…there is a deep fracture, a fault line, between our instincts, our desires, what we feel is innate within us, and the pattern of holy living God calls us to in Christ. It is the theology embedded in the Scriptures. This isn’t simply true for those who believe they are gay and not called to celibacy””it is true for all of us, and it is a point of tension and struggle for all who seek to live faithfully in the footsteps of Jesus. The chief dishonesty here has been amongst ”˜liberal’ bishops who have ordained men knowing full well that they are living contrary to the bishops’ clear teaching on this issue..
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What is the real challenge facing the church in the UK? In all the discussion about gender and sexuality, about women bishops and the response to gay men and women, there is a massive paradox. The Church which is apparently almost irredeemably misogynistic is numerically dominated by women in its membership. The Church which is, it seems, deeply homophobic has a disproportionate number of gay people in its ranks, and especially in its clergy””in some dioceses, vastly disproportionate. Yet one group is consistently under-represented, and rarely discussed: men, and particularly working class men. And if all the recent media coverage has done anything, it has pushed them further away through painting an unremitting picture of the church feminised.
I look forward to the time when the agendas of Synods, the headlines in the papers, and the tweets and posts in the social media are dominated by the importance of the offer of purpose, direction and wholeness to the men of our nation found in the message of the gospel, which has become the preoccupation of the Church.
“Yet one group is consistently under-represented, and rarely discussed: men, and particularly working class men. And if all the recent media coverage has done anything, it has pushed them further away through painting an unremitting picture of the church feminised.”
Isn’t that the truth! I found listening to Synod and most of our church pronouncements remarkably depressing. Year after year we are obsessessed with our hierachy and who should be a bishops – women bishops, gay bishops, bishops from here and bishops from there. The big topic this last Synod which vexed members was the housing of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and those Bishops we do have do not speak of Christ, well only illustratively to chuck into their latest pronouncements on carbon footprints, ethical investments, global warming, and so on.
But if only we just get this one last topic out of the way… then we can get onto evangelising the nation and its working class men – when we have gay women bishops living in million pound houses, we will be all set …. won’t we?