a blog by howard jameson @ gatheringgrace.org

Being Human

Just had Baroness Greenfield speaking on the neuroscience of what makes us human. Mind blowing stuff.

Now sitting on the lawn with a Guiness trying to avoid the tennis. Once Borg is out I lose interest.

Clergy Conference

Up, up and away to [insert weather pattern here] Derbyshire for our Clergy Residential.

Looking through my stats page on the blog I got a lot of hits yesterday on the page that I advertised as the content of the seminar I am taking on Tuesday; presumably it is people still not decided what they are doing (rather than people who had decided and are now wondering why on earth they chose mine).

4 days in the company of other Clergy is a somewhat artificial environment, but interesting line up of speakers and some friends I look forward to meeting up with.

More busy days

Just seem to have been on the go pretty constantly...

I enjoyed twittering our Safari Supper this evening, memorable for hills and the hostess who was embarrassed after asking us if we had grand-children, but other than that fine (we've had much worse). After striking a whole big pile of to-dos off the list I almost feel like I can start to look forward to the Clergy Residential next week. Can't remember the theme, can't remember who is speaking and the prospect of time in the bar with a lot of Clergy fills me with horror, but there will be good bits, I'm sure.

Can we renew ourselves?

An interesting question here for Parliament. Several MPs spoke yesterday on the need for renewal, and for the new Speaker to bring this about.

I have to say I am not overly optimistic. I thought the allegations of Tory sleaze from a decade ago had disappeared, but we now realise they had simply been transferred to an equally unpleasant system of claiming "expenses".

I hope and pray (genuinely) I am wrong on this.

Synod: Bishops and Archdeacons

Now I'm not sure what animal based metaphor to start with...

Chickens coming home to roost?

Cat among the pigeons?

Dog in a manger?

Actually, not sure what that last one means - forget that one.

Up for discussion at General Synod (I understand) is the suggestion that the C of E has become top heavy, and the number of Archdeacons and Bishops has stayed broadly the same despite a reduction in the number of full time paid Clergy. Some are annoyed that Mission is not even a footnote on the agenda anyway, which is regrettable - by their agendas shall ye know them! Even worse, IMHO, would be to do the typical C of E thing of saying that there should be a standing agenda item every time. Always a good one for getting collars heated. Rumours abound of a recent appointment which included a part-time Mission focus and the successful applicant acknowledging at interview that they knew nothing about Mission - only to be told that it was ok, they could pick that bit up as they went along. I digress.

I do sometimes imagine a situation in the distant future where I am the only Priest covering most of West Wiltshire, and having so many bosses and bods from Salisbury wanting to come and see me that I never get any work done at all. My first boss in Engineering operated under the dictum

the nail that sticks up gets hit

and hence my happiness in operating on border territory - nobody in their right minds come out this far - and if they do they can't find us anyway (tee hee). The problems for Bishops and Archdeacons who want to maintain the status quo can be treated to exactly the same arguments that they have been offering for the last 20 years or so as Parishes have been rammed into each other (the Ecclesiastical equivalent of continental drift). The need to delegate authority to Lay people to make them grow, and the pattern for a local Clergyperson to take up some degree of an Episcope (oversight) role are both fine sounding in theory, but can be "a right bugger" (please excuse the technical agricultural terminology on this one) in practice.

The difference, though, is that this most definitely IS about money - I don't imagine there will ever be a shortage of Clergy seeking the plum posts and the most CV enriching Chaplaincy in order to boost their chances of preferment. However I can imagine certain quarters of the press having a field day (the campaigning heirs of John Bold) and getting this all about privilege and status - the mood of the nation speaks!

I think if we've learnt one thing from the last 20 years it would have to be what an absolute cods gets made of Church when it is managed by making steps that just seem the most convenient at the time. Churches (like most organisations) contain good bits, yes, but also areas ruled by ego and vanity, distrust and nimbyism, and so if a nettle needs to be grasped (ie some form of change management is going to be introduced) then let it be done in the right way.

