Category: Blog Entry

It’s hard not to like Copenhagan – apart from the prices. But the place that brought us the Danish pastry can’t be altogether bad. I’m here for the ceremony to mark the Danish church’s full membership of the Porvoo Communion.

The most obvious thing is the cycling culture – one third of the population cycles to work every day. The flat terrain helps. But Copenhagan is on the same latitude as Edinburgh so the climate is not altogether favourable.

That in turn can’t be unconnected with the absence of the obesity which is increasingly obvious at home. The charming incongruity is that in a land where all is trim, slim, green, organic and wholesome, there is more smoking indoors and out than I have seen in years.

Another year of Back to Church Sunday – it’s growing steadily. We all understand the difficulties – not least that many people today don’t have a church to go back to. Going to church on BTCS is a ‘first’ and we’re delighted to see them. I also think that it makes sense to offer to our congregations a simple and practical ‘thing’ to do under the heading of mission

It makes me think of the nominalism with which we struggled when I was a Rector. The headcount was around 925 families. But, depending on where one ‘drew the line’ it could be anywhere from 600-1200. Church Offering envelopes were a sort of membership token for some – not to be used for their designated purpose. The definition of membership remains a difficult issue – and for us in the SEC.

The rest of the week? Where did it go … partly on a meeting of the quaintly-named EMU partnership – Episcopalian, Methodist and United Reformed. We need a better name than the bird that doesn’t fly. Alicia is on a well-earned holiday and we haven’t been able to appoint a new Secretary for me – so I’m in sole command of the Diocesan Office. I had to have a graduate-level lesson in working the franking machine.

Tomorrow I’m going to Copenhagan when the Danish Church becomes a full member of the Porvoo Communion.

And just in case you were asking, Poppy is quite a bit better – the most recent tests show a big improvement. We inject night and morning.

I found myself yesterday at a Seminar on Rural Churches – run by a group of architects, conservationists, planners and others. I think I was invited because of earlier blogging on this subject which arose from the Rural Commission Report which came to our General Synod in 2010.

I expected it to be all about the 101 uses to which redundant churches might be put – and no doubt they got down to that after I left. But what surprised me was the extent to which they wanted to know that the church has a vision of its future in the rural community – and an understanding of how it can contribute to the building and sustaining of community. Something seems to have changed. What is punished is not vision but lack of vision.

I’m grateful to Margaret Lye for an extract from the diary of Very Rev. G T S Farquhar which explains – in the eyes of the Incumbent of Doune – the reasons for Newman’s defection:

Apr. 24 1893. Not for the first time lately I took the duty at Doune yesterday. Old Mr Cole, who is one of our Canons & Synod Clerk, is very poorly there. I enjoy a quiet Sunday in such a place. The old man was telling me some of his reminiscences—how he used to hear Newman preaching in Oxford. Particularly he remembered going with Bp Selwyn on S. Simon & S. Jude’s day and Newman’s silvery voice as he began the Sermon “Of S. Simon & S. Jude but little is known” remains with him to this day. He declares Newman never would have seceded if he had met with any sympathy from the Anglican authorities; he was of a sensitive disposition and needed some one to lean on and when instead of sympathy he got abused and prosecuted he was secretly wounded and couldn’t manage to hold out in spiritual solitude and went where they were kind to him. So thinks old Mr Cole. The latter also told me how he was of Bp Selwyn’s party, when he first set off for New Zealand. They did so in a vessel of 400 tons that wouldn’t be considered good enough for coals now. For 105 days they were out of sight of land. And then for a while they sailed within sight of Australia, shining in the sun. The Bp was arranging a thanksgiving Service for a Tuesday and had half his Sermon written: the rations were served out to the steerage passengers: in honour of the end of the journey they shared their spirits with the sailors: one of these, having taken too much, went up the mast and Mr Cole saw him fall plop into the sea from thence; the ship was brought to but the man was lost and one of the men in the rescue boat was drowned too. The Bishop held the Thanksgiving Service but of course made an alteration to its tone. I am trying hard to get the Doune people to appoint James Burton, the son of our late Provost, who has fallen into ill health and has to resign Peterhead to succeed Mr Cole. I have had the fortune as a reviewer for the ‘Scottish Guardian’ to become possessed of Liddon’s newly published ‘Analysis of the Romans’. It appears to be a very masterly work. Elaborate and lucid. A book beyond which I need not go for that Epistle. A great mercy to get that happy hunting ground of ‘justification by faith alone’-ists, properly expounded by a master hand.

Margaret tells me that this diary will be on display at the Open Doors Day at our Cathedral in Perth on Saturday.

I’m still catching up with myself after being part of the Lambeth and Westminster bits of the Pope’s visit … maybe tomorrow.

Well an interesting week.

I’ve been at a meeting of the UK Bishops in Oxford in the first half of the week. Basically that means the Church of England House of Bishops with the bishops of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It’s always interesting to work out how to be ‘not the Church of England’ in a positive and helpful way. By the way some of the new generation of suffragan bishops are beginning to look somewhat youthful. Bad sign when bishops start looking young.

I got back to Edinburgh in time to go to Holyrood for the meeting between the Queen and the Pope at the start of the State Visit. I was able to greet both of them – which is much more than I expected. And when they had gone off elsewhere, I found myself in a tent with 400 interesting people from all over the UK. So I did a bit of networking.

Tomorrow I’m going to be part of the meeting with the Anglican Church at Lambeth and attend the Pope’s Speech in Westminster Hall and the Service in Westminster Abbey. These things don’t happen often – so whatever I feel about some aspects of all this, it’s a great privilege to be part of it.

