Tag: Presbyterianism

Unicorn Church

I was bouncing some ideas around with a friend the other day; unpacking some of my frustrations with the institutional status quo of churches and denominations and movements grappling with ministry and mission — with being the people of God — in post-Christian Australia.

I have a handful of pebbles in my shoe around the Presbyterian Church of Australia (and its federated state-based expressions) as we respond to various challenges in the culture by circling the wagons. An article by Kevin De Young, a Presbyterian minister in the United States, about a book about his friend Tim Keller gave me a certain sort of language for what’s going on in our denomination, and what it feels like to be more aligned with Tim Keller’s approach than De Young’s. Watching the eulogising of Keller by the people who take De Young’s approach (at the expense of Keller’s) felt like being gaslit. Anyway, the De Young piece in First Things included this paragraph:

Though I hope to be kind and careful, my public ministry has often involved correcting error, guarding the truth, and warning against creeping liberalism. By contrast, though Keller usually lands squarely on the traditional side of doctrinal matters, he has a public ministry focused on making the gospel attractive to outsiders, staying out of intramural theological disputes, and warning against extremes. You might say I specialize in building walls, and Keller specializes in building bridges. 

Bridges or walls.

Our denomination has responded to a changing culture, in the main (not necessarily at the level of every local church) by building walls; walls with good defensive positions from which to launch projectiles at “the culture” (whoever isn’t behind our walls).

And a good defensive position sometimes means either bringing up the bridge (turning it into a drawbridge) or burning it. And it’s tiring and a self-defeating strategy that requires not taking any new ground for one’s kingdom, and maintaining a birth rate (or increasing it) in order to sustain the thing behind the walls or to expand it. I’ve written a couple of things about these dynamics within the Presbyterian Church over the years, including a submission to a review of how we operate in Queensland, and I fear things are getting worse, not better.

De Young reckons Keller would’ve said we need both bridge builders and wall builders. I’m not sure an institution built on wall maintenance has a future, especially when the walls are built in the wrong place — out of reaction against people — and so exclude those seeking life within them. If the walls are meant to mark out those who have received life in Jesus, by his Spirit, then excluding those whom God has included is a problem. Our approach to this problem has been, I think, to legitimise building such institutions around, say, the “Reformed Tradition,” because there are other places with other walls where one can find that life. I think that sort of differentiation might turn out to be both ill-advised, and a luxury in a culture where the walls can be less porous and where Christendom’s still kinda a thing. I’m not one of those ‘the sky is falling in’ types who is devastated by the loss of Christendom; and I think we have to keep acknowledging that secularism and its ethical vision, in the west, are still profoundly shaped by Christian values (even the left who want justice, liberty and dignity for humans; to liberate people from oppressive structures — that’s Christian right there), but I do think it’s patently obvious that a ‘secular age’ has dawned (in part through maximised choice about what to believe), and that we’re in for a period of being a minority who’re being called to account for what the church did when it enjoyed political and social power.

Anyway. This bridge building v wall building paradox (or simply a commitment to bridge building) stuck itself firmly in my craw, and has created a growing sense of dissatisfaction with my institution; which seems committed to building walls on matters of race (where we’ll build walls on acknowledgments of country and the Voice to parliament), on sexuality, and on the full participation of women in the life of the church (even if one holds convictions about different roles for men and women, at the moment you couldn’t say we’ve fully imagined a mutual and cooperative co-labouring in the mission of the Gospel as fellow workers). The catch is, I’ve looked at the denominational or institutional landscape on offer in Australia and found all the alternatives suitably lacking. So in this conversation with my friend Dave Benson — who I’ll name because I’m about to quote (badly), I sketched out what I’d love to see in a church network (and hey, it could be within an always reforming Presbyterian Church) not just responding to the challenges of the present time, but as an expression of who we’re actually called by Jesus to be. I described this sort of church as a ‘unicorn’ — I’ve described some of this previously as a church for the “excluded middle”; ignored and alienated by a culture war.