A bit of a round up of things that annoy me

Some tendencies are getting on my nerves...I simply share them for you to add to if you wish.

Flimsy plastic bottles with more solid plastic tops. As soon as they are below half empty they fall over all the time

And the shapes are so complicated that its almost impossible to get the last bits of the content out (shampoo or whatever)

Quiz shows on TV that are increasingly complicated so that they seem to spend most of each episode explaining the rules ("so its down to the last three of you, so one of you will be playing for big money...")

Or stupid extended periods of silence (usually with the sound of a heart beating in the background whilst they wait for the answer or the judges decision

Plastic music where every new act sounds like every previous act

I could go on...

Is there a fan site for Euguene Peterson?

I was (if you were reading back then) very cautious about reading...

"The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Director" (Eugene H. Peterson)

At the time I think this was because the "contemplative" bit made me think that this was a how-to book for people who were more i than e on Myers-Briggs and the "pastor" bit was therefore focussed internally to running Church. Clearly the first misconception was totally wrong. The second less so, although I think I am happy to live in the tension between a strong sense that my vocation is NOT to The Church but my greatest day to day responsibility usually is - because I can do outward looking mission stuff, but unless we change the hearts of our Churches to follow then the mission will be temporary and not seen as the life blood of Christian existence and the "action" which grounds our worship in reality.

So I have decided to repeat what I did then by blogging my way through another Peterson book...

"Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work" (Eugene H. Peterson)

I have to say his first paragraph has just blown me away.

Pastoral work takes Dame Religion by the hand and drags her into the everyday world, introducing her to friends, neighbours, and associates. Religion left to herself is shy, retiring, and private; or else she is decorative and proud - a prima donna

So is there a Eugene Peterson fan site?

Unity: a typical Church and Romans 14 and 15

The bit of Romans that struck me afresh as we studied it this week (certainly in terms of direct relevance to our situation) was the discussion in Romans 14 and 15 on unity despite strong differences of opinion. Dunn explained this in terms of small house or cell Churches (large tenements with limited space would mean a normal Church unit would be, say, a dozen people). Each of these cells would probably be small enough to be an accumulation of Christians from a similar geographical location and background - so probably the issues of clean and unclean foods would not arise. But, again presumably, there would be regular larger gatherings, and therefore it is at these celebrations (to use Cell Church vocabulary) that cells with different understandings with regard to questions such as food would clash.

Dunn argued that Paul's use of the terms strong and weak in faith refer to whether "faith" alone was sufficient; thus a Gentile (in Paul's view) would have been strong (because it was by faith alone that they regarded themselves as "saved"), whereas a Jewish-Christian would be weak (assuming that they regarded their salvation as coming by "faith" plus adherence to some other code - the Law). Dunn (according to my notes) here distinguishes the verbs used in the attitudes between these two groups. The stronger Christians (14:3) must not despise the weaker, and the weaker (same verse) must not judge. Dunn goes on to point out that these two verbs are the classic responses between differing Christians; those who feel they are closest to some core definition of "faith" despise (or look down) on the others, whilst the weaker (those for whom maybe faith is expressed by the fulfilment of some additional action or requirement) will judge (or condemn or tut or a myriad of other things in the same vein).

For our eyes, at least, the use of the ideas of strong and weak probably sounds a little pejorative or judgemental, but one advantage of this metaphor of relative strength is that it immediately moves the debate on from whether the two groups are even Christian to begin with.

Paul's solution is that the "strong" forego some degree of liberty out of love for the weaker (v15) and Paul can then encourage us to "pursue what makes for peace and mutual edification' (or a version you might be more familiar with as the introduction to the Peace in Common Worship.

