More than one way of getting out of the boat

Just when you're flagging, a good friend sends a response to a blog post that leaves you chuckling and hopeful. So I thought I'd share it.



She wrote: 'but Simon - have you forgotten? - you can swim! Jump in! Allow though for a few minutes to tread water in the process as you catch your breath. We're praying for the waves to carry you - and everyone else - and for other passengers in the boat to jump in after you too. Some will need life jackets or even be put in a lifeboat at the start but that's ok. They'll have got out of the boat!'

She rightly points out that there is more than one way to get out of the boat. Life jackets will be available and the strong swimmers will give the more nervous what help they can...

Getting out of the boat

So, reflecting further on where the tornado left us, listening to the excellent Brown Bear Music's Amazed album (whatever happened to Ian Mizen and Andy Presdee, the UK's two best, most inventive and tuneful writers of worship songs?), I'm pondering...

It is interesting to observe, to feel what happens as you seek to put into effect strategies that have been shaped, honed, worked and prayed through in meetings and away days. It's like the moment when a laboratory discovery is cleared for trials with real humans. Suddenly, this is no longer a good idea, a well-crafted plan. It is something we are going to do. It is something that will have consequences in the lives of people we know, love, have shared our lives with, people who trust us to have their welfare at heart.

And suddenly people aren't as convinced as they were.

That's fear.

I wonder at this point whether God is saying - as he did to Peter - 'Get out of the boat'. Peter was all gung-ho to do so while he was in the boat. Admittedly, it wasn't all that great in the boat with a heavy swell and the darkness closing in all around. But at least it was dry and there was something solid under his feet. Actually getting out of the boat was a different matter. It was wet. The lake was deep. Would faith really hold him up? Why not wait for Jesus to reach them where they were? Why did he open his big mouth?!

Since the beginning of the year God has been saying to me 'get out of the boat'. It's been a word recurring as we've plotted the future direction of the church. And it's been a word for the church not for me as an individual. And now we well and truly need to get out of the boat. And...?

Well, we could wait for Jesus to come to us. And if other people want to meet him, they can come where we are; there's plenty of room for any who walk to us.

And Jesus says 'get out of the boat'; and I am aware that if  I stay here, I'll miss him. While the fear gnaws, faith sparks and I have a foot dangling over open water. What next?

Four months, four albums, a promising year for music...

The year so far has blessed us four albums destined to be classics and vying for album of the year.

At the moment I'm listening to Nick Cave's majestic Push the Sky Away. I think this is the year's best offering so far - though there is stiff competition. Cave has let out the visceral, animal side of his music in his side project Grinderman, which I haven't really warmed to. It leaves him free to produce atmospheric meditations on life, faith and hope with a buttoned up restraint that you think might explode at any minute but is kept beautifully, achingly in check. It makes for a wonderful journey through Brighton and Cave's netherworld to the title track that is a muted rage against the dying of the light, the need to keep living, creating, singing in the face of our all-too obvious mortality.

First out of the stocks in fact was Eels Wonderful, Glorious, lighting up a frosty late January with Mr E's sometimes angry, often gentle, always prescient musings on the absurdity of life in the modern world and the saving qualities of love and faithfulness. He's so good that his song writing seems effortless, one great riff here, a hook to die for there, a lyric that stays with you for the day here and there and everywhere.

Depeche Mode's Delta Machine, out last month, sounds at times like a southern revival, all speaking in tongues and faith snatching us from oblivion. Coming after last year's collaboration between Dave Gahan and Soul Savers, this album makes you wonder what's going on in these Essex boy's souls. here's a whole ton of reflections on life and faith and love. Wonderful tunes, great vocals, catchy rhythms - all the ingredients of a classic Depeche Mode album are present and correct.

And then there David Bowie's unexpected comeback album; unexpected for two reasons - no one knew it was coming and no one could have guessed that he still had such a great collection of songs in him. The Next Day is the true follow up to Lodger, a ghost ride through the Berlin of the late 70s and early 80s that spawned Bowie's great trilogy. The songs are a dizzying display of hooks, gorgeous vocals, great guitar licks and some pretty wonderful saxophone from the dame himself. Every time I listen, I am surprised at how good it is. Half of me hopes it's his last album ('cause I'm not sure he'll better it) and the other half hopes there's twenty more songs of this quality awaiting release in the autumn. Who knows with the elusive boy from Bromley!

