Guides and God

June 19, 2013 by 2 Comments

So, am I all up in arms about Girl Guides dropping their promise to love [their] God[s]?

No, I don’t think so. I suspect God can take it.

This is what the Girl Guides used to promise:

I Promise that I will do my best;
To love my God,
To serve my Queen and my Country,
To help other people
And
To keep the Guide Law.

Now they are going to say this:

I promise that I will do my best:
To be true to myself and develop my beliefs,
To serve the Queen and my community, 
and
To keep the Guide Law.

This doesn’t seem to me to be particularly troubling. It looks as though Guiding wants to be modern and inclusive. I’m just a little surprised they’ve kept the Queen in there which surely must exclude republicans.

I don’t expect that Guiding will change significantly by changing that promise except to allow some girls to take part who might once have thought that it was not for them because they were not religious.

The “self” has a complex relationship with religion. And Christianity is something of a mixed bag when it comes to the self. On the one hand it is all about losing your self and being lost in God and service of others. On the other, we are told to work out our salvation in fear and trembling, which sounds a bit like a good starting place for a lot of modern therapy.

“Unto thine own self be true” is an injunction that sometimes is wrongly attributed to the Bible. It isn’t, it is a misquote in any case and comes from Polonius speaking to Laertes in Hamlet: “This above all- to thine own self be true”.

I think that God will survive the Guides’ change of wording and I hope that Guiding will flourish as a result of trying to keep up with the times.

However, you can see an enormous shift in ethical thinking taking place between those two versions of the promise. The self is paramount in modern thinking. I think that’s an inevitable thing. I also think that it is a good thing. We’ve not thought nearly enough about the self in the past. Somewhere inside though, I find myself thinking that focusing on the self is not an absolute good. Some things within the self may not be good. Presumably the injunction to serve the community in the Guide promise is an attempt to mitigate that.

If I’d been a Guide taking part in their big consultation about the promise, I’d probably have wanted something included about preventing harm. I think that’s a good direction to follow for ethical thinking and can cover the self and others.

I like the new Rainbow promise though:

I promise that I will do my best to think about my beliefs and to be kind and helpful.

You can find the inside skinny on this from a Guide leader at Some Random Bint’s blog.

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Watching the House of Lords

June 18, 2013 by 2 Comments

The internet is a wonderful thing and means you can watch all kinds of things you would never have been able to see in the past. Yesterday, I found myself watching the House of Lords discuss whether or not I was fully human.

At least, that’s what it felt like to me.

I’m a great believer in debate and understand why things need to be challenged and fought over and argued through. It is right and proper that parliamentary processes run their course. But can you imagine what it feels like for me to watch that being done over the Equal Marriage legislation. This week it is the Westminster legislation and soon it will be the Holyrood legislation.

Once you’ve accepted that the right to marry a partner of your chosing without regard to gender is a human right, it is as though people are arguing over your very humanity.

Some people go mad, of course – both victims and perpetrators.

In many ways it would be easiest to turn off the stream from the House of Lords. It would be so much easier not to see Bishops from the Church of England saying such calculated and vile things about one.  The script that seems to be coming from them this week is “The church hasn’t been nice to gay people. Perhaps it should be nicer. But I’m still not going to support equality for gay people.”  What makes it so horrible is that it is done with knowledge aforethought.

However, it is almost impossible not to watch it. It is a fascinating, almost sinister, watch.

This argument is only going in one direction.

This video from the Irish campaign for marriage equality still rings true at the moment though.

[Memo to self: Don't forget to ask every candidate in next General Election whether or not they are committed to removing the bishops from the House of Lords]

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Baptising

June 17, 2013 by 2 Comments

There are few more joyful things to do in this world than a baptism service. Yesterday I got to baptise someone called Theodore, which of course means Gift of God. He rather enjoyed proceedings and I’ve seldom held a child more keen to jump right into the font.

