The new normality - 20 years of women and men priests together

It will probably surprise those who know me well but I represent the new normality.  I am part of the first batch of clergy who were ordained a few months after the first women’s ordinations in 1994, in the natural course of things.  I trained alongside women and so it was to be expected that we would be ordained alongside one another too, well after the vote had gone through.  I would have regarded it as being odd if this had not been the case and a number of us were not sure what we would have done if the vote had not gone through back then.  The previous ‘catch up’ ordinations were a one-off and over time normality settled in so that now 30% of the clergy in this diocese are women, it is 32% nationally.  We all know it is still a ‘work in progress’ but I feel honoured to have been part of the first group of the new normality.

Over the last twenty years I have found myself closely involved in establishing this new normality and moving it forward.  My first incumbency followed a priest who had been deeply opposed to this development and left the Church of England over it.  I worked to move the church from no women ministering to a place where two of my successors have been women.  Key to this move was an excellent curate in a neighbouring parish.  The quality of her ministry impressed people.  I heard a number say ‘I don’t agree with women priests, but Amanda is alright’.  Gradually it dawned them that Amanda was a woman priest and so perhaps they were alright after all.  As is so often the case experience changes us.

As a training officer and a training incumbent I have worked with many women curates and colleagues.  I have seen firsthand just how important it is to have men and women clergy working together.  It opens conversations and enables ministry which would otherwise be closed.  I now find all male groups strange and impoverished.  When I go to clergy meetings I expect to find men and women together.  And we should model that and see it modeled.

It was inevitable that the Church would have to make women bishops too.  The House of Bishops is impoverished without them.  We now have legislation which is clear, decisive and offers a place for dissent, which is generous, even if there is still some pain.  I am hopeful that General Synod will approve this at its July meeting; it has certainly been given a strong steer with all of the dioceses voting in favour.

There have been some hard won battles in our society over equality and each generation needs to be vigilant.  There are attitudes in Hip hop, rap and pop music, board rooms, advertising hoardings and comedy which still betray sexist assumptions.  I see little evidence that girls are finding it any easier than when I was growing up.  Trafficking and exploitation are very much a current vice.  It is therefore very important that the church is able to talk with integrity into these debates and live the equality in Christ we proclaim.

Reflection as part of Peterborough Diocesan Celebration of Ministry, marking 20 years of women's ordination as priests, Peterborough Cathedral Saturday 7th June 2014

More than spiritual clubbing

What draws you to come to church?  It’s not a trick question or one designed to trip you up, questioning motives, but each of us have lots of different reasons for coming.  And whenever this question is asked of a group there will be a number of answers which are likely to appear: to get a spiritual fix, to meet with friends, the music, the atmosphere, to find a bit of peace, it’s good for children, I’ve always done it and life would feel odd without doing so.  None of these are wrong in themselves and they hint at the kinds of things that help us get out of bed on a Sunday morning, particularly on those dark winter mornings, and make the journey.  From time to time I am deeply humbled and impressed by the incredible effort some have to put in to make the journey overcoming various difficulties: personal physical, emotional and public transport timetables.

Our readings this morning in their various ways touch on what is going on when we make the effort to worship.  We live in a time of human history when corporate worship is not part of the popular culture, well not in Western Europe.  It is in the rest of the world, USA, Eastern Europe, Africa and the East.  We are not the norm here, but John’s words in his gospel this morning ‘the world cannot receive him because it neither sees him nor knows him’ (John 14:17) take on a new dimension for us.  The idea of corporate worship is not obvious or assumed as something that is missing from life.  And if we reduce worship to some kind of spiritual fix then we reduce what is happening here to a form of ‘spiritual clubbing’ and that means that we are competing with all sorts of other events, interests and activities.  Getting the spiritual fix is important, but it is not the most important reason for coming to worship.

The reason we do this was spelt out more clearly in our first reading (Acts 17:22-31).  Paul is walking through the city centre in Athens.  He finds that they are a very religious people because there is a veritable supermarket of statues and faith traditions on offer.  It must confuse the life out of people.  The competing claims are deafening.  It’s like walking through Cathedral Square with people shouting that we are all sinners in one corner, offering free copies of the Qur’an from one of the Muslim traditions in another, with city centre chaplains offering free hugs and cake in another and quietly standing as the backdrop in one direction is this church and in the other, peeping over the archway is the Cathedral.  The spiritual marketplace is not very different from one bank offering 5% on a current account balance up to £2,500 and another offering a fixed rate bond for 3 years.  The city centre becomes a place where just shouting and being there does not mean that we are heard.  Something else has to go on that makes someone interested.

