What is in Kelvin's Head?

The sacrament lottery

28/03/2014

One of the consequences of decisions being made in different jurisdictions which don’t align with other geographical entities is that you end up with what we tend to call in the UK a postcode lottery. The most frequent use of the term is in describing a situation whereby someone can get treatment for a medical condition paid for if they live in one place but not in another. Or access to a particular school. Or a particular council service.

There’s something of the same thing happens within the life of the church and right now we are seeing new anomalies open up before our very eyes.

This weekend, for the first time, marriage in some parts of the UK (England and Wales) will be open to same-sex couples as well as straight couples. (And no, we are not getting same-sex marriage or gay marriage – those terms become history tonight – it is simply that marriage is open to more couples than once it was).

So, if a gay couple in Scotland want to get married they either have to wait until some date yet to be determined, probably within the next year, and get married in Scotland. Or alternatively they can go down to England and get married there where their marriage will be recognised by the state as a marriage in English law but as a Civil Partnership in Scots law. Within the life of the church, if a same-sex couple get married tomorrow in Carlisle say, and approach their local Anglican priest for a blessing, a service or some form of recognition then they are not supposed to be offered much. They are supposed to be asked why they have departed from the teaching of the church and then, maybe, offered some private prayers of thanksgiving.

However, if that couple from Carlisle should get on a train over the border and approach a sympathetic Anglican priest in Scotland then they can have a lot more. They might, if they so wished have a nuptial mass at St Mary’s. They can have their rings blessed. They can make lifelong vows. They can process in and/or out with splendid music. They can book the bells to be rung. And they can do all this in public without so much as a hair being batted. Indeed, if one of the Scottish bishops happens to be a pal then they can, if they are invited, choose whether to turn up themselves or not.

It is a remarkably different state of affairs. And this is a year for people in the UK to think about how odd borders are – sometimes feeling very real and sometimes feeling very artificial.

I suppose that it is already the case that some of the sacramental acts of the church are available to different people in different places. For some time now we have had just about every different discipline regarding admitting children to communion happening in our church. Indeed, we have had just about every different discipline happening within individual congregations. However the deal has always been that if someone has been admitted to communion in one then they must be offered the bread and wine everywhere else, even if it is not the local custom to offer communion to children.

I asked my own bishop recently whether it was the case that gay people in the Scottish Episcopal Church could expect to be treated in the same way in all of our dioceses. He didn’t seem to know.

That strikes me as one of the fundamental questions that need to keep on being asked.

I know that not everyone thinks of marriage as a sacrament. However, I know that most people I know in the church think that the love between a man and a woman can be sacramental – can show forth in its essence something of the love of God. One of the questions I often ask those who are hestitant about treating gay people like other people is whether they think that the love that a same-sex couple might share has the same potential to show forth the love of God.

Now, some people just don’t think this is so. They tend to disagree with me on these issues and I have some respect for that. The people I find most puzzling are those who want to say that a same-sex couple do have the potential to show forth by their relationship something of a love that is holy, precious and even divine in its nature but who stumble over the question of whether marriage should or should not have been opened to same-sex couples. (Note the past tense in that last sentence).

We have a sacramental postcode lottery at the moment. People have different access to the sacramental acts of the body of Christ dependent on where they are geographically in the UK and in Scotland. This is an unstable situation that seems to me to be hard to defend as having any integrity.

It is my view that the best hope for peace in the church though and the best hope that we can get on with other business and not become fixated on this topic for a further 10 years of decline is to accept a situation whereby those who want to marry same-sex couples can do so and those who don’t want to do so don’t have to. At the moment we are all forced to behave the same way regardless of what we believe.

In the past we have adopted similar compromises for the sake of the gospel – that which allows clergy to marry people who have been married before but who don’t have to do so seems to be a reasonable situation to look to for inspiration.

I’m thrilled beyond measure for those who will be marrying in England this Saturday who could not have married on Friday. It is as though the legal clocks have been put forward to the present day despite the mainstream churches mostly wanting to exist in their own timezone.

Congratulations to all those getting married this weekend. Good luck. Good wishes. God’s blessings.

Here’s to the future and here’s to removing or at least undermining the postcode lottery by which God’s people get offered half-baked blessings rather than the whole blessing shebang, according to where they happen to live or worship at the time.

LGBT, marriage, sacramental lottery, same-sex

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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