Showing posts with label Priesthood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Priesthood. Show all posts

Monday, 1 March 2010

Evangelicals, priesthood and elitism

A lot of what I have written about ministry over the last few days has been ‘thinking out loud’ (for the last posting, see here) — and whilst I don’t think I’m at the end of the trail, I do think I’ve reached something of a personal milestone.
Some time ago, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali caused some controversy when he said that there are “virtually two religions” in the Church of England. He was referring, of course, to the long-standing divide between conservatives and liberals, and although this division is endlessly nuanced, in the end it is clearly present.
I have now reached the (interim!) conclusion, however, that we must overlay on top of this divide between “two religions” another divide between ‘two ministries’ — in short, two ‘priesthoods’.
On one side of the divide are those who view the Anglican priesthood as essentially ‘functional’. The priest is someone given public authority to do what any Christian can do, as it were ‘in the privacy of their home’. Ordination therefore confers on the priest nothing other than this authority, and any accompanying prayer for the grace of the Holy Spirit is simply that the priest may perform this function of priesthood properly and effectively — just as we might similarly pray for a newly-arrived teacher or a local mayor. For sake of simplicity, we will call this the ‘priest as presbyter’ model, bearing in mind that the English word ‘priest’ derives from the Greek presbuteros, or ‘elder’.
On the other side are those who take the view that the Anglican priesthood is essentially ‘personal’ (the technical term is ‘ontological’). In ordination, the person being ordained is, as it were, ‘made into’ a priest — he (or she) is no longer quite what they were as a layperson, and is not simply ‘authorized’ by ordination, but is changed and ‘empowered’ by it. The views on this ‘empowerment’ may vary, but the essential characteristic is that priest and laity are in some way separated in what they are, not just in what they do. We will call this simply the ‘priestly’ model, since for most people, the word ‘priest’ conjures up exactly this ‘set apart specialness’ of someone different from the layperson.
Now of course, there are nuances also to these distinctions. There are many jobs, for example, in which it is hard to separate the office from the person. A policeman, for example, is always a member of the police at all hours of the day or night, whether on duty or not. Again, a fortunate person may find themselves in a job for which they were, in a sense, ‘made’ — such as the skilled teacher or compassionate carer. The clergy are very fortunate in often being able to find their niche in this way.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the two views are clearly distinguishable. And the important thing is that they overlap the other distinction between liberal and conservative.
In particular, there are traditionalist priests and liberal priests — both sure of their ‘separateness’ and of the fundamental importance of their own ordination to their relationship with God, with the Church and with the world, but both (as Nazir-Ali observed) operating with entirely different theological assumptions at almost every other level. Importantly, this overlap also includes ‘evangelical priests’, who, for example, see themselves having a singular importance in relation to the sacraments, not simply a particular role.
One finds rather less overlap between traditionalist and liberal presbyters. Indeed, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually encountered the latter. On the contrary, the insistence on using the actual term ‘presbyter’ is something I have only found in the most ‘straight’ of strait-laced evangelicals. However, there are undoubtedly liberal Anglican priests for whom what they do outside the framework of liturgy and church is a fundamental expression of their ‘priesthood’ — as theologically important to them as celebrating the sacraments.
To repeat: the key point is that the ‘priesthoods’ overlap, rather than simply distinguish, the theologies.
The recognition of these two ‘priesthood’ models is important, however, for two pressing reasons. The first is that it directly affects whom we will admit to the priesthood and on what basis. The second is that it directly affects what we expect this person to do, and therefore how we will train and equip them.
Now the problem as I see it at the moment is this: the Church of England desperately needs, and indeed is increasingly demanding of its ministers, a predominantly ‘functional’, ‘presbyteral’, approach to ministry. However, it is deeply committed to the personal, ‘priestly’, model of ministry. We are thus calling people on the basis of their ‘personal’ characteristics, and training them to function accordingly, whilst what we need is predominantly ‘functional’ ministers, completely unlike what has gone before, enabling others to share their ‘presbyterate’.

The final point I want to make at this stage, however, is that for all evangelicals our whole practice of ministry is infused with the ‘image’ of the personal priest. The result is that even whilst we may decry the ‘sacramentalism’ of the  ‘priestly’ model, we imbue the  ‘presbyterial’ model with an almost unconscious elitism! Later, when there is a bit more time, I want to post on the implications of this for Anglican ministry.
John Richardson
1 March 2010
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Saturday, 27 February 2010

A church halfly reformed?

