just chillin’
July 16, 2005
It’s one of the great things about living in the Lake District - after working today on the service tomorrow, I was down on the beach at Miller Ground, swimming. The water was like a warm bath - at least for the first 12″ or so. Cold after that! But a quick drive, or a visit to the lake, or a river, and it feels as though you’re on holiday! And I get paid to be here … eat your hearts out, fellow bloggers!
Eyes on the G8, not just London
July 16, 2005
Wasn't it amazing how effectively the London bombings knocked the Make Poverty History capaign and the Gleneagles summit off the front pages? I mean, just look at mustard seeds as an example! There's a post on the bombings, but nothing on the coach trip to Edinburgh. What an astonishing experience! Nearly a quarter of a million people taking over the streets of the city for 7 hours. I spoke to a police officer (I'd lost one of my bus charges!) and he said there'd been no trouble, no drunkenness and no ambulances called. He couldn't believe it. I'm usually not on the side of people who whinge about the media and their reporting, but I couldn't help noticing how effective violence is as a publicity stunt! Look how much coverage and screen time the handful of anti-globalisation demonstrators got by comparison with our record-breaking demo.
Of course, the good news is that there was some significant good news to come out of Gleneagles. The package of debt relief, doubled aid and a commitment to tackling Aids is going to make an enormous difference to millions of people's lives.
Here's the question that intrigues me. What if we've actually done it - what if we've actually changed the way of life for Africa, and with it, the world? What effects will that have? Let's be optimistic. Let's say that release from crippling debt will revolutionise the economies. Let's say that the aid gets to where it's needed. Let's say that the Aids programme starts to bite. African lives are going to change dramatically - thank God! We need to keep up the pressure so that the debt relief is extended as far as is needed.
But how does it change us? I wonder if it's going to alter radically our postmodern mindset? I have a feeling that somewhere at the heart of Po-Mo is a despair of the complexity of reality. It seems to me that part of the demise of the Big Story is a pessimism about being able to alter things on any significant scale. The global economy is just too big, complex and powerful. Unaccountable multinationals, far more powerful than nation states, are unaccountable. If the pressure on them in one place gets too great, they decamp operations elsewhere. So we give up on any hope of changing the world and instead concentrate our efforts on small, individual, single issues. We might at least make a difference in our own back yards! So, for example, we profess a "zero tolerance" policy towards drugs and jail someone for 14 years for having a dope party in the privacy of their homes, but live with the fact that the drugs cartels can be inconvenienced but never eradicated. Small wonder that students these days are so frighteningly conservative by comparison with our generation, obssessed with grades and CVs!
But what if we've actually done it this time? What if we've got the most powerful people in the world to listen and act? How much pent-up hope will that unleash? Will we find other ways of making a difference to the Big Picture? So many questions! I confess to being quietly hopeful…
dave faulkner has an interesting section on "What Did the G8 Accomplish?"
Oh, the picture? It's of two of the demonstrators at Edinburgh, saying to the G8 (ala Sting) "We'll be watching you!"
Can we handle life in the highways and byways?
July 12, 2005
Lucy's comment on the "Visions to Avoid" post set me thinking (read that thread if you haven't - we need to develop it!). We're "selling" Jesus, she suggests. That's what we've got to offer. And she raises the question, "To whom?" I wonder what most of our church folk would answer if (a) the question was, "Who would you most like to attract to your church?" and (b) they had to answer honestly!
I suspect that the answer is that we'd like middle class, well-spoken, enthusiastic, productive, skilled, younger, thinking, popular, gifted, comfortably off people. I'm getting on for sure-to-certain that the answer will not be poor, damaged, difficult, marginalised, unpopular, dirty, destructive, embarrassing, unemployed (unemployable?) people who need giving to.
This is where I get stuck. I actually believe that these are precisely the people we should be seeking to attract first (ie before turning our attention to those less needy). That's what Jesus did, after all! But Jesus did more than extend charity and hospitality. He chose these people as friends! They were his first choice.
We concentrate our efforts on people like us. We are battling to communicated with jaded, satiated consumers who are overwhelmed with choice. That is not to say for a moment that they - and we - aren't needy. But our needs come from having too much. We pray "Give us this day our daily bread", while my daily bread frquently goes hard and mouldy and gets fed to the ducks and swans because I have so many other, more exciting things to eat. We have Communion services, procaliming Jesus to be the Bread of Life, while people starve to death. Then we have theological arguments about how to dispose of the leftovers! One of our greatest health problems is obesity and our most common mental health problems centre around our bodies and self-image. Part of our salvation is a fairer world in which we live more simply in order that others may simply live.
The parable of the Great Feast is about abandoning concentration on those who are most reluctant to hear the Good News of the Gospel and concentrating on those whose need is greatest - for whom the Gospel comes as gloriously Good News. That is not the same thing as abandoning those others. It's about where our efforts are concentrated.
So how can we make that sort of quantum leap? How can we begin to create a Church that is recognisably the Church of Jesus Christ precisely because it reflects Jesus' priorities in this area? That seems to me part of the task of catching the vision of God's Tomorrow.
