Author Archives: Elizaphanian

About Elizaphanian

Rector of West Mersea

Incarnational worship

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Joe and Peter took issue in the comments with the previous post and I wanted to expand on my perspective (ie why I liked the article I linked to).

On the one hand we have worship that is centred on holiness, the mysterium tremendens et fascinans, the provoking of awe and (in the strict sense) ecstasy. This is more associated with the Anglo-Catholic style of worship.

On the other hand we have worship that is centred on being human, relational, relaxed and informal. This is more associated with the Evangelical style of worship.

Pushed to an extreme, is this not a failure (on both sides) to be incarnational? In other words, the Anglo-Catholic tendency is to err in losing the humanity, the evangelical tendency is to err in losing the divinity in worship?

Whereas Jesus unites the two; and therefore so must our worship.

My worry with what Peter and Joe argue is that when we are worshipping, we are specifically worshipping God, and our relationship to Jesus must contain – I suggest – more of the woman clutching his cloak or Thomas exclaiming ‘My Lord and my God!’ than simply gathering to share a glass of wine with a community of friends (and it is that, of course). We need to find the place of balance, the sweet spot of the Spirit.

Peter said “The assumption in the article is God/Jesus is only present in church, specifically at every communion…” – it’s not so much that God/Jesus is ONLY present in church, but that he is indeed especially present in communion, there is a real presence which is significant. That is what lay behind my comment about the place of Old Testament worship (on which topic John Richardson has an excellent point here).

In other words, I think there is a further permutation of the evangelical error above, which is to flatten our experience of God. To say that God can be encountered everywhere and worshipped anywhere is true. Yet it is also true that we are a) sinful, b) therefore need to be taught how to worship and relate to God, and c) need to take account of the Scriptural witness that God is to be found and worshipped in particular places at particular times in particular ways. What has in fact happened, as a result of that evangelical emphasis (Protestant emphasis) upon God being worshippable anywhere, is that God ends up being worshipped nowhere – because we no longer know how to worship. The historic desire to avoid sacerdotalism has eviscerated the holy and we now live in a culture full of the spiritually starving who see what goes on in church as irrelevant to their hunger. The one leads inexorably to the other.

It is indeed possible to be mystically united with God at all times and in all places. Yet I suspect that any human beings like me need training and assistance (the what, the why and the how) in order to attain such an exalted spiritual state. This is exactly what communion does – it is our principal spiritual medicine which heals us and enables us to share in Christ’s life. After all, Jesus didn’t just come to abolish the Temple; he came to abolish it and replace it, with his Body. If we fail to take that seriously, ie with sufficient awe and reverence, then I believe that we are not keeping the faith, and we are not growing in the Spirit.

Mysterium Tremendens

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Loved this:

How might we behave if we walked down the aisle in knowledge that God himself will permeate our beings? Because at present we have a long way to go. How do I know this? Because if the Queen announced a visit to S. Barnabas, or any other church for that matter, the place would be packed, people dressed in their finest and everyone hushed and speaking in muted tones. Yet perversely Jesus comes every Sunday, but people pick and choose when they come, drift in late and rarely find the need to confess before receiving the sacrament. A fact that should make us all stop and think.

(From another blogging vicar with a daughter called J_)

Normal service will hopefully resume here before too long (Ollie hopes). I’m convalescing from something, I think it’s exhaustion, my wife thinks it was ‘flu (but not swinish).

An "interesting" problem with Outlook Express

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Every so often Outlook Express compacts messages. It would appear as though some time last week, when it was doing so, it wiped several of my e-mail folders down to nothing. I do have a back-up – a couple of months old – but I was just wondering if anyone knew of a way to merge the back up with the existing folder files, so that I don’t lose the material accumulated since I did the back-up. All help gratefully received.

And yes, it’s another hint to take me off Microsoft completely.

UPDATE: found this, which (hopefully) will do most of the work:

The BAK files your OE folders before compacting. They are copied there
as a precaution in case something goes wrong with the compacting.

1) Look in OE at Tools, Options, Maintenance, Store Folder for the
location of your Store Folder. Then close OE.

2) Go to Recycle Bin and restore the most recent Sent Items.bak file.
That will put it in OE Store folder, but still as a BAK file.

3) Open the Windows File Explorer and look at the store folder you found
in step 1. (You may need to enable the the display Hidden and System
files in Tools, Folder Options, View as well as uncheck the option to
Hide extensions of known file types. You should see both a Sent
Items.dbx file as well as the Sent Items.bak. Rename the Sent Items.DBX
to Sentold.dbx and then rename Sent Items.Bak to Sent Items.DBX. When
you open OE, your Sent Items messages should be restored.

Another glorious cartoon from ASBO Jesus

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I should add, in the interests of accuracy, that lots of people have been asking how I am recently. That’s because there is a rumour going around that I am mentally ill 🙂

I’ve taken a day off today, partly because I’m severely knackered, partly because I’ve got a fairly major meeting tomorrow night. You probably noticed that the number of blog posts has risen!

An unoriginal thought about human sexuality

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Prompted to write this by Doug’s post.

The wider social group has historically had an intense involvement in the regulation of human sexuality.

The justifiable reason for this is that human sexuality has (predominantly) had the consequence of reproduction – and the wider society has a major stake in the raising of children. Given that (by and large) stable relationships are the best way to raise children it seems legitimate for society to support stable relationships.

The advent of cheap, reliable and widely available contraception changes this.

Now the expression of human sexuality has no _necessary_ link with reproduction.

This puts humanity into a new place, and we are still working through all the implications. (In particular, just because the mind knows conception will not follow, the body has its own reasons, and may not ever adjust to the new situation. I suspect men find the consequences easier than women – but perhaps I’m just thinking of Julie Gianni.)

