What is in Kelvin's Head?

I respectfully disagree…

02/07/2022

I respectfully disagree with the latest College of Bishops statement on Aberdeen and Orkney and I do so in two respects.

Firstly, there is no mention of a mediation process in Canon 53. If the College of Bishops wishes to use Canon 53 section 11 and subsequent sections, then they should follow the procedure laid down there and name the bishop who is hearing the dispute. The bishop in question should publish the terms under which they are going to determine the dispute and the date on which the hearing will take place. Canon 53 does not allow for the resolution of such disputes to be outsourced to other individuals or organisations. (Sections before section 11 do not apply to disputes within a diocese). The procedure outlined in Canon 53 Section 11 and the following sections is clearly a decision making process and not a process of mediation. (In any case, my personal view is that mediation processes are seldom appropriate in cases where bullying is alleged and where there are discrepancies of power between the parties involved).

Secondly, anyone making a claim of bullying against a serving bishop or any serving bishop wishing to make a claim that they have themselves been bullied by anyone subject to the Code of Canons, should be explicitly invited by the College to make a complaint under Canon 54.

Canon 54 can only be initiated by someone who is a member of the church. My view is that the College should make public appropriate arrangements for the bringing of a complaint by anyone who has subsequently left the church – specifically that the complaint would be passed to a (communicant) diocesan registrar or the clerk to the Episcopal Synod to be initiated formally.

Making vague references to the “Disciplinary Canonical process” of the church in a press release is unhelpful. Canon 54 is what the process is and the College of Bishops should long ago have insisted that people use it to bring allegations.

This is not the first statement by the College of Bishops with regard to these matters that has given me cause for concern. In a statement last December the College asserted that neither the Primus nor the College of Bishops had the power to suspend a bishop. The Code of Canons is very clear that bishops can be suspended and that only the Primus can do so and that this can only be upheld or not by the Episcopal Synod (which is the same body of people as the College of Bishops). The due processes governing how these things can come about are found in Canon 54 (Of Offences and Trials) and Canon 6 (Of Diocesan Bishops and their Jurisdiction and of Bishops’ Commissaries).

For the last few years I’ve been a member of a review group which has been carefully considering whether the disciplinary canonical processes of the church need to be updated. In time, I hope that they are. However, the canons that we currently have remain in force. Bishops require clergy to take oaths to uphold the Canons. Bishops themselves take oaths that they in turn will uphold the canons of the church.

I regard members of the College of Bishops as colleagues and friends and remain willing to discuss these matters with any of them or indeed with any member of the church. A number of the members of the College of Bishops have heard me say privately what I now assert here, that for the good of the whole church, the College of Bishops needs to return to the Canonical norms of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

I will not be discussing this matter with any journalists. The opinions expressed in this post are explicitly with regard to the College of Bishops and do not constitute a comment on anything that may or may not have happened in the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney, about which I have little knowledge.

The Code of Canons of the Scottish Episcopal Church can be found here: https://www.scotland.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/Code-of-Canons-2020.pdf

9 responses to “Who we are”

Susan Sheppard Hedges

26/10/2012

I have a question… What were the genders of these two persons?

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1. kelvin
  
  26/10/2012
  
  Person 1 was male. Person 2 was female.
  
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Suz Cate

26/10/2012

I arrived here in June, after graduating from the fine institution where you are visiting now and my subsequent ordination as transitional deacon. When I am ordained to the priesthood in December, I will be the first woman to serve as priest at St. James. I have sensed a growing excitement, especially among the women here, about the ministry of a woman priest–not unlike the the frisson expressed in the visitor’s statement: “Really? Wow! All this, and divorce and women priests.” We are figuring out together what difference it makes who we are, and on most days it is exciting!

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Calum

26/10/2012

I think the exchange is completely adorable. But also bang-on accurate. The Piskies are indeed “the ones with woman priests” – it’s not a bad moniker to be known by, is it? Although progress is still to be made in certain parts, I think it’s positive that that might be how some people identify and distinguish Episcopalians.

