Exploring Ecumenism

The Littleness of Methodism

Leslie Griffiths.  Image via Wikipedia

It has taken me some time to catch up with this issue, as I currently don't have access to the Methodist Recorder.  Fortunately, Methodist Preacher has published the letter printed in last Thursday's Recorder.  If you follow the link, click on the image and follow more links you eventually do reach a legible image!

I was impressed by Methodist Preacher's post and it is this I will respond to, rather than Leslie Griffith's letter, although the two are obviously related.  So, today I'll comment on Methodist Preacher's article and then in some further posts I will write about what I believe has gone wrong with the Anglican Methodist Covenant and suggest how episcope might paradoxically help answer some of the issues MP identifies in his article.

MP quotes Martin Atkins, the General Secretary of the British Methodist Church, who during his Presidential year remarked on 'the large number of people he met during his presidential year now serving in other churches'.  I have at times joked about the 'Methodist Diaspora' because it is not difficult to find ex-Methodists in almost any church, or indeed any faith.  Some of them look upon the Methodist Church with some affection, my experience is they are not always antagonistic to the Methodist Church, they have simply moved on.  Why is this happening? 

It is as if the Church is failing to do its job of being a Catholic denomination, one that holds together a variety of theological positions.  It seems its failure as a Church is in providing the basics of what people need for faith and so they, often reluctantly, look elsewhere.

Further on, MP quotes Leslie Griffiths' comments about the experience he has had, presumably of the leadership of the Methodist Church.  Whilst I have experienced something of what he writes about, it has not been to the extent that he describes, which is truly shocking.  He concludes: "there's a chasm between our people and those who lead them." 

He's right.  Like MP, it is my experience in the local church that keeps me faithful, rather than the politics of what goes on at Methodist Church House.  Leslie Griffiths uses the adjective 'littleness' and it is picked up by MP.  I must confess I'm a little unclear what the word means, but I think I have some experience of the limited vision and groupthink at the core of the Connexional Team.  I'll write more about this in a future post.  For now I will mention one example, that I believe is typical of the problem with the Church's leadership.

The closure of the Resourcing Mission Office in Manchester is one of the most short sighted and irrational actions I have ever had the misfortune to witness at first hand.  I worked there for six years, whilst this decision was rolled out (I write 'rolled out' rather than 'taken' as I believe the decision was made over 6 years ago if not earlier).

The reason given as far as I can tell is that somehow it is less efficient to run the church on two sites.  Never mind that the team in Manchester was efficient, effective and irreplaceable.  In the name of efficiency, or is it tidy mindedness  (littleness?), it had to be dissolved and replaced by some new people, with no experience, no knowledge of the connexion and working independently of each other in London.  Somehow this is supposed to help the Districts.  15 or so faithful, knowledgeable staff are to be made redundant for what reason? 

MP concludes, 'This I have learnt is not a matter of individuals but a systemic institutional problem that simply debilitates.'  He is absolutely right and somehow we need to address this problem.  I'll have a go in my next few posts.

Global Christian Forum, Monado Conference Update

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One of the last posts I made on Methodist Ecumenical News was in advance of the meeting of the Global Christian Forum, which took place early in October 2011.

This post will provide an overview of what happened, mainly through links.  I am very impressed by much of this material and I will return to it in the near future.  I have two main sources of information and would welcome information about anything else that has been placed online.  Presumably more than one person who attended wrote blog posts?  Let me know if you aware of anything.

First up, a series of posts by Wes Grandberg-Michaelson, General Secretary of the Reformed Church in America, who writes for the Sojourners blog.  He wrote a post every day during the consultation and here they are:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

The second source is the Global Christian Forum's website.  Here you will find the final statement and some information about the way the Forum operates and its background. 

I will return to some of this material in the near future. 

Related articles

• Global Christian Forum Meets Next Week (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)

Changes Ahead for Exploring Ecumenism

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This post is one of my occasional orientations, introducing new themes for Exploring Ecumenism.

