My finger tips are raw and my nails are bleeding ......

This has been the bleakest Easter I can remember.

There are a number of reasons for this state of affairs but the single most compelling reason is that I find that having the church as the interlocutor between me and whatever is meant by God is proving more and more unsatisfactory.

This dis-ease arises partly from the fact of being retired: I'd rather do it myself than watch someone else do it badly.

Partly from being fed a poor diet when I do attend worship. The warmth, drama, music, colour of the Liturgy has been reduced to a 'going through the motions' on the part of the overworked and overstretched clergy.

Partly from my being an island of catholicity in a sea of evangelicalism.

Partly from seeing the church which I had served as well as I was able, 'burning myself out in the service of the Lord' as I was instructed by my theological college principal, being reduced to a faded facsimile of itself, reproduced on a Cannon photocopier?

Partly seeing and hearing the 'leadership' of the church twisting themselves inside out in order to pretend that business can carry on as usual when it clearly cannot.

Partly because the social gospel that I believed was the only valid Kingdom expression arising from the Lord's Prayer and my reading the Bible, has been forgotten.

These are the 'six impossible things' that have happened since my Priesting 45 years ago this year and they have left me clinging onto the church by my finger tips, occasionally conducting worship, usually for congregations of five or six people, in cold churches, with no music, moth or rodent eaten vestments and the drama provided by wondering whether, as happened recently at a funeral I attended recently,  a member of the congregation might collapse and need an ambulance.

I overheard the person who called the ambulance answer the question about where they were, when the finally managed to find a signal by standing on a gravestone, by saying 'in the middle of nowhere'.

Which was both literally and metaphorically the case.

I gather from other clergy that whilst some would disagree with me about all this, many would agree.

These six impossible things lead to other dissatisfactions.

It seems to me from my observation that nobody has a Vicar anymore and that the Church of England is becoming markedly congregational in its practises.

When I was living in a previous parish where I was basically a house for duty assistant curate (which interestingly offered me the opportunity for the happiest and most rewarding five years of ministry) I had an accident.

As a result of my accident, which left me hospitalised with a punctured lung and cracked ribs, I wrote in the parish magazine a piece in which I was able to say just what it meant to me to have a Vicar rather then being a Vicar for my six weeks of convalescence.

But now as a retiree in a Diocese I am pretty clear that not only am I not a Vicar but I don't have a Vicar either.

The congregationalism however is qualified by a leadership which consistently requires that those seeking office in the Church become more and more academically qualified. Surely a 'reader' needs to be able to read? And if they are called to preach then they should call on the example of Jesus and take as their subject matter, simple ideas drawn from scripture and illustrated from the stuff of the world around them? You don't need a degree or New Testament Greek for that?

This blog on 'Me and the Church' was preceded by two blogs which I began but didn't take very far, one was called Voice Crying in the Wilderness and the other Prophet Without Honour.

Most of what passes for social commentary emanating from the leadership of the church is woefully under researched and under stated.

Nevertheless it has caused the Government to complain and demand that the church stays out of politics.

The two Archbishops in their public statements seem to approximate to a political broadcast for the Liberal Party when compared with other preachers and church leaders.

Compare the recent essays Rock and Sand, 'fixing the economy is not enough we are told, the market has limits we are advised, solidarity is important, the social compact represented by the welfare state is under threat, the church needs to have a vision'.

I much prefer my reading from Bishop Helder Camara:

'The capitalist empires, with their affirmations of sacrifice for the free world, of defence of private enterprise, of safeguarding order from subversion and chaos, are in fact defending their political prestige and the economic interests arising from it; they are indeed at the service of economic power and the international trusts. The socialist empires for their part are hard and intransigent they do not allow pluralism, they impose dialectical materialism, demand blind obedience to the party, set up a regime of total and permanent insecurity and fear, just like the fascist dictatorships of the extreme right'.

Or:

'When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist'.

When I was a curate in Bolton I once asked the Vicar of Bolton what were his views on the ordination of women. He told me that he didn't have view because it wouldn't happen until after had retired and so didn't concern him.

I always felt that there was an issue of simple justice at the heart of the debate and that the Church should reflect its commitment to that justice being realised for its own sake and for the world.

Now we are seeing something, at least in the English Church, America is different, that somehow fails to reflect or respect that justice and offers a poor example to the world.

As a conspiracy theorist it seems to me that what we are witnessing is not positive discrimination but the failure of due process and cabalistic scheming behind closed doors which honours neither the principles that underpin and argue for the ordination of women and the natural way in which women duly ordained should when it is appropriate be elevated to the episcopate.

What I hope is that the women duly elevated will have the courage and confidence to challenge the Bishop's to behave more appropriately as leaders of a church that is rapidly losing its place in world, losing its influence and hemorrhaging its membership and failing to attract young people into membership. 

I'm still clinging on but my finger tips are raw and my nails are bleeding.

