Feline Fakir, Fake but Fun

With the blog on the blink, Lucy and I are missing the kids and the cat already, but we’ll soldier on, buoyed up by something I came across whilst googling around Eastern religions, a bit of innocent whimsy for the simple hearted from, er, the far West. Here, hot from LA, the city with 143 Jesus Christs in the phone book (and that's just Venice Beach), is a man who puts the Yogi into Yogi Bear. East is East and this ain’t it.

source: Yogakitty

Sweet taste of India

Not the Monty Python Gas Man Sketch, but the Visa queue at India House the other day. Lucy (aka the Bishopamma) and I are going, with Leslie Stephen, Director of Education, for a week in the Diocese of Nandyal, part of the Church of South India.

Earlier this year Bishop Lawrence came to visit us and spoke to our head teachers conference. Now we are going to his diocese, bearing greetings, to meet people and lay strong foundations, we hope, for a really fruitful mutually educational partnership, meeting clergy, helping with a chapel dedication, and seeing how we can be part of the Nandyal schools & clergy development programme. I’m very much looking forward to meeting people, and discovering new opportunities and friendships. I’m very keen to learn from Indian faith siblings how Church feels in the context of thousands of gods and languages, and a fully ecumenical diocese.

All will be revealed, but not every day, or perhaps even any day this week. Bangalore is hi-tech, but a lot of the time we’ll be in Nandyal (Andhra Pradesh, too small for the Rough guide) and rural villages and schools. Anyway this week’s about meeting people, not tiddling with technology. So, the blog's on the blink for next week, but I'll take the camera and a notebook, along with the Imodium and antimalarials. Watch this space!

Santa says...

Give it a rest this year. At least this is what he was saying, in this very British Lord Kitchener incarnation I saw yesterday morning, sprayed onto a wall (tut tut) near a cash machine in Turl Street Oxford. This could be a good year to beware & think twice about what we're really doing. We'd all be happier if we went modest, and did less of the “Gadarene Swine down the shops” thing. The Canadian Mennonites are appealing to us all to rethink this one a bit. Adbusters tries to help people curb their spending habits and, surprise surprise, has real difficulty getting ads like this published:
This is worth pondering as we try to reclaim Christmas from the wreckage of the “holiday season.”

Stop the world. I want to get on!

Yesterday evening I chaired a well attended public Climate change consultation at St Michael’s Amersham, with Revd Profesor Ian James (head of the school of Mathematics, Meteorology and Physics at Reading University), Sandeep Sengupta (International Relations doctoral student from the Enivronmental Change Institute, Oxford University) and Miranda St John Nicolle (Diocesan Environmental Group). We got a comprehensive overview of the basic science, human and development issues, and practical possibilities. I found the whole experience disturbing and energising.

1. We have a phenomenal depth of expertise and passion about environmental justice in this diocese. Out and about, if I say "gay bishops" everybody except the occasional couple of zealots glazes over almost instantaneously. When I engage about Creation, which I do rather more often, I notice that people light up. Of course they do. There are four or five verses in the Bible that just possibly could have anything at all to do with the Gay issue. Meanwhile ruddy great chunks of it, say a fifth of the text, is the Creator’s love song — heavens proclaiming God's glory, people exercising stewardship, prophets drawing messages from God out of nature. Apart from the anoraks, a few religious correspondents and rentaquote coteries, nobody in long trousers actually gives a pig's burp about gay bishops, compared to staying alive. Sometimes I feel like a kind of Kierkegaard / Nietzsche character who sees the village is burning down and runs into the square shouting, but nobody wants to know! This diocese is already engaging closely with the environmental challenge in a few parishes and most of our schools. Now we need to get out onto the streets more. We need to change, whilst there's still anything left to argue about. Here endeth the Bishop's rant!
2. No it doesn’t! The hacks are brilliant, and are doing some great consciousness raising, thank God, but UK editors still give astounding amounts of airtime to wacko contrarians, as though there were any doubt about the basic science. For them it's just another story. For everyone else it has to be more than that. It took us forty years, nationally, to learn about smoking and health, and change our public habit. We haven't got that kind of time on this one.
   
3. Lambeth 08 will be a fantastic opportunity to network around and explore the global dimension Sandeep talked us through last night. I'm taking his stuff with me on my pre-Lambeth South India schools visit next week (watch this space), and I'm praying we get quality time together on it next July at Lambeth, especially if we can pull together the various strands like we did at last night's seminar.

