Reflections on the Life & Times of Boris Yeltsin

This morning I watched some of the funeral service for Boris Yeltsin, which was broadcast on the BBC World Television News on BBC America. It took place in Christ our Savior Cathedral in Moscow, itself a product of Yeltsin's years as President of Russia.

The cathedral had been blown up by the Soviets under Stalin and the area was turned into the largest outdoor swimming pool in the world. In 1995 my elder daughter, Olivia, and I leaned over the railings and watched some of the last swimmers to use the pool enjoying themselves in the sunshine, yet it was soon to make way for a rebuilding of the cathedral, a symbol of the seachange that had taken place in Russia.

Boris Yeltsin tends now to be remembered as a baffoon and a bit of a drunken clown, but this is hardly a fair characterization. While Gorbachev prepared the way for an opening up of the country, Yeltsin was the man who not only slammed it through, but also provided leadership at a time when there could have been terrible bloodshed and hundreds of thousands of refugees spilling out of the east into western Europe. But none of this happened. He was often a contradictory figure, and while there was much suffering in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was the father both of freer markets but also religious freedoms the likes of which Russia had never known.

As I watched the funeral there were faces I recognized among the celebrants from the time when I was involved with the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1990s, and once again I was haunted by the extraordinary beauty of Orthodox liturgical music. There is nothing to beat the glory of a Russian church choir. Memories of the times I spent in Russia came flooding back, whether it was freezing ears and feet during the middle of winter, or extraordinary moments in worship in some of the country's ancient churches.

I have all sorts of questions of Russian Orthodoxy, and have been especially uncomfortable by the way it has wrapped itself in Russian nationalism, but having said that its presence right at the heart of an occasion like this is a telling example of how much Russia has changed. Much of this is a result of the courage, tenacity, and larger-than-life-ness of Boris Yeltsin and others. As he stood there holding a funeral candle I wondered whether President Vladimir Putin, when he was a member of the KGB ever thought he would be doing such a thing before the world's television cameras.

Yeltsin needs to be thanked over and over again for some of the things that he did, and those in the area of personal and religious freedoms could well be his greatest legacy. Lauren Homer, an attorney who worked in the area of Russian religious freedoms in the 1990s, has written of him, "Without President Yeltsin’s personal intervention and courage, Russia today would have only a handful of state controlled faiths. People of faith within and outside Russia owe Boris Yeltsin a huge debt of gratitude."

After the cathedral service, instead of being buried in the Kremlin wall behind Lenin's Tomb, Yeltsin's body was taken through the streets of Moscow to the hauntingly beautiful convent of Novodevichy, and became the first Russian leader to be laid to rest in consecrated ground since 1894. I have a small oil painting of the convent on the wall of my study, picked up for a few dollars at a Moscow street market when Russians hardly knew how they would keep body and soul together.

All this got me thinking afresh of those seven or eight years when Russia loomed large in my work and ministry. I first went to Russia along with an Episcopal Church delegation, thinking that we might pick up one or two projects that would excite the supporters of the ministry for which I then worked. We came as friends, wishing to share with our Russian counterparts some of the blessings that had been bestowed on us. Their church was in tatters, while we had much that we thought we could make available.

Today the roles are reversed. Their church now plays a significant role in the life of the Russian nation as ours lies in tatters, in many ways the victim of its own hubris and intellectual arrogance. One of the things that struck me in the time that I spent with ordinary Russian Orthodox Christians and clergy was how they had learned some important lessons during the seventy years of their humiliation, and I found myself praying that God will teach us the lessons we need to learn during this period of our own humiliation.

Picture of Books

Some of the books that will soon be going to new homes!

For the love of books

I have in the last couple of weeks been dealing with that most thankless of all tasks when moving as far as we will be moving, and that is thinning my files and culling my library. I have no problem with ditching with delight and great glee tons of paper that gather in files, but books are a different. I know that I can't afford to take all of them back to England, and when I get there I won't have room for them anyhow, but thinning the shelves is like murdering my children. However, as they say, no pain... no gain!

My books illustrate the development of my thinking and my interests during these three decades that I have spent in ministry in the United States. It is interesting also to stumble across old friends that I brought with me from England in 1976, and what they say about where I was in interest and intellect half a lifetime ago.

Some of my books have been read from cover-to-cover, annotated, re-read, and literally chewed up, but of others I have read a few chapters then abandoned the work for some reason or another, and others I have hardly even opened. In fact, it frightens me just how many books I have bought but never actually read or properly used.

I remember being told when I was in seminary that you can tell an awful lot about a priest from his books (in those days there were no hers in the clergy business). As I traveled during the middle part of my time on these shores I was able to snoop through a lot of clergys' bookshelves, and these often told me things about the owner of these volumes, where they were, where they were going, and more sadly, when they stopped reading. It is surprising how many priests are still ministering merely out of the bits and pieces that they picked up during their years in seminary.

It goes without saying that most of us will buy more books by authors with whose presuppositions we are likely to agree, but it also goes without saying that an unbalanced theological library is one that is primarily made up of books written by those with whom we are most comfortable. Reading a book is engaging in a conversation, and a one-sided everyone agreeing conversation is hardly going to be particularly stimulating. Yet most of us seem to be happiest with such conversations, with the result that often the intellectual edge is missing and our creativity is never nourished.

My library illustrates the fads and phases of my life and ministry. There was a time, for example, when church growth fascinated me, and then there have been particular thinkers or writers who managed in differing ways to catch my imagination: Thomas Merton, Lyle Schaller, Eugene Peterson, Peter Drucker, Henri Nouwen, to name but a few. There are a lot of books about particular periods of history which I have drenched myself in, or odd little books that no one else seemed to appreciate, but which I have loved to death. Then there was "The Prayer of Jabez" -- how on earth did such a thin little thing become such a big best seller?

There have been those, "Why on earth did I buy that?" books. Some years ago I bought this huge turgid biography of King Alfred the Great. For weeks I struggled to get into it, and finally threw in the towel. Yet there was a genuine sadness that I hadn't been able to break into it when it joined the growing pile of those that will not return to England with me.

But biography is important. When I was setting out on my ministry I was working on a post-graduate degree in 19th and 20th Century church history. To my surprise one of my mentors became Max Warren, one of the greatest missionary statesmen of the Church of England. Canon Warren was getting close to the end of his life, his aging body had been weakened by a bout of tuberculosis contracted when he had been a missionary in Nigeria between the two world wars and then arduous ministry after that.

I remember the most wonderful day that I spent with him and his wife in his home less than a year before he died, when we worked over the thesis that I was trying to develop, him filling me with ideas and thoughts that have fed and nourished my thinking ever since. The thesis never reached the examiners, but the wisdom he shared is better than putting more letters after my name. One of the things that he taught me that day was the value of reading biography. Always try to have a biography on the go, he told me, and I loved the idea.

This is advice that I have kept, and so there is in my collection a large selection of biographies, many of which, alas, I am going to have to part company with. Much can be gained from reading the lives of men and women for faith, as well as those who might have struggled with the faith, and when the biographer is honest and gives a 'warts and all' picture it makes the subject so much easier to identify with.

My collection of biographies stretched from Winston Churchill to Max Warren himself, and from movie stars like David Niven to Christian writers like Patricia St. John. Just recently I have been reading Bill Bryson's funny autobiography, Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, about growing up in Iowa in the Fifties -- learned a lot about America from that one. I love learning about lives, and discovering the strengths and the foibles of all sorts and conditions of people has always been a great aid to being able to minister among folks and to work with them.

When I was in high school I was introduced to the Essays of Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon was a renaissance man during the time of James I whose many of whose pithy comments within the context of lucid but dense writing have become well-known quotations in the English language. In his essay on writing Bacon says, "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." In one way or another that piece of advice has stuck with me through my life and is reflected in the shape and content of my library.

Now I am preparing for these books that have been my collection, some of them for many years, to be scattered to the four winds. Already some are finding their way onto other people's shelves, and soon only a rump will be left for me to treasure as I take them back to my homeland and new ministry there. I am not a particularly clever individual, just average, but a lifelong friendship with books has helped me to fill in some of the gaps and to stretch the few talents that I have been given a little further than they otherwise might have gone.

