Perilous steps on the journey home

I thought I'd post my piece from our church magazine this month (as I do from time-to-time) because it has a bearing on my continuing reflections on Alan Roxburgh's book.

I was talking to some friends recently about their summer holiday plans. Well, it’s the time of year for it, isn’t it? The days getting longer and warmer, we’ve found our summer clothes at the back of the wardrobe and begun to daydream about sun, sea and sangria.

Our conversation was actually more about travelling to and from our summer break destination because, we agreed, that that was one of the best parts of the holiday. Journeys are often times of discovery, finding new places, seeing things we’ve never seen before, even meeting people in hotels and restaurants who pass on tips about what to go and look at.

Journeys are like this because we are away from the familiar surroundings of home, exposed to new experiences, invited to take a fresh look at our lives. As a church we are on a journey from what we were to what God wants to be. This is a permanent feature of Christian living. We only stop travelling when we reach our destination in God’s completed Kingdom.

Some people like travelling and others would rather stay put. For some the open road is a place of adventure and discovery; for others it’s a place of uncertainty and discomfort. The temptation for the latter group is to book into the nearest inn and say ‘this far and no further.’ The trouble with this is that we are in neither the familiar surroundings of home nor the promised comfort of our final destination.

It was for nervous, even unwilling travellers that Luke wrote the central section of his gospel. Uniquely among the gospel writers, Luke has a long section that is known as the ‘travel narrative’ that tells the story of Jesus’ journey from Galilee in the north down to Jerusalem in the south and his final confrontation with the powers-that-be.

He seems to have had two reasons for compiling his account the way he did. The first is that it gave him a good place to put all the material that no other gospel writer used – the parable of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan, the meetings at Mary and Martha’s home and with Zacchaeus, for example. The second is that he enabled him to spell out what following Jesus is all about. The travel narrative is a handbook on discipleship written for small groups of Christians scattered across the Roman empire in the second half of the first century, wondering how to live as followers of Jesus in a somewhat hostile and fast-changing world.

Luke 9:51-19:27 is about being a disciple of Jesus. The focus of these chapters is on the folk who are on the road with Jesus: how does he expect them to live as his followers, what will their life together be like, what kind of values will they embody in their relationships with neighbours and work colleagues?

Through this spring we will be making this journey with Jesus and his friends hoping to learn what it means to be a disciple in Bromley in 2011. We will be thinking about the nature of our life together and how we can make Jesus known to our friends and neighbours. It is a crucial journey for us to make because we live in a fast-changing and at times confusing world where the old certainties of home have been swept away and not replaced by anything so solid and sure.

Just before Easter, I was sitting outside a café in Victoria, warmed by the sun, watching office workers scurry in and out getting lunch to take back to their desks. He was with one of them, a young man, successful at work, happily married with a growing family. They had recently left their church and we were talking through the steps that had led up to that decision.

Neither he nor his wife loved Jesus any less; both wanted to continue serving him in the way they lived their life; both were keen to explore what being a disciple of Jesus meant with other followers. But neither of them could do church any more. He spoke of the decaying formality of it all, the superficial relationships, the tedious round of singing and sermons. He had been going to a lively, charismatic fellowship, and yet…

They had launched out on a somewhat perilous journey to discover Jesus on the road. They are looking for connection with a like-minded group of travellers who take Jesus seriously and want to live by the values of his Kingdom as they travel to their final destination. They also want to share what they’ve discovered about Jesus with people along the way.

In many ways they are living in Luke’s travel narrative, hearing the call of Jesus to follow and being prepared to leave the security of home to meet him and know him better. Are we prepared to make the same journey together?

Doing what we're put here for

Finally managed to read last month's Q magazine, featuring some great British song writers.

Guy Garvey from Elbow is fascinating on his native Bury and the inspiration for the excellent build a rocket boys album. He says that he's started thinking about songs for the next album too, showing no sign of resting on his laurels.

