British Evo's and the shape of national life

An article recently published in Prospect magazine under the header The Marshall Plan, has a lot in it that seems well noted and there's a degree of sympathy in the writing, allowing for it to transcend being simply a 'hit piece'. As someone who has commented on allied matters on this very blog over the years, it is interesting to see some lacunae of mine closed with further information. I've been on the edge of the kind of Evangelical-Charismatic Christianity examined in the article most of my adult life. So I do recognise the truths in this description.

I think there are two things I want to pick up from this article. One is to note the way that the narratives of this particular brand of Christianity are pulled to the political right (and need not be). The other is to consider how (or maybe if) it can be called more fully into a better force for the good of the "least and the lost" to borrow a phrase that is popular -ish in such circles. 

I'll pick some quotes from the article to comment on.

The first one is a 'credit where credit is due' sort of thing. "...he is worth around £800m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List—Marshall lives relatively modestly." And that is good to learn. Though 'relatively modestly' is an elastic concept, I don't doubt that it involves not retaining all his income for himself and his family and investments. I do think that there are wealthy evangelicals who do indeed take seriously biblical teaching about modesty and almsgiving.

The next quote is both to affirm and to question. "Marshall is worried by the displacement of the Christian ethic in society. He has said that “traditional British liberalism rests on the Judeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures... Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness” that is ultimately the consequence of the sins of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. On this view, we are all sinners, redeemed only by Christ’s death for us, so anything we have is an undeserved gift from God. What we do with our time, money and talents is a response to what God has done for us. This outlook reminds me of what Jesus said to his disciples in Luke 12:48: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”

I think that I recognise this from my years of insider acquaintance with this brand of Christian discipleship. Both the worry about 'liberalism' and the core focus on fallenness of humanity (it's in most evangelical bases of faith). I also recognise -with sympathy and gladness- the sense of responsibility and humility that this engenders. This fruit is Evangelical Christianity at its best. That said, I would want to do a bit more work with the fretting about 'liberalism' and the heavy lifting it is doing in a culture wars /moral panic sort of way. I'd also want to think more about the way that the fall narrative is functioning and whether it is a fair theological move.

I pick up comment on the phrase "Judeo-Christian" further down the article. It's also important to pick up the issue of the work that the Fall is pressed into ideologically.

Marshall is quoted as saying in 2012: “I am a committed Church of England Christian, I believe we are all made in God’s image, that we all have gifts and that education is the key to realising our potential.” And again, I want to affirm something of that: making a starting point with being made in God's image and recognising human giftedness. I think that this might not be doing all the work it should, however, in this kind of world view.

Politically speaking it is interesting to learnt that "he co-edited The Orange Book, which was a plea for a return to the core liberal philosophies of choice and freedom" This is important, I think, because it already indicates a capture by right-wing talking points and I think is probably symptomatic of a lack of rigour in theological thinking. The Orange Book was was enabled the LibDems, essentially, to go into coalition with David Cameron's conservative government in 2010 (was it?) enabling support for austerity politics and economics.

 Of great concern to me is to read the following. 

Marshall invested £10m in GB News, taking over as interim chair when Andrew Neil—who had been the founding chairman—jumped ship. The following year, with the station in financial and technical chaos, Marshall stepped in with a further multi-million-pound investment and gained, with others, significant control of the company. Most of the rest is owned by Legatum Ventures, a private equity firm and cousin of the right-wing Legatum Institute, 

This is recent history and as such is concerning in that it may indicate a trajectory more fully into the political right, if not fascism -at least that form of paternalistic and individualistic moralism that gave cover for some Christians in the 1930s to support Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. I think that some sentences from later in the article raise similar concern: 

Marshall’s latest reform project is the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (the acronym serving as a second take on the Ark theme). Its glitzy inaugural conference, attended by 1,500 people last November, culminated with a keynote speech from Jordan Peterson in the O2. This Arc is crewed by right-wing politicians, activists and influencers, whose aim is to repair what their research describes as “the fraying of the social fabric”. While not explicitly religious, it is clear that faith—in its Judeo-Christian expression—underpins the enterprise. Once again, Legatum is providing finance and infrastructure for the movement

Fascism, of course, won't arrive saying "Look, we think Mussolini got a bunch of stuff right". No, it's going to talk about traditional values, citizenship and it's going to pick up and amplify fears about the fraying of the social fabric and suggesting that we need to discipline people for their own good. -Without, of course, noting that the fraying is pretty much a direct result of the financial shenanigans let loose by 40 years of financialisation, privatisation etc which is driven by these same Old-school-Tie-ers making millions in usury, derivatives and hedge funds and eroding the safety nets and protections for the many vulnerable and precarious members of society. No, (they think): better redirect concern to personal morality and culture-wars and in doing so find a way to ridicule and blame those most concerned and who have ideas to address the inequalities that fray the fabric. (I note that Pickett and Wilkinson's thesis, based in good research, about inequality and worse social outcomes remains a standing rebuke to right-wing political postures -somehow Marshall et al manage to 'miss' that addressing this societally would actually help with a lot of the fraying they claim they are fretting about).

But of course, the blind spot about what works is probably rooted in a blind spot shared by background. 

"Culturally, Holy Trinity is rooted in the public school system and the ethos of English exceptionalism. Several of the clergy who have led the church into its current dominant position are Old Etonians, like Welby, and have been friends since meeting at Cambridge in the 1970s." 

And unfortunately, the Christianity that is sincerely and wholeheartedly taken up by these folk is so focused on individual salvation and evangelism that it cannot see the social except very blurrily. Their position in large part depends on not knowing the social. I know, because I've been there -not as public school product but by trying to be part of the Christian Union at university and beyond that, being in circles which were often significantly influenced and led by the public school Evangelical networks. These networks are very suspicious of people who don't 'fit' unless they have done the necessary gymnastics to pass soundness tests and the 'one of us' social-fit tests. This resonates with what is said later on in the article: "The view from Brompton Road is that the Church is divided between those who champion the true faith and those who do not, and that God is blessing the faithful." -Interestingly, the latter is a precarious proof, for many biblically aware Christians know that persecution is rather to be expected for being faithful. They then look at themselves and wonder why that's not the case, and wanting to justify themselves they find tiny little frictions where people disagree or push back against them and try to make out that this is persecution -so "See! We are the faithful". Never mind that much of the time they bring these 'persecutions' on themselves by being insensitive, not reading the room, arrogant and even bullying. It's a 'heads we win, tails you lose' sort of situation. See below in the quotation where Michael Gove is mentioned, it ends with 'signs that God is at work'. So heads -we are blessed by God and tails -we are persecuted, so we know God is at work with us which is also a blessing.

I'm also a bit suspicious of the work that the term "Judeo-Christian" is doing in this discourse. I think that the term is probably meant to capture something that is judged to be common to the two religious traditions, and the Hebrew scriptures and particularly the 10 Commandments probably lies at the bottom of that. "Judeo-Christian" is probably code for the 10 Commandments for the most part. I think too that for those in power, the more individualist morality of the commandments is congenial. What is omitted in this framing is the more social dimensions and redistributive elements as well as the ban on usury -charging interest, for example.

In relation to redistributive strands of the Torah, the vision is clearly of levelling, preventing the accumulation of power through the accumulation of wealth, enjoining a duty of the better-off to care in practical terms for the less well-off and so forth. To this end the laws of Sabbath and jubilee envisage a return of land acquired to the original holders, this would have had the effect of re-distributing wealth and re-levelling the playing field -by giving all families access to means of production- as well as putting back the accumulation of wealth and power to more equal terms. I find it funny-sad that the spirit of these laws is rarely invoked in evangelical Christian discourse about social and economic relationships and governance while far more marginal and dubious laws are made shibboleths for orthodoxy. 

I'd like evangelicals to consider the example of John Wesley who supposedly had an annual income of £28 when he started out and although his income rose during his life, he still lived on £28 pa and gave the rest away (hat tip to Howard Snyder, I think it was this book that first tipped me off about Wesley and money: New Wineskins ).

Going now to banning the charging interest as part of the actual Judeo-Christian traditions (and recall that it was only in the medieval period that usury was redefined by the Church as 'excessive interest'). This alone should give pause to many of the bank-roll-ers of western evangelical endeavours. It seems from this article that many of them are deep in the practices that the Judeo-Christian laws against usury are arguably meant to disallow or curtail. These would include the idea of making money from money rather than from production or offering goods or services. Money should 'stand for' actual goods and services and the licensed gambling in money markets, derivatives and the like should be very much looked at askance by inheritors of the Judeo-Christian traditions. It's salutary to read David Bentley-Hart's Jacobin article in relation to this.