What is God going to say to the Anglican Church in the hour of death and the day of judgment? Well done, you sorted out the property disputes over gays in Virginia but, oops, bad news, you destroyed my world! It's time to get real and get out there.

Look out, there’s a monster coming

According to a report earlier this year in the Daily Mail

Health chiefs are spending thousands of pounds ordering churches to put up signs banning smoking. The decision has left religious leaders bemused because, they say, no one smokes in places of worship anyway.

The Botafumeiro of Santiago de Compostela shows there are Churches in the world that appreciate smoke, and flash photography. Just don’t try this with your house group at home...

Even if every Church can't have one of these (why not?), surely it could recruit a Quasimodo/ Oompa Loompa crew to get the things that really matter done around the place. That would bring men back to the Church.
So what’s the most distracting piece of kit you've ever seen in Church?

as long as a piece of string

Looking ahead to Advent, which I’m going through this year with Maggi Dawn’s reflections Beginnings and Endings, the cover and blurb drew me into thinking about time; time (chronos — how long), and time (kairos — opportunity). And what about the context of both: beyond time what? — eternity? Infinity? world without end?

We can use a bit of Maths here. How long is the coastline of Britain? There’s an AA Road Atlas answer, which is good enough for most purposes, but there’s also a completely different Mathematical answer, which you could express by breaking down every line and mapping it as a set of points in a complex plane to form a fractal. Here’s a Mandelbrot set (not the coast of Britain). If the final frame were the width of your screen, the whole fractal would be larger than the known universe — it’s an interesting image to pray with... world without end?

...that Christ may reign

I spent time yesterday on a right wing US Anglican website and, once I acclimatised to the sarcasm and bitterness, I found I respected the logic, and rather sympathised with the sincere desire not to jettison tradition. After twenty minutes someone with whom I was sharing the experience said “If that's what being an Anglican is, I'd rather be an atheist.” Why did twenty minutes on a traditionalist website make anyone feel like becoming an atheist?
“I respect their point of view. But it’s so pushy and vituperative. What is their problem? And when you look behind the words, it's so angry and self-important — The Pooters do God, in their own image. It’s like moralistic road rage.”

“Oh,” I said. It’s got a bit of Pelagian feel, I suppose. ”

“Wossat?”

“Well, the original was a fifth century holiness movement gone wrong. They started out OK, but they lost the script about Grace, and what was left was their own earnest endeavour, which they mistook for faith, which is actually a gift. They forgot that, and on that foundation they built a curious amalgam of righteousness and judgmentalism, with a powerful "pull your socks up" mandate aimed hard at everyone. St Augustine tried to point out the problem, but found there wasn’t a lot of point trying to argue with people like that. Pelagianism was invented by an Englishman called, guess what, Pelagius. The English love it. 1000 years later it still achieved special mention in the 39 articles. It's a well meaning Anglo-Saxon makeover for God that turns the Church into a Myers-Briggs J-Club, designed to vindicate its own high standards, set a good example and so make people good.”

“Doesn’t the Church exist to make people good?”

“The Church exists that Christ may reign, said holy man Michael Ramsey. Our morals, right or wrong, don't make us Christians. We do not make the Church by signing up. He makes the Church, Ramsey said, by his death and resurrection. We get in by grace, freely given. None of us can do anything to deserve it, and none of us can do anything to stop him loving us. It’s a kingdom, secured not by our efforts but by his choosing. He fills all, and one day will gather it up in himself, (Colossians). We celebrate Christ the Universal King as a reality check. Which it was for me today.”

Walloon Evangelism Process Failure

Last Saturday, Evangelism. This Saturday, thanks to Dave Walker’s wonderful Cartoon Blog (complete with excellent cartoon) How Not to Do It.

This is the story of a Norfolk pastor called Leslie Potter, who has been evangelising by sticking his sermons in old plastic bottles and chucking them into the North Sea hoping they will land in Germany or France, people will get them out and read them, and so be evangelised. In fact the wind did blow, and the Billows did rise (like they do), and the Word of Life was soon back on the beach, annoying the dogwalkers. Said DW’s got the sermons out instead of the Germans, and told the council, who have now done poor ol’ Pastor Leslie for littering. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

There are various messages in these particular bottles:

1. Jesus was right (Luke 5:38) — new wine really does need new containers.
   
2. (Dave’s questions) What language did he do it in? and (supplementary, but Poirot fans want to know) what’s wrong with the Belgians?
   