And PJ Harvey confirms her status as current best song writer in England with wonderfully simple and insightful reflections on her craft. Maybe it's because it's Good Friday and I've been thinking about the job that had to be done on behalf of all of us (as so wonderfully captured by Stanley Spencer in his painting Christ carrying the cross), but this comment caught my imagination:

Asked if she'll be taking six months off to do what rock stars do, she said: 'no, because there's too much work to do. And because this is my job. This is the thing that I can do best, why I'm here on planet earth. I therefore feel that I need to keep concentrating on doing as well I can. There's a lot to be said yet. A lot to do.'

Maybe we could all take a leaf out of her book.

Travelling in Yorkshire

So here we are in sunny Huddersfield after three days in a very sunny York. We're here for a friend's wedding tomorrow, so we're catching up with a load of old friends this evening over dinner.

Spring Harvest was manic - especially for the two men on the team - but worthwhile. There have been big changes at the top of the Spring Harvest tree which will probably take some time to bed down. The preaching was ok but nothing to get excited about and all a bit safe and predictable - yes, I know Spring Harvest is safe and predictable but in most years there's a surprise or two. This year felt a bit bland - despite the fact that the theme was the Bible!

York was lovely - probably helped by the sunshine and heat. We walked along the walls, checked out the shops and chilled in a selection of very acceptable tea shops and eateries. The art gallery had a show featuring David Hockney's recently painted bigger trees near Warter which is wonderful. I went to look at it every day (the gallery serves excellent coffee). The enormous work (15ft by 40ft) was painted on 50 canvases over a six week period in 2007 and then hung together to make a single large study of a group of trees. It's a rich and satisfying work.

This morning we went to the Good Friday service at the Minster. We only got to half of it due to a mix up over timings but it was a moving and effective way of remembering the passion while the shoppers and the tourists bustled round the minster much like they would have done in Jerusalem 2000 years ago when Jesus was condemned and crucified.

Another highlight of the trip was Barbican Books (part of Wesley Owen) that has a fantastic selection of second-hand theology books. I spent a most enjoyable hour in there yesterday!

Off on our travels

We're off to Spring Harvest in the morning. We'll be making our annual pilgrimage to Skegness and joining somewhat diminished pastoral team for a week. It's always a blast and hopefully we do some good in the lives of those who cross our paths.

I shall be picking up my thoughts on Alan Roxborough's book while I'm there and hopefully posting them as I write them.

After Spring Harvest, we're looking forward to a few days in York chilling, and then a friend's wedding in Huddersfield (which offers the chance to catch up with a load of people we've not seen for ages). It should be a really good few days.

An arresting case for Christian faithfulness

I caught last Friday's repeat of Desert Island Disc's which featured Martin Sheen and cam across the most intriguing definition of Christian faithfulness I've heard for a while. It was a very moving programme as Sheen spoke of his struggles with alcohol - and the pain of seeing his son, Charlie, succumb in a similar but more spectacular way - and his forty+ year marriage to a woman that he describes as the love of his life.

But the most moving section was where he spoke about re-embracing his catholic faith in the early 1980s. It is that more than anything that has given his life strength and focus. And it was here that he offered an intriguing view of christian faithfulness: how many times have you been arrested because of what your faith has led you into? Sheen has been arrested a load of times on demonstrations about a variety of causes that his faith has compelled him to embrace. And he speaks of it as a consequence of following Jesus that he is prepared to put up with.

I was moved and set thinking about what my faith has cost me...

Sinking into Rothko

On Monday, the last day of our first mini-heatwave of the year, I went to London's South Bank to stroll among the tourists and drop into Tate Modern. I was delighted to find that the Rothko room has made a welcome return. This low-lit space houses seven enormous canvases of sombre maroons and blacks by the great abstract expressionist.

This is one of my favourite spaces in London. I spent a good hour looking deeply into and through these window shapes. Now, in one sense, these paintings are just slabs of colour. Up close you can see that Rothko took great care in how he applied the paint, going over parts of the canvas with different shades of the dominant colour which, as you step back from it, gives the painting enormous depth.

