Why I still want to reflect on Anglicanism - Three Reasons

So, I want to contiune writing about Anglican issues. It would, I think, be tempting to ask why. After all it is now a little over four months since I left my ministry in Anglican churches and it doesn't look likley that I will be going back either to the Church of England or to Anglicanism more generally. So why continue to write about it?

I want to offer three good reasons (I think) and one bad one. These are:

1. To process. I have been an Anglican all my life. I was baptised as a child, confirmed as a teenager and ordained as an adult. I didn't do the last two lightly, I did them by conviction. Now, I have always prized other things as more important than my Anglicanism - I am both a Christian and an evangelical before I am an Anglican. Hence, in my resignation, although to some extent I have moved away from being an Anglican I have not lost my faith, nor stopped being an evangelical. I have also, at times, worshipped in other denominations - particularly Baptist Union churches and Nazarene churches, but I nver became a member and was never baptised as an adult, because I hadn't shifted my allegiance. At times over the debates of the last few years I have been told that I was always going to leave anyway. Now there have certainly been events that have set me on that trajectory, but it was never the case that I was confirmed or ordained whilst knowing that I would leave. So for me, I need to process the shift away from a major part of my spiritual and church life. To do so on a blog simply helps me get things down in an orderly way and allows others to discuss that with me.
2. To reflect. The battle for conservative evangelicals like me has been both hard and intense over the past few years. With shifts on women bishops and then on ethics such as sexuality and transgender issues it has been hard to keep up. Working in a diocese that has pushed hard in the direction of liberlisation and, from my perspective, has been far from friendly to those who hold a conservative theology has made the battle all the more intense. I have felt I was constantly asking myself what the right thing to do about this or that issue and situation was. In the intensity it has not always been easy to see the wood for the trees nor to get things in proportion. At a distance I have a chance to reflect and hopefully be a little more objective, especially about where I have been right or wrong in the past in my assessment of things.
3. To be a critical friend. When I started as a school governor, the expression "critical friend" was used to describe the governor role. It describes, I suppose something of being both an insider and an outsider, or having a foot in each camp. There is enough inside knowledge and care about the school to make a useful contribution and enough distance to be critical in the best sense of that word so as to help the school do better. I wonder if that is something I am placed to do with respect to the Church of England. I was saying today that no longer having a post has given me a joyful freedom from all the emotional and practical impacts of the decisions of bishops, archdeacons and the like. However, I still have a pretty good idea what the impact is!

I hope they may be good reasons to still want to reflect on Aglicanism and its issues. I want to do that charitably if possibe, which leads me to the bad reason. What is it? Simple: to self-justify! That would be easy, to constantly blog about why I was so right to do X, Y or Z. For what it's worth i think I've probably done enough of that and seen enough of that. So I will try to avoid it.