And then it’s time for a family wedding in Dublin.

‘I note with great satisfaction how Pope John Paul’s call to you to walk hand in hand with your fellow Christians has led to greater trust and friendship with the members of the Church of Scotland, the Scottish Episcopal Church and others.’

It was good to hear that call to stronger ecumenical relationships in Pope Benedict’s Homily at Bellahouston this afternoon. I believe that our ability to engage with this society is directly related to our willingness to make a real commitment to strong inter-church and inter-faith relationships. Then speaking at Holyrood this morning, the Pope said: ‘the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society.’

And, just to complete the circle, I listened yesterday in Oxford to Baroness Warsi telling the Anglican Bishops of the UK that the coalition ‘does God’ The message seemed to be that in the ‘big society’ faith will come in from the cold – if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphors. We’ll wait and see.

Yes I do share the Pope’s sense of exclusion. The Scottish Government tries hard to involve faith groups – and contacts with public representatives and institutions at more local levels are often very good. But the press .. we’ll leave that for another day.

I think that the danger in what the Pope is saying is that an indifferent society and a pietistic church become mirror images of one another. Put it like that and it becomes a challenge for the church to muster all the openness and integrity at its command to engage with this society. But it’s tough.

One of the things which amused me on the cruise in August was the difficulty which ordinary members of the C of E seemed to have in working out what I represented. ‘Are you a member of the House of Lords?’ they asked. ‘No’ ‘Do you have a seat in the Scottish Parliament?’ ‘No’ So – as they questioned John the Baptist – so they questioned me. And they struggled to grasp that I am part of a cheerfully independent Anglican Province. We’re catholic, evangelical, liberal, conservative. We have high levels of lay participation. We’re not much into hierarchy and certainly not into establishment. We give a very high value to worship, prayer and spirituality.

What Pope Benedict might find a little strange – but maybe I underestimate him – would be the nature of a church in which almost everybody has a view about almost everything; in which I and others offer leadership and exercise authority with almost none of the visible props with which he is familiar.

It can be maddening, slow and circuitous. But it is in the best sense edgy. We talk about most things and we’re getting better at working out how to talk about things we have difficulty talking about. Most elephants in the room get noticed after a while.

Pope Benedict’s visit next week raises all sorts of questions about what kind of society he is visiting. Tomorrow morning, I’m off to Kinloch Rannoch. If he was able to join me – Passat rather than Popemobile, I think – he would discover that Scotland is a virtuoso performance by the Creator. But it is pretty secular. I think I can safely say that the House of Bruar just beyond Blair Atholl will be doing better business than any of the churches along the way.

The Pope and I would of course talk wistfully how wonderful it would be if there could be more than the nine or ten utterly faithful souls who will be in All Saints tomorrow. But then he hasn’t had the chance of meeting Rose, Anne, Lucy and the others. We might talk about confessional states – places where the social and moral teaching of one church has an undue influence on government policy and popular culture – like the Irish Republic of my childhood or Northern Ireland as Ian Paisley would have shaped it. Maybe there were bits of that in Scotland when I visited it as a student.

So on the way back – passing the crowded car park at the House of Bruar – we’d talk about the positive aspects of the secular society. Yes it is full of individualistic indifference – the shrug which says, ‘if you want to do religion, that fine. Just don’t ask me .. ‘ But it is also an open place with a proper separation between church, state and judiciary. And because there are lots of people floating around who have lost their former denominational ties, it is a place which suits a small-ish church like the SEC. It gives us lots of people to talk to – particularly if we can get better at listening to them and responding in a faithful but undogmatic way.

Of which more another day ..

What I sometimes – but only sometimes – feel I enjoy about my life is that all sorts of very different things seem to jostle for position allathesametime.

So I spent Monday in fairly fruitless media fire-fighting because portions of the media had been led to believe that we are changing the way we address God. The reality is that our College of Bishops has approved eight optional inclusive-language alterations to the 1982 Eucharist. ‘Do we still say, ‘Our Father’? asked my friend William Crawley of BBC Northern Ireland. ‘Yes we do.’ ‘Wise up’ as they say in Belfast.

Meanwhile Poppy’s diabetes is looming fairly large in our lives. Injecting the cat seems set to become part of the daily routine here at Blogstead – indeed, given the amount that we shall be away over the next while, it looks set to become part of the life of almost everybody who lives here. She was very ill on Sunday but much better now, thank-you.

And in amongst all of that, I shall be giving a fair amount of next week to the Pope’s visit and a meeting of bishops in Oxford. It amuses me that, amid all the media hype, nobody has actually asked me what I think about it. I’ll be interested to see it, of course – who wouldn’t be and honoured to represent our church. But I find myself feeling more and more that the life of a small, independent [or was that ‘autonomy with inter-dependence] never-established Anglican church with mildly Celtic tendencies is not the worst thing.

So some kind of order has been restored to life and work.

The e mail backlog is still around 150 but I’m getting there. But it gets harder to knock them off as the number reduces. I did a Thought for the Day on Rabbi Yosef – judging from my Inbox I can forget about that trip to the Holy Land for a while.

Followers of the faithful Passat will be interested to know that it passed 200000 miles last week and has survived a trip for service since. So now that that milestone – as it were – has been passed, it should be fit for the next 100000. It needs a set of front tyres so that’s a significant investment.

Looking ahead, I’ve made the bookings for the various bits of travel associated with the Pope’s visit. It involves separate trips to Oxford and London – followed by a visit to Dublin for a family wedding. Sounds like another e mail backlog coming up.