What is in Kelvin's Head?

The Peace and Unity and Order of the Church

12/12/2014

One of the things that I’ve occasionally raised in blog posts is the question of whose responsibility it is to promote the unity of the church.

I think this was focused for me particularly at the consecration of the Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane just over 9 years ago when the preacher preached a sermon which was one of those sermons that you remember. It was one of those sermons that you remember because something about it niggles away at you. Sometimes that can be a good thing and sometimes not so good. At this particular service, it was a sermon that I knew at the time I disagreed with but I couldn’t immediately work out why. The gist of the sermon was fairly simple – we were at the consecration of a bishop and the preacher, Lord Eames, spoke of the ministry of the bishop as being a particular gift to the church – that of being an icon of unity.

I remember thinking at the time that it didn’t just sound odd to me but foreign.

Years later I remember that sermon and I think I was right in what I thought. It is a foreign idea to us in the Scottish Episcopal Church. It doesn’t belong here.

In the Church of England, bishops are expected to be the focus of unity in their dioceses. Their Ordinal says so. In Scotland, our Ordinal says no such thing.

But it is more profound than that. You see the truth is, the responsibility for promoting the peace, unity and order of the church doesn’t simply rest upon bishops in Scotland, it rests upon all of us who are in authorised ministry in the church. It isn’t that this is their responsibility it is that this responsibility belongs equally to the rest of us who minister too.

If you enter authorised ministry in the Scottish Episcopal Church then you make a series of promises, one of which is this:

I will show, in all things, an earnest desire to promote the peace, unity, and order of the said Church….

It is perhaps worth thinking this weekend about what the peace, unity and order of the church look like and how we take seriously our oaths to promote each of them.

I take the promise to promote the peace, unity and order of the church very seriously. So seriously, I’m prepared to fight for them in ways that don’t always look peaceful. Indeed I know friends from other denominations who can’t understand how Episcopalians cope with saying what they think to one another in the ways that we do. Politeness is a sacrament in some churches but I don’t think it is so in my own. Kindness is worth striving for but I don’t think we tend to paper over the cracks when things get tough.

Things have certainly become tough this week. I referred earlier this week to a new document that has been published by the Bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church which deals with the changes in the law regarding marriage in Scotland which come into force this week. I don’t think it is overstating the case to say that the publication of this document has seriously disrupted the peace and unity of the church. It was an attempt to say something about the order of the church which the bishops thought it important to say. The manner and timing of it though has caused more disruption to the peace of the church than I can remember for many years. (And I can remember more years of our church’s life than several of our bishops). It is my view that the bishops didn’t expect the sense of outrage which many feel about this. I also believe that it must be ghastly trying to do the right thing and be presumed to be malevolent in return.

I personally seek the peace, unity and order of the church.

I seek peace in the church by trying to bring the church to a place where all can stand united in our love of God and able to freely share that love with those who do not yet know it. I don’t believe we are in that place of peace at this time and I yearn for it, hope for it and pray for it.

And I am praying for that which my heart does not entirely desire but which my oath demands.

You see, what I want in my self is every church to be a welcoming and safe place for gay people, including those gay couples who chose to get married. My conscience demands that I hope and pray for that. But my oath to promote the peace, unity and order of the church demands that I put at least some of my own needs to one side and ask what will bring that peace to the church which will allow us to stand side by side.

The oath I’ve taken demands that I seek a place to stand for those who disagree with me. It demands that I defend their rights to be upset and grumpy and cross. It demands that I weep when they are weeping.

And in recent years, I think I can say that I’ve developed a far greater respect for those who say they disagree with me on gay rights than I do for many of those, particularly those who have power over other people’s lives in the church, who claim to me in private that they think I’m right. (Mind you, there are plenty who once disagreed with me who don’t now, so we can’t presume that these are two immutable categories of piskies).

I have to search for peace, unity and order in the church and my view is that we won’t have anything that looks like that until we have a church in which I can marry gay members of my congregation one unto another amidst great rejoicing whilst simultaneously defending the right of a sister or brother priest not to have to do so. And I have to hope that the desire to reach Scotland with the good news will allow colleagues who do disagree with me to search for the same peace that will allow us all a place to stand in order to reach out united to a world that needs the love of God.

I don’t believe and have never believed that the oaths to seek the peace, unity and order of the church are oaths involving any kind of conformity. And one of our troubles at the moment in my view is that our bishops have mistaken conformity for collegiality. The two are different. Collegiality is required of the College of Bishops. Collegiality is also required in a different way from the rest of us. Demands from any of us that look like conformity though do not look like the road to peace.

The sooner these issues that trouble us are resolved the better. It is my view that the bishops of our church have struggled to lead us towards peace. I pray for them, as I hope they pray for people like me.

Right now, the need to find peace, unity and order are becoming urgent. The mission of the church is compromised by our inability to live peaceably together.

I personally never renew my ordination vows at the annual chrism mass where such things are done. (Not least because we don’t have an authorised liturgy for such things in the Scottish Episcopal Church and I’m led to believe that doing things we don’t have an authorised liturgy for is somehow rather naughty).

I take my oaths more seriously than to think they need topping up once a year. I renew them daily as I live my life.

And today, as I see the peace of the church more seriously disrupted than I’ve ever known, I find myself reminding myself of my own vow.

I will show in all things, an earnest desire to promote the peace, unity, and order of the said Church.

And I will do so knowing that we will only get these things when we are ready to come together and accept that we all need a place to stand.

The church will have no peace whilst those who believe in the dignity of God’s gay and straight children alike are told that they belong to a church in which such a thing is impossible

This could all be resolved very quickly if people were minded to do so. Prolonging this argument is leading us further from the godly peace we need.

LGBT, marriage, order, peace, same-sex, Scottish Episcopal Church, unity

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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