the annual holiday is nearly upon us, back in circulation from 10th July.
In the meantime, I went to the doctor this morning, he took one look at my trousers, cut the end off one of the legs and sent it to the library. I said 'there's a turn-up for the books'.
Bude here we come.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Help the Aged
Have heard a number of stories this week of old people's groups in the Yeovil area who are thinking about closing, because the cost of the local CVS minibus has gone up to a level which members can't afford. The minibus is the main way in which group members are brought out from their homes, and lunch and social clubs across South Somerset are being hit hard. Ironically, at the same time their is a government initiative towards 'Active Living Centres' which encourage the elderly to mix, get out and about, and be, well, active.
The hike in prices is due, I gather, to the expiry of a Department of Transport grant. There seems to be no funding available to plug the hole.
If you're in the Yeovil area and see this before Friday, contact David Laws office (423284), as a group is going to see him on Friday about this issue, and the more stories he is aware of the more he may be inclined to do something. Also speak to your local councillor, and pray.
The hike in prices is due, I gather, to the expiry of a Department of Transport grant. There seems to be no funding available to plug the hole.
If you're in the Yeovil area and see this before Friday, contact David Laws office (423284), as a group is going to see him on Friday about this issue, and the more stories he is aware of the more he may be inclined to do something. Also speak to your local councillor, and pray.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Deconstructing ministry
A side thought from the previous post: one part of 'changing lives' is a paper called 'Models for Ministry', which is all about setting up 'local ministry groups' and encouraging the ministry of the baptised - i.e. the whole church, not just vicars.
It struck me this morning, and I was surprised it hadn't struck me before, that the paper isn't radical enough. There seems to be no questioning of the ministries that the church should offer - preaching, leading the eucharist, leading worship, etc. as if everything that we're doing at the moment is fine, we just need to recruit more people to do it.
But what if the problem, or part of the problem, is not failure to involve lay people (don't really like that term, but it'll do for now), but in what we are doing in the first place? What if we need to radically critique the ministry we offer, before we try to recruit people to it?
For example: every church has a Sunday school, or would like to have a Sunday school. It's taken for granted that a church firing on all cylinders would have one. But why? My sketchy understanding is that Sunday schools were first set up to educate children in the community, and were part of the outreach of the church. Yet now they are predominantly for the children of church families, and an expected part of church life. But what if the best context for children learning about their faith is the home, rather than hiving them off into their own little groups on a Sunday morning? If that's so, then more of our energy should go into helping parents become disciplers of their children, rather than encouraging the client/provider mentality of Sunday school - that the church will do this for us and our children and do it to a certain quality.
Another example: communion. At it's simplest it is 3 instructions and 6 words: eat bread, drink wine, remember Jesus. How did it get so complex?
All of this may be complete cobblers, but it strikes me that we have built an edifice that we can't sustain without massive effort and financial sacrifice, not just our buildings, but our ways of doing worship, teaching, fellowship, the ordering of church life etc. If mission is the reason for the church's existence, it can't be right that mission comes in at no 8 on the agenda after we've fixed the building, paid the bills, put up the no smoking signs, agreed the rotas, etc. etc. Could it be that we have got it massively wrong? Could it be that we shouldn't recruit lay people into ministry before we've critiqued what that ministry is and should be - which in turn requires a critique of the church and how we operate, and what exactly we think we're doing.
In 3 new housing estates around Yeovil we're thinking together as local churches about the possibility of a missionary Christian presence on each estate. Part of preparation for that will be 'detoxing' the folk who join the mission teams, so they don't go in thinking that their job is to duplicate the church they've just come from. Rather, any structural stuff (meetings, sermons, childrens work, finance and resources management, buildings) should emerge as a byproduct of mission, and only if it's really necessary. It would be interesting to see what kind of church emerges if that is the basis on which it is started. That itself might help the rest of us in more established churches to critique what we're doing, and how much of it is necessary.
It struck me this morning, and I was surprised it hadn't struck me before, that the paper isn't radical enough. There seems to be no questioning of the ministries that the church should offer - preaching, leading the eucharist, leading worship, etc. as if everything that we're doing at the moment is fine, we just need to recruit more people to do it.
But what if the problem, or part of the problem, is not failure to involve lay people (don't really like that term, but it'll do for now), but in what we are doing in the first place? What if we need to radically critique the ministry we offer, before we try to recruit people to it?
