"Escape to Danger"

Well, if not danger, mild irritation, anyway. At the beginning of the Clergy Conference at Swanwick it is now the custom to ask everyone to stand, and then those whose first conference it is to sit, and so on until the longest-serving (or -suffering) clergyperson is left standing. This year our suffragan bishop had brought along a bar of chocolate which he claimed had been in his fridge for nine years to reward the final upright cleric and it went to Barry who actually retired three years ago and is house-for-duty so had the perfect reason not to be there. Can't he find anything else to do? I forget whether it was my seventh or eighth Conference: they blur. 

I ran away on two occasions, after breakfast on each morning. On Wednesday I went to the convenience store in the village as I was desperate for digestive biscuits, and on Thursday my destination was the same but I wanted a sandwich to take away for lunch as I was anxious to get back to Swanvale Halt for Ascension Day as soon as I could. On the way I spotted what looked like an ornamental drinking fountain in a Classical arch erected to celebrate the Golden Jubilee in 2002, but on inspection it turned out, disappointingly, to be a seat. Or a niche, anyway, with no obvious purpose if it wasn't a seat. I suppose you could put a vase or something in it to mark a notable occasion, but only if you could get through the iron railings surrounding it.

There was mercifully little breaking into small groups during the sessions. There was one occasion during a presentation on statistics about public attitudes to faith when we were encouraged to talk about ways we felt the environment for faith had changed, and I and two colleagues from mainstream moderate evangelical churches were rather taken aback by another gent none of us knew who stated 'As far as I'm concerned the bishops should be repenting for leading the Church into disaster with all this liberal garbage'. There wasn't really a good reply to that as it wasn't really what we were discussing, but in the spirit of engaging with those I disagree with I should have said something like, 'So do you speak to people outside your congregation who tell you that they would come back to church if only the bishops would be tougher on the gays?' but in fact we ended up talking about the Bible as this chap clearly felt he'd succeeded someone who was so liberal they were barely Christian at all and having found a bookcase of Bibles facing the wall his first act as incumbent was to turn them round to face outwards instead. I quite approve of people reading the Bible so that was a point of contact, anyway.

The highlight of the conference wasn't quite my two visits to the corner shop but the short meeting of the SCP chapter we were able to squeeze into Wednesday afternoon between lunch and the afternoon session on Wellbeing. Seven of us gathered in an upper room and had what turned out to be a very pleasant hour in which we heard about a couple of Catholic-side-of-centre churches served by members which had grown very considerably over the last couple of years through nothing more than faithfulness and diligent care of the things of the Spirit. 'A bit of a life saver' said one colleague. 

Requiem for a Bishop

Purcell; Duruflé; Fauré; and Rutter's 'The Lord Bless You and Keep You', which I find a bit soppy but says what you want it to; the Cathedral choir acquitted themselves superbly at Bishop Andrew's Requiem Mass today. Not that the order of service referred to the liturgy in those terms, but it was all very traditional. Even the piece of music that nodded most in the direction of +Andrew's usual Evangelical constituency, Stuart Townend's 'In Christ Alone' (complete with the words about God's wrath that some of us can't sing), is about as close to an old-fashioned hymn form as you get from modern Church songwriters. Serried ranks of bishops in proper black chimeres rather than the red they usually wear nowadays whether or not they are Doctors of Divinity, the Diocesan Chancellor in a full-bottomed legal wig, ++Sarah preceded by the primatial cross of Canterbury, and some Orthodox fellow in a black hood - it was all very fine indeed. The only disappointment was that the Lord Lieutenant came in a suit rather than full uniform. He even came to talk to the Swanvale Halt Men's Breakfast once in that, I must point out. Though he was on his way somewhere else, admittedly.

Resting on the coffin were 'the diocesan crozier', which I didn't know existed, a chalice and paten representing +Andrew's priestly ministry, and a mitre standing for his episcopal role. The mitre was rather nicer than the one he usually wore, and I wonder why Anglican bishops can't have nice mitres all the time. Even +Paul and ++Sarah's mitrae simplices were rather handsome in their plainness. In the picture above you can see the Dean carrying the formal crozier up to the high altar where it was laid, the bishop's pastoral ministry being symbolically relinquished. At least he didn't have to snap it in two like the Lord Great Chamberlain at the Queen's funeral, or we'd still be there.

I've already said that the manner of his dying might well have been +Andrew's greatest ministry and, while nobody wanted to say that out loud today, the same sense did hang in the air. It was a great act of faithfulness and I remember most strongly his expression of relief in his second, and last, pastoral letter to the diocese that his faith had not given way in the face of his diagnosis. He talked in a way so personal that you felt it was a kind of liberation: a pastor shouldn't be personal in a way that throws attention on themselves rather than on Christ, but this end-of-life candour was completely appropriate.

A couple of my Evangelical colleagues insisted on raising their hands in the air during the hymns as though they felt they had to, but the communion worked its spiritual wonders and I found any irritation that flashed into my heart was swiftly and rightly drowned by the amazement that after 2000 years Jesus still gives himself up for all these flawed, ridiculous human beings, of whom I am one. The Passion of the Christ draws sombrely closer.

I had an hour to wait for the next train and rather than even attempt to find any lunch at the Cathedral café I went in the other direction and down the hill where there was a 'Pan-Asian' eatery that served me tea and a spicy Indian potato fritter in a bun drizzled with chutneys. 'There were some really fresh green chillis in that' the proprietor grinned proudly. Indeed there were. 

