From Council of Churches to Churches Together

In the previous blog, post I wrote about ecumenism as lived experience and as such is a contextual theology. But whilst contexts change and theology must respond to changing contexts it is important to recognize where you have come from. In this series of posts I am not attempting the impossible, that of writing a comprehensive history of the ecumenical movement, but rather offering a series of reflections on the elements of the ecumenical journey that strike me to be of significance. 

During the time that I spent as a member of an ecumenical community, there was a bigger story unfolding in the ecumenical journey for the churches of Britain and Ireland, namely the Inter-Church Process “Not Strangers But Pilgrims”. This was unique in the history of ecumenism because it engaged churches at a local level in a deeper reflection on what it means to seek the unity in Christ that is God’s gift to the church. It would not be an exaggeration to state that Christians in local churches were wanting the leadership of denominations to go much further than they had previously. The result was the “Swanwick Declaration” of 1989 and required of the churches a shift in thinking, that would transform the way work was done with the vision of freeing resources and energy:

“from ecumenism as an extra, which absorbs energy, to ecumenism as a dimension of all that we do, which releases energy through the sharing of resources”. 

This, it has to be said, was against the context of increasing secularization and a process of decline which the sociologist Bryan Wilson suggested was one of the main drivers for the ecumenical movement. Perhaps…

The Swanwick Declaration went further in its vision to include a mindset whereby no work would be undertaken by a denomination as though no other church existed, but always looked to work ecumenically in all aspects in the life of the church. 

This process led to the dissolving of the British Council of Churches and the creation of the Council of Churches of Britain and Ireland and subsequently Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, along with similar bodies in England, Scotland and Wales that sat alongside the Irish Council of Churches and Irish Inter-Church Meeting. 

Thus, was born the “Churches Together” model which was a moving away from conciliar ecumenism to one where ecumenism happened organically at every level of church life. The work of the British Council of Churches was done with and in its place would flourish a whole field of ecumenical flowers! Well it didn’t of course and arguably the Swanwick Declaration was too ambitious for its time and has largely failed. Why is this so?

The fundamental conviction of Conciliar Ecumenism is that it is part of the esse of the church. From it ancient times the church has come together and sought council. It was out of this ecclesiology that we have the important historic councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. And in 2024 we will mark a milestone anniversary, that of the Council of Nicea, an important anniversary for the churches of the East and the West. The act of “taking council together” is important as it is the only way that the woundedness of Christinaity can be overcome by an intentional prayer for unity and a dialogue aimed at overcoming disunity and misunderstanding. This involves not just dialogue and listening but also a mutual accountability. It is not about uniformity but about deep respect and love of one another and a recognition that we are not complete without one another.

Did the churches in the UK and Ireland think, in the 1980’s, that conciliar ecumenism had achieved all that? It would be a bold claim for them to have made but there are reasons to believe that the ecumenical movement had indeed reached that excitable place. Indeed, the Faith and Order Conference in Nottingham in 1964 saw real organic unity as a reality by Eastertide 1980! Perhaps the failure to meet this target led to a sense that something needed to change? And this was surely driven by the strength of the ecumenical spirituality of the time that I had encountered personally in 1986-7. 

But there is something here that is not often commented upon. The individuals that “took council” together in the BCC may have belonged to different churches – Anglican, Baptist, Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian – but many of them came from the same sort of social background. They were overwhelmingly male, mostly white and middle class and the product of similar schooling and education with the vast majority coming from leading university theological faculties in Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh and Oxford. A good many of them had also seen War-time military service. Thus, they already had a world view that was broadly similar even if their ecclesial belonging was different. They were deeply honorable and faithful Christian people who could not have foreseen the very different context that exists today – a society that is religiously plural, a Christianity that is much more fragmented, ecclesially weaker and less deferential in terms of class and hierarchy. 

The Churches Together model has often been criticized by international ecumenical theologians as an abandonment of a serious aspect of ecumenical theology, namely conciliarity as part of the esse of the church. But as we have seen within international communions of Christian traditions, that conciliarity has been seriously tested especially when it comes to matters relating to gender and sexuality. 

But is a Churches Together model any more successful in matters of unity? Arguably this model has never really gotten off the ground. Many local CT groups are very effective in coming together for prayer and social action and arguably that is where the real ecumenical heart lies today (as of course it did in the 1980’s). But at a national level it is more “Council of Churches-lite” with the bringing together of lead persons for ecumenism rather than the stated aim of Swanwick “from ecumenism as an extra, which absorbs energy, to ecumenism as a dimension of all that we do, which releases energy through the sharing of resources”. The notable exception being that of the Joint Public Issues Team (Baptist, Methodist, United Reformed Church and more recently the Church of Scotland) which does precisely what Swanwick intended – the pooling of resources and releasing of energy. 

The ecumenical journey in Britain and Ireland has reached an interesting place. The ecclesial scene is much more diverse and fluid. In subsequent blog posts I will aim to reflect more upon that diversity, but needless to say this involves migrant churches (including Orthodox), black majority churches, a dramatic increase in the presence of women’s leadership and a growing confidence from LGBTQ voices. 

But in conclusion to this reflection on an historical development that began in the 1980’s: to what extent is the theological conviction of the conciliar nature of the church still held by denominations and its leaders and if, as many do, maintain that a moving away from conciliar ecumenism was the right thing to do, how much has the aspiration of Swanwick been fulfilled? 

Ecumenical Memory: Beginnings

We sometimes talk about “ecumenical memory” and that usually means the memory of “the movement” but so much of that is bound up in personal memory and so I begin with this very personal reflection, which may or may not resonate with the experience of others.

