Resources for your very own Pilling Report Party

This week brought a public meeting with m’learned friend Malcolm Duncan from Gold Hill Baptist Church for a public conversation with 280 people listening in. I welcome same-sex marriage in a way he can't, but we both enjoyed talking and agreed it was a helpful thing to do. We hoped that people might value listening in to a conversation that didn't pretend, piddle about or otherwise minimise the sharpness of our differences, but which also, people told us, conveyed our respect for each other as fellow ministers, with the Kingdom high on our hearts.

Then, out of the blue, came the Pilling Report — a discussion document. Recent speculative flurries about what might be in it shows how profoundly wise it was simply to publish it. That way everyone, including the bishops, can have better information to go on when they discuss it.

I have been asked by various people, however, for some resources to inform, enrich and enlarge intelligent conversations on this subject. Such conversations carry their own risks. It can exacerbate the problem when straight twosomes talk, even well-meaningly, about gay people rather than with them. I also realise how weird it seems to the majority of people younger than me who have sorted this subject and moved on that we are still talking about it at all. They feel as though they had strayed into a Saudi discussion of whether women should be allowed to drive.

That said, I am trying to help us do what Pilling bids us do. With my two health warnings, out of several thousand possibilities, I commend a few books that provide intelligent ways into various aspects of the matter — I don't agree 100% with all or any of them, but they have worthwhile information about different dimensions of discussions based...

Science

Law

 

Bible

 

Theology

Denominational Stories

  

Dialoguing in Church ...

On Waking up and Smelling Coffee

It’s hard to express the joy and relief, to those of us who often feel we live in the wilderness on such issues, of having an Archbishop who has woken up and shows real signs of being able to smell coffee. His much loved and revered predecessor, a scholar and saint, seemed to live on his own ecclesiastical planet, a place of bendy syllogisms, poetry and occasional weightlessness.

This produced an environment where it was a virtue for the Church to believe rather romantic stories about itself, for which synod became a massive recycling operation. Heavy in the air hung massive sententiousness about being the “National Church.” Its Nomenklatura shuffled around its hall of mirrors muttering to themselves mysterious self-referential Koans:

• Everything must change but continue to feel the same
• Theology was what really mattered, best done behind closed doors, and daily life was somewhere else
• A Church that acted as the sole arbiter of its own attitudes and behaviour could engage in Evangelism
• If everyone who looked out of the bubble and saw anything they shouldn't just shut up and switched off their computers it would all go away
• You could listen to people without hearing anything to change your life
• You could discriminate against gays and women without discriminating against gays and women as long as you always had and didn't mean to

To hear that it is absurd and impossible to pretend that nothing has changed is actually a massive relief.

In the old world the Church saw itself as the National Trust for Morals, especially about sex, driven by fear, especially about loss of control, and a sense of its own entitlement. Good news was good news in a desultory “Eat up your Brussels Sprouts” kind of way.

Where we are going the Church looks more like a movement, fuelled by faith, that can carry its institutional burdens honestly and lightly and not be bound by them. This kind of a Church is free to see what it sees. Its message is good news, not good news / bad news. This makes it Evangelical in the best sense of the term — genuinely engaged with the real world in a transformational way.

And the path to this new world, according to the parable of the prodigal son, is realism that leads to repentance, coming to its senses about itself, returning to the Father whose everlasting arms were always there underpinning everything. That leads to hope and, St Paul says, hope does not disappoint.

What does such a world offer those who are most invested in the old thing, who indeed have drawn much of their sense of identity and value from it? If the Peace Train is in the station, why should they climb aboard? We do not have to feel bad but we do have to think different. If we want a future without sexism and homophobic bullying, all we have to do is stop practicing those things, practice resurrection instead, and we are free.

