My assessment of the Church of England today based on seventy years experience as a lay member, an ordained member, and a disenchanted activist, is that it is impossible for any church to be a healthy, Christ-like religious, spiritual body . . .
. . . when it is systemically prejudiced, abusive, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, culturally divided and globally divided.
. . . when it is so unaware, so unconscious of its prejudices and abusive behaviour, so addicted to un-Christlike teaching and practice, so unable to think with transparent clarity in a Christ-like way.
. . . when its status is so important, it’s integral relationship with the British establishment so problematic.
. . . when it is so attached to systems of power, dress, hierarchy, historic buildings designed to demonstrate the power of God and the power of the Church and its symbolic figures.
. . . when it is so unable to express in theology, images, language, an awareness of God, creation, evolution, the cosmos and the reality or matter and life.
The old familiar
I can still see a Church of England that looks and sounds and acts in ways very familiar to me, still in many ways the same church I’ve been involved with for over seventy years, a Church that gathers people Sunday by Sunday to worship in familiar ways on a spectrum from BCP to the Missal as well as a Church that gathers in ways less familiar to me, from lounge suits, slacks and sweaters to fiddle back chasubles and cottas. That’s church as a gathered community in local parishes that comprises a mix of people, mature and immature, functional and dysfunctional, encouragers of reform and defenders of the old and familiar.
Then there’s the Church of England as the institution with synods, leadership, legal structures, modes of selection and training, safeguarding procedures, etc. From all the evidence now available, the institutional structures are no longer fit for duty. The church at the local, parish level is not subject to the same level to of scrutiny and may appear to be in better health but it is clearly affected by the ill-health of the institution.
Decline and insecurity
We are living in a period of dramatic change, from old, familiar paradigms in the world of faith and from a period in the political, economic, scientific and social worlds, of relative stability and security. This period that began in the middle of the last century is coming to an end. The erosion of familiar securities and patterns of life we are experiencing at the moment isn’t unique to the Church.
I can see with greater and greater clarity what I don’t like about today’s Church, but it’s not so easy to see what the Church of the future will look like, as one of my friends recently challenged me to do. What would be a better form for the Church from my perspective? It’s so much easier regret the loss of the old, known familiar and to pick holes in what we don’t like than it is to visualise what we think would be better. It’s easy to be a remoaner. But let me try to be a re-imaginer.
Reimagining Church
What I would like to see, what I dream about and have visions of, is a prejudice and abuse-free, relationally healthy, spiritual, humane, nourishing and enriching Christian, Christ-like Church.
I would like to see a Church communicating and practicing the essence of being human in a world, a universe, an evolving culture, in which we are a fragile species at heart, increasingly vulnerable, insecure, neurotic, addicted (to bad religion, politics, economics, fantasies, as well as harmful substances).
I would like to be in a world where people are becoming more confident and courageous about living a fully human life in a world where gods of Tyranny, Power and Might become relegated to history.
I would like to be free from the tyranny of a dehumanising God who authorises abuse, prejudice, discrimination and violence, a dehumanising God requiring worship and praise for being the supreme creator and author of all things rather than the essence of love, goodness and truth, an essence to be found within creation and within the heart and soul of every human body and life.
A New Community
I would like to be part of a community that recognises intuitively, experientially, that we human beings live with otherness and mystery as the subtle reality of simply being alive. I am a mystery to myself who lives with the complex mysteries of other people and the deep mysteries of Love, Goodness and Truth as essential to the depths and heights of life’s reality.
I would like to be part of a community that is immersed in the essence of the good, the beautiful, the creative, the transcendent qualities of love, wisdom and intimacy, affirming us at our best, a best that we are all, in essence, capable of – the essence of being human and humane.
This experience of at-one-ness (or atonement as Christianity came to formulate it), of the integration of otherness and mystery is what human beings came to create religious systems, myths and legends and populated with different realms of heavenly beings identified with historical and mythical figures, prophets, mystics, saints and visionaries – with Yahweh, Jesus and Mohammed.
At the same time as we are now living through an existential period of crisis we are also living though an existential change in our experience of the mystery of sacred otherness and our conceptions of the Mystery humankind has labelled God. We are living through this existential reformation of our awareness and understanding of God because we are living through this global, existential crisis; and God, in my experience, God as taught by tradition in the Church, isn’t proving to be of much help.
Human transformation
What we haven’t yet begun to understand, I think, are the lessons about ourselves that are necessary for us to be transformed. We might label this a death and resurrection process, a new and further stage of enlightenment.
I believe that coming to terms with this existential period of crisis and then coming to terms with the implications for our human transformation requires us to become more self-aware, more conscious of our gifts and goodness, our wisdom and understanding, our innate, intuitive energy resources of love, goodness and truth.
Christianity in its ‘orthodox’, ‘traditional;’ ‘Biblical-fundamentalism-mode is having great difficulty understanding, let alone adjusting to this evolutionary development. It just doesn’t seem to be Christian in the old, inherited sense.
The challenge for me is to stay open, trusting and focused in the hope I experience as I follow the spiritual path that, in this new evolutionary development, is a seamless continuation of all that I have become aware of and understood in the first seven decades of my Christian life.
A friend suggested that what I am daring to believe and trying to articulate is something as unarticulated, lying out there which, when named, will generate a widespread response. To put it out there as I am gradually trying to do is an act of faith. Getting it out there in a way that attracts maximum attention is the only way to find out if the Spirit is moving in the way I and some of my friends think she is and should.