"Bend It Like Beckham" -- A Movie Review

Bend It Like Beckham -- A Review by Richard Kew

Say the name Beckham in most circles in the United States are you are met with a blank stare, unless the person you are talking to kept up with the 1990s music scene and remembers, "Wasn't he the guy who married Posh Spice of the erstwhile Spice Girls?" Say the name elsewhere in the world where soccer reigns supreme and there is a certain awe and reverence for the Real Madrid striker, although England fans may turn their noses up a little at the moment because his captaining of the England team did not bring home the World Cup in 2006.

Several years ago there was a sort of Bollywood-come-to-London movie made entitled Bend it like Beckham that has started showing up on various of the movie channels of late in the USA. I suspect it is not being watched by a lot of people, which is a pity because it is a charming little film focusing around the lives of two soccer-crazy teenage girls.

If you have got that far and have just read my last sentence then you are probably wondering if my brain is turning to mush, but I implore you to give me a couple more paragraphs to explain myself.

Set in the West London suburb of Hounslow, this is the tale of two young women who belong to a local women's soccer team, the one from a prosperous blue collar English home and the other from an upwardly mobile Indian background. Of course, Indian girls don't normally don shorts and cleats to kick a ball around a field, but Jessinda (or Jess) slips out of the house behind her parents' backs to indulge in her passion for the beautiful game. And, of course, when it comes to kicking the ball she can bend it into the goal just like David Beckham, who is, quite naturally, her hero. Her best friend, the English girl, is Juliet (or Jules), who has some of the same skills when faced with the delghtful prospect of an open goalmouth.

Yet in a way the story of the two girls and their passion for what the rest of the world calls football is almost incidental to the subplot of the movie, which is the interrelationship two diverse cultural communities living alongside one another in the melting pot that is the sprawling suburbs around London's Heathrow Airport. But this is not another one of those angry multicultural movies, rather it is a delightful insight into the way people of differing backgrounds can relate to one another, as well as the puzzling world of an English kid trying to straddle the world in which she has grown up and mores of the Sikh household in which she is reared.

Directed, produced, and written by Gurinder Chadha, who used to work for the BBC, the movie comes from inside the British Indian community from which we can then look out into the weird world of the English with their strange perceptions and values. Ms Chandha makes creative use of comedy, and clearly has a delightful sense of humor that peeks out from every corner of this movie. On top of that it has a delightful musical score that blends traditional Indian music with Western styles -- I have actually watched it a couple of times just to enjoy the music.

After all sorts of joys and sorrows, a Sikh wedding and fascinating misunderstandings, the two girls win soccer scholarships to the University of California at Santa Clara, and the story ends with them heading through the gate at Heathrow Airport for their new life on the West Coast -- but not without first getting a glimpse of David Beckham walking along an upper hallways with his wife, surrounded by their handlers. The final puzzler is the realization at the very end that Jess has fallen for Joe, the coach of the Hounslow women's team, setting up yet another of those difficult challenges facing Indians living in Britain and trying to hold onto their cultural roots.

Because the movie is such a delight, you come away from it warmed and encouraged about the possibilities and challenges for radically different groups of people to be able to live cheek-by-jowl, and to develop warm and lasting relationships with one another. There is also the message that perhaps soccer can help with all of this. What is a pity is that the only religious piety shown in the movie is that of Jess's superstitiously Sikh mother -- although the way in which she prays is very much like the manner in which so many Christians pray when they bring their shopping list of requests to God.

So, if you get the chance while Bend It Like Beckham cycles through the movie channels, watch and enjoy it.

Looking Back and Looking Forward

It is Sunday evening and I am sitting in my favorite chair with a long cold drink beside me. There is gentle music in the background, and my wife has gone to her small group so I have some time on my own. Each year on August 27th I try to take an hour or two to meditate, assess the last twelve months, and prayerfully wonder what the next twelve months will bring forth. This is the last day of my sixty-first year on this planet, tomorrow is my birthday and I begin voyaging into my sixty-second.

I have been doing something like this either on my birthday or the eve of my birthday for many years now. One birthday morning I rose early and climbed a mountain hillside in the rugged heart of Corsica to consider what lay ahead, as I watched the camp of teenagers who I was chaplaining as we trekked across that wilderness gradually awaken and come to life. There were many miles ahead for our blistered feet that day -- but I was only in my mid-twenties at that point and it seemed nothing. Now I'm moving rapidly into senior citizen territory and whereas in the early 1970s the hugest chunk of life stretched out before me, now the developmental tasks before me are somewhat different.

For us as a family the year past has been kind. My younger daughter's marriage was, perhaps, its highlight, but nothing can take away my delight at spending several mornings in the spring with my then not-yet-one-year-old granddaughter perched on my lap. Gone are the days when I could scramble up a rock face like a mountain goat, but I keep myself pretty fit and my mind seems in some ways to be in better shape than ever it was, while family means a huge amount.

It is amazing how time puts realities into perspective. Yes, it is true I am deeply anxious about the state of the church, especially our very own dysfunctional corner of it, but the focus of my concern is moving away from the pitiful fractiousness of ecclesiastical politics to a deepening sense that whatever label we put upon ourselves, we have to a greater or lesser extent missed the point of the Gospel. Would we really prefer to swim around on the surface and be nasty to one another, or are we prepared to consider the depths of discipleship to which we are called, and from which the endless wrangling seems to keep us?

Once sixty-one was considered old, and while today it is possible to pretend that this age is merely an apprenticeship before true eldership, it is impossible to reach this stage in life without giving serious (and persistent) thought to what comes next when this earthly journey ends. During the last year I have watched several friends and contemporaries leave time for eternity, and while I make my plans like everybody else, it is increasingly obvious that I must make all plans in the light of all eternity.

It is from within the context of my consciousness of this that I recognize how we in our time have become so caught up with the challenges of the here that we have overlooked the hope and expectation of the hereafter which puts this life into perspective. When I signed up for service in Christ's Kingdom it was not to endlessly fight over sexuality, but because not only had my life been transformed by Jesus Christ, but by coming as King he promised that we would be partners together in the transformation of the whole of creation - and that is huge.

Pondering the vastness of the Good News, then bickering over the husk of a once-great denomination seems a somewhat pathetic diversion. With so much of eternal and cosmic significance hanging on how I spend the remainder of my life on earth, do I really want to waste my time haggling over the ruins that have been created by what I perceive to be the consistent watering down of the church's message over the last forty, fifty, sixty years or so?

I guess that this has been turning over in the back of my mind as I have made decisions in the last few months that will profoundly influence the rest of my life. Today I said goodbye to the congregation in which I have ministered since early 2002, and next week I will become interim rector of a congregation on the other side of town for a year, as Rosemary and I explore a huge ministry opportunity that has borne down upon us during the last few months, and which could keep us busy for most (and perhaps all) of the rest of our active lives.

We certainly won't be material winners if we follow this course that seems to be opening up, but an eternity-shaped mindset puts material things in far clearer perspective. So, as this year ends for me I look forward to the next year with expectation and a certain degree of anxiety. It is hard to see where the Lord is leading, but what we do know is that he is leading -- and our responsibility is to follow, regardless of cost, for only in that way can we be faithful to the Kingdom into which we have been called.

Reformational Times Require Rational Debate

What passes for debate in these tragic times is a sorry business. Indeed, if my experience of the last months and years is anything to go by, there is almost nothing going on that could be called a meeting of minds as we wrestle with substantial ideas and their inevitable consequences. There are, no doubt, many reasons for this, among them the reality that we live in a polarized culture where screaming at one another without listening to what the other side of an argument (or a worldview) is saying is now normative. To a greater or lesser extent, it sometimes seems, Jerry Springer's approach to a meeting of minds has won.

Just listen to the puerile contentiousness that passes for political dialogue in the secular arena, for abundant evidence of this. We no longer are prepared to cut our minds on one another, testing ideas for their veracity and ultimate acceptance, instead we cling tenaciously to our position and seek a strategy and the resources to impose it on the whole. This means that debate of crucial notions is essentially stillborn, and surrenders to the task of gaining power and influence so that our notions, whether true, false, or somewhere in between, win the day.

The outcome of such a mentality is that groups within the culture or institutions that are part of that culture bristle at one another from behind their heavily defended positions, exchanging blows, insults, or soundbites, but never attempting to get inside the head of the other in order to discover whether any of their ideas are good, or the manner in which they are flawed. The fact is that we have all fallen in love with the prejucides and preconceptions that we have come to treasure, and woe betide if anyone comes up with solid evidence that questions or deflates our illusions. While I do not see the present generation able to reach beyond these polarizations, I sincerely hope and pray that the rising generations finds a creative way beyond this for if they do not, we are all in trouble.

Within this environment is not only an unwillingness and inability to hear and listen to the other, but more worrying still, an absence of the capacity to understand the basic principles of intellectual engagement. Whether these have been abandoned, forgotten, or never taught, is hard to tell, possibly a mixture of all three, but their absence intensifies our problems. In western culture down through the centuries, building upon the philosophical and rhetorical insights that have come down from antiquity, there has been an engagement of minds that has borne rich fruit. In our present climate this does not (and possibly cannot) happen.

I have noticed increasingly when I try to engage in debate with others over the issues that have divided the church, seldom do I receive a response that actually answers questions I have raised or points at issue that I have drawn attention to. Now I understand the game of diversion in discussion or argument because I have done it myself, but it appears that much of the responses I receive at the moment are more diversion than actually answering what I have put on the table for discussion. Sometimes I wonder if my opponent knows how to answer me.

