Why is our Christianity so Immature?

I’ve just sneaked back home under a volcanic ash cloud. The Munich Passport Contoller who said the flight was cancelled was wrong.

I’ve said various things about Kirchentag, but it is remarkable how the Germans do serious theology on a mass scale.

Equally remarkable was the age breakdown of 167,000 people a day doing this:
. 7,68% Unter 12 Jahren
. 13,74% 12 bis 17 Jahre
. 16,45% 18 bis 29 Jahre
. 7,77% 30 bis 39 Jahre
. 19,07% 40 bis 49 Jahre
. 18,12% 50 bis 59 Jahre
. 7,34% 60 bis 65 Jahre
. 9,83% über 65 Jahre

Think about it.
Incidentally, where were the 30-39’s?

Thoughts such as these, Nick Baines’ reaction to the Hans Küng / Jurgen Moltmann evening, struck me again and again —

This evening was remarkable. Thousands arrived early to ensure a place in the auditorium – I got there for 6.30pm thinking it began at 7pm only to find it was scheduled to start at 7.30pm and didn’t in fact get going until 8pm. More people were locked out than could get in. The excluded crowds chanted ‘Wir wollen rein’ (‘We want to come in’) to listen to these two elderly men talk together about church.

Can you imagine that ever happening in Britain? Most of the excluded were young people eager to garner the wisdom of these two theologians. Why? Because their theology is neither dry nor ‘merely academic’, but engages with the real world of economics, politics and culture. They bring to their subject the intellectual rigour that is associated with German philosophical thinking. Yet, they speak with simplicity, clarity and passion – eschewing theological cleverness in order to communicate accessibly with all-comers: they are remarkable men who show no sign of being ego-driven.

This brings to mind a disturbing question posed by Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest and spirituality wonk, about why the way we do Christianity in the West is so childish and discombobulated by rushes to judgment:

All spiritual teachers tell us “DO NOT JUDGE.” For those of us raised in a religious setting, this is very difficult. In a strange way, religion gave us all a Ph.D. in judgmentalism. It trained us very early in life to categorize, label, and critique. It told us all about worthiness and unworthiness. This judgmental mind told us what is right and wrong, who is gay or straight, and who is good or bad. This sort of mind never creates great people, because everybody has to fit into our way of thinking. At an early age our grid was complete. We had decided who fit in and who did not fit in. We fashioned our own little world.

Christianity that divides the world in this manner and eliminates all troublesome people and all ideas different from our way of thinking cannot be mature religion. It cannot see the multiple gifts of each moment, nor the dark side that coexists with it. This mind does not lead us to awareness, and above all, this mind will find it impossible to contemplate. To practice awareness means you live in a spirit of communion; your world becomes alive and very spacious, and not divided by mere mental labels.

Any alternatives to Dogs and Vomit?

After much apocalyptic huffing and puffing last year, which involved touching each one of us for three grand a taxpayer to bail them out, UK Bankers seem to be back to business as usual. Holy Scripture (Proverbs 26:11) suggests that it is the nature of dogs to return to their own vomit, and sows, having washed, to go back out there and roll in the mud. Nick Baines reflects some of the anger and frustration many feel at all this:

Let’s get this straight. Some of my friends are bankers. I don’t have a problem with bankers getting paid for the work they do. Some bankers should get paid more than others. Big bankers should get paid big salaries. But bonuses should be rationalised and spread about the people who work at all levels of the business. How do you justify a single individual getting a one-off (almost guaranteed each year) payment amounting to many multiples of what the ordinary bank staff earn in several years? And whose money is it that they are playing with anyway?

It’s certainly a shame if a good crisis has been wasted.

One development I will be watching this year, after discovering philanthropic microfinance through Kiva, is the growth (or not) of Zopa. Billed as the “eBay of banking,” this is a microfinance site that enables people to borrow or lend directly with minimized middleman profiteering. Risks are potentially higher, but not perhaps by as much as you would think, and returns rates have held up much better than convnentional banks in the past year or so. For a small investor, there’s more flexibility and returns are substantially higher than anything you would have got last year from the UK high street with its pathetic levels of customer satisfaction, up t0 20 point differentials between bank rate and their rate, and fat markups for the fat system.

As ordinary low-risk borrowers and lenders increasingly use microfinance sites, what’s holding back change? Personal inertia — apparently disgruntled Brits are more likely to change their partners than their banks. Also Brits are not currently awash with cash, being legendarily more inclined to borrow than to save. Finally, the UK tax régime around savings income isn’t (yet?) favourable to such direct ways of saving — or indeed any ways of saving?

However, the times are a’changing, and if direct lending sites, presently a bit of a joke, develop, the Drones Club with its fat bonuses and useless customer service could be begin to experience an interesting run for our money.