I don't know how much longer the Lord intends to keep me as part of the church militant, but I hope and pray that I will always be surrounded by books. One of the great figures of the Anglican tradition in the 20th Century was Michael Ramsey. A large, brilliant, bumbling figure, we used to look forward to his visits to our seminary, although with all the self-righteousness of young men who knew that they knew best, we thought that his theology was at times a bit fuzzy.

Like the present Archbishop of Canterbury he taught theology before becoming a bishop, and was a man who loved reading and books. As his years ebbed away so did his eyesight, and I remember John Andrew, his former chaplain and at that time Rector of St. Thomas's Church, New York, telling me how at the end it became necessary to find people to read to him. I hope and pray that my eyes do not grow dim like that because I always want to be able to enjoy books.

I have no doubt whatsoever that when I get back to England and get settled, more books, with titles old and new, will find their way into our home and my office. Let me finish these wanderings with another quote from Bacon which perhaps describes the way books should be used, "Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider."

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

I dislike being quoted in the press because the result is always mangled. Last week I was in a position where I couldn't avoid talking to a reporter, and as is inevitable what was published was partial at the best. This led to a conversation yesterday evening with someone who took exception to what had appeared. While the reporter did not actually misquote me, she took words from the beginning of the interview and words from the end, then put them together with no reference to the modifiers from the middle.

The issue was, of course, that depressing constant of human sexuality. Life and ministry are about a great deal more than sex, but these days a huge amount of what we do and say is interpreted through this grid of the politics of where we stand on the issues of sexuality.

For a number of years leading up to and following on from that critical point in this crisis in August 2003 I had been puzzling over why human sexuality had turned into such a hot potato. It always seemed that there was more at play here than what it had been reduced to, and which was now being as fiercely fought a fight as a Quidditch game between Gryffindor and Slytherin.

I reached the conclusion that actually sexuality was only a symptom, not the real cause of the problem. Treating sexuality as a stand-alone is about as intelligent as treating toothache without trying to find out the underlying cause. This meant reaching behind the battle to see what exactly is at stake.

My conclusion was, and this has been backed up since then by my testing of the hypothesis, that what we are dealing with is the issue of what it means to be human. How we actually "manage" sexuality is only a part of a much larger and more significant whole. Although it is obviously a highly emotional subject, I assert that it is only a small part of the enormous challenge that faces the 21st Century, which is to discover afresh what it really means to be human, and to appropriately define the limits of humanity and the boundaries for human behavior.

One of the reasons I have tried not to engage the sexuality wars as enthusiastically as some have wished is that I believe they are a skirmish in a much more significant debate and conflict. To fight over sex is to distort realities by focusing on only a part of the picture. The result of this is that the whole issue has been highly politicized in all arenas with parties backed into corners from which we lob shells, doing our best, perhaps, to do as much damage as we can to each other, rather than addressing the true extent of what is going on and what the issues really are.

The clue to a whole book is often found in the first chapter, even in the first few paragraphs, and Scripture is no exception. When humanity is introduced to us we are told that God set out to make 'adam' (human) in his own likeness, to have dominion and stewardship of the earth, and that he made them "in his own image, in the image of God he created him (adam); male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:26-27). The rest of Scripture is, in effect, dealing with the implications of these few words.

Judeo-Christian culture has had built into its very being this high understanding of what it means to be human, and the dignity of the stewardship to which we have been called. This presupposition has shaped every aspect of our understanding of humanity, from the way our laws are configured, through science and medicine, to our social interaction and behavior.

But in the last few generations our culture has been abandoning any workable notion of a creator God. In the last 30-40 years the impact of this has filtered into society's perception of what it means to be human, and meanwhile we have been steadily letting go of any sense of the absolute. We are now at a point where increasing numbers are willing to negotiate what it means to be human.

What is being implied more and more is that human beings are creatures who have reached a particular point on an evolutionary continuum and now ready to move on. Behind such notions is the presupposition that we have reached a degree of maturity that permits us to direct the evolution of future generations. To some this may sound bizarre, but there are numbers of serious anthropologists, philosophers, and so forth toying with this notion, while developments in biogenetics, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, nanotechnology, and so forth, mean that such gameplans need to be taken seriously.

The truth is that in so many fields the tools are either in place or will soon be there to enable human beings to alter their physical, psychological, and ontological nature. Reading professional literature as well as thoughtful stuff in journals and news sources, it is clear that there are many who have no qualms about pushing this envelope as far as they can, while those of us who say, "Wait a minute, let's just get some definitions in place as to what it means to be human," are thrust aside as dinosaurs who ought to shut up and get out of the way.

Our confusion about the nature and place of sexuality is part of this much larger picture -- a symptom that what we have accepted as givens are no longer acceptable in this brave new world.

I believe that John Paul II recognized this and sought in his theology of the human body to address these realities, but his thinking, and that of others like Dr. Leon Kass, who has been Chair of the President' Council on Bioethics, is not being as seriously listened to because it requires caution and thoughtfulness on the part of those scrambling to make fresh scientific discoveries.

The reason recent trends in sexuality are part of this picture is because they are, I believe, a component of this renegotiating of what it means to be human. There are those who are suggesting because of their own biases that we are free to re-assess what it means to be sexual beings, and what it is to be made in God's image. Clearly, what Genesis 1 teaches, and this is then echoed throughout Scripture, is that part of this being made is God's image is that we are either male or female, and that men and women have not just a functional but an ontological complementariness. From this then emerges the whole flow of biblical teaching about being human, and sexual ethics.

It is my contention that this vital passage in Genesis 1 has not been given the attention that it deserves, and neither has it been looked at within the wider context of changes and movements in our culture that are calling into question and seeking to remake what it means to be human. There is a lot of work ahead of us if we are to find a way forward, but right now we are into lobbing emotionally laden shells rather than creatively engaging the whole much more worrying issue of which this is only part.

This passage is extremely challenging. It raise to the highest level what it means to be human because we are created in the image of God which means taking incredibly seriously the dignity of every human being -- and that means every man, woman, and child on this planet, no exceptions. But it also demands that we take with the utmost seriousness what all the given-nesses of our lives are about, our gender being a crucial part of this. In truth, serious study of Genesis 1:26-31, and Genesis 2:4-25 will stretch all of us to ask and try to answer some very uncomfortable questions.

I suspect that we will not find a way forward in the culture as a whole, or the church, until we are prepared to deal with the whole picture and not part of it.

Call and Vocation

The Courtyard at Ridley Hall, Cambridge

Changing the country which is my base of operation for the second time in my life has, as you might imagine, been much on my mind in the last few weeks. Among other things I have thought a lot about the way God calls, guides, and leads.

In the midst of the crisis of the last few years I have found myself thinking a lot about the nature of vocation, and have a number of times wondered whether God is calling me to leave the Episcopal Church. I have watched others who I love and respect doing something similar, but a tension deep inside has prevented me from crossing that threshold.

Unraveling the reason for this has taken time. Certainly it has to do with creedal belief and ecclesiology, but I think it has also been because I understand vocation to be a call of God to do or be something, not the call of God to walk away from something.

Folks will now be saying, well, aren't you now walking away from the Episcopal Church? In a way I suppose that is so, but this is purely because I cannot be in two places at once. Actually, I have told my bishop and congregation that I will not be ceasing to be a priest of the Diocese of Tennessee, and I will certainly try to play my part in the life of the diocese even with an ocean in the way.

However, I will certainly not be engaged in the daily life of the diocese as I have been involved in the past. Some of this comes as a relief. Being involved in the internal battles of the church is important, but it hasn't done much to edify my soul over many of these years.

The call from God has been to something, and that inevitably leads us to back away from something else because cloning is not an option! Since my early fifties I have had this sense that a component of the latter part of my ministry would in some way be involved in training the next generation of leaders. I do not believe that us old guys should stick around forever standing in the way of up-and-comers, but I also believe that part of the stewardship of senior leadership is to insure that there are faithful men and women to take their place.

I served for a good few years on the Commission on Ministry of the diocese, taught a few adjunct courses, gave the occasional counsel to folks considering leadership and ordination, but that was about it. I had reached the point last year where I reckoned that would always be the level at which I would fulfill my responsibility in bringing to the fore younger folks to be tomorrow's leaders.

