Weaving the Rainbow in Wycombe

Rainbow Worship is a regular outfit based at St Birinus and St John High Wycombe, which started four years ago and increasingly draws in several dozen people with learning difficulties from all around, to network, celebrate, and worship. It’s a congregation that’s started from the other end, not so much trying to jam people into conventional observance as to allow simple and engaging expressions of love and prayer to emerge from a very diverse crowd.

RW is rumbustous and celebratory some of the time, but hushed and awed at others. Comments are chipped in from all around as things happen, like an ol’ time revival meeting. Craft actvities are built in, and the management has radically tried to break down the distinction between client and helper. On one occasion, as Noah’s Ark was revealed in all its glory, a loud voice cried from the back, “This is one I made earlier.”

Last night I confirmed six members of this community. It’s extraordinary how live it feels praying with people who have no “side” or pretensions, but simply respond instintively in the moment. Highlights included a Creed delivered to thunderous band in clubbing style, melding into a sea of friendly, open faces, dancing and banners, and losing myself in the joys of dance with a marimba. One of the first things I believe we will lose in heaven is self consciousness, which will be subsumed in self-awareness, and the tingling joy of being alive, as death is swallowed up in victory. That’s what we did last night anyway. A lot of us came away feeling we had had a trip to the cleaners — and that doesn’t always happen when we worship, does it?

I found it the experience of a lifetime to bless, anoint and confirm in such a place. There had been modest anxiety in the setting up about how some would cope with the touching and liturgics.
Actually, it was a liturgical stroll along a moving walkway, to call people by name into the kingdom, to anoint them as a sign that they are royalty with the King of Kings, to bless on the basis that “God has called you by name and made you his own...”

Although the language of inclusiveness is politically usable, I don’t actually think it quite covers such experiences. “Inclusiveness” assumes there is a some thing that really belongs to “us” (whoever we are) into which “they” (whoever they are) need to be “included” preferably by the things “we” do for “them.” This did not feel like that at all.

The truth is that we are all exceptional people, all fearfully and wonderfully made, with varying awareness and ownership of what makes us exceptional. Some people with learning difficulties have far more of this than the well-heeled. The real emergence of something heavenly occurs naturally when we all embrace our exceptionalities — why should we wish to be deceived? — and lose ourselves in the emergent transcendence.

One interesting little piece of inclusiveness though, was the inclusion of Morag who founded and leads the group. She was stuck in Switzerland waiting for a plane, so was skyped into the event on one of the worship leaders’ laptops.

It was the first tme I had seen that done in a confirmation, and it somehow affirmed the irrelvance of geography, as well as “disability” to the proceedings.

Many thanks to Steve the Vicar, Morag, Roger who led the talk, craft leaders, and Jay who led much of what geeks would call the Synaxis, and friends, including Scratch the Preacherman Dog.

When you get to heaven it will seem a more natural carry-on to you than it wll people who have been further up themselves on earth, because you will have been practising first.

Wisdom, truth and hope

An extraordinary evening with the Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks. His talk was warm and passionate, spiced with rabbinic wisdom and storytelling. He explained two kinds of covenant in the Hebrew Scriptures — Noah’s covenant of Fate sealed by the rainbow, and Moses and Abraham’s covenants of Faith, looking forward. From these we learn the sanctity of life, the integrity of all creation, and the value of Diversity in the rainbow’s split light. These provide foundations for friendship and common witness to the world, healing 1,000 bitter years of anti-Semitism in England up to the holocaust. If we were not particular we could not make a covenant, and if we were all the same, we would have nothing to say when we got into one.

A moving testmony came after the talk, when Sir Jonathan was asked about divisions in the Anglican Communion. This is what he said:

Every faith, being particular, has cracks and schisms. But the Anglican Church has held radically different people together more graciously and successfully over many hundred years than any other Western religion I know. I view it with wonder, awe, and admiration. Your ability to hold together in a world driving people apart is your gift to a landscape of hope.

He told us something about his education in Church of England schools, echoing what we find all the time in ours — that faith speaks to faith:

I was a Jew in a Christian school. Never once did I hear an anti-semitic remark or incident. Because the teachers knew about their faith, they could understand how I cared about mine. That is what the Church of England gave me, growing up.

