What is in Kelvin's Head?

The sun comes up it’s a new day dawning

13/06/2015

At about 4.30 this morning I found myself awake, wide awake in my hotel room in Edinburgh. The sun was streaming into the room despite the curtains trying to block it out. And my first thought was words that we sang at morning prayer yesterday in the General Synod meeting.

The sun comes up, it’s a new day dawning.
It’s time to sing Your song again.
Whatever may pass, and whatever lies before me,
Let me be singing when the evening comes.

And I realised for the first time the impact of what happened during the synod meeting yesterday.

What we did was set out the pathway that we are on to be able to have the chance of allowing same-sex couples to be married in church.

I’m delighted, of course that we achieved that. No one would expect me to say anything else. But it was a day of much more than getting what I wanted – it was a day when those who disagree with me were kind and generous. People who were hurting were unfailingly godly and I see in them the love of Christ.

It was perhaps the first day I’ve spent at any synod when I couldn’t predict what would happen. There were many speeches that surprised me. Several folk whom I expected to speak against what I hoped for, spoke about their journey to a new understanding of sexuality. We witnessed one almost damascene conversion. And one of the most prominent people in the church came out as a settled married bisexual whom though now married to his wife had previously loved a man. And the thing was, that wasn’t the most talked about thing of the day. It was just something we learned that we didn’t already know.

At the end of the day, we made some strikingly clear decisions. We are moving towards removing the doctrinal definition of marriage from Canon Law that was placed there in 1980. This will then allow a move to enable the church to nominate those, and only those, who wish to celebrate marriages for same-sex couples to be able to do so. This may now happen in summer 2017.

It seems glacial to those of us who want change. It will seem terrifyingly fast to those who don’t.

But the glacier is moving. That is now undeniable. The vote to instruct the Faith and Order Board to prepare the new legislation was 110 in favour to 9 against.

Along the way we also decided not to go down the route of allowing Civil Partnerships to be registered in church. We’re going for marriage being possible for gay and lesbian couples.

Once upon a time I’d have leapt at the chance of getting Civil Partnerships in church. Now I hope for something immeasurably better.

There was drama yesterday at synod. There was passion and there was pain. But there was also love.

Within minutes of the vote being announced I saw someone predicting on a US website that three of our churches would leave the Scottish Episcopal Church over this and take 40% of our membership with them. It will be news for those churches that they represent that proportion of the membership of the SEC. Notwithstanding the strength of those particular churches they don’t represent anything near that percentage.

In any case, one of those churches which is near where I live is simply not of one mind about these things. The rector of another told us of the gay folk in his congregation and how clear it was that they were welcome to marriage preparation classes. The rectors of those churches tried to bring in the possibility of opening marriage to same-sex couples by a different route to the one we eventually chose. That was costly and generous of them all.

Today I awake to a new church. I believe what I believed yesterday morning – that it is the love of Christ that can hold Christians together much more effectively than a definition of marriage.

Yesterday though, I saw it happen.

For all Your goodness I’ll keep on singing,
Ten thousand reasons for my heart to find.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, O my soul,
Worship God’s holy name.
Sing like never before, O my soul.
I’ll worship Your holy name.

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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