Ash Wednesday

What kind of Lenten discipline does my heart and soul seek this year? I yearn to inhabit more deeply my experience of God in which I feel called and invited to live by love, grace, Spirit, by the infinite, eternal, transforming, creative, sacred energy of life.

In contrast there is the Church, with its expectation of prayerful discipline through Lent and the suppression of pleasures, desires and addictions. The Church is an institution which requires people to live by rules and laws (Biblical or otherwise) creating in the process categories which include and exclude.

Far from encouraging people to live into and believe in the sacred energy of life the Church divides the human community in categories of people in which some are less entitled than others to the fullness of their humanity.

Today’s lessons can be read as providing support for a disciplined Lent but I found evidence for a contrary perspective when I read them this morning.

Isaiah 1.10-18 rejects as futile the countless sacrifices and idolatrous ceremonies and instead encourages the people to do good, pursue justice, guide the oppressed; uphold the rights of the fatherless and plead the widow’s cause. But it was the next verse, 19, which caught my attention: “... you will eat the best that earth yields.” The problem is, the first half of the verse will be taken to support those who believe Lent is about following the rules: “If you are willing to obey ...” it begins.

1 Timothy 6.6-19 concludes with an invitation to fix our hopes on “God, who richly provides all things for us to enjoy.” We are exhorted "... to do good and to be rich in well-doing ...” and if we follow the advice, we will “... grasp the life that is life indeed.”

Luke 15.11-end is of course the parable of the Prodigal Son. As I read it, I wondered why the Church drills verse 21 into us: “Father, I have sinned against God and against you; I am no longer fit to be called your son” rather than verse 20: “While he was still a long way off his father saw him, and his heart went out to him; he ran to meet him, flung his arms round him, and kissed him.” This is the God I yearn to encounter and who in truth I do encounter, but often with no thanks to the Church, especially since I’m a gay man.

My life task, the task I will adopt this Lent and for the remainder of my life, (in the words of James O’Dea who I heard speaking in North Reddish, Manchester last Sunday) is: “... to grow and deepen our awareness of the concentrated living essence which has the capacity to align us with our own core. And not only to wake up to who it is we really are but who we can become in those moments when greatness, wisdom or unusual generosity are called for.”

My project for Lent may seem to be very different from the traditional Lenten disciplines but I suspect it is something which resonates with many more people than the fasting tradition and is in truth much closer to the teaching of Jesus who clearly experienced in his body, heart and soul a tender intimacy and love which is the essence of his Father.

Writes James O’Dea:

“These moments when you are picked up and carried towards the seemingly infinite reserves of essence are a reminder that the truly great adventure in your life is the fullest realisation of your inner wholeness and where it wants to take you.”

“When you begin to surrender to ‘I don’t know’ you break the control that false certainty has over your life. Admitting doubt is a dimension of the authentic journey of faith.”

My faith, my spiritual life, is anchored in an hour of deep attention every morning where I discover an inner awareness that is carrying me through all of life’s many challenges and difficulties. This is a faith which has no need of an intermediary between me and my Life, life in all its fullness, eating the best that earth yields. This is Life filled with a raw, elemental energy - a truly spirit-anchored, inner, soul life.

Jesus’ reply to the Pharisees in response to their question about the greatest commandment in the law is: ‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” That is the greatest, the first commandment. The second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’

For those of us who have or are struggling with deep anxieties about whether or not we have been created as we experience ourselves in the core of our being – lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender – or who are haunted by the many prejudices of the Church against us, leading us to question whether our SELF is to be honoured, loved and cherished, James O’Dea’s statement about the first commandment needs to be internalised and trusted as a true reflection of Jesus’ teaching – to love our neighbour and to love God as we love ourselves:

“The first commandment is ‘Be yourself.’ It is a commandment which strikes terror in the hearts of many. We wonder, ‘Do I have permission to be myself? How will I be received if I am really myself? Is it safe to be myself? Who am I?' And sometimes we find ourselves utterly amazed: ‘Wow, how did I achieve that? I had no idea I was capable of such things! Where are these incredible ideas and feelings coming from? What is this charged feeling I have about my own destiny? How do I stay true to myself?’

I pray that all followers of Changing Attitude, our supporters, trustees, patrons and the Director himself; will have a holy, healthy and creative Lent in which we are enriched and nourished by a deepening awareness of God’s tender love in the very core of our being.

Colin Coward

The Church of England’s dramatic disconnect

The George Careys, Michael Scott-Joynts and Andrea Minichiello Williams (recently elected to General Synod, Director of the “Christian Legal Centre”) of the Church of England think that Anglicans (their type of CofE Anglican, of course) are now a persecuted minority that need protected legal status.

To me that sounds like an acknowledgment of reality – and failure. Just under 3% of the population attend Church of England services once a month and under 2% attend worship weekly, statistics show. We are indeed a minority, with seats in the Lords, the Established Church of our country, with a status and privileges way beyond our significance. It’s difficult stand back and gain a realistic picture of where we, Christians in general, C of E in particular, fit into British society. It is clearly even more difficult for those living with privileged status like bishops and retired Archbishops.

It’s difficult for Anglicans at the parish church level as well. I meet with a local support group once a month to talk about my work for Changing Attitude. The conversation is often about frustrations at the local as well as the national and international level. At the last meeting, we talked about the congregation to which most of us belong. Why is it so difficult to capture a vision of Christianity inspired by Jesus’ teaching and prophetic ministry? Why do so many feel they are just going through the motions?

My answer is that we are all victims of our normative environment, family, school, locality and church. We internalize values and ideas and they become ‘normal’, self-referential and self-reinforcing. The way we have come to read and interpret the Bible becomes normative, the way we worship, pray, conceptualise God, all become not just ‘normal’ but universally true.

Those of us of a certain age carry assumptions and expectations about church life and worship which we can see no longer work, when we are able to ‘take them out’ and examine them. There is a deep frustration and disillusion among many, of which church attitudes to sexuality and relationships are but one symptom.

It is hard for people to understand what their frustration is about and even harder to have any vision of what action they might take to change it for the better. That’s because the church is locked into maintenance mode (fabric and financial) and is on the defensive, as Carey and company repeatedly show us.

Even younger and supposedly more alert bishops like Tim Thornton, recently moved from Sherborne to Truro, can write an article about civil partnerships and marriage for the Daily Telegraph which is defensive and badly argued. He talks about the blessing of ‘homosexual practice, to put it in crude terms’ which is, from Changing Attitude’s perspective, to put it in very crude terms indeed, Tim.

Bishop Tim thinks the most significant thing is the danger of a confusion between different things, marriage and civil partnerships, which, “if we open ourselves up to blurring that difference ... would be unhelpful for all concerned.” This is a problem for a minority, for bishops who spinelessly toe the line and other Christians who still think gay relationships are unlike heterosexual relationships.

The advice to me from his replacement in Sherborne, Graham Kings, is that I should “lie low for the moment.” I suppose Graham wants me to act like a bishop.

From where I sit in Salisbury Diocese, the edifice looks insane at times, most especially around the way the church colludes in negative teaching about LGBT people and forces people into closets which our leaders seem all too willing to hide inside. There is a collusive corruption and deep dishonesty in our Church.

My heart aches and yearns not simply for a change in church attitudes towards human sexuality but for a church which inspires me and nourishes me spiritually and expresses a vision of God which responds to the age we are living into, a future in which God is doing so many creative, new things. What do we get in reality? George Carey, Michael Nazir Ali, Michael Scott Joynt, Andrea Minichiello Williams. God help us.

