Digging up Old Bones

My website is a kind of snail's trail of my activities over the years. Some parts still have an unfinished aspect. Regarding the actual website only one request has ever been made regarding the removal of complete pages: my time at Unitarian College. There are some edited diary entries there (in the Autobiographical area) about my early days in the college. The idea was to give an account of what it was like spending a year in a theological college.

I refused to remove the pages, but I never actually added to them. However, today, looking at the church library, I saw a book that is the account of Unitarian College Manchester up to 2004. So I thought I'd look in it and indeed located references to me. How interesting, and you can see the delicate footwork in the writing. Indeed you can, because I have reproduced the said passage on the usual academic type grounds - the relevant passage for comment.

Oh, it is surely old history and things move on. But do they entirely? Now that a few more people are coming through the door, the church I attend is updating its membership. All you have to do is sign the book. But at present, at least, I won't and I probably won't at all. I didn't when I was there from 1994 to 2004, and I was urged then to be a member as soon as I came back from Derbyshire - but I didn't because I'd had no Unitarian involvement in the Sheffield, Mansfield or Chesterfield areas when I lived equidistant from all of them. Now I'm back in Hull again I still don't want to sign for membership. It's a sort of trade off. You can have me attending more frequently than many, but I'd rather stay semi-detached.

I have not seen this book before. The account in this published book about what happened with me is feeble and a half-truth at best, about as much perhaps that might be put in a book but nevertheless it is not accurate. At that time I'd had just experience of the Hull congregation, which was broad then, plus a short stint visiting broad Sheffield under Conrad Dippel, and had been to many regional and national meetings, all of which were of a more progressive expression than local gatherings. I also had an ecumenical background - Methodist, Anglican, let's add Bahai and Buddhist too - and I thus by choice went to the northern and ecumenical college. As a minister of long-standing said about my time there, I should have done nothing but attend churches and chapels in the area to acquire more knowledge about them. Not preach but sit. It would indeed have been an eye-opener. What I didn't realise is that many of these simply operated a semi-Christianity, and all the emphasis on pluralism was so much talk.

Now you see why my website label is 'Pluralist' - it is based on an argument within Unitarianism.

It's interesting to hear that a number of these Lancashire churches are going the same way of all denominations, and that the density of these places geographically is no protection from decline. All the old structures are in trouble: the Sunday Schools, the youth meetings and the assumptions of continuation. This is why there is an ideological fluidity now that there was not even back in 1989. Even in Hull back in 1989 you would have to include the sung Lord's Prayer every week: now you hardly hear it said or sung. In fact it is starting to sound out of place. People realise that liberal churches and chapels have to present something different from the rest, something that is a Unique Selling Point. I could have told them that then.

My removal was not about pastoral matters: it was about the fact that I held an ideological position of a small minority of Unitarian churches in Britain. As one report on one pastoral stay put it: I had competence and potential, but where would I minister? In other words, my experience contradicted the very point about freedom, reason and tolerance, and the non-credal test of ministry that Unitarianism trumpeted. That's what was exposed in all the localism, not a pastoral matter. Of course, it is called pastoral because it becomes about not relating to the people in the pews: but actually it is ideological: It is not about an inability to sympathise, empathise, comfort and relate. I turned up with a Ph.D in the Sociology of Religion: the university MA sociology using theology course included the tutor telling me I was too high level for the MA and so I transferred to an adult education course, which had directly useful material for ministry. But many people (other than the Principal) couldn't see that, taking it as a lack of commitment, nor did they value a diverse and different voice.

This is why, in the Unitarian setting, I move carefully: it is why I have not yet written to The Inquirer on any denominational issue, and it is why I stay interested in matters of faith and belief and considerably less so about institutional matters. I'm interested in people gathering, and worshipping, and discussing, but that's about it. I would indeed like to direct some of that traffic in a ministerial kind of way, but that was something ruined a long time ago, and it remains the lost opportunity of a lifetime.

