The Kew Continuum

Reflections on Benedict XVI's visit to Britain

2010-09-18T23:24:00.000-07:00

Cambridge, England,

September 20, 2010

I have spent the last few days watching the coverage of the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain. The Pope has shown extraordinary stamina for an 83-year-old, and great fortitude in the face of the negativity toward him from some many quarters. I suspect that Britain's historic distrust of Catholicism still lurks beneath the surface.

By the end of the Saturday evening prayer vigil in Hyde Park, London, he looked utterly exhausted -- but happy, and happier still when he had beatified John Henry Newman in Birmingham on Sunday morning. Perhaps the most moving moment for me, however, was when he and the Archbishop of Canterbury stood side-by-side on the steps of the high altar in Westminster Abbey and together pronounced the blessing at the end of the beautiful prayer service held there.

There was tension hanging in the air when he arrived, but as the days passed there was a visible thawing toward Benedict, who handled himself with great grace and courtesy. To me there has been the deepening sense that while there are huge barriers that hold us apart from our brothers and sisters in Rome, there is very much more that we have in common, especially in the face of an assertive secularism.

Interestingly, there was a mingling of Anglican, Protestant, and Catholic hymnody at the gatherings, with John Newton's "Amazing Grace"being belted out in Birmingham, while the last hymn sung at the vigil in Hyde Park was "Tell out my soul..." by Timothy Dudley-Smith, an evangelical Anglican bishop trained at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Following that the choir sung a well-known piece by John Rutter. It seems that not only are elements of our liturgies converging, but we praising God with many of the same songs. These may be little things, but they are evidence of two streams that want to run together despite all the difficulties.

The dark side of the Pope's visit to Britain has been the constant reminders of the Roman Church's child abuse scandals. The Pope constantly apologized, as indeed he should, but for his detractors that is not enough. While the activities of a tiny minority of sick priests is detestable in the extreme, these sins should be measured alongside the extraordinary ways in which Roman Catholics in Britain have served the poor and needy, provided education, and stood firm in times of need -- all in the midst of proclaiming the love of Christ. Indeed, my own granddaughter is being educated at a Roman Catholic elementary school not far from Newman's Oratory Church in Birmingham, an education that is enriched and tempered by the evangelical Anglican parish she attends on Sunday mornings!

Yet it is this dark side of the papal visit that has added ferocity to the response of the secular left and atheism toward all things Christian. While the media have generally covered things better than I had anticipated, these opponents have been allowed to get away with things that are scurrilous, tainted by anger and viciousness. For example, on the BBC World Service the other morning a question was asked of a sophisticate of a detractor; his throwaway response that he would not deign to answer a question about "a man who wears lace and red shoes" cried out for cross-examination, but he was allowed to get away with it. While it is clear that there are some wonderful people at the BBC who have treated this visit with great grace, there are others there and in the newspaper who have taken every opportunity to cast aspersions.

After having lived back here for three years I have little doubt that Europe has been disposing of its Christian heritage with a breathless rapidity. This sexual crisis in the Roman Catholic church has certainly not helped the cause of Christ, either within Catholicism or beyond for in one way or another we are all being tarred with the same brush. It is almost impossible for a holy man like Benedict to claim any high ground when members of the priesthood have behaved so badly and seem in certain cases to have gotten away with it. This is perceived as an inconsistent hypocrisy that Christians should not be allowed to get away with, barring their access to the high moral ground.

In my more pessimistic moments I find myself wondering how on earth the churches are going to recover from this horror. Cleaning house is necessary, but the memory will remain as a scar for generations to come. This is just one more strike against the faith. Nothing short of a new Reformation and Counter-Reformation is called for, and at the moment it is hard to see from where that might come.

There is a sense of wrestling not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers whose reach seems almost limitless. This is a continent that is assertively and with glee turning its back on its spiritual and intellectual heritage in favor of the empty puffery of materialism, and a purposeless listlessness coupled with self-indulgence. In a way this crisis could not have come at a worse moment, but in the timing there might be evidence of just a glimmering of the providence of God. Could it be that the old traditions that have shaped European Christianity for so many centuries now must be deconstructed and reconstructed -- but this time to enable mission and not governance/control? It is certainly the case that structures that had seemed solid and immovable just a few years ago are starting to totter.

Christianity is not dead in Europe, as can be seen by the multi-national crowds that turned out to honor the Pope, but it is certainly going through a very difficult time. Could it be that the structures with which we have lived since the Reformation are in their dying days and that not too far into the future we will see a 21st Century remaking of the churches in order that they might effectively proclaim Christ to pagans, Muslims, materialists, and secularists alike? Already many are exploring new ways, something that could well snowball.

I would like to think we are on the verge of a new beginning, but first it is from relationships like those being forged through Benedict's visit that residual distrust is given permission to edge toward a more cooperative fellowship. Europe is not lost to the Christian gospel, the wounds inflicted have not been moral, but there is much to be done and prayed over in this generation if the faith focused on Jesus Christ is to begin to assert itself again in this part of the world.

Now I am sixty-five... (with apologies to A.A.Milne)

2010-08-30T03:30:00.000-07:00

My inspiration

Cambridge, England

After a week that included torrential rain this particular day dawned bright and fair. I knew it was coming, but had stuffed the idea to the back of my mind, paying little attention to it until two or three days before it actually occurred; now I found myself early that morning sitting with my bible, my journal, and feeling glum. All sorts of thoughts ran through my mind, some of them less than charitable. I had turned sixty-five and there was no way on earth that I could ever again pretend I was young. Having been raised and worked my whole life in a culture that glorifies youthfulness, it had been possible to kid myself, but the march of time had brought any lying to myself to a conclusion.

As the day progressed greetings started popping into my Facebook inbox, together with cards through the letterbox. Most were gracious, some were humorous, one or two were rude, and my former churchwarden deigned to call me an "old man," not that I felt that old. In fact, in some ways I feel younger now than I did ten or even fifteen years ago. My brain is still working pretty well (after a fashion), and my elder daughter following her mother's genetic line has more gray hair than I do! The body is working pretty well, too, and the crippling back pain that marked my middle years seems to moved on to make someone else's life misery. I admit that I tire more easily, and am now convinced that televisions have been designed to encourage an evening nap before going to bed.

But here I am at that age when most of us are supposed to collect our clock with a little plaque on it and ride off into the sunset. Sixty-five has been perceived for several generations as the age at which you graduate from being a useful member of society to one who is spending your children's inheritance, as the old bumper sticker goes. That is changing -- for example, I cannot receive my full US Social Security for another year, while people all around us here in Britain are hopping up and down with fury about a proposed hike in the retirement age, but it will take several generations for this particular birthday to lose its sense of hope for some, and stigma for others.

I thought when I was around 45-50 and gasping under the load of college bills that retirement looked an awfully attractive option, but as the years have passed since then I have been changing my mind. I have friend and peers who are rejoicing in their new-found status as retirees, but while I respect the decisions they have made, sometimes for very good reason, it is not something that I find myself attracted to.

There are all sorts of reasons for this, but first among them is that I am not ready to leave the pitcher's mound and disappear into the dugout. Friends have said as they move toward retirement that they feel pretty worn out, and a slower life beckons. I fully understand that, and on a cold wet English winter's day when it is dark until long after breakfast and barely teatime before the sun sets again, I find myself wondering as I back my car out of the driveway why I am doing this to myself. But most of the time I find myself looking forward to the day ahead and the opportunities that are awaiting me.

Being on the staff of a theological seminary means that I no longer have to be at the helm of something, for which I am truly grateful, but in a creaking economy it can be frightening to find myself in the midst of raising a huge sum of money to insure the college's future strength and vision. Yes, I do sometimes wake up at night worrying about the challenges that lie before me. I miss parish ministry, but at the same time I get regular opportunities to preach, pastor, baptize babies, marry young couples, and bury the dead -- and that is a huge privilege. But it does mean that what I once got paid for I now do as a hobby (there is a certain penuriousness about the Church of England when it comes to clergy fees and expenses if you are a non-parochial priest).

The challenge of our campaign at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, will keep me busy for several years yet, and meanwhile I am part of a congregation where I am able to make a significant contribution -- I might slow down a little but thiswill mean that my modus operandi is altering to be more that of the tortoise/turtle than the hare! I believe with all my heart that those of us who have been around for a while still have a huge contribution to make, even if it is not as part of the mainstream of our society or church.

I have been reading a book by several faculty from Duke Divinity School and one or two others entitled Growing Old in Christ, and have found myself appreciating their notion that growing old, becoming a elder, is not the problem that our culture wants to make it be, but a privilege that the church would do well to honor -- and we would do well to live into. My emotions like the idea, but I am still in the process of getting my mind around it.

The evidence suggests that my generation are likely to have a devil of a job adjusting to being old, senior, elders, golden-agers. Many have not saved for this chapter of their lives, some have ragged familial relationships, and others still are likely to find that the hedonism of their youth will not hold them into old age. This places a huge opportunity in front of the Christian churches, and it will be those of us who are in the final quarter of life who are best positioned to help them over the ultimate threshold that awaits us all.

Am I happy to be sixty-five? Not really, but it does seem that there is an awful lot waiting to be done. As Billy Graham once said when asked about retirement, "I don't read anything in my bible about the apostles retiring." I have been on a bit of a Robert Frost jag of late so let me leave the last words with him as he paused in the New Hampshire snows:

The woods are lovely dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Whatever happened to discussion and dialogue?

2010-08-26T03:40:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to dialogue and discussion? It seems that much that passes as interchange has disappeared, with the online world being the biggest killing field. Almost everywhere you go looking for intelligent input there is little or no thoughtful response to something that has been said or been posted. An honest and astute interplay of ideas is becoming rare because instead of responding rationally people seem determined to respond viscerally, ad hominen, and with raw emotions rather than enquiring mind.

Online forums (fora?) have become settings in which moderating or dissenting voices are literally drowned out by those who shout and pontificate. Each online setting develops its own peculiar brand of political correctness, and woe betide anyone who crosses a particular line in the sand. Often these correctnesses are contrary to the original intention of the owner of the site, and they will lean heavily in one direction or another. There is in many places what can be described as a Rush Limbaugh approach to conversation: not to listen to what another is saying but to shout the so-and-so down because he or she has no right to say such things in this setting, and besides, any fool knows that their position is wrong and not worthy of serious consideration.

The result of such a quarrelsome modus operandi is animosity so that those with helpful insights on a particular subject in that setting refuse to post there any longer because, honestly, life is too short to put up with that sort of wrangling. There is a particular site that I have visited for a long, long time and will probably continue to visit because it is helps me to stay up-to-date with things that are going on, but last week I wrote the owner to say that I will no longer be contributing because I just don't have the stomach for the bruisings I so often have been given. I am delighted to engage with people who read the materials and want to discuss them, but I am no longer willing to be treated as if I am weak in the head, apostate, someone who taken up arms against the western world.

Wherever I look, on either side of the Atlantic, there is animus being hurled around online as one adamant group takes on the other. Scurrilous things are said which people should not be allowed to get away with -- but because people like me have now opted out, they do. This only makes them bolder, less reflective, and more bombastic, so the whole sorry cycle is intensified. Whatever one's principles or presuppositions, some of the things that I have read about the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Newt Gingrich, James Dobson, and so on, and so on, should be challenged because they are a parody of the reality. If there is such a thing as freedom of speech, and I believe there is, then individuals should not be allowed to get away with some of the things they write or say.

In a sane and ordered setting this is possible, but in one where an unyielding pack mentality prevails, the pack's job is to pounce on anyone who strays into their little domain and questions what they hold to be precious and true. Anyone doing so reaches the point in the end where we find there is no longer any delight in banging our heads against this particular brick wall. Besides, no one is listening. The result is that creative debate does not take place, lines in the sand become concrete bunkers, and constructive dissent becomes impossible.

When I was in seminary and university in what is now the distant past we were rigorously schooled in the fundamentals of logic so that we might learn rationally to analyze an argument and respond to it in an informed and reasonable manner. It was some of the most valuable teaching I had, but in today's forums that rules of logic and principles of rhetoric have all but disappeared. We have delineated ourselves into what are essentially two armed camps slugging things out. Moderating voices are sidelined and so the answers now HAVE to be right or wrong, black or white, left or right, liberal or conservative, traditional or progressive, and so forth, and so forth.

I am not sure that discussion in most places on the Internet as they are presently configured can be redeemed, partly because I am not sure that those who shout and holler from atop their particular soap box want to hear any other position or view than their own. They are convinced that they are right, they have the truth, and others are so wrong that alternative voices do not deserve to be heard. To function this way is to stray into very dangerous territory that will have disasterous consequences in the long term.

When this happens among Christian people then we have to examine ourselves to see if this is how we learned Christ.

(Also posted on www.covenant-communion.net)

2010-05-12T09:54:00.000-07:00

The planned new facility at Ridley Hall

I was walking the dog across the fens as the sun was starting to set the other evening when Gordon Brown drove to Buckingham Palace and tendered his resignation to the Queen, by the time I was home the new Prime Minister was on his was to 10 Downing Street to take up the reins of office, as many have said, perhaps accepting a chalice poisoned by the ailing British economy.

At the back of my mind was anxiety about what the markets would make of all this -- we are certainly in for some roller-coasters and months of uncertainty as soon-to-be proposed debt-reduction measures are brought into play. Just yesterday the markets tumbled and the value of the euro plummeted. A layman has to be asking questions about what this means.

This last week has felt something like those days in November 2000 when the Florida election was twisting in the wind because of hanging chads. There was that sense of deep uncertainty, fear and hope mingling with one another at each turn in the road that finally delivered a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition. This was the first time Liberals have even sniffed power, with the exception of World War Two, since 1922.

What does seem to be clear is that while not wanting to give anyone a majority, the British people are getting ready to grit their teeth and accept that the finances are a mess, there are debts to be paid, so we had better hunker down and do something about it. That fiscal tightening will hurt us all as taxes rise, services diminish, and discomfort increases in all sorts of ways. The truth is that the British people have been spending too much, saving too little, manufacturing has shrivelled, and despite all the vitriol that has been thrown at the banks, it has been the huge financial sector that has done a lot of the economic heavy lifting for too long.

As someone whose job is to raise money this is just a tightening of the screw that will make my work just that little bit more difficult. Development work in Britain is not easy at the best of times, as there is just not the tradition of giving here that there is in the USA, but now we are being stretched that little bit further.

As we have moved forward with the major capital campaign on which we are working at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, we have been acutely aware of God's leading and guiding along the route that we have taken. If that leading is into a long wilderness journey, then so be it. Our task is to follow in hard times as well as good. This task we are involved in is of great importance for the future of Christian witness in a university city like Cambridge, and to the ends of the earth. So let us get on and do it, anticipating that God will open the windows of heaven in some way or another.

I have been Kindled

2010-03-16T06:31:00.000-07:00

I am now well and truly Kindled!

After I had been kicking the idea around for months, at Christmas my family bought me an Amazon Kindle and in one leap I entered the age of digital reading. My idea was that having a Kindle would be much more convenient than lugging round armfuls of books as my travel schedule on planes, trains, buses, and automobiles expanded, and then there was the fact that the Kindle could help conserve the limited bookshelf space that we have.

I didn't have great ambitions for my Kindle at the outset, it was more about convenience than anything. But to my surprise I have fallen in love with this approach to reading and at this precise moment there are fifty-eight items on this little piece of equipment with room for about 1200 more. It is possible to carrying around a veritable library, and the whole thing weighs less than a pound. These days wherever I go I am able to take with me the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the compete works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen, the whole of Sherlock Holmes, a whole scad of novels, some serious works of study and biography, and even PDF files that I need for my work. In there also is the American Oxford Dictionary, as well as the ability to switch on the wireless facility and download whatever I want from Amazon's library of about 450,000 electronic titles. I can even go online if I want to.

Several weeks ago I was reading in bed when reference was made to a title that I thought sounded interesting. I went exploring to see if by any chance Amazon had the book on its downloadable list -- they did, and so as I lay there under the covers I got it for myself to read and seconds later it was corralled on my Kindle and backed up both on my laptop and at Amazon's great cloud in the sky.

Since moving back to England I have been distinctly underwhelmed by the British press, but that problem has been solved by Kindle. I have always loved the International Herald Tribune, and each morning I turn my Kindle on a five o'clock when I get up and within seconds there is the daily paper, waiting to be read while I drink my first cup of tea of the day, and do my daily devotions.

Yesterday evening I came home from work, changed, and went out to the garage to pump my exercise bike. Kindle came with me. Before beginning to pedal I set up the text-to-speech capability and listened to pages of news from the paper as I looked after my body. I confess that I don't like the female voice that the Kindle has, it sounds too electronic and tinny, but apart from the occasional odd pronunciation the male voice is very listen-able to. I suspect that several generations of text-to-speech from now it will be difficult to tell that it is not a human voice that we're listening to, and we will probably be able to choose timbre and accent.

If I was into MP3s in a huge way I could store and play them on my Kindle, but I am a book person, and if I want to listen to music it will be classical on the radio or one of my nice CDs. I know that CDs are now considered old-fashioned, but I grew up in the day of vinyl records that galloped around the turntable at 78 rpm, so having it all on a disc makes me feel comfortable.

A fascinating title that I have on my Kindle is Publish Your Own Book on the Amazon Kindle. I haven't yet cracked it open, but it is enticing to think that it is entirely possible with a laptop and this Kindle technology to sidestep the publishers who might not be interested in a small niche market -- and do it myself.

Of course the Kindle has its shortcomings, and it is at present limited in ways that will not be the case as each new generation of the technology is launched. Already Amazon are strengthening their position for the future in this whole realm. I bought a hybrid car in December 2001, and although people thought I was nuts, we loved it. When I moved to England in September 2007 I bought the same model but six years on -- and the technology has moved on in leaps and bounds during that period of time. The e-reader will be the same. It probably won't be long before the Kindle produces huge pages in color as well as black-and-white, but for most of my reading a spectrum of shades is not necessary. I expect in due course it will get slimmer, lighter, swisher in its presentation of itself, but right now I am perfectly content with this approach to reading.

I would happily admit that the Kindle is probably not for everyone or for every type of literature. When I am working hard with what I will call a study book I go to and fro between the pages, underline, write comments in the margins, and so forth. While such a thing is possible with the Kindle it's a bit clunky. Also, because you can vary the size of the font so that page numbers don't work, distance into the book is measured by what it calls 'locations.' It took me a while to work out that these are the number of sentences. Page numbers really are an easier way of remembering where something is.

I suspect I am in the process of moving from a single approach to reading from books, magazines, etc., to a mixed economy of hard copy and my e-reader. Some things will work better in print, others on the nice little screen which doesn't glare at me, and to all intents and purposes looks like a page.

When I took my Kindle on its first transatlantic flight six or seven weeks ago I was afraid that the battery might give out on me. The fear was groundless. I could have gone around the world on one battery charge not just across three thousand miles of water or so. I reckon that the Kindle has about a 20-25 hour charge depending on how carefully you use it. I defy anyone to read for that long in one stretch!

So, as I say, I'm Kindled. I bought my first laptop (then called a portable computer) in 1988. It was a computer, yes, but not portable by today's standards, yet this technology in a few short years zipped forward and revolutionized the way we handle information. Today's Kindle is probably where the computing industry was with mobile computing in about 1990, and already there are other models and technologies nipping at Amazon's heels. We will have to see whether the reader by Plastic Logic or Apple's IPad are serious contenders, or whether the Kindle will stumble and give way to other software and hardware options in the future...

... but right now I would encourage you to think about Kindling yourself!

Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus is not all it seems

2009-11-10T00:43:00.000-08:00

There is much about the Roman Catholic Church that I have come to appreciate over the years: Catholic colleagues whose fellowship has been the source of much blessing, occasional opportunities at Catholic worship that have enriched, and joint projects with Catholics that have been fruitful. Having grown up with a somewhat negative Protestant attitude toward the Church of Rome, I have come over the years to benefit from their particular graces and charisms.

Yet, alas, there seems to be almost an imperialism about the Catholic tradition that allows for little variance from their church's dogma.

Given the concerns Pope Benedict has about the secularism and godlessness of Europe (and so out into all the world), it seems that some kind of common front under the charmanship of the Bishop of Rome would be of great benefit to the churches. This, of course, would require a measure of acceptance of the differing emphases of other Christians by Catholics, especially those of us who are rooted and grounded in the historic creeds and statements of faith of the church. However, it is sad that Rome is not able to stretch that far.

The whole recent flap around the Pope's overtures to dissident Anglicans is an example of this. I understand very well that there are fellow-Anglicans who have lost confidence in the Anglican tradition, and if their own faith is more happily accommodated in the Roman setting, then so be it. But as we mull over the small print it seems to be more hard line than the gentle invitation of concerned fellow-Christians.

A genuine, fraternal invitation, for example, would at the very least turn the expectation of re-confirmation and re-ordination into conditional rites, but Rome seems unwilling to reconsider the 1896 declaration that Anglican orders are, in effect, no orders at all. This un-churching of Anglicans has a tang of dishonesty about it because on the ground in most settings Anglican and Catholic clergy work alongside one another, mutually accept one another's status as ministers of word and sacraments.

The Apostolic Constitution makes it quite clear that the Catechism of the Catholic Church is definitive theologically and doctrinally for all those who move along the path Rome is offering, which, in effect, obliterates theology that is distinctively Anglican and nullifies the richness of the Anglican tradition. You can come in, we are being told, but you have to leave what we perceive to be Protestant baggage at the door.

As I read the small print of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, it is phrased in such a way as to suggest that only certain Anglican liturgical texts will be acceptable for use by those who want to make this transition, which would suggest that anything that does not dot the 'i's and cross the 't's of Roman Catholic eucharistic theology, etc., will be unacceptable. This would then probably declare out of court much of the historic Prayer Book tradition which has been the foundation of Anglican life for nearly half a millennium.

While I don't really wish to nitpick to death this document that codifies an invitation that some are likely to take up, the more I look at it the more I suspect the spirit in which this invitation has been made. It comes from a mindset that because it believes it is the one true expression of the Christian faith, it possesses the trump cards, and can demand rather than entering into conversation accepting the graces and charisms of another tradition.

Last week I cooperated with the most gracious Roman Catholic priest in the funeral Mass and burial of my nominally Roman Catholic brother-in-law. The priest was a prince among men, godly and caring, and the manner in which he presided over the Eucharist was both sensitive and genuinely moving. He was genuinely embarrassed that he could not invite to the Lord's table those Christians of other traditions, so there I sat behind the altar, with my faithful Anglican extended family sitting in the pews (together with a few family Baptists), while the handful of Catholics present took participated in the sacrament.

This to me was an acted parable of the situation in which we find ourselves as two Communions that maybe respect one another, but nevertheless talk past each other. By excluding Anglicans from their sacramental life they are treating us as non-Christians, while at the same time in the day-to-day elements of church life in local communities considering one another to be believers. The are plenty places in the world where Anglicans and Catholics even share the same buildings. If the Catholic priest had not thought me a Christian, would he have allowed me to preach in his church, and would he have accepted that committal by me according to the Book of Common Prayer was appropriate in any shape or form?

In the Apostolic Constitution the Roman Catholic Church is saying, "Well, if you jump through the hoops we think necessary then we will accept you," while all the time jumping through those hoops is a negating of what are already our convictions -- in which they may see inadequacies, but little fundamental heresy.

The challenge facing us is missional, and it gets more pressing as each day passes. While accepting that each church has its own ordering that should be respected and taken seriously, it would seem that the time has come for Rome to be willing to enter a conversation with the same generosity as is expected of Anglican Christians.

Reflections on the 20/20 Report of 2001

2009-10-19T01:28:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, while looking for something else, I ran across a copy of the Report of the 20/20 Task Force of the Episcopal Church, produced in 2000-2001 at the request of the General Convention. For a few minutes I thumbed through its pages, remembering the rising sense of excitement experienced by those of us who were part of that Task Force, and drew up the report. Now the Report was far from perfect, but looking back over the work we had done I realized afresh that our prognosis and prescription, if applied, could have done a significant amount positively for the Episcopal Church.

The 20/20 Initiative was deceptively simple: it was to do all that we can to double the size of the Episcopal Church between 2000 and 2020. Such notions have visionary potential, and we felt that as we did our work, this was more about launching a movement rather than becoming mired in a program. Perhaps those of us who were part of the 20/20 Task Force were naive, but we were cautiously optimistic that our recommendations would be taken seriously, and if that happened that they would bring a fresh evangelistic fervor to the church. Doubling the size may have been a little optimistic, but we believed that the Episcopal Church was capable of a good crack at that sort of challenge.

A few days after I had reacquainted myself with the 20/20 Report the 2008 Episcopal Church statistics were published. They do not make happy reading. While numbers may not be everything, they are a record of just about wholesale retreat on every front. Rather than being twice the size it was by 2020, things will be going well if it is only half the size. And like a patient ignoring the doctor's warning after a full physical comes up with some disturbing outcomes, the denomination continues to deny the realities.

We had worked hard during 2000 and 2001 to come up with this Report, which we then took to the Executive Committee in October 2001. It was hardly a fortuitous moment for the nation was still reeling from the shock of 9/11, so grief and anxiety were never far from the surface. But we made the best of the opportunity.

The Executive Council was meeting at a pleasant hotel on the Jacksonville Beaches in Florida, but even before we made our presentation I sensed a degree of hostility toward what we were all about. Our potential agenda was passe, another was brewing and would eventually prevail. We would, no doubt, be indulged, it was highly likely that the product we presented would be watered down to the point of being neutralized, with the institution pulling its teeth and domesticating it. That is precisely what happened.

The agenda which prevailed, and which would start having its most significant impact around the General Convention of 2003, was already gathering momentum. Since that time the church has been divided, financial resources have been dwindling, and the shrinkage has been nothing short of disasterous. Congregations, clergy, bishops, dioceses, have headed for the exits, with litigation being used as never before in the history of the Episcopal Church. Church planting, which was an encouraging component of church life in 2000, is virtually at a standstill, and heads are buried deep in the sand whenever anyone attempts to make honest sense of the truly appalling statistics that get dished up now each year. What is bizarrely fascinating is that no one seems to have the heart to ask the very difficult questions of this distressing reality, or act constructively upon them.

For me, the final chance of an exciting future for the Episcopal Church was nailed into the coffin not during General Convention 2003, but at that meeting of the Executive Council in a comfortable hotel by the beach in Florida in 2001, when the 20/20 Report was received with phony smiles and blue-penciled to death. I think that was when the Episcopal Church broke my heart, what followed from that time was merely a further trampling of it into the dust. That was when I retreated, burying myself back in parish ministry and avoiding the national scene.

It was, however, while I was at that hotel in Jacksonville Beach that I had the worst nocturnal experience of my life. Not long after switching off the light one night, and when I wasn't sure whether I was asleep or partially awake, I found myself face-to-face with a kind of gray featureless creature which was doing its level best to suffocate me. I was in terror, and truly thought I was dead and was being dragged down to hell. My body thrashed as I fumbled for the light switch. When eventually I managed to illuminate the room I was alone, drenched in sweat, heart pounding like a sledgehammer, and frightened out of my wits. It was a long time before I was calm enough to face the darkness again, and try to get back to sleep.

I have spent eight years attempting to make sense of that episode, whose reality is as intense and frightening today as when it happened. Did it emanate from somewhere inside me? Was it something to do with the room in which I was staying? Did it have something to do with the recent events at Ground Zero and the Pentagon? Or, perhaps, was it related in some way to the spiritual conflict related to the Executive Council meeting? I cannot answer these questions with any sense of certainty, which would be presumptuous. It may have been due to none of the above, or all of them may have somehow contributed to this particularly unpleasant situation.

What I do know is that imperfect as the proposals of the 20/20 Report might have been, the Episcopal Church would have been a very different place today if the strategy suggested had been pursued. If a red-blooded 20/20 had happened perhaps there would not have been the agonizing parting of friends, perhaps the financial dilemmas would be ameliorated, and perhaps the challenge would have continued to be planting new congregations, while training to recruit and train the sort of leaders who could nurture these little green shoots and turn them into something significant.

During these last years there have been many casualties, and perhaps I am one of them. I remain a priest in good standing of the Episcopal Church, but my ministry is now an ocean away. I find what I am doing fulfilling, satisfying, and (I hope) making a constructive contribution to the advance of God's Kingdom. However, the temperature of my passions starts to rise when I think of the extraordinary adventure 20/20 would have been as a movement in the hands of the Holy Spirit.

A Conversation Waiting to Begin

2009-07-17T01:31:00.000-07:00

I spent the last couple of days of my vacation reading Oliver O'Donovan's A Conversation Waiting to Begin: The churches and the gay controversy (London: SCM Press, 2009). The book has sat on my shelf for several months, but this was a good time for me to digest O'Donovan's words, applying his insights to the circumstances in which I am living.

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the USA was meeting as I was reading, and each day my spirits were further dampened by the actions the Convention was taking, decisions that are surely moving it beyond the fringes of the Anglican Communion, and perhaps beyond a generous catholic Christianity. These were decisions which the good professor was, I think, hoping to head off with a thoughtful and carefully argued discussion.

I was also reading it following something that had happened in our own family recently, something that was not on my mind when I purchased the book. During this time one of my nearest and dearest came out of the closet and admitted to being actively gay. While I had long suspected this, knowing something for certain tends to color perceptions and raise a whole series of questions. This latest admission probably means that within my immediate family there are statistically actually more homosexual persons than in most others.

The actions of the church and circumstances like these have forced me on several occasions during the last decade to ask substantial questions about human sexuality. I have found myself wondering if there is something that I have missed. My understanding of human sexuality has been very traditional, but I have felt for the sake of honestly that I must go back and examine not only my presuppositions, but also the evidence being presented to me both by current scholarship and the substance of the Bible. Neither in my exploring have I stuck to those writers and thinkers who echo what has been my own position, but have roamed far and wide and, among other things, have been looking to see if there are insights that I have overlooked, misunderstood, or misinterpreted.

I guess you can say that within my own limits I have sought to be as open and as honest as is possible. The exercises have been fruitful, because each time this has occurred I have gained new and constructive insights into the human condition in general, as well as this particular aspect of being human. As I have approached this topic again, among others I have had Oliver O'Donovan as a helpful companion, and for this I have been grateful.

However, this time I have brought a different set of questions to the dilemma the contemporary approach to human sexuality presents because this whole business comes impossibly close to home for me. My questions have been informed by the fact that this is something I am likely to have to deal with face-to-face most days for the rest of my life. The overriding query I have made of myself is how I might do this.

My internal landscape during this last ten or fifteen years of battling over sexuality, both in the church and in wider society, has probably experienced most of the same ups and downs as so many others. Fury, fear, confusion, and now a kind of stoic fatalism have flavored my responses. At times raw anger has led me to say and do things which I have subsequently regretted, at others I have worked hard to find some kind of modus vivendi with those whose convictions have not matched my own. It has seemed to me more and more that we have been presented with a fete accomplis rather than being able to participate in a conversation both whose substance and whose outcome have been far from clear.

Oliver O'Donovan's book was published in the USA as Church in Crisis: the Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion. With all due respects to the American publisher, I believe the British title, A Conversation Waiting to Begin, is a much better description of the book's essence. Yes, the starting point of these ten dozen pages is the crisis in the Anglican Communion that caught light in 2003 with the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, but having alighted from that point it ranges over far wider territory much as any intelligent conversation would.

Rather than pontificating, he graciously nudges us to look at issue within the context of the changed realities with which we live in an evolving culture. Each relatively short chapter asks us to come at the topic using tools of ethical and theological scholarship, Scripture, hermeneutics, and measuring these against the substantial doctrines of creation and redemption. Sometimes he speaks overtly about being logical and reasonable in our quest, but on almost every page he is whispering this as if between the lines.

Why is it, he asks, that this one little thing has proved so explosive and divisive? Well, comes back the answer, it depends what you mean by 'one little thing?' How little actually is this? In the fourth century the church as it went through the exercise of creed-making seemed to be riven over one little iota, but in reality that discussion was about a great deal more because at stake was affirming a truthful understanding of the nature of God or one that is idolatrous. Are we, he asks, in a similar situation here?

While never exactly giving a definitive answer to such a question, by leading us along a number of different pathways as we approach the topic he leaves us nodding and saying, "Yes, there is an enormous amount at stake here of which differing understandings of human sexuality are merely the trigger."

Part of what is being said is that we have probably not given as much attention as we should to the changing social climate of the world in which we now live. Certainly since the nineteenth century, and especially within Anglicanism, there has existed a 'liberalism' that has modulated disagreement and enabled diversity to exist within the context of a generous unity. This underlying liberalism has been able to step back, untangle the skein, reconcile conflicting views, tone down exaggerated positions, forge coalitions, square circles, and in the process find a commonsense way through (page 5).

But now "the whole stock in trade of a tradition once defined by opposition to enthusiasm of every kind, seems to have been mysteriously wiped off the software. In its place are radical postures, strident denunciations and moralistic confessionalism" (page 5). Because of the tendency of 'liberalism' to ally itself to 'victim' causes that they believe require a moral and just leveling of the playing field, a situation is created which leads to a face-off with conservatism, both political and ecclesiastical.

"For the theological liberal... the substantive content is indeterminate, and what is wrong with conservatism is precisely that it clings to the past, holding back in reserve from the God-destined character of the present cultural moment... the self-validating ethical convictions of modern civilization are the final criterion for judging all else; they are the very image of God that it bears anonymously as its birthright" (pages 9-10).

While I cannot hope to encapsulate a carefully presented discussion in a handful of words, O'Donovan is essentially saying that yesterday's 'liberal' way of resolving things no longer works because the culture has moved on, but what we do not have, to quote the Archbishop of Canterbury, is a "habit of cultural sensitivity and intellectual flexibility that does not seek to close down unexpected questions too quickly" (quoted Page 7).

Having set the discussion up, the rest of the book examines the dilemma using the finely tuned tools of O'Donovan's trade as a world-class theologian, ethicist, cultural observer, and philosopher. All the time he is nudging us toward the final chapter which is entitled "Good News for the Gay Christian?"

Professor O'Donovan does not step back from saying that there is hard news in the gospel for gay Christians (as well as all other Christians) to listen and respond to, we also need to consider Rowan Williams' question, "How does the homosexually inclined person show Christ to the world?" He continues, "For if the gay Christian is to be addressed as a believer and a disciple, a recipient of the good news, he has also to be addressed as a potential evangelist. But we must take this... question further. The good news meant for the human race is meant for the church, too. What good news does the gay Christian have to bring to the church?" (page 103).

O'Donovan demands that instead of making our case with statistics, scientific reports, and so forth, but we should use the words of the evangel for, "if the church speaks not as a witness to God's saving work but as a pundit or a broker of some deal, it speaks out of character... for the gospel must be preached to the gay Christian on precisely the same terms as it is preached to any other person" (Page 110), for homosexuality is NOT the determining factor in any human being's existence -- despite the pressure within the culture to make us think it is such.

