Debate about women bishops will dominate the General Synod agenda next month. In all, the Synod will spend about seven-and-a-half hours discussing the various ways forward.

The General Synod will meet on the York University campus from 4 p.m. on Friday 4 July until 1 p.m. on Tuesday 8 July. The chief item on the agenda is the consideration of the recent Manchester report (News, 2 May), which outlined the various options for introducing women into the episcopate in the Church of England, and accommodating those who find women bishops unacceptable.

The matter first comes up on the Friday evening, when the Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Revd Nigel McCulloch, introduces the issue and briefs the Synod on the plans for the following morning. These involve an hour-and-a-quarter in group discussions, beginning with prayer. These are followed by a two-hour “take note” debate, in which the general concerns of the different positions in Synod can be aired.

Controversial matters are customarily avoided on a Sunday during the York sessions, and the Synod returns to women bishops on Monday afternoon, spending three-and-three-quarter hours debating the motion proposed by the House of Bishops: no legislative security for traditionalists, but, instead, a code of practice. The Archbishops have said that they expect amendments to this motion in order to test the mind of the Synod. These can be submitted as late as Sunday afternoon; so it will be impossible to predict until the day what choices the Synod will be faced with.

Read it all.

I have lost count of the number of people who have commiserated with me because I am going to the Lambeth Conference. They either assume it will be an ecclesiastical punch-up or imagine the company of over six hundred bishops must be a foretaste of everlasting punishment.

An overload of episcopal fellowship will be bearable because of the cultural and theological diversity among the bishops, let alone their varied personalities. My real regret is that the diversity will be diminished compared with the last two Lambeth Conferences, because there have been so many refusals of the Archbishops invitation. While I wouldn’t relish any sort of ecclesiastical punch-up, I will be disappointed if we don’t discuss the issues which are currently so divisive. We need to do so in ways less oppressive than some of the plenary sessions last time, but it is difficult to have a debate if some of the main contenders are not represented.

Those bishops who refuse to come stand in a longer tradition than they may realize. Archbishop Longley invited 151 bishops to the first Lambeth Conference in 1867. (He even included all retired bishops: we would need an extra university campus if that was tried again.) In the event 76 bishops turned up, almost exactly half those who were invited. This time the proportion will be a good deal higher.
Bishops will stay away from this year’s Lambeth Conference for the opposite reason given by the original refuseniks. They think the Lambeth Conference has too little authority. They also believe its standing has been fatally weakened by the way in which Resolution 1.10 from the last conference has not been obeyed in some parts of the Anglican Communion. There seems to be less concern over the failure of the Communion to implement and obey many other resolutions over the years. But they ask, not unreasonably, what is the point in passing Resolutions if nothing is resolved? Doesn’t this simply reveal a vacuum of authority at the heart of Anglicanism?

It is intriguing that the Lambeth bishops have, from the beginning, produced a stream of resolutions, reports and pastoral letters. The Colenso affair (the hot topic at the first conference), evolution, birth control, the South India scheme or the ordination of women: there has always been some Communion-breaking issue which has tested episcopal unity and also spawned lengthy pronouncements. The current convulsion over sexuality doesn’t seem at first sight so very different.

But it has introduced a new, if not entirely unprecedented, factor. The Dean of Sydney, the Very Reverend Phillip Jensen, was recently reported as saying that the problem with the Lambeth Conference was the attendance of bishops who had consecrated Bishop Gene Robinson (who has not received an invitation himself). Those who consecrated him, argued Dean Jensen, were ‘false teachers who have acted in a way which makes fellowship with them impossible’. So it seems you cannot even confer, let alone worship, with those whom you believe have led the Church into error.

I am glad the same stance was not taken by the vast majority of English Anglicans when the decision was made to ordain women to the priesthood. The Act of Synod on episcopal ministry, as well as the provisions within the Measure itself, were grounded in a desire on both sides of that issue to remain in fellowship with each other despite profound differences. If things had been different, then I don’t suppose I would even be writing this article. If progress is slow on the ordination of women to the episcopate, it is the desire to remain in fellowship and with as much sacramental unity as possible which makes the task of devising legislation exacting.

