Standards, we have got to have Standards

All right the title is jokey, the thing is the Reformed tradition has subordinate standards. Now don’t go looking in the Westminster Confession, or Belgic or the Statement of Nature, Faith and Order of the United Reformed Church for statements about Subordinate Standards, you won’t find any. The simple reason is this is self referential these are the subordinate standards. That means for all URCs that the principle Subordinate Standard for us is the Statement of Nature, Faith and Order of the United Reformed Church. So saying we don’t have standards is a bit stupid!

There is one thing every one should spot I have so far and will continue to do so, use the term Subordinate Standards. They are Subordinate to scripture. The Protestant shout of “Sola Scriptura” means that practically they never ever have been the final statement on the faith. Doctrine can and is Reformed in order to bring it better in line with Scripture. This is alive and kicking in Reformed Churches. I can remember being asked how a hymn of Kathy Galloways could get into Church of Scotland hymn book where it would struggle with its feminist images into an Anglican one. The answer was simple, the images Kathy used were Biblical, therefore the question was not “Are these images feminist?” but “Are these images Biblical?” and if they are then they trump all questions about whether things were feminist or not. Many Subordinate Statements say exactly that.

Secondly Subordinate Standards are about where the faith has been. Have a look at Reformed Presbytery of North America’s list and really go down them. You will find an odd bunch of documents. There are the standards such as: the Apostles Creed and the Westminster Confession, but then look what else is there like: Metrical Psalms and the Acts of General Assembly of the Church of Scotland betweeh specific dates! This does not look to me like a group trying to specify Doctrine it looks far more like a list of documents they tell where the group has come from. To ask who we are is nearly always to ask who we have been.

The picture I tend to come back to is of cairns, they normally come from places where the originating group for some reasons feels that it is a good idea to make a statement about how they see the faith. The reasons can be various; I am almost certain that the Congregationalists insisted on one when the URC was formed. They did not want any pesky Unitarians getting their hands on any property of the new united church and therefore having a statement was essential (the Unitarians won’t have a statement because that might meanthose troublesome Congregationalist getting their hands on the property). I think it is instructive that the requirement in the United Church of Canada to become a member is that you assent to belief in the Trinity (not the incarnation or ressurection) and this was insisted on by Congregationalists. The memories of fights in church history die hard. However it has to be said that fresh statements at the creation of a merged denomination are common. They equally occur at times of crisis, points of turmoil and not always theological, quite a few of them are political. However most of the time we plod along with those we have got and don’t pay much heed to getting new ones.

URC approach to “Substantial Agreement”

A while ago I drew two pictures of what we would mean if we required a ministers faith to be in substantial agreement with the subordinate standards. I suggested the URC’s approach was like the diagram shown here. I would suspect quite a overlap with the Basis of Union, maybe with quite a bit of agnosticism about parts of it, with other bits being inconcurrence with other Subordinate Standards which we accept. In other words the tradition is defined by having a broad scope with many overlapping subordinate standards and the requirement is that the faith falls mainly within those parameters. It does not mean that all ministers sign up to the same things exactly. Indeed although I have shown three here, there are at least another six named subordinate standards. I defy anyone to know them well enough that they can recall them at an instance and say what they agree and disagree with them let alone accept them all. Then there are the ones we don’t name but are included as “of the tradition” e.g. the Scots Confession. However what status is John Robinsons address to the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth.  You won’t find it on the internet, I might put it up at some stage if I get hold of it, but the paraphrase in the form of We limit not the Truth of God (ignore the tune) is widely sung in the URC and I have heard quoted in theological debate. There is thus a deliberate ambiguity.

Yes I use the subordinate standards, they have been an important vehicle of my initiation into Reformed Theology, but I do not use them in a sort of lets try to believe twenty impossible things before breakfast style. I usually read them through quite quickly the first time, to try to get a feel of them, what is important and how they stand. Then and this is an ongoing process I turn to bits I see as significant and try and work out why. It maybe I disagree with them, in which case I need to work out why, or it might be a phrase gives me cause for reflection, time to look deeper at other understandings. So Subordinate standards are there to say where we have been, not to determine who we are. Remember “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Sanayana) so we need methods of remembering where we have been and knowing why we have travelled to where we are.

