There is something missing in the public conversation about human connection and community identified by Catharine Viner in a recent Guardian article. I observe that human connection and community are also missing in the Church of England. Discovering this essence would be a valuable outcome of changing attitudes, helping people develop lives well-lived and enriching all our lives, engaging with unadulterated love and living life in all its fulness.
Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, Gurdwaras, should be gatherings of people learning the dynamics of human relationship according to the life, teaching and practice of wisdom people - Jesus Christ for Christians – showing us how to live life in all its fulness as open, self-aware individuals, deepening through spiritual practice and commitment, our self-awareness as members of self-aware communities.
The troubled industrial adventure of the twentieth century has morphed into what is now an even more deeply troubled AI nightmare. We are losing, or have lost, the power to control what is happening in the development of AI and LLMs. Loss of the personal dimension has become even more serious. We have lost the wisdom stream in Christianity life, teaching and practice. The stream of the last century is now barely a trickle.
A few weeks ago I began to talk with close friends about my excitement at rediscovering the wisdom of books that had inspired my faith in earlier decades. One friend suggest I should write a book about, say, eight of them, 40,000 words describing what the Church needs to learn today from their wisdom and insight.
The C of E is in a very unhealthy state. Numerous conversations with friends and encounters in churches I visit demonstrate the crisis affecting the Church. How can the C of E develop a corporate awareness of the dangers inherent in adopting models simply because they ‘grow’ congregations, helping them to survive and become financially independent but losing the essence of Jesus’ wisdom teaching and practice?.
Christianity for me is about being more healthy and spiritually human and humane. This is in dramatic contrast to our primary dependence on a Christianity that has been about salvation, good and evil, a dualistic theology and philosophy, a God who rescues and sends his Son to be a sacrifice for our sins.
The nineteen organisations and networks listed on this blog share, in my mind, a common interest, purpose and vision. They/We, are working towards the formulation of an answer to the existential question that haunts me – What kind of God do we believe in? A common, shared vision emerges from the statements of each group – one people in Christ, in creation, in shared experience and the pursuit of love, truth and justice, a vision that understands the universal, cosmic essence of the sacred, holy, divine presence in creation and in all of life and every human body, heart and soul.
I knew at the age of 11 that I should trust my intuition and experience over the dogmas and teachings held by the Church and derived from the Bible through the authority of God. My sexuality was integral to my essence. Now I know more confidently, despite continuing hostility in the Church that in the uncertain dynamics of life, subject and object, the knower and the known, the self and Gods, are not separable. Relativity and the uncertainty principle require a non-dual mode of knowing whose essential nature is to be undivided from what it knows, counter-intuitive to the reality generally taught in Western Christian cultures.
I wish to be part of a movement in the Church that is reimagining Christian basics, recovering the Christian Church, not as an institution with commands, prohibitions, creeds and doctrines, but as a movement of people touched by the reality of God at the heart of their lives, nourishing the divine, the essence of God in the centre of our being, in our bodies and emotions, valuing and honouring the incarnational presence of the Christ.
A Jesus Christ centred church, simpler, humbler, bolder – yeah, go for it, Stephen Cotterell. The Jesus Christ centred church that is simpler, humbler, bolder, isn’t remotely visible on the horizon yet. You and your comrades in the House of Bishops are lost in an almost impenetrable maze of scriptural authority, archaic traditions and invalid reasons that you are showing no signs of the vision and courage necessary to develop the church of your dreams.
