February’s General Synod is now in our rear-view mirror, and I’ve found that one of the complexities to processing and explaining what exactly happened is trying to understand the significance of Canon Andrew Cornes (Winchester)’s amendment to the original House of Bishops’ motion, now known as Clause G.

If you recall, this amendment asked the Synod to “endorse” the Bishops’ decision not to propose any change to the doctrine of marriage (between one man and one woman), and clarified that “the final version of the Prayers of Love and Faith should not be contrary to or indicative of a departure from the doctrine of the Church of England”.

Notably, this was the only amendment that was approved – requiring a majority in all three Houses to gain such approval. Not unconnected, it was also the only clause that wasn’t resisted by the Bishop of London, who was proposing the original motion.

So what’s going on? How is this amended clause seeming to function? How should we understand the response to it?

A Purge for Episcopal Consciences?

For starters, the key reason this amendment was carried was because it managed to gain a simple majority in the House of Bishops. This was where every other amendment failed. The count was as follows:

Bishops, 22 in favour, 14 against, with four abstentions; Clergy, 100 in favour, 94 against, with three abstentions; Laity, 98 in favour, 96 against, with four abstentions.

As mentioned, this amendment wasn’t resisted by the Bishop of London, which seems to have signalled permission for members of the House of Bishops to vote ‘for themselves’, rather than as a block.

The sceptic might suggest that there was more going on here than first seen.

After all, why did the Bishop of London not resist this amendment? Perhaps it was for theological reasons. Perhaps she sincerely wants to uphold the doctrine of marriage and she believes this amendment will genuinely safeguard that belief.

But could it perhaps have been because she knew that without the amendment in place the overall motion may not have passed? We’ll never know how the House of Bishops would have voted for the overall motion without this amendment. Perhaps it was unlikely to have been voted down in that House, given it was their own proposals. But we can probably assume that some of the twenty-two bishops who voted for the amendment would have joined the four bishops who voted against the overall proposal, had the amendment not been present.

Considering the House of Clergy & Laity, it was always going to be closer to call in regards to whether an unamended motion would have got through. But again, we can assume that having the amendment in place will certainly have reassured some ‘middle ground’ voters in those two houses. For example, it may have helped persuade those voters who had been concerned about the divisiveness of the main motion that it wasn’t actually as divisive as they perhaps thought.

But it may be the Bishop of London was also under some pressure to include this clause from her Episcopal colleagues. With 22 bishops voting for this amendment, it certainly feels like they were keen to publicly demonstrate they valued this clause. We know the College of Bishops has been greatly divided about Living in Love & Faith. We also know they’ve struggled how to propose a way forward.

At least one bishop spoke in favour of the amendment, with the Bishop of Truro saying that without this amendment he wouldn’t have been able to vote in favour of the overall motion. I’m sure there were others within the twenty-two that felt similarly. In the last few days we’ve seen a number of evangelical bishops acknowledge that they were prepared to vote for the amended motion.

But this then prompts the question as to whether such action is noble episcopal contending for the doctrine of marriage, or, as one lay person put it to me, whether the clause is simply an opportunity for bishops to ‘purge their consciences’? To some it will indeed look like a tokenistic gesture, a traditionalist’s shibboleth that further attempts to rationalise the bishops’ double-minded and nonsensical proposals.

After all, the House of Bishops would not have been unaware of the accusations of double-speak inherent in their original proposals. They would not have been unaware of the large numbers of the House of Laity and Clergy still dissatisfied with the amended motion. And they would not have been unaware of the majority of the Anglican Communion remaining sceptical about even an amended motion.

A Foot in the Door?

But is this entirely fair? As some have also argued, if the motion was going to be passed, then it is surely better for it to be passed with this amendment than without it.

Of course, we might argue that the twenty-two ‘orthodox’ bishops who voted for the amendment could also have voted against the overall motion – which would have ensured that it didn’t pass. But this would have looked intrinsically ridiculous, because, after all, it was their House who proposed the motion in the first place.

So shouldn’t we be thankful for the amendment?