When two traditions collide

In 1972 the URC came into being and two denominational traditions collided. There are problems today that are caused not by the positions regarding wider traditions, these were both traditions dominated by the Reformed Tradition, but by the fact that the two traditions did not bother to find out how the other tradition worked, the Presbyterian assumed that with these sort of half toned Congregationalists they would find it easy to dominate, the Congregationalists assumed that they would continue doing things as they always did with a few adjustments for Presbyterians as they had done before. The Presbyterians assumed there was a meeting two dissenting traditions of which theirs was superior  because it was articulated. The Congregationalists just assumed the way they did things was the way it was to be done noy because it was Congregational but because that was how it was.

The mistake was made in thinking that within English Congretationalism there was a named tradition that in some way is comparable to the Presbyterian tradition of the Presbyterian Church of England. This Presbyterian tradition is that of a clear dissenting tradition that stands against the mainstream. It says “We do this BECAUSE we are PRESBYTERIAN”. It is clear and defined. English Congregationalism on the whole found no need for such a tradition. Indeed may have found problems with having it. Rather with respect to tradition it relates as a dominant discourse, the tradition has no name (or rarely is named) but is referenced by how “We do it”.

I suspect that this has several roots. Firstly the obvious one, the tradition is not a single strand but a loosely woven rope of many strands that are not always compatible. It is true that the Reformed strand is the core one but there are plenty of other bits. It has to be seen as an grouping that specialises in bringing the disparate together. What is more with the Independent part, for most congregations “the tradition” is primarily the tradition of that congregation and only secondarily draws on the wider experience of other congregations and the wider church. When you talk about the wider context few members have any interest. Thus there is a need to have a way of talking and holding things together without setting people’s backs up. Names tend to carry baggage with them, so it is convenient if their is no name for anyone to object to.

Secondly in England there was an indicator name change I suspect at the end of the nineteenth Century. Before that all Congregational churches tended to be called Independent and Congregational used only after then. Traditions are conservative by nature, I suspect that there is a strong streek of people who still think of themselves as going to the Independent Chapel despite this. To add to this the change seems to coincide with the NonConformist Ascendancy in Late Victorian times. There were places in England where Congregationalism was the dominant tradition, so naturally it took the dominant form.

The result is that former English Congregationalists are not concious of their Congregational heritage but they are secure in it, assuming it is the way things ought to be done by any rational person. They have not had a name and feel no need for a name. For them the question was how the Presbyterians will alter the way we do things. It is a tradition based around absorbing not fracturing.

The former Presbyterians, as do former Congregational Church of Scotland, (I have not idea what former Churches of Christ do) find that what happens is that instead of their nice named dissenting tradition, they are faced with a nameless mesh of ideas that somehow resists their attempts to say what it should be like.  What is worse it uses the first person plural “We” of itself so your choice is to join it or dissent from belonging. This is not tradition as they know it, yet it assumes the dominant position.

Respect the Culture of the Internet

An incident still annoys me and it is probably ten years since it happened. I was studying Sociology and doing one of the how to courses, which had its bit on ethics and the need to anonymise. One guy did a bit on exploring internet culture and the thing that rankles is that he totally disregarded this advice, so much so I am sure I know and can get in touch with one of his informants.

He took a bit of conversation from a chat room. It was a short exchange between two people using nom de plumes. It looked to him as if people were using pen names and therefore he thought he did not need to anonymise. What is more the name was short and not a recognaisable name in any language. Surely this name was not a give-away. It is, it belongs to one specific person who has used it for the best part of twenty years or more. If I see that name anywhere on the internet I assume it is her who typed that. What is more the personna she portrays in the interaction is typical of her personna elsewhere where I do know her.

Lets go back to the beginning and to usenet boards and maybe even earlier. Names were limited, the maximum length was eight characters if you were lucky. So you could not have JohnSmith as your name. The challenge in those days was to find an eight letter code that was both memorable and not taken. Once found people tended to stick with it. In a very real sense they developed an ownership of that code. Towards the end of those days a six letters in a search engine would have got you most of my internet activity except work stuff (there it was five). Now you’d have to go down half a page to find something that relates to me as others use that code. However some have stuck with their name or code and some of those are very short.Therefore when people move from forum to forum you can look out for the same names and find the same people.

So despite what the social scientists like to think, the internet was never a lot of nameless geeks rampaging around having careless fun. The geeks from fairly early on established a culture that maintained identity across bulletin boards, message boards and discussion rooms. There was no policing except the more codes you used the more names and codes you had to do, sock puppetry (having multiple codes on a single discussion board, was looked down upon). In a stuation where discussion boards appeared and disappeared pretty frequently by doing so people often knew who they were talking to or at least knew what previous interaction they could recall.

