What do ‘we’ actually believe?; ‘We’ Christians, members of the Church of England; ‘We’ whose faith is interrogated and doubted. This is the question to be explored at the Changing Attitude England ‘Life in all its fullness’ event on 2nd March 2024. If this is a question that pursues you, then click on the link and buy a ticket now.
On Thursday seven CofE bishops published a document offering a ‘theological vision’ on Christian life and discipleship
“as a positive contribution to the Church’s ongoing theological discernment in the Living in Love and Faith project, and as an invitation to ongoing conversation. They seek to present a concise but broad vision of Christian life and discipleship, to bring greater clarity to our points of convergence and divergence, and to encourage and equip those who remain committed to the Church’s inherited teaching.”
These seven bishops seem to think that by writing and publishing this document they can . . . well, they can what? That they can provide a description of Christian faith that everyone is duty bound to agree? That they can persuade all those who think differently to review the essence of their theology and spirituality and experience of God and join them – and the bishops whose names are not there?
The ‘Life in all its fullness’ gathering is happening because many, possibly the majority, of people have an equally strong, Biblically inspired, prayerful, often contemplative experience of the Mystery, the Divine, the sacred and holy infusing our lives, that we live with deep conviction. It can be a lonely path sometimes, seemingly less travelled. It is not a deliberately unorthodox, un-Biblical, un-spiritual version of the Christian life and faith pursued by people who don’t really know God at all. It is a path followed by people of deep faith and conviction, integrity and love, who seek justice among other key teachings of Jesus. Something we may not profess, lacking the conviction of the seven bishops, is an “emphasis on the unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity of the Church.” We have too much experience of the abusive, prejudiced, Omni-God characteristic of the traditional, orthodox, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. We are not in hoc to the institution. Which brings me to a question frequently posed by the conservative evangelical monitors of orthodoxy:
Do I believe in God?
I’ve been writing a book for about fifteen years – writing and re-writing and adding more writing. I offered the text to a publisher once, but they weren’t interested. I’ve written about my life and I’ve written about the story of God. In my blogs I’ve written more openly of late about what I believe. The book outlines the development of my faith, such as it is. It will explain to some people why it is that I seem to be shockingly indifferent to everything that is orthodox, historic, traditional and Biblical about their faith. To others, it will, I hope, affirm the freedom we all have to trust our intuition, our inner voice, our emotions and our bodies, vulnerable and fragile as we human beings are.
What you need to know at this point is that when I agreed to consider ordination I had no real idea whether I believed in God or not. I was deeply involved with church life and had been continuously since I was sent to Kindergarten Sunday School at the age of three. I had strong ideas about belief and worship, but about God, I had more questions than confident answers. I had no personal prayer life and no experiences that convinced me God was “real”, apart from my experience with the South London congregation I wrote about in a recent blog.
Despite this uncertainty about God, which some might consider a real contra-indication that I might have a vocation to the Christian priesthood, when the Rector of Basingstoke asked me to consider the possibility of ordination I responded with a yes, yes, I’d like him to put my name forward to the bishop. I had one conscious reason for saying yes, and it was, “If you can’t beat them, join them”. I’d had a decade of frustration before moving to Basingstoke, trying with my peer group to introduce new ideas and practices at my south London church in the context of an incumbent and a congregation who indulged my whims from time to time but had no great desire for change and every desire to keep things exactly as, in their minds, they had always been.
Vocation confirmed
The resistance to change that endured through my teens and twenties produced in me a deep frustration and determination. When invited to consider ordination, I said yes because arrogant me thought I could do better and be far more imaginative and creative than the old regime. So my name went forward and the process of selection began. At each stage of the process, I experienced a growing confirmation that I was doing absolutely the right, congruent thing. I saw no light and I didn’t acquire a faith in God as such, but I knew in the core of my being that this was the right path to be taking. Having been accepted for training, I talked with Canon Derek Tasker, the Southwark DDO. Derek said I should apply to Westcott House. The twenty four hours I spent at Westcott for interviews and assessment reinforced my conviction that I was doing absolutely the right thing in seeking to be ordained. It was an internal conviction of congruence and authenticity. But I arrived at Westcott some months later still unsure whether I believed in God in a way that would enable me to preside at Communion with integrity and preach with conviction and clarity.
