Thoughts Of A Former Anglican

[poliphilo]

I started writing an angry piece about the Church of England and gay marriage and then pulled up short. What was the point?  I left the church a quarter century ago because everything about it was so annoying and that really should have been the end of the matter. How does it hurt me that it's placing itself "on the wrong side of history" again? It's what it does. What it's persistently done. It's not as if it'll win.  

It's the assumption of the moral and spiritual high ground that offends me most- that people who know so little about God should presume to speak on behalf of Him/Her/It. Bah! I persist (I don't know why) in expecting better of them. It saddens me that all they seem to care about is what goes on in other people's bedrooms.

I have, I suppose, a vision of what the Church might be. A city set upon a hill. The New Jerusalem. A light to the world. I joined the gang with that vision in mind and quickly found it was all about- other things. 

Individual Christians do sometimes embody that vision. The Church does its best to smother them.

Happily the Church matters less and less. A Tory PM is defying it in the knowledge that it can't really hurt him. How odd that I should be backing a Tory P.M against the Church!

I worry about the buildings. I love old churches. They hold the history and culture of their communities and some of them are (or contain) amazing works of art.  Who will maintain them when the silly old Anglicans are so reduced they can't afford to keep the roofs on? 

Comments

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

PS. Numbers aren't counted as regularly in the Catholic Church as in the Anglican Church so the statistics are deceptive - they are only taken for a few Sundays of the year. All the same, attendance is certainly increasing in some part of England and Wales, although it's quite true that overall attendance is declining in both Churches. Also, those who do attend don't attend as conscientiously as was once the case
I think (but I can't prove it) that Catholics tend to be more generous financially than Anglicans.
Another of the cases I know is one in East Anglia, where a former Anglican church and Vicarage is owned by the Catholic Diocese and houses a (pre-Ordinariate) ex-Anglican priest and his family

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's interesting.

I like the idea of sitting down to dinner in a former church. When we're in London we often eat in the crypt of St Martin in the Fields- surrounded by gravestones. My brother-in-law swears by their rhubarb crumble.

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

The bar is in the church - food is next door - they knocked down the wall between the two premises