I’ve written this blog because I believe that we are “called” do something about the theologies and teachings and ideas of God and Jesus that are commonplace in today’s Church despite what we are able to explore and despite our supposed evolution from the traumas of a century in which two world wars were fought.
Trusting our epiphany experiences
I believe epiphany experiences are as much internal as well as external experiences. Indeed, epiphanies are in a sense entirely internal. They is nothing without us, our bodies, our body chemistry, our evolved mechanisms for sensing and interpreting the world around us. Transcendent reality ‘exists’ within us as much as it ‘exists’ beyond us, is more knowable within us if we can but find the courage to trust our intuition.
Is Truth Dead?
How do we inhabit our personal faith and other vital Christian values, essentials and meanings (at least as I have come to understand them) in the context in the Post-Truth Trump world, reeling from the effects of tariffs and this week’s response to the security ‘leak’ where the world doesn’t know what to do about the death, the evisceration, of Truth?
Living by intuitive, experiential, emotional faith
I knew at the age of 11 that I should trust my intuition and experience over the dogmas and teachings held by the Church and derived from the Bible through the authority of God. My sexuality was integral to my essence. Now I know more confidently, despite continuing hostility in the Church that in the uncertain dynamics of life, subject and object, the knower and the known, the self and Gods, are not separable. Relativity and the uncertainty principle require a non-dual mode of knowing whose essential nature is to be undivided from what it knows, counter-intuitive to the reality generally taught in Western Christian cultures.
Jesus and human flourishing or Trump, enemy of Christian humanism
I wish to be part of a movement in the Church that is reimagining Christian basics, recovering the Christian Church, not as an institution with commands, prohibitions, creeds and doctrines, but as a movement of people touched by the reality of God at the heart of their lives, nourishing the divine, the essence of God in the centre of our being, in our bodies and emotions, valuing and honouring the incarnational presence of the Christ.
Present at General Synod – the God in whom I don’t believe
A Jesus Christ centred church, simpler, humbler, bolder – Yeah!
A Jesus Christ centred church, simpler, humbler, bolder – yeah, go for it, Stephen Cotterell. The Jesus Christ centred church that is simpler, humbler, bolder, isn’t remotely visible on the horizon yet. You and your comrades in the House of Bishops are lost in an almost impenetrable maze of scriptural authority, archaic traditions and invalid reasons that you are showing no signs of the vision and courage necessary to develop the church of your dreams.
What is the relationship in the CofE today between parishes and the hierarchy?
Whenever I write about the crisis in the Church some people post comments telling me that parishes are in a healthy state despite the crisis at the top and others tell me the opposite. One person recently commented that “everything is all right in the parishes” whereas another commented: “It is very hard to be a parish priest at the moment, trying to faithfully serve while having no faith in the hierarchy of the Church of England.” What is your experience?
The urgent need for movement
Here I am, posting another blog dealing with the Church of England in crisis when I really want to be writing about the far more critical existential crisis going on moment, of which this week’s events are but one element. There needs to be a far, far more radical transformation of the life and culture of the Church of England, a movement developing in the root, seeing and feeling the essence of unconditional love.
Transformation is required – How to achieve it?
This evening I'm writing and posting a spur-of-the-moment blog arguing that nothing is going to change, despite the serious nature of the failures reported yesterday, because something is far, far more seriously wrong with the basic fabric of the Church - what it claims to believe about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Bible - the fundamentals of our faith. A new movement is required.