Category: International Relations

Bishops Speaking Out: So Very Right and So Very Wrong

by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham, former Member of General Synod and Trustee of the Ozanne Foundation

This is my thoughtful quote of the week: ‘The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget – that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.’ So said the wonderful Rachel Held Evans. Her prophetic voice did exactly that. It drew people in. Oh my, do we miss her!

It’s easy to jump to a pious interpretation of this radical inclusivity of the gospel, but the truth is more incarnational than sacramental. Jesus includes real embodied people, not their notional ‘souls’ (whatever you imagine a disembodied soul might actually be!). Because there are prostitutes and beggars, refugees and tax collectors in Jesus’ life we can’t avoid the message our faith is giving us. That message, because it is embodied, can’t help but be political.

When the policy of exporting refugees to Rwanda was first mooted, I thought it was a joke. It seemed so off the scale of normal morality that it couldn’t be true. More than failing to welcome the stranger amongst us, a code which most world religions hold dear, the proposal was to export them. It looks like a government-sponsored form of human trafficking. People who are in the most desperate need being sent against their will to a country they don’t want to go to. A country which for many will prove dangerous.

As a country we badly need more people willing and able to work. The NHS, care services, farms, haulage, airports are all struggling to deliver. We need people, but not, it seems, refugee types of people. The layers of prejudice are astounding.

All this stirred the hearts and consciences of our Archbishops and Bishops. They wrote a stiff letter which appeared in The Times on June 14th. I’m tempted to say: ‘What took you so long?’ Even Prince Charles pronounced before them. But yes, it was a good and helpful intervention, and yes, for some, this dose of gospel truth was offensive.

As I write, we have seen a plane loaded with a mere handful of men stopped on the tarmac by the European Court of Human Rights. They are now saying it might be a year before another flight is attempted. The government is managing not only to be cruel and immoral but also ludicrous!

I am left with a question: a question about this united action of the bishops. They understood that you don’t exclude people, you welcome them, and they knew that this was at the heart of the gospel. They were prepared to tolerate the consequent offence that some felt because they deeply believed that what they were saying was right.

Why then can they do the right thing at a national level, but not within their own institution? If you are a gay priest and you get married you are excluded from any further preferment. If you are gay and married and feel the call of God to ordination you are excluded before you even get on to the first step. Many are put into the intolerable position of being asked to choose between the call of God on their lives and the person they love most deeply. Somehow the Church of England thought it was OK to embark on yet another cycle of study and discussion about the theological rationale for excluding people simply for being the people God made them to be.

I know some folk defend Living in Love and Faith, but frankly it stinks. It stinks because it only exists because we have accepted the premise that discussing other people’s sexuality in order to determine whether they can be fully included is a legitimate thing to do. It is not. It is abusive and simply repeats the abuse that the church has perpetrated over the decades.

Only this time it is worse.

Worse because we’d reached a point where it looked as if change might happen, but maybe it never will. Worse because privately many and possibly the majority of bishops know what is the right, faithful, gospel-led thing to do, but remain silent. Worse because the way we exclude people is the primary cause for the collapse of numbers. Not the language we use or the music we play, but the way the Church spits out the people we love.

I could have written the same article about excluding black people, or disabled people, or people with mental illness, or alas survivors of abuse. There is a long list because in so many areas we still get our sense of identity by who we keep out of the club. We know it’s not right, but somehow we can’t help it!

Dear Bishops, why keep the good ‘you’ hidden? Why follow the crowd? You could have a rush of blood to the head and decide to tell one another what you really believe, and acknowledge that we have a huge gospel imperative to stop excluding anyone. That’s not only at a national level, but within the very heart of our church. In this past week you have rather magnificently conquered your fear of causing offence, for the sake of the gospel. You are still standing. It was OK. You can do it again. Take a long hard look at who is being excluded from our church and resolve to stop doing it…..for the sake of the gospel.

June 17, 2022
Ghana: “Grandma, What Big Teeth You Have….!”

by the Ven Peter Leonard, Archdeacon of the Isle of Wight and Chair of OneBodyOneFaith

On social media this last week I saw a light-hearted post which questioned how Little Red Riding Hood fails to recognise that a wolf has replaced her grandma in the famous fairy tale. It is a good question but not seeing or responding to the danger in front of you is not sadly restricted to fairy tales.

The parliament of Ghana is about to discuss the “Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill” which proposes that anyone who identifies as gay or transgender face imprisonment for up to five years and anyone who promotes or supports non-straight sexual identities be sent to prison for up to 10 years. It also requires Ghanaian citizens to report so called ‘suspects’. This is potentially the toughest anti-gay legislation in the world and the House of Bishops of the Anglican Church in Ghana has issued a statement in full support of the bill stating that to be LGBTQI+ “is unbiblical and ungodly”. They further state that they will “open their counselling and support centres for the needed transformation services required by these persons” – also known as conversion therapy. You can read the full statement here.

Despite the media coverage of this statement neither of our English archbishops nor any bishop in the Church of England has said anything about the Ghanaian bishops’ actions. It is as if they have their red hoods pulled down and are still choosing to see grandma rather than a wolf. Although it is interesting how quick they are to respond when an Anglican province makes a more progressive statement about the LGBTQI+ community isn’t it?!

