Bishop Alan’s Blog

Beyond Sneering

2012-05-28T08:11:00.000+01:00

We need words to communicate, but we also use them to consolidate the tribe. On the Day of Pentecost God used words to include everyone as they are in the tribe. It was the end of tribalism.

Back in the eighties the great ra-ra sneer was “Fundamentalism.” All it meant was “something unpleasantly Conservative better rubbished than understood.” The more Conservative noughties brought a new ra-ra term — “Revisionist.”
The give away is always that the person being described thus wouldn't use it of themselves. It may one day become a badge of honour, like “Methodist”, but until it does, whenever you see it used you know all that is going on is mindless sneering.

Then there’s the L-word. At a meeting in 2004 about the Windsor Report, our Diocesan Registrar told us of a young man he saw in Sierra Leone when he was a missionary there in the seventies, necklaced for being gay. He supposed “most of us here were more Liberal than that.” A hand shot up — “Why are you accusing me of being Liberal?”

Since the 1830’s “Liberal” has been the Napoleon of ra-ra words.

Served up in a tasty ad hominem all it means is “if you’re one of those people who believes in say, not hanging people, voting, ending Apartheid, rehabilitating criminals — well then... splutter... you’re just one of those people who believes in...” Preached to the choir, the name-calling combats tribal insecurity, oft reinforced as howler monkeys do, by bouts of furious mutual masturbation that, unlike the simian version, is mercifully mainly verbal.

But what lies beyond? Why, for example, do I believe passionately that women and gay people are equal apart from a mere irrational attachment to a social agenda and a drably conventional theology of Creation that says “whatever God has made is good?”

It struck me yesterday how the cacophony of language on the day of Pentecost says difference is good and unity is emergent. God respected the people’s varied cultural idioms, but the ensuing chaos told the mighty acts of God. To receive the word people didn’t need to divest themselves of their cultural particularity, as would have been necessary if God were a merely tribal deity or mascot. One mark of toxic Pharisaism is scouring land and sea to make people like yourself.

The mightiest act of God is his commandment to love him as we love our crooked neighbour with all our crooked heart. It’s shockingly unconditional. Someone wrote to me last month to say it beggared his belief that a bishop should think that “Love thy neighbour as thyself” applied to homosexuals. It beggars this bishop’s belief that anyone should think that it doesn’t.

“Yes,” I hear some say. “We love people, of course. We welcome all. But that doesn’t mean endorsing what they do.” On one level this is obviously true. Best of luck to you, say I. But make sure you really are welcoming people, not just laying a grinning veneer over a subtext of disapproval. It doesn’t work because, I find, people who have experienced oppression have an almost psychic radar about that kind of hypocrisy. And please remember two other primary truths of the Gospel —

I am in no position, as one sinner, to endorse or not endorse what another sinner does. The Lord does that bit. In God we trust. All others pay cash. I therefore have to be very careful and critical of my own perception. Only when I have removed the plank from my own eye can I help my neighbour see more clearly. It is comical if I, as a Pharisee prone to anger, contentions, party spirit and self-righteousness, all things Jesus taught are evil, rise up and denounce anybody for things Jesus said absolutely nothing about.

We need to assess, ruthlessly, our impact and its fruit as well as our intentions. The good Samaritan teaches us that our actual performance with real people matters more than our good intentions. This is the hardest discipline of all, perhaps. A second sign of toxic Pharisaism is laying burdens on others’ backs too heavy for them to bear. If our welcoming strategy is experienced as oppression it doesn’t work and we need to repent of our hypocrisy ten times more than the object of our welcome needs to divest themselves, even if they could, of whatever it was about them that disgusted us in the first place. By their fruits ye know them. Any policy of the Church that produces scarred, broken self-loathing or even the anger of feeling oppressed in the people it is designed to help needs to change. because either God has given up on all that “Love thy neighbour as thyself / do unto others...” stuff, which is unlikely, or it’s a pretty useless policy.

This, not some notional tendency called Liberalism is the root of the matter. Blessed are those who hear the word of God and do it. That’s all.

Cooking the Curate’s Egg

2012-05-25T08:09:00.000+01:00

So, where has the C of E got to this week on Ministry and gender?
Assuming Les Six have done their stuff, an amended scheme will go before the General Synod in a few days time.

Down the road leading here two mantras have pullulated behind the discussion:

(1) “This isn't, of course, about gender. Perish the Thought.”
This assertion is a lie. It is, and it always was. Discriminatory is as discriminatory does. It is not for the discriminator to judge the matter, based on their intentions, but those discriminated against, based on what actually happens. All else is illusion.

(2) “This is about theology not discrimination.”
This assertion is a lie. However you tart it up, Trevor Huddleston showed us years ago, discriminating is actually a theological assertion. Imagine, as I have attempted sincerely to do, that there is a theology that justifies treating women, against their will and calling, as inferior. I can't conceive of such a thing, but let's suspend disbelief for a moment. What is the difference between that noble theology and cultural prejudice dressed in voodoo? At no time in the past five years has anyone showed me. All that unites reactionaries in this matter seems to be a cultural prejudice against seeing women in positions of authority, reinforced by a reactionary subculture. It is every bit as much drawn from the contemporary world’s values as progressive aspiration. It’s just drawn from the reactionary quarter of them.

So, for synod members, it’s what one game show used to call make-up-your-mind-time, for the next five years anyway.

If the Church needs a gender-neutral ministry, something the vast majority of people believe to be right, this scheme does not deliver that. It is fundamentally inequitable and discriminatory. The best condoms do not have holes in them, however small. There is no telling what monstrous births may take place in the various caves of Adullam this measure potentially creates. It could be a step in the right direction, but it will retain the Church’s institutional sexism in a way most people outside the bubble find puzzling and, ultimately, morally disgusting.

If what matters most is the lesser matter of allowing women to be bishops, this scheme does finagle that. In itself the eventual presence of women in the house of bishops might be able to achieve what the present set-up couldn’t for the institution, and plug the hole in the bucket. In a down and dirty world this won't be the first time in human affairs tulips were grown on dung.

As to the leadership of the Church in synod, a lifetime of pretending, whilst trying to set their course on dead reckoning and politics with only an occasional star sight, scarcely prepares them to exercise moral leadership at a critical moment. Most episcopal palaces are emitting a loud and eloquent silence now. Many of our senior men probably thought on Monday that all they were doing was giving the women what they wanted whilst being as nice as possible to the other lot. That's why you can't see them for dust now.

It’s Touch and Go, I’d say.

Swimmin with the Wimmin part 94

2012-05-22T13:40:00.000+01:00

So what was the women bishops result? I don’t really know, of course, not being part of the house of bishops, but preliminary indications are pretty much that things can roll forward. Bishop Pete Broadbent, who sits in the House, has provided a good thumbnail summary.

The result, in true C of E fashion, is a curate’s egg, but probably not such a rotten one as to send the whole process around again in five years time. The Bishops said “yes,” mainly because anything else would be ludicrous now. The number of people requiring alternative episcopal oversight has dipped in most of the country, very likely, below 2-3% of electoral roll members — something like 0·06% of the population. Another circuit to land in 5 years time would not yield a different result, and certainly not one more congenial to those who believe women do not belong in positions of episcopal authority.

But, some inquire, what exactly does the press release Ruth Gledhill called “the worst written since the Reformation” actually mean?

The project basically moves forward with two amendments. I will now attempt to pick through the entrails. If I am wrong, please correct me. But this is what I think it means...

(1) The first amendment expresses the slightly donnish theological distinction Rowan pushed at the last general synod between “delegated” power, a legal thing, and what could be called ordinary episcopal authority. Thus when I ordain people I am understood to derive my authority to do so from my ordination as a bishop, not from the Bishop of Oxford let alone his gene pool. This has the benefit of expressing traditional ecclesiology in the way that the flying bishops project never did.

