Hi, y'all

Now if the greeting above sounds a little un-English, I confess my first experience of the New World was as a just-left-school boy, aged 18, on an exchange from Plymouth (England) to Greenwood (Mississippi).  It was a great eye-opener to someone who had lived through the war – 1939 it began for us, and we had our home in Plymouth bombed, then were ourselves 'bombed out' (and all but killed) in Birkenhead and Greenock.  We were in those places, mother and I, because my father, in the Royal Navy, was sailing from those ports in his destroyer on the deadly Russian Convoys, to Murmansk and Archangel.  So while were were still suffering rationing in England, the sheer bounty of the USA came as a welcome surprise in 1953; as did the hospitality of my hosts.  Pre-integration Mississippi had its dark side, though, and a visit to the local gaol and seeing all the black faces on death row was a shock. 

Subsequently I have visited Texas a few times, stayed with friends in Washington DC and Kentucky, been on Conferences in LA and Baltimore, and even stayed briefly in New York.  My wife still treasures the comment of a Texan on hearing we were going on to the Big Apple: "Why?" he asked. "That's not America".  And neither is London England.  So any perspective I try to give concerning the Church in England at present will be a little Provincial, and not as London-centric as the news which Americans generally get from England.

As for churchmanship, I trained at the once great Theological College (seminary) of Cuddesdon, in the days when its monasticism was such that I had to get special permission from the Principal, Edward Knapp-Fisher, for my mother to step over the threshold of the Common Room.  It came as a shock, visiting the old place a year or two later, to find a notice to the effect that "Ladies Bath night in college is Friday and genetlemen are asked to avoid using the bathroom on King I those evenings".  Robert Runcie had taken over, liberalism had begun, and two of his proteges were signatories of the recent letter to the Times seeking to persuade the Church of England to permit same-sex blessings. 

The catholicism I learned there was Tractarian, reserved, did not care for dressing-up, was non-Papal, and used the Book of Common Prayer in its many revised forms.  I still celebrate 1662 (approx) Holy Communion every Thursday here in my retirement, though as a 'Flying Bishop' I found most of the parishes in my care used the Roman Missal, and I am equally at home with that.

So those are some of the lenses through which I see the Church today, and you must make allowances for those various distortions to my vision.