Enjoy the silence

So yesterday I wrote about listening to the radio less. This is essentially about reducing the amount of background noise, both sonic and intellectual. But toning down the wallpaper is not the same as knocking a hole through to the other side.

So what have I done to actually make time for silence?

Well I think it’s fair to say that I’m working my way into a daily and weekly rhythm that includes time to be intentionally still. Each morning, my colleague and I spend twenty minutes in silence as part of our morning office. And before Christmas I was more and more reliably including a midday office with ten minutes of silence and night prayer with a further twenty minutes. Over the Christmas break, I let it go. And it’s been more difficult to reinstate since coming back. I’ve been struggling more with another old habit – staying up late.

So it’s a work in progress, but I think there is real progress.

I’m realistic about where I’ve got to, but I’m approaching this with a sense of joy and freedom. I am not experiencing a ‘hardening of the oughteries’! It’s in response to a sense of invitation and call that I am engaged in this journey, not duty.

So what difference does this make?

Perhaps first I’d better reflect on what the experience of reasonably frequently (I can’t quite yet truthfully use the word regularly) spending time in quiet has been like. I know this is a well worn path. Many have been this way before. And my experience has been very similar to the little I’ve read of others entering into a contemplative way of life.

The first word one has to speak is ‘distractions’. We are so trained by our lives to live either in the past or the future that the mind very quickly wants to inhabit that territory. It’s difficult not to go over some incident that has been. Or to start to plan something that is to come. The ironic thing is how often those thoughts are about how I will share with others the beauty of silence and stillness!

You might notice, though, that I haven’t used the words ‘struggle’ or ‘frustration’ in reflecting on that. It seems to me that so much of our lives is cramming stuff into our consciousness (and in me thereby fermenting this sense of near dread that there’s something I’m missing). It’s not unreasonable to expect that given a bit of space, some of the excess of psychic noise will begin to bubble up and out. (I use the word psychic here in its psychological rather than parapsychological sense.) So I actually see this as a positive thing. That doesn’t mean I let the reviewing or planning instinct take over. I try to acknowledge it and draw myself back to simply searching for stillness.

The way that I do that is again very well known. I repeat a simple phrase or word in my mind, in time with my breathing. Mostly I use the Jesus Prayer: ‘Jesus Christ; Son of God; have mercy on me; a sinner’ or occasionally: ‘in God I live and move and have my being’ or as in Advent: ‘mar-a-na-tha!’ (one of those deeply mysterious Aramaic words we generally equate with ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’). That does allow me to re-centre when the mind wanders.

It’s out of that experience, partly, that I have sought to reduce the level of ‘noise’ with which I surround myself (hence listening to the radio less, watching a bit less TV).

The other thing to say (again?) is that stillness is a better word than silence. It would be difficult to achieve with huge amounts of external noise, but on the other hand, true silence is not possible. There’s always the noise of the rain, or the hum of the fridge, or the sound of a car door being slammed, or birdsong. The essential thing is not to tune it out but to gently suppress the sort of categorisation I’ve just done. To be present to the unique sonic qualities of each vibration, without naming what it is. It’s about the unique gift of each sound actually being a doorway to being present to the immediate present moment.

And sometimes, just sometimes, I am brought into a deep sense of inner stillness, calm and presence.

So what difference does it make?

It doesn’t make me one of those annoying, superhuman, people who never lose it, are never phased or upset or worried. But there is a just emerging sense for me that there is a still centre to my being and that in that still centre I connect with Being and that there I am loved; utterly constantly and faithfully loved.

What difference does it make?

According to Mozza, of course, it makes none. But I’m a little more positive than the mercurial Manc. Only a little ;-). I’m not talking about some dark secret revealed to a friend, but the thing what I blogged about yesterday – my desire to enter more deeply into a contemplative rhythm of life; to live a life permeated with silence.

So what difference does it make, this strange new sense of calling? I have responded in some practical ways. I have taken some real steps.

First, I will reflect in this post on one seemingly tiny thing that is actually, I think, quite significant.

I listen to the radio less.

Great, you might say, so now you’re less well informed. Well you might think that (unless you thought I was listening to Radio 1 or local radio). No. I was listening a lot to Radio 4. So I was, even if I say so myself, incredibly, magnificently well informed. But this was my routine — I would get up and put on the radio, then go downstairs to make breakfast, and put on the radio, then get in the car for the school run; and put on the radio.

So the upshot of all that was I was stupendously, fantastically well-informed. And that during those mornings with my family my head was somewhere else. At times I even shushed my children because there was something so interesting, so informative that I wanted to listen to on Radio 4. I was so concerned with the big world out there that I missed the entire universe of wonder right in front of me, every time my wife and children sat down together to eat.

I was not present.

So I took a decision. I turned the radio off. I listen to it much less. I am somewhat less well informed and somewhat more present.

How wonderful! Well, yes and no. Being present is hard. It’s scary, actually.

Being confronted with the reality of ourselves in the present moment can be mightily uncomfortable. That’s why most of us avoid it.

And I have been astonished to discover how addictive a simple thing like listening to the radio can be. There are times when it takes a conscious mental effort to leave it off. I don’t always manage it.

Why does it matter? Surely it’s okay to listen every now and again? Well maybe, but I feel that until I can actually manage to do without it, that I must do without it.

Does this sound mental? Maybe it is, a bit. But I do feel that it’s spiritually significant –this little skirmish with this little habit. It’s about how much I am truly prepared to truly embrace the gift of discipline.

And it’s interesting that when I do manage to be firm with myself, other things take the radio’s place. Like games on the iPhone. I had to delete one before Christmas because I found myself playing it in every spare moment, and even in some moments that weren’t spare.

But in the main, sticking to this small commitment is making a difference. I actually manage to complete things like preparing the breakfast in a reasonable time. And so I am not quite as much of a source of frustration for those closest to me in the mornings. And I give those closest to me much better attention than they were getting before. I am more present to them. They and I feel more valued, appreciated, loved.

