Bishops, bells, books and blogging

The Bishop's Pastoral Letter opens and ends with a question: Who is my Neighbour?

When the smart young lawyer asked this same question of Jesus, he was told a story and was asked a question.

Who was Neighbour to the man?

The one who showed mercy!

The pastoral letter is in fact addressed to parishioners in the parishes of the Church of England not the coalition Government or any of the political parties so if it has touched a conscience or tweaked a nerve in someone then their response is very telling.

But unless they are members of the Church of England then the letter is not addressed to them but it does offer some guidance to those who are as to how to think about the forthcoming election and those who are seeking their support.

The letter takes as its starting point a quotation from St Paul's letter to the Phillippians.

Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Phillippians 4:8

This text if applied to the current Government's policies and public statements acts as a Barium Meal, it is sharp, difficult to swallow and when it is examined under the right light reveals where the policies and statements are mistaken and where some of its rhetoric is deeply divisive, unpleasant and unnecessary.

The sentence highlighted in the first section of the report states that: As Bishops we support policies which respect the natural environment, enhance human dignity and honour the image of God in our neighbour.

I find it hard to take issue with such and unexceptional statement. It is anodyne, but it has clearly touched a nerve.

Images of David Cameron in his hoody hugging a husky and inviting us to vote blue and turn green spring immediately to mind. But admittedly there's little he can do, having along with previous administrations from Thatcher to Blair, sold most of our energy dependency to foreign owners, about the natural environment except to think you frack on and I'll frack off?

Perhaps the idea of the DWP employing sanctions to get couch potatoes off of their sofas and into work or GP's sending their sick and lame off to be independently reviewed after a month on the sick could be seen as enhancing human dignity?

And as for the image of God in our neighbour the guest list at the recent party held in support of election funding suggests a fairly limited view of what the Divine imagine might look like but like Moses on the mountain we were not invited to gaze too closely or for too  long, especially those who entered by the back door so as to remain out of public view.

The document is clearly intended to promote a debate and it would seem appropriate for it to be on the agendas of church councils long before election day.

Not all church members will agree with some of what is said but it is not in fact proposing a programme or as the document states a list of policies of which the Bishops approve although treating people equally and fairly, as human beings not units of production, welcoming immigrants, staying in Europe rather than isolating ourselves as a nation, preferring a land based army to a costly nuclear defence system that (hopefully) will never be used just to keep our seat at the top table all seem to be policies that will appear in one manifesto and not in another.

That said the document makes two claims of the church in support of its right to contribute to the political discourse before the election.

That it has a presence in all communities through the parish system and that even despite the decline in attendance over recent years, the church still claims the loyal support of thousands of people who attend worship Sunday by Sunday.

Sadly both these claims are seriously undermined by reality.

Of course churches run food banks and the Archbishop has promoted credit unions but the parish system is facing a serious existential crisis, the real and present danger that it cannot be maintained and Bishops are the last remaining vestiges of a structure which has over the years lost its front line troops, whilst uniting parish after parish, under the somewhat misguided view that skeletons can still breed effectively.

But as the parishes amalgamate and hard working parish priests run from meeting to meeting in ever decreasing circles Bishops have retained their status and the rewards that go with it.

I once heard about a headline in a local newspaper referring to the appointment of a new area Bishop:

I am a socialist says new Bishop.

Reading the response of some Tory MP's it would have seemed that the right leaning newspapers might have carried a headline that said:

I am a bishop says new Socialist.

Sadly that is not the case. The document is a call to Christians to consider the question what kind of society do we wish to be?

A society of strangers or a community of communities?

This is of course an historic question that resonates with words we associate with another cleric the poet John Donne when he offered the idea in Meditation XVII, that we are interconnected, interrelated in our common humanity, that 'no man is an island'.

It's worth quoting:

The Church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptises a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; and when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and very chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod is washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.

What an unholy mess we're in ...........

At a recent meeting of Clergy we were warned by a senior member of the Cathedral Staff that the future is 'coming towards us faster than anyone expected'.

At another meeting, asked to share our hopes for the future, the only consistent hope expressed was 'survival'.

What has gone so dramatically wrong?

Is it the 'undulations' of the C S Lewis's Screwtape Letters?

Have we simply become confused and discouraged? Are we sunk down into one of the 'valleys of life' Should we 'faithfully persevere until better times remain'?