Let’s stop pretending suicide bombers are cowards
July 12, 2005
Am I the only one who gets really angry with the media depiction of suicide bombers as cowards? They may be many things, but cowards they certainly aren't! I've fought in a war, and one thing that strikes me forcibly is that most soldiers spend and awful lot of time and energy surviving! The idea is to kill the enemy while escaping harm. Yet these people quite deliberately give up their lives. When I try to imagine myself into the mind of the bombers, or the terrorists who flew the planes into the twin towers, I'm haunted by wondering what it is like waking up knowing that today you are going to die. Or what goes through their minds in the last seconds before they detonate their bombs. Are they frightened? Any last-minute doubts about whether or not it's worth it? When they look at the passers-by they are going to kill, what do they think, or feel?
Why do suicide bombers evoke such particular horror in us? Why do we portray them as so very, particularly evil? It can't be for their effectiveness - many bombers die taking hardlyanyone with them. Perhaps it's the deliberation of it all. Or the knowledge that anyone around could be a walking bomb. Or maybe it's our horror of casualties. After all, we expect to go to war with minimal casualties. We have smart bombs and tanks that can pound the hell out of people and places from great distances. We shelter our troops behind inches of toughened metal and glass. We kill people from heights or distances. We rarely have to see them, or engage with them as human beings. They are statistics. Our military language carefully removes the personal, human element from our killing and dying. Suicide bombers don't allow us that sort of detachment. Their stuff is too "in our faces"; too personal. They remind every one of us that, in their eyes, we're to blame - each of us. Not just our government, but us. They say, in effect, "This is between you and me".
We are happy to participate in the kinds of things that breed suicide bombers. Israel carries out its state terrorist policies (well, come on, let's call a spade a spade! If anyone elese did what they do to the Palestinians, we'd regard it as an act of terrorism, wouldn't we?) because Britain and the US exercise their vetos in the UN. We might not like it. We might protest. But we don't see ourselves as deliberately and personally involved. In the eyes of the victims, we're culpable. We are participating. When a Palestinian loses a child to an Israeli sniper or gunship, or his wife dies giving birth at a chekpoint because the soldiers won't allow her to get to an ambulance, or a farmer loses his land and wealth at a stroke because the Wall is routed through the family olive grove, then that person blames you and me, just as much as George Bush, Tony Blair or Ariel Sharon.
I spoke to some Palestinian young people of 17-18 years. What was terrifying was the level of despair. They saw no way out, no end to the fighting and no means of influencing events. The only people who, in their eyes, were doing anything positive, were Hamas. One told me, "The Americans think they have their smart bombs. Well, we've got even smarter bombs!" She was referring to suicide bombers. Pretty desperate when you look at suicide bombers as a sign of hope, eh? And when a 14 year old girl believes the only thing left is to sign up as a martyr - what is going on?
And no, before anyone starts, this isn't an apology for terrorism or suicide bombers. On a personal and spiritual level, it's an attempt to understand fellow human beings. I think that is vital and we do no good pretending things are other than they are. Calling them cowards makes it easy to dismiss them. I interrogated many "terrorists" in Zimbabwe. Some had done some very, very evil things. But there were two things that struck me. Firstly, they were, without exception, brave. Secondly, they saw themselves as being engaged in a struggle against a great evil, against a powerful enemy who was waging a terror war on their people, with no means to wage it other than through terrorism.
That was a salutary lesson for me. It meant I had to take them seriously as human beings. It meant I had to take seriously the fact that they had consciences and a moral argument for what they were doing. It meant I had to take them seriously as soldiers. It meant that I couldn't ignore the ways in which they saw every citizen of what was Rhodesia as intimately connected to and involved in what was going on on the streets of the black townships.
If we want to rid the world of terror, one of the things we need desperately to do is to avoid playing things as though they are different from the way they are. If we don't like terror on our streets, then we must recognise that it has come to our streets from their streets. And they reckon we're to blame! We can't just disagree - we need to struggle for justice and peace.
Visions to avoid
July 10, 2005
Too many discussions of Emerging Church are still underpinned by a desire to be successful. If "success" means growth, then the hard facts are that most churches grow at the expense of others, because we are not so much conecting with people who have nothing to do with Christian faith as competing for a market share of people who are already Christians. Church as it is is getting to the point where we are exhausting the list of people "on the outside" who are interested in "joining" Church.
If the vision to be caught is of a Church that is simply more successful than before in wooing disaffected Christians, it's one we ought to avoid assiduously! There are enough churches presently catering for "already Christians". If we have a justifiable reason for existing beyond our existing shelf life, it must be because we are finding ways of connecting with the vast majority of those for whom the Gospel is clearly not Good News. When we create spaces for them to find faith and join the community of faith, we will find ourselves changing organically. That's when we start to become the Church of Tomorrow!
Praying for our enemies
July 9, 2005
Quite a challenge in the wake of the London bombings, isn't it? Yet Jesus gives a command that is a deliberate rejection of the cycle of violence, hatred and revenge. He says that we are to love our enemies, too. Praying for them as people we love (rather than as those we hate and fear) is immensely challenging. So, as soon as the news broke, we set up a vigil cangle - a huge candle with 6 tealights set into it. We prayed for the victims and their families, the rescuers and medics, the government, the G8 summit and for a world in which poverty is history and justice and peace render terrorism and violence redundant. We also prayed this prayer: "We light a candle for the bombers. Restore their humanity. Keep them from further evil. Have mercy on their souls."