Marking the end of an era

I had my last Assembly Project Team meeting yesterday. After five years of running Prism, I have hung up my flip flops and made way for someone else to take the Assembly's alternative to new heights.

It's been a great ride from the first Assembly planning meeting I attended where I suggested giving the Assembly a multi-focal feel by offering an alternative way of accessing its themes. Many large Christian gatherings already offered an alternative programme and hundreds of churches across the country had been moving away from the one-size fits-all approach to events for more than a decade.

So Prism was a response to those trends and an attempt to help the Assembly appeal to those who are sceptical about the well-managed set piece celebration event so beloved of evangelicals over the past generation.

And I reckon that it has offered a fresh and worthwhile alternative to what's happening in the other place at the Assembly, giving delegates a chance to explore our faith in a more interactive, participatory and, let's face it, more personal because smaller, space.

There's no doubt that The Assembly needs this kind of fresh thinking if it's going to attract the large - and growing - numbers of Baptists who are not attending our annual gathering. In particular, we have to address the fact that the under 50s aren't turning up in the numbers we'd hope and the under 30s are conspicuous by their almost total absence from the event.

I don't think Prism is the whole answer. But I do think that it embodies an approach to gathering that could be attractive to people who currently don't make the annual pilgrimage to the seaside. So, I wish whoever takes it on every success and will be praying that they bring fresh thinking and boldness to making Prism (or whatever it will be called) better and better.

The trouble with words

A man from the midlands, asked on Breakfast TV whether he ate cauliflower, replied that he thought cauliflower was 'an inept vegetable'. I wonder if his expectations of the humble brassica have been set a little high. Has he been bringing them home from the market and asking them to do a little DIY only to find they're all fingers and thumbs?

I'm a big fan of cauliflower but have no expectations of it except that it will lie in the pan for 12 minutes and taste great afterwards. But apparently, we're not buying as many of the lovely vegetables as we used to and one theory is that it's because they are white (well, at least the bit you eat is) and we are being told to eat more greens (all part of the five-a-day thing), so people are avoiding them in favour of broccoli and cabbage.

It's good to start the day with a chuckle. And I think Britain's cauliflower growers would like you to buy more of the glorious white vegetable. So, that's my public service announcement for the morning.

Praying on the tourist trail

One of my meetings was cancelled today so I had a bit of time once I got into London. I strolled up Whitehall, picking my way over the trailing cables and manoeuvring in and out of gaggles of tourists and journalists waiting for something to happen and into the National Gallery.

It was as ever a place of tranquility and calm. There were groups of primary age children crowded round a painting having it explained to them and a few others wondering between paintings, whispering to one another.

I spent a good deal of time looking at the two wonderful Piero Della Francesca paintings the gallery has in their own viewing space.

The better known of the two is the Baptism of Jesus, a painting of such stillness it is impossible not to stop and contemplate it. The figure of Jesus is serene and prayerful but captured leaning slightly towards the viewer, as if  inviting us to share his moment of commitment to John's movement. Above him a perfectly stationary dove waits to complete her descent on to God's Son. It's as if Piero has frozen the action and invited the viewers to come and linger over the scene: Jesus at the start of his public ministry - what does it hold for him, what does it mean for us?

To the right of it is his less well known nativity. The painting looks unfinished, yet the backdrop appears very similar to the one in the baptism painting, suggesting it's drawn from Piero's own home town where he did a lot of his work. The simplicity of the execution looks intentional on Piero's part. This is not the cluttered nativity so commonly found in the work of his contemporaries. It is a sparse scene: a simply dressed Mary kneels before her infant who reaches up to his mother. A choir of angels with lutes sing to him. Joseph and the shepherds chat in the background.

Again Piero captures a moment of stillness, contemplation and devotion. Mary prays while Jesus reaches up to her, a suggestion that the Son of God responds when we call. And yet Jesus is also 'calling,' wanting feeding, affection, the tender human touch of a mother.

These are works of genius, beautifully composed and executed. But they also appear to be works of deep faith inviting the viewer into the life of prayer that is at the heart of them. It's wonderful to be able to able to step out of the bustle of Trafalgar Square into this holy space.

Praying for our new government

It's interesting listening to the various guests on the Today programme asking for clarity on the nitty gritty of policy. We're apparently obsessed with having everything nailed down, every 'i' dotted and 't' crossed. But this is day one of a new and exciting era and the rule book is being re-written.

It's to be hoped that it does signal a radical realignment of politics in this country. In particular, it is hoped that the tribal nature of our politics will decay in favour of a politics based on cooperation rather than competition, a weighing of issues on their merits and working constructively with people from parties other than my own.

Writing to the Philippians, Paul talks about the politics of the Kingdom of God with these words: 'do nothing according to rivalry or empty conceit. Rather, in humility, value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interest but each of you to the interests of the others.' (2:3-4 in the TNIV).

My prayer for David Cameron and Nick Clegg and everyone else who this morning commits themselves to making this new coalition work, is that these words, in some form or another, will echo in their heads and inform every conversation they have with one another.

These are the values that could make this coalition work for the good everyone. My prayer is that it will work and that as a result we are able to live 'peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness' (that's the reason Paul says we should pray for our government - whether we chose it or not).

Let's all commit ourselves to pray for this new government in the coming days that this bold experiment will work for the good of the whole country - especially the poorest, weakest and most vulnerable.

Good listening

Michael Portillo has just started an excellent new series on democracy on BBC Radio 4. You'll be able to catch it on the iPlayer and I recommend that you do.

His first programme was a fascinating look at the progress of democracy since 1945 and the threats that it faces today. Interesting one of the things he said was that income inequality within established democracies such as ours was one of the key threats to democracy that any incoming government would have to address.

From thatcherite poster boy to mature political thinker....

Counting the winners and losers

Well, it's getting lively down in Westminster - the comings and goings of men in suits trying to work out how to move the country forward into what could be a fascinating new politics.

I just wish the BBC would stop talking about unelected Prime Ministers. We never elect a prime minister. In our system we elect an MP to represent the constituency in which we live. The leader of the largest party (someone we never elect unless we are a member of that party) is then asked by the queen to form a government and hence become Prime Minister.

Since the war, many party leaders have stood down and been replaced by another person who has become PM as a result - Blair, Thatcher, Wilson, Macmillan....

In the new politics we also need to stop talking in terms of largest party and begin to look at share of the vote since we need leadership that reflects what the majority of the nation wants. After all, that's how democracy is supposed to work. So on share of the vote, the numbers stack this way: 36.1% voted Tory, 29% voted Labour and 23% Lib Dem. So 52% - more than half the electorate who voted - expressed a preference for parties of the centre left. If we add votes for the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, that figure rises to around 55%

So who won the election? The honest answer was given by Ken Livingstone last night when he said 'everyone lost'; and he's right. Under our old broken, first-past-the-post system, no one got a governing majority.

But maybe we all won. If we get a government that reflects the views of a majority of the voters, haven't we all won in a way that the electorate haven't won in any election in recent history.

And a footnote. If Labour and the Lib Dems form a coalition and put a budget that proposes cuts in public spending aimed at reducing the deficit, are we really expected to believe that the Conservatives, who have been baying for such cuts, are really going to vote against it? What would that say about our politics?

And doesn't this show that in the new politics, MPs are going to have to vote on each issue as it arises in the best interests of the nation rather than narrow party interest (with implications for whipping the House of Commons). And if we want to learn it might look like, perhaps we should examine what's happened in Scotland and Wales since devolution. If we look carefully, we'll see that the world hasn't come to an end and that government has worked pretty effectively (even if we don't personally like every decision they have taken).

Looking for a leader...

Our new series on 2 Corinthians - being a holy people in an unholy world - limped into life yesterday. I say limped because I'm not at all you'd say it was launched. I'm not convinced that I was on top of the material. Still, we'll see what subsequent weeks hold.

I finished Hilary Mantell's Wolf Hall last night. It's a very satisfying read, if a little long (since it only tells half of Cromwell's life as Henry VIII's key servant) but it's made me want to read more about my favourite era in English history. So I've got myself John Schofield's The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell, the most recent scholarly life of Henry's right hand man, which looks pretty good.

So, Gordon has resigned and the talks between Nick and David are taking a long time. Who knows, we could still see a progressive alliance that brings voting and political reforms. Perhaps we need a man or a woman of the stature, humanity and political savvy of Thomas Cromwell to help us navigate these uncharted waters. If only...

The change we still need

The dust is still settling. The outcome is uncertain. Still time to make our voice heard. Why not go here and sign the petition. You could even turn up in Westminster tomorrow to make your voice heard for genuine rather than cosmetic change.

Some good results, though; the best of them being Caroline Lucas' victory in Brighton and the trouncing of Nick Griffin.

More evidence of the brokenness of our current system were the numbers in mainly urban areas shut out of polling stations, who couldn't cast their vote. As the electoral commission has already indicated, local officials should have done better. Results might well be challenged and changed in the coming days.

Will we grab the chance to fix the democratic deficit?