Then came the approach from Ridley Hall, Cambridge, as out of the blue as any that I have ever had in nearly forty years. Just as the call to move to the United States was unexpected when it was first mooted in 1975, so the call to return from the United States was a similar curve ball. From June until February we prodded it, tested it, and jumped through the various hoops that had been placed in front of us by a cautious theological college and the regulatory mindset of British employment law, prayed, talked, got cold feet, got warm feet, and so forth.

If God was going to slam the door in our faces, he would have done it in those months. But he did not, and while I have certainly had anxieties about the call that I have accepted, I am very much at peace that we are faithfully attempting to follow the path that Jesus Christ would have us walk. I have been called TO something, and that means letting go of other things here, which is the painful business in which I am involved at the moment.

During the next few years I will be Director of Development at Ridley Hall at a time when the seminary is rapidly expanding. Ridley has gone through a metamorphosis from being a troubled theological college with an uncertain future because of low enrollment a dozen years or so ago, to a vibrant place today that is bursting at the seams and planning to double in size during the next four or five years.

I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity, which is truly a gift from God. It seemed to me before Ridley came along that the best option I had was to take an early retirement, do a little interim work, write, and wait for my wife to end her career as a college professor before returning to the arms of our family in Britain. Bits of the above scenario attracted, but it seemed a waste that I still had health, energy, and some tread left on my tires. Then came this option which God had been preparing us for, a task whose job description could have been written with us in mind.

There is another side of this, too, and that is the deepening sense of burden that I have had for Britain during the last few years. While there are places in Britain where the Christian faith is remarkably robust, there is also this strong secular undercurrent that has radically reshaped the nation's values and mindset over the last few decades. There surely is in much of Europe a walking away from its Christian heritage and this leaves a frightening vacuum. The Britain to which we are returning is certainly not the country that we left as thirty-one-year-olds.

I have wondered over the years as this burden has increased, what someone like me could do to contribute to helping turn things around. Other than ministering to the elderly or, perhaps, taking a small parish or chaplaincy, I couldn't see that there was much that I could grab hold of. Ridley Hall altered that altogether.

British seminaries have always been hand-to-mouth operations when it comes to financial resources, something that raises huge stewardship issues (but that's another story). Ridley is forging ahead seeking to train leaders who are skilled and appropriate for post-secularist times likes these, but to train them properly there is a need for fresh resources and new facilities. The theological college is functioning out of the same buildings it was using when Queen Victoria was on the throne!

Now, there's a challenge for a seasoned guy like me to get his teeth into as his active ministry begins to draw to a close. Not only would such a resource help train new leaders for this time, but it would keep on giving and train leaders for several generations to come. Perhaps some of those coming through Ridley Hall will be the folks who will shape the post-secularist Christianity that will work in Europe in the 21st Century and beyond, as well as present a gracious face of truth to the advance of Islam.

When I was working in New England thirty years ago, I heard an old Baptist minister talk about finishing well, and how difficult that is. One of my prayers in the years since then has been that God would give me the strength and capacity to finish well. I give thanks to the Lord that an opportunity has been given to me that will, I think, give me a shot of doing just that.

Church of the Annunciation, New Orleans

Rev Jerry Kramer orienting folks from Resurrection, Franklin, to New Orleans now

When a group of us from the Church of the Resurrection, Franklin, Tennessee, were in New Orleans working with the Church of the Annunciation the other week, there was a crew from PBS there doing some coverage of this and a Methodist church in another part of the city.

Jerry Kramer, Rector of Annunciation, has just sent me the link to the program, and it gives a very fair idea of the challenges that are still facing our brothers and sisters in Christ down there in what was once the Big Easy but what is now a big mess that is taking a very long time to rehabilitate. The mindset in the video gives an idea why folks from Resurrection, Franklin, are already eager to go back to support Annunciation in the near future.

You can find the text and the video that PBS aired today on their Religion and Ethics program at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1032/cover.html#, and be ready to be challenged.

The years that I have spent ministering in the Episcopal Church have been a mixture of agony and ecstasy -- in recent years there has been more of the former than the latter. However, the images that nourish me as I look back on my thirty-one years as a priest of the Episcopal Church are less those of garbled theology and confused ethics, ecclesiastical politics that are out of control, and a seemingly endless procession of specious bishops who wrapped themselves in today's chaotic zeitgeist, and more those of which this little video is a sample.

Jerry Kramer, and his wife, Stacy, are, in effect, saying that what is before us is not about the declining institution that is the Episcopal Church, but is about the Kingdom of God. They haven't got time to play the messy game of church politics in order to get their own way regardless of the consequences, rather they are dealing with issues of life and death. They and their colleagues and congregation are an example of those who are prepared to minister faithfully in the hardest place and not to give up, even when the going gets tough. This gives us a pretty fair reflection of what the Gospel is all about.

Most of those pushing agendas in the Episcopal Church today are saying that the Christian faith is about me, my preferences, or the concerns of my particular bias or pressure group. This is in contrast to the faithful, bold witness of the likes of the Kramers who are saying, "No, there is much more at stake here -- people's lives and people's souls, and we are called to stand with them and help rebuild this place in Jesus' name. We surrender personal preference in favor of serving Christ our Lord."

Actually, from my many years of experience there are a good few such folks in the church with the same determination to faithfully serve Christ, but most of them do not find themselves in the sort of circumstances that the Kramers are, and able to get media attention. Nevertheless, they get on and do what is required regardless.

The people in New Orleans have been pushed into a situation where the option was to launch out into the deep of faith or go out of business. Dozens and dozens of churches in New Orleans already have, and more will follow, Episcopal congregations among them. What Annunciation is seeking to do is more than rebuild a congregation in a marginal area of a devastated city. They believe the Good News is about the people of the Church of the Annunciation rolling up their sleeves and getting on with the work of rebuilding, organizing, and being a beacon of hope amidst so much devastation -- whether the television cameras are there or not.

These and many life them are the true faces of the Episcopal Church, and are building as Paul put it, not with that which is transitory, but that which reflects the eternal. The Apostles said, "For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw-- each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done"(1 Corinthians 3:11-13)

In Christ's name I honor them, give thanks for them, and ask that I might be able to emulate their faithfulness.

Looking Through Binoculars

The View Through My Study Window

My desk is set near a window so that I can look across the rapidly greening Tennessee countryside, and this morning I was treated to a bevy of turkeys wandering around the field behind the house. Distracted from my work I grabbed the binoculars and perused their behavior for a while, before realizing that these were as good an analogy for something I have been trying to write for several weeks.

The fact is that the view you get depends on which way you look through the binoculars. If I look through them normally I see the turkeys in all their spring glory, strutting across the grass and grubbing around for food. However, if I turn them round the other way the view changes and I can hardly make the birds out at all so distant do they appear to be.

Several weeks ago while reading something by Katharine Schori said to the Diocese of East Tennessee, it dawned on me that her way of thinking is so alien to me because she is looking at the faith and what its implications are from a diametrically opposite way to myself. While it is chi-chi among Episcopalians to put far more weight upon the Baptismal Covenant than it was designed to bear what I realized was that the Presiding Bishop, whether she realizes it or not, is interpreting it from a reverse direction to the way it is set in the Book of Common Prayer -- which reflects the historic approach to believing.

I have come to conclude that one of the reasons why the Millennium Development Goals figure so prominently in Dr. Schori's thinking is that she seems to start into the Baptismal Covenant with the very last question and affirmation: "Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?"

I am not one of those who has real difficulties with the Millennium Development Goals. There is absolutely nothing wrong in striving for justice, peace, and human dignity, and I would assert that these are very important outcomes from believing, but they are outcomes and not the starting point. As one who when called by Christ into his fold was committed to bringing in the Kingdom of God, then obviously justice, peace, and human dignity are part of the mix, and we should chide ourselves and our forebears that so often we have forgotten this.

However, we should not hold our whole way of understanding the faith through the lens of justice, peace, and human dignity. When that happens we come up with a very different perception of what believing is about. The Baptismal Covenant, despite its shortcomings, lays things out in the right order. The starting point is the Trinitarian God who has called us into his family, redeemed us, and made us his own -- then it goes on to the fulness and nature of our response to God's initiative, and the nature of Christian discipleship.

