Blog

  • A Pentecostal Worldview

    It is through the agency and power of the same Holy Spirit speaking in us and through us that the Word of God can be and continues to be communicated, as living dynamic Reality to humankind in the proclamation and the teaching of the Church. This holds good in the most difficult circumstances, for it is the coming of the Kingdom of God in Christ and the Lordship of the Holy Spirit on earth that are at stake in the mission of the Church. Just as when Jesus cast out demons by the Spirit (or finger) of God, the Kingdom of God or his sovereign Presence and Power came among people, so when the church proclaims  the victory of Christ over all the forces of evil and darkness, it is God himself  in the Sovereign Presence and Power of his Spirit who is at work bringing redemption and freedom to captive humanity.  (Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, page 63)

    Aye, but do we believe all that? Does Pentecost decisively shape my worldview? Not if I’m simply flattened by the avalanche of gloom and manufactured anxiety that passes for ‘ the news’. Pentecost is the day when the Church believes in miracles again, when all that darkens and diminishes life is swept up into purposes much bigger than sin, and more determined than any number of demons. Whatever else, Pentecost announces Who rules, OK??

  • McJob and the Oxford English Dictionary

    So. Mcdonalds want to rewrite the English language by erasing the word McJob from that responsible guardian of verbal verities, the Oxford English Dictionary. Here’s the story from Lawdit, the intellectual property solicitors.

    Arch The

    UK

    arm of McDonald’s is planning a campaign to have the dictionary definition of a McJob changed. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is: "An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector."  Lorraine Homer from McDonald’s, however, said the firm felt the definition was "out of date and inaccurate".

    The fast food chain is planning a public petition to try to get the definition changed. The word McJob was first used in the

    US

    in the 1980s and was popularised by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book Generation X. It first appeared in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary in March 2001. McDonald’s tried to improve the image of its employment opportunities last year with the slogan: "McProspects – over half of our executive team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob."

    Now I think it’s laudable (a couple of letter changes make the word laughable) that McDonald’s are now concerned about fairness, keen for everyone to use accurate descriptive terminology, and aspire to be supportive enablers of their employees’ prospects. And I do think if a company has genuinely turned around, and is now espousing and promoting fair trade, fair labour practices reflected in liveable wages as a global and not only locally expedient policy, and works credibly towards not only image change but to evidence a change of ethical substance, then that’s to be commended and rewarded.

    However – rather than remove the pejorative McJob, Mcdonalds could inspire new words like McFairpay, McFairtrade, McHealthy, McOrganic. If they carry on appealing to the courts, and using their commercial weight, they might generate the even less welcome neologism, McLitigation.

  • Courageous intervention

    I was once told by one of the congregation, after preaching on a particularly astringent passage from the Gospels where Jesus was berating the religious status quo, that I needed to preach like that more often. When I asked ‘Preach like what’?, I was told ‘Give us a hard kick up the backside’.

    I have to confess I was a bit surprised – I suppose it hadn’t fully registered that

    a) preaching might have had that kind of aim expressed in such unevangelical terminology

    b) there are those who expect to come to church and be the regular recipients of that kind of ‘team talk’!

    But at the same time I recognise the truth of Thomas Merton’s comment that the church suffers from ‘chronic niceness’, a capacity to be accommodating and non-confrontational, and that in so doing the church is being unfaithful, avoiding the pain and rejection of being both critic of the status quo and exemplar of another way.

    51x45jbq92l__aa240_ Which brings me to a passage from my A year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer daily readings book. Some of Bonhoeffer’s writing is an unmistakable example of ‘a hard kick up the backside’ for the Church. The words below were written at a time when the church’s silent acquiescence let evil go unchallenged.

