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Year: 2022

  • Another Year Gone: What’s Wrong with the Church of England?

    by Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University, authorised lay preacher, member of General Synod and vice-chair of its Gender & Sexuality Group

    BERJAYA

    As another calendar year draws to a close, and those who make resolutions write them down, it seems like a good time to ask my headline question. Your answer to it may  revolve around the Living in Love and Faith process, as well it might. What’s wrong with the Church of England? The abuse by some of our number of those who don’t fit the male white cis-het model? Being obsessed with peripheral matters? (I’m not a fan of Twitter posts showing the clergy in their swankiest rose vestments for Advent 3). Having a total disregard for what is good in the society in which we are placed? Going too far in accommodating our message to that society? Not being sufficiently faithful to whatever we see as the central message of the Bible? But I’d like to take this question back further and reflect on what I see as the four ‘oppositions’ which I think lie behind many other aspects of the Church of England today; and none of them is conservative/progressive, because I think the problems run far deeper.

    This blog post is stimulated by something I was doing back in September, when I was invited by those running a church committee I’m on to offer my reflections after joining it. I did as they suggested, although I’ve heard nothing from them since. Was I too forthright? Or was it all too obvious? The four oppositions I offered there, and have developed here, are all ones which I think about in other aspects of my life and work, too. They are binaries, but could also be spectrums, if we accept that both of the poles are equally important and that much lies in between, rather than prioritising one term over the other.

    The first would be access vs excellence. As someone with Open University experience, I strongly believe in access to any sort of education or training or anything else being entirely open. You don’t need any previous exam passes to start an Open University degree. Similarly, I believe that baptism should be freely offered to anyone asking for it; think of the Ethiopian eunuch, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” (Acts 8:36). And yet we hear of churches where the child of a couple who are same-sex isn’t welcomed to baptism… While baptism ‘courses’ should be offered to those who would find them helpful, they shouldn’t be compulsory. Yet only once have I been at a C of E service at which the bishop asked if anyone else in the congregation would like to be baptised on the spot… but I thought that was a really Scriptural invitation!

    In churches, access should continue after baptism as we want everyone to feel welcome, to be able to join in. That means being accessible to people of all ages, every class, every race, every gender identity or sexuality. But we need to know where the barriers to participation lie before we think about how to overcome them. That’s difficult because the people whose views we need to hear may well be those who aren’t in the room. There can be little more depressing than a group of middle-class people discussing how to attract more working-class church members; unless it’s a group of straight people and same-sex attracted people who think they must never have a sexual relationship, discussing lesbian and gay people in committed sexual relationships (that was rather how the process of writing the Living in Love and Faith book felt).

    At the other end of things, there’s the need to enable everyone to be their very best self. That may mean encouraging or even pushing them. Sure, open the choir to everyone, but there’s nothing wrong with training; with expecting choir members to join in rehearsals! And that applies everywhere else too. Those preaching need opportunities to think about what a sermon is for. Everyone helping in the Sunday School needs to do the safeguarding training, not just the leaders. Access is not the end of the matter. And we need to go further still; we need to think about how to recognise and honour excellence. That means transparency in finding out who is outstanding, and encouraging them to go even further. We shouldn’t be afraid of excellence and we should be ready to recognise it in anyone, not just those who turn up with all the advantages already, or those who fit our expectations about what sort of person would make a good preacher or a good welcomer. What if you’re a woman in a church with a ‘complementarian’ position where you would never be allowed to preach, let alone to lead? How is your excellence to be encouraged? And who is going to do this work of discernment?

    The second is local vs national, and that one seems to me to be the key fact about the Church of England’s dual identity which we rarely face. General Synod may make some decisions but, back in their dioceses, bishops rule. The Church of England may declare a national policy, for example on maternity leave for clergy, but does that mean every diocese follows it? I think you can guess the answer to that. If you challenge any instance where something isn’t done consistently they’ll cite ‘subsidiarity’ or ‘local context’ – both highly important, although dioceses often contain a mixture of rural areas and large urban centres, areas of poverty and pockets of wealth, so claims that they need to do things differently from the next diocese along fail to convince. But we are a national church, and the implicit assumption that people grow up and develop within just one diocese doesn’t really wash any more. So, what happens when those people move house? For example, is it right for one diocese to have its own lay training scheme, or should this be centralised? Does ‘local ordained ministry’ make any sense? In a recent case, someone on the Reader pathway in one diocese moved, and found that the new diocese would not support them because of their sexuality – which hadn’t been seen as an issue in the previous diocese. What is best done at a local level? Who decides?

    The third opposition, and this one is really obvious, is lay vs ordained. Going by my own experience, if you are in a middle-of-the-road Anglican parish church and you go to see your vicar to say that you are feeling that you are being called to something new but aren’t sure what, the default assumption is that this must be ordained ministry. I wasn’t comfortable with that assumption but agreed to work with a spiritual director for a while. She affirmed my calling to be lay. But the assumption persists that the ordained ministry is the ‘gold standard’ and everything else is a mere shadow of it, and this is one reason why not getting through the selection process leaves people so badly bruised. In the last few years there have been various Grand Schemes in the C of E; ‘Renewal and Reform’, ‘Vision and Strategy’, the ‘Transforming Effectiveness agenda’ and so on. These involve throwing large numbers around (10,000 new lay-led worshipping communities, 3000 new paid leaders of work with children and young people).

    I remain unconvinced about these plans. Leaving aside what I see as the dubious wisdom of embarking on all this when numbers have still not returned to pre-pandemic levels, and when we can’t get enough volunteers for existing roles, where will these lay leaders come from? And what will they be allowed to do? In a conservative evangelical church where women can’t lead, will women be among these new lay leaders, or is it only men – and straight men at that – who will lead? How will they be trained? Locally? Nationally? What are the safeguarding implications? Meanwhile at the same time as the C of E is discussing expanding lay ministries, it is also piloting schemes to fast-track people to ordination. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to decide what we mean by laity and clergy before doing any of this?

    And that brings me to speed vs depth. The C of E doesn’t usually ‘do’ speed. Look at the long process culminating in ordaining women, or the decades spent on producing various reports on sexuality. At the moment, though, speed suddenly seems to be OK when it comes to training as a priest. I’ve heard from someone whose church hosted a person who’d done one of the new one-year ordination schemes and who was very happy with this; so, maybe it can work, although it’s early days. The language I’ve seen in C of E papers is that of ordaining ‘seasoned saints’ (we do love our alliteration, don’t we?). I would like more assurance that this isn’t shorthand for ‘people like us’. But, in any case, is this sufficient formation? I remember about 20 years ago when a friend was accepted for ordination quite late in life, and was allowed the two-year training, that he said this was the one chance he and his wife had to gain the depth which would sustain them.

    And are we ordaining people mainly so that communion services can continue, because since the Parish Communion Movement it’s all been about communion? (I’m old enough to have grown up with Mattins) Paradoxically, this ‘keeping the show on the road’ mentality can also lie behind encouraging lay leadership: one published report into lay ministry suggested that the laity were being seen as “a new source of voluntary help in maintaining existing patterns of public worship and associated activities”. Have we yet gone beyond that to appreciate lay ministry in a more distinctive, more positive way? My own parish is in interregnum at the moment and is fine as far as services go, not least because we have three retired clergy and a team vicar who are sharing them out. But there is so much more to church than services!

    For me, when the normally slow C of E suddenly decides to move quickly, as in one-year ordination courses, alarm bells ring (because, normally, “Like a mighty tortoise/Moves the Church of God”, etc). I’m even more worried when the people sent on the ‘cheaper’ training options or expected to end up in self-supporting (i.e. unpaid) ministry tend to be women.

    So: access vs excellence, local vs national, lay vs ordained, speed vs depth. Do you agree that these are the four oppositions, or spectrums, behind a lot of our discussions? And would it advance those discussions if we were able to bring them up to the surface and address them directly?