Food for thought as we turn to business later this week...

Reactionary Mount Improbable?

Presiding at the Eucharist this morming for a religious community, the Gospel from St Matthew told of Jesus and the woman with Haemorrhages and Jairus' daughter. These gave some hope of healing and resurrection. The verses just before, I notice with great disquiet, had Jesus laying down the very un-English principle that new wine requires new wineskins — not great politics, but the sober truth. I can say, with some relief, I'm not a part of this afternoon’s discussion. We’ll see how and where the Spirit leads, and try and make it work, whatever.

Driving back, it struck me that the Bible contains all kinds of praxis, including women judges in the OT and a gender balanced leadership in early Churches. The NT tells women to wear hats and ask their husbands when they get home, as it tells slaves to obey their masters cheerfully. It's a command to live incarnationally within the real world. Following that command today would take you to a missional place where female subordination wins no respect, and slavery is gone in spite, you may feel, of the clear teaching of the Scriptures, if you take their advice to slaves as absolute rather than circumstantial.

From a Catholic viewpoint whom you ordain is a matter of canon not dogma. I respect and very much like the tiny number of petitioning clergy we have. I hate the idea of the church causing them distress. I wish they had been able to come up with some way of locating their convctions aganst female bishops in some bigger moral framework, in which there was some positive candle, apart from inertia, reactionary fear and hurt feelings. I would love to have this explained to me, but nobody has so far come out with anything remotely convincing on this level to any except their own.

Talking to non-ecclesastical-anoraks, Discriminatory is as discriminatory does. For them, rejecting gender inequalty isn’t a fashion statement. They believe, deeply, that discriminatory attitudes and behaviour are disgusting and immoral. The Church preaches hope and new life, but seemingly behaves less ethically within itself, as they see it, than Woolworths. To reply that ’tis all, in truth, some kind of Father Ted voodoo mystery thing means nothing at all to anyone who thinks this way. This is as big a missional no-brainer as disobedient wives and truculent slaves would have been in the early church. No system of pockets within which gender based discrimination is OK can cut any ice missionally. Pragmatically, perhaps you can abolish racial discrimination in Alabama whilst keeping a few all white buses, or all-white drivers’ rotas. On every other level, it just don’t make sense.

That’s the mountain our so-called traditionalist friends have to climb, and sincerely I wish them good luck with it. I can’t join them on the climb, because I believe passionately in the Church’s mission, and at the heart of that is the building of a kingdom in which there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, but all are called to be one in Christ Jesus. Period.

Clergy HR: Eat your shorts, B P Richfield

We use Claire Pedrick of 3-D Coaching, regularly and increasingly, to help and counsel clergy with a variety of professional developmental needs. I met Claire yesterday, among other things, to scope some generic trends affecting clergy welfare, including the impact of new diversity and equality legislation next year.

As laid out by Harriet Harman there are four threads to a bill for the next session of parliament. The current complex raft of equality and diversity legislation (107 statutes, I’m told) is insanely spread out, and driven entirely by giving individuals rights which they are not always willing or able to enforce. The government’s thinking is that this is a systemic problem, and calls for a systemic solution. They intend to pull things together and take positive action in four areas, rather than simply relying on employment tribunals:

1. Greater Transparency
2. Enforcement
3. Public procurement
4. Preventative systemic action — training etc.

This sounds really good, though the devil is always in the detail. There is, of course, work to do about genuine occupational requirements — ensuring the Pope’s a Catholic, and you don’t get The Deerhunter as director of Greenpeace. I don’t imagine it’s beyond human wit to work that stuff out. For common or garden purposes, I see this as a really positive way forward for everyone. As work continues on our own Committee for Racial Justice (which I chair) on developing our own rigorous diversity agenda, to turn it from a motherhood-and-apple-pie aspiration into a way of life based on Biblical and Moral values, I can see benefits in all four of these areas.

