Warning Signs

Some pretty stark findings from a Girl Guides survey on how young girls see themselves, confirming what the Childrens Society reported a couple of months ago:

Among the 559 seven- to 10-year-olds who took part in the survey:

• 36% said they were made to feel the most important thing about them was their looks
• 38% felt they were not pretty enough
• 35% agreed women were judged more on their appearance than their abilities
• 23% felt they needed to be perfect

And these feelings were far more prevalent among the more than 1,000 11- to 21-year-olds who took part:

• 80% felt their looks were the most important thing about them
• 66% felt they were not pretty enough
• 93% agreed women were judged more on appearance than ability
• 47% believed their looks held them back most of the time
• 61% felt the need to be perfect

This follows on from last weeks news that 26% of women aged 16-24 are reporting symptoms of mental illness. Not so long ago, that was the lifetime figure - how many of us over our lifetime might suffer from depression, anxiety or other mental illness. 

This is a major crisis. Philip Hammond was highlighting 'productivity' yesterday, and wanted the Conservative conference to believe that by investing in a few key parts of the economy, we'd get it sorted. Perhaps the problem is something much more fundamental, and the solution something much more radical. No matter how well educated we are, or how fast our broadband speed, we are a nation in the grip of a mental health epidemic. It affects our relationships, parenting, rates of substance abuse, and workplace productivity, along with a whole host of other things. 

Time to Change is a commendable campaign to end mental health stigma, but don't lets pretend that once we've done that, all will be well. On the same day as the Guides survey came out, the Royal College of Surgeons issued patient guidelines for people wanting to have cosmetic surgery. This is a symptom of the same disease - women who learn to hate their appearance when children will be the customers of the cosmetic industry when they're older. 

The Bishop of Gloucesters campaign on body image among girls is timely, but there is a whole industry that needs taking out here. After Justin Welby prophetically spoke and acted on payday loan companies, the Welby Effect has been quite dramatic. It will take something bigger to undermine the structure of an image industry which involves surgeons, dentists, magazines, music, film, TV, Kim Kardashian, social media, selfie sticks, the cosmetics firms, advertising, and the devil - who doesn't wear Prada, but wants women to believe that their lives are incomplete without a brand name.

In an image-dominated society, the cultural flow is towards appearance and presentation. How do we bring into the cultural mainstream the idea that beauty is a quality of character, rather than an advertisers dog whistle? "Stop judging by mere appearances and make a right judgement" (John 7:24). We are so far gone it's almost impossible to imagine what UK society would look like if we took these words of Jesus seriously

We are also incredibly conflicted about this - the Paralympics (remember them?) does a great job for promoting a positive image of people with disabilities, but at the same time we enshrine in law a procedure which will lead to the abortions of more disabled children. A sense of value is based on externals - what people can do, contribute, look like, produce, or achieve (anyone for Grammar Schools?) - is spiritually and emotionally toxic. I'm not sure if a post-Christian society is actually able to come up with anything better than this, the signs are that any cultural sense of intrinsic worth as people uniquely loved and made in God's image is decaying fast. 'Because I'm worth it' is a marketing slogan, not a philosophical truth - the irony is that the slogan undermines self-worth at the moment it's delivered. 

Final thought: feminism needs to be reclaimed from capitalism. It has been colonised and trivialised. Imagine if you can the early Suffragettes sitting at the NFL final, watching Beyonce and her army of half-dressed minions waving their bottoms at the crowd, then turning to each other and saying "ladies, our work is complete." No, me neither. 

From the Girl Guides report: From as young as seven, girls feel the impact of daily sexist images of women and girls in the media, online and around them. Girls tell us that sexist objectification of women in the media makes them feel disempowered and that gender stereotypes make them feel that their gender will hold them back in life. They tell us they have to confront intense and unobtainable appearance pressures to be perfect and many say they feel they’re not good enough. 

WATCH with Mother: recreating God in our own image?

“If we take seriously the idea that men and women are made in the image of God both male and female language should be used.”

When I meet someone new, I introduce myself as David. I'm gently riled if they then refer to me as 'Dave'. Dave is a TV channel, my name is David. That's how I've chosen to identify myself. 

WATCH (Women And The Church) have for some time now advocated using female terms to refer to God. The Bible has female imagery (Jesus speaks of himself as a mother hen, for example), and the danger of using one set of words repeatedly is that they can come to confine God to a certain set of meanings, rather than allow God to be God. The issue has surfaced again over the weekend. 

