Two southern provinces and their clergy...

A little while ago the Church of England just failed to pass a measure that (as its principal function) would have allowed women to become bishops in that church (the Anglican provinces of York and Canterbury).  It was nail-bitingly close, and one of the houses just didn't quite make the 2/3 majority needed.

Why care? As a Scottish Episcopal priest, it won't affect life.  We are allowed women bishops up here already.  At that point the complacency ends.  We haven't had one, although there have been attempts (we vote for bishops up here). Staggeringly few women are even in the few senior posts in the church, the deans and the provosts.  Only ever 2 female provosts and one female dean.  Not a particularly good track record.  But it takes years for a change to flow through a church, especially one that is contentious from a theological or traditional view.

I was ordained in England, and have many, many friends in ministry there.  Some of them are wrapped up in the campaign for women's episcopal ministry.  They will be hurting very much this evening.

But the vote was much more subtle than just the straightforward issue of gender justice, as Kelvin points out. The continued issue of maintaining a sanctuary for traditionalists who don't wish to accept the ministry of women bishops has also been rejected.  That was a live issue when I was still in the C of E, and I found myself taking a rather hardline against any compromise, and signing petitions etc. against such measures.  Go and see how green the grass of non-conformism or the ordinariate actually is, I muttered.

But how pyrrhic a victory is rejecting compromise at the expense of delaying female bishops for further years?  It is a hard, hard place that many English clergy will find themselves tomorrow morning.  Many of them have tweeted 'Ashamed to be Anglican,' and rather than pedantically correcting them, I share some sympathy.

Our house in Scotland is equally not in order from a gender justice point of view: no sanctuary for traditionalists, a canonical structure that allows female bishops: and we have still not made it...

And as for the issue of some other moratoria.  We'll let that lie for the moment.

Diaspora memories captured...

I love the fact that people make pilgrimages to our churches - two sets of families in the past week, one to Bute (grandfather married and lived there) one to Dunoon (grandparents buried there).  They are usually people from England who have emigrated south with family/work/wars.  But they come up, often on a coach trip, to visit these important places of family pilgrimage.

The Bute visitors were there for the third time - second time during my stay here.  I'd spoken to them on the phone last year, but met them in the flesh for the first time.  They left a home-made book about their grandfather (Thomas Wilson), his life, death (falling from a gang plank in a new Zealand harbour in 1954), their journey, health and encounter with Bute. I blessed them and there were lots of tears.

The Dunoon visitors turned up while I was pottering about. moving boxes into church.  Flora Fraser (nee McAllister) had put up a plaque in memory of her husband John, killed in 1918 when his ship, HMS Montague, collided with the USS Manley off Ireland (Google said all that, not the gravestone).  29 years later she died, and was buried in the same lair (what they call a plot in Scotland) - beside her brother Samuel's lair, near the door of the church.  Her family were at the burial, and this was who was visiting.  Daughter & son from England, and son from Canada, over for the first time in decades, plus several partners and grown up children.  They had a look at the register with the record of Flora's burial - we didn't get round to Samuel's marriage etc.

Their memory to capture: on the funeral in Feb 1947 it was so snowy that the hearse couldn't get up the drive at Holy Trinity, so the pallbearers with coffin and all the mourners had to pick their way up the icy hairpin bend to get to the (no doubt freezing cold) church.  I can just imagine it, the black coated figures, the breath hanging in the cold air, the slips and scuffles with no words said.  It has stayed with them for the 65 years since it happened.

There is a distinct diaspora of the Scottish churches, just as there is of Scotland: economic movement, fluidity of society, never mind things like clearances from older times.  And we can meet and relate and engage with this diaspora wherever they may be, esp. with new technology!

  

Oban again

Off up to Oban today, to see Nicki McNelly made the new provost of Oban cathedral.  It feels rather momentous: the first female provost in Oban, only the second ever in Scotland.  There is now a female dean in Edinburgh, but overall the need for senior female clergy in our province is as great as ever!
So Nicki's role, as well as being one of my stipendiary colleagues, is to be a pioneer in our church.
Roll on a woman in a mitre: no canonical reason for this not to happen up here, we just need the right person and the right diocese.

Checklist:
Silver (borrowed) - polished: check
Cassock alb & stole: check
Falling apart black shoes: check
Wife & daughter (signed out of school): check.

I think we're ready!

Carried Away by a Moonlight Shadow

Maggie Reilly is the red-haired singer on Mike Oldfield's hit single 'Moonlight Shadow' from 1983. The girl from Glasgow has done loads of things since then, in a long and hard-working musical career. The latest in this long line of performances was a live set on Saturday night, in a hall in Dunoon. She, with her long-standing collaborator Stuart McKillop (and Mark on guitar and Chris on sound) played a benefit gig to support Holy Trinity Scottish Episcopal Church in Dunoon raise funds for the Restoration Project.

