Tag: church of england

Open letter to my bishop

kathleenjowitt6 Comments

Dear Bishop,

I write to express my profound discomfort with various aspects of the Church of England’s conduct over the past few days, as the news story regarding the ‘Just Pray’ advertisement has unfolded.

Firstly, I note that the DCM agency was entirely within its rights to run or not to run any advertisement it chose. I think that its blanket policy to avoid religious or political material is sensible, and, one assumes, designed to avoid exactly this kind of mess. It is no great effort to imagine the reaction in the tabloid press had another faith group or a secular body attempted to run a similar advertisement. I consider that the Church’s attempt to present this decision as a ‘ban’ and an ‘attack on free speech’ is dishonest and I am ashamed to be associated with this disingenuous act.

Since the agency’s policy is to avoid religious or political content, the question of whether the advert is, in fact, offensive, is not particularly relevant, and I have been equally disappointed by the Church’s emphasis on this aspect. However, I would take this opportunity to make it clear, from my perspective as a practising Anglican, that I would have been extremely uncomfortable had I been in a cinema where this advert had been played. I find the idea of involving non-consenting strangers in my religious practice distasteful in the extreme.

I find the attempt to attack the agency’s decision by using the Equality Act 2010 hypocritical, to say the least, given that the Church has obtained several exemptions from it (much to the distress of myself and numerous other Anglicans). I am equally disappointed that the Bishop of Chelmsford has mooted the possibility of taking advantage of his position in the House of Lords to place political weight on the question – an abuse of privilege, so far as I am concerned, which contradicts any assertion of ‘persecution’.

Lastly, I have been deeply concerned today by the sight of some emails between DCM agency and Rev Arun Arora which give the impression that the Church of England was aware of the likelihood that the advertisement would not run as early as 3 August this year. If these are genuine, this gives the lie to its claim to have been ‘bewildered’ on 22 November, and the hypocrisy and cynicism is revolting.

I would urge the Church to make the true position clear as swiftly as possible.

Yours sincerely

Kathleen Jowitt

All-Purpose Build Your Own Socially Liberal Christian Rant

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I had this in another place, and today seems as good a day as any to wheel it out again, with a couple of updates and additions. If anyone was in any doubt as to my feelings on the subject, I think that:

a. a cinema is not an appropriate outlet for an advertisement exhorting people to pray, because:

b. I would feel deeply uncomfortable involving non-consenting strangers in my own religious practice, which would in effect be the result of showing the ‘Just Pray’ advertisement;

b. the Church of England has not been discriminated against in any way, shape or form (see Miss S. B.’s excellent post for more on this).

 

There is a limited pool of news stories on Christian issues, and the talking heads are tiresomely predictable. Now my outraged response can be tiresomely predictable, too!

Link to offending article (unless it belongs to a known click-baiter, in which case, summarise). Select response(s) as appropriate from the below list:

George Carey says something – OH GEORGE CAREY NO

George Carey says something else – no really you are not Archbishop any more NO ONE CARES and also YOU ARE WRONG

Michael Nazir-Ali says something – see above

Andrea Minichiello Williams of Christian Concern says something – well I am a Christian and damn straight I’m concerned about this woman SPEWING HATE AND BIGOTRY

Christians are persecuted in this country! – no, Christians are treated the same as most and better than many. Try Egypt.

David Cameron claims to endorse Christian values – see Isaiah 58:3-7

Pope does something – aha I approve of this Pope

Pope says something about poverty – at least SOMEONE remembers the point of the Church (see Isaiah 58:3-7)

Pope says something about sex or gender – yes, well, that’s why I’m an Anglican… oh, wait.

House of Bishops says something about poverty – at least SOMEONE remembers the point of the Church (see Isaiah 58:3-7)

House of Bishops says something anything else – FFS hurry up and disestablish so I can get out of this with a clear conscience

Daily Mail is concerned about erosion of traditional Christian values – someone must be doing something right

Archbishop of Canterbury goes too far – Archbishop of Canterbury does not go too far enough!

Women bishops – and about time

LGBT clergy – can we stop treating them as second-class citizens?