Under all of this is the basic question: has God revealed Him/Her/Its self to us. Has God given us a name by which to call him? (I'm going to use the male pronoun out of habit and precedent, and because it'll be unreadable otherwise). Through scripture, and Jesus (God incarnate, lets remember), has God given us particular ways in which to understand his character and nature? If so, then these images, metaphors and words have to anchor our ways of talking about God. Alternatively, if these are just the best guess of the people at the time, then we're quite within our rights to talk about God in any way we like. We are more likely to end up making God in our image, but at least we can ditch the words we find unhelpful or upsetting. 

Cranmer has a piece up at the moment on 'truthiness' - our tendency to believe the things we want to be true, rather than the things that actually are true.  History is littered with attempts to rewrite the Christian faith in the image of the writer, or the culture of the time, to have the God that we want to be real, rather than God as he actually is. If God is fundamentally other, then in describing him in the metaphors and titles we prefer there is the danger that we simply end up talking about humanity in a very loud voice, and cease to talk about the God who is who God is. 

In WATCH's terms, this is part of a long-term goal to change the language we use about God: Watch’s chairwoman, Hilary Cotton, added: “We are at a very, very preliminary stage in terms of shifting the language of worship.
“The question of how might we rewrite the worship services of the Church of England in a way that broadens our understanding and perception of God is a really difficult question over which we will wrestle for a number of years to come.

Yes we need to use the full range of Biblical language to talk about God: wind and fire, judge and servant, warrior and lover, etc. But it's a brave person who thinks they know God better than Jesus: 'when you pray, say 'Father....' Of course, I'm a bloke, so this can all be discounted as patriarchal ranting by a theological dinosaur. But once we end up with a definition and an image of God that we're entirely comfortable with, then we're in trouble. We're sinners, we aren't whole people, we will only be entirely comfortable with God when we're fully renewed with him in glory. A God who really is God will never be an easy God for anyone in this life, as a skim-read of the Psalms will testify. 

Yes, lets broaden our understanding and perception of God, but lets make sure it's God we're looking at, not just a reflection of ourselves. 

The story is told of a girl who was hard at work drawing a picture. The teacher asked what she was doing: "I'm drawing a picture of God" she answered. "But nobody knows what God looks like." responded the teacher. She replied "they will when I've finished."

update: if you can bear it, here's a list of links to various comments and opinion blogs on this topic, which for some reason doesn't include Ian Pauls piece. 

The Spirituality Spectrum: 21st century believing

The University of Exeter published some research earlier this week on evolving attitudes among those born in 1970. Here's the analysis of their views on religion and faith, with analysis by Prof David Voas (who's also been involved in some of the CofE research recently). More details plus a link to the full research here.

Professor Voas concludes that it would be more meaningful to allocate people to one of seven categories:

• Non-religious (28% of the 1970-born cohort): Does not have a religion or believe in either God or life after death.
• Unorthodox non-religious (21%): Does not have a religion or does not attend services. Believes in God or life after death but not both.
• Actively religious (15%): Has a religion and believes in God and life after death. Attends services.
• Non-practising religious (14%): Has a religion and believes in God and life after death. Does not attend services.
• Non-identifying believers (10%): Does not have a religion, but believes in God and life after death.
• Nominally religious (7%): Identifies with a religion. But believes in neither God nor life after death.
• Unorthodox religious (5%): Has a religion and attends services at least occasionally. Believes in God but not life after death (or, in a few cases, vice versa).

It's a fascinating spectrum, and a reminder that the UK doesn't have a simple Christian/atheist binary option (if it ever did). On first sight it reminded me of the current political opinion polls, a spectrum of identities with no one block claiming a significant or decisive percentage. 

What I'd love to see is some way of tracking how people end up at these points. The research suggests that the stronger your religious upbringing, the more likely you are to have a faith now, and be practicing it. No surprise there. But how do you end up as an agnostic who believes in God and life after death. Or a Christian who doesn't believe in either?

It's a reminder that we can't pigeon hole people, everyone's faith is part of their life story, not everyone in church will believe the same thing, nor will everyone at a Richard Dawkins book signing. People need to be listened to, rather than lumped together, 

The report also notes that men are much less likely to identify with a faith than women. Another challenge. Given that Jesus started with a bunch of blokes, the church has to ask itself what we've lost of authentic Christianity that the majority of men don't see Jesus as any of their business, or themselves as any of His.

Anthropocene or Neanderthal? Murdoch signals the end of an era

A few days ago, some geologists announced that we were living in a new global epoch, the Anthropocene Age. It turns out that the first nuclear tests marked the beginning of this new phase of global history, up there with the Triassic, the Cretaceous and the Audacious.

It turns out they had got slightly ahead of themselves. We are actually in the final few days of the Neanderthal Period, with the news that the Sun is about to stop publishing pictures of breasts on page 3.

