What is in Kelvin's Head?

We are not stewards

19/09/2025

A long time ago, back in the mists of nearly twenty years ago, I started to think that it was important that there was a liturgical celebration of creation. I thought long and hard about it and decided that instead of celebrating that modern invention the Harvest Festival, we would celebrate Creation instead, rolling a sense of thanksgiving into that but praying too for the wellbeing of the created world.

That is the way that it has been for quite a while now. We usually keep it on the first Sunday in October, around the time of the Feast of St Francis. We even sometimes throw in an animal blessing service that weekend, despite the fact that Francis himself wouldn’t allow members of his order to keep pets.

As time has gone on, the climate crisis has become more obvious to more people and the churches have been looking for ways to think about creation. Thus the idea of Creationtide – a month long celebration of creation has started to be marked in different ways in different churches.

Now, I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to churches declaring new seasons. When the Church of England and those who follow its mysterious ways decided that Kingdom Season was a thing, I wasn’t impressed. Similarly, when in the Scottish Episcopal Church, the bishops started talking about a Season of Christian Living or a Season of Discipleship I was more inclined to be a disinterested observer than an active participant. The biggest problem, it always seemed to me, with new Seasons in the Calendar was that the worldwide church hadn’t made its mind up.

And yes, I know that there are those who will think that it is odd that I thought we could move ahead with the marriages of same-sex couples or the ordination of priests who happen to be women without the enthusiastic agreement of the whole church but that we couldn’t have a new season without universal agreement but there we are. We all have our red lines.

The surprising thing about the Season of Creation though it that it is attracting considerable interest across different denominations. Churches of the Orthodox tradition, Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism are all pondering what it means to keep a season or a feast meditating on creation. Significant elements of the world church do seem, this time, to be on their way to creating a new season or feast.

I’d be happy with a feast rather than a season, but that’s not the principle point that I’m interested in right now.

The thing that bothers me more than anything about this isn’t the intention to mark Creation in the calendar. It is how we mark it and what we say about it.

In particular, it troubles me considerably that the language that we use to mark the feast might be contributing to damaging ways of thinking about the created order in the face of the climate crisis. Our words form our thoughts and I’m not convinced that declaring a Season of Creation without thinking hard about what words we will use is really going to help.

I struggle most with the notion that it is a positive thing for human beings to be seen as Stewards of Creation. This idea inhabits many modern liturgies.

We currently have the following as a prayer offered for experimental use during the Season of Creation.

God give you grace to be faithful stewards of Creation,
rejoicing that you are made in God’s image,
and seeking justice for those who do not share in the earth’s bounty,
and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
be upon you, and remain with you always. Amen.

This is by no means unusual. The idea that we should become better stewards of creation comes at us in hymns and in prayers and, I suspect, in sermons preached around this time.

The trouble is, I think that human beings being stewards of creation is part of what has got us into the mess we are in globally.

It posits a God who has gone away, leaving creation to be managed (stewarded) by human beings.

Firstly I don’t think that God has gone away. And secondly, the trouble with a management model is that it imagines our role in creation to be primarily that of taming it, controlling it. It is as though we are here to turn creation into a park fit to live in.

That very idea of human beings being created themselves in order to manage the rest of creation seems to me to be deeply problematic. It puts human beings at the centre of the created order when all that we can see around us tells us that this is not so. Who stewarded the dinosaurs? Who stewards Alpha Centauri?

Placing ourselves at the centre of how we think about the world isn’t surprising. It may even, with a little side order of repentance be something that is forgivable. I think therefore I am very quickly turns into I think therefore I am right here at the centre of things and morphs into I think therefore I am in charge, all too easily.

Here in the Scottish Episcopal Church we’ve also been experimenting with the idea of being “priests to creation”.

…you formed humanity in your own image,
and entrusted us with the priesthood of your Creation.

It is a poetic image which comes from some serious theology but it is theology that predates the Climate Crisis.

And anyway, I have more of a sense that creation is a priest to me, mediating my relationship with God than that I am a priest to creation, somehow standing between the created order and divine love.

Creation is not ours to tame. The stewarding and priestly metaphors lead directly into a control mentality. And the outworkings of that are all too evident. At least one of the leaders of a political party in the UK came away from the Triumpian Banquet this week convinced that the best way forward was to extract all our oil and all our gas from the North Sea and use it. Note the possessive adjective used – our. In the face of the Climate Crisis, oil of ours might well take us closer to our destruction.

Deep inside, I think that most Christians know that Creation is not ours to tame.