We lose the whip hand, and the right to bully and hector people from the moral high ground. But we lost that anyway, years ago. What we gain is the dignity and loving respect that all are due. There is no shame in honest disagreement; but everybody’s ideas are subject to impact assessment from everybody else, mutually. Such a Church expresses unity held in tension between people whose outlooks are their own, not groupthink secured by manipulative mannerism.

In fact, nobody is going to lock anyone up in the Tower of London for holding retro-conventional views about women or gay people — that’s another self-aggrandizing hysterical story that has been doing the rounds. But those views will lose their privileged status, and unless people who hold them work to develop a new kind of discourse that does not have to rely on fear, disgust and autos da fé, they will find it increasingly difficult to be heard because of all the morally repellent white noise outsiders hear around their message. This would be a crying shame, because the world needs their wisdom and positive input across the spectrum of concerns, along with everyone else’s.

Engaged or marooned on their own island? It's a stark choice, after the Indian summer for churchy solipsism in the past few years. However, in fact, the eternal God is our refuge, all of us, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

The only way to prove it is to act as though it were true, and step out in faith...

Genuine Unity — How to focus it

A bishop is called to be a focus of unity. But how?

Unity matters. Here’s the theory, according to St Paul. The whole created order is emerging into Unity through Christ whose death has reconciled everything and triggered a viral process of reconciliation that takes in every human dimension. the Church is a new people, the firsfruits of the whole creation. Nobody is left out. It takes a whole world to know Christ.

Disunity is all in the mind. Some Christians believe gayness is within the purpose of creation; some against it. Much of our official history has taken the anti-gay line, and much of our unoffcial practice has behaved differently. Some believe in women’s senior leadership, some not. According to the last Archbishop, bishops could only be a focus of unity by resisting change in order to reassure traditionalists, in public anyway. The price of unity was rejecting gay people, largely paid by gay people. Ditto with women. They were to calm down and accept being diminished in ministry, as the price of unity.

This policy has failed, on every level.

The dwindling number of Traditionalists were not reassured and gay people continued to be diminished, patronised, bullied, and rejected. Meanwhile the Church became the only UK public body left allowed to discriminate against women in its senior leadership. What seemed even-handed was actually taking sides and has kludged up real dialogue, parking the issues in a siding, but guaranteeing an increasingly guilty and untenable paralysis. Meanwhile society got on with sorting both issues without the Church.

Bishops sat on the fence for the sake of unity in the name of even handedness, trying to slow everything down and keep order. The result was disunity, frustration and chaos.

In reality there was no fence to sit on. In effect, doing nothing was siding with the decreasing majority who believe gay people are wicked, stunted, sick or disabled, or the one that believed women were made by God for non-leadership roles.

As the numbers who believe gay people are just people and women are equal grew and became a majority in England, even the Church of England, the game was up.

You can't build unity in a family by excluding any members of it. If your children fall out it is not even handed to ignore the one who's stepping out of line, to build fellow feeling between the others who aren't, sacrificing the black female, or gay member “for the sake of family unity.” Doing that actually destroys the family, not unites it. You can only parent a family on the supposition that all its members are equally valid. Thus Bishops, by trying to be nice to gays whilst siding with anti-gays have not been a focus of unity, but have actually stoked a bigger crisis over gay people in the church than was experienced in education, politics, the military, the law, commerce, or any other area of life.

If bishops want to be real focuses of unity they have to stop trying to be nice, in effect siding with anti-gays. Both sides act out of conviction. Good. It's time to stop trying to calm everybody down and synthesize them. A working model is actually in the New Testament, and we need to wake up and follow it.

Romans 14 deals with Meat sacrificed to idols. This mattered to early Christians not as animal lovers, but because meat came from pagan temples. Eating it was either subsidizing idolatrous cults or defying them by proving Christians were immune to their products. Eat or refuse, you couldn't do both simultaneously. The issue was black and white. If St Paul ate meat he sided with those who think their faith is strong because they eat meat. If he refuses he sides against them with those who refuse, on grounds of conscience. There is no middle ground.

