Persecution, Paranoia and Pluralism for Pot-Plants

Holy Saturday brings what the Daily Mail calls an Astonishing attack on the Prime Minister by Lord Carey. I was not astonished. The timing is plainly the Daily Mail’s, to embarrass the government as much as possible. Apparently two thirds of Christians now feel they are a persecuted minority — or at least they did fifteen months ago when the fieldwork for this survey was conducted.

Since almost 60% of the population self-identified as Christians in the 2011 census, it's hard to see how the basic maths of this notion could possibly be substantiated. There are Christians in some parts of Africa and the Muslim world, for example, who actually do experience persecution. This does not consist of some politicians, including Christian politicians, disagreeing with them, but losing jobs, homes and freedom. Any comparison with them seems, to put it mildly, tacky.

Apparently UK persecution consists of having to tolerate the fact that many people don’t share their narrow interpretation of the Bible, including many if not most other Christians.

So what basis could there be for the factually tendentious feeling that Christians are persecuted in the UK? Perhaps top-shelf reactionary religion, in itself, can engender its own nightmares. I turned to the memoirs of Frank Schaeffer, talking about the anxieties of his Fundamentalist childhood:

We Schaeffers never compromised. At times it seemed that only God knew how important we were, how right, how pure.

But isolation and rejection by “The World” only confirmed our self-importance.

The sense of being like the tribes of Israel wandering the desert, with enemies on all sides, was the underlying reality of my childhood.

I think it was shared by my three sisters... Susan took grim satisfaction at the looming damnation of just about everyone but us. Debby wept and redoubled her efforts. Priscilla got nervous and threw up. I hid.

Conservative Christians are people of high integrity and seriousness. I believe them when they say they do experience  marginalisation. In the good old days their  social mores, backed by the criminal law and psychiatric practice, absolutely ruled the roost.

Cultural development since 1945, for better or worse, has left many conventionally minded Christians dazed and confused. A character in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger says of her father — “Poor Daddy. He’s a pot-plant left over from the Edwardian high summer who can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more.”

Where does this marginalisation leave them? basically in the same position as the rest of the population.  Conservative Christians have a right to hold and express their views and be heard with respect like anyone else. That does not require everyone else to agree with them. Some people, most people, including other Christians, may well disagree with them. Nor does their right to be heard give them moral high ground from which to curtail the rights and dignities of others. They simply have to take their chances with everybody else,a nd be judged on the merits of their case.

That is not persecution. It’s reality. It’s Democracy.

Bible and Culture 101

Back in the 1960’s school RE was boring and worthy but predictable, and largely based on the Bible. You might decide it was a load of old tosh, but at least you ended up able to understand Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Milton’s Paradise Lost. The past becomes a completely foreign country, however, when a society obsessed with the latest of everything loses touch with its own roots, and compromises its own corporate memory.

Let me illustrate. As a sixth former I learnt that after the death of Palmerston, in 1866, a group of anti-Reformists called the “Adullamites” forced the resignation of Lord John Russell as Prime Minister. This interesting bit of Lib/Con coalition building has much contemporary resonance. John Bright, leading political commentator of the day, coined the term to draw attention to Lowe and Elcho’s unwillingness to be led by either Gladstone, whose reformism they had consistently opposed, or Disraeli. The meaning was plain to anyone who knew I Kings 22. Trouble is, not many of today’s students know I Samuel 22. We even have students who have never read Genesis 1 or Matthew 5, let alone I Samuel 22.

Enter Maggi Dawn, and her new book The Writing on the Wall. It’s a trip through the Bible for the biblically ignorant but otherwise educated reader, giving some basic info and background on the stories that have shaped our literature and history. She doesn’t just tell the story, but gives enough background to it to help you understand its meaning, and why it may have been used as it has been. So she turns on a light bulb to illuminate a range of cultural basics — Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Milton, Senser, Jacob Epstein, Wilfred Owen, William Blake, Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, yea even Monty Python... and hundreds of others.

