Lama's log

It's been a long while since I blogged and quite simply it's because I've had really nothing of note to say. There are a few things that have been buzzing around in my head of late which I may well comment on now, but I think I am still only writing out of a sense of duty to a space I seem to have been neglecting.

So; where to start. Easter day, which seems to have been a very long time ago was marked with me being a little, well, depressive. By that I mean that by the time I reached Sunday morning this year I had undergone such a journey through Holy Week that I felt very responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. That's not such a bad thing in as much as I really did walk the walk this year. However, it did mean that come Easter Morning a congregation who were expecting a rather chipper preach on the risen Christ instead got hit with, 'Christ is risen, feel the fear'.

It was an interesting take for me as well. Lets face it though if you actually were part of the crucifixion, you know, one of the ones baying for blood, or even a disciple fleeing the scene, then you have to wonder at just how pleased you would be to see the risen Lord. The feelings of guilt and mastodonic error, the fact that not only had you fled the scene but then have been caught doing it by God himself. Peter must have squirmed in Jesus' presence (which was then preached on rather brilliantly by Andy the following week from John). Yep, on Easter morning it wasn't simple joy floating around me, there was a tangible sense of the fear of God

Other than that, I read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini which prompted me to enter the world of women's oppression again. It's a good read, well written and I advise you not to let the fact that it's been in Richard and Judy's book club recommendations put you off. I am often awed by the fate of most other women in the world. Gender issues brush me but lightly and there have only been 2 occasions in my life where my gender has put me in a position of real powerlessness. Realisation that other people live in such a way day to day provoked both an emotional and practical reaction in me. It also prompted a recurring thought that in the normal sphere of things, fiction may well be a much more powerful medium than academia.

In and amongst things there's also been a lot of 'stuff' at church which has meant huge numbers of conversations which have been both draining and enlightening. All in all I look at 'church' and think it's bloody marvellous. People are glorious with tendencies towards mass lunacy. I stand in the midst and alongside the madness for the most part, and so it goes on......

I went over to Bradford this week and in and amongst watching a bit of drama I had another discussion on the frustration felt over experiencing real community in church. The dilemma of when to leave a church because it is not being community it is simply doing community.

It's a toughy. Meeting in a building, singing songs and listening to a preacher just doesn't hack it. If you change that all about though and get a small group of folk together and do a bit of liturgy and 'alternative worship' and call yourself emergent church, my guess is that that won't hack it either. The buzz word seems to be 'authentic'. I hear it so much I am beginning to tire of it a little. There is a lot in it though.

Authentic meaning that people commit to each other and seek to explore faith seems to work. I'm not sure the format is all that important but the intentionality is. If services are held in order to preserve what has always been done, after a while folk may struggle.

We have started a mid week service at our place. For all the world it seems to me to be emergent church but the term has never been used because being is emergent it not the aim, being community is. I found myself this morning being in the position to invite one of the families from my son's school along, something I haven't attempted in some time. It is a group of people enjoying each other and seeking God (last nights discussion on the agenda's of the Gospel writers with regard to the transfiguration is something I have not experienced before in a church service).

The people in the group have come though not with a sense of washing their hands of an existing community but from working with it. The aim is not about worship but about people and the commitment to community and the work being invested is high. In other words they are not expecting 'the church' to put on a more authentic worship event. They instead are seeking authentic discipleship.

Sometimes church is such a gorgeous place I want to bust.

My son was non too pleased that I took the tree down on the 1st Jan.
'Is Christmas over then?' he said
'Errmm no, actually we have 12 days of Christmas.'
'Then why is the tree down?'

The following conversation about a season of Advent and a Christmas season was lost on him. All he knew was that he'd been cheated out of a bit of Christmas.

This was in my head as I've sat down to plan tomorrow evening's sermon on the Epiphany. My head is still in festivities (especially since I've just come from a really rather wonderful Epiphany breakfast with bubbly and every kind of wondrous food). I am reeling from the excess and reveling in the celebration.

So I sit down and read about the journey of the wise men feeling all nativity scene esque. I am wondering what to do with this passage and then remember some distant teaching that the wise men were really just soothsayers and it's not quite as glam as it is made out to be in the church propaganda. That it was some ancient monk who gave the magi their names and that they were probably to be derided not applauded and that OT biblical teaching is against them not for them. Suddenly I have my sermon. Matthew's on another shock session hurrah and there's much to be said about who the gospel story includes and that will probably be our epiphany if we choose to take it seriously. Great, sermon on the way.