Sede Vacante

That progressed shockingly quickly. The announcement that the Bishop of Guildford had inoperable pancreatic cancer only came a month ago. Very quickly a message followed to say that the disease was advancing faster than expected - 'possibly my last letter to the diocese', he stated - and this morning he passed to his reward. Last week I went to the Cathedral to take part in a vigil of prayer for the Bishop - nothing organised, simply (and rather affectingly) people sitting quietly in the nave for as long as they wanted to - and now the journey is over. This happened recently to a neighbour, therefore a parishioner though not a member of any church, who went from diagnosis to death within a month; a much-loved member of the congregation died a couple of years ago from a brain tumour, but that took three months, and we all thought that was fast. This gives no time for adjustment and assimilation, and as I'm not sure any bishop in recent times has ever perished in an accident, such an experience is very rare. This is not something that happens to bishops: they retire, write the odd book, maybe wait for the media to start questioning the decisions they took in office. Recently I reflected that the business of his 'dying well', as he put it, might be the most important ministry +Andrew would carry out - but, as it has turned out, there hasn't even been much of that.

Of course my relationship with my diocesan has been an odd, distant one. At times I got the impression he rather preferred that, not just with me but with everyone apart from those immediately around him. He was my father-in-Christ who I was committed to obeying in all things lawful and honest, as the phrase goes, but that was about it. Nevertheless he was the one person the whole of the diocese related to, in whatever way: a bishop is 'the focus of unity' not in the sense that everyone agrees with them, or even ought to, but simply because the bishop is connected with them all and, through the bishop, they to each other (including the worshippers of the past in the diocese's churches, as the bishop is a link in a chain). So +Andrew's sudden removal plucks out a kind of axle around which everything else revolves, however eccentrically or remotely. Without a bishop, with a sedes left vacans for stretching months or years, would we spin away from one another? No, we would be kept in tenuous connection by the diocesan mechanisms of parish share and safeguarding training. But there would not even be the potential of love, which is what any relationship should include.

Telling Me The Story

As the diocese digests, as it seems to be, the imminent death of its bishop - things have moved on since the news got to the BBC - I'm conscious that I have been silent lately, but even though my thoughts today weren't connected with the update +Andrew issued they are not a million miles away from relevant. 

I am struggling towards the end of a number of projects, themselves the conclusion of a series which has occupied me really since the early Covid lockdown. I think that, once they're done, I may well have a rest for a while. I find myself writing about something contemporary over which opinion is very divided, to the point that different groups involved seem to inhabit entirely separate mental worlds. I fall more on one side than the other, though I will strive to be fair and at least do justice to both.

As you know I am a historian in a small way: even my holy well compendia are, in a way, gathered stories. When you set out to write history, you almost always have a thesis, a story already vaguely formed in your mind, if only because the smaller subject you're writing about is set within the grander story of humanity and you probably have that pretty much sketched out according to your beliefs. It's rare that you know nothing about your topic in advance. As you do your research, you'll be looking for anything that bears on that narrative, but not only what confirms it; you'll continually be checking it against what you find. It's a process of constant revision and re-evaluation, and to do it properly and honestly you have to be prepared for the possibility you might uncover something that sends you in a different direction from where you thought. It's not an exact business, but neither is it simply a rehearsal of one's own biases. That's how it works.

That's as it may be. As we draw closer to the end of our lives we might wonder how an impossible collection of events and impressions, of memories and experiences, can conceivably be shaped into a story, something we could put into a memoir or tell to a child. It cannot be, really. We don't know where in the human story we are: closer to its beginning or its end, or what that story means, even whether there is one. I tell the good people of Swanvale Halt Church that the story of Christ is the one overarching narrative of Creation in which our individual stories are gathered and made sense of. His is the book of which we are sentences. There is a comfort in that.

Episcopal Dealings

A few weeks ago I shared the text of the letter we sent on behalf of the SCP to our diocesan bishop outlining our 'dissatisfaction' with the way the Living in Love and Faith initiative, or its results, were handled. A couple of people wanted to know what happened next:

I wasn't expecting the Bishop to ask whether he might meet with us to talk through the matter, and I wondered what there was to say. In the end 'us' turned out to mean me, and it was slightly odd: both the Bishop and I knew each others' position, we weren't actually negotiating anything, and I don't think he expected me to change my mind any more than I expected him to. I had the strange impression that he wanted to talk for his own satisfaction as much as to exchange views. He outlined some of the ways in which he thought the process had gone wrong, and said he felt too much had been expected of the LLF initiative - that no consensus was ever likely to emerge about a subject that, in his view, required consensus before significant forward movement. He wasn't sure where we went from here now that General Synod had said it rejected the bishops' opinion, while for a substantial body of Anglicans not blessing same-sex relationships had become an absolute touchstone issue, regardless of what anyone else might prefer. He said he felt very keenly a responsibility to keep talking to divergent bodies of opinion within the diocese while trying his best not to say different things to different people, and maintaining his own sense of integrity.

So I was released from the Bishop's house and not consigned to the dungeons. It was a perfectly agreeable meeting but what it achieved was another matter!

A Letter

A letter to a diocesan bishop:

We write as your loyal diocesan chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests in regard to the recent statement on Living in Love and Faith issued by the House of Bishops, and we acknowledge your Ad Clerum of the 5^th on the subject. As you remind us there, we remain aware of, and faithful to, our ordination oaths.

We are not all of one mind regarding the substantive issues; we are, however, equally dismayed by the current process.

In the statement, Archbishop Stephen writes that some will find the decision ‘difficult and disappointing’. It seems to us that the word ‘disappointment’ expresses how one might feel opening the fridge to find that the milk had gone off, not the kind of situation in which people’s futures and legitimacy in the work God has called them to do is in question. Not a single word in the statement acknowledges the sense of peril people with a same-sex orientation feel in the Church, as the minority who want them gone seem to wield greater and greater influence. We appreciate that in your letter you went somewhat further in expressing sympathy than the Archbishop felt able to.