Fundamentally changing the nature of marriage – like Marriage With Deceased Wife’s Sister; see also shellfish, mixed fibre clothing, what Jesus said about marriage ahem ahem

Destroying the institution of marriage – possibly this would be a good thing?

Mention of Anglican Mainstream – No, it’s not mainstream

Mention of Church of England Newspaper – No, it’s not representative of the Church of England. Try the Church Times.

Find someone who is talking sense. Alan Wilson is usually a good bet; so is Vicky Beeching.

Consider, rhetorically, whether they are clinging to their crosses where the Breton boat-fleet tosses.

Include appropriate Dave Walker cartoon.

Post.

December Days 23: #ChristmasMeans

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Help us spread the real meaning of Christmas to as many people as possible by tweeting what Christmas means using images, video and text

SHAN’T.

I am stretching the definition of ‘prompt’ a little bit here, since, while the Church of England has certainly prompted people to write about what #ChristmasMeans, I think I’m meant to do this on Twitter, and, you know, take it seriously.

I started on Twitter, but it ended up spread across several increasingly irritated and unintelligible tweets about why I dislike being told to do things on Twitter.

So I thought I’d write about that on here, instead.

I have never been able to take the Church of England’s hashtags seriously since their #EverythingChanges campaign a few Easters ago; anyone who’d watched five minutes of Torchwood must have been sniggering. (Not that Torchwood was without its clunky paschal imagery, I must admit. But still. The twenty-first century is when #everythingchanges, and you gotta be ready.)

Twitter encourages triteness. The tweets currently gathering on the hashtag are no doubt very sincere, but they are mostly making me want to vomit. I am a terrible Christian (but a very British one). There is not much room for deep theological debate in 140 characters – 115, once you include the hashtag – and simplistic religious messages, however pithy, set my teeth on edge. I am the sort of Christian who smiles at, and, yea, retweets, things like ‘Actually, axial tilt is the reason for the season’. (And this is the reason that I will never be invited to tweet from @OurCofE.)

And then I think I am just hopelessly contrary. Even things that I like doing, that I would go out of my way to do, can be soured for me by a Twitter instruction to do them. Go to this! Do this! Why not…? I growl, ‘I already do this, you patronising tosser’ or, ‘Sod off’. I very rarely retweet things that tell me to retweet if I agree, even if I wholeheartedly do agree – because I don’t want to place that same burden upon my followers. This is, I think, just my stuff about being told what to do, and I don’t know where I picked it up from, but it’s a thing.

On top of that, there’s that instruction to proselytise, in the superficial ‘ask a friend to church’ way, that I have never, ever, felt comfortable doing, that has never felt authentic. I will write some other time about my profound discomfort with the idea of ‘mission’, about getting free of that, about the liberating revelation that I don’t have to try to convert everybody. #ChristmasMeans is a ghost that haunts my past self, that tells me that I am an insufficient Christian, even though the harder I try the more diminished my faith feels. I didn’t actually have this in mind yesterday, when I added “I do not pressure or guilt other people into doing things they don’t want to, dammit” to my dammit list, but in fact it’s one of the oldest hurts I have, and no better for being partly self-inflicted.

#ChristmasMeans is also setting my teeth on edge, particularly coupled as it is with that old guiltbag ‘the real meaning of Christmas’, because I can’t help feeling that the subtext is ‘and you, whatever you are doing, are failing to understand what Christmas really means. You are celebrating the wrong thing, you are too selfish, too impatient, too taken up with worldly matters.’

And there are enough expectations placed upon people at this time of year as it is. I say this as a comfortably-off middle class person with no children who isn’t going to have to do any cooking until the 29th. I feel bowed down with the expectations that people – good, faithful, Christian people, in many cases – are putting on me, and it is exhausting to hand those expectations back to them graciously.

Insisting that we focus on the Real Meaning of Christmas just adds another expectation, unless we are also given permission to not take part in the Unreal Meaning. It has been a real struggle for me this year to write Christmas cards. I don’t know why; I know they ought to be simple for an administrative genius like me, and God knows I feel like a pathetic excuse for a human being for not even being able to write a simple Christmas card, but there it is.

