I wanted to bring together a few thoughts about leadership, and being a Christian in general. I come across folk all over the place who have dropped out of church, Christian faith, and leadership. Meanwhile 'Extreme Pilgrim' Peter Owen Jones is finding his faith dry and his church uninspiring, and gone off on a world tour to find spiritual depth and nourishment.
At a New Wine conference a few years ago, a speaker on leadership was talking about the importance of leaders giving a significant chunk of their time to 'personal renewal'. It's not just leaders. Life is demanding whatever you do, and any Christian needs renewal time to move from surviving to thriving. This renewal includes
- Time out
- Accountability
- Spiritual disciplines
- Learning
A few thoughts on Time Out...
'The Unreflected Life is Not Worth Living'
Socrates I think. His point is that if you never stand back from what you're doing, saying, thinking etc., you won't really live. In this weeks Touching Base I raise the question of whether we are thermostats or thermometers. The thermostat sets the temperature, the thermometer merely reflects the temperature. We'll be thermometers all our lives (or to use Biblical language 'blown here and there by every wind of doctrine') unless we're able to stop, stand back, stop reacting to things, and plot our own course.
This comes back to the idea of putting the big rocks in first. Jesus was able to withstand incredible pressure because he knew what his priorities were. After 40 days fasting in the desert, he withstood temptation because he knew his God and his mission. After the (possibly even greater) pressure of success, he told the disciples it was time to leave and go elsewhere to declare the good news 'for that is why I have come'.
How did Jesus manage it? When the disciples find him, he's been away praying. Jesus is always doing this. He manages to be at his best with the crowds, because he's already been with God.
What Peter Owen-Jones is doing is getting away from it all in order to find spiritual life. I don't know if he normally goes on retreats, or whether he's now catching up for 14 years of not taking them (!) It's the same impulse, but done on catch-up. Jesus knew that he needed time with God before the pressure came, rather than when he'd got to a point of frustration or burn-out.
My own pattern for putting the big rocks in first, which is just what works for me, not a blueprint for anyone else, is:
- weekly: a couple of hours on a Monday morning looking at the week ahead, putting the big rocks into the diary (rather than squeezing them in around smaller things), getting a handle on what needs to be done, and spending some time reading and praying, and using some review tools (e.g. a short stress levels questionnaire, questions on how my walk with God is going, where the pressure points currently are, Bible passages which help to reflect on character and discipleship etc.)
- monthly: either a quiet day at a nearby retreat house (see below) or a study day - a local family has lent me use of their granny flat, which gets me away from the phone and the internet, and is a great space to read, pray and think.
- yearly: at least one major conference (for teaching and encouragement) and a retreat of 3-4 days to really get into stillness and silence, and to try to hear what God's saying about the year ahead, and about where I'm at and where my key relationships are at.
I've discovered through hard experience that this is the minimum of what I need in terms of time out, though it's a constant struggle to make and protect these times. That's the trouble, unless we make them happen, nobody will make them happen for us.
The next bit will be useless for those of you who don't live anywhere near Yeovil, unless you fancy a pilgrimage to the West Country. If you want some time out locally, and are wondering where to go or how to start, then here's some links:
Abbey House Glastonbury
Compton Durville - Franciscan convent just off the A303
Mill House, Tiverton
Chantmarle Centre, Dorset
Hilfield Friary, Dorset - sadly scaling down what they do, but still open to some visitors
Monks Yard, nr Ilminster - opening up in the next few months, has the advantage of an on-site cafe! Looks better for group awaydays than individuals
Chemin Neuf Community, Langport. Their current programme is here.
Sheldon (Society of Mary and Martha) Devon - specifically aimed at clergy couples, but available to others too.
May God help you thrive.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Michael Nazir-Ali on 'no go areas'
The Bishop of Rochester is in the news today for claiming in a newspaper article that some parts of the UK are now no-go areas for non-Muslims. He's been accused of scaremongering in some quarters, but some of the responses to the story (see the feedback on the first link) indicate that he's right. Of course the story is about bigger issues than that.
Michael Nazir-Ali argues that the 'multiculturalism' agenda has failed, creating local sub-cultures rather than integration, and that behind it is an implicit secularism which levels out all faiths - corroding the distinctives they have, and undermining traditional chaplaincy provision in schools, hospitals and educational institutions.
He calls for a fresh national vision of what kind of nation we want to be. A vision which doesn't include an explicit faith statement leaves the playing field open for whoever has the loudest voice or most influence. The modern secular state has jettisoned Christianity but replaced it with the Cheshire Cat of multiculturalism. In fact, this is simply cowardice, a failure of nerve on behalf of our political system to articulate a proper vision of humanity and society.