Update: for a 'full on' presentation of the 'Catholic' view of ministry, see here, and for confirmation that this is by no means confined to the Church of Rome, see Peter Ould's (Anglican) blog here, to which I owe the link.

When I began what has now become a series of articles on the Anglican ministry, I set out rather like Abraham in Hebrews 11:8, not knowing whither I was going. Now, in this post, I feel that I’ve arrived somewhere that has a certain feeling of inevitability, even though it wasn’t where I expected to be.
After due consideration my conclusion is this: what we have in the Church of England is a Catholic structure of orders, operating on Protestant principles, upheld by an Erastian authority. This is surely a recipe for confusion!
The godly prince
Let me take the last point first. By ‘Erastianism’, I mean basically ‘the exercise of supreme authority by the state in the affairs of the church’. And I would want to observe immediately that this was not the original nature of the ‘Henrician’ project at the time of the English Reformation. For if we look carefully at contemporary statements about the authority of the monarch, we find a fundamental assumption, preserved in our Articles but no longer in our laws, that authority to order the Church in matters of doctrine was derived from God through the monarch, rather than inherent in the state.
Thus, in his speech at the coronation of Edward VI, Cranmer announced both to him and to the assembled listeners,
Your majesty is God’s vice-gerent and Christ’s vicar within your own dominions, and to see, with your predecessor Josiah, God truly worshipped, and idolatry destroyed, the tyranny of the bishops of Rome banished from your subjects, and images removed. (Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, Ed J E B Cox [Cambridge: The Parker Society, 1846, reproduced by Regent College Publishing], 127)
This power belonged to the King as of right. As Cranmer had said earlier in the same speech,
For they [kings] be God’s anointed, not in respect of the oil which the bishop useth, but in consideration of their power which is ordained, of the sword which is authorised, of their persons which are elected by God [...]. (ibid, 126)
Nevertheless, the key to the English Reformation at this point was what Article XXXVII, ‘Of the civil magistrate’, calls “godly princes”. Thus godliness (specifically, Christian and un-Roman godliness) was an attribute which it was assumed all King’s should display if they were to fulfil their calling under God. Hence, as we have seen, what was intended in Henry’s day was not an ‘Erastian’ state control of the Church, but a godly society, ruled by the godly Prince, under whom the ‘temporal’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ functioned with the monarch’s authority.
An Erastian authority
Over the course of time, however, the authority of the monarch was gradually diminished. Just as gradually, the original Church of England of Henry’s day, intended to be the same everywhere throughout his dominions, became a denomination — something neither Henry nor Cranmer would have welcomed. Throughout this process, the established Church fought to retain its state-sanctioned privileges. The unintended consequence of these developments, however, was that the Church of England found itself under the thumb of a mixed, and in recent decades increasingly secular, parliament.
By the 1950s, senior appointments in the Church of England were thus virtually in the hands of the Prime Minister and his Appointments Secretary. And as recently-released correspondence has shown, whilst these duties were generally taken with utmost seriousness, the considerations behind the appointment of bishops were in every sense ‘political’. Thus from the years of Harold Macmillan, we have a revealing letter from his Appointments Secretary. It is worth quoting at length:
The first and greatest problem [in September 1960] is the See of Canterbury, and here I see only two candidates of archiepiscopal stature: the Archbishop of York ([Michael] Ramsey) and the Bishop of Bradford ([Donald] Coggan).
Here it is fair to remark that the Archbishop of York has not settled down happily alongside the present Archbishop of Canterbury. He never seems quite to have got over the relationship established at Ropton [sic, Repton public school], where Ramsey was at school when Fisher was headmaster.
They are men of a very different type and live on entirely different planes. Ramsey is less worldly and a more distinguished theologian than Fisher. He knows absolutely where he stands on all matters of doctrine and theology. Fisher likes to have his own way and is sometimes unpredictable in his actions and judgements. His capacity is prodigious and he hates to delegate. None of this makes him an easy man to work with, and Ramsey is not the first to suffer these difficulties.
I mention this relationship for two reasons, partly as a warning that Fisher’s view of Ramsey ought not to be taken altogether at its face value, and partly to explain why Ramsey, during his five years as Archbishop of York, may appear not to have grown in stature to quite the extent that was hoped when he was first appointed. He nevertheless remains the outstanding figure in the Church of England today. He is, of course, a definite high churchman, but I have not gathered any impression amongst people of a different way of thinking that he is in any way intolerant of their point of view.
The Bishop of Bradford, Donald Coggan, is much younger (51 in October) but is coming on fast, and is about the only member of the Bishops’ Bench who earns unqualified praise from all quarters. He would make an excellent Archbishop of York, if it were decided to move Ramsey to Canterbury. He would also make a possible Archbishop of Canterbury if it were decided to leave Ramsey at York. He is too big a man to have any definitive party allegiance, and has grown from an evangelical background into a central churchman. His evangelical background would provide a balance to Ramsey’s tendencies in the opposite direction, and together they would be a truly representative pair of Archbishops.
One fascinating aspect of this is that Coggan was always (even in my memory) regarded by evangelicals as definitely ‘one of their own’, whereas the establishment clearly regarded him as one of their own — a man who had “grown” into “a central churchman”. But, above all, we should notice, in the last sentence especially, the deliberate intention to produce balance. Erastianism in the Church of England was not so much about the imposition of doctrine as the imposition of tone. The Church would be a moderate body, kept so by the appointment of moderates, from differing backgrounds, but not prone to any “party allegiance” (though Ramsey was an acknowledged “definite high churchman”, he was not, note, “intolerant”).
