Every year General Synod goes north on holiday.
It takes itself
mighty seriously, wallows in process and the fine detail of procedure.
In an airless and windowless hall, it slowly administers neat chloroform
of tedium.
There are moments, no, hours when I wonder why on
earth I gave away five of the best days of the summer to sit here in
York.
No debates produced an outcome that will make any difference
beyond the synod itself.
Even the glorious absurdity of it all, spiced
by gentle whimsical humour, failed to keep me awake.
There was action to be sure, but all behind the scenes.
I hope, having discovered that the C of E holds £3.8m worth of shares
in News Corporation, that someone puts the thumbscrews on the finance
team.
At one point, men in suits sweated and scurried into dark
recesses, hotly pursued by a media pack.
Later, a rather jolly
conspiracy theory surfaced that synod enforcers had stopped people
tweeting from the public gallery. It's rather a shame that turned out to
be university policy, not the dark arts of the synod controllers.
However
comatose, I am of good heart.
There is an utterly depressing list of
reasons why I should not be. A small lobby group called Changing Attitude
handed out meaningfully rainbow-coloured material at the door, and I
could see in their eyes the shadow of the treatment they receive from
fellow Christians.
There were the usual exclusive huddles of loonies
plotting to take over the world. Alas, it took money to stir the heart.
The sparkiest moment was when synod threw out the parochial fees order. This was but brief respite, and waffle about pensions soon re-established business as usual.
Maybe
the real energy bubbles up in the fringe meetings? Do I get charged up
by a lecture on how to prevent lead being stolen from my church roof?
How about a worthy but tentative chat about new media? Not really.
Why then is my heart in good shape? Because we were treated to an archbishop on fire.
Rowan
Williams often gets a rough ride in the press and is certainly not
universally understood in the parish.
Neither has he always got it
right. Indeed the way he succumbed to pressure and asked his friend
Jeffrey John to step down just before his consecration as bishop of
Reading may well still give him sleepless nights.
However, being flawed
and human like the rest of us doesn't stop him being one of the giants
of our generation. He has a phenomenal brain. On Saturday he put that
brain at the service of his heart.
He had just returned from the
Congo and what he experienced obviously stirred his guts. In a period of
unspeakable violence and terror local people told him: "The church did
not abandon us." A sleeping lion in the archbishop stirred. He thought
to himself: "If it wasn't for the church, no one, absolutely no one,
would have cared, and they would be lost still. "
In the Congo, he
seemed to have rediscovered something often masked by the sheer grey
grind of his day job. "It was almost a fierce sense, almost an angry
feeling, this knowledge that the church mattered so intensely."
Back
home, the truth is that the church hardly matters at all. At a local
level churches produce fabulous stories, but generally the church isn't
even on the radar.
The presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church of Denmark, the Right Rev Peter Skov-Jakobsen, Sunday morning guest preacher,
pointed out that this won't change until we sort our internal ethics.
Whilst we are seen as discriminatory, racist and homophobic, it is
almost impossible to convince folk that we have good news for them.
Many
people in this country experience the abandonment Williams talks about
as abandonment by the Church of England.
The archbishop faced the
problem head on.
Quoting Bonhoeffer, he called on his church to search
for a new kind of language for faith that could have the same
revolutionary and liberating force that the words of Jesus originally
had. Good grief! If we actually did that it would blow General Synod
apart.
Rowan was on fire, but alongside him we met another bishop of real stature, tough and humble, intelligent and grounded – Bishop Victoria Matthews
of Christchurch, New Zealand.
Beneath the tedious manicured York
agenda, the issue of women bishops doesn't go away.
"Do you believe in
women in the episcopate? Why, I've seen it done, and it rocks."