‘Happy’ Reformation Day?
I have been (electronically) wished ‘Happy Reformation Day’ a remarkable number of times this morning. Each time, it has jarred slightly.
Read MoreChurch responses to equal marriage legislation
I see no less than seven different positions concerning the introduction of SS/E marriage that were/are on the table from the churches in the UK. My point here is not to defend or to demolish any of the arguments, just to make clear that different positions were/are in play, and that they led/lead to different attitudes to the bills.
Read MoreCelebrating Lynn Green’s election
Today, the Revd Lynn Green has been elected as General Secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain. (Report here.) On one level, this news is distant from me. It happens that I do not know Lynn – we have met, more or less in passing, but I certainly cannot claim any close relationship with her. And it is eight years or more since our family moved to Scotland, and so I transferred my ministerial accreditation from BUGB to the Baptist Union of Scotland. That said, BUGB is the denomination into which I was baptised, which tested and affirmed my call to ministry, which ordained me, and in which I began my ministerial service. The two General Secretaries before Lynn are personal friends, as are several other national and regional leaders. I owe BUGB more than I can say, and retain many relationships with individuals, churches, and translocal structures within the denomination; I still feel as if I belong to some extent – I do not know if BUGB would still want to own me as one of theirs, but I would want to be so owned; for me, there are deep ties of history, loyalty, and friendship here. So today, knowing from friends that something exciting – I did not know what – was in the offing, I repeatedly checked my Twitter feed between sessions of our church awayday. I saw that Lynn had been proposed, and then that she had been elected; I saw the rejoicing from brothers and sisters ‘down south’ at the election; I shared in the rejoicing; I saw at least one friend, an Anglican priest, express a wish that she were a Baptist today; I began to reflect. The General Secretary of BUGB is the leading Baptist office in the UK. This is, so far as we have one, the equivalent of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, or the See of Westminster. Lynn is the first woman to be called to the role. I saw numbers of friends down south tweeting ‘proud to be a Baptist today’ – and, as I say, at least one Anglican friend wishing to be a Baptist. What did all this mean? Of course, the calling of the first female General Secretary is a moment of history; this will be recorded and remembered as the moment when a decisive change became visible. And many – perhaps on my timeline 75-80% – of the comments were celebrating this moment in history. They did not know Lynn; they had no doubt that the selection committee had made a wise choice; but the celebration was for the crossing of a Rubicon: now there is no office left in (British) Baptist life that is not open to women and men indifferently. The other 20-25% of the people I heard celebrated because they knew Lynn and had no doubt that this was a transparently excellent appointment, to be rejoiced in because Lynn is Lynn, not because Lynn is female. It seems to me that both reactions are valid, and both are important to understand why today should be a day of rejoicing for British Baptists. The second first: Lynn was called because, simply, she was the best candidate for the post. Nothing I saw even began to0 suggest any element of ‘tokenism,’ or even of a desire to right a lasting injustice, appropriate though such a desire might have been. I was not privy to the internal discussions, but I feel completely convinced that I have heard enough today to assert with utter confidence that Lynn was called because she was the best candidate for the post. The first reaction: as I read the reaction – and the reports of voting percentages – this was not a moment where the view of the denomination changed; rather, this was the visible working out of a change in view that had already happened. Almost nobody in BUGB is worried about the highest office being occupied by a woman now. Many of us knew, or suspected, or hoped, that that was the case; the Assembly’s calling of Lynn, however, was a public and visible confirmation of what we knew, or suspected, or hoped – as such it is worthy of great celebration, not as a moment of change, but as a moment when a change that happened before became transparently visible. I have read dozens of tweets announcing ‘Today, I am proud to be a Baptist’. Yes. Today, I am proud to be a Baptist. Not just proud, but hopeful. Lynn’s calling is profoundly important because she is the first woman to be called to this position, and that will, I pray,...