Put another way, it seems that what O'Donovan is asking us is as a broken church living in the context of a broken world to speakChrist's righteousness to a shared brokenness, and this inevitably involves our sexuality in all its shapes and forms. In such an environment soft and evasive compromises do not appeal, and neither do they have traction. The touchstone is living the righteousness of Jesus Christ in a world that has presented us with a very different reality. This, he posits, is about friendship, not about "juridical language of justice and rights" (Page 116).

"The gay Christian thus faces in a particular way the choice that constitutes the human situation universally: whether to follow the route of self-justification or to cast oneself hopefully on the creative justification that God himself will work within a community of shared belief" (Page 116). However, if this is to happen not only is friendship a prerequisite, so also is serious patience. The old-style 'liberalism' that used to preside over the church has to give way to something that is differently flavored, friendship and patience being touchstones.

I am only at the beginning of unpacking what this means given my own personal dilemma, but I have to say that it makes a lot more sense than the polarized and polarizing yelling at one another and excluding one another that seems to have been taking place. I have been hurt by what has gone on, and it is likely that I am doing some of the hurting. As I deal with this on a personal level I have been given clues to try to keep the conversation civil and constructive.

On the ecclesial level, it would appear that separation is the only solution being offered by 'liberals' and 'conservatives' alike. Given the gospel of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, neither appears acceptable when tested against the great doctrines of Christianity, catholic ecclesiology, and within a forum where the grace of friendship and the grace of patience surely ought to prevail. "Anyone who thinks that resolutions can be reached in one leap without long mutual exploration, probing, challenge, and clarification has not yet understood the nature of the riddle that the ironic fairy of history has posed for us in our time" (Page 119).

Tired, Postmodern, and a Generally Depressing Convention

2009-07-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

We have been back in the States for the last three weeks but will be returning to our ministry in Cambridge, England tomorrow. This means we have been around for the razzmatazz that went with the launch of the Anglican Church of North America, and now for the spectacle of the General Convention. Having been present at most General Conventions since the last Anaheim convention in 1985, I am glad I am not there. I have to say that what looks to be happening is a sad, sad spectacle, and from the deluge of words coming out of Anaheim it is evident that the Convention is in little mood to take seriously historic Christianity, or to honor the worldwide Anglican Communion.

As a bishop friend said to me in a personal email from Anaheim a day or two ago, the trend seems to be for TEC to become a stand-alone American denomination rather than part of the worldwide church. Clearly, the presence and advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury for a few days meant little or nothing to the majority of the House of Deputies. As the same episcopal friend also said, those who are for inclusion do not seem to realize that for a large chunk of us that means exclusion -- although we certainly have no desire to be excluded from catholic Christianity through the Communion.

This whole exercise is not about sexuality or sexual behavior, but is fundamentally about what we believe the Christian faith to mean and be about. When it comes down to it, it is about our attitude toward Jesus as God's Son, the nature of the Trinity, divine revelation, Christian obedience, and holiness of life. The cavalier attitude of the Presiding Bishop to the creeds and their recitation is evidence that she considers the likes of me as pedantic has-beens rather than those who are on the cutting edge -- but the cutting edge of what?

Yet the truth really is, as you look around the world, that those who are pushing this worn out postmodern melange and calling it Christian are increasingly the has-beens. They seem to have tied themselves to the coat tails of the last dribblings of the least attractive side of the Enlightenment, and it is entirely likely that they will disappear down the drain with them. I say this as an Episcopalian who lives in England and now functions as part of the church under great pressure.

The church in England is wrestling to adapt to an altogether more secular and hostile climate than exists in most of the USA, and what is interesting, I don't see postmodern Christianity standing up very well in such an environment. It is a limp and aging rag. The creative scholarship, for example, is coming from a far more theologically orthodox direction (as can be seen from the recent awarding of the Michael Ramsey Prize for theological writing to Richard Bauckham for his extraordinary challenge to scholarship in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses). Healthy progressive liberal and theologically to-the-left congregations are few and far between, while it the theologically more conservative who are creatively evangelistic that have become the majority of stronger centers of the faith.

This isn't to say that the English church doesn't have a belly-load of problems and challenges, some of which it is refusing to address; but it is illustrative that so-called progressive faith is not flourishing well in an environment which affirms and celebrates many of the values and attitudes it endorses. Picking over concrete evidence from Britain and asking what this might mean for the Episcopal Church of the USA, one can only confess that it does not auger well on this side of the ocean. Looking at the hard statistics about the health of the Episcopal Church that have been coming out of Anaheim, the best interpretation of them is that the church is in serious decline -- if not free fall, and those who say otherwise are clearly in denial with their ostrich necks firmly stuck down holes.

All this is happening in the midst of the deepest recession in living memory, and one that promises to impact us for a very long time to come. Looking at the dire financial state of the Episcopal Church after the Great Depression might be a valuable exercise to help us grasp what the circumstances of denomination, dioceses, and congregations could well be like when the world eventually pulls out of this dive. Money is the mother's milk of ministry, and there are huge problems if there is none, or little or none.

The churches in England that are healthiest are those who approach their Christian witness in a missional manner: which means trying to ask and answer how we take the gospel message and enable it to speak in an environment where the church a bit of a joke -- or worse. Some of them are making whopping mistakes, but at least they are trying! The intelligensia in Britain will generally take every opportunity to denigrate religious people of all flavors, the Church of England in particular. There is little or no social or intellectual kudos to be gained from being a believer in England, and the bulk of the general population doesn't have the vaguest notion of what the Christian faith is all about. There are too many uncanny parallels to the 1st Century.

Yet, there are Anglican churches (and varieties of others) that are packed to the doors. There are some fascinatingly creative experiments being undertaken. The theologically orthodox seminaries are the ones enrolling the majority of new students. The House of Bishops is becoming increasingly orthodox (although they may not want to label themselves that way), and so on, and so on. The end product will ultimately be a church that looks very different from the one we have now, and it is likely to be one that the older folks (like myself) will have our struggles with. But what is more important: our understanding of the right way to express the faith and decline, or a whole new generation being renewed and revived by God to take the message to their lost and floundering contemporaries?

As a priest of the Episcopal Church I honor my ordination vows and I stand with those who stand with the historic, catholic, and evangelical formularies of the faith. I recite the creeds with conviction, I believe Scripture is God's Word written, and I cannot and will not walk away from what is happening.

At the beginning of this decade I was part of the 2020 Task Force that posited ideas and plans for the doubling of the Episcopal Church in the first two decades of the 21st Century. The reverse has happened because that agenda was dumped by 2003 in favor of what Paul might describe as 'another gospel.' I suspect that if the Episcopal Church is half the size it was in 2000 by 2020 it will be a miracle if the present course continues to be followed.

This is a tragedy of monumental proportions, but it does not prevent us from standing firm alongside Augustine, Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Hooker, Janani Luwum, Festo Kivengere and many other selfless women and men who have gone before us in the faith. Error disrupts and does damage, but in the economy of a God who is truth it does not ultimately win the day.

The Times They Are A-Changing

2009-05-18T05:54:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in my office during my lunch hour thinking. For a while I have been trying to make sense of all that has been happening in the last year or two. Not only has my own life been turned upside down by moving back to work in England after thirty-one wonderful years in the USA, but the world in which we live is experiencing ructions that compare with some of the things I have been going through.

All this has been brewing for a long time, but most of us either didn't notice -- or didn't want to notice -- what was going on. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Soviet bloc fairly rapidly disintegrated. After that I spent several years going in and out of Russia when that giant of a nation was on its knees, and wondering what it would look like if something similar happened in the West.

Of course, the rats were gnawing at the innards of western culture and life, but under the cover of the prosperity of the last couple of decades it was easy to ignore them, or to pretend that they weren't really there. As the millennium turned things seemed to get more frantic. The new century properly began when planes controlled by fanatics flew into New York skyscrapers, sought to obliterate the Pentagon, and could have done worse. For a moment people stopped, even came to church for a few weeks, but seemed to want to reassess what they had believed reality to be. But then, as the trauma diminished it was back to business as usual -- and shop 'til you drop.

But the gnawing didn't stop, so that the results were finally exposed when the crafty misuse of complex financial instruments began blowing up in our faces in the middle of 2007. I moved to England soon afterward, and as I shaved every morning that Fall I listened to the financial gurus of the City of London talking confidently on the BBC of the minimal impact these American misdemeanors would have in Britain. I remembered thinking then that this all seemed like so much whistling in the dark, then I tried to bury the thought feeling guilty that I had even had it.

Just as we watched helplessly on September 11, 2001, as the Twin Towers collapsed in on themselves, so during the last twelve months we have watched helplessly as the banking system tottered and almost fell, coming within an ace of bringing down the whole economic world as we have known it. Through the grim, bleak winter that has just passed we listened to day after day of gloomy news and agonizing statistics which rubbed salt into already raw wounds. We aren't out of the woods yet, by any means, but things do appear to be more stable since billions and billions have been thrown at the problem.

As Spring progresses there are suggestions that perhaps, maybe, sometime in the future, we will see some of the slender green shoots of recovery. Meanwhile, the statistics continue to be miserable as hundreds of thousands are thrown out of work, but here and there we see intimations that perhaps not all is lost.

However, all of this is happening against a backdrop of ecological gloom and doom. Constantly, we are being told that the way in which we are living is destroying the planet, melting the ice caps, dissolving the coral reefs, and obliterating any future that our children and children's children might enjoy. This diet of planetary despair leads many of us to shrug, mutter "What's the use?" and keep on living as we are living because, however much we care, there are no viable alternatives being presented to us.

It is into this that the latest peculiarly British crisis has been dropped -- Members of Parliament messing with their expenses. I suspect that the House of Commons is a pretty fair reflection of the cross-section of people they represent, a good number of whom would not be averse to a little bit of nest-feathering of their own if given half a chance. But this for many has been the final straw, and it would be surprising if significant parliamentary reforms were not ultimately in store here. The last time politicians were so loathed, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, it eventually led to the Great Reform Act of 1832, something desperately needed and long overdue.

There is little doubt to me that these gloomy facts are evidence that we have reached the end of a particular chapter in western, possibly even human, history, and that a new chapter might well be in the process of beginning. The trouble is we don't yet know whether it will be better or worse than the one now closing.

I was thinking these thoughts when I read a little piece by Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent of The Times of London. In it she quotes a letter received by The Times in the last few days. It read, 'There is growing evidence that society is starting to embark on a process of desecularisation. The role of religion in renewing civil society, human well-being and the growing identity politics are all significant reasons why it is back on the political agenda....Since religion is going to play a more central role in global politics in the future, we'd better try harder to understand it.'

I don't know whether the author is right, but there is certainly plenty of evidence to suggest that course which our culture and society has been following for so long has run out of steam, and that we are disgusted with ourselves for allowing it to go on for so long. Just perhaps, now is the time when a tired and jaded secular world will look again to the treasures of its religious and spiritual past that until now it has so happily trampled underfoot.

The Lost History of Christianity

2009-05-10T09:11:00.000-07:00

The Lost History of Christianity - The Thousand-year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia
Philip Jenkins
(Oxford: Lion Publishing. 2008

New York: HarperCollins. 2008)

A Review by Richard Kew

I have gained much from Philip Jenkins' writing, and his latest book, The Lost History of Christianity, I have found to be as edifying as his earlier titles. This book is a surprisingly successful attempt to open up a Christian world that is little more than a ghost to most of us in the west.

Jenkins sets out to explore the rise and decline of the churches of Asia and the East over the last two millennia. While much of the hard data relating to these churches has long since disappeared, what evidence there is tells the story of a vibrant faith during most of the first millennium of the Christian story, followed by a steady decline that during the last hundred years or so has accelerated. Professor Jenkins fills out a story of which a few of us might be aware, by drawing upon the remaining shreds of evidence that have been left behind by these believers.

He wants us to know something of the history of a lost Christianity because “a society that today considers itself Christian might in a century or two have equal confidence in its complete identification with Islam, or radical secularism, or Buddhism, or some other religion not yet born. That caveat also applies to specific denominations...” (page 42). Jenkins ends his book by drawing out a selection conclusions for us to ponder in our time. These may not be rocket science, but they demand serious attention.

Philip Jenkins is one of those gifted intellects whose reading is encyclopedic, as is his capacity to absorb, organize, and synthesize the quantities of information he has been digesting. Perhaps one of the shortcomings of his earlier works has been a tendency to overwhelm the reader with so much data that the narrative gets so thick that it loses its vivacity, sometimes with the result that the case being made is swamped by the welter of facts and statistics backing it up. “The Lost History of Christianity,” perhaps because so much of the information pertaining to these eastern churches has been lost or deliberately destroyed, does not fall into this trap.

The result is 262 pages of riveting reading. For a long time now books seldom have the ability to keep me awake if I read them in bed before putting the light out: this was an exception. Oh, I don't want to give the impression that this book is under-researched and based on hunch and intuition, because there are a further 34 pages of endnotes!

We westerners read the story of the spread of Christianity with our perceptions molded by the Acts of the Apostles and our own geographic location. Whether we like it or not our viewpoint is shaped by the fact that our heritage is rooted in the European part of the Roman Empire and what followed it. The result is that we overlook the reality that missionaries headed out from Jerusalem after the Day of Pentecost to every point of the compass, not just westward. In fact, the eastward expansion of the Christian faith is nothing short of spectacular.

In large parts of western Europe the natives did not exactly fall over themselves to accept this new faith, while to the east extraordinary things were happening in the name of Christ. Just as the Roman roads aided the spread of the gospel in our direction, the Silk Road and other trade routes across central Asia enabled the message to move well beyond the borders of the Mediterranean world. If Roman stability assisted things in the west, those pioneers traveling eastward were dependent upon the power of the Persian Empire. And, “as in Europe, early followers of Jesus spread into a world already extensively colonized by Jews” (Page 53).

This glorious history has perhaps been overlooked because of our myopic (and sometimes fretful) focus on Europe, as well as those centuries further on, by the New World and those bits of the globe that were influenced by more recent European colonial ambitions. The churches in the east were sage and mature when those in the west were still trying to find their voice and their spiritual compass.

We may treasure some of the awe-inspiriting stories that brought the message to our part of the planet, but our limited horizons mean that we have never properly noticed the courageous mission to the east with its own set of heroes and martyrs. Within relatively few centuries the Gospel had penetrated Africa as far as Nubia and Ethiopia, as well as all the way from the Mediterranean to the heartland of China. I was amazed to learn of strong and established bishoprics in places as diverse as Tibet and Samarkand well before the end of the first millennium, and that these Christians developed cordial relationships with the pluralistic mishmash of religious traditions that they encountered.

The tale of the eastern church is the story of powerful centers of learning serving literally hundreds of dioceses networked across a landscape that we today think of as having been Islamic from the moment that Mohammed's followers came out of Arabia. Basra and Baghdad were major centers of Christian learning, with equally impressive focal points hundreds of miles further to the east. Christian mission was well established in Arabia, with strong churches led by forward-looking bishops in what was to become the heartland of Mohammad and modern Yemen. Indeed, Jenkins suggests the significant influence of these Christians upon the founders of Islam.

Hugh Jordan, who taught me Old Testament in the 1960s, was convinced that Islam is actually a Christian heresy, a thesis with which Jenkins toys. “Even when Christianity has seemingly been eradicated, we find many traces of it on the cultural and religious landscape. A traveler in today's Middle East sees societies that are so overwhelmingly Muslim, and in some instances exclusively so. In many cases, though, those Muslims are the lineal descendants of communities that were once Christian, and that often maintained their Christian loyalties for a millennium or more. Even if the connection is not by blood, many other Muslims live in nations in which Christian influence was once predominant and shaped everyday life... Modern Christians or Muslims can scarcely denounce the practices of the other religion without in the process rejecting a substantial part of their own heritage” (Page 174-175).

Having made such a sweeping statement, Jenkins then sets about illustrating some of these factors, demonstrating how, for example, strands of Christian piety were translated into Islamic terms and have given substance to various traditions of the Muslim faith. For example, he ponders the possibility of a close link between Islamic devotional practices and the Jesus Prayer, as well as the manner in which the historic Ethiopian and Yemeni Christian approach to Lent gave shape to the Islamic season of Ramadan.

While Christianity may have rapidly collapsed before the advance of Islam in North Africa for particular set of social reasons, it did not crumble and fall when Muslim princes became the rulers of other lands. Even as Islam grew stronger, Christians remained at the core of society for centuries following. Even after the arrival of the Muslims there were courageous missionaries, extraordinary bishops, preachers, and teachers, as well as diplomats, monks, hermits, and daily heavenward focus of ancient liturgies. Jenkins asserts that very often the basis of the learning that gets attributed today solely to Islam during its intellectual heyday, was actually grounded in the scholarship of Christians in major centers like Baghdad – whether it be the study be mathematics and philosophy, or any of the other sciences.

One of the reasons we know little of this story is that at its core were churches whose theological niceties were scorned by the church catholic of the great Councils. For example, there is little doubt that some of the most dynamic missionaries of the first thousand years were the Nestorians, a group expelled as heretics after the Council of Ephesus in 431AD. Yet, Nestorius and his followers could well have been excommunicated as much because of a strong political undercurrent running against them as because they nuanced the nature of the Godhead slightly differently from the majority. However, when placing Nestorius and his crew beside some of the absurd theologies circulating within the churches today, they look like paragons of doctrinal virtue!

As Philip Jenkins draws together the threads of his research he makes some tentative suggestions about churches that once were and now are no longer, and upon which we would be wise to chew. He challenges us to ask various far-reaching questions about our own church and current Christian tradition. “The ruins of Christianity in a particular region might confound Christians who have long been accustomed to seeing the expansion of their faith as a fundamental expectation,” he writes, but asks us to see the long haul of the faith within the broader and over-arching providence of the God who is the Lord of history.

He wonders aloud how we might interpret the apparent disappearance of the faith from what was once its well-established heartland, and what this might have to do with winning the world for Jesus Christ. One brief illustration he draws attention to has fascinated me for several years. This is the “Back to Jerusalem” movement being prayed over and fostered by the growing Christian Church in contemporary China. Could it be that they have properly understood the panorama of the history of salvation when they think of themselves as God's chosen vessels called to take the faith back to Jerusalem from the east along the trade routs of that old Silk Road?

I would love to see a variety of authors write about various facets of this story, making them accessible to the general reader, and providing further insights into some of the broader observations that Jenkins makes. I suspect there is much food for thought for those of us living in post-Christian Europe, for example, as we explore precisely how the Christian churches were eclipsed in the east, how geopolitics played into the hands of the forces aligned against the churches, what precisely was the role of Islam and the rise of the Arabic language, and so forth.

I don't think that The Lost History of Christianity is a book that is likely to sit on my bookshelves gathering dust as so many other volumes do. I am sure that there are assertions that can and will be challenged by more serious scholars than myself, but I am also sure that with broad brush strokes Philip Jenkins has written something that will force us to ask and seek answers to some very difficult questions.

Being an Anomaly

2009-04-19T09:48:00.000-07:00

Some weeks ago I met another Anglo-American returnee, a professional woman who has been back in England several years longer than myself. Over lunch she "comforted" me with the news that I have at least another two years of adjusting to do before I will have come to terms again with being back in this country again. I was grateful for Liz's insight because I guess I was beginning to think along such lines myself.

Re-acclimating to Britain has been a seesaw kind of business, positives and negatives mingled with one another in a hodgepodge kind of way. There is the sheer exhilaration of coming into work on a soft spring morning with the sun breaking through the mist over Kings College Chapel and the Backs, only to be greeted when I get to work by something annoyingly English that has me grinding my teeth!

I love the work that I have been called to do, and feel privileged that for the last lap of my stipendiary ministry I am able to do something that could have a real long-term impact on the advance of the Kingdom, but at the same time I realize with every passing day that I am an anomaly. As when a radio station is slightly out of tune, so do I feel about my inability to fit here.

To begin with, development and institutional advancement has a puzzling flavor to many on this side of the water -- and that a priest should be doing it further intensifies that puzzlement. But playing a part in bringing the noble work of gathering resources to the fore is the sort of challenge that I have always relished. I guess that having played a role in widening the commitment to global mission among North American Anglicans over the last thirty years, which was no small feat, getting people used to raising of funds for ministry and mission should be a no-brainer here... but I am not sure that it is. However, my life has been a succession of challenging interludes, so I suppose that what I am doing fits me admirably.

But then the waters are muddied by the fact that I am really much more American in my attitudes than I had ever imagined when I came back. A friend who is the CEO of one of the largest container ports in East Asia, and who was back home for a couple of weeks leave over Easter, with typical North of England bluntness said things about the British with which I found myself agreeing with 101%. His work has taken him all around the world, and the attitudes of the British do not enamor him one little bit. I often find myself scratching my head that this nation once put together the greatest Empire in the world, because now visionary thinking is very much a minority sport in most areas of enterprise.

I love that American expansiveness that says, "Let's give it a try," and I caught that bug in my three decades in this States -- something that makes me very much an anomaly on the British side of the Pond. What is lovely, however, is that it is not entirely dead. There are great successes that people have when they think and act that way, rather than playing protective games that erase the excitment that comes when taking a calculated risk.

Two sayings from my American years have indelibly imprinted themselves on my consciousness. One is from Martin Luther King, who said that if a man has not found anything worth dying for, then he isn't fit to live (remember King spoke before gender inclusive language became the norm). The other is that we need to take on challenges that are so big, that unless the Lord is in them they are bound to fail. That's what gets my juices flowing.

But such thinking doesn't cause much of a ripple here, and yet could unleash such talent if it was tried. It isn't that such big picture thinking isn't possible but that there is a tendency to shy away from it and play safe. I guess I have never been too good at shying!

But another thing that makes me an anomaly is far more personal, and that is that even when I am trying to be extra careful I find when speaking with others that I am often slightly out of tune. A very funny joke flops, a throwaway remark is interpreted in the wrong way, or in some way or another I find myself talking past someone -- even when being scrupulous in my choice of subject or words. While my accent might sound almost English when I speak, beneath the words that come out is a mindset and worldview that is thoroughly transatlantic and at odds with Old World attitudes.

We really are two great peoples divided by a common language, but when that becomes personified in one individual who isn't quite sure which of those languages or thought worlds he inhabits, then the confusion is complete. This then carries across into everything else from the way in which we "do church" to the manner in which we make decisions, explore interesting ideas, or seek to find our way through difficult sets of circumstances.

It is interesting that the things about which Americans get passionate are somewhat different than those which light up the sky for Brits. It does seem to me that the British are much more inclined to accept uncomplainingly what is dished out from those in power and authority, and yet there is a certain kind of assertiveness and posturing among leaders in the States that would never go down in this country. Then, while most of the "loud mouths" on the American scene come from the Right, often the very far Right, in Britain they tend to be more measured, less bombastic, but are also distinctively leftward leaning.

Whereas secularism has eaten away at the heart of each nation in its own way, I would have to say that because there is still a healthy civil religion in the States, there is still something of a soul in public life most parts of the country. Here, such a thing is very hard to find, and it is de rigor in the media to ignore, denounce, or find fault with all things religious and religious people (always very carefully and respectfully if they are Islamic, but with utter disdain if they have anything to do with the Church of England!).

But then there are wonderful things about England that I am treasuring. This afternoon, for instance, I took my bike and headed out across the fields and along the Fenland ditches for miles, listening to the birds in the air and watching the little clouds go scudding across a gentle blue April sky. In the distance on the horizon were the towers of Cathedral in Ely, whose diocese is this year celebrating the 900th anniversary of its founding.

And then there is Cambridge itself. It is crammed to overflowing with some of the brightest people I have ever come across. World-class discoveries are coming out of Cambridge laboratories and hi-tech facilities with monotonous regularity, and at a social gathering you might find yourself talking one minute to a learned barrister and the next to an inventor who is bubbling over with ideas. On top of that, I wouldn't have missed Maundy Thursday at Kings College...

Manure and the Church

2009-03-08T00:28:00.000-08:00

For my special Lenten reading this year I have chosen Eugene Peterson's book, Tell it Slant. Asking us to consider the way we use language, Peterson takes us through Samaria with Jesus as he went up to Jerusalem in Luke's Gospel, opening up the parables that are the heart of the Lord's teaching. Early this morning I got to what Peterson calls the Manure Parable (Luke 13:6-9).

Here is a parable that I have read for years, puzzled over, but never really properly understood -- and had certainly not seen in light of the struggles that the churches, especially the Episcopal Church, have been going through in recent years. But Eugene Peterson has not only shed fresh light on my understanding, but has also given me some helpful insights into the way we have all been handling ourselves, especially through the last half dozen years.

The parable goes like this:

Then Jesus told them a story: "A man had a fig tree planted in his front yard. He came to it expecting to find figs, but there weren't any. He said to his gardener, 'What's going on here? For three years now I've come to this tree expecting figs and not one fig have I found. Chop it down! Why waste good ground with it any longer?' The gardener said, 'Let's give it another year. I'll loosen the ground and dig in manure. Maybe it will produce next year; if it doesn't, then chop it down.'"

When I saw the subject of the chapter this morning was manure, I have to admit that I wasn't particularly excited. I thought I might skim over the pages so that I was soon somewhere more interesting. But from the outset it grabbed me. Here is Jesus leading his disciples through the sometimes dangerous country of Samaria where religious wars are common and even bloody, but he is challenging the natural response which is "Chop it down!"

"So much of the time it is not complecency that threatens but its opposite, impetuosity. We see something that is wrong, whether in the world or in the church, and we fly into action, righting the wrong, confronting sin and wickedness, battling the enemy, and then we go out vigorously recruiting 'Christian soldiers' ... we solve kingdom problems by amputation" (Page 69).

He goes on to point out that manure is not a quick fix because it takes a long time before anyone begins to see that it is making any difference. What we want is results: which means chopping down the tree, clearing the ground, making a fresh start. Spreading manure is neither glamorous or exhilarating work, it is the slow solution, but "it's the stuff of resurrection."

He quotes George Adam Smith, the great Victorian Scottish expositor who says when commenting on some of Isaiah's prophecy that "we are not warriors but artists... after the fashion of Jesus Christ who came not to condemn... but to building life up to the image of Christ." What a wonderful description of the nature of Christian ministry and relationships during difficult times.

The trouble is, we don't have the patience for manure -- cut it down, make a fresh start, if we are Christian soldiers then those who disagree with us must be the enemy.

Peterson goes on, "Manure. The Psalms are prayers worked into the soil of our lives to shape our imaginations and obedience so that we live our lives to shape our imaginations and obedience so that we live our lives congruent wit hthe way God works in the world and in us, works in a world of violence and antipathyu without becoming violent. One of the most repeated sentences, repeated because we are so impatient to 'cut it down and get on with it,' is 'O give thanks to the Lord for he is good; His steadfast love endures forever... His love never quits.

Manure. God is not in a hurry. We are repeatedly told to 'Wait for the Lord.' But that is not counsel that is readily accepted by followers of Jesus who have been conditioned by promises of instant gratification, whether American or Assyrian. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, one of our great modern Isaianic prophets who has extensive experience with violence in two World Wars, wrote, 'The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships.' Like Isaiah, he was ignored" (Page 72).

But we are in a hurry. We are pushing to put things right, and to get them right here and now -- even if it means pushing God out of the way but, of course, in the name of God!

"Manure. Silence. Manure reentering the condition of 'Let it be done to me,' submitting to the silent energies that change death into life, the energies of resurrection. Language consists in equal parts of speaking and silence. The art of language requires skills in not speaking quite as much as skills in speaking. Much mischief and misunderstanding result from talking that is not embedded in much listening. When we listen we are silent. I like Saul Bellow's comment, 'The more you keep your mouth shut, the more fertile you become.' Silence is the manure of resurrection...

... The Manure Story is free-floating throughout the journey through Samaria -- as it is in the journey through America. It is ready for use whenever we come up against animosity, against antagonism and impetuous indignation and are prepared to counter the opposition with violence, whether verbal or physical. But the story comies to its most powerful and incisive expression in words Jesus spoke from the cross..." (Page 73).

As I look at the ruins around us as well as the promise of more to come, there is great enlightenment in the words of Jesus, and Eugene Peterson's insight as we seek to understand them. This is a little story for the church in our time. It is a story that points the finger at our impatience that fails to allow the manure of divine grace to slowly filter its way into our relationships, our disagreements, our politics.

This is a story that speaks volumes to those of us whose impatient wielding of power has us hurling vituperative lawsuits at those who can take no more and want to walk away.

At the same time it is strong medicine for those who have lost patience and walked away saying "Chop it down" as they have departed -- and sometimes those words are spat out with agonizing viciousness.

We have become warriors and abandoned the artform of the Christian faith. It is little wonder that there is a swathe of destruction all around us that is the ecclesiastical kin to the path taken by a tornado through a densely populated suburb. I know that is a good analogy because I have had just such a thing happen to me.

We No Longer Take A Newspaper

2009-01-10T23:53:00.001-08:00

For the first time in my whole life I live in a house that does not have a regular subscription to a daily newspaper. This is not to say that we are no longer keeping up with the news (although it is SO bad that often I would rather bury my head in the sand), rather it is a vote of no confidence in the quality of daily journalism. While I find journalism leaving a lot to be desired everywhere, in the UK it seems to be particularly unattractive.

I read a newspaper so that I might learn what is going on in the world, and while I realize that I am going to get it funneled to me through the perceptions of the writer, I have reached a point where I am tired of the journalist propaganizing me for his or her particular agenda. Since my initial first-hand encounters with the press in the early 1970s when I discovered that their description of events at which I was present did not seem to jibe with what I had seen and experienced, I have been leary of the media. Over the years, on those rare occasions when I have been interviewed, I have concluded that rather than listening to what I am saying and engaging with me, they have instead been looking for a hook on which to hang a story that might have a whiff of controversy about it. Since the dreadful fall of 2003, after a particularly painful episode, I have avoided dealing with journalists altogether.

It seems to me that if we want to get a rough idea of what is actually going on then we need to gather our news from a whole variety of sources, taking into account the innate biases that these sources might have. One newspaper with its own editorial line is no longer enough, and if taken needs to be supplemented by all sorts of other publications in various media formats. Neither is one broadcasting source enough, whether it is the BBC or the Fox News Channel, each of which has their own bias despite their vaunted claims otherwise.

These days we find ourselves primarily drawing on the Economist, the BBC (both domestic and the World Service), the online New York Times, CNN International, CNBC, Bloomberg, the online Tennessean, the online Times of London, and the headline services that appear on AOL, Yahoo, and other internet portals. The important thing is then to measure reports from different sources against one another, mentally debating their reports and assertions. I know that I am going to get much more serious reporting of current events from the BBC World Service, the Economist, and the NY Times, but then unlike AOL and Yahoo they don't give me interesting little snippets of information that provide some flavor for our worldview.

I think it is the Times of London that has disappointed me the most since returning to England. This once great icon of serious news reporting seems to have lost its way in the rough and tumble of the highly competitive newspaper market in Britain, and as a result the perspective of its reporters and correspondents leaves the reading asking questions about what actually is going on. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum the popular daily tabloids are about as helpful as the average weekly tabloid found at the supermarket checkout in the USA! This might be amusing, but it needs to be remembered that it is these that are shaping popular opinion.

The media that I have missed most since returning to Britain has been National Public Radio and the wonderful current affairs programming of Public Television. NPR has always said that it has modeled itself on the BBC -- well, I would have to say that in much of its handling of the news it has surpassed the Beeb by far.

The funny thing is that I don't feel anything is missing now that a newspaper is no longer delivered each day to our home, which rather surprises me. I rather like it that twice a day the New York Times plops into my online intray, and despite the howls of some that the Times is too liberal there is something stately about the way in which it handles the stories and issues that are concerning the world. I am actually looking forward to Amazon beginning to sell the Kindle outside of the USA because I intend to buy one -- and could very well subscribe to have the NY Times delivered to it!

I guess, therefore, that there are two reasons why we no longer receive the delivery of a newspaper. One is that the journalism is not of a quality that we actually want to pay for it, and the other is that we are actually find ourselves being ushered further into the electronic age of news delivery services. However, I am old-fashioned enough to say that if a newspaper is worth buying then I would jump for it. When we were recently on vacation in Vienna we read the International Herald Tribune, a publication that I think is a real winner.

There is increasing talk about newspapers going under in the midst of the economic crisis, and of journalists losing their jobs. Perhaps one of the ways this could be prevented would be their willingness to publish the quality that would make you mad not to subscribe to their publication.

What can we learn from all this?

2008-12-29T02:32:00.000-08:00

The year that came from hell
It is no exaggeration to say that 2008 was a hell of a year and there are few of us who walk away from it without some kind of wound or, at least, a heightened sense of anxiety. At a meeting the other day a colleague leaned over during one of those dead-time moments and whispered that a friend who last Christmas had been the epitome of success had that very morning filed for bankruptcy as a result of a real estate deal gone badly wrong.

Each day the news from either side of the Atlantic (and Pacific) seems to bring another sad story of a business or chain of stores seeking protection or closing down. In the USA the auto makers teeter on the brink of ruin, while in the UK we have watched that venerable institution, Woolworths, close its doors for the last time. Japan reports a whopping drop in export production, in China there are fears of unrest because of lost jobs, and in some countries there is denial that things are that bad at all. Meanwhile, those at the bottom of the pile of world prosperity are being hit the hardest.

For years now we have crowed about the arrival of globalization, and while we have focused on the positives of this movement within planetary culture, we have forgotten that if we internationalize the economy then when it tanks it will tank globally. Among the earlier victims of this new kind of world emerging a generation ago was world socialism and the Communist bloc, could it be now that the capitalism of the 'free world' as we have known it is being weighed in the balance (and found wanting)? It is because we have no answer to that question that our fears are magnified.

And the news has gone on being either bad or worse. I have in the last few months found myself praying as one appalling thing after another comes up on the media, "O Lord, please give us some good news, please, please, please..." I had often wondered how it must have been for my parents' generation in England to live through the first three years of World War Two when the news each day was one of backs against the wall, retreat, and one defeat after another as Britain sought to hold tyranny at bay. While this is nothing like as bad, I think I now have an idea.

Back last summer people were keeping their worst fears to themselves, but I have discovered there are now people of influence who are prepared, in private at least, to express them. There was a particularly grim face on a very successful man I met with several months ago who not only declared that he thought things would get worse for quite a while before starting to improve, but also that he feared massive civil unrest on the streets of Britain and the USA -- now there's a comforting thought!