I am particularly impacted by this statement because I serve in the Diocese of Portsmouth, which as part of the Inter Diocesan West Africa Link scheme is partnered with the Anglican Church in Ghana. Portsmouth has a long history of supporting the church in Ghana financially, in prayer and through mutual visits. The diocese is due to be hosting the Ghanaian bishops and their wives in the run up to the Lambeth conference next year. I have been aware of their anti-LGBTQI+ stance for some time and that has been problematic for me as a civil partnered gay man and for others.

But this new step presents me, and many other ordained and lay members of Portsmouth Diocese with a challenge. I am already being contacted by people asking what they can do. I know of churches who are withdrawing their financial support immediately and asking for action in terms of a statement from the Diocese of Portsmouth and more direct steps when the Ghanaian bishops visit. What form that action could take is uncertain – is it more effective to refuse to host them or to challenge them and protest when they are here?

One of the joys of being within the Diocese of Portsmouth is that it has felt a relatively “safe” place to be an openly gay member of the clergy and there are many churches which are fully inclusive of LGBTQI+ Christians. To invite the Ghanaian bishops into that safe place makes it considerably less safe, not only for those of us who work for the diocese but also for those members of the church, clinging on by their fingertips, who will see welcoming them here as a statement of support for what they have said.

For anyone outside of the church who sees the diocese welcoming the Ghanaian bishops also places us squarely in support of them. The only way to address this is a clear and unequivocal statement condemning the bill and their support of it.

To be clear, this is not about whether you support equal marriage, this is not about whether or not you think LGBTQI+ people can be part of the church. This is about that fact that LGBTQI+ people, or even those who are suspected of being LGBTQI+ will be locked up. If I were in Ghana I would be in prison as would my partner and many other people I know, or we would be being subjected to the tortures of so-called “conversion therapy” which even the UN has now condemned. Members of my family and friends would also be locked up for supporting me. Worse still it will result in people being hunted down in Ghana, beaten, and potentially killed. This is not an issue of culture or of different biblical interpretations – this is a matter of life and death for some. This is not the fabled “Good Disagreement” that is so often spoken of, but little seen, this is not a matter for “Pastoral Principles” however good they may be on paper.

This is homophobia. This is oppression. This is injustice and it is the absolute opposite of how Christ lived and what he taught.

I have said before, and it is a great sadness that it remains true within the Church of England, an apology with no action to change the behaviour is meaningless. The Archbishops and the House of Bishops can make as many apologies for the way the Church of England has treated the LGBTQI+ community, they can set up as many shared conversations and LLF type programmes as it likes but until something changes these are meaningless. Their silence in the face of such blatant homophobia and abuse of human rights puts them on the side of the oppressor.

It is time to call out the wolf and stop pretending we are still looking at grandma.

October 25, 2021
A Gospel of Love Trumps Hate in the White House

by the Revd Professor Robert Gilbert, Biochemistry Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford and Anglican parish priest

Does his faith help us to see why Joe Biden is the American President needed right now?

Political debate, and public discussion in the media, have never seemed so angry and divided as in recent years. Both in the United States and the United Kingdom there is a growing realisation that we are disunited. In other countries too, such as Poland, Hungary and Brazil, a politics of extremes has flourished.

One way in which the success of extreme political positions can be explained is as a response to the experiences of people “at the grass roots”. As a response to a profound sense of alienation and impotence, and of financial and social disadvantage, too. They feel that a radical, new direction is needed, and that they need to take back control.

And for sure, many people are justified in feeling powerless, and alienated from the centre where the power is; and many people do live in poverty and are forgotten about, with no route that they can see of making a greater contribution to the common life of their community and country.

But the anger and division voiced in politics and echoed by it in the media have not been simply a response to the voice of the people. I think the French-American literary anthropologist René Girard can help us understand something else that has been going on, and why Joe Biden might be the person well suited to help bring the hurt and fury to an end.

In Girard’s view, within human social groups, communities and societies, competition for limited resources and opportunities, and resentment at (perceived) relative success of others and unmet desire, find a let out in the spontaneous creation of “victims”, or perhaps put more biblically, “scapegoats”. Onto the scapegoats get loaded everything which seems to be making the community or society all wrong with itself. The scapegoats are innocent, but the community that has fastened their problems to them really believes they are guilty. If they do not believe this, then the scapegoating mechanism will not work. When the scapegoat is driven out, or killed, no sense of relief will come.

Girard then realised that the life and teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus provide a total critique of this scapegoating process. Jesus seems to be the one who is driven out by his society, and whose death can bring people together: “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed” (John 11:50). For Girard’s analysis, Jesus’s resurrection, the return of the scapegoat in forgiveness and love, reveals the reality of human violence and demonstrates the power of God to contain it, forgive it, and end it. In the words of the British theologian James Alison, following Girard, in this “God himself has given us the key to discover and inhabit with God the ordinary and good “secularity” of everything that is” (On Being Liked, DLT 2003, p60).

The former American President, Donald Trump, fuelled his rise to power on the sowing of division. He cynically preyed on the anxieties and resentment, on the sense of alienation and impotence, of the people in order to maximise their anger and the blame they ascribe to others. In order to identify for them individuals and groups that can be held to account, and punished or driven from power, to make for a better and greater America.

That this is so seems plain from the language of his 2016 campaign. That he continued to rule by creating and stoking a sense of division fuelled by the identification of scapegoats seems plain too. They include the residents of Muslim majority countries he banned from visiting the United States, the Mexicans he sought to exclude with a border wall, as well as his political opponents in a way which reached its inevitable violent conclusion on January 6^th in the storming of the Capitol. The spate of executions which accompanied Mr Trump’s last days in office look, frankly, like a series of judicial sacrificial murders, offered to satisfy people on whose support he relies.

