The Faith and Order Board of the Scottish Episcopal Church has published a response to the St Andrews Draft of the proposed Anglican Covenant.
You can read it all here.
Latest official response from the Scotland to the Covenant proposal
24 March 2009 By Leave a Comment
Akinola on +Idris
11 February 2009 By 1 Comment
Well, last week it was the meeting of Primates of the Anglican Communion in Egypt. You can read +Idris’s take on the events here.
Rather more interestingly, an angry and despairing letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury purporting to be from Archbishop of Nigeria has been issued (on an American website) which quotes +Idris directly.
Here is a snippet:
In our meeting we recommended that you initiate a “professionally mediated conversation which engages all parties at the earliest opportunity.” It now seems increasingly clear that without a radical change of behaviour on the part of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada the only possible outcome of such a process is acknowledgement of a bitter truth that the differences in the words of Archbishop [sic] Idris Jones are “irreconcilable”.
You can read the whole thing here.
Primates Meeting Communique
5 February 2009 By Leave a Comment
The Primates of the Anglican Communion have been meeting this week in Egypt.
Their communique can be read here.
I see also that they have been hobnobbing with Pope Shenouda III of the Coptic Church. Just before being ordained, I spent some time in Egypt, including a very memorable and enjoyable evening at one of Pope Shenouda’s Wednesday Bible Studies.
We are Created By God – a Mothers’ Union Discussion Booklet
22 November 2008 By 29 Comments
I’m grateful to Sheila Redwood of the Mothers’ Union for sending me this discussion booklet as a response to my earlier posts (here and here)) about the MU attitude to those who are gay.
It is a nicely produced book. A shiny cover has friendly stones piled on one another. It is clear that a lot has been put into its production. The booklet aims to discuss four particular issues, Marriage and Cohabitation, Divorce and Further Marriage, Being Single or Widowed and Lesbian and Gay Sexuality. It is the last of these which I will concentrate on in this review as that was the main purpose in my being sent a copy.
Here is what I think. [Read more...]
Listening. Talking. Discussing. LGBT
17 November 2008 By 15 Comments
A while ago, I posted some remarks about the Mothers’ Union (here and here) which surprised a few people, not least members of the MU. The MU, as I said before, is an organisation which does a lot of good things in the world. I was trying to explain why I would not welcome it my congregation. I did this in order to try to explain to people keen on the MU why it might be that clergy (whom we might presume to be supportive of family life, as the MU are) might not want them.
It is worth saying in passing that I wish I had a pound for everyone who has since said to me, “You are a brave man for taking on the MU in public”. I don’t think so. I’ve always found the MU to be full of charming and well intentioned people. However, if that is what people think of them in private, then they have an image problem that they might like to reflect on. The church is no place for a culture of fear, after all.
One of the issues which I brought up was the MU policy on those who are gay. In response, they sent me a copy of a new workbook that they have published which includes a section on LGBT issues and identity. I’ve been looking at it carefully and will post my reflections on it later in the week.
However, I think it is worth establishing before I do so what I think some of the parameters are, for engaging in this debate these days. Here are a few points against which I make judgements about whether or not people are seriously trying to engage with people who are gay or whether they are just giving voice to prejudice:
- Mind your language! When engaging in this debate do you use pejorative terms? Do you use language which makes people affected by the debate uncomfortable?
- Find positive role models! Have you made any effort to find positive role models amongst those who are gay or do you present those who are gay as troubling, difficult problems. (If you do this, it is quite a good indication to me that you have prejudices which you are not ready to acknowledge).
- Allow people to speak with their own voices! Do you speak about people or do you engage them in conversation. Do you try to speak “objectively” about people and do you lump them together in stereotypical ways? Or alternatively, do you seek out gay voices and allow them to speak for themselves.
- Name our writers! Do you include links to gay thinkers, writers, preachers and opinon-makers? Or do you miss them out of your discourse? Have you asked gay people whom you should be reading?
- Include gay people in the process from the beginning! Can you give me an assurance that gay people were consulted about what you are doing from the beginning? Has their advice on process been sought out and listened to or did you presume that you knew best?
- Deal with your history! Do you expect people to enter freely into debate with you whilst you have policies, presumptions or historical events in this area which remain unresolved? If there are difficult issues you can’t resolve, are you willing to name them or do you pretend they don’t exist?
Have I missed anything?
Sermon – 27 July 2008 Leah’s Lovely Eyes
27 July 2008 By 5 Comments
[The audio of this sermon can be heard on this page - the text is Genesis 29:15-28].
I have to confess, that I’ve quite enjoyed preaching on the readings that we have been getting in the book of Genesis. All human life, it seems is there.
I preached a couple of weeks ago about how a wife was found for Isaac. This week’s reading is about how Jacob got two.
All human life is here in just a few verses. We have drama, pathos, jealousy, sensuality and unrequited love.
It is a simple tale, isn’t it. It is as old as the hills. Boy meets girl. Boy sooks up to the prospective father-in-law. Boy married girl. Boy gets rather a surprise in the morning. Boy sooks up to wicked father-in-law again. Boys gets married again. And all ends up happy. It could happen to anyone! [Read more...]
Book Review
11 July 2008 By 4 Comments
The Anglican Communion and Homosexuality – A resource to enable listening and dialogue
Edited by Phil Groves (SPCK – £14.99)
The clearest call for a process of listening to the experience of lesbian and gay Anglicans came 10 years ago at the Lambeth Conference of 1998. That this book is being published just a couple of weeks before this year’s Lambeth Conference is a testament to the failure of that previous call.
The process of listening to the experience of lesbian and gay Anglicans has been comprehensively hijacked and turned into a process of listening to the different warring factions of the communion. Things are not going to get better until those gay voices are heard more clearly and I am unconvinced that the process that has been adopted here will help matters much at all. Rather than ensure that we are listening to the experiences that the Communion bishops told us to listen to, we are being encouraged to listen to schism. Who can be surprised if further division is the result?
The book, like the Communion, is a mixed bag. Parts are good, parts are bad, some parts look rather uneasy and insecure and some parts are sick.
By far the best chapter is the one on Listening and Dialogue which appears near the beginning of the book. Would that this had been published as a pamphlet for the churches after the last Lambeth Conference. Less secure is the strategy of locating the listening process within the context of a discussion about mission. There is much in the experience of foreign missions which can throw some light on the current crisis, yet that experience goes largely unexamined here.
Near the beginning of the book, we are told, “The aim of this book is to enable you to begin or to continue listening to those identified as ‘homosexual persons’ and to discover and engage with the diversity of responses found among Anglicans.” Herein lies its failure. It presumes that the reader is straight, it uses terms like “homosexual persons” which unravel the identity of those very voices it claims to be promoting and it sets the whole within an agenda of listening to schism.
By far the worst parts of the book are the last couple of chapters which claim to be about listening to the “Witness of Science”. The placing of these chapters at the end of the book unchallenged and as though they were some kind of a conclusion is unfortunate at best. The clearly stated agenda for this work is an examination of what causes homosexuality in order that it can be cured. Are gay people supposed to welcome this kind of agenda being published as a response to a call to listen to their voices? We are warned in an introduction to this section that the depersonalized and medicalized language might be upsetting. Indeed, there is a suggestion that we read it in the company of a scientist or a doctor. However, we don’t need a medic present to conclude that it is not gay people who are sick.
It is the Communion itself.
Sermon 6 July 2008
6 July 2008 By 12 Comments
// UPDATED – this post now visible in Internet Explorer
Here is this morning’s sermon. For audio, click on this page.
This is the text that I was using, based on the story of Isaac being found a wife in the second part of Genesis 24:
We are going back to the Old Testament soap opera this morning. I want to talk about the story of Isaac being found a wife by his father’s servant.
The story is this – the servant goes off to the old country. He parks his camels by a well and does a deal with God. If he asks a young woman for water and she offers to draw some for the camels too then, she is the one. She gets the nose ring, bracelets on her arms and gets carried off into the sunset to meet the man she will spend the rest of her life with who shoves her into his dead mother’s tent and climbs in himself.
It has to be said, it is a dating strategy that I have not yet tried. [Read more...]
Sermon – 1 June 2008
1 June 2008 By 7 Comments
For audio, click the icon above. Text below. Usual disclaimers. I didn’t say what the text says. Here it is:
I don’t preach on St Paul very often, but this seems to me to be important this week, so I am going to preach on the second of our readings, from the letter to the Romans. What I want to say, is something about the context we are in as Anglicans about the need for us to look deep, very deep into the foundations of our faith. [Read more...]
Pre-Synod Meeting
30 May 2008 By 15 Comments
Crossed to the dark south side of the city last night for our pre-synod meeting. This is where General Synod members from the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway go through the synod agenda and mull it over before actually going to synod to do the business in a fortnight.
This year promises to be quite a technically complex synod. There are a lot of changes to canon law being considered and it seems that we are not all of one mind about them all.
There seemed to be quite a small turn-out last night, which is a bit worrying. I find it immensely helpful to hear what others from the diocese think before actually going to synod. There are always views that you don’t expect to hear and it is fascinating hearing people try to articulate why they do or do not agree about things.
This year there are several obvious points of interest. Canonically, we are looking again at congregational status. The idea is that Independent congregations would become incumbencies, those who are priests in charge would all become rectors and as if by magic sleight of hand, it will then be possible to link congregations together in a sensible way. I approve of the latter strongly, but find it hard to understand why all the changes are necessary.
There is a similar complex issue about the church trying to identify who its members are. This sounds easy, but the truth is, we have little idea. Not everyone who thinks of themselves as an Episcopalian appears on any church roll. Not everyone who appears on a church roll thinks of themselves as belonging to the Episcopal church. Trying to sort this out brings about new anomalies.
Then there is a debate to be had about Local Collaborative Ministry and related matters. My latest on this is that I believe in an increasingly participatory ministry but am not yet convinced by the Whole Total Full Body Ministry of All the Baptised People of God.
And finally, we are getting a real substantive vote on the Anglican Covenant proposals. Motion 3 this year is stated thus:
That this Synod affirm an ‘in principle’ commitment to the Covenant process at this time (without committing itself to the details of any text).
This is going to be difficult. I suspect that like a lot of people who will be at synod, I want to vote for the motion which follows this one, which commits us to engage in the processes of the Communion by discussion and debate. But do you think my arm is going in the air to vote in principle in favour of the Covenant process?
Not in my name, Bishop Rowan. Not in my name.
I wonder whether we might be able to find an amended text for Motion 3 that will keep the church together and which we could all vote for.
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