Reluctantly Inclusive

Many years ago I designed a joke logo for an organisation I wanted to call Exclusive Church. It consisted of a portcullis with a cross on the top. It was, of course, a jesting riposte to Inclusive Church, the organisation founded in response to the dreadful mess in 2003 when Jeffrey John's nomination as the new Bishop of Reading was withdrawn after several large evangelical churches in the diocese of Oxford kicked up a stink over his sexuality. For a couple of years one of our churchwardens, a nice, liberal former local councillor, has mentioned the idea of Swanvale Halt church subscribing to Inclusive Church. The other day its national chair, our new cathedral Dean, came to the PCC to talk about it.

Oh dear. There's so much about the style of Inclusive Church which instinctively gets on my nerves. The bouncy-happy modernity, the multicoloured jellybean presentation. It's not me. That's quite apart from anything that might approach principle; I don't like the organisations which Inclusive Church has partnered with in the past, from the Group for Rescinding the Act of Synod  to the Modern Churchpeople's Union, now redubbed Modern Church . Some of these organisations have institutional members on Inclusive Church's board of trustees, though they are always outweighed by independent members. I don't agree with their statement of hope that the Church will move towards admitting same-sex couples to the sacrament of matrimony. I've seen membership of Inclusive Church as a signal that you and your church don't regard as very important the things I, as still something of an Anglo-Catholic, regard as important.

All that said, I found the Dean's exposition of Inclusive Church worryingly appealing. She explained how the organisation had certainly arisen from those core concerns about the ministry of women and the equality of same-sex relationships, but how it had broadened into a means of thinking theologically about the exclusion of various different categories of people from Church life: at the moment they're concentrating on mental illness and what that means for Christians. Inclusive Church's focus is not on campaigning, though it links with various organisations that do campaign on single issues, but on thought and analysis. "So as regards equal marriage", she said, "We want to think about what marriage means to the Church and society, rather than just coming up with a statement. Some people who support the ordination of women, for instance, just say, that's that, you should admit women to all three orders of ministry and there's nothing to think about. The shame of that is that with more thought and consideration we could have thought differently about what orders actually mean."

I find that rather interesting and creative. It's quite often the case that you support an organisation without agreeing with everything it says and does. Seeing Inclusive Church as a means of doing theological work on the nature of the Church and its people alters the picture somewhat, and I can now just about envisage myself being able to argue that having its logo on our wall isn't a sign of subscribing to a set of trigger issues, but something bigger, deeper, and more worthwhile. Never say I can't be persuaded.