What kind of Unity? and of Church?

Rowan Williams’ lecture in Rome marks an interesting reframing of ecumenical futures. There is, of course, the conventional RC model. The Church achieves the Unity for which Jesus prayed when every Christian in the world submits to it as a Divinely sanctioned Imperium. Or try the Protestant version. Structural and organisational convergence will somehow produce a complex multiplanar hybrid. Everyone trades in their old but coherent structural and accountability models to the shining new one. Unity remains a future goal, and we all have to make it happen.

Those two notions have their finer points. The retro-RC one has the virtue of coherence and vertical accountabioity lines, allbeit a coherence that many of its own followers ignore. It does actually exist. The Liberal Protestant one respects the value of every strand and models mutuality, consent and fellowship but, here comes the twist, it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, like its Roman colleague, it has a tendency to homogenise everything into what it wants them to be, rather than taking the trouble to understand the particularities which make up any Church. Surely these amount to more than simply a ghastly mistake on God’s part.

What the last thirty years has revealed, however, is that a simple binary unity based on Imperium or Liberal democracy raise questions as well as answering them. The great ecclesiologists of Vatican II have established a great deal of common ground theologically, but considerable divergence organisationally and politically. At which point, enter Cardinal Kasper with a model I think is fundamental to what we are trying to do in England today. In a vitally important address delivered in St Albans in 2002, Cardinal Kasper suggested we accept the old Structural/bureaucratic ecumenical quest had gone as far as it could in its own terms, and it was time for fresh thinking. He suggested what he called Receptive Ecumenism. This means that everyone lays gently on one side the dream of Homogenised unity, and concentrates on seeing how they can be a gift to the whole company of Christ’s faithful people. Equally tellingly, we try to develop attitudes and practice in receiving the others as gift not threat. Do that for a bit, and see where it gets us. So out go big merger schemes based on fudge, and quests for imperial hegemony. In come processes of Appreciative Inquiry and clarity.

How is Rowan sharpening up these questions? He’s asking what the great degree of theological convergence revealed by the work of the past thirty years amounts to. He’s diagnosing two principles inherent in the life of the baptized — a Conciliar horizontal plane, and an ordained vertical line of accountability. He’s asking how these integrate in the actual lives Churches and Christians live, as well as the notional sructures within which they find themselves. Catholic is both a macro-concept, but also an inherent dimension of local, micro Christian life. Playing one off against the other is foolish, wherever you’re coming from.

Catholic Unity isn’t something humans create by obiterating others. God created it on Good Friday, and it’s inherent in the Unity of Christ. Is Christ divided? When Jesus prayed for Unity, did God say “no?” or did God decide that the effectiveness of the whole enterprise depends on ecclesiastical politics come right? Or did he say yes, create a spiritual unity by the death and resurrection of Jesus, clothe Jesus’ followers in it by baptism, and ask them to make sense of Unity, not as a goal on the distant horizon to be achieved by diplomacy or conquest, but a resource to be realised in an emergent way by faithfulness in a multiplanar reality we call “communion.” The submission required is necessary but mutual, not one-way. The obedience is primarily to God in Scripture, mediated through the whole life of all the baptised...

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All I have been attempting to say here is that the ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full – and then to ask about the character of the unfinished business between us. For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain. And if it isn’t, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?

Seer Green: Global story, Local school

Back to Seer Green Church of England Combined School where I had great fun with music a couple of years ago, for their 150th Anniversary celebration. Singing was great, and Olwyn Oakley, children, staff and friends seem to be enjoying life. Good to share the assembly with Gaenor Hockey, the local Vicar, who is well known and loved in school.

150 is a great age to be, along with Big Ben, the Red Cross, the Suez Canal, the Liberal Party, and the Royal Albert Bridge of the Great Western Railway. It was also the year John Brown was hanged at Harper’s Ferry, and the year of the Pennsylvania Oil Rush, when people began seriously to use oil from the ground rather than whale oil for their domestic lighting.

Well that’s enough history — how was school?
My eye was taken by some colourful Story Bags. These contain stories and all the gear you need to bring them to life with very young children. There was an interesting display of photos and records from the school, which has a very full set of logbooks, admissions registers and inspection reports. I loved a 1905 exercise book by a girl called Maude, describing the British Empire, the reign of King Josiah, and Queen Alexandra.

Attendance in those days was much worse than today, as children were often required to help their parents at work, specially at harvest. Reading through the records shows how innocent in some ways children were, but also how young they sometimes were when they first encountered death, poverty and disease. The logbooks lovingly record the joys and sorrows of school life, and circumstances of thier lives.

