Skip to main content

Anglican

The parish church of St. Gregory and St. Martin, Wye, Kent.

About 5 years ago our diocese had an electoral synod in which I was a candidate. The events leading up to the synod and the synod itself were particularly grueling for me, and it took me fully two years to recover from them. One of the very unfortunate side effects, for me, of the events surrounding the synod was a sense of alientation from much of my own diocese and a sense of deep disillusionment with the national Anglican church. I remember one of the members of the synod using a metaphor which has stuck with me since that day. She said our diocese was on a roundabout, going round and round looking for the right street to exit into. I had a sense, on that day, and one which has grown every day since, that I got off on one street and the Diocese of Dunedin got off on another. Following the synod, I remained as Vicar General of the diocese, a position I deeply did not want to hold but which I could not quite find a way to relinquish, at least until my illness gave me the excuse I had been looking for. I found myself in a leadership position in a diocese whose decisions often (usually?)baffled me, but also in the odd position of being uniquely unable to comment on or critique those decisions. Further, the Anglican Church at national and international levels was making decisions and doing things which I found more than baffling. My reaction to much of what was said and done was Toto we're not in Kansas anymore. As the months drew on I could find fewer and fewer points at which I could comfortably identify with much of what my church did. I found myself, at times, wondering if I wanted to remain with the church I had given most of my adult life to; but there were two things above all others which kept me loyal: the support of a few friends within the church (particularly my Archdeacon, Graham Langley) and the wonderful community of St. John's Roslyn.

This pilgrimage has been a pilgrimage to the heart of the Anglican Church, and it is one that I completed yesterday when I stood on the spot where, in 1170, Thomas Becket was martyred, and, later, on the spot in St. Martin's churchyard where, in 597 St.Augustine baptised King Aethelbert and thousands of his subjects. These two events were defining moments in the history of Christianity in England, and both were incidents in the long and tortuous relationship of Church and State which have shaped the pragmatism which is Anglicanism's defining characteristic.

The pilgimage began with a journey into Catholicism. Across Spain, Italy and France, week by week I worshipped in Catholic churches and associated with Catholic people. It wasn't an intellectual journey -I couldn't understand a word of the liturgies, readings or sermons - so much as an emotional and spiritual one. I tried to choose ordinary parish churches in which to worship and felt held by the warmth of the congregations. I witnessed many examples of fine pastoring by holy priests. In this way, I experienced something of the seedbed out of which my own church had grown.

Journeying to England has been an experience of the things which set this European country apart from the rest of Europe. A different currency, system of measurement and language and a deeper rigour about immigration matters are only part of it. In the rest of Europe you see the European flag flying as often as the national flag. Not in England. Here it's Union Jacks all the way, proclaiming a sense of difference and independence which is mirrored in the relationship of the Church of England to European Catholicism. This is a different church. Quirkily different. Proudly different. Sometimes different just for the sake of being different.

The Church of England is like that most English of jokes, a curates egg. Parts of it are excellent. The new life bursting out of Holy Trinity Brompton and the deep spirituality of Walsingham could not be more different but they are held in the same organisation and both are inspiring. I have been in dozens of small churches, though, where a tiny congregation struggles with the upkeep of their much beloved ecclesiastical museum (aka the parish church) with diminishing resources of money and personnel. I have seen both the church's impotence in the face of the increasing social and economic malaise which seems to be engulfing Britain, and her small courageous, and often ingenious attempts to make a difference. But it's the history which has helped me to understand the current Anglican church.

The church here is old. I met a vicar who spoke of the damage done to his parish church by "the invasion". He meant the one which took place in 1066 but he spoke of it as if it was last week. In every place the plundering of the dissolution, the ravages of Viking longboats and Luftwaffe bombers and the vandalism of the puritans have left their mark, and the current parishioners are dealing with them still. This is a church which has been part of the fabric of the society around it, and where the demands of being a social institution and of being the body of Christ have caused constant tension. Sometimes the church has become more a part of the social fabric than the spotless Bride of Christ, and it has failed. Sometimes though, it has been a witness to the Gospel in the face of hardship and oppression and sometimes the Spirit has caused rebirth, even centuries after a seeming full stop.