Maybe so. Ian Paul has written, “All [the amendment] was asking for was something that had already been promised informally—but it makes all the difference that it is now in writing, and agreed.”

Indeed, it could be imagined as a ‘foot in the door’ going forward. It seems that some bishops are certainly communicating that there is ‘much still to play for’. After all, no prayers have yet been approved. No pastoral guidance has been written or agreed. Now all of the above has to be done through the lens of the amendment – in theory at least.

Again, Ian Paul writes, “Acceptance of this amendment has made formal and explicit that the doctrine of the Church not only does not change, but cannot be seen to have changed—the prayers ‘cannot be indicative of a departure from the doctrine of the Church.’ This constrains not only the content of the prayers themselves, but the context in which they are used and the way they are deployed.”

In other words, “The motion was passed, with a significant addition which explicitly limits the scope for manoeuvre, so the work will continue.”

The Evangelical Fellowship of the Anglican Communion has also noted the significance of this clause:

“This means that, when the Bishops come to make a formal proposal, the only prayers which they could legally permit would be those which were faithful to the doctrine. If they comply with this stricture, it is hard to see which of the draft prayers would survive, without a clear public statement at any service that they MAY NOT be used to bless sexually active relationships.”

Martin Davie, former Theological Adviser to the College of Bishops, has also shown how the current forms of proposed prayers “run contrary to the doctrine” of marriage, arguing that they will therefore need to be reined back from their current form if they are to pass through Synod in July. He notes two reasons:

i) “to liturgically mark with prayer in the presence of God a form of life which claims to be marriage but is not marriage as God has ordained it to be, is blatantly ‘contrary to, and indicative of a departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England.’”

ii) “what the bishops propose makes no distinction between sexually abstinent and sexually active same-sex relationships. However, if, as the doctrine of the Church of England maintains, sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage is sinful, then it cannot be right to pray for God to bless sexually active same-sex relationships since this would mean asking for God to bless sin.”

These points presumably also apply to the parts of the forthcoming Pastoral Guidance that are related to the moral lives of Church of England clergy.

And so this is why Martin Davie calls this amendment clause a ‘great victory’ and calls for the following actions from ‘traditionalist Anglicans’:

“First, they need to realise the extent of the victory that the insertion of clause (g) has given them.

Secondly, they need to be vociferous in pointing out that the motion adopted by Synod did not give the green light to the indiscriminate blessing of same-sex unions, but in fact ruled it out.

Thirdly, they need to be willing to subject the future work of the House of Bishops to detailed scrutiny to make sure it takes clause (g) into proper account and to be willing to challenge its work (legally if necessary) if it fails to do so.”

A Charge Sheet on the Wall?

Perhaps the last way this clause can function is as a visible ‘charge sheet’ pinned to the wall, declaring to the Church of England, General Synod, and (perhaps especially) to the House of Bishops, what they have theoretically affirmed. Time will tell whether this charge sheet testifies that how in this chapter in the Church of England’s history its orthodox members of the House of Bishops held to their convictions, or whether these were empty words to placate old friends.

The accusations of ‘fudge’ were profuse after the original House of Bishops proposals were released. They were widely condemned as saying one thing – ‘marriage is not changing’ – but doing another – offering what amounted to blessings for same-sex marriages. Synod was therefore full of accusations of the proposals being deceptive, non-sensical, and theologically lightweight. So have these accusations actually been heard?

But what has now happened is that we have voted for an amendment that, unless some radical change is actioned, appears to simply double-down on the logic that such blessings can be encouraged whilst also affirming a traditional understanding of marriage. Is this more double-speak, or will we see how these can be held together?

Without some significant change in how these prayers are framed or understood, it’s hard to see why orthodox bishops have gone down this route. Without some significant change, one fears it will look like evangelical clergy and laity are being taken as fools by their own bishops. I worry too that the amendment will be used by bishops to justify kicking ‘visible differentiation’ into the long grass. But undoubtedly this amendment means the charge sheet above their heads has now been written in an even bigger font.