3. This story contains all the elements that make UK Retro enamel badge Evangelicalism so appealing — faith collapsed into hopeless optimism, sociopathic well-meaningness, Holy disregard of collateral reality, high minded determintion to persist and be right. On the Western Front this guy (if only he survived ten minutes) would have got promotion.
   
4. The best bit is, who knows, maybe someone was even more blessed than the dogwalkers were annoyed, perhaps by the sheer loonery of it! Only time will tell.
   
5. Even for those old enough to remember that 60’s classic The Gospel Blimp, This has to be, surely, the most dumb*ss tactic ever to Propogate the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Unless, that is, you know otherwise...

O Brave new world that has such creatures in it!

At last! Rare as Kingfishers by the towpath or Giant Pandas mating — an intelligent analysis of current Anglican shenanigans. Anglican Communion in Crisis, by Miranda K. Hassett started life as a Princeton thesis. A social anthropologist, she examines alliances between disgruntled Episcopalians and African Churches with hi-fact lo-bile rigour. That in itself makes this book rather special. If you really want to know what’s happening & why, forget the Fleet Street comics — read this.

Based on fieldwork in the Southern US and Uganda, mostly 1997-2003, Hassett zeroes in on a very popular hypothesis (connected with Philip Jenkins’ groundbreaking book The Next Christendom) about the global realignment in Christianity, where the decadent North sinks as the vibrant South rises:

This globalizing work has profoundly entangled two processes: first, the growing power and assertiveness of Southern Anglicans in an Anglican Communion still struggling with the implications of decolonization; and second, American conservatives’ search for Southern allies to help discipline the Episcopal Church.

Most commentators on globalization see it as a liberalising phenomenon. Passionately pursuing their sincere ends, however, Anglican Right Wingers have surfed the cutting edge of globalization. Those who believed they had lost out in the US gay debate threw themselves into a vigorous process of alliance building — networking on steroids — to outflank what they saw as the triumphant liberal ascendancy back home. This had absolutely nothing to do, in itself, with the Bible or theology, and everything to do with US Church politics. Thus surprisingly yoked together, “Rwandan” churches appeared in the American South, and one African archbishop began loading his big guns with roundshot prepared by hitherto obscure powder monkeys from places like Virginia and Oxford.

US dissidents were first to harness the globalizing panjandrum, especially after Lambeth 1998, but it may start rolling back on them as the internet spreads open society values indiscriminately and undermines simple concepts of what the "Global South" is. Outside the rarefied world of Anglican office politics, the majority tendency has been in a socially liberal direction. Poland and Ireland, for example, have reinvented their social mores in astonishingly short time-frames under the impact of globalization.

Hassett, provides the first really competent outside historical account of the origins of AMiA. She doesn't buy the cynical idea that this is just an exchange of gifts, US money for outflanking legitimacy. There is very much more going on. All the proposed driving factors (post colonialism, material interest, communications technology, etc) receive a judicious "Yes, but..." from Hassett. This is a war of perceptions — a shooting match in a hall of mirrors. The wise will beware taking anything at face value. Anglicanism is particularly susceptible to Rock-Scissors-Paper games, because of its simple traditional ecclesiology centred on the diocese rather than denominational HQ (which doesn’t exist), and its global openness combined with a general freedom from centralised authoritarianism. But kid yourself not, everybody's in for this argument in the end, on this planet anyway. Most have been having it for years, and continue to have it, but in a rather more crypto way.

Hassett treats all parties carefully, with great respect and profound understanding. She doesn’t suggest that anthropology is the definitive path to enlightnement. She doesn’t discount theology, but her social anthrolpolgical spotlight does flood this fascinating aspect of globalising Christianity with fresh light. In some ways contemporary communications help us all know other people infinitely better, but they also undermine, in significant ways, our capacity to understand what we think we know of others. The US catches a cold, and the rest of the (Anglican) world sneezes, hard. Bless!

Poetry and Religion

On a day some sit down for turkey dinners, and some celebrate Saint Cecilia, patron of musicians, two pictures of arrayed religion I took a couple of years ago in Växjö Cathedral (Sweden) where they do incredible things with glass, and a poem from the incomparable Les Murray, Catholic Poet, who writes poems to the glory of God:

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.
A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.
Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?
You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,
fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror
that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry
or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

Wodbine Willie says...

