When we could not and would not reach out to him, he has reached out to us. “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly… God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6,8). 

There are no truly innocent human beings. Each of us has willfully rebelled against God, but even if we hadn’t, we would still be tainted by the sin of Adam, for “by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners” (Romans 5:19).
In Paul’s great letter to the church in Rome, he explains that in our sinful state, we actively suppress any knowledge of God, even denying the undeniable reality of his power and presence in creation.
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Ordained Church of England Clergy have repeatedly made dubious statements in the public domain, the Bishop doesn’t care and believes facts are debatable and merely opinions (except, of course, those facts which suit him). The one person who might have steered the Bishop to a different conclusion has used his own belief in climate change nonsense to uphold the Bishop’s decision. As the Church of England descends into a woke hell of its own making – and its absurd fixation on climate is just one manifestation of this.

At the last count, fewer than a million people worship regularly in the Church of England. I am one of those, having so far resisted the almost overmastering desire to extract myself from the Church’s increasing wokeness and ever closer conformance to – and infiltration by – the secular society it is meant to serve. My frustrations are usually vented by strident comments on social media and the occasional email calling individuals to task, but the straw which really threatens to break the camel’s back in my case is the Church’s obsession with ‘climate change’.
Why the Church of England is so vocal on a subject about which it clearly knows nothing is beyond me, but when it makes completely unsubstantiated statements in the public domain, easily capable of being refuted by facts, it is time to take action. One source of the Church’s outlandish statements in this regard is the Community of the Resurrection (CR) in Mirfield, West Yorkshire.
Most people – even many churchgoers – think Religious Communities died out forever in the Reformation, but they actually staged a comeback in the 19th Century and to this day there are vowed monks and nuns, many ordained to the Priesthood, living in Communities as part of the Church of England. I came to know the one at Mirfield and it was therefore a great disappointment to witness CR jump on the woke climate bandwagon and promulgate in its official publication, CR Review, what appeared to be climate facts but which, in reality, were nothing more than personal opinions – although this was never once made clear.
I endeavoured to call CR to account and the Community was gracious enough to include in its publication my rebuttal of one offending article, although radically edited. I hoped this would be an end to the matter but no, CR continued to pump out articles and videos making outrageous climate assertions. Each time these appeared I contacted the Community with detailed facts, evidencing the untruthfulness of the statements, but, unlike on that first occasion, the Community became unyielding, refusing to publish any retractions even though the Superior later admitted to me “we are not climatologists”.
Matters came to a head earlier this year when yet another article appeared in CR Review full of inaccuracies and clearly written to scaremonger and possibly to influence voting (the local elections were just around the corner). Yet again, I provided detailed evidence disproving each assertion and once more CR refused to recede from its position. Having reached deadlock, I decided it was necessary to escalate matters.
My initial approaches were to those holding some degree of responsibility for the Community, its doings and its members. However, neither the Archdeacon of Halifax nor the Bishop of Blackburn, Chair of the Advisory Council for Religious Communities in the Church of England, had the courtesy to reply. The Bishop of the Diocese in which CR resides, the Rt Revd Nick Baines, Bishop of Leeds, responded claiming that the Community was “not accountable” to him and making it apparent that his sympathies were entirely with the climate alarmists (unsurprising, given his own actions and public proclamations on climate matters). The appointed ‘Visitor’ to CR (a kind of overseer for the resolution of disputes), the Bishop of Lichfield, replied saying the matter lay outside his area of responsibility. Thus, the buck having been well and truly passed, the only route left to me was to raise a formal complaint against CR under the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM).
With whom does such a complaint have to be lodged? The Diocesan Bishop. Yes, that meant the Bishop of Leeds, who originally said he had no accountability! Of course, I asked that he recuse himself because, in my view, he had already prejudged the matter. It appeared obvious to me, when he summarily dismissed my initial communication to him asking for help, that this Bishop is part of the Church’s groupthink on climate.
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This side of eternity we see through a glass darkly, and we must just cling to God in faith. And as I and others have often said, it is not so much a case of my great faith in God, but my (often weak and failing) faith in a great God. We can only trust him, believing that he is with us in these dark times. And we can do that with confidence, since he promises he will “never leave us nor forsake us” (Hebrews 13:5).

The biblical Christian knows at least two basic truths: suffering is a universal condition which none of us are exempt from, and God is sovereign over this world and what happens in it. Other core truths can also affirmed, such as the fact that we are all responsible and accountable for the choices that we make.
Sometimes these things appear to conflict. But often they seem rather clear cut. For example, if you smoke three packs of cigarettes a day and end up getting lung cancer, the immediate cause and fault of this was your own bad choices. A non-theist will also recognise that reality.
But besides various moral evils involving human choices, there are also natural evils. If an earthquake strikes a place resulting in much death and destruction, it is not really due to human culpability (although some might argue that the way we treat planet earth accounts for much of this). So we look for bigger causes, and in times gone by insurance companies would speak of these things as being an “act of God”.
Of course whole libraries are filled with the volumes that discuss all this. Here I want to narrow things down quite a bit, and also make things a bit more practical. For as long as I have been a Christian, I have been interested in the issue of suffering and evil, and how Christianity accounts for it.
The term ‘theodicy’ has to do with justifying the ways of God in the face of great evils and so much suffering. So there is a theological and philosophical level in which all this can be teased out. But when suffering hits home, then it really becomes real, and you want theory to match reality.
With my wife’s battle with terminal cancer my thoughts about all this have simply increased greatly. I still ask the big questions, but I of course also pray like mad, as would anyone else who goes through such things. And I continue to meditate on these matters and read heaps, be it books or articles. I also watch various videos and so on.
And I have shared our story fairly often and fairly far and wide. But I find this interesting: I know of other couples who are going through quite similar things, but I do not hear much from them on this – at least on public forums. As I wrote last night:
We are all different. Some folks in our situation seem to say nothing on the social media about what they are going through. But I have said quite a bit. Neither is right or wrong. All I can say is, I am weak and I need help, and I am happy to admit it. The more prayers I can get for our situation, the better. So that is why I talk a lot about it. But others might have good reasons not to.
When it seems like your whole world is in upheaval, all you can do at times is cry out to God. As I have said before, sometimes I can only pray: “Help, help, help.” And I for one so very much greatly value the prayers of others. I sure do need them.
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