Almost daily nowadays my post contains a request from someone for information about the Sea of Faith Network.
They may have read about us in Anthony Freeman’s book God in Us or in an article in the New Statesman (both of which gave my name as a contact person) or by long searching for an address to write to. Some people in the last category have had to use some diligence to find us.
One person took an easy route by phoning Lambeth Palace, who put them on to Don Cupitt, who put them on to me.
The search for our address should be easier shortly when our entry appears in the Directory of British Associations.
Then any reference librarian at a public library will be able to look it up quickly for enquirers.
What do I do when I receive these enquiries? I have a simple routine, which consists of sending out a carefully worked out response letter and enclosing the carefully worded information leaflet/application form and two items reprinted from Sea of Faith magazine. One is the carefully written editorial article ‘‘What’s our line?’’ from the January 1994 issue. The other consists of my article “How it all began’’ from the very first issue, combined with Stephen Mitchell’s follow-up article ‘‘What happened next?’’ from the second issue.
All that adds up to a considerable amount of careful thought! Although there is always room to improve (and up-date) our current information handout, I think it is quite an honest package.
But does it really say what we are? What are we? We have several hundred members, so we shall have several hundred ideas of what the Network is. I guess most of those impressions will be conditioned by our morethan-several-hundred different sets of needs which urged us to seek out, or help found, the Network.
Historically-minded people might suggest that the founder-members might be likely to have (or have had) a clear idea of what the Network is. I suppose I could be considered one of the founder-members (in that I have been around all the time!), But I can’t give a precise answer, You see, we didn’t know we were founding a Network. We were not trying to do that.
Initially, two or three of us met and talked, urged to do so because we each confronted similar practical problems in life in the church. We then found a few others with similar interests and we went on meeting and talking.
Eventually we had an ambition: to have a_ national conference in which theologically radically minded church people would meet. I had no vision beyond meeting once, discussing our problems, and solving them!
I remember anticipating confidently, when such a conference had eventually been planned, that it would mark a great divide in time: after it, all would be plain sailing.
Mutual consultation would solve everything. (Even in late middle age one can be naive!).
So we organised a conference and it happened. Then many who attended it said they wanted another one.
Another was planned and it happened. So it has gone on ever since. I don’t know if we have solved many of the problems we set out to tackle, except one, and that only partially. That was the problem of loneliness. Many who felt very lonely in their pilgrimage of religious faith hi ve found companions and reduced their loneliness.
I think we have discovered one or two more problems in the five years since the Network was set up, but at least we now have a forum in which they can be discussed.
And, without our seeking it, we have had some media attention. This has not always portrayed us accurately (but even they can’t be expected to put over the severalhundred-plus views of ourselves that would be necessary for complete accuracy!).
Also, I may be being optimistic but I see some tiny signs that the views held by some of our members within the churches may just be beginning to be acknowledged as not quite so horrid and outrageous as was first thougl.t. (The Church Times review of Don Cupitt’s recent book After All convincingly reversed the trend of many of their earlier and increasingly unsympathetic reviews of his books).
This brings me back to the question: What are we?
The first (and then the only) Sea of Faith conference in 1988 was advertised as ‘‘an exploratory conference for radical Christians’’. The details that were circulated to enquirers raised three questions. ‘‘Can the faith as it stands be interpreted along ‘non-realist’ lines, or must it be drastically reformed? Should radical Christians form a continuing organisation? Meanwhile how are they 1) function and to grow within the church as it is?’’ A press release after the second conference (advertised as ‘a follow-up to last year’s exploratory conference’’) reported that ‘‘a question exercising the mind of the conference concerns the way in which a theological radical profile can best be maintained and strengthened as an accepted position within the churches’’.
Between the first two conferences and for three months after the second, the only on-going Sea of Faith link was an occasional newsletter sent to all who attended the conferences. Three months after SoF II, in October 1989, a ‘‘Policy and Task-setting Council meeting’’ was held at Loughborough University, open to all on this mailing list.
An important development happened at that meeting.
After a lengthy discussion and an interval for reflection, the Sea of Faith Network was set up. In the fairly brief minuted notes which served as our ‘‘constitution’’ till 1994 the words ‘‘radical’’, thinking based on the statement of intent - ‘to explore and promote religious faith as a human creation’’ - without a slipshod shorthand that begs too many questions.
I think the statement of intent has served us very well and that it can serve us well for a good while yet. (It was of course incorporated in the 1994 Network constitution).
But what of the practical application of it - the exploration and promotion? At the October 1989 meeting some of us would have been content to stop at the word ‘‘exploration’’, but others wanted to go further and include something which showed that we were not content to be simply an academic or other sort of talking shop. We did not find it casy to settle on a perfect ‘‘Christian’’, ‘‘non-realist’’ and ‘‘church’’ do _ not appear.
SE Why not Methodist SoF groups, word to express this. I remember suggesting ‘“celebration’’, but that was This was by deliberate: decision. We widened our concern and avoided terms such as ‘‘non-realist’’ which some saw as contentious and we broadened the range of our membership potentially to embrace Humanists and others with no formal religious allegiance, and people of other RC SoF groups, Buddhist SoF groups? We cannot promote religious faith as a human creation in a vacuum. We have to promote it where we are, in the institutions to which we belong. not exactly right. In the end we settled for ‘‘p motion’’.
I think this was (and probably still is) the best word we could find, but I feel that of all the words in our statement of intent this one has given us most problems. (One academic religious faiths than Christian.
