Binary Follies and missional drift

There are two kinds of people: people who divide others into two kinds of people, and people who don’t. Sometimes it’s wise to distinguish between others, but often not. Usually it’s helpful to remember that any one of us has it in us to be several things at once.

Which brings me to Bishop Stephen Cottrell’s great sermon at yesterday’s Racial Justice Sunday celebration in Oxford. St James tells us about pure wisdom, and that the harvest of true righteousness is sown in peace, for/by those who make peace. So he roots our divisions in our pride, frustrations and faithlessness, and calls on us, double-minded people, to wash our hands and cleanse our hearts.

Jesus told the story of two boys, one of whom refused to do as his father asked, but ended up doing it anyway, as against his brother, who said he would obey but never did, nor even really intended to. We will be surprised in heaven by all sorts of people getting there ahead of us.

Classic bourgeois hypocrisy is all about striving officiously to appear respectable, but another, possibly more pernicious form of double-mindedness is dividing up and compartmentalising the whole world, in ways that tend put ourselves perpetually in the right.

Looking at our grasp of St Paul’s great revelation of unity in Christ in Galatians 3 — all One in Christ, neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female — is not entirely encouraging. It took the best part of 100 years of bitter disputes to bring words and public deeds into alignment over Greeks and Jews, 1800 over slaves and free, and among Anglicans, we still seem to be a tad confused over male and female...

I notice, myself, another intrguing way of indulging this ugly side of human nature; making up novel denominational, racial or religious reasons not to engage with others, producing a technical but narrow conformity to our own particular interpretion of Galatians 3, or whatever.
Who’s driving the narrowness? God, or the limited way we see ourselves and others, and our reluctance to engage?

This all leads me to surmise that if ever we do decide to give practical Christanity a go, there are all sorts of people out there who would love to see it put into practice, much more than they can bear all the fear, excuses, bickering and other symptoms of doublemindedness they are picking up now.

Fallen, frail: Holocaust Memorial Day

I was going to put up fascinating colour footage of Dachau shot by George Stevens in 1945, but could not bear to do it. This material is just too indecent to show, too painful to watch. “How can one human being do this to another human being?” was his question. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is one helpful contemporary take, in a year the focus is on children.

It matters that we remember, because the awful truth is that evil can take root anywhere, any time, given the facts Christians call Fall & Freewill. Political convictions, good intentions, progress, even religion or lack of it, all existed in Central Europe in 1941. They cannot innoculate against evil. Only truthful memory enables us to understand our own moral frailty and, perhaps, make better choices in future.

I can understand lack of belief in God. God does not compel faith, and honest doubt is worth more than feigned belief. I object, however, to lack of belief in evil, including the possibility of anyone being entangled by it, for that really is a pernicious, blinding thing.

Racial Justice — Slough & Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zimbabwe — The Mask of Anarchy

The four horsemen of Apocalypse seem to be doing just fine in Zimbabwe. If you remember the deal, Empty Conquest (Mr White) leads on violence (Mr Red), Famine and Drought (Mr Black) and finally Death (Mr Pale). The sequence is eerily accurate.

I was first disgusted by the behaviour of former Anglican bishop Nolbert Kunonga after reading asylum papers from one of his clergy who came to live in Bucks. NK was chucked out of the Church last year, after much abusive behaviour, including a bizarre anniversary bash in the football stadium. His version was that he was walking out because of the Gay Issue, and British colonialism. Abusive Twaddle alert. Last year I met a former Zimbabwe minister of agriculture at a confirmation in West Wycombe, moved to tears by the destruction of the good land by politics and corruption. Earlier this year, I met a family at another confirmation who had come over here to try and build some kind of life for themselves — decent people who had been much abused — one among many families.

As Zimbabwe prepares for an election with no opposition, the level of atrocity and human rights abuse, bizarrely, doesn’t seem to diminish. Online media are harder to suppress than their conventional counterparts. The Wardman Wire has been running a Mugabe Monitor detailing election news, including an Election Photo Album. Sokwanele have a detailed Google map of 1450 cases of violence and intimidation with chapter and verse about the Terror. An initiative of the Churches, the Solidarty Peace Trust, gives a gallery of photos, and video background profiles.
And yet, incredibly, Mugabe apologists still toe the party line. The election violence is all down to the opposition, apparently. How long, O Lord?

Confronting oppression in Brazil

More evidence that the local Church is the hope of the world, this time from Brazil. Francesco Silva reports on his blog an outrageous act of violence and intimidation this month, aimed at a poor community by powerful landowners in Carcavel, Parana:

In an act of extreme violence, employees of powerful landowners destroyed, among other buildings, the chapel of an Episcopal Church at the Primeiros Passos Camp, located road side of the BR 369, near the city of Cascavel.

