Reflecting on my friend going home

I went off to get papers and bread this morning in the fresh cold air, with Leonard Cohen's new album on my iPhone. Yesterday I had been at the bedside of a friend who was bumping along the shoreline between life and death. Today as  walked in the morning sun, Leonard growled these words in my ear:

Going home without my sorrow

Going home sometime tomorrow

To where it’s better than before

Going home without my burden

Going home behind the curtain

Going home without the costume that I wore

I thought of my friend and Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 4 and 5: 'Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day' and 'For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.'

I got home to be told my friend had died, she had 'gone home', she had gone 'behind the curtain' and would no longer be wearing 'the costume that I wore.' That costume was tired and worn out and ravaged with cancer. Her new costume will be gorgeous as she moves into heaven's fitting room to be prepared for the body with which she will rise.

A loved one's death breaks over us unprepared, however long we've known it's coming. And we're left with feelings of sorrow for those left to grieve and relief that a long road of suffering is now over and she will be in a place 'where it's better than it was before.'

Cohen has lost nothing of his ability to articulate the things we find too difficult for words. And for that I'm hugely grateful. 

Aching for a new world

It's that time when again when our church magazine hits the stands and both excited readers pore over its contents. Anyway, here's my perspective in the dark days of winter longing for spring...

In the depths of winter, you can often overhear people longing for lighter evenings and warmer days; at the bedside of a loved one, we ache for things for be different; in the tents outside St Paul’s, there’s a call for a better world; on the streets of Syria’s cities, the cry for freedom and justice grows louder despite the tank shells and bullets.

Everywhere, it seems, there is the ache for a new world. We hear it in the parents raising money for their child to receive experimental life-saving treatment only available at great cost in a far-away place. We hear it in the worker whose pay packet will not stretch to cover all the bills this month. We hear it in the middle-aged whose lives are cut short by an unexpected illness or accident. We hear it in the child drinking dirty water because there’s nothing else to slake her thirst.

And we hear it in the bible.

There’s a great moment in the movie Evan Almighty where Morgan Freeman, playing God, takes the hapless Evan, a weatherman, to show him what the Californian valley he lives in looked like when God first created it. It convinces Evan that the Freeman character really is God but leaves him perplexed. ‘Why me?’ he asks. ‘Because you want to change the world,’ God replies, ‘and so do I’

Martin Luther King expresses the same urge this way: ‘We are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.’

In Isaiah 65, the prophet gives voice to God’s dream: ‘“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind…Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out their years; the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child; the one who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed. They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat…My chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands. They will not labour in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune. [Isaiah 65:17-25].

It’s a wonderful vision of people at peace, families enjoying the fruit of their labour, ill health banished, hunger a memory. It’s a dream that appears in the New Testament as well. Many of its themes are taken up in the final chapters of Revelation. But the sentiment echoes through Romans 8 where Paul sees the journey to glory and new creation passing through a vale of tears and sorrow.

We ache for a new world, says the apostle, because we’ve tasted it through our faith in Jesus. The Holy Spirit, that messenger of the world to come, has taken up residence in our lives and now sings the song of that new world even as we struggle with this one. It is the Spirit’s song that fills our hearts with the hope that what we ache for will become a reality in God’s good time.

And so, we don’t only ache for the new world; we actively work for it now. We add our voice to the cries for freedom and justice echoing round the world. we feed the hungry and house the homeless, care for the young and elderly, create meaningful and fulfilling work for all people to enjoy because these things are foretaste of the new world God is dreaming.

All our Good works – those things that God has prepared beforehand for us to walk in (Ephesians 2:10) – point to what God is doing in the shadows, what he has unleashed through the cross, resurrection and enthronement of his King, Jesus, and the pouring of his Spirit on the church. We become his partners in redemption through our lives lived in accordance with the values we see in Jesus.

The trouble is that often we don’t look to see what God is doing. We see only the brokenness and despair around us that sometimes takes hold of our spirits and persuades us that life will always be like this until it stops. And the trouble is that because we’re not sure what we should be doing or that our good works could really make a difference, we sit on our hands and do nothing.