So, here is an ideal present for the sixth former in your life who seeks some background to our culture. Its clarity and sense of perspective may also help the busy preacher. No cave of Adullam, though. Now someone’s done Literature, could it be History next for this treatment?

How the Swiss conquered the world...

...without anyone noticing. Design education for all! Had it come from Bristol not Basel it would have been called Helvetical, indeed it probably has been, but since 1957 Helvetica has become the Lingua Franca of print. And now it has its own Movie.

Helvetica is the finest design education documentary I have seen. It tells the tale of how the West was won — by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’ Schriftgiesserei in the Swiss village of Münchenstein (Basel).

The boys were trying to produce a clean modern interpretation of Akzidenz Grotesk, a classic Victorian Sanserif, for the Swiss market. Three years of development produced Neue Haas Grotesk, at around the time clean design was all the rage. Reflecting on the success of Univers, Artur Ritzel of Stempel picked up NHG, reworked and renamed it, cleaning up its characteristic horizontal endings. Enter Monotype and variants in variants in Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Vietnamese and hey presto! the boys soon conquered the world, in a characteristically understated Swiss way, without anyone noticing.
This wonderful film, which is nothing like as boring as I probably make it sound, shows how Helvetica fills the earth, from the NY subway to sports shirts, TV titles, Brass plates, prostitutes’ calling cards, Church bulletins, commercial logos, road signs...

It is the glory, and perhaps, curse, of type to be almost entirely implicit. Little things make all the difference. It works by not drawing attention to itself.

This film stars the John, Paul, George and Ringo of type design (Massimo Vignelli, Matthew Carter, Erik Spiekermann, and Wim Crouwell — and where’s Lars Müller? you ask). My eyes were opened to such things by Spiekermann’s fabulous book Stop Stealing Sheep, and hairs rose on the back of my neck as the Great Man, resplendent in bottle-thick glasses, held forth in a thick Teutonic accent:

Other people look at bottles of wine or girls’ bottoms. I look at type. It’s a very nerdish thing to do, but I am very much a work person, I think.

Go Erik! Modernism. That‘s the rub. Helvetica is characteristic of Modernism — clean, open, minimalistic. If you don’t like Modernism, you probably don’t like Helvetica. This film is not entirely reverential. However one look back at the tawdry, fudged up design of a fiftes Magazine was enough to convince me that 50 years of Helvetica is worth celebrating. If only it was as easy to clean up every other aspect of the New York Subway system!

God Not Englishman: Official

Cole Moreton’s Is God still an Englishman? How we lost our Faith is a brilliant, compelling journalistic romp through the past thirty years of goings-on in the Church of England by a disillusioned Charismatic Evangelical. It’s the low-church version, so he doesn’t really do Gary Bennett or Brian Brindley, but his vignettes of various Evangelical attempts to call down fire from heaven and defibrillate the old girl are painfully acute. His marvellous eye for detail and crisp, open style make this a real page-turner, although it is stitched together from various pieces penned nearer the time.

It sounds a loud death knell for the C of E as the all-pervasive National Trust for Morals presided over by Almighty Gawd himself. Cosmo Gordon Lang invented this role for it in the 1920’s. It reached its apogee under the Headmasterly eye of Geoffrey Fisher, and suffered its inevtable Oz-like deflation in the days of Robert Runcie. Attempts by George Carey to transmute this vision of Church into a new model C of E plc are seen as a dying flick of the tail. Cole Morton sincerely bought this Kool-Aid at a time he was very impressionable, swilled it, relished it, gargled it for the best part of twenty years, and is now, with relief I would think, spitting it out.

On the way he provides a fascinating and at times painfully acute critique of the various crankdoms and nostrums that were going to save the C of E through the eighties and nineties. None of them, surprise surprise, turn out to have been all they were cracked up to be. All the various Evangelical Body-building schemes seem to have built some muscles, but in funny places. This book should, therefore, be compulsory reading for all Ecclesiastical Don Quixotes.

