Oil extraction thumbs down

This is a good site if you're concerned and want to lend some weight to the Extractive Industries' Report of the World Bank. There's a chance to email the president of the world bank too.

Here's a bit of light relief

Just a set of political cartoons from the USA using flash. Well, I thought they were funny.

If you like to see corporate giants lose...

This site is Greenpeace celebrating their recent victory over Esso with regard to ripping off Esso's logo [well altering it for a campaign]. It's reasonably amusing to see what the Esso case was ...

brown cloud pollution

Just to keep us from getting too elated by the good news; here's a bad news item about atmospheric pollution originating in Asia and circulating in higher atmospheric currents. The knock on effect is drier climate and this combined with water shortages already happening is very worrying for the global security situation.

the future's bright the future's .... windy

This areticle shows a huge growth in wind generated electricity is likely to become part of the UK supply over the next two years. Of course it's still a tiny fraction but the speed of growth is encouraging and with developments in the pipeline in wave generation and the possibility of fairly cheap back-garden wind turbines the possibilities are very encouraging.

We're already paying for global warming

According to Reuters we are already paying for global warming in increased insurance premiums. This combined with the recent anouncement [blogged on this site a week or two back] that the Pentagon is costing the security implications of climate change must surely mean that the USA can't hold out for long -not when defence and financial implications become apparent. Can it?

Paramilitary forgiveness

I note that his own actions were fuelled by anger -at least that is how it reads with regard to the desire to retaliate. There is something of right in this it seems to me: it is not good to simply acquiesce in wrong done as if giving it a blessing; simply forgetting it is not to care, really that a wrong has been done. Anger shows we care about the wrongs done to others, anger is the flip side of love, even.

The interesting thig is that the reaction tends to produce an equal and opposite reaction. Opposite not in the sense of non-violence being meeting violence but of violence pushed in the opposite direction -towards the original perpetrator [or representatives of them or their community]. Perhaps our sense of justice is about wrongs rebounding on the offender and that it would be fitting if *we* did that in the absence of a more automatic nemesis.

Alistair says: "My experience is that people easily turn to violence when their voices aren’t being heard, or when they feel under threat". The wrong of being ignored [accounted nothing] or being [unjustly?] threatened results in feelings that there is a balance to be reweighted or a return to be made.

He writes further; " came to realise that people who use violence – myself included – see things only from one angle only. They don’t see that if you use violence yourself, you encourage revenge and hatred in others. You end up with a never-ending circle of violence. "

The attempt to re-weight the balance or to push back to the perpetrator the wrong thay have done is itself perceived as a wrong and so the cycle kicks off. It is interesting that seeing the wider picture and acknowledging that there may be reason for the other side to have behaved as they did and do can help break the cylce by revealing the cycle to be based on a partial truth. At least that's how I think it goes.

Got to go now; but I think that there's more in this story I want to comment on and engage with. Later -I hope.

Ah Wednesday

The idea is to blog stories from the forgiveness project site. Normally my approach is to get an overview and then work down into detail -iNtuitive approach according to Myers-Briggs. However I think that it could be valuable to try working the Sensing way: details build into picture.



Forgiveness is something that I constantly find eludes my grasp in understanding. I think that some of that is because people seem to mean different things by it and not all of them seem to 'fit' easily with God's forgiveness which is what I hope to appreciate better by doing this.



My own experience of forgiveness is of the utter sense of not being able to change something bad that I have done and the only hope for a restoration of relationship is the mercy of the other person. Of Forgiving I remember most prominently that in my teens, becoming a follower of Christ asn realising that I was called to forgive others and realising that I had a 'hit list' of people I would like to pay back for hurts inflicted on me [bullies mostly] and finding that mentally I was able to tear up that list -I can't now even remeber most of the people on it or what the hurts were.



I think I need to tryto process these things [and no doubt others that will be triggered by the reflections here] alongside the stories of others and then the theology.