Faith as experience – the risk
My faith resided in experience. It was confirmed by the evolving conviction that I was moving in a direction of deeper integrity and truth. But all this happened without a dramatic revelation or any change towards greater security in faith about the God who was notionally calling me and in whom I was to place my trust.
Fifteen years later – living “as if”
There has been one other similar moment in my life when I allowed myself to abandon my usual caution and uncertainty and take a risk, which some would call a risk of faith. It happened at least fifteen years later, when I had become incumbent of St Faith’s in Wandsworth. We had completed the building of a new Primary School, Parish Church, Youth Club and Adult Education Centre. I said the office in the new church every morning and meditated for 20 minutes.
I had been seeing a therapist for a few years and since ordination had regularly spent time with a spiritual director. I had become accustomed to being open about and exploring my inner world, my doubts and anxieties and some of my unexamined assumptions about life, faith and God. I was slowly learning to trust more in the givenness and potential goodness of life. I know that I had decided by then that God had to be unconditional, infinite, intimate love. I know this because I wrote it in the journal I kept during my sabbatical taken when the school was being rebuilt.
One morning, kneeling in silence, I decided to take a risk – to live more fully “as if” my understanding of God was true, to live into a faith that I knew about experientially but that my cognitive self wasn’t convinced by. Even now many people wouldn’t find my construct of faith and God that unusual or unorthodox but in the mid 1990s, even in the diocese of Southwark, what I taught and preached and the way parish life at St Faith’s was developing was judged as being “not properly Anglican” by some of the clergy in the deanery.
I decided to live “as if” the vision of God and the teachings and practice of Jesus that I had been ordained to teach and proclaim really were true and effective in people’s lives. Clearly I thought I was doing something different from those clergy who thought I wasn’t properly C of E. I wasn’t going to start preaching a more concrete, literal, fundamentalist faith and I wasn’t going to change the pattern of worship we had evolved. What I was going to do was relax my uncertainty about the effectiveness of incarnating in practice the teaching and life of Jesus. I was going to live trusting that unconditional love had a profound effect on relationships, health and vision and that living into unconditional love changed, if only subtly, the outcome of our lives for the better. Looked at over time and from an outside perspective, the changes might well be seen as radically transformative, but the changes are hard to see from the inside.
I think real change did happen as a result, combined with my attempt to model a genuinely inclusive, open, participatory life within the congregation. The worship involved everyone. It was relaxed and playful and profound and deeply still and silent, fun and serious, inventive and responsive. I let my intuition flow and trusted that if I pursued the vision and allowed this God in which I uncertainly believed to do her own thing, then creative, loving good would be the outcome. I knew there had to be a degree of madness in living in faith, trusting in God, and worshipping and praying and exploring life of faith with a comprehensively diverse group of people.
Uncertain faith in retirement
In retirement, I continue to live with this uncertain faith. I have more clarity now about what I believe are utterly truthful, primary ingredients of Christian faith, and what are secondary, mythical elements.
As a child and young adult, I had internalised ideas about what I was supposed to believe as a Christian that I evaluated as being unbelievable and, in some instances, damaging to human health and well being. A critical observer took up position on my shoulder, holding me to account for my subversive, unorthodox ideas. I haven’t entirely got rid of this unwelcome critical voice, but I’m much better now at noticing when it’s attempting to question me and undermine my confidence. Now, I have the ability to dismiss unhelpful doubts, kick them into touch, and reprieve my creative self.
I encourage you to join Tina Beardsley, David Page, John Seymour, Helen King and Robert Thompson, my friends and colleagues in Changing Attitude England to explore and affirm living the Christian faith “as if” the God who invites us to explore “Life in all its Fullness” really has “called us out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2.9).