Colin Coward
Changing Attitude, Human Connection and ...

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.

Changing Attitude, Human Connection and Community and Unadulterated Love

systemic abuse

Safeguarding the Institution: What Has Sex Got to Do With It?

Safeguarding the Institution: What Has Sex Got to Do With It?

Stephen Kuhrt’s book Safeguarding the Institution concludes with two radical proposals.

A wider clear-out of the Church of England’s senior leaders is desperately needed, a ‘circuit-breaker for the Church since, at present, most new bishops inevitably adopt the ethos of the group they are joining. A new type of bishop is required to replace the “one single characteristic overwhelmingly found in the bishops of the Church of England.

And “the single most controversial issue within the Church of England”, equal marriage. The official position must be brought into line with current practice, accepting and endorsing “gay marriage”. This is overwhelmingly favoured by the general public and the majority of churchgoers.

Safeguarding the Institution: How the Culture of the Church of England Facilitates Abuse

Safeguarding the Institution: How the Culture of the Church of England Facilitates Abuse

Stephen Kuhrt’s book ‘Safeguarding the Institution: How the Culture of the Church of England Facilitates Abuse argues that the running of a properly functioning church involves confronting issues and problems rather than avoiding them. The question “why are we doing this?” has been unconsciously present in most of the meetings Stephen has had with bishops and archdeacons. Every time they have been unwilling to discuss matters of principle and truth. It is the most terrifying question they can be asked.

Ending Abusive Theologies - Beginning Again with Love

Ending Abusive Theologies - Beginning Again with Love

Adrian Thatcher has written a book that redraws fundamentals of Christian theologies, beliefs and practice, fundamentals of Christian orthodoxy and tradition that have been used to deny, over the centuries and into the present century, equality in the kingdom of God to various categories of people: women, black, brown, LGBTQIA+, other faiths, divorced, the sexually active outside marriage, the solo sexually active, and the myriad other ways in which people default from God’s long accepted norms of acceptability. Adrian has done something even more dramatic. He has redrawn our map of God.

A conversation about making Jesus known - systemic prejudice and abuse in the Church of England

A conversation about making Jesus known - systemic prejudice and abuse in the Church of England

The Church doesn’t begin to understand what it is about its teaching, culture and practice that forms sexually and emotionally immature, inadequate and unhealthy personalities. I’m very happy to visit churches with different traditions and styles of worship. I am not prepared to anticipate that in many churches, there will be a silent, unspoken, unadvertised prejudice against people because of their gender or sexuality.

The Podcast, the Archbishop, Makin, Resignation, and the Future

The Podcast, the Archbishop, Makin, Resignation, and the Future

A sequence of three events in the last three weeks has conspired to create turmoil in the Church of England resulting in a crisis that will be difficult to resolve. As a result of our contemporary inability to talk openly and honestly about the God we do and don’t believe in it may well be almost impossible to agree the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury. The next Archbishop will need to have the most remarkable and combined gifts of courage, vision, prophecy, awareness and resolve.

The past, the present and the future Church of England

The past, the present and the future Church of England

I visit churches in the hope of finding inspiration and wisdom, of finding something, anything, that communicates the essence of Christian love, truth and faith as I have experienced and known it through earlier periods of my life. There have been notably few places where love, God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love, is the first truth the church wants to communicate.

Changing attitudes towards life in all its fullness

Changing attitudes towards life in all its fullness

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.

The Safeguarding Crisis in the Church of England

The Safeguarding Crisis in the Church of England

We are living at a time of crisis, globally and individually. The crises are multiple: climate, ecosystem, political, economic, spiritual, religious, refugee, health, housing, pollution. Every member of the human race is at risk of being affected by and infected by this systemic state of crisis – emotionally, intellectually, physically and spiritually. In the Church of England, the drama last week about the sacking of the members of the Independent Safeguarding Group manifests the total mess that is safeguarding policy and practice in the Church of England. The Church is directly affected by the unhealthy magical thinking that is a normative part of today’s Christian teaching and thinking.

Ian Paul's shocking view - allowing gay clergy to marry reminiscent of Nazi Germany

Ian Paul's shocking view - allowing gay clergy to marry reminiscent of Nazi Germany

The Rev Ian Paul, member of the Archbishops’ Council, General Synod, and a leading conservative voice told students at an Oxford Union debate on Thursday that allowing gay clergy to marry would amount to state interference in religion reminiscent of Nazi Germany. He provided the evidence that underpins my conclusion that there is no relationship between faith in the Mystery named God, a mystery manifest in the life and teaching of Jesus and experienced mystically in the essence and energy of unconditional, infinite, intimate love.