Two events in recent weeks have reminded me that I was not born an Anglican. I was brought up a Christadelphian. The Christadelphians are a sect which began, like some others, in the USA in the middle of the 19th century. They are now small in number: I’d guess maybe not more than 5,000 in the whole of the UK.
Although I left them in the 1970s, I owe them a great deal. They provided a clear structure to life, and a regular pattern of worship and study. They made a habit of reading through the Bible every year, Old Testament once, and New twice; and that meant that one got a good overview of the Bible. And in my case of course, it was because we were both Christadelphians that I met Jenny, my wife.
Seen from outside, they look like several other such groups: like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Plymouth Brethren and the Seventh Day Adventists. Indeed its founder, and the founder of the Seventh Day Adventists worked together for a while.
But seen from inside, all its ideas appear to fit together perfectly; it appears to be unique and appears to be the absolute truth. Why is that? The answer is precisely that its ideas do seem to fit together and make a harmonious whole; a bit like a completed crossword puzzle. If all the words fit, then the answers must be right.
There is a lesson to be learned from that. Our ideas seem to fit together into a harmonious whole. It’s very difficult to be critical of our own mindset because, by definition, we are inside it.
These thoughts came to my mind because my brother – who still is a Christadelphian – rang with various bits of news; and then asked what I thought about the ministry of women, and whether I thought it was still necessary for them to wear hats at Sunday services. I’ll come back to the hats.
Very conservative Christians – including those in the Church of England – tell you that they do their best to take all the precepts of the Bible quite literally. In fact, they are somewhat selective in which verses they refer you to. My brother had in mind a verse from the first letter to Timothy in the NT [1.14]: I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man: she is to keep silence.
The letter claims to be by St Paul, so that should settle the matter. In fact scholars for about the last hundred years have been satisfied that it is not by Paul at all, and was written several decades after his death, when the church was becoming misogynistic. If we want to understand the mind of St Paul, we need to go to two other sets of correspondence in the NT: to the Churches in Corinth and in Rome.
In one of the letters to Corinth, Paul refers to women preaching and praying in public. In the letter to Rome, Paul sends greetings to a number of women as well as men, of whom some at least had ministerial roles. They include a woman who apparently looked after her church in his absence; and they include a woman called Junia whom he names as an apostle – not meaning she was one of the college of Twelve in Jerusalem; rather that, like Paul himself, she was a missionary with the care of several churches.
So St Paul not only included women in the ministry; he even included a woman with a role like that of a modern bishop. Where did my brother’s hang-up about hats come from?
Oddly enough, from the same bit of the Corinthian correspondence where Paul talks about women praying and preaching at services. When they do, he says, they should have their heads covered. He meant with a veil, like the hijab worn by some Muslim women. He didn’t mean fancy creations from John Lewis. That is a social custom from a past age. When I joined the forensic science in the mid 1960s, female expert witnesses were expected to be wearing a hat when they got into the witness box. No-one expect that now; it is a vestige of the Victorian era. The possible reasons for his wanting women to be veiled are interesting, but too complicated to discuss just now.
So far, we have learned three quite important lessons:
I said there had been two recent events that took me back to my Christadelphian background. The second happened last weekend when Jenny and I went to Leicester to the Ruby Wedding celebration of a couple of old friends who had also been Christadelphian; and who, with a number of others, left at about the same time as Jenny and I did. The wedding couple both became Readers, as did I to begin with.
Most of the guests were Anglicans, several of them clergy, and all of them interesting. One of them was called Andrew Wingate, an expert on inter-faith relations and, in a happy co-incidence, an old friend of David Busk’s. We ought to invite him to come and talk to us sometime.
As well as those who, so far as I know, had always been Anglican, there were six of us who had been Christadelphians, and two old friends who still were. One of them, Bill, was the man who had married our hosts forty years before. Our hosts had asked me to act as MC. After I had proposed the toast and asked for a few speeches, we closed that bit of the evening by saying the Grace together: The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all.