And so I am just beginning to experience, in a small way, how simultaneously rewarding and challenging is giving up something good for something better. I suspect this little skirmish is going to lead me into others. I’ll let you know.

Got religion?

Quite apart from my deliberations over my Sunday night conversations in the pub, I have been in the grip of something of a crisis. I don’t mean I’m having a breakdown or anything like that. Or maybe I am, of a sort. I think it’s more like what I understand the Swiss theologian Karl Barth to mean when he refers to a ‘krisis’. It’s a moment of realisation, a sort of existential confrontation with a bigger reality.

I have been feeling increasingly like I am playing at being a Christian. And that far from working as a priest being an expression of my discipleship, it’s actually a hindrance. Because being a priest can make you feel like ‘of course I’m following Christ’, whilst simultaneously evading the all-consuming implications of a life of discipleship. But this cognitive dissonance can’t persist indefinitely without reaching a moment of krisis. That came for me late last year.

I found myself increasingly troubled by the same insistent question:

Am I really prepared to live my life as if God is at the centre of reality?

That’s scary on a number of levels.

First it sounds like I’m a religious nut. There are people, I know, who read this blog, who don’t share my faith who are probably feeling a little worried, scared or disappointed. Maybe you thought that despite my faith, I was at least in other respects fairly sensible. But no, turns out I’m just as much of a nutjob as the rest. To those friends I say bear with me, it’s not going to make me into a relentless and annoying preachy sort who talks about nothing but God. And you might even find a point of connection with what I think this all means in practice.

The other level on which it’s scary is that I don’t wholly know the answer. I’m not sure I am prepared to live like that. What might it mean for my family? Will it be another thing drawing us apart, or might it be something that draws us together? On the other hand, the alternative is not particularly attractive either. I am finding it less and less tolerable to be a sort of nominal follower of the Way (I wouldn’t have said I was before this). But giving up and embracing a materialistic lifestyle isn’t much of a draw either.That seems to me to leave people exhausted, broke and broken.

But what does it mean in practice? What am I actually talking about if not that I will just bang on about God the whole time?

Well what it comes down to is a call to embrace discipline as a gift not a burden; to live in a rhythm of life that makes prayer the centre of everything. And I’m not talking about prayer in terms of nagging my invisible magic friend to give me what I want, not even what I want for MIMF’s sake over my own. No this is prayer as contemplation. This is about making proper time at set moments each day to be still and silent — that sort of deep and intentional silence and stillness that opens up the possibility of a real encounter with the Divine. I am hungry for that experience for myself and I am increasingly persuaded that it’s the most important thing I can do for the people of Somerstown and the city centre.

It’s good if there are effective managers and leaders of organisations and projects around. It’s good (but rare!) if Christian clergy are similarly ‘effective’, but I am finding myself more and more taken with the view that what people need me to be, whether they are members of the local Christian community or not, is a deeply spiritual person. They need me to be someone who has sunk deep wells into the Greater Reality, the Mystery of Being, the Wellspring of Life or if you prefer — God. Because people here, as pretty much everywhere, are so caught up in the daily grind and rush of life, of living in the painful past, the uncertain future or anaesthetising themselves with extremes of experience; they are so caught up in that that they cannot be truly present to themselves or the present moment or to the Eternal in that present moment. And most of the time, neither can I. But what people need is not someone with a load of good arguments and ideas about how that’s all wrong, but someone with a genuine and compelling story of a different sort of experience — the sort of experience that seems to be available to anyone who takes silence seriously.

And so prayer (or if prayer sounds too narrowly religious for you, think: stillness and silence) is not merely the thing that will sustain me in the primary work of Christian ministry. It is the primary work of Christian ministry. Because people see through bullshit. They’ll know if I’ve really been there or if it’s someone else’s story I’m trying to pass off as my own.

So I am in the process of attempting a re-ordering of my life. I am trying to get more religious; religious in it’s best sense: a commitment to a rhythmic life. Because the experience of monastics and mystics alike is that the reconnection (another meaning of religion) I desire is not achieved casually but through persistence. Have I ‘got religion’? Not nearly so much as I hope to yet.

There’s more to say on this, but for now, I think I need to stop. And be still.

Losing faith in the pub

After another Sunday night in the pub pretty much on my own, I am beginning to wonder whether this is an idea that has had its day. Indeed, I wonder whether it ever really had legs.

I’ve persisted with what became known as ‘PUB:FAITH’ for a year now. The idea is that on a Sunday night in a city centre pub I host a conversation for spiritually inclined people who ‘don’t do church’. I start each evening with a ‘skinny ritual’ — a brief, symbolic activity to lead us into ‘spirited conversation’. I usually choose a topic based on the Church of England lectionary, after thinking about the broadly spiritual issues reflected in one of the set readings for each Sunday. My question as I approach the text is, ‘What are the experiences, questions or challenges that non-religious spiritual people might connect with?’

There have been nights when there’s been a good turnout and a good conversation. But in the main, most of the people who’ve come have been people who do ‘do church’. They haven’t all been finding their experience of church to be entirely helpful. And there have been some, even some who have come reasonably frequently, who are not churchgoers or people of acknowledged Christian faith at all. But I am not now, and haven’t been since the outset, making many connections with people who are, in the terrible churchy jargon, ‘unchurched’ or even many who are, as yet, ‘de-churched’.

I value what I’ve been able to share with people who have come, and I’m grateful for those who have supported me by turning up. But if it doesn’t really do what it says in the tin, I’m not sure it’s what I should be doing with my time. Especially if, as now, I am only seeing one person each week and that person is well connected with another nearby church.

I haven’t made as much effort to promote it as perhaps I might. I have advertised — just recently, in fact. I placed an ad in a local publication that goes to 10,000 homes. Nobody came or even made contact as a result. In fact it’s since that ad went out that it’s been the quietest it’s ever been! I haven’t ever done the other thing I’ve vaguely pondered doing — handing out postcards in the Guildhall Square. But even if I had, I would have been likely to reach far fewer people than 10,000. I send out an invitation each week on Facebook. But it’s a sad reflection of just how churchy have been the circles I’ve moved in that overwhelmingly the people I’ve invited are Christians, or even fellow clergy. I guess I just thought that the website and word of mouth might lead people to come along.

