Beyond words | 19 January 2008

By the time you read this I shall have watched two days of the 3rd Test between India and Australia at the WACA in Perth, and given a paper on how important good Church music is in the context of modern worship. Both events will not be without their political sides: the novelty of an Indian being penalised for racist comments about an Australian, however mixed-race, has not escaped the attention of cartoonists in the local media; and my lecture topic is designed to rebut the pronouncements of the current Dean of Sydney, whose extreme evangelical views have been making waves throughout the global Anglican communion for some years now.

The fact that the Dean and the Archbishop of Sydney are brothers makes the situation for lovers of good music at Sydney’s Anglican Cathedral especially unfortunate. For the parishioners there is no escaping the hard-line and destructive opinions of these two, whose double-whammy reminds one of the accumulation of power by the Kaczynski twins in Poland. There is a difference, though: the Kaczynskis never made any pretence about being politicians who wanted to be elected to high office; whereas the Jensen brothers speak derogatively about how formalised religion, with buildings, hierarchies and ritual, runs counter to the spirit of the early Church, and then allow themselves to be appointed to just the kind of posts they think shouldn’t exist.

One wonders how they came to be appointed in the first place. Here is what the Dean, the Very Reverend Phillip Jensen (a title he doesn’t hesitate to use), has to say about large religious buildings of the kind he now runs: ‘There is no discussion in the Bible about buildings. So we must not make too much of them, they are not central to God’s purpose, not important, not the church of God, not a replacement for the Temple.’