Add to this the black humor of friends who have now decided to postpone retirement because, as they put it, their 401k had been reduced to a 201k, or to see well-endowed universities scrambling because their endowments have suddenly plummeted and something grips us inside. Even though I knew there would always be ups and downs, for the first time in my life I have come to realize just how fragile the economic gods we have worshipped really are. The whole financial system upon which we have depended all our lives has demonstrated that it has feet of clay, and with that realization comes fear and lack of confidence.

Denial?
However, the other day when we went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company's latest take on Hamlet in the West End of London, the streets were crammed with shoppers, and the same was true in Cambridge yesterday when I slipped into town to buy socks to replace the increasing number of holey ones among my aging collection. Yet on the streets there wasn't the lightheartedness that normally goes with after-Christmas sales and coming off the holiday season, rather the mood was a somber one of let's get the things we need and want while we can and while the prices are low, or put another way, "Eat, drink, and be merry..."

Silver Linings?
An array of black thoughts has been churning in my mind for so long that some days ago as a spiritual exercise I began trying to see if there are any silver linings in these glowering economic clouds that have put down the mighty from their seats. The Boomer materialist in me doesn't like the idea of hardship and discomfort, and I truly hope that things will not be as bad as the Cassandras suggest. Yet I also realize that there are a lot of us who have lived so long with seemingly endless prosperity that a little sabbatical from plenty might be healthy.

My sense is that this is not just a rather deep pothole which is rattling the undercarriage of our world, more a significant turning of the page. We have come to a major intersection, and this is reality check -- a reminder to us that the world's idols have feet of clay. For a long time we have been coddled and now that the tide has been going out we have to dig deep and ask some really fundamental questions about the sort of people we are, the lives we should live, and the values that will shape them. Society as a whole is being asked to do the sort of inner hard work that the bereaved have to do when they lose a partner, a parent, a sibling, and to build a new life for themselves in the wake of it.

A lot of us have been used to paying lip service to the idea that life is about more than things and their accumulation, and then having placated our consciences with our words have got on with the business of getting more. Now the opportunity of living more simply is before us and once again we are being asked how we are going to handle our patterns of consumption. Are we ready to ask ourselves whether having lots of things has actually been good of us, and what we might be able to do to begin cutting our cloth somewhat differently?

Living more simply and frugally
I have entertained private thoughts for a long time that it is the height of madness to build a national or a global economy on a throwaway materialism that uses every instrument in its toolbox to urge us to consume more percentage points of stuff every year. I am not an economist, but I think we should consider whether the affluent consumerist way isn't one huge Ponzi scheme as we borrow from the future to fuel our present. And I mean all of us, because whether we like it or not we are all implicated.

If I ever made New Year resolutions this year one would be for the rest of my life that I will try not to consume just for the sake of consuming, or to purchase things that can only be discarded when they go wrong rather than being repairable -- these would be a start down a different pathway. The trouble is that right now that is almost impossible.

Now is the time for renewed economic responsibility, and perhaps we Christians should be working on removing whole trees lodged in our own eyes before encouraging our fellow-citizens to work on the logs in their own. Several bishops in Britain have been castigated by the press for making pronouncement about economic things in which they have no expertize. Actually, they are asking ethical questions, and while they may not understand all the macro-economic implications of their words they have asked us to consider whether the emperor has clothes.

A time of hope
If this is a time to question the pattern of our lifestyle, then it is also a time for hope which comes with a fresh beginning. That may sound a weird thing to say as we consider that throughout the world before this whole crisis winds down millions will have lost their means of livelihood, so I write advisedly. Yes, this has been a huge hiccup in the way our culture organizes itself and governments have been doing their best to find a way through, and they deserve the fervent encouragement of our prayers. But perhaps we should see this time as an opportunity.

Here is the opportunity to launche into a major overhaul of the world we inherited from our forebears and have made a bit of a mess of. Here is a massive and exciting challenge for the rising generation of late cohort GenXers and the Millennials -- to reconstruct a different kind of world that is governed by a fresh vision and set of values, and we might say that it wouldbe helpful if it had a smaller carbon footprint. The task for those of us who are older is to be there for them, prepared to roll up our sleeves and work alongside them on this truly massive project. The is a 'Marshall Plan' of huge proportions. As Christians play their part in this, they are the church seeking to be the leaven, for there are facets of this that have a truly Kingdom flavor.

In a way, if global reconfiguration for the 21st Century began with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, could it be that 2009 is the year when the great 21st Century task facing the US, UK, and all the nations together actually comes into focus in the wake of this great economic bruhaha?

I have been rereading John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address which he delivered on January 20, 1961. I was a high schooler in England when it was delivered but despite the fact tha America was a long way away and I never thought I would be part of it, Kennedy's words challenged me to an idealism that has never fully gone away. It is fifty years since those words we await the arrival on the scene of another visionary president -- and coincidentally, his Inaugural Address will be delivered on January 20. Whatever our varied political biases, we are obliged by Scripture to wish him well and pray for him as he takes on leadership with expectations laid upon him that no man nor woman could fulfill. It is within this environment that we are called to be the Church of God for a different kind of culture.

Perhaps we should bring into the present Kennedy's words from the steps of the Capitol a half century ago: "In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world." If this signalled a turning point in 1961, how much more in 2009? While Kennedy spoke to the fifty States of the Union, this year Obama will speak to (and perhaps f0r) a listening world.

Meanwhile, while Presidents are important we are the followers and the family of the Prince of Peace, called to live as part of this generation at a most difficult time. What sort of fire are we going to light so that its glow might be seen around the world?

"Rowan's Rule"

2008-12-21T08:52:00.001-08:00

Rowan's Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop, by Rupert Shortt.

(London: Hodder and Stoughton. 2008)

Rowan's Rule is a fascinating book, not only tracing the life and ministry of the present incumbent of Augustine's Chair, but also seeking to introduce us afresh to one of the most complex individuals. The book confirms what I have been saying about Williams for a number of years: that he cannot be pigeon-holed by simplistic labels and shallow formulas, especially those that might be polarized and polarizing.

Rupert Shortt reckons that Williams is probably the most brilliant Archbishop of Canterbury since Anselm, while at the same time being one who wears his intellectual capacity humbly. This is a huge claim to make when there have been incumbents such as Michael Ramsey of recent memory, and Thomas Cranmer of the Reformation years. The reader will have to judge whether Shortt has succeeded in backing up his assertion, but he certainly makes a strong case.

The Archbishop is a man who in conversation with those who lack his ability treats them as equals and listens to them with great care and an open mind, always willing to modify his own views if a case is made to justify it. Many who are as gifted take great delight putting interlocutors in their place, but not Rowan Williams; indeed, it could be that he is prone to take a little too seriously some of the input that he receives. This is a mark of Archbishop Williams' genuine godliness, and a humility that is, perhaps, his greatest strength. It is probably that humility is one of his qualities that is least understood either in or beyond the church.

There is little doubt that the Archbishop occasionally misspeaks, and in recent years he has occasionally handled things flat-footedly, but these shortcomings should be seen in light of the onslaughts that have been launched against him -- often way out of all proportion to the 'offence' that he might be accused of committing. A lesser man would have fired back withering broadsides in response, but not Dr. Williams. Instead, he has worked to listen to all points of view, taken on board what he can, and whatever difficulties he has been dealing with to keep as many people at the table as possible. It has been a kind of crucifixion, but he has borne it with great grace.

Being in the presence of Rowan Williams is like being with a transparently holy Orthodox monk or patriarch. This is hardly very surprising given the amount that he has drawn upon Orthodox spirituality and wisdom in his own thinking and personal Christian discipleship. The fruit of a recently sabbatical was a substantial book dealing with Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and it stands as evidence of his significant grasp of Russian culture and spirituality, into which he began to dig when he was undertaking his doctoral work -- to the extent that he taught himself Russian.

Yet having been immersed in the treasures of Orthodoxy, Williams has then mediates them to others with a distinctly Anglican appreciation and focused by an Anglican lens. But in a way it is much more than Anglican because his earliest perceptions were shaped by the noncomformist Chapel culture of his native Wales in which he was reared until his teens. In the Williams family tree are several minor leaders of Welsh noncomformity, as well as the likelihood of poets and hymnwriters. Poetry, it seems, is well imbedded in the Williams DNA!

One of the points that Rupert Shortt seems determined to make is that despite his willingness to undertake academic exploration and theological surmise, Rowan Williams not only owes a lot to Orthodoxy (with a capital 'O'), but is also theologically intensely orthodox in terms of his trinitarian faith that is focused on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and mediated to us through Scripture. While he will rhuminate in an exploratory manner over issues and doctrinal challenges, his faith is catholic, and he is not prone to press his intellectual inquiry upon then church, or to go off on wild goose chases after theological notions that curry favor with the present age but lack roots and foundations in that which the church has received.

It seems there was a time when Rowan considered the possibility of celibacy and the religious life, but he always seemed to enjoy the company of women, they enjoyed his, and eventually he settled down to marriage with a woman whose theological acumen is an excellent match and foil for him. Jane Williams is the daughter of an evangelical bishop, and her own teaching ministry now takes place as part of the theological training college that is within the nexus of Holy Trinity, Brompton. However, Jane Williams, it seems, is not without her worries for her mate. She believes that she lost her own father to the stresses placed upon him by the church, and is fearful that she could lose her husband in much the same way.

Her fears are easy to understand because Rowan Williams has the heart of a poet, and composes sensitive and perceptive verse in both English and Welsh. While I am sure he has had to develop a certain thickness of skin to deal with the things that get thrown at him, he has not grown the hide of a rhinoseros that can protect his inner being from the darts and arrows that get aimed in his direction. Being Archbishop of Canterbury is the most onerous of offices, especially in our time, and maybe the question this raises is whether he will step down from the task before he reaches normal retirement age. I suspect that if he did Oxford, Cambridge, or maybe an American university would create a chair for him so that he might finish out his ministry within the context of academia, a setting in which he is very much at home.

Meanwhile, he toils away seeking to hold the Anglican Communion together in some kind of way. Several years ago he admitted to me that it was the Communion that kept him awake at night, and since then the ongoing riot that is international Anglican life has intensified rather than subsiding. As I read Shortt's latest book on Rowan, again and again I found myself thanking God that he had called such a man to this challenge in our era.

In 2002 I was deeply disappointed by Rowan Williams' appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, but as the years have passed my assessment of him has altered. His tenacious grace has done an enormous amount to keep this fractious family of Christian churches at least on speaking terms despite the pressures of those at either end of the theological and ecclesial spectrum, as well as the actions of the occasional bomb-thrower. Maybe the best that can be done at a time like this is to keep people talking wherever possible -- and there is no better person than Rowan Williams to keep the conversation going. The final outcome of these wrenching years will probably not emerge on Rowan's watch, I suspect, but the trajectory that Anglican life will take for generations is now being set.

I find that the example of Rowan Williams calls forth from me a generosity of Spirit, and a desire in my own small way to try to emmulate his humility and gentle kindness. Although Rowan is prepared to think outside the box in ways that I consider to be tempting providence, in many respects there is not so large a gulf between his brand of catholic Anglicanism and the charitable evangelicalism which I hope occasionally characterizes my faith.

Historians are likely to spend generations picking over the archiepiscopate of Dr. Rowan Douglas Williams, but there can be little doubt that this intellectual giant and gracious pilgrim is one whose whole heart is in the business of seeking to enable the church to maintain the unity of the Spirit within the bonds of peace.

The Church of England after a Year Back

2008-09-05T23:54:00.000-07:00

St. Andrew's Church, Impington, Cambridge, approx. 1900

Yesterday was one of the wet and windy days that seem to have been the trademark of what passes for a summer in Britain, but there was a brief sunny break early in the evening which gave me an opportunity to take the dog for a walk. We went to a favorite place, one of the ancient trackways northward out of our village along which cattle were driven to market for hundreds of years. As we turned the slight corner along the very wet and muddy drove there on the horizon, shining in the evening sun, was Ely Cathedral, nine or ten miles away.

I have often wondered what it would have been like for men and women hundreds of years ago when they saw such a massive building as they trudged toward the ancient city in the heart of the Fens. The cathedral is 175 yards long with two towers, one of which rises more than two hundred feet. There was an Anglo-Saxon abbey there before the Normans came along and started work on the present building. Next year the Diocese of Ely will celebrate its 900th anniversary, making Cambridge University look positively youthful at 800 years old next year!

These are the sort of buildings inhabited by the Church of England, evidence of the long and remarkable Christian heritage that there is in this country, and they give the illusion of Christian rootedness here. While it is an illusion to think of England as a Christian nation, folk religion still survives and it has been shaped by the established church. Whatever anyone says, the Church of England remains the church of the English people, the one from which they stay away -- and woe betide you if you threaten the church build which neither they nor their forebears attend!

Having been born, raised, and ordained here, these historic buildings are as much part and parcel of my identity as is my own name. In a very real sense the Church of England is my spiritual mother. However, coming back to be part of the life of the English church last year after all these years away I realized that I had tumbled into something that I no longer really properly recognized or understood. Some of the most difficult elements of returning to the UK have been focused on readjusting to the good old C. of E., an entity that is simple to parody and always provides an easy target for journalists when there is a slow news day.

The media trumpet the Church's shortcomings endlessly, and seldom is there any good news shared with the general population, many of whom are six or seven generations away from realistic contact with the church. That innate religiosity that pervades much of American life is just not there in this country, and probably hasn't been in the major industrial cities since the Industrial Revolution or earlier. The British people are quite happy to sing "God save the Queen," especially at football (soccer) games, but have little idea who that God they are asking to save her actually is.

The great untold story of the Church of England is that of faithful persistent ministry in season and out of season. There are impressive batallions of laity and clergy who receive very little affirmation for their constant labors, their care for the sick and needy, the conduct of worship, bouts of evangelism, and the maintenance of these expensive historic buildings that crop up in even the tiniest community littering the countryside everywhere. These are good and faithful servants, and they have their parallels in the other Christian traditions and denominations in the UK.

Alongside this very traditional continuity of the church there is also what is called "Fresh Expressions." This, I think, illustrates that the Church of England's life is not trapped in crumbling medieval piles but is seeking to reach beyond the culture of the churched to the culture of the totally unchurched. This movement has a long way to go but seems to be gathering encouraging momentum. New congregations and other expressions of church are coming into being which may not look anything like what the Church of England is meant to be, but are an open door and threshold over which the spiritually hungry might come without feeling alienated. We have Fresh Expressions leaders training at Ridley Hall, and I have to say that while their commitment to Christ and mission is rich they don't look or sound like previous generations of pastors and clergy!

It is, perhaps, too early to tell where all this is leading, but I find it very encouraging even if it is rather alien to the likes of me. But then, coming back from the USA I have found much of what the Church of England has become rather alien. I suppose that as a result of my years in the States I have become a bit of an oddity -- a liturgical evangelical Anglican. Nothing innately abnormal about that in America, but here I'm truly out of step with the mainstream of evangelicalism.

Perhaps I should say mainstreams, because Anglican evangelicalism has fragmented since I left here in 1976. When I was ordained we were a disdained minority who stuck together for comfort and fellowship. Today evangelical Christianity is the tradition with the most significant life and vibrance in the English church. It has produced some of the finest scholars (Wright, McGrath, and younger generations nipping at their heels), many dioceses realize that if it weren't for their evangelical congregations, and especially the larger ones, they would be in an even greater degree of trouble. Perhaps 80% of those training in theological colleges are of the evangelical persuasion (although there are weekend courses that produce clergy whose flavor is more varied), and if our experience in Cambridge is anything to go by we are seeing some of the fruits of Alpha training for leadership and ordained ministry.

Yet there are differing flavors of evangelical and I am not sure that I have yet worked out the lines of demarcation and nuance. At one end of the spectrum are the 'open evangelicals' who have followed the lead of the National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele University in 1967 that has seen itself as part of the whole church and seeks to be integrated into the church's life. Open evangelicals believe that other traditions bring an enrichment that we should learn from and not ignore. Then at the other end of the spectrum are conservatives who have maintained the historic suspicion that evangelicals have always had for the church and its structures, and have their eyes skinned for what they consider to be compromise.

This whole evangelical hotchpotch has been profoundly influenced by charismatic renewal, while at the same time in certain quarters a significant adherence to classic Reformed theology and historic Protestantism remains. Perhaps one of the most apparent things about evangelical Anglicanism here is what a colleague of mine has called "The Wimber-ization of the Church."

The average American Anglican coming to the UK often exclaims that evangelical parishes, both large and small, feel more like Vineyard churches than what they understand Anglicanism to be from their North American experience. They are right, because John Wimber seemed to have had a profound influence here 15-20 years ago, and the fruit of that is still working through. From an endless torrent of renewal songs that are often weak on content and sentimentally egocentric to the absence of a robust sacramental theology and practice, we find in many places something that only vaguely resembles the tradition from which all this has grown (although often they are merely pale imitations of the model that came across the water to them).

This is disturbing because while I recognize that there is a great need for diversity of worship styles and approaches in a country like this, you can readily reach a point where the baby has been flushed out with the bathwater. The transcendent is often missing, and in its place is something that might be described as believing in "My big bro Jesus." This clearly leads to a poverty-stricken faith very quickly, and I think we are seeing some of the fruit of this. The casual (even sloppy) also reigns supreme now in the UK generally, and particularly in evangelical environments there seem to be few means whereby believers can appropriate the presence of the great high transcendent God.

All that I am saying is probably a vast over-simplication, but I present it to make the point. If you want to worship God in an Anglican church in Britain today it is almost as if your choice is a dry recitation of the liturgy, or little liturgy at all and a great deal of real or manufactured vibrancy where the contemporary reigns supreme.

But then a wholesale abandonment of the old, tried, and true is probably a prevailing characteristic of Britain itself today. Organizations with venerable names are suddenly called something else, the traditional and historic is frowned upon, and often the great heritage from the past (with its warts as well as its plaudits) is something to be embarrassed or ashamed about. Ancient-Future does not go down here as well as Contemporary-Future (and let's forget anything more than 25 years old). I suspect that some of this is over-reaction against the past, and there are signs that there might be a redressing of the balance starting to take place.

Last year when I got here I needed to find a church to which to belong. I decided to begin at a parish church in a neighboring the village where I live, but their website was down the weekend I intended to go there so I couldn't find service times. Instead, I went to another neighboring parish. The congregation was older, but no sooner had I arrived than I was welcomed, invited to coffee after the service, and made to feel at home. The worship was fairly traditional, the preaching not stunning but certainly truthful. At the coffee hour I was invited to a men's breakfast the following Saturday. Within a week I was hooked and never went anywhere else. Welcome is the parish's secret weapon, I think.

We have come to love the people at St. Andrew's, Impington, and are seeing the church gradually grow as a result of the faithful lay leadership it has. Not only that, but every now and again younger folks are appearing... and some of them are staying. St. Andrew's is not doing many of the things that are now considered de rigor here if a congregation is going to grow, but something is going on that is both lovely and intriguing. I say this about our congregation to illustrate that despite what I have said generalizations about the Church of England ought not to be taken too literalistically.

One Year After Returning to England

2008-08-24T00:53:00.000-07:00

After thirty-one years in the USA I have now been back in Britain for one full year, during which time I have been rather quiet online. There are all sorts of reasons for this: one is that re-immersing myself has been demanding in different ways than I had anticipated -- and all of them energy-sapping. Another reason is that I have been incredibly busy, while a third is that contemporary Britain is a bewildering place and without a good grasp on the current landmarks I haven't been entirely sure what I have been looking at.

I see this country today with eyes that are more American than British, and I have found myself being tossed about by the waves of reverse culture shock. You may think you know the country because you were born and bred here, but it has changed enough to be familiarly unfamiliar. I know that I have changed and am prepared for some friction, but what has battered at me has been totally unexpected. I lived out of England for half of my increasingly long life: this is not the country that I left and neither am I the person who left it. It is amusing to be considered strongly English when in the USA, but now that I am back here I come over as a brash (and sometimes opinionated) American.

While the economy here is going through the same ructions as the rest of the world, the Britain to which we have returned is far wealthier than the one that we left, and there are people who have been able to establish financial empires that rival those found in North America. The average person has a higher degree of affluence, but try to get this across to Brits and most of them will be insistent that it is "poor little Britain" as opposed to big wealthy America.

However, the Britain to which I have returned is seeing the full bloom of the fast-advancing secularism that was spreading across the landscape when we left. This is illustrated in all sorts of ways, not least an intense and vociferous distrust of all things religious in public intercourse. A number of times on the media I have sensed a sickening emptiness in the pit of my stomach as representatives of the chattering classes have aggressively dismissed someone's deeply held religious convictions as hypocrisy -- or suggested that they are a cover for something questionable and even malevolent. With the possible exception of certain facets of Islam, little benefit of the doubt is given to faith, and it seems to be a truism in the British mind that all religious people are narrow-minded and intolerant, dinosaurs to be discouraged until their outmoded ideas eventually go away. Meanwhile the seed that was being sown in the Sixties and Seventies is being harvested in all sorts of ways in the culture.

All this make Britain (like much of Europe) a demanding context within which to minister effectively, and figuring out how to be a mission-driven church in such a culturally demanding environment is still very much a work in progress as far as the churches are concerned. This is a challenge for everyone: Roman Catholics, Methodists, Baptists and Pentecostals, the Salvation Army, Anglicans, the whole company of Christians. It is my assessment that a large proportion of the solutions being experimented with are too contemporary and not enough rooted in the ancient, but despite that courageous folks should be given high marks for at least trying to allow the Gospel to speak to a totally different form of culture.

What I have begun to realize is how easy it is for North Americans to point the finger and declaim how poorly the European churches are doing. Having started to become engaged in the situation here I have found myself wondering whether they would be as effective if facing the sorts of challenges with which the People of God here are seeking to get their arms around.

Yet despite the regular obituaries that get written, and the seemingly endless retreat that has marked the Christian faith in Europe for a century or more, all is far from lost. Interestingly, the congregations at cathedrals seem to be growing significantly, while a new generation is arising in Christian leadership that has no illusions about our environment and is exploring the options -- even if for many in the older generation the penny has yet to drop. Experimentation is necessarily, but by its very nature you don't get everything right first time, while sometimes you might find yourself making a significant mess of things.

Since the end of the Olympics I have re-watched the eight-minute segment of the finale from Beijing where custodianship of the Olympic ideal is passed on to London several times. At the heart of the presentation was a London double-decker bus coupled with dancing and music. That piece said an enormous amount about the sort of country Britain has become -- and, as a result, the challenge that British society presents to those seeking to be faithful to the Christian gospel. Like that segment which got rave reviews in the media, popular culture here is shallow, gaudy, disposable. It is much more about pop singers and football stars than the roots and traditions of the nation. Indeed, huge numbers of Brits have been conditioned to be embarrassed by these, the positives from the past constantly being damned, or damned with faint praise.

This reflects an absolute confusion of what it means to be British, and what have been the events and values that have shaped the country. The church (and its message) is considered to be very much part of that old-fashionedness. It is a lingering embarrassment from the past, and the subliminal message is that the country will be a better place when it is dead, buried, and gone. A lot of this negativity is focused and unfairly personalized onto the person of the Archbishop of Canterbury with his scholarly language, thick glasses, and straggly beard, but there are other figures who bear the brunt as well. Suffice it to say that it is an exception for a leading Christian to be characterized in a positive manner.

The question is, of course, what would fill the vacuum if Christianity did utterly collapse? I think it unlikely that the mile-wide, inch-deep secular hedonism that is always shouting the loudest would last long -- any more than Marxist-Leninism was able to outlast the rich history and spiritual heritage of Russia during the Soviet era. Islam is constantly named as a possibility, but while it has all the pushiness of an adolescent, an awful lot would have to change very quickly for Britain to embrace the Crescent while trampling the Cross underfoot. Certainly, this needs to be flagged for careful attention, but scenarios of this kind are a long way from playing themselves out.

What I would say is that there does seem to be a real sense of spiritual hunger flowing somewhere beneath the surface of Britain, but the spiritually hungry at this point seem determined not to go to the historic places to look for sustenance. Meanwhile, as I have intimated already, the churches are still in the early stages of working out how to speak to a spiritually-empty culture that brashly asserts itself. I have found myself musing whether the period through which we are now living might be more akin to that period when the industrial revolution radically changed the face of the land in the matter of a generation or two.

If there is anything to such a theory, then with it comes the recognition that the churches scrambled in those days to catch up with the new reality of sprawling industrial cities, coalmines instead of cornfields, and a population whose whole mindset was being radically altered. It took a work of the Holy Spirit, several generations, and the genius of the likes of Whitefield, the Wesleys, for there to be any effective communication of the Gospel story to this burgeoning new kind of world.

I am sure that there are many who would disagree with me, but there seem to be all sorts of telltale signs that things are not well here as in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. The ones that leap out at me are the demise of the family, incredible levels of alcohol consumption, unprecedented levels of personal debt, petty pilfering, and a prevailing live-for-the-moment kind of mentality. I suspect that some of these things are inevitable in a country that is stressed and in the midst of a huge transition, but I suspect also that because there are no longer very many values that are generally accepted an anything goes mindset is almost bound to prevail.

While the demise of marriage and the family presents huge challenges in the long-term this is not being taken particularly seriously by a whole raft of politicians and social leaders who don't want to be labeled as narrow and small-minded. I have this notion that providing meaningful ways for couples to stay married and have fruitful relationships could very well be a means of great renewal here and should be something the churches might concentrate on.

Something that has truly startled me since getting back has been the enormous expansion in the accessibility of alcohol at all hours of day and night, encouraging over-consumption, binge drinking, and worse. Let me put it crudely: there is a lot more vomiting in the gutter going on than there was 30+ years ago, and those involved tend to be both male and female. Add to this gambling and staggering levels of consumer debt as the symptoms of a deeper problem, and it is possible to see how much a mission field this is, and how much the churches have their work cut out for them.

While there is part of me that wants to run away from all of this, another part of me is eager to roll up my sleeves and wade in the best a sixtysomething can. I might not be able to do the frontline things any longer, but there is a lot that can be done to support, encourage, and fund, while pastoring and picking up the pieces of those who have been exhausted or hurt by the inevitable hugeness of the challenge.

Jesus told his disciples to life up their eyes and look on the fields, that they are white already to harvest. They may be one of these days, but there is a lot of ploughing, planting, weeding, and tending of the crops that needs to be done before there can be bumper harvests -- but those harvests are still possible.

The Scapegoating of the Archbishop of Canterbury

2008-07-01T00:39:00.000-07:00

I wrote this little piece for Covenant blog yesterday (www.covenant-communion.com):

I am concerned about attitudes toward this present Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems by many of those of the GAFCon persuasion to have become the scapegoat not only for his own shortcomings in this confusing crisis, but also everyone else’s. I have found myself wondering what the attitude of the GAFCon loyalists would have been if George Carey had still been the ABC — and who/what the scapegoat would have been in those particular circumstances. Scapegoating is, quite honestly, a very easy way to shrug off one’s own responsibilities for the situation.

Yes, the office of Archbishop of Canterbury does seem to have colonial overtones, but again, is the anti-colonial argument pressed because it can be used to great affect against Rowan Williams whose public persona is eminently difficult for most people to grasp (especially when the media have finished messing with his idiosyncrasy)? It needs to be asked if the office would be disdained in this particular manner if John Sentamu was Archbishop of Canterbury instead of York: I rather doubt a once-persecuted Ugandan with a huge and extrovert personality and faith would be dismissed with the scorn afforded the gentle Welsh scholar who inhabits Lambeth Palace.

One of the frightening things about the whole turmoil of events since 2003 is that it has become so wrapped up in issues of personality that the principles of theology, ecclesiology, and anything else have been molded in response to attitudes toward people rather than truths and errors. Now I realize that it is almost impossible to separate persons from beliefs and ideas, but it does seem that increasing numbers are not willing even to try.

What has grieved me more and more as this whole sorry game has played itself out is that both grace and truth seem to have become victims of the fight. I suspect that it is going to be increasingly difficult as time passes for the scars of the wounds now being inflicted to be soothed — yet seeking some kind of reconciliation has to be our priority if we are truly bearing with Christ his Cross.

There were all sorts of responses to this piece, and several of them lashed out at Archbishop Rowan. So here is my clarifier:

Either I did not make myself clear or the point I was trying to make has been missed. In the first sentence of what I said I had hoped I had made clear that Rowan Williams has his shortcomings. He is in an almost impossible position and since his accession to the See of Canterbury I have felt that he may not necessarily be perfectly equipped for times like this; let's face it, few individuals are.

However, what has happened is that Archbishop Rowan has been turned into the issue and made to accept almost everyone's blame. I state quite clearly that he has not led as I would have liked him to lead, but this pickle has been stewed up and then made worse by people on every side of the spectrum. Conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between has made this mess, and everywhere we look instead of humility and grace what we see is self-righteousness and posturing.

For saying something like this I have been roundly accused of being soft, of having lost my theological bearings, of compromising biblical truth, and so forth. Although this is untrue, people have the right to their own perceptions, but nothing could be further from the reality. It is because I am committed to biblical truth that I say what I do. Rowan Williams should not be blamed in the way he is, we should all take upon ourselves the responsibility for the chaos and the seemingly endless stand-offs that just lead to a downward spiral. The Archbishop can surely be criticized for some of what has happened, but then so can everyone from the Primates and bishops down to you and me.

Brothers and sisters, this situation is about being honest and it is about the Cross. The Cross challenges me in ways that I do not find comfortable, but without that Cross I am lost and in hopeless despair. There is nothing comfortable about the Cross for it demands of us integrity, humility, and a willingness to put ourselves under God's microscope -- whatever other people might do. The Cross is not there for us to use to hit others over the head. The truth is that we have had rather an insipid theology and practice of Cross-centered Christianity.

Let me be brutally personal about what the Cross means. I have said (and done) some pretty awful things about those with whom I disagree in these troubles, and who I believe have played a major role in bringing this crisis on the church. I have been presumptuous, judgmental, bitter, arrogant, and unkind. I have had some of the worst years of ministry I can remember, and have wept copiously. Much of what I have done has been grounded in pride and self-rectitude. However, regardless of what I believe to be the errors of others, I cannot load the consequences of my sins on anyone else's shoulders. I must take responsibility for them, and then share them with the Lord who died for me and rose again -- if I do not do this then I am of all men the most to be pitied.

I would plead with those who seem to want to blame Archbishop Rowan for everything to reconsider and look first into their own hearts. This is a case of the one who is without sin throwing the first stone...

How I have changed

2008-06-28T03:40:00.001-07:00

My wife has a picture that was taken of us on the damp cold March day in 1969 when I was ordained deacon in an equally damp, cold church in North London. I was looking at that picture the other day and wondering how much is left of that couple setting out on life together, grinning broadly, and with their arms around each other. Every morning when I stare at the mirror I recognize that beneath the surface somewhere is that skinny man with a thick mop of dark hair, but these days I feel the face I am looking at is more like my fathers did than that twentysomething uncomfortably clad in his brand-new clerical collar.

Today's waistline isn't anything like it used to be, my collars are several sizes larger, and I have less hair and it is turning pepper and salt gray. I am still pretty fit for a sixtysomething, but my back and knees tend to creak a little, if left to my own devices I drop off to sleep in my chair around 8.30 pm, and the beauty to whom I had been married for only seven months when that picture was taken is now a grandmother -- which, come to think of it, makes me a grandfather!

Back then I would have considered someone my age now incurably old -- but the funny thing is that despite the occasional aches I don't feel old. In some ways I feel younger now than I did ten or fifteen years ago. Certainly, our concerns are those of any couple our age, like how we fund our old age so that we are not a burden on our children, but I still have that same sense of excitement that goes with having something useful to do in God's Kingdom.

There was a similar excitement back then when we were setting out on our life's journey, and whilst a seasoning has taken place over the years there is still essentially the same flavor. I don't know how I would be feeling if I was staring down the barrel of the gun of retirement because that is not something to which I am looking forward. Spending and being spent for the Kingdom is a lot more fun!

Neither has the substance of my theological presuppositions changed much. Again, there has been a maturing and I have wrestled with my share of doubts and agonies related to the faith over the years, but at the heart is still the crucified and risen Jesus Christ as revealed to us in the Scriptures -- which I maintain now as back then to be God's Word Written. Part of that maturing has been discovering a richness that I didn't know was there when I was first ordained, and an exposure to scholarship and attitudes that have forced me to think through my own positions very carefully, modifying some of them, but whose foundation is firmly laid and stands firm despite all my sins and shortcomings.

I think that points to another factor: I am more conscious today of my sinfulness in a way that I am not sure I was when I was young. I grieve that while I might have made some progress in the process of sanctification, there are so many flaws in my character and personality that I had believed then I would grow out of. They are still there, and like Paul's thorn in the flesh they harry me daily. I press on toward the goal of God's call, but as I perceive the holiness of God when compared to my own innate fallenness I realize just how unworthy I am of God's grace.

Most of those years since that picture was taken were spent in the USA, and coming back to England points up just how much my American experience altered me. The other day a friend was comparing me to another American who we both know and who has lived in England for a long time; he said that this individual had become as British in his attitudes to the same extent that I had let go of my Britishness to become American. Most of the time I can see it in myself, but there are occasions when I say and do something that is quintessentially "New World" and it has to be pointed out to me.

I have shed a lot of the middle class English conditioning that had shaped that newly-minted deacon in the photo, and instead a middle class American conditioning has taken its place. I was never particularly comfortable with a lot of those English attitudes that once shaped me, but it wasn't until I got back here that I recognized just how many of them I have during my American years shed.

My political bias in the 1960s was of a distinctly more radical and leftish flavor than the one I adhere to now. In those days I believed the Conservative Party for which my family had consistently voted for ever and aye was so far to the right that no thinking Christian could possibly support them and retain their integrity. By contemporary American standards I suppose my political views are now perhaps slightly in the center or, perhaps, slightly to the left, but while I have changed so have the political parties here. These days I look at the three main parties here and consider them all a bit too progressive for my liking. I am not particularly comfortable with the 'nanny state' and neither do I have a lot of time for a lot of the social engineering that is so chi-chi in all quarters. In my youth I thought I knew what the political values appropriate to citizens of the Kingdom might be, now I am far from certain!

I was talking to my old liturgics professor a while back (one of the pleasures of returning to England has been remaking links with folks of whom you had lost track), and said to him that I felt that I had left England as one who was gently radical when it came to Christian worship and had come back three decades later as a hopeless traditionalist. I was not here for the full-scale Vineyardizing and Wimberization of the evangelicals in the Church of England took place, and from whose worst excesses Anglican evangelicalism has yet to recover.

What the Episcopal Church did was to allow me to realize just how much liturgical worship can sing and it formed me away from the overly informal approach to worship that English evangelicals have tended to glory in. Interestingly, I probably have an approach to liturgy, ceremonial and ritual that condemns me to minority status everywhere. In Tennessee I was considered a snake belly low churchman, while among evangelicals here I am a tad further up the candle than most would like... and don't get me talking about the quality of the lyrics of so many of the more contemporary pieces of music that we sing -- and the endless and unthinking repetition of verses, choruses and phrases.

