Skip to main content

Marriage Hui


There is a call in the Church for leadership. It is echoed everywhere, that we are failing for want of strong, firm, decisive leadership. Amongst all the clamour for leadership though, there is very seldom any sound of a question being asked: "what do we mean by leadership?" Judging by the way the request for leadership is usually addressed to me, it seems to mean, "why doesn't someone around here, ie you Kelvin, kick a few butts and get those bozos over there to do what I want them to do?" A suggestion that the others might conceivably have a valid point of view is, of course, wishy washy accommodationism (or cowardly reactionism, depending ) and the idea that I might put the boot on the the other foot and kick the butt of the questioner, outright apostasy.

So, on May 25 we met at St. John's Roslyn to discuss marriage. The catalyst for the gathering had, of course been the issue of the ordination of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender people and the related issue of the marriage of people in same gender relationships. The request for our hui had come from Synod 2012, and was made well before the recent law allowing for such marriages was passed by parliament. At synod a motion requesting us to sanction the ordination of people in same gender relationships had led to a ragged, divisive discussion during the course of which it was realised by everyone that the issue was complex and that requesting people to vote yes or no to a proposition was simply unhelpful. For me, the wider  issue of marriage had been niggling me for years. It is obvious that the ways in which people meet, commit themselves and begin a life together had undergone a radical revolution in the last couple of decades and what did the concept of Christian marriage mean in that changed social milieu?

Of course, in the lead up to the hui I was subject to a lot of advice, most of it from people at one end of the spectrum of debate or other asking that the church in general and I in particular exercise a bit of leadership on the matter. My own aim was a not quite so clear cut, but I suspect it was one shared by many of those present. I recognise that all those in our diocese who have strong views on matters of sexuality, gender and marriage are quite genuinely seeking the best. They have thought, discussed and prayed. They have read the relevant scriptural passages, often in exhaustive detail.. Further, they are all seeking to promote the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the good of humankind. And yet they are often coming from very different places and reaching wildly different and mutually exclusive conclusions.

And these conclusions really are irreconcilable. So, we could duke it out and see if one side could persuade the other to either change or do the decent thing, admit their heresy and leave. Or we could try and find a way in which we might recognise each other as sisters and brothers in Christ despite our differing opinions. This latter position is the one I want to arrive at. I believe it is possible to do this, because it is in effect what we have been doing for ten years or more in the Diocese of Dunedin. As Jim White pointed out in the last Hermeneutics hui in Auckland, pacifists and soldiers exist side by side in the same church without demur, despite the issue of pacifism being perhaps closer to the heart of the Gospel than is the issue of sexuality.

In the end, the day went well. Sue Burns from St. John's College facilitated the process with the gentle firmness and clear grasp of group dynamics which were the reasons I had asked her to do it. Gillian Townsley led us in a study which was not so much a Bible study as a reminder of hermeneutical principles and an application of scripture to various real life scenarios of moral ambiguity. Group discussion was engaged, vigorous and intelligent. I was impressed by the respectfulness with which we spoke to one another.

At the end of the day no-ones opinions were much changed. But the great triumph was that we stayed together, we talked and we began to feel our way towards that sense of God's presence which enables us to be the body of Christ. We have a long way to go, but I am very optimistic.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I think a lot here hinges on whether those who hold strong views genuinely recognise the Christian faith of those who do not think as they do. Without such acceptance, all conversation is a sham.

That is the only foundation for 'progress' - the acknowledgement of the foundational significance of our Baptisms, that those who think differently to us are still doing their darnedest to follow Jesus.

Thus we obey the Dominical command to love the one another as Christ loves us. And lets face it - He puts up with a whole lot worse from us every day!

Here endeth the Sermon :)
Elaine Dent said…
Christ was truly present.

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

The Matter With Things. 2

  Last night I finished reading Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things, Our Brains, our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World , the biggest book I have ever read, in all senses of the word "biggest". Back in 2017 I wrote about books which had been important to me , and, however I would recompile that list now, The Matter With Things would go straight to the top. Really. It's that good. I've read every word: no skipping or coming to and realising that my eyes have been glazed over for the past ten minutes. It's taken me a couple of months to engage  with its 1300 or so pages of text, and, as well, there are another couple of hundred pages of  appendices and bibliography (well, OK, I haven't read the bibliography). At the end of the book proper there is an epilogue which is a "so what" chapter in which McGilchrist speculates about the implications of his hemispheric theory for the world in the immediate future. This epilogue is preceded by a

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

Prayer as Relationship

  This is a reconstruction of the talk I gave, last night, at the 3 in 1 group at St Michael's Church, Anderson's Bay, Dunedin.  We have all had unhelpful experiences of prayer . I remember the clergy colleague who would sometimes correct the theology of my sermons 5 minutes later, when he led the intercessions; or the prayer groups when you dreaded THAT person speaking, because you knew they would speak for a quarter of an hour and list everything they knew to be wrong with the world. I've heard prayer used to share gossip, or to preach sermons, or to make announcements. I've seen prayer used to shame, or to control or to boast. In all these instances I have to ask "who, exactly is being addressed here?" and find myself asking again what, exactly, is prayer anyway?  I know what it's not. Prayer is not telling God what God should do with the universe. Neither is it barking into a silence in which nothing is ever heard. Prayer is not exercising some positio