The Emperor Has No Clothes

The ‘nones’ (those who when responding to surveys tick ‘none’ in the box marked ‘religion’ but who might possibly tick C of E if pressed) need look no further for a home. Bishop David Jenkins, that prophet of our time, once was heard to declare that God was not interested in the Church. God was all about the Kingdom. It follows that if and when we stumble upon the Kingdom in the context of the Church, we do not need to look very much further to find God. The problem lies in defining the Kingdom, if such a thing is definable. You could say the same thing about the Church. It is not easy to describe what the Church is, still less what it ought to be, if it is to be true to its Kingdom calling.

The original commission to go out and make disciples has acquired a rather hollow tone, given the Church’s history of conquest and forced conversion, not to mention prejudice and plain hatred. But the kernel of truth remains. If the Church is called to be anything at all it is called to offer to the world the peace which only God can bring, the peace of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is even called to embody that peace.  Peace is its garment and peace is the substance of the body it clothes. It is called to give that body to the world, as Christ gave his. The Church cannot simply talk about peace in rather abstract terms overlaid with the clothing of pietism. We need to tend the hurt and resistant body, lest we be accused, like the Emperor who failed to realise that he had no clothes, of being completely naked.

It is the build-up of hurt and the resistance to healing which makes it so difficult for the Church to truly embody peace. As with any physical body, allowing wounds to fester without healing can make them life threatening. Could it be that something like this is happening in the life of the institutional Church? We keep knocking each other’s old wounds without pausing to consider the damage. We are more concerned with allowing our buildings to fall into disrepair than we are about healing the hurts which we have inflicted on ourselves.

At the more traditional end of the Church, we hide complacently behind beautiful but arcane (in the minds of many) liturgy, clerical dress and the kind of managerialism which consists mainly of moving the deckchairs on the Titanic. At the other end, as I have suggested in previous posts, lies a mixture of naïveté and hubris. I do not think that either of these scenarios provides a setting in which the ‘nones’ are likely to meet God in his Christ.

What is needed, before it is too late, is for the Church to take ‘time out’, a couple of year’s sabbatical perhaps, in order to focus prayerfully and pastorally on its relationships, particularly on those which relate to authority and the pastoral care of its people, clergy and laity alike. If the present hierarchical system of governance is to endure, those with the most authority must be subject to those with the least, as Christ was. It is the powerful who must begin this work of peace-making, because peace- making is both the mandate and the sign of true leadership.

Peace-making in the Church will entail the hard practical work of seeking forgiveness and the bridge-building which should follow; hard because it requires that everything that is not of love be burned away. Love must do the burning. This, incidentally, is about as close as it gets to the burning fires of hell. Hell is hell insofar as it is the ultimate conflagration of love vs. hatred. In the life of the Church the gates of hell appear to be impregnable, though, as Christ promised, they will not prevail. The fire of love will ultimately destroy them, even if the Church as we know it is destroyed in the process. The gates of hell are such that they bar human beings from the forgiveness which brings peace, from facing into all the private and collective betrayals, untruths and resistance to the goodness and giftedness in people which it has allowed over the centuries, and still allows, leaving only a hard shell of fear and mistrust, for those who experience the Church at close quarters. This makes embodying the peace of God for the world very difficult for them.

Thankfully, this is not always and invariably the case. There are acts of heroic self giving which pass unnoticed in the Church’s life. Priests who minister in and for the love of Christ, and whose work is largely ignored by the Church’s critics, embody the healing fires of love. Their work endures in the hearts of those whose lives they have touched. Bishops who are true to their calling as peace-makers and as pastors to their clergy do the same.

All of this suggests that it will take time for the Church to be transformed in such a way as to make the ‘nones’ tick a different box, but I am convinced that it will happen. Such is the nature of the faith we proclaim, that we will be changed ‘in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye’ and that we shall all belong together in Christ.

Women bishops and the Church of England - from death to life

In the week that the arch-traditionalist Revd. Philip North refused Episcopal consecration from ‘tainted’ hands, including those of his own archbishop, we also see the Revd. Libby

Lane consecrated as the first woman bishop in the Church of England. ‘What a piece of work is man’ – forever trying to square the circle in order to keep the show on the road, if you will pardon the mixed metaphor.