However, there are signs that we may be simply entering the Dacre Age: most of the papers reporting on the Sun story are themselves putting up lots of pictures of women in bikinis, because their readers clearly need to be reminded what a woman in a bikini looks like.

 #Fail.

This has been standard Daily Mail practice for years - x is so outrageous we have to show you a picture of it, just so you know how outrageous it is (wink wink).

Congratulations to the No More Page 3 campaign, even the Mighty Murdoch can be forced to change by people power. Now for Stop the Sidebar?


update: having said all that, the Neanderthals may not have quite given up yet...

This is what Feminism looks like

After centuries of struggle, lives lost, reputations put on the line, battle after battle for womens rights and equality, female empowerment has reached its natural peak today. Hearing primary school aged children singing a song they picked up in the school playground 'Oh my gosh, look at her butt'

Emmeline Pankhurst, Anthea Dworkin, Sojourner Truth, Germaine Greer, Millicent Fawcett, are you watching Simone de Beauvoir? Your girls took one hell of a beating.

Sadly it was from themselves.

Maybe I'm just an over-protective parent, but my daughter isn't going to find any decent role models in a pop culture dominated by women singing about their bottoms, waving them around, or both. And my son isn't going to learn anything about how to respect and value women as equals. Is it just me?

Marriage: what's up for grabs?

Amidst all the sound and fury around redefining marriage this week, I've been trying to work out what I think. The Ugley Vicar has already pointed out a lack of clear thinking in government about what marriage is, and what it is actually trying to do. 

So much of the debate seems to come down to whether or not marriage is a 'given', an institution, something which exists independently of our efforts to define or redefine it. And if it is a 'given', how much of that is up for grabs, and how much of the nature of marriage can be tweaked from culture to culture? So the Church of England, for example, has moved from a set of marriage vows where the wife promises to 'obey' and the husband to 'worship', to creating an alternative symmetrical set of vows, to taking the symmetrical vows as the norm. 

Here's Dietrich Bonhoeffer Marriage is more than your love for each other. It has a higher dignity and power, for it is God’s holy ordinance, through which He wills to perpetuate the human race till the end of time. In your love you see only your two selves in the world, but in marriage you are a link in the chain of the generations, which God causes to come and to pass away to His glory, and calls into His kingdom. In your love you see only the heaven of your own happiness, but in marriage you are placed at a post of responsibility towards the world and mankind. Your love is your own private possession, but marriage is more that something personal – it is a status, an office.

This sense of an office is part of the furniture of Christian thinking, whether we are thinking about leadership in the church (apostles/bishops etc.) thinking about power (kings, prophets, the place of the law), work and rest (sabbath), or relationships. There are some 'givens' which God has put in place, for our good and for the good of community and the planet. Even in secular terms, we still recognise a 'vocation', that sense of a call which comes from beyond you to take a particular place in society as teacher, healer, carer, pursuer of knowledge etc.  

Postmodern liberalism, on the other hand, doesn't recognise any givens. Everything is a social construction, everything is up for grabs. Inherited institutions, from the monarchy to the Lords to the church to marriage, carry no intrinsic authority, and have to justify their existence on the same terms as everything else. All is merit and practicality. And there's plenty to be said for this. I would much rather have a competent Bishop than one who says 'I'm the bishop of (insert), this is what I do', to justify any action. 

The political and cultural outworking of this is the extension of free choice into any and every area of life, from conception to cremation. The battle over assisted dying is the same as the battle over marriage, is individual free choice sovereign, and does anything else trump it? The proponents of euthanasia, consistently led by the BBC, will not let this one drop until they win it. 

However the flipside of this is that any principal that liberalism appeals to must be a social construct as well. You can't reject all 'given' social institutions, and then insist on innate and given moral values. The notion of 'equality' which the government is currently appealing to is a social construct too, and just as open to challenge as the institutions it is used to challenge. 

The Biblical description of marriage - the exclusive and life-long union of one man and one woman, instituted and blessed by God - is consistently affirmed from Genesis 1 to the arrival of the 'Bride' in Revelation. It is a microcosm of the human race, a reflection of the love of God for his creation, the ideal context for having and raising children (though the Bible wouldn't recognise our nuclear family, operating as an independent unit from any form of community or clan). There are things that are like marriage: a parents commitment to their children is (hopefully) life long, there are deep friendships which offer companionship, there are extended families who support the rearing of children. Marriage doesn't have a monopoly on the social goods it embodies. But that doesn't mean that other relationships which carry these social goods need to be renamed 'marriage'. 