What about Christmas though? I took the tree down. For all the guff I gave my son about the reasons why and my blathering over seasons and times, I think it would be true to say that somewhere on rout I lost the rhythm of Christmas. Advent was the Christmas season rather than just the preparation. Christmas was the day and not the birth; the incarnation; the journey. As I reflect on how Christmas was for me I realise with a touch of regret that there was just one occasion, when I sat in Wakefield Cathedral with a friend, that I allowed the enormity of Christ incarnate to enfold me and thus prompt me into gut wrenching, heart tearing prayer for any and all.

So with this epiphany upon me I would like with all sincerity to wish you all a Merry Christmas and thank God for the miracle of Jesus Christ.

A few things have been floating around recently. Firstly I went to see 'The Golden Compass'. I was a tad excited about it as I loved the books and I really wanted to see Iorek Byrnilson in 'the flesh'. Just before going I picked up an e-mail from one of the church groups in the area asking us all to warn people about the film and the 'dangerous' message it gives. The mail warns against the atheism of the author of the books, Philip Pullman and the anti-church stance the books adopt.

It makes me want to spit. Why do Christians have to come out as the 'anti' group? Against stuff which actually might generate thought rather than engaging with it? The irony is that the church in the book (known as the 'Magisterium') spends all its time trying to shut down heresy and free thinking and seeks to control the information people have. Pullman seems to have got that right.

In the end the film was rubbish and doesn't come close to drawing you into the characters or the central questions of the novel. I was bored.

The other stuff I've been thinking about comes from the emerging church stuff I'm looking at and a post over at Sean the Baptist about how we go about teaching imagination to trainee ministers.

The emerging stuff I read, constantly talks about disaffection with the inherited church and the need to break out. I personally see this far less as a disaffection with worship form but far more a disaffection with a lack of authenticity. People haven't fallen out with preaching or hymns or even hymn sandwiches. There is not a dislike of church spaces or Sunday worship. There is a dissatisfaction with it being meaningless. We don't often experience church as a place where we really believe in and mean what we say. There is a lack of authenticity which leads us into apathy and disillusionment.

To tie this in with what Sean was saying. Perhaps we don't need to primarily teach or develop imagination. Perhaps instead we might start to teach people how to think. Or at least that it's OK to think. That we could well have an obligation to question and challenge what we believe and that our congregations can be trusted to do the same and bring with them the witness they have to the Gospel. This is harder than is seems at first because there is a fundamental liberalism that is as strong as the fundamental evangelicalism that I grew up in and it's just as stifling. The air of intellectual and spiritual superiority sometimes wafted from the emerging church is as real as the religious condemnation from the right wing of the church. Intellectual intolerance with regard to those who profess biblical literalism can be palpable in some areas and damage done to those on the edges of church such as homosexuals and women by 'inhereted church' is well documented.

Permission to think doesn't require imagination it requires a trust that Jesus might be bigger than the doctrine we have and that the doctrine we have may be richer than we give it credit for. Some sense of what we do being important to us and living with us will bread the energy and imagination that we often lack. Within this we may arrive at all sorts of biblical perspectives and positions. God may well burst in, in all sorts of guises and challenges. Church is starting to sound more engaging already.

It will also stop us being so ruddy threatened all the time and allow us and our kids to enjoy some good guilt free reading.

I know I've been neglecting posting for too long. I blame facebook. Well, that and my lack of will power. To get back to it then. A while ago now I attended a YBMF AGM. Yep, I know, far too many letters. Due to everyone else’s disparaging remarks regarding my sat nav the machine was left at home and we traveled to this event in Mary's car.

I point out now that I took no pleasure in the fact that we got hopelessly lost in Leeds and I magnanimously conceded that it must really be the will of God that we couldn't seem to find a church that Mary herself had been to several times previously. Sadly, however, we were journeying with a student minister who has not yet done the 'will of God' module at college and the persistent little bugger kept going with the map until we found the venue. The only consolation I have for that fact, is that he regretted his persistence around 2 minutes into the event.

I digress. As it turned out the speaker wasn’t half bad when he got going. I enjoyed looking at pieces of art and exploring the theme of experiencing God. The kick off though left me cold. The events are always the same in make up. Loads of middle aged, middle class men. We always sit in rows, we always pray, we have to sing and we are, unmistakably, of an ilk.

