Blog

emotional and spiritual interrogation

For about a month I’ve made my way through Eliot’s Four Quartets using Howard’s slim commentary, Dove Descending, as a guide. And Howard is a good guide – not too talkative, not prepared to explain ad nauseam as if you had no eyes of your own, but well informed, not pushing you along too quickly, and clearly in love with his subject.

I have seldom read a poem more historically specific in its imagery, (the first half of the 20th century). And yet there is in its power and subtlety, unflinching realism about human experience of precious life and inevitable death, penetrating truthfulness about fear and hope, anxiety and aspiration, time and eternity, an unnerving contemporary feel. It isn’t easy poetry – apart from the intellectual artfulness, the technical construction, the precision of language and subversion of form – it is the emotional and spiritual interrogation that takes place when the four poems are read in 2007. These quintessentially modern poems, accurately and specifically, diagnose the symptoms and trace the complexities of the post-modern worldview as it impacts on human existence. And Eliot does so profoundly informed by Christian tradition.

Time and timelessness, the centrality but elusiveness of human experience, the loss of the metaphysical structures of thought, the "chronological snobbishness" that thinks newest is truest and the accompanying suspicion of meta-narratives; these are some of Eliot’s themes. I know some of what he says doesn’t ‘work’, ‘connect’, with where we are today; what he’d have made of a world wired to the Web, welded to the mobile phone, dissolving into globalised standardisation – I’ve no idea. But if I want to even begin to examine life’s deepest foundations, his is one of the voices I would want to hear. Why? Because he is honest about how hard Christian faith is, both to hold on to, and to relinquish – because we are caught in the love of the God who is caught in the love of the world.

31 January 2007
Leadership and Community – which defines which?

One of my favourite writers complained in one of her books that life was happening too fast, that experiences, conversations, people and thoughts require time to be assimilated. She viewed unassimilated experience as wasteful, an irresponsible squandering of life’s significant moments, a culpable extravagance that failed to learn from other people’s ideas.

That’s how I feel after a working retreat (oxymoron?), when important conversations, shared times of prayer, intentional time away from the usual routines, were dedicated to giving us space and inclination to think, talk and plan, to dream, grumble and get whatever is in our hearts off our chests! There’s a couple of intriguing questions that I want to think about, (assimilate!!) – then in a day or two suggest some of my (probably tentative) conclusions, so that if you are interested you can offer your perspective, correctives, insight.

What is the relationship between community and leadership?

Is leadership individual or corporate? Is it a personal charisma or a community gift?

If it is not an either/or, how can it be both personal and communal?

These kinds of questions are important because if we aim to identify potential leaders, develop gifts of leadership, grow certain kinds of leadership (visionary, enabling, strategic, prophetic etc), it seems to me one way or another they have to come from, emerge from, and find rootedness in the community. Or do they?

Then there is the Baptist thing. If I ask, how do we develop effective leadership within Baptist communities, what difference does the word Baptist make to the style and implementation of leadership initiatives?

Is it idealistic to say that in a Baptist fellowship the congregation is the source of leadership as it seeks through prayer, conversation and listening to Scripture, under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit, to discern the mind of Christ together?

What then, is the role of the prophetic individual? The persuasive motivator, the convincing strategist, the inspirational thinker whose ideas seem exciting, attractive – are these gifted individuals to be muted in a process that seeks the common denominator of communal agreement?

Or, put more positively, what in practice does it mean for the body of Christ to function effectively, to act in a co-ordinated and purposeful manner, under the head who is Christ? Specifically, what does leadership look like in a Baptist community, where the word Baptist is definitive as well as descriptive. I mean by that, Baptist as a self-description given content by such identity conferring principles as personal discipleship following after Jesus, covenanted community of shared mission and ministry, co-operative faithfulness to Jesus as revealed in Scripture. What is leadership that emerges from such a context?

31 January 2007
Ministry and the pragmatism of God
I’m off to a two day meeting to talk about ministry, in particular how to intepret the apparent dearth of ministry candidates in the current cultural and church climate.
1. Is God calling fewer people to traditional forms of ministry?
2. If so is that being compensated by churches and people developing different forms of ministry, perhaps more fluid and adaptable to a culture now in chronic rapid-change mode?
3. Or has the career displaced vocation, and the career trajectory replaced the sense of upward calling, so that against a career with its rewards, ministry is unattractive as a vocation with its cost?
4. Or is it that the forms and styles of ministry being modelled are increasingly unattractive – because of tolerated mediocrity in standards and competence, obsessive attachment to outmoded forms, negative joylessness about ministry as a way of life, churches resistant to change and frustrating to the point of muting calls for change, or whatever else?
That the hard-edged distinction between ministry and laity, or between clergy and the rest, is neither valid nor healthy, has long been conceded by those interested in learning from NT understandings of the correlation between ministries and gifts. The recovery of vocation as God’s calling on each life, and as conferring on all ethically legitimate work that Christians do, the blessing of God’s call, was one of the clear gains of the Lutheran Reformation.