This is not simply a matter of equality, or justice, it's a deep philosophical and cultural issue about the very structure of existence. Are we simply making it up as we go along, or is there some kind of a structure to human existence and society which actually needs to be respected and worked with? It doesn't strike me that this week has made these questions any clearer, or helped us to resolve them. 

Other bits worth reading:
Peter Ould has several posts
God and Politics notes that ignoring the public response to the 'consultation' is seen as a badge of honour by the Equalities Minister. 

No More Page 3

I've signed this petition, which asks the editor of the Sun to stop putting pictures of naked women on page 3.

you shouldn’t show the naked breasts of young women in your widely read ‘family’ newspaper.

Consider this a long overdue outcry.

Dominic, stop showing topless pictures of young women in Britain’s most widely read newspaper, stop conditioning your readers to view women as sex objects.

Enough is enough.

Thank you.

The 'No More Page 3' campaign also has a Facebook and Twitter presence. Lucy Ann Holmes explains her reasons for starting the petition here, though why the Independent felt they needed to use that particular picture..... well, it just proves her point.

Holmes writes: The page 3 girl image is there for no other reason than the sexual gratification of men. She’s a sex object. But when figures range from 300,000 women being sexually assaulted and 60,000 raped each year, to 1 in 4 who have been sexually assaulted, is it wise to be repeatedly perpetuating a notion that women are sexual objects?

or in the words of the late lamented Somerset band 'Why?'
Naked woman on page 3
Page 4 the story of a sex offender
Somewhere down the line we miss the point....

The campaign is now asking major supermarkets to boycott the Sun until it discontinues the practice.

It's very difficult in 2012, unless you have very poor eyesight, to keep to Jesus teaching: "anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Culture is riddled with the message that women are sex objects, from page 3 to pole dancing being marketed as exercise. I'm reminded of Douglas Couplands observation that marketing is feeding our own waste back to us in such a way that we don't realise it's real food (he uses stronger language than that). Fashion, music videos, magazine covers, you name it, there are plenty of things out there which make it difficult for men who want to keep their thought life pure.

Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a life. Holmes is right, what we sow in a tabloid photo we reap in misery.

CofE Response to Marriage Consultation

The CofE has published its response to the government consultation on changing the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. The consultation closes on Thursday.

the response begins: (the proposed changes) would alter the intrinsic nature of marriage as the union of a man and a woman, as enshrined in human institutions throughout history. Marriage benefits society in many ways, not only by promoting mutuality and fidelity, but also by acknowledging an underlying biological complementarity which, for many, includes the possibility of procreation.

We have supported various legal changes in recent years to remove unjustified discrimination and create greater legal rights for same sex couples and we welcome that fact that previous legal and material inequities between heterosexual and same-sex partnerships have now been satisfactorily addressed. To change the nature of marriage for everyone will be divisive and deliver no obvious legal gains given the rights already conferred by civil partnerships. We also believe that imposing for essentially ideological reasons a new meaning on a term as familiar and fundamental as marriage would be deeply unwise.

full response here, 13 pages worth. Press release here

Bishop Tim Stevens, quoted by the BBC: "I think the difficulty we have here is the substitution of equality for uniformity, that is to say that there can be no distinction at all between men and women," he said.

"From a standing start within three months to arrive at a fully considered, weighed and articulated redefinition of a fundamental social institution which has been thought about in one particular way for centuries... to change all that on the basis of a consultation like this seems to be at the very least unwise and ill considered."

There are several headlines that suggest that the main issue is whether the CofE will need to be disestablished. That's completely beside the point, and isn't one of the main arguments in the submission. This isn't about the CofE keeping any special status, though changes to that status might be a consequence of changes in the definition of marriage.
 
I guess I'm contributing to all the chatter about this today, when I'd much rather the CofE was focusing on other issues, but Clegg and Cameron did ask what we thought. And it's important to get this right, rather than make a fundamental social change in a very short time-frame to appease a few LibDem backbenchers.

The consultation itself is about mechanics, not about principle: This consultation is about how we best remove the ban on same-sex couples having a civil marriage, not on whether this should or should not  happen says the Home Office consultation page. Which would, if they wanted to, enable the government to dismiss the entire CofE response on a technicality. The language used ('ban') and the way the whole thing is set up shows that the government doesn't actually want a public debate on this.

Loaded, lads and the degrading of women

Excellent post at God and Politics, on the slow awakening of a Loaded editor to the realities of pornography. I won't be posting anything today, except to recommend that you read Gillan's excellent piece, which also references a campaign for New Look to withdraw some appalling t-shirts.

The Trouble With Men

ITV1 has a documentary at 7.30pm on 'the hidden epidemic of male depression'. There's not a massive amount of programme information around, but it should be worth a look. ITV's Penny Marshall talks more about the programme here.