Mr Trump’s strategy seems to have been to define “his people” – the people who are with him and support him – by the common objects of their hatred. There is every sign that the new President Joe Biden understands this very well and sees it for what it is. And there is every sign that it is his Christian faith which enables him to do that.

Quoting Augustine in his Inaugural Address, President Biden showed that he plainly believes that a people need to be “a multitude defined by the common objects of their love”. He understands that the things that Mr Trump used as fuel to build anger and resentment are real and need solutions, but they are not new, and recognising that is an important step towards building back better beyond them. President Biden clearly named “the foes we face – anger, resentment and hatred,” to which he added some of their effects: “extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness, and hopelessness”. But he also understands that their solutions start with recognising the good, ordinary secularity, the natural worldliness, of everything that is. In other words, that we are in this together, and we are good.

For Trump, a strategy of divide-and-rule was essential. For President Biden, this division must end. We can disagree, but “every disagreement does not have to be a cause for total war”. The new President’s Address makes clear that he sees growth in unity relying primarily on growth in equality – for a need for mutual recognition of equality between the politician and the people they serve, between the scientist or expert and the person they advise. A mutual recognition of goodness, frailty and value.

Joe Biden’s Christian ordinariness is what is needed now. It’s needed in the United States, and I would suggest something like this is sorely needed here in the United Kingdom too.

January 23, 2021
Uganda’s Unholy Trinity & the Forgotten Martyrs

by the Revd Dr Nick Bundock, Team Rector of St James & Emmanuel, Didsbury

The ‘Shrine of the Martyrs’ is located in Namugongo, which is a township about 16 kilometres north-east of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city and one of the largest metropolitan areas in Africa.

There are in fact two shrines at Namugongo, one Anglican and one Catholic, and they commemorate the loss of 45 young men who were burned to death in 1886 by the King of Buganda for refusing to renounce Christianity. It’s a moving and uniquely African site of devotion. Such is its importance that in 2015 a crowd of two million gathered to pray there with Pope Francis. But this incredible site of Christian pilgrimage hides a deeper story because many of the men who were burned in the fires of martyrdom were courtiers who had refused the king’s sexual advances. The Shrines at Namugongo reflect not only the power of Christian devotion but also the complex and difficult relationship of Ugandan same-sex sexuality.

It was on Thursday 20th February this year that I found myself in a taxi, without a working seatbelt, racing down a Ugandan highway with two dear friends, Rob Eloff, an ordinand at St Mellitus and Kevin Lowe , the father of Lizzie Lowe, a gay teenager who took her own life in September 2014. An unlikely band of travellers on an equally unlikely mission.

The sun is so strong in this part of equatorial Africa that the pale-skinned burn even through glass. I could feel my legs singeing as we came to halt in the Kampala traffic. The cars were thick on the roads and they were coughing out fumes into the Ugandan streets. Our destination was Namugongo, but not ostensibly to visit the shrines. We had another destination that day. Off the beaten track, down roads that defied Google Maps, was a residential compound surrounded by a high wall and a sliding metal gate. This was our destination. We really didn’t know what we were coming to and in our nervousness we’d given the others in our party (safely back in the luxury of a western-style hotel in Entebbe) a constant mobile phone lock on our location – just in case.

As the taxi pulled up and came to halt, I reflected on how we’d come to be in this unlikely place. Two months previously, in the safety of my study in Didsbury, Manchester, the Facebook invitation to visit Tom Twongeirwe in Kampala had seemed like a good one. I’ve had a lot of communication from LGBT+ advocacy groups in the years since Lizzie took her life but not, I confess, from Africa and so Tom’s communication piqued my interest. We chatted across the internet for some weeks before I eventually revealed to him that I would be with eleven others from my church on a trip to Uganda in February, visiting a long-supported children’s crisis centre in the beautiful Virunga Mountains. Perhaps we could meet, however briefly, on our way back to the airport just before our flight home?

And so here we were, the three of us in a taxi in the middle of this Kampala suburb and within walking distance of the Namugongo shrines. What Tom revealed to us in the hours we spent with him and his colleagues will remain vivid in my memory and has prompted me to write this short reflection. Disturbingly, in the exquisitely beautiful country of Uganda, the Pearl of Africa, there are still martyrs being made in the twenty-first century and the issue is still about sex and faith.

For many in Uganda there is a commonly held theory that homosexuality is a Western ‘disease’ that is not indigenous to their country, that it’s an import totally alien to their culture and values. The Namugongo shrines tell a different story, of course. The ironic fact that Ugandan Christianity incorporated the nineteenth century European Church’s teaching on homosexuality is written into the blood of the martyrs and is just as strong today.

The Ugandan Pentecostal pastor, Martin Ssempa, an outspoken supporter of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (2009), in recalling the blood of the Ugandan martyrs, has demanded the blood of the ‘gays’ and invoked true Ugandans to die rather than surrender their moral convictions to Western imperialism. Not many indulge in such outspoken invective, but St James and Emmanuel has its own painful experience of being rejected by the Anglican bishops of the Ugandan church. The punitive legislation that was eventually passed in 2014 was supported by the vast majority of Pentecostal, Anglican, Catholic and Muslim leaders in Uganda before it was struck down by the Supreme Court of Uganda on a technicality. Even today, however, you can receive life imprisonment for ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’ or seven years for ‘gross indecency’.

