Truly Free Schools?

Freedom is a lovely thing, and HM government is trailing “Free Schools,” to be set up by groups of parents or others. We don’t yet know what this actually means — an almost inevitable state of affairs with a new project at this stage. I know many educational professionals remain far from convinced that the answer to English Education is yet another scheme for school ownership and governance — that makes 11 different geometries for this in the maintained sector. Will an 11th be the silver bullet?

The Board of Education I chair works in close partnership with all our 280 schools to support them as they seek out and apply what they believe is the best route through the whitewater rapids of today’s Education. We know various set-ups within our family of Church schools from the inside, warts and all, and one size does not fit all. We also have considerable experience of capacity building for schools moving from Controlled to Aided status, as well as an innovative way with academies.

Given the joy and privilege of delivering a keynote for the Fourth Oxford Education Debate at Oxford Brookes University the other day, the terminology got me wondering what a truly free school wold be like. With compelling loaded terms like “free” you have to ask “from?”“to?”“who’s free?” “for what?” and “how?” otherwise they just float off into orbit.

However as a start I came up with four things I’d love to see all English schools free from:

1. Indifference: We have a very strange attitude to children in England. We vigorously defend them against harm. But look at what happens when you take a child into a restaurant. Distraction bags abound, because it’s literally inconceivable that a child could be part of a dinner party on an equal basis, like they would in most European countries. Many children experience life as embarrassing walk-on extras in their homes, not engaged with, confined to a world called childhood which is not quite normal and attracts an extra helping of criticism and cynicism. Oft patronised, ignored, belittled, told to shut up, sometimes even hit, bribed, packed off to school. It all goes together, and until someone can come up with a school that’s really sets children free from the British Adore/ Patronise/ Ignore / Thump approach to children, I don’t see radical transformation in children’s chances.
   
   
2. Process Obsession. Some schools try so hard to get it right they get it wrong. The whole gubbins of measuring and assessment somehow swallows everything else. We need accountabilities and routines and measurements, standards, predictive grades, attainment targets and frameworks. But all these things are greedy concepts. They seem to tell us more about children than they actually do. You can spend a lot of time on them. They need to be treated as servants of the learning, not masters.
   
   Any truly free kind of education has to contain its own process, and tame it, allow for flexibility, and make it accessible. It has to avoid the temptation simply to pile initiative on initiative to impress the voters every five years. Building great schools takes longer than the standard political cycle, and school improvement is a very subtle and time-consuming process.
   
   
3. Third Freedom and, I speak as a Hungarian Scot, I’ve never quite understood why the English are so obsessed about Class. Why does our whole Education system predicate itself on elitism about the acme of everything, including polytechnic education. My French and German friends are delighted when their children land an engineering apprenticeship. Not so in England. Why, oh why? Back in 1944, why were the grammar schools not flooded out with parents complaining that their children had been allocated to the grammar stream when their real interests and passions lay in technology and the future so they needed a place at the Technical High School. I don’t know, but they didn’t.
   
   Ancient schools to serve the poor were somehow hi-jacked by the middle classes in the nineteenth century, and it’s been downhill ever since, for a sizable proportion of our children. When are we going to learn from other European systems that do not require fear of failing schools to drive attainment in all the others, for example.
   
   
4. Obsession with output targets. This is the assumption that All that really matters is the subject, and the job afterwards. As young people face a world where they will need to acquire eight or ten jobs in a working lifetime, we still ask schools to educate to the notion that they will go into a single career. The broadening lateral thinking learning that might enable people to make personal choices that will be fruitful, is treated as a sideshow as horizons contract and every school has to fight the temptation to become a crammer’s.
   
