Ordinands – quality not quantity

The ordination at St James Grimsby yesterday morning was full of excitement, anticipation and celebration.  The four new deacons ordained in the north of the Diocese of Lincoln yesterday bring to the church a depth of gifts and competencies which bode well for the future.

Frequently I find that conversations with congregations seem to suggest that the quantity of those coming into and available for stipendiary ministry is the important issue.  I think, however, that it is the quality of those coming forward which will resource the church most effectively in God’s mission and ministry.

As the cost of employing priests increasingly depends on the generosity of congregations, we need to ensure that those in stipendiary ministry bring a quality and competancy  which supports such generosity.  At the same time, the church needs to ensure that it is using all vocations to ministry in such a way as to honour the gifts and talents of those call by God not only into the ordained ministry but also into Reader and other lay ministeries.  Justin Lewis-Anthony recent book – “If you meet George Herbert on the road, Kill Him” challenges the Church of England to rethink how we unfold the practice of priestly ministry.  As the resource of stipendiary ministry reduces, it is time for us to understand how best to use the gifts and talents of those who respond to the call of God.

Just repeating pattens of ministry from the past by stretching the resourse of the stipendiary ordained ever further is a questionabe strategy for mission and ministry.  Lewis-Anthony asks pertinent questions and it is down to us  in the local church, in deaneries and in parishes to respond creatively – if we are to use the gifts and talents of those ordained yeasterday effectively in the cause of the Gospel.

Fewer Suffragan Bishops?

Writing in the Church Times in May, Bishop John Bickersteth raises the question of the number of Suffragan Bishops in a Church with few clergy.  He argues that their function could be carried out by archdeacons and cost saving achieved.  His approach is based on the ASB service for consecrating Bishops which puts the emphasis on the main responsibility of a Bishop being the care of the clergy.

I scribbled the following reply to the Church Times:

“The Rt Revd John Bickersteth raises an interesting issue when he asks “Why not cut some Bishops”?  Yet his argument focuses on cost and function, rather than leadership and mission.

In the introduction to the Ordination of Bishops we are reminded that “Bishops are ordained to be shepherds of Christ’s flock and guardians of the faith of the apostles, proclaiming the gospel of God’s kingdom and leading his people in mission.”

A reduction in the number of suffragan bishops would inevitably result in the remaining bishops becoming increasingly inaccessible both to the Church and also to the wider community.  In an age of connectivity, networks and subsiduarity we need to ask how encouraging such rarity would assist in leading people in mission.

The fundamental question raised by Bishop John Bickersteth, but not addressed, concerns the nature of leadership needed for a Church committed to mission in the twenty-first century.  Resolving this question applies as much to incumbents, as it does to bishops   Models of oversight and leadership from the past may not always be helpful in determining what is right for the present.  Yet the relationship between leadership and mission is well established.

Quoting clergy numbers and ratios of bishops to clergy is to ignore the changing nature of the church.  In my area we have over 350 laity who have undergone training to equip them to unfold various aspects of ministry and to become part of the public face of the church’s ministry.  Relating to them, maintaining a mission mindset and ensuring that their gifts of ministry are well used, requires a different approach both from their priests and also from their bishops.

In the same way, parish priests are taking on significant complexity as their ‘cure’ encompasses increasingly diverse communities.   Supporting, encouraging and pastoring the clergy requires a far more informed understanding and involvement than may have been needed in the past.

Cost and function are pertinent, but the nature of leadership and appropriate shapes for that leadership are perhaps prior questions.”

Incumbents and Extended Oversight

With more and more Vicars/Rectors being asked to take on more parishes or even another multi-parish benefice into their ‘cure of souls’, I have written a paper about how the model for being an incumbent needs to be revisited.  It is a discussion paper to stimulate thinking and it can be found on this site at:  Incumbents and Extended Oversight

Trust and Power

I have been trying to put my finger on why I feel so outraged at what we’ve learnt about those MP’s who appear to have abused their expenses. Set against so much wickedness in the world, their behaviour is certainly wrong and needs to be addressed, but it needs to kept in proportion when we live in a world where daily there are stories of abuse, violence and criminality which destroys people. Why is it that so many of us feel outraged as this story about the MPs unfolds?

