radref

Why Recession is Costing the Earth

2012-01-24T14:59:00.000Z

It is hard to hate an institution or a mood. We like to personalize our villains. At least the 26 January, 2009 Guardian piece, 'Twenty-five people at the heart of the meltdown...' outlined the structural backdrop to their rogues gallery of politicians, bankers, hedge fund managers and speculators. The list even accused the entire American and British public. Though this high sugar diet of debt and denial made addicts of all of us it is hard not to conclude that the chief beneficiaries and architects of the boom were most responsible for the bust.

But we are still in denial, not only around debt but about growth. Whilst News 24 picks apart the marginalia of our Eurozone crisis in banal detail, the ecological crisis unfolds almost without comment. Even the elephant in the room is in danger of extinction! Growth, that holy grail of capitalism, has made an unholy mess of the planet. In a classic example of false consciousness 'growth' is defined as GDP; bagged and tagged at the checkout as consumer spending. High Street share prices rise and fall, sometimes on a single day of pre-Christmas consumption. Thus narrowly defined the only response to our current predicament is a 'return to growth'. The addict languishes in withdrawal but still craves the high. Biodiversity, equality, justice and sustainability seem at best expendable or worse, simply unintelligible.

Saying that recession is good for the environment is ethically simplistic. But responding to the bust shouldn't mean reinstating the boom. The way our system works punishes the poor, in good times or bad. I believe in growth, but not necessarily the kind that flatters a bank balance. Perhaps the development of philanthropy, equity, quality of life or treasures in heaven.

The price of our narrow definitions is appalling. At risk of belittling a crisis comparable to the 1930's, it could be that the current slump will prove a fatal distraction. For a political culture in the grip of narrow agendas and cowardice getting our priorities right seems too much to ask. Which twenty-five people are most culpable for the ecological meltdown?

The Wood Green Mennonite Church Audit Survey

2011-11-03T15:15:00.001Z

My own north London London Anabaptist congregation, Wood Green Mennonite Church (<http://www.menno.org.uk/wgmc>) is carrying out a ‘mission audit’. They’re looking to see their church grow and build closer links with their community, near and far. They would very much appreciate your help. If you have any connection with WGMC (however slender) they would be very grateful if you could please follow the link below and complete their survey which need not take longer than a few minutes. Please return the survey by the 15th December, 2011. Many thanks. (It may not be possible to complete the survey more than once from one computer - eg if more than one family member wants to answer it - though it may work if each uses a different browser eg Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.) We'll be running a separate survey for those who are or have been part of the congregation in the past. If that applies to you, you may want to wait for that survey.

Here's the link to the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZCS6KZC

Thanks,

Phil

No Time For Capitalism?

2011-11-02T10:16:00.000Z

As the crow flies it's less than ten miles from our home in Chingford to St. Paul's. My route to the Cathedral yesterday was rather more circuitous. With an hour in hand I visited the Clockmakers' Museum at the Guildhall before talking to protestors. By my reckoning this is one of the most interesting small museums in London. The story of London-made marine chronometers and longitude offers a fascinating if chilling perspective on the rise of British Imperialism. Trade, war, empire and ... horology.

The time on the steps of St. Paul's steps was a little more ambiguous. For a place of worship with hourly prayer and daily services protestors seemed arrive from another world. I found the camp far more interested in conversation and the latest media reports than the time, unless the bells were tolling for end of capitalism. In a recent ICM poll 52% of respondents agreed with the statement, "The protesters are right to want to call time on a system that puts profit before people".

Granted that the protestors are a rainbow coalition, there is considerable astuteness in discerning the signs of the times for the current system. The establishment have vested interests in perpetuating a myth that where Socialism is concerned we have been there and done that. Truthfully, what we have overwhelmingly been and done since the Industrial Revolution is Capitalist. This is the same system which fuels obscene inequality and an ecological Armageddon in pursuit of limitless economic growth.

It was growing dark just as the bell chimed five. As I walked through the City of London to the tube station the office workers were clockwatching. It is late in the day for Capitalism in Paternoster Square and Athens.

St Paul's, Protestors and the Kingdom of God

2011-11-01T10:13:00.000Z

It isn't hard to name the lowlights in this sorry St. Paul's Cathedral tale. Perhaps, Boris Johnson's exegetical blonde moment: "In the name of God and Mammon, go"? I am unsure whether this is a Bullingdon Club motto, but as biblical interpretation it rather misses the point. 'God and Mammon' isn't a multiple choice question. Perhaps it's the sight of Richard Chartres, who slinks around the set of this saga like some Constantinian extra from the Borgias. Maybe it's the resignation of three principled men who couldn't stomach what the Cathedral is preparing to do in the name of Jesus.

The lowest note for me is a continuing compound sin of omission. The first part, a failure to recognise the Kingdom of God. The second, showing partiality to the rich. The third, a travesty of welcome.

A modest proposal for Christian hospitality: do not evict Jesus from your doorstep.

As I write protestors face legal action. Whatever St. Paul's chooses to do next, this is an important moment for the Christian Church in this country. In my view there is a way forward. The Church of England has made a virtue of the 'middle way' but on this occasion peace is neither pacification or neutrality. If the Cathedral will not rise to the occasion then Rowan Williams must.

The Clock That Ran Slowly

2011-10-20T14:20:00.001+01:00

We are heading to Hereford for the weekend, buoyed up by reports that this border county of Herefordshire is the capital of ‘slow’. Research for the trip turned up a curious press report from the Hereford Times which featured nearby Leominster’s millenium clock. The article from two years ago featured news of probable vandalism of the clock, which was chiming an hour late. The unusual timepiece features a reference to Sarah Leeke, in 1817 the last woman in England to fall victim of a ducking stool. I wonder whether the clock was vandalised by furious feminists.

What caught my eye in the article was a comment from Molly Cook, chair of the committee which oversaw the installation of the clock in 2007. Cook commented, “Mechanisms are funny and the slightest thing can complicate them.” In my experience the biggest source of ‘complication’ in mechanisms are people. We are always messing up the pristine purity of tidy systems or well oiled machines. The notion of persons as ‘complications’ to well ordered mechanisms is frankly, chillingly contrary. Every so often people try to fit in with mechanisms so as not to complicate them, but I’m reminded of Wendell Berry’s description of dehumanized humanity – ‘thing-ridden men’. The purpose of mechanisms is surely to enhance humanity. It should give us some pause for reflection that those same mechanisms easily take on a life of their own and trap people in clockwork of our own making.

For good or ill clocks don’t only measure the passage of time, but have supplanted an earlier sense of time as the rhythm of seasons or the arrival and departure of days marked by solar or lunar cycles. A device which purported to measure time accurately (and has brought many advantages) has wormed its way inside our consciousness. Any office worker who has ever indulged in ‘clock-watching’ or most of us who complain of ‘not enough hours in the day’ will confirm the point. Measured time is hastened, stretched and controlled. Those who control the time (those who own the factory clock), also control the workforce. The military connotation of the word ‘workforce’ might also be worth a moment of reflection.

So, long may people complicate mechanisms. God bless the vandals and the Luddites! I’ll raise a glass of best Herefordshire scrumpy to clocks that run slowly.

I'm Backing the Tortoise

2011-10-18T10:30:00.001+01:00

Sometimes it feels like I’ve had more jobs than hot dinners. A few of them had their fair share of misery! My recollection of the best ‘team’ though came from the first two years at Leeds Nightstop – before Barnardo’s spoiled the party. ‘Spoiled’ is a critical and partly subjective comment. We joked that Nightstop was an organisation ‘devoted to serious coffee drinking punctuated by occasional prayer’. I suspect our bucolic brook had a few too many meanders for the mighty river of corporate charitable efficiency. This Hare and Tortoise race was always bound to end in tears. For Hare and Tortoise read Cain and Abel? Certainly, the early Nightstop pace contributed to its creativity and our shared sense that this was a good organisation. Incidentally, we know who eventually won the race! At the moment I’m writing a book (‘The Gospel of Slow’) which develops the theme.

For the past couple of months I’ve taken a ‘blogging break’. That’s a euphemism for another bout of depression. Depression is a bad kind of ‘slow’- a kind of bludgeoning anaesthetic. At the moment I’m still in the midst of it, but determined to find a new tempo guisto for blogging, writing, life and everything.

Boomtown

2011-08-03T20:51:00.000+01:00

Roundstone

Twenty years is a long time, for cities and with love. I came here first with Karen and the girls. Galway is recognizable, though a little angry at the edges. Local graffiti says ‘fuck the bankers’. I turn on the TV to a docudrama on the ongoing clerical child abuse scandal. The race week revellers though, don’t seem to mind. It is raining – that soft, soaking Atlantic rain. The weathergirl says ‘the jet stream is low this year’. Signs and portents! We were here before the boom. Now, everything is bust.

Carraroe

Anna hired a car; a black Toyota with banshee brakes. The AA failed to exorcise the spook so we’re screeching our way around Connemara. There is an art to getting lost. It’s almost a spiritual discipline, like prayer and fasting. From Galway to Roundstone, Carraroe is the wrong way for efficiency. The ‘right way’ though, wouldn’t have taken us to that famous coral strand. I wonder if the beach will outlive coral itself. It’s a fetching place, but a few too many visitors for solitude.

This isn’t a travelogue or a retreat, but the patron saint of word processing must be watching looking out for us. I’m working on a journal, something I haven’t done for years. Every holiday should have a little literary companionship. Mark Patrick Hederman is the Abbot of Glenstal Abbey and the reading is Walkabout. Our car has haunted brakes but this is a banshee book. I can’t decide whether Hederman is inspired or delusional. Perhaps, he’s a little of both but I’m still a touch too English to know the difference.

Galway But No Guinness

2011-07-29T21:02:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow we head to Ireland for a fortnight. Galway is a familiar friend, though it will be a new experience to be there for race week. I hope to keep up the blog whilst I'm away, but radref might have a rather different flavour for a little while. No, I don't mean Guinness!

If all the World Were Rivers

2011-07-28T10:52:00.001+01:00

Some years ago I worked for the Churches National Housing Coalition. Our logo consisted of a rather stylized cityscape. Our witty architect criticized it on the basis that if it were actually built it would fall down. I’ve always had a liking for maps and charts. They set my imagination racing over the contours. Peter Hampson, my former geography teacher, would be glad he taught me at least something. There is no such thing as a literal cartography. Every map has a story to tell. If AW Wainwright were reading this, he would have a smile on his face.

Beatus, PD-US

Eduardo Hoornaert’s fascinating ‘The Memory of the Christian People’, has quite a few geographical gems. I’m grateful to Hoornaert (pp.25-27) for my first introduction to ‘Beatus’, an 8^th Century cartographer working in Spain. In contrast to later maps Beatus chooses not to centre his map on Rome or even Jerusalem. Later maps, as Hoornaert points out, served the needs of Pilgrims or Crusaders. Moreover, those maps have been ‘northified’. They accomplish the not inconsiderable feat of squeezing a globe into a mental grid with a top, bottom and an in-between. That ‘grid’ – the centralization of those later maps – is ideological. Who benefits from a world where north is ‘top’ and Rome is ‘central’? Beatus’ world, on the other hand, is ‘collegial’ (pp.25,26). No city predominates. No region looms over the rest. Beatus’ map depicts a network of connections. Rivers represent not only geographical features but conduits of shared faith and trade. The world is divided between the twelve apostles and is journeying eastwards towards the rising sun, which represents Christ.

Beatus’ map is many things, but it is certainly part of a struggle for Christian memory and hope. I almost said that Beatus has turned the world upside down, but that would tell only part of the story. His is a map without any true ‘up’ or ‘down’. It is not even a map of fixed boundaries and borders. In Beatus’ mind every place and every identity is becoming something and somewhere else. It’s only meridians are the tutelage of the apostles.

Bibliography

Hoornaert, Eduardo. ‘The Memory of the Christian People’, 1989. Burns and Oates, Tunbridge Wells.

Christianity, Norway and the Case of Anders Behring Breivik

2011-07-23T16:59:00.000+01:00

Last week few people had heard the name of Anders Behring Breivik. Today he is trending on twitter for all the wrong reasons, along with 'Freemasonry' and 'Christianity'. The carnage in Oslo and Utoeya Island will change Norway. What these attacks mean for understanding the relationship of religion and right-wing extremism, is a more open question.

We have a great deal more to discover about alleged murderer, Breivik. Much of the speculation is based on Twitter and Facebook accounts set up on the 17 July. On that Facebook page he describes himself as a Christian and a conservative. He lists his interests as hunting, body-building and Freemasonry. His internet posting seems to show far-right, nationalist and anti-Muslim views. Until we know more it seems unwise to make too much of the suspect's possible motives. Much of the Norway 'debate' on Twitter today amounts to Punch and Judy, Christian vs Humanist head-banging.

So, what do we know? There is no unanimity on the political or religious far-right. This is a murky and convoluted world where resentment, racism and dogma mutate into bizarre and sometimes lethal configurations. It is hard enough to keep track of a myriad of sects and splinter groups, let alone individual psychology. Christianity makes a poor civil religion. Allegedly it 'enfeebled' a people. The Nazis believed this, hence the attraction of Alfred Rosenburg's 'Positive Christianity'. Rosenburg attempted to rid the Bible of its Jewish heritage and claimed the 'Aryanhood' of Christ. His influence can still be traced in today's far-right groups, which espouse either outright paganism or a tractable and bastardized Christianity.

The Church has found trouble enough with barbarism committed by the orthodox, let alone our dogmatic, convoluted first cousins. I have no idea whether this has any relevance to events in Norway. As for Anders Behring Breivik, I hope to be proved wrong.

The Many and the Few: Reflections on the Control of Population

2011-07-22T11:38:00.002+01:00

My grandparents had a grandmother clock. When my mother was ill, I remember the comforting sound of it. It was a proper clock. For sure, a child’s eye view, but I can clearly recall my dad’s face when he told us mum had lost the baby. Nan said there were fields across the road, where I had only known a housing estate. As Bury expanded, the suburban tide seemed relentless. Since the world of the early 20^th Century, when my grandmother was a child, there have been so many changes. Conflict, rumours of wars, technical transformation and so many more people; everything is new. Sometime between now and that pure town, before the world went mad and went to war, we have lost our demographic innocence.

Why the issue of population growth has remained politically toxic in liberal democracies is obvious enough. The statistics are sobering, though. In 1900, the year before my grandmother was born, global population stood at 1.7 billion. It is now 6.8 billion. According to some predictions that figure could rise to 9.2 billion by 2050. On the 12^th July Steve Connor reported in the Independent on a new two-year study by the Royal Society into global population levels. John Sulston, joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the human genome, will head the research. He said, “We will be examining the extent to which population is a significant factor in the momentous international challenge of securing global sustainable development, considering not just the scientific elements but encompassing the wider issues including culture, gender, economics and law.”

Sulston might have added ‘religion’ to that list. The professor may not read the Mennonite Weekly Review but Sheldon Good’s piece, ‘Amish Population Continues to Grow, Especially in New York’, raises some troublesome questions. Whilst American families work out at 2.5 children, Amish households typically average 7. As Donald Kraybill points out, there are ‘push’ as well as ‘pull’ factors at work in the New York growth. The availability of relatively affordable land and opportunities for small businesses are important. Good summarises: “The Amish population doubled from 1991 to 2010, growing 5 percent on average every year”. Demographics matter to the Amish. In a community which does not proselitize growth is maintained through large family sizes and a high retention rate of around 85%. The Amish may shun the world but can the world ignore the Amish?

In one of my favourite Star Trek movies, ‘The Wrath of Khan (1982)’ Spock has sacrificed himself for the crew, receiving a fatal dose of radiation in the process. Tugging down his jacket he summons his remaining strength to say goodbye. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, he says. Well, do they? How shall we weigh the needs of the global many against the few? Indeed, the many are the few. We are all daughters, sons, families and communities. This is the reason why the politicians find population control ‘toxic’ unless they are too autocratic to care.

Population control has never been attempted on a worldwide scale but it already carries the baggage of eugenics and coercive Statist social engineering. Citizens of the global south are rightly suspicious that when over-consuming northerners mean ‘population control’ it isn’t our own populations we have in mind. The world cannot go on like this. But neither is coercion peaceable or sustainable. To remain human the many need the few, more than ever.

Self-Employed! (But Hopefully Not a Lemming)

2011-07-21T10:31:00.001+01:00

There are two ways to step off a cliff. The first involves a hang-glider and some skill. Lemmings have another approach which rarely ends well. Having handed in my notice on Monday I don’t think much of the rodent route. Even if the intention is to fly, first time self-employment is nerve-wracking. There are all kinds of reasons why people choose to work for themselves. In my case, it has a lot to do with the straightforward accountability and control over what I do. Confidence matters a great deal. ‘Selling me’ doesn’t come naturally, but thirty years in eclectic Third Sector organizations and theological education were a good preparation. Now I am self-employed I had better not fall out with the boss!

So what comes next? There are books to write and projects to develop. I can’t say more about this just yet, but I’m quietly encouraged. I hope as well to offer some mission consultancy to local churches. After twenty years of running Vision Days I look forward to broadening my horizons. I’m open to offers. I’ll be updating my Linkedin profile over the next few weeks.

Retractions?

2011-07-20T09:29:00.000+01:00

What does it mean to make a retraction? It is the disavowal of something spoken. In light of some fresh insight the previous words are revealed as harsh or erroneous. 'Retractions' can of course also be false. They can also be made under duress, as Anabaptists are acutely aware. Outside of radref I have said many things I later regretted. There is nothing in this blog I would want to ‘retract’. That is not to say I would not say some things differently.

Firstly, in hindsight I don’t think I should have used ‘absolute pacifism’. That expression is exclusive in a way I did not intend. Pacifism shouldn’t be a creed or a tickbox confession for the righteous. Peacemaking is a living practice established in the real world; not a code for the perfect. It is something to do with the ‘feel’ of phrase. Aren’t ‘absolutes’ another way of saying ‘dogma’? Isn’t dogma tainted by coercion and violence? Put that way, ‘absolute pacifism’ is a nonsense phrase – an archetypal square circle. So, in future I shall remain pacifist and let the absolutes look after themselves.

Secondly, reading over my posts on persecution there is something of a disconnection between the earlier and later material (i.e. 'The End of Martyrdom' and 'Ways of Remembrance'). In the later posts I critique the ideological use of martyrdom. I think the earlier posts are vulnerable to my own critique. That Catholics or Anglicans might make reparations to Anabaptists in relation to persecution in England is arguable. It isn’t however, up to me to make the case. I am grateful for more enlightened times and better relations between Anabaptists and ex-oppressor churches. There is considerable potential in the development of that relationship.

Apples and Raindrops

2011-07-16T11:50:00.000+01:00

There are many serious posts on this blog. This isn't one of them. That's just as well, since the rain is lashing down on my conservatory roof. In case you hadn't noticed, it's St.Swithin's Day. Anabaptists don't really go in for saints but we're not above borrowing them for a special occasion. St.Swithin (or 'Swithun') was a 9th C bishop of Winchester. He is the perfect English saint, since his name is regularly invoked whenever the Brits moan about the weather (i.e. frequently). It is said that rain on St.Swithin's day 'blesses and christens the apples'. Any friend of trees is a friend of mine I'll gladly raise a glass of Stowford Press.

Secret Island: Jersey and the Ethics of Tax Avoidance

2011-07-15T11:36:00.004+01:00

Jersey is a beautiful island. For a time we lived there. I was warden of Communicare, a Christian community centre in St. Brelade. When this blog began three years ago, I set out to be honest. This post is honest to a point and in the circumstances, which are beyond my control. A room full of lawyers prevent me telling you what the ‘circumstances’ are. If anyone who knows the ‘back-story’ is reading, I wish you hadn’t legislated against forgiveness.

Some of Jersey’s contradictions add to the intrigue of the place. Here is an island that is geographically French and pointedly British; ostensibly modern but residually feudal. Jersey has the highest density of car ownership per head of population in the world, but an island-wide 40mph speed limit. At low tide a hidden eldritch realm appears from under the sea. The long west coast of St Ouen’s was my favourite place. From the surfer cafe at Big Verns it is possible to watch the storms roll in.