In a softly spoken presentation in the converted garage of that compound in the shadow of the Namugongo shrines Tom told us about the realities of life for LGBT+ Ugandans. Many, of course spend their lives in the shadows of shame, many married, never daring to confess their true feelings. Those who do ‘come out’ are almost immediately rejected from the family home and their existing poverty is compounded by a desperate lack of training and employment opportunities.

As Tom himself eloquently told us: ‘LGBTI persons in Uganda are dismissed and disowned by their biological families no matter at what age they are because they are regarded as a shame and a curse to the family and the community. These people who are especially between 15-25 find nowhere to go other than the streets, no shelter, no food and no hope for the future. The end result is them engaging in crimes like robbery and having unprotected sex work for survival. During the course (sic), some contract HIV and others commit suicide.’

Tom is now the National Coordinator for the Universal Coalition for Affirming Africans Uganda (UCAA-UG). He is a very brave young man surrounded by a small team of very brave colleagues. They told us about their new project ‘Thrive’ which has four main aims. Firstly, they want to rent out safe houses where the queer and rejected can be safe and receive mental health support, re-learn the art of self-care and begin to recover their self-esteem. Secondly, they want to offer peer support to gay-affirming religious leaders in Uganda, many of whom are afraid to challenge the status quo. Thirdly, they want to engage in spiritual direction for LGBT+ persons. At the core of the UCAA-UG mission is a message of Christian love for the queer person. Fourthly, they want to offer basic skills such as hairdressing so that LGBT+ Ugandans can make their own way in the world. This is a huge task and they asked if we would put our shoulders to the wheel to help them start. We will.

As we left the compound and got back into the dusty taxi for the journey home we asked the driver to stop at the Catholic Shrine of the Ugandan Martyrs – it would be ridiculous to get so close and to simply pass it by. At the heart of this sacred site there is a basilica and at the very centre of the building there is an altar. It marks the exact spot where the first martyr was slow-burned in 1886. The death of the Ugandan martyrs ‘the seed of the Church’ led to one of the most Christian countries on earth, if one of the poorest.

As we sped back along the highway to Entebbe and the air-conditioned rooms and luxury pool of our hotel, I had one final reflection. Ugandan societal norms about homosexuality are controlled by an almost unbreakable triangle. On one corner is a legislature determined to punish homosexual Ugandans in the severest terms. On another corner there are long established societal prejudices whereby gay children are expelled from the community in shame and dishonour. But the final corner is occupied by the Church and it’s unflinching teaching on the moral evil of same-sex love. This trinity of Ugandan culture is crushing and destroying lives, including the lives of young Ugandans with nowhere to turn.

When conservatives in the West blithely support the latest pronouncements from GAFCON do they have any idea what that means for actual people in Uganda? Do they appreciate that a whole new generation of martyrs are being created in Namugongo?

What I witnessed in Kampala and in the beautiful lives of Tom and his colleagues goes way beyond ‘inclusion’. They are fighting for justice and conservatives would do well to think on that before pouring ignorant fuel on the fires of Ugandan culture that have been alight since 1886.

Revd Dr Nick Bundock is pictured here (second from left) with Tom Twongeirwe (left),Rob Elroff (middle) and Lizzie Lowe’s father, Kevin (on far right).

Click here to support Thrive

March 7, 2020
Secularism – A Force for Good?

by Savi Hensman, community worker, author of “Sexuality, Struggle and Saintliness” and LGBTI+ equality activist

Sometimes religion is twisted to serve the ends of those ruthlessly seeking power. Yet others live out their faith through commitment to justice and equality, risking themselves for others.

One of example of this is what we have witnessed in South Asia over the last few weeks where people of various faiths and none have risked their own safety to defend their neighbours and values they regard as important, including secularism. There have been moving scenes of caring and courage across India in resistance to a law that would harm a vulnerable religious minority. Women students in Delhi have bravely protected a male friend from further beating and slum-dwellers in Mumbai (Bombay) have marched in their thousands against discrimination.

Often ‘secularists’ are thought of as being opposed to faith or at least its influence on public life. But for many in South Asia and beyond, opposing the idea that the state should favour just one religion, so treating people with other beliefs as if they were of lesser worth, is seen as a way of showing love and promoting justice.

Avoiding division, cruelty and inequality

According to its constitution, India is a ‘secular democratic republic’ with ‘equality of status and of opportunity’ in which state discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex is banned. This has often not been put into practice, but as the 70th anniversary of the original constitution approaches later this month we are reminded that the ideals still remain. For instance, gay sex was only decriminalised last year. This happened in part because the ban was ruled unconstitutional, as was shoddy treatment of the ancient transgender community, though on this matter the law remains unsatisfactory.

However, in recent years a government has been in charge which has distorted Hinduism in its quest for power – despite the protests of some devout Hindus. As Religion News reported last October, Muslims have been lynched and Christians, Dalits and dissidents persecuted. Economic bungling has worsened the plight of the poorest. The seizure of Kashmir in 2019 and isolation of its residents (in ways now ruled unlawful) was a further step towards ditching the ideals which energised the independence movement. A national register of citizens is now planned, where people will have to prove their status – which of course is extremely hard for those on low incomes, who often do not have birth certificates or other documents and cannot afford lawyers.

