What is in Kelvin's Head?

Blessings abounding

01/10/2012

I’ve been at a couple of blessings of same-sex couples recently – as a guest rather than as someone celebrating the liturgy. Neither of the recent ceremonies that I’ve been at have been in Scotland. It is more clear to me than ever that this is Â global movement and the push towards allowing gay couples to celebrate weddings is an idea whose time has come.

At the most recent of these ceremonies, the local bishop was presiding over the blessing and one of the people being blessed was a rector. The church was packed full of people as friends and parishioners gathered for an utterly joyous occasion. As has been my experience in Scotland, one of the most extraordinary things about same-sex blessings is how unextraordinary they are. People often comment that they never thought they would live to see the day when such a thing could happen in church but then when you ask them, they say that they think it is just great.

The churches are still tying themselves in ever more complicated knots over how same-sex couples tie the knot though.

At one of the ceremonies that I was at, in a part of the world where gay couples can legally get married, I went to a ceremony in a church hall that was entirely secular and conducted by a marriage registrar which was followed by the entire party processing along a corridor and up a flight of stairs to the church sanctuary where another ceremony – a service of blessing took place. Though it was lovely, it was a bit silly to have two ceremonies in different parts of the same building and hard not to feel the injustice of gay people being treated not merely differently but differently in a banal kind of way that brought no credit to marriage, church nor God in her Glory, Might, Majesty and Power.

At the other service, no legal marriage was possible so the church has devised a liturgy entirely separate from marriage but which effectively does the same thing, with vows, readings, rings and all the trimmings. My question there, is what is going to happen when straight couples come along who like the blessing ceremony and want that rather than a legal wedding. It will happen, and what will the church say then? “Terribly sorry, this isn’t for the likes of you….”

I also found myself thinking that it is now more than time for our bishops in Scotland to review their policy of not attending any blessing services. It always was a disgraceful policy – effectively making their gay friends and colleagues appear to be their dirty little secret rather than people they were proud of. Saying you are proud in private and sending a nice card won’t do and speaks more of pecksniffian pomp than gospel values.

None of this is going to be sorted until same-sex couples have the same rights to wed as straight couples of course. For my money, in Scotland, that should mean doing away with Civil Partnerships and simply opening marriage up to same-sex couples. It is the right thing to do and equality through parliamentary decision, plebiscite or legal challenge is coming in so many jurisdictions around the world one way or another that we might as well take a deep breath and get our ecclesiastical house in order so as not to do things which make us, the gospel and Christ himself appear foolish, silly or just plain cruel.

I was intrigued by Andrew Brown’s Guardian article this weekend -Â http://t.co/6UKAnEra

His conclusion is the most striking thing in the piece:

Conservative evangelicals in England have dreamed or hoped for 20 years that England could be brought back to a Nigerian or Ugandan view of homosexuality. It’s not going to happen, and it’s not going to happen within the Church of England, either. That’s true whoever becomes archbishop. The sexuality wars are coming to an end, and the liberals have won.

Someone asked me on twitter whether or not I thought that was an overly optimistic view. Actually, I think Andrew Brown is bang on – he just has the gift of being able to see slightly further over the horizon than many people can do. I might want to take issue with the idea that there is just one Nigerian or Ugandan view. Working with a Nigerian curate has taught me that there is diversity Â of opinion amongst such communities – a fact that is hardly surprising. However, I think we all know what Andrew Brown means.

The number of people holding to the hardest of hardline positions amongst the Evangelical communities in the UK seems to me to be declining quite sharply. I’m often in the company of lay people from Evangelical churches who assure me that the tough stuff about gay people is really only the view of the rector and that there is a far greater diversity of opinion than I might expect amongst the congregation. There will probably always be a number of people who can never accept gay people as equals, just as there will probably always be people who can’t accept that women and men are equal and there will regrettably be those who practise racism even now, long after it has become socially unacceptable. Though we need to work to undermine such opinion, my view is that the best way to challenge that with regards to gay people at the moment is not to fight and bicker and fall-out. Rather, we need to work for change, to organise and to simply assert that negative views about God’s gay children are a scandal to the Gospel and stop good people being able to hear the saving news of Christ.

We are now right in the middle of the process of enormous change that is taking place as the law catches up with popular opinion. It is exciting to be seeing it from different perspectives, coming in different countries.

What Andrew Brown writes about in the Guardian, I’m seeing with my own eyes. How about you?

bishops, LGBT, Same Sex Marriage

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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