Conservatives claim that declining numbers in progressive congregations are the result of progressive, non-Biblical, non-orthodox, non-traditional, non-creedal formulations of Christianity. I claim that declining numbers are due to people abandoning the Church because people think traditional theologies are no longer believable.
Foundational Anglican Christian theology with its reliance on scripture, tradition and reason is responsible for creating and justifying a core theology, an edifice on which and within which abuse has been built. The edifice supports conservative Christian homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, racism, prejudice against other religions and cultures and particular categories of people.gy and culture that underpins abuse in the Church. Abuse has become systemic.
Fifty years ago I found Harry Williams in Heffers bookshop in Cambridge. In Harry’s books I found wisdom and truth, honesty and humanity, integrity and playfulness, that reinforced my courage to believe and the freedom to trust my own intuition. Among others. Harry gave me courage to believe disbelievingly.
Jesus was processing his life of human experience and emotions and relationships with exactly the same resources as you and I process our lives and experience. One difference between us (not the difference between divine and human nature) is that our experience, if we are Christians, is processed through the constructs of theology and faith that evolved following Jesus’ death and have been evolving ever since. We are programmed in a way Jesus wasn’t.
In September, five members of Changing Attitude England met in a London garden one afternoon to explore our beliefs about God. I had circulated a position paper beforehand setting out my thoughts as a framework for our conversation. The five of us who met in the garden, plus one, wish to extend the conversation we began by organising an open event on 2nd March 2024 at St Andrew’s Short Street, Waterloo from 10.00 to 16.00 when we hope many of you will bring your own experience to the gathering, exploring our understandings of God in our human awareness and vision raised by the question What kind of God do we believe in?
There are, within specific cultural and social frameworks, specific bodies that have been regarded as particularly vile: those of a particular sex, race, religion, tribe, sexual orientation, disability or age. “Powerful Christians have regarded as abhorrent not merely the bodies of women but the bodies of many other perceived ‘others’, for example Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, people of colour, heretics.”
The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches issued a press statement on February 20, 2023 regarding the Church of England’s decision regarding the blessing of same-sex unions. The more the homophobic Anglican Primates, bishops and leaders pontificate about the un-Biblical horrors of equal marriage, the more LGBTQIA+ Africans are targeted within their churches and societies, abused from the pulpit, physically and emotionally attacked, denounced, humiliated, arrested, imprisoned and murdered. The GSFA leaders and their allies in other Provinces including England are directly responsible for this evil, wicked state of affairs. There is nothing in the Bible or in the Christian tradition of my youth on which prejudice against and abuse of LGBTQIA+ people can be justified.
I could never be a member of a group or congregation where people were expected to believe what the leaders taught, beliefs to be accepted without question. When I was in parish ministry, if people chose to come to church with their own particular set of beliefs, or with very fluid ideas about God and Jesus and faith, or with no particular belief at all, that was fine – typically Anglican.