But God is in the ache we feel for a new world. And however much we can’t see how it will come about, deep down we know that the God who met us Jesus Christ, forgave and made us new, will bring that new world into being. Deep down we know that one day we will be whole, living in a renewed creation of heart-stopping and wonderful beauty. God has said it will be so and, even in our darkest moments, we can’t but believe him.  And it is that tiny mustard seed of faith that gives us the strength we need to press on.

So, spring is coming, the evenings are getting lighter, the mornings warmer, the sap is rising and God’s Kingdom bursts out in unlikely ways pointing us forward to the future being dreamt up in the Father heart of God. And doesn’t it fill us with hope until we’re fit to bust!

Yet more on why austerity isn't working

Today we can add to the roll call of Damascus-road conversions (following S&P's last week). This time it is none other than Christine Lagarde of the IMF - obviously helped by her welter of  economists. When she was French economics minister, she championed austerity policies, arguing that only by driving down deficits would room be made for growth to return. Such Hayekian mumbo-jumbo seems to have been cut down by the - dare I say it - Keynsian good sense of the IMF.

At the heart of the warning issued by the IMF, World Trade Organisation, World Bank, World Health Organisation and the Organisation For Economic Cooperation and Development plus a cluster of development banks from across the continents, is a simple assertion: austerity by itself doesn't work.

Faced with decelerating growth across the globe, these representatives of the nearest thing we have to an economic establishment, argue that governments need to manage deficit reduction only in a way that promotes growth and employment. They further argue that policy responses to the mounting crisis have to focus on reducing inequality through labour market reforms and the use of the tax system to encourage job creation.

Even more surprising is that they agree with the International Labour Organisation in its assertion that governments need to invest in skills training, education of young people and social safety nets to cushion labour market transitions. The elimination of inequality is essential for generating stable growth in the world's economies.

Well, let's do that then. Messers Cameron and Osbourne are always banging on about how the OECD, IMF, WTO et al are key audiences for their policies. Well, they are listening and seem to find the UK policy path somewhat wanting.

I must say that I find it gratifying that the great Keynsian institutions - IMF and World Bank - are bringing their thinking more into line with their founder. But I am much more gratified to hear the biblical echoes in all this.

There is a strong strand in scripture that talks about equality being a goal of social and economic policy (if use of that language is not too anachronistic). We see it not only Paul's argument in 2 Corinthians 8:1-15, but the whole concept of the Jubilee, which stood at the heart of Old Testament economic thinking, Jesus' announcement in Nazareth and the early church's focus on economic sharing so that no one within the community was in need.

It is interesting that Steve Keen, an Australian economics academic, has called for a jubilee as a key tool in stabilising the world's economy. You only have to look at figures out this week showing that UK debt is currently running at 400% of GDP - that is, we owe four times the nation's total output. Most of this financial sector debt; another chunk is corporate debt; quite a bit is personal debt (mortgages, credit cards and the like); and a vanishingly small proportion is government debt.Who ever owes it, the maths indicates that we will never pay it off unless we have at least another decade of austerity, zero growth, rising unemployment and plummeting living standards.

Is there any other out of this mess than considering what a debt write-off would mean, how it would work and what shape it would leave the world's financial system in? Keen acknowledges that this is not straight-forward but since every other suggestion seems to be steering us closer to the economic rocks, someone should be crunching the numbers.

Of course, the question of living standards and perpetual growth is a question the Bible has a good deal to say about as well. But that's for another day.

Reading to give ideas a fresh hearing

Today I have finally acquired a copy of Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God. I have resisted until now because of the sheer size and the vast price, so when I found a pristine copy going for a comparative song at a second hand book shop this morning, I thought 'oh, go on, then...'

I am due to teach a course on Romans from the beginning of February and since Campbell's book is seeking to make an argument about Romans, I thought it would be good to have it to refer to. I have read some bits and pieces of it before (in library copies) and remain to be convinced that his central suggestion that not all of Romans 1-4 represents the thinking of Paul but rather that of a rival teacher he is seeking to correct holds any water.

