Bob's place

Thirty odd years ago I worked in a public building. At the rear there were some staff-only rooms and, at the end of the corridor by the back door, was Bob’s Room.  By the time that I worked there Bob had long since retired, although I did meet him from time to time as, with his wife, he would drop by for a mug of tea with his former workmates. Though retired, he still felt he belonged. 

His room was full of the junk that builds up over the years, when people like the public areas to be tidy but lack the willpower to throw things away. But a careful look revealed that this room had once been a workshop, equipped with tools, benches and bubbling pots of pearl glue. For Bob had been the caretaker / handyman. 

When Bob retired, he was not replaced. For a start, fewer people had the skills and the interest to turn their hand to the range of practical matters that would occupy Bob’s working day. Health and safety concerns meant that simple plumbing and electrical matters now had to be attended to by qualified practitioners.  It was cheaper to discard any damaged Ercol furniture than to repair it (but don’t throw it away – put it in Bob’s Room!).

However the real reason Bob was not replaced is that this was the beginning of the era of efficiency savings. The stripping-out of the ‘dead wood’ from the system that would help to make public bodies as efficient as their private sector cousins. So now, when a fuse or high-level light bulb needed changing or the back of a seat started to work loose, a manager would raise an order for a maintenance company to come in. Eventually, someone in their 20s would turn up in a company van, make an assessment, cost the job and wait – sometimes weeks - for approval to proceed.  And, in bare economic terms, I daresay there were savings although, heaven knows, Bob’s salary was fairly meagre.

Is there a purpose to this reminiscence?  Archbishop Vincent Nicholls has today added his voice to those who believe that our government’s approach to welfare is increasingly ‘punitive’.  More and more Christians and others of goodwill are both saying this and taking practical steps, such as food banks, to show that the punishment of people on benefits should not be done in our names. Now I believe that welfare reform is much needed and long overdue but it needs to take place in a compassionate way that recognises that we have reached our present state because of society’s choices and our collective failures to do what is right. 

But also – and here’s the relevance of the Bob story – because for the past 30 years so many choices seem to have been made on grounds of financial efficiency alone. Wouldn’t a truly just society ensure that there are places where people can contribute and belong even though, economically, no business case would support that? 

You may say I’m a dreamer; but I’m not the only one. We Christians are here to model an alternative way of living – one that reflects the many hundreds of bible verses that consistently reveal God’s bias towards those shoved to the edges of human society.  The suggestion that we revert to a society which found employment for Bob is economic madness. I am content to be thought naive. But our reaction to what I suggest might be one measure of how far we are colluding with the values of the world around us, which are content to leave millions of people without a way to contribute and belong. 

A super Pea Soup

We had a really fun church brunch yesterday, beginning with a chance to do some thanking for 2013 and some thinking and hoping for 2014. It was great to see all ages taking part, with the ice-breaker won by a young team, as well as really good contributions from Daniel and Charis.  Afterwards we shared a meal and managed to see off the final remaining mince pies of Christmas. The main feature was winter soup:  a sweet potato and lentil and a pea and smoked bacon.  Several people asked about the latter, so here’s the recipe for a soup that is tasty, warming, colourful and very cheap to make.

You need (for 4):

• 2 dessert spoons of cooking oil
• 1 medium sized onion, chopped up small
• 1 medium sized potato, diced into 1cm cubes
• 0.5 litre of stock - can be stock cube + water 
• 500 grams of frozen garden peas
• 200 grams of smoked bacon chopped to around 2cms size

Place 1 spoonful of oil into a saucepan on a medium heat. Add the chopped onion and fry gently until the onion is soft but not brown.  Then add the diced potato and add enough stock to cover, return to the heat until the potato is cooked. Add the garden peas and any remaining stock and bring to the boil. This may take a few minutes, so meanwhile fry the bacon in the other spoonful of oil until cooked and then set aside.  After the peas are cooked (2-3 minutes after coming to the boil) turn off the heat and blend the soup using a hand blender or a potato masher until it is smooth and without any lumps or solid peas. Add the bacon and some freshly ground black pepper and stir.  Don’t be tempted to add salt as the bacon will season the soup.

An impressive clergyman

 Studdert Kennedy

There was a time when, to be an impressive clergyman, it helped to have an impressive name. 