Whatever the failings or inadequacies of my marketing strategy, though, in the end I wonder whether it’s just a flawed idea. Are non-religious, but spiritually inclined people really going to want to go to the pub to speak with some vicar bloke they’ve never met before?

I probably wouldn’t, to be honest. And it’s not really about meeting people where they are. It’s still a ‘come to me’ sort of approach, even if the place I’m inviting people to come to is a pub instead of a church.

There have been some good times. And I’ve learnt through the experience. But maybe it is pretty much dead and I just need to put it out of its misery.

Maybe you think I’m being hard on myself. And to be honest I am feeling a little despondent about it. But if this sort of work is going to achieve anything, I need to be really robustly truthful with myself and name my failures. I’m not beating myself up over it. Lesson learned. Move on.

That is itself a substantial challenge. What do I move on to? I’m not talking about moving on from my current post. I mean what do I do instead to meet spiritual questers who are making their journey outside of the Church. Not to show them the error of their ways but to join the conversation and offer some insight from the Christian Tradition. And to open that tradition up to challenge, question and reinterpretation in the light of people’s experience. Real, risky dialogue is what I’m seeking. I’ll share some thoughts about that in the coming days.

Too much of a good thing

Another thing called Sanctuary. A dodgy sci-fi show off the telly.

Rebranding has something of a bad press. The most notorious in this country is the renaming of the Royal Mail as Consignia. So furious was the reaction that it wasn’t long before it was changed right back again. It’s frequently mentioned by the tabloids whenever they’re having a good old laugh at the ‘millions’ that get paid to branding consultants to redraw a familiar logo or rename something that had a perfectly good name all along. It’s one of those things that is popularly regarded as an example of the emperor’s new clothes or the exchange of wedge for not new rope.

Back when I had a proper job, I got involved myself in branding and corporate identity work. It’s a bit of a soft target for that sort of scorn. A lot more thought goes into the process than it appears when you just set an old logo against a new one and write a headline saying how much this change cost. There is often a much more thoroughgoing root and branch reform of the organisation’s communications. But in the end, much as it pains me, I have to admit that branding and advertising is, essentially, cack wizardry. [<–for a fine example of having one’s cake and simultaneously eating it, see the preceding paragraph.]

You’d think, given my years of experience in the field of cacromancy, including the dark arts of nomenclature, that I’d be all right at coming up with names for stuff. And to be fair, it wasn’t a bad moniker for a chat about faith and stuff in the pub or for a bit of breakfast and some stories in a room in a tower block. But I probably should have done better than just calling them both pretty much the same thing. Thus, Sunday evening faith chat in the pub: Sanctuary; Sunday morning breakfast and Bible Stories: the Sunday Sanctuary.

It got interesting when some people started coming to both.
‘Will I see you at Sanctuary?’
‘Which one?’
‘The one on Sunday.’

But the straw that broke the camel’s back for my somewhat lazy nomenclative twinning was the establishment of our new evening service. For a dreadful moment I considered, and maybe even suggested, that we call it, you guessed it: Sanctuary. I thought about naming it Sanctuary 2, renaming my pub chat, Sanctuary 3, and Sunday mornings Sanctuary 1.

Sanctuary 1? Sounds very much like Sanctus 1! I think our friends in the North would justifiably have prosecuted us for ‘passing off’. We would have been the Fresh Expression equivalent of ‘Ken Lucky’s Fried Chicken’. Another possibility I explored was calling the evening service ‘Presence’ — a name I’d nicked off David Cundill, pioneer blokey in Leicester.

The business of naming fresh expressions is getting a bit like the business of securing a domain name. Names are getting more and more obscure and ridiculous in an attempt to be simultaneously unique and memorable. I mean: ‘moonpig’. What’s that got to do with customised greetings cards?

So in the end, we plumped for…

The colon is part of it. The colon is an important part of our gathering… its name; its name. It’s a fairly pretentious way of suggesting that whatever space we manage to create is both full of possibility and awaiting interpretation. More about that (the gathering, not the colon) in another post.

And at the same time, I decided it was time to perform separation surgery on the conjoined twins of Sunday mornings in the tower block and Sunday evenings in the pub so that they were free to live their own lives. And so, having secured the domain name ‘pubfaith.org.uk’ (still congratulating myself on that one) I decided to rename my Sunday night pub chat ‘PUB:FAITH’. There’s that colon again. I was obviously concerned that the backlash on changing such a well-loved and nationally renowned brand would be difficult, just as it was for the Royal Mail/Consignia, but I suspect it won’t quite have the power to force me into a reversal. I am braced though.

One step forward…

I posted at the weekend about the hugely encouraging breakthrough that there had been in forging one community among those who gather Sunday by Sunday in Wilmcote House, despite some clear differences of approach to what that gathering should be about. I wanted to celebrate that, and I still do. I hope not to lose sight of that in what follows.

But it does often feel that renewed challenges follow hot on the heels of every ‘win’.

It was a relatively simple matter for the PCC in the end to complete the review of the Sunday Sanctuary and gather all the fragments of our discernment process together. Because there had emerged at the same time as that was all going on, between my colleague Alex and myself, a desire; an intention to create a new evening service, that would offer a different sort of space from both Sunday mornings in Wilmcote House and Sunday mornings in St Peter’s. More of that in another post.

The upshot, though, was that there would be an outlet for the more established members of the Sunday Sanctuary to express their spirituality through contemporary sung worship and quiet contemplation. Thus it no longer felt necessary, or appropriate (given the response to the suggestion from our newer friends) to try and shoehorn those things into Sunday mornings at Wilmcote House. So far, so positive.