People sometimes comment on how much babies seem to enjoy being baptised at St Mary’s. Some older folk sometimes say, “I thought they were supposed to cry….” to which I reply, “…and I think it is nicer if they don’t”.

Sometimes people even come out with that old medieval nonsense that the cry of a baby at a baptism is the devil coming out. Here’s your theology starter for 10: the devil ain’t in there in the first place.

If you want to make a baby cry at a baptism, here are the instructions:

  • hold them upside down
  • hold them so they can’t see anyone they know
  • use cold water
  • flick the water in their face with a large, hard shell
  • hold them as though you are frightened you are going to drop them.

Otherwise,

  • hold them so they can see what’s going on – sitting on the side of the font is a good start
  • surround them with a sea of happy smiling faces
  • warm up the water
  • talk to them and mean what you say
  • keep parents in sight and free from anxiety themselves
  • lots of splashes
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10 Unanswered Questions about Same-Sex Marriage

June 13, 2013 by 2 Comments

Last week, at the General Synod in Edinburgh, it was announced that the Scottish Episcopal Church is to undergo a process of discussing what were referered to as “same-sex issues”.

I’ve written about this before, and no doubt will do so again.

For today though, here are some of the questions that are running around in my mind, most of which I don’t think were asked last week during General Synod and which I don’t think we have any answers to.

  • Once the Scottish Parliament has completed its legislative process and marriage for same-sex couples is legal in Scotland, what will be the consequences of a priest blessing such a couple in church. (NB – I can already, in some circumstances, bless couples entering into a Civil Partnership)?
  • Will all priests of the Scottish Episcopal Church be subject to the same discipline in this area or will different rules apply in different dioceses?
  • Will a member of the clergy who enters a civil marriage with someone of of the same sex have equality of opportunity in the church or will they automatically be ruled out of some appointments? Will there be parity between dioceses in this area and will the bishops have agreed a common policy?
  • If the Scottish Government were to subsequently proceed to allowing straight couples the possibility of entering a Civil Partnership, what would be the consequence of a member of the clergy entering a civil partnership and living in church-provided accommodation with their partner? Is that an acceptable moral choice in the church?
  • If it is not an acceptable moral church in the church for straight couples to live in a Civil Partnership when they have the opportunity of getting married, what standards apply to same-sex couples who might have a choice much sooner as to whether they live within a civil partnership or get married?
  • Is it acceptable for any member of the clergy to live with someone without having a legally binding committment to that person or not?
  • Is it acceptable (or even legal) for a bishop to refuse a licence to a priest on the grounds of their marital or partner status?
  • Would it be acceptable for a bishop to insist that clergy in same-sex Civil Partnerships should get married to one another once the opportunity arises for them to do so?
  • Does the peculiarly Scottish moratorium against bishops attending Civil Partnership ceremonies still apply and does it extend to civil marriage for some clergy and yet not for others?
  • Would a bishop support a priest who came to the conclusion that as the church has not made up its mind about who may get married, the right thing to do would be to declare a moratorium on marrying anyone (gay or straight) until the process of discussion about what marriage is had been concluded?

I don’t think that any of these questions is a hypothetical question.

Anyone with more questions or any answers?

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Choral Masses

June 12, 2013 by 2 Comments

We’re having a month of Sundays at St Mary’s at the moment. Well, strictly speaking we are having a month of festival Sundays.

The West End Festival is currently going on around these parts – the largest cultural event in Glasgow. One of the responses that we’ve made to it here in St Mary’s this year is to have special music on the Sundays in the festival. It has been a lot of work for the musicians, particularly as the church festivals (Pentecost, Trinity, Corpus Christi) which sometimes fall in West End Festival time were early this year and so we kept them with gusto before launching off on the festival programme immediately afterwards.

Last Sunday the upper voices in the choir had a morning to themselves – the tenors and the basses having a morning not singing and the sound of the service was quite different to what we normally get. The music was the Fauré Messe Basse, one of my favourite settings and one which sounds simple and calm.