If we translate this to a contemporary situation though I am struggling to see how this model works. I guess my initial suspicion is that we would each like to see ourselves as being "strong". A not untypical issue in my type of situations is that of the frequency of Communion and the degree to which a more Charismatic style of worship is allowed to be see an anything more than something tolerated at an evening service. For those wanting Communion I think I am being fair in saying that there is a twin strand of a familiarity of what is going to be happening combined with the traditional view of the Sacrament as nourishment ("we need to be fed"). On the other side of the argument are those who want to see the Holy Spirit at work more directly and visibly. In a sense, according to Dunn's interpretation of Paul's descriptions, both sides are "weak" because, in their own way, both "add" to the requirements of "faith" in making an insistence of a specific style of worship. If Dunn is right then the eating of foods was not a "how do we worship" question, but a "how do we meet together to eat" type of question. I was going to add the word "socially" but imagine that Paul would not see the eating together as a social activity, even if it wasn't strictly a worship event in the way we would understand it.

So maybe, just maybe, the extrapolation of Paul's writings on this to 2009 would be to say that we might worship in smaller groups in differing ways. I have to say that this flies in the face of my gut instinct which is to try to build Church across divisions to ensure that we have mutual support and encouragement and move on from a view of a Church as being divided or divisive. Certainly in an environment within which people come to Church less and therefore would see their obligation to time in Church as being limited multiple events don't sound like an obvious winner, but we must have a specific coming together time where we share our lives - we might want to add that even amongst people who prefer a similar style of worship there is little evidence of a sharing of lives in that eating together type of meeting - it seems to be something we have broadly lost from Protestant or Anglo-Saxon styles of Church.

So I'm not feeling much closer to an obvious answer....

Paying the price

Tired and little overdone today. The price of the fourth day of being in Salisbury for excellent teaching is the backlog that has slowly built up on my desk and in the to do lists, even with dates rescheduling to next Friday (it won't go away).

An interesting thought from an overview of Romans. The majority of the letter that we have been working through (1:1 to the end of chapter 15) are addressing issues of the story of salvation and relationships within the body of Christ, and the outworking of that in terms of worship and conduct. There is only really one chapter which is the personal stuff (the sorts of things that Clergy would refer to as Pastoral situations). Should we learn to see our primary pastoral responsibility to be to the body and not to the individuals - if Paul was as Jewish as I think then his conception of the individual as distinct from a member of the greater body was almost non-existent.

Paul

(or wot I've lurnt in Skool).

I have hugely enjoyed this Bible Break at Sarum College looking in depth at Paul's Epistle to the Romans. I chose this one partly because I had heard of James Dunn and because this is one of those books which can intimidate. I am really glad I have done it. The last session is tomorrow and I've done Parish stuff all evening (except for a run) so my homework for the good Prof is also going to be a blog post. I find if I know its going into the public domain then I can't write total rubbish, but I am aware that this is rushed - so I will offer this tomorrow in our final session and then maybe add corrections.

We were given a list of questions as our homework - some of which look a bit frightening, so I am going to have a bash at a couple of them (stream of consciousness style) and I think my choices of questions is a reflection of what I feel I now have to say (or explore) in future teaching of my own. This, after all, was the primary reason for going in the first place.

I guess my first point is a revised view of Paul the man. Dunn certainly filled out more detail of how a Pharisee would be motivated - so Saul of Tarsus would have happily held the coats of those stoning Stephen because they were following the entirely Biblical precedents of expunging the tainted aliens who would subvert the true faith and lead the people astray (e.g. Elijah and the prophets of Baal) and Dunn seemed to suggest that Paul's pre-conversion antipathy was reserved for the Greek speakers, who may well have been Diaspora Jews who returned to Jerusalem but then found themselves unable to speak Aramaic and probably have made other compromises with Hellenist culture. They deserved to die - simple as that.

This makes Paul's conversion all the more radical as he turned to see himself as the one appointed Apostle to the Gentiles. He is sent to Antioch, but then ventures further west under his own authority. Paul would have operated in the major population centres, planting Churches and sending mission teams to the smaller towns. By the early 50s he was around Corinth and Ephesus with a sense of having completed his job in that neck of the woods, and so he had a few months in which he wrote this and other letters.