It was clear from our wider discernment that we didn’t need to persist with keeping the Sunday Sanctuary open for two hours. Residents of Wilmcote House liked the idea of a slightly later start and others were finding the long morning hard going, especially those working to keep the kitchen open.

We had been moving towards closing the kitchen at about 11:00 and I had often notified people of that with ‘last orders’ announcement; which, unfortunately, frequently had the effect of creating a rush and making it more difficult to gather people for our all together time. (It made it virtually impossible for kitchen workers to join the all-together time as they had to clear up a new batch of dirty plates, cups and so on.)

So we decided that the Sunday Sanctuary would open at 10:30 instead of 10:00. The kitchen would close at 11:00 and be followed immediately by our all-together time. 11:45-12:00 would be tidy up time, which we would all share together, not simply as a clear up after the real activity but an important part of the expression of our life as a new community. (Kitchen clear-up was to wait until then too, so that kitchen helpers could join the all-together time.)

We also thought that the time between 11:30 and 11:45 might involve differentiated activities so each age group got the sort of stimulation that reflected its unique needs.

As I write this, I think this all sounds right and good. But we haven’t perhaps been as good as we might have been at sticking to that schedule and that may be at the root of some of our problems this half term.

Because it hasn’t felt to me as if we have really been hitting the mark since our restart. There have been lots of good things. The barbecue our first week back was a really good way to come back together. And of course it was encouraging after something of a break that we did all come back together. I think taking a break in future might seem a little odd. It felt odd, actually, during the summer. Projects take a break. Communities – churches? – do not.

Somehow, in between making a clear choice not to include sung worship and an ongoing effort to avoid cutting and sticking (for those who hated the ‘Sunday School’ feel that it had on occasion) we have ended up with a lot of up-front talking. Storytelling has been and remains an essential part of our shared identity. And I’m a firm believer in storytelling as an art form in its own right. There is a place for a variety of ways to share stories – story sacks, puppetry, pictures, film clips – but above all I think a really engaging storyteller simply speaking a tale can hold the attention of a group. But somehow our style (mostly delivered by me) has become flabby, unengaging and drawn out. Instead of being punchy and exciting, the stories and most especially the reflection following have become long-winded and talky.

In the past few weeks I have noticed that nobody has really been engaged. The youngest children are gravitating back to the Lego, which in a very echoey room is very distracting. The parents and older children are trying to draw their children/siblings’ attention back and the adults without children there are distracted by all of that going on. And on occasion when I’ve been speaking, I’ve been wondering who I’m actually speaking to!

It has brought me for the first time in ages to question my personal commitment to intergenerational community/church. Is it really possible to hold the attention of a middle-aged professional at the same time as you’re engaging a pre-schooler from a refugee family with next to no English? If your comparison is with school, then you’d say: ‘Of course not!’ Vertical teaching groups can work, but the age span is not normally more than two years. But if your comparison is not with education but with, say, a family meal, especially a special celebratory meal like Christmas dinner, then it’s not nearly so clear cut. But maybe I have confused the idea that ‘we only do apart what we cannot do together’ with some notion that we do nothing apart.

[Editor’s note – and I’m the editor! – this post has well and truly now broken the short post rule. Commitments are dropping like flies all around. 😉 ]

Of course, we are rather stuck in that we are in one room. There are not alternative spaces except for outside in the good weather (we have taken children outside for a game or activity). But when it’s getting colder, it becomes much more of a challenge to create discrete spaces – especially with the awful acoustics that this room has (very echoey).

The lesson I’ve learnt from being married to a teacher and being involved in a local primary school is that if we are not engaging people, children especially, it’s because we’re not engaging not because the people are not responding appropriately.

So what to do?

Funnily enough, the thought that has occurred to me is to go back to the liturgy. To look back into the shape of the Eucharist and see how the moments and movements of that might be reinterpreted in our setting. It may be that we need to make the occasional simple sharing of bread and wine into a more regular feature.

That might seem like quite a conceptual leap from talking too much not working to let’s have a simple sort-of-communion each week. But there’s something about the way we’re having to reinvent the wheel each week that I think is giving us a bit of a headache. And actually to start with sharing a meal: breakfast; and to conclude with sharing a simple commemorative meal: bread and wine (grape juice actually) gives the whole thing something of a shape that maybe it’s lacking. Within that, there are moments for gathering, self-examination and reflection, hearing and reflecting on one of our inherited stories, looking out to the wider world and giving thanks, that might just give us the structure that will keep things moving along in a much more dynamic way. It might also help us to express our newfound community-ness more wholeheartedly in the content and shape of our mornings together, not just in the sheer fact of our coming together. And I think the times that have worked best have been those occasions when we have shared food that has some symbolic, nay sacramental, significance – a high point for me, was the simple passover we shared when we were journeying through the stories of Moses.

I’ll let you know how things develop…

[If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking with me. I’d welcome your comments. 🙂 ]

Power to the people!

Another 70s TV reference! Robert Lindsay as ‘Wolfie’ from Citizen Smith.

So when the PCC of St Luke’s agreed to relocate our main Sunday activity to Wilmcote House — one of the local tower blocks — it was, at my suggestion, for the period of one year. We agreed that we would review before the summer break.

And here we are. That review is about to take place. And it’s clear that some members of the congregation formerly known as St Luke’s are wanting to ask some pretty searching questions about what we do. Let me be clear: that’s a good thing. I should be welcoming it. I do. But I also feel somewhat nervous about it.

Why is that?

Perhaps there are two reasons.

FIRST: THIS IS MY BABY

It isn’t of course. This is not my church or my mission. But its current form is an expression of a vision I’ve been articulating – that we would become a mission community, spending a period rooted in particular places in order to found new, indigenous and eventually self-sustaining congregations in Somerstown. TCFKASL (The Congregation Formerly Known As St Luke’s) would be sustained in its mission spirituality by forging and living a shared ‘rule’ in our Tuesday gatherings and our everyday lives.