     

     

  • The Sexism Women Continue to Face in the Church of England

    by Rev Martine Oborne, Chair of WATCH (Women and the Church), a group that works for gender equality in the Church of England

    BERJAYA

    At Christmas parties this year, the chances are that someone will start talking to you about the dire national census results for the Church of England, which show that less than 50% of people in the UK now identify as Christians. If, like me, you are ‘in the Church’ in some capacity – perhaps a minister or a Churchwarden – they’ll want your take on it. Why don’t people go to Church anymore? How can people sit down to turkey and all the trimmings without first spending an hour in a chilly ancient building singing ‘O Come all ye faithful’?

    These are good questions. And there are many possible answers. On the positive side, perhaps our Christian values have become so embedded in our culture that we no longer need to be stirred up from the pulpit. Or, on the negative side, perhaps we are put off by a Church that can’t seem to make up its mind about gay marriage. Quite often, however, there’ll be one person at the party who starts going on about the female vicar of their local village church and how everything has gone downhill since she arrived.

    So I want to give a big shout out for that female vicar, and all the other female vicars and leaders in our Church. Do you have any idea how hard they work, how often they feel unvalued and what they have to put up with?

    Usually, the said female vicar has made some kind of change which is, of course, what all new vicars do. Maybe she has asked the Choir to occasionally sing a hymn that was written less than a hundred years ago. Maybe she has introduced an all-age service on the first Sunday of the month – for the two or three children who hardly ever come. She might even have succeeded in growing a congregation of families who now annoy ‘the regulars’ because they don’t sit still and make too much noise. The reason she is doing these things, of course, is a desperate attempt to build a wider congregation than the handful of septuagenarians and octogenarians she has inherited. A male vicar who did this would also be annoying to the indigenous congregation, but a female vicar gets it in the neck because she is a woman. Somehow, it’s simply because she is a woman that she is doing these things. Which is, of course, pure sexism – or unconscious bias, at the very least.

    But sexism is still sadly par for the course in the Church of England. In 2014, with great fanfare, women were finally allowed to be bishops as well as priests. But, in almost complete silence, provisions were then made so that parishes who didn’t accept female vicars and bishops could avoid their ministry. And this situation remains.

    So our vicar, who simply happens to be a woman, just has to put up with this. If she was ordained since 2014 she will have had to sign on the dotted line to say that she accepts that the Church both recognises her as a priest, but also recognises that some, including her colleagues and maybe even her bishop, don’t recognise she is a priest – and that is how the Church intends things to be indefinitely. This means that there may be a church in the next village where she could not cover a Sunday service because that church’s bishop isn’t confident she can consecrate the sacraments validly. And there may be a church in the nearby town, where she could not lead a service because that parish believes that women should not preach to mixed congregations.

    Our woman vicar will be working six days a week, sometimes looking after about six or seven churches and often not being paid a penny. More women are ordained later in life than men and they tend to get directed towards leading small churches or groups of small churches – often without a salary. Men tend to get ordained earlier and end up in paid posts leading bigger churches in more urban environments. One clergy colleague once explained to me why this made sense by saying, ‘Men are generally more dynamic than women and should therefore lead the bigger churches.’ Again, pure sexism.

    Earlier this month, Rev Rob Munro was appointed Bishop of Ebbsfleet to provide episcopal ministry to churches who do not accept female vicars and female bishops, although this purpose was cloaked in church jargon so that any ordinary person might have struggled to understand. The Church said that Munro ‘will have a special national ministry to parishes of a complementarian evangelical theology across England… [who] are unable to receive the priestly or episcopal ministry of women,’ which is fairly clear. But Munro, in his interview with The Church Times, simply talked about his ministry being for ‘resolution churches.’ Neither explained what complementarian theology is – the understanding that God created men to lead and women to submit in the Church and in marriage. Even the word ‘complementarian,’ which is now being used to replace what was previously referred to as ‘male headship,’ is misleading because it suggests equal balance and fairness, rather than one sex having authority and control over the other.

    Of course, neither I nor most of my colleagues in the Church of England agree with this theology but we feel under great pressure not to debate the matter, certainly not publicly. As Chair of Women and the Church (WATCH), a national campaign group for gender equality in the Church, I want to help us lift the lid on the ongoing sexism and discrimination that women, both ordained and lay, experience in the Church and help to change the culture. One of the things that we are asking for is that every church should have a statement in clear English about any limits it puts on women’s ministry in a logical and visible place on its website. This way, ordinary churchgoers can easily be aware of this matter. Munro says he doesn’t believe this should be required – he says it’s up to churches to say whatever they think is important on their websites. But, despite claiming that their theology on women’s ministry is so important they need a special bishop to look after them, churches who limit women’s ministry are mostly saying nothing on their websites or saying something in incomprehensible language on a page deeply buried within it.

    This isn’t about naming and shaming, it’s about being honest on a matter that ordinary Anglicans care about deeply. We have all worked hard to bring discrimination to an end in the secular world but, thanks to exemptions that the Church has under The Equality Act 2010, it can go on discriminating legally. Many people want to be members of churches who say no to this and feel angry when they find out, sometimes after years of support including financial donations, that their church limits women’s ministry. Furthermore, it’s not just a theological matter – these beliefs result in practices that impact women’s opportunities in the Church and their well-being.

    The Student Christian Movement recently launched a campaign called #honestchurch seeking churches to be clear on their websites regarding their theology about LGBTQ+ people. Their CEO, Naomi Nixon, was featured last week on Via Media. And we join with SCM in seeking equal clarity about women.

    So, when you go to Church this Christmas, and I hope you will, please spare a thought for your hardworking vicar. And, if that vicar is female, please tell her she’s doing a great job, a job she has every right to do. If you are ‘in the Church,’ please make sure you know where your Church stands on all this and who your bishop is and what their position is. Not to be a nuisance, but for the long-term good of our Church.

    After all I can’t believe that, if we brought an end to discrimination in the Church of England, this would not have something of an impact on those dire statistics.

  • An Argument for an Honest Church

    by Naomi Nixon, CEO of Student Christian Movement

    BERJAYA

    There aren’t a lot of blogs written by progressive Christians about matters affecting LGBTQ+ people which can open by declaring that their basic premise isn’t very controversial. But I really believe that honesty is something we can all agree on. Honesty, for most if not all Christians, is not a very controversial subject.

    On a deep theological level we know ourselves to be freed by truth (John 8:32); it is one of the ways we understand our very salvation. Knowing that we are loved by the one who created us liberates us. There is nothing truer for us than the gospel.

    Added to this is the imperative to share our truth: faith is not a private thing, it is outward. However, it manifests itself in each of our traditions. None of us want to hide our faith, instead we are compelled to show it and to share it.

    In the practice of discipleship, we sit with each other, or just with our Bibles, and wrestle with difficult questions, because we are seeking God’s truth for us. Likewise, the reverse is true. It’s a widespread Christian understanding that hiding things is wrong: look at what the New Testament tells us about hiding a light under bushel (Matt 5:15), or at the problem of cloaking and dissembling described in the Book of Common Prayer.

    Arching across all of this is the shared understanding that honesty is a virtue, a moral good. ‘Be honest’ is the positive contrast of the Old Testament’s repeated prohibition of lying. And here we get into where it can be tempting to split the difference: not to lie, but not to be fully honest either.

    Not all honesty is comfortable. If a church doesn’t affirm LGBTQ+ people, that is hard for a queer person to hear, but they’d rather know before they join. Finding out later can be devastating. In this case, even if it isn’t nice, we need to know.

    The Student Christian Movement’s Honest Church campaign is not everything we’d want to say about LGBTQ+ people’s welcome in church. In truth, we wish all churches were affirming and celebrating of queer people. But that’s not where we are, and we have to be honest about that. There are a lot of reasons why honesty in this area matters. But at its heart we grieve for every person who drifts away from church and sometimes from God because they didn’t find a congregation that communicated the boundless love of God in a way that met their heart and soul. At SCM we hear stories all the time of how this happens, and we don’t want to be the last refuge of rejected young people (though we’ll do that if it’s needed). We want to be empowering student and graduate Christians who are a full part of local churches, receiving and contributing as they worship God in community.

