Outside my office window there is a stunning tree. Burnt-red, tall and thick, deep blue sky behind it, and on either side trees still bright green. A plane, a silver arrow, flies across the face of the half-moon clearly visible in the sky, and it is all so beautiful I can almost ignore Robarts Library hulking behind.
I recall as an undergraduate being asked to read H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (1951).Niebuhr had set out five options of how one should understand this relationship, with “Christ versus culture” and “Christ in culture” as the two opposite extremes, the former representing a critical approach to culture from a distance, the latter an all-inclusive one.
Twenty-five-year-old noblewoman Anne Askew (1521–1546) was accused of heresy, arrested, interrogated at least twice, tortured on the rack, and burned alive at the stake. Her account of her examinations was published together with the comments of exiled reformer and historian John Bale (1495–1563) as The first examinacyon (November 1546) and The Lattre examinacyon of Anne Askew (January 1547).
As we prepare to receive 50 new students at the College this semester, I am once again reminded that many, if not most of our students have been drawn to Wycliffe because of our evangelical commitments and the quality of our teaching, and not because of any denominational allegiance. Those who come because we happen also to be an Anglican institution have for a number of years been in the minority, and given the demographic trajectory of the mainline churches we don’t expect Anglican students to account for more than about 40 percent of our student body anytime soon.
I was raised in a church and family that encouraged women to be all that they were meant to be. It was only when I started going to a church where women’s roles were restricted that I encountered pushback from the so-called silencing texts in 1 Timothy 2:11–12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34ff. Restrictions on what I could do and whom I could teach forced me to wrestle deeply with questions related to women’s roles in the church and family during my theological studies. I soon learned that the debate over women’s roles in the church had a very long history.
“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.” So begins William Williams’ hymn in which Christian life is a pilgrimage along which the believer’s weakness is exposed, and God’s provision abounds. Pilgrimage is a deeply embedded description of the Christian life. It reflects Israel’s own wilderness trek, one which too often included complaint and the fear that God might not provide (Exod. 17:1–7). During Lent, we imagine ourselves into Christ’s own sojourn in the desert and accompany him toward Jerusalem.
We live in a time of repeated scandals in which prominent church leaders turn out to be hiding egregious sinful behaviour. We all know what it is to be tempted and to fail, but so often what is revealed are not such lapses but instead ingrained, habitual sinful behaviors repeated across many years without any apparent desire for repentance and forgiveness until caught out and exposed.
In a conversation with some students recently I made reference to Wycliffe College’s Six Principles, and was met with blank stares. I do not fault the students. The fact is that we don’t talk about the Principles nearly as much as we did when I began teaching here in the late 1990s. I therefore decided it might be time to say a word or two about them. As our website helpfully clarifies, Wycliffe’s teaching and ethos articulate “the beliefs and values of evangelical Anglicanism.
In Churchland there is a natural tendency to look to churches that appear successful, hoping to learn from or emulate what they are doing in our own communities. Perhaps especially when things aren’t going well, or when we are facing challenging transitions such as slowly moving out of the Covid pandemic. While many practices are not easily transferable to a different context, there are also other important questions we might ask before assuming that “success” is repeatable or desirable.
When my children were young, Valentine’s Day was hugely exciting. We made cookies with pink icing in heart shapes. We got those boxes of Valentine’s ‘cards’ -- actually tiny strips of paper that did not deserve to be dignified by the name ‘card’, but the kids loved them, and they painstakingly tore them apart on the dotted lines and wrote a name on every one, for every child in their class; Caitlin, the artistically inclined, made valentines for every child in her class; glitter and glue, markers and paint and paper scraps everywhere; it was chaos. But it was delighted chaos.