The bishops must be aware that referring the matter of ‘bespoke’ liturgies to Synod and requiring a two-thirds majority for change means change will not happen. Consensus is an admirable aim, but there is clearly no consensus in the Church currently, nor is there likely to be, and if we cannot proceed without securing that two-thirds majority in Synod, we will not proceed at all. The bishops cannot seriously believe otherwise. At no point do they express what they want to happen; perhaps, not being of a common mind, they cannot, in which case it might be better to say so and admit that the entire LLF process has produced all it can.

We feel that blessing of a same-sex relationship sanctioned by society at large does not affect the doctrine of matrimony because matrimony is not in question.  We look forward to reading the advice of the FAOC, but at present the argument seems to be ‘a standalone blessing service looks too much like a wedding’, and that is pretty thin theology.

Even if the bar to potential legislation regularising the status of clergy in same-sex marriages is lower, we believe that our LGBTQ+ brethren are left in an invidious position. The bishops cannot be unaware that there are numbers of clergy to whom this already applies. And yet, again, the bishops give no indication of their thinking. The law of the land allows clergy to contract a legal marriage with someone of the same sex just as their parishioners can. The bishops gib at telling them this is sinful, yet they refuse to follow the logic of that.

There may be no consensus, but we feel consensus is not necessary. Difference in practice would not, as we would say, be a breach of Catholic order. No one would argue that orders conferred on a person in a marriage to someone of the same sex are invalid, whether they agreed with it or not. Nor would such an ordained person be causing grave offence to either society as a whole or the great majority of our laypeople. It might be impolitic for them to be appointed to some churches, but then they probably wouldn’t apply to them.

The position resembles that relating to divorce. When your illustrious predecessor Bishop Reindorp was translated to Salisbury in 1973 virtually his first act was to terminate the licenses of 8 clergy who were divorced themselves or married to divorcees. Of course George Reindorp felt he was doing absolutely the right thing and enforcing ‘higher standards’ among clergy than those expected of laypeople, but no bishop would do the same now and there would be outrage if they tried. We have reached an accepted position on that, and this matter seems little different.

Whatever our individual positions in the Chapter, we vigorously reject the idea that ‘orthodoxy’ should be defined as some pressure groups within the Church want, making a person’s attitude to some ambiguous and contested verses of Scripture the prime test of their faith. For us, ‘orthodoxy’ means the Catholic faith as expressed in the Creeds, formularies which many Anglican churches do not even use. ‘In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas’. 

Omerta

There is an Area Dean in the church-set TV comedy series Rev, but she has a minor role next to waspish Archdeacon Robert, who turns up at the vicarage almost every week to patronise Fr Adam Smallbone and tip his coffee into the sink. And yet thanks to the horrible scandal of David Tudor the phrase ‘Area Dean’ is all over the place: he was a ‘senior priest’, say the news reports, ‘in charge of twelve parishes’ in the Chelmsford diocese. Well, says anyone who knows anything about how the Church of England works, Yes and No.

An Area Dean is a bit of a dogsbody. You don’t get paid to do it, but generally you do the job alongside your parochial duties: someone who isn’t a parish priest can technically be an Area Dean, but it’s uncommon. They act as a conduit for information between the local clergy and the diocese, and have a pastoral brief over those clergy. It’s a task nobody generally wants, because we’re all busy enough, thank you, and yet everyone likes to be asked, because it shows that the bishop and your colleagues have enough confidence in you to think that you’d be good at it. Or at least no worse than anyone else available.

But appointing the Area Dean in a deanery is very much the bishop’s initiative. Which is why, in David Tudor’s case, it not only baffles that Stephen Cottrell, as Bishop of Chelmsford, kept re-enlisting him to do it when he, Tudor, was subject to a safeguarding order, but that he was ever asked to do it in the first place. Just like Stephen Cottrell, his predecessor John Gladwin would have been perfectly aware of the restrictions Mr Tudor had had placed on his ministry some months before he was appointed in 2008: why did that happen at all? How could the bishop, whichever bishop, really believe that being subject to a safeguarding order didn’t make a difference to David Tudor’s ability to carry out this extra duty? Today, clergy in a Deanery – and their Parish Safeguarding Officers – would have been told that one of their number wasn’t allowed to be alone with children, but this clearly wasn’t the case in Chelmsford Diocese in 2008. Or maybe they were told, and decided not to believe it, a habit which crops up in many of these depressing narratives.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether institutions that are seduced by abusers or the bishops who make mistakes in dealing with them are liberal or conservative, evangelical or catholic; instead the real conflict is between openness and secrecy. Priests get used to keeping confidences, for very good reasons, but perhaps the habit tends to extend into areas it very much should not. The next step is to imagine that keeping the secrets makes you important, and that only you have the wisdom to deal with them in the right way. You picture yourself as one of a special cadre defined by the secrets they keep. That's above the non-existent pay grade of an Area Dean: that's bishop territory. 

Bishop Down

Ironically, as it was pointed out to us at Deanery Chapter today, this coming Sunday is designated Safeguarding Sunday in the Church of England. Some of my colleagues wanted some kind of diocesan statement to be made about the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury that they could share, but although I might allude to it in what I say in any sermons I won't be making any declaration to the parish or even the church as such. Other incumbents found themselves dispirited and concerned for the effect on parish relationships, but my experience is that in so far as people in local communities have any attitude to the Church at all they detach the immediate manifestation of it, the clergy and individuals they know, from anything that might be going on more widely. Haters gonna hate, but everyone else carries on. This generosity is, of course, exactly the phenomenon that benefits abusers - nobody believes the person they know could be wicked - but the rest of us can be thankful for it for now. I will very much let the whole thing lie unless anyone mentions it. 

