Clarkson, Risk and Insurance

A further thought about yesterdays Jeremy Clarkson story - one thing that makes it newsworthy (apart from Clarkson getting egg on his face, which will have delighted most of the population), is the sheer brazen risk of putting your bank details in the biggest circulating 'newspaper' in the country.

It stands out because it's countercultural. Buy anything on the net now and if you don't carefully check all the little boxes on the screen you'll find you've paid an insurance premium for safe delivery, safe travel, safe sex or whatever. Buy anything electrical and the price of a warranty (insurance against it breaking down) is thrown in, because that's the main way the retailers make a profit. Insurance is a symptom of a risk-averse society. Our attitude to children is another barometer of this: we protect them from percieved risks, when in many ways it's safer for children now than it was a generation ago. In fact our very protecting of children (bundle them into the car rather than walk) creates risk for everyone else. It's a prime case of individualism working against what everybody wants.

But we also seem to have lost the middle ground on risk. It's either obsessive safety, or extreme sports. A few tentative forays, like 'the dangerous book for boys', have recognised that there was a healthy attitude to risk in previous generations that we've lost in our own. In some ways the petrolheads like Clarkson are the only prophets for risk in mainstream society. It's just a shame that it's wasted on something as boring, and dangerous, as cars. We seem to be great at taking risks in all the wrong areas - fast cars, binge drinking, excessive debt - whilst areas which deserve the odd risk or two: friendship, faith, telling the truth, standing up for the poor, protesting and campaigning, you can probably add dozens of examples - risks which pay off for the benefit of others - we have become timid.

So Jeremy, do it again. Sorry for having a pop at you for taking a risk. We need you.

Be a Better Debtor

The Church of England has produced a helpful new resource for people in debt, timed for the post-Christmas financial reckoning. At a time when 8m of us owe over £10,000, and 2m people don't even know how much debt they're in, debt is one of those icebergs that sinks a lot of people, and many more in an economic downturn.

The main resource page is here, with a 1-page 60 second questionnaire here to work out how much debt you're in and how big a problem it is. The resource page has lots of useful links, a powerpoint presentation ready to use in church or any sort of meeting, tips on saving money and wise budgeting, and some case studies.

The Ugley Vicar got there first. Meanwhile Jeremy Clarkson, who published his bank details in the Sun to make the point that we shouldn't get so worried about the Inland Revenue losing our personal data, has been eating his words after finding that someone had used the info to donate £500 of Clarksons money to charity.

From Surviving to Thriving, Part 1

I wanted to bring together a few thoughts about leadership, and being a Christian in general. I come across folk all over the place who have dropped out of church, Christian faith, and leadership. Meanwhile 'Extreme Pilgrim' Peter Owen Jones is finding his faith dry and his church uninspiring, and gone off on a world tour to find spiritual depth and nourishment.

At a New Wine conference a few years ago, a speaker on leadership was talking about the importance of leaders giving a significant chunk of their time to 'personal renewal'. It's not just leaders. Life is demanding whatever you do, and any Christian needs renewal time to move from surviving to thriving. This renewal includes
- Time out
- Accountability
- Spiritual disciplines
- Learning

A few thoughts on Time Out...

'The Unreflected Life is Not Worth Living'
Socrates I think. His point is that if you never stand back from what you're doing, saying, thinking etc., you won't really live. In this weeks Touching Base I raise the question of whether we are thermostats or thermometers. The thermostat sets the temperature, the thermometer merely reflects the temperature. We'll be thermometers all our lives (or to use Biblical language 'blown here and there by every wind of doctrine') unless we're able to stop, stand back, stop reacting to things, and plot our own course.

This comes back to the idea of putting the big rocks in first. Jesus was able to withstand incredible pressure because he knew what his priorities were. After 40 days fasting in the desert, he withstood temptation because he knew his God and his mission. After the (possibly even greater) pressure of success, he told the disciples it was time to leave and go elsewhere to declare the good news 'for that is why I have come'.

How did Jesus manage it? When the disciples find him, he's been away praying. Jesus is always doing this. He manages to be at his best with the crowds, because he's already been with God.

What Peter Owen-Jones is doing is getting away from it all in order to find spiritual life. I don't know if he normally goes on retreats, or whether he's now catching up for 14 years of not taking them (!) It's the same impulse, but done on catch-up. Jesus knew that he needed time with God before the pressure came, rather than when he'd got to a point of frustration or burn-out.