For example: every church has a Sunday school, or would like to have a Sunday school. It's taken for granted that a church firing on all cylinders would have one. But why? My sketchy understanding is that Sunday schools were first set up to educate children in the community, and were part of the outreach of the church. Yet now they are predominantly for the children of church families, and an expected part of church life. But what if the best context for children learning about their faith is the home, rather than hiving them off into their own little groups on a Sunday morning? If that's so, then more of our energy should go into helping parents become disciplers of their children, rather than encouraging the client/provider mentality of Sunday school - that the church will do this for us and our children and do it to a certain quality.
Another example: communion. At it's simplest it is 3 instructions and 6 words: eat bread, drink wine, remember Jesus. How did it get so complex?
All of this may be complete cobblers, but it strikes me that we have built an edifice that we can't sustain without massive effort and financial sacrifice, not just our buildings, but our ways of doing worship, teaching, fellowship, the ordering of church life etc. If mission is the reason for the church's existence, it can't be right that mission comes in at no 8 on the agenda after we've fixed the building, paid the bills, put up the no smoking signs, agreed the rotas, etc. etc. Could it be that we have got it massively wrong? Could it be that we shouldn't recruit lay people into ministry before we've critiqued what that ministry is and should be - which in turn requires a critique of the church and how we operate, and what exactly we think we're doing.
In 3 new housing estates around Yeovil we're thinking together as local churches about the possibility of a missionary Christian presence on each estate. Part of preparation for that will be 'detoxing' the folk who join the mission teams, so they don't go in thinking that their job is to duplicate the church they've just come from. Rather, any structural stuff (meetings, sermons, childrens work, finance and resources management, buildings) should emerge as a byproduct of mission, and only if it's really necessary. It would be interesting to see what kind of church emerges if that is the basis on which it is started. That itself might help the rest of us in more established churches to critique what we're doing, and how much of it is necessary.
Changing Lives, Changing Churches for Changing Communities
Have just returned from a 'conversation morning' with the 2 Diocesan bishops about the diocesan strategy (if that's the right word) 'Changing Lives'. Such things are given more edge by the fact that half of my job is as a facilitator of said strategy in the Yeovil area, so I tried hard to pay attention to what was going on.
In the days when I didn't know how to make curry, I'd buy some mince or some sort of meat, put it in a frying pan, and start to add spoonfuls of whatever powder was to hand, perhaps with a bit of tomato ketchup, in the vain hope that if enough flavours were added and fried at a high enough temperature, what resulted might end up tasting like a curry. It never did.
The 'Changing Lives' strategy strikes me as similar - there are a number of different elements: dealing with the drop in clergy numbers, trying to promote and enable the ministry of the whole church, mission, engaging with changes in culture, a philosophy of ministy in teams rather than as individuals, restructuring of parishes, and Bishop Peters vision of a 'Jesus society' which is expounded by a recently released 'Changing Lives' DVD. Changing Lives comes across as an attempt to flavour the chewy meat of clergy reductions with a mixture of spices, in order to create something spicey and edible.
There is a spectrum of opinion within the diocese, which at one extreme sees Changing Lives as window dressing on the unpalatable facts of clergy reductions, and at the other extreme..... well, to be honest I've not come across anyone yet at the other extreme, of seeing it as an exciting re-orientation of the Diocese towards mission and the gospel. There is certainly the potential to do that, but it's not going to happen overnight. The conversation morning was a good event, some vision and values material from the Bishops, some good conversations around tables, and an interesting array of post-itted comments at the end of the morning. Most striking was the number which pleaded for a more mission-focused DAC.
The DAC is the planning authority for the diocese, which decides which plans for church alterations should be approved. I discovered recently that, despite mission being the 'driving force of this diocese' to use the Bishops words from this morning, and despite that fact that for many parishes the church building is their primary resource for mission, there isn't a single mission specialist on this body. There is a strong grassroots voice for this to change, it remains to be seen if that will happen. Speaking as a missioner, I would hope that we have mission specialists involved in every part of the church's ministry - buildings, finance, training, vocations, youth and childrens work, the Cathedral, and so on. One good thing about this morning was the sense that the mission perspective is heard and taken seriously, rather than brushed off as the preserve of a few enthusiasts.
In the days when I didn't know how to make curry, I'd buy some mince or some sort of meat, put it in a frying pan, and start to add spoonfuls of whatever powder was to hand, perhaps with a bit of tomato ketchup, in the vain hope that if enough flavours were added and fried at a high enough temperature, what resulted might end up tasting like a curry. It never did.