I was thrilled to see how this school and its Church are building links between Seer Green and Kisiizi in Western Uganda. Staff and friends, including a local doctor, have been out to Uganda to help in the hospital and school. The display of children's profiles and materials from Kisiizi was very moving, including some home made footballs and skipping ropes.

In an increasingly globalised world, the Christian Church is the greatest network on earth, and building relationships across it is something Church schools are wonderfully well placed to do. There’s an immediacy and closeness across cultures we feel in belonging together in one world, whether giving or receiving hospitality. It takes a whole world to know Christ. There is no down side, and I hope all our 281 schools will work in increasingly focussed ways to create and sustain these kinds of link, as they are doing at Seer Green.

Ministry: Rudiments of Wisdom

30 years ordained this year, and someone asked me what I thought I’d learnt. That conversation gave birth to a few stray thoughts on the back of an envelope. It would be rather grand to call them laws of Vicaring, but here goes (in no particular order of importance):

1. If someone says Jesus has healed their wooden leg, rejoice, but be sure to kick them in the shins first, just to make sure.
   
   
2. If you get away with it and it works, fine. If it doesn’t and they catch you, just cough up cheerfully and enjoy all the times you got away with it
   
   
3. Do the job you’re doing now with all your heart, not the one you used to do in your last parish, or hope to do in your next. Time flies when you’re having fun...
   
   
4. Don't ask until you’ve worked out the question. Only ask people questions they are likely to answer in the way you want. Also, Don't ask when the baby is due until the new lady in Church has actually told you she is pregnant. Never ask a Lawyer “Can we do this?” The question is always “How can we do this?”
   
   
5. Pick up the bloody phone! (This applies to outgoing as well as incoming calls)
   
   
6. You do not have their P45's in your back pocket, so always explain, always apologise
   
   
7. Make the other lot line up with their own rulebook, and have a go at doing so yourself before you propose change
   
   
8. Be extremely loyal to your predecessors. They are your most powerful secret weapon, along with people who pray quietly at home.
   
   
9. Schedule your free time as zealously as you would a funeral. Your family are the closest members of the body of Christ. Strive not to be toxic to them, and remember they didn't ask to have you for a parent.
   
   
10. Beware Grand Designs, especially your own. Dolus latet in generalibus — the Devil's in the detail, along with the delight...
    
    
11. You can't argue with whining, but you can with anger. Damaged, angry people have their own reward. Bless ’em all.
    
    
12. Rigid faith is often brittle. In the Kingdom the first often come last and the last first. You are not God's minders, or managers, but guides who should strive to be reliable and trustworthy (I Corinthians 4)
    
    
13. You inherited far more than you realise. Before you go buy a new tool, check the old toolbox you seldom use and nine times out of ten you've already got one. Revolution by tradition!
    
    
14. All constructive change works from the inside out — “You can sleep in the Garage, but it don't make you an automobile” (Billy Graham?)
    
    
15. This job is about the how and why of people’s lives, including your own. You accomlish for more long term than you think, and far less in the here and now: “I think I've far exceeded what I ever thought I could possibly do. I'm almost shocked that I'm still around after all these years . . . and always grateful that I get another turn to do something.” (Billy Crystal)
    
    
16. “The Church doesn’t need new members half as much as it needs the old lot making over.” (Billy Sunday)

That’s enough Billies for now. I’m sure everyone has discovered their own rules — the floor is yours!

PS the rather wonderful window is in Aston Sandford, and shows two Churches, Aston Sandford on the Left and Thame on the Right. More about Aston Sandford another time, but my thanks to those who hosted a wonderful Sunday morning together last week, including lunch together. Above all, thanks for all you do the rest of the time...

Global Warming reality checkpoint

Thanks to Martin Hodson, environmental scientist, for a tip off about the best book I’ve seen in the run-up to Copenhagen. There’s all kinds of srong views being expressed about global warming and our options about it. As something of a natural contrarian, I’m not comfortable with treating dissidents like medieval heretics. Truth should be big enought to stand up for itself. There’s a Benedictine principle that the least voice is always worth listening to, even if you disagree.

On the other hand, despite noble efforts by some elements in the right wing press to pretend there is no relationship between trashing the planet and the planet getting trashed, the science is basically in, and was years ago, and everybody actually knows we can’t just carry on the way we’ve been. Even if it were somehow proved that chucking stuff into the atmosphere isn’t dangerous, I’d still want to know what’s the joy in filthing the place up and wasting scarce resources? Why not think different and live cleaner lives?

