I'm Going Out Fishing

“Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink”. The suffering caused by the Pakistan floods has touched us all, and I hope it will continue to do so after the media circus moves on. For the real tragedy is still to enfold, with summer crops destroyed and winter sowing impossible there is a real danger that famine will follow after flood and pestilence, and some fear that the dark forces of extremism will exploit the situation. The adjective “Biblical” gets bandied around these days to mean “epic in scale” (Jezzer is rather fond of it in his Top Gear car reviews…). Surely this is a flood of Biblical proportions and on the waters ride the four horsemen of the apocalypse – death, pestilence, famine and war. Where else can we turn to find words and images to describe this catastrophe, other than to the Bible?
Yet there is an imagine from our TV screens which sticks in my memory – an old man fishing in the flood waters from what remains of his house – and fishing very successfully too. It is a wonderful picture of human ingenuity, tenacity and adaptability in the face of devastation. I grew up in a family of inshore fishermen and to me, going fishing means falling back on something familiar and deeply ingrained, something you know how to do, something you can rely on when all else fails. When Peter the disciple faced all the confusion, loss, desperation and fear which followed the crucifixion of Jesus he said: “I’m going out fishing”, and I would have gladly joined in the answer of his friends - “we will go with you”. And that was when they met the risen Jesus.
Faced with the tragedy of Pakistan we need to go on fishing too by believing in the power of ordinary people to rebuild their lives through ordinary means – and that includes the ordinary means of help at our disposal through giving and praying.

Why the Church of England has no Balls

It has been a troubled month for the Church of England. A weakened and long delayed proposal for women bishops has finally been accepted by General Synod (muted cheering), but Jeffrey John's name has mysteriously been withdrawn from the shortlist for the prestigious bishopric of Southwark (loud booing).

There really is a crisis of authority in the Church of England and much as I admire Rowan Williams I regret that it is now time for him to come out loud and proud for what he actually believes in. It is widely accepted that Dr. John is the best bishop the Church of England hasn't got and it is time to put this right. The Archbishop is of course facing pressure on two fronts - from conservative "catholic" Anglicans over women bishops and from conservative "evangelical" Anglicans over women bishops and gay clergy. Both groups are actually minorities though substantial ones.

I'm not an Anglican but it puzzles and distresses me that the Church of England has ceased to believe in its own authority to make decisions. The founding principle of the Anglican Church is not so much a unique doctrine, as a belief in its own right to govern itself independently. When decisions like the consecration of women bishops or the nomination of a candidate for bishop who happens to be gay, are taken through the proper processes of that church they are valid and binding. Part of our Christian fellowship is that we belong together in churches in which we may not always agree - but we have to accept the decisions that we have made prayerfull y together after seeking God's guidance. The Church of England does not have to wait until it finds full unanimity (this will never happen) nor should it be looking over its shoulder at what Rome is doing (a denial of the very nature of Anglicanism as a self governing church). Acceptance of decisions with which we cannot all agree is part of the true meaning of Christian discipline.

Given the nature of the issue I shall not mince my words. It is time for the leadership of the Church of England to have some balls. If you want to find the right people to be your next generation of bishops then you should look at those whom God is gifting and calling - and that cannot be done by restricting God's choice to one gender and one interpretation of sexuality.

Ghosts in the Machine

Whilst searching for an old email that I needed to recover I came across several others from two friends who have died in the last year. There are ghosts in my computer. Unsurprisingly it was a bitter-sweet experience: memories of times and tasks shared, in one case shot through with a stab of laughter seeing again the words of one who was infamously witty and wicked in her on line correspondence. I paused – just what is the “etiquette” about keeping or deleting mail from lost friends? Are emails like letters, to be held as a treasured keepsake, or should they be discarded as nothing more than a memo, a fleeting moment unworthy of being held as a true memento?

This strangely mixed moment raises real issues about who we are and the footprint of our lives in this digital age when so much of what we do is recorded. A hundred years ago what physical trace would we “ordinary” people leave behind us? Birth, marriage and death certificates, a handful of letters, perhaps a will and some sticks of furniture for our children if they were lucky. Today all my financial dealings, all my correspondence, most of my work and a large part of my life are recorded somewhere on computers or cameras. There are photographs and videos, sound recordings and filing cabinets, all full of bits of me. Does this effect who I am or not? Some contemporary social thinkers would insist that I am creating my own “identity” out of this scrapbook of choices and chances.

It was once said of the rather vain Benjamin Disraeli that he was “a self made man who adores his maker”. I’ve always thought of myself as a half-made human, a collaborative work in progress with the real me still emerging out of the ongoing conversation with God which we call “life”. Mostly I detest the idea that all these people are holding so much information about me, but in some ways it serves to show that I really am not “self made” - I only exist in a whole network of relationships and responsibilities to others. What I need to sort out is which of these relationships and which of these records really matter to me - which of these threads of conversation are significant in the tangled web which joins me to the God who is the centre of all things truly real?