Just spare a thought for poor old B. P Richfield. Dinosaurs ran for a few years in the early nineties until Disney inexplicably pulled the plug on what was, IMHO, the best TV they ever did. B. P. Richfield was the ultimate boss from hell, a Palaeolithic Alan Sugar, CEO of the Wesayso Corporation. B. P. ran on high octane Theory-X, and was, of course, the first great mentor and management guru of a generation of bishops. Here’s the kind of workplace encounter he used to initiate:

B.P. Richfield:	SINCLAIR!. I oughta kill you and your whole family, but I'd probably get in trouble with the union. As it is, there's only one thing I can do to you: you're fired, Sinclair, fired, fired, FIRED!!!.
Earl:	Fired? That means I don't have to come to work anymore. Oh, this is the happiest day of my life.

I was delighted to come across evidence, however, that even BP had mellow moments, especially after chewing the Happy Plant:

Why? Wherefore?

There is something in us all that isn’t quite civilised — a gap between what we are and the basic requirements of humanity. Before 1945 it was possible, convenient even, to pretend that it didn’t matter, or that progress and education and secular wisdom would render this gap obsolete. In 1945 there were many who thought nothing so bad could ever happen again, as long as the memory was kept alive. Since 1945 the gap, a radical expression of what theologians call the Fall, has opened wide again, all over the world. Where does this leave us? How aware of the roots of it within ourselves?

Shoah is the first of a sequence of seven memorial poems called Menorah by Don Barnard written in 2005.

Shoah

In the beginning was the Word and the word was Jew.
And the word said Other, the word said Them. Not Me, not You.

Then the ploughing of the minds and the sowing of the lies
and the lies said Rapists and the lies said Thieves
and the lies said Evil in disguise.
And the Word was Demonise.

Then the growing of the Weeds. And the Weeds were Greed.
And the Weeds were Spite and the Weeds were Schadenfreude
and folk passed by on the other side.
And the Word was Bleed.

Then the writing of the Laws.
And the Laws said Jews
are not as other men.
No loving of your neighbour.
No Jews as citizens.
And the Word was Cleanse.

Then the packing into trucks and the tracks led east.
People carried like beasts and harried like beasts
and herded like beasts into pens.
And the Word was Untermensch.

Then the Words became a sentence and it sent them to their death
by burdening the strong, who earned another breath
before they died,
and murdering the rest, who simply died.
And the Word was Genocide.

At home in the real world?

There are two radically different concepts of “world” in the NT. There’s (often) ‘this world’ that by wisdom did not know God (I Corinthians 1:21) — Everything that drifts along regardless of, or even in opposition to God. More often there’s ‘the world’ which God loved so much (John 3:16), and which God has reconciled to himself = the created world.

Organised religion can, if religious people let it, create for them their own private self-referential little world, outside of which nothing else matters, or even sometimes registers on the consciousness. That’s how passion slides over into the licensed insanity of fundamentalism. Jesus told his followers they could know the real spiritual value of things not by their origins, or how tightly they measure up to some abstract written standard, but by their fruit — in the real world.

For a reality check, this movie can be used together with the Global Rich List income calculator.

Big or Dispersed Corporate? Hard or Fluid Lines? Starfish or Spider?

An interesting post on Mike Croghan's Rude Armchair Theology Blog, about open and closed social networks.

Social networks like Facebook and Myspace require you to sign up to participate and then keep you within their "walled gardens." Mike was railing against them, then became a Facebook addict! But not before reading this BBC piece by Canadian Networking Guru Michael Geist, suggesting the future belongs to walled gardens that manage to to pull down their walls a bit, if not a lot.

This got me going about Church. How grasping and imperialistic is the way people do Church? Some denomintions require a hell of a signing up to pass go, and others wall their gardens high, to the point that some of their members end up believing their denomination is the whole bang shoot, or at any rate the normative model. Incredible, but true.

Which brings me onto starfish and spiders. Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom describe two types of organisations. Spiders derive their strength from command 'n control and centralisation. They are powerful and mobile, but, here comes the catch, bash the body/head complex and the thing dies; so a lot of their energy goes into resourcing and defending the centre. Starfish are strong and powerful but in a different way. You chop one leg off, it scuttles off and becomes another starfish. There's a hilarious tale in the book about some beefy Aussies who charged off down the beach in their tiny speedos to go deal with the starfish on the reef. When they got the machetes out they had 300 starfish, and by the end of the day they had 3,000. That's the power of starfish, and to tap it you have to be a radically decentralised network, but strongly held.

