Category: Church

Catholicity means we do not make our own rules. Our Anglican readiness to make new rules about who may be ordained a bishop shows that we have lost touch with the church in any part of the world. Our lack of concern for the rest of the world is a lack of love. Is it really all the same to us if we do kiss goodbye to the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church? For Rome, Cardinal Walter Kasper is saying that Anglicans and Episcopalians have put the movement we were making towards the unity of the Church into reverse because the started making new rules for Church order. We think we can make new rules, just for ourselves. But we may not make unilateral decisions for our corner of the worldwide church. The Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA) is only the Church when it is connected, not just to the United States, but to all the rest of the Church catholic – worldwide, historic and eschatological. In England, the Church of England is only the Church when it is connected to the rest of the Church not in England, and the Anglican church is only the Church by being connected to the non-Anglican Church. Our salvation is our being tied together, our connection, to these others, so that with them we make the whole universal body of Christ. If we loosen our connections to the rest of the Church, it is not just that we float away from the rest of body, but that the whole body starts to break up, and ceases to be that universal community of witness to God. By leaving we threaten the life even of those we leave, never mind what this does to our own life.

At the Sunday eucharist at St Mary’s, our discipleship sometimes appears in the intercessions. These tend to be led by a small number of lay members of the congregation who learned their faith in Sunday school in the West Indies forty years ago. Their intercessions are the Word of God and the gift of God to us still. They know how to pray, and their prayers teach how to pray, and in the course of these prayers we learn a little about our Master, and as a result we learn something about who we are. Because the organist has taught the congregation to come in on time, each ‘Lord, hear us’ receives a proper crisp ‘Lord, Graciously hear us’. You can’t drift too far off in intercessions because your response is continually required. Every part of the service is antiphonal, so the whole congregation is at work, and all this repetition brings slow comprehension, very slow in my case.

St Mary’s follows Common Worship and the Revised Common Lectionary. This means that the Word of God we hear week by week provides some of the narrative logic of the gospel. This week’s readings follow on in some respect from last week’s. The great advantage of this is that we are not dependent on choices made by our own clergy. Of course we get their platitudes from the pulpit. Typically sermons begin with a rambling anecdote, come back to one aspect of one of the New Testament readings (ignoring the other NT reading, the Old Testament and psalm – see, four pieces of Scripture altogether), and then wobble towards some trite apercu about the way ‘we’ are today. But I really don’t mind sitting through the sermon, with its embarrassed English inconsequential and often contradictory moralizing. I willing sit through twenty minutes of nonsense in order to have the forty-five minutes of liturgy, with the huge amount of the Word of God that Common Worship contains, with all its sentences, licks and riffs – so I can hear it, say it and sing it in full congregation.

Sermons that follow a theme or expound a book of the bible are fine in an evening worship-and-teaching service. If I was vicar I would move Sunday evensong back to Saturday evening. Then we could say that Saturday evensong was the prelude to the through-the-night prayer meeting or liturgy that culminates with full church sung eucharist on Sunday morning. In non-feast (‘ordinary’) times of year I would have the whole preaching-teaching-worship service followed by pizzas, dance, more guitars-and-drums modern worship racket until the young people wore themselves out.

After five years with this basically very middle-class congregation, I know that it is Christ who serves himself up in the sermon and in the cup. He serves us in the strange form of these embarrassing performances. It is not that Christ hides himself in the gabbled and uncomprehending reading of Scripture and embarrassed serving of the cup, but that he makes himself plain in there in these cringe-inducing performances. He makes himself present and available here for us all, not only in the obvious disciples, whom even I can identify, like those who lead intercessions well. He makes present in the – to me – hidden way represented by those who despise an evangelical faith, though they are our leaders, and who prefer to dive down every culture-de-sac of middle-class imported spirituality and activism. Not only are these the ones I have to break bread with, but they are the cup I have to drink in order to drink with him, and share in him.