Ash Wednesday -Lent project

Thanks to jonny baker for the piccy -I hope it was okay to include it.
It signals that today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent and I hope most days to be able to blog a reflection on a story of forgiveness on my spiritual direction blog anamchairde. Be happy if you'd join me.
See also this posting for further ideas. And see here for a 2006 posting on Lent.

Ms Strangelove -or how I learned to love the computer

It's no surprise this, when you consider that there has long been a 'love affair with the car'. We do seem to have this ability/drive to form "affective bonds" with the other and somehow our technology is able to sneak into the frame as well as other people and God [which is what these bonds are for -I guess].

"Professor Cary Cooper, an expert in organisational psychology and health at Lancaster university, said he believed that people had a form of "technological umbilical cord" to computers. "That a form of bonding occurs for both children and adults highlights the significance of this technology in our daily lives," he said. "

Indeed, we do need to keep some of this in perspective though. We already have these kinds of bonds with other technologies: Clothes, houses, cars and TV to name a few obvious ones [or is 'clothes' not so obvious because we no longer think of them as technology?]. Much contemporary advertising relies on commodity fetishism [to borrow a bit of marxist analysis and vocab] -which I think is related to this phenomenon.

Perhaps the other interesting thing is the way that such things become invested with personality -and the following quote is interesting: " Catherine Stewart, the community manager at supermarket chain Tesco ... said: "Interactive items are now increasingly popular for both adults and children, which could be a reason why computers seem to be developing personalities of their own". "

I guess on the whole we don't do that with clothes but occasionally I've heard of houses referred to as having personality and I note that teddy bears etc may develop personality to their owners/regular users. It's no surprise then if computers do too, especially as they actually do interact and sometimes the vagueries of different distributions of operating systems, specifications and configurations of programmes means that they all behave slightly differently.

Of course this may all also be related to the Feuerback/Marx/Freud hypothesis on God -we tend to make God in our own image or to meet our needs; clearly we do this kind of things with our own technology. This proves nor disproves God's existence of course, merely that human beings have quirks that result in projection.

Technoetic Arts

I've just had delivered the first copy of a new interdisciplinary journal concerned with the interface between technology,sciences, the arts, culture ... looks interesting and intriguing titles lined up including "The shaman reborn in cyberspace or evolving magico-spiritual techniques of consciousness making". You'll only get the abstracts at the referenced page but it's a taster. In exploring what technology and culture are producing on their interface we are potentially finding clues for gospel, discipleship and worship in faithful Christian living.

The new image for baddies -the birth of a meme?

Last night I saw an episode of 'Stargate SGI' in which a cloned gou'ald host is found being used in an experiment by a government agency. The thing that interested me was that the chief experimenter was in effect torturing his subject and justified it on the basis of expediency. The other interesting thing was that he was shown pretty much every scene he was in smoking. This is noticible because it's about the only time we see smoking portrayed in the series and it was done in a way that was very reminiscent of the smoking man in th X-files. Given that rcently I watched the film "Hope Springs" where the 'baddy' [played by Minnie Driver] is practically a chain smoker, I am beginning to wonder whether we are seeing the birth of a new video stereotype: the baddy can now be identified not by the black hats but by lighting up a cigarette.

Now there's a part of me that thinks that this could be good: it reinforces the idea the smoking is not good. But then I stop and think: there are many people in our society who pick up the accoutrements of 'badness' or 'naughtiness' from our media stereotypes and adopt them because in so doing they gain some kind of street cred cachet. So cause for concern perhaps?

Hydrogen Now!

If, like me, you think that hydrogen economy is likely, on balance to be better for the world than the oil economy then this is a good site to bookmark /favouritise.

Liturgical year resource.

Set out in the form of a monopoly-style board game, an interactive guide to the current church year. 52 squares, click on one and you get the liturgical date and the RCL readings. Don't know why I like it but I do!

Contract and converge

It's tough for the Kyoto protocol -but it may be that Russsia won't ratify and a change -if it happens- in the complexion of the USAmerican administration may not get the USA to ratify either. So is there anything that can be done? I remember seeing this in a magazine a while back so it was good to find this Guardian article from December last.