Before leaving this season of Remembrance, a passage from the writings of G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, World War I Uberchaplain and evangelist, caught my eye. Democracy and the Dog-Collar (1921) is about the organisation of working life, reacting to the claim that the First World War was a failure of Christianity, but this says something powerful about ecclesiology, too...

TRUE PERPETUITY IS ONLY OBTAINED BY PERPETUAL READINESS TO CHANGE
ORGANISED Christianity is a failure, but then organised anything is a failure. Christianity is a life, and you cannot really organise life in its fulness. It always tends to break its body and reform it into a more perfect expression of its real soul. It is not only organised religious life that fails and is always crying out for reformation; organised political life fails, and is always crying out for reformation. That is the necessity that lies behind political change. An organisation that was not a failure could never hope ultimately to succeed — it would be dead. Christ has always been greater than His Church, and always must be, until His Church becomes the new Jerusalem and the Kingdom of God.

Remembrance on the roads

On Sunday I was in Thame to help lead the annual Thames Valley Police Road Death Victims service. 3 people a week die on our local roads, 70% of them under 45. That this is one of thirty events around the country indicates the sheer scale of the heartache that people have to carry after these catastrophic bereavements. Worldwide, it’s the equivalent of a 9/11 every day. David Wilbraham, force chaplain reminded us never to forget in the dark that which we knew in the light of those we love. He quoted an old bit of wisdom from Lancashire mill towns where he served his curacy, which calls all of our life a weaving:

Not till the loom is silent, And shuttles cease to fly,
Will God unroll the canvas, And explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful In the Skillful Weaver’s hand,
As the threads of gold & silver In the pattern He has planned.

Road death is the sort of problem most of us just don’t want to think of most of the time, but it happens every day. Dr Cicely Davey, who lost her husband only two years ago recited a poem. The courage of the people I met was overwhelming, and the kindness and consideration of those present from Police, Ambulance, Fire & rescue and NHS emergency services. Every day they tackle what has to be one of the most harrowing and unpleasant jobs there is, and here they were helping people through the long term slog of coping with what happened in an instant, gently and considerately. Also there were Roadpeace, Brake, and Sara Thornton, Chief Constable. The service culminated with an act of remembrance with white petals on the altar, one for each life commemorated, and two minutes silence. Supt Mick Doyle led prayers near the end of the service:

We can shed tears that they have gone
Or we can smile that they have lived.
We can close our eyes and pray that they will come back
Or we can open our eyes and see all the good they have left us.
Our hearts can be empty because we cannot see them
Or our hearts can be full with the love we have shared.
We can turn our backs on tomorrow and live yesterday
Or we can be happy for tomorrow, because of yesterday.
We can remember them and only that they have gone
Or we can cherish their memory and let it live on.
We can cry and close our minds, be empty and turn our backs
Or we can do what they would have wanted:
Smile, open our eyes, love and go on.

Game of Two Halves?

You can’t always get what you want. So, for those who don’t believe in the possibility of trampolining elephants, here’s another future for the dear old C of E, from the ghastly, but compelling, Criss Angel:
h/t to Nick (Wilson) for showing me this.
PS Don't have a cow. It's been like this (Trust me — I am Cambridge trained historian, yes?) for at least the last 1300 years...
PPS CA must use little/ exceptional people n’est-ce pas? Or ET?

60 years on

The Queen’s and Price Philip’s diamond wedding anniversary — Lucy reminded me at morning prayer. I don’t know if HM has sent herself a telegram, but it’s significant that after the official celebrations yesterday the happy couple are spending today together privately.
Having a monarchy of a thousand years (today is St Edmund’s day) provides public milestones as well as a daily soap for the Sun. Pretty much like the Old Testament, we still set at the iconic heart of our national life a human being, not an idea, or a piece of paper, or the force of the gun. It’s bedrock for a civilised, stable and progressive society. In spite of all the bitterness and cynicism in the world, what we celebrate today is pretty simple. All relationships have their wraths and sorrows, and some are pretty awful. However, some couples (I believe, statistically, most couples) do make it! Why should our eye be evil, because some, sadly don’t (“Honi soit qui mal y pense”). Various events are bringing together others in Britain celebrating their diamond weddings this year, we should all, surely, congratulate them all and wish them all good that can be. As usual, Rowan caught the essence of the matter yesterday:

Every marriage is an act of faith. When you think about it, the promise to be in the company of the same person for a lifetime is an extraordinary thing to undertake; it is a statement of trust in one another and in the future which can never be free of risk. Another person, however well I think I know him or her, however confident I am about the mutual attraction between us, is still going to be deeply mysterious, beyond my control. Giving away my life to them is quite a step...
Before we complain too loudly about a world of disposable relationships and short-term policies, a world of fracturing and insecure international bonds and the decline of trust, we should remember today that we have cause for thanksgiving – thanksgiving that God has made human beings capable, against all the odds, of reflecting his own completely costly and self-giving commitment to his world; that the gift of marriage makes this capacity visible in our world; and that, in the lives of the couple with whom today we join in celebration, that bracing, renewing and hopeful vision of faithful generosity has been for sixty years set so clearly before our eyes

Autumn Leaves

On the morning after our first slushy snowfall of this winter, pictures to establish that we do Mists and Mellow fruitfulness over here, as well as in France, taken a week ago as I snickered out to do an 8·00 prayer book service at Wotton Underwood...

Creation and Creativity 2

Here, as the UN Secretary General has warned about global warning, is a piece of real creativity! h/t Martin Everitt for emailing me the original...

Redeeming the E Word

A helpful practical presentation about Evangelism at Diocesan synod by Bishop Stephen. Mission =

Everything that the gospel of God’s love in Christ does in the world

and Evangelism =

Processes whereby people become Disciples (not “churchgoers” or “converts”)

Classic C of E thinking was that Evangelism was basically Advertising, something we weren’t any good at. We left Evangelism to everyone else, including a few designated “evangelicals.” Everyone knew where to find us, and in the end people could graduate ozmotically to our superior brand! Not very glorious. The Decade of Evangelism did reveal some basic realities about how evangelism works.

One basic model just zips along from Contact to Commitment. To know the Christian community is to love it! Not. But For some people it really does work like this, a kind of hole in one. Why waste time thinking about it? Just load up on tracts and resources, and get out onto the streets — The Vivien method. It's by no means dishonorable. It often, however puts far more people off than on, which was not exactly the idea in the first place...

For most people this simple blatant model just doesn’t work, for personality reasons quite apart from anything else. God just didn’t make them that way. The average journey time is 4 -5 years, for a start...

During that time, people need some fairly basic things — a place to be accepted for who they are and to belong, with opportunities for discovery when they want it, and personl understanding and support.

This is the place for courses of one sort or another; but their effectiveness is almost entirely contextual not as something in itself. What counts isn’t the content of the curriculum, but the love and realism people find, and the generosity, and the space to explore for themselves. Actually, small churches can provide this nurture just by being themselves. They don't have to be all zapped up; in fact it almost helps not to be.

Strangely enough once people do commit themselves, sharing and generosity naturally develop a sense of vocation. As people respond to that, confidence grows, and they grow in the things they really care about in a way that’s infectious.

So what? provide contexts for nurture and growth, and the community of faith will grow, says this model. It's the way communities of faith always have grown. Christianity is essentially a way of life, not a religion or code of morals or ideology. I warm to the simplicity of this process, like the early Churches traveling light institutionally. Am I right to warm to this? If I did, I'd be in good company (h/t Ian Macdonald) — “the Church of God does not have a mission, but the God of mission has a church.” (Robin Greenwood)

It all comes down, in the end to the kind of community we are. In these terms, we get the growth we really want, deep down, and the growth appropriate to who we are. Since World War I, Dick Shepherd and others, The C of E has increasingly had to realise this is an exam in which we cannot cheat, and about which the punters sometimes, pretty much have our number! If we want people to become disciples, we need to be disciples!

Creation and Creativity 1

Along the lines of someone who did the warmup slot at Willow Creek last year, Ilana Yahav, Sand Artist

Early Years excellence

I went yesterday to reopen St Andrew’s Church of England Infant School, in Great Linford, a genuine village pocket of Milton Keynes. It’s had to reinvent itself, against the odds, after losing a much-loved, long serving head. Small scale and limited resources make total renewal a very challenging process. Frankly, St Andrew's almost went under, but with hard work, inspirational leadership from Anne Sheddon, a community campaign that surprised the powers that be, along with brilliant support from parents and friends including Peter Ballantine (local vicar), this school is really humming. Completely refurbished, it now has a staff room, admin area, head teacher's office and excellent learning space, along with a thatched barn that’s crying out for a village nativity one day. Everything now feels so right you wonder how it used to be!
The small scale helps everyone feel valued in a very special way, but what struck me most, apart from a fantastic whole school Space display, was the excellence of its approach to early years education.

