Part 540. Simple, yet profound

During a discussion with an officer of The Salvation Army he remarked that the two Great Commandments attributed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels were simple, yet profound.  Add the Golden Rule and you have in a nutshell a theology of helping people at point of need and campaigning for social justice, all done in love.  Academics label this theology 'progressive', adding love and care for all creation to its attributes.

Variants on the theme of progressive theology include liberation, feminist, black and other equality theologies, each stemming from the injunction to love your neighbour.

Some define their belief/faith as being encompassed by Matthew 25 which rather limits the scope of progressive theology, but illustrates an important point. A broad, sweeping principle is open to interpretations seeking to either limit or expand its application.  

Detailed rules are more cut and dried in application.  It is important to distinguish a system only permitting  actions contained within the rules from those permitting  actions where the rules are silent.  

Principles are applied flexibly and are susceptibe to novel interpretation, rules are applied rigidly unless a degree of flexibilty is contained within them.  

 

Part 539: Short, simple and jargon free.

 When I commenced this blog I decided on three rules:

*  Keep posts short.

* Keep the arguments simple (but not simplistic).  Avoid convoluted sentences.

* Minimal use of jargon, recognising that some jargon is convenient shorthand.

With occasional lapses I think I have stayed within the rules.

This is post 539 and I admit my writing has sometimes been poor, often inadequate, bereft of literary merit, occasionally quite good and, vary rarely, accorded accolades.   What I do hope is that my output has described changes in my theological ideas and expresses clearly my current thoughts.

So, what is my current position?  Deep breath.......

A very brief simplified summary:

God:  God is beyond our understanding, beyond our imagination.  I offer the opinion that God is the creator of the universe, is in all of us, and that we subjectively apply the concept of God is Love to our understanding of what God means to us.

Scripture:  My conclusion is that scripture is of human origin in its entirety.  It is not the objective word of God, the authors have not been inspired by an outside agency known as God, but by subjective thinking.  Needless to say church doctrine and dogma is entirely of human origin. However the value of scripture is recognised as recording ideas of our ancestors and as a guide to human behaviour.  This is the case particulary in respect of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) in which the authors attribute concepts to the person we know as Jesus.  For those of us who seek to be inspired by and follow the teaching attributed to Jesus we place our emphasis on the two Great Commandments, to love God, in other words to love love, and to love our neigbour, ie. to show by our words and actions God's love for all creation.

I dislike labels for the simple reason they come with baggage.  I admit to numerous influences on my thinking. My current position is a melange, mixture, potpourri of existentialism, liberal, progressive, deconstructivist, liberation and radical theologies,  postmodernism. My understanding is influenced by my life experiences.  Faith, belief, do not exist in a vacuum sealed from and immune to the rest of the world.   

Part 538. Of banks and churches

 In many towns and you will find buildings that once were banks.  Some towns no longer have any operational banks.   Building societies also have reduced their branch networks.  Why should this be the case?  In part the development of internet banking has reduced footfall.  The growth of on-line purchasing and out-of-town shopping has resulted in many people not needing to go into town.  ATM machines in supermarkets etc again has taken away the need to visit bank premises.  From a commercial perspective the reduction in demand has enabled banks to achieve savings by closing branches and reducing staffing levels. Those without internet access, mobile phones or wary of using debit and credit cards, mostly older people, have lost important, indeed vital, access to banking facilities.  For the banks it is not managed decline but adaptation to give effect to customer preference.

Compare and contrast this with what is happening in the Church of England (CofE).  Every acre of our green and pleasant land is within a church parish.  But all is not well.  Travel around and you come across abandoned churches, parishes with no priest, or at best sharing a priest with another parish.  Some parishes share their priest with anything up to fourteen other parishes.  The reality is that  failure to recruit more ordinands than resigning or retiring clerics means demand outstrips supply. A palliative is to use the services of retired clergy with permission to officiate.  The CofE is increasingly reliant on authorised lay persons to conduct services or perform other functions traditionally the responsibility of clergy.  However such persons cannot conduct weddings, or perform functions reserved in the Book of Common Prayer specifically for ordained ministers.

The parish system needs volunteers to act as churchwardens, members of parochial church councils (PCCs) and various offices including those of treasurer and PCC secretary.  Many PCCs do not have a full complement of members, some parishes have no churchwardens and others no treasurer. In law PCCs are independent charities subject to the full rigour of charity law overseen by the Charity Commission.  With parishes lacking a full complement of officers, PCC members and churchwardens as well as no priest dedicted soley to the parish  is it any wonder the parish system is creaking. Then there is the issue of the upkeep of church premises.  As footfall decreases the pool of individuals prepared to fulfill roles within the parish also diminishes.  Whilst this conjery of pressures affects many parishes to varying degrees it is no surprise that parishes in poorer areas, suffer most.  Lower footfall means reduced income and this, together with the difficulty in finding people within a parish to improve the situation, means such parishes are earmarked for closure or merger.  Instead of tackling head-on the issue of engagement within parishes the CoE has gone along the road of managed decline.

The parish church was and should continue to be the beating heart of the CofE in the community.  The church should invest in resuscitation and development, particularly in poorer parishes, making the church meaningful to the community, being of, for and with the community.  It is not a question of more bottoms on seats, mixed ecology and church planting.  It is about engagement. It is about presence. St. Paul's is an excellent example of what can be achieved in this regard by the parish itself without recourse to top-down strategies and visions.