Christian Aid: A Bigger Splash

Everything in India is bigger. Driving through Hyderabad assaults the senses with its seemingly endless miles of heaving humanity in all its expressions, diversity and colour. How small it makes the field on which I play out most regular work seem. In 42 degree heat a small group of us hone a development plan for a school based on Jesus’ principle that the child is greatest in the Kingdom and only the best is good enough for the poor. 

This is no time for half measures or empty gestures. World citizens clever enough for the social and technical way we’re evolving but morally grounded enough to make it worth living in do not grow in trees. Each child gets one opportunity to grow and learn, and there are no dress rehearsals. Here, beyond gestures, for some of the poorest people int he world, We are trying to capture Jesus’ vision of life in all its fulness. Nothing less is worthy of our highest endeavours, even if it means being real but also radical about everything, including ourselves. 

But how?

The question brings me back a particular conversation with a City trader. He’s a good and decent man, who well understands the virtues of capitalism and has pursued them. He is no fool. He knows that our present system, worked by autopilot, has no long-term future. It has produced wealth, but also tremendous debt. It relies on half a billion partying in first class whilst everybody else lives a less enriched life. The arrival at the ball of another two billion aspirant middle class partygoers from Brazil, India, Russia, and China (to name but a few)has to change everything radically. It calls for a new kind of ingenuity. Finally the rape of the pant has consequences.

So what we need, he says, is beyond economics. 

Economics is often treated as a science but in fact it is no such thing. It manages inequalities according to a set of assumptions about worth that go beyond its own capacity to examine them. 

Economics draws its basic premises from choices we make about what we see as a good life. Questions about those bring the doctor and the priest in their long coats, running over the fields. 

What we need, my trader friend and I say, is beyond the secular principle — life pursued pragmatically, free from the imposition of particular religious dogma in its narrowest sense. It’s a precious hygiene factor in any free society, but does not exhaust the possibilities of being alive. Without is we cannot run a decent and humane society, and it has serious comment to offer on how the ship is running, but can have no idea of where the ship is going.

I wonder about a slogan I saw a few years ago, painted on the side of the South Karnataka State Legislature in Bangalore — “Government business is God’s business.” They don’t mean any particular god among the thousands India holds. But they do means what they say. Not only is the ultimate subject matter the stuff people engage with in community by faith, but these things that really count can only be pursued radically with courage and confidence. Pure pragmatists are only tinkering, and more is being demanded of us all than mere tinkering.

How is God calling us to do this? By grace through faith that is committed enough to

• be Real and open to what is — not to tart things up, because faith is beyond pretending
• be Positive about what might be — because what proceeds from faith is faith, and Anglicans above all should know that all you get from fear is paltry squabbling, however worthy and genteel
• Get Engaged — to get right out of its comfy seat and engage, remembering that because of the incarnation the only bass for true and fruitful engagement is equality
• be Honest — taking every thought captive to Christ because otherwise we are stuck in no more than a religious hall of mirrors

That’s enough down and dirty agenda for a lifetime, is it?

We have work to do. Over the next three days the newly honed school development plan needs to go back to its originators in the school, and we work with them to make it happen. 

The jeep calls at 11.00. 

Revelation: Saving Faith

Speaking on Newsnight last week, John Broadhurst suggested that current disputations among Christians are really all about revelation, and I think he has a very useful point. Rosie Harper picked it up on the programme by pointing out that “Revelation is something which evolves; tradition grows in response to the work of the Holy Spirit.”

For some people, revelation is the process of handing down a fixed corpus of doctrine, a wrapped package that we label “the faith once delivered to the saints.” Faith is the work of protecting, propogating and defending that deposit against all comers. That’s where Saul started out, a Pharisee of the pharisees, zealous in his defence of the faith in which he had been brought up, a persecutor and zealot.

Then Saul encountered Jesus on the Damascus Road, and even though some of the rags and cultural assumptions of a persecuting zealot clung to him thereafter, the whole course of his life was changed. Faith was not slavishly adhering to works of the law, but exhibiting the courage, vision and hope of Abraham whose faith was accounted to him as righteousness. Once someone was in Christ they could not simply carry on using the old absolutist auto-pilot. They were subject to the Spirit who gives life, not the letter of the law that kills.

