In the sun

Happy New Year

A YouTube video for the New Year (Michael Stipe and Coldplay).  The creator of this video has shown real artistry in the placement of images to accompany the lyrics.  To me it speaks of our search and longing for meaning in life.  "May God's love be with you always".

How to wreck a good Carol Service

Two gripes following a Carol Service that I attended just before Christmas…

Firstly the violence being done to some of our greatest hymns in the name of accessibility.  Changing ‘thee’, ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ into ‘you’, for example, is basically dumbing down – it implies that the people singing the carols don’t understand what the words mean, which is both wrong and patronising.

Worse is the changing of phrases such as, for example, ‘sing choirs of angels’ into ‘sing all the angels’ (you’ll know the carol).  This changes the meaning to an extent – if the words are ‘sing all the angels’, to how many angels we are referring?  Three, four?  More than this?  But ‘choirs of angels’ implies tens or hundreds, much more impressive. Everyone knows what a choir is, why change the word?

Secondly, and more importantly, we were about 30 seconds into a lengthy sermon when the subject changed from nativity to crucifixion.  Now I fully acknowledge the centrality of the atonement in the Christian faith (and will be posting a full blog item early in the New Year), but Christmas is about the wonder of the incarnation.  I think the problem here stems from Paul’s statement that he was determined to “preach nothing but Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23 and 1 Corinthians 2:2).  In my experience, many Evangelical preachers have taken this to mean that they should only ever preach on the crucifixion and nothing else.  So it is my common experience to find every sermon, whatever the text, contrives to reach this topic as soon as possible.  Brian McLaren has noted the problem that many preachers jump straight from the beginning of the Gospel to the end, missing out everything in between. (I’m sorry I don’t have the reference).

But for those who come to church maybe once a year for the carols this approach has missed out on ‘who He is’ (the incarnation), so what He has done becomes much less relevant - and a lengthy sermon, when carols were expected, is a missed opportunity to say something short, meaningful, and really engaging.

Leaving the C of E

It’s great that the legislation for women bishops has now received Royal Assent.  Now it seems that the last hurdle is for the canon (church law) to be enacted by the General Synod on 17 November (2014).  Most commentators believe that the first woman will be consecrated as a bishop in the first half of 2015. At the same time the C of E is having a ‘shared conversation’ about the issue of sexuality – a polite way of saying ‘a discussion about the church’s approach to homosexuals’.  

This is a good thing.  

There is clear precedent in the early church for the leadership to debate issues where there is difference of opinion in the church.  The Archbishop of Canterbury says he hope the outcome will be at least that there will be different views but members will still remain "gracefully and deeply committed to each other".

Reform (an influential and firmly right wing evangelical group) seems to have pulled out of the process because, as I see it, they want the current Church of England official position that all sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage “should be met with a call for repentance and the exercise of compassion” to be an unassailable precondition to the conversations.  

Difficult to have a conversation with someone who is not prepared to discuss the issue from the start. 

These two issues seems to be indicative of the current overall approach of conservative evangelicals within the C of E.  Back in July Reform responded to the approval by the General Synod of women to become bishops by saying in a general statement to its members: “You will have been saddened, but probably not surprised, by the General Synod’s vote last Monday on women bishops”, and then more threateningly: “we will in the next few weeks seek to help PCCs think through both whether they consider themselves able to act on the new provision in the House of Bishops' declaration and, if they do, what might be involved”.  Letter from Rod Thomas to Reform members

Briefly, the background here is that individual Parochial Church Councils will have some form of opt out from oversight by a woman bishop and be allowed oversight by a male bishop.  How this will work exactly is not known but rest assured that those who take this position will be looking for a bishop who strongly takes their conservative evangelical (they have taken to referring themselves as ‘classical’ evangelicals) point of view.  

Which brings me to GAFCON…

The Global Anglican Future Conference is a meeting of conservative Anglican’s worldwide, overwhelmingly led by the churches in Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries (not South Africa), who tend to the very far right.  In 2013 the conference pledged primatial support for the Anglican Mission in England an umbrella group for British conservative evangelicals.  Dr Peter Jensen, a former Archbishop of Sydney, confirmed that this would effectively be a new province.

My deep concern is that some churches in the C of E are going to be shepherded into this new province, The Anglican Mission in England – thereby leaving the Church of England and setting up a new province in competition with it.  This has already happened in the USA with the establishment of the Anglican Church in North America.