The alternative -and perhaps even eatter alternative to Kyoto is "Contraction and convergence" and relies on the idea of setting a budget for how much carbon ther can be in the atmosphere which would be divided up on a per capita basis amongst the world's population -so we would all carry our share. How that would work beyond that -well emissions permits which could be traded. So Bangladesh could sell their unused surplus of possible emission to the USA ... read it in the article

Neo-Pagan musings

Bizarre to say: I was at a lecture today by a Khalid Yassin, a Muslim Sheikh, who had been invited to address staff to help understanding of Islam. [He gave a not too well researched reheating of the cosmological and teleological arguments and then onto a few specific claims about Mohammed and answered a few questions]. The bizarre thing was that afterwards I ended up in a discussion with a neo-pagan who had preveiously been chatting about "paganism" with a colleague.

There was a lot of energy in their desire to make a lot of the Christian failures like the inquisition and the witch burnings and to say that the Pagans are pacific ["an it harm none..."] and have never persecuted anyone let alone killed them. But what really hit me was the strength of the need to cast pagans/witches [for which read "Wiccans"] as the victims. It seemed to me that the dynamic of this was that you win the argument if you can show yourself to be the victim of injustice/ violence.

You know how it is when there is so much wrong with something that is being said that it is just not possible to say much useful at all in the time available? That was the situation. No time to point out that pagans were responsible for torturing and murdering Christians in the first 300 years of Christian history; that pagans certainly have [and do in non-western places] offered sacrifices of animals and even of humans [this was denied]. In fact, as the article referenced shows, and as many neo-Pagan scholars are now beginning to admit, neo-paganism is a sanitised fantasy of the mid 20th century. Not that his invalidates it: clearly it is resonating with important themes in western spiritual sensibilities [hey, I was even into it once upon a time -albeit in a fairly dabbley/minor way]. But let's have some sensible discussion about facts as well. Some of it says more about rejecting things [and mostly abuses] in Christianity than real paleo-Paganism.

Billy Bragg reforming the Lords

I've been suggesting that since people don't seem to be so keen on voting but there is some [growing?] support for single-issue organisations like Greenpeace and various charitable organisations, churches etc, perhaps we should use such organisations to supply 'peers' on a basis of membership [say 100,000 supporters=one peer]. Then we'd have a second chamber representing what people in this country actively support which would then perform a useful scrutinising function bringing the expertise of these voluntary and semi voluntary organisations to bear on the processes of government. Of course there are downsides but it looks better than what we're getting at the moment!

On the other hand you could support Billy Bragg's suggestion [headline link] and have our votes count twice. It's not my first choice but Iwould go for it ... since my own idea seems to be in want of support!;-)

Lent Keeping

I've just posted up a whole load of stuff on my soul-befriending blog suggestions for keeping Lent. It'd be good to see further suggestions grow there too ....?

In terms of personal discipline for Lent, I'm thinking of taking a story a day from the Forgiveness Project site and spending a bit of time reflecting on it [and maybe blogging it on anamchairde]....

Gearing up for Lent

Where I have some say in it, I tend to try to make the Sunday before Lent [ie the coming Sunday] a day to encourage people to think about what they are going to do [or not] for Lent rather than getting to Ash Wednesday and thinking, "Whoa! is it Lent already? What shall I do? Oh I'll give up chocolate again." I'm trying to revise and put together some ideas and perspectives to help our students and staff to give considered thought to the matter. So to warm us up here's my take on the historical background.

Lent began as a season of preparation for Easter, firstly for those who were becoming Christians to receive instruction before their baptisms at Easter and secondly for the rest of the church to make some solidarity with them. This gives Lent the traditional characteristics of penitence and abstinence. Penitence as people reflected on the events on Holy week and why they happened and then the sense of getting things right with God. Abstinence as an outward sign of penitence and preparation and as an act of solidarity with the sufferings of Christ [archetypally in the temptations in the wilderness].