At this point St Paul could come running on, saying "Calm down, dear! Nobody eat anything because that will upset the vegetarians! Let's all discuss what we all have to do before we can do anything! And then when we're ready to move, we must all move together!"

What St Paul recommends is the exact opposite. He tells every Christian

• to be convinced in their own mind, each one personally.
• to get on with doing whatever they do, meaty or veggie, 100%, but to do it for faith reasons, for Christ, not fear reasons. What comes from faith is faith.
• When doing this produces passionate disagreement, to view it as an opportunity to accept the other as is and love them, not an opportunity to tribalise
• To judge nobody else before the time
• When people see you doing this, they will be amazed, and God will be glorified. Nobody has to pretend. Every particularity praises God's works, not its own, in its own language. Nothing is judged or synthesized before the time.

Fake Unity is basically about what's going on among the officers on the bridge. Its aim is keeping everyone as happy as possible. Driven by fear of everything falling apart, the captain becomes what Walt Disney called Mickey Mouse, "a little guy trying his best."  Its aim is a world tamed and homogenised, where everybody calms down, and each particularity curbs its enthusiasms whilst every anomaly is synthesised out.

Real unity is concerned with where the ship is going as well as how the ship is running. Its comes from the Cross, powered from within by a shedding of blood that bridges every contradiction in heaven and earth, even life and death. Its aim is a world reconciled, not homogenised, where every particularity believes and does what it does to the utmost and so becomes fully itself in a new, emergent, diverse, chorus of praise to God.

The coming days, for the General Synod, could be make up your mind time between these two visions of unity, cheesy or real. At last.

On Cliffs and Hanging

So this is what the Game show hosts call “Make-up-your-mind time.” For once, the Guardian and the Telegraph agree — this is Decision-Day. Like everyone on all sides, I’m praying. On days like this the Church chances the notion that the rather slippery and elusive concept of God’s will can emerge and take flesh. The risk is real, both that it will and that it won‘t. I read again what I’ve said on this blog about women and the episcopate. Back in July 2008, it struck me that the mountain those opposed to this had to climb was to come up with some way their sticking points, however irrational, could be positive and missional — good news. This has not happened, perhaps because it could not be done.

Since then, considerable ingenuity has gone into attempts to square the circle between justice and voodoo, almost successfully at times. We nearly discovered Schrödinger’s Cat with a Hat — she both is and is not a bishop depending on whether the box is open. Along the way many have said “there is no doubt this will happen — the only question is how.” They are probably correct, politically, but it doesn’t help to have lost focus on why and what it could mean to have women in the episcopate. Also, there's a danger that this way of speaking has created an illusion that any institution can stagger on for ever finessing the detail without losing something of the plot.

On offer is a considerable, almost fatal, compromise of principle, but most progress in the world is made crabwise. Looking at the big picture, it would be tragic to waste another seven years on this issue, and, given the sheer quanitity of thought and prayer that has gone into the present sticky compromise that’s on offer, the idea that one more wee heave will dissolve the knot is purest moonshine. Permitting blacks to sit on white beaches may leave a vestige of apartheid. It may be less good than abolishing white beaches. But it’s progress. MLK said, “The time is always right to do what is right.”

If not now, when?

So Long, Mr Nibbles

Dr Robyn Skinner, psychotherapist, once had a patient with a most annoying habit. He always brought along a stuffed toy rabbit, a mysterious authority figure that was assiduously consulted before any critical decision. The presence of Mr Nibbles was lucrative for Dr Skynner, but seriously inhibited progress with the gentleman’s condition. Theological discussions involve sensitive personal matters, and participants often bring along their stuffed rabbits — mystery authority figures. 

Anglicans have three particular bunnies. 

There’s a Vatican Gold one — 

“we’d love to, but what would the Pope say?” Well, the real Pope has always shot straight from the hip about womens’ ordination. He abominates it lock stock and barrel. He even came up with the ordinariate, a tiny but perfectly formed exercise in what Southern Baptists call sheep stealing, that leaves no room for doubt.

