A dilemma, perhaps

This blog comes with a warning. When I said that I had given up controversy for Lent someone suggested that it might not have given me up. If you do not want controversy, do not read this blog; wait for the next one!

The next Master of a livery company asked to see me today. He was superficially very friendly and agreeable but I knew that he had come with a purpose. Like my predecessors I am the Chaplain to the Master of this Company. It is the Master's appointment but, to my knowledge, the Rector has been appointed every year; certainly I have done it now for fourteen years. My visitor is intent on appointing someone else, one of the clergy from St Helen's, Bishopsgate, and more than that, one of the signatories of the so called "Joint Statement from the City of London Deanery Synod representatives from St Helen Bishopsgate, St Peter-upon-Cornhill, and St Botolph-without-Aldersgate, made at the Deanery Synod on 16th October 2008". You may recall that statement - it was put on the web by a body calling itself "Anglican Mainstream". It said:

We do not presume to have any authority over Dr Dudley or his church, but given this service took place within the Deanery and that the Deanery Synod meets with an assumption of shared fellowship, we feel the need, with great sadness, to make clear that our fellowship with Dr Dudley has been broken by his recent actions. In particular, we cannot recognise him as a teacher of the same gospel as ours.

Now one of the usual functions of the Chaplain, apart from saying grace at the monthly lunch and a couple of dinners, is to preach at the annual service in the Company Church, which is St Bartholomew the Great. An invitation to preach comes from me, and you may wonder - and I am wondering too - how I can invite someone who is out of fellowship with me and refuses to recognise me as "a teacher of the same gospel". Those who have come recently to St Bartholomew's may be confused by now but it is, of course, all about the blessing of the civil partnership of Fr Peter Cowell and Fr David Lord in this church last 31 May.

There were two particular deficiences in the St Helen's Bishopsgate Statement. The first was the way in which breach of fellowship was expressed. The Church of England is not a series of parish churches which work together in a partnership agreed by each parish. It is an episcopally ordered Church, which means that the focus of our unity is the Bishop. Whether you agree with the bishop or not, whether you like the bishop or not, is irrelevant; when you are in a diocese your communion with the greater Church - the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church - is mediated through the Bishop. The Bishop represents the local church to the universal Church and the universal Church to the local church. The real point of last summer's controversy was whether I had somehow fallen out of communion with the Bishop of London. I hadn't and the matter is now closed. The St Helen's Bishopsgate Statement has, however, not been rescinded, though we may consider it to be so flawed as to be irrelevant, a piece of posturing by evangelicals.

The second deficiency shows the true nature of the flaw. The Statement said "we cannot recognise him as a teacher of the same gospel as ours". I don't believe that we have any gospel other than the good news of Jesus Christ; this gospel is not "ours" in the sense that we can give it a distinctive meaning that differs from that embodied in the text. The Church can only proclaim the good news that it has received and I can find no place in the New Testament where the Lord Jesus Christ has anything at all to say about same-sex relations. Now I don't want to revisit all that (and I did accept that while I had done what I believed to be the right thing, I had almost certainly broken church law in the process) but St Helen's does seem to think that it has a gospel - a purer version than the one preached here - and that I cannot, in consequence, be recognised as a teacher of the gospel (not their gospel anyway).

So, a nice young priest (though he probably doesn't call himself that) signs the St Helen's Bishopsgate Statement, declares he is out of fellowship with me, denies that I am a teacher of the Gospel - which I have been preaching to this livery company for fourteen years - and then becomes the Master's Chaplain with the expectation, presumably, of preaching here! Should I invite him?