Whatever we might make of wealth and usury in relation to modern life, I think we who claim to be Christians should be wary of straying too far from the concern for the perils of wealth accumulation and exploitative means for doing that. Since much of the political right wing is essentially about defending wealth accumulation and has shown itself extremely sanguine about unjust and exploitative practices which enable it, I think that as Christians we should be very wary, at peril of our souls, of supporting the political right.

Of course, we should look at the theological justification for supporting right-wing political-economics. This is where the prioritisation of the Fall comes in. The line of thinking takes greed and selfishness as givens in human affairs and these are taken to be signs that "Since the fall, the whole of humankind is sinful and guilty..." (UCCF Doctrinal Basis) and the harnessing of these fallen characteristics by the theory of free-market capitalism is taken to be a happy mitigation in a 'fallen world'. Never mind that the theory is a crock and the actual results of following that theory tend towards accumulation of wealth and power on the basis of injustice and exploitation. The point of the correlation being made is to provide cover for the mammonists to continue serving Mammon and to head-off measures that might substantially restrict that service or seek to make a more just and fair social settlement in relation to the common goods that God has bestowed upon the earth. 

"Don't resist this greed, make it work for the common good" is what they say, in effect -ignoring that the Market doesn't, in fact, do that. In fact, it's made into a way to avoid doing justice and loving mercy (Micah 6:8) -matters which would overwhelmingly benefit the poorer, the marginalised, the least. These are in such dire straights because of the injustice and lack of mercy in the political economy of the West. Shouldn't we rather be taking the idea of the Fall to mean that we need to set up systems to disable greed from producing such disparities, misery and unfairness? Shouldn't we rather follow the example of the Torah in putting in place measures to capture ill-gotten gains for re-distribution back to the society which actually enables the wealth so captured? -Especially to the poor and vulnerable who are often those exploited and extorted of their just rewards. That we are all 'undeserving' theologically, does not mean that those who are defrauded should continue to endure the fraud while the perpetrators get away with it.

And, let's also note that 'bearing false witness against your neighbour' covers maintaining falsehoods that prop up a system of extraction from the most powerless of our neighbours. That's a Judeo-Christian principle for you but the big money uses its muscle to commission think tanks to sow seeds of doubt about markets, inequality (and don't forget climate change) which is already impoverishing and immiserating many globally. I note 'against' in that commandment; a special emphasis on the harms that such falsity brings about?

"The resentment industry"

Germane to that prior observation, is this following quote which I have also seen and heard echoes of among Evangelicals I have been in fellowship with.

"He believes that large parts of the leadership of the Church have fallen captive to what his friend Gove, speaking in a broader context, has called “the resentment industry”. But in evangelical theology, attacks—whether from outside or inside the church—are to be expected. In fact, they are a sign that God is at work."

Let's notice what work Gove's rhetoric is doing and hiding: he doesn't argue but merely labels something as 'resentment'. By that he seems (in common with many on the political right) to imply that people noticing wealth and privilege and seeking ways to address the injustices produced and the lack of mercy involved, are acting from resentment. It's not a new accusation: I heard the like back in the Thatcher era to disparage the idea of taxing the rich at higher rates. In Gove's discourse "resentment" is a framing of legitimate concerns about inequality to imply they are not legitimate and the sour grapes of the losers -as if it was a 'fair competition' in the first place rather than the rigged 'game' where "to those who have, more will be given". A better word than 'resentment' might be 'fairness'. And once we've noted that, let's note too, that there might be actual resentments, and that they might be well deserved pointing to a need for redress. I may resent someone having stolen from me, disparaging the resentment doesn't make the injustice go away. It also obscures the possibility that a resentment might be just: you've had your efforts and fruits of your labour misappropriated by others through bullying tactics or systemic discrimination -that would be just cause for resentment, would it not?

So, there's no real reason to think that church leaders (which?) have fallen to the "resentment industry" -rather those that champion the poor and social justice are simply doing two things. One is to attempt to apply the teaching of Jesus and Torah in a world of system-built inequalities. The myth being constructed behind this word in Gove's discourse is that church leaders should be pushing the lines 'rich man in his castle/ The poor man at his gate/ God made them high and lowly/ And ordered their estate'. -A position which gives a free pass to the immoral means by which wealth and power were obtained and maintained. A position which elevates the expediency of the powerless to an eternal virtue -disallowing redress even when it is legally and strategically possible.

The second thing is to bring the truths about how inequality and poverty is formed and maintained in a world that is really pretty abundant. The actual resentment, it seems to me, is that of the rich at having their self-congratulatory narratives challenged and shredded by those they consider less worthy than themselves. The claim of those church leaders that Gove so dislikes is that the actual 'resentment industry' -more properly designated as movements for social and environmental justice- are a sign that God is at work: anointing people to bring good news to the poor, sight to the blind, setting prisoners free ...

British evangelicalism going forward

I hope that Graystone is right when he writes the following.

Despite all this, we’re not likely to see the emergence of a religious right in Britain comparable with the evangelical movement in the US any time soon. The historic social liberalism of the Church of England means the identification between evangelicals and the political right is nowhere near as potent. In the forthcoming UK general election, very few politicians will campaign on issues such as abortion rights, and few British pastors would dare to instruct their flocks how to vote.

 I think that in many ways this is correct. I hope it is right that British evangelicalism may resist the capture that we see in much of USAmerican evangelicalism. However, I'm not quite as sanguine about it as Graystone seems to be. There is clearly money being deployed from the USA to influence things on this side of the Atlantic. It's worrying that MP Steve Baker, a member of an evangelical church in High Wycombe, has become meshed in with climate denialist and oil-extraction interests.

British evangelicalism has been increasingly influenced by USAmerican evangelicalism through the greater output of books, songs, and other media products. Many of them are innocuous in themselves but by building brand loyalty and on-selling techniques, enable exposure over time to more noxious content veiled as Christian but in fact betraying the spirit of Christ and the church of the first centuries in relation to wealth and power and keeping faith with the spirit of the parable of the good Samaritan.

The veiling is accomplished through bringing to the fore less weighty matters with a particular spin on application and pushing them in such a way as, over time, to make them central in the consciousness of evangelicals to the point where the position so named can be activated without dissonance to what should be central matters of faith expression like compassion, mercy, neighbour-love and so forth. Abortion is a good example. 

I suspect that the abortive Franklyn Graham evangelistic campaign which was being planned in 2018-19 (if memory serves aright) was less an evangelistic campaign (and let's face it, the format is largely unsuccessful and a waste of money and effort, be honest; it's more a test of orthodoxy than a means to win hearts and minds of unbelievers) than a means to network British evangelical leaders with a significant chunk of USAmerican-based right wing pressure-groupees. I resent that our faith and notions of fellowship are being viewed as social capital for recruitment to causes that betray the spirit of Christ.

I think British evangelicals are not sufficiently aware and wary of these overtures and avenues of capturing the evangelical mind and I fear we may have reached a tipping point. In part this tipping point is because there are numbers of ex-evangelicals who have left evangelical churches or Christian corporate practice altogether and the drivers of the exodus are the increasingly uncharitable, insensitive, unnuanced teaching they are hearing, the bullying and abuse they experience and see and the failure of large evangelical churches to be able to resource spiritual growth beyond a certain point (so people leave for more spiritually nourishing churches). At this point my evidence is experiential based on the number of people I interact with who report having been evangelical at some point but left for the kinds of reasons implied by what I've just mentioned. I visit churches where people tell me this, I interact with students in ministerial training who have this in their personal history. There are a lot of ex-evos out there.

Philanthropy, power and democracy

As I was thinking about this article, I found myself considering Jesus' words in the gospels to 'sell all you have and give to the poor'. This because 'give to the poor' is a different dynamic to 'set up a charity to do things for the poor', though at first it might seem like they are outworkings of the same thing. The latter is actually a form of paternalism while the former actually puts the poor in charge of how they use the money given to them. The latter is usually based on a fear on the part of the donor that the poor will spend it frivolously or harmfully, and so a means to give is devised that prevents that but leaves the donor in charge and often breeds resentment. We should bear in mind that there is research to indicate that putting the poor in charge of their own affairs is actually better in general terms. This relates to the issue of philanthropy more generally. Philanthropists mostly give money for pet projects but do not open up a democratic door into the donation and use processes. "Nothing about us without us" should apply to receipt of charity and is generally regarded as good practice in third sector work while paternalism is rightly frowned upon. I note also that the same power-divesting dynamic is at work when Jesus sends his disciples ahead of him to the villages and towns around and effectively tells the disciples (12 at one point and 70 or 72 at another) to rely on the hospitality of those they are proclaiming to, to be vulnerable to their welcome. 