When the last part of the Covenant is made first we immediately start defining the nature of discipleship in our own terms, and that then allows us to define the nature and call of God in light of our own perceptions. As a Christian believer I believe passionately in what might broadly be labelled justice, peace, and human dignity, but I must define what they mean in light of God's nature, God's call, how God has revealed himself, and what God wants me to do and be.

By turning the Baptismal Covenant on its head, I then, in effect, define these elements of the life of faith in my own terms, projecting my own preferences back onto the Godhead. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why so much that comes out of this school of thought in the church reads so much like the platform and manifesto of a left-leaning political party.

Because those on that particular end of the spectrum handle the Baptismal Covenant in this way, it should come as no surprise to us that the whole biblical doctrine of the covenant then gets misconstrued. Reading the Presiding Bishop's stuff, it would seem that she tends to blur the distinction that exists between the covenant community of faith, called to witness Christ into the world, and the whole human race.

Restoring God's people to unity with one another, for example, takes on the a strong social justice flavoring. She says, "The world is not reconciled, as long as some live without..." Well, yes, but neither is the world reconciled when the covenant community of grace fails in its obligation to share the faith which is their stimulus to action as citizens of the Kingdom, witnessing in Christ's name.

One of the great weaknesses of North American Anglicanism is, as a result, pointed up, and that is we want to play down or reinterpret the evangelistic component of the church's mission. This obviously happens because if you wishfully think that all will be redeemed, then there is obviously little incentive to encourage people to surrender their lives to Jesus Christ -- despite the fact that we talk about this in the Baptismal Covenant in no uncertain terms.

The challenges before the world are enormous, and the church is called to follow the leading of God in working with those challenges during these Kingdom times in which we live. Both those who might be called conservatives and those who might be called liberals have not done justice to what the Scriptures teach about bringing in God's Kingdom, and course correction is always necessary

The King has come to claim his own, the bring about transformation, and he calls the covenant community of grace to be partners with him in this task. Yet if our perception of the nature of God and the nature of our call is out of kilter, then we are going to distort the breadth of our vocation.

"Go to the back of the bus"

When the House of Bishops was meeting recently I was far too busy with many other things, worthwhile ministry, so I was able to push what they were up to to the back of my mind. I only really started tuning back in when I drove back from our week-long mission trip to New Orleans, and began to realize that what these men and women in purple are saying to the likes of me, "Go to the back of the bus," or better still, "Get off the bus altogether."

I guess I have known for all the thirty-one years that I have served as a priest of the Episcopal Church: that I am not particularly welcome here, but never has denominational leadership spelled it out so bluntly.

In October 1976, less than six weeks after I had arrived in the United States, I attended a diocesan clergy conference in Massachusetts. I knew virtually no one, no one knew me, and feeling very much like a fish out of water I was keeping my mouth firmly shut. However, this didn't prevent a bevy of my 'colleagues' from cornering me, rounding on me, and castigating me with some of the most vituperative language because of what they thought were the primitive nature of my beliefs. This kangaroo court lit into me without even doing me the courtesy of checking out the facts!

This may have been the first time such a thing happened, but it was certainly not the last, and such harassment has continued with varying levels of intensity through all these years. Now, at last, the point is reached where there is a big enough critical mass of those in political power to castigate us as throwbacks, primitives whose ideas and belief systems are inadequately developed, less than wholly Episcopal (whatever that means), and therefore fit only to squat at the back of the bus, or better still, be kicked out the back through the emergency exit.

What is ironic is that we were told in 1985 by the then newly-elected Presiding Bishop that there would be "no outsiders" in this church. Of course, that pledge was the code language of those pushing the program that aggressive agenda-driven interest groups would get the substantial hearing, but those of us whose Anglicanism might be dismissed as 'fundamentalist,' and therefore, defective, can only ever be seen but definitely not heard. Increasingly, the councils of the church were loaded against us, and despite growth our voice was diminished. Perhaps we are merely 2/3 of a person.

After years of such discrimination it is hardly surprising that many of our number have decided that this bus isn't worth riding, but before they go they are frisked down and forced to leave their possessions and even those things that only have sentimental value behind. Part of me envies those who have gone. It must be nice to be out of the uncomfortable pressure cooker that the Episcopal Church has become; but even if separate theological development takes some of the difficult pressures out of life, I suspect this course is fraught with profound, and as yet unrecognized problems. I would hazard that some of these will be as challenging as staying part of the dying mainline denomination.

If history is anything to go by, world-altering new movements and fresh ideas do not arise from opting out, but by engaging what is going on in creative and courageous ways. In his breathtaking grasp of the nature of faith and history, Herbert Butterfield points out that "The Hebrew prophets in the periods of successive disaster found what might almost be called new patterns in history" (Christianity and History, p. 108), from which he draws the conclusion that it is in cataclysmic times that God opens us up to new insights that will lead us creatively away from the rut and trench warfare into which we have fallen.

I believe we are in just such a time, and it is by surviving in the midst of being maltreated, like the Suffering Servant, that the raw materials for forging the Holy Spirit's new way forward come to the surface. Right now the whole Episcopal Church, perhaps on behalf of a large chunk of our culture, stands under the judgment of God, and we should never forget that.

I can think of a thousand reasons why I do not belong on the bus. I am a wretched sinner saved by God's grace alone, and I reach the end of each day conscious of how undeserving I am of the Lord's goodness and generosity. Perhaps it is good for me, one who is blessed and privileged in so many ways, to spend some time at the back of the bus for there are always new lessons in humility that I can learn only when I am excluded and treated as valueless. However, it does not seem appropriate to cast the likes of me out of this particular bus on the charges that have been trumped up.

I developed a nose for bullying when I was a small and timid boy on the receiving end of many such torments: what has come out of the House of Bishops smells an awful lot like bullying. You don't belong here we are told despite our faithfulness within the tradition of faith to which we belong! One of the things this frightened little kid learned was being on the receiving end was that the only way to handle bullies is to stand up to them. "Grief, no, this is my seat and I am not walking away from it, as much as you might want me to and put pressure on me to do so."

The truth is that great movements begin with seemingly insignificant actions -- whether a humble African-American woman refusing to be intimidated by gross discrimination, or a studious Augustinian monk nailing his theses to an abbey door hoping to get a hearing. These people fermented revolutions because they stuck to their guns in the face of error and falsehood.

This, I think, is where we are today. I do not have a crystal ball so I cannot tell what the future is going to be like. The only thing I can claim is that I have been saying for a long time now that God was going to reconfigure his church. This is happening, and sometimes it is agony to us all.

Pictures from New Orleans

This is the Church of the Annunciation, the base from which we are working -- the setting we are playing a small part in rebuilding for mission in this damaged city

Bonnie Lloyd and Pat Smith take a coffee break

Jack Clarke, the youngest member of the team, whose teeshirt "Small but Mighty" sums the whole endeavor of the Christian Gospel up!

The "Sweatshop" Crew working on the production of window coverings for the dorm where volunteers will be staying while they undertake the rebuilding.

Katrina broke the cross from over the old entrance of the Church of the Annunciation. If you look carefully you can see it lying on the roof of the porch

A view of our crew cleaning the grounds of the Church of the Annunciation

Lessons from Visiting New Orleans

From New Orleans, Louisiana

Spring break has brought several dozen folks from our parish, the Church of the Resurrection, Franklin, Tennessee, to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. There is something surreal about a trip like this. Last time I was here was before Katrina, and New Orleans was a sweaty, bustling city, while the Mississippi coastline a haven for those seeking to enjoy the warm gulf breezes.

Today there is the jarring interface of normality with something that has hardly been normal at all. As I drove along Intertate 10 yesterday the strange emptiness in the communities on either side of the road has a science fiction flavor to them, as if streets and apartment complexes had suffered a plague of some kind.

We are here to work with the Church of the Annunciation, New Orleans, but I took a side-trip to Pass Christian, where I preached this weekend at Trinity Church. My memory of Trinity from the past was a tastefully designed facility set amidst a grove of live oaks. Today all that remains is the trees made more ragged. The frame and roof of the church are there also with walls that are rough framing stuffed with insulation to keep the worst of the cold, heat, and rain out. The offices and education building are gone -- as are the lovely houses that once abutted the church's site no more than a few hundred yards from the ocean.