I don't know how the young man in the picture would respond to what I have just said because there was no such thing as contemporary music of that kind in church settings back then -- we listened to the Beatles and Rolling Stones sing that stuff!

I know that the seeds of what I was going to become were there back then, but I'm not sure that I would have guessed how the youth would give birth to this older man. If God gives me another quarter century of life then it will be interesting to see how the even older man then will look back on the relative youngster I am now, and the mere babe in arms I was then. I hope to goodness that I am not a bad-tempered old curmudgeon!

A Week of Weeks

2008-05-31T07:09:00.000-07:00

The Prince of Wales talking to me together with the Principal and Bursar
after viewing the plans for new buildings at Ridley Hall

As you can see from the above picture we have had quite a week at Ridley Hall -- probably one of the most momentous and busy in the whole of my forty years of ministry.

The Prince of Wales dropped by for tea on Tuesday, and it fell to me to coordinate and stage manage the event. The Prince seemed to enjoy himself very much and had good conversations with sixteen Ridley students training for ordination in the Church of England or for youth leadership. It was valuable for the future Supreme Governor of the Church of England to meet some of those who will be ecclesiastical leaders when he comes to the throne.

I don't want to leave you with the impression that this is something that happens every day for this was the first royal visit to the college since its doors opened in 1881. It has certainly raised our profile in Cambridge, with Ridley being on the front page of the local paper twice in a couple of weeks. My impression of the Prince having met him briefly is rather different from the image that the media paint of him.

But that wasn't the end for the week, because on Thursday we had a major event at Lambeth Palace hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It kicked off among major donors and potential donors the campaign that we hope will put new academic and residential facilities for students at Ridley Hall -- the first building of its kind since 1914. Again, it was my responsibility to make it happen. It didn't help that there were torrential rains all afternoon and evening despite nothing being forecast. However, it went off well and we seem to have gathered some new friends who we believe are going to help us to make the expansion of Ridley Hall a reality.

But that isn't the end of it all. At this very moment, even as my fingers hit the keys, the Council of the College are working toward the selection of a new Principal and we were all tied up in that yesterday. Meanwhile next week we have a very important Council meeting, an Alumni/ae event with 150-200 participants, and the first lecture in a series of public lectures in memory of Professor Charlie Moule with Bishop Tom Wright as the speaker. We aren't quite sure how many visitors will be coming for that, but we have learned someone has made it the primary reason for coming from the USA.

Someone suggested to me the other day that I might be slowing down now in preparation for retirement. I had to chuckle because I have never being going so hard in my whole life. While I expect retirement will happen one of these fine days, right now it is a dirty word as there is just too much to do for the Kingdom of God!

The Challenge of Adjusting

2008-05-06T01:25:00.000-07:00

Author Laurie R. King, in whose company I have been spending a lot of time since coming to England

During the last eight months I have been less than assiduous about keeping up my blog, and I apologize to any regular readers for this -- if there are any regular readers left! Some of you probably think that I have more or less dropped off the edge of the world, while others might be relieved they are hearing less from me! I haven't disappeared and am still here on the edge of the English Fens, working as hard as I ever have, and puzzling to adjust to the British way of doing things!

I have to confess that while there are times of great delight and satisfaction, there are also days of utter frustration. The truth is that I was in the USA for so long that I don't think or respond to life and reality as Brits do. Also, my use of North American vocabulary has been the source of entertainment to some of my colleagues at Ridley Hall.

In the midst of all this there are times of a deep and even painful missing of the United States. It is fascinating that I still dream in American, as it were. I do not remember in the nine months that I have been here ever dreaming in an English setting -- they have all been set in Tennessee or some other part of the US (last night, for example, I dreamed I was elected a US Senator for Texas -- glory knows where that one came from!). The other night I woke in the wee small hours and lay there for a full thirty seconds trying to work out precisely where I was and what I was doing here. All this, I have concluded, reflects a massive dislocation and disorientation at a significant depth in my psyche.

One of the side effects of this is the amount of mental and emotional energy I am using up as I adapt to a new life and lifestyle after three decades in the States. A by-product is that my concentration and creativity quotient are both at a very low ebb. I can just about manage to put together an occasional sermon and writing my daily devotions, but apart from what is required for my work I tend to be short of the emotional and spiritual wherewithal to do some creative exploring and branching out mentally and imaginatively.

Making major adjustments upsets the life of different people in different ways. Some may gobble up intellectual stimulation as a result of being tossed around so much, but I am finding the demands made by transitioning to be so enormous that reading serious books that are filled with significant content requires more intellectual energy than I have, and I sometimes fear that I might never get that side of myself back.

Instead of digging into works that are meaty and demanding, I am reading far more fiction than I have for a long time. Having been recently introduced by my elder daughter to the Mary Russell mysteries written by Laurie King, a San Franciscan who has some transatlantic roots in Oxford, I am devouring these with a passion. It is as if my psyche and imagination need taking care of and recharging before I am able to launch back into heavier fare.

It just was as I started writing this that I met a man who had recently gone through a similar episode, and it was a comfort to know I am not alone in attempting to garner the concentration levels and capacity to do things that make a high demand. After a heavy business schedule with much traveling globally for years and years this particular individual began slowing down as he felt the end of his career approaching. He was actually considering how he would redirect his life. This was the point at which his brain seemed to clam up, and coupled with a bout of ill health it had taken eighteen months to get his head back on so that he could read significantly and write again.

It is obviously a human shortcoming to refuse to accept that there are certain life events that leave us hollowed out and in need of recovery time if we are to be generative and creative in the future. I plead guilty to being one who finds it difficult to listen to the inner voice that prompts me to slow down a bit at times. I like to think that this fallow time for me is being a bit like a connoisseur laying down a cellar of fine wine that isn't yet mature, but will be able to be enjoyed later on.

So I have been spending the last months observing and learning again what reality look like from a British point of view so that I can eventually participate in and draw upon the seeds of ideas being stored up. In a way I suspect what I am doing is a little like adjusting to sharing my life with a new spouse, a process that probably requires meeting some of the unknown or overlooked darker and nastier sides of one's partner personality and being -- as well as enjoying the nice, sunny, and enjoyable components of their identity in a more intense and satisfying way.

The underlying truism is that this country has changed enormously since we left and this is what we are trying to come to terms with, discovering things about this land that I didn't really wish to know. Such reality therapy takes a toll. I am developing this impression that while Britain has succeeded in the material world after fighting world wars followed by a long time in the economic wilderness, the price it has paid has been its soul. The country in which I now live is wealthier and more prosperous by far than the one I left, and in true British fashion is muddling through, but it is a country that has happily sacrificed much of its historic identity.

The solid and serviceable have given away to the transitory and garish, in everything from the way people furnish their homes to the kind of lives they set out to lead. Being British today is more about supporting a soccer team than belonging to a nation. In some ways Britain feels very much like a historic building whose innards have been gutted and replaced with decor that may for the moment be fashionable but in every other respect are transient.

I hope in due course I will have some mature and constructive comments to make about this reality, but right now I'm not ready so must continue nurturing my psyche and soul with the hope that in due course I can enter into British life with the kind of verve that I enjoyed those many years in the USA.

Trying to Sell an Environmentally-Friendly House in Tennessee

2008-04-13T03:09:00.000-07:00

A Fenland Landscape

Early this morning, soon after the sun had risen, I took Freddy, our Silky Terrier, for a long walk over the Fens where on the lodes (or drainage canals) we saw a spectacular cross-section of waterfowl. Walking in the cool English spring sunshine helped clear my brain following an unexpectedly difficult week.

Perhaps at the heart of the week was the deepening realization that in my growing sense of being settled here I had let certain guards down and had started talking and trying to relate to people as if they were Americans. Even as I turned over in my mind a little presentation I made yesterday afternoon to an essentially friendly group, I probably was a little too unguarded for most of my listeners. Americans tend to reveal more of themselves and allow themselves to be read far more readily than the British.

Three decades in the USA have left little of the English reserve with which I crossed the Atlantic in the 1970s, and now I am having to work out how to synthesize the American me with the British way of doing things and managing relationships. With this comes another level of reverse culture shock, one which after seven months or so here is not so readily forgiven by my British friends and colleagues who probably believe I have now adjusted back to this land. So, as I walked across the Fens this morning I was doing some painful reassessing of myself.

In the midst of all these ponderings I found myself gazing at an indescribably beautiful wooden house, and that got me thinking about my own house in Tennessee that has not yet sold despite being on the market since the end of last August.

I found myself ruefully wishing that I had it here in Britain where it would be not only a relatively easy sell, but I would get mucho, mucho pounds for it! Not only is housing here exotically expensive, but environmental sensitivity is far higher here than it is among the general public in the USA, An environmentally-sensitive house like ours would be in very high demand -- probably with people bidding, counter-bidding, and scrambling over one another to get it.

There sits our beautiful home in Tennessee and the only offers we have had have been derisively low -- what one Tennessee friend with a lot of financial smarts has described as carpetbagging. While we know we are experiencing the post-sub-prime blues, it does sadden us. Our home sits on three lovely acres, overlooking a beautiful valley, it is well-insulated and generates its own electricity while at the same time heating its own water, but no one seems to want it unless we are almost prepared to give it to them.

That is probably a sad commentary on environmental consciousness in the USA, especially in Tennessee, the state which we love the best and where we lived the longest. Whatever you believe about global climate change, and I think the evidence is overwhelming that it is happening, just being a responsible steward of the planet should encourage us to think in these terms when it comes to housing. What we have learned from our realtor is that some of those who have viewed it have been more concerned about the lack of granite counter-tops than the things that make the house such an energy treasure!

I suspect that we were such pioneers when we built the house as far as America is concerned that even the early adopters are wary of doing something that might make them look silly (tree-hugging wackos) -- even if it does leave them several thousand dollars a year better off each year when it comes to utility bills! But not only are the bills lower, so is your carbon footprint -- again, not a bad thing.

Yet having said that an environmentally-friendly house would sell like hotcakes on this side of the Atlantic, I was talking to a scientist researcher a month or two back who was telling me that in North America in general there are far more opportunities to explore and experiment with alternative fuels and energy sources than in Europe, and that despite all the words that come from official chatterers in this country the USA is probably ahead on the technology. The problem here, he asserted, is that regulation is out of control -- and land to do such things is very difficult to find.

I guess that on all sides of the world we are struggling to work out how to live on a small planet with such limited (and over-stretched) resources. I suspect that for the next few years the issue of food security is going to be as high up the agenda as the climate, partly because there is such a food crunch and partly because our food situation has been made more difficult by uncertainties created by the climate.

The challenges before us are enormous.

Easter and Human-Aminal Embryo Research

2008-03-24T09:58:00.001-07:00

Hybrids are made from an animal egg mixed
with human genes

Over the Easter period perhaps the biggest issue in the British news has been that of scientific research using animal-human hybrid embryos. The issue has been smoldering for a while, but legislation is being thrust with indecent haste through Parliament to allow British scientists, within careful limits, to create and use in research these chimeras. Last week in his Easter message this development was challenged by the Cardinal Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland.

Cardinal Keith O'Brien stated, "It is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation which more comprehensively attacks the sanctity and dignity of human life than this particular bill." The Cardinal's words hit the nail firmly on the head, and others have supported and endorsed his deep anxiety about what is going on. Bishop Tom Wright of Durham said in his Easter sermon that "Our present government (is) pushing through, hard and fast, legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby."

Bishop Tom goes on to say, "We create our Brave New World here and now; so don’t tell us that God’s new world was born on Easter Sunday. Reduce such dangerous beliefs to abstract, timeless platitudes. The irony is that this secular utopianism is based on a belief in an unstoppable human ability to make a better world, while at the same time it believes that we (it’s interesting to ask who ‘we’ might be at this point) have the right to kill unborn children and surplus old people, and to play games with the humanity of those in between. Gender-bending was so last century; we now do species-bending. Look how clever we are! Utopia must be just round the corner."

For some years now I have been asserting that one of the most pressing issues before us is just what does it means to be human. As Tom Wright implied on Easter Sunday, the whole sexuality debate and controversy is merely a symptom of the confusion that prevails, for the culture has abandoned anything that approaches a Judeo-Christian understanding of humans as beings made in the image of a sovereign God, while at the same time providing no alternative to take its place. Indeed, not only has no clear alternative emerged, but those who question this so-called scientific advance are being painted (and not for the first time) as spoilers and obscurantists, and that their thinking is an attempt to draw a red herring across the path of scientific advance.

Yet what is spoiling and obscurantist about insisting that we need carefully to define our terms in order to understand where we are and what we are doing before we proceed with a particular course of action? As I have listened to the debate over this past weekend, it has appeared that the government is utterly determined to shove legislation allowing this kind of scientific activity through the House of Commons, so much so that it has little sympathy for the conviction of members of its own party who for religious and/or ethical reasons are saying, "Hey, wait a minute..."

The reasoning for proceeding with this course of action is pretty threadbare:

1. There are nationalistic commercial reasons for doing this -- we don't want to tie our scientists' hands behind their back in such a way that it prevents Britain from retaining its position as a global leader in biogenetic research. Such an argument should hardly surprise us because we live in an environment in which economics is king, and if there is an unstated definition in our society of what it means to be human it is that homo sapiens is a consumer and creator of wealth: "I spend, therefore I am."

2. The stated morality behind research of this kind is that out of it might come cures for some of the dreadful diseases that assail millions of people, old and young, around the world. Evan Harris, A Liberal Democrat MP who is a member of the House of Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Select Committee, has said that it is right to conduct research that "might be used to treat people with terrible diseases".

There is a legitimacy to such an argument, but to date the track record arising out of so much biogenetic research suggests that the promise is more significant than outcomes and results. Besides, is it justifiable to destroy or radically tamper with life in the hope that from such activities will come positive outcomes for the human race?

In the last forty years I have been up close to many of the diseases researchers are determined to eradicated, and have pastored (and buried) many who have been suffering from them. Of course, I would love to see such horrible maladies wiped out because I have seen their consequences in the lives of sufferers and their families, but I find myself stumbling over the question of whether it is right to destroy life in order to save life. In this case, does the end justify the means? If we believe that human beings reflect God's image then it is hard to answer in the affirmative. Those who argue along these lines have succumbed to the crudest form of utilitarian thinking.

3. The third argument is that science must be allowed to advance for we stand on the brink of a whole new frontier, and we won't know what opportunities might lie just around the corner if we don't follow this path. True, but the counter-question then has to be posed whether it is appropriate for our race to find out. Just because something is possible does not make it either necessary or right. It is entirely possible for a pilot to land a plane full of passengers on a busy road or a playing field, but only in one landing in a million is it right to do so.

Behind such thinking as this, and it has been expressed variously in a number of books that I have read, is the conviction that we are on the cusp of a new evolutionary development -- and what is so exciting about it is that this time we human beings can control and direct that development (and do not have to leave it to outside, supposedly random, forces). This is a notion that is deeply ingrained in the whole transhuman movement, and that movement is of significant influence in certain scientific circles. While I am not saying that pursuing such a path of research has Frankenstein qualities, I am saying that those who enthusiastically pursue such studies either have not properly thought through the long-term consequences of their actions, or are quite happy about being in such a driver's seat.

The mentality of those who believe this line of research is right seems to reduce human beings -- men, women, babies, fetuses, embryos, -- from being flesh that reflects the divine nature into products to be used and mixed in the process of manufacture -- whether it be manufacture of cures for diseases, or ends up as being something more sinister.

Now as soon as someone says such a thing the champions of such research throw their arms in the air and say that we untutored ignoramuses are meddling in something that is not any of our business. We might respond by affirming that while we may not be experts in this field, is it appropriate for a self-appointed scientific priesthood to make these kind of decisions for the whole human race, for human-animal embryos are playing with the DNA that is at the very root of every persons' being.

It also seems that today, especially when Christians start raises objections to something that is going on, the rejoinder is that it is none of our business, and shouldn't the Church keep its nose out of areas of endeavor and discovery that do not concern it. We have to respond in this instance, "Sorry, but this does concern us very much. We are human beings, we believe there is purpose in God creating us in the way he has, and while meddling with the building blocks of life in this way may not immediately result in some terrible disaster what does it say about the value of being human?"

Let me leave the final words with Bishop Tom Wright:

"Have we learnt nothing from the dark tyrannies of the last century? It shouldn’t just be Roman Catholics who are objecting. It ought to be Anglicans and Presbyterians and Baptists and Russian Orthodox and Pentecostals and all other Christians, and Jews and Muslims as well. This isn’t a peripheral or denominational concern. It grows directly out of the central facts of our faith, because on Easter day God reaffirmed the goodness and image-bearingness of the human race in the man Jesus Christ, giving the lie simultaneously to the idea that utopia could be had by our own efforts and to the idea that humans are just miscellaneous evolutionary by-products, to be managed and manipulated at will. The Christian vision of what it means to be human is gloriously underscored by the resurrection of Jesus, and we as Easter people should make common cause with all those who are concerned about the direction our society is going in medical technology as in so much besides.

…The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the final putting-to-rights of all things. In the light of the resurrection, the church must never stop reminding the world’s rulers and authorities that they themselves will be held to account, and that they must do justice and bring wise, healing order to God’s world ahead of that day. Those who want to depoliticize the resurrection must first dehistoricize it, which is of course what they have been doing enthusiastically for many years - and then we wonder why the church has sometimes sounded irrelevant! But we who celebrate our risen Lord today must bear witness to Easter, God’s great act of putting-right, as the yardstick for all human justice."

Choosing A Bishop

2008-03-05T04:19:00.000-08:00

During the last couple of years I have found myself close to the selection of a new bishop on either side of the Atlantic, and the contrast between the two approaches could not have been more different.

On Monday morning at 11.00 a.m. London time it was announced from 10 Downing Street that Chris Cocksworth, the Principal of Ridley Hall, is to be the new Bishop of Coventry. Chris had shared this piece of news with just a handful of us in the leadership of the College before the weekend, but it would have been a great embarrassment to all if the statement of the Queen's approval of his nomination for election to the position had been upstaged. Even the people in the Diocese of Coventry did not know until a smiling and nervous Chris was brought out into the ruins of the old blitzed cathedral to meet them and the press.

There are wheels within wheels in back rooms that produce bishops here. There is a process of feeling out, approaching of candidates, checking credentials, etc., which eventually lead to the bishop-elect's name being announced and everyone applauding. It certainly means that someone of ability can be selected for the task, and while the diocese is involved in the process far more than was the case thirty years or so ago when I left England for the USA, there is still this pall of secrecy that hangs over things. However, it only takes a few months.

What a contrast to the long drawn out battle that we had in the Diocese of Tennessee when we attempted to elect a new bishop. The first stirrings of the process were in the latter part of 2004, the whole of 2005 the Episcopate Committee worked assiduously at the task, and because we took four bites at the cherry before electing John Bauerschmidt as bishop, it wasn't until October 2006 that we had a successful candidate, and then early 2007 before he came on board.

The great thing about the American process was that it is about as public as it could have been, with only those components kept confidential that needed to be. There was an effort to listen to all the voices in the diocese and to take them into account, and then it was up to the diocese itself gathered in convention to do the electing. Finally, the bishops and standing committees of the church had to endorse the election that had been made. A lot of people were involved in the selecting and making of the bishop.

I am absolutely convinced that an English style of electing would not work in the US, given the culture and history of the nation; but given the sort of House of Bishops that it has thrown up in the last couple of generations it has to be asked whether it is working particularly well. On the other hand, given how theologically detached from historic Christianity the Episcopal Church has become, I am not sure that I would want some unknown network of individuals working in private to come up with potential leaders for the dioceses.

I am delighted for our Principal at Ridley that he will soon be the youngest diocesan in the Church of England, and while we will certainly miss him here, my prayers go with him. However, the part of me that has been well-marinated in the American way of doing things wishes that the people could have a lot more say than they seem to get here.

"Rowan Williams is a Wimp" -- or is he?

2008-02-24T09:48:00.000-08:00

I confess to being very disappointed when Rowan Williams was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, but as is too often the case I made my judgments about him prematurely and on the basis of limited (or even flawed) information. Perhaps I am a contrarian, but as the general opinion of the leading inhabitant of Lambeth Palace has tended to slip my attitude toward him has been one of increased admiration. That is not to say that I am in agreement of all that he does and says, but I respect the manner that he has attempted to remain faithful to the radical teaching of Jesus Christ while steering his ways through today's impossible and polarized landscape.

At times I am stunned at the accusations made against him, for many of them just do not stand up under careful cross-examination. I suspect that the vast majority those who yell the loudest or throw the smelliest eggs at him have neither listened to what he is saying nor read with care what he writes. I suspect that Rowan himself would not be very patience with those who take his every word as gospel, but I suspect also it must irritate him no end when people attack him for things he neither is nor has said. While he is warm in personal conversation, welcoming, and has a tremendous consideration for those who come into contact with him, he is also one of the most significant minds of our time -- certainly there hasn't been an Archbishop like him since the time of Michael Ramsey (and Ramsey did not have to deal with such a predatory press as that which savages Rowan on a regular basis).

This is all preparation for saying that during the last few weeks my respect and admiration for Rowan Williams has grown. This is not to say that I agree with all that the Archbishop has said or done, but I stand in awe of the manner in which he has handled himself. It is when a person is under great pressure that we see of what they are truly made, and it seems to me that if you look more closely at the man behind the events of the last few weeks (and years) then the Primate of All England has acquitted himself as an intelligent, holy, and gracious Christian leader should.

Lambeth Palace was, perhaps, more than a little naive in the manner it handled the press in the lead-up to the Archbishop's now infamous lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Maybe if he had to do it again he would alter the timing of his interview to the BBC and answered some of the questions put to him with different wording, but I respect him enormously for not backtracking from the substance of what he actually said (rather than he is reputed by journalists to have said), and neither did he apologize for raising a very difficult and emotional issue for a pluralistic and multi-religious society to address. He was subsequently sorry for any pain he might have caused, and that is entirely within character, but he spoke from the basis of mature reflection on the dilemma presented to British society by a large Islamic minority in our midst.

I have since gone through the lecture the Archbishop gave with a fine tooth comb, and while I am not entirely in agreement with him, he did not say anything that a faithful and orthodox Christian need be ashamed of. It is significant, I think, that we have heard support for the Archbishop from both the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and several leading evangelical ethicists, which suggests that Rowan Williams is not so far out on a limb as the press would like you to believe -- just that he has courage to put onto the table a pressing social issue that has strong theological overtones.

Through this whole sorry business the Archbishop has handled himself graciously and firmly, and with great integrity. It is this which I find myself admiring. A couple of the days after the storm broke, he preached in Cambridge at the memorial service for Professor Charlie Moule, and in the pulpit we saw and heard from a man who is captured by and committed to the living and risen Lord Jesus Christ. I have never heard a memorial service address with such conviction and depth. Then during the last few days both English archbishops were in Cambridge for the kick-off of the university's 800th anniversary and the Diocese of Ely's 900th, and although I was not present the addresses given and the way in which together they handled theological students and seminarians from across the spectrum reflected commitment, intelligence, and godliness.

Perhaps there is an inevitability in an aggressively secular society for Christian leaders, especially if they appear a bit quirky or are intelligent way beyond anything the lowest common denominator can imagine, to be attacked, misrepresented, and ridiculed by the forces that are at play. What is more difficult to stomach is when these individuals are set upon by those who should be their own spiritual kith and kin. Some of the things that have been said about Rowan Williams in the last few weeks, and by those who are fellow-travelers along the Christian way, have been at time scurrilous. I just hope the Archbishop doesn't sit up late at night surfing the web looking for them, for they would cause him a great deal more pain.

As I have watched Rowan Williams these last few months (and you get a much closer view in England than the USA), I have seen a man who is an example of Christ to me. He appears to be someone who has been so captured by the redeeming love of Christ that it is reconciliation and forgiveness that he seeks, even when being bombarded by viciousness from Christians and secularists alike (although for different reasons). As a person he seems to be in the process of thoroughly absorbing the message of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, of forgiving his enemy and turning the other cheek. Wherever we are on the spectrum of the conflict that is tearing at the very fabric of the church, this is an example from which we can all learn and seek to emulate.

Neither does the Archbishop shirk responsibility for what he says and does, or hide from his detractors. Some of the nastiest things have been said about him by those (often professing to be Christian) who are delighted to lash out on the Internet, but then hide behind fictitious aliases or wear the cloak of anonymity. To me this distasteful Internet practice demonstrates an unwillingness to stand behind your own words and convictions, and is in many respects both cowardly and dishonest. Rowan Williams can be accused of neither.

Like so many who are denigrated in their own time, I suspect that when the history of these times is written that Rowan Williams will be treated more kindly than many are treating him at the moment. While I am not asking readers to like him or even to agree with him, I would encourage them to (if only grudgingly) admire him and respect him as he attempts to do one of the most impossible jobs in the Christian world.

Out of the depths...

2008-01-20T02:55:00.000-08:00

The container being backed into our driveway in Waterbeach, near Cambridge, England

After one hundred days spent living separately on different sides of the Atlantic, Rosemary and I are now together again under the same roof with our dog and cat, and just a few days ago our container of household goods was backed onto our driveway and out poured the old friends that make our house feel more like our home. Our furniture and treasures had survived its journey across the choppy waters of the North Atlantic in winter.

Yet while domestic life is more settled there has been a sense of anxiety about what is going on in the church back in the USA, together with a sense of distance and powerlessness to do anything. In the next couple of days the Diocese of Tennessee will be holding its convention, and for the first time in as long as I can remember I will be absent. We had a battle at a recent convention over the feasibility of proxy votes, and part of me wishes that I had one! Then hardly a day or two passes without some announcement or event that confirms the steady unraveling of what was once the Episcopal Church.

Every time I think that I might be getting inured to what might be going on something happens that makes my stomach heave, brings tears to my eyes, makes me see red, or just drops a pall of deep sadness over me. Just as it was hard for me to let go of our home in Tennessee, so it is hard to live at a distance from what is going on back in the States, particularly the parting of friends, as John Henry Newman described it.

What is hardest is when people alongside whom you have labored in the Gospel for many years cut off communications with you, probably because they know you will not be sympathetic with the course that they have chosen to pursue. Tangentially, I read a little piece on a website the other day by a woman agonizingly anticipating the break-up of her marriage, and found myself feeling many of the same emotions over the break-up of the church in which I have been a priest for more than three decades.

It seems we have reached such a point in the process of fragmentation of the church where the thinking is that if you are not with us, you are against us - so we just don't want to have anything to do with you. Add to that the inner confusion that we all feel when such things happen, not knowing quite how to relate with or reach out to others who have taken a very different path from the one that we would prefer them to have followed. Also, those who separate are implicitly passing judgment on those who remain by their actions, even if that is not their intention.

In some ways many of the feelings I have been trying to come to terms with are a bit like the ones I had when the Charismatic Renewal began asserting itself. I am old enough to have been there to see almost the beginning of this movement in the life of the church, and have watched it wax, wane, change shape, and mutate over the intervening years.

I was a greenhorn in seminary in London, naive and enthusiastic, when the charismatic thing burst upon us. I remember vividly around the middle of my first term that Dennis Bennett arrived from the United States and addressed a crowded gathering of seminarians after dinner one evening. In the wake of that meeting what had seemed to be the stable life of the college community was disrupted as some received what was being described as the baptism of the Holy Spirit, others wanted to but did not, while others still had profound theological and spiritual questions about whether it was appropriate at all. For much of the rest of that year there were often unspoken dividing lines and uncomfortable tensions as we struggled to come to terms with what was going on around us.

By my final year there most of us had worked out how to live with this new phenomenon, but when we got out into ordained ministry and the movement continue to spread its wings and flourish, we found ourselves dealing with it in our various parish settings. Those tensions and implied judgments were very much part of the spiritual and relational geography of church life - especially if you were (as I was) working among young people. There was a sense of there being First Class and Second Class Christians dependent upon the nature of your experience and the exuberance with which you wore it.

Of course, within the context of these tensions subtly different cultures developed with variant hermeneutical approaches to the Scriptures' teaching about spiritual gifts. Naturally, dependent upon your experience of the Spirit in these circumstances was the line of thinking and acting that you followed.

Thankfully much of the tension that went with that particular tide has ebbed and with it has come to a more holistic and balanced understanding of the nature and ministry of the Holy Spirit. However, the recent unpleasantness in the Episcopal Church has, in me at least, revived that sense of implied judgment that is being made. Maybe I am interpreting this wrong, but there is the sense on the part of those leaving that those of us who remain on the basis of what we believe to be good reasons rooted in Scripture and the catholic faith, are hopelessly compromised. We are Second Class Christians who are not taking Scripture seriously, and consorting with those who have sold the Gospel down the river. Of course, every side considers itself more Anglican than the other, and there are no exceptions here.

Add to this the further complication that some have shrugged their shoulders and said a plague on Anglicanism altogether, we don't want to be part of any of this any longer, and so have gone off to Rome or Constantinople. What has surprised me with some of them is that a few have in a relatively short time done such a flipflop that they are affirming beliefs that they gave the impression just a few months ago were nowhere on their radar scope. Their attitude now is that they have found the true truth and, perhaps, have put on all the Ultramontane clothing necessary to demonstrate their new allegiance, and scorn those of us left squirming in the Anglican pit.

And so far I have just been talking about the so-called "conservatives."

Those on the other and "progressive" side of the theological and ideological fence are demanding an almost subservient loyalty to the institution, and are saying woe betide you if that does not happen -- we will use the full force of the canons against you to get you to comply. This is a wrestling match and submission is being demanded. Reading what some of them write there is an extraordinary sense from many of them that they are correct and enlightened, while the rest of us are lost in Neanderthal thinking and backward-looking obscurantism.

This is all such a muddle of attitudes and mindsets that it is almost impossible to weave any meaningful way through it. Human fallenness and arrogance rears its ugly head at every corner, and perhaps most of us think better of ourselves and our positions than we really should.

I sat this morning for a while with the only book written by my late friend, Michael Howard, God in the Depths. Michael had a sequel in mind for this remarkable little tome, but alas, he died just months before he was due to retire and to get on with that work. The depths (or the deep) about which he talks are that encircling darkness that is always there within the context of the human condition. They are the gale across the heaving ocean, they are the chaos and emptiness that are an intimate part of being human, "they are 'non-being' out of which, in God's hands, things 'become'" (Page 31).

In institutional and ecclesiastical terms this is what we are wrestling with. The depths now roil in the life of the Church, the community of faith having itself been made chaotic. Howard tells us that thius is the opposite of community. "The Church is a partner with the Spirit in the re-creation of the earth through the victory of Jesus over the powers of the deep," Michael Howard wrote, but in the process we will find ourselves embracing the deep by living with doubts, uncertainty, incipient chaos, and mystery (Page 131).

The church as we know it is being swamped by the deep, and perhaps all of us crave for Christ to stand on the prow of the sinking vessel and say to the churning waters, "Peace, be still." But that would be to short-circuit the process of finding our way through the discomfort, fear, and anguish bearing the Cross, being borne by it, and allowing the Cross to form and shape us anew. The Cross clearly has to be the starting point for any rebuilding of the Church, and the Cross is the ultimate place of letting go, the place above all others.

As I look at us all in the Anglican family, especially the Anglican family in the United States, we don't have a lot to be proud of or arrogant about, however we might be preening our feathers. We have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, all of us, in destroying a large part of what we inherited, and now seem set on policies that will tear what remains to shreds. There are no simple answers to the questions with which we struggle, but right now every one seems to determined to stand upon their own self-righteousness and to vaunt themselves up. As we do so, we tumble further into the Deep.

Keeping a Spiritual Journal

2007-12-28T07:49:00.000-08:00

The other day a friend said to me that he was thinking about starting the practice of keeping a journal and I had kept one for a while, hadn’t I? We chatted a little about it, but it was neither the time nor the place to go into any depth. Since we had that conversation Christmas has passed, the Kews have moved with animals across a wide ocean, and now we have a long weekend to adjust to being a family of husband, wife, dog, and cat together in our English home before I get back to work and Rosemary begins teaching online.

As I couldn’t talk to David while in Tennessee I am going to talk to him through this entry – and allow anyone who wants to eavesdrop on what I say. With the New Year beginning, starting to keep a journal might be something that others want to do.

I got into the business of journaling forty years ago. I didn’t set out on my journal for any highfaluting reason but because I was having trouble concentrating on my prayers. Praying has never been an easy business for me as I have one of those minds that zips off after every red herring. While sometimes red herrings can be substance for prayer, most of the time they are distractions and diversions with little to do with the task in hand. My journal began as an act of desperation: the only way I could keep my mind on my prayers was writing down what I wanted to say to God.

So, having purchased a modest notebook I set about the process. It wasn’t clever or sophisticated, but it did the trick because I find myself writing jibberish if I don’t keep my mind on the task. I really envy those for whom prayer seems to come naturally, with a flow of words between themselves and God that is akin to a conversation!

I guess from that point onward what I was doing evolved, and over the years it has been on the pages of several dozen rather ordinary notebooks that I have wrestled through my relationship with God. Here’s the first important point about keeping a journal, what you write in it is between you and God, and is certainly not the business of anyone else, even your nearest and dearest.

A few years ago I was reading a biography of Tolstoy. The great Russian novelist kept a journal for many years, but his biographer suggested that he wrote with one mind on eventual publication and so there was some posturing. Also, as his relationship with his wife deteriorated he realized that she was reading it after he went to bed, which then prompted him to use it to poke at her knowing that she would never admit to peeping. This was obviously a man engaging in keeping a journal for questionable reasons!

What began for me as a place to record my petitions gradually moved beyond that. Certainly all these years later I write out my prayers like I always did, and it is obvious that the journal is addressed to God, but it is also the place where I bring into the presence of God far more of myself than that.

I am writing this the day after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan, a cause for great anxiety and much grief both in her homeland and beyond. Her death will definitely have a profound impact upon the world and I found myself writing and praying about that, but I went beyond looking at parallels in history and the meaning of God’s providence in such tragic circumstances. My journal entry became about God’s nature and purpose, enabling me to ponder the mysteries of the divinity as they intersect with the fallenness, evil, and foolishness of humankind. I said nothing new and definitely did not develop my own understanding of the Lord any further, but it enabled me to grapple with and lift to God a tragedy within the context of my praying.

Sometimes my journal is fed by the Scripture that I am studying in my own devotional life, and I might meditate on a the whole passage or just one tiny fragment of it. At other times I find myself ruminating on something someone has said or an insight (pleasant or otherwise) about myself. My journal is a place where I can bare my soul not only to God, but also to myself for I find myself able to identify and tussle with things about me and my personality that I would often prefer to avoid.