The article is worth reading in full. (And if you want a laugh visit the National Secular Society homepage, which claims that his article is an argument for secularism. ) The 'multiculturalism' agenda (it doesn't really qualify as a 'vision') is the dominant paradigm in health, education, politics, social policy and media. It's time it had a Christian rival in the public sphere, well done to the Bish for having the guts to get the debate going.
Update: more links on this story at Thinking Anglicans, see the entry for Saturday 5th January.
Update 2: a good article on the Ekklesia site, and MadPriest and Cranmer also have their 2 penn'orth.
Update 3 And some evidence for Bishop Nazir-Ali's case from Irene Lancasters blog and the chairman of the Muslim forum writing in the Mail
Michael Nazir-Ali argues that the 'multiculturalism' agenda has failed, creating local sub-cultures rather than integration, and that behind it is an implicit secularism which levels out all faiths - corroding the distinctives they have, and undermining traditional chaplaincy provision in schools, hospitals and educational institutions.
He calls for a fresh national vision of what kind of nation we want to be. A vision which doesn't include an explicit faith statement leaves the playing field open for whoever has the loudest voice or most influence. The modern secular state has jettisoned Christianity but replaced it with the Cheshire Cat of multiculturalism. In fact, this is simply cowardice, a failure of nerve on behalf of our political system to articulate a proper vision of humanity and society.
The article is worth reading in full. (And if you want a laugh visit the National Secular Society homepage, which claims that his article is an argument for secularism. ) The 'multiculturalism' agenda (it doesn't really qualify as a 'vision') is the dominant paradigm in health, education, politics, social policy and media. It's time it had a Christian rival in the public sphere, well done to the Bish for having the guts to get the debate going.
Update: more links on this story at Thinking Anglicans, see the entry for Saturday 5th January.
Update 2: a good article on the Ekklesia site, and MadPriest and Cranmer also have their 2 penn'orth.
Update 3 And some evidence for Bishop Nazir-Ali's case from Irene Lancasters blog and the chairman of the Muslim forum writing in the Mail
Anglican Bloggers
Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.
It was inevitable really...... Dave Walker has set up an Anglican Bloggers group on Facebook. I don't know if this is a cunning bit of marketing by facebook to get people like me signed up, but it worked. It's fascinating to see the variety of people on there.I have a worry. Already there are a couple of bishops signed up, so it won't be long enough before we reach critical mass, and decide that there's a defining issue which sets us apart from all other Anglicans (e.g. that we're members of Facebook and they aren't). I give it 6 months till schism........
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Links, and a link
Prompted by Mike from church, there's now a 'Resources' section down the right hand side of the blog. If you want to send me any links which should be there, fire away!
Meanwhile, a great post by Steve Tilley which begins thus...
If you are in the business of retaining people's custom, support, visits or whatever you may think that the best thing to do is for them to find occasional outstanding service, content or offers. Whilst these things are not bad ideas they will not necessarily do the job. It is consistency that makes people return and keeps the footfall falling.
So the way to retain business is not to have one-off acts of genius but to eliminate the acts of folly.
1 in 100 of the people who have a good experience will tell a friend. 1 in 10 of the people who have a bad experience will tell a friend. So if you don't fix the leaks you wil have to have 10 times more genius than error simply in order not to shrink.
Meanwhile, a great post by Steve Tilley which begins thus...
If you are in the business of retaining people's custom, support, visits or whatever you may think that the best thing to do is for them to find occasional outstanding service, content or offers. Whilst these things are not bad ideas they will not necessarily do the job. It is consistency that makes people return and keeps the footfall falling.
So the way to retain business is not to have one-off acts of genius but to eliminate the acts of folly.
1 in 100 of the people who have a good experience will tell a friend. 1 in 10 of the people who have a bad experience will tell a friend. So if you don't fix the leaks you wil have to have 10 times more genius than error simply in order not to shrink.
Extreme Pilgrim
The latest thing in religious programming seems to be the 3-parter. After 'Make me a Muslim' last month, it's the turn of 'Extreme Pilgrim', featuring the very watchable Peter Owen-Jones. He's an Anglican vicar, but you never see a dog-collar, think of a cross between Indiana Jones and middle-aged hippy and you're part way there. There can't be many clergy who use roll-ups and have to be bleeped on BBC2. He's also a lot less annoying than Robert Beckford, Channel 4's house 'theologian'. With a career in advertising and marketing before he became a vicar, he 's also been behind some provocative church advertising campaigns.The premise of the programme is that P O-J is dissatisfied with Western spirituality, and especially it's Church of England form. He's not a big fan of doctrine, and is frustrated with a Christian faith which bombards people with doctrine but doesn't seem to have spiritual depth, so he's off to try to find spiritual depth somewhere else. First stop is a month with the Shaolin Buddhist monks of China. After a week at a martial arts boot camp (fair play to him for letting himself be filmed trying and failing at things, we need a bit more of that attitude in the church), he finds the constant stream of tourists off-putting, and heads up a remote mountain pass to find a 'purer' form of Buddhism.