If you haven't added any of these to your collection, you should.

Wondering where the tornado left us

I've been having an interesting exchange on Twitter with some good friends and colleagues over the future of our movement. Thanks to Neil for the initial stimulus and to Andy and Anthony for the provocation thereafter. I feel  need something more than 140 characters to set down some thoughts - hopefully to stimulate further conversation and creativity.

We baptists stand at the crossroads - we've been here for a while - and at the forthcoming Assembly (which I'm unable to attend), some sense of the new direction in which we will be travelling will become clear with the appointment of a new General Secretary. God will need to give this brave soul great and continuous supplies of wisdom, creativity, stamina and chutzpah.

As well as this strategic appointment, Neil pointed to the creaking structures of finance needing a thorough overhaul. He suggested the current model could remain in place for a while; I'm not so sure, though it depends on how long the 'while' turns out to be.

Undoubtedly the church in the UK needs to change. It's older, more set in its ways and less nimble on its feet than most of its neighbours; and for that reason fewer younger, agile people see it as essential for making sense of their lives - and hence are not joining.

My church needs to change. And thereby lies the problem. When I outline dreams that suggest that what so many people mean when they say 'church' will be replaced by something more flexible, more missional, more responsive, more dynamic, more connected with our neighbours, I can smell the fear; I can see the anxiety in people's eyes, hear it in their (often supportive) observations and questions.

Like Dorothy at the start of the Wizard of Oz, the realisation that we aren't in Kansas anymore is unsettling. Everything that has given comfort and security, the familiarities of home, has been caught up in a tornado of change and we have been deposited somewhere we don't recognise even though we are waking up in our familiar beds.

So, we need pioneers - and a movement that is supporting them - but we need to find stories that help those who do not feel like pioneers, rise to this fresh challenge. This is because Neil's second point is as true for local churches as it is for our movement as a whole, namely we need change to be bankrolled by the very people who want things to stay the same while we are exploring new ways of funding the kind of mission we're called to do and the communities that such mission creates.

As a minister paid by the church, I can smell my own fear about that!

Riding a wave of grace

So, here's this month's contribution to the church magazine that I blogged about the other day. Hope you find grace in it.

I'm sitting on the south bank of the river Thames. The sun is bathing my face in the first warmth of spring. The sky above London's iconic buildings is luminous blue. Nearly everyone around me - tourists, office workers grabbing lunch and fresh air, joggers, cyclists, human statues, sellers of trinkets and soft drinks - is as good humoured as the day. I find myself half-muttering, half-singing (under my breath) 'God is good'.

An elderly man next to me is checking stock prices in a pristine copy of today's FT; behind me skate boarders clatter in the brutalist under-croft of the national theatre accompanied by squeals of delight from young spectators; a lean African man entertains us with lilting Kora music; and an Eastern European artist offers original artwork to bemused passers-by (his subject matter jars with the lazy spring feel all around).

I'm on my way to a meeting with the guys behind the Community Bible Experience that so many of us have found has led us to fresh understanding and appreciation of scripture as we've read it and talked about it in groups. But I'm grateful for fifteen minutes in the sunshine and fresh air, grateful for the reminder of God's opulent, extravagant creativity. 

And as I watch the water and people, I can feel the cares and anxieties that I've been carrying through the day slipping from my shoulders, to be replaced with a serenity born of the reminder that whatever's happening, God's on the case. As he is creating this day, so he is gently showing me that whatever I'm wrestling with, he has the measure of it.

It's a reminder of grace. A reminder that God is constantly favouring us with his glance, his presence, his glory, his unexpected arrival in the midst of busyness and hassle, with refreshment, laughter, an unexpected word, a hug...