Yes, my journal is filled with joy and delight, but it is often a place of confession and penitence, and there have been occasions when the writing has been accompanied by tears and deep heartrending. It is because my journal is designed for the Audience of One that I am able to do this, pulling no punches about myself as I do so. I hate let’s pretend religion, and have discovered that this spiritual diary has the capacity to keep me honest not only in God’s presence but with myself and with others.

If a journal is a place of confession and penitence, it is also a place where the immensity of life is agonized over. One of the problems for many of us is that we tend to live life on the surface, either ignoring or avoiding some of the deeper and more tangled challenges. There are many doubts and fears that I find myself mulling over and trying to work through. I loved what Os Guinness wrote years ago that doubts are the growing pains of the soul, and my journal is definitely a place where doubts of all kinds surface and are explored.

Sometimes, like a sore in my mouth that my tongue refuses to leave alone, I will come back to these issues ad infinitum, kicking them around, poking at them, and trying to get inside why it is that this thing might be troubling me. But this is what God intends for us. Our faith does not grow and deepen if our life remains unexamined, and a component of prayer is examining ourselves and our mind in the presence of the Most High God.

What is fascinating when going through journals years or even decades later is how things that seemed insurmountable issues back then have now either melted away or been put into an entirely different perspective. In addition, requests are made and there is a record of those prayers being answered. Diaries and journals that have a prayer-related orientation are a wonderful record of God’s dealings with each of us. One of the pleasures of keeping such journals is going back over them and discovering not only how we have grown and changed, but also how within the context of this happening we have gained a clearer understanding of what God is truly like in the manner that he confronts, cares for, and shapes us.

Just as I am bound to spend time with Scripture each day, because my journal and prayer life are now so closely interwoven I also try to spend daily time with it. Now there are days when I don’t manage it, and I don’t put myself onto a guilt trip for missing this important part of my life. It is when I go two or three days in a row without getting into my journal that I start getting anxious because it tells me that I am letting my spiritual disciplines slip. But there is more to it than that, because when I avoid my journal it is evidence to me that I am seeking to avoid something in my life that needs to be dealt with: be it sin, shame, confusion, guilt, a relationship gone bad, or whatever. I probably know in my heart what it is, but I am not necessarily eager to see what my heart thinks there in blue-and-white upon the page.

And it is important to me that it is written on the page because I know I would never do it properly if I used my laptop. Others might be different, but just as it is important to me to receive communion kneeling if I possibly can, so it is important to me to have the white, lined page before me and the pen in my hand. There is an indelibility when the words are on the page, while on the computer it can be erased or edited until I think I have got it right. Often what goes on the page, even if the spelling is rotten and the grammar awful, is the heart truly speaking.

Sometimes I will open my journal not knowing what I will be writing about, at other times the subject matter may have been on my mind for days and now I am letting it out to see the light of day. On those days when I don’t know where to begin I just start writing, seeking God to guide me into all truth. It is often amazing what come flowing out and some of those entries are the most fruitful.

Entries don’t have to be long. Sometimes I will write no more than half a dozen sentences, and there are rare occasions when I might write several pages, but most of the time it is 300-500 words. This works for me, but others may go about this in an entirely different way.

Not long after C. S. Lewis’s death, his brother, Warren, was discovered making a mighty bonfire in the garden at The Kilns of letters and journals by his brother. While some were retrieved, others were lost. I like to think that my journals will be destroyed in the same way by my survivors after I am gone from this world because there is much in there that is between me and my Maker. Through my journals I have learned to pray, and praying can at times be a raw and messy business, as are some of these books.

So, David, I hope that will get you started…

Going down to the sea in ships

2007-12-23T05:19:00.000-08:00

For nearly two and a half years I have lived in the company of several remarkable men. I met the first of them in a chance encounter with an audio book which I listened to on a long car ride, and this set me off on an odyssey that almost three dozen novels later is nearly over. The men I am talking about are Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, the product of Patrick O'Brian's productive mind, then more recently I've come back into contact with C. S. Forester's hero, Horatio Hornblower.

It was Patrick O'Brian who launched me on this journey that has given me such delight while feeding my own imagination -- something that I have always believed especially important for a preacher to do. I am not a nautical person. My father-in-law was a civil servant with the Royal Navy so my wife has always had this yearning for the sea, but I am a landsman who will get a touch of seasickness on the shortest ferry journey. Yet I have found myself deeply stimulated by my immersion in the period of the long drawn out conflict that was the Napoleonic Wars.

Because we had read O'Brian's Master and Commander series Rosemary and I went on to read the whole Horatio Hornblower saga. The Hornblower stories were written by C. S. Forester during the years that straddled World War Two. I had tried them when I was a kid and had not acquired the taste, but fifty years later I came back to them with gusto, and reveled as much in the glorious tapestry of adventure and interrelationship as I did in the Aubrey-Maturin tales.

Now, as this epic spasm of novel reading draws to a close I find myself determined to learn a great deal more about the Napoleonic conflicts against whose backdrop our fictional heroes lived out their lives, fighting, prevailing, and often grieving deep wounds and loses. I had never actually been able to place the Napoleonic Wars when it came to their importance in world or British history, but now I realize them to have been a major turning point. They enthrall me -- as have the fictional characters on whose lives I have eavesdropped.

Jack Aubrey, Patrick O'Brian's creation, is a complex personality, a gentlemanly mixture of swagger and kindness. He is an extrovert, a man's man, someone who grabs life with both hands, and seemingly loves nothing better than a good fight -- especially if it helps him acquire prizes by capturing other vessels and their cargoes with the result that he and his crew get a percentage of their value. His foil is Stephen Maturin, the ship's doctor, who is an even more complex individual, an Irishman with a Catalan father who aligns with Britain because of his loathing for Napoleon and the evil that he wreaked in the Iberian peninsula.

Jack Aubrey is shrewd and cunning at sea, but he is also a lamb for the slaughter when on land -- a fool who is easily parted from his money by those who promise to make him richer quicker. He knows how to fight and inspire men, but you always sense that he is a little at a loss when he is in the company of his wife, family, and polite society. I suspect that his shortcomings on land was fairly typical of sailors of that age used to tours of duty that would be months or even years in length.

But there's another side to Jack Aubrey, for he is the man of war who loves music. In this he is a complete contrast to Horatio Hornblower for whose wooden ear turns music into a raucous din to be endured rather than enjoyed. Aubrey is a halfway decent violinist, and it is music that cements his deep, brotherly friendship with Stephen Maturin. There's many an evening when they have sat in the captain's cabin playing string duets, for Maturin was a pretty good cellist. If other musicians happen along, then they are dragged into this business of music-making, even music writing.

While Jack Aubrey is bluff and hearty, Horatio Hornblower continually fights internal battles with himself. Like his hero and namesake, Horatio Nelson, a little while on land and he has lost his sea legs, so seasickness is his unwanted companion whenever he gets back on board a ship after time a-land. Then there are these inner uncertainties that dog him even as he rapidly ascends the ladder of naval promotions, proving himself a strong and courageous leader. It is as if Hornblower never really grows out of being the uncertain boy who was rowed across Portsmouth Harbour to the HMS Indefatigable, where he became a midshipman.

He creates a kind of shell around himself to protect his seemingly fragile psyche, with the result that he barks at subordinates unnecessarily and cannot even tell his best friends his appreciation of them. He makes decisions well, but then in the quiet of his cabin second guesses himself, scared that if the action goes wrong or if the unexpected happens his career will be at an end and the respect that people have for him will evaporate. What thoughtful leader, if honest, has not had such fears and anxieties in the dark of the night after hard decisions have been made?

While Jack Aubrey has a lusty appetite when it comes to the opposite sex, Hornblower doesn't have much of a clue about women. He stumbles backwards into his first marriage to Maria, seemingly unable to walk away from a kind young lady who is the first to show him feminine affection. It is an inappropriate marriage, and throughout he wrestles to hide his pitying true feelings from this poor creature who is his adoring wife. Maria has a sad life, losing two children to smallpox, then dying in the process of giving her husband his son, Richard (what an excellent choice of name!).

Hornblower is off fighting Bonaparte when this tragedy takes place, but it sets him up to marry a woman who he believes is so far above him both socially and in every other way that she is beyond reach. He has the good fortune to become the husband of Lady Barbara Wellesley, the younger sister of the soon-to-be Duke of Wellington, England's greatest general. With such a match to a woman he adores, his continued rise is almost guaranteed.

I have loved the interplay of warfare, the hard life of sailors in those days, the relationships with wives, sweethearts, naval bigwigs, politicians, and the enemy, to name but a few of the factors that are so artfully woven together. Hornblower emerged from the leftovers of a film script that C. S. Forester, an English resident in California for much of his life, was writing. The Master and Commander sequel was imagined into existence by Patrick O'Brian, an Englishman who wished he were Irish and lived much of his adult life in Southern France with his wife. How is it that two determined exiles should write such glorious books about this England about which they had such mixed feelings?

The naval escapades of the Napoleonic Wars were in many ways the climax of the age of wooden ships. For millennia when men went down to the sea in ships and carried out their business in the great waters they had done so in small and by our standards flimsy vessels. The ships that fought in the early Nineteenth Century might have been the climax of wooden ship technology, but although their sailors did not know it within a generation or two they would be replaced by metal creatures driven by steam engines and requiring coaling stations all over the world.

O'Brian and Forster capture the squalor of those old boats: the close quarters in which men lived, the stench between decks, the ghastly food, the damp cold of wintery oceans, the terror of storms tossing them all over the place, the hard work and the countless hardships endured by officers and men alike. The authors have great respect for these tars, for they were a tough race, beyond anything most of us are likely to experience today, and the discipline with which they lived could be cruel and harsh.

But it was upon their backs that the British Empire blossomed. By prevailing at sea against Napoleon's navy, the Britain that emerged from those years of endless warfare was poised to become the preeminent global power. The British developed a supreme confidence, gathered colonies so that the sun never set on the Union Jack, and they were both the dominant trading nation and manufacturing power. The British were to be feared and envied after Napoleon had been finally defeated in 1815, and although not without challenges, they remained the world's top dog for a full century. That dominance slipping from their hands first in the trenches of Flanders and later in the battle to the death against Hitler and his Nazis. In those conflicts British and French were not enemies but fought side-by-side.

The Royal Navy remained the premier sea force for nearly 150 years, finally surrendering this privilege to the Americans during World War Two. Alas, it has continued to shrink and atrophy, and today is a mere shadow of its former self. I don't think the Royal Navy is worried about playing a supporting role to the Americans, but perhaps the tragedy today is that it continues to be pruned and reduced as once Great Britain adjusts to being Little England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

I have enjoyed my thirty months spent with fictional characters who represent beings who laid the foundations of something proud and significant. While these individuals have warts and shortcomings they also reflect an ideal -- men of honor prepared to die for the cause for which they were fighting if that is required of them. We live in an age that glorifies self-interest, and old-fashioned notions like this are either unknown, unrecognized, or unappreciated. I have no desire to romanticize war, and in one of the Hornblower books Forester launches into a tirade against it, but the real battles of life are ultimately only won by men and women of enduring honor and integrity. Furthermore, honor and integrity add touches of civility to a society that has become a dog-eat-dog affair.

Good fiction should stimulate rumination over these and larger concerns. I think that these naval sagas are good fiction and do just that. Characters are given time in book after book to develop, much as personalities grow and mature in real life. I suspect that some of the facets of these players that I have met in my reading have influenced me, and will continue to shape my thinking for a long time to come.

The View from the Bleachers

2007-12-12T07:21:00.001-08:00

My memories of the many games of rugby that I played when I was younger were of the tackles, the bumps, the bruises, and those occasional wonderful moments when I could tuck the ball under my arm and run. Because I was on the field my experience of the game was just what my own eyes saw and my own body felt. When I watch a game today, whether live or on television, I have a much better picture of what is actually going on, and can tell you with far greater accuracy what is really happening.

I feel that having moved to ministry in the UK I am now watching the fate of North American Anglicanism working itself out from a seat in the bleachers. In some ways, because I am no longer involved on a day-to-day basis and experiencing the rough and tumble, I can step back a little and try and work out exactly what is going on. Obviously, it is a very personal set of observations, but they come from someone who spent many years, as it were, on the field of play.

When you have an opportunity to stand back from what is going on, you are better able to see all the players in action, and it is a little easier to measure their play against a common set of reference points. Quite honestly, it seems to me that denial of the realities is standard at both ends of the spectrum. The voices of those who ally themselves with the "establishment" and the National Church seem as determined to read the situation through their own set of colored lenses as those at the other end of spectrum to put their own spin on the realities. While those who want everyone to kiss and make up are more sentimental than realistic.

If Kevin Martin is correct, and I think he has been fairer in his analysis of what is going on than most, then for those who continue as part of the Episcopal Church a crunch point is fast approaching when declining numbers and funds will no longer be capable of upholding the infrastructure that presently exists. You might have been able to say until now that its only a relatively small number of parishes that are causing all this upset and, by and large, other than them everything is fine and dandy, but it is no longer just parishes heading for the exit. When dioceses start doing the same then you have to change your tune.

But then, those who are conservative, orthodox, or whatever other label you want to give them, have their own blinkers on when it comes to looking at the realities. It might be a wonderful sense of relief for those leaving to get out from under the antagonistic leadership of the Episcopal Church, but it is incredibly hard and grueling work to create a whole new infrastructure in which to be church. Having been at the front end of a number of new ventures in my time, I know from personal experience the grinding agony of having limited financial resources, relatively little land or property, and how incapacitating it can be to do pioneer work after you have got over the euphoria of getting the new ministry (or whatever) up and started. It requires guts and a special mix of gifts to be a pioneer.

If you look at those who split away from the denominations at the time of the Fundamentalist Crisis in the 1920s, it wasn't until the 1970s that they were in a position to move forward having put a complete new set of structures, seminaries, and so forth, in place. While the parallels between the 20th and the 21st Centuries are not precise, there is plenty of evidence from history that movements take at least a generation to take root and much longer than that to make a systemic difference.

What makes it more tricky for those who are attempting to plough a new furrow is that in many circumstances they are facing crippling legal challenges. I almost gagged when I heard the size of the legal bills facing the CANA congregations in Northern Virginia. If you are starting afresh sums of the size they are having to cough up to the attorneys are crucial in the launching of new initiatives and the firmer establishment of what is there already. It is very handy to blame these lawsuits on Dr. Schori and her legal advisors, but when you take the action of separating from the denomination, knowing what the situation is regarding the ownership of the property, then you have to admit that you walked into this one with eyes wide open.

It is handy to blame what has happened on other people, and certainly the disastrous decisions of the 2003 General Convention were the climax of a long build-up to this crisis, but scapegoating those who you believe caused the problem does not find a way forward, neither does it seem to square with the spirit of Scripture's teaching about finding reconciliation. There is a dysfunctionality on all sides, let's call it fallenness, that has intensified the depths of this tragedy. Put in the language of heaven and earth, the Devil has been having a field day and we have all cooperated with him.

Watching the Rugby World Cup in September and October, what struck me about the way England played was their ferocious determination after a terrible start in the tournament not to let their opponents score. They were dogged in their defensive play, but their problem was that instead of going out to score tries and goals, they tended to play to prevent the other side from scoring against them. When in the final they came up against South Africa, they encountered a team who played a different kind of rugby and knew how to sidestep England's defensiveness.

What I see in the American church right now is that same dogged defensiveness. Each side is saying, "We are not going to let those who are against us win." The result is unappetizing, a war of attrition, which ultimately no one can win, and from which only the lawyers and those who nay say the gospel are benefiting.

Right now the orthodox/conservatives are winning nothing, in the medium and long-term the Episcopal Church loyalists are going to be really digging a deep hole for themselves, and meanwhile the Anglican Communion teeters on the brink of division and, worse, extinction. Clearly, the Anglican experiment as we have known it is floundering in deep water and the outcome for the advance of the Gospel is hardly very encouraging. I am sure that those who are passionate that they are right are going to stomp all over me for what I have just said, but that is what the game looks like from someone who is no longer actively involved. All I can do is grieve and pray, and ask God that at some point he will raise up wiser heads whose voices will be heard above the din.

It is because there are no easy answers that I write as I do. The church as we have known it probably is way beyond any kind of repair, but the dynamics now in place seem to me to promise further rending, further parting of friends, and further bloodlettings. Such a course is one that only leads steadily downward. Each time through history that major crises have shaken American Anglicanism the result has been to further weaken the witness of the church. Isn't it about time that we started to learn from the mistakes of the past while attempting to create a Kingdom future? This isn't about compromise, this is about what does it mean to be faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ.

The End of Term

2007-12-06T10:40:00.000-08:00

Looking forward to seeing my animals again!

It seems amazing, but my first term as Development Director at Ridley Hall is now drawing to a close. In a few days I will be boarding a plane back to the USA, and will be reunited with my wife, Rosemary, after our longest time away from one another in nearly forty years of marriage. One of the things that these fourteen weeks apart has re-emphasized to me again is that I am not constitutionally suited to bachelordom and the single life. As Scripture says, "It is not good for man to be alone..." I say "Amen" to that!

What has been interesting, and it came up in a conversation this morning, is how I am perceived by the students and my colleagues here. In the USA I am very obviously English, but here folks are not sure of that at all, and over breakfast with the Principal, an American, and a Canadian student, it became obvious that in this community I am perceived to be an American. That will probably make some of my American friends chuckle, but that's the way it is in perfidious Albion.

This very much came out yesterday at a trustees meeting of the seminary. I will not bore you with the details, but apparently from the way I presented my report, and from a slap across the wrist that I received from one of the bishops, I had forgotten in such situations how to be haved with necessary English reserve. I would hasten to add that I have no desire whatsoever to rediscover how to become English like that again, although perhaps I will have to be a little more careful. There is nothing wrong with a little brashness every now and again, especially if it keeps people thinking and discourages them from being stuffy.

It fascinates me what I have missed in these last few months. Obviously, I have missed Rosemary very, very much, but I have also missed my dog and cat, too. I am looking forward to having them all here in Cambridge with me. But almost as much, I have missed what can only be described as the priestly rhythm of life. It is now more than four months since I last presided over a Communion service, and nearly as long as that since I last preached the Word. These activities, the ministry of Word and Sacraments to which I was ordained in the late 1960s, have shaped the pattern of my life and suddenly they were taken away which left me floundering.

Here I have had no opportunity to exercise these tasks, merely to sit in the congregation and be ministered to. Perhaps that did me a world of good. Certainly, I have learned to squirm as parishioners do, and last Sunday if I had not been a visitor at the church where I was worshiping I would have been tempted to walk out because of the vacuous error that was being proclaimed angrily from the pulpit. Sitting as the recipient of ministry in a congregation is a good place to learn some fundamental lessons about humility and self-control!

I mentioned how empty life could seem without celebrating and preaching to our fellowship group on Monday morning. We were pondering and praying over the high points and low points of this first term of the academic year, and the Principal and I were the only two ordained members of the group. I wasn't fishing, but within minutes I was asked if I would be the celebrant of the end-of-term eucharist for the group, and that was a great joy. Then within 24 hours my phone rang and I was asked to preach and celebrate on a regular basis at St. Andrew's, the village church that I have been attending. Suddenly, after this enforced lay-off I was being given back something that I realize is much more precious to me than I had previously imagined.

So, I return home to Tennessee for two last weeks on Monday. I say home because I realize that home for me on earth is where Rosemary is. It is also my home because that is where one of my houses is, for our beautiful Tennessee homestead is like so many tens of thousands of others, trapped high and dry by the sub-prime crisis. There are nights when I have lain awake getting quite mad at the greed that has created the mortgage crisis that is now enveloping the markets here. I pray that we won't be paying two mortgages for too long.

What has been an interesting phenomenon is that as far as I can recall, I have not dreamed about once about England the whole time that I have been living back here. Instead, I have been dreaming about America -- perhaps that says something about where a large part of my soul is lodged.

Is the worm turning?

2007-11-25T00:54:00.000-08:00

There is a piece on today's BBC website in which Tony Blair, Britain's former Prime Minister, admits that his Christian faith is hugely important to him, that when traveling he always sought a church in which to worship on Sundays, but that he kept quiet about it when he was in office because people might think him "a nutter." The program in which he says this is to be aired later this evening, and if I can stay awake until then, I will watch it!

In that one comment Blair summed up the way the British have been enculturated over several generations to assume that a forthright affirmation of Christian faith by anyone, whether they have influence or not, is a somewhat screw loose kind of thing. Richard Dawkins, whose book about God's apparent non-existence was ironically on the Christmas-buys shelf at Borders in Cambridge the other day when I was in there, plugs into that mentality and represents it at the elite end of the spectrum.

This notion that Britain and Europe have shed every last vestige of their Christian heritage is accepted all over the place as the right way of interpreting the facts, but I would suggest that folks should be a little more cautious before drawing such conclusions.

When I was meeting in London this last week, a contact close to the hub of things, told me that actually there are now more churchgoers in the Cabinet that an any time in probably more than a century. While that doesn't prove anything it is certainly worth pondering. In addition, there is regular creative contact between 10 Downing Street and Lambeth Palace, just across the River Thames, and it ought to be remembered that the present Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is a Preacher's Kid who affirms many of the lessons he learned growing up in a Presbyterian manse.

It isn't only in secular Britain that this is happening. When I made my one trip to Australia more than twenty years ago there was a book going the rounds at that time entitled, "Can God Survive in Australia?" With the phenomenon of churches like Hillsong, it is clear that God is surviving, and now the Australians have elected a Prime Minister who makes no secret of his Christian profession. Is the worm turning, and could such a thing happen in other places in the secularized West?

The United States is unique in the openness of its prominent leaders to faith, but most of the rest of the western world is embarrassed when Presidents, senators, members of Congress, or governors talk freely about such things. The chattering classes here see such overt religiosity as gauche, naive, simplistic, reflecting an unthinking childishness that is altogether irrelevant in today's complex and increasingly troublesome world. They wonder what is wrong with such people, which illustrates the anxieties of Tony Blair, and his concern to his faith be under wraps for fear that he would be considered weak in the head -- and therefore unfit to govern.

Meanwhile, if the statistics are to be taken seriously Christian (and Jewish) religious observance in Britain continues to bump along the bottom. The question is how should such figures be interpreted, and should they be allowed to stand alone without prodding or questions being asked of them? Could it be that higher levels of Christian observance by those in political leadership here and elsewhere in the world are merely straws in the wind of something larger that is happening, or are they mere coincidences that mean little? Perhaps it is too soon to answer such a question, but a few years hence we may have a better perspective on a whole array of realities -- and this could suggest that it is the line pushed by the popular media that is amiss.

I have been guilty of over-optimism regarding all sorts of issues and concerns in the past, so it is necessary to keep that side of myself in check. However, as I re-acclimate to the British environment there are other factors that I see. Certainly, there is an undercurrent of distrust of organized religion, but I find myself asking fundamental questions about whether this means that faith itself has been flushed down the toilet.

One of the things that has impressed me is the potential long-term impact of Alpha. While well over two million people have attended an Alpha Course in the UK since 1993, and while Alpha may not be growing as fast as perhaps it once was, there is certainly no evidence of it fading away. Living and working as I do in the heart of one of Britain's healthiest theological colleges there is plenty of evidence that we are seeing some of the fruit of Alpha coming through our doors.

Just as in earlier generations there was a bubble of candidates seeking ordination several years after a Billy Graham Crusade had been held in Britain (some of my contemporaries at seminary came to Christ through Graham), today there is this steady surge coming from the ranks of those whose lives have been touched by Christ through Alpha. Last year, for example, and no one seems to have a clear explanation for it, there was a significant and unexpected increase in those seeking ordination.

A quarter of the British population knows about Alpha, and one person in thirty has attended Alpha, which would suggest that something has to be going on -- and will continue for a while. When I was first ordained the Diocese of London was the fastest shrinking when it came to church attendance, now it is seeing healthy growth in membership and average Sunday attendance. Alpha seems to have been one of the causes of this, together with a diocesan bishop who is willing to think strategically and use tools like Alpha to improve the health of his diocese.

If Alpha is a work of God, then we can expect some kind of long-term impact in altered lives, enriched families, and strengthened moral values. It takes only a relatively small critical mass to experience a transforming faith for that to filter through into wider society. I am not suggesting that Alpha is the one and only reason for spiritual advance, but it is certainly evidence that something is going on, which belies a wooden interpretation of the statistics which might lead us to think God is permanently on the back burner in Britain.

I suspect that Alpha has received the kind of response that it has because of a lot more than clever marketing and Nicky Gumbel's way with words and winning smile. I suspect that Alpha is one of several things that has touched a deep chord of longing in the British heart and psyche. In America, especially the American South, there is a general assumption within the wider culture that life is about a lot more than being a consumer, but that assumption is nowhere near as strong here. This leaves people fishing around for something more.

In Britain you see people living from one self-indulgence to the next. Right now it is Jingle Bells time, but as soon as that is over the television will be shouting to people to start booking their holidays -- a time when sun-starved Brits can turn themselves into sweaty lobsters in Florida, the Mediterranean, or some more exotic spot, convincing themselves that they are having lots and lots of fun, and this is what life is about. And so the cycle continues. I sense that a small but growing number are stopping and asking themselves whether life is about more than this. It only takes so many to do so before the pendulum starts swinging.

Furthermore, I have also found myself in conversations about the Christian faith since being here, where ordinary secular folks are trying to make sense of it in light of the Islam that they see around them. I don't think many native British people find Islam particularly attractive, but I sense that although it is hidden at the moment there are growing numbers asking how Christ stacks up when compared to Mohammad. Such popular comparative religion is probably at an early stages, but I sense we will hear more about it in the years to come.

Then there is this other fascinating phenomenon of Christian in-migration to the UK. We hear an awful lot about Muslims flocking here, as they are, but it could very well be that even more overt Christians are finding their way to these shores. 600,000-700,000 Poles have revitalized the Roman Catholic church in this land, and many of those who have come from Africa or Asia are themselves strongly committed to the Lord Jesus Christ. While the ethnic variety of Britain is far greater than it was thirty years ago when I left this country, within this new diversity are followers of Christ who in the years to come will have a lot to say and do here.

Maybe I am a Pollyanna, but maybe also a worm is turning. Certainly, it can no longer be assumed that Europe is speeding inexorably down a secular highway, although the voice of those who have no religious belief will be loud and strong. Neither can it be assumed that Christianity has lost all its dynamic and spine in the face of secularism and other faiths moving onto its turf. Something seems to be happening here. The Christian church has been written off far too many times in the past and then has popped back for me to want to do such a thing now.

Culture of Possibility or Culture of Scarcity?

2007-11-11T03:15:00.000-08:00

Portrait of Handley Moule, First Principal of Ridley Hall and later Bishop of Durham. This hangs in the Ridley dining hall

Since the beginning of September I have been attempting to get under the skin of the institution within which I now minister so that I can serve it better. I have wanted to know where it came from, what makes it tick, what is its institutional DNA, and so forth. I guess that as I have been discovering things I have been asking a lot of why questions.

I struggle for words because it is hard to describe what it is like to return to your homeland as a stranger. While much that is going on around you is very familiar, you see it through very different eyes and ask some startlingly different questions of the reality. This is what has been happening to me as I have dug into getting to grips with Ridley Hall. From this has come a whole series of interesting thoughts about the nature of Britain itself since the latter part of Victoria's reign.

Ridley is the result of a huge surge of self-confidence and generosity in this country in the 1870s and 1880s. Given the spiritual awakening that had occurred a generation earlier I would have to suggest that it was probably part of the knock-on effect of that. One of the things I learned from the great missionary statesman, Max Warren, was that we should never disconnect actions that demonstrate the advance of the Gospel from God's initiative -- especially those initiatives that had an extraordinary focus and intensity like awakenings, renewals, revivals.

Neither was Ridley Hall the only thing that happened during this period. Essentially the same networks of people were establishing and Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, simultaneously, and colossal sums of money were raised not only for these two ventures but all sorts of other godly activities, social care, public education, and so on, and so on.

Britain was at that time riding high in the world, and while some of that confidence was the product of Gospel incentive and its accompanying empowerment, some was the outcome of the wealth and influence that had been accumulating. A can-do mentality seemed to prevail, and in the years that followed Ridley's founding, for example, significant amounts of money by the standard of any age were raised to enlarge and improve the college's facilities.

Everywhere you look in Britain you find buildings and institutions from that time. Great investments were being made in what was believed to be the nation's robust future, and it was often the Christian faith that was a major driving force behind this movement. But that era of philanthropy and expansiveness evaporated within a few decades. I have little doubt that there was some kind of relationship between the ebbing of generosity and the ebbing of the Christian faith.

The Twentieth Century was also a period during which Britain received what might be described as a treble whammy. It began with World War One which, as we have been hearing today, Remembrance Sunday, decimated the flower of a generation. The brightest and best of British, French, German, and other nations' manhood gave their lives in the bloodbath that was the Western Front. It is impossible to assess just how much spiritual and psychological damage that war did to the capacity of the nations involved to think well of themselves.

There followed first the Great Depression and then a mere twenty years after the first World War had ended a second, the war in which my father fought -- and many of his contemporaries died. Winston Churchill knew as he entered that conflict for what he described as "Christian civilization," that even if Britain was on the winning side it would be impoverished. By 1945, the year in which I was born, there were few fortunes left to fund philanthropy, and the church itself had been deeply wounded by the course of events together with its own loss of spiritual and theological nerve.

During World War Two the government had taken control of almost every aspect of life so that everything possible could be directed at the business of winning the conflict against Hitler and his dreams of world domination. When the war ended that sense of the government being the one who gathered and then divided out the goodies was embedded in the national psyche. It didn't help that the nation was penniless, its empire was dribbling away, and the people were weary from the slog that the Twentieth Century had to that point been to them.

It was sometime during that first half of the last century that the culture of possibility which had accompanied plenty gave way to a culture of scarcity which would rather fight to protect just a tiny portion of what it already had, rather than losing everything altogether. The habits of such a dependent culture do not disappear readily, and Brits are still far readier, even if they constantly moan about it, to allow the state to eavesdrop and intrude upon its life than is healthy. This is one of the areas where I realize how differently I now see things than when I first left these shores.

Yet Britain has little excuse these days to plead poverty and continue hiding from the challenges by wallowing in this culture of scarcity. This is a wealthy country, one of the richest in the world. While there are certainly pockets of need and disadvantage (some of them quite large), the vast majority of the population are more prosperous than ever before: why else would a large portion of the European population and half of Africa and Asia want to migrate here?

Something that is required now is for a larger portion of the British to relearn the grace of possibility-thinking, and the philanthropy that goes with it. Christians need to learn it just as much as the general population, and I wonder whether part of the weakness of the faith here is that we still tend to give God a tip rather than at least a tithe. That is not to say that money would solve all the problems, but didn't someone once say that where our treasure is, there will our heart be also?

I have been wondering (my line of thought following a suggestion in Philip Jenkins' book, God's Continent, that I reviewed a couple of months ago), whether the arrival of a dynamic Islam on these shores might actually be a blessing in disguise because its presence forces the native population to think seriously about God, faith, morals, values, and so forth. What a challenge for the Gospel Britain is today. We here could well be on the front line of something big. The question is will we rise to the challenge?

What is required is a vision and an imagination that is huge, as big as the Lord God himself. Such a vision and imagination would has such Kingdom implications that we would all stand back in amazement and astonishment.

Why the American Church crisis is not front and center

2007-10-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

St. Andrew's Church, Impington, where I am worshiping

Watching the goings on in the American church from a distance of 3,000 miles, is an eerie, almost out-of-body experience. It is like sitting on the window sill and looking across at the being you once inhabited while a melee of people work on it, and you are not quite sure which ones are doing the healing and which ones are doing the ripping apart!

What is more intriguing and a little disconcerting is that apart from a few enthusiasts, ecclesiastical events on the landmass that sits between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans do not seem to be high on most lists of priorities here in Britain.

Part of me understands that response, because when I log into various of the blogs and read the pronouncements of bishops or the Episcopal News Service, the bit of me that is getting absorbed back into the English church and the new ministry before me is distancing from the crisis in an attempt to protect myself from the on-going pain. The other part of me, the part that is still a priest of the Diocese of Tennessee, rings my hands, prays, gets anxious about what is going on and how people I love are being treated (or hurt); but most of this I have to do in private -- because there is an entirely different set of agendas and priorities here.

Now, I confess, that I have not traveled much out of Cambridge since arriving here, so my insights are limited to the sliver of opinion in the little bubble in which I function, but the world in which I live is pretty engaged with broader circumstances so what is happening here is probably not much different from what is happening in a lot of other places. Everyone knows that things are not easy in the American or Canadian churches, but either they have a different set of pressing concerns, or they don't want to know about it. Although I haven't heard it said, I suspect some are shaking heads and a muttering to themselves something about those crazy Americans.

Yet, I suspect there is more going on beneath the surface than just this. In Britain there is now this huge sense that the Christian perspective on things is very much a minority taste that should be neither seen nor heard. Regarding the tussle to shape postmodern culture, a relativistic utilitarian approach to living and decision-making prevails, and attitudes which are rooted in an omnipotent God who has revealed himself are often condemned as irrelevant, intolerant, or both.

Nevertheless, in many hearts there is this yearning, and people find it difficult to put their finger on it. Yesterday afternoon I was talking to a totally unchurched family whose daughter had completed some graduate studies, and the graduation ceremony had taken place a few days earlier in the cathedral of the city where she had been studying. There was, it seemed, something about the building, the prayer, the graduation exercises, that had grabbed at the soul and heartstrings of these folks: they were aware of their need for the transcendent, but did not have the language with which to express it.

Thus it is that the Church of England and others are concentrating increasing amounts of attention on how to reach the unreached: folks who are three, four, five, or more generations removed from any kind of faith expression or church involvement. There are now folks in my own extended family who are four or five generations removed from any kind of Christian profession or church membership. What the Christian gospel is about is a mystery to the vast majority of the British (and I would have to add broader European) native population.

I suspect that what people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are doing in their best-selling frontal attacks on belief in God is both shaping public attitudes as well as amplifying the prevailing popular mindset. One American Christian visiting here that I was talking to the other day was describing a very interesting conversation with a taxi driver in which he expressed many of the same opinions as Professor Dawkins, although he had probably never heard of him. The general drift of his argument was that "no one believes that stuff any longer," something that is eagerly reflected back to folks through the media.

Thus the challenge before the churches is huge. Just how do you coax people into a relationship with the believing community when a large part of it either seems totally inept, or might affirm ideas and values that the popular culture either does not understand or sees as petty and narrow-minded. My own commitment to biblical Christian values has already been roundly condemned as such by some of my nearest and dearest, even though I have overtly said very little.