The distinction is supposed to help on two fronts. Those who believe higher clergy need male gonads can comfort themselves in the knowledge that their guy got all of his regular authority to function from the admittedly nebulous entity called “the whole church of God,” not the XX bishop up the road. On the other front the Chromosomally Simplistic One can reassure herself that she got her authority from the same place and did not lose any of her episcopal Mojo in order to placate the XY-only people. Their arrangements were a merely legal fandango.

In itself this amendment was probably necessary to move forward at all, given the situation created by the Act of Synod from 1993. Unlike the nineties flying bishops arrangement, at least this amendment is ecclesiologically coherent, and it could help normalise perceptions from a theological point of view. The extent to which ordinary people (in the non-ecclesiastical sense of that term) know or care about it may well be limited.

(2) A second amendment requires bishops to have serious regard, when allocating clergy, to the reasons parishes require bishops or priests with gonads.

On the face of it this is common sense. If people want a male because the Eucharist must be celebrated by someone who shares Jesus’ biological gender (if not his Jewishness or Beard), they get a Real Man of the Eucharist. If on the other hand they believe that God Made Woman not to hold any authority over men in Church (unless an Archdeacon or Supreme Governor), then what matters isn’t the Eucharist, but that women don’t preach to other men. In effect these latter want a proper male preacher, having often in past times had an Oxbridge blue in some Manly Pastime. Just remember this is nothing to do with gender, and that this second amendment, kindly and sensibly, requires a proper match in this matter.

Is the Church going to remain a discriminatory organisation, with a thinning theological figleaf to cover its vulnerability? Truth compels me to say, probably yes. In Brer Rabbit terms the old deal was that the buses were not segregated, and as long as the whites who believed in segregation on biblical grounds sat at the front, they could kid themselves that there weren't blacks at the back of the bus. This has now been modified. The driver can soon be black, and those who believe in Biblically based separate development can either stare out the window sideways or comfort themselves that they only have to look on the back of the driver's head. This scheme could well be a way to bring women bishops onshore from places like Oz, New Zealand, Canada, and the US. That's progress, I suppose. Intellectually, it’s not quite desegregation. But do not underestimate the power of evolution. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Evolution didn’t work.

In the meanwhile my picking over the entrails mattereth not a pig’s burp. There is a special Group of Six Wise Ones (including one woman) who will now pick over the entrails to decide whether this is too radical a change to go forward. I wouldn’t think that's too risky a bet, but the C of E is a place loaded with surprising possibilities. If Les Six do decide this amended scheme won’t blow all the fuses on the Enterprise, everything rolls onward to York in June. Get that old ecclesiastical anorak out of the cupboard and tighten your underwear. The Monstrous Regiment is at the gates.

Ascending thither not Copping Out

2012-05-17T14:42:00.000+01:00

It’s now many years since the British celebrated Ascension Day like other Europeans. Have we lost touch with the ascension as good news?

I confess that I am unimpressed by the rock at the Mosque of the Ascension, the one Jesus’ foot cracked on takeoff. I am unmoved by depictions of holy feet topped by hairy ankles lifting off like a Saturn Five — “See the canny Scot return to his native Bannockburn.” Any depiction of this transition as a return to HQ, or the shedding of physicality, makes it less than good news. It blazes a trail all follow towards their destiny. It illuminates our present humanity.

Bishop Christopher Wordsworth put it like this in 1862:

He has raised our human nature in the clouds to God’s right hand;
There we sit in heavenly places, there with Him in glory stand:
Jesus reigns, adored by angels; man with God is on the throne;
Mighty Lord in Thine ascension we by faith behold our own.

Classical Christian theology calls Jesus eternally Incarnate. The Ascension is not the reversal of the Incarnation but a radical extension of it beyond time and place, into the depths of all human life as well as to its ultimate destiny.

If we understand this we can no longer think anything human alien from us or beneath us.

This matters because one easy response to stress-induced change is “stop the world, I want to get off.”

A popular Christian version takes the form of railing against the world as it actually is, often because of romantic attachment to some imagined age of faith in the past, served up with a dash of “here’s to us, who’s like us.” It might be a lot of fun to live in the twelfth century, or perhaps not. It is no part of our calling as a Christian. All ages are provisional, but this does not require us to be anything less than realistic about the one we’re called to live in.

The ascension frees Jesus from any particular age. Its result is not subtractive delocalisation but hyper localisation. This makes the gospel potentially good news for everybody and anybody, far more than a tribal identity. The Church becomes an expression of Christ’s universal servant kingship to others as they are rather than a club, or a vehicle for human imperialism. Christ's body reveals itself as what it is not by cutting others out, but by serving anybody on their own terms at their point of need, as in the parable of the good Samaritan. It is transferability makes Christianity fly. Its scope is infinite, and infinitely adaptable.

The big issue with settling for a smaller vision isn’t judgmentalism or discrimination or romanticised lock in to some imagined past, although these tendencies bring their own problems.

Club Christianity represents less than the stature of the fulness of Christ who fills all things. It speaks with the voice of Scribes and Pharisees, and not with authority. Its god is too small.

The mystery of the ascension invites us to radical deep engagement, the enfleshing of the Word in the world as it is, not a Gnostic cop-out.

Christian Aid: A Bigger Splash

2012-05-06T03:43:00.000+01:00

Everything in India is bigger. Driving through Hyderabad assaults the senses with its seemingly endless miles of heaving humanity in all its expressions, diversity and colour. How small it makes the field on which I play out most regular work seem. In 42 degree heat a small group of us hone a development plan for a school based on Jesus’ principle that the child is greatest in the Kingdom and only the best is good enough for the poor.

This is no time for half measures or empty gestures. World citizens clever enough for the social and technical way we’re evolving but morally grounded enough to make it worth living in do not grow in trees. Each child gets one opportunity to grow and learn, and there are no dress rehearsals. Here, beyond gestures, for some of the poorest people int he world, We are trying to capture Jesus’ vision of life in all its fulness. Nothing less is worthy of our highest endeavours, even if it means being real but also radical about everything, including ourselves.

But how?

The question brings me back a particular conversation with a City trader. He’s a good and decent man, who well understands the virtues of capitalism and has pursued them. He is no fool. He knows that our present system, worked by autopilot, has no long-term future. It has produced wealth, but also tremendous debt. It relies on half a billion partying in first class whilst everybody else lives a less enriched life. The arrival at the ball of another two billion aspirant middle class partygoers from Brazil, India, Russia, and China (to name but a few)has to change everything radically. It calls for a new kind of ingenuity. Finally the rape of the pant has consequences.

So what we need, he says, is beyond economics.

Economics is often treated as a science but in fact it is no such thing. It manages inequalities according to a set of assumptions about worth that go beyond its own capacity to examine them.

Economics draws its basic premises from choices we make about what we see as a good life. Questions about those bring the doctor and the priest in their long coats, running over the fields.

What we need, my trader friend and I say, is beyond the secular principle — life pursued pragmatically, free from the imposition of particular religious dogma in its narrowest sense. It’s a precious hygiene factor in any free society, but does not exhaust the possibilities of being alive. Without is we cannot run a decent and humane society, and it has serious comment to offer on how the ship is running, but can have no idea of where the ship is going.

I wonder about a slogan I saw a few years ago, painted on the side of the South Karnataka State Legislature in Bangalore — “Government business is God’s business.” They don’t mean any particular god among the thousands India holds. But they do means what they say. Not only is the ultimate subject matter the stuff people engage with in community by faith, but these things that really count can only be pursued radically with courage and confidence. Pure pragmatists are only tinkering, and more is being demanded of us all than mere tinkering.