The Macedonians had experienced this. In the midst of their struggle to make ends meet, the sheer hard graft of putting food on the table and clothes on their backs, God had refreshed them with his grace and they wanted to return the favour by being gracious to those in even greater need than them. Paul tells us about this as he announces the offering in 2 Corinthians 8. They gave themselves to God because God had given himself to them, lavished the goodness of his presence on them in such a way that they couldn't help but trust him and pass it on. 

That's what grace does. In the midst of the pressures of life, the voices telling us that things are too hard, that we haven't the resources to make it through the day, that the forces ranged against us will grind us down and bring us to our knees, God comes and sits next to us and says 'hey, remember me!'

I'm sitting with a lemonade and Joe Stiglitz, musing on the state of economic chaos engulfing us and pondering the whither and what and why of inequality. Of course, Stiglitz is only with me in a book of his I’m reading. And Paul reminds us that grace is the great equaliser. He's not wanting the Judean Christians to be lining their pockets at the expense of the Macedonians or the Corinthians; he just wants equality, everyone to have enough. He's reminding us that our God became poor so that we might become rich and we should be modelling our lives on him. 

And this too is grace at work, God's great work of giving, seen in the provision of manna in the wilderness, now seen in the way his grace opens the hearts, hands and wallets of his people, so that they become the means by which equality is made and maintained. And in a crazy world where the cost of my lemonade, enjoyed in the Southbank's spring sunshine, is all a family might have to live on anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, Stiglitz makes a lot of sense (he's won a Nobel prize, after all), but Paul makes more.

When we are recipients of grace in the way the Macedonians were, we instinctively not only want to see those in need helped, but also to play our part in making that happen. For if God lavishes his grace on us, so generously, so relentlessly, so continually, why would we not open our hands and let it flow through our fingers to those around us who need it as much or more than we do.

We live in days of change and turmoil – in the world around us and in the church so close to us – when our ability to trust is being stretched and tested. And I am feeling, as the sun warms my face and chases away the memory of a hard winter, that his grace will be sufficient to deal with whatever comes my way. The challenges we face may be many and various, they might be things we’ve never faced before, they may be causing us acute anxiety. But one thing is true: God’s grace has the measure of them and mastery over them; he can be trusted to lead us through whatever comes our way with open, generous hearts and an eye on those who need to realise for the first time who made the sunshine that brightens all our lives.

Writing and thinking

I discovered something about writing and thinking yesterday, as I was penning my contribution for the church magazine sitting in the sunshine on London's South Bank. It's a simple thing really, something I've known for a long time but maybe not as clearly as I saw it yesterday. It's probably something you've known forever, so you'll be able to cheer that I've caught up!

The process of connecting words leads to new avenues of thought. Like synapses in the brain firing and making new connections between brain cells (someone will tell me that's old science!), so the very act of linking words together on the screen or page, creates new thoughts which, more importantly, leads to fresh lines of enquiry.

Sometimes I sit at my keyboard, needing to create a sermon, write a lecture, compose an article and  find my brain is suddenly and spectacularly stripped of any inkling of what  might write. So I start typing and the every act of joining words together opens up the possibility of something to read that will be worth reading, that means something.

Inevitably what I first keyed into the machine is worked over and reworked out of existence as by the third or fourth paragraph something is emerging what looks like a train of thought, an interesting reflection. But this is not always the case; yesterday's first paragraph stayed remarkably intact!

I was always told by editors and, more recently by my MA supervisor, to write and then find out where the gaps are in your knowledge, rather that to read and research until you think you are ready to write. It's good advice. I'm going to try and follow it over the coming few weeks and see what emerges.

What I wrote yesterday will be posted here in the next day or so as it emerges in print form in our church magazine.

Public service versus public pomp

I don't have much to say about the death of Margaret Thatcher. I felt she was a divisive PM wedded to an economic model whose whirlwind we are currently reaping. But this comment from Peter Oborne in today's Telegraph (here) is, I think, very apposite.

In particular - and he's not alone in this - he contrasts the funeral of Clement Attlee with that proposed for Thatcher. You could argue that he was the prime minister who most profoundly shaped the post-war world in which we still live. And yet just 150 friends and family attended his quiet service in 1967.