The invasion occurred in the early morning hours of May 08, with the participation of tractors, excavators, retro-excavators and weapons of large caliber.

The intimidation occurred in a context of serious tensions between landowners and social organizations. The Episcopal Church and fellow Christian’s churches are firmly defending and supporting the Movement of Landless People in the west of the Paraná state. The Episcopal priest in the area is the Revd. Luiz Carlos Gabas, and he is supporting the families in build a school(also destroyed at the attack) for children and the chapel. The chapel was planned to be dedicated on May 18 and was built with great effort by the whole community.

The destruction of the chapel becomes even more symbolic because it represents a clear message from landowners against the Church.
The Rev. Luiz Carlos Gabas has been suffering intimidation from great landowners as a consequence of his pastoral position in favor of the landless people. settlers camp with which holds a pastoral work recognized by the whole community. A group of 150 families are living in a settlement waiting for legalization of the area. After clear evidences that the Rev. Gabas suffered intimidation the State Commission on Human Rights inserted him into a program of witnesses’s protection.

Today the west of the state of Parana is mapped as one of the regions of greatest tension with regard to conflict of land. The IEAB has been firm in defending the rights and dignity of small rural workers and especially the landless which lives in sub-human conditions along the roads and land occupied.
Bishop D. Naudal Gomes, the diocesan of the Diocese of Curitiba, has offered wide support to his clergy and received from the Provincial House of Bishops strong solidarity through a motion approved and forwarded to the Secretariat of Public Security of Parana.
Our prayers and support are required for our brothers and sisters in that region. The fear of impunity and violence must be faced with solidarity and practical support.

For the people of the settlement and the Diocese of Curitiba is time to rebuild the Mission destroyed and to rebuild the self-confidence of the people.

Significantly, I feel, when I Googled “Parana land owners Brazil” Google will ask you “Did you mean Piranha landowners Brazil?” Let us not deceive ourselves: Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker (Proverbs 14:31)

Thus says the LORD of hosts: Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another... (Zecharaiah 7:9-10)

Curitiba is moving towards a link diocese relationship with California (Reflections by Bishop Marc here). Messages of support can be sent to bishop Naudal Gomes at naudal@yahoo.com.br .

Human Rights begin with us

Everybody should respect human rights... that often means Everybody else. How about us? How aligned are our values with the ways we treat our own people? It’s sometimes suggested Bishops are guardians of orthodoxy, to enforce conformity of doctrine. Actually, in the Acts of the Apostles there’s almost none of that. Right being aligns with right doing, the weeding out of hypocrisy, the discernment of strategic direction, not behaving like the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition, least of all about ideology.

So how do we respect human beings habitually in this diocese? On the Day of Pentecost, God could have put the clock back to the Tower of Babel — one language, one simple identity, and lots of neat little bricks all in a row until we reach heaven. But God didn’t do that. In an essentially chaotic act he affirmed the value and identity of every language and culture under heaven. God passionately affirms human diversity — do we?

Martin Luther King said “Peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice.” Christians talk a lot about love, and the first claim of love is justice. To lie low playing “Colour blind”, bracketing racial justice along with motherhood and apple pie, is just not enough. We need to get real about this. We need to take positive action. It involves holding ourselves accountable for cherishing the diversity to which God calls us, with as much determination as we pay our bills and taxes.

I've been doing some serious work with our diocesan Committee for Racial Justice, which I chair. We’ve been working hard to develop what we call a Rigorous Diversity agenda, and it begins with us, not “them”. We’re studying the Wood-Shepherd principles, and working out how and when to apply them to our diocese. And I believe finding a way to do that will help with various other objectives. Rigorous, open diversity practice founded on respect and fully accountable will help grow a kingdom culture.

Auditing and enforcing a rigorous diversity agenda will help create a fairer, safer working environment — one in the eye for the bullies. It will give a truer perspective in which to have discussions about authority (male and female), and, perhaps, even help us to discern sexual orientation issues more honestly and truthfully. I can quite understand why intelligent people out there cannot hear the gospel in us, and even hold us in contempt, for as long as our HR practice is less fair and accountable than that of Woolworth’s.

Get our act together on this and who knows, people on the outside may begin to realise that, OK we are a bunch of hypocrites, but a bunch of hypocrites who are being healed... Let’s put some serious work into respect for the human beings closest to us, in basic accountable ways. Then see what kind of love begins to grow among us, and where that enables the wind of the Spirit to take us. It’s a major undertaking, but I believe it’s been neglected, and it’s worth serious effort.