Now with something like twenty years of being on the internet (alright so I was technically on one of its precursors in 1984 and I have very rarely been off since but using really started around 1992 with the present job). I can say that on the internet it is possible to fool everyone sometimes and some people all the time but it isn’t possible to fool everyone all the time. It is simply too much effort for most people to keep two or more different consistent personas going. They normally make one of two mistakes:

  1. The actually create two very similar personnas, and then some adminy type does the checking on the logs and all are revealled
  2. The go for the spectacular, with heightened stories or crusading for a particular perspective (Kierkegaard the first internet troll?). These draw attention, almost certainly as much suspicious attention as any others. Such people are either unmasked or are asked to leave as they are causing problems.

To do it successfully you must keep a low key, everyday persona who is distinct from yourself for long periods of time. Its not easy, imagine trying to write fiction that is as boring to yourself as paint drying and you get some idea of what they have to do. My suspicion is the vast majority of people who try that get bored. What is the point of being , clever if no-one knows about it and if anyone knows then your game is up and you are no longer clever.

So when you investigate social behaviour on the internet, please do not fall for the simplistic assumption that pen-names are anonymous. They may be or they may be the way that individual is most widely known.

Fair Fuel: fair to whom?

I am begining to wonder if some people understand what joined up thinking is. Low tax on fuel may not be a good idea and here is why:

  1. Oil is a limited resource, the consensus is that we are over dependent on it in the west and if the oil producing countries suddenly stop producing oil for some reason our own supplies are even more limited. We are an oil consuming; while not really an oil producing nation, Europe’s supplies are due to run out in two years and I suspect most of those are in Eastern Europe. Some oil producing countries are very volatile politically. So long term oil will run out, short term we are rather dependent on friends where perhaps we would be wise not to be. So anything that means we should use less, being more cautious about what we use may be for our own long term health. What is more my Chemistry teacher argued that oil is such a valuable substance it should not just be burnt up and that goes back to 1980s. It seems to me it is pay now or pay more later.
  2. You have heard of global warming, the theory suggests that to some extent it is related to increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The bi-product of burning oil in a combustion engine is carbon dioxide which is put out into the atmosphere. Given the effects that can cause I suspect we should be trying to minimize rather than increase the risk for the sake of the whole planet.
  3. Finally we will talk about how high oil prices makes UK industry uncompetitive with other industry. Keeping oil prices relatively low in the developed world has often been a method of enabling UK industry to out compete local industry in third world countries, sometimes the need to do this had led to quite drastic situations such as Ogoniland Oil Spill

Need I point out that if paying more for our petrol, food and other goods now, weans us off our culturally high dependency on it, it may well be good for the whole planet. It seems to me that much of the present outcry is about preserving our present lifestyle at the expense of the poor and the future. Some how that seems selfish.

From Fencing to Open Communion

This is the story of a piece of folk liturgy within the Reformed tradition that is so common that we don’t even see it as there. It is nice because it is tidy story that covers Reformed tradition from start to current day and probably is most influential in creating the Ecumenical movement

The story starts off in Geneva with John Calvin. John Calvin in quite a dramatic way fenced the table from libertines. His document Treatise against the Anabaptist and Libertines does suggest some more moderation:

“That is, that none be so hardy to approach to this holy table, which is not verily of the body of Jesus Christ, worshiping one God with all faithful men, and serving him in good lawful vocation. But where they come to make declaration  in their fourth Article, how a man ought to separate himself from all pollutions of the world to join himself to God: there they begin to deprave [turn out of the way] altogether”

Note that piety is indeed required but separation from all pollution is not.

However in Scotland under Presbyterianism and fencing the table got out of hand. In the song Cameronian Cat, you get the story of a cat found catching a mouse on the Sabbath day and the dire consequences it suffers. James Hogg, author of  “A Private Memoir and Confession of a Justified Sinner” writes about this song in his collection of songs called Jacobite Reliques:
” It is by some called The Presbyterian Cat, but generally as above; and is always sung by the wags in mockery of the great pretended strictness of the Covenanters, which is certainly, in some cases, carried to an extremity rather ludicrous.  I have heard them myself, when distributing the sacrament, formally debar from the table the king and all his ministers; all witches and warlocks; all who had committed or attempted suicide; all who played at cards and dice; all the men that had ever danced opposite to a woman, and every woman that had danced with her face toward a man; all the men who looked at their cattle or crops, and all the women who pulled green kail or scraped potatoes, on the Sabbath-day; and I have been told, that in former days they debarred all who used fanners for cleaning their oats, instead of God’s natural wind.” 