It's an intimidating read - there are 300 pages of thicket clearing before he actually gets to Romans! The introduction does contain one insight that has set me thinking, however - and augurs well for the journey ahead. He argues that 'at the heart of the conventional "Lutheran" approach to these texts...are powerful commitments to individualism, to rationalism, and to consent.' He goes on to suggest that Luther's reading of Romans (and Galatians) were heavily influenced by the prevailing renaissance culture with its strong attachment to humanism and individualism.

It is of course not new to suggest that protestant and evangelical formulations of the faith are deeply indebted to modern and even enlightenment thinking. But it is new (at least, it is to me) to have a scholar arguing that the very reading of the core texts of protestant Christianity owe more to the renaissance than they do to the apostle Paul.

I am interested to see what Campbell makes of this because one of my current study interests is the whole area of the relationship between literacy and spirituality - both in the NT world (where literacy rates were very low) and in our context (where literacy rates are high but people read less and less - especially in the areas of theology and Christian spirituality).I am wondering if we need to develop a hermeneutics of the faith that is based on oral culture rather than reading, much as the one Paul operated in; wondering if evangelical renewal will come via hearing rather than reading.

And I wondering if  a 1200+ page book is going to help me!

S&P springs a surprise

So Standard & Poor has downgraded the credit rating of half the Eurozone. This is not a surprise as it was flagged up a long way before Christmas.

But there are two surprises in all this. The first is that we still pay any attention to the credit ratings agencies. After all, they managed to give triple A ratings to securitised sub-prime mortgages that caused the 2008 credit crunch and near collapse of the financial system. Their subsequent response seems to have been a giggle and cry of 'whoops'. Sadly, it seems that Obama's plans to sue the pants off them ran into the sand.

But the second surprise is that buried in S&P's statement is reference to the fact that austerity by itself will not get the Eurozone out of the crisis it is in. Well, derr...! They have been calling for austerity to reduce government deficits to maintain low real interest rates and market confidence. And now they have recognised that by itself austerity just adds to deficits and keeps economies bumping along the edge of recession. We should all rejoice at  such Damascene conversions!

Perhaps we can look forward to the agencies starting to give triple A ratings only to governments that use their deficits to stimulate growth.

Keeping baptist life fresh

For those of you interested in where the baptist movement (I've stopped calling it the baptist family because that suggests something cosier and more settled than we should be) is going, there's a new conversation beginning at beyond400.net

Over the next few weeks baptists from all the country and in all kinds of situations will be sharing their ideas about where we're going as movement as we approach and move through the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of the first baptist community in London. It ties in with the Assembly this year (also happening in London) and aims to provide a place for creative conversation to take place.

It would be good for as many baptists (and others interested in missional discipleship of all kinds) to lend their voices to this conversation as we face challenging times and enormous opportunity to continue to embody the values of Jesus in our communities and ministries across this land.

Would St Paul the Tentmaker have camped with Occupy?

As promised, here's the full version of my presentation at the Bank of Ideas this afternoon. We had an excellent time with some lively and imaginative thinkers who were keen to explore whether Paul the tent maker had any wisdom to share relating to changing the world. None of them were church-goers but all found Paul more interesting than they were expecting!

Anyway, here's what I said:

If St Paul walked into the building in the churchyard that bears his name, he’d struggle to make the connection between it and the movement he belonged to. So maybe he’d make a tent and pitch it alongside the others outside the Cathedral and pondered the paradox.

Paul was a craftworker who lived by making tents, shop awnings and other canvas and leather goods. He was never a religious professional; if he didn’t make and sell his goods, he didn’t eat and couldn’t pay his rent.

He lived like other craftworkers in the empire in a rented workshop, sleeping on a mezzanine floor above his bench, tools and canvas or in a room behind his workspace. He bought his food at a street café – a popina – if he’d made a sale and shared it with fellow craftworkers as they talked about Jesus and how they might embody his values in their lives.