Traditionally Lenten fasting was to give up meat and dairy produce [in effect to become vegan -though fish may have been allowed for at least some]. This would have been in addition to the regular weekly fasting from any food on Wednesdays and Fridays. Apart from the practical use that such a restricted diet would be in an agrarian economy at the end of winter, it also meant that the resumption of normal diet was felt as celebratory. Perhaps this deferred gratification is something we can learn from and emulate in today's consumer, 'instant hit' society.

Fasting is often a fasting from something in particular, be it from food or certain kinds of food or drink, or from activities [such as watching TV or going to the cinema]. Also often included in Lenten discipline is the idea of undertaking study or particular courses of action [as people would do as part of their preparation for Baptism]; hence many churches hold special Lent study groups and many Christians undertake special activities to help them grow in faith or understanding - reading the whole of a particular part of the Bible or going on a pilgrimage or having a special regular prayer time they wouldn't normally have, for example.

I've found a few good web sites too this one from a broadly evangelical perspective. Then there's Ken Collins' site which is more Catholic. And this Orthodox site has links to recipes as well as helpful info on Orthodox Lents [yes plural] -which are different dates to the Western Kalendar.

Called to leave the ministry.

A little back I mentioned Simon Parke writing in the Church Times -"Called — to leave the ministry", 30 January 2004, by Simon Parke -well it's now appeared [though you have to go to the search part of the CT site, select "features" in the search box and type in some of the details just mentioned]. It's a weekly series so next week the next episode [published in paper two weeks ago] and so on. It's worth a look.

For me it's made doubly poignant by the recent announcement that a colleague in the local deanery has just announced his retirement to pursue a non-clergy career [still being explored as to what that might be -teaching?]. I don't know the inside story but I rather suspect that there are reasons similar to Simon Parke's in there and things that I could relate to in terms of the way the church priorities seem to be awry. I still think that it is important that we have some kind of exit review of such people [if they are willing] as well as some way to take the vocational temperature of those of us who somehow stay in to get an idea of what it is that the Spirit may be saying to the churches through that area of the church's life. I know there are risks of getting a list of moans, but if we could have the patience and wisdom to get past that I suspect we would be learning something rather important for the future of the church.

different perceptions are hardwired

This from New Scientist 31 Jan 04 p40, [with thanks to Rod Anderson for precis].
"The genes of taste, smell, touch and vision are being explored. They are highly variable between individuals. For example, people vary widely in their perception of "bitter" taste as in tonic water. Sight has even more variability, with four versions of the gene that codes for "red" receptors and another four for green. Blue seems to be standard. Some women even appear to have four different types of receptor cone instead of the three types the rest of us have, enabling them to tell the difference between "identical" shades of green.
Pain receptors also vary. But the big implication could be for consciousness research. The key is often seen as how the physical world becomes our private sensory experience. If the inputs are so varied, it gives new problems to solve in trying to find out what someone else's consciousness is like. Perhaps, example. If your perceptions give little weight to sense of touch and smell and so on, your theology will be different. "

I think that this also throws us right back into debates about perception and truth and about pluralism. However, it should be noted that it adds nothing new in principle to the philosophical issues around, solipsism, relativity, positivism, realism etc. It does, seems to me, intensify the need to engage seriously with post-modern and 'new age' views which take personal experience and relativity seriously. It does also strengthen the case for taking a dialogical ['open source'] approach to theology, perhaps.

Creat-ures great and small.

Couldn't resist pointing to this site [gratia Sojourners]; it starts huge -showing our galaxy as a small speck andby magnifying in steps of x10 goes right down to quarks. It's a really good meditation tool.

'Worship' songs

I wouldn't have blogged this were it not for a conversation with a significant other in my life. They had just been to a Eucharist where the theme had been Job's comforters and the music had mostly been triumphal, upbeat stuff. We talked about the mismatch, but most of all we talked about the way that when we feel not in the happiest place emotionally it can be really hard to enter into much of the contemporary worship-songs. They require us to make statements of how we feel that we can't get behind properly and they seem intent on making statments about God and faith that, at that particular time, we can't line up with fully. Yes we believe but... "help thou my unbelief". Actually what we want to do is to be able to own our grief or bewilderment before God. The Psalmists do it and Job does it but can we?