So, we're all off to vote.

What a privilege it is to choose the people who will make the decisions about how our country is run. This is the creation mandate democratised, everyone having a say in how we till the garden.

This is not to say that there aren't problems with our current way of operating, of course. Wonderful though it is to be able to vote, it is galling to think that the election will be decided in just about 100 constituencies (and mine isn't one of them!), leaving 500+ constituencies facing a democratic deficit of some kind.

And whichever party emerges as the biggest will still only have the backing of between 25 and 35% of the popular vote - hardly an overwhelming endorsement of any party programme!

The case for reform is pretty overwhelming. Add to that the hopelessly muddled and outdated way our second chamber is filled and it's not hard to see why many overseas observers are doubtful that if we were an emerging nation, our system of elections would pass muster.

But what chance is there that this creaking system would be overhauled by a government that squeaked home with a working majority under our first-past-the-post system? Not much judging by the past 30 years!

So a hung parliament could well be the best outcome of this voting round, providing it gives rise to a serious attempt to reform our democratic institutions, making the link between voters and parliament stronger by ensuring that everyone's vote counts.

The markets won't like it but then you know what happens when we allow bankers to run the world!

Unpacking the Prism offer

Well, Glen has created a new compound noun - Prism-Style-Worship (I'm not sure I'd go for capitals there, Glen; sounds like you're shouting!) - and raised two really interesting points (see the comments on the previous post).

I think prism-style-worship taps into Christian tradition and practice through story telling and ritual acts. The Sunday morning communion is a case in point. our celebration of the Eucharist happened in three parts. The first involved cake with individual wine glasses stuck in it and as we sat around the tables we told stories of when Jesus partied, when he was guest at a dinner or host; what he did and what he said on those occasions.

So people spontaneously told the story of the wedding at Cana, the feeding of the five thousand, the tea with Zacchaeus, the bread breaking at Emmaus and many more. We shared how we felt when we heard such stories, what they meant to us, what they revealed to us about Jesus and why we want to follow him.

Then we produced a French loaf nailed to a plank of wood and invited people to share stories of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem, from Palm Sunday, through Maundy Thursday to Good Friday, stories of adulation and rejection, bonhomie and betrayal, friendship and fearful denial; and ultimately stories of the lonely death of the one who more than any other revealed God to us.

The contrast between the cake and the loaf caused a sharp intake of breath among a number of people around the table, even some tears. It was a stark reminder of the meaning of the meal. The stories of Jesus' suffering seem to be given context by the ritual, something tactile and visual, even visceral, was entered into our memory and story telling. And it was powerful.

In the course of these two sections - lasting about an hour, probably slightly less - worshippers were exposed to more scripture than the average church goer gets in a month. Not only that, there was opportunity to reflect on that scripture and extract reactions and responses to it.

This is just a single example of how this approach to constructing a gathering enables people to interact with one another and the Christian story at quite a deep level.

Because prismstyleworship (see I've now made a single word of it) is interactive and participatory, those engaging in it are able to ask questions, seek clarification, add insights, unwrap, probe and explore a single thought at length, write something down, draw or paint a response or reflection. The learning that happens in such a context is likely to be more lasting than that gained from just listening.

I think it ought to be an essential part of the mix of activities we offer in church but probably not the only way of teaching and learning, engaging with God and encouraging one another because one size does not fit all.

What in the world are we doing?

A final thought on the Baptist Assembly. Glen (here) has raised an interesting question in his reflections about the style of what we do at Prism that I want to muse on. I think alt worship is actually a bad name for what we do because it implies that we are merely seeking a replacement for the more traditional activities that the church calls ‘worship’ (wrongly in my view – but that’s for another post) such as singing and listening to sermons. Rather, I think we are seeking to do a number of things simultaneously.


The first is to help people see the world differently, from a strange, even obtuse angle with unexpected shafts of light falling on it. We were helped in this by the theme of the Assembly – One World, One Mission – but it is one of the key considerations I always have uppermost when planning an event – be it, a church Sunday gathering or home group. This is because we gather to engage with God who calls us to embody his values in the world in which we live and work. So having an understanding of that world is important.

It means that we need to hear what the world is saying about itself and not only what we want to say about it. Now, I appreciate that the world speaks with many voices and we will inevitably be selective in what we turn our ears and eyes to. But it seems to me that it’s essential that we hear voices from the world as clearly as we can.

The second is to suggest that God is to be found already working in this world and that if we look carefully we’ll see his shadow falling across it, notice his finger print on all we’re seeing. So, we listen to a Patty Smith album and become aware that she talks more and more intelligently about God than the average ‘worship’ album; or we see a movement working justice that inspires us even though its motivation is avowedly not religious; or we see vital theological issues being played out in a movie or the plot of a novel.

This helps us in the key task of bridging the gap that Christians are often guilty of maintaining between the world we live in day-by-day and the faith we express in our worship; the gap we express when we say ‘I come to church to focus on God without being distracted by all the awful things in the news’ or ‘we are going into the world to take the presence of God with us.’

The third is to help us see ourselves in a different way as a result of the first two. In focusing on what’s going on the world, we see that God is bigger and that our lives are more significant than we thought. We find ourselves caught up in the story of God, the creating, covenant-making, coming King; and we see that God has given us a key role in how that story unfolds in our world.

My hope is that people leave an event like Prism, with a fresh way of living in the world. I guess this is the hope of traditional gatherings, but I wonder if the traditional model tends to focus on me and God and take the world for granted as a fixed entity from which we’ve withdrawn in order to worship before we go back into the world with a changed view of ourselves and perhaps a better take on God.

The trouble is that it tends to treat the world as a given on which we will act rather than something which acts on us as we seek to identify the shape that God wants us to take on to effectively embody his values in that world.

After the first Prism – which seems like a lifetime ago in Brighton in 2005 – I wrote a series of articles for the Baptist Times on ‘alt worship’. It’s my intention to dust those off over the next few days and re-post them here.

Finally got round to listening to the Mumford & Sons album - a fascinating and rather wonderful example of hearing God in the unlikeliest of places!

From the Assembly to the real world

Back from the Assembly and beginning to recover. I had to hurry off yesterday morning to get back from Plymouth to chair an election hustings meeting last night (200+ people on bank holiday Monday evening, not bad!).

I can only comment on Prism at the Assembly because it's all I got to - five sessions plus a double seminar slot. I gather from the blogs that the Assembly overall was better than it's been in recent years which is good to hear.

Prism went really well. The final session on Sunday evening where we welcomed the ministers about to have their hands shaken on the stage in the other place, looked at how we communicate the good news, interacting with Billy Graham, Rob Bell and Where the hell is Matt? The fact that we shared deeply with one another and ended up dancing probably means that something gelled!

The team were great and worked really hard to make the whole event go really well. It almost makes me want to do it all again, but....

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I have a leaders meeting tonight that I'm really looking forward to. With our newly elected team of nine trustees, we will be starting the journey into the future that God is inviting us on. Let's hope we catch the right wave!

And the spell checker button has reappeared - thank you blogger!

Baptist Assembly update

Day three in the Baptist Assembly house and all is well. Four sessions in, it's possibly the best Prism ever - good numbers, excellent atmosphere, real engagement with the issues and a tangible sense of the presence of God in unexpected and rather wonderful ways.

We had a particularly good communion this morning - but Prism communions have been special from the first. But all the sessions have gone well and, possibly for the first time, I think we have created a trajectory through the weekend and are taking delegates on a journey.

The cost of all this is that I'm totally wiped out, we've one session to go, then we've got to de-rig the space and I've got to get back to Bromley to chair a hustings meeting tomorrow night. Ah well! Tuesday I shall sleep - until the leaders' meeting in the evening.

The financial markets are all Greek to me...

Greece is in crisis. I grew up with such headlines being a relatively regular occurrence as the regime of the colonels lurched from crisis to crisis through the 60s and 70s until democracy was restored. The causes of the current troubles are complex and beyond the comprehension of most mortals (certainly this one).

But at the heart of Greece's current problems are the bond markets. The way the media talks about these exchanges where cash is swapped for Government debt, you'd think they were operated by god-like powers who were above being questioned for their actions. I thought the credit crunch, if it's achieved nothing else, has at least dethroned the masters of the universe.

But no, these impersonal forces are still very much in control of events. Take this quote 'The market is now looking at every country with a lot of curiosity.' It was said this morning by Gilles Moec, senior European economist at Deutsche Bank, in response to questions about why the stock markets across Europe are falling.

In a sense he's right. Markets, those collections of individual decision makers with certain amounts of money to spend seeking products at a price they're prepared to pay, are looking for profits across Europe. But in a more profound sense, his comments illustrate the levels of denial at the heart of our current crisis - not just in Greece but across the globe.

The markets are moved by people like Moec and hundreds of others who make decisions based on their political views, religious outlook, knowledge of economies and how they work, the fact that they got to work with indigestion following a dodgy breakfast on the go and congestion on the metro. It's people who decided what to buy and sell and how much they're prepared to pay. The fact that the deals are in billions of dollars does make them impersonal; it just means that the sums involved are eye-wateringly huge.