How is God calling us to do this? By grace through faith that is committed enough to

be Real and open to what is — not to tart things up, because faith is beyond pretending
be Positive about what might be — because what proceeds from faith is faith, and Anglicans above all should know that all you get from fear is paltry squabbling, however worthy and genteel
Get Engaged — to get right out of its comfy seat and engage, remembering that because of the incarnation the only bass for true and fruitful engagement is equality
be Honest — taking every thought captive to Christ because otherwise we are stuck in no more than a religious hall of mirrors

That’s enough down and dirty agenda for a lifetime, is it?

We have work to do. Over the next three days the newly honed school development plan needs to go back to its originators in the school, and we work with them to make it happen.

The jeep calls at 11.00.

But mummy, he hasn’t got anything on!

2012-04-19T09:02:00.000+01:00

One way Bishops can respond to the government's consultation on gay marriage is sitting on our hands, staring out the window, going ho-hum, hoping that the whole thing will just go away.
Yesterday the archbishop of Wales showed a better way:

Dr Barry Morgan said the Church would not be able to ignore the new legislation on civil marriage proposed by the Government, despite the fact that the legislation would not allow gay couples to marry in church. He called on the Church to discuss how it would respond.He said, “If the legislation to allow civil marriage is passed, I cannot see how we as a church, will be able to ignore the legality of the status of such partnerships and we ought not to want to do so.“The question then as now is, will the church protect and support pastorally, faithful, stable, lifelong relationships of whatever kind in order to encourage human values such as love and fidelity and recognise the need in Christian people for some public religious support for these..."

What this discussion is uncovering for me, is the extent to which I am, at heart, an Evangelical who believes in Marriage. That’s not “Evangelical” in a Fundamentalist sense — I don't think fundamentalism is particularly good news to anyone, not even fundamentalists.

I am Evangelical enough to believe that Christ is, in fact, risen and we are, actually, his body in the world, charged in Matthew 28 to be good news to the whole creation, by observing his commands. He didn't say “keep everything the same” let alone “suppress gays.” He did say “Love your neighbour as yourself” and “Judge not that ye be not judged.” He did say “take the beam out of your eye before you try and remove the mote from someone else's” and “Love as I have loved you.”

Is there anything unclear about any of that? I don't think so.

Therefore the highest duty of the Church is not to preserve institutions, but to be, simply and completely, good news. The gospel isn't “good news/bad news” or “good news as long as you buy it properly.” It isn’t even “what would Jesus do?” It’s “What is Jesus actually doing through the whole creation, and trying to do through us if only we got real?”

Jesus referred marriage back to the way God actually made us. Marriage is a gift of God in creation that strengthens community and expresses divine love — that’s what’s meant by calling it “sacramental.”

In fact a very small but significant proportion of every human population is gay. If some of these people want to build stable faithful relationships based on love, that has to be a good thing. Love is love wherever it is found. We know it by its fruits, not its origins. But the fruits reveal the origin. God is love and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them. This is the good news.

Thus the prime question Christians have to ask is not “is the idea of ay marriage right or wrong?” but, whatever we make of the theory of the matter, “how can we be good news to the real human beings involved?”

Whatever the rights and wrongs of gay marriage it could be advancing the Church towards a rather healing Emperor's New Clothes moment.

Art h/t — http://kidsartists.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/emperors-new-clothes.html

Unity

2012-04-06T16:51:00.000+01:00

I spend the morning of Good Friday, when possible, listening to the St John Passion. This year a particular theme stood out of the narrative: Unity — something bishops are supposed to represent, and something Anglicans have been mortgaging the farm to try and create. Today’s narrative seems to contain three concepts of Unity

Totemic Religious Alignment
This is what Caiaphas and Annas seek. The Temple is the great expression of religious identity and aspiration. Whatever secures cohesion, loyalty to the temple is prioritised, no matter what the cost. Thus it is expedient for one man to die for the people. It will reassure Roman authority by putting clear blue water between the temple authorities and a troublemaker who, apparently, preaches against the precious holy place. Justice may be desirable but becomes dispensable to the high priest, discharging his over-riding responsibility as professional guardian of the sacred.
Political containment, control, Imperium
This is Pilate’s aim. Whoever Jesus is, whatever he has done or not, there is a tumult among the people. Whatever secures the power of the state is paramount. There are fine Roman principles of justice but this man is no citizen, and for some reason his own leaders want him out the way. The pragmatic duty of a wise ruler charged with securing the public peace is to let the pale Galilean die. His Death is regrettable but ultimately the best way to hold the Empire together.
Emergent from Failure and Brokenness
As the events of Thursday and Friday unfold, the disciples must have been utterly dismayed to see their leader abandon everything and, surrendering any credible sense of his own destiny, seemingly throw himself into the vortex. He mounts no defence, answers question with no more than another question, and refuses to summon the angels to save him. Everything he has said and done appears to add up to... nothing.

So bishops who want to focus real unity will not settle for patched up falsehood — the totemic unity pushed by the Sanhedrin or the political balancing act of Herod and Pilate. Real unity grows in people's hearts, as they recognise a bigger source of spiritual unity as the gift of God and live out the implications, however hard it may be to do so. Real unity comes when people see they belong to others because God accepts all his children so it is foolish to play off one against another. Real unity cannot be engineered by pretending but begins with union that accepts loss and despair.

You cannot create unity that is worth anything by appealing to it as a general principle, or by religious or political manipulation. True unity is the gift of God — love with open eyes.

Christ on a Cold Stone from Catharijneconvent, Utrecht; photo credit: Ruud Raats

Time for a reboot not a bailout

2012-03-30T11:37:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, for the third time this year, someone expressed to me genuine concern about involving the Church in a project because they feared that dealing with a discriminatory organisation would compromise their moral integrity. The C of E used to be the guardian of the nation’s morals, but is increasingly perceived as irrelevant, or even a threat to them. At first sight this is amazing, because the people I meet in Church are usually kind, upright and morally aware. The nation’s moral instinct has changed, however. The Church in its own bubble has become, at best the guardian of the value system of the nation’s grandparents, and at worst a den of religious anoraks defined by defensiveness, esoteric logic and discrimination.

The collapse of Empire may have led people to search for a new moral purpose in diversity not conformity. Neoliberal economics since Thatcher may have broken down networks and social tribes, regional identities and family ties. A new social and moral consensus has emerged. It is broadly Christian in the sense of "inspired by the teaching of Jesus” but disconnected from the institutional Church.

This affects more than just the C of E. Evangelical bodies bemuse people who are innately suspicious of religious zeal and unpersuaded about the particularities involved. The RC Church seems corrupt and weird about sex.

Locally, the C of E is often good news. Individual clergy and Christians are often liked and respected on the streets. The figure of Jesus remains broadly attractive, even intriguing and sometimes compelling.

The national institution, however, appears disconnected from all this, remote, hierarchical, fixated on its own stuff.

This moral shift makes the conventional language of high, low and broad, conservatives and liberals, traditionalists and revisionists, mods and rockers, irrelevant. The real fault line now in the Church is between those of all stripes who are at home with social change, and whose Jesus inspires them to find ways of living authentic lives in this culture, and those who fear it, and whose religion is a way to prevent it, or even reverse it.

Where does faith come into this? As a theological virtue, faith can never be entirely at home in any particular cultural context, nor so scared of it as to take refuge in paranoia. On the streets what binds Christians of all denominations together is not institutional but inspirational glue — our mission. Missional zeal is kindled when passion sets values alight, not regulatory efficiency or structural elegance. the Church of the future may be less a civil service or conventional business, and more a movement like Alcoholics Anonymous, the ultimate locally delivered life-changing non profit. The job of the hierarchy will be to enable this, not to represent it or control it.

