Anglicanism

The Bright Field

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Late on a summer evening, as I took photos from the summit of Divis (478m above sea level) the highest of the Belfast Hills towards Lough Neagh, suddenly a shaft of sunlight broke through and illuminated the fields on top of Budore Hill, about 4 km away. Clearly visible on Lough Neagh is Ram’s Island, … Read more

Presbyterians, Salvation, and God

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Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole.

We cremated my friend James on the freakishly warm Friday before St Patrick’s Day, between the two bouts of even freakier snow. We did this after a celebration of the Supper of the Lord Jesus Christ who was his Saviour and the anchor of his life. The daffodils bobbed in the sunshine as we took his coffin through the traffic from the church in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral to the crematorium in East Finchley, his terminus ad quem before his voyage to heaven. As an Angus-born and Edinburgh-reared son of the Kirk, he came to mind after this week’s shenanigans at the Presbyterian General Assembly in Belfast.

James lived with MS for thirty years, something unimaginable when he was first diagnosed in the late 1980s. His continued life was a miracle, but it was also a struggle. I never knew the wordsmith, cyclist and cook that his older friends wrote about (movingly here and here). By the time I met him, sixteen years ago, his disease had robbed his legs of the power to walk, left his hands unable to handle a pen or a carving knife, and made his speech slurred and slow.

What he was never robbed of was his indomitable spirit, his twinkly smiling eyes, or his dry humour. Nor did MS prevent him throwing the legendary champagne-soaked parties in his Barbican flat, attended by a mix of characters who had little in common but their friendship with this delightful bon vivant: nonagenarian grand dames from Islington garden square mansions would rub shoulders with middle-aged actors struggling long past any hope of stardom and recently arrived twenty-somethings from Doncaster or Brazil, penniless but sure they’d make their fortune in London.

I never heard him complain about his lot: at most he would sigh wistfully that people should avoid getting MS if they could, not that they can. In that I saw a shadow of the boy, many decades before, whose father died when he was only nine, who then had to grow into a man far too soon and just get on with it.

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Why This Liberal Catholic Will be Praying #ThyKingdomCome

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The last thing the disciples are recorded as saying to Christ on Earth: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

After all they’d been through, they still didn’t get the point. They were looking for an earthly realm founded on their values – which of course were God’s, and therefore would usher in an era of justice and peace – and missed so much about the Crucifixion and Resurrection they’d experienced first-hand. Doubtless too, they missed the subtle point that all earthly kingdoms, political, theological, or otherwise, are prone to corruption and subverting their own principles.

Why should we be surprised? After two thousand years, we are no different.

As a Liberal Catholic, I can understand Angela Tilby’s pain and sense of loss: for we were the future once. Our tribe had once controlled the kingdom – or at least that small part of it that is the Church of England – and, while we had our faults, it was broadly a time of enlightenment and faith, liberation and not a little courage. It is wonderfully captured in a photo from the mid-1980s, I think in Dean’s Yard, of a smiling Desmond Tutu and Robert Runcie. This was the future of the Church – Catholic and reformed, deeply faithful yet open to asking hard questions, confident in its calling while open towards others, sacrificially committed to justice and peace. This was just thirty years ago.

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On The Twelfth Day of Christmas

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I’m still wishing people a Merry Christmas, because it’s still Christmastide: today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, and traditionalists will take their decorations down tonight. In fact, this year, most churches will have an unusual thirteenth day of Christmas. Rare indeed will be the place of worship that keeps the Feast of the Epiphany … Read more

You’re hired!: Can the Catholic Church learn about choosing parish clergy from the Church of England?

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This article was printed in The Tablet on 10 November 2016 Ecumenical Catholic leaders have been considering whether they could learn from the Church of England about lay involvement in choosing parish clergy One of the most distinctive differences between parochial life in the Catholic Church and the Church of England is in the choice … Read more

Lent

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James Tissot, Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness, c. 1890.
James Tissot, Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness, c. 1890.

What am I giving up for Lent? I’m going to try giving up cynicism and unhappiness.

Cynicism is worn as a badge of maturity in 2010s Britain. To dare to be optimistic, to dare to hope, is a sign of being a tragically naïve mug; and there’s nothing worse in our oh-so-sophisticated-and-worldly culture than being naïve. Actually things can and do get better; wrongs are often righted and the mistreated ultimately vindicated, often when their cause seemed utterly lost. People do choose to be good and kind and selfless, rather than being mean-spirited and grasping, and they do it all the time. The public narrative that everybody is only out for themselves isn’t just wrong, it’s damaging: if we are convinced that we live in a selfish world then we begin to conceive of living kindly and generously as a dangerous act of rebellion rather than the stance that makes us happiest.