A few days after reading the De Young piece, I happened to listen to a podcast interview where Dave described a church he’d been part of establishing here in Brisbane — there’s much that resonates with me about his vision for church in this interview, but nothing more than when he described what I think is an even more Biblical vision for church than bridge building. Dave talks about his in-laws experience as livestock farmers, and how farmers gather their animals. In a sheep farm fences have some use — but if you want the sheep to gather together in a spot, you don’t build a tiny paddock with a strong fence to contain them; you build a well.

Wells are a profoundly cool thing in the Bible — there’s a bunch’ve well-building projects in Genesis that are little ‘living water bubbling up to give life’ moments; where husbands meet wives and there’s the possibility of Edenic life on display. In Jeremiah God is described as “living water” and idolatry is described as ‘drinking from broken cisterns’ or wells; and the Hebrew word for well is beer. Which is fun. When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well and offers her living water he’s offering her life connected to the source; a return from exile; an invitation into Eden. Wouldn’t it be great if we conceived of the project of being the church as being little Edens — little wells — connecting people to the source of life and confident in the drawing power of the Gospel; of the person of Jesus and the life of the Holy Spirit (which hey, it turns out is what Living water is as we get a little further into John’s Gospel). What would happen to our vision of church and our approach to forming a community if we weren’t trying to keep people in or out with a wall, but inviting people to drink?

What would a denomination look like if it was committed to this? How would we approach contentious political, cultural, or ethical questions? Or the people experiencing those lived realities? We might see that transformed lives actually come from drinking that water, and that some of our fences or walls keep people out who might otherwise be changed; they might be brought from death to life; from exile from God to restoration to life in his presence. Wouldn’t that be amazing.

Anyway. In spelling out a little of where I think we’ve built fences not walls, in my conversation with Dave, I laid out some areas that I’d love to see at the heart of a network or denomination that I reckon would be ‘building a well’ that might draw people towards life in a pretty dry and dusty landscape.

I’d love a church that embraces a “Bible Project style Biblical Theology” rather than a systematic theology/doctrinal framework that is used to build walls — I say this not because the Bible Project gets everything right, but because too often denominations and traditions create an authority structure that is used to police people and frame our engagement with the Bible, and these structures tend to impose human constructions that are a product of time and place and expertise on how we approach the Bible. Biblical scholarship is good — and we’re always learning more about the richness of the Biblical text, especially read as a unified story that leads to Jesus (which is kinda what Jesus himself says it is). So much ‘wall building’ is bad traditionalism. We protestants even claim to be the church always reforming. A rich Biblical Theology is exciting and it gives the Bible back to people who’ve experienced the worst forms of abuse, exclusion, and trauma as a way to encounter God and be drawn into his life, as it is revealed in Jesus and poured out to us in God’s Spirit as both the fulfilment of the Bible’s narrative and our invitation to participate in that story.

I’d love a church that thinks about politics and ‘the systems’ and cities we live in through the spiritual lens the Bible provides where we see powers and principalities at work dragging people away from God so are more keen not to just bring those powers into the church as though they don’t need to be crucified, and radically altered (technology and techniques from the business world might be ‘wisdom’ that can be plundered, but they aren’t ‘neutral’ if they’re left in the form of a golden calf).

I’d love a church denomination that embraces a Side B sexual ethic — one that offers a positive vision of what life as an LGBTIQA+ person — or any person — with what has been described as a “vocation of yes” — a sense of how to faithfully steward our bodies in response to things we might otherwise sinfully desire, as an expression of living out our new story. So much wall building is built around ‘saying no’ and excluding those who might find new life in Jesus in a way that radically alters (altars even) the way we approach sex and our desires. I feel like LGBTIQA+ Christians committed to a Biblical/traditional view of sex and marriage and trying to work that out ‘in the flesh’ are caught between a progressive and affirming church and a church that wants to leave these folks outside the walls to be hit by projectiles, and there are few (if any) denominations built on saying “come to the waters and find life and work out what faithfulness looks like securely planted in Jesus and his people.”