In addition, as I have stated so many times before, the basic principles of reason and elementary logic are nowhere to be seen in the discussion that is rending the church, and while both sides of the divide are guilty of such abandonment, it does seem that reason and logical process are a total mystery to those on the reappraising side of the ethical and ecclesiastical equation.

The outcome is that conjecture is presented as fact, and objections to what then is perceived to be "fact" are brushed impatiently aside. When, as is sometimes the case, I press the issue the person with whom I am in discussion flies off at a tangent with a whole trail of red herrings that have little or nothing to do with the item in hand.

This is often where story is brought in to make the point the other person thinks they are pressing, believing that story is the trump card up their sleeve. In wider forums where the basic principles of discussion and argument seem lost forever story is the trump, but, for example, it never seems to cross anyone's mind that it is irrational and illogical to argue from the particular to the general. Special cases are neither now nor ever have been a good basis governing principles.

All of this frustrates because eventually it seems as if we are wrestling with an eel rather than attempting to explore together the realities and how the People of God should respond to those realities in a manner that is worthy of their calling. We are, I believe, at a reformational moment in the development of western Christianity, and it could well be that if we are determined to wallow in this intellectual and spiritual mudbath which lacks any hope of discovering clarity, the benefits of this moment will be lost.

The time is well past, I believe, for all engaged in the discussion first to know the facts, and this means attempting to master the viewpoint and mindset of those with whom we disagree. Woefully, neither side seems willing to do this. The second is to be prepared to grasp, understand, and use the basic principles of rational debate, which means learning a little fundamental logic. The third is to begin to find ways of respecting those with whom we disagree, because a genuine interchange of ideas cannot take place without decency, civility, and respect. The fourth is to be willing to listen to what is being said by our adversary and respond to what they are saying rather than resorting to personal inuendo, diversionary tactics, or story as trump card rather than illustration.

While there is more to careful conversation and debate than this, just to put these simple rules in place would make a tremendous difference.

Something About Rowan Williams

When Rowan Williams, then Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury I was among those who were profoundly disappointed. I confess that I did not know much about the man, but his arrival in the mother diocese of Anglicanism was about as bad news to me as the election of his American counterpart had been in 1997. I wondered what now stood between our worldwide church and the deluge!

In the years since he ascended Augustine's chair, I have had time to reassess this man, hear him speak, correspond with him, spend time alone with him, read some of the things he has written, and discover that I had badly misjudged him. This is not to say that I would dot ever "i" that Rowan does, nor would I cross every "t," but I find him to be as fascinating and holy a man who bestrides the Christian scene as has been there for a long time.

One of the lessons I have had to relearn as I have begun to get to know the Archbishop of Canterbury is that like so many other evangelicals I am prone to rush to judgment on the basis of what I perceive to be a person's ideology, rather than allowing a person's fruit to mark them out. Rowan Williams is a godly man whose life bears of the traces of the kind of fruit that I would long to see in my own life. He is a humble, faithful, gentle man, whose self-effacing personality belies a gargantuan intellect and a spiritual shrewdness.

The amazing thing about this individual is that, like his friend and colleague, Tom Wright, he has read and digested everything. In his early ministry he taught in a couple of English seminaries, and while still in his twenties one of his senior colleagues pointed out that Rowan could readily have taught every subject on the curriculum -- with the exception of liturgics! He taught theology on the faculty of Cambridge while being unpaid assistant in an unfashionable working-class parish, before becoming Lady Margaret Professor of Theology at Oxford at the ripe old age of 32.

He is married to a bishop's daughter, who is no mean theologian herself, and the joy of his life are his daughter and son, born to the couple after a series of miscarriages. While his writing can often be turgid, to say the least, he has a reputation for preaching wonderful children's sermons. As Rudyard Kipling put it, he can talk with crowds and not lose his virtue, and walk with kings without losing the common touch. The day I saw him at Lambeth Palace in May, our lunch date was slotted between a British cabinet minister and the production of video resources in which he was to "star." Despite such a hectic schedule, as we ate our sandwiches and chatted he seemed able to eliminate from his mind the other concerns that pressed in upon him.

Every contact I have had with Dr. Williams has always been affirming, even when he has been nudging me to rethink an idea, or pressing me to see that there are other viewpoints than my own. One of the problems that those of us who are firmly part of one particular ecclesial tradition have is that we tend to interpret a person through the limited grid of our own presuppositions. While it is clear that the Archbishop comes out of an Anglo-Catholic stable, I would say that he is one of the few people I know who really does stand outside and above the various competing streams of tradition in the church.

The earlier error I made about Archbishop Williams was that my perception was so colored by what I thought was his mind on human sexuality that I was not able to hear anything else. Yet while he continues to maintain an open mind on items which I believe Scripture and the catholic faith to be more clear, he is more a communitarian than a individualist, and is not going to step outside the understanding of the Anglican Communion on maleness, femaleness, marriage, and human sexual relations. However, this does not preventing him like many an academic to give theoretical consideration to notions that are on the periphery.

I first heard Rowan Williams speak in September 2003, when he opened the National Evangelical Anglican Congress in England. There was a touch of bellicose distrust in the crowd of several thousand who greeted him in Blackpool, but far from being intimidated he spoke briefly and to the point, unselfconsciously holy in the message that he brought. He spoke with clarity and a conviction that, in effect, asked evangelicals to share their own particular strengths and giftedness with the church. Williams is enthusiastic about Alpha, for example, and his wife, Jane, teaches in the theology school that has been set up by Holy Trinity, Brompton.

There is in the Archbishop's theology a deep trinitarian instinct, and comprehension of the redemptive and transformatory work of the Cross and Resurrection. Raised in Welsh nonconformity it was as he was entering adolescence that he discovered the local Church in Wales parish, where he was nurtured by a gifted priest whose door seemed always open to him. A brilliant degree in theology at Cambridge was followed by a DPhil from Oxford, but during this time Williams was considering what his life's vocation might be -- and the setting in which he should exercise it.

His trinitarian bias (and straggly beard!) demonstrates how drawn he was to Orthodoxy, a particular Russian theologian being the subject of his doctoral work, before settling back into the tradition in which he had thrived. Yet what has enriched his Anglicanism has been a profound appreciation for the spirituality and theological discipline of Orthodoxy. He has written movingly about the place of icons in the Christian's relationship with God, as well as seeking to understand the nature of our own discipleship and spiritual growth as invitees into the community of the Godhead that is the Holy Trinity.

The reason I think many misunderstand, (some deliberately), Rowan Williams is that as with almost every individual of huge intellect, his approach is more nuanced than most of us properly appreciate. This is not that he deliberately sets out to be fuzzy or inconclusive, but that he sees facets of the panorama that most of us tend to overlook. I, for one, am grateful that this is so for a lesser leader would perhaps have had trouble guiding us through the complexities of this present quagmire.

Rowan Williams is a man not only of significant spirituality, but of genuine sensitivity. He confessed to me that while there are encouraging signs in the life of the Church of England, it is the Communion that weighs heavily upon him, keeping him awake at night. His task is hardly enviable, yet he is determined to keep all the parties talking to one another as long as possible, although as far as he is concerned the content of the Windsor Report can neither be dodged or disposed of. He longs to hold the Communion together, but recognizes that this is an uphill battle.

Just as I misunderstood Rowan Williams because I wanted to read him through my own color of glasses, I would suggest that others at the more liberal end of the spectrum have misunderstood him because they have sought to read him through their own particular set of lenses. The point really is that he cannot be so readily pinned down by anyone whose viewpoint is governed by a particular agenda.

Once in a while you meet someone who you really want to know better, moving beyond acquaintanceship to something more significant. That is how I have come to feel about the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. I know that such a relationship would be challenging, and given our differences of station, as it were, I don't know whether it will ever be possible, but at the very least I can make this man who is in the bullseye of the Anglican Communion and its worldwide mission, the subject of my prayers and the object of my respect and admiration.

Cuckoo Theology

I am not a fanatical birder, but have spent most of my life watching birds, enjoying them, and learning their habits. The other evening as cliques of swallows swooped and dived over me as I took our dog on his evening walk around the neighboring field, I realized that they will soon be gathering on the power lines and beginning their journey southward to warmer climes. Thoughts of their migration got me thinking about the Cuckoo, a bird that is almost a national institution in Britain, the first of which will already have started for the warmer south.

The Cuckoo is Britain's only parasitic bird. It arrives in April from its wintering grounds in North Africa, and it is the male bird's cry of "cuckoo" that is so distinctive and is said to be the sign that spring has begun. Once a breeding pair have established a territory, the female will scout out the other species of bird that are nesting there and when there is a clutch of eggs in a nest she will come along, remove one of them, and replace it with one of her own that mimics in color and size the eggs that are already there. She will do this with as many as a
dozen nests in her territory.

Eventually, the young cuckoo hatches, usually a little ahead of the rest of the brood, turfs the natural youngsters out of the nest, and then is raised to adulthood by the sparrow, warbler, linnet, or whatever it is that is the host bird. Cuckoo fledglings are not small creatures and grow fast, so it is not unusual for the smaller host parents to be standing on the baby Cuckoo's back to stuff its mouth with worms, grubs, and whatever else they find to feed it.