But still, churches need leadership as service, and such service requires the freedom to evolve and the equipment to be effective to fulfil it well. So how are we to resource needed ministry today? And accepting the theological clumsiness of that question (because it is Christ who resources all ministry in the power of the Spirit), what are the promising possibilities presented by today’s experience of church decline, contemporary ministry needs, missional thinking, accepted human limitations, ongoing pastoral uncertainty?
- If there’s one kind of ministry the contemporary church needs it’s………….what?
- If there’s one underlying vocational motivation ministry needs to ignite it it’s………what?
- If there’s one thing God is saying through the experience of "ministry shortage" it’s….. what?
These are pragmatic questions – they look for answers that might work – I’m not worried about that. I wonder if amongst other attributes discernible in the creative and redemptive activity of God,there is an element of divine pragmatism? Though seldom addressed as such in the more careful categories of systematic theology, is the pragmatism of divine grace, God’s love looking for ways of redeeming that work – would that be pragmatism from an eternal perspective? And for all our agonising about the hows and whys, isn’t that eternal perspective the needed reminder that the health and future and completion of the church’s mission in God’s purposes is secured by sovereign self-giving love, that chooses to use us?
29 January 2007
bewilderment fatigue
In a recent post I mentioned (tongue in cheek) the Blessed John Reid, who has given us such bon mots as ‘Not fit for purpose’ and ‘Get it! Recent mismanagement of Home Office remits has put one of the most durable and varied political careers of recent years in serious jeopardy. Now I can’t begin to make sense of how and why so much has gone wrong – and like most others I am suffering from bewilderment fatigue, that rare but serious condition when the mind has been exposed to so much incredible nonsense and self-contradictory claims, that it resigns itself to accepting nonsense as the norm.

I suppose what I’m trying to do is make sense of something like this –
- prisons are in short supply, overcrowded, and in crisis (all agree)
- too many people are being imprisoned for offences better dealt with by alternative sanctions such as community service, tagging or fines ( some, perhaps most agree)
- the Home Secretary is obliged and expected to keep the judiciary up to date with the current position, and to remind of guidelines about appropriate sentencing (some agree, but it seems some judges don’t)
- the judiciary is independent of government, and due legal process is expected to operate beyond political interference ( all, or at least most, agree)
- so why have some judges acted on the Home Secretary’s reminder as if it were an order they had to obey – and in doing so have used the independence of the legal process to make a political point by acting as if they were not independent, which they are free to do because they are independent.
See what I mean, bewilderment fatigue!

That a judge who could have detained a man convicted of serious offences involving child pornography, chooses not to in response to the Home Secretary’s memo, is, it seems to my less complex mind, an abuse of the independence of the judiciary. If the appropriate sentence is custodial, and that is what the law requires, surely the availability of a place is a secondary and practical problem – the primary obligation is that a law intended to safeguard the public (in this case children) should be upheld. Had the judge in question imposed a custodial sentence, that would have upheld the independence of the judiciary. Instead, the judge chose to make a statement – by acting as if he were not independent of political pressure.

Or have I missed something?
29 January 2007
Hauerwas 7:the gospel is not a conquering idea

Now and again Hauerwas is so engrossed in his conversation with Matthew, Bonhoeffer and Yoder, that his view of Christian discipleship, and of the Jesus who calls, is couched in the language of all three! Here’s a quotation where Yoder’s view of the non-violent Gospel precluding aggressive forms of evangelism, and Bonhoeffer’s portrayal of the self-emptying Word, and Matthew’s portrayal of discipleship as a radical unselfing of the self, coalesce in a theological restatement of Christian obedience.

Following Christ requires our recognising that the one I am tempted to judge is like me – a person who has received the forgiveness manifest in the cross. The recognition that the other person is like me – in need of forgiveness – prevents those who would follow Jesus from trying to force others to follow Jesus. We must, like Jesus, have the patience necessary to let those called deny that call. It means that the disciples are not called to make the world conform to the gospel, but rather the disciples are schooled to be non-violent – which means that the Gospel is not a "conquering idea" that neither knows nor respects resistance. Rather,[as Bonhoeffer comments] "the Word of God is so weak that it suffers to be despised and rejected by people. For the Word, there are such things as hardened hearts and locked doors. The Word accepts the resistance it encounters and bears it."