What is less secure is in the book’s grasp of the longer sweep of history. It takes the Cosmo Lang/ Fisher fantasy as sober absolute truth, rather as Fisher and Lang did, then projects it back in a monolithic way that, if true, would, for example, have made the Civil War impossible. But the book isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be historical. It’s a most excellent topical romp through the stories that made the Church trade press, seasoned by hindsight.

And when, in W. H. Auden’s poem, the lovers they were gone, the deep river ran on. It is this deep river that the book attempts to plumb for its view of where all this leaves the English. It’s very hard to put flesh and bood on that kind of Englishness without sounding like a folkloric fetishist, but the book does land, in the end, on Peter Owen-Jones, a Sussex Non-Stipendiary Vicar, who relates in sincere, compassionate, subtle and creative way to the community he serves in what can only be described as the very best traditions of the Church of England.

Whilst young Cole was getting slain in the Spirit and lancing himself till the metaphorical blood ran, there were thousands of vicars all over England, of all Ecclesiastical stripes, doing an Owen-Jones type Job. Thank God, there still are. I was burying the dead of Reading myself, and learnt from the thousands in whose front rooms I sat a mass of information they don’t teach you at college. Many of the people I served, Churchgoing or not, were far wiser, more loving, courageous human beings than I’ll ever be, and their general spiritual instinct to prioritise the Good Samaritan over Boanergic indoor Churchy games, was, in the main, sounder than any of us knew at the time.

This book chronicles someone struggling his way, using Church, through Fowler’s stages of faith development from stage 2 to early stage 4 (Mythic-Literal to Synthetic-Convetional to early Individuative-reflective). Therefore there’s much good to come. Ahead lie the increasingly sunlit uplands of stage 5 — that’s where the crock of gold, if there is one, lies. It probably always did.

What is Pioneer Ministry?

I have been drawn into various conversations this past month about pioneer ministry. I want precision about what it is, because otherwise it just becomes a sexy moniker for anything creative, alternative and generally involving young people. Someone's suggested to me, for example, that helping set up a monthly service in a village hall is “pioneer ministry,” or running a youth group, or recruiting a new missional community of 20-somethings and resourcing them for ministry. That last one obviously is — but what about the others? What is pioneer ministry?

Inspired by Vincent Donovan’s book Christianity Rediscovered, I’ve had an idea. Fr Donovan was a 1960’s RC missionary in Kenya who went out to sell the locals his faith, and experienced some degree of honest frustration and discomfort before he realised he could more fruitfully work from the other end. In other words if he got under the skin of Masai Culture, taking its sociology and culture as a gift of God not an obstruction to the gospel, people would find their own way of being authentically Masai Catholic Christians instead of copies of Liverpuddlian RC’s. The result of this was to fulfil his original mission brief, but from the other end to the one he had anticipted, and to produce a new and authentic strand in Catholic faith, to enrich it from a new culture.

So, the essential distinctive for a pioneer minister, I reckon, is:

a willingness and ability to go live in another sociology, listen to it and struggle to understand what it is about and how Christ is reflected in it, then work from within it to develop a community of discipleship that is authentic to it, but also to the Way of Christ.

Imagine I was 95, and discovered that the other residents of my sheltered housing scheme were brought up in a pattern of Christendom Christiantiy which had not worked for them and rendered them deeply unable to access what was good in it because they were so blocked by what had broken down and changes int he context. I work out what, positively their culture is, and what it tells me of Christ who is greater than any culture but reflected in all. I then work out a way of life that does justice to both historic Christianity, as an authentic development, and also their culture. I’m 95, but I’m a pioneer...

So the qualities required of a pioneer minisuter would be profound rootedness in the substance but not necessarily the form of historic Christianity, plus a willingness and activity to live within another sociology, plus discernment, plus the willingness to build community, plus an ability to articulate what has been learnt and interpret it back tot he rest of the Church. It’s a tall order — very much more than just being a real trendy geezer. The joy and strength of Christianity has been its capacity to enculturate and adapt whilst retaining its golden heart. “Stop the World I want to get off” is an expression of fear not faith. We need more than that. As cultures interface, develop and fracture only to re-form, the Church needs real pioneers!