In general, I wish I could be anything more than wearied and unsurprised by the outcome. It's not that I have no sympathy: were someone to tell me an issue had been referred to the police, I might well assume the police were dealing with it, and move on to the next thing (and there is always a Next Thing onto which to move). It wouldn't make it right, though. If I say that Justin Welby's decision to resign could well turn out to be his best day's work during his tenure at Lambeth Palace, I do so not to be mean or sarcastic, but because I genuinely think the Church will ultimately benefit. It's exactly the dramatic, galvanizing event required to blow the whole thing open, to tip the balance away from power, display, and inertia, and it would not be beyond possibility that Archbishop Justin's will not be the only pointy hat rolling in the dust before too long.

Disgusted Of

'Never read the comments' is of course sound advice in almost any corner of the Internet (not here as all the comments are informative and kind). So I can't recall what led me to take note of some letter to the Telegraph lately in which a gentleman in where else but Tunbridge Wells opined in the following terms:

SIR – Although there are social and demographic reasons for the Church of England’s decline, a major contributory factor must be finance. The wasteful pursuit of woke causes by both the central Church and dioceses, as well as the unnecessarily large number of bishops, are putting huge burdens on the parishes. ... It is not clear to me why there are nearly twice as many now as there were 200 years ago, and four times as many bishops, while the number of parish clergy has fallen by three quarters.

As soon as anyone denounces 'woke causes' their views should very largely be put carefully to one side, but apart from that I bring this up only to mention that I don't recognise any of this picture. I'm not sure about the decline in numbers of parish clergy, but there are about 13,000 ordained people in current ministerial roles (as opposed to retired priests still doing stuff) and just over 100 bishops, which doesn't seem all that top-heavy a structure. And bishops don't really cost all that much either, certainly not enough for cutting their numbers by, say, half to make any material difference to the funding of the Church of England. I have questions as to what bishops do - at least ours, who we barely see from one year to the next - but there's little reason to think that their existence is pulling the rest of the structure down. I also struggle to think of a single 'woke cause' that might be imposing any burden on the parish of Swanvale Halt. Race, sexuality and gender identity - no, there's absolutely nothing that our diocese has demanded we campaign on or develop a position about. I think the hearing aid clinic run by Sally our Pastoral Assistant is the closest I can come up with. Special treatment for the hard of hearing? It's political correctness gone mad!

Post Offices and Pointy Hats

At the time, the time being early 2018, Paula Vennells’s personal involvement in the case of our Swanvale Halt subpostmaster’s suspension, and the transfer of the license (or whatever it is technically) to a relative so the post office could reopen, seemed like an act of generous flexibility. Having written to her more than once to complain about what was happening, I felt it was only fair to write again to thank her for finding some way for the service to resume, without the subpostmaster being prosecuted. Even then, only about 18 months before Mr Justice Fraser’s excoriating judgement on the Post Office’s behaviour since introducing the Horizon accounting system in 1999, Ms Vennells maintained to me that ‘I can’t go into the circumstances in this case, but we never suspend a post office without good reason’, and to others that there was no problem with the system at all.

A long while later, when things were clearer, the redoubtable Estelle had discovered that Ms Vennells was also the Revd Vennells, holding a license to officiate in the diocese of St Albans. Estelle wanted to write to the Bishop there to protest, and asked for copies of my correspondence. As I had, indeed, written, I felt I couldn’t say no, but I warned our Bishop that I was agreeing just in case the Bishop of St Albans might corner him in a corridor at the House of Lords waving my letters at him and shouting ‘What’s this?! What’s this?!’ I can’t recall how our Bishop replied to me – I think it must have been in person at a rare moment we were in the same place at the same time – but I do remember he said something to the effect that he’d ‘always found Paula Vennells very impressive’, which he may have done, but it was an entirely otiose thing to say. And what were the circumstances in which he came to any conclusions at all about an NSM working in an obscure parish in another diocese?

We now know exactly how impressive the hierarchy of the Church of England found her – enough to shortlist her for Bishop of London when that position was being filled in 2017, and for the Archbishop of Canterbury to support her candidacy personally. When the BBC reports that Ms Vennells is ‘an ordained Anglican priest but does not hold a senior position in the Church of England’ this is a bit of an understatement. She’s never been anything other than a Non Stipendiary Minister, part of a team in a group of rural parishes. To catapult such a person into the Church’s third most senior bishopric would be the most gobsmacking promotion since Thomas Becket. That it could even be thought of, let alone that it could reach the point of her being interviewed, is quite stunning. Thankfully there may have been angels making sure it didn’t happen.

For quite some time, the Church of England has been in an episode of bewitchment by the world of business and management: I hesitate to say it’s now passing out of it. Of course having a variety of backgrounds and experiences in your leadership to bring other viewpoints to the table is not a bad thing, and I wouldn’t want the Church to be composed entirely of Oxbridge arts graduates like me. Assuming that this equally narrow band of expertise is exactly the one which is going to save your organisation is quite a different matter, but that seems to be what the current cohort in control of the Church of England has thought. The Archbishop of Canterbury supports one individual businessperson-turned-priest’s promotion; another bishop thinks they’re ‘very impressive’; a third speaks up in their support, while carefully and typically not saying anything actually untrue.