Paul lived in a world where an elite 1-3% owned pretty much everything, called the shots and lived lives of hitherto unknown luxury. The other 97-99% got by as best they could. A few earned enough to enjoy a modest surplus – maybe a week’s cushion, a month’s in boom times; most scraped by a day at a time – if they got work today, they ate and kept the landlord happy til tomorrow.

So everything Paul says about money, he says against this background – a context that has a curiously modern ring to it.

Paul also joined a movement that already had some firm views about how the economy ought to be organised – certainly the economy over which they had a measure of control, namely their own churches. There were two abiding principles that seem to have been at work among those early followers of Jesus – mutualism and equality (the former arising from the latter).

In the opening scene of his story of the Jesus community in Acts, Luke twice tells us that the believers had everything in common and distributed to those who were in need (2:44f; 4:32, 34f). This form of social organisation is sometimes called 'love communalism', a community of shared or pooled resources motivated by love between its members. It is mutualism in practice, ‘the implicit or explicit belief that individual and collective well-being is attainable above all by mutual interdependence’ (as Justin Meggitt puts it)

Some scholars suggest that this was a social experiment that failed. Their argument hinges on the fact that when famine came to the region in the mid-40s, the Jerusalem and Judean believers did not have the resources to cope and were therefore dependent on support from elsewhere.

But such a view completely misunderstands the precarious nature of life in the first century. Few people had the resources to be able to cope with food shortages – the result of the prices of staple foods going up beyond their reach – let alone famines. The majority of Jesus followers were middling to poor people who lived at or just a little above subsistence and who were vulnerable to economic downturns.

It also fails to grasp the consistent teaching of the Bible, taken up and reinforced by Jesus and sitting at the heart of the movement that bears his name.

Economic justice, in the form of frequent acts of redistribution to ensure equality among his people – was at the heart of God’s agenda for his people from the earliest days on.

The Sabbath cycle ensured that the poor were not neglected. Every harvest was to be taken in such a way that the crops at the edge of the fields were to be left for the poor to glean. Every seven years, the land was to be left fallow, allowing anything that grew on them to be picked by those without fields to work (Exodus 23:10-11; Leviticus 25:2-7). On top of that, slaves were to be released (Exodus 23:10-11; Deuteronomy 15:12-18). And debts were to be cancelled (Deuteronomy 15:1-6). God’s idea seems to have been that no one, regardless of whether they’d brought it on themselves or not, was to be left in unsustainable debt and everlasting slavery. Grace was built into the economy.

Then every 50 years, everything was to return to how it was when the people entered the land. All the families would return to their portion of Israel. It was a reminder to the nation that the land belonged to God and they only worked it as tenants or stewards, managing it for their landlord, God (Leviticus 25:10-16).

The prophets emphasised the importance of the jubilee in the future God plans for his people (Isaiah 58, 61; Ezekiel 45:7-9; 46:16-18). At the heart of the prophetic critique of the people’s life was the fact that they had neglected justice in the land. For example, Ezekiel 16:48-50 likens Judah to Sodom, a city marked by greed and neglect of the poor; and Isaiah calls the leaders of Judah ‘Sodom’ (1:10) because they have neglected justice (1:17; 3:13-15 and especially 5:1-7).

Much of Jesus’ teaching about money and life in the Kingdom of God is rooted in the jubilee notions of release and restoration – especially his first sermon at Nazareth and the model prayer he taught his disciples with the line ‘forgive us our debts as we have already forgiven our debtors’.

Paul absorbed these radical economic values and they became the bedrock of his understanding of how the Christian community should work. And while he outlines how the principles of mutuality and equality should work within the Christian community, he does so because he believes this to be God’s blueprint for human society everywhere.

It’s interesting that Steve Keen, professor of economics and finance at the university of Western Sydney, has suggested total debt cancellation as a way of getting the global economy out of the mess it’s been pitched into by an over-reliance on debt-financing of everything! He argues that a debt jubilee is politically improbable because it would cause the failure of many banks. But the alternative is a decade of economic stagnation with the poor picking up the tab for the rich world over-dosing on debt.