Unsurprisingly, it is where there is a continuing practice of spirituality that the church has flourished. Where there has been prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, meditation, social responsibility and almsgiving the Church of England has thrived. It has also thrived where there has been disciplined, holy, fearless leadership. To see the marks of the Church's history and to hear the stories has been to encounter this deep vein of spirituality and to feel again the influence of her sainted leaders. Where this rich seam is refound, as on Iona and in Mother Julian's cell, the 21st Century church has risen, seemingly invincible, from the ashes. It is this, the great treasure of our church, that I have glimpsed, and which I know to be the only hope of my own diocese and of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

I was raised a Methodist and chose to be an Anglican. After this month in England, I choose still to be an Anglican, but I know that much of what occupies our church and seems so important in our councils is froth and bubble: the detritus rising to the surface from the ongoing struggle with our wider culture. I choose to be an Anglican, but know that the only way for my own faith and my own parish to be viable is if I try to dive deeper and find the cool streams beneath. This seeking the depths must be what forms my ministry in this, the last decade of my life as a stipended Anglican priest. Which brings me to reflect on the third thread of my own journey: that inward one of my own soul.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Dear Kelvin,

THANK YOU, thank you and AMEN. We pray that God will guide us as we seek more deeply with you. Underpinned by more constant prayer lives we can remain alive and be the "light" that Alan F.has alluded to recently.
It will take another read or two to absorb that blog which I am very thankful to have read this morning.
We pray for courage and strength as you and Clemency complete this next week of long travel.
N
Rev R Marszalek said…
Thank you from an English Anglican. Much that got me feeling excited here about the institution in which I am happy living out my discipleship. Beautifully written.


Rachel
Anonymous said…
Great to meet you guys in the 'Mater Angliae' (& what I think of as one of the 'Matres Novae Zelandiae'), & I hope you enjoyed the Globe.

I hope we will see 'the Wright Stuff' in a book before long.

Blessings on journey to the snowclad hills of Dunedin.

Brian
gregcarroll said…
What a journey ... in all sorts of senses. It has been great to follow your travels and journeys from our little old spot in the world down here in NZ. Another term finishes at school today and we have missed Clemency tremendously.
Sad for you guys that it is all coming to an end but will be good to see you again and hear about all the details. The children of R9 are excited at the prospect too.
Keep safe in your travels!
Greg
Brian R said…
Have enjoyed reading of your adventures. Your comments about the Diocese of Dunedin are worrying for someone who intends moving there and one of the main reasons is to shake off the dust of the Diocese of Sydney.
Kelvin Wright said…
Different diocese, different dust. And a good deal of ours has settled. I think.
Peter Carrell said…
Hi Kelvin
Not sure how much you can do re tracking the progress of your brilliant post, but Titus One Nine has a lead to it (http://www.kendallharmon.net/t19/index.php/t19/article/23752/ ) and Bishop Alan's Blog carries a lengthy excerpt (http://bishopalan.blogspot.com/2009/07/c-of-e-sublime-and-ridiculous.html )
Kelvin Wright said…
Yes, I saw from the data at Statcounter.com that this piece was getting a fair bit of traction. And if I'm not mistaken they saw it first on Anglican Down Under. Thanks.
Unknown said…
Dear Kelvin,

Thank you for sharing so deeply. I am sorry that we didn't manage to connect because much of what you say resonates with me.

It is finding that "river beneath" that is so vital for my life, ministry and the church I serve.

The Episcopal Church of Scotland is not like the C of E, it has much more in common with NZ Anglicana. In some ways it is not unlike the Diocese of Dunedin in that it is a minority church in a largely Presbyterian environment. It also was never part of the English Reformation and has it's own history some of which was very painful. Loma and I enjoy being part of it.

Thank you again for your deep sharing. Blessings.
David Balfour

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old