But the Gulf Coast is very different from New Orleans. Whereas in Pass Christian I was proudly shown the drawings a the new facility that will rise on the site of what was the old one, in the hard-hit areas of New Orleans things are far from orderly.

I have seen a lot of shanties and barrios in the Global South, as well as the ruins of the Soviet Empire as Russia was emerging from seventy years of Communism, but adjectives used to describe these situations don't work in the New Orleans context. This morning I watched both kids and adults in our group grow quieter and more thoughtful as we were given a view of the Lower Ninth Ward and the devastation nature wrought.

I talked to an older woman named Louise, whose daughter was bringing her to see the site of her former home on Tennessee Street. She had lost everything, even the building in which she lived most of her life had never been found, and she was trying to explain how hard it was to pick up the pieces after such a disaster. "You can never forget it," she said thoughtfully, "Even if at times you can put it out of your mind for a little while."

In Broadmore, the community around the Church of the Annunciation in New Orleans there is a greater sense of order, but listening to Jerry Kramer and various of the folks working with him, it is clear that disorder, even anarchy, are not very far beneath the surface. Frustration levels are high, and the work that needs to be done sometimes seems impossibly demanding. These people rightly feel as if they have been forgotten, and have little but disdain for the politicians who have compounded the mess.

This afternoon I watched as the some of the kids in our group worked on what is going to be the Annunciation Youth House. It was good therapy for them to be out there doing something -- and I hope the activity will help them sleep tonight!

New Orleans seems to me in some ways to be a parable for our culture and the culture of our church. There are places where the city is very obviously broken, and this cannot be hidden. There are places where the place seems little changed from what it has always been. Yet as dereliction and seeming stability exist cheek-by-jowl with one another, their proximity seems much like the various textures of life that we see in the church and culture today.

I have this fear that we might in some ways be moving into a new dark age, and what we see in New Orleans is the practical outworking of that in what was once a significant city. Yet what is seething under the surface, spiritually and psychologically, is also part of that darkness that has begun to envelop us. Just as it is hard to be optimistic about a city like this, it is also hard to be optimistic about our culture and our church.

The Let's All Make A Rainbow Crowd

You can hardly call the debate in the Episcopal Church over these last years a debate, it has been more like two sides talking (and sometimes yelling) past one another with others in the middle wringing their hands. This alone has been pretty pitiful given in a church that has always prided itself on its intellectual prowess - very little to be proud of here.

What is worse is that the whole sorry business seems to have brought out the worst in everyone. If you stand on the sidelines and look at the debate, contest, or whatever you want to call it, it is almost as if sometimes we deliberately play into the image which others have of us: the Archie Bunkers (for those old enough to remember him) clashing with aging free love hippies. Frankly, there has been very little gospel grace and humility, but I guess that is the way it has always been when division roils the church.

Most of the comments that I have seen since the Primates' Communique was made public have done little more than demonstrate the truth of a comment made to me last year by a leading Anglican in the worldwide church: the American church has something of a "theological deficit." Few, it seems, are either capable of or want to respond to the Communique theologically, but rather have done so politically, emotionally, and showing a very limited ability at intellectual analysis.

I was misguided enough to think that the worst was past and then the "let's all wear rainbow colors on Easter Day" campaign started shouting the odds. I confess that after one or two experiences in my twenties I have a low toleration threshold for demonstrations of any kind, but really this latest little game has me shaking my head with a wry smile. All I want to say is for goodness sake grow up.

It seems that there is a real childishness about all this, and I wonder if some of those on the right are taking it more seriously than such immaturity deserves. It is sort of "Let's all dress up and dance around the maypole to show those horrid ol' primates just how mean we think they are."

Those foisting all these innovation on the church have never successfully responded to the objections coming from the mainstream of Christianity. What responses there are reflect an inadequate grasp of Scripture and Christian tradition. But this doesn't seem to matter, for where the church has always been is more likely to be blown off with a wave of the hand that the Holy Spirit is doing a new thing, while they skip off down a path reflecting the tired values of a relativistic, confused, and secular-pagan culture.

What is interesting is these are the folks who are now lining up to say just how awful the Anglican Communion is, are the very same people who are few years ago were disdainfully writing off orthodox folks like me for not being Anglican enough.

How things have changed! Those who were not long ago saying such things are now making it very clear that they want to walk apart, which means that they really don't consider themselves to be Anglicans any longer. This saddens, but the Lord God has made us free to make our own choices. What these antics point up is just how important it is that faithful Anglicans within the Episcopal Church receive a Primatial Vicar who is able and willing to provide the kind of oversight that we require.

We can only hope that it will not be too long before we get beyond the banal and the bizarre.

"Amazing Grace" - Movie Review

Amazing Grace -- The Movie A Review

I grew up with the story of William Wilberforce, the man who led the fight against the Slave Trade in the British Empire. Somehow or other he has always had a place of honor in England, an example of selflessness looked up to as much by non-Christians and Christians alike. Throughout my education he kept reappearing in different guises, but it was not until the late Seventies that I realized just how many fingers he had in many, many pies. Neither did I realize what an influence he had on British culture as well as the future shape of the British Empire, and after the Empire was gone the Commonwealth of Nations.

Given all this history I have with Wilberforce, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when going to see the recently released film of his fight against the slave trade the other evening. Usually I find that movies about people of note, especially Christians, leave something to be desired. But friends I respect had said it was a "Must See" so off we went -- and were not disappointed.

From start to finish I was spellbound. Not only was the movie briliantly executed, but it was about as true to the facts as the cinema can make it. The production tells its story with a mixture of understatement and (sometimes) whimsey that add force and poignancy to what is being said. It would be very easy for a subject like this to get preachy, but Michael Apted's production avoids such heaviness while at the same time not compromising the significance of what was being portrayed.

On the screen we meet William Wilberforce the enthusiastic and sharp-witted young Member of Parliament for Hull in Yorkshire, and we meet this same Wilberforce when worn down by years spent banging his head up against something akin to a brick wall. We see his youthful friend friendship with William Pitt the Younger, the youngest man ever to be Prime Minister, turn sour, renew on the latter's deathbed, and then we are told as the credits roll that they were buried side-by-side in Westminster Abbey.

We see Wilberforce the man of faith, tenacity, and vision, and also Wilberforce battling the laudinum habit that was created by the use of this opiate as a medicine. We are introduced to the beautiful and indomitable Barbara Spooner who, after a whirlwind romance, becomes his wife and partner in causes of which the Anti-Slavery movement was only one championed by these extraordinary 18th and early 19th Century evangelicals.

We are shown Wilberforce in the deepest depression, Wilberforce the man of song, Wilberforce grappling the extent of the evil he was fighting and acting as a general to gather data and finally defeat this evil. What I didn't know but the movie pointed up was that William Wilberforce loved animals and kept a whole menagerie of species in his home, especially a beloved hare. Wikipedia tells me that he was among the founders of what would eventually become the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), one of the largest and most influential humane societies in the world today.

Together with people like Hannah More and the other Evangelicals who lived in the Clapham area of South London, William Wilberforce had a profound influence on British society and outward into all the world, a fact only hinted by the movie, but is fully recorded in the multitude of books about the man and his times. My favorite biography of Wilberforce by John Pollock, published in 1979 is, as far as I can see, no longer in print or available.

The endurance and perseverance of these folks should be a model to us today, for despite what were at the beginning insurmountable odds they were prepared to take on an evil and fight it to the end whatever the consequences. The movie does not tell us that Wilberforce used most of his family's financial resources in his fight for good. One of the tragedies of our times is that people of commitment rather than fighting against what they perceive to be evil, after one or two bloody noses step from the ring and walk away. Amazing Grace is a tonic that if taken would seriously stiffen the spine of the faithful.

There are so many fine performances in this movie that it is seems almost unfair to single anyone out -- but the actor who surprised me the most was Albert Finney, who played the priest and hymn-writer John Newton. I have watched Finney in any number of roles throughout his long career, but nothing matches this performance. Tears flowed down my cheeks when his face shone and he said, "I know only two things, that I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior."