Many will be left stateless and most likely herded into camps, as has already happened in Assam. A Citizenship (Amendment) Act has also been passed which would allow most of those affected, if they are not Muslim, to eventually be declared ‘refugees’ and allowed to become citizens again. It seems clear that politicians appear to have intended to pick off minorities one by one.

But defying fear, protesters – many of them women – have gathered in India and overseas, with slogans such as ‘All Indians are brothers and sisters’, ‘Save humanity, save country’ and ‘Keep dividing, we will keep multiplying’.

A couple of weeks ago, 200+ Christian leaders from across India came together and stated: ‘The new law is deeply divisive, discriminatory and violative of human rights. In particular, this legislation discriminates against Muslim communities in India, who constitute over 14 per cent of the population of India, and therefore, it is totally unacceptable in a secular democratic republic of India.’ They appealed for lawmakers to scrap the legal changes and ‘stop the construction of detention/concentration camps at the earliest’.

The Archbishop of Bombay and president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, Cardinal Oswald Gracias, has also spoken out, declaring ‘The Citizenship Amendment Act is a cause of great anxiety for all citizens and there is a danger that there could be a polarization of our peoples along religious lines, which is very harmful for the country…It is the responsibility of all to promote solidarity and respect for all in our country.’

Not watering down spirituality for worldly gain

I would therefore suggest that in such circumstances, secularism can in fact assist the deepening and spread of true religion.

This may seem a strange notion to some people of faith, especially given many Christians believe that belonging to an established Church helps to promote their message. I accept that links with the state, and with others with authority and wealth, can be helpful in sharing the Good News and serving the community. Yet ties which are too tight can in my opinion cause harm, especially if a Church is too afraid to defend the weak or the essence of faith is diluted to please powerful patrons.

Piety may in fact become a cover for corruption and the quest for power or status at others’ expense, a concern. This is something that the ancient Jewish prophets knew all too well about and to which Jesus also pointed. Worse still, a twisted religious fervour can be turned against women, minorities or others who are marginalised, hatred and contempt whipped up against ‘outsiders’, who may become scapegoats.

As one brave Hindu priest, Pujari Laldas, warned before he was murdered by fanatics of his own faith in 1993: ‘All the communal riots that have rocked India have been caused for financial and political gain.’

In contrast, kindness, generosity, wisdom and concern for peace with justice are at the heart of authentic faith.

This is not to say that those drawn to ‘religious’ movements which oppose human rights for everyone are always insincere. Some are just naïve and unaware of the human cost to their neighbours, especially those whose experience is very different from their own. Others may be seduced by charismatic leaders or slick publicity, especially if these tap into the insecurities or resentments which we all have. However Divine love offers a deeper and more lasting satisfaction.

Christians worship a God who, for love’s sake, abandoned power, privilege and security, instead being born as a helpless baby and condemned to death by the mighty and ‘holy’. Yet, through the cross, new life is offered in a world turned upside down, the hungry fed and divisions overcome. This hope helps to sustain many Christians, in India and beyond, who have put their own reputation and safety on the line for others.

Therefore, whilst I recognise that there are some secularists who are agnostic or atheist, I would suggest that passionate faith can, and often does, go hand in hand with commitment to religious equality and human rights for all.

January 17, 2020
Remembrance, Inclusion & Identity

by Lord Ian Blair of Broughton, cross bench peer, former Metropolitan Police Commissioner and parishioner in the Diocese of Oxford

In this period of remembrance, I have been reflecting on the time-limited nature of memory. I was born after World War II in 1953 but my childhood was dominated by it, with poppies and remembrance services being as absolute a fixed part of the year as Christmas. My childhood games and comics were all about Gerries, Nazis and Brits.

This last decade has seen an outpouring of remembrance as the 100 year anniversaries of the First World War slipped past, followed by the 75 the anniversary of D Day this year and with the 75th anniversary of VE day still to come next year.

A number of issues have been striking me this weekend, two of them very strongly. The first is the question of how long the significance of these particular acts of remembrance will continue. The second is whether we are necessarily remembering things quite right.

The industrialised slaughter of 1914-8 and the loss of so many brilliant young lives is burned into British, German and French national memories. My uncle was killed in France in 1915.

We also now pretty much understand that the Second World War was effectively a continuation of the First and its victors’ peace. But if we look ahead 30 years, will people still be remembering the bravery and the futility of these events? And what will people be remembering?

The way in which a small pebble can start an avalanche caused me to think about this when I noticed a newspaper article to the effect that a number of police forces were no longer prepared to devote manpower to all the remembrance services in their particular region and were asking village events to be subsumed into larger city ones. Where does this lead?

Soon, all those with direct memory of these titanic struggles will be dead, with all respect to those mourning losses from more recent but thankfully smaller conflicts. What then?

Who knows what future generations will do but what it made me think is that those who do survive and those of us whose lives have been was so influenced by it need to make sure that the memory of all that sacrifice is accurate and comprehensive and not able to be twisted into a narrative of British or even English exceptionalism and nationalism.

The great 1940 cartoon by David Lowe entitled ‘Very Well, Alone’ pictures a single British Tommy standing on the white cliffs of Dover, fist raised aloft against German bombers streaming in overhead. It was published after the fall of France earlier that year. It was a wonderful piece of propaganda and those who come after should not disregard its significance.

