Back to Church Sunday Back to Back

Back to Church Sunday at Emmanuel, Chesham, a classic Evangelical church which has grown so much they now need two shifts on Sunday mornings. Emmanuel started out as a Victorian daughter church, which built a new contemporary worship area (with expansion pods on the sides) in the early 90’s. They went on to convert the old building into working space for groups and activities. John Shepherd, Vicar, is a quiet leader; biblically centred, high on reflective obedience rather than extravert high jinks... and the place is just heaving with people. It’s got one of the easiest worship groups to sing with — supportive rather than domineering. This church grows ordinands, and is amazingly engaged all around the community it serves.

With sustained organic growth in numbers over recent years Emmanuel has had to double up morning services. It was strange to lead exactly the same service with John times two, but with a different music group etc. It also surprised me how distinctive each service was, given the basic script was the same. I’m told that it is almost impossible for a congregation to grow in our culture, once the accommodation is 80% full; something has to be done, and doubling up is a relatively economical solution, in buildings terms.

Dividing into shifts is something one or two Bucks churches have had to do in recent years — It’s gone really well in Wendover. Earlier this year, working with another congregation in Bucks that was considering doubling up, not Emmanuel, I came to realise how complex this transition can be — it puts a big loading on the human and ministry resources of a congregation at one fell swoop.

A lot of prayer and discernment has gone into doubling up at Emmanuel. Everything flowed, and I would have had no idea they had only doubled shifts for the first time two weeks ago. It felt as though this had been the pattern for ages.

The challenging news, and I hate to say it, is that the 9·00 was about 75% full, and at 11·00 there wasn’t a spare seat in the house! therefore, if the 80% rule is true, now is the time to consider future needs! Emmanuel is growing a new ministry on one of the estates, which has just outgrown a house and may become a church plant...

Bank crisis: last gasp of a gilded age?

Reflecting of recent financial news, this weekend has produced two articles that have had me rocking on the seat crying “Amen, brother!” — Incisive, creative, and understanding reponses to the recent UK ban on Short Selling in the City.

Giles Fraser in the Church Times puts in a good word for the short sellers. We’ve all been on the game, and the easiest thing in the world is to fix on someone to blame, when, to use and abuse a metaphor from the world of choir training, we all need to tighten our underpants. “The Bubble needed to burst.”

... by blocking short-selling, all that the regulator does is to en­courage the value of stock to become over-inflated — and that is precisely the problem of our world markets. For instance, there is no way of short-selling the housing market. As a result, house prices have become absurd.

Householders may scream blue murder if the value of their property goes down, but it ought to be clear to most people that a great many houses are vastly overvalued. It is just this overvaluation that generated the sub-prime crisis in the first place.

Short-sellers are a vital corrective to the instinctive bullishness of most city traders. Sure, it is immoral to sell a stock, talk it down, then buy it for a large profit. But that is no different from buying a stock, talking it up, then selling it on at an inflated price — the “pump-and-dump” man­oeuvre.

Modernity has given us the myth of continual improvement; that technology and human advancement will lead us ever onward and upward. It is the philosophy of New Labour’s “things can only get better”.

And it is the naïve mantra of the city trader for whom the stockmarket always goes up. Such a philosophy encourages us to borrow money against our ever-rising fortunes. In such circum­stances, making money is easy: bor­row as much as you can, and invest. It is a proven recipe for boom and bust

My other weekend serendipity was Andrew Brown’s Guardian article. He starts from the twaddle the ignorant and foolish produce, painting Rowan as a crude Marxist (actually ludicrous, if you know anything at all about where he’s coming from) and draws attention to his work on Dosteyevsky, in which Rowan

...hates the consumerist ideology of limitless choice because he thinks it tears us way from our real and limited wants; and he sees it prefigured in some of Dostoevsky's villains, for whom "Everything depends on choice, and what is chosen today need have no relation to what is chosen tomorrow or what is chosen by anyone else". Reading these words detached from their context, it's obvious that they are also the perfect description of the workings of an untrammelled market, which may go up, down, or merely sideways depending entirely on the free choices of participants today. For Williams such a market is dehumanising and by extension diabolical:

What is depicted as The Devils moves towards its conclusion is the process by which the elevation of choice increasingly produces an evacuation of desire.

Bruce Springsteen put it in rather fewer words: "57 channels and nothing on".

