Another but similar to rejig CofE doceses

 I was interested in this thought experiment. It appears to be a 'from new' rethink, but I'm intrigued as to how similar it is to a proposal from 12 and more years ago by Gareth Miller. I have previously blogged about it and this post will guide you to the various webpages that could help understand it.
 The author of the title-linked article describes what they are doing thus:

... an exercise in visualising what the provinces and dioceses of England might look like if:
– the Leeds model of several episcopal areas one of which overseen by the diocesan were "rolled out" across England
– more, much smaller provinces were created and some of ABC's workload (long acknowledged to be too great by far) was redistributed
– dioceses and episcopal areas are usually named for current centres of population rather than nostalgia (ecclesiastical or otherwise.)County Dioceses in England:

So, you'll see some similarities in terms of distribution of areas but different groupings of areas. It'd be good to have a discussion about this. I fear that reformers would end up dissipating energy into arguments about what ways of slicing the cake would be best and so the status quo would remain by default. However, the question about the huge disparity of cover by the provinces of Canterbury and York, does begin to raise the issue.

 You'll see from these two maps that there are a lot of similarities. The main differences I can see are the place of Salisbury (in SW or south central areas), Chichester and whether Yorkshire and the North East are one entity or two (I think two would be better).

I'm beginning to think also that perhaps proposing a new Anglican British Isles with the 9 or 10 proposed provinces for England and then also the structures for Scotland, Wales and Ireland also included, should at least be talked about. (I suspect the other nations wouldn't want it but still ...)

Beyond the geographies, the issue would be about costs both of transitions and also of maintaining the polity structures. We'd probably have to consider how best to have decision making done so as not to increase overall costs. But economies of scale of province over dioceses could help.

I'd love to know what other people think and whether we should campaign about these ideas.
It might also raise questions about the CofE's democratic deficit ie. the fact that ordinary CofEers don't get to elect general synod member directly and that GS is worked in such a way as to routinely make difficult participation by lay people who are employed in regular sorts of jobs -but maybe that's another post /topic...

Does the Church really exist for the worship of God?

What I need to say, right upfront, is that I support, broadly, the organisation Praxis which originated the following definition in support of its mission (this is the UK instantiation of the organisation):

The Church exists for the worship of God.
Worship is the only activity of the Church which will last into eternity.

Worship enriches and transforms our lives.
In Christ we are drawn closer to God in the here and now.
This shapes our beliefs, our actions and our way of life.
God transforms us as individuals, congregations and communities.

Worship provides a vital context for mission, teaching and pastoral care. Good worship and liturgy inspires and attracts, informs and delights. The worship of God can give hope and comfort in times of joy and of sorrow. Despite this significance, we are often under-resourced for worship. Praxis Home

I think the problem with this is a conflation and confusion of different meanings for the word 'worship' which often, I think, ends up misdirecting our attention and effort when it comes to what happens in church buildings.

I think I need to unpack what I mean more. You see, I think that the two meanings of worship play out in that statement but one tends to displace the other while relying on the displaced meaning for its justification.

I guess that still needs unpacking further. So let's start by saying what I think the two meanings are and how they relate to one another.

The first meaning is summed up in Romans 12:1-2 "... in view of God's mercies, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice to God which is your spiritual worship ...". This is picked up in Anglican communion liturgy in the prayer after communion in which we "offer our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice". That this is an important way to understand "worship" is accentuated by Matthew Myers Boulton's book God Against Religion, which (drawing on insights from Karl Barth) makes a case for understanding liturgical worship as a fallen artefact and understanding the message of the first chapters of Genesis as showing the more fundamental human calling to be to tend and till creation as created co-creators.

So, I think that there is a problem with "The Church exists for the worship of God" and "Worship is the only activity of the Church which will last into eternity", if "worship" is understood primarily as an assembly for the the performance of  rites, actions, words (what many would call 'liturgy'). Assuming the basic rightness of Boulton's (and Barth's) thesis, the church exists for the worship of God only really if we understand worship primarily as becoming and being part of God's work (and rest from) [re]creating. The problem, it seems to me, with the Praxis landing page blurb is that it seems to shift the meaning into narrowly liturgical events. Such meaning -by the Barthean thesis as picked up by Boulton- is precisely the wrong way to go: there is no temple in the New Jerusalem and the liturgical acts of Revelation chapters 1 to 20 are not to be understood as eschatological but as representations of present reality (as per the kind of approach to interpretation of the book of Revelation in David Wilcox's commentary). The only  kind of worship in the New Jerusalem seems to that which could be included in the wealth of the nations -which would surely be all human achievement rooted in God's own work of creation.

So what place liturgical worship in the Christian life? Well, I think that the blurb does give indication of that where it says:

In Christ we are drawn closer to God in the here and now.
This shapes our beliefs, our actions and our way of life.
God transforms us as individuals, congregations and communities.

 Liturgical activity in the form of "public worship" and it cognates of prayer groups, family prayers, so-called personal devotions and the like, should have the effect all being well of drawing us closer to God, shaping us Christicly and transforming us ("by the renewal of our minds" as Romans 12:2 puts it). Barth and Boulton point out that this can only happen because such a fallen artefact as liturgy is reoccupied (my metaphor not theirs) by Christ who redeems it by the Spirit so that it can accomplish such purposes.

So, when the blurb says; "Worship provides a vital context for mission, teaching and pastoral care." I am inclined to say that it should be more radically stated still: Worship is mission, teaching and pastoral care (Rm.12:1-2, applied), some worship is accomplished through liturgical acts much may be supported by them.