I was somewhat surprised by this move, but wholly persuaded by it, and I remain convinceed that it was right.
It has enabled me to look much more widely at the religious scene than I had done previously. It has helped me to learn from pioneers in religious studies like Professor Lloyd Geering about the origins and nature of religious faith. I hope and think it has been helpful to others also.
Consequently I have been concerned to keep our Network demonstrably open to Humanists and those who accept no particular label of a specifically religious kind. I have learned the value of the word ‘‘faith’’ as implying trust that it is possible to give value and meaning to life. (I know that for some it is still a difficult word because of its possible confusion with ‘‘belief that...’’, but I hope that such confusion can be reduced).
To this end it has seemed to me very important that, beyond our statement of intent, the Network should not be associated with any one theological ‘‘line’’ on any subject or be seen as a pressure group for particular radical ideas within churches. This has seemed a hard discipline to some, but I think it has been worthwhile in the long run. It has enabled much work to be done in priest at a diocesan meeting I attended was incensed, wholly unreasonably to my mind, that we should try to promote as we'll as explore in our area of interest). By remaining an open network for the exchange of ideas (exploration), and incidentally for the relief of the loneliness at local and other levels, we have, I believe, great potential. But we are rightly committed also to promote religious faith as a human creation.
What are we as we try to do this? How do we do it? To preserve our openness I have campaigned steadily that individuals and groups in particular churches should do their own pressure-grouping or ginger-grouping as individuals or groups within those bodies, and not as members of SoF. It seemed an important strategy for them in the churches and for us as an independent Network. I tried to follow this out in the public discussion that followed the Bishop of Chichester’s reaction to Anthony Freeman’s book.
But can we follow this purist line indefinitely? I don’t know. Maybe I am weakening, but I haven’t yet found satisfactory answers to the question of how we promote religious faith as a human creation if for an indefinite period we continue to leave behined our SoF hat when or if we are involved in Humanist, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Quaker or other circles.
Maybe I am weakening. Or maybe I am thinking of flexing a now too rigid attitude. Certainly I think that were we openly to keep our SoF hat on if we move in such circles, we should always take care to remember those of our Network who do not have such allegiances, and we should make sure that we do not in any way compromise their positions. And we should not compromise the Network as a whole by seeming to align any denominational ideas with those of the whole, broad Network.
In my local SoF group and in the wider Network I feel great affinity with those members who have not had, or who have rejected, any formal religious allegiance. At the same time I remain an Anglican priest, feeling great affinity with other Anglicans, especially remembering the Church of England principle (now severely threatened, but still alive) that all parishioners living in a parish have a right to feel that their parish church is a resource for them.
It is probably my long years of learning how to be a parish priest in semi-rural parishes that have encouraged me to follow the vocation of dual affinities - that of the church and that of a wider constituency. It is not an easy one to follow. At one time I found the strain of it considerable. I am a slow leamer but I am increasingly coming to see how it is wholly possible (if not easy idling) to maintain these two affinities, to speak two languages but mean the same thing in both.
After a very difficult patch, made more difficult by my premature retirement for health reasons from being a parish priest, I am now finding it increasingly possible and desirable to try to hold in balance a non-realist idea of God, accepted as a spiritual discipline and not as a dogma, and being a practising member and priest of the church, I find I am able to gather together my developing insights into Christian spirituality and the world of symbols in such a way that I can do simultaneous translation between the language of the 1980 ordinal and the language I use in my own symbolic understanding of spirituality.
I hold it very desirable that the best in all our faith systems should be rescued from obscurantism and pressed into service at this time of desperate need in human society. Humanity seems to be drifting into chaos without a convincing spirituality to bring creative order out of it. (In biblical language, God created life out of the formless chaos. In terms of depth psychology, chaos is the raw material with which the Self can be creative).
I see crime and other ills of our present society as partly a judgement on us who have not handed on a credible spirituality to the coming generations. In this country, the Tory remedies of increasing punishment and the Labour ones of reducing poverty are only partial answers to the crime problem. The evolution of the human species has reached a critical stage in which the instinctual drives need direction from a spirituality which unconditionally accepts those drives but also acknowledges the value and needs and rights of other people.
How are we to promote the additional (or perhaps primary) healing factor of such a spirituality in a world of chance that may have no meaning of its own?
For those who have inherited some remnant of a western Christian culture it may be best if we have, and try to share, a spirituality in which there is a God to serve who is not a Father Christmas figure but a convincing imperative for loving our neighbour. This God can be seen as the creation of our long Judaco-Christian religious heritage but without the distortion often given to it by Plato’s theory of forms.
Others may see that their religious heritage has produced (say) the Gods of Hindu spirituality whom they can share meaningfully with people attracted to their culture. The Humanists may sce their ideals (perhaps descended partly from one or other of the world’s religious traditions) as the spirituality, the religious faith, which they may be able to offer, perhaps especially to some with a less rooted background. And so on.
My point is that we cannot promote religious faith, even as a human creation, in vacuo. We have to promote it where we are. So perhaps now, now that our Network is firmly stretched out to include in their own right people from Humanist and uncommitted and other religious faith positions, as well as those with a Christian background, might it be time for us as a Network to reduce our detachment from involvement with particular religious faith groupings and consider having, say, Methodist SoF groups, RC SoF groups, Humanist SoF groups, Anglican SoF groups, Buddhist SoF groups, and so on?