The other dimension of this is trickier for many of us which is the 'Sell all you have' bit. This is reinforced by the example of the church in Acts where people sold stuff and shared the proceeds with the church. It's also clear in the background of the epistles that there was quite a lot of looking after the poor going on.

At the very least, I think we should consider what it would look like to encourage discipleship built on John Wesley's example, mentioned above where the money is genuinely given away or at least put into democratically-run trusts like Marlene Engelhorn did with her inheritance.

My suggestion for Marshall, his fellow evangelical Old Etonians and their networks is to decide what the equivalent of Wesley's £28 per annum is and give away everything in excess -preferably by giving it over to citizens' assembly-like trusts (Christian or otherwise) drawn from the ranks of those likely to be beneficiaries. This latter because other research indicates that simply giving aid directly to the homeless or the poor results in better use of the money or assets. It may be that Marshall is doing this. However, I get the impression that his lifestyle far exceeds what could be afforded on a median-sort-of income which might be a better starting point for consideration. I would commend taking in the insights of limitarianism as a starting point.

Fall theology as ideology

As mentioned above, Marshall is quoted: “traditional British liberalism rests on the Judeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures... Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness”.

Ironically, as I mentioned above, the "sense of fallenness" has been selective: happy to see it in political opponents of mammonism but giving a pass to those benefiting from the channels of wealth accumulation and retention which are normally the flip side of misappropriation, wage-theft, and the use of power to suppress claims for just reward or fair shares. As long as the latter is dressed up with a veneer of legality, it is ignored. The Hebrew prophets and many a psalm would disagree that this is moral.

I guess that the "arrogance of the Enlightenment" is meant to be the idea that 'man (sic) is the measure of all things' and/or that reason is somehow not subject to fallenness. In the case of the latter, I think that this is in need of more nuance. Reason is properly a collective rather than individual matter, Enlightenment reason is the idea that some version of peer review will over time solve problems and come to better and better understandings of things -but the key is not to allow the formation of pockets of group-think, epistemic privilege or shared prejudice. I agree that probably considering that 'man is the measure' is a problem but mainly because it cuts us loose from our (God-given) ecological roots and embeddedness. In practice it also makes wealthy white males the actual measure of all things and without a sense of accountability (to God, ultimately) ends up justifying genocide, ecocide, misogyny, racism and so forth -basically treating other humans as lesser and forming systems of life and habits that sustain the lessening of these others. In Christian terms, this is neglect of love, justice and mercy -the weightier matters of the Law.

 A sense of fallenness would seek a Tower of Babel resolution -that is to decentralise power. It would put in place robust means to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power (and recognise that the latter is often a product of the former) or mechanisms for the removal of excess wealth and redeploying back into the ecosystems and social networks that enabled it to be created in the first place. And the means and mechanisms would themselves be scrutinised democratically.

Beware the Liberalism my son...

It's worth noting that the term is used in a weasely manner. 'Liberalism' can be a kind of way of thinking about politics, human rights, government and in the quotes above that is to the fore. However, we should notice that for evangelicals it is more frequently a boo-word designating churches and theologians who go 'too far' in adapting Christian thought to the culture and times. So we should be aware of this double-entendre when hearing evangelicals speaking. Part of what is being done often is activating the framing which disposes evangelical hearers well-trained in their tradition to put the concepts or ideas into the mental rubbish bin -and by association, the people who use the concepts and ideas. It is a logical fallacy but since it rarely reaches conscious thought, it is not seen as such and it then becomes simply a part of the outlook.

It's actually more a felt thing most of the time and because it's not fully conscious it is deployed inconsistently and hypocritically quite a lot.

In practice 'liberals' are Christians who might not express Christian ideas in vocabulary that fits the evangelical norm (this despite a professed desire to not speak or write 'Christianese'). One is becoming liberal if (too many and too hard) questions are asked about received ideas in the evangelical traditions -this despite setting up enquirers' processes which claim that any question is allowed; at some point one must put up or shut up.  Liberals are people who "don't accept the bible as God's word" this is a lie in many cases. I've come across many people who are looked at askance or written off by evangelicals who take the bible with utmost seriousness as an artefact which conveys to them the voice of God. And because thy take it seriously, they find they have to think about what kind of communication it offers, how to think around the inconsistencies it has in it and what those differences one part to another mean for how we need to read and receive it as God's word. (And, btw, never mind that the Word of God is theologically speaking, Christ primarily). Too often those who don't treat the bible as a kind of textbook are regarded as liberals and metaphorically booed. These 'liberals' are people who are often putting The Quiet Time into practice, and if you enquire of many of their evangelical detractors -these latter are often only reading scripture when they attend church or a bible study and relying on others to tell them stuff rather than hearing God for themselves in scripture.

Evangelicals may agree that "God has yet more light to break out of His Word", but all too often they are discouraged (both by authority figures and from internalised self-censorship) from actually listening to discern whether this might be so.

Explicit link to article: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/65415/the-marshall-plan-paul-marshall-gb-news

Further reading: https://jacobin.com/2024/03/christianity-poor-debt-jesus-moses-wealth/   

https://discipleshipresearch.com/2017/02/millennials-bible-readers-or-bible-admirers/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13644-013-0109-2

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2021/04/evangelicals-and-their-politics-dispatches-from-the-field/ 

"Here again we see that more Bible reading is positively related with higher scores on the liberal policy views scale." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235410637_Reading_the_Bible_in_America_The_Moral_and_Political_Attitude_Effect

Comment on evangelical recent history in USA by Barbara Bass Butler.

Foundation, Empire -and the mission of the church

 I've been watching the TV series 'Foundation'. I read the books about 50 years ago (I know!) but scarcely now remember anything but an outline and some character names. A lot has happened in my life since I read the series and now watch it adapted to television. For one thing, I committed my ways to Christ and have a role which involves official ministry in the church's mission.

In the intervening years, a constant companion for me has been concern for ecology, for creation. Latterly this has become a more urgent concern and I have realised that we have collectively run out of time. We are living on borrowed time. In fact, some of us, globally speaking, are not even living on borrowed time. All through my adult life I have unconsciously (I now realise) assumed that we would have time, that there was time to persuade and to change and to head off the worst. That assumption, that naive hope, has now been stripped from me.

The situation of living on borrowed time  needs to be spelled out in greater detail. And this is where the connection in my mind with Hari Seldon and Foundation starts to kick in. In Foundation, the scenario is that the Empire is about to decline and collapse, giving way to a dark age, an age of vast human suffering and misery. For me that scenario has clicked with the likely paths our own current civilisation seems to be on. Whatever happens now, some global warming is 'baked in' and we have already seen the kinds of effects it is having. The prospect is that such effects will continue and worsen. How much worse is unknown. 

It seems likely that parts of the earth will become uninhabitable for humans. It seems that there will be greater extremes of weather, including drought and storms. It is inevitable that coastal and low-lying cities like London will have to find ways to cope with encroachment of tides or be abandoned in part or wholly. The clear implications of that basket of effects will be population movements, migration. We should also reckon on food supplies becoming erratic as land becomes unsuitable for cultivation. This "erratic" food supply will, as usual, be dire for the most vulnerable and stressful for those who are usually less vulnerable. More migration. These kinds of stresses in the past have exacerbated intercommunal and international tensions. We might be unsurprised to see wars or at least armed 'incidents' and also insurgencies, civil disorder and revolutions.

So, in many ways, it wouldn't be unfair to call what we are embarked upon, a "dark age". An age when more and more people die, suffer loss, are undernourished, unhoused and displaced, fall into servitude, are brutalised, exploited and traumatised.

None of this is to imply that things up to the moment have been idyllic (far from it), just to say that it could -probably will- get worse by a number of measures. This too reminds me of the Foundation story. The dark age is relative, the Empire is cruel and brutal in keeping order but one catches glimpses of many people living lives which are at least okay: materially speaking they are well fed, have homes and good things in their lives -provided they don't threaten Empire's power. However, the dark age multiplies the detriments. In both Foundation and in our real world trajectory now, the further dangers are that human collective knowledge and now-how are eroded making reconstruction harder. This can be further triangulated with the medieval period in western Europe -the so-called dark ages*- where the monasteries played a role in preserving information which could later be retrieved and added to. They also, let's note in passing, played a role in healthcare, agricultural know-how and sometimes, at their best, in protecting the interests of ordinary people or at least mitigating some of the worst effects of bad, venial, governance.

