10 reasons I would walk out of Church

Today was a joyous and sad day. Christians get this.
My friend Tim died, his funeral was an unhurried festival of joy. Most of the two or three hundred gathered there were walking backwards and forward from joy to tears.
As I say, Christians get this. While saddened that one of us dies, yet we are glad of Jesus's prophetic words . This day you will be with me in Paradise.
Fr Grant Bullen spoke eloquently in his eulogy about how today we have friend on 'the other side'.
While we may want to demythologise this ( I am not terribly fussed) this seemed to me an authentic expression of my relationship with this saint of a man.
In one of the conversations I had today, someone noted that Tim had walked out of a local church when the priest started ranting against marriage quality.
It caused me to wonder what else would make me walk out of church
...I don't intend to fill out the whole list but here are a few things....perhaps you can send me some more.
1. I agree with Tim, while the Church respects everyone's views...when it starts saying that LGBTIQ are disordered and not worthy of equality...I get up and walk out
2. When it says Children should be seen and not heard...I get up and walk out
3. When it says women are subordinate ...I get up and walk out
4. When it prefers the affluent middle-classes, and overlooks the faithful poor, and humble....I get up and walk out

and so this might go on...What are your suggestions?

A great Bishop

The bishop belongs to all.
Let no one be scandalized if I frequent
Those who are considered unworthy
Or sinful. Who is not a sinner?
Let no one be alarmed if I am seen
With compromised and dangerous people,
On the left or the right.
Let no one bind me to a group.
My door, my heart, must be open
To everyone, absolutely everyone.

The Most Reverend Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara

former Archbishop  of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife

This is taken from the installation of Bp Katherine Jefferts-Schori many years ago as the American Presiding Bishop

She has in my mind been a great leader during difficult times. Her time is coming to an end.
There is much to be thankful for about her leadership.....
...refusing to be bullied
...remaining steadfast in the faith
...and apart from all that   seeming to command a sense of humour

Meryl and Hilary

My admiration for Meryl Streep continues to grow. This Tribute to Hilary Clinton is quite wonderful and well worth watching
 Such depth of perception. Such articulateness. I really want to believe that this wasn't the work of a professional speechwriter, and it doesn't seem to be.

For all the greatness of his electioon, it is also the great sadness about Obama being elected that Hilary wasn't. But maybe she was saved the denigration that inevitably follows.

When enough is enough!

One of my Facebook friends draws our attention to this post of Bp John Spong who opens with the gambit that he has decided he is no longer going to dignify the discussion about homosexuals in the life of the Church by trying to convince bigots that they are wrong. (see here)

The good Bishop does have a point.

There is much of what he writes that I do not agree with, but I have always admired the way he makes people think, myself included.

I therefore have some reservation about a 'manifesto' that says there will be no more discussion; but I can understand how one can get to this point. There is too little time to waste it trying to convince people who just aren't even prepared to listen constructively to another viewpoint.

I got to this point in the debate in the Australian Church about the ordination of women to the priesthood.

For two decades we were told that we should all be open & listen to those of differing viewpoints. That culminated in a whole series of toings and froings and pseudo church legal proceedings which seemed to resolve nothing (see a time line here) Finally when the Bishop of Canberra was ready to go ahead an injunction was taken out in the NSW Supreme Court to prevent him from doing so. I felt deeply saddened, and wondered why those who kept saying that their opposition was 'scriptural' seemed to have forgotten the scriptural injunction to not take your fellow Christian to court (see 1Cor 6:1-10 for St Paul's very strong teaching on this ).

This was a watershed experience for me, I realised that however tolerant I and my ilk were prepared to be the other side were not playing by the same rules. Indeed today, 20 years later, they still do not appear to have shifted. Indeed in the Diocese of Sydney it appears that things are worse. Even though ....but that's a whole other issue :)

My point?

Like the good Bishop, I can understand there comes a point when you realise that continuing on being 'tolerant' and 'fair' is actually aggravating the situation.

I am not quite at that point with the gay issue, but pretty close!

The case of the disappearing banners

People often don't get it...but we had a wonderful funeral today. Pioneer feminist and Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW) member, Alder Hall.

She was one of a fascinating group of driven women who were the stalwarts who kept up the battle for the ordination of women to thge priesthood in the Anglican Church.

The banner to the left is one of a series made over a number of years for the group who would gather at our cathedral after ordinations to protest at the refusal of our church to ordain women to the priesthood. It took 25 years or more of hard plugging for our church to get around to it.

Alder was a key mover in this.

We wondered where they might be as it would be good to display them for the service today. Any way we tracked them down (not me really) and found a whole array of them.

The first comment of many members was ..."We wondered where they were" and then "We think there are 8" and we only had three or four.

Any way by the time we talked it through we thought we tracked them all down.

Alder's sewing skills are phenomenal. Not the typical image of a strident feminist.
Yet I think the lovely Alder did not want to become a man and stop doing traditionally womanly things, she wanted equality for all. Men and women.