Paul looked at what was going on in Athens and decided there was a searching for answers.  He started to offer a way through the supermarket approach of this fix is better than that one or this claim trumps that assertion.  He takes it back to the core.  He starts with the purpose and point behind creation.  We are made, we have a source and we therefore have a goal.  God is God.  We serve the divine; the divine does not serve us.   And the fundamental shift that is required in mindset for Western people comes in verse 24, ‘he who is Lord of heaven and earth’.  To our more democratically shaped minds this might sound archaic and out of touch, but God is not someone we vote for.  God is God and beyond that.  We need a major shift of mentality when we come to worship because we have to bend our will to the will of God and reorientate our focus from self to God.  That doesn’t mean that our interests are not central, they are because Christ came to give life in abundance, but we are mortal, fragile and mess it up at times.  A humble and contrite heart is a pre-requisite for worship and being able to understand what it means to be a disciple.

The challenge is then to find a tradition that starts to make sense and it is clear that not everyone offering their wares in the squares outside is telling the same message.  What we offer here is the classic Anglican tradition of scripture, tradition and reason.  We take the bible seriously because it has truths to teach us and wisdom to impart.  It tells stories of a faith journey through time and how a people have understood the nature of God.  It tells us about Jesus and in him we see all that we can see of God in human life and the hope of resurrection to come.  The journey of faith continues to today and over the centuries there is a tradition of each generation making sense of God in their own age.  Tradition is not static; it is a journey of thought and insight.  And we have our own generation’s understandings, the incredible discoveries of science and travel.  This ‘reason’ means that faith matches life as it is experienced.  This is the lens though which we approach the great supermarket of faiths and competing claims.  They are assessed and weighed using these tools.

If our only reason for coming is to get a fix of some kind, then we are engaged in what I call ‘spiritual clubbing’.  This is one way we could spend Sunday morning among many others and the only way we will convince others is if we can make it sound more attractive than golf, swimming, football, a walk in the park or listening to Desert Island Discs on the radio.  It may fare well; it may struggle depending on mood.  However Paul did not stand up in the market place and proclaim a different leisure activity.  He stood up to proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord, to affirm God as God and that our life is incomplete without the commitment and challenge of being a servant of God in Christ.  We come because our hearts have been converted from the Western obsession with ourselves and the next high or happy experience, to follow God.  We come because this is where we proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord.  We need to say that out loud because it is not assumed by those around us.  Saying it changes us and how we live, how we approach life.

Sermon preached at Peterborough Parish Church, Sunday 25th May 2014

Story telling

There was a very interesting talk on Radio 4 last week as part of their ‘Four Thought’ series.  Philippa Perry, a psychotherapist and columnist, was talking about the importance of story telling.  The stories that we tell and hear shape our minds.   And what is more the more we hear certain sorts of story the more we come to interpret the world through that narrative.  The flip side of this is if we don’t hear certain types of story we become unable to hear them.  So, at an extreme level, someone who has only heard and experienced stories that don’t have positive endings or ways of behaving won’t be able to hear stories that do.  They won’t have the neural pathways to assimilate them.  This affects how we approach life, how we hear what others are saying and how we make sense of the world around us.  It also affects how others hear what we are saying.

There are lots of stories around.  We hear them through the news and sometimes at home we play ‘death and destruction bingo’ to see how many of the headlines are gloom and doom laden.  We read stories in newspapers and some newspapers are really bad for your mental health because of how they tell the stories with excessive negativity, paranoia that everyone is out to get us and attitudes that don’t lead to wholesome living.  We hear stories from our politicians as they create narratives of strivers and skivers, deserving and undeserving, false dichotomies between employers and employees – actually their interests are aligned and without that both suffer.  At the cinema the other week we were subjected to a tidal wave of apocalyptic film trailers before watching the film ‘Noah’, which was pretty apocalyptic itself, especially the way it was told.  The point of the story of Noah is that it doesn’t work; the rainbow is the key. God decides that a different tack is needed and so patriarchs and prophets come on the scene to remind them of their covenant relationship, the way they are to live.  These are presented through stories to help us see and understand the point.

