[Oe List ...] 11/26/09, Spong: A Church Tower in a Shopping Center! A Restaurant in a Church! Is This Evolving Christianity?

[elliestock at aol.com]

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A Message From Bishop Spong
As our nation pauses to give thanks for our life and our history I want to send my best wishes to my readers. We struggle as a nation to find a way both to celebrate our past and to incorporate all of our citizens into our future. That is a noble struggle and one that many people of the world could never have. In the stress of the battle we sometimes forget that, but it remains the source of our deepest identity and our greatest hope. Happy Thanksgiving Day to you all. – John Shelby Spong




Thursday November 26, 2009 

A Church Tower in a Shopping Center! A Restaurant in a Church! Is This Evolving Christianity?

I have just completed a whirlwind tour of the United Kingdom — nine lectures in eight days in places as far east as Colchester, as far north as Edinburgh, as far west as Exeter and as far south as London. This tour was under the auspices of a group called the Progressive Christian Network of the United Kingdom, or PCN-UK, which is chaired by Hugh Dawes, a remarkable Anglican priest. These lectures, attended by just under 2,000 people, tapped into a religious yearning that is clearly a growing presence in this deeply secular nation. The content of each lecture was some aspect of the subject of life after death and whether the concept of eternal life can still be held with integrity by modern men and women. I returned home with a new hopefulness about the Anglican Communion in the UK.
The PCN has formed some 35-plus study cells in various towns and cities throughout the UK that meet regularly, mostly monthly, but a few weekly. Attendance at each group averages between 20 and 25 people, drawn from current and lapsed Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Methodists and the United Reformed Church, a combination of Presbyterians and Congregationalists.
In Colchester, the lecture was held in the Lion's Walk United Reformed Church. This church was originally a large stone structure near the center of the city. As the city grew it became surrounded by a variety of shops, but very few homes, and slowly the value of the property rose as a commercial site. When the repairs on the old structure began to drain the church of its life and assets, a decision was made to tear it down and to take advantage of its value by allowing the site to be developed for commercial purposes. The congregation, however, saw the value of continuing to worship in that same location and the shopping center also wanted the church to be part of its new venture. This mutual desire produced a remarkable new thing.
The church building was razed to the ground except for the proud tower, its primary identifying mark. The tower was then restored and it stands today in the middle of the site, rising high above the shops as this center's most recognizable feature. This ecclesiastical landmark, drawing people to it, provides the shopping center with a sign of permanence. At the eye level of shoppers is a glass case in the tower that enumerates the continuing Sunday and weekly activities of this URC congregation. Hundreds of people pass these announcements each day. Near this tower are large glass doors directing people to the church. Inside, potential worshippers have the choice of navigating two flights of stairs or of entering an elevator. Both lead to the church itself, which is now located above the shops. The new worship space is large and octagonal, with the familiar stained glass windows from the old church setting a tone of reverence and continuity in this new environment. It seats perhaps three hundred, yet it still projects a sense of intimacy. Offices, washrooms, Sunday school rooms, activity rooms and a kitchen complete the church's "upper room" facilities, providing far more modern and usable space than this congregation had ever previously enjoyed. Parking is no problem for the members of this congregation on Sunday or for those attending evening activities, for adequate parking is provided by the shopping center. Today this congregation is vital, alive, engaged and led by a newly installed pastor who is a Scottish Presbyterian. Included in the congregation are people of remarkable ability. There is Norman Hart, a retired journalist, who has spent a good part of his life working in various countries in Africa training young African journalists to take their places in the Africa of the future; his wife, Linda Hart, sings with the London Choral Society, for which she takes the train up to London once a week to attend rehearsals. Together she and Norman anchor the church choir. Then there is Linda Harri son, who is the congregation's liaison to the national Progressive Christian Network and the organizer of the nationwide study cells.
The benefits of the new arrangement with the shopping center have placed this congregation on a firm financial footing, and it is now busy about the task of transforming its life and doing its ministry. The members of this congregation are eager to engage the contemporary world in all of its complexity, not to hide from it or to become a ghetto of irrelevant evangelical fervor within it. I was deeply impressed with their vision.
Two other churches on the tour have long been the power centers of a progressive Christianity in England. One is St. James' in Piccadilly Circus in London, which from the days of its former rectors, Donald Reeves and Charles Headley, has become a major place of interfaith activity in Great Britain. The other was St. Mark's in the Broomhill section of Sheffield, which is the center of England's steel industry some three hours north of London in the Midlands. This church was served for over 20 years by Adrian Alker, an incredibly gifted priest. As part of his ministry he started an organization called "The Center for Radical Christianity." Through the years he nurtured this congregation into a new understanding of Christianity, regularly introducing the members to frontier scholars of the Christian faith and so building this church into a center of intellectual exploration. Naturally, he frightened local ecclesiastical authorities, which seems to have been the response of religious leaders from the time of Jesus on, when anyone dares to step outside the box of conventional thinking. While the authorities quaked in their boots and sought to marginalize this priest, his congregation grew and thrived. English bishops seem content to watch churches in their dioceses die of boredom all the while fearing that they might be disturbed by controversy. I was fascinated to learn on this tour that the authorities in several of the dioceses near the locations of the various lectures had refused to publish notices of the PCN-sponsored lecture tour for fear that some of "the faithful" might come and be upset by ideas about which they had never heard, even though these ideas have been abroad in academic Christian circles for at least the last two hundred years!
St. John's Episcopal Church in downtown Edinburgh with its rector, John Ames, was another remarkable church on this tour. It was packed for the lecture and had to close its doors and allow no more people to attend under the fire code of the city that limits the number of people that can safely be in each public building at any one time. I had the honor of being introduced on this stop by a man I regard as the most creative bishop in the Anglican Communion today. His name is Richard Holloway, the former Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Referring to my book Eternal Life: A New Vision, Bishop Holloway announced that they had worked out a special price with the publisher Harper/Collins to make this book available at the price of ten pounds, "a price below that of Amazon," he said Then he asked, "Where else can you buy Eternal Life for ten quid?" If that were literally true it would indeed be a bargain, well below the cost of indulgences once sold to gain the same end.
When I got to St. Luke's, Holloway, in North London, I discovered that this church had turned its worship space into a series of candlelit tables and chairs around which the people drank wine as they listened to the lecture. Their priest is Dave Tomlinson, whose book describing new understandings of Christianity has been a topic of much conversation in the Anglican Communion. Moving on to St. Faith's Church, Dulwich, in South London, I looked out on a rainbow congregation of multiple ethnicities. There were also in the congregation on that Sunday a number of retired priests; a young Scottish infectious-disease doctor and his social worker wife who hailed from California; a Harvard Divinity School graduate who chose not to be ordained; and many other fascinating people. The Sunday school was made up of primarily African, Indian and Asian children who reflected the mix of the neighborhood. Hugh Dawes, the head of PCN, was the vicar here and he has led this church in his gentle but stretching style for well over twenty years. The hymns that Sunday were contemporary, not the dirges of the English hymnal whose title is "Hymns: Ancient and Modern" but which seems really to mean "ancient hymns and not-quite-so-ancient hymns." They used a contemporary creed that was not bound to the three-tiered universe of a pre-Galileo mentality, but still touched the essentials of the Christian story. Hugh also included those traditions that longtime Anglicans would feel related them to their past: familiar vestments, incense and other trappings of English Christianity. 
The lecture tour then moved west to another refurbished United Reformed Church adjacent to another shopping center in Exeter that is served by a gay pastor, Iain McDonald, who lives openly with his partner of some years. This congregation's enthusiastic embrace of the gifts of this pastor demonstrates new levels of consciousness. Then we moved on to Hereford, where the lecture tour concluded in a downtown, liturgically conservative Anglican Church named All Saints. This church had earlier been marked by its bishop for closure since there were no longer any people living near its commercial location. Instead, however, a creative rector named Andrew Mottim decided to turn half of this church's building, including the balcony, into a vegetarian restaurant that today serves mid-morning coffee and "biscuits" and afternoon tea and "sponge" to shoppers. In addition it serves an average of four hundred vegetarian lunches each day. This vegetarian restaurant is set in full view of the church's altar and chapel where the Eucharist is celebrated regularly. Both kinds of eating, lunch and the Eucharist, are in this place deemed to be holy. 
These were some of the signs of hope, creativity and new life that I saw everywhere I went. These churches formed the background against which a new Christianity for a new world is emerging in secular Great Britain. I have renewed hope. 

