Anglicanism

Prisoners of Conscience on St John the Baptist’s Day

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gxMq7s0ELE

I always had a good appetite as a child, getting stuck into seconds and more whenever I had the chance. My mother, observing this, would often remark, “Son, you’d eat the head of John the Baptist.”

John the Baptist’s messy end is one of the best known of Bible stories. Like most Gospel stories, it is a short narrative and doesn’t go in for detailed descriptions of personalities and motives. As so often, much of the popular memory of the story doesn’t come from Scripture at all.

Oscar Wilde’s grotesquely brilliant play Salomé, later turned into the first true 20th Century opera by Richard Strauss and then into a Holywood epic by Columbia Pictures, has added much to the popular perception of John the Baptist’s death, even among those who have never seen any. Scripture does not record the nymphomaniac, borderline necrophiliac, Salomé of Wilde, Strauss, and Rita Heyworth, but instead a girl very much under the thumb of a ruthless mother with a personal grudge against John because of his uncompromising sexual moralism.

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Why is Cathedral Evensong Growing and What Does It Mean?

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This piece appeared in the May-June 2014 edition of Salisbury Cathedral News I’ve always preferred the intimate parish church community to a cathedral’s grandeur. I came to mature faith in Belfast’s city centre parish of St. George’s, walking past the door of the Cathedral to do so. Since arriving in Salisbury last summer, I’ve yet … Read more

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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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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