So we all want to know how things stack up, but lack the information to work out how to evaluate the various claims and counter-claims in the air. David MacKay is Cambridge physicist, a competent mathematician, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His English is also fluent and fun. His book is called Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air.
In this book he does two invaluable things

1. He takes us through the way things stack up, both energy use and energy sources. Thus we can work out, for example, how big a role various renewables could or could not play in a sensible energy policy.
   
2. He’s concerned n ot only to give us rough and realistic figures, on a pragmatic, down and dirty rather than ideological basis. He also wants to help us develop for ourselves a greater numeracy about the various options and realities; what they mean and how good they might be for what.

Interestingly the book is available from conventional channels, but also free on his website here. If you disagree with his figures, he’s happy to consider others and correct his conclusions if necessary. All in all, this is the level and kind of information we need to understand our future options and make decisions which are realistic and effective about a subject which has hitherto generated far more heat than light.

Revision Committee: Tough Salami

The latest from the rather dry and technical sounding Revision Committee on women in the Episcopate which met yesterday contains one ecclesiologically significant discovery:

After much discussion, the members of the Committee were unable to identify a basis for specifying particular functions for vesting which commanded sufficient support both from those in favour of the ordination of women as bishops and those unable to support that development. As a result all of the proposals for vesting particular functions by statute were defeated.

The effect of the Committee’s decision is therefore that such arrangements as are made for those unable to receive the episcopal ministry of women will need to be by way of delegation from the diocesan bishop rather than vesting.

It seems that the 19 members of the committee spent long hard hours trying to see if there was some way of producing some kind of new model episcopacy that simultaneously was and wasn’t complete in the ministry of every bishop. What they seem to have discovered by painful endeavour is that it just isn’t possible to salami slice what bishops’ ministry is within an autocephalous Church. St Cyrprian’s principle (“Episcopatus unus est cuius a singulis in solidum pars tenetur”) has, since the time of Archbishop Benson (1882-18891), been the keystone of Anglican theology of Episcopacy. Thus, ecclesiological first principles prove themselves.

So what? The choice now before Synod is for provision outside the legislation itself, or a statutory code of practice. The full synod will doutbless discuss these options and decide what they want to do between these options. There is, of course, always a third option of dong nothing (letting the measure fail). This is the kind of discussion and decision making the General Synod is for, really. February’s debates could well make interesting reading...

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 2

Reflecting on our Area Deans and Lay Chairs residential, the thought was that we could go away and talk in the abstract about how to sustain the sacred centre. Alternatively, we could instead go and sustain our sacred centre, with three creative spiritual guides to accompany our group and catalyse thoughts and prayers in ways that would deepen our awareness of God in our lives. I reccomend this approach highly for tired churches and groups.

Our Second guide was Dani Muñoz-Treviño, a wondrfully gifted, creative and reflective priest. Dani has done a curacy at Hazlemere, and is just coming to the end of a time in Marlow, during which he has built an emergent congregation and led a number of arts projects and activities involving hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people. He’s off soon to create a new project in Andalusia, Los Olivos — a two hundred year old hacienda, set in thirteen acres of national park. This will be Spain’s first Christian Art and Spirituality Retreat Centre, opening in the autumn of 2010.

Dani took us through a journey together around the ways people engage with God in a time of change, accompanied by movie clips and community art. His presentation built, very much, on Ernesto’s in which we entered an Old Testament narrative at depth, connected with the soundtrack of our lives in Christ, then crystallised th learning into an image. There’s a sense in which this is an area where the first are last and the last first. Some well established churchgoers have real difficulty engaging with God through art and creativity, where people everyone might think of as being complete outsiders sometimes get it instinctively.

I was also struck by the way that high energy arts projects such as Dani has been encouraging in Marlow seem to generate the energy to sustain themselves in new ways, sometimes by the seat of their pants, but well enough to survive. This said something powerful to me about the possibiities if we think we are short of resources; one response is to go round weeping need until someone feels sorry for us and shells out. Another is to kindle more energy at the heart of the project, so that a kind of mutual firestorm develops between people who understand and feel passionate about it. If nobody’s passionate about it, this could be divine guidance to give it your best shot, then try another project. If people get passionate about it, energy and all kinds of resources seem to flow from that shared commitment.

That’s the theory, and the gubbins of getting Los Olivos up and running will certainly test the theory. If Art is many people’s route to spiritual awareness, what matters is to unlock that potential in everybody, churchgoer or not. Gospel, good news, in an age where so much popular imagiation is locked down by sterile rationalism and superficial manipulation, is partly about refreshing the whole culture by releasing imagination. The Church’s role is not primarily to dogmatise at people from its own little bubble, but to celebrate and share images and experiences that create openings to God for hearts and minds and free the Spirit...

