Tag Archives: Church of England

Church without God

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A Church of England parish is hosting The Sunday Assembly, whose vision is: “a godless congregation in every town, city and village that wants one.”

From here:

_70838730_sunday_sanderson_croppedSt John the Evangelist in Leeds can rarely have hosted such an ungodly meeting.

The Sunday Assembly – dedicated to providing “the best of church but without God” – was on the latest stop of its UK tour.

Spilling out through the open door of the 400-year-old church came voices united in a rendering of Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.

Inside, a couple of hundred people – average age about 35 – clapped rhythmically, swaying in the venerable pews.

[….]

The event is a brazen copy of a church service.

As well as emotional and uplifting songs, there was a talk from a woman who had turned her life around by volunteering, another from a scientist about the human propensity to misperceive reality and a minute’s silent reflection.

During a rendering of Dire Straits’ Walk Of Life a collection was taken.

“We both wanted to do something like church but without God and we just nicked the order of service,” admits Mr Jones.

A Church of England vicar was in attendance to pick up tips for developing a nuanced view to the more crass beliefs of Christianity, stumbling blocks such as the Virgin Birth and Resurrection:

Canon Adrian Alker’s job is to attract people like Andy to the Church of England by fostering imaginative new ways for it to practise and explain Anglican Christianity.

He accepted that many in the Church’s target audience have become disenchanted with what they perceive to be compulsory but dubious doctrines – such as a belief in the birth of Jesus to a virgin and that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead.

Canon Alker said the answer was not for the Church to place less emphasis on God, but actually to make more effort to explain a more nuanced idea of what God was.

“I think doctrine does develop,” he said. “It wasn’t born in Palestine 2,000 years ago. I think there should be open discussion, and [there] often is, about these core elements of the Christian faith.”

Canon Adrian Alker doesn’t seem to realise that we have already tried that in Canada. The Sunday Assembly bears an eerie resemblance to – not just a tofu hamburger – the Anglican Church of Canada. It:

  • Has no doctrine.
  • Is radically inclusive. Everyone is welcome, regardless of their beliefs – this is a place of love that is open and accepting.
  • We won’t tell you how to live, but will try to help you do it as well as you can.
  • Most of all, have fun, be nice and join in.

How the Church of England should compete with Wonga

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Wonga makes short term loans to people at exorbitant rates. The idea is that the loan is repaid on payday: it is a payday loan company.

Justin Welby wants to “compete Wonga out of business” by creating church assisted credit unions. The problem is, it will take ten years to accomplish; meanwhile Wonga is approving 10,400 loans a day and makes £1.2million a week in profit now.

After lending more than a £1billion in a year for the first time, it now plans to expand by encouraging customers to buy luxuries they would otherwise struggle to afford.

Its ‘Pay Later’ deal allows borrowers to buy ‘higher value goods’, such as furniture or a dishwasher, for up to £1,000, with an up-front charge of 7 per cent of the price.

The idea of buying luxuries we “would otherwise struggle to afford” was not a problem that afflicted my family as I was growing up. Post-war rationing made ½ a pound of butter a luxury, afford it or not; my parent’s lives were not so devoid of meaning that they felt the need to fill the emptiness with “luxuries they would otherwise struggle to afford.” Not so for many people today, I fear.

In trying to set up competing credit unions, the Church of England is foolishly engaged in trying to beat the world at its own game: for some reason, it will keep doing this – possibly because it has forgotten what its own game is – and it always fails.

If Justin Welby really wants to compete with Wonga, preach the Gospel – the real Gospel – and give people meaning and purpose in their lives so that they don’t have to yield to the impulse of attempting to fill their vacuous existence with luxuries that they don’t need, can’t afford and won’t satisfy.

The last word in bumper sticker theology: WTFWJD

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wtfwjdIt comes from an Anglican vicar rather than Richard Dawkins. The ‘What The F*** Would Jesus Do?’ bumper sticker is a creation of the Reverend Alice Goodman.

Goodman pointed out that she gave Rowan Williams a ride in her car and he didn’t raise an eyebrow. How could she tell – surely they don’t move?

The Venerable John Beer, Archdeacon of Cambridge, reckons ‘Christianity has a long tradition of open debate where people can bring their differing views and share their perspectives.’ I reckon that a vicar who thinks she will stimulate open debate by resorting to a vulgarity, whose overuse has rendered it meaningless, is unhinged.

Rev Goodman: if you really wants to stimulate – not necessarily open – debate, try WTFWMD. M=Mohammed.

From here:

Goodman A female vicar yesterday insisted she has not sinned against God by putting an obscene bumper sticker reading ‘WTFWJD’ on the back of her car.

The Reverend Alice Goodman stuck the sticker, standing for ‘What The F*** Would Jesus Do?’, on the back of her red Subaru Legacy – sparking outrage from members of her parish.

But the Reverend insists the sticker is harmless and even the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams was happy to accept a lift in her car in the past.