I was raised within the English Nonconformist tradition in Lancashire.  As a child I had very little experience of other churches and had only a passing awareness of my school friends who belonged to other churches particularly Catholics. But I was also aware of the sectarian suspicions that Protestants had against Catholics hearing from time to time anti-Catholic prejudices especially following a terrorist attack by the IRA. 

But all this change when I was 19 years old when I spent a year (1986-87) as a member of an ecumenical Christian community in the East of England. This community comprised mostly of Catholics and Anglicans, myself being the only Nonconformist in the community.  This was at a time when I was reflecting upon my own vocation to Christian ministry and it coincided with a period of ecumenical excitement where there was real feeling and hope of greater moves towards visible Christian unity. Ecumenism at this time was seen as radical and new. For the first time I was living and praying with Christians of other traditions and came to realize much of the pain that is the result of disunity.  This was most apparent during Holy Week and Easter when Catholics and Protestants were unable to share Holy Communion together. I was also aware that despite the rules around communion there were Catholics who refused to accept this reality and were prepared to openly defy the instruction of their church. So my first experience of ecumenism was a willingness to push the boundaries and break the rules. It was there that I learnt the phrase “the scandal of disunity” which was not merely about different churches being divided from one another but the way in which that disunity contributed to division in the world. 

And so the next ecumenical lesson that I learnt was that we cannot talk of overcoming Christian disunity without addressing injustice in the world. At the heart of that community was a commitment to justice and peace.  This was at a time when the Cold War was very much a reality and the fears of nuclear war were real and so many of the community were involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and were regularly involved in demonstrations outside military bases.  The community was also involved in the setting up of a homeless shelter in the nearby town. Oscar Romero was, I recall ,an important figure as were those who were fighting against apartheid and opposing militaristic regimes around the world. This political activism grew out of the ecumenical spirituality of the community where prayer was central and whilst they were different services and prayer times for different traditions, the community always came together to pray for peace, unity and reconciliation. 

However being the only person from Nonconformist tradition in that place caused me to reflect for the first time what it meant to be part of one’s own tradition. As I look back I realize that this was the most formative year of my life because it confirmed me in the belief that my tradition was part of my identity and something to be treasured, not disregarded, diminished or emptied of distinctiveness.  Yet at the same time living in such a community and praying with others such as Anglicans and Catholics my prayer life and spirituality was able to draw on the riches that other traditions offered, meaning that I could feel spiritually nourished by the Catholic Breviary, Anglican Evensong and the Orthodox liturgy. 

This was nothing short of a practical lesson in ecumenical theology:  years before I was to pick up a book of ecumenical theology I had imbibed the very essence of what is today called “receptive ecumenism”, I understood what is meant by the phrase “the scandal of disunity” and I grasped without writing a single essay why you cannot speak the language of Christian unity while humanity and the planet bleed. 

As I reflect on that year (and my many subsequent return visits to the community the last one being in 1999,  just a few years before the community closed for good) I realize that ecumenical theology must be lived experience, and is as much contextual theology as anything that goes by that fashionable name today. But it also equipped me with a spirituality and a theological conviction which has never left me and has always been my default position. 

But at the same time this contextual ecumenical theological formation cannot be divorced from the reality of the time and I can recall clashes between community members, arguments over controversial issues (not least during the 1987 general election campaign) and all the emotional insecurities that brought many to that community, damaged as they were in their encounters in the world.  But this too is part of the lived ecumenical experience, that the spirituality that grew there was one that was nurtured and flourished with grazed knees, pieced eardrums and bruised bodies and souls. This ecumenical spirituality is not found in escaping the world, least of all by compromising with those with different beliefs than ourselves, but is born out of an experience of living in the world and enduring the blemishes and blows that the world – and the church – can sometimes inflict. 

When my time in this community came to an end I became a full-time student, and then an ordinand, and then a minister of Word and Sacrament in the Reformed Tradition and whilst I  have always felt rooted in that tradition, I have often been fed and enriched by the spirituality, liturgy and prayer life of other traditions. That is where the ecumenical story begins for me. 

I Return!

I haven’t written for a long time!

A personal crisis has made this impossible to undertake. But I am returning to writing as I have things I want to say about the ecumenical movement. So over next few weeks I am aiming to offer a series of reflections on ecumenism that begins with where it all began for me. There will then be pieces of some of the historical journey that has taken place amongst the churches of Britain and Ireland, aspects of ecumenical spirituality, the place of social justice, why inter faith dialogue matters for the ecumenical movement before tackling the present context where I hope to offer some honest points of view!

But lets start at the beginning…

Quiet Whispers of Easter Hope

“Enlighten by a word,
a sign, a token gentleness,
this state of numb confusion, relentless
disparagement, and point the way
to beginning over again
the slow ascent to light, the gradations
of blue that come at the break of day.”

                (Jeremy Reed “Prayer” in the collection “Nineties” (Jonathan Cape 1990, p.147-8)

I wanted to write something about Easter. Having written previously about Good Friday and Holy Saturday, I felt something ought to be said about Easter. Struggling to write this on Holy Saturday, my mind went back in time to Mansfield College, Oxford (1994) and the last college based sermon class where I was the one being scrutinized. For the reading unfamiliar with this kind event, it is (or more likely, was) an important part of ordination training when an ordinand would lead an act of worship and preach a sermon before her/his peers and tutors, to be scrutinized in a session that followed. Sometimes these were brutal occasions, other times encouraging and affirming. On this occasion, in my final year of training before I was unleashed on the congregations at Holloway and Harecourt, Islington, I chose the readings for Low Sunday and in particular when Thomas is shown the marks of the nails and the wound in Jesus’ side. The sermon proved controversial for some of my peers because it was not an explosive proclamation of Easter joy! Unfortunately I no longer have the text of what I preached, but I do remember more or less what I said, and the overall message is one I still wish to affirm. So this is an attempt to say it all over again with extra thoughts that come with the passage of time.

