The Anglican Covenant

Dave Walker cartoon church

I am about to start researching an essay on the Anglican Covenant. I need to critically examine it and analyse how it has been constructed in relation to emerging problems in the communion.


I hope to understand the Covenant in terms of the reasons for supporting it and what might motivate the ambivalence that many are feeling towards it.


As is often the case, I am more interested in developing my understanding, academic awards are nice but I often end up writing beyond the scope of the question so that I can blog the aspects of an issue I am really interested in. If you have any points of view to contribute, I would like to hear them. I am wondering where my support will lie and what I will discover about my own Anglican identity as a result of looking into this. I know it has been causing a lot of debate around the blogosphere but my head has been elsewhere as I have been researching the decline in women across Evangelical Christianity and the legitimacy of a ministry to single gender group: women in an 'effeminised' church. 


But as with university education, you only get a few weeks with a particular topic, so it is time to move on to considering the Covenant. 

Dress the vicar

I think I am sorted with a few weeks to go but still tend to get a bit confused with all the different items of clothes. Perhaps helpful for all of us as we approach ordination would be this site where we can print off pictures and decide on what goes where. We could have a lot of fun with our small cardboard cut-outs.

Three out of four is not bad!

Torah, Nebi'im and Ketubim

I appreciate that God speaks to us through the law, through revelation and through our own discernment. I am looking at the ancestress in danger, the thrice telling of the passing off of a husband's wife for his sister and the resultant delay in blessing as a result until the situation is rectified. Abimelech discovers that he has taken another man's wife into his harem through the folly of Abraham/Isaac through God's curses befalling his household and then through a dream in the next version of this narrative plot and finally through discernment and his own senses: his wisdom.

These three accounts would seem to conform to Torah (Law), Nebi'im (Revelation) and then Ketubim (wisdom) in turn. (sp. correction h/t Doug)

...and I am given to reflect on how God speaks to us all differently - some of us focus on obedience to God's laws and are gifted to think things through from a biblically ethical point of view - their knowledge of the scriptures enables them to discern the mind of God on a situation. Some of us are spoken to through revelation - dreams, visions, tongues etc. Some of us are highly discerning, can think things through and are known for bringing a wise and judicious view-point.

Of course, God makes himself available to us through all these ways and more. I wonder, however, whether thinking in categories like Torah (Law), Nebi'im (Prophets) and Ketubim (Writing) might enable us to think through how we relate to God...however, as is more than likely, I am also just doing a lot of half-baked thinking out loud - but that's blogging for you....

Also are there not a few problems with the ancestress in danger texts?

It gives us cause to be hopeful - for Sarah - 65 and then possibly as old as 89 is considered very beautiful.

How can Abimelech have really been so wise to discern that Sarah belonged to another man when really it must have been pretty obvious their having the children Esau and Jacob with them?

It is believed that possibly redactors have messed about with one ethnological saga and the story probably went something like this originally:


Because of famine Isaac travelled from the desert in southern Palestine to the
nearby Canaanite city of Gerar, to live there as a 'sojourner', i.e. to keep within
the pasturage rights on the ground belonging to the city. He told everyone that
his wife was his sister so that his life would not be endangered by those who
desired her. However, Rebekah's beauty could not pass unnoticed. The king of
the city, Abimelech, took Rebekah into his harem, amply compensating Isaac. As
a material sin was about to be committed, God struck the people of the palace
with a mysterious illness. Through the medium of his gods, or a soothsayer,
Abimelech recognized what had happened. Abimelech called Isaac to account:
"What is this that you have done to me?" He then restored him his wife and sent
him away, loaded with gifts.

Well, hopefully I will find out more about this puzzle when we start Biblical Narrative on Thursday. 

Neat Messy Church

Messy Church is neat! It's a natty, clever idea to get people into church. It extends hospitality practically with the provision of a meal and it enables families to get together, make time for one another and do creative things without having to debate who is going to tidy up or prepare the food for hungry kids.

It asks that people sit together with those they do not know and the meal eaten takes on something of a symbolic quality; social bonding occurs over the eating of food, conversations occur that might not happen if there was not the plate requiring you stay and the knife and fork to give you something to be busy with.

After writing on women's ministry and finding a legitimacy for it despite the 'effeminisation' of the church, I am more won over by the homogenous unit principle.


Mission-Shaped Church believes ‘there is a church because there is mission, not vice-versa. Apart from worship, everything else is secondary to this,’(Mission-shaped Church, p. 85, quoted in Hull, Mission-Shaped Church, p. 27).

However, as I said at the end of my placement report, twenty-four ministries where the homogenous unit principle is in operation must come together to worship and break bread, or so I believe, and in the context I was looking at they do. Holy communion enacts the process of reconciliation and is a prophetic sign of our eschatological unity. Mixing people up and together in an intimate spiritual fellowship is made possible by the spirit and this bears witness to a world promoting isolationism and suspicion of one's neighbour.

I am glad that Worship is made possible at Messy Church, a message is given so that behaviour can be reflected upon and the Christian life explored, the messy grace is shared:

“May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”II Corinthians 13:14 with actions)

and songs are sung in praise. Worship empowers mission as we dwell in the presence of God whose mission it is. In Worship we learn what our God hopes from us.