Jersey is an island which has always found what it needed to hand, whether the trade was agriculture, tourism or tax avoidance. These days the finance industry is Jersey’s main employer. Unsurprisingly, when the subject of tax reform comes up, many islanders are unwilling to bite the hand that feeds. When Christian Aid protested tax avoidance in St.Helier the Jersey Evening Post carried dozens of indignant letters. The indignation is unsurprising, given that nearly 12,000 people are employed in Jersey’s finance sector. To its credit the island’s parliament has been critical of over-dependency on the finance industry for years.

The other side of Jersey isn’t immediately apparent to outsiders or the throng of weekending tourists. It took me more than a year to realise that what I first took as reticence, masks a darker obsession with secrecy. Some of what I heard isn’t repeatable here. I have no way of verifying allegations that ranged from charities funded by dirty money, wartime collaboration, alarming rates of alcoholism, prostitution rackets, eating disorders, political corruption, to devious trusts and illegally held weapons. Some of these issues are already partly in the public domain. The rest, I keep an open mind about. What I still find surprising, six years on is that so many people should have taken the trouble to tell me this. Secrecy is understandable, but it seems it is also burdensome.

At the heart of the island’s culture of secrecy is the finance industry. Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK explains why he uses the term ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ rather than ‘tax havens’:

Our language is new and perhaps surprising, not least because it deliberately avoids referring to tax and financial issues in defining the locations and the issues. This is because secrecy and the abuse of laws and regulations that it permits is at the core of the issue we have been studying. Secrecy is the original problem; tax abuses are an outcome (but not the only outcome) of that secrecy.

The advantage of Murphy’s terminology is its flexibility in describing not only offshore financial arrangements but the kind of tax avoidance that also occurs in mainland UK. As Murphy makes clear, secrecy is at the heart of the issue. According to the OECD more than $5 trillion rests in such jurisdictions. The organization places Jersey on its so-called ‘grey list’, of territories which lack fiscal transparency but are committed to change. At a time when the citizenry of northern democracies are resisting harsh austerity measures, setting fire to Greek public buiildings and marching in their hundreds of thousands, the amoral tax habits of our largest companies strike a sour note. The serial tax-avoiders rely not only on secrecy, but the complexity of the system. It is a system which is designed to deflect attention from the blindingly obvious. As Niall Cooper points out in his blog, the poorest 10% pay a far greater percentage of their income in taxes to the Government than the most affluent 10% (46% as compared to 34%). The ethical point should be simplicity itself, but the emperor still claims a fine set of clothes. Cooper continues:

Britain’s 20 largest companies between them operate a vast network of over 1,000 offshore companies, potentially allowing the companies and their clients to avoid huge sums in tax.

The means by which such companies sidestep the obvious is underpinned by secrecy and in turn that secrecy thrives in a bubble of amorality, artfully separated from the real world. In December 2007 edition of ‘Finance Magazine’ in Ireland had an article entitled ‘Is Tax on Your Board’s Agenda’. Written by Liam Lynch, tax partner of KPMG, the article contained the following statement:

Alongside these developments, a worrying tendency seems to have emerged among external stakeholders to make ‘moral’ judgements about tax planning and to expect companies to manage their tax affairs in a ‘moral’ way. The ‘fairness’ of corporations’ tax policy is frequently questioned by tax authorities, pressure groups and media.

There is more in the same vein, which focuses on the duty of a board to shareholders in managing tax as a cost to business. To be charitable, this is narrow logic. More bluntly, it stinks! We simple folk assume that every pound parked in a offshore bank account cannot be spent elsewhere. Jersey deserves better. So do the poor, who are daily crucified by this industry.

Clergy and Chips With Everything?

2011-07-13T09:46:00.000+01:00

Sometimes the blogosphere feels rather like a weather system. Issues seem to rumble around like tropical storms. A recent post on the Out of Ur site, picked up in a St.Joseph's Vanguard post by Roman Catholic apologist Devin Rose caught my eye this week. As did Maggi Dawn’s scrutiny of glass ceilings and women in ordained ministry. There are good things in all of those conversations, but perhaps the real 'glass ceiling' is the difficulty of raising fundamental objections to clericalism. To be more specific, it ought to be possible to question ordination per se rather than have progressive clerics repeatedly shunting the issue off into the sidings. It's like a restaurant where every meal comes with chips. The ontological divide between laity and clergy is a travesty of Christian community. That divide does not need re-balancing, only abolition. In that vein here are my comments in response to Devin Rose on priesthood:

Thanks for responding in detail and for the ‘challenge’. Let me begin by saying that I don’t believe there is a discernible New Testament scheme along the lines of say, Calvin's ‘fourfold pattern of ministry’. I accept your picture of interchangeable roles. We might have a discussion about ‘priests’.

If I were responding in depth to your ‘challenge’ I would ask you for clarification. What justification have you for saying that the early Church seems to have had a ministerial priesthood? When you say ‘early Church’, what period are we talking about?

In essence I believe, with Bernard Haring, that for the first three centuries the church didn’t know ‘the concept or the reality of a ‘clergy”. That said, I accept that by the time of Ignatius in the early 2nd Century, episcopacy was beginning to acquire a normative status. Prior to that we are confronted with communities (for example in Hebrews or Justin) where leaders were described in terms of the secular hegeumennoi ('presidents'). Hebrews is notable for a stance which the priesthood of the Old Covenant is contrasted with the once for all priesthood of Jesus.

The challenge I would make to your sacramental understanding of the priesthood is both ecclesial and missional. If the priest is in some sense Sacerdos alter Christus what remains for the whole people of God? Are the laity left clinging to the clerical coat-tails? What does it means for the ‘shape’ of the whole community (see http://radref.blogspot.com/2011/02/shape-of-christian-conversation.html) if the community is ontologically partitioned? In essence, one of my key objections to priesthood is that it cedes to a clerical elite what properly belongs to all of us.

What lies in the background of our discussion is the legitimacy or otherwise of change. To give an example, how should we view the Constantinian transition? Anabaptists have routinely seen the 3rd Century as a calamitous ‘fall’. Others are rather more Eusebian. How shall we decide on the legitimacy of change or the necessity of restitution?

Why Cain Wasn't Able...

2011-07-11T10:59:00.000+01:00

I have a bad habit. Only one, I hear you say! I read books from back to front. It’s good practice where it comes to reference books but an especially bad habit with novels. In telling Cain’s tale, Adam’s eldest is at a disadvantage. We’ve spent thousands of years reading the last page. Cain the murderer: cursed, monster, demon. Genesis 4:1-26 doesn’t start that way or end that way. Cain comes across in flesh and blood and not CGI. Eve’s son: brother, father, builder.

Commentators try to make a distinction between the brothers, but the text is silent on the reason for God’s partiality. Whatever the explanation, rejection left Cain lethally angry. In the midst of a passage full of colourful phrases and Hebrew puns (Cain = grasp; Nod = wandering; Enoch = inauguration) the murder itself is strangely colourless. It lands on the page with a dull thud.

There is an ambiguity of punishment and mercy in the way that God deals with Cain. For Cain the agriculturalist, the ground is cursed. Cain is declared ‘outcast’, even by the earth beneath his feet. On the other hand, despite his resentful exaggeration, murder is not punishable by death. The ‘last page’ has ‘the mark’ as a kind of ontological disfigurement, but on the first page it is merciful. If Cain has a fatal (lethal!) flaw it is not that he is some Tabloid ‘beast’, but that he is habitually incapable of trust. The blessing was always his. Scarcity was an illusion. Forgiveness did not need to be grasped. Security needed no city walls. A forfeited immortality might be regained, but never recaptured. We imagine Cain ‘east of Eden’, looking over the fence.

It was Jacques Ellul in ‘The Meaning of the City’ that pointed out the strangeness of this story. From Enoch through Sodom to Babylon and Jerusalem (which kills its prophets), the city is the greatest, bloodiest of human creations. If we were writing the novel, the last page should be a garden – Eden restored. Instead there is yet another city. However debased, creativity belongs inseparably to our humanity. God redeems, transforms, liberates and forgives - but creativity is never obliterated, even if it does bear ‘the mark of Cain’.

Throughout this chapter Cain comes across as a flawed but talented man. Banned from the soil, he shaped his own walled and dynastic world. If the story had ended there it would have been tragic enough but the chapter’s conclusion paints a picture of exponential hubristic violence. The house of Cain was creative (music and metalwork), but the ‘family firm’ do feel a little like an ancient ‘cosa nostra.’ Where Cain had regrets, Lamech gloried in murder (vv 23,24), outdoing the old man seventy-seven times over. That’s how violence works. After the story is told a thousand times who remembers the original offence? Israel/Palestine, Serb/Croat, Falklands/Malvinas, Christian/Muslim, Greek/Turk, North and South Sudan. Two incompatible versions of the past lie side by side. Cain is ‘avenged’ (v.24). Somewhere far away a mother still grieves her sons (v.25). But will Lamech have the last word?

“Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me?” Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”

Where have we heard that before?

Phil's Saturday Breakfast

2011-07-09T08:44:00.004+01:00

The Journey

Greetings
I don't know whether you give cards for birthdays or other occasions. I do. We keep a drawer full of cards for encouragement, empathy or a few words of friendship. Recently I went along to the Christian Resources Exhibition and bumped into artist, Jenny Hawke. I bought a bundle of cards.

As a wordsmith I've always admired musicians and artists. I think though, that good cards aren't always easy to come by. Usually, I like my cards blank inside. The image should have 'associations' without being over prescriptive. I would be interested to hear your ideas of what makes an ideal card. Jenny can be reached at
www.creativegrace.biz.

One More Week, One More Nation
This week has seen the birth of a brand new nation, South Sudan. The World Council of Churches have an interesting piece. Amidst the celebrations this fledgeling state faces as daunting task. Drought, famine and continued conflict grip the region. Many Nubians feel betrayed by the process which led to S.Sundan independence and are pressing for an independent homeland.

Weekly Blog Roundup

Eric Carpenter definitely has a point over at 'A Pilgrim's Progress'. He describes as 'Tragic', the position of pastors who would like to walk away from ministry but can't afford to do so.
Well, you've probably heard of Amish, Mennonites or even 'plain' Quakers. Did you know though, that there are 'plain Anglicans' too. Magdalena Perks blogs over at 'Anglican Plain' . There's some beautifully observed insights into crofting life here.
Bishop Alan has a fresh perspective on the News of the World/News International saga. He wonders 'how far down the rot reaches'. 'How far up' is an interesting question too! The Bishop is also rude about the Daily Mail. Now, that's my kind of episcopacy.
Rob Haskell has a piece that any Brit should read for an insight into the up's and down's of life in the U.S.A. He clicks the 'like' button on democracy and freedom of speech but gives xenophobia, sectarianism and arrogance the thumbs down. A big radref 'like' for Rob.

Have a great weekend.

Shalom,

Phil

The Prison of 'ism': Towards a Life Without Labels

2011-07-08T10:13:00.001+01:00

Published in 1979, Kosuke Koyama’s ‘The Mile an Hour God’ is an absorbing read. Koyama was a Japanese Christian who rejected an either/or dualism that would have set him against his South-East Asian cultural roots. He has a little piece in that book entitled ‘Grey Hairs and the People of Other Faiths’ (pp.68-74). The Indian people, says Koyama, ‘do not call their religion Hinduism’ (p.69). Rather, they call it the Hindu way of life (p.69). He then goes on to assert that the notion of religious traditions as ‘isms’ was a 19^th Century invention. There isn’t space in a blog post to test it out but Koyama cites W.C. Smith in tracing the origins of these ‘isms’:

Boudism (1801 Hindooism (1829) Taouism (1839) Zoroastrianism (1854) Confucianism (1862) Shintoism (1894). With Islam the history is slightly more complicated; Mahumetisme (1597), Mahumetanism (1612), Islamism (1747) Musulamanisme (1818) (p.69)

Koyama is engaged in a wider argument about interfaith engagement in his piece. I wish to make a more modest point about labels. An 'ism' is a label. It is a way of simplifying complex reality. Labels would not exist if they were not useful. Accepted, but useful to whom and why? The overwhelming majority of labels are the province of outsiders 'looking in', rather than insiders talking about themselves. In some cases the label becomes so ubiquitous that insiders reluctantly adopt it. The label is then, for good or ill, absorbed into self-understanding. 'Anabaptism' originated as a term of abuse. 'Christian' is another example. Before then the Disciples were 'the Way', though even that description probably originated as a hostile piece of labelling.

As Koyama points out, people aren't reducible to their ism's, labels or religions. Putting 35,000,000 Thai Buddhists in a box which reduces them to a category does those people a disservice. Moreover, our world is even more complex than Koyama's. The Buddhists live next door as well as in Thailand. Even more fundamentally 'labels' say something significant about language. Language - all language - both describes and distorts. I am an 'outreach worker' and a 'husband,' but I am more than either of these things.

If anything, labels as applied to God are even more troublesome and potentially idolatrous. In the Old Testament the nearest we get to God's self-description is 'I am who I am'. Against patriarchal curiosity and Jaciob's wrestling techniques God, is remarkably resistant. To Jacob's credit, he was willing (literally) to risk life and limb rather than reach for a handy label. God sees prisons as a challenge to open doors and expand our horizons (Gen 39-41; Acts 12:1-19; 16:16-40).

Bibliography

Kosuke Koyama, 'Three Mile an Hour God', 1979. SCM Press

Hymns We Cannot Sing

2011-07-07T10:14:00.000+01:00

This might sound a strange admission, but I don’t often enjoy singing hymns. Perhaps I am a Quaker in the making. Sermons, prayers and Bible readings are tolerant. We can disagree with the preacher and no-one need be any the wiser. Hymns on the other hand, make demands on us. They place other people’s words in our mouths and demand assent. The frailties of borrowing words for worship aren’t always culpable. Singing ‘here I raise my Ebenezer’ long before I knew what an ‘Ebenezer’ was, is forgivable. Singing lines with which we flatly disagree is another matter. I have never been able to sing ‘I vow to thee my country’, ‘make my flesh life melt away’ or any of those jolly revivalist choruses that go on and on about the ‘blood of the Lamb’.

It isn’t perhaps, surprising that the corpus of Christendom hymnody is lapsing into silence. The ‘wreaths of empire’ look decidedly tarnished. It would be simple if it were just hymns vs choruses. Fundamentalist tunesmiths however, have stuffed our contemporary songbooks with images of the military Christ and dreams of ‘taking the land’. Week by week we sing our regrets; half protesting, half lamenting the loss of a glorious past.

The well-known description of congregational worship in 1 Cor 14:26 states that “...everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, etc”. The elements of worship, says Paul, “must be done for the strengthening of the church”. Whatever a ‘hymn’ might have meant in this context, there seems less distance between the songs and the singers than would be common practice today. The hymn was brought to worship and shared, not imported from a hymn book. The difference between borrowing and sharing is significant. The former imposes a voice but the latter is multi-voiced. A great deal has been said about this strange realm after Christendom. ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s songs in a strange land?’ is a worthwhile question.

Do Tories Make Bad Christians?

2011-07-06T09:51:00.000+01:00

Once again I’m sitting in the coffee shop. There is a woman in a blue quilted jacket near the artificial palm. She is reading that newspaper. It is the same every morning. I hope she doesn’t believe migrants always constitute an ‘invasion’ or that claimants are invariably ‘scroungers’. Entering the Kingdom of Heaven is never easy, but it’s even harder carrying a copy of the Daily Mail. It’s not that the ‘rich young ruler’ was unfit for Paradise, but he did have disadvantages.

Of course, I’m not the first person to ask a question like this. In 1996 Tony Blair ruffled feathers on the opposition benches by comments which implied the incompatibility of Christianity and Conservatism. In a Daily Telegraph article Blair denied he was saying Christians could only vote Labour, “But Tories, I think, have too selfish a definition of self-interest.” Blair continued, “They fail to look to the community. That is the essential reason why I am on the left rather than the right.” Whether Tony Blair is ‘on the left’ is contestable, but on this I’m sympathetic to his point of view. If community-mindedness and social justice is at the heart of faith, the word ‘Tory’ does not spring to mind in living out that commitment.

In practice most politically active American Mennonites vote Republican. I find this habit uncomfortable, especially in light of Anabaptism’s radical roots. I do at least understand that many American Christians are voting with abortion or family values in mind, rather than poverty, social concern or environmental ethics. In Britain the role of the religious right is less prominent but the same preoccupations are identifiable in Conservative Evangelical and Fundamentalist Churches. As a Christian on the left who takes a pro-life position I recognise that others see this stance as a blot on my radical landscape. I see it as nonviolence to the unborn person. That social justice is embedded (or disavowed) as a matter of party policy, rather than personal conscience, explains why I’m a card carrying left of centre Green Party member, rather than a wicked Tory. Tories can be Christians but they have...disadvantages.

Anabaptists Should be Birdwatchers

2011-07-05T11:02:00.004+01:00

Last week I saw a Great Spotted Woodpecker, seemingly clamped to a overhanging branch. It was early - just the two of us. For a moment I waited before the bird had enough. I watched as it made for a convenient forest headland across the road. The handbooks say that Woodpeckers have a 'bounding flight', but their rising and falling reminds me of the sea. There is some confusion over whether a nearby Epping forest locality is called 'High Beech' or 'High Beach'. Entirely appropriate!

Birdwatching in Epping Forest

Anabaptists have been community-minded, martyrs, peaceable; but we should also be birdwatchers. No birder could ever believe that God is present in history at the expense of nature. The accusation of 'unrepentant anthropocentrism' (Guroian, p.158) levelled against Christianity by historian Lynn White and liberal Mennonite theologian Gordon Kaufman, is rejected by Guroian. The Armenian Orthodox theologian believes that it ignores the 'element of blessing in the biblical and Christian tradition' (p.158). Agreed, White and Kaufman overstate their case, but Christians do not have a good record of living up to our best insights. Anthropocentrism would be laughable if it hadn’t been so obscenely harmful. We have drawn a circle and placed ourselves at the centre of it. Technically speaking the central task of a Christian ecotheology is a non-anthropocentric Christology: history and creation recapitulated in Christ. In plainer language, what Christians think and do should be less 'Top Gear' and more 'God in Creation'.

I am a birdwatcher and not a twitcher. Rarities are all very well, but they don't come along every day. The way a forest wakes up in song every morning is as 'multi-voiced' as any Christian congregation. If the light falls just so on a Starling's feathers, the bird is transformed. There are plenty of people in the Green Movement who are more interested in the politics than the poetry but Thomas Traherne has the balance about right:

You never enjoy the world aright till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it...

Birdwatching is a way of being Anabaptist, Christian and human. Highly recommended!

Bibliography

Vigen Guroian, 'Ethics After Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic', 1994. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids

Phil's Saturday Breakfast

2011-07-02T06:41:00.002+01:00

Prayer and Not Guns in Mexico

Gladys Terichow has a fine piece in the Mennonite Weekly Review. She highlights the plight of Mennonite Colonists in northern Mexico facing robbery, kidnapping and other violence. Pastor Hein Thiessen of the Conferencia Misionera Evangelica church in Durango colony said,

“Prayer is the only weapon we have,”...“I always say that I will never use a gun. The day I kill someone then I will live in danger for the rest of my life. I would rather die on my knees while I’m praying.”

More Photos From the London Mennonite Centre Farewell

The Prayer Hut

The Kitchen (my favourite place)

This one's for Sheldon Good (the LMC magazine rack, with Mennonite Weekly Review)

LMC from the rear

Weekly Blog Roundup

Word in the Hand is a brilliant progressive Catholic blog that keeps me coming back for more. The quality of her biblical reflections make 'Word' a unique and lyrical voice. No wonder the writing won an Inspiring Blog Award. Richly deserved!
It's a week for goodbyes (or is that farewells) this week. That superstar mouse has announced he's going to take a long break to spend time with his family. He'll be very much missed. Goodbye too to Maggie Dawn who has a brand new post with Yale Divinity School. Congratulations Maggi and safe travels.
David Fitch's 'Reclaiming the Mission' is a new discovery for me this week. He has an intriguing post entitled 'Stop Funding Church Plants...'. Whether or not you agree with David this is a serious attempt at addressing Post-Christendom missiological challenges in a North American perspective.
Jake picked up my 'Ways of Remembrance' post on the martyrdom of Dirk Willems over at 'A Mennonite Dreamed a Dream'. He used the last line of my post as a title: 'Dirk Willems Belongs to all of us', which now that I think about it might have made a better title for my original post. Thanks Jake.
The Sojourners 'God's Politics' blog is a treasury. Steve Holt has a piece every church should read in 'Wanted: An Uncool Church of Distractions.' Jackson Helms, a 12 years old with a form of cerebral palsy, was removed from the service at Elevation Church for making a noise at the conclusion of prayer. Long may churches continue to be 'uncool', inefficent, shambolic and scruffy at the edges.

