The first couple of weeks of July are a very particular time to be in Belfast. Coming from Glasgow is a reasonable preparation for this. You know instinctively that the bonfire being built out of pallets next to your hotel is a symbol of celebration for some local people but not at all for others. You know that the sound of fife and beating drum is one that some will tap their feet to and which will bring a sense of fear and apprehension to others. And you know that the flags and the bunting have not been put up to welcome Anglicans from all around the world.
But not everyone did know.
One of the most striking things about the recent meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council was that many of those present did not immediately know what any of these local cultural signifiers meant at all.
Over the course of the week, things became a bit clearer, not least through the Council being able to hear the extraordinary testimony of Richard Moore in Derry. After walking the walls and seeing the layout of the place, the Council listened with rapt attention to Richard’s story of having been blinded by a rubber bullet fired by a British soldier when he was 10 years old and of subsequently forgiving the soldier and then searching him out both to express that forgiveness and ultimately befriend him.
Reconciliation does not come cheap in Northern Ireland and this and other stories of the Troubles formed the backdrop to an extraordinary week of conversation about the Anglican Communion.
Before saying anything about the divisions of the Anglican Communion, it is perhaps worth saying that I came away from the meeting of the 19th Anglican Consultative Council with a deep sense of awe and wonder in relation to the Anglican Communion. I know friends who think of it as being a relic of the past, a distraction from current mission and little more than the Commonwealth (another creaking institution that is difficult to define) at prayer. However, I return from Belfast rejoicing in what God is doing throughout the Anglican Communion and nothing had really prepared me for the onslaught of great stories and deep, deep connections that I witnessed through being a delegate at the ACC.
The Anglican Communion turns out to be both bigger and smaller than you think. Simultaneously.
I travelled four hours in relative comfort to be in Belfast. Some had travelled through war zones. I have relative peace and plenty in living out my life as a Scottish Episcopalian. Some come from communities that are hungry. I come from a place where the faith has been present for centuries. The diocese I come from was founded considerably before there was any thought of a bishop or archbishop at Canterbury. Others came from churches that have only joined the Anglican Communion during my lifetime. Some of us come from places where churches are in decline. Others come from places racing to plant enough churches to cope with the growth in faith that they are seeing. “The age of multiplication is not over, Kelvin” I was told by someone whose job included planning the planting of 2000 churches over the next 3 years.
Such conversations blow your mind. They expand your imagination and go beyond any experience of the church you could imagine. Take a view of the church to an ACC meeting and you have to be prepared for it to be expanded beyond your wildest dreams.
But then go to an ACC meeting and you find yourself sitting at tables of people drawn from across the Anglican World and immediately the conversations start and you realise that you are already deeply connected. I found myself looking across one of those tables at a Malaysian Bishop who happened also to be someone that I knew from his time training and serving in Scotland as a younger man. I found myself in conversation with someone from South America about a priest that I worked with for three years who had served previously in Buenos Aires. Was it possible that we had both known the same priest mentor in our younger days? At the ACC it was not only possible, it was inevitable.
The bonds of affection that people talk about in the Anglican Communion are real – I’ve always known that. But an ACC meeting is a meeting of people who come together and discover just how deep those bonds are and I was moved in my soul again and again to discover myriad connections to places all over the world that I had either forgotten about or not quite realised existed. In all those places the church is alive and people are praying daily. Sometimes they pray for me.
Last week I found myself praying with Irish friends for Ireland, praying with the Bishop of Amazonia for the Amazon, praying with people from island nations on the far side of the world about the climate crisis and praying with the Archbishop of Jerusalem for peace. Those prayers have faces now. Faces that I won’t easily forget.
The prayers and the conversations permeate the business at an ACC. They are meant to and they do – but we were there to do serious business and to have conversations which will help to shape Anglicanism for the next few years.
The primary business was a consideration of a set of something called the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals. These had been put together by something called IASCUFO – the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order. This is a very learned group of academics and thinkers who had tried to put together a way forward for the Communion.