It isn't often that you watch a film and the audience is transfixed at the end, but this is what happened in the theatre the other night in Franklin, Tennessee. There was a short round of applause followed by people riveted to their seats as they thought, prayed, and watched the credits go up. Indeed, strangers started talking to one another, sharing their own perception of the last couple of hours or so.

This is a movie that I will buy as a DVD when it is published in that format, and which I will watch again and again. The telling of the story of William Wilberforce ought to rekindle the vision of us all to be willing to surrender everything to change the world in the name of Jesus Christ. It is certainly something to share with young Christians who might be in a position to do in the 21st Century what Wilberforce and his friends did in the Britain of the Georgian and Regency era.

William Wilberforce lived to see the slave trade abolished by Parliament in 1807, but he had to wait until 1833 to see the abolition of slavery and total emancipation in the British Empire -- he was on his deathbed. Parliament ended this mean and wicked trafficking in human souls on July 26, 1833. As news came to his home in Clapham the great Abolitionist said, "Thank God that I have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of Slavery." He died just three days later.

Responses to the Communique

With everyone and their aunt responding to the Primate's Communique, it is hard for a busy parish priest to keep up with the welter of words, and until this morning I haven't even tried. However, I spent some time on this, my day off, scanning the various offerings that are being dished up here. Occasionally I have stumbled over a helpful nugget, but most of the time there is little that inspires (on either right or left).

As was to be expected, there are few people who seem to be hearing what the Communique says, or have perhaps even read it with care. Instead they have rushed into asserting the rightness of their own position over against the wrongness of those they consider their adversaries. There are several thoughts that I have been having as I have attempted to plough my way through this tangle of non-communication, and I tentatively share these.

The first is the observation that for many Anglicanism seems to have ceased being a historic Christian tradition rooted and grounded in the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it was understood by the Church of England, and then developing outward, eventually spreading around the world. It is almost as if the notion of "Anglican" has become to many a convenient hold-all into which can be poured whatever you want to pour.

So for some it seems that Anglicanism, which has always been a generous approach to the faith, is now so generous that there are no boundaries to its inclusion of all and sundry -- even that which will destroy it. As we look back at the Elizabethan settlement and then at the manner in which the church and communion have handled differences in the past, while we have always leaned over backwards not to exclude, there have inevitably been limits to our openness because of clear theological, biblical, creedal, and ecclesiastical mandates.

Our problem is that North American Anglicanism has, at least in the past several generations, become profoundly non-biblical and untheological, with the result that we measure what is going on more in anthropological and socio-political terms than using Scripture within the context of the church's on going tradition - and place within Catholic Christianity.

This means that the language being used in so many of these statements tends to be the language of human and civil rights and not the language in which the faith is cast. The picture that is then painted by bishops and others is that God is the God of such rights, and what the Communion's leaders are doing is trampling on those rights, and therefore flying in the face of God's will and purpose.

Human and civil rights are obviously extremely important and as churches we have struggled with their implications for a long time. However, what Scripture teaches about the nature of humanity made in God's image and about ethics and morality are also extremely important, and those of us in the mainstream of Anglicanism are saying that these cannot be over-riden.

This is not to suggest we don't reach out in love to all people, but it does mean we must with the utmost seriousness bear in mind what Scripture and tradition teach about the pattern of life of those in leadership in the church. Christian leadership is not a right -- it is a fearful responsibility and a heavy privilege. The pastoral challenge is how to be welcoming of all while recognizing that all offices of the church cannot be open to all as if the church were a golf club putting in place a new president or captain.

Then many of the responses seem to weigh heavily on the canonical and procedural way of doing things in the Episcopal Church -- and certainly this needs to be taken into account. But this seems to me to be a "business as usual" mentality in the midst of a vast crisis that the Episcopal Church has triggered by going it alone rather than working with the wider Communion.

What is clear is that the ones who call upon those of us who are a minority within the Episcopal Church to knuckle under and be team players, are not prepared to listen to the Communion when it says in a pastoral but clear way that they should do something similar for the good of the wider Anglican family. There is a mutuality to communion, and that is hard to find in many of these statements.

Some on the left are making comments which, in effect, say that they really don't want to be part of the Anglican Communion any longer. That is fair enough, as they break away from the wider church then they should not prevent those of us who are Anglicans wanting to continue to remain. One writes, "If the Anglican Communion must separate over this fundamental issue of human rights, then so be it. To everything there is a season. Perhaps this is the season for the growth of the gospel in truth and in love in ways that we could never have imagined" (Steven Charleston of EDS).

In the midst of all this are plenty of "victim" statements. For example, a group calling themselves InclusiveChurch state, "As the debate becomes more disconnected from the reality of everyday life of those we serve, it is increasingly clear that TEC is becoming a scapegoat." Now obviously I sit in a different place and this debate is not disconnected from the reality of my life and ministry, but when a province has, in effect, given the finger to the rest of the Communion and then the Communion acts upon it that action is hardly scapegoating. Rather, it is the majority trying to find some way to maintain a measure of order and biblical discipline.

This raises just one more element of many of these statements, and that is the loose or loaded use of language. This is the way it has been all along, and does little to help along a process that might somewhere or other have reconciliation and the Cross in it.

In the midst of all this some are eloquently counseling patience and care, which is most valuable - and vital. A first step, perhaps, in humility.

What the Communique does reflect is Archbishop Williams' concern that all parties should keep talking, for it is when the talking stops that the most destructive kind of fighting begins. In all its components it also reflects the fact that the willingness of a large part of the Communion to allow the Episcopal Church to continue forestalling the majority is now wearing thin.

Radical Ecclesiastical Reconfiguration

Between the procession of Ash Wednesday services today I have found myself looking today at some of the things I wrote in Brave New Church (Morehouse Publishing: 2001) a few years ago about what was then the coming "radical ecclesiastical reconfiguration." I have looked at these as I have read with more care and then started to study the documents coming out of Dar-es-Salaam. While I never expected the players to take the field in the way they have, in various things we have said we seem to have foreseen some of the bits of what might happen.

The past few years those of us who are historic Anglicans in North America have been grieving over the passing of the old denomination in which so many of us were shaped and reared. However inadequate your parent might have been, it is always difficult to see them decline, deteriorate, and ultimately die. We have been watching those structures from the past with their accompanying rules and regulations begin to shuffle off, while a raucous new wave of structures are noisily (and sometimes rancorously) are testing the waters.

The tentative structural steps outlined in the Communique from the Primates concerning a Pastoral Council and Primatial Vicar in the United States, appears to me to be the Communion now catching up with and attempting to give some order to the changed realities that are all around us.

Of course, we are hearing howls from those who are still living in what Leonard Sweet called a state of "persistent make-believe" over the old structures. They are saying things like "This document is demanding the biggest change in the polity of the Episcopal Church by people who have absolutely no authority to even ask." (http://anglicanscotist.blogspot.com/2007/02/just-say-no.html). This is an interesting statement from a writer who cries foul to changing structures, but who consents to changing of fundamental doctrine -- but has absolutely no authority to do so!

It is hard to see what the long term outcomes of the Communique's proposals are likely to be, and I am certainly not eager to make brash predictions, but this does appear to be the first formal step down a road that will ultimately result in something rather different emerging, gathering strength and authority, and enabling Gospel ministry in this century.

The Primates are attempting to honor the received approach to being church while at the same time taking into account the effect of the anomalies which have surfaced with increasing intensity since August 2003. A dozen years or so ago when we were thinking about future structures we had in mind a network of networks -- now that possibility of that is beginning to emerge.

What I find so fascinating is that the so-called "progressives" are so retrogressive about and hostile to all this. One would have thought that those with an eager desire to recast Christian doctrine and behavior in a more contemporary mode would readily embrace a recasting of the old-fashioned way in which the church manages itself, but quite to the contrary. The only thing any one can say about this is that perhaps there is some other reason for their penchant for the tired and worn-out...

I love the words of Loren Mead written in the 1990s, and Loren is hardly a theological conservative. "Both the church and the world are always in flux, but usually we bring to that constant change a stable and unchanging paradigm, a mind-set that sometimes last for centuries. Sooner or later, however, the thousands of minute shifts and changes bring such pressure to bear that the stable mind-set cracks, shifts, or falls apart. That has happened to us" (Once and Future Church, 1991).