    Bonhoeffer The church confesses itself guilty of violating all the Ten Commandments. It confesses thereby its apostasy from Christ. It has not so borne witness to the truth of God in a way that leads all inquiry and science to recognise its origin in this truth. It has not so proclaimed the righteousness of God that all human justice must see there its own source and essence. It has not been able to make the loving care of God so credible that all human economic activity would be guided by it in its task. By falling silent the church became guilty from the loss of responsible action in society, courageous intervention, and the readiness to suffer for what is acknowledged as right. It is guilty of the government’s falling away from Christ. (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 140-1)

  • Still Reading Torrance

    41pmc6kwr3l Someone defined a good book as one that should be sucked slowly, like a lozenge. Now ‘lozenge’, ever since I was a wee boy and had to suck cough lozenges on account of chronic bronchitis, brought on it seems by secondary smoking, has always seemed to me to be a grown up word for a sweetie, that while tasting a bit different, would definitely do you good. 

    Tom Torrance’s The Christian Doctrine of God is a lozenge of a book. I am reading it slowly because it’s a grown up book that is doing me good. Here’s one of my latest lozenge paragraphs – to be taken slowly and allowed to do good.

    …our belief in the Deity of Christ rest,…upon the whole manifestation of ‘the Christ event’ as soteriologically proclaimed and interpreted in the gospels and epistles. We rely upon the whole coherent evangelical structure of historical divine revelation given in the New Testament scriptures. It is when we indwell it, meditate upon it, tune into it, penetrate inside it and absorb it in ourselves, and find the very foundations of our life and thought changing under the creative and saving impact of Christ, and are saved by Christ and personally reconciled to God in Christ that we believe in him as Lord and God. This does not come about, however, without renouncing ourselves in a repentant rethinking of all that we are and claim to know, that is, without our being crucified with Christ in heart and mind and raised to new life in him. (page 53)

  • To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak

    Music is a powerful, persuasive, subversive force in human culture, having a capacity ‘to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.’ Decided recently to have a summer of rediscovered favourite music and newly discovered shouldn’t have missed it first time music. So I’ve added a sidebar called Music Redivivus – the albums there list the music I’m now making time to listen to. My usual stuff includes Baroque, Beethoven, assorted Country – mainly female vocalists, Joan Baez and bits and pieces of other stuff. So I’ve asked several folk to give me the name of a CD they think would help me recover from my self imposed philistinism and restore a sense of cultural connectedness!! Over the next couple of months I’ll occasionally update on my progress on a musical refresher course, curriculum dictated by other people’s tastes.

    But first, a singer I am revisiting.41c3cvt5xnl__aa240_ Several years ago I discovered Carrie Newcomer. Her work was profiled in Sojourners, never a recommendation I’d ignore. I discovered a singer and writer whose major key is hopefulness, who combines faith with justice, and laughter with serious critique of all that makes laughter hard. She tells stories of the hopes and dreams, the struggles and courage of immigrants, single mothers, refugees and others whose place in the world is threatened and whose life chances are made fragile by ‘the way it is’. Her songs vibrate with a sense of life’s mystery, how frustration mixes with fulfilment, sadness with joyfulness, loss with new possibility. She is a wonderful apologist for music as a deeply formative shaper of moral response and a hopeful worldview. Here’s one of her songs from the CD My True Name.

    When one door closes another door opens wide
    It’s hard to believe all of the locked doors I’ve tried
    And you can’t pray for what you want or what you’d have instead
    You can only offer up your heart and ask that you be led

    Life’s gonna take you, where you never thought you’d go
    When you finally think you’ve got it down, It isn’t so
    There are windows and doors, you’re not finished with yet
    It’s not always getting what you want, but wanting what you get
    Chorus

    It’s not gettin’ easier, so I’m not going to pretend
    That I know this story from it’s beginning to it’s end
    Oh believe me when I tell you, believe me if you can

    If I could turn down the noise of my own will and choice
    I could hear the truth of my life in a clear voice
    I will bow down my head to the wisdom of my heart
    Cool my heels and hold on to the best parts

  • Muffins and Sandy the Poet; Pizza, IRN BRU and Wembley

    200424062001 Thursday morning went in to College hoping to find my glasses – the expensive ones. Asked at the Cybercafe – no luck. Over to the library and asked on floor three if any glasses had been handed in. Librarian misheard me, looked at me as if I was daft, and said,

    ‘We don’t lend glasses. Anyway, the only ones I’ve got are my own and they would look weird on you.’