Total Politics has noted this week how few MPs own up to mental illness or depression, despite how common it is.

On a lighter note, here's some insight into how mens brains work.


think this might find its way into our Marriage Preparation course next year...

Is Church Too Easy for Men?

the numbers don't lie. Men are staying away from church. The reasons are undoubtedly complex, but perhaps a clue can be found in a Christian group that attracts men and women in roughly equal numbers: Eastern Orthodoxy. A cynic might say that men are attracted to Orthodoxy because it is conservative, with an all-male clergy, many of them sporting beards. The finding of religion journalist Frederica Mathewes-Green, however, is closer to the truth. She surveyed male adult converts and discovered that Orthodoxy's main appeal is that it's "challenging." One convert said, "Orthodoxy is serious. It is difficult. It is demanding. It is about mercy, but it is also about overcoming myself." Another said that he was sick of "bourgeois, feel-good American Christianity."

Yes, some churchgoers are satisfied with feel-good Christianity, but I think many Christians—women and men—yearn for a more costly, demanding, life-changing discipleship. Perhaps women are more patient when they don't find it, or more discerning of the deeper cross-bearing opportunities that lie beneath the candied surface. Men take a walk or hang around the church coffeepot talking in jargon about football: another disciplined and costly arena of life in which people sacrifice their bodies and their individual desires for a larger cause that matters to them, at least for the moment. Near transcendence is preferable to no transcendence at all.


full article at Christian Century.

I can relate to this. On 3 months of sabbatical, the things I enjoyed most were not really the free time, or the cold beers, but the challenges: a weeks silent retreat, a 30 mile walk in the Lake District, converting half the garage into a games room for our kids with limited (read 'no') DIY skills. Those were the highlights.

Here's the survey the article refers to, which really is worth reading in full. Here's a snippet

The term most commonly cited by these men was “challenging.” Orthodoxy is “active and not passive.” “It’s the only church where you are required to adapt to it, rather than it adapting to you.” “The longer you are in it, the more you realize it demands of you.”

The “sheer physicality of Orthodox worship” is part of the appeal. Regular days of fasting from meat and dairy, “standing for hours on end, performing prostrations, going without food and water [before communion]…When you get to the end you feel that you’ve faced down a challenge.” “Orthodoxy appeals to a man’s desire for self-mastery through discipline.”

“In Orthodoxy, the theme of spiritual warfare is ubiquitous; saints, including female saints, are warriors. Warfare requires courage, fortitude, and heroism. We are called to be ‘strugglers’ against sin, to be ‘athletes’ as St. Paul says. And the prize is given to the victor. The fact that you must ‘struggle’ during worship by standing up throughout long services is itself a challenge men are willing to take up.”

A recent convert summed up, “Orthodoxy is serious. It is difficult. It is demanding. It is about mercy, but it’s also about overcoming oneself. I am challenged in a deep way, not to ‘feel good about myself’ but to become holy. It is rigorous, and in that rigor I find liberation."

Archbishop of Canterbury: The All-Woman Shortlist

Following the unexpected popularity of the list of lay candidates for AB of C, it struck me (and one or two observers) that there wasn't a single woman on the list. Time to put that right.....

Miranda: Theologically sound - has a great grasp of The Fall - and powerful enough to beat Chartres over 3 rounds. Public school background is ideal for the House of Bishops, we may be ready for a woman, ready for a layperson, but God forbid we should ever have a commoner.

Mother Teresa: saintly, appeals to those with Catholic sympathies, and with global appeal. Has the added advantage of being dead, which means she's unlikely to say anything off-the-cuff which can be misquoted by the broadsheets and mangled by their headline writers.

Dame Edna Everage: great to have a candidate from the colonies, I mean, the Anglican Communion. Dame Edna has charisma, wisdom, insight and great hair. Hang on a minute. This is a bloke isn't it? It's a bloke trying to sneak his way onto the all women shortlist! First they dress in womens clothes, then they try to take a womans job! Perhaps alternative oversight and a church all to themselves is the only way to keep the testosterone in order.

Jordan: the ideal candidate if the CofE wants to carry on being fractious and bickering, as nobody will be remotely worried about falling out with her. After all, you have to cross Jordan to get to the promised land (sorry). Might be some problems getting the vestments to fit.


Marge Simpson: presides over a nominally Christian household which is always arguing, and persistently ignores the ways of the Bible-believing family next door. Bingo. There might need to be a mitre extension to accomodate that hair, but it's a small price to pay. Minor concerns that, over 24 years, she's still not managed to get her infant daughter to talk. .She'll face the opposite problem in the CofE, which is getting fully grown males to shut up.