I begin with the betrayal and abandonment of Good Friday and the stone-like stillness of Holy Saturday. How can one find a way to peer inside the empty tomb when betrayal and abandonment cannot be merely preached away into the dim distance?

We can learn much from the theologians who tried to make sense of faith in the aftermath of the Holocaust for whom mass slaughter cannot easily be theologized away, or of the experience of the survivors of childhood abuse for whom memory and survival go hand in hand. As a survivor myself I know too well of the primal wound that never quite heals.

For all the bombast of the church’s Easter acclamation, the Gospels are surprisingly low key and gentle in the way they proclaim the resurrection: a figure in the garden who is mistaken for the gardener, a woman weeping by the tomb, a private encounter on a routine journey, a meal by the shore and an invitation to touch the marks of the nails and to remember. It was not sufficient for Thomas to merely see the risen Christ, he needed not only to see the marks of the nails but to touch, feel the sheer horrific nature of what Christ had endured. Only then is he able to acclaim “my Lord and my God”.

Many are content to acknowledge and celebrate the risen Christ without any sense of recall of suffering. For the church, Easter is a season in C major, with no discordant notes. But where is the church for those whose lives are still in D minor on Easter day? For all of us who are survivors, who have endured betrayal and abandonment, we continue to bear the wounds that never completely go away. Yet the proclamation of the resurrection lies in the whisper of a gentle Easter that we are still here, still living, and still have the will to live and to love, to go on in hope and yes, joy!

Now that I have made the deliberate choice to no longer preach in churches, I need not worry that a sermon might be badly received or might offend evangelical or catholic sensibilities, for I can write freely even if no-one is interested in what I write – that alone is liberating! I had thought that in these past few months, faith had gone for good, yet the God beyond our knowing has the quiet persistence of creeping in through the drafty cracks in the doubt that was thought to be solid and well sealed. Easter whispers through the cracks, offering a gentle and intimate promise of hope that all can be well.

 

 

God dies again – A Holy Week reflection on faith, betrayal and abandonment

In the midst of collapse and desolation what is left of faith? When love turns to betrayal, when hope crumbles into failure, and success is rendered into humiliation, can faith survive?

William Blake offers us the image of the beautiful rose that has deep inside it a worm that is invisibly devouring and destroying it. So it is with betrayal – on the outside all is beauty and hope, yet deep within, this secret malevolence is slowly devouring it:

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Good Friday and Holy Saturday are framed by human betrayal and divine abandonment. Jesus dies because human love betrayed him, and his mental anguish is because God abandoned him. How precious love is and yet so easy to defile it! Even the act of betrayal is signaled by a kiss! On Good Friday the preciousness and beauty of love is reduced to a crime scene and all eyes are upon the crumbling of that love, upon the scandalous betrayal and the scoffing at the divine abandonment – “others he saved, himself he cannot save!”

In human relationships we learn that love and faithfulness are only as good as the reciprocity received. Yet the paradoxical mystery of Good Friday is precisely that there is no reciprocity: unconditional love is repaid by betrayal, denial, hatred, torment and ultimately the absence of God. There at the foot of the cross you just miss the figure of a woman weeping over it all and over her deep and profound loss.

Jesus dies amidst this failure of love freely offered, and betrayed for personal gratification without any consideration of the consequence. And Jesus is placed in a desolate tomb with all the other failed attempts at living.

Holbein’s painting reminds of the finality of Good Friday in the face of the church’s eagerness to move to Easter joy. No reassurance, no voice from heaven, no warm feeling that God is close at hand, just a desolate emptiness and a cry “my God, my God why have you forsaken me?”

In Leonard Bernstein’s stage work “Mass” we witness the mental collapse of the Celebrant, in part because of the rebellion of the crowd against his liturgical orthodoxy, but what also emerges is his own grief that Christ had promised to come and yet the lonely, empty waiting continued:

“You said you’d come! Come love, come lust, its so easy if you just don’t care! Lord don’t you care?”

and that in the mass, Christ dies again, and again, and again

“Don’t let him die again – stay oh stay!” (words from Leonard Bernstein: “Mass”)

In Holy Week we come to terms with a reminder that every time we break the bread, we break also our hearts because our beloved has died yet again, has descended to the depths and the abyss and because God has departed. And in the midst of human suffering we discover that the God of our imagining, the God we create in our own image, dies and is laid in the tomb with all our hopes and dreams. What we lament is the turning to dust of all of it – hope, dreams, and even faith itself.

Peter Rollins’ words are helpful here – “It is only when we see the Crucifixion as the moment where God loses everything that we begin to glimpse the true theological significance of the event. What we witness here is a form of atheism: not intellectual…but a felt loss of God.” (Peter Rollins: “Insurrection: To Believe in Human, to Doubt Divine”, Hodder & Stoughton 2011, p.21)

Easter joy must wait and may never come so long as the heart is betrayed and broken, so long as the human form is abandoned, so long as the body is taken down from cross and laid in a dark and desolate place.

