Times are Changing.

Bishop Quinine has booked himself out of rehab and come home to us early: it seems that as the tremors subsided he had a vision of starting his own program for attractive young men and women in need of some sort of help, and consequently pronounced himself cured.

He’s calling it “The Fourteen Steps” which doesn’t sound very original to me: 1-12 are the standard sort of thing, although step 13 is awfully Mark Driscoll, and why number 14 requires an armadillo costume and a large bowl of cheese sauce is beyond me. Still, he’s trying something new to attract people into the Church, and that’s more than can be said for many of my conservative brethren.

While I realise jetting around the world to attend conferences on the evils of same-sex marriage can be tremendous fun, the reality is I’ve never met anyone who says they came to Christ as a result of some late middle-aged man in a purple shirt racking up frequent–flyer points in an obsessive crusade against people being the way God made them. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good back-slapping session with my cronies as much as the next GAFCON leader, but the reality is ministry can’t be all fun and games. Sometimes we all ought to just get on with the business of growing our churches, because if we don’t there’ll be no future generation to keep paying for the kind of rectories and hotels to which we are entitled.

It’s all very well for the über-Tractarians at Forward in Faith to reminisce about the 19th century, when fiddling with children was only technically illegal, and nobody ever asked questions, or for a nasty evangelical to fantasize that the early 1960’s were a time of a glorious reawakening in the wake of Billy Graham’s 1959 crusade, when the reality was entrenched corruption as police and politicians amassed fortunes in bribes from organized crime and backyard abortionists, but times have changed. I also find myself longing for the days when children could be sold to work as pit-ponies and chimney sweeps, and parents routinely experienced the joy of watching their children die in waves from all-but-forgotten diseases like diphtheria and polio, but those days are gone forever (unless Jim Carrey is allowed to have his way).

Our is an age when thanks to the miracle of broadband Christians can gaze upon Paris Hilton’s pudenda from the comfort of their own La-Z-Boy; it’s no longer enough to wave a bit of man-lace or Calvin on a Sunday morning and expect the sheep to come flocking in. We need to find ways of meeting people which don’t discard our history, but which also don’t require people to pretend they’ve entered a time machine.

Here at St. Onuphrius’ we’re unapologetically conservative, so our core evangelism strategies of liturgical pole-dancing and unlimited free alcohol for everyone under the age of 21 probably aren’t going to work in more progressive congregations, but I mention them as inspiration for your own prayerful explorations into ways of reaching out to people not currently part of our great and glorious communion. Let’s face it, simply telling people you hate queers isn’t working like it used to.

I’m Father Christian and I teach the Bible.