is a clear call for Christians across all denominations to work towards housing provision.

    The Coming Home report spells out a distinct Christian vision for housing and community. The scriptures tell a story of a journey from a God-provided home, of humanity then becoming ‘homeless’, moving out into a dangerous world, and then of a long process of redemption which leads back home again – but to one that looks different from the first.

    The report unpacked this trajectory and from it developed five core values to characterise all good housing. First the story of Creation and humanity’s role in stewarding the earth means that our housing must be sustainable; the built environment needs to be in harmony with the natural environment, and our housing should be high on quality but low on carbon.

    The pervasive reality of sin means that God’s good creation is susceptible to environmental and social disintegration. Homes aren’t always places of protection, nor communities free from injustice and exploitation. Physical housing can be poorly built, standards compromised, and repairs neglected, which is why good housing will always put a high value on safety.

    Thirdly, the incarnation reaffirms the goodness of the physical creation and the value of human communities having places and spaces where they belong. Good housing should therefore offer stability, where local people can afford to live and put down roots, so they and their families can thrive.

    God’s redeemed people – the Church – represent a new kind of humanity, no longer governed by unjust distinctions based on race, class, gender, sexuality, ability or income. This translates into a commitment to housing that is welcoming and sociable, with hospitable spaces that can help people from different cultures, faiths and backgrounds find a place of connection, and build long term relationships.

    Finally, the vision of the new creation means that although we will never achieve perfection in housing in this age, we can still work towards the one to come, where all is healed and transformed, and God is at home among us. Housing that reflects this means the architecture, design and technology all work together to create satisfying places of beauty that people delight to live in.

    This reflection provides five simple values as the benchmark for the Church’s engagement in the housing sector: good housing is sustainable, safe, stable, sociable and satisfying. The language is accessible for people of all faiths or none, yet there is theological depth undergirding each of the five values.

    An example of a church-initiated response to the shortage of affordable homes has been in Keswick. Back in 2009, Keswick Churches Together hosted a series of open meetings on issues facing the town. Housing kept coming up in these conversations, as many people who were born in the town, had gone to school there, or worked in Keswick, were living in substandard accommodation at unaffordable rents, or were being forced to commute into the town from miles away.

    A working group was assembled to think about the best response to the need for more and better housing, and Keswick Community Housing Trust (KCHT) was set up as a result. The vicar of St John’s Church in Keswick offered to sell them a piece of land next to the church graveyard, and 11 affordable homes were built there. The success of this led to three more developments by KCHT, one of them on land that had belonged to the Methodist Church. Around half the homes are for shared ownership and the other half are let out at rents that are truly affordable in perpetuity – measured in relation to local earnings, not market rents.

    This experience from Keswick was shared with the Commissioners and features in the Coming Home report. We would love to see many more grass roots initiatives like that, so we want to invite you to be part of this journey. We’re setting up a Church Housing Foundation to empower the Church to engage with housing at all levels, and are looking to collaborate with any partners, groups or individuals who share this vision and want to see God’s kingdom expressed through bricks and mortar – delightful homes and thriving communities up and down the country.

     

     

  • Getting Hot under the Collar about Sex

    by Mother Fiona Jack, curate at St.Barnabas, Ealing and member of General Synod

    A motion to urge the government to take action to limit children’s access to pornography was passed with an overwhelming majority at the July sessions of General Synod. There was also a recommendation for programmes to increase awareness of its pernicious influence on the young. There’s currently an Online Safety Bill at Committee stage in Parliament; if passed, it will go some way to bringing in legislation to address the problem. No-one, I imagine, would take issue with this; we heard evidence from professionals, parents and confessors attesting to the damage done when children access age-inappropriate material.

    I have a particular interest in this as, in my other life, I run a qualitative research business. Recently, we conducted a study for a major platform provider on the same topic. We discovered that not only do children access 18+ sites, but they are often more tech-savvy than their parents and can circumvent parental controls because they know their parent’s login and password details. The issue is much broader, however, than pornography. Equally harmful for children is violent content or horror. I remember my own daughter (despite warnings from me) watching a horror film with a 15 rating when she was about 12. She discovered, to her regret, why such films are not recommended for younger children. As well as horror and violence, online gambling and other online purchases can present problems: not only can children manipulate their parents’ email accounts, but they sometimes have their bank and credit card details and can run up large bills through online purchases of – for example – computer games, which also sometimes have violent or other adult content.

    Given this potential broader remit, I was somewhat disturbed that the debate in Synod focussed on pornography, to the exclusion of these other risks to children’s mental health and well-being. Coupled with other debates in Synod and the subsequent furore around same-sex relationships and marriage at the Lambeth Conference, this led me to reflect on why, as a Church, we seem to have sex on the brain. The overriding narrative from the Church seems to be that sexual sin is more serious than any other. What about the many other besetting sins of our age? Why don’t we hear much about pride, greed, envy or anger?

    I would argue – and I don’t think this is particularly contentious – that the underlying message of the Gospels is love. We hear plenty about agape love, certainly, the kind of selfless love a parent has for their child or the love God has for us. In the Church, we’re all comfortable with this kind of love. Love is OK as long as it’s pure and spiritual, right?

    There’s also the eros kind of love though, as so breathtakingly portrayed in the Song of Songs. What is it about the eros kind of love that makes some people in the Church get so hot under the collar? Being embodied is part of our identity – we are not built or intended to be pure spirit either on this or the other side of the grave – have you noticed how nobody talks about the resurrection of the body these days? We interact in the world for good or ill with our bodies. In a lecture entitled “Towards a Christian Sexual ethic for the 21st century”, the Revd Dr Carla Grosch-Miller pointed out quite rightly that the only function of the female clitoris is pleasure. If we believe we are fearfully and wonderfully made by our Creator, then we can only assume that enjoyment of sex was part of God’s plan for women in the first place. And for how many centuries have women who have enjoyed sex been thought of as whores – not to mention the cultures which still practise FGM for this very reason?