Last Sunday evening I attended the village church to which I have chosen to attach myself and delighted in the office of Evening Prayer, together with eleven others. As one who has spent his whole adult life hanging around the church and soaking up the liturgy, it was a joy to be part of that act of worship, however, what we were doing in that ancient building would not have made much sense to the vast majority in the homes that cluster around St. Andrew's Church. To them this was about as relevant to daily life as the strange secret ceremonies of the Freemasons.

It isn't that there aren't gifted and godly people attempting to find the way to bring Christ into the lives of the unchurched population of this land. To my delight I have been discovering some of the most committed and creative people imaginable who are seeking to respond to today's challenge, but there are few parts of England where the seed when planted sprouts forth thirty, fifty, a hundredfold. In most places the going is much tougher than that, and apart from this wistfulness that there must be something more to existence than this, there is little evidence of the spiritual tide turning.

Thus, the goings on in the United States are not going to be on the front burner. What is happening in America is a bit of static, there in the background, irritating, but like someone else's civil war of which we here are spectators. It is almost as if the English church is saying, "We're sorry, we have bigger fish to fry."

Yet when one part of the Body is troubled there is no way that another part can responsibly wash its hands of the problems. If you were to ask me what is the biggest problem facing the English church at this time, it is that in so many ways it has taken on the relativistic utilitarianism that prevails in so much British thinking. Thus, instead of expressing conviction and living it out, it shrugs its shoulders and says we must be tolerant, committed to diversity, non-judgmental, living and letting live. While some of this may be admirable, it should not take place at the expense of biblical standards and values, however unpopular they might be in the prevailing culture.

Falling into the Sub-Prime Pit

2007-10-21T01:55:00.000-07:00

It would appear that the Kews have fallen into the pit created by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the consequent slowing of the economy, and the slump in the housing market. Other than a nibble or two, very little interest has been shown in our house in Tennessee by potential buyers, and with winter coming on this is not the time of the year when people traditionally spend a lot of time and effort trying to find a new roof to put over their heads. We aren't alone, tens of thousands of sellers are in the same boat even in fast-growing counties like ours.

Meanwhile, within the next ten day we complete the purchase of a house here in England, and face the prospect of two mortgages to pay every month for a while. I don't like the idea at all, but there is little I can do about it. I had lunch with an old friend the other day who was caught in the same bind of owning two houses for several years in the recession of fifteen years or so ago -- something I hope and pray does not happen to us!

It seems only yesterday that folks were saying that there should be no reason at all why people wouldn't snap up our home in Williamson County, Tennessee, set as it is overlooking a beautiful view that will never be spoiled by building, a home that is energy smart, beautifully finished, and has been a delight and joy to ourselves. But that was before we found ourselves on the receiving end of a financial crisis that has been partly triggered by a major failure on the part of the banking system when it comes to making loans to families wanting a home of their own.

The tragedy of this whole banking crisis is that so many who aspired to the American dream of their own rather than a rented roof have now lost what they yearned for in the downward spiral that has taken place. I suspect we will be able to find our way financially through the impact of this crisis upon ourselves although will lose quite a lot as a result, but others have had their lives ruined for years to come, sometimes as a result of their own collusion with the less-than-honest practices of the mortgage companies.

I love my solar home in Tennessee, and so does Rosemary, my wife, and we built it in an effort to be environmentally responsible. We love it so much that we want to pass it on as a trust to some other family who will take care of it and use it to make the point that there are ways of living comfortably but having a minimal impact upon the world's climate.

If God had not called us to the new work which I am now doing in Cambridge, England, there is no way in the world that we would have left this house so soon. But following God's clear leading sometimes means making painful sacrifices, and that is what we are in the process of doing. The problem is that the sacrifice is now even more painful than we had anticipated.

What has happened in the USA regarding sub-prime mortgages, their packaging, and their selling on to other lenders, is now having an impact here in Britain. This crisis is truly global. Last month I saw the very first bank run of my life, when thousands lined up outside offices of the once much-respected British bank, Northern Rock, to retrieve savings which they thought they might lose. Watching the line snaking along the street in Cambridge was like seeing live the run on the family savings and loan in the Jimmy Stewart classic, "Its A Wonderful Life."

Then there was the news this week that over 65% of mortgage applications were turned down in this country last month -- which is one reason, I think, why my bank has been dragging its feet, and turning over every stone before issuing the loan that I need here. In these last couple of months I have learned a lot about the knock on effect of sin, and the disappointment of seeing something that is precious to me waiting forlornly for a new owner.

Thoughts on Transitions and Change

2007-10-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

The other afternoon I grabbed a book off my shelf and headed round the corner to an old-fashioned barber's shop to get my first haircut since arriving in Cambridge. They don't take appointments, you just have to sit until it is your turn to be shorn, so I needed something to while the waiting time away. The book I picked up was William Bridges' Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change.

This is a book I have read several times before, as well as dipping into from time to time because the writer understands transitions, my life has been shaped by a series of difficult transitions, and I have not always navigated them well. Indeed, I think that I have developed this abiding interest in the future because I sometimes transition so badly that I have hoped it would give me a leg up, as it were! As I flipped through the pages and looked at my previous underlinings I realized that perhaps I was not as far down the transitional road back into English life as I had thought.

Bridges identifies several stages to a transition, the first being making a good ending of what you have been and what you have been doing. You cannot get on with a constructive transition until you have given decent Christian burial to your past. When you move forward into something new, there are always losses and with those losses come a tangle of emotions, awkward feelings, and ambivalences, all of which require your best attention.

The day after my haircut I received an email from someone who because of the health of a child has had to leave in mid-stream a ministry that he loved in order to be in a place where his kid is going to receive absolutely vital health care. Of course, he and his wife were battered and bewildered by his internal responses to all they found themselves going through. I understand some of those feelings, because that is where part of me is right now. Put simply, I am not yet able to be fully engaged in my ministry in Cambridge because there are still so many factors of my life in Tennessee that, quite honestly, I am finding trouble letting go of.

Individuals, organizations, cultures all have trouble saying farewell to the past and moving on into the kind of neutral zone where they are able to reorient, and which is the beginning of so many elements of growth that can take place when transitioning. Abandoning our past is not the way to healthily handle transition, because abandonment aborts the process of leaving and grieving. To put it crudely, it is a bit like not bothering to go to a parent or sibling's funeral, however much you were at odds with that family member. If we are to make a fresh beginning then it is essential that we manage a good ending to the old.

Transition has the capacity make you into a very different kind of person. Handle it well and you grow, handle it badly and you either stagnate or fester. William Bridges wrote another much more personal book about his own transitions which he sub-titled "embracing life's most difficult moments." The message of this book is loud and clear that if you fail to embrace such moments then it is possible that maturities of which you are capable will pass you by. He echoes the opening words of Moby Dick, where Herman Melville writes about "the damp, drizzly November of my soul." I guess that journeys of transition often feel like this, and it is necessary for us to gird ourselves up and grasp them appropriately.

The transition I am making is not only from the USA to England, but is also from parish ministry to seminary work, from maintaining the life of a congregation to advancing the life of a theological college that has an exciting future. I feel at sea in that I no longer have a congregation, which to me has always been a bit like an extended family to which I belong, but I am in the process of becoming part of a team in the rather intense little communities that seminaries often tend to be. Meanwhile, for the first time in nearly forty years I find myself temporarily living not as part of a couple but a single life - which means I am learning all sorts of interesting things about myself as I wait for my wife to arrive.

In the midst of all that is going on in my own life I am reading a recent history of Ridley Hall, commissioned for the 125th anniversary of the college. The Sixties and Seventies, were a painful period when the whole future of Ridley was up for grabs, and the college struggled to make a difficult transition either into oblivion, or a merger, or into something different. One of the reasons it was so difficult was because these were difficult years for the Christian faith in Britain.

Elements of the mood of that period I recall as if it was yesterday, because it was when I was preparing for and starting out on my ordained life. While our seminary was relatively healthy, when I got into parish life I found myself confronted with all sorts of things I had not been expecting because so much was changing. We had been trained for one kind of ministry, but so much happened during the four years I was in process that by the time I came out a different kind of world was being born. The fabric of the church was being stretched within a context where the fabric of the culture was being radically altered. I am certain that some of my peers have spent their whole ministries with heads buried in the sand trying to ignore what is happening.

The truth is that Ridley Hall came within a whisker of dying in the early Seventies. By God's grace that didn't quite happen, and while reading the story of the college's trials is agony, the story of its rebirth makes fascinating reading. Now, several decades later this is a place of grace that is full to overflowing with men and women eager to serve Christ with heart, soul, mind, and strength in the church. Yet some of the seeds that are blossoming today were planted during that 'near death' experience that took place a couple of generations ago.

The transition that Ridley has made has not been easy, and the veterans here would perhaps agree that there is still a long way to go, but out of that era has come something potentially very beautiful for God. Valuable lessons were learned in those dark years that so far have not been forgotten, and I sense that no one rests on their laurels here. There is something extraordinarily robust about this theological college as it focuses on Christ, his truth, and how these impact the nation and nations during this postmodern time.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned about transitioning is that these periods cannot be forced, any more than a child can be encouraged to be born on its due date! Our lives don't straighten out after a transition for months for any number of reasons, but out of these in-between-times can come great and glorious blessings.

As I flicked the pages of Managing Transitions as I waited for a little boy to finish having his hair cut the other afternoon I rediscovered a quote from the French novelist Andre Gide that rings bells with me: "One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a long time."

I suspect that in the church today we have lost sight of the shore, but if we can accept that we are being led forward under the sovereign hand of God, then in due course and by his grace we will discover new lands.

A Month After Returning to Britain

2007-10-02T23:48:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken by the webcam in the market square in Cambridge just a couple of minutes after I had finished writing this (http://www.camplus.co.uk/webcam.htm)

It is now more than a month since I returned to Britain and am already in certain ways reverting to type and complaining vociferously about the weather, as is the habit of all the people of this land. After a long hot dry summer in Tennessee it was at first nice to feel the gentle breezes and little showers, but when the gently breezes turn damp and cold, and the showers keep coming for days on end, it doesn't do a lot for a person's spirits!

Then what is fascinating is to discover the North American sub-culture that exists in a place like Cambridge where there are literally thousands of Americans and Canadians. As we get together with one another each has his or her own very interesting take on the place, recognizing that there is a certain resistance to change here that can be either quaint or infuriating, depending on your mood or your circumstances. This innate conservatism is, I suppose, inevitable in the context of a university and city as deep-rooted as this is, but it contrasts fascinatingly with the rush to change that have taken place in Britain's overall culture during the three decades that I was away, and how this relates to the Christian community.

Cambridge probably has a higher density of churches and active Christians than most other places in the UK, and I am functioning within the context of a Christian community, but despite this fundamental to all thinking seems to be that by its very nature the prevailing culture and Christian faith and values are at odds with one another. So many of the normative responses of the mainstream culture now are those that began to gain credence during the 1960s as part of the counter-culture; in most people's minds here the church and Christian responses to the challenges of our times are dismissed as the product of dessicated minds that live in a cozy backwater.

This is an increasingly common European attitude, and showed itself off significantly when the erstwhile European Union constitution that died at the hands of referenda in France and Netherlands several years ago, baulked at mentioning the Christian heritage of this continent as part of the antecedent forces that have shaped Europe. For the vast majority of the elite, their Christian past embarrasses them, filtering down from and out of the popular culture.

Yet strangely enough, religious news and the activities of such as the Archbishop of Canterbury garner much more coverage than one would expect in a post-Christian, assertively secular environment. Add to this the fact that the Prime Minister of the UK is a son of the parsonage and his predecessor openly professes a Christian faith, and it is easy to see that there are a lot of ambivalences and ambiguities that are still in the process of playing themselves out.

In addition, the lines are drawn very differently than in the USA. Right now there are rumblings of a General Election in Britain in the next few weeks and this was a topic of conversation the other evening in the Roman Catholic theological institute where I am temporarily rooming. I shrugged and said that I was glad I was not registered to vote because I am not sure where I would cast it. One very traditional Catholic woman pushed me and I said that despite a past voting history elsewhere, I found the more family-friendly policies of the Conservative Party rather attractive. She was horrified, walked away from me, and refused to talk to me for the rest of the evening.

The reason for her horror was a visceral perception that the Conservative Party is weak on issues of social justice, the environment, and other concerns that do not ruffle the feathers of traditional people that much in the USA. It hardly seemed worth telling her that in many respects by American standards I am politically rather liberal, I doubt whether she would have believed it. I had always known that there was a much tighter relationship between conservative political attitudes and traditional/conservative religious ones in the USA than is the case in the UK, but this interchange enabled me to see just how far the center of gravity has shifted here in the last generation or two.

Let me go back to the issue of the family, which I think from my observation of life here, is going to be increasingly crucial. There has been a tremendous erosion since 1976. When I left the UK for the States, while traditional notions of family were under pressure, children out of wedlock were still a pretty big no-no and divorce while rising was nowhere near as prevalent as it is now. Neither was co-habiting, or experimental configurations of "familial" relationships involving both sexes and just one. When I go with my daughter and son-in-law to take my granddaughter for a walk in the lovely park behind their home in Birmingham, I would estimate that perhaps as many as 50% of the parents with children in the playgrounds are raising children alone, and many may never have known two parents, certainly two parents married to one another.

Not only that, but relationships are fluid and realities are covered up in the typically post-modern way with words. Whether married or living together or what, people here tend to refer to their significant other as their "partner," a word that can be given all sorts of connotations. I was in a public building the other day engaging with the bureaucracy and saw there waiting in line those who have been badly hurt by such domestic fluidity, listened in on their noisy conversations, and recognized the despair in their faces as they brought their concerns to the various officials in the building. I suspect from what I have read systematically and gathered informally, that these folks are merely the tip of a colossal iceberg.

Suffice it to say that what has for a long time been the norm is no longer the norm, the culture is in uncharted territory, and the outcome of that is right now hard to predict -- and, personally, I do not feel sanguine.

In addition when I take my granddaughter on one of those walks I see the huge impact that immigration from around the world is having on Britain. Unlike the USA, Britain has not been the migrant's destiny to anything like the same degree over the last couple of centuries, until this period since World War Two. As I watch our two-year-old happily jaunting around the swings and slides, she does so in the company of kids from all over Asia, the Caribbean, parts of Africa, and various corners of Europe.

From the dress and style of the parents gathered with them, this means a huge religious variety. Certainly the Muslims are the most prominent, some women with everything but their eyes covered, but there are obviously a lot of Hindus and Sikhs as well. Of the native population it is hard to tell how many would profess a Christian faith of any kind, but from language and behavior it is not difficult to work out those who do not!

What does this mean for the future? At apocalyptic moments I find myself getting quite frightened for the wellbeing of my kids and grandkids, but this observation of a changing reality has certainly fed my praying in the last few weeks. It could be that we are seeing a genuinely multi-cultural Britain emerging from which great richness could flow, but this is not necessarily the case and we are too early in the process to see what the pie being baked will look and taste like.

Whichever way we interpret the changing situation, the challenge before the Christian community is enormous. Functioning in the setting of a theological college (the British for a seminary), what I am seeing on the part of students and teachers alike is an eagerness to confront the issues modern Britain throws in the face of the Kingdom, and not to run away. I came to Ridley knowing that something remarkable was going on here, but what I have discovered has more than met my expectations.

Some weeks ago I was accused by an American detractor of going and burying myself in obscurity in Cambridge, which suggests an unrealistic and romantic notion of what this city is actually about! Indeed, one of the things that I have sensed since being here is that I am now in one of the "hot spots" that is playing a significant role in shaping our world, both in terms of ideas and in terms of technology.

If the Christian faith is to advance in this bracing spiritual and intellectual climate in which it finds itself then it is going to need the brightest and best in leadership, and these leaders, lay and ordained, are going to require the sort of training and resourcing that will enable them to be affect the changes required. I am increasingly certain this is what Ridley Hall is all about, since its foundation and until now.

As I look at the honor roll, as it were, of this place, I keep coming across names that have fought the good fight with great tenacity, skill, grace, and courage. John Stott was an alumnus of this place, but so were many other key leaders, not least John Sentamu, Archbishop of York. Graduates from Ridley literally helped plant the Anglican Communion, and have served God everywhere from the Houses of Commons and the Lords, as well as Britain's industrial jungles, and cities and real jungles in every corner of this planet -- and still do.

The task of a seminary like Ridley Hall is to raise up the next generation to follow in their footsteps, and as I look at the men and women in chapel in the morning, or talk to them over lunch, I find myself wondering which of these is destined for greatness, and how many of them will dig in, get on with the job, and serve Christ with all their heart, mind, and sinew, receiving very little applause for their faithfulness. Because we live in a global culture, a place like this is for the whole world, not just for Britain alone. This is certainly an exciting place to be, and I think that we heard God's call aright when he offered us the chance to be here.

Well, here I am

2007-09-27T00:37:00.000-07:00

Granddaughter, Hannah, on her swing

Fiction and reality sometimes collude, and that seems to be happening in my life. Over the last two years I have, with gaps, been steadily working my way through the Patrick O'Brian "Master and Commander" series of books. These novels, set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars trace the friendship of a rising British naval officer, Jack Aubrey, and his close friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, who sails with him as the ship's surgeon.

What makes these stories so fascinating is the developing relationship between the two men, their marriages, their children, their shipmates, even their enemies. Written by O'Brian late in his career, they represent the mature fruit of an author who is a master craftsman, someone who is an acute observer of people. The last book in the series is simply entitled "21." This wasn't what O'Brian intended, but he passed away at the age of 85 leaving 65 pages of typewritten manuscript and a further dozen more of rough draft. We are literally left in the middle of a sentence as Aubrey and Maturin leave the reader's life without any idea of what happens next, how their lives would continue to evolve, and where the tides of time and fortune would take them.

I tell this at such length because that is much how I am feeling at the moment. On September 3 I got onto a plane at Nashville and left behind my old life in Tennessee, arriving here in Cambridge on September 4, and beginning my new life at Ridley Hall on September 5. The threads of the past which had always been so important were suddenly severed, and new threads and relationships needed immediately to be crafted. What made it more difficult was that I left my wife, dog, cat, and home behind, and found myself living in a single room in a Roman Catholic institution just round the corner from the seminary. It was like being back in boarding school!

It was as if I had slipped through a wrinkle in time and been stripped of my identity. Just as I lost my friends, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, in mid-sentence, so it seems to be in my own life.

One very helpful woman, a retired priest's wife, gave me a several page piece written by a Japanese woman who had spent fifteen years in Britain before returning home, and she was talking about the reverse culture shock she was experiencing. As soon as I read it, it rang bells with me. You come back to your place of origin a very different person from the one that left so many years before, and in reality your home is now the place from which you came. There is grieving that needs to be done, not the least for me over the business of trying to sell our American home which I love dearly.

During my first couple of weeks here there was a strong impulse to break my contract, jump straight on a plane, and go back to Tennessee where we have lived for so long. I miss its climate (Cambridge is already getting awfully damp and cold); I miss its people (I am realizing just how dear some of my friends there actually are); and I miss the familiar word where I knew who I was, what was my place, and how I fitted.

I think I am over that now, helped along by large doses of daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law, but I recognize that I am still in survival mode in what is, by and large, an alien world and culture. I am getting into my work and discovering just how huge the challenge is, and that is engaging my creative energies, and I must say that I am enjoying that sense of rootedness which is inevitably there in a city as old and significant as Cambridge.

Last Sunday I went church-shopping. I didn't want to be part of one of the big congregations in Cambridge that cater overwhelmingly to students and the young, but I wanted to find somewhere for Rosemary (when she gets here) and myself where we can be part of a loving fellowship and make our contribution to the advance of the Kingdom. I found my way to St. Andrew's Church, Impington, a delightful village on the north side of Cambridge, and next door to the one in which I will soon be living.

After having been part of two congregations in Tennessee, each of which was under 25 years old, I now found myself worshiping in a village whose existence was first recorded in the 10th Century, and whose church is a 14th Century foundation. The congregation of fifty or so was older rather than younger, and there was a faithfulness about the whole thing that I appreciated and found a great blessing. In the coffee hour afterwards I was made to feel more welcome than almost anywhere I have ever gone. I have promised to go back, and I have this funny feeling that this is going to be a place where we could have a part to play. (http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/st.andrews.histon/impmain.htm)

Several people have been asking what's happening to me, so there's my first report. Perhaps in later items I will go into some of the other things that I am adjusting to, one of them being thousands of miles from the maelstrom that is the Episcopal Church, but that's for another time.

The Revd. Dr. Robert D. "Chip" Nix

2007-09-21T05:09:00.001-07:00

I learned when I logged on to my email yesterday morning that my friend of thirty-five years, Robert "Chip" Nix was promoted to glory, taken home by the Lord yesterday evening. Chip had been ill for several months fighting cancerous lesions in the brain. I was in the midst of having my haircut on a hot July Saturday when my phone rang and Chip broke his news to me. He said then that it didn't look good.

I had hoped that I would be able to see Chip before leaving the USA for my new work and ministry here in England, but try as I might to arrange a quick visit to Texas, such a thing proved impossible, so I had to make do with phone calls. Actually, I had been planning to call him from England today, but that is now not possible. I continue to wish that somehow I had managed to get to Austin, and share one of the precious days with him.

Chip Nix appeared in my life in the early 1970s when I had just become the assistant at St. Mary Magdalene Church, Stoke Bishop, a leafy suburb of Bristol, England, and he arrived as a seminarian at Trinity Theological College, just a few hundred yards from our church. He was there as part of a triumvirate of young Episcopal evangelicals whose lives had been influenced for Christ by John Guest, then Rector of Chip's home church, St. Stephen's, Sewickley, on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, PA. Chip had a lot of hair in those days, a droopy mustache, and was a Vietnam Vet.

And so our lives became entwined, but I thought when he returned to the US with his newly-acquired English wife, Carol, that this was just about the last I would see of him. I never at that time expected that America would be in my future, but several years after we first met my life took its American turn, and on my first visit I spent a night with the Nixes in their Manhattan apartment when Chip was doing his Episcopal year of studies at General Theological Seminary.

From then on our paths continued to cross. As is often the case in the Episcopal Church spread across a huge continent, we would stay in touch, but there would often be several years between being able to see each other, although we talk on the phone, exchange emails and occasional instant messages.

Chip's ministry, like all of us had its highs and lows. He worked in various corners of the USA in parishes large and small, and there is a trail of lives who have been shaped positively by his ministry. But it has seemed to be that it has been during his latter years that he found a role that so well fitted his extraordinary array of gifts -- that of an interim minister. There are several congregations today who have been profoundly blessed because the Nixes have been there, and Chip has been their rector for a while.

Perhaps the fairest thing that could be said about Chip was that he was someone whose life was devoted to Jesus Christ with passion, and he lived out that discipleship to his very last breath. He was certainly one of the kindest men that I have known, and always had a listening ear and shared good counsel when this friend was struggling or in trouble. We would talk about ministry and its struggles, share titles of books that ought to be read, and would just sometimes shoot the breeze. He prayed for me often, I know, and I prayed for him, and have prayed constantly for him during these last couple of months of his life.

Chip had his weaknesses and shortcomings, which of us doesn't, but if I were to find a way of summing this person up it would be as a man who sought to be mastered by God. He will be sorely missed. He now shares the joy of eternity with the Lord he has served wholeheartedly, and for that we can be glad. Yet he leaves a wife and two daughters who are bereft without him, in addition to those many, many friends that he accumulated.

I am thankful for the privilege of knowing this delightful man, and I pray that he will remain an example to me as someone who I should seek to emulate.

God's Continent - A Review

2007-09-04T23:53:00.000-07:00

A Review of Philip Jenkins' book, God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) US$28.00 (Amazon.com $13.00)

I am writing this as I seek to adjust to the fact that after more than three decades my homeland, England, is once again truly my home -- although in many ways I feel a total stranger. I finished reading Philip Jenkins' latest book, God's Continent, as I traveled back to Britain to take up my new position at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and coming here added urgency to the task. Not only have I worked harder than I might sifting Jenkins' words, but often this has been accompanied by long moments of staring into empty space attempting to grasp the implication of what he has written.

Philip Jenkins, the Welshman who is Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State, is one of those rare individuals who is capable of digesting huge quantities of information, and from his synthesis of it emerges theses that are calm, considered, and sensible, and sometimes slightly contrarian. There has been an awful lot written and said during recent years about the rise of Islam in secularized Europe, some of it frightening, much of it hysterical, and often seemingly designed more to sell books than to enlighten.
God's Continent comes, therefore, as a delightful relief. Philip Jenkins, instead of fanning flames of anxiety tries to digest the realities as they are on the ground and to put them into some kind of historical perspective. Jenkins sees it as his task to enlighten rather than to terrify, believing that responding to the facts as they can be ascertained is far the best way of proceeding. God's Continent is chock full of facts, while the endnotes suggest many, many more are stored away in the recesses of the author's brain!

As he has gathered these facts Jenkins has obviously asked of them endless questions, and then sought to put them in some kind of perspective. Jenkins sees his task as enlightening rather than terrifying, and builds his case from the facts as they are on the ground. God's Continent is chock full of facts about what Europe is like, how secularism has become so influential in Europe, yet how vibrant are certain strains of Christianity, coupled with the vibrancy of many less mainstream forms of the faith. The other morning I was driving early through the industrial town of Luton (where it happened I had been born), and was surprised to see that one of the huge old movie theatres is now the UK headquarters for what I suspect is an African, Afro-Carribean denomination.

Then there are facts about Islam in Europe, whose dynamic growth in numbers and influence is the unexpected outcome of post-World War Two immigration policies, coupled with the decline in birthrates of the domestic populations. Britain and France, for example, allowed significant immigration of workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Algeria, never having thought through the consequences for second, third, and fourth generation descendants of these eager newcomers.

Unlike Britain and France, Germany did not have an empire from which to import people to do the menial jobs, so guest workers were imported from countries such as Turkey, the expectation being that they would return home when their time in Germany was up. This did not happen, and so there is now a growing Turkish and Islamic group within the heart of German culture and society. In the last dozen years or so Europe has woken up to the fact that there is a whole new challenge before it, the nature of which Jenkins spells out using demonstrable facts and circumstances to make his case rather than appealing to emotion and fear to make his point.

First of all he debunks the notion that the Islamic crescent flag is going to flutter in dominance over European skies any time soon -- if ever. The statistics of past, present, and future immigration from the Islamic world, he contends, do not support such a notion. This is not to say that Islam won't be a significant minority in Europe but it radically overstates the case that Westminster Abbey's future is as a mosque or that the fashionable Champs d'Elysee in Paris will be peopled by women wearing head scarves and burkas!

Secondly, he encourages his readers not to write off Christianity so quickly. Yes, its traditional forms and liberal theologies are in trouble, but there is a great deal more to the faith in Europe than that. Many of those immigrants from Africa and Asia are often mistakenly labeled as Muslims when in fact they are Christians, and vibrantly so. Some of the largest congregations in Europe, in fact, are to be found in the minority communities (thus the old Odean theatre in Luton), and don't write off fresh energies in the Catholic or mainstream Protestant churches, coming in flavors and packages like Alpha.

And bear in mind the nature of Christianity, he encourages us, for as it is challenged in what has historically been its home territory there is the likelihood that it will perk up considerably. "Viewed over the centuries, perhaps the best indicator that Christianity is about to expand or revive is a widespread conviction that the religion is doomed or in its last days... nothing drives activists and reformers more powerfully than the sense that their faith is about to perish in their homelands and that they urgently need to make up these losses farther afiled, whether overseas or among the previously neglected lost sheep at home (pages 288-289).

What is clear is that Europe's secular elites, after having dismissed religion as a curiosity for the best part of half a century, are just starting to wake up to the fact that religion is not withering away, but that there are two major religions each with a significant sense of identity in their very own backyard. Yes, Jenkins tells us, as Islam takes root in Europe it is going to be changed by its encounter with modernity, secularity, and being a minority movement in an unsympathetic culture, but this "Islamic Revolution" is not going to change it into the empty and vacuous affair that has so gutted liberal Christianity, which is the elitist model of the way it ought to go.

Philip Jenkins works hard to tease out the various issues that Europeans, whether Christian, Muslim, secular, or something else, have to address in the coming years. These will include issues of sexuality, gender, freedom of speech, censorship, self-censorship, and so forth. Then there is the huge one of Islam being given great freedom to express itself in what has been the Christian heartland, freedoms that are utterly denied Christians in Islam's own heartland, a point brought home strongly to me in a conversation yesterday evening with a student who has come from one of those countries. Saudis, for example, are free to finance a $65 million mosque in Rome, while as one priest puts it, Christians in the Arabian peninsular function in something akin to the catacombs.

Then there is the whole issue of blasphemy, and what can be portrayed on screen, stage, and in the written word. The most significant and legitimate question related to this is whether it is appropriate for Christianity to be openly pilloried, as it often is in Europe, because Christians do not threaten violence and even murder when attacked in this way in a free society. However, society tiptoes around Muslims, censoring itself, because it fears that if treated as Christians are they would resort to violence.

I always feel much better when facts are out because then we can address them, Jenkins
deliberately puts the facts on the table. Some of the facts I personally do not like, some are not as bad as I feared, but all of them are grist for the mill of what is a remarkable book that ought to be taken seriously by thoughtful Christians -- especially any who have a deep concern for the future of Europe. I would add that the thoughtful Muslim would also have much to gain from reading this helpful volume.

That secular Europeans are now asking important questions about their religious heritage is itself an encouragement. That there is an alternative forceful challenge being mounted for people's hearts is something Christians need to take with the utmost seriousness. Perhaps there are signs that this is happening and there could be some very interesting fruit being borne in the days ahead. I cannot help thinking that God's providence is preparing the ground for something that could be very significant as Europe moves forward into the future.

On a personal note, I find myself pondering that maybe... perhaps... God has drawn us back to Europe at just such a time as this, and that the ministry ahead of me is a small part of a bigger Kingdom response to this huge challenge (and opportunity) that will shape the future of Europe, and therefore of the whole world.

After half a lifetime...

2007-08-26T14:00:00.001-07:00

It is hard to believe that my time here has almost run out and I am in my final days as a resident of these United States. When I board the plane in Nashville on Labor Day to go to my new ministry in Cambridge, England, almost to the day I will have spent half my life on these shores and half my life in the country of my birth. I have lived, worked, and raised children here, and have for nearly a quarter of a century been a Citizen. The challenge of the Cambridge opportunity is a big one, it came as a surprise and in some ways I am surprised to find myself taking it up. Perhaps there is a tad of hubris in accepting something like this that has come my way so late in the game.

As with all moments of parting, these are bittersweet days. What makes them sweet is my growing excitement for what lies ahead, what makes them bitter is the business of leaving a place and a country where we have lived so much of our lives, and where we have been fulfilled and edified. What makes them worse is that I will be apart from my beloved wife for three months, something to which I am not looking forward.

Each day I say goodbye to someone or something that has been important in my life. I know when saying farewell to some that it is unlikely we will meet again on this earthly shore. One thing of which this experience convinces me is that the Gospel is far, far more about eternity and unseen than we in the earth-bound West tend to make it. We would do well to redress this balance.

These have been profitable years, although not without pain and anguish -- but that is always the case with the vocation of ministry. The call which came so long ago to work within the Episcopal Church was unmistakable, and we believed then that God had it in mind for us to play a tiny role as his Spirit's renewed North American Anglicanism. Throughout most of our time here we worked hard in the hope that this vision would one day become a reality. In the midst of the present turmoil I find myself wondering how much of this dream was rooted in wishful thinking rather than realizable fact.

This is not to say that nothing has happened. During these last three decades we have seen a burgeoning of the missionary vision of orthodox Christians within the Anglican tradition here, and were privileged in various ways to play a small part in re-establishing this vital element of what it means to be a faithful witnessing church. Given the nature of the Episcopal Church, this is no small advance, and I suspect that as North American Anglicanism is forced painfully to reconfigure itself, this willingness to exercise a missionary vision alongside the outreach of a global Communion, will become one of the defining characteristic of whatever freshly emerging Anglicanism looks like. If it does not, then it is doomed before it begins.

We have also during these years seen a steady increase in the number of those, lay and ordained, who have a confidence in the faith as it is revealed in Scripture. Year after year there has been that gentle flow of men and women who sense a call of God to leadership, and who also are prepared for their lives to be honed and shaped by the vision that God makes plain in the Word written as they take up their cross daily to follow the one whose death upon the Cross was their means of salvation and eternal redemption. This is a long way from the carriage trade image of the church to which I came in the mid-1970s.

I had thought that we were coming here to play our part in the renewal of the denomination in which we have served, but in recent years I have had to do a lot of pondering and rethinking. As Paul wrote that "we have this treasure in earthen vessels" (2 Corinthians 4:7), the organizational vessel in which God's treasure is contained is ultimately replaceable, and I suspect that if we could see time from the end to the beginning rather than the other way round, we would have a much better idea of what is going on in the midst of today's confusion.

Out of my introspection on this issue I have come to the conclusion that while the church as an organism that has organization, the Gospel is ultimately a great deal more about the Kingdom than it is about the institution. I confess that there have been times when my love for the institution has gotten in the way of my passion for the Kingdom, and in some respects these recent years have been a radical corrective for me.

I came to realize some time before that fateful General Convention of 2003 that re-formation requires revised structures and we were probably the generation who would live through the early stages of remaking of those structures. Reading between the lines of histories of the Reformation era, I realize that those exciting days of the 16th Century were perhaps every bit as nail-biting as the period through which we are now passing. Reformation then did not happen overnight, and we should not expect the same. Luther may have set the fire of reform in October 1517, but it wasn't until the 1540s that the actual new shape of the Reformation and the Catholic churches began gingerly to emerge.

I take many riches from these years in the USA. One is a far deeper respect for the genius of Anglicanism, while another is a more robust ecclesiology that is much more catholic in many ways. Strangely, this puts me in a place where I am at odds with many with whom I have journeyed during these years, because I have yet to be convinced that attaching to other Anglican provinces and entities is necessarily the right way to go. While I deplore error and have little desire for companionship with it, I also hope that I know my own soul just a little and recognize that in my sinfulness I am capable of creating something that is every bit as inadequate as the fallen and straying church of which I am part.

As an evangelical and catholic Christian, fragmentation does not seem the right way forward, but I am not sure what actually is appropriate. I guess that for me that jury is still out on what is happening. This is a time, perhaps, when we need to combine those biblical values of faithfulness and patience, prayerfully waiting to see where God might guide us -- and guide us he certainly will.

However, fragmentation has taken place, which means one of the major tasks ahead of American Anglicans is to find ways of putting the pieces back together in some coherent form. I suspect that this will be about as easy as returning the contents to Pandora's box and then closing the lid. When there is a multiplication of jurisdictions and bishops, each with ego needs and turf issues, it is clear that all the seeds of significant tension have been sown. Ultimately one has to wonder what damage this does to Gospel ministry, much as those of us who remain in the Episcopal Church wrestle with the damage done by the theological and ethical faithlessness of the denomination.

