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.

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?

Encouraging what engagement? How?

Looking at the Covenant documentation for General Synod, it seems one laudable aim is to promote closer engagement between Churches.
Institutional structures can assist as well as impede strong and fruitful relationships, of course. Having a formal marriage certificate doesn’t stop marriage partners loving each other — indeed it ought to help, all ohter things being equal. What it cannot do is make people love one another.

Direct meeting is a gospel value. And if this is the aim, one way to judge the Covenant proposal will be to ask “How might it deliver what kind of closer engagement between Churches?” A new refereeing institution could bring churches together when they make decisions others abhor. That‘s the theory, rather like requiring divorcing couples to seek counselling.

Yet wise counsellors with whom I’ve worked in prisons and counselling centres have always told me how difficult mandated counselling is. For it to be effective people have to be willing to contemplate changing something about themselves, and to be committed enough to the process to give it a go. They have to be equal enough to talk and often if they had been that in the first place they wouldn't have got into the situation they're in.

A couple who both believe profoundly “I am in the right and it’s basically my partner needs to change” are unlikely to find counselling effective. Anyone who is not reasonably committed to the process will spend their counselling session staring out the window or at their watch. Again, the exercise is almost certainly pointless, and the kindest thing a counsellor can do is point this out honestly from the outset rather than stage a charade where there is no meeting of minds, or will to reach it, or preparedness to change.

I’m also struck, as I look back to the spat that gave rise to the Windsor report, how the human impact of what was going on had explicit and implicit expressions. On the one hand various politicians, scribes, pharisees and manipulators proclaimed their righteous indignation from the housetops, along with what others had to do to call off the dogs of war.

On the other, many gay clergy colleagues bottled up, often bravely and quietly, what must sometimes have seemed intolerable burdens of depression, frustration and pain. This came from a feeling they were being institutionally rubbished by the Church that had nurtured them, and to which they felt profoundly committed, personally and spiritually. Someone told me it felt like being mugged by a parent, at the behest of a nasty neighbour. Many found it almost unbearable to talk about, in the way people who had been in the trenches couldn’t and didn’t want to talk about what they had witnessed when they got home. The clearest expression of the hurt beng experienced by gay clergy wasn’t imposing declarations but days off sick with depression and stress, many of them never even logged as such.

Of course people should engage. But engaging institutionally and legally is nothing like as important as engaging personally and spiritually with real human beings. That’s why boycotts are usually evil, because they are excuses not to engage but to feel as righteous as if you had. People matter so much more to God than the abstract issues ever could. We owe far less to dogma, than to the people our dogma impacts, because that is the way of Christ, and the Scriptures teach us that love is the fulfilling of the law, whatever law you may have in mind, even the ten commandments.

I notice how the wording of section 4 of the various drafts of the Covenant has become less legalistic and more relational. Good. But I want to know how positively relational it really is now, or is this just a drafting cleanup because people wouldn't swallow the medicine for what it actually was, neat?

I want to know, in close particulars, how the new structures being proposed will give what voice not only to the Scribes, Pharisees and bureaucrats, who in my experience can usually speak for themselves, but also to the poor blighters in the dust who look to us, bishops especially, because they thought in all innocence that bishops were supposed to be more committed to the way of Jesus Christ than the way of Caiaphas.

It could be that a new refereeing body gives a voice to the voiceless. OK. How? And if this process does not go out of its way to do this, and especially if it contents itself with pious intentions and merely institutional stitching up, it will only make our spiritual sickness worse, not better.

Wisdom of the Solomons...

... voice of the martyrs? Still searching for the pick of original voices to inform our thinking, I came across an engaging and interesting contribtion by Terry Brown, Bishop of Malaita, Province of Melanesia, to the Hearing on Lambeth Reflections Draft, yesterday. This province has seen martyrs this century, seven Melanesian brothers killed by a sectarian warlord in 2003. This province has a consistent and honourable record of Christian witness and maryrdom, going back to Bishop Patteson. +Terry says:

I was confirmed in The Episcopal Church, by a black bishop of Massachusetts. I was made deacon and ordained a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada, in the diocese of Fredericton, a Loyalist diocese, by a bishop whose ancestors ran away from the American Revolution because they distrusted liberalism, political and otherwise.