When I started this blog back in 2008, I was working for the Methodist Church and have done so until the end of last month, as Assistant Ecumenical Officer.  The big change is that I have been made redundant.  This will have implications for this blog.  My relationships with the ecumenical scene will inevitably change.  I will be more dependent upon the internet and my direct experience will be more local.  This may not be a bad thing, as I have long doubted the relevance of national ecumenism.

Whilst I was with the Methodist Church, I started a second ecumenical blog, called Methodist Ecumenical News.  My intention was to do something quite different from Exploring Ecumenism.  EE has always been speculative.  I have written mostly about my own thinking about ecumenism.  Methodist Ecumenical News was intended to be more of a billboard, drawing attention to what others are doing.

With Methodist Ecumenical News suspended for the time being, if not forever, I plan to add some of its approach to this blog.  However, the news sharing depended upon time and opportunity to pick up on things that were happening and those opportunities are harder now.  My plan is to explore how I can introduce posts which pick up some of the characteristics of Methodist Ecumenical News, drawing attention to new developments as they come to my attention.  My aim will be to combine the notice board elements of Methodist Ecumenical News with the comment typical of this blog.

I will also not be quite so constrained in my comments as I was.  I will still adhere to the principle that writing about ecumenism should be constructive and supportive of the work of others but I have already started to introduce material with more of an edge.  I will attempt to be an increasingly critical presence on the web because I believe anyone writing or thinking about ecumenism probably encounters a daunting lack of comments on their work. 

I should note that my hope back in November 2008, three years ago, was this blog would become a forum for debate.  I know it has readers but for whatever reason, few comment.  I would value more comments but in their absence, the least I can do is comment on the work of others, hopefully constructively.  If that generates debates, it would certainly be a welcome development as far as I'm concerned.

I am increasingly uneasy about the direction of modern ecumenism.  I have so far been critical by implication, writing about how I think things should be rather than how they are.  I have more freedom now to highlight bad practice and I shall begin to do that over the coming weeks and months.

In a nutshell, which shall take some time to unpack, I will make the point that national ecumenism is becoming bogged down with analytical theology, a mode of theology that was out of date in the 1960s (if it ever was up to date) and is increasingly counter-productive.  This type of theology is not fundamentalist but rather it is technocratic.  It is designed to keep power in the hands of church leaders.  It is divorced from the needs and interests of local churches and causes unnecessary confusion.

The time has come for a sea change in the way ecumenism is done.  I wouldn't be so arrogant as to suggest you will find it in this blog, but as one of the few people regularly blogging about ecumenism, I intend to challenge the old ways and encourage new radical thinking.

Related articles

• The Last Post? (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Patience and God's Timing for Unity (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)
• Expressing Catholicity in Common Confession (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)

Love One Another

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This is part of a series of posts based on the Churches Together in England publication one light: one world.  If you click on the link you will find the biblical texts.  This post of the same name covers the purpose of this series.

Romans 13: 8

Debt is one of the most destructive to human society.  We have in recent years entered a recession, caused in part by billions of pounds of personal debt.

My father's advice to me as I set off for university was to avoid debt.  Interest, he said, is of no use to you, you are simply giving money away to other people.  I have found this to be good advice and apart from a few years with a mortgage, I have always lived within my means.

But how many people manage this, today?  Debt was a source of great fear for Jesus' and Paul's contemporaries (and indeed control of debt a major concern of the Torah).  If you owe money, you are in effect enslaved to your creditor.  It messes up relationships; where money is owed it gets in the way of relationships.

This is, therefore, advice from Paul for Christians.  Don't get into debt with one another, all you need is love. 

It is interesting the churches can get into debt with one another through ecumenism.  For example, where premises are shared and one tradition contributes to the development of another's property.  A few years later, the ecumenical partnership ends and the property owner, under the Sharing Agreement, owes the other church for their contribution.

Should churches enter into this type of relationship?  It is not an easy question to answer.