Reasons for doing less well but having well-being

I am not writing my 5000 word ministry reflection quickly enough and time is running out. I have three days to go and another 3000 words to craft or thereabouts and it is because I keep reading and I do not always want to write and what I read is so arresting, it sends me off into spirals of thought I just can not contain within the confines of an academic and assessment orientated report - hence another reason for blogging, even if it's just a place to store the threads I can pick up and weave something beautiful with one day, when other people are not shepherding so heavily what I can and can not read for particular certificates certifying I read and write the right stuff!! (and I can write impossibly long sentences here because I just can)

So here is another one to file away from Ministry in the Subjunctive Mood by Cynthia A. Jarvis (Theology Today 2010 66: 445)

                                                                  

I have taken the distance I live from certainty to be a gift of God for the sake of the gospel I have been ordained to proclaim. The longing, the doubt, the sighs too deep for words find me climbing the steps to the pulpit with an urgency and an astonishment that is missed in others whose proclamations major in the indicative. Such proclamation sends to my study the lost who have an inkling that they are not too far gone if even their minister admits to whistling in the dark now
and again. In the give-and-take of the classroom, the honesty dared in talking
about the efficacy of prayer or the agency of God in history or the wild prom-
ise of eternal life or the sort of truth the Bible tells becomes a conversation
whose goal is not an answer but our collective sighs too deep for words made
audible. Make no mistake, I am a relentless student of the history of doctrine.
I thrill at explicating the labyrinthine theological battles that have led us to
confess God in three-personed names. The substance of the church’s faith is
the air I breathe. But the distance I live experientially from the God the church
confesses leaves me astonished, agog, incredulous, and overwhelmed that this
could be so. 

Horrible Mrs Potiphar and fabulous Abby Guinness

Abby Guinness came to college today, so together with the lecture I post about below, there were many good things for us today at college...

Still thinking about our theological education

Stanley Hauerwas says:

It is appropriate that you might believe you are here to make you think, because you have been told that is what universities are supposed to do, that is, to

make you think. Universities are places where you are educated to make up your own mind. That is not what I am trying to do. Indeed, I do not think most of you have minds worth making up. You need to be trained before you can

begin thinking. So I have not made the claims above to shock you, but rather to put you in a position to discover how odd being a Christian makes you.

I remember finding it strange when I began theological education that no one seemed to be able to give me any answers, only a range of other people's answers and how to find some kind of via media and even that was only ever offered tentatively. I remember at first trying to decode my lecturers to see if I could nail their theological colours to some of the masts that I had erected in my head. It's just that as soon as I began to do so, I found that masts had been blown down and some shifted so far from the landscape that they positively didn't exist anymore. I soon got used to never hearing a personal point of view but still continued to try to read between the lines. I know a little better now but still have much to learn. 

...but today, we did hear a personal point of view and certainly we also heard echoes of Frei and Barth and Hans Boersma but we also heard a personal point of view about how one person stands at the foot of the cross, where they stand, and how, and what they see when they look up and marvel. 

We heard a journey about theological transition and the expectation that there will be more, a 'stammered' attempt (his phrase) to articulate the greatest, most painful and precious occurrence that this world has ever witnessed and witnesses to, and we are all left somewhat changed by the unveiled vulnerability, the holy humility and the desperate adventure of it all. 

Thank you St John's!

Theological education - good enough or adequate?

An interesting article has come to my attention - thanks DDD.

We live in a complex and fast-changing world that will require a generation of leaders who are as well trained and educated as are the people in any other profession. It is a crime and miscarriage to require anything less. I often tell my students, "If you were laying in the operating room and some one bounded in and declared, 'Hi, I'm Fred, and I don't know a thing about anatomy or the practice of medicine, but I just love the idea of serving God through surgery,' you would use your remaining moments of consciousness to roll off the gurney and claw your way down the hall. And yet it was Jesus who said, 'Fear not those who can kill the body, but those who kill the soul.'" Churches that fearfully cast around for quick fixes to the training of clergy, give it scant attention, and then abandon their priests and pastors to the vagaries of forming themselves cannot expect to be a spiritual force in the world. Nor can they expect their clergy to be positive spiritual forces in the lives of others.


Read more here

It is making me think about my own theological education. However, embroiled in the middle of it and perhaps because I am not yet out there in the thick of it, I will return to the thinking here in a year or two and see how prepared I really was. 

Religious metaphors and the sacred self - Pete Ward

...So I am researching the viability of women's ministry, looking for a theological rationale for a church that claims the pain of feminisation. I am interested in statistics that go against the grain. Dr Kristen Aune, sociologist, has reason to believe that evangelical women are leaving the church at a faster rate than men. There were more of them in the first place so we do not notice that they are leaving, only that the men are still failing to arrive.

Kristen Aune supposes that women are often defining themselves against celebrity ideals or conversely learning 'what not to be' from celebrity failings.

Pete Ward now begins to uncover that 'religious metaphors as they appear in celebrity culture paint a picture of the possibilities of the sacred self,' (p.7) so what I am interested in, which is probably beyond the remits of my assignment, (but then many things are, which is partly why I blog - to waffle on about what I am really interested in and where it doesn't accrue me grades towards that Masters thingy that will hang over my horizons until the dissertation gets written some time between 2012 and 2015)...what I am really interested in, is how we turn this fascination with celeb culture and glamour back in on itself and recover the sense of the sacred self in our Christ-likeness and in the identity we come to have shaped as we share the intimacies, struggles, pains and joys of our lives in Christian community.

I am also interested in how at times we might borrow things of the world to redeem them for the Kingdom, so that as our churches begin to strive for excellence and quality and even a little glamour, we might do so to point people to the only excellence that will ever really be found - along the difficult road to discipleship and amongst the struggles and sharings of humanity, with eyes fixed on an otherness and a sense of completeness that can only be found in God.

Pete Ward describes how we judge and we adore and I wonder if when we exalt and glory in their failings, our fascination with celebrity reveals that we are articulating perhaps the meta-narrative that we have lost and need to recover. As I read Ward I spin off with my own thoughts.

It's great how he has an ability to do this, the same thing happened when I read Liquid Church as the stimulus behind my presentation on E-church for my bap (Bishops Advisory panel 'vicar interview'). He inspires me to do some of my own creative thinking on these topics, which can be dangerous sometimes as you do not know what to credit to him and what span off as your own pontifications on a topic. Whatever, he has a clever way of suggesting stuff and then getting you to think things through.

We are choosing insecure gods and creating gods out of ourselves rather than locating ourselves in a grander and much more excellent narrative. He looks at Michael Jackson in chapter one and the hysterical reactions to the death of Diana.