Regurgitating on Liberal Religion

Of course I look at other blogs, but I try not to regurgitate what is said elsewhere. If you can read something there, go there sort of thing. Unless I can add something, what's the point in repetition?

Still, an occasional look at Bishop Alan's Blog had his entry about Brian McLaren's latest book, which I'd looked at a while back, and he was more generous towards it than his commenters. I rather agree with the commenters, if from a different perspective. Anyhow, a discussion formed amongst the comments about liberalism in religion from Si Hollett and Brett Gray in particular using the definition in Grenz, Stanley J., Olson, Roger E. (1992), 20th Century Theology : God & The World In A Transitional Age, Paternoster Press.

Si Hollett wrote:

In their book 20th-Century Theology, Grenz and Olson, no rabid fundamentalists they, describe classic liberalism in five points:

1. Liberals believe doctrine needs to develop to meet the needs of contemporary thought.

2. Liberals emphasize the need to reconstruct traditional beliefs and reject the authority of tradition and church hierarchy.

3. Liberals focus on the practical and ethical dimensions of Christianity.

4. Liberals seek to base theology on something other than the absolute authority of the Bible.

5. Liberals drift toward divine immanence at the expense of transcendence.

Page 52 (1992) outlines these characteristics:

1. Reconstructing Christianity in the light of modern knowledge, that elements of thinking since the Enlightenment cannot be ignored. It had to adapt to the new scientific and philosophical mindset.
2. Freedom of the individual to criticise and reconstruct traditional beliefs. Even communally orientated (liberal) Christians reserved this right.
3. The moralising of doctrine and focus upon the ethical over the speculative doctrinal.
4. Foundation other than the absolute authority of the Bible. Historical-critical research undermined supernatural inspiration. For liberals Scripture has an eternal gospel 'within' that will survive the critical process and theology is to find the kernel beyond the supernatural husks.
5. More emphasis in immanence than transcendence. Jesus becomes the exemplary human.

Brett Gray's comments are worth recommenting, I think, for each part.

1. 'Liberals believe doctrine needs to develop to meet the needs of contemporary thought'... but what about those who believe that doctrine does develop (a patent truism from Church History) in conversation with new questions that emerge in new contexts? And that tradition is an ongoing faithful discussion, not a static given?

What tradition does, in this sense, is offer a broad road, a set of concepts and a language to use. This language is inherited, and comes from the past. However, in the liberal approach, as you go backwards in time you become aware of the differences of meaning from what has been kept and the language they used that at some point was dropped. In fact it can go all the way back to opposites, such as the journey backwards from Unitarianism to broader English Presbyterianism to the opposite of Calvinism.

2. 'Liberals emphasize the need to reconstruct traditional beliefs and reject the authority of tradition and church hierarchy.' That is protestantism. Are all protestants liberal?

No they are not, but early on some were (seen from our perspective, but they were not and could not be ideologically). Some used 'ordinary comprehension' in their direct reading of Scripture off the page and found a mixture of unitarian and Arian stances, and equally found less doctrine than some Reformers supposed. In other words, most Reformers saw what they wanted to see through their existing doctrinal spectacles, as many continue to do today despite their Bible based claims.

3. 'Liberals focus on the practical and ethical dimensions of Christianity.' Inasmuch as you did it to them, you did it to me. Is Jesus a liberal?

The problem with the term liberal is that it gains meaning from about the 18th century in an ideological sense. To call Jesus liberal is at best to extract him from his supernaturalist last days beliefs and Jewish traditions. Only aspects can be 'liberal' and to use the old view that the liberal has the religion of Jesus as opposed to the religion about Jesus just won't do: they are all about Jesus. However, the liberal focus on the practical and ethical can mean that focus unhooks from Jesus.