Related articles

• Let Us Love One Another (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)
• That They All Be One (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)

The Anglican Covenant Debate

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This post needs to be read in the context of the last one.  My aim is to explain why I think the current debate about the Anglican Covenant is important to ecumenical relations and indeed to the wider community in Britain.

The Anglican Covenant derives from the worldwide Anglican Communion's (in blue on map) debate about sexuality.  Some provinces in the West have ordained gay Bishops and other provinces, primarily in Africa do not find this acceptable.  The position seems to be the former group have been excluded from conversations within the communion, whilst the latter have more or less absented themselves because they do not feel the former have been excluded enough.

So, the idea is to agree that if any province wishes to make a decision outwith the agreed criteria of what it means to be an Anglican, their decision cannot be implemented until it has the approval of the communion as a whole.  It seems there will be panel whose role will be to agree what is Anglican and whether a new proposal meets these criteria.

I cannot see how this could possibly work.  If we consider the historic compromise between the three main branches of Anglicanism in the Church of England, there has never been an overall authority to which they have to go to justify their particular doctrinal emphases.  That is how catholicity works, it cannot happen if it depends upon some formal authority.  (The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps an exception.  It is a single worldwide church.  I suspect it is the nature of Anglican catholicity that it cannot form a single worldwide communion.  The intricate balance between traditions within a single Anglican province is not robust enough to work on a global scale.)

The problems started because the General Synod made decisions in recent years that some cannot accept, primarily about the ordination of women.  When both sides threaten to take their bat home should the other win, you have a problem.  However, as far as I'm aware this isn't the real situation.  Those opposed to the ordination of women are threatening to leave, whilst I have not heard of those in favour making an equivalent threat. 

In the light of the quote from Volf, a couple of posts ago, we can see the danger.  Once the polarity of the debate becomes more important than unity, the established arrangements fall apart.

Those who support the Anglican Covenant see this and are attempting to hold the communion together with a written document.  And it is perhaps those people who need to look at how this debate has been conducted and whether their emphasis on unity has been the right one.

In some parts of the world, LGBT people are persecuted.  The attitude of the church has contributed to this persecution in some places and opposed it in others.  Attempts to hold together a communion under these differences are doomed to failure because self-evidently these concepts of justice are incompatible.  Without reconciliation there can be no progress.  A document that papers over the cracks cannot do the job.

This is a tragic situation because what was at one time a debate between two incompatible ethical understandings of what is God's justice has become a struggle over the heart of the Anglican communion.  I fear the Anglican Covenant is a much greater threat to Anglican integrity than a split in the communion would be.  

The history of the churches is a history of such splits and perhaps it would be more honest for the two sides to go their separate ways.

There is however a ray of hope.  I read somewhere that the stand against non-heterosexual sexualities is primarily amongst the Bishops.  The clergy in those provinces have other priorities, such as poverty and Aids.  Sexuality is far down their list of priorities and surely it is ultimately for all ministers a pastoral matter, rather than a political or ecclesiological one.  As always the response of people with power to a problem is to legislate.  Perhaps it would be best if the response came from people on the front line, unencumbered by the pronouncements of those who seek purity, sexual or ecclesiological.

But it is also an ecumenical issue and the Anglican Communion perhaps needs to turn to its ecumenical partners for help.  Volf writes: Other cultures are not a threat to the pristine purity of our cultural identity, but a potential source of enrichment (page 52).  The other cultures I mean here are outside the Anglican communion.  Perhaps through their ecumenical relationships, Anglicans can find new perspectives on their own communion. 

Volf goes on to write on page 53: In the battle against evil, especially against the evil in ones own culture, evangelical personality needs ecumenical community.  The church does not belong to any one faction and what I believe Volf means here is that whilst the fervour of those who believe they have the truth has value for the church, it does so only where it is tempered by understanding the faith as wider than any one faction.