The Word of God and the Eucharist are not two things, but one. Five years at St Mary’s now, and this is as far as my thinking has got. For the eucharist to be the eucharist, Scripture has to be heard and explained. Where the Scripture is not read and opened the cup of eucharist is empty, and this wine brings us no Christ. Scripture has to be opened, and that means read and expounded. First it must be read, well, slowly and loud, not gabbled or murmured, by someone who understands what they are reading. And then it must be explained. The lessons – all three of them – must be so explained, week after week so that we begin to realise who we are and what it means for us to be Christ’s people, and to be Christ’s people here, in our case in Hackney, London. If the Scripture is opened in the course of the service, then as the years go by people will be converted and become disciples, and the whole business of our sancification will begin. If Scripture is not heard and opened, this bread and cup will be precisely as eucharistic as our coffee and biscuits. Scripture is not opened by preaching alone, nor by the eucharist alone, but both together, understood as one.

It seems to me that the Christ served up in the cup is the Christ served up in the sermon. The one Lord is served up in what to us are two forms, preaching and sacrament, but of course just the one indivisible Christ. So the preaching is sacramental and eucharistic, and the eucharist is edifying because it reaches our heads as much as our heart, it feeds, teaches and unifies each of us, head and body.

The Word of God means not just the Scripture read but the Scripture preached on – explained – in the sermon. Actually we could widen that to include the congregational responses, which are also sentences from Scripture, and even further to include the hymns, for they are also our responses to the Scripture-and-bread received. In fact I think that in St Mary’s, insofar as Scripture is opened, it is by the hymns and intercessions, rather than by anything that comes from the pulpit. Well, I’ll try to make the case – you see what you think. In St Mary’s the teaching happens principally through the antiphonally sung psalm that follows the Old Testament and then through the choice of hymns. Clearly our selection of hymns follows some well-thought out schema associated with Common Worship. I approve of it. It seems to me that the great teacher in my church is the organist. By his playing he teaches that congregation to sing and so in some measure to worship. He plays with a crispness and a dedication to supporting and driving the singing of the congregation that I have never seen anywhere else. The congregation sing so confidently that some of the theological sense of what we are singing is surely absorbed.

The hymns we sing, particularly in the season of Easter, contain lines of lurid (Protestant) penal substitution and macabre (Catholic) accounts of Christ’s wounds bleeding for us. Whoever picks the hymns either cannot tell the difference or is isn’t concerned by it, and that is fine by me. But I don’t think I have ever heard the judgment and the anger of God tackled in sermons, let alone any talk of Christ’s blood. The atonement is considered too difficult or divisive to preach on, even in the run up to Easter. Though our hymns are full of it, penal substitution and almost any account of the atonement are avoided by our clergy, and when you can get the conversation onto the topic the subject is quickly changed. They avoid the atonement in sermons, except occasionally when say Genesis 22, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, comes up, and then the idea of sacrifice to God is ruled out, hard to say on what grounds – taste, maybe? Still, the atonement is there in the Scripture read, in the sentences, responses and above all in the hymns, so we are always receiving a good part of the evangelical narrative in the Sunday morning eucharist. Much of it is said or sung by the congregation, and this is crucial it seems to me. But the sermon never explains the lessons we have heard, or the responses we have made to those lessons and so never points out to us the unity of the whole, given by the evangelical narrative. None of this unity of Scripture-and-response is explained, so my question is – how eucharistic is this?

Jesus Christ is the universal man, the summit and definition of what human being is. He is the properly catholic being. Life with him means communion with all mankind. He is now forming us into catholic beings, people who are defined, by participation in him, by fellowship with every other human being. The Christian life – the apprenticeship we serve – opens us out from our present incurved state to bring us into relationship with every other living thing. This means that the Christian life and faith is intrinsically about catholicity, thus ecumenism, the reconciliation of every household and community with every other, is what the gospel is. In the apprenticeship of this Christian life we learn to reach out to the whole of the rest of the Church, indeed to the future completition of the Church, when Christ shall be all in all.

You are only a catholic as you strain towards reconciliation with all other churches, and treat them not only as wayward and sometimes willfully disobedient, who you must mourn and pray for, and mention in your intercessions that precede every eucharist. But you must also treat them as those who have some part of the gospel, and some ‘portion’ of Christ and so as those you must learn from and submit to. Being catholic certainly means being under the authority and Magisterium of the Roman Church, treating its teaching with respect and being formed by it. But you must also be under the authority of every other part of the church (no matter how abusive that authority sometimes is), and everywhere look for Christ and ask to be renewed and reformed by him.