I know that I can choose not to write Christmas cards. I know that some of the consequences of this will be: that some people will not hear of my new address; that I will go on some people’s Stinge Lists; that some people will not even notice; that some people will notice and wonder if we are still friends; that some people will notice and wonder if I’m all right. And so, because the thought of all that is daunting, I have written the damn things, and sent them.
I would like to know that #ChristmasMeans that I am not, actually, a pathetic excuse for a human being even if I do fail to write a single Christmas card. Somewhere, deep down, I do know that. But it doesn’t fit into 140 characters.

Do not get me wrong. For me, the Incarnation is the most important thing in the history of this planet. (Yes, for me, even more so than the Resurrection.) And yet #ChristmasMeans feels at once like an invitation to troll and like a burden that I cannot bear.

#ChristmasMeans turkey and mince pies

#ChristmasMeans new Doctor Who

#ChristmasMeans the most beautiful music ever written

#ChristmasMeans the most awful music ever written

#ChristmasMeans hard work

#ChristmasMeans I am, as ever, a social failure

#ChristmasMeans feeling horrible for rolling my eyes at the hashtag

#ChristmasMeans I am, yet again, failing to be a good Christian

#ChristmasMeans pretending I’m coping

I will tweet one single, serious response. It will not convey everything I am trying to convey. But it is the best I can do, and it will say this:

#ChristmasMeans you are OK exactly as you are.

Faith, belief, doubt, and pedantry

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I think, for me, there are two main elements to this: the way faith works for me in the context of my history of depression, and my religious background.

First, thought, it’s worth mentioning that I draw a distinction between faith and belief, and that I am acutely aware of the difference between knowledge and knowledge (why doesn’t English translate savoir and connaître properly?) – knowing intellectually, in the head, if you like, and knowing in the heart – the difference between knowing facts and knowing people.

Faith, for me, is not the same as belief. (This, I know, is not something that all Christians would agree on, but I am only talking, here and throughout, about one Christian.) I can remember a real lightbulb moment a few years ago, at one of my parish’s Lent Courses Where One Is Not Told The Answer, where somebody linked faith to trust rather than to belief, and I suddenly stopped feeling guilty about not believing hard enough. These days I think I would describe it as ‘relationship with the Divine’ and leave it at that.

I’m very Anglican. I am both catholic and protestant, and neither Catholic nor Protestant. My non-conformist streak is Quaker, and Quakers don’t conform with anything, particularly non-conformists. And I say all this because the thing about the very Protestant Churches that I was most glad to leave behind was their insistence on belief, the idea that one has to believe the right thing to be saved. It always felt all wrong to me.

I am finding increasingly as I get older (she says, from the ripe old age of 28) that what I believe is becoming less and less important. I don’t worry at all about whether other people are believing the right thing, whatever that is. My own belief has become less certain, and less defensive. I don’t know what I believe about all sorts of things, and that no longer seems to be a problem, except to other people. At the same time, my faith has become much surer. I can’t really describe it, except by saying that it’s a sense of being loved, in a very calm, sustaining kind of way.

Which is all very well, when my brain is working. Quite often it isn’t. I’ve had depression on and off for the past twelve years, I would guess. There are two things about this that are particularly relevant to this post. Firstly: when I am depressed I cannot remember how it feels to not be depressed. (Conversely, when I’m not depressed, I find it difficult to remember how awful being depressed is, but, because my brain is working better all round, I can – if I choose, which I usually don’t – describe it via imagination.) Secondly: when I am depressed I cannot feel love, either giving it or receiving it. I can have my best friend hugging me and feel about as much emotional response as a dustpan.

This is where savoir and connaître come into it. In my head I know that my family love me, that my husband loves me, that my friends love me. Sometimes they tell me this using actual words. They mean those words. And in my head I know all that, and it means absolutely nothing. It doesn’t get any further. When my brain is working, on the other hand, it’s fine. It all gets through and I feel it deeply. I can quite often be in love with the entire universe for whole seconds at a time. (An interesting side-effect of this is that I now cry at pretty much anything. Tinny call-centre Vivaldi, for example. Also discovering that I have more and better friends than I thought I had, which has happened quite a lot over the past few months because of my brain not being so broken as usual.)