This is what we are up against. This is what +Rowan is up against. This is what the Holy Spirit is up against - impoverished, defensive lack of courage and imagination. The Church of England is trapped in a dualistic mode of thinking, nostalgia for a time when there was more ‘certainty’, fear of change and difference and of human beings, some of whom might be growing into greater maturity and spiritual depths despite the best efforts of the Church to restrain them and dull their hearts and minds.

Well, pooh to that! I am not a Christian who is a member of a persecuted minority in England and I don’t need legal protection to live my faith. I have a dream of a Christian community that is inspired, imaginative, creative, filled with energy, genuine in friendship and love, open, risk-taking. Rather New Testament, in fact, Christ-like, even Pauline in challenging the old and responding to the new.

So yes to marriage equality and civil partnerships, yes to new visions of God’s activity in the whole of creation (and not just the 2% the C of E tries to numb each week), yes to our campaign for equality in ministry for all, LGBT as well as straight, yes to a passionate, creative Christian witness and vision in the UK that is true to the infinite holiness of God.

Colin Coward

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Dreaming non-dualistic dreams and seeing visions of a new creation

We arrive at the end of 2010 with an ‘us and them’ duality still firmly embedded in the mindset of some Christian leaders. Us and them as in we who are Christians set against Moslems, we who are Bible-believing Christians set against those who have deserted the tradition, we who are faithful to Jesus set against those who have abandoned Biblical teaching, we who are destined for salvation set against those who are following Satan’s path to hell and damnation, we who are heterosexual and happily married set against those sexually licentious lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who are promiscuous and engage in perverted sexual practices.

The Telegraph reports that Lord Carey has written to the Prime Minister. Carey highlights one subject he defines as particularly contentious - the clash of rights between homosexuals and Christians - as if these are distinct groups at war across a great divide.

Lord Carey mindlessly repeats the belief that those who hold traditional Christian viewpoints, “in common with millions across the globe and across history, suddenly find their position labelled discriminatory and prejudiced and then discover that it has effectively become a legal bar to public service.”

In the same vein, the ever-reliable Bishop of Winchester, Michael Scott-Joynt, told the BBC’s World This Weekend: “The problem is that there is a really quite widespread perception among Christians that there is growing up something of an imbalance in the legal position with regard to the freedom of Christians and people of other faiths to pursue the calling of their faith in public life, in public service.”

It doesn’t seem to occur to George Carey or Michael Scott-Joynt that Christians such as myself and the patrons and trustees and supporters of Changing Attitude and the tens thousands of LGBT Christians and their friends and families, hold a very different view of what it means to be a Christian, in deep prayerfulness and with great integrity.

The polarities which these two bishops wish not simply to defend, but extend the reach of, are in my view a danger to the health and safety of individuals, of our society and of the well-being of our planet and the global community.

They want to protect minority traditions, an exclusive idea of God and salvation, an us and them mentality, and a defensive, judgmental system of salvation.

This is not the vision of God’s creative energy and of the incarnation which inspires (too small a word – how about fuels?) my faith and my work in Changing Attitude.

“The Word became flesh; he made his home among us, and we saw his glory, such glory as befits the Father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” John 1.14

“He is the image of the invisible God; his is the primacy over all creation. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created … the whole universe has been created through him and for him. He exists before all things and all things are held together in him. For in him, God in all his fullness chose to dwell.” Colossians 1.15-17, 19

All things are created in the image of God, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and our loves and relationships.

Does the future of creation lie with those who want to preserve, defend and protect old paradigm, dualistic patterns of theology and human relationships? Will the Church continue to judge and find wanting those of us who are simply different from what the majority assumed to be ‘normal’?

Are those of us who dream of a new heaven and a new earth, a new paradigm, who dream dreams and see visions of the things which the apostles and evangelists were inspired and enlightened by, are we going to live more deeply into our vision of the Kingdom of God in 2011?

The apostles, evangelists and witnesses were given revelations into the nature of God and creation which can still transform our emotional, cognitive and imaginative ability to dream our own dreams and have confidence in our vision of this finite creation with its infinite potentialities which can transcend our destructive, dualistic thinking.

Today’s visionaries and dreamers include Desmond Tutu, Esther Mombo, Jack Spong, Elizabeth Stuart, Ken Wilber, Carter Heyward, Marcus Borg, Grace Jantzen, Thomas Moore, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Richard Holloway, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, James Alison, Nomfundo Walaza, Richard Rohr, Jenny Plane Te Paa, Gideon Byamugisha and many, many others.

More tomorrow!

Colin Coward

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Lead us into all truth with words that take shape in our hearts

In 1975 when Canon Nigel Harley, then Rector of St Michael’s Basingstoke where I worshipped, asked me if I was going to be ordained, I had no idea whether I had a vocation or not. I thought about the question overnight, took a risk, and the next day asked Nigel to put my name forward. At each stage of the subsequent selection process I felt a greater conviction that what I was doing was absolutely the right thing.

I didn’t believe in the creeds as factual statements of truth, nor did I believe in the Bible with any greater degree of certainty, the Book of Common Prayer had always been a stumbling block liturgically and theologically and the 39 Articles were archaic. Nor did I have a more coherent or defined understanding of the Eucharist and a conviction about it’s efficacy. The level of my conviction about creeds, scripture and communion remained roughly as they had been formed in my teens and twenties, from reading Honest to God and allied books by Eric James and others, engaging with South Bank Religion, and learning from a holy incumbent and an innovative curate at my childhood church.

My relationship with the creeds, the BCP and the 39 Articles hasn’t grown any closer with the passage of time – quite the reverse. It has always been somewhat indifferent. Their influence on my Christian formation has been primarily negative. However, my relationship with scripture is renewed daily and my eyes continue to be opened and my heart and soul nourished and nurtured by the Bible. My relationship with the Eucharist remains ambivalent. I know it’s good for me to be there but it’s rarely an unalloyed spiritual pleasure – something to do with the words and theology of hymns, the tunes, clergy voices, sermon content, the disembodied, cerebral routine.

I have been formed by daily reading of the Bible, prayer and meditation and a largely intuitive, innate sense of what I’m about as a Christian, living the life without ever quite knowing where I was on the path. I was convinced of certain truths about what it means to be a Christian gleaned from the Bible and the pattern of Jesus, moving more deeply into a contemplative pattern of prayer, rooted in the body, in the present moment, infinite and intimate.

I live by intuition, by an innate sense of who God is calling me to be and become as a follower of the Way. My sexuality is formed in the same way, by intuition and an innate awareness, conviction, of who I am in Christ. Nothing the church teaches is ever going to get in the way of my conviction about the nature of God and the nature of my own sexuality. The church is so, so wrong about my gay identity. From my perspective it is also often wrong about the nature of God, creation and the spiritual life.

Dogmas, creedal formulations, approved liturgies, ‘orthodox’ biblical interpretation, none of these has really inspired my search for the God of love, truth, justice and a life lived towards God. I have been inspired in my life of prayer and by the holy, unorthodox, saintly people who have accompanied me on my journey.

And now I’m reaching a double crisis. The Anglican Communion’s inability to deal with my sexuality is intolerable. Christian (and Moslem) teaching and preaching about homosexuality affects millions of people across the globe, consigning them to lives of fear, hatred, self-doubt, depression, lies and lovelessness. Homophobia describes a global mental and emotional attitude of prejudice and fear of difference. I hate it because it is hate-full, and time is running out for the church because millions of LGBT people need to be freed, now, from the yoke of ignorance and oppression. I’m in crisis because my heart screams with pain for my brothers and sisters whose lives are made intolerable by religion.

The second crisis concerns the way in which the church constructs its identity around allegiance to dogmas and formularies, concepts of sin, guilt and judgement, concepts of God and God’s relationship with the world and creation. We are still so incredibly obsessed by law rather than grace and by rules of belonging. We are tribal, literal in our beliefs, failing to respond to the potentially liberating insights of scientific research and discovery, spiritual renewal and global imagination.