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.

Beverley Ruddock (1947-2007)

Beverley Ruddock’s funeral today at Binfield Parish Church. She died terribly suddenly a couple of weeks ago. Beverley was the Chair of the Diocesan Council for Racial Justice, an educational psychologist with a special interest in Children with learning difficulties. Comng here from Jamaica in 1965, her professional career began in nursing before education. She was a Deputy Lord Lieutenant for Berkshire. She was a canny and perceptive selector for Clergy and other vocations.

In a very full church, many kind and true things were said about Beverley — about her strong sense of justice, her refusal to give up on people or issues that affected people, her kindness and wide smile, courage and integrity. All I can add is that she also made a mean spicy chicken, that stole the show at this year’s Racial Justice barbecue here.

I hope the very inspiring service left me a little more committed to clarity and honesty about injustice in all its forms, less accommodating to bullying and pretence about real world issues, within or beyond the Church.

Bishop Richard Harries brought a poem to share, characteristically spot on.
Into the Hour by Elizabeth Jennings [from Recoveries (1964)]
was written whilst recovering from a breakdown, and talks of loss and grief,
and the journey towards wholeness through hope:

I have come into the hour of a white healing.
Grief's surgery is over and I wear
The scar of my remorse and of my feeling.

I have come into a sudden sunlit hour
When ghosts are scared to comers. I have come
Into the time when grief begins to flower

Into a new love. It had filled my room
Long before I recognised it. Now I speak its name.
Grief finds its good way home.

The apple-blossom's handsome on the bough
And Paradise spreads round. I touch its grass.
I want to celebrate but don't know how.

I need not speak though everyone I pass
Stares at me kindly. I would put my hand
Into their hands. Now I have lost my loss

In some way I may later understand.
I hear the singing of the summer grass.
And love, I find, has no considered end,

Nor is it subject to the wilderness
Which follows death. I am not traitor to
A person or a memory. I trace

Behind that love another which is running
Around, ahead. I need not ask its meaning.

Is this the Truth? Could things really turn around?

Stick with the possibilities of this — There's a twist in it!

Kudos to Eric Bramlett, Creative Arts monkey @ Community Christian Church of Chicago.

Making Sense of the Troubles?

Interesting blog comment from Bishop David Chillingworth — Northern Irish bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane in Scotland — about reconciliation after the troubles and truth:

There is an interesting debate going on about how much truth the new Northern Ireland can cope with. The South African model of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggests that progress is inextricably linked with the availability of truth. The question is how much truth the fragile political process and political institutions in Northern Ireland can cope with at this stage.

As Ian Paisley steps down from the leadership of the denomination he founded, +David also references what looks like a fascinating collection of resources for the painful process of reconciliation based on truth from the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland. Coming from mainly Evangelical roots, but with realism and a deep sense of the whole counsel of scripture, both the methods and content of CCCI's work look very significant indeed for contexts far beyond the province.

I have seen UK media stories about Northern Ireland most days for the past 40 years, but I have to confess and marvel at my ignorance about it. The best Noddy book to recap it all for me has been David McKitterick & David McVea's Making Sense of the Troubles. The same authors have produced another Correspondents' masterpiece, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died Through the Northern Ireland Troubles. When I picked it up in Waterstones in Lisburn this summer, I couldn't bear to read it. It's an aggregation of the stories of the 3697 people who died in the troubles since 1966 — a memorial as much as a history. Here is the pity of this war, and sketches of the faces behind those figures that most of us Brits got used to disregarding as they rolled by on the evening news for 40 years. 3697 people died and, by and large, this side of the water, we neither knew nor cared who they were or why.

Is that their problem, or ours?

Niceness or Justice? Growth or Pretending? Cheese or Truth?

Great time yesterday with my colleagues Alison Webster & Raj Patel doing the first Oxford Podcast about Racial Justice in our diocese. Coming back I found a fantastic Greenbelt 2007 talk by Raj about Conflict — When do we confront and when do we walk away?

Raj gives a Gujarati slogan for us all — What God first created you to be, that you must become! and conflict, justly and honestly undergone, is a means to this happening, personally and corporately.

Conflict holds up a mirror to an organisation, an opportunity to get real, grow and learn. Secular organisations are often further ahead in their self awareness about conflict. Churches are often more into niceness than faith, so that fear of conflict paralyses them, rather than grows understanding and faith. Bullies use Fear of conflict to manipulate people. There's a weak "let's split" option that preserves subgroups' nicencess, along with their immaturity, sitting apart in smug little self-reinforcing circles, tolerating bullying and manipulation as the price of peace that isn't peace.