To walk from the vestry into the sanctuary in my former church, one strode through a gallery of photographs of my predecessors.  Day after day I would walk under the gaze of the founder of the church, The Rev Augustus Jones, with his Edwardian lamb-chop whiskers.  

Not far from him was The Rev William Thimble Thorpe. Although Mr Thorpe did not sport whiskers, you would have to admit that his name is deeply impressive. Sadly, 60 years after he resigned his ministry, the old greybeards in the church still shook their heads on the rare occasion his name was mentioned.  It turned out that Mr Thimble Thorpe had left under something of a cloud. There were dark mutterings that he had allowed his wife to take paid employment…

My sister’s researches into our own family tree have revealed a remarkably impressively-named clergyman, three generations removed from us: The Rev Theodore Theophilus Pitcher.  In giving him such a God-centred pair of Christian names (God’s gift + friend of God), were The Rev Theo’s parents giving him, from birth, an ever-so-gentle steer towards his eventual vocation?  We may never know.

Some impressive clergymen of the past didn’t always need to be named: their titles were enough.  Throughout my time as a minister I have kept a large grainy photograph of The Rector of Stiffkey above my desk. This has served as a reminder of what happens when a minister goes wrong. He also has a rather fun, rakish stare. Google him – his tale will repay the effort – and spare a prayer for ministers, that they may not end their careers defrocked and killed by a lion in Skegness, as he was.

Anyways, all this is but an introduction to another impressively named, and much more admirable, clergyman of the past who in this anniversary year of the beginning for WW1 ought to be better remembered today. The Rev Geoffrey Anketell Studdert Kennedy was an Anglican priest and poet. He was nicknamed 'Woodbine Willie' during World War I for giving Woodbine cigarettes along with spiritual aid to injured and dying soldiers. 

The Rev Studdert Kennedy was awarded the Military Cross during World War I. The citation reads: “For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He showed the greatest courage and disregard for his own safety in attending to the wounded under heavy fire. He searched shell holes for our own and enemy wounded, assisting them to the dressing station, and his cheerfulness and endurance had a splendid effect upon all ranks in the front line trenches, which he constantly visited.”

Having been rather gung-ho about the war at its outset, he became a Christian socialist and pacifist as a result of his wartime experiences and, on return to civilian life, wrote a great deal about democracy and the problems of unregulated capitalism and greed.  He finished his career as an industrial chaplain, campaigning for the rights of working people and offering them in the workplace the same selfless spiritual aid that he had given to comrade and enemy alike in no-man’s land.

Which, it seems to me, is pretty impressive.

New challenges in 2014

The year that is now drawing to a close has been, for me, one of completing several longstanding projects. 2014 will bring some different challenges. 

  

From 1 January, I will reduce my paid hours as co-leader of Church from Scratch by 50%. 

We are together exploring the  ‘re-imagining’ of church for its next ten years, which is an exciting process. One thing is clear already – we need to halt the process of centralizing (ideas/decisions/power) on stipended ministers and take greater steps to encourage, equip and draw upon the skills of all.  That is hard to achieve unless leaders reduce their paid hours. Our church also needs to reduce its spending and ministers' stipends are the largest budget item.

Although my paid hours are reducing, CFS remains my spiritual home and Southend the community in which I will stay rooted. I will continue to co-lead the church with Peter Dominey and others.

So what about those other 3 days each week?  Well for a few days each month in 2013, Church from Scratch ‘loaned’ me to work with Ten Spires community interest company.  Ten Spires assists Christian churches and charities to make better use of their buildings for mission and to benefit and bless the communities they serve. This creative team supports urban churches as they choose new ways to share the good news of Christ, as well as managing major development programmes for clients, usually without significant financial cost to them.  I am delighted now to be joining the Ten Spires team for 2 days a week from 1 January, working directly with 4-5 urban Anglican parishes in London that want to refocus on relevant mission. 

I also expect to be leading more church weekends and leaders’ awaydays and am involved in creating The Big Ambition project (more of this later in 2014!)

I thank God for these opportunities. It will take us all (me + family + church + clients) a while to get used to sharing my time between church in Southend and church-work elsewhere.

Your prayers, questions and encouragements in 2014 would all be very welcome!  