It has been interesting to note the portrayal of responses to the prognosis of Seldon and psychohistory in the Foundation story. Again, there are parallels. There is denial on the part of those in charge and a 'shoot the messenger' reaction. Tick: we are seeing that. There is a prioritising of dynastic concerns which minimises the responses. Tick. -Our billionaire overlords seem to be doing something rather like that, abetted (gaslit, cajoled, wealth-groomed) by those who hold the formal reins of governance.

As I've already nodded towards, there is a parallel too in the 'solution'. In the books and the TV series, the Foundation is set up to provide a repository of knowledge for reconstruction, and a means to help shorten the dark age. Interestingly, and making the parallel more visible, the Foundation spawns an order of monks, in effect, whose mission is to try to help shorten the period of darkness and to keep alive the 'light' of knowledge and humanity (in the sense of 'humane'). I can't help thinking that Asimov was giving a hat tip to the role of monastic communities in the European dark ages*.

This is what I think we need to take on board with regard to the mission of the churches in the coming century (or centuries). We need to be asking "what is God doing and calling us to collaborate with?" In answering that question, we may do well to consider the role of the churches (including monastic expressions) at their best during the 'dark ages' in western Europe. We would do well to consider also how they failed or fell short. In writing that, I'm also mindful that I have written 'western Europe' several times. I'm somewhat aware that we might also look at churches in other parts of the world during times of civilisational stress to learn from their experiences. And given that there are commonalities of desire for human flourishing and spiritual disciplines, it may be also that the experiences of people of other faiths can help us to consider our vocation as churches. And that's not to pass up that the encouragement to people of other faith traditions to similarly dig deep to retrieve their own resources to help human flourishing in such challenging circumstances. It wouldn't be the first time Christians have learned from other faiths. It is strongly arguable that the Renaissance was greatly indebted to the re-discovery of classical learning and manuscripts held and preserved by the Islamic nations which became available as a result of the Reconquista in the AD1400s.

We would do well also to consider the understandings we have amassed about sociology, economics, psychology as well as the physical sciences and their related technologies. It may be that capacity for advanced research in the latter is diminished but the ways of understanding and thinking can enable better adaptation for communities to changing conditions and harsher natural conditions. It is important also to consider that we have been coming to understand that some indigenous perspectives and accumulated understandings of biomes and skillful human living in them are worthy in seeking human flourishing. The collective wisdom and learning can inform people settling and/or adapting in new conditions. The attitude, at their best, of respect for natural process and reflexively understanding interconnection, an ecological instinct almost, is valuable. The attitude of considering how we might be good ancestors and trying to take the long view is one that we need to take on board. Not doing so is part of the reason why our civilisation is failing now.

As churches, then, we might consider our own part in Foundation. Not for a galactic empire, but for human flourishing in the long term on the only planet we have. The only planet we have been entrusted with. As churches, 'Foundation' means discovering together God's mission in the present keeping an eye on the likely future. It means adapting and renewing our discipling, our engagements with our communities, our structures (for surely we cannot continue as we are). We will need to listen to the Spirit and one another's discernments to "hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches". We will need to learn disciplines of simplicity of life, corporate discernment, and humble, patient learning. We will need to learn the discipline of sitting light to our preferences and to let of some, perhaps many, of the things we have grown attached to in the way that we 'do church together'. We will need to become peacemakers in earnest and set our hands to the plough of learning how to do that work (and find ourselves blessed in it!). We will need to face and process our own grief and bereavement of the kind of life we have come to expect and hope for, and our collective guilt in making the world worse for our afterbears (opposite of forebears). We will need to learn how to minister among the shocked and traumatised, the cynical and the dispirited (having faced those things ourselves).

I feel like this could be the introduction to a series of fuller considerations of those different dimensions to what I suspect we are called to. And probably some more too. Maybe I'll be able to do that. I'm sensing that the five marks of mission may be a helpful frame to hang some of that consideration on.

Well, a blog post is meant to be provisional, and that seems to be what this is! Let's see if I can pick up some of these strands in the coming weeks and months.

Footnote

*The term "dark ages" is contested by historians because there were at times some very good, hopeful and even progressive things occurred during the period often named such. However, as a label for a time when civilisational collapse, whether partial or more wholly, takes place, it serves. Especially as it is explicitly part of the Foundation storyline.

Fifth-mark mission futuring

Recently I've been thinking something along the lines of "What would Tom Sine say?" Some readers may recall Tom who wrote "The Mustard Seed Conspiracy" in the early 1980s and continued writing books about mission and the projection of trends into the following decades. He wrote about Christian mission in relation to the environment from the early 2000s and is still doing so.

I thought of his approach of Christian missional futuring when I read this article in the Church Times. It reminded me that I'm trying to get my head around what the Churches need to be doing now to prepare for the climate-changed future. I'm thinking in terms of broad headline points and noting the kind of pastoral and missional activity implied and tracing those back to the very near future so that we begin to do now what will be needed later.

So, here I'm trying to 'think out loud' about the kinds of things that we need to pay attention to and the implications. I'm thinking, too, that looking at the kinds of scenarios that emerge as likely with 2C of heating.

Taxonomy of climate changes

It might be good to start with a kind of taxonomy of effects (and if you feel you're well acquainted with them just skip down to the next heading). The first order effects are things like the atmosphere growing warmer on average and the average sea temperatures rising also. Then there are derivative effects from those: more heat in the air means faster movement and greater retention of water vapour. It also means that other things being equal average temperatures at various latitudes will rise.

Third order effects in these cases derive from those knock-on effects. So, habitable zones for different species of plants and animals shift -often faster than plants can grow into new zones. These effects are more chaotic because they interact and create new feedback loops. The kinds of effects that have been concerning people most have been desertification (already evident in the middle east and sahel regions); extension of the range of malaria into what were temperate zones; crop failures and resulting food precarity; areas of the globe that literally cannot support human life; loss of groundwater because aquifers are no longer or inadequately fed having lost their trickle-top-ups from melting snow which may no longer exist on mountains.

Higher sea temperatures means less sea ice which means in turn more liquid water -hence higher sea levels -which have been creeping up already over the last century or so. In turn this means coastlines will change: some are being and others will be inundated; more erosion from higher tides and more powerful weather effects. In addition, like with land-related warming, habitats shift (in some cases faster than species can migrate or adapt). Salination of soils making them unsuitable for previous vegetation and animal life.

So these create a bunch of fourth-order effects among human societies, many of which we are seeing already in more precarious or vulnerable peoples and places. It is these effects that may be civilisation altering. It is these sorts of effects on smaller scales that have played a part in ending previous human civilisations. These effects are migration and/or population loss to disease, inadequate diet and outright starvation, violence and the depredations of stress and diminishing healthcare. These effects interrelate and are complex.

Responding to civilisational crisis

In a quick-and-dirty way I often use the collapse of the Roman empire as a reference point. There/then, as I understand it, some of the kinds of things mentioned just as civilisational challenges came together and resulted in a slow collapse. In Britain the effects were to undermine the infrastructural supports for urban life. These led to population movements with the violence that was engendered or resulting from or by those movements. In turn these changes resulted in new patterns of mission and pastoral care by the churches -giving rise to the Celtic forms of church life more resourced by monastic communities than urban organisational patterns. It's worth noting that the contribution of monastic mission was wide-ranging: from land management through creating, collecting and disseminating knowledge, through works of mercy, healthcare, peacemaking, lawmaking, civil service all the way through to calling and nurturing disciples. In other words, ranging through the five marks of mission and back again.

I think that this is potentially a helpful reference point (and no doubt there are others) for us to consider how to equip churches to be agents of care, hope and even relative flourishing as the slow collapse takes place and as new arrangements for living together develop.

Missional challenges

First of all, right up front, we should be playing an active part -now- in resisting trends, organisations and ways of thinking that make more extreme heating more likely. So it is right that churches are making commitments to zeroing their own carbon footprints and are beginning to divest from climate heating operations in their financial portfolios. We need to make sure that these things happen and don't get kicked into the long grass of day-to-day concerns which have the effect of maintaining a kind of business as usual and distract, in effect, from putting in the work of following through. Let's note also that this will be costly at times (financially, in terms of time and energy too) -but then would that not be a kind of "taking up your cross"? We need to account for such costs in our own heads as a form of mission giving because that's what it is in the bigger picture.