I have just finished some really rather scattered thinking that I never got to speak out loud in the end, (probably a good job) because I was up against the clock (seven minutes only) as I articulated an idea for what happened at the cross using Jade Goody and how in some ways she served to tell us about something else entirely.

It would have gone like this had the clock not spared my audience:

To return to our obsession with celebrity. You will remember Jade Goody who was a young woman counted as nothing, reviled. She suffered a horrible death through cervical cancer at 27 years old and let everyone see her decline, because through it being photographed, she would be able to provide financially for her children. She also attained a kind of glory in her dying, giving life to others as many young women were drawn to her and were inspired by her openness to go for tests for cervical cancer so that they might secure life and be released from death. God rebuked us and I think we felt this for our judgmental ways and our voyerism but then transformed all that sin by revealing it in Jade and bringing it to a new life.

I wondered if death could tell us something about Jesus, which some of you might find even a bit offensive, depending on whether you exalt Jesus or you exalt Jade but I assure you, crude as my analogy is, I had good intentions and blogging is where you get to test out some of your more wacky thinking. Thankfully my lecturers were spared due to the 'you have thirty seconds left,' I chose to leave my analogy out, realising its serious flaws. 

Anyway to return to Pete Ward, I am in the middle of reading him. If Aune thinks that women are locating identity in celebrity rather than Jesus, I am interested in it. I want to look at this interest we have in celeb culture and the language that we use to describe that interest, a language that about which Ward is helping make me conscious, so I might see if something can be understood by our churches so that we might respond to it positively and creatively. I have no answers but then the exploration is what I am enjoying. 

One for all my college friends this Lent

Signs pointing to signs pointing to signs

I liked Jody's poem the other week which she meshed together from people's descriptions of a priest. I contributed the word 'sign,' to communicate a priest acting as a signpost to Jesus. Clerical clothes perhaps do this too, pointing away from ourselves and towards what we are all about. I am still wondering whether the clerical-collar puts people off and causes a barrier or not. I know that low evangelical denominations rarely wear clerical clothing. High church folk seem to like it a lot and I am beginning to learn that there are even certain ways of wearing a clerical-collar: all the way around your neck communicates a particular theological flavour, I think...


On the whole, I am probably a little naive about some of the clothing significances. There are cassocks with 39 buttons and some clergy leave a button undone on the articles they are less convinced about, which could prove a little distracting if those buttons happened to fall in particular places!



I wonder if other professions communicate such a range of various things with their attire. It is almost as if clerical clothes point explicitly to what we are all about, as well as implicitly to the theological distinctives that many will miss. There is an honesty and a hiddenness.

Photos from Wipples




There are also those who conform to wearing the attire but can not help but want to communicate something about their own personality too, much as we did creative things with ties when we wore our school uniforms.





Some of this stuff is interesting, for the most part, it is not. Often I guess it's for practical reasons. I didn't get for a long time why I would need a 'funeral cape,' in which I look like something out of a goth/rock festival, but I am assured it will keep me warm, look appropriate and help me to manage service books because of its sleeves. Allegedly, it also enables you to do the 'one hand undo button and fling into nearest pew,' move, as you enter the church in front of a coffin carried by undertakers, who will not stop mid-procession for you to undo the toggles on your M&S mac. Some of it just makes sense.

So some of it is fairly stylish, if a bit austere...

It doesn't have to look too awful.

...so when it comes to choosing stoles, I think I might have failed to be a sign pointing to a sign, with clothes that are further carrying signs! I think I might have even deliberately stopped sign-posting. The one that I have chosen really does not communicate anything much at all, apart from being really rather nice...or at least it appeals to me. On seeing it I simply said: 'Oh that is sooo lovely...,' and I quite forgot I was shopping for clerical clothing and just started to rather enjoy myself. I am left wondering now quite how penitent I should be for such an over-indulgent flight of fancy! ;-)

Stole by Heather Marshall - other creative and more 'religious' stoles available. 


And thanks to Nancy who reminds me that they are clerical collars rather than 'dog-collars.'

A testimony from a while ago

I am writing my reflection on my church placement which lasted about six months from April 2010 to December 2010. I had to share testimonies of God's work in my life and as I select 14 diary entries to be read by my tutor, a rather strange and personal thing to have to do, I share these two experiences with you that I shared on placement.

The first was this shared at the beginning of placement in a morning service:

I will tell you briefly about my journey with God. I was brought up in a Christian home and I was aware of God and Jesus. I had no understanding of the Holy Spirit. I know this because I was quite a cute and sappy child and when I went to sleep at night, I would squash up next to the wall to leave room in my bed for Jesus and God. But I never left any room for the Holy Spirit.

We were a church-going family but the Bible had not really become a living word for me. I think most of my understanding about Jesus came through the hymns I sang. I am the Lord of the Dance said he was my only indication that there might possibly be something good about following Jesus but I never really understood what it might be. Instead I imagined my own unworthiness because fourth Sunday each month, I was separated from my parents who sat in pews behind me as I kneeled in a brown uniform to hear how I was not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under his table so that the Lord who had welcomed me to the dance in the school assembly suddenly became this far away person in church. My gospel was all the wrong way around and I was convinced I had to earn my salvation. No one really explained properly what it was Jesus had done for me. At eleven and my confirmation, I learnt that Jesus died in a horrible way and this made me even more worried by the whole thing.

I grew up pretty regular with my highs and lows, teenage rebellions, at one point too many boyfriends and I think my self-worth revolved around doing well in school or trying to fit in.

I met my husband at 16 and I remember it being important to me that he believed in God. Until my twenties, I had faith in God but I did not know how I could come into his presence. My faith was pretty binitarian really. But then I was invited to Alpha. At the same time I began to teach Bible stories to the under fives and because of Alpha it was like I was reading the stories for the first time, and in the case of some of them I was, it was like I needed the milk before the solid food.