The 'windows frames' seem solid and so as you look, you are invited to fall through them into whatever lies beyond. In the swirling pale maroon of the canvas illustrated, there is the suggestion of light, as if the sun is shining behind gossamer clouds. It's also possible to feel that the light is edging towards the centre of the painting where the viewer stands as it were by the open window.

In many ways, the Rothko room is a sacred space; it's a place where people, if they've the patience to sit and look intently through one of the windows, are asked questions about where they sit in the world, the universe beyond, about whether the light approaching them will illuminate their lives. Great art gently evokes big questions and has the good grace not to provide clunking great answers.

If I were running Tate Modern, there's only one thing I'd do to make the Rothko room perfect: I'd only let people in on the understanding that they would not leave for an hour. This would prevent one's meditation being interrupted by parties of people catching the greatest collection of modern art on their cell phone cameras between elevenses and lunch!

The stories we live by

Early on in part 2 of Alan Roxburgh's Missional: Joining God in the Neighbourhood which is about Luke-Acts, described as 'a narrative for shaping our time of missional formation' (p63), is this arresting statement:

Scripture is filled with amazing stories that go to the heart of the issues we're facing in our crazy, pluralist, consumer-driven cultures focused on self-actualising individuals living in instrumental relationships (in which people relate to each other out of roles or what each can get from the other. (p68)

It's not so much the idea that scripture is relevant to our context that grabbed my attention, but Roxburgh's description of that context. It's about as succinct and brilliant a snapshot of where I live as I have read in the past year! It's worth pausing to ponder.

He takes Luke as his biblical story teller because he sees Luke writing at a time when the early Christian movement was beginning to lose confidence in its story. Things hadn't turned out as these young believers thought they would and Luke writes to create a new language house that takes the context in which people live as seriously as the message they live by. So Luke is a story teller for our times too.

Roxburgh comments: 'We don't encounter this God through universal principles, formulas, visions and values but through concrete, grounded stories of God's life in the ordinary' (p72), adding that 'Luke is determined to convince them [his first hearers] that in the midst of a world of competing narratives, this is the one about Jesus and the good news of God that is worth giving their lives to because it is God's' (p73).

Our trouble is that we have turned the biblical story into a self-help guide, a handbook for making our lives work better. 'I'm aware how this orphanization of the Christian narrative has turned us ever more quickly into anxiety-laden, functional atheists needing ways to use God to make our lives work.' (p73-4) Ouch! Ponder that too...

I've always thought that Luke focuses as much on the disciples as on Jesus and mainly on their inability to let Jesus into their story in a way that would have rewritten and recast it along the lines that God intended. Being caught up in God's story and discovering where that story is being written and told in our neighbourhoods, so we can get involved, seems to me to be a hugely exciting prospect. If only we can shake off the strait jacket of our churches!

The high art of collapsing into now

It's been a busy but productive week. I've been listening to the rather fine new long player from REM. Collapse into Now is one of the best records of the year, I reckon. It's certainly kept me sane

I also think that the reviews have been somewhat churlish. They tend to say that it's a good record but it's not as good as REM in their heyday. Poor REM, it seems, have to write tunes that are not only good as Losing my Religion, Night Swimming, Everyone Hurts, etc for every record but they also have to make reviewers feel as they did when they first heard those songs 15 or more years ago. This is too heavy a load to bear for any band - even one as exceptional as REM.

On its own merits Collapse into Now is a fine record, lively tunes, fabulously jangly guitars (even Peter Buck's mandolin) and intriguing lyrics. I'd say that in Blue - an extraordinary half-slurred, half sung duet with Patti Smith - Oh My Heart and It Happened Today, it boasts songs that would not be out of place on a greatest hits compilation that features the vintage tracks mentioned above.

In short it's good, so listen without prejudice (as some other singer once said).

