It’s never a good sign when someone precedes the word “God” with the indefinite article.

Michael Ingham, in his address at SFU on receiving his honorary degree, resorts to this device, as do many who have wandered from the Triune God of the Bible. He intoned, piously: “I believe in a God” – one of many equally suitable anthropomorphised candidates available for selection; we, if we are wise and wish to avoid the horror of “fundamentalism”, should do likewise. It doesn’t really matter whether we choose the same god as Ingham so long as we don’t fall into the trap of leaving out the all-important “a”, thereby excluding all other gods: that would never do.

We live in a time when religious fundamentalism is growing stronger in all faiths and traditions. It is a movement rooted in fear. The answer in my view is not to abandon religious faith but to join the side of religious progress. Religions must struggle for the equality of women. Religions must uphold the dignity of gay, lesbian, and transgendered people. Religions must work to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation. And religions must work together, not against each other, for justice and peace.
I have never believed in a God who was male, white, and elitist. I believe in a God who is engaged on the side of life, often with powerless people, in the struggle against the many faces of death. And that is my invitation to all of you today.

Michael Ingham preached his last synod sermon at the recent Diocese of New Westminster synod.

If reports on the diocesan website are to be believed, it was greeted with adulation:

When he finished his remarks, the prolonged standing ovation partly answered his challenge.

In the sermon he likened the court battles in which he participated and appeared to be only too eager to fight, to “crucifixion”:

I had never been trained in seminary to spend two days on a witness stand in the Supreme Court of British Columbia.

And yet now, twenty years later, many things have changed for the better. We know the word Indaba; we understand something of the depth and complexity of dialogue; we have with us a new friend and companion, Bishop Tengatenga, who has traveled all the way from Africa to build new bridges between the Church in the North and the Church in the South. Out of crucifixion is coming new life.

Having won the court battles and, therefore, not actually having to sacrifice any buildings, Ingham goes on to note that buildings are really not that important after all:

we have a great treasure: it is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a treasure worth far more than all the things we want to cling on to: our buildings, our properties

In spite of the mass exodus of conservatives from the diocese, it is apparent that not all malcontents have fled; murmurings of discontent at the diocese being little more than an ecclesiastical CRA must be rife since Ingham took the opportunity to deny it:

the Diocese” is all of us here. It’s not a group of people somewhere else. It’s not a taxation centre that robs us of our few remaining pennies.

It is only fair to give a departing bishop the last cliché sequence, so here it is; I trust it will move you as much as it moved me:

I realized how insightful and articulate I used to be! But it wasn’t just an exercise in nostalgia. I wanted to see how far we have come, and how much we have remained the same. It’s always a matter of both, not one or the other. We’ve come a long way, but there are miles to go.

From here:

“What’s not widely understood is that the great majority of conservative Anglicans remained part of the diocese of New Westminster,” said Ingham. In fact, moderate conservatives and moderate progressives in the diocese worked to create provisions that no one should be compelled against their conscience to bless same-sex unions and to offer a visiting bishop to oversee parishes that were opposed to the decision. “I’m proud of the fact that a lot of people of goodwill on all sides came together and helped to make it work,” he said.

I doubt that the 800 people in St. John’s Shaughnessy who left the Diocese of New Westminster would agree that “the great majority of conservative Anglicans remained”. Those who did remain were tame conservatives who were duly paraded before synods as a demonstration of diocesan tolerance; no-one in the diocese actually listens to them, of course.

But the reaction was not confined to the diocese or even Canada. Same-sex blessings remain controversial in various parts of the worldwide Anglican Communion, but Ingham says New Westminster’s process of dialogue serves as an example for the Communion. Indaba conversations-an African model of respectful listening and dialogue-are now being used to help heal divisions in the Communion.

“If I have a word of advice, and I did actually say this to Rowan Willliams when he was the Archbishop of Canterbury,” said Ingham, “it is that these things do pass and you do someday find yourself on the other side of these passionate differences. And the way we deal with each other in the midst of them determines the quality of life of the community afterwards.”

To stoutly assert that the storm will soon be over as the church sallies forth into a bright new future of eco-harmony and prophetic social justice making, is a fondly-held liberal self-deception born of the blind optimism of arrogance.

I remember the Diocese of Niagara’s Bishop Ralph Spence in the 1990s peering mistily above the heads of his audience, presumably into a vision of the future that was impenetrable to the rest of us, intoning with an affected piety: “don’t worry about same-sex blessings; in ten years we will be performing them and the fuss will all be forgotten.”

Ingham has also worked to promote interfaith dialogues, including writing the book Mansions of the Spirit. “I’ve seen the whole church move from the attitude, ‘We don’t need to talk to people in other religions; we need to convert them,’ all the way to what I see as a predominant sentiment throughout the churches that we need to understand our neighbours of other faiths much better, because religion needs to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.” That has been increasingly relevant as awareness grows of how religion in its extremist and fundamentalist forms is a destabilizing and violent factor in so many parts of the world, he added.

One important challenge for the church moving into the future is Canada’s increasingly secular society, Ingham said. “Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus are not our competition. All of us, of all faiths, are seriously challenged by secularism, and we need to find a language that can address people whose understanding of the world is highly secularized, where there is no sense of God or the message of Jesus in their cosmology.”

This, in a way is good news. If Ingham and his successors see no need for converting people, the diocese will gradually wither away as congregations “understand our neighbours of other faiths much better”, realise that they actually believe something and convert to their beliefs. By the time the current generation joins the choir invisible, the diocese will be nothing but a disagreeable memory.