Gerry Lynch

In response to Owen Jones: In Defence of the Establishment of the Church of England

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Owen Jones’ appeal for the separation of church and state showed a deep respect for Christianity in general and the Church of England in particular. But he failed to explain how and why disestablishment would be an improvement. Throughout the article, I only read one serious criticism of the status quo: that it is an ‘anachronism’.

Perhaps so – the relationship between Church and state in Britain is certainly illogical. The monarch swears in the Coronation Oath to maintain the “Protestant Reformed Religion established by law”, but Britain doesn’t have an established Church. England has one, and Scotland has a different one, more thoroughgoingly Protestant than the curious part-Catholic hybrid south of the border. No kirk celebrated Holy Week like we did at St Martin’s in Salisbury, with prostrations before the Blessed Sacrament and kissing of the cross. Wales, like Northern Ireland, gets by without an established church.

Indeed Northern Ireland argues against disestablishment as a means of promoting good relations between faith communities. The Church of Ireland was disestablished fifty years before Northern Ireland’s creation, and was in any case the minority Protestant tradition in the new state. That didn’t prevent a horrendous history of state-sanctioned anti-Catholic discrimination, nor a descent into thirty years of ethno-religious violence.

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So You Follow Jesus? Are You Sure?

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A common line in blogs and sermons these days is to call on people to be followers of Jesus and not just admirers of Jesus. There’s nothing wrong with that on one level. I like to think I do that sometimes myself; but I know just how flaky I am when the going gets tough. Following Christ is hard. Sometimes even being an admirer of Christ is hard; often it’s hardest even to like Jesus when one really has tried to follow Jesus to the Cross and ended up being crucified.

Some of those blogs make out that if you don’t follow Jesus, 100% of the time, right to the end, then you aren’t a real Christian. If that’s the case, then there are no real Christians. I wonder what image they have of themselves if they think they’re the real Christ followers, with the authority to lecture the poor benighted masses who just want an easy ride.

In Holy Week, Palm Sunday was when everybody got to admire Jesus; the night of Maundy Thursday was when following Jesus got really hard and everybody, and I do mean everybody, abandoned Him.

We’re all good at liking Jesus on Palm Sunday. We all love Jesus when He rides into Jerusalem in triumph, fulfilling the prophecies, and doing nothing to contradict our understanding of what a Messiah looks like. The Kingdom of God is at hand! Safe as one of a crowd of thousands, we know Jesus will soon show His power. As we’re good Christians, we know that will be good for everyone, and especially for us.

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Russia, China, Crimea, Xinjiang and Putin’s Risky Gambit

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Photo credit – www.kremlin.ru under Creative Commons licence.

Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole with a few amendments of no particular significance to improve the readability…

A friend on Facebook led me to this Ambrose Evans-Pritchard article in the Telegraph on the possible impact of Putin’s Crimea gambit on Sino-Russian relations. Pritchard has his own prejudices, of course, and the headline is terrible – there is no Sino-American diplomatic co-ordination to effect a ‘double pincer’ but – the article is worth reading. China’s failure to back Russia at the UN Security Council was significant, but not surprising.

It’s a useful corrective on a UK mainstream media narrative dominated by commentators telling us the West has miscalculated in doing anything other than patting Russia on the back over the past month, as it is claimed that Russia will simply reorient itself towards China in the event of any sanctions.

Let’s start with the idea that Russia will reorient towards China. China is, of course, a rapidly growing market for both energy and commodities. There is, however, no gas pipeline between Russia and China. China already sources a huge amount of energy from Central Asia and the Middle East (never forget that 90% of Gulf oil flows east). Why should China buy Russian gas and not Kazakh or Turkmen gas through an already existing pipe? Evans-Pritchard correctly points out that China is an assertive player in the New Great Game taking place in Central Asia over gas and much else.

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No Simple Answers for Christians in Politics

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I’ve enjoyed the series of posts hosted by Gillan on God and Politics UK, where guest bloggers associated with the three main GB political parties, as well as the Greens and UKIP, say they support their particular party from a Christian perspective. Two final articles are from someone saying he finds it hard to vote, and someone who says voting is a Christian duty.

I was a member of both the Liberal Democrats for many years and was heavily involved in the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland for a long time. I’m not a member of any political party at the moment. Given the events of the past 16 months in Northern Ireland, I doubt I could vote for anyone other than Alliance just now, but I’m living in Wiltshire and I don’t know who to vote for in Great Britain. Not voting at all is certainly an option, although one I’d take only with great reluctance. I might return to how all that fits with being a Christian in a later blog post, but just for now I thought I’d ask a few questions of the philosophy behind the series.

It seems to have been taken as a given by all the posters except Frank Cranmer, who isn’t voting, that it is a good thing that Christians are involved in politics; and that the world would be a better place if more of them were. Indeed, Daniel Stafford argues very directly that Christians should get involved both in the party which most closely reflects their beliefs, and that party’s internal Christian grouping. This view is a common assumption in British Christianity, indeed an unusual case of an assumption that cuts right across Evangelicalism, Roman Catholicism and Liberal Christianity. How valid is it?

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Anna Lo, and the Myth that Northern Ireland Politics is about the Border

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Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole…

I very much doubt Anna Lo’s Irish News interview was in the Alliance Party’s 2014 elections gameplan. While almost all members of the party will remain loyal to her in public, I have equally little doubt that a number are privately fuming. Even some of them will have little problem with what she said, rather with its timing two months before local elections and little over a year before Naomi Long has to defend East Belfast. Others will regard it as a genuinely positive step, creating space for Alliance to expand beyond Belfast suburbia.