The sheer raw courage of the Churchill-led government in refusing peace terms with Nazi Germany should never be discounted.

But even when Lowe’s cartoon was published, ‘Alone’ was rapidly becoming less true. Soldiers from New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa were already steaming towards our shores. Resistance movements from Holland, Poland and France fought and flew with us. Then the Americans came in and eventually Germany was to be defeated by huge Soviet sacrifice. All this is compatible with my childhood memories – these were all people recognisably like us.

But people recognisably not like us, not like anyone in my entirely white Cheshire home town, came as well. And my childhood memories do not include any understanding that those who fought alongside the British included hundreds of thousands of non-white citizens of the British Empire and Commonwealth.

This was brought home to me sharply at a Remembrance event in Hounslow in west London, which I was attending in an official capacity sometime in the 2000’s. I met an elderly Sikh, with a slew of medals across his chest. I was very surprised indeed when he told me that he had been a Squadron Leader in the Battle of Britain. Where did this story fit in to my understanding of the past? Turbans among the Few?

Ever since, I have been tracing the stories of Black and Minority Ethnic contributions to the events Remembrance Day commemorates.

I am just going to take the example of India. One million Indian soldiers served in the First World War, as the magnificent Indian War Memorial in northern France makes clear: 75000 died, while 87000 died in the Second World War.

But their contribution is scarcely remembered in most of Britain.

I always see Jesus Christ as the epitome of diversity. Christ outraged the Jewish religious authorities of his time by mingling with tax-gatherers and sinners. He enjoyed the company of women not of his family, a very unusual course of action at the time, appeared first to one of those women after His Resurrection and protected an adulteress from being attacked.

He spoke at length to a Samaritan woman – regarded as an apostate by Jews at that time – at a well and then stayed in her village.

Jesus preached at and stayed on the Mount of Olives, just outside Jerusalem. This was then the site of Jerusalem’s leper colony. He was inclusive above all.

The Temple in Jerusalem was divided into concentric courts, first the court of the Gentiles into which anyone could go, then the court of the Jews open to both men and women, then one only for Jewish men, then one only for priests and then the Holy of Holies, which could be entered only by the High Priest, only on one day a year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The deeds and words of Jesus challenge this exclusivity, as did His early followers in taking Christ’s teaching to the ends of the earth, offering Christianity to all the world.

We need to follow His example and ensure that, for future generations, the message of Remembrance Sunday is not only about – although certainly including – a British (Scottish, Welsh, Irish as well as English) triumph and sacrifice but a wonderful diverse achievement by all faiths and none against all the odds, against world-wide evil and brutality.

At the going down of the sun, we need to remember all of them. And that inclusive memory will help future generations combat the evils to come in their day, rather than allowing such a glorious moment in our national history to dwindle into a little Englander motif.

November 11, 2019
A New Clash of Civilisations – Where God is on “Our Side”
by Jayne Ozanne, Editor of ViaMedia.News and Member of General Synod

It seems our world is getting even more divided by issues that create irreconcilable differences between hitherto relatively peaceful sections of Western society. There is a growing desire for what can only be likened to divorce, where one side or party no longer wants to live in the same space as the other. This is becoming increasingly difficult given that they are committed either financially or geographically to living in the same city, town, village or church.

Be it Brexit, Trump, social policy or sexuality debates – the issues are countless. However, more often than not they tend to be a front for a far deeper difference founded in fundamentally opposing world views.

We are now seeing a “Clash of Civilisations” no longer just between East and West, as put forward by Samuel P. Huntington in his classic text for anyone studying international relations, but within our civilisations. This is creating a far more worrying fissure that threatens the very bedrock of so much of what we hold so dear.

These opposing world views go to the core of who we see ourselves to be and as such are a key to our identity. There is much that these opposing views tend to hold in common, namely:
- Both sides believe the other is wrong – fundamentally wrong.
- Both sides believe the other is ignorant of the “true facts”.
- Both sides believe the other is dangerous – creating instability and chaos.
However, there is increasingly the advent of a new dimension which is a far greater cause for concern – and which has yet to be named given the enormity of the size of the ‘elephant’ it represents.

It seems to me that the most dangoeus dimensiom of all, as with the “Clash of Civilisations” text, is that both sides are now invoking a divine dimension – that is, that each now believe that God is on their side. That they alone hold the true Christian view and that the other is therefore representing a view that is “anti-Christ”. Put more simply, that the other side is evil.

It is this I believe that is behind the growing tendency to “other” people.

Indeed, it is this belief – that one side is Godly and the other is demonic – that has led to policies and practices that have shocked the world in their inhumane treatment of people who “do not fit certain select criteria”.

Be it the way we welcome or fear the stranger in our midst, or embrace or reject those who are different to ourselves, there appears to be a growing trend to demonise “the other”, the one who is different.

The most frightening thing is that this is happening amongst Christians who arguably should know better.

I’ve been reflecting on why sincere Christians are doing this….and I can only believe it is because they see “the other” as someone who is outside of God’s love and care. Who represents a threat to the Gospel and is what God warns us to ‘guard against’ – they perceive this threat in real people rather than in spiritual powers.

But is this really Biblical?

Do we really have people who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’ – those who have the right skin colour, the right postcode, the right sexuality. Those who have prayed ‘the right prayer’, believe ‘the right thing’, live ‘the right way’. Members of the ‘lucky spiritual sperm club’ – born in the right place at the right time and into the right church.