K2:Sincere Politician Shock Horror

There I was, minding my own business with a party of eight from our diocese, being a humble Kirchentager, when who should come waltzing up to me but my friend and colleague Bishop Nick Baines, all round esteemed colleague and Meissen Commission wonk? Unlike me, Nick actually speaks proper German. I’m very much looking forward to his contribution.

I’m not underestimating any of us here when I say that Church of England participation in what is, overwhelmingly, the largest and most significant Christian gathering in Europe, if not the world (125,000 people here this year) is light, to say the least. The only frustration so far has been the failure of the organisers to connect up to the fast Wi-Fi system at the Messe, forcing humble (and penurious) souls to hang around the station typing furiously into space, to the general mystifaction of assorted travellers, drunks and evangelists... It's a great life.

People talk about Kirchentag moments, and this morning contained one or two very significant ones. I have no time to say how joyful it was to be only feet away from the head of Government of the largest nation in Western Europe, as she provided Ronettes style backing for a renidition of Swing Low Sweet Chariot. Anyway, that would be telling.

But I was greatly impressed with Angela Merkel’s session this morning. She talked modestly and realistically of life in the East for 35 years before the wall came down, and of the challenges involved in maintaining a free society — Freedom, Order, and Responsibility. She explored what freedom and democracy mean, and how it is possible to maintain some sense of momentum in a complex and diverse liberal democracy.

Then, right on cue, came a demonstration by local farmers. She engaged calmly, and gently reiterated the value of dissent, and the primary importance of everyone being able to express themselves in a way that had not been possible in the old DDR. However, she warned, there is a danger of creating a society where everyone has something angry to say, but nobody’s listening on anyone else. The answer is to feed the roots of civil society so that people can get together to refine and press their various points of view in ways that test them and engage with others who differ, rather than just sloganising resgardless, with everyone shouting past each other.

And for the first time in a very long time I realised I was near a politician who was enacting, only feet away, exactly principles of tolerance she had been commending in theory minutes before! Alignment! Gott sei Dank!

Church of England: Why and How?

What is the C of E, and how does it keep going? Andrew Brown asks, pertinently,

Can the church of England, or even the Anglican Communion, ever split? Or is it simply too disorganised to lose a unity which it never actually had?

Not a cruel question — an obvious and sensible one, and the answer is basically “yes.” This answer shows up something special about the character and process of the Church of England. Just like the Apostolic Church in Corinth, it’s always going down the pan, always sneered at and despised, always dying, yet behold we live. The offscouring of all things it may be, but it doesn't go away. Why not? “Is it a good way to be a Christian, or even a stable one?” asks Andrew. It’s certainly a very down to earth one.

Nick Baines observes with great clarity how the Church hangs together, in human terms. Such behaviour, seldom described but often experienced, resonates through Church life like Brighton goes through Brighton rock. Parishes freely welcome, then gently cherish and nurture, challenging people. Clergy cry at strangers’ funerals, and try to think of new and entertaining school assemblies, with governing body in the evening. Ringers slide off to the pub at 6·30 and catch up with the gossip. Lambeth does Indaba, sustained disciplined cross cultural listening. being this kind of Church annoys imperialists and bullies of all stripes, but we stick with it. You find similar processes of listening, respect and accommodation, if you look for them, on every level and, to a great or lesser extent in every place:

The Church of England is perhaps the only church witnessing to the pain of holding together instead of taking the easy option and simply splitting and going where your mates are. It costs nothing to form yourself into a community of like-minded people among whom you won’t have to struggle with challenge or difference. But that is not the Church. Just like the first disciples of Jesus, our vocation is to follow Jesus together. Jesus did not give any of his disciples a veto over who else should or should not be called into the company of disciples.

Secondly, instead of doing it the way the world does it (that is, running away from the tensions into safe groups of the like-minded), perhaps the Church of England has no option but to wrestle openly with its tensions in a way that refuses to pretend to the watching world that every issue is easily resolved or reality ignored. I get as impatient as everyone else at some of the things I hear, but they don’t give me permission to walk away.

Yesterday’s synod debate on the Uniqueness of Christ, with its landslide result (wonderfully live-blogged by Peter Ould), shows something significant and often forgotten. What basically holds the C of E together is a sense of Christ, and reverence for Christ, addressed from many different personal directions but focussed simply on him. The Rest is Noise. The Church simply has no big organisational Salt-Lake-City/ Vatican coherence. Whenever it tries to develop one, because human nature is always more comfy that way, it makes a fool of itself. Its power is profoundly voluntary and humane, rather than institutional. We can be as passionate as we are inspired to be, but we don’t do doctrinal fascism. Our cultural milieu is not confessionally Liberal, but it is profoundly Libertarian in a John Milton sense (Areopagitica). The Church is almost the ultimate Starfish, rather than Spider organisation. This, in fact, is its strength, not its weakness. Go figure.