The referenced webpage is worth checking out especially point 5 which asks for songwriters to write laments for worship. I agree. However I also ask myself why there is a reluctance to do so?

I have a couple of starting reflections and would love to see some further ideas.

One is that it is hard, as a worship leader/orchestrator, to work out how to do it. I think there are a number of reasons for this: we have not experienced models; we consciously or otherwise believe that we should help people to leave feeling good. Indeed, for the most part this latter factor becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in embryo since if people 'know' that this is what a service is for then they will come expecting that and there will be difficulties if we deliberately counter-fulfill the expectation. So we design uplifting worship for consumption [!] by people who come to be uplifted. We thus marginalise those who are not in an emotional-place or of a temperament to find 'uplifting' comfortable

The second reason might be that worry that we sould sink people in gloom or worse -find that there is a mismatch of mood of congregation and the content we put before them to use. Of course, ironically, this is the mirror image of what actually goes on, but since our culture values happiness so highly we will tend to go for the upbeat.

To me, assuming these observation-musings are correct, it is clear that we need to manage expectations to some degree if we are going to use lament as a tone and mood in corporate worship. Some of that can come through actually doing it and explaining it and working with it. Some of it could come from using the liturgical year -Lent and Advent are times which probably lend themselves to an exploration of lament and the darker sides of human experience as worship. Maybe you know some other ways?

Heaven, hell and USAmerican beliefs

When I was in the USA recently I was struck by how many churches there were [and that was just the buildings] and so the figures in this report from Barna were no surprise. However, these figures would be no indicator of things in Britain. Sometimes we need to be reminded how different our societies are and the issue of spiritual beliefs is one area where that becomes quite different. IT is making me increasoingly skeptical of the value of using methodologies for, eg, church growth, that work in the USA in the UK. What would be interesting is to see whether the are indications that the UK is the USA's future in this respect or whether we are just very different societies in this respect. I know that Len Sweet in a personal conversation said at one time that he felt that the UK is the USA's spiritual future and this based on his reading of the trends. But seeing these figures I'm less sure. However when you look at the figures related to busters [20-30 year olds] and younger and also hispanic-background people [the gowingest section of the USA population, I believe] then perhaps there is something in what Len said.

All of which has implications for the growing interaction between emerging church folk in USA and UKGBNI...

The other interesting thing is how the labels people adopt is not necessarily a good guide to what they may beleive -there is a lot of evidence to suggest that not insignificant proposrtions of 'Bible Christians' hold some pretty unorthodox views in the USA -including reincarnation, afterlife-pluralism etc. So perhaps it's the religious affiliation element that is the biggest difference between us -much the same mix of beliefs, I suspect, would be found in England but without there being a more formal religious label applied to the person themself. The actual beliefs may be much more similar, it's the church attendance that makes the difference. Maybe.

Buffy -the new Dante? Hell, no.

Interesting brief comment on the state of hell. It does raise the issue that any of our talk about an afterlife is likely to be interpreted by many younger people against a background of Fluffy the Umpire-Sprayer, Millenium and films like Dogma or Stigmata. It makes me wonder whether we really need to overhaul our thinking and our language about such things in order to communicate more accurately; avoiding the sillinesses and hooking into the helpful. I don't think I've seen anything yet that does that. If you know differently, plesae tell me.

blogging greenly

I've just started a blog for stuff to do with becoming a more environmentally harmonious global society [or not]. There's some pretty encouraging items as well as a few scary things.

Less denial from USA planners

This is the Pentagon: planners there are taking global warming seriously as they try to analyse its possible impacts on security issues. So it appears that at least some branches of the USAmerican administration are taking global warming seriously. In the present climate [sorry!] can the other aspects of government be far behind?



