The Rock, November 1996
In England Now

It was George Bernard Shaw who said that Englishmen and Americans
are "two nations divided by a common language".

The truth of this saying shows itself in the usage of such words as
"homely". In England this only means one thing nowadays (though the
dictionary mentions others). It is on the whole a term of approbation
meaning "simple, straightforward, plain, down to earth, easy-to-feel-at-home-with".
In some parts of the USA, depending where one is, it can by contrast
mean "rough, ugly, unpolished, unattractive", though in other places
it can have the English meaning.

In matters to do with the faith the same problem arises – as I discovered
on one of my early visits to the Continuing Churches in the USA in
the early 1980s. The words Anglican and Anglicanism both at that time
had a distinctly dodgy ring in England, suggesting as they did words
like compromise, fudge, and that general benevolent attitude of "we'll
muddle through somehow, so don't ask awkward questions!" which led
me to quit my theological college in despair in 1959. An understanding
bishop who realised that there was something deeply wrong with the
Church of England ordained me notwithstanding, but it was quite clear
that if this was "Anglicanism" I wanted nothing of it.

You can imagine my difficulty when I found that in the USA the word
Anglicanism was evidently a term of strong approbation. Everything
became clear, however, when I discoverd that it was almost invariably
applied to all those things which were most estimable about the Church
of England and the tradition which it engendered over the centuries.
The careful formularies of the Church of England, the Preface to the
Book of Common Prayer, the BCP itself, and names like George Herbert,
Jeremy Taylor, Lancelot Andrewes, John Keble, Edward Pusey and the
faith which they succeeded in defending were what my American colleagues
were referring to when the spoke about Anglicanism, and once I had
learnt that lesson it was a great deal easier for us to understand
each other.

Easier, but not all that simple. For there continues to exist between
the two cultures (and I dare say the Canadian culture provides a third)
a difference of perception. This is most clearly seen by the way in
which ECUSA and the Anglican Church of Canada on the one hand have
gone about trying to destroy or mute the voice of those who are opposed
to doctrinal and ecclesiological novelty and what has happened in
the same situation in England.

We are told, for instance, that it will be impossible after 1996 for
diocesan bishops to refuse to ordain women priests; and in Canada
I am reliably informed it is necessary for an ordinand to receive
Holy Communion at the hand of a woman priest on a number of occasions
before he is ordained, besides writing an essay explaining why he
believes that women priests really are priests.

Such an attempt effectively to reintroduce the Test Act (a seventeenth
century device in England to try and exclude crypto-papists from parliament
by obliging them to receive the Sacrament before doing so) would simply
not get off the ground in England.

Why? Because it would simply be ignored to the point at which it was
discredited. This says very little about the courage or otherwise
of English people, but a great deal about their sense of humour. By
and large people in movements like Forward in Faith, Reform, and Cost
of Conscience (about which I wrote in the last issue of The Rock)
simply do not take political correctness seriously or see it as anything
but a welcome opportunity to demonstrate both the depth of their 
convictions and their rugged individualism.

Time and again it is the Liberal innovators who demand to be taken
with a degree of seriousness that their cause does not merit. Let
me illustrate this by describing the events leading up to Saturday,
16th November, when the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement were given
permission to hold their 20th Anniversary Service in Southwark Cathedral.

It is worthwhile bearing in mind the Statement of Conviction adopted
by the LCGM and openly publicised in their literature. It reads as
follows:

It is the conviction of the members of the Lesbian & Gay Christian
Movement that human sexuality in all its richness is a gift of God
gladly to be accepted, enjoyed and honoured as a way of both expressing
and growing in love, in accordance with the life and teaching of Jesus
Christ. Therefore it is their conviction that it is entirely compatible
with the Christian faith not only to love another person of the same
sex but also to express that love fully in a personal sexual relationship.

Notice how the "conviction" is laid out. It begins with a wholly unexceptionable
sentence but then tries to glide  seamlessly into a conclusion which
is not only wrong but a non sequitur. For a start it could just as
easily be used to justify adultery. Try substituting the word "opposite"
for "same" in the penultimate line and you will see what I mean.

But it is the therefore in line five which gives the show away. There
is nothing whatever in the conclusion (however right or wrong it may
be) that can be inferred from the premise (which the word therefore
implies that it can). You don't get from the first (and only) premise
in this Statement of Conviction direct to its conclusion without a
second premise which says something like "All gifts of God are necessarily
compatible with the Christian faith and should therefore be freely
available" For instance does this apply to anything which my fancy
might prompt me to steal from someone else? Adultery, stealing and
covetousness and a whole host of other sins would be compatible with
the Christian faith at that rate.