So I’ve got a lot invested in this enterprise, emotionally, spiritually and, dare I say it, in terms of my reputation. Now some of you more saintly readers of this blog will perhaps be shocked that such a consideration as the last of those should even feature. But there it is. I admit it. I have an ego. It matters what people think. It’s not decisive, but it’s there. Perhaps because I acknowledge it, I’m better able to mediate against its less favourable influence. Time will tell.

By suggesting that we keep the arrangement to a year, I was attempting to save us from getting stuck in yet another set way of being and doing. It was my intention that the arrangement should never become fixed, but always provisional, under constant review. The funny thing is that I think of all of us involved, I have become the most ‘stuck’ in what we’re currently doing. I do genuinely think we might need to give it a bit longer to see how it might work. Even though this is the annual review, we’ve actually only been going for seven months.

SECOND: WHAT ABOUT US?

I am nervous because in part the motivation for some of the questioning is that perennial question ‘what about us?’ I don’t blame or condemn people for that question. It’s a perfectly legitimate question. I’ve been saying for all those months we’ve been operating and for several before that, that if we engage with God in God’s mission we will be fed. And I’ve been saying that if we engage with children, like whom we are invited to become, we will meet God. I’ve been saying it. But for some at least, the experience hasn’t lived up to my rhetoric. There is a degree to which I wonder whether people have been as open to those sorts of experience as they might. But the fact remains. What I said would happen for people has only happened really for those who already found spiritual fulfilment in those ways.

So my nervousness comes from the desire I hear being expressed to pull back from the ecclesiological edge to somewhere a little more familiar. It worries me that the new people we’ve got to know could be sidelined as longstanding Christians look for more of what they’ve known in their church experience.

This is such a difficult balance to tread. In one sense, I am tempted (alongside my recognition that ‘I’m a failure’) to see this as a failure of my leadership. I have not managed to persuade people or demonstrate to them in our shared enterprise that the presence of God is to be found and that this is of itself worship and offers opportunities for discipleship. I am actually not so sure of this position as I once was. I need to look into the Tradition and recent experience to explore more deeply how it is that a mission community on the edge is spiritually sustained.

But on another level, I think I can allow myself to recognise, without blowing my own trumpet – well all right, maybe just a little – that this paradoxically represents an endorsement of my leadership. Because alongside the mission stuff (and in fact not separable from it) is the community stuff. I have worked hard to foster investment in relationships that are open, honest and trusting. People expect and feel safe to share how they’re really finding their journey. And in looking for and implementing ways that we can share in communal discernment, I have encouraged this community to develop a flat structure and an ethos of shared responsibility.

We find our way forward together. So that’s what we’re doing. We are going to try to find a way forward together that allows space for people to be resourced spiritually in more familiar ways as well as engaging in adventurous mission.

I’m a failure :-D

I am thinking of renaming this weblog. ‘Failblog’ is my favourite. Unfortunately it’s taken.

If you get the reference here, you’re too old for all this cutting edge stuff! It is, of course, the hapless Frank Spencer.

I am just very conscious of my failings at the moment. I’ve posted nothing on here for a month at least. I have failed to write a single word of the dissertation chapter I intended to write this half term holiday. Instead I faffed about tidying the study and serfing (sic) t’Internet. I have also stayed up way too late, far too often playing video games. So it’s not even as if my failure to do any work (which I shouldn’t really have been doing anyway) resulted in my family getting quality attention from me. Pottering around the edges of a bit of work meant that nothing and nobody really got any good attention. *Sigh*

I am my own worst enemy.

Being tired, of course, doesn’t tend to lead to feelings of joyous hopefulness. I just need a good night’s sleep or seven.

I am writing this sitting at the table in the pub hosting my Sunday evening conversation. Except of course the fact that I’m typing this dear listener should be a massive hint that there ain’t much conversation happening! I’m not particularly bothered about that. I am happy to just be here on occasion to maintain the presence. I am conscious though that this weekly event hasn’t connected as yet with any new constituency of people. To be honest it’s mostly christian friends I’ve met in various ways in my previous ministry and a few others. It’s clearly meeting some sort of need for them for more ‘edgy’ spiritual/theological conversation. But I haven’t made contact with those other people — the spiritual but not religious people in the city — who might be interested to discuss what the Christian Tradition might have to offer.

I know that I’m repeating myself now. I have said this before. I can even think of the actual post title where I’ve said this before. I suppose this is then just to report: no progress! Fail.

Failure and success are slippery categories in my view. There is something of the immediate results culture that has touched the Church. And with resources being so tight, it’s right that hard questions should be asked about the value of this particular investment over another – those are the choices that have to be made. I am sometimes guilty of letting myself off the hook. It’s all too easy in the worlds of pioneer ministry and fresh expressions to hide laziness and lazy thinking behind funky words. With me I think it’s not so much that I don’t work hard enough (though I can’t evade that entirely) but rather that I don’t always work intelligently enough. And I do too easily allow myself to become distracted. For instance, this morning, looking for a nice picture of Michael Crawford as Frank Spencer led me into a period of reading about both the real actor and the fictional character on t’interweb.

Life is full of strange consonance, conjunctions and coincidences. It’s rare in my experience so far that anything is ever completely wasted. There is something about the quality of a spiritual life that allows I think for idleness; that values human life as a whole, not just for its productivity or effectiveness. Alongside that, of course, one has to set the call to discipleship which is a hard road. So I recognise myself as a failure. I look for opportunities to grow and be more attentive to life and those with whom I share it. But at the same time, I can, like Frank Spencer, express that recognition with joy, because that call to grow never takes me beyond the confines of grace. I am loved. There is One who delights in me despite, maybe even because of, the fact that I’m a failure.

Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.

When you look into the Bible and begin to interrogate it for stories of discernment or guidance, you do find a lot of strange things happening. Actually the Bible is pretty strange all round. Some of it seems at times inpenetrable to me.

I’m probably not supposed to say that as an Anglican priest. But I hope the effect will not be to unsettle people but to release them from feeling inadequate because they struggle too. I think there’s a whole other post here waiting to be written. But I think for the moment I must lay those thoughts aside and press on with what I wanted to discuss here, which is the third of the sessions I ran on the recent weekend away for the congregation formerly known as St Luke’s.