Have a great weekend.

Shalom,

Phil

Goodbye to the London Mennonite Centre

2011-07-01T10:12:00.003+01:00

Last Saturday some fifty of us came together in Highgate to say goodbye to 14 Shepherd's Hill. Since 1953 the London Mennonite Centre has been at the heart of Anabaptist-Mennonite witness in the UK. Peaceable, hospitable and thought provoking, the LMC has offered a haven and crucible for a wider community. There are too many emerging hopes and positive memories woven around Shepherd's Hill to be preoccupied with recriminations. What regrets I have focus on disagreements around the sale of the Centre. The London Mennonite Centre will rise again in an as yet undisclosed location.

For Mennonites in the UK this is a crossroads. We do mission at a time of profound cultural, political and ecological change. At the same time shifting relationships between Anabaptists in the global south and north, offer a great deal of food for thought. This is a good time for discernment - an honest look at fears and opportunities. Perhaps it is time for UK Mennonites to come together in a more concerted way, to consider the future together.

Gathering in the garden at 14 Shepherd's Hill

Wrestling God and R.S.Thomas

2011-06-30T10:20:00.001+01:00

Perhaps it was at Cwmduad that I discovered his poems. I had read R.S. Thomas before that but ‘discovered’ is something else. Maybe he came in with the soil and the blackthorn. When our friends first arrived at Pwll-y-Gaseg someone left a rather tongue in cheek guide book for them. It said, ‘your cottage is burning’ and ‘go home English’. Thomas would have approved.

Like God, Thomas is worth wrestling until morning. The first poems I came across were from ‘The Echoes Return Slow’ which was published in 1988 when Thomas was 76. ‘Laboratories of the Spirit’ (1975), an earlier collection has some of my favourites. There are several versions of R.S. Thomas: Welshman, doubter, mystic, poet or eccentric. All of them say something about the man. His early work is rich and lyrical like Yeats, but the later poems are lean like Llyn and the landscape. They have a wiry strength and are often ‘difficult’, in the sense that God and brokenness are difficult.

I change my poems of choice periodically, but ‘The Combat' ‘from ‘Laborotories of the Spirit’ is a fine companion. In a way the poem is bleak, in the same way Psalm 88 is bleak. God enters and leaves the poem nameless, leaving us bruised and dislocated. Language will always fail; will slide around God, leaving the name unspoken. Always God resists where words end – beyond the frontier. Thomas has other poems where the waves of prayer break on God as an eternal shore.

Anabaptists, Gyrovagues and Cherry-Picking

2011-06-29T11:14:00.001+01:00

When a Mennonite prays, a Pentecostal praises or a Muslim faces Mecca is what we are doing fundamentally similar or different? I don’t mean in the wider sense – a debate about the scope of ‘salvation’. But, when it comes to spirituality do we speak the same language? Is the Puritan covenant the same thing as a monastic vow? As a Mennonite I think I know what Anabaptists might mean by ‘simplicity’ but are the monk (Christian or Buddhist) or the Shaker simple and free with me? Or perhaps ‘simplicity’ is just a label all of us put on something quite dissimilar.

In some ways this is a modern question – a product of mobility and instant communication. A century ago I could live my life without meeting Mennonites or talking spirituality with a Sufi. Now I meet a thousand traditions with a click of my Kindle. In the 1990’s I helped to set up a New Age and Neo-Paganism course in Ripon. More than once I heard the New Age criticised for its ‘pick and mix’ approach to religion. But that is rather unfair. We’re all picking and mixing these days. The eclectic motor of contemporary spirituality generates a thousand possibilities before breakfast.

All of this could, of course, be a mile wide and an inch deep. We are tantalised, or racked at wrists and ankles by multiple demands or competing vocations. The monastic tradition has always understood the danger. The vow of stability addresses a kind of roving, rootless spiritual tourism. Bernard makes the point:

Then come the spiritual gyrovagues: their inconstancy carries them from reading to prayer, from prayer to work, preventing them from obtaining the benefits of their undertakings: stability in effort and perseverance in devotion. Victims of acedia, they think it better at one moment to do one thing, and, at another, something else; they begin everything and finish nothing.

Tbe purpose of ‘stability’? God is not elsewhere.

I regard myself as a liberal Mennonite but if I’m honest I frequently rely on conservative Anabaptism (especially Amish and Hutterite) for examples of spirituality in corporate context. There are certainly problems with this approach. The elements of Amish or Hutterite life so attractive to outsiders are tied up with a discipline and worldview which is specific to that community. Other aspects of these traditions – patriarchy, reclusiveness, etc – explain why such communities tend to be admired at a distance.

‘Cherry picking’ is a pejorative phrase because it seems to involve abstraction of a virtue from its context. Or (to extend the metaphor), thoughtless eclecticism forgets that cherries grow on trees. The world of plural spirituality is here to stay, not least because post-modern identities grow between traditions and not just within them. Still, there must be a better way forward than picking random fruit via the internet. Whatever else it is, the ecumenical movement ought to be a place where Christians from different backgrounds (individuals and communities) can come to together to share spirituality. A related discussion exists around Interfaith dialogue. There is no reason why the ecumenical conversation need be any less disciplined than a monastery or an Amish community. In particular, the retreat movement has a crucial part to play in encouraging responsible, stable spiritual communication between Traditions.

Ways of Remembrance

2011-06-28T10:11:00.001+01:00

On the 22 June my piece on persecution, 'The End of Martyrdom' appeared in the Mennonite Weekly Review. The reflection began life on my blog. I have blogged for long enough now to realize that perceptive comments contribute greatly to the post. This post is offered by way of response to Jim Juhnke's comment:

Phil, could you give examples of the ideological employment of martyrdom from the fairly extensive body of Mennonite writings about Anabaptist martyrs? We have used the story of Dirk Willems, the most famous Anabaptist martyr, to teach the doctrine of love of enemy. We tell the story to remind ourselves that some things are worth dying for. Willems reminds us of Christ. Is this ideological?

On 16 May 1569, at Asperen Dirk Willems was put to death. The account of his death and the preceding rescue of his pursuer from thin ice is arguably the best known of Anabaptist martyr narratives. Between the original execution and the present day this story has been told and retold, pre-eminently a century later in Martyr's Mirror. This is an excerpt from Van Braght's account:

The thief-catcher wanted to let him go, but the burgomaster, very sternly called to him to remember his oath, and thus he was again seized by the thief-catcher, and, at said place, after severe imprisonment and great trials proceeding from the deceitful papists, put to death at a lingering fire by these bloodthirsty, ravening wolves, enduring it with great steadfastness, and confirming the genuine faith of the truth with his death and blood, as an instructive example to all pious Christians of this time, and to the everlasting disgrace of the tyrannous papists. (MM, p.741)

Joseph Liechty's 'A Meditation on Dirk Willems', makes reference to the weaknesses as well as the strengths of Anabaptist thinking during this period. Liechty has in mind the same Two Kingdoms Theology which is evident in Van Braght. Light and dark, lambs and wolves, good and evil, wicked enemies and shining saints. Willems might reasonably have escaped to safety. That he chose not to is a profound example of sacrificial love. As Jim Juhnke rightly pointed out 'some things are worth dying for'. Dirk Willems saw his pursuer as a human being and not a demon or a wolf. Van Braght however, imposes a Two Kingdoms narrative on the story. Consigning the 'tyrannous papists' to 'everlasting disgrace' is entirely inconsistent with Willems' original testimony. Van Braght is being ideological but Willems is not.

What is the essence of 'ideology' as it applies to persecution and remembrance? It is the utilization of past suffering for the purpose of claiming authority or legitimacy for a cause or institution. The negative corollary of this involves denigrating the other, especially the opponent. Willems' death is authentically Christian in the hope offered to both persecuted and persecutor. This is the insight which Andrew Shanks articulates so eloquently in 'Faith in Honesty'. In the light of this hope, Anglicanism becomes the pioneeringly repentant ex-oppressor church. The same hope is there for the 'tyrannous papists'. Dirk Willems belongs to all of us.

Bibliography

Braght, Thielleman Jansz van. 'Martyr's Mirror', The Story of Seventeen Centuries of Christian Martyrdom, from the Time Christ to A.D. 1660, Herald Press: Scottdale, 1938

Liechty, Joseph. 'A Meditation on Dirk Willems', 'Mennonite Life', September 1990, p.18

Shanks, Andrew 'Faith in Honesty: The Essential Nature of Theology. 2005. Ashgate

Phil's Saturday Breakfast

2011-06-25T09:56:00.001+01:00

News from the Global South

Relationships between Anabaptist churches in the north and the vibrant global south have been very much in the news lately. The appointment of Colombian, Cesar Garcia as general secretary-elect of the Mennonite World Conference is a breath of fresh air Further evidence of southern creativity and imagination from comes from Africa, in the form the Anabaptist Network in South Africa (ANISA). Their website has an invaluable news service (http://anisa.org.za/news). Current stories include coverage of the situation in Sudan and violence against the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe.

Farewell to the London Mennonite Centre
Today we say goodbye to the London Mennonite Centre. Apart from helping pack up the library next week, it's the end of a chapter for 14-16 Shepherds Hill. Today we're gathering at 3pm. Being diabetic, I'm not allowed any of Will Newcombe's famous ice cream, but I'll be coveting it from across the garden.

Weekly Blog Roundup

This week I've been back and forward between radref and Andrew Perriman's new look p.ost blog. I asked whether decline was a 100% communicable disease - UK, US, etc. Andrew responded with a rather interesting 'train crash' cartoon.
Over a Lesley's Blog she's got some lovely news for us. Getting married today! Huge congratulations and a big radref wave to Lesley and Alan.
One of my blog posts on 'the end of martyrdom' is running on the Mennonite Weekly Review this week. It's a look at the use and misuse of martyr histories.
Niall Cooper is the director of Church Action on Poverty. He has a scathing, passionate post that will ring bells for all of us who care about poverty in the global north or south. Once in a while a really important post comes along. This is one of them. Here's a taster:

We now live in a world in which the old notions of the ‘rich North’ and the ‘poor South’ are fast disappearing. Within the global economy there are huge inequalities of wealth and power not just between countries, but within them.

I've been dipping into the aptly named 'The String of Bede's' from time to time. It's an often beautiful and visually stunning miscellany of Celtic Christianity. Well worth a visit.

Have a splendid weekend.

Shalom,

Phil

Simplicity

2011-06-24T13:34:00.000+01:00

There is a simplicity on the near side of complexity which is worthless. There is a simplicity on the far side of complexity which is priceless.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

God made man simple; man’s complex problems are of his own devising

Ecc 7.29 (JB)

We are all aware of people who are dedicated to living simply. Some of them are monks. Others belong to ‘lay’ communities with a tradition of inward and outward simplicity. Anabaptism has many communities like this, whether Amish, Hutterite, Mennonite or Neo-Anabaptist. Community is important. It is hard to live simply and alone. Even hermits like Thomas Merton in later career, benefitted from a supportive community. There will always be an element of resistance in simplicity – a refusal of haste and duplicity. That sounds harsh, though. It is a good thing to make peace with our distractions. Sometime their insistence is the voice of God.

Our world – the world of haste and machines – is ever more complex. All the while, the world which existed before us – the world of bees and Barn Owls - is rendered obscenely simple. Still, in its place ‘simplicity’ is a good word. Mary’s kneeling and listening is simple. She knows what really matters. Our challenge though, is to be simple in Martha’s shoes. This is the place of priceless simplicity beyond complexity. The value of simplicity like that cannot be overestimated. To thrive in Martha’s shoes we should see with her eyes. To be simple in the midst of complexities is a gift to the weary. To know the ‘one thing necessary’ in a world of variety isn’t only an exercise in perspective. It is a benediction on the ordinary - a way of seeing life in full colour. What Martha did with hospitality was extraordinary and simply beautiful.

Is Post-Christendom a Train Crash (and are we sitting in the wreckage?)

2011-06-23T15:08:00.001+01:00

I owe that graphic illustration to a former college friend, Andrew Perriman. He picked up my comment on his blog yesterday:

I was talking a little while ago with a friend who has a senior role in an American Mennonite Conference. We had a long discussion when I said that in Britain we were ahead on the Post-Christendom curve but what’s UKtoday will be US tomorrow. Britain is the oldest industrialized country in the world. I don’t think it’s a surprise that so many of these trends (the breakdown of community too) have their origins here. Whether the decline virus is 100% communicable is another question. If I were being hopeful I would say that before the curve reaches the vibrant churches of the global south we might have learned a thing or two about being Christians without Constantine.

His cartoon and my comments make an interesting combination. See what you think over at his blog.

The Economics of Heaven

2011-06-23T12:19:00.001+01:00

Guy Hershberger’s ‘War, Peace and Nonresistance’ is a remarkable book. Published in 1944, it is very much of its time. Hershberger acknowledges that had he known of Martin Luther King or the Vietnam War, he would have taken a different approach. His reputation suffered, both under the impact of realist opponents and the ascendancy of John Howard Yoder.

Nonresistance as Hershberger envisaged it is a biblically rooted way of life. That way of life is embodied, not only in wartime nonconformity but in industrial and race relations. His economics certainly appear ‘unrealistic’:

... it is possible to plan the life of the community in such a way as to bring it more nearly in line with the way of Christian non-resistance than it now is in many cases. (p.224)

This idealised rural Mennonite economy, his anti-unionism, anti-urbanization, flow from a sectarian non-resistance that John Howard Yoder critiqued so sharply.

There is a ‘disconnection’ between 21^st Century readers and this mid 20^th Century perspective. Perhaps though, that says as much about our cynicism and addiction to inhuman scale than Hershberger’s naivety. Hershberger’s world has vanished, swept away by urbanization, secularization, ecological crisis and the digital age. The sons and daughters of his agrarian idealism are city dwellers now; either Neo-Anabaptist or lost to the Mennonite constituency.

Yet there is something precious here. For Hershberger small was beautiful long before E.F.Schumacher came along:

...the Mennonite way of life should have something to contribute in the field of industry as well. It should, for example, keep Mennonite factories from growing so large that they become impersonal, soulless corporations. (p.225)

Those ‘soulless corporations’, as Hershberger rightly anticipated, are the engine room of the military-industrial complex. Hershberger could not have anticipated though, that they would also spawn an ecological nightmare. The quest for human scale was never ‘unrealistic’, only inconvenient for the wealthy elite that benefit from the current system.

So, now it’s 2011. Since 2005 Fresh Expressions of Church have been springing up. Pioneers have recognised the value of social entrepreneurship as a means of financing these infant ‘colonies of heaven’. Now, where have we heard that before?

Bibliography

Hershberger, Guy ‘War, Peace and Nonresistance’ (1944). Herald Press, Scottdale.

Bishop Alan’s Blog: Dickens Lives! Bullies Rule OK!

2011-06-22T16:42:00.000+01:00

Bishop Alan’s Blog: Dickens Lives! Bullies Rule OK!

Evangelism We Can Believe In

2011-06-22T12:27:00.000+01:00

In the beginning was the light of the Word. The darkness has never put it out. Our world though, has grown tired of being preached at. For Christians evangelism has always been there. Why is it that sharing faith has become so hard?

Evangelism has always been difficult. Even in the 1st Century many of Paul's pagan or Jewish contemporaries found reason to refuse the invitation. Some of this 'refusal' turned violent. The deficit we carry though, is more than the worldliness of the world or the necessary offense of the gospel. It is the sense that this message we call 'gospel' has failed to be good news. That the messengers have often been far from peaceable, goes some way to explaining this. Evangelism has baggage. Christendom arrogance, crusading Christians, evangelistic arm-twisting or colonial agendas, to name only part of it. That God also stands accused of unreasonable behavior, is an even more fundamental issue. The 'baggage' partly explains why many Christians navigate their way around evangelism, like ships avoiding the rocks.

In the beginning the gospel was simply beautiful 'good news' (Is 52: 7-10). The messenger carries news of peace. Literally, 'shalom' since our English word doesn't do justice to the original. Though we are urged to 'proclaim the Gospel of peace' (Eph 6.15), shalom-making and evangelism have become strangely disconnected. Perhaps this is unsurprising since the holistic dimensions of shalom (and what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God) is unrecognizable in the disembodied individualism of 'soul winning'. For the 'little ones', the indebted and the tax collectors, Jesus' eloquent, equitable guest list was demonstrably 'good news'. The workers Jesus appointed to bring in the harvest (Luke 10.1-12) were sent peaceably, without purse or provisions. They were, in turn told to look for people of peace and to accept the hospitality of their hosts. This stance of articulate vulnerability embodies the gospel of peace. The messengers will eat, heal and tell but there is no sense here of the autocratic rightness of the cause.

The search for 'evangelism we can believe in' begins with the rediscovery of 'the gospel of peace'. In this, the wider church can learn something precious from the historic peace churches. In turn, those of us who are heirs to the Radical Reformation tradition have a good deal to learn from those who have never given up on evangelism. Our peacemaking is itself evangelistic: peace from the rooftops.

Thirty Years of Darkening Valley

2011-06-21T10:40:00.005+01:00

In the years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki there has been no more eloquent response to our nuclear predicament than Dale Aukerman’s scarifying ‘Darkening Valley’. The book was published in 1981, four years before Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Aukerman’s prose has weathered well, but thirty years of political turbulence has been less kind to the anti-nuclear movement. In 1981 it was meaningful to read the situation as a double-handed conflict:

In the East-West struggle there are two sides. As each side seeks the status of Abel – what Cain sought – it becomes Cain.

In 1981 the bomb was still centre stage. It had been a progressive lightning rod; a defining moral challenge for a generation.

Now there are many sides. In the UK, support for CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) suffered after the end of the Cold war. Despite periodic revivals of public concern backing for unilateralism fell from 31% in September 1982 to 21% in January 1983 and 19% in May 1983. Today it is not clear whether the threat comes from Russia, or China, Islam or anywhere. The prospect of nuclear terrorism and a bevy of aspirant nuclear states make the picture considerably more complex than the world Dale Aukerman contemplated in 1981. For many people the ecological crisis has replaced nuclear holocaust as the Armageddon of choice.

Yet, the weapons are still there. It is all too easy to let the mind slide around our nuclear vulnerability. Despite the formal end of the Cold war in 1991 Russia and the United States maintain an arsenal of around 20000 warheads between them. The increasing sophistication of potential individual or state sponsored terrorism adds another dimension to the equation. The introduction of false data into command and control systems is a chilling possibility.

It was the Marxist historian E.P.Thompson who said in 1980, ‘We must protest if we are to survive’. He described the immobilism of the left in the face of ‘exterminism’. The left do not have a monopoly on immobility. The charter statement of the ‘two futures project’ which exists to rally support amongst American Christians for nuclear weapons abolition contains a note of repentance:

We repent of apathy towards devices that cause indiscriminate destruction.

The recent launch by Iran of a Safir rocket, ostensibly in relation to a domestic space programme, concentrates the mind. “It is capable of photographing the Earth”, said Iranian TV. Successive generations of the technology may be capable of doing rather more. In a thank-you speech to Strategic Arms Reduction staff delivered in July 2010 US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said, “I am personally very grateful for everything you’ve done to move us toward our goal of a world someday, in some century, free of nuclear weapons”. Someday, in some century hardly seems soon enough.