Some are certainly sceptical. Rev Dr. Stephen Noll was involved in defending orthodoxy in the Episcopal Church in America. Are we putting too much trust in this single clause? He fears here that at this point there is no interest in ‘debating further the theology underlying the matter’. For many the ‘dialogue’ is over and this is just about implementation now.

And when it seems that some have intentionally led the House of Bishops away from any sense of Synod-approved due process, it’s understandable to be concerned. If we haven’t been able to trust the process so far, why would we expect it to deliver us anything now? If the LLF concluding video was being filmed before the College of Bishops had even finalised their proposals, then it hardly lets us see clearly what the process is. Will Synod be given opportunity to comment or vote on these prayers – or will this be consigned to dreaded ‘group work’ again, with Synod’s ‘views heard’ – but only by being written on large sheets of paper, never to see the light of day.

And so, again, we are in a place where much of what is before us would seem to land with the House of Bishops. Perhaps those twenty-two bishops who voted for this amendment will be willing to ‘quantify’ their convictions by ensuring the actual form of the prayers and accompanying Pastoral Guidance end up looking radically different? Have they heard clearly enough the accusations of double-speak that echo loudly around their dioceses and 75% of the Anglican Communion?

Moving Forward

There will be many who instinctively feel those orthodox bishops who voted for the overall motion were mistaken to do so. There will be many who would have wanted more individual or group statements from bishops expressing dissatisfaction with the overall proposals – perhaps a dissenting ‘minority report’ like Bishop Keith Sinclair’s ‘minority’ report as part of the Pilling report back in 2013.

And yet many of us recognise we do not understand the inner workings of the College of Bishops. We aren’t aware of the political wrangling that we hope is going on. We aren’t privy to the tactical manoeuvring that we’re led to believe all of this involves. There is a sense in which we are powerless.

This brings with it an inherent tension. Some of us want to trust and give benefit of the doubt. Some of us feel let down or hung out to dry. We are where we are. July is not yet upon us. But what will surely make a difference in the meantime is communication. Is there a ‘game plan’? Are allusions to ‘work behind the scenes’ just placating our needs? Why, if there is a plan, did four bishops feel the need to vote against the amended motion? They clearly weren’t convinced by the amendment. Please share with us.

And so we must pray for our bishops, for it would seem that only they can determine how this clause will function. A genuine foot in the door? A glaring charge sheet on the wall? Or merely a purge for episcopal consciences?

Disorientation and the Inevitable Crisis of Biblical Illiteracy

In Yuval Levin’s much-praised recent book, The Fractured Republic, the political analyst comments on how one of the defining marks of American public life thus far in the twenty-first century is undoubtedly disorientation. He writes:

“It’s as if we cannot quite figure where we stand, and therefore where we’re headed…we live in a period of profound transformation.”

For Christians, this disorientation feels even more pronounced. We feel the force not just of societal change, but of our faith’s rapidly changing place within that society. Like the early remnants of a sandcastle after the first tide has come and gone, we see the clumped heaps of a tower that remains and so find ourselves at once both wistfully looking back to supposed ‘glory-days’, and anxiously looking forward, apprehensive of the change that’s still to come.

And perhaps the most marked of these signs of disorientation is what pollster George Barna has called the ‘crisis of biblical illiteracy’. Indeed the very phrase is enough to draw out knowing shakes of the head and deep, long, sighs from the faithful.

Sadly it’s a crisis that makes for fairly dramatic statistics. One poll revealed 12% of American adults believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Here in the UK the Bible Society surveyed children aged 8-15 and found that a third couldn’t identify the Nativity as a biblical story. That percentage doubled for Jonah. Can you take more? One in three children thought Harry Potter was in the Bible, and over half thought The Hunger Games might have been too. For a second it’s ditzy funny, and then you realise it’s just plain desperate. DeYoung & Gilbert have described how the Bible’s increasingly peripheral place in the West has “spawned a rising generation of postmodern biblical illiterates”.

