WRITING ACROSS THE PAGE

Here's the agenda setting introductory piece for my new Wardman Wire column, published today. Kudos to Matt Wardman. The style and presentation is a bit different to the ones I usually employ, so it will be a useful learning experience to work in a different way. While I am here, and apropos of something else whirling around my mind, let me do an additional commendation for Savi Hensman's essay, Binding the Church and Constraining God, in which takes a usefully askance look at what might be going on within the sub-structure of all the Anglican and Lambeth shenanigans at the moment, indicating some wider lessons.

Savi "shows that inflexible, one-sided, naïve or ideological conceptions of God in sections of the Christian tradition can reinforce domineering models and practices in the Church – which is in fact supposed to be a creative vehicle of Jesus’ broken body in the world, not a defensive fortress. God is not confined by rules set by humans and our institutions, she argues, however powerful they may be by earthly standards. In the biblical tradition, God is at work outside as well as within institutions, including those that claim to be about God’s business. Liberation, reformation and healing will continue to happen even if, at first, they are not acknowledged by the authorities (ecclesial and otherwise); and in time truth will break through our illusions."