Phil's Saturday Breakfast

2011-06-18T07:14:00.004+01:00

This doesn't amount to a promise that I'll post a Saturday roundup each week. Today though, here's a little selection of my favourite reading from the blogs this week:

Lesley Fellows has an splendid balanced piece on Luther's sola scriptura over at Lesley's Blog.

My friend Brian Gumm is indulging in a seriously wonderful Tom Jones track and 'The Spiritual Disciplines of Being Troubled and Peaceable' at 'Restorative Theology'. A great post for teasing out the connections between peace and social justice.

Dyfed Wyn Roberts always has a worthwhile slant on issues in the news. A piece on the alleged anti-Christian bias of the BBC caught my eye. He's rude about the Daily Mail, so he's alright by me.

Sometimes Christians behave badly. The quirky 'God of Dishes' includes a few tales to make your toes curl. This piece inspired my own offering on 'horror stories' this week.

Enjoy,

Phil

Lives Made Much Easier? Reflecting on the Amish Use of Technology

2011-06-17T10:38:00.001+01:00

Enfield isn’t far from Chingford, where I live. The 313 takes me past my old house in Ponder’s End each morning. The bus also passes an Enfield branch of Barclays Bank. It could be any bank, but this one has a claim to fame. A blue plaque on the front wall proudly announces this branch as the site of the world’s first cash machine. It is hard to imagine life without the ubiquitous cash dispenser, but the writing on the wall says 27 June 1967. The bank is sure this is a good news story. The plaque reads “Lives made much easier”.

I am not so sure. It isn’t only that I am technically awkward. I still wonder whether there’s a resident philanthropic pixie behind every machine! No, I appreciate the benefits of technology but I worry about the downsides. There have always been concerns about cash machines. In the early days before the invention of plastic cards there were fears about radioactive cheques. More recently scientists found ATM’s to be dirtier than public toilets. Perhaps scientists should also take swabs from the Daily Mail. The social impact of cash machines is harder to quantify. Tim Worstall's analysis is blunt:

Yes, ATMs do destroy, have destroyed, teller jobs. Mechanisation of anything destroys the jobs of anyone previously doing the job that has now been mechanised.

Unfortunately Worstall then goes on to draw thoroughly capitalist conclusions. The machine, in his view, frees up labour for the worthwhile end of making yet more wealth. What Worstall's perspective lacks is a sense of the life-giving value of community. Once upon a time, before the elf of wealth dispensed bank notes from a wall, two human beings had a conversation over a counter. As the plaque says, life is easier. It is also more impersonal and individualistic.

In recent years Donald Kraybill has done more than anyone else in drawing our attention to the subtleties of Amish life. In The Riddle of Amish Culture he explores the puzzles and apparent contradictions inherent in the Amish use of technology. The Amish are modern people, not inhabitants of a 16th C time capsule. They do however value community and family life. The impact of technology on community provides the benchmark for Amish acceptance or rejection of innovation. Amish for example, do use telephones but refuse to keep them in the home. Partly, the phone is regarded as a means of truncated communication, acceptable (at a distance) for business but inappropriate for home life. It was regarded as an imposition on domestic life and threat to 'visiting', which has always formed a crucial part of Amish face to face relationships. To give another example, Amish children are allowed scooters but not bicycles. The former encouraged young people to stay within the family orbit.

Slowing down the uptake of technology seems quaint and pointless against a backdrop seemingly unstoppable 'progress'. In essence though, the Amish have refused to cede inevitability to change. Rather, innovation is placed on trial - assessed on the grounds that some things matter more than convenience. The deliberate 'down-pacing' of Amish life offers a respite from the breathless hurry that marks mainstream attitudes to technological and cultural change. Does technology have a reverse gear? The German government certainly seems to think so, after announcing plans to phase out its nuclear power plants by 2022. The Amish option is very much alive.

The End of Martyrdom?

2011-06-16T14:36:00.002+01:00

Andrew Shanks in his thought-provoking ‘Faith in Honesty’, raises awkward questions about the cult of martyrdom. There are, he says, two kinds of martyr: those martyred for a broader cause (e.g. Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero or Dietrich Bonhoeffer) and those who die for a sacred ideology (p.155). The self-critical honesty of a “community which congratulates itself on its martyrs” is suspect (p.155). This question drives to the heart of early Christian self-understanding. After quoting Nietzsche with approval he says,

He is thinking of the way in which the early church used its martyr stories, as a source of glamour, for recruiting purposes; and the way it coupled them (as in Revelation) with terrible dreams of eschatological vengeance against the persecutors. (p.155)

Such cautions imply a dilemma and a tension in Christian martyr narratives, then and now. Religious persecution remains a 21^st Century reality, as does the need to maintain rigorous advocacy on behalf of victims. On other hand the temptation to use persecution and especially martyrdom as ideological glamour remains very real. In America Evangelicals stand accused of falsifying martyr statistics. In the U.K. conservative Christians have been criticized for crying wolf on persecution. That the Constantinian shift transformed a fellowship of the martyrs into a persecuting church within a generation , should give us pause for thought.

For Anabaptists the martyr conundrum presents us with considerable difficulty. Anabaptism origins were bloody and brutal. In contrast to mainstream martyr histories from the same period, Anabaptists fell foul of both Catholic and Protestant authorities. Evangelical Anabaptism was highly coloured by a deeply ingrained theology of suffering which gave great resilience to the early persecuted communities. The chief work of Anabaptist devotion, par excellence, is ‘Martyrs Mirror’, Thielman van Braght’s formidable account of Anabaptist Christian martyrs. Many of the narratives in Martyr’s Mirror are both graphic and moving, but this is clearly not martyrdom in the King, Romero and Bonhoeffer tradition. There were ‘peaceful’ 16^th C Anabaptists whose dreams of deferred vengeance were every bit as terrible as Revelation.

In general contemporary Mennonites have turned their back on both violence and vengeance (deferred or otherwise). There are indications too, of an emerging maturity in interpreting the martyr testimony. Craig Hovey (2008), for example, reflects on Mark’s Gospel in exploring what it means to be a martyr church, whilst specifically opposing a utilitarian view of martyrdom. Chris Huebner’s work is equally perceptive. In Huebner’s view only the community can make martyrs and martyrdom itself exists between suicide and victimhood. Following Elizabeth Castrelli, Huebner underlines that remembering martyrs is elusive. The ‘truth’ of a martyr narrative, whilst it should be pursued, may not be fully captured.

So, in response to Shanks, we may go some of the way with Nietzche. He doesn't develop an alternative positive reading of communally focused martyr history. The possibilities lie in what the community does with the story. For Christians, the death of the saints should always be beautiful, but never useful.

Bibliography

Hovey, Craig. 'To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today's Church' 2008. Brazos Press

Huebner, Chris. 'A Precarious Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge and Identity'. 2006. Herald Press

Shanks, Andrew 'Faith in Honesty: The Essential Nature of Theology. 2005. Ashgate

Fat is a Theological Issue

2011-06-15T11:58:00.001+01:00

As a Type 2 diabetic I appreciated Denis Campbell's article on the rise and treatment of diabetes in today's Guardian Society (p.3). I did not appreciate the image of an obese woman the Guardian used to illustrate the story. It is a fine line between raising awareness of a major public health issue and playing on the 'yuk' factor to sell newspapers. I know what it feels like to be the 'fat kid' at school and to be three stones heavier than I now am. That the identity of the woman in the Guardian image was obscured (it's a rear view) is some mitigation. Not, that the negative stereotyping and sheer misery reinforced by images like this, really lets the paper wriggle off the hook.

Clearly there is a connection obesity and conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. On the other hand negative body image is linked to depression, anxiety and suicide as 2006 research indicated. Whatever the answer to rising obesity might be, our 'think thin' culture is intent on making matters worse. As 'Women in Theology' points out the diet industry is growing in parallel with obesity, but is failing to deliver long-term weight loss.

This post isn't a self-help guide, but I do want to talk a little anthropology and theology. Since I was first diagnosed with diabetes in 2004 I have lost a considerable amount of weight. Despite a little fluctuation the pounds have largely stayed off. Understanding why that has happened is complicated. It has a lot to do though, with a shift away from my prickly pre-occupation with size to a sustainable way of life. The latter, in turn, is linked to an Anabaptist perspective on community and simplicity. It also has to do with my less conservative theological position.

Before you rush away with an 'I was a fat Fundamentalist, but Anabaptism made me thin' headline, it's not that simple. As a Conservative Evangelical I carried more guilt than was good for me. Anabaptist simplicity is a frame of mind. It's firstly about what really matters before it is a set of disciplines about appearance or abstinence. In the seven years since I heard the bad news from my doctor I have learned to be comfortable in my own company.

Community matters too. The combination of an individualistic hedonist culture with western over-consumption is a lethal combination. It is celebration which restores the balance: abundance in community. Rather than placating our boredom, food is restored to its rich social context. I still wouldn't have published that picture!

Theology at the Well: the Strength of a Samaritan Woman

2011-06-14T11:00:00.000+01:00

Rose Marie Berger’s Sojourner’s piece, ‘The Most Interesting Woman in the World’ attracted only a little comment, including mine! Such a shame, because Berger’s pulverizing post had all my Christological bells ringing. Centre stage is a quick, feisty Samaritan woman, sometimes known as the’ woman at the well’. As Berger points out, the John 4 passage comes with an established tradition of interpretation which presents the story as a kind of sexual morality tale. That tradition is confronted head on:

She is not a whore, nor promiscuous. She’s not spiritually dead or “hopelessly carnal,” as some male interpreters have claimed.

As for the ‘five husbands’:

The meaning is much clearer when “husbands” is understood as “lords” or “gods”. Samaria has had five foreign gods since the Assyrians (see 2 Kings 17:30-31) and the one Samaria worships now is not Yahweh, but from Rome.

Here is a picture of a perceptive, articulate woman who knows truth when she sees it. That little detail of a discarded water jar raises obvious echoes of the fishermen who leave their nets. As Berger points out “She is an apostolic witness”.

It is implicit in Berger’s piece that this conversation is more than one-way traffic. If Jesus told her “everything I ever did”, then for Jesus she is a gateway to Samaria. The balance of the dialogue is as much due to her rigorous questions as it is to Jesus’ revolutionary and candid responses. If anything, this conversational balance is even more evident in another discussion with a Canaanite woman (Matt 15:21-28). We are used to seeing Jesus in control of a conversation, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. A number of feminist perspectives on this passage show Jesus transformed through this encounter. Setting aside the hermeneutics for a moment (i.e. the sense in which Jesus meant ‘dogs’), the hostile response from (mainly male) commentators to the idea that Jesus might have learned from this woman, does seem puzzling. What is to be gained by maintaining a version of ‘humanity’ that doesn’t include change and growth? Bluntly, that is docetism.

The Forgiveness of Grass

2011-06-13T10:34:00.007+01:00

Grass has been called 'the forgiveness of nature', for it heals the scars that we make in our greed and urgency (John Seymour, 'The Countryside Explained', p.87

In general I don’t hold with anthropomorphisms. Foxes aren’t ‘sly’ and beavers aren’t ‘busy. It takes a person to be devious or hasty. The comparisons are questionable in reverse as well. Describing a Hutterite Bruderhof as a ‘beehive’ wasn’t meant kindly. To call 16^th Century radicals ‘wolves’ was an offence, to the animal as well as the Anabaptist. That the Bible does the same thing is a point for reflection.

But I believe in the forgiveness of grass. It isn’t only people but places which are healed. The Iron Age fort at Wittenham Clumps near Wallingford, where I used to walk, is a place like that. The fortifications are still clearly visible but grass has softened the place. These days the only resident garrison is made up of beech trees and skylarks. The underground hospital in Jersey on the other hand, remains ‘unforgiven’, despite a creative attempt to turn the place into a tourist attraction. Ever since I was taken to the hospital as a child I haven’t been able to go there without a sense of the wrongness of the place.

Of course, it is easy to have our cake and eat it. Sometimes these anthropomorphisms have their uses. Perhaps it is claiming too much to say that beavers are busy. But reflection on the activity of the animal and the ways in which people are ‘doers’, is a metaphorical oasis and a conversation starter. Ted Hughes has it about right, in his magnificent poem ‘Thrushes’. In contrast the bird’s ‘bullet and automatic purpose’ human action is self-regarding: ‘his act worships itself’. Whatever the ‘busyness’ of beavers might be, doesn’t amount to a career or even a vocation. Grass is forgiving without a sense that it could be otherwise. As a rule grass does not have enemies or make war on the neighbouring brambles.

It is More Important to Be Healed Than to Be Right

2011-06-10T10:01:00.000+01:00

This post could become a ‘confessional’. That would be a shame, because this isn’t the place for it. Twice in my life, I could have empathized with W.B.Yeats, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. When things fell apart for the first time there was no shortage of Job’s comforters. It took a real friend to say, “It is more important to be healed than to be right”. If the centre cannot hold, it can be re-imagined. Restoration is sometimes quite unexpected. Forgiveness is the road.

There are other roads, though. Walking along them owes more to fantasy than imagination. The fantasy is already out there, in every cinematic lone gunman with a cause. Whole communities walk that way, counting their martyrs. Mostly, this via negativa isn’t Hollywood heroics. For every vigilante there are thousands silently suffering their own bitterness. The urge to trade pain for pain is understandable. It is easy to be impatient with other people’s resentments. We don’t feel the hurt from the inside. Self-justification is a potent compulsion.

The media interest in forgiveness is curious. There’s hardly a victim that doesn’t seem to be pressed to express instant absolution. Forgiveness is powerful but it is also slow-growing - a living thing. It responds to light, water and nourishment. We are tempted though, to dig it up periodically to see how it is doing. In my view this is mistaken: the pace as well as the power of forgiveness, matters. We forgive, but there are days when it is good to be reminded. In other words, forgiveness takes a while to reach maturity.

Horror Stories: When Christians Behave Badly

2011-06-09T11:55:00.002+01:00

There are quite a few top quality occasional blogs out there. Weeks and months pass and then another excellent post comes along. One of my favourites is God of Dishes. Andreana relates a pair of stories that put me in mind of the kind of accounts I have heard regularly in conversation with former Christians. The same kinds of stories are also told by Christians, perhaps in relation to a previous church. They are what I can only describe as ‘horror stories’. In other words, accounts of believers behaving badly that have negative implications for the perception of the Christian faith.

Here are a few examples, beginning with one I heard from my father:

Many years ago my father installed fire escapes for a living. One morning he was parked up very early in central Manchester, opposite Manchester cathedral. There was a rough sleeper on the steps. My dad then told me that a door opened at the top of the stairway. He saw a clergyman come out of the door, look one way and the other, before kicking the man down the steps. It was a story my father told whenever his own attitude to church came up.

My second story comes the early 1990’s when I was a project worker with Leeds Nightstop:

We received a referral of a traumatised young woman. What we heard was that she had been ‘befriended’ by a couple in a local church. The details of this case are far too graphic and horrific to relate here, but they focus on the alleged rape and abuse of this young woman by the couple. The story was told to us by a secular advice agency.

The next story comes from theologian Jürgen Moltman, who quotes a letter:

When my wife and I moved to Stuttgart three years ago we were faced with the need to make contact with a congregation. We hoped for new human relationships. In the church we heard good sermons on which the pastor had spent much time and energy and which gave us a lot to think about. But our hopes for new genuine relationships with our fellow Christians with whom we sat in the pew were not fulfilled. We entered the church as isolated individuals, and we left it the same way. (Moltmann, 1978:113)

This is one of Andreana’s stories. She makes it clear that there were Christians amongst the perpetrators:

I'm also feeling sick from a conversation I had over lunch yesterday - Easter Sunday - with a group of mainly Christians. Someone told of how students from the student village in Maribyrnong - next door to the Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre - placed Easter eggs on the outside of the fence line, so that the people locked inside could not reach them. The students were taunting the imprisoned asylum seekers. People sniggered over their Easter barbecue lunch.

The final story is the oldest. It comes from the biographer of Martin of Tours, Sulpicius Severus. The account is remarkable, in that it was originally told (without embarrassment) by a stout admirer of Martin. I have heard stories like this more than once in talking to contemporary Neo-Pagans:

It was somewhere about this time that in the course of this work he performed another miracle at least as great. He had set on fire a very ancient and much-frequented shrine in a certain village and the flames were being driven by the wind against a neighbouring, in fact adjacent house. When Martin noticed this, he climbed speedily to the roof of the house and placed himself in front of the oncoming flames. Then you might have seen an amazing sight – the flames bending back against the force of the wind till it looked like a battle between warring elements. Such were his powers that the fire destroyed only where it was bidden.

In a village named Levroux however, when he wished to demolish in the same way a temple which had been made very rich by its superstitious cult, he met with resistance from a crowd of pagans and was driven off with some injuries to himself. He withdrew, therefore, to a place in the neighbourhood where for three days in sackcloth and ashes, continuously fasting and praying, he besought our Lord that the temple which human hands had failed to demolish might be destroyed by divine power.

Then suddenly two angels stood before him, looking like heavenly warriors, with spears and shields. They said that the Lord had sent them to rout the rustic host and give Martin protection, so that no one should hinder the destruction of the temple. He was to go back, therefore, and carry out faithfully the work he had undertaken. So he returned to the village and, while crowds of pagans watched in silence, the heathen sanctuary was razed to its foundations and all its altars and images reduced to powder.

The sight convinced the rustics that it was by divine decree that they had been stupefied and overcome with dread, so as to offer no resistance to the bishop; and nearly all of them made profession of faith in the Lord Jesus, proclaiming with shouts before all that Martin’s God should be worshipped and the idols ignored, which neither save themselves nor anyone else. (Cited in Fletcher, 1997: 43, 44)

In the thousands of volumes on my shelves there are hundreds of stories like these, from accounts of African colonialism, to the complicity of Protestant missionaries with the opium trade and gunboat diplomacy in China, small-scale of Christian misbehaviour from local congregations or appalling narratives from the conquest of the Americas (see Wright, 1992). The stories throw fuel on the flames of Post-Christendom disillusionment. They also go much of the way to explaining why ‘evangelism’ has become a pejorative term.

What should we make of such ‘horror stories’? In some ways they are quite different.

They are told by insiders and outsiders for quite different reasons
They differ widely in terms of historical and cultural context
Some are personal but others belong to the perspective of a group or a people

In other ways they are rather similar:

They may initially be ‘factual’ accounts but eventually come to have symbolic or polemical significance
They accentuate the theme of Christian hypocrisy
The relationship of violence and coercion with Christian mission

In some cases we may never know what the actual ‘facts’ of the story were. Memory and partisanship hardly lend themselves to ‘neutral’ perspectives. Sulpicius’ account is a classic example of a history told from two utterly opposite points of view. Clearly though, Christian misbehaviour communicates eloquently. The linkage of so-called ‘good news’ with coercion, violence or imperialism stains memory, often for generations.

For Anabaptists such ‘horror stories’ and the broader narrative of disillusionment associated with them present a problem. Our own history is rooted in a theology of suffering and spirituality substantially derived from the experience of martyrdom. In other words we also have ‘horror stories’ to tell. ‘Martyrs Mirror’ is full of accounts like this. We should be aware of what Nietzsche had to say about martyrdom – in particular how martyrdom is used ideologically. Relating the painful past honestly is one thing but utilizing martyr histories to reinforce a perpetual victim status is quite another.

‘Horror stories’ should be told but (as the comedian said), “it’s the way I tell ‘em”. Giving attention to who is doing the telling and why is a valuable safeguard. However grave the original offence it offers victims no memorial to press history into service in perpetuating an ongoing confllct. We should also bear in mind that ‘Post-Christendom’ is a reality for more than just Christians. The victims of Christendom are no longer silent. Some of them are very angry indeed. The stories they tell deserve a hearing.

Bibliography

Fletcher, Richard. 'The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity, 371-1386 AD. 1997. HarperCollins

Moltman, Jürgen. 'The Open Church: Invitation to a Messianic Lifestyle'. 1978. SCM Press.

Wright, Ronald. 'Stolen Continents: The "New World" Through Indian Eyes. 1992. Penguin.