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Tracey

26/10/2012

The first time I attended an Episcopal church (in California), and they invited me to a picnic afterward on the church grounds. I agreed to stay on, but was kind of dreading it… and then I saw the ice chests full of cans of lager. So yeah, I have to admit that it was at first beer and later, divorce (both of which had caused me to become ostracised from my family) and women priests (i’d been brought up in a fundamentalist church where women were to keep silent in church) that made me become really interested in finding my way into this wonderful, welcoming, non-judgemental, and inclusive group where hell-fire and brimstone and damnation and punishment were never a part of the lovely, uplifting and inspiring sermons.

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NÃ¤dine Daniel

26/10/2012

Well in one way, the lack of awareness is pretty depressing, but the willingness to give the Cathedral a try would be encouraging, where it not for the perception that divorce made a denomination more acceptable. Frankly I don’t care what brings someone into a Church, any Church; just so long as we make them want to stay and discover the love of Christ once they get there.

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Rosemary Hannah

26/10/2012

I come to this from another angle – a liberal church background. It does not come to me as a surprise to hear women preach, teach and lead. I rejoice in it but the equality of women is no news to me

Divorce – well, to me it is never more than an admission of failure. Not something to be celebrated and welcomed, but a sad admission that things which started so very happily and hopefully and with such love, have ended in heartbreak. That my sometime husband left me for another woman in the church came pretty close to breaking my heart, and was one of those knife-edge things. A thing where either there will be just damage and misery and loss, or one day a resurrection, and you do not know which. That for me the balance finally tipped to life does not mean that divorce is something I want to rejoice in as I do in the ministry of women.
That God can turn evil to good is a blessing. It does not do however to continue in evil that He gets a better opportunity at such transformations. I would a jolly sight rather we were known for work for social justice, for respect for the environment, and for really positive things.

Beauty however – whether sound or image or architecture or the spoken word – yes I love us to be known for that and I rejoice in it.

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1. kelvin
  
  28/10/2012
  
  I suspect that what we may really talking about here is not actually divorce, but the question of whether divorce and remarriage bars one from communion.
  
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Rosemary Hannah

28/10/2012

Recently our Government had the stunning idea that ‘victims’ ought to be choosing the sentences of those who had offended against them. This is my idea of a utter nightmare – to have not merely the need to undertake one’s own recovery, for which one is of course responsible, but to then have to undertake some responsibility for the rehabilitation of those who have offended one strikes me as a bridge too far. I could never ask that somebody is turned away from communion because of an offence against me, and therefore I cannot ask that they are turned away because of a sin against others. I don’t really believe in that kind of God.

Yet there is a problem. Of all the bad moments I had over the divorce, one of the very worst was the moment I walked alone into church and saw in a prominent pew my husband, who had left but from whom I was not yet legally separated, sitting shoulder to shoulder with his new partner. I ended in the nearest pew on my knees, helplessly sobbing, unable to hide my distress. That should not happen to anybody and it should not be up to the ‘victims’ (however much we espouse a doctrine of equal blame for marriage failure) to protect themselves from such a thing.

I took communion every week with the lady with whom my husband now lived, and every week I had to forgive her anew in order to offer the Peace and forgive her. It was, to put it mildly, a big ask. That, to me, is the essential reality of divorce, and I really, really, really do have the right to say that we may have divorce and we may have to live with it, but the reality of it is pain and hard hard work. I find no ‘Wow!’ anywhere in it. It was hard and bitter punishment for all the stupid things I had managed to do in 30 years of marriage.

There is always a cost to be borne for such things. We believe in forgiveness and fresh starts, and I must suppose the ‘Wow!’ is for that – but such things are costly. I believe they are always costly for God, and most usually they are costly for humans too. I don’t want humans judged, but – but where the joy of person A is bought at the price of the pain of person B we need to tread exceedingly circumspectly.

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