Is it because this isn’t just another story of expenses being fiddled, but is far more about the trust which lies at the heart of the British democratic system being abused? When we go and vote, we trust an individual to represent our best interests. We give power through the ballot box and we trust those who represent us (even if we didn’t vote for them) to be worthy of the power which they have been given. I think that I am outraged because, in a healthy society, power and trust go hand-in-hand. When the trust is abused, then what about the power?

How people use power is a moral question. The Christian faith is founded on an individual whose power was to be found in vulnerability and service. Because of our history, the Christian story has shaped the British approach to politics – vulnerability to not being re-elected and election being to the service of all  people and not just your supporters. It is an approach to politics which is so different to those worst expressions of politics, where power is taken for self-interest and is used against one section or group.

I think this why I feel so outraged at the expenses fiasco – because floating duck nests, moat clearing and non-existent mortgages do not reflect vulnerability and service. They undermine the trust which is so central to British democracy. We have to be able to trust those we vote for to use their position for the good of each and every section of our society no matter who they are, who they voted for, where the come from, their colour or their creed. Essentially, we have to be able to trust those we vote for to be moral in what they do once elected, trust them to use their power in a moral way and to be worthy of our trust – then they can be described as ‘honourable’.

First published in the Cleethorpes Chronicle May 2009

Easter – features of the future

Recently whilst visiting a school I was in a class which had been given the task of imagining and designing an island. In pairs they had been given a blank sheet of paper and asked to put in the features needed to shape the future of the people living on their imaginary island.   I was fascinated by the way in which all the islands ended up with similar features – mountains, rivers, fields, villages and towns.  All had roads and most had railways, some had an airport and most had docks, some had reservoirs and one had a rubbish dump – but none had wind farms, none had hydroelectric power stations and none had solar panels.  What was common to them all was that they imagined the future in terms of what they had already experienced – their future was a reflection of the past and I suspect that many of us, given the same exercise, would have done the same – imagining the future as a reflection of the past.

To Christians, the Easter story is an invitation – an invitation to become involved in shaping the future – our own and for our society.   An invitation to glimpse what is possible when we allow our imagination to be fed by the possibilities of God and his transforming love; an invitation to re-imagine our future, not as a reflection of the past, but as a new landscape of life and love.

We celebrate Easter this year when the world is experiencing remarkable changes and uncertainties.  The global economy is undergoing a fundamental readjustment, the recession is teasing out the viability of businesses leaving in its wake the unemployment which makes the future so uncertain for millions of people.

We celebrate Easter with the growing spectre of climate change and the continued threat of terrorism contributing to a general texture of uncertainty and, as ever, we celebrate Easter against the backdrop of all the ongoing joys and sorrows of life, from the joys of new birth to the heart rending plight of the Italian earthquake victims.

It is a troubling picture and it is far too simplistic just to say that Easter and its message of hope is ‘the’ answer to all the problems of our times.  The key to understanding Easter is the image of Jesus dying on the cross. The pain and suffering of Jesus tortured to death on the cross is transformed not avoided.  The hope which Christians celebrate today is not about making everything all right again, but how we can re-imagine the future.

As we wrestle with the future, it is understandably tempting and attractive for politicians to offer a future which is a recovery of the past good times, but what’s the sense in that?  More of the same will bring us to exactly where we are now – I think that it is called boom and bust.

It is too easy to jump on a bandwagon of blaming the bankers for all the economic problems we are facing.  We need to remember that they were operating in a system of values which we endorsed as we enjoyed the benefits of a buoyant economy, but those values had no substance, for they were not about shaping the future but exploiting the present.  A target driven world can be a world that sacrifices wisdom for the short term gains and approval of meeting the targets.