I’m going to spend Lent trying to see the best in people, in institutions, and goodness help me in the run up to a General Election, even in politicians. Call me naïve, but I don’t think there’s anything sophisticated in thinking everyone is heartless and shallow and selfish (except of course for deep and meaningful me). It’s actually incredibly juvenile. How come the material and sexual liberation of the past half-century has made us regress into being grown up teenagers?

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Thoughts on Bishops who won’t Ordain Women

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Philip NorthToday it was announced that Philip North, Vicar of Old St Pancras in London and a prominent member of Traditionalist Anglo-Catholic group Forward in Faith, is to be the new Bishop of Burnley. He is, therefore, someone who will not receive the sacramental ministry of women priests and bishops. Kelvin Holdsworth, the Provost of Glasgow, has objected to Philip’s appointment on social media today. Although Kelvin is someone I have a lot of regard for and agree on a lot of things with, I simply can’t agree with him here.

For what it’s worth, I am and always have been a supporter of the full inclusion of women in the Church’s threefold orders of ministry. It is one of the main reasons why I moved from Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism 17 years ago. I rejoice that I think I can reasonably expect to see a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury well within my working lifetime. More than that, I don’t find remotely convincing either the ecumenical or the ontological arguments on which Traditionalist Anglo-Catholic opposition to women’s ordination rest. But I still don’t agree with Kelvin.

Quite apart from the personal regard in which I hold Philip, there are four significant reasons why. The first and last are specifically related to the current situation in the Church of England, and therefore may not apply so directly to Kelvin’s context. The middle two are, I think, universal.

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Our Experience of Secret Church in Salisbury

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This is a bit of a brain dump after the Secret Church event I helped organise in Salisbury last night. If you aren’t interested in the background to our church and our advertising programme, just click down to find out what happened during the service.

In September, some advertising material for Open Doors’ Secret Church campaign came across my desk in work. I was instantly taken with the idea: it gave the opportunity to pray in solidarity with and for persecuted Christians; to raise awareness of extreme persecution, particularly of the ‘forgotten Christians’ of North Korea; and it also looked like a fun and exciting worship event. I consequently gave it a bit of publicity on the Diocesan website, weekly e-Bulletin and monthly Grapevine, but also decided to run an event as the first thing sponsored by our new Mission, Education and Outreach Committee at Sarum St Martin.

St Martin’s is not a very large church, with a usual attendance of around 40 at the main Sunday morning service. It is a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic parish (Resolutions A, B & C), now growing again after the departure to the Ordinariate of the previous incumbent with a sizeable minority of the then congregation on Ash Wednesday 2011. It has been in interregnum since.

Advertising and Attendance

Advertising JPG used on Facebook, correctly sized for the platform.
Advertising jpeg used on Facebook, correctly sized for the platform.

I produced a poster based on one of the image files sent out by Open Doors UK, and put it in a number of church and Christian venues in Salisbury City Centre. I also advertised the service on Facebook and Twitter, with images specifically sized for each platform.

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Jesus Went to Birmingham. Did the People Let Him Die?

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Every Eucharistic service, in whatever Christian tradition, is a recreation of the Last Supper. I’m at a work conference in Birmingham at the moment, staying in a hotel bang opposite the Cathedral, so I joined the 8 a.m. congregation there today for the service that I was taught, unfairly, to call Muddled Matins and Holy Confusion.

We were 12 congregants, like the apostles, gathered around the altar where the priest played the role of Christ. In Christ, we are always being made new: the priest was a woman. For two millennia it would have been a vanishingly rare event, although not as unheard of as the sceptics admit. Now, at least in the churches which emerged from the Reformation, it is commonplace. That should not deflect us from how wonderful and glorious and new it all is. The Holy Spirit continues to renew His Church.

How could we have been so blind, for so long, to the truth expressed so plainly in Scripture by St. Paul barely two decades after the Resurrection? There is no longer male nor female, for we are all one in Christ. To say that a woman cannot represent Christ at the altar is, to my mind, dangerously close to saying that God did not so much become man in Christ, but male.

And we 12 whom the priest fed with Christ’s body and blood were a reflection in miniature of the final heavenly banquet, where people from every tribe and nation will gather. We were young and old; men and women; black, white and Asian. Some were in good suits on the way to an office job that doubtless paid for a comfortable bourgeois life; some were obviously very poor to the point were they could have been sleeping rough. All of us equal in God’s eyes, all of us citizens of the family of holy screw ups we call the Church.

The sun streamed through that magnificent east window depicting the Ascension, Christ triumphant over death and going ahead of His people to prepare a place for them in Heaven. In the glorious silence between the words, the sounds of a vibrant city waking up to glorious September sunshine percolated through the walls.

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