I wonder whether this tells us something about how attitudes to public service have changed for the worse over the past generation. Politics seems to be less about serving the public good than about promoting sectional interest. A selfish and self-serving society gets the politicians it deserves, I guess.

The most poignant comment on Thatcher's death was from Russell Brand (of all people) in yesterday's Guardian (here) where he said: 'The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't.' Everyone deserves better than that, even those who create the conditions for society to fall apart around us.

The Kingdom of God is a party – so let’s throw one….

Here's the piece I wrote for the church magazine about our forthcoming 150th birthday celebrations. I will reflect on the planning process for this in a subsequent blog...

The baffled café owner, not quite sure how to process what he’d just been part of, asked ‘what kind of church do you belong to?’ The tall, balding sociology professor from the US East coast thought for a moment and then said ‘I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for whores at 3:30 in the morning.’ To which the café owner said: ‘no you don’t. There’s no church like that. If there was, I’d join it. I’d join a church like that.’ Wouldn’t we all?!

The story comes from a book by Tony Campolo, the American Christian leader, activist and sociology professor. He puts his finger on a key aspect of what Jesus is all about. His book’s called The Kingdom of God is a Party. Jesus spent more time at parties than in church; he was constantly surrounded by the wrong kind of people, eating and drinking with them, celebrating their lives and talking about the Kingdom of God. To the surprise of the religious folk of his day, he likened the Kingdom of God to a party that he was throwing and inviting any- and everybody to come along to it; a party where life in all its fullness was on tap for everyone.

It is in that spirit that we are approaching our 150^th birthday. On 2 June, we’re throwing a party for Bromley. Along the high street, we will be celebrating the Kingdom of God by offering food, games, fun and conversation to anyone who wants to join us.

We have begun talking to traders and restaurant owners along the stretch from the Partridge to the Swan and found a really positive response from them. More conversations will follow. The town centre manager is offering all the help she can to make the event a success – and a template for something she’ll put on when the improvements in that part of the town are complete in 2014/5! And we are talking with a Christian organisation that specialises in throwing community parties who have offered to come and help us as we gear up for the big day.

So, why are we doing this?

Our church was born in a pub in a world that knew and honoured the Christian story. It grew in such a world and has enjoyed years of fruitful mission and ministry in the town. We are celebrating our 150^th birthday in a world that neither knows nor particularly honours our story. People who have any impression of the church think of us as a group that likes to say ‘no’ to the way people live, who deal in guilt and judgement. We want to correct that mistaken impression and the best way to do it is to throw a party. We will say thank you to God for his blessing over 150 years by blessing our neighbours.

2 June is the day of the big lunch, an initiative of the Eden Project in Cornwall. Its founder Sir Tim Smitt, says “If you get to know your neighbours, not only does it create a happier, safer environment to live in, but you will probably find they are happy to help you out with your pets or water your plants when you go on holiday. You never know, you might even end up with a new best friend, simply from knocking on your neighbour’s door to say hello.”

As church people we often bemoan the fact that society today isn’t as neighbourly as it was when we were growing up; there is a lot of fear and suspicion of strangers; the world we live in isn’t as friendly a place as it once was. As Christian people we believe that Jesus came to bring reconciliation not only between us and God but between people of kinds. Paul reminds us that the dividing wall of hostility has been broken and we have all been brought close to God and hence to one another. So, of all people we believe that neighbourliness is a good thing; that anything that brings people together and helps them to get to know one another can only be positive.

That’s what we’ll be able to do on 2 June on our high street with a whole cross section of our neighbours. The aim is to provide food from a variety of restaurants and fun for all the family. The advantage of buying the food from the restaurateurs along that part of the high street is that it blesses them. Over recent years they have seen trade suffer as a result of developments around the Glades, along with the recession. In some small way on 2 June, we can bless them by bringing them business and, perhaps more importantly, introducing a whole load of people to their food which might result in increased custom over the longer term. In that way we have made a significant contribution to the livelihood of some of our neighbours; we will have sought and brought the prosperity of the city where we live!

After Easter there’ll be training events for the day facilitated by Marty Woods, an Australian who has organised street events across the world and was last year involved in a range of Olympic-related community parties. There is a time line elsewhere in this issue of In Touch giving more details.

