Tag Archives: CofE

2 minutes with the Archbishop of Canterbury… and a helium balloon

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“Archbishop of Canterbury is thoroughly nice bloke” – that’s the headline my husband suggested. But mine says what it is I want to tell you about…

Today was Back to Church Sunday.  Our church celebrated this not only by having Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, there for the services in both of the parish churches (a formal service and a more freewheeling one), but also by all having lunch together.
I had something specific I wanted to ask the Archbishop, which I’ll tell you about in a minute.

The Archbishop did both a talk with the children, and a sermon today. The children all had a sheep to hold, and the Archbishop explained that the staff he had with him was a real old Kentish shepherd’s crook.  Given what happened later, I think this made a bit of an impression on the kids.  He answered questions about going to church when he was young, and what life had been like growing up (tin baths in front of the fire, apparently).
The really nice bit was that, as the children had all gathered on a mat at the front, he went and sat on the floor with them.  I noticed that, similarly, when doing communion, he bent down to each child’s level to do their blessings.  It was a great reminder that being head of the Anglican church nevertheless puts you on a level equivalent to a child in the eyes of God.

The sermon we heard (and apparently there was a different one at each service) was on the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16, 19-31).  This is a great subject for any newcomers service (the other good one is Acts 8, Philip and the Ethiopian with it’s message “how can I know what its all about if no one explains it to me”?)  The story of the little girl who told her mum that the Optician of Wales had been to her school triggered a great sermon on helping people to see, to see time at church as honest time in which we confess our sins but also celebrate how God sees us, with unconditional love.

When the service ended, we all helped put up tables and move the chairs to make a dining hall.  A posse of helpers had baked potatoes, made bolognese, grated cheese and provided great vats of baked beans and coleslaw.  We had all also brought desserts to share.
The Archbishop did not spend his time just talking to our minister.  Instead, he made his way around the room, firstly meeting all the people who’d stayed for coffee but not staying for food, then round to each table, joining us and chatting with us.  This was done gently, without entourage (he brounght a “minder” with him, basically like a Minister bringing a private secretary – or a Camerlengo to the pope?), and without formality.  He moved around seemingly at random, but clearly trying to see everyone.
When he came to our table, we were all ready to talk to him, but right at that moment, our vicar and a woman in a pink jacket came over – the Archbishop’s visit had been filmed, not just to go on the church website (as I’d assumed) but for Back to Church Sunday, to be shown in other churches. As recent arrivals, would we mind talking about it?  Of course we were happy to do so, but part of me was thinking, well that’s our chance to talk to him gone.   And when we’d filmed our segment, the Archbishop was asked to go and film a segment.

Someone at the church had provided some large silver helium balloons for the service spelling out WELCOME.  After the meal, some of the children were playing with them, and somehow the L had become separated from its weight and had floated up to the high village hall ceiling.  The children tried to use the O balloon to lasso the string of the L but even though the O could reach it, there was not enough tension in the string to bring the balloon down.  The the vicar’s daughter had a bright idea – the Archbishop’s shepherd’s crook!
Although they tried and tried, standing on a chair, the kids couldn’t get the hook to twist around the string and rescue the balloon.  Then one of the church team arrived with sticky tape.  They coated the top of the crook with it, and on tiptoe on a chair, the balloon was finally rescued.  The whole room applauded.

I started to take some pictures – and in the last photo , I realised the Archbishop had sneaked into the background – he’d come to see what was happening and congratulated the kids – nothing wrong with the flock borrowing the crook and all working together to solve a problem.  I’m sure there’s a metaphor there somewhere…

Which meant that, thanks to wanting to record this for my blog, I actually got two minutes with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
 I talked about this blog and the other things I do online talking about faith issues and in particular the discussions I have with those of no faith.  I asked ths:  I talk about personal experience of God in our lives, and that if Jesus rose again then everything else is interesting but ultimately we need to take seriously what he said and live it… but what other message should I have for you?

The Archbishop said this: the incredible value of each individual.
This is what we learn from Jesus – how much we are loved by God, and the value we place on each human life.  There are and have already been people in this world who don’t value people this way, but we feel this is wrong. It is through seeing ourselves through God’s eyes that we understand why we feel it is wrong.