The Church is obviously both starfish and spider. Viewed as a whole (sorry your holiness) the Christian Church is rather more starfish than spider. That's how the early Church grew in the face of persecution. That's why when Christians gather for conferences like, say, Kirchentag, Greenbelt or the Leadership Summit there's an obvious unity much bigger than any denomination. You don't have to work out the head office niceties to get you going. It just happens.

And the Church of England? By historical accident, whilst holding onto historic accountability lines, it has devolved authority radically, in a subtle and complex way — Incumbents and parishes have had tremendous autonomy, and Dioceses have traveled light. Right on, I say, but being starfish involves a high degree of trust... Do we have it within us to be the kind of (Starfish) organisation that, if Michael Geist is right, the world really needs, or are we going to put our energy into chasing after empire dreams, empire games?

Friends, enemies and neighbours — Seeing everything as it is?

We took Nick & Anna to the Living Rainforest, which turns out to be near Newbury.
— a lot of greenery, some fascinating critters and a very handsome chameleon.

Over in the Pupa cabinet I saw something I'd never before — a butterfly being born. It said something powerful about how everything hangs together in one seamless whole, and the fragility of it all.

In the Ken Robinson creative thinking talk I posted from TED, he quoted Jonas Salk (the Polio Vaccine pioneer) as saying:

"If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all life on earth would end. If all human beings were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all forms of life on earth would flourish."

What is this factor about people, this radical rejection of Genesis 2:15, that makes us narrow, unwittingly destructive and toxic? In the bookshop was a book of eco-pioneering voices including, surprisingly perhaps, an artcile on G. K. Chesterton. He was quoted as saying "We make our friends. We make our enemies. But God makes our Neighbours."

Jesus has powerful things to say to his followers about their "neighbours." Your neighbour is not the person you choose, or the person with whom you have affinity. It is any person who is cast into your path in any need. How you respond to the challenge of encountering them is the Test of Discipleship, not your ortho-anything defined by some abstract standard.

In how we do Church, In our interaction with the real world, we need to go figure. We will be known for what we really are, friends of God (or not), by our fruits not our intentions.

Waiting — a forgotten part of real discipleship

Rosie our Vicar preached a sermon I found really perceptive and helpful at this morning's 8.00 in Great Missenden, on the almost forgotten Christian virtue of Patience.

14 times the New Testament speaks of its centrality for life, and as a fruit of the Spirit. Unfortunately, from terrorists to supermarket shoppers, whatever it is, we want it our way, we want it Now, and nothing less will do. Not to have an instant solution is the ultimate failure. There's no such thing any more as a season for which we wait, not even for strawberries. Perhaps that's one reason so many people can't get no satisfaction, and are so angry and unhappy, scanning the bookshop for a 'How To' Book that will somehow take the waiting out of wanting.

But think how patient God is all the time! In us, Patience is a fruit of the Spirit that grows, in due season, as we wait in hope. The Eucharist itself is the joyful expectation of an unfulfilled hope — an act of patience.

So exactly the people to break bread with are the people you can't stand, whilst you wait, with them, for something better. That's exactly the point of the ruddy thing! Hang up on them and you cut yourself off, because God hasn't hung up on them yet, even if you have.

Food for thought.

Biovisions — Rich, beautiful Diversity in a single Cell

David Bolinsky is a medical illustrator, whose company, Xvivo, has been working to illustrate creatively the dynamics of life to Harvard students for a programme called Biovisions. Thanks to Patrick Mayfield and Steve Whitmore, as another spin off of this year's Leadership Summit I've been exploring TED Talks, creative ideas from some of the world's greatest thinkers sponsored by BMW. David's work (which he introduces in this video) is just incredible. A single cell contains all manner of diversity of form and activity within it. Christians can hold at the back of their mind the biological pictures of the Church in the NT. Static institutional images and models are pathetically inadequate, given the beautiful dynamic diversity and relatedness of everything God called 'good' because that's the way he wanted it, through and through!