You see what’s going on here. The first instinct of the hierarchy of the Church is to support the powerful, because that’s who they mix with. A priest made bishop can be ever so good and upright, but from the moment of their consecration they enter a world of MPs, Lords Lieutenant, CEOs and Chief Constables. They talk to them and get to know them. They can see their good points. Eventually they can see nothing but their good points, because they have become like them. The last sentence of Animal Farm comes to mind.

And here I am, a small and lowly counterpart, bathed in the beguiling warmth of the Establishment in this one place. It is a great privilege to be invited to schools, to turn on Christmas lights, to sit on committees, to bless this and that – to have an established and settled role in a community. A privilege, but a temptation. It is a great mercy that I would never, ever be a bishop, because I know what would happen. I’m exactly the same as them. I would kid myself that I could resist, and a year or two later would be as rusted and corroded as anyone else.

Objection

There are many occasions when I take great comfort from not following the debates of the national Church in any detail: there are plenty of strains and stresses in ministry and life generally without adding to them, and my only interest in Synodical acrobatics is in how they might impact on what I am called on to do or not do. So there are many people more invested than me, for differing reasons, in the Synod vote this week to go ahead with experimental services to pray for, or bless, relationships in which both partners are of the same sex. I’m not entirely sure how it’s decided which measures do or don’t require an Act of Synod to enact: the admission of women to the ministry did, which was why two-thirds of Synod members had to support each measure, whereas this current change only needed a simple majority in each House of Bishops, Clergy, and Laity. And the Bishop of Oxford’s amendment to the effect that blessing services could be separate events rather than incorporated in other acts of worship only squeezed through by one vote in the House of Laity. Although some of the votes against might well have been cast by Synod members who would have preferred to go further than the proposal on the table, this isn’t a consensus, whatever else it is.

The Church of England Evangelical Council is now exploring ways of supporting dissenting clergy ‘who in some way might feel their membership of the CofE to be compromised’, including feeling unable to relate to their bishop on anything other than a legal basis. This is clearly inspired by the similar arrangements that have been in place for many years for trad Anglo-Catholics opposed to the ordination of women, but it’s odd, because Evangelical objections to these changes to do with sex arise within a different sort of ecclesiology. For those trad Anglo-Catholics, the Church itself, including its organisational arrangements, is the creation of the Holy Spirit, and fundamentally altering those arrangements is, arguably, cutting the organisation off from the Paracletal electric current. It’s not just about cohabiting organisationally with people you disagree with. But Evangelicals don’t think about the Church in that way. If you’re an Evangelical Anglican, your relationship with God is direct. It doesn’t make any fundamental difference to you what the church down the road does, or what your bishop believes. Your bishop’s opinions are probably massively divergent from yours already. It may be uncomfortable that she, or that putative church a few streets away, might be blessing or even eventually marrying same-sex couples, but you will still have the option of regarding them with the same derision and contempt that you probably do now. You may find it awkward that a same-sex couple might turn up to worship with you (though they’ll probably steer well clear), but they could easily do that already. No, my brethren who take a more conservative view on this matter won’t be forced to do anything they don’t want to do, and neither will I, so, as I have no interest in compelling anyone to fall in line with what I think, my sympathy is really very limited.

++Justin is clearly very content that he abstained on the vote, ‘to act as a focus of unity’. This too is modelled on the way the Church has accommodated trad Anglo-Catholics over women, and again it shows the same kind of misconception. A trad Anglo-Catholic objects to a bishop (or Archbishop) who has actually ordained a woman, not because that prelate thinks ordaining a woman is right or wrong: it’s not a matter of opinions, but of deeds. Evangelical objections are precisely about opinions, and we all know what the ABC thinks. That's why, I imagine, sundry Christians might find him hard to talk to from now on, if they hadn't before.

A Chrism Mass, or Something

Several of my colleagues of The Other Integrity have been posting pictures this Holy Week of the Chrism Masses they've attended with the Bishop of Oswestry or His Grace of Fulham all wearing nice Roman vestments and cohorts of clergy in concelebration gear. I doubted I would do the same for ours from Guildford, although the occasion is less trying than it once used to be since the suppression of the clergy music group who used to accompany the worship: the cathedral musicians wrested back control in a coup and the Mass sounds much the better for it.

But why wasn't the Bishop presiding? He preached, but left Her Serenity the Dean actually to celebrate the Eucharist. To be fair he is a very efficient preacher, although on this occasion I remembered his introductory gambit 'If you met Jesus in your parish, would you invite him to dinner?' and my attention wandered after that, I fear. But really part of the point of the Chrism Mass is that the Bishop celebrates with their presbyters around them, as was the case in the first few centuries of the Church: it isn't just to 'celebrate ministry' (which now includes laypeople who we are all encouraged to bring along) and pick up three small bottles of oil. In fact Bishop Andrew always used to delegate the Mass to the Bishop of Dorking, but even in those circumstances it at least expressed something of the idea of shared episkope between the two. Even most generously interpreted, that can't encompass the Dean. Could it possibly be that the Bishop thinks it's more important to signal inclusion by making sure a woman presides at an all-diocese eucharist, rather than do what the Chrism Mass is actually there for? Could he really have that 'thin' an appreciation of what he does?

(Mind you, a few years' time and we may all have to go somewhere else for the event anyway)

Living in Fallibility and Indeterminacy

The question will now be whether the shaky and open-ended compromise statement the College of Bishops is recommending to the Synod on human sexuality and equal marriage or its absence will get through it: you will remember that the last time they proposed something of this kind, it failed, and I am not at all sure the Synod will be in any more a mood to compromise this time. I refrained from making any comment a couple of days ago when the main points of the bishops' report were leaked because I wanted to see something more than the headlines, and read some of the reasoning.