Playful Hospitality: Nightstop and the Practice of Welcome

2011-06-07T10:21:00.000+01:00

Leeds Nightstop never was an exclusively faith-based project. Many of our hosts saw their hosting as an expression of Christian welcome. Others took a more pragmatic view. I heard a volunteer make a compelling connection between one person’s surplus space and another’s homelessness. In a largely individualistic culture ungrudging hospitality stands out. For Jews, Christians and Muslims the practice of welcome represents perhaps the oldest of shared Abrahamic community values. The recollection, transmission and development of this tradition continually seeds a succession of new settings and fresh expressions of hospitality. As God’s people find ourselves facing new cultural challenges hospitality accompanies mission.

Nightstop began in the late 1980’s. It was Hilary Willmer’s idea, to co-ordinate hospitality already offered by local churches in Leeds. Barnardos CANA (Churches and Neighbourhood Action) did the original research. The concept was simple. Emergency accommodation for young homeless people provided in the homes of volunteer hosts. There are many more Nightstop projects now, in the UK and Australia. DePaul Nightstop was formed in 2007, successor to Nightstop UK. Our Leeds project was the original vintage. It seems a while ago now but it’s good to remember the 1980’s mood. In Thatcher’s Britain youth homelessness reached epidemic levels. At its height Leeds Nightstop had more than 130 volunteers - hosts and telephone contacts.

The welcome of strangers is direct but there is no such thing as ‘simple hospitality’. Hospitality has always been offered against a backdrop of complex political and social flux. Genesis paints a graphic portrait of tensions between a nomadic and settled way of life. Relationships between host and guest are often highly nuanced, even in the biblical text. The way Jesus begins as guest and becomes host has a kind of subversive playfulness. Recognising the broader context of hospitality is important. The scale and pace of hospitality also matters. In our culture ‘hospitality’ is a commodity. ‘Corporate hospitality’ is at best self-serving and at worst deeply corrupt. ‘The hospitality industry’ may be industrious but is fatally undermined by its own price tag as authentic welcome. For the people of God, doing what we always have – offering intimate, ungrudging hospitality – the open home and the welcoming community offer desperately needed contemporary space for healing and renewal. Whatever the Promised Land beyond Christendom looks like, it will certainly be a hospitable place.

Hospitality is both preserved and limited by its own boundaries. For those involved in ongoing hospitality the possibility of exhaustion and collapse is very real, as the Didache classically illustrates. Whilst the act of welcome is mutually transforming hospitality is no substitute for home. Hosts remain 'at home', with all the power that implies. Hospitality is eschatological. It points forward to homecoming.

Bibliography

Christine D.Pohl, 'Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition'. 1999, Eeerdmans.

Happy Blogging Birthday to Tall Skinny Kiwi

2011-06-04T11:05:00.000+01:00

A big radref wave and huge congratulations to Andrew Jones. Ten years of 'Tall Skinny Kiwi'! He's a modest soul but plenty of us are blogging today, in no small part because of Andrew. As ever he's worth listening to. Today's blogiversary reflections offer an insight into the future of blogging, e-publishing and a few words of encouragement on starting a blog.

Hippocampus Crusade? Exploring Faith and Mental Health.

2011-06-03T11:04:00.002+01:00

I'm grateful to Ryan over at Rumblings for a light-hearted look at a recent piece of Duke University Medical Center research. Apparently conservative Christians have a smaller hippocampus (the part of the brain that helps regulate memory and emotion) than their more progressive fellows. Rather unworthily I speculate if this explains why some Christians read the Daily Mail.

The study has been running in the U.S. press and already attracted some understandably hostile criticism. No doubt believers and unbelievers will be tweeting mutual insults for the next few days. The discussion will probably generate more heat than light. There is some light to be had though, in exploring the serious margins of the controversy. Given that there is an association between a shrinking or small hippocampus and mental health conditions such as depression, Altzheimer's and dementia, the Duke research deserves a second look.

Linkage between faith and mental illness is both complex and contested. Ever since Charcot and Freud linked religion with hysteria and neurosis the debate has been skewed by tit for tat arguments around religious rationality. Simon Dein's excellent and balanced piece, 'Religion' Spirituality and Mental Health' in the Psychiatric Times offers an intriguing but ambiguous picture. Religious adherence is associated with better outcomes for psychiatric patients and for lower suicide attempts than the general population. There is however, another side to this. Dein says:

Negative religious coping (being angry with God, feeling let down), endorsing negative support from the religious community, and loss of faith correlate with higher depression scores. As Pargament and colleagues state, "It is not enough to know that the individual prays, attends church, or watches religious television. Measures of religious coping should specify how the individual is making use of religion to understand and deal with stressors.

Dein's article is intended primarily for clinicians, but Christian congregations and other religious communities could learn a lot from his approach in nurturing positive mental health. An excessive emphasis on fear and guilt, rigidity and legalism, disappointment and disillusionment, make up the downside of religious life. After more than thirty years a Christian insider I have seen ample evidence of closure, denial and outright abuse. Thankfully congregations can do a lot to promote an environment of openness and support. The 'hermeneutic community' I have often referred to in this blog can also be a therapeutic community. A multi-voiced approach to worship, teaching or decision-making may also be about listening to what we could call, 'melancholic voices'. The formation of a life-giving spirituality is crucial. Which God is on our mind is likely to be more important that the size of our hippocampus.

The Prayers of Stanley Hauerwas

2011-06-02T12:02:00.000+01:00

“I fear ‘holiness’ because in our time ‘holiness’ is too often one of the ways the truthfulness of religious claims is lost” (Stanley Hauerwas, p.xiii)

As Stanley Hauerwas says in the title of this little volume, these are ‘prayers plainly spoken’. I have read Hauerwas for some years now, but the book was a discovery. Mostly these are prayers prayed before a theological ethics class at Duke Divinity School. If that gives the impression that this is ivory tower spirituality, it would be a shame. The prayers are deliberately direct. Hauerwas distances himself from an assumed piety. In a sense these are ‘anti-prayers’.

Plain though, is not innocent. The Psalms aren’t innocent either, or pious. It’s a compliment to Hauerwas to say that he reminds us of the Psalter, but he does. This Texan professor is saying something profound about prayer. It isn’t necessary to borrow a voice in order to speak to God. Ordinary life is what we bring – broken, sublime, half-blind, furious and uncensored:

“... the ‘stuff’ of these prayers is simply the stuff of life” (p.xvii)

One more thing; these are written prayers. Hauerwas says “I lacked the depth required to pray ‘spontaneously’.” (p.xiii). Whatever is said about prayer in general, writing prayers is a particular discipline. Hauerwas’ striking prayers are ‘plainly spoken’. Shallow they are not.

Bibliography

Hauerwas, Stanley. ‘Prayers Plainly Spoken’, Triangle, 1999

Reputation and the Posterity of Christ

2011-06-01T18:03:00.000+01:00

I am grateful to Paul Munn and his excellent Pilgrimage Journal blog for setting me thinking. This little post began as a comment on Paul's 'thirty years' reflection.

I think if I'm honest I do care about reputation. I care about how other see me - even if I'm long dead at the time. I even care about my blog traffic and the rankings. It occurred to me that whatever it might mean to attribute 'Lordship' to Jesus, it doesn't mean the exercise of omnipotence over posterity. In the face of a million potential distortions to his reputation Christ is nonresistant. 'Who am I?' is still a multiple choice question which we have the freedom to get entirely wrong.

I am the Gate (John 10:1-10)

2011-06-01T11:57:00.004+01:00

This reflection began life as a sermon, delivered at Westbury Avenue Baptist Church for Christian Aid Week. This passage manages to be both pastoral and unsentimental. For a time we lived on a smallholding near Carmarthen. The place is beautiful, but pulling a dead sheep out of a ravine wasn’t so pretty. There is a good deal of the shepherd’s hard life in John 10 and very little Sean the Sheep! The obvious background to this passage (Ezek 34:1-6) presents the profession in a very poor light. Shepherds had a difficult and sometimes dangerous life. In this case the image, ‘I am the gate’ recalled the practice of shepherds lying across the entrance to the sheepfold.

There are all kinds of gates:

The gate of a castle
A hidden door to a walled garden
A ‘gated community’
A city gate
The stile at the edge of a field
Prison gates
Checkpoints (perhaps between Israel/Palestine)
A Toll gate
Highgate (named after the toll gate kept by the bishop of London to charge travellers for crossing his land)

A gate joins two places. It can be an entrance or an exit. Sometimes it is for protection – to keep something or someone out. It could be for security – to keep people in. Sometimes it might be a meeting point like a land border – a neutral ‘safe space’. When I visited Belfast a few years back I was told that during the troubles the so-called ‘Peace Line’ went through a house straddling the two communities. Their lounge served as a point of contact. Lot, catching sight of the angels by the city gate would be another example.

A gate isn’t only an architectural feature. It is a threshold, often associated with distinctive occupations: hotel receptionist or doorkeeper; perhaps too, the guest-master of a monastery, peacemakers who stand as observers at checkpoints or ‘gatekeepers’ in local communities. These thresholds matter. There is trouble at the boundary of church and community. For some time now churches of the global north have found our exits larger than our entrances.

Every time Christian Aid week comes around we think of the people at the margins – the people outside the gate. These are the invisible people; the people in damp overcrowded rooms on our way from the tube station. This week comes around every year and is a wonderful opportunity. It connects us to a wider world of a billion gates and thresholds between communities. Each cup of coffee and every banana is a gate to another world. In London we are told to ‘mind the gap’ on the underground. We might do the same. These gates and thresholds are important.

Our church (Wood Green Mennonite Church) meets in the porch of Westbury Avenue Baptist. Perhaps it feels a little like we’re squatting there, but there’s something appropriate to worshipping here. There’s an organisation in Oxford called the Porch which now has two other places called the Gap and the Gatehouse. Specifically, this ministry at thresholds is hospitality. We all like to think of our church as welcoming, but it’s not hard to welcome people we’ve known for 20 years. Welcome is truly welcome when it’s offered to people beyond the gate.

Years ago we had a ill-fated spell with W.EC, a missionary society based near Gerrards Cross. The Society was located in a mansion formerly belonging to Judge Jeffrys, the infamous ‘hanging judge’. There was a rather inefficient ha ha around the house. I remember chasing our neighbour’s sheep back across the trench. That verse came to mind, ‘I am the gate, whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture’. This isn’t just a passage about gates and sheep but a community with open boundaries. Between ‘finding pasture’ and the safety of a sheepfold there is a creative tension. Former psychiatrist Matthew Scott Peck sums up well what happens when that tension goes badly wrong:

“When I was still in the practice of psychotherapy, it seemed to me that at least half my patients had what I came to call drawbridge problems. Sooner or later I would say to them, “All of us live in a castle. Around the castle, there is a moat, and over the moat there is a drawbridge which we can lower open or raise shut, depending upon our will.” The problem was that my patients' drawbridges did not work very well. Either they were laid open all the time, so that virtually anyone and everyone could amble into their personal space, prowl around, stay as long as they liked, and do whatever harm they would – or else their drawbridges were raised shut and stuck so that nobody and nothing could penetrate their isolated solitude. Neither case was benign.” pp191,192

All of us know people like that. We might think that describes us. It also describes some churches, with little room to ‘restore the soul’. There are many more locked up tight, either physically or in some other way. The entrance to a sheepfold is not meant to be a prison gate. Some time ago i wrote an article entitled ‘The higher the hurdles, the fewer the runners’. It was about community; in particular the tension between identity and openness. This is a tension felt acutely, especially within intentional communities. The community recognises that there are essentials which constitute a shared identity. So, understandably barriers, rules and regulations are put in place to preserve that special quality. In turn the same barriers and restrictions choke the life out of the very life-giving identity they were intended to protect. In John 10 there is no such malign tension. Jesus is both protector and the gate to abundant life:

“The Lord will keep you from all harm – he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and for evermore” Ps 121.7

“I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendour into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there.” Revelation 21.22-27:

Bibliography

Scott Peck, Matthew, 1993, ‘Further Along the Road Less Travelled, Simon and Schuster.

Slow Church Coming: Evangelism at Walking Pace

2011-05-25T14:27:00.009+01:00

On the 6^th May I went along to the Fresh Expressions ‘Changing the Landscape’ conference in Oxford. Rowan Williams gave the keynote address. He offered a good deal of food for thought but his remarks about journeying are worth quoting at length::

One of the things that the whole fresh expressions story has, I think, helped many of us to see more clearly is that we need to push away the notion of church as simply something to which people sign up in one go and in one way. And we are discovering, sometimes discovering the hard way, just how complex, how varied, people's journeys are towards the heart of church because those are journeys towards the heart of God's purpose - if my starting point here is right. And journeying towards the heart of God's purpose is really quite a long business; in fact it's one you never come to the end of. Literally never.

As Williams pointed out, there is a need for patience. Change doesn't happen all at once. Increasingly, the Church of England is taking a long view of mission. Seeing Anglican community workers or pioneer missioners appointed for nine or ten years at a time, I confess to a moment of ecumenical envy.

Pardon the Star Trek moment, but whatever else life after Christendom means, it entails a ‘temporal shift’ – a fundamental gear change. I mean ‘gearing-down’.

Why this shift might be necessary is in part tied up with how people hear good news. The evangelistic staple diet of 20^th Century Evangelicalism, ‘missions’, celebrity evangelists, altar calls and Damascus road conversions, is no longer fit for purpose. Even worse, the Christendom legacy leaves us missiologically compromised. What has a crusader, an inquisitor or an imperialist to say in the name of the Prince of Peace? Muslims in Leeds still talk about the Crusades. For many Neo-Pagans in Ripon, Christianity is a scourge on the earth. For new atheists (and Don Cupitt!) dogma itself is inherently violent. Say ‘evangelist’ in Potters Bar, Glasgow or Wood Green and the spectre of every ‘pushy’ Jehovah’s Witness or prima donna preacher haunts the conversation. Mostly, there isn’t a specific horror story; just a lingering sense that religion lands on us from a great height. When Christians are perceived to be coercive or to have an axe to grind the outcome is an evangelistic deficit. That a large section of the church is effectively Post-Evangelistic is another outcome. If Christianity is slowing down after Christendom; getting alongside, learning to listen, rediscovering Incarnation and sharing journeys, then it is the most welcome change of pace for centuries.

This geared-down gospel of a slow church may not suit a frenetic, instant consumer culture, but it does go to the heart of why that culture is soul-destroying. Salvation isn’t only in the content but in the pace and rhythm of the gospel. This is why, for all their missional introspection, Amish practice is good news. The deliberately slow uptake of technological innovation offers breathing space to weigh the impact of change on community and family life. That 'breathing space' also enables a remarkably contemporary reflection on the meaning and value of human life. For the rest of us there always will be times to share Christ conversationally, but the journey as well as the moment is what it means to enter the Kingdom of God. Before the followers of Jesus were ever ‘Christians’, we were simply ‘the Way’.

If speed is orthodox then we should all be heretics. Peace, patience and simplicity combine in slow evangelism. When the gospel is finally experienced as good news in every aspect of life, then we have gone beyond Post-Christendom to somewhere more complete.

Bob Dylan at 70

2011-05-24T21:37:00.000+01:00

It's hard to believe Bob Dylan is 70. I still have a black and white image in my mind of a young Dylan with a very intense looking Joan Baez. Happy birthday Bob. Many happy returns.

Jerusalem Needs Antioch (and visa versa)

2011-05-23T15:03:00.000+01:00

It took shoe leather, a ship and some luck to travel from Jerusalem to Antioch. Whatever dangers by sea or land, this tale of two cities involved risk of a different kind for early Christians. This is a story of how the Jewish church romanced a Gentile world. It is also an account of what each gained and lost in the encounter.

So, how did it begin? It started with violence. Refugees heading north after Stephen was stoned. Sometimes it was tense! Mother and daughters are like that. But it was creative. Jewish roots and Gentile extravagance. Settlers and Pioneers. James and Paul (and Peter in the middle). Holy City and 'Queen of the East'. Shipwrecks, bandits and famine. It ended with violence. The destruction of Jerusalem. More refugees. More mission. More churches.

Jerusalem took a chance with Antioch. A 'Fresh Expression of Church' for the 1^st Century. Now when people talk about Fresh Expressions we hear, 'Is this proper church?' They were tutting in Jerusalem too:. 'those northerners should learn some manners'.

Sometimes the rain falls and the waters rise. Bridges are washed away. Between Jews and Gentiles the bridge was down. Antioch, a city by the riverside, is where it was rebuilt. 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus'. Jerusalem needs Antioch.

There we were first called 'Christians'. First it was just 'the way of Jesus' and the Kingdom of God. Antioch, Potters Bar and ends of the earth are the right places to be. Where is our Antioch? Who are our Gentiles? We should be there. But it does get complicated. We're still walking the way. We still remember where we came from. Antioch needs Jerusalem. It's a tale of two cities.

Vladimir Putin is Driving the Bus (Reflections on the St. John's Vision Day)

2011-05-23T11:52:00.000+01:00

The early hours are long and quiet. The only sounds are our Strasbourg clock; the hum and tap of the laptop. I work through the night. My neighbour is not sleeping either. There is a smell of his cigarette smoke through the walls. Filthy habit! I curse my disorganization. Far too much at the last minute as usual.

Later I’m on the 313 again. Vladimir Putin is driving the bus. At least, the resemblance is striking. Today it’s the St. John’s Vision Day. No matter how many times I do this, I’m nervous. We make a late start. Lunch spills over from the morning service. How much of last night’s purple prose will go unsaid? Will our groups know what is expected? I’m so thin-skinned – fretting over sessions too rough at the edges. I tell myself that I am here to serve the day. Later on someone tells me I am ‘too nice’. Do they do ‘nasty classes’ anywhere nearby?

Feedback is sometimes slow to trickle in on a day like this. The opening reflection, ‘Why Jerusalem Needs Antioch’’ struck a chord with some. Early Christians took a chance with Antioch, to bridge the gap between Jew and Gentile. ‘Fresh Expressions’, it seems, are as old as faith. Later, we told the story of St. John’s. Someone laid a brick in 1941, when the Baker St building was constructed. Other moving stories were shared too, that ought not to be published here. We were touched by accounts of conflict and healing, loss and hope.

People at St. John’s still talk about time eighteen years ago that led to the refurbishment of the premises. There are some critical things to be said about our preoccupation with church property. The listening and togetherness of that process though, made a lasting impression. A weekend together could be a creative thing. Perhaps Mr Putin will drive us there. .

Waterstones

2011-05-20T09:40:00.000+01:00

Today it was announced that Waterstones, the UK's largest high street bookseller, had been sold for £53 million. That's a little more than my loose change but cheap at the price for a retail icon. HMV shares jumped at the news, which says everything about who will benefit from the sell-off. For years Waterstones was the enemy. I've always defaulted to 'small is beautiful', local is lovely. Now the arch-predator has been out-sharked. The online beasts have bigger teeth.

As readers of this blog will know I have more than a few Luddite sympathies. I also love books – the tactile kind! Dropping a spanner in the works is mighty tempting. If only we knew where to put it.

A Call to European Mennonites

2011-05-18T11:40:00.002+01:00

An earthquake has rocked the Mennonite world recently. Colombian César García is the first Mennonite from the global South to become General Secretary of the World Mennonite Conference. The offices of the MWC are also transferring to Colombia from Strasbourg. For non-Mennonites wondering what all the fuss is about; this is the Anabaptist equivalent of an African Pope or an Argentinian Archbishop of Canterbury. The torch has passed. This is welcome news and timely.

It wouldn't be human though, not to find a little sadness in the mix. The fire burns in Bogotá but what shall we make of the European embers? I warmly support the transfer of energy and resources to the vibrant south but in the north we also need resource of a different kind. The current UK Mennonite landscape may not be typical of Western Europe as a whole but it's worth capturing the mood as a snapshot of where we've come to. The scene hardly seems encouraging. A handful of congregations, the mothballed London Mennonite Centre, an ambiguous Anabaptist Network and diminished North American engagement. Post-Christendom offers opportunity but it also brings loss. We feel the loss keenly. The east wind is very cold indeed. As all you boy scouts will know though, wind and glowing embers can be used to restart a fire.

