Faith, Ministry, and Human Kindness

As someone who spent my thirties burying people in an urban parish with a crematorium in it, on one occasion 13 a week, I was really moved by Martin Samuel’s piece in the Daily Mail about his uncle Sid’s funeral.
It certainly took me back to what my job seemed to be all about in those days,

Sid was a whisky man and he liked it straight. He regarded water with suspicion, as if it were a particularly inadequate mixer.

During one spectacular coughing fit caused by his choice of solids to accompany the whisky - 40 cigarettes daily - he was offered a glass from the tap. 'No thanks, son,' he said between wheezes. 'I tried water once, tasted of nothing.'

And that is what some people think about the Church of England, too. That it tastes of nothing. They would prefer something stronger, with a bit of oomph, a little more fire and brimstone, a greater commitment to the cause. Yet no religion could have given Sid a better send-off than he had that day.

The vicar held a service for a man who never set foot inside a church unless he had to, yet did so with dignity and humour. He introduced faith for those that sought comfort from it, and displayed humanity and respect for those who were there just for Sid. And, in doing so, he converted a room of people, not to the beliefs of the Church of England, but to the idea of it.

The very modern, very civilised, concept of a faith that can be all things to all men with a common decency that may come from the teachings of God, or the teachings of Man on subjects as wide-ranging as conservation and contraception. A faith that embraces the Bible and Dean Martin, Charles Wesley and Sid.

Can any good thing come out of the Daily Mail? Apparently, yes. The fact that Martin’s experience goes on all over England any day of the week, goes a long way to explain where the real energy lies in the Church of England, and the very serious way the vast majority of my colleagues try, not always successfully, to take their responsibility, as an established Church, to be there for anyone.

Jesus preached a kingdom where the first were sometimes last and the last first. He said the real kingdom was hidden deep within, like a seed or yeast. Our job isn’t to manipulate, bully or coerce people, just pray for them, whoever they are, be there for them, and, based on trying to grow a Eucharistic community in every community, bear witness as best we can (being all of us sinners) to the way home to God. It may not sound like much, but it’s we’re there for...

[the] Church is not redundant, but more relevant than ever, precisely because it resists dogma, hectoring or the fanatical, because it does not move people to acts of violence or cruelty.

The Pope proposes to welcome Anglicans to the Roman Catholic Church, but the ones most eager to take him up on the offer will be those out of step with society, who vehemently oppose the ordination of women as priests, for example.

They see the Church of England as feeble and compromised, they hear Dean Martin where a church organ should be and think it has lost its place in society. They are wrong.

There is great modernity in the inclusiveness of the Anglican Church because it places human kindness to the fore. And that simple grace should never be mistaken for weakness...

I have to say, however, I contest any impression the papers have been giving that Fr Ed Tomlinson is some kind of twisted misanthropic oldie. Fr Ed and I come from different ends of the candle, and disagree fundamentally about women’s ordained ministry, but when I visited his parish earlier this year it was obvious that his work, about which he cares passionately and sincerely, is very outward focussed in a community which hasn’t had many advantages in the past. Catholic in every sense of the term, it encompassed prayer, hospitality, a commuity play, and the renewal of a school and playgroup, among other big pieces of outward focussed hard work.

I don’t know what his local paper’s on, or maybe they were just sexing up a story to sell it, but grateful as I am for the discussion the story stimulated, and much as I agree with Martin’s conclusion that the simple inclusive grace of the C of E (where it can manage it) is its greatest strength, not a weakness, I’m uncomfortable about any injustice about the priest whose blog it was orignally based on.

Incarnation and ghetto blasting...

Tunbridge Wells is is a game of two halves. There’s the propserous touristy bit, and there's a smallish underbelly that originally provided the servants for the rest. In living memory two lines of children walked down Camden road to school, the ones on the right side with shoes, and many of the ones on the left without. For over 150 years, St Barnabas has unashamedly served the ones without shoes.

The Church was built by an enterprising Victorian slum priest in the classic mould, raising a noble edifice that must have seemed extraordinarily bold and beautiful at the time, on what had been a quarry and a rubbish dump. In this parish, the Gospel begins with the Magnificat

he hath put down the mighty from their seat,
he hath exalted the humble and meek
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

This may sound a tad off message for Tunbridge Wells as conventionally conceived, but that is the Christian Faith, if its mission is more than providing veneer and designer fig leaves for the bourgeoisie.

I was really moved and enriched by spending a day as the honored guest of a community that has had considerable ups and downs, but is clearly and profoundly aligned with its founding purpose, whilst looking out and pursuing a vigorous gospel agenda. Fr Ed Tomlinson took me round, and introduced me to various people in Church and community — his story of the day is here. We prayed together, talked and walked together, through the various realities that bear on St Barnabas as a missional community.

The closer you come to the streets, the more things make sense. This is not to minimise the importance of grand debates on the natonal level, which do have a local impact, but to try and establish what matters here. In word and deed this parish is about Incarnation — a clear and profound response to the incarnation of the Son of God by living it out sacramentally and in social action. Accessibility is secured by being there, not by diluting or dumbing down.

It is a very diverse congregation, where people are accepted for whom they are, to grow into being what they could be, not clones. I was struck by two or three stories of people being grabbed by a sense of holiness in the place, for some quite dramatically. It is a growing congregation, with a school which is integral to the common life, not tacked on. Here again, the St Barnabas story is about clear, honest leadership and hard work. Congratulations to Theresa Anderson, head, and colleagues. Spot the fire-breathing dragon above: hint — there isn’t one. It’s all about growing confidence among and within children who, historically, were sometimes seen as a problem.

We live in a context that increasingly reduces human beings to cardboard cutouts — just say the word based on the notional “-ism” and that’s enough to blast away with. I think we all need to be very careful about the use of language to label, stigmatise and belittle others. I remember George Kitson-Clark the historian, saying the only “ism” he’d allow in historical essays was “baptism.” Wise man.

“Do not be afraid,” says the Lord. “I have overcome the world.” There’s always been a degree of walking apart in the C of E, rather than engaging different organs in the Body of Christ to work together. Back in the Victorian age this was the tacit agreement that Anglo-Catholics could do their own thing in the places that didn’t matter, as long as the boat wasn’t rocked in the places that did. Every now and then open hostility broke out, as when neighbouring vicars denounced St Barnabas as the road to hell! Seems funny now, but they meant it. A Church experience that does not engage us deeply and radically with our fellow Christians is not enough. How can it be said that the love of God lives in such a parody of Church?

These days everything is tamer, but shame on any of us, if we go through the motions of tolerating others for whom Christ died, and in whom Christ lives, rather than striving to understand and support them wholeheartedly. And if we do this on the basis of hearsay and cliché, double shame on us. What will the Lord say on the Great Day? “If only you had known the things that make your peace, but you would not...” A ghettoised world needs a more than ghettoised Church.

The old armed neutrality, or political balancing act, is just not adequate to build the kind of Church we need to be, that the world may believe. The first principle of Benedict’s way is to come together; not primarily to debate, but to pray and share faith. Doing that then changes our perceptions of the matters at issue between us. A day’s appreciative inquiry in somewhere with strong particularity is worth of year’s management training. And given the various matters at issue involving traditionalists a solution grown by “indaba” between real people may yield a sound basis for detailed work that, doubtless, must be done by conventional parliamentary methods...