4. 'Liberals seek to base theology on something other than the absolute authority of the Bible.' 'Authority' and how it is constructed is an interesting question. Authority is not a univocal concept and 'absolute' as an adjective adds nothing to the clarity of this statement except to say 'No, it's really, REALLY authoritive!' Which leaves 'authority' and how it operates still undefined.

The first reformers who would be continuous with liberals were still completely Bible centred, but ordinary comprehension said something about the individual and the mind of the reader. So that becomes continuous, eventually, with the focus on the individual mind as authority.

5. 'Liberals drift toward divine immanence at the expense of transcendence.' So do some charismatics I know...

This may be why Diarmaid MacCulloch (in his BBC 4 series A History of Christianity) sees some Pentecostalism as marking a route away from Christianity. There is nothing particularly exclusive to liberals about a focus on immanence. The Secular City approach did this, and it was not liberal (in the sense of asking questions, of taking new routes of faith).

Liberalism has so many definitions. Last Sunday, at the Hull congregational meeting (that decides things) one person said being liberal is to be broad and generous in your welcome, like saying someone was liberal in their hosting of a dinner party. That adds one more meaning to so many.

Revelation in Spain but Mainly Not

Thanks to Gordon, but (again) not its Gordon, for bringing to my attention the news that the Christian-Zionist and fundamentalist station Genesis-Revelation TV is moving its broadcast licence to Spain. The shift means it can dodge around the complaints it receives from casual viewers via Ofcom when it offends Ofcom regulations for British broadcasters. Ofcom has been actually quite generous in recognising it is a Christian (according to a narrow understanding) television station, but it asks for basic ethical and representative recognition of those others it is talking about. Presumably now these will be subsumed under the Genesis-Revelation own ethic that can be so offensive to those outside the walls of the Church Without Walls.

What puzzles me about Genesis-Revelation TV is how it can spend on new plant and equipment in New Malden, London, and yet operate under a licence from another country; how is it that God TV and its money-begging activities can link with the North East of England with all its well-living American culture characters and yet operate outside Ofcom strictures for British stations?

Genesis-Revelation TV is a curious double TV channel (soon to be single again and just Revelation TV). On the one hand it has been a homely and communicative support for its sympathetic audience that has an umbilical connection with its shambolic and penniless presentation, financing itself through donations to its trust. Despite its rampant and dangerous Zionism and its ridiculous Creationism, it has rejected the Prosperity Theology seen on other channels. Its shift to Spain in terms of its licence might see it become more remote, and allow it to become more politicised too in terms of a right wing stance (that Ofcom has prevented so far) prior to the British General Election, so it will presumably promote these little Christian parties with less resistance than would have been the case. What the station doesn't perhaps realise, in its striving to present just one angle, is that its best programmes have been when another view has been present, even if they have set it up with presenter and guest versus the one other, such as the programme with Mandi Schrader regarding Paganism and also the female bishop of the Metropolitan Community Church regarding homosexuality and the Bible.

[This is my one thousandth post to this blog.]

A Magnificent Lecture

I discovered at the Barton Anglican church this morning that people who attended the Archbishop of Canterbury's Bishop King Lecture at Lincoln were very impressed; one of the "pedestrian questions" afterwards, whether people should obey the Ten Commandments was, nevertheless inputted into this morning's high quality sermon (I thought) by the retired priest Gordon Plumb. I suggested that he had it put on the church website. He said he will first "tart up" the text as some were notes ad-libbed; but a joke was to make a podcast of his sermon as was done of the Archbishop's lecture where this priest asked for and received a link to it from the church's website.

The podcast has an abrupt end, but I think we've got the message in full. I see what this morning's preacher meant: it is a very impressive lecture. Rowan Williams speaks in a way that reminds me of Armand Marie Leroi in his one and a half hour television survey of evolution as a chaos system entitled What Darwin Didn't Know. Williams too gives a slower, sparing, economical speech and, at last, he can be well understood.

