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.
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?.
We live in a complex global Christian matrix in a complex global multi-faith world on a fragile planet undergoing a global climate crisis. In the capitalist West the increasing dominance of right-wing authoritarian leaders and governments, dominated by Donald Trump’s second term as President of the USA, has become disastrously destructive. Pope Leo’s stand against Donald Trump is vital, but the reimagining of the commonplace dualistic belief in a God of good and evil who exists answering prayer in heaven somewhere is urgently required. But the signs of are not propitious.
The old order’s desperate decline and decay into decadence and confusion continues.
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.
I have lived a dissenting life, a person at odds one way or another with the direction of travel of the institutional Church that, despite this, selected me for training and ordained me as a priest but hasn’t known what to do with me for the past twenty years. I’m at odds with the primary direction of travel of today’s C of E. I knew I was at odds with God at the age of 11. I still am. I still believe God to be at odds with many widely held ideas about God and the Church’s map of God.
I believe the Church should embody and model essential qualities in today’s context of a Trumpian world in which autocratic, abusive leadership is sought by people who are more fragile, vulnerable, insecure, abused and abusing and addictive. The qualities and values vital to healthy, non-abusive human societies and cultures are needed as primary qualities to be developed in the life of every congregation and the ministry of every priest, preacher, teacher and leader.
It is clear from the General Synod Living in Love and Faith debate and the voting figures that significant numbers of the Houses of Clergy and Laity do not trust the House of Bishops to do anything that will achieve the outcome worked for by progressives seeking LGBTQIA+ equality over the past 8 years, or 15 years, or 40 years. As bishops speaking in the debate revealed, maintaining the unity of the Church of England is a higher priority for the House of Bishops than achieving a radical new Christian inclusion for LGBTQIA+ people – inclusion that includes equal marriage for clergy and laity.
Robert Thompson, priest, friend and ally, has shared the speech he would have given in Thursday afternoon’s General Synod Living in Love and Faith debate at Church House, Westminster, had he been present and not at home recovering from eye surgery. He says it is perhaps fitting that he write now about sight — because the question before synod is whether the Church of England is willing to see clearly.
Last Saturday the Bishop of Salisbury commissioned nine volunteer chaplains to offer confidential and non-judgemental spiritual and pastoral care to LGBTQIA+ Christians. It’s a great initiative, following similar models in a dozen other dioceses. But I fear that it is so long since we had great visions declared for us of what a healthy, inclusive, Christ-centred Church would look like that we have somehow mislaid the moment for action and are settling for support and repair work rather than challenging the bishops and pursuing a radical Christian vision.
The homily written by Fr Robert Thompson, vicar of St Mary’s with All Souls’, Kilburn and St James’s and the Sherriff Centre, West Hampstead and due to be preached by him at the Eucharist of Full Inclusion on Thursday 22 January 2025, the Feast of Vincent of Saragossa, Deacon and Martyr and the launch service for Together London.