   I think there must be some sort of national curriculum, and I’ve come across great examples of it being used creatively, but I am disturbed to meet good students who are simply crammed for exams, with little hinterland or capacity to look beyond the answers expected of them. Associated with this, some schools are tempted to play the system by fiddling around with targets and other dark arts which I won’t go into but are well-known to all. This approach generally recalls that of the electronics goods warehouse in the Midwest that managed to achieve 100% success at the target of getting all orders out by close of business by yanking the phone socket out of the wall
   

Anyway that’s my big four. I come across excellent schools of all kinds, but these are some of the big systemic wonkinesses that make English education harder work for everyone, and less effective. Any more out there?

Do not adjust your set

Every year I encourage colleagues to offer a week’s ministry to a majority world Church. This includes ARchdeacon Karen and me, with great joy and I have not died, but am simply away in Nandyal, India (leaving a houseful of grieving Children and colleagues rocking on with friends behind) for a few days. Pictures etc. are sure to follow...

Onward to Potterdämmerung

Potter world is now going to hell in a handcart. It really is. The benign old buffers who used to scoff custard creams in the Ministry of Magic have lost it, and Dumbledore’s body lies a mould’ring in the grave — actually it doesn’t moulder, it kinda glows, obviously. Things are falling apart, the centre cannot hold. On the streets there's a purge of mudbloods. The Dark Mark fills the horizon, Black wispy Satanic candyfloss on speed zaps through darkened skies. It smokes like the rear end of my Morris 1100 used to when the big ends were going. Death Eaters loiter around the mouth of the Dartford Tunnel splatting owls.

Through the pallid dystopia created by Lord Voldemort and his dark chums trek Harry, Hermione and Ron like hobbits who wandered onto the wrong set. They camp out in a wee Canvas tent like my old dad had in the scouts, seeking Horcruxes to zap. That’s pretty much it, apart from assorted bangs and whistles, a few snakes snapping away like angry crocs, and a hooligan gang modeled on Adam and the ants. Dobby the House Elf provides the only emotional relief, blasted at the end.

I doubt that this particular movie will turn out to be many people’s Pick of the Potters. Not quite enough happens, and as the characters age, the school adventure fun has gone. The plot is all characterisation, setting up the characters for the final showdown. It’s really only starters for a main course to be served up next year — Deathly Hallows part 2.

It may be the final countdown, but that’s only a warm-up act for a rumble in the jungle that will make Armageddon look like a Sunday School outing. The elderly should bring earplugs. The young should clutch transitional objects and therapy buddies. Everyone, pack spare underwear. Forget Ali/ Frazier — this is Potter/ Voldemort, and the Dark Lord is already mooching around, his slitty little nose twitching at the smell of blood... Harry Potter is coming of age. And not just Harry. The New York Daily News tells us, in the real world, that Emma Watson kisses like an animal. “What kind of animal?” we may wonder, indiscreetly. An Anteater? A Slow Loris? a Manatee? Watch this space. 4 stars out of 5.

My fluttering Pelagiometer

The Anglican Covenant may well not end up accomplishing as much bad or good as it is cracked up for, but the discussion around it has been worthwhile and fascinating, and at last something of a broader debate seems to be starting up, for example Andrew Goddard and Jonathan Clatworthy, here and here. People are still, however, often picking over the bones rather than addressing the big questions around having such a thing in the first place, and it seems to me those are where the action is. Many thanks to all who have offered comment on this blog for their clarity, honesty, and will to try and understand the whole picture.

If Christians are alienated from each other, culturally, sociologically and psychologically, how high a formal fence should they erect between themselves? Enough, surely to give reflective space to both and a chance to relate their partial interests in the whole gospel picture whilst they live in tension and await, in joyful hope, a new heaven and a new earth. But temporary fencing, as low and light as possible, has to offer the best way forward if it’s relationships that count.

The wall is too high if it prevents interchange, and dangerous if it resorts to cantonment — a strategy that promises much short term, but has been historically, literally, bloody disastrous all over the world in the 20th century — Ireland, Kashmir, Germany, Cyprus, Israel/Palestine, South Africa... the examples of how disastrous it is are obvious and I can’t think of a single example of it bringing long term peace. In the end, people have to get together, especially if we are all aiming for the New Jerusalem, the sooner the better, the more porous the boundaries the better.