The sign – a play on the Christian motto ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ – has offended some of the worshippers in the Fulbourn and Wilbrahams parish in Cambridgeshire where Dr. Goodman is the rector.

But the American-born vicar, 54, claimed she was simply using an Old English word.

She said: ‘F*** is not a blasphemy, it’s a vulgarity, an Old English word.

Vicar wants to be accessible to all faiths

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Perhaps it’s just me but, short of claiming to work for the Diocese of Niagara, I can’t imagine much that I would find less inviting than a vicar proclaiming himself to be dynamic and accessible to all faiths.

The Reverend Andy Cain not only makes these boasts but also wants to create an inclusive support network of community champions, a phrase of such concentrated prosaism, it gives me the shivers.

Rev. Cain busies himself with things like “inter-faith” –  akin to the “inter-net”: 90% incoherent, 9% squabbling and 1% unverifiable fact – being non-judgemental, utopia now rather than heaven later, and Gandhi quotes.

I’m sure he means well, though.

From here:

A dynamic vicar, inspired to take up the cloth following a near death experience, is aiming to unite different faiths and create an inclusive support network of community champions.

The Reverend Andy Cain took up his role as the vicar at St Mary’s Church in Cuddington – “a church that was already doing okay but was seeking a greater community focus” – he said in September last year.

The 37-year-old, who was born in Carshalton, is not only focused on diversifying what the church offers to its Anglican community, but on bringing different groups together – regardless of their religion – to “significantly impact the area for the better”.

He said: “Many people give a significant amount to the community.

“I need to find those people are encourage them more, to become great ambassadors for the community.

“I see myself as someone who meets, encourages and drives community champions.

“I would like to be part of the growing spirituality of the community, but want to be accessible to all faiths and none.”

The church bat problem

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From here:

Bats are destroying British churches, the Second Church Estates Commissioner Sir Tony Baldry told Parliament. Speaking in response to a question from the member for Bury North, Mr. David Nuttall (Cons.) on the “ effects of bats in churches”, on 4 July 2013 Sir Tony said the “present situation” of 6400 churches infested with bats was “simply unsustainable.”

“A small number of bats living in a church can be manageable, but parish churches are finding an increasing number of bats taking up residence in large roosts. There are significant costs in financial and human terms to those who worship in these churches, and to the wider community,” he said.

[….]

He [Sir Tony Baldry] told the House [the] bat infestation was “not a joking matter…..”

I’m not laughing – really.

When I was in Britain around 15 years ago, I took a walk to Roath Park Lake close to where I used to live. To my surprise, I noticed a few Canada geese floating serenely on the water; “aren’t they lovely” someone next to me said. “Lovely”, I agreed with a smirk; apparently Canada had been exporting some of its excess wildlife. Just wait a few years when they have gone forth and multiplied and are pooping all over your well-manicured trails, I thought.

I’m sorely tempted to bring a few limey bats back to Canada and introduce them to the Anglican Church of Canada.

Worsening Wonga-gate

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It seems that the Church of England has investments not only in Wonga but in gambling, tobacco, pornography and arms dealing, not to mention alcohol – I expect that is just communion wine, though.

I think that the real problem is not so much what the church invests in, but how much it has to invest in the first place. An organisation that wastes no opportunity to heap opprobrium on a secular government for not doing enough for the poor, is sitting on £5.2billion which, instead of distributing to the poor, it invests, taking advantage of the capitalist system of which it disapproves, at the highest possible interest rate, all the while venting its indignation on Wonga for – that’s right – charging the highest possible interest rate.

From here:

It also emerged that the Church’s ‘ethical’ rules allow it to invest its £5.2billion assets in firms involved in gambling, tobacco and alcohol.

Even firms involved in arms dealing, pornography and human cloning are not barred from receiving Church investment.

The Archbishop confirmed the Church had a £75,000 stake in US venture capital firm Accel Partners, which injected capital into Wonga in 2009.

Justin Welby and the sexual revolution

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In his presidential address at General Synod, Justin Welby spent some time ruminating on the idea that Western society is in the middle of a sexual revolution. It’s amazing what the clergy notice when they put their minds to it.

Society has been in the middle of a sexual revolution since I was a teenager in the 60’s. Then it was all about having as much sex as possible with the opposite sex; later it was about having sex with members of the same sex; we are now at the point where it’s about having sex with many people of any sex, preferably simultaneously. The clergy are just catching up to the second point.

What is strange about Justin Welby’s address is his apparent surprise at the sexual degeneration rampant in what are probably the dying embers of Western Civilisation, the implication that the church is under some obligation to recognise it as wholesome, the idea that the church should be swayed by cultural norms and, perhaps most odd of all, the hint that one cannot be simultaneously opposed to same-sex marriage and the hanging of homosexuals in Iran.