Thinking about this more, this is like the argument that our morals and values must come from somewhere – why is it that, underneath our own interests, our greed, that we instinctively know that equality and fairness matters?  Why do we sometimes feel that the right thing to do is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends?
And all the psychological, biological, genetic, historical efforts going into trying to prove that altruism and ultimately self-sacrifice is not a betrayal of selfish genes but somehow good but without a God dimension… this pales into insignificance when you realise that we know this because. for a moment we see ourselves through God’s eyes and realise how life changing it is to see others in this way too.
How can you not give to the flood victims in Pakistan, send clothes for the deported Roma, visit your neighbour you’ve not seen around lately, buy a coffee for your collague that’s having a tough time when you realise that God sees them as just as important as the Archbishop of Canterbury?

Without that sense that each individual should be prized, we are no better than the rich man ignoring Lazarus starving at his gate. And as Jesus has the rich man in his parable say, if we don’t realise it now from all the words from everything that we’ve been told, then we won’t believe it no matter who tells us, not even if someone were to rise from the dead.

Churchquest 2010…

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Well, we’ve been here long enough and done enough unpacking that we can’t avoid it any longer…  we need to find a church.
There’s probably a lot of people that think – why bother?  Surely if you’ve done without one this long you’ve found there are plenty of other things you can do on a Sunday morning?
The truth is that both my husband and I are better people when we are going to church regularly.
We’re nicer to each other, which makes for a happier house, and we think more about other people in the comunity and beyond.
So we’ve started to try to find a church that we’ll like as much as St Mark’s Battersea.

The problem is that St Mark’s is a really amazing church.
It’s big, for a start.  It’s an urban church to which people are willing to travel.
It works in the community (running a kind of half-way house for young offenders, running Alpha at Wandsworth prison…) and people that are helped by the church often join the congregation.  The morning service that we used to go to was so popular that they actually had to split it in two, and even then there are enough children attending that the groups could be split by school year. The music – incorporating both band and organ – was  uplifting, and while primarily Graham Kendrick/ New Wine/ GreenBelt worship type songs, has more traditional hymns mixed in too.  The sermons were based on the reading of the day, really explaining the gospel helping you to go away are really read the bible for all its worth.

Ashford, for the size of its population has a phenomenal number of churches (something at work here, perhaps?), so there’s plenty of options to try.

There are a few things which influence the church we’re going to go to:
1)  we need the church to be a member of the Churches Together in Ashford partnership (this is important for primary school places);
2) we want it to be within about 15 minutes of home (means we get integrated into the local community, actions undertaken by the church for the community should be taking place where we can actually see the results, increases our chances of making friends in the local area, also means my husband can stay in bed later on a Sunday morning);
3) we’re looking for a service as similar to St Mark’s (and indeed my previous churches The Bible Talks at Christchurch Mayfair and Holy Trinity Brussels): liberal evangelical, encouraging thought, questioning, Bible-based preaching, catchy music…
4) we’re looking for a welcoming, friendly, mixed age service, with good children’s groups;
5) I’m looking for a homegroup that is on a day I can attend and where my son is also welcome… or where I have the possibility of setting one up that runs like that…

Two further thoughts.
Firstly , we heard this morning (more of which in a seperate post) that churches preaching to unbelievers need really good sermons, and churches preaching to believers need really good prayers.  My problem is that I still need both, not because I’m an unbeliever, but because I still pray for help with my unbelief…
Secondly, CS Lewis in the Screwtape letters and in setting out the fundamentals of Mere Christianity really goes to town on the idea that you should go to the nearest church of whatever domination and congregation, and not seek a church full of people like you.
Well, possibly. But it’s easier to get my husband to come to church at all when he feels like he belongs.

So off we go on Churchquest 2010.  I’ll keep you posted…

What’s the politics equivalent of CofE?

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When the census was published in 2001, the big story was the religion box and the internet rumours about how if enough people put Jedi as their religion it had to be “officially recognised”. Absolute rubbish of course, but nevertheless 390,000 people said that they were Jedi’s leading to this rather fab report title on the ONS website…
37.3 million of the 53 million respondents to the census gave their religion as “Christian”.  Individual denominations were not specified, nor was there any breakdown between practising and non-practising because the census records the label that people choose for themselves.

Just about anyone you ask will tell you that practically no one goes to church on a Sunday (actually it’s more people than go to football matches each week, but no one’s saying that football’s on it’s way out and the stadiums should be converted into bijou residences, are they?) 
And indeed speculation at the time was that many people that had said that had done so out of habit or tradition - that they were not really Christian other than for hatches, matches and dispatches, and that many people would’ve preferred to put ”C of E” rather than Christian in any case becuase it conveys a sort of equivocal, half-hearted, keeping the door ajar approach rather than a total immersion.