The North American equivalents of Cuckoos are Cowbirds and Grackles, and there are more than seventy other species of parasitic birds around the world who get up to the same kind of tricks, with their own variants on the theme. It is an unfortunate bird, indeed, that ends up being the host to a Cuckoo, Cowbird, or Grackle, because that is the end of that breeding pair's ability to advance its own gene line that particular season, and their energies will go into nurturing this foster child that
is foisted upon them, and who has happily destroyed their own young.

It has seemed to me for a while now that as you look at the history of the church, and its efforts to make known the apostolic faith down through the centuries, there have been major episodes when what I will describe as a Cuckoo Theology has, somehow, landed in the nest and caused great difficulties. Gnosticism, Arianism, the aridity of Rationalism, and various other -isms, have played a significant role in elbowing their way to center stage and intimidating or even seeking to destroy the legitimate offspring.

I believe we live at just such a time today. The deconstructionist theologies that are now prevailing in so many Christian settings, and which are the source of fragmentation in the Episcopal Church, are, as far as I can see, Cuckoo Theologies. They have been laid in the nest of the churches, have grown fat and strong on the generosity that has been shown to them, and are now in the process of levering out the legitimate apostolically-driven offspring.

While the offending Cuckoo Theologies have various flavorings, at their heart seem to lie a surrender to the incipient relativism of the culture, and a determination to think of the church in terms of rights rather than grace. It is the cry about rights that seems to have been one of the most persistent in the thirty years that I have ministered in the Episcopal Church. We have been asked, or so it seems, to be sensitive to the rights of every group that perceives itself not to have been given a fair deal -- and sometimes this has been necessary and true. But ultimately this gets taken to unacceptable extremes.

Bishop Tom Wright comments when writing about Paul and rights in 1 Corinthians 8, "But, in any case, talking about 'rights' as a way of making the point has its own problems. It can be a way of standing up for the weak; but it can also be a way of asserting all kinds of other things about people being independent, being able to do what they like or want in every sphere of life... in fact, having the 'right' to be arrogant, selfish, greedy or whatever" (Tom Wright. Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians page 106). It seems to me that we have been seeing a lot of this, but in 1 Corinthians Paul is asking us to think seriously about sitting much looser to our so-called rights.

During the last three decades I have watched as groups claiming victimization have come cap in hand pleading for a place at the table. However, once at the table like the cuckoo and its fellow-nestlings, they have set about elbowing the rest of us out of the way. I remember how shaken I was when one particularly radical bishop made it very clear in something she wrote that if the likes of me did not like what was
going on in the church to which I belong then I should leave and go somewhere else.

Yet this particular bishop's pronouncement was only part of a continuum that I have observed or been on the receiving end of during the last three decades. At the very first clergy conference I attended in October 1976 I was rounded upon by a group of priests, none of whom I had ever met before, who told me to go back to where I came from -- not because of my nationality, but because they found my theology offensive. Similar kinds of slights have followed me through most of the rest of my ministry in the USA, and they usually come from those whose belief system has been somewhat eccentric when compared to apostolic Christianity as understood by the broad mainstream of world Anglicanism.

The question is how do faithful Anglicans counter this? If the recent General Convention is anything to go by, Cuckoo Theology now thinks it has cleared the nest of challenges to its predominance and is now ready to push its agenda to their logical conclusions. As tragic as such a mentality is, I find myself thinking in the long term and I also know that in order to survive Cuckoo Theologies need a host upon which they can foist themselves -- when that host is gone, then their very survival is at stake.

The English Cuckoo would have no future if there were not these other trusting nesting birds on whom they could palm off the tedious business of raising their offspring. The truth is that if mainstream Anglicans are thrust from ECUSA (or whatever we are now calling it), then so-called progressives, radicals, or whatever, are going to find that they have actually done damage to themselves that could well be terminal. I sense this will be discovered sooner rather than later.

The task, therefore, of faithful people is to be just that -- faithful. I suspect that reconfiguration is going to be a significant part of that, painful and difficult as it will be. Meanwhile, in ECUSA there will remain a small minority, a remnant, (probably much despised) and from that remnant new life is likely to spring. How that remnant works with those Anglicans in the USA who are now outside ECUSA, I do not know, but some kind of networked reality will emerge out of the trial
and error of the moment.

Meanwhile, we have a lot of hard theological work to do. Knee jerk reactions and heroic acts of defiance are hardly likely to bear the fruit that we expect them to. Yet, if church history is anything to go by, God stands by those who bear witness to apostolic truth. Athanasius is a prime example of just such an individual, and it is to this kind of witness that I cling at times like this.

I find myself thinking of those host pairs of birds who find themselves with a Cuckoo in the nest, for they don't give up. Instead, they are back again next year and this time are likely to rear a brood of babies that are very much part of their gene stream.

Seminary Boy

The other week I happened to be browsing in Barnes and Noble when I saw John Cornwell's book, Seminary Boy. Cornwell is an author I became aware of a quarter century ago when he wrote a fascinating analysis of the death of Pope John Paul I after a mere month in office. I have read several of his things about the Roman Catholic church since then. On a whim I picked up Seminary Boy and read it over the weekend.

John Cornwell is now in his mid-sixties and is attached to Jesus College, Cambridge, as well as being a writer. This book is the tale of his teenage years that he spent as a student at a minor seminary in the English Midlands training for the Roman Catholic priesthood. Like so many of his peers his head never got beneath the bishop's hands, and then for two decades dropped out of religious observance altogether before returning to the Church as a layman a quarter of a century ago.

Cornwell is a man raised in a very humble home in Barkingside, along the River Thames where the East End of London and the colorless suburbs of Essex meet. His father looked after sports fields and his observant Roman Catholic mother scratched to make ends meet and keep the family together. Cotton College, the seminary to which John Cornwell went, gave him the opportunity of a richer life in every way that either of his parents could have imagined.

I found the story fascinating, because here was a man wrestling with the Roman Catholic way of growing up Christian at a time when I was wrestling with the evangelical Anglican equivalent in the same country. Many of the struggles that we had were similar, which is hardly surprising, although the Roman Catholic approach to addressing these difficulties was at times in sharp contrast to the counsel and nurturing that I received.

I need to come clean here and say that I have always found the Roman Church difficult to grasp and understand, and while I intellectually know why people jump out of the Anglican frying pan when they have had enough of the lunacy that often passes for church on our side of the Tiber, it seems from where I stand that their destination is a Roman Catholic fire!

In recent years, as the foolishness of the Episcopal Church has intensified, I have again found myself wondering what alternatives there might be for someone like me if I ever decided things had gone too far, and honesty has demanded that I look again in the direction of Rome. While by no means an expert, I have tried to keep up a little bit with Roman Catholic theology, and have watched the goings on as they have sought to handle their flavor of the postmodern crisis as it has effected their church. I much admired the mental and spiritual acuity of John Paul II, and have been impressed by the intellectual rigor of Benedict XVI as he, like us, has faced up to the challenge of rampant secularity and resurgent paganism.

It is in light of such realities that I have asked myself the question several times whether my distaste for Roman Christianity has more to do with upbringing and conditioning than having substance. This is not an easy task, for most of us find it difficult to address our own prejudices with the honesty that is required to modify them, and I confess that some of my feelings toward Rome are deeply ingrained prejudices which go back to the earliest parts of my life.

There is a richness to Roman Catholicism that I, because of upbringing, have not always been able to see. I praise God for the saints and martyrs of the Roman Church, and for the examples of selfless discipleship that we are able to see within the bounds of that Christian tradition. As a graduate student I drank deeply at the well of John Henry Newman, a man for whom I have had a growing regard with the passing of the years, although someone whose journey and mindset have puzzled me no end.

Yet, as you are probably expecting, there is going to be a "But."

John Cornwell's memoir brought me to that "But" once again in a whole variety of ways. There was the "But" that the Roman Church was sending little boys off to seminary at a time when they were hardly ready to make such far-reaching decisions about a life's vocation. While this does not happen today, thank goodness, the residue of this practice is still to be seen in many priestly attitudes in the Catholic tradition.

There is the "But" that so much of the church's life is bound up with its priesthood, almost as if they do not trust the laity one little bit. While I have to say that the religious democracy of the Episcopal Church, and the revising of theology and practice on the basis of the opnion of a temporary majority at General Convention is inadequate in the extreme, I have to say that there is also an inadequacy in a setting where nine out of ten of the cards are in the hand of those who are ordained.

Then there is the "But" of Christian experience. While I recognize that God meets different people in a diversity of ways, I have the sense both from Cornwell's books and from what I have seen on the ground and in the churches that significant numbers of priests have been formed in the Catholic tradition without a clear commitment to Jesus Christ prior to taking up their vocation. While we have done something of the same thing in the Episcopal Church, especially as we have ordained people more according to politically correct quotas than whether they actually are being called by Jesus Christ to be his servants during this difficult time, I have never sensed the same kind of institutionalization.

Then we get to the issue of sexuality, which was bound to arise in a memoir dealing with the Roman Catholic church and its priesthood. What struck me was just how many of Cornwell's peers were wrestling in one way or another with their sexual identity, and the laxity of the faculty, a proportion of whom were in precisely the same boat. I may be thinking the worst of Roman ways because of my conditioning, but it seems from the way that Cornwell, a skilled writer, presents himself, that while there were certain standards that were affirmed in public, behind the scenes there was a lot of turning of blind eyes.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that these components mingle with a life's experience to suggest that here is a culture of church that is at odds with many of the ideals that I affirm, even if those ideals are not always adhered to in the tradition to which I belong. Perhaps it is the closed-ness of Romanism that puts me off, when compared to the open-ness to which I have been used, as uncomfortable and disconcerting as that can often be.