When I heard Nicky Gumbel open up the scriptures at Alpha and explain who Jesus was, it was like the road to Emmaus was happening in my life, I could feel my heart burning within me, or as Wesley described it felt strangely warmed. This was great but then even more powerfully I came into relationship with Jesus through the power of his Holy Spirit on the Alpha weekend. That weekend changed my life. I started to knock on some doors and they began to open. I was slowly letting God take centre stage in my life. I got involved in holiday clubs, and youth work because I now understood how great it felt to be in the presence of God and I just wanted more and more of Him. I sensed that God wanted to get to know me or I wanted to get to know him and it was so overwhelming, sometimes it positively frightened me. I started to wonder whether I might even be dying and God was preparing me. That sounds really dramatic. I now know that he was preparing me for that 'dying to self' stuff because I had built up layers and layers of self-reliance which he was slowly going to ask me to let go. My husband and I had just about every policy under the sun: life insurance, critical illness cover, private health cover, a nice house, good jobs, private education for the children. We were doing it all, protecting ourselves against every conceivable difficulty by any means we could – we were insecure and frightened people. Slowly we have given our lives to God, he has been patient. The job went, the books were studied, after vowing I would never become a student again. The house sold, the education for the children changed. The private heath care ceased...

We have a confidence and an assurance now that we never had before, a joy now that we did not know was possible. Everything now feels like an adventure. We seek out God and he never lets us down. I kneel now, knowing I am worthy, not because of anything I have done but because of what Jesus has done for me.

On another occasion I shared this, after being asked when God had met me in a difficult time in my life. This was really difficult and challenging to share: 

My name is Rachel. I am training to be a vicar at St John's theological college in Nottingham and I am here on placement – thank you for having me.

I am an ex-secondary school teacher. I have lived in various villages in and around this area since the late 90s. I am married and I have two girls.

Hobbies – no time but they will return I am promised.

My tough time, both in terms of my faith, and life in general, was about three years ago. I was working for my local church doing some kids and youth work and bringing up my pre-school children and we lived three doors down from the church where we were serving. My faith was in quite a good place and I was enjoying what I was doing but all the time I was wondering how big a place I was giving God in my life. In some ways it all seemed too easy. The church was only three doors down from where we lived, the work I was doing created for me a lot of friends in similar positions to me because they all had children and I felt like I was being really blessed by all the work I was doing but I wondered where the challenge was. I wondered if I would be serving so enthusiastically if the church was not next door and I did not have friends involved.

At this point I felt an overwhelming desire to move on and out, which was quite strange, we had a nice house in a nice village. The church had really encouraging leaders who were helping me with my journey and encouraging me to bring people to Alpha and run holiday clubs and such things. But I felt really called to move on to another village and so we moved. It was like I was asking God to shake my faith up and challenge it. I knew the new house was the right one to live in because even when I was in my old house, I would wake up feeling disorientated because in my head, I was already in the new house.

In our new village, we wanted to worship with our new church just once a month so we could get to know people, we still had work to do in our old church but we would study in local house groups. And it was at this point that God took me to a place of serious challenge, way bigger than I had ever expected, way bigger than I had ever asked for.

First of all, he was opening up his Word to me like never before so that I began to sense the living Word through the written word in a way that I had not experienced. And at first everything was brilliant. My faith was growing, we would travel back to serve in our old church with a new energy. We had not just served there because it was easy, because it was convenient, because it was three doors down, we really had a heart for serving and my love of the Bible was really growing in studies with my new house group locally.

As time went on I began to sense that I should not return to English teaching, God was calling me to teach and preach the Bible, rather than use my energies on Shakespeare's Macbeth and whatever else. I felt this more and more strongly and so I began to share this with my new congregation leaders. But the problem was that I began to sense over time that their theological point of view did not support women in leadership positions in churches and they were not happy about my sense of calling to ordained ministry.

I got stuck in a strange place for about 18 months, not knowing whether I was being obedient to God or not. I could not reconcile this strong urge to preach and teach the gospel with my community teaching me that this couldn't be for me because I am a woman. When I looked at the bible it didn't seem to say that to me or any of the members of my old church. I just wanted to be obedient to God and I was finding it hard to work that out now. I almost forgot that the church had ordained women since 1992. I almost forgot that my old church was run by a woman as well as a man. My church world just completely shrank.

The bible verse that kept coming up for me over this time period was 1 Peter 5 verse 7.

Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

I was very challenged by this verse. I knew that these fellow Christians were not my enemies. They were godly and good people who wanted the best for me. It was up to me to be self-controlled and that was the bit of the verse that challenged me most. I even had a time when I wondered if I was the one looking for someone to devour and when the vicar of the church asked me to pray protection on him for his first ever preach in eight years in which he was going to declare his stance against the ordination of women and encourage his congregation to repent that the church had ever ordained women in the the early nineties, I prayed that God might protect him from me. I was really ready to challenge him.

Now unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, and in some ways I still feel ambivalent about it, my challenge did came. I exercised some self-control but probably not enough. And what I want to say to you is God will fulfil his promises even when you go through serious pain. And when as a consequence of that pain you lose your self-control. I also want to say be careful what you pray for. I had asked God to challenge my faith and my sense of calling had been seriously challenged by the sermon this vicar would preach against the ordination of women which I listened to on podcast. I knew enough to not test my sense of self-control by actually going and parking myself in a pew to listen!

My moment of weakness came when I listened to that sermon, and lacking the confidence to speak to the vicar personally about it, I ran down to the church the following Sunday in dark glasses to post my reply to it on the windscreens of all the cars in his church carpark. I was caught on CCTV camera so they knew it was me. Obviously, I had done nothing illegal, people put pizza flyers under my car window-wipers all the time but theological treatises about 'God's Strong Women of the Bible' is not something you usually return to your car to find.

Anyway, the rest, as they say, is history. 