What kind of stories do you hear and where do they come from?  What is the story that you tell yourself?  We all have such a story or narrative and at its most simplistic are we a glass half-empty or a glass half-full person?  Is life filled with purpose and hope or pointless and ultimately despairing?  How is your sense of awe and wonder focused and shaped?  How does the story of faith affect what you see and how you see it?  Philippa Perry outlined how stories are presented, the key elements: there is the content, the scene setting of names and places; and then there is the structure, how it goes, the roles that are taken, what usually happens.  It is understanding the structure, how it goes, that tells us what kind of story we are hearing, what kind of story is being told, how our outlook is being shaped, reinforced or challenged.

Worship, coming to church, is extremely important in shaping the story that we tell ourselves and therefore the one that we live.  Worship is rooted in praise and thanksgiving because God is to be praised and being thankful makes us generous in response to the generosity of God.  It is a faith that is open and realizes that common purpose is better than selfishness and standing alone.  In this season of Easter, we fill our worship with ‘alleluias’.  Last Saturday I went to St Paul’s Cathedral for the National service celebrating the 20^th anniversary of women being ordained as priests alongside men.  The response, the acclamation ‘He is risen indeed, Alleluia’, the ‘alleluia’ at the end, resounded round the dome and hung in the air as if to reinforce its importance.  And so it should, because we are a people who tell the story of alleluia, we sing the praise of God and are thankful.

Our first reading (Acts 2:42-47) gave some subtle clues to the type of story that we tell, to ourselves and through the way we live tell to others too.  Those who were baptized devoted themselves to the apostles teaching.  They wanted to learn and grow in faith.  They took scripture seriously, they took who they were seriously and needed to be rooted and grounded in the story of salvation through Jesus Christ. They came together regularly for fellowship, to break bread (which is a reference to sharing Communion).  And they prayed.  They held things in common, looking not to their own interests only but the common good.  With an election looming, this ‘goods held in common’ asks what we think profit is for?  The old lines of left verses right, which have their origins in parties for workers and parties for bosses produce a false split.  When someone is paid this week $40m in shares as an incentive to join the global computer company Apple, you have to ask just how much money is needed to incentivize.  How can anyone spend that; it is on a scale that is beyond incentive.  It shows that these large pay packets are actually not really needed because with a fortune of that size she doesn’t need to work again, so that she does means money is clearly not the main driver.  A former investment bank CEO wrote in the Financial Times last week that the idea that top executives need this money otherwise they will go elsewhere is nonsense because they won’t.  And if they do, none of them are that special that they can’t be replaced.  What is the story we tell about the use of money?  And today is the beginning of Christian Aid week which brings other stories into focus.

The common approach was taken further in distributing aid and helping the needy.  Above all they ate their food with gladness and generous hearts.  I didn’t realize until this week that New Zealand lamb is slaughtered according to Halal practice because most of it is exported to Muslim customers.  We tend to eat British lamb, because we like to support British farmers and apply the principle of sourcing locally as far as we can.  But the Halal slaughter, with stunning, means that a lot of lamb eaten has been slaughtered with a prayer of thanksgiving, albeit to Allah, and a spirit of generosity.  While I would prefer my food to be blessed with thanksgiving to God through Christ, and there is a narrative behind Halal which is different, it does have a common ground of acknowledging God.  And there is only one God. Allah is the Arabic name for God and God is God.  That said its use comes with a story, a narrative which rejects Christ and so is not one I would choose to buy into which is where St Paul’s comments (1 Corinthians 8) become relevant about abstaining from food dedicated through another religious tradition so as not to cause confusion and to be clear.  The words used are “In the name of God, God is the Greatest”.  There is nothing inherently offensive there for people of faith.   And what is really more offensive, the prayer said at slaughter or the intensive and cruel conditions much livestock endure before?  Halal will not harm us but it carries a different narrative, one which I don’t wish to proclaim, in fact which denies Christ because it sees him as a superseded prophet, which is a stance we clearly don’t agree with.

So stories are all around us and we are constantly encountering them.  They shape us and challenge us.  As with the first disciples we are reminded this morning to refresh and school ourselves in the story of our faith: salvation through Jesus Christ, the importance of prayer and sacrament, the common good and being thankful.  The story we tell is a major part of our mission.  It is the good news we proclaim and through telling it is a major way we seek to be agents of God’s transforming presence in the world.  It may be that we have to keep telling, because it is a story that is difficult for others to hear, but tell it we must.