There’s the Biblical Literalist one — 

Oh, we all know God didn’t do the job in seven literal days, but the nursery narrative says could have, and we want to play safe. On gender equality most people know the score. The most avid “complementarians” do allow their wives to bob and cut their hair, to speak about faith, except in Church, to lead teams containing men. They’re part of a Church whose supreme governor is a woman. The English settled the real issue about whether women could ever, as a matter of Creation ordinance, hold positions of authority over men back in 1569, and it’s generally worked out fine since.

Finally there’s the dog eared old rabbit called “nice.”

All manner of murder and mayhem, backstabbing and worse, go on at the Vicarage. Only we must be nice about it. In fact, none of us are as nice as we like to think we are, but the pretence continues in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary if only we behave well. Nice is full of “yes, buts.” I first encountered it in the form “We’d love to have a Cheshire home in the town, but we can’t let people in wheelchairs dent our property values.” yes, But... It’s anything but nice. And in present circumstances another canter round the paddock for this question is anything but nice.

This week the General Synod reaches a final vote. Stuffed rabbits sometimes help make it possible to talk together along the way, but they can't help with final decisions. Best vote according to your positive convictions, one way or the other. If you believe women cannot be bishops, you couldn’t live with yourself if you voted any way but against. Nobody would expect otherwise. But the reverse is also true for those who do believe women can be called by God to the episcopate.

It makes no sense at all to anyone to consult any stuffed rabbits any more. Everyone has compromised, including those who believe in a non discriminatory church. The idea that another trip around the gasworks on this subject will deliver traditionalists anything better in eight years’ time seems, frankly, insane. That could only happen if a new synod represents a final retreat into the ghetto, because the direction of travel on planet earth is plain as a pikestaff, and it's the other way.

After years of trying out every conceivable permutation a compromise has been reached that leaves almost everybody unsatisfied. The only process grounds left involve the notion that a statutory instrument is too far short of a statute to protect people — a somewhat top shelf legal concept that is simply untrue in any other area of life.

Time to leave Mr Nibbles out of it and vote according to conviction. Time to move on. 

Swimmin with the Wimmin part 94

So what was the women bishops result? I don’t really know, of course, not being part of the house of bishops, but preliminary indications are pretty much that things can roll forward. Bishop Pete Broadbent, who sits in the House, has provided a good thumbnail summary.

The result, in true C of E fashion, is a curate’s egg, but probably not such a rotten one as to send the whole process around again in five years time. The Bishops said “yes,” mainly because anything else would be ludicrous now. The number of people requiring alternative episcopal oversight has dipped in most of the country, very likely, below 2-3% of electoral roll members — something like 0·06% of the population. Another circuit to land in 5 years time would not yield a different result, and certainly not one more congenial to those who believe women do not belong in positions of episcopal authority.

But, some inquire, what exactly does the press release Ruth Gledhill called “the worst written since the Reformation” actually mean?

The project basically moves forward with two amendments. I will now attempt to pick through the entrails. If I am wrong, please correct me. But this is what I think it means...

(1) The first amendment expresses the slightly donnish theological distinction Rowan pushed at the last general synod between “delegated” power, a legal thing, and what could be called ordinary episcopal authority. Thus when I ordain people I am understood to derive my authority to do so from my ordination as a bishop, not from the Bishop of Oxford let alone his gene pool. This has the benefit of expressing traditional ecclesiology in the way that the flying bishops project never did.

The distinction is supposed to help on two fronts. Those who believe higher clergy need male gonads can comfort themselves in the knowledge that their guy got all of his regular authority to function from the admittedly nebulous entity called “the whole church of God,” not the XX bishop up the road. On the other front the Chromosomally Simplistic One can reassure herself that she got her authority from the same place and did not lose any of her episcopal Mojo in order to placate the XY-only people. Their arrangements were a merely legal fandango.