When these are put together with what I believe to be the theological inadequacies of the Roman Catholic approach to faith, I have problems. As a biblical Anglican I have deep misgivings about their theology of the sacraments, the place of the Scriptures in their scheme of thinking, the authority of the papacy, and the whole Marian tradition in their approach to Christian devotion.

I do not believe that the challenge before us is the abandonment of our Anglican ways, but the honest asking of questions and exploring of possibilities within the framework provided for us by our tradition that leads us toward a more authentic faith that speaks meaningfully to a culture that is lost and at sea. I believe it was in 1958 that the Lambeth Conference in its thoughts on ecumenism said that the time might come when Anglicanism by its very nature ceases to exist in a reshaped tomorrow's church, but until that time we need to be a catalyst within the whole community of God's people.

This, I think, is still part of our vocation. Yesterday's husk of being the church is proving itself incapable of being an appropriate environment for faithfulness to God's revelation and vocation in tomorrow's world. We are now facing the "entertaining" sight of those who would abandon revealed faith in favor of something more fluid clinging rigidly and idolatrously to a structure of church that requires modification and reconfiguration at precisely the moment when creativity and fluidity is required. I do not know how we get beyond such pettiness and bullying, but we need to if we are to be faithful to our vocation.

There are no easy answers to the questions with which we are being presented, but walking away from them to somewhere that might on the surface appear more secure is hardly the way forward for me, and I suspect, many others.

Looking Again At The Windsor Report

I sat in a meeting the other day where little bits and pieces of the Windsor Report were being lobbed about, used as ammunition, much as shells and missiles are being shot about by Hezbollah and the Israelis right now -- and with a lot of collateral damage. It would appear that various groupings within the Episcopal Church have locked onto certain bits of Windsor, and are now using them to make their case -- seemingly regardless of meaning and context, and have not looked with care at these statements in their setting.

Certainly, when put alongside Archbishop William's excellent theological response to the inadequate actions of the General Convention 2006, the substance of the Windsor Report provides what can best be described as a theological and ecclesiological agenda for the next goodness knows how many years.

There is a huge amount in the Windsor Report, and I think it entirely possible that it will go down in time as a formative document of the church as we have transitioned from modernity into a globalized postmodernity. It has been to the sections on the Authority of Scripture (paras 53-56), and Scripture and Interpretation (paras 57-62), to which I have found myself being drawn, because I believe these are the two elements of the Report that best help us as we seek to make sense of Anglican faith in a changing age.

Interestingly, reading the Windsor Report in the wake of having read Tom Wright's, The Last Word, several months ago, it is an interesting exercise in theological sleuthing to see how much the Windsor statement was shaped by the Bishop of Durham. Wright's attempt to unravel just how Scripture speaks to us is masterly, while the Windsor Report (considered inadequate by some) does at least identify what some of the issues at hand might be in the same way.

Rightly, the Windsor Fathers and Mothers deduced, that the issue of the interpretation of Scripture is huge. "It is the responsibility of the whole Church to engage with the Bible together; within that, each individual Christian, to the fullest extent of which they are capable, must study it and learn from it, thoughtfully and prayerfully" (para 57). However, one of the problems that we have in our time and culture is that when we interpret the Scriptures we must work to ensure "that it really is scripture that is being heard, not simply the echo of our own voices..." (para 59).

All too often, certainly as the debate has developed in the Episcopal Church and the North American setting, we are hearing too much of the echo of our own voices and too little of the voice of God that Scripture mediates to us. I say this not pointing my finger at one group in particular, although I do think that in North American Anglicanism there is a carelessness about the text that is worrisome, but I say this of all the churches as they seek to witness in general into our culture.

I was eating breakfast the other morning with a Baptist pastor who was despairingly talking of the kind of way that the Word is handled in his tradition, and that manner in which they have managed to baptize certain elements of the culture, rather than speak the faith meaningfully into the culture. Mainline Christians have done exactly the same thing, but they have sought for it to echo their own voices in different ways.

Windsor certainly recognizes that the whole church is in danger of not hearing Scripture because of "the assumptions and entrenched views of the Enlightenment (which have often resulted in unwarranted negative judgments on much biblical material), as well as to the assumptions and entrenched views of a pre- or anti-critical conservatism" (para 60). Then comes one of the key sentences in the whole document, that "Biblical scholarship needs simultaneously to be free to explore
different meanings and to be constrained by loyalty to the community of the Church across time and space."

This is a hard tension to hold: how do I manage to affirm the richness of biblical scholarship, some of which is excellent, some of which is turgid, some of which is destructive, some of which is imaginative, some of which seems to sit loose to the disciplines that have been developed over the generations? Yet at the same time how do I work to be constrained by the community of the Church across time and space?

Certainly, I saw little in the deliberations of General Convention that suggested it was prepared to work within the constraints put upon us by the community of the Church across time and space. My Baptist friend also said to me that he had been raised to think that there was this great void in Christianity between the death of the apostles and his own coming to faith in Christ, so it seems this mentality carries over into our tradition as well -- and with distressing results. I sometimes think the only way that Episcopalians want to live within the discipline of the whole church is in their passion for certain kinds of liturgy.

Windsor again says that "we need mature study, wise and prayerful discussion, and a joint commitment to hearing and obeying God as he speaks in Scripture, to discovering more of the Jesus Christ to whom all authority is committed, and to be open to the fresh wind of the Spirit who inspired scripture in the first place" (para 61). I heard this sentence being used last week to justify a separation of the written word from the actions of the Word Incarnate, who with the Father sent
forth the Spirit to blow fresh winds.

To set these two against one another is nonsense and seems to suggest that Christ can and does speak separately from the Scriptures. Indeed, in the next paragraph, Windsor states that it is the Spirit who inspires scripture, and if this is the case, then the Spirit which the Father and Son send is hardly likely to speak against himself. Windsor does not say this, but it certainly implies it -- and thereby challenges us to look at the manner in which we interpret the text to see if we are echoing our own voices or listening to the voice of God.

I suggest that we are so trapped by the values and minset of our culture, that most of the time we find it hard to distinguish the two because we are not prepared to either do the work necessary to discover precisely what Scripture is saying in our day and age. I would further suggest that when the clear meaning of Scripture stands in contradistinction to what we want, we take what we want over what Scripture might urge.

Windsor envisages us reading the Scriptures in communion with one another, for in paragraph 62 it states that since the Spirit inspires Scripture, the Bible ought to be the means of unity and not division. "In fact, our shared reading of scripture across boundaries of culture, region and tradition ought to be the central feature of our common life, guiding us together into an approriately rich and diverse unity by leading us forward from entrenched positions into fresh appreciation of the riches of the gospel as articulated in the scriptures."

What, in fact, Windsor is saying is that now that we are a genuinely global community of believers, and able to be in close communication with one another, there is no excuse for us to hide behind our own cultural barriers and preferences when it comes to the manner in which we handle the Word of God. While I am absolutely certain that those in the Global South bring their own slant to the manner in which they use Scripture, so are we in the West.

As I watched the General Convention 2006 deliberating on Windsor it seemed to be fixated in an almost entirely western-centric mindset. For a majority of my 30 years in the USA I have worked to interpret the world church to the American church. That, I have to tell you, is a hard job because American culture is so huge and all-consuming that often it barely notices that there are different ways of seeing things elsewhere in the world that need to be taken into account -- and which sometimes might have things to say to us. General Convention reflected that, right
down to those who were grumbling that we do not need the Anglican Communion any more (because it won't let us do our own thing and have our own way in the truly radical individualism of our culture).

There are many, many reasons we are in the fix we are in now, but what Windsor does is give us some good ideas of what we need to be working on to find a way forward. I suspect that the mindset will now be "Well, Windsor is out of the way, what's next on our agenda." If folks are thinking like that then they are very wrong. The lessons that Windsor teaches are only beginning now to be looked at and considered. I would urge you, therefore, to go back to the Windsor Report and give it
careful consideration.

"How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith" - A Book Review

How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith: Questioning Truth in Language, Philosophy and Art by Crystal L. Downing
(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006. 230 Pages)

A Review

When I started reading this recently-published book by Crystal Downing I wasn't sure whether I would like it or not, but the title had roused by curiosity -- and also found myself wondering who she was. Crystal Downing teaches English and fild studies at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, although was raised and educated on the West Coast. When I started reading I sometimes found her turn of phrase or choice of illustration a little saccarine, but by the time I got to the end I realized that this was someone who is an engaging teacher and is truly worth knowing.

Dr. Downing has read and absorbed most of the fundamental works that have shaped the postmodern mindset. While the likes of me have only dipped into Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, and Richard Rorty, and the like, she had read and digested them, and from this has concluded that the era they have ushered in, as part of the sweep of the culture's advance, is a setting that orthodox Christians should learn to embrace more than criticize.

Like all good communicators, Downing tells her story. She grew up in the bosom of evangelical Christianity, but it was as she ventured out into the hostile world of academia that her faith was challenged down to its very roots. There she encountered a cynicism toward things Christian that forced her to confront her detractors while at the same time asking significant questions about what she believed. As she said, she came to realize of her inquistors that "Christians are not the only ones who hold on to their beliefs so tightly that they can leave bruises" (Page 36).