But each of the deals is made by a trader pushing the button on his mouse or shouting into a phone. And perhaps we need to start calling these people - a highly paid, enormously powerful minority across the globe - to account for their actions.

This is why it's good that the US Senate is giving Goldman Sachs a hard time for developing products that appear to have been designed to benefit from the failure of other financial instruments.

This morning's election press conferences were all about party leaders trying to show how they will cut the deficit to ensure the market will continue to fund to Britain's national debt. The trouble is that such cuts fall disproportionately on the poor, the unemployed, the long-term sick and disabled; they risk creating new pockets of intractable, generation-after-generation deprivation in parts of the UK. And all to satisfy the markets, all to ensure our credit rating doesn't go from triple A to junk as Greece's has.

As the crisis deepens isn't it time for a different way of organising our financial affairs? Shouldn't those who want  to lead us being saying something about this?

Equality, responsibility and dreams of a better world

There was an interesting exchange on the World at One phone-in with Gordon Brown yesterday. A woman city worker was asking why he was against aspiration, the evidence for which was seen in the fact that she was now paying income tax at 50%. This means that she earn in excess of £150,000 a year, £3,000 a week, £75 an hour.

It came on the same day that Birmingham City Council lost an equal pay case brought by women workers who were being paid around £12,000 a year and weren't receiving the bonuses their male colleagues on the same pay scale were getting - sometimes to the value of 150% of their annual salaries.

It's the contrast that strikes me. In their book The Spirit Level: Why Equality is better for Everyone, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue, pretty cogently with a wealth of statistical data, that inequality is bad for people's health and well-being. The more unequal a society, the more likely it is to be affected by higher incidence of mental illness, more violence, more relationship breakdown.

Sadly, the book is not at the centre of the election campaign despite party leaders welcoming it when it was published last year.

And this morning we wake up to news that Greece's credit rating has been down-graded to junk status, that it risks bankruptcy and massive default on its debts. The effect of this apocalyptic scenario - brought about by international capital markets (that's people who buy and sell bonds in the markets of London, New York and the Far East, like Gordon Brown's interrogator) - will be lower wages for the poor, massive rises in unemployment among lower paid people and large numbers of people losing their homes - in short, even more inequality.

The city worker challenging Gordon Brown said how fed up she was of being blamed for the world's financial crisis. This on the day that Goldman Sachs executives were trying to defend the indefensible before a Senate enquiry.

It's all left me with a feeling that we haven't begun to have the conversation we need to have about how we value people, what kind of society we want to live in and what it means to take responsibility for our actions. If the election is about anything, surely it should be about this.

Making the (w)right move

Excellent news about Tom (N T) Wright: he is moving to St Andrews University to be professor of New Testament and Early Christianity.

This is excellent news because it will allow him to focus on completing his bold and brilliant series on Christian Origins and the Question of God as well as other projects that he's had on the go for too long.

He will be a loss to the Anglican hierarchy but a huge gain to the academic world. You can read all about it here and here.

Finishing touches all round

Having planned the framework for Prism, I've been spending the day sorting out running orders, shopping for a good deal of the stuff we need in the zones and listening to copious quantities of dance and chill out tracks to serve as background and fill-in music when people are gathering and in zones. The bar will be open in our venue from 7pm, so we need to ensure a suitable atmosphere is created as delegates arrive.

We've had trouble sourcing 200ml cartons of red grape juice (any suggestions? we need 150 of them) but apart from that we've got everything we need to ensure the event goes with a swing.

The plaster is drying nicely in our bathroom ready for the tiler to come tomorrow and make it look fabulous. So hopefully we're on track for a Friday tea-time finish. I'll be in Plymouth, but the rest of the family will be able to spend the weekend moving between the shower and the bath, washing off a fortnight's accumulated grime.

Falling short but feeling excited all the same

On the train to Bristol for a Prism planning session using my dongle. The experience so far is that the connection is slow and occasionally haphazard. Of course, 'slow' is a relative term, since connection speeds are vastly quicker than anything we experienced just a few years ago. But today we expect instant and lightening fast.

Last night I rounded off our series on living the resurrection by looking at Philippians 3:10 and reflecting on our dreams and God's role in them. Philippians 3 is one of my favourite passages; I've preached on it often and yet I still feel that its heart eludes me. Someone said that yesterday's sermon was really helpful and cast new light on one of their favourite passages.

But I felt that yet again I had not done the passage justice, that what I wanted to say about it lay just beyond my finger tips - much as Paul's complete knowledge of Jesus is just another step beyond his grasp. And maybe that's the way it has to be with this text. Our knowledge of Jesus will always be partial, our view through the distorting mirrors of our own perception, and so our thoughts about and reflections on this amazing text will always leave us feeling excited but dissatisfied.

Maybe this should be true of all our preaching. Like my internet connection, it's good but not as good as we'd like it to be.

Being a holy people in an unholy world

As an experiment - which I started last month - I am posting my perspective from our church magazine on my blog and facebook for those who would rather access it electronically than in print. I hope it's of interest to a wider audience - I've shortened it a little, cutting out the very specific stuff.

Not long ago the comedian Frank Skinner wrote a fascinating piece for the Times. In it he welcomed the increasingly marginal status of the Christian faith in the UK. Now Skinner is not noted as a popular theologian but his comments certainly made us sit up and listen.

Skinner said this: ‘There was a time when social pressure made people go to church. If anything the reverse is now true. Most adults you see in church nowadays are there because they want to be there. That’s not decline, it’s progress.’

Now, that’s an interesting thought, worth pondering for a few minutes...

He follows it up with this one: ‘I’m a little wary of muscular Christianity…It seems to be in direct contradiction to “Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also”. This is the doormat as positive role model — a doormat who’s more concerned about the “welcome” than the muddy feet. Surely the central image of Christianity is someone who can shoot fireballs out of his fingertips allowing himself to be nailed to a wooden cross — submission as the ultimate show of strength — love as impenetrable armour. Most British Christians are badly dressed, unattractive people. We’re not pushy and aggressive members of society.’

Now, of course, we’re better dressed than the average congregation, but surely Skinner has a point. Being a follower of Jesus is not about status, power, influence, being the centre of attention. Rather it’s about serving people and being, like servants, a bit anonymous as we do it; people get served but they’re not sure who did it.

And this chimes in with the major theme of Paul’s passionate letter to the wayward Corinthian church. It is a sustained meditation on what it means to live a cruciform life, that is a life shaped, as Jesus’ was, by the cross.

His plea is that his readers take seriously all he’s taught them about Christian living. In the course of this he offers a model of life based on the character and cross of Christ, a life that he lives. The trouble is that this life is perceived as weak and worthless by his readers. It doesn’t bring them the kind of attention and status that people in Corinth valued so highly; it doesn’t help them win friends and influence in high places.

Now, of course, we’re not interested in such things. But we do think we have a right to be in the place of honour in public debate, that our view of morality is to be given preference over anyone else’s. And we’ve lost that over recent years and it hurts and, if we’re honest, we resent it.

With a mixture of charm and invective, Old Testament exposition and explanation of the difference between Jesus and every other religious teacher on offer, Paul urges, cajoles and encourages his readers to make it up with him and with Jesus. In doing so, he says, they will be able to live the kind of life that God calls them to.

That call is to be a holy people in an unholy world. Paul’s focus is on how his hearers will develop a way of living that puts a broad grin on the face of God. They’ll do it by hearing again the story of Jesus and his cross and building their lives on it as he’s built his life on it and offers that as an example to follow.

And while this way of living inevitably means that we don’t do some of the things our neighbours do – for Paul’s readers that meant avoiding what went on in Corinth’s temples and private function rooms – it mainly means that we develop a community life that has our neighbours looking enviously on wanting what we’ve got.

As we explore this letter between May and the beginning of August, we will look at how we can build and nurture strong, mutually supportive and encouraging relationships, how we can develop a community life based on equality and justice, where the weak are cared for and all are channelled into good works, how we can reflect the values of Jesus in our lifestyle at church, at home, at work and at play.

Celebrating St George

It's St George's Day. For some bizzare reason a range of English people, some with questionable attitudes to foreigners and precious little interest in the Christian faith, will be celebrating the life of a Middle Eastern Roman soldier martyred for his faith under Diocletian for refusing to worship the emperor.

One suspects that the recent revival in the cult of St George - it was a major feast in medieval and early modern England - has something to do with the surging confidence of Welsh and Scottish people in the wake of devolution and the perenial self-awareness of Irish people who have managed to get their saint's festival - St Patrick's Day - celebrated by any and everybody across the globe.

There's a parade featuring St George in the City of London today for the first time since 1585. According to stgeorgesday.com (yes, our saint has his own website featuring Ian Botham on the home page!) over a million of us think we should have the day off to celebrate.