For Paul the Apostle, the faith once delivered to the saints is not an ideology but life in the Spirit by grace through faith, a revolutionary process of renewal by the Spirit. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counted for anything but grace working through faith, a new creation, to incorporate someone in Christ. This is the work of the Spirit, not human agency. In this way of looking at things Revelation is a dynamic personal process, not an instutional or ideological fix.

This renewal process didn’t nullify the law, but it did set it in a radical new perspective in a way that painfully exposed its limitations. The law was good as far as it went, but Grace accomplished what the law, weakened by sin, never could — the constitution of a new humanity in Christ where there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.

Looking back at the law which had been his everything, Paul did not rubbish the concerns of those who stood where he had been, hanging onto various kinds of legalism, obsessing over meat sacrificed to idols and the like. But still he insisted, the reality of being in Christ transcends all else, and every decision now needs to be interpreted in the light of its over-riding significance.

In this perspective, the disputes that arise between Christians are a means of proving the genuineness of their convictions. Factionalism is part of human nature, but if indulged, it becomes Cancer in the body of Christ which needs to be watched and stamped on hard. Therefore erecting any Apostle, even Cephas or Appollos, into a rallying point for intra-Church exclusivism or disunity is profoundly abusive, however well-intentioned.

The challenge is to incorporate the vision of Pauline Christianity in our consciousness consistently as a way of life, and not to produce a new Pharisaism. Make no mistake, this was the big issue for early Christians, and concern about it runs through pretty much every page of the Epistles. Had the broader transformative Pauline vision not won through, the Church would almost certainly have survived only as a minor Jewish sect. The transformative stuff comes from the Spirit, and against its justice there can be no law.

Confronted with causes that divide people today, as then, what we need to do is reflect on the realities of the context in which God has set us, the mystery of Christ and the call of the Spirit, and then go figure.

The radical willingness to do this is saving faith, and by its fruits the world shall know Christ for who he is.

Change, Decay and Renewal

Wallace Benn has got me thinking, when he says:

I've only two years left before retirement but the Church of England into which I was ordained is not the same church today

Is it optimism or faith, or both, but I’m rather glad the Church isn’t the same as the one into which I was ordained 31 years ago. I can’t as a Church historian think of any age in which somebody could have said the Church of thirty years ago hadn’t changed in ways that mattered. Certainly not the first century, or fourth, or sixteenth.

I’ve taken a quick flick through some paperback commentators about the Church Bishop Benn seems to wish he were in, including Nick Earle’s What’s wrong with the Church? (1961). Here were the things he thought had to change in 1961:

1. Growing out of being the Tory Party at Prayer and engaging with society in a less hidebound way.
   Good Story: We have. Faith in the City was one major turning point. And the current mood music from government implies that many of them have had enough of mindless secularism as the only way to engage with religion in the public square. I rejoice that the Church is very much more diverse, though it faces major internal anti-discriminatory challenges.
   Bad Story: the pain of having to climb down from Imperialism and Monopoly has exacted a cost of it own. Faith is the opposite of, not a higher form of, nostalgia.
   
   
2. Growing away from financial dependence on endowment income, and providing pensions for the clergy as well as looking after the buildings. Good story: Another Job done. C of E giving has mushroomed since the eighties and our diocese is now financially self-supporting, thanks to a revolution in generosity. Buildings are in better nick than ever, but pose great challenges. Retirement is now possible, and pensions have come in, albeit recently downsized.
   Bad Story: How do we, as a voluntary organisation, prevent ourselves becoming financially driven and keep aligned with basic Gospel values?
   
   
3. Opening the “Parson’s Pleasure” clerical caste, freeing up ministry
   Good Story: Much progress on this in terms of access and, since 1989, female colleagues whom God has called and gifted and who enrich the life and witness of the Church immeasurably by their love, prayer and dedication. They reach places the old fashioned public schoolboys club that was clergy chapter back in the seventies never did, and have helped develop a more realistic picture of servant ministry to replace old romanticism.
   Bad Story: We are still too obsessed with clergy — “Lay ministry” often means getting lay people to be clerical, rather than fulfil their calling in the community by being what they are particularly called to be, beyond the walls of the Church. Also, we have a new challenge to use new HR tools to secure justice and the common good, but preserve a sense of calling.
   
   
4. Stopping pretending and obsessing about sex (in 1961 contraception and divorce) Good Story: Some real progress in the Church and the culture. Contraception has happened. The Church always did marry divorcees before 1925, and having to confront all the hypocrisy of pretending it didn’t, however painful, has delivered us to a potentially more honest place.
   Bad Story: Society at large is all messed up over relationships and we, who live in this society, share the pain and damage the arises from this. One thing’s for sure, though. Hypocrisy wasn’t the answer. We are in some ways more fearfully childish and obsessional about gay people than we were n 1961, when everything was safely in the closet.
   