Now the event which took place in the Cathedral on Saturday 16th November
implied that the Provost, and to some extent the Bishop of Southwark
who was also present, wished to identify themselves with this nonsense.
The Bishop of Southwark I believe did distance himself somewhat from
the proceedings, but he attended nonetheless.

Reform and  Cost of Conscience and the Southwark Diocesan Evangelical
Union three organisations dedicated to safeguarding the faith with
which we have been entrusted, thought differently. We decided to call
for a Nationwide Day of Prayer and Fasting in order to distance ourselves
from the goings-on in the cathedral. As a result some forty churches
took up the challenge up and down the country, and if they attracted
anything like the numbers (almost 200) who came to St Mary Magdalene's
Church, Bermondsey (just down the road from the Cathedral) their numbers
would easily have exceeded those who joined in the LGCM Anniversary
Service.

We're not, of course, in the numbers business. I was quite prepared
for there to be less than a hundred throughout the day; the fact that
nearly double that number came was an indication of just how much
indignation this service has aroused in people's minds.

The fact is that we are dealing with people who are incapable of,
or unfamiliar with the discipline of rational discussion. Where we
quote authorities for our views, the LGCM talk about their feelings.
One can understand why. To say "I feel so-and-so" effectively ends
any reasonable discourse. You cannot say "Oh no you don't" because
one does not have access to the necessary information. All that you
can reply is "I'm so glad" or "I'm so sorry".

Nowhere did this come out more clearly than at a "Brains Trust" on
homosexual issues, in Brixton, a neighbourhood with a very high proportion
of black people who were well represented. I appeared on the panel
with Anne Atkins, and vicar's wife from the other side of London (about
whom more in a moment). On the other side were a professedly "gay"
priest called Colin and a woman priest called Maggie.

Time and again Maggie and Colin would talk about their feelings. Anne
and I were afforded relatively little chance to reply because they
went on at such length about them. But the fact of the matter was
that there was so little to reply to.

What interested Anne and myself most, though, was the fact that the
Africans in the audience gave them such a rough time. Over and over
again they asked what possible scriptural justification there could
be for the position that they were adopting, and time and time again
we were told both by Maggie and Colin that they "had studied the Bible
carefully and did not see that it necessarily forbade homosexual acts".

It was a dialogue in name only. We were talking two quite different
languages as Bernard Shaw said. Though the words we employed were
the same we were using them to quite different ends. Maggie and Colin
were inviting people to feel sympathetic towards them; we were inviting
people to draw certain conclusions from the scriptural evidence which
we offered them.

Blessings in Disguise

One thing has happened over and over again during the past few months
that these events (the LGCM Service and the Day of Prayer and Fasting)
were being planned. They have thrown together a group of people who
might never otherwise have met each other, let alone have enabled
each other to accomplish what we did.

The first discovery was Anne Atkins. Her husband is a member of Reform
and she herself a novelist and actress, besides being a mother of
four children and living a busy vicarage life.

Anne was invited to speak on Thought For the Day  (an early-morning
religious broadcast barely ten minutes' long). She chose to raise
the question as to why this Anniversary Service for LGCM should be
taking place at all.

Instead of rational discussion by those who thought it should take
place, Anne had to face a barrage of accusations: she was "homophobic";
she was "right wing"; she was in favour of slinging out homosexuals
from church buildings. 

On the other side of the equation there were over a thousand letters
of approval for what she had said, and the fact that it should have
taken one hitherto unknown person to say it reflects very ill on the
Bishops of the Church of England whose silence has been deafening.

The fact of the matter is, I think, that they have once again got
themselves into the position of being afraid to offend anyone. Because
some of them (perhaps many) have ordained practising homosexuals and
allowed them to minister in their diocese they realise that they cannot
now, without enormous loss of face, go back on the practice. On the
other hand to sit quiet and say nothing is to attract the charge of
cowardice to themselves.

In the end most of them try to pretend that the problem doesn't really
exist and they take refuge in that cliche which is implicit in the
English use of "Anglican" that whatever else we are we are a Broad
church. That sounds all very well, but it is really a cop-out. there
may be indeed many things about which alternative practices and traditions
can be not only tolerated but encouraged. Because of the tradition
of the church where the Day of Prayer and Fasting was held the event
tended to be Evangelical and non-eucharistic in its format. That mattered
not a bit. All those who took part "were of one heart and one mind".

And that brings me to the final blessing which has emerged from this
rather sordid event. It has brought together people of diametrically
opposite churchmanships who have found that they can work together
perfectly happily  and profitably on a venture such as this. Costs
were shared between Reform and Cost of Conscience and little by little
we began to discover that in this area at least we had far more in
common than we might otherwise have supposed.

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