I’m not going to explain this very well, but the God who encounters me and who I encounter in Jesus of Nazareth continues to be trapped by a failure of imagination and courage in the church – and I know it will always be so – that’s the nature of institutions and human systems. But we live at a time when people’s perspectives and imaginations are being transformed by new discoveries. They know there is more to life, to being fully alive and spiritual, than either secular agencies or the churches offer.

The church has become a battleground not just around the issue of human sexuality but for the survival of my integrity and my innate spirituality and faith. I don’t believe for one moment that God is concerned about our conformity to rules and dogmas, creeds and doctrinal formulations that define individual denominations and congregations. What I yearn towards is my immersion in the infinite, divine energy of love, goodness, truth, creativity and justice. Against this there is no law.

The trustees of Changing Attitude meet this weekend for a 3 day residential near York. Reflecting on our faith and spirituality, on the authenticity of our Christian lives and on our dynamic encounter with God which fuels our campaign for justice for LGBT people will occupy much of our time together. Next week I may be able to develop this theme further, with more insight into my own soul and greater clarity about how the Spirit is speaking to the churches.

Colin Coward

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Time for change – in depth

The tensions in the Church of England and the Anglican Communion surrounding the space it allows lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people to occupy is reaching breaking point, I suspect. It is certainly driving many of us LGBT Anglicans who live within this insane dualism to the edge. In civil society we can contract civil partnerships (marriage in all but name) and create social lives which are largely free from anxiety about being gay, adult and equal. In the church we are a problem, a source of tension, guilt and embarrassment, a threat to unity and for some, a sinful body to be healed or an evil to be eradicated.

The practice of the Church of England encourages dishonesty, secrecy, collusion, fear, bad pastoral practice and bad theology. LGBT people either tolerate this unhealthy state of affairs, rail against it, or leave the church.

I don’t have the patience to wait while bishops revisit ‘Issues in Human Sexuality’ – it needs to be binned. I don’t have the patience to wait for the church to opt to treat the key biblical texts about same-sex activity in the same way it has treated texts about divorce, remarriage, slavery, the wearing of hats, the length of hair and the role of women in leadership, let alone the patience for the church to come to a common theological mind about homosexuality.

I want to be part of a church which no longer has an issue with my innate identity as a gay man, nor my visibility in church, nor my relationship with my life partner. I want to be part of a church which has overcome its uncertainty about the place of women and LGBT people in ministry, lay and ordained.

Tensions are reaching breaking point in the Communion, having been stretched in one direction by the Episcopal Church’s election as bishops of a partnered gay man and a partnered lesbian and in the other direction by conservative leaders and networks organising schismatic, transgressive movements.

Two weeks ago I was sent a scan of the Ugandan Rolling Stone front page naming Uganda’s 100 “top” homosexuals, including a picture of Bishop Christopher Senyonjo and a yellow banner saying “hang them”. The report has now been picked up by western media and websites. The Bishop of New York has written to the Archbishop of Canterbury and I’ve been asked whether the Archbishop is going to condemn the naming of and demand to hang Bishop Christopher (who of course is not gay) and the 99 other named homosexuals. Lambeth Palace usually tells me that private representations are being made and that these are felt to be more appropriate and effective than a public statement.

Changing Attitude may have acquiesced in this apparently reasonable justification of behind-the-scenes diplomacy for too long. The risk to the lives, security and emotional and physical well-being of LGBT people in Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, the UK, USA and elsewhere is too serious now for subtle diplomacy to be an appropriate response.

Homophobic individuals, newspapers, governments and churches need to know that the Anglican Communion condemns unequivocally all violence and prejudice against LGBT people (which is the Archbishop’s stated position). The fear of upsetting certain Anglican Primates, bishops and pressure groups inhibits a proper reaction.

In England, bodies have been busy planning their departure for the ordinariate or forming new pressure groups – the Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda or the Society of St Augustine for the Anglican Mainstreamers – or not so mainstream following this development.

Archbishops and Popes and bishops don’t like schisms. They are symbols of unity and managing and containing threats of schism are a high priority compared with naming and condemning threats to the lives and well-being of vulnerable minority groups such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Condemning sexism and homophobia should be a priority, alongside the condemnation of racism, fascism, rapacious capitalism and fundamentalism. The position of the Anglican Communion and the Archbishop of Canterbury should be to unequivocally support the dignity and full inclusion of LGBT people in church and society.

In the Communion, every action taken against LGBT people should be condemned and challenged. The Church of Uganda has allowed Bishop Christopher Senyonjo to be vilified, impoverished and threatened with death in the Ugandan press. The church should have immediately condemned the Rolling Stone report.

In England, LGBT Anglicans must now work towards converting the House of Bishops and General Synod from their various shades of prejudice, intolerance, passive tolerance and active if circumspect welcome for LGBT people into a radical change of church teaching and practice. There should be no discrimination against LGBT people in congregational life or ordained ministry and access to all the sacraments, including the blessing of relationships and the marriage of same-sex couples.

A great deal of time, energy and attention has been given to the parish of St Peter’s Folkestone and to the four bishops who may leave the Church of England to join the ordinariate. Those thinking of leaving the Church of England issue threats and a bishop calls the church vicious, vindictive and fascist because they are negative, against things, ordained women, gay relationships, gay bishops (funny, that one), theologies of justice and peace. Their departure opens up space for people who feel differently, theologise differently and have a very different awareness of how God is active in their lives.

A mini-storm has been going on in the church where I worship following front page stories and pictures in the local paper about the civil partnership my partner and I are planning to contract. Some people have left the congregation, others have arrived, and the balance between conservatives and progressives has changed. Those arriving can’t fathom why the church is so obsessed in a negative way about women and gay people. God is about love, compassion, integration, justice and truth, isn’t s/he? they ask.

The sermon the Archbishop of Canterbury preached in India seems apposite. "Sometimes we have listened to the past," he said. "We have identified ourselves with our ancestors in faith. Sometimes we have listened to our own unconverted hearts and used the church of God for our own ends, welcoming people like us and rejecting those who make us uncomfortable. And when any of those things happens, the Church begins to fall apart. The wounds in the Body get wider and deeper, and we find ourselves giving great energy to justifying our decision not to be together. As we stop listening to one another, we stop listening to Christ. Whether this happens in the name of nationality or tradition or pride of achievement or purity of teaching, the effect is the same tragedy."

It would be easy to say the church is falling apart because it doesn’t unconditionally welcome women or lesbians or gays or bisexuals or transgender people or black people or people from different social strata – people “not like us”. Christians find it very difficult to listen to Christ and don’t find listening to each other much easier sometimes. A Reflections group meets monthly at my church to meditate together and talk about spirituality and faith. The conversation is very tentative because the members are unsure of their experience and of the language to describe their faith. We are learning together how inadequate the church has been in providing us with the resources to go deeper into ourselves and into God.

+Rowan was one of the people who provided me with the basic tools. If he were to focus on one thing which might stop splits from occurring in the Communion, it would be to teach people and churches how to go deeper, really deep into silence and stillness, heart and body and emotions, mystery and unknowing. But we live in a Christian era, internationally, when attending to ourselves and God in depth is one of the last things people want to commit their lives to.

Colin Coward

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Yearning for change in the Anglican Communion - discrimination wrong, affirmation right

I want to add my thoughts to those posted by Christina yesterday on the Times interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Ruth Gledhill’s blog and The Times leader. I haven’t read any of The Times material directly, only what is available outside the firewall, so I may be commenting on inaccurate reports and I’m going to be cautious.