An Education: young, gifted and stuck

Back in the 1590’s’s when Popes were Popes, Painters were Giants of the Italian renaissance who churned out jumbo ceilings and monumental walls heaving with large-as-life-and-twice-as-natural centaurs, heroes and gods, accompanied by chunky putti. The English, on the other hand, excelled at miniatures — tiny, intensely personal studies the size of passport photos. Titter ye not. It was a highly skilled art form.

Fast forward from the 1590’s to the 1950’s. An Education, like Michael Caine’s Is Anybody There? is a miniature. It's a closely observed study of growing up before the Chatterley Trial and the Beatles’ first LP. In 1961 God was still in his heaven, and all was right with the world. Suburban Surbiton was several thousand miles away from Zabriskie Point. Everything was just off the ration, but felt as though it was supposed to be still on it. In this drab universe, Cliff Richard was positively orgasmatronic. Sylvia Plath knew the real score:

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.

On 11 February 1963, Sylvia Plath stuck her head in a gas oven, in the house where W. B. Yeats had once lived. In the world she was leaving behind, aertex-clad Grammar school girls spent hours standing around in the rain with their cellos, walking down corridors with books on their heads, pretending to be old men in class Shakespeare read-throughs, and charging up and down frozen hockey pitches wondering why their legs were going puce. In the evenings they could relieve the boredom by learning irregular Latin verbs and cramming for Oxford. Life was almost as boring for 60’s schoolboys, but they had the goon show and Radio Luxembourg under the bedclothes.

Into this terminally grey world drives a flash geezer in a Bristol, a glamorous maroon roadster with three headlights and a glove compartment full of exotic cigarettes. Confused? You will be. Especially when your drab but well meaning parents start opening the sherry for him, months before Christmas. This is an intensely atmospheric, beautifully crafted film. It is brilliantly and subtly acted, finely observed down to the tentative way Carey Mulligan handles a cigarette, in exactly the way teenagers being naughty in the sixties did.


Nick Hornby’s screenplay is precisely right, managing to be substantial without being preachy. That’s a relief because otherwise the whole show could easily turn into a high class sex education morality play. It doesn’t, thanks to the consummate skill and lightness of touch of the actors, great direction, and casting the film in a flat natural light that conveys the feel of the story and its context precisely. Never again will you make the mistake of thinking the UK in the sixties was some kind of continuous full-on acid trip. Not in Surbiton it wasn’t.

So, If you like intense, atmospheric beatufully crafted, personal films, An Education will be one of the secret delights of the year. Vin Diesel fans may prefer to sit this one out. 4·5 stars out of 5.

Building the future at Frieth School

Good to open a new classroom extension at Frieth School. Nice to see how well the Revd Jeremy Mais is settling into the valley, and to go round with John Wigram, the highly effective local vicar. An excellent staff, led by Lindsay Phillips, is backed by superb parental support, numbers have been growing. The computer suite had become a kind of Piccadilly Circus. Now there’s a new extension every learning group has its own work space, and it was good to see how naturally the new build fitted in with the rest of the school buildings. There was real craftsmanship in the new knapped flint work. Real care had gone into moving the old gable and window rather than junking it.


Children were full of life, and had been working on various projects and displays, including some spectacular fireworks that seemed to fizz away in the wall. There was a great assembly, telling the story from Genesis of God building the world, singing building songs, sharing poems and reactions to the school environment. It was fun to be in an assembly where every child in the room took part.

“Half form per year” entry makes for a school size of about 130 children. This allows for a degree of natural vertical streaming in all sorts of learning groups, and staff had some really elegant ways of leading busy small groups where children enjoy learning together from everyone of different sizes. Perhaps we stack children too firmly in notional year groups, rather than helping them access the different levels of experience and imagination you get with mixed ages. The staff were making handling the potential differentiation issues arising really well, and the children seemed delighted with the result.

Even after 14o years, Frieth has a vibrant, bustling school community. It draws together children from various villages in the Hambleden valley. It’s not PC to go on about the buildings, but the excellence of the new work that’s been done, underwritten by real generosity from the parents and friends of the school, is part of a really creative and committed approach to managing the school buildings. Tom Nixey, chair of governors, showed me a staff room cunningly clawed back from a roof space, and shared plans to enhance the hall and to cover outdoor play facilities for foundation stage children.

It’s always good to find really vibrant village schools. There is some degree of anxietiy around the place about numbers and rolls. The key strategy has to be to build a really strong school community, invest for the future, and look to sensible alliances and communities of interest.