...Williams's real objection to the market is that it turns its participants into things to one another – and that, he believes, is a blasphemy because we are not things, but, in some sense, images of God. Money allows us to treat other as impersonal means to an end, and this offends both his reactionary and his socialist instincts profoundly. In 19th-century Russian literature, it is almost always nobler to be a serf than a wage-slave. Though the relationship between a serf and his master is based ultimately on violence, it is personal violence, not the impersonal and invisible transaction of the market, and so it has more room for virtue, and for growth.

...There's a great deal that could be said about Williams's particular critique of the markets: although he's a very clever man, I don't suppose he knows any more about economics than all the other very clever people currently bewildered by the question "What should we do?"; and to know that the archbishop supports a ban on short-selling doesn't make it much clearer that this ban is a good thing.

But the one thing you can't say is that this is a knee-jerk response, or a piece of publicity seeking. The belief that capitalism tends towards evil is one of his deepest convictions.

This is not crude Marxism. The old puritans drew all their theology from what they called “total depravity”. The current bonfire of the vanties on Wall Street is its own critique of human tendencies to build castles in the air out of fantasy. Perhaps the whole sorry business started in the garden, when Adam and Eve chose “choice.” It’s no more realistic to point a grizzled finger at City Traders as though they were somehow qualitatively more selfish than the rest of us — Christian views of the human condition caution about idolising “choice”. We are all in need of redemption, including our fears and fantasies... interesting times!

On Shoulders of Giants...

I was touched and honoured to represent the diocese yesterday at a very special moment — Henry Chadwick’s memorial service in our Cathedral, of which he had been dean from 1969-79. The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster led the prayers, honouring a key ecumenist. Professor Chadwick was a masively learned and perceptive historian, who knew from his Evangelical roots how discipleship feels from the inside, and laboured to develop an honest historical basis upon which Christians could understand their origins, and use this understanding to grow together in love.

Like other students of my generation, my view of early Christian history was based largely on Chadwick’s scholarship — glancing along my shelves I see the short Penguin History that first kindled my awareness of the subtlety and complexity of early Christianity. Just along I find his Contra Celsum translation that still commands its field after fifty years, an immaculate study of Boethius, and the fruit of his mature reflection — a wonderfully comprehensive History of the Church from Gallilee to Gregory the Great and East and West: the making of a rift in the Church.

One highlight of the service for me was a quote from John Donne’s Meditations that Professor Chadwick loved:

The Church is Catholic, universal. So are all her actions. All that she does belongs to all. When she buries a man that action concerns me. All mankind is of one author and is one volume. When one man dies one chapter is not torn out of the book but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators. Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation. And his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another...

MacBook Air — Machine of dreams...

...especially for those of us who can’t honestly justify or afford one, but there appears to be no end to the machine's talents... here is Rahul Sood, CTO of HP’s gaming business using one as a cake knife... The most delightful barmy use yet for a computer, unless you know otherwise...

Banking meltdown: The Plain Truth

City banks have been struggling recently. As Presidential hopefuls lay aside their differences to try and avert disaster, archbishops probe the morality of meltdown. Theories abound about how such a crisis could ever have happened. Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse expose a poingnat but awful truth at the heart of our present Banking Crisis:

Love and Death — and coming alive

Bishop Stephen brought a fabulous love poem to today’s senior staff Eucharist. Reflecting on the physicality of Anglo-Catholic worship, and the propensity to kiss altars, books, even human beings sometimes, this poem somehow made sense of breaking bread — a kind of St John of the Cross thing. The poem is from Carol Ann Duffy’s extended exploration of love’s moods and realities, Rapture.

If I was Dead

If I was dead,
and my bones adrift
like dropped oars
in the deep, turning earth;

or drowned,
and my skull
a listening shell
on the dark ocean bed;

if I was dead,
and my heart
soft mulch
for a red, red rose;

or burned,
and my body
a fistful of grit, thrown
in the face of the wind;

if I was dead,
and my eyes,
blind at the roots of flowers,
wept into nothing,

I swear your love
would raise me
out of my grave,
in my flesh and blood,

like Lazarus;
hungry for this,
and this, and this,
your living kiss.

Carol Ann Duffy, 1955-

And then, precisely timed in the great scheme of things, I noticed a quote from Howard Thurman on Maggi Dawn’s blog:

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.

Yes!