I am not a Roman Catholic, but an Anglican, a Reformed Anglican (‘catholic evangelical’ for convenience). The term ‘reformed’ can only refer to the catholic church and so to the determination together that the Church must repent and be disciplined, reformed and renewed by Christ its head. But I think it is right always to wonder whether I should be more ‘Roman’, whether I should convert to ‘Roman Catholic’. Of course this is not a comfortable place to be. Of course this means many contradictions. You may change my mind on this. Of course.

We believe that the Windsor Report offers in its Sections A & B an authentic description of the life of the Anglican Communion, and the principles by which its life is governed and sustained. We accept the description offered in Sections A & B of the Windsor Report as the way in which we would like to see the life of the Anglican Communion developed, as we respond in faithful discipleship to Christ.

The Anglican Communion has never before articulated so clearly and fully its self-understanding. Given the rapid growth of the Anglican Communion in recent decades (especially in the Global South), the wider globalisation of our culture, and Anglicanism’s characteristic features of diversity and autonomy it was only a matter of time before such articulation of Anglican ecclesiology became necessary. It is tragic it required some to ‘tear the fabric of our Communion at its deepest level’ (as the Primates said in October 2003) for this to happen. Nevertheless, it is now clearer than ever before just who we are as Anglicans within the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. That is a major fruit of the suffering of recent years with benefit not only in inter-Anglican discussions but wider ecumenical ones.

Andrew Goddard Walking Together: The Future Shape of the Anglican Communion

You can read the Windsor report online (left-hand panel) or download in PDF.

To the extent that the church of England bishops only go to church of England parishes and churches, they have forgotten what the office of bishop is. To the extent that Methodist bishops (in the States) only go the Methodist congregations they have not understood that office of bishop is intrinsically ecumenical, because it is intrinsically the very office of Christ, who calls all men to obedience. He commands them, and they must hear and obey. The ecumenism is not an option but the evangelical command of God, the assertion, for our sake, of his lordship. And what we have said for bishops is so for all Superintendents and Moderators, who if they know themselves to be under the discipline of the whole Church are all bishops by another name.

So it is the job of the bishop to knock humbly on the door of every church in his diocese, not only those churches which ostensibly recognise bishops because their structure is Anglican or Episcopalian, but most particularly those who do not recognise bishops and assure us that they are independent of all that hierarchy. He must go to every charismatic assembly and little house church and wait until they get over themselves and let him in, and with him, the rest of the catholic Church. Until that time he must wait out in the rain. He is the icon of Christ, the sign of unity of the whole church that is presently waiting out on the street for each of us in our assembly to let them in. He is the icon of the Church because the suffering of Christ is visisble in him – for those who can see it. It is us who are making our Lord wait for us out there.

My own vicar (rector, actually) does not like to lead. He does not see his ministry in terms of leadership, but in terms of enabling. But being an enabler or facilitator does not mean not leading: leading is exactly what facilitating is. Is it really such a great paradox, that some ministry (that is some Christian servanthood) takes the form of leadership? He serves us by giving us a lead, he is set over us because he is our servant.

Of course, in some way he is leading us just by saying that he is not leading us. He corrects when we come to him with what he sees as wrongly prescriptive requests. He is leading, but denying it. This distorts the relationship between us, taking away removing the language by which we can appeal to one another for aid and support and leadership.
We have to intercede with our clergy and beg them to take our needs seriously. We really do need to hear from Christ, and they really are the ones appointed for this purpose. They promised to do this for us in their ordination vows, and repeated it when they were licensed.

Let us remind them in our prayers that they do not now need any extra permission to do this. But let us tell them often that we give them this permission, and encourage them to lead and teach and train us in the whole discipleship package of Christ.

Who is it that they are looking over their shoulder at? Who is it who has more appeal to them than us? Who is it carries more authority with them? It is of course the liberal elite outside the Church, who deride the Christian faith, that our clergy are listening to and want affirmation from. So then let us raise our voices to make them louder and gladder, and more desperate and importunate, than all these other voices.

