Army Chaplains

A friend sent me this link on the work of an army chaplain in Afghanistan. Sobering stuff.

MP's expenses: one rule for the governors, another for the governed

Update: Result! Probably due to the campaign below, Gordon Brown has backed down on plans to exempt MP's expenses from the Freedom of Information Act tomorrow (Thurs). A campaign effectively co-ordinated by one man, but with a well-oiled use of the internet, Facebook, and email contact with MPs, has resulted in a government climbdown. So never say 'what can one person do' - the answer is 'plenty'.

original post:
Matt Wardman, among others, has noted that on the day of the Heathrow runway report, the hard-fought gains on transparency of MP's expenses were, quietly, jettisoned. One report quoted by Matt says: The move next week will allow parliament to nullify all the long-fought victories by campaigners and journalists to force MPs to publish details of all their individual receipts for their second homes, including details of what they spent on furnishings, maintenance, rent, mortgage payments, staffing, travel, office staffing and equipment.

Having slaved away over our tax returns, I don't imagine the average taxpayer will be too impressed that our MP's can claim for sound systems, second home furnishings, office expenses etc. without scrutiny or having to publish details. And some of us are no longer taxpayers because our jobs got axed, so giving protection to MP's who want to exploit the expenses system is not just sleazy, it's unfair. (Remember fairness? Gordon Browns mantra). I don't usually support political campaigns. But I'm supporting this one.

Here's a summary of what's going on:
On the 16th of May 2008 the High Court ruled that MPs’ expenses must be published under the Freedom of Information Act.

This Thursday, MPs are voting to change the law to keep their expenses secret after all, just before publication was due and after spending nearly a million of your pounds and seven months compiling the data.m Your MP may not even know about this proposal (it was sneaked out under the Heathrow runway announcement). Please take a few minutes to alert them to this attack on Parliamentary transparency and ask them to vote against the measure.

Summary of what we're fighting about:http://www.mysociety.org/2009/01/17/6-days-to-stop-mps-concealing-their-expenses/

PLEASE DO THESE THREE ACTIONS:
1. Please write to your MP about this through http://www.theyworkforyou.com/foiorder2009/ - ask them to lobby against this concealment, and tell them that http://TheyWorkForYou.com will be permanently and prominently noting those MPs who took the opportunity to fight against this regressive move. The millions of constituents who will check this site before the next election will doutbtless be interested.

2. Join this facebook group and invite all your least political friends (plus your most political too). Send them personal mails, phone or text them. Encourage them to write to their politicians too.

3. Go to any online community that you are part of that is not connected to mySociety, and (politely) tell them why it matters. Could be fishing, knitting, student groups, am dram, residents association, whatever. It's super important to get the message into non-usual quarters.We can win this. BUT WE NEED YOU TO ACT. It's exactly the sort of issue that isn't worth senior politicians losing that much political capital over. Please help!

More background: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/16/mps-expenses-exemption
RSS feed of news on this story http://news.google.com/news?q=mps%20expenses&output=rss

Street Pastors

It’s not everyone’s idea of the perfect night out. Why would any sensible person pay £300 up front to walk the streets in the small hours of Saturday morning, cleaning up drunks and handing out blankets?

This weekend we’re interviewing 30 people who want to be Street Pastors in Yeovil. The local police have been on at us for a while to get started, so training begins in a fortnight, with patrols starting in early April. The aim is to be out from 10pm to 3 or 4am every week, if we have enough suitable volunteers.

Concerned about crime, drugs and guns amongst local youth in London, inner city pastor Les Isaac set up the first Street Pastor unit in 2003. The idea was to be a listening, serving presence on the streets at the most dangerous time of the week. Six years later there are now well over 2000 Street Pastors in the UK, a number which increased by 45% in 2008.

This is neither a bunch of naive Christian do-gooders, nor is it anything spectacular. The Pastors give out flip-flops as a safe alternative to broken stilletoes, talk to revellers who’ve been separated from their friends and get them back together, chat with gangs who might otherwise spark something off, pick broken glass off the pavement (potential weapon, or potential hospital trip if you step on ot barefoot), and simply sit and listen.

One man was hauled out of the path of a bus, another had collapsed unconscious in a dark alley on a winters night and was found a blanket and taxi home, a better end to the night than hypothermia or mugging.

Volunteers range from 18 to 80, with grannies being especially popular, and in 6 years none has ever been injured. Where police intervention might escalate a situation, the Pastors are seen as friends.

Does it Work?

Street Pastors are up and running in over 60 centres in the UK, from Peckham to Plymouth, Aberdeen to Melton Mowbray, plus the majority of London boroughs (”extraordinary and inspiring” Boris Johnson).