Communal Bath House manners

Interesting times down the local Hammam this morning. Cultural interaction, this being a local rather than tourist bath house, was fascinating. Women whom we would think prudish because they wouldn’t walk down the street in a skimpy top and shorts found our female Western insistence on wearing a top in a wholly female bath house weird and prudish. So what is, actually, “prudish?” what is “natural?” Another conversation with someone local who had been to London posed a question —“why do you need millions of security cameras in England? Here, most people, most of the time, know God will be angry with them if they steal, so they don’t” — a naïve point of view, perhaps, but indicative of another cultural gap?

Back to the Public Bath House. Hammams conserve water and combines the advantages of a shower and a bath — you open your pores and relax like a bath with steam (aided by gommage = mud scrub if you want) but refresh and get rid of the dirt like a shower. The whole notion of a community bath house is a bit odd to our very privatised Western sensibilities. Being bloky and throwing water over ourselves was a lot of fun and we all wish we'd taken the plunge (except there isn't a plunge to take) earlier in the week.

I came away feeling that how we interpret and understand gender are the finest tuned most personal bits of our cultural conditioning, and the easiest to get wrong. Absolutising them is ridiculous. They live within our comfort zones and evolve all the time. It’s all too easy to assume we know that the other person is being liberated or oppressed when all they are being is themselves! Observing gender interactions in an Eastern culture also throws some of the context of the Bible into perspective, as a near Eastern text.

To respond to God in others, we need to listen carefully, reducing our interpretative filters and assumptions to a working minimum, defocusing on our own reactions and respecting their provisionality. We need to express ourselves openly but courteously, suspending our disbelief about the other person’s culture. Then we need to draw gentle and provisional conclusions. That’s how cross cultural sensitivity works, and seeing the different strategies people have for straddling cultures, it’s plain Christianity in an open Cross-cultural environment feels very different to the way it does from an Imperialistic ( = Chauvinstic and standardized) standpoint.

Early Christianity grew best at points of cross-cultural intersection, the open ports and trading system nodes of the near East; so an age of globalised communications should be fertile soil for the authentic article... What has to change in us for this to be the case?

Michael Jackson Dead

The Death of Michael Jackson is a significant milestone, if not quite a Kennedy moment. Thriller remains the highest selling album and video ever, and cutural historians may well see him as the Elvis of his generation.

However repellent and bizarre the Sun’s “Wacko Jacko” had come to look and sound, with his strange colour, weird childish ego and nose jobs, Jackson was an astonishingly able entertainer. For all his undoubted personal and musical eclipse, he still managed to sell out a run of 50 O2 concerts next month.

Jackson’s stage act defined a central strand of a whole generation’s culture. His seamless song and dance fusion and OTT stage effects had astonishing visual impact, delivered to audiences at one fell swoop and largely without computer graphics, fusing talent, hard work and meticulous craftsmanship. Fred Astaire once phoned him to compliment him on his dancing. Along with Freddie Mercury’s performances, Jackson’s were the popular entertainment phenomenon of their age, and his videos defined the field for a new art form.

Parents may well wag their fingers and draw attention to the ludicrous aspects of Jackson’s strangely blessed and stangely cursed fifty years — they certainly give pause for thought to any pushy mummy tempted to shove her little darling onto the stage at age 6. Good news — you become an icon. Bad news — your whole life is messed up. Just say no.

Driven by a desperate need to be loved, combined with an inability to grow up, Garland’s Law still applies, in good ways and bad: “Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else” Jackson’s ability and inability to do that, musically and personally, were the rub. It’ll make a hell of a movie, someday.

Revolutionary Road — to nowhere?

Kate Winslett and Leonardo deCaprio were last seen bobbing in the sea off Newfoundland. But what if they’d made it ashore? Surely they would have lived happily ever after, raised a big corn-fed premium family. Wouldn't they? Don’t bet on that.

