When the world is in meltdown

This weekend is taken up with our annual Diocesan Meeting or Synod. The Eucharist last night seemed only moderately well-attended both by clergy and laity. We seem to have forgotten about the opportunity to invite community and other church leaders, the liturgy was very clergy dominated and even (as far as I could tell) those laity who were allowed to administer Communion were trainee priests.
The Bishop's address was dry, and he looked tired...poor man
The agenda is dominated by formality with only (it would seem) a slight departure into the controversial to discuss GAFCON (so called Global Anglican Futures Conference...a body that declares itself to be the new fount of orthodoxy).
The Bishop did press us about water issues, and the global financial crisis, but where were the community leaders to hear it?
It will all be over tomorrow evening. PTL!

At last

It depends how you calculate it, but it has actively taken between 30 and 60 years for a woman to be consecrated in Australia.
Now at last we hear that Archdeacon Kay Goldsworthy will be ordained a bishop on May 22nd .
I don't need to relate the immediate events of how this has happened the ABC has a reasonable report on it here

Uniting the disaffected

What ever else people say about Gene Robinson, the Bishop of New Hampshire, in the USA he always impresses me as the person who has the character of a Bishop.

Now, he may just have a good publicity machine (something most episcopods seem to lust after) but virtually all the articles I have read about him show a man with a deep pastoral heart. Not one interested in chasing the limelight, but one rather happy to nurture  small communities of faith in difficult places. Which is what his diocese is like. (see for example this recent article from the Guardian newspaper in the UK here or here)

The fact that he is no doubt one of the most hated Anglican Bishops of all time should not go unnoticed. His deep hurt expressed in the above article goes largely unremarked, instead he is caricatured as a monster intent on destroying the Anglican Communion.

Bishop Robinson is of course gay!!

There are bishops left, right and centre all urging us to be quiet and 'moderated' about the issue of homosexual bishops. 

There are too few bishops urging us to stand fast against the prejudice and indeed hatred of homosexual people that exists in society and in the church.

The pragmatic political types invariably defeat the pastors.

While we still live in a world where it is dangerous for a person to openly declare that their sexual orientation is homosexual...and we do... then Christians, in my opinion, should be standing against that prejudice rather than adding to it.

It doesn't seem to me, for all the blustering, that the hyperbole and comment from most bishops is actually clarifying this issue. 

Their second guessing  "love the sinner but hate the sin" as if homosexuality was (in their opinion) equivalent to murder, is so often thinly veiled prejudice that someone needs to challenge it. If it goes unchallenged too many people will believe that that sort of equivalence is true.

I do not accept the case that homosexuality is sinful. (What sort of God afflicts 10 per cent of humanity with a tendency to sin which the others don't have?). 

Nor do I believe that homosexuals have any more license to be sexually immoral than anyone else. None of us has that right.

The Gene Robinsons of this world help us see, at least, that God's love transcends our own smallness of vision

This is a bit of a ramble...expressing I think something of the anger I feel about this.,

Anger that the Church which should be the champion of the downtrodden is so often (not heeding the Saviour's words) the very first to cast not onbe but many stones.

God bless Gene Robinson, I am thankful that at least one bishop has a pastor's heart.

Not very pointy

Although other, non-Anglican, Churches often say of us that we are very 'hierarchical'. It's not really true. We have an hierarchy, but it's only got two or three levels. There is the Bishop, the clergy (and maybe one division within that group- the in and the out perhaps!) and the laity.

In a way this is far more frought with danger than a multi-levelled hierarchy like the army. Because it means, in reality, unless you are careful the top level can subsume almost everything it wants. It can take power unto itself, and even create authority lines that don't really exist.

This can work really well, and particularly in the country where resources are often slight, it can operate as a sort of benevolent dictatorship.

When it doesn't work well, like when the Bishop goes mad or begins to drink or starts to weaken under stress (all of which have happened in my living memory in different parts of this country) benevolent dictatorship rather breaks down.

So, it is sad to see the playing out of a fracas in our neighbouring Diocese of The Murray (here), where various people (clergy and lay) have gone to war with the Bishop and are seeking a Tribunal (here).