Perhaps in these matters we need to renew our acquaintance with the Donatists. The parallels are inexact, though Dean Jensen’s words do carry some echoes of those fourth-century schismatics who thought they were more faithful to the Gospel than anyone else. The origins of the Donatist controversy centred on the consecration of Caecilian as Bishop of Carthage around 311. The claim, especially of bishops in Numidia, was that the consecrators included those who had betrayed the Christian faith in the Diocletian persecution and so were false teachers.

As time went on, the Donatists exploited economic unrest in North Africa, and consequent resentment of Rome as an imperial power and ecclesiastical authority, to add fervour to their cause. More locally, Numidia had no fondness for Carthage. In the current controversies within our own Anglican Communion, resentment of American hegemony and Western cultural imperialism is frequently exploited too.

St Augustine cut the branch on which the Donatists sat by stressing that the unworthiness of the minister did not effect the validity of the sacrament, a theological position so central to Anglicanism that it found its way into the Thirty-Nine Articles. But the long-lasting nature of the Donatist controversy weakened severely the North African Church. The Donatists only disappeared when almost the whole of the North African church was wiped out by Muslim conquest in the seventh century. If parallel it is, it is a grim one.

Back in the 1860s, Archbishop Longley recognized the imperfections of Anglican ecclesiology but placed considerable faith in the determination of this developing worldwide Communion to remain in fellowship. He believed that conferring with one another was a way to unity. In his day, St Augustine challenged the Donatists to public debate about that theological imperative derived from Christ himself – the unity of the Church. They were not responsive. I fear that those who have refused the Archbishop’s invitation to this Lambeth Conference will damage the unity of the church and the mission of Christ in our own time more than they seem to know.

–This article appears in the May 2008 edition of New Directions magazine

People who fail to act over global warming are “as guilty” as Josef Fritzl – denying our children a future, a senior Anglican bishop has warned.

The Bishop of Stafford, the Rt Rev Gordon Mursell, said a refusal to face the truth about climate change was akin to locking up future generations and “throwing away the key”.

He insisted he was not accusing those who ignored the environment of being child abusers, but added that such shocking parallels were needed to make people aware of their responsibility.

Fritzl, 73, held his daughter Elisabeth captive for 24 years in a dungeon beneath the family home in Austria, repeatedly raping her and fathering seven children, one of whom died days after birth.

Read it all.

Writing in the first edition of the current affairs magazine, Standpoint, Dr Nazir-Ali said the decline of Christianity produced a lack of “transcendental principles” which has left the door open for the “comprehensive” claims of radical Islam.

The bishop, who was born in Pakistan of Christian parents, said Christianity had knitted together a “rabble of mutually hostile tribes” to create British identity.

But Dr Nazir-Ali said the loss of what he called the Christian consensus had led to the breakdown of the family, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and a loss of respect for other people.

He said the marginalisation of Christianity had happened just as large numbers of people of other faiths arrived in Britain.

Read it all as well as Bishop Nazir-Ali’s whole article linked in the first sentence above.

To those who live outside the bubble of Daily Mail “why oh why” anxiety about a nation going to the dogs, the latest remarks from the Anglican Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, will probably seem little more than the fulminations of an irate cleric who didn’t succeed in his candidature for Canterbury. But there’s rather more to it than that.

Nazir-Ali is not, as some of his critics will want to claim, a stupid or bigoted man. He is, rather, a representative of a whole swath of opinion (some of it militantly Christian and some of it agnostic but conservative) that finds itself up a cultural cul-de-sac and cannot think of anywhere to go but backwards – towards an imagined society of stability and order based on allegedly Judeo-Christian values.

Much like the idea that churches used to be full to the brim in the Victorian era, a popular misconception punctured by the research of Professor Robin Gill and others, this notion holds little water. The era of Christendom in Europe, one where institutional religion found a secure and privileged place in the social order in exchange for pronouncing its blessing on governing authority, is coming to an end. For many of us, Christians included, that is a sign of hope not despair.

Read it all.

The Bishop of Bradford, whose granddaughter was born before 24 weeks, has said MPs made a mistake by not voting to reduce the time limit a woman can have an abortion.

MPs on Tuesday threw out the first attempts for nearly 20 years to cut the 24-week time limit for abortions after a stormy debate.

Despite fierce lobbying by church leaders, they rejected an amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill to cut the limit to 22 weeks by 304 votes to 233, a majority of 71.

Today Bradford’s Bishop and the Bishop of Leeds both expressed their disappointment, saying 24 weeks was too late.