Tweeting with Montaigne and Qohelet

I had an interesting time at Eltham College this morning. I tweeted that I was spending a few minutes with South East London's young elite and I have to say that I was impressed by the politeness of all the pupils (only boys in my lower group group as the girls don't join until sixth form).

I was given a good hearing and very polite round of applause at the end as I swept out in the wake of the gowned teachers (slightly surreal that!) I did roughly the same as I'd done a month ago at a fee-paying girls school. I'd say it went down better with the boys than the girls!

So, here's what I said....

It was a bit of a rush this morning….but I updated my facebook status: doing assembly at Eltham College……made sure my blog was prominently promoting my new book……and tweeted where I was going…off to Eltham College. (actually I tweeted from the college reception as I was a bit early). I am just so new, up-to-date and original! Just like the lovely Stephen Fry here, tweeter extraordinaire. But actually, you know, we’re not so modern….

Meet Michel de Montaigne. Last month he celebrated his 478 birthday – He’s not looking bad for his age is he? In 1572 he began writing essays – like many of you will have to do today! But unlike the philosophers who came before him, they were all about himself. They were status updates; accounts of what he’d been doing that day, what he was thinking about and maybe some useful tips for others about how to live.

But even Montaigne was not original. Not really…2000 years before him another philosopher put down his status updates on how he was trying to make sense of life. We don’t know his name but he was known as ‘the teacher’ and his thoughts are recorded in the book of Ecclesiastes that you can find somewhere in the middle of the Hebrew Bible, what we often call the Old Testament.

He looked at the world and his life in it and drew a lot of conclusions. Like this one – there’s time to do all that we need to do. So if we run out of time, maybe we’re trying to do too much? And this one… ‘what do workers get from all their toil?’ which probably boils down to ‘is what I’m doing worthwhile?’ Hopefully, you’ll gain good grades and a better understanding of the subjects you’re studying as a result of your hard work today.

And he also said this: ‘get in touch with your creator while you’re still young’ because he came to see after all his looking and trying things out that the world made a whole lot better sense when he was in touch with God than when he wasn’t. So looking back as an older man, his advice to the young – those he was teaching – was to look for God in what you’re doing and then what you’re doing will be so much more rewarding and fulfilling

It seems updating our status, tweeting our thoughts, blogging isn’t really as new as we think it is. And, as was true for Michel de Montaigne and for the teacher who wrote Ecclesiastes, it’s so much better to put finger to keyboard when we’ve got something to say that is really worth saying. So, let’s live well today; let’s get in touch with God, be a good friend, help out those who need it and then at the end of the day, when all our chores are done, we’ll have something worth tweeting and facebooking about…

It's in the shops

Tomorrow is the official release date for The world of the Early Church but I have it on good authority that at least one eager customer has got his hands on a copy already and is looking for a smart coffee table on which to display it.

Grab one from wesley Owen in Bromley and if you really can't travel, you don't need to go to Amazon because wesley owen's website is giving 25% off all academic titles (mine included) with free shipping on orders over £5.

You know it makes sense!

The stories we tell and live by

'We have not shed what others call a Christendom imagination where the church is basically the centre of activity and conversation. Church questions are at the forefront of our thinking, so we default to questions about what the church should be doing and what the church should look like.' (p54).

Alan Roxburgh argues that he isn't church bashing; rather he is trying to free us from a picture that has held us captive for too long. Between parts 1 and 2 of Missional, there's a fascinating intermezzo called 'the Language House' that reflects on the stories we tell to make sense of our lives. Drawing on the ideas of Charles Taylor who speaks of 'social imaginaries', the 'unstructured and inarticulate understanding' that we have of our lives, Roxburgh explores what it means to live in a 'language house'.

The term comes from Mark Lau Branson, a teaching colleague of Roxburgh on a course at Fuller, and grew out of reflections his congregation had on seeking to be community. They realised that while they thought they were being shaped by the Bible's story and teaching on how to be disciples in the modern world, they were actually being shaped by other stories.