This year I have been privileged to join the Advisory Committee of the Mennonite Central Committee (Western Europe). MCC's work with peace, reconciliation and in addressing poverty unites Mennonites around the world. In general funds flow from north to south. Whilst I agree with this policy there is a dilemma for Mennonites in Western Europe. We may be culturally rich but we are largely congregationally poor. The same issue exists for the Mennonite Mission Network. When I mentioned 'resources of a different kind' earlier I was thinking of evangelism. Our congregations and institutions do not need ongoing subsidy. What we do need is missionally focused seed corn funding sufficient for new initiatives and to free up time for training and resourcing pioneers. This might include funding for church planting and innovative mission along the lines of the Anglican/Methodist 'Fresh Expressions' programme. Unless European Mennonites can nurture vitality in our own Christian communities any hope of increasing or even maintaining the flow of support to pan-Mennonite work such as MCC is wishful thinking.

Eagle eyed readers will have noticed my caveats as regards the Anabaptist Network. I do not mean to devalue one of our key partners. However, the notion that UK Mennonites 'agreed' not to plant churches in Britain (who agreed this and when?) and the existence of the AN have been instrumental in creating an evangelistically neutered Mennonite constituency. Mennonites will always need to revisit and renew our Anabaptist Vision but we will also need to be ourselves.

There is a good deal of detail in taking this agenda seriously, but I have some outline proposals for European Mennonites to consider:

A European development fund should be created under the auspices of the Mennonite Mission Network, specifically geared to offering mission focused seed corn finance. Whatever grant aid provided to set up the fund should be matched by a 'tent-making' approach utilising entrepreneurship alongside traditional fundraising.
We should state unequivocally that Mennonites intend to plant churches in Western Europe.
Across much of urban Western Europe there are large and growing migrant communities, many originating in Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America. These communities present a huge challenge and opportunity both for integration and peacemaking on the one hand and partnership with Mennonite communities in the global south on the other.
A Mennonite initiative equivalent to 'Fresh Expressions' should be launched. 'Mennofex' perhaps? (i.e. Mennonite Fresh Expressions of Church). There would clearly be opportunity to do this under the banner of UK Fresh Expressions, but there are other options too. Two more denominations have joined Methodist and Anglicans since the original launch of FE in 2005.

Lesley

2011-05-18T06:43:00.000+01:00

Yesterday morning Lesley Anne Misrahi passed away. Lesley, you were much loved and this post is totally inadequate to saying how much we'll miss you.,

Re-formation After Christendom

2011-05-16T10:04:00.003+01:00

There was no 'golden age'. The Christian community has always been made up of flawed and forgiven people like us. Neither was there a 1^st Century 'pattern' – an off the peg church polity. Anabaptists are uneasy with Calvin's linkage of a fourfold ministry to apostolic precedent. Yet the inner life early church had a 'shape' of sorts which pre-dated the 2^nd Century novelty of normative episcopacy. That original vision was not perfectionist, though it tended to peace and forthright mutuality. Open process is, in other words, a quality of the mature Christian congregation (as Jürgen Moltmann might say).

All of this sounds so high-minded and abstract. It's only when we think about what happens when that congregational life gets out of shape that the real issues hit home. From the beginning there was an uneasy tension between the life-giving encounter with God in Christ and the institutional appetites of the Christian church. Often the Christian faith has been far from mutual or peaceable. Christian 'mission' came to be identified with expansionist imperialism. Leadership became clericalism. Evangelism took on the baggage of coercion. Forthright defenders of the original shape of Christian community met either with exile or crucifixion. This is very much the Anabaptist testimony. Whatever the deep flaws of our own fellowships – Mennonite, Hutterite, Amish – we recall the memory of a community where every voice was heard and valued.

A multi-voiced fellowship though, looks forward as well as back. We remember and anticipate. Our re-formation is as much oriented to the coming Kingdom as it is to the shape of Pre-Constantinian Christianity. This multi-dimensional approach is important because it acts as a counterweight to what might otherwise be an obscurantist project. Anabaptists would do well to avoid hitching a wagon to every historical lost cause. Pre-Christendom precedent does not per se establish a Post-Christendom imperative. A church of many voices is however, on firm ground: both the push of memory and the pull of the Kingdom. We remember a community where each of us had a word or a song. We also anticipate a coming city of perpetual day with gates that are never shut.

The weakness of the Post-Christendom mantra is obvious enough. It's just another 'post' in a Post-Everything world. What we are against is apparent. What we are for is less certain. For as long as the hyphen exists Post-Christendom will always be residually Constantinian. Where identity is defined as a point of departure an umbilical connection is maintained with our point of origin. It would be wise to listen to John Howard Yoder's repeated Neo-Constantinian sequence in the 'Priestly Kingdom' (pp. 123-134). Constantine is a wily character and capable of re-invention! The thrilling truth is that we need not be bound to Christendom, either directly or indirectly. There is no bishop big and purple enough to tell us how we should be church. Once again paraphrasing Moltmann, there never was anything 'higher than the congregation'. At the end of this glorious, appalling age there is still the Kingdom of God.

Truth is Hospitable

2011-05-14T17:52:00.000+01:00

Truth is hospitable,

Though a poor place to live.

It is a nomad,

But no settler.

How simple it is,

To kill the one we love.

Malignant Goodness

2011-05-13T18:14:00.002+01:00

People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what they do does.

- Michel Foucault

Years ago when I was working for Leeds Nightstop and supporting volunteers I remember a conversation with a senior housing manager. He worked for a leading homelessness charity. At the time he was taking some stress related leave. We talked about the pressures on Voluntary Sector staff. An aside in the back of a car seemed to strike a chord with him. I said that in my experience many 'secular' Voluntary Sector organisations still unconsciously carried over a Christian legacy. In this case it was the ethos of self-sacrifice typical of large sections of the sector. There are a good few secular charities that have a work ethic more suited to a 19^th Century missionary society than a 21^st Century agency. The effect on him was devastating. His employer unwittingly colluded with an exploitative ethos which involved the organisation looking the other way whilst my dedicated colleague stacked up hundreds of hours of unsalaried work.

In the right setting that kind of dedication might have a place. Here it was bluntly, malignant. Yesterday I was reading Margaret Miles', 'The Image and Practice of Holiness'. It struck me how relevant her argument was to that conversation twenty years ago. Her analysis of classic devotional manuals (e.g. the Imitation of Christ and Pilgrim's Progress, etc) led her to conclude that the 'examined life' as described in these manuals is an unaffordable, otherworldly distraction if carried over into the modern world. In light of the nuclear threat she highlights the 'cultural conditioning to passivity' and cites Saul Bellow: “The temptation to lie down is very great” (p.30). In a nuclear world a social rather than a purely individual holiness is required. To our shame, Christianity has inflicted a bevy of horrors on the world, from the Crusades to jaw-dropping hierarchical arrogance. Yet some of the negative consequences of faith are entirely unconscious. They are virtues misplaced; goodness grown rancid over time. Though some of the distortions of Christian virtue are unintended, they are sometimes also appalling. Thomas Merton's chilling description of Eichmann – “... duty, self-sacrifice and obedience” (p.30), is a portrait of a man with a recognisable relationship to a Christian culture.

There is value in traditional devotional literature, but the historic examined life exists in tension with the need for a culturally transforming social holiness. Anabaptists in particular have reason to get this tension right. A martyr theology makes sense for a persecuted community, but an ethos of martyrdom without end feels like an indulgence. We might look afresh at Martyr's Mirror in that light. In ecumenical relations where does simple Anabaptist honesty about an often painful past morph into the utilization of persecution as an exercise in negative power. No-one likes to hear, 'you owe us'. We would do well to consider the negative uses to which memory is put in Israel-Palestine. To give another example, it is understandable if a community disappointed by the failure of the Peasant's Revolt turns from politics to seclusion. What is less understandable is the mechanism by which a 16^th Century survival strategy translates to an ongoing communitarian, apolitical sectarianism. The piety of seclusion has had its day. Our precarious world of nuclear mortality and ecological crisis begs for shalom in the marketplace; an unashamedly political holiness.

Merton, Thomas. Raids on the Unspeakable, 1977 Burns and Oates, Great Britain.

Miles, Margaret.R. The Image and Practice of Holiness, 1989. SCM Press, London.

I Blog Therefore I am

2011-05-07T20:17:00.004+01:00

Radref has been up and running for a little less than three years. The blog started off as an occasional journal. To be honest its growth has taken me by surprise. I am an unlikely blogger. What I don't know about the technical side of online communications is a very long list. HTML and inspired design is a mystery to me. Perhaps I'm instinctively Amish in fearing the underbelly of technology. In some ways though, this flawed, prickly blog has become a minor vocation.

I noted with interest (and a little ecumenical envy) that Catholic bloggers (though I did hear a few others crept in through the back door) had been invited to meet at the Vatican recently. Plenty of good things came out of this meeting, not least an acknowledgement of the relationship between Christian bloggers and the wider church. When we do 'inherit the land' in the form of the new Mennonite Centre, it would be valuable to host a similar event here. Before I started blogging I had little notion of how hard it is to do it really well. Writing, promoting and maintaining a blog is time consuming. Quite a lot of radref posts have a life before or after they appear on the blog. It's certainly the interaction I value most; and the sense of community that crosses timelines and cultural barriers. Some of my regular interlocutors don't agree with me, which is often creative. Blogging has a directness and immediacy which is hard to match. I enjoy a freedom to engage with emerging culture or tackle issues which wouldn't normally get attention in the mainstream media.

The 'underbelly' I mentioned earlier is evident from time to time. I sometimes find Facebook and Twitter ill-tempered, self-important and distracting. Social media create a pond in which to swim and fish but it is a pool that is also full of sharks and pirates. Some of the 'pirates' are Christians; freebooters with a cutless in one hand and their latest book in the other. Many of them do it with style, but it is tiring to be constantly bombarded by commercial or ideological propositions. I have far greater concerns with the extent to which the internet is commercially colonised and politically manipulated. My response is to note the familiar Anabaptist tension between assimilation and withdrawal. It would be easy to shake the dust off our feet and walk away. There are men and women of peace though, who would miss us if we were gone.

I am left with an intriguing thought. If blogging is a vocation - perhaps even a modest Christian practice - then what disciplines might accompany that vocation? Is it possible, for example, to cultivate an appropriate form of spirituality or find ways in which blogging fosters peacemaking or social justice? How should congregations relate to their bloggers? Is blogging a sub-category of the solitary vocation or is some form of guidance or spiritual direction appropriate? What is the relationship between bloggers and other Christian writers? In my experience, as someone who blogs and writes for publication, blogging is often overlooked as a literary form. A word to all you lonely bloggers! Peace be with you.

Roses by the Roadside: Suffering and Restoration in the Everyday

2011-05-04T10:14:00.001+01:00

I feel hung over. Not that it's the drink, you understand. It's been a weekend for the grand and the ghoulish. The tide has been flowing one way but as usual I've been going the other. I am tense, like an over-wound clock. Yesterday should have been routine but it's as if the week caught a fever. Arriving in Crouch End on the way to a church business meeting there are ambulances and a police car by the bus stops. Police were talking to the driver. A pedestrian lay on the ground, half out of sight. I wonder whether tomorrow there will be roses by the roadside.

Later I headed for a nearby coffee shop to collect my wits only to walk straight into a telegraphed 'conversation' between two customers. One woman, obviously distressed, was talking about her private life in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. I admired her conversation partner, a young woman with a laptop, who listened patiently to the the woe and frustration and gave calm, simple advice. 'I can't win', the first lady constantly repeated. Her account spoke of implicit violence, mental health issues and an abusive relationship.

I carried the tension into our meeting and was prickly and contrary all evening. This is how 'bad days' are made up. Life is out of tune and we return the favour.

Even when we're not affected by misery on a grand scale, there is more than enough everyday suffering to go around. Most pain is no grand tragedy, but scaled to consume lives one-by-one or sour relationships. In turn when Christians talk about peacemaking, spirituality, healing or the Kingdom of God the everyday is mostly likely to be the scale of it. There are always opportunities to recharge and retune but it's easy to let them slide by. We pay a price in peace of mind. Others pay a price too.

So, this morning I am at work. I have set aside my usual coffee break to take a peaceable twenty minutes of silence

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,

my eyes are not raised to high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvellous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul.

Like a weaned child with its mother;

my soul is like the weaned child that

is with me.

Ps 131:1,2

Why the Strong Should Listen When the Weak Tell Stories

2011-05-03T15:01:00.001+01:00

The way narratives are imposed by the strong has been the weekend's theme. This applies both to the current agenda and retrospectively On Saturday (despite our best republican efforts) it was a royal media-fest. In Pakistan an act of violence was draped in the flag and rebranded. As an Anabaptist I'm still expected to sit here meekly whilst Anglicans present the status quo as a 'via media' (i.e. a moderate middle way) despite having exterminated us to arrive at this point. Telling the history honestly has always been subversive and potentially liberating. The 'scribes' who bring out forgotten stories from the storeroom have a genuine vocation. In God's mercy these tales have the power to transform shared identity and reshape relationships between the centre and the margins.

It is often said that God has a 'bias to the poor'. I do not wish to disagree, but it is equally true that God is biased to marginality. The biblical narratives cede precedence to younger sons over elder brothers, Galilee over Jerusalem and nomads over settlers. Still, what begins on the margins may be good news for the centre. A little rabbinic story makes the point. This is a story told by Rabbi Levi Yitzchak when he was received inhospitably by the people of L'vov: "Do you know the difference between Abraham, our Father of blessed memory, and Lot? Why does scripture go into such detail about the full meal Abraham served the angels? After all, Lot also baked matzos and prepared a feast for his guests? Why is Abraham's hospitality considered special and not Lot's?" Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev answered his own question by pointing out that when the guests came to Lot, scripture states (Genesis 19:1), "Va'ya'vo'uh sh'nay ha'mal'achim S'doma," the two angels came to Sodom. Whereas with Abraham it says, "Anashim," "And behold he saw three people standing upon him." In other word Abraham's hospitality was superior because it was offered to three weary travellers and not (as in Lot's case) three angels. I could tell a thousand tales like this. The story was told in an urban setting but it began with the nomad Abraham. The centre needs the margins!

This is why Constantine, Justinian and all their despotic successors are wrong. They are to leadership what Cuckoos are to birds. All other narratives are displaced in order to feed their version of the truth. They are tyrants but they are also diminished by their own narrative isolation. They are what David would have been without Nathan.

The Death of Bin Laden

2011-05-02T17:17:00.001+01:00

As Michael Radcliffe pointed out 'there must be some really terrible bad news they want to bury this weekend'. There's really no conspiracy, though. It's just that the news is only 'good news' for some and then only for a day. What price our self-congratulation tomorrow?

Murder doesn't look good naked. Heroism, glory, national security, just causes and 'fitting retribution' are garments of choice for the well-dressed warrior. President Obama's portrayal of Osama Bin Laden's assassination as a national 'achievement' flatters violence and diminshes all of us. Peace with reconcilation is achievement. Social justice is achievement. Every community organizer should know that. The so-called 'War on Terror' is not winnable because from the beginning it has never sought collective solutions. Its envisaged 'peace' was always pacification. Violence is incapable of achievement. It is a factory with one product, namely itself.

Rossetti and Republicans at the Red Lion Square

2011-04-30T09:13:00.002+01:00

The manic infant I avoided on the tube yesterday, wielding two flags like machetes, rather set the tone of the day. I arrived at Red Lion Square at around 11.30am, for my planned 'not the royal wedding' piece of sanity. At least for the day this Square was the Republic - and certainly did better coffee the real Red Square. This was the party organised by 'Republic', the leading UK Republican campaign.

I was interviewed by Reuters, the Indedepent and a Spanish journalist before I even reached the other side of the square. Republican heaven but introvert hell! I retreated from the crowd for a while. No.17 Red Lion Square is a Post-Raphaelite mecca: Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones. On the other corner of the square was the humanist oasis, Conway hall.

My reaction on the day? I was glad to be there. Glad to talk to Peter Tatchell. Fine, brave man! The crowd said everything though, about the strengths and weaknesses of the UK Republican movement. This was a left-wing, secular kind of crowd. Well meaning Guardian readers against the royals. In seemed an occasion for rallying the faithful and not building bridges. Where, I wondered, would the middle ground come from? The republic will be secular and spiritual, left and middle, Canterbury and Conway Hall. The republic is ours. Are you listening, you sons and daughters of Thomas Paine? You need us.

I left just as Jon Snow arrived. When I stopped to text my wife outside Holborn tube station my phone had gone. Sadly the Republic is not proof against general wickedness. Much, much later my neighbour's party was in full swing. Her majesty, it seems, likes ghetto blasters.

Equity After Monarchy

2011-04-27T13:45:00.003+01:00

On the 29th April some of us will be preoccupied. Quite a few of my friends are planning overseas trips to locations with no TV reception. I intend to head for the republican street party at the Red Lion Square, near Holborn. I know introverts hate parties but this one is a must. I can always sit in a corner drinking coffee from my 'I'm not a royal wedding mug'.

The polling evidence in the UK is ambivalent. Polls vary wildly, estimating republican support at somewhere between 20% and 43%. Depending on respective vantage points that picture either shows a gradually building republicanism or the relative resiliance of monarchist support. The trends are probably encouraging for the anti-monarchists. Despite pro-royalist media bias and sporadic establishment attempts to stifle dissent, republican support is in the ascendent.

Monarchy has survived into postmodernity partly because of its ability to reinvent itself. In an age that doesn't 'do God' the royals have recognised the power of a strategic name change or the cult of personality. They have become minor deities in the pantheon of celebrity; household gods in a gospel of gossip.. If that sounds like exaggeration how else do we explain the mawkish devotion to Diana - in life and death? The same cultishness is evident in the media driven speculation that the succession might skip a generation. The prospect of King William and Queen Kate is simply too tempting a photo-opportunity. From a republican point of view it's shabby and shallow. From a Christian perspective it's idolatrous.

There are plenty of reasons to be republican; not all of them honourable. The fragmentation, 'personality politics' and frequent negativity of republican movement miss the point. Moreover, attacking the royals personally simply offers backhanded confirmation for the cult of celebrity. It was Gerard Winstanley who rightly warned that simply chopping off the king's head and removing the 'Norman Yoke' was insufficient (Hill: p.134). In so far as Winstanley was 'restitutionist' his focus was not only a return to Saxon values but to an equitable Eden. Winstanley's The Law of Freedom carries a potent message for today's anti-monarchists. The republican case is rooted in a vision of a just community and a grown-up democracy. In some senses this mature democracy completes what the Civil War left unfinished: a fully economic revolution. That vision is just as pertinent in challenging an increasingly post-democratic political eliite and pressing for urgently needed land and tax reform as it is in replacing the monarchy. It reminds us that a monarchist 'detox' would involve giving up constitional royalism and residual aristocratic privilege (e.g. land ownership) as well as sacking Mrs Windsor.

Establishments give the impression of ubiquity but in reality they are vulnerable, to external and internal pressures. To offer an example, the position of the Church of England in a time of cultural and constitutional uncertainty is intriguing and ambiguous. The established church is no longer simplistically the Tory party at prayer or a persecutor of Anabaptists. In Post-Christendom UK it is hard to say whether establishment is abomination or anachronism. Almost certainly, if Britain became a republic, disestablishment would be inevitable. The impact of disestablishment on a continuing monarchy would be less dramatic, but it would be a piece of institutional 'levelling' in the right direction. 'Equity after monarchy' is a fine ambition. I would be proud to live in a country like that.

Bibliography
Hill, Christopher 1972 'The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution'. Penguin, London.

Christian Practices: Simple or Subtle?

2011-04-19T10:50:00.000+01:00

Christian practices are sometimes described as simple but it is better to call them direct. There is little simple about hospitality. When we were working on the first Nightstop project in Leeds we grew used to the accusations. 'Do gooder Christians'. 'Sticking plaster scheme'. In reality, though our hosts offered direct emergency accommodation to young homeless people in their own homes, they were well-informed and articulate about the political context of homelessness. Our hospitality formed part of a complex web of support. Twenty years on feels like deja vu. Christians offering free food in Westminster find themselves at the centre of a political storm. The local council would like to ban rough sleepers and the soup runs from a large area around Victoria station. The connection between mobile food distributors and homeless if direct (and all the more personal for being direct) but it is hardly simple. The volunteers and the soup runs know this, even where individual efforts could do with being better co-ordinated.