    But here’s what happens all too often. An 18-year-old arrives at university, waved off by their church back home. They go along to freshers events including church pizza nights. People are fun and kind and there are other students, so they start going along on Sundays. A couple of months in they are feeling uneasy that cis/heteronormativity is everywhere, and they stop mentioning anything about their queer identity; they make themselves less fully themselves so as not to stand out. There is a call for people to volunteer for the worship group. Our student used to do that from time to time back home, so they volunteer. Someone takes them aside and says it’s not appropriate for someone with their ‘lifestyle’ to have a leadership role because it goes against the teaching of the church.

    If we took this story as a case study, conservatives and progressives and everyone in between could argue back and forth about what happened and where right and wrong lie. But to the student it isn’t a case study, it is their church rejecting them. They had no way to know that the church which initially welcomed them would do that. They expected church to be a place of safety, and now they are hearing that they are unacceptable. Many LGBTQ+ people choose to worship in churches like the one above, and no one should tell them they can’t, but it is important to know what you are getting into. Stories like this happen in real life constantly. I wish those churches accepted people like this student, but at the bare minimum I want them to avoid hurting the student by making them think they belonged and then withdrawing their acceptance. We want to ask these churches to be honest: to use clear language about what they mean when they say ‘everyone is welcome’.

    Let’s imagine that our young Christian here is bruised but not broken, so they pick themselves up and go looking for a church where the same thing won’t happen. There’s one next to where they work and another that they pass on their way to the bus. Their websites say nothing about inclusion, and they are nervous to try again. Inside those church buildings are worshippers who have gay children. In one place there’s a trans woman who was just quietly welcomed and no one makes a fuss. At another there’s a chap who frowns if the rather woke churchwarden mentions equal marriage. As it happens our student comes from a church just like these, and would have felt at home. But if you have already been hurt it is really hard to take a risk. We want to ask these kind of churches to be honest too. You don’t need to be the church in town that has a stall at Pride, just let people know something about where you honestly are in terms of LGBTQ+ welcome.

    We agree about honesty, so why can’t church be honest?

     

    Find out more about Honest Church here or follow the hashtag #HonestChurch on twitter

  • Unity and the Myth of Neutrality

    by the Revd Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow at Girton College Cambridge, and Assistant Curate, St John the Divine, Kennington

    BERJAYA

    There is no such thing as ‘neutral’ when it comes to our treatment of other people.

    This is, of course, an obvious truth – one accepted for generations and across thousands of different particular circumstances. Refusing to take a position when it comes to the dignity of others is not morally neutral – it comes with a moral cost. Silence in the face of oppression is complicity.

    Yet this seems to be something that people in the church – whether bishops, other clergy, or lay people – seem far too often to be unable or unwilling to accept. For years, with a few notable exceptions, the church has lagged behind in matters of social justice – acting not as a spur to change or even issuing a call to action, but instead bringing up the rear. Yet we have told ourselves, far too often, that to take a position instead and risk losing ‘neutrality’ is to do a disservice to our role in the world. We convince ourselves that silence is a moral good – often in the name of ‘unity’. Indeed, we convince ourselves that neutrality is possible.

    There is so much wrong with this position that it seems almost embarrassing to engage with it. Taking a step back and looking in at the church from the outside, it becomes increasingly clear why nobody wants to hear anything from us. It is not only our open hostility to things the world takes as read that makes us irrelevant. Our ‘neutrality’ on matters of human dignity entirely compromises our ability to speak out and be listened to as well.

    Silence is one end of the spectrum. A refusal to say anything, of course, is nonetheless a very clear statement. Silence means ‘we don’t have your back, and we draw an equivalence between “both sides”’. It means ‘we don’t care enough about you to stand up for you’. It means ‘you don’t matter’. It means ‘we will protect the institution of the church whilst using you as collateral’.

    Yet silence is only one part of the problem. Alleged neutrality is, in a sense, far more pernicious. And that false sense of neutrality seeps into every aspect of church life. We have seen it in the ‘both-side-ism’ of Living in Love and Faith, and we see it still in the conflation of the vulnerability of LGBTQI people with the vulnerability of those taking a self-professed conservative viewpoint. We see it in false equivalence between the ‘concern’ to keep conservatives in the church and the need to be ‘pastorally sensitive’ to LGBTQI people. Enough with the patronising claptrap. Enough with the falsehoods. We are barred from ministry; our loves are called ‘ungodly and devilish’; our lives are pruriently pored over; we are condemned to second-rate tolerance – at best. We are bleeding LGBTQI people from our church. There is no equivalence here – we don’t want to push anyone away from the Table, we simply want to take our rightful place, each of us created in the image of God just as much as straight people. We want the church to see what is already blessed by God.

    Yet within the church, we have departed so far from the reality of life that people live day to day that we have created our own ‘churchy’ culture that replaces real life with cis, heterosexualist fantasy. And far too many of us participate in it, LGBTQI or otherwise. We give it credence – we tell ourselves and each other how ‘brave’ it is for bishops and others to speak out in even lukewarm terms about LGBTQI people. We dance around ‘the issue’, and we ‘keep our heads down’ so as not to cause trouble.

    One of the most depressing things I’ve noticed in recent weeks is how many self-identifying LGBTQI clergy – and, worse, our allies – seem to have been conditioned into believing that the most we should hope for is the scraps under the Table. I have sat with clergy who fear being ‘too pro-same-sex marriage’ despite living with their partner, who have bought so heavily into the need for ‘balance’ and ‘neutrality’ that they are willing to disown the love of their life in the process. I have been told it’s a ‘step too far’, and that ‘well, we have managed OK’. ‘I’m not sure the church is in that place just yet.’ ‘These things move in long time frames.’ ‘We need some more theology’. ‘Let’s not rock the boat too much’.

    It’s about time to take the blinkers off. The life-giving power of the Gospel is not about ‘privately managing’. ‘We’ might have managed so far, but since when has the church been a church for those already in the institution, those already in the know who can have a ever-so-secret civil partnership ceremony in church, against the rules but allowed with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge. How have we gotten ourselves to a place where we – as LGBTQI clergy and those who profess to be our allies – will not be honest? Much criticism has been levelled at the bishops – and much of that is entirely valid – yet where is the ground-swell of truth-telling from clergy on the front line? Why are we so timid? Have we really drunk the ‘unity’ Kool-Aid, a ‘unity’ that is simply a false neutrality that tramples over queer people in the process?

    The time has come for us to get off the fence – bishops, clergy, laity – everyone. The time has come for us to stop pretending there is something called ‘neutral’, and to call it out. There is nothing neutral about the current position of the Church of England as pertains to LGBTQI people – nothing whatsoever. In refusing to bless our relationships, it says there is nothing good in them – that we are unable to reflect the love of God in the same way that heterosexuals are. It says that we are somehow, innately, disordered. We are ‘less than’. Our love and its human expression is something that needs to be ‘excused’, something we should be slightly embarrassed about.

    There is no neutral position on same-sex relationships – but there is cowardice. And it needs to be called out – in bishops, in clergy, in laity – in ourselves. Yet we continue to let people get away with it. We tolerate their warm words that lead to no action. We nod when we hear talk of ‘unity’, buying into the absurd suggestion that bishops create it and that Christ demands it at any cost – even the lives of LGBTQI young people. We call people supportive who won’t lift a finger to actually support us. We keep quiet in order to ‘keep the peace’. We deny the image of God in others – and far too often ourselves as well.

    No more of this nonsense. It is time for the cycle to be broken. Our mission, our faith, our truth, our love, our relationships, our whole being depends on us loosening the shackles that continue to bind us, and our minds. The church can – must, surely – start to say what we believe it should say. But it’s not going to do it on its own – and if, as members of this church, we aren’t willing to play our part, then what are we for?