Scientists Create Life

Scientists in American have created life! Well, if you believe the headlines they have, a closer examination with a little scientific advice shows that they have successfully rearranged some of the components of life to make a synthetic microbe capable of reproduction. This is a remarkable achievement and whatever reservations we may have the imagination, ingenuity, skill and sheer persistence of the research team deserves our admiration and applause.

Two comments – firstly, as ever in these breakthroughs scientists are accused of “playing God”, as though this were a knock down argument against human arrogance. Allow me to let you into a little secret – according to the Christian faith human beings were actually made and designed to “play God”. In the Bible humanity is said to be made “in the image of God” – with the capacity to imitate God and to be intimate with God. Created not to be God, or replace God but to imitate God. It is our very purpose for being here that we should honour God by becoming a people who are shaped by the same qualities that God has shown towards us – love, patience, grace, justice, compassion and yes creativity! So “playing God” is precisely what we are to. To suppose God made a mistake when we were made with minds capable of synthesising DNA is what I find arrogant – not that scientists should venture to do this.

But secondly: This discovery clearly has both dangers and opportunities attached to it. Part of “playing God” is learning about restraint. A God who can do anything doesn’t chose to do everything. Some things are not to be done not because they are impossible but simply because they are harmful and demeaning. We are told that there are big moneyed interests behind this development, and that worries me more than the success of the scientists. Market forces are notoriously difficult to control when they conflict with ethics.

So let us pause. Let there be plaudits (and Nobel Prizes?) for the scientists, but we need to do some more ethical thinking before we start to use this new technology. If we want to play God that is the way to do it – creativity and wisdom hand in hand. If there is any arrogance in science I find it not in these discoveries but the false notion that we can imitate the creativity of God without seeking to imitate his wisdom.

Hymn Books are Sooooooo Last Century

The Methodist Church is about to publish the proposed list of Hymns/Songs for inclusion in its new official hymn book. There will follow a positive mêlée of counter lists complaining about what has been included or omitted. I await the discussion with scarcely restrained disinterest. It matters not one jot or tittle what is excluded from the list as we can all sing it anyway if we want to. Being the creature of habit that it is, the Church still seems to think that publishing an authoritative list and printing an expensive book will somehow define our worship. This is modernist thinking in a post modern world resulting in an industrial product being offered in a digital market. It just can’t work anymore. Worship material is now drawn from digital and online sources, words are printed or projected in selections and forms which meet local needs: the sun has set on the normative hymn book.

What goes in the list is not a big issue, but there are really two major concerns for the Church here – the first is east to see and grasp: blindness to new technologies and contemporary cultures. Martin Luther described the printing press as “the best of God’s inventions” and the reformers (Protestant and Catholic) seized hold of this new technology to renew the spiritual life of the church, so why have we lost this enthusiasm for new communication technologies which could serve us so well?

The second issue is more profound and ought to disturb us more. If I am right in my description of what is happening then the purpose of the new “hymn book” really isn’t to introduce “new songs” – which we can already access. So what is its purpose? I can only conclude that this is about control – a rearguard action to try to hold together our increasingly diverse theologies and liturgies by creating a normative list of Methodist hymnody. The list serves not to modernise our music, but rather to restrict our choice, it is there to define an elusive Methodist identity. Like so much human activity it is about control, and I’d just like us to be honest and recognise what it is that we are doing, rather than go on pretending that this is a major renewal of our worship.

Playing with God

It’s Monday lunchtime at work and I am still tired from Sunday evening’s service! Along with some really gifted and enthusiastic friends I was leading an experimental service in a Café Church. I don’t want to parade the details of what we did here – for that is not my point in this blog – only to say that to prepare and run this service needed about ten people to rehearse all afternoon, three or four others to meet to do some technical work and at least one to create a complex and scripted narrative which held the thing together. That’s a lot of work - a lot more than your typical liturgy or even family service takes.

My question is this – whose needs does alternative worship meet? It is often billed as the new culturally relevant spirituality which will re-engage a new generation with the church – but it is not. The people who plan it run it and attend it are mostly highly committed Christians who are just looking for something different, for a few spices and pickles to enliven palates dulled to insensitivity by the routine of church life and all too often uninspiring worship.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am generally a fan and certainly a practitioner of alternative forms of worship, guilty of inflicting all kinds of imaginings on congregations at different times. BUT this is mainly because in common with many other Christians I need times to be playful with God in my worship. Play is that activity in which we imagine what it would be like to do, try or be something, in which we make and follow all kinds of rules and procedures together just because it is good to be together and do these things.

So let’s have worship godly play for adults too.

It’s Time – But not as we Know it

As a university chaplain I spend a lot of time I expend a lot of effort explaining to the secular institution in the run up to exams why so many of their students cause so much trouble by wanting to go and pray at such odd times. University timetabling has a clockwork mentality – Muslim and Jewish prayer, however, is governed by the movement of the sun and moon. This causes a degree of holy havoc, and in many ways I’m glad that it does.