Amen!

Canterbury and Rome

As I sat down to my breakfast at Gatwick Airport this morning I was greeted by the headline in the London Times that said, Churches back plan to unite under Pope. What followed was an article by Ruth Gledhill, doyenne of religion journalists who recently managed to get her hands on a leaked document that will be published later in the year. The document suggests that the wheels are already being greased as to how Anglicans might reunite with Roman Catholics under the leadership of the Bishop of Rome.

By the time I got to Atlanta Airport some eleven hours later, the place where I am now sitting, there had been some correction and clarification of the Gledhill article, stating that this is part of the 35-year-long conversations that have been taking place between the two ecclesial bodies, but there is no doubt that Ruth Gledhill's timing is elegant.

Clearly the crisis within Anglicanism that was triggered by the inappropriate consecration of Gene Robinson in 2003 has contributed in many ways to a greater willingness on the part of Anglicans to reassess what the relationship between Rome and Canterbury might look like. In a rather cheeky manner Ms. Gledhill thinks there might be ways "to seek reunion with the Church of England's own mother church."

Obviously a couple of thousand word article summarizing a 42-page document at a time of high drama in Anglicanism is not enough to be going on, so we will need to wait until we have more data before we can make a clearer assessment, but it seems that there are up sides and down sides to all of this.

The up side is that in an increasingly hostile world Christian unity needs to be more than something we just chatter about. Our fragmentation in a postmodern age is itself a slur on the Gospel, and we need to start taking that reality more seriously. I can certainly see ways in which I might be able to acknowledge the leadership of the Bishop of Rome, but having said that there is a significant doctrinal gulf between what Rome affirms and where classic Anglican Christianity stands.

Now, I suppose that if I had to choose between Benedict XVI and Dr. Schori, Benedict wins hands down. At least the Pope affirms the fundamental doctrines of historic Christianity, in light of her early month os statements as Presiding Bishop, Schori doesn't even seem to know them - and seems perfectly happy to harass those who do.

Having said that, like most evangelical Anglicans there is much about the Roman obedience that I find hard to digest and the list can grow so long that it is sometimes hard to know where to begin. Rome's theology of the eucharist is highly suspect, for example, and calls into question the once-for-all efficacy of the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ upon the Cross. Together with this goes a theology of the priesthood that to me would be untenable.

Then there is Rome's theology of authority which raises tradition to an inappropriate level and, I believe, diminishes the place of Scripture as containing all things necessary to salvation. From this over-emphasis upon tradition comes all sorts of no-nos as far as an Anglican is concerned such as Marian devotion and the accretions that have gathered around Mary like, for example, the Immaculate Conception. Add a retinue of saints and the like and all sorts of alarm bells begin to go off.

As uncomfortable as I am with the Episcopal Church's loose and often almost illiterate use of Scripture, and a desire to go beyond it, I am no more happy with Rome's sense of Scripture, which seems to allow for all sorts of add-ons.

I suspect that some of my anxieties are that Anglican distinctives might well get swallowed up in the vastness of the Roman Church, the numerical majority ultimately swamping the minority. But I suppose it could be possible that Anglicanism could act like a healthy virus that starts to positively influence Roman values, beginning a process of re-forming and re-making it. While Roman Christianity could enrich Anglicanism, Anglicanism would certainly challenge Romans, asking some very difficult questions about belief and theology that Rome may not want to address.

At the heart of these concerns is th authority of the Papacy. It is here that the Roman Church most compromises the authority of Scripture and I, for one, have to reject the notion of magesterium that is so focused in that office. The Bishop of Rome might be the "senior bishop" of the Western church, but to me he can never be allowed to be more than that. If I am asked to concede more, then I must politely decline.

Personally, I would much prefer conversations of this kind with the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Moscow than with Rome, although there is certainly a lot of Orthodoxy that makes me an outsider. However, given the mess Anglicanism is in as a result of The Episcopal Church's unfaithfulness, the issue of relationships between ecclesial bodies becomes relevant in a new way.

Continued division and bad blood are counterproductive to the Gospel in today's world, but we cannot afford to sacrifice doctrinal clarity for unity. Somehow or other Christians must learn to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with each other as we face today's challenges.

Moving 3,900 miles East

From: Birmingham, England

It is Sunday morning and I am just coming out of what has been a tunnel of total exhaustion. Four heavy weeks of ministry followed by a transatlantic flight, followed by a long an grueling selection process, followed by a several hour drive through the Friday evening rush hour traffic across the middle of England, and yesterday I was dead meat for much of the day -- wondering what on earth I had done and what on earth God had in mind for us.

All this is prefatory to say that on Friday evening I was offered the position of Development Director at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and accepted. Ridley is the evangelical Anglican theological college that is situated there, and is expanding in a variety of ways to become a major center in the life of the Church of England -- and beyond (www.ridley.cam.ac.uk). I suspect that given these crisis of Anglicanism in North America, it is well positioned to play a role on the western side of the Atlantic as well.

There are some huge challenges ahead because although Job One is to raise five million pounds in the next several years for desperately needed accommodations and teaching facilities, there is strategic planning to do, pastoring to undertake, and we are having significant conversations that relate to the area of stewardship -- something that concerns the Archbishop of Canterbury, so that he has been eager to see me at Ridley.

There are obviously more details to get sorted out than I can shake a stick at, but right now I am enjoying a couple of days with our daughter Olivia, son-in-law Joe, and our granddaughter, Hannah, in Birmingham, before catching a morning flight back to the USA tomorrow from Gatwick so I can celebrate Shrove Tuesday and then the solemnity of Ash Wednesday with my congregation. There is that sense of anticipation about what lies ahead, as well as the beginnings of grieving as we prepare to say goodbye to our home and so many friends in Tennessee where we have now lived for nearly 22 years, with 31 in total in the United States.

However, there is a real sense that God's hand has been upon us. As I look back over decisions we have made during the last couple of years I am now able to see how they have all fitted together into the remarkable pattern that God weaves in our lives. I have that sense that the Lord Jesus is calling Rosemary and myself back not only for the benefit of ourselves and our kith and kin, but also because we have a part that we can play at this crucial moment in preparing the next generation of leaders for the challenges of ministry in Great Britain in coming days -- and the challenges here are truly enormous.

We would value your continuing prayers, and as we eventually get ourselves settled in the Cambridge area you can be assured that there will be a warm welcome for you -- about half the congregation at the Church of the Resurrection, where I am interim rector, have promised that at some point they will appear on our doorstep.

My promise is this -- you have certainly not seen the last of me in North America. I leave a daughter on those shores so regular visits will be part of our life, plus the fact that we want to see Ridley playing a part on the reshaping of the American church in years ahead. I am actually now the third American citizen who is part of the "permanent" Ridley community, and there are several American students.

Some will, no doubt, identify this as me leaving the Episcopal Church. Nothing could be further from the truth. I will remain a priest in good standing of the Diocese of Tennessee, and am doing what I have done before, and that is transfer my ministry from one province of the Anglican Communion to another.

Meanwhile, the Daily Devotions will keep on coming, Toward2015@listserv.episcopalian.org will keep on trucking, and the Kew Continuum will still be found at http://richardkew.blogspot.com.

Loyalty?

I have an XM Radio in my car, which means that I regularly listen to the BBC World Service. A few weeks ago a large part of a business program was given to the horrible mess that the Ford Motor Company finds itself in having swallowed a $13 billion loss in 2006.

It was a piece that was well done and extremely fair, but what fascinated me was the reactions of the workers interviewed as they came off shift at one of the Ford plants in the Detroit area. Several of the folks talked to were bombastic about Americans who bought foreign vehicles, either directly or indirectly questioning their patriotism. Several were very worried about their jobs, while others obviously shrugged and said words to the effect that there wasn't much they could do about it.

It was the response of one particular man that caught my attention. He was measured and thoughtful and said something like, "Of course I'm worried. It seems to me that we have a huge problem here, and Ford is not going to pick up again until it starts producing the sort of cars with the kind of quality and fuel efficiency that attracts purchasers."