   
5. Getting real about other Christians, by allowing inter communion and engaging with other faiths
   Good Story: The structure is there for inter communion, and the rise of Charismatic spirituality and non-denominational churches have blessed everyone greatly in unexpected ways. Past Imperialism and exclusivism are not entirely dead, but largely possible to see for what they are now. The Church has begun to seriously de-institutionalise and become more like a movement, trying to model its life more on energy than power games.
   Bad Story: There’s been a loss of optimism and confidence about who we are and what we’re doing there, and the whole challenge of being traditional rather than reactionary, which we don’t always handle well.

I wonder what changes others have noticed over thirty years?

On balance, I thank God the Church is not as it was in the seventies because, however improbably, I do believe the journey we are on is his journey not ours and we are now thirty years’ march nearer home. But make no mistake. The Church is always called to change. Some change is good, some less good, but you only know which when you step out in faith and do it — what one of my college tutors used to call the Jewish rowing-boat view of history. That’s why we’re in God's hands not ours. The disciples in Luke 9 only discovered the resource to go out two by two out there, when they did it — what Jesus called travelling light, without excess baggage.

Jesus Christ, risen, ascended, glorified does not change, and the result is we are resourced to live and witness in a changing world without pretending! The reason the Cross is static, one for all, and our whole vision secured by an eschatalogical vision, is that this creates a liminal space in which we can live responsively in the world God has given us, always in the end times. In this zone the life of the Church is endlessly dynamic. The ark is secured not by being anchored to the sea bed, but by the Holy Spirit, as it interacts with the world.

Lions and Unicorns, mods and rockers

One of the great highlights of last week was finally meeting Euan Semple. I’ve come across Euan as a thinker and educator (in the broadest sense), and have long been impressed by his pragmatic wisdom, systemic awareness, and ability to open rather than close down, or geek up, new media issues. Euan’s blogged our conversation here.

On the face of it I was after new ways to raise my colleagues’ capacity to engage in the new media landscape, and Euan is indeed a resourceful friend in this world.

Most interesting, however was to chew over how communication develops people and groups of people. We have entirely different world views when it comes to orgnaised religion anwyay, but some strongly congruent instincts and values — freedom, emergence, openness.

It seems there is a Right brain creative world of wacky possibilities to which the internet gives all kinds of flight. Now that anyone can communicate with anyone, hierarchies lie helpless — look at BP, for example, flailing around, trying to manage its image in the context of its present oil spill.

However there is also a minimal but essential Left brain rigorous standards world, without which the whole thing is imposible. A few infrastructural rules make the whole communications structure, possible. We saw a fundamental difference between blinkered rules that, taken too seriously, restrict human flourishing and others that enable it. One feature of good rules is that they don't draw attention to themselves, just serve a bigger infrastructure elegantly.

So the relationship between order and complete liberty sounds like a tussle between the authoritarian lion and free range unicorn. People get their security and meaning, the ability to articulate, from a settled order that revolutionaries then subvert by asking questions which initially irritate system professionals, but change the order of everything and eventually move the whole game up a notch.

For this to happen you need enough common framework for questions to be asked, but an anarchistic freedom in asking them. Put it another way — Jesus receives a Pharisaic / dogmatic education, then goes round from within it, asking Pharisees cheeky questions that subvert everything. So we deconstructed human communication as something almost like a religion.

It struck me how elements of the Christian tradition work this way — creeds, commandments, golden rule. Once people become self-conscious about them, however, and add their own powergaming, they soon become death warmed up; licenses for insanity.

It's a struggle reflected by everything from the war between Data managers and Creatives in industry to St Paul’s great struggles to locate the Jewish Law in its place for the infant Churches of Rome and Galatia. It mirrors our own internal conflict between painting by numbers and free expression.

Bad “religion,” in this sense, takes itself too seriously, frames issues too narrowly for forward movement, closes down fresh possibilities for meaning, and becomes a license for stuckness, paranoia and, ultimately, sociopathic insanity.
The law, as St Paul was wont to say, is fine as far as it goes. It just does not go as far as its most enthusiastic afficionados think

Good “religion” in this sense thakes the same raw materials, but encourages people to tell their personal and pragmatic stories. It frames discussion in a way that can fly, by holding creative, open articulations within a minimalist framework that exposes everything to human, empirical fit. Its truth is emergent rather than propositional; or, as the man said, by its fruits ye shall know it.

