Velcro and Teflon in Pastoral Care

Teams offer the best pastoral care, not primadonnas. One particular reason has struck me recently — the complexity and depth of damage in some people’s lives in a consumer society can exhibit in a tendency to shop around. “I've tried 11 vicars — none of them was any good, so now I'm trying you, bishop.” Dangerously, this can hook into our own need to be needed, flatter our own sense of drama and, when the velcro attaches, we’re stuck — and so are they.

Ministry, and especially deliverance ministry, is one sphere of life where it really doesn’t pay to shop around. Every time a priest introduces boundaries to the conversation you bail out and find another, until, presumably, you can find one who mirrors your dis-ease perfectly = can reinforce your problem precisely. The only hope of healing usually lies in picking a small selection, if not one, taking the blindest bit of notice of any of them, and then sticking with the pastoral relationship for long enough for something good to happen. From the point of view of clergy, we can best offer help by communicating together and integrating care, not flying solo.

When people ask for deliverance ministry, it’s best to offer an organic integrated package where specific spiritual needs emerge as a strand within a holistic and relational approach, not zap-u-up pyrotechnics, silly voices, and cliché storylines from the Hammer House of Horrors. The whole key is not to make a drama out of a crisis. We centre carefully on the health, personal, relational, and spiritual realities involved, and go gently. Whereupon, I find, healing comes swifter and sooner than anyone usually expects.

Post-Christendom: rafts or trawlers?

Steve Hollinghurst works for Church Army in Sheffield, researching the cultures of people who don’t go to Church in the UK. He came to our local Deanery Synod last night with simple facts and figures about post-Christendom England.

• It’s an immensely fluid and complex picture out there. Fewer people buy into institutional church and the whole “Christian England” thing. Denominations are a thing of the past — a phase we went through, that means nothing to most people now. We are also globalizing massively.
• As “Religion’s” stock (genteely) declines, “Spirituality’s” increases. There’s a lot of curiosity out there. Steve contrasted the ubiquitous modernist “Scooby-Doo” interpretation of paranormal phenomena 30 years ago with multiple wall-to-wall ghosthunter shows now... Tech is cool, but the Eagle Comic optimistic scientism with which we all grew up has, worryingly perhaps, collapsed into widespread pessimism and cynicism about Science. People are massively switching off assertive fundamentalist certainties. Experts are now as good as their last job; Richard Dawkins is, in fact one of the best recruiting sergeants the Churches have.
• People find Churches spiritual places, but most of all when we’re not there! More people are passing through and by Churches (now up to 82% of the population a year), but far fewer committing themselves to the gathered twice-a-week experience.
  

So what do we do? We could retreat fast into the bunker, clinging on to what we fondly imagine were the certainties of the past. We could get the wagons into a circle for vigorous “Judaean People’s Front” debates around then camp fire. Alternatively, we can get the wagons out onto the trail, and see who we meet along the way. Where we decide to do the latter we will find ourselves needing the same kind of utter versatility St Paul talked about in I Corinthians 9 — Greeks to Greek, slave to slave, Jew to Jew. We need to distunguish clearly the gospel from its cultural wrappers. It’s a simple story — love is strong as death.

• Keep the core simple and authentic.
• Don’t rob the Word of its power as mystery — embrace the subtlety and poetry of it.
• Get engaged. Be holy pragmatic / entirely versatile about the wrappers.

Notes on a Phone

New horizons in technology, with notes on a mobile from Christmas Day at Aston Clinton on Jude Adam’s blog, Random acts of senseless beauty (and with the tags "Nonsense, General...") And if that isn’t all you need for your technological faith future, here, from the wonderful AV people at (Chicago) Community Christian Church, is a gadget you don’t know quite how much you need — the iBible:

In selva oscura? Lost in the great forest?

Michaelmas Priests’ pre-ordination retreat at Glenfall House, Cheltenham. It’s a tremendous privilege and always great fun to work with Abbot Stuart Burns, OSB. It's tremendously encouraging to share these days before ordination with ten excellent candidates.

I brought a poem to compline. Everything is de-institutionalising, and all the conventional waymarks are changing. Priests easily lose the script and feel lost. They can react to feeling lost by desperately clinging onto reactionary fantasy, buying a ‘how-to’ book, losing any sense of their own worth as priests or people. The contemporary stress on technique is usually self-defeating. People really need God’s grace and realism, not fantasy and guilt. The only way out begins when we live humbly and graciously within the realities of the context He has given for our priestly ministry. Tomorrow’s priests need to learn how to embrace reality, not to pretend they are not lost. Pretending not to be lost only leads to authoritarianism and hypocrisy, breakdown and guilt. Priesthood is about releasing people from that, not inducting them into it!

This poem is by Seattle poet David Waggoner. What do you do if you’re lost in the great redwood forest? If you don't know where to turn because it all looks the same?

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Nigerian flying bishop for England?

We live in a jolly postmodern Teletubby world where if people object deeply enough to anything, they don't have to be stuck with it. Antsy Conservatives are as entitled to be like that as anyone else. Out on the streets, politics, focus groups and factions rule. The Church of England Newspaper reports an unnamed source saying there are plans to consecrate an English priest as a Nigerian flying bishop. So, to quote the great Barry Norman, "Why not?"

1. The whole mentality is against Scripture. I Corinthans 12: "What if the eye says to the hand I have no need of you?" There was all kinds of moral and theological fandango going on in Corinth, but St Paul did not send in his own clowns to sort it all out. The NT way of doing Church says apostles represent the gospel by grace, not factions by political choice. Church is a place of shared respect and accountability — mutual submission. A Church which forgets loses the plot.
   
   
2. The whole English flying bishop thing works, when it works, because of dedicated colleagues who are prayerful, discipled and charitable, with a profound lived sense of Catholic order. Attempts to run this geometry without that last factor can only be toxic.
   
   
3. History contains various partition schemes — 60 years ago in the Indian subcontinent, 86 in Ireland. We're still picking up the pieces. Perhaps these were the only way of containing lethal craziness at the time, but in the end people have to grow up and be reconciled, because that's the way of Jesus and you can't get away from it. One day he will be all in all. It's really sad if the Church forgets this and can't do better than the secular world about this sort of thing.
   
   
4. The postmodern Teletubby "Pick Your Own" thing promises so much but delivers so little. It achieves its narrow short term aim, but on the way mucks up bigger relationships and loses sight of long term realities. The way to Revelation 21 leads through I Corinthians 12, not around it! Do you have to go through Canterbury to get to Christ? Yes, of course: and Lagos, and Darfur, and Bangalore, and Rome, and Penge, and Chicago. God made the lot, and his mercy really is over all his works.