From what had been a sensible practice the barring has become as ridiculous in its strictness as the anabaptists practice that John Calvin wrote against.

Now let us move to the end of 19th Century   and to the pastor of Trinity Congregational Church Edinburgh, one John Hunter. Now Congregationalists in Scotland often struggled to find their position with respect to the strong Presbyterian culture. A Reformed church that was not Presbyterian in structure just seemed odd.

Equally at the time in Scotland there is renewed interest in written liturgy with the forming of the Church Service Society and the work towards a new Book of Common Order for the Church of Scotland. It is perhaps therefore not surprising that John Hunter who has an interest in liturgy writes his own Service book.

 

Now Reformed churches did not do much beyond basic liturgy whether Congregational or Presbyterian but John Hunter takes the prohibitions that are used by the Presbyterians and changes them around  in his address by the minister to the people. This change is described Horton Davies  as John Hunter’s “… greatest single liturgical invention” [Davies, H.(1962) Worship and Theology in England: From Newman to Martineau; Oxford University Press p232].

“Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins and are in love and charity with your neighbours and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of the God and walking henceforth in his holy ways; draw near with reverence, faith and thanksgiving, and take the Supper of the Lord to your comfort

Come to this sacred Table, not because you must, but because you may: come to testify not that you are righteous but that you sincerely love our Lord Jesus Christ and desire to be his true disciple: come not because you are strong  but because you are weak; not because you have any claim on heaven’s rewards, but because in your frailty and sin you stand in need of Heaven’s mercy and help: come not to express opinion but to seek a Presence and pray for a Spirit
And now that the supper of the Lord is spread before you, lift up your minds and hearts above all selfish fears and cares; let this bread and this wine be to you the witnesses and signs of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit, Before the throne of the Heavenly Father and the cross of the Redeemer make you humble confession of sin, consecrate you lives to Christian obedience and service and pray for strength to do and to bear the holy and blessed will of God”

What was a prohibition is now an invitation.

At most URC communion services today you will here an invitation often picking up phrases from John Hunter’s original. However, if you go back to the worship books you won’t often find it, yet time after time in the actual act of worship. What is more is the invite asks people to come, more and more it has stressed that it is Christ’s table not the table of any creed or sect (yes I am quoting but not sure where from).

This repeated use of this liturgical innovation has entered into the consciousness of the church-going public. It has become part of how we think of ourselves. I have seen it quoted in theological debate as well as during worship.  It has been picked up by lay preachers as a key element of worship. Most people’s understanding of the rubrics of communion come from this and not from the dry rules that technically govern such things. If a congregation of whatever tradition has some sort of an open table, I suspect this working in the background. The genie is out of the bottle, the tables have become open, I suspect no-one can put it back, however, much any tradition tries to apply the rules. This all because a Scot’s Congregationalist needed to find a way to differentiate his congregation from the Presbyterian around it!

What is holiness

In Leviticus 11:45 we read:

For I am the LORD who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.

”. This would not be problematic if it was not for 1 Peter 1:16 which quotes it. So at least one biblical writer thought it applied to Christians as well as Jews. But what does “Holy” mean. Initially it seems in context to have done with ritual purity but then Christians have a different understanding of what makes a person unclean see Matthew 15:11 and refers it to moral deeds done by a person. However I am going to suggest that we learn more about what being Holy entails if we see it as reflecting God. So what are the characteristics that seem to specifically define God as worshipped by Christians. I would suggest that chief amongst them is generous, faithful love.

Generous – In some ways we need to come to terms with this. God’s love is never sensible in its generosity. God does not seem to give us what we think as practical or even what we think we would like. God is frustratingly the sort of person who decides we need a diamond ring when what we were looking for was a good night out. God is capricious and overwhelming. There is not saying what he will do, but you equally can’t be sure that he won’t permit or do something. I don’t know why, but I do know that if God’s action on the cross is what Christians claim it is, then no amount of prayer not answered can balance the books. The problem is that God is does not seem to keep account and give fairly. Generosity in this sense is not about amount its about openness. So our response needs to have some of the lack of calculation that God’s response to us does.