Good Friday 2015

I read Bultmann on the recommendation of our Curate as a relative youngster, certainly before I went to theological college, I was probably about 19 years of age.

It wasn't the easiest of reads for someone who had left school at 15 with 'O' Levels in Woodwork and Geography!

But somewhere or other I gained an impression that whilst de-mythologising the scriptures as an academic, Bultmann was still able to preach the Gospel as 'Kerygma' from his pulpit on a Sunday.

That early exposure to the idea that it is possible to have an emotional commitment to the essential claims of the Gospel whilst retaining an honest and open critique of the gospels themselves has remained with me throughout my ministry and now into my post ministerial retirement.

As a student at Salisbury in the mid sixties I found that I was required to read the same books as everyone else and then attempt to write an original essay on whatever the subject at  hand was. In those days, before Google, it was necessary to go to a Library and find a book, hopefully one that no-one else had found including the Tutor and then write something original.

During a tutorial on The Resurrection we were set a task of writing about what happened during Jesus Passion and the days following.

The book I found, was dusty, dirty and hidden on a shelf in the  local bookshop it was the work of Bishop Barnes.

Barnes was unknown to me but he was a liberal Bishop and in his book The Rise of Christianity he attacked, coherently and cogently, it seemed to  me, many christian claims including the Virgin Birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

So I wrote my essay, echoing much of what Barnes had said, that the body after it was taken down from the cross was tossed into the rubbish pit and lost. That the disciples were scattered, broken hearted and leaderless. And that the real miracle of the 'psychological' resurrection was that the story was first told, then re-told and then gossipped, that Jesus was alive and myth became, what Norman Mailer characterised as a 'factoid'.

I submitted my essay and after a while it was returned. I looked to see whether I had achieved an Alpha or Beta plus or minus but no I laughed out loud when I saw that at the end of my essay he had written one word, 'Balls'!

Clearly Bishop Barnes, liberal Bishop and courter of controversy, was still at it, provoking the tutor from beyond the grave through the medium of my essay, was I 'channelling' the Bishop's spirit? Was he still alive? Had I 'resurrected' him?

Later in a tutorial the tutor asked if I actually believed what I had written and I had to admit that it made more sense to me than the stories in the gospels, and that in some ways the real miracle was that here we were 2000 years later still telling the story of a man who had lived and died and that his story enabled people to live better lives loving, as he commanded, God, whatever that concept means in practise and their neighbours as themselves.

(Interestingly Don Cupitt quotes the Jewish literary critic, Howard Bloom who comments on the J narrative, the founding epic of God written by an unknown author who presents us with a demanding, persecuting, jealous, capricious, enthralling super male ego. Bloom suggests that the author of the J narrative may have been female! Certainly the most difficult aspect of the God we describe today is that S/he should allow evil to persist in the human condition, the most anaemic is the image of gentle Jesus meek and mild).

Later I preached a sermon as part of a college mission and later rehearsed the sermon in a preaching class in the college chapel, the response from the visiting lecturer was: 'that, gentlemen, was the Kerygma'.

I had to go away and look the word up to realise that the lecturer was complimenting me, it was the opposite of 'balls' and means to cry or proclaim as a herald.

Looking back over the forty six years since I my ordination in 1969 I realise that this has always been the tension between my private thoughts and my public ministry.

In my view the commitment to  living a social ecumenism which allows the rich tapestry of the stories from the Bible to mix and mingle, enrich and enliven the equally rich tapestry of human existence to embed the claims of faith in the context of secular reality allows the christian story to have a real and meaningful effect.

I once rehearsed my secular view of the real miracle of the feeding of the five thousand from the pulpit. I suggested that Jesus' breaking and sharing the bread and fish caused a ripple effect of generosity so that those with packed lunches began to share after the manner of a pot luck supper, this caused one indignant worshipper to walk out and then write to say that he could no longer worship with someone who denied 'God's Word'.

Aah well I reflected, we'll just have to manage without you!

This Easter, without an Altar or a Pulpit, there will be no opportunity to preach the Gospel as Kerygma.

But what is more important is to continue to reinforce the power of the Easter story through the secular interpretation of the gospel.

I started with Bultmann and end with Don Cupitt:

'Traditional ecclesiastical Christianity has now completed its historical task, which was always in the end to go beyond itself, exceed itself and become something greater than itself'.

This is still the challenge facing the church to accept and understand that without intellectual honesty and rigour the old myths will continue to fade and without some form of secular interpretation will be rendered meaningless by those who have forgotten them or increasingly never learnt them.

But if the church retreats into its comfort zone, with clergy brandishing irrelevant texts to answer questions that are troubling people or suggesting prayer or attendance at an Alpha Course as the answer, then the church will remain trapped in time, never exceeding itself or becoming something greater.

It is sometimes too easy to wonder whether the Church does actually believe in death and resurrection?