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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Sexual and Religious Freedoms: the First Casualties of Russian Crimea?

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The excellent Forum 18 organisation, which supports freedom of religious belief and disbelief in Europe and Asia, reports a recent wave of harrasment of and raids on premises owned by Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses in what is now Russian-controlled Crimea. Officials claim they are merely searching for ‘extremist’ literature and the region’s Prime Minister has … Read more

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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Thoughts Occasioned by the Sunday Morning Long-Path Opening to Australia and New Zeland, 9th March 2008

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I will go to forty metres On this sunny BERU morn Where the strong Antipodeans Make me glad that I was born. Signal bearing polar flutter From the town of Christchurch fair, Lands upon this Irish meadow Answering my silent prayer. Signals coming on the long path From a far Australian shore, Crossing ice and … Read more

A Journey of the Mind to Ancient Antioch

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A reflection on Acts 11:19-26 for Diocese of Salisbury staff prayers.

Try to imagine the world of Antioch as the refugee disciples in our reading would have known it. Antioch was the third largest city of the contemporary Empire, after only Rome and Alexandria and it was, by ancient standards, enormous, with a population of around half a million. Situated just inland from the great bend in the Mediterranean coast, near what is now the Turkish-Syrian border, Antioch’s roads ran to Asia Minor, and on to Greece and Italy; to Syria, Judaea, and on to Egypt; and to Mesopotamia and then beyond the boundaries of the Roman world to the Parthian Empire that was the forerunner of modern Iran.

Taken by the Romans in 64 BC, Antioch was favoured by them for its wealth and strategic location and the city, already large, was granted new public buildings and even a visit by Julius Caesar. It was famous for its opulence, obsession with fashion and devotion to pleasure.

By this time Antioch’s Jewish community would have been large and centuries old, and part of the kaleidoscope of ethnicities and faiths one might expect in a major metropolis of the Empire. That good road link would have ensured a steady stream of pilgrims to and preachers from Jerusalem.

Into this world came refugees from the very first persecution of Christians, which followed the martyrdom of St Stephen. Precise dating of events in the Acts is always difficult, but given that Paul and Barnabas are already part of the Christian story, we are probably talking about the mid 30s.

From today’s reading, these refugees seem mainly to have been sheltered and possibly rather sectarian Jewish Christians, native to the Holy Land. How strange the thronging pagan crowds of Antioch must have seemed to sheltered Torah scholars who had lived entirely in the world of pious Jerusalem Jews, or those who flitted between preaching in the small towns of Judaea and fasting in the desert. What did they make of the parading high-class whores and the wealthy businessmen arrayed like peacocks, one wonders?

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Praying for Ian Paisley’s Soul

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Crossposted to Slugger O’Toole…

I have prayed for the happy repose of the soul of Ian Paisley. Initially almost to make him turn in his grave, but then with sincerity. The Book of Common Prayer says that Christ died as a “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world”. Note the sins of the whole world – Christ’s death atoned for my sins, for your sins, for Ian Paisley’s sins.

Paisley’s sins? In my book, they were grievous.

Would The Troubles have happened without Paisley? Almost certainly, in some form or other. Would they have been as bad without him? It’s difficult not to believe that many people in their graves would still be alive today if he’d ended up the pastor an independent Baptist Church in North Wales.

As the Northern Ireland of Craigavon and Brookeborough became untenable in the late 1960s, that booming voice with its hypnotically rhythmic, staccato, delivery was everywhere. Denouncing O’Neill and his successors as ‘lundies’, or traitors; weaving grand conspiracy theories about Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholics, and implying that any amelioration of the anti-Catholic bigotry of the old Stormont state would only empower the conspiracy; popping up in Nationalist strongholds to start riots around marches and flags. Later, as The Troubles got worse, so did he.

His main object was always to destroy the Ulster Unionist Party and its old establishment hierarchy, whatever the cost to his country and his own community, so he could become Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. He never had the slightest idea of what he would do if he achieved it. It was a suitably limited aim for a man made big only by the Fisher-Price scale of Northern Ireland.

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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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Two Ceasefires and A Coming Out: A Memoir

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Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole…

I’ve been thinking about coming out. There have been a few horror stories doing the rounds recently: Vicky Beeching’s harrowing life and those of Lyra McKee’s friends. It’s made me think about how it was for me, all those years ago. If I’m honest, it was a banal tale set against a bizarre backdrop.

Maybe it’s just because I’m home, for the first significant amount of time since Chris died, sleeping in the room where I came out to my Mum, and this all happening on the 20th anniversary of the first IRA ceasefires, but I can’t pull the threads of my coming out from the tapestry of mid 1990s Belfast into which they were woven.