Here are my notes of the speech in the podcast:

The title of lecture - Faith, Hope and Charity in Tomorrow's World - can mean anything you want it to mean!

Faith, hope and charity are good things, so to get a grip on these is not easy. To do so I will come at it in a roundabout way and will approach these as a mystic did, namely the 16th century St. John on the Cross.

He takes for granted the human mind working three ways: it understands, remembers and wants. Or this is an interaction of understanding, memory and will. The distinctive fresh insight he offers is that put these with faith, hope and charity and you get a perfect picture where we start (understanding, memory and wanting) and where we finish (faith, hope and love).

In the Christian life, he says:
Faith is what happens to our understanding;
Hope is what happens to our remembering;
Love is what happens to our wanting.

To grow up as a Christian is to take that journey from understanding into faith, remembering into hope, and will into love.

He also believed that in Christian growing a very difficult process is we lose our bearings on the way. What we thought we understood we never did, what we thought we remembered is covered with confusion and what we thought we wanted turned out to be empty. We have to be recreated in faith and hope and love.

Some of the contemporary cultural crises confront us in understanding, remembering and wanting, and involve how we try to deny the problem is posed, and also can show how we as people of faith recover our direction and enter into the fullness of our humanity [on this journey].

So in our culture now, intelligence is not much prized (if an overstatement): it is an environment where any conviction is as good as another; one wonders how intelligence works where people ask 'what is truth?'. One approach now teaches knowledge as functional - education is to make us a more competitive economy. One might ask about such intelligence in the financial world. This does prize intelligence: it is not about the mind being stretched, challenged, and enriched (that indeed may be unprofitable). In a postmodern environment, claims to truth, never mind absolute truth, are seen as offensive or oppressive. It's a dark night or brick wall for intelligence: of what knowing is for. This affects our Christian understanding too: "We've lost a great deal of our doctrinal uncertainty, however loudly we may shout about it." [Rowan Williams] We have lost a sense that we can confidently trace the works of God and confidently relay to the world what God has said.

We deny this sometimes by slipping back into tribal, moralising and noisy forms of faith which never quite come to terms with the huge crisis and challenge in the middle of it all. We've lost a lot of our bearings. The Church at large carries on saying what it has said; and has always said in the context of worship; it reads its Bible faithfully: and yet there is a degree of loss of nerve, loss of confidence. Can we really understand God, to expect people to absorb the doctrinal universe with its full pattern that an earlier generation (or so we think) inhabited? The present Pope has identified (very shrewdly and more than once) a loss of confidence in reason. He doesn't mean rational procedures as much as a loss of patience with argument, real mutual persuasion and careful argument which might enlarge our minds to receive more of the truth. Our intelligence is not in a good way inside or outside of the Church: we have devised successful ways of pretending there's not a problem.

St. John of the Cross says out of the brick wall before our intelligence and confusion and loss regarding understanding, faith grows in its true meaning - not as a system or comprehensive answer, but it appears simply as dependable relationship. We may not understand or have the words easily but one learns to be confident or reliant on a presence and other who does not change or go away. When the signposts and landmarks have been taken away there is the presence that does not go. That's faith in a deeply Biblical sense.

When the disciples say something spectacularly stupid a number of times, and Jesus says, 'Don't even you understand?' Or the number of times they ask silly questions or try to turn away or manifestly don't know what is going on. But then there is John Chapter 6 (Peter) when they also say, 'Where else can we go?' The presence is dependable: while they may be insecure and volatile or running away the one they confront in Rabbi and Master will not go away.

The loss of understanding of the clear sense of what we know and how we know is part of the difficult business of learning to question at every level who we are. But we are somehow set free to face this and live with it by the conviction that we are not let go. Faith as dependable relationship is something other than faith as a system of propositions, faith as confidence in my own capacity to master truth; it is much more a confidence that I can be mastered by truth - that 'I' can be held even when I don't think 'I' can hold on.