In Revolutionary Road Kate & Leo are the Wheelers, exploring true love, locked-in frustration and ennui in 1953. There’s no way like the American way. The babies are booming and so are the ’burbs. Under the sink, however, various streptococci breed, and the worst ones eat you up, from the inside out. Gatsby showed us the toxic tender underbelly of the jazz age; Frank and April do the same for the McCarthy era.

Off and on, hopes raised in the Wheelers’ cute meeting scene seem teasingly capable of fulfilment. 95% of the time, however, the film pokes around the bend under the sink, where germs lurk. Frank works in a dead end job; April is bored out of her mind. Frank tries to impress a girl in the typing pool; April tumbles meaninglessly with a neighbour in the front bench seat of his Buick. This is not elegant, or even particularly erotic, but maintains Kate’s record of making out in a car once per blockbuster.

Enter John, the neighbours’ wacky spaced out son, fresh off a massive breakdown. John tells it like it is, like Lear’s fool. Life is suffocating, unbearable. It’s enough to make D. H. Lawrence run off into the woods, roll around naked in wet leaves and write a poem about it, but you can’t even do that in suburban Connecticut. Paris calls, in the form of a breakout that, in itself, would have made a jolly alternative movie. Cary Grant would have moved to Connecticut, but the Wheelers have already done that, with no place else to go and April newly pregnant with No 3. The Wheelers are now in big trouble...

Beneath Sam Mendes beautifully crafted well-scripted film lurk big questions. What is the relationship between love and the marriage bond? What are our masks good for and bad for? When things unravel, how does one level fill with hope, and the next deflate to absolute zero? How does happiness come, from outside in and inside out, and what is it anyway?

Tracking the Wheelers through their downward spiral, Kate Winslet in particular eases deeper into her character in a truly remarkable way. Banking down, she becomes, increasingly, a complete outsider to the honeytone fifties colour scheme. Everything stays intact around her as she catastrophically crumbles internally. Increasingly, the show feels like a horror film. The kids go curiously out of focus as all the wheels come off the wagon. Pleasantville, friends, is a sham.

Understsood or not quite understood, love or loathe the implicit message, this is a very good movie, just a squeak, perhaps, off a really great movie. Just do yourself a favour, and take your first date to a more optimisitc show, like Friday the 13th.

Thomas Merton 60 years on

On this day forty years ago, Thomas Merton, 53, stepped out of the shower in a hotel bedroom and accidentally touched a short-circuited electric fan — a random end to an extraordinary life. Also on this day, but sixty-seven years ago, Thomas Merton, 26, stepped out off the streets into the guesthouse of a monastery, seeking acceptance into the Cistercian order. His was a life of great stability and order, amidst great randomness.

December 10 is a key date, then. Merton lived a sensitive, wild, intellectual, passionate, reflective, pragmatic, holy, privileged, disordered, centred life. What makes him a man for all seasons is that you can select every second word from that list and construct a simple personality — the redeemed or the rake. To understand Merton, though, you have to stick the list back together again and give every word its due weight. Merton did not collapse the ordered into the sensory aspect of his life, but lived elements of both to the full simultaneously. Merton’s holiness is emergent, not statuesque. And that is where his power and engagement come from.

Merton is a gloriously broad both/and character. His imagination and honesty shine clearly through his stumbling attempts to find God, and be centred in him. I doubt the present management in the Roman Church would be interested in making him a saint, because he hits all the wrong institutional tickle buttons. But it is impossible to think of Merton as one long dead, because very few of us have yet caught up with him; and it is that capacity to gift oneself to the whole Church, the whole world, that constitutes sainthood.

Saints, in this technical sense, hold out to others, freely, sometimes unwittingly, some tangible actualization of holiness. Anglicans don't do the Borders Reward Card thing about sainthood — we just let it emerge and then celebrate it. Therefore I cannot pontificate about exactly where Thomas Merton is, but if you go looking for him in heaven, I bet you’ll find him in the jazz section.