I'm preparing for Sunday at the moment - only one sermon as I've just talked to my morning preacher who has made it back from the States! I am focusing on how knowing the power of the resurrection enables us to live a cruciform life. I know nothing of St George - I suspect most of what we know is legend and rumour - but if he died for his faith, standing against an imperial ideology that sought the worship of its citizens, then he'd grasped what Paul is saying in Philippians 3:1-4:1 and especially v10.

In this sublime piece of rhetoric, Paul shows how the cruciform life of Jesus is the model for the lives of his disciples. Paul shows how it's working out in his life and urges us to work it out in ours. And it hinges on knowing the power of Jesus' resurrection. For only that power enables us to leave our old lives and press on into the future that God has for us. And only that power enables us to share the sufferings of Jesus in our daily lives - whatever those sufferings might be.

If those who want to celebrate St George's Day want to celebrate this, pass me a banner and count me in.

Marking McLaren with a minute's mayhem

I hope we’re all planning to have a minute’s mayhem at midday in honour of Malcolm McLaren who is being buried today (as his family has requested).


I thought I’d play Steely Dan’s Showbiz kids very loud and dance like a loon round my study. Of course, I might not be able to hear myself singing along over the sound of the drilling and banging from upstairs!

It seems an appropriate track since McLaren was nothing if not a showbiz kid and at the end of day the punk movement he helped launch was much more style than substance, all about the tee shirts and posturing and not much about changing the world (though it did blow a much-needed gale of fresh air through the music business).

Putting fire into the campaign

The lacklustre election campaign pitched into farce yesterday with Ken Clark ranting against those who might vote in such a way that we end up with a hung or balanced parliament. With his apocalyptic talk of IMF bureacrats touching down in London the day after the election, it's the first time I can recall a candidate threatening armageddon if you don't vote for his party.

Still, it's good to have a titter among the tedium! The thing is that with the prospect of a balanced parliament and a real chance for radical reform of our broken political institutions, the election camapign should be rivetting. Candidates and leaders should be engaging with the real issues of how we can refresh and renew our democracy. Instead they seem to be arguing over who can be trusted least to manage our present less-than-adequate way of doing things.

Back in the real world, it's 100 days since the Haiti earthquake but the suffering of a nation seems to have dropped off the radar - you really have to search hard to find anything on the BBC news site (though the Today programme featured a report on the continuing relief effort that contained the good news that immunisation of children has prevented epidemics of water-borne disease).

And Obama is making a speech about banking regulation in New York later today. Let's hope there are some radical proposals to regulate the excesses and even support for the Robin Hood Tax. Such a tax on every transaction of every financial institution across the globe could raise more than $300 billion for poverty-relief and front-line services in every nation where banks operate.

As Alexandr, the meerkat, would say 'schimple'

I wonder if it will feature in the prime ministerial debate this evening....

Bathrooms, music and the nature of reality

We have a bath and a towel rail, shower tray and many holes in walls; the electrician has arrived to do the wiring for the down-lighters and tomorrow the plasterer will come. It's like a convention of the skilled here! And we're on track for a completion at the end of next week.

I've been listening to the debut album by John Grant. Queen of Denmark is simply gorgeous. I've been eagerly awaiting this release since I heard the first single, Marz, which you can download for free at his record label's site (here). On first listen, it seems to be a list of ice cream flavours, but it slowly reveals itself to be a lovely meditation on memory and simpler times.

I've been working on the opening session for this year's Prism. So far we're kicking off with Gorillaz Glitter Freeze, moving into the Grace section of the second 1 Giant Leap DVD, possibily taking a peek at Christian Falk & Robyn's Dream On before moving into the zones for story telling and conversation. The aim is to create uncertainty - even a sense of disorientation - about whether there really is 'one world' and even more uncertainty about the reliability of our perceptions of that world.

I will also be using some of Alan Roxburgh's insights on maps and the growing sense that the maps we use to tell us how the world is and therefore how we do 'one mission' in it are no longer in tune with reality - and basing it all on Epeshians 2:1-10.

It will all make sense when it happens (maybe)! Of course, it'll all change over the next week. We have a final team meeting on Monday at which I hope we'll nail down the framework for the five sessions.

Transitioning to a new world

We're having our bathroom done. The lovely Steve and his mate have ripped our old bathroom out and over the next fourteen days will put in a lovely, gleaming new one. Over that time we shall grow increasingly smelly as we have nowhere ablute (well, I exaggerate, of course, because we are able to bath in the kitchen or hose one another down in the garden!

The transition is painful and inconveneient (briefly) but the end result will be wonderful.

I have also just started reading Alan Roxburgh's Missional Map-making: skills for leading in times of transition. Everything Roxburgh writes is worth reading, so I'm looking forward to picking up some hints on how I will manage things over the next six months as our new leadership beds in and we begin to chart a course into the mission God's calling us to join him in.

The introduction contains two great quotes. A seminary president addressing his peers and saying: 'I have just been elected president of a seminary that trains men and women for a world that no longer exists! What do I do?' And a denominational leader who echoed the seniment with the words: 'I was trained to lead and minister in a world that no longer exists. I learned methodologies and strategies that don't work in today's culture,' before adding that 'the chuch [is] a vampire sucking the love of ministry out of my system.'

I admire the honesty and would like to see it reflected in the way our denominational leaders and seminary principals speak about the world we're in. And I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of maps Roxburgh will help me make as I seek to lead my church in this time of transition.

I'm also looking forward to having a shower!

Poised for the great leap forward

We're back from the best Spring Harvest for a number of years. The main sessions in the big top were consistently excellent with Ruth Dearnley, Dave Steell, Steve Holmes, Gerard Kelly, Steve Chalke and Gill Rowe each preaching on Esther.

Although our pastoral was half the size of last year's, we still saw the same number of people - so we were very busy. But it is a huge privilege to be able to walk with people through a whole range of issues. I had the joy of helping a 15 year old boy become a Christian which was great.

Yesterday our week got off to a great start with the election of nine trustee leaders, including a number of younger people - the average of the leadership is probably around 40, which is fantatstic. I've been telling people that this is year zero - not because we're planning a cull of the uncooperative - but because I believe that we have come through a long transition time and are now genuinely poised for a great leap forward.

This week will be mainly taken up with Baptist Assembly planning, catching up with people in church, preparing for the weekend and having our bathroom completely refurbished (fortunately, we've got experts coming to do that for us!)

On why it’s important to get out more

It's Day 4 in the Spring Harvest and we're all still sane. It's been a good week, Here's a story from it that the person concerned said it was okay for me to share. And I think it's worth sharing.

Anne came for prayer, feeling that she had nothing to offer, that God was distant and that she didn’t amount to anything. She’s not a sophisticated woman. She struggles with poor health, but she remains as active as she can be. After we’d prayed briefly and generally, she told me this story.

One day she was at the bus stop by the crematorium in her town. She often speaks to people at bus stops, so when she saw a slightly dishevelled elderly man, she asked if he was all right. He said he was visiting the memorial for his wife who had died recently.

She asked if he had family and he said that he only had a daughter but didn’t see her because she was a Christian. Anne thought this was a strange response and told him that she was a Christian and asked why he thought his daughter being a Christian was a problem.

He said he didn’t really know but got the impression they probably wouldn’t want him around. He added that his daughter had given him her phone number at his wife’s funeral, Anne suggested he ring her. What had he got to lose, after all?

She got her bus. That Sunday she told a leader at her church what had happened, who strongly advised her not to talk to strangers at bus stops but do something useful in the church instead.

She felt disheartened, guilty and useless.

About three week’s later, having prayed on and off for the elderly gentleman, Anne was getting off a bus in the centre of town when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to see a smartly dressed, clean shaven man smiling at her. ‘I want to thank you,’ he beamed.

Anne was flummoxed. He’d never seen this man before as far as she knew. Sensing her bewilderment, the man said ‘you were the lady I spoke at the bus stop by the crem a few weeks ago, who told me Christians weren’t so bad and that I should ring my daughter?’ Suddenly she twigged: ‘Oh yes,’ she said.

She hadn’t recognised him because at that first meeting he’d been scruffy and unshaven and really down.

He explained: ‘I rang my daughter and then I went to see her. It was ok. In fact, I now live with her – she and her husband have a large house – and I worship at their church.’ He grinned broadly. ‘So thank you. Life’s come good since I met you at that bus stop.’

So in what sense does Anne have nothing to offer? I wish I had a church full of people who spoke to strangers at bus stops. God see3ms to have a habit of using such conversations to turn people’s lives around. And I wish church leaders would realise that Christians are more use on the streets than in the church building and let them get out more.

A bracing week at Butlins

Today we're off to Spring Harvest, to the icy chill of Skegness, for a week of listening to stories and praying with people.

Being on the pastoral team at an event like this is a wonderful privilege as people entrust us with their struggles and joys, challenges and disappointmnts and we are able to walk with them for a while, offering pointers to where grace might be found in their circumstances.

We also work with a team with whom we have loads of fun. So we're looking forward to our week.

I'm taking Patti Smith's memoire, Just Kids, with me to read in the quiet moments as well as the manuscript of my book to start compiling a list of subjects and people that might go in the index.