Read it all.

Campaigners are staging a demonstration outside Rochester Cathedral today against the Bishop of Rochester’s stance on gay rights.

The protest has been planned to coincide with International Day Against Homophobia (Idaho) and will see members of the county’s gay community gather at the cathedral from noon.

Ray Duff, one of the organisers, said: “Dr Michael Nazir-Ali has regularly opposed gay rights measures; for example, adoption by gay and lesbian partnerships.

“He has himself received threats because of his conversion from Islam to Christianity. Lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender (LGBT) people fully condemn such threats unreservedly.

“Thus, we, the LGBT community in Kent and the UK, will urge the bishop to now extend his support and sympathy to the LGBT community, who have suffered for centuries because of Church homophobia.”

Read it all.

I acknowledge and respect the equal dignity of all – regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation. There is no place for the harassment or persecution of anyone for whatever reason.

We are thankful that in this country there is freedom of meeting and expression for all.

The Bible and the Church teach that the proper expression of our sexuality is in the context of marriage. This has to do with God’s purposes in creating us, respect for persons and the importance of the family as a basic unit of society.

Read it all.

One of the most important and disputed pieces of recent legislation is being debated in the House of Commons. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is hugely complex, reflecting the newest developments in embryology but some of the oldest questions, such as “when does human life begin?” and “does every child need a father?”. The different faith organisations in this country all have concerns about this bill, but also disagree among themselves. Dr Lee Rayfield, Anglican Bishop of Swindon and immunologist, and Dr Usama Hasan, an Imam who is also a scientist, talked to Sunday.

Listen to it all (a little over seven and one half minutes).

Senior clergy who have signed the letter include Canon Lucy Winkett, precentor at St Paul’s and Canon Jane Hedges, steward at Westminster Abbey. Both are women likely to be considered for the episcopate once it becomes possible to consecrate them.

More than 700 women priests have signed it, indicating they are backing the stance.

Canon Winkett told The Times: “We are saying that to consecrate women bishops is right, both in principle and in its timing. We believe now is the time to do it. But the way that it happens is important.

“The Church at large misjudges women if it really believes that we would support the consecration of women bishops at any price. We would regret very much a delay, but regretfully we would rather wait than see discriminatory legislation passed.”

When women were ordained to the priesthood over a decade ago, the Church of England passed an Act of Synod which created “flying bishops” to care for traditionalist parishes. Under that legislation, which will be repealed when women are ordained bishops, parishes can still opt to be cared for by a bishop other than their own diocesan, and to make their churches into “no-go areas” for women priests.

Read it all and a copy of the letter itself is here.

For some people, of course, these events raise questions about whether there can be a God, or if there is a God could he is good. For them it is inconceivable that there could be a God who permits suffering. But nowhere in the Bible; and nowhere in the Christian tradition is it suggested that God is a sort of heavenly puppet master; the sort of god who treats us like robots, who is two steps ahead of us sorting out our lives in front of us.

Faith doesn’t promise us that. Think back to the psalm: ”˜When you travel through the valley of the shadow of death I’ll be with you’. Not ”˜if’, ”˜when’ is what the scripture says.

John Polkinghorne, priest, author and former Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University puts it like this: God does not bring about everything that happens in the world. Because God is a God of love, he allows creatures to be themselves. That sort of valuable, worthwhile, independent creation has a cost. We see that in the terrible cruel choices of humankind. We also see it in the physical history of the world. Exactly the same bio-chemical processes that enable some cells to mutate and produce new forms of life – the very engine that has driven the amazingly fruitful history of life on earth ”“ will also allow other cells to mutate and to become malignant. You just cannot have one without the other. The tragic fact that there is cancer in the world is not because God did not bother ”“ it is a necessity in a world allowed to make itself.

The freedom that enables me to choose to give generously at the moment to Myanmar, the freedom which enables someone to give their love to someone, to go the extra mile to care; is precisely the same freedom which those rulers in Myanmar are using to stop aid coming in. It is part of the way the world is set up. It’s both a wonderful freedom but a terrible responsibility.

The Christian gospel never says that there will not be suffering or evil. And it does not promise us that we will not go through it. And those of you being confirmed today, this isn’t some sort of talisman which will stop you ever experiencing evil. You and I will experience the same suffering that is the common lot of humanity.

Read it all.

