Mandy Young is a retired Church of England priest now living in South Manchester. She is also a former secondary school teacher (of RE and Philosophy as well as Debating) and a journalist. She has three adult children.
We’re taught from a pretty young age that there are some things you don’t really talk about in polite company – sex, money, politics and religion to name the top four. This website, you’ll be relieved to know, has little to say about the first three – though it will (eventually) cover what the Christian faith teaches us about each of them. Its primary interest is religion – because the trouble with not talking about anything, especially faith, is that the silence (which presumably benefits some) embeds caricatures and leads to misconceptions. Equally problematic, we end up avoiding topics that most profoundly relate to our understanding of meaning and purpose in this world – to our happiness and sense of self. That’s a pity.
So these posts speak about faith – mostly but not exclusively the Christian faith. They speak from an unashamedly progressive perspective. This is not a whimsical, or culturally bound perspective as some critics might argue – it is rooted in a confident belief that the Holy Spirit moves beyond the bounds of both Bible and Church and that neither can ever tie it down. We have to ask what matters and what doesn’t. And then stand with and for what does. For that to happen we have first to debate and to (where necessary) challenge and be challenged by the profound caricatures that hinder genuine understanding about the place and purpose of religion in the world. Much of these hugely damaging caricatures now come from the far right and Christian nationalism.
There is a page on a few sermons I have preached – I have tended to go for themes – ‘on humility’, ‘on animals’, etc so you can see if the topic is likely to interest or challenge or just ‘wind you up’ before diving in. I have added a Bible link at the bottom of each sermon if that is helpful. There is a section on my blogs – the style of blogs is very different in intention to a sermon, so it seemed important to keep them separate.
There’s also a page for discussing how faith is represented in art. They do say a picture paints a thousand words and so often we can be moved by art in a way that words don’t quite reach, and each time we go back to a familiar painting or drawing or photograph we see things we didn’t see before. I think that is true of the Bible too!
The Bible is a focus (but not the only one) of the relationship between us (as communities and as individuals) and God – it tells the story of humans striving after meaning throughout history. And that striving is often remarkable, sometimes troubling, and, viewed as a whole, both faithful and courageous.
We should not be dogmatic when we turn the pages of Scripture – it is a text to be engaged with and inspired by, not a weapon to beat people around the head with – and to even try to keep an infinite God in a finite book seems to me the ultimate heresy.
This website is meant to work the same way – it is not seeking to be definitive, only to open conversation. It is not claiming to have all the answers, not even close, but it does seek to engage readers in debate – to say, this is what I think, what about you – and to challenge those who think they know what Christians believe and have simply rejected the caricature they have formed in their minds. In this I agree with the late evangelist John Stott that all evangelism is, by definition, cross-cultural and needs to communicate well with those who inhabit a different reality. As he rightly said the first great act of evangelism was the ultimate cross-cultural event – the Incarnation itself, when God sent Jesus into a world stripped of hope.
I hope too this website may be of some help to those who have no real knowledge of Christianity at all and want to ask what they see as the most basic questions – every question is a good one! There is a page especially for questions and answers (add your own) and there is also a glossary for those who are unfamiliar with key terminology or who simply have always understood such and such a word to mean something different.
The issue of communication finally brings me to St Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle to the Gentiles, the guy blinded on the road to Damascus – Paul, more so than anyone else other than Jesus, was the great communicator. He travelled the known world and was willing to engage in debate and speak in the language of his listeners; to adapt to their cultural needs and norms. And all the time he did this he held with integrity to his own encounters with the Divine. He adjusted his style not his purpose. ‘Though I am not a jew, I am willing to become one’ he writes, ‘though not under the law, I become as under the law’ – in other words, Paul/Saul was willing to reach out and communicate for the sake of the Gospel – He was entrusted along with others to share ‘the greatest story ever told’ and the one story more than any other which has changed the world – the story of Jesus. And because he did it well, the Christian story found its way to the gentile world.
Indeed Paul was ideally placed to fulfil this mission – straddling the cultures of Judaism and of the Greco-Roman world as he did – he was Saul and Paul! In modern Britain the risk is that secular society and Christianity are speaking such radically different languages, or maybe more accurately using the same words with radically different meanings, that we hardly understand each other at all. This website is all about conversation, not conversion. Each page has a link to the contacts page – so do get in touch and challenge me. That way we all learn and grow. And there is nothing to be afraid of in doing either. There is nothing to be afraid of in talking about religion, or any of the other taboos our society hides from in polite company! We all have so much to discover.
I finish with three quotations – the first quotation is from Proverbs, chapter 4: ‘The beginning of wisdom is this; get wisdom!’ and, for balance, the second quotation is from Greek philosophy – Socrates himself, : ‘I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others’.
And the final one, from the Gospel of John, where Jesus appears before Pilate during his trials – Pilate, trying to get himself and Jesus off the hook, asks Jesus if he really is a King, if he really is claiming what the religious leaders, in their need to be rid of him, accuse him of. Jesus replies:
‘I was born and entered the world so that I could witness to the truth. Everyone who cares for truth, who has any feeling for the truth, recognises my voice.’
And Pilate replies: ‘what is truth?‘
BOTH READ the Bible day and night;
but thou read’st black, and I read white.
from The Everlasting Gospel,
by William Blake