Alongside this, I reckon it’d be great to have a church with a theology of the body — and of place and beauty — a vision for creation that doesn’t just reduce these physical things to ‘potential objects of worship or temptation’ but finds ways to encounter the physical world to glorify and enjoy God as the source of these good created things (and people). This would be transformative not just for how we approach questions of non-straight sexuality, but, for example — would counter both ‘purity culture’ and ‘porn culture’ (where bodies are reduced to tempting objects), and how we think about money, and generosity, and art, and architecture, and the full and abundant life we are called to. It’d be nice to have a positive vision at the heart of a movement; not just a commitment to avoiding sin. This might be part of building a well.

I’d love a church with a non-hierarchical, mutualist (and genuinely inclusive — regardless of sex, age, race, etc) approach to governance that avoids the pitfalls of congregationalism and top-down authoritarianism. This is tricky to build in to a church culture, but one would have to value listening, and the limits to growth and ‘productivity’ produced by such a structure. This also means rethinking how we approach metrics; I’d love a network that encourages and supports kingdom growth in various forms and expressions that isn’t wedded to raising money to expand one’s own little kingdom; or to the machine — to efficiency and technology and the market.

I’d love a church that appropriately holds Gospel clarity (proclamation) together with Gospel charity (deeds/justice etc), not as a tension or paradox, but just as a picture of integrity. It’d love this to include avoiding bad syncretistic church politicking that aligns with either conservatisve or progressive politics.

And a church where we all get to ride unicorns.

This is what a church that offers life — functioning as a well — would look like for me (and I’m aware that there’re plenty of wall builders whose bricklaying reflexes have been triggered by this stuff who’d now be keen to exclude me, and other cynics who just reckon this is motherhood and apple pie stuff that’s all good in theory and abstraction). These are the values — the distinctives even — that we’re trying to embody as a church community in the little corner of the church I belong in, in ways that have been rich (at least for me).

The really big paradigm shift here isn’t in the political or technical stuff — though that’s part of it — it’s in a shift in posture from defensive and pessimistic; a constant vigilance because we don’t want sinners in the camp or sinful ideas corrupting us , to a posture that is confident and invitational — where we want sinners in the camp, and at the table — drinking from the well — because that’s how God works to transform people.

Now, I’m not naive enough to believe a utopian church is possible, and institutions have a tendency towards become corrupted, sure — but I’m experienced enough in the machinations of church to know that there aren’t many churches reacting to a rapidly changing cultural context by asking ‘how do we build more wells’ rather than ‘how do we build more walls.’

I reckon if you’d like to be part of a church like this then the only thing really stopping us is not having enough wells. And, like the people of God in Genesis, maybe we should start digging so that life might bubble out. And if you have your own vision for a unicorn church — or what building wells looks like — hit me up. I think it’s time to break new ground.

August 17, 2023

On Presbyterians preaching ‘the whole counsel of God’ while burning dollar bills

In 1994 the performance art group the K Foundation (aka musicians KLF) burned 1 million quid. They stacked up a bunch of banknotes and set fire to their hard earned dollars — capital they’d built up through years of craftsmanship. Every time I think of the way the church has responded to LGBTIQA+ issues in Australia I picture that burning money. All the social capital we spent years building through establishing schools, hospitals, and charities — advocating for the local and global poor, looking out for those on the margins… set up in flames; a $1 million dollar donation from a prominent Evangelical denomination there, an attempt by a less prominent-but-still-wanting-to-be-significant denomination to exit marriage all together if those others were granted recognition here… smoke and ashes. Gone.

One way I know we haven’t learned is that in the face of the Change or Suppression (Conversion) Therapy Bill passing in Victoria we haven’t been able to recognise that smell of smoke in the air as our own capital burning up. In fact. We’ve doubled down and stoked the fire with whatever small bills we’ve got left.