Having a choral mass means that the choir sing more of the music and particularly the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei. [On Sunday we had a congregational Gloria because Fauré didn't write a Gloria for the Messe Basse]. These bits are called the Ordinary of the mass. That’s because they appear through the year. There’s not a Gloria in Lent and Advent, but apart from that these are the bits of the service where the text remains the same throughout the year. Other things (readings, hymns, Eucharistic Prayers, collects, post-communion prayers etc) change around them to give us the seasonal variations. The idea is that there is a familiar structure to the service – the same basic shape, that allows us to relax into the worship whilst the things that change stimulate the mind to meditate on the passing themes and the stories of the Christian Year.

The worship we celebrate in the Scottish Episcopal Church is a form of the Western Rite. That’s the liturgy which is celebrated primarily by the western church. If you go to church in an Eastern congregation (Russian, Greek, Syrian, Coptic etc) the the liturgy does feel quite different. Whereas, if a Scottish Episcopalian goes to mass in a Roman Catholic Church or a Roman Catholic comes to mass in one of our churches, they are more likely to comment on the similarities than the differences. Indeed, it is common for us as a Cathedral in a city to find after a service that there are foreign tourists at the service who have not realised which denomination they are actually in.

I’m a bit of a Western Rite groupie myself. It is how I am and who I am. My identity is formed by it. It gives shape to my life and allows me to be who I am.

I sometimes think that we don’t talk enough about where it comes from, what it is and what it does. Corpus Christi, that feast we celebrated with the rose petals and great clouds of billowing prayers the other week was the liturgical celebration of joy in the actions of the eucharist.

It it hard to beat Dom Gregory Dix’s emotion in the following passage, which comes to my mind every year at Corpus Christi and is what I’m thinking of as I stand at that altar.

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.

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Here’s what I said @secsynod

June 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Here’s what I said as the Convener of the Information and Communication Board at General Synod in Edinburgh last week:

The report of the Information and Communication Board can be found on page 43 of the Blue Book. Apart from reiterating publicly my thanks to Lorna Finley the church’s Communication Officer, I shall not repeat in my presentation what can be found in that report.

Instead, I want to bring two areas of work to the synod’s attention. These are each topics in which the Board has an interest at Provincial level. However, they are areas which have a relevance in other contexts of the church too. They are engagement with the press and the issue of the online presence of the church.

Firstly, I wish to highlight the increased coverage that our church has been getting in the press. (And generally, coverage for positive reasons!) At one time, we were getting lots of column inches in the press but not always for terribly serious stories. Typically we were seen as a soft touch by journalists simply seeking the quirky and the bizarre. Now, the odd quirky story is not necessarily a bad thing – it reminds people that we are here. However, it seemed to the Board a few years ago that there was a task to be done trying to engage with issues a little more. At that time, a review of the Communications Strategy suggested that some attention needed to be paid, largely through support that could be offered by the Communications Officer to enable the church to be seen to engage with issues in public life in Scotland.

It is my view that this year, we’ve started to see that bearing some fruit – [as you can see from some of the newspaper clips that will appear on the screen].

This year there have been significant stories reported on, amongst other things, the bedroom tax, Centrica, benefits changes, secularization. These are a far cry from the puppet shows and parrots in the pulpit that we were once known for. There’s also quite a geographical spread of coverage and a number of voices being heard.

It is worth noting that there are the same numbers of column inches to fill this year as there were last year and yet not all the Christian voices which were the dominant voices of last year are still around to provide the quotes that journalists love. There has been more space recently for Episcopal voices to join in the national conversation.

I bring this to the Synod’s attention both by way of noting the hard work of those who have stuck their heads above the parapet and also by way of encouraging people to engage creatively with the press where that is appropriate locally.

