When the Church acts out its institutional anxiety, hypocrisy and self pity, embarrassed people switch off. Turn it onto Jesus, immerse ourselves in his spoken and lived teaching, and ears prick up. It also leads people to expect we will be genuinely aligned. I increasingly think I need to be a “Red Letter” Christian. My college tutors were horrified by red letter bibles’ apparent certainty about who was speaking when, but the principle increasingly makes sense to me.
If the Church prioritizes being a delivery vehicle for the Kingdom it cannot take itself too seriously, and will stay clear of fruitless culture wars about semi-irrelevancies. The only credible strategy has to be II Corinthians 4:
We preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake.
If it's any comfort II Timothy 2:23 shows that the early Church faced exactly the same challenges. We need to stay watchful and focussed on the things that Jesus cared about. And, as professional gardians of the sacred, we need to remember that his harshest words were reserved for people in our job. We have the greatest need to stay watchful, because it's easy to deceive ourselves that our business is automatically God's business, which it isn't always quite. Thus, Richard Rohr's daily email today strikes a resonant note for me:
In recent elections one would have thought that homosexuality and abortion were the new litmus tests of Christianity. Where did this come from? They never were the criteria of proper membership for the first 2000 years, but reflect very recent culture wars instead—and largely from people who think of themselves as “traditionalists”! The fundamentals were already resolved in the early Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed. Note that none of the core beliefs are about morality at all. The Creeds are more mystical, cosmological, and about aligning our lives inside of a huge sacred story. When you lose the mystical level, you always become moralistic as a cheap substitute.Jesus is clearly much more concerned about issues of pride, injustice, hypocrisy, blindness, and what I have often called “The Three Ps” of power, prestige, and possessions, which are probably 95% of Jesus’ written teaching. We conveniently ignore this 95% to concentrate on a morality that usually has to do with human embodiment. That’s where people get righteous, judgmental, and upset, for some reason. The body seems to be where we carry our sense of shame and inferiority, and early-stage religion has never gotten much beyond these “pelvic” issues. As Jesus put it, “You ignore the weightier matters of the law—justice, mercy, and good faith . . . and instead you strain out gnats and swallow camels” (Matthew 23:23-24). We worry about what people are doing in bed much more than making sure everybody has a bed to begin with. There certainly is a need for a life-giving sexual morality, but one could question whether Christian nations have found it yet. Christianity will regain its moral authority when it starts emphasizing social sin in equal measure with individual (read “body-based”) sin and weaves them both into a seamless garment of love and truth.
Academies are all the rage in England. It all began with visits by UK politicians to Charter Schools in the US, especially KIPP and the Harlem Children's Zone. Here were transformational inner city projects that helped the poorest achieve great things. They were also non-unionised, and non selective — indeed most energy was focussed on those with the greatest obstacles to learning. Almost 12,000 children's lives are impacted by HCZ, with an almost 100% graduation rate. What’s not to like?
Very little; indeed after spending a day in NY with HCZ, I’d love to see something similar in the UK. The current government-driven academies programme is a less than flattering imitation of the original.
HCZ Is bottom up, not top down. The whole notion of forcing people to convert to a Charter structure induced helpless mirth among our hosts.
HCZ is holistic, It takes a whole area of 79 blocks in the roughest end of Harlem, and attacks on several fronts at once, through 18 different programmes from parenting classes to litterpicks. The schools are not isolated from the rest of life.
HCZ is driven by educators, not politicians. It is happy for politicians to take a share of the credit and engage on a governance level, but they fiercely protect the integrity of their operation. This is no particular slight on their local politicians. It’s the only way it can build long term, and escape the doleful consequences of the political five year cycle. With a $95m budget, 70% of which is privately raised, it needs good business links. But donations do not buy anything operationally — companies simply have to buy into the programme as is.
HCZ is passionate about making sure all the credit for its achievement is placed with the people in its programmes themselves. It wants to grow leaders from within the community, not impose expertise from the outside.
HCZ is in for the long haul. It's not about getting impressive results ramped out for the next election but a forty year programme of broad social transformation.
Pushed to describe HCZ’s ultimate value, the word was “Equality.” It does not exclude children from its schools, but works with them to find a way through. Therefore the whole mechanism of exclusions and competition between schools at the heart of English State education since the eighties doesn’t apply.
Many in the UK mouth platitudes about improving education, but if they don’t actually believe in equality, the class system wins every time. Without the motive to engage in the way HCZ does, all our politicians are able to do is clip out bits of the Charter Schools programme that sound as though they might be appealing back home. Concept without values is meaningless. The result is a government that blunders around aping something from the US it doesn’t really understand, and wouldn't actually want if it did.
They say history begins as tragedy and ends as farce. Comparing the UK government driven approach to HCZ, I was reminded of Mimi the Persian Cat. Alive she was quite a looker. Stuffed by a semi-competent taxidermist, she lost her charms... Don’t our children deserve better than this?
Read the comments and weep. Everybody outside the Bubble sees that this is about discrimination. The C of E as a discriminatory body is running hard over thin air, way off a cliff that used to be there. What yesterday's synod debate demonstrated clearly is that binloads of dense legal verbiage actually obstructs understanding and mutual communication. Better just sit down, talk and arrange matters, like they have everywhere else in the world. It's the Gospel way. If this ludicrous Sir Humphrey approach is all that's possible, at least try and keep the legalese simple, brief & to the point.
When the Church acts out its institutional anxiety, hypocrisy and self pity, embarrassed people switch off. Turn it onto Jesus, immerse ourselves in his spoken and lived teaching, and ears prick up. It also leads people to expect we will be genuinely aligned. I increasingly think I need to be a “Red Letter” Christian. My college tutors were horrified by red letter bibles’ apparent certainty about who was speaking when, but the principle increasingly makes sense to me. 
If the Church prioritizes being a delivery vehicle for the Kingdom it cannot take itself too seriously, and will stay clear of fruitless culture wars about semi-irrelevancies. 
