A Church without faith

One thing I haven't mentioned since I started this blog is that I am a Christian. Now, don't jump to the conclusion that I'm some sort of Bible bashing, evangelising nutcase - I'm not. At least I don't think I am! I'm a regular church goer - well, I regularly go to Midnight Mass and I manage a few Sundays during the year.

For me, my faith is a very personal thing. As an Anglican I do not agree with everything that the leaders of my church say or do, but I do realise that their statements will affect the way others view people like me.

So the news that a Church Of England document is calling for "radical corrections" to traditional church teachings and questioning the "masculine imagery" of the Bible is something that bothers me. Not because I feel a need to suddenly start referring to God as "It" - I won't. My God will always be He and He will always be "Our Father".

However, apart from the fact that this ridiculous document has given the secular atheists ammunition that allows them to come up with such headlines as the one on the link above "How marriage causes violence, by the Church", what really bothers me is that this document reveals a complete lack of self confidence from the Church Of England.

Faith requires - faith. Belief, confidence, trust. Strong faiths are confident faiths - Islam and Catholicism are both thriving because they are strong confident beliefs which, between them, attract around a third of the world's population. In comparison, Anglicanism is dying out. It is a dying faith because it comes across as a wavering, uncertain religion. What people want from their religion is to know that their faith is not misplaced. They want to be confident in the path they have chosen - not to have their church leaders umming and ahhing, apparently unsure if their beliefs are right or not.

Pandering to the post-modern ideologies of feminism, socialism, secularism and progressive liberalism and indulging in this sort of navel gazing will not halt the decline of the Church Of England. Indeed, it will only hurry it's collapse along. Only by getting back it's belief and certainty will it recover. Trouble is, I can't see that happening under the current Archbishop of Canterbury. However, I do have more hope in the Archbishop Of York who appears to be a far more appealing leader than Dr. Rowan Williams. Can we have a coup in the Church Of England?