Evil through the eyes of a child

Way back, the Go Between explored how adult games look through the eyes of a child, vivid, simple, utterly pragmatic. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is Auschwitz through innocent eyes — good script, brilliantly cast, beautfully made, well acted, almost impossible to watch.

This film does not ham things up, preach, sentimentalise, or demonise. The unvarnished tale is more disturbing. The horror is in the substance not the way it’s served up. Conventional war movies, even compassionate ones like Sergeant Ryan, are all well and good, but all the wrong things steal the show. They’re like sermons where the circumstantial illustration smothers the point. This one is painfully right on the button.


The “Bloody Fool” school of history has answers to everything, but understands nothing. It’s too ready to believe that people in the past were just utterly different, that‘s all. Big labels like “Evil” do not answer the basic question that matters — “how do people do such things?”

Filling in faces of the holocaust is a painful necessity, or it simply becomes incomprehensible or, worse still, the stuff of prurient curiosity or myth. We have to try to understand what there is in us what blinds us to what we don’t want to know, our own capacity for “Don’t ask, don’t tell”.

The audience we were part of in Wycombe was slightly stunned. So we bloody well should be. I suspect this film will not pack the cinemas this autumn, but people who can bear to watch it, may understand a little bit more, and, in the end, be glad they did.

Dinton and Cuddington share future

A wonderful Sunday in Dinton, inaugurating the new Cuddington & Dinton C of E Primary School, along with the Revds Eric Chamberlain, who pastors Cuddington as part of Haddenham benefice, and Nancy Wallace from Dinton. With leadership from an able head, Pam Talbot, and Chris Blumer, chair of governors, two village schools with over 100 years of history apiece have merged into one new one on both sites:

• keeping the school lights on in both villages
  
• producing the critical mass to sustain future staffing and teaching excellence
  
• making effective use of a head teacher, rather than retaining all the paraphernalia of being a complete school times two

I suppose the logical alternative would be some kind of Darwinian shakeout, with one of the villages losing out. This has happened elsewhere — a bit of a bureaucratic dream and community nightmare.

People seem really positive about the future here — I couldn’t see the joins. The children themselves were brilliant — they really enjoyed their singing, including a new school song. After the service in Church, there was a pig roast on the School Field, with entertainment by the children, and (haven’t seen one for years) punch and judy. All this, and a beautiful sunny day...

Look out there's a monster coming

A vicar was telling me about a close encounter this week with a city trader. The guy’s face was Pale Grey. We are now definitely in uncharted territory, apparently. On Thursday Andrew Brown drew attention to a new form of “socialism” that, having privatised the profits is now socialising the losses. Commenting on an FT Editorial Andrew suggested:

Extraordinary to reflect that I have lived long enough to see communism die and then the capitalism that replaced it too; to see the nation state and the empire wither away in Europe, and now to return in Asia, and that I have managed to do this without getting very old at all.

As various big UK names hit the skids, naturally, action is being taken to see if financial institutions can renormalise everything. Short Selling was one way institutions seemingly alchemized increased profits (“fertilizer”) out of falling prices (“manure”). Now it’s off the UK menu until next January.
Can the various other ripping wheezes that have inflated fantasies all round get us all back to where we thought we were?

Striding towards canary Wharf from just below the horizon, come various other Bogeypersons, threatening the way things have been:

• An increasingly embattled dollar, withering as the oil-based reserve currency.
  
• New energy world order, with big fresh competitive demand from the East, in which state owned big players marginalize the cosy old “Seven Sisters”
  
• Debt crisis — stoking trillions of housing loss into mushrooming US public debt, the eventual burden supercharged by desperately socializing AIG insurance losses as well as FM/FM bad debt.
• Climate Change adjustments about which it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend
  

Big lumbering monsters, all these, and peak oil? Is this just me, or is it all beginning to look slightly precarious, à la Ezekiel 28, out there?

PS (h/t Kendall Harmon) the NYT reports that the US treasury is likely to pick up the tab on foreign banks’ US debts... Richard Lindsay of HSBC says “this is a positive step forward but it won’t solve the problems of an overleveraged industry...” Hmmm.

Keeping the Faith in High Wycombe

70th anniversary mass last night for one of our (comparatively few) Anglo-Catholic churches in Buckinghamshire. Set in a tough urban landscape, St Mary & St George Sands has been a real landmark since 1938. This is a simply lovely place to sing Mass; it has a simple resonant interior. Its real glory, however, is a wonderfuly mixed and close congregation — which has grown a recent ordinand, with another on the go. There’s a warmth and spirit here, exemplified by the celebration cake (The roof was fudge flavoured icing).

