Forty-five years ago when I was going through the process of selection for training as an ordinand in the Church of England, my very good friend Alan DuPuy warned me that I should avoid at all costs becoming a “nice” priest, the kind seen as caricatures on TV played by Derek Nimmo in All Gas and Gaiters, a 1966 BBC Sitcom, always ready to be “nice”, ingratiating himself with his superiors, pleasing the expectations of others. Those of you who know me will decide for yourselves whether I adhered to Alan’s warning. I know that I never totally avoided being a “nice” priest – who among us does? I at least had many outstanding examples of priests in the Church of England in the sixties and seventies in London and Southwark, priests with an outstanding prophetic, visionary, independent presence.
But now I’m wondering whether the Church of England has fallen prey today to the ever-present systemic risk of becoming a “nice” Church rather than a Church with the necessarily uncomfortable, challenging vision we confront in Jesus of the Gospels. Has today’s Church become a somewhat spineless Church, too “nice”, despite, or perhaps because of, the decades of conflict over sexuality and gender?
Have LGBTQIA+ activists and allies for equality and justice allowed ourselves to moderate our vision, our passionate desire for transformation and changed attitudes by accepting the hierarchy’s clear preference for togetherness, translated in LLF-speak as “living well with difference”? My answer to my rhetorical question is, yes, we have. I find it difficult to reconcile my belief that following Jesus means exactly that, but not so literally as to provoke people so much that I become impossible to live with resulting in my arrest, trial and unjustified execution. Jesus lived and preached and taught in a way that he consciously provoked the religious and secular authorities to the point where, by design or tragic mistake, they decided his life had to be terminated – or . . . that he provoked his own barbaric death, and event “we” glorify and make safe by belief in his physical resurrection.
I am from time to time haunted by the implications of this reality for us – or maybe just for me. Surely at any stage of my life, I’m deserving of a quiet life, time now for a “nice”, peaceful end in retirement with a heart attack, two stents and seriously osteoarthritic hips enough to contend with. But the God who plants seeds of hope and doubt in my consciousness has other ideas, not leading, necessarily, to a violent, painful death. These thoughts help to maintain my awareness of Alan’s injunction that I become not a “Nice” Christian.
Malmsbury Abbey - making Jesus present
Let me take you on a diversion. On Tuesday in the company of a priest friend who was staying (a friend since ordination, being in the Camberwell deanery where I served my title, joined me on a drive to local ‘places of interest’. After two hours in the Courts Garden at Holt (where the railway to Devizes once branched off) we drove to Malmsbury to look at the Abbey Church, an imposing late Norman nave, all that remains of the original Abbey. You enter through an astonishingly rich Norman arch and tympanum. Through the door is a newly-installed large TV screen providing an introduction to the life of the congregation. The building itself was alive with creative energy. Chairs were arranged around a table in the centre of the nave which might or might not be the altar on Sunday. Sofas and coffee tables and chairs towards the back were occupied by people with coffees, teas and cakes bought at the cafe in the north porch. There are beautiful new displays in the north aisle about St Athelstan, Malmsbury being his burial place in 941AD, the town marking 1100 years since he became King in England. A part enclosed chapel at the east end of the south aisle is dedicated to stillness, prayer and meditation and people were spendin g time there. The building was buzzing with life, welcoming, creative, energised, the most powerful experience I’ve had on walking into a church for a long, long time. Malmsbury Abbey speaks of living faith and living presence – it simply “makes Jesus present”. Quite how it does this isn’t obvious or prescriptive It’s a real presence I have been searching for in a church for a long, long time. I know there are many churches that have the same effect, but this is very remarkable. I trust the God whom the people of Malmsbury gather to worship.
Spiritual life at the Abbey is enhanced by the Community of St Aldhelm. This is a community of people who are seeking to follow God more closely by keeping a Rule of Life based around a rhythm of Daily Prayer. They try to be intentional about setting time aside for spiritual reflection, together and separately, exploring together what it means to live more fully as a community even though we aren’t living together in a community house. It was established in 2016 and there are around 18 members at the moment. Their Rule of Life is broadly based on the Benedictine Rule – Malmesbury Abbey was originally a Benedictine foundation – but reinterpreted for people in an ordinary English parish church setting who are not living a monastic life.
St Mary’s Tetbury - Being God’s people . . . in this place, at this time
After our fill of Malmsbury we drove ten miles to Tetbury, a church I first visited in 1965. It’s an astonishing building, completed in 1795, skeletal and ethereal and stunningly beautiful. Tetbury also has a large TV monitor as you enter communicating a “Warm Welcome”.
St Marys' is a Christian church that believes that everyone is created in the image of God with unique characteristics, beliefs, abilities, and infinite worth.
We believe that Jesus came to give humanity true and complete fulfilment without discrimination.
We seek to be totally inclusive, and to remove all barriers to church life.
We invite all to join us in our faith journey toward greater love, understanding, and mutual respect.
By different means compared with Malmsbury Abbey, we felt deeply welcomed at Tetbury. This is a congregation that is not unsure of its position in relation to the place of LGBTQIA+ people.
Malmsbury and Tetbury don’t “make Jesus known”, a common bye-line in today’s church. That’s head stuff; for me, they “make Jesus present”. This is body, heart and soul stuff.
No God in the machine: the pitfalls of AI worship
“The Long Read” in the Guardian for 8 August 2024, an article by Navneet Alang, argues that although artificial intelligence has sparked panic about losing control of our world, the real threat comes from falling for the hype. He references a short story by Arthur C Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God. It concludes with an image of the computer as a shortcut to objectivity or ultimate meaning – something that animates today’s fascination with Artificial Intelligence, but the line between thinking human beings and pattern recognition machines, which is what AI is effectively about, is not quite as hard and bright as we think or some may hope.
So much of what produces will and desire is located in the body, not just in the sense of erotic desire but the more complex relation between an interior subjectivity, our unconscious, and how we move as a body through the world, processing information and reacting to it. The body matters for how we can think and why we think and what we think about.
AI cannot tells us, of the billions of data points it can process, what things are good or have value to us. We human beings arrive at moral and spiritual evaluations through what is irreducible in us: subjectivity, dignity, interiority, desire – all things AI doesn’t have. We are living in a time where truth is unstable, shifting, constantly in contestation. Every age has its great loss – for modernism, it was the coherence of the self; for postmodernism, the stability of master narratives – and now, in the 21st century, there is an increasing pressure of the notion of a shared vision of reality.
When the systems that give shape to things start to fade or come into doubt, as has happened to religion, liberalism, democracy and more, one is left looking for a new God in a world in which it can occasionally feel like nothing is true and humans are awash within a sea of subjectivity. The result is the end of everything, erasing the very act of faith that sustained the journey toward transcendence. But perhaps here in the real world, meeting God isn’t the real aim. Perhaps it is in the torture and the ecstasy of the attempt to do so.
As is obvious by now, my search for and encounter with God is through my intuition and experience, formed and enriched through life in the Church of England of previous decades. What I experienced in Malmsbury and Tetbury on Tuesday this week were two congregations whose self-awareness and understanding and life communicate trust in the God I came to know, God of Jesus Christ and the Bible, God of evolution and creation, uncertainty and deep trust, God of human experience and bodies and emotions, God of the revelation to which all reflective and completive and intuitive people are open. I trust both congregations to be on their guard against becoming “nice” Christians on the one hand and misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, abusive Christians on the other. How, across the CofE, do we further develop and embed these qualities?