Andrew Brown The Guardian David Jenkins: the bishop who didn’t believe in the Bible
Archdruid Eileen How to Shorten a Church Meeting
David Walker, Bishop of Manchester, ViaMedia.News Welcoming Signs
Justin Welby Church Times Prayer changes everything
Colin Coward Living in the closet – fifteen reasons why it’s not an okay place for gay bishops
Claire Jones Dear… the next LGBT St Anselmer
Many thanks to Claire for writing this piece about her time in the S. Anselm community. Her words, “The single thing that will make the most impact for people who have only ever thought about sexuality in terms of arguments and verses, is knowing you”, remind me of some things that happened in my diocese’s Shared Conversations – only of course that was a mere 3 days, not a year. Maybe we can also link this to women priests and the way some parishes changed their views once they came to know one?
Unfortunately, the font of Colin Coward’s piece is too small for me to read.
Archdruid’s words of wisdom should be engraved on the heart of every committee chair and secretary. Badly conducted meetings are the bane of church life. They are one of the reasons why the synodical system is so corrupted; their irrelevance and interminability means only those who like sitting on committees get elected and because they can’t acstually run committees effectually no one else will stand. In my view it’s important as a chair of a committee to have a clear view of what you want to get out of it. That doesn’t mean fixing the result, it means so ordering… Read more »
Laurence,
if you’re reading on your PC or laptop, you can press Ctrl + to make the font larger. Ctrl – makes it smaller again.
[And Ctrl 0 resets the size to the default. On a Mac replace Ctrl by Cmd – ed.]
In the first half of David Walker’s piece he talks of conditional welcome. It’s good. Very good. Then he morphs into saying that in practice the church often offers only constrained or conditional welcome but he never really justifies that theologically. He never talks about challenging constrained welcome. A sad end to an article which started with such promise.
Increasingly I wish Archdruid Eileen was a bishop…
At some point in every meeting that I chair, I say “remember that if you suggest something, you will be in charge of doing it.”
Such a sensitive post from Claire. I’d wondered what it must have been like to be part of the Community of St Anselm if one were LGBTI+. I’m sure that her advice will be very helpful. It also demonstrates the kind of tone we desperately need in the Church of England as a whole.
Claire’s article is gently moving and reminds us how much we can learn from the experience of religious communities. “You can’t unchoose a member of that community when you discover they take a very different position to you. And they cannot unchoose you.” The same applies to our eternal relationship with one another as members of the household of God. Like it or not, we are in communion for all eternity because we are in union with Jesus Christ. This is a lesson that our whole Church, and its squabbling partisans, can learn from religious communities. We grow, in part,… Read more »
What a lovely, encouraging post from Claire Jones – former member of the Community of St.Stephen at Lambeth Palace. Claire’s openness to others will become the new paradigm, one hopes, for openness about one’s sexual orientation within the family of the Church without fear of rejection. Claire’s example is a good and wholesome example of what we ought to expect from a ‘Good News’ generation in the church of England and other Churches of our worldwide Anglican Communion. May others in the Church – including clergy and bishops – have faith enough to believe that a new openness of LGBTI… Read more »
A very good obit for David Jenkins on the ‘Last Word’ programme on radio 4 last Sunday evening.
Well worth listening to it on i-player or on-line. Good hear extracts from his talks and interviews too.