To represent the grace and truth of Christ to this generation and be good news to those within its care, the Church needs, not a re-brand or a bailout, but a reboot.

Where does Christianity connect with Life as it is lived?

What lines of code would come up on the screen during such a reboot?

Boot and Reboot?

2012-03-27T17:33:00.003+01:00

The boot goes into the Anglican Covenant. Time to reboot?

We could try to defibrillate the whole thing hoping that somehow this process that has just split the Church of England down the middle will somehow transmute into a great Focus of Unity. That way madness lies — stupidity that repeats the same mistake over again, hoping for a different result. Another very English option is to pretend nothing really happened, sit on our hands going “ho-hum” whilst, as Covenant supporters sometimes prognosticated, the sky falls in, or not.

Wouldn’t it be healthier to acknowledge reality? Take this as an invitation to look at the painful image in the mirror. Bishops were largely out of touch. In spite of, nay, because of our infantilised “Daddy knows best” culture, Daddy got it wrong. The troops did not buy a well-intentioned attempt to lick us into denominational shape. Much heavy covenant sell failed to persuade. It did not explain why or how bureaucratic accountability would improve on a free relationship of equals. Always start with “why?”

There were flaws way back down the line in signing up for the whole culture war that started this. Perhaps the real mistake was colluding in the first place with the foolish erection of homosexuality, hitherto a subsidiary ethical question, into a massive make or break worldwide custard pie fight. The dogs of war this unleashed did not want to be refereed by anyone.

Once upon a time, a bishop so loved chocolate he convinced himself that if he fed his chickens coco pops they would lay Easter eggs. People queried his pet scheme, only to be told “it’s the only show in town.” Questioned further, His Lordship said “but I thought you liked chocolate.” Backed into a corner, he accused his questioners of cruelty to animals.

In the cold light of day, much argumentation for the Covenant really was similarly barmy. I still don’t know whether I’m a bunch of grapes or a billiard ball. Neither do I care. Nothing in it would have made the slightest bit of difference to potential refuseniks on either side of any question that really mattered to them. The tone and content of Archbishop Okoh’s reaction to Rowan’s retirement makes this abundantly plain, as well as conveying the sheer crappiness of all he’s gone through these past ten years. The letter explains why people thought something had to be done, but also why this could never have worked.

All we are left with, as a diverse family of churches, is to talk with people directly rather than about them. This could be a great opportunity to think through the implications. The Anglican communion works wonderfully well as a network of people, but makes a lousy vatican-on-sea. If top-down doesn’t work, what does? It may be time to take stock, some would say grow up. But how?

Watch this space...

Anglican Covenant: Teapot on the Hob?

2012-03-16T07:51:00.000Z

Since writing a piece for the Church Times last year wondering whether the Anglican Covenant was a Chocolate Teapot, dioceses have been voting on it. As things stand 17 have voted against and 10 in favour; voting across the board has so far been more than half against. So what?

Well, the Covenant may be, as the Archbishops say it is, a Very Wonderful Thing. On the level of the Trades Descriptions Act, however, if more than half the people don’t buy it, there is no way it can honestly be seen as summing up the basis of their identity. At the very least it needs a trip back to the holy drawing board to turn it into something most people actually own. The matter speaks for itself, as the lawyers say.

When I wrote my CT piece I thought I would get a flush of answers explaining its virtues to me. No such luck.

What I got instead was concerns from all over the communion founded on fears it will turn the Anglican Communion into the kind of denomination where you opt in by signing up rather than turning up. Some will face legal complications — one Canadian legal officer estimated it would add $10K to law suits over land if the dioceses had to establish their Anglican credentials in addition to what they have to do now.

Meanwhile it's also clear as day that nothing in this document would make a diocese minded to make either a Gay Bishop or an African Incursion think twice, let alone desist. If the covenant goes through nice guys will use it to include people in; nasty to exclude those of whose behaviour they disapprove. The law of unintended consequences applies.

Some have expressed concern about the rather Tony Soprano phrase “relational consequences.” Yes, but everything we do impacts others, and thus has relational consequences. If the covenant goes through these will be more formal and bureaucratic at an earlier stage, that’s all. The Anglican Communion thrives relationally, but struggles bureaucratically. If you think a bit more formality at an earlier stage will build relationships, by all means vote for it. By and large my experience in all fields of life indicates that when you call in the lawyers it stilts and blocks relationships rather than builds them.

Similarly in soothing mode, I’m not sure the Covenant will be the abomination of desolation. The New Zealanders, for example, can’t sign it as one of their three constituencies has rejected it. They have a bad history of impositions from London and didn’t buy it. Does that mean they are now slow lane Anglicans? I’ve asked around, and the answer is, apparently not. This is comforting, but raises the Kenneth Williams question about the whole exercise. (“what’s the bloody point?”)

I shall listen carefully to the debate in our diocese. I can only vote for the covenant if those who support it can produce something very much better than tendentious waffle spiced by emotional blackmail to explain it.

The row that produced this document has, mercifully, moved on fundamentally from the night of the long knives to the night of the long trousers. I don’t want to go back to where we were on the gay issue, and I don’t want to have a two-speed Church, and I don’t want to add to the burdens on colleagues abroad, and I don’t want to collude with childish attempts to punish the Americans for being children of the Enlightenment, if such they are. Neither do I think a healthy family should roll over in a supine way and pretend to believe in something it doesn’t just because Daddy will be upset if it doesn’t.

The whole thing is foolish, and founded on a damaging control fantasy. Best give it a decent Christian burial and move on.

Gnats, Camels, Gospel

2012-02-28T07:45:00.001Z

When the Church acts out its institutional anxiety, hypocrisy and self pity, embarrassed people switch off. Turn it onto Jesus, immerse ourselves in his spoken and lived teaching, and ears prick up. It also leads people to expect we will be genuinely aligned. I increasingly think I need to be a “Red Letter” Christian. My college tutors were horrified by red letter bibles’ apparent certainty about who was speaking when, but the principle increasingly makes sense to me.

If the Church prioritizes being a delivery vehicle for the Kingdom it cannot take itself too seriously, and will stay clear of fruitless culture wars about semi-irrelevancies.
The only credible strategy has to be II Corinthians 4:

We preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake.

If it's any comfort II Timothy 2:23 shows that the early Church faced exactly the same challenges. We need to stay watchful and focussed on the things that Jesus cared about. And, as professional gardians of the sacred, we need to remember that his harshest words were reserved for people in our job. We have the greatest need to stay watchful, because it's easy to deceive ourselves that our business is automatically God's business, which it isn't always quite. Thus, Richard Rohr's daily email today strikes a resonant note for me:

In recent elections one would have thought that homosexuality and abortion were the new litmus tests of Christianity. Where did this come from? They never were the criteria of proper membership for the first 2000 years, but reflect very recent culture wars instead—and largely from people who think of themselves as “traditionalists”! The fundamentals were already resolved in the early Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed. Note that none of the core beliefs are about morality at all. The Creeds are more mystical, cosmological, and about aligning our lives inside of a huge sacred story. When you lose the mystical level, you always become moralistic as a cheap substitute.Jesus is clearly much more concerned about issues of pride, injustice, hypocrisy, blindness, and what I have often called “The Three Ps” of power, prestige, and possessions, which are probably 95% of Jesus’ written teaching. We conveniently ignore this 95% to concentrate on a morality that usually has to do with human embodiment. That’s where people get righteous, judgmental, and upset, for some reason. The body seems to be where we carry our sense of shame and inferiority, and early-stage religion has never gotten much beyond these “pelvic” issues. As Jesus put it, “You ignore the weightier matters of the law—justice, mercy, and good faith . . . and instead you strain out gnats and swallow camels” (Matthew 23:23-24). We worry about what people are doing in bed much more than making sure everybody has a bed to begin with. There certainly is a need for a life-giving sexual morality, but one could question whether Christian nations have found it yet.
Christianity will regain its moral authority when it starts emphasizing social sin in equal measure with individual (read “body-based”) sin and weaves them both into a seamless garment of love and truth.