Whatever the virtues of the Covenant text, or not, it is inconceivable that people will hold themselves accountable to something they never wanted in the first place and don't believe in. Many TEC people the Windsor process was aimed at see it as abusive and biased interference. Meanwhile Conservatives are increasingly seeing it as a Chocolate Teapot (e.g. here). Windsor is increasingly and profoundly tainted for both, and, cuts diminishing amounts of ice with either. Why bother, then, with a blow-up Windsor process? The only people such a thing would would work for are people who don't need it or care about it anyway. This is a profoundly Groucho Marx place to end up.

If this were The Apprentice, I would be underwhelmed by the Covenant marketing department. Vituperative defensive ad hominem spiel sounds hollow and does not answer the broader question above. Perhaps nobody needs Section 4, even in its current toned-down form. The whole idea that a few more primates’ meetings would do the trick is very improbable. There may have been all too many primates meetings, used for grandstanding as much as mutual personal and spiritual engagement. Perhaps we don’t need additional structure; just to learn from our recent history and move on, resolving to use what we’ve got more wisely before we try to grow the apparatus further from a tainted root.

Meanwhile, all this talk of declaring actions in or out of court, and impaired communion, has got my Pelagiometer twitching. My Pelagiometer measures how much personal energy I am investing in faith or works, in other words whether the things I do arise from grace, or whether my awareness of grace is being clouded by anxiety, fear or politics. It tells me when I am taking myself or my faith more seriously than the Holy Spirit.

When “impaired communion” was the relational consequence for everyone to discuss, I used to wonder with whom couldn’t I share Communion in the light of the cross, except for grave and urgent scandal (Book of Common Prayer) where hot anger would obscure and compromise the sacrament?

Whatever Anglicanism is, it is Augustinian in extraction and has to contend with Pelagianism in all its forms. My Pelagiometer is very sensitive, because I recallibrated it when I worked in a prison. I shared communion with “Graham.” He was convicted a major fraud, but for various reasons he sincerely believed he had been in the right to do what he had done, and had squared the transaction that was held to be fraudulent with his boss. He ended up going down for three years anyway. I don’t want to undermine the courts, or the ten commandments. “Graham” and I would probably have to agree to differ about whether he was guilty or not, but never in a million years would I have refused to sit down with him at the Lord’s table. Nor with “Andy,” who probably murdered his girlfriend, but claimed he hadn’t. I took a charitable view that it was the Lord’s supper not mine, and left the judging to God.

Those whose pelagiometers have been calibrated in more genteel environments may set the gauge higher, or use denominational conformity to set theirs. As a sinner saved by grace through faith, I have absolutely no will to start making judgments about my sister or brother, or the institutional churches to which they belong, that would compromise my ability to sit down at the Lord’s table with them, let alone put them out of the house.

The best way forward might be to pass sections 1-3, which are unexceptionable, but put Section 4 on hold and reflect on what we do need, then come back and see if something like Section 4 fills the bill. I’d be amazed if this happened, though. Yes there are tensions in the Communion. Leadership is acknowledging real tensions in an organisation that can't be resolved and leveraging them so that their energy works for everybody. This is often not possible, but that’s what we have to do, not corral people in separate camps. Our status as people baptized into Christ is infinitely more valuable and significant, than our membership of any other group, founded on anything less.

Only us, redeemed

From her rather improbably titled office, Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, “UFO Director at the Anglican Communion Office,” reminds us that the Anglican Covenant hovering over us poses no threat to Churches whose antics may be referred to the First Fifteen, but they must accept that if processes of mediation have broken down their actions have (Euphemism alert) “relational consequences.”

Frankly, this phrase needs very careful handing before can possibly be wisely applied by to Christians to other Christians. I cannot get away from a queasy feeling that it would belong more fittingly to a Mob Protection Salesman or Gestapo Dentist.

