What is in Kelvin's Head?

Rainbow Laces

20/09/2013

Congratulations to Stonewall for their Rainbow Laces campaign – trying to persuade the various football organisations to make a gesture to indicate that they are supportive of their gay players. For such organisations, it is a gesture that won’t cost them much.

I’m pretty sure that for gay players themselves, all closeted at the moment, there will be a range of internal reactions. For some, there will be a huge sense that this is supportive. For others, I’m guessing that this may actually be personally be unwelcome because it shines a light too close to their own lives. For pro players must wonder whether if they come out they will lose sponsorship, support and opportunity. There is no legal protection to help you other than not being sacked from your team.

Of course, the chances are, that any player in such circumstances would do well. They would receive overwhelming support from anyone in front of a microphone. But what would it be like on the terraces?

I have enormous sympathy for what must go on in the mind of the player wondering whether to come out. It isn’t that different from my own world in the church.

I heard recently of a prominent member of the clergy choosing to talk about being gay for the first time in public recently at a well known Christian Arts festival. It is a big deal. For someone in that position they really can fear that jobs that they might have enjoyed doing would suddenly be blocked for them. There is no legal protection for such a person at all. They can even be sacked from the team.

In the football world there are said to be no professional football players who have come out. In the church it isn’t much better. No bishops have done so and even at the level of people running cathedrals in the UK, I think there are only two of us who are out (and one of us was initially outed in the press). Clearly, obviously, there are other people who are gay who do my job.

I’m not suggesting a rainbow cassock campaign nor even rainbow laces in the sanctuary – my views on footwear are clear. However, the time in drawing near when we ought to be calling for some small uncostly gestures from those in the church who are straight and who are in positions of power and influence.

I remember a number of years ago Bishop Idris making a supportive statement about his gay clergy during a Synod address. It meant a huge amount to a small number of people.

Church leaders need to think about how to make those gestures. For all Archbishop Justin Welby seems to have struck a welcome new tone recently, much like the pope, there is no change in policy.

I’d like to hear the likes of Justin Welby speaking positively about the gay clergy he has known and making it clear that senior gay clergy who do chose to come out will be supported and nourished and cherished. The fact that such talk is absent won’t strike many people. It strikes me every day.

It is the lack of such things which makes this area of the churches’ work so troubled. Those with some power and influence have the means to make a big difference by doing small things.

Rainbow laces won’t do the trick in the church but a few rainbow words would go a long way.

bishops coming out, LGBT. church, rainbow laces, Stonewall

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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