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.
I had a long, vivid dream two weeks ago.
It was a dream about my experience of visiting churches and what I find. I’m engaged in conversations with various friends about the state of the Church today. A small core understand my awareness and ideas. The majority do not. When I engage people in conversation, they struggle to comprehend what I’m saying.
What I am not finding is a clear awareness that life in all its fullness is the essence of healthy, flourishing Christian life, fuelled by unconditional, infinite, intimate love, goodness, wisdom, and truth.
I’m trying to map the many dimensions of change and concern that impact my life every day. I want to change and expand and bring into conscious awareness the multiple challenges confronting us, here and now, in space and time, stories for me as an individual, for humankind corporately and for the Anglican Christian community of which I am a member.
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.
I think the Church of England is in crisis. I think the contemporary ideas held by the Church, the “theologies”, the ideas about and metaphors for and images of and awareness of the God it claims corporately to worship have become grossly inadequate and dangerously flawed. The result of this systemic incompetence are the gross failures of safeguarding and the deep malaise of abuse and the inability of the Church of England to recognise and face up to the abuse that is now a dominant narrative in the Church.
It’s not the doctrine of marriage that needs our primary attention, It’s the doctrine of God. That’s why I keep asking the question – what kind of God? I won’t stop asking the question. I believe it is fundamental to what we seek and that by which we are drawn – the mystery of love – what this mystery of love is and why we fall into it.
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.
Trans people will be participating in the Changing Attitude England’s conversation at St Andrew’s Short Street, Waterloo on 2nd March as we pursue the ‘deeply Christian’ vision of ‘Life in all its fullness’, by which we mean, at the very least, ‘treating each person as a unique individual of inherent worth.’
What are the elements of a Christian community, cell, gathering or congregation needed to create a seamless, healthy, spiritual, deeply relational, visionary, Christ-like movement? What does life in all its fullness look like and how do we assemble a model of Christian life and theology based on this, working to achieve this?