    After explanations – she’s embarrassed and I still don’t have my glasses. Eventually I found them – on the floor of my study (I don’t have an office – I have a study, HMMPHH!) – under the chair, undamaged either by the wheels of the chair or the cleaner’s hoover the night before!

    A_hutchinson Friday morning did lots of phone / email / marking then went for a coffee with Graeme. Met Alexander Hutchison the Scottish poet – not to name-drop but Sandy has been a friend since my early days here at the University – he gave me one of his poems, signed, as a gift to mark my Doctorate. Well a long blether about illumination in the poetry of Theodore Roethke, the dialectic between immanence and transcendence, the inordinately long sentence (Sandy thinks the longest one extant!) that comes at the end of Michael Polyani’s 1951-2 Gifford lectures, Personal Knowledge, and our usual swipe at the suffocating algae of contemporary academic administration that reduces the oxygen and light of scholarship.By the way, did I mention the curling stone sized blueberry muffins that Graeme and I ate???

    Friday afternoon did another 10k run – still quite hard going but slowly improving. Not today though – end of Semester fatigue took the edge off. But the wind, a couple of light showers and quite a lot of sunshine provided a pleasant climate in which to risk expiring. Running past a bus stop in Crookston Road, obviously looking mildly distressed, young ned says, devoid of sensitivity,  ‘ Ach ye’ll be too auld onywye by 2012.’

    Obviously I no longer cut it as an Olympic prospect. But I did shift most of that mountainous muffin though!

    This afternoon is fitba’ and pizza – Andrew and I are hoping for a scoring draw, extra time and then a penalty shoot-out at the new Wembley which today doubles as the OK Corral between Mourinho and Ferguson. If one is the goodie and one is the baddie, which is Ike Clanton and which is Wyatt Eearp? 

    _39342935_irnbru203_3 Doesn’t matter we’re neutral observers of the beautiful game, skilled practitioners of sofa fitba, the high energy spectator sport sustained by Pizza and, in true Blythean spirit, – IRN BRU. Anyway the BIG game is tomorrow – Aberdeen need to beat Rangers to qualify for Europe – or Hearts need to lose at Kilmarnock – which makes me a two day fervent Killie fan.

  • 65938277_1e031f0ab7 A good conversation with Sean and Stuart the other day about why we blog, should we blog, is blogging addictive, why spend time blogging when you can do real writing, what are we avoiding / escaping from when we blog????

    (By the way, the pictures on this post are some of the ones I have enjoyed using – they serve to reinforce the human, moral and spiritual dimensions of what I think makes blogging ‘worth it’ for me.Donkey)

    Well, right up front, some of it must be vanity – the assumption someone other than me is sometimes interested in some of what I sometimes say. So a bit of self-indulgence – but it’s the other reasons that I hope are the main energy sources.

    Some of it is creativity – I love words, I enjoy writing, the ‘create a new post’ button gets pressed I see the empty whiteness and get thinking and tapping – not just for the sake of it, but because articulation and communication of thought is a significant defining activity of the human person – and of the Christian following after the One who was "the Word made flesh", the articulate communication of who God is.

    Trinity Some of it is curiosity – wondering if others think as I do, care about what matters to me, laugh at the same things, but also it helps me learn if and how others see life differently and more interestingly than me. Communal reflection and conversation isn’t about me being re-assured by others reinforcing my view of the world – but a shared exploration of its ambiguity, frustration, loss, wonder, joy and whatever else happens. A creative communal curiosity about the best ways to share life on this planet might break a few vicious cirles.