Protestant principles
We must move on, though, to the second element of the Anglican ministry, namely its underlying Protestant principles. Here again, though, we must be careful what is meant. I do not mean the theologies of Calvinism or Lutheranism, much less the views of Calvin or Luther! Rather, I refer to that streak of individualism and independency which has, at its best, been a defining strength of the English character, and at its worst makes each man (or woman) what Robbie Low memorably called a pope in his own front room.
The most obvious effect of this inchoate Protestantism is that the Church of England clergy have never exercised that grip on the laity enjoyed (for better and for worse) by the Catholic priesthood. The Church of England has, in the past, used the law to enforce attendance, but it has never been able to rely simply on the power of the clergy to command or to sanction.
There is, however, another, and less obvious impact, which is that the same Protestant attitude is taken up into the ordained ministry itself. Thus, Low spoke also of the person who is pope in his own parish. And this does not apply only to protectionism with regard to the daily practicalities of ministry (whereby, for example, a parish priest can for the most part, in a very un-Catholic manner, effectively ignore his or her bishop, even when he or she does not have the freehold).
More importantly, the parish clergy bring (and indeed are encouraged to bring) the same individualistic attitude to doctrine as do the laity. Thus it is a long time since newly-instituted clergy were required to ‘read themselves into’ their new appointments by reciting the entirety of the Thirty-nine Articles from the pulpit. But it is even longer since they were actually expected to believe them “in the plain and full meaning thereof”, as the preface requires.
Indeed, for some considerable time the Church of England had a common, national (and indeed international) liturgy, but an increasingly local (indeed parochial) doctrine, determined in practice by whoever wore the senior dog-collar. The current ‘local difficulty’ in The Episcopal Church’ may be seen as the logical outcome of this attitude.
Catholic orders
In all this, however, the Church of England has outwardly maintained the ‘Catholic’ threefold order of ministry: the deacon as probationary priest, the priest as the one solely authorised to administer the sacraments (lay Readers can, of course, fully share the ministry of the Word), and the bishop as the one who rules a diocese and ordains the clergy.
Yet this is done despite a conscious disavowal of the pre-Reformation understanding of priesthood. One only has to look at the tortuous justifications put forth by the House of Bishops in their report Eucharistic Presidency for denying celebration of Holy Communion to authorised laypeople, to see that the Church of England’s position is formally unlike that of Roman Catholicism. Here, there is none of the clarity that a priest is given at ordination a ‘charisma’ that the laity do not have. Instead, the position of the report is that,
... presidency over the community’s celebration of the Eucharist belongs to those with overall pastoral oversight of the community ... (Eucharistic Presidency: A Theological Statement by the House of Bishops of the General Synod (London: Church House Publishing, 1997] 49)
It is thus the function of the ‘priest’ in relation to the parish which notionally gives him or her the ‘exclusive’ right to celebrate, not the ontological nature of Anglican ‘priesthood’. And yet, of course, the argument wobbles as soon as the assistant curate, or a visiting minister, celebrates in the absence of the priest-in-charge or incumbent.
The whole thing is desperately confused, and yet at this point so is the Church of England. We deny the Catholic doctrine of priesthood, but we attempt to retain the Catholic privileges of priests.
Where from here?
Logically, then, there might seem to be only two places to go: the Church of England must become more Catholic or more Protestant.
The former is, of course, the position of the Oxford Movement and its inheritors. In this respect, it is surely significant that the movement itself began in response to a perceived unwarranted interference of the state in the affairs of the Church, when the government of the day decide to abolish a number of Irish bishoprics. What began as a protest against the diminution of the Church in public life, however, (Keble’s Assize sermon repays reading) could not end, finally, in full union with Rome, despite years of work by the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission.
Instead, the Protestant principles of the Church of England, and the wider Anglican Communion, have inevitably asserted themselves, not least (some would say) in the admission of women to the Church’s orders.
Logically, therefore, the Church of England, minus those who accept the Papal offer of an Anglican Ordinariate, ought to become more Protestant. Yet to do so ought to mean to become more biblical — at least according to the Church’s own self-definition in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. Otherwise, it will surely suffer the same fate as other institutions, such as the Quakers or the Unitarians, which may have begun well but which, divorced from Scripture (though notionally reliant on the Holy Spirit), have declined into a vague ‘spirituality’, unrecognizable as historically Christian.
We may therefore take the view of the Puritan, William Fuller, that the Church of England is still “but halfly reformed”. Yet a full reformation would surely involve a radical reassessment of Anglican orders — of which the ‘probationary’ diaconate should surely be the first victim!
There is, however, a third option. And in reality is seems to be the one the Church is most likely to adopt, namely to sit, as it always has done, rather awkwardly on the theological fence. This is the much-vaunted, though historically revisionist, position of Anglicanism ‘between Rome and Geneva’. And, arguably, it has served us well in the past. The Church of England has been, variously, a chaplain to the nation for those so inclined to see it that way, and an excellent boat from which to fish for those who take a more evangelistic approach to ministry.
The trouble is, fence sitting is, by its very nature, indecisive. And the Church of England may be about to face making decisions which will challenge its fundamental character at the same time that the nation has decisively turned away from the Church that bears its name. Fence sitting is written into the Anglican character. But it is not an inevitable outcome of history. We may already be in the time when we must choose whom we will serve.
John P Richardson
27 February 2010
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Sunday, 19 July 2009

