A bad day for the Church of England

So says the Independent and for those of us who work here I suspect it is not just today. I admit, I am more that just a little bit irritated about the disaster at General Synod and am really annoyed at the constant implication that I must be anti-gay because I am a priest – but I am not so disheartened by the news of the census results.
Why? Because if you work in the church you already know that is true. If you walk around in a dog collar you know that people ignore you when you say good morning and look away with either indifference or sheer embarrassment because, by their own estimation you are, at best, nothing to do with them and at worst are hostile to the things which they most value.
I was reading through the Ordination Service earlier and was reminded that priests are called  “to search for his children in the wilderness of this world’s temptations, and to guide them through its confusions.” This led to a somewhat sardonic snort on my part as the most confused institution which I currently have on the horizon of my life is the Church of England, in which I am a priest.
We have completely lost the plot somewhere. Is it that we are trying to be friends instead of the voice in the wilderness, is it that we value the power and privilege of the world, more than the power of God’s Spirit? Or perhaps we are all just a little bit too comfortable?
The census is not a shock, it is not bad news because news is something you do not know – this is something very obvious. People are sick and tired of an institution which cannot deal with real life and real people. Of course, day in, day out, we do deal with very real life in the parishes and too often we wear ourselves to a crisp doing it but as a facade of English spiritual life, as an institution, we are a clanging gong of mediocrity, compromise and vestige.
And the worst thing is, it is not up to us at all, we are simply supposed to be responding to God. We are nearly at Christmas, the news of the Incarnation of Christ is in danger of getting subsumed by our in-fighting. And sadly, the Incarnation is often news (is often new) for our nation and for our church – God made human, God entering in, God returning us to Godself.
It is not up to us to hold God in a small box of our own creation – remember that man in the Sanhedrin in Acts – Gamaliel – if it is of God, he says of the newly emerging church, it will survive. Perhaps we need a little more courage to trust that our God is really big enough to come as a child in a manger – in love and not fear and to trust ourselves to be that love for this nation – if we are of God, doing God’s will, proclaiming and living incarnation and love we do not need to worry about whether we will make it or not – we will be there already.

tint or taint

A few years ago I was asked to preside at a Eucharist which was out of the tradition of the Church who invited me. It was during Lent and they were exploring different ways of using Anglican Liturgy and someone decided a High Mass would be a good idea. This was not going to be a stretch and I was vaguely amused by the deliberate inclusion of having a woman president so I agreed. When I arrived I found, to my horror, that the vestments were borrowed from a Church which I knew to be completely against the priestly ministry of women, they were very distinctive and I had seen them in situ.
My horror was that I respected this other church’s right to their opinion and felt that the priest who had done the borrowing could not have been completely honest in doing so. But now, my patience is wearing thin. Not that I want to thumb my nose at those who are against the ordination of women and neither would I revel in rather childishly being deliberately deceitful or hurtful. But I would really ask that I am afforded the same respect  – if not as a fellow priest – then at least as a human being.
The problem with the robes, of course, was taint. I tainted them by using them – at least I suspect I did. Just by performing a sacramental act as a woman wearing something I almost certainly ruined it.
Hearing the word taint this week is evoking a very different reaction in me. I am beginning to lost patience and respect. Whilst I understand the theological arguments this word is part of a misogynistic apartheid that has no place in the Church of Christ. In no other organization would it be allowable, on the basis of gender, to say that someone, by performing the role to which they are called, they would be tainting and ruining anything.
I would not deliberately force my priestly ministry on those who cannot accept it – but the Church of England has spoken and spoken decisively – women are called to serve Christ as priests just as men are. There will always be those, on an individual level, who, for whatever reason, find receiving ministry from a particular gender easier. But does this still really need to be institutionalized? And certainly, should language, which is veiled as theology , but which is downright hurtful, be allowed to continue.
Women in the Church of England have put up with a lot, especially those called to ordained ministry. We do not choose priesthood just to be annoying, God calls, even through the fog of ancient prejudice.
I do not taint things. I cannot taint things unless somehow Christ’s sacrifice for me means nothing – unless somehow in that holiest of moments, that moment of consecration, God can be overpowered by humanity, and there is no hope in that. Jesus does not stay hidden in the tomb because of me. Bread and wine cannot be changed or not changed because of me. Christ died for all, all are washed in the precious tide, tinted not tainted.
I will accept the taint and malaise of sin, of separation which is just being human, but not because I am a woman – because I am a person, made in God’s image and called to serve in this sacred and blessed ministry.