In our age and ahead the faith we as Christians proclaim will need to be not a glib system but the possibility of dependable relationship: we need to point to God who does not let go, to Christ who does not go away, but the rub is we need ourselves to be dependable people: for those who feel abandoned and who don't know where they are. In our faithfulness to the lost, suffering and marginal we begin to show what it is to have faith in the one who does not let go. One of the biggest challenges to the Church in our age is how we embody that kind of dependability in this society and throughout the world. It does need a bit of a shift in the kind of Church we think we are. Given that we are commonly perceived as people who are anxious to whom they say no.

In the dark night of the intelligence we are being led towards dependable relation: to offer it and embody it.

The dark night and brick wall affect memory just as much: our social amnesia. A newspaper (every six months or so) asks what is Britain and Britishness, our history forgotton and our teaching in schools. What is truth here for memory becomes, 'Have we forgotten who we were?' Crises of identity is also common in society: what is it to be Western, Christian, modern. Crisis of identity also with Jewish and Muslim. And the crises are with individuals too and no less serious. These are crises about continuity. 'Am I the same person as I was?' There's no job for life, no stable relationships for life. Is there something that holds together the coming and going of experiences? Fractured careers and relationships seem to be the order of the day. Is there a story about who I am and who we are?

There are strategies of denial in memory for Church, society and individual. We can construct satisfying stories; we can recreate an imagined past; we take refuge not in good tradition but an artificial traditionalism which is not good. We pretend continuities that are not there. A dark night of memory, then, but what would St. John of the Cross say to that?

Hope is not just a confidence in a future but in a continuity. The same living reality comes through. There is hope in relation: in relation to that which does not abandon or go away: relations to a reality that knows, and sees and holds who we are. There is a witness of who you are, your identity. The bits of yourself you cannot pull together in a convincing story are all held in a single gaze of love. You don't have to work out and finalise who you are and have been, or settle your truth or your story, because in the presence that does not go away all that you have been and are is still present and real held together in a unifying gaze. Disparate and disconnected bits are held together by a string twitched by a divine observer and witness. Bonhoeffer's poem is vivid, written when in prison after the Hitler assassination plot. They say he's like a squire in the prison yard: the poem is about the great gult between what they see (confidence) and what he knows is going on inside him (his weakness and loss, inner wimpering and dread). 'Which is me?' he asks. His answer is surprising and blunt. He hasn't got a clue: God settles it - who he really is. He doesn't have to decide. This is the hope St. John of the Cross talks about. It goes beyond the assumption of what I see and know, that instead I am more than I realise in the eyes of God for good or ill; hope in what is unseen (biblical), to hope in the one who doesn't need to be told how humans work because he knows the human heart (biblical: St. John's Gospel). Confidence in past, present and future is held in one relationship. Memory confusions of who I am and was, and we, become bearable because of the witness in heaven who does not abandon.

This suggests a Church marked by profound patience in actual human beings in their confusions and uncertainties, patience in an environment where so much is unclear and getting lost, patience that it takes time to grow up into Christ: it takes time for each one of us and for the body/ community to grow. Hope and patience belong together. Only a Church that is learning patience can proclaim hope effectively.

What about the will? There is a great deal of choice talk in our culture. It means just supermarket shelf choice. This means disconnected, fractured, choosing. Such choices don't much matter, the culture says, but being free here and now matters to effect such choice for me. In this we lose touch with the deep desires that make us who we are, lose touch with a current in our lives moving towards a goal. We have underplayed reality of Eros (sounds strange when sexual imagery is everywhere, as it is), but Eros here means a profound desire that makes me who I am that makes the whole of my life drawn towards something beyond myself that gives meaning - the other person, the God I seek to love. Such is not so clear in our society. We privilege consumer mentality but fail to ask deep questions about the direction of the desire at the root of our being. We deal and deny it via strategies that increase consumer choices in society, that sharpen assertion and aggression in individual contexts: we use the language of being 'purpose driven' that only means more aggressive assertion. We lose touch with the notion that the most important freedom is to be ourselves and grow - not what we want moment by moment, but to discover slowly and patiently the direction in life to grow as God means us to do so. Will and choice in that framework, not assertion or choosing in a vacuum.