I was struck by three quite particular indications of spiritual strength in depth here:

1. SMSG featured on one UK TV news channel after the arrests of nearby alleged terrorists in 2006, as an extremist mosque! OK, it’s got a green dome. It’s also got a 9 ft Cross on top. You'd think that would be enough to make a UK TV editor question whether it really was a mosque but, er, you’d be wrong.
2. SMSG took in and for two years cared for Fr James Mukunga, a Zimbabwean priest subject to official persecution. Fr James is now working in the Southwark diocese. For him and his young family it was a place of recovery, healing and hope. This may be a comparatively small congregation, but it’s generous and focused on the needs of the real world.
   
3. As part of thier recent celebrations, SMSG hired in an Earth Balloon, filling the area under the dome for a day with the 16 metre blow-up globe, so that local children of all ages could come and discover amazing things about the real world in Church, in a way they will remember for the rest of their lives.

Mother Susie Simpson is leaving soon, to follow a calling to serve as a priest among young offenders at the (original) Borstal in Kent. There’s a fabulous job here, wating for the right person...

Baby’s connected to the Microphone...

...now hear the word of the Lord! All behaviour is learnt behaviour. Many thanks to the wonderful Raspberry Rabbit for drawing my attention to the Revd Kanon Tipton, aged 18 months, for it is he:

Talk about Fresh Expressions. It all ends with a lovely hug, and the reverend obviously loves his Church, who love him lots.

RR wonders what Anglican babies would do — he suggests invite unconfirmed babies up for a rusk. It’s not quite the same thing, but it picks up a recent theme here: One of my predecessor’s children in Reading used to come out to the altar at the Agnus Dei, stare in to the Chalice and say “Eurggh! Blood!” He was then dragged away tastefully by old ladies in white coats, protesting “It is blood! Daddy says it is!” and similar Anglican devotional comments.

What do the mouths of babes and sucklings say to those of us who lead worship?

• Some people worry obsessionally about what is preached. Its effectiveness is largely, perhaps, about how it is preached. Psychologists tell us that (rough figures) 7% of communication is “the script,” 38% “the Music” and “52% “the Dance.” Forty years long were we grieved as a Church over prayer book revision, paying close attention to the script. I wonder what would happen if we paid closer attention to the other 93% of what is communicated in Church.
  
• I am also reminded of a comment I heard from a wonderfully experienced and effective housemistress at what is in fact often the highest performing school in the country, who told me what she always remembers about teenagers is

  “I remember almost nothing you say,
  I forget much of what you do;
  but I will remember for the rest of my life
  how you made me feel.”

Blood Donors: not quite Transylvania

Count Dracula’s original vision for the UK National Blood Transfusion Service was simple — Donors just went to sleep by an open window and the Count or one of his associates (ably assisted by fair henchwomen mounted on castors) took it from there.
Yesterday this vision came one step closer to fulfilment at Prestwood, as Lucy and I got through in about 20 minutes with no queueing, thanks to a new preappointment system that works, er... really well.

Also, although the set up is still rather more makeshift and basic than the Count’s original conception, he is now serving orange carrot cake muffins in place of his traditional plain digestives. I knew the rot had set in ten years ago, when he introduced custard creams.

Long blood donor queues haven’t been entirely without interest. Like fly fishing, you could wait all day for someone to fill up with embarrassment and flee before the rather intrusive questions on the card (“have you had a prostitute recently?” “have you ever had unprotected gay sex?” etc.) The Count has to be rather direct about such matters. We are, however, one step closer to his original plan’s elegant simplicity, even if the British aren’t quite ready yet for the ultimate donor-friendly experience:

Acedia: Are we bovvered?

Why is everything crap? Why is life itself so damn boring? As we travel on life’s great highway, the cry goes up ‘Are we there, yet?’ Then Maggi Dawn’s blog tips me off about Kathleen Norrris’ fabulous new book on Acedia. This was the old Desert Fathers’ Noonday Demon. The best monks sometimes wasted days in the sun, clockwatching and bored, when they should have been getting on with the job. Call it Sloth if you like, but Ms Norris points out that in our century its most common form is the blue-arse-fly version, our own particular way of being there whilst not being there. Acedia kills off deep thought, relationships, religion and all kinds of other worthwhile activities that involve completer finishing. It kindles impatience, frustration, and superficiality. Get down on the street, and everybody’s doing it. In a great review of this book, Denis Ockholm writes:

We urgently need such reminders amid the “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair” of contemporary life, particularly in the context of a marriage such as the one that unfolds in this book. In a society where acedia results in relationships that are recycled more often than aluminum cans, Norris insists that what is most likely to maintain a marriage is not giddy romance but discipline, martyrdom, and obedience (which, at its etymological root, refers to hearing): “The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. You may say the 'I do' of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, but it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married.” Good advice in a culture where that "five-o'clock somewhere" mirage always beckons.