There are currently many Christians coming on pilgrimage to Scotland. (When Jerusalem is closed, Iona is open). Many of them come via the church I serve either on their way to Iona or on their way back.

There is a sense when you talk to them that they have an instinctive urge to get to a place where human beings have not tamed the created order. As though God will speak to them there. I have many problems with that as I think that God is as present in the city as in the country and in the New World just as much as the Old. However, that sense of the goodness of creation being found in the wilderness is instinctive in the minds of many of the pilgrims that I meet.

Kierkegaard asked himself whether he should choose the monastery or the deer park – piety or pleasure. Our choice lies in whether we choose to see God in the crashing waves, the raging of the volcano and the struggle between the predator and their prey or whether we can only imagine God at work in some place where the wilderness has been tamed.

We may have been created for a garden and we may end up destined for a garden of delights, but here, out of Eden, we neither live in parkland nor are called to tame, pillage or plunder the world around us.

That notion of stewardship is trouble for it doesn’t allow us to think of ourselves as inherently creatures within creation. It always calls us to manage, interfere and control. It brings with it mentalities of harm.

Jesus has harsh words to say about stewards. They are seldom, in his thought world intrinsically good.

In Scotland, we use other vocabulary for stewards. Both in terms of managing highland estates or in terms of how we manage shared buildings in cities, the steward is called the factor. Factors are often disliked and often mistrusted. They are simply there to manage and steward property on behalf of others who are either absent or unable able to exercise the level of control that is needed to cope with property.

Such an image is a terrible one for how we think about creation.

Somehow we need language that stops us from thinking that human beings are in charge.

Should we pray, “God give you the grace to be faithful factors of Creation?”

Everyone who has ever had a factor will think we should not.

creation, creationtide, Francis, Season of Creation

10 responses to “The Church of England and its Bishops”

Joan H Craig

20/11/2012

You put it well, and I agree with all that you say. In one sense it is a very sad day for priests who are women. In another, parity is crucial 🙁

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Patrick Smith

20/11/2012

I am not a regular C of E communicant now but have been so in my life and I unequivocally support the proper human rights entitlement of women to serve equally as Bishops.I think that the women priests appear to have been too inclined, cap in hand, to compromise that would still have deemed women bishops, as second class.This Vote, according to some of their spokespersons was as far as the talented women priests could get, amongst the conservative antis, in the C of E.

Surely,that in our enlightened world men do not hold a monopoly on either the aspiration to achieve good in their work or to eclipse human goodness in prayer,mission and faith in the ranks of the C of E? The Bishops and Clergy have seen that women are now do one third of active work in the C of E but do not have parity at the top table.

Why is it the case that women are ordained in the US and NZ and have served their communities equally, as men, over 20 years? Whereas, in the C of E at home, the vision of the Laity Synod threatens to derrogate the status of women, as if the clock had been turned back into Victorian times and before the Suffragettes had started their quest for universal suffrage and equality in work for women.

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Duncan MacLaren

20/11/2012

Nigel McCulloch said in the debate, “If you wait for the perfect piece of legislation, you’ll be waiting for ever.”
I can understand the principled position that you don’t want to pass flawed and discriminatory legislation: but I can’t help thinking this would be better than acquiescing for another 5 years in an even more discriminatory status quo.
Had women bishops been voted in, they would have had five years to demonstrate practically to their opponents that they were competent, valuable, indispensable, talented and undeniably called leaders in the church. Instead, we now have the task of creating legislation the opponents will like even less (because it won’t make space for their position), and then trying to get it voted through. And five years of practical experience – perhaps the best argument – wasted.
If there were six lay liberals (the margin of votes) who voted ‘no’ on principle this evening, I wonder how long before they will rue the day? Principle is all very well, but possession is nine-tenths of the law. Had women been granted this possession, we could have spent the next five years chasing down the discriminatory clauses: as it is, we are back to square one. Barren theological argument now prevails over the witness and example of flesh and blood women.

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1. kelvin
  
  20/11/2012
  
  I understand that view, Duncan. I’d agree with it if there was any evidence in the last 20 years of anyone either trying or succeeding to eliminate the flying bishops that were created last time around. It is much, much easier to create good legislation than to repeal, tinker and undo bad legislation.
  
