Women Reflecting

http://www.salisbury.anglican.org/ministry/publications

A series of reflections, mainly from ordained women in the Diocese, ahead of the General Synod vote on legislation for Women Bishops in July 2012.

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Rugby

It has been just over three weeks now since we have arrived in Rugby and it feels like a world away from South London. If I was used to being in what is generally thought of and written about as a post-Christian secular world then Rugby looks and feels very different. There are a proliferation of churches across Rugby which are very active in working together for the good of the town. There seems to be a genuine Spirit of God's love working across Rugby in impressive ways that I'm not sure what century I am in! It is surprising to find a town that works so hard in regenerating and reinvigorating all that it is and it feels like an enormous privilege to be here. Not that South London was any kind of spiritual desert! It was also a great privilege to work there and see how God can still be so central to people's lives in the 21st century. If the image we get from the newspapers and national media is that God is redundant in the modern age it seems that the reality is very ...

Wonga and the Archbishop.

The Archbishop’s embarrassment concerning the Church Commissioner’s investment indirectly in Wonga helps to clarify ideas about sin, purity and holiness. In particular it reveals the extent to which sin is communal and interconnected. The Archbishop talks about a complex world which we all have to live in. He is right, but it can be put more theologically than that. The in-depth discussion around the Charity Commissioner’s investment portfolio and its tolerance of say up to 3% in companies (perhaps a hotel chain) that sell pornography reveals the way in which it is probably impossible to exist in perfect holy isolation. Nobody is perfect in and of themselves because we exist inter-dependently of one another. That is why sin is so corrupting - the wide effect of the pornographic industry not just on those who make it and buy it can be charted. That is why, when God made Himself known to the Jewish people as YHWH, that he started a covenantal relationship not just with a few individuals ...

Invited by God

Anyone who seeks to say that God exists and that they have something to say about God, or even for God, is walking a very fine line between insanity and megalomania: religions have fallen foul to both and still do. With that in mind, how can I stand before you as a priest, a person who is meant to be a sign of God in the world? Am I mad or a psychopath? And yet I stand here, and you are here too...... The most important thing I can say to you, is that I do, because of a sense that life is a mystery. That mystery of my existence and of yours isn’t easily located in all the other narratives that I hear and have heard through my life, about creation, purpose and meaning, or lack of it. Science and humanism offer us much, but not that. There’s a mystery at the heart of me that’s profoundly invitational – by which I mean, it invites me to believe that my existence isn’t just a matter of flesh and blood. And this mystery can be explored through the medium of p...

Rev elations

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