Of course - lest it go without remark - at the very core of this report is a gaping inconsistency. The bishops apologise to LBGTQ+ people and 'welcome same-sex couples unreservedly and joyfully'. It will immediately be asked how, if they continue to regard same-sex relations as sinful, they can possibly say this, and, if they don't, what reason they can have for not treating homosexual individuals the same as everyone else. People are not stupid: they can see that question is unanswered.

The reason is, as the bishops say repeatedly, they cannot reach a consensus and the line they are proposing to Synod is the most radical one they can agree on. Frustrating though it may be, this humility and recognition of reality is somewhat refreshing. 'We are pursuing unity and not imposing it', they plead, and when you remember that once upon a time the Bench of Bishops was baying for Anglo-Catholic priests to be imprisoned because they put candlesticks on their altars, you can see how far we have come. 

I would be happy to bless a same-sex couple along the lines the bishops propose, though I can't see any turning up to ask me to anytime soon. Why would they? I have (as I've said before) an inkling why God might want the Church only to marry people of different sexes, but the report doesn't give any reason beyond the fact that the bishops can't agree, and that's not likely to make anyone feel very welcome and accepted. The bishops are right to say that more theological work is needed: my own position has itself arisen from asking what the sacrament of matrimony actually means, what it implies to pronounce a blessing, how sexual differentiation might reflect what God wants for human beings. I am delighted that the bishops even recognise these questions as ones that need to be asked; I am encouraged that they approach the task with seriousness. I do wonder whether the gigantic areas of theological work they identify at the end of the report are a bit ambitious. Perhaps it aims at more systematic organisation of thought than we need, and maybe we just need to ask Why does the Church marry people, and what is happening when it does so? Oh, and come up with an answer that makes sense. When I say what I think my impression is that people blink and have no idea what I mean.

Words of Encouragement

The grim monument of Archbishop George Abbott in Holy Trinity, Guildford, provides one of the most Gothic experiences you can have in Surrey. His effigy rests on a charnel house propped up on columns of books, all carved in marble. Yesterday our suffragan bishop had been addressing us all in the church about the theme of ‘Tension’ in Advent, and as I sat with ++George for a few minutes to contemplate I reflected that this dramatic structure also had a tension about it. All flesshe ys grasse, it seems to want to say, and nothing earthly about us abides, but it also wants to do it in grandiose marble funerary art and to remind us that the Archbishop was very, very clever and devoted to his books. He doesn’t want us to remember that he was (to date) the only Archbishop of Canterbury ever to have killed anyone outside conditions of war. Oops! It was an accident, honest.

The Study Morning was billed as a ‘retreat’ though there’s only so much retreating you can do together with a hundred or more other people at a town-centre church. I am better at these things than I would have been at the start of my ministry, a bit less brittle and insecure, and so I can let most of it wash over me and even try to be prayerful now and again. After it was all over I went for lunch with Cara from Emwood and Gillian from Stanpool and we weren’t even that bitchy. Not about what we’d just been listening to, anyway.

On Sunday at Swanvale Halt we’d had three services. The 8am and 10am were a bit thinly attended and as I did the second of a short series of talks about elements of Catholic spiritual life in the Church of England I did wonder whether I was wasting everyone’s time. Problems with the sound system were horribly distracting and the PCC Secretary has just resigned for health reasons, two more little incidents which have contributed to the feeling that the millstones are grinding our little church at the moment. But numbers at the Advent Service of Light in the evening were a bit up on last year.

Yesterday Derek, who came into the church first thing to set the heating for the week, told me how his faith had revived since coming to worship with his wife; at the Study Morning someone I’d dealt with in my role as a vocations advisor and who is now sharing a curacy with her husband came over to tell me how our conversations had been ‘pivotal’ for them both; and Cara thanked me for giving her the idea that it’s important to pray in your church building, as this had actually had a positive effect not just on her own sense of relationship with her parish but also with some difficult souls within it. So perhaps I have done a little good! And the eucharist reminded me of the wonderful gift we are given and can pass on to the souls God loves, which is more important than anything.

Retaining Clergy

At Deanery Chapter we counted up the incumbents of local parishes who have left full-time ministry over recent years, and spent some time musing why this seemed so common. It was slightly surprising to me that several of my colleagues talked about money worries and especially those of clergy with families not being able to manage without a great deal of help - parishioners supplying secondhand white goods, charities paying for holidays, and so on. I can't recall anyone who actually quit the clerical life - though not the clerical state, that's a more radical and problematic step to take - mentioning this as a factor, though it may feed into the stress which definitely is. Most of the time the cause seemed to be something less definable, to do with a sense of purpose and support. In fact, as we spoke, we became unsure whether clergy were very different from other professions, teachers, nurses, even the armed forces, in the proportion who took the decision to leave after a certain time. Perhaps we are operating on a model of lifelong service, expressed in that old belief that ordination imprints a permanent character, which is less relavent now than hitherto. 

One thing we were agreed on was the feeling that our diocese doesn't feel like a collaborative venture in which our ministries are supported by a pastoral centre, but like a managed one in which we are supposed to deliver locally a central agenda. Funny how our discussions almost always seem to orbit in around the same point: there must be something in it. I feel the diocese's hand sits rather light on Swanvale Halt, but, as you know, the confirmation service last week was the first time I'd been in the bishop's presence in about three years. 

A Matter of Choice

The proposal that the old town centre parish church in the probably-to-be-merged parish of Hornington and Tophill next door to Swanvale Halt be referred to in the future by the ridiculous title of ‘Hornington Minster’ is merely annoying: a more troubling aspect was brought to my attention yesterday.

