Rev: Faith, hope and charity

Adam Smallbone, the new BBC Rev., is engaging, with real spiritual depth. At last the BBC has moved beyond The Vicar of Dibley. She engaged millions with woolly jumpers and chocolate silliness, with a good humoured take on life, the Universe and everything. Rev. is engaging in a very different way, much closer to where many urban vicars are, in fact.
People talk of the Church of England as an institution, forgetting it isn’t anything of the sort — just a ragbag of around 20,000 trusts and bodies, loosely aligned, that has evolved over the past 1600 years. Its ties bind in all kinds of intriguing elasticated ways. Describing life in such a place is no light task.

It’s easy for any outsider to critique the detail of any TV depiction of anything. Years ago the BBC broadcast Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance. Next Day a retired military gentleman complained that “the Buffs in fact had seven buttons down their tunics not nine as portrayed by the BBC last night.” As any ful kno. This kind of complaint is rarely as clever as it seems to the person who makes it. We all know that few Archdeacons cruise round London in Taxis wearing Gestapo surplus leather gloves, but that’s not the point. The point is that’s how it feels.

On a personal and emotional level, Rev: is remarkably sure-footed. It brings back vividly for me memories of ten years’ urban ministry — trying to be a Christian and pray, feeling rather bemused often, filling the diary, trying to love people in the face of my own inadequacy, the size of the task, and the vagaries of human nature. Rev: has a clutch of improbable vicarage characters I could match almost name for name, as, I suspect, could anyone who’s ever been an urban vicar for any reasonable length of time.

For all its tendency to self-parody and caricature, I like Rev. It’s a noble enterprise. Those who wrote it know whereof they speak. Adam sits in his Church trying to pray the office, wishing God would bloody do something, but secretly suspecting he won’t until his unworthy servant has made it through the next funeral. It’s a ministry that resents all the distractions, until it realises that the ministry is the distractions.

There’s holiness in the unglamorous, haphazard, but profoundly kind and patient way C of E vicars do urban ministry, even in some of the crazier characters vicars encounter. It’s highly implicit, always understated, rarely obvious. Light very occasionally streams in serendipitously, but the grind is always there. You just have to pray for people, and try to help them make the best of themselves, and never give up.

There is, actually, courage, resilience, faith and even holiness wrapped up far more than thousands of urban vicars will ever know in their ministries. It deserves more understanding and respect than it sometimes gets, and this show does acknowledge its reality and worth. For all Rev:’s occasional TV simplification, full marks to writers, cast and crew for trying to capture it, and occasionally succeeding.

PS: I studied in Shoreditch thirty years ago. St Leonard’s was an amazing place, and it’s good of the telly people to give the old dump its own TV show.

Get real! Kill George Herbert!

At home I have a groaning shelf of books published since 1900 about ministry in the Church of England. Justin Lewis-Anthony’s If you meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him is the latest and, no mean feat, by far the best. The trouble with “how-to” books about ministry is that they can easily become part of an oppressive structure that keys into a significant vulnerability in sincere ministers. You woke up this morning with 25 things you hadn't done, and felt vaguely guilty about. You read the how-to book, and now you’ve got 35. Could be time to stick your head in a gas oven. Indulging in the wrong kind of how-to stuff, spiced with paperback Evangelical fisherman’s tales by the Successful, does not make you the best priest in the street (shades of the Father Ted “Golden Cleric”) but a nervous wreck. Its nursery slopes are the way to slow death — what some do call burn-out.

Justin’s excellent book does not play this how-to game, although it does end up talking Turkey, with excellent alternative strategies and tactics to help lower spiritual and personal blood pressure, and bring a Kill-George-Herbert priest back from the Church of the Planet Zog into the Church of England.