St. John of the Cross says if we face the dark night of the will and freedom and choice and their trivialising in our selves and culture, maybe we shall become able to grow into love. Love: an expression of the freedom to receive: Love as that which drives us to take time and let go of anxiety; Love which permits us to be enriched, to be given-to, to be made alive, to be breathed into. Not a passive thing but a state of openness to joy; love not just as doing good: but as a deep, contemplative regard for the world, humanity and human beings in particular, and God.

On faith, hope and charity, St Paul says it is not just doing good but it has to be about the delight in another, a refusal to be glad in another's failure, the willingness to receive truth as a life-giving, joy-giving thing. Love is something generated by being loved, not that we loved God but that God loved us (says 1 John).

All the themes come together. That presence that doesn't go away, that remembers and holds in a single gaze what has been and is true of us, that eternal and unshakable witness to what we are and dependable presence of what we are is love. We are seen, known, held and above all we are welcomed. We are the objects of an eternal delight. If this sinks into our eternal being, then what the Church is fundamentally and must show itself to be is a place where time and space are given: where people are allowed the space to experience eternal love, where nothing needs to be left at the door, and where people are made free to receive in a world that so often seems to be demanding of them all the time: that they trade, offer, and out there making a difference. Is the Church an environment in which people can learn to open themselves to joy that can only come by letting go of anxious selfishness and the obsession with 'choosing'? Just as it is a great challenge to the Church to be a dependable place and patient, it is a great challenge for it to be sufficiently still for people to open up, sufficiently quiet and unanxious so people can receive what the ultimate truth of the universe wants to give them. These are some of the ways in our cultural context (with its anxieties and obsessions) and through the crises - the dark night or brick wall - in which we might come to rediscover those three... [ends]

Given what I do and don't believe, I think this vision - and with all this about patience it is a Rowan Williams vision - can be turned around to roughly parallel what he says. I do agree with his central thrust, once turned around (he may then say it has then lost the 'witness' involved but then he is Christian and I am religious humanist).

Rowan Williams is presenting a kind of via negativa. Have the crisis of the brick wall of knowledge now and you release (if painfully) a means to faith; have the crisis of memory and continuity individually and collectively and you can progress to hope that links past, present and future; have a crisis in terms of realising the shallowness of our consumerism and you can end up with a love that comes about through receiving enrichment. All this needs space and time to develop and for the Church to cradle where the transformation can take place.

My own turning it around is this. The Church, however small, must be large. It must be elastic in its walls. It must converse and dialogue and debate. A new person coming in changes the Church. It must hear different voices and be confident that these voices can sometimes create consensus and sometimes become difference that can become an acceptance of difference. I think we can be more positive about reasoning if only as a process: but we can say more that there is research and that there are therefore points of anchoring; we can say that some knowing is more like art: that such is creative and expansive, and we don't need to agree.

If the Church is space, and people are friendly in their conversations, then that allows people to develop their own story. For example, part of my identity is an involvement in an English Presbyterian community that started out very differently, militantly indeed, that evolved its beliefs and developed a liberal identity. There is a joining here of a personal identity and a collective identity. I can tell a story of my life. Also my life can be seen as a resistance to consumerism and ambition, in that I have paid for and failed in some of education as it is because it is so bogus and I have said so, when others have called failure and disguise an opportunity to show better statistics. So we can see, by going into and being in a religious community, that we each have a life story that also relates to a collective story and that it expresses values that are contrary to the shallow consumerism all around. The very act of spending an hour of reflection, meditation and contemplation, followed by discussions, is part of the building of a memory and connectedness.

