When the terrible death toll from Covid 19 reached 100,000 in the UK, it was understandable that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York were asked to speak on various media platforms as leaders of the national church. Indeed Justin Welby has had much to say during this pandemic, calling for co-operation amongst the nations of the world to ensure that all countries receive vaccine supplies. The archbishop has spoken up for poorly paid care staff, he himself has been a volunteer chaplain at a London hospital.

The imagination should be allowed a certain freedom to browse around. —Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action

Basic religious faith is a vote for some coherence, purpose, benevolence, and direction in the universe. Unfortunately, the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good.

I worry about “true believers” who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Saint Teresa of Calcutta (1910–1997) learned to do. Doubt and faith are actually correlative terms.

'When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, even as I was also fully known.’ (1 Corinthians 13:11-12)

I have always treasured these words from Paul's letters to the Corinthians, although probably more so because of his use of the mirror metaphor – the mysterious idea of seeing things dimly at present or as a fragmented reflection of reality – and not so much because of his stress on the process of 'manly' maturation, allegedly required for personal spiritual development…

What follows is the response of a rural churchwarden to a deanery plan about ministry and the push, yet again, for more giving for the “quota” (MMF / Parish Share or whatever it is named). These thoughts were sent not only to deanery members but to the diocesan bishop.

First the Plan. We are invited to discover what is the ‘unique selling point’ of our church. There is much about how to attract more people into church and there is, unhappily I feel, a conflation between ‘rejoicing in the generosity of God’ and canvassing the congregation to put more into the collection plate. This is a marketing plan really, overlaid by biblical quotes employed as straplines. The bishop is quoted as saying ‘’ business as usual could well be the death of us’’. He is quite right and yet this is business as usual, the same preoccupation with targets, fundraising and congregational footfall!

On the 28th of August 2020, the BBC’s medical editor Fergus Walsh published an article asking the public whether it was “time to move on and get back to normal life?” Now, as I write this blog on the 19th of January 2021, having not left the house for more than an essential shopping trip for a number of weeks, I think it’s safe to say the answer was no.

After twenty years ministry in the Church of England, my wife, Sue, and I and our two boys Fergus and Patrick (19 and 20) and the two dogs left our vicarage of nine years and moved to a post in the Church of Ireland, on the west coast of County Clare.

I ONCE heard a college chaplain talking to students about the word “salvation”. He went for a humanistic definition. Salvation, he said, was really a word for fulfilment. It meant that our personal journey of self-discovery was destined to arrive in a good place. Such a definition tuned well with what were then current expectations about the inevitability of personal and social progress. Life is a journey. Things get better. It even echoed the “inalienable rights” enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

January

Withering and keen the Winter comes,

While Comfort flies to close-shut rooms,

And sees the snow in feathers pass

Winnowing by the window-glass;

Whilst unfelt tempests howl and beat

Above his head in chimney-seat.

John Clare

We all know the future. It is online, home delivery, click and collect, view on demand. It is goodbye high street; farewell butcher, baker and Bricklayer’s Arms. But is it also goodbye church?

Normally Christmas is bumper season, not just for toyshops and turkey farmers. Three times more Britons – 2.3 million – go to church on Christmas Day than on any normal Sunday. Families who never attend parish church all year don their Sunday best and troop to a carol service. Teenagers party before midnight mass. It is churchgoing’s Black Friday.

This year, our movements and communities demonstrated that we can and will do things differently.

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness." ― Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, 2007

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the whole earth with a lever. —Archimedes

Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BCE), a Greek philosopher and mathematician, noticed that if a lever was balanced in the correct place, on the correct fulcrum, it could move proportionally much greater weights than the force actually applied. He calculated that if the lever stretched far enough and the fulcrum point remained fixed close to Earth, even a small weight at one end would be able to move the world at the other.

“I owe Christianity a huge debt,” the best-loved living composer of Christmas music said. “And it is rather ungrateful of me not to believe in it more.” John Rutter’s sweetly singable modern carols, anthems and large-scale choral works have filled churches and halls around the world since the late 1970s. The New York Times even dubbed him, a little impiously, “the composer who owns Christmas”.