Now. This isn’t to say the Church shouldn’t be faithful, at cost to itself, in the world. Or that popularity of social capital is the essence of faithful presence in the world (though we are meant to ‘live good lives before the pagans,’ lives that are appealing and notable… but I had hoped we’d burn our social capital speaking against the powerful on behalf of the marginal (or, particularly, not out of our own self interest). Now I know, I know, speaking out for God’s design for sex and marriage and human flourishing is speaking for marginalised people. That’s true.

But when the Government acts because it says we are harming a marginalised people group through our practices, and so many of us are prepared to say ‘yes, those practices did exist in a relatively mainstream way in the past, but they’re unicorns now, but trust us…,’ the additional fuel we have to throw on the fire is this.

We keep insisting on our right to keep harming people.

Publicly.

At least. That’s how it reads. All the nuance in the world about what exactly we’re objecting to isn’t going to cut it so long as people are convinced that our practices and beliefs lead gay young people to suicide. All the world is hearing in our objections to this Bill is that we want to keep hurting people. We might not think we’re saying that, but there’s a big pile of smouldering bank notes sitting behind us just itching for a little more fuel. In the eyes of Joe and Jo Public, The Royal Commission showed our institutions can’t be trusted to have power over vulnerable kids, while the plebiscite showed we aren’t particularly safe for LGBTIQA+ individuals.

If we genuinely, in the interest of our neighbours, want to invite people to know the goodness of submitting one’s whole self — including our sexuality — to loving and worshipping Jesus, and we want that to be persuasive (humanly speaking), we need to rebuild our social capital — perhaps precisely by caring for vulnerable kids and the LGBTIQA+ community (creating some public distance from Andrew Bolt might be wise on that first one). Most churches have outdone themselves in responding to the findings of the Royal Commission — and there’s a vast gap between the credibility of an entire Royal Commission and one Victorian Study interviewing traumatised survivors of church practices — but maybe, just maybe, we could take those survivor’s accounts seriously and respond pastorally. Not just to rebuild our social capital as some appeasement exercise, but because it’s the right thing to do…

The other thing we might do, to take up the task of rebuilding our social capital, is heed the call of the Presbyterian Church of Australia’s Moderator General Peter Barnes to ‘preach the whole counsel of God’ in Victoria, and perhaps around the country. Rev Barnes responded to the legislation passing in Victoria by urging Presbyterian ministers around the country to: “preach all that He has revealed to us, whether law or gospel, and to do so in a spirit of love and truth.” Barnes has been praised for his courageous leadership. What the K-Foundation did was courageous too. Burning all that money. Courage isn’t necessarily wisdom.

Now. Rev Barnes was particularly encouraging ministers to clearly proclaim the Bible’s prohibition on same sex sexual intercourse, calling sin sin, that was both the spirit of the email he sent out and the spirit of the glowing feature article written by another Presbyterian Minister over at cess pit Caldron Pool, that site took a break from calling Joe Biden a Communist, to run an article headlined “Presbyterian Church of Australia Set to Defy Gay Conversion Bill”... which is just another way of saying “Presbyterian Church of Australia wants to harm Gay people.” Because the thing is, despite the scare campaign about an (overreaching) Bill, the legislation only kicks in when Christian practices are harmful. Now, harm is a nebulous and utterly subjective concept, to be sure. But. The plain reading of a headline urging defiance of a Bill that prohibits harm, is that this denomination wants to harm people. Another way of framing the article could well have been “Presbyterian Church of Australia set to set fire to $1 million” — only, we probably don’t have the money.

But Rev Barnes is right. We Presbyterians should be prepared to call sin sin. Even if it makes us unpopular. We should preach the whole counsel of God — including the Bible’s design for sexuality and human flourishing — grounded as it is in the relationship not just between man and woman, but Jesus and his bride (the church).

We should preach about greed. About affluence and Aussie comfort. About penalty rates, and the modern banking industry, and negative gearing. We should talk about how the Bible has lots more to say about the idolatry of Greed than the idolatry of sex, and how comfortable the average Aussie is with the notion that greed is good, and economic prosperity should drive our ethical decision making. Greed is sin.