So do we really want to go back to that?  Or, if given a blank sheet of paper and asked to re-imagine the world, what features, what values would we draw in to shape the future for our world. The message of Easter invites us to draw in life and love, peace and justice, hope and goodness as foundational features for shaping the future.  These features are not exclusive to Christians – life and love, peace and justice, hope and goodness are universal and a commitment to them would be future shaping.  The Easter story enables us to glimpse that when these things are lived out to the full, then there is a flourishing of life which even death cannot destroy.

Good Friday – what’s good about it?

Over-to-you  BBC Radio Humberside  10th April 2009

I suspect like many children and probably quite a few adults I was always confused about Good Friday – what was ‘good’ about it?  It is the day in the year when we mark the story of Jesus who, having been betrayed by Judas Iscariot, arrested, tried before the ruling powers and condemned to death by the Roman governor, is nailed a cross an left to die in agony.  How can this possible be called ‘good’?

Well, the explanation for why it is called ‘good’ is either that it became known as ‘God’s Friday’ which through usage ended up as ‘Good Friday’, rather like our phrase ‘Goodbye’ has its origin in the phrase ‘God be with you’, or the alternative explanation that it was called ‘Good Friday’ because it is the day on which we remember the powers of Goodness triumphing over the powers of evil.  Either way, the significance of the day is to remember the suffering and death of a young man who offered a new and fresh way of knowing and understanding God.  In churches around the world there will be services to mark the event of Jesus’ death and its meaning.

That battle between good and evil was understood as a very real and spiritual battle in the time of Jesus.  Down the ages and still today for many that spiritual battle rages on – to Christians the victory in that battle was won by Jesus through his death and resurrection, but we are still engaged in ‘mopping up’ operations as units of evil refuse to accept their ultimate defeat.

In our modern world such imagery has less and less hold on our culture.  But we are still very alive to evil and will quickly adopt the phrase to describe those whose acts and behaviour we find unacceptable or which we cannot understand.

Trying to understand evil has been the subject of much philosophy, theology and psychology, but in the end it is a difficult concept to capture.  At its simplest,  evil is the consequence of excluding God – in which case there is a lot of potential for evil around.  Whilst in a more complex analysis, the term evil is adopted to justify the punishment of wrong doers and I think that’s why it is quickly adopted as a term by the tabloid press to describe criminals, even young children, as though the use of this word can capture the complexity of those who resort to violence and perversion.

The reality of evil is however all around us, as we encounter the ways in which human flourishing is undermined by violence, abuse and poverty. Whilst we may use all the force of the law to curb evil, Good Friday reminds us that the only way to overcome evil is for goodness to prevail.  In the face of evil we all need to become do-gooders, lest we become part of the problem ourselves.

Free to protest

Over-to-you.  BBC Radio Humberside 8th April 2009

There just seems to be so much news around at present that there is ever the danger that you miss the really interesting, but less sensational, stories.  This was particularly true yesterday, all the international attention was on President Obama’s visit to Iraq and a story from the Iraqi Appeal Court received little attention.  But the court ruled that the sentence given to c the journalist who hurled his shoes at President Bush, had been too severe and it was cut from 3 years in prison to one – which is still a long time for him to ponder the wisdom of his acts.  Zadai claimed that had thrown his shoes, a grave insult in Arab culture, as a protest on behalf of  the Iraqis who had been killed, orphaned or widowed since the US-led invasion of their country and in President Bush’s own words “it is one way to gain attention”.

It  raises the question – how do we gain attention when we feel that everything is going wrong? It comes as we absorb the concerning video footage associated with the death of Ian Tomlinson at last week’s G20 protest, scenes which ask serious questions about police behaviour.  When the powerful stop listening, how do we gain their attention and make them aware of our disquiet?

One of the stories about Jesus, which we read during these days leading up to Good Friday, is about him wreaking havoc in  the Temple, turning over the tables of the money changers.   It is a story of protest, a violent protest and Jesus’ actions were every bit as insulting in Jewish culture as an Arab throwing his shoe. Yet Jesus had found that the powerful had stopped listening and as the story unfolds it has a very modern feel, for the powerful used all the apparatus of their power to resist the truth Jesus was expounding.  The nature of Jesus’ protest against the abuse and corruption of truth becomes increasingly silent and the authority of his protest becomes greater as he offers a contrast to the anger, threats and violence of those who seek his death.