Boy world

I was recently at a meeting about ministering to men in our churches, and more to the point , those not in our churches. We need blokey things, we were told, places where men feel safe.
All well and good but then the bit that made me fume. The speaker mentioned he had invited the bishop to think about the gender breakdown of one of the groups he spends a lot of time looking at, confirmees, and in particular adult confirmees. As I imagined for a moment looking through a bishop’s eyes I wondered about another group bishops uniquely face and that is ordinands. So,stupidly,because I knew the answer,I asked whether that was a factor that ought to be considered. The fact that from a predominantly female confirmation slate (not a good thing) we move, at least for the workhorse stipendiary clergy, to a still predominently male ordination list.
That was nothing to do with lack of men in the Church, I was told. I exchanged glances with a female colleague next to me who took up the baton, but to no effect – it was a different matter. We gave up. We have both been around the block enough times to know that there are times when the implicit mysogeny of he Church of England is not going to be taken seriously as an impediment to our growth and so we put it back in the bag until next time – or until we are in female clergy company.
This may sound like a feeble whine – but it isn’t – it is a thunderous rant. I do not whine. Public ministry is a risky undertaking for anyone. It might look from the outside like rather a cushy number – and I suppose it can be if you switch off an actual prayer life and actually listening to God and maybe even doing what God calls you to now and then. But that is not what most clergy do, most clergy spend a lot of time thinking and praying and honestly trying to discern and do God’s will in an environment which is often hostile and if not hostile then mocking.
Women are at a disadvantage in this already. Although we have been the backbone of parish churches for centuries we have not always or often had public voice. Those who have risked public voice have often been crusaders and campaigners and those sorts of on fire people are not the easiest to get on with and are often very easy to knock down with genderist comments – after all would you want to really have dinner with Jeremiah or John the Baptist.
There are realities to being a woman which strengthen us, and there are those moments at which we seem to be at war with the flesh in which we find our current existence. Writing down the joys and woes of womanhood sounds like a rather pathetic drip, but we all know that real life brings real challenges,whoever you are. In the Church strong women are accused of wanting to be men, women who show gentler traits are accused of being ineffective. It is a buffeting and baffling process to get through the ranks of the church to the ordination process. I once read that boys tend to play fight to show affection and often the process seems like this – kick after kick – but you know we love you, right?
There are layers and layers underneath this. Women have begun to express them over the past few decades and I have huge sympathy with the older feminist theologians such as Mary Daly who have found the image of God so completely shredded in the Church, the language of God so abused that they have rejected both – not because the should be no reverence to deity but because every instrument we use and know has been tarnished by the oppression and suppression of both female humanity and the female divine.
We have to deal with this – somehow and soon. We cannot engage either with society or, more vitally, with the true nature of God as community, if we do not hang up for good some of our ancient, deep and often assumed shackles. Sector ministry to encourage those outside in is all very well, deep rooted and dangerous experience of God is something much more central to who we all really are.
There are no easy diagnoses, there are only those glimpses and snags which we all have as we journey through life, our fascination with female mystics I think tells us that there is something we hunger for in this purer experience of the divine but we do not really know how to access this without reference to our ancient and mis-drawn boundaries.
I don’t like the feeling that comes from being adamant and digging my heals in, I do not enjoy a rush of power or use authority as a weapon, but too often in this ministry we are engaged in we are talked down to and belittled. Perhaps men experience this too – there is so much we need to learn.
There is concern over the women bishops debate about navel gazing, I am worried I might be encouraging us to more introversion – but is it introversion to find the still small voice which whispers in each heart and sets it free to truly live?. Is it introversion to accept that there is both unity and difference in all humanity and that these are not exclusive and do not have to break down, but can make truly alive?
Perhaps putting women in purple will change all this, perhaps a different way of being church will emerge – perhaps not radical, perhaps not even describable, but discernible. Or perhaps we are offering food to ravening lions of ancient and broken institutions – God can close those mouths and bring us through safe  – but who is God to us anyway?