That paragraph is a needed antidote for the underlying triumphalism that informs much thinking about mission, church, christendom, evangelism. And I’m left wondering, because I’ve seldom been asked as bluntly to think about it, what a Christian existence might look like if we stopped thinking of the gospel as a "conquering idea"; if in Christian apologetics the underlying principles were forbearance, patience and respect for this other person, who needs God’s forgiveness which cannot be imposed by logic or compelled by argument, but perhaps which can be caught by the contagion of the Kingdom, the love that does not need acceptance to endure and persist. One of hauerwas’ magnificent overstated but necessary one liners, "The Father has refused to let our refusal determine our relationship to him….we are God’s enemies yet God would still love us – even coming to die for us."

29 January 2007
all weather walking………

Decided to get my walking boots dirty today. The weather forecast was bright, mostly dry – where we went, it was dull mostly wet, at least till about 1.00 o’clock. By then we had just passed Broughton and ate our packed lunch – observing the horizontal drizzle, psyching ourselves up for an all-weather walk along the banks of the River Tweed, doing a self-peruasion act to convince ourselves that the exercise would do us good, that rain is only water without which human life is impossible, and trusting the car thermometer which was indicating a bearable 5 degrees – but with no allowance for wind-chill.

So dressed for all weathers – that is three layers of jersey, fleece and a wind and waterproof jacket, (and a seriously ridiculous hat) we succeeded in two or three minutes in getting the walking boots not only dirty, but clarty, slaighered wi’ glaur, ( both Scots terms for impressively muddy!). But we did have a walk, with intermittent slitherings and constant squelchings, along what was probably the recent flood plain. And I believe ( I do, really), that it did us the world of good, that it was healthy despite the chill and drizzle, that the fresh air obliterated all sign of mental cobwebs, that we did more than our 10,000 steps worth of daily exercise – but it wasn’t the pleasant wee dauner (Scots for leisurely walk), we had hoped for, to get us back into walking ways.

Instead it was the kind of walk you do when you have some serious guilt to shift and you believe in more than nominal penance, or if you want to train for the 100 metre dash through a slurry sump – not kidding, we passed a huge shed up on the ridge which was full of happy, noisy, excrementally productive pigs. All that said, the rolling hills, the surrounding woodland, the quiet of the river, the company of a heron, a wren, a kestrel and a bevvy of arguing oytercatchers, a hundred sheep, and of course the pigs, followed by a pot of tea at the Laurelbank Tearoom, made for genuine Sabbath – if that word means rest, a halt to productive work, freedom from toil, and time to enjoy what God is doing – then yes, Sabbath. And Aberdeen won!

28 January 2007
Building a new life

Watched last night’s episode of Build a New Life in the Country. You can read more about it on the programme website, http://homes.five.tv/jsp/5hmain.jsp?lnk=451

A Whitby middle aged couple bought a ruined farmsteading and bastel house and spent a year making it habitable. Reminded of my own early years in old farm cottages, some of them needing major renovation in days before makeovers. But this project was in a different league. No roof, with decades of weather damage,it was an 18th century bastel house – that’s a fortified farm house on the Scottish borders to deter Scottish cattle stealers! Walls 2-3 feet thick, and parts of the floor feet deep in centuries of dung, muck and rubble; the cows shared the building nights and winters to protect them from the Lowland rustlers.

It takes a combination of desire, acquired skills, co-operation, muscle and perhaps a little oddness, to envision such a ruin transformed into a dream home. Centuries of dung removed, tons of concrete laid by hand, the stone tiling roof rebuilt, floors, windows, electricty, plumbing, the lot. As an example of a marriage of minds and sharing of a life project it was simply inspirational – and I was moved by the indomitable, resilient, optimism of this pair – and the way they simply, ‘got on with it’, through snow, flooding that washed their building materials away, and serial night shifts of hard graft.

This would be the place to get homiletical and expand on dilapidation and ruin as metaphor of life, and how vision and passion can make the impossible achievable – but that would be to look for spiritual lessons. And it trivialises the realities this programme was about. It was about stone tiles, hung floors, bolted cross beams, hard packed dung requiring pick-axes, a 50 odd year old 5 foot grandmother revelling in the power of a power hammer. Lord Macleod’s doctrine of creation was deeply biblical because he took matter, the sheer materiality of this world, with theological seriousness. That’s what I saw happening last night – two people tackling ruined chaos with creative energy fired by a vision of the beautiful. Great television!

27 January 2007
Hauerwas 6

"Nothing enslaves more than that which we think we cannot live without." (Page 80)

Freedom is therefore affirmed and strengthened by fasting. Fasting is not only a voluntary statement of self-denial, it is a celebration of that spiritual liberty that makes bodily living a joyous valuing of created things -by keeping them in their place.