When we have that knowing conversation and that reconstructing of memory, what we also do is find a depth of who we are on the life journey. This is also framed in community. One thing that has struck me in being in a small church of known people is that they keep dying. You become very aware that each life is its own entity, and that each life ending says something profound about the living. It underlines that, in developing the community for beyond your own time, you are also someone who will die and, hopefully, the community will go on to serve others. It has the potential for a longevity that you cannot have. So you come to know, as these people die, and as other people appear (as they must do, unless the place closes), something about your own being and transience. It is a physical link with one part of the point of the religious encounter, which is to come to terms with death. And then your 'real being', so to speak, is glimpsed in that moment of something other, that maybe within a religious service of worship, or in a moment for which that worship has assisted - for example when today I sat in the car and watched lots of birds having dustbaths in the tenfoot that I'd just driven along.

This is my parallel account, along a similar way of what I think is a very profound lecture, one all about relatedness and what is the more significant as opposed to all the noise, including the exasperating noise that is all too visible presently in religious institutions, which I suspect is a subtext in what he was saying.

History of an Opening

This is a scanning and formatting/ editing task I've intended to do for some time, and at last done. It is the Opening Service of the Hull Unitarian Church in 1977. Looking at it, the theology contained simply would not be expressed today or even implied, other than by a few visiting preachers (and not by Peter Godfrey I am sure). Nevertheless, that's the point, and consistent with changes to expressed theology through history as within the overview I wrote years ago. The painting here (by me in 1995) comes from a photograph in the mid 1980s showing the Minister (1955-2000), the Rev. Ernest Penn, who was in large part responsible for broadening out the theology of the church in dialogue with the congregation. Click on it to see it larger.

Ecclesiastical Diversity and All That

The Unitarian service Sunday morning was followed by one of those necessary bimonthly congregational meetings, at which I was asked about hymns and the like (as I continue to volunteer my efforts around audio recordings). What do I think of Sing Your Faith (I even had my own copy with me), I was asked. I said a comment had come from Barton of all places about why the typeface is not larger or bolder than it is. I said, also, there is supposedly, though I don't understand why, a relationship between a preferred non-transferring of tunes and having, peculiarly, lower case letters at the start of lines. In my view, tunes should always be transferable (and, in fact, they still are). The book introduces a greater range of material, much of it very good, and has in it at the back some useful texts for chalice lightings, benedictions and the like. So the congregation decided to buy. In other discussion I argued for the producing of an equivalent to a Parish Profile used in the Church of England as the congregation considers the process of attracting a minister. Also I delivered my 'emergency liturgies' for the unusual occasion when an outside preacher does not turn up, or the weather turns foul, or someone due to take a service falls ill. There are two so far, delivered, but there will be more. The first two are like polar ends, Traditional style and Radical style (though they might be more my style!), and then more will be in between them and out on other axes. At the moment I have a similar service under construction that has some Eastern orientated material in it and another one that is actually traditional Unitarian in what is presently 'dumped' there but can be further Christianised. It is important that a Unitarian service represents the diversity of the people present and the people who could be there.

As my focus shifts somewhat institutionally I am less motivated to comment on more internal Anglican affairs. Nevertheless I do note the continued welcome signs of a shift in the perspective of James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, as he relates to the apparent diversity of viewpoints within his own diocese which, he claims, is moving in a direction similar to his own change. How he measures this impact I don't know. I have to say, from when I lived in Hull and he appeared in the local media, that I didn't develop a particularly high opinion of him: Hull seemed to be a stepping stone, and that here was someone on the move. Liverpool was a step up (well it is: one is suffragan and one is diocesan) and from a distance, in some contrast, he seems more of a Liverpool advocate. I remember spending a short time in Liverpool and Southport and tasting how different was the religious air, even among Unitarians. It's not so far from the culture of Northern Ireland.