Entertaining doubts on a Sunday morning

This morning I found myself stepping down from the pulpit with a sense of doubt. These were not those ‘nagging’ doubts about God or the gospel —they usually come at about 4am, and I have learned to treat them as one does ‘mood swings’. No, this was a much more determined doubt, a ‘Have we got it right?’ doubt, an ‘Are we barking up entirely the wrong tree doubt?’, indeed a ‘Have I spent my whole life on the wrong cause?’ doubt, to do with Anglicanism.

To make matters worse, the reason was my own preaching. We’ve been working our way through Mark, and I had meant to spend just a few moments on 6:34, just before the feeding of the five thousand: “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.”

The plan was to point out to the congregation the link with Ezekiel 34, where the Lord condemned Israel’s ‘shepherds’, and then chapter 22 where we read about the conditions in Israel: corruption in high places, falsehood amongst the priests and prophets, and then in 22:29, “The people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the alien, denying them justice.”

However, I’d forgotten my notes (or rather I’d printed off last week’s sermon instead of this week’s) so I was ad-libbing slightly, and I began addressing the issue of social injustice. Here, from memory, is roughly how it went:

“The failure of the leadership —the shepherds —in Ezekiel’s day had created injustice,” I observed, “And we see much injustice around us in the world today. But look at what Jesus did when, in his day, he saw the people as ‘sheep without a shepherd’.”

“What would we do in the same circumstances?” I asked. “Surely we would try to address the causes of injustice. But what does Jesus do? It says, ‘He began to teach the many things.’ But how would this help? The answer is that injustice is, in the end, caused by people, and so by teaching the people, Jesus was addressing the injustice.”