Her needlework is a significant reminder of craft giftedness. She was also one of great humility, compassion and erudition. She was persistent and tenacious

My friend and colleague Joan Claring-Bould who is the chaplain at the Women and Children’s Hospital sent me an email yesterday to say she could not be here. She said of Alder: Alder was a prophet of reconciliation, justice and peace. Her gracious and tenacious support for the Ordination of Women in this diocese and the Australian Church, along with Alison Gent and others, should never be forgotten by the women clergy of the diocese. I hope some day we will find a way of making sure her memory lives on in the history, present and future of this diocese.

I agree and I know many others will too

Just Julia

I am inclined to think that Julia Gillard is not the ambitious vixen that some would try to caricature as.

She seems to me to have been about as open as you can be about her desire to lead the nation, and also as reluctant as you must be to pursue this with the sort of ferocity that many of her male counterparts would only too happily indulge in.

The absolute and utter hypocrisy of much of what transpired as comment yesterday on all sides of politics, almost infuriating if not so utterly transparent and laughable.

I mean, who could fail to be aghast at the audacity of the mad monk standing up there lecturing the Labor Party about how no leader should be treated as Rudd was by the bovver boyz of his own party.

I mean if he wanted to be taken seriously he should at least have been made to look Malcolm Turnbull in the eye while he was saying this.

Having worked for over thirty years in an institution (the Anglican Church) which is even more male-dominated than the Parliament, I hope for our country what I believe is true also for the Church. And that is, that female leadership will be different in style from all-male leadership.

There are those who find this laughable, who tend to suggest that women are more ruthless than men and only get into power by being more power-driven than their male counterparts (some of those voices were heard yesterday).

In my experience the proponents of this are very often men who have been rolled by strong women who are not prepared to be patronised.

What seems to be truer, is that women rather value and encourage certain loyalties rather than others. They are not so driven by the need to 'win' so much as to 'succeed'. This might seem a subtle, even nuanced, difference. But it is rather important.

Winning is rather short-term, where success is a much more wholistic idea.

I think Ms Gillard's language indicated that she is aiming to succeed rather to win. Kev's problem (and I suspect Abbot's) is that they have to win

UnAustralian

I tire of the epithet that declares this or that to be "unaustralian".

It is clear that in a pluralist society we are as divided about what is and what is not "Australian" as we can be.

For heavens sake our key value would seem to be that people should be allowed the maximum liberty to do what they like without interference. It's unaustralian to try and minimise people's liberties in fairly arbitrary ways.

No one is seriously suggesting that values of safety and security should be compromised by a sort of anarchy which says anything goes...but saying what people should and should not be allowed to wear...and the burkha is the case in point...is ridiculous

I personally am not inclined to believe that Senator Bernardi is the best arbiter of what is and what is not “Australian”.
His comments about the burkha would seem to be such blatant political opportunism, aimed at the sort of divisive scare tactics that the Opposition is renowned for, that it causes me to conclude he is the last person who should be allowed to pontificate on what is “unaustralian”.

Coming into their own

What ever you may think about the Acting Prime Minister (yes that's right, for 60 hours until Kev gets back from Bali .....half his luck) isn't it good when you see people coming into their own?
Despite her and my good fortune of having red hair (you brownies, blondies and blackies just don't get it!), and her nasal voice. Don't you like the way she just ploughs on?
In yesterday's paper the Vox Pops asked the question of whether a woman would be a good PM...the resounding response was yes. And the reason? Because they see things differently.
This is (for those who could care less) one of the reasons why we need women bishop's too. Most bishops I have known (all men) have a side of them which is blinded by their own glory; some cope with this better than others. For the rest it can be disastrous.
Women don't seem to be so easily deceived. (I don't imagine a woman Pope would have dreamt up the doctrine of papal infallibility). So often women are some what more confident of themselves and don't need to be constantly worshipped and adored, like we frail creatures who need our Mummy!
So I am finding Ms Gillard's growth in stature, character and stateswomanly behaviour wonderful to observe.

Women at the pointy end

In a split but definitive judgment of the Anglican Church's Appellate Tribunal, a majority (4-3) judgment was handed down last week that there is no objection to women being ordained as bishops.
In the way that we love legal things, it is all a bit too tricky to go into here ( I will be happy to point you in the right direction...like here). Friends outside the church will find it laughable. Might I say that much of it is because we are too sensitive to people's alleged sensibilities and so we slow everything down to try and accomodate absolutely everybody. This doesn't seem to work, and does allow bizarre obstructionism which can go on for years.
Well perhaps now it is over.
The ABC's Religion Report had very good interview with two leading Australian Church Women, Colleen O'Reilly from Melbourne and Kay Goldsworthy in Perth. O'Reilly makes a number of very good points. She exposes how those opposed to women's ordination are a little precious in their claim that their opposition is 'biblically based', as if some how those of us who support the ordination of women are not.
I, in fact, (and O'Reilly makes the same point) would hold that the notion of the radical equality of women is a key scriptural principle...just as much as the equality of black and white.
Moving on from this she then makes the point that if 'alternative episcopal oversight' is going to be sought in Dioceses where women minister for people who can't tolerate it, then equally well alternative episcopal oversight should be being provided in Sydney, The Murray and Armidale for people who (like me) are deeply affronted that women's ordination is denied.
These streets need to run both ways!!