It could even be used as cover for a Pelagian three card trick that horrifies me. Why?

What drives and resources my faith is Jesus’ giving himself up to death on a cross, what BCP calls his “one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.” Think on these words. This, in itself, is a mighty powerful mediation process. No talks between factions that do not acknowledge its paramountcy are worthy of Jesus’ name.

When I become a follower of Jesus Christ in baptism, when I receive the bread and wine, I am swept up personally into a process of reconciliation between heaven and earth in which all principalities and powers are disarmed, all sins forgiven, all and, in the end, every tear wiped away from all eyes. The ordinary business of worship is my point of contact, now, with that glorious reality where Christ will one day be all in all.

I really believe this stuff, and, it has, for me, unmistakable “relational consequences” of its own that are far deeper than any merely human falling out however justified. I exercise saving faith when I allow Jesus to break down barriers that divide people, not when I define them. Any label I slap on others who disgust me (what a comical concept in itself) will be torn off anyway, on the day of unveiling. Any dividing wall has been fatally undermined by the earthquake that came after Jesus died. Any protecting veil for what human beings hold, rightly or wrongly, to be holy, been torn in two.

Therefore, in the end, if we take the cross seriously, there can no longer be “us” and “them.” There is only “us,” at the foot of the cross, even though, confronted with the other people involved, some of us find that distasteful for now. Defining people by their acts, gathering them into self-validating camps within which they can huddle fantasizing about their own righteousness and the opposition’s faithlessness is childish, unworthy and sub Christian. All we have to do to find healing and grace is stop doing it. And designing hidiing places where anyone can hide from the true implications of the cross is the silliest and most perilous policy for Christians to contemplate. It really is alien to our best tradition.

Revelation: Saving Faith

Speaking on Newsnight last week, John Broadhurst suggested that current disputations among Christians are really all about revelation, and I think he has a very useful point. Rosie Harper picked it up on the programme by pointing out that “Revelation is something which evolves; tradition grows in response to the work of the Holy Spirit.”

For some people, revelation is the process of handing down a fixed corpus of doctrine, a wrapped package that we label “the faith once delivered to the saints.” Faith is the work of protecting, propogating and defending that deposit against all comers. That’s where Saul started out, a Pharisee of the pharisees, zealous in his defence of the faith in which he had been brought up, a persecutor and zealot.

Then Saul encountered Jesus on the Damascus Road, and even though some of the rags and cultural assumptions of a persecuting zealot clung to him thereafter, the whole course of his life was changed. Faith was not slavishly adhering to works of the law, but exhibiting the courage, vision and hope of Abraham whose faith was accounted to him as righteousness. Once someone was in Christ they could not simply carry on using the old absolutist auto-pilot. They were subject to the Spirit who gives life, not the letter of the law that kills.

For Paul the Apostle, the faith once delivered to the saints is not an ideology but life in the Spirit by grace through faith, a revolutionary process of renewal by the Spirit. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counted for anything but grace working through faith, a new creation, to incorporate someone in Christ. This is the work of the Spirit, not human agency. In this way of looking at things Revelation is a dynamic personal process, not an instutional or ideological fix.

This renewal process didn’t nullify the law, but it did set it in a radical new perspective in a way that painfully exposed its limitations. The law was good as far as it went, but Grace accomplished what the law, weakened by sin, never could — the constitution of a new humanity in Christ where there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.

Looking back at the law which had been his everything, Paul did not rubbish the concerns of those who stood where he had been, hanging onto various kinds of legalism, obsessing over meat sacrificed to idols and the like. But still he insisted, the reality of being in Christ transcends all else, and every decision now needs to be interpreted in the light of its over-riding significance.

In this perspective, the disputes that arise between Christians are a means of proving the genuineness of their convictions. Factionalism is part of human nature, but if indulged, it becomes Cancer in the body of Christ which needs to be watched and stamped on hard. Therefore erecting any Apostle, even Cephas or Appollos, into a rallying point for intra-Church exclusivism or disunity is profoundly abusive, however well-intentioned.