Claire Balding: Relentlessly cheerful and a great lover of dogs, which make up about 50% of the headcount in many rural Dioceses. Plenty of continuity with tradition, as we've had plenty of balding Archbishops already. Just don't show your teeth when taking communion

Amy Pond: companion to the saviour of the universe, is used to the passage of long periods of time without changing her dress sense, speech patterns or main residence, and is closely involved with a child born with strange powers who ends up condemned as a criminal. The fact that none of this is explicitly Christian is not really a problem, ECUSA have managed on this basis for several years.

That Girl from Outnumbered: angelic in appearance, impossible to argue with, and used to having boys trying to boss her around. Ideal.

but I'm sure you can do better than this.......

and thanks to Richard Hall and Rev Lesley for linking.

No Songs Please, We're Blokeish

Church Mouse has a snippet from a survey done by Sorted magazine, on mens attitudes to church. It finds that 2/3 of them feel uncomfortable in church (more than would feel uncomfortable in a lingerie shop: Thongs 2 Songs 1), and the most off putting thing is singing, which again 2/3 feel uncomfortable about.

The findings aren't too surprising, when I think about the response of the average wedding congregation to being asked to sing 'All things Bright and Beautiful'. Again. Most churches seem almost designed to put people off: big dark forbidding doors, no jolly signs outside, seating reminiscent of a Victorian classroom etc. You have to work quite hard to make it feel comfortable.

the trouble is that we know this but we don't do anything about it. I don't think the answer is to scrap singing, but there might be other ways of doing things. Another church in Somerset started up a pub group: short Bible passage and discussion questions on a laminated 'menu' card, pints round a table to talk about it, and prayer requests shared at the end. Speaking of pubs, and making men welcome, Banksyboy is worth a read.

We only have 1 recorded instance of Jesus and the disciples singing, the rest of the time they walk, talk, do things and go fishing. Each to their own. I'd rather visit a lingerie shop than go fishing. Which just goes to show that when it comes to men, you can't generalise. There's also a danger of portraying an ideal 'mans man' image - of which there's a hint in Sorted - which many men may feel they don't measure up to. Just as most women aren't Scarlett Johansson, most men aren't Bear Grylls. And that's ok.

Update: more discussion of this over at Tall Skinny Kiwi.

The Role of the Vicars Wife

Cranmer's Curate writes:

The parlous state of the Church of the nation makes the traditional vicar’s wife role more not less necessary.

Elderly parish churches with scarcely any children in the regular congregation do not need a vicar’s wife sporting a t-shirt at her husband’s licensing: ‘I don’t make scones.’

A wife willing to do such traditional feminine things is essential if that church is going to start attracting children and therefore families.

What a great discussion starter....! What do you think? Pop over to his site and join in the debate.

Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage

Had this recommended by someone I met at a baptism 'do' recently,



there's a few clips on Youtube, website here. A church in Wellington, Somerset has used the DVD set, and it's gone down well. Anyone else come across this?

As with the 'comedians on God' series here, I think comedy is such a good way to come at issues, especially serious and potentially tricky areas like relationships and marriage enrichment. If you can deal with it and laugh about it at the same time, then that's a massive bonus.

Vogon Hymnody

As every reader of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy knows, the Vogons write the third worst poetry in the universe. Well, there's competition, initiated by the Anglican Communion gathering in Jamaica, for the most uninspired verse of doggerel every penned by human hand.

Andrew Brown quotes the opening stanza of the offending item, as sung in Jamaica last week to the tune of 'Ode to Joy' (which I must admit I can't remember off the top of my head):

Lord of our diversity,

unite us all, we pray;

welcome us to fellowship

in your inclusive way.

and it gets even worse

Sanctify our listening

and help us get the sense

of perplexing arguments

before we take offence

It's enough to make me want to puree my own internal organs and imbibe them through a straw. Anyone who uses the word 'inclusive' in a hymn deserves to be locked inside an organ for 2 weeks whilst a family of hippos dances on the keyboard. Several of Andrew Browns commenters have attempted to surpass even this, my favourite is freewoolly's, though it's a bit rude to reproduce here.

On a related topic, Nick Baines posts about 'girly worship'

According to an online survey of 400 UK readers of the men’s magazine Sorted, the majority of blokes who responded said they ‘enjoyed singing – but added comments showing they preferred anthemic songs and ‘proclamational’ hymns as opposed to more emotional love songs.’ They also dislike flowers, embroidered banners, hugging, holding hands, dancing and ’sitting in circles discussing their feelings in church’. Oh dear.