For the journey, as well as listening to at least one Patti Smith album, we also have the soundtrack from Slumdog Millionaire, Lonelady's lovely, edgy Nerve Up, and Paloma Faith's still splendid Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful.

We'll be testing out the dongle. So I hope to be able to post from time-to-time through the week

Good stories in the wash up

This might have passed you by, but in the wash up - that wonderfully named time when the government haggles to get as much of its programme on the statute book before Parliament dissolves altogether - the vulture bill was passed.

Vulture funds - many UK based - are investment houses that buy up the debts of the most heavily-indebted poor countries, often for a few pennies, and then sue those countries for the payment of the full amount owed. This is capitalism red and tooth and claw, a montrous injsutice backed by UK courts, and it is wonderful that our Parliament has voted to protect the poor from the rapacious rich.

The law restricts the ability of these funds to sue poor nations in the UK courts and so we should no longer witness the spectacle of a fund succeeding in getting a British court to uphold its claim for $20m immediate payment from Liberia, one of the world's poorest countries, on a debt outsanding since the 1970s. Hopefully, it renders their 'investments' worthless.

The bill gets Royal Assent today and so becomes law. There is a sunset clause built in, meaning that it will have to renewed in a year's time. So we need to remain vigilant.

But it's a good day for the world's poorest people.

The stories we live in

Picked up all Patti Smith's wonderful 1970s albums in a slip case for a tenner yesterday. result! Five albums (the package included 1988's Dream of Life). I shall listen to Horses and Easter as I read her wonderfully observed memoire, Just Kids, chronicling her start in the business and her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

And I confess a frisson of sadness at today's news that Malcolm McLaren has died. I remember early punk washing over Manchester in gigs of complete anarchy and chaos that blew through the rather ossified rock scene in 1976ish. He was a true pop maverick.

Meanwhile, back in the study, I have been putting the finishing touches to a Spring series on 2 Corinthians. I am really looking forward to getting into this urgent pastoral appeal for restored relationships and a cruciform lifestyle. Paul is urging his hearers to a life of holiness based on the story of Jesus in a world of competing stories and spiritualities.

The stories we tell about the world and our place in it, gives shape to our lives. Tell the story that McLaren and Smith lived by and one's life takes on a particular shape and course. In many ways, the election campaign is a clash of stories - how does the world work, what's our place in it?

And here's Paul, retelling the story of Jesus and his story, showing how in that story, God works to bring people together in a community of justice and equity. That's a spiritual vision but also a political one. Paul's intent is not that we withdraw from the world and huddle together but that we live in the world by the values we encounter in the story of Jesus.

We're off to Spring Harvest in Skegness on Sunday to serve on the smallest pastoral team we've been involved in. I'm assuming that numbers are down - otherwise we're going to be really busy! We always enjoy our week, working with some great people, catching with up how God's been working in their lives since last  year, as well as walking with a whole variety of folk as God speaks to them about all kinds of issues.

And then it's the Baptist assembly. Spring is so busy!!

In the footsteps of Joanna the apostle

Happy Easter everyone. He is risen and the world is changed as a result. I thought I'd share with you what I'll be saying at church later thgis morning in our family Easter celebration. It focuses on one of the key witnesses of the events of that first Easter:

Joanna stuck to her guns. She had to. The men didn’t believe her.

She told the story again, even explaining it’s significance in the light of what they’d all been told a while back, when they were in Galilee.

Eventually Peter and John cottoned on and went to look for themselves.

No wonder Paul describes her as ‘outstanding among the apostles’. For she was one of the women who came with the news that the tomb of Jesus was empty on that first Easter Day and the first explanation of its significance.

Joanna had grown up with everything a little girl could dream of; she was rich and privileged, a proper Jewish princess. Then she married a wealthy and powerful man. She was part of the Judean elite, that small circle who enjoyed influence and power in Herod’s domain.

But one day her son became ill and desperate for him to get well, her husband had sought out Jesus, a wandering preacher who was gaining a reputation as a healer. The moment he spoke, her son recovered.

She had to find out more. So she joined the ramshackle band of disciples, became part of that group of women who met the financial needs of the group as they travelled proclaiming the good news, not caring that she was providing the lion’s share.

She heard Jesus’ parables, listened to his explanations over countless meals, watched him heal the sick, open the eyes of the blind, unstop deaf ears and even bring his dead friend Lazarus back to life.

And she watched as he was betrayed and deserted by his friends, denied by those closest to him, rejected by his own people, arrested, tried and crucified by the Romans.

Jesus had said to them that there would be those who’d not taste death until they saw his kingship in all its glory. Is this really what he’d meant – being enthroned on a cross of wood, under an angry sky?

Heart-broken, shattered but faithful to the last, she’d gone to the tomb on the day after the Sabbath to do what friends do for the dead, only to find the grave empty and Jesus gone.

Awe-struck and terrified in equal measure, she and the other women met two men who reminded them of what Jesus had said while they were on the road from Galilee to Jerusalem:

          That he’d be handed over and crucified and on the third day rise again.

She was entrusted with this message: he is not here; he is risen! Go, tell his friends (even Peter) that this has happened and that he is going to meet them.

It was a life changing moment.

Yes, she’d been amazed at Jesus’ teaching; yes, her eyes popped at some of the healings – not least that of her son; yes, she’d given her resources to help fund Jesus’ movement…

But here as the sun rose on that first Easter Day, and the angels’ words sank in, she knew the world had changed; that something old had been crumpled up like wrapping paper, torn away to reveal something new.

And later that evening, she saw for herself as Jesus came to them, spoke peace and opened the scriptures.

In rising from death, Joanna saw that Jesus was right when he said that she would see his kingship in glory. She had truly seen without fully realising it on Good Friday as he was enthroned over sin and death, as he embraced and absorbed all the pain and darkness of the world, so that on this bright new morning, he might burst from the grave and make all things new.

And if this amazing, wonderful, mind-blowing news was true, then everyone had to know – the disciples, her neighbours, people in the villages up the road, those who lived in Rome; everyone.

So, now with her husband, she leads a congregation of Jesus followers in the capital of the empire, a privileged Jewish princess, bringing the gospel to craft workers, dockers, slaves and the like in the back streets of Rome itself, watching the risen Jesus change despair to hope, darkness to light, death to life for all kinds of people – just as he had for her.

He did it when he healed her son, when he told his stories and drew her into his circle; he did it as he hung on the cross on Good Friday; and most emphatically, he did it when he met her in his risen glory on that first Easter evening.

And what Joanna wants more than anything else, is that he’ll do it for you. That’s why she’s travelled, suffered, even done time in jail with Paul. If Jesus is alive, then everyone needs to hear about it, everyone needs to be drawn into the new way of living she’s found in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Everyone. Including you and me.

[This story is reconstructed from Luke 8:1-3; 24:1-12; John 4:43-54 and Romans 16:7. It takes account of the fact that followers of Jesus were often only identified by one of their given names to protect their security and that Jewish people often had both Jewish and Roman names. For a full explanation see Richard Bauckham ‘Joanna the apostle’ in his Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels (T&T Clark, 2002) Pp109-202]

May you all know the joy of the risen Lord this Easter

With Thomas and Bono in the embrace of life

So, here's the piece I wrote for our church magazine which has just come out. I thought I'd share it in this format as probably as many members of my church will see it this way than in the print form. It's a generational thing...

We head into Easter with the world still reeling from two major earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, armed conflict in 38 countries and an economic recession that is blighting the lives of millions across the planet. Against such a global backdrop, our troubles can seem trivial. Except, they are our troubles and we feel their weight each day – whether it’s ill health, uncertainties at work, family and relationship pressures or just a feeling that life is hard work.

Easter is an explosion of life and joy after the fast of lent and the dark agony of Good Friday. But so often we feel stuck on Saturday. The battle is over, the tomb is sealed, everyone’s gone home and that’s it. Sometimes we feel too tired to realise that Easter has dawned, the sun’s up, the Son has risen. We need some one to remind us.

So many of us are like Thomas, sincere, well-meaning, loyal and shattered. We’ve had enough, as he had had enough. For him the cross was the end of the dream. He might have been the Eeyore of the disciple band, but he wasn’t alone in feeling that the world ended on Good Friday.

And he wasn’t going to be taken in the wishful thinking of a group of friends who wanted to keep the spirit of their movement alive. So when Peter and the others excitedly told him that they’d seen Jesus, he didn’t believe them. He wanted to see the evidence. Like any of the heroes of CSI he wanted to get up and close and personal with whoever his friends had seen to assure himself that they weren’t being deluded. Handling the wounds was the only proof that would persuade him.

John tells us that Thomas got his chance. Jesus invited Thomas into the embrace of life. Yes, the man before him was wounded from the cross but he was gloriously, triumphantly, luminously alive. No wonder all Thomas could say was ‘My lord and my God.’ Thomas knew what it meant that the battered and beaten Jesus was standing in front of him. By some great mystery that was beyond his ability to compute what had happened on Good Friday had created a new world and Jesus was at the heart of it. So whoever he was, he must at least be God.

