From the Dean & President - S&H Mar/Apr 2007

I feel we need to move beyond the national and international game of musical chairs that is Anglican church life at present.  We really have to move on.

There is emotional and religious gridlock in our context, which is just about as intense as midtown Manhattan on a very bad day.  Nothing is changing, everything is getting worse – entropy! – and it is one long-running soap opera.  “Will the ABC invite the PB to Lambeth for 2008?”  “Will ‘we’ get seated there, too?”  “What will Nigeria do, and when, and how, in relation to Canterbury?”  “Will new Network bishops receive the consents required for consecration?” “Will Father So-and-so and the Vestry of Such-and-Such be able to stay in their buildings?”  As the King of Siam exclaimed while dictating a letter, “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...”

This is all a soap opera, involving fewer and fewer real people.  Everybody else in the world is out there suffering and sighing, and we are playing small parts in the extended version of a very long video game.

“Stop, In the Name of Love”!

Get out of the kitchen (it is burning up), hand back your ticket (not worth anything anymore), get off the train (it is going in circles), exit the security line (this airport is closed ’cuz of ice on the runway). There is no live future for Christians in this.

I don’t mean stop being what you – what we – are.  I am not talking about suspending the core and power of Christianity. Not for a minute.  But I am talking about the big Loyalty, which trumps, in full, every little loyalty.  The Gospel trumps the Church. It has to, to do justice to the observed facts of history.  Weakness trumps strength.  Always has, starting with St. Peter.  The Grace of God fulfils the Law.  We are living in the New Testament.

Moreover, the human condition has not changed.  The overwhelming majority of people in this world are suffering privation and drought.  Every person on earth is suffering droughts of love, the taintedness of love gone wrong, which makes for needy and needy-for-love lives.  Christians have been given a fantastic answer to the drought and deserts of human mourning.  The answer we did not manufacture.  It came to us.  “From heav’n you came, helpless babe” (Graham Kendrick). 

G.E. Lessing, who is not my hero, said many good things.  One of them was that “Christianity has failed, but the Religion of Christ has not yet been tried.”  He was writing in the long aftermath of the Thirty Years War and the disillusioning, chilling effect of that war on the Christian Churches in Europe.  I think I could paraphrase Lessing’s idea in saying that our church-project has failed – this is undeniable from the evidence on the ground – but our lives are still created and stirred and re-created by the Grace and Power of Christ Jesus.  On that point, nothing has shifted.

So again, get out of the kitchen, hand back the ticket, exit the security line.  Next Stop, to quote great Cardinal Suenens, who was a hero, is A New Pentecost.

Love, ever,

In His,

Paul