Thou disentedst

At the weekend, the Cathedral marked 30 years of girl choristers.  I was first living in Lincoln and attending the Cathedral in the mid-1990s.  I looked out my much used copy of the first CD they produced which I would have bought a liitle later. 

All I could find was the CD case, not the disc itself.  Perhaps I played a track for a service or group at some point, brought the case home, and left the disc behind in whichever machine had been used?

A specially commissioned new setting for George Herbert’s King of Glory, King of Peace was sung at the commemoration service.  I’d always assumed the hymn was the whole of one of his poems, but I was in fact struck by lines which I’d never sung or heard.

The growest soft and moist with tears,

   thou relentest;

and when Justice called for fears,

   thou disentedst.

A quick looking up showed the hymn consists of six of Herbert’s poem’s seven verses, first placed by Robert Bridges in the Yattendon Hymnal in the 1890s (the parish hymnbooks which also introduced All my hope on God is founded, words translated by Bridges).

Perhaps Bridges left out the verse so that the remaining six could be set out in pairs as a three verse hymn?  Perhaps he judged the verse as the least easily comprehended or least felicitous?  The hymn has certainly always felt complete without the verse.

Now I know, I am sorry that the idea of God’s grief was lost (long before twentieth century theological speculation about whether God suffers).  I’m also treasuring the idea that our potential fear of God’s justice is misplaced.

 

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.