One of the most striking things about the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals was how much they acknowledged divisions in the communion and how little they addressed the cause of those divisions. More than one person spoke to me, days into Council, to express surprise that they had just discovered that the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals were related at all to the divisions about human sexuality that have surfaced in recent years in the Communion. This was not clear from the text. Rather like those who came to Belfast and heard talks about the Troubles without realising initially that the Troubles had anything to do with religion, there were people at this council who took quite a while to understand that these proposals, which would have changed the Anglican Communion significantly had anything to do with the main presenting issue in our difficulties.
It was also not really very clear to the Council that these Proposals would help very much at all. It was clear fairly early on that these proposals were not something that the Council was in any mood to adopt or to pass. One sticking point was a proposal to change the definition of the Anglican Communion from one which acknowledges communion with the See of Canterbury as being a defining factor into us becoming a communion of churches which “have a historic link to the See of Canterbury”. Such a change was relatively easy for some. For those of us who come from churches which don’t have a historic connection with the See of Canterbury in the sense of being founded by missionaries from England, that change rather stuck in the throat. In the end, the Council wasn’t terribly minded to move in that direction. Nor was it minded to move towards a rotating presidency of the Anglican Consultative Council. Council members seemed to prefer a more informal way of the Archbishop of Canterbury sharing in leadership in the Communion to a formal change in structure.
Overall the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals received a welcome which could only be described as lukewarm. Those who had prepared them were warmly thanked for their work and they will inform further discussion. However, it is fairly obvious that these proposals are not going to fix the divisions in the Communion and ACC-19 wasn’t minded to do much with them other than commend them for discussion. Notably, I think, it chose to commend them for discussion in member churches but did not pass a resolution asking those churches to report back to the next ACC.
It was striking how generous the conversations about these proposals were. This ACC was a Council which acknowledged real divisions but which was not characterised by bitter conflict.
As I process the experience of going to ACC-19 as one of the delegates from Scotland, there are a number of themes which race around in my mind.
One of them is that I think that there is quite urgent work for the Communion to do in trying to understand why different churches have made different choices about the propriety of blessing or marrying same-sex couples. I don’t think that at the moment there is much scope for the Communion coming to one view about this matter. There is going to be no great declaration that this matter has been resolved by the development of a doctrinal statement about this that everyone is going to gleefully sign up to. However, there is much work to be done in trying to understand ourselves and trying to understand why we come to different conclusions whilst holding the same bible in our hands. This is a rich theological vein to mine.
Related to this is a discussion about what it means to address postcolonial issues. There was some suggestion that the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals were there to address a postcolonial church. I don’t believe that they did do this.
By a long way, my strongest recollection in this area came when someone asked for a definition of what postcolonialism meant. Without a moment’s hesitation, a male, white bishop from the Church of England stepped up to a microphone and answered the question in a way which brought the conversation to a close. The truth is, I don’t think that I’ve ever been in a more interesting group of people who might have answered that question with theological rigour, personal experience and deep reflection on trying to live in a broken world. To put it simply and bluntly, I’d like to hear all of those who were in that room answer the question of what postcolonialism is and to be able to listen gently to one another in trying to articulate their answers.
Coming from Scotland, a land which both benefited from and led the expansion of the British Empire and which also has a powerful myth of being colonised by England, there is much to think about on our doorstep. At an ACC, our doorstep is the world. My hope is that this question is not lost at subsequent Council meetings.
A further reflection from me is that the idea of being in degrees of communion (or being in impaired communion) is one that needs a good deal more thinking about. I realised during my week in Belfast that it is a phrase that means very different things to different people. We don’t have the idea of being in impaired communion within the polity of the Scottish Episcopal Church. I learned last week that there are plenty of other churches that don’t have this idea within them either. However it is the very stuff that the Church of England is built from. One way of seeing the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals is to see them as somehow taking the deeply flawed (some would say heretical) theology that one can be in impaired communion within your own church and make it normative in the Anglican Communion. The Church of England may think it is acceptable to have dioceses in which bishops are not in full communion with their clergy or indeed with one another – it is quite another thing to get people who don’t have this idea to think that it is in any way a force for good. I’m glad that ACC-19 had no enthusiasm for this way of thinking. So far as I can see the words “being in impaired communion” within a church are little more than a euphemism for denying the legitimacy of ordained women. Many from around the Communion had not grasped that this is the reality of the Church of England.