One of the great blessings I have gained from my years in the Episcopal Church is that I leave these shores with a far deeper appreciation of the liturgical strengths of our tradition. I arrived just as the present Prayer Book was being brought in for trial use prior to final acceptance in 1979. There is much in the 1979 book that I really appreciate, but having said that hardly a day passes when I have not been deeply conscious of the book's significant theological shortcomings, I have wished that in some way these could be straightened out, but looking at the trajectory liturgical revision has been taking I knew that such a thing would never happen.

However despite this, over these years I have transitioned from tacit acceptance of liturgical worship to a deep love of the liturgy. I have visited a lot of Episcopal parishes over the years and seldom have I seen worship conducted in a manner that is either tacky or lacking in reverence. This may seem a strange thing for a priest to say, but the English Evangelical Anglican nexus in which I was formed tended toward ambivalence about the liturgical tradition. The liturgy sometimes seemed to be considered an unfortunate necessity pressed upon us by the church, rather than the vehicle whereby the People of God enter the presence of God.

There were good reasons for this. Evangelicals recognize the need to be able to reach beyond the walls of the church with the Gospel, and therefore did not want anything, including our patterns of worship to be the stumbling block to the outsider coming in to see if he or she could discover (or be discovered by) God. However, within the tradition there is this tendency to fall over backwards and abandon (or nearly abandon) our liturgical rootedness altogether. My American years have helped correct this imbalance, and I suspect that as I return as an Episcopal priest to the life of the Church of England, liturgical casualness among my fellow-evangelicals could well be a point of irritation.

I have also become much more sacramental. I was formed to believe in the power of the Word, so wouldn't have minded if we had had Communion just once a month. I am now grateful that the norm is to gather around both Word and Table each Sunday, the one preparing for the other, and the other reinforcing the one. Some years ago I went to be with a former Southern Baptist on his first Sunday in his Episcopal parish. I was looking forward to sitting at his feet as he opened Scripture - and to this day I remember the text: Romans chapter 7! However, it was not his preaching that left the most indelible impression that morning, but the humble reverence with which he presided at the Eucharist. The pre-America me would never have been able to admit such a thing.

But the shortcomings of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer point up what I believe is American Anglicanism's greatest weakness -- its theological vapidity. I am not an Anglican because of the lovely worship or our sacramental life, or any of the various pieces of adiaphora that so many of us enjoy. I am first and foremost an Anglican because of its doctrinal and theological tradition.

I don't know how many times I have heard it said outright or implied in my years here that theology doesn't really matter or Anglicanism is not confessional. I'm sorry, that is just plain wrong: Anglicanism from the 16th Century onward has taken doctrine seriously and is has always had a strong confessional tone. Because so many have come to believe this flaccid approach to theology and the revealed truth, in recent years we have been reaping the whirlwind of the wind that for several generations has been being sown. I think this has been one of my greatest causes of grief.

What startled me when I first came here was that I was pilloried by some because of my theology, and then immediately judged not on the basis of what I believed but on my stance in relation to what was the issue du jour. In those days it was women's ordination, which most of the time was approached not as the theological issue that it truly is, but as an issue of human right. Very early on I realized that not only did many leaders not really know the Scriptures very well, or be particularly interested in growing in their Scriptures, but they did not see that as a problem. Added to that was a very limited understanding of those generations of Christian shoulders on which we as people of this time stand.

It was when I started traveling around the church that I got to visit the seminaries that I started to discover how they functioned and what they perceived their role to be. Also, for a decade I happened to be officed in a seminaries so could see what happened there first hand. Gradually it dawned on me that my understanding of the nature of theological education was not what was going on in most of these places. There was little laying a firm foundation in Scripture, classic theology, philosophy, church history, and so forth, thereby equipping the next generation of ordained leaders for pastoral and missional ministry, but was more about propagandizing the student body into seeing life, ministry, and God in a particular culturally-conditioned kind of way.

In these seminary settings some students rebel, a few are capable of cutting their theological and intellectual teeth in a constructive manner, but significant numbers swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker, and in the process often seemed to lose their first rich passionate love of the Lord Jesus Christ. A significant element of this prevailing seminary process is that it is predicated upon a hermeneutic of suspicion when handling the Scriptures, coupled with a sense of disdain for the wisdom of those who have journeyed the Christian way before us, and the notion that we now know better. When coupled with the desperate shortcomings of the Commission on Ministry system in most dioceses it is not difficult to see why leaders cannot lead, and the faith is not growing and blossoming as it ought.

Today's theological confusion is the end product of decades of such conditioning. Perhaps the classic example of our church's theological vacuity was the statement that came out of the House of Bishops in March: a mishmash of inadequate theology coupled with such a spin being put on history that the facts could not sustain. It was a classic example of wanting things to go a particular way, and so tinkering with events, movements, and theology so that it was possible to justify what was desired by the majority.

Theology is not meant for this. Theology begins with God. Theology for us starts with worship of this omnipotent God. Theology goes awry if we do not set out by prostrating ourselves before the living God in awe at his glory, grieving because of our sin, amazed at his grace, and willing to give our all to serve him. Theology begins, like prayer, in the heart of God, and the Lord Almighty then seeks by his love to form us into the people that he yearns for us to be. Theology requires that we work hard to engage God's self and God's revelation with the minds that have been given to us.

Yes, we should read, discuss, debate, perhaps even disagree, but in the presence of God and for the good of the church, not because we are cherishing a certain issue or agenda. It is a long time since such an approach to theology has prevailed in North American Anglicanism. My prayer is not only that the Episcopal Church and the rest of North American Anglicanism allows itself to rediscover God's glory, but that we allow ourselves to be rediscovered by this God of glory.

It is true that God's call is taking me across the ocean to live, but I will not be permanently gone. Ministry and family will bring me back, and I remain a priest canonically resident in the Diocese of Tennessee. There is much about America that I will be desperately homesick for, and there are friendships and attitudes that I am sure I will crave. However, God calls and we must follow -- which is what I am trying to do. I expect when I next put fingers to keys and add something afresh to this blog that I will be in Cambridge, the new kid on the block at Ridley Hall, someone learning afresh the survival skills necessary in the oh so different country from the one that we left thirty-0ne years ago.

The Anguish That Accompanies Moving

2007-08-24T07:23:00.000-07:00

At my age I should really know better...

In just over a week from now I will be repeating in reverse the journey that we as a family took thirty-one years ago -- a half a lifetime away for me. That is, I will be moving back across the Atlantic Ocean to the new ministry that God has in mind for us in Cambridge, England. There is a deep confidence that we are following the Lord's leading and doing his will, but the same pain of letting go of where I am has returned. I had not really expected this.

While I was working hard in the parish, and even in the first week since I finished my pastoral duties, my emotions remained amazingly placid, but in these last few days as the clock ticks, as realtors swarm over the house, as we are warned that we are being caught in the credit crunch when it comes to selling our home, as I seek to get plans in order on the other side of the water, and so on, and so on, I find myself subject to occasional emotional meltdowns.

Do I really want to do this, I find myself asking, and my head says one thing while portions of my heart say something else. Certainly, because it demands that my wife and I live apart on either side of that vast expanse of water for several months, I am not looking forward to the separation one little bit.

"This is much too difficult," I complain, especially when in addition to all else I, in effect, see myself letting go of the stuff that has surrounded me and comforted me for these many years. But I need to gird myself up because part of this exercise is discovering just how much I have been possessed by my possessions, and now must deliberately let them go. In a way my system is being flushed out, but like an enema, there is no reason I should enjoy it!

Moving is almost always a foretaste of hell, but moving back across the Ocean has miseries that are unique. Among them are the dreams and nightmares that I have been living through during the hours of darkness. I hardly remember the content of the ones that assailed me last night, but my consciousness is still living with the feelings that have stuck to everything like so much mud and debris after I woke up and lay trying to work out whether it was the dreams or my sweaty tossing body which were the genuine reality.

It is ironic that when we left England in 1976 the landscape was brown and parched as a result of a long, hot summer, and one of the severest droughts then on record. While the Midwest struggles with too much water, we in the Midsouth are living with endless days of searing heat, 100 degree temperatures, and weeks and weeks since we saw even the whisper of rain. The landscape here is brown and parched, too, and as I look out of the window at the results of the endless sunshine that is how my heart feels.

I thought that I would make this hop across the Pond with ease, but that is far from the case. I am looking forward to the new challenges awaiting me at Ridley Hall, but my psyche has caught up with me and is reminding me that whenever we follow God's dream for our lives we are not necessarily going to experience all sweetness and light. Grieving for and letting go of what has been is part of the process of moving forward into God's providence for the rest of our days.

While it is exciting that at this stage in my life God should entrust to me a challenge that a person half my age would relish, I had under-estimated the angst that accompanies the letting go of the old in order to move forward to the new. I am glad that my latter years will be spent fruitfully in the service of the One who has redeemed me, but I have been as conditioned as anyone else in this cosseted age to believe that the Almighty will dish up life for me sugar-coated and drenched in honey.

While digging around in the attic yesterday and packing endless boxes I came across a little book of Victorian devotions and spiritual bon mots. This morning while doing my devotions I treated myself to a few minutes in its pages. Some of the little sayings and texts made me shudder, I have to confess, but others are helpful, bolstering me up in times like these.

For example, Isaac Pennington (whoever he was) wrote, "Prize inward exercises, griefs, and troubles; and let faith and patience have their perfect work in them." Another was by M. De Molinos, who said "Thou art never at any time nearer to God than when under tribulation; which He permits for the purification and beautifying of thy soul."

On the same page is this quote from Scripture, "Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: ...ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful until death, and I will give thee a crown of life" (Rev. 2:10).

I guess that is what sums the turmoils of this life up and puts them in perspective. We go through none of this for personal aggrandizement, but because we are seeking to be faithful servants of the living God. Faithfulness is the name of the game, whatever the challenges that are before us.

Flock of Dodos

2007-08-20T09:06:00.000-07:00

While we are working like slaves to get our house ready to put on the market, this is supposedly my vacation! So the other morning when I was exercising and ran across an interesting documentary on the television called Flock of Dodos, I felt no guilt about sitting down for a couple of hours and watching it.

This movie was an attempt to talk to both evolutionists and intelligent designers to get a clear picture of what the conflict is between these two ways of perceiving the origins of the created world.

It was put together in an engaging manner, and managed to talk at least somewhat seriously with everyone from the conservatives who used to be on the Kansas School Board, and who had opposed the teaching of evolution in the state's schools, to professors at the Ivies and beyond. What I appreciated was that although the narrator/interviewer, Randy Olson, was by training and inclination clearly an evolution activist, most of the time he managed to handle everyone appropriately and get them to present their position in a digestible and gracious manner.

However, every now and again interviewees got out of control and in those moments revealed their true colors. For example, there was a discussion between various professorial types who had been friends of Stephen Jay Gould, and during the conversation one of these gentlemen suddenly fulminated against the "ignorant yahoos" who could not see that evolutionary thinking was the only approach that held any water.

In that one moment he made it clear that he had absolutely no respect for those who asked questions of Darwinian orthodoxy, and the manner in which it has developed in the last 150 years. One of the basic principles of a serious intellectual discussion is having respect for those with whom you disagree.

As far as the evolutionists were concerned the bete noire was the Discovery Institute in Seattle, an outfit that I have visited and enjoyed several times. There are a lot of very bright folks associated with Discovery, and they have over the years put a lot of funds into advocating intelligent design, underwriting scholars and publications, etc., but Discovery refused to allow the filmmakers access or an interview. Not talking to your opponents is another way of blowing off where they are coming from.

This also made them seem much more sinister than they really are. Then when the figure of $5+ million was being thrown around as the annual budget of Discovery, it was made to seem that these folks were using money from conservative and reactionary deep pockets to buy a huge hearing for their cause. What the filmmakers didn't say was that Discovery's budget covers a lot more than just intelligent design, including, for example, issues to do with the environment in the Pacific Northwest.

As someone who does not have the problems with evolution that some other orthodox Christians do, as I watched Flock of Dodos I realized I was observing the dynamics more than the content because it is a fight in which I do not have a dog. I believe in an Intelligent Designer and while I can see the difficulties inherent in the more classic developments of the Darwinian thesis, do not find it hard to believe that the Designer used evolution to enable the creation to reach the point where it is today.

So, I found myself fascinated by the manner in which these two sides faced off against each other. What made it enthralling was that the dynamics were in many respects similar to those we see within the divides of North American Anglicanism. The truth is that with a few exceptions, there seemed to be little genuine engagement between the two sides of the debate.

On the one hand the evolutionists, as the "ignorant yahoos" comment suggests, had little patience for the scholarship of the intelligent designers, a good number of whom were not trained biologists but came from other disciplines and used the intellectual tools developed in those disciplines to look for the inconsistencies in the generally accepted evolutionary models. Perhaps the evolutionists were right, but their unwillingness to take seriously the positions of their opponents was itself shortsighted.

This is precisely what we see in the church fights going on. We are now at a point where there is virtually no genuine intellectual engagement between those opposed to one another happens, and it is clear from the manner in which we treat one another that there is little respect for the positions of those who disagree with us. There is a strong bias in the Episcopal Church. I have spent a lot of my life over the last thirty years being dismissed as an uneducated and narrow-minded theological wacko, an "ignorant yahoo," as it were, not because I necessarily am, but because I bring to the table presuppositions that are not respected by those who use this language of me. The result is that I am dismissed as irrelevant.

Both sides are guilty of such a thing because in the church context those on the right sometimes function as if those who disagree with them are not just wrong, but are dead wrong, and because they won't listen to what is being said to them are beyond the pale. So, with ears closed and megaphones in hand we scream our propaganda at each other, rather like evolutionists and intelligent designers, and there is never a meeting of minds from which something substantial and creative might possibly come.

But more than that. By not engaging one another it is as if we are free then to dehumanize (even demonize) those who we are against. A good cartoon takes certain characteristics of an individual and exaggerates them. This is what happens in much of our characterization of those with whom we disagree in the church conflict. In the process in our minds they cease to be the people they really are but a misrepresentation of that reality. Once we have set someone up like this, then it is easy to knock them down or to put ourselves in a position where we do not have
to have a serious relationship with them.

When we create such circumstances of non-relationship then there is no way of any kind through any impasse except conflict. The conflict we are experiencing has turned into civil war, and as history shows, whether it be the war between the American States or the battles in the former Yugoslavia, civil wars or often the most hostile, bloody, and damaging, leaving the most lasting scars. The question we should also be asking, too, is whether they glorify Christ.

As I watched Olson's representation of the evolution debate it was clear that these kind of dynamics were not only at play, but they were preventing either group from finding a way forward in any kind of relationship with the other. With but a few exceptions each side ridiculed the position of the other.

I was reminded of Francis Bacon's comment in his Essay on Truth, "'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."

Bacon goes on to talk about the giddiness of fixing a belief but not allowing discussion of the intellectual questioning of that belief. This, I think, is how battlelines get drawn up, shooting begins, homes are burned to the ground, much blood gets shed, and many lives are hurt. Those of us who are pastors are living with that hurt and its long-term consequences.

Whenever notions like these are raised there is an immediate outcry that the one presenting them is soft, flaccid, a theological and ideological wimp, or worse, a turncoat. Sometimes this may be so, but often it is an individual suggesting that ortho-doxy must be married to ortho-praxy. That is, true believing and true acting go hand-in-hand with one another. Grace and Truth belong together, but in the fight that is destroying the church today either one or the other tends to be the victim of all the combatants.

Somehow or other, and before it is too late, we need to get beyond this stand off, but, alas, I do not see anyone with the courage, the position, or the ability to do so.

Ecclesiastical Courts and Universal Fallenness

2007-08-10T16:05:00.000-07:00

During the last couple of days I have been following the responses to the reporting of the ecclesiastical trial of a priest in Colorado who has been accused of the misuse of more than $400,000 of funds. It is not so much the details of this tragic case that I want to focus on, however, but the way people have greeted the guilty verdicts of the church court.

Reading the responses to the story on two conservative blogs, Stand Firm and TitusOneNine, I found myself getting both uncomfortable and irritated. What makes me uncomfortable is the notion that the diocese brought charges against this priest in order to destroy him and his credibility. While I suspect antagonisms, to suggest such a thing is a very dangerous supposition.

Many of the responses have, in effect, said that despite the fact that this man has been found guilty, because the panel is predominantly of a revisionist/progressive mind, then their minds were so twisted that they could only interpret the facts negatively as far as the defendant is concerned. These responses have been based upon little more than a cursory grasp of the facts, whereas we have been led to believe that the diocese has worked with the best figures accountants have been able to compile.

I know no more the rights and wrongs than anyone else who reads the media so cannot come to any firm conclusions, although a reliable and respected person close to the case has told me that these were certainly not trumped up charges. We must accept a strong possibility that this ecclesiastical action will be followed by state and federal investigations, and possible actions about which we must just wait and see.

I want to plead with folks always to be more thoughtful before they rush to judgment. It may be natural to want to smear the motivation of those who oppose us, or whose ideology and beliefs are at odds with our own, but is this a worthy way of proceeding? Just because we believe people are deeply in error in one area, it is illogical to assume that they are going to be incapable of seeing facts clearly in other areas.

While I have experienced misrepresentation and have seen much misrepresentation in the church, I have never in 30+ years as a priest of the Episcopal Church seen anything on the scale that is being implied by respondents here. From all I know it appears that the Diocese of Colorado is seeking to get to the bottom of this apparent mishandling of money because it has grave fiduciary responsibilities.

What those making the accusations seem unwilling to accept is that the outcome of the court makes it increasingly likely that the priest actually did commit what he is accused of doing. Just because his theology is sound when compared to the belief systems of those adjudicating the business does not mean that he is not prone like all of the rest of us to give way to temptation and fall into sin.

This is the point that I was wanting to get to.

I am anxious about the attitudes of the respondents because they seem to be working under the illusion that just possessing an adequate theology trumps the universal curse of fallenness. I sense that both the left and the right of the wider conflict are working with a deeply flawed understanding of the pervasiveness and power of sin to draw us from the Lord we claim to serve. Even the best theologies in the world are incapable of saving us from sin's power if we are not able to say to our temptations, "Get behind me, Satan!"

The Last Harry Potter

2007-08-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

The other morning I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and now know what happens at the end of the boy-wizard saga. In many ways I found this last more engaging that most of the earlier novels, but perhaps that was because it successfully concludes the tale J. K. Rowling set out to tell rather than leaving us at a point where we know that there is a lot that still needs to be resolved.

As the series has progressed it is clear that Joanna Rowling has developed as a storyteller, and in this last book of the series she demonstrates admirably the way in which she has mastered her craft -- and, it has to be pointed out, has made an awful lot of money in the process! Indeed, I found myself wondering whether she has opened an account for herself at Gringotts Bank! My wife said she doesn't have to worry about her pension, to which I responded that she probably owns the pension fund...

Before publication there was a great deal of speculation about the ending, who would die, and so forth. By the time I got to the last page I was nodding my head and whispering, "How appropriate," for there is satisfaction in the way in which the characters mature is brought to an appropriate conclusion. While I am sure there will be websites popping up with all sorts of alternative endings (if that hasn't happened already), the way the threads are pulled together left me feeling very satisfied and able to continue chewing over the substance of what I had read.

But it wasn't so much the tale that kept nudging me as I read along but what I saw happening with the story. For most of the Potter books I have found myself walking through a landscape that was vaguely familiar, for they are in many respects a variant on the English boarding school stories with which I grew up. Also, having gone to boarding school there were elements that were entirely recognizable, although Hogwarts might have been a lot more interesting than the Victorian hallways, classrooms, and quadrangles where I learned the three Rs.

This book does not stop there but takes us into a bigger landscape. Now I have read it I realize that there were earlier hints that the Potter saga was moving in this direction, but only as the end of the tale approaches do we see the reality of this emerging. There were times when I thought I had wandered into something that was more akin to a Tolkienesque world than the boarding school genre with which we started.

I suspect debates will continue for years about whether Harry Potter has a Christian flavor or not. My wife's aunt in England is firmly of the opinion that the floods that have caused such devastation there are God's judgment on a nation that allowed such anti-Christian stories to sully the minds of the country's children. She is a lovely and godly woman, but I have to disagree with her. However, I am not entirely sure that I agree with Bob Smietana, writing for Christianity Today, that "She began writing about wizards and quidditch and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, and somewhere along the way, Christ began to whisper into the story." (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/julyweb-only/130-12.0.html)

Yet if Christ did not whisper into the story, we were taken to the edge of that larger stage upon which the Lord God in Christ worked out the drama of salvation. While I am not entirely sure in the elaborate mythology of Tolkien that I was ever able to see, as it were, a Jesus figure, Tolkien certainly gave me a wonderful sense of the great divide between good and evil in which Christ is the primary player. This last Harry Potter is somewhat similar.

Just as you cannot leave a Tolkien book without knowing that there is something more than what we can see, touch, feel, and smell, the same is true with this final volume in Rowling's series. If I were an inquistive kid reading this story I would have all sorts of questions about right and wrong, good and evil, life and death, whether there is a resurrection from the dead, and so on. I think I would also have a much more highly developed sense of justice. It is a fabulous launchpad for conscientious Christian parent to talk seriously with their children.

While there is no mention of God, the church, Jesus, or any of the paraphenalia of ecclesiastical life, there is a lot more to these books than may at first glance meet the eye. Some years ago I was a little concerned when a kid brought a Potter book to church with her, I don't have those misgivings now. There are, perhaps, things that a young mind can learn about the topography of time and eternity that Joanna Rowling does not know she is imparting to her readers.

Just as we do not abandon the myths that surround King Arthur, the Holy Grail, and so forth, so here is a 20th and 21st Century myth that broadens our scope and widens our vision. It is entirely possible that the Potter stories will take their place alongside these older tales that have shaped our culture, in the company also of the likes of authors like Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad. Maybe there's even something of a Moby Dick in there, too.

I grew up with several Ron Weasley-like boys, and I have to confess that every time I read about Hermione Granger I see elements of both my wife and my elder daughter. Dumbledore in a strange way is not unlike a very influential teacher in my own growing up, while when I manage to expel Alan Rickman's movie portrayal of Severus Snape from my mind that wily professor is very like the gangly man with a beak-like nose who taught me to love English literature and the beauty of our langauge. This means, I think, that these characters have become friends, which I suspect is something any novelist wants of her or his creations.

Rather than being scared of the Potter books, in a few years time I am looking forward to being able to sit down with my ganddaughter, Hannah, and read her the first of the Harry Potter stories, hoping that it will give her a love for the language, too, and that it will help her to understand the vastness of the temporal and eternal landscape across which we are rowing our fragile barques.

Values and the Tour de France

2007-07-26T08:16:00.000-07:00

Michael Rasmussen in the Yellow Jersey

At this time of the year for a number of years I have done my best to keep up with that toughest and most extraordinary of all cycle races, the Tour de France. I started watching about the second or third year of Lance Armstrong's long reign as Tour winner, so fascinated was I by this man's endurance and ability to overcome the agony of his body to win on the horrible slopes of the Alps or the Pyranees.

This year my interest has been no different, particularly so as it has been an extremely open race and there has been no one individual who has looked as if he could win convincingly until these last few days.

Until now it had been enthralling, but this week the whole thing has unraveled as one after another riders and teams have been forced from the race by doping scandals and dishonesty. The 2006 race was marred by similar problems, when winner, Floyd Landis, tested positive for excessive testosterone after he had stood victoriously on the podium in Paris and received the plaudits of the world. More than a year later there is still a huge legal and medical battle going on as to whether he won or not -- and he hasn't raced since then, and probably never will again.

I was driving home from the church last night listening to the sports news and learned of the latest heartbreaker: Michael Rasmussen, the race leader and wearer of the Yellow Jersey, had been thrown out by Team Rababank for lying about his whereabouts in June when he missed some crucial statutory drug tests. This was a body blow because Rasmussen cycled the race of his life yesterday as he won the hardest stage, confirming himself as the winner-elect: in the last three or four days of cycling it was his to lose. Now, not only is he out of the race, but the Dane's career as a professional cyclist is also probably over.

As I drove the rest of the way home I wondered what made these guys do such things, surely they must have known that somehow or other in due course their actions would be discovered, and that there would be hell to play. The temptation in as tough a sport as this is that even the smallest edge means the difference between success and failure. As grueling as three weeks of pedalling around France is, competitors must always be looking for just about anything to keep them going and keep them ahead of the pack, whether it is appropriate or not. But by falling into temptation and taking on board a chemical pick-me-up, some of the finest athletes have not only lost the race but their career and their good name.

All that got me pondering the pervasiveness of dishonesty in almost every realm of human endeavor, and especially in these early years of the 21st Century. It looks so easy to cut corners, tell "little white lies," cheat on your income taxes, mislead your spouse, and most of all, deceive ourselves. We certainly don't trust politicians, business moguls, and the like, and consider them guilty of dishonesty until proven innocent.

A former bishop of mine pointed out to me a long time ago that those of us who are reasonably intelligent, educated, and middle class, are among the most gifted at justifying our actions to ourselves, even when in our heart of hearts there is no justification for what we have done. The Scriptures are right in their assessment of the depth of our sinfulness. Yet I wonder whether our culture even begins to understand this, or wants to try to understand this.

It is disappointed that the likes of Michael Rasmussen have let themselves and the public down by their deceptions, but how do we know what is and what is not a deception? When relativism runs riot who is to know what is right or wrong and whether there are any gray areas? As dear old Francis Schaeffer used to thunder, value words like good and bad, right and wrong, and so forth, do not describe something the prevailing culture can understand because all values are subjective when you function without absolutes -- an ultimate point of reference. Values language is the language of those who walk the way of the revealed faith.

We seem now to be living in a strange world where differing sets of values are given differing sets of credance in differing circumstances. When an athlete wins a race or a game we want that person to have done it with their own ability, not with the help of chemicals or whatnot. When that athlete breaks the rules, then we get serious and throw them out. Yet when we personally come up against values rooted and grounded in God's revelation, rather than honestly seeking to work through the consequences in our daily lives we make special pleading or attempt to turn those values on their head.

Perhaps the time has come for most of us to do some very serious thinking...

Communion Matters

2007-07-22T18:01:00.000-07:00

As I have been working with Communion Matters in preparation for a gathering in our congregation, I find myself disheartened. Not only is it confused and confusing, but it seems politically-driven, desiring rank-and-file Episcopalians to concur with special pleading being made by this Anglican province which has run foul the rest of the Anglican Communion. It is designed like a questionnaire whose outcome is already predetermined, and the predetermination is that the Episcopal Church at the very best wants to sit loose to the wider Communion.

The Anglican Communion
The Anglican Communion for 150 years has been a loosely knit global fellowship of churches sharing a common spiritual, ecclesiastical, and doctrinal heritage rooted in the English Reformation. We are catholic in the way we are ordered, and reformed in our theological convictions.

It is as much what Communion Matters does not say, as what it does that offends. It wants us to believe that provinces within the Communion are autonomous and independent, free to develop along lines appropriate to particular culture and biases in a region or country. This is an effort to legitimate actions of the General Conventions of 2003 and 2006 that presuppose a different understanding of human sexuality than has hitherto been held by Anglicans or any other body of Christians ever, for that matter.

Communion Matters totally ignores the consensus reached during the early 1960s that the Communion is mutually responsible and interdependent with one another. This had been the cry until the Episcopal Church began functioning differently.

The Anglican Communion asked the Episcopal Church to step back from this schismatic act. If it believes it is right in its convictions, then first it should set about persuading the whole Communion of the rightness of its approach. So far it has not, nor has it even tried. The Windsor Report of October 2004 laid out a process whereby the Episcopal Church could walk with the Communion or decide to “walk apart,” and we are now well down that road, with a deadline approaching on September 30th.

The Episcopal Church, focused particularly in the March 2007 meeting of the House of Bishops, while asserting the value and importance of the Communion has continued along the walking apart course. Words of praise for the Communion have a hollow ring.

The Via Media
Communion Matters makes particular play of “the via media, the middle way between polarities, as a faithful theological method” (page 5), but then misrepresents what the via media is and how it might be attained. The notion of the Middle Way is rooted in the work of Richard Hooker, the leading Anglican mind of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, but Communion Matters has misperceived Hooker.

I can do no better than quote Frank Limehouse, Dean of the Cathedral of the Advent, Birmingham, AL, who wrote, ‘Hooker’s understanding of via media was never meant to guide Anglicanism to a middle way between God’s revealed truth and any other kind of wisdom, leave alone the prevailing wisdom of the world; it was never meant to guide us to a middle way between those who look to Scripture and those who look to experience. For Hooker, even "reason" and "tradition" were absolutely subordinate to Scripture.’

Communion Matters allows human insights to stand either alongside or in judgment over Scripture. Read this carefully: “Ultimately the ‘mind of Christ’ is perceived in community through prayer and dialogue, as Scripture is studied and interpreted and as reason and tradition inform that interpretation” (page 5). For those leading this process the “community” is the starting point, while Scripture is merely a resource the community can use when seeking to grasp truth.

Anglican Christianity has never taught this of Scripture even though there are those who wish it had. The fountainhead of truth is Scripture as it is plainly understood and interpreted, and a task of Scripture is to be the touchstone against which we measure and test ourselves and ideas – much more than an interesting resource. Until recently this is what the Episcopal Church has believed. In the Catechism it states, “We recognize truths to be taught by the Holy Spirit when they are in accord with the Scriptures” (Book of Common Prayer, p. 853).

Anglican Christianity has always strived for comprehensiveness in understanding the Christian faith, recognizing God’s truth will inevitably be fuller than any one group or individual can grasp. But at the same time there are boundaries and parameters to our believing, and these are set by Scripture, the historic Creeds, the Articles of Religion, and the historic Books of Common Prayer.

The course desired by Communion Matters is far from being a Middle Way but is extreme and beyond legitimate boundaries. Any Middle Way must be grounded in the person and nature of the self-revealing God. The plea for tolerance that we find in Communion Matters is not the traditional Anglican desire for generous comprehensiveness, but is asking us to now tolerate what until now had always been beyond the boundaries of catholic faith and behavior.

Conclusion
In vain I have sought to find any redeeming features in Communion Matters. It says one thing – that it respects and values the Anglican Communion – but it seems to prepared to sacrifice the Communion on the horns of its own insights into what God is like, how God reveals himself to us, what it means to be human, and how we humans should live our lives.

As a faithful priest of the Episcopal Church who has spent much of his ministry working within the wider Anglican Communion, I have to caution that the path desired by this provinces leadership is causing great pain, producing terrible disruption, and can only lead to the disintegration of both the Communion and the Episcopal Church of the USA.

We speak a different language

2007-07-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

Paul Tillich's Tomb in New Harmony, Indiana

For several days now I have been unpacking in my mind a meeting that I attended whose subject was supposed to be the proposed Anglican Covenant. While my hopes for the gathering had been less than modest, I had expected more than we actually managed to achieve because we spent the whole time speaking past one another. One priest of an orthodox persuasion came up as we broke up scratching his head and said that he hadn't understood much that was being said by so many of the participants.

This wasn't because he is dumb, but rather because it is clear that we are now at a point in the Episcopal Church where we talk a totally different language from each other. Understanding these languages is now crucial because having acted on the progressive insights we have entered uncharted territory.

For a number of years I have been asking those on the left, the progressive wing, or whatever you want to call them to engage with us in theological debate and dialogue over what divides us, but there has been little or no response. It has irritated me no end that we have not talked theologically about what divides us, but now I am reaching the conclusion that we cannot -- because we have little or no common language left, and our mindsets are a thousand miles apart from one another.

I came away from our meeting the other day as frustrated as from anything I have attended in a long time. It seemed as if the Grand Canyon yawned between us, we had been shouting across it at one another, and only hearing the odd word being said by those whose perceptions are different from our own. I am now convinced that it will be impossible to address the presenting issues until we are able to strip back at least three or four different layers of understanding, and can grasp the presuppositional worldviews that undergird our various starting points.

I am not sure that we are capable of doing this, partly because of the preconceptions that we bring to our understanding of what the other people's worldview might (or might not actually be), and then the baggage we bring with it to the table. The left treats the right as if they were six-day creationists and flat-earthers, while the right is of the mind that the left has sold out every distinctive of what it means to be Christian, and are swimming along with the spirit of the age.

When we look at each other as either Neanderthals or Heretics, it is like one team coming onto the field to play the American brand of football, while the other is kitted out for soccer. Such a game might have entertainment value, but it is not going to get very far, there is no way of measuring a result, and ultimately it will probably end with tears.

I spent a good deal of time in my late twenties, in post-graduate study, trying to get my mind around the contributions of both Freidrich Schleiermacher and Paul Tillich. It is no accident that the way I felt at a loss as I scrambled my way through Schleiermacher's massive volume The Christian Faith, and then the three volumes of Tillich's Systematic Theology. Actually, it was akin to the way I felt as I listened to the conversation at our meeting the other day. This should have been no surprise to me because Schleiermacher) and Tillich) are very much the forebears of the movement that has put this wedge between us.

It was no accident that Tillich was actually quoted by the facilitator of the meeting which set me thinking, for it seems that Tillich has in one way or another been the patron saint of Episcopal theological education for the best part of half a century now. The problem when grappling with the likes of Tillich and Schleiermacher is that their presuppositions and subjectivity render it almost impossible to grasp and nail down, as it were, the ideas being expressed.

After our meeting the other day one of my colleagues mentioned the writing of Dr. Robert J. Sanders and what he calls The 'Ecstatic' Heresy, an article that I have found helpful in attempting to describe what has shaped the landscape over which we are now trying to move forward (http://users.iglide.net/rjsanders/theo/ecstatic.htm), although I do think in attempting to explain he sometimes cuts corners. He says, "In the ecstatic view, language applied to God is always symbolic since God is ineffable... the task of theology is to reinterpret the faith as relevant to new cultural contexts. Faith is evolving since culture evolves."

Even if Sanders is only half right, and I think he is more than that, it is clear to see how the orthodoxy and the progressive approach to thinking and believing are at odds with one another. "In the orthodox view, doctrines reveal God. They can be variously understood, they reveal mysteries, but they cannot be reinterpreted in terms of categories that have no objective reference to God," but for the 'ecstatic,' "doctrines do not refer to God but to feelings, the depth of reality, the horizon of being. Therefore doctrines can be radically reinterpreted in terms of categories that have no objective reference to God."