I had my sense of calling tested further in a community with a mix of theologies as I started to study at St John's. I got to test out whether I really believed the bible presented opportunities for women to lead and preach. My first essay as an independent student was on this very issue so I could put all the research that had gone into my windscreen flyer to good use and after I put the last full stop in place, I had been working up to this essay for two years... As I put the last full stop in place, I grabbed my essay for delivering to college, grabbed my kids from school and we all went off to worship at St John's, where I am now training and I said to God on the A52, 'Okay, I have now understood the Bible on this issue, can you give me one more sign that you really want me to go forward for ordination training?' and at the service that evening, it was the only time in my life I have ever spoken those words that only the priest usually speaks, it was an inclusive Eucharist where all the words said over the bread and wine were spoken by the congregation too and it was God saying 'yes, these words are words you are going to speak, not just now but week in week out. Leave teaching English and come and teach the Bible instead.'

After this God quickly called me forward into the discernment process where you have to test out your sense of calling, your motivations and suitability, in a series of meetings with the big bods of the church.

The tensest moment came for me one or two months before the big Church interview for potential vicars when they asked me if I had anything to confess and after I had gone all around the houses, I eventually told this story I have told you, giving it to God, saying, 'it will either go one way or the other, into your hands I place my life. They will either think I am a trouble maker or just someone who sometimes feels an overwhelming urge to speak out and present a different point of view'. I told my story, there was a pause and then a smile from the person sitting opposite me who understood exactly what I had gone through and handed me the rest of my papers to prepare for the interview - phew!

So here I am – God got hold of a rebel, took me to a place of challenge but was still faithful in what he had promised. Even though I had lacked some self-control, he brought me through and to a place of reconciliation, both in my own mind about this debate and with the people whom I differed. After the event I was actually invited to lunch by the associate vicar and we went through our bibles together for four hours discussing our different viewpoints and even though he suggested I go back to my old church where they could nurture my journey, I think we are still friends and I will ironically end up working in the same diocese. 


God loves all his children and sees not our theological differences and he has given me a real heart for dialogue and unity with those who are different to me. I will always have a passion for seeing women released into ministry and I do not think that that will ever leave me but I now have an objectivity which has enabled me to have some really good friendships with people who do not even believe I should be doing what I am doing. I no longer take any of it personally. It also means that as a vicar myself, I will be open to challenges because if ever I find criticism of any of my sermons challenging, I will just look back on how I ran around a car-park like some strange person on a mission all worked up and desperate to share my point of view. I will become accustomed to checking under my window-wipers!

God is good even to sinners like me. 

Community - ten years on

Mike Moynagh asked these questions ten years ago deciding that the parish system does not have the pull it had in bygone days now that people no longer know their neighbours and are highly mobile.

I would like to ask these questions ten years on and compare the results.

Please fill out the survey, it will only take a minute or so and then I will be able to release the findings in a few days.

Prof James Jackson of Cambridge

One of the ten biggest earthquakes in the last 100 years hit Japan on Friday March 11th. Prof. James Jackson of Techtonic Activity from Cambridge skypes on the Tsunami. Plate boudaries unzip and Prof. James warns the world should be ready for more waves.

Pray for Japan!
Donate to Worldvision or the Red Cross.

Why women are leaving the church

I am writing my second longest essay to date and looking at the reasons why we do need women's ministries to operate out of our churches.

I have been trying to find online articles by feminist researcher Kristin Aune from the University of Derby. She has been researching the reasons why women appear to be leaving the Church. Depressing as her findings are, we might be able to use the very ideas that are persuading women away to persuade them that something better exists (with help from the Holy Spirit!).

Kristin believes women find more relevance in TV icons who promote a sense of female empowerment. She also thinks that the church conveys itself as an outdated, patriarchal institution with the huge media/ newspaper attention to issues like women’s ordination and female priests' slow progression through the ecclesiastical ranks. She has calculated that 50,000 women are leaving Christian denominations a year. I am not sure of the precise figures for the C of E but hope to find this out. Perhaps in our outreach, we can address some of the misconceptions.


She cites another set of reasons as to why women are leaving the church -

• they are having fewer children to replace the older generation lost from the church.
• Feminism challenges traditional Christian views about women’s roles and raised women’s aspirations and even though the church is catching up in this area, it is not perceived to be doing so. 
• two thirds of women are in the labour market and employment, childcare and housework causes church attendance to drop in value
• churches are failing to reflect the large number of non-traditional families that women are now living in. Women can not find families like theirs in church. 
• She also believes that conservative attitudes to sexual desire are causing women to stay away

Her research informs a book called 'Women and Religion in the West' co-authored with Sonya Sharma (Edinburgh University) and Giselle Vincett (University of British Columbia). It suggests activities to suit women to attract them back to the church.

My report will also look touch on the 'feminisation' of the church. I hope to discover what might be happening to these men who stay home once a week whilst their women get together for fellowship and food. I have reason to believe that men's groups are forming and that sense of 'brother-hood' is being recaptured in the particular ministry I am going to focus on in its particular setting. David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church and Leon Podles’ The Church Impotent: The Feminization of the Church have done much to alarm us about the hemorrhaging of men from the church. I wonder what I might glean from these findings too.

Speaking soteriology

...so we are all just about recovered from our 7 minute presentations on an angle of the work of Christ. However, the wrestling with how to communicate it still continues. The WordAlive guys, who visited on Wednesday, gave us some depressing stats for how many people actually read the bible these days. There is an even more pressing need to communicate our salvation in ways that are faithful to the Bible and can be communicated in modern parlance or at least with analogies and metaphors to which today's world can relate.

A friend of mine gave a very fine presentation with some really creative images drawn from popular culture and contemporary fiction.

The book I am recommending promises to be helpful. As we are taken through metaphors from the Bible which communicate the work of Christ, we might better think through how to preach on this essential issue. It doesn't promise to teach us how to preach these things but it does seem intent on exploring the range of biblical metaphors about salvation in a straight-forward way. It also explains the power of figurative language. The book talks about how 'Salvation is compared to more mundane realities in the lives of the New Testament authors and their audiences for the purpose of conveying spiritual truth.' (p.16)

This means that as preachers and teachers, we must surely follow suit with that precedent set. Modern-day analogies and metaphors can be used to further unpack the biblical constructions.