As I reflect on these conversations, it is my hope that the Church of England will become more like the other churches of the Anglican Communion. That is a far better thing to hope for than that the Anglican Communion should become like the Church of England.
Perish the thought!
The Anglican Consultative Council is an overwhelming thing to belong to for the week it meets. It is bewildering, frustrating and utterly wonderful and it will take this participant some time to think through what it means to be part of a global church of such exuberant and vibrant life.
There is a huge pressure on all the Instruments of Communion within Anglicanism to hold things together. That pressure exhibits itself as a drive to find consensus even in the most difficult of times. This ACC did manage to agree a substantive resolution by a huge majority. No-one got everything they wanted. No-one actually needed to get everything they would have wanted.
My overriding sense of the end of ACC-19 was that the bonds of affection were deep and had been deeply renewed by the experience. We all loved one another. And there is no new schism to be had this time.
That might be as good as it ever gets.
And I thank God for it – for all of it.
I have a much better sense of what all of it looks like now than I did before I went.
God bless us one and all.
37 responses to “Keeping the faith”
It was an inspiring recitation. Following the English translation in the service sheet provided added insight to the life of Mary. All the more so as the cathedral is dedicated to St Mary. You are reminded of Mary every time you walk into the building with the Gwyneth Leech mural over the High Altar.
Kelvin is quite right. The very self-righteous defenders of the Bible (including the ones who trolled a brave young Muslim woman, for days, with the most vile language, and those who did not reprimand them) totally ignored the Biblical instructions for raising concerns with a brother in faith (Matthew 18:15; 2 Tim 23). Very practical instruction too! As anyone who has ever lived in community can verify. Could all these obsessive men *please* stop trying to divide our communities in Glasgow. We will not be divided. At the first sign of trouble we rush out to embrace one another. These abusers have much to repent of, even if *just* standing by while others throw stones.
I HATE it when the wrong tune is picked for a hymn … it is simply an abomination before God.
However, helping people to think about how we share hospitality, welcome and learn from each other is the WAY of God! Blessings on you Kelvin.
Some reasons why this time was different:
1. The other quaran recitations you mentioned happened at Nine Lessons and Carols, or special ecuminical and interfaith events. While 9L&C was originally a modified Evensong, nowadays it’s usually considered a seasonal community musical recitial with a religious tinge, so having a Muslim from the community recite something from their faith would seem natural enough. Civic and interfaith services will likewise naturally include representatives of every faith in the community. By contrast the Eucharist is the central act of Christian worship and people expect to hear ONLY Christian doctrine proclaimed in the Holy Eucharist. In other words, this was the wrong venue for showing hospitality to Muslim neighbors. You did not intend to practice syncretism, but I think the outcome was syncretic despite your good intentions.
2. Post Brexit (and post Trump) British Muslims are now seen as alien invaders rather than fellow members of the community.
3. Because hostility to Muslims is now fashionable, the Express and rest of the gutter press decided that this was a story worth reporting. Since conservative Americans often read the online editions of the British gutter press, the story then went global.
4. Because you are gay and out, your every action is scrutinized for any possible hint of heresy by GAFCON and Co.
Of all these reasons, only reason #1 is a legitimate criticism, but I hope you do think about criticism #1 as well as defending yourself from other, illegitimate criticisms.
Thank you for your comment Whit J – all the more because it is a thoughtful criticism.
I’ve plenty to reflect on about the how and the when we do things like that and I do hear loudly and clearly that many people think this was an inappropriate context. Though of course, I’d be bound to say that some are saying that the Eucharist is precisely the place indeed there are some saying that is what it is for.
I’m not going to get into a back and forth with all the comments on this post and I’m deliberately not letting through things that have already been said but be assured that I’ve heard the criticism and will reflect on it not simply now but over coming months. (I’ve learned a lot about where God is this week that will take a long time to process). I’m grateful for the way you’ve made your point.
