There are no levers to pull

 

Yesterday began with the opening verses of Isaiah, the set first reading at Matins.  God is revolted by the sacrifices his people offer, sees their festivals as futile, and turns his ears from their persistent prayer.  He pleads with them instead to ‘learn to do good, pursue justice, support the oppressed, champion the orphans, and plead the widow’s cause’.

The day ended at a consultation event for the diocese’s developing new strategy.  Although almost the first PowerPoint slide reminded us that one of the three strands of its long existing strategy is ‘joyful service of the community’, every one of the ‘emerging themes’ of the new strategy focussed on the life of the church.  There was no hint that ‘kingdom seeking’, justice promoting or marginalised supporting was to feature in our future.

The work being done, we were told, is undergirded by a Theological Reference Group, but the Diocesan Secretary declined an invitation to name a theological insight which informed the process or these themes. 

‘Raising the spiritual temperature’ has been much referenced in diocesan communication, and was there as both one of three new objectives and repeated slightly strangely as one of the five ways to reach these objectives.  Someone asked what this actually meant, and was told that the Bishop has written three papers about it and a young communications officer present was working on how this might be summarised accessibly.  Things used not to be done like that.

So we got on with the set task anyway.  We had post-it notes to affix to laminated posters of the five emerging themes, unsure of what some of them meant (‘a church in reach’?), uniformed about the actions the ‘lever groups’ (seriously?) were considering recommending, and unable to query whether they were actually the themes which capture the directions in which we should go. 

But things took a turn this morning when I went back into the dedicated section of the diocesan website where I had previously found the first of the Bishop’s papers, and now found all three, laid out across sixteen pages.  It is almost the only thing there with actual content about anything other than the process of developing the strategy.

The Bishop’s papers do not advocate the sort of shift towards a more cult-like enthusiasm which the slogan might make people fear.  They actually set out a vast range of the sorts of things (‘a miscellany of many regular tropes and themes’) about Christian spirituality which I have been taught for sixty years, which I have taught for forty (very often with exactly the same illustrations and references the Bishop uses), and some of which I have sought to practise.

Early in the first paper, he acknowledges the kingdom grows in hidden and unexpected ways.  He says he ‘treasures those who witness through service’.  In the second, he says growth ‘is not just about size – it is about health, attitude and outlook’.  In both the second and third, he references the Five Marks of Mission (only the first two of which are about the life of the church, while the last three are about service of neighbour, community and world).  He even situated the pursuit of Carbon Zero in the last of these.

While I continue to be puzzled and even troubled by the narrowness of the emerging themes with which we were presented, and about by the educational design of the evening, it would be hopeful if the proposals which do emerge grow from these steers.

I also wonder if the reassurance will apply more widely.  I even hope that the yet to be released Seeking God: Seeking Growth material, which the Bishop mentions and of which I recently spent eighteen months in Grimsby fruitlessly asking to see drafts, might also turn out to be well pitched.  Perhaps even like the sort of Mission Action Planning tool which the diocesan Mission and Training Development Forum was sharing with the diocese when I was a member of that team at end of the last century.

So I’m again almost nostalgic for Robert Warren’s Missionary Congregation approach which we promoted then – a church both ‘distinctive’ (something not totally unlike ‘raising the spiritual temperature’?) and ‘engaged’ (not allowing inevitable concerns for church flourishing to distract us from being deeply involved in the concerns of a place).  What if a new diocesan strategy turned out to be about renewing faithfulness – giving thanks for the dedicated right approach through the unpropitious time of the last couple of generations and encouraging a recommitment to them in this present time?

The view is one which those climbing to the belfry in Grimsby Minster see, and will be fully populated with a welcoming congregation when a new Vicar is launched there at a service this week. 

That we might have hope

 

I have been drawn into the Epistle set for those who observed last Sunday as Bible Sunday. 

Perhaps the most predictable choice of Epistle was set last year in our three year cycle of readings: ‘all scripture is inspired [God-breathed] and is useful for teaching’ (2 Timothy 3.16).  The purpose being ‘that everyone who belongs to God may be equipped for good works’ (3.17).  A preacher’s temptation might be to seek to express what it is about scripture which gives it authority, and which should provoke action.

But this year we were offered ‘by encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope’ (Romans 15.4), a focus on us as being what is inspired by it, something which elicits hope.  Authority not found by theory (there is even the possibility of some idolatry of the Bible in that?) but verified by grace discovered in engagement with it.

And the verse nests in the middle of Paul wrestling with living together with those specific aspects of whose theology and practice we are sure is wrong: ‘put up with the failings of the weak’, ‘not to please ourselves’, ‘for the good purpose of building up the neighbour’ (15.1,2).  The set passage doesn’t finish ‘so that we may glorify God’ but ‘live in harmony with one another so that we may with one voice glorify God’ (15.6).

