Good news in Gerrards Cross

Delighted to be in Gerrard's Cross for their 150th anniversary celebrations yesterday. It’s one of our very few large UK churches that have broken through what one could call the 400 barrier, with two or three times that number of regulars. It remains very much a parish Church, serving its locality more than hoovering in people from far and wide.

The Crown jewels of St James’ parish, are

1. enabling servant leadership at all levels, rather than fat controller indoor games. Martin Williams, ministry team and lay leaders are very mutual and focussed.
   
2. passion to foster people in varying styles of discipleship, traditional, Charismatic, Conservative and open (to use current jargon). The characteristic virtues of these expressions of faith become cumulative and shared, rather than being played off against each other, wittingly or unwittingly.
   
3. Commitment to clear and charitable attitudes that are good news across the board. Evangelical values are very much more important than -isms — politics or labels.
   
4. A general culture of excellence in all things. People work as hard, and in as focussed a way, as a commercial concern would at its operation.
   

Using Ephesians 3, we explored the uncertainties of the world around, in 1859 as much as today, and what it means to be called by a faithful God to be rooted and grounded in love.

The height, depth and breadth of that reality inspires not optimism, but a firm hope. Just for the record, and because some asked, the Credit Cruncher of 1859 I quoted was a gentleman called D. Morier Evans, and this was what he learnt from the string of financial crises in his day:

Each separate panic has its own distinctive features, but all have resembled each other in occurring immediately after a period of apparent prosperity, the hollowness of which it has exposed.

So, what goes around comes around. It’s a standing invitation not to take ourselves, or the news of the moment too seriously, and to fix our hearts where true joys are to be found.

Church and MegaChurch Stress Test

I go to the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, not as a signed up US MegaChurch fan, which I’m not, but because what you see is what you get — an opportunity to reflect on and learn about leadership with colleagues, in the context of a consistently world class training event put together from a wide range of sources by Evangelical Christians from outside my own expression of the faith. It’s also a personal check back for me to core discipleship values, and I really value the opportunity to take that journey systematically, rigorously and regularly.

But here’s a housekeeping question. How does a Megachurch like Willow Creek weather a recession? Those of us getting muddy and wet, if not shot, in the trenches sometimes wonder how the war’s feeling on the Battleship Invincible. It was interesting to find out.

In his opening address, Bill Hybels talked of the rough seas through which the enterprise was sailing. It included, amongst other challenges, $300K annual donors exploding in the water. There’s some comfort in knowing the seas look rough from a supertanker as well as from our little English dinghies. Of course my Anglo tendency is to be sarcastic about the differences, but it’s a fact that a place like that, as well as yea many more dollars resourced (the thing people always notice first) is also yea many more dollars committed and exposed.

Hybels acknowledged that the conditions we have all assumed to be normal may never come again, and simply hunkering down and awaiting the return of financial glory days is not an option for faith. This is a challenge to the Church to be the Church in the face of circumstances over whch we have no control. Acts 2:38 has to become a more a practical proposition, less a romanticised ideal. This means some formerly large donors downsizing radically, and accepting the humbler place of recipients, whilst those who still doing well step up their generosity.

Jack Welch, formerly of GE says “In a Crisis Cash is King.” Present conditions are an opportunity to own another kingship, and so prove what people in poor areas of the world often know better than rich Christians in the West — that there is nothing like the local Church when the local Church is being itself, rather than the means of getting a light dose of God at the weekend.

This strikes me as a significant philosophical principle for living in testing times, which I think it would be as interesting to try in the smallest housegroup as the largest megaChurches.

Life in the Slow Lane

An interesting time in the beautiful city of Ely, where Lucy and I are helping lead an Engaged Encounter Weekend.

The spring is sprung, the gardens are lovely, and it’s great to be alive, especially around one of the most glorious Cathedrals in the world. Who am I, to be alive in such a place on a spring day such as this?

Yet, as my old training incumbent used to say, every silver lining has a cloud. The cloud here is the unavailability of a fast data network my dongle can access through T-Mobile. All I can get is a strong but utterly, pathetically slow GPRS network. So out goes any notion of a film review on Michael Caine’s latest, because I couldn't conceive of moving video files around at this connection speed. I suddenly am brought hard up against the reality of life at last century’s connection speeds. Uploading a modest snail takes almost 10 minutes!! O Life how short, Eternity How long!