    The Archbishop of Canterbury, and other bishops, may be willing to continue to construct the alternative reality of ‘neutrality’ and silence when it comes to the human dignity of LGBTQI people, but we do not have to accept this as the only way. It is not. It has never been so, whatever we have become used to believing that we believe. Rather, let us become the church he speaks of – excepting this issue – as wanting to become:

    ‘We acted rightly, we spoke clearly, and we loved generously and we believed faithfully’.

    It is high time that this became true for our approach to LGBTQI people, our lives and loves, just as much as it is for anything else. To refuse to make it so is surely to cavort and collude with faithlessness, dishonesty and – ultimately – oppression.

    If you sit on the fence too long, it becomes rather uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s time to offer a reminder of that simple fact – and time for the church to become the beacon of hope it is called to be.

  • An Open Letter to Bishops – Your Pastoral Charge

    by Jayne Ozanne, Founder of Via Media, Member of General Synod and Director of the Ozanne Foundation 

    BERJAYA

    ‘Again, Jesus said, “Simon son of John do you love me?” He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said: “Take care of my sheep”’ (John 21:16)

    Jesus had just asked Peter a second time “do you truly love me”.  Peter’s answer was the same.  Jesus’ response wasn’t.

    The charge Jesus left Peter, the ‘rock’ on whom Jesus said “I will build My church” (Matt 16:18), was first and foremost a pastoral one.  It was not a doctrinal one, or a call for unity but quite simply a charge to care for His people.  All of them.  Each and every of one of us – those that we know, those that we don’t know.  Those who are like us, those who aren’t.  Those we agree with, those that we don’t.  Everyone.  That is, unless you think there are any sheep that Jesus is not concerned about?

    ‘Take care of my sheep.’

    It really is that simple.  A pastoral charge given by the Good Shepherd to the person who would go on to start His Church.  Peter is called to look after Jesus’ sheep and safeguard them from harm.  I would therefore suggest that it is this that you are called to – above all else! Taking care of people.

    But I fear that many appear to have forgotten this of late – and instead have got side-lined into prioritising arguments around doctrine, around ‘unity’ and misplaced notions of collegiality.

    ‘Take care of my sheep.’

    It may seem obvious to say, but a shepherd should never knowingly harm his or her sheep – they should never take a decision that they know will leave some vulnerable.  Indeed, quite the opposite – a ‘good’ shepherd will always prioritise protecting those in their care, particularly the most vulnerable, from forces that are seeking to kill and destroy.

    So why then, bishops, are you so determined to sacrifice certain sheep on the altar of expediency?  Why are you protecting some and not others?  I for one know that you have been presented with reams of evidence of the harm that LGBT+ people have experienced in their churches, you have heard countless testimonies of how so many have suffered because of the religious teaching they have been subjected to, you have been made aware of the numerous research studies (including one from the UK government itself) stating the mental health outcomes of young LGBT+ people growing up under conservative teaching.  Goodness, even the UN are now commissioning a report to document the harm done by religious teaching on the LGBT+ community.  But for some reason you just don’t seem to want to engage with these facts or prioritise them.  So why, please, is that?

    I’d love to know just how much time you have dedicated to listening to the impact of church teaching on LGBT+ people’s lives?  Indeed, how many LGBT+ people have you met who have attempted to take their lives (for there are far too many of them, but they may not feel able to talk to you about it – it would be interesting to reflect on why)?  Can you honestly say you’ve given as much time to listening to LGBT+ people as you have done to arguing about scripture?

    Cutting to the chase.  Did you listen to LGBT+ people yourself, or did you try and create a short cut because of time pressures?  Perhaps you chose just to read the executive summary instead?

    ‘Take care of my sheep.’

    Maybe you don’t think this is that important after all.  Or maybe you don’t really believe that LGBT+ people are getting hurt by current church teaching?  I mean, it would be difficult to hear that we have been causing so many people such deep distress, causing young people to hate themselves, leaving them in impossible situations at far too young an age, where they have had to choose between hiding who they are and being accepted and welcomed by their families and friends.

    Or perhaps you don’t want to believe these truths because, let’s face it, it’s all a bit awkward?

    Or is it because you just don’t care about the harm your teaching is inflicting on certain sheep?

    ‘Take care of my sheep’

    Not just some of them.  Not just the religious ones.  Not just the good ones.  Not just the ones that conform to your understanding of what a sheep should look like.

    As you may know, I had the great honour of meeting Pope Francis just over 3 years ago.  I was told I would have about 45 seconds to say something and was advised to choose my words carefully.

    I wonder what you’d choose to say in my position?  As it happens, I spent many sleepless hours the night before trying to discern what I should say.  Here was a golden opportunity, and I wanted to make the most of it.  In the end I decided it would be best to reach out to his pastor’s heart – for that, ultimately, is what he is.  Christ’s pastor.

    So, the next morning after introducing myself I held his hand, looked him in the eyes and said:

    “Your Holiness, I grew up being told by the church that I would never be a wife, a mother or a grandmother – and sadly this nearly killed me.  This is my story (giving him my book) and this is some research showing that there are thousands more just like me.”

    Before I could say anything else he grabbed both my hands, lowered his head and in what many witnessed as a holy moment, whispered softly “please pray for me – as I will pray for you”.

    Two days later I was invited back to the Vatican to hear him castigate leaders who spoke out against LGBT+ people.  Two years later he then also chose to give a speech to various theologians urging them to engage with lived reality of people’s lives, not just ideological doctrine.

    ‘Take care of my sheep.’

    Bishops, we have journeyed long enough on this road regarding whether we LGBT+ people have the right to be treated as equals, and to be honoured for our desire to love and be loved.  You may think that we have travelled it together, but I can assure you that there are many who have been lost along the way as they can no longer cope with the pain of it all.

    If we are honest, we have spent hours discussing certain biblical texts, but we have spent precious little time discussing the harm that we have inflicted and continue to inflict on some of our most vulnerable members.

    I know that many of you have chosen to stay silent through this ‘time of reflection’, which has sadly only served to strengthen the status quo. I can’t help wonder why you chose to do this? Perhaps it was because you were scared of upsetting some of your flock?  But I have to ask you, what about the sheep you left undefended on the margins?  What about those who needed you to protect them?

    So please, as you deliberate this week ensure that you make have one thing central in your mind:

    “Take care of my sheep.”!

    And that means all of us!

  • The ‘Trans’ Body of Jesus and Transgressive Theologies

    The ‘Trans’ Body of Jesus and Transgressive Theologies

    by Penelope Doe, University of Exeter, who has just completed a PhD thesis on Church reports on sexuality and the ‘Queer Art of Failure’ 

    BERJAYA

    There was a lot of manufactured outrage recently, both in the mainstream press and on social media, about a visiting preacher at Trinity College Cambridge – Dr Joshua Heath – claiming that Jesus was trans, and the Dean then defending the sermon. Spoiler: neither said that Jesus was trans. What really happened, for those who have managed to avoid the brouhaha, is that Dr Heath’s sermon used mediaeval and Renaissance art depicting Christ’s side wound to suggest that His body is simultaneously masculine and feminine, since the wound can be figured as a vaginal tunnel through which the Church (the Body of Christ) is birthed.

    This imagery may be shocking, but it is hardly innovative. The trope of Christ’s wound as both vagina and lactating breast, in theology and art, goes back to the Middle Ages. If you google ’Jesus’s vagina’, you will see some exemplary images, although, as several women were keen to point out after this latest uproar, what is being depicted is a vulva rather than a vagina!