What I am driving at here is probably obvious: that a faith that manifests itself predominantly in a sense of love cannot make itself felt all the time, particularly when I can’t feel love all the time anyway. And I suppose the spaces between might well be called doubt. The thing is, though, that I know that the ones who love me don’t stop loving me just because I don’t have the capacity to experience it, any more than the sun stops burning when it’s behind a cloud. The same feels true of the Divine. Apart from anything else, that’s always the first thing to come back.

So: that’s me, and faith, and doubt. I hope… I don’t know what I hope. But there it is. Be gentle.

“Ignore him and he’ll just go away…”

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I feel that I need hardly repeat to my followers and friends list that no, Lord Carey does not speak for me and that in a country where I am free both to practise my religious faith and to make flippant remarks about it on Twitter (with obscure TV references for good measure) I do not feel marginalised.

I really cannot be bothered to go through all this again, but Bishop Alan has done a pretty good job of summing up what are, I suspect, the feelings of a lot of us. Vicky Beeching is also good.

The Church of England and Same-Sex Marriage: What Happened, and How Very Furious I Am About It

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1. Govt starts talking about same-sex marriage.

2. Much to the fury of much of its membership, Church of England expresses opposition to this idea, on the grounds that (despite this having been explicitly vetoed) religions might be forced to perform same-sex marriages against their beliefs.

3. Govt obligingly provides ‘quadruple legal lock’ to prevent Church of England performing same-sex marriage.

4a. Members of Church of England who wanted same-sex marriage very upset, as (this is feeling familiar, isn’t it?) this puts us about five years backwards from where we could be, at a conservative estimate. (I do feel that this is being glossed over in the coverage, but possibly I am not reading the right coverage.)

4b. Other members of Church of England fairly upset as they have been hoist with own petard and been made to look kinda homophobic. (I don’t have much sympathy there, no.)

Synodfail: where I go from here

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A friend retweeted this earlier:

Yet another thing I genuinely don’t get: why women want to part of a club that resolutely keeps telling them to fuck off.

It is a very good question. Here is my answer. A lot of it is similar to this post, which I wrote back in 2010. Some of it, however, is considerably more hopeful than I was in 2010.

I should first make it absolutely clear that I am deeply disappointed and saddened by yesterday’s Synod decision. It hurts like hell. I think it is bad for the Church’s mission, in terms of both ministry within and credibility without. I had almost begun to believe that we would see the first female bishop in the Church of England before I turned thirty – and could then move on to eradicating inequality elsewhere.

With this decision the Church of England has, of course, rendered itself unworthy to speak on the topic of inequality, hurt and betrayed hundreds of its own best ministers, and, it seems, hung out a huge sign saying WE DON’T WANT YOU.

I, however, am staying. Here are some reasons why:

The overall vote was 72% in favour. 72% of Synod do want us.

The measure got through the bishops. It got through the clergy. It only failed in the laity. Of course this is disappointing and infuriating, and highlights how bloody stupid the voting system is, but I am, in an odd way, encouraged. The bishops and clergy are there because that’s their job – and the vast majority of the bishops and clergy want women to be bishops. The laity are there because they’re fanatics with an axe to grind, on one side of the debate or the other, who have gone through all the hassle of being elected to Synod in order to grind that axe. (I, of course, am a fanatic with an axe to grind. I’m not on Synod, so just think how fanatic they’ll be who actually are.)

I wasn’t able to listen to the actual debate, being at work and all and therefore restricted to the Church of England’s Twitter feed, but I understand from people who were listening that several people who spoke (and, presumably, voted) against the measure did so because they felt that it did not protect women bishops enough. A clearer case of shooting oneself in the foot I never saw, but it does suggest that the House of Laity is not entirely a herd of misogynist dinosaurs. Of course, misguided idealists can do just as much damage…

Outside of London, where all things can be found, I very much doubt that I’ll find another congregation that’s simultaneously sound on women and LGBT, and has a decent choir. I’ll be interested to hear the Rector’s sermon on Sunday; I suspect it will be along the lines of ‘keep working for this, because we will get there’.