In darkness we wait…

Queering the Pitch? Ecumenical Space and Queer Faith

 

Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

The recent decision of the Enabling Group of Churches Together in England to “empty chair” their Quaker President because of her equal marriage has sent shock waves through the ecumenical movement. Whilst CTE is but one ecumenical body, the entire “Churches Together brand” came to be implicated in this decision. Many of the churches with historic longevity in the ecumenical movement were clearly unhappy with this decision (the Methodist and United Reformed Churches have both published statements criticizing the move), as were many involved in local Churches Together groups. What is significant, and worrying, is that with very little by way of theological reflection, a decision was taken to exclude one church’s nominee on an issue that is not a first order matter (such as baptism or Eucharistic participation).

But as so often in these controversies LGBTQ+ voices are ignored or at the very least are the subject of condescension. We are “good people” with “much to offer” and we always have the prayers of others to fall back on – how nice! Strange also is the way in which the hardliners who really want to exclude us seem to take a vow of silence when their actions enter the public domain! Let us note that not a single name is associated with this decision! Meanwhile everyone else seems embarrassed and express warm and sympathetic sentiment. But rather than see LGBT+ people as victims always ‘othered’ by well-meaning liberal types in the church, the perspective of the faith of Queer people is often lost and unheard. So what might a Queer perspective on ecumenical space be? What follows is just one perspective. It is aimed largely at an audience of other LGBTQ+ people, their friends and allies. It is not a demand for churches to accept LGBT+ people, but a humble voice seeking to make sense of matters of faith, identity and Christian unity.

Let’s begin with my own experience for it was in the ecumenical movement of the 1980’s that taught me that true reconciliation and unity is found when we overcome boundaries and barriers and this enabled me to come out and find a place within the church because ecumenism seeks to overcome division, brokenness and isolation. For queer people, the “closet” is the very antithesis of all that the ecumenical movement has stood for.

Let me attempt to explain further: The Queer Christian seeks an alternative, a sense of Christian living that challenges and transgresses the barriers and walls that cause the divisions both external and internal. The external are the barriers that prevent full participation in the life of the church, whilst the internal represent the inner spiritual conflict that arises from ecclesial teaching and practice that are so problematic to the Queer believer.

Being gay in the church and being Christian in the LGBTQ+ community are both challenging! This of course is the common experience of being Queer and Christian, that sense of never quite belonging, never quite being at home. In Walt Whitman’s words, the feeling of being urged into the “unknown region, where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow” or in Matthew Arnold’s words “wandering between worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born”. The Queer Christian can often be a believer with no fixed abode, never quite at home in the community of the church, yet witnessing to the need for the church to be transformed into a place of radical welcome. In her book, “The Queer God” Marcelle Althaus-Reid offers the image of surviving with “different passports”, a “theologian in diaspora who explores at the Crossroads of Christianity issues of self-identity and the identity of her community, which are related to sexuality, race, culture and poverty.”^[i]

Being a Queer Christian is a reality of being in an “unknown region”, never knowing the experience of fully belonging within a community of faith, and finding the LGBTQ+ community a place of uneasy security but never sufficiently earthed in a costly grace.

The Queer Christian experience is a daily one of risk and cost. As one “comes out” daily there is the risk of rejection and vilification, and the emotional and spiritual cost that comes with an openness about oneself that defies and stands against religious power that seeks to conform and control. Queerness is the faithful risk-taking that finds a resonance with the woman with the jar of costly ointment who anoints the feet of Jesus, wiping them with her hair (Luke 36-50). She invades a constructed ‘safe space’ with her distinctive, and implicitly sexual boundary crossing. And just as, in some accounts, she is a woman of questionable morals, Queers are understood and judged by the assumed carnality they appear to embody, rather than the humanity they bring to human relationships. Queers are always suspect in their relationships, and have projected onto them all the self-loathing and revulsion that individuals and institutions have about sexual life.

Like this un-named woman in the Gospel of Luke, the Queer Christian is instinctively drawn to the one whose promise is to bring life in ALL its fullness, and Queers yearn for fullness of life because they have lost so much fullness in their lives. This wounded Christ who loved unconditionally, who died a torturous death because he dared be true to himself, and died crying out words of total abandonment, enters deeply into the Queer experience and offers the hope of redemption.

This notion that the church is scandalously divided when it fails to recognize its diversity is a particularly unique contribution that Queer experience makes to ecumenical theology. In traditional Faith and Order discourse there is much vexation over the relationship between unity and diversity. Yet for Queer theology the only unity that is possible is one characterized by diversity. Classically the Pride flag expressed this in terms of the rainbow – different and distinctive colours that reflect the immense diversity of the LGBTQ+ community yet at the same time stress the unity of the movement of liberation that Pride represents. Queer Theologian Patrick S.Cheng eloquently summarizes this perspective:

“Indeed, the extent to which the church is one body that is made up of people of many sexualities , genders and races, we can understand the church as a place that dissolves the traditional boundaries that divide us from one another.”^[ii]

And, we might add, threaten to divide us from God. This is where the LGBTQ+ experience of “coming out” is of critical ecumenical significance. By “coming out”, the Queer Christian declares that all barriers are an affront to the prayer of Christ “that they may all be one”. Coming Out is a profoundly transgressive act that defies the degradation of people labeled morally suspect, thus dividing Christian communities. ”Coming out” also defies the sin of “othering” that leads to division.

It is often claimed that LGBTQ+ people cause ecclesial division by being “out” and “demanding” equality, but this is to place conservative sensibilities as central to the ecumenical agenda. To put this differently, those that argue that moves by some churches to include more fully LGBTQ+ people is disregarding the ecumenical importance of mutual accountability, and causing greater disunity, are defining ecumenism over and against the love of God that knows no barriers and restrictions. This is an ecumenism that cares only for the institutional church, leaving power and vested interest unchallenged, whilst God’s love is promiscuously monogamous to all!