Merton rode white waters of chaos, and the heightened sensitivity that comes with living on adrenaline and late nights never entirely deserted him. He found stillness, supremely in a toolshed just beyond the monastery enclosure. His sacred centre was a dancing point, and that is the great resource he offers us, as we try and drink enough water to stay alive under the incessant shower — the information and media shower, the globalization shower, the goods, services and marketing shower. Showers are dangerous places...

And Merton’s message to us? The thing he learnt that we haven’t caught up with yet? Try this:

Man begins in zoology.
He is the saddest animal.
He drives a big red car called anxiety.
He dreams at night
of riding all the elevators.
Lost in the halls
he never finds the right door.

Man is the saddest animal.
A flake-eater in the morning,
a milk-drinker.
He fills his skin with coffee
and loses patience with the rest of his species.

He draws his sin on the wall,
on all the ads in all the subways.
He draws moustaches on all the women
because he cannot find his joy,
except in zoology.
Whenever he goes to the phone to call Joy,
he gets the wrong number.

Therefore he likes weapons.
He knows all guns by their right name.
He drives a big black Cadillac called death.

Now he is putting anxiety into space.
He flies his worries all around Venus,
but it does him no good.
In space where for a long time there is only emptiness,
he drives a big white globe called death.

Now dear children
who have learned the first lesson about man,
answer your test.

Man is the saddest aimal.
He begins in zoology,
and gets lost
in his own bad news.

Bishop of Rochester does his job

This week’s Sunday Telegraph carried an interview boldly headlined “Bishop of Rochester reasserts ‘no-go’ claim.” Oh goody, I thought. Now I can find out where some of these places are. We have very significant Muslim populations in Slough, Wycombe and Aylesbury. If one of them’s a no-go area, I can get on down there and find out what it’s really like. Sorry, mate. Turns out the headline bears no relation to anything Bishop Michael actually said. This is the old “Pen an outrageous headline, and they ignore the rest” trick that was played on Archbishop Rowan the other week.

So what was the authentic substance of the piece? Bishop Michael’s personal courage and faith shone through, along with a characteristically sharp, thoughtful and uncomfortable question he’s challenging us all to consider. Christianity has shaped our laws, culture and history in a fundamental way. Do we really want to blow all that? If we don’t, we need to commit to it and nourish it. The positive message I heard was “use it or lose it.”

No no-go areas. In a pathetic attempt to cover up, the journalist lobbed in a random anecdote, nothing to do with anything +Michael said, about the home secretary being heckled by a crazy in the East End last year. Apparently that’s what has to happen for your street to become a “no-go area.” And if that’s all that Fleet Street’s finest can come up with in three weeks of trying, you may safely assume that, whilst there are a small number of nutters out there, the whole “no-go” thing is essentially provocative tosh, designed to prop up dwindling newspaper sales.

Meanwhile the searching question +Michael raised deserves a serious answer from the secular elites who like to think they form our culture. In the present superheated climate, I wouldn’t hold my breath for it, though...

Highway 61 Revisited

Indian driving is a social dance. English driving is largely an essay in suburban anger management and getting nowhere fast. What Mr Toad called “the joy of the open road,” the Easy Rider thing, is purer fantasy. To do it you need the Great American virtues — a big country, abundant gasoline, optimism, almost autistic self-absorption, resilience and a childlike capacity for wonder. If you really believe no-one else matters, Mister Kerouac, there’s a whole life to be made of it...

Parson says a sinner will
perish in the
flames (O parson
says a
sinner will perish
in the flames
Yes Parson says a sinner
will perish in the flames)But
i reckon that's better
than freez-
ing

Everybody's dying to be
someone
else(O every
body's
dying to be some
one else
Yes everybody's dying
to be someone else)But
i'll live my life if
it kills
me

- e.e. cummings

Sing Yo! for the life of a Yahoo

In our recent blog discussion about becoming a surveillance society, Sarah Brush mentioned a film she had come across in her youth work — Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. This movie is well on its way to becoming a cult in its own right, partly because of the way the corporate that produced it (Fox) apparently tried to strangle it at birth. You won’t find a trailer or a website, because they never produced either. Fox behaving exactly like the kind of idiot super-conglomerate Judge is taking the Mickey out of has increased Idiocracy’s urgency and appeal. However minimally released and promoted, it has gained and established a substantial cult following on its own. It is extremely foulmouthed, but to make a clear point.