The Archbishop, according to Ruth, seems to have said both that he has issues about a "particular choice of life", which makes the question of gay ordination more problematic than the ordination of women because for women, that’s simply about who and what they are.

I think (though I can’t be sure) that the Archbishop is not saying that being gay is a particular choice of life (because he then goes on to say that gay celibate Christians can serve as bishops in the Church of England) but that a choice to live a non-celibate life as a gay priest or bishop is problematic.

Canon Dr Vinay Samuel has commented on the Archbishop’s interview on Anglican Mainstream. He questions the Archbishop’s assumption that being gay is who some people are, that we are not simply different in the way that some people are male, some female, some white, some black. He claims that there is still “no incontrovertible evidence to suggest that orientation is not a choice but an inherited characteristic … although many liberal proponents used orientation to mean an inherited trait.”

Orthodox Anglicans insist, he says, that gay sexual orientation is “a feeling, a choice or even possibly an outcome of certain psycho-social pressures and upbringing” and “[m]ore than two decades of research in many fields has failed to confirm that gays are born that way.” This is Anglican Mainstream’s belief and Vinay Samuel disagrees with it. He says that “if someone believes strongly that they are gay, the church is not rejecting that self understanding out of hand. It may challenge it but it is willing to accept as the way that individual understands his/her sexuality.”

I believe in the core of my being, my identity in creation and in Christ, that I am gay. To suggest, as Mainstream does, that I am mistaken about my core identity, is wounding and destructive of my whole being. Whatever the Archbishop of Canterbury says about what I am and am not allowed to do as a gay Christian priest, I need to know incontrovertibly, to use Vinay Samuel’s word, that who I understand myself to be is who I really am, and that the Church of England acknowledges my self-identity and the Anglican Communion acknowledges the identity of those across the Communion who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

If there are minority campaign groups such as Anglican Mainstream who wish to argue that I am mistaken in my self-identity, they have to freedom to do so, of course. If the Anglican Communion, in the person of the Archbishop of Canterbury or the other Instruments of Communion, fails to recognise me for who I believe I am, along with tens of thousands of other Anglicans, then our differences are profoundly serious.

The Archbishop says that from his appointment to Canterbury eight years ago he was “conscious” of the issue of homosexuality as “a wound in the whole ministry”. I hope this means that there is a wound in the whole ministry of the world-wide Communion because gay people are present as priests and bishops and parts of the Communion experience our very presence as problematic, a wound – not that being gay itself is the wound.

He said that being gay is no bar to being ordained as a priest or bishop. “To put it very simply, there’s no problem about a gay person who’s a bishop.” I take that to mean that the concerns I express above are answered by the Archbishop. I am gay and I am a priest. But Ruth queries the Archbishop. Is there really NO PROBLEM with being gay and ordained?

There are traditionally, historically, standards that the clergy are expected to observe, such as fidelity in marriage. Lesbian and gay Christians are not challenging the church’s traditional, historic standard of the expectation of fidelity in relationship. We are questioning why lesbian and gay adults who form permanent, faithful, stable relationships should not make vows to each other in the presence of God and our congregation and have our covenant relationships blessed by the church, at least equivalent to marriage.

Ruth asked the Archbishop what is wrong with a gay bishop having a partner. “I think because the scriptural and traditional approach to this doesn’t give much ground for being positive about it. The Church at the moment doesn’t quite know what to make of it...” When asked if the Archbishop personally wished it could be overcome in some way there was silence and then: “Pass.”

It’s true that the Church corporately doesn’t know what to make of it. I would disagree that the scriptural and traditional approach doesn’t give much ground for being positive and here is one of the places that much more work needs to be done.

Is it really so difficult for the Archbishop to say what’s wrong with having partnered gay bishops, asks Ruth. He continued: “We’re in the middle of vastly difficult conversations about it, and I don’t want to put thumbs on scales.” I don’t think I understand what he means by thumbs on scales, but I most certainly understand that the conversations are vastly difficult, and not only in Africa, South America or Asia.

The conversations in my home church in Devizes about our Civil Partnership and the intention to follow it with a Communion service celebrating friendship have been intense. Some people who have been friends for 6 years have shuned me, others have left the congregation. The added pressure on our incumbent became intolerable with the result that he has taken time off. At the micro and the macro level, conversation is difficult and relationships become severed.

I am committed to developing relationships across difference following the example modeled by the Archbishop. It means going out of your way to take risks, cross the street towards people, not the other way in order to avoid them, and turning up in places where you are unlikely to receive an enthusiastic welcome from other Anglicans. The Anglican Communion, local, national and international, is not very good at doing this.

The Times leader says that in seeking a settlement within Anglicanism: “Dr Williams risks diminishing its prophetic voice. If he were to worry less about politics, he might find the resources to strengthen Anglicanism and find spiritual fulfillment of his own. For with his profound theological insight, Dr Williams is better placed than anyone to, in the words of Matthew’s Gospel, discern the signs of the times.”

Rowan’s spirituality and profound theological insight has been a core part of my inspiration since I learnt from him in lectures at Westcott House and more crucially, from joining him every morning in the chapel for 30 minutes of contemplation.

Meditating with other people every day in this way leads into an experience of prayer and encounter with God that has deepened with the passing years and infuses my work for Changing Attitude as much as it infuses the Archbishop’s ministry and role in the Communion. I can’t help but wish, with The Times, that he use his historic role of interpretation in the tradition of Christendom to affirm as a Christian leader and a theologian that discrimination against homosexuals is wrong. I wish for more, of course – that he positively affirm that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are loved by God and welcomed unreservedly by the Church, with our partners, into the threefold ministry.

Colin Coward

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The Global South missionary delusion

Shopping for yam and Knorr chicken stock cubes in Brixton market last week, I was served by a Nigerian guy who had arrived in the UK 10 years ago when he was 22. He asked if I had visited Nigeria. Nope, I said. Why not? I told him that I’d visited Ghana 4 times and felt safe there, but was uncertain about safety in Nigeria. I should go, he said, Nigeria is safer than Brixton. After a few more exchanges, I decided to take the risk of telling him I was afraid to visit because I’m gay and have a public profile. Being gay is not a problem for him, he said. Would it have been a problem when he was in Nigeria, I asked – Yes. Have his views changed as a result of being in the UK? Yes.

In an article for Evangelicals Now entitled The Africans are coming, available on Anglican Mainstream, Canon Chris Sugden writes about the second all-African Bishops Conference in Entebbe, Uganda. He says the African Anglican Church is now going to move on to the front foot and actively promote orthodox Christian faith “from everywhere to anywhere.” They think that the Anglican Church in the West has forgotten or abandoned many of the foundations of the Christian gospel that we brought to Africa. Africa will now take responsibility for bringing that biblical gospel back to the missionary homelands.

Oh the glory of the conservative evangelical world view, shared by Canon Chris Sugden and, as I think he assumes, millions of Anglicans in every part of the world apart from those white, western Provinces infected by the terrible disease of liberal revisionism. Conservatives, of course, are faithful, orthodox and Biblical in a way which I, gay, white and western, am not according to the judgment of Global South leaders. I would like to suggest that their judgment has a tad of a tendency to arrogance.

What they fail to understand in their myopic wisdom is that there are tens of thousands of African and Caribbean Anglicans in this country who do not share the Global South theology and message. Africans living in the UK do not hold the attitudes expressed by some (and I stress that it is not all) of the bishops in Entebbe. Many Africans arriving in the UK and the USA are changed by their experience and revise their views on issues such as homosexuality.

The congregation I served in Wandsworth, South London, was 50/50 black and white, the black members coming from west and east Africa and the Caribbeans from Jamaica, St Lucia and other countries. All of them were at ease with me being gay.