Is this really the teaching of our God of unconditional love who we worship? Is this truly what Jesus teaches in His sacrificial death that ensures that we all have access to God because of what He has done, once and for all?

How then should we determine which view is right and which is wrong – if indeed we ever can?

Well I for one believe the answer is plain and simple….which ‘side’ is the side of love? Or perhaps it’s easier to discern the opposite – which side is the view based on fear?

Unconditional love has no limits, no boundaries, no borders.

It loves all, embraces all, forgives all. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

It Just Loves…
December 1, 2018
Bishops and Transforming Love

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

Over the last few months the Vacancy in See Committee of the Diocese of London has been working to set out our view of what kind of bishop we need for the next stage of our journey together.

The Committee has been keen to connect our hopes with the content of the (modern English) Ordinal for bishops, to put the current challenges we face into the historic context of the mission of the Church. To help that process, I read through the Ordinal to find the words, prayers and questions which frame the calling of a bishop.

One of the things that struck me was how the content of the Ordinal is related to its origins in the sixteenth century conditions of Christendom and schism: in particular the concern for what in modern management-speak is termed ‘outputs’ (what the bishop and the Church are to do) as opposed to ‘outcomes’ (the fruits we bear). There’s a lot about proclamation of the Gospel so that it may be heard, gathering and feeding the flock, teaching rightly and guarding against error, and building up the unity and love of the Church. But there’s not so much that relates to the Great Commission in Matthew 28 to ‘make disciples of all nations’, or much about the revelation of Christ in the love of his people for one another as in John 13 and 17; when the reality of day by day mission is that God’s love for us in Christ is made present and visible in the love of the Church for one another and for the world – or not. The Church in the Ordinal is spoken of as a single community of love in space and time, and bishops are charged with loving ‘their people’; but they aren’t directly charged with loving those who are outside the Church, not least because when the Ordinal was drafted there were few people known to be outside the Church apart from ‘heretics’ and a few of other faiths.

There are two consequences to this. One is that bishops can carry a huge weight of expectation, being given an almost messianic level of responsibility for shaping the life of the Church and leading its mission in individual isolation. As with churches seeking parish clergy in times of stress and decline, dioceses look for someone who will rescue and transform their situation: and although there’s a lot a bishop can do, she or he is liable to damage their physical, mental and spiritual health in trying to do it without the Church being alongside.

And the other consequence is that we as the body of Christ don’t take seriously enough our responsibility for being the evangelistic community of love which leads people to Christ. Of course we need to have living faith, and witness to it: and we do so through how we live much more than in what we say, and by how we love those around us, within and outside the Church. It’s our job corporately to boldly proclaim the Gospel of Christ, confront injustice and work for righteousness and peace in all the world, and so make disciples of all nations, and not the job of the bishop to do it for us.

And how do we see that happening? I have been greatly challenged over the last weeks by the response of the Coptic Church to the extreme persecution to which members of its community have been subject: bombed, beheaded, beaten, shot and killed just for being Christians in Egypt; most recently at least 26 men, women and children killed in the Egyptian desert going to pray, in between the Manchester bomb and the London Bridge killings. Bishop Angaelos, the Coptic Bishop in the UK, has not only called for forgiveness, but love: addressing the terrorists he has said, ‘the violent and deadly crimes you perpetrate are abhorrent and detestable, but YOU are loved…. You are loved by me and millions like me, not because of what you do, but what you are capable of as that wonderful creation of God, Who has created us with a shared humanity. You are loved by me and millions like me because I, and we, believe in transformation.’

Here is a bishop speaking out for love, boldly: bearing witness to the love which is held not just by him but by the community of faith, by a Church which is determined not to retaliate with hatred but to make disciples of Christ through the witness of love.

Here’s a challenge to Christians in this country as to how we proclaim Christ by living out the love of Christ in the face of terrorism and violence and frightened communities.

And here’s also a challenge to the Church as to how we help our bishops, in being the Body of Christ together: not expecting them to sort everything out for us, but together to build a community of love which puts Christ at the centre and enables everyone, wherever they start from, to find the power of the transforming love of God.

June 9, 2017
Time to Cultivate Your Garden?
by the Revd Canon Simon Butler, Prolocutor of Canterbury

Autumn is not the most rewarding time for gardening, especially if (like me), it’s the last thing you want to do at the best of times. Fortunately, my parents have recently downsized and my father passed on a wonderful gadget which blows and sucks up leaves, making the most mundane of seasonal gardening tasks an awful lot easier.

Gardening is Britain’s most popular pastime, the recreational response of many to the stresses of daily life. Making things grow, cultivating a little patch of ground, what better way of taking control of something, in a world that feels uncontrollable?

Such was Voltaire’s advice. At the end of his satire Candide, the eponymous hero, having found that the ultra-optimism of Dr Pangloss is rather wanting, responds in disillusion with one of the most famous lines in all literature, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” We must cultivate our garden. In the face of a world that is not as good or as hopeful as Candide had been led to believe, the retreat into the domestic (expressed in the gathering of Candide’s ‘family’ into a simple farming lifestyle) is the best he can hope for and marks a reasonable, pragmatic response.