Branson says we were 'formed during late modern consumerism...shaped by such priorities as individual choice, personal affectivity, and expectations (imaginations) that emphasised the pursuit of careers that should supply meaning and resources for our lives.' In the west we are all to a large measure shaped by this story of individualism, consumerism and careerism; that is the language house in which we live.

I found this idea richly explanatory for some of the things that have long puzzled about church in the UK, not just my current church but to a large extent, every church I've been involved with. And it's this: we are able to say one thing and believe it and yet find ourselves living as though we had said and believe a different thing. Roxburgh suggests, for instance, that we talk about community and how important it is that our churches are expressions of community while at the same time living lives that are shaped by the story of individualism that we have grown up with.

So, he suggests that we need to move. He argues that there is another language house that offers a different, better understanding of who we are and what stories should shape our lives. That language house is scripture, particularly in this book, Luke-Acts, which is where part 2 of Missional takes us (more to follow).

Learning to ask the right question

Yesterday I started reading Alan Roxburgh's new book Missional: Joining God in the Neighbourhood. I've been a big fan of Roxburgh's since reading The Missionary Congregation, Leadership and Liminality - the book that more than any other has given shape to my ministry. Everything he writes is excellent. But, 60 pages in, this new one is by far the best thing he has written.

If you've not read much on missional thinking or anything by Roxburgh, start here. For one thing the writing is really clear, the story telling is punchy and well focused and the story he tells is ruthlessly honest and richly informative.

And the clearest insight that I've got so far is that I've really been asking the wrong question over the past few years. I've been asking questions about how to do church better, about how to make my congregation more missional. Roxburgh has helped me ask this question. But in this book he points out that it's the wrong question. It's not that the book or his thinking is anti-church - far from it - it's just that church is not the place to start thinking missionally.

Contemporary missional thinking grew out of the ministry and searing insights of Lesslie Newbigin and going back to the source has helped Roxbugh see that Newbigin's concern was to investigate the matrix of gospel, scripture and culture. The church only entered Newbigin's thinking once he had thoroughly and fully explored how the gospel and culture informed and interacted with one another.

Church - or congregation in Newbigin's terminology - comes as a result of mission that has itself been born of the interaction of gospel and culture. So the key questions that Roxburgh begins to ask at the start of his book are ones such as 'what is the gospel?' not in general, but specifically for the community he is walking through on a given Sunday morning, discovering that most people are not in church. He does not ask - indeed he has stopped asking - 'how do we create the kind of spaces where people who are not in church on Sunday morning might feel safe to explore the Christian faith'? Such a question seems irrelevant. These people are not in church and are never likely to be given what they seem to enjoy doing on a Sunday morning. So the question is 'what is the gospel for them?' A supplementary question might be 'how will they see and hear that gospel'? but that is a little way down the track...

As I started reading this ahead of a leaders away day on Saturday, I have been given plenty to think and pray about. Indeed, one consequence of yesterday's reading is that I went walking in my neighbourhood prayerfully watching and asking 'what is the gospel for this place at this time?' And I came home with aching feet!

Feeling the warmth of radiohead

Having been listening to it on and off for the past couple of weeks, I am really loving the new Radiohead album. Quite a few reviewers have described King of Limbs as chilly and inaccessible, but I am finding it lush and involving, full of quirky, edgy rhythms and great melodies.

I agree, though, with those who have asked why Thom Yorke sings since it is very difficult to make out what he is singing when you do, the lyrics are just fragments of ideas - a bit like T S Eliot (and I know that's probably the point) but without the structure!

But it's a really fine album.

I am looking forward to getting into the new Elbow record which at first blush seems to be more of what we expect from Elbow - finely crafted, poignant songs about something that matters.

Protesting the big society

I got an email from the Evangelical Alliance just as I was finishing preparing for Sunday evening. The email concerned the big society and how it was a great opportunity for churches - and asking for money to help make their version of the big society a reality. The sermon I'd just finished is about spurring one another in to love and good works and focuses on the fact that our faith is for the world and not just us. So, I should be putting two and two together and saying let's all leap on the big society bandwagon...