In itself this amendment was probably necessary to move forward at all, given the situation created by the Act of Synod from 1993. Unlike the nineties flying bishops arrangement, at least this amendment is ecclesiologically coherent, and it could help normalise perceptions from a theological point of view. The extent to which ordinary people (in the non-ecclesiastical sense of that term) know or care about it may well be limited.

(2) A second amendment requires bishops to have serious regard, when allocating clergy, to the reasons parishes require bishops or priests with gonads.

On the face of it this is common sense. If people want a male because the Eucharist must be celebrated by someone who shares Jesus’ biological gender (if not his Jewishness or Beard), they get a Real Man of the Eucharist. If on the other hand they believe that God Made Woman not to hold any authority over men in Church (unless an Archdeacon or Supreme Governor), then what matters isn’t the Eucharist, but that women don’t preach to other men. In effect these latter want a proper male preacher, having often in past times had an Oxbridge blue in some Manly Pastime. Just remember this is nothing to do with gender, and that this second amendment, kindly and sensibly, requires a proper match in this matter.

Is the Church going to remain a discriminatory organisation, with a thinning theological figleaf to cover its vulnerability? Truth compels me to say, probably yes. In Brer Rabbit terms the old deal was that the buses were not segregated, and as long as the whites who believed in segregation on biblical grounds sat at the front, they could kid themselves that there weren't blacks at the back of the bus. This has now been modified. The driver can soon be black, and those who believe in Biblically based separate development can either stare out the window sideways or comfort themselves that they only have to look on the back of the driver's head. This scheme could well be a way to bring women bishops onshore from places like Oz, New Zealand, Canada, and the US. That's progress, I suppose. Intellectually, it’s not quite desegregation. But do not underestimate the power of evolution. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Evolution didn’t work.

In the meanwhile my picking over the entrails mattereth not a pig’s burp. There is a special Group of Six Wise Ones (including one woman) who will now pick over the entrails to decide whether this is too radical a change to go forward. I wouldn’t think that's too risky a bet, but the C of E is a place loaded with surprising possibilities. If Les Six do decide this amended scheme won’t blow all the fuses on the Enterprise, everything rolls onward to York in June. Get that old ecclesiastical anorak out of the cupboard and tighten your underwear. The Monstrous Regiment is at the gates.

The Plain Truth (100 words)

Read the comments and weep. Everybody outside the Bubble sees that this is about discrimination. The C of E as a discriminatory body is running hard over thin air, way off a cliff that used to be there. What yesterday's synod debate demonstrated clearly is that binloads of dense legal verbiage actually obstructs understanding and mutual communication. Better just sit down, talk and arrange matters, like they have everywhere else in the world. It's the Gospel way. If this ludicrous Sir Humphrey approach is all that's possible, at least try and keep the legalese simple, brief & to the point.

St Paul’s: Writing on the subway wall?

What can leaders in the Church of England, like me, learn about our operation from last year’s experience outside St Pauls? I wanted to capture three bits of feedback about the Church of England from sympathetic voices. Their words are not comfortable, but we have to pinch ourselves and remember the Facts are our Friends. They can be changed, but doing so will require change in us.

Voice 1:
The chair of our local council, a member of the Conservative party, wrote to the Archbishop to

jolt the leadership of the Church of England to become more vocal and effective in offering moral guidance based on the Gospel to a society where the vast majority are fumbling to find their way to a place where the world’s resources are more evenly shared and where the poor and weak are both supported and respected.  ....It is absolutely appropriate for you to comment on the ethics of particular financial structures, taxation and economic policy. However, in arguing for three specific financial solutions in your first public response to the concerns highlighted by the protesters you sounded like yet another economist or politician rather than an Archbishop. Even if each of the suggestions proved to be a brilliant idea would they solve the fundamental problem? No! 

You state that the demands of the protesters have been vague. 