The challenge is to incorporate the vision of Pauline Christianity in our consciousness consistently as a way of life, and not to produce a new Pharisaism. Make no mistake, this was the big issue for early Christians, and concern about it runs through pretty much every page of the Epistles. Had the broader transformative Pauline vision not won through, the Church would almost certainly have survived only as a minor Jewish sect. The transformative stuff comes from the Spirit, and against its justice there can be no law.

Confronted with causes that divide people today, as then, what we need to do is reflect on the realities of the context in which God has set us, the mystery of Christ and the call of the Spirit, and then go figure.

The radical willingness to do this is saving faith, and by its fruits the world shall know Christ for who he is.

Equalities and discrimination 101

I am puzzled when Christian people speak of equality as some godless imposition on a Church whose duty is to preserve tradition by contending for, well, inequality. Have they not read the New Testament? Jesus taught we are all sisters and brothers, and we have one father, and should “call no man father.” He opened up and subverted attitudes to women and children in his society in a way that still reverberates today. His early disciples held all property in common, refused to stigmatise disabled people or women, and developed a glorious vision of a body in which every part was equally valued, whether held in greater or lesser customary honour. This body was to think of itself as the firstfruits of the whole human race.

This radically open society, the Church, looked forward to a day when Christ would be all in all, above every rule, authority, principality and power of the present age. The apostles were severally and corporately agents of this process, and were to structure their life around service not status. These are not isolated soundbites, but major themes of our Scriptures that we may not have fully grasped and inculturated in our context, but we are charged with nevertheless.

Therefore we need to recognise that the struggle against wrongful discrimination is a moral struggle, recognised as such by most people around us of all faiths and none, and if the Church has fallen behind the values of the Kingdom in this regard, shame on us. Our task is not to remodel kingdom values to suit our cultural prejudices, but to embody them in our lives. We contend against inequality because we believe in the Incarnation.

Is all discrimination wrongful? Well, choosing particular people can be justified. A football team agrees freely only to have members of one gender because without such an agreement they could not play football against other similar football teams. A sickle cell anaemia self-help group can choose only to enrol people with sickle cell anaemia. A religious order can agree to be gendered because of a voluntary commitment to celibacy, and if people disagree they can leave at any time. A political party only signs up people who are willing to agree with its founding principles. All these are private commitments, freely undertaken.

But even they have limits. If a football team tries to exclude players on racial grounds, society intervenes and says that fairness and openness cannot be served by that degree of discrimination, so their freedom must be limited for the good of all.

The other core awareness is that discriminatory is as discriminatory does. If I refuse to serve people of a particular racial group people in my Café, it is no defence to say

• I gave them fair warning, they could start their own café,
  nor
• that I did not intend to discriminate or consider that I have
  nor
  
• that I’ve never served such people in 2,000 years,
  nor
  
• that God told me to do it,
  nor
  
• that some of my best friends are x and agree with my policy,
  nor
• there are other parts of the world where such discrimination would be acceptable
  nor
• I say my behaviour is not discriminatory, so it’s not.
  

None of these defences stack up because however reasonable they may sound to the people concerned, they compromise the fundamental possibility of equality.

In many of our parishes we govern schools in which these principles are implemented throughout with ease and grace. The reason is that our leaders, many of them inspired by Christian commitment of one sort or another, have turned what was originally an eccentricity of the enlightened into a social norm.

How sad if the Church that is supposed to be the corporate expression of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, whose words undermined all injustice and inequality, then and now, has to be dragged along as an afterthought, kicking and screaming. So we sometimes see the last first, and the first last — another gospel principle that implies fundamental equality for all God’s children, and the necessity of social as well as spiritual transformation in the Kingdom...

Right solution, wrong problem?