Yet the choirs’, and congregations’, favourite describes himself only as “friend, fellow traveller, and agnostic supporter of the Christian faith”. He has problems with God as a controlling deity: “a bit like a Mafia don who is capable of doing good and charitable things, but also almost takes pleasure in doing malicious and harmful things”. Covid-19 might surely count as one of those mafioso stunts. Undaunted, the tireless and selfless Rutter has just written a new seasonal piece, Joseph’s Carol, in honour of the scientists who worked on the Oxford vaccine. It premiered in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre last Friday.

Our recent meditations have considered meanings of advent and Christmas. How Advent can be our awakening more fully, our becoming more present to the deepest parts of ourselves, our values and our silence, our hopes and our fears, our joy and our passion for making justice, healing and compassion happen. To love therefore.

We have also considered how not only are we re-born on Christmas more fully as “other Christs,” but we are ourselves are called to be birthers of the Christ (or Buddha Nature or Image of God) in a special way in this season. We are called to do what Mary did in our time, culture and historical moment.

So it seems right to ask the question: What is this Christ (Buddha, Image of God) we are choosing to birth into our hurting world at this time of solstice, darkness and silence? I invite the reader to ask yourself that question.

I will attempt my partial answer to the question here.

There is the view on the right of Anglo-Saxon politics that market forces are the only real engine of economic growth /the EU single market. It may be “single” but it is also heavily regulated. Indeed, there is more than a trace of Catholic Social Teaching in this philosophy

THERE IS only a Westminster because there was once also an Eastminster. The Abbey of St Mary Graces was founded by Edward III in 1350. Dissolved in 1539, its shrine has been restored inside the local Catholic Church of the English Martyrs, in the parish of Tower Hill.

The streets around this church in east London contain stark contrasts of wealth and status. At the height of the pandemic, Pope Francis spoke of the “ordinary people – often forgotten people” who were “in these very days writing the decisive events of our time”. Coronavirus was revealing how our common life was sustained by “doctors, nurses, supermarket employees, cleaners, care givers, providers of transport, law and order forces …”. These are all well represented in Eastminster today.

This paper prepared by Dr Sarah Horsman MB ChB, Warden of Sheldon, July 2020 in collaboration with Aston University Research Team including Dr Carl Senior FBPsP and Dr Alena Nash.

This is the first ever empirical analysis of the lived experience of the Clergy Discipline Measure.

Read report here:

Emerging research findings on cdm

‘Christianity’ is clearly a spectrum, and we might always be better to speak of ‘Christianities’. On a scale from literalist/evangelical to radical/humanist, the former Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church is just slightly more orthodox than I am, but not much! He is ‘a Christian without God’, as he says at the end of this thrilling book. But he has not yet ‘returned the ticket’. Mine is sitting on the mantelpiece and might yet end up in the fire! Apart from his earliest work, which he now recants, anything by Holloway is always well worth a read and I still return to ‘Doubts and Loves’ (2001) on a regular basis. It’s a brilliant exploration of how to hold onto some kind of faith when so much makes me want to abandon it entirely.

His ‘mission’ is to make the Jesus story believable in the modern world. It is an urgent task, far more important than fancy flow diagrams and lists of allegedly innovative strategies. Dare I say, even more important than the endless sexuality debate. It’s the message, not the medium, which needs to be addressed.

LLF is framed in such a way as to offer the possibility of, and hope for, greater agreement between the sharply divided factions within the Church of England, based on the six Pastoral Principles for Living Well Together (4-5). The prior question is whether the framework provided in and by the book can do this. Unfortunately, I don’t think it can, for at least three broad reasons.

Read full article here:

Living in Love and Faith review Adrian Thatcher

All of the work that we did together on #5WeeksTooLong led to some really important changes. However, there are still many things that we can do to improve not only UC but other benefits and legislations that are pushing people into destitution.

I never cease to be amazed at the CofE's facility for scoring own goals. A report in The Yorkshire Post, by Grace Newton, highlights that Leeds Diocese spent £530,000 on a six-bedroom house for the vicar of Yorkshire Dales parish