Practices such as almsgiving, hospitality, truthtelling or peacemaking are so embedded in the Judao-Christian tradition that it is impossible to imagine faith in action without them. Indeed it is impossible to imagine life without them. People of faith are not the only ones to encounter strangers with generosity or give to those in need. In an increasingly complex, impersonal and fragmented world it seems somehow incongruous to persist in practices which make a direct personal connection through everyday necessities (food, shelter, friendship, etc). It is precisely this directness that gives the practice power and critical significance. Often people are reduced to categories or problems. Practices make personal connections. You and I may be different but I cannot walk away from you. This cup, that bread is a sign of the stuff of life between us – our relationship around a common table.

Christian practices have never been simple,whether in the 1^st Century or today. The extension of table fellowship to 'sinners' or marginal people was a far larger issue than a straightforward spat about social etiquette. It went to the heart of who belongs; the boundaries of welcome. The recent debate between Ted Grimsrud and Mark Thiessen Nation on homosexuality involves a fundamental disagreement over the limits of hospitality. In this setting to say 'you are welcome' is direct but it is not simple. Congregations, denominations and friendships are dissolving over this issue. We have been here before, as anyone who has read the Didache will note. The administration of radical welcome exists in a tension between unlimited openness and practical limitations. The accent though, should always be on openness. In the face of a multitude of needs there is little sense of Jesus retreating into a small world of caveats and limitations. The Kingdom of God escapes confinement, whether in Palestine or Westminster.

For further inspiration I warmly recommend the excellent 'Practicing our Faith' site sponsored by the Valparaiso Project: http://www.practicingourfaith.org/what-are-christian-practices.

Giving Ground: Loss and Renewal After Christendom

2011-04-18T14:12:00.002+01:00

Last Saturday was our church away day. I caught the 84 bus in Potters Bar and walked a pleasant couple of miles from the centre of London Colney village to the All Saints Pastoral Centre, a Roman Catholic retreat house. It seems though that the times are changing. The centre is set to close. 'Wherever we go shuts down', said one of our group. She was thinking of the London Mennonite Centre. Wherever shall we hang our Amish hat? Who knows.

Sitting amongst the ruins of a lost Christendom, the church is 'giving ground'. Literally, plot by plot, our possessions are changing hands. That phrase 'giving ground' was on my mind all day Saturday. It has at least a double-meaning. The first is a military metaphor. Here ground is given, yielded unwillingly in the face of an advancing enemy. Yielding feels like defeat. For more than a thousand years our banners and steeples have dominated the landscape. We have sacrificed sons and daughters to a Christian commonwealth in the name of a God of Empire. God knows, we have died for this ground and we have also killed. At best this feels like a managed retreat. At worst every painful inch of turf is soaked with blood and recrimination. Glory has departed but the sons of Constantine still long for the good old days. The second meaning is more gracious. Ground is given, but with a sense that it was never fully ours. We yield property and possessions but there is also yieldedness to a quite unexpected God. After 1500 years of pomp and circumstance we wait to be called again and rediscover what following Jesus on the road might mean.

A great deal has been said about Post-Christendom. I suspect the truth lies somewhere between reactionary pessimism and an over-romantic vision of life after Constantine. In some settings churches will continue to own property but it is likely most will not. Just as there is ecological wisdom in low impact dwellings, so Christians need to tread lightly. Our footprints are there for all to see, for good or ill. The world will no longer tolerate our high-impact triumphalism. There are many facets to the new situation but one of the most important lies in the changing character of Christian hospitality. To offer welcome from strength or weakness is qualitatively different. The more we become a travelling people, the more welcome is an invitation to a shared journey. Such sharing narrows the gap between host and guest and lessens the disparity of power, which is the flaw of all hospitality. Here is an irony. Though we have less to give, we may have more to offer.

Absolute Pacifism

2011-04-17T23:11:00.002+01:00

I am not interested in 'realist' critiques of absolute pacifism. I couldn't care less if A.N. Whitehead is correct in branding pacfists 'bad citizens', warning darkly of the necessity of force. Violence is sterile. It is incapable of creation. At any rate there are more important things than joining in the 'realistic' game of misery endlessly renewed.

I am interested in what 'absolute pacifism' might mean in a society which is increasingly uneasy with absolutes? Any talk of 'absolutes' immediately invites a discussion of postmodernism, in particular the onslaught on postmodernism on so-called 'grand narratives', 'master narratives' or 'metanarratives'. Every community, group or institutuion has its stories but these metanarratives are systematic - 'totalizing'. Metanarratives not only unify but all justify the power and prestige of those institutions which perpetuate them. Postmodernism alleges an umbilical connection between these overarching grand narratives and the perpetuation of violence and coercion.

Lyotard's famous definition of postmodernism as 'incredulity towards metanarratives' then, raises some awkward questions, not least for the Christian faith. The questions are especially pointed where it comes to Christianity. So, when atheists in Chicago run a bus campaign attacking the story of wise men following a star, the strategem is pure postmodernism. Here is a story constantly repeated in every school nativity play and which (in postmodern eyes) adds weight to the construction of a wider metanarrative.

But, I digress. This post is about 'absolute pacifism' and incongruity of maintaining any 'absolute'. Whatever the usefulness of postmodernism in uncovering the inherent violence of metanarratives, from the crusades to nazism, an 'absolute' - no matter how seemingly irenic - is problematic. Pacifism - especially religious pacifism - is faced with an apparent contradiction. A universal rule of peace is maintained but the 'universal' itself stands accused of every manner of crime. What are we to make of Christian pacifism which proclaims 'blessed are the peacemakers' whilst maintaining divine beligerance as orthodox and biblical? We talk about 'peace churches' but do the words 'peace' and 'church' properly belong in the same sentence? For many of us describing ourselves as Christian pacifists the corporate context of our nonviolence is deeply problematic. Historically many of our communities have unblushingly practiced pacifism with one hand an coercive church discipline with the other.

Part of the trouble here lies in our use of the word 'absolute'. Postmodernity is uncessarily jaded in this respect. Not evey absolute is absolutist. Postmodernity itself faces criticism. Universal suspicion of the absolute is itself totalizing. 'Absolute' pacifism is never absolute in the sense that it presets a normative standard, an imposed homogeneity or mere pacfication. Rather the vision of shalom pictures the world in exhileratng harmonious variety. Peace here is no bland unification but the interconnection of the whole world in all its difference. 'Absolute pacifism' is fundamentally both an anticipation and a fulfillment of shalom.
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Introvert

2011-04-12T17:56:00.001+01:00

I'm an introvert. Nothing wrong with that. I'm the life and soul of every retreat centre. An INTP with bells on. Sometimes though, I wish there were medication for my affliction. Take two pills for instant extroversion. Step out on the dance floor. Let the talk flow. Be tactile. Instead there is a knot in my guts where small-talk might have been. Politicans go unlobbied. Funds remain unraised. DIY remains a mystery. Those of you who are extroverts won't have a clue what I'm on about. I would rather have my teeth drilled than go to parties. I am quite capable of crossing to the other side of the road to avoid a conversation with someone I actually like. When I am depressed the introspection is extreme. I remain indoors for days. I fear the telephone and opening the post.

In the main though, I am at peace with inwardness. It can be awkward for introverts that generally extroverts dominate public space. It's often introverts however, who understand the spirit of that space. I am captivated by silence and rarely bored. I love my friends and enjoy spending time with them, expect when they club together. I do enjoy talking as long as I have permission to be serious. If it's not a subject I know backwards I would rather be prepared. Books are more important than food (though on a par with coffee). Walking in the forest restores the soul and re-establishes the pace of life. Rhythm may seem automatic but it takes attention to the ebb and flow of everyday life to leave time for solitude, refreshment or reflection. It is good to be patient with natural mood swings.

Statistically there are marginally more introverts than extroverts. It is my impression however, that most congregations have an extrovert, activist character. Whilst Quaker practice is exceptional there is a great deal other Christians can do to nurture the kind of reflective space where introverts thrive. Retreat, meditation, silence and reflective reading all have a part to play. For Anabaptists the accent of spirituality has tended towards the corporate, but there is much to be learned from the practice of spiritual direction more typical of other Christian traditions.

I'm especially keen to hear from introverts, about your experience - positive and negative. Comments are encouraged, though not party invitations!

The Politics of Soup and Suffering

2011-04-08T12:17:00.003+01:00

Yesterday Westminster City Council ignored the opposition and pressed ahead with plans for the ban. The proposed by-law will outlaw rough sleeping and mobile food distribution (i.e. soup runs) in a designated area around the Victoria station in London. Final decisions await a full Council meeting in May. The WCC proposal has sharply polarised both public and Third Sector opinion. On the one side are a section of local residents and Tory Councillors. On the other are an eclectic but determined coalition of mobile food providers and soup-run guests. There are Third Sector organisations on both sides of the divide, with starkly contrasting points of view.

So why should it matter that the soup should continue to flow in a populous patch of earth in central London? What does it mean in Harrogate, Cardiff and Nether Puddle on the Marsh? It would be one thing if WCC's proposed action were just an isolated outbreak of the 'bah humbug' tendency, but what begins as a Dickensian exception is in danger of becoming the rule. This debate isn't simply about the 'right' of soup runs to distribute free food or even the most appropriate ways to tackle rough sleeping. It's about who we think we are – what kind of community we want to be part of. What does 'public space' actually mean when sections of our population are fenced out, purged or hidden away like some disreputable eccentric relative? This is why the supporters and cheerleaders of this ban are wrong. They imagine a respectable dystopian 'gated community' where the mad are safely incarcerated in asylums and poor people are meek, regulated and most of all, invisible. The best available research which supports the value of well co-ordinated mobile food distribution (see Laura Lane and Anne Power, London School of Economics and Political Science, 'Soup Runs in Central London') flatly contradicts their position. Behind the apparently sensible arguments for the ban is the same politically sponsored violence that sees homeless people hosed down on the Strand.

Poverty has always been badly served by its own mythology. Notions of the scary poor' – dirty, feckless and frightening are renewed generation by generation. If the 17^th Century had their 'masterless men' we have a collection of Daily Mail or Daily Express grotesques – 'scroungers', migrant invasions and rampaging Travellers. These same newspapers are strangely silent on the legacy of the 'scary rich' – economic meltdown, social inequality, ecological devastation and democratic nominalism. Christians aren't immune to these stereotypes. Ecclesiastical response to the ban has been mixed.

It is a good time to remember that these practices – hospitality and almsgiving – didn't originate on the streets of Westminster with the soup runs. Christians have been doing these things for a long time, extending Jesus' scandalous open table to the marginal and the suffering. There is a need for better co-ordination of mobile food distribution but just because feeding the hungry or welcoming the stranger is direct doesn't make it naïve. If the politicians in Westminster have their way it will, it seems, also be subversive.

Silent Quakers, Noisy Anabaptists?

2011-04-07T10:48:00.001+01:00

"'Silent Worship', in the fully formed character in which the Quakers practice it, is not possible in a 'Church', as we understand the word-today, but only within the narrower limits of a more intimate 'Brotherhood of the Spirit'"" - Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

There is a kinship between the spiritualist wing of Anabaptism and the Society of Friends, not only in peacemaking but in the mistrust of outward forms and dogma. Otto's observations (arising from a reflection on Violet Hodgkin's 'Silent Worship') however, highlight a fundamental dilemma for most contemporary Anabaptists. Whatever the mystical influences on early Radical Reformation continuing Anabaptism is overwhelmingly Evangelical and not spiritualist in character. Our worship is actvist and liturgically 'noisy' on the Protestant model. That 'noise' is all very worthy but there is something about our brand of busy Protestantism that falls short of the practice of the presence of God.

It might be helpful to hear what Quakers have to say about the value of silence. Arthur Roberts has an interesting summary in his Devotions on Silence. He says that silence:

1. fosters awe before the Almighty;
2. indicates submission to God;
3. provides a posture for worship;
4. provides freedom from noise and distraction;
5. condition for tranquility;
6. sets the stage for prayer;
7. signifies respect for others;
8. renews wonder at the world;
9. provides holy space;
10. prepares for effective social witness.

Roberts' list reveals the debt of Quakerism to the mystical via negativa. It also firmly rejects an otherworldy, asocial seclusion. That silence offers 'holy space' though, is a phrase that feels like cold water in a desert to contemporary hearers. We have filled our culture and our churches with distraction, idols, superficiality and an open sewer of mental clutter. What the Quakers have accomplished is a gift for all of us and a reminder that lifegiving solitude isn't just he province of monks, hermits and the professionally silent.

Just now a little Pentecostal Church in Bury I used to visit came to mind. Over the years I have know hundreds of churches, but no-one did 'silent waiting' and expectancy better than this little Apostolic fellowship. The waiting, the silence and the sheer exhileration of God's presence left a lasting impression on me. This was 'holy space', established in the life of an ordinary congregation through patience, persistence and many years of active listening. Whilst Otto is right that 'fully formed' silent worship on a Quaker model is not possible in a church, the idea of devolving silence to a 'Brotherhood of the Spirit' seems like ducking the issue. 'Breaking bread' in Anabaptist understanding is a celebration of God's presence in the ordinary. Why should silence be any different? It is as if silence might grow up in everyday life like grass pushing up between the flagstones. This 'holy space' is not'religious, simply fully human.

Behind the Amish Smile: Reflections on Gelassenheit and Anabaptist Spirituality

2011-04-06T10:40:00.000+01:00

There is a photo in Donald Kraybill's 'The Riddle of Amish Culture' which I have always liked. It shows the contented smile of an Amish man with a caption that links the facial expression with Gelassenheit. It's a German word which is elusive in English. The Mennonite Quarterly Review (Mennonite Quarterly Review, 1950, 22, note 17) offers around 15 possible translations. Essentially Gelassenheit is about submission. Amongst the more corporate Anabaptist settings this is 'submission to God in community'. It has implications for simplicity and economics as well as for spirituality.

Gelassenheit though, had a spiritual history which predates Anabaptism and was an important influence on the 'spiritualist' wing of the movement. The term is found in the literature of medieval mysticism - the radical abandonment which opens the way to union with God. In his journal entry of November 13, 1966 Trappist monk Thomas Merton notes:

Gelassenheit - letting go - not being encumbered by systems, words, projects. And yet being free in systems, projects.

Merton's usage is clearly in line with mystical precedent (especially Meister Eckhart) but here Gelassenheit acquires a postmodern tinge. Through Gelassenheit the potentially idolatrous human impulse to systematize and define is resisted through abandonment to God. The over-mighty claims of institutions, creeds and dogma are revealed as partial and provisional.

Robert Friedmann suggests that contemporary Mennonites have largely lost the ideal of Gelassenheit but holds out hope of recovery. He is surely right. A Gelassenheit which exists in a creative tension between its mystical and communitarian connotations is profoundly relevant. It is an antidote to the sheer pompous weariness of the world.

In Strasbourg With the Mennonite Central Committee

2011-04-05T11:21:00.000+01:00

I am just back from Strasbourg after an invigorating few days with the Advisory Committee of MCC (Mennonite Central Committee) Western Europe. Being part of a committee of a committee wouldn't normally sound like a thrilling experience but MCC is warmly supported by Mennonites, whatever our differences. MCC began in 1920 - a response to famine in the Ukraine, but has grown to become a unique relief, peace and service agency with a global reach.

The main focus of MCC's work remains in Asia, Africa and Latin America but it was valuable to come together in Strasbourg as Western European Mennonites. We heard stories from around the table around a number of social cohesion issues, but our main focus was migration. I am sure that each of us came away with different things but for myself it was good to able to set UK Anabaptism in a wider context. MCC work in a variety of different ways, through peacebuilding and community development, but it was the potential of developing creative responses to migration that gave me a lot to think about. Despite my extremely limited French, I hugely enjoyed the vibrant all-age worship I encountered in Strasbourg last Sunday. In the Continent of its origin the Mennonite tradition is very much alive.

The March

2011-03-26T19:49:00.002Z

It was right to be here today but this was not the moment when the tide turned. There were too many subtexts; too fragmented an agenda for that. Our march started on the steps St Martin in the Fields near Trafalgar Square. Anna and I joined the Housing Justice group, opposing both the cuts and standing up for the homeless people Westminster City Council intend to cleanse from central London.

I have been on many protests before. This one was strangely subdued. As we made our way to the park there were whistles, banners and an occasional African band but remarkably little chanting. We largely marched in silence. I know this blog is read around the world so forgive a word of explanation. Just because Brits are quiet doesn't mean we're not furious. Believe me, we are mad as hell. The chief beneficiaries of the boom - the people whose reckless arrogance and greed devastated the global economy - are still raking in the profits. The the poor and helpless pay the price. No doubt the minor violence which broke out after the march will be blown up out of all proportion by the right-wing press, but overwhelmingly today was an expression of nonviolent outrage.

I mentioned 'subtexts'. One of the most apparent is that protestors are more united in what we are against than in what we are for. The exclusion of Green Party leader Caroline Lucas from the platform today struck a petty note. It's a sober reminder that there are partisan agendas at work on all sides. I am sure there were many Christians on this march. Some were identifiable. A sizeable group of Quakers walked and waved as we stood on the steps. I spoke briefly to Niall Cooper from Church Action on Poverty and noticed a Pax Christi presence. For Christians this march might be a turning point of sorts - at least for those of us who read our 16th and 17th Century history. The former bishop of Liverpool was not wrong when he noted that God has a 'bias to the poor'. But we are still missing a spark, a catalyst, some Gandhi or Luther King to step into the limelight. This was not yet Tahrir Square.

Before the March

2011-03-26T07:20:00.002Z

Today is the day of the march. Anna, Rob and I will be joining Housing Justice at 12pm on the steps of St.Martin in the Fields. We are marching for the alternative to greed, inequality and injustice. This morning I read an excellent piece by my former colleague Niall Cooper of Church Action on Poverty. This was the bulk of my reply:

...'tolle divitem' is the legitimate slogan of an overwhelming moral necessity. There are two main obstacles to substantive change:

1) The rich are good at staying rich (fortified behind legions of lobbyists, institutionalized corruption and tax avoidance on an industrial scale)
2) It is difficult for any of us to imagine equality (that's another way of saying that the general population are farmed like a herd of prize cattle and that the alternative to this 'factory farming' is still regarded as 'loony' and unrealistic)

As I sit here this morning watching the Jackdaws carrying twigs from Epping Forest across the road I remain full of hope - but it is the same hope that prevented Enclosure and gifted the forest to the people of London.

Who Breaks the Bread? Reflections on the Eucharist

2011-03-25T14:22:00.003Z

I heard something from a Methodist Minister: 'If it weren't for Communion what are Presbyters for?' Perhaps a little over-simplified, but a fair question. In other circumstances this man was liberal and tolerant. I doubt whether he cared whether Local Preachers in his Circuit believed in the Trinity, preached universalism or denied the deity of Christ. He clearly cared a lot about Communion. This is more than a story of vested interests: stipend, status or control. It was one lifelong insiders' view of a vanishing, ordered world. In his mind the denial of clerical presidency at the Eucharist would have been the end of that world – an antinomian nightmare.

In the beginning though, the 'Eucharist' had its origins in something less structured. John Howard Yoder has done as much as anyone to restore the earthy economics of breaking bread. His slender 'Body Politics' (1992) – only eighty eight pages – is a revelation for those of us brought up with the institutionalization or ritualism of Christian practices. As Yoder points out, the meal that Jesus blessed and was marked out as remembrance was their ordinary eating and sharing together (1992:16). In turn the ordinariness of breaking bread isn't only embodied in the meal itself but its implications: 'sharing, advocacy, and partisanship in which the poor are privileged (Yoder 1992:22), the forgiveness of debts (1992:24,25); the feast of God for the whole people of God.