What he finds is a spirituality built on two things: community life, and the physical discipline of movement. As he gets into the dance-like moves (I don't know if it was tai chi, or something else, I'm not much of an expert), he discovers that he can actually meditate, clear his mind, and find the stillness he's looking for. Alongside that he finds a strong sense of community life, which seems on the surface to be at odds with Buddhist 'non-attachment', something which is never quite resolved.
It was fascinating to watch, not only to see the monks in action, and POJ's efforts to learn the moves and exercises, but then to reflect back on Christian spirituality. We talk about the body, mind and spirit as a unity, God has made us that way, but Christian spirituality is still stuck somewhere between St. Anthony and the late 20th century, in putting the mind and spirit in the spiritual Premiership and demoting the body to non-league. Discipleship, worship, ministry training, most of the life of the church is centred around words, learning and intellect. Very little is centred around practice, physicality, an embodied life of prayer and discipleship. There is much more of this in the Eastern church, and the charistmatic and (newly rediscovered) Celtic streams of Christianity are reintroducing the body to Western Christianity, but often these feel like add-ons. Last nights programme showed a community for which the physical was the path to the spiritual, a way of moving and breathing developed over centuries.
I've a couple of concerns with 'Extreme Pilgrim'. One is the 'crash diet' concern, that it might portray spirituality as something you only need a month to crack, if you put in enough effort under the right guru. More problematic is the approach, taken by 'Spirituality Shopper' a couple of years ago, of treating all religions as more or less equivalent. I wouldn't want to throw out the doctrinal baby with the bathwater - we do have to reckon with questions of truth and understanding, with who God is, how he has communicated and how we live in right relationship with him. Peter Owen-Jones is right to complain that doctrine is unduly dominant in Western Christianity, but the solution to misuse is not disuse but right use.
See other views from the Mirror, Atheist Tuesday , the Times, and a broader article on religious programming on TV from the Independent.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists
Cracking article 'Ten propositions on Richard Dawkins and the new atheists' which is well worth 10 minutes of your time. Thanks to Maggi Dawns blog for the link.
Here's an excerpt:
Here's an excerpt:
If Professor Dawkins is the “bad cop” of the New Atheists, the Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee is probably the “good cop”, while Christopher Hitchens is undoubtedly the “corrupt cop”. I saw him on the British TV programme Question Time, contemptuously holding court like Jabba the Hutt. And I sat for half-an-hour at Waterstone’s dipping into the over-priced God Is Not Great as if it were dishwater, a highly flattering simile. Hitchens’ penetrating scholarly appraisals include descriptions of Augustine the “ignoramus”, Aquinas the “stupid”, and Calvin the “sadist”; while Niemöller and Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazis was motivated by a “nebulous humanism”, and Martin Luther King’s faith was Christian only in a “nominal sense”. Enough said. It is all rather embarrassing.
If in doubt, legislate?
There are calls today for new laws on data protection, after HM Revenue and Customs lost 25m sets of bank details. It's ironic that these people are empowered to haul me over the coals if I can't back up my tax self-assesment with a detailed audit trail of my expenses, but if they lose my tax form and the accompanying cheque they get off scott free.
When I initially heard the story, I thought it was just another case of knee-jerk legislating, assuming that anyone who lost this kind of info was already on the wrong side of the law. So it does make sense. But it does raise the question of what are the limits of the law? What happens if we legislate against every form of workplace incompetence?
The Anglican church in the USA is currently disintegrating as individuals, parishes and dioceses take their stand on either side of the sexuality debate. The complex but frail structures of tradition, prayer, church family and mutual commitment haven't been strong enough to hold it together, and there are now threats from the national US Episcopal Church (ECUSA) to use civil law to reclaim property and assets from breakaway churches. Contrast the Roman Catholic church, which has a much stronger structure of central authority and law, and has avoided the serial splits which have beset Protestantism since the Reformation.
Is legalism the price of unity? Anglicans elsewhere have been trying to find a form of words, and a quasi-legal structure, that will be strong enough to hold the Anglican church together without turning it into a church run primarily by law and only secondarily by grace. So far they've not succeeded.
