Getting Stuck In

New research from the Evangelical Alliance reveals a startling level of community engagement from Christians, compared to the general population. "Does Belief Touch Society" is part of an ongoing research project into the beliefs and practices of evangelical Christians in the UK.

The research is based on a survey of 1151 people around Easter last year, and covers social involvement as well as spiritual practices. Some of the headline figures:
25% are trustees of a charity (10 times the national figure)
9% are school governors (0.7% is the national average)
81% do some kind of voluntary work at least once a month
91% had voted or were intending to vote in local elections (the turnout was 42%)
4% are members of political parties (1.3% is the national average).

there were a cluster of questions around Easter: 41% had taken part in some kind of outreach, 57% had done something with another church (hooray!), and 65% had attended something on Good Friday - mainly older folks (which could be work pressures). We've ended up with 2 Good Friday events, a family-friendly workshop afternoon, and a churchy meditation thing, which between them seem to cover all the bases.

There's a section on social attitudes: 80% are opposed to same sex marriage, and there is a mixed picture on military action in Afghanistan and Libya. And there's also a section on beliefs, which deals mainly with the atonement: it's a shame it's quite narrow, but I guess they couldn't cover everything.

Thoughts:
1. It's great to see that, for lots of Christians, their faith inspires them to serve their communities, and to be involved in politics and social issues. I would hate us to become like US conservatives, where there's a cultural identification between evangelical Christianity and particular political viewpoints. At the same time, is there any kind of consensus or common mind on a Christian approach to politics (with committed Christians in all 3 major parties) or social issues?

2. Nick Cleggs speech yesterday focused a lot on liberal values, and the core message was that you act true to your values, rather than true to your paymasters or public opinion ('not easy, but right'). It was a reminder to the LibDems what they stood for, what motivated them, and what battles they should be prepared to fight. It was the first time I'd even got remotely stirred by the phrase 'Social Mobility', which is a massive injustice lurking underneath an insipid label.

Clegg gets it: values drive behaviour. If you don't value others, the planet, the future, your community, yourself, then that's a toxic combination. Christian faith provides a framework for all of this, and the research backs this up by showing the fruit of that, but I sense these values are being eroded in many other places. Big Society behaviour needs more than just a slogan, it needs a foundation of values and morality. 

3. I would like to see the link between the questions the EA thought important to ask (about how the Cross works) and the involvement of people in their communities. How are churches joining the dots? And how is this reflected in the workplace? The voluntary sector is a natural place to serve and bless, but are we helping people to live differently in secular workplaces too?

Irish Evangelical Alliance and Civil Partnerships

I normally avoid this sort of thing because, unlike certain sections of the Anglican communion, I'm not thinking about sex every 7 seconds. More female leaders, that's what we need.... sorry, I'll avoid that tangent for now. But this seemed worthy of note: the Irish Evangelical Alliance has recently issued a document on its response to civil partnership legislation in Ireland. Things are different over there, but I was struck by this summary on Zoomtard:

We endorse the Civil Union legislation as it stands because as evangelical Christians we recognise that we have no automatic rights to have our Biblical beliefs enacted in law. In a pluralistic society, tolerance is a two-way street. We can not demand and protect our right to religious expression and simultaneously oppose the rights of others to form significant relationships.

In a follow up post, Kevin writes
do not mistake that the EAI’s support of civil legislation and the associated extension of rights to these couples as some kind of woolly-headed rejection of Christian orthodoxy. It is not a complex idea to hold that we can wholeheartedly believe what we believe and not expect others to agree and simultaneously want to fight for the rights of people who do not agree with us.

In a way this is an easier position to come to for Irish evangelicals, because they're not a big group, and probably don't wield a massive amount of influence. At the same time, should your theology be determined by how much power and influence you have...? I guess if you have some influence and weight in society you need a theology and set of principles for how you use it.

this document is not a caving in to contemporary pressure. It is a deep theological reflection on how to live as a group of Christians in a land where plenty of people disagree with us.

"how to live as a group of Christians in a land where plenty of people disagree with us." Sounds like a pretty good place to start. You may not agree with their conclusions, but recognising that, in a pluralist society, maybe we can't just draw a straight line from the Bible to the statute book and say 'here I stand, I can do no other'. We can do other - see yesterdays post on John the Baptist for a start.

Spring Harvest 2009

Better late than never, a few reflections on Spring Harvest Week 3 in Minehead.