Mimi the Dead Cat. She Being Dead yet Speaketh.

2012-02-17T12:24:00.000Z

Academies are all the rage in England. It all began with visits by UK politicians to Charter Schools in the US, especially KIPP and the Harlem Children's Zone. Here were transformational inner city projects that helped the poorest achieve great things. They were also non-unionised, and non selective — indeed most energy was focussed on those with the greatest obstacles to learning. Almost 12,000 children's lives are impacted by HCZ, with an almost 100% graduation rate. What’s not to like?

Very little; indeed after spending a day in NY with HCZ, I’d love to see something similar in the UK. The current government-driven academies programme is a less than flattering imitation of the original.

HCZ Is bottom up, not top down. The whole notion of forcing people to convert to a Charter structure induced helpless mirth among our hosts.
HCZ is holistic, It takes a whole area of 79 blocks in the roughest end of Harlem, and attacks on several fronts at once, through 18 different programmes from parenting classes to litterpicks. The schools are not isolated from the rest of life.
HCZ is driven by educators, not politicians. It is happy for politicians to take a share of the credit and engage on a governance level, but they fiercely protect the integrity of their operation. This is no particular slight on their local politicians. It’s the only way it can build long term, and escape the doleful consequences of the political five year cycle. With a $95m budget, 70% of which is privately raised, it needs good business links. But donations do not buy anything operationally — companies simply have to buy into the programme as is.
HCZ is passionate about making sure all the credit for its achievement is placed with the people in its programmes themselves. It wants to grow leaders from within the community, not impose expertise from the outside.
HCZ is in for the long haul. It's not about getting impressive results ramped out for the next election but a forty year programme of broad social transformation.
Pushed to describe HCZ’s ultimate value, the word was “Equality.” It does not exclude children from its schools, but works with them to find a way through. Therefore the whole mechanism of exclusions and competition between schools at the heart of English State education since the eighties doesn’t apply.

Many in the UK mouth platitudes about improving education, but if they don’t actually believe in equality, the class system wins every time. Without the motive to engage in the way HCZ does, all our politicians are able to do is clip out bits of the Charter Schools programme that sound as though they might be appealing back home. Concept without values is meaningless. The result is a government that blunders around aping something from the US it doesn’t really understand, and wouldn't actually want if it did.

They say history begins as tragedy and ends as farce. Comparing the UK government driven approach to HCZ, I was reminded of Mimi the Persian Cat. Alive she was quite a looker. Stuffed by a semi-competent taxidermist, she lost her charms...
Don’t our children deserve better than this?

The Plain Truth (100 words)

2012-02-08T06:46:00.000Z

Read the comments and weep. Everybody outside the Bubble sees that this is about discrimination. The C of E as a discriminatory body is running hard over thin air, way off a cliff that used to be there. What yesterday's synod debate demonstrated clearly is that binloads of dense legal verbiage actually obstructs understanding and mutual communication. Better just sit down, talk and arrange matters, like they have everywhere else in the world. It's the Gospel way. If this ludicrous Sir Humphrey approach is all that's possible, at least try and keep the legalese simple, brief & to the point.

No Woman No Cry

2012-02-05T13:35:00.002Z

Back in 1945 the first BBC Any Questions devoted many minutes to discussing “Would you allow a black man in your house?” It was a vigorous discussion. Since then, public sentiment has developed radically, and the Anglican Church, having initiated this moral shift in the days of Trevor Huddleston, Canon Collins, Gonville ffrench-Beytagh and Desmond Tutu, has now been left high and dry as one of the only institutions left that gets away with gender discrimination in its senior leadership — or wants to.

Using a Protected Characteristic, to use the legal phrase, to deny someone a position or service they would otherwise have had access to is Discrimination and it is seen in our present mores as immoral, and in pretty much every field except religion, illegal.

It would be helpful, I’m told, to explain what Good Discrimination is and how to do it. I can’t oblige, because there is no such thing as Good Discrimination, any more than Ethical Fraud or Slavery Lite. If you think you can abolish Apartheid but mollify your tail-enders by allowing a bit of segregation on Tuesday afternoons, or limit it to a couple of sports clubs, this is just evidence that you don’t quite get it, yet.

I hope therefore this week will not see Archbishops pootling around on a pinhead all over again trying to come up with some convoluted form of Discrimination Lite against women. The very attempt will amaze and disgust the vast majority of people in this country far more than any major player in the game of blowing ecclesiastical bubbles can perhaps understand. It undermines at a tectonic level any claims the Church may make in our culture about bearing, let alone being, Good News.

“But how can you be so sweeping?” some will ask. “There are sincerely held theological arguments and motives involved.” Indeed. There always are. There were for Apartheid and, as Mark Noll’s work has clearly revealed, Slavery in the antebellum South. Most of those arguments were far stronger than the proof texts used for female subordination. All kinds of help and people can adjust, but you simply cannot half abolish apartheid or slavery. Either you do it or you don’t. People may not personally intend discrimination, but the whole Church of England does it, and it’s got to stop, not half stop. This is no time for an ingenious form of Discrimination Lite.

Time to move on. Of course everyone deserves personal kindness, respect and understanding. But views that were obvious in 1945 are now obscene. You can’t have a whites only beach, not even a tiny pebble one, in post-apartheid South Africa.

And if you understand the real moral score, why would you want one?

Looks Like a Duck, Stings like a Bee,

2012-02-03T20:30:00.000Z

A course in Dignity at Work yesterday reinforces what every employer knows. In law and in fact, Discriminatory is as Discriminatory does. If a behaviour is experienced as belittling (and it is for the person who feels it to decide this, not the perpetrator), and it actually expresses itself in measurable behaviour, that's it. Discrimination has occurred whatever the motives or intentions of the perpetrator.

Imagine I open a Hungarian restaurant and refuse to serve anyone but Hungarians. I am discriminating against non-Hungarians. I may point out that I never served non-Hungarians before, or there are parts of the world where racial discrimination is legal, or my head office in Budapest likes me to do it, or any other excuse that comes to mind. I may even say Jesus is telling me to do it, but that is evidence I am crazy, not Jesus. None of it is strictly relevant.

Discriminatory is as discriminatory does, even if I have no conscious intention to discriminate, even if I cannot believe I am the kind of person who would do such a thing. Thirty five years ago I was once quartered with a Christian lady, call her Doris, who explained to a colleague and me that "darkies deteriate (sic) the area.” My more courageous colleague tactfully said he found this sentiment racist. Doris was horrified. Of course not. “If it were,” she said, “that would make me a racist, and I'm not.” Doris was wrong. Hers was a racist sentiment, and, thank God, less likely to be heard from a good Christian lady now, I imagine, than it was thirty five years ago.

In that spirit, it is more than high time for the Church of England to stop discriminating against women in its senior staffing. It really is as simple as that. Whenever this obvious point is made, howls go up from various Dorises that they have no intention to discriminate. We are not as other men are. When we discriminate it is not discrimination. Increasingly, this assertion seems merely ridiculous.

I was glad to read John Sentamu’s recent Telegraph interview on marriage equality, because the full transcript reveals just how little of it was actually about marriage equality. As sometimes happens, the newspaper concerned span the controversial bit largely out of a couple of stray comments at the tail end.