Pentecost, Spirit and Dogma

Pentecost does raise in acute form the question of what we really believe Christianity is. It burst on the world as a process of incarnation, God breaking out beyond the limits of preconceived thought about him, and starting again.

Christian faith was a process of personal, spiritual and social renewal, more like a fire than an object or a doctrine.

From Christianity’s earliest days, people who didn’t quite get this tried to debase it into a knowledge-based religion. Gnosticism often came with weird ceremonies and strange terminology but its heart was the idea that getting the doctrine, “the knowledge” right, led to everything else. The knowledge was absolutely right with God in a way flesh-and-blood human beings never could be. It was the dogma that judged everything, and established itself by fear.

Dogma is meant to be the wrapping of the process for purposes of transmission — an encapsulating membrane that enables the activity of the Spirit to be passed on, picked up and personalised in future. It is not an absolute in itself, however, and it’s a poor substitute for the Holy Spirit. The Spirit gives freedom, where the categories and concepts, even good ones, easily become idols, especially when stuck up and treated as absolutes. Pathetic substitutes for faith, like being right, create their own ideologies and sticking points. Still, however, the Spirit animates those who will let him, from the inside out, and raises fresh possibilities in every fresh context.

Even Christian History is the Holy Spirit’s — for it is no mere catalogue of facts, far less a chain of legalstic precedents to bind the Spirit. Rather it is the discipline that restores to people whose lives we embrace as intricately bound up with ours within the communion of Saints the freedom that once they had. By doing this, we are enabled to live free and faithful lives in our circumstances, without manipulation or pretending.

How to read the Bible story fruitfully

Holy Week is built around multiple retellings of the passion story. As well as events in Church, round here that means listening to the whole of two Bach passions. To profit from this week’s activity, we need to hear the story in itself as for the first time, noticing fresh details, engaging our imaginations with the world around us and our personal circumstances, and listening for a sympathetc resonance between those realities.

We live in a world of powers and empires, of brands, logos and globalized world order. St Paul’s letter to the Colossians engages with the realities of empire, its principalities and powers, and reveals Christ above and beyond it all, yet also deep within us.

There’s a wonderful description of how the Church uses Scripture corporately for this purpose in a great, creative commentary on Colossians I have been reading recently:

In order to have vision we must have memory. Indeed forgetfulness or amnesia is precisely what strips us of vision — without the past there can be no future. So our contemporary improvisation must be informed and directed by both a profound indwelling of the biblical vision of life and a discerning attentiveness to the postbiblical scenes that have already been acted out in the history of the church.

There is a certain dynamic in this approach to Biblical authority that could be described as a dance between innovation and consistency. Our serious reading of Scripture must be characterized by fidelity to the thrust of the narrative and thus provide our life with a stability and consistency, a rootedness. At the same time, however, the Bible as an unfinished drama gives us freedom for historical innovation and thus a creative and imaginative flexibility in our historical responses. It is only by maintaining the essential relationship between stability and flexibility that we “may avoid the hazards” of both a rigid fossilization of our faith and “a deeper relativizing that gives up everything for a moment of contemporary relevance.”

As we read through the Biblical Story, it is clear that the Israelites themselves retold their stories with such fidelity and innovation. As the ancient Israelites encountered new situations, they remembered and interpreted their traditions in such a way that they engaged contemporary problems and concerns. Indeed without such dynamic interpretation, the texts and traditions contained within them were seen to be incomplete...

Stability and flexibility, fidelity and creativity, consistency and innovation — these are key if a narrative text is to have any current authority in our lives.

Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat
Colossians remixed — Subverting the Empire
pp 134-5

Faith in the City today

Urban Theology Day with colleagues, practitioners and experts in Manchester, learning and sharing together about urban realities. The theological input from Andrew Davey really got me thinking. Among various soundbites noted for future contemplation, I begin with a phrase from the current World Cities debate, that pretty much encapsulates what I remember working out pragmatically as a first incumbent
— The Whole Truth about the Parish System:

We need to think of placed identity not as a claim to a place, but as an acknowledgment of the responsibilities that inhere in being placed (Doreen Massey)

A soundbite for planners everywhere, from the Tower of Babel to the parish profile or deanery plan:

Every regeneration project begins with Poetry, and ends with Real Estate (L.K. Platzman)

Finally, a challenging marker to pin under those old fifties Eagle Comic pictures suggesting the Secular City of Towers was the only future:

If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen again in the post-industrial cities of the developing world (Mike Davis)

All this, and the amazing news to me that the most cloned high street in Britain (= colonised by identikit national chains to the excusion of local traders) is Exeter. Do we thank the Luftwaffe for that?