Jesus is the one who brings God into focus. But more than that, he is the one who, having triumphed over all the forces ranged against us, invites us into his new world of love and life, justice and joy, the adventure of being caught up in his mission to put everything right. What this means for us, as Jesus says, is that as we believe, so we get to see who he is and what he’s doing. And he invites us to join him so we can see him more clearly.

As so often, it takes a great popular theologian to spell out what this means for us. So here’s Bono, sometime singer, sometime campaigner, a scribbling, wine-drinking, bible-reading band man.

'True religion will not let us fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom,' he says. 'Love your neighbour is not a piece of advice, it's a command. That means in the global village we're going to have to love a whole lot more people - that's what that means.' He adds: ‘if you’re going to enjoy having your sneakers and your jeans made by developing communities, you are already involved with these people. You cannot therefore just ignore some of the problems they’re negotiating. They’re living on your street. There was an old definition of generosity, which is that at the very least the rich man looks after the poor man on his street. Guess what? Now that street goes round the globe.’

And he reminds us that 'the poor are where God lives...God is with the poor and he is with us if we are with them. This is not a burden, it's an adventure.'

The words have a liturgical as well as rhetorical rhythm. I love that last sentence. Our lives with God in mission among the poor, in sharing what we have, in pooling resources and energy, insights and hard labour is an adventure not a burden.

And it’s an adventure because it’s led by Jesus. He invites us to travel through Good Friday to Easter morning, through the cross to the new world of resurrection, through suffering with a world in pain to the daw of a new creation with pain or tears.

We are Easter people because we follow a suffering servant who broke the tomb and spreads life in his wake everywhere he goes. Are we up for the adventure?

Purifying the temple with Nehemiah and Jesus

The trouble with the new blogger editing suite is that I can't find the spell checker. So if there are spelling infelicities in this it's down to me not being able to spell. Ah well.

We've had a good weekend. It's been lovely having our grand daughter staying with us for the past week - we went for a walk in Knole Park on Saturday which was full of deer and beginning to emerge from the winter with buds and leaves breaking out all over.

And yesterday evening we finished Nehemiah (hallelujah!). It's been a challenges 12 weeks. I think some good things have come from our wrestling with this text, but I can't escape the feeling that Nehemiah was the world's first spin doctor (as David Clines suggests in a fascinating essay on the book) and that it would be great to have Sanballat's autobiography on the same events!

But yesterday we pondered what we might learn from the two cleansings of the temple - one in Nehemiah 13, the other in the gospels; one by the outsider Jesus, the other by the insider Nehemiah. And we wondered what these events might have to teach us regarding creating missional communities (the subject of our journey through Nehemiah).

My reflection was that Nehemiah and Jesus, while superficially poles apart, are on the same continuum, with Jesus (as you'd expect) fulfilling and completing what Nehemiah was involved in progressing. In particular I drew two conclusions about being a missional community from all this.

The first is that to be a missional community we need to have a firm centre. A key lesson from Nehemiah is that at the heart of the community he was seeking to build was a covenant, the scriptures and prayer. These are the key to knowing who we are; these give shape to the values and lifestyle that creates the community that can truly be a city within a city.

The second is that a missional community needs to have fuzzy edges: We learn this from Jesus and the way he allowed any and everyone who wanted to to attach themselves to the band of disciples, to listen in and ask questions, to come along for the journey to see what it was all about.

It is in this way that Isaiah 2:2-4; Micah 4:1-4 (key Old Testament prophecies about the calling of God's people); Isaiah 61; Acts 3:17-21; Ephesians 3:5-7 (see the temple imagery in 2:20-21) will be fulfilled in little groups of Jesus followers; groups where people are moving from the edge to the centre, drawn by the possibility of becoming aware of who they are in Jesus and through that of discovering life in all its fulness.

It seems to me that that’s mission, that’s our calling; this is what it means to be a missional people.And if this is what Nehemiah has taught us, then it's been twelve weeks well spent - especially if we have actually learned it!

history lessons

Apropos of yesterday's post, I've just listened to Bettany Hughes' programme on women in the early church. It's worth a listen (on iplayer for the next couple of days before part 2 is broadcast on Sunday). It seems well informed though it doesn't really tackle the first century at all except in a few passing references to Phoebe and Priscilla.

I love her description of the early Jesus followers as a guerilla church, an underground movement where jobs were done by those who could do them regardless of gender. This seems spot on as a description of the gatherings we encounter in the first two or three centuries of Christian history.

Perhaps if we could recapture that sense of being a movement rather than an institution, our debates about who exercises 'power' would be seen in proper perspective. Of course, we can't shed 1500 years of history. But we can learn lessons from the early days of the movement that might help us to navigate our way through our post-Christendom culture.

Reflections on drawing the short straw

A couple of stories caught my eye in this morning's paper, hidden away from the torrent of speculation, supposition and spin about today's budget (easy boys, all will be revealed...)

One concerned the death of the singer-songwriter Lesley Duncan, a woman whose pin-sharp tones and lovely turn of phrase brightened up my university days. Her Earth Mother album was a particular delight.

The obit in today's Guardian tells the story of her and her brother touting songs in Tin Pan Alley in the 60s and being taken onto retainers, him at £10 a week and her at £7 because she had fewer songs and was a woman!

The other story concerns, in passing, Anne Moffat, deselected by her Scottish constituency for allegedly not being up to the job. As the ever-presceient Anne Perkins observes in her column 'how remarkable that in a thousand years of male MPs there has never been a case of deselection for incompetence before.'

I think I might have sensitised to these stories by David Kerrigan's insightful blog on the recent BU Council's discussions about women in leadership.

My heart sank as I read it and even more as I read the comments from able, gifted women like Julie and Catriona. Why after nearly a century are we still having this conversation? Why after accepting in the 1920s that God calls women just as he calls into men into church leadership, inlcuding full time ministry, do women find it such an uphill struggle to be settled in pastorates in our churches?

We have a truly exceptional minister in training serving with us at the moment. She is one of the sharpest thinkers I have the pleasure to converse with regularly, she preaches with insight, clarity and purpose, she is developing gifts as a listener. She would be an asset to any church anywhere in the UK of any size. When it comes to her turn to go through settlement, I would expect that she'd be snapped up by a church that recognises her gifts and calling.

Will this happen? Sadly, it seems, we baptists, like tin pan alley, undervalues the assets God has given us because some of them come in female form and, like constituency panels, seem to judge women more harshly than men.

And it's got to stop because it's an offense to the gospel, a cause of grief to the Holy Spirit and a major impediment to our mission.

Jets overhead - but no need to duck

I'm just rediscovering a rather wonderful Canadian band called Jets Overhead. I got their 2005 album Bridges (download for whatever you wanted to pay for it) a couple of years ago. And I've just downloaded last year's No Nations. It's rather lovely.

You can check them out here and listen to the whole album before committing to purchase. Give them a spin; I don't think you'll be disappointed seeing as how as you're all discerning music listeners with impeccable taste!

I'm also using the upgraded blogger software which is smooth and easy...

Figuring out the reasons

I've been pondering the church's teaching programme on off over the past few months (as regular readers will know). I've completed the first draft of a feedback form for sermons which I will distribute to interested parties for comment this weekend.

But as we veer towards the end of our series on Nehemiah, I have been asking myself whether some books of the Bible lend themselves to Sunday ministry better than others.

I've made no secret of my struggles with Nehemiah as we journeyed through his memoir and I think I'd have to say that I'm not alone. this series has seen attendance at our later service drop off quite significantly.

And most noticeable among those who aren't attending are our young adults. This is a major disappointment. Clearly what we're offering is not seen as essential or even worth checking out.

In this we are not alone. Earlier this morning I read a series of papers posted on the EA website (here) examining why churches struggle to attract and hold onto 20s and 30s. The stats have been available since Peter Brierley published The English Church Census in 2005. They tell us that while 12.84% of 65-74s are in church on Sunday, only 3.5% of 20s and 4.5% of 30s attend regularly. I gather the figures for Scotland are if anything worse.

Only 7% of the average congregation of an English church is aged between 20 and 29. You don't need to be a genius to work out the implications of this for the future of the church. As David Voas, consistently the most interesting and challenging commentator on the sociology of church life in the UK points out: 'on average people experience little change in their beliefs and practices once they reach their early 20s.'

He draws a wider lesson from this with implications for church thinking across the board: What secularization does is to change the environment in which children are raised and the likelihood of an effective religious upbringing.'

Those looking across the pond for answers on this will find only questions. Barna tells us that six out of ten teenagers who are active in church will drop out in their twenties and Pew Forum figures suggest that only 17% of the members of evangelical churches in the US are aged 18-29.

I'll reflect further on the implications for us in due course. This is one of the challenges facing the new leadership our church is choosing at the moment. My prayer is that we'll be up for it.