I was consecrated a bishop in the Church of the Province of Melanesia, a global south diocese, where all the Millennium Development Goals score about 3 out of 10, even though we are great dancers.

And to make matters worse, my own sexuality is "dodgy". I live in and am a part of all four worlds -- The Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Church of Melanesia and the pained world of gay and lesbian laity, deacons, priests and bishops.

Yet I am a bishop of a diocese that is full of life and has had much growth. In my last 12 years as bishop, I have confirmed 10,000 candidates. The diocese is deeply involved in evangelism, education, medical work, liturgy and peace and reconciliation.

My life as a bishop in all four worlds is possible only because of my faith in Jesus Christ. I had a conversion experience in which I felt deeply loved by God. That, the Eucharist, the life of Christian friendship and community, and Scripture, have sustained me through thick and thin.

From my perspective, do I have any suggestions for the text of the final Reflection?

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you.” There are many other competing kingdoms, do not bow to them.

As much as is in you, try to maintain communion and friendship with all, whether inside or outside the church, however deep the disagreement.

Reject the Puritan option. We are Anglicans, not Puritans.

Exercise restraint and urge others to do so, whether locally or globally. Not everything has to be said or written about.

Be very careful in using typologies to classify people, theologies and churches. We are all the children of God, redeemed, with all of creation, by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If you have not done so, accept all the gay and lesbian people in your midst, in all their complexity, pain and celebration.

Finally, let the conversations (even debate) continue. Television has finally come to the Solomon Islands, so we now have the privilege of seeing BBC interview both Gene Robinson and Greg Venables. In our case, I do not think the church will thereby collapse. But in other situations, that may not be the case, and the endless talking to the media of both may be destructive. That is my final suggestion -- remember that whatever you say publicly in this wired age, will go to every corner of the world. Honesty and prudence are both Christian virtues. We need to learn to balance them.

Thank you.

Fixing a hole where the rain gets in

Just finished the preliminary Windsor report hearing, next to brothers from Tanzania, England and Canada. I have to be very honest and say I was not expecting this to be a wow. Shame on me. The room’s still there. There weren’t any custard pies. And I can say that for me and the people sitting around me it was a very special experience, for the respectful, clear and charitable way strong points were made from all sides of the Wndsor report issues. It was good also to have affrmation from an ecumenical colleague that they acknowledge as deep a probem in other churches and commit to travel with us towards ways forward for the good of all, not just Anglicans. It’s good to know some partners see us as leading the pack in working this through, though it’s a scary place to be.

The official output will be streaming out soon enough, no doubt, but there was a general buzz of approval in the room for the willingness of everyone involved to talk to each other, not about each other. People experienced realism all round, which is a good place to start.

The highlight soundbite for me was from +Keith Ackerman, Bishop of Quincy, who placed before us big ecclesiological questions about finding a way to bring the family back together. All models, magisterial, conciliar, confessional have upsides and downsides, but we know we've got to do something, and the vast majority it seemed this afternoon, believe that, in God, we can. +Keith wisely drew attention to the limits of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis compromise over things that matter absolutely: Thesis? Jesus is Lord. Antithesis? Jesus is not Lord. Big discussion synthesis? Jesus is occasionally Lord. Not. That one raised a laugh.

We are trying to learn enough about each other to be able to dance together, as another bishop put it. Before hysteria and extremist rhetoric steal the day, we were given an estimate that 0·7% of Episcopal congregations had split. We need to learn in conversation, not judgment; and we began to do that for real this afternoon. To use a Caribbean metaphor, you know you need a good roof for the hurricanes. It’s far from easy to fix your roof in the hurricane season — but it can be done, and we surely got going this afternoon. Praise God!