My own pattern for putting the big rocks in first, which is just what works for me, not a blueprint for anyone else, is:
- weekly: a couple of hours on a Monday morning looking at the week ahead, putting the big rocks into the diary (rather than squeezing them in around smaller things), getting a handle on what needs to be done, and spending some time reading and praying, and using some review tools (e.g. a short stress levels questionnaire, questions on how my walk with God is going, where the pressure points currently are, Bible passages which help to reflect on character and discipleship etc.)
- monthly: either a quiet day at a nearby retreat house (see below) or a study day - a local family has lent me use of their granny flat, which gets me away from the phone and the internet, and is a great space to read, pray and think.
- yearly: at least one major conference (for teaching and encouragement) and a retreat of 3-4 days to really get into stillness and silence, and to try to hear what God's saying about the year ahead, and about where I'm at and where my key relationships are at.

I've discovered through hard experience that this is the minimum of what I need in terms of time out, though it's a constant struggle to make and protect these times. That's the trouble, unless we make them happen, nobody will make them happen for us.

The next bit will be useless for those of you who don't live anywhere near Yeovil, unless you fancy a pilgrimage to the West Country. If you want some time out locally, and are wondering where to go or how to start, then here's some links:

Abbey House Glastonbury
Compton Durville - Franciscan convent just off the A303
Mill House, Tiverton
Chantmarle Centre, Dorset
Hilfield Friary, Dorset - sadly scaling down what they do, but still open to some visitors
Monks Yard, nr Ilminster - opening up in the next few months, has the advantage of an on-site cafe! Looks better for group awaydays than individuals
Chemin Neuf Community, Langport. Their current programme is here.
Sheldon (Society of Mary and Martha) Devon - specifically aimed at clergy couples, but available to others too.

May God help you thrive.

Michael Nazir-Ali on 'no go areas'

The Bishop of Rochester is in the news today for claiming in a newspaper article that some parts of the UK are now no-go areas for non-Muslims. He's been accused of scaremongering in some quarters, but some of the responses to the story (see the feedback on the first link) indicate that he's right. Of course the story is about bigger issues than that.

Michael Nazir-Ali argues that the 'multiculturalism' agenda has failed, creating local sub-cultures rather than integration, and that behind it is an implicit secularism which levels out all faiths - corroding the distinctives they have, and undermining traditional chaplaincy provision in schools, hospitals and educational institutions.

He calls for a fresh national vision of what kind of nation we want to be. A vision which doesn't include an explicit faith statement leaves the playing field open for whoever has the loudest voice or most influence. The modern secular state has jettisoned Christianity but replaced it with the Cheshire Cat of multiculturalism. In fact, this is simply cowardice, a failure of nerve on behalf of our political system to articulate a proper vision of humanity and society.

The article is worth reading in full. (And if you want a laugh visit the National Secular Society homepage, which claims that his article is an argument for secularism. ) The 'multiculturalism' agenda (it doesn't really qualify as a 'vision') is the dominant paradigm in health, education, politics, social policy and media. It's time it had a Christian rival in the public sphere, well done to the Bish for having the guts to get the debate going.

Update: more links on this story at Thinking Anglicans, see the entry for Saturday 5th January.
Update 2: a good article on the Ekklesia site, and MadPriest and Cranmer also have their 2 penn'orth.
Update 3 And some evidence for Bishop Nazir-Ali's case from Irene Lancasters blog and the chairman of the Muslim forum writing in the Mail

Anglican Bloggers

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

It was inevitable really...... Dave Walker has set up an Anglican Bloggers group on Facebook. I don't know if this is a cunning bit of marketing by facebook to get people like me signed up, but it worked. It's fascinating to see the variety of people on there.

I have a worry. Already there are a couple of bishops signed up, so it won't be long enough before we reach critical mass, and decide that there's a defining issue which sets us apart from all other Anglicans (e.g. that we're members of Facebook and they aren't). I give it 6 months till schism........

Links, and a link

Prompted by Mike from church, there's now a 'Resources' section down the right hand side of the blog. If you want to send me any links which should be there, fire away!

Meanwhile, a great post by Steve Tilley which begins thus...
If you are in the business of retaining people's custom, support, visits or whatever you may think that the best thing to do is for them to find occasional outstanding service, content or offers. Whilst these things are not bad ideas they will not necessarily do the job. It is consistency that makes people return and keeps the footfall falling.