Next time, if I am asked for real to talk about the Work of Christ, without having to defend a particular view, I will use this book to help me. It presents the full kaleidoscope of images that is faithful to the biblical presentation of the atonement and what it achieves:

Is the Word Alive for you?

The guys from WordLive came to talk to us this morning. They are looking at creative ways to communicate the Bible to a digital generation.

They introduced me to a bloke called Wesch, virtually, not literally and I was wow-ed by this You-tube film capturing just what is capable for communication and community with web 2.0 technologies.

The Wordlive guys also referenced the digital Christianity symposium a couple of years ago where Tom Wright said that anything that is not embodied community is an impoverished community. This didn't prove too popular a sentiment with those living out their Christian faith resourced through the Cathedral in Second Life. That God made himself incarnate in his Son and entered into the messiness of life with us, the gospel has its deep resonance. But as with many things, we have to live with a both/and. We have to think about the ways that virtual community can point to embodied community and pave a way for it but we have to be present in the virtual world with a Christian presence and witness. I do not worry too much about the lack of authority there, as with anything there is a need for discernment, sifting the bad seed from the good. With the development of the printing press, many extreme points of view were published but credibility operated in the same way. Just like we can put down a book or change channel, we can give up internet sites that are not edifying. A natural editing process will develop. We will also continue to develop techno-ethics. 

Enjoy the film below:

Atonement angst

I wonder how the following will sound. It was really hard to write. My assignment was to write a seven minute speech defending Penal Substitutionary Atonement. My friend defended Christus Victor. I had hoped to develop more competently the idea of Christ as our federal head. This is what Garry Williams of Oak Hill seems to be interested in. Perhaps, however, this is representation rather than substitution, perhaps it is a combination of the two.


What the exercise helped me to do is stop polarising. There was always something in me that was a bit afraid of those people who held to a very defensive PSA. It was as if you have to believe that solely, anything else just is not the gospel. As I struggled with it, I polarised Christians a little. They were falling into the PSA camp or not. I know that there was even something in me that wanted to be as sure as those that preached solely PSA. It seemed so neat and satisfying. It seemed like an answer. In researching all the counter arguments, actually they are not really even that, I'll rephrase...in researching many of the other glorious things that the cross achieves, my appreciation of the cross (which will never be enough) has grown. I feel better equipped to explain, without too much bias in one direction or the other, the atonement as the multi-faceted gem that it is. Preaching and teaching these various views all need to be thoughtful. My speech below is one-sided but it was supposed to be, as an academic exercise. The thought and the prayer that goes into preaching the atonement has to consider faithfulness to the biblical text and an awareness of the pastoral implications of each model. Moreover, how is theological praxis as a whole impacted by the model(s) of the atonement to which we hold?


There is much of me that is dissatisfied with what follows for various reasons. One of the problems with Psub is that it is so hard to come up with contemporary analogies and metaphors that work for a postmodern, post-Christendom generation. Every time I created an image, I found some way in which it just didn't work on the level that Psub works - the exchange, the incorporation, the exchange that is more on one side than the other, the benefits....etc

This is something I hope to give more thought to. I consider it part of my role not to explain my own feelings about what happened at the cross, although I am aware people might want to know what I think, but more helpfully to explain to people what the church has thought over the ages and allow God to accompany people on a journey of wrestling with it for themselves. I am still on my journey.

So here goes nothing...

What I have written is inevitably full of holes, both because it is theologically one sided and also because of my own linguistic inabilities. Perhaps bear in mind the exercise set before me and also that for missional reasons, I really do want to be able to learn from you how much better I might express this way in which the church has articulated the cross of Christ. This is not the place for your objections to the doctrine per se but just for your suggestions about how much better it might be explained. Bear in mind, I didn't set the question either, this was set for us as if it came from a person at church.


Did Jesus need to be tortured to death?
Philippians 2, verses 5-11 confirm that Jesus humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross! Martin Hengel in a book, originally titled Mors turpissima crucis (“the foulest death, the death of the cross.”), tells us that crucifixion was the most horrible, contemptuous form of execution known to the ancient world. Crucifixion was torture visited by the Roman imperial army on Jesus.

Did he need to be tortured to death, you are asking?

That you are asking is understandable. Paul expressed to people in Corinth how the cross could be difficult to understand (a stumbling block) or seem crazy (foolishess). (1 Cor 1:21-24). We struggle to comprehend this mystery at the heart of the Christian faith and say with Paul 'now I know in part’ (1 Cor. 13:12) but also 'we preach Christ crucified' (1 Cor 1:23). Jesus is glorified in His death on the cross, and the Father's name is glorified and through that cross, his being raised and ascended and then giving us the Holy Spirit, we are included in that glory. That makes little sense to us, because we're into human glory, as we prove through our fascination with celebrity but Paul says to Galatia, 'God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,' [Galatains 6:14].