Early Years language education is a big national can of worms. Pretty much everywhere else in Europe children get far more enriched kindergarten experience before being expected to tackle academics. The English are obsessed with formal learning, and stack the whole system top-down so that you get far less money for labour intensive early years work than you do later! It's one reason that, in spite of so much hard work, we achieve such low national language standards at 11 compared to, e.g., Nordic countries. Children can survive, and some even excel at, formal early years working, but for many of them the national curriculum learning process for writing is a house built on sand. Imagine how discouraging it would be to have a pushy football coach if you had only basic ball skills and confidence. You’d fake it, and feel bad most of the time. With writing, notoriously, some boys (particularly) half get it, then sign off and become increasingly disaffected throughout key stage two. Backfilling pre-learning attitudes and skills with bored tweenagers is blue murder.

At St Andrew’s they take an approach pioneered in Sweden by Ragnhild Ousorren called Write Dance. This uses physical and social activity to grow spatial awareness, confidence and pre-writing skills. Children really enjoy themselves, acquiring (without knowing this is what they’re doing) pre-writing skill, in a very engaged, multisensory way with music. As a result, they stand a very much greater chance of achieving confidence with writing in a couple of years time. Until we can tame the ignorant naional obsession with formality in the early years we won't achieve Nordic standards of language learning excellence. They just might here, though! At least they are trying to help their children achieve real confidence and competence with writing, and the result is fun, learning and joy.

Aircrew or Snakes on a plane?

In every area of life Teams draw the best out of people and get the job done better. Sadly, many teams aren’t really teams — just clumps, playing out their inability to get on together, and fouling each other up. That really matters if the Benedictine principle that best discipleship comes through community works. It does.

Linda Gratton and Tamara Erickson have published a helpful (current) HBR article on Eight ways to build Collaborative Teams. Biggest foul ups?

1. Size — too big in business (too small in Church?)
2. Badly managed diversity
   
3. Virtual working: doing most things by email rather than personally
   
4. Herding Cats: High education levels and overactive Egos

With a spiritual twist, these foul-ups can be radically upsetting and intractible. You end up with a team that isn't a team, just the Vicar’s fan club — or, even worse, anti-fan club. So what? Gratton and Erickson suggest eight ways of fighting back and making your team a real team:

1. Investing in an environment to support real teamwork — in business, designing working space appropriately. In Church, taking the pews out (in various senses).
2. Modelling collaborative behaviour — The same issue in any context. Leaders and senior staff have to do what they commend to every one else. Just do it.
   
3. Creating a gift culture — supporting social and professional networks, and mentoring. In Church growing cultures of generosity rather than a demoralising rationing mentality that kills off all joy.
4. Training to raise emotional intelligence. Good news — anyone can acquire people skills if they work at it. Bad news — they have to work at it. Focused learning works infinitely better in this area than happenstance and good intentions.
5. Working to grow a strong sense of community. People often look to churches for community, but it has to be worked at hard, especially in dormitory communities of pressurised people. ‘Christians are people who pray and have parties.’ (Bishop Jack Nicholls)
   
6. Assigning leaders who are task and relationship orientated. Brits tend to be task driven and relationship weak (stand offish and/or implicit).
7. Building on heritage relationships. In business, putting people who know each other together. In Church, bearing in mind the baggage, and using positive baggage to hold luggage that needs transporting. Also, avoiding year zero thinking, and using the (usually abundant) history for blessing and enrichment not cursing and limiting possibilities.
   
8. Role Clarity/ Task ambiguity. With fuzzy generalised idealistic expectations, and the way they load all accountability on to the few, along with their tendency to no agreed metrics and high judgmentalism, churches are almost conspiracies to foster Role ambiguity and Task Clarity!

So, team ministry or ministry team, ask:

• Is our team a team?
  
• How is this so?
• If not, why not?
  
• What's the single thing I can do to make us more what we say we are?

Ice Cream Moghul Loses (Ball) Bearings

Here’s Ben Cohen. He co-founded Quirky Vermont Icecream business Ben & Jerry’s:

Crazy Guy. Now here’s Peter Maurin. He co-founded a Catholic Worker movement, Pete & Dorothy’s:

If we are crazy it is because we refuse to be crazy in the same way that the world has gone crazy... The future will only be different if we make the present different.