Fifth mark missionaries

It also means, I think, that we recognise that there are those among us whom God is calling to take action for the common good and to support them as "fifth-mark missionaries". There is a cluster of callings in this respect that we need to recognise and support. There are those whose regular and (often) paid work is wrapped up in environmental care. That is relatively uncontroversial, although we might visibly support them more and demonstrate that we value their work. There are those who are called to activism in relation to creation-care: to protest; be arrested; support and care for protesters; to help organise protest. This is possibly more controversial, though it shouldn't be in principle. We are heirs to the activism of anti-slavery activists, chartists, suffagists, health and welfare activists of many kinds. Many of the struggles involved uncomfortable and controversial tactics. We laud people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King jr forgetting that they made many people profoundly uncomfortable -that the discomfort was part of the point because things needed to change. We sometimes blithely talk of the Holy Spirit being sent to "afflict the comfortable". Well, this is precisely the sort of comfort-afflicting that is meant, surely? So at the very least we should recognise they have just cause and pray for them. We might also encourage fellow Christians to support them practically, pastorally (visiting those in prison is mentioned in the gospels, after all) and theologically. This would include public statements of support particularly reinforcing and underlining the imminent dangers of climate crises and reminding us of obligations under international law and how these relate back to core Christian values relating to neighbour love, creation care and solidarity with the poor.

We might also note the concomitant effects of the involvement of Christians and indeed churches in these movements. There is a positive apologetic effect. In the coming decades as the effects of climate change become even more evident and distressing, the church's witness to the truth of what was happening and its involvement in trying to help mitigate and head-off the worst effects will be an important and demonstrable apologetic asset.

Prayer, liturgy: lex orandi, lex credendi

We can help to solidify these things by building into our regular liturgies, prayers relating to the fifth mark of mission and in support of the activities of fifth-mark missionaries. We can help preachers to connect lectionary readings with climate crisis and creation care matters more securely and frequently. We can make the Season of Creation pretty much mandatory. We can strongly encourage eco-church processes to be ordinary in the way that safeguarding processes are now fairly well embedded into ordinary parish life. Supporting climate mitigation projects or climate activism should be as normal as having mission partners that a church supports or encouraging people to be active in a food bank. All the while we keep on saying why it is important to be doing this stuff: keep repeating until we feel like we are cracked records saying it over and over: because only then will it get to seem like it's simply the right thing and that the only real question is 'how?' not 'whether'.

In respect of the longer arc of missionary mitigation, I suggest that we could do with the following sorts of things.

Ministries and vocations

Help people to learn diy food production skills -gardening, window boxes, allotments, mobilising the skills and knowledge of gardeners to help with this. Involve children, open out to the wider community as partners in learning and teaching. In times of food precarity the more people know about growing our own food, the greater our collective food security. In theological and missional terms this sits with a practical theology centred on "Give us today our daily bread" (more in another post, on that one, but it's there in embryo in the relevant Ionesco of my book 'Praying the Pattern'). I would also suggest, relatedly, that there's a need to help people who are beginning to move away from fast food. Bring together people with teaching skills with people with skills around cooking and preparing local food to convene learning communities -use suitably equipped church hall kitchens or offer a house-call method. Have cooking parties.... These become community building events in themselves with all the good missional effects that can come from that.

Learning practical skills to recycle, reuse and repair. In an age of fast fashion and goods which are more expensive to repair than to buy again new, we've got out of the habit of repair and so also of passing on repair skills. However helping people to understand some basics is likely to become increasingly important as price-structures and markets change. There is often stuff on the internet to help but it's also valuable to many people to work in three dimensions and with a friendly coach. We should introduce our congregations to the various recycling networks -free to collect ones like freegle and money-exchange ones as well as donating to or buying from charity shops.

Demolishing strongholds and taking every thought captive to Christ. In climate emergency I would suggest that this includes -as a matter of missional urgency- helping people to become aware of our own collective cognitive biases and how they are weaponised against us and to sow division by propagandists and advertisers. Given that various forms of climate-change denial and delaying action on climate emergency are propagated via media exploiting our cognitive biases, such 'mental fight' is a vital part of equipping the saints and those of good will in the short and longer terms. This actually has very strong links to meditation, confession of sin and the final petition of the Lord's prayer. We should examine afresh our liturgies to enable them to help us to turn cognitive swords into attitudinal ploughshares and not to learn war anymore. We might consider how we use Lent, for example, to connect spiritual disciplines with creation-attentive justice and peace-making and take the mental hygiene dimension as an important strand in it all.

Equip and train peacemaking, non-violence and de-escalation. We have already begun to see rising anger fed by increased stresses and fanned by commercial and political interests exploiting our cognitive environment. Add to that the presence of refugees both local and from further afield and food precarity and infrastructural strains, and we have the makings of interpersonal and inter-communal tensions which become increasingly likely to have flashpoints for violence embedded in them. Jesus's blessing on peacemakers is to be taken fairly literally in such circumstances whatever else you make of it. Wouldn't it be great if the churches had in regular deployment a host of people who were good at listening and enabling others to hear one another, who were able to draw people together to get past differences and construct new futures together, who were skilled in calming tense situations and building relationships and alliances which made for safe, more secure and more prosperous futures? May such peacemakers be raised up and blessed with the fruits of their labours.

Create pastoral structures to support people working through climate grief, anxiety, anger etc. Recent research has been clear that it is likely that many people -probably a significant proportion of those who have become aware of the scientific discoveries and projections regarding climate change- are becoming concerned, anxious and/or fearful of the impacts. One evidence of that is XR and the school climate strikes on Fridays. Alongside these have begun to grow up a variety of mental-health support structures. These range from climate cafes, to circle-group methodologies and climate-attuned therapists. Christians have been involved in these. However, churches, as such, have not been prominent. I suggest that this may need to change. I suggest however, that rather than setting up parallel structures and ministries, churches first identify, support and empower their members who are being called into this and learn from them. Churches more corporately would do well to adopt a servant attitude by making resources available and finding appropriate ways to encourage Christian vocations in climate change pastoral care and to resource those who become involved. In the meantime we should be encouraging ourselves to explore the ways that our traditional insights, spirituality and approaches to care connect with creation-attentive spiritualities so that we can model and offer from a secure base, robust Christian spiritual pathways which support people in their pastoral needs and spiritual growth.

I note, in passing, that the previous paragraphs set an agenda for Christian discipleship and ministerial training. I note too that it is an agenda that needs to be initiated and rolled out as a matter of urgency as the changes to be addressed and responded to are already underway. We don't have decades to get started, we have a small handful of years. One of my own reference points to considering this is Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. In some ways, I think we need a Rich Christians in Climate Emergency.

Build capacity for community organising. It is likely that many things will become of necessity more local: food, leisure, work and to live well locally will mean actually making good on the nostalgia for good old days when supposedly people knew their neighbours and everyone rallied round to help. Whether or not those days really existed in the way they are not-quite-remembered, it will be important for us to discover together how to pull together and organise to do things together. This kind of activity and offering servant leadership in it is part of the Christian vocation. We would be demonstrating values about the sacredness of life, the importance of power-with rather than power-over because we are all loved by God and share God's image and the importance of working for the common good. These values would be rooted for us in the teaching of Christ but not exclusive to Christian faith; we would be working alongside others of good will. And we need to step up because -be sure- there will be some who would offer less benign and more exploitative leadership.

As I look back on that, I think that there's more to be said, but it gives an outline to be elucidated. More later, perhaps. Each of those paragraphs a chapter ...

Redeeming Evangelism

Gotta say: this is one of the best articles on mission that I've read for a long time.

Redeeming Evangelism: Authentic Mission in the Church of England | Salisbury Cathedral: A lecture by The Very Reverend Professor Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, on Saturday 13 July 2019

I warmed to it because it says a number of things that I've been saying and thinking for a while and draws them all into a bundle and sprinkles in a few insights more. It pulls out a few salient points of mission history as they affect the recent experience of the CofE. Most of all it unrelentingly takes a Misso Dei perspective: the idea that God is at work in the 'secular' and our role is to learn to spot it and to work out how we make common cause with it. 

It also discusses the concept of obliquity (look it up on this blog's search window and you'll find it's been of interest to me) and uses it to note how we tend to mishandle the church's approach to mission and especially evangelism.

There's a Harry Smart poem called ‘A Fool’s Pardon’ quoted towards the end which is very much to the point. It's challenging in language and in concepts, here's the first verse:

Praise be to God who pities wankersand has mercy on miserable bastards.Praise be to God who pours his blessingon reactionary warheads and racists.