Her doctoral studies, teaching, and life experience have led her to recognize that if we are to remain trapped in modernist, Enlightenment thinking we are going to miss the blessings and benefits that postmodernity bring to those of us seeking to think and live as Christians. For several hundred years we have labored with the illusions of the Enlightenment that there is such a thing as a legitimate objective ground for all knowledge that is achieved solely through the use of reason, but now we have been set free from this cage.


Dr. Downing writes, "My willingness to start asking questions about postmodernism led to the discovery that it serves my faith -- not in spite of its view of history but because of it. For postmodernism calls into question historical accounts that proclaimed Christianity a superstitious construct of the past" (Page 49). While demonstrating how postmodernism can legitimately be considered the offspring of modernism, that child of the Enlightenment, it is developing a thoroughly different identity of its own.

Crystal Downing does not keep on beating Enlightenment thinking over the head with a baseball bat, but recognizes that for all its strengths and the benefits we have gained from it, even though it had (and has) woeful blindspots. Many of these blindspots are rooted in the Enlightenment's determination to absolutize human rationality and demand that everything must be empirically verifiable. As soon as we start thinking like this it is obvious that, for example, the existence of God cannot be tested, and so the notion of God ceases to have any positive meaning to the modernist thinker.

To use the language of postmodernity, the Enlightenment sets up a metanarrative, that claims to be a consistent worldview, and all must be measured and judged within the context of that metanarrative. What postmodernist thinkers did was to start poking holes in this mindset which ultimately is as much a human intellectual construct as any other worldview. Modernism had hoodwinked us for a long time into thinking that it alone is able to judge on the basis of its own mindset what reality is, when modernism itself has been unwilling to recognize that it, too, has feet of clay.

One of the strongest messages from Crystal Downing's book is that it helps me recognize how the whole intellectual and spiritual topography has been changing during my ministry. In the Sixties we felt we had our backs up against the Enlightenment wall and sought ways that would help us to escape from the corner into which we had been backed. Because modernity's take on the way reason is used was supreme, we were always looking to get beyond conceding that the Christian faith was an illusion, the figment of overactive or naive imaginations.

As Crystal says, "a long-established model of intellectual autonomy had shoved Christianity out of the door" (Page 83). Yet while its seemed domination, the Sixties was actually the period during which the Modernist, Enlightenment myth was being throttled, and with it the evolutionary notion that we are on this constant upward journey that takes us to a greater level of advance and maturity than previous generations. This mentality still prevails in the Episcopal and other mainline churches.

So it is that we have entered a different kind of discourse in a world with changing presuppositions. Whether we self-describe as orthodox, liberal, conservative, progressive, or what, many of us remain trapped in yesterday's world of ideas. We learned to think and believe in that Modernist world which has now been deconstructed, and do not want to leave its ruins. The result is that a lot of the time we flounder.

The manner in which Reason was enthroned at the Enlightenment, and then the way in which those of us who are children of the Enlightment have used it, whether we are coming from the left or the right, in one way or another either shuts out or devalues the past. On the other hand, postmodernism, "makes the past relevant to contemporary lived experience as though to say that the Enlightenment did not get any closer to objective truth than did the Christian Middle Ages" (Page 98). If you read that carefully, then you will see immediately that the playing field which has for generations been rigged against believing has now been levelled and we can come out of our bunkers.

Even so within the postmodern mentality is an insistent desire to raze the foundations of our thinking, acting and believing, and Downing handles the complexity of this with adroit brilliance. However, what it comes down to is that objectivity has different shapes and forms, and that we minimize humans if we use our way of thinking to reduce them to merely rational animals. The question is whether we are going to try and prop up the claims of the Gospel using a reductionist cornerstone, or whether we are going to recognize that "the truth of Christianity is not like the universal truth of reason. The cradle of Christian faith is a story rather than a system" (Downing quoting Kevin Vanhoozer, page 109).

I wish I had space to really unpack this 230-page book because Crystal Downing has provided us with good reasons for stepping further back from the Enlightenment prison without falling in the other direction and uncritically accepting this Postmodern age as the best thing since sliced bread. She has in the latter part of the book excellent material that deals with the nature of objectivity and subjectivity, as well as the nature and danger of radical individualism.

I suspect that this book will not be picked up by many who would benefit from it, partly because it is published by InterVarsity Press. This is a pity because Crystal Downing is no more willing to do a whitewash job on the evangelical way of thinking (which owes so much to Modernity) than she is to any other mindset. This book has been written by a woman knows very well, as any good postmodern should, how to assess the impact of her own presuppositions and conditioning, and then to reach beyond it. If nothing else, the method with which this book is written is a lesson to all of us attempting to live out Christ in this strange new world.

This leads me to the conclusions she draws. I am being over-simplistic, I know, but perhaps it can be said that those of us who are children of the Enlightenment have, as Christians, either sought to replace the prevailing secular metanarrative with an equally absolutist "Christian" metanarrative, or we have tailored our understanding of the faith so that it is more comfortable with the blinders of Modernity. Thus, conflict is made little more than a battle of ideas, which ideas are the most superior, and who is in power.

What postmodernity has done is to allow the culture to take a "religious turn" (Page 214), which is one reason why this multicultural world is so confusing. "The return to religious crops, however, created a new problem: an excessive multiplicity of faith vocabularies, with an indescriminate emphasis on tolerance for all. Tolerance, of course, is a good thing. But postmodernists who argue most vociferously for tolerance are often intolerant of anyone who disagrees with their definition of tolerance... The problem of the religious turn of postmodernity, then, is not getting people to turn toward a Christian window but getting them to spend serious time looking through it so that we can explain to them the significance of what they see" (Page 216-217).

This brings us back to focus on what we believe and how we believe it. We function in a different marketplace than the one that has formed any of us who are over the age of about 45, and even the under 45s live with the echo of our Enlightenment past. Sitting as we now do in a postmodern culture demands not that we let go of the Scriptures but handle them with care within the great tradition (Downing quotes everything from Nicaea, to Augustine, to Barth, to the Shepherd of Hermas, as well as the Bible to make her point).

But ultimately, if the window through which we see reality and understand truth is to have any validity at all, it is only going to be taken seriously if we incarnate what we actually believe. "The example of Jesus, formalized by Christian doctrine, thus fulfills what is 'written on the hearts' of postmodern theorists: that ethics must be based on 'openness to the other.' And, I would argue, it is also true" (Page 229).

The Christian faith in the postmodern age, therefore, only makes sense if what we say with our lips we believe, we live and love out in our lives. The tragedy of the church in the West, conservative or liberal or whatever other label you hang on it, is that we are failing utterly and miserably in this. While Crystal Downing does not say it, I will. One of the reasons why denominations, especially our own, are crumbling is that they spoke and worked well in an age that no longer exists.

Yesterday morning one of our church members, whose family have been to hell and back over the past years, said the most wonderful thing about our little congregation that I have ever heard. He said to us just as we were closing the building after Sunday worship that unlike so many other Christian communities, people could come to ours broken, and there in Christ's love and power, they find healing and are made whole. This was what was happening in his family. This is the power of the faith in a postmodern age.

Post-Convention Meanderings

Like many of you I have watched during the last several weeks as claims and counter-claims have been made in the wake of General Convention 2006. I have seen the statements from Africa, from the various competing bodies on the USA, from the Archbishop of Canterbury, and so forth. The more I read and look at the situation, I can honestly say, the more confused I get. Add to this that there are an awful lot of egos being played out on this particular field.

Interestingly, I have had emails from a number of folks, ordained and lay, who share my sense of bafflement at the present confusion, although as one friend has pointed out at the moment there does not seem to be the same sense of panic there was in 2003. Part of the reason for this is that many of us have done our mourning over the passing of this elderly and frail relative who we had already concluded did not have much time left in this world. It has been sad to watch her go, but the time is arriving to dream fresh dreams and seek God's vision for a 21st Century church.

I suppose it was inevitable that there would be a huge rush to judgment in the wake of the disappointing failure (as far as an orthodox Anglican is concerned) of GC2006. Interestingly, the left are as disappointed as the right about the Convention's outcomes, although for wholly different reasons, and some of their statements and attitudes are exceedingly shrill, to say the least.

More than ever we are being forced to realize that the left-leaning activists in the Episcopal Church are in a different place and have a different worldview from the likes of lifelong Anglicans like myself. Never before has it been so clear that such wildly different Christ-views and worldviews exist within this one denominational family, so much so that the ties that have bound us together now seem stretched beyond their previous elasticity. Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury has basically said that there have to be appropriate boundaries if communion is to be sustained and faithful Anglicans need to learn to live within them.

In all the harrumphing and posturing that is going on I see a polarization set up that promises little more than mutually assured destruction. Some of the mentors of my youth were men who fought on the Western Front in 1914-1918 -- one of the most willful acts of inane warfare that humankind has ever perpetrated. It was appalling that gaining real estate that was measured in yards rather than miles was used to justify the inhuman slaughter of tens of thousands in a single action. Not only was the war inconclusive, but there was a rematch of this "war to end all wars" less than a quarter of a century later. Clearly, polarized battling is seldom the answer to intractible human problems.

This morning I read a letter in The Living Church by Don Stivers, my predecessor in one of my former parishes. Don asks whether "the Holy Spirit may be guiding the Church int a deeper spirituality of love for one another often obscured in older models of the Church that demand uniformity by exclusion." I do not know whether he is right, but I would suggest that the Holy Spirit ought not to be left out of the anguish we are passing through, and that perhaps we are tending to talk too much about the Spirit without necessarily having listened carefully for his voice.

