Humane Catholic

A sermon preached at SMV, Trinity 7, 2008. The Sunday before GAFCON. Yesterday, if one can believe what one reads in the papers, the Anglican Communion split. The curtain-raiser for the Global Anglican Future conference, the conservative alternative to Lambeth, announced, in effect, that there was no future – at least no future in which conservatives and liberals could co-exist. As someone who doesn’t much like being called a liberal, but who is certainly not a conservative, I wonder what place there will be for me – for most of us perhaps – in this brave new world of two Anglican churches. It is actually far too soon to say whether the GAFCON leaders are right, or whether Archbishop Williams will be able to stitch back together the broken seam. And so in this sermon I don’t want to try to address directly the issue of a split, or even the presenting issues driving that split. I do, however, want to address what I believe to be one of the background causes. One of the accusations I mos...

A sermon at Evensong at SMV, Feast of St Barnabas (24 August) 2008 When I was a student in theological college over a decade ago, there was a regular question raised in the Friday “community time” as to the contemporary spiritual value of the daily offices of morning and evening prayer. Some – including myself – said we found it not merely helpful, but an essential part of keeping sane in the wake of the quite manic program of study and work we were required to undertake. Some others, however, said they found its rigid formality stifling of prayer, and argued for much less highly structured forms of daily worship and reflection. Perhaps the most helpful intervention in the debate came from someone, I can’t remember who, who suggested that the issue here was no so much the substance but the form. What some were finding helpful and others difficult was the form of the service, and its rigidity. No-one, however, was seriously questioning the substantive idea that as priests in training we...