More than a stand-up

There's a lovely Times article by comedian Frank Skinner about how Christians should live in our society. He revels himself not only to be a very funny man but also one who is well acquainted with scripture and church history.

In particular, he says that Christians should stop whingeing about people being beastly towards us and start living as Jesus wants us to.

He says: 'Lord Carey feels that Christians have been too soft. He said that if you behave like a doormat, you get treated like one. I’m a little wary of muscular Christianity. It’s been used to justify everything from the Crusades to the shooting of abortion doctors. It seems to be in direct contradiction to “Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also”. This is the doormat as positive role model — a doormat who’s more concerned about the “welcome” than the muddy feet. Surely the central image of Christianity is someone who can shoot fireballs out of his fingertips allowing himself to be nailed to a wooden cross — submission as the ultimate show of strength — love as impenetrable armour. Most British Christians are badly dressed, unattractive people. We’re not pushy and aggressive members of society. We’re a bit like Goths — no one can remember us being fashionable and we talk about death a lot. I love the glorious un-coolness of that.'

I reckon there's a lot of wisdom here.

He adds: 'I went to a debate this week. The motion was “England should be a Catholic country again”. I ended up voting against. The marriage of Church, any church, and State seems alien to the teachings of Christ. Power corrupts and British Christians should be happy to continue relinquishing it. The Catholic Church lost more than it gained when it got into bed with the Emperor Constantine.'

Can't argue with that, can you?

And then he concludes: 'Christians tend to save their best work for the “voice in the wilderness” genre. We are most impressive when operating as a secret sect, kneeling in small, candle-lit rooms and scrawling fishes on walls. I’m enjoying this current dose of persecution. It’s definitely good for the soul.'

Read the whole article here while I listen to my old mate Alan Billings on Thought for the Day (he's one the reasons I'm a Christian!)

Let's hear it for the album

Pink Floyd have struck a blow for the album. In the age of the track-by-track, pick n mix digital download, the finest purveyors of concept albums in the history of the genre have won a case preventing EMI from filleting their best work and selling it track by track.

It means if you want Wish You Were Here, you have to buy the whole thing and not just your favourite song from it.

It seems to me, however, that the album is actually very much alive and well. For my birthday I acquired the lean and lovely debut album by Lonelady on CD which comes with a track listing indicating side A and side B. And when you listen with that in mind, it makes perfect sense that Immaterial would open the second side of the album.

This week I've been listening to the stunning new album from Gorillaz which has an obvious beginning and middle and end and demands to be listened to in the order of the track listing. It's not an album made for shuffle.

The Decembrists Album, The Hazards of Love, one of the best releases of last year, is clearly a concept album and demands to be listened to in the order in which the tracks appear on the CD.

Such works are more than just the sum of their parts, more than a collection of songs thrown together in random order. Listening to them from start to finish is to be taken on a journey, invited to see the connections that are made as songs are put in a particular order. So, let's hear it for Pink Floyd.

health, wealth and the credit crunch

I'm on the train testing out my new dongle (they can't touch you for it), on my way to Didcot for an Assembly Project Team meeting (less exciting than it sounds).

Yesterday I was preparing for the final leg in our look at what the Bible says about money and how that informs how we live. I'm doing some stuff on prosperity teachiung and the jubilee (building on what we last time).

I came across a great piece in the Atlantic, a US political and cultural monthly magazine. It's headline says it all really: 'did Christianity cause the crash?'

It shows that many churches promoting prosperity doctrine are in US sub-prime hotspots. On top of that, many of their ministers or senior leaders were loan oifficers at banks at the forefront of the sub-prime boom. Who is prospering whom? cherck it out here.

How to create a dialogue in church

It's been great to read the responses to my post on Lent with Stanley over on Facebook - especially as they're from members of my congregation!

What is really encouraging is the genuine hunger they reveal for having their lives shaped by God's word. This is, of course, music to a preacher's ears. So thanks for your responses.

For those who haven't picked this up on facebook, here's what people said:

Sara said
I have never commented on someone else's conversation but have been thinking about this a lot. If you guys want to know what is happening as a result of your sermons you have to ask. If there were a bit more testimony about then you would feel better and others would be inspired. My suggestion is to ask 5 people to feed back to you the next week what they thought God was saying to them in the sermon and how it played out during the week. We would all become a bit more accountable and focus on God changing us and our circumstances.

Becky said
Feedback and more testimonies....i like it! It is always great to have more people from the congregation involved in the services. .....and I would also love to have a 'bit more' to the sermons...I've been listening to a series of hour long sermons and they have been really challenging me - although i do pause and rewind and relisten fair amount!...not sure that would go down well in a Sunday service!

And Rob suggested longer sermons!

So, this week, I'm going to be working on a simple questionnaire/feedback form to give a few folk the chance to respond to what they've heard which could then form the basis to a testimony slot a week or so later that would enable people to hear how people's lives are being affected and shaped by what they are hearing.

It would also give the preacher the chance to clarify and expand on things said so that over a period of time a genuine dialogue between preacher and people would develop.

Yesterday, I had a number of people say to me how helpful the sermon was. This is always great for a preacher to hear but what I wanted to ask everyone who made such comments was 'So what? What difference is this sermon actually going to make to you this week?'

Well, some kind of feedback form would help me get a handle on this which in turn would help me to shape future sermons in the light of reactions to former ones.

And a regular testimony time would give the opportunity for people to say what they were learning, how it's affecting their daily lives at work and challenge the preacher to develop thoughts or even return to material that hadn't been clear enough first time round.

It's quite an exciting thought.

On the finishing of a great undertaking

Ah rejoice, rejoice, rejoice for the great undertaking is complete!

I have just put the final full stop to the manuscript of The World of The Early Church.

Coming in at 50,679 words, it's a tad too long (about 2,000 words) but the excess will come out in the wash.

And I think I'm really quite pleased with it. I think it reads well and tells a good story. But the proof of that will be when I read it again next week or the week after.

Even more so, will be the verdict of my publisher. it is in her inbox now. Watch this space...

Lent with Stanley

I am reading Stanley Hauerwas' A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching for lent. I started this morning (slightly late...)

Hauerwas is one of the premier theologians of our age who says here about his craft and its practitioners, 'modern theology tends to be an extended exercise in throat clearing,' adding that 'even after the theologians have cleared their throats it often turns out they have nothing to say.'

I think he's an exception to this rule. He laments that modern theology has become less and less scriptural, suggesting that theologians have tried to see themselves as philosophers. 'Theologians are not "thinkers",' he says. 'We are servants of a tradition in which the creative challenge is how to be faithful to what we have received.'

And he thinks that the best form through which this is expressed is the sermon. 'I am convinced that the recovery of the sermon as the context for theological reflection is crucial if Christians are to negotiate the world in which we find ourselves,' he says

This is a challenge to those of us who find the sermon an inefficient tool for disciple formation in our churches. But perhaps the problem is less with the model than our execution of it(!), though I do feel that preaching is only part of the issue; listening and hearing is the other part and even the best speaking needs good listeners. As C S Lewis once said in a different context, there are no bad books, only bad readers.

As Hauerwas says: 'I hope the reader will discover that the problem is not that they do not understand what I say. Rather the primary challenge is how what I say challenges the way our lives are put together.'

All this magic and I'm only on p14!

Christians and politcs (again)

Jude pointed to this fascinating Financial Times article on Christians and the Conservative party in a comment to a recent post (thanks). Here's the link. It's really worth reading.

Changing our maps

We went to a party in Essex on Saturday evening. It was a blast. Great to celebrate Juliet's 40th and catch up with people.

We needed the sat nav to get us there and fairly near the end of the journey we hit a dead end. The sat nav wanted us to go straight on and right but a no entry sign and barrier prevented it. It's maps were wrong. The landscape had changed and the map hadn't caught up with it.

Alan Roxburgh tells as similar story in his new book called Missional Map-making: skills for leading in times of transition. The first chapter is available on the publisher's website (here). The book will be available next month.

I think Roxbugh is the most interesting of the missional thinkers currently writing. I find his use of maps as metaphor really helpful. A key point he's making is that most us are still using maps that relate to a landscape that no longer exists, so it's not surprising that as churches we can't find our way in the world.

Equally, it's not surprising that none of our neighbours has much of a clue what we're talking about when we share our faith.

The environment in which we are seeking to be church has changed faster and more radically over the past 25-30 than at any time since the Reformation/Renaissance. The best guide to this is a wonderful book called The 500 Year Delta by Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker.

It simply means that our models for action and community are no longer up to the job.

Yesterday evening we began asking the question what is our mission and what do we need to be in order to do it. Next week we'll ruminate further on it. I wonder if most of us have grasped the scale of the challenge...

It's enough to make you weep

Well, you've got to hope that the election campaign rises above this morning's smearathon!

I don't mind people trying to sell books - I've got books to sell, so I understand the impulse. But having read the extracts from Andrew Rawnsley's new book, the best I can say of it is that he has a book to sell...

I don't know if anyone else caught a whiff of irony in the hectoring John Humphries interrupting his way through a process of trying to get answers out of two interviewees on the non-story of whether an anti-bullying hotline had or hadn't received complaints about Gordon Brown bullying staff at number 10.

