How to wreck a good Carol Service

Two gripes following a Carol Service that I attended just before Christmas…

Firstly the violence being done to some of our greatest hymns in the name of accessibility.  Changing ‘thee’, ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ into ‘you’, for example, is basically dumbing down – it implies that the people singing the carols don’t understand what the words mean, which is both wrong and patronising.

Worse is the changing of phrases such as, for example, ‘sing choirs of angels’ into ‘sing all the angels’ (you’ll know the carol).  This changes the meaning to an extent – if the words are ‘sing all the angels’, to how many angels we are referring?  Three, four?  More than this?  But ‘choirs of angels’ implies tens or hundreds, much more impressive. Everyone knows what a choir is, why change the word?

Secondly, and more importantly, we were about 30 seconds into a lengthy sermon when the subject changed from nativity to crucifixion.  Now I fully acknowledge the centrality of the atonement in the Christian faith (and will be posting a full blog item early in the New Year), but Christmas is about the wonder of the incarnation.  I think the problem here stems from Paul’s statement that he was determined to “preach nothing but Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23 and 1 Corinthians 2:2).  In my experience, many Evangelical preachers have taken this to mean that they should only ever preach on the crucifixion and nothing else.  So it is my common experience to find every sermon, whatever the text, contrives to reach this topic as soon as possible.  Brian McLaren has noted the problem that many preachers jump straight from the beginning of the Gospel to the end, missing out everything in between. (I’m sorry I don’t have the reference).

But for those who come to church maybe once a year for the carols this approach has missed out on ‘who He is’ (the incarnation), so what He has done becomes much less relevant - and a lengthy sermon, when carols were expected, is a missed opportunity to say something short, meaningful, and really engaging.

Leaving the C of E

It’s great that the legislation for women bishops has now received Royal Assent.  Now it seems that the last hurdle is for the canon (church law) to be enacted by the General Synod on 17 November (2014).  Most commentators believe that the first woman will be consecrated as a bishop in the first half of 2015. At the same time the C of E is having a ‘shared conversation’ about the issue of sexuality – a polite way of saying ‘a discussion about the church’s approach to homosexuals’.  

This is a good thing.  

There is clear precedent in the early church for the leadership to debate issues where there is difference of opinion in the church.  The Archbishop of Canterbury says he hope the outcome will be at least that there will be different views but members will still remain "gracefully and deeply committed to each other".

Reform (an influential and firmly right wing evangelical group) seems to have pulled out of the process because, as I see it, they want the current Church of England official position that all sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage “should be met with a call for repentance and the exercise of compassion” to be an unassailable precondition to the conversations.  

Difficult to have a conversation with someone who is not prepared to discuss the issue from the start. 

These two issues seems to be indicative of the current overall approach of conservative evangelicals within the C of E.  Back in July Reform responded to the approval by the General Synod of women to become bishops by saying in a general statement to its members: “You will have been saddened, but probably not surprised, by the General Synod’s vote last Monday on women bishops”, and then more threateningly: “we will in the next few weeks seek to help PCCs think through both whether they consider themselves able to act on the new provision in the House of Bishops' declaration and, if they do, what might be involved”.  Letter from Rod Thomas to Reform members

Briefly, the background here is that individual Parochial Church Councils will have some form of opt out from oversight by a woman bishop and be allowed oversight by a male bishop.  How this will work exactly is not known but rest assured that those who take this position will be looking for a bishop who strongly takes their conservative evangelical (they have taken to referring themselves as ‘classical’ evangelicals) point of view.  

Which brings me to GAFCON…

The Global Anglican Future Conference is a meeting of conservative Anglican’s worldwide, overwhelmingly led by the churches in Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries (not South Africa), who tend to the very far right.  In 2013 the conference pledged primatial support for the Anglican Mission in England an umbrella group for British conservative evangelicals.  Dr Peter Jensen, a former Archbishop of Sydney, confirmed that this would effectively be a new province.

My deep concern is that some churches in the C of E are going to be shepherded into this new province, The Anglican Mission in England – thereby leaving the Church of England and setting up a new province in competition with it.  This has already happened in the USA with the establishment of the Anglican Church in North America.

I am an evangelical by tradition – but not an unthinking dogmatic one, unable to think beyond the ‘received’ position of the right wing.  

I don’t want to find my church voting to leave the C of E because the evangelical thought police have led them to it.