    Jalozai_children_waiting_m Some of it is cathartic – when something gets to me, –  perceived injustice, culpable stupidity, inexcusable arrogance, unnecessary rudeness, blatant greed and needless waste, human hurt and humans causing hurt – that and much else – it helps to name it. So naming injustice, resisting cruelty, saying prayer, giving voice both to moral outrage and to moral admiration – now and again, here and there, this and that happens, and the odd piece of prophetic blogging names it and brings it into the light, so that we can see if its deeds are evil, or if it can be clearly seen that it is the work of God.

    1576871487_01_pt01__ss400_sclzzzzzz And some is celebration – living wittily is still an underlying worldview I try to live. Witty as in wise; witty as in funny; witty as in curious, cathartic, creative, celebratory engagement with the life God gives. Not that I manage anywhere near all of that ; or even some of it most of the time. But to enjoy life and people, to be the occasional gladness maker, to resist the suppressive forces of consumer self interest by generously living its opposite – to laugh, encourage, support, affirm, praise, appreciate, all those whose lives impinge on, and enrich, our own living – that’s a worldview compatible with the Kingdom!

    Holbein18 Those who missed my induction to blogdom can read what I take living wittily  to mean here. Sean paid me the embarrassingly welcome comment of saying what he thought of that post – he obviously liked it! Living wittily means living attentively (to others), seeing (others) wisely, listening (to others) with critical care, acting supportively and curatively (for others), speaking constructively (to others), and gratefully receiving the grace that comes (from others).

  • held together by covenant and trustful of the Spirit

    Sfw Two short italicised extracts from Sean’s Whitley Lecture give a good indication of what he is proposing as a Baptist Covenantal approach to interpreting the Bible:

    Biblical interpretation in covenantal perspective should be understood as the church’s active, diverse and ongoing engagement with the biblical texts.

    A Baptist, covenantal hermeneutic will permit interpretive diversity and disagreement as a hallmark of the church’s life and not insist on particular interpretive decisions as the necessary hallmark of being ‘biblical’.

    Embedded in a magisterial, though still developing lecture, these proposals offer important and liberating principles that could enable Baptists both to take the Bible seriously, and accept that differences of biblical interpretation can be seen as both enriching corrective and shared responsiveness in our task of living under the rule of Christ. The underlying assumption is that if we are met together in covenanted fellowship in Christ, then that foundational covenant agreement should be strong enough to support significant difference, enable us to agree to differ and respect our differences, and continue talking towards, and walking towards, a shared understanding in seeking to discern the mind of Christ.

    Listening to Sean eloquently and persuasively arguing for such interpretive diversity within a covenanted unity raised the thought:

    the maturity of a Baptist community could well be measured by its capacity to allow, encourage and practice the interpretation of Scripture, believing that differences in interpretations of Scripture are to be subsumed under the greater responsibility to live out our covenanted relationship with each other in Christ, within the diversity of the community Christ Himself has called together.

    In other words, as we explore, discuss, disagree, try to agree on the meaning of the biblical texts, we presuppose as a prior principle, our shared relationship with the living Christ, and our sincere goal of hearing and obeying His call. That call to obedient living is often mediated through the faithful questioning of a community engaged in listening…to Christ through Scripture, and to Scripture interpreted by a community held together by covenant and trustful of the Spirit, who bears witness to Christ amongst us and within us.

    Those of us who heard Sean’s lecture, now look forward to the intended expansion of his reflections into a full monograph. As Baptist Christians too often tempted to claim ‘biblical’ for our point of view, and to represent any other view as ‘unbiblical’, we sorely need such wise, generous and capable guidance. Thank you Sean for a good evening of thinking and rethinking about an area of our life together that is both crucially important and culpably neglected.

  • Strawberry tarts, IRN BRU and related educational experiences!

    P4201151 Yesterday Glasgow was basking in Spring sunshine, which made for a good day with our visiting friends from Manchester. After an unintended circular tour of Paisley our visitors arrived at the College in time for coffee and strawberry tarts (illustrated).

    Stuart then introduced us to Scottish culture and the underlying implications for understanding the context of mission in contemporary Scotland, – and did so by using the blue and orange cuckoo Irn Bru advert. _39342935_irnbru203_2 This was quality exposition of a foundational contemporary text in Scottish cultural expression – nae kiddin, it wiz so!