Faithful – There is as saying that goes “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” and that really is the core of being faithful. God has a habit of turning up in the darkest of places. He rescues Israel from Egypt not in Joseph’s day, but when they were basically slave labour. He does not decide to come in person when things in Israel are going well and turns up at the palace, he comes when Israel is occupied and gets himself killed by the occupying authorities.  Now lets be clear I don’t trust God for one moment to get me out of trouble, he may, he may not; I do trust God to be there in times of trouble.

Love – forget romantic attraction, this seems to be more positive regard. Well wishing that is followed through into practical action.If you prefer unconditional regard for all of creation and all creatures with it. Another is that God enjoys creation, much as many men enjoy hobbies, the are serious about it, often  quite nerdishly so and gain satisfaction from doing it.  God does not need creation but it flows out of the very nature of God.  That is important, God’s love comes first. The challenge for the Christian is to mirror this sort of connection back at God and onto creation. As we do it towards creation we become co-creators with God, as we do it to God we honour and enjoy him.

Christmas thoughts from visits to my hairdresser

I have been to have a haircut today and for the second time on the trot my hairdresser and I got talking about Christmas. No not the “What are you doing at Christmas talk”, well we did briefly, but as she is off to Australia just after and I am just doing the usual it is neither of ours hot topic of conversation.

No what we have been talking is about excess that surrounds Christmas. Last time it was the commercials asking people to go into debt in order to get people the right present. Yes that is right, there are commercials that advertise going into debt as a positive solution! It seemed over the top to me and to her.

Today the topic was on excess drinking. A student has been knocked down and seriously injured after a “Christmas Day” event at the Students Union. You can check it out at Sheffield if you prefer but that reporting is far more sensible in my opinion than what is available at Sheffield.  The quotations marks around “Christmas Day” are deliberate since it was held on 15th December and secondly its main attraction seemed to be cut price drinks. The carol service happened on 14th for instance and I did not hear of anywhere serving turkey sandwiches cheap. Is Christmas really seen by those student age as really being about getting drunk, probably very drunk?

It makes you wonder if all our festivities at this time of year are well and truly fucked up. Maybe we would be better off in a world where the story did not end with Scrooges conversion to the Christmas Spirit and we all had to be in work on Christmas day. Maybe we could do with having to get a certificate from our cleric to say that we were active Christians in order to have Christmas day off as a religious festival. I wonder if church attendance would go up if that was the case. Give any religion three days a year, to be specified by the authority of the group (maybe we would have to specify three for atheists: maybe Human Rights Day, Workers Day and Earth Day as they don’t seem to require any religious attachment. If you want other days, than those, you have to find you religious person to certify you as practising whatever belief. It would mean the withdrawal of Christmas Day, Good Friday and Easter Monday as general bank holidays. Maybe Boxing day could be attached to New Year as in Scotland.

It sounds good in principle but I just expect the excess would be spread over to New Year.

Now I am also sure the Students Union was playing to what attracts students. Cheap alcohol has long been a tool for attracting students to use the Union and I am pretty sure that if the Union lost its license it would pretty quickly be in financial difficulties despite the money the University puts in and its other enterprises. I am pretty sure as well that the encouragement to go into further debt was because in part the economy runs on debt. We have become dependent on people behaving excessively to survive as a culture. I want to suggest our culture is sick.

I tell you we have lost two things  is desire and appreciation. What we have is gratification. The thing is that without desire, gratification looses it savour. Desire is the practice of developing  a want, of understanding the wanting in itself to be good and a proper preparation for gratification. It is about imagining what we want, thinking it through, planning for it, finding the money, denying ourselves other things so we are ready for it. This sort of practice does not diminish the gratification but increases it and can itself be pleasurable.

Appreciation is the mirror image of desire, it comes after the gratification, when you appreciate what is given not because it means a want but for what it is. It is the looking back and enjoying memories (try doing that after a night when you are blind drunk), it is knowing not that you got anything for your desire but you chose the right one and it is the feeling of no longer having to do without. Instant gratification never gives you the sense of something truly desired being gratified, you never fully appreciate the part it plays in your life unless you have truly experienced being without it. It is savouring the flavours in the drink not just knocking it back for the fussy feelings it gives you. It is about caring for something, looking after it, because it is desired even though you have it.

A Radical Welcome Eh?

