What Does the World Outside Think Of the Church of England?

Tonight, I was at a meeting for prospective candidates and voters for the elections for General Synod in the Autumn. During this meeting I had to give a quick, off the cuff, introduction to who I was and why I was standing.

I do my job for a number of reasons, one of which is that I hate standing at the front talking, so this was never going to be one of my favourite things to do. However, thanks to the clergy present, I had had sufficient wine to give me a little courage, and so I stood up and spoke...

And amongst my waffle (because that is all it probably was!), I found myself telling the floor that I wanted the Church to re-engage with the world out there (arm gestures toward the windows was included). I found myself saying that the "the world out there" (TWOT) thinks that the Church is obsessed with sex and needs to get back to the Gospel.

Upon getting home, I found myself asking whether this was really true. What does TWOT really think about the Church? What do we want TWOT to think about us as the Church? What does God think?

My survey to answer these questions is fundamentally flawed in that it starts and finishes with information that I can pull together in one other browser tab whilst typing this post. Mostly this means I'm judging the answer based on the Church of England newspaper's Twitter feed which seems to act as an aggregator for stories relating to the Anglican Communion in particular and religion in general, so this is a very poor sample, but this is meant to elaborate the question not to give a definitive answer.

In the last 40 posts on that feed, the word "sex" (or compounds based on it e.g. sexual, homosexual etc.) appears 10 times, another post is about civil partnerships, one is about CANA (the Nigerian Anglican Church's invasion of the USA, so that comes down to who the bishop was bonking anyway), some on abortion and family rights and 10 posts were about Islam and Christianity in tension in Asia. Only two were about poor people, and they are both about the same story, the situation in Somalia.

So if this indication is anything to go by, TWOT thinks (or at least the Church thinks TWOT thinks) that the Church is obsessed by sex and Islam.

What do we want to people to think of about us then? Well the prophet Micah made a suggestion: he delivered the Lord's message that we should "act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God", a certain first century rabbi suggested we should be the light of the world. A hymn suggests that "they'll know we are Christians by our love".

That same rabbi explained that on the Last Day the Son of Man will say to those on his right: "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me." The Son of Man, in this tale, goes on to say "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me"

So how are we to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God? As the rich man didn't quite ask Christ, how do I love my neighbour?

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The long quotation is from Matthew 25, and I've copied and pasted from the NIV because its the default on the site I copied it from.

The Micah quotation is from Micah 6:8, again NIV.