Much of this article is about the threat to the gulf stream [with a good emplanation of why it is an issue]. It certainly made me think that we'd be better preparing for more Labradorean weather than for grape growing in the longer term -so now could be the time to consider taking courses on dog-sledging. Still it's one way to get Britain to perform better in winter olympics. It would also be likely to dissuade migration of climatically-displaced people into the UK and the knock on effects of that would be less work force when our population is at its oldest ... Perhaps there are other actuarial issues but those are the ones that occur to me.

Who'd've thought it? Bush goes green.

On the quiet -at least I don't remember seeing much about this, the Bush administration is angling for a big increase in funding that might help push the USA towards the hydrogen economy more quickly. Before the Iraq war many people were saying that the truly patriotic USAmerican thing to do would be to reduce the USA's reliance on foreign oil and so patriotism demands investment in renewables. Well, it looks like that argument may have been won, in principle. Hoorah!

polluter doesn't pay, apparently

Exxon, it seems has managed not to be paying anythign for the environmental and associated damaged from the Valdez disaster. The reason this is important is that we really do need to be seeing the principle of polluter pays being worked into the corporate psyche and thus into the everyday economic decisions which will then drive the reneable, recyclable and ecological decisions that will embed environmentally sound processes and products into our personal and social living.

Homage to Woking

All of a sudden I want to go to Woking. Never really thought much of the place before -just somewhere reasonably close to Reading of a market town kind of ilk [and my ignorance is such that I've no real idea whether that view is accurate]. But now I take back all the little regard because it turns out that Woking is the home of the future: solar powered civic amenities and the first hydrogen power station. I feel a pilgrimmage coming on....

Solar powered London?

This article points to Ken Livingstone's throwing his weight behind the idea of putting solar power on new roofs in London -and presumably incentives to put them on existing roofs too. This is the kind of thing that needs to happen to properly green the UK -ideas and initiatives that will embed greener practices into our lives without it being a 'hippy-dippy' thing -they'll like the cheaper fuel bills too and perhaps even the chance to sell the surplus electricity back to the grid when they're at work or on holiday.



I'm sorry to say te full article is only available to subscribers but at least you get the first para and editors always make sure the most important overall info is in that first para. It's just a bum deal if you're into detail.

'03 -a foretaste of summers to come

It may be that last summer waas 50 years too soon but gives us a foretaste of the way things could be in Europe in about 50 years with an average increase of 4C. Of course this ingnores the possibility that melting polar ice sould affect the Gulf Stream and lower north west European temperatures by about 5C -or who knows what other effacts there could be.



What we do know, from chaos theory is that the more energy that we put into the system the more chaotic and extreme the effects are likely to be. So whatever else we should be doing, finding ways to reduce our input of fossil carbon into the atmosphere is vital no matter how beneficially we may view some fo the milder effects of global warming. There's no getting away from the need to change our culture's addiction to oil, gas and coal.

Christian board games -the wrong theology...

A number of years ago a very dear parishioner who had recently become a Christian proposed making a board game based on Christian faith. The basic idea looked vey like the one referenced by the link for this entry. He asked some of us to look the game over. We duly did, and we were horrified: the basic idea was much like many a board game involving questions and answers and an element of competition to win. The difficulty was in the implicit theology which [like 'Glory!'] rewards right answers etc in order to avoid hell and go to Glory. In other words right answers gets you saved. Is this not salvation by works and not as a gift of God?

We put this to our friend and he saw the point [regretfully]. We tried to tweak the idea but without reaching a satisfactory solution. The best we could do was to suggest a game where it became after a while apparent that it was impossible to win by ones own effort -but we couldn't think of a good way to bestow unmerrited wins. Of course no-one would play the game more than once except as an instructional exercise.

Aspirate those consonants [or not].

As a linguist I find this utterly fascinating: the idea that which language you speak [or rather; habitually use in face-to-face conversation] could perhaps alter your liklihood of catching a cold, 'flu or other airborne virus. It's all in the aspiration of plosives, affricates and the like. Chinese and English tend to be quite heavy on "puffs of air following" and so increase the amount and range of airborne viruses expelled by speakers. Who said"'...names will never hurt me."?
Of course it's theoretical but it could just be a factor.

