Showing off? shutting shop? showing up?

Even amid a forest of high towers, St Paul’s Cathedral remains, architecturally, the heart of the City of London.

It could be a key place for people to confront anxiety and seek a new vision for the future of humanity, money, and power. This process, that is goinog on around the world, has to take in all interested parties — Limiting it to the elite who got us into this mess is insane.

After visiting the OLSX camp yesterday, I have no idea why St Paul's shut up shop last week. The appearance of a large handful, but still only a handful, of cheap tents fifty yards from the front door would be possible to manage, one would think. If, as Woody Allen suggests, 80% of success is showing up, at least now St Paul’s has reopened it is back in the game.

But what game?

Once upon a time an Urban PCC in theSouth of England was interviewing candidates for the post of Vicar. One willowy Anglo-Catholic youth made a big pitch for a shift up the candle — recalling the grand tradition of Anglo-Catholic slum clergy he said “what this place needs isn’t a leader, but a Priest!” Stirring stuff... until, quarter of an hour later a local bag lady with a skinful of cider but a heart of gold, crashed through the doors crowing, as was her wont, her signature line - “Help! I need a Priest!” Willowy Anglo-Catholic youth disappeared to the Toilet. He did not get the job.

And, as St Paul’s reopens its doors, this tale raises a question for its managers. Can they redeem their initial hysterical over-reaction? Do they want to draw all voices into a vital public debate, or will they clear the site as tactfully and soon as possible, probably in the middle of the night — when Caiaphas and chums used to do their business?

In other words do they have the stomach to engage in the real world at the crest of a tidal race between people, money and power, or are they just overgrown public schoolboys playing indoor games in their own self-important Tourist Disneyland?

Over to them...

Accounting for Everybody

Most of us like to think we believe that people matter more than things. Archbishop Rowan’s New Year message in 2009 challenged us to be more honest and consistent about this belief. Taking as his starting point the story of Laurence the Deacon, who told Roman authorities that the poor supported by the Church were its treasures, he asks

What would our life be like if we really believed that our wealth, our treasure, was our fellow human beings? Religious faith points to a God who takes most seriously, and values most extravagantly, the people who often look the least productive and successful — as if none of us could really be said to be doing well unless these people were secure. And as we look around in our own country as well as worldwide, this should trigger some hard questions...

This year’s takes a similar theme, and raises the stakes to a global scale: —

There are fewer and fewer problems in our world that are just local. Suffering and risk spread across boundaries, even that biggest of all boundaries between the rich and the poor. Crises don’t stop at national frontiers. That’s one thing terrorism, and environmental challenge and epidemic disease have taught us. We share the risks. The big question is “Can we share the hopes and create the possibilities?” Because it’s when we do share the hopes that we really see what it is to belong together as human beings, discovering our own humanity as we honour the human dignity of others...

The challenge to discover our own humanity as we honour the human dignity of others raises its own hard questions for a society in which the gap between rich and poor has, almost unbelievably, been widening these past thirty years. It calls to mind a report produced late last year by the New Economics Foundation — A Bit Rich: calculating the real value to society of different professions. In the spirit of progressive economics, it’s available free as a .pdf.

The report examines the real value to society of six very different jobs. These professions come with big mythic perceptions and assumptions in the great game of Careers — City banker, nursery worker, advertising executive, hospital cleaner, tax accountant, waste recycling worker.
The result isn’t a simple game of goodies and baddies, but it does challenge the Great Golden Myth of eighties yuppiedom.

In its purest form, the GGM tells us that a tiny elite of pangalacticaly superior individuals create wealth for society, which largely consists of lumpen drones and wasters. Any silly nonsense that these self-designated “Wealth Creators” care to indulge is thus, ipso facto, OK. Fairness, like taxes, is strictly for the little people. And the lesson of the past year or so is that not only is life in the golden dome golden, but largely consequence-free as well. Nice work if you can get it.

NEF’s report does not call into question the right to private property, or fair reward for labours and risks, or differential remuneration. It does, however, suggest we push the envelope beyond considerations of the naked cash nexus in assessing the social and environmental costs and benefits of all jobs.

So how do we account human worth? How should we? It’s as much about what we notice and our methods as the conclusions we reach...

Church and MegaChurch Stress Test

I go to the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, not as a signed up US MegaChurch fan, which I’m not, but because what you see is what you get — an opportunity to reflect on and learn about leadership with colleagues, in the context of a consistently world class training event put together from a wide range of sources by Evangelical Christians from outside my own expression of the faith. It’s also a personal check back for me to core discipleship values, and I really value the opportunity to take that journey systematically, rigorously and regularly.

But here’s a housekeeping question. How does a Megachurch like Willow Creek weather a recession? Those of us getting muddy and wet, if not shot, in the trenches sometimes wonder how the war’s feeling on the Battleship Invincible. It was interesting to find out.

In his opening address, Bill Hybels talked of the rough seas through which the enterprise was sailing. It included, amongst other challenges, $300K annual donors exploding in the water. There’s some comfort in knowing the seas look rough from a supertanker as well as from our little English dinghies. Of course my Anglo tendency is to be sarcastic about the differences, but it’s a fact that a place like that, as well as yea many more dollars resourced (the thing people always notice first) is also yea many more dollars committed and exposed.

Hybels acknowledged that the conditions we have all assumed to be normal may never come again, and simply hunkering down and awaiting the return of financial glory days is not an option for faith. This is a challenge to the Church to be the Church in the face of circumstances over whch we have no control. Acts 2:38 has to become a more a practical proposition, less a romanticised ideal. This means some formerly large donors downsizing radically, and accepting the humbler place of recipients, whilst those who still doing well step up their generosity.

Jack Welch, formerly of GE says “In a Crisis Cash is King.” Present conditions are an opportunity to own another kingship, and so prove what people in poor areas of the world often know better than rich Christians in the West — that there is nothing like the local Church when the local Church is being itself, rather than the means of getting a light dose of God at the weekend.

This strikes me as a significant philosophical principle for living in testing times, which I think it would be as interesting to try in the smallest housegroup as the largest megaChurches.

Work: Curse of the Drinking Classes

Unto him that hath shall more be given... seems to apply to debt as well as money. Maybe Jesus wasn’t as much saying how things ought to be as warning us about how they are. This morning’s post brings something I hadn’t seen for a while, what with the credit crunch: an unsolicited offer of an additional credit card.

Nectar/ American Express are willing to loan me money when no-one else can lay hands on the stuff, all for a beguiling 17·8% interest rate! Hang on, UK Bank Rate fell this week to a 315 year low of 1·5%. I wasn’t expecting Bank Rate, but there’s a competitor offering a product that charges 6·3%. 17·8% is Money for old rope; money that could be lent out to businesses struggling to survive, or first time buyers desperate for a roof over their heads.

Yeah, yeah, this is all too simple, of course, but it’s hard not to see this as an invitation for debt drunks to hit the bottle again — Scripture says “the dog returns to its own vomit.” Not so beguiling, perhaps...