In the preceding session on our weekend, we considered how we might receive direction from unexpected sources. Alongside that we experimented with the charism of prophecy as we considered an issue that is about the long term future of the Anglican mission in Somerstown.

This time we looked at the relationship between visionary leadership and the wider missionary community as we considered an issue that is much closer on our horizon. (In the subsequent session we thought about a very immediate question.) We looked at the story in Acts 10 and 11 of Peter’s vision, the expansion of mission that followed, and the wider Church’s response.

It’s interesting to me that the one to whom (according to the fourth gospel) Jesus says: ‘feed my sheep’ — a seemingly pastoral comission — ends up (according to the book of Acts) leading the Church in mission. Now of course I’m stitching two narratives together here that may or may not have had any influence on each other. But if I may be allowed to proceed on the basis of the wider canon rather than just a single author/redactor, I think this is gryst to my mill. When people have asked me: ‘But how will we be fed?’ I have most frequently returned to an assertion that following God in mission is how we are fed. And so, taking the New Testament as a whole, I am happy to affirm that Peter, charged by Christ with feeding the ‘flock’ does so by leading them into new dimensions of mission – he is the first to take the gospel into a Gentile home. It seems to me to be only a logical outworking of Jesus’ own response to the question of how he would be fed. Jesus said: ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.’

The second part of that question as people ask it – indeed I was asked it this weekend by a group of ordinands in training – is expressed as concern for me. I’m not sure the concern is always genuine but maybe I’m just an old cynic. ‘How do you get fed?’ Above all, my answer to that is: by getting involved with God in mission. I don’t get the kind of weekly teaching that others are looking for. But I am learning every day. And of course I have the benefit of working with a trusted colleague with whom I pray daily and meet weekly. It’s very difficult to ensure that our meetings are focused on prayer and theological reflection instead of just ‘business’. (Yes I know we shouldn’t make a divide between what’s spiritual and what’s not. But believe me, some of the stuff we have to deal with week by week is neither inspiring or uplifting!) Nonetheless that relationship is a source of stimulation and growth for me. But above all, I am spiritually fed, sustained, enlivened, encouraged, challenged, shaped, whatever you want to call it through being with Jesus in the world.

I’ve lost the thread again, haven’t I! Forgive me for riding my hobby horse all the way through this reflection on Peter’s vision.

On the other hand, to be fair to myself, it’s not entirely irrelevant. I think the point that Peter feeds the church by leading them in adventurous mission is a valid one. But having banged on about that – at length [sorry] – what else can we say about discernment through this passage that we looked at on our weekend away?

• THE RIGHT PLACE?
  I’ve often heard evo charismatic types talking about being in the ‘right place’ to hear from God. But I don’t think Peter is there. He’s hungry and tired. He goes up on the roof and falls into a ‘trance’. It sounds to me like Peter is either knackered and falls asleep, or his blood sugar drops so low that he starts hallucinating. Now I’m not saying that Peter isn’t in the right place spiritually. There’s no suggestion that he isn’t but he seems to me to look for all the world like someone who is overworked and under pressure. And yet in the midst of his exhaustion, when his body finally forces him to rest, he hears from God.

  I don’t want to equate my experience with Peter’s but I think Peter’s story here does connect a little with my own. It’s often on my days off, when I really want to be switching off from the pressures that my role inevitably brings, that I somehow manage to have the most clear thinking about the issues I’m facing. I’m not suggesting that those occasions are always or perhaps ever about me hearing from God. I don’t think God, having established sabbath as a creation ordinance, would particularly or especially want to frustrate my desire for rest and recreation. But it may be that on occasion for me, as for Peter, a pause from overwork allows me to finally hear the still small voice that has been speaking to me as my unconscious mind has continued to wrestle with issues of finding a way forward. Which brings me on to my next point…

• THE UNCANNY
  In her book, the Creative Mind, Margaret Boden writes about those moments of sudden inspiration that scientists and artists often report. These often appear to interrupt our conscious thinking. Margaret Boden’s thesis, developed through her extensive research into cognition, is that the unconscious mind continues to work on problems while the conscious mind is doing other things. The interruptive nature of the moments when the unconscious mind furnishes the conscious mind with a new insight has led some to the idea that they therefore must come from outside ourselves. I don’t see why these moments cannot be both inspired and the conclusion of an unconscious process. ‘Uncanny’ refers to experiences that are both familiar and strange. These moments of insight will inevitably be of that sort. But is that a credible explanation for what is going on for Peter here. On the face of it, this text seems to suggest a sudden God-given visionary experience that radically transforms Peter’s mental space. This is a paradigm shift moment. But I think there’s a familiar unfamiliarity about what Peter experiences at this point. We can focus on the shocking nature of this experience for Peter as a Jewish man and see it as a wholly revolutionary moment for him. It is revolutionary. It is strange. But there’s also a sort of logic to it if we consider the whole of Peter’s narrative.

  Peter is a man for whom the expression of the love of God for outsiders has some precedent. The whole of the Jewish identity had been focused on Jerusalem and the temple. To be Galilean was to be a ‘hick’, an outsider. Peter is disconnected from the arena where the proper worship of God takes place. And yet he is called by one whom he increasingly understands as making present the divinity of God in Galilee. In fact this man who he comes to call Messiah is Galilean himself. God comes to him, the outsider, as an outsider. And since Jesus’ ascension, he has had experiences of God connecting with outsiders through him. On the day of Pentecost, Peter preaches not to native Jerusalemites, but to diaspora Jews visiting the city from all over the Greco-Roman world, most of whom don’t even appear to speak the lingo. And then Peter has ended up endorsing Philip’s ministry among the Samaritans – an absolutely despised people as far as Jewish people are concerned.