    One thing that struck me about this latest ‘the Church of England is heretical’ scandal is not the unfamiliarity of the media (and of some Christian commentators) with fairly arcane mediaeval art and mysticism, but the horror being expressed that Christ’s body might be trans or non-binary by being neither male nor female, masculine nor feminine. There was a similar backlash when, in a sermon delivered ten years ago, Paul Oestreicher suggested that Jesus might have been gay. Worshippers and secularists alike are habitually repulsed by an unmanned Jesus. For me, all this suggests that the Church – and cultural Christianity – has capitulated not only to white Jesus, but to cis heteronormative Jesus, a straight male saviour rather than a human one, and that in turn raises the question of whether heterosexual and cisgender identities have themselves become idols.

    Why is the concept of a trans or a gay Jesus so offensive to contemporary sensibilities, ostensibly seared by secularism and post modernity? I think there are quite a few answers to this question. One is that Christians have apparently lost the playful and imaginative approach to scripture and tradition that was evident in the early Church and in the Middle Ages. Post-Reformation tradition seems, generally, to be a much sterner and more humourless affair. Another is that, even for secularists and cultural Christians (perhaps especially for these), a transgressive Jesus who disrupts cherished, if unacknowledged, norms is too disturbing a figure. For some theologians and historians, however, gay/bi/trans Jesus is incongruous not because this troubles the mores of contemporary discourse but because it imposes current cultural identities on a first-century Palestinian who was born and died in the Greco-Roman empire. Furthermore, as the theologian Linn Marie Tonstad has argued, this insistence that Jesus must have a sexual and gender identity actually ‘unqueers’ our understanding of Jesus, if the incarnation requires Him to be depicted with ‘healthy’ sexual impulses.

    One way of rescuing the trans/gressive Jesus from the coils of modern identity politics is by adopting a lens which either He or the writer of Matthew’s gospel chose, that of the eunuch: in Matthew 19:12,

    For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.

    In Putting Jesus in His Place, Halvor Moxnes argues that both the Church Fathers and modern commentators have ignored or suppressed the implication that ‘eunuch’ was an insult thrown at Jesus that he himself then appropriated to describe his and his followers’ ‘place’, much as LGBTIQ+ people today have adopted the term queer, formerly used as a slur. In reality, those who were made eunuchs were disadvantaged socially, although many held prominent and confidential positions as servants, as we see in the Ethiopian eunuch who is a court official in Acts 8:27. Occupying both male and female space in the household, eunuchs were the objects of both trust and suspicion. They were useful in that they could not establish their own households, so that they were dependent on their masters; some eunuchs were valued as sexual partners. Reading the eunuch as a figure of chastity and continence is another misstep the Church has made in making Jesus’ words in Matthew 19 into an appeal to an ascetic Christian ideal. While eunuchs were not able to procreate, some were capable of and celebrated for their sexual prowess.

    Moxnes argues that this virile understanding of continence erases that ‘queer space’ that Jesus claims from those who were criticising him for abandoning conventional male space and thereby embracing ambiguity. Why were they ‘eunuchs’? Because, although male, they were no longer ‘men’, since to be a man was a status of honour, a status which could be achieved but which could also be lost. Rather than being seen as a positive ideal – the virile contest for celibacy – Moxnes sees Jesus as identifying with the slander and putting himself and his followers alongside other marginalised and ambiguous groups who are included in the Kingdom, such as tax collectors and prostitutes. He writes:

    Eunuchs were men who were permanently out of place, in a liminal position where there was no possibility of integration into the order of masculinity …  I suggest that the modern term that can best provide a lens for viewing the material and a category of interpretation is that of ‘queer’. This is in contrast to suggestions that Jesus could be understood by means of categories like feminine or gay. These would be categories that once more attempted to view Jesus in terms of a fixed identity, as feminine in contrast to masculine, or gay in contrast to heterosexual. ‘Queer’, on the other hand, does not indicate another category. Rather, it signals a protest against fixed categories. As a protest or opposition to fixed categories of identity, it points out that all categories are historically and socially constructed, and that human experiences are forced into these categories.

    If all identities are historically and socially constructed, as Moxnes claims, then the traditions which the Church (and the secular media) lay claim to are more unstable than is generally admitted. Few ecclesial traditions are unambiguously 2000 years old, and the figure of a transgressive and liminal saviour is deeply rooted in scripture and theology. But these are traditions which the Church seems to have neglected, so that a trans Jesus is now perceived as improperly, rather than properly, shocking. If the Church of England is to have a grown-up conversation about gender and sexuality – a conversation which the Living in Love and Faith resources promised – it seems to me that we need to some smash some modernist cis heteronormative idols, recover some neglected traditions, and lose our squeamishness about sexually transgressive and genderqueer theologies.

     

    References

    Halvor Moxnes, Putting Jesus in His Place: A Radical Vision of Household and Kingdom (Louisville, KT: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).

    Linn Marie Tonstad, “The Limits of Inclusion: Queer Theology and its Others”, Theology and Sexuality, 21, no. 1 (2015).

  • Mutual Flourishing or Repeating Our Mistakes? A Response to Together in Love and Faith

    Mutual Flourishing or Repeating Our Mistakes? A Response to Together in Love and Faith

    by April Alexander, member of General Synod 2000-2021; Church Commissioner 2008-2018; member of Crown Nominations Commission 2013-2018

    BERJAYA

    I was delighted to read the proposals from the Bishop of Oxford summarised  in the Church Times (4 November) and to hear him speak about them further on Radio 4 (details of all media engagements here). I had begun to fear that the Church would remain too timid publicly to extend to those in same sex relationships the love and welcome extended to those in heterosexual relationships.

    Looking at the first four of +Steven’s proposals in Together in Love and Faith, the second is to give “freedom of conscience to clergy and ordinands to order their relationships appropriately”. This would at last allow us to move on from the 1991 Issues in Human Sexuality document which was only prepared as a “discussion document” but which subsequently – and astonishingly – acquired the status of “holy writ”, even though the Preface stated “We cannot expect all to agree with our conclusions”. Yet when, in July 2022, Revd Mae Christie asked the question at General Synod, “When and by what mechanism was Issues in Human Sexuality formally written into the Selection Criterion of the Church of England?”, she received the following reply from the Bishop of Chester in his capacity of Chair of the Ministry Council:

    We do not have a record of the date or the mechanism by which Issues in Human Sexuality was formally written into the former Selection Criteria. Unfortunately, since the information is not readily available it could not be obtained within the time-frame available for responding to Synod questions.

    I was a founder member of Inclusive Church in the wake of the Jeffrey John debacle in Oxford diocese before the days of civil partnerships and same sex marriages. The “freedom of conscience” which +Steven is now proposing was the hallmark of our endeavours and, over two decades later, we have made no progress to date. I had rather feared that such a provision had been lost entirely in the pressure to regularise same sex marriage.

    Looking at +Steven’s proposals 1-4 together, I am taking it that clergy should be among those who are able to turn to the Church to solemnise their own same sex marriages in Church. I am not quite sure that this is crystal clear.

    However, there may also be a legal difficulty with the proposal for solemnising singe sex marriages in Church, whether for clergy couples or lay, which only rarely enters into LLF discussions. The CofE website Your Church Wedding makes clear that “Although same-sex marriage legislation has changed, it remains the case that it is not legally possible for same-sex couples to marry in the Church of England”.

    The reason for this prohibition is that, in 2013, when the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act was enacted, the then-Archbishops (Williams and Sentamu) were so bitterly opposed to it that the Government went massively out of its way to appease them by including a “quadruple lock”. This was intended to “safeguard” the CofE against any attempt by any future Government to unscramble the legislation to allow such marriages in CofE Churches. Savi Hensman has discussed this on the Equal website.

    Bishop Steven’s proposals 5-7 are a different matter; they concern the provision of a platform for those clergy who oppose single sex marriage in approximately the same way as has been done for those who opposed the ordination and consecration of women. I am afraid my sympathies lie with the suffragans in the Oxford Diocese who are not in agreement with this, because that framework has at its heart a central dilemma. While the Five Guiding Principles state that “the Church of England is fully and unequivocally committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all, without reference to gender”, at the same time they make “pastoral and sacramental provision for the minority within the Church of England who are unable to receive the ministry of women bishops or priests”. How is it possible to do both? More than that, this arrangement apparently allows the Church to “maintain the highest possible degree of communion and [also, and at the same time, contributes] to mutual flourishing” (House of Bishops Declaration 2014; GS Misc 1077). Whether Synod would be prepared to accept such a flawed notion a second time remains to be seen.