This is very much what I saw happening last week. Speaking personally, the way that I understand God's nature is that although omnipotent, majestic, beyond our fullest comprehension, God has in his grace revealed himself to us and that self-revelation enables us to grasp the principles of the divine nature, our response to them, and the enabling of belief and holiness that are concomitants of this. Those on the other side of the spectrum not only do not think in these terms, but are puzzled by them because to them "God is always beyond concepts and language... Since God is beyond language, every attempt to verbalize God is partial and inadequate, with the result that differing partial truths, even when they contradict, can be harmonized at a higher level in God."

The challenge before us now is to work out if it is even possible for these two approaches to the nature of the divinity to coexist in any way, shape, or form. Can we talk, or are we like someone who speaks only Chinese trying to hold an intimate conversation with someone who only speaks Arabic? Is it possible that there are folks who can act as interpreters? If we cannot interpet to one another, what should be the next step?

Blowing one another off does not work. The consequence of this is the bitter, bitter disputes that are in the process of ripping North American Anglicanism to shreds. But right now we don't seem to be able to do more than blow one another off, talk at cross purposes, get angry, bring lawsuits, walk out in a huff, shout, scream, denigrate, and so on, and so on. There is serious theological and anthropological work that needs to be done, but it will not be done while the major players on the field are not only unwilling to listen to one another, but also unable to communicate with each other.

The great missionary statesman, Canon Max Warren, was one of my mentors. He told me about a year before he died when talking about his son-in-law's work in dialogue with the Hindus in India, that we can never enter into cross-religious discussions honestly until we are prepared to be converted by the other person's viewpoint. Perhaps this is the level of vulnerability that is required by us at this point.

2007-07-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

The Jesus Way and the Chaos in the Episcopal Church

A Kind of Applied Review of Eugene Peterson's book, "The Jesus Way" (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2007)

Like many others, during the last several years I have wrestled over what is the appropriate and godly way to respond to the crisis that has enveloped all of us in the Episcopal Church. Like many, I have explored a variety of options in terms of action and attitude, and come away dissatisfied. Sometimes it seems almost impossible to maintain a balanced commitment to revealed truth, countering error, reconciliation, grace, forgiveness, the unity of the church, and biblical moral and ethical values. I can't think how many times I have wished that there were some simple formula that could be readily applied.

For many years I have bought and read everything Eugene Peterson writes, for there are few theologians who marry, as he does, careful scholarship, perceptive pastoral insight and an abiding and tested commitment to catholic values of the faith. So, a couple of months ago I picked up Peterson's latest extended essay on pastoral theology, The Jesus Way.

I started into it thinking it would give me helpful insights into my own personal discipleship, which it has, but it has also given me clues to help me address this thorny ecclesiastical controversy in a manner that is worthy of my Lord. Certainly, Peterson does not come up with those illusive easy answers, but identifies patterns of believing and being from the Scriptures, the life of Christ, and his contemporaries that if taken seriously have the capacity to begin the process of breaking the present impasse.

And impasse it is, with none of the actions of any side within going anywhere other than digging us ever deeper into the mire. While fudging the issues before us is not going to be a solution, neither is the hand-to-hand combat which we are treated to each day. It occurs to me that Eugene Peterson's insights might help us find our way out of this dark jungle of our own making.

On the very first page he forces us to pay attention. "My concern is provoked by the observation that so many who understand themselves to be followers of Jesus, without hesitation, and apparently without thinking, embrace the ways and means of the culture as they go about their daily living 'in Jesus' name'... The whole North American ways and means culture, from assumptions to tactics, is counter to the rich and textured narrative laid out for us in our Scriptures regarding walking in the way of righteousness, running in the way of the commandments, following Jesus" (Pages 1, 3).

Straightaway, Peterson raises all sorts of questions not only about how we are immersed in our culture, but also how our own faith has been shaped as much if not more by the influence of the culture upon us than seeking to follow the mind of Christ. He talks of the eucharistic life to which we are called, which now should shape our whole being "as we give ourselves, Christ in us, to be taken, blessed, broken, and distributed in lives of witness and service, justice and healing."

Then he goes on ominously to point out that this "is not the American way. The great American innovation in congregation is to turn it into a consumer enterprise... We can't gather a God-fearing, God-worshiping congregation by cultivating a consumer-pleasing, commodity-oriented congregation. When we do, the wheels start falling off the wagon. And they are falling off the wagon. We can't suppress the Jesus way in order to sell the Jesus truth" (Page 6), and yet this is what we are trying to do.

That American way of church comes in all sorts of different flavors, liberal or conservative, traditional or progressive, Protestant or Catholic, and so forth, but all of them reflect our consumer mentality, so we pick and choose what we want, as well as our ways and means of being the church. Let's face it, in whatever shape or form it presents itself the American church is uncritically American. (It is probably true that in other parts of the world the church is uncritically British, Kenyan, Australian, French, Chinese, and so forth, but right now the challenge before us is our American blind-spots).

Yet we are called to live in the world by making Christ the King. "If Christ is King, quite literally, every thing and every one, has to be re-imagined, re-configured, re-oriented to a way of life that consists in an obedient following of Jesus. This is not easy." Indeed, it requires a lifelong work of total renovation beginning with the first word of Jesus's ministry, "Repent!"

I didn't become a Christian so many years ago just to prop up a decaying ecclesiastical structure. I became a Christian from the secular background in which I was raised because Jesus grasped me, and set about the process of reworking me into his own image. I have wanted to walk the Jesus way, but often have stumbled and fallen headlong. Then the word "Repent" has echoed in my ears and by God's grace I have been able to pick myself up and carry on. But I have to do this in partnership with fellow-travelers within the church, across the globe, and down the corridors of time.

A Christian is never a Christian in isolation, and as a follower of Jesus Christ I am called upon to function within this great continuum of God's salvation initiatives taken in history. The Jesus Way demonstrates the reality of this by spending a huge chunk of the first part of the book talking about facets of the way of faith of Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, the Isaiahs, on the shoulder of whose insights and discipleship the way of Jesus is built.

Peterson introduces us afresh to great notions and concepts of Scripture, such as what it means to be God's servant, what is the nature of sacrifice, and the place of prayer in this momentous journey. Yet "the way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped -- it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in the pauses and reflections where we engage in prayerful conversation with one another and with him" (Page 18).

The question we are being asked by a statement like this is about how prepared we might be to pause, reflect, engage in prayerful conversation with one another and Christ, and whether we have it within us to continue forward on a path that might well be in process of diverging from the way, the truth, and the life. "To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us" (Page 22), and I wonder for how many of us this might be true. I know that I fall very far short.

This battle within the church is, I think, not so much about the issues, important as these are, but is about Jesus Christ and what should be the nature of the discipleship to which we have been called. Toward the end of The Jesus Way Eugene Peterson identifies several other ways taken when Jesus was incarnate upon earth, and as I read his descriptions of the contrasting ways of Herod, Caiaphas, and Josephus, I found myself squirming uncomfortably because the way many of us are carrying on compares more to the approach of these characters than the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Herodian way glorifies size and wealth. It is the way of power, influence, and conspicuous consumption. Yet the Jesus way stands in stark contrast to it and is reflected in the life of the young woman, Mary, when Gabriel brought her news that she was to be Messiah's mother, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word" (Luke 1:38). Perhaps, Eugene Peterson surmises, the burden of this prayer was something Mary taught her first-born son. Certainly it is reflected in the Gethsemane prayer of "not my will but yours be done" (Luke 22:42).

If we are journeying on the Jesus way then we pray ourselves into the identity of slave (Greek: doulos). "The more exalted we become, the more prominent the position in which we are placed, and the more important we become in the economy of the kingdom of God, the more subservient we become. 'Servant' was the prayed identity for Mary," and by implication it should be our identity, too. In our battling I see little in any of us that tells me very much about servanthood, but a great deal about our fascination with power, influence, and making end runs on one another.

I do not pretend to know the right way forward, although I hope I am earnestly seeking it. Neither can I stand in judgment over the actions others might have taken, because there is much in my own record of which I am thoroughly ashamed as I seek to measure myself by the way of Jesus. However, it does seem that in the struggle for control and power the whole notion of Christian servanthood has been one of the casualties.

Having described the true task of the priest Peterson wants us to think about Caiaphas, pointing out that "sometimes priests, impatient with being servants of God and God's people, insist on taking control of the relationship, managing God's business and our salvation. When this happens... we end up with Caiaphas" (Page 224). He goes on to say that "priests are at their best when we don't notice them. The moment we begin to notice, we become wary. When he or she, whether laity or clergy, pretends to do God's work for us, an alarm sounds" (Page 226).

By Christ's time the priesthood had become as much about power, privilege, and influence, as it was about being the intermediary between the people and their God. Peterson gently reminds us that if following Jesus means walking the path of servanthood, then in no way can it be turned into a path of privilege rather it is about taking up the cross daily.

Jesus always accepted that healthy spirituality requires an institutional structure. Despite how compromised the structures of his day were, he did not separate himself from them. He didn't, like the Essenes sheer off and form his own exclusive, ascetic regimen isolated from the wider community, and when in Jerusalem he worshiped in the Temple the megalomaniac, Herod, had built, and that was governed by that sly old fox, Caiaphas. Certainly, there seems to be a lesson we can learn here.

The prayer of the Jesus way in these circumstances is the prayer of Thomas, "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28). "No matter how much we know, we don't know enough to know what Jesus is going to do next. And no matter how familiar we are with the traditions and customs and privileges that go with being on God's side, we aren't familiar enough to know how Jesus fits into it" (Page 242). Such a prayer should have us thinking twice and thrice about the words we say and the actions we take in the midst of so much confusion.

Finally we come to the way of Josephus, a man who was beginning well and then was seduced by the spirit of the age. He had, among other things, trained as a Pharisee, but he ended his days living the life of a wealthy ease in Rome having sold his soul and integrity for personal wellbeing. Josephus was an opportunist with natural charm and great charisma. Perhaps these are dangerous gifts in the hands of religious leaders, certainly we have seen much misuse of them in our day.

Force, in one way or another, was the flavor of each of the other religious and social alternatives of Jesus's lifetime, yet despite all the errors the early Christians made, this was not one of the traps that they stumbled into, for as the Epistle of Diognetus puts it, "force is no attribute of God" (Page 260).

No, the Christian way, that which sought to walk in the footsteps of Christ was one in which they prayerfully sought to find their way forward, seeking to be "of one accord." If you don't buy Eugene Peterson's book for any other reason, then I would encourage you to purchase it for his extraordinary exposition of 'homothumadon,' the almost untranslatable word that keeps cropping up in the Acts of the Apostles. It means roughly being of one mind, being of one accord, experiencing the fire of the Spirit in the midst of community.

"The difficulty of experiencing homothumadon is that typically we aren't paying any attention to the resurrected Jesus, and don't know what to look for, or are impatient in the waiting, or are distracted by more glamorous and riveting events and circumstances that promise shortcuts" (Page 263).

I would posit that at the heart of many of our problems is the reality that we have yet to even attempt to follow the Jesus way.

"What stands out as we consider all these dismissed options is that following Jesus is a unique way of life. It is like nothing else. There is nothing and no one comparable. Following Jesus gets us little or nothing of what we commonly think we need or want or hope for. Following Jesus accomplishes nothing on the world's agenda. Following Jesus takes us right out of this world's assumptions and goals to a place where a lever can be inserted that turns the world upside down and inside out. Following Jesus has everything to do with this world, but almost nothing in common with this world" (Page 270).

Yet our battles are being fought out using the goals and attitudes, ways and means, of this world. Maybe, just maybe, what we need to do now is to step back, and even if a few of us look to see how we might live the Jesus way in the midst of the confusion, something beautiful for God would be born, rising as a phoenix from the ruins.

Actions of Bishop Geralyn Wolf

2007-07-06T14:54:00.000-07:00

Almost as soon as I had posted yesterday came the announcement that Bishop Geralyn Wolf of Rhode Island had taken action in the case of Rev. Anne Holmes Redding.

As most of you are now aware, the bishop wrote to her diocese, "After meeting with her I issued a Pastoral Direction giving her the opportunity to reflect on the doctrines of the Christian faith, her vocation as a priest, and what I see as the conflicts inherent in professing both Christianity and Islam. During the next year she is not to exercise any of the responsibilities and privileges of an Episcopal priest or deacon. Other aspects of the Pastoral Direction will remain private."

There is both grace and discipline in the bishop's action, and from what I have read there has been an appropriate response from Dr. Redding. While this is far from the end of this incident, I cannot but help thanking the Bishop of Rhode Island for the sensitivity and forthrightness that she has shown. Let us pray that in their pastoral relationship, Bishop Wolf can provide Dr. Redding with both oversight and space to work through what it means to be a servant of the Living God.

Let us pray for a godly outcome to this strange situation.

The Implications of the Episcopal Muslim Priest

2007-07-05T09:14:00.000-07:00

I suspect some of you will think that I am fixated on the case of Rev. Ann Holmes Redding, the self-proclaimed Episcopal Muslim. I am not sure that I am, but her situation raises (in one way or the other) so many substantive issues -- not least the nature of the Godhead himself.

During the 1990s I got to know Leonid Kishkovsky, one of the leaders of the Orthodox Church in America, and unusual for an Orthodox priest in that he has also been heavily involved ecumenically. Among other things, Leonid is a past president of the National Council of Churches, hardly a right wing body! We were, if I remember correctly, talking over dinner one evening about the agendas people bring to believing and what might be the core requisite doctrinal convictions necessary for Christian believing.

I recall Leonid saying that he could cope with a breadth of belief, but it was when folks started messing with the doctrine of the Trinity that he found himself getting extremely uncomfortable. We kicked this around for a while, and I felt that by and large my friend was making a pretty good case. During the years since then I have watched as ecclesiastical wrecking balls have moved ever closer to deconstructing the Nicaean Creed. Certainly there have been individuals in the church who have problems with it, but they have been less blatant about their rejection of its central tenets than Ann Holmes Redding.

It is not that Dr. Redding's circumstance is strange, although it is, but stranger still has been the lack of appropriate response by the bishop of the diocese in which she is canonically resident, and also the almost-affirmation of her stance by the bishop of the diocese in which she is geographically situated. She clearly is in open denial of substantial truths concerning the nature and person of the Lord Jesus Christ, but it seems that those under whose authority she ministers are either unwilling or unable to enter into dialogue with her or take the appropriate disciplinary action. (See additional comments at the end of this piece)

So we have this bizarre reality now prevailing where priests and whole congregations are not only being shown the door, but are being subjected to draconian and bitter legal action because of they are attempting to actively work out what it means to live with the affirmations Christians have always believed. Meanwhile, another priest who has denied the very substance of her ordination vows, thereby de facto revoking her commitment to the doctrine and discipline of the Episcopal Church, not only gets away with it, but has complimentary articles are written about her by a church publication!

There is nothing take-it-or-leave-it about the Nicean and Chacedonian truths concerning the nature of the Trinity, and especially the fullness of the person who is the second member of the Trinity. These are not adiaphora, these are at the very heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, God's Incarnate Son.

Ann Holmes Redding has now clearly become a test case. If she is not put under any kind of discipline for her heterodoxy then it confirms that subjective relativism is the name of the game, rather than even the mildest form of catholic creedal believing. Jesus may be honored in Islam, but that faith honors him as something far less than the Son, God's ultimate revelation of his being, love, grace, and nature.

If Redding is Islamically faithful, then she probably believes that Mohammed is the bearer of God's ultimate message to humankind, which Islam affirms. If this is the case then she had relegated Christ in such a way that genuine Christian believing is made extremely difficult. However, if she believes that Jesus is God's only-begotten Son as stated in the Nicaean formula, then she is flying in the face of all that Islam believes about Christ. Christianity and Islam's understanding of Jesus of Nazareth are mutually exclusive of one another.

While such evisceration of truth leading to irrational relativism is as strange as anything that has come up in recent years, it is merely part of the amazing continuum along which much North American mainline religion is traveling.

Within the Episcopal Church, this relativistic tide is the environment that is leading to the wholesale rejection of the Anglican Covenant by dioceses, individuals, seminaries, and so forth. As I have studied the Covenant it seems to me to be little more than a 21st Century re-presentation of classic, historic Anglicanism. But historical Anglicanism is not what this tide of change is all about. Instead we prefer to stroke and be stroked by the Zeitgeist -- from this will come all manner banality.

*****

Within a very short time of me posting this piece, Bishop Geralyn Wolf of Rhode Island place Dr. Redding under Pastoral Direction. We owe Bp. Wolf a great debt of gratitude for the manner in which she has handled this situation both with loving pastoral care and firmness. (http://www.standfirminfaith.com/index.php/site/article/4194/)

Nevertheless, the principle that I spell out here is one we need to ponder upon for it cuts at the very heart of a Christian understanding of the nature of the Godhead and the manner of redemption.

Richard Kew

The Strange Business of the Muslim Episcopalian

2007-06-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

I have over the last few days been attempting to get my mind around the assertion of the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding that she is both a Christian and a Muslim. I have done my research by going back to the "source" documents to make sure that I have fully grasped what this is all about. Then this morning, my day off, as I have been going about my chores I have been turning it around in my mind.

The furor surrounding Ann Holmes Redding has a number of fascinating dimensions, not least the appropriateness of her status as a priest in the Episcopal Church. During the last few years it seems that some of us have been regularly lectured about obedience to the doctrine and discipline of the Episcopal Church, and there have for some been dire consequences for stepping outside it. Now Dr. Redding has provided an interesting test case about whether all the talk about the doctrine and discipline of the church of these years is really serious, or if deep down it is about something else.

While the Episcopal Church has turned itself into a maximalist when it comes to obedience to the discipline and canons of the church as interpreted by the leadership, it has steadily become increasingly minimalist regarding doctrinal affirmation. Yet however many fundamental Anglican formularies are shaved away, the Nicene Creed is one fundamental doctrinal statement that the overwhelming majority say they accept.

If Ann Holmes Redding is now free to continue her idiosyncratic course without action being taken, then the creeds are up for grabs and any pretence of being a catholic and reformed church is being deliberately abandoned. That her bishop, Vincent Warner, does not seem to understand the theological implications of the statements Ms. Redding has made is a sad and ominous sign.

But there is more going on than this. I must begin by saying that I respect Ms. Redding's willingness to approach the Islamic faith with reverence and respect. While the aggression of popular Islam around the world has caused gred grief, I have learned from the likes of Bishop Kenneth Cragg that I will never fully be able to understand this religious confession if I do not treat it respectfully. I confess that as much as I attempt to do so, I find this extremely difficult.

Yet it seems Ann Holmes Redding has only managed to make this dual commitment to Christianity and Islam by stepping aside from a biblical and historical understanding of the nature of the trinitarian God and the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, toward a theology and Christology that has robbed from our Lord and Savior his must essential distinctives.

To be a Muslim is to accept Christianity as a way station preparing for the fullest revelation that is the Islamic obedience, and Jesus as a prophet making straight the way for Mohammed. The great rift between Islam and Christianity is radically different understandings of the nature and person of Christ.

As the Seattle Times summarizes Ms. Redding's belief system it is clear she has wandered far, far from anything that vaguely resembles the historic Christian faith. "She believes the Trinity is an idea about God and cannot be taken literally. She does not believe Jesus and God are the same, but rather that God is more than Jesus. She believes Jesus is the son of God insofar as all humans are the children of God, and that Jesus is divine, just as all humans are divine — because God dwells in all humans. What makes Jesus unique, she believes, is that out of all humans, he most embodied being filled with God and identifying completely with God's will."

Perhaps her "progressive" Christian faith has led her in this direction, but her jump to Islam while attempting to continue holding onto her Christian standing would suggest that when it comes down to it the Christian doctrinal tradition is of little importance to her.

But there is more here. If she has in the past questioned what she might have considered to be the unfounded biblicism of those of us who are orthodox Christian believers, how is she going to handle the Islamic belief about the inspiration of the Quran as dictated directly by the angel Gabriel to Mohammed? That same Quran denies the reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, something that she says she believes in. It would seem that these two paths to most thinking people are incompatible.

It would be wonderful to think that this priest had discovered an appropriate way to breach one of the most agonizing religious gulfs in human history, and that neither Christians nor Muslims would have to compromise their beliefs to become brothers and sisters in faith together. However, it would seem that what it seems she has actually done is to deliberately let go of the most substantial distinctives of her Christian heritage in favor of an understanding of God that cannot appropriately figure within Christianity.

The more I have thought about Islam over the years the more I have come to appreciate the assertion of one of my seminary professors that Islam is actually a Christian heresy, and in its formative period borrowed much from the Christian church. Some have even suggested the the Nestorian church of the east, with its less-than-thorough grasp of the nature of the Trinity readily prepared for Islam to sweep the faith away through much of what is today the Islamic world. If I did not know the saving mercy of redemption that is available through Jesus Christ, there is much in the stark ethic of Islam that I might find attractive. However, it seems to me that with the best will in the world it is hard to consider these two religions as compatible bedfellows.

I would suggest that Dr. Redding has for a long time probably affirmed a somewhat relativistic understanding of the Christian faith that has now met and is being steadily subsumed by the appeal of Islam, and her embrace of it. Which way she goes will be interesting to see, but while she is making up her mind it is entirely inappropriate for her to be considered a priest in good standing in the Episcopal Church, however theologically suspect this denomination is.

Victors Reaching Out To Losers

2007-06-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

Hands Across the Divide -- A Sculpture in Londonderry, Northern Ireland

I love having satellite radio in my car, and the other day I was listening to a piece as I was driving about peacekeeping and reconciliation. It was from the BBC World Service and was by Paddy Ashdown, a former military officer, British MP and party leader, and then international representative in Bosnia.

He started in Berlin at the museum established to commemorate the occupation of Germany during the immediate post-war period. Ashdown and his interviewees talked about the peacekeeping success of Germany in that era from which many lessons were learned and applied as difficulties have arisen elsewhere.

One example that was pulled from the hat was that the victors sought to reach out to and make friends with the losers. The museum apparently highlights this in many of its exhibits, and Ashdown and the curator to whom he was talking discussed this.

That one statement got me off thinking about the crisis in the Episcopal Church, where no such thing is going on. Indeed, there seems to be a determination by the present "victors" to drive forward their agenda regardless of the distress it causes to the apparent "losers," or the damage it might be doing the denomination. I'm not sure how a reaching out and making friends would take place, but certainly that moritorium on litigation would be a great starting point, for then it would be possible to sit down to try and talk our way through this issue to some satisfactory resolution without an axe hanging over the heads of any of the parties involved.

People will inevitably complain that this would take far too long, but there is no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to these kinds of circumstances. Besides, it seems that prolonged stretching out of what might be right and worthwhile is never a good reason for not doing it. John Bauerschmidt, our bishop, points out that church conflicts seldom sort themselves out quickly -- and this one should be no exception. Yet our fallen-ness tends to encourage us to put speed ahead of what might be a faithful way of proceeding.

The other day, as I was thinking this through, I tried out my thoughts about victors reaching out to losers on a friend whose insights I value. He thought about it for a few moments then said something to the effect that do we know who the winners and the losers are?

Good point. It do not doubt that it will take several generations before we are able to see this time in perspective and only then will we have some clarity. However, I have in my mind this hunch that ultimately these difficult events through which we are now living will appear very differently then than they do now to those of us who are living through them.

As I read over and over again the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, the reaching out of victors to losers, and vice-versa, seem to have to do with the very uncomfortable teaching of our Lord. There is some turning the other cheek stuff going on here, which itself in the Sermon is a lead up to the loving of our enemies. Oh, and while we seek to love our enemies we are called to "pray for those who persecute" us (Matthew 5:44). Now here are some challenging words in these circumstances.

If we are looking for a way forward, a way out of the present impasse, then we would cannot do much better than to really soak ourselves in the words and actions of the One we consider our Lord and Savior. These values of the Kingdom are demanding, and I am not sure a godly way forward is possible until some of us on ever side of this sorry affair start taking them seriously.

Long and Winding Road Home: Pt. 2 - The Episcopal Church

2007-06-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

The Chiltern Hills and the fields among which I grew up

While I will continue to be a priest of the Diocese of Tennessee, as I leave active involvement in the Episcopal Church in early September it will be with tangled and knotted feelings. For most of my three decades here I have appreciated being part of this denomination, and it has been a setting in which I have grown as a disciple of Christ and as a person.

There have always been elements of Episcopal life that have irritated me no end, high on the list has been this church's inability to take seriously the need for doctrinal clarity, but then there have been all sorts of other components of Episcopalianism that have enriched me, stimulated me, challenged me.

The Episcopal Church forced me to reach outside the tiny little Anglican box I had inhabited prior to my first crossing of the Atlantic, and for this I will always be profoundly grateful. Yet it has been recent years that have floored me, with deficiencies of the church getting out of control in such a way that they have completely overwhelmed many of the benefits.

There was a time when with a sense of genuine appreciation I could tell people "I am an Episcopalian," yet these days I try to avoid such identification, and when it is necessary to make it with mingled emotions of regret and embarrassment. The turmoil of these recent years has, in effect, stolen the church I loved, and started the process of putting in its place something so distorted that at times the only descriptive words I can come up with are bizarre and even grotesque.

The extreme lurch that the Episcopal Church into the arms of the Zeitgeist has disfigured it to such an extent that part of me is very tempted to get back into that tiny little box that I once inhabited. Certainly, it has been made abundantly clear by those who control the denomination that those of us who occupy the broad mainstream of Anglican Christianity are no longer wanted nor particularly welcome. The most recent actions of the Executive Council are further illustrations of this, and such things will always be a source of personal sadness.

I came to America in the first place because God made it clear that this was the setting to which he was calling us, and we believed that we were being asked to play a small part in the renewal of the Episcopal Church that was gathering strength at that time. There have been all sorts of good things that have happened, and over the years we have seen God's hand at work in things we have been part of, and enterprises we have undertaken. There have been some successes, and there have also been a number of obvious failures.

Yet the present climate excoriates what we considered to be advances, and what I had thought had been worthwhile contributions to the life of the Episcopal Church in obedience to the demands of the Kingdom, is being treated by the postmodern majority as some sort of a defacing of the tradition (although the postmodernizers are very much making up what they believe the tradition to be as they go along). While I do not like what has become of the Episcopal Church, this is the setting in which God has placed me, and it has become a very difficult boat from which to fish in recent years.

While the Episcopal Church seems determined to rid itself of many of the major contributions I and my ilk have made, I honestly do not see much in the new alphabet soup of Anglican entities that is emerging as anything more than a temporary holding pattern, and not necessarily a wise one at that. I agree entirely with Archbishop Drexel Gomez that much of this separating has seemed extraordinarily premature.

While the doctrinal side of me finds is much more at home with these slivers of Anglicanism than the ailing denomination from which they have turned, I am sure that if I were to be part of one of them, then I would be peculiarly uncomfortable about their life as well. While I respect many of those who have made these moves, there is no reason to believe that separation solves the problems we have -- which are so much bigger than the presenting issues that have disrupted the life of the church.

This battle is about nothing less than who God is, how God has revealed himself to us, and what the implications of that might be in daily living. The starting point for any debate or discussion has to be the Trinity, and certainly not human sexuality.

What has happened is that we have been shoo-ed by God out into a Wilderness, we have been dispatched into Exile. After the Jews were taking into exile in Babylon, a couple of generations passed before God began speaking to them with the red-blooded words of that great prophet in the tradition of Isaiah.

Exile is agony and can be utterly debilitating, but evidence from the history of salvation is that it is the place where God meets and renews his expectant people, having allowed them to shed much of the unhelpful baggage that they were carrying. My work with the Russian church in the 1990s brought me face-to-face with a church who had been forced to learn some incredibly painful lessons from a different kind of exile, now it is our turn.

If we look at the experience of the Jews and of church history, it is in exile that we experience theological and spiritual renewal that would have been impossible if our standard had still been flying high. In humiliation and sitting amidst the ruins we are called upon to wait until the Lord God is ready for us again. Maybe all this will take decades and not months, and all the time our demeanor should be humility in sackcloth and ashes.

There is much from the Episcopal Church that I will miss, but most of these things are from the old Episcopal Church, the one that used to exist, not the one that is being born in the confusion and error of today. I have fond and thankful memories, and my prayer is that even an ocean away I will be able to do something that will play a tiny part in the restoration of North American Anglicanism to the favor of the Lord.

A Long and Winding Road Home -- Part One

2007-06-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

Around this time thirty-one years ago I was wrestling with a whole cascade of ideas and emotions. It was one of the hottest summers on record in England, but it was the United States that was so much on my mind as the days ticked by, and we found ourselves getting ever closer to pulling up our roots and moving across the wide Atlantic Ocean.

We were venturing into the unknown. As exciting as the prospect was, fears and anxieties jostled and adrenalin pumped. Was this the most colossal mistake we had ever made in our lives? How would we ever adapt to living in such a strange and alien country as the USA? How would our children fare amidst so much change? How would we adjust to the American Church? And so the inner debate went on and one.

Between keeping our little girls clean and fed, we were packing up our home, and bringing to an end the happy years of our ministry in Bristol, England. During the long light summer evenings Rosemary and I talked endlessly about what we were about to do, praying, and at times holding onto each other as both reasonable and silly fears swept over us.

I will never forget the moment the British Airways 747 lifted off and the roofs of Heathrow Airport quickly disappeared beneath the mist. I fought back tears, felt nauseous, and wondered whether ever again we would see our beloved homeland. It seemed we were about to fall over the edge of the world. If crossing the Atlantic was as emotionally fraught as this for us, how must it have been for the first settlers in Virginia and the Pilgrims?

Three decades have passed since these things took place and many of those same feelings have again become our companions. However, this time we are preparing to make the return journey. The days are ticking by for us to go back to England, and after a half a lifetime of Americanization I now find myself anxious and concerned about whether I will be able to fit back into a very different Britain, and a much altered Church of England from the one that we left.

While there is a sense of adventure about all this, in my calmer moments I wonder whether issues of sanity come into play when people consider migrating across an ocean for the second time in their lives! Yet how many folks get the chance to serve the Lord in a position that perfectly fits their gifts and skills when they are in their early sixties?

A number of years ago when trying to prepare for the latter years of my active life, I had this sense that God's purposes for me might be in the realm of bringing to birth the next generation of Christian leaders, but as time passed and nothing came of it I concluded that I had misread the signs. Then when such dreams had been forgotten, out of the bright blue yonder came Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Now I find myself amazed that I will be able to wrap up four decades of stipendiary ministry playing a small part in this vital enterprise of getting the next generation onto the front lines. In many respects I can hardly believe my good fortune, but leaving our world here is the price that we have to pay.

Right now we are wrestling with realtors, and beginning to part with precious possessions, wondering all the time whether we can financially make it in a place where a modest apartment costs about as much as a significant mansion in this neck of the woods. There are fears galore, and while England isn't an unknown there are trends and subtleties within the culture that are sure to come as a huge surprise. How will we adjust back to the English Church? Isn't it going to be very difficult to leave our younger daughter, a physician and wife, here on this side of the water? Meanwhile the question of thirty years ago comes up again to haunt us: are we making the most colossal mistake of our now considerably longer lives?

My late Aunt Mary has been a warning to us. After twenty-five happy years in Montreal, Canada, and having been widowed, my father's elder sister returned to our hometown in the 1970s to live. It didn't work. The woman who had left the United Kingdom for the Dominion of Canada in the year of the Queen's coronation, had been altered by the New World out of all recognition. She chafed at the smallness of English life, and it wasn't too long before she sold up and returned westward, never even wanting to visit her birthplace again.

I find myself wondering in my darker moments if it is going to be the same for us. I am already bracing myself for my first year back in England's green and pleasant land. Like my aunt there are bound to be elements of English life that will chafe, irritate, drive me mad, make me angry, and trigger reverse homesickness. I live here amidst a residual Christian culture within which I am comfortable, how will I adjust to the European side of the ocean where such a thing is long gone, and the most significant religious challenge of the 21st Century is how to address the rising tide of Islam?

During these many years spent in America we have experienced periods of intense homesickness. At first it was an agonizing sense of loss, but as time has passed it has turned into a delicious bittersweetness -- more romantic yearning for a Masterpiece Theatre figment of the imagination than a longing for the England that is really and truly there. At this point I find myself walking into a bracing north wind that is blowing such dreaminess away. England is not about rose-covered cottage doorways and Jane Austen country house society, but is an over-populated, thrusting, secular realm which at times has a very nasty edge to it. It is to this England that I am returning, and to which I must readjust.

It should be no surprise that as we let go of our American life we should be be looking back and assessing what it has all been about. For a start, I am immensely grateful for the time that I have spent here. For nearly a quarter century I have been a citizen of two countries, never entirely at home in either, and I expect this to be true for the rest of my life. There is so much about the United States that I love and admire, and I hope that during our years here we have been shaped bysome of the very best in American culture and Christianity.

The United States may be far from perfect, but I recognize that this is an extraordinary country that still has extraordinary potential, and while here I have had the privilege of knowing some of the most remarkable people that walk the face of this planet. I hope that I will carry back to the Old World some of the great benefits that are mine because of the time that I have spent here in the New.

I am not entirely sure of how it is there now, but the Britain I left was one where some of the brightest ideas would very politely have cold water poured over them (unless they came from someone who was very forceful, or who had the right background and connections). The America to which I came was one that was willing to take a calculated risk and give something new and different a try. Failure was not seen as terminal, and space is given to folk to pick themselves up, dust themselves down, and move forward after such a hiatus. I still believe this to be the case, and it is part of the strength of the American spirit.

I want to ponder the Episcopal Church at length in a later piece, but I cannot finish this one without some reference to it. I came to the USA believing that God was asking that we play our small part in its renewal. During the years I have been here we have seen some remarkable things happen and God acting in ways that were beyond our wildest dreams. But now as I prepare to go back to England, the Episcopal Church has reduced itself to a pitiful tatter of its former self.

I grieve the fragmentation and the rich web of relationships and ministries that have been badly damaged or terminally broken. It seems increasingly evident that the Episcopal Church I have known and loved has committed itself to the garbage heap of history, but I am not sure the course which has been taken by many who have been fellow-travelers and colleagues in the past is the right one. I said many years ago that if the Episcopal Church were to split then the only people to gain from it would be the attorneys. Alas, from what I am seeing and hearing, this sad prediction looks set to turn out to be true.

I try to comfort myself that we are passing through that time of confusion that inevitably precedes a new beginning. It is my prayer that after this time of upheaval steadier hands will take the tiller of the Episcopal Church and its separated daughters, and with it wisdom and willingness to face up to what the Kingdom of God demands will emerge. Perhaps the Spirit of God will take that American can-do mindset and enable us to come out of this slough of despond into which we have fallen, and help us to create a missionary body that knows how to reach the hearts and souls of post-Christian, post-modern America, with the Good News of Jesus Christ in all its fullness.

Meanwhile, my job is to get on with the process of sorting my things, wrapping up my life here, and getting ready to go back to my homeland and all the challenges and opportunities for the Gospel that await us there.