General Synod Election Address

It's taken me long enough, I know, but here is the text of my election address...

In your situation as someone reading these election addresses, there are three main questions that I would hope an address to answer, so that is what I shall try to do here.

Who am I?
My name is Justin Brett. I am a teacher, and I live just outside Brighton with my wife and seven year old daughter. I was born in 1971 and brought up in rural Gloucestershire. I went to boarding school in Cheltenham, and it was there that I became a regular churchgoer when I was 13, and was confirmed about a year later. I went from school to Exeter College, Oxford in 1989 to study Classics. At Exeter I sang in the Chapel Choir, resulting in a lasting love of the words of Prayer Book Evensong. I worshipped in a variety of churches as
I moved around Oxford, but spent most time at St. John the Evangelist, the church attached to St. Stephen's House. Following my degree I qualified as a teacher at St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill.
My first permanent post was at a prep school near Slough. I was very much involved in worship there - preaching, leading services and still singing. During holiday times I worshipped at the local parish church. In September 2001 my wife and I moved to Berkshire, where I spent some time working in the secretariat of the local council, and taught in two different local schools. It took a while to find a church where I felt at home, but from 2002 onwards I worshipped at St. John the Evangelist, Newbury. At St John's I became Treasurer, Child Protection Officer and a Deanery Synod representative. I was elected as a lay member of General Synod by Oxford Diocese in 2005, and for three years was Lay Chair of Newbury Deanery. I also held a Bishop's licence as a lay preacher. In September 2008 my wife was appointed Deputy Head at Roedean School, so we moved to Sussex. I am currently teaching at St Aubyns School in Rottingdean, once again involved with Chapel services as preacher and worship leader, and worshipping at St. Margaret's Church, Rottingdean, where I have been elected to the PCC as a Deanery Synod representative. In my spare time I am studying for an MA in Social Policy and Criminology with the Open University, and my wife tells me I spend rather too much time on the Internet.

Why am I standing?
It looks as though there will be two issues over the next Synod that will attract a great deal of media and public attention. One is the consecration of women as bishops, and the other is the continuing question of how the Church deals with homosexuality - further complicated by the development of the Anglican Communion Covenant. As far as the first is concerned, although the legislation could be rejected at final approval, my best guess is that within the next decade women will be consecrated as bishops in the Church of England, and personally I would be delighted by that outcome. My real concern with this issue is how we keep the Church united throughout the process. I do not want to see women bishops at the cost either of losing the Anglo-Catholic heritage so important in this diocese or of compromising the orders of the women who are consecrated. The second issue, that of sexuality, is one which is current in this diocese - for example in the survey on attitudes to same-sex relationships now in progress in Sussex. While I am aware that the theological issues surrounding sexuality are complex and sometimes contentious, I am certain that committed and loving relationships deserve in some way to be celebrated by the Church. Again, my hope is that we can find a way to keep the Church united as this issue is inevitably dragged through the media over the next few years. I am convinced, however, that the only way we will reach any resolution of either of these issues is by continuing to be open to different views and opinions, even if we find them at times disturbing. It is for this reason that I am concerned about the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant. It seems to me that the Church of England, as a national church, is called to be welcoming, open and available to all people, regardless of their situation in life. I cannot see how the constraints of a covenant designed to exclude those deemed to be 'unsound' can help us in this important mission.
Although these issues might cause the greatest publicity, they are not the greatest challenges we face. The current financial crisis is forcing us to ask ourselves what the Church of England itself is going to look like in the future. The next Synod may well need to take a view on just what our churches are for, and whether our current structures are correct and sustainable. As with the other issues I have mentioned, this is bound to cause some divisions, and the way forward might not be immediately obvious. I am not pretending to have any easy answers, but I am willing to keep an open mind, and look to solve problems by consensus.