Not the God we were expecting

John 1: 15-36 and Matthew 11: 1-19

It is hard to know quite what to make of John the Baptist.  In the four Gospels there are many tens of references to him and a further handful in the Acts of the Apostles. But what do we end up understanding about this man?

One thing you can’t miss is that everything about John shows him to be doing something symbolic. For example, Luke tells us that he ‘was in the wilderness until the day he was revealed to Israel.' That is a great image of someone who fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy of ‘one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.’  His base is the river Jordan where, symbolically, the children of Israel had become a new people. Just look at the way he dresses in a camel hair shirt! And then there’s the food: even to those of us on a pre-Christmas diet, John’s food of locusts and wild honey is pretty weird. 

What is he doing in the river?  Washing people. Dunking them. A once-in-a-lifetime washing away of the trash that builds up in everyone’s life. In a society where women were often the possessions of men, John's baptism was open to both women and men. Those who came to John were normally shunned by respectable, religious people: sex workers, collaborators and people on the edges of society.  The religious people of his day came to gawk at what John was doing. Too proud to get washed by him, they came to point their fingers in criticism as religious people so often do. After baptism, the followers of John returned home, to live their baptized lives as housewives or carpenters or bakers or driven by necessity back into the sex trade, I guess, but this time with a hope of change.  

For a warm-up man to the gospel stories, John had a large following from a wide area. The claims of large numbers were supported by Josephus, the Jewish historian (no friend of Christianity). Years later, Paul was surprised when as far away as Ephesus in modern-day Turkey, he met people who only knew of John's baptism (Acts 19:3).

All the Gospels tell that Jesus went with the crowds to the Jordan to be baptised by John.  It was John who saw the spirit of God descend like a dove and fall upon Jesus. Someone once said that that is when the Old Testament finished and the New Testament began. The last Old Testament prophet makes way for the long-promised messiah and a new ‘deal’ offered by God to all people.  Then, when Jesus got started, some of John’s disciples left him to follow Jesus.  John’s followers resented this but John was clear on the topic: ‘He must increase and I must decrease’.  

Jesus considered John to be the greatest of the prophets and a man of integrity who had taken to the limits what was possible under the Law of the Old Testament. And the best was never going to be good enough. So Jesus then shares his good news based on grace, where those who trust him cross a pass-mark of acceptance in God’s eyes that no mere religious living could ever do.

John died the death of an Old Testament prophet, having made himself enemies.  John died a brutal and political death, which also symbolized how Jesus Himself was to be treated.

One incident stands out for me, in part because we so rarely read it.  Matthew 11 records that John was in prison, well into Jesus’s active teaching, and he sent two of his students to Jesus to ask who he was: ‘Are you the One we were expecting or is there another?’

A moment’s thought reveals how strange that question is. Now that he is in prison, John begins to doubt. Can it all really be true?  It is not turning out as John may have imagined it would.  Perhaps Jesus has not lived up to his expectations of a hero.  Here I sit, he may have thought, with no way out and facing a sticky end.  The Roman oppressors control our land still.  Perhaps I have misunderstood. Perhaps I got it all wrong. This isn’t the God I was expecting.

As ordinary men and women, our tendency is always to make a god for ourselves, especially when we have lost hope in the image of God we had before. 

For us too, the simple fact of living in this world means that so often we find that God does not wear a red cape and fly through the air faster than a speeding bullet. He doesn’t leap tall buildings at one bound or stop runaway trains. He never said he would. When our hopes lie broken at our feet, we may build up a limescale of unbelief.  We love the stories and we go through the actions but having first moulded Jesus into a model we can cope with. We may ask: whatever happened to the God we were expecting? But he never promised to make himself in our chosen image.

He won’t fit into the moulds we make for him.  We need to take the time to fit into his pattern, not the other way around.  Our call is to seek Jesus for who He is.  Not to settle for what is comfortable, nor to tie Him down as something we can manage and control. He is bigger than we can understand. We are not called to follow the Jesus that we have made or the Jesus of the church down the road.  We must seek him ourselves, first-hand. The Advent message is that, as we do so – with honesty and trust – we will find that he is Emmanuel: God with us. That he is with us even as we seek him. He just may not be what we have made him to be or what we expected.