Every Anglican parish has a patron, the person, or body, who has the right to propose someone to be its vicar or rector, a system which goes back to the early Middle Ages when the system of parish churches was first established; before the creation of Parish Church Councils representing the laypeople, the patron merely appointed the incumbent, and the right to appoint to a rich parish was well worth owning. When partisan activity in the Church was at its height in the late 1800s and early 1900s the societies set up to promote various aspects of either the Anglo-Catholic or Evangelical position gaily bought up ‘advowsons’ – the patronage of parishes – to embed their own viewpoint. The trade in advowsons came to an end in 1924, and, especially in rural areas where churches have been yoked together in multi-parish benefices, patronage is now often a complex matter, a patchwork of religious societies, Church authorities, Oxbridge colleges, and private individuals; Fr Barkley’s patron in Yorkshire is the local Lord of the Manor, while Il Rettore’s in Lamford was the Lord Chancellor. Since the foundation of PCCs representing the laity, the PCC has the ability to reject a candidate for the incumbency – not that it would be advisable for them to do it too often.

I learn that the patronage of the putative united parish of Tophill, Bramblecombe & Hornington is to be passed to the Church Pastoral Aid Society, an Evangelical missionary society which has been around since the 1840s.  Now, the last appointment to the united benefice of Tophill and Bramblecombe, just after I arrived in Swanvale Halt, was made by a patronage board including the Archdeacon, the Area Dean, the Lay Chair of the Deanery Synod, the PCCs of the two churches, and the Martyrs Memorial Trust; the MMT – like Simeon’s Trustees, another Evangelical body – has handed all its patronages over to the CPAS which explains their involvement. But the patron of Hornington is the Bishop. The proposal for the CPAS to take over the wholesale patronage of the entire united parish is presented in the form of a request to the Bishop to surrender his interest in Hornington, and as a tidying-up exercise. But, although our current Bishop is an evangelical, his successors might not be, and the removal of the Bishop effectively disposes of any non-evangelical influence in the appointment of a new incumbent.

Of course it makes me think about Swanvale Halt’s position. With the exception of Thorpe, whose patron is Keble College; St Augustine’s Aldershot, where the Bishop and the Society for the Maintenance of the Faith appoint the incumbent jointly; and the Clandons, where the Bishop and the Earl of Onslow alternate to make appointments, all the remaining Catholic parishes in the diocese are pretty vulnerable. Our patron here is the Bishop, making another reason for me to stick around to see whether Guildford Diocese is abolished and merged with a more congenial neighbour. I wonder how the Bishop would react to a suggestion from our PCC that he ‘surrender his interest’ in the patronage in favour of, I don’t know, the Guild of All Souls?! 

Unity Breaking Out

When I suggested to S.D. last week that Archbishop Justin should trumpet as a great step forward the fact that the Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference were refraining from knifing each other in the way they would have done during the Church's formative conflicts over Christology or iconoclasm - look how far we've come in 1600 years! That's progress for you - I was joking, but this does indeed seem to be the lesson of the Conference. On Sunday the RC parish priest, Fr Jeffrey, told me warmly in the vestry that the compromise statement on how the Anglican Communion was to manage same-sex relationships was 'a move in the right direction', a declaration which made me blink a bit. Which direction was that? Surely not the one he's not officially supposed to approve of? But then, stricte dictu, he shouldn't really be genuflecting in front of our aumbry whenever he passes it!

Some of ++Justin's statements make one gasp with their ineptness ...

... BUT his brief summary of The State We're In was, I thought, rather deft. The African Churches oppose homosexuality, he said, because they will be shredded if they don't: for them, it's an existential question. Meanwhile, the Western Churches, by and large, strain to take a liberal position for exactly the same reason: they face scorn, rejection and irrelevance if they don't. You could even argue (though I don't think ++Justin did) that, in a context where African states are harrassing and persecuting LGBT+ advocacy groups and people physically attack neighbours who come out as members of sexual minorities, to insist that, yes, gays are disgusting and horrible but really we shouldn't be stoning them to death is perhaps as far as the Churches can realistically go. You can hope people might be heroes, but I fear you can't demand it.

When African bishops argue that their Churches are growing 'because they are Scriptural' this is, of course, a fantasy. Their Churches are growing because Africa is being polarised between Islam and that which isn't Islam - i.e., different brands of Christianity in different places - and in this crossfire the old animist religions are vanishing. Religions almost never grow for reasons unconnected with politics and community relations. But recognising that is perhaps a step too far, just for the moment.

Distance Learning

One of the few boons of the pandemic period was that we all became accustomed to online meetings. Although they are, in form, horrible, they can sometimes be a great mercy: you don't have to drag yourself to a distant venue with all the palaver that entails, especially when rail strikes mean the alternative is driving to Woking, dumping the car somewhere, and sitting in a bleak independent church for an hour listening to the speakers at the Bishop's Study Morning. Had I been at home on my own with all the proceedings beamed in on my laptop I would have got on with some sewing, but, as it turned out, going to the neighbouring parish of Tunfield and sitting in Fr Jonathan's ancient church with him and retired SSM Jean in front of his laptop wasn't all that bad. 

The theme was 'Leadership and the Abuse of Power'. The first speaker, Debbie Sellin, used to be an incumbent in Guildford Diocese, but is now Bishop of Southampton and in fact Acting Diocesan Bishop for Winchester after the forced resignation of Bishop Tim Dakin. Frustratingly, if understandably, she wouldn't say anything about that. Nor would the next speaker up, Marion Peters, talk in any detail about her experience of 'spiritual abuse', just her reaction to it and what it felt like to be a victim. Finally our own Bishop Andrew came on to talk about Christian leadership styles with the aid of pictures of gardens. It was all completely irrelevant until the very last couple of minutes, when he mentioned accountability mechanisms, before running off the platform so that, we all agreed, the Director of Mission couldn't pray for him as he had for the other speakers before and after they spoke. Can't we give the Lord an occasional rest from our jabbering? 