Why should you vote for me?
I am not offering myself as a candidate in favour of any particular issue, nor am I a member of any particular church faction. I do, however, have a deep love for the Church of England in all its diversity, and I believe that it has a continuing role to play in our society. Over the past five years as a representative for Oxford diocese I have done the best I can to fight for the principles outlined in this address. It was my amendment that encouraged the Church to take a more definite moral line on Trident, and I have intervened where possible to speak in favour of openness, tolerance and diversity. I was also appointed to the Steering Committee for the Ecclesiastical Fees Measure. I have tried to report on Synod proceedings as clearly as possible online and to my former deanery and diocese, and I will continue to do the best I can to act as a link with my own deanery and any other to which the diocese might assign me.
If there is a simple summary of what I have written so far, it is that I believe that the greatest need in General Synod over the next five years will be for members who are prepared to be open minded, creative and accommodating. As a self-confessed Liberal who has nevertheless worshipped happily in a parish under alternative Episcopal oversight, and whose roots are in the traditions of the Oxford Movement, I have sympathy and respect for a wide range of views within Anglicanism. Too often elections such as this one result in the establishment of opposing camps - whose side are you on? My position is that rather than being on any side, I am committed to a united and inclusive Church which values all its members and treats their beliefs with respect. I believe that its diversity has always been the strength of the Church of England, and I am very suspicious of any attempts to remove that diversity by imposing one particular set of values, however sincerely they may be felt.
I am under no illusions that one lay member of General Synod can change the world, but if, like me, you feel that to be an Anglican is to be part of a community that is welcoming, inclusive, caring and tolerant, I would urge you to give me your first preference vote.
If there is anything I have said here that you would like to discuss, or if you would like to know about anything I have not mentioned, please feel free to contact me. You can e-mail me at justin.brett@yahoo.co.uk or telephone me on 07876 746074 and leave a message on the answering machine for me to call back. You can also find my reports from the previous General Synod on Alastair Cutting's General Synod Blog http://gensyn.blogspot.com
Thank you for reading this address.

If you want to see it in all its properly typeset glory - thanks to my friend Graeme who is very talented at all things typographical - then you can find the .pdf here.

ACNA-Related Ramblings

I was really quite frightened yesterday about what could have happened in Synod - and I stood up and said so in respons to the motion to move to next business. Later on an old friend of mine - also a Synod member - told me how he had looked at the line of people acting as Eucharistic ministers for the Communion service on Wednesday morning and thought just how fragile the bonds were that held us all together. We could have done an enormous amount of damage yesterday afternoon... but thank God, we didn't.

Of course, if you ask three different people to tell you what happened yesterday you'll get at least four different answers, but the best analysis for my money is on Scott Gunn's Blog. From my own perspective, I have a few thoughts that I wanted to put on record. Yesterday morning I had a long and interesting conversation with one of the ACNA delegation who had come to observe the debate. What he told me was that ACNA wished to enter into the Anglican Communion via the Covenant process. Now that seems to me to be an entirely reasonable aim - especially, as I pointed out to him, that provided the Covenant was ratified by the Communion this would mean that ACNA's relationship with TEC would have to be the same as their relationship with the Church of England.

However, if ACNA is going to present itself as the representitive of the conservative strand of Anglicanism in North America - and I think that is the only way in which it can present itself if it is going to make a serious attempt at being part of the Anglican Communion - it has a way to go yet. Scott talks about some aspects of this in his article I have mentioned above, and I would add in particular the fact that there is currently one major continuing Anglican presence in North America that is missing from ACNA. Changes in the Episcopal Church in the 1970s led to the Congress of St. Louis and the subsequent establishment of several conservative, Anglo-Catholic continuing churches. These are still operating in North America, and number more than 200 congregations - in other words about a quarter the size of the current ACNA grouping. These groups represent a style of traditional Anglo-Catholicism that is very familiar us in the Church of England - more than that they represent a tradition that I would expect to find in any conservative grouping. The fact that they are not there makes me wonder to what extent ACNA really does currently represent traditional Anglicanism in North America.

So what did and didn't we do yesterday? We did acknowledge (rightly so in my opinion) that a lot of people in North America who identify as Anglicans - whether part of the Anglican Communion or not - are in a very difficult situation right now. We did affirm that ACNA are telling us that they aspire to be part of the Anglican Communion. We did acknowledge that at the simplest level our inclination is to be inclusive. What we did not do is recognise ACNA as anything other than a self-defined group. Unless or until the Anglican Covenant is adopted, that is as far as the Church of England can or will go. The ball is now firmly back in ACNA's court. Do they genuinely wish to be part of the Anglican Communion? Time will tell, and I will watch with interest.

Synodical Ruminations Part 1 (Covenant)

Thinking about what's on the General Synod Blog from this group of sessions, it looks in general like a pretty fair summary - especially of that major topic of conversation as to whether or not you need a Y chromosome to be able to wear a pointy hat... There are two things, however, that I want to pick at a little more. The first is the Covenant. Fine, so you've all gone to sleep and I'm now talking to myself. I'll carry on anyway. If you don't know what the process is that I'm talking about, by the way, then you can find the official Anglican Communion page about it here. You might also like to look at the pages of the Modern Churchpeople's Union who don't like it, and Anglican Mainstream who like it a great deal.