The 'Changing Lives' strategy strikes me as similar - there are a number of different elements: dealing with the drop in clergy numbers, trying to promote and enable the ministry of the whole church, mission, engaging with changes in culture, a philosophy of ministy in teams rather than as individuals, restructuring of parishes, and Bishop Peters vision of a 'Jesus society' which is expounded by a recently released 'Changing Lives' DVD. Changing Lives comes across as an attempt to flavour the chewy meat of clergy reductions with a mixture of spices, in order to create something spicey and edible.
There is a spectrum of opinion within the diocese, which at one extreme sees Changing Lives as window dressing on the unpalatable facts of clergy reductions, and at the other extreme..... well, to be honest I've not come across anyone yet at the other extreme, of seeing it as an exciting re-orientation of the Diocese towards mission and the gospel. There is certainly the potential to do that, but it's not going to happen overnight. The conversation morning was a good event, some vision and values material from the Bishops, some good conversations around tables, and an interesting array of post-itted comments at the end of the morning. Most striking was the number which pleaded for a more mission-focused DAC.
The DAC is the planning authority for the diocese, which decides which plans for church alterations should be approved. I discovered recently that, despite mission being the 'driving force of this diocese' to use the Bishops words from this morning, and despite that fact that for many parishes the church building is their primary resource for mission, there isn't a single mission specialist on this body. There is a strong grassroots voice for this to change, it remains to be seen if that will happen. Speaking as a missioner, I would hope that we have mission specialists involved in every part of the church's ministry - buildings, finance, training, vocations, youth and childrens work, the Cathedral, and so on. One good thing about this morning was the sense that the mission perspective is heard and taken seriously, rather than brushed off as the preserve of a few enthusiasts.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Fresh expressions of church, and Galatians
At a conference last year on 'fresh expressions of church', one speaker raised the question of whether the Gentile church, or indeed the early church itself, was a 'fresh expression' - a new form of worshipping, witnessing community which took on a radically different shape from the old.
Preaching this evening on Galatians 2, where Peter has compromised with the 'Judaisers' and stopped eating with non-Jewish people, implying that the route to Jesus takes you through Jewish purity laws and circumcision. Paul is stridently against this, as you'd expect, insisting that the gospel is all about what God has done for us in Jesus, which means that the Jewish law itself is neither here nor there when it comes to right status with God.
But the fact still remains that for Peter (who had had a vision from God telling him to accept Gentiles, and had seen them come to faith at his preaching), fell back into his old ways under pressure from a group in the church. If he found it difficult, then it will probably be difficult in our day for the established church to accept and recognise new forms of Christian community as being authentically 'church', and will insist that they prove themselves by adopting some of the outward forms of religion and churchmanship that the rest of us will recognise. This will afflict our leaders too - people who started out as pioneers will become less adventurous, under pressure from vested interests and from people who are nervous of change.
I wonder how much of it we will come across as we try to start up missionary Christian presences on the new estates in this area as they are built in the next few years. How long will it be before the 'sending' churches demand something which looks more like the church they are used to, rather than letting these initiatives take their own form? How much 'detoxing' will we need to do with the people who take part in these things, to wean them off the way they have been used to corporate Christian life being done, to embrace something more radical? Will some of the pioneers and key thinkers (myself included), be tempted back to doing things which we find safer and more comfortable?
The pioneer missinoary Vincent Donovan talks of mission as going to a place where neither you (the missionary) or they (the people the missionary is sent to) have been before. The 'mixed economy' church of traditional and innovative forms of church needs the courage of Paul in the face of Peter, the ability to identify the key principles of the gospel and not be swayed from them.
Preaching this evening on Galatians 2, where Peter has compromised with the 'Judaisers' and stopped eating with non-Jewish people, implying that the route to Jesus takes you through Jewish purity laws and circumcision. Paul is stridently against this, as you'd expect, insisting that the gospel is all about what God has done for us in Jesus, which means that the Jewish law itself is neither here nor there when it comes to right status with God.