"Abundance not scarcity is the mark of God’s care for creation. But our desire to live without fear cannot help but create a world of fear constituted by the assumption that there is never enough. Such a world cannot help but be a world of injustice and violence because it is assumed that under conditions of scarcity our only chance of survival is to have more".(Page 82).

This is Hauerwas at the eisegesis again, this time in Matthew 6 – but he stays faithful to the Kingdom meaning of the text, because he has an instinct for those values of the Kingdom that force a revaluation of the values of a culture in which fasting is near sacrilege in the consumer God’s temple. As I read this commentary I am constantly aware of the other ways of writing biblical commentary – historico-grammatical exegesis, socio-cultural analysis, rhetorical and reader response approaches – none of these are all that evident in Hauerwas’ approach. But I am repeatedly finding myself reading the gospel, then reading Hauerwas, and finding that his theologically controlled eisegesis has taken him to the heart of the text – and to the core values of the Kingdom.

How does this eisegesis thing work? It isn’t true that Hauerwas is irresponsibly imposing his views on the text – I don’t sense that at all. In fact the opposite, his is a deeply responsible handling, reverently receptive, an informed engagement in which who he is, and what he believes is brought to the the text. For Hauerwas, presuppositionless exegesis is not only impossible, but undesirable. His eisegesis is characterised by several qualities, I think:

instinct guided by theologically astute reflection on the meaning and transforming power of Jesus the person.

intuition born of years seeking to listen to, and be changed by, Jesus’ teaching

ethical and pastoral assertion of what this text says to those prepared to hear it today,

docility before a Gospel story whose power wrests control from the careful exegete subverting all attempts to domesticate the text by too much knowledge.

The result, for me anyway, is a reading of Matthew that is informed by serious ethical, theological and political standpoints, and which is compelling in its uncompromising directness – non-directive counselling, objective exegesis, this is not!

26 January 2007
I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they couldn’t. (Mark 9.18)

Failure, if taken rightly to heart, is an education in humility, in self understanding, an opportunity to grow. But not for the disciples in Mark’s Gospel. Having failed to exorcise an evil spirit themselves, they then become the self-appointed Regional Quality Assurance officers for Exorcisms. Not surprising, that desire to regulate others, control the boundaries, – they’d just been having an argument about who is the greatest. A kind of Blair Brown ambition-fest as to who would be the leader of the disciples. And Jesus had just given the kind of answer that only works in the politics of the Kingdom of God, ‘Whoever wants to be first , must be last of all and servant of all.’ And like the self-preoccupied movers and shakers they believed themselves to be, they didn’t, as John Reid would say, ‘get it’.

So failed exorcists with a lust for leadership, presume to disqualify others from their ministry, and they do it in Jesus’ name, and so unwittingly disqualify themeselves. The not so Blessed John Reid would say, ‘Disciples not fit for purpose’. The whole scary story forced the question, "How dare any of us erect boundaries around compassionate ministry exercised in Jesus’ name?"

And Jesus reply was generously inclusive, ministry affirming, welcoming compassion wherever it rears its beautiful head …whoever is not against us is for us.

Such radical open-mindedness implies an ecumenicity of the heart, only possible when being first is an irrelevance, and being servant of all is a priority. Whoever is not against us is for us – this inclusive principle, gives not only the benefit of the doubt, but the benefit of trust. To live with such an attitude of openness to goodness, to see each act of kindness as Christ-serving, to believe each costly casting out of evil wherever it lurks collaborates with God’s Kingdom, to recognise, acknowledge and celebrate compassion wherever it radiates into human lives, is to take on the generous inclusiveness of Jesus who welcomes all the help the world needs.

The text critiques our motives and self image- there is uncommon honesty in any of us who can identify that part in each of our hearts, that leads us to say, without thinking clearly what we mean, ‘we tried to stop him because he was not following us’ – as if our kind of discipleship could ever be normative!

25 January 2007
historians of the actual

Reverence may be the road to the sacred and wisdom may be the natural song of the spirit, but story is the text of God and the groundkeeper of prayer. (24)

The Shaping of a Life is autobiography bent to the purpose of spirituality, story-telling as the medium of theology. And Tickle is alert to the dangers:

Compressing long years of gradual understanding into single epiphanies or even tying revelations to singular events may allow us to organize our spiritual autobiographies, but it certainly does not make us fine historians of the actual. (34).

So her honesty, and the correctives and disclaimers she inserts, make what might otherwise be an exercise in introspection and self-explanation best kept for a private journal, into a helpful example of how to map the way we have come. Glad I read it – but it’s a hundred pages too long. That’s a pity because the other 280 pages both as connected narrative, and as a mosaic of shorter stories where God is encountered in ordinariness, make the book worth the effort. None of us can so stand outside ourselves that, when it is our own story we are telling, we perform as ‘fine historians of the actual’.

25 January 2007