That, I suggest, is a symptom of their inability to collectively articulate their desire for a fairer world. 

Had your response been to answer simply and directly the question on the banner most frequently featured in the media coverage outside St Paul’s “What would Jesus do?”  you  may have been able to help them. 

Present concerns about the future of life, work and money transcend political stereotypes. Mammon is the god that failed, but remains enticing. Right now he has us by the short and curlies. People are desperate to go beyond the assumptions and processes that got us into this mess. They want spiritual guides to engage with the real big issue not tinker with silver bullets and quick fixes. What would Jesus do? Over to us...

Voice 2:
I was lucky enough to have a conversation in the week of all the resignations with a French Monastic friend I much admire. 


With the bodies piling up on the bed like the final act of a Jacobean tragedy, he told me:

 

There was no need to resign
— only to repent!

Our faith is one of repentance, renewal and hope. This isn’t always well understood in England, natural home of Pelagianism — the religion of dyb-dyb-dyb/dob-dob-dob and pulling your socks up. The world we are entering is an ever more risky place. To make fools of ourselves may be embarrassing, but if it’s only our pride on the line, that shouldn’t be the end of the world. A faith in grace breeds courage, including the courage to risk failure. Every day, we can start again. We become what we could be by the grace of God, not corporate planning.

Voice 3: 
Last word goes a US banker working in London. I wish I knew his name. He came up to me on the street outside the Cathedral that first weekend. With the press asking me what bishops think of bankers, I found it especially valuable to hear what bankers think of bishops. He saw my collar and asked if St Paul's was “my Church.” “Yes, and no,” I said. But I am a Church of England bishop. And he said...

Ah! Church of England! — a lot of what you do in your churches is beautiful. Your downside is your top people. Their heads are stuck so far up their own asses they can't see the light any more!

Excuse my friend’s American. They talk like that, especially the bankers. I hate to think our good and decent College of Bishops comes over like this. But it does.

The facts are our friends. And the fact is there is a world out there rocking on its bearings, looking to Jesus Christ, among others, for wisdom and hope.

An institution that’s absorbed in anxiety about itself, and gets hung up on, for example, arcana like “the gay issue” as currently framed, or discriminatory behaviour towards women, doesn’t inspire wisdom or hope in anyone outside itself.

This is painful to admit, but it’s the truth on the street. Most local parishes are far more recognisable as the Body of Christ than the anxious fading institution wringing its hands at the centre.

The time has come, not to resign but to re-engage — and to repent on the way. Change is possible, but we need to want to get real. That’s what metanoia is. How can we expect the bankers to do something we find so damned difficult ourselves? By grace, through faith. Same as everyone else. Who knows? our struggles to get real may resource them on their parallel journey.

But only if we do it.

How about the particular role of leaders in institutions? Can they do more than whistle for the wind, telling everybody how magnificent the Emperor’s new clothes are, pour encourager les autres? Let me throw in a final soundbite. I’m currently reading a wonderful book by Euan Semple about the realities of communication. I hope to review it when I’ve finished reading it. Reflecting on his hands-on experience of many corporate entities including the BBC, he says

We are used to thinking of the world in terms of mass. Big things like nation states, religions, society, the media. We are used to expecting those big things to look after us and protect us. But the internet splits those up and breaks them apart. It is made up of networks of individuals, each with their own voice. If we are going to survive the changes we need to see in our institutions we need to help them find that voice. We need to help them grow up.

Discriminatory Louse on Lady’s Bonnet

As Buckinghamshire experiences its annual Burns Night Kilt Hire peaktime, recitations will roll of Robbie Burns’ poem To a Louse, on seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church, 1786:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:

At a recent confirmation, I saw a louse in Church... It was a bonny evening with many candidates of all ages and a congregation of several hundred, and great joy and celebration. As I sat in the hall afterwards signing gifts and cards, a candidate in his late 20’s came up to me and, as often happens, we began talking about about his coming to Christ.

