The Church of England has got itself into a complete muddle. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention over the past few years. The latest fiasco is ‘GS 2055’, the document which sums up what the Bishops have come up with after 2-3 years of ‘shared conversations’. Unsurprisingly, the […]
Tag: church of england
The New Monastics
The New Monastics: not, as you might have imagined, a pop movement from the 1970s and 80s, but something which is happening in 2017 in the Church of England. Earlier today I noticed a post on Twitter announcing that the Diocese of Leicester were looking for a Prior of a ‘New Monastic Community’. This follows […]
Responding to false teaching: Lessons from 2 Peter
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend amongst evangelicals recently. I encountered it most recently in this blog post by Baptist minister and theologian Steve Holmes. This is how he puts it (you’ll have to read the full blog for the whole context): No, I know Megan and Bill, I know that they call people to believe in […]
The Bible and (same-sex) marriage: Cutting through to the root issue
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have blogged quite a few times about marriage, and in particular same-sex marriage. You can see my previous posts under the “marriage” tag. Anyway, it seems we are still talking about marriage: the debate has simply moved from society – where same-sex marriage is now a […]
“Change or Die”: is the church doomed?
A popular line of argument these days is that the church must either change or die. More specifically, the ‘change’ to happen must include being affirming of same-sex marriage. Vicky Beeching wrote this on Twitter a few days ago: Today many predict that #LGBT inclusion will ‘split the Church of England’. Perhaps it will just […]
Just what is a Priest anyway?
On Sunday afternoon I was ordained Priest in the Church of England. Up until a few years ago, I would never have used the word ‘priest’ to describe myself. What changed? And what is a priest anyway? A few years ago, whenever I heard the word ‘priest’ the main vision I had was of a […]
The Bible: “That’s just your interpretation”
Over the past few weeks on Facebook, I’ve been in a group discussing (what else?) sexuality and the church. One of the themes that comes up again and again is the issue of interpretation: we all interpret the Bible differently on this, and there is no way of judging between different interpretations, so we may […]
Liberalism and the Church
I’ve just finished reading “Christianity and Liberalism” by J Gresham Machen. It was written nearly a century ago (1923) but it’s still an excellent book. He argues throughout the book (and, to my mind, demonstrates conclusively) that Liberalism – in the sense of liberal Christianity – is actually a different religion to Christianity. Given the age of […]
Why is the church obsessed with sex?
It’s a legitimate question: if you’re an outsider, it looks like the church wants to talk about nothing else at the moment. One obvious answer to the question is that sex is the area of our culture which rubs up most obviously against the traditional Christian understanding – hence the clashes. In previous years there […]
Secularism: What does it mean to you?
The title of this blog post is taken from an article I read yesterday. The Guardian basically asked a few different people what secularism meant to them, and published their responses. To be honest, the article doesn’t encompass a huge range of beliefs (most of the people there seem to be atheist / humanist in outlook), […]