Next question, could awareness of disease-spreading capabilities become an engine for linguistic change? Well maybe it's unlikely but ... you never know.

Managing the CofE

I'm just reading "The Living Company" by Arie de Geus [a former executive with Shell]. I'm doing so as part of growing my understanding of corporate human bahaviours and whether there is a meaningful way to talk about corporate personalities. Anyway I just read this: "It takes a long time to build a river company [as opposed to a 'puddle company' that's in it for short term aims of money and mere profit]. But if you have a river company, you can demolish it in less than twelve months. Simply follow these easy steps.
1. Declare that the company isn't profitable enough. Henceforth your goal will be a specific amount of return on capital employed.
2. Develop an action plan in which all assets will be trimmed back across the board to meet these goals.
3. Follow the plan."

I'm sad to say that this is how it has looked to and felt for me in the last year or so but it seems to me that it's been around in the CofE for a decade or so though perhaps only impacting on sensitive and anxiety-prone souls. Of course our problem is that CofE largely does not have people running it who are trained as managers, particularly managers where decline is to be managed. Those who are trained as managers have largely not been trained to deal with the kind of 'subcontracted independence' of clergy or with volunteers. This seems a recipe for mistakes and errors. How should we do differently? I can only see it in structural changes that free people up to do what is necessary rather than trying to maintain apple orchards in a climate changing to grape-growing or threatening to return to tundra.

Laicising Simon Parke.

In the last couple of weeks a column hs apeared in the Church Times wherein Simon Parke begins to describe the experience of becoming a lay person after being an ordained parson. In it we begin to pick up reasons why he felt he should leave the ordained ministry. The CT policy is that these articles don't become available for a couple of weeks so I expect that the first will appear next week but I didn't want to wait to comment as Simon's action is one which I have a great deal of sympathy with. He says:
"I had to go. I was struggling with the middle-management climate now prevailing in our slimmed-down Church of England, with its passion for audits, accountability, challenges, five-year plans, ministerial goals, and budget projections. But much more telling and worrying than these predictable moans, I was bored of the good and the gracious."

I can understand this, I think. Though the problem, I think, is not so much management as the way it is done. All of the things Simon mentions I can see have a legitimate use; I have found audits can be helpful in knowing what is going on; I would argue that there are areas where not only do I not want to lose accountability but I would want to extend it and so on. No, my difficulty is that these things seem all too often about institutional survival than mission. And my question is whether the real challenge is to evolve ways of being the Church of England that preserve the telling of our story and re-craft it to a vastly changed situation and one in which our institutions did not evolve.

My worry is that all the target-five-year-auditted-SMART-ing is really about simply re-cloning the current churches. This is no good: the global warming of post-modernity is changing our social and cultural climate and we need to grow different church-crops. Better we manage that change than simply carry on and then have a crisis [as if we don't already have one].

I personally have suffered mild depression in the past over trying to match up to inappropriate managerial goals [partly self-imposed but driven by acute awareness of the precariousness of being an unfreeholded priest in a climate of dwindlement and a situation where, realisitically it wasn't going to be otherwise]; we need to start where Mike Ridell challenged us to in "Threshold of the future" -with the frank acknowledgment of the death of the Christendom-church in the Euro west and so get out of our institutional [and personal] denial. Denial takes up a lot of resources and energy which could be better used for the work we are actually called to discover and do.

One of the reasons I went into chaplaincy work and wanted to stay in it was that it delivered me from some of this 'more of the same' bureaucracy. The one thing we are not doing [or haven't been] is trying out new stuff and investing in the margins that could be growing edges. Hence, for example, the post I now occupy is being cut in July -when the stated aim of our bishop is to increase investment in ministry that involves youth, when the number of international students is about to go through the roof and in an area where engagment with Islam is probably most important and easier thn in most other areas. This is because actually the apparently radical plans of the diocese [to devolve power and money] actually seem to mask a policy of keeping the money to do the same old same old with dwindling congregations. Of course some of the difficulty is freehold which allows clergy to stay and resist innovation. On the other hand at least that is a protection from summary dismissal because one makes the wrong kind of waves. Perhaps the extension of employment rights to clergy will help to deal with this?