– John Shelby Spong
 



Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


A. Wiant from Gainesville, Florida, writes:
If we are to presume that being gay is just a personality trait of a minority of people and that gay people should be welcomed into the Christian community as "equals" (whatever that means in this context), how do we consider pedophilia as a perversion of the human condition to be segregated and punished if the source has similar roots in the mind? If this is so, why do we as a society feel that pedophilia can and should be treated and homosexuality should be considered a normal variation? (This is an academic question and does not reflect my own feelings in this matter.)
A. Wiant from Gainesville, Florida, writes:
If we are to presume that being gay is just a personality trait of a minority of people and that gay people should be welcomed into the Christian community as "equals" (whatever that means in this context), how do we consider pedophilia as a perversion of the human condition to be segregated and punished if the source has similar roots in the mind? If this is so, why do we as a society feel that pedophilia can and should be treated and homosexuality should be considered a normal variation? (This is an academic question and does not reflect my own feelings in this matter.)



Dear A. Wiant,
I hope that your last sentence is correct, but by repeating some of those outrageous charges you appear to give credibility to them.
There is an overwhelming difference. Pedophilia has a victim and is an act carried out by heterosexual people far more frequently than by homosexual people. Pedophilia is a strong person exercising his or her will against a vulnerable person. For any person to act in such a way as to violate the dignity and will of another person is always wrong. Pedophilia is thus always wrong just as rape and child abuse are always wrong, for all these have a victim.
Both homosexual and heterosexual people can violate their partners. Prostitution is the mutual using of two people and is practiced among homosexual and heterosexual people. These are acts, however, that people do in their insecurity to meet their emotional needs. The proper response is to condemn any victimization, but then to work to address the insecurities out of which these distortions flow.
There is nothing about heterosexuality or homosexuality per se that necessitates a victim. Homosexual love and heterosexual love are both based on mutual giving and receiving. Both create wholeness and holiness in life.
Your suggestion (whether academic or personal) that to accept homosexual persons as equal to pedophiles is simply an uninformed opinion arising out of a deep-seated homophobia. Prejudices always thrive on ignorance. I hope you will examine this attitude and if this question reflects your attitude, rid yourself of it.

My best, John Shelby Spong






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