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!

Monstrous World! Dangerous Conceit!

Various people around here have been experiencing a weird disconnect between what the media are saying about this event and how it feels for those of us actually here. One member’s 90 year old mother, after reading inflammatory twaddle in her Canadian paper phoned specially to warn her son “Now don’t you go stirring up trouble!”

Nobody at breakfast this morning had seen the yeterday’s presser about Archbishop Den Bul and gays. The way we perceive him is in terms of the persecution of his church and Darfur, not gays. We do not have access to the pressers, but it seems to many of us that the correspondents are missing the point of this conference.

What of the words of the bishop in the Times video? We respect them deeply and look forward to hearing them along with everyone else’s in the context of indaba. The whole idea of indaba is to facilitate frank and honest speech like that. To make them the lead output of this event is leading to bizarre misrepresentation of the reality of it.

The press is sometimes making the news as much as reporting it, sometimes in the tradition of journalists who used to give out stones to Northern Ireland youths to provide pictures for the evening news. Shame on them. What is actually going on in here is generally delightful, global in scale, light of touch, with a lot of laughter, prayer and joy in one another. Journalists are naturally drawn to the extremes to make a story, but there is far more energy around the great unacknowledged centre.

SPCK Bookshops — Gags & Gimcrack

The funniest thing in the exhibition area today was this card by Dave Walker. I was disturbed to come back this afternoon and discover he has had a “Cease and Desist” order served on him from Texas, arising from blog entries tracing the fate of former SPCK Bookshops. The news itself has now disappeared from Dave’s site — surely not a censorship notice censored?!

SPCK used to be a worthy chain of Christian bookshops, often in Cathedral cities, run by a slightly retro but worthy charity. Faced with mounting losses they turned to the Saint Stephen the Great Trust — a robustly Conservative Texas Orthodox outfit. SSG planned to grow the bookshops as a resource against secularism. Two years on, this plan is in tatters, amidst recriminations about bad labour practice and unpaid bills. One former manager has, tragically, taken his life. The contents of the stores have been weeded of unsuitable content, stock has plummeted, the public have deserted the shops, and some have closed. Plainly the skills required to sabre rattle for reactionary causes are very different from those you need to run a bookshop, let alone re-evangelise England.

Former Staff had been filing inside stories on Dave’s blog. Now a gagging order has been served and, unable to risk high legal costs, Dave has had to comply. I have only loosely followed the story, but I can’t remember anything remotely actionable on Dave’s site. Now it’s been taken down I wonder what SSG was so ashamed about that it wanted it suppressed? The rapid and pathetic decline of the bookselling business betokens management way out of its depth. Its latest behaviour raises questions also about bullying and free speech. Heavy handed or what?