What worries me is reconciliation needs to take place not only between the members of the communion but also between the communion and LGBT people.  As the fervour of ecclesiological conflict dominates the discourse, it is easy to forget those who experience practical discrimination day after day.  A church that should be on the side of the persecutor has turned persecutor.

Those who argue on behalf of the persecuted are not in a position to forgive because they are not the ones who are being persecuted.  This means the issues cannot be addressed until those who favour the persecution of people with different sexualities repent of their sin.  I am sure this will happen in time.  Whether it happens in time to save the Anglican communion is another matter.

Why The Anglican Covenant Debate is Important

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This is the example promised in my last post.  I write as a Methodist looking into a troubled sister communion.  It is time I addressed this issue because it has profound implications for English ecumenism. 

The Church of England, and indeed the worldwide Anglican communion, has made a tremendous contribution to ecumenism.  This is largely due to their catholicity.  It is hard to imagine (or at least it used to be) Anglicanism without their brand of catholicity.  For many decades, if not centuries, Anglicanism has functioned as a compromise between Catholics (outside the Roman Catholic Church), evangelicals (who can be traced back to the seventeenth century Puritans) and a liberal tradition which seems to have arisen through eighteenth century latitudinarianism, although it may go further back than that.

These traditions were held together by an ingenious system which included the Book of Common Prayer and was embedded in the structures of the church.  From time to time, groups could not be contained and, around the start of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most serious split was with the Methodists.

To me, as an outsider, the loss of this catholicity amounts to the loss of Anglicanism.  Some might respond with 'good riddance' but I think this response needs to be examined carefully.  I have written about how my own Methodist tradition contributed its organisational approach to the rising working classes from the impoverished industrial poor in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In a similar way, the Church of England, has had an immense influence on a state which has itself been a compromise between many traditions.  Secularism in England is based upon the historic Anglican compromise.  Different Christian traditions and indeed other faiths today, co-exist and their coexistence is based upon the Anglican catholic compromise.

This is what the Anglican Covenant debate is about.  If the Anglican communion were to disintegrate, the implications in Britain and all over the world would be profound.  In my next post I will write about what I understand is happening.

An Historic Event

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On Friday evening, 17 September 2010, I attended the service of evening prayer at Westminster Abbey, led by Pope Benedict XVI and the Archbishop of Canterbury.  It seems this was an historic event.  This was the first time any Pope has set foot in Westminster Abbey and I think the first time a Pope has led a service with any Archbishop.

So, what do I make of all this?  How will this service be viewed in 10 or 20 years time?  I suspect it will be mentioned in the guide books at the Abbey; will it have any more significance than that?

One problem I had was, being somewhat hard of hearing, I had difficulty hearing what the Pope was saying.  I hope to track down and read his speeches and so will comment on them later.  I was sat in Poet's Corner, not far from William Blake, and there was a screen between us and the high altar, where the service took place.  So, my comments this time are upon the event itself.

As a non-conformist, I find this type of ceremony less moving than many people seem to and so much of the emotion passed me by.  But I think it was significant they were able to make this commitment together.  The point at which they prayed together at the tomb of St Edward the Confessor moved many people.  For me perhaps the most moving moment was right at the end of the service when the two men walked down the chancel steps.  I noticed the Archbishop was supporting Benedict.  Perhaps this is a sign of personal warmth between them, I hope it is.

This was an act that primarily took place between two traditions, Roman Catholic and Anglican.  Leaders from other churches were present as witnesses but this was certainly not a multilateral ecumenical event.  This is not necessarily a bad thing and is certainly understandable in view of the venue.

My deepest concern is more difficult to express.  I've sat in on planning several liturgies where delicate issues have had to be addressed.  I've seen the way in which positive gestures can be used to skirt around other difficult and deeper issues.  My impression was Benedict was there to pray at Edward's tomb. 

It did not feel as though the divisions between the two churches were being addressed.  I wasn't expecting any grand gestures but the reality of the blood shed between these churches a few centuries ago was an unspoken presence.  Was Benedict there to pray at the tomb or to heal the divisions?