I am an evangelical by tradition – but not an unthinking dogmatic one, unable to think beyond the ‘received’ position of the right wing.  

I don’t want to find my church voting to leave the C of E because the evangelical thought police have led them to it.

Women and Men – Equality, Marriage and Obedience

The Anglican Church is very wrapped up with this issue of the role of women – especially the current issue of women bishops. The view of the naysayers seems to stem from a view that men are set over women in the Bible. E.g. “But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God”. (1 Cor 11:3, NIV). And 1 Cor 11: 9: “neither was man created for woman, but woman for man”.

But for me the passage of real importance comes in Genesis, where the Bible says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1: 27, NIV). This right at the beginning does not say to me that God created men to be in his own image, as opposed to women, but that he crated mankind, men and women, male and female, to be in his own image. There is no distinction made that should confer a higher status, or role, on either gender. It is, however, only a little later that the Bible records: “The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’” (Gen 2: 18, NIV). My view is that this is a reflection of the human culture (a strongly patriarchal culture) that existed at the time that this passage was written, continued right through the history of the Bible, and still exists in many areas of our Western culture today, especially in the church and, it seems, in the 'higher classes' (where titles and property are still inherited through the male line). I do not think that this is the original purpose of God, and indeed Jesus himself seems to have related to women on equal terms (although he necessarily operated in the patriarchal culture of his time and only the male disciples are listed as disciples). But Jesus offered his shared inheritance to all: “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God”, (John 1: 12, KJB). So, in a time when women could expect to inherit nothing, he gave them the equal status of ‘sons’ meaning that they also could inherit the kingdom. 

And then I cannot improve on this from Wikipedia: While some scholars maintain that Paul restricted the office of deacon to men, others dispute that assertion. For example, when describing the qualities that the office holders called "deacons" must possess, Paul, wrote in I Timothy 3:11 that the gunaikas (Greek for women) "are to be worthy of respect, not malicious talkers but temperate and trustworthy in everything." Combined with the fact that Paul called Phoebe a diakonos (servant) in the church, Paul's instruction to the "women" in I Timothy may indicate that there was an order of servants in the early church that included both male and female members who were in service to the Christian community. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_%28Bible%29

There seems to me no justifiable or sensible reason for the resistance to women in leadership roles – in the church, or anywhere else.

Now when it comes to marriage there is a crux text: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything” (Eph 5: 22,23, NIV). But then, and crucially: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself” (Eph 5: 25-28, NIV).

So taking my interpretation of the Bible as conferring equal status of men and women as my starting point, I propose an interpretation of this crux text as follows: In marriage both partners have equal status. Decisions (e.g. whether to start a family) should be discussed, agreed, and made together. This should be the pattern for all of married life. However there may come a time when an important decision has to be made (e.g. one partner has a new job offer that entails moving a long way away and which has to be accepted or declined quickly) and about which it is not possible to come to a agreement. In this instance a ‘casting vote’ is given to the male partner – probably because it is the male that has the most testosterone and it is therefore the male that will react most negatively if he is not given the ‘casting vote’. However, and this is the most important point, the man must love his wife as himself, meaning that he should always exercise this casting vote in favour of the woman. This means that, should in time it be found that the wrong decision was made, the woman has no complaint, as the decision was made in her favour, and the man has no complaint as it was his decision. 

As I hope to show in a later entry, Gods priority seems to be always to be protecting relationships (all sorts of relationships) and valuing faithfulness in those relationships.

What is the New Heaven and the New Earth?

I have been influenced quite a bit by writers like NT Wright and Brian McLaren on this subject, but have developed my own understanding, I think, beyond the points that they reach.

It seems to me that God seems always to act, when he does act, using the natural processes (the laws of physics if you like) that he has set in place. So, for example, it has recently been proposed that the crossing of the Red Sea by Moses and the Israelites was achieved by the way that winds in the area blow in a certain way across the area between Egypt and Israel. I saw a programme a while ago in which the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen suggested that it could have been a tsunami caused by an earthquake on the other side of the Mediterranean that caused a complete withdrawal of the sea (during which the Israelites crossed) followed by the tidal wave, which killed the chasing Egyptians.