Formerly an atheist, he had found faith in a flourishing Evangelical church, but the biggest obstacle in his way had been what he called the Church of England’s sexist senior leadership structure and poor record on human rights. If his workplace behaved like that they'd be closed down. Here was a national institution claiming some kind of moral authority, but behaving in a way which he, and everyone in his office, found morally disgusting.

Steady on, I thought, and trotted out a line about tradition and variety. How could I say that? he asked. Everybody knows that in the workplace discriminatory is as discriminatory does. It’s no defence in an Equalities case to say you didn’t consider your discriminatory behaviour to be so, far less that the Pope told you to do it, or that you’d always done it, or that God does it. Anyway there was a happy ending, he said, because after four years’ delay, he had eventually found in his local Church a genuinely open and apostolic community. But when was the institutional national Church going to catch up?

As legislation for female bishops goes out for consultation, everything will be framed in terms of the problems experienced by a tiny minority of churchy dissidents. I don’t suppose anyone will speak up for those who don’t yet go to Church, like my confirmation candidate and his work colleagues. They don’t show up on our radar. Maybe that’s why there aren’t more of them being confirmed.

Great Soapy debates will be held in the next day or so, with much lather produced in good faith and many croc tears about mission and why congregations fail, and how sad it is that the average English Anglican is 61. It’s not going to change, though, is it, until we accept the hard truth that some of our cherished behaviour and attitudes can be a real stumbling block to those on the threshold of faith. The problem is with us and either we don’t really care that we are blocking the gospel, or we have to do something, perhaps the obvious, about it.

Leadership and Lifeboats

A factfinding visit to the Middle East has led to a blogging break. As normal service resumes, my eye caught the Times obituary of Admiral Peter Branson (here, behind paywall).

In 1941 the young Midshipman Branson’s transport ship was torpedoed by U-1107 and he spent several days in tropical heat on half a pint of water a day in a lifeboat. He recorded an interesting tendency of men in lifeboats: “everybody was giving orders and nobody was listening.” As leaders in conventional Churches begin to see themselves as minorities in lifeboats, fed by a lot of twaddle about being persecuted in England, I wonder if this tendency is beginning to spread among us. He went on to conclude:

the best morale in the world is useless without discipline to back it up in such a case as this. Our morale was high but rendered useless through lack of discipline

This gives me a queasy feeling about the lack of alignment in a lot of what we do. Like Woody Allen’s joke description of God, the Church is often “someting of an under-achiever.” At every level, including Primatial shenanigans among people who should know better, there is a profound gap between sincere faith with enthusiasm and the discipline to turn the high energy, love and prayer among Christians into something transformational for the world. Discuss?

General Synod Election Address

For the General Synod of the Church of England, most English of Legislative Institutions, a Ruritanian Mask hides the curious fact that all three houses have completely different forms of franchise:

• Licensed or beneficed Clergy all get a vote — fish and chips common or garden democracy. The sort of thing they did in ancient Athens. One Person One Vote. Radical Stuff.
  
  
• Laity are elected indirectly (making it possible to be a candidate whilst not being an elector). Such a system was used for the US Senate before the 17th Amendment (1913?)... Curiously enough, primitive Anarcho-Syndicalists were keen on indirect elections too.
  
  
• Diocesan bishops are elected by Cathedral Chapters instructed to elect them by Her Majesty the Queen. This ardently Royalist elective system, which fills the majority of the upper house, will renind some of Mogens Jallberg’s pithy comment: “In Democracy: it's your vote that counts. In Feudalism it's your count that votes.”
  
  
• Southern Suffragan Bishops like me have our own clergy-style mini elction, with a tiny electorate of around 50 and 9 candidates for 4 places, so anything could happen. This is a grassroots kind of election appropriate to, say, a smallish parent teacher association.
  