Local reports from police suggest that, in place after place, crime has fallen where Street Pastors are working. In one London study:

data provided by the Police show that in two different crime hotspot areas of London (Peckham and Camberwell) the work of Street Pastors have brought remarkable reductions in the number of crimes. A nine-month police evaluation included comparing the rates for two consecutive annual 13-week periods, that saw a 95% fall in one area and a 74% fall in the other.

Here’s one first-hand account:

When I agreed to do some reporting in the early hours of ‘nasty Friday’, the last Friday before Christmas on which drunken revellers cause havoc in city centres, I thought I might see some vomit, one or two twisted ankles - at worst, a bloody nose from a drunken punch.

Little did I know that, by one o’clock, I would be on my knees in the middle of a busy North London road, attending to a man who was critically ill after somebody stamped on his head stamped during a violent brawl.

the perspective of one police officer in the Midlands:
“On the Saturday night there were two men talking to each other, calming down after an argument, and a third man talking to a street pastor. By speaking to the street pastor that man didn’t get involved with the others and didn’t aggravate the situation. His view was that if he hadn’t engaged with the street pastor he would have got involved. That’s one less violent crime to deal with.

And a few comments from the folk they talk to:
“I’m happy to know they’re on the street. They’re like a little boost.”

“What a brilliant idea… they are the peaceful people on the streets.”
“They gave me a pair of flip-flops and saved me a lot of pain.”

What’s the Catch?
Why do they do it? There’s no pay, little sleep, and a big sacrifice of time and money. The short answer is ‘compassion’.

A slightly longer answer may be in this piece by Roy Hattersley, not himself a Christian, which notes that Christian faith motivates people to compassion in a way which nothing else does. He writes:

Civilised people do not believe that drug addiction and male prostitution offend against divine ordinance. But those who do are the men and women most willing to change the fetid bandages, replace the sodden sleeping bags and - probably most difficult of all - argue, without a trace of impatience, that the time has come for some serious medical treatment. Good works, John Wesley insisted, are no guarantee of a place in heaven. But they are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists.

The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand.

No matter what the adverts say, there are people out on a Saturday night who are worrying less and enjoying life more because of people who do believe in God. From the earliest years of Christianity, when believers would stay behind in plague cities to bury the dead and tend the sick long after everyone else had fled, Christian faith has had unrivalled power to motivate acts of service and love. Sure, you don’t need to be a Christian to care sacrificially, but it certainly helps.

St. Francis of Assisi is quoted as saying “preach the gospel, use words if necessary”. Maybe the best answer to Richard Dawkins is not complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority, but just normal people showing an abnormal amount of concern for others.

this post originally appeared on Touching Base, a regular column hosted by the Wardman Wire

I'm now a Twit

It's official. I think it's set up to update from this blog as well, but you never know with technology. Bishop Alan has a better explanation of Twitter than I could ever give, so blame him. As yet I have no idea whether it's a good thing, or just a colossal waste of time.

And yes, I may have already been a twit for some time now, as no doubt some of you will wish to point out.

Review Questions 3 - RPM's

Another resource from Arrow is the idea of watching personal RPM's in 4 key areas, the idea being to make sure you don't get into the 'red zone', or at least if you do, it's possible to take stock and get out of it again. Being in the red zone in 1 of the 4 areas is tricky, being there in 2, 3, or 4 is dangerous.

For each area there's a simple list of symptoms, what the 'red zone' might look like, to which you can add a few of your own: everyone has their own symptoms for what happens when they get overtired, or shut off emotionally.

Physically

- stress targets a particular part of your body (migraines, back etc.)

- you become ill at the start of your holiday

- you take little exercise

- irregular sleep

Emotionally

- you don't have time to pay attention to feelings.

- more vulnerable to escapist sin (this is a way of subduing emotional needs by distracting yourself - pornography, alcohol, addictive behaviour etc.)

- you become dispassionate about the plight of suffering people

Relationally

- relationships become superficial

- you don't have time for friendships

- You spend more time with other people than with your partner

- you are always apologising to your children for not being there.

- you say to yourself it will get better in a few months, but it never does.

Spiritually

- prayer is reduced to cries for help

- worship is reduced to thanksgiving

- you begin to rationalise misbehaviour and sin

I use this roughly every 6-8 weeks, and its a good check on energy levels. There have been times when 3-4 of these were in the red zone, and guess what? I ended up with depression.

The list is deliberately simple, and doesn't spell out what you need to do to recover spiritual, mental, relational or emotional energy and health. After all, all the best warning signs are simple ones.