I can see Paul nodding in the door of his tent…

When Paul talks about the mutualism of the small churches he wrote to, he has in mind the release from oppression at the heart of Old Testament jubilee ideas. In Galatians 2:10, 5:13-14 and 6:7-10 he outlines an ethic based on mutual sharing and seeking the good of others – especially those in the household of faith. In Philippians 2:1-4 he argues that we should seek one another’s interests rather than our own, since through Jesus we have been freed from sin and competition and he offers his own life as an example of being content with our economic circumstances because God will provide all that we need to live in the context of thanking them for sharing economically with him while he was in need (4:10-20).

And in 2 Corinthians 8:1-15 we have an outline of the heart of his thinking about money and mutualism that is based on the key jubilee principles of release and restoration. By the grace of God, the Macedonians have been released from the prevailing greed of the culture, freed to share their surplus with those in need, so that they in turn might have a measure of prosperity restored to them.

And at the heart of this vision is equality. Mutualism – which aims for those in surplus to share with those in need – is based on a fundamental principle that there should be equality between people. He says:

¹³Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. ¹⁴At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, ¹⁵as it is written: “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.” (Ex 16:18)

For Paul the simple principle that everyone should have what they need and share what is left over with those who are in need determines our economic relationships. He was gathering support for believers in Judea because they were hammered by hunger and a crashing economy.

His model is that everyone should work to have something to share. So when he writes to a small group of believers in Thessalonica, he urges them to work with their hands rather than be dependent on hand-outs from wealthy patrons, so that they will have something to share. Indeed, his aim appears to be that everyone would want to be a benefactor, using their surplus for the good of those who were in need around them.

Paul’s economics are probably not directly transferable from his world to ours. But his was a world where government was weak and a wealthy minority called the shots; his was a world where the have-nots were hung out to dry by those who amassed wealth for themselves; and his was a world where the poor were squeezed by rising prices, high taxes and a lack of opportunity.

So perhaps his economic principles of mutualism and equality have something to say to our world. Perhaps he’d have spoken about this as he sat outside his tent in Paternoster Square.

Comments very welcome...

Would Paul join Occupy?

I am doing a gig with Juliet and Rob at the Bank of Ideas on Thursday at 1pm. Details here.

I'll be reflecting on what we can learn from Paul's ideas of equality and mutuality. He was keen to 'remember the poor' (Galatians 2:10), seen particularly in his raising a redistributive collection among his churches for the hard-pressed Judean believers.

If you work in the City, please come along, bring your lunch and join in the debate; if you know people who do, invite them along. It'd be good to have an audience!

I'll post what I say after the event.

Keeping the rumour of God alive

Peter Oborne has a timely and wide-ranging piece in the Telegraph (here), charting a rise in church attendance in recent months.He suggests 'Their Christian values stand at an angle to the brash, thrill-seeking, instant consumer culture that has become dominant in Britain over the last half-century.' I hope so.

Oborne tells stories of churches attracting large numbers in the capital but admits that the picture elsewhere in the country is less buoyant. For me the most encouraging part of his story is that there is some evidence that locally rooted churches are seeing an increase in numbers as people seek something more than shopping as a source of purpose and values in life.

He argues that one reason why London might be bucking the trend is that there are fewer churches sharing ministers, so a minister or ministry team is able to focus on a single gathered community, able to create a welcoming and stimulating environment for people of all kinds. There could be something in this.

He acknowledges that a little upturn in numbers over recent months does not assuage the haemorrhage of people the church has suffered over the past generation. He cites the statistics, well known from Peter Brierley and Callum Brown, that show the scale of the collapse in church attendance since the 60s.

But it is encouraging that in the midst of austerity and consumerism the rumour of God is being kept alive and is drawing people who are seeking something deeper. And that something is not just a desire for a 'spiritual hour' on a Sunday morning. One and a half million people are engaged in volunteering activity through their local church; this is an army of people seeking to model different values in our me-first culture - and that has to be good thing.