We should preach about systemic racism. About how all people are made to bear the image of God, and how sin gets entrenched in structures to improve the lot of the proud and haughty — nations and systems that rule at the expense of others — and how the Kingdom of God came to reverse these structures because of God’s nature and character, and his love for all humankind. Racism is sin.

We should preach about the environment — about how we were made to be stewards who ruled the world with God, and for his purposes, to bring life and fruitfulness — but how our sin, especially greed, turned our ‘dominion’ with God into ‘domination’ and destruction. Vandalising God’s planet is sin.

We should preach about gender equality and toxic masculinity and the way the same cursed, sinful, relationships that create systems of racial inequality create systems of gender inequality, and create the grounds for things like coercive control and family violence. Sexism is sin. Family violence is sin.

We should preach about how the story of being exiles brought home to God — as gentiles — is a lot like the story of Israel being brought as refugees out of Egypt, and how that story of God’s hospitable welcome to us in Jesus, just like the Exodus for Egypt, should cause us to love and be hospitable to the refugee. Not showing hospitality to vulnerable people — our neighbours — like in the Good Samaritan — that’s sin.

We should preach about the importance of truth in an age of fake news, and hit-piece sites that run polarising attack ads on the repugnant political other. Bearing false witness is sin.

We should preach about Australia’s past; the dispossession of our First Nation’s peoples, and the ongoing systemic disadvantage they now face not just because of the original European settlement, but because of government policy decisions that led to things like massacres, and stolen wages. Murder is sin. Theft is sin. Racism is sin.

We should preach about God’s love for the poor, and the marginalised, and act in ways that led the church for generations before us to invest in building institutions like schools and hospitals not just for our own good, but the good of our neighbours, building credibility for the goodness of the Gospel of Jesus. And we should practice what we preach.

We should preach the whole counsel of God. Both law and Gospel. We should call all these things sin, in a Spirit of love, and truth. And we should offer the same pastoral support to Greedy people, racists, and toxic men.

But we won’t. Or, most of us will do that too — but we don’t get emails from the Moderator General inviting us to do this when laws pass that prop up the destruction of the environment, or support our greed, or continue our track record of racism or the abuse of refugees. We won’t get told to ‘preach the whole counsel of God’ when the Close The Gap report gets handed down, or when new statistics about family violence in our country are reported.

We’ll just keep talking about sexual morality — one of the things that was meant to set Christians apart from their neighbours. We’ll keep asking to harm people in Jesus’ name, rather than love them into an encounter with his bride, and body, the church, that makes his love tangible and oh, so worth it.

We’ll just keep adding fuel to the fire.

February 10, 2021

Gone with the wings: Christianity, cancel culture, and Presbyterianism in Australia

Conservative Christians have enjoyed expressing outrage at Gone With The Wind being cancelled this week; and by that I mean ‘cancelled cancelled’ not ‘not renewed;’ the classic movie was removed from HBO’s streaming service for depicting racism (now, I think we could all do with a little more literacy when it comes to what stories do and don’t do; that description is not prescription is an important lesson we all need to learn when approaching texts, so that, for example, we don’t adopt King David’s sexual ethic from the pages of the Old Testament).

Conservative Christians have also enjoyed being outraged at woke Twitter’s attempts to cancel J.K Rowling this week too.

We love to hate it when “cancel culture” reveals the unforgiving nature of those who are not us; of course, we wouldn’t remove books when authors are revealed to not live up to our moral standards, or, you know, indulge in a little cancelling of Harry Potter ourselves (when it comes to Christian school libraries).

But, as the world around us seems to be losing its mind, cancelling people and things we love right and centre (and sometimes even on the left), we can breathe a sigh of relief and thank God we’re not like those sinners. Loudly. In 140 characters or less (I know it’s now 280 characters on Twitter… believe me).

But while the world is pushing hard on conservative Christianity (and by this I mean both politically conservative Christianity and theologically conservative Christianity) we’re pretty hard running our own internal cancel culture; circling the wagons and drawing boundary lines and cancelling all those who fail to line up neatly within the corral. Leaving them to either be picked off by the world, or to find shelter

I’ll give some examples on this in the context of my own denomination and tradition below, but what has prompted this post is the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and the cancelation of Aimee Byrd.