This process is clumsy, and is in the proces of being changed. It remains to be seen whether it can even be applied in this case. The Bishop in question doesn't think so, and the lay people who want it (I think) will find that it does not deliver what they want... the sacking of the Bishop.

There are and will be lots of lessons to learn from this. One of them will be that in a 'not so pointy' hierarchy, it does actually make a difference that you get the top right. 

In a multi-levelled structure there are always people at the next level who can be drawn up but that is not necessarily the case when the next level is fairly flat, and indeed many are the appointees of the leader concerned so may not achieve what 'removalists' want any way.

Poor old Diocese, poor old Bishop, but mainly I keep thinking poor old people of the Murray both churched and unchurched let down by hubris and infighting!

After the event

The conference referred to below was quite demanding but probably quite good. We were told that he wanted to love us, it was good to be so told. And I believe it.
Our facilitator mused about how she worked with many ages but often these sorts of consultations in the church were more torrid. One would hope that it is not because we are worse but because we are more vulnerable. But it would be presumptuous of me to say so.
I did determine that I would write a letter to the former Gorgonzola, (not that I would send it to him, but I need to write it for my own integrity)
God bless us all!

Embarassment , the Elephant of Truth and the Big Cheese

Commenting on someone else's blog in which they ask the question posed by Jack Spong...Why the Church should change or die...and trying to be too cryptic for my own good, I said

Maybe we shouldn't be so embarassed to die.

As I think about it there may be more than an "elephant of truth " in that little insight. Not that we should be careless or reckless with what has been committed to us, but we are awfully reluctant to let stuff go. While this is understandable it is not necessarily or particularly commendable.
Even if we think about someone dying (Jeff of a previous post died earlier this week...one of his fundamentalist daughters abused the good Archdeacon who had tried to minister to the family in their grief...but I digress).
Today we have to endure a "clergy conference". The last one we had on this subject really got to the Big Cheese as he copped a fair bit of flak for his non- consultative style. I imagine today we will see a wresting back of authority, comforted now with an episcopal ally of his own making, and months of consolidation of his position he is in a much firmer place. But he is, for all his rhetoric, I suspect too embarassed to let things die.

Funereal reality

AJD's funeral went well yesterday. It was good to be critiqued by M for my former entry, which as I said was maybe a bit harsh (here).
I did think about what I wrote in that entr,y conscious of the fact that not everything that can be said needs to be said. But I did need to say what I said since he figured as a large part of my life and my formation as a priest. He was not responsible (for good or for ill) for the way I turned out, he did have some influence.
Part of the therapy of a funeral, however, is not to be bombarded by a litany of glory but to hear different perspectives.
So I heard this difficult man's wife (an amazing person by any standards) say of him that she was thankful for the unconditional love he had for his family. I think this was true and good to be stated. She talked, too, of how the awful Alzheimer's Disease had been a gift to this family. She is always open to the challenge and growth of impossible situations. I wonder if her fine children (as difficult a bunch as any) had her deep commitment to this. "He enjoyed chocolate biscuits and holding hands" seems a fine statement to make
It was good, too, to catch up with the cohort of people who share the same space with me that this man shared. We look older, we are dreading the next time we meet...it may be one of us. Indeed some of us were not there for that reason. One is on his deathbed and his daughter was there, but not his wife who needs to be with him.
Others were just not there. I needed to go, and it was really good for me. I feel a 25 year old spectre has been let go of. I hope that is true. There have been times when I just could not bear to go to a funeral, and go to so many that I could easily justify not going to another. It has not been so bad of late. I am glad I went.
No Bishop was present, a shameful statement of the Church's pathetic abilty to care for its own. Fortunately the deceased would regard this as something of a victory! This is something he taught me...the first instruction of my funeral requests reads....no Bishop will take any part in this service! I am not yet at the stage where I feel that I can endorse the shameful abnegation of oversight that the episocpate has perpetuated in recent times.....another blog all together!!
So, on the whole, this difficult funeral weaved its magic. WE should settle for nothing less than a difficult funeral!