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2. Augur Pearce
  
  21/11/2012
  
  As I see it part of the problem was the large number of Synod members who wanted to see women bishops but thought that unity was more important than principle, and were therefore prepared to compromise. The ideal scenario would not have been rejection of the Measure, but an amendment to get rid of the discriminatory clauses. That wasn’t possible because the ‘unity party’ (for want of a better name) would have allied with the fundamentalists to defeat it. I hope that those who made up this ‘unity party’ will now realise the time for compromise is past and support legislation which, as you say, the opponents will like even less because it wonâ€™t make space for their position. I believe such legislation would pass, but would lead the fundamentalists to dissent from the C of E and form their own conventicles (as many have done before them, for better reasons). There would then be some hope of the General Synod addressing other equality issues, such as marriage…
  
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Tim

20/11/2012

Could it be said that it spent too long cooking?

The impression I get is that the SEC was quite decisive in dealing with the Covenant earlier.
What I’ve seen with the CoE looks like internalized via-media meeting a half-open door – and no wonder some people use the word “irrelevant”. As such, I’m wondering if it shouldn’t have simply been “women bishops, yes or no?” a while ago and then there wouldn’t have been such clumsy inaccuracy of reporting, at least…

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Ritualist Robert

21/11/2012

I have to say, regretfully, that I am relieved it didn’t pass because, imho, it allowed for far too many ‘provisions’ for so-called traditionalists. Their arguments seem to be based on one of the most vile theological concepts ever invented – ‘taint’ – though, of course, nobody admits to it. I understand the Evangelicals’ objections (though I disagree with them), but I am flummoxed by things like the ‘traditionalist’ catholics’ demand for ‘flying bishops’ (a concept which fails any test for catholicity) and attacks the very basis of Anglican Church structure and order – that of a bishop acting as the Ordinary in his/her diocese. Choosing one’s bishop based on whether one likes their theological outlook is quite a novelty, but it’s one that the so-called traditionalists insist on being allowed. Moreover, to claim to be catholic surely means to support the Church. When the Church of England ordained women for the first time surely it was up to those catholics who disagreed to either (a) conform their minds to the mind of the Church – surely the duty of anyone who calls themselves catholic – or (b) to have enough integrity to part with the Church and find another spiritual home.

Instead we have so-called traditionalists promoting what are essentially congregationalist novelties whilst claiming – falsely, I believe – to be catholics, all the while arguing for a distinctly non-catholic version of the Church.

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Justin Reynolds

22/11/2012

If politics is ‘the art of the possible’ then surely all liberals should have backed the measure, whatever its flaws. The notion that one day we will all be marching hand in hand towards the sunlit progressive uplands is somewhat fantastic, I think.

Everyone who joins the C of E, or indeed the SEC, knows what kind of church it is: essentially progressive (as witnessed by the Synod vote) but with significant minorities opposed to change. And it isn’t like a political party where arguments are conducted in the field of political philosophy and politics with a realistic hope that the mind of the party might change decisively over time in one direction or other. In the case of the church disputes are necessarily more intransigent, concerned with the interpretation of revelation and long standing traditions. These disagreements take decades, indeed centuries, to resolve, in so far as they can be resolved at all.

Perhaps those who can’t live with compromise, be they conservative or liberal, should consider whether they are actually in the right denomination at all, rather than hoping that one day – sooner rather than later – everyone will agree with them. It’s often noted that conservatives can go Orthodox or Roman Catholic, as indeed some have. It’s less often suggested that liberals might consider Unitarianism or Quakerism. I say that as a liberal who has at various times wavered between those two – and others – and Episcopalianism. I’ve ended up as an Episcopalian, but I did so knowing full well the intractable nature of the disagreements besetting the denomination, and that I had to live with them or simply go elsewhere. It seems to me that Christians are far too sentimental and attached to particular denominations.

Also, with respect Rowan Williams’ tenure can hardly be seen as an ‘abject failure’. Everyone knew he believed in conciliation and compromise when he was selected. His liberalism on a number of issues only formed a component of his theology. And his intellectual contribution over the past decade to British national life has been significant, particularly in regard to political and economic issues. His archepiscopate has gone some way towards restoring Anglicanism’s intellectual credibility: witness the tributes from secular as well as religious quarters on news of his retirement.

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Seph

22/11/2012

Apparently Diana Johnson MP (Lab., Hull North) is planning to bring a ten-minute rule bill in the new year which will include a clause calling for women bishops. Parliament could succeed here where General Synod failed.

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Rosie Bates

02/12/2012

Check out Bristol Diocese action re Vote of No Confidence in Synod! How lovely on the mountains are the feet of Him who brings Good News! Hope the rest take note and follow a fine example. Hope in this Advent message. Bishop Mike was an Area Bishop in Oxford Diocese and likely to be very clued up to certain of their Synod Reps games which cannot be stopped before July without reform or, at the very least, tough love.

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