In a repeat from 2010:

This is my Church. It is my Church by right as an Englishwoman, by baptism, by faith, and by inheritance. I am working to see it become more like the Kingdom of Heaven, and I am not going to stop doing that just because those members who wish to restrict the ministry of other members have ‘won’ this time.

The Church of England is still the Established Church. For as long as it remains so, it behoves me as a member of the Church that belongs to the nation to make sure that the doors remain open to the nation.

In fact, in a bizarre way, this feels a lot more hopeful than 2010. I stopped crying last night when I thought how other members of my church would be feeling the same way as me. This time it’s not just me and a couple of other wingnuts on the internet. This time it feels like the vast majority of the Church of England, the rank and file, the clergy and the congregations, crying out in pain and fury. We are all standing at the foot of each other’s crosses. It’s rather like the end of Life of Brian.

We wanted it. And we will get there. And I want to be there when we do.

Hier Stehe Ich; Ich Kann Nicht Anders

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Here I stand. I can do no other. Except, you know, I can. I have always promised myself that, if it came to it, I would. That, if the Church of England did something so egregious that I could no longer countenance belonging to it, I would leave. That if it came to a choice between the Church and the Kingdom, I would choose the Kingdom.

And yet here I stand.

It is not that the Church has failed to do anything egregious enough. On the contrary; it feels as if it has been doing it every day of this year. Today’s news alone (assuming for the moment that there was more to the whole thing than vicious rumour) was more than enough to make me wonder. The worst of it? I wasn’t surprised – just very, very disappointed.

Why do I not go down the steps and cross two streets to the Friends’ Meeting House? I have thought about it, believe me. Have I become one of those people who only goes to church for the music? (No. I’m married to one, so I can tell the difference. He keeps saying he will post about this.) Here I stand. But it’s not as if I can do no other. There are plenty of other options.

Why don’t I?

First things first. My church isn’t going anywhere. And my church has a poster outside that reads:

BEWARE

Here we preach the inclusive gospel of Jesus Christ.

This means you may be mixing with tax collectors, sinners, adulterers, hypocrites, Greeks, Jews, women as well as men, female and male priests, homosexuals, lesbians, the disabled, dying, thieves and other sinners; white people, black people, Asians, and people from other races; Muslims, Bishops, bigots, people of other faiths, strangers from Rome and Nigeria, heretics, etc., etc.; and yes even you, dear guest, are most welcome

in fact anyone like those who Jesus mixed with.

So beware, this is not a private club.

WELCOME TO ALL!

It would be cutting off my nose to spite my face to leave such a fabulous, supportive, spiritual community simply because of a real or perceived shortage of vertebrae in Lambeth or real or perceived shit-stirring in Gafconville.

So here we stand. Why don’t we move? Because we don’t see why we should have to. We believe in a Church that asks people in, not one that turns them away. Because we don’t see why the party that wants to turn people away should have the casting vote in a faith that welcomes strangers. Because we are not prepared to move over to accommodate people who will then spread their knees out to occupy the entire bench, and allow only those who are Like Them to sit down.

But it is more than that: we believe that we should not. We believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic Church – and we, who believe that all should be invited in, are going to be neither the ones who leave it nor the ones who hold it to ransom by threatening to leave it. We will not leave, because we believe that we are welcome as we are.

And then there is this: for as long as I remain in the Church of England, I know that there is one person in the Church of England who will welcome LGBTQ people into it. For as long as my church remains in the Church of England, I know that there is one parish in the Anglican Communion that will display the message that ends ‘WELCOME TO ALL!’. And if we leave, who will do that? Or, rather, if we leave, why should others stay?

There are people who do not like the way I think, the way I love, the way my faith is. They are pushing me, and those who think like me, and love like me, and whose faith works the way that mine does; they are pushing us to leave. But, so far as I can discern, no one is calling me to leave, and that makes all the difference.

Here I stand.