Noted thematic points of engagement:

1. Discerning the City: What is going on in fast moving environments, symbolically and thematically? Only dialogue can tell! But where is the soul of the city?
   
2. Ethics and Ideals: What makes a “Good” City? by our context-sensitive moral experience, intuition and activity, we enact this — how consciously?
3. Cultures: Churches have a long record as being part producers of culture. Where is our Creativity? Added Value, freely offered?
4. Language: Largely Christian in origins, these days! “Regeneration” “Renewal” “Iconic” etc. etc. etc. What is the appeal of this language? What does it really mean, contextualized? How can the faith which spawned it use it creatively?

All this, and a couple of final impressions:

1. None of us know exactly what we’re in for just now, as the fallout continues from financial woes. It’s only just beginning. Government is, as ever, a huge, diverse and complex conglomerate of ideas and energies, not the simple Big Player people often speak as though it were — bit like the Church! But a general shift in emphasis away from Social development and devolution, laudable as it is in theory, could get a bit weird in a global recession...
   
2. Along with other faith organizations, but particularly as an established Church, the Church of England is strategically placed to help, because of its presence on the ground. There is paricularly strong contribution to be made to Local Area Agreements. There is an improving level of faith literacy in government at all levels compared to very recently. It’s important not to blow this availability and opportunity for service by suburbanizing the Church entirely, allowing the weak to go to the wall. It’s also important to sustain and build this capacity in spiritual and human terms; Some popular images of the city may have yuppified, but there is a vulnerability about all community groups and subgroups, especially faith ones. At every level from sub housegroups to the diocese, leadership is a key influence, for good and/or bad. One key priority has to be trying to ensure that strategically aware and pastorally gifted area deans have the time and resource to do their jobs.

Change management: A Dog’s Life?

Whilst minding my own business this week comes an urgent call to impersonate m’colleague the Bishop of Stafford, and give a keynote address at this weekend’s National Consultation on the future of the Deanery. Whilst casting around for material, I encountered the story of Tattoo, the Basset Hound:

In 1992, a traffic patrol in Tacoma, Washington State, 
saw a car travelling at 20 with something apparently dangling from the door. 
Close inspection revealed this to be 
a puffing basset hound called Tattoo, 
caught by his lead in the door, 
with tiddly four inch legs, 
‘picking them up and putting them down 
as fast as he could to keep up’

Caught up in changes we don’t want,

padding along faster than is reasonable
towards an uncertain future for which we were never designed?
Do they mean us?

Cardinal Newman on development...

...no bones about it. Best weekend story has to be Ruth Gledhill’s, that after 118 years there’s nothing recoverable in Cardinal Newman’s grave. Andy the gravedigger once told me human remains last 80 years in a hardwood coffin, 25 in MDF. Andy was right.

Some saint stories feature incorruptible bodies — not this one. I have to confess that relics put me off not on; When I learn that one medieval collection contained “a piece of bread eaten at the last supper” I rather agree with Luther in thinking that by 1517 the relics business had reached a kind of silly vanishing point. Newman will have to be a culturally English rather than Mexican saint.
The Cardinal himself, being dead, yet speaks.

And what does he say? His 1845 Essay on Development, almost Copernican in its impact, asserts that in the providence of God the only way to do real theology is live, contextual and dirty — Skip to the fundamental last sentence if you like:

whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. Nor does it escape the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, nor does it remain truer to itself, and with a better claim to be considered one and the same, though externally protected from vicissitude and change. It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become wore vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same.
In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

If Newman is correct about this, measuring orthodoxy by simple conformity to what has been said or done in the past, becomes impossible. “Traditionalists” take note, and “Progressives,” too —
all your notions can only be proved in the crucible of real shared discipleship over extended time.

My second favourite Newman quote? It’s the epitaph he devised for his memorial:

Ex Umbris et Imaginibus, in Veritatem

“out of shadows and fantasies, into the Truth...”