Kedgeree nights

  

 

 

 

 

      The name is evocative of another place and time. 

      Often thought of as a traditional British brunch dish, it was brought back to Britain by returning colonials from India, having started out as Khichari, a dish of rice and lentils.

      This is an amazingly flavoured food with hints of subtle spice. Too fussy for breakfast (in my opinion), it makes a great dinner for a winter’s evening.  

       Here's the recipe I use (serves 4):

       Ingredients

·         50g butter

·         1 medium onion, finely chopped

·         3 cardamom pods, split open

·         ¼ teaspoon turmeric

·         1 small cinnamon stick

·         2 fresh bay leaves or 1 dried

·         450g basmati rice

·         1 litre/1¾ pints chicken, vegetable or fish stock

·         750g un-dyed smoked haddock fillet

·         3 eggs

·         3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

     Method

1.    Melt the butter in a large saucepan, add the onion and cook gently over a medium heat for 5 minutes until the onion is softened but not browned. Stir in the cardamom pods, turmeric, cinnamon stick and bay leaves, then cook for 1 minute.

2.    Tip in the rice and stir until it is all coloured in the spicy butter. Pour in the stock, add half a teaspoon of salt and bring to the boil, stirring once to free any rice from the bottom of the pan. Cover with a close-fitting lid, reduce the heat to low and leave to cook very gently for 12 minutes.

3.    Bring some water to the boil in a large shallow pan. Add the smoked haddock and simmer for 4 minutes until the fish is just cooked. Lift it out on to a plate and leave until cool enough to handle. Hard-boil the eggs for 8 minutes. Flake the fish, discarding any skin and bones. Drain the eggs, then peel and chop.

4.    Uncover the rice and remove the bay leaves, cinnamon stick and cardamom pods if you wish to. Gently fork in the fish and the chopped eggs, cover again and return to the heat for 2-3 minutes, or until the fish has heated through. Gently stir in almost all the parsley, and season with a little salt and black pepper to taste. Serve immediately on warmed plates, scattered with the remaining parsley.

4 WARNING SIGNS FOR CHURCHES IN TROUBLE

Most of us love lists.  The 50 Greatest.... or Your 100 favourite....I am a minister. I also work with churches (Anglican, Baptist, Free and others) and para-church bodies to help them to overcome obstacles and to find new direction for growth. If asked, most of us could come up with a list of pitfalls for churches to avoid. Here are just 4 from my perspective. They are not exhaustive, nor would I claim them to be ‘right’. But if they help you to reflect critically and constructively on your church or charity then maybe they will serve a useful purpose.

1.  Finance is at the top, or near the top, of every agenda

This cleverly masquerades as sound management or good stewardship.

Now, of course, churches should manage their affairs well. But elevating money to the prime position then defines all other matters in relation to it. It is then finance rather than faith and vision that shapes what can or cannot be attempted. In this kind of agency, the treasurer – and quite often the other trustees too – will see themselves as custodians of limited funds rather than those who resource the church's work. They bury their one talent in the ground out of the fear of loss because they do not really believe that God will provide more.
 
There is another insidious outcome of putting money first.  The trustees and the church will come to believe that the church’s assets are those listed on the balance sheet of the charity rather than the total of all Christ’s assets held in trust by the members (income, houses, savings, cars, household goods).  What in our programmes would not be possible if we used that as our gauge rather than the few thousands held in a bank account in the church’s name?

Monitor your finances but make sure the financial report on the agenda comes way below what the church is actually here for: discipleship, mission and community.

2.       The church has more meetings than new disciples of Christ.

Jesus could not have made it any clearer. We exist to love God and to love others as we love ourselves. We are to help others to find and to follow his way. Writer G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The church is the only institution that exists solely for the benefit of non-members.” Jesus connected with those on the outside and those who follow him do the same.  

However, if too much energy is focused on internal gatherings and processes rather than spending time building friendships with people outside the church then how can we truly say that we are following him?
 

