Many ordinands haven’t had their imagination informed deeply by Scripture or by the experience of life within a worshipping community for a long period of time. Even fewer have grown up in the Church. So, while they may have tremendous faith — and it takes a great deal of faith to put oneself forward for the ministry in the Church of England these days — they often aren’t native to the Church. Their way of understanding themselves and the world is typically formed within the same culture as everybody else: late modern consumerism. Through no fault of their own, they operate largely out of a secular social imaginary.

Schools for the Imagination: Reflections of a Former Theological Educator

As a simple layperson, this certainly explains a lot. A shame really, because maybe if there was serious attention paid to this, we’d have a better class of discussion. So tired of priests who don’t know a bit of Hebrew going off on some subtly anti-Semitic tangent during sermons, or those without any understanding of Thomistic theology shallowly opining on science/technology and respective ethical and interpretive concerns. It’s really… kind of embarrassing to be honest!

 

But *is it* decline theology?

This just in from the church side of things (how ironic – I’m trying to do more posts on critical theory of tech and the first blog post I write is online church stuff), I’ve been seeing this article by Revd. Goodhew make the rounds via a couple of priest-y friends on twitter. It’s yet another of those posts that make me realise there’s a whole other world the priests/vicars/etc. are living in to those of us in the laity.

Or just me. Yeah, maybe just me.

So anyway, Goodhew’s main argument in the article is that a key factor to the CofE semi-existential crisis is what he calls a theology of decline, or at least an organised spirit of suspicion from broad (so basically any non ‘Evangelical’) Anglicanism when it comes to the issue of church growth, where one finds – according to Goodhew – ‘hostility to talking of growing churches is widely shared, at least in the Global North’.

So… there was an actual fuss about this?

How Is Sarah Silverman Right About Jesus Being Gender Fluid? – Honestly people (mostly Christians, or ‘Christian-aligned’ shall we say. Yes yes, Christian hegemony and yet… why is it so decidedly basic, infantile and factually/creedally wrong Christianity…) are so silly and unimaginative when it comes to Christianity. Not that I’m a ‘truther’ but didn’t the analysis of the Turin Shroud* come out with some XXY results in the chromosomal analysis?

*I KNOW, my point is more for the kind of people that that means something to. I don’t believe believe, that the Turin shroud is real although obviously I have my biases.