Anglican Mainstream and their allies in the Global South live in a fantasy bubble in which they fantasize about rescuing western Anglicans from our faithlessness and perversion. Such arrogance …

They are not alone in failing to have an accurate picture of the UK, thanks in part to the work of Anglican Mainstream. The Pope is reported as having had an about-turn, saying yesterday that his visit to Britain had enabled him “to see how much the Christian legacy is still strong and active at every level of social life” and how he had the opportunity to get to know “a people rich in culture and faith”. This is in stark contrast to the warning he had issued before arriving and experiencing the UK for himself. He had warned against “aggressive forms of secularism” and an aide had described Britain as prey to an “aggressive new atheism”.

Chris Sugden concedes that none of the conservative primates claims to know or possess the whole truth but continues that church has been entrusted with the “faith once delivered to the saints” and to witness to the truth entrusted to it – as if we in the west do not have such faith but the conservatives do.

There is something appallingly wrong in Chris’s description of African and Caribbean Anglicans who have come to live in the UK. We have long welcomed overseas Anglicans to the UK and treated them as “objects of mission”, says Chris. Well, excuse me, but I have never treated overseas Anglicans as “objects of mission”. I have welcomed them as co-workers in the Gospel. Those who have worked with me would be shocked at Chris’s description of them.

Chris then makes another grave error of ignorance or deliberation. They live here, he says, with children and grandchildren born in these islands. Many have senior roles in public life – members of the House of Lords, leaders of Trades Unions, senior doctors. He then writes about examples of recent months (well-publicised by Anglican Mainstream) of Christians of African origin standing up for Christian witness in their workplace and losing their jobs as a result.

These people are a tiny minority of the African and Caribbean Christians living in this country, who have integrated into UK society and continue to live their faith with commitment and passion, but without some of the prejudices that the Global South would like to import to the west.

Chris quotes Vinay Samuel who asks: “What is the new that the African Anglicans will bring to Britain? What has God given them in their experience in the intervening century which is something that Britain needs?” It’s a question worth asking, because they do bring new perspectives and insights. African Christians do themselves less than justice in claiming to bring back to the UK solely the gospel we have forgotten, says Chris. The African peoples have faced the legacy of slavery, colonialism, racism, their own internal conflicts, the oppression of their own rulers and the challenges of economic poverty. They have a rich understanding of the nature and resources of the Christian faith in addressing such matters.

This is indeed a valuable resource. And we have other, equally valuable resources to contribute. I’ve just finished reading A Simplified Life by Verena Schiller, a member of the Community of the Holy Name who has lived as a hermit in North Wales for the last 25 years. She writes that “Our masks do not fool God but neither are they removed until the time is right and we begin to see them for ourselves. There is a great deal of painful discovery on this journey to where God is the centre and the context.” “[I]n a life that is attuned to the sense that we are not ultimately in control this transformation does begin and we are gradually brought home to ourselves.”

“Through prayer, through attentiveness and stillness at our heart’s centre, we are gradually transformed and begin to discern the way forward, the path to tread. And this ‘transformation’ is contagious; it ripples out in ways of which we are unaware. We respond where we see compassion and love in others. Love stands at the intersection of our inhumanity to one another and our ravaging of the earth, and begin to transform it.”

Verena writes from her roots in the Celtic eremitical tradition. It is a Christian path shared by many in Changing Attitude and amongst those working for a transformed, inclusive church. We in the west still follow an authentic Christian path, steeped in prayer and faithful practice, whatever the Global South leaders may think about us and however much they believe us to be in need of missionary endeavour because we have lost the true Gospel. We haven’t!

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude needs all the help we can get to further our campaign to change Anglican attitudes. To contribute to our work by becoming a supporter, please click here; or to make a donation click here.

Driving to General Synod immersed in the infinite love of God

I should be packing my bags and the Changing Attitude materials for our stand at General Synod in preparation for the drive north at 11am, but blogging is addictive. The blog received 2,500 hits yesterday and nearly 3,000 on Tuesday when the gay Ugandan story was posted.

I was sitting outside my house at 6.50 this morning drinking my second mug of Darjeeling when the Guardian arrived with the headline ‘'Williams under siege over gay bishop veto'. I read the articles by Stephen Bates, Riazat Butt and Andrew Brown and then said the morning office and settled to meditate. For 35 minutes I was more fully present than any morning this week, resting in awareness of the rich diversity and beauty around me and the infinite goodness and love of God flowing through creation, ever present in the reality which is God. I’d previously read this morning’s lectionary passage from 2 Corinthians 4:

It is not ourselves we proclaim; we proclaim Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’s sake. For the God who said, ‘Out of darkness light shall shine,’ has caused his light to shine in our hearts, the light which is knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

This is a deep reality for me as I pray and meditate each morning. It is a deep reality for many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Christians who know in the depths of their hearts and souls the light that shines and the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We are here and now living into the deepest faith and a profound experience of the presence of God. We are not leaving God and we know that God will never abandon us nor any other beings in creation. Talks of splits in the church is, at this level of deep contemplation and prayer, irrelevant, because we know that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

It is in awareness of these deepest realities that I will drive to York and a meeting of General Synod which takes place when the Church of England faces intense media scrutiny yet again over its attitude to women and gays. My prayers are for a decision in Synod which grants the potential in legislation for full equality in the episcopate for women.

My heart was unsettled as I went to sleep last night. My friend Andrew Goddard had emailed, taken aback by my Wednesday blog blaming evangelicals for leaking information from the Crown Nominations Commission. We had sat in the sun in Andrew’s garden in Bristol last Friday, talking mostly about scapegoating. I’ve just read Raising Abel by James Alison.

Andrew commented that I might be fuelling suspicions and speculating in unhelpful ways about who in the Church of England could be to blame, leading to scapegoating kicking in again in powerful ways whether against Rowan or Jeffrey John or Colin Slee or Chris Sugden or whoever.

I take Andrew’s reflection very seriously. I am committed to a path in which I believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection opened the capacity for us to cease scapegoating each other and stop projecting our fear and blame onto other groups. Only, absolutely only, when we cease to do this, do we have the potential to stop the rot and live with others into the Kingdom of God.

Time to pack! I can do no better than sign off with the final sentence from the email Andrew Goddard sent me as I was writing:

Trust that in midst of a pretty traumatic Synod you and all there - especially Rowan! - will continue to know God's loving presence and peace.

Colin Coward - on the road to York

No Time For Turning

Later this month the novelist Michael Arditti is going to address the Spring meeting of the (LGBT) Clergy Consultation, an organisation that also welcomes lay ministers and their partners. http://www.clergyconsultation.org/

Author of The Celibate (1993), about a gay ordinand, and Easter (2000), the chronicle of Holy Week in a north London parish when a gay curate is arrested and a lesbian couple’s daughter baptised at the Easter Vigil, Arditti has done more than most to explore what it means to be lesbian and gay in the Church today, and both novels introduce, or allude to, trans people within the orbit of the main characters - thank you, Michael.

http://www.michaelarditti.com/

Using humour and unexpected historical parallels or coincidences Arditti is a brilliant analyst of the key theological issue of theodicy - how suffering can be reconciled with belief in a God of unconditional love – and also of the effect of the erosion of faith or the loss personal religious convictions, subjects that he returns to in his latest novel, The Enemy of the Good (2009). The possibility of theology after the Holocaust is a constant theme of his fiction (one of his novels, Unity, concerns the Mitford sister who admired Hitler) which, despite Christian settings, contain key Jewish characters and themes (the narrator/ordinand of The Celibate is a convert from Judaism).