The Queer Theologian sees the call to be one that is at the heart of the ecumenical movement in radically different ways. We might develop the work of Queer theologian Patrick S.Cheng who describes how the experience of LGBTQ+ people, where they have broken down barriers of sexuality and gender, there is a fundamental unity that is being pointed to.^[iii]Furthermore, the act of “coming out” dissolves barriers between LGBTQ+ people and people close to them, they are also overcoming barriers between themselves and God. Thus the Queer experience of truly living the faith of the Christian is a profoundly and radically ecumenical act. And when all can find a place at the table, then we find ourselves in a faithfully ecumenical space.

Notes:

[i] Marcelle Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, Oxford: Routledge 2003, p.7f

[ii] Partrick S.Cheng, Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology, New York: Seabury Books, 2011, p.106

[iii] Patrick S.Cheng, , p50f

Unusual Kindness: A Bible Study

Acts 27.27-28.10

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity occupies a central place within the ecumenical movement when Christians pray for the visible unity of the church. Often the themes chosen by different contexts have resonances with inter-religious work. Sometimes this has been explicit as in Indonesia this year, or implicit as with the Caribbean the year previous. So this Bible Study offers a reflection on part of the passage that has been chosen by the Churches of Malta for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in 2020 and was given at a meeting of inter faith officers convened by the World Council of Churches, 31 October – 2 November 2019.

Paul, along with other prisoners, is being transported to Rome but the ship encounters a storm and the story is one of turmoil and fear. They are adrift and thrust about in the midst of a storm. No-one feel secure, they are afraid and most probably convinced that this is how they would end their days, drowned or dashed against the rocks! Paul however has faith that they would reach the shore unharmed and it is his act of breaking bread that is a tangible sign of Paul’s absolute faith that they would reach the shore.

In the church we usually read the breaking of bread in scripture as a sacramental act, yet the unavoidable truth of this passage is that Paul breaks the bread in the midst of a community that is clearly not the church! For this reason we might be inclined to resist a sacramental interpretation, as we did when we prepared this text for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We might note that the eating of food together is something common to all faiths and cultures, and bread is significant in the rituals of many faiths; it is a sign of that which we share together, basic hospitality and mutuality. In some respects the Eucharist affirms that which binds humanity together, that is celebrated in the person for Jesus Christ, the incarnate of God.

Yet the Luken arc is one of greater and greater inclusion. Our ecumenical sensibilities would lead us to resist the eucharistic overtones to this passage, as it is bread broken amidst those that included the un-baptized , yet the Eucharistic implication seems obvious, even if it leaves us with a theological question about this invitation to ritual participation! Following Rabbinic tradition we may wish to interrogate the scripture and also allow scripture to interrogate our traditions.

Yet, regardless of how one reads Paul’s breaking of bread, there is a sacramental quality of this remarkable incident, that Paul in the midst of this extreme danger demonstrates in word and deed that not a single hair from their heads will be lost.

The reality in this story is one without a firm foot on solid ground. Not unlike the experience that some of us might have had in mid air flight turbulence, the fear that results when one’s feat are not planted on the security of firm and solid ground.

This sense of being at the mercy of turbulence has tremendous resonance with contemporary events of political and social turmoil that threaten the planet and human life. In the words of Willie James Jennings in his recent commentary on the Acts of the Apostles: “Even in our time no one’s feet are on solid ground. This is not an allegory but reality. We are always on this ship, and the question for the church is not whether we will eat but when and where we will offer food and under what conditions will we invite those fear laden and troubled to eat”.

Paul’s insistence that they will survive is no vague reassurance, it is more than mere spirituality that divorces the spirit from the flesh: here Paul’s faith in God’s faithful deliverance is manifested in his determination to feed the body as well as the soul, for if they are to survive they must eat! The words of Guru Nanak spring to mind – what is the use of your spirituality if my stomach is empty?

But returning to the Luken drama, the significance of Paul’s words and deeds are all the more remarkable as the ship disintegrates and the soldiers prepare to kill the prisoners once they realize they are not able to deliver them to their ultimate fate. Willie Jennings sees echoes of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and cites the incident of the slave ship Zong when in 1781, running low on water and food, 132 African (soon to be) slaves were mercilessly thrown overboard. The turbulence and terror of the storm is only outdone by the historical backdrop of imperial cruelty and dehumanizing action.

Ashore they are welcomed by the inhabitants of the island which we are told is Malta. For the churches of Malta today it is to these events that the churches trace their origin. As the unfortunate travelers from the ship make their landing, Luke tells us that they encounter “unusual kindness”, a phrase that stands out as curious to many. What is “unusual” about “kindness”? Can it be that in the midst of the cruelty of these times, kindness was usual. Or was it because the travelers had experienced so much that lacked gentleness that acts of kindness felt so unusual? We might be tempted to see an echo of the welcome of refugees today on another Mediterranean island, Lampedusa, where tormented and trafficked people were warmly welcomed ashore by the island’s mayor. Or perhaps the example of Muslims who have offered sanctuary, solidarity or protection in the aftermath of terrorist incidents targeted at Christian communities.

But the church often imagines that it alone owns the “copyright” on acts of kindness, love and forgiveness. As Jennings observes “the Maltese actions towards the shipwrecked was a surprise of grace and kindness that would be repeated in so many other contexts and with so many other peoples in the centuries that followed , and the church has never learned to see such kindness as what they actually are – signs of the Spirit’s presence with peoples as a precursor to a holy joining being orchestrated by God.”