Most of it was moving testimony to how it has felt to be on the wrong end of one of the Church of England’s dirtiest little secrets — genteel and not-so-genteel Racism. When, back in the Halcyon days of the fifities the Windrush generation arrived, 90% of whom were weekly churchgoing Anglicans, we froze, humiliated and drove them out from our churches, often in a few weeks. John Sentamu has himself played a noble part in changing the Church the way it had to go, in the face of howls of protest from Doris and her compadres. It is a positive story looking a happy ending. That will come when the racial balance among clergy in parishes corresponds to the makeup of the communities we serve, and not before.

Now all that is necessary is for Sentamu’s colleagues in purple to join up the dots and get on with ending discrimination against women in bishop appointments. Whether they have the guts to do it now will say much about whether they have anything else of value to offer a society crying out for alternatives to materialism, prejudice, selfishness and apathy. Martin Luther said “The time is always right to do what is right.” After twenty years of ludicrous faffing and wiggling, the time to sort things out is now.

Thatcher: Puccini or Sylvie Krin?

2012-01-10T12:50:00.000Z

It’s always fascinating but unsettling to see living people walking around on the big screen — Stephen Frears’ masterful portrait of The Queen springs to mind.

It’s disturbing to think that the person concerned, along with their nearest and dearest, must be watching this.

I gather the Thatcher clan sat this one out, wisely I think, but they may have sneaked a few peeks through the cracks between their fingers.

This is non-political non-historical Thatcher; indeed all that is missing is music by Signor Puccini to accompany the verismo libretto of “Signora Thatcher e Denis”. The curtain rises to discover our heroine in a Pooter-Chic apartment full of pictures of herself, the sort ordinary people would have to had to Photoshop, mulling over her glory years. Age has wearied her, and the years condemn. June, a maid, hovers cheerfully in the background, whilst her slightly dog-eared daughter Carol performs the functions of a faintly exasperated maid. Meanwhile, 6,000 miles away, the adored Boy Mark drifts on, heedless.

The other principal in the tale, is the shade of Denis, who is not entirely buffo. He flits in and out between arias with kindly but piquant saloon-bar comment.

There goes the Falklands war, and in a furioso aria, La Thatcher tongue-lashes an Argentine dictator, a US Secretary of State, and her own lily-livered crew.

As the aria fades, Denis slides gently onto the sofa behind MT and says something like “well, that saved your bacon, didn’t it old girl.”

You get the idea.

At heart la Thatcher is an ordinary human being with a penchant for occasional Churchillian verbal spasms. Early on she stages an epic breakout, and gets as far as the paper shop where she discovers, horrore! milk is now 49p a pint. This treatment is kindly to the point of patronising, a kindness for those of us still traumatised by her Spitting Image. It’s free with the facts but that could be its greatest strength.

What about Thatcherism, though?

Well what about it? Nothing to it, really. That could be why, in real life, her foundation went bust a few years ago.

Mrs Thatcher’s lifetime achievement turns out to have been holding on tight to the memory of a much-admired father, and living up to his instincts and slogans courageously through an escalating variety of challenges — a thoroughly decent thing to do, but hardly the basis for a new kind of world government.

In 1964 Geoffrey Barraclough observed

contemporary history can only justify its claim to be a serious intellectual discipline and more than a desultory and superficial review of the contemporary scene, if it sets out to clarify the basic structural changes which have shaped the modern world. These changes are fundamental because they fix the skeleton or framework within which political action takes place.

This film is no work of contemporary history. It does not clarify the structural changes that have shaped the modern world. As various chickens come home to roost, sending the wheels flying off the whole neo-liberal free market panjandrum Mrs Thatcher and her friends honestly believed in and represented, perhaps the same can be said of “Thatcherism” itself. But that’s a judgement for historians a few years hence. For now, just enjoy the show.

Meryl Streep's performance is as amazing as everybody says, and if your taste runs to opera verismo in a Barret Home, Signora Thatcher e Denis could well be the production of a lifetime.

St Paul’s: Writing on the subway wall?

2012-01-06T09:00:00.000Z

What can leaders in the Church of England, like me, learn about our operation from last year’s experience outside St Pauls? I wanted to capture three bits of feedback about the Church of England from sympathetic voices. Their words are not comfortable, but we have to pinch ourselves and remember the Facts are our Friends. They can be changed, but doing so will require change in us.

Voice 1:
The chair of our local council, a member of the Conservative party, wrote to the Archbishop to

jolt the leadership of the Church of England to become more vocal and effective in offering moral guidance based on the Gospel to a society where the vast majority are fumbling to find their way to a place where the world’s resources are more evenly shared and where the poor and weak are both supported and respected. ....It is absolutely appropriate for you to comment on the ethics of particular financial structures, taxation and economic policy. However, in arguing for three specific financial solutions in your first public response to the concerns highlighted by the protesters you sounded like yet another economist or politician rather than an Archbishop. Even if each of the suggestions proved to be a brilliant idea would they solve the fundamental problem? No!

You state that the demands of the protesters have been vague.

That, I suggest, is a symptom of their inability to collectively articulate their desire for a fairer world.

Had your response been to answer simply and directly the question on the banner most frequently featured in the media coverage outside St Paul’s “What would Jesus do?” you may have been able to help them.

Present concerns about the future of life, work and money transcend political stereotypes. Mammon is the god that failed, but remains enticing. Right now he has us by the short and curlies. People are desperate to go beyond the assumptions and processes that got us into this mess. They want spiritual guides to engage with the real big issue not tinker with silver bullets and quick fixes. What would Jesus do? Over to us...

Voice 2:
I was lucky enough to have a conversation in the week of all the resignations with a French Monastic friend I much admire.

With the bodies piling up on the bed like the final act of a Jacobean tragedy, he told me:

There was no need to resign
— only to repent!

Our faith is one of repentance, renewal and hope. This isn’t always well understood in England, natural home of Pelagianism — the religion of dyb-dyb-dyb/dob-dob-dob and pulling your socks up. The world we are entering is an ever more risky place. To make fools of ourselves may be embarrassing, but if it’s only our pride on the line, that shouldn’t be the end of the world. A faith in grace breeds courage, including the courage to risk failure. Every day, we can start again. We become what we could be by the grace of God, not corporate planning.

Voice 3:
Last word goes a US banker working in London. I wish I knew his name. He came up to me on the street outside the Cathedral that first weekend. With the press asking me what bishops think of bankers, I found it especially valuable to hear what bankers think of bishops. He saw my collar and asked if St Paul's was “my Church.” “Yes, and no,” I said. But I am a Church of England bishop. And he said...

Ah! Church of England! — a lot of what you do in your churches is beautiful. Your downside is your top people. Their heads are stuck so far up their own asses they can't see the light any more!

Excuse my friend’s American. They talk like that, especially the bankers. I hate to think our good and decent College of Bishops comes over like this. But it does.

The facts are our friends. And the fact is there is a world out there rocking on its bearings, looking to Jesus Christ, among others, for wisdom and hope.

An institution that’s absorbed in anxiety about itself, and gets hung up on, for example, arcana like “the gay issue” as currently framed, or discriminatory behaviour towards women, doesn’t inspire wisdom or hope in anyone outside itself.

This is painful to admit, but it’s the truth on the street. Most local parishes are far more recognisable as the Body of Christ than the anxious fading institution wringing its hands at the centre.

The time has come, not to resign but to re-engage — and to repent on the way. Change is possible, but we need to want to get real. That’s what metanoia is. How can we expect the bankers to do something we find so damned difficult ourselves? By grace, through faith. Same as everyone else. Who knows? our struggles to get real may resource them on their parallel journey.

But only if we do it.

