Category Archives: mersea

Ah, Church

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Found this from here, via Graham, and thought I’d share it as it impinges on several conversations being had within the benefice:

Here is a step-by-step plan for how to get more young people into the church:

1. Be genuine. Do not under any circumstances try to be trendy or hip, if you are not already intrinsically trendy or hip. If you are a 90-year-old woman who enjoys crocheting and listens to Beethoven, by God be proud of it.

2. Stop pretending you have a rock band.

3. Stop arguing about whether gay people are okay, fully human, or whatever else. Seriously. Stop it.

4. Stop arguing about whether women are okay, fully human, or are capable of being in a position of leadership.

5. Stop looking for the “objective truth” in Scripture.

6. Start looking for the beautiful truth in Scripture.

7. Actually read the Scriptures. If you are Episcopalian, go buy a Bible and read it. Start in Genesis, it’s pretty cool. You can skip some of the other boring parts in the Bible. Remember though that almost every book of the Bible has some really funky stuff in it. Remember to keep #5 and #6 in mind though. If you are evangelical, you may need to stop reading the Bible for about 10 years. Don’t worry: during those ten years you can work on putting these other steps into practice.

8. Start worrying about extreme poverty, violence against women, racism, consumerism, and the rate at which children are dying worldwide of preventable, treatable diseases. Put all the energy you formerly spent worrying about the legit-ness of gay people into figuring out ways to do some good in these areas.

9. Do not shy away from lighting candles, silence, incense, laughter, really good food, and extraordinary music. By “extraordinary music” I mean genuine music. Soulful music. Well-written, well-composed music. Original music. Four-part harmony music. Funky retro organ music. Hymns. Taize chants. Bluegrass. Steel guitar. Humming. Gospel. We are the church; we have a uber-rich history of amazing music. Remember this.

10. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

11. Learn how to sit with people who are dying.

12. Feast as much as possible. Cardboard communion wafers are a feast in symbol only. Humans can not live on symbols alone. Remember this.

13. Notice visitors, smile genuinely at them, include them in conversations, but do not overwhelm them.

14. Be vulnerable.

15. Stop worrying about getting young people into the church. Stop worrying about marketing strategies. Take a deep breath. If there is a God, that God isn’t going to die even if there are no more Christians at all.

16. Figure out who is suffering in your community. Go be with them.

17. Remind yourself that you don’t have to take God to anyone. God is already with everyone. So, rather than taking the approach that you need to take the truth out to people who need it, adopt the approach that you need to go find the truth that others have and you are missing. Go be evangelized.

18. Put some time and care and energy into creating a beautiful space for worship and being-together. But shy away from building campaigns, parking lot expansions, and what-have-you.

19. Make some part of the church building accessible for people to pray in 24/7. Put some blankets there too, in case someone has nowhere else to go for the night.

20. Listen to God (to Wisdom, to Love) more than you speak your opinions.

~~

No comments for now, although I don’t agree with all of it.

About the church magazine, and a bit more…

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So. The Church magazine was dead on it’s feet a few years ago, before a friend picked up the editorship and managed to take it off life-support. For very good reasons, he is now wanting to concentrate on other things, and I have said that I will – in the very short term, ie between now and Christmas – take over that job.

Yet I look at the magazine and I wonder… why? Why do we keep it going?

We need to have a channel to distribute information to the congregation. Yet we already have a weekly pew-sheet and an e-mail circulation list. The number of people who actually rely on the magazine is pretty small, if any.

It’s not as if there is any prospect of it becoming a general interest magazine, which non-churchgoers would be happy to peruse (which happens in a different one of my parishes, and very successfully). I can see a way of working to build up the magazine with lots of interesting articles… but why? What would be the point? There is a general interest magazine/newspaper for the Island already, and actually I think it’s pretty good. More than that, I think that as a culture we are drowning in words and we really don’t need any more.

In addition, the job of being a magazine editor is pretty thankless, all things considered (and I’ve done it before, so I know what I’m talking about). If there was a proper budgeting of the enterprise – that is, one which included the cost of the labour involved to produce it – I have no doubt that it would be shown that the magazine runs at a significant loss.

So I wonder… why? What’s the point? Why don’t we just let the natural processes take their course and allow that particular expression of church communication to rest in peace?

And then I think: what’s the difference between church magazines and church as such?

Happiness is a team sport

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Courier article – posted here two weeks after publication.
I wonder how many people on Mersea were closely following the fortunes of the England team in the World Cup. By the time this gets published we’ll know who has won it this year. Personally I’d like it if a country that has never won it before wins the prize – so Holland or Spain – but the form of the German team (playing their semi-final tonight as I write this) is ominous.

Before watching the England-Germany game – for which I didn’t entertain much hope, although I thought we’d limit it to a 3-1 defeat – I was watching the BBC build-up, and there was an interview with Boris Becker, where he said (rather smugly, it must be admitted) “football is a team sport, and Germany has the better team”. It was annoying to admit it, but he was right. Doubtless there are all sorts of long-term reasons why England doesn’t do well at international tournaments but the sight of our players doing their best to impersonate cranially-challenged poultry was unnerving. I’m sure that Capello’s slavish adherence to 4-4-2 had something to do with it, but….

There was another bit of feedback from the victorious Germans after the match. Thomas Muller – who scored twice against us – said “”It is difficult to have so many ‘alpha males’ and have them row in the same direction. You don’t only need chiefs, you also need a few Indians. You need people who are willing to do the hard work. It may be a problem with England that players are simply not mentally prepared to go that extra mile for their team-mates.” It was annoying to admit it, but he was right.

Football is a team sport. It doesn’t matter how many ‘new Maradonas’ or ‘new Zidanes’ a team might have – if they don’t work together, if they don’t have a common purpose, if they are not prepared to make personal sacrifices in pursuit of a larger goal – then they will fail. The failures will be both individual and corporate. The team of brilliant individuals will always lose out to the team of lesser talents prepared to work together.

The great French philosopher Albert Camus once wrote “After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport and learned it in the RUA” – the RUA being his football team, for whom he kept goal. It is, in truth, not a complicated lesson to learn. If we look after each other, and work for the common good, then everyone benefits.

This doesn’t just apply to leisure pursuits like football. It applies to every sphere of our lives, and in our context of increasing economic misery, it will apply most of all to the fundamental matters of life – having enough to eat, having a roof over our head, having clothes for our children to wear. If we look after each other, and work for the common good, then everyone benefits.

When exploring the context of our contemporary crises – of economic collapse, resource exhaustion, wars and the rumours of wars – I am very struck by the way in which the best-informed commentators continually return to one basic truth. There are so many things that can be done to help prepare people for what is coming – getting out of debt, learning to grow our own food, investing in alternative energy – but the single most important thing is to build up a community. This is because a community working together can withstand a very great deal more than a loose collection of individuals all looking out for their own interests.

Which is one of the blessings that Mersea enjoys. Partly – but not just – because of the geographical accident of being an island, Mersea does have a community identity, and we need to do as much as we can to support and foster it. There are many ways in which that can be done – and I’ll return to