Altogether, a rather outré performance:

The social context is changing radically. There is a revolution. It may be, it was, that 59% of the population called themselves Christian at the last census, with 25% saying they had no faith. But the YouGov poll a couple of weeks back was the reverse, almost exactly, for those under 25. If we are not shaken by that, we are not listening.

The cultural and political ground is changing. There is a revolution. Anyone who listened, as I did, to much of the Same Sex Marriage Bill Second Reading Debate in the House of Lords could not fail to be struck by the overwhelming change of cultural hinterland. Predictable attitudes were no longer there. The opposition to the Bill, which included me and many other bishops, was utterly overwhelmed, with amongst the largest attendance in the House and participation in the debate, and majority, since 1945. There was noticeable hostility to the view of the churches. I am not proposing new policy, but what I felt then and feel now is that some of what was said by those supporting the bill was uncomfortably close to the bone. Lord Alli said that 97% of gay teenagers in this country report homophobic bullying. In the USA suicide as a result of such bullying is the principle cause of death of gay adolescents. One cannot sit and listen to that sort of reality without being appalled. We may or may not like it, but we must accept that there is a revolution in the area of sexuality, and we have not fully heard it.

The majority of the population rightly detests homophobic behaviour or anything that looks like it. And sometimes they look at us and see what they don’t like. I don’t like saying that. I’ve resisted that thought. But in that debate I heard it, and I could not walk away from it. We all know that it is utterly horrifying to hear, as we did this week, of gay people executed in Iran for being gay, or equivalents elsewhere.

Vicar thinks school prize-giving is un-Christian

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My first form mathematics teacher introduced himself to his new class by informing us that a few years ago – in Victorian times, in actuality – a middle class young man who left school without any tangible abilities could always, as a last resort, find employment as a vicar in the Church of England. Clearly he was unimpressed by the prospects of those he saw before him. His name was Mr. Gower; he emitted an aura of cynicism which, even at the tender age of eleven, I found appealing – unless it was aimed in my direction.

Little seemed to give him greater pleasure than mercilessly berating hapless Christians who had the misfortune of being in his class; he used to ask whether they had received “a visitation” – I thought it great fun. Attending Morning Assembly was compulsory, yet I noticed he was never there. If it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me I decided so, as a burgeoning atheist, I demanded to be excused. To no avail: the headmaster informed me that the government compelled him to compel me to attend – there was no Equality Act in those days. It put me off Christianity for the next 20 years.

I digress. Mr. Gower’s view that the Church of England provides last resort employment is still in evidence in the educational theories of the Rev Dr Hugh Rayment-Pickard. He believes that schools should be run without the benefit of competition or rewards, leaving students entirely unprepared for any normal work, and thus fit for little other than jobs as Church of England vicars where all they have to excel at is managing the decline of their denomination.

From here:

Prizegiving ceremonies that recognise the achievements of outstanding pupils should be scrapped from Church schools because they are ‘un-Christian’, a clergyman has said.

The Rev Dr Hugh Rayment-Pickard argued that singling out the brightest pupils for praise left those students not receiving prizes with the ‘gently corrosive sense of being not quite good enough’.

Dr Rayment-Pickard, who co-founded an education charity with the aim of getting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into university, said prizes cultivate an ‘individualistic and competitive attitude to success’, which he described as being at odds with the ‘servant ethics’ of the Christian kingdom.

 

New Church of England plan to attract people: a Pagan Christian church

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From here:

As part of its drive to retain congregation numbers, the Church of England is training its clergy to create a “pagan church” where Christianity will be “very much in the center,” a British newspaper reports.

The mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion is seeking to create new forms of Anglicanism with which people of alternative beliefs should feel comfortable, according to The Telegraph.

“I would be looking to formulate an exploration of the Christian faith that would be at home in their culture,” the daily quotes the Rev. Steve Hollinghurst, who is advising the denomination in its new endeavor, as telling the BBC.

What the church is looking at is “almost to create a pagan church where Christianity was very much in the centre,” he adds.

I have bad news for Rev. Hollinghurst: the Anglican Church of Canada has been telling people they can believe whatever they like while concealing Christianity in a centre that no-one ever seems to find for decades. The result has been that potential congregants choose a belief that tells them that it is better to stay in bed late on Sunday morning than attend a church that can’t confidently convey a coherent Christian message.

Church of England gives up fight against gay marriage

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The truth is, there never was much of a fight. Western Anglicanism is dominated by comfortably tenured bishops whose interests lie in swimming with the cultural tide while indulging in leftist dabblings from the safely of their ecclesiastical plousiocracy. It is more fun to criticise banks than to stand up for traditional marriage. In Anglican Newspeak this is known as prophetic social justice making.

From here:

In a short statement, the established Church said that the scale of the majorities in both the Commons and Lords made clear that it is the will of Parliament that same sex couples “should” be allowed to marry.

The Bishop of Leicester, who leads the bishops in the House of Lords, said they would now concentrate their efforts on “improving” rather than halting an historic redefinition of marriage.