The whole thing just makes you want to weep. It's little wonder that fewer and fewer are contemplating voting.

Food for thought

My last post referred you to the Theos website where you can find Tom Wright's excellent paper on God and Government.

Theos is a think tank really worth getting to know. Over the past couple of years they have produced some excellent material on Christian engagement with political issues. The organisation's reports are available for free download and are worth getting, reading and talking about in your churches, book clubs, huddles at a cafe, etc.

Currently, there's an opportunity for you to comment on religious programming on the BBC, something I know is exercising some members of my congregation.

In this election year it is more vital than ever that Christians are well-informed about what's going on and how the Bible and Christian tradition might help us to make sensible choices as we head to the polling station.

So go and check Theos out here.

As well as politics, there's a string of good materials by Nick Spencer and others on Darwin which shouldn't be forgotten just because the 150th anniversary year has passed.

Tom Wright lecture on government

The Tom Wright lecture mentioned last week can now be downloaded here (scroll down to find the link). It's well worth reading carefully and even using as the basis for a group discussion in church in the run up to the election.

Wright's lecture is a robust analysis of the issues facing British democracy seen through the lens of the Biblical narrative and the post-enlightenment history of the West. There's nothing in the lecture about the biblical story and especially that of Jesus as the bringer of the Kingdom that is emphatically for this world, for the here and now, that we haven't read in Wright before. But here it's delivered as a brief and accessible overview that's then applied to how Christians might think about the contemporary political process.

Hearing the Bible as it really is

Well I have just completed the fifth of eight chapters of the book. So i am on track to finish by the end of February.

It's been a challenge but I think what I've written so far is good. Hopefully the publisher will agree!

I have to say that immersing myself in the culture of the Roman empire - albeit pretty superficially - has made me more aware of the need to see how the gospel earths itself in our culture.

we had a fascinating gathering at church last night. it was the first of three sessions on money matters. Last night was looking at the New Testament world and I shared the fruit of that day's writing.

What intrigued me about the questions was how they all came out of a Christendom heritage and not the New Testament as rooted in its culture. That's not a surprise I guess since it's how people have been trained!

It'll be fascinating to see what happens next time as we tackle issues that people are concerned about in the light of our understanding of the gospel. I guess my hope is that knowing a little of the context will help us to hear the New Testament as it was heard by its first hearers.

Of course, we'll never be able to do that perfectly but I'm hoping that its message will gain a fresh clarity and a fresh purchase in people's lives as a result of what we're thinking about.

We'll see...

A healthy dose of scepticism

It's an interesting week for the news.

I'm listening to Simon Jenkins on Radio 4 telling us how the media were all swept along by climate change hype that is now being exposed as less credible than we all thought. Does that mean we should all be climate change skeptics now?

At the Church of England Synod, a Ugandan bishop has confirmed his support for legislation in his country outlawing homosexual behaviour with the death penalty being proposed for repeat offenders. Are we all going to sign up for the government's proposed equality laws in revulsion at such a view?

I guess what this tells me is that what the media increasingly leads us by the nose into how we should feel about things. Jenkins, not a man I always agree with, has just said that the media should always be sceptical. And I agree wholeheartedly with that.

Scepticism is essential for evaluating the truth of anything. It's how science works and in many ways it's how faith works too. The trouble is that we seem to want to be told what to think, so if the media changes its mind, so do we!

I'm currently writing about the economic location of the early Christians for my book. One of the distractions historians need to be aware of is the tendency of Roman writers to speak of a binary economy in the Roman empire - a few very rich people at the top and everyone bumping along the bottom, one missed crust away from penury.

Such a view is reproduced by some historians and NT scholars. But the evidence of it is slim indeed. They appear to have fallen of the hype of the empire's reporters. Reality is always much more nuanced and interesting.

When I was being trained as a historian, I was always taught to run a sceptical eye over the evidence looking for those nuances, the bumps on an otherwise flat sheet that lets the light fall on the era under study so that we see it as well as we possibly can.

Then when I was being trained as a reporter, I was told to ask the how, what, where, when and why questions always backed by the prove it riposte. Would that our media did that more often.

More salvoes in the election campaign

There's an interesting page in today's Times that says something about the forthcoming election and how Christians will be challenged by it.

At the top of the page the ever-sensible Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, expresses concern that God is being squeezed out of politics by the way the current government does business - though he does reckon this process started under Mrs Thatcher.

At the foot of the page is a report of a David Cameron interview in the gay magazine Arena where he says that churches have got to accept gay people into their ranks as equals.

For some Christians this could well leave no party worthy of consideration when it comes to casting their vote!

Clearly that's not a sensible position, so there's going to be a need for some really careful thinking to take place between now and 3 May. Deeply held opinions need to be challenged and fresh reflection on what scripture and Christian tradition says about crucial issues will have to take place.

That thinking will undoubtedly be helped by the lecture that Tom Wright is due to deliver at the synod next week and a book co-authored by Nick Spencer and Jonathan Chaplin that's coming out this week.

Resources are one thing, but I also think we need to be serious in prayer for our civic society. There are fault lines that can become fractures; there are deep differences of opinion even within congregations that need to be prayed about and talked out.

So, let the conversations begin - and those that have already started (and there are lots, I know), spill over into the public domain so we can all benefit from them.

Thoughts about sermons

'We no longer seem to expect our ministers to spend hours (literally hours) every week, thinking, reading, praying: so that when the hungry sheep look up they may be fed.... '

So said Davis McCaughey, the first president of Australia's Uniting Church, in 1979.

It's quoted in blog piece lamenting the decline of the denomination over the past thirty years. I don't know enough about church life in Australia to comment on the main argument of the piece (here), but it caught my eye because it seemed to have something important to say about the issue I was thinking about earlier in the week.

Perhaps people in our churches would be better equipped to live and share their faith, if they were better taught by ministers who took greater care and time over preparation for Sunday.

I find myself somewhat conflicted about this. Having been challenged on Sunday evening about how fragile some people feel in the face of attacks on their faith in the wider world, McCaughey's comments suggest a way that ministers can be the key to encouraging muscle growth among members of our congregations.

McCaughey is not a lone voice, of course. Eugene Peterson has always aregued that the primary calling of the minister is to listen and speak, to pray, study scripture and offer spiritual direction through Sunday teaching and one-to-ones.

I'm not sure the sermon can carry such baggage, however, in our media and information saturated world. But I do think churches - and ministers especially - need to think about what they teach and how they teach it (I've said this before), so that individual Christians feel better able to face the challenges of the world they live in.

The question is how will this best happen? Answers on a post card, please.

Building spiritual muscle

We had a really excellent Later Service yesterday evening. There weren't many of us but the conversation was rich and stimulating. I guess the latter was very much the product of the former!

We were continuing our reflections on Nehemiah, looking at chapter 4 and Glenis, having set the scene really well, asked what opposition we feel we face from outside the church.

We got the usual stuff about people being too apathetic to oppose what we're doing providing it doesn't interfere with how they live their lives and the fact that certain elements in our culture, especially the liberal media, are mounting a concerted campaign against belief.

So far, so expected

I don't buy the second argument - though I think the first has a lot of merit - and said so. To which one our people said that it's alright for me because I used to be a journalist, I've studied a lot and I know how to answer people and so I'm not fazed by such attacks. She admitted that she found such attacks quite unsettling.

I was lost for words (momentarily!).

Part of the issue here is the end of Christendom, something we who've read missional church texts know all about. It's about how the Christian faith has been moved from the centre to the margins of our culture - quite rightly in my view; it's where we belong.

But the upshot of this is that all opinions are now equal and therefore are equally fair game. And this is still a relatively new experience for Christians, especially those of a certain age and those who grew up in Christian families. For them it feels personal; their faith is being attacked now in a way that would have been unthinkable 30 to 50 years ago. And that's uncomfortable.

So, it's made me think about how we help people in church to think about their faith.

People were talking last night about such opposition calling for spiritual warfare. And I guess that's true. But it depends on how you understand spiritual warfare. For me the idea is much more about how we live than how we battle unseen spiritual powers. I tried to sum my view up in these lines:

In the early hours
writing these lines
aware of unearthly powers
in unsettling times;
war rages on our TV screens, the front line’s in my soul:
your light and these neon dreams still wrestling for control.
cause I hanker for the good life that work and money brings,
seeking the products as advertised and clinging to these things…

I’m not looking for a way out, Lord,
just some high ground so I can see
this game and its many rich rewards
in the light of all you have for me…

So we overcome evil by doing good, according to Romans 12; and we take thinking captive so that we can demolish arguments, according to 2 Corinthians 10. This means that we know how to think and how that thinking works itself out into the way we live. And the church's 'teaching' programme should be addressing that in a variety of ways.

It's back to that issue I keep returning to in this blog, discipleship. There are two facets to it here: how we can be disciples in today's challenging environment and how does what we do in church help?

Lots to think about there...