Highs

• Good opening night - often these are a bit low key, as the SH team try to allow for people to settle in and get their heads round things, but instead we had an upbeat evening, great talk from Jeff Lucas, and a slightly complex questionnaire to help people work out their learning styles. I came out as a 'Theorist' (alternatives were Reflector, Activist and Pragmatist. Reflectors wanted to change the questions, pragmatists wanted to know why they were filling in a questionnaire, Activists wanted to get on with the rest of the evening and not do the questionnaire at all).
• Lots of challenging teaching around the theme of Discipleship, including plenty on how we help people to grow as disciples in a local church context, and on discipleship as a whole-life thing, rather than something measured in 'churchy' terms. SH has got more 'catholic' in where it draws teaching and wisdom from, and it was good to see the idea of a Rule of Life being taken seriously.
• Good childrens programme - our two enjoyed themselves and got stuck into their groups
• Excellent band for the Big Top, led by Vicky Beeching (who I discovered on Spotify on returning from SH, which was nice). Just as energetic at 9am as 9pm, in what must have been an exhausting week for them.
• Minehead beach, which has been covered in sand since I last saw it, and is great.
• More interesting seminars than I could fit in, which is unusual - in recent years the programme has looked all too familiar, with very little which hasn't already been done a couple of times before. It was nice to have lots to chew on.
• Good seminars by Alastair Burt MP and a guy from LICC, on discipleship and modern culture.
• The bookstall. I just love all that browsing.
• Cbeebies on the chalet TV's for when the children needed some downtime.
• Excellent study notes, as always, with plenty to chew on and challenge
• Just the whole experience of being there.

Lows (relatively speaking)

• One or two speakers trying to copy the 'anecdote' style, rather than being authentically themselves. I tuned out of one talk and ended up spending 20 minutes thinking about Peters confession of Christ in Mark 8, which actually turned out to be quite fruitful.
• Too much marketing of stuff through events which were supposed to be for worship. Put me in mind of Pete Wards critique of 'selling worship'. One event was particularly blatant, and felt very uncomfortable.
• A lack of seriousness - yes SH should be fun, but if we're supposed to be meeting with God then I'm not sure that stories about the bodily functions of seagulls really help us with that, though perhaps it really spoke to someone. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood that evening.
• Powerpoint training - some speakers had clearly got the hang of what powerpoint/visuals are for, others hadn't, cramming the screen with as much text as possible, and skipping to the next slide before you had time to digest it.
• Finnegans fish and chips. Awful. Skegness-goers, it may be perishing cold by the North Sea, but at least you've got Harry Ramsdens.
• Lack of a decent international speaker. It may be false memory syndrome, but SH used to regularly bring in well known speakers from outside the UK. Having been inspired by Tony Campolo and Don Carson at SH in the past, it would be great to hear Brian MacLaren, Tim Keller, Alan Hirsch, Tom Sine, Bill Hybels, Jackie Pullinger, (insert your own favourite) etc. Or maybe I'm just spoilt. (or, see below, maybe I went to the wrong week!!)

Will post some quotes from the speakers in a few days, if I can decipher my notes.

Not a mention, by the way, of New Word Alive, which parted company with Spring Harvest a couple of years ago. Adrian Warnock has a detailed blog from the event, which gives a flavour of what it was like. I hope the two festivals don't retreat to separate sides of a wall, writing messages in Chalke but no longer communicating.

There were also no major speakers from New Wine, another major evangelical network - possibly because they're all prepping for their leaders conference in a fortnight. It's worryingly easy to pigeon-hole a lot of well-known church leaders into the conference you'd expect to hear them speak at, which isn't healthy. We need to listen to people we aren't necessarily going to agree with.

Other Spring Harvest bloggers
Tom Bullock who was there as an 8-11s leader
Dan Kingsley
David Derbyshire
Sean Stillman
Abigail
Sammy
Nigel Wright - reading his blog it sounds like we did get Brian Maclaren, just not when I was there!
Forbidden Fruits Frustrated Writings, going back after a 20 year gap.
Help i work with children who helped lead the 5-7's work at Skeggy

and probably loads more....

NEAC 2008

I normally avoid Anglican politics on this blog, which is probably why nobody reads it. But as an evangelical Anglican who finds his church more hospitable to mission and evangelism than at any time in living memory, I can't for the life of me see why some of my evangelical colleagues are intent on throwing it all away.

The weekend saw the National Evangelical Anglican Congress (or Consultation, or something beginning with C). I once went to one of these (or something like it - you can tell I'm a real insider to all this) in London, and most of it is a line-up of speakers delivering stuff from the front, with the conference organisers hoping that enough of the streams of evangelicalism are represented to keep everyone happy.