But the fact still remains that for Peter (who had had a vision from God telling him to accept Gentiles, and had seen them come to faith at his preaching), fell back into his old ways under pressure from a group in the church. If he found it difficult, then it will probably be difficult in our day for the established church to accept and recognise new forms of Christian community as being authentically 'church', and will insist that they prove themselves by adopting some of the outward forms of religion and churchmanship that the rest of us will recognise. This will afflict our leaders too - people who started out as pioneers will become less adventurous, under pressure from vested interests and from people who are nervous of change.
I wonder how much of it we will come across as we try to start up missionary Christian presences on the new estates in this area as they are built in the next few years. How long will it be before the 'sending' churches demand something which looks more like the church they are used to, rather than letting these initiatives take their own form? How much 'detoxing' will we need to do with the people who take part in these things, to wean them off the way they have been used to corporate Christian life being done, to embrace something more radical? Will some of the pioneers and key thinkers (myself included), be tempted back to doing things which we find safer and more comfortable?
The pioneer missinoary Vincent Donovan talks of mission as going to a place where neither you (the missionary) or they (the people the missionary is sent to) have been before. The 'mixed economy' church of traditional and innovative forms of church needs the courage of Paul in the face of Peter, the ability to identify the key principles of the gospel and not be swayed from them.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Naming things
A train of thought kicked off by the Evanescence track 'Tourniquet', from their CD 'Fallen'. The lyric runs 'My God, my tourniquet, return to me salvation', which struck me not just because it was about God, but whether you could think of God as a tourniquet (the God who preserves my life is a theme in the Psalms...), and how new names and images can open up new ways of thinking about things.
Another example: a nearby theological college had the habit a few years ago (I don't know if it still does) of referring to modern England as Babylon. Once you name our country in that way, it opens up different ways of thinking about it, and about the place of Christians within it - a country of exile rather than a 'Christian country', and so on.
On a more mundane level, the words we use can reinforce patterns of thinking. St. Paul talks about taking every thought captive - the way we talk to ourselves about things, the words we use, the way we describe things to ourselves and to others, which in turn affects our attitudes, feelings, and actions. So people who talk about 'happy clappy' churches, for example, are using a name which distances themselves from a (percieved) style of worship and behaviour, and also using language which demeans that style of worship and confers a sense of superiority and sophistication on the speaker. (Too bad then that the Bible instructs us both to be joyful in the Lord and to clap our hands in worship.)
But names can be deceptive. To go back to the TV drama House (a posting from a few weeks ago) - 'just because you call it a dwarf doesn't mean it is a dwarf'. As well as looking for new words which give us new ways of seeing things, we also need to critique the words we already use, even if we've been using them for ages.
Take the word 'church'. Just because you call something a church doesn't mean it is one. The Moonies call themselves a 'church'. A conversation over coffee the other day led to trying to define what makes the church the church. My favourite one is the marks developed by Robert Warren:
- Mission
- Worship
- Community
- Discipleship (or spirituality, which is part of discipleship)
In diagram form, the first 3 are drawn as 3 overlapping circles, and the 4th is the area where all 3 overlap. (There's a good explanation of all this here)
If these are the marks of a geniune church (and I'm not claiming papal infallibility for them), then a church which doesn't engage in mission is not fully the church. And a church which is a collection of individuals who come for 'my communion' but don't love one another is not fully the church. And so on. And when does 'not fully the church' become 'not the church'? How far can a group which calls itself the church fall short, but remain the church? Can we critique the way we talk about ourselves, even the name which gives us our very identity, or is this too much of a risk?
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Media wolf pack?
Just imagine for a moment that Tony Blairs farewell pot shot at the media, describing them as a pack of feral beasts , for whom impact is more important than accuracy, had been the words of someone else. What if we couldn't dismiss them as a parting two-fingered gesture in the direction of the people who have been the main opposition to Blair since 1997?No sooner had I heard Blairs description than a series of images and stories flashed into my head:
- the pack of photographers chasing Princess Diana's car to it's death in a subway
- the outpouring of bile upon Jade Goody after her racism spat in the 'Celebrity Big Brother' house, by newspapers which at other times thought nothing of playing the race card to win the circulation game
- the reporting of the Bob Woolmer story, in which everyone (myself included) was only too willing to believe it was murder rather than something less sensational like natural causes. It was interesting to hear the BBC correspondent on the story on last nights news admitting the media had got it wrong - an early (if muted) response to Blair?
- the reporting of the Madeleine story, the way 'suspects' were seized on and every drop of scandal about their past, alleged or otherwise, dredged up and paraded before the public.