Or is it something much deeper and more serious happening?

Will we collapse to the point where the dinghies cannot ever again be floated on the next rising tide?

This Christmas the indoor critic and I drove down to Manchester to meet her brother and have lunch.

The place we chose happened to be close to the parish where I became Vicar, aged 29, in 1974 so for old times sake we took a drive around the church.

It was a Sunday. The church was locked and tacked onto the closed gates was a handwritten notice that stated: Service 10 30 St Paul's.

In 1974 this was a thriving anglo catholic parish, average attendance was around the 100 mark and I was inducted as Vicar and had the freehold, which meant that if I had stayed, I would still, at age 70, be the Vicar.

A typical day for me in 1974, started with Mattins or Mass, continued with School Assembly followed by a session in the Study, afternoons were spent visiting and most evenings there were meetings ranging from Church Council to various organisations, study groups and the Youth Club.

Not much time left as R S Thomas has it, for the music of Cesar Franck or for fishing.

Nearby St Pauls had a full time staff and the other neighbouring parish had a Vicar and all were thriving.

Today the website suggests a staff of two with the Team Rector living in what was my old Vicarage.

This is possibly not a bad result for the three parishes as they are still open and still have staff support  but the message from the handwritten notice was eloquent, survival was the best they could hope for.

So how did we get into this sorry state?

The first time I ever visited Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB) it was for a wedding.

Personally I found the whole experience utterly depressing somehow the message was being compromised by the medium, carpeted nave, drums and guitars and definitely no vestments, but when I questioned I was told again and again that it was successful, it was bringing bright young people into the life of the church and into belief.

But as Bob Dylan once observed, I didn't believe it.

Years later I was cornered into running an Alpha Course (by public demand) and I found myself faced with the dilemma of really wondering how such nonsense could be pedalled so successfully, so successfully that a Catholic Priest I knew, thought it a great way to, as he expressed it, 'Catch the mums at the school gate'.

Well the mums I met at the school gate were far to sharp to confuse the medium and the message.

The thing is that the Church is not, cannot be, about success.

It is, or should be about weeping with those who weep. Sharing the joys and sorrows of people as they confront the challenges that life sends their way.

In the parish I revisited this last Christmas, the Methodist Minister, the Catholic Parish Priest and I ran a job creation scheme, by half way through the Thatcher era we were the largest employer in the area.

Today however the influence of HTB is felt across the Church of England, the author of the Green Report (see my earlier blog) was followed down the street refusing to answer questions from the Panorama reporter.

But The Rev'd Lord Green, himself is, together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, an alumni of HTB, as well as the head of a bank that handed out 'bricks of cash' as he called it in the title of his book, it was just money!

I cannot help make a connection here with another expression of evangelical thought which I suspect is closely associated with HTB.

Prosperity theology or gospel is the 'christian (?)' religious doctrine that financial blessing is the will of God. It proposes that faith alongside support for the Church and its ministries will increase your personal material wealth.

The spread of the evangelical view of the church and what it should be has spread corrosively through the institution. Such minister's no longer view themselves as 'parish' priests they act as chaplains to congregations, join up and you are part of the 'parish' stay out and you are on your own.

Alongside the prosperity gospel and the quoting of  a bible verse for every occasion sits another danger.

What is being peddled is tantamount to what Bonhoeffer dismissed as 'cheap grace' compared to which is contrasted another altogether more powerful and challenging version of what the church is and should be.

It comes not from contemporary London but from a 17th century Dean of St Paul's whose erotic yearnings for love became the no less erotic yearning for a relationship with God, which was both personally challenging and costly:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

John Donne

This is the passion that the church has lost and along the way the affection and respect of people.

Abrahamic Ecumenism

I  moved to Bradford in 1996.

An early memory was of the Billboard on the inner ring road advising me to read The Koran which the poster described as 'The Final Revelation'.

Another memory was my first visit to the Synagogue for worship and seeing the mix of faiths represented in the congregation.

I was involved in a project which sought to create a visitor attraction as part of the Cathedral's celebration of the Millennium which aimed to illustrate the significance of faith as a response to the human search for meaning and identity.

Historically immigration into Bradford was by no means unusual.

Part of the historic quarter adjacent to the Cathedral was called Little Germany, Bradford was an international centre of the worsted cloth industry and it was said that on the floor of the Bradford Wool Exchange it was possible to hear every European language on any morning of the week.