Well, it all seems to have kicked off: various links for more details
Rachel at Revise Reform (lots of good reflections)
Radical Evangelical which in turn links to a discussion thread over at Forum.
Tim Goodbody has a good summary of the day.
Thinking Anglicans has the text of some of the presentations
Peter Ould has an excellent reflection on the day, and analysis of the issues.

What's all the fuss? It sounds like the delegates (who could be anyone, it didn't sound like you needed to sign a doctrinal basis to attend) were presented with a motion for discussion in the afteroon. Except there wasn't much discussion, people were just asked to give their support. Here's the motion

“That this National Evangelical Anglican Consultation,
acknowledging that the Church of England professes the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and bears witness to this truth in her historic formularies (the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-nine Articles and the Ordinal) and as set out in Canon A5, Article 6 and the Declaration of Assent

and mindful, as members of the Anglican Communion, of our obligations to faithful Anglicans across the globe,

(a) express our support for the Jerusalem Declaration
and
(b) recognising that Evangelical Anglicans will pursue a variety of strategies, support our brothers and sisters in their strategic decisions including those set out in the GAFCON Statement made in Jerusalem on 29th June 2008 at the Global Anglican Future Conference gathering attended by 1148 people, including 291 Bishops of the Anglican Communion”

Most of the Jerusalem Declaration is fine, but the motion effectively
- asked the conference to give its implicit support for GAFCON, indeed sees it as an 'obligation to faithful Anglicans across the globe'. Not all of us supported it.
- give a blank cheque to whatever tactics pro-GAFCON leaders might use. Like, for example, setting up a new province in North America, which also happened over the weekend. Again, no.

It sounds like the way the debate was handled probably didn't help, and I'd love to know whether the motion came from the Council who ran the event, or just from the chairman, Richard Turnbull. Wisely, the conference declined to take a vote.

I can understand why Anglicans in other parts of the world are having major struggles. What continues to bother me is that a small clique of evangelicals in England seem intent on stirring the pot, and trying to create clear blue water between themselves and the Church of England structures. This is a church, for those who have forgotten, which threw out John Wesleys preaching. In the 1960's the best-selling book by our bishops was one which denied the objective existence of God. We had Don Cupitt. More recently our bishops have denied the resurrection of Jesus. It's not as though we have a spotless history. Henry VIII?

And now? The church has a fund set aside for mission. The Bishop of Durham is a prominent evangelical bible scholar. Church of England rules are being changed to enable church planting and new forms of church. A national body has been set up to encourage church planting and mission, and it's first leader has just been made Bishop of Sheffield. Several Dioceses organise themselves around Mission Action Plans which work at both Diocesan and Parish level. Rewind to 1990 - all this would have been unheard of. Check out the cluster of thriving evangelical churches and Anglican mission agencies in Sheffield, soon to be joined by Steve Croft as Bishop. Or the Oxford church-planting pilot set up with Church Commissioners money. Or the new partnership in theological training between Holy Trinity Brompton (home of Alpha) and London Diocese. Would Alpha have caught on in the RC church at all if it hadn't come from a 'reformed Catholic' church like the CofE?

For evangelicals, mission is a non-negotiable. Our church is more hospitable to mission than at any time in living memory. Funds, energy, research, leadership are all being geared towards outreach and growth, and this is increasing. I want to say to my fellow evangelicals WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE! This is the scenario we have been working and praying for for years, so stop thinking about homosexuality every 7 seconds and get stuck in. No matter that influential people in other places want you to sign up to their movement, God is moving here, now. Sign up to that. And if you don't like your bishop's doctrinal stance, hold tight and another one will be along soon. One word: Durham (though some clergy in Durham might tell you that there's more to being a bishop than good theology!!)

To be honest I have enough on in terms of local mission activity that things like NEAC are way down my list of priorities, which is why I didn't go. But I shall be there at the next one (if there is a next one) and I'll be going to the New Wine conference next year as well, and feel like I want to start arguing for those of us who aren't into the politics of all this, but see time and energy wasted when we could be getting on with the important stuff.

Now, back to business.

New Statesman: 'Belief is Back'

'Belief is Back' declares the front of the latest New Statesman, which has:

- a lengthy interview with Tom Wright summarised as a declaration of war on 'militant atheists and liberals'. Thanks for letting us read it with an open mind. Wright also restates his much-cited take on the resurrection: "We are talking about a good physical world which is to be remade, not a bad physical world which is going to be trashed in favour of a purely spiritual sphere."

- an article by Stephen Bates on the rise of the Bogeyman, sorry, evangelical Christians - These range from the charismatics (the happy-clappies) to the open movement, placed pretty well in the centre of Church life, to the conservatives, whose more militant fringes are now consciously mirroring some of the highly politicised techniques of the religious right in the US (they get some funding from there, too). The conservatives' tactics are also quite similar to those of the old Militant Tendency in the 1980s Labour Party.