The United Reformed Church has decided to run an evangelistic advertising campaign called  Radical Welcome. Now I can argue that it is a good thing on a number of issues, and I can also here the arguments about it being wrong on a whole lot of other issues but that is not the point of this posting. It has two names really the one used “Radical Welcome” which seems fairly popular with people at present and the less popular one that the campaign agency prefers of “Zero Intolerance”. Lots of people are attacking “Zero Intolerance” as a title I however want to make clear that “Radical Welcome” is not without its problems.

The problem isn’t with the word “Radical” its the word “Welcome”. What is a welcome? Is it the ability to enter a church building without hindrance and to be physically safe while in there? Is it the strength of the hand shake on the door? Is it the depths of the fellowship?

Most URCs are actually pretty good at the first two although and I hope disability campaigners will take note, we tend when it comes to disability to form fill until we are confronted with someone who is. So at my local congregation we had braille hymnbooks but until we were faced with a person who used them we did not wonder about getting a table to put them on. The number of loop systems that are not properly working until someone who is deaf and understands these things comes along, is appalling. I can still remember one guys face when a friend made the effort to get a loop system working at a church that had one that wasn’t and he heard the sermon for the first time in years. He was beaming from ear to ear. My view on disability is that all congregations should advertise someone as the person to contact, and they should be prepared to meet with a disabled person and/or their carer and discuss requirements before the person is faced with coming into worship on a Sunday. This person should normally not be clergy.

The warm handshake and the brief chat is clearly catered for in most URCs. I mean that seriously, here is the description of the welcome given at the first Mystery Worshipper Report I found today on Ship of Fools

“The welcome was amazing. I was greeted at the front entrance by a couple, who both shook my hand. Then, as I entered the church, three other people welcome me. I received the relevant service sheet, Bible and hymn book. One of them introduced herself as Eunice, the church secretary. I sat down near the middle of the church, and three more people came up to me, one by one, to say hello and welcome. The minister also came over and introduced herself. They even showed me where the coffee hatch was, although it wouldn’t be open until after the service.”

Most URC reports are in that style. As far as initial welcome is concerned we largely have it sussed.


What is more most URCs have had it drummed into them that they must be welcoming, it really has been dinned in in the last twenty years. However apart from the tick box approach to equal access and the initial welcome,  most members of the congregation judge a church to be welcoming by the warmth of the fellowship they experience.


The problem is that very cliquey churches where nobody could possibly join are also often places of very warm fellowship for those that belong to the clique. In such congregations the switch from “I am welcomed” to “We are welcoming” happens unnoticed. However this is poor evidence. Are they equally welcoming to the parents of the child with Aspbergers who can’t sit quiet during the service? Are they as welcoming to the person who is twenty years younger than they are or do they think “he will be off very quickly to join a church where there are more young member and modern music”. That sort of thought can become a self fulfilling prophecy and when the next person comes in in that age bracket then there is even less reason to be welcoming as “she will be off like the rest”.  Or what about the person who nips out between worship and coffee to have a cigarette? The person who comes in tatty clothes or smells? Yes we greet them at the door but hold a conversation with them when our friends are around?


No I am not being pious, I know I am as guilty as the rest of doing this, it is always easier to talk to people we know than to those we don’t. I still have to make myself do it. It is also easier to talk to people we think of like us. It is far easier for many churches to accept a middle class gay couple in a long term relationship, than to accept the young married couple with a group of noisy children who use colourful language in discipling them. 


What is more, if I only deal with people I know, then to some extent I am dealing with a known quantity, I like the familiar. The incorporation of somebody new into the community does not just mean change for them, it means change for us, and what is more unpredictable change. It takes real discipline to try and implement a consistent interest in people who are on the edge of your friendship group whether congregation or other. Even if you start from the supposition that variety makes for richness there is still the day when richness isn’t what you want, or the a friends has pressing needs.


That means we need to look further into our hearts that we think. The welcome we really needs to have, is about meeting the person as that person. Not giving them a hand shake at the door then ignoring them, not ask them through to coffee the first week then expecting them to mix with their own friends from then on and leave us to talk to ours. It is also the real challenge of realising that some of them has a profound ability by our standards to mess things up and still managing to care for them without saying it is fine to mess things up. It is also the ability to see the love and care that so many of them demonstrate despite the mess they are in.


Communities that attempt to do that, I believe are struggling to become Christ like, but that isn’t the work of five minutes, the human capacity to mess it up is huge. All I hope is by my death I have learnt slightly more of how to do that than I do now, I can only learn that from trying to participate in such communities not from all the theory books. This sort of knowledge is heart knowledge and the head can be totally sorted and the heart in totally the wrong place.