I have recently re-read Easter and am now two-thirds of the way through re-reading The Celibate which is set in 1980s Britain. With the media currently full of the General Election of 2010 it was sobering to read the following passage in which the narrator, inspired by the community and solidarity of taking part in a Gay Pride March through central London, reflects on the contrast with Thatcherite rhetoric of that period:

'We condemn ourselves from our own mouths as we’re left to use words that have become as discredited as the era they’ve been made to represent. So society is nothing more than a chimera, socialism anathema, the welfare state the dependency culture and idealism immaturity. While for their own part, political expediency has been elevated to the national interest, historical accident to the natural order, the party in government to the party of government, and their opponents branded the enemy within. The expropriation of language has gone hand in hand with that of faith. So though millions live in abject poverty, they still insist that we’ve been witnessing an economic miracle: as if the Feeding of the Five Thousand were simply to make the best use of resources rather than to share all that we have'.

I must be careful what I say here as Changing Attitude England is a non-political organisation, and also because, in the party leaders’ debate, Mr Cameron, more than once, accused Mr Brown of frightening voters, but I must admit I am frightened by the proposal that vast swathes of legislation will be repealed if Labour loses this election. Of course, the laws in question may have nothing to do those which, in recent years, have brought about greater equality for LGBT people, but I also recall Peter Tatchell’s comment, after describing the impressive number of these hard-won gains: ‘what has been given can also be taken away’.

As Arditti’s ordinand, accompanied by his lover and a friend, walk past the Palace of Westminster, they find themselves near ‘a banner opportunely demanding that we “Repeal the Section”’ a reference to Section 28, draconian legislation that put restrictions on artistic freedom just as it prevented LGBT schoolchildren at that time – like Mark, now in his late thirties who I was talking to only last week - from articulating their desires and learning, from teachers, how to manage them in humane and loving ways.

Whatever the outcome of Thursday’s election, we cannot allow any government to try to turn back that particular clock.

St Paul sowed the seed for a new paradigm for Christianity and the unfolding of a new Christian vision

At the moment, in different areas of my life, in my local parish and Changing Attitude networks, I’m encountering people who are longing in their hearts for something different from the church. Their longing transcends frustration and anger with the church which doesn’t ‘get’ LGBT people and ties itself in knots as it struggles to make space for women in the House of Bishops. Why are we expending so much time and energy on these issues, they ask, to the almost total neglect of people’s spiritual experiences and their yearning for spiritual vision and nurture?

Total neglect is an unfair assessment. There is, in many places in the Church of England, a flourishing depth of prayer and spirituality, but it is often peripheral to the habitual life of the church as manifested on Sunday mornings or in PCC meetings. Teaching and preaching rarely embrace the vision of what it could mean to be fully human and fully alive, as I’m sure the majority of you reading this know only too well.

There is a yearning among Changing Attitude supporters and trustees for a transformation of the church, for the courage to take risks and explore and experiment with language and music, stillness and silence, visual imagery, creative use of space, thinking outside the box – and freedom from those who trap us in a church bent on self-preservation and the maintenance of tradition, addicted to what I would see as peripherals.

St John’s Devizes held it’s AGM yesterday. Most of those who spoke voiced complaints and moaned about this and that. No, said one person, to a reordering of our church if it means making it warm, user-friendly and carpeted like a recently reordered local church. Consider the (poor, hard-done-by choir) said another, forced to robe in the challenging circumstances of finite space. ‘Twas ever thus, and, it seems, ever shall be.

Thank God, therefore, for Clive Larsen and Jenny Clark, one recently appointed, one recently retired as a trustee. Both of them engage me with new paradigms for Christianity and a new unfolding of the Christian vision. They have introduced me to CANA, Christians Awakening to a New Awareness and to the Wrekin Trust.


CANA is a loose-knit community of explorers who have Christian roots and share different experiences and insights for living out the teachings of Jesus in holistic and integrated ways. They are open to the moving of the Spirit to seek and explore God and the spiritual dimensions of life in a way that is open-ended and free from the boundaries that most religious frameworks and structures have imposed.

CANA recognises that we are all one through that of God within us from whatever background we come. It is a group where risk becomes safe through trust and where exploration is key. Everyone’s contribution is a valued part of the whole and none is dispensable. We are challenged to find new expressions of the emerging vision: global, ecological and mystical.

The Wrekin Trust is not specifically Christian. It is part of a world-wide movement towards personal and planetary transformation at a time of major social change. It seeks to awaken and revitalise a spiritual dimension in society and to encourage the emergence of a culture of love, healing and forgiveness, wisdom and harmony with nature.

The Wrekin Forum’s purpose is to empower and support a deeper connection between visionary organizations and individuals whose approach is based on holistic, spiritual and ecological principles. By exchanging ideas and perceptions and by combining resources and skills, a greater synergy can be created.

The Wrekin Forum’s guiding principles are:
The interconnectedness of life and the unity of consciousness
The intrinsic value and potential of each individual
A deep respect for the wellbeing of all interdependent life forms
A planetary ethic of interdependence
The recognition that diverse faith traditions and secular knowledge contribute to our collective wisdom
Mutual learning through open inquiry

The work of Changing Attitude is inspired by many diverse sources, scriptural, traditional, radical and liminal. Jesus, the pioneer of our faith, who descended to earth “… is none other than he who ascended far above all heavens, so that he might fill the universe.” (Ephesians 4.10) He has given us gifts in ministry “… to equip God’s people for … the building up of the Body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity inherent in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God – to mature personhood, measured by nothing less than the full stature of Christ.” (Ephesians 4.12,13)

Both CANA and the Wrekin Trust help me catch St Paul’s extraordinary vision of what it can mean to be growing towards maturity as a person and of the presence of God in all creation, filling the universe transcending all dualism and human divisions. I pray that those pursuing their particular agenda in the Global South may also catch something of St Paul’s sublime, expansive and all-embracing vision of God, woven into creation.

Colin Coward

Working for change in contemplative and activist ways

In a recent comment posted on the blog, Erika Baker, contact person for Changing Attitude in the diocese of Bath and Wells, posed a question that I promised to respond to: “How can you be part of a pressure group created to change people's minds when you can no longer engage in the mind-numbing nonsense that is the de facto baseline of the debate?”

Erika said she had decided neither to get involved in futile arguments nor to allow opponents to set the framework of the conversation. Because there is little intelligent conversation to be had outside the a narrow set of parameters, she has pretty much opted out of the conversation altogether, no longer engaging where Changing Attitude needs to engage.

She ends up “just living, just worshipping, just focusing on God and my neighbour” but in doing experiences gain as well as a loss – and doesn’t know how to resolve the paradox.

I suspect Erika’s experience is common to many. Certainly it is shared by some of the people who I was on a 48 hour silent retreat with this weekend at Abbey House in Glastonbury.

I think that living, worshipping and focusing on God and neighbour are not “justs” - they are the essence. If 599 Changing Attitude supporters are focusing on self, God and neighbour in depth and ‘just’ one is engaging in the conversation, I doubt that our work would necessarily be any less effective.

Having said that, I think that being and doing are both important and of great value, but some may be called to ‘be’ and others to ‘do’, and some to both, and some to one or other at different periods of life.

In truth, the conversation about human sexuality in the Church of England is apparently going nowhere right now, especially for those LGBT Christians who experience a strong connection with God, friends and neighbours, and in the depth of their own heart and soul (though possibly they feel less connected when they step inside a church building or engage with their parish priest and local congregation, let alone bishop or diocesan structures).