Moving from Familiar Stories to Finding Our Place in The Story

But how do we tend to respond to these statistics? Well, there’s probably two typical quick-fire reactions. The first is blame. Biblical illiteracy? Yep, that’ll be the fault of our consumer culture’s carte-du-jour of endless options. And, of course, throw into the mix the distracting banality of social media, and if together those aren’t enough of a ’cause’, then we can always assign fault to liberal Christianity’s gentle erosion of a high view of Scripture. Blame.

And the second reaction? Well, it’s obvious: more Bible, right? We need to fight for the Bible back in our schools, lobby the Bible back in the town hall, and of course press for a new reformation and put confident Bible teaching back in the pulpit. Unless we get more Bible then we may as well give up any hope of people being able to distinguish their King David from their Dumbledore, or their Peter from their Peeta. Biblical Illiteracy + more Bible = biblical literacy, right?!

But whoever came up with that ‘not seeing the wood for the trees’ idiom was onto something. Because when it comes to knowing the Bible, being able to identify a few trees is a very different thing to standing in awe of the whole forest. Maybe in our fervour to reverse this outbreak of biblical illiteracy, we’ve forgotten that facts and stories are not what we’re after.

The real challenge of biblical illiteracy is moving beyond familiarity with Bible stories to introducing people to the Bible’s big story.

And never mind surveys of British schoolchildren, those of us in the pastorate probably need to up our game for a start. Surely the ultimate evidence of biblical illiteracy is when Christians don’t even treat the Bible as one big story. Surely that shows we’ve misunderstood what the Bible is for? Not only can we suffer from a recurring inability to read Bible verses in the context of their particular book, but – and perhaps more devastatingly – we often fail to place those books within the context of one overarching biblical narrative. 

Why would we want to see a generation grow up well versed in the accounts of Joseph, Joshua, and Jonah, if they still failed to set them within God’s great story of redemption. Herman Bavinck put it well when he noted that the Bible doesn’t consist of “a number of disconnected words and isolated facts but [that it] is one single historical and organic whole, a mighty world-controlling and world-renewing system of testimonies and acts of God” (Reformed Dogmatics, 340).

And as we see this big story, we see a bigger Jesus: a Christ who doesn’t just rock up by chance in Israel one day, but one who has been promised and longed for. The Author has stepped onto the pages and has come as a better Adam, a perfect law-keeper, a suffering servant. He will right every wrong, stand in our place, restore us to our Maker, and bring about the perfect world we long for.

Only God’s Story Can Bear the ‘Burden of Identity’

Of course, those of us who feel we have benefited from having the Scriptures taught to us as a unified story will feel particularly strongly about this. I remember being handed a copy of Vaughan Roberts’ God’s Big Picture as a fresh-faced teenager and being told to dive deep. Wow, I felt like I’d never spotted Luke 24:27 before. Then it was on to Graeme Goldsworthy’s According to Plan and my mind was well and truly blown. So of course it’s right that we care about right exegesis and bang the table for biblical theology.

And yet what if recovering the Bible’s big story is actually about more than ‘right theology’? What if this was the very thing our fractured world needs right now?

In the face of the gaping cavern of biblical illiteracy, what if sharing this ‘big story’ is what will truly bring the hope and stability that is so absent in our disorientated cultural moment?

A fascinating series of articles appeared in the Irish Times earlier this year, examining several common cultural identities currently inhabited across modern Europe. And yet the editor, Ian Maleney, observed that despite their diversity, there was a shared characteristic amongst them: the “exhausting and attritional effort” it takes us to both maintain these identities and then ‘perform’ them in front of others. We are desperate for something that relieves us of the “burden of identity”.

One telling example was the notion of the ‘hipster’. Maleney comments on how it has become almost cringeful; too obvious, too intentional, another “visible, shameful evidence” of this burdensome quest for meaning. He then concluded the series with this striking comment:

“Living in a world that says we can always do better, a world that consistently presents the impossible and unreachable as ordinary and everyday, we live with the cruel optimism that we might uncover “a meaningful narrative” about who we are. This is the dream. Where can I get it, and how much does it cost?”

Like a plane desperately struggling to find its equilibrium in the midst of heavy turbulence, our culture is desperately turning to these personal narratives to find hope and permanence, but slowly finding they can’t just can’t take the strain. 