The Spirit, the dynamic energy of God, the breath of the divine life, is often associated with random inspiration, with inspired prophets and enthusiasts who do their own thing. But in the Bible the Spirit is also the one who orders. The mighty wind that swept over the waters of chaos in the very opening verses of Scripture brings order and pattern and shaping life. Energy and order are not opposed in the order of the new creation of God’s life-giving Spirit any more than they are in the patterns of energy that make up the order of the universe. The church is to be and to live the order of the new creation. The Spirit is the Spirit of transforming holiness, shaping men and women in the pattern of the divine love in whose image they are made.

St Augustine knew that a fallen world was a world of disordered desire. He went so far as to say that all thefts, all murders and adulteries sprang from disordered love. “Shall we stop loving then?” he asks. “No, if you stop loving you will become a block of wood, a dead thing.”

Our calling is to “set love in order”, to be shaped and ordered, we might say, by the internet of the Spirit, the Lord and the Giver of life, who “alone can order the unruly wills and passions of sinful men”. And that grace and that life is at the heart of the Church’s being, and of what it is to be human, and so at Pentecost we pray: “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire!” for “the Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole world. Alleluia!”.

Read it all.

Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire has not been banned from pulpits in the Church of England according to a spokesman for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who denied press speculation that the Archbishop Rowan Williams was attempting to silence Bishop Robinson.

A press officer confirmed on May 2 that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams had not issued Bishop Robinson a license to officiate in the Province of Canterbury. However, Church of England canon law does not grant the archbishop the authority to ban preachers, the spokesman noted.

Read the whole article.

10 years ago the Thames Valley Police pioneered “Restorative Justice”, with the aim of giving every victim an opportunity to meet the perpetrator of the crime against them. Celebrating 10 years of development we had the opportunity to meet a man, lets call him Pete, who had spent most of his adult life in prison. We also met Dave, who told us that coming back one night he found an intruder in his house, whom he fought and finally got arrested. This intruder, Pete, and Dave were brought together-not very easily. Pete said that at the time he would far rather have gone straight to the Old Bailey and prison, for at least he knew where he was there, rather than face his victim. At the meeting Pete began by saying “When we last met”. This casual reference, as though they had met in a pub, so infuriated Dave, that it unleashed a torrent of emotion about how he had felt about having his house broken into, and how every time he had gone through his door since, he had wondered if there would be an intruder. In response to this Pete said, that for the first time in his life, he had felt a victim’s pain. He had done hundreds of crimes, mainly for drugs, and never given his victims a thought, but now, experiencing the pain of one of them, as he put it “Blew him”.

It cannot have been easy after that, but he got himself off heroin, went to college, and for the first time in his life did a job.

Read it all.

But there is another even stronger reason to abolish the death penalty, wonderfully exemplified in the case of Billy Moore. On Death Row he discovered the names and addresses of the family of the man he killed and wrote to them to say sorry. Not only did they write back to say they forgave him but they continued to write to him encouraging him to turn his life round and use his experience as an incentive to help other people: and that’s what he did, starting a Bible Study Group in prison, and saying to his fellow inmates “Its bad enough us being in here with the state trying to kill us, but while we are waiting to die, we can treat each other right”.

When Billy Moore had lost all his last appeal and was faced with his final execution date the Georgia appeals board heard his case. Five members of his victim’s family were there to petition for his death sentence to be commuted. He was released, is now ordained as a Pentecostal Minister, and has been campaigning ever since. In short, people can change. One of the most moving stories in the New Testament concerns the criminal crucified beside Jesus who said “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” and who hears the words. “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” However battered and brutalized by life a person may be the Christian faith does not allow us to give up on them.

Read it all.

From here:

The Catholic Group in General Synod and Forward in Faith warmly welcome the publication of the Report of the Legislative Drafting Group. We are most grateful to the Bishop of Manchester, to the members of the Group (particularly Fr Jonathan Baker SSC and Sister Anne Williams CA, members of both the Catholic Group and Forward in Faith) and to the Officers and staff of the General Synod for the very great care with which they have clearly approached this mammoth undertaking.

We are pleased to note that the Report appears to have addressed most, if not all, of the issues which we raised with the Group and that it seems, among the several possible ways forward described, to include proposals which those unable to receive the ordination of women as bishops could in good conscience embrace. However, we shall naturally need time fully to digest and reflect upon the Report before commenting further.