Indeed in the Bradford Club train timetables on display allowed members to plan journeys to almost any country where there was a railway.

Without a flow of  migrants to work in manufacturing cities like Bradford much of the industrial revolution would not have happened. Indeed the most recent wave of immigration was by invitation as Britain and cities such as Bradford looked overseas to india, Pakistan and Bangladesh to a fill a shortage of workers in its textiles industry.

I reflected on this again when recently I visited family in Bradford.

Our meal was ordered from the local restaurant Eastern Spice which is one of a number of restaurants alongside the imposing Aakash situated in a redundant Congregational Chapel in Cleckheaton.

The multi-cultural, multi-racial identity of the City might horrify some and community relations have been strained by riots in the City, inappropriate comments from politicians and events that have happened or are happening on the Asian sub-continent.

When I lived in Bradford I found myself thinking of the City as reflecting what I chose to call, 'the future becoming of British society'.

Britain as a whole and Bradford in particular is a City where faiths are meeting and the result of this meeting reflects the possibility of moving away from the mistaken ideas of the past towards a new form of ecumenism.

In his book Abraham Sign of Hope for Jews, Christians and Muslims Karl-Josef Kuschel observes that the reason why such deep seated bitterness exists between these three communities of faith is that this is in reality a family quarrel.

What elements do we need if we are to establish the possibility of an Abrahamic Ecumene that would enable Jews, Christians and Muslims to continue in their faith traditions but to recognise that as, 'people of the book' they share more with each other than divides them and what they share is their common bond in the person and character of Abraham the father of many nations.

When Sarai his wife was rushed from the old peoples home to the maternity ward it was then that God's promise to Abraham was demonstrated, that his descendants would be as the dust of the earth, too much and too many to count.

What would an Abrahamic Ecumene need to draw together the people of the book?

In the Bradford Millennium Project the Exhibition designers engaged in an iterative dialogue which led us toward a focus on great life events and the stories of faith that surround them and the search for answers to the existential questions, Where am I from? Who am I? What will become of me?

These are fundamental questions, at the end of the First Millennium Wulfstan Archbishop of Canterbury identified these questions as being of concern to his contemporaries and they are no less pressing on our generation.

So the exhibition focused on the ceremonies in and by which the faiths which celebrated birth, marriage and death and alongside these exhibits we explored dress, food and worship.

The outcome of this focus was to see illustrated the commonalities which extended across all faiths but particularly Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Kuschel points towards the need for Abraham to be placed at the centre not as a substitute for Christ or Muhammad but as a 'primal image of faith', he then demonstrates that Abraham is a constant and critical figure demonstrating trust in God and the rejection of idolatry. This trust points towards the image of Abraham as a peacemaker and the places associated with the children of Abraham as places of peace, Hebron, Jerusalem and to which I would add Mecca.

Kuschel concludes his search with a passage exploring how the faiths can pray together for peace and reconciliation.

In my job as Director of the Charity Toc H a colleague developed a project 'Taking Tea with Toc H' which encouraged neighbours, communities, peoples of faith and no faith to 'take tea together' the results of this project were extraordinary insofar as the original invitations were reciprocated and tea was taken in synagogue, church and mosque. 

In Bradford I accompanied the Bishop to attend Friday Prayers as a gesture of solidarity at times of international stress and crisis.

Kuschel concludes with a chapter on prayer which contains the words of a meditation by Ibn 'Arabi a mystic who lived in the Caliphate in Spain with christian and jewish neighbours.

To one whose religion is different from mine,

I shall no longer say,

My religion is better than yours,

For my heart is ready to accept any form, 

to be a pasture for gazelles,

a monastery for monks,

a temple for idols,

the Ka'ba for one who has made a vow,

the tables of the Torah, the scroll of the qur'an.

For me there is only the religion of love:

wherever your ascent leads me,

love will be my confession and my faith.

The current atmosphere of fear and hostility generated by the rise of terrorism and counter terrorism the hostility directed at people of other faiths can only ever lead to greater conflict and deep unease. Western imperialistic attacks on Iraq and civil war in Syria and the rise of Isis make the need for an Abrahamic Ecumene ever more urgently necessary and ever more impossible to imagine.

But imagine it we must and what better place to start than a City like Bradford where the future becoming of British society is being shaped and imagined in schools, temples, synagogues, Gurdwara's, Mosques and churches.