This is tricky. At a micro level, families need rules to help them to function well, and marriage itself is a covenant relationship which recognises that there will be bad times as well as good. There will be times when the rules are appealed to, and times when the promises you made at the altar are the one thing that is keeping you together and helping you to work things out. But to live by law all the time would destroy a loving relationship. At church level, the same kind of dynamics apply, with the added complexity that the church is an organisation as well as a family. Paul tells the Corinthian church off for going through the civil law courts to sort out disputes between Christians: "the very fact you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already" (1 Corinthians 6:7)
I don't know if there is a 'tipping point' in a society, a community, a church, or an organisation, where law rather than relationship starts to become the principle way of regulating relationships and life. Once this happens, you are in deep trouble. I can sense it happening more and more in the UK. We have more laws, (and more CCTV) but are the shoplifting capital of Europe and are fighting the Irish for the binge drinking crown. When does the rush to legislation and surveillance stop? How do we keep law as the protecting and enabling framework for healthy relationships (for which the 10 Commandments are a prime example), and keep it from becoming an end in itself, with the Pharisees/Stasi waiting in the wings?
When I initially heard the story, I thought it was just another case of knee-jerk legislating, assuming that anyone who lost this kind of info was already on the wrong side of the law. So it does make sense. But it does raise the question of what are the limits of the law? What happens if we legislate against every form of workplace incompetence?
The Anglican church in the USA is currently disintegrating as individuals, parishes and dioceses take their stand on either side of the sexuality debate. The complex but frail structures of tradition, prayer, church family and mutual commitment haven't been strong enough to hold it together, and there are now threats from the national US Episcopal Church (ECUSA) to use civil law to reclaim property and assets from breakaway churches. Contrast the Roman Catholic church, which has a much stronger structure of central authority and law, and has avoided the serial splits which have beset Protestantism since the Reformation.
Is legalism the price of unity? Anglicans elsewhere have been trying to find a form of words, and a quasi-legal structure, that will be strong enough to hold the Anglican church together without turning it into a church run primarily by law and only secondarily by grace. So far they've not succeeded.
This is tricky. At a micro level, families need rules to help them to function well, and marriage itself is a covenant relationship which recognises that there will be bad times as well as good. There will be times when the rules are appealed to, and times when the promises you made at the altar are the one thing that is keeping you together and helping you to work things out. But to live by law all the time would destroy a loving relationship. At church level, the same kind of dynamics apply, with the added complexity that the church is an organisation as well as a family. Paul tells the Corinthian church off for going through the civil law courts to sort out disputes between Christians: "the very fact you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already" (1 Corinthians 6:7)
I don't know if there is a 'tipping point' in a society, a community, a church, or an organisation, where law rather than relationship starts to become the principle way of regulating relationships and life. Once this happens, you are in deep trouble. I can sense it happening more and more in the UK. We have more laws, (and more CCTV) but are the shoplifting capital of Europe and are fighting the Irish for the binge drinking crown. When does the rush to legislation and surveillance stop? How do we keep law as the protecting and enabling framework for healthy relationships (for which the 10 Commandments are a prime example), and keep it from becoming an end in itself, with the Pharisees/Stasi waiting in the wings?
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
New Year, Big Rocks, Big Waistline
How reassuring it was to hear Giles Fraser on 'Thought for the Day' this morning, critiquing the diet industry and talking about fatness and self-esteem. Even more reassuring to discover that, at 16 stone, he weighs in 3 1/2 stone heavier than I do. In the local Tesco corner shop, the Christmas displays have been replaced by a 'healthy eating' stand - positioned exactly where the legions of chocolate bars were sited just days ago. Don't you just love marketing? The hypocrisy is so overt that we don't even notice anymore.
Meanwhile Alex Ferguson has complained that the New Year crowd at the Man Utd. game was quiet. New Years Day? Hello? After a pretty restrained party with some friends I woke up (actually, 'woke up' is putting it too strongly) with a cold and a headache, and the last thing I'd want to have done is spent 2 hours surrounded by 75,000 people shouting at a referee. If they've been daft enough to spend £50 on a ticket, I guess they've earned the right to enjoy the game in silence. Judging by the press reports on record ambulance and police call outs over new year, sitting with a quiet hangover at a football match is the least of the sins committed in the last 72 hours.
On a more positive note, a spot-on new year sermon at St. Johns Yeovil (click here to hear the talk), based on an illustration popularised by Steven Covey, which goes something like this........
You have a bowl, and 4 other containers, one each containing rocks, pebbles, sand, and beer. Put the rocks in the bowl. Is it full?
...No, because if you pour in the pebbles, you can fit them in around the rocks, until the bowl is full...