We are being held by the church in a conversation that feels futile and which many of us are outgrowing. We are trapped in a dynamic which is spiritually and emotionally unhealthy for us and in truth, for those Anglican leaders and the 40million majority they claim to represent. They do not, as they imagine, represent pure Christian truth and orthodoxy. For a start, the leave no room for those called to leave home and family, security and safety, to journey into the wilderness to encounter God, sometimes in agonizing silence and sometimes in the most profound, loving presence.

I am consciously trying out new possibilities, new options for Changing Attitude, at the moment. One possibility is that we have been doing ourselves a disservice by engaging too much with the arguments and obsessions of those who oppose the full inclusion of LGBT people.

Those who ‘just’ live, worship, focus on God and neighbour, may be effecting changes in church attitudes just as powerfully as those who engage in conversation, dialogue and argument for change. I believe that change is ultimately most effective when generated from the grassroots, and not just by the grassroot activists but by those who ‘just’ are as fully and prayerfully themselves as possible.

The path to God in the depths of our heart and soul is not easy. It can be so much easier to live anywhere else but in the present moment and inside our own thoughts and feelings. Those who claim to be right because they lead majorities and experience dramatic growth in numbers and can interpret the Bible more accurately than anyone else are in truth fools.

Without calling others fools (because that would be to diminish their humanity and denigrate that which is of God in them), Changing Attitude supporters have somehow to live where we are, as we are, knowing that we often experience a profound relationship with God. Prayerfully and patiently we can demonstrate our truth and faith to other members of the Anglican Communion. One day, they will wake up, open their eyes, and see us for who we truly are.

Colin Coward

Changing Attitude’s meta-narrative

The trustees of Changing Attitude met last Saturday and devoted the final forty minutes to a conversation about what I called in my report to the trustees: ‘Changing Attitude’s meta-narrative’. This is an expansion of my original paper, integrating comments from the discussion.

I would like Changing Attitude to tell a more positive ‘meta-narrative’ and I have been puzzling over this a lot in recent months. I have been searching for something deeper and more embracing than the desire for an inclusive church or justice for LGBT people or ‘back to Hooker’.

Changing Attitude has been habitually reactive or defensive in working for change, reacting to conservative initiatives and defending ourselves against accusations and falsehoods. We are also constantly being pushed into a dualistic dynamic, though this is changing.

I am searching for a focus on being healthy and holy – living as mature people, adult, emotionally literate (Rowan Williams used the phrase in an article in the Guardian recently) in contrast to the sin/guilt/redemption/heaven/hell, dualistic, us and them, Christian/Moslem/Jewish/Buddhist dynamic which we still inhabit.

I have a prophetic urge to move to a new phase, creating a more comprehensive description of what is of essence to us as gay-affirming, inclusive Christians. I dream of a bigger vision to match the coherent conservative sin/redemption account, a theology which I believe to be dangerous for the health and future humankind and our planet, let alone our ‘salvation’. This may be too ambitious, but I am fed up with being trapped by conservatives in a narrative which is unhealthy for people and destructive of creation and human relationships and trust.

Our present ways of thinking in the church are dualistic, based on confrontation and competing claims to exclusive truth, not only in relation to different faith communities but between different Christian churches and within the denominations themselves.

From this dualistic, competitive starting point, I have been challenged to move to a different awareness of God – awareness that God is one and creation is one. Progressive Christians are searching for a meta-narrative that describes the unity of creation and the unity of God. We are striving to let go of the dynamic of conflict with those who disagree with our theology of human sexuality. We can be critical and analytical of each other’s positions but we do not need to engage in a competitive dualism.

Time and energy is absorbed in the futile conflicts over human sexuality. We could live together in greater harmony, harnessing the energy of creation, divine energy, to build communities of cosmic consciousness, gathering those who can trust in their own spiritual experience of the spirit within to work in co-creative ways.

We are in a state of emergency within the Anglican Communion. At the same time we as living in an environmental and financial crisis of global proportions. Both are symptomatic of a much deeper problem, the state of our consciousness, how we think about ourselves and conceive our world. We need to be aware of our interconnectedness and live into a new paradigm, living sustainably in harmony with nature and each other and the living universe, birthing a global culture that will endeavour to bring well-being to every form of life on earth.

The trustees of Changing Attitude are among those hungry to become catalysts for change, agents of transformation in God’s creation. This led us to think about healthier ways to be spiritual, a concept that Western Christianity does not always understand and therefore has difficulty encouraging.

The disapproval of human sexual diversity expressed by church authorities leads to a constricting vision and a negative effect on emotional and spiritual health and well-being. Intuitively, we yearn for truth, beauty, goodness, love, but the church invites us to suppress or repress our innate holiness. We are challenge to work with a holistic model of being healthy that affirms our human integrity. To be a healthy person is to be integrating physical, emotional, spiritual and relational dimensions of health.

In Changing Attitude, we believe that to be on a spiritual path, exploring and deepening our relationship with God, is of the essence. Only then can we grow towards being healthy people, people of integrity.

How do we become absorbed in such unhealthy ways of being in the first place? All children internalise the values of their parents, extended family, school, church, society and culture. Human beings are not free in the sense that we all inherit from our childhood and upbringing an embedded mindset that reinforces cultural and religious values. The process is mostly unconscious, and blessed are those who are gifted with or develop an ability to examine what has been internalised. The capacity to reflect on and explore our internalised assumptions and prejudices is an essential ingredient of the path to healthier living.

Tragically the church tends to reinforce the wounds and traumas of childhood by modelling God as a bad parent who infantilises us. There is a huge need for an expansive vision of God who is utterly trustworthy, absolutely the good parent ‘par excellence’. A good parent God could never do the things the Church does to us: encouraging us into dualistic ways of thinking so that we demonise and exclude one another and those we perceive to be ‘different’. A reforming voice is needed that will challenge the church when it projects its prejudices and fears onto LGBT people.

How do we become more healthy? For Christians, prayer and meditation are of the essence. Times of individual or corporate silence, reflection and meditation deepen our connection to ourselves, each other and God. Meditating opens us to a matrix of awareness and relationships which can bring a new consciousness into being. It helps us become aware of the relationship between our inner and outer worlds, a consciousness which can begin to embody the changes we dream of. Transforming our own attitudes through personal reflection and work on self-transformation are essential as we work for change in the church.

Heart-centered awareness underpins our prayer and meditation, involving both rational and non rational consciousness. Without this there can be no true, just and lasting peace in our world.

Deep trust is an ingredient of heart-centered awareness because trust enables us to take the creative risks which are necessary for a just peace, whether personal or societal. To be hopeful ‘we need to do hopeful things', highlighting the connection between hope and action. Without hope it is impossible to continue to be motivated in the demanding struggle for justice in the church. Maintaining hope depends both on inner resources and outer actions.

Factors which have brought about dramatic changes in our perception of our place in creation include the image of our fragile planet seen from space; globalisation, including the telecommunications and the internet; the separation of sexual pleasure and intimacy from reproduction and insights derived from the human sciences, psychology and psychotherapy.

Many of the deep seated beliefs at the heart of each religion need to be challenged. Cooperative thinking is required between Christians and members other faith traditions as well as those working from a secular perspective. Major global problems arise from what people believe or are brought up to believe. Those which run counter to humanist values of peace, justice and equality need to be reframed.

Religions turn the deepest revelations about holiness and justice into norms, hierarchies and rules. The institutional model of relationships is habitually formal rather than spiritual. We live with a model of salvation which derives from Augustine rather than Origen. A growing theological shift is occurring that many people seem to be aware of, albeit unconsciously. We should try to reclaim and reframe the Scriptures which so often have been used against us.

The integrity and health of LGBT Christian people can be difficult to maintain when church authorities repeatedly criticise and deny us. Our challenge is to help LGBT people realise their vision and encourage their faith in their self-worth and in God who loves and cherishes us infinitely.