Well, no, I'm not doing that. I'm actually working on an email to send to Christians in the area asking if they'll support the youth charity I chair because local authority spending cuts have put its future in grave doubt. And that's the big society dilemma for me.

In good years, when government spending was available to forge real partnership between the statutory and voluntary sector, I'd have been pretty supportive of much of the thinking embodied by big society propaganda. I think local groups are better at shaping the services to be offered to their locality; I think voluntary sector organisations offer the flexibility and fleetness of foot that's needed to meet the real needs of people as they change over time. But that can only happen if there's statutory support in the form of funding, not to mention the flow of funds of grant making trusts. Sadly the savagery of the spending cuts means that not only is there no local authority grants but bids to grant making trusts - themselves seeing reduced assets because of the shenanigans of the bankers - outstripping supply of money.

A sensible government would have put the big society transition arrangements in place before local authorities took the ax to support of the voluntary sector. A sensible government would have established the big society bank on a sound financial footing - probably using the proceeds of a robin hood tax on the banks that would see £10bn+ a year flowing into its coffers - so it could fund the transformation of our communities. But it didn't. So we will see many good voluntary sector groups go to the wall as the funding dries up.

So the church has a dilemma. Government says join us in the big society and we want to say this is what we've always done, so of course we'll join you. And like the good Samaritan, we will bind up the wounds of those damaged by life, mugged by misfortune. The church has always done this. it will continue to do so. But in the coming months it might find itself expected to do vastly than its meagre resources will allow. Can we provide care for the vulnerable, training for NEETs, support for struggling families, food for the hungry, utilities to those priced out of the market, care for those struggling to live in the community with mental health problems...? In short, can we make good the effect of the most savage spending cuts ever envisaged in a single spending round? I doubt it.

Paul says that we should pay our taxes as a sign of love for our neighbours. This implies that government has a responsibility to the vulnerable. It implies that one of the ways in which we order the big society is through the election and action of good government, charged with gathering and distributing tax revenue fairly. So, yes, Mr Osbourne, close the VAT loophole on goods brought in from the Channel Islands (I will willingly pay the correct price for my Cd's and DVDs from Play or wherever), but also do something to claw back the £25bn lost each year to tax 'avoidance'.

So, I think we should help out where we can by bringing aid to the vulnerable and protest the fact that we have left in the mess we're in by a financial system that is still out of control (how can a bank that makes £1 in losses be paying out just shy of £1bn in bonuses to the incompetent?). I think a few occupations of the places that are still part of the problem would be a good way of churches showing that they are part of the solution. If the EA is raising money for such a campaign of protests, I'll donate to that.

Learning to break bread in the city

I had lunch at Le Pain Quotidien yesterday and it was wonderful. Bread and cheese to die for! Good company too.

The company's website (here) says this about its communal table: Friends and strangers alike come together around our communal table to break bread and linger for a while...Take a seat next to a neighbor, share the Brunette and be reminded that, even in the big city, we are a community.

Isn't that what we want church to be? Good food, a welcome for all, breaking bread together... Of course, we want to break bread and remember Jesus, so our eating and drinking together becomes a conscious reflection of his values and lifestyle. But it seems to me that we could a thing or two about our gatherings from a lunch or two at Le Pain Quotidien.

Taking the new perspective out of the classroom into the church

I've just finished preparing for tomorrow's Romans session at Spurgeon's tomorrow. We're looking at the new perspective and how we understand the term 'the righteousness of God'. The new perspective has now been around for so long that it really needs a different name. Yesterday evening I reread Krister Stendhal's essay 'The apostle Paul and the introspective conscience of the west' which first appeared in 1963. In many ways this was the spark that ignited the new perspective's fire - and it's still wonderfully fresh.