This is why the possiblility of new diocesan and provincial structures [which I mention in an earlier blog [Sat 17 Jan] which could actually save money and free up possibilities. While smacking of the managerialism that Simon Parke finds distressing, this could actually help when combined with an emphasis on emerging church. I feel a hugely miffed that my post -which I've been saying is about exploring emerging church- has been removed just as some of this engagment with the real issues of emerging church is coming to possible fruition.

I'm finding a lot of clergy struggling with the disappointment of working in a structure that asks of them so much that isn't closely-related to their core vocation. Should we not be building our church with and not against the vocations of the members [including the ordained]?

Furred label

Just one of those 'cameo' observations that has come back to me after a few days. Sitting waiting for the train at Union Station Washington DC, I noticed a young lady wearing what appeared to be a fur coat. She had her back to me and so I could see that in the middle of the part of the coat that covered her shoulders there was a label on the outside. I couldn't see what it was but it made me think. Once upon a time the mere fact of wearing afur coat was a statement. Now even fur has to have a label? Of course there are number of other possible factors involved here. Was ther fur real [looked it]? Did even that doubt mean that a label is necessary? Is it that labels [worn outside for the status-giving function of conspicuous consumption] are the new fur? It just seems interesting that a fur coat needs [apparently -on my preferred interpretation] the legitimaising of an outside designer [?] label.

Other factors that may impinge on the semiotics of this display: the woman was young [early twenties?], she was black [in Washington DC] and she was travelling by public transport. Perhaps there are other factors I haven't picked up, but these add up to an interesting picture and the word "bling" comes to mind as a cognate.....

Greening SwVa

This is good; a resolution on green issues. Though it could simply be 'motherhood and apple pie' [ie something we would all agree with] or the verdict on sin -"he was against it". However it is also worth noting that another resolution was passed on clean air which at least recognises the outworking of the green motion. I wonder whether the resolution will encourage churches to change their building habits and their practicesa dn perhaps roll on to an ecological audit of diocesan proceedures? [Our diocese should move to this but I've been proccupied with other diocesan matters lately though I had intended to table a motion to this effect as soon as may be].

The practical follow-through is the important thisng on thses kinds of motions. In England, of course, though the financial constraints are going to be a disincentive. On the other hand many green habits, methods and solutions can actually save money in the longer term. Meantime examination of such things as the carbon impact of diocesan synods, location of synods and other meetings [perhaps we should be looking to net meetings and email discussion 'meetings'?] location of diocesan and other offices in relation to travel and public transport etc etc etc. I'd love Ecocongregations to think of running an eco-diocese award.

SwVa resolution on sexuality

I'm trying to catch up with the various things for the trip to USA given that I've not had access since Sunday until today. The SwVa diocesan website has posted up the results of the council decisions and the link tells us what they resolved on this issue. The main thrust of the thing seems to be to try to hold together and find a way forward. Certialy this was the tenor of the sermon on Sunday morning given by one of the diocese's Rectors [Chris Payden-Davies]. The image was used of a large family of sisters and brothers who disagree very strongly over a particular decision by a couple of their members but neverthelss decide that their family history and unity is more important that dividing over what they disagree about. Quite a nice story.

On the other hand I can see that it would leave the majority of the family feeling used and abused. The story could be seen to legitimise the actions of the minority in the 'parable'. It leaves the issue of the longer term unresolved: who will 'win' the argument in parctice: will the majority simply give way or the minority? The which will turn out to be the status quo that 'going along with' tacitly supports? It's not a teneble long-term solution but it is a good idea while resolution and mediation is attempted. And of course there may be shifts in the way people feel after some time has elapsed and some of the results are examined.