I would further suggest that a certain creativity and imagination needs to be brought into play at this moment. Our creativity and imagination are gifts that God has given to us, and which the Holy Spirit can use in circumstances just as these. Maybe all the older models, conservative, liberal, or moderate, are inadequate and need thorough rethinking, recognizing that we have reached a Rubicon of some kind.

It is my observation that few of us wish to tear apart those with whom we are in such deep disagreement; indeed, if we are going to live Christ as well as talk Christ then we need to seek every viable alternative to some of the more negative scenarios that are floating around.

One of the games that has been played up until now has been the one which might be described as "The-winner-is-the-one-who-ends-up-with-the-most-toys" game. That is, if we have the political power to push forward our agenda, then we will do so regardless. On the national level those on the left hold the trump cards in this particular game, however, at the diocesan and local levels in many places things are less clear. Perhaps it would be wiser instead of keeping on hitting our perceived opponents over the head with lawsuits, canons, or whatever, to step back and ask that simple but telling question, "What would Jesus do?" in such circumstances.

While I am not sure I know the answer to that question, I am fairly certain that he were we to address it with the seriousness, fairness, and openness that it deserves, we would probaby start coming up with some very different answers to the difficult questions and decisions that lie before us.

If there is to be any constructive break out from our present entrenched positions, then it is vital that we stop and prayerfully ask fundamental and searching questions about theology, ecclesiology, soteriology, evangelism and mission, and in the process try to define the nature of the society in which we are called to be both salt and light. These are mammoth undertakings, but we move forward at our own peril if we sidestep our obligation to do so. At the moment, this is what I think we are doing. And the key word in what I have said does not have to do with studying and asking questions, but is "prayerfully."

During the last couple of weeks I have had a steady procession of people getting in touch to ask me what I think will happen. I have honestly said to them that I don't have the slightest idea. I have long since stopped having hopes and dreams because in our present fluidity they turn out to be little more than that.

God is clearly at work, and our responsibility is to walk forward with him, incarnating the love of Christ as we do so. What worries me is that we are all failing to live out the meaning of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection, and instead are fighting an ideological battle which is ultimately unwinnable for every party involved.

Over the last few days I have been reading Crystal Downing's intriguingly titled, How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith (Downers Grove: IVP: 2006). In this she attempts to unravel the various worldviews and relativisms that confront us, recognizing that the configuration of the playing field has now altered. If we are to cut any ice for our beliefs in the world that is emerging, then it is vital that we as a community reflect in our individual and corporate lives the riches of our inheritance. The question is whether we have even started to do this.

What Is God Doing?

During the last couple of weeks as the General Convention maneuvered the church into deep mud I have been reading Phil Turner and Ephraim Radner's book, The Fate of Communion. In every way this is not an easy read, nor an easy time to readit, but it is the most exhaustive attempt to put the crisis through which we are living in the Episcopal Church into a well-founded theological framework.

I was getting toward the end of the book the other afternoon when I was brought up short when they wrote, A communion-oriented apprach to the temporal assault upon the church in her churches, will move the question, What are we to do? -- the strategic ecclesiological question -- to the question, What is God doing? The first question has no meaning outside the second, and may well simply need to be put aside in its shadow. Here we move into the realm of reflection upon God's providential ordering of the church's life, a form of theological and devotional discipline woefully under-practiced within modern Christian life. The agony of communion itself is apprehended only through such reflection as this (Page 254).

Since reading those words a few days ago they keep returning, demanding reflection and prayer on my part in the light of the depressing outcomes of the General Convention. I was not naive enough to think that GC2006 would, for example, respond to the Windsor Report as the Communion desired, but I had hoped for more hints of level-headedness than actually occurred. The only encouragement I had was reading reports of the Presbyterian General Assembly and realizing that we are not alone in this mess -- although wishing that the Presbyterians were handling it better than we have.

However, that these two great Christian streams are struggling with essentially the same concerns had me returning to the question that Turner and Radner ask, "What is God doing?" I have begun to come up with tentative answers and wish to share these with you in the hope that they will help shape your response to Columbus 2006, which I find myself believing was probably the last General Convention in the old scheme.

My first attempt to answer that question was to reaffirm one of the greatest and most comforting of all biblical truths, that God is sovereign and nothing on heaven or earth can prevail against him. This being the case our task as his covenant people is not to try to find the way through this morasse on our own but to see if through prayer, meditation, thoughtful pondering, Scripture, fasting, repentance, and every other Christian discipline to attempt to discover what his will and purpose is as we seek our way forward.

A key component of such discerning, as Turner and Radner point out, is patience -- not a fruit of the Spirit that westerners in general and Americans in particular are particularly wont to either develop or use. The grace of patience, however, is writ large on many a page of Scripture as part of our response to the living God. I am convinced from my many years of ministry that we almost always complicate issues by rushing to resolve them, often depending on our own strength and insights. Perhaps we are being asked now to learn afresh what it means to wait upon the Lord seeking clarity from him before advancing.

My second response to that question is that before we can move forward one inch God is calling us to repentance. During the last few years the Windsor Report has, rightly, called on those who have divided the church by non-biblical actions to regret and repent of their actions, and if anything came out of GC2006 it was that they were either unwilling or constitutionally incapable of doing so. Yet those on the left of this crisis are not the only ones for whom repentance is the appropriate response. We who claim biblical orthodoxy have undealt-with logs in our own eyes that we have missed as we have eagerly pointed out the splinter in the eyes of those who have missed the biblical mandate.

As I have looked at both sides in this controversy I have been struck by the way in which they have in many respects become mirror images -- and I include myself among those who lined up. We need to repent of many things, but at the heart must be our own culpability in what has happened. Just as it is failures by both husband and wife to destroy a marriage, so it is in this church crisis. Going back forty or more years the orthodox have failed to respond as they should to incipient error seeping through the whole fabric of the Body of Christ, now we are living with the consequences of that.

But there are other things that I see within myself and others that must hurt the heart of God: self-righteousness, bitterness, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, and a determination to push our agenda. These are not the fruit of the Kingdom of God, Paul tells us (Galatians 5:20-21). Communion, which begins in our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, should leave us "without an agenda" says Rowan Williams, as quoted by Turner and Radner (Page 257).

I find myself, despite my own desires and inclinations, being drawn into a season in which I must humble myself before the living God and seek forgiveness not only for my own grasping fallenness, but also for the part that I have played in this tragedy that is being played out in our midst. The pride of our Anglican heritage has been brought low, these great buildings and fine stones are being thrown down by the living God, and perhaps not one will be left upon another (Mark 13:1ff).

To use another biblical allusion, we are out in the wilderness, which is always the place of transformation. It took God forty years to get Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land, but he who guided them into the wilderness was the one who brought them ultimately across the River Jordan. When he had led them into the land Joshua challenged the people to choose this day whom they would serve, "but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord" (Joshua 24:15), for "far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord and serve other gods' (24:16).

One of the visitors to GC2006 was Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester, England, and he observed that other gods were certainly there to be seen: One tendency that was informing the culture of the convention, in a major way, was to do with the diffuse religiosity of the present-day West. Such religiosity, in my view, has much in common with New Age ideas, vague as these often are, such as nature mysticism, or a sense of oneness with the world around, and pantheism, the belief that everything is divine: God is identified with Mother Nature and also with our own souls. Jesus then becomes just a special example of a god-self. Such a world-view is likely to be optimistic, inclusive and non-judgmental. It regards the world and the people in it as more or less as God intended them to be. Such people should be accepted as they are and, if they wish to be, fully included in the life of the Church without further question.

Nazir-Ali continues, We need to be saved from the consequences of our own thoughts and deeds as well as from the "wrongness" of the world. People need not just acceptance and inclusion but conversion and transformation. The work of the Spirit is not formless, vague and without direction, as some "progressives" would have us believe. It is, rather, that of witnessing to Christ, making plain the words and works of Jesus to us and glorifying both Christ and the Father who sent him. The Spirit is continually forming us so that we attain to the fullness of life in Christ.

The man sharing these words is neither a westerner, nor was he raised in the Christendom world that is our heritage. As an observer looking in on the American scene this is what he sees, and we ignore his wisdom and insights at our peril.

Which brings us back to that question, "What is God doing?" I would love to be able to give a definitive answer to that question but cannot. Much as is the case with my own life, things have seldom worked out as I would have planned or expected. There are times when I have looked ahead and thought that I could see the shape of things, yet no sooner have I told myself this than the earth shakes beneath me and my expectations are roiled. What is true of individuals is true of churches. The foundations on which we have rested have been shaken, and I suspect there will be little yesterday-style stability in the lifetime of most of us.

North American Anglicans are no longer "carriage trade" people, we are now being forced to be a pilgrim people trying to find a way out of the ruins of the past and into whatever future God has in mind for us. Turner and Radner's book ends with a call to holiness, something that North American Anglicanism has hardly modelled for many a long year. Such holiness of heart and mind is something God wants of us in our covenant relationship with him, and perhaps nurturing that holiness is the starting point -- long before considering how the church ought to be configured.


THE BOOK IS:
Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner: The Fate Of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006).

Beyond General Convention...