Aimee Byrd had her wings clipped… or, the Alliance chopped off it’s wings and is now going to hit the ground with a pretty hard thud…

Stephen McAlpine was at his very best on this earlier today and you should read his offering for an Aussie response on the specifics of this particular case.

I’ve got some pretty strong sympathies with Aimee Byrd, theologically, I’m more than halfway through Recovering From Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and have found it both enlightening, invigorating, and a useful diagnosis not just of the particularities of the American church, but the western church and our obsession with parsing questions about maleness and femaleness through the prism of ‘authority’ and position (or role) in church communities (and how far one should expand that beyond church communities ala the Centre for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood). I share her concerns about the model of the Trinity used to prop up a particular vision of male/female relationships. I think co-operation and listening and mutuality and love are at the heart of a dynamic way of participating as equals in the body of Christ, and also that there are created differences between men and women and systemic differences in a fallen world exhibiting the patterns of curse (ala ‘the patriarchy’) that give men and women submitting to the Lordship of Jesus different responsibilities when living together in Christian community (the church) and family (marriage). I think our traditional structures, especially those built without critically reflecting on how much of the world is infecting our view of authority (especially positional authority rather than the authority that comes from maturity in Christ) and leadership, and how much we’ve normalised the pattern of curse rather than Jesus and his redemption and new creation of us as divine image bearers transformed into his image. I think we’ve lacked both imagination about how we might structure our communities around the dynamic of the Gospel (and the dynamic nature of love within the Trinity, see Philippians 2 and Ephesians 5), and a solid sense of the imago dei (image of God) as a vocation we participate in in the world, a doing through relationships with God and one another, not simply some inherent value connected to our being.

So I’m here for her critique.

I’m here to listen.

And I think, like many other women who are harnessing the platform offered by the Internet, just as Paul harnessed Roman road networks and the epistle, and Luther the Printing Press, Aimee Byrd has done a fantastic job inviting us to listen to her voice as she’s sought to serve and reform the church.

Maybe you don’t have to be a teaching elder to be a reformer of the institutional church and its practices? I imagine it really helps to be speaking out as one with a voice that is going to get heard by virtue of the ‘yellow wall papery’/patriarchal status quo… but wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to be a bloke to say ‘this is wrong’ and be heard?

Maybe we blokes shouldn’t get our marching orders from the example of the Disciples on resurrection Sunday who laughed off the testimony of the women who came from Jesus’ tomb? Maybe the pattern we’re designed for ‘in the beginning’ is to listen to one another and work in partnership — and Eve’s sin wasn’t speaking but was folly (and maybe wisdom is personified as female for a reason in Proverbs). I think she also did a tremendous job narrowing the scope of her book to what the Gospel might invite us as laypeople — members of the body of Jesus — to share in while up front acknowledging that she wasn’t seeking to overturn how difference between men and women is something upheld by the New Testament even in the organisation of church communities.

But still.

Cancelled.

The ‘yellow wallpaper’ metaphor she used to describe the patriarchy and a failure to make space for women’s voices in church communities became a self fulfilling prophecy.

How many times do a group of unnamed, faceless men (those publishing the questions that Aimee Byrd decided not to answer before her passwords were changed) passive-aggressively playing orthodoxy police (or inquisition) get to silence and exclude the voices of women, while inviting us to repeat the mantra ‘the patriarchy is a marxist myth’ before they think we’ll believe it?

We don’t want to hear voices from the wings at the moment; voices from the margins who might call us to reform.

We, the conservative church, want to complain about cancel culture, and the world not making space for our voice when it disagrees with us, while practicing cancel culture in our own communities.