This all points us to the ancient wisdom of our holy father Benedict, whose Rule was not conceived as legalism on speed, but a toolbox for sticking with discipleship through the dead zone, so that it can bear real fruit. Confronting the futility of our own lives, we can wallow ’n bitch, or engage the mid-day demon more closely, and grow a few better habits to promote stability...
Stop Press: Comment by Prodigal Kiwi (Paul Fromont)

Racial Justice — Slough & Reading

Racial Justice Sunday yesterday, which I celebrated in Reading and Slough. The morning parish mass at Christ Church, Reading, involved various members of the congregation using languages of their upbringing — a fair selection, including Tamil, Ndebele, Spanish, Shona, Hausa, Malayalam, Krio, Zulu, Mende, and Luganda. How many languages are there lurking in your congregation?

Among many highlights was a fabulous African anthem on the way in — I wish I'd had my digital recorder. Mervyn Williams has been working on the sound to produce a choir where the kids listen carefully to each other, as well as belting it out. Resulting intonation was just beautiful, but with all the vibrancy of African music, from a robed choir. Children from Christ Church School sang Siyahamba, too — but these are just snippets of a fabulous morning. The big learning for me was just how vibrant things can become in a congregation containing real cultural diversity, and enjoying it. Many thanks to Father David West, and a large supporting cast. I came out feeling there may be abit hope for the world, after all!

In the evening, our diocesan celebrations went Charismatic Evangelical at St Paul’s Slough. In the ten years he has been the Vicar, Mike Cotterell has opened a few windows around the place with his passion, commitment to growing a church around the Word, and openness to the Holy Spirit. This church’s Urdu house group has produced two ordinands in the past five years, the music group drew us in, loudly but supportively. After half a dozen visits, I’ve just about worked out the response when being dismissed in Urdu at the end — I’ll get there in the end, Gilbert! A couple of unexpected highlights made the experience for me —

1. Saying the Lord’s prayer in our own languages, à la Lambeth, really works in this congregation — English was in there somewhere, under the radar, but not predominating. Just like Heaven. On which subject, it was good to remember in prayer Beverley Ruddock, who was so passionately committed to Racial Justice in our diocese.
2. Janet Binns, who had put the service together for us, led us into the intercessions with this Video, from Opus Jones:

And the Message? Well, the Tower of Babel was one way of reaching heaven. Brick by brick, regular, regimented, logical... and wrong. God threw the babel project into confusion to save their souls. On the Day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit put eveything back together again, in embryo, but by exactly the opposite method. He could have got all the people speaking Hebrew, or conforming to the mega-organization back at the Temple, but he didn’t. Rather than that, he injected massive diversity into the disciples, getting the twelve to speak everyone else’s language, and they ended up becoing a new kind of temple.

The Spirit knew what he was doing; we’ve got to catch up with the logic of it, and enjoy living it.

• Where is all this going to end? With every race and kindred and tribe and language gathered around him in glory.
  
• When? On one level, at the end of the world, when everything is rolled up into eternity. On another, as soon as we let it happen.
  

We tried to do a bit of that yesterday in Slough and Reading, and the experience was glorious.

Dostoevsky: How to Read Rowan

Day off, and a chance to open Rowan Williams’ book on Dostoevsky, which arrived yesterday. I’m wondering how to eat this particular elephant. It doesn’t look like an in-flight job. Russian novels can be a tad complicated anyway:

And then, of course, Dostoevsky is stuffed with added complex metaphysics:

Think about it. Rowan Williams on Dostoevsky could take longer to read than it did to write. Well, I hope I don’t have to read the entire works of Dostoevsky to pass go, but it’s been a few years, so I've loaded up the eBook Reader with some (free) prime juicy Dostoevsky. Then it’s down to my patent method for reading Rowan's more “clotted” stuff:

• He’s really a poet, therefore it's densely packed with images. Often the images, in themselves are simple but surprising. That’s half the fun. Like all forms of poetry you have to unpack it yourself. If you only ever do bleeding obvious level sudokus, I can reliably suggest Rowan is not the writer for you. But if you like a good puzzle and learning by discovery, it’s magical stuff. Ideas are often approached by the side entrance, not the front door. It’s usually better to take things a chapter at a time, slow down, switch off the speedreading circuits, and relax. Like a poem, go with the flow and see where it leads. Don’t analyse, or you lose the flow! Read the whole paragraph, then stop and think it through.
  