This glory is yours, you who are asking this question, because Christ did all of this for you. John Stott says 'If God in Christ did not die in our place,'. We could have not come into relationship with God. God offered Jesus in our place and this is the foundation through which all the ideas about what Christ achieved at the cross make sense, and it is worth saying at this point that there are many biblical ideas which have resonated with different times. Christ is the sacrificed paschal lamb of the Passover, the priest offering himself as a sacrifice in the temple, the ransom paid in the slave market to secure our freedom and the victor over sin and death and Satan in a cosmic battle (Col. 2:15). The lynchpin holding all these images together is that 'Christ, though guiltless, took our punishment, that He might cancel our guilt, and do away with our punishment.'Sin's penalty is paid with the death of Christ, securing our spiritual and eternal life (Rom 6:23). God in Christ cancels the accusation that stands against us with its legal claims. Part of that accusation in today's post-Christendom, postmodern world is that God's is simply a retributive punishment of Christ that is not restorative. In articulating the work of Christ, we need to be aware of a postmodern sensitivity about God's wrath. His is not a petty anger: God’s wrath is about his being 'too pure to approve evil' (Hab 1:13), it is his wounded covenant love, it is in reality more salvific than punitive in its intention. Punishment is not the goal, relationship is the goal. Wrath and love coexist in a Holy God and we must not present these characteristics as antagonistic. Cyril of Jerusalem says 'behold the wisdom of God; He preserved both the truth of His sentence, and the exercise of His loving-kindness.' We must not separate the cross from the resurrection either and we must not separate the members of the trinity from one another. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit together purposed that the Son should become a man and as a man bear on the cross God’s just punishment for sin in the place of sinners. Our old life is dead with Jesus, our sin and our new life is alive with the resurrected Christ. God is about life and love. Love is the basis of the divine reconciliation that is ours (2 Cor. 5.19-21). God initiates it with us through Christ. This work 'none but God can make and none but man ought to make, [so] it is necessary for the God-man to make it': Christ. God does not enjoy suffering and torture, he wants to prevent suffering and torture, God wants for us so much to be in covenant relationship with him and he provides the way so that we become Holy through Jesus and can be that covenant partner. Jesus is gift, given for us. For – given. It was decided before time began that God in Christ would offer himself as the means by which the sin which provokes God's wrath could be done away with. He is 'for' us – he is hyper, hyper means 'for', we know it to mean extreme, it took an extreme act but we must hold on to the idea that John explains God is love. . . . 'Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins,'(1 John 4:8-10). If we are still offended by this God whose justice can not leave sin unpunished and like Green and Baker think 'an abstract concept of justice instructs God as to how God must behave,' we must look to the psalmists and the prophets and Jesus who understood that hostility to sin was a characteristic of the holiness of God. If God cannot deny His own nature (2 Tim 2:13), then we are foolish to deny it. In the OT a realtionship was ratified by walking through the severed halves of animals. On breaking the covenant, the punishment was to become like the animals: broken and slain. Significant in Genesis 15, is that it is God who 'walked between'(Jer . 34:18) the severed animal halves. Under the New covenant, God through his Son becomes broken and slain instead of us. He suffers where we should have done. He is a God who 'so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son’ (John 3:16);who 'shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8). It comes about because Jesus knows that ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends . . .’ (John 15:13). The apostles, moreover, understand Jesus as punished for our transgressions for when the Ethiopian reads about the suffering servant 'stricken', 'smitten', 'afflicted', 'wounded', 'crushed', 'upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace', 'he bore the sin of many...' Philip tells him about Jesus. If we think that God's Holy justice does not demand our punishment, then we are ignoring Jeremiah's warnings and hearkening instead to the false prophets' assurances that all is well. To appreciate this idea in all its glory and to avoid seeing it as simply a legal exchange between humanity and Christ, as simply an exchange of guilt for innocence between parties, which in any court of law would be very unjust, we must understand our incorporation into the Godhead. We are 'in Christ' and he is in us. There is a union rather than a simple representation and in understanding this union, we understand that we died and rise with Christ (Rom. 6:3-4)). As Ireneaus explains, 'The Son [has]...entered into communion with us.'

1Stott, J., The Cross of Christ, InterVarsity, 1986, p.196.
2 Augustine:Writings Against the Manichaeans and Against the Donatists, Bk 14:4
3Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 13, Section 33
4Anselm, 'Cuer Des Homo', chp 6
5Green, J., B., & Baker M., D., Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, p.147
6Irenaeus Against Heresies (Book III, Chapter 18, para 7)

Oh Betty's!

I love to eat, as I am sure many of us do. I have many happy memories which are associated with food from my favourite tea when I was a child: mum's cheese and onion flan followed by apple pie, to Granny's pork crackling and roast potatoes and little fellows cupcakes, to nana's bacon and she would fry up the rind separately so that we had these long, crunchy tiddlybits to eat...I could go on and on.

Afternoon tea, I just love, and being rather a sedentary creature by nature, I always look for the places to break up a walk or a day out and usually these involve cups of tea. Much of what Jesus did involved food and drink and the sacrament of all sacraments just so happens to be a meal. I love it that Tom Wright describes himself thus,

I am one of those who think it good that the church has never formally defined 'the atonement', partly because I firmly believe that when Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn't give them a theory, he gave them a meal.

The above would seem a little unrelated had I not just delivered a seven minute presentation on the Penal Substitutionary nature of the atonement today, which I am still reflecting on, despite trying not to.

My main thought as I write this post though, is about how we share together, 'eat' together, wait for one another. One of those verses I find resonates with me particularly, from the bible, for various reasons, is this one:

So then, my brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. 1 Cor 11:33

After New Wine Harrogate Women's Conference this Saturday, which was a very special time 1700 women all shared together, I visited Betty's in Harrogate and we waited in the queue and discussed what we had seen God doing or heard about God doing at the gathering. I loved that queue, all these different people thrown together, waiting to eat and I became conscious that the couple behind us were listening very intently to what we were all saying and I began to wonder what their lives and experiences of God might be like.

Soon I will be far away in another country, just for a few days, eating with people I do not know yet and 'waiting for one another' in the way I have come to also understand it, as we discuss theology, the authority of scripture and no doubt many other things besides. I am glad for this reason to have found N Humphrey of  THE SEMINAR ON CONFLICT ECCLESIOLOGY and I think that just as we all gained so much from Ruth Gledhill posting on the 10 blogger commandments, promoting transparency and mutual respect, these pearls of wisdom from N Humphrey are worth posting here so that I do not forget that when we are debating and exploring theologies, pneumatologies and christologies, for they seem to be more plural than singular, we remember the covenant of grace that binds us each to the other. 

Thanks N Humphrey

The following theses are subject to critique and revision by the Members of the Seminar. Nathan Humphrey is the original proposer of these theses:

01. Conflict is the normal condition of ecclesial life. As such, conflict is the basic context for ecclesial discernment. [NH: Amended 10/12/2007]
02. An ecclesial community reveals what it most truly is (and is not) in periods of conflict.

03. The goal of discernment is not to resolve conflict but to know the will of God for a particular community in a particular place and time.