Ouch -but I recognise in it a loyal characterisation of the grace of God.

I'm thinking very seriously about where I can put this into the essential reading for 'my' students of mission and ministry ...

From the Inside Out -review

This is a nicely written book about mission. It's nicely written in that it's based in personal experience which is well-narrated and gives a good understanding of why the author has grown and evolved in their understanding of mission. It's nicely written too because it's just the right amount of challenging!

I helps us to understand what mission is and, more importantly, helps us to decolonise our thinking about mission. One of the main objectives of the book seems to be to help us to understand the way that mission by western churches for a long time has tended to mirror the imperialism of our host /sending cultures. And, given the writer is USAmerican, 'imperial' in this context includes the USA.

One of the big themes that emerges is one that is really important for us to understand: that when we conceive and execute mission as a delivery of a package of care, aid or message to passive recipients, we get it wrong. Now Kuja is very kind and gives more than due concern for the cultural-cognitive disabilities of those who end up doing 'imperialist mission' (my words not his). This means that people are charitably assumed to be operating according to their lights and the best motives are assumed. In this he is a model of civility in argument that Christians (and others) in our times would do well to note and emulate.

'Imperialist mission' gets it wrong because it assumes that mission is one-way. Kuja challenges us to see that it is two-way; there is mutuality (something we see Paul wrestling with in the first chapter of Romans imho); we have something to bring and to receive. God has things for us to learn whether as recipients or donors, missioners or en-missioned. We might do well to recall the sending of the 12 and the 72 in Luke's gospel: there we see the apostles instructed to receive the hospitality and the "peace" of those among whom they are sent. Enforced mutuality; reversed power dynamics.

I'm certainly considering recommending this book to my students who are being trained in mission. It might well appear on next year's book list. I might even recommend a chapter as an inter-session reading.

By way of disclaimer. I received and e-copy of this book for review purposes. In doing so I was in no way obliged to review favourably (or otherwise) simply to review within a reasonable period of receiving a copy.

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Ryan Kuja

Hallowe'en and dodgy Christian responses

Fundamentally, Halloween is a humorous reversal. We take bad, frightening or horrific things and treat them as if they’re good because it’s a funny thing to do. That’s not a step into genuine darkness at all. It relies completely on a shared moral compass.

I think maybe he has a point. He, in this case, is David Mitchell. I have a small series of confessions in relation to this. One is that I find David Mitchell's tv personality too remniscent of public school bullies for my taste -but perhaps that has no bearing here unless I fail to spot it in my reactions below (hence the warning to you). Another confession is that I used to be one of the people he's taking aim it in the referenced article. A further confession is that I've changed my mind about Hallowe'en. In fact I do think we need to pay attention to the underlying social psychology that Mr Mitchell draws our attention to and respond, as churches, 'smarter not harder'.

I used to make the argument that to celebrate the symbols of evil is to soften ourselves up for accepting evils and I used the analogy of dressing up as SS officers for fun as perhaps helping us to understand the dangers of such an approach. (Interestingly Mitchell along with comedy partner Webb, did a comedy sketch on just the theme of SS officers wondering whether they were, in fact, the baddies -actually a very clever piece of work). I'm not now convinced by that analogy or that the argument applies.

What I have become convinced by is that there is a social need for times when we look things that scare us in face, feel the fear and learn to put it in its place, maybe even laugh at it. There is something psychologically healthy about that approach. And we Christians ought to be helping this to happen for the health of society. So my challenge (to myself as much as anyone) is to think through how we could celebrate Hallowe'en and find ways to do so as Christians. In the first wave of response, in dark ages Europe, having services of remembering the dead, lighting candles etc was part of it. Our challenge now is to step up to affirming the psychologically healthy aspects of hallowe'en dressing up etc and to connect it to Christian spirituality in a positive way which also allows us to critique things that are unhelpful, unhealthful or genuinely dangerous.

Paul's Gospel may be stranger than you thought

This morning's reading got me thinking.

Galatians 1:11-12 For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

What struck me was that a revelation of Jesus Christ is said here to be the gospel. Now, cross-referencing to the accounts in Acts of Paul's vision of Christ on the Damascus road gives us an intriguing idea of what the gospel might be. Presumably it is this vision that Paul is referring to in this passage, so we need to be able to understand the word "gospel" in such as way as to include what happened with Paul on the Damascus road.

We get a bit more detail, in verses 15-16

But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased ¹⁶to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles

This reinforces the revelation of Christ to Paul aspect of the 'gospel' and adds explicitly a commissioning element. In terms of what we get to see in Acts, this pretty much seems to sum it up.

But let's have a quick look at the passages in question in Acts. First, Acts 9:3ff

...as [Paul] was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ 5 He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. 6 But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’

It seems to me that the basic thing in that revelation-encounter was that Jesus is the Lord and that challenges, implicitly, Paul's course of action in persecuting the Lord's people. The story in Acts 22 is pretty much the same:

While I was on my way and approaching Damascus, about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone about me.  I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”  I answered, “Who are you, Lord?” Then he said to me, “I am Jesus of Nazareth[b] whom you are persecuting.”  Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me. 

And a bit later in Acts 26 Paul gives more detail (verse 12ff):

I was travelling to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, when at midday along the road, your Excellency, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my companions. When we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.” I asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The Lord answered, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you. I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.

This version indicates a couple of further things. One is that Paul knew he was being spiritually goaded towards recognising Jesus as Lord. The other thing is the commissioning of Paul as, in effect, apostle to the gentiles.
I'm intrigued, however, to note that in none of these do we get the kind of gospel that many Christians nowadays would say was essential. There is no cross and resurrection, no explicit call to repentance and faith. There only seems to be an event that makes Paul realise that Jesus really is the Lord and a commission to serve and bear witness.

So, what I'm wrestling with now is how I feel about the idea that 'the gospel' might simply be an encounter with Christ that leads us to recognise Jesus as Lord. I guess that in context I can see that there are implications in the story of Paul's Damascus Road encounter -but in terms of proclamation it is interesting that these are implied contextually, not explicitly stated. The implications I see are the Lordship (deity?) of Christ, the life, death and resurrection of Christ, and the fulfilment of God's purposes in those things and the implication of 'repentance' as a new direction in life is taken up. But the centring of gospel in this instance on life-changing encounter with Christ seems to suggest that all those implications are more about helping people to come to, recognise and respond to the encounter.

Of course, there are also implications about the role of the Holy Spirit (the producer, presumably, of the goads in Paul's life).

I can sense that maybe I'm going to be returning to this later. But I'm thinking that this seems to foreground the idea of evangelism as initial spiritual direction which I've blogged about before (see the penultimate section in this article).

'via Blog this'

Jesus learning from life and practice

Over the last few months, this passage has cropped up several times. The latest being this morning's readings (I started writing this on 14 December) for Morning Prayer. Perhaps noticing it has been an artefact of a particular reading of it having got my attention and that perspective sinking in and being weighed by my unconscious thought processes. So the passage is this.

"...a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’ 24 He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ 26 He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ 27 She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ 28 Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly."      Matthew 15:21-28 NRSVA - The Canaanite Woman’s Faith - Jesus - Bible Gateway: 

And the perspective on reading it is as follows.
This way of understanding it proposes that we take it that Jesus learns from the woman in the course of the conversation and that we are actually seeing him in this little narrative moving from a somewhat ethnocentric mindset to one which explicitly grasps that God's Mission is bigger than that. In short, we see Jesus in the process of learning during the course of this conversation and his teacher is the Canaanite woman and, presumably, the Holy Spirit (echoes of the Nicene Creed there).

Now it seems to me that the Evangelical knee-jerk reaction to this (and maybe not just Evangelicals) is to be very suspicious of it or to reject it outright. I know this because my own first reaction was precisely to be suspicious of it and I found that I had to ask myself why I was resisting the idea. To be fair, full disclosure here, the reason I asked myself what that resistance was about was because I found the idea somehow intriguing and maybe that was because I'm interested in how learning takes place and what it means to be a wise and faithful human in the way of Christ, believing that it is in the moments of challenge that learning is forged and wisdom and orientation tested. So I was perhaps more disposed than before to thinking about the humanity of Jesus in relation to how he learnt things. And I have to say that in the moment, I felt that there was something wonderful about the possibility that we were catching Jesus in the act of learning. In fact perhaps participating in one of those wonderful conversations that I'm sure most of us have from time to time where we get caught up with others in a slightly excited thinking together as each contribution opens out further insight, learning and application of something that enthuses us. I wonder whether we are seeing a snapshot of Jesus enjoying just such learning banter.