Now, who’s really crazy here? And, just putting in a word for the couple of dozen BB's with Union Jacks on them, why do “we,” along with the guys who have 10,000 ball bearings, get to lead the whole world in its high crusade to prevent other people getting any ball bearings — which they surely shouldn't have, because only a maniac would want any.
To quote Father Dougal, “Ted. I'm going mad.”

We would see Jesus

On this day (1836) died Charles Simeon, Evangelical leader. Born in 1759 at Reading, he spent most of his life in Cambridge as Fellow of King’s College and vicar of Holy Trinity Church, where I used to go to Church as an undergraduate. Lord Macaulay said of him

his authority and influence... extended from Cambridge to the most remote corners of England, ...his real sway in the Church was far greater than that of any primate.

The source of Simeon’s influence was clearly focused discipleship. Around the inside of the pulpit of Holy Trinity, where only the preacher could see it, he engraved the words of the Greeks in John 12:21, “Sir, we would see Jesus.”
Simeon walked faithfully within the constraints of the unreconstructed Georgian Church of England, helping young disciples not to spin off up their own pious rear ends. Simeon took God and his Word more seriously than his own attempts to follow God and his Word. He refused to allow discipleship to be cheapened into mere zealotry, and the results were transformational. He led a new wave that reached around the world (he was one of the founders of CMS) and transformed English society, abolishing slavery, and bringing in socially progressive legislation to protect children and others, under the parliamentary leadership of Lord Shaftesbury.
At the roots of Simeon’s discipleship was an awareness of grace, as a way of life:

With this sweet hope of ultimate acceptance with God, I have always enjoyed much cheerfulness before men; but I have at the same time laboured incessantly to cultivate the deepest humiliation before God.

This was no false modesty, but the theological principle that gave discipleship a real cutting edge

Our holiness is an effect, not a cause; so long as our eyes are on our own personal whiteness as an end in itself, the thing breaks down.

The crude moral is, perhaps, that when disciples stay close to Jesus and grow up, stop faffing around Church politics and pull their finger out they can really make a difference.

What to do if you can’t Swim.

Criss Angel, that is. And how it’s done...

Remembrance, progress and hope

Remembrance this year included dedicating a new school war memorial at Wargrave Piggott School, and a village service at Worminghall. Lists of names make the point that wars involve particular human beings, not just walk-on parts in war movies or computer games. With a small amount of imagination you can spot the family connections, even in small village communities.
Here are some postwar musings of Woodbine Willie, about winning the peace:

Trying to cure Europe of its present miseries by mere information and intellectual education is like trying to cure a man suffering from peritonitis by giving him a new pair of pyjamas. The only hope is in something that goes deeper than reason, and purges and purifies the underworld of man’s irrational self. The primitive passion must be opposed by, and overcome by, a purer passion of greater power — a passion for God and his humanity, which is true religion...
...It is easy to get out of trouble by sweeping generalisations which enable you to take sides, and shift the blame to someone else. It is easy to say that the workers are work-shy, and the employers greedy, and to turn the problem into a battle. It is always easy to get out of thinking and praying by fighting, always easy, and always useless and mean. But with that sort of nonsense Christianity can have nothing to do.

Back to the future...

Churchwardens Day at Waddesdon School. One of the seminar groups described vividly the scale and scope of change being experienced in our parishes. David Ford calls contemporary life as “a series of multiple overwhelmings” We know exactly what he means in our families, our schools, our churches, our communities, our country.
Most of the statistics around our lives are unprecedented, but maybe they always were. What was it like, say, to be a churchwarden in Buckinghamshire at the time of the Black Death, with half the population dying, or the Civil War with all conventional authority dissolving? How did the Saint Wandrille brothers feel when the Vikings came up the Seine and burnt everything down, or the French Revolutionaries dissolved the community and destroyed its Church after more than a thousand years (then)? Without some consciousness that we come from God and are returning to God, I think we'd all go barmy.
Indulging a few moments’ historical imagination around issues of long-term change management, I found this medieval monks’ helpline for people struggling with change, off a Norwegian comedy show:

Credits to Øystein og jeg on NRK (2001), Øystein Backe (tech support guy) and Rune Gokstad (desperate monk). Written by Knut Nærum.