The interesting aspect of this story from an inter-religious perspective is that we are left with an unresolved question about the nature of the divine economy: who are these people on this ship and on the shore and how are we to view them in relation to God’s grace? The encounter with other faiths has long begged important ecumenical questions about the place of other faiths in the divine economy, what John Parry, in his book on the Christian-Sikh encounter, calls the “koinonia outside the gate”. Just as in the encounter with other faiths we are frequently left humbled by acts of hospitality and human service that many of our traditions assume are only Christian impulses. Hospitality is a human motivation that is intensified in the cross of Christ. It cannot be the case that there is no love of neighbor without the cross, for that would be to suggest that only Christians can do good in the world.

Acts of hospitality are however much easier to approach when they are common to almost all. The events recorded in Acts also pose difficult challenges for Christianity’s dialogical and missional engagement with the world. The incident with the snake biting Paul’s hand, his destruction of the snake and the assumption that because he has not died means for the islanders that he must be a god! Indeed, there is something rather messianic about this passage that might cause us to step back: Paul is the one with faith on a boat amidst a violence storm, echoing Jesus stilling the storm on the Sea of Galilee, he takes bread and blesses it in what could be their last meal together, he cures the father of Publius, and here he is mistaken for a god. We might deduce that Paul represents the church, Christ’s body in the world, to witness and to act God ways of justice, hope and reconciliation, even in a world of hunger and hatred where the acts of the church in dialogue and service might sometimes be misconstrued.

For the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in 2020, the churches of Malta naturally invite to us walk with them as they reflect more deeply on the apostolic roots of Christianity on their island home. “Unusual kindness” is the theme that they have chosen to draw out. Many of you are guests on our island home and I hope you have experienced at least a little unusual kindness! But many here do not experience that unusual kindness – if you are refugee, a migrant worker or anyone identified as “outsider” and “threat” whether that be Jew, Muslim, black, LGBT who are suffering the destabilizing and threatening territory that comes with rise in hate crime. Will the church today recognize the unusual kindness of those they have “othered” and learn to offer it in the name of Christ who welcomed the stranger?

When inter faith solidarity is not enough

Ever since the attacks of 9/11 I have been attending and arranging vigils and memorials for the victims of terrorism. So I’ve been doing this for just short of 20 years and I have recently been asking whether this is enough? With all the popular chatter about religion being the cause of the world’s ills, perhaps it is necessary to prove people wrong, that religion is a source of good and means to wholeness and peace. But is it a case of protesting too much? That in our insistence that we really are people of peace, there is an implication some sort of apology and need to explain our actions or the teachings of our faith? Furthermore, are we doing enough to challenge the language of mistrust and even hatred?

The attacks in New Zealand seemed to have amplified that unease in my mind. I was pleased and honoured today to join with others in standing in solidarity with Muslims at the Central Mosque in London, itself a beacon of inter faith understanding for more than 30 years. Yet often our solidarity seems passive and reactive. Our tears and solidarity seem to be all that we have to offer. So my question is – are we doing enough to be proactive in challenging the language of mistrust and hatred? And when I say “mistrust and hatred” I am also including those things that are said that negatively group together everyone of one religion and make generalizations that lead people to the conclusion that all of “them” are a “problem” and that we should be “wary” of them.

Even in the space of the past 12 months I have heard things said about Jews and Muslims that sometimes (often?) go unchallenged. They are not comments so bad that they would warrant them being reported to the police as a hate crime and they certainly do not suggest that those that say these things are likely to turn to violence, but there is a spectrum of thinking and a normalizing of pejorative talk that diminishes people’s humanity by the language of “othering” and causes mistrust and a wariness that leads to isolation and labeling of whole groups of people. Some would say that by challenging such language we are closing down free speech and “fair comment”. Yet there is a middle way – by engaging in conversation and dialogue (rather than resorting to embarrassed silences) we uncover complexity and suggest that we might begin to look at things in a much more nuanced way.

And maybe we should also be open to doing this within ourselves? Only by challenging ourselveswhen thoughts and uttered words begin to “other” people in terms of their religion, ethnicity or sexuality, are we being serious in how we proactively engage in confronting the hatred in our societies. There is nothing more insufferable than the self-satisfied ideologue, who believes that because they are “committed” to anti-racism, they themselves cannot be racist (a glance into the Labour Party sees that laid bare). Instead, we can all embrace a little humility and look deep within ourselves.

So rather than walking away from the post-attack vigil feeling that “I have done my bit” and feel that I have done something out of the ordinary, perhaps these occasions might lead us realise that we have somehow failed: failed to be suitably proactive in confronting the language of suspicion and hatred of those we see as “other” and also look deep within ourselves and some of the prejudices that spring up in unexpected ways and in surprising circumstances.

Why are you crying? Eastertide reflections in times of turmoil

I don’t often share my sermons on this blog; there is something about the written rather than the spoken word that convicts one of inadequacy or mediocrity! However, yesterday’s offering at St.Andrew’s United Reformed Church, Frognal, London (my church of residence) seems worth sharing.

John 20.1-18

In his poem “The Coming” R.S.Thomas offers us the image of God the Father holding in his hand the globe that is the earth. And God the Son looks upon it and sees all the wonder and torment contained within it and he asks of the Father “Let me go there?” Thomas, wrestles with many issues of faith, most particularly a sense of a God absent yet present, but in this poem he describes the central doctrine of the Christian faith – the Incarnation. Drawing no doubt upon the visions of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich who saw in her hand a hazelnut that represented all that there was and how much God loved it, it is but a mere commentary upon the text in John’s Gospel “God so love the world that he gave his only Son”. And by extension God the Son as he looks upon the world that is in his Father’s hand, he sees terrible and joyful things.

