Reignite

OK, I'm wandering into the territory of Beauty Tips for Ministers here, but a couple of recent conversations have brought up the issue of what clergy should wear for protests. I know a number of Ministers who only wear clerical collars for protests. The logic is that it's important to identify as a Minister when you're supporting something society doesn't expect clergy to. So Ministers will wear a collar at gay prides or pro-choice rallies to make this point. Now I could understand this if it you wore a collar going about your general business, and also did during a protest, but I'm quite uncomfortable with the idea of wearing clerical wear ONLY for protests. The seems to be something worth exploring. I have said before that I'm not in favour of special titles or clothing for religious leadership, mainly because Jesus explicitly said this was a lot of nonsense. Religious leaders should not need these articial crutches. I have no problem with certain liturgical c...

Posts by a couple of my colleagues have got me thinking. Here Andy posts about the slogan of his church in London : "A church for atheists... and everyone else." And here Danny says "There is no such thing as atheism." How interesting. So do Unitarian churches welcome atheists? To me this is not the significant question. I don't know of any church that would say it wouldn't welcome atheists. If I asked my Anglican neighbours "do you welcome atheists?" they would say, "Of course we do, but we welcome them to enter into a relationship with God." So the question is not "who do you welcome?" but rather "what do you welcome people into?" The invitation goes out to all, but what is it an invitation to ? This is the pressing question to Unitarianism. In many Unitarian circles there's a lot of talk about welcoming all people: people of different beliefs, different sexual orientations, different races, but what are we welco...

A commenter on the last post asked why I call myself "evangelical." Now it's certainly true that I'm not part of the Christian movement called Evangelicalism (although I do have a lot more respect and admiration for some aspects of it compared to some liberals). Evangelicalism is characterised by a strong commitment to the authority of the Bible, amongst many other things. As a liberal I do not share that approach. However I am not prepared to give up the label of "evangelical" - someone with good news. I still believe that faith is good news, and I'm not ashamed to live it and say it. I am an evangelical liberal. The point for me is that liberal religion needs to be evangelical. The reason liberalism is nearly always a failed project is that it is not evangelical enough. Conservative, orthodox, even dangerous forms of religion are out there in the streets with passion saying what is so important about their faith. If liberals do not do the same then peo...

It's the time of the year when the Unitarian Directory comes out. This means I can do some number crunching, and thinking about the health of our community. There are 172 congregations in the Unitarian General Assembly. This is one down from last year (173). Two congregations have disappeared from the directory, though I can't remembering anything being reported about the congregations closing. One is Pudsey in West Yorkshire, and the other is Loughborough in Leciestershire. The good news is that one new congregation has been recognised this year, Bangor, in North Wales, accepted as a small congregation. I'm sure that we going to continue to see about two congregations closing every year, I just hope we can see a few more starting as well. The Directory also lists 133 Ministers (one down on last year) but this is a pretty meaningless number as it includes retired Ministers, and Ministers living in Ireland, America and other parts of the world.

This week the Prime Minister David Cameron said he was in favour of same sex marriage, saying, "I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative.” I remember reading a similar argument a number of years ago in America. I sort of agree with it, though I'm not a Conservative in any way. Marriage equality is a pro-marriage position: it's valuing commitment, family, love, stability. The Government has announced it's going to hold a consultation on same sex marriage in England and Wales next March, but it has already excluded the possibility of religious marriage. They only want to allow civil marriage as a possibility. This cannot be acceptable to religious progressives who want to allow marriage in their own places of worship. So we're now faced with a major disagreement between religious progressives and religous conservatives. Religious conservatives should not be made to perform marriages of which th...

In the last few weeks there have been two articles on Unitarianism in the Guardian. In the first Theo Hobson described visiting a Unitarian church in the US . He describes what sounds like a summer lay-led service that might be different to what he would get a month later. He describes three women who led a service based on a play they had recently put on. In his final paragraph he says this: "I came away with the feeling that it was very harmless. And maybe that's the key difference from Christian worship. In Christian worship there's a certain sense of risk: we risk affirming an idea of truth that is somewhat at odds with natural wisdom, inner peace. And we risk affirming a tradition that has an aura of violence – the violent rhetoric about the Lord of hosts and so forth – and the references to death and blood in the sombre ritual. There's a sense of potential danger in Christianity – this religion has been used for violent ends, and people have suffered martyrdom fo...