So, I think that focus on divinity is precisely where the resistance from many roughly-orthodox Christians comes. I suspect that thinking first about his divinity (or even as a hugely gifted sage, come to that) tends to set us up for a default perspective that assumes that Jesus had got it all together, that he always saw things coming and had a ready-composed response or was meticulously inspired in the moment. But that is almost-certainly some kind of Docetism (see this article for more theological background). It is worth asking ourselves, too, whether for some of us there could be an inner resistance formed by the idea that it is unworthy for Jesus to learn from a gentile woman. However, I think that part of the marvellousness of the episode lies just there: that someone whom religious teachers of the day would have placed at the bottom of a hierarchy of likeliness -even worthiness- to have valuable spiritual insight, that person is just the one whose insight is affirmed and built on by the embodiment of Divine Lore.

So we are duty bound to question our Docetic tendencies by returning to value the humanity of Jesus and the logic of incarnation. In this case doing that means recognising a bunch of probable facts about Jesus, most of them to do with him being a baby, then a child and growing up in a human household and small town, perhaps even being apprenticed to a trade. I want to pose this in the form of some questions and musings. So, for example, how do we think Jesus learnt Aramaic, Hebrew and (probably) Greek? It seems to me that it probably happened in the regular sort of way: hearing them spoken, making sense, trying things out and noting responses, and eventually working on letters in scrolls. I don't really think that he was born knowing the languages or that God downloaded them Joe 90 style into his brain. In fact, let's put that more theologically still, by providence and Spirit the means God used for Jesus to become eloquent was interaction with parents, relatives, friends and wider community. Or, do we think that Jesus picked up carpentry or sailing (or whatever it was he did for 20 years before his preaching ministry) by sudden divine transformation or do we think his neurons, muscles and sensorium grew and developed through usage and relationship to others: teachers, customers, colleagues and the like?

But perhaps we are comfortable with the idea that Jesus learnt everyday common-place ordinary-life things in the same way as the rest of us. But are we comfortable with thinking that was the way it was with spiritual learning? And perhaps this is where a spasm of Docetism lurks more fully for us. And perhaps with some reason (even if misaligned reason): when the things of God are less obvious and more contentious, we feel that a more 'direct' learning from God is wanted to help guarantee the purity of the message. We feel we need Jesus to have the kind of hotline to God we sometimes wish we had. But I want to suggest that this too is Docetic and undervalues the fully human processes of spiritual formation -that is learning to think and act in godly ways and to cultivate a positive relationship with God.

Let's ask ourselves, then, how Jesus learnt religion and spirituality. I think that perhaps we should prepare ourselves to think about this in continuity with the other learnings we considered just a few sentences ago. I would rate as a high probability that in the household Jesus grew up in, he was socialised into religious practice and viewpoints pretty much as any other child of that day and place. In fact, given that the Hebrew scriptures have instructions for such things, perhaps we should recognise a Christ-centred divine intention in those instructions being in place: in part they were there to help to form the spirituality and upbringing of the Messiah in the midst of God's people. In other words, it's highly likely that the divine intention was for Jesus' growth in spiritual awareness to be achieved in part at least by the processes of learning, ritual and religious practice witnessed to by the Hebrew scriptures.

So Jesus would have heard and learnt to memorise scripture and to ask questions about it and weigh opinions regarding interpretation. He would have accompanied his family and friends in reciting prayers, going on pilgrimage, participating in festivals and fasts and generally be/com/ing Jewish. And in God's providence this was an appointed means for the Messiah to learn from and about God and God's mission. This involved the sculpting of neuronal pathways and patterns and bodily responses which is apposite to be/com/ing human. So, the fact that Jesus could deftly quote scripture and make insightful remarks about religious matters and ethical issues is built on that human training and personal time spent learning and reflecting on the inherited traditions of his people. This was a significant means of God's teaching of him.

But ... but ... You may want to interject: that's still not quite the same as the incident with the Canaanite women, is it? By the time he starts his ministry, and having starting with that baptism and the Spirit descending and all that, surely that means he's got it all down by this point? And doesn't the idea that perhaps Jesus didn't know something like this imperil the reliability of his teaching? That is, if there was stuff he didn't know at this point then that could mean he might miss something or fail to pass on something that we really need to have there in the corpus of his teaching. And there is some merit in that concern because ignorance can be the means of things going astray. However, I think I would want to suggest a couple of things in response to that. One is to do with Jesus' relationship to God and the other is to do with God's providence.

Jesus's relationship to God, mediated by the Spirit, would be such that Jesus would be receptive to God's leading and so in an encounter like this one with the Canaanite woman we also see by implication the work of the Spirit 'quickening' the incident to Jesus's imagination or conscience or just 'tingling his spidey senses' so that he paid attention in the right kind of way to be led through what unfolded in a God-revealing way. And the incarnational take-home from that is that the same Spirit is at work in us so that, in principle, we too could learn-in-the-moment from God. It also indicates to us that there is something important about the fact that we are teachable -to be teachable in this way is to be and become like Christ -as we are called to become.

In fact it seems to indicate that whatever crap stuff our culture and upbringing might bequeath to us can be challenged and put aside and we can step into new insight and new relating. The background we inherit is not in itself sin; it's what we do with it that can become sin. It is the resistance to the Spirit moving us on that is the problem and the definition of sin. So here, Jesus' background had a streak of theologically bolstered ethnocentric pride in it which at this point for Jesus he became aware of through and in the interaction with the Canaanite woman. That he allowed the challenge she posed to stand and is able to affirm the larger vision and implications contained in that challenge is the point and the thing we need to learn from. We don't need to have it all sewn up, we need to be teachable and humble enough to learn and affirm the insights of others.

The providential element in all this is to take seriously that Jesus is the One for whom everything that exists, is made (this I take to be an implication of  Colossians 1:16ff ... all things have been created through him and for him. ... in him all things hold together.) In which case Jesus' experiences are part of the ordering of things towards making sure that God is personally present in human flesh, blood and soul in the life of the one we call Jesus of Nazareth (among other things). The implication of this is that the learning experiences are part of incarnation and so the incident with the Canaanite woman is about God sharing what it means to be a learning, growing human and in such a way as to be for us and our salvation. Through this incident we can see the trajectory of imagination that leads to the inclusion of gentiles in the people of God. We should let the actual life of the incarnate Christ inform our thinking about what it is for God to become flesh rather than let our never-fully-understood doctrines try to (mis)inform us unchallenged about what Jesus must have been like.

Contemporary Churches: a review

What attracted me to getting hold of this book and reading it was the prospectus that it would help '"to apply the insights of contemplative spirituality and spiritual direction to entire faith communities"

For me this is a really of the moment prospectus. Partly because for some time now I've been thinking that we should be discerning the way forward for churches by really listening to the vocations in formation of our members -a sort of corporate guidance exercise. And of course this means that we should be actually living our church lives, for want of a better way of describing it, contemplatively. Part of this is that I have been challenged in the past by the Quaker discernment process as a way of trying to take spiritual accompaniment to the next level which is corporate, congregational discernment. But I have also wanted to take seriously my Charismatic movement roots and the evangelical referencing to Scripture, not to mention taking seriously what we learn (positively and otherwise) from church history about how we do or don't discern good ways forward, or God's ways forward, in relation to our context and cultural milieu. So ... a few implicit expectations on this book; would it be as helpful, insightful and even exciting as I would hope? Was I going to find a book on my wavelength that pushed my thinking forward a bit or even a lot?

Well, yes to varying degrees. One of the unexpected things for me from this book was catching a glimpse of just how rapid and alarming is the decline of USAmerican institutional Christianity. However, this is good for reading in a British context as the stories of dealing with decline and institutional death are helpful. "At a time in Amerecan culture when more peolpe than ever are interested in spiritual practices and young people have a renewed interest in ussues of social justice, institutional religion is proving itself to be ill-equipped to respond." -quite so, it looks similar in Britain too.

In respect of decline and death, I found it particularly helpful to have a case-study of a church's good death and of the institutionally problematic but kingdom-serving resurrection. In relation to that case it was also helpful to have the author's (psychologically well -informed) psycho-spiritual reflection on the tasks ("stages") of grief and how these are important to be honoured in processes of reflection, church direction-setting and pastoral and missional work. It was good to see, too, the complexities of this named and recognised along with a basic strategy for approaching them. For example, "Some people are in denial, some are moving to acceptance; some are angry; others try to bargain for solutions. That is the state of the institutional church today." I particularly liked the way the tasks of grieving were seen also in Jesus' passion; "Even though he saw it coming, even though he spoke about it to his disciples, Jesus continued to wrestle with his fate and bargain for a different future in the garden of Gethsemane." I think that this is a very important permission-given thing to notice and draw into consideration. And a little further on, "Jesus himself worked through the denial, expressing anger at the religious authorities, bargaining in prayer for another way before accepting his fate." There is some useful reflection following that in how we do this corporately.

