This letter appears in today's Leicester Mercury:
Bishop guilty of three errors
The Bishop, in asking whether we would be more fulfilled "if there was no monarch to act as head of the Established Church" (First Person, February 18), gets three things wrong.
The first is grammatical; when we ask hypothetical questions we use the subjunctive mood, so what he should have said is "if there were no monarch".
The second is constitutional. Since the days of Elizabeth I the monarch has been styled "the supreme governor". And to get that wrong is, far more seriously, to get Christian belief wrong.The Head of the church, of any church, is Christ.
This understanding goes back to a momentous passage in the Epistle to the Colossians, when the author says of Christ: "He is the head of the body, the church" (1:18).
Richard Gill, Leicester
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