It just remains for you to be doing two things. The first is to pray for all those involved in the organisation of the day and all those who will come; pray that the Lord will bless them. And the second is to take a stack of fliers when they are ready and invite your neighbours to join us. There will be fun through the day for all the family, for people of all ages from toddlers to senior citizens.

So, get praying, come along and be part of the blessing of Bromley to celebrate our 150^th birthday.

Shelter lessons

Today we said goodbye to our last guests as our winter night shelter closed its doors after 94 days. It closes with us dreaming of having a place that is open all year round to help the growing numbers who do not have access to a home.

We have met some great people over the past three months, people who have been an inspiration in how we create community. Just last night one guest who has been offered a flat that he moves into today arranged for another who has not yet secured permanent housing to allow him to stay with him. So, I'm dropping off two beds to the flat this afternoon, along with a load of other things needed for a decent life.

We've worked with more than thirty people over the winter, most of whom have gone into more permanent accommodation. What has been a surprise is the number of young people (those under 35) and those who have work (albeit of a casual and insecure nature). It was a reminder - as if one is needed on budget day - that we have a housing crisis in the UK that is not touched by any measure announced by the chancellor.

Just this morning, in the pre-budget build up on Radio 4, a pundit was explaining that house building is depressed because there is no demand for housing in the economy and therefore no incentive to build. This is, of course, complete nonsense. What he meant was that there are fewer than in recent years looking to buy. This does not mean there is a lack of demand. Tens of thousands are seeking affordable homes for rent all across the country but especially in London.

Such demand can only be met by a public sector with the wit and imagination to realise that such investment creates jobs, oils the wheels of the economy and can be done at virtually no cost since the government will be borrowing from itself at historically low rates of interest that over the medium term are negative because of the rate of inflation. Sadly we haven't got a chancellor with the wit to see that (he is droning on about slashing departmental budgets and public sector pay as I write this; sensible to work to take more demand out of an economy that is suffering from a chronic lack of demand...)

What I saw in the night shelter was a group of men (and one woman) who have determination to make their lives better, who are gifted, talented, hard-working and community minded but who are excluded from the life they crave because of a massive and inexcusable lack of provision and of the levers that are meant to be there to help them rise up from where they have fallen. What I saw was a group of people who have been failed by our society and who have therefore become a growing cost on it, a cost they do not want to be.

I also saw what the churches can do when they work together, honour one another's contribution and pool each other's talents and resources. In short, I saw something of the Kingdom of God, and I like what I saw.

Shall we try moving the furniture one last time?

Peter Brierley is one of the most astute, accurate and faith-affirming observers of statistical trends in British (mainly English) Christianity. So his observations on the 2011 census data repay careful consideration. You can sign up for his excellent bimonthly report from the frontline here.

His analysis of the age profile of church goers makes for sobering reading. A third are over 65 and another third are over 40. Given life expectancy of c80 years, the likelihood is that on current trends the number of church goers in England will have more than halved by 2030 (a drop of 58% is predicted for Anglicans and other denominations and streams are likely to follow the same path).

The drop in those self-identifying as Christian in 2011 census of 11% could be accounted for by the death rate among church goers over the decade since 2001 rather than a loss of faith by the living.

Only a third of church goers are under 40 and given that church goers as a whole comprise less than 10% of the population, you don't need to be a mathematician to work out that things don't look good.

His analysis of the data bears out David Voas' observation that secularisation works between rather than within generations. As the older, more religious generations die out, so the prevailing landscape becomes more secular.

This is a missional challenge. How will we reach those under 40 with the good news about Jesus? My suspicion is that our current ways of working, models of church, patterns of ministry and mission are not going to cut it.

We don't have that long to answer this question either as the older generations tend to be the ones who fund the church's programmes. They are the richest generation Britain has ever known; younger church goers do not have the amounts of disposable income to commit to church coffers that their parents and grandparents had - nor the inclination to shore up declining institutions.

So, we're running out of time and money - what an amazing missional challenge; will we rise to it or try rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic on last time?