Stuart (who is the cousin of Dinkie, the people's warden at HT: you start to see how this came about) last performed in this church hall in the famous Dunoon High Kirk pantomime in the 1970s (Oh no he didn't etc. etc.). So he was quite used to the surroundings. It felt slightly unusual - but this church has been trying out all sorts of things as fund-raisers, awareness-raisers and community-spirit-raisers. We have 'fair-ed', concerted, quizzed, coconut-shied, bag-packed, Italian-mealed - the list goes on and on!

It was a brilliant gig, with enthusiastic applause from the audience and massive stamping for an encore (with the spine chilling 'He moved through the fair' to continue).

But what did I love best about this rock'n'roll extravaganza?

We all had a nice cup of tea at the interval....

..time for a rant

The General Synod of the Church of England (20 months ago I was a cleric in that church, at some point in the future I may well become one again) is continuing to debate how the C of E should live with women bishops. They have already committed to the fact that women should become bishops - the process is slowly grinding on, and the arguments are now about what happens to people, lay and ordained, who don't like the idea.

Outside the church, society would prosecute under discrimination law for this sort of behaviour. The Equality Act 2010 has an exemption for religious organisations that allows them to disciminate on grounds of belief or sexual orientation - but not gender! Interesting - I hadn't really hoisted that on board!

How do the churches play this game?

There some who like debates about churches being places that define counter-culteral positions - Jesus came and contradicted the existing unjust structures of his day, didn't he? So it's the job of the church to take that same ground. And that means rejecting women/LGBT/... delete as applicable.

But if the counter-cultural position that the church takes is only counter-cultural because society has moved on and has a more developed view of what human justice ACTUALLY is - on gender, sexual orientation etc. - is not the church merely hanging onto a conservative, reactionary point of view?

What appears next? 'But the bible says...'

It says a lot of things. It has things that were oral traditions gathered around campfires over 3000 years ago, it has polished histories of an occupied people 2500 years ago, it has grumpy letters to badly behaved churches, it has love poetry, it has books of pithy maxims. It is a glorious human edifice, filled with God-inspired wisdom - and also filled with dozens of cultural contexts.

The culture that surrounds our churches, whether resisted or accepted or embraced, is a vital part of how a church relates to people and relates to God. And culture formed scripture, tradition and our view of reason.

The church in which I am now a cleric, the Scottish Episcopal Church, has already fully accepted women bishops. But we have never had one. In fact, I'm not even sure there's been a woman dean or provost (I'm sure someone will correct me if there has been one). Hmm. The hot issue, in the SEC view on the wider Anglican Covenant-related debate, is on sexual orientation and the episcopate.

And I would observe that Scotland, as a nation, is advancing faster than our neighbours in the UK on removing the final inequalities for sexual orientation. Legalisation (but not compulsion) of same-sex marriage in church is high on the Scottish government agenda.

Where is all this rant going? Where would Jesus be with all this? This first century Jew, in the occupied territories known as Israel/Palestine - what would he make of all these heated, sometime vitriolic debates on who/what is right and wrong? I suspect he would crouch down and draw with his finger in the dust, maybe humming a little tune to himself, before coming up with something along the lines of,

"Let you who is without sin cast the first stone..."

Standing up for yourself...

I turned away a funeral this week.

Well, I tried pretty hard to make it work - someone who was 'Church of England' (a thing maybe only admitted after death in the West of Scotland, or maybe very shortly before...) had shuffled off this mortal coil and wanted the 'right' funeral. So an Episcopalian priest was requested. We don't have a parochial system as such in our Anglican Province - canonical areas I suppose sum it up. The chap hadn't come to see us in life, but in death he was in 'my patch'...

The day was no good for me - not an unusual occurrence. My local retired colleague was away that day. My colleagues over the water in Greenock and Port Glasgow otherwise engaged. And at that point I ran out of Episcopalian ministers who were sensibly close.

Other days - no good for the family. Other options - church rather than crem - no good for the family.

Well, I hope the Church of Scotland funeral that the family get is OK for them - I'm sure it will be. The minister who has taken it on needs another funeral like a hole in the head, IMHO.

Questions for me - how important are funeral ministries for random people who decide they want something Anglican in a country where that's not the establishment?
Is it good to be importing into Scotland the English - the C of E will 'do' us when we die - that I lived with during my curacy, and I see my C of S colleagues doing for ordinary non-church going Scots?
Do we drop everything and mess up established community building activities (in my case a eucharist, and set of social & business meetings on 'my' island) to meet such a demand?

I very nearly started to cancel a regular service and shift meetings and plan complicated multiple ferry journeys, until I suddenly thought - no - this is not a priority.

But I am sorry for my C of S colleague who has to take on yet another funeral service. I wonder if ATBAB will be before or after Crimond...