How about the particular role of leaders in institutions? Can they do more than whistle for the wind, telling everybody how magnificent the Emperor’s new clothes are, pour encourager les autres? Let me throw in a final soundbite. I’m currently reading a wonderful book by Euan Semple about the realities of communication. I hope to review it when I’ve finished reading it. Reflecting on his hands-on experience of many corporate entities including the BBC, he says

We are used to thinking of the world in terms of mass. Big things like nation states, religions, society, the media. We are used to expecting those big things to look after us and protect us. But the internet splits those up and breaks them apart. It is made up of networks of individuals, each with their own voice. If we are going to survive the changes we need to see in our institutions we need to help them find that voice. We need to help them grow up.

Dark Crusading in rural Sweden

2012-01-04T09:49:00.001Z

On our first date nite of 2012 we try out David Fincher’s Hollywood remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It’s a pacy stylish two and half hours, with one or two slightly sicko undertones, but time flies when you’re having fun.

Daniel Craig plays a disgraced journalist, if you can imagine such a thing, who takes refuge from the slings and arrows of a libel conviction by sorting out the dirty linen of Sweden’s most dysfunctional family.
They live on their own private island that they’ve turned into a Fraggle Rock of murder, mystery and intrigue. Everyone nurses their own dark Nazi, misogynistic or Oedipal secrets, sometimes all three simultaneously, as mist curls off the lake towards deserted boathouses past the mangled corpses of beheaded cats.
Pretty standard stuff, but is the killer still be at large? That would be telling.

There’s a dark arthouse feel about this take on the tale, and Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth heads the charge. In the good old days a trainee secret agent used to swing provocatively across English TV screens with a box of Milk Tray for the lady. Now the Lady is doing the swinging, tattoed like a sailor, abetted by several pounds of chunky metalware installed in unusual ways around her person.

She’s a dark, lean, mean street machine, who melds with her machinery as she locks on motorbike or laptop. She zaps through action like a steely robotic whippet but is she emotionally engaging enough? Probably not for some, but it is a considerable achievement to have evolved an action heroine who makes Angelina’s Lara Croft look like Mary Poppins.

Finally, brethren, the wackiest wacko on this Fraggle Rock murders women according to prescriptions derived literally from the Book of Leviticus.

So, what price literalism?

It’s easy to bang on about “biblical” attitudes and practices in a way that bears no relationship at all to what’s actually written in the Bible.

Let the reader beware...

All Clear: O Frabjous Day!

2012-01-02T21:18:00.000Z

Alarm over. This site is now pure and wholesome and lovely and safe, with an almost lemony freshness. No techie, me, but I’ve been tinkering deep in the works this evening, struggling to eliminate the cause of a warning that was coming up when it was opened with the Chrome browser, proclaiming that, although essentially harmless, it could damage people's computers if opened, because of Malware sourced from another site.

Many thanks to Alan Crawley and others for helping me pin this down and eliminate any appearance of foul play or sordid beastliness. Job done. Unless anyone out there knows better, in which case please say.

In the meanwhile I have also taken steps to simplify radically the blog design, retaining one or two of the bits people actually seemed to use, but eliminating a large number of tools, markers and badges that had growed like Topsy since 2007. The purpose of many had slipped into the mists of time, and I had been warned by some readers that the site was taking longer to load than it should.

In that spirit, I hope we are all clear to proceed to more interesting subjects. I am aware, however that there are still mimsy borogroves out there. Please email me at the first sign of anything untoward, or if you miss any feature of the old site that could do with being ported to this one.

New Year Resolutions?

2012-01-01T19:39:00.009Z

2012 — the year the world ends? I sincerely hope not; there’s work to be done, and I wish anyone reading this all good faith, hope and love in the coming year.

Among many cards and messages recently, a fair few friends have asked after this blog. After four heavy years, December has been my month off blogging, aided by three realities — an extended educational development trip to India, the need to do a bit more work elsewhere, and curiosity about taking a break. That and the Day job.

Any result? This is how things are shaping up, at the start of a new year of Grace...

Over the autumn I have put more time into Facebook, as a more interactive space in which it has been possible to explore some in depth conversations.

I've certainly decided that having a very open policy on responding to friend requests on FB is an excellent wheeze, and much of the goof-about stuff I had been using this blog for as a kind of commonplace book, is probably better done through FaceBook. Friend me, and I will friend you, er, friend.

I have finally disconnected from Fleet Street. When the Times paywall came in, I subscribed, mainly because someone’s got to pay for journalism and it could have been a fruitful way to go. I've let the sub go now, mainly because it was adding little value to my life. The upside was occasional pieces of themost superb journalism — Simon Barnes, I will miss you, sir. The downside was a tedious sense of being trapped at a fundamentally narrow andsuperficial party, surrounded by low grade right wing bores, stories spun up in a hurry, often lifted from the internet or agencies anyway, a dreadfully sparse and low standard of scientific, historical, educational and religious reporting. By December I noticed I could only be bothered to download the Times once a fortnight, out of a sense of duty. Why? I wondered. So I stopped. Mr Murdoch, I sucked it and saw. Now I’m out of here.

Twitter has been my space of choice for immediate news, keeping up with events and opinions, and reportage.

The odd meeting or event, anything with potential news value, has proved to be well worth tweeting, and I have been using Twitter to trawl reactions and opinions all over the place.

If I worked at a desktop rather than being out and about so much, I might use Twitter even more, but certainly it remains my best immediate reaction and comment source, to listen as much as to talk. I use Echofon to thread conversations on iPad and iPhone.

What is best done on this blog, however, are short comment pieces with the opportunity for follow-up conversations. As to frequency, I had been writing a piece then seeing through conversations arising from it until they dried up then sticking another on.

And in the meanwhile I'm also experimenting with a far cleaner simpler design. Some have been telling me they find the old one took ages to load, and had even produced the odd malware warning. I'd love to know reactions, especially if anyone misses any of the elements I've eliminated in the interest of de-cluttering.

That seems to me the way to go. Twice a week? Let’s see...

Showing off? shutting shop? showing up?

2011-10-28T09:41:00.011+01:00

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

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

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

But what game?

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

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

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

Over to them...

Jobs: He being dead yet speaketh

2011-10-06T08:19:00.008+01:00

Ever since I went on telly suggesting Apple was in some sociological respects a religion, people have asked me about Steve Jobs as Messiah. So today’s sad news does call for some comment, perhaps.

This may be time to stop all the clocks and disconnect the telephone, but I do not anticipate a literal resurrection.

Howbeit, quite apart from anything of historic import Mr Jobs may have achieved in his garage with Woz back in the eighties, he did resurrect a corporation.

I sometimes encounter the idolisation of business leadership, even among those appointing vicars. I never quite want to drink this particular kool-aid. When I was a lad the UK had the third or fourth greatest trading economy in the world. Its slippage to the low twenties has to have something to do with the quality of its business leadership since the sixties, that has not always been stellar. The Church hath little need for more of the UK's often class-ridden, stale, vain, self-indulgent business leadership. It’s already riddled with that stuff.

Furthermore what passes for business leadership often turns out to be no more than grumpy old men sounding off about their control fantasies, or low grade Pelagian boasting about their deservings, or saying nice things about a religion that is no more than top dressing for their own greed and prejudices.

Not so Mr Jobs. As well as providing a creative context in which the world’s greatest designers, men like Jonathan Ive, could flourish he did provide genuine moral leadership on occasion, rooted in his own experience, and free for all. In the often murky world of business leadership it shines out, as a Monty Python character once said of Oscar Wilde’s wit and wisdom, like a stream of silver bats’ pee in a dark cave.

So here, in memoriam, are two passages for pondering from Mr Jobs’ famous Stanford Commencement Address:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart..

Not to labour the point, he went on to discuss his own diagnosis of terminal cancer and say:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Bullying of and by clergy: a way ahead?