Spreading the word across the pond

My last blog post was picked up by the Ethics Daily website in the US - which is nice. You can read it here (of course, you can read it below as well!!)

Should we do our own what we can do better together?

First post of the year... Let's just say that 2013 has got off to a frenetic start. Anyway, as is my custom, here's my piece from the church magazine that will be hitting the chairs on Sunday. Although it is focused on Bromley, I think it applies more widely.

We were sitting downstairs in Costa on a cold Tuesday morning, warming our hands on Americanos: a retired catholic layman, a Pentecostal woman who works for the council, an Anglican priest and me. We’d met to pray for the night shelter and having done that we were chatting.

Ann said something along the lines of Bromley being unlike anywhere she’d lived in that the churches were so up for working together. We all raised our eyebrows. Others asked why and we fell into a conversation about cooperation and being able to put aside the issues that divide us and focus on what we can do together.

It reminded me of a conversation I’d had right at the start of my ministry. It was with my director of training at what was then called London Bible College. Nick Mercer, a Baptist minister who has since become an Anglican priest and now serves as a Bishop’s chaplain in central London, remarked that it was interesting that I was going to Peckham because it was ‘the networking capital of the Christian world’ by which he meant churches and Christian leaders worked well together.

Following Ann’s comment in Costa’s basement, I fell to thinking about what it is that leads to some places being better than others in this matter of Christians working together. I’m not sure I’ve arrived at any great insights but I think what we have in Bromley is worth celebrating – as we did recently at the joint service at the start of the week of prayer for Christian unity. But more than that, I think it might be worth asking what God is saying to us at Bromley Baptist Church about how we see the future shape of our mission here.

We highlighted five ministries at the joint service at the start of the week of prayer for Christian unity – night shelter, Foodbank, JusB, street pastors and the chaplaincy – that were started by individuals who wanted to see the local churches mobilised in response to a specific need. Each of these – of which Foodbank is the most recent – work because Christians from across the churches come together and work to achieve specific goals in our community.

What is remarkable about these projects is that Christians from a whole range of traditions and denominations are able to come together and focus on the task in hand without feeling the need to agree a theological agenda beforehand. In many ways that agenda has already been given to us clearly in scripture; in Titus 3:14, for example: ‘let people learn to devote themselves to good works in order to meet urgent needs, so that they may not be unproductive.’ Paul has already outlined in Titus 2:11-16 that the goal of our being brought to faith in Christ is that we become a people who are zealous for good works. Doing demonstrates that our faith has a distinctive contribution to make to our neighbourhood.

What many of us have found as we have worked together with people from other churches is that what we have in common is so much more important than what might divide us. Now I don’t want to downplay doctrinal difference and emphasis. I am a Baptist, after all, by conviction, not by accident; I have chosen this form of churchmanship after prayer and study and in response to what I know to be the leading of God.

But I can work with Christians who do not share my convictions because we recognise that Jesus calls us to action on behalf of others. For too long Christians have lived in silos, doing their own thing in their own way and the losers have been our neighbours in need whose needs have gone unmet.

As Paul reminds us, those needs are urgent, whereas dotting doctrinal ‘i’s’ and crossing theological ‘t’s’ isn’t. What has been brilliant about churches together is that we have been able to create opportunities for those needs to be met in ways that have enabled countless Christians from all our churches to lead productive, fruitful and fulfilling lives.

So, I wonder what this says to us about the decisions we need to be making this year about the future direction of our own church. One obvious thing is that we need to redouble our efforts to support those projects that are already up and running and are showing God’s love to our neighbours in practical and tangible ways. But can we go further?

Are there ministries that would be better done across churches rather than within individual communities? Can we offer programmes for our young people, our senior citizens and others that span more than one church? This would be a way of pooling resources at a time when they are tight for every church; it could also be a way of responding more creatively and imaginatively to the needs of these groups both within and beyond our churches.

It seems that there is an open door for effective and cooperative mission ion our town. Let’s all be praying about how we can most usefully walk through that door and make our contribution to seeing God’s love shared with our neighbours and his Kingdom take ever more intriguing shape in our midst.