The whole piece is worth reading, together with a very good follow up post on what worship is, and what part songs play in it. Interesting that the original report is penned anonymously by a 'daily mail reporter', and that in the comments women have the same complaints as the men.

I did pick up a copy of 'Sorted' at Spring Harvest, but can't find it, so I can't tell you whether the magazine is any good. It certainly looked ok from the cover (apart from the title, which seems a bit 20th century...?). End of useless magazine review.

WATCH with Mother

The General Synod vote on women bishops is tomorrow (Monday), and I hope that it goes through, with some satisfactory framework for people who can't agree with it. I'm in favour of women bishops for 2 reasons:

1. Women are found in church leadership in the New Testament, a fact made all the more striking by their low social status. If you look at the practice of the early church alongside their teaching, their theology of women and authority clearly didn't bar women from church leadership.

2. I'm not entirely sure we're right to exalt bishops so much anyway - again, the New Testament sees churches led by small teams of people, and terms like elder, presbyter and overseer are used pretty much interchangeably. The idea that the order of deacons was founded in Acts 6 is slightly hilarious - 2 of those appointed sit so light to their job description that they'd be sacked under the Clergy Discipline Measure: Philip abandons the food programme to do mission work to foreigners, and Stephen does lots of miracles then gets himself killed.

My main caution over women bishops is when I look at some of the people who support it. There is a lot of wafer-thin theology which talks more about the rights and experience of women than about God. Women and The Church (WATCH) is one of the main campaigning groups. Their website has quite a thorough and concise digest of the main arguments in the bishops debate. They probably cover quite a spectrum of people, but one of the papers on the website, on inclusive language, caught my eye. Here's an extract:

God, Christology and the Church
The constant and uninterrupted use of language which is exclusive
and used repeatedly can be intimidating or even aggressive:
Almighty God, Lord of Power and Might, Everlasting Father,
Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. Intimidation and aggression
do not give life to the people of God called to grow in wisdom
and understanding. We need to use the full range of biblical
images for God, the tender and nurturing as well as the powerful.
Yet we must recognise that our growing includes encouraging
fresh expressions of language for each new generation. The
gospel always has a reforming, reinterpreting edge to it.
“Almost all of the language used in the Bible to refer to God is
metaphor, with the possible exception of holy...There is no point
in pontificating what metaphors like “God as father” ought to
mean. If God metaphors become problematic for a significant
group of people, it is pointless and patronising to tell them they
ought to understand differently”. (What Language Shall I
Borrow” by Brian Wren). God reveals the Godself to us throughout
the scriptures as mother, father, friend, love, wind, fire. And
for some God is more than static noun: God becomes dynamic
verb. We may leave words behind entirely: “The more I walk
with God, the less words about God will do” (John Spong). The
best God metaphors are those that move us deeply and enable
us to encounter and be encountered by the dynamic dance of
incandescent love that Christian experience names as Trinity.

Aside from having a vague worry about anyone who quotes Spong as an authority in theology, there are a number of problems with this approach to language, God and prayer:

1. The problem is not with the language, it's people's interpretation of it. Fair enough, a bad experience of fatherhood will make it more difficult to relate to God as a loving Father, but the idea that the hymn 'Dear Lord and Father' is intimidating or aggressive is bizarre. It's beautiful. These titles belong to the God who is on the side of his people: 'the Almighty God is our fortress' (Psalm 46). What's more, fathers can be 'tender and nurturing' too, and women can be aggressive and intimidating. We don't do ourselves any favours by caricaturing the genders.

2. I've no problem with finding fresh expressions of language, but they have to be anchored in the right harbour. Yes there are plenty of metaphors in scripture, but there are some key ones, and when Jesus teaches his disciples to pray 'Father', that's not something we can ignore. 'Leaving language behind' can become just a pretext for leaving the language behind which we don't like. The best God metaphors are not those which move us deeply, they are those which are true. Something which moves us deeply can be simply a good bit of manipulation. There are films which move me deeply, but most of them are selling a subhuman myth - the revenge Western, the overblown romance etc. They move me because they manipulate me through image, words, music and mood. Does truth come into the equation at any point?

3. We can't leave words behind - words carry meaning, and God has a big history of using words to communicate with us. God uses meaningful words because he wants to communicate with us, to establish a relationship. If there are no words, there is no revelation, and we are completely in the dark about God.