I think there is a good deal in what Whit J says, although I am not sure the effect actually was syncretic. I think one does perhaps have to be a regular worshipper at St Mary’s to understand how totally orthodox the worship there is, and how much Jesus is the focus of worship – how utterly unlikely it is that anyone there would make the mistake of thinking he was not revered by the congregation as a whole as very God from very God. It would be impossible for them not to realise that all the clergy there rejoice in this belief. The congregation saw the words of the Qu’ran in an English translation which portrayed that book’s far-from-easy-to-follow account of Islam’s view of the conception of Jesus, in which there was nothing offensive, and heard a very beautiful voice singing in a strange and glorious language. These were clearly indicated to be the beliefs of another faith. We certainly neither saw or heard or understood any insult to the person of Christ. I am sure none was intended, either. Whereas, and this bears repeating, I am totally sure that many of those commenting (not of course by any means all of them, and nobody whose comments are published here) simply wish harm to relationships between the great faiths in Glasgow.
I have spent my whole adult life in dialogue with people of other religious traditions, it has been deeply rewarding. However I feel that what happened at this service was profoundly wrong. When we are truly ourselves we allow other people to be profoundly themselves. The truth of Christianity is not compatible with any other religion. To avoid that incompatibility is to avoid reality. Worship of Jesus is the fountain of our faith the Qu’ran is opposed to that. I love Jesus and therefore cannot conceive of reading the Qu’ran in an act of worship – no problem doing so in other contexts but not in worship. I am profoundly disturbed that you cannot see this Kelvin.
There are so many things aren’t there, not just around this issue which we hold dear in faith and which we can’t see from another perspective?
I can hear and see that people are upset by this and clearly there are many people not upset by it too. And obviously, at least I hope obviously, I love Jesus too.
The trouble with religious questions and the questions that religious people have I think is that so often that our love for our faith can make it impossible to comprehend others who also claim to love the same faith but who take different views about things. We can hear them claim that love but be intellectually unable to process it because it leads them to different conclusions.
I’ve found the same thing to be true in the sexuality debates very frequently though I perceive that to be changing sometimes now. Similarly with other identity issues and some political issues. Israel/Palestine conversations for example often seem to be conducted (when they are conducted at all) by people who seem to behave like ships passing in the night.
I happen to have views about Church Schools which are pretty intransigent and negative. You are one of the few people, no the only person, who ever made me really think there might be a point of view about them other than mine which might have an integrity I could respect. And I’m very grateful for that.
Kelvin, thank you for your reply. I have enormous respect for you. I have no doubt that church schools can be argued against from perfectly respectable positions. Worship of Jesus is simply a different order, it cannot include a reading from the Qu’ran. Worship is one thing, study, dialogue, relationship something else.
I am really grateful to Richard for the phrase “When we are truly ourselves we allow other people to be profoundly themselves” which reflects my experience of interfacing with sincere people of other faiths. Is a Christian Eucharist a place this should happen? I can understand some Christians feeling it is not, but as long as everything was clearly labelled as what it was and the integrity of the liturgy was intact, I can also understand some feeling it is.
Brother Kelvin,
Although I do not agree with allowing the Koran to be read in our Christian churches, I truly appreciated your firm and resolute stand for the deity of Jesus. He is our great God and Savior and I love Him very much. Blessings from Tennessee.
Just as a perhaps amusing point of reference, the 1982 hymnal of the Episcopal church in the USA has “Brightest and best of the STARS” (caps mine) “of the morning,” apparently so as to avoid offending any daughters who might be present, and the two tunes included are “Morning Star” by James Proctor Harding (1850-1911) and “Star in the East” from The Southern Harmony (1835). The Harding tune was also in the 1940 Hymnal, wherein the word “sons” was still used.
I am not clear as to whether the hospitality at St Mary’s anticipates infinite extension of parallel lines between Islam and the Church in Glasgow. Are you planning some opportunities for Glasgow Muslims to understand the Christian faith and prepare for Baptism and the glorious liberty of regeneration by the Holy Spirit? (In whichever order; no axe about that!) As you move around the Glasgow community and meet more Christians of Islamic background, why not invite such to participate in groups for new Muslim enquirers? The testimony of an ex-Muslim can express vibrantly “How I know He lives” (as your SA brethren would sing). You might find not only new hearts from a divine work of grace among your Muslim neighbours but in other neighbours too. Amen. Inshallah!
There are a small number of people in St Mary’s who are converts from Islam to Christianity just as there are a small number of people in local mosques who are converts from Christianity to Islam.
St Mary’s regularly puts on events and courses for people discovering and exploring Christianity. Most living religions do the same thing.