Commentary from the Guardian in London-
This week the Church of England's parliament will debate once again the subject of women bishops, global capitalism, whether membership of the BNP is compatible with being an Anglican, and the deadly question of the covenant, a new set of rules for what counts as being a true Anglican which (though the higher-ups all deny this catagorically) is designed to exclude the US church from the communion because it had the temerity to make a gay man a bishop.
This is the church putting its worst foot forward. Question time allows petty doctrinal point-scoring or score-settling. Other speakers are so bound up with procedural obscurantism that they make the question of angels dancing on a pin look like a model of practicality and relevance. The only thing that keeps me from falling asleep is my anger at the wastefulness of the whole thing. So I trudge home in the rain deeply miserable about the state of my church.
Yet as I write, two dozen or so churchgoers are sitting in our back room, discussing new ways of raising money for AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe or the Christian Aid appeal for Gaza or the local homeless project. They visit the sick and help look after the needy. They offer a space for people to come together to share their hopes for a better world and to seek means for personal transformation. And then I remember once again why I do it all. Of course, you don't have to be a Christian or even religious to do any of these things (but given that it's a pretty safe bet that there are very few secularists having an equivalent meeting in Putney tonight, I suspect that it helps).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/feb/10/religion-anglican-general-synod
No comments:
Post a Comment