But it's Ed Sanders, whose book Paul and Palestinian Judaism, really opened a radical new way of reading Paul, dubbed 'the new perspective' by James Dunn in 1982. In fact, it wasn't so much a new way of reading Paul as a rereading of his Jewish context. If the Judaism in which Paul grew up was not the religion of works righteousness that Luther thought it was, then everything he says at the beginning of Romans needs to be reassessed. If Paul was not wracked with guilt as the young Luther was, then our understanding of justification needs to be rethought. That's basically what the new perspective is about.

It seems to me that it is a much more fruitful approach to Paul and, especially, to Romans, particularly in the way that it has been refined and fleshed out by Dunn, Tom Wright and even Francis Watson, whose Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles is the best book I've read on the New Testament this year.

But it leaves me with a huge question: if this approach is correct, how will we teach it in our churches? If it's correct, it calls into question a lot of what has been taught in evangelical and reformation tradition churches, in particular, because it shifts the focus of Paul's teaching from individual salvation to being the people of God.

As I've been tackling Romans in our church Bible studies over the past few months, I've lost count of the number of times that people have said 'this is so different from what I grew up with' and even 'am I supposed to regard all those teachers whose ministry I valued as wrong in the light of what you are saying?' I guess this applies to a lot of what is taught in theological colleges. there is always the temptation to leave the allegedly 'difficult' stuff behind and do what's always been done, say what's always been said. But are we robbing our people of the opportunity of hearing the fresh light and truth that God wants to bring forth from his word (something baptists have always thought important)? Answers on a post card, please...!

A good accompaniment to these musings has been Laura Veirs' Carbon Glacier album from 2004. Lovely stuff - like pretty much everything she's done.

Celebrating the generations

Lily (now 2) holds her new cousin, Sophia (now 2 weeks), with a little help from grandma. It's been a lovely weekend.

Comforting one another

We've been doing a series at our evening services on the 'one another' sayings in the New Testament, those places where God's people are urged to do something for one another in order to build their communal life. It's helping us to explore what shape Christian community might have.

Last Sunday we were thinking about comforting one another, reflecting on Paul's great statement in 2 Corinthians 1:3-5. One of the issues that particularly resonated with people was the need to help one another cope with the times of rapid social change through which we are living.

Some people find the dizzying pace of change profoundly unsettling. Those of us who are gleefully adopting new technology, facebooking and tweeting at every opportunity, are in danger of leaving behind those who struggle to make sense of what's going on. They feel it as a profound loss of a way of being and doing things that was familiar to them, that they felt in control of. In many ways they are grieving a lost way of life with the same intense emotions with which people grieve the loss of a loved one.

Generally when people are bereaved we know what to do. We rally round, bring a comforting presence that is accompanied by few words, we cook meals, do a bit of shopping, create the space people need to work through their grief. Why can't we do the same with people who are struggling to come to terms with the loss of old familiar ways of doing things. We know that the 1950s are not returning; rapid social change, increasingly driven by the revolution in communications technology, is here to stay.

The question for us is how will we comfort one another through these changes. Comfort is about bringing strength, the strength to face changes that unsettle and upset us, to see them accurately and speak about them honestly. Without such seeing and speaking, all we do is live in denial of the effect of change on our lives and the pain continues. Comfort is about facing the things that cause us pain and bringing the strength that comes through knowing the support of a loving community.

And behind all this is God, the one who comforts us through his grace and strengthens us to face events that unsettle us, so that we in turn can be the means of bringing comfort to those around us.

Album of the year - yes, already!

I've been listening to what will undoubtedly be the album of the year; undoubtedly because I cannot imagine it being bettered. It is Let England Shake by PJ Harvey.

I came late to Polly Jean's oeuvre but have loved Stories from the city, Stories from the Sea and the more recent White Chalk. She writes beautiful, intelligent, edgy songs. But nothing prepared us for Let England Shake.

The album is full of fabulous tunes. Some of them arrive on the gossamer wings of a mayfly, things of fragile beauty; others come with an almost industrial groove, played with a wonderfully light touch. And all of them are made more enticing, ethereal, stranger by the instrumentation and use of samples - bugles, reggae hits, etc. Polly Jean has even triumphantly made the autoharp a rock n' roll instrument.