I spent Sunday afternoon trying to immerse myself in the US Open Golf championship from the Winged Foot Golf Club rather than allowing the news that Katharine Jefferts Schori had been elected as Presiding Bishop to eat at me. However, when I logged on both on Sunday evening and Monday morning there were emails asking, "Where do we go from here?" I can honestly say that I don't know, although I am beginning to believe I that patience and prayer are the best counsel that I can give.

On Monday morning Ruth Gledhill, the Religion Correspondent of the London Times, was on the BBC World News. She is one of the most respected observers of the world Anglican scene, and suggested that while Shori's election is probably not going to cause a split within Anglicanism, it was yet another straw in the wind that something of this nature is less and less avoidable. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester in England, a visitor in Columbus and an astute leader and theological mind, is saying something similar following the election.

Of all the candidates on the list I would have had to say that the Bishop of Nevada seemed not only the least likely to be elected Presiding Bishop, but also the least qualified. A dozen years in ministry, none served as rector of a parish, hardly seem qualification for leadership of a denomination at a time like this, however able an individual she might be.

Bishop Schori's election is a perfect illustration of Philip Turner's comment in his new book, co-authored with Ephraim Radner. He writes, Episcopal elections in America now turn on how the candidates stand on the issues, and behind each issue stand contending interest groups each pressing their particular cause. Seldom, if ever, does one hear questions asked about the candidate's grasp of Christian tradition, the depth of their life in Christ, or what might be called their wisdom in the Lord. The ability of a candidate to further what is common seems in no way to be a qualification for office. The important thing is their commitment to a particular set of interests. In short, the life of the Episcopal Church has been politicized all the way down, and the result of this process is erosion of the church's communion" (The Fate of Communion, page 141).

I know little about Bishop Schori, and have no intention of criticizing or defaming her -- that would be churlish. Bishop John Howe of Central Florida, whose opinion I respect, says that she is a delightful and brilliant person, although lacking in experience and seasoning. Personally, having known a good few Presiding Bishops going back to Henry Knox Sherrill of the 1940s, who I met about a year before he died, Katharine Schori does not seem to measure up to the stature of most of her predecessors. I wish her well and promise her my prayers, but wonder if her election isn't yet another symptom of the deepening malaise of a denomination lost in the wilderness.

However, her election and actions of the General Convention suggest that our problems have reached massive proportions which cannot be dodged or fudged. Yet these difficulties will not be solved by ranting, fuming, losing our cool, and whatnot, but by much care being taken in fellowship with our sisters and brothers in Christ around the world to find God’s will and do the right thing. Unilateral action and anger by faithful people will not help but only hinder and hurt both in the short-term and the long-term.

My own spiritual and theological conditioning, which is rooted and grounded in the genius of Anglicanism, shies from division. I have done a lot of study of Scripture on this issue in the last three years, and not only did Jesus call us, his disciples to be one, but Paul echoed the Lord by saying, "Endeavor to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace," (Ephesians 4:3).

The question puzzling me now is how. Let me quote Philip Turner again, words with which I agree and resonate, but, nevertheless, struggle: Any rejoicing in or acceptance of our divisions can only be read either as failure to get the point of what God is 'up to' in and through Christ and the church or a deliberate rejection of his providential purposes... in the midst of the inevitable divisions that appear in the process of handing over the faith and practice of the apostles, the godly attitude is one which leads us to 'make every effort' to overcome our divisions. To put it another way, in times of greatest stress, 'patience' as well as love and truthfulness, is a power of soul necessary not only for the peace of the church but also for the truthfulness of its witness (Ephesians 4:2). (The Fate of Communion, page 169). I commend the whole passage by Turner from which this clip has been taken.

The question is how to make sense of such an obedience at a time like this. Early this morning as I sat looking out of the window watching the dawn break across the misty newly-mown hay field behind our house, I found myself being forced to think about what continues to be for me the unthinkable as we seek a faithful way forward. Let me say that I lean in the direction of Dean Turner, and am merely pondering the point, not recommending we necessarily pursue it. What I found myself wondering was whether we want to be an ecclesiastical equivalent of Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, nations that have now disappeared from the map.

The Yugoslavs managed to create a network of sovereign nations out of one federal country at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, much disruption, the destruction of the economy, genocide, the entrenchment of hatreds, continuing suspicion, and the agonized involvement of nations and troops from across Europe and the world. The former Yugoslavia has not been a pretty sight and will take generations to recover from this disastrous trail of events.

On the other hand, the Czechs and the Slovaks when they found themselves no longer able to live together in anything approaching national harmony, negotiated the famous "Velvet Divorce" under the leadership of Vaslav Havel, the dissident writer turned president. Today both Slovakia and the Czech republic are prosperous countries in the heart of Europe and part of the European Union. While there may not have been the long history of tension between the two that had existed for centuries in the Balkans, such a bold move that ultimately peacefully divided the land in two could easily have led to much bloodshed.

If Bishop Nazir-Ali is right, if the warnings of the Archbishop of York remain unheeded, if the carefully argued theological plea of the Bishop of Durham has not been listened to, if the anguish of the Global South in the Communion is not enough to persuade the left within the Episcopal Church to draw back from divisive actions, then perhaps the time has come to start talking about talks that might lead to some kind of "Velvet Divorce" that is as amiable as possible – or some way of living under the same roof in a semi-detached kind of manner, not getting in each other’s way.

I hope it is clear from what I have already said that I have no real desire to break up the tenuous unity of the Episcopal Church, nor do I believe it faithful, but it seems that there are those in the church so set upon a course of theological and ecclesiastical novelty, that they do not either want nor value that unity which I treasure on the basis of my faith in Jesus Christ because they think they have the power to get their own way.

There are a variety of convictions living under the roof of the Episcopal Church, but it might fairly be said that these broadly break down into two categories. There are those who are committed to belonging to the wider Anglican Communion, to assent and submit to the values of the Windsor Report, to be part of the historic continuity, and to be in full communion with Anglicans throughout the world and the discipline of doctrine and fellowship that such a relationship demands.

Then there are those who have a distinctly American and postmodern vision for the church. They believe the church is acting prophetically and appropriately and want to press forward along this course. It is also clear that those walking down this path have little desire to be held back from their quest by those of us who because of our convictions cannot journey where they wish to go.

Has the time come when we must recognize that we have are now at an impasse, that patience has run out, and that perhaps the best way forward is a negotiated separation rather than a vitriolic battling that will ultimately be destructive to all involved, to the Gospel, and the only winner will be the lawyers? Personally, I consider this second, third, or fourth best, as almost every divorce is, yet I do not see any will on the left to allow those who stand in the mainstream of Anglicanism to live under a roof with them as anything but harried creatures, or the desire of those on the right to necessarily continue doing so.

There is sadness in my heart, for what I write is not what my inner being wants. While not a theological liberal and innovator, I have been generously supported and loved in my long ministry by many who are. Indeed, I would probably not be a priest today if it was not for a former bishop who nurtured me in the midst of crisis. He and I were theologically poles apart but he loved me and supported my family through the darkest tunnel. There may be truth in the adage that we all need each other, but how can we find a way forward when living under the same roof becomes more and more of a challenge?

General Convention and the Misuse of Motorcycles

One of our congregation is a managers of one of the rather more fashionable restaurants with the thirtysomething set. The other evening, when work was over, one of the employees of the restaurant was hanging out with some friends in the parking lot. He had had a few beers and was fooling around on his motorcycle -- one of those racy jobs that weaves in and out of lanes traffic on the Interstate going at high speed.

It would seem he was doing wheelies and things, being egged on by his buddies as he did so. In normal circumstances, I am told, this was a fairly responsible individual. My friend, the manager, knew nothing of what was going on outside until the guys who were with him came rushing in to announce that he had had a most horrible accident when he had misjudged his tomfoolery and had hit a curb then a wall at high speed.

Today this young man who is only twenty-four lies in the trauma unit of one of the local hospitals. He is being roused from a deep (and then medically induced) coma, and when he awakes he will be told that he will never walk again. While he was wise enough to be wearing his helmet, when he hit the wall he broke his back and severed his spinal cord. The manager of the restaurant is mortified at what has happened and the friends are basket cases.

Tragic as this is, I believe it to be a cautionary tale. This week the General Convention has gathered in Columbus, Ohio. Today the Archbishop of Canterbury sent a fairly clear warning that the Convention should act with care, or there would be tears (double meaning there: tears and tears). He is right and should be listened to with care.

But I wonder whether his words will receive such care. I have been watching Conventions since 1976, and have hung around most General Conventions since 1985 until this year and have watched the dynamics of the things. They take on a life of their own. There may be a lot of responsible individuals in the two houses of the bicameral body, but when they get together they can at times be more like that group of young men who had a few beers after work, then egged their friend on until he injured himself irreparably.

I am at present reading Philip Turner and Ephraim Radner's new book, The Fate of Communion. It is not an easy read but it is stimulating in the extreme and is certainly an intellectual window on all that has been going on through which we need to look with great care. One of the questions raised early on is whether the vision for the church catholic on American soil works alongside America's radical commitment to democracy. More on this when I review the book, but I am of the mind that the Convention lacks checks and balances that would prevent some of the foolishness that we have especially experienced in the last few years.

I am profoundly grateful that Dr. Williams using Archbishop Sentamu as his messenger, sent a stern warning to the Convention to behave like men and women of God who belong to a worldwide Communion that ought to be one of those checks and balances. I fear, however, that the American church's sense that it is a 'special case' will brush the wisdom and pleas of the universal church aside in favor of its own blinkered take on it believes the faith to be. The Archbishop has said as plainly as diplomacy allows what needs to be done for there to be no irreparable damage -- the thought of which he abhors.

