Category: Blog Entry

Poppy’s admirers will be interested to know that she has now arrived in Belfast for the pre-Lambeth hospitality programme.  Having just been to Donegal, she’s a bit jet-lagged and noisy.  But she gets a lot of attention from Anna and her friends and will settle down here comfortably until August.

The pre-Lambeth publicity – and the reports of the Church of England Synod – mean that friends I have met these past few days want to know more about what lies behind the reports.  They work in situations where any kind of discrimination in the workplace on grounds of gender, sexuality or anything else would be regarded as unthinkable.  They want to know why the church is different and why it finds these issues so difficult.

Welcome to the other Latin tag I remember from my Classics degree.  So is £26800 enough and more than enough – pre-tax – for a couple to live on, not including a car?

Dominic Lawson explored this in yesterday’s Independent – commenting on a report from the Rowntree Foundation, ‘A Minimum Income Standard for Britain.’  What is interesting about this approach to defining poverty is that it does not express it as a proportion of a median – such as the national average wage.  Rather it attempts to set a ‘minimum standard’ as ‘having what you need to have the opportunities and choices necessary to participate in society.’  Which, of course, brings it closer to the concept of a stipend – the amount which one is given in order to live while carrying out the work of ministry.  At that, a £26800 stipend would sound generous to our clergy.

The caveats?  Well let’s dispose of the nonsense one first.  Housing is included in the £26800 and clergy are provided with housing?  Yes they are – during their working lives.  This means that, unless they are fortunate enough to ‘marry well’ or be otherwise endowed, they have to deal with their housing needs at the end of their working lives rather than at the beginning.  Just in case you were asking, I think we need a more subtle answer to that question than ‘Sell the rectories and let the clergy .. ‘  And the car – which isn’t covered by the £26800?   Well – set aside the fact that fuel costs have increased by 50% and the mileage rates have remained the same.  Most clergy cover fewer miles per year than I do in the faithful Passat.  They also travel uphill now and again whereas I, as a bishop, travel downhill only.  So the amount they are able to claim in expenses will help to run the car but will never be enough to replace it.

Satis superque?  Interesting.

Quick pre-Lambeth visit to Blogstead Na Mara – just to make sure that I know who I am before I plunge in.  So we’re weeding and hacking surrounded by the empty houses of the speculative building boom.

I was reminded of my years as  Hospital Chaplain yesterday when the cleaner came by while I was sitting outside the toilets in Belfast City Hospital – don’t ask.  Two words from the staff defined chaplaincy for me.  The expectations of the patient would be raised by the introduction, ‘Here’stheministercometohaveaweechatwithyou’   And when you were sitting on the edge of the bed wrestling with the search for meaning in difficult times, the cleaner would arrive and say, ‘Justliftyourweefeetdear’

On weightier Lambeth matters, I was interested to read Deborah Orr in the Independent writing about Rowan Williams as ‘A man of God we should all be supporting.’  Describing herself variously as a secularist and an atheist, she bewails the fact that ‘there is a tendency among secularists .. to believe that no belief that is held by a religious group – even a progressive one – is worthy of support.  She sees sexuality questions as almost entirely a rights issue.  So this comes in the area of ‘placeswherewesharemediumtermobjectiveseveniflongtermaimsdiverge.’

While the blogosphere is working itself up into a pre-Lambeth peak of excitement .. hereabouts we’re doing a bit of light pruning in the Lord’s vineyard.

The Clergy Conference is nearly planned for next January – looking at worship and how it might meet the challenge in the Nine Marks … worship which transforms and renews.  And I’ve been down in Alloa this evening helping them to explore how a congregation which has developed a strong collaborative ministry ethos might grow and develop without losing that.

It would be wrong to suggest that the big issues of Lambeth simply aren’t relevant to the kind of church which will develop at local level.   But I find at that local level an absence of passion about the issue.  Concern and interest – yes.  But passion – no

I have to confess that my heart sinks a bit as I find myself listed among episcopal bloggers heading for Lambeth – look at this for example.  There is clearly an opportunity to give people in my own diocese and elsewhere a flavour of how it is.  But I haven’t worked out in my mind what the Chatham House or other rules for this ought to be.

At this moment, I’m busy trying to get to the point at which I can walk away and go to Lambeth.  I feel curiously uninvolved in it all – and rather uninformed and unprepared.  The good stuff?  I am very much looking forward to being part of such a big international event.  I haven’t experienced much of that in my life – just to be in that great multi-cultural mix will be very enriching and enlivening.

I don’t really expect this to be the sort of ‘make or break’ event that people expect.  Two reasons for that.

First that the people who are passionate at either end of the sexuality divisions tend to present their arguments in a way which ensures that no resolution is likely.  There is no space for winners and losers.  I saw enough of that in my former life in Northern Ireland.  It took me a long time to realise that it was sometimes the healthiest thing to acknowledge it and live through it.  But however much people deny it, there is always an inexorable movement towards dealing with the issue – everything leads back to the same place but it may take a while.

Second – there is movement taking place all the time.  But it happens ‘off centre’.  Just to take one example, I have been reading Kenneth Stevenson’s ‘A Fallible Church’.  Look at Bishop James Jones’ article about the impact which the triangular relationship between Liverpool, Virginia and Akure [in Nigeria] has had on him.  It’s through those kinds of long-term relationships that we grow towards one another.

I have just paid a flying visit to Northern Ireland to preach at the Eucharist at the Down and Dromore Synod and to offer some Home Thoughts from Abroad.

I think it’s always interesting to find out what someone says to a different audience …

Belfast Wayside Pulpits continue to win prizes for naffdom.  Lurgan Methodist offers ‘1 Man + 3 Nails = 4 Giveness’  My old favourite, Hillhall Presybterian, continues its ‘Sun and Sunblock’ theme with ‘Love the Sun?  The Son loves you’

In the multi-cultural category, I noticed the Thai-tanic Restaurant.

These are difficult times.  I seem to be in fairly constant movement at the moment – apart from being available for the Bogstead crisis – so I am having difficulty keeping up with all the blogs and websites.  But it looks pretty febrile.

I came away from our General Synod continuing to ponder what I think is one of the key challenges of leadership in a situation of conflict like this.  We all have personal convictions and values which we wish to assert.  If one is to do that, I think it has to be done  somehow without being partisan and without excluding others.

In my past life, I did much reading on sectarianism.  Not so much the ‘in your face’ stuff.  But the more subtle [and more dangerous] forms of it.   ‘Overlooking’ is what happens when you speak of your own group as if no other group existed.  Ian Paisley used to refer to ‘the people of Ulster’ as if the catholic population didn’t exist.  The Pope came to meet ‘the young people of Ireland’ as if the protestants didn’t exist.

And every time I hear somebody say, ‘We are a liberal church’ – that’s what I hear.  We are a church which has within its life the divisions which are present in world anglicanism.  We may be liberal in our ethos – but we are not exclusively so.  And we have to keep finding ways of saying that so that we honour and respect those whose ethos is more conservative.

I told you it was difficult.