“But Jesus was not addressing the rich and powerful. So how would that help reduce injustice? Because he was empowering the poor by what he taught them. And that is the best way to reduce injustice, because there are more poor people than rich and powerful people. So in England, in the eighteenth century, the Wesleys empowered the poor, not the rich and the powerful, by preaching the gospel to them and empowering them, and they changed societies and communities.”

But as I was preaching, I could feel at the back of my mind a realization that what I was saying didn’t quite work. So often, the gospel has not changed society, because it has not empowered people. And my doubt is this: whether Anglicanism, and specifically the Anglican understanding of priesthood, will always disempower people, and can therefore never really change society.

As evidence of this, look at all the fuss that is made about ordination generally and women’s ordination in particular. Where in the pages of the New Testament do we ever find a heated discussion about ordination? Circumcision, yes, but ordination?

And then what about the link between ordination and the sacraments? It is no wonder people want to get ordained in the Church of England, if this is the only way you can, literally, get your hands on sacramental ministry. Hence women’s ordination is an issue of ‘justice’ because ordination is power. But where is ordination an issue in the New Testament?

I simply do not find convincing the argument that Jesus passed this on as an ‘apostolic’ ministry at the Last Supper. Michael Green, when he was principal of St John’s Nottingham, used to point out how in the Corinthian correspondence a great deal was said about the Lord’s Supper and the need for discipline, but nothing about who should ‘celebrate’ it. As he said, can you imagine that in a situation parallel to what we find in Anglicanism today?

So I found myself with my head in my hands after the sermon (people probably thought I was praying) wondering if we haven’t got it all wrong. How is the Church going to empower the poor, when the ‘rich’ —the rich in talent, and learning, and leadership qualities, and language skills, and the ability to work the middle-class ‘system’ of Bishops’ Advisory Panels and DDOs —monopolize the ministry of word and sacrament? Surely this is why the Church of England has never truly reached the poor in this country (except through works of ‘charity’, done in a condescending way and never really making a difference) and why only truly ‘indigenous’ ministry from the poor to the poor can work to transform the poor, such as we see, for example, in the best of Pentecostalism.

In short, am I simply part of the problem —along with all my dog-collard brothers and sisters —because merely by being what I am, I stifle the life of the Spirit by creating a dependency culture? Am I not colluding in the power structures, even whilst I try to preach the gospel for the poor? Are we not just as fearful as the religious leaders were in Jesus’ day, that if just ordinary people took on the privileges of priests and bishops then we would lose our influence?

I note that in Acts 4:13, the Sanhedrin saw that Peter and John were ‘agrammatoi kai idiōtēs’. The NIV translates this, ‘unschooled, ordinary men’. A more blunt version would be ‘ungrammatical idiots’. Would you and I trust them with what they were doing? I ask again, “What would Jesus do?”

Revd (still) John P Richardson
19 July 2009

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Tuesday, 7 July 2009

Further reflections on the FCA launch

Correction: It has been pointed out to me that it is not correct to say, as I have below, that "the platform and presentations did not feature any ordained women". In fact, the gospel was read by an ordained ( priest) woman, the Rev Erin Clifford, Associate Minister at St Michael's Chester Square, and one of those offering prayer was Rev Carrie Sandom ( a deacon), now based in London. This doubtless will not satisfy some people, but it does put things in a (slightly) different perspective from what my comments may have suggested.

On the second evening after the ‘Longest Day’ (the July 6th launch of FCA UK, which, as I’ve said before, was a bit over-packed), I find myself reflecting that the Church of England may be in even worse trouble than I imagined last night —and that was bad enough.

The reasons for this lie in three reactions to the day I am picking up —two of them simply disappointing, and one of them more challenging.

The first reaction is the not-unexpected, but still sad to behold, visceral dislike from those who have been hostile to GAFCON and were inevitably therefore going to look askance at FCA. These I would generally characterize as ‘liberals’ from all wings of the Church, as well as most wings of the media. Since their opprobrium was inevitable, however, one tends to greet it with the sense that if these are the people one has upset, one has probably done at least something right. Nevertheless, it is still sad.

More disappointing, though, is the response of some who were there as supporters, yet who didn’t feel their ‘side’ was sufficiently represented.