Sermon preached at Peterborough Parish Church, Sunday 11th May 2014

Annual Meeting Address

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, triggered a debate last week about whether England is a Christian country and by implication how that is sustained.  The picture is complicated.  At the last census in 2011 59% of the population ticked that they regarded themselves and their households as being Christian.  That figure may be falling, down from 73% in 2001, and certainly among young people it is even lower than it is among older generations.  But the number who call themselves atheists is not high, still in single figures and not rising. Linda Woodhead, who is a sociologist of religion at Lancaster University has carried out research into those who tick ‘no religion’ on surveys and found that they are far from irreligious.  What ‘no religion’ seems to mean in the main is that they don’t identify with a particular religious group, creed or narrative.  That means that they are what they would call spiritual, but it’s not focused down traditional lines.  It is looking for something to make sense to them.  The ‘no religion’ group does of course also include the atheists.  But atheism offers ‘nothingness’, a belief in the ultimate futility of life because it is just biological and when it ends it is done.  Most people seem to reject that.

This week the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has argued for the Church of England to be disestablished.  I’m not that fussed really about this.  For me establishment is about having a commission and obligation to serve the whole community, not just the club, and I’m very committed to that.  It’s an attitude of outward looking love, not status.  However again the picture is complex. There are places where we are still a trusted brand and I enjoy good relations with our city council and in particular the senior officers.  Headteachers regard us as allies and value our involvement with their schools, however limited that might be: in particular Peterborough School, Thomas Deacon Academy, Kings and West Town Primary.  Recently Rob has become a governor of the troubled Bishop Creighton Academy to try to help them with their improvement.  This followed me hearing about them being desperate for help and I called in to see them.  Even though they are not in the parish, they occupy the first site of this church before it was moved here in 1407, so I felt a degree of connection.  The local vicar has given us his blessing to pursue this.  St John’s is regarded as an important place in the city centre, valued by business and civic leaders.  The partnerships through the St John’s Development Board display a high level of goodwill towards us.  People call in for coffee when the café is open and appreciate the hospitality on offer.  Nationally we seem to have suffered a massive blow from the central church opposition to the changes to marriage.  The General Synod has said it wants to devote two years to discussing this so that we can see how we can respond more positively.  I seriously wonder whether we have two years to sort this and a boat was missed when Civil Partnerships came in, but we are where we are and we will see.

So on one level we enjoy goodwill towards us, on another a falling number of people count themselves as belonging and that number is particularly acute among younger generations.  Inherited faith cannot be relied on for much longer and Peterborough seems to me to be a place where this is more obvious than it is in some other places.  It means we have work to do to tell the Christian story.  This is the challenge this church has faced for over 600 years because each generation needs to hear it anew otherwise it dies out.  But we can’t rely on a general background culture which does this with us and for us.  The task is now urgent and if we don’t do it we will cease to exist.  There are signs of hope and the three people who were confirmed last weekend are encouraging.  All three have come to faith in adult life and found in the Christian faith we proclaim here a faith that is relevant, intelligible and credible.  That is something that we are offering here.  There are lots of people who stand in the city centre and they shout at people what I regard as utter gibberish and they give faith a bad name.  Sadly I fear we may get tarnished by their brushes, so we need to find a way of making it clear we are different.  I had an encounter with one of them in the cathedral last year and I clearly didn’t give the answers he wanted but then I think he knew that would be the case because he was aggressive in his questioning as if trying to point score.

So I want to offer a few ways that we can use to focus us on the missionary task that we face.  This is far more important than anything else in front of us.  They are location, love, live, longing and learn.  They are not particularly new, they build on what I said last year about key values, and some we are working on already.  But perhaps new packaging may help them feel a bit fresher, help us see them anew, and we need to be clear what we are aiming for.  A recent church report, ‘From anecdote to evidence’, has highlighted that churches that are conscious about their missionary challenge and direction have more chance of growing than ones that are drifting, or unfocused.

‘Location’.  This church sits in a prime location.  You couldn’t ask for a better place.  It should be buzzing and a hive of activity.  It is at times, but not all the time.  We will only make contact with people and stand a chance of drawing them into the worshipping life of the church if we are open and able to meet them.  We have a presence which all other groups in the city would give their right arms to have.  However, as we have seen, many people seem to be quite content to just pass by and ignore the building, or at least don’t interact with it much.  The Good Friday hot cross buns after the Walk of Witness was an area where we got it right.  The church buzzed.  Coffee shops are good as far as they go, but why do we shut precisely when people want to buy lunch?  I think we need opening this up on our agenda and it may be that we need to subcontract so that others do it, provide us with an income which we can use to develop the missionary work.  We can think about activities which can take place at the same time, like story telling, and we may need to look at how we are able to use the different spaces in the church.  A few ideas buzzing about, but the conversation needs to start so that we can make better use of this prime location.

