A conversation recently veered backwards to what I used to do before I was a minister. Long time ago. Hardly seems relevant it was so long ago. But then I began to think about it. In the years between leaving school at 15 and starting as a minister I was a tractor driver (16 the legal age then), worked in a Clydeside tomato / bulb nursery, did two years as an electrical engineer, worked as a brick setter in a brickworks, two summers at Easterhouse social work dept as a debt advisor, and one or two other bits and pieces including house plant cultivation and greenhouse glass repairing!
The point is I learned stuff doing all these things, and what remains is a set of skills all these years later. I can still drive a 16 gear tractor, make a difference in any garden I'm let loose in, know a good brick when I see one, and have a deep sympathy and at times an angry solidarity with and on behalf of folk caught up in hopeless webs of debt. But more than residual skills, there's the hard to explain and harder to replace experience of finding out what I could do, what I was good at and not so good at. But also the sobering thought that a young and unskilled man with no educational qualifications managed to stay in work for 5 years to earn his way to University. Not sure what chances anyone has today of repeating that career trajectory. Had I needed to draw up a CV then, not sure there was enough relevant content to fill half a page – and much of what was relevant would hardly have encouraged an employer.
But I was given life-chances. There were life chances to be given, and I'm not sure when that will be said again with some confidence about young people who don''t make it in the more fiercely selective and streamlined walkways to a career in a post recession culture sinking beneath the weight of its own debt, and looking to throw overboard anyone unable to pay their way. It's a hard time to be young….or middle aged….or old. It's a hard time. And I'm increasingly impatient with the rhetoric of politics, economics, and social theory that suggests we are all going to have to bear the pain. I'm sorry. But pain is relative, and during a recession there is no equal distribution of financial hardship, no common levels of anxiety, no universal experience of having to choose between food and fuel. Not all of us will have to make that kind of choice – we may have to pay more, but we will manage with a bit of adjustment. Not so for everybody.
So my impatience extends to the church, and the lack of evidence for a new approach to missiology that borrows from Amos, the Lucan Beatitudes and the preferential option for the poor that is definitive of the Kingdom of God. Because wherever else Jesus of Nazareth might place his vote, it would certainly be on the side of those who are the easy targets, the marginal folk who are too easily deprived of social benefits rather than cost us more money in taxes. I just don't think an increase in VAT feels the same for me as it does for a single parent with several children and no full-time job, or an elderly person on a basic pension. The church's voice could do with being heard, and speaking with a Galilean accent.
So that conversation about what I used to do? The great thing was, there used to be things to do that you could be paid for. Now an entire generation of people with skills, training, education, and life hopes and plans, are encountering a world no longer congenial to their life plans, and where life chances have to be fought for, and with no guarantees. Now whatever else I think the Gospel of Jesus means, it has to have something to say not only to people who are struggling to hope, but something to say on behalf of those who struggle to hope, in the face of massive economic and social forces aligned on the side of the haves.
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