The three approaches set out by the Legislative Drafting Group are:

Ӣ The simplest national statutory approach with no binding national arrangements;

Ӣ Legislation that would provide some basis for special arrangements for those unable to receive the ministry of women bishops, such arrangements to be made within the present structures of the Church of England;

Ӣ Legislation that would create new structures within the Church of England for those unable to receive the ministry of women bishops.

The Group does not offer a recommendation of its own but analyses the pros and cons of each approach, identifying, where relevant, various sub options.

Read the whole summary and download and read the whole report.

THE Church of England’s youngest bishop assumed his new role when he was consecrated in York Minster.

The Right Rev Mark Davies has been appointed to the landmark post at the age of just 45 and became the new Suffragan, or assistant, Bishop of Middleton in the Diocese of Manchester during a ceremony overseen by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu.

Dr Sentamu also consecrated his own chaplain, the Right Rev Robert Paterson, who now becomes the new Bishop of Sodor and Man based on the Isle of Man. He succeeds the Right Rev Graeme Knowles.

A third clergyman, the Right Rev Chris Edmondson, was consecrated during the ceremony on Friday as the new Suffragan Bishop of Bolton, succeeding the Right Rev David Gillett.

Read the whole article.

It was very satisfying to hear a Church of England Bishop boldly and fearlessly state that the Resurrection is unquestionably central to the Christian faith. AND it must be properly understood not as “life after death” for Christ but as a Resurrected Body which is the beginning of our Resurrection.

He was asked about the Anglican Communion and Lambeth. He said (briefly as time was late) that he feels we have moved from “1 Corinthians to 2 Corinthians” by which he meant (as I understood him) that it is time for Rowan Williams to reassert his apostolic authority over the straying churches. Not sure exactly how or what this means, but nonetheless he is planning to attend Lambeth with that message.

I can’t help but think of how often Christians say things critical of people who “live in an ivory tower” of intellectualism, implying that people who spend years of their life researching are somehow ignoring ministry. Yet after they emerge from their studies and start sharing their insights, they are Rock Stars. N.T. Wright, fortunately, uses his gifts to equip the whole body of Christ, rather than simply exploring theoretical questions. However, it took him years of study to get where he is. I think we need to do a better job of encouraging (and funding) young scholars and trusting their work as faithfulness to their calling. Who knows what future N.T. Wrights are out there? It may take them literally decades to be ready to break it down for us, but it will be worth it. Lets be on the lookout for opportunities to support young scholars.

Read it all.

Third, however, all this has come about not least because Paul has written a painful letter (2.3f.). This too is of course historically controversial: is the ‘painful letter’ 1 Corinthians itself, or is it one of the somewhat disjointed sections of 2 Corinthians itself, perhaps chapters 10-13? I am cautiously with those who think that it is a letter written between the two epistles, and now lost, but that doesn’t take away from the remarkable relevance of 2 Corinthians for our present moment. When the Archbishop issued his invitations, he made it clear as I said that their basis was Windsor and the Covenant as the tools to shape our future common life. That invitation was issued only three months after the remarkable joint statement from the Primates issued in Tanzania in February 2007. After a summer and autumn of various tangled and unsatisfactory events, the Archbishop then wrote an Advent pastoral letter in which he reiterated the terms of his initial invitation and declared that he would be writing to those bishops who might be thought particularly unsympathetic to Windsor and the Covenant to ask them whether they were really prepared to build on this dual foundation. Those letters, I understand, are in the post as we speak, written with apostolic pain and heart-searching but also with apostolic necessity. I am well aware that many will say this is far too little, far too late – just as many others will be livid to think that the Archbishop, having already not invited Gene Robinson to Lambeth, should be suggesting that some others might absent themselves as well. But this is what he promised he would do, and he is doing it. If I know anything about anything, I know that he deserves our prayers at this most difficult and fraught moment in the run-up to Lambeth itself.