There is a problem though, the URC has consistently told its congregations that they must be more welcoming. The congregations have responded, they have developed a good initial welcome and dealt with a lot of discrimination issues. Members also find the local fellowship welcoming particularly if it has familiar faces that you see week in week out. So when they are asked to be welcoming they tick the box. Few, very few are going to admit there is something missing and those that do, know they are unwelcome for saying so.

The problem is that we need a conversion, that is us in the church need it, not those outside, and I worry that with all this talk of welcome we might just miss how radical the real task is.

From where does good self image come?

I am on holiday staying with close friends, last Sunday morning my friend applied for a job working with alcohol and drug abusers. Her reason for taking it rather than staying with a current job was partly pay, although it is even shorter term than her current one, partly status as it is ‘proper’ social work  although it is no more secure than her current job (both have short term contracts) and that means that her clients have to see her.

I challenged her on this, my dealings with addicts suggest that it takes lots of self discipline to stay off what you are addicted to. That it is a niggle that wears away at a person. She then made the comment that for most addicts accessing services meant they had to acknowledge their addiction and to do this was to undermine their already poor self esteem. This is wronger than a wrong thing that is mistaken (Erin:Ship-of-fools).

The thing is there are two things that build real self esteem in my book and the first has to come first. According to Jurgen Wolff, Brian Tracy when stuck in the desert with a friends and a broken down landrover, faced the first. That is if life is to be worthwhile, it is up to us to take responsibility for what is going on in it at the moment.  Not seek to blame but in the same way a treasurer is responsible for a clubs money. Circumstances can be someone-else’s fault and nearly always we are co-creators of them with others, but on the whole the finding of blame is pretty pointless. Rather the question that is useful is “What am I going to do about it?” Doing something to try and improve the situation, in Brian Tracy’s case help fix the Landrover, is the crucial step. It changes one from victim to active player. There is no guarantee of success but you have made failure less likely.

It is recorded that most addicts don’t believe they are addicted. They believe they can give it up at any time and because they never try they never fail at that! The fact that the addiction is controlling more and more of their lives is not taken into consideration. They will justify doing it, even telling themselves lies. I have seen it, it is not pretty. Keeping the addiction going becomes a method to avoid dealing with other things. It eventually becomes the overarching organising principle of their lives and in doing so it saps their self esteem. Until someone in this situation faces up to the fact that they are responsible for their lives including their addiction nothing will change. So much as my friend may like to spare them that step until they do, there is no future and there will be no growth in self esteem.

The second part is altogether pleasanter and that is to find a non-judgemental accountable community. This is difficult, I suspect that for at least the first few years the person needs daily contact with the community. That is asking a lot of any group of people.  It certainly isn’t a one off thing. I suspect that it is not accidental that where such communities have existed they have had religious overtones (from Alcoholics Anonymous “higher power” to Evangelical Christian missions in Russia). The real good news as far as alcoholics go, is that when they are going sober, they often are some of the best and most skilled people at doing this. I do not know whether this is the case for drug users. I do know that other groups such as writers groups and so forth can form a similar function for parts of a persons life.

I suspect that for a few individuals of exceptional character the second may not be necessary, but it certainly eases the struggle. Unfortunately if the second happens without the first you can well end up supporting someone’s self delusion. If that is addiction that could well make the situation worse.

Please note I am not saying addiction is solely a self-esteem issue, it isn’t. It has many other facets, not least of which is craving, which is almost certainly due to brain chemistry and is very unlike other desires in that it is very close to compulsive.

Mission in Urban Priority Areas (personal reflection)

I am tired after a hard week in work, it has been frustrating checking the fine details of papers to be submitted to journals and by 5:30 p.m. I am exhausted. All I really want to do is go home to my warm flat and relax with a glass of wine and a book but I need to shop for the weekend still, so that I can spend tomorrow working on my thesis.

So I set out and head to the supermarket. In doing so I walk down a major road, with ice still on the pavement from the snowfall about a week ago, past a few equally weary workers who trudge up the hill to where they live. By doing this I walk through a small area of with quite a high level of social deprivation. However although there are lights on in my home church, I see people come out of car park carrying large black cases which have the outline of brass instruments. there is Samba drums coming from the local community centre, but when passing the high-rise flats not a single creature stirs, not even the overfed pigeons. Nearby is the old Methodist Church that the Jesus Army have taken over and are redeveloping as a Jesus Centre.