The Church, in its effort to keep going in the face of tacit or open misogyny and homophobia, has become a squared circle and is in danger of grinding to a halt. Wanting to please everyone all of the time, in the interest of maintaining a spurious unity, leads to a standstill situation.  We are trying to keep going without first having done the hard work of reparation, the servicing of the Church which involves listening, hearing, understanding and loving one another unconditionally. This is what brings life and enables real unity and, later, forward movement.

However, there is a sense in which trying to please everyone all of the time does enable a little forward movement to begin. It does so when the desire and the collective will is for a shared life in God. This is not bland piety. It is the hard reality which faces us when we place our humanity ahead of our concerns for the institutional church or for the individual’s professional advancement in that institution. Our humanity consists in who we are as persons before God, and as we are known to one another.

As far as I know, Bishop Libby Lane was not a ‘key player’ in the inside deliberations of who would be the first woman bishop for the Church of England. She is, to many of us, an unknown, a King David figure. The young David was sought out and anointed while he was in the fields tending the sheep, over the heads of his elder brothers. Like David, she is a bit of a surprise.

Bishop Libby Lane’s consecration is a major step in the right direction when it comes to forward movement, but more is needed – not just more women bishops, but a re-humanising of the Church and a re-ordering of its priorities, priorities which until now have consisted of the upkeep of safe and predictable career paths mainly intended for men. We need more surprises. But, paradoxically, hope may be on the way, through the unlikely source of management. Driven as we are by internal politics, the professionalization of the work of priests, and by management-style mission agendas, the human beings caught up in these processes may yet rise up and protest. Hopefully, Bishop Libby will be one such human being. Meanwhile, we in the Church in Wales, which voted for women bishops but has so far failed to deliver, hope that new life will appear through a new management initiative, the creation of ministry areas.

Management thinking, and the creation of ministry areas, justifies itself on the basis of cost effectiveness and vague talk of mission and the empowerment of the laity, by which it means the people who come to church. All of this is alright as far as it goes but it does not go far enough. It is the people who do not go to church, because they are put off by misogyny, homophobia and clericalism, who need to be empowered. Many are understandably cynical but there is also good will out there, as I find when I happen to be wearing a clerical collar while shopping or paying the toll fare in order to cross the Severn Bridge. I get an encouraging smile where others perhaps do not. 

The smile and friendly word is not about recognition of status. It is about recognition of God’s unconditional love, made flesh in his Son, operating within the contexts of day to day life and made visible in the Church’s ministry. The Church, and people wearing clerical collars, irrespective of the colour of their shirts, exist to make that love known and, more importantly, experienced, by all whom they meet, including those who may not go to church or who do not think of themselves as religious. The essence of mission is therefore not what we say or do, but what we are. The task of managers in the Church consists therefore in making it possible for those they manage to be recognisably what they are called to be which is Christ in the world.

This is also what empowerment is about. To empower is to liberate. Good management is a liberating process. In the Church, it ought to enable those who minister in God’s name to recognise and fully ‘comprehend’ the pains and joys of others. This comprehension, or ‘holding’, is part of God’s ongoing work of creation and salvation. The two words are rooted in the Greek words for ‘life’.

For Christians, the work being done in all of us through the Holy Spirit, whether or not we go to church,oHo is about real life and practical action, so it is not enough for those who minister, whether lay or ordained, to be nice people with a sense of humour. They need to be people whose humour comes from an understanding, a connectedness with a God who laughs with us. The parables of Jesus were not told as grim morality tales. They were often jokes, and jokes only work when they are told from a place of empathy, rather than one of cynicism and judgement. Humour is central to salvation. Gloomy religion and solemn clergy do not speak of the salvation offered in the person of Jesus.

All of this brings me back to the kind of hope which Bishop Libby’s consecration offers both the Church and the world. There was a spark of real affection and humour which passed between her and those around her in the moments which followed her consecration, and a sigh of relief when the lone protestor failed to ruin it. We hope, and we pray, that this affection will prevail against all that is barren in our Church. We hope that the laughter will overwhelm the cynicism, that it will bring life and hope out of a death situation which has lasted for far too long.