At an early stage – the 1930’s – the Anglican Communion decided that contraception was not against the will of God, and the matrimonial service was adjusted to reflect this.

Now sexuality is seen as not simply about reproduction but about mutual affection and the development of relationships.

As Rowan Williams has previously argued, once you accept this, there is no argument against homosexual relationships as such – after all, even Adam was given the final choice of mate by God.

I suspect that – in a hundred years or so – we will end up with two different institutions, one which is centred on reproduction and the provision of the best possible environment for the raising of children; the other based around the mutual giving and receiving of affection. Society will regulate the first but have nothing to do with the second. (Sometimes, of course, they may overlap.)

Final thought: people who comment blithely about a ‘biblical understanding of sexuality’ don’t seem to read the same bible as me.

And here’s something I obtained earlier:

What sort of future for the Church of England?

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One of the things that I talk about in my LUBH talks is exponential growth, ie what it actually means when something grows consistently at a certain percentage per year. In sum, consistent annual growth (eg 7.5%) means that the entity doubles in size in a particular time frame (10 years for 7.5%), when that continues then stupendous consequences follow, eg fold a piece of paper 40 times and it will touch the moon!

The same principles apply in reverse of course, which brings me to the future of the Church of England:

What this means is that, unless something dramatic changes, the Church of England will have around 80,000 members at the end of this century. I think that there are all sorts of reasons for this decline (not least George Herbert syndrome) and here I just want to draw attention to it as the context for some other things happening at the moment. (I should say that there is a very large difference between ‘the Church’ and ‘the Church of England’ – I have immense confidence in the long-term future of the former, whereas I am quite pragmatically pessimistic about the long-term future of the latter.)

Now we can all point to pockets of growth and new life that spring up here and there – there are several in this patch – and we can come up with all sorts of wonderful reasons why the Church of England is a lovely institution that deserves to continue… but I suspect that, in anything like its present form, the CofE is in the process of dying, in an oh-so-genteel way. The inertia of establishment will prop it up for quite some time before it properly enters its rest however.

Two other factors to bring in: first, all the faction-fighting, especially over women and homosexuality. It does look as if TEC is prepared to go its own way, and this will have implications for how the CofE carries on. I can’t see the split being exclusively outside England and, as I’ve said before if it is the ultra-conservative biblicists that split away (as in previous centuries) then the CofE will be able to muddle along for a bit longer; if, however, it is the (much larger) progressive side that ends up splitting away – leaving the biblicists in a much stronger position – then I suspect the decline will be much swifter.

Will anyone care, or even notice? I’m sure most people in the congregation don’t – they’ll keep turning up and worshipping and supporting the wider life for as long as they can. However, there is the second factor to consider – which is the increasingly straitened financial circumstances that we find ourselves in. The Church is having to shed jobs continuously, and more and more stipendiary posts are vanishing, to be more-or-less replaced by non-stipendiaries and lay workers. This is all well and good – and, I believe, part of God’s secret plan to renew his people in this country – but it has the inevitable side-effect of accelerating the financial crisis. As Bob Jackson has pointed out in his research, the most effective way to precipitate a decline in membership and giving is to not have an incumbent in post.

In this situation I see two main alternatives: the first is a ‘managed decline’, where at each point anyone in authority can say, looking locally, ‘we’re doing alright, it’s not so bad, we’ve slowed the decline – or even stabilised our numbers! etc etc’. This is the apocryphal boiled-frog option in reverse – we haven’t been boiled alive yet!!

The second is that we bet the house on a different way of doing things (after all, if we lose the bet, we have simply embraced the expected future consciously rather than backing into it out of fear and denial) – and it could work. What do I mean by this? I mean things like:
– setting the parishes free of the parish share system, with each parish paying for it’s own minister and housing etc (to the charge ‘what about the poor areas?’ I respond ‘what about the actions that free and faithful Christians will take?!’);
– passing ownership – and therefore the cost of upkeep – of most church buildings to the state, to be cared for as part of our national heritage;
– abandoning establishment, eg Bishops in the House of Lords, which has all sorts of pernicious consequences, one example being the canon law requiring priests to baptise any children whose parents request it;
– abandoning the parish system and reverting to the minster model for church organisation – in effect we become the Anglican church in England, just one denomination, not the Church OF England – so it would be much more like the situation in North America.

I think we need to set ourselves free, to shed the skin of establishment that has become constraining, suffocating and distancing from our environment. I believe it is what God wants – and all the travails we are presently suffering are the ways in which God is trying to get us to change our patterns of life. Bring home the revolution!

The art of constructive criticism

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Last weekend I went up to the Peterborough Diocese to lead a study day on ‘Transforming the World’ using my LUBH material, which I thought went well, and the feedback has been solidly positive. Along with the positive feedback, however, came two bits of ‘criticism’, ie that I ask ‘is that clear?’ or ‘does that make sense?’ a bit too often, and I have a tendency to smile too much (something of a nervous tic) which might suggest that I don’t take the material as seriously as might be expected. This I felt was an excellent example of constructive criticism – things that I can do something about to continually improve my presentation skills so that the message gets across ever more effectively.

I do think that our culture as a whole, and clergy in particular, need training in how to give constructive criticism; it’s an incredibly useful art and would probably lead to many fewer of the conflicts now afflicting us if we were able to practise it more effectively. I suppose it’s a way of ‘speaking the truth in love’, which is something I need to work on myself (that is, I think I’ve got the ‘speaking the truth’ bit down OK, it’s the latter that needs attention….)