Please, Covenant people, tell us what you think your pet project will achieve and how. We know it’s fallout from the Windsor process, and I’ve seen the text endlessy, but still do not understand exactly what problem it will address and how. Therefore I cannot forbear to share, with my grateful thanks to Maggi Dawn, an attempt to mend a troubled relationship, nothing to do with Church. Sheila wrote to a South Carolina agony column with her relational problem

Dear John,
I hope you can help me. The other day I set off for work, leaving my husband in the house watching TV. My car stalled, and then it broke down about a mile down the road, and I had to walk back to get my husband’s help. When I got home, I couldn't believe my eyes. He was in our bedroom with the neighbour’s daughter!
I am 32, my husband is 34 and our neighbour’s daughter is 19. We have been married for 10 years. When I confronted him, he broke down and admitted they had been having an affair for the past six months. He won’t go to counselling, and I’m afraid I am a wreck and need advice urgently. Can you please help? Sincerely. Sheila.

John writes back with what is unquestionably a brilliant technical solution to what he thinks is the real problem, worthy of a high powered deisgn group:

A car stalling after being driven a short distance can be caused by a variety of faults with the engine. Start by checking there is no debris in the fuel line. If it clear, check the vacuum pipes and hoses on the inlet manifold and also check all grounding wires. If none of these approaches solves the problem, it could be that the fuel pump itself is faulty, causing low delivery pressure to the injectors. I hope this helps. John

Eh voilà! A perfect 10 of a solution, sincerely meant, technically flawless, but completely useless to address a relational problem! You don’t build trust by inventing a third party body to talk about people behind their backs and adjudicate. People who go to court usually end up feeling worse, sometimes even when they have won. Trust comes, in my experience as a bishop, from openness, listening skill, direct speech, compassion, accountability, stability and hope, experienced relationally in as low-key a register as possible.

It may be that the Anglican Communion needs an Anglican Covenant, but the troops are as yet unconvinced and all I seem to be hearing from its proponents, I'm very sorry to say, are rather testy responses to criticism, blaming everybody else for misunderstanding it, whilst everybody else seems to think they understand it only too well.

Meanwhile the Church Times has set its readers a question of the week about the adoption of the Covenant. Normally they get about 200 votes, split about 60/40. This week, I see it’s over 800, 86%, yes 86%, against the Covenant. That's hardly a scientific poll, but if the powers that be have any interest at all in what active Anglicans think, they ought surely want to try and work out why so many people are as yet unconvinced. Is it just a communication thing, or is it something about the proposal itself that hasn’t yet connected with everybody?

Because the Church of England has only a limited ability to listen to the Holy Spirit speaking through the non-elite faithful, it may be that habitual deference, lack of moral courage, infantilism and amateur inexperience can sail such a thing through the General Synod with less than 20% of the punters actually believing in it. The kindest thing that may end up being said was that it seemed like a good idea at the time of the Windsor report, whose child it is, but it represents a rational/legal solution to something that wasn't essentially a rational/ legal problem, and never mind because everybody has now moved on.

I very much doubt that places where they are less into deference, infantilism and amateur inexperience than England will buy the covenant wholesale on this basis. So come, on, Covenant people. Please explain to us positively how this helps build a closer and more relational communion that is not a super-denomination, and we will consider your advice very seriously. Right now, the kindest one can say is that the case appears “not proven.” yet?

Change, Decay and Renewal

Wallace Benn has got me thinking, when he says:

I've only two years left before retirement but the Church of England into which I was ordained is not the same church today

Is it optimism or faith, or both, but I’m rather glad the Church isn’t the same as the one into which I was ordained 31 years ago. I can’t as a Church historian think of any age in which somebody could have said the Church of thirty years ago hadn’t changed in ways that mattered. Certainly not the first century, or fourth, or sixteenth.