    Lunch – then we reflected together on the prayers, politics and pacifism of George Macleod of Iona, which took us into a wider discussion of the importance yet difficulty of building deep levels of personal and spiritual formation into an educational process that is modular, intense and inhospitable to slow organic growth of spirit.

    Kg_exterior_06_small Then off to Kelvingrove where we were all free to follow our artistic, historic, gastric preferences either in the art galleries, the historic galleries or the very fine cafe. A walk around Kelvingrove Park, then to our Italian Restaurant (Sarti’s in Bath Street which we are happy to recommend), where we met up with Isabella (SBC events manager and all round fixer), and where our guests made us their guests – in a Gospel reversal of hospitality.

    In recognition of significant calorie acquisition, we then strolled into the centre to George’s Square and inadvertently gate-crashed the ad hoc parties of the Spanish football supporters here for the Uefa Cup final tonight at Hampden. Drawn as if by some not alttogether inexplicable magnet we drifted to Borders (Books and Coffee), before strolling back, saying goodbye and heading for home and bed.

    Friendlycitylogo What a good, full, satisfying day – laughter and seriousness, food and friendship, conversation and culture, time to pay adequate attention to the importance of what we do with our lives but also time to remember not to take ourselves too seriously. This was partnership in the Gospel and friendship for the sake of it – and something to be repeated. An invitation to Manchester is already tabled…..where’s my diary??

    Dr Sean Winter, NT Tutor and member of the Manchester staff at Northern College, will stay over until tonight, Wednesday 16th. At our invitation Sean will be at the Central Baptist Church in Paisley – 7.30 p.m. when he will deliver the 2007 Whitley Lecture: ‘More Light and Truth? Biblical Interpretation in Covenantal Perspective.’

    Everybody welcome – some serious and important theological thinking going on here, so feel free to come and enjoy a celebration and affirmation of theology done well as a service to the Kingdom.

  • A hundred Thousand Welcomes

    Quad2t_2We are sharing today with friends and colleagues from Luther King House, the home of Northern Baptist College, Manchester. Our friends are on staff retreat and are staying at Gartmore House up in Stirlingshire, but they will spend today with us in Paisley and Glasgow to get a feel for what we are trying to do about theological education and ministry formation in Scotland.

    Stuart and I will share some of our thinking about doing and teaching theology in the Scottish cultural context; Stuart through a brilliant (I don’t use superlatives as redundant flattery!) paper on post-modern cultural features as they impinge on theological and social awareness; I will use the prayers of George Macleod to open up discussion about the formation and development of prayer in ministry, its rootedness in the doctrines of Trinitarian love, creation and redemption, and its expression as a form of ministry that engages with political and social realities.

    Kg_exterior_06_small_2  Then lunch – after which we take a trip to the most popular visitor attraction in Scotland, the magnificent Kelvingrove Art Gallery and we will spend time enjoying the creative genius, varied beauty, emotional intensity, of great art.

    Because it can’t be done in a quick jaunt, we will explore the delights of the Gallery cafe before continuing the enjoyment of Glasgow’s finest cultural centre – and it’s free. The day will finish with a shared meal (Italian) and good conversation amongst friends and fellow theological journeyers.Kgrestjim1461l_2 

    To all who are coming to be with us, a hundred thousand welcomes –

    and may you each know the blessing of God expressed in our Scottish weather:

    If it’s wet – then may you know the blessing that softly and persistently falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.

    If it’s cold – then may you feel the fresh bracing air of God’s galvanising Spirit, even if it causes goosepimples.

    If, by any chance, the sun is shining – may you bask in the radiant extravagance of God’s love, and know the spiritual equivalent of photosynthesis

    If it is cold, and with showers and sunny intervals – may you know the threefold blessing of the Triune God and be blessed, galvanised and radiated by the love of God, and give thanks for the predictably unpredictable weather of Scotland, which one way or another, speaks the welcome of God.