So the way to retain business is not to have one-off acts of genius but to eliminate the acts of folly.

1 in 100 of the people who have a good experience will tell a friend. 1 in 10 of the people who have a bad experience will tell a friend. So if you don't fix the leaks you wil have to have 10 times more genius than error simply in order not to shrink.

Extreme Pilgrim

The latest thing in religious programming seems to be the 3-parter. After 'Make me a Muslim' last month, it's the turn of 'Extreme Pilgrim', featuring the very watchable Peter Owen-Jones. He's an Anglican vicar, but you never see a dog-collar, think of a cross between Indiana Jones and middle-aged hippy and you're part way there. There can't be many clergy who use roll-ups and have to be bleeped on BBC2. He's also a lot less annoying than Robert Beckford, Channel 4's house 'theologian'. With a career in advertising and marketing before he became a vicar, he 's also been behind some provocative church advertising campaigns.

The premise of the programme is that P O-J is dissatisfied with Western spirituality, and especially it's Church of England form. He's not a big fan of doctrine, and is frustrated with a Christian faith which bombards people with doctrine but doesn't seem to have spiritual depth, so he's off to try to find spiritual depth somewhere else. First stop is a month with the Shaolin Buddhist monks of China. After a week at a martial arts boot camp (fair play to him for letting himself be filmed trying and failing at things, we need a bit more of that attitude in the church), he finds the constant stream of tourists off-putting, and heads up a remote mountain pass to find a 'purer' form of Buddhism.

What he finds is a spirituality built on two things: community life, and the physical discipline of movement. As he gets into the dance-like moves (I don't know if it was tai chi, or something else, I'm not much of an expert), he discovers that he can actually meditate, clear his mind, and find the stillness he's looking for. Alongside that he finds a strong sense of community life, which seems on the surface to be at odds with Buddhist 'non-attachment', something which is never quite resolved.

It was fascinating to watch, not only to see the monks in action, and POJ's efforts to learn the moves and exercises, but then to reflect back on Christian spirituality. We talk about the body, mind and spirit as a unity, God has made us that way, but Christian spirituality is still stuck somewhere between St. Anthony and the late 20th century, in putting the mind and spirit in the spiritual Premiership and demoting the body to non-league. Discipleship, worship, ministry training, most of the life of the church is centred around words, learning and intellect. Very little is centred around practice, physicality, an embodied life of prayer and discipleship. There is much more of this in the Eastern church, and the charistmatic and (newly rediscovered) Celtic streams of Christianity are reintroducing the body to Western Christianity, but often these feel like add-ons. Last nights programme showed a community for which the physical was the path to the spiritual, a way of moving and breathing developed over centuries.

I've a couple of concerns with 'Extreme Pilgrim'. One is the 'crash diet' concern, that it might portray spirituality as something you only need a month to crack, if you put in enough effort under the right guru. More problematic is the approach, taken by 'Spirituality Shopper' a couple of years ago, of treating all religions as more or less equivalent. I wouldn't want to throw out the doctrinal baby with the bathwater - we do have to reckon with questions of truth and understanding, with who God is, how he has communicated and how we live in right relationship with him. Peter Owen-Jones is right to complain that doctrine is unduly dominant in Western Christianity, but the solution to misuse is not disuse but right use.

See other views from the Mirror, Atheist Tuesday , the Times, and a broader article on religious programming on TV from the Independent.

Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists

Cracking article 'Ten propositions on Richard Dawkins and the new atheists' which is well worth 10 minutes of your time. Thanks to Maggi Dawns blog for the link.

Here's an excerpt:

If Professor Dawkins is the “bad cop” of the New Atheists, the Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee is probably the “good cop”, while Christopher Hitchens is undoubtedly the “corrupt cop”. I saw him on the British TV programme Question Time, contemptuously holding court like Jabba the Hutt. And I sat for half-an-hour at Waterstone’s dipping into the over-priced God Is Not Great as if it were dishwater, a highly flattering simile. Hitchens’ penetrating scholarly appraisals include descriptions of Augustine the “ignoramus”, Aquinas the “stupid”, and Calvin the “sadist”; while Niemöller and Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazis was motivated by a “nebulous humanism”, and Martin Luther King’s faith was Christian only in a “nominal sense”. Enough said. It is all rather embarrassing.