The meal then, is not only a remembrance but a witness to God's original plenty. What it has become though, is something less. The abundance of the table belongs to Christ and to all of us. Whatever clerical presidency achieves it does not make for equity or community. Once again we hear echoes of the serpent's deceitful rhetoric in offering to Eve what she already had. The priest thrives on a manufactured scarcity. Clericalism trades on the exclusive mediation of salvation. The supper is transformed from joyful celebration of the ordinary to a marketable clerical commodity. In many Protestant churches where the significance of the Eucharist is minimised monologue preaching takes the place of Communion as the stock and trade of a new class of ministerial scribes.

The Eucharist is subversive and always has been . It has sometimes been said that 'Christianity took the wrong gradient when it left the Kingdom of God for the church' (P.Chenchian in Osthathios: 1979, 86), but the Kingdom lives and breathes in the breaking of bread. Presently the meal is a shadow – celebrated in the presence of enemies (Ps 23), by a shattered church in a hungry world. The bread is broken in memory and in hope.

Bibliography

Mar Osthathios, Theology of a Classless Society: 1979, Lutterworth Press, Guildford and London

John Howard Yoder, Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World: 1992, Discipleship Resources, Nashville

Peace Has a Fine Shirt: Violence, Nonresistance and Loving the Enemy

2011-03-25T11:08:00.001Z

I met my enemy on the road and he stripped the shirt off my back. So now he stands there grinning that he has a fine shirt and we're doing all the hurting and hard work. We would hate him if we could but he's wearing our best shirt. In this light he looks just like me. Shall I give him my coat as well and walk a little further? Let's see if the trick holds. So they walked another mile.

This is a time when Christians are preoccupied with journeys. We are walking with Jesus to Jerusalem or two nameless travellers on their way to Emmaus. Sometimes the route is chosen for us - bullies with packs to carry, a tyrants' census or Simon hauling a borrowed cross. In the end though, no journey is ever fully planned. Zaccheus waits by every roadside. Inconvenient babies are born in borrowed mangers. Thugs in stolen shirts carry their victims' memory. Sunday follows Friday.

Behind the Uniform: Emergency Services Beyond the Call of Duty

2011-03-24T13:56:00.003Z

Over the past week or so I've been critical of people in uniforms behaving badly. Yesterday though, restored my faith in human nature. Waiting for the bus outside the Slug and Lettuce in Muswell Hill I witnessed the kindness of two police officers and an ambulance crew. They were speaking to an elderly man - obviously disoriented and distressed. My first guess was 'alcohol' but my second was probably epilepsy. He smelt pretty ripe and didn't look like the average north London upstanding citizen. Most of the queue were keeping their distance. His 'angels' treated him with the utmost dignity and respect.

What a dozen bus passengers saw in Muswell Hill yesterday went beyond duty. Christians would call it 'service'. At its best 'service' has an interior, almost sacramental, quality. It is a quality though, which transforms the ordinary. The Slug and Lettuce sacrament was no ceremony; more a celebration of everyday possibilities. I have no idea whether our any of our bus stop 'congregation' were Christians, but the Kingdom of God is like this.

Peace and Militarism Between the Lines

2011-03-22T13:11:00.005Z

We peaceniks like our issues in tidy parcels. If, God forbid, another 'war to end all wars' loomed onto the horizon most of us would reach for the conscientious objectors tickbox. But issues are not tidy and the borderland terrain is marked in shades of grey. Here are a few choices from the borderlands:

1) Chaplaincy
2) War tax resistance
3) Opposition to the military-industrial complex
4) Filling in the census form (or not)
5) Structural Violence
6) The overlap betwee coercion and violence
7) The legacy of monotheism
8) Coercive argumentation
9) Reporting crimes to the police (do we or don't we?)
10) Recourse to the secular legal system
11) Abusive church discipline
12) Patriarchy
13) Whether dogma is intrinsically violent
14) Political involvement or separation
15) The military associations of uniformed organisations
16) The ethics of doing nothing
17) Is pacifism voyeuristic or parasitic?
18) Institutional racism
19) The adminstration of limited resources
20) The link between violence and propaganda

Responding peaceably to these heavily nuanced conundrums is enough to tax any of us. Quite a few of us in my own peaceably inclined congregation were challenged by the impressive and committed young woman who turned up at our morning service a few weeks ago. What support she asked, was available to people who objected on principle to the current census? I know it was news to a few of us that world's largest arms manufacturer exporter Lockheed Martin had won the contract to support the 2011 census in England, Wales and Northern Ireland . To my knowledge none of us had refused to fill in the forms. I knew of a similar internal debate in the Green party. In both cases we were also aware of counter-arguments based on the social benefits of the census as an indicator of deprivation. At very least I felt that even if the pacifist majority filled in the returns whilst holding our noses, supporting 'conscientious objectors' in the event of legal action was the right thing to do.

To take another example - uniforms. Being honest, I detest them. Perhaps it was the sight from schooldays of my classmates parading around and drilling with the Combined Cadet Force. Presumably their teacher-officers thought they were making men out of boys, but they made a pacifist out of me. I don't think it went down well when, a few years later, I described a church scout troop as a 'junior para-military'. Michael Foster has a useful survey of the militarism issue in scouting, particularly in relation to the anti-militarist Francis Vane. With respect to the often terrific work carried out by uniformed organisations, in a society marked by a crusading nationalism we could do better than schooling young people in a military mindset.

The above list is not exhaustive but it's certainly exhausting to tackle alone. Perhaps that's one reason we have peace churches in addition to naked, individual pacfiist conscience. Reasoning together around peace and violence has formed part of the Jesus movement from the beginning. That reasoning has never faced a more complex and hostile environment.

Crusaders

2011-03-20T09:07:00.004Z

This morning I turned on my radio to a sick sense of deja vu with news of war in Libya . Eight years to the day that George Bush announced attacks on Iraq a stony faced President Obama did the same as he spoke to reporters in Brasilia. Perhaps predictably Colonel Gaddafi has described the action as "a second Crusader war." In this at least he may be right. Radical opinion across the Muslim world is already conjuring the ghost of crusading armies and colonial aggression. The Kavaz Center, linked to Pro-Chechen insurgency in Cauacaus, announced, 'U.S. and allies launch Crusade against Libya'.

But the rhetoric flows both ways. Popularized in the crusades and adapted by Puritan preachers, the myth of redemptive violence is alive and well in American self-understanding, the bellicose nationalism of British foreign secretaries and the anti-muslim tirades of the far right. It was President Ronald Reagan who addressed a British Parliament on the 8 June 1982, calling for 'a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation'. As we are living in the 'next generation' I can only conclude that in Libya Reagan's prophecy of a perpetual renewal of the crusading spirit has been chillingly fulfilled.

A New Silent Spring

2011-03-18T10:54:00.000Z

Today I remembered my grandmother. Her monk's chair stands in our hall. I suppose you would say my grandparents were well off, but I was a child and didn't notice these things. All told I spent more time at her house than I did our own. I owe her a good deal, Edith Gertrude Ainsley, especially for her encouragement.

My grandmother bought me my first bird book, 'Bird Spotting'. It was a chunky hardback with illustrations I memorised from back to front. The book long since fell apart through overuse, but the pictures are still in my head. Not that I could ever tell a Chiffchaff from a Willow Warbler by sight.

When we moved to our new home near Epping Forest almost the first thing we unpacked (after the coffee) was the Bird Table. It's not expensive but it has a green roof , space for seed and hooks around the rim of table for hanging fat or peanuts. Apart from a few welcome visitors, including Jays from the nearby woodland, the take-up has been sparse. Birds which I would have expected in this forest borderland are absent. It is hard not to give way to nostalgia, but the suburban bird table of my childhood groaned under the weight of Greenfinches, Blue and Great Tits.

In general British birds have seen significant declines in woodland, farmland and grassland settings. The most comprehensive survey, the British Trust for Ornithology's (BTO) Common Bird Census, ended in 1999 but it is clear that the downward spiral has continued. Nightingales probably never did sing in Berkeley Square but these days they don't warble in our woodlands either. The BTO survey reported a 95% collapse in Nightingale populations over a thirty year period. Reasons for the decline are complex. In some cases it seems likely that less sympathetic habitat management is to blame. The impact of browsing by sharply increasing deer populations certainly has an impact in some woodland areas. Damage to habitats outside the UK is also significant, especially with migrant woodland species that overwinter in parts of Africa where more intensive agriculture and drought are a factor. Finches especially are vulnerable to trichomonosis, which is passed on through food and water. The effect of climate change is more subtle but there is a link with the timing of egg laying and migration. As temperatures rise many birds are driven north. Some birds like the Scottish Crossbill, which is unique to the British Isles, face extinction, because there is simply nowhere else to go.

The prospect of another and more deadly 'silent spring' comes ever closer. A solution will take more than banning certain pesticides. This is more than a question of birds and bees. It goes to the heart of what it means to be human – whether we wish to be the sole occupant of a desert world; both perpetrator and victim in a hell of our own making.

Bread, Soup and Homelessness

2011-03-17T11:01:00.002Z

The first job I ever had was with Bethany, a Christian hostel in Bury near Manchester. I don't know what I expected. Perhaps not assisting the DHSS in closing down another local 'hostel' which was doubling as a brothel. God's world of original plenty is always open for business but in our world space can often come at a very high price.

For my parents' generation the appearance of street beggars and the rise of visible homelessness came as a post-war shock. The TV documentary Cathy Come Home (1966) followed by the launch of Shelter later that year and the Greve Report (1971) prepared the ground for legislation which has defined the landscape of homelessness, particularly the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act.

Homelessness exists, not because the overwhelming majority of homeless people love the lifestyle, but because of a lack of affordable homes. This scarcity is entirely manufactured. Many homes have been sold off. Few new ones are being built. House prices, deposits and market rents remain beyond the reach of many people – not only the poorest. At the same time land is expensive and largely monopolized by a tiny landowning elite. The system of private land ownership in the UK has hardly changed since William the Conqueror. To play off environmental concerns against the need for affordable housing is a red herring. Three million additional homes would take up 0.3% of our land area. That figure would be even lower given creative development of brownfield sites.

Homelessness creates more sound and fury than any other form of poverty. This is not because homeless people are necessarily in greater need than other poor people, but because they are the awkward poor. They have the temerity to be visibly poor; to give the merchant bankers indigestion as they count their bonuses. The current controversy in central London in which Westminster Council are seeking to ban rough sleepers and charities providing food and support from an area around Victoria Station, is a graphic illustration. The proposed ban has nothing to do with the welfare of homeless people and everything to do with creating a sanitized new world for wealthy Londoners and the 2012 Olympics.

Once again the myth of scarcity is at work. There is always room for bread and conversation, for homes and hospitality. Whatever the complexity of our overall response to homelessness there is always space for Christians to make peace, welcome strangers or pour the Westminster minestrone. There is no room for greed or 'communities' composed of people just like us.

Serpents and Scarcity

2011-03-16T19:56:00.006Z

In the main this has been an occasional blog. I want to do things a little differently over the next few days with a some musing around a theme of 'plenty and scarcity'. What prompted the reflection? Partly, Veronica Zundel's challenging Sunday sermon from Genesis. However the story turned out the headline on that biblical front page is a celebration of original plenty. The repetitions are designed to catch our attention. Just in case we hadn't noticed, we're well blessed. It's a 'good, good and very good world'. Whatever meanness and misery flow from the fall, this fundamental superabundance remains. Though the Psalmist sings in a broken world the chorus - wild asses, lions and the birds of the air - still celebrate God's plentiful generosity (Ps 104). The Lord's hands are open and extravagant (Ps 104:27,28).

Into this picture of plenty and fruitfulness comes the serpent (Gen 3). It isn't easy to play tempter in a perfect world. The serpent's ploy was to offer something to the woman that she already had. The 'Original sin' is false consciousness - capitulation to a myth of scarcity.

The Creator did not abandon this world to the serpent. God names the tempter's lie. Our hunger starts with the tree but where will it end? The whole world will never be enough because it is already ours. We feed on a mirage and in so doing consume ourselves. In the end liberation is possible because the world is restored as the Lord's. It remains the celebrated Creation of an openhanded God:

You never enjoy the world aright, till you see how a sand exhibiteth this wisdom and power of God (Thomas Traherne)

Though Traherne's revelation is thrilling in practice we rarely see all at once. This is partly what the reign of God is about. To hear 'the Kingdom of God is like...' and begin to imagine the world right way up. At the table of Christ, parable by parable - through the hope of a new Creation, God's people recover joy and resistance. The old world of God's Creation pushes up through the flagstones into the world we have made.

Beyond all this talk of serpents and scarity we want to know what the story means. There is certainly a mystical dimension in seeing with new eyes; renewing the first communion with God in Creation. But on its own that is so too individual - hardly political. Perhaps 'seeing' might entail trusting serpentine politicians less when they tell us that nuclear power will fill the 'energy gap' or that public property is wasteful and inefficient. An end to unchecked economic growth and what comes with it - pollution, stress and climate change It might mean the right to roam or even the necessity to 'trespass' on what is already ours. It might even mean the children of Abraham living peaceably as neighbours, sharing their father's estate. It does not mean a land without birds and bees, adding field to field or purging homeless people from the streets of London.

Shopping Trolley Theology

2011-03-15T09:47:00.002Z

Life is perverse. There are always teaspoons at the bottom of our washing up bowls. Voting Clegg gets Cameron. Once again our shopping trolley lurches into the baked beans. It's that one with the bias. Who will deliver me from this trolley of death? I was about to say I meet ten contrary things before breakfast, but then again I'm too busy trying to get the lid off the marmalade.

Yesterday I blogged about Caananites. In my head was perfect prose - wise and profound. Instead, it sits there like a slab of meat - a trolley crash of a post. Last week I chatted to a friend about writing. She said it better than I did, but the day writing gets polite - house-trained, mannerly, domesticated, is a good day to take up train-spotting. This morning I was tempted to pull yesterday's post but I've changed my mind. I shall leave God, the Bible and the Canaanites in a heap with a trolley and the baked beans. It's better to live the questions than to find the answers.

How Many Dead Canaanites Does it Take to Make 'God' into 'god'?

2011-03-14T18:19:00.003Z

“...and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.” (Deut 7:2)

Just because Fundamentalism is wrong in general doesn't make it wrong in particular. The carcass of plenary inspiration still has a little flesh remaining. Within the conservative diatribe against liberalism is a kernel of truth. When the text is susceptible to both liberationist and reactionary readings it is a reasonable assumption that hermeneutic a prioris are at work: vested interests searching for textual pegs to hang ideological hats. As Regina Schwartz points out,

“ In practice it seems that the narratives of history (and the agents driving them) adopt a particular vision of a narrative of biblical literature with a particular political purpose” (Schwartz, p.156)

Whatever the awkwardness of the story it matters that the narrative should be preserved as Scripture – as 'other', with a voice to be heard beyond the clamour of culture and partisan armed camps. When the interpreter pushes then the text should push back. This is in part what Anabaptists mean by the relationship of the inner and outer Word.

So, when we observe that what was good for Israel was bad for Canaanites what does the voice of Scripture mean for a biblical theology – for God's 'reputation'? Just how many dead Canaanites does it take to make God into god? Firstly, I take it on board that it is possible to adopt a revisionist view of Israel's history. For 'invasion' substitute 'settlement' perhaps, much in the way that scholars of English history have revised our understanding of the Anglo-Saxon 'conquest' . Secondly, Millard Lind and others have added enormously to our understanding of Yahweh War (Lind, 1980). In this view because Yahweh is a warrior Israel need not be. Lind's reading makes a clear case for reading the Old Testament via a peaceable Christocentric hermeneutic. Within the Old Testament the journey from Joshua to Jeremiah represents movement from a national military consciousness to a universalist nonbeligerance. Further, as Lind makes clear, this journey entailed both a radically nonconformist perspective on kingship and nationhood. Yet, troubling issues remain. However progressive our approach Yahweh is still a warrior and a genocide is still a genocide:

“You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded” (Deut 20:17).

Perhaps it is an illusion accentuated by publishers but the way Bibles are packaged and presented doesn't help. That conservatively covered, portentously organised volume misdirects the reader from the blindingly obvious. The canon is not 'fixed' like some hapless insect trapped in amber. The Bible is constantly subject to revision, addition. struggle and variation. As late a the 16^th Century arguments raged as to the canonicity of the Apocrypha and Revelation. Song of Songs, Proverbs, Ezekiel, Esther and Ecclesiastes weren't incorporated until the 2^nd Century. Even today Jews and Christians (Catholic, Orthodox, Anabaptist and Protestant) accept different Scriptures. Much of the Amish wedding sermon is taken from the apocryphal book of Tobit, which says something about an Anabaptist hermeneutic that is neither (or both) Catholic and Protestant.

Canonicity is only one part of the picture. Despite our attempts to smooth off the rough edges, the text itself represents multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives. Yet there is something life-giving in this conflict and chaos. We need not seek the true God by canonizing our own culture. Rather, the Bible itself bears witness to a constantly developing dialogue with formative narratives and founding identities. Schwartz is especially helpful. She begins with a discussion of the Exodus (Schwartz, 148-153) in which |Israel's view of the Exodus 'officially' outlined in Deut 26:5-10. Yet the Exodus can be told and retold. In Isaiah it is the Egyptians who cry to God for deliverance and are described along with Israel and Assyria as 'my people' (Is 19:20-25). As Schwartz points out, citing Jonathan Boyarin, the Exodus may be read from a colonizing or liberationist perspective (Schwartz, 154). Joshua's victory over the Canaanites was said to be total (Josh 21:44) yet Judges makes it quite clear that the outcome was far more complex. Schwartz's conclusions are nuanced and dynamic:

“The dialectic of loss and re-creation, of forgetting and remembering, is so frequent in the Bible that it comes to inform each of the scenes of writing the Bible depicts” (Schwartz, 161).

By the time Jesus encounters a sassy, perceptive Canaanite woman (Matt 15:21-28) the story has turned full circle. Here is a Canaanite theology of liberation!

The Bible does not resolve the matter of war, peace, God's violence and human agency. Rather, we are invited to share in a dialectical engagement, not only with the biblical story itself but with the direction of that story. That God also 'grows' within this dialectic is a profound mystery. If 'revision' is part of the biblical dynamic then for the Christian, that dynamic is the way of Jesus and the God of Peace.

Lind, Millard C. 1980 Yahweh is a Warrior. Herald Press, Scottdale

Schwartz, Regina M. 1997. The Curse of Cain: the Violent Legacy of Monotheism. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Why Japan's Tsunami Should Wash Away Our Nuclear Ambitions

2011-03-13T06:17:00.004Z

On Friday Japan was struck by a massive earthquake 1000 times more powerful than the recent Christchurch disaster. Thousands have lost their lives in the quake and resulting tsunsami. Also caught up in the devastation was the Fukushima nuclear power plant. With six nuclear reactors the site is one of the largest in the world. Many people were evacuated from their homes as pumps on the oldest reactor failed.

In both Britain and Japan nuclear plants are situated in coastal locations to take advantage of seawater for cooling. Even for an area of relative geological stability such as the UK, there must be serious concerns for long-term nuclear safety. In Britain tsunamis are not unknown. The ongoing threat of rising sea-levels due to global warming raises similar questions. If anything the danger posed by domestic terrorism in the UK exceeds that in Japan.

Next month will see the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe. The Japanese reactors are of a light water design but similar to the plant involved in the Three Mile Island incident in 1979. In January the British Government announced a plan to allow private companies to build a new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK. Yesterday thousands of people protested against the a decision to extend the life of German reactors. It is a development which may yet breathe new life into the ailing anti-nuclear movement.

However massive, the Japanese earthquake will not curtail our nuclear ambitions. The best that we can hope for is a renewed anti-nuclear movement. For all of us who maintain a principled abhorrence of the use and possession of nuclear weapons the compromised stance of those who also justify civil nuclear power is a major issue. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) reflect a fundamental contradiction - striving to prevent nuclear proliferation whilst actively promoting 'peaceful' nuclear power. Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are umbilically connected. Nuclear proliferation in India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea graphically illustrates this connection. That uranium enrichment technology has also spread to Iran and Libya is a worrying observation and an odd backdoor linkage between the two stories dominating global news headlines.