Some would say both.  Maybe that's true.  But if both, why did we need the prayers at the tomb?  Yes, I accept this was a significant step on the way (how significant we will learn in time) but it seemed to me the Pope was still holding this relationship at arm's length. 

I feel uneasy about it.  This was not ultimately the normally easy relationship Protestants and Catholics experience in England.  It certainly isn't enmity.  But is it friendship?

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Called to be One 9: Protestantism and Cultural Disorientation

This post relates to the ninth critical issue in Called to be One: What Now?, Protestantism and Cultural Disorientation .

This is another issue that seems misconceived.  So, Protestantism has, unlike Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, been consumed by markets, management and novelty.

First, this implies unity lies in following the lead of Catholic and Orthodox churches.  But why should we?  Protestantism is widely varied but it seems we are all suffering from cultural disorientation and need a good dose of (very) old time religion to get us back on track.  Whilst I admire the grace and charisms of the great non-Protestant traditions, I also admire the grace and charisms of my own.  It has its debts to these ancient traditions but that is no reason to return to them.

The writers make a number of assumptions.  They imply Protestantism in Europe has sold out.  But Protestantism is all over the world and some of the world's most vibrant churches in Asia, Latin American and Africa cannot in any way be described as suffering cultural disorientation.  This is not to say they are perfect (far from it), but they are authentic.

What is being implied is liberal protestant theology has sold out to markets, management and novelty.  In my view, the churches that have sold out are American fundamentalist churches and the churches around the world that copy them.  Think about prosperity gospel  and what what that says through its uncritical view of markets.  Or the tele-evangelists and their marketing of cheap faith for a high market value.  Or Sarah Palin and her tea party movement.  Or Glen Beck who says the social gospel is not Christian.

Time and again I hear people saying Europe needs missionaries in reverse.  Last weekend hundreds of thousands of Christians attended the second ecumenical Kirchentag  in Munich.  The faith is alive and well in Europe, perhaps its America that needs missionaries in reverse.

So, what about the liberals?  They uphold in the main that branch of Protestantism that argues, debates, values research and evidence.  These are the traditions that have analysed the Bible and the tradition; questioned many things formerly held to be sacred.  All the churches have benefited from this activity, as they have adapted their teaching to the demands of the modern world.

Called to be One - what now?

I want to return to my sequence about the modern history of ecumenism.  The last post about the Marigold Book  was on 15 February.  In November 2009, an informal consultation on the future of the ecumenical movement  took place in Bristol. 

As a result of this consultation an open letter was sent to the church leaders of Britain and Ireland , calling on them to examine and question the commitment of the churches themselves to ecumenism:

What is being asked for is not another re-examination of the ecumenical instruments as such – these need the fullest possible affirmation, support and resourcing – but a self-examination and mutual questioning of the churches themselves as to their ecumenical commitment, attitudes, and actual performance. What were the expectations in 1990? How far have the churches actually lived up to them? How much closer are they today than they were then?  How far in practice are we ‘committed to’ each other?

Will Methodism Go Out of Existence?

On Thursday 11 February, Revd David Gamble, President of Methodist Conference, addressed the General Synod of the Church of England.  The impact of his speech certainly brought the Methodist Church to the attention of the media, even to the extent of an interview with John Humphreys on BBC Radio 4's Today programme!

The passage in his speech which sparked the controversy was this one:

Methodists approach the Covenant with the Church of England in the spirituality of that [Wesleyan] Covenant prayer. So when we say to God “let me have all things let me have nothing”, we say it by extension to our partners in the Church of England as well. We are prepared to go out of existence not because we are declining or failing in mission, but for the sake of mission. In other words we are prepared to be changed and even to cease having a separate existence as a Church if that will serve the needs of the Kingdom.

To get some measure of the media response, I recommend a post by Peter Phillips, Reflecting on metropolitan ecumenism and grassroots mission .  Follow the links from this post and others around it, and you will find a number of blogs about the speech.