Hearing the Smiths again for the first time

My beloved bought me the Smiths box set for Christmas, consisting of the four studio albums, the only live album and three compilations from the 1980s, all beautifully packaged in vinyl replica album slip cases. And it's a revelation.

Now I am a smiths fan. I have a good deal of their output - some of it on vinyl from its original released date. But listening to this is like hearing the band for the first time. Each album has been lovingly remastered by Johnny Marr. And I guess, they each sound as the band had intended they would.

We fans are used to listening to the muddy analogue recordings that were released during the band's all-too brief career (the studio albums were released between February 1984 and September 1987). They sounded great and yet... Listening to properly remastered versions of these great songs (and there have been a number of ghastly remastered collections over the past decade or so) reveals so much that was unheard on the original pressings.

The first album always sounded as if it had been recorded at the bottom of a fish tank. Now, although it is still very much a work in progress, a band finding their feet as writers and recorders, it glistens with flourishes of Hammond organ and rolling bass lines previously unheard. And the songs shine as a result - Still Ill, This Charming Man and and in Glove were already classics; now Reel around the Fountain, Miserable Lie and Suffer the Children take their place alongside them. Indeed all 11 tracks clamour for attention in a way they never used to.

But it's The Queen is Dead that is the biggest surprise here. The sound on the new version is spacious and deep allowing the songs to take on a new life, providing the proper sonic backdrop to what I think is Morrissey's best set of lyrics.

Meat is Murder is still a bit of a disappointment - but I never really rated it their best (unlike a lot of critics) - the sound is crisper but some of the tunes are still limp and the title track is as preposterous now as it was then. Morrissey should stick to what he knows best - yearning love songs and wry observations on the lure and emptiness of celebrity. Still, The Headmaster Ritual, Rusholme Ruffians and That Joke isn't Funny anymore are still crackers.

If you got vouchers or cash for Christmas, do yourself a favour and get this; it's £30 really well spent.

the 2011 festive fifteen

Well, it’s high time for my festive fifteen, the stand-out albums of the year fast slipping away. One record secured its place in the top spot early in the year and, as expected, nothing has dislodged it. But other artists have produced music of outstanding quality this year. So before we get to the top of the spot, here’s ten of the best in no particular order.

Early in the year, Radiohead surprised with a download only release of startling quality. King of Limbs has since made it to all formats and is a joy (if you can use that term of a Radiohead album), full of great tunes and packing an emotional punch.

American Justin McRoberts has been putting out a multi-EP collection called CMY, of which C and M have emerged. Thoughtful lyrics swinging from robust and beautifully played tunes make these collections worth repeated listenings. There’s also great digital booklets available for each on the artist’s website (here).

Another find from the States are Civil Wars, a sublime country-tinged duo with amazing voices and guitar led tunes that are to die for. They’ve justifiably won some awards this year; they are destined for great things.

The ever reliable and permanently touring (though I can’t get him to the UK!), Bill Mallonnee released a new proper studio album – after a string of works in progress. The Power and the Glory is majestic and muscular, full of wry observations set to electric guitar heavy music and is quite lovely.

Ron Sexsmith, after years of working away in the shadow of lesser song writers, emerged with a mature collection of finely crafted tunes, Long Player Late Bloomer.

Still in the States, the Decemberists followed their epic The Hazards of Love, with an altogether lighter and at first blush rather ordinary record, The King is Dead. Repeated listens, however, reveal it to be a work of great depth with infectiously catchy tunes.

From our side of the pond, Elbow turned out another classic full of songs of aching beauty and wry observation from a writer hitting the heights of his powers. Build a Rocket Boys is full of reflections on growing up, of losing and finding love, of lessons learned along the way that barely misses a beat.

Fold produced an EP with proceeds going to the tax justice campaign. As if that wasn’t reason for buying it, the fact that it’s full of samples of great speeches over a fine electronic wash that provoke thought and conversation certainly is.