When then the speaker, through use of a piece of art, described us as ‘nonconformists’ I listened a little more attentively. In fact, it would be safe to say, I listened with a little annoyance. You see, it is clear to me and actually to anyone who cared to observe us, that the one thing we couldn’t be called was/is ‘nonconformist’. We are born out of a history of it I’ll grant you but there is little identification with it. We don’t know our history or revisit it, we don’t take pride in it or put into practice the radicality of it.

To drive home the point the speaker had us stand in rows to sing a Bonhoeffer hymn together. There were too many ironies all at the same time for me to make sense of them in my head. There is an offense to the Gospel when we kid ourselves that we identify with those who struck out for word and works while laying fallow. We sing Bonhoeffer and live Pharaoh. It’s not that I’m not doing it, I am but hell I’m not going to tell myself I’m on the cutting edge when I belong to and affirm a sexist, middle class, traditional, wealthy Christian group. I’m in the church, the Baptist wing of it and lets call a spade a spade. I don’t want to beat myself or others for what we are ‘cause for one thing there’s loads of good bits. It’s just that I don’t like us lying about who and what we are. It just builds another layer of separation between us, the outside world and the Gospel.

Well this is what happens when I post I end up getting all crabby. I blame ……. Oh me I guess…

This weekend was a Street Angels weekend. I had a good night. It rained for half of it which meant that it was quiet on the streets, there were only two incidents all night and for the rest of the time people were pretty chatty and good humoured.

I spent most of my first shift with a couple from the Quaker church. We walked and talked and I started to reflect on the rota of people we have and who is signing up for Street Angels. The project is struggling for volunteers. What has surprised me has been the demographic. There seems to be a lot more women signing up than men. There also seems to be an older generation doing this, rather than younger people.

The reasons for this may be straight forward. The volunteer base comes from the churches and churches are generally older and female. Younger people with families are going to find this sort of thing harder because all night out plus a small child simply doesn't mix.

However, aren't we being told that churches are feminine environments, to the point which they exclude and inhibit men, thus causing them not to come? Street Angels, it seems to me, is a pretty butch pass time. Men are needed to walk around city centre Wakefield dealing with drunkenness and vulnerability. Where are the men who have been looking for a suitably masculine way in which to get involved in the church? Is the issue feminisation or sheer apathy of the male gender. Are women volunteering a lot more while men declare it simply not for them? Whatever the answer the plea is simply this, we need more volunteers, it's a great way to do church (would Henry take issue with this), sign up.

I finally got to see Spiderman 3 last night. I think my expectations were too high so I came out feeling a little disappointed in the film.

The movie tried to deal with the issue of forgiveness and and personal choice, it was interesting in its approach. Everyone depicted was given a dark side. Spider man, his girlfriend and best friend all went off the rails, the 'baddies' were both understandable. Gopal commented on his way out about a shift in approach in films, with heroes no longer being beyond reproach. This was all good.

In one of the end scenes, Spiderman magnanimously forgives the guy who killed his uncle. This was interesting because the 'bad guy' was depicted as 'good really' so forgiveness was easy. In contrast, Christian models of forgiveness seek to be much more than this, to forgive those who are thoroughly unlovely and beyond understanding and without their seeking of forgiveness. This perhaps would have been a step too far for Spiderman but it gave it a triteness to the scene that didn't need to be there. There was also a sense for me that Spiderman giving forgiveness to the guy who had committed crimes in order to provide for his sick daughter, was the wrong way round. St Vincent De Paul talks about the poor forgiving those that are rich for being rich. The bad guy is depicted as poor and oppressed, should he be the one forgiving society for putting him in the position he is in? If we really take account of oppression in our society should we also take some responsibility for it as well?

Whilst writing this waffle on Spiderman 3 I have been listening to radio 4 'The Reunion'. This week Sue MacGregor has around the table the perpetrators, victims and political players from the IRA bomb which exploded in Brighton's Grand Hotel during the Conservative Party Conference on 12 October 1984, killing five and injuring many more. This has been quite the backdrop within which to think about forgiveness and choice.

Listening to this report has given every possible response the the event. Norman Tebbit refused to be at the table with Joseph Magee given the act of terror he committed. Duglas Hurd was there though as was the widow of one of those killed. It has been amazing to listen to these figures gathered round the table together. People who you would think would not be able to find a point of meeting. But then who would have thought it possible for Jerry Adams and Ian Paisley to sit at the same table? Forgiveness was spoken of in this Reunion but not because it was asked for but because of its own power to move people forward. People also told their own story and gave perspective and what was remarkable was that each was listening to the other when personal histories and stories were at stake.

Listening to these people talk makes you hopeful of human capacity, the ability to heal and the possibility of the miraculous.

