The faith I inherited was lukewarm Anglicanism – I was brought up to think that this was the only ‘proper’ way to act, and I suspect that many others emerged from middle-class white backgrounds with the same attitude.  A Surrey village in the 1980s was not the place to learn about diversity: I couldn’t name a non-white person that I knew personally until I started secondary school (and then it was just one in a year group of 300); I first knew an openly gay person only once I was 18.  As a teenager, I sought approval to the extent that, when joining the Baptist church (predominantly to impress the parents of my first boyfriend), I agreed blindly and fanatically with their teaching – including that homosexuality was immoral.

Looking back, I’d never been comfortable with excluding people from Church but, to be included myself, I kept quiet.  Thankfully, university helped open my eyes.  Unable to find a church that nurtured me as a thinker and questioner, I fell away from faith and began to draw my own conclusions.

That is precisely the danger of power being placed in church leadership: compliance often becomes necessary, the ability to speak out suppressed and individual thought and conscience silenced. When I informed a Bishop in another denomination that they were breaking their own Canon Laws in excluding females from their monastic order and was ignored, I vowed never to accept these requirements in any church and have now found a church where I am free to think and to question.

One of the single most problematic characteristics of humanity is that each individual tends to think that they are right.  Couple this with authority and a Holy book that is not exactly specific aside from a handful of commandments, and you have a recipe for zealotry and intolerance.  I have always been interested in comparative religion and have wrangled with the interfaith question many times, but it was the 12 steps that taught me the phrase ‘humility means giving up the right to be right’.  In living that phrase, I have discovered that instead I have the right to be wrong and, when I am, I tend to learn more.  My relationship with a Beloved Muslim Ex showed me that there is something beautiful about people who understand God differently praying together and each coming to God in their own way; I learnt that neither of us needed to be right, just to support and value each other’s beliefs.  Through this and through Beloved Jewish Friend showing me how she celebrates the Sabbath (hint: there’s no popping to the shops because it doesn’t really count as shopping), I have questioned my own faith practices and grown in understanding.  I can’t say that anyone’s beliefs are wrong or right (my own included); all I can do is trust that God will guide and nurture all of us towards truth. 

My answer to redistributing power is simple: surrender. Believing in God doesn’t make us right and it doesn’t make us God; all we can do is try to let God work within us.  We don’t have the right to be right, just to be heard.  And that right must be extended to all.  We must be comfortable with different views, nurturing towards those who hold them and ready to honestly discuss what we each believe.  As Christians, we are called to be Christ-like and that includes allowing an unclean, haemorrhaging woman to touch the hem of our robe because she is both a fellow human and has an entirely different world-view from which we may learn.