And I just wonder whether, among other reactions to the current depression, the government might care to consider upgrading the infrastructure of this country à la Singapore. Fast free data for all. This would stimulate business, commerce, life, industry, social development. It would be comparatively cheap, certainly compared to some of the things money has been lavished on just recently. And some people would find such a plan at least as effective an investment for the future as paying out plushy six figure annual pensions for Fred the Shred and his layabout incompetent chums.

Any merit?

Rebooting

Madness is doing something over, thinking it will yield different results next time:

If all you do is what you always done, all you’re ever going to have is what you always had. (Def Leppard)

Saturday’s Board of Social Responsibility reflected on the need to reboot, using excellent materials from the CTBI Conference in January. At the centre of these was a paper by Bob Goudzwaard, Dutch economics professor, on money and idolatry.

Even in narrow financial terms, some wondered why we are now loading money so freely into the top of a discredited system, rather than financing businesses on the streets, refloating the economy, as it were, from the bottom up. Perhaps it’s time to re-read our own Scriptures in the light of experience, including such concepts as Jubilee, Shalom, and household. This might even mean challenging usury — the making of money out of money alone, with no added work. This cornerstone of recent practice is consistently condemned in the Hebrew Scriptures as unjust, immoral and oppressive in itself.

We need to reboot. But how?With the question ringing in our ears, and the Scriptures at our right hand, it’s interesting to begin by remembering that everything impacts everything else in interesting ways:

Credit Crunch Bank Bust: King Rat?

Brilliantly rendered graphically by Jonathan Jarvis: h/t Euan Semple:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
This side of the pond, Sir Fred Goodwin wrestles internally with Jiminy Cricket over his £650,000 a year life pension from age 50, his reward for delivering the biggest cockup ever in UK corporate history, a record breaking loss of £24,000,000,000, at a cost to his fellow citizens of £20,000,000,000, including the ruin of many of his colleagues and customers.

Give it back, or what be stripped of it? I don’t believe anyone should do anything illegal or vindictive. There are plenty of others out there as bad, but less public, no doubt. But if I were Sir Fred, I’d scrabble up as much of the offending money as I could and do something genuinely altruistic with it, perhaps an investment that helps poor people through hard times. That way some good comes of his cockup, nobody breaks the law, and he can recover a bit of respect in the community. Howzat?

Meanwhile the Long Johns (Bird and Fortune) explain the matter perfectly clearly, as is their wont:

Gang of 4 Bankers Group self-criticism

Today Four Big Bankers were wheeled into the Treasury Select Committee for Ritual Humiliation and Group Self-Criticism. There they confessed publicly to various errors of judgment, crimes against the workers, and sundry false consciousness. I hope we all feel better. I’m slightly surprised these Titans had no idea anything like this might happen. People reading, for example Kevin Phillips’ Bad Money, appear to have been better informed about these comrades’ businesses than they were themseles. Cost? £17·39 for awareness these comrades couldn't manage on £4·4m a year. Why, Jon Molton warned them a year ago on national TV. Heigh-ho.

Simple minds thought the Gang of Four got paid telephone number sums of money every year because they took big risks. But apparently they didn’t. We did. They just got the money anyway. Big sorry. Surprisingly, I’m told none of the four had done any banking exams. Really? So they were only amateurs anyway. Big Multimillion pound Banking, like flower arranging, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Morris Dancing, turns out to have been a mainly amateur activity in the UK. Perhaps we should all have a go. Mary Poppins will be revolving in her grave.

I don’t think they will need to be beheaded. Instead someone like Mr Darling should be very cross with them. Furthermore he should write them a letter telling them he is very cross. Then, when we have all stumped up a few more billion pounds, it can start up all over again, and the good times will roll? or maybe not. Perhaps we will not be returning to 2007 again, any of us. Make no mistake. We have all been collectively foolish, fuelling what Andreas Whittam-Smith calls our banking “Doomsday Machine.” (h/t Ruth Gledhill, for a really helpful link) We’re all in this thing, like it or not. These were just ordinary people, doing their jobs as best they could; we mustn’t let their extraordinary wages blind us to that disturbing fact...

