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

Divine Violence and Abuse: Part Two of Ending Abusive Theologies

Divine Violence and Abuse: Part Two of Ending Abusive Theologies

What next, then, for a Christian faith that is being largely abandoned by those countries in which it was once prominent? It seems essential that the churches should pay close attention to what they believe and to acknowledge the harm they cause. There is too much emphasis in the churches on mission at the expense of reflection. An abusive God cannot be wished away. Secular cultures are right to reject him. Their rejection is a sign of moral health. The question is whether any version of Christian faith is now possible.

Letter to Archbishops objecting to Synod event in support of “Conversion Therapy”

Letter to Archbishops objecting to Synod event in support of “Conversion Therapy”

Eighty-two members of the General Synod have written to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York asking why a fringe event and exhibition space at the July 2026 Synod have been approved. The letter asks the Archbishops to exercise their discretionary powers as Presidents to uphold the Church’s safeguarding guidance and the ethos of the Church of England.

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.

The Scientific Revolution : Idolatry Triumphant

The Scientific Revolution : Idolatry Triumphant

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.

Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society

Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society

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 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.

Changing Attitude, Human Connection and Community and Unadulterated Love

Changing Attitude, Human Connection and Community and Unadulterated Love

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.

Co-founder of Living Out engaged in an inappropriate relationship with an adult man

Co-founder of Living Out engaged in an inappropriate relationship with an adult man

Living Out founder, the Revd Sam Allberry, a supposedly celibate Church of England priest, now in the USA, was found to have engaged in "an inappropriate relationship with an adult man in 2022 but no formal clergy misconduct proceedings have been initiated against him within the ACNA.”

Healthy transcendent sacred or unhealthy decadent decline

Healthy transcendent sacred or unhealthy decadent decline

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?.