This is dark Swiftian social satire, delivered through the medium of Beavis and Butthead/ South Park potty humour. It’s Teenage Mutant Moron Brave New World — a kind of Nightmare MacDonaldized Metropolis. Like most high concept movies, everything depends on the concept: if you can’t swallow it you’ll hate the movie, but if you give it a go you could well have a lot of fun.

Here’s the deal. The future is not going to be a Dan Dare hyper-intelligent Spockfest. Oh no. The dim breed like rabbits whilst the not-so-dim faff about in a non reproductive middle class fashion, with inevitable results. This genetically not-very-cogent thesis makes disturbing sociology, in the tradition of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. As the thickies go forth and multiply, celeb junk culture lives long and prospers, whilst the scientists devote all their efforts to hair care and erectile athletic products. Fast forward 500 years, into a radically informal dumbed down world where everybody is thick as a brick — they actually need cautions on bags of peanuts to warn them that they contain nuts.

They make the whole world one big teenager’s messy bedroom, in which the rubbish piles up, and the buildings fall over. High Court judges ponce about in shell suits. Hospitals diagnose using keypads like tills at MacDonalds. Doctors blow grass in surgery. In the shadows lurk sinister corporations who have bought out everything and turned it into advertising. Government is conducted by celebrities for celebrities, whilst the punters need tattoos to identify themselves, and think almost entirely in marketing slogans.
The film’s hero is ordinary Joe from 2005 who has to bash his way through all this. The pace is sometimes uneven and the odd joke misfires, but the big questions this film raises deserve serious reflection by anyone interested in not ending up as a moron. Go ye, get it in as a DVD (£5 at Zavvi just now), if for nothing else, just to annoy the Fox Corporation.

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...

Is that it?

A characteristically creative and catchy new advert for the Alpha Course — There’s a line in Fawlty Towers ‘That was your life. Do I get another? Sorry, mate...’ It 's a challenge to outsiders, but also a challenge to Christian insiders —
how much of a ‘factory’ is Church? Do we ever treat people like things, or standardize them, or homogenize them? if so, what are we doing to free the spirits involved — theirs, ours and God's?

All members one of another?

Michael Schluter of the Relationships Foundation & Jubilee centre spoke this morning at the Chiltern Prayer Breakfast, with MP's, business and community leaders. Michael was a world bank economist, frustrated by the ineffectiveness of much aid activity, and the various theoretical models offered in East Africa. Michael believes Biblical (OT) teaching about Jubilee, Freedom from economic slavery, relational criminal law & education, are resources for an increasingly divided, unhappy and frustrated UK. Our manic, fragmented and precarious relational life came bottom of the UNICEF advanced nations wellbeing/ quality of life survey, with 1/8 of the population medicated for depression.

1. 100 people in a room actually represent (by the time you tot up their links) half a million relationships! Our educational system examines academic and learning skills, but not the main thing employers find makes a difference — emotional/ relational intelligence. How crazy is that?
   
   
2. Pretty much all the measuring sticks for human activity are financial. We think we are ‘the developed world,’ when actually we are relationally underdeveloped compared to some poorer countries. Yet this whole language reinforces the idea that only money really matters.
   There has to be more to life than GDP! Dr Schluter quoted Bobby Kennedy —

Gross Domestic Product
does not measure the health of our children,
the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.
It does not include the beauty of our poetry
or the strength of our marriages,
the intelligence of our public debate,
or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures everything, in short,
except that which makes life worthwhile...

Bobby Kennedy, 1968