We need to learn when to confront and when to walk away rather than walking away because we hadn't the courage or self awareness to work it out or see it through... Raj's talk includes some pointers and practical help about these crucial decisions.

The way we handle conflict is a mirror of ourselves — What do we see in the mirror just now in our hearts, our homes, our congregations, our churches?

Is it Cheesy or realistic?

Just or Convenient?

Manipulative or honest?

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.

Divis Flats, Falls Road, Sandy Row, Shankhill — redeeming some names from the curse of the past....

For as long as I can remember Belfast was a war zone. It seems incredible that people so decent, caring and pleasant should have descended into civil war for the best part of forty years. Belfast now is in full recovery, building everywhere to put behind it the legacy of the troubles. Thank God.

There's a particular theological challenge here. Jesus said people would know the genuineness of faith not by its content, or its conformity to some ideal specification, but by its fruits. How could religion bear such bitter fruit?

Dawkins, of course, would say it was religion wot done it. Dawkins has a point. Sometimes, as the Chief Rabbi tactfully puts it, people believe too much. But you don't have to know very much about the troubles to see that religious identity was only a background factor. Sir Edward Carson wasn't a religious leader, as such, nor were those who have driven this strife ever since. It's about far more than religion, and most religious people on all sides tried consistently to ameliorate the worst of it, rather than stoke it up. Anyway, the hypothesis that atheism somehow stops you being violent is ridiculous: most of the great Mass Murderers of the last century — Mao, Stalin, etc. — were, in fact, secularists.

As history begins to emerge from the headlines and slogans, here's one crude tentative hypothesis, overheard on the streets. It states that these nice people were let down catastrophically by their leaders, at all levels, including the highest echelons of the British government. Wilson, Heath and Callaghan governments committed their fair share of cock-ups and bad tactical calls, but were essentially carried along by forces beyond their ken, reacting tactically to something they didn't really understand, and couldn't think through strategically.

The shocking, culpable failure came in the late 80's when the UK government pulled up the draw bridge, pursuing illusory military solutions to a non-military problem. Thousands died whilst they sat on their spotty behinds, trying to sound hard for Fleet Street, throwing shedloads of money at increasingly ingenious security measures — anything except the one thing needful.

History awards surprising prizes. I was never keen on the Major government, but they turned things round. Often panned by Fleet Street as weak and vacillating, Major had the imagination and moral courage to see there was no military solution, and the problem wasn't going to go away unless he did something. Far from the line that "you can't talk to people like that" that played to the gallery at home but accomplished nothing, Major (and, eventually, Trimble) came to see that the people they really needed to talk to were the enemy. Until that happened nothing was going to change.

Well there's a tentative historical hypothesis, from which we learn...

1. Wars on terrorism are, by definition, exercises in pointlessness and futility because they attack the symptom not the cause. When you win the hearts of people of goodwill, you win. There is no military solution — the lesson the British learnt at great cost in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus, Aden, etc. etc., and Northern Ireland.
   
   
2. Positive change happened here, and in South Africa, when the two sides sat down together and talked. The role of leaders is to bring people together. Any fool can cheerlead abusive songs from their own camp. It takes courage and real leadership to talk; and until someone develops that courage and leadership you are descending into a deep abyss, from which it will take years to emerge. If you feel the urge to walk out, turn it round now, and get listening, get talking.
   
   
3. We have to find a more Christlike way of doing Christianity, for God's sake, for the peace and salvation of the world, for our own souls' good.
   
   St Paul's letters to Corinth dealt functionally with the bizarre phenomenon of schism among Christians — the body that rips itself apart for the sake of politics and being right, the Christian who fixes on a leader who comes to matter more than Christ. In Ephesians 2 he hits the heart of the matter — Christ has broken down every dividing wall of hostility that stands between people — race, or identity, or history. Who are we to rebuild them?
   
   Posture and manipulate as much as we will, in the end we have to sit down in peace as children of one heavenly Father. We are all laden with culture, expectation and identity. As we lay down those burdens for what they are, we will be free to discover each other the way God sees us, with perfect understanding and hope, and begin to live a bit of the life of the world to come now. That's how redemption works on the ground.
   

"I wish we could learn to bob and weave more" — Kirk Franklin

High energy start to the Day with Kirk Franklin — amazing person: He talked movingly of his rocky start in life, and more recent struggles with addictions.

Kirk expressed deep convictions about the need for people to slow down and understand, and figure out how we can listen and connect more with each other whoever we are racially, personally, because God has made us all beautiful inside. "I'm not the standard, God is the standard." Amen.