    Another aspect of this arrangement in relation to women as priests and bishops is that it did not emanate from the Church in the first place but very definitely was imposed upon the Church by Parliament in 1992; Judith Maltby’s 2011 chapter in Mark Chapman, Judith Maltby and William Whyte (eds) Established Church: Past, Present and Future explains this. Having been established in 1992 this arrangement was, in effect, replicated in 2014.

    By 2014, however, the attitude of Parliament was totally different. It was the Government, rather than the Church, which introduced the Lords Spiritual (Women) Bill in 2014. This was specifically to allow new women bishops to leapfrog over their male counterparts in order to speed up the process of appointing women to the House of Lords. Indeed, debates in both Houses reflected their view that discrimination against women was not to be tolerated any longer in the Mother of Parliaments. All indications are that nowadays Parliament is as opposed to discrimination on these grounds as it is to discrimination against women.

    On the Sunday programme on 20 November, Ben Bradshaw, MP assured listeners that Parliament could well take an interest in the matter of gay clergy and laity if the Established Church continues to remain out of step with the people of this land. Mr Bradshaw was a very effective Parliamentary operator on the matter of women bishops and I am sure he would be as effective this time.

    Further, these arrangements in respect of women have allowed pockets of discrimination and, in some cases, bullying and downright rudeness to persist, which grieve and may damage all women (lay and ordained) who experience and even hear about them. This is why a mediation service had to be set up. Those who are “unable to receive the ministry of women as priests or bishops” can still be elected to the Crown Nominations Commission, there to impede the nomination of women as Diocesans. If similar arrangements persist, the same discrimination would be likely to occur in respect of those candidates in civil partnerships and same sex marriages.

    I would beg the Bishop of Oxford to bow to what seems to be the majority view in his own Diocesan House of Bishops and not to propose another fault line which will involve many of the same people and parishes and is likely to have many of the same effects. He might also reflect upon the costs of supporting specific bishops for the relatively few parishes which are already provided with Episcopal Oversight in these straitened times.

    Finally, the Established Church should perhaps be asking itself whether it can yet again propose a framework which would rely on carve-outs from one of the most important and effective pieces of legislation in recent times, The Equality Act (2010). It might also bear in mind that discrimination of any kind is essentially against the tenets of our Christian beliefs as has been made abundantly clear in the recent work on race and disability, for example. The Church perhaps needs to examine the justification for continuing to go out of its way to facilitate discrimination on grounds of either gender or sexuality.

    The first four proposals from +Steven are permissive rather than directive; that should offer latitude enough.

     

  • Dear Bishop Christopher… An Open Response to my Diocesan Bishop after his Address to Southwark Diocesan Synod

    Dear Bishop Christopher… An Open Response to my Diocesan Bishop after his Address to Southwark Diocesan Synod

    by Simon Butler, former member of Archbishops’ Council and member of General Synod 2005-2022

    BERJAYA

    Dear Bishop Christopher,

    First of all, I want to express my gratitude for your remarks at Diocesan Synod. I read them at a distance in New Zealand where I am currently travelling and was grateful for the clarity with which you spoke. It is important now that all bishops join the rest of the Church of England in saying exactly what they think about human sexuality. Otherwise Living in Love and Faith would be a dead letter.

    I want to thank you for the way in which you have quietly and often publicly affirmed the ministry of LGBT+ clergy and lay people in the diocese. You have, in many ways, fulfilled the call we gave you in the Diocesan Statement of Needs at your appointment in relation to sexuality. I declare an interest: the drafting was my work! Thank you for your faithfulness here.

    Being Bishop of Southwark has always been about herding cats – our clergy are outstanding in their passion and commitment, conservative and progressive alike – and you have gone as far as you possibly can – and as far as your conscience will allow – to appoint and encourage LGBT+ clergy in their ministries. You have been a pastoral bishop to us all, even if that has been frustrating for some colleagues who have wanted you to go further, and faster. After all, this is Southwark!

    Your address to the Diocesan Synod was, as ever, the words of a pastoral bishop in the best tradition of Anglican Catholicism. I was not therefore surprised by a phrase I’ve heard you use before: “I do not expect to see the marriage canons changed in my lifetime.” It is something you often say, and it has served you well in Southwark, because it avoids you having to say what you think about same sex marriage. It does have the sense of being a politician’s answer, however, but one that I have often thought was both clever and perceptive. Only recently have I come to disagree with you, and from a surprising direction.

    I have been privileged to take part in a series of – until recently – entirely confidential series of discussions called the St Hugh’s Conversations. They began between Conservative Evangelicals and some progressive bishops, but have in the past three years broadened to include some conservative bishops, and those, like me, who want to see change to the current teaching on sexuality changed (it is worth noting that the majority of members are senior members of General Synod, who have an eye to getting things through our decision-making bodies). Despite our profound differences as members, we have agreed we can now identify ourselves individually and share themes. During the Conversations, we have listened to one another with great respect and affection, particularly to the concerns of conservative colleagues who remain deeply concerned about any change to the current position, including the one you advocated in your address.

    The uniting spirit of the St Hugh’s Conversations is a desire to bring to a conclusion the battle over sexuality that has beset the Church since 1987. None of us – conservative, progressive, LGBT+ or those who prefer to identify themselves as same-sex attracted – want to see our fragile unity further fractured, or the harm we do to one another as Christians continue its toxic tone. We believe – at least tentatively – that now must be the time to find a settlement which will suit us all. I have come to agree with this position.

    To that end, I am very sorry to say that I think your proposals outlined at Diocesan Synod fall short of such a settlement. I think that to preserve the maximum amount of unity by virtue of an incremental settlement through a liturgy of blessing same sex relationships (including marriage, I assume?) is a mistaken, if understandable, episcopal desire to kick the can down the road on same sex marriage. You will expect a progressive like me to say that, but what has been a stunning development in the St Hugh’s discussions is that conservatives can see a church which accommodates such a development. There is a growing unanimity that – noting how painful it would be for conservatives in the Church to agree to such a development – a Church which allows same sex marriages to be solemnised, while at the same time making provision for those who cannot agree to such a development (which in their mind goes some way beyond the sort of conscience clause you propose), is the best way ahead. We need to make fair and just provision for both sides here if we are to reach the possibility of a settlement. Only in the St Hugh’s Conversations have such possibilities been aired and a fragile consensus sensed.

    It is easy to see what provision for progressives would look like – an inclusive version of the marriage service. But what do conservatives want? To be honest, my sense is that there is not agreement here yet among them – like women bishops’ opponents, they are an alliance between impossibilists (who baulk at any change and would prefer an even more conservative settlement than the current position of the House of Bishops), those who want a very firm and clear boundary at every level of church life and governance (as laid out by the Church of England Evangelical Council, and something akin to a new Province), and those who are somewhere in between. It is not clear to me what their settled position is, and I sense it is not clear to them either! But it is much more than a conscience clause for opting out – rightly, in my view, they want some assurance of a future honoured and secure place in the Church.

    Questions of ‘provision’ will stir strong emotions among bishops (and many women clergy too) who have to deal on a daily basis with the settlement we have made on women in the episcopate. It is not hard to see why such steps will fill episcopal hearts with dread! But, as you and I have shared with women colleagues the tortuous pain of the women in the episcopate synodical journey, I regrettably have concluded that likelihood of inadequate provision, which I firmly believe that what you propose in your Synod address offers conservatives and progressives, will lead to another round of politics, campaigning and rancour. Such an incremental approach may well appeal to some in the College of Bishops, but in the wider Church I think the College risks not reading the signs of the times adequately.