All political parties have internal ideological faultlines. Nearly twenty years ago, Nicholas Whyte identified Alliance’s primary faultline as being between the Liberal Unionists and the Liberal Liberals. I think that was spot on back then, although there were always a few Liberal Nationalists in Alliance – remember that one of Alliance’s first Stormont representatives was the Tyrone Nationalist MP Tom Gormley.

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Some Thoughts on Tony Benn

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TonyBennTony Benn was a lovely guy. I once got chatting to him on the Circle Line going home from work: I got on at St. James’ Park and said “Hey, you’re Tony Benn!”, and we chatted until he got off at Notting Hill Gate. He was just like that. Great company, totally unspun, absolutely principled. And, even better, he wore tweed jackets and smoked a pipe.

Unfortunately, he was a bloody awful cabinet minister, and the government he last served ultimately tested beyond destruction the post-war consensus, paving the way for Thatcher and all that came with her. He was one of the prime reasons for that. In the mid 1970s Britain was a more economically equal country than it has been before or since; there was never a better time for a young adult from a poor background to come of age. It was rapidly on the way to becoming a more inclusive society of minorities as well. EEC membership was helping British industry discover new markets, and Britain was finally catching up with the rest of Western Europe on living standards after a lost generation.

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Categories UK

Banish the Square Brackets! The Case for Reading the Ugly Bits of Scripture.

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I have never been in any doubt that God has a wickedly playful sense of humour, and that it is most often deployed when he encounters the Church at its most institutionalised. During this month’s Church of England General Synod, with another crucial vote on the path to the consecration of women as bishops on the agenda, the lectionary had us reading the First Letter to Timothy day by day at Morning Prayer. Those of us in the 8 a.m. weekday gang at St. Thomas’ in Salisbury were reading it along with the rest of the Church of England.

On the morning of the crucial vote, the reading included the following comment on women. “Their role is to learn, listening quietly and with due submission. I do not permit women to teach or dictate to the men; they should keep quiet.” It then goes on to justify this with reference to the fact that not only did Eve come after Adam, but she was responsible for his temptation. Women should therefore, the letter argues, be happy in bearing children modestly, instead of getting uppity ideas about teaching.

By all accounts, red faces abounded and an alternative reading was supplied. But, really, should it have been? Are we embarrassed to deal with the Scriptures that God has inspired for us? Do we think we do ourselves any favours but cutting out, little by little, the bits that offend our sensibilities?

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Address at the Memorial Service for the Revd Mervyn Kingston

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This was one of three adresses celebrating the life of the Reverend George Mervyn Kingston at a memorial service held at St George’s Church, Belfast on 8 February 2014. Mervyn was a wonderful priest, a loyal friend and an unlikely prophet, whose prophetic ministry was particularly concerned with reconciliation between Northern Ireland’s churches and communities. He co-founded Changing Attitude Ireland with his husband and partner, Dr Richard O’Leary.

I hadn’t been long back in Belfast in 2007 when I chanced across the website of Changing Attitude Ireland. Mervyn and Richard had set the organisation up a few months before, and it had yet to catch a fair wind. I sent them an e-mail and a cheque, a sign of my good wishes and a salve for a conscience that felt it could do little more. CAI was still very small – I think I was member number 6.

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A Farewell Discourse: The Hard Truths That Set Us Free

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Within a few days, I shall be subsumed the Church of England’s system as a loyal and obedient functionary. Having spent the last three years deeply engaged with the struggle for LGBT acceptance on the other side of the Irish Sea, including the struggle for marriage equality, this is probably my last chance for some time to say in public what I actually think about the state of the Church of England.

Following the House of Lords vote on same-sex marriage, the anger and bitterness that already existed among LGBT churchpeople and those who support their full inclusion in the life of the Church has deepened. Online, people are shouting, not always terribly coherently. Privately, they are saying much worse things to one another. I have never seen this depth of anger among churchpeople before; some of it, from deeply loyal churchgoing Anglicans, tips over into outright hatred of the Church leadership, in a way that it never has in my lifetime. The reaction of Church of England bishops, and conservatives more generally, to this has been defensive and bewildered.

Shouting does none of us any good, and neither does chippy defensiveness. Nonetheless, I think there are messages my conservative my conservative brothers and sisters in the Church, especially my Evangelical brothers and sisters, need to hear. Some of them might not make terribly comfortable reading. But please take the time to read them – conservatives have set the agenda on sexuality issues in the Church of England for a generation. The view who feel betrayed and marginalised as a result  must also be heard.

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Bobbie and Dessie: Does a 1980s Photo Tell Us Anything About Anglicanism’s Future

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BobbieAndDessiePictured: the Bobbie and Dessie show, I would guess around 1985. 28 years is more-or-less a generation, and the ’80s, the first decade I can remember in any meaningful way, are now starting to be a long time ago. The ’80s, in hindsight, marked the apogee of Liberal Catholic power in both the Church of England and Anglicanism more generally. It would have been hard to see the rapid rise of Evangelical power from that vantage.

And it is hard from here to see what might come next, other than to note that a generation is a long time, and that all proud empires pass away, including Anglicanism’s mini-empires of the mind that we call “churchmanship”. The Anglican pendulum moves in at least two dimensions and swings constantly.

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