Read MoreOn feeling valued
Yesterday I travelled down to the Westminster Faith Debate on same-sex marriage. The Religion and Society programme had booked my train travel first class (complete with confirmation from a university travel service announcing in big letters ‘CHEAPEST FARE OF xxx REJECTED. SAVING OF xxx COULD HAVE BEEN MADE. REASON GIVEN FOR REJECTION: “vip passenger”.’ which I enjoyed, and which says far too much about the general state of university support services in the UK). I have never actually traveled first class over any distance before, apart from occasional overnight sleeper trips on a promotional ticket, so I was looking forward to this experience, and ended up laughing about odd details with some Twitter friends. Then I was met at the debate venue, by an extremely polite intern, taken to a Green Room, greeted warmly, &c. Then I met the photographer (see previous post), and was bossed around and fussed over till she had exactly the shots she wanted. I ended the evening in a restaurant where the standard of service was higher than I am accustomed to before boarding the train home. There were other details, but you get the flavour. The day was extraordinarily pleasant – there were moments of course; it is a controversial subject. Given the choice, for instance, I’d have skipped being told to my face that people of my intellectual calibre should be banned from speaking in public (love you too, mate…), but these felt like brief clouds in a sunny sky. I reflected on the whole experience on a delayed train this morning, and realised: I had spent the day being valued, being treated as if I mattered, and that this is both fairly unusual in my life, and extraordinarily affirming. I half-remember a quotation from G.K. Chesterton: he puts it in the mouth of Fr Brown, but I am sure he is speaking, and speaking out of his profound Catholic faith. ‘All people matter. I matter. You matter. It is the hardest thing in theology to believe.’ All people matter. We debated same-sex marriage, and I found myself troubled. On the one side are those whose rhetoric too often suggests that only straight people matter. This is about as close to heresy as any modern view I have ever encountered. On the other side, there is an ‘inclusive’ (heavily inverted commas) position that says, essentially, ‘lesbian, gay, and straight people who obey the rules the church has set matter’. This is just as close to heresy. The truth is, all people matter – straight, lesbian, and gay, bisexual, confused, queer, asexual, polyamorous, living in profoundly improper and abusive relationships, struggling to find any term to describe their felt identity – they are people; they matter. Chesterton somewhere else imagines Father Brown facing up to someone who has committed a sin that society regards as unforgivable. ‘I wouldn’t touch him with a barge-pole,’ says another character; Father Brown’s comment is something like – I am quoting these texts from memory – ‘as a Christian I must touch him, and not with a barge-pole, but with a benediction.’ The call of the church is to treat people – all people, without exception – as if they mattered, to touch them with a benediction. I know that I benefit from almost every injustice in the world; I know how to check my privilege extraordinarily well – and yet I found the experience of a day being treated as if I mattered emotionally powerful and deeply affirming. I think of friends who are on the wrong side of one, or more than one, injustice – lesbian/gay, or poor, or female, or disabled, or young, or old, or black, or Romany, or – well, you know the list… I think of people I have met who are on the wrong side of almost every injustice – what would it feel to them to spend a day being treated as if they mattered? I know that, from my position of privilege, I can’t imagine. I also know that I believe in the depths of my soul that this is what the experience of church should be – for every person who...
Read MoreOnce more: congregationalism, authority, and gender
As a very young scholar, I was involved in organising a conference in honour of Colin Gunton’s sixtieth birthday. I commented to Colin over a meal in his favourite Italian restaurant after that conference that we worked in an odd field, where we assumed that the way to honour a colleague was to gather all his closest friends to tell him where he was wrong in public… I sort-of-knew then, of course, and know much better now, that there is no higher honour anyone can give to our writing than to take it seriously, and critical engagement is the way we take each other most seriously. I have had cause this week to be grateful for a couple of deeply serious interactions with my work: Fred Sanders and Matt Jenson have begun a blog conversation about my Trinity book which is extremely generous in its appreciation (thus far…) and careful and serious in its engagement; I look forward to learning much from their readings and reflections. Fred and I also both feature in the latest edition of Credo Magazine, which is on the doctrine of the Trinity, and which also includes a lengthy article review of my Baptist Theology book by Bobby Jamieson of Nine Marks Ministries – an engagement for which I am equally grateful. Jamieson is extremely kind in his appreciation of the book, and offers some helpful challenges (He cites statistics on open membership positions amongst SBC churches which are news to me, and which I must follow up; on the other hand, I’m sure I’m right about Spurgeon, but the point does need further defence; …). About a half of his review, however, is taken up with an extensive engagement of my suggestion in the book that Baptists – or other congregationalists – cannot, logically, accept the currently-popular version of ‘gender complementarianism’, because it relies on an account of the location of authority which congregationalism necessarily denies. I am enormously grateful for the engagement, and find his development of a version of congregationalism which is not susceptible to the charge I make fascinating and very helpful; my instinctive suspicion is that it is something of a departure from Baptist traditions, but we would need to have that argument with recourse to many specific texts, taking each of the manifold varieties of Baptists one by one – I am certainly open to the claim that congregationalism developed differently in North America and Europe, and that I have missed that, for instance. This is real, substantive, critical work, which helps me to see the limitations of my knowledge and imagination and to have a larger view of what is possible in our shared tradition at the end. I am, genuinely, very grateful. That said, the discussion of gender and ministry in my book ran to less than three pages – of 160pp in the book – and Jamieson is far from the first to highlight it. I will not pretend that it is not a subject I am passionate about – readers of this blog may have noticed – but the point borders on the incidental in this particular text. I knew when I wrote those few paragraphs that they would attract attention out of proportion to their length, of course; I left them there because the point is the best illustration I know of a broader theme of the book. As Jamieson notices, I try to sketch a ‘middle way’ between maximalist and minimalist accounts of Baptist distinctiveness. The core of that ‘middle way’ is to insist that Baptists are distinctive only in our ecclesiology, but then to suggest that our ecclesiology is sufficiently different that it echoes around the whole of theology, imposing itself in surprising ways in a whole host of places. I suggested that one of those places was the currently popular defence of ‘gender complementarianism,’ which turns extensively on notions of authority. Baptists have different ideas about where authority is found, and how it operates, in the church, I suggested, and so many of these recent arguments, which work perfectly well in presbyterian and episcopal polities, cannot work for congregationalists like Baptists. In this I assumed a piece of work I have begun to do, but not yet published, concerning shifting evangelical justifications for ‘complementarian’ positions. the ‘headship-authority’ defence is, I think, actually very new – a couple of decades or so old. There were several identifiable waves of previous defences, which all worked much better within a Baptist ecclesiology. So my point, and I hope I made it clear, was never that Baptists could not be ‘complementarians’ – I think we should not, but that is a different argument...
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