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 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.
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.