Networking is a powerful agent of social change. Change is born at the grassroots and networks bring energy to this source of potentially radical change. The power to forge our future lies with ordinary people, with their inventiveness and enthusiasm, who pool their ideas, resources and energy. This is the new force that is able to re-shape world opinion and bring about change. Networks operate through a synergistic process, and result in outcomes that are greater than the sum of the contributing parts. New and more fluid structures are evolving in society and Changing Attitude supporters and local groups need to be connected locally with those who share our transforming vision.

The process of listening in depth, of awareness, openness, and a sense of being guided by the questions rather than the solutions, become tools for transformation.
Significant seismic shifts are having a ripple effect throughout the Anglican Communion. If we choose, Changing Attitude has the opportunity to seize this moment, a paradigm shift from the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant to Jesus’ ministry of baptism into the New Covenant. Today, society appears to lead in areas where the Church was once the bearer of conscience and creative change.

The new scientific-spirituality paradigm, which is so meaningful to many people outside the Church hardly affects those within the Church. We live in a dynamic, ever-changing universe in which 'everything flows, nothing stays still'. Our work requires us to let go of certainties and be less attached to particular outcomes a greater vision of God and creation.

The most comprehensive and lasting peace, whether in the church or the secular world, requires that 'all the voices come to the table' so that a solution can emerge which does not leave some participants as victors and others as vanquished. Changing Attitude must work collaboratively with individuals and other organizations, mutually empowering one another and helping each of us to fulfill more of our potential.

Struggling to live in a flexible tent craving for the infinite

Before picking up yesterday’s thread on ‘betrayal’, I want to reflect for a moment on my own Christian faith and experience. My faith can feel vulnerable and fragile when it is being bashed around by prejudice in the church and the storms which fly around LGBT issues, as they did yesterday and will continue to rage in the foreseeable future. I need to be reminded that I am not isolated or misguided in my attendance on the God of profound depth, stillness and presence whom I encounter in contemplation and meditation each morning.

This morning, before entering silence, I finished reading ‘Unutterable Love: The passionate Life and Preaching of FW Robertson’ written by Revd Christina Beardsley, a trustee of Changing Attitude representing trans issues and experience. Robertson began ordained life as an evangelical but ended up closer to Unitarianism, drawing towards but not embracing the Oxford movement on the way, a theological liberal who trusted his feelings and intuition and explored the relationship between masculine and feminine.

Ideas on p178 of the book express something of my own faith and experience of God and the Christian path I follow. I need reminding of my own core experience when a storm breaks and I find myself hounded towards a prison of false orthodoxy and Biblical conservatism or literalism.

Robertson was a friend of Lady Byron and explored his theology in correspondence with her. He expressed the view that:

“The tragedy was that faith in the Bible, or even a particular interpretation of the Bible, was frequently substituted for faith in Christ, and in those circumstances he agreed with her “’better no Bible’ indeed.”

“Discovering the fallibility of the Bible had led him to seek God within himself and this subjectivity enabled him to feel that his faith was truly his own.”

“His emphasis on religious interiority, supported by the tenets of idealistic philosophy, [will, through introspection], prove that the deepest human desire is ‘a craving for what is infinite.’”

I turned from Robertson to begin reading ‘Trans/Formations’ edited by Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood. Lisa writes in her introduction about Trans-theology, transsexuals and the debate about transgender issues.

“The author of St John’s Gospel tells us that God pitched his tent among us, that is to say a very flexible structure, one that moves with the winds of change, one that is mobile, one that can be pitched in many different locations and one that is permeable yet firm. There are absolutely no fixed boundaries in this performance of salvation history among us but rather an ongoing performance of flexible boundaries which successive generations of believers have tried to fix for their own security.” Lisa refers to Bob Goss: “Christianity does not offer security or even survival; there is no survivability ethic at its heart but rather disruptions to fixed and known cherished ways.”

I am with those travellers in the Anglican Communion who are seeking not to abandon faith in God or scripture but to escape from false security, tradition and literalism and expose ourselves to God who loves and nurtures, draws us irresistibly towards the infinitely divine and on the way, painfully transforms us. I wish, as I am sure +Rowan does, that we weren’t in the middle of this chaos and the painful conflict which infiltrates friendships – but we are.

Betrayed by the Church’s stance on gays

Ruth Gledhill, the Religion Correspondent of The Times, phoned me late yesterday afternoon and interviewed me at some length. The result is an article in today’s paper which pretty accurately reports what I said.

In the interests of total accuracy, ‘a close friend of the Archbishop’ is pushing it a bit, and I was in parish ministry for 17, not 15 years, 3 as a curate at St George’s Camberwell (where Geoffrey Beaumont and Canon Eric James had previously been incumbents) and 14 years at St Faith’s Wandsworth. I didn’t actually tell Ruth that Bishop Mervyn Stockwood knew I was gay. Lowly curates like me didn’t share that kind of information with Mervyn.

I grew up in Southwark Diocese and at the age of 22 became involved with the cathedral and diocesan networks. Southwark obviously had many gay priests then and still does, despite Bishop Tom Butler’s initial reign of terror, a period now thankfully in the past.

When I returned to Southwark from Cambridge to serve my title, two of the bishops were known to be gay and my post ordination training group (in my memory) was between one third to a half gay. The gay sub-set was divided in two – the camp, closeted, Anglo-catholics who sat clad in black in the back row, giggling, and ‘my’ set, those who were less ashamed of being gay and seemed more mature. There was a good support network in the diocese for those gay priests who wanted to engage with each other, reinforced by the twice-yearly meetings of the Clergy Consultation for gay priests convened by Malcolm Johnson.

I have to confess astonishment that at least one of the gay men I remember sitting in the back row is now married and a bishop in the Church of England, but that’s another story. Well, perhaps it isn’t another story but in truth, THE story. The story of what has happened in England in the 40 plus years since I first became involved with the wider diocese in Southwark.

Then to be gay was to be closeted. It was a widely known semi-open secret to those in the clergy networks, the deanery, POT, the bishops. Let’s list those who were my area bishops in the time I was there – Michael Marshall, Keith Sutton, Peter Selby and Martin Wharton. The diocesans were Mervyn Stockwood, Ronnie Bowlby, Roy Williamson and Tom Butler. I was out to all of them. Bishop Roy was hugely supportive at the time Changing Attitude was being formed. The others were all pastorally affirming.

And now? There are still affirming and supporting bishops, but they are in the closet. Some actively encourage their clergy to contract a Civil Partnership knowing that it is healthier and holier to be in a faithful, loving, committed relationship rather than footloose and cottage-or-sleezy-night-club free. There were and are many clergy in the Anglo-catholic black-cassocked, ‘Father knows best’, misogynistic sets in London and Southwark, Forward in Faith to the core, who lived deeply dishonest and unhealthy lives. And there are gay (or ex-gay) bishops, married, acceptable to the hierarchy and those who compile the potential bishop list.

I feel more angry this week than I have for a long time. Mature, intelligent, totally committed LGBT lay people and priests in the Church of England are totally fed up with the context in which they have to minister. They allow themselves to be compromised by church attitudes driven by conservatives, knowing that they could be more Christian, more true to God and themselves, more integrated and emotionally healthy, were they to give up parochial ministry. Sadly, many are doing just that and the church is achieving by a slow process of erosion a reduction in the percentage of LGBT clergy in ministry.

What would the Church of England be like without her LGBT clergy? She might lose at least 10% of those currently in post. She would lose many of her most dedicated, spiritual, reflective, pastoral clergy - and she would be left in the hands of the spineless or the tyrannical, the dishonest, the closeted, the unhealthy.