This year saw the passing of REM. Athens, Georgia’s finest called it a day seemingly at the height of their powers. Collapse into Now, the last studio record, is full of great tunes and Michael Stipe’s voice sounding wonderful. Then they top it with a career retrospective of 37 of their best songs and three new ones that show they’ve lost none of their magic. If you only buy one REM record, make it Part lies, part heart, part truth, part garbage1982-2011.

And fast becoming a favourite is Bon Iver’s second, self-titled work. I found his first record a trifle twee and annoying with its half-finished songs and chilly arrangements. This more than makes up for it, demonstrating that Justin Vernon is a fine song writer, not afraid to push the boat out on arrangements that range from folk to jazz, gospel to ambient which all fit snugly together in a hugely enjoyable 40 minutes.

And now to the top five.

Find of the year is split between two American Christian-hued artists, Josh Garrels and the Afterlife Parade. Both show a lyrical maturity and questing, evening questioning and imaginative faith that so rare in Christian music. Garrels is giving his album away at Noisetrade but don’t let that put you off. Afterlife Parade’s two EPs meditating on death and life are sonically and lyrically a treat. The stand out track is Simple off the death EP, a song that  captures the longing of the human heart for connection with God like nothing I’ve heard before.

The other new band that I got to see live this year at a gig in St Giles in the Fields church in November is the wonderful Other Lives. Think Fleet Foxes with depth and attitude (and I like Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues almost made the cut). Each song on Tamer Animals is musical adventure with the five members of the band playing a cornucopia of instruments to create little pop symphonies. It’s fabulous.

Paul Simon released his best album since… well, maybe his best album ever. With songs reflecting on life well lived and awash with the possibility of God, So Beautiful or so What would have been the hands-down best album of the year, but… It’s full of wonderful turns of phrase and is incredibly funky.

But album of the year is P J Harvey’s Let England Shake. This is an indescribably beautiful and heart-breaking record. It is also fiercely intelligent and serious. It’s a suite of songs that reflect on how England, a land  Polly Jean loves with a passion, has been shaped by war and conflict. She takes words from world war one veterans – especially the Dardanelles campaign – and weaves them with brief, episodic reflections on the shape of English character. It is an album as deep as an ocean, at turns desperately sad and wryly funny, played with panache and skill by a tight circle of musicians. It’s been described as her masterpiece, won the Mercury prize and is, quite simply the best record of the year bar none.

The weakness of black box Christianity

Two cheers for David Cameron. It is a bold politician who speaks of the centrality of the Christian faith in our culture and calls for Christians to be bold advocates of it. I am grateful to him for the debate it has provoked.

His sharpest insight, as far as I was concerned, was this: 'the tolerance that Christianity demands of our society provides greater space for other religious faiths too'. This is an argument that Vinoth Ramachandra makes about the Christian faith in a world of faiths and is well made.

The problem with the speech, though, is a problem that has beset politicians of all hues for a generation. It is the tendency to treat Christianity as a sort of black box of cultural and moral values. It is as if the nation has crash landed in some moral wilderness and rescuers searching for survivors have come across the black box flight recorder that tells us that prior to the crash we were heading one way, according to one compass setting of rules or values, then we suddenly changed course and hit a mountainside.

It is very appealing to a lot of traditional and conservative Christians (with both a small and a big 'C'). But I think Cameron's comments that he was a 'committed' but 'only vaguely practising' Christian and that he was 'full of doubts' about big theological questions betrays the problem here. The Christian faith is not a black box that can be consulted when we need a bit of moral guidance. 

It is first and foremost a call to discipleship, a call to follow Jesus, to embody his way of living in communities of like-minded disciples. Yes, Christian values are good and should be given a hearing in the public square; they speak to the human condition in a way that other systems do not. But to be Christian is follow Christ, to be caught up in the adventure of discovering who we are in him and to embody his revolution in our lives and communities. This is a radical call to remember the poor, to live for justice, to welcome the stranger and signpost the coming of his Kingdom of peace and equity. 