Fourth, we have seen, predictably but sadly, the rise of the super-apostles, who have wanted everything to be cut and dried in ways for which our existing polity simply did not, and does not, allow. Please note, I do not for one moment underestimate the awful situation that many of our American and Canadian friends have found themselves in, vilified, attacked and undermined by ecclesiastical authority figures who seem to have lost all grip on the gospel of Jesus Christ and to be eager only for lawsuits and property squabbles. I pray daily for many friends over there who are in intolerable situations and I don’t underestimate the pressures and strains. But I do have to say, as well, that these situations have been exploited by those who have long wanted to shift the balance of power in the Anglican Communion and who have used this awful situation as an opportunity to do so. And now, just as the super-apostles were conveying the message to Paul that if he wanted to return to Corinth he’d need letters of recommendation, we are told that, if we want to go on being thought of as evangelicals, we should withdraw from Lambeth and join the super-gathering which, though not officially, is clearly designed as an alternative, and which of course hands an apparent moral victory to those who can cheerfully wave goodbye to the ‘secessionists’. I have written about this elsewhere, and it is of course a very sad situation which none of us (I trust) would wish but which seems to be worsening by the day.

Read it all–my emphasis (Hat tip: Babyblue).

A gay couple’s church blessing has been blocked because the ceremony “looked too much like a wedding”.

Paul Sewell, 41, and Andy Nicholson, 42 from Metheringham had planned a civil ceremony and then wanted a blessing in their local church in Dunston.

But the service was cancelled after a small service of friendship prayers grew to a 150-guest celebration.

The Bishop of Lincoln, The Right Reverend John Saxbee, said a parish church was not an appropriate venue.

Read it all.

The poet-priest R. S. Thomas asked why God appeared so frequently in his poems, responded simply: “I believe in God.” Pressed about what sort of God he meant, Thomas replied: “He’s a poet who sang Creation and He’s also an intellect with an ultra-mathematical mind, who formed the entire Universe in it. The answer is in a chapter of Augustine’s Confessions where it says, ”˜They all cried out with one voice, He made us’.”

For the Christian this God does not remain unknown, but has revealed Himself to us in Jesus Christ, in the characteristic way in which persons make themselves known to us, not as ideas and abstractions, not as collections of atoms and molecules, or the patterns of energy of sub-atomic particles, but as persons with a capacity for love and relationship. Love always involves both faith and hope. Without this trio there would be no human life as we know it.

That reality points us to the God who made us, and whose being and action the Christian creeds confess, as one who is a communion of love, and life, and relationship, the source of our being, the ground of our knowing, the goal of our living. To say Credo ”” I believe ”” is to open ourselves to the deepest possibility of our lives. As the great preacher St John Chrysostom said: “Let us then draw Him to ourselves, and invite him to aid us in the attempt, and let us contribute our share ”” goodwill, I mean, and energy. For He will not require anything further, but if He can meet with this only, He will confer all that is his part.”

Read it all.

[Bishop Tom] Wright has deep family roots in the Durham area, which from the 14th to the mid-19th century was ruled by the prince-bishops; in medieval times they had the right to mint their own coins and raise armies. Today’s incumbent may not have wanted to fight this last battle, but there are plenty for which he is ready. One, in particular, will have evangelicals itching to draw swords. “The massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of western liberalism has a lot to answer for,” he thunders in his new book. “The nihilism to which secularism has given birth leaves many with no reason for living.” The bishop would like to see nothing less than an end to the Enlightenment split between religion and politics.

“There is a Christian view of politics,” he says after lunch at a fish restaurant by the coast, “and whether or not the government knows it, it has a God-given duty to bring wise order and to facilitate human flourishing.” The Church does not just have a right to comment on whether ministers are failing in their divine task, he argues. “To try to shut us up, to say, ‘You keep off the patch'” is “totalitarian”. So, no apologies for his Easter Sunday sermon on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, in which he criticised the government for “pushing through, hard and fast, legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby” whose aims are a “1984-style world” where “we create our own utopia by our own efforts, particularly our science and technology”.

“Using what is in effect live human tissue for experimental purposes is not a frontier we think people ought to cross,” he says, “and we’re going to go on saying that. The more of these moral frontiers a government crosses, the more it owes to citizens to make a space for conscience, not just in voting but in how scientists and doctors carry this work out. To think that the Church should not be involved in politics is to say: ‘Here are some areas of crucial concern for human flourishing, but the Church is not allowed to address these matters of public debate.’ I think that’s ridiculous.”

Read it all.