I think that to protest is to exercise our God given freedom to use our minds, to have an opinion and to speak about how we understand truth in this world.  Yet like all freedoms, there has to be responsibility and those who protest have to keep a fine balance between on the one hand making the powerful listen to their views and on the other becoming so forceful that the powerful have an excuse not to listen.  Over the years there have been many protests at the G8 meetings about the way the world economy was being run – they became very violent and the violence ensured that the protesters were not listened to by those with the power to change the economy.  As we now live in the grip of a terrible recession which is wreaking havoc in the lives of so many people, we may well feel that wisdom was actually found to be with the protesters, for it is painfully clear that the powerful who ran our economy  got it very wrong.

You can’t measure prayer

Over-to-you  BBC Radio Humberside  Tuesday 7th April

Yesterday, high above us in space, the European Goce Satellite switched on super-sensitive instruments which will make ultra-fine measurements of the Earth’s gravity.  The purpose of the Goce mission is to study the oceans – to understand better how gravity pulls water and heat around the globe and thus improve our understanding of climate change.  The satellite is an amazing feat of science, technology and engineering which will enable us to understand more about earth our home and the gravity which keeps us on it.

It was a tragic irony that on the day on which these super-sensitive instruments were switched on, miles below the residents in and around  L’Aquila in Italy were woken by the devastating effect of our globe’s most destructive force. The tectonic plates, which relentlessly grind together around Italy, moved suddenly causing an earthquake which brought devastation and destruction to the town and the power of gravity wreaked death and injury to the citizens of that region as buildings and infrastructure collapsed around them.

Our hearts go out to those who are caught up in this devastation – the bereaved, the injured and the homeless and we wrap them in our prayers along with those who continue to search for signs of life amidst the rubble and recover the victims of this natural disaster.

Science enables us to understand more and more about our planet and the life it sustains, with projects such as the Goce satellite extending that knowledge.  Already there are questions about why the scientists were not able to give any warning of this impending disaster as the energy built up under the epicentre of this earthquake.  Yet in the end we live on a living planet with the movement of the continental plates being part of the 4.5 billion year history of our world.  The victims of yesterday’s earthquake are tragic victims of this reality.

There are ever those who want to drive a wedge between science and religion. Artificially introducing conflict where there is none.  Science gives us an understanding of how this world works and how life is sustained; religion gives us an insight into the human dynamics of life, the purpose of life and the preciousness of each and every life.  As we wrap the victims of yesterday’s earthquake in our prayers we can do something which science can never offer, nor should it, we can for a moment become involved in their suffering and grief – we can’t change it, nor can we remove it – but in our prayers we avoid being indifferent to their plight – in prayer we are drawn into it.    That’s what makes us human and God makes possible – an ability to relate to each other in a way that science can never measure, no matter how super-sensitive its instruments may become.

Transforming Conflict

I have just finished a really useful book for church leaders about resolving conflict – well worth a read.  I wrote the following review of the book for the Foundation for Church Leadership, who commissioned the research:

Eolene Boyd-MacMillan and Sara Savage

Fundamental to effective leadership is an ability to interpret and engage with human and institutional complexity.  In the life of the church such complexity is to be found in abundance and it is a reality which needs to be embraced by church leaders.  A significant element to this complexity is that of conflict. In sponsoring a major piece of research into how church leaders handle conflict, the Foundation for Church Leadership (FCL) has engaged with an aspect of church life which is too frequently treated as an inconvenient truth or a sign of failure, rather than as a reality of institutions and of those who inhabit them.   The importance of this timely research is that, in a time of change for the church, conflict will be a factor for those attempting to plot a course for the future and when it is left unaddressed or misinterpreted, then conflict leeches energy and fosters dysfunctionality.