I had my eye on my old friend, Bill, while we were saying it; and I was intrigued that he did not join in. It can’t have been because the words were unfamiliar: they come from the Corinthian correspondence in the NT, and he must have read them hundreds of times. It must have the been the practice – saying words in concert - that was unfamiliar.
That ought to make us think about how people, who aren’t regular churchgoers at all, and who have no knowledge of the Bible, think about us. Clergy and Readers know exactly what it is like to look at a congregation of non-churchgoers at funerals and weddings – when no-one knows the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Because of the difficulty in being self-critical, we may not realise it, but we talk – or at least sing – in a funny language. Think of the phrases in some of our hymns: He willeth. Pardon? Thou dost. What is that supposed to mean?
Before we say, But it’s only traditional language; people should accept it, let’s recall that we objected to traditional language only 30 years ago. In 1980, the liturgical experts replaced the old Book of Common Prayer with the Alternative Service Book. Its language was sexist and we objected. In the confession we were supposed to acknowledge that we had sinned against our fellow men. Some of us thought there were sins against women that needed repentance. Now we use the word neighbour. In our prayers we were supposed to pray that men might honour one another and seek the common good. Shouldn’t women be under the same obligation? So now we pray that we might honour one another.
The Common Worship services published in 2000 made the appropriate changes. If we think that some religious language is not just out of date, but offensive, why shouldn’t our non-churchgoing friends think the same?
Language changes. Julian of Norwich – one of the finest theologians ever to write in English and, despite the name Julian, was a woman, was born in 1342. Geoffrey Chaucer was born a year later. Both wrote in Middle English. Unless you are an expert in the language, you do well to read them in translation into Modern English; otherwise they are barely intelligible. But it was only traditional English. Why would anyone not understand?
Let’s go back another couple of hundred years into the time of Old English and think again about how to distinguish the sexes; for then, both were referred to as men. The difference was that male human beings were referred to as were-men. “W-E-R-E” as in were-wolf. It comes from the Latin Vir, an individual male human.
Female human beings, married or single, were referred to as wyf-men – from which the word woman is descended. If I addressed you in a sermon as Ladies and Gentlemen, you would think I was being unduly formal. If I called you Men and Women you would think I was being a bit curt. If I addressed you as Were-men and Wyf-men, you would think I had taken leave of my senses.
That, I fear, is exactly how folk from outside the church community may see us. It’s not just the language, which is a mixture of modern and archaic. It’s also the way we behave. A newcomer at the 9.45 sees people wearing the clothes that were worn in Rome in the 4th century AD, and sees people processing around with candles, when the electric lights are on. And he’s supposed to think we are normal?
There are two ways we can respond.
If we do not try to attract other people, we fail in two ways.
One possibility is that, being a Grade II listed building, it will be taken over entirely by English Heritage; that it will become a museum and art gallery and concert hall. The clergy vestry could be a kitchen and the chancel might become a café. Exactly that has happened in a church in Lubeck in north Germany that I have visited on a couple of occasions; and it is highly successful. But there are no Christian services there.
Another possibility is that the listed status will be overturned and the building will be used as a warehouse. Several churches in the UK are used like that. So imagine the pews stripped out and floor to ceiling metal shelving, with fork lift trucks darting in and out.
Or, if the need for housing grows at the present rate, maybe the building will be demolished and its site and the graveyard will be levelled and turned into a building site.
I don’t know about you, but I have a natural distaste for mission. I like things the way they are; I don’t want to do things differently. Even so, I should be sad if my natural distaste were to result in the loss of Anglicanism in Godmanchester; very sad if the church became an art gallery and café; more so if it became a warehouse; even more still if it were pulled down and were lost for ever.
Maybe we ought to go back to Lesson one – not the biblical one; I mean the lesson about the need to see ourselves through the eyes of others. Maybe then we could find more effective ways to make folk welcome; for them to get to know us; to believe we have something to offer them; and to think church might be a place worth coming to.