Yates’s years as Bishop of Gloucester, 1975-91, showed him to be a leader who could persuade people to think for themselves and face the reality of a changing world. He would not allow members of staff meetings, diocesan synods or parochial church councils to get away with pious platitudes. His own faith was well tested and he was convinced that the divine was at work in the world as it is. It was significant that when the ordination of women came to be decided in the General Synod in 1992 the lay vote from Gloucester was the highest in favour for any English diocese. He was not a campaigner, but an intelligent persuader. This was noticed when he later presented church views to Douglas Hurd at the Home Office.

The lay people of the diocese found him accessible, willing to listen, ask questions, argue and reach agreements. In 1991 he set out his policy in a visitation charge, Treasure in Earthen Vessels, that was witty and well researched. He delighted the parishes by saying: “Whenever I come back to the diocese from some meeting in London the feeling I have is that I am coming from the less real to the more real Church.” He likened its middle-of-the-road Anglican attitudes to “the back wheel of a bicycle: it does not wobble about as much as the front wheel, but it gets there almost as quickly”.

He did not hesitate to criticise and his comments, firm though tolerant, were shrewd and compelling. He noticed especially the “massive if slow and silent slide . . . especially among the young, away from the Christian words and images through which most of us learnt our Christian faith”. He pleaded that the parochial church councils should not lose touch with the realities of national, local and personal life, or be taken over by money or administrative questions. He criticised churches that had no access for the disabled, gave warning against excessive rigidity in doctrine and commended the saying “we should believe more and more about less and less”. He aimed at an ecumenical and less authoritarian Church. He urged the Church “to travel light, unencumbered as far as possible by dogmatic or liturgical baggage acquired centuries ago”. He sought a more human Church that proclaimed a gospel of costly self-giving on behalf of the poor and powerless.

Read it all.

David Aaronovitch, using the pulpit of his column, challenged me to justify an “outrageous claim” that I made in my Easter sermon. I said that there was a “militantly atheist and secularist lobby” that believes that “we have the right to kill… surplus old people”. He replied that it was simply not true.

But there is clearly a strong body of opinion – part of a larger, albeit unorganised, secularising or atheist agenda – pressing in this direction. Such an agenda doesn’t need protest marches. It has powerful politicians and journalists presenting the case.

Lord Joffe’s “assisted dying” Bill, rejected by the Lords last year, was, at one level, about “voluntary euthanasia”. The normal word for that is, of course, suicide. But his Bill was about those too ill to achieve that unaided – it was proposing not just “voluntary dying” but “lawful killing” by people enlisted by the patient. You can’t reduce this, as Mr Aaronovitch implied, to “people having a right to end their own lives”. The question is, do other people have the right to help them do so? Those who support this Bill reckoned they do.

He might want to come back at me on two other counts. First, I said “old” people. But clearly young people, too, suffer debilitating and incurable diseases. Reports from the Netherlands suggest that moves are being made to extend the euthanasia protocol to cover new-born children.

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At one level, of course, the continued puzzlement of the disciples is a mark of the story’s authenticity. If someone had been making it all up a generation later, as many have suggested, they would hardly have had such a muddle going on. More particularly, nobody would have made up the remarkable detail of the cloth around Jesus’ head, folded up in a place by itself, or the even more extraordinary fact that Jesus is not immediately recognised, either here, or in the evening on the road to Emmaus, or the later time, cooking breakfast by the shore. The first Christians weren’t prepared for what actually happened. Nobody could have been. As one leading agnostic scholar has put it, it looks as though they were struggling to describe something for which they didn’t have adequate language.

But this problem isn’t confined to the first century. Ever since then, people have tried to squash the Easter message into conventional boxes that it just won’t fit. There was a classic example in the Times on Good Friday (I know I probably shouldn’t have been reading a Murdoch paper on a holy day, but there you are). In a first leader entitled ”˜Universal Truths’, the writer suggested that the Easter message is one that everyone can sign up to. ”˜Good Friday,’ it says, ”˜commemorates sacrifice, the giving of oneself as a martyr for the love of others, so Easter is the achievement of victory through suffering.’ ”˜These,’ the writer goes on, ”˜are universal spiritual truths. And the more interaction acquaints those of different faiths with the beliefs of others, the clearer is the common acceptance of these truths.’ So, in conclusion, ”˜The Easter message draws the devout together’ (presumably the devout of all religions). ”˜From suffering, goodness can triumph. Death is not final.’ And then, a grand and woefully misleading last sentence: ”˜That is what all faiths in Britain can proclaim and where they can come together this weekend.’