4. God has revealed himself to us in particular ways. If I introduce myself as 'David' and the other person immediately calls me 'Dave', I get slightly irked. Part of human dignity is being able to name ourselves, and not have other people decide what to call us. If God has spoken, and revealed himself to us, we're not at liberty to ignore that and just find names which we like saying.

and a couple of wider concerns
a) Orwell noted in 1984 that control of language is key to control of thought. If you can outlaw certain bits of language, you make it impossible to think in particular ways. I'm aware that I may be just as guilty of this as the WATCH paper, but we need to be careful with this stuff, and not assume that anyone who calls God 'Father' or 'Mighty' is an unreconstructed patriarch.

b) In terms of fresh expressions, we will find new ways to communicate the gospel to a changing culture, but how do we make sure we stay faithful to the gospel? We can't redefine God completely according to human experience - this experience is limited and touched by sin. God has shown himself to us in scripture and in Jesus, so we must stay anchored to this, whichever direction we paddle in.

Those Hard Working Families

My latest Touching Base column is now online at the Wardman Wire. It deals with those creatures of political myth, the 'hard working family', and why the term doesn't do families any favours. Here's a snippet:

the ‘hard working families’ rhetoric is always used in economic debates. Outside this, families seem to barely exist, except when they’re trying to get their children into a local school. But what both of these are about is money: the better the child does at school, the more they’ll earn and the more tax they’ll pay, and Labour has been very keen to gear schools to the modern economy. At one level, that’s great, but at another you do have to wonder whether it’s being driven by childrens well-being (at an all-time low), or by £££££ signs.

Likewise the hard working family (lets call it the HWF) is first and foremost an economic unit. It’s not about love, companionship, raising children, building community, or any of that stuff, it’s about the money.

We had a government leaflet through our door a few months ago, which basically said ‘why stay at home looking after your kids when you could be out working - look at all the different people who are queueing up to take the little darlings off your hands!’ The overall message of the thing was ‘work = good, parenting your own children = bad’.

for the rest go here.

Wedding Fairs: The church in the market place?

Holy Trinity Yeovil is hosting a wedding fair next Saturday, and we've booked a stall there to represent the local church. It'll be interesting to see what comes of it, and whether it nudges people to think of a church wedding, or to think about wedding preparation. The stall will include:

• Resident friendly vicar, to answer questions (armed with map, parish boundaries and diocesan handbook so that people can work out their parish church)
• 'Ready for Marriage?' booklet (only £1 each, to give away)
• 'Your Marriage in the Church of England' glossy leaflet (£15 for pack of 20 from Church House Publishing) free to give away
• details of Marriage Preparation course in early 2009, which we may offer to non-church people as well, it'll be interesting to see if many are interested.
• Laptop with rolling DVD from the Marriage Preparation course (we use the Nicky & Sila Lee one, rather than the latest CofE version) so people can see what's involved.
• A couple of posters and things like that.

I'd be keener to see people drawn to marriage prep than to a church wedding, but we'll see how it goes. (We're already looking at whether we can offer a single church-run marriage preparation course covering the whole town.) If the experiment is succesful, we'll try to get into the round of local wedding fairs. I'm aware of churches that host wedding fairs, but haven't come across anyone yet who does the rounds of fairs hosted in secular venues.

Don't know if we've time to get hold of some of the stuff on eco weddings, the carbon footprint of the average wedding is 14.5 tonnes, which is higher than the average yearly adult carbon footprint.

Women, church and communication

Some interesting thoughts from Jenny Baker via Jonny Bakers blog:

a post from the archive, 'what women want', on how men and women relate in church, and the effects of our nervousness about friendships between men and women:

Because there has been such an unspoken fear of inappropriate relationships between men and women developing, most opportunities for strong healthy relationships have been squashed as well. Women are safe to converse with in larger groups but not one to one. It's OK to encourage them but not to mentor them. You can chat over coffee at the dinner table but not go down the pub and have a beer together. Single women are, of course, especially dangerous. And so the conversations and networking tend to happen in separate gender groups and are all the poorer for it.

and more recently, a review of 'the myth of Mars and Venus', a book examining the evidence or otherwise behind John Grays bestselling franchise on how men and women relate and communicate. A snippet:

The belief that women talk more than men, for example, was boosted by a book called The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine which claimed that women utter 20,000 words a day while men utter 7,000. The claim got huge publicity because it made great soundbite science, but was not based on any actual research. When the author was challenged to reveal her sources, she admitted that there was no evidence for the claim and withdrew the statistic from subsequent editions of the book. But in terms of perpetuating myths, the damage has been done and the ‘fact’ of women’s talkativeness has entered our common mythology.


I wonder what proportion of accepted 'facts' are false? There are now various websites devoted to exploding urban legends, including Snopes, truthorfiction, and a recent example from Urban Legends. They're normally my first point of call when I get one of those 'this is such a scandal you must forward to all your friends immediately' emails. 99% are hoaxes.