And this speaks to that last line: "Despite this significance, we are often under-resourced for worship".  It might be better to rephrase it "... under-resourced for liturgical events" to help us to recall that the resourcing of these events is meant to be part of equipping the saints. Perhaps even a major part given that for many church folk an hour in church most weeks is it for corporate formation. Thought about like that, perhaps we should indeed be taking with utmost seriousness the potential of liturgy to support and strengthen worship in terms of joining God in mission beyond the service.

Of course, this prompts a question as to whether a lot of liturgical worship really does a good job of promoting in-life worship. I have doubts that  it does, in many cases. I suspect that the confusion between the two meanings of 'worship' misdirects churches as to what we are meant to be about when we meet together round the Lord's Table or other 'services'. Believing that worship is preeminent in Christian life and interpreting it as wh at we do together when gathered for a service, we end up fetishising liturgical acts and the criteria for assessing them becomes detached from -or downgrades- equipping the saints and prioritises aesthetics and/or shared emotion.

That's not to say aesthetics or shared emotion are irrelevant to equipping the saints. However, we should recognise that it is really easy for them to become ends in themselves with little carry over into the service of life. They should play their part in inspiring, encouraging and making connections. They make good servants but terrible masters. So liturgy might be under-resourced, but I'm not convinced. I worry that there may be many churches where liturgy is quite possibly over-resourced in relation to the in-life worship of their members. Where what goes on in church is in effect considered the most important part of discipleship.That would be like considering medical school the most important part of a medic's life and work. It clearly is important but it is supposed to be focussed towards a career which will help many people to be well, become well or not to die so soon.

Where's my leisure society, dude?

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen.

In the late 1960s my primary school teachers were telling us that they were helping to educate us for leisure as well as for work because when we were adults our country would be able to produce enough wealth for us not to have to work such long hours.

Well, they were right and they were wrong: actually our country arguably does produce enough wealth for us all to live well enough without having to work 60 hour weeks or even less. Perhaps even only 15 hours. Perhaps someone's done the sums (let me know if you have come across them). Certainly in terms of productivity and capability in comparison with the 1960s it's hard to believe we couldn't possibly. In this respect, I reckon, my teachers and Keynes were right.

Obviously, they were wrong because ... austerity! By that I mean that we are in a situation where the idea of only needing to work for a fraction of the time many currently work seems ridiculous. Especially as there are many who feel that they would need to work more to be free from miserable conditions of life.

Part of the clue to why this might be so is in the policies Keynes proposed and which were being enacted between the start of the 1950s and the mid 1970s (and which produced what the Cambridge economist Ha Joon Chang calls the 'golden age' in relation to the political economy of the West). These were key in bringing about a period of time in which my teachers and those they were influenced by could seriously envisage the leisure society. After all it was a period when the gap between the wealth of the richest and that of the poorest was diminished allowing millions to be raised out of poverty. Productivity was growing. (Obviously this scared the would-be plutocrats who plotted to put this stuff into reverse).

So, I guess in short, the main answer to my query about what happened to my eagerly-anticipated leisure society is that it was smuggled away when the foundations for it were substituted by extractive rentier capitalism given a fig leaf of respectability of the superficially plausible Chicago school economics  and the idea of trickle down prosperity (Chang does a good job of showing how this rather one-dimensional approach to economics really isn't adequate).

What we need to remember is that economic activity is socialised at root. The reason why an arch capitalist like Henry Ford would pay his workers more than subsistence wages was a self-interested-but-enlightened recognition that for him to sell stuff, people had to be able to buy it. The name of the capitalist game is to find systems and ideological justifications to extract and suck up to the 1% as much as possible of the wealth that pretty much the whole of society is involved in producing and circulating. What Keynsian policies did was to offset some of the more egregious ways that this wealth-mining takes place and to re-settle the wealth back with those who actually produced much of the value in the first place.

One of the things that has bearing on this is the idea of a Citizen's Income or Basic Income Guarantee. It's been a policy of the Green Party in Britain since the 1970's and seen as likely in the book The History of the Future in 100 Objects (an intriguing read, btw). It would be one way to try to keep wealth from floating off into the stratosphere of offshore banking and ridiculously OTT property bubbles (which, remember, drive up prices for all of us and provide a further extractive mechanism for the already hyper rich).

Redistributive economic mechanism are a vital way to keep the economy balanced and serving the many. The BIG experiment seems to indicate that people will still work and it won't demotivate work being done. It would enable some people to do what turns out to be socially useful stuff 'for free' so to speak.

If, as many Christians would argue, it is true that humans are created to enjoy adding value to creation and to enjoy exercising creativity, learning and helping others (notwithstanding whatever distortions fallenness represents in those things), then we should expect that given opportunity people will indeed make efforts to do things which turn out to work towards the good of many others. The genuinely lazy and parasitical turn out to be relatively rare especially in circumstances where there is a genuine sense of belonging, inclusion and pride in playing ones part.

What we need, as Christians, to recall is that fallenness generally acts upon the already or in-principle good to distort, pervert or weaponise it. Our task in a fallen world is to work to preserve, enhance or even make more goodness and to undistort, revert and ploughshar-ise what has been caught up in fallen usage. We can expect some success in all of this because the Spirit of God still hovers over creation to empower ordering and teeming and redeeming.

The attractiveness of beauty, truth, goodness and love will always draw people (who are created to be drawn) to work with God whether or not they can name or recognise their activity as such.

I would expect 'my' leisure society to be filled with huge amounts of productive 'work' being done, in a sense, for free. Why? Because it would be enjoyable, fulfilling and create social bonds, respect and recognition.

Check out:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-mincome-experiment-dauphin?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE!: