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Ask! Tell!

20 September 2011 By 7 Comments

Today shall not pass on this blog without noting the change in the law that now allows gay people to service openly in the military in the USA. The so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule that has now been consigned to history was an emblematic piece of hypocrisy. The idea was that it was OK to happen to be gay in the US military, but it wasn’t OK to be honest and open about that. It was an uncomfortable half-way house on the road to acceptance. On the one hand the policy prevented the military authorities from harassing closeted gay military personnel but on the other it meant that people faced direct discrimination if they did disclose their sexuality.

Over 13000 people were discharged from the US military because they were either caught out or chose to be open. That is a lot of people’s lives messed up, a lot of money spent on training people who were then deemed unsuitable and a lot of grief all round.

All over now. Cause indeed for rejoicing.

So why is it significant for me to mark on this blog?

Well, the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy is similar (though not identical) to the situation for many gay clergy. To be blunt, you get rewarded for staying in the closet. Come out and you don’t know what will happen to you. Come out and you could be removed from your post by your bishop. Or the next bishop who comes along. Or the Vestry might make life impossible because there are no established guidelines to stop them. Come out about your relationship and you don’t know where you are in the morass of ethics and values regarding who you can live with and what are the rules.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell comes very close to the attitude that the Anglican Churches have in the UK towards gay people becoming bishops. It doesn’t affect that many people directly, but it sends out a ghastly message indirectly to the many. Moderate Christians supportive of gay clergy think that policy stinks. Those in the church most opposed to gay clergy think it stinks. Friends in the USA and Canada, punished collectively in their churches because they affirmed one ministry or another connected to people who happen to be gay, think it stinks. The angry leaders of African provinces looking back at Britain think it stinks.

We can’t just blame Rowan William’s depressing tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury. That is too easy. Notwithstanding that though, I’d say that the closeted straight supporters of gay clergy have a particular role to play in finding a way out of the mire.

Ask! Tell! Whoever you are.

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Archbishop promotes Bisexual’s Bible

5 January 2011 By 13 Comments

Oh, do forgive me for the attention seeking title. I just couldn’t resist. Its just that I find myself gently raising a curious eyebrow at the current love-in being manufactured for the anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible.

When I heard that the Archbishop of Canterbury had based his New Year message on the KJV, I have to admit that I groaned. It just seemed to be so backward looking at a time when one can say something forward thinking. Indeed, when I heard the message on Radio, I thought it was poor. However, when I saw the video, I have to admit that I was much more impressed. Its a New Year message meant for video and well worth looking at over on his website. It is nothing if not clever and I have to say that I quite admire it now having seen the visuals.

Curiously, Fr Archbishop doesn’t seem to have much to say about the personal life of our own dear King James VIth (and Ist).

Odd that, isn’t it?

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Tyler Clementi

4 October 2010 By 3 Comments

There is a certain amount of discussion and debate going on over on American blogs at the moment, religious and non-religious about a several suicides of young gay people. Being gay is a factor in so many young suicides, something I’ve highlighted on this blog before.

Rather than point to any of the debate, I think the thing I want to do is highlight the video below. It shows one of these young men playing his violin in church.

Watch and listen.

You might have heard of him. His name is Tyler Clementi and he apparently threw himself to his death from a bridge once he discovered that two other students had streamed on the internet a video of an encounter he had with another man.

The video is important. The church connection is important. The church he is leading worship in is Grace Church, Ridgewood, New Jersey. The church belongs to the Willow Creek Association of churches. Although there have been some brave attempts to challenge Willow Creek to change their views, the policy of that church is that being gay is an impediment to fully being part of God’s church, particularly where leadership is involved.

These are broadly the same values that the Archbishop of Canterbury was advocating in the national press last week. They are the same values that our own dear bishops are associating themselves with in keeping to the moratoria against gay leadership in the church. They are the same values that others want to enshrine in our churches by stealth in the adoption of the so-called Anglican Covenant.

(A tip of the praepostorial biretta to Robin Angus for finding the video)

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Englandwatch

8 July 2010 By 3 Comments

Sometimes it is almost too painful watching the Church of England. Currently the blogsphere and twitterscope are full of reports of the decisions which are supposed to go on behind closed doors with regard to the nomination of the Bishop of Southwark. The short version is that Jeffrey John was apparently on the list. His name was leaked. There was a fuss. His name is no longer on the list.

However, we are also being treated to a commentary on Rowan Williams’s temper and the suggestion that he personally vetoed Jeffrey John’s nomination. I don’t even know whether that is possible. In any case, I’d prefer not to believe it, I think. It was bad enough that +Rowan laid down his friend for his life the first time around when Jeffrey was nominated to be suffragen bishop of Reading. If he really has become someone who would lay down the same friend for his life twice, it is too ghastly to contemplate for long.

Now, its straight off to General Synod for the Archbishop, where he is sponsoring an amendment to the measure allowing women to be nominated for the Episcopate which would make them second-class bishops forever.

I hope the English Synod says no to this and does so clearly and decisively.

With regard to who gets to choose who is on the list to become Bishop of Southwark, we need to remember that it is David Cameron, who appears to be a good Anglican (ie one who turns up sometimes) and may know a thing or two about the Church of England which some Prime Ministers have not. It could still be that whatever names are suggested to him are rejected in favour of a fresh list. This one could run on for a bit, I’d say.

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What’s going on in America?

16 July 2009 By 17 Comments

There is quite a lot going on in the Anglican world this week. The Church of England Synod was meeting, but did not make much headline news, with the exception that they decided not to shift power from committees and boards to bishops. (ie from laity, clergy and episcopacy to episcopacy).

More interesting is what is going on in the States, where the General Convention of the Episcopal Church is taking place. It only happens every three years and is their great decision making body.

The General Convention has passed a resolution which is getting a lot of press at the moment, Resolution D025. It is worth reading what it actually says and not simply relying on other people’s interpretation. (Including mine!)

The American church seems to have decided that honesty is the best policy. They say simply where they are at with events which have become so toxic within Anglicana. They say that they remain fully committed to the Anglican Communion and also that their methods of selecting bishops remain those of their constitution and canons. This means that those who must consent to Episcopal elections must apply their own conscience when giving consents. The Anglican world cannot simply assume that the American church will reject a bishop who happens to be gay, just because Rowan Williams (or anyone else) asks them to.

That does not mean that there will be a sudden rush of gay bishops. Nor should it. It simply means that the American church is being true to who it is. Just as in Scotland, there is plenty of scope within the canonical process to reject someone who happens at any time to be unsuitable to be a bishop. The Americans will use their own polity to determine who can be a bishop and not have some additional extra-canonical process imposed on them.

They are quite right to do so. What holds for them should hold for us.

The Americans have not walked away from the Anglican Communion. They have walked away a little from the idea that the conflict over LGBT issues would disappear if everyone did what Rowan Williams said and adopted the proposals of the Windsor Report. They were right to do so.

The Windsor process has little currency now. The notion that world Anglicanism could be held together by asking churches to discriminate against gay people is shot to pieces.

We need to return to the rather more basic notion that it is devotion to Jesus which holds the potential to unite Christians, not devotion to prejudice. And we must thank God that the Americans have shown us how to make that real.

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Salisbury’s Glorious Font

14 May 2009 By 11 Comments

font1
The above pic is one that I took on my recent trip to England.

Whilst I was in Salisbury to preach, I saw this wonderful new font which has just been installed in the middle of the nave.

It is dark and mysterious. Large enough to drown someone in. The dark interior makes the surface of the water reflect all that is around it. The water seems still and calm, yet is actually moving all the time, running over the edge of the corners.
Two things interested me particularly about it. The first was the propensity of people to throw money into it, proving that there are spiritual things deep inside us that refuse to die, no matter how much we try to baptise it out of people through no matter how many centuries.

The second thing was the consecration crosses. They got Archbishop Rowan to consecrate the font using holy oil. Only thing was, no-one worked out in advance that it would not be a trivial matter to wipe them off. And thus they remain. Ghostly and Holy. The whole thing is magnificent. One of the most successful modern commissions I’ve seen.
consecration-crosses-of-rowan-williams

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Clash of cultures

31 October 2008 By 14 Comments

Just back from our diocesan clergy conference. It was just 24 hours, which was not long enough for me. Although I find myself resenting having to rearrange my diary, I know that on these occassions, the thing that matters most is meeting people and there was not quite enough time for me to feel that we had done enough of that. I’d have liked us to discuss something that mattered, and I’m not sure we did.

We had good input though. The headline speaker for Wednesday was Lorna Finley, who came and spoke to us about dealing with the media. Her party-piece was a series of imagined headlines from newspapers reporting on the story of the Prodigal Child. Excellent.

Today the headline act was Rowan Williams. He spoke to us of poetry.

One frustration that I found was that it started to feel to me as though quite a few of my colleagues were frightened of the media but much more accepting of poetry. Rowan William’s experience of the firestorm over Sharia Law earlier in the year was very obviously in our minds. That kind of effect inevitably induces fear. It felt as though people felt much more comfortable listening to RW talking about medieval Welsh poetic structures. (And here, I must  admit that RW was the best speaker on the structure of medieval Welsh poetry that I’ve ever heard at a clergy conference).

The thing that troubled me was that we never seemed to connect the two. I’m a person who lives in a soundbite, internet-driven, headline culture. And I love it. What none of us seemed able to vocalise during the conference is that this same culture is the most successful, witty, influential poetic culture that the world has ever seen. We turn our backs on it at our peril.

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Its about Human Rights, Rowan

29 July 2008 By 23 Comments

I’ve refrained from commenting much on the Lambeth Conference as there has not been anything official to react to and media reports do not give a good flavour of what is essentially a closed event.

However, now we have a published address from Rowan Williams.

At first sight, it seems reasonable enough. Indeed, he is making an honest attempt to hear and articulate the feelings and emotions of two hypothetical voices on either “side” of the debate.

The fact is, it is the conception of the Communion as having these two sides that is the real problem.

I don’t actually think that the attempt to sum up the “liberal” side comes anywhere near to my position at all.

The things is, its all about human rights, Rowan. This is not just about the rights of gay and lesbian people in the US, it is about all of us. It is about the rights of people in all parts of the world to self expression, to practise their religion, to live freely with dignity before God. It is about the whole people of God, (you know, the laos, you must have heard of it, you’ve read a bit of theology) being able to speak in decision making in the church. It is about women and men being treated as equal human beings. It is about the western church standing up for persecuted brothers and sisters wherever they are. It is about having the confidence that Muslim and Anglican can live together in the same street and not attack one another.

Sometimes, that means standing up to bishops, such as condemning the inflamatory remarks made by Akinola connected with inter-religious rioting in Nigeria. We’ve not yet heard any condemation from the Lambeth Conference of the circumstances which caused the UK Government to offer policial assylum to a gay Anglican this week because of the violence and persecution he could expect from his home church. That shames the whole church.

It is only when a human rights agenda gets woven into all of this that there will be dignity for all those affected.

We need human rights missionaries. We need to interfere in other jurisdictions until all God’s people are free and safe in their societies and in their churches. We need to set those high, inclusive moral standards amongst all Anglican peoples. That Covenant you are suggesting is not a patch on that vision. It is a step in another direction altogether.

Any covenant which allows anything less than treating all the baptised as equally enriched and empowered by the potential of God’s grace will result in non-juring Episcopalians again in Scotland. That would be communion breaking, not communion making. You might have some problems with it even closer to home than Scotland too.

What is proposed is not a solution. What is proposed is the problem.

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Hapless Rowan #2

8 February 2008 By 8 Comments

The thing is, what the ABC needs right now, is a bunch of clever left-leaning liberal intellectuals in sympathy with the church sorting all this mess out and standing up for him and spinning the story in a different direction.

It could be done. Those kind of people are people like me.

Such people, he has alienated so very thoroughly.

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Covenant Response

15 January 2008 By 2 Comments

The Scottish Episcopal Church now has a published response to the draft Anglican covenant. Although I have one strong reservation about something that it says, I do broadly welcome it.

My reservation is over the phrase, “There is much in the Draft Covenant which we wish to commend: we appreciate its rootedness in Scripture, …” It has always seemed to me that the Draft Covenant was littered with scriptural texts rather than rooted in Scripture. There is quite a difference. There is no-one I respect on either side of the covenant controversy who would be happy to treat the bible in as cavalier fashion as those who have drafted the covenant. The “proof texts” which are scattered through it show a lack of conviction and are one of the worst examples of taking the biblical texts out of context. Those of us who love the word of God, liberal and evangelical alike should not be commending that – we should be condemning it.

The Scottish response makes it pretty clear that the covenant is not really what we are looking for and proposes an alternative name and an alternative way of responding to the Anglican “crisis” to that which the covenant proposes. This is nothing new, of course. At last year’s General Synod, Bishop Brian said something to the effect that the covenant was “not the only show in town” and there were other speakers who wanted to find other ways of allowing the Anglican communion to hold together with diversity rather than be whipped into order by a central curia.

Of course, Rowan Williams has let us down. In his Advent Letter, he said, “I have underlined in my letter of invitation that acceptance of the invitation must be taken as implying willingness to work with those aspects of the Conference’s agenda that relate to implementing the recommendations of Windsor, including the development of a Covenant. ” (His italics, not mine).

I cannot read that in any other way than him saying that those taking the line that Bishop Brian took at the General Synod and anyone who is supportive of this new Scottish response to the Draft Covenant should stay away from Lambeth. Will he enforce that?

In Scotland as a church, we have never accepted or supported the Windsor Report in any forum to my knowledge. Nor Lambeth 1.10. Nor this Draft Covenant.

Wonder what will happen next.

UPDATE

Some comments on the response are available on Thinking Anglicans.

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