When we celebrate the eucharist we must start sending some eucharistic bread round to every other church in the area. We should send our bishop to knock on the door of every congregation in the borough, ask to be admitted and allowed to bring them some bread, wine (not consecrated, but blessed) and a little encouragement from us. Yes, that’s right, he must go to every denomination, which means other denominations, those which do not recognise his authority. If they admit him they admit us, and so start to recognise the catholicity of the church – which means that we cannot be Church without them, and they cannot be Church without us, and that we represent a proper discipline on each other. Of course he must walk, all right, take the bus, and of course he must wear his robes and take his crozier, and stand outside each Church and knock. He must offer himself to those who did not ask for him. He must beg to be received and heard by them, and to be encouraged and taught by them, and he must bring back to us what he has learned from them. He has to beg their forgiveness for our separation and aloofness, and in our name he has to forgive them for separating themselves from us. He has to teach and correct them, warn them of the results of their separation, and he has to receive their teaching and correction, and together with them look forward to the day when we can celebrate together at last. Every eucharist looks forward to this and every exchange of the peace anticipates this. Obvious, isn’t it?

Over at Confessing Reader, Peter Brown’s article on the future of Anglicanism, in the United States in particular, starts by thinking through the institutional possibilities but quickly gets down to the theological motives and principles.
Here are three of the points he makes:

1 The bond of communion is a sacramental witness to the love of God on earth.

2. The catholic community is a necessary context for authentic exegesis of Scripture

3. To survive as a unified body, Anglicanism will need to develop an authoritative tradition of Scriptural interpretation. In order to provide an effective restraint, this authoritative tradition will need an institutional voice. In short, we will need something very like the Catholic magisterium; indeed, since we have retained episcopal governance, our episcopate is the natural location for such an interpretative function.

These three points are blooming obvious, so it is only a very short time I am sure before we start to hear these points being made by bishops in the United Kingdom. After all it is exactly these three points that make a bishop a bishop.

Last week’s Church of England Synod discussed the issue of how to look after those who will not accept a woman as their bishop. It didn’t deal with the issue of woman bishops, but merely this lesser issue of how to look after those who, after the decision to ordain woman as bishops has been made, hold out against their (woman) bishop. The Synod was beginning to consider whether they should be offered another bishop to report to, under a measure allowing for ‘transferred episcopal oversight’? (Should they? What do you think?)

According to my source (my vicar is a member of Synod), the Synod doesn’t know how to talk through the issue of women bishops directly, but the majority assumes that they are inevitable.

This is not the problem at all, however. The problem is that we do not know what a bishop is, and this is because we are so confused about authority. Being under authority is good for us, and it is a fundamental part of the good news of Jesus Christ. A bishop is quite simply our trainer and our disciplinarian, given to us by our Lord, to train, discipline, form and disciple us. He and his discipline is good news, central to the gospel and to our salvation. We are not left alone, but in Christ we are now to be shaped, moulded and loved, by the Church, the whole Church, the whole historical tradition and worldwide catholicity that is the body of Christ. This Church has authority over us for our sake, to bring us up and make Christians of us. But the Body of Christ is not a merely theoretical or amorphous authority that we choose to receive as we want, that we may choose the acceptable and discard the unacceptable parts of. It is a specific sets of authorities, and indeed one specific authority, one person, this bishop. The bishop was chosen, by Church, for you. You were chosen, by Christ, for the Church, for the world. The logic is exactly the same. We have to put up with you, and receive you gladly as the gift of Christ to us. So individually we don’t choose our bishop, our teacher, but they are imposed on us, by the Church. Of course we are under many authorities in the Church, but this one particular person, the bishop is all these authorities conveniently packaged in one person, whom you can ring and go and see. (In your church, the bishop is called the Moderator, or the Superintendant, or something similar).

The snag is that our (Church of England) bishops forget how to be under discipline. They forget how to take discipline themselves, and so they forget how to give discipline. They don’t know how to lead or disciple us. No one ever tells them that they are the discipline of Christ for us – and we seldom pray for them. A Church without real leaders and disciplinarians is as confused and unhappy as children without parental discipline. They don’t know where the boundaries are, and so are always pushing a bit further to se if they can find them. Each episode of childish misbehaviour is a question to their parents. Do you love me? Show me, grasp me more firmly. So with bishops, if our bishops don’t push back, and reprimand us, it may be because they love us too little. Let us pray for them, and whenever you see your bishop, remind him of who he is and what he has to say to Church.