I suspect that actually there’s something very British about this sort of attitude.  Andrew Marr pointed out in his excellent series “The Making of Modern Britain” that what probably saved the UK from Oswald Mosely’s fascism was the British sense of humour, that we don’t commit too lightly or take things too seriously (look how long Jedward managed to stay in the X Factor if you need a more trivial example). 
CofE means: of all the faiths that I’m not currently practising, this is the one whose service I didn’t go to on Sunday… 
If that’s true, I guess they were the people that would’ve found my last three churches (TBT at Christchurch Mayfair, Holy Trinity Brussels and St Mark’s Battersea) a bit “too much”, not CofE in the sense they mean it. But I digress.

So I’ve just found this excellent post over at Sharpe’s Opinion, which sets out in a short, neat way something I’ve thought a bit about for some time. 

Political party membership is falling in the UK, and I think that part of the problem is that to join a political party, you need to feel that you subscribe to all of a diverse range of policies (and pay for the privelege of saying that you do so).
Actually I remember my politics teacher at school saying exactly that- that she had never signed up to a political party because she could not support the whole message of any of them. And she was one of the cleverest people I knew (Miss Pickles, you were a legend!  But as she was a sit-up-and-beg-bicycling, bun-wearing non-TV watcher I’m not honestly expecting to be able to find anything online from her to hyperlink to other than this link to the school…)

So you might be someone that thinks marriage is the best thing for encouraging families to stay together and that there should be tax breaks to encourage this, but pro-European. 
Or you might favour positive action in recruitment for women, disabled people and minority groups, but strongly in favour of grammar schools as the best way to help bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds be socially mobile. 
Or you might be in favour of local income tax but own a house worth over £2 million.
(Just to clarify this is not me we’re talking about in these examples - I don’t even own a house!). 
In each case, your two interests would conflict with two of the few clear policies espoused by a major political party.

So – assuming that there’s no one policy area on which you are intending to be a single issue activist – how would you be able to “commit” enough to actually “do” something in politics to make the world a better place?
  
It’s not that easy at the moment.
If – as it seems from my paddling in the UK and EU political blogospheres- one of the main ways of getting your voice hear is through the team/ brand loyalty of a political party.  This guarantees you a pool of potential readers who will click onto or link to your blog just because you’ve got a little bird or tree or rose emblem just like theirs (or indeed a different one to theirs).  There will be lists that you can get onto, bringing more readers to debate with in the comments section and share ideas and build your knowledge. 
But these of course are the hardcore supporters, and while bloggers like Iain Dale are clear that they are not official party mouthpieces, they do tend to take a my-party-right-or-no-actually-we’re-always-right type of attitude (unless on an issue where they’re personally affected in which case they try to justify both views).
And what happens if, like Charlotte Gore, you fall out of love with your party over bits of what they stand for? 
It’s a bit like a religion isn’t it?  But while exegesis or midrash are “allowed” in some religious circles, and small group discussion is thought to help you understand and deepen your faith, there will always be some people who are happy with the simple faith version, looking for an easy label and willing to say “C of E” and get back to mowing the lawn without trying to go into what it means and why.  And indeed there will always be some people within the faith that don’t want you to do more than parrot back received wisdom – could that be said to be the case for political parties too, as in “we have clever people to do the thinking and they’ve come up with this, take it or leave it?”

So can anything be done to make this better?
Not clear.  Experiments like Jury Team tried to overcome the political party system, but the polling at the 2009 European elections for their independent candidates was hardly spectacular. 
Esther Rantzen might be trying to use her celebrity in a Martin Bell-like manner to stand against a politician whose morals she disagrees with, but she’s not exactly standing on a platform of anything that people can sign up to positively, merely that she’s been known in the past as a consumer champion and is not the sitting candidate.
I suspect that actually a different electoral system allowing for coalition politics might be part of the solution. 
Then, I don’t know, pro-European Tories could be free to praise the benefits of the EU to the rooftops, Labour supporters that think that an insurance-based healthcare system might actually be better than the current NHS, and Lib Dems who think that students should pay tuition fees would all be free to say what they think without fear of losing the whip or never getting on in their party and therefore never making it to the front benches/ government. 
Maybe the way to avoid groupthink and to really stimulate new ideas is to have lots of different groups suggesting them.  And while I guess there’s a Pythonesque risk of ending up with the Judean People’s Front/ People’s Front of Judea, at least it would be debate out in the open rather than manifestos out the front but little black books and the like behind the scenes.

Of course which ever party forms a government via which ever political system, I’m sure they’ll do their best to be a good govenment.  But as the old saying goes, it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. 
I guess there might be a lot of people out there wondering which is the “C of E” option on the ballot papers…