It is worth noting in passing that though it has been possible to get good stories into the press that are not about same-sex marriage that remains the dominant story through which many people in the media view the church. It is my personal view that this is because of a perceived disconnect between the morality of the majority of those whom the press regard as decent upstanding members of society and the morality expressed by the churches. Whilst that perception remains, same-sex marriage will remain the key story in the minds of those who put together our newspapers.

The second major thing that I wish to draw the Synod’s attention to today is the work that is underway towards renewing the online presence of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

Questions about the website have been raised for some time and the view of the Information and Communication Board is that the time has come to renew the online presence of the church. A sub-group of the I and C Board led by the Rev Chris Mayo has been consulting within the church to this end and has now begun the work towards the new website. My expectation is that this will be done within the year that is to come.

The Scottish Episcopal Church is a church which has done pretty well in informal engagement online. The lively conversation around blogging and social networks indicates a church which has people who are not merely passive members but who are engaged in a conversation about it. Up until now, that conversation has been through informal channels and I expect that to continue.
A few years ago, I raised the possibility at synod of a website through which we communicated with one another rather than simply one which was used to disseminate news items. That challenge remains in view and those responsible for this part of the Board’s work have been speaking much more of a web presence for the Scottish Episcopal Church than of a simple site on which articles are posted.

I am grateful to Chris Mayo for taking the lead on this work and involving other members of the Board in the process.
The composition of the Board has changed this year and the work on the website is indicative of the Board developing ways of working that are changing. To be blunt, ways of working which don’t all include me as the convener. That is a positive step and needs to be the first of many as my time as convener of this Board will come to an end in a year’s time. The fact that I took a sabbatical for three months to wander the highways and byways of the Anglican churches in Canada and the USA last autumn gave a taste of an I and C Board without me on it. I’m grateful of course to those who made it possible for me to take that time out for reflection and growth. Thanks particularly to Lorna but thanks to others too. To all those who work and think about the communications field in the church. To all those who write, edit, make decisions and challenge and cajole.

My thanks to everyone.

That concludes what I want to say today and I am happy to take questions.

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General Synod

June 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

You can find coverage of the General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church on twitter at http://twitter.com/secsynod
(It is me who is tweeting).

Questions welcome either to that account or to me on @thurible.

There are details of how to follow the synod over on http://www.scotland.anglican.org including details of the live audio feed.

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Turning Up

June 4, 2013 by 6 Comments

There are a number of reasons why church statistics make for depressing reading these days. One reason that I’m not sure we give nearly enough attention to is how often people come to church.

I find myself regularly in conversation with people who seem to believe that they come to St Mary’s far more often than I see them there.

When I was young, you used to hear people talk more about the benefits of weekly churchgoing. I’m not sure you do hear that much these days. Is it that rather than being a way of life, Christianity is seen more often than it used to be as something you fit in to your way of life?

I think that you get more out of going to church by going weekly. The cycle of the seasons makes sense. You get nourished regularly. (If you don’t get nourished, go to a different church or work out ways of topping up your God experience online or elsewhere). You also get more of the chance of the joy of friendship which isn’t just a sideline. Friendship is one of the ways that God touches us.

Turning up is also an offering. It is the offering of time that is so precious these days. Of couirse, not everyone ever turned up every week. But more did once.

A big part of the decline in actual bums-on-pews numbers could be resolved by rekindling the idea of weekly churchgoing. Once upon a time churches told people to do things for to do otherwise was a wickedness and a sin. In its day, that worked in its way. It doesn’t now. And I thank God the world has changed in a way that makes that sensibility untenable.

I’d rather tell people about the benefits of turning up. But then generally speaking, I’d rather be a priest who preaches joys not woes.

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The Forum with Michael Bawtree

June 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment

We had a good Forum meeting after the 10.30 am service yesterday. This time I was interviewing Michael Bawtree.

Michael is an international musicial and conductor based in Glasgow but frequently travelling the world.