We happen to be (once more, still) in the middle of church dispute, and I happen to have also been rediscovering Simon Tugwell’s Ways of Imperfection: Christianity has to be a disappointment, precisely because it is not a mechanism for accomplishing all our human ambitions and aspirations... necessarily involving a remaking of our hopes.

Meanwhile, late October is the time for Christmas decoration to go up on Steep Hill.

Including Samaritans

 

Matthew is careful to categorise Samaritans (perceived as an heretical Jewish sect) with non-Jews rather than with Jews.  He does so in one of Jesus’ mission commissioning:  ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans’ (10.5).  It is his only reference to them, although presumably they are caught up with the whole non-Jewish category in the final commissioning: ‘Go make disciples of all nations’ (28.19).

But Luke invites us to value them quite differently.  It was an old thought which came back to me again on St Luke’s Day yesterday.  The clues may be in his second book, Acts, explicitly identifying them in the mission commissioning at the very start: ‘You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth’ (1.8). 

He then tells of them as the first successful mission field: ‘all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria... Philip went down to a city of Samaria proclaiming the Messiah to them... (they) listened eagerly... hearing and seeing the signs... they were baptised both men and women... (and) the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God’ (8.1,5,6,12,14).

So, when we look back to his Gospel, it is the first Christian Samaritans who might have been in his mind as he wrote.  Perhaps he even knew such Samaritan Christians.  If so, the three stories of Samaritans which his Gospel uniquely preserves are not just about a category of ‘outsiders’ but about ‘insiders’: ‘I’ve included some stories of Jesus already valuing you, dear often discriminated against fellow Christians, dear first fruits of the church’s mission’.

Luke tells of Jesus rebuking those who wanted revenge on a hostile reception in one of their villages (9.52-55).  Luke record’s Jesus story of a Samaritan’s exemplary care of neighbour, contrasted with that of two Jewish religious officials (10.30-37).  Luke highlights one Samaritan’s thankfulness to Jesus, contrasted to nine other apparently non-Samaritans (17.11-19).

Mark, on whose earlier, shorter Gospel Matthew and Luke build, mentions them not at all.  John does the once, the story of the woman at the well at Sychar, but that is a story for many other days.

Ascoughs at Stallingborough

 

It is two and a half years since I explored Ann Askew's family but I finally got to Stallingborough Church on a recent Heritage Open Day to see the monuments to her brother Francis (top) and Francis' son Edward (bottom).  I spotted that Francis is commemotrated as Edward's father in particular, so I presume that it was Edward who arranged thgis group of memorialisation.  I remain aware of just how interrrelated the gentry families in the north of Lincolnshire were - Francis acquired South Kelsey through his marriage to a Hansard step-sister, his mothers-in-law included a Tyrwhitt and a St Paul, and both Edward and his sister Elizabeth married Grantham siblings

St Oswald's cross and body

 

Preaching on St Aidan's Day at the end of last month, I drew attention to the picture of St Oswald in one of Grimsby Minster's stained glass windows.  He is standing with the cross he raised on the Heavenfield battle field.  A week or so later, staying with friends in Northumberland, they took me to revisit the battlefield site, where this cross now stands.  I was struck by seeing it twice.  

We also stopped at the shrine of St Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral where St Oswald's head is likely to be the one buried in the same grave.  

A few weeks earlier a different friend had helped me renotice that a small cluster of churches at the northern end of Lincolnshire's Isle of Axholme are dedicated in St Oswald's name.  We wondered whether perhaps his body (which was taken to Bardney Abbey in central Lincolnshire) might have rested there on the way, or perhaps, in the grisly story of his body parts, some now unrecorded relic belonged there for a time.

Uphill Lincoln today

 

The replica tank parked by the Cathedral, encountered when going uphill, was more explicable when the new sign had been unveiled by the time I went back downhill, although the information on the pair of signs (one old and one new) is pretty similar, so almost appear to be be there to promote their promoters.  Lincoln’s early twentieth century agricultural machinery industry had pioneered caterpillar tracks, which is what opened the way for the development of what secrecy initially labelled water tanks, a name which stuck.

And walking a little further, I found the rebranding of Bishop Gosseteste College / University finally visible at the beginning of a new academic year.  Sad as I am to lose the place of Grossteste in our landscape, I do realise that people not knowing how to spell and/or pronounce Grosseteste can't have been a good marketing feature, and the 'Nottingham Trent' or 'Leeds Beckett' model of name alreday existed (even though the latter has already taken the 'LBU' brand).

Campaign choices

 

The Daily Telegraph has discovered that if someone places a house in the name of a disabled child (so that the child can have a secure home for life) it nevertheless counts as still being the parents property for some tax purposes.  They even discovered an example of a parent who didn’t realise this and had paid less tax than they should, although that person promised to pay the extra tax as soon as being made aware of this.  What would that campaigning newspaper do next?  Presumably it would put a lot of effort into a campaign to have this law changed?