2011-09-29T08:48:00.007+01:00

Many thanks to people who have posted stories and comments on clergy bullying. This is no more than an open discussion, not a therapy point, but any posting of information and ideas helps break the culture of silence around the subject. I did promise to say what we were doing in our diocese.

Archdeacon Karen and Poli Shajko, our HR Lead, have been scoping a new policy and procedures in the light of the Dignity at Work national documentation, in collaboration with Anne Lee, an Oxford psychologist who specialises in this area. We are going to recruit two confidential non-hierarchical listeners in each archdeaconry, the Parish Development Advisor (who already works and is known by any clergy) plus one - a mixed gender team with access available from any to all. This includes congregational members who say clergy are bullying them, as well as clergy who say congregational members are bullies. We are working with an independent partnership to develop training both for awareness and implementation of a new dignity at work policy, with documents to go to Bishop's Council, then out. I'm not sure how and when this is published around deaneries, but that's got to happen well — a comms job.

It seems to me, along with some comments earlier this month, that everyone knows what bullying is, and when they feel bullied, but the description needs to be in terms of the behaviour that has to change. If we don't do that the onus stays in the wrong place, and things will never improve. The vast majority of claims I have drilled into dissolve into mutual recrimination. So I have to say that the perception of "bullying" boils down to a symptom of organisational malaise, the abuse of power.

We need procedures in place, as for whistleblowing, available to individuals; but this is not enough.

The key to progress is to have a public framework describing the proper use of power against which all behaviour can be measured.

Such a framework makes any anomaly look like an anomaly, rather than just a random incidence of "shit happens."

One final frontier remains, however. Church culture, deferential, hierarchical and often inclined to hypocrisy, breeds an alignment gap between aspiration and active accountability at the top. The Church is full of good intentions but some bishops, forgive me for saying but it's the truth, fear and loathe that kind of open accountability. Confronted recently with a proposed standard policy on appointments, out poured reasons why this was an impossible bureaucratic imposition to clip their wings. Ironically, much practice is consistent with what was proposed, and the law will probably carry my Lords kicking and screaming where they don't want to go.

Why does it have to be like this? Perhaps the Great Sacred Cow of diocesan exceptionalism belongs to good and decent people who think they are doing their best, so where could the problem be? "parked on the candidate, not them" is the answer. The problem is this: Candidates applying for jobs need to have confidence that their applications will be treated consistently and fairly, and that the rules of the game are being observed by everybody involved - or why should they waste their time offering their work and ministry in the first place? Without some public standard applicants will inevitably suspect stitch-ups all over the place without this elementary accountability — even where they aren't happening! So culture has to change at every level in the organisation, if our practice is to align with our values. The problem is not, of course unique to the Church, but this may be the next area in which us Don Quixotes need to grab Sancho and buckle up.

Clergy Bullying revisited

2011-09-12T08:20:00.000+01:00

I fully appreciate why this comment, left yesterday, was anonymous — Many thanks for it. Bullying is a subject to which I've returned again and again because, Christian siblings, there’s a lot of it about. This should not be. We are meant to be a community whose love shows the world the best that life could be. Bullying is a betrayal of all the Church stands for. So who do you tell? A part of me says, “It doesn’t matter, in a way, as long as you tell someone.” Traditional C of E cultures of secrecy and deference will not do. Openness is a Gospel Value — the open proclamation of the truth, the city set on a hill. So is mutual accountability, or submission of our work to each other - a discipline that cuts all ways.

Many (but emphatically not all) accusations of bullying mirror each other. A says B is bullying them. I go to B who then tells me that A is in fact the bully. This calls for definitions and metrics, but don't be put off. What the B word does indicate is a possible abuse of power, that’s all; so ask “what sort of power is being exercised how?” Go on to ask “by what standard can this be measured? human rights? codes of practice? the ordinal?” Don't get angry, don’t turn yourself into a designer victim, just tell someone. This whole thing thrives on fear, deference, and Voodoo. Remember the Wizard of Oz. Then ask “to whom is the perpetrator, as you see it, accountable to, and how?” Armed with that information, go deploy your information strategically.

One thing’s for sure. Doing nothing will make the problem worse, and you will increasingly internalise it until it becomes business as usual. To paraphrase Jesus, Once the light within you becomes darkness, said Jesus, you are well and truly stuffed. And so are all the rest of us.

Forgiveness and Healing

2011-09-11T11:44:00.003+01:00

God's word is the hammer that shatters rocks in pieces, even or perhaps especially on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. This Sunday many of my colleagues may have been sucking their pencils and feeling blank, but some of them will preach the sermon of their lives. By “sheer coincidence” the Lectionary serves up readings today about forgiveness.

Romans 14 is about the handling of profound conscientious difference that produce strong mutual antagonism among Christians— something they experienced in the first century, too:

we will all stand before the judgment seat of God... then, each of us will be accountable to God. Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another. I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean...

This approach has not generally been taken by the top brass of the Anglican Communion in the last ten years. Their occasional eschewings of judgment have ministered grace, but their fondest strategies for dodging the embarrassment of sexuality issues, or devising an ingenious lawyer’s band aid, have simply backfired and compounded the hurt. Go figure. Romans 14 really is the only way. Sooner rather than later, I hope.

And then Matthew 18, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who uncompromisingly told his followers to love their enemies, kicks in, straight to the solar plexus

Peter came and said to him, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

Jesus goes on to tell the story of the unforgiving servant, that exposes the complete idiocy of our wraths and sorrows. How do we love our enemies, though?

Here in Great Missenden, Rosie the Vicar explored with tremendous clarity what forgiveness is and isn’t. The thief hanging on the cross was unquestionably guilty, and Jesus unquestionably innocent. Their interaction is outrageously simple.

This made me reflect that if we try to forgive out of our own supposed resources of niceness, we will only compound the anger and hurt. All we can work out of, fruitfully, is our own receiving of forgiveness, love as strong as death, love with open eyes.

Her sermon went on to say true forgiveness is the hardest thing in the world. It is NOT

Forgetting — it doesn't change the past, or choose to ignore it
Reconciliation — it takes two to be reconciled, but only one to forgive
Condoning — it is not about excusing bad behaviour
Dismissing — saying it doesn’t matter when it does
Pardoning — which is legal release from the penalty or other legal consequences of having done wrong

It is a personal transaction that releases the one offended against from the offence. That’s all.

She went on to quote the Roman Catholic psychiatrist Dr Jack Dominian, one of the Church’s greatest and wisest teachers about the reality of being human. He was talking here about marriage breakdown:

Forgiveness is not enough. We need to go beyond forgiveness and do as Christ did, who knew what it was to be man. We must try to understand what lies behind the act of aggression. One set of reasons is that the aggressor himself is hurt, insecure, vulnerable, bored, tired, depressed, confused, under stress and is seeking help through aggression. If that is the case, it is not good enough to forgive. We have to do something about remedying the cause of the aggression.

Even more important, the cause may be ourselves. There is nothing more hypocritical in Christian life than to forgive the aggressor with magnanimity when in fact we are responsible for his aggression.

The woman who forgives her husband for having an affair when she denies him love and affection is no saint. The parent who forgives the errant child who is not allowed their independence and is constantly devalued and undermined is no saint. the friend who forgives while driving their companion to distraction is no saint.

She went on to say

You have to be pretty honest with yourself to recognise your own culpability when you have always thought of yourself as the victim — but being able to think in such a way can be the key to unlocking hurts that have rumbled on for years

I wondered, leaving Church, whether the same skill of costly forgiveness that Jesus commanded his followers to exercise an infinite number of times when they fell out, the grace to let go, is not also necessary if we are to be released from idols, especially those we have inherited from the past, and so become what God is calling us to be as we embrace his future.