• The writing often works on more than one level simultaneously. The secret is to latch onto the level that’s caught your attention, follow it through consistently, then review the chapter. If you pick up another angle follow that through in its own terms. If you accidentally mix ’n match the levels, it gets like controlling SuperMario on several levels at once, and you go nuts by the end of the chapter. You are allowed to read the book more than once.
  
• It rarely works to try and read the book at one sitting. Pacing chapters between, say, one morning a month sessions works a treat. I did once read a Rowan book on why history matters on a plane in under 3 hours; but historiography is my thing, and that was a one off achievement I don’t ever expect to emulate again.

Similar things could be said, perhaps, of Dostoevsky. So this is either gong to be a resonant match of deep speaking to deep, or a clotted expressionists Godzilla-meets-the-beast experience. I’ll let you know in, er, about two years time?

Idols: exchanging God’s truth for a lie

Fabulous, thought-provoking post by Richard Hall about idolatry. Calvin observed that every person is an “idol factory.” Richard reminds us that “exposing god-impostures is a perennial element in discipleship.”

But what are idols? Needless to say, they are not statues made of stone or wood! Rather idols are that to which we give our absolute allegiance; they are, in Paul Tillich’s idiom, our “ultimate concern”.

But what turns us into idol factories? Calvin makes another acute, if less well known, observation in the Institutes, paraphrasing the first century pagan Roman poet Statius: “Timorem primum, fecisse in orbe deos: fear first made gods in the world” (I.IV.4). If idolatry is the primal sin, fear is the primal negative emotion that fires it.

If this reasoning is correct, then perhaps the best way of unmasking our idols is to discover what we’re afraid of. So over the past few weeks - in casual conversations, in watching the telly, in reading the papers - I’ve been taking a little survey to see what frightens people - and then drawing some conclusions about some of the chief idols of our times.

Richard draws attention to some of the great false gods around us, powered by fear —

• fear of foreigners leads to idiot xenophobia,
• fear of getting fat leads to the narcissism,
• fear of insignificance leads to a cult of celebrity.

He does not stay the knife at the ecclesiastical idols — “Christianity” founded not on love, but fear of Muslims or liberals or losing family values. All I’d add to Richard’s analysis is Gregory Nazianzus’ observation: “Concepts create idols. Only wonder understands.”

The fact is, perfect love casts out fear. When people are in the grip of fetishistic alternative gods, the give-away is fear and hatred, explicit or implicit.

So — “Christianity” founded on fear of “Fundamentalism,” what is that? Christianity powered by fear of “Liberalism,” what is that? Very much less than the real thing?

Pigs in lipstick — time for Chivalry

I’m having a slightly surreal time over here, trying to work out this pigs and lipstick thing. Apparently Barack Obama said:

John McCain says he’s about change, too — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics. That’s just calling the same thing something different.

You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change; it’s still going to stink after eight years.

John McCain said:

[Hillary Clinton’s plan for healthcare is] vaguely — not vaguely but eerily — reminiscent of what they tried back in 1993. I think they put some lipstick on the pig but it's still a pig.

Is this a cheap shot at Hillary’s femininity? And, Mr So-Called Obama, what about fish? Also, try and deny it, your comments are totally piggist.

For the past 600 years Brits have had their own Norman French slogan for these occasions — Honi soit qui mal y pense (“Evil be to any that think evil of it.”). Nice that it’s so relevant. It speaks truth into this situation, and takes us all back to the dear ol’ days before everything went to hell in handcart. Vote for Edward III! Up with the Treaty of Crétigny! Bicameral parliaments Now! Down with the Black Death! Free public bow and arrow shooting on the village green for the French wars! It’s time for a bit of true chivalry in politics...
PS: Anyone seen discarded lipsticks near any pigs they know?