You think I'm joking? Here is one article in the magazine of the conservative Church Society about how to take over a parish: "The rural Church is likely to be dominated by the 'old guard' who are suspicious of innovation . . . do they actually understand about the issues or even care about them sufficiently to make in telligent dialogue worthwhile?" The answer, he says, is to recruit small groups of the like-minded to infiltrate congregations "to help others see the need to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus". The conservative evangelicals are the ones who do not hesitate to tell that nice, Guardian-reading, self-designated hairy lefty, Rowan Wil liams, Archbishop of Canterbury, that he's a false teacher and a heretic. They noisily assert that they wouldn't allow him in their churches to preach because he would only confuse their congregations with wrong doctrine.

I'm sure there's an informal rota amongst journalists, so that roughly every 6 months since 1975 someone publishes a 'conservative Christians are coming to get you' article. Some of the categorising is pretty sloppy - I speak as one of his 'happy clappy' types - but the conclusion is spot on: the ultimate irony is that the more urgently they profess the need to win the nation for Christ, the more they repel those they say they most wish to save.

Finally Mary Warnock argues that God shouldn't be a trump card in law-making, arguing that an MP's religion should have no influence over how they vote. This is nonsense. If you have a religion, it is bound to affect how you vote, otherwise you are a hypocrite. Everyone votes and thinks on the basis of a value system, so to rule out theistic value systems discriminates against Christians, Muslims and other believers. You can't pretend this is even-handed, even though Warnock makes it sound ever so reasonable. Her litmus test question "Will society benefit from it in the empirical world?" is hardly a neutral one - your notion of society and what benefits it depends on your value system.

Plenty to chew on for a spring Saturday. Plenty to spit out too!

A Word of Wisdom from Tom Wright

A very big thankyou (the bloggers in-phrase is 'hat tip' I think...) to Malcolm Chamberlain, newly discovered blog (via Steve Tilleys comments on what sort of evangelical is the right one) for this fantastic bit of wisdom from Tom Wright:

"In Christian theology, such phrases [as "the authority of Scripture"] regularly act as “portable stories”—that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the Church and the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, and then carrying them about with us. Shorthands enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point in doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in the new location. Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the contents go moldy. They will benefit from fresh air, and perhaps a hot iron." (emphasis mine)

this is an extract from an interview with the excellent Wittenberg Door, the original Christian satire magazine.

Putting the venge into evangelical?

Good post from Ruth Gledhill today on the rumpus at Wycliffe Hall, one of the UK Anglican training colleges. Custardy, a Wycliffe Hall student, has some interesting comments. The national press has been following this one for a while. The latest development is that Elaine Storkey, a well regarded theologian and speaker, is going to court to claiming religious discrimination against the college, arguing that she was dismissed for being the wrong sort of evangelical.

By coincidence (?) I'm reading 1 Corinthians at the moment.
1 Corinthians 6
1 If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints?
2 Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases?
3 Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life!
4 Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, appoint as judges even men of little account in the church!
5 I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers?
6 But instead, one brother goes to law against another— and this in front of unbelievers!
7 The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?
8 Instead, you yourselves cheat and do wrong, and you do this to your brothers.

It's very sad that we have evangelical Christians taking each other to court, which itself says something about the failure of the Wycliffe structures to deal with the issues in a satisfactory way.

There are hundreds of other blogs poring over the small print of evangelicalism, and I have no intention of this becoming one of them. I just think it's tragic that evangelicalism is the strongest it has been within the Church of England for generations, that mission has never been more on the CofE agenda than it is now, and that we have a historic opportunity to be at the heart of this church which God loves and to help it to move forward. It is foolishness to be fighting, and squandering energy on working out who belongs to which theological clique. And if our theological students and ordinands are so weak-minded that they can't cope with being taught by someone of a slightly different point of view, then God help us.

Elaine Storkey says:

I am bewildered as to why anyone would want to spend their energy doing this when there is a world out there we should be speaking to of the love of God. And we should not just be speaking it, we should be living it, first of all, in the way we love one another, and also in the way we love them.

'What is the point of going out and trying to find heretics, so we can shoot them down? It seems so unloving and so unproductive. I cannot figure it out.

'Never before in the history of the evangelical church have we had so many evangelicals and of such talent. The whole way we could pull together with other people and other traditions of the church, it could be fantastic. But rather than do that, we end up squabbling. It is appalling. It is ridiculous. There is no victory there. It is just daft.'

Amen