This year has seen some very good reasons to persuade me to retreat into some philosophical, political or theological gardening:
- The Brexit vote has thrown much into confusion, especially in my parish which is one of the most prosperous, international, pro-EU communities in the country.
- The election of Donald Trump last week has thrown much into uncertainty, especially to those of us with an evolutionary, progressive, “things are always going to get better”, dare I say it, Panglossian worldview. Some of our most passionate commitments to equality matters which seemed to me settled in Western public life, appear suddenly more at risk than they have done for a generation. I was struck and slightly chilled by the Government minister present at our Remembrance Sunday Service, who said that this was a time for liberal internationalists, like her and me, to work as hard as possible to prevent that political vision from being lost. How long is it since that has been thought a necessary battle to fight?
- At a much more personal level, the ongoing agonies of our church over sexuality, cause many of us to ponder whether the church will ever find a way of living with difference, and whether the church really can be good news for sexual minorities. Only this week, as the ultra-conservative GAFCON movement, published my name among many others claiming, effectively, I am a threat to the Gospel in our nation. It is salutary to remember that, if such a list had appeared in a more intolerant Christian culture, it would undoubtedly have been an act of incitement.
Time to cultivate my garden, then? Time to retreat into the personal and the narrowly-parochial? By no means, as the Apostle Paul might have said. Preaching on Remembrance Sunday, I concluded my sermon with these words:

“Because we can turn nowhere else, Christians bring all our fear to the foot of the cross, where the crucified Lord reigns in ultimate victory. In the light of what we see there, we know there is hope. And, in hope, we pray and try to learn the lessons of history and redouble our commitment to a better sort of world. President Barack Obama talked eight years ago of the “audacity of hope.” It may be audacious to hope, and hope can easily give way to cynicism, but hope has always been the energy through which a better world is built.”

Maybe I am being too pessimistic but, like many right now I think, we worry for what the future brings. But my faith is a hopeful faith, built as it is on the cross and empty tomb, on death defeated and Christ triumphant. That means, for me at least, this is not a time to be spending in the tool-shed or the garden, but a time to be preparing myself spiritually for, if not the ushering in of “the best of all possible worlds”, then at least building the vision of the Kingdom the Gospel assures us is God’s purpose for the world.

Gardening tools aside then. Time to put on the whole armour of God.
November 17, 2016
“Who Am I?” – The Hidden Key to Reconciliation
Reflection (written before last weekend’s revelations by Archbishop Justin Welby) by the Rt Revd Dr David Walker, Bishop of Manchester

One of the great privileges of being Bishop of Manchester is that I get invitations to meet with remarkable people. I learn far more from human engagement than I ever glean from books, academic articles, and (dare I say it) blogs. So the chance that came my way last month, to meet with two people from very different backgrounds and faiths, yet who are colleagues in an organisation working to bring peace to the deeply conflicted region of Kashmir, was not one to let pass by. Their work is a powerful testimony to the contribution that individuals who are prepared to engage with their hearts as well as their heads, and who are willing to have their own presuppositions and ideas about the “other” challenged, can make. The very name of this blog, Via Media, suggests that finding new ways through persistently conflicted situations is a key part of why we are here. So let me offer a few reflections and see if together we can build on them.

What struck me most in the conversation was not just that these two workers for reconciliation managed to emphasise the importance of the personal over the political, but that they did so whilst avoiding the trap that such efforts usually fall into. Two short statements summed up for me the approach; they are worth quoting in full:
- We can choose to find our own personal answer to the question “Who am I?”
- Engage with this paradox – change starts with you but isn’t about you.
I’ve been tussling with them ever since.

It’s a widely held view that traditional methods of debating and addressing conflicted issues, based on ideology, principles and supposedly rational argument, privilege the powerful. As a famous piece of graffiti put it, “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in”. A necessary counter to this has been the growth in recent times of various types of “identity politics”, based around key aspects of human beings, such as gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation; issues which have traditionally been the basis on which significant sectors of society are marginalised. Each of them has developed its own theological counterpart. Engaging with these constructs helps me to recognise, at least some of the time, that when I think I am being rational and somehow “above” identity, I may well be simply rationalising the interests of the dominant group to which I belong. More importantly, identity politics has had genuine successes. However, at the end of the day it remains politics. It can win or lose battles, but is far less able to unite, reconcile and work for the level of mutual flourishing that may be the only way to move beyond a particular conflict.

So what I’m now interested in exploring, in the light of my Kashmir conversation, is whether there is an extended and distinct role for “identity” in conflict situations, one that doesn’t collapse into identity politics, and which can be helpful both in secular and religious contexts. The two statements I’ve quoted above give me hope that there may be.

My own answer to the question “Who am I?” is (in words movingly echoed by Archbishop Justin Welby since I first drafted this article) that I am first and foremost a deeply beloved child of God, with infinite and eternal value. You may phrase that differently, and we may all build on such a core definition in different ways. Almost certainly, somewhere early on in constructing our sense of identity we would give key importance to aspects of ourselves, such as our deepest relationships and belongings, that lie far deeper than any externally provided political construct can reach. If, by God’s grace, I build the foundations of my answer on firm enough rock, that may be enough to allow me to engage with conflicted situations without selling myself (or my soul) to politics of either the conventional or identity brand. Will that then enable me to be part of a solution where other methods have failed? Will it in fact give me the strength and confidence to let change began with me, without feeling that such change as ensues will either be a direct threat to, or a necessary condition for, my understanding of who I am?

Picture of the Rt Revd David Walker, Bishop of Manchester, by Paul Heyes, Wednesday June 5, 2013.
April 13, 2016