Time as we know it was invented in the middle of the nineteenth century to solve a railway timetabling problem. In those innocent early days everyone assumed that the trains would run on time, but the time in London was different to the time in Bristol. Everyone set their clocks by the sun but the sun takes a longer to get to Bristol than it does to London. Having struggled with publishing timetables with each stop adjusted for local time, Bradshaw’s Railway Guide eventually gave up and unilaterally declared train time to be London time.

Machines run like clockwork; nature does not. Natural time is messy and surprisingly variable, so the time we use now is “mean time” - watered down wishy-washy stuff averaged out over the year by timetablers, engineers and administrators. It’s a time of our own making which ties us to the regular motion of the machines we make to serve us and the needs of the industrial production which supplies us.

Time wasn’t always like that and for many people today it still is not, and here is the rub. Originally the “hours” of the day were the “hours” of prayer in the monasteries. It was prayer not production which defined time. After all who is to say that our days must be governed by that nasty, pinched “mean” time driven by productivity rather than God’s messy, awkward, wasteful and wonderfully generous gift of time?

I’ve learnt a lot from students who are being “awkward” because of their faith; I’m sorry to say few of them have been Christians.

Gay Sex, Christian Counsellors and the Law

I decided this thought was not appropriate for "Thought for the Week" on our chaplaincy website so here it is instead!

Christian counsellor Gary MacFarlane has lost his case against being dismissed for refusing to give sex therapy to a same-sex couple. I don’t agree with Mr. MacFarlane – there is more than one Christian view on this – but nor do I agree with the judge’s verdict which argues that legislation cannot protect religious views as this would be irrational, “divisive, capricious and arbitrary”. The reported basis of this judgement strikes me as more than a little odd, it could just as easily be argued that the judge has decided irrationally, divisively, capriciously and arbitrarily that religious views have no place in our public life. This kind of ideological secularism is as much a world view held on trust as any religious one – it cannot be proved, nor can it claim to be the only rational view of the world. It also misses the very point of secularism which is to ensure freedom of belief and the practice of belief. In this country procedural secularism was largely invented by Christians in the nonconformist tradition to ensure such religious freedom.

It is one thing for the judge to uphold the dismissal on the grounds that Mr. MacFarlane’s views were preventing him from doing the job for which he was employed, but quite another to dismiss the basis of his views or their right to respected and consideration under the law.

Democratic Christians or Christian Democrats?

I’m preparing a quiz on the Election to use at our International Students’ Café this week. Some of the students are from countries with strong constitutional democracies – like USA or France, others come from states without democracy as we understand it. Has democracy become the sacred cow of our politics? It is all too easy to assume that government of the people, for the people, by the people is the very goal and highest achievement of society. I’ve got two problems with this – firstly Britain isn’t really a democracy in that sense anyway so let’s not get too self righteous: our sovereign and one of our two chambers of government are not elected. Secondly, as Christian I advocate and defend democracy as the least worst option in government, it provides the checks and balances needed in human society to prevent one group dominating another, it enables us to get rid of bad government and to seek the common good, but it cannot guarantee good government. In a democracy the people get the government they deserve.

There is nothing divinely ordained about this system.

Nor is the church a democracy – it is a body (at least in my corner of the vineyard) which makes full use of democracy as an excellent tool to find the mind of Christ by consulting the people of Christ. When we vote in church we are trying to find out what God is saying to us rather than expressing our rights as citizens of heaven or simply going along with the majority. It’s far from perfect, but I believe it to be a way God can speak to us.

What is God saying to us as a nation and how can we express that through our voting….. tricky….

Methodist Synods - Act of God or Work of the Devil?

Over 25 years I’ve seen synods (our regional District gatherings) change from being extremely dull but important decision making bodies in which real Christian diversity was debated and expressed, to meetings with no real business to do and in which different opinions are almost suppressed. We now have a discipline of attending a meeting which is mainly social in character. Consequently synods no longer express our diversity but are more about creating a common culture in which we are all expected to develop similar tastes. I’ve never shared Methodism’s assumptions about what my social tastes should be (how many men of working age attend church socials willingly?). It saddens me that these social tastes do seem to get confused with fellowship. It feels like fellowship is being made into wanting to be together because we all like doing the same things, when really it’s about being together dealing with our differences.

Perversely the old dull debates did actually do that and the shared culture they fostered was one of a way of dealing with differences graciously. Having dismantled most of those structures (which did need change) I fear what we may be left with is not Methodism as a way of doing things which holds together a diverse Christian people (a genuine “discipline” worthy of our attendance), but Methodism as a particular set of Christian tastes into which we are enculturating one another.

Incidentally I was one of only a handful of people who voted against the creation of a London Methodist District. We used to have four London districts based on a sound mission principle uniting inner city, suburban and rural areas in each region whereas the new district is based on a supposed unity of identity for London (not on diversity).

Of course all this may blog may reveal is that I am very skilled at providing pseudo-theological justifications for being a grumpy old man who woudl rather go out and ride his motorbike on a sunny saturday than spend it in yet another church meeting