Hull is utterly different: being one of the most secular places in England and resistant to organised religion. It's what makes the continued existence of the Hull Unitarians one of sheer longevity and resistance more than anything, and it is interesting that it remains one of the least traditional and more diverse in outlook of the Unitarian churches of the M62 corridor.

James Jones is obviously worried about Anglicanism and where it is going. One can surmise that the next Archbishop of Canterbury ought to be evangelical given the ongoing balance of forces, but such would have to be acceptable to the broad based and progressive-Catholic side, and more competent and safe than George Carey. But if James Jones is the 'acceptable evangelical' replacement for Rowan Williams, he would be less 'in the theological detail' than Rowan Williams; the present Archbishop tries to deal in the narrative that looks orthodox and also he is rule-bound as combined with a Catholic-interpretation centralising agenda. Should the Covenant fail, and it looks rocky as some evangelicals try to make it the disciplining method on the road to creating a believing doctrinal worldwide fellowship, Rowan Williams will have to go as his imposed project will have failed around him (should it do so).

Now it can be argued that Rowan Williams is a kind of liberal-end Neil Kinnock who has sort of reversed himself in the service of his party, the Anglican Communion, though the argument only runs so far (because he always was Catholic in a purple sense, and has pursued this project; and his theology was more conserving-postmodern than liberal, even if tolerant of social difference). However, James Jones would be a kind of evangelical-end Neil Kinnock, from that stable but attempting, without the same theological endeavour of his predecessor, to urge levels of 'live and let live' in Anglicanism as in the manner he is laying out now. Rowan Williams is institutional with the use of theology and ecclesiology, whereas James Jones is more directly institutional and perhaps prefers people over ideas.

I note the continued 'capture' of Fulcrum discussions by Conservative Evangelicals, though they have received some Open Evangelical replies now about their intolerance, against which the Conservative Evangelicals have responded with the Bible as a rule book (over and over again). Would a James Jones as Archbishop persuade them, when the blood of the kill drips from their lips? It's very doubtful, but the calculation has to be that the Conservative Evangelicals are a very small proportion of the Church of England, of Western Anglicanism and probably not as large as they think in much of the so-called Global South. James Jones's position and positioning still makes him appear to be the obvious candidate to replace Rowan Williams.

Brown and the Iraq Inquiry

Gordon Brown should visit the troops in Afghanistan. He claims he makes visits this time of year, and this was arranged some time ago. Humm, perhaps about the same time ago as his visit was arranged to the Iraq Inquiry.

Unfortunately I was able to watch Gordon Brown the day before at the Iraq Inquiry, although later I didn't because I could see what he was doing. He treated it like a session of Prime Minister's Question Time. He repeated himself over and over again for what he wanted to say whether he was asked it or not. He blinded with statistics in rapid fire mode as a kind of 'get out of this' strategy, causing frustration regarding his lack of an ability to give a straight answer. He insisted defence spending went up, when he didn't say that it was inadequate: he says he never refused a request for money - yes, but were the military any time reluctant to come forward because of the squeeze on defence spending (a squeeze soon to come again with the financial crisis)?

Then we have him agreeing with Tony Blair about going to war in Iraq, yet on a different basis than Tony Blair (insisting Saddam Hussein obeyed UN resolutions - humm, apply that to the rest of the world including aggressor countries...), and once again he did his Mr. Macavity act of never being in any of the key meetings, having the ear of Blair (e.g. those still withheld letters between Bush and Blair) or having knowledge of what was going on - like not knowing the changing legal opinions about going to war. And of course he dances through his attendance at the inquiry differently from Blair, such as asking the people behind if they were finding the thing interesting - and they replied about listening to the answers (in other words, don't patronise us and don't think we can't see what you are doing).

Gordon Brown doesn't give the lawyer's response of a Blair, he just both avoids and bludgeons his way through like a politician. We see what he is doing. And yet - this is a display of the politician's skill. Somehow you have to ask whether Cameron is anywhere near this display of the trade.