The Da Vinci Code -- Movie Review

You know, I often read movie reviews, and then find myself shaking my head at the world-weariness of the reviewer who does not seem to be able to find anything good to say about a particular production. During the last few weeks I have read some pretty mean reviews about "The Da Vinci Code," and reckoned that I was getting a lot of the usual shoulder-shrugging that I have come to accept as normal for such types. I gather it even got hissed down at the Cannes Film Festival, a rare accolade!

While I think that some of them have been overly cruel about "The Da Vinci Code", I have to say that if it hadn't have been for the fact that millions have read the best-selling book of the same name, that this baby would have had fearfully mediocre takings at the box office. Hanks acts well, but then Hanks almost always acts well. If you are a Hanks watcher, then this is a fascinating new episode for the man who first caught attention in "Bosom Buddies." There are other roles like Silas, the albino monk, that are particularly well done, but if it hadn't have been for the millions that Sony have poured into the movie for special effects, magnificent settings, and so forth, this would have been little more than an adequate depiction of Dan Brown's story.

And it went on too long. Toward the end I realize that I was not especially engaged with the story but was trying to see if I recognized the location where the thing was being filmed. The film would not have lost anything if another 10-15 minutes had been lopped from it. Part of the reason for the difficulty I had concentrating was that it is incredibly difficult to turn into a screen play a book that is set in so many places like this one. Chapter-by-chapter in the story the writer is able to jump from London to Paris to goodness knows where else, but a movie director has to try to bounce you around the place without losing the thread of the tale. In this it is only partially successful.

Enough for the production itself, what about the tale it told and the message it presented? By and large it was pretty faithful to the book, but as we were walking out of the cinema my wife turned to me and said, "You know, the movie is even more postmodern than the book." Relativism, especially religious, certainly runs riot through its pages, and every effort is made to diminish the Christian faith at the expense of the other spiritual streams that run through this story. The distinctiveness of Christianity are stripped away in a vague kind of gnostic pablum.

One of the comments I made on emerging into the fresh air was how powerful a medium cinema is when it comes to communicating a message because it can with great skill and subtlety by-pass the mind and go straight to the emotions. As various techniques were used to play up the Mary Magdalene thesis, especially that she appears in Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and was the wife of Jesus of Nazareth, I found myself so fascinated that if I had had little in the way of background information I could have swallowed what was being presented. The question I came out of the multiplex was whether we would ever have the resources or the ability to counter such skilled debunking of the faith. On top of that, such works require an awful lot of money, and the churches have never had access to that.

I don't want to grizzle to much, however. I had an entertaining evening watching this movie, and saw some lovely shots of London, Paris, and the Scottish countryside. The story is interesting even if the author's attention to detail leaves an enormous amount to be desired. I don't think the movie is anything like fair to the Roman Catholic church, although the obviously Catholic characters in the piece were for me some of the more compelling figures. Sophie, the female star of the production and Hanks' sidekick in this helter-skelter chase, is gorgeous with a winning smile and hair that never seems out of place even when the most violent things are going on!

Go and see it if you want to, but take the message with a pinch of salt.

Can A Phoenix Fly? -- Part Two

As I ponder the responses, both published and private, to my last piece with this same title, I noticed a tendency to think of North American Anglicanism just in terms of ECUSA, when the Anglican obedience on this continent has a much wider pull and reach. One of the tragedies of North American Anglicanism has been its tendency to fragmentation, and in this respect (although most Anglicans may not be happy with the comparison), we are much more like Baptists than anything else. I suspect that the roots of so much division are to be found somewhere in the wider American personality, but that is a discussion for another day.

One of the great joys for me during the time I worked on the US Anglican Congress, was to begin to get to know godly Anglican men and women who are part of smaller, separated jurisdictions. I have over the years developed a particular fondness for the granddaddy of all the smaller jurisdictions in the United States, the Reformed Episcopal Church; I suspect that if ECUSA had the same kind of clergy swap arrangement with them that we have with the mainline Lutherans, then I could function very happily in their midst.

So when I talk of North American Anglicanism I mean a much broader swathe of believers than just the old, declining mainline denomination. But I suspect that we need to cut that swathe even broader than that because in the emerging church movement is a great warmth toward Anglicanism. I have been heard to say a number of times in the past that we need to develop relationships with the emerging church types, because whatever kind of Anglicanism is re-born during the next generation or two, they are probably going to need to be part of it.

As I have explored the strengths and weaknesses of post-denominationalism, and as I have sought to understand what it means to be a biblical and catholic Christian as the culture's clothing becomes more postmodern, it has seemed that the denomination as we know it is increasingly an anachronism. This is not to say that 'families' of believers will not continue to affiliate with one another for fellowship, mutual encouragement, administrative support, and so forth, but it is to say that the lumbering top-heavy monster that most denominations have become is a quaint left-over from a bygone age.

Perusing the budgets of the Episcopal Church we can see how much the beast needs to be fed and how little we get from it -- and what I say of ECUSA is said similarly by friends in other mainline traditions. As we watch Ford and General Motors dying on the vine because they are structured for the past, we are also seeing the inevitablity of something a parallel happening in the mainline denominations.

When I was working on the 20/20 Taskforce six years ago, at a time when I was still persona grata in National Church circles, it was obvious that if evangelistic growth was to take place resources of every kind would have to be poured into the grassroots. The denomination could create an environment for growth that would encourage congregations and dioceses to set their eyes on the prize and give a good chance of Gospel expansion. Although there were inadequacies (especially theological) in the report we presented to the Executive Council in October 2001, if it had been acted upon we might have seen fascinating evangelistic things happening.

However, the denomination, led by those whose agenda had more to do with sexuality and redefining what it means to be human, gutted the report, sidelined forward thinkers and actors, and then changed the agenda. The outcome of this is the disaster that we now have on our hands. It is extraordinary hard work to grow congregations, particularly when the culture is in full flow against the biblical faith, and it is much easier to marry the spirit of the age -- which is precisely what ECUSA has done, thus destroying what was its last great hope.

However, as our bishop here has put it, all that has happened does not mean that God rescinded the Great Commission, and even amidst the ruins of what might of been we have work to do. As a mission congregation pastor I have learned to my cost that the actions of the General Convention made my work a hundred times more difficult and significantly reduced funding. This is one of the reasons I find myself shuddering what the General Convention will come up with this time to further hamper the progress of the Gospel.

If Anglicanism is to re-emerge as a potent force for the faith in North America, then like Anglicanism in so much of the Global South it has to be thoroughly biblical and thoroughly missional. This is going to mean faithful Anglican believers finding ways to cooperate and work together. Structure must follow mission, rather than the other way round. Whether inside or outside of ECUSA, faithful Anglicans have an obligation to get together and work together with other believers from other traditions for the biblical faith here in the USA.

Today's world is a bracing climate that takes pleasure in humbling bloated organizations, and ECUSA will not be spared. The car companies are today's poster children of this reality, but in the corporate world we watched this sort of thing going on for a quarter of a century or more. The structures of ECUSA are already living on borrowed time, and as funding further dries up so retrenchments will take place until they are forced to face up to changing realities: whoever is elected, the one at the helm when this takes place will be the next Presiding Bishop.

In the marketplace customers and shareholders ultimately dictate terms, in the ecclesiastical marketplace it is members in ordinary congregations. If structures are divorced from the concerns of the grassroots, then they have already hollowed out the foundations from beneath their feet.

But there also have to be ways of enabling faithful Anglicans to cooperate with one another. One of the tragedies of the fragmentations of the last decade is that folks who once worked together closely now seldom even talk to each other. Not only has the rending of the church broken relationships, but we all then become so intent to build up our own little empire that we do not have the time or spare energy to ask how we might share our resources our outward reach to the glory of God. I believe that part of the thrust of John 17 is that Jesus meant Christians to work together because their effectiveness is decreased when they attempt to go it alone.

If Anglicanism is to experience a resurgence, then whatever our present jurisdictions we are going to have to get beyond our present circling of our own set of wagons to address the bigger and more pressing task in hand. This will require generosity, grace, and humility -- characteristics that are in short supply. It also means that there need to be leaders who are willing to draw divergent groups together, and be prepared to let go of what they perceive to be their power and authority for the benefit of the larger whole.

But just being buddy-buddy isn't going to do it. Those who have separated themselves for ECUSA have done so for what they consider to be good reasons, and at their heart is theology. A worthy Anglican churchman said to me when I was in England several weeks ago, "I perceive there to be something of a theological deficit in the Episcopal Church." That, I told him, was a massive piece of British understatement! However, not only ECUSA can be blamed for theology-lite, the same has to be said for many Anglicans outside ECUSA.

It is vital that the faithful take this deficit in hand. As J. I. Packer said in Nashville a couple of years ago: from the pews upward we have a massive task of biblical re-education on our hands, and we fail to do it at our peril. But it is not just in the pews that a demanding and faithful theological education needs to be undertaken, the institutions that train men and women for leadership have the same challenge before them. I would hazard that we would not be in the mess we are today if the seminaries had been faithful to the revealed faith and doing their job properly. In some cases those seminaries teach almost anything but the revealed faith. I hazard that many of our clergy could not, as Windsor puts it "walk together" with the Communion because they do not really know what historic Anglican Christians believe.

When next I write on this topic, theology and theological education are the issues that I will address.