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Reform have posted up a letter sent yesterday to Bishops and General Synod members. A measured reading will see that, despite their gentle language, they have effectively drawn a line in the sand on the issue, as the following excerpts demonstrate…

An illustration of the practical problems we will face should a Measure fail to provide adequate safeguards, can be seen with future ordinands. At the moment we are encouraging young men into the ordained ministry in the knowledge that they cannot be discriminated against if they hold convictions about male headship. While this remains the case, we have encouraged them to believe that there is a worthwhile future for their ministries in the Church of England. However, we will be unable to do this if inadequately protective legislation is passed. The issue that will then arise is how to encourage these men to develop their ministries if they cannot do so within the formal structures of the Church of England. The answer must be to encourage them to undertake training for ministries outside those formal structures, although hopefully still within an Anglican tradition. We will, of course, have to help them with the financing of their training.

Our congregations will inevitably start asking questions about their own place within the Church of England if they see us encouraging people into training for alternative ministries. This will come into sharp focus when the issue of succession to an incumbency arises. Since we cannot take an oath of canonical obedience to a female bishop, we are unlikely to be appointed to future incumbencies. We see nothing but difficulty facing us. In these circumstances we will have to discuss with our congregations how to foster and protect the ministry they wish to receive. This is likely to generate a need for the creation of new independent charitable trusts whose purpose will be to finance our future ministries, when the need arises.

These twin developments will need to be financed from current congregational giving. This will inevitably put a severe strain on our ability to continue to contribute financially to Diocesan funds.
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Finally, for those of us ordained since 1992, our understanding, in good faith, was that proper legal provision would be made for those who did not agree that women should have the overall leadership of a church (Resolution B, etc). It seems to us a matter of simple integrity that Synod should now keep its word to us in this and not force us down a road none of us wish to tread.

I think that’s pretty clear.

The letter has 50 signatories, including Rod Thomas, the chair of Reform, and prominent evangelicals such as David Banting, Vaughan Roberts, Jonathan Fletcher, Melvin Tinker, Willy Taylor and Bishop Wallace Benn.

No need to write much. Video does it all…

I can’t be the only one to notice that today’s date is 3210? Can I?

Apologies for not getting this one to you sooner.

The recent announcement by the Church of England’s legislation drafting committee for the introduction of women bishops that there would be a delay in their work has generated a lot of comment.

Pete Broadbent, bishop of Willesden, frequent online commentor and member of the committee recently commented on the Church Mouse blog in response to some of those remarks.
Church Mouse has put those comments up as an article:

There’s a lot of completely ill-informed comment about all this. What people refuse to hear is that the Revision Committee was not given a remit with which it had to comply; that’s not how it works. At Revision Stage, every single option (we received 300 submissions) has to be considered, including those options that Synod did not vote for. People may not like this way of working, but that’s how it operates. The Committee has therefore worked through all the options systematically, considering each in turn, and gradually ruling out each option that didn’t command a majority.

The other factor is that each person who has submitted a proposal for revision is entitled to attend the committee in person and argue their case. Listening to each representation takes time, and we then have to inquisite the proposals being made. A majority of those representations came from those in favour of the ordination of women as bishops.

We’re drafting law here, so we have to get it right. Those who are familiar with Parliamentary process will know that Government often imposes a guillotine on consideration of a Bill. Arguably this makes for bad law, as later clauses in legislation don’t get properly argued over and revised. The guillotine option isn’t open to Synod; and impatience with proper scrutiny simply won’t serve us well in the long run.

So, please, have some understanding of those hard-pressed officers of Synod who work for the Church and have been writing, drafting and re-drafting to try to get something coherent to get to Synod. And respect a democratic process that seeks to give a voice to everyone who’s entitled to be heard. There’s a lot of intolerance about listening to opponents of the legislation, and it doesn’t do those of us who support women bishops any favours to seek to bulldoze those opposed.

I like Pete Broadbent - there’s a refreshing honesty and clarity about the position that he holds and, unlike some supporters of the consecration of women, he genuinely wants to have a solution that leaves objectors well looked after.

But I can’t help but observe, yet again, that this whole thing is going to be a disaster. The revision committee wants more time to draft up legislation that will, most likely, not be the mind of the General Synod which gave them the task in the first place. If you remember the last General Synod of the CofE agreed not to implement a statutory protection for dissenters - but now it seems that that is exactly what the committee might be preparing!

I’m all in favour of “proper scrutiny” and I think the last vote by General Synod was a disaster. Church Mouse was right to exclaim in his original post, “when did we get into this farce?”

The answer? A long long time ago. This is just a symptom of a much deeper malaise. Good luck to Pete and the committee, they’re going to need it. Heaps of it. In spades.

In our local rag, the Mosman Daily, the letters page (p28) had this little gem following on from last week’s report on the local authority “shame list” of eateries that failed a health and safety inspection:

Thank you for the name and shame file of eateries in our area. It does not surprise me that most of these places are run by people from overseas, where personal hygiene standards are low.

Words fail me at the moment. I suspect that a number of people may be moved to write in response to that. I might just be one of them.

It seems you can’t stop the media talking religion these days. The latest example is the BBC News website whose stimulating Magazine section brings us “Why does God allow natural disasters?”.

It’s a pretty fair popular-level survey of the various theodicies that are offered. So, for example,

St Augustine, author CS Lewis and others have argued God allows our bad actions since preventing them would undermine our free will, the value of which outweighs its ill effects.

But there’s a counter-argument. Thoroughly good people aren’t robots, so why couldn’t God have created only people like them, people who quite freely live good lives?

However that debate turns out, it’s quite unclear how free will is supposed to explain the other kind of evil - the death and suffering of the victims of natural disasters.

Perhaps it would if all the victims - even the newborn - were so bad that they deserved their agonising deaths, but it’s impossible to believe that is the case.

Or perhaps free will would be relevant if human negligence always played a role. There will be some who say the scale of the tragedy in natural disasters is partly attributable to humans. The world has the choice to help its poorer parts build earthquake-resistant structures and tsunami warning systems.

But the technology has not always existed. Was prehistoric man, with his sticks and stones, somehow negligent in failing to build early warning systems for the tsunamis that were as deadly back then as they are today?

The survey continues referencing Hume, Irenaeus, Kant and Hick. At the end is a chance to add your own voice.

OK as far as it goes. But one thing was missing - an explanation of the Christian view that derives from understanding that God takes part in suffering at the Cross. Here’s what I wrote, I’ll let you know if they publish it…

What is missing from your otherwise comprehensive survey is the Christian understanding that the cross of Jesus Christ is a paradigm for understanding all the works of God.

So, under this thinking, we see that God willingly embraces suffering for an extrinsic benefit. Not that this explains all suffering but it does challenge our preconception that all suffering is wrong and that, somehow, God is immune from any suffering (a key point in Hume’s argument).

What is also revealed is that the God of the Bible is not the simple God of philosophy. He is not presented in categories of thought. The “God” we so often talk about in these questions is more akin to Aristotle’s idea of the unmoved mover. While such a God is certainly reperesented in the thought-world of Islam and the Qu’ran it is not, however, the God of the Bible and we should not make the mistake of confusing the 2.

not quite sure what to do with that left over fir? This might be an option…

What impresses me most about Chandler is that he is aware that a lot of people are watching him, not just at his home church but all around the world, and he’s keen that even his personal brain cancer is a means to call others to love and trust Jesus.

A little test post to see if the link on twitter works correctly…