I’ve taken a quick flick through some paperback commentators about the Church Bishop Benn seems to wish he were in, including Nick Earle’s What’s wrong with the Church? (1961). Here were the things he thought had to change in 1961:

1. Growing out of being the Tory Party at Prayer and engaging with society in a less hidebound way.
   Good Story: We have. Faith in the City was one major turning point. And the current mood music from government implies that many of them have had enough of mindless secularism as the only way to engage with religion in the public square. I rejoice that the Church is very much more diverse, though it faces major internal anti-discriminatory challenges.
   Bad Story: the pain of having to climb down from Imperialism and Monopoly has exacted a cost of it own. Faith is the opposite of, not a higher form of, nostalgia.
   
   
2. Growing away from financial dependence on endowment income, and providing pensions for the clergy as well as looking after the buildings. Good story: Another Job done. C of E giving has mushroomed since the eighties and our diocese is now financially self-supporting, thanks to a revolution in generosity. Buildings are in better nick than ever, but pose great challenges. Retirement is now possible, and pensions have come in, albeit recently downsized.
   Bad Story: How do we, as a voluntary organisation, prevent ourselves becoming financially driven and keep aligned with basic Gospel values?
   
   
3. Opening the “Parson’s Pleasure” clerical caste, freeing up ministry
   Good Story: Much progress on this in terms of access and, since 1989, female colleagues whom God has called and gifted and who enrich the life and witness of the Church immeasurably by their love, prayer and dedication. They reach places the old fashioned public schoolboys club that was clergy chapter back in the seventies never did, and have helped develop a more realistic picture of servant ministry to replace old romanticism.
   Bad Story: We are still too obsessed with clergy — “Lay ministry” often means getting lay people to be clerical, rather than fulfil their calling in the community by being what they are particularly called to be, beyond the walls of the Church. Also, we have a new challenge to use new HR tools to secure justice and the common good, but preserve a sense of calling.
   
   
4. Stopping pretending and obsessing about sex (in 1961 contraception and divorce) Good Story: Some real progress in the Church and the culture. Contraception has happened. The Church always did marry divorcees before 1925, and having to confront all the hypocrisy of pretending it didn’t, however painful, has delivered us to a potentially more honest place.
   Bad Story: Society at large is all messed up over relationships and we, who live in this society, share the pain and damage the arises from this. One thing’s for sure, though. Hypocrisy wasn’t the answer. We are in some ways more fearfully childish and obsessional about gay people than we were n 1961, when everything was safely in the closet.
   
   
5. Getting real about other Christians, by allowing inter communion and engaging with other faiths
   Good Story: The structure is there for inter communion, and the rise of Charismatic spirituality and non-denominational churches have blessed everyone greatly in unexpected ways. Past Imperialism and exclusivism are not entirely dead, but largely possible to see for what they are now. The Church has begun to seriously de-institutionalise and become more like a movement, trying to model its life more on energy than power games.
   Bad Story: There’s been a loss of optimism and confidence about who we are and what we’re doing there, and the whole challenge of being traditional rather than reactionary, which we don’t always handle well.

I wonder what changes others have noticed over thirty years?

On balance, I thank God the Church is not as it was in the seventies because, however improbably, I do believe the journey we are on is his journey not ours and we are now thirty years’ march nearer home. But make no mistake. The Church is always called to change. Some change is good, some less good, but you only know which when you step out in faith and do it — what one of my college tutors used to call the Jewish rowing-boat view of history. That’s why we’re in God's hands not ours. The disciples in Luke 9 only discovered the resource to go out two by two out there, when they did it — what Jesus called travelling light, without excess baggage.

Jesus Christ, risen, ascended, glorified does not change, and the result is we are resourced to live and witness in a changing world without pretending! The reason the Cross is static, one for all, and our whole vision secured by an eschatalogical vision, is that this creates a liminal space in which we can live responsively in the world God has given us, always in the end times. In this zone the life of the Church is endlessly dynamic. The ark is secured not by being anchored to the sea bed, but by the Holy Spirit, as it interacts with the world.