He sees the ancient communities ravaged by war, and people maimed, tortured and killed – and God the Son says “send me there”!

He sees those desperate to escape the violence and abuse of people traffickers to make the often doomed voyage across the Mediterranean Sea, and he see the unaccompanied children fleeing the conflict in Syria, at the mercy of traffickers, abuser and organ harvesters – and God the Son says “send me there”!

He sees the person sleeping rough in a cold city and then he sees the teenager caught up in gang violence – and God the Son says “send me there”!

He sees the transgendered teenager, brutalized by bullying and derision, contemplating ending their life, and he sees the torment of the rape victim – and God the Son says “send me there”!

But he sees other things too –

The exhaustion and happiness of the mother having given birth, and the joy of a father holding their son or daughter for the first time – and God the Son says “send me there”!

The laughter of children, relishing the present, and the contentment of the person filled with years looking back with nostalgia and joy – and God the Son says “send me there”!

The joy and happiness of lovers, at ease in other’s arms, unafraid of what the world may think – and God the Son says “send me there”!

Astonishing human creativity of pieces of music, art and literature, and the skill of science – and God the Son says “send me there”!

And all the acts of love, kindness and generosity – and God the Son says “send me there”.

And God the Father sends his Son to take our flesh and live as we live, with all the joy and sorrow, wholeness and brokenness, excitement and disappointment, love and torment. And as we say so often at Christmas time, this is not just a story about a baby in a stable but about the whole of Jesus’ life among us, his death and his resurrection.

And so we come to the end of the week we call “Holy”. We have meditated upon a very human story that is characterized by violence and torture, betrayal and denial, and the collapse of all the human expectation and disappointment: as the disciples on the Road to Emmaus say to one another “but we had hoped”. The work of R.S.Thomas continues to speak, even when he ponders the apparent absence of God. And if we think that being a good Christian is being nice in the world and always joyful and social in the church, then Holy Week and Easter has something more to challenge us into.

Yesterday was Holy Saturday when Christ is dead in the tomb and is yet to rise from the grave. This is the absence of God from our world – how acutely it must have been felt by the disciples! If you have ever felt that God has departed or is distant from you then you understand the importance of Holy Saturday. “Christ, filling all things ever unconfined” in the words of the Orthodox liturgy, and all things means even the darkest and loneliest of places and states of mind.

But then…listen! An early morning voice asks “why are you crying?” This question is not a rebuke nor is it asked in incredulous derision, but the risen Christ asks it of Mary Magdalene out of the depths of God’s love: “why are you crying?” Do we assume too often that tears have no place on Easter Sunday? Yet Mary weeps for her Lord, even when the tomb is found to be empty.

And what do we still weep for? A world that we once knew, now gone, a church we loved that seems beset by so much change, perhaps the passing of years, perhaps the daily suffer that we learn from our news or the apparent disintegration of values of truth, compassion, love and forgiveness? Even on Easter Sunday, when all around seem to be singing “Alleluia” there is still the place for the early morning voice “why are you crying?”

But this is the miracle and the good news of Easter morning. Sometimes the Easter Triduum can feel like one is participating in a drama, much like the role of the chorus in a Greek tragedy. And just as the chorus knows what is to befall the central character we know that we will reach Easter Day. Yet Easter is much than our participation in a liturgical drama. It isn’t merely a celebratory chorus because we have reached the end of the drama (although plenty of church services will feel just like that). No, Easter is the supreme moment in the Church’s year when we rejoice that God sent his Son into the world, to be one with us, sharing our bone and flesh, our joy and sorrow, not seeking glory but to humble himself in order that the world he loves so much might be saved. It is God’s intimate closeness with us, that overcomes our tears and seeks us out, even in the midst of the darkest moments and loneliest of places.

So the good news of Easter day is not a doctrinaire insistence upon what it means to be a Christian, and it is nowhere near empty praise. The empty tomb is the categorical declaration of God’s completed task: God the Son came here, he shared our life, suffered and died, and his rising reconciles the world to himself: this is the good news to the hopeful and despairing, those who still weep and those filled with Easter amazement.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

From Faith and Order to Doubt and Disorder: Is a new kind of ecumenism possible?

From Faith and Order to Doubt and Disorder: Should ecumenism be radically re-shaped?

Christian disunity is a scandal – or so we used to say.

 

The divisions amongst Christians have historically led to wars, conflicts and community disruption. The hurt and pain is most acutely felt within families where there have been different church belongings. The consequences of religious sectarianism continue to make their impact felt, most particularly in Northern Ireland, and, as many from the global south observe (particularly Desmond Tutu), intra-Christian division is an impediment to work for social justice. It is for these reasons that the work of “Faith and Order” has been regarded as central to overcoming Christian division. Its aim is “to serve the churches as they call one another to visible unity in one faith and in one Eucharistic fellowship.” Yet in recent years Faith and Order has floundered in the face of a cooling in many churches towards ecumenical endeavour. Ecumenism now struggles to convince people of its urgency and many openly question the goal of visible unity.

 

So, there is doubt as to the goals of ecumenism and a disorderliness is reflected in less joint working between denominations. We are a long way from the aspirational Lund Principle (1952):

 

“Should not our Churches ask themselves whether they are showing sufficient eagerness to enter into conversation with other Churches, and whether they should not act together in all matters except those in which deep differences of conviction compel them to act separately?”