  His experiences up to this point might well have suggested to Peter that the love of God is reaching out in an ever-widening circle. This would have been something that Peter would doubtless have puzzled over consciously and, most likely, unconsciously too. In the light of all that, Peter’s step into the Gentile world doesn’t look so much like a totally unexpected change of direction but more like a logical expression of God’s embrace of the other particularly in Peter’s ministry.

  This is a paradigm shift for Peter. But it’s a predictable paradigm shift. It transforms his mental and spiritual landscape but in a direction in which he was, to some degree already travelling.

• AUTHORITY: FOCUSED AND DISPERSED
  There is a good deal of authority invested in Peter. (How much depends on your churchmanship!) But he is clearly for a time, the leader of the Church in Jerusalem and its mission. Authority has been invested in him by Christ himself. Peter does not immediately consult on this new direction for the Church’s mission. He pioneers it in response to his vision. And then he shares the story with the wider Church.I am not much of a one for power – having it or reaching after it – at least I like to think I’m not. But I recognise that there is a degree of authority vested in me by virtue of both my ordination(s) and my licence. I am engaged in mission here in Somerstown with the authority of the local inheritor of the apostolic commission: the Bishop.

  I think this story and that fact suggests that there are times when those with responsibility for leading the local church in mission are called upon to press forward with a new direction. On occasion to say: ‘This is where we’re going’.

  My colleague and I are saying something like that in regards to the issue of whether the Anglican mission in Somerstown is best served by there being two parishes or one. We are clear that there should be one parish.

  But there is no absolute authority at work here or in the first century Church. If we model our discernment process on this occasion we’re looking at, it becomes apparent that there are some moments where it’s legitimate for vision to come from authorised leaders, not the whole community. And even for those leaders to pioneer the initial expression of that vision.

  However, there does come a moment when that vision and its pioneering inception do need to come back to the whole community for affirmation or (presumably) or rejection. Peter comes back to the Jerusalem church to share the story of his experiences with Cornelius & Co. The Church affirms that this vision and action of Peter’s is an authentic expression of its mission, as much as it opens up a whole new dimension of the experience and outworking of God‘s saving action in Christ.

  In our setting, Alex and I are saying one parish for Somerstown and pioneering it by working as close colleagues. But in order for the reality to match the vision, that vision and action must be tested by the church communities it will affect – not just the two parishes but the wider cluster, deanery and diocese as well as the patrons and ecumenical partners.

• COINCIDENCE
  This idea is a much loved device of Richard Dawkins in his attempts to debunk providence and God’s being. Religious people are always looking for meaning in random events that aren’t there – so I think he would say. It’s not remarkable that events coincide. It’s simply statistically inevitable.

  I don’t disagree with that. I actually do think that coincidences are, on the whole, real chance events. I don’t think really that they arise because of magic or direct interference in circumstances by divine agency. But that doesn’t mean that I think they’re devoid of meaning. On the contrary, I think coincidences are pregnant with meaning – because it is we humans who find and assign meaning in chance events. But also, along with Chris Sunderland, author of In a Glass Darkly (see the appendix to his book, pages 262-269), I want to affirm that events that coincide by pure chance are also the means by which God’s purposes unfold. This brings us back to where I started a couple of posts back. There’s a role for chance and particularly coincidence as we exercise discernment.

  Peter’s vision happened just before Cornelius’ two representatives arrived. We can choose to think on the one hand that it’s because God directly intervened to ‘fix’ the circumstances. Or we can choose to believe that coincidences are, by their very nature, the surprising coming together of otherwise unconnected occurrences in ways that stimulate our capacities for pattern recognition and meaning-making. This event only seems remarkable because it has been recorded but that’s only because the thousands of other occasions when coincidences didn’t happen aren’t!

  But however we interpret this phenomenon, I would still want to allow for and recognise the role of chance in finding a way forward. Maybe God fixed these particular events because this had been God’s plan from before the beginning of time or maybe this real coincidence provided the opportunity for the realisation of God’s desire that non-Jews should have the opportunity to come to faith in Christ. It doesn’t matter. We should look at coincidences as opportunities for discernment.

I planned beforehand (and then forgot) to talk about the role of the abbot in Benedict’s Rule during this session of our weekend away. That seems to me to offer a helpful model of the relationship between authorised leadership and the whole community. A matter for another post I think. This one is, surely, long enough!

Take a chance on me…

Any priest who encouraged their congregation to take a punt on the ponies would probably not be surprised to be summoned to see their bishop. Gambling has probably rightly been seen as difficult to reconcile with Christian discipleship. It’s forever associated in the Christian imagination with the game of dice that determined which of the soldiers that had brutally executed Jesus would get to keep the shirt off his back. Gambling is associated too with the frivolous waste of resources – the opposite of good stewardship – and with greed and vice. Games of chance seem at odds with a somewhat more deterministic Christian worldview. Letting things turn on the roll of a dice appears the inverse of seeking to learn the will of God.

And yet at the very beginning of the Church’s life we see a pretty major decision being made on the basis of a game of chance. Choosing the successor of Judas was settled by the casting of lots (aka cleromancy [sorry I love jargon]) according to the book of Acts.

It’s not the only time it features in the Bible when people are trying to hear from God or in the next case, the gods. In the story of Jonah, the stormblown sailors work out who the ‘Jonah’ is by casting lots. According to some writers on t’internet there are 70 references to ‘lots’ in the Hebrew Scriptures and a handful in the New Testament. That may be right or it might not. To be honest I can’t be bothered to trawl through and check it out. Maybe I should cast my urim and thummim to find out…

Thinking about the choosing of Matthias over Justus led me to wonder about the role of chance in the process of discernment.

If you’re a reasonably regular reader of this blog then you’ll probably have been wondering if there was ever going to be anything new on here anytime soon. But leaving that aside you probably also know that I’m in the process of writing my MA disssertation at present. It’s on the subject of discernment in pioneer ministry. This is no pure ‘academic’ exercise for me. There are some really puzzling questions facing my colleague and I and the churches and communities we serve. Finding out what shape is taken here by the ‘thy will’ that we want to ‘be done’ in Somerstown as in heaven is very much on our agenda. I’ll say more in coming posts about what we might mean by God’s will and how we engage with it. For now let it suffice to say that I don’t think it’s as simple as working out what God wants and then just getting on with it.