‘Love’.  It can sound twee, but if we are not a loving community, who on earth would want to bother with us?  If we are loving we will welcome, we will care and we will display respect for everyone.  I had to give one of the Holy Week talks in the cathedral and the text I was given included these words from Hebrews, which leapt out at me: “provoke one another to love and good deeds” (10:24).  When anyone provokes us we usually respond in kind, with a sharp put down, with anger and hatred.  The challenge is to be so filled with God’s love that we aim to bring that out of the other and incite love within them.  Is this a community which schools us in this?  If not how can we make it better?  If it is, we need to celebrate and strengthen those  areas because they are missionary in themselves in a world which thinks hatred and division is the way forward.  If it is being worn thin, this should be a place where being provoked by love renews us, and we all need that from time to time.

‘Live’.  The faith that inspires us is to be lived.  It is to be put into practice so that there are good deeds flowing.  We support the food bank, people are involved in so many areas of work from council, to other voluntary organisations, to cultural and daily working.  If England is to be a Christian Country then our faith has to be what shapes our values and our thinking.  Not in some kind of blind rule book way.  Anyone who tries to treat the bible like that has fundamentally misunderstood it and will find themselves not wearing mixed fabrics, eating shellfish or bacon.  But the faith we proclaim should be lived and we need to find a way of expressing the rationale behind that clearly, simply and intelligibly.  Nationally we do not hear many good examples of this to model.  We live in an age that doesn’t understand where our faith is coming from and so what we say needs translating and decoding.  But the words and deeds without love are nothing worth!

‘Longing’.  What do you really long for?  One of the most important desires for the biblical writers is justice.  It is for people to be treated with honour and respect, for riches to be shared so that they benefit all, for a vision of a world where we live sustainably and at peace.  As soon as we say things like that they require a close look at the policies of those we elect to bring it about and that’s the world of politics.  Christian living and mission can’t avoid that and shouldn’t.  Do we long for full churches?  Does that matter to us?  The desire for mission is itself a crucial element in being missionary.

‘Learn’.  How do we learn about our faith?  Learning is life-long and there is no point at which we stop learning new things about our faith and seeing it in a new or renewed light.  A church that doesn’t take this seriously stops thinking, stops being inspired by its faith; it stops being a church.  A learning church is one that is equipped to proclaim the gospel.  Sermons have a very limited impact here because they are brief and the liturgy moves us on quickly after them to the next focus.  We held a series of evenings during Lent, not many people came.  The church calendar helps us retell the story of Christ through the year.  Not many came on Good Friday, or Ash Wednesday, or Maundy Thursday.  Clearly different things work better in different places, but we don’t have many places where we are learning.  This needs attention.

So five words to think about when we think over what this church is for and how it can be a vibrant house of mission: location, love, live, longing, learn.  I could say a lot more about these but that will do for an introduction.

When thinking about location, we also have a presence in West Town, which we don’t really make full use of.  It’s a challenge, but the developer of the former hospital site is interested in how they can help improve the community provision and St John’s Hall site is clearly a key contender with this.  There are some early conversations, not least establishing the ownership of the site, which is far from clear, but we are on the case.

Five words, five areas, five foci for mission.  We can add another ‘L’: ‘Leadership’.  Without it we don’t travel in any direction.  It needs to be shared and there are limits to what any one person can do.  Without Chris Brown’s daily commitment we are going to struggle and I want to thank him again for all he has given and done over so many years.  The new administrator will be able to do some of the nuts and bolts stuff, but leadership and lay leadership in particularly is crucial.  When we don’t have lay leaders it is a sign that something is wrong.

You may have noticed that there have been a lot of images of pieces of art in these slides.  They are from our Artist in Residence project, which is a St John’s Development Board initiative.  This has been a project that we have learnt through as it has gone on, but it has brought some interesting insights and challenges and made us think.  The ‘Art at Advent’ calendar in the tower doors was a particular highlight for me.  I am grateful to Garth for what he has given us.  There will be an evening here on 12^th July to celebrate the project.  TV auctioneer David Palmer will be here to sell of the works and there will be entertainment and a talk about buying art too.  Tickets are available.

I leave you with the five ‘L’s to hold in your minds: location, love, live, longing, learn.  They are worth thinking through as we plan and shape the future direction of making this church vibrant in its prime location her in the centre of our city.

Address at the Annual Meeting, Peterborough Parish Church, Sunday 27th April 2014