Thankfully, this is where resources like the recent evangelistic series, Life Explored, or Glynn Harrison’s excellent book, A Better Story, are helping us move in the right direction. For kids (and adults!) there’s The Jesus Storybook Bible and The Big Picture Story Bible. Likewise, it’s been interesting to observe how various university Christian groups in the UK have been using the concept of Story in their evangelistic mission weeks to seeming great effect, and it was also the focus of this year’s Evangelism Conference (talks available here).

As we feel the disorientation of a growing cultural unfamiliarity with the Bible, our response is not to champion the Scriptures for the sake of Bible trivia, but rather to communicate that in this book we have the only story of reality that can bear the weight of our personal struggles for meaning and substance.

Are you sitting comfortably?

When was the last time you picked up a decent kids’ book about the Church? And what about a kids’ book that celebrated God-given difference within the church?

Yeah, I’m struggling too.

Part of that scarcity is perhaps because we instinctively think that Church is hardly going to make riveting subject matter for a children’s book. Maybe it’s hard enough to get the kids reading Christian books, but Christian books about the Church…

That’s why I was so delighted to get our family’s hands on God’s Very Good Idea, one of the Good Book Company’s latest releases, written by Trillia Newbell and illustrated by Catalina Echeverri.

The delicious subtitle is “A true story about God’s delightfully different family”, which underlines that this ‘very good idea’ is all about God making lots of different people who would “all enjoy loving him and all enjoy loving each other”.

And it’s brilliant. The book is aimed at 3-6 year olds, and I think that’s about right. Our oldest is nearly 4, and she loves following along.

Here’s a few things I particularly appreciated:

• Enjoying difference and treasuring sameness. One of Trillia’s phrases that sticks is that “everyone you see is different than you, and the same as you”. I love that. I think that kids get a lot of input about difference in school, and yet that’s rarely rooted in the idea that there is also a sameness: we’re all made in the image of God, and so we’re all valuable. The book really brings out the richness of this difference, and you see how precious the church is in bringing humanity back together through Christ.
• Jesus is at the heart of God’s very good idea. As well as articulating how we’re all made in the image of God, the book also explains how God had to rescue his very good idea through Jesus. This gives the opportunity to show how, because we choose not to love God, we are not therefore able to love each other like we should. Trillia deftly points out that this often shows itself in treating others badly because they are different. Trillia then presents Jesus as someone who embodied loving those who were different to him. Jesus dies so that we can be forgiven, but he also exemplifies how we enjoy loving each other amidst difference.
• Catalina’s illustrations bring colour and life to every page. If you’ve read any of the other books in TGBC’s Tales that Tell the Truth series, then you’ll be familiar with Catalina’s style. She’s got a great eye for detail, and our kids love going through and spotting these. There’s one double-spread page that shows a park scene with loads of different people playing/talking/having fun, to illustrate the goodness of living in God’s world with difference. Then you turn over and there’s the same scene, but with lots of these relationships gone wrong. It was great to go through and ask, “what’s happened… what’s gone wrong here… what about there?” Similarly, there’s some great illustrations to help kids identify with how they treat others badly, and some really fun ‘church community’ scenes that help make the idea of living out ‘God’s very good idea’ a practical reality: people having fun, talking, praying together, weeping together, etc. We enjoyed drawing the parallels with our church situation, and the illustrations really serve the text.

The best kids book are probably those that get adults excited too – and perhaps even teaching us a thing or two along the way. And by referencing the differences we should expect and encourage in our churches: skin colour, sex, languages, disability, hobbies, etc, Trillia has created a resource that will bless kids and grown-ups alike, helping us to have our eyes open to God’s very good idea.

The last page has the simple invitation, “And, with your church family, you can enjoy being part of it right now!” And would you believe it, by that point I reckon you’ll really want to!

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Why not enjoy this teaser trailer:

You can pick up God’s Very Good Idea from the publisher, The Good Book Company, here.

Disclaimer: The publisher sent me a free copy of this book, but I hope it is still a fair review.