Last Tuesday was our community council meeting. The main item on the agenda was the dignified project we have been looking at. The meeting went well, I thought. A good turn out. People engaging with the possibility of Dignified and asking pertinent and demanding questions. It was good. The community have also expressed their desire to further explore the project and I need to get on with the nuts and bolts of what this really could look like in a legally binding kind of way. All in all the meeting pushed, queried and sort the will of God. Good stuff.

There was this nagging feeling in my mind though, that we may well have been scuppered in our desire to do something significant, in the fact that the church was given a whacking great sum of money from a legacy. It sounds like a great thing; to be given a load of money to do with as you will. In fact, in the end, it may well be. At the minute though, it seems to have had a number of rather unhelpful effects.

*)The need to tithe all but disappears when the church sits on a load of money. This is a just thing to happen. I don't really expect those who are struggling, to give sacrificially to a wealthy organisation so can it mull over what it might do with it; while they struggle on.
*)The responsibility of such a large gift of money induces fear at the prospect of wasting God's resources. Very understandable. It can translate though, into an inability to spend the money because of the 'what if we get it wrong?' factor. Thus you end up doing nothing and sitting on cash that could be transformative and redemptive.
*)There comes to the fore a competing agenda for worthiness. Basically different people have different priorities and theologies as to where and how money is to be spent. If you have a project that seeks money and gets it you are OK, God has spoken into the project by the fact that you have succeeded. But to have money and then to decide where to put it means a whole set of more difficult questions and requires a large number of people to agree on something, which is always - interesting.

The great thing about this is that I do actually believe in the possibility of God's guidance and presence in these things. I have a friend who keeps saying, 'Oh Kez, there's that Old Time Religion again', well, maybe, but I do think God works and gets involved in what we do. I also think he does this despite the fact that this makes theology problematic and inconsistent. God's allowed however, as He is, after all, God.

So the community goes forward with this for now. The legacy remains in its glory and its difficulty and in the end there are worse problems to have.

On Tuesday 9th of January I led the funeral service for Jenny Brown. She was one of my favourites (am I allowed to say that?) from Barnoldswick, the church I did my student stint in.

I have been having a lousy month so was surprised at what a gift this service was. Jenny always gave me a lot when I saw her. Very chatty, very funny, gorgeously Christian and oozed love of a sincere kind. She was the person you went to see, not because you should, but because she would unwittingly minister to you.

Writing the service was easy. Being able to give the family something was a privilege and I really thank them for it. There was a real pleasure in feeling sure that, at the funeral, heaven and earth were really meeting in some way and that we could all count on God to take over the care for Jenny.

The family have been great. When Jenny was in hospital I felt a sense of beauty at watching Jenny's children love her. I learnt a lot about demonstrating grace. There was something of the divine community at work in how they operated as a family and I hope I have managed to relay that back to them.

I miss the fact that someone as beautiful as Jenny is no longer around with us. I thank God she was here for the time she was. I thank God I was able to give something into her situation.

Over the month of December I volunteered with the organisation 'Street Angels' which I posted briefly on before. Basically a group of volunteers get together between the hours of 9pm and 3am and patrol the streets of Wakefield helping vulnerable people out. The violence and trouble on the streets is the domain of the police and the night marshalls. Street Angels pick up the drunk, the incoherent and the dodgy.

I loved it. What is interesting for me is that most of those, if not all of those, who have taken part seem to have felt the same. Why should dealing with regurgitated Kebab at 2am or being slavered on by a Polish guy who is struggling to focus, induce feelings of well being and grace? Well, for me, its because I think the experience feels more like church than church. It is not self indulgent, it is useful, it manages to reflect something of the Gospel and there is a sense of community. Church often seems to distance me from Gospel realities, the gathered community which is church is often educated and middle class and seems by nature to exclude a huge raft of the population. Going out on the streets on Friday and Saturday night reconnects you with people not normally encountered. It feels good. Instead of saying what you need to be in order to come to church it demands that I make myself accessible to those outside. So, instead of expecting that those outside the church get themselves up and dressed for 10:30 Sunday morning, I expect that I get myself up and dressed for the community that meets between 9pm and 3pm on a Friday and Saturday night. That seems to me to be the right way round.

The project will now have a break for a month to review how things have gone and to set things up on a more permanent and ongoing footing. Well done to Urban Space and in particular Ben Brown for getting this going.

Finally something that feels Christian, holy and for those under 50 and yet not stifling, condemnatory, cheap or inappropriate.