Work: Curse of the Drinking Classes

Unto him that hath shall more be given... seems to apply to debt as well as money. Maybe Jesus wasn’t as much saying how things ought to be as warning us about how they are. This morning’s post brings something I hadn’t seen for a while, what with the credit crunch: an unsolicited offer of an additional credit card.

Nectar/ American Express are willing to loan me money when no-one else can lay hands on the stuff, all for a beguiling 17·8% interest rate! Hang on, UK Bank Rate fell this week to a 315 year low of 1·5%. I wasn’t expecting Bank Rate, but there’s a competitor offering a product that charges 6·3%. 17·8% is Money for old rope; money that could be lent out to businesses struggling to survive, or first time buyers desperate for a roof over their heads.

Yeah, yeah, this is all too simple, of course, but it’s hard not to see this as an invitation for debt drunks to hit the bottle again — Scripture says “the dog returns to its own vomit.” Not so beguiling, perhaps...

Woolworths Liquidation: Endgame

Friday. The rats have left, the ship is bare. What remains is shelving, for which bids are invited. On it, a solitary copy of (appropriately enough) Mass Effect (£22.97). No, prices weren’t cheap; all sweets had gone, and near the front of the store huddled items from the far back of the stockroom, like a Millennium Celebration Banner (Complete with “2000” in figures, thus useless even to those preparing for the next one). Yours for £1·99. Only in Woolworths. Only Today.

Blowing bubbles in Hard Times?

Are we Bishops out to get Gordon Brown? Heck no. All my Lords of Canterbury, York, Winchester, Durham and London meant in what they said at Christmas was exactly what they said. Desperate attempts by the Daily Telegraph to turn their sermons into a party personal campaign are ridiculous. No wonder DT’s readership has dwindled to under half what it used to be.

But what about Gordon Brown and the economy? Like most colleagues in funny hats, I have a great personal respect for the Prime Minister. His words at the Lambeth Conference were brilliant and impassioned, showing deep personal understanding of, familiarity with and commitment to the millennium development goals. They were entirely ignored by the UK flock of Salaried Hacks, who were trying to portray him at the time as all washed up and about to resign. In the flesh, he seemed nothing of the sort, and so it has proved. He wasn’t and he didn’t.

In bigger terms, Labour government since 1997 deserves credit for at least trying to adress many significant issues, often long term problems and trends around which predecessors failed. It’s striven nobly to use the fiscal system and other means to tackle Child Poverty and help pensioners. Having gotten us into the hole in Iraq, it’s trying to dig us out. It’s talked the talk on development, globalization and the environment, and sometimes even walked the walk.

At home, HMG has tried to address questions of social cohesion, although some of its initiatives here smack of boy scouts helping old ladies across a road they don’t need or want to cross. Education and, even more, healthcare are areas where it’s poured money in, although there’s still chronic doubt about bangs per buck. On Civil Liberties, the record is dubious, but, in fairness, this area of governance has been a chronic tidal race between ideals and pragmatism for all our rulers these past 500 years. Let’s be kind and draw a tactful veil over transportation and penal policy, both disaster areas. Since the days UK penal policy was transportation, all governments have been clueless about both.

On the Economy? By the wisdom of the world and curent economics Labour has played up, played up and played the game — and reaped many benefits for us all. It was a bit hilarious to see politicians on all sides clambering over each other as they turned on a sixpence last autumn about the need for tough regulation of financial institutions, after years of loud boasting about the virtues of low to zero regulation. However, it would be unfair to suggest our politicians were greedier or naughtier at the party trough than anybody else’s.