Justin’s thesis is that we in the C of E have indulged in harmful romanticism about ministry, focussed around a gentle bucolic fantasy about the ministry of George Herbert. Roman Catholic friends tell me of a similar phenomenon in their tradition about the Curé d’Ars. This ecumenical dimension, as well as a certain Cambridge historian’s reluctance to use any “-ism” except baptism, made me judder a bit over terms like “Herbertism” but the term does clarify the discussion and provides a tool to enable us to continue to enjoy Herbert’s sublime poetry without being sucked into a lot of crushing sentimentality and hype about his three year ministry as a parish priest in the seventeenth century, in a parish of under 500, with two curates to do the dirty work.

Back in the late eighties, when I was an urban vicar, I almost had a breakdown through the unsustainable and unrealistic expectations I was putting on myself. I can see it now, but it brought its own tunnel vision at the time. As well as lifebelts from spiritual advisers, teachers and friends, I read Bonhoeffer, then Vincent Donovan, then Martin Thornton, then Rowan Williams, then Sara Savage, as healing and hope gradually dawned. The analytical sections of this book reprised almost exactly the path I found towards recovery. Dame Edna would call it spooky. If I’d been able to read this book years ago it would have saved me a lot of trouble. Therefore I commend this book 110%.

The combination of high fantasy and self-expectations, an apparent duty to say yes to everybody all the time, a one-man-band mentality about ministry, historical romanticism and exhaustion almost got me. Care Bears who attenuate everything else about their lives get crocked. I don’t now mind admitting it, and the more we all admitted our need to be needed, got some boundaries in and stood up to our own fantasies and the cult of nice, the more we could all begin to be half the people God made us to be, as priests and ministers of the gospel.

This book is a vastly intelligent, compassionate, understanding and helpful resource. Some will find it a bit clever, so if you prefer your books stupid, you may be disappointed. Of course, if the cap does not fit you don’t have to wear it. It does fit many of us. The fact is that almost all of us vicars have been on this game for far too long. It has done us no favours. As crocked care bears we may even have sought a way off the not-so-merry-go-round. This book offers the most cogent escape route I know, historically and theologically, as well as practically. Take it, and get a life!

New Urbanism: redeeming cities

No time today for more than a pointed little jibe: Why do we have to burn fuel, fray our nerves, waste our time, piecing our lives together out of a tangled mass of commutes?
The answer, of course, is that nobody wants to live in our inner cities the way they are. It’s a matter of history, but is it a necessity?
If we don’t like your city, could we improve it until we do, rather than simply dumping it and sprawling out to the next ’burb?

Responding to the challenge of this so-called “new Urbanism” would involve reversing the habits of 200 years, but could it help make our lives massively more sustainable, and even enjoyable, as we became more plugged into our localities in a different way...

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.

Keeping the Faith in High Wycombe

70th anniversary mass last night for one of our (comparatively few) Anglo-Catholic churches in Buckinghamshire. Set in a tough urban landscape, St Mary & St George Sands has been a real landmark since 1938. This is a simply lovely place to sing Mass; it has a simple resonant interior. Its real glory, however, is a wonderfuly mixed and close congregation — which has grown a recent ordinand, with another on the go. There’s a warmth and spirit here, exemplified by the celebration cake (The roof was fudge flavoured icing).

I was struck by three quite particular indications of spiritual strength in depth here:

1. SMSG featured on one UK TV news channel after the arrests of nearby alleged terrorists in 2006, as an extremist mosque! OK, it’s got a green dome. It’s also got a 9 ft Cross on top. You'd think that would be enough to make a UK TV editor question whether it really was a mosque but, er, you’d be wrong.
2. SMSG took in and for two years cared for Fr James Mukunga, a Zimbabwean priest subject to official persecution. Fr James is now working in the Southwark diocese. For him and his young family it was a place of recovery, healing and hope. This may be a comparatively small congregation, but it’s generous and focused on the needs of the real world.
   
3. As part of thier recent celebrations, SMSG hired in an Earth Balloon, filling the area under the dome for a day with the 16 metre blow-up globe, so that local children of all ages could come and discover amazing things about the real world in Church, in a way they will remember for the rest of their lives.

Mother Susie Simpson is leaving soon, to follow a calling to serve as a priest among young offenders at the (original) Borstal in Kent. There’s a fabulous job here, wating for the right person...