Personally, the lack of ‘balance’ is something I have already noted —and it was not just a matter of breadth of churchmanship. However, this was a launch, not a last word, and on other days the swings may compensate for the roundabouts. More importantly, FCA is attempting to bring together groupings within the Church of England which have a past history of open conflict, yet without compromising or ‘fudging’ their integrity. (In this, I would argue, it is being more bold than anything attempted by ‘Open’ Evangelicalism.)

If this is to become a reality, all of us are going to have to swallow some things which we find unpalatable, and there will be times when ‘our’ point of view takes second place. For me, one such moment was seeing rows of ciboria, neatly labelled as containing so many ‘hosts’, waiting for the end-of-launch communion. The Protestant in me still finds such manifestations of ‘Catholic’ spirituality slightly uncomfortable —but hey, that’s life. Or at least, it will be life if FCA as presently conceived is to succeed.

By the same token, however, I made sure I wore my dog-collar to London (not something which Conservative Evangelical clergy are generally inclined to do), specifically because I wanted to take seriously the sensibilities of Anglo-Catholic clergy who would be there and whom I might meet.

The third reaction, however, is more serious because it is the most challenging. It concerns the ordination of women, but not necessarily in the way people might think.

It has been observed, both by supporters and opponents of FCA, that the platform and presentations did not feature any ordained women [but see correction above], and that, indeed, several known individuals and organizations opposed to the ordination of women were in evidence.

The latter cannot be helped. The truth is that FCA, and GAFCON before it, is attempting to embrace both viewpoints. That being the case, those opposed to the ordination of women will (inevitably) be welcomed, seen and heard. This is not, after all, the House of Bishops or the General Synod!

However, the more challenging reaction is from those on the Anglo-Catholic side who have complained about the very fact that FCA is trying to treat this as a ‘second-order’ issue —one, that is to say, on which Christian brethren can agree to disagree.

Indeed it is rather ironic that at this point Traditionalist Anglo-Catholic and Liberal ‘others’ share the same point of view —in the eyes of both, women’s ordination is a first-order issue, standing in the way of full cooperation with those who think otherwise.

It may, therefore, be the case that FCA cannot finally work, not because it contains those who accept and those who disagree with women’s ordination, but because it cannot contain both those who view this as a first-order issue and those who do not.

The matter is further complicated by the fact that, for Conservative Evangelicals like myself, ordination itself is not a first-order issue. Indeed, I once remarked, slightly tongue in cheek, that this was why I could happily sit down with Anglo-Catholics who have a view of priesthood and sacrament which I regard as somewhat beyond the Pale of true Anglicanism. It is because I don’t think ordination is worth that big a fight that I don’t think someone’s (in my view) extreme position on ordination is similarly worth a major falling out —not when I find myself agreeing with them on so many other things. To illustrate it from another angle, I have previously enjoyed Christian fellowship with Seventh-Day Adventists whose views of the Sabbath are, I think, quite misguided, because I found them to be co-believers in Christ and co-belligerents for the gospel in a very tough situation.

By the same token, however, I can also accept ministry —including sacramental ministry —from an ordained woman, even though I might have serious reservations about women’s ordination generally and women’s consecration specifically. In this respect, it is genuinely, for me, a second-order issue.

However, I have considerable difficulty with those for whom the acceptance of women’s ordination is a first-order issue, especially when the worthiness or otherwise of any enterprise or event is judged by whether or not the women on the platform or the organizing committee were ordained women. To me, this is to elevate ordination to the point where you are not at the ‘pinnacle’ of spiritual development unless you have been endowed with that ‘quality’. Frankly, it smacks of the old concept of priestly ‘character’. Someone who insists at this point that I must see things their way is making a demand with which I simply cannot comply.

And so I find myself surveying the Church of England on this second post-FCA evening with rather less confidence (even) than I had last night. If the FCA cannot work because we are too defensive about our own positions, that will be bad enough. If it turns out that women’s ordination has become a first-order issue on both wings of the Church —the Traditionalist and the Liberal —then those of us who are presently ‘in the middle’ may well wonder if the institution can truly embrace a diversity of views. The only other alternative, I suppose, is that we must adopt the same position ourselves, whichever may be the side on which we come down.

Revd John Richardson
7 July 2009

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