Fact is, We’re all in this mess together — The Church of England, the Bank of England, the Labour Party, the Conservative party, the owners of newspapers, and indeed everybody else in Britain with a house, or a pension, or money in a bank, is implicated up to the eyeballs. To look ahead in hard times, we need to address the “meta” level. As we all stand around the bonfire of the Vanties, trying to warm our hands, some “meta” questions strike me:

1. We need a reboot not a bailout, as the man said. It’s time to think different. The fantasy that the answer to one housing Ponzi is another is profoundly barmy. Debt fuelled growth is problematic. It makes everybody feel good for all the wrong reasons. The wealth is like fairies in Peter Pan — fine as long as you believe it really is wealth, but every time a house is undersold, a fairy dies. It’s certainly no substitute for hard work, added value, goods and services. Borrowing to bailout has to be paid for by future taxation. If we must borrow heavily off our children, perhaps even our grandchildren, as the UK did to defeat fascism in the 1940’s, at least let it be for a rational and worthy cause, not just more of the same.
2. Rich and Poor — the gap has widened, though the government has sincerely tried to reduce child poverty. This is exactly the global problem highlighted by the Pope at New Year. It’s right on the button and nothing like unique to the UK. But what do we do about it? What about the losers? What about savers? What about pensioners struggling with bills and taxes, often on fixed savings-based incomes for which they’ve worked damned hard, and which now seem so inadequate? MP’s read their post and know exactly who I mean — it matters that the poor are not forgotten.
   
3. Has our economic effort gotten out of balance? Not enough manufacturing, design and R&D — too many bubbles blown. Ingenuity that has been applied to repackaging debt as profit could now be applied to, er, what — the real world?
4. Was “more” in itself a sufficient object? — yes and no? It would have been, if we had a greater vision of how to invest it, perhaps. But then our greater vision would have been the sufficient object. So, logically, no. Sure we all need to feed outselves. There’s nothing wrong with growth, and lots that’s right with it, but it is not big enough to be the purpose of our civilisation in itself.

These concerns touch core traditional theology as well as secular economics. Christian theologians talk about social as well as personal regeneration. In the Christian Scriptures, Poverty and Justice are issues that will not go away, from the prophet Amos to the Letter of James or the beatitudes in Luke. The Old Testament principle of Jubilee, and its radical questioning of debt as an instrument of power speaks into this mess. It deserves serious contemplation, after years of being sidelined and thought unthinkable.

This be the Verse 2

Philip Larkins (in)famous “This be the verse” (They f*ck you up, your mum and dad...) has long been highly regarded in counselling circles. It’s a lot of fun, and every time I've heard it quoted, it’s met by by knowing looks of recognition, wherever folks gather for encounters like Dr Evil’s legendary Father/Son family therapy session with Carrie Fisher:

Now, in the week of the poet’s death, John Halton has posted a response from a newspaper cutting by Adrian Mitchell:

They tuck you up, your mum and dad
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.

They were tucked up when they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.

Man hands on happiness to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.

Kudos to John for the poem. Two impressions from yesterday — Anna waving goodbye before my annual Xmas trek, & one of the sights of Newport Pagnell, more Philip Larkin than Adrian Mitchell...

HBOS: Personalised Credit Crunch

Welcome to the share offer that enables you to have your very own credit crunch at home this Christmas. As a student I earned some holiday money and put it in the building society. Then the building society became a bank and my shares were converted into, er, more shares... Imagine my joy, then to be sent an “important document” this morning that “required my immediate attention.” It’s my opportunity to bail the bank out by taking them up on a very special offer — They are willing to flog me 261 shares, as a special favour, at only 113.6 pence a share. Here comes fate, tapping me on the shoulder, offering me a career as a major capitalist, and all for only £296·49! Deep Joy! One or two questions:

1. Why would I spend 113·6p a share on this very special offer, when I could go out and buy as many HBOS shares as I wanted anyway @ 67·5p yesterday, thereby saving myself, click-click-click, £120·32 on this joyful transaction. Presumably I’ve got MUG tatooed on my forehead somewhere I don’t know, or they wouldn’t have sent me this very special offer in the first place, but I’m a cheapskate mug.
   
   
2. Unless my math is totally duff, only the other week Lucy and I, as UK taxpayers, compulsorily invested approx £2,800 in these jokers anyway. Perhaps we should see how that little speculation goes before we bring another £176·13 along to the party.
   
   
3. It might be fun to have our own little micro credit crunch, personalised for the Wilson household, like a Micro Brewery, or a Minibeasts jungle, but I think I’ll pass. All the more so, as dread small print warns me this priceless offer is not something I can trade to any other mugs out there.