04. Conflict resolution is unimportant except insofar as it aids discernment, edification, sanctification, and mission.

05. Reconciliation of human beings to each other in the church cannot happen unless the church is also committed to an ongoing reconciliation of the church to God. [NH: Amended 10/12/2007]

06. Discernment plays a prophetic role in the church, in that it names the idols and false gods that we have erected in our sanctuaries and calls us back to the worship of the one, true God.

07. Issues are church-making when they are used iconically, that is, to point beyond themselves to God as the focus of the community’s energy. Issues are church-breaking when they are used idolatrously, that is, to point to themselves as the focus of the community’s energy.

08. The church should never be described in idealistic terms, nor apart from concrete historic experience. If an ecclesiology describes an idyllic community that has never existed, short of the eschaton, it will never exist in the future, and is an unhelpful model of the church.

09. Human fallibility, weakness, and sin are a part of ecclesial life. The church does not exist in a pure state apart from fallen humanity.

10. In the church, redeemed humanity ought never to be confused with perfected humanity.

11. The only pure community is the Kingdom of Heaven, which is not the church. Purity is only attained eschatologically through participation in the divine lovelife of the Holy Trinity, the source of all purity. As such, it is impossible to have a “pure church.”

12. Nevertheless, it is possible for the church to be semper purificanda, insofar as participation in the divine lovelife of the Holy Trinity is possible in the here-and-now through the community of the church and its reconciling relationships.

13. The only pure human being ever to walk the face of the earth is Jesus Christ. His purity was and is maintained through communion with God, not through disassociation with the unpure.

14. Purity through isolation and schism is a satanic temptation; the more one values orthodoxy and holiness, the more attractive this temptation.

15. Absolute undifferentiated inclusivity is not a Gospel value, inasmuch as absolute inclusivity is static. Inclusion without conversion is contentless.

16. Ecclesial stability must be rooted in a basic common commitment to Jesus as the Incarnate Word whose Spirit interprets the Word of God to the community. The full humanity and full divinity of Christ and Nicene Trinitarian faith are foundational to this account of ecclesiology. All ecclesiology is Christocentric, pneumatic, realistic, historic, and eschatological.

17. The Church is best maintained in unity by the Holy Spirit when its members have a basic commitment to each other that is grounded in the unbreakable covenant that God has first made with us.

18. The minimum basic commitment required of a member of the Church, therefore, is an indissoluble commitment.

19. Edification, or building up the Church, serves the mission of the Church, and must therefore be a primary focus of each member’s activity.

20. When engaging in conflict, focusing on the edification of the Church keeps the Church visibly united; unedifying words and acts lead inexorably to schism and heresy.

Multi-media and faith and community

Image from Ship of Fools.com

Lesley Fellows asked if I could argue for blogging from scripture. I think I probably could. I have begun to collect resources under the heading blogger apologetics and I am quite vocal when visiting speakers to college denounce the individualism of our postmodern life-style and reference facebook etc. I 'get' what they go on about but social networking creates community and can be used for good as much as it can be used for ill, like anything else in life. The Christian community, engaging in social media, often use it as a resource for swapping ideas, sharing reflections and doing theology. It's like a virtual indaba. Jody, Radical Evangelical ('disciple' now, but that header has stuck for me from her old blog), helped me to understand that we can create together in all sorts of ways. She recently put together a poem from a facebook thread exploring the nature of priesthood.

Ian Paul talks about how he was 'asked of any nautical metaphors in hymns anyone knew of, and ended up (with five minutes’ work by me, and in about 3 hours) with 30 comments, giving complete coverage of hymnody.'

It is obvious to me that facebook and blogging can simply be another way in which we live out Pauline images of the body of Christ.

The community at Corinth is not said to be part of a wider body of Christ nor as 'a body of Christ' alongside numerous others. It is 'the body of Christ' in that place. This suggests that wherever Christians are in relationship there is the body of Christ in its entirety, for Christ is truly and wholly present there through his Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13).

Robert Banks, Paul's Idea of Community, Revised ed., (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994).


How do you think that the virtual Christian presence challenges or bears out Banks' statement?

What DO we teach our children?

I talk openly to my children about the various relationships that are being practised. They are not being wrapped in cotton wool. I also talk to them about what the Bible and the church have taught about what constitutes marriage. I wonder if ever I was to go on a government parenting course, what it is I would be told to teach my children about issues in human sexuality. Churches run parenting courses all over the country. I would be curious to know if they cover these issues and whether there is any variety between courses on this issue. 

The Telegraph tonight tells us about Eunice and Owen Johns, a Christian couple, denied the opportunity to adopt children because they are 'unwilling to promote a homosexual lifestyle to a child'. The Telegraph tells us that 'neither Mr nor Mrs Johns has anything against gay people but they are not in favour of sex before marriage, whatever an individual's orientation.' The newspaper goes on to tell us that 'not that long ago they would have been considered mainstream' in their views.

I think it's really interesting that The Telegraph uses religious language to explore this issue saying: 'We are witnessing a modern, secular Inquisition – a determined effort to force everyone to accept a new set of orthodoxies or face damnation as social heretics if they refuse.' 

There seems to be a new faith system dominating: secular humanism, and those who disagree are the marginalised and the misunderstood. Perhaps with the crossing of this theological rubicon on sexual issues, for in many ways that is what it is, the church will have to consider separating itself from the state. Perhaps Christianity will become a more distinct way of life again. There will be less careless census form filling and more consideration for those who might at one time have ticked the 'Christian' box. 

Are we really a secular state? It does not feel that way to me, but then I am at theological college, with children in a Church of England school. The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali has spoken out regarding the facts that a monarch takes a coronation oath promising to uphold the laws of God. Acts of Parliament are passed with the consent of “the Lords Spiritual”. The Queen’s Speech finishes with a blessing from Almighty God. He does not believe we are a secular country. 

Do you?

In what ways do you think Christianity is still shaping the legal system of this country?