Now, obviously I think there are boundaries to what’s “Christian” and what isn’t (have you read my stuff on Israel Folau and modalism) — but maybe the answer for us at the moment isn’t to tighten the boundaries and eliminate the wings — those voices who might call us to keep reforming as we look to the words of Scripture — but to hold tightly to the centre. There’s a danger that in our own ‘cancel culture’ we’re setting out to define the boundaries in ways that make the church its own echo chamber.

See, this is part of a broader pattern; it’s not just Aimee Byrd getting her wings clipped. First they came for those in our midst who experience same sex attraction and affirm the Biblical definition of marriage and vision of sexuality (as limited to male and female), those who invited us to reform our views of sexual attraction and the language we used, and lots of us were not same sex attracted, so we didn’t care as the boundaries were tightened… then they came for those who wanted to affirm that “Black Lives Matter”…

You know the pattern.

If it’s not women speaking up about how a toxic culture with a problematic vision of male authority and masculinity is robbing the church of its ability to live the life we’re called to live together, it’ll be some other area where some at the margins of the church, holding the same centre, are asking us to listen.

But we don’t like listening to voices who challenge our uniquely true and right understanding of the boundaries of orthodoxy. We cancel. We exclude. We circle the wagons and create ‘coalitions’ and mark boundaries and replace liberty and grey with black and white new rules as we shore up our institutions.

I was excited about the opportunity for Aimee Byrd to be a conversation partner for my own denomination as we consider how to continue reforming our practice around partnership between men and women. We lack the imagination to have many women in the room when the courts of the church are meeting and deciding; when we could find ways to reform that do not occlude male eldership. It is not a crime to listen to the voice of women in business meetings, or even on issues of how we understand the Gospel (Aimee Byrd reminds us gently that it took her inviting a bloke to contribute a guest post on her blog before anyone took the Eternal Subordination of the Son (ESS) view of CBMW as serious and problematic). I was hoping that because of her obvious orthodoxy and attachment to both the Alliance, and the Mortification of Spin podcast, and her careful unpacking of some problematic theology and practice, that she might get a hearing — and it feels to me like a bunch of blokes in a backroom might have calculated that risk and sought to remove it from any serious consideration by wielding that big, rubber, ‘cancelled’ stamp.

But this will be another in a long line of issues where our denomination pushes for clarity around a big-R Reformed position, rather than taking the opportunity to be the church always reforming; a commitment to “Ecclesia semper reformanda est” is fundamentally a commitment to challenging the status quo; and perhaps the best way to truly challenge the status quo is to listen to voices from outside the status quo. Sure, people from the centre might one day realise that they’ve drawn the boundaries wrong, but it’s much more likely for people who hold a shared centre, who come together in dialogue, and listen to one another, to identify problems. The one way to guarantee that we will preserve or conserve ourselves from the hard task of reform is to cancel those who call us to do so…

Our denomination, The Presbyterian Church of Australia, is divided. We’re kidding ourselves if we pretend it’s not. It’s divided between those who want a pure, confessional, Reformed Church, who see a little thing we call ‘The Declaratory Statement’ as a loophole that allows the erosion of truth in the pursuit of liberty from a confessional standard, and those who want to keep using Scripture as our authority so that we question even the traditions of our own magisterium — the framers of the Westminster Confession. The beauty of the Presbyterian Church (and even the Confession itself) is the place it gives to liberty on non essentials.

God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are, in anything, contrary to His Word, or beside it, in matters of faith or worship. So that to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience: and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also. — Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 20.2

It’s a document that wants to hold the centre and allow questions from the margins… The ‘Reforming’ wing of our denomination is occasionally viewed by those big-R reformed types as a bunch of compromisers, who are going to pull us in the direction the social gospel/ecumenical movement of the Uniting Church took us in; but maybe a better way of seeing union is not that people wanted to expand the boundaries too far, but that the union was not built on shared convictions about a centre.

The thing about Aimee Byrd is that it’s quite clear, from her book, and her platform over the years, that she shares a theological centre with the Alliance. Her cancellation was absolutely an expression of a boundary marking syndrome; a clipping of the Alliance’s wings to move the fence in closer to the comfort zone of those faceless men. It was an act of anxiety; a failure of nerve.