Muslims & Christians in Wycombe

Buckinghamshire New University, to help launch the Council for Christian & Muslim Relations for High Wycombe. This body isn’t something downloaded from the centre. It began with spontaneous meetings between religious leaders following the 10/8/06 arrests in Wycombe, led by Chaudhry Shafique and Revd David Picken, Team Rector. It was a great honour to share a keynote slot with Dr Khursid Ahmed, from the British Muslim Forum.
There’s already a developed faiths sharing network in the town. This enterprise is about building community.
The launch and seminar was backed by local imams, clergy, school leaders, and representatives from the Council (including Valerie Razzaq, mayor), Mohammad Azaz (recently appointed Thames Valley Police Community & Diversity officer), Dr Ruth Farwell, (University Vice Chancellor), Matthew Kitching (President of the Students' Union), and Paul Goodman, local MP. Paul is personally deeply engaged in promoting community cohesion on a national level, as well as locally. The panel for questions included Rahida Khazi, educationalist. It was really good to meet Maqsood Ahmed, Government adviser for Communities and Local government. It’s always humbling to be part of something that’s high powered on all fronts.
This faith-based regeneration network is about “tolerance plus” — understanding and respecting everyone for who they are with their particular identities, rather than patronising, synthesising or homogenizing them.
One big issue is perceptions. Local press are usually professional, well earthed and informed, but national media can be gobsmackingly ignorant and biased. After the 10/8 arrests a national TV channel carried a headline picture of the evil mosque where everything was planned — a foreign looking building with a dome — actually St George's Church Sands! You'd think the ten foot Cross on the roof would be a hint, but that's religious illiteracy for you. Tom Davies, journalist in Northern Ireland in the early 80’s, told me years ago how they used to set up kids to throw stones for the UK papers.
Global perceptions have a local impact. An information society really does need clean information. That's as big a challenge in the current climate of hysteria and ignorance as it is for communities to relate to their own young people, and articulate their positive aspirations in the public square. Wycombe is one community getting together to build respect and understanding by taking on these challenges, and I was proud and delighted to be part of this launch.

Praying for the peace of Jerusalem?

CCJ Middle East briefing at the House of Commons with Professor Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis. Joke: CNN asked on the streets of Tel Aviv for a summary outlook. One word? “Good.” Two words? “Not Good!”

Wikipedia’s List of middle East peace proposals since 1919, says “this list is incomplete. You can expand it.” But how? Looking ahead to the Annapolis Convention, what exactly could this be whenever it happens?

1. The Crowning moment of a peace process? Lovely idea, but crowning what?
   
2. An opportunity to negotiate, like Camp David? fine, but Bush ain’t no Carter or Clinton in this region, especially not post-Iraq. Post-Iraq?
   
3. a Launching board for a new process phase, as the Madrid conference was? It could be, but will need careful timetabling and focus to reassure the parties they can move forward.

For what could we all focus prayers right now in the middle east?

1. Stabilization — West Bank settlement activity ends / Palestinians end violence. Great idea. All attempts so far to do this have failed...
2. Road Map 2 — “provisional state building” / “Comprehensive armistice” Some kind of recognition thing would be a start.
3. Negotiate permanent status agreement — ideal, but who’s really ready for this, and how?

It would be lovely to think that Annapolis could be more than a high class photo opportunity. But how, I wondered?

1. The cleansing of historical memory on all sides is fundamental. Competing narratives cannot be reconciled right now, not even on the level of “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” They have to be acknowledged for what they are, and how they impact the communities that hold them. Mental note to read the new edition of Benny Goodman’s analysis.
2. The good ol’ British Army Bloody Fool theory says the other lot are just like they are because they are who they are. Because everyone is, to a certain extent, a bloody fool, it explains everything. This thinking produces designer conflicts on the TV news, which the media just feed, like they used to in Northern Ireland. Stereotypes are not enough. Just say no. Progress will only come as people, including “us”, are willing to go the second mile, imaginatively, compassionately, and rationally. This means acknowledging provisionality but not losing hope. It means assessing people’s motives in terms of their basic needs and perceptions, and refusing to create simple goodies and baddies. When tempted to settle for “they just do it because they are...” just say no.
   
3. The Scriptures picture a future that is God’s, and hold out hope. It's always necessary to be realistic about others’ motives and intentions, but all forms of cynicism, including crude instrumentalism, are not enough. Everybody has legitimate needs and aspirations. How could these fit together? Religious people have a special duty, and, theoretically, special resources to cherish and model respect, imagination, compassion and understanding. Religion that doesn't do these things is just licensed insanity.