...Except that it isn't full, you can fit in a surprising amount of sand into the spaces between the rocks and pebbles. And now it's full...
...Except that it isn't full, because you can pour in the beer, and that will fit too...
There are 2 morals to this excercise:
a) No matter how full your life is, there's always room for a beer.
b) Put the big rocks in first. If you fill the bowl with pebbles or sand first, there won't be room for the rocks. And the rocks are the things which are most important: God, relationships, health, character, calling, parenting, developing your gifts and so on. The sermon illustrated this with the story of Mary and Martha - Mary sitting at Jesus feet, because this was 'most important', compared to washing up and tidying the kitchen. Obvious really.
The other key feature of these big rocks is that they only demand our attention in a crisis. The rest of the time, our time, energy and attention will be demanded by sand and pebbles - emails, phone calls, little jobs that need doing, a TV programme, blogging something (!) etc. Unless we commit time and energy to the big rocks, they won't get any. I discover this anew every holiday. My morning workday routine includes time to pray and read the Bible. On holiday, with no routine to speak of, the prayer rarely happens.
Which is why New Years resolutions aren't enough on their own. A list of wishes is, unless you're possessed of iron will or a nagging wife/husband, pretty useless. Until the resolution becomes a plan with concrete steps - (book the gym appointment, work out which times in the week you'll go and put them in the diary) - it's not going to get us anywhere. Which is why we all end up depressed in February, because we've set ourselves up to fail at the start of the year.
It's good therefore to hear of some wisdom from American family therapists on realistic expectations of relationships. The myth of the perfect couple sets us up to fail, and this is much more damaging than being realistic, and accepting that I'm not perfect, you're not perfect, and that bad stuff will happen. The Bible already knows this (the technical term is sin), but it's a sign of where we are as a culture that when therapists notice it, it's suddenly news.
Meanwhile Alex Ferguson has complained that the New Year crowd at the Man Utd. game was quiet. New Years Day? Hello? After a pretty restrained party with some friends I woke up (actually, 'woke up' is putting it too strongly) with a cold and a headache, and the last thing I'd want to have done is spent 2 hours surrounded by 75,000 people shouting at a referee. If they've been daft enough to spend £50 on a ticket, I guess they've earned the right to enjoy the game in silence. Judging by the press reports on record ambulance and police call outs over new year, sitting with a quiet hangover at a football match is the least of the sins committed in the last 72 hours.
On a more positive note, a spot-on new year sermon at St. Johns Yeovil (click here to hear the talk), based on an illustration popularised by Steven Covey, which goes something like this........
You have a bowl, and 4 other containers, one each containing rocks, pebbles, sand, and beer. Put the rocks in the bowl. Is it full?
...No, because if you pour in the pebbles, you can fit them in around the rocks, until the bowl is full...
...Except that it isn't full, you can fit in a surprising amount of sand into the spaces between the rocks and pebbles. And now it's full...
...Except that it isn't full, because you can pour in the beer, and that will fit too...
There are 2 morals to this excercise:
a) No matter how full your life is, there's always room for a beer.
b) Put the big rocks in first. If you fill the bowl with pebbles or sand first, there won't be room for the rocks. And the rocks are the things which are most important: God, relationships, health, character, calling, parenting, developing your gifts and so on. The sermon illustrated this with the story of Mary and Martha - Mary sitting at Jesus feet, because this was 'most important', compared to washing up and tidying the kitchen. Obvious really.
The other key feature of these big rocks is that they only demand our attention in a crisis. The rest of the time, our time, energy and attention will be demanded by sand and pebbles - emails, phone calls, little jobs that need doing, a TV programme, blogging something (!) etc. Unless we commit time and energy to the big rocks, they won't get any. I discover this anew every holiday. My morning workday routine includes time to pray and read the Bible. On holiday, with no routine to speak of, the prayer rarely happens.
Which is why New Years resolutions aren't enough on their own. A list of wishes is, unless you're possessed of iron will or a nagging wife/husband, pretty useless. Until the resolution becomes a plan with concrete steps - (book the gym appointment, work out which times in the week you'll go and put them in the diary) - it's not going to get us anywhere. Which is why we all end up depressed in February, because we've set ourselves up to fail at the start of the year.
It's good therefore to hear of some wisdom from American family therapists on realistic expectations of relationships. The myth of the perfect couple sets us up to fail, and this is much more damaging than being realistic, and accepting that I'm not perfect, you're not perfect, and that bad stuff will happen. The Bible already knows this (the technical term is sin), but it's a sign of where we are as a culture that when therapists notice it, it's suddenly news.
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