Despite the fact that the flash-points for the Covenant process were the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire and the policy of the Anglican Church in Canada towards the blessing of same-sex unions, I have never really believed that the whole thing is about sexuality. It's really about a fundamental difference between two possible ways of dealing with the relationship between Church and Society. Does the Church itself need to change and adapt to continue to minister to the society in which it finds itself, or should the Church instead proclaim more firmly what it understands to be its historic orthodoxies and attempt to refute the errors it finds in society. Both alternatives have their problems: the former runs the risk of becoming post-Christian, of losing the uniqueness of the Christian message in a fog of moral relativism; the latter has to struggle with the question of what orthodoxy actually is in an institution like the Anglican Communion. Quite why the line got drawn in the sand over sexuality, as opposed to marriage after divorce or the ordination of women, for example, I have no idea, but this is the situation in which we find ourselves. At this point it has to be said that neither extreme in the current squabble has acquitted itself particularly well - in terms of intolerance there is really not a great deal to choose between the hard-line progressives and the ultra-orthodox, and frankly neither side is particularly attractive. They do, however, have a slightly different attitude to those with whom they disagree.

The caricature progressive position is that anyone who does not espouse liberal doctrines must be suffering from a deficit of intellect and education. If only their thinking can be raised above Neanderthal level then they will eventually see the light and join the liberal ranks. This is best achieved by saying the same thing over and over again to them very loudly, and squashing all counter-arguments by claiming that they demonstrate lack of understanding on the part of the arguer. The caricature orthodox position is that anyone who does not espouse orthodox doctrines has not read the Bible properly or is interpreting it wrongly. If they can be shown that the Bible contains all necessary truth, then they will see things the right way. This is best achieved by repeating the same Bible verses over and over again to them very loudly, and ignoring all counter-arguments on the grounds that they cannot be justified by reference to Scripture.

What really distinguishes them, though, is that while it is an article of faith to all progressives that anyone can eventually be persuaded to their point of view, it is an article of faith to the orthodox that those who do not follow orthodox teaching are not Christians. So, from a progressive point of view any sort of innovation is fine if the innovators all agree about it, and if there are other people who don't then they'll come round to our way of thinking eventually. On the other hand if you sincerely believe that you are guarding the orthodox traditions of the Church, and some other people start doing a whole load of things of which you do not approve, then first you must attempt to convert them back to orthodoxy. If that fails, then they must be removed from the Church until they repent of their sins, at which point they can be welcomed back. That is very much the way the Covenant seemed to stand when it was first mooted. The price of keeping traditionalist provinces within the Anglican Communion - rather than having them go their own way, possibly attempting to take traditionalists from other provinces with them - was to provide a process whereby the Communion could decide what was or was not acceptable innovation, and enforce it. If necessary, this enforcement could take the form of expulsion from the Communion.

Since that point, quite a lot seems to have changed. There has been quite a lot of consolidation in the traditionalist camp - GAFCON and the foundation of ACNA are two examples that spring immediately to mind. However, the emphasis of the Covenant process has shifted too. The most recent draft - the response to which Synod noted in its debate last week - has travelled some distance from the legalistic tone of earlier efforts. From the point of view of the Church of England this is probably a good thing. The fact that as an Established church our governance is bound up with the governance of the country makes doing things like signing up to sets of rules somewhat difficult - the Church of England cannot submit itself to an 'external power of direction' as it was put in answer to a question I asked in October last year. It was noticeable that in his speech introducing the debate last week the Bishop of Rochester described the proposed Covenant as "comparable to agreements about communion with other churches and, indeed, to some forms of ecumenical commitment into which the Church of England has entered." This means that we are to think of the Covenant in the same terms as say the Porvoo Agreement or the Bonn Agreement, or perhaps the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. None of these is anything other than a voluntary agreement of common intent - they do not enforce doctrinal uniformity, they are not in any way a set of rules.

You might have guessed from the title of this blog that I tend rather more towards the progressive side of things, so this drift away from enforcement is good news as far as I am concerned. However, I can't help remembering some of the things that were being said at the beginning of the process to the effect that there was no way a covenant can deliver unity. Either it has to have some method of enforcement - in which case it will inevitably exclude some people in its efforts to keep the rest as a cohesive whole; or it has to be sufficiently vague as to encompass everybody - in which case it will not keep any of those who hold extreme views within the fold. I suspect that we are drifting towards the latter option, and while I am personally happy to see things progressing in that direction, I can't help thinking that there might have been better uses for all the money and the tons of carbon that the process will have cost by the time it comes to an end.