On the underpass to the supermarket sits Mike, he has his battered blue parker hunched around his thin body, his black eyes sharp in his thin face, and before him sits his cap, waiting for any spare change the straggling passers by might put in. I stop and ask if he is getting on and if he wants anything to eat. In doing so I learn he is seven quid short of his B&B money for the night having ‘slept’ rough the previous night.

As I go to buy him his egg sandwich and a chocolate milk shake I ponder what to do. It is clear to me that tonight of all nights nobody should be sleeping rough. I am not sure that ringing emergency accommodation has any point even if I knew the number, which I don’t. I know Mike is in contact with the authorities at least for the last six months. I also have never seen him clearly drunk or under the influence, I know he is ex-services and he smokes. I also know that most of the places I could send him during the day (or better still go with him to) are shut. In the end I give him the £7, he offers to repay, I reject saying that he should do something for himself with any extra.

It takes another eight months, a trip to hospital with serious illness before Mike is housed. His first plan on being housed was to go and help at local charity. Now I know I did not fix anything, I maybe gave Mike a bit more comfortable existence for twenty four hours but that is it. I may even have allowed him to get drugs that were the cause of his homelessness in the first place. I don’t know. I do know that one of the problems of trying to help people like Mike, and there are plenty, different stories but similar difficult circumstances, is the fact that they live chaotic lives.

Expect them at church dressed in clean clothes at 11:00 a.m. on Sunday, and then to behave politely is just not reasonable. I am afraid the chance of getting them to a church is negligible. Mike was invited at least three or four times including people willing to walk in with him, to a community breakfast at my church less than half a mile away, he never came let alone to Sunday worship with many middle class people.

The problem is that in many ways church has to be twenty-four seven in these communities, it is no good expecting them to come when church is open, church needs to be open when they come. What is more they often need more support and effort at least initially than your average middle class person. In order to even start to comprehend the faith they will need a small affirmative accounting community. A place where they are helped to tackle the chaotic forces that rule their lives.

Yet I know equally the high cost of trying to do such work. I have lost count/track of the cases of burn out when people have tried. These were people of faith, why else would they do it. Even to live your life in close proximity to these people (by that I do not live in the area, I have done that for years and it can be done with very little contact, but actually living so you shop at their shops, socialise where they socialise) is extremely draining work.You are faced with an overwhelming need that could drain your spirit and your finances very single day.

I have come too a conclusion that really only two groups have the ability to deal with such a challenge. On the one hand there are the Roman Catholic orders who specialise in living alongside the marginalised. They manage to do it, partly because they have systems that watch peoples reserves, because quite often the brothers and sisters who do this have as much money as those they help (i.e. none) and because you normally do this as a community.

The second group are from the other end of the spectrum and are groups like the Jesus Army, again the do it by living in community, actually by quite strong discipleship and again by having a communal rather than an individual purse. The difference is that people from the area can join the Jesus Army where as the Roman Catholic brothers and sisters would expect people to join the local RC church and are not looking for others to have a vocation to their order. In some ways this makes the Jesus Army more vulnerable to the stresses of the people around them.

Which of the two is best?

Well the Roman Catholic has the advantage of not expecting people who want to be involved locally to make the commitment the brothers and sisters have made. The supply of people for the presence is not from the locality and what they want is to create a worshipping community around them that will be part of the Roman Catholic Church. The problem is that as soon as you start to help people in these very dire circumstances in a way that really does challenge the chaos, then they normally start rising up the social ladder and quite often end up moving out of the area. So you have an continual mission situation with the need for constant support.

With the Jesus Army approach you actually do develop a local community. There are people from the neighbourhood and they tend to stay because the amount they have invested in the Jesus Army, i.e. housing, job and friendship means that leaving is very difficult. What should the Jesus Army do for people who want to leave. They may well have come in with nothing, been given shelter and then experience of employment by the Jesus Army. If that person leaves and the Jesus Army gives them nothing then that person is destitute again and open to fresh forces of chaos. However given the amount of support the Jesus Army gives such people why should it be expected to support them still when they no longer want to belong?

It seems to me both are flawed but both work better in these circumstances than standard church model as practised by many churches in this country. Getting the balance right, for there to be a church which really is open to the community will always be extremely tough.