Given the reality of conflict within the church, it is not surprising that Eolene Boyd-MacMillan and Sara Savage were able to gather 29 church leaders from across the ecumenical spectrum to engage in research days on conflict transformation.   These research days and the material shared during them form the content of this handbook. Whilst the bibliography for work in conflict resolution has become extensive, it is the practitioner research base which gives this publication its authority.

Many of us regard conflict as a negative experience, but Boyd-Macmillan and Savage contend that conflict is holy ground, offering a potential driver for spiritual growth.  They describe ten steps on a journey towards transforming this dimension of human engagement – moving it from destructive negativity to that of learning “to see something good in the enemy, rather than rejoicing in their total destruction”.

Central to Boyd-Macmillan and Savage’s approach to achieving peaceful conflict resolution is Integrative Complexity (IC).  This they suggest refers to the “extent to which we consider different and even opposing points of view” about an issue and then incorporate that understanding into our work.  In promoting IC they draw on a well researched field in psychology and make it accessible to those who, just by virtue of office, find themselves trying to make sense of conflict within an organisation which proclaims peace and goodwill.   Working positively with conflict requires the high IC which comes with a differentiation between the many viewpoints of those involved in a conflict situation and then the integration of those viewpoints and values into a solution.

Boyd-Macmillan and Savage offer a strategic approach to transforming conflict which is based on their ten steps.  Those who follow this journey into transformation will discover that achieving a healthy outcome to situations of conflict will involve the leader taking into account their own conflict style and spirituality.

This is a practical resource book for those in church leadership and will become essential reading for those taking up senior appointments.  The authors’ understanding of the church is a key factor in making the book both accessible and pertinent, although it is not always easy to discern how the ideas have been informed by the research itself. The only substantial criticism of the material offered is that Boyd-Macmillan and Savage make conflict transformation sound too easy, when experience suggests that it isn’t quite like that, but I suspect that this is because few of us adopt the strategic step approach to conflict transformation which they commend.   The transformation they seek requires training and practice for those involved in leadership, but the Action Checklist offered for leaders who find themselves immersed in a conflict situation should be printed on a separate card, to be reread in the corner of a parish hall, the wings of a synod or the edge of a staff meeting – indeed at any time when “all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you”.

Publisher:  The Foundation for Church Leadership

ISBN  978-0-955057335

There, but for the grace of God

Whilst I really struggle with the morality of awarding anyone a pension of over £700,000, I also struggle with the morality of how Sir Fred Goodwin, that failed chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, is being treated as a ‘scapegoat’ for all the wrongs of our society’s approach to money. Sir Fred is just an example of how we have become obsessed with money and I wonder how many of those who have joined in the criticism of Sir Fred would themselves have passed up the opportunity to have legally obtained such a huge sum of money.

When a chap called John Bradford was imprisoned in the Tower of London some 450 years ago, he watched a prisoner being led out for execution and commented “There, but for the grace of God goes John Bradford”. In just one phrase, Bradford offered us a humble recognition that there is a capacity in each of us to get life wrong, a recognition which we retain in the proverb “there, but for the grace of God go I”.

It is a less attractive side of human nature to enjoy the failures and wrong doings of others and to take pleasure in their disgrace. John Bradford’s own execution had to be delayed because of the size of the crowd which had gathered to watch him burn to death for what was then the scandalous crime of being a protestant! Whilst today we don’t indulge in such barbarism, the desire to punish through public humiliation is still there in the government’s policy of ‘naming and shaming’ – a policy which is described in the Bible as “gloating over other men’s sins” and quite the opposite to any sense of love or justice.

In the face of so much that is wrong in our world and so much wickedness perpetrated by individuals, I do wonder whether we need to start our response by recovering that sense of ‘There, but for the grace of God go I”, for such humility is a sure foundation for goodness. Mercifully few of us are capable of committing any of the crimes which so dominate our headlines, nor do we have the opportunity to grab outrageous pensions, but which of us can claim to have got life absolutely right and to have never got it wrong? I rather suspect that there is a little something of Sir Fred in many of us and we will only really begin to solve the deep problems in our society when we recognise this inconvenient truth.