It was encouraging too to read of approaches to church life where a spiritual-accompaniment approach has been taken. Encouraging because this is what I think I'm finding myself increasingly drawn to. "Council meetings were transformed with the presence of a spiritual director whose function was to call the council together in prayer and reflect back on the process of the meeting from a spiritual perspective. Meetings became times of active discernment marked by the exploration of what it meant to live out the congregation's sense of mission."

And also to my liking, because it named where I've got to in my own reflections is this: "As Christians, it is the teachings of Jesus and the way of life he modeled for us that should be the center (sic) of our lives and not an institution. Churches are places where we gather, learn, share faith, and celebrate our way of life and beliefs. But the institution is not a substitute for the experience of leading a spiritual life which is primarily informed by the teachings of Jesus and the experience of God in our midst." And A few pages later we are helped o see the implications of this kind of approach for leadership: "In this model, the role of leadership is to equip people to respond in authentic ways to the stirrings of God's Spirit, to be always open to new possibilities and to use the resources of the church to translate the understanding of one's call into something tangible. To that end, leadership must be committed to ongoing prayer and discernment."

I also found helpful the insight about how communities of faith might approach things in our new spiritual context. "...communities of faith which are primarily spiritual centers don't limit spirituality to a program. Instead, spirituality, the experience of the Divine, the animation of the human spirit by the Divine Spirit, becomes the foundation upon with the church gathers ... the lesson of the sermon is put into practice more directly..." The kind of approach recommended is much like the principle that 'Sanctuary' in Bradford was constructed in the years of the early 2000s. Here there was a clear drive to build collective worship around responses in real time to the issues raised and discussed: acts of forgiveness, signing petitions, planning for actions. The founding insight in that case was seeing liturgy as repentance: a turning of ourselves to follow Christ -which meant embodying as best we could at that moment what it was we were sensing a call to. In both cases this involved "not viewing themselves as the hub or center of life in the community, members of post-modern congregations live out their faith and spiritual practice with others as equal partners to bring positive change in the world." In reading that I caught a resonance of the thinking in Raymond Fung's 'The Isaiah Vision' and Ann Morissey's 'Beyond the Good Samaritan'.

One of the other things I found myself reflecting on in reading this book is how useful the role if interim ministers can be. I think that this book could also be usefully added to interim ministers' reading lists.

Link-Love: 
Rev. Louis F. Kavar Ph.D. Website
Contemporary Churches on Amazon
Rev. Louis F. Kavar Ph.D. on Facebook

Please tag #ContemporaryChurchesSpeakeasy

Disclaimer: yes I got my e-copy of this book as a freebie in return for a promise to write a review of it. But that's as far as the deal went: I am not obliged to post a favourable review or to pull any punches. But I tend to be a generous sort and my way of appreciating a book is usually to find things that I have enjoyed thinking about or at least that have provoked my thinking further. Only after some thinking do I tend to get negatively critical. 

Blue Ocean Faith -book review and reflection.

I have to say that I'd never heard of the Blue Ocean network, and when I read what they were about I had a bit of a 'where have you been all my life?' moment.
So, what's the 'blue ocean' thing about then? Well, we're told neart the beginning that it's a way to describe churches who "fish where other churches don't and because it's the blue oceans that connect all people". I like the idea of fishing where other churches don't and I wonder how that really works out even while I recognise a real need to do so from a situation where I see rivalrous churches casting for the same kinds of people to form congregations of middle class soft-rock singing slightly multi-media soft-charismatic people. And while I get it that they'd want to pitch in where there is obviously some traction, I can't help wondering what about the huge number of people outside of that kind of demographic -is God's Spirit really not at work beyond it?

The movement is characterised by six things. First what they call a 'solus Jesus' framework and with that a centred-set mentality. They aim for a childlike faith approach to spiritual development and a third way for controversial issues. They aim to be ecumenical in relation to other churches and for joyful engagement with secular culture. All of these things I warm to and in many ways I would describe my own position in very similar terms. Of course those are the headers. What do the particulars look like?

Solus Jesus is looked at through a historical development lens, a trajectory from the Reformation (and worth thinking the more about given that we are in the 500th year since Luther's famous 95 theses) and in particular the Sola Scriptura approach that emerged from it. The point is well made that without inspired interpretation, it perhaps doesn't help us as much as we'd like to have a sola Scriptura thing going on. So the thought is to take our attention to the Jesus who speaks through scripture and to embrace the subjectivity involved in that. I found one quote intriguing and probably about right in this matter; "Neither Jesus nor Paul, nor Peter were sola scriptura people. Actually, their apponents better fit that description" (Loc.558)
I also liked the approach to subjectivity captured in this quote: "When Joan of Arc's opponents assert that what she calls the voice of God is in fact only her imagination, her response is 'Of course. How else can we hear God?' " Perhaps that is slightly undermined by the real doubtfulness of what she 'heard', but the point is well made that our human faculties are inevitably involved and interpreting scripture does not deliver us from that.

On the matter of childlike faith, it seems to me that the idea is to focus on faith as trust and counterbalance the inherited 'faith as propositional assent' that we seem to have got locked into in much of the west. There's a nice tour of scripture to show that this is really consonant with the experience of God's people and the thrust of a lot of scripture.

One of the things I'm left thinking about is the 'third way' approach to controversial subjects. It is based -rightly in my opinion- on Paul's approach to the meat offered to idols controversy and from that the basic approach of inclusion until clarity is found (and a historical point is made to say it takes a lot of patience and quite some time) is taken as well as the principle of respect for 'weaker' brothers and sisters -but the way that is done is worth considering. I'm not sure that it helps fully as the problem of identifying who is 'weaker' still complicates things -but the principle of inclusion as the default is definitely worth thinking about further as a principle based in a clear biblical strategy. For the record the 'weaker' here are identified as those who take the more restrictive role in a dispute. I think that this is probably right and a good way to approach things. However, it may just become a political football of a principle: I suspect we need to test it a bit more against some hard cases from history...

In some ways, apart from the third-way approach, I don't think there is anything radically new here, and that is fine. Similar things are said by others. But then they need to be said perhaps quite a lot to be heard: said by many people in many ways to get through (think advertising and political slogans). And not only said but, as we glimpse here, acted upon and made the heart of a curriculum of Christian formation. I think some of the ways these points are put over are likely to grab some people but maybe not others, but that's okay since the idea is to find somewhere to fish where others are not.

It's interesting to read too from the perspective of not being in the USA which is, of course, not nearly as far down the post-Christendom road as the UK and indeed western Europe. So I'm left musing about the fishing-where-others-don't motif. In England that probably means noting that the HTB church planting network will continue to do a good job of creating the kinds of church they tend to produce where there may be relatively good numbers for that expression of faith. However, there may also need to be room and encouragement given to those fishing in other waters where the results may be less spectacular and take longer (and indeed there are signs that the HTB folk are finding this at the edges).

I found, also, the question raised and partly answered here about how the hippy-like Jesus movement became entrapped by right-wing fundamentalism. I think that this book offers an intriguing answer to that but I suspect there is more to be said too. However, it is a question adjacent to my GB-centric question of how come the creative and radical Charismatic movement of the 70's in Britain became so influenced by fairly hardline and defensive approaches to Christian faith. Admittedly the GB scene has retained a great deal more openness to concern for the poor and for the environment, but still ...

There are some interesting glimpses of how this approach is fitted for engagement with post-modern culture. For example, "... what you're saying is that Jesus is for everyone, not just for Christians! I've never heard such a thing!" -Said by a previously-unchurched person wishing to bring similar friends to a set of workshops held at the church.

Link-Love: 
Blue Ocean Faith website
Blue Ocean Faith at Amazon
Blue Ocean Faith on Facebook
Blue Ocean World - Podcast
Hello Horatio - Website 

hashtag for this book is #BlueOceanSpeakeasy

I reckon it's only fair to let you know that I got an e-copy of this book as a deal: review within 30 days of receiving it. However, that is the full extent of the 'contract': I am not obliged to make the review favourable and there is no direction given to me whatsoever concerning the content of this review. the Only thing that is given is the 'Link-Love' bits above.