3.       There are too many ‘Safe Pairs of Hands’

In a great many churches you will find key voluntary leadership roles filled by people who are thought to be ‘Safe Pairs of Hands.’  They get the work done.  They are dependable and unflappable and the backbone of the church. They keep the machinery of church and para-church agencies well-oiled.  They chair committees and help the church to steer a sensible course. They produce decisions, properly made with proposers and seconders, leading to crisp sets of minutes.  They are usually good people.

The downside of having ‘Safe Pairs of Hands’ in key positions is that their churches will tend to end up serving internal processes rather than living as a counter-cultural guerrilla movement co-operating with the invasion of Jesus in society.  They pursue moderation. No one rocks the boat.  Any new idea is seen as too risky or even dangerous. The main 'opposition' to new direction in churches comes from the comfortable and confident.

Get the ‘Safe Pairs of Hands’ out of the key seats. They are often a sign of a slow death to a missional church.  Embrace the messy and uncertain. If these ‘Safe’ people really are effective, get them working on the front line of mission rather than a back-office function.

4.       We prize church as it has been over church as it needs to be now

Throughout history the church has been reinvented from time to time, to be able to speak the unchanging truth of the good news about Jesus to a changing society and culture.  However, much of what people prize in our churches and how they gather and act is relatively recent.

A worrying number of people continue to believe that we are just one more prayer meeting away from ‘revival’.  Revival, in their minds, means a wholesale conversion of the nation to being followers of Christ, when our churches will once again be full (they almost never were in the past, by the way), filled with people who end up looking and thinking like us.

Spoiler alerts!  I do not know what God will do, except that I am clear that he will not be compelled to do just what we demand.  And sometimes he chooses to allow his followers to face exile, powerlessness and even extinction (Have a read in the Old Testament before you tell me that I’m wrong.  Or the Methodist Church and the Salvation Army, now just a decade or so away from disappearing from the UK?).

On the wall of a church I visited last year was a poster with a slogan claiming to be a Puritan saying:  “The task of the church in every generation is to discover what the Sovereign Lord is doing and to join in.”   

Anything else, however useful or loved it has been in the past, is baggage. We must be willing to leave it behind.

If this article has raised questions about how your church can avoid some of the more common pitfalls, why not contact me for a conversation about how I can help?   There's a link through here:  www.parsonking.co.uk 

Oceania is at war with Eurasia !

At this moment, in 1984, Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.  (George Orwell, 1984)

It is 2015 and the United Kingdom is at war with the Islamic State.

  

It is plainly right that we do everything in our power to oppose these evil men who ruthlessly lash and even behead people for daring to disagree with them.

In this righteous campaign, our staunch ally is Saudi Arabia. Which, er, ruthlessly gives 1,000 lashes to bloggers and beheads people who hold a different view to the controlling royal household.

We also now soft-pedal our opposition to President al-Assad of Syria because the evil-incarnate that is ISIS is engaged in the genocide of minority groups in Syria.

President Assad’s support is particularly valuable in our righteous crusade because he knows rather a lot about killing townloads of civilian minorities - children, women and men - with the nerve agent Sarin.  So he’s a useful chum to have on the team.

Of course our country’s most steadfast ally in defence of liberty, freedom and humans rights is the United States of America. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our Atlantic cousins in our opposition to middle-eastern torturers and the fat fruitcake of North Korea.

Good job the Yanks don’t torture, then, isn’t it?  Or execute people so that they take a long, long time to die – in agony, using untried combinations of chemicals.

But at least the British government’s hands are Persil clean! It’s a shame that the Irish government is raking up all that nonsense about torture of NI suspects and the withholding of key evidence from the European Court of Human Rights. We were at war then! We had always been at war with them. 

Except that now those people are in the government of Northern Ireland. So of course they are our allies. 

Here's my prediction for the end of 2015.  By December, we will be allies of North Korea (and will always have been friends with that progressive state.)  By then, our ISIS friends will look by at the palace from time to time to take tea with the Queen.

It’s enough to make Winston Smith’s head spin.