Post-Christendom: rafts or trawlers?

Steve Hollinghurst works for Church Army in Sheffield, researching the cultures of people who don’t go to Church in the UK. He came to our local Deanery Synod last night with simple facts and figures about post-Christendom England.

• It’s an immensely fluid and complex picture out there. Fewer people buy into institutional church and the whole “Christian England” thing. Denominations are a thing of the past — a phase we went through, that means nothing to most people now. We are also globalizing massively.
• As “Religion’s” stock (genteely) declines, “Spirituality’s” increases. There’s a lot of curiosity out there. Steve contrasted the ubiquitous modernist “Scooby-Doo” interpretation of paranormal phenomena 30 years ago with multiple wall-to-wall ghosthunter shows now... Tech is cool, but the Eagle Comic optimistic scientism with which we all grew up has, worryingly perhaps, collapsed into widespread pessimism and cynicism about Science. People are massively switching off assertive fundamentalist certainties. Experts are now as good as their last job; Richard Dawkins is, in fact one of the best recruiting sergeants the Churches have.
• People find Churches spiritual places, but most of all when we’re not there! More people are passing through and by Churches (now up to 82% of the population a year), but far fewer committing themselves to the gathered twice-a-week experience.
  

So what do we do? We could retreat fast into the bunker, clinging on to what we fondly imagine were the certainties of the past. We could get the wagons into a circle for vigorous “Judaean People’s Front” debates around then camp fire. Alternatively, we can get the wagons out onto the trail, and see who we meet along the way. Where we decide to do the latter we will find ourselves needing the same kind of utter versatility St Paul talked about in I Corinthians 9 — Greeks to Greek, slave to slave, Jew to Jew. We need to distunguish clearly the gospel from its cultural wrappers. It’s a simple story — love is strong as death.

• Keep the core simple and authentic.
• Don’t rob the Word of its power as mystery — embrace the subtlety and poetry of it.
• Get engaged. Be holy pragmatic / entirely versatile about the wrappers.

Anxiety, leadership & Rabbi Friedman

I’ve just lent out my copy of the most teasingly brilliant leadership book I know — Rabbi Edwin Friedman’s Failure of Nerve — Leadership in the age of the quick fix. The rabbi, who died over ten years ago now, was a family and congregational systems therapist. His book isn’t, like many other studies, a how-to book or analysis of “successful” leaders. Leadership isn’t really about what you do, as much as why you do it, what it does to you, and how is is grounded in the person you are. Sounds heavy, but it’s common sense, actually. As a skilled systems therapist, Friedman diagnosed six phases in the process of leadership:

1. Differentiating the self: If you don’t know who the hell you are, why would anybody else? This means defining yourself as more than just a pale reflection of what everybody wants from you. If you start to disappear into the context, your boat has sunk and it won't be going anywhere. This is the key to the whole deal: “Leadership [is] the capacity to define oneself to others in a way that clarifies and expands a vision of the future.”
   
2. Staying connected: Sticking with reality, including your own pragmatic reality, not merging yourself into the demands and anxieties of the most angry and conficted focus groups you serve.
   
3. Maintainng a non-anxious presence: “Keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you” as the man said. Colluding with hysteria increases the amount of idiocy in the system.
   
4. Keeping open space to be proactive: Not becoming entirely imprisoned by the latest crisis; making phonecalls as well as answering them. Entiely reactive turns you into a football for others. Being that compromises (1) above.
   
5. Managing triangles: This is where three people run scripts between them where any two gang up on any one serially. There re also fix-it games which are actually hellish triangles of blame — hot potato circles in which nobody accepts true responsibility. Ther’s an old game of Victim—Rescuer—Persecutor. Three chairs, two people, keep moving. Just Don’t do it!
   
6. Persisting in the face of sabotage: ‘No good deed goes unpunished!’ That’s a reason to do it, not to fail to do it...
   

Rabbi Friedman observes that in every area of life these days (10 years ago), especially perhaps the Church, many (most?) people are chronically anxious and desperate for quick fixes. Leaders who get sucked into that stuff and start playing to it lose their souls and burn out. The institutional frameworks that once held leaders in a zone from which they could lead have been compromised and busted all over the place as society has de-institionalised. Therefore the only people left do the job are the leaders themselves, and, er, God!
The only tragedy of Friedman’s book is that he died before it was finished, so half of it is barely reconstructed from notes. Does it ring bells for anyone else?