For more in this series, follow the 'review questions' label below.

Resources on Debt, Families, Relationships

Resources from Care for the Family:

a good leaflet on debt and families, available free to download here.

Events listing, including national tours of
Teenagers! What Every Parent Has To Know
Motherhood - a Roller Coaster Ride
The 1-2-1 Challenge (activity weekends for 1 parent & 1 child)
Breaks for single parent famlies
Living With Loss (for bereaved parents)
A Different Journey (for those who have lost a partner at a young age)

facilitator training days
How to Drug Proof your Kids
Quidz In - raising financially confident children

The CFF website also has sections for bereaved families, stepfamilies, sigle parents, dads, marriage, parent and toddler group leaders and several other family-focused areas.

What's Wrong with the Church of England? God Shaped Misson revisited

Following on from yesterday, in God Shaped Mission, Alan Smith has a useful section outlining the various diagnoses of the ills of the CofE, and what should be done to put them right. He identifies 4 broad medical schools: (sorry this is in pseudo-note form!)

a) Truth: Communication is key to renewal, the apologetic task of showing that faith is credible and relevant, and the teaching task of equipping the saints and teaching the gospel. E.g. Alister McGrath, Proclamation Trust etc. – preaching is the answer. Also liberal apologists who try to put faith in modern terms (Jenkins, Cupitt). They share a conviction that truth is vital to renewal.

b) Spirituality: concern with peoples religious experience, or lack of it. Using courses to bring people to faith (Alpha, Emmaus) belonging before believing, retreats and spiritual exercises, charismatic renewal – experience of God vital to conversion. Spiritual renewal is key.

c) Organisation – e.g. Bob Jackson: advocates of strategic change. Also the church planting movement, and moves to reform church structures. For some the organisational problem is exclusion: women, gays, blacks, etc. Or its ecumenical division, or the need for clergy to do things differently – e.g. more pastoral work ‘a housegoing parson makes a churchgoing people’ etc. This would probably include Mission Action Planning too.

d) Culture: Mission Shaped Church argues that churches express worship and mission in cultural forms. Common Worship is an attempt to respond to cultural change. Liturgical renewal, lively music, prayer book society etc. are all dealing with cultural questions, some arguing for change and relevance, others for the preservation of a supposedly pure/ideal culture from a previous age.

Smith argues that the truth is probably in the intersection of all 4. But you might disagree....

Around the World in 80 Faiths, Part 2

Already falling behind with this religious travelogue - episode 3 (Africa) is tomorrow and I've only just watched no.2 on Iplayer (where you can still watch it for another 43 days from today). Rev. 'Indiana' Peter Owen Jones tours the Far East in search of exotic religion, taking in Taoism, Confucianism, Korean Pentecostalism, and a very strange 'all in one' Vietnamese religion which seems to centre around a giant bauble with a single eye in the middle of it.

It's still a fascinating programme, Jones contrasting the orderliness of some Far Eastern societies with the chaos of some of the rituals - one which involves lots of men dressing up in white, getting hopelessly drunk, lighting hand-held firebrands, and then racing one another down a flight of stone steps in the dark. Health and Safety it was not.

It hardly seems to have set the BBC message board buzzing: perhaps that's because there isn't very long spent with each faith, and there isn't the time to really see a practitioner in action. There was a lot of interest in Father Lazarus, the monk featured in the final episode of Extreme Pilgrim last year, but we got to see and hear him at length. With 6 minutes per religion, it's hard to get that kind of acquaintance here. It's also quite hard to see the distinctives, though POJ does his best to sketch out the core beliefs of Taoism, Confucianism etc.

The other frustration I have is that most of the appraisal is aesthetic: apart from applauding the inclusivity of the Vietnamese eye religion (CaoDao I think it was called, they have statues of the prophets of every major religion in their main temple), most of Owens comments were about how beautiful, peaceful etc. something was. At prayer mountain, standing in front of hundreds of prayer cells built by Paul Yonggi Cho's church in Seoul, he remarked on how beautiful it was to hear people praying, and about how you could get yourself sorted out with God in one of the prayer cells. My understanding of Prayer Mountain was that the focus was more on intercession, asking God to move in Korea, North and South.

That avenue doesn't seem to be one which the programme explores: instead it's the direct mystical experience of God, and the meaningfulness or otherwise of rituals. It's quite privatised, and in a sense quite touristy - to evaluate things on how much they appeal to us, whether we enjoy them, and whether they give us that sense of the exotic that a far-flung foreign trip is supposed to impart.