So, let's hope David  Cameron has begun a conversation. Let's join him in it and sees where it leads us.

Sniffing out influence

I've been chuckling today because I have appeared on the dessert menu or coffee course of a list of influential baptists. You can check it out here at Neil Brighton's blog (I don't appear until the comments kick in!). It's a good list - the dinner one, that is. But I share Paul Lavender's concern and would want to ask a broader question.

What do we mean by influence and where is that influence best felt? To be fair, Neil's post has come out of conversations about where the Baptist family in England (particularly) is going. We face times of austerity like everyone else and have to make choices about the use of resources. We also face declining numbers - not everywhere, but overall. There are also exciting things happening but these tend to be on the margins, in places where the centre of Baptist life isn't really looking. And they tend to be happenings that defy easy definition and corralling into tidy pigeon holes.

As a movement, we have tended to struggle with pioneers. How do we train them, how do we resource them and how do we give them time to explore and find new maps for our mission? Our current list of ministerial competencies doesn't seem to have much space for anything that doesn't look like church as we've done it for the past century. That clearly won't help us chart a way to mission for the current situation we face, let alone the future.

Our current models are all resource intensive - costly buildings, costly ministers, costly initiatives to attract people, costly technical specs for our outreach. Now, I am one of those costs - a minister who gets paid for it in a church that spends a small third world country's debt on our buildings. But I see the writing on the wall for us and all like us and we have got to find better, more organic ways of engaging with people in our communities; a way that puts the Kingdom before the empire (our empire that is).

So I have a feeling that influence is something that is going to emerge at the margins, probably from those margins that we're not paying any attention to. I have a feeling that what emerges that will be influential will, in the first instance, be very difficult to see or understand. The move of the Spirit and the emergence of the Kingdom tend to be somewhat shadowy and hard to pin down at first. They certainly do not lend themselves to easy measurement or categorisation. A bit like Jesus, really.

So, if I was going to name influential baptists, I'd begin with Peter Dominey and Ivan King and church from scratch precisely because it is so difficult to get a handle on what it is and yet it has the reek of authenticity, the aroma of the Kingdom. That'd be a good place to go an sniff.

Advent and the coming of the Kingdom

We had a great time on Wednesday. All our girls - daughters and grand-daughters - were with us and we went off into London to visit two sites - the Occupy  London Stock Exchange camp at St Paul's and the Christmas market on the South Bank.

I was hugely impressed with the Occupy LSX site. It's well organised, clean and very friendly. We spent some time at the tent university, chatting about the revised general assembly's economics working statement with a couple of the people who hold things together there.

I was invited to come and do a session on New Testament economics, something I hope to do in the New Year. There was an openness to fresh thinking and debate about ideas that was really refreshing. Here is a group of people looking for a new world. I was reminded of the context into which Jesus came - a world of injustice, dominated by a powerful one per cent, a world at war, a world where the poor are disenfranchised and struggle to make ends meet (sound familiar?).

It seems to me that during Advent we should be asking questions about where our world is going and how it is going to be renewed. Some have pitted the Occupy LSX group with the church on whose doorstep it is camped. But this is a huge mistake.

As I chatted with occupiers, I was reminded of the encounter Jesus had with a teacher of the Law about what really mattered (which is the greatest commandment). The encounter ends with Jesus saying to the man that he's not far from the Kingdom of God (Mark 12:28-34).

What strikes me about this conversation is the sense of the Kingdom's porous borders, of the fact that the Kingdom is looking to sweep into its embrace all who are looking for a new world. I am also struck by the fact that Jesus is open to insights from those who are apparently his enemies or at least those who are challenging his right to interpret the way things are. The teacher of the Law says that love of neighbour is more important than religious rectitude and Jesus says 'you're not far from the Kingdom.' I suspect he would say the same thing to the mixed and energetic group camped around the steps of St Paul's.

At advent we listen for the voice of the Kingdom - wherever it comes from.