These faceless men from the Alliance are not alone in leading from a place of anxiety. Anxious leadership (following Edwin Friedmann’s A Failure of Nerve) is displayed on a failure to manage simultaneous differentiation (knowing where your own boundaries are) and ongoing connection (especially with those you disagree with, and perhaps, especially, when they belong to the same system or community as you). Time after time  when contentious issues come up arguments are mounted not from careful exegesis, humility, and charity on areas of Liberty, but on the big-R Reformed position (and the Presbyterian Church of America’s recent paper on sexuality is an example of this, so too the fact that our denomination is even considering whether individual congregations and ministers, might, from good faith convictions, participate in an acknowledgment of country (a marker of respect and listening to Australia’s First Nations peoples), those who speak up against that position are viewed with a suspicion that the Reforming types can’t muster against the ‘Reformed.’ It’s easier in a conservative institution to maintain your location in group if your ‘sin’ looks more like the Pharisees than the theological progressives.

Sometimes that Reformed position gets up (especially with the spectre of ‘liberalism’ and the Uniting Church in the background), other times we remember that we’re at our best when we’re a broad church with a strong shared commitment to the centrality of the Gospel of Jesus, not a narrowing church that exists to eradicate grey with black and white rulings from the courts of the church. Sooner or later our eradication of liberty, the erosion of the Declaratory Statement and its intent, and the replacement of grey with black and white is going to lead us to clip our own wings, and cancel all sorts of people we might not see coming… and we keep bringing it on ourselves. Because we’re anxious, and we’re not well practiced in simultaneous differentiation and connection, or working together from a centre such that we’re comfortable acknowledging a plurality of faithfully Presbyterian views. The Reforming side has a bit to answer on this (myself included). Mea Culpa. I’m guilty of fighting fire with fire; of responding to polemics with polemics (whether about Acknowledgments of Country, or the idea that ‘women’s ministry in our denomination should focus on mothercraft, or how we should approach the same sex marriage debate); but it’s tricky not to do that when what’s at stake is your own cancellation. Just for the record, I don’t want those with opposing views to me on any of these issues — or how men and women might work together in our churches — to be cancelled; but I do want us to be holding on tightly to a centre: the Gospel, the “essential doctrines” contained in the WCF, including the concept of liberty, rather than circling the wagons. I want us all to be less anxious.

In uncertain times so many of us ministers want and keep asking for clarity from the Assembly on tricky conundrums (for example: on giving communion to kids, on whether conditional immortality is a legit view, on the one true understanding of the millennium in Revelation). We need to stop this or we’re going to end up cancelling each other, landing with a very small church exclusively containing the most hardcore Presbyterians we can find; and I like Presbyterians, but nobody wants that. We’re better off not asking for an authoritative ruling from those in the status quo, but genuinely listening to those who hold the same centre we do but feel marginalised. That doesn’t always mean agreement, but I wonder if it does always mean hospitality, generosity, and trying to keep those voices around. This means not seeking to ‘cancel’ those we disagree with.

We need to keep our wings, or we won’t be able to fly.

Let’s not cancel each other.

We can’t complain about the axing of Gone With the Wind, while at the same time saying “gone with the wings…”

Let’s keep listening, and keep reforming ourselves as we’re transformed together into the Body of Christ, the image of Jesus.

June 18, 2020

Queensland Assembly: A taste of the future

I had my first taste of the Presbyterian Assembly line today. Turns out to get ahead in the denomination in Queensland you should be balding and sport a goatee.

I sat in on a day’s worth of policy debate on a bunch of boring stuff, in order to see the appointment of our new principal (pending his acceptance, other bloggers have jumped the gun on that one…). Gary Millar. Who is cool because he knows U2. Sort of.

The coffee at Assembly was awful. I sense a bit of a business opportunity.

Tomorrow morning I’m doing the “devotion” at Assembly. Five minutes on Romans 14. Devotion is such an odd word.

June 21, 2011