Then there's her voice. She's noted for being a bit strident, though I've always loved its slightly west country timbre. But here, her voice seems to come from a different dimension altogether, strong and yet delicate, angelic and earthy.

The music and the voice on their own would make this my album of the year. But the songs are amazing. This is record about something that matters - and how often can you say that these days? Gone are the introspective songs about love and relationships. Instead Polly Jean tackles war - what bigger subject is there? - but even more importantly, why England, the land she adores with a passion, has been shaped and is still being shaped by war.

The album is a meditation on what has made England the country it is, what has shaped our psyche, our national character. She achieves it by musing on the first world war, especially the Gallipoli fiasco, using first hand accounts filtered through her subtle and fertile imagination.

The result is an unsettling spiritual masterpiece, an album that makes you think and feel; a suite of songs that forces the listener to ask why things are this way and what have I contributed? For instance, In the Dark Places suggests a link between our war record and young men who use guns to settle their differences on our streets. On England, she describes the land as 'a withered vine' - a potent and powerful biblical image of a land and its people - and speaks of her longing to find the springs that might renew it; and yet she sings 'undaunted, never failing love for you, England, is all, to which I cling.'

When she sings 'cruel nature has won again' on On Battleship Hill, which begins with an almost disembodied vocal singing that the scent of thyme stings you into remembering that nature has won again (a hopeful, even beautiful image - especially so due to to her voice), as the song's final line, you realise that she is talking about our nature, human nature. Even after all this time, the innocent scent of thyme brings back the horror and futility of a battle that cost so many lives.

It sounds like a heavy brew, yet it is also awash with wonderful light, even humorous moments, like the sampling of the line from Eddie Cochran's song Summertime Blues at the end of The Words that Maketh Murder: Polly and her band sing 'what if I take my problems to the united nations..?' It makes you laugh and weep in equal measure.

In short, buy it, listen to it, talk about it, reflect on it: this is what rock n' roll was always meant to be - music that might just change the world.

The light dawns over the Nile

Great news from Egypt this evening. As one of the demonstrators in Tahrir Square said 'Pharoah has let his people go'. Let's pray that in the wake of Mubarak's departure, the forces of democracy, justice and freedom are stronger than the forces of chaos and authoritarianism.

One of the things that has been striking over recent days is how president Mubarak has gone from being a key western ally in the search for middle eastern peace to being an obstacle to modernisation and the transition to democracy. I should applaud conversions, however late, but it is a bit rich for those who have kept Mubarak in power to side with his people only when those people seemed likely to get rid of him.

We bang on a lot about democracy but we really do have to be more consistent in our determination to see democracy flourish everywhere. Our selective support for unpleasant regimes does our interests in the world no good in the long term.

But maybe our relationships with the world should always be founded on something more noble than what is in our interest. I know Robin Cook's notion of an ethical foreign policy was somewhat tarnished by the government within which he served, but it seems to me that at the very least we should not expect the people of another nation to put up with a regime that we would not live under just because it's in our 'national interest' defined as militarily expedient or necessary for our economic well-being.

And the Middle East peace process ought to be aided by Arab democracy rather than hindered by it. Israel is always trumpeting its democratic credentials in a region of authoritarian governments. It should rejoice that Egyptians could soon share the same rights. 80 millions Egyptians could be voting alongside 7.5 million Israelis and 10.5 million Tunisians. Who knows, that common experience might help them to listen to and live at peace with one another in the coming years.

And this is one of the great pictures of hope to have come out of the Egyptian uprising. Last thursday as demonstrators were being attacked by pro-Mubarak factions, Christian Egyptians linked arms and protected Muslim Egyptians as they prayed.

It's pictures like this that give me hope that young Egyptians - the overwhelming majority of the population - will be able to live together in peace and harmony despite their religious and cultural differences.

It's a picture that inspires prayer - and joy.