Thinking about casting lots came about as I puzzled over how to help my little mission community – the congregation formerly known as St Luke’s – into taking part in and responsibility for discerning a way foward for our ‘Sunday Sanctuary’ endeavour as we went away together for the first weekend in March. I was taking a trawl through the book of Acts looking at occasions when the Church in mission engaged in a process of discernment as its members wrestled with questions of direction. And this choice – who should replace Judas as one of ‘the Twelve’ – was the first that we looked at. At our weekend away, I suggested four features of that process that might help us in facing the questions that lay before us. I’ve since thought of a fifth. So starting with that new thought, here are five features of the discernment process that I discern in Acts 1.12-26.

1. BEING GROWN UP
   This is pretty much the first decision that the band of Jesus’ disciples had to make following the ascension of Jesus. Here for the first time they’re on their own. They’re not simply following where they’re led anymore. The responsibility lies with them. I think that’s significant. It’s not simply a matter of seeing where Jesus is off to next and tagging along. It calls for a degree of maturity, independence even. I don’t mean that they are no longer dependent on Christ. But their relationship has changed. He is simply not physically there any more. The disciples have to come to terms hwith his abscence. His promised presence comes to them through the gift of the Holy Spirit. In terms of the Acts account, the fullness of the Spirit is yet to come at this point. They’re not quite on their own. But they’re not just followers any more either. It’s down to them. They have to grow up.
2. GROUNDED IN PRAYER
   But as much as they have to grow up from their dependence on Jesus’ constant physical presence and direction, they are absolutely grounded in prayer. They don’t approach this question cold, their response comes out of their prayer. According to the writer of Acts they are ‘constantly devoting themselves to prayer’. I think this isn’t so much about just becoming empty vessels through which the Holy Spirit can speak. Prayer is the means by which they continue to be formed as disciples; to become themselves; to grow up into the people God is calling them to be.
3. ROOTED IN THE TRADITION
   Judas was a pretty bad egg. At least that’s what the writer of this text wants us to think. None of this hanging himself after being overcome with remorse as in Matthew. (Take note anyone who wants to deny that the Bible has errors or contradictions.) In contrast to Matthew’s account, the Acts writer depicts a smug Judas getting his come-uppance. God gets ‘medieval on his ass’. Anyway none of that is really the point! The point is that despite having had a really bad experience with one of the Twelve (whom incidentally, Jesus chose), they don’t think: ‘well, eleven apostles is enough’. It doesn’t even occur to them that there should be fewer than twelve. The deep sacramental significance of the number is not a matter of small importance for them. It was what they had received from their Lord and it echoed the symbolic division of tribes in their own sacred history. There was no question for them but that their should be a twelfth apostle.
4. TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
   I suppose this is very much linked to the first point, so maybe that wasn’t such a new point after all. But it comes from a different part of this story of discernment. There are about 120 people together at the point of making this choice. Some of these will have joined the growing (and, on occasion, shrinking) band of disciples at different points in Jesus’ ministry. But the original Twelve were chosen from a bigger band of followers who had been there from the start: Jesus’ baptism. So I think it’s unlikely that the two names were the only two possible names that could have been put forward at this point. This group have taken responsibility and narrowed down the options. From a larger field of candidates they have got it down to two between whom they cannot choose. They’ve got two good options. If there was only one obvious choice, they wouldn’t have needed the next step. It would have been settled by default. But the writer wants us to see that the unsuccesful candidate was a jolly good egg. Joseph Barsabbas (son of Sabbas) has the latin nickname ‘Justus’ – meaning fair-minded.
5. LEAVING IT TO CHANCE
   This is the bit that is the most difficult for the modern mind to cope with. But when it came down to it, they left it to chance. They drew straws or threw dice or coloured stones. We don’t know exactly how they ‘cast lots’ and it’s a good thing that we don’t. Otherwise we might have ritualised that particular action instead of being able to see the metaphorical possibilities. There is a place for chance, or happenstance if you prefer, in finding a way forward.

At the beginning of our weekend away we drew straws to see who would end up reading which Bible passage of the half a dozen or so we would be hearing over the course of the weekend. I suggested to people that if they got one of the Bible readings they might look for what God wanted to say to them through this particular reading. And to those who didn’t get a reading, I made the invitation that they look for what God was wanting to say to them through not having a specific passage to look at.

Does that mean that I think God chose this particular reading (or lack of a reading) for them? I honestly don’t know.

I suspect not.

I think it’s more about the openness to hear from God that’s important. I believe that God, by God’s Spirit is gently calling, speaking, leading us all the time. That openness, if people achieved it, will have created the space for them to connect with the still small voice and so grow into what God has for them. Do you understand what I mean?

I guess I’d say the same about that group of disciples. Was Matthias the only right choice? Was there some flaw in Justus’ character that meant he would have been a disaster? He surely couldn’t have been worse than Jesus’ personal choice: Judas. So maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe both men would have been an equally good choice but in the end there could be only one. So let chance happen and see what emerges.

But what both men had, I think, is character. They were formed through their experience of Jesus and their deep and constant engagement with God in prayer. In the end it was about the whole community being shaped by Christ together and then seeing what happened. As I’ve said before I think this is a more authentic way of reading the stories of Jesus himself. I don’t think his ministry is about him following a minutely laid out plan. So that at every point he is hearing form his Father what to do next – turn left up ahead you’ll meet a blind man, heal him; breathe in, Son, now breathe out – no I really think Jesus just wanders about and stuff happens because of who he is. Wherever he goes, there’ll be a blind man or a troubled woman or a demoniac or a dead child. So maybe for us too, discernment is more about the formation of a Christlike character in us as individuals and communities. Making some choices ourselves using the brains what God has given us, then, taking a chance, letting stuff happen.