Rome was not a Church planted by Paul - rather merchant Jews would probably have taken this new faith to the Jews of Rome (40-50,000 in total) and Jewish-Christian cell Churches would have grown in the tenement blocks. In 49 Claudius expelled the Jews because of the rioting provoked by Chrestos ("Christ"?) and so the remaining Christians would have probably been more Greek in their background. When Claudius died in 54 the Jews returned t discover their Churches bore little relation to the ones they had left (and presumably led). Hence the Jewish-Gentile relations in the early Church become Paul's focus in this letter.

I imagine Paul now as a sort of New Testament Jewish Billy Bremner - a short man with a chip on his shoulder who you did not cross. He falls out with Peter for withdrawing from eating with Gentiles when other Jews saw him, but this could well have been because Peter was conscious of the need for him to remain ritually pure in Jewish eyes for his own ministry to the Jews, especially with a rising sense of Jewish nationalism and identity prior to the revolt in 68 (I think). Thus Paul (in my imagined picture here) is a little chastened and softened in his attitudes, and realises that these pressures and/or his fragile relations with the other Disciples make a move back east impossible. So Paul sets his sights to the west, which means passing through Rome - so perhaps Paul is trying to show a more compromising side so as to both encourage the Roman Church, but also to allow them to let him in as a springboard to his next mission. Perhaps Paul even felt that the Roman Churches were in danger of collapse, especially in an environment fundamentally hostile to small groups who met in private. Either way it sounds as if he meets Prisca and Aquila, two Jewish Christians expelled from Rome but clearly still well thought of, and uses them as a way of establishing a rapport with Rome.

What do you find most difficult about Paul?

I think that even the above explanation and the reams of notes I took show that there are still huge gaps in our appreciation of Paul's Jewishness and of his understanding of Christianity. Would he, for example, have signed up to the Nicene Creed (I am sure he would have "in spirit" but imagine that some of the detail would have baffled him, responding as it does to questions not asked in Paul's time). Paul was not a 16th Century (or later) Protestant and it would be most unfair to portray the Reformers, as it were, uncovering the real meaning of Paul. How could they - he was primarily Jewish and many of his assumptions and thought processes stemmed from that.

Paul also refuses to write in a way that is accessible to our style of analysis. There are times when, as Dunn pointed out, he leaves holes in his own arguments and allows is metaphors to become really quite tangled - but he seems quite relaxed about that. Either it didn't bother him, or he didn't notice, or they just did things a bit differently then.

How do you conceptualize the Spirit working in human life?

I found Dunn's analysis of Paul's description of the body and gifts in Romans 12 really enlightening. If, and I have no reason to doubt him, the root of our word Charismatic is charis meaning grace, then charism means something more like 'a means of grace' than we would think of in a secular use of charismatic (that is a person's character which attracts one). But 'means of grace' has become very entrenched in our Sacramental statements - in fact this is what we describe a Sacrament as. But going back to Dunn a charismatic gift, therefore, (Paul has a whole list) would not be, in Paul's view, a gift of a skill to an individual person, but a gift which is seen in the grace received in the moment of ministry. A charismatic gift is not, therefore, so much to be thought of as something to go on one's CV, but rather to be witnessed as a prophetic word or an act of healing is ministered for it is at that point that grace (God's goodness) is to be witnessed.

Certainly this remains within the framework of a group of people being the body together, but in fact it increases the importance of the ministering in God's name to one another, being the vehicles and recipients of grace at work. I find the corollary of this quite a challenge both on terms of the traditional "charismatic" ideal of the gifted individual person and the "sacramental" tendency towards a routine and, often in the way we do it, private transfer of grace through the symbols of water or bread or wine. Paul also juxtaposes this talk of gifts and bodies (as he does elsewhere) with really quite un-dramatic stuff too, such as love and hope and hospitality. Somehow we don't have these different modes of Church sitting comfortably cheek by jowl, probably because of the baggage and distrust of tradition.

Which brings me on to...

What are the issues which divide Christians today, and is Paul's way of dealing with the big issues of Romans 14 and 15 still relevant and helpful?

I don't know

yet...