Some of the things we talked about were:

  • Can you tell a musician’s faith by the music they make?
  • What is Spirituality and is it the same as Religion?
  • Why commission new music?
  • What makes a musician?

We also discovered Michael’s guilty secret – he revealed which composer he just doesn’t quite get.

You can see it all in the video below.

(Note that the sound is considerably improved from last week).


 

 

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Statistics and the Church

June 2, 2013 by 11 Comments

There’s a reasonably prominent article in the Sunday Times today on page 4 in Scotland highlighting the numerical decline of the Scottish Episcopal Church over the last five years.

There’s quite a few quotes from what they expect the Primus to say when he opens this week’s General Synod and there’s an old recycled quote from me into the bargain.

The headline figure which they quote is a decline in membership of 15% over the last five years. That figure should make people sit up and take notice.

The pattern on the ground is more mixed of course. There’s good news to report in Argyll and The Isles and also in Moray, Ross and Caithness.

I think it is interesting that the two dioceses which have invested most in Mission Action Planning are not doing as well as I think might have been hoped for. That isn’t surprising to me. I expect to be told that it just hasn’t had time to work yet. The time is surely coming when it will  have had time to work though.

There’s a quote from me in there which I think they’ve lifted from something I said a few weeks ago. I’m quoted (as “one of the Anglican Church’s most prominent clergy”) as saying that I look forward to “an Easter Day when I can celebrate new marriages for gay members of my congregation just as I can for straight couples”.  The implication, which the paper makes on behalf of its readers, is that churches which drift far away from common sense, public goodwill and what most folk think of as decent morals don’t really deserve new members. It is a fairly obvious thing to say though my suspicion is that most church folk still think that churches are highly regarded in society and haven’t realised that with a huge number of people they are not. Pitching themselves on the wrong side of the gay marriage debate is not the only reason that churches are in decline. However, it is a factor and one that needs to be thought about.

Those of us going to General Synod this week are going to have the chance to think about the statistics. There are several short sessions where we will get the chance to talk about them. It is more than timely.

A few years ago we agreed a mission strategy called the Whole Church Mission and Ministry Policy. It puts a greater emphasis on dioceses and less on the province (ie Scotland-wide organisation). In some ways it seems like common sense to make decisions as locally as possible. However, there are a number of reasons why that is quite a hard path to follow. I voted against that strategy when it was proposed at Synod a few years ago. It was obvious to me that unless the dioceses were better resourced than they are then it would be too difficult to bring about the changes that are needed. I also think that the Scottish Episcopal Church is capable of having an identity that can be promoted. I don’t think any diocese is capable of that nor do I think they should try. Identity matters hugely these days. Deprecating the national identity of the church in favour of diocesan identities is a policy almost designed to promote decline.

The best example of “Whole Church” thinking which is struggling at the moment is the report on TISEC, the Theological Institute of the Scottish Episcopal Church. That institution is found wanting in some areas, not least those which are most devolved to dioceses.

It remains my view that there are significant things that we can do better together than we can do apart. By that I mean things that we need to do on a provincial, Scotland wide basis. TISEC is the most obvious of those things.

The statistics that we have to look at this week are interesting. They are mixed and not universally poor across the board. Notwithstanding that, they are very serious indeed. The obvious reality is that although some places are doing better than others, some are doing significantly worse and they include some areas that we’ve always regarded as Episcopal heartlands.

The statistics seem to suggest that some of the ideas that we’ve been promoting are not currently working. The Sunday Times today seems to imply that the longer we prolong the debate about whether or not to accept that gay people should have the same rights and responsibilities in the church as anyone else, then the longer the slide will go on. I happen to agree.

Not all statistics are bad, of course. Some of those which we don’t regularly gather are rising significantly. Take the readership of this blog, for example. In the last five years, it has risen by 24%. Indeed, it has more readers now in a year than the number of people who belong to the Scottish Episcopal Church. Significantly more in fact.

Makes you think, that, doesn’t it?

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