Blair is right, completely, no question. Our media, with a few noble exceptions, no longer serves a sense of vocation, it serves Mammon. The vocation of the journalist - to discover truth, tell people's stories, narrate events - has been undermined and all but destroyed by the pursuit of profit and circulation figures at the expense of all else. The broadsheets are just as captive - the self-congratulatory graphs of circulation figures are a commonplace on pages 1 and 2 of the 'quality' papers.
Blair is also 100% right on the use of pundits on the broadcast news, that there is often more commentary than there is news itself. Maybe I'm the only one, but I would rather hear what Blair, Brown etc. are actually saying than what Nick Robinson of the Beeb actually thinks about it. The pundits present themselves as the media priesthood, they alone give us access to truth and insight, but like the priesthood they become an obstacle to the very thing they profess to offer.
Anyway, if the gloves are now off, and Blair can now say what he really thinks and feels, it could be an interesting couple of weeks.....
Stumbled across a brilliant blog posting Ads vs Reality , someone who has taken the marketing photos of various fast food products and put them alongside the real thing as it appears at their local outlet. Very funny, and very telling.
The trouble is that with 99.9% of products, if you describe them truthfully then nobody will want to buy them. Marketing, as Douglas Coupland memorably described it, is the art of feeding people **** in such a way that they don't realise it's not real food. That's the trouble with marketing - if the truth on its own is good enough, you don't need marketing anyway, and if the truth isn't good enough, then it's morally wrong to use marketing because it's lying by another name. I guess the marketers would say that what they are doing is about presentation, rather than truth, but sometimes it's hard to tell them apart.
And it's hard to resist musing on 'church marketing'. Informing people of where we are, what we do, what the gospel can do for them is one thing, but there's nothing worse than being oversold a product. This has been the problem for some Alpha course participants - church hasn't then matched up to the reality of a people filled with the Holy Spirit, folk being healed, lives radically changed etc. Unfortunately we've become very used to talking about the reality of the Kingdom of God as Jesus describes it, whilst living with a watered down version of it in the hope that a) revival will come, and then the talk will match the reality b) If a doesn't happen, then at least there'll be heaven.
And because we know there's a gap between what we say and what we experience, there's a search for a magic formula: a way of being church, a particular gift of the Spirit, a brand new Bible insight, liturgical purity, great music, a zippy Mission Statement etc. which will catapult us across the gap. In this we are just copying our culture - the gap between the life we want and the life we live is enormous, so we quest for transforming experiences in more and more exotic ways in order to bridge it. But the problem is not that we are missing some key external ingredient to our lives, it is that we are missing a key internal ingredient, it is a spiritual problem.
This post has already gone a long way away from where it started, so the train of thought is pulling into the station and I'd better get on with what I was supposed to be doing.....
The trouble is that with 99.9% of products, if you describe them truthfully then nobody will want to buy them. Marketing, as Douglas Coupland memorably described it, is the art of feeding people **** in such a way that they don't realise it's not real food. That's the trouble with marketing - if the truth on its own is good enough, you don't need marketing anyway, and if the truth isn't good enough, then it's morally wrong to use marketing because it's lying by another name. I guess the marketers would say that what they are doing is about presentation, rather than truth, but sometimes it's hard to tell them apart.
And it's hard to resist musing on 'church marketing'. Informing people of where we are, what we do, what the gospel can do for them is one thing, but there's nothing worse than being oversold a product. This has been the problem for some Alpha course participants - church hasn't then matched up to the reality of a people filled with the Holy Spirit, folk being healed, lives radically changed etc. Unfortunately we've become very used to talking about the reality of the Kingdom of God as Jesus describes it, whilst living with a watered down version of it in the hope that a) revival will come, and then the talk will match the reality b) If a doesn't happen, then at least there'll be heaven.
And because we know there's a gap between what we say and what we experience, there's a search for a magic formula: a way of being church, a particular gift of the Spirit, a brand new Bible insight, liturgical purity, great music, a zippy Mission Statement etc. which will catapult us across the gap. In this we are just copying our culture - the gap between the life we want and the life we live is enormous, so we quest for transforming experiences in more and more exotic ways in order to bridge it. But the problem is not that we are missing some key external ingredient to our lives, it is that we are missing a key internal ingredient, it is a spiritual problem.
This post has already gone a long way away from where it started, so the train of thought is pulling into the station and I'd better get on with what I was supposed to be doing.....
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