If I hadn't had my hands on the wheel I would have applauded him -- it was a perfect answer. This individual was the most loyal of all these Ford-ites because he was prepared to address the problem head on, and say that as much as he loved the company it didn't deserve to dig itself out of the mess until it does what it was founded for: to make cars that folks are willing to spend their hard-earned dollars on.

During the last several years I have heard all sorts of calls to loyalty to the Episcopal Church, especially among those who affirm a "progressive" agenda. These, I think, are the sort of folks who are like the Ford workers who asserted that Americans ought to buy cars produced by American manufacturers. This is not loyalty, this is papering over the cracks and pretending that there is nothing wrong. The most extraordinary thing about our whole sorry state of affairs is that this is an agenda of denial.

It comes in all sorts of flavors.

Dr. Schori's favorite flavor is that there is only a small disgruntled minority that are functioning in this way. Well, hundreds of congregations have voted with their feet, including several of the church's largest, but still the disinformation campaign continues that those who stand with worldwide Anglicanism and no longer the Episcopal Church are a bad-tempered handful.

In our diocese where we have changed the canons so that individual congregations can designate whether or not their funds find their way to the Episcopal Church Center, there is great discomfort among some, who feel this is dropping the ball on our obligation. Now it doesn't seem particularly loyal to me to fund those who have not only consented to that which flies in the face of Scripture and historic Anglicanism, but rejoice in it; so why reward those who have done damage with more money with which to do even more damage?

A third approach is to bad-mouth those of us who are mainstream and biblical Anglicans, and label us as schismatics. This division of the church was caused by those of us who have taken the denomination down the homophile road. The schismatics were the ones who set that ball in motion in August 2003 and then followed up with an inadequate response to Windsor in June 2006.

I am a loyal Anglican, and am trying to be loyal within an Episcopal Church that has in pride and error taken a very wrong turn and is now trying to whitewash its actions by projecting the blame on those of us who are, dare I use the word, its victims! Loyalty is telling it as it is, like that Ford worker. So here is my act of loyalty.

The Episcopal Church has messed up really, really badly and is basking in error rather than the truth. This is not going to win people to Jesus Christ, so the church is not going to grow -- and will continue to shrink, with consequent attending problems. We are not going to learn the lessons these circumstances should be teaching us if we refuse to face up to facts. I spent an hour today with the widow of a man who died of an aggressive form of cancer a couple of months ago because the doctor misdiagnosed the symptoms he was suffering.

I'm sorry, saying that all in the church is fine and dandy is misdiagnosis. The tragedy is that denial is now the name of the Episcopal game, and the reality is that these "loyalists" will wake up and realize the extent of their error when it is too late. I have no desire to see ECUSA go down in flames, and I have no particular desire to be forced out by those who are preaching "another gospel." However, the strategy that is being pursued can only end in tears.

Above All Earthly Pow'rs -- A Book Review

Above All Earthly Pow'rs - Christ in A Postmodern World by David F. Wells (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006)

A Review

Of late I have been feeling a lot of sympathy for old Augustine as he sat in Hippo watching the world that he knew disintegrating around him as the seven centuries of Roman power collapsed. When it came, Rome's end happened relatively quickly, ushering in several centuries of confusion and uncertainty before Europe started to climb out of the hole, dust itself off, and start moving in a somewhat different (and far less developed) direction.

I have this nasty kind of feeling that we are living through the lead up to a similar kind of collapse as Western culture trivializes or entertains itself to death, with swathes of the Christian tradition following rapid suit. Reading David Wells's Above All Earthly Pow'rs during the last couple of weeks has merely intensified such thoughts.

The Distinguished Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and a mentoree of John Stott, completes his four book series on the way in which the faith encounters the emerging culture with this remarkable tour de force. In it he undertakes a remarkably clear analysis of postmodernism, and then how the classical formulation of the faith addresses Jesus Christ into today's environment.

There are few really trying to grapple with such topics, and there are fewer still whose grasp of both faith and Zeitgeist is deep and extensive enough that the end product is of use to both pastoral and preaching facets of ministry.

I have been reading Wells during the build up to the Primates' Meeting in Tanzania, replete with posturing, politicking, and prediction, but there has been little theological analysis and reflection on the decisions and actions that have brought us to this present pass. I think that Wells's book does a sterling job in crafting a picture of the environment that has spawned this crisis, and what the faithful response might look like in this setting.

What makes David Wells' latest work so fascinating is that he is not exactly addressing either the Episcopal Church or the other mainline denominations, but rather is talking to those who self-select as evangelicals. Fifteen years ago Wells wrote movingly of the way in which biblical faith in America had been, over several centuries, turned from something meaty and substantial into little more than a thin veneer. In this book he goes beyond that to show how postmodernity's infiltration of the churches has cracked the veneer -- indeed, many of those who present what they assert is a biblical faith are toying with little more than a pale shadow, a parody of the real thing.

In effect, Wells is saying that in a slightly different way the evangelicals have set off down exactly the same road as the minimizers of earlier generations, the so-called "liberals" who have got the mainline denominations into such serious trouble. If the father of the liberals was Schleiermacher, the parents of this evangelical slide are marketing and seeker sensitivity.

Wells is far from opposed to proclaiming the faith in such a manner that the unreached are reached and lives are transformed as they enter a grace-filled relationship with Jesus Christ. What he asserts, however, is that in their efforts to make Christ accessible there has been a flushing of the baby with the bathwater for they are "operating off methodologies for succeeding in which that success requires little or no theology" (p. 265).

The seeker sensitive approach panders to the consumer mentality with the intention of gathering numbers, but the accumulating evidence suggests that fewer truly life-transforming conversions taking place, with self-surrendering disciples being made. Professor Wells is horrified by evangelical willingness to look for "success" by using the methodologies and business models like those of the folks at Disney. The result is that we are dishing out pablum, when all the time we are ignoring a robust, meaty, biblical faith, strong and serious enough to encounter the ennui and afflictions of the postmodern world.

Truth not technique is the resource God has given us as we weave our way through today's landscape in which the self, whatever that is, has become the be all and the end all. Wells demonstrates how the richness of truth actually addresses the shallowness of our world.

The brilliant core of the book are several chapters in which Wells expounds a meaty Christology and how it addresses how the children of postmodernity, radical individualism and relativity, who have swept aside the substance of what remained of Christian and Enlightenment cultures. Relativism and radical individualism are now in the process of reshaping almost every facet of the Western person's life within the context of a bored culture, but the answer to their corrosiveness is immediately available in our biblical heritage.

As you read you have the impression of a skilled physician carefully explaining what he is doing to his patient as he goes forward with the right treatment of a nasty ailment. What he is trying to tell us is that BandAids, whether liberal or conservative, will not do the trick. His exposition of both God's grace and Christ's atoning work is among the best that I have seen in a very long time. These doctrines are strong medicine, especially when compared with the shallowness of seeker sensitivity and the vacuousness of those that veer off down the progressive, liberal, radical, or whatever you want to call it road.

I came away from this with a renewed sense of awe and wonder at what God has achieved on our behalf through the work of Jesus Christ upon the Cross, and a deepened commitment never ever to settle for anything less. In this determination I sometimes feel in my own denomination that if I am not a lone voice, then I am part of a tiny minority. All around me I can see the heart-breaking damage that has been done when we settle for little, this leading inexorably toward the destructiveness of error that now prevails.

As I have watched, I have had this growing sense over recent years that the conservative churches, in a different way, are making all the same mistakes made in our tradition several generations ago, and that ultimately unless they alter their modus operandi they are going to finish up with similar kinds of unfaithful and erroneous outcomes. This is bad news indeed.

Which brings me back to Tanzania, and the gathering of the Primates. Part of their task will be to continue pointing out to the North American churches the error of their believing and their doing, and that actions have profound consequences. Action of some kind will in all likelihood be taken, but we are a long way yet from the body ceasing to writhe.

The very emptiness of those on the left illustrates Professor Wells's case for him. All he needs to do is to point out to his evangelical constituency the pitiful creature that the Episcopal Church is and to say to them, "Now do you really want to be like that?" At the same time, however, he needs to look at the Global South churches, as well as conservatives, evangelicals, catholics who remain in ECUSA or who have recently split from the denomination and say to them, "Never, ever, ever forget these great truths -- you do so at your own peril."