    I once agreed with your ‘politician’s answer’ and thought it clever and necessary. But I am afraid now a politician’s answer won’t do. Living in Love and Faith has taught us to be clearer, rather than avoiding the elephant in the room. I want to know whether you are able to offer your support to an extension of the doctrine of marriage to same-sex couples or not. And I think you owe it to the process to give it.

    By all means, if your answer is ‘no’ or ‘not yet’ then please make that a little more clear. But if you do, then I ask you to consider that your solution risks the very unity you wish to preserve, and condemns the Church to another round of politics, electoral games and harm. It offers nothing to conservatives and not a great deal to progressives. I think it just offers a way for bishops to avoid biting the necessary bullet rather than working to the maximum unity we can achieve where everyone – in a deeply broken Church – comes away feeling, if not happy, then secure and free to minister according to their conscience.

    My prayers are assured for your next meeting with episcopal colleagues in the College.

    Your brother in Christ,

    Simon

  • Real Presence in Sex and Sacrament

    Real Presence in Sex and Sacrament

    by Jessica Martin, Canon Residentiary at Ely Cathedral. Her book Holiness and Desire (Canterbury Press, 2020) explored the relationship between human and divine desire in an age of commodification. The concerns of this article were first explored in the 2021 Bampton Lectures (https://www.theology.oxford.ac.uk,/article/bampton-lectures-11 ) and are explored in The Eucharist in Four Dimensions (Canterbury Press, summer 2023).

    BERJAYA

    The pandemic and its lockdowns has had one strange effect for sacramental Christians.  It has destabilised the awkward theological truce on the eucharist. In Anglicanism, the range of sacramental understanding has long embraced the widest possible range of positions, from memorialism (“Do this in remembrance of me”) to Real Presence. Our liturgies (from 1549 onwards) gesture towards both and land on neither. The rise both of ecumenism and the parish communion movement have made too much theological clarity undesirable. So we look away, do what we do, and hope the Holy Spirit will supply all deficiencies.

    Until, that is, lockdowns forced us to think about it. The eucharist moved online. In the absence of either bread or bodies, in what lay the transforming work of the sacrament? The question became urgent, for a time, much discussed – even within Roman Catholic circles where sacramental orthodoxy is less commodious. The urgency has diminished as people have returned to physical worship, with real bread and even (for some) real wine, but not because the question is answered. Rather, it has made a wider question more visible.

    Because, even with restored physical freedoms, we inhabit an image-dominated digital world anyway. Those images hover between and across the boundary between the fully fictive and the representatively ‘real’, blurring the distinction between thought and the material world – just as the more evasive of our sacramental liturgies do.

    Even in secular encounter we do not seem to know what constitutes a present, unambiguous action, as distinct from reflecting or representing an action (itself perhaps ‘unreal’) that took place elsewhere. So business meetings online may be ‘real’ meetings taking real-world decisions; but other forms of online encounter claim a freedom from real-world consequences by defining the online world as closer to thought than to action. In such a definition, online speech should have no real-world outworkings, and online images of events no weighty, real-world counterparts. In fact, truth and fakery merge in the online world of represented things – and the shadowlands between the two contain monsters more powerful than they claim.

    Meanwhile, sacramental action (in person or online) has at its centre a presence-in-absence, Jesus. That presence-in-absence, the reality of Jesus at the heart of the eucharist, both underpins and fiercely divides our collective understanding of what counts as ‘real’. How significant is ‘the material’ to this?

    Is the Real what happens in the transformed believing heart, the bread no more than a materialised idea? Or does the Real lie, not in the bread as bread, but in the performative power of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper: ‘this is my Body: do this in remembrance of me’? In this reading, repeating the divine command within the liturgy gives the words their power to transform what the bread is, from one substance to another. And, in those cases, place, and even time, might not be important. As long as the words were said, and the person listening were participating in the rite at which they were said, any bread might do. (Theological opinions on this differ; but in practice, many eat bread at home at the point of reception onscreen, even when watching a recording of a service celebrated at some other time and in, of course, another place)

    Finally, the bread itself may, within that divinely performative liturgical event made by the priest at a particular place and time, be so fused with the absent body of Jesus as to allow no gap at all between the materiality of one and the Real Presence of the other. In such a case an online eucharist, for the one watching, is not a eucharist at which she can receive.

    The historic divisions on eucharistic theology underpinning these different positions have had a profound influence on our modern assumptions about the reality status of represented things. That’s too long a story for this article. But we can see how it has come to matter by comparing two activities that are not as different as they seem: the holy Sacrament, and sex.

    Sex and sacrament both assume a real encounter with an Other. Yet, for both, though the realness of the encounter is in some sense guaranteed by the sensory apprehension of a material thing (bread, a body), online that material thing must also be, as material, absent. It is represented.  How far that representation is presence depends on the reality-status accorded to it.

    In the online world, representation is the only presence. Online, the sacrament hopes against hope to convince its participants of the reality status of its representative actions. Sex, on the other hand, is the activity of all activities most represented digitally. It is the focus of the most intense interest and engagement – and of the most contempt and exploitation. Taking the porn industry, for example – the internet’s biggest sexual expression – it is highly reliant on maintaining a boundary between the fictive and the real, because its imaginings are so frequently violent. Just one true example: when 14-year old Rose found video of her real rape by older men online (under the tag ‘teen getting destroyed’) her challenge to the platform, Pornhub, was ignored until she had the bright idea of writing to them, not as herself, but as a lawyer – at which point the platform took that video down. But it blended unnoticeably with the mass of other content similarly tagged: ‘extreme teen abuse’; ‘teen abused while sleeping’. When Pornhub was challenged about providing such content at all, it took refuge in the idea of representation as a form of thought: ‘We allow all forms of sexual expression that follow our Terms of Use, and while some people may find these fantasies inappropriate, they do appeal to many people around the world and are protected by various freedom of speech laws’.

    There are many, many Roses – and the boundary’s permeability is also porn’s great promise for its users. Imagining something might be true is the point – transforming, or corrupting – of fantasy. For, at some level, all digital encounter piggybacks on the idea of having reality status, however deniable.

    And, in all digital encounter, the ‘real presence’ experience is actually very elusive. In online sacrament as in online sex, the watcher may conclude, at the end, that the Other they sought was no more than a chimera, an ephemeral set of internal brain-to-body responses, with no ‘real’ meeting here to walk the heart into knowledge – heavenly or horrifying, transcendent or disappointed, all fading into the shadows from which it came.

    Yet both sex and sacrament, across the centuries, have made very similar kinds of claims to be an irreducible encounter – an encounter of transforming power, to which no calculable value can be assigned. ‘If one offered for love all the wealth of one’s house, it would be utterly scorned’ writes the Bible’s erotic poet (Song of Songs, 8.7). The parallels between meeting God and meeting a lover run throughout humanity’s long history of desire, which is why the reading history of Song of Songs has as much in it about God as about sex. Now that sex is, in almost all its forms, so fully transactional – whether in swiping right, or in matching identity-statuses, or in becoming product as one consumes product technologically – so that only friendship is left as the great desideratum – it is curious to remember a history where human desire, in some circumstances, had no price-tag to it.

    This old-fashioned characterisation of desire as literally a priceless quality asks of us another question about its expression online. Because the online medium is not simply a transparent, neutral means for access to experience that would otherwise be remote or inaccessible.  Sex and sacrament, in fact, share the same difficulties with the platform: that the ’free’ digital experience automatically monetizes ‘presence’ for gain.

    So it’s not good enough to treat the online medium as a fully transparent open window onto experience, as unambiguous in the nature of its seeing as the corporeal gaze of the human eye. Online seeing is an inexplicit transaction to which the seer assents simply by entering the portal. The ‘free’ model for internet encounter, based on the harvesting of customer data, was not an inevitable market model for online presence, but it has become so. It is the dominant mode for all non-physical encounter. And the point about it is that it requires the one who sees to be both consumer and consumed, without ever quite telling its users that the stuff of their lives are its ongoing and continual price. That is why a corporation can peddle the cruel and violent destruction of the young and the corruption of all whose desires are stirred by it, and call it business-as-usual. Just people thinking stuff they would think anyway, monetized. So they say.