I, Jonathan and Jean agreed three things. Firstly, and positively, it was remarkable that the Church was even dealing with this subject in such explicit terms: we couldn't imagine it being done even ten years ago. Secondly (and less positively), we noted the the focus on experience rather than theology which does seem to epitomise the approach of the Church to a whole variety of issues currently. Thirdly (and linked to the second point), there was very little analysis, and therefore very little advice. We thought it would have been good to have a psychologist, or a management consultant, to talk about exactly why and how abuses of power happen in church contexts, and what might be done about them. Instead - as the Church seems reluctant to draw on the insights of anything outside itself - the only advice we got was 'be more like Jesus', which is pretty useless as advice goes: we know that, thank you.

Unbeknownst to him, Bishop Andrew had already provided us with the high point of the event before he even began his talk by saying, invisibly and therefore completely out of context, 'I can never remember which way up these things go'.

A Dinner at Willow Grange

For such a big and venerable house, there are remarkably few images of the Bishop of Guildford’s official residence, Willow Grange, around. This one from the catalogue when the house was sold in the 1930s, long before a bishop came anywhere near it, is quite fun.

I should have taken a photo of the house when I was there on Friday for the Bishop’s supper for ‘clergy and plus-ones’; as the Bishop himself pointed out, increasingly often those plus-ones are clergy themselves (I suppose that cuts down the number of guests at these things). I hadn’t been to anything like this for a long, long time, so I thought I ought to go, rather than scooting over to Emwood for Cara’s garden party which was happening at the same time.

It was all fine, as it happened. Rather than hang around in the marquee dithering over the social/emotional/theological implications of sitting at one already-established table rather than another, I went in ahead of most people, brutally sat at an empty table and dared others to join me. Tom from Charlham and his wife took up the challenge. The food we were served was tasty but could have been a bit hotter. Perhaps it was to encourage us to eat quickly, never usually an issue with me.

When people learn that I’ve been in Swanvale Halt for nearly 13 years now they tend to widen their eyes and offer the opinion that it’s a long time, but Tom has been incumbent of his parish for over twenty and he was curate there before that. ‘You need to keep yourself fresh if you’re in a place for a long time’, he told me, ‘Do lots of reading.’ Oh dear. When I try to read I usually nod off. The trouble is that I can’t imagine being any more fresh in another setting: I think of my predecessor Fr Edgar who basically did the same thing in three successive parishes and looked less trendsetting the longer he carried on.

I managed to reverse out of the car park at the end without destroying anything. There might have still been time to race across the county to Emwood but my socialising batteries were well depleted by that point so home was by far the more charitable option!

Reorganising the Bishops

When he attends Morning Prayer at Swanvale Halt, Donald, the retired hospital chaplain, often brings a subject which is at the top of his mind to throw in my direction, which can be useful as he takes the Church Times and I don’t. ‘Have you seen anything about this latest report on reorganising the House of Bishops?’ he said this week. ‘They’re planning to have bishops as Church spokespeople on Brexit and the like.’ I’d been aware some news of this sort had been doing the rounds as there had been ribald remarks among friends on LiberFaciorum about bishops’ pensions, which related to the same report, but this specific matter was new to me.

The idea of ‘a bishop for Brexit’ was indeed what caught the imagination (and attracted the derision) of the non-Church media, but the actual document turns out to be less crackers and more dispiriting than that. It ponders the role of bishops in the modern Church of England, beset by financial, cultural and organisational challenges, and how the episcopal office might be exercised in a way which meets those challenges more flexibly and effectively. Much in the manner of such consultation documents it throws around a variety of ideas, including shrinking the number of dioceses, ‘enhanced regional structures’ whatever that means, early retirement and fixed terms of office for bishops, as well as those ‘specialist’ bishops to speak into particular topics; and, again much in the manner of such things, it remains to be seen how many of them may survive. The Church Times was mainly exercised by how few people had seen the document – the bishops themselves! – and demanded wider discussion.

There is a theological paper accompanying the document which hasn’t seen the light of day beyond the House of Bishops: its absence doesn’t help dispel the impression that it’s very light theologically, and the trouble is that our current bishops don’t think very theologically. They talk about being pastors but behave like managers. The document has a whole section on ‘missionary bishops’, mentioning the Celtic Church (remember what we said here about St Samson of Dol a while ago) and, in a more modern mode, the role of the Bishopric of Islington which since 2015 has worked rather well in establishing new church communities in the Diocese of London. It even cites the Flying Bishops who oversee trad-Catholic churches as a helpful example. But I am becoming suspicious of the whole language of ‘mission’ which seems to have little practical effect. The paper mentions that ‘leading God’s people in mission’ is part of the Ordinal for bishops, and so it is, but words like this appeared nowhere in the old Book of Common Prayer and crept in to do their mischief when Common Worship emerged in 2000, so we have had two decades of bishops ‘leading their people in mission’ and precious little to show for it. What I suspect will happen is that rafts of new bishops will conceive of ‘leading God’s people in mission’ in terms of writing reports and issuing goals, targets and objectives, not, say, baptising people, preaching, or going to live as hermits in derelict Roman forts like St Samson did; that is, telling other people how to ‘do mission’ rather than, in any remotely practical way, doing it themselves.

Apart from the occasional circular letter I haven’t had any interaction with our bishop in about three years: ‘good thing too’, you may cry, but even given the pandemic, it does make you wonder where the office of pastor pastorum really is.