 

This new context has sometimes been described as the “ecumenical winter”, but what if this is not a seasonal change from which spring will surely come, but a dramatic change in the Christian climate? Has ecumenism run its course? Is this the new normal? But let’s be clear about what “normal” might mean: in the face of decline, denominations have reasserted their own identities in the search for renewal in the ecclesial-market, often in competition with one another, and this is undertaken over and against the ecumenical movement itself. Meanwhile younger generations have less of a fixed loyalty to a tradition, with considerable fluidity regarding belonging, including multi-denominational belonging.

 

The new ecumenical normal includes several features: the axing of regional and county level ecumenical councils and bodies, the closing of Local Ecumenical Partnerships, ecumenical budgets slashed and ecumenical organisations diminishing, meanwhile there is a much more fluid and dynamic reality at local level. Meanwhile some church leaders are panicking over decline, pinning their hopes on slick strategies that will deliver an immediate turn around for institutional decline. There is much lamentation over decline and the diminishing of church institutions. To put it another way the scandal of disunity has been replaced by the scandal of decline.

But is a new kind of ecumenical movement possible, one characterised by a different kind of “doubt and disorder” that may bring us closer to a new kind of Christian unity?

 

With globalisation, has come a profound questioning of established ways of doing things, and old structures and authorities are challenged. There is a creative doubt over old ways and old, established power structures. It is of course the outworking of the Enlightenment that individuals and groups do not have to be content with the inherited ways of doing things. The ecumenical movement was arguably one such fruit of the enlightenment – a response to secularisation and a determination to create a better world for tomorrow in the post World War II era. To work and pray for visible unity was as much a protest against religious institutions that had perpetuated division and conflict, as a desire to realise “One Church, On Baptism, One Eucharistic Fellowship”. As such ecumenism, paralleled other movements that sought to bring about reconciliation between the nations such as the European Union and the United Nations. But like those bodies, ecumenical organisations and their agendas can so often look stale or belonging to a bygone era, especially those with a large bureaucracy.

 

A different kind of energy for change is around today, energy that is much more visceral and unrestrained. It doubts the unassailable nature of authority passed down from the past, and it has no difficulty with transgressing boundaries of nationhood, identity and family even if the results are a frightening disorderliness. Perhaps this is most abundantly clear in the breaking down of voting patterns inherited from ones parents , how marriage has changed and developed, the way in which transgendered people are seeking to challenge received definitions of gender identity and , when it comes to the church, in the way that individuals feel less of a sense of denominational loyalty when it comes to choosing a church to worship on a Sunday. Traditionalists of all sorts may lament or complain about this but it is the reality of the age in which we live. But it has a dark side too, in the return of old fears and prejudices where minorities are blamed and targeted by those angry that the world they once knew (or thought they knew) might be slipping away forever. “Post-Truth” has emerged as the means by which an old order is restored. Religious conservatism (some may call it fundamentalism) is offered as the only salvation for churches in decline in the face of a bewildering world of change.

 

What might this mean for the future shape of ecumenism? What we can say with a degree of certainty is that high level ecumenical agreements on matters such as communion and ministry will not be enough if we are to attain true visible unity: they belong too much to a previous era that could be slipping away forever. All too often they have been expressed in terms that seek the renewal and sustaining of existing church/denominational structures (and of course how power is exercised). More and more I hear people thinking out loud that the church structures as we know them are in irreversible decline, that the old models of “church” are ill-fitting for our times and new ones will emerge in their place, and that being “church” in the future will be very different. This is a frightening prospect if you can imagine nothing else but the church of your childhood, or even of 10 years ago.

 

I have been struck by the way in which many younger theologians are speaking of the visceral nature of the Gospel and thus of faith too, and speak of a theology that is almost anarchical. This is most obvious in the work of queer and feminist theologians who have been almost compelled to reinvent theology because they have so often been the victim of it.

 

Herein lies a clue to possible future trends: theological fluidity and diversity. In the 1980’s and 1990’s the British Council of Churches and its successor body the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland published “The Forgotten Trinity”, which was more than a collection of academic articles, but a plea to take seriously Trinitarian Theology. It was a seminal moment in the history of the British ecumenical movement: since then Trinitarian theology has been more central in many church’s theologies. Yet one of the the themes that emerged from this is an ecumenical theology that stresses diversity amidst the dynamic life of the Trinity. “Diversity” is a word behind which lies an almost chaotic human reality. This is implicit in the story of the day of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles where different languages are heard proclaiming the Gospel – a reversal of the Tower of Babel where the apparent chaos led to confusion and division. Is this is a better image of unity for the modern age, a unity characterised by a pentecostal disorderliness that is the human response to the visceral nature of the Gospel where Jesus is tortured to death that we might live? And this visceral quality has always provided the means by which the church can engage in solidarity with, and offer hope to, a tortured world and an orphaned humanity.

 

The ecumenical movement was at its most dynamic when it was led, not by church leadership and even less by church bureaucrats, but by people in communities anxious for change in their churches and in their society. People who, for example, were eager to transgress their church authorities in who could and could not receive the sacrament. And in spite of decline there is plenty of that around at the moment! Maybe a new ecumenical movement is possible (perhaps it is already here?) where people will transgress those things that keep Christians apart (from who can and cannot receive communion to overcoming racism, sexism and homophobia) in order to work more effectively for a world that is reconciled to God.

Now, didn’t Jesus pray for something like that?