1994 is starting to be a long time ago. It was just before the internet arrived; it was a year that started with the last whites-only government in Africa still in office, if only marginally in power. John Major was the Prime Minister, and his government was consumed with moral panic about illegal acid house raves. It seems like a different world, with the tiny details often being the most dramatically different. There were more pubs and fewer pawn shops. Newsagents near schools were wreathed in the fug of chainsmoking Sixth Formers at 4 p.m. There was no Tesco or Sainsbury’s in Belfast, only local supermarkets like Stewart’s.

In Northern Ireland, 1 September 1994 was a great watershed. It is still the most logical point at which to divide recent history into a ‘now’ and a ‘then’. Before, The Troubles simply were and, to my generation, always had been. My memories are of an endless succession of road blocks and traffic jams; of young men in uniform in patrol, with English accents and heavy weapons which would be aimed at you, following you down a street; of dead people on the news and footage of haggard young women in black crying at funerals; of heavy wood beams put across the front door at night, to buy possibly vital seconds in case an assassination squad broke it down with a sledgehammer; of an acute awareness of where was ‘safe’ and where was ‘dodgy’.

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Is Paddy Ashdown right? Is it time for an end to Sykes-Picot?

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ISIS blows up a border post on the Syria-Iraq border. From the ISIS propaganda video 'The End of Sykes-Picot'.
ISIS blows up a border post on the Syria-Iraq border. From the ISIS propaganda video The End of Sykes-Picot.

Paddy Ashdown had an unusually courageous article in the Guardian on Thursday calling for the West to accept that the 1920s-era boundaries of Middle Eastern countries should be redrawn. Courageous doesn’t mean sensible. How does his argument stack up?

“This is the start of a long conflict which could cross the entire Muslim world”, says The Guardian subheader, correctly, “The west’s strategy must accept the end of the old imperial borders.”
 

There’s much that’s sensible here, including the admission that the West neither has the men nor the money to think about remaking the Middle East through force of arms, even if that were possible. So Paddy is essentially calling for Iraq to be allowed to fall apart, for Southern Iraq to be allowed to fall into Tehran’s sphere of influence, for the West to arm the Kurds and for an end to Sykes-Picot.

This is might well happen whether or not “the West”, with its vaunted idea of its capacity to shape events, likes it. Iraq, as an entity, is currently in the last chance saloon. We should not forget that collapsing countries always leave some mess behind. In this case, it will be particularly bad as there is no agreement as to what the boundaries between the various successor entities might be. On off fighting over legitimate ownership of Kirkuk, for example, could last for generations in that context. In fact, I think Paddy knows this so maybe he’s just calling for us to accept that the Syrian Civil War is turning into the War of Syro-Iraqi Succession?

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Nobody loves themselves a conspiracy theory anywhere in the world like they love themselves one in the Middle East

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The latest conspiracy theory doing the rounds in the Middle East: ISIS is a front established by the USA to legitimise a reinvasion of Iraq, and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is actually a Jewish actor called Shimon Eliot. (Of course the actor was Jewish.) Here’s a sample from the Turkish twittersphere:

Of course, conspiracy theories are hardly unique to the Middle East, and some of the commenters in the comments zone on the Guardian website are hardly less convinced that ISIS is a convenient excuse for the Americans to reinvade Iraq: to be honest Fisk isn’t far off that sort of terrain this week.

But there is something spectacular about the sheer scale of the conspiracies that ordinary people in the region imagine are confected in the world. Provincial Turkey in the weeks after 9/11 was fascinating. Of course, the educated provincial secular élite scoffed at the theories and it was generally a fascinating time to hang out with them and talk about the world. But among the ordinary Mehmets on the Yenişehir omnibus, an awful lot happily believed that “Amerika kendini yaptı“ (America did it itself) and “Hiç Yahudi o sabah işe gitmiş“ (they say none of the Jews went to work that morning). Not all of them believed that sort of tripe, by any matter of means, but a lot.

Hussein Ibish has a brilliant piece, Baghdadi Denial Syndrome, on the atonishing unwillingness among Sunnis, across ethnic and national lines, to believe that ISIS can’t possibly be a real phenomenon. Many refuse to believe that Sunni Muslims could be responsible for the sort of maiming/crucifying/baby-starving antics that ISIS gets up to. In a way, that’s sort of sweet: it’s a counter to the Daily Mail coverage that mutters behind it’s hand, you know, they’re all secretly a bit like Abu Hamza. But it’s still nuts, and damagingly, self-righteously, nuts in that it transfers the blame for all problems to other people like Westerners, Jews and Shi’ites sets Sunni Islam on a non-tenable moral pedestal in the process.

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