    And this medium – the speeded up, logical end of a society based upon consumption – is the one into which we have decided to put a most sacred ritual at the centre of which is a body broken and consumed.

    When communion re-enacts, in symbol and in narrative, the consumption of a body, it does this out of a conviction that eating people is wrong. Deathly wrong. ‘Their throat is an open sepulchre’ writes the psalmist of the wicked, ‘eating up my people as it were bread’ (Psalms 14 and 53). Jesus (who thought through the language of the psalms), said to his companions, ‘take; eat; this is my body’.  He knew what he was doing when he asked people to eat him as if he were bread.

    His offer: take me as a sacrifice, in exchange for every act of devouring the human race ever has or ever could make. Take, break and consume me, just as you take, break and consume each other in the commonplace voracity of the world, but learn that my ordinary act of sacrifice is of infinite value because I am also the infinite God. Devour me, in order to be freed of the appalling consequences of your devourings of each other.  Eat me, to enter, however briefly, into a world where your needy emptiness no longer drives you to prey upon those around you, freed from the cruelty of your being by the constant gift of my self.

    I am not sure that we meant to place the holy eucharist inside the temple to the marketplace gods; but we did. We put it there for consumption (along with a lot of the Church’s other highly marketised ‘missional’ activity).  Perhaps by doing it we have become subversives on the marketplace gods’ territory. Or perhaps we are the subverted. The internet is a strange platform upon which to choose to place the ritual that reverses all other greeds.

    It might be the boldest thing we could do – placing communion in the heart of all commodification. Or it could be the silliest choice, the most foolhardy. Are we blaspheming? Or are we, urgently hungry, sick of gobbling shadows, filling ourselves with the bread of the Presence?

    I don’t know the answer. We took the eucharist online at a tricky time, for terribly practical, sensible reasons – and we are still doing it, because otherwise, in our world dominated by online representation, we feel our physical expressions to be ephemeral, powerless, invisible. If we are not on the internet, we think we are not really present at all.

    And – however our merciful God might redeem our terrible choices –  there’s something very, very wrong about that.

     

     

  • ‘Hermetically Sealed Hermeneutics’ & an Inability to Own Up to Harm

    by Jayne Ozanne, Founder of ViaMedia.News, Director of Ozanne Foundation and Member of General Synod

    BERJAYA

    The inability to engage with the pain and abuse that Christianity has and still causes many people appears to be a hallmark of a certain type of theology, which completely refuses to allow any dissention from a “I am right and there’s absolutely no questioning that” way of thinking.

    It is the ultimate ‘Strong Man’ argument – where you are challenged to prove how ‘strong in the faith’ you are by your commitment to a certain truth, despite all the evidence to the contrary that it is, in fact, causing people great harm and inflicting untold levels of suffering.

    People in these sect-like groups are enjoined not to ‘give in’ to ‘soft-heartedness’ (otherwise known as ‘loving concern’ or ‘compassion’) as they risk forfeiting their own salvation.  Instead, they are told they must ‘stand firm’ against any attempt to undermine their beliefs, because (they are taught) ‘the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion’ seeking to knock them off track by appealing to their most vulnerable weakness – their emotions.  (I mean, heaven forbid that we let our love and compassion for our neighbour risk jeopardising our place in eternity!)

    That of course is why the “Bible is so clear” on certain topics, because to think otherwise might just be to create a hairline fracture in the wall, which might risk bringing down the whole edifice of the Christian faith.  And we couldn’t have that, could we?  I mean – questioning certain truths that have been held for hundreds of years is obviously something that Biblical scholars have never ever done!  For we Christians have never ever got things wrong in the past (best to forget that we once thought that the world was flat, or that women should be kept silent and have no role in ministry).  Indeed, questioning given teachings was never ever something Jesus did…did he?!

    I was reminded of all this recently when I watched the challenging film “The Report”, that set out the harrowing account of the horrific abuses committed by the CIA when using enhanced interrogation techniques (aka torture) after the 9/11 attacks.  Despite the fact that many operatives were really uncomfortable with these techniques, they were ‘strong armed’ into agreeing them as they were only actually legal if they were thought to be working.  To admit that they weren’t working was to question the whole legitimacy of the programme and ultimately the legitimacy of the CIA itself.  They had to believe it and were kicked out if they didn’t.

    It was a ‘hermetically sealed’ argument – with no room whatsoever for dissent.

    Likewise with certain “clear Biblical teachings” that most know cause severe harm – like forcing someone to live a chaste life because they are gay even if they do not have the gift of celibacy.  A ‘hermetically sealed hermeneutic’ peddled by some is that you can only be a true Christian if you believe this, and that any challenge to this teaching is a sure sign that you are unsound.  What’s more, if you insist on pursuing this challenge then you must be rejected by your community.

    If you doubt me, have a look at the UK Evangelical Alliance’s ‘Affirmations’ on how they recommend their member churches and church leaders respond pastorally to questions regarding homosexuality:

    “We believe both habitual homoerotic sexual activity without repentance and public promotion of such activity are inconsistent with faithful church membership. While processes of membership and discipline differ from one church context to another, we believe that either of these behaviours warrants consideration for church discipline.”[1]

    Interestingly, the question of why church leaders are so unable to engage with the evidence of the harm that they have caused is a subject that the Bishop of Oxford, Rt Revd Dr Steven Croft touches on in his recent essay on same-sex relationships, Together in Love and Faith: Personal Reflections and Next Steps for the Church.  In it he movingly acknowledges and apologises for the pain and hurt that the Church has caused so many LGBTQI+ people, asking:

    ‘Why was it so hard to hear the extent of the pain and distress of my fellow Christians?’

    He responds by admitting:

    ‘It is very difficult as a Church leader to acknowledge pain, and discomfort within your own community – especially if you are the cause of that pain or see it as a challenge to deeply held beliefs.  It is much too easy to dismiss the experiences of a small number of individuals as particular to them.’

    In other words, the heart (or, indeed the head) will not hear what it does not want to hear.  It is far easier to dismiss the testimony of one or two individuals as “exceptions”, rather than engage with the truth of their lived experience.  The irony of this approach is that evangelicals tend to thrive on people ‘giving their testimony’ as a way of sharing the impact their faith has had on their lives.

    So why isn’t the lived experience of LGBT+ individuals heard?  Why aren’t the numerous testimonies offered in TV documentaries, research studies, health journals and government reports not heeded and taken onboard?

    I have to say to the Bishop of Oxford that the answer normally lies far deeper than a leader’s inability to accept uncomfortable truths.  For most it lies in their theological understanding of the nature of God, of sin and of judgement. In short, many hold that their religion teaches that these individuals have brought their suffering upon themselves because of their ‘ungodly’ desires.

    This is sadly another example of an ‘hermetically sealed hermeneutic’, which leaves LGBT+ people with no way out.  Evidently, they are hurting because they are ‘ungodly’ and because they are not healed – it is a circular airtight argument that is not open to reason or challenge.

    It is deeply concerning to see such a rigidity of thinking that does not allow for reason, science or human suffering to shape and refine religious teaching!  It is this that the history books will recount and question – why weren’t people’s hearts broken by the evidence of harm that was so clearly being perpetrated?  Why were people who believed in the primacy of love so cruel?

    Perhaps, deep down, the real problem is that they don’t want to have to admit that they have got things badly wrong, because – like the CIA – they would then be held accountable for the horrendous pain and suffering they have inflicted on countless individuals!

    Time will tell.  God alone knows.

    [1] Evangelical Alliance 2012 report Biblical and Pastoral responses to Homosexuality