    There can be no more beautiful expression of love than the joy of sexual union between two people who love each other in the context of a committed relationship – and that’s equally true for heterosexual and homosexual couples. If we theologise sex into something shameful and sinful, then we deny a fundamental part of what it is to be human, and life becomes beige not red-blooded. In the words of the Song of Songs: ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it’. If we are fortunate enough to find this kind of love in our lives, we might find in it a window into the love of God which is both passionate and fervent, full of desire and longing, eros as well as agape. Sadly, we are taught not to want certain things or certain people: we don’t choose who we love – how much easier would life be if that were the case?

    Going back to our starting point, our children must be protected from all kinds of harm online, not just pornography. Over-emphasis on sexual sin can make us look like people for whom it is always Lent and never Easter (Pope Francis) or like Narnia without Aslan where it’s always winter and never Christmas. Here’s a radical thought: instead of disapproving attitudes and a tone of moral outrage towards the secular world and our fellow Christians, what if the Church were to send a message of understanding and encouragement, a message that speaks of joy and hope even in the midst of suffering? Perhaps then we’d be following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.

     

  • Entering Creationtide: The Church and the Climate Emergency

    by Revd Ruth Newton, parish priest of St John’s Sharow, tutor at St Hild college, and member of General Synod and the Environmental Working Group. Ruth is undertaking a doctorate into the theological motivations of environmental activists

    There is no longer any question that anthropogenic climate change is happening, with an overwhelming scientific consensus that the climate is warming at an alarming rate due to human activity. In 2021, the UN Secretary-General suggested that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change findings were nothing less than “a code red for humanity”, that “the alarm bells are deafening”, and that the evidence is irrefutable. The record-breaking temperatures experienced this summer have hammered home to those of us in this country a message that our brothers and sisters in the global South have been telling us for some time: that climate change is a present reality, not a future threat.

    Consensus for action has been growing within the Church too. Striving “to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth” has been recognised as a mark of Anglican Mission for over 30 years. It’s the aspiration of General Synod that the Church be “Carbon Net Zero” by 2030, and this has placed environmental actions firmly on the agenda of PCCs and Diocesan Synods.

    In a Church which is divided, not least on human sexuality, environmental mission has the potential to provide the common ground around which we can coalesce and where the Church could give unequivocal moral leadership. The recent “Lambeth Calls” on the environment and sustainable development attracted less publicity than the more controversial one on human dignity, precisely because, as one bishop reportedly said, they were a “no brainer”.

    Nevertheless, in a Church recovering from the impact of the Covid lockdowns and facing the immediate challenge of the cost-of-living crisis, I wonder if “the environment” is seen as just another issue to be ticked off an ever-growing to-do list. For too many, environmental mission is still seen as a distraction from the “core business” of being Church – the evangelism, youth and children’s work, pastoral care, social advocacy, and the myriad of other things we need to attend to.

    However, “the environment” is not one issue amongst many, or even the issue of our times. I would argue it is not “an issue” at all; it is bigger than that. It is not a distraction from “core business”, but rather the backdrop to it, the horizon against which all our theology, mission and ministry are undertaken. Our apologetics and evangelism will prove ineffective if we present a version of the Gospel which fails to address the pressing questions the ecological crisis is raising. Those engaged in pastoral care will find themselves faced with people who are, with some justification, suffering eco-anxiety. Those who advocate with and for the poor will discover, as so many relief and development agencies have done, that climate change and ecological degradation intersect with and amplify poverty to the extent that one cannot be dealt with without addressing the other. All our theology, mission and ministry will need to be recalibrated to meet the challenges of “the environment”.

    Doing this will not be easy, as even finding the appropriate language is a struggle. I wrestle with the idea of stewardship. I find little scriptural warrant for it, apart from a contested interpretation of Genesis 1:28, and, given our track record to date, I have little confidence in the abilities of humans to proactively manage the natural world. I wonder if we might do better to think in terms of human restraint in using natural resources.

    Thinking in terms of creation-care is preferable, but only if we recall that we too are created beings, dependent upon both God and the non-human creation. We need the rest of creation more than they need us. Since we have tended to think of ourselves as separate from the rest of creation, the language of creation-care does not always sufficiently emphasise the degree to which the ecological crisis is also a humanitarian one, affecting people, and affecting them right now.

    Climate change disproportionately affects the global poor, black and brown people, women, and children. Those who, historically, have been least culpable are also the ones who are bearing the most cost. Those who are already marginalised will be marginalised further. We have a responsibility to future generations who bear the consequences of our actions and inaction. So I prefer to think in terms of justice. Whilst I am unsure whether God has given Christians a mandate to “steward” creation, I am confident he has given us one to do justice and love mercy, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.

    This month, as we celebrate creation-tide, we may well rejoice in the beauty of the natural world and the splendour of all that God has made. We may even consider our culpability in the world’s problems and may commit to live differently. But let us not shy away from addressing the human cost of the ecological emergency, and our prophetic role in addressing that.

    A Christian response to “the environment” cannot be left to those environmental enthusiasts and nature lovers who have heroically advocated for decades. Nor can the theology be delegated to the specialism of eco-theologians. It will involve the whole Body of Christ, in all its diversity, uniting, as the Church takes up its calling to announce and signify the Kingdom of God. I am probably slightly too fond of saying “in the face of global heating, we cannot be lukewarm”. But really, as those who seek to follow Christ, we can’t afford to be anything other than “all in”.