It was the timing of the event, happening just at the right moment, rather than the event itself, which demonstrated the miraculous. This starts me on a path of thought that suggests that a completely new earth, as believed by many from reading Revelation 21, is not the way to understand this passage: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God….” (Rev 21 v 1,2a, NIV). We are taught that Revelation is composed of fantastic imagery and is to be understood with reference to symbols that would have been understood at the time that it was written (e.g. references to the woman and the dragon, the four living creatures, etc). These descriptions are not to be taken literally but are symbols given to provide understanding of the bigger message. Why then should we understand the picture of a new heaven and new earth (ie completely new things, not containing any of the old) so literally? 

My own view is that the Bible, indeed the whole of Gods plan, is leading us forward to a time when all things are put right. That this will be, in effect, a future time when humanity, under the guidance of God and living increasingly in the way he has set out, reaches a point where ‘justice roll[s] on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream’. (Amos 5 v24, TNIV) and where the imperative on all is to ‘act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God’. (Micah 6, v8). The “world as it should be” as said by Hillary Clinton when campaigning in the last American election. So this new heaven and new earth would be this world at a point when all things are put right. This view means that there will not have to be a suspension of the natural processes to create a new thing, rather it will be a point in the future to which humanity is travelling. This future world will be marked with the signs of the ‘Kingdom of God’: justice, mercy, righteousness (when people governments, etc, do the right thing, do right by all).

And we see signs of this all the time (of the world coming together, of demonstrations of justice, mercy, and righteousness). See for example the way that the world now reacts to natural disasters (the Asian tsunami, the Haiti earthquake). Countries around the world, including Russia and China, rushed to send help to these areas. How about the end of apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission under Bishop Desmond Tutu? All signs, I believe, of the Kingdom coming closer. 

So this is what we work for. This gives us real impetus. Not ‘pie in the sky when you die’, but a very real world, this world, made better as more and more people work for it and seek it, until it comes about. This is my reading of the message of the Bible; this is what Jesus, already standing there at that point when this new heaven and new earth are in place, calls us to.

Social Mobility – What Happened?

This is my first post - something I wrote a year ago - just putting it up as a start, until I get into the swing of things....

It seems that the rate of social mobility is at a lower level now than it has been for many decades, and the Government, which has set great store by its stated aim in increasing rates of social mobility, has been found wanting. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jul/21/all-party-report-on-social-mobility. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8160052.stm. 
 

So what happened? 

My grandfather worked in a quarry. My father, son of a quarryman, passed his eleven-plus, went to Grammar School in the 1940s, and retired having risen to a senior level in the Civil Service. Now to me, that’s Social Mobility. 

What I see now is a problem with boys and their aspirations. Girls seem to be doing well (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/884405.stm) which is to be applauded. But there seems to be a problem with it being “uncool” for boys to work hard at school, to the point that boys that do are victimised or ostracised by their peers. Now this didn’t happen in the days of Grammar Schools. Those that wanted to work hard were identified and placed in separate schools using the Eleven Plus examination, and the threat of intimidation by their less diligent contemporaries did not then arise. Yes there were frequent reports of trouble between the “Secondary Modern kids” and the “Grammar kids”, but it wasn’t all the time. Many local authorities made sure that there was a good geographic separation between the Grammar and Secondary Modern schools to minimise this tension. And the proof of the system was that Grammar School kids did well, whatever their back ground. Now all are together and, I suspect, that the need to conform to a prevailing attitude that sees working hard at school as a serious deficiency, effects far more boys than it used to under the old system. 

We also hear increasingly of the problem of segregation, particularly residential segregation, affecting our communities. (Segregation being the separation of different groups of people based on ethnicity, race, religion, class or gender). This is exacerbated by the modern phenomenon of ‘white flight’. It is the most affluent in society who actually possess the power to choose where they live and they are moving out into middle class enclaves as never before. As populations become segregated by both class and religion, so does the provision of services. Healthcare and schooling are the worst affected. Again, the affluent have the most choice and many turn to private healthcare providers, and send their children through the private education system, because there is no Grammar School option and the local Comprehensive School does not provide an acceptable standard of education. 

This is just human nature at work, choosing the best option available whenever it has the means. It is the demise of the Grammar School system rather than a clear intention to ‘go private’ that is really driving this, leaving the state provision with even less of a contingent wanting to apply themselves at school, and undermining all the Government’s well meant attempts to promote social mobility.