Please, somebody, tell me. What have I missed? As bit of a muggle I was sorry to miss out on the Bernard Madoff thang, but why, for Charles Ponzi’s sake, would I stake any more of our our kids’ dinners, other than compulsorily as a taxpayer, on HBOS just now?

Woolworths bankruptcy: end of era?

Back in the 1930’s one iconic sign of the great depression in Jarrow was that the town’s Woolworths couldn’t stay open. Now that’s in danger of happening to us all, as Woolworths calls in the receivers — bad news for 30,000 staff, suppliers, and even competitors who may well find their businesses hit by the dumping of a large amount of liquidation stock on the market in the run-up to Christmas. Of course times have moved on, and Woolworth’s, like the rest of the high street, was in big trouble from out of town competition before ever the credit crunch came along. Ironically, Woolworth’s original winning formula was based on providing a comprehensive range of everyday practical goods conveniently under one roof — exactly the battleground on which it has been beaten by today’s out-of-town supermarkets.

All the same, Woolies’ demise after 99 years marks the end of a much-loved national institution. We Brits excoriate those national institutions we love best. Here, from earlier and kinder days, is affectionate comment from Brummy legend Jasper Carrott:

As the circle of businesses affected by the current troubles expands, one or two colleagues have discussed with me positive practical attempts to offer love, prayer and personal support to people in the broader communities they serve who may be feeling isolated and vulnerable. I’m more than happy to know of good practice. Can we spread ideas around?

Banks, Bandaids and Badinage

UK Satirical magazine Private Eye provides its own narrative of our recent financial plague month, with cartoons:

The root of all this isn’t some quantum of greed beyond the rest of us, but something we all do given half a chance:




Funnymoney is ultimately, er, funnymoney:





The result has been, depending on your point of view, a Massive Bank Nationalisation to make Lenin blush, or an act of (compulsory) mass investment beyond Mrs Thatcher’s wildest nightmares. Same difference?



Meanwhile the Wilson family has been fiddling while Rome burns in our own sweet ways. Catherine made Anna a Deep Chocolate and Fresh Raspberry cake for her birthday yesterday, whilst Stewart and Nick have made an creditcrunchable escapist movie — Jim & Jam’s Bicurious Adventures:

FTSE 4435: Bank Crisis. Bingo!

Whilst heading for the Earth’s Core yesterday, the FTSE-100 plumbed the magic depths of 4366, passing 4435 on the way — its monthly low when the Blair government was elected in 1997. So there you have it, folks. All the puff and funnymoney was soapy bubbles after all. When everybody gives up making anything or saving anything to become a property wideboy instead, we all end up in the poorhouse. Bailouts follow overtrading as night follows day. Borrowing short and lending long is fun for an afternoon, but hopeless long term. Big unearned bonuses make wasters. Loss is loss, and as poor old King Lear pointed out years ago on his way to the Funnyfarm, nothing will have nothing. Fancy that. Now What?

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:

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.

Mortgages — forever blowing bubbles?

Talking to a surveyor about the near collapse of trade, I wonder about the impact of the current housing bubbleburst on people’s lives. And about debt and oppression — a classic Old Testament theme.

Even non subprime backloaded US mortgages are funny old things:

The UK government has announced some desperate measures this week to try and ease things, including a stamp duty holiday for houses under £175,000 and 100% loans. It’s hard to see what they could have done, but:

1. When you look at the trillions involved in the bubble, how could any realistic fiscal measure make much of a dent in the real problem? Will four times as many people now rush out and buy houses, given all the other pressures on them from accumulated personal debt, rising energy prices, 2% pay settlements, etc? I think not, Holmes.
   
2. Stand by for one unintended consequence — all low end asking prices (say up to £300,000) now nosedive to £175,000. Shome mishtake? If there were a miraculous mass recovery in low-end house prices, guess where it will be pegged? £175,000?
3. Just as all sensible financial institutions decide subprime 100% lending is a mug’s game, part of the problem, not the soluton, jolly UK taxpayers (= us) dive in headfirst bigtime... I feel a Homer Simpson “D’uh?” moment coming on.

Or have I missed something, here?