Well, sorry. Of course we must work to find common ground and common purpose with those of all faiths and none. I found myself on a platform in Sunderland not long ago with the deputy chairman of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, discussing these very things. The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently asked me to join a small group working to take forward the discussion of the Open Letter from leading Muslims to the Pope, entitled ”˜A Common Word’. These things matter enormously.

But you don’t achieve anything by downgrading the unique message of Easter.

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Because the newly public message which is the good news of Easter is at one and the same time so obvious ”“ the message of new creation, which answers the deepest longings of the whole cosmos ”“ and so utterly unexpected that if we are to announce God in public in these terms, as Paul did so spectacularly at Athens, we need the preceding private stillness to rinse our minds out of preconceived notions and make ready for God’s startling new world. Note, by the way, that it is the public truth of Easter ”“ the dangerous, strikingly political truth that the living God is remaking the world and claiming full sovereignty over it ”“ that has been for two hundred years the real objection, in western thinking, to the notion that Jesus rose bodily from the tomb. Western thought has wanted to keep Christianity as private truth only, to turn the Lion of Judah into a tame pussy-cat, an elegant and inoffensive, if occasionally mysterious, addition to the family circle.

And part of the point of where we are today, culturally, socially, politically and religiously, is that we don’t have that option any more. We face a dangerous and deeply challenging future in the next few years, as the demons we’ve unleashed in the Middle East are not going to go back into their bag, as the ecological nightmares we’ve created take their toll, as the people who make money by looking after our money have now lost their own money and perhaps ours as well, as our cultural and artistic worlds flail around trying to catch the beauty and sorrow of the world and often turning them into ugliness and trivia. And we whose lives and thinking and praying and preaching are rooted in and shaped by these great four days ”“ we who stand up dangerously before God and one another and say we are ready to hear and obey his call once more ”“ we have to learn what it means to announce the public truth of Easter, consequent upon the public truth of Good Friday and itself shaped by it (as the mark of the nails bear witness), as the good news of God for all the world, not just for those who meet behind locked doors. Every eye shall see him, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn as they realise the public truth of his Easter victory. But we can only learn that in the quiet privacy around the Lord’s Table, and the humble stillness where we lay aside our own agendas, our own temperamental preferences, in the darkness of Holy Saturday. When we say Yes to the questions we shall be asked in a few minutes’ time, we are saying Yes to this rhythm, this shaping, of our private devotion to our Lord, our private waiting on him in the silence, in order to say Yes as well to this rhythm, this shaping, of our public ministry, our living out of the gospel before the principalities and powers, our working with the grain of the world where we can and against the grain of the world where we must.

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The Situation on the ground for voluntary organisations working with families is “chaotic”, the Bishop of Southwark has said.

He highlighted problems faced by the organisations during a debate on “strengthening families, community cohesion and social action” in the House of Lords on Thursday, February 28.

The Rt Rev Tom Butler said funding continuity was one of the particular issues leading to uncertainty.

He said Christian organisations, such as Welcare in his diocese, are “committed to supporting families through prayer, pastoral care and in other practical ways ”” and through the provision of education”.

Bishop Butler told peers: “I wish to focus on the delivery of family care at local borough level, for here ”” despite what were well intentioned changes in the delivery of services ”” it is our experience that the current situation on the ground is chaotic.”

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The Government has failed to find a vision for the country and has not built a cohesive society, the Archbishop of York has claimed.

Dr John Sentamu said that racism had been allowed to flourish and that Britain was no longer the “great nation” it once had been. Instead, it was a nation in crisis. “Britain is in a very, very uncomfortable place,” he said.

In a wide-ranging speech on the country’s “broken society”, the Ugandan-born archbishop called for Britain to regain the values of “mission and enterprise” that had made it so effective when it had an empire.

His comments follow weeks of debate between political and religious leaders over the impact of multiculturalism on Britain, which has centered on claims from fellow senior bishops that the country has no-go areas for non-Muslims and will adopt aspects of Islamic sharia law in due course.
The criticism from the Church of England’s second most senior figure will come as a blow to Gordon Brown, who yesterday, at Labour’s spring conference, vowed to build “the Britain of our dreams” and a country where “security and opportunity for all is within our grasp”.
Dr Sentamu said that it had suffered from a loss of identity, which had made it less able to welcome immigrants and had deepened tensions between communities.

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