People with no sense of fun or soul might think this is all a right old mess, and ripe for reform so everyone gets a vote on some consistent set of principles. People with soul, however will enjoy the way this way of operating gives the Holy Spirit an opportunity, in true English fashion, to hedge his bets on three different systems simultaneously.

The Bishop of Fulham has been telling the New York Times what this all adds up to –“The trouble with the Anglican Church is that it has adopted a parliamentary model and one that presumes change and presumes everyone can have a say. I think it’s become a kind of fascist democracy.” After years of being rather snooty and invertedly snobbish about the General Synod, I observe that change does happen, and God is usually in it somewhere (but where?), and I believe to the bottom of my boots that everyone should have a say, because to deny them really is a kind of fascism. Was it time to climb off the fence and get involved?

As Her Majesty has not instructed a Cathedral Chapter to elect me on pain of imprisonment for prae munire, the only way to find out out what it would be like to be part of a fascist democracy has involved asking my colleagues to vote for me, among others. Mind you, this is pretty much what happens in most elections. This involved producing an election address. If you're not a suffragan bishop you haven't a vote anyway, but if you are, vote early! vote often!

Before becoming bishop of Buckingham is 2003, I worked for 23 years as a parish priest, with some prison ministry, teaching and design work. This summer I found myself encouraging friends to stand for General Synod, feeling a hypocrite because of my own long-standing cynicism about it; There’s an obvious answer, and I’m very grateful to +Lee Rayfield of Swindon and +Christopher Chessun of Woolwich for kindly proposing and seconding me. What are my issues, and what might I bring, as a new member, to the General Synod?

Church Culture

I have played a leading role in the implementation of Common Tenure in our diocese. I believe we can work out our procedures in a helpful way, but I hope it’s done within a theological vision for Christ-centred servant ministry. CT must promote vocation in ministers. Beyond the clergy, many parishes are feeling poor and downhearted. All kinds of growth happen when churches seek out the energy around them and work with that — an analogy with air source heating comes to mind.

Communications

I am not techie for the sake of tech, but really enjoy being part of the C of E’s discernment process about new media, as well as having my own blog, which has had over 380,000 hits. Social media can painfully expose our weaknesses, especially if the Church is boring, weedy and faithless. People in a flatter, globalised social order seek loving service, not conventional authority figures. Authenticity and Interactivity count for more than the effortlessly superior Olympian heights which past Anglican bishops have commanded. People are often surprisingly open, and we can exercise real influence, but it must be earned not assumed. Christians often have real depth and authenticity, but I also encounter fear and denial among episcopal colleagues and others. We need to learn how to change, not only to engage more clearly with people for the gospel, but for our own souls’ health.

Education

At a time many in the schools trade are casting around for a vision, anyone with a clear idea of what it means to be truly child centred, anchored in confidently held values, has much to contribute. As chair of one of the largest Boards of Education in the country, I can see in our 288 schools everything to play for, and much to gain... or lose!

Ecclesiology

With deep Evangelical roots, I wrote a doctorate on Anglo-Catholic Ecclesiology. My view of the Church, Catholic and Reformed, is shaped by spending regular time over many years with a French Benedictine Community. Conversion, Stability and Obedience strike me as vital tools in discipleship and community building. I’m a historian. I think our tradition is often fuller of resource and hope than we realise. Covenant? I can see why the Archbishops want some basis for the Communion better than the fading Cheshire-Cat smile of the British Empire, but wish it would go on one side of A4.

The next Synod is about far more than the ordination of women to the episcopate, which I joyfully support. Christ transcends gender. The sociological geometry of Christian ministry has always reflected the society we serve, and I see this as part of our incarnational calling. A two-speed episcopate seems to me a long way from Catholic order. It’s embarrassingly obvious that further wobble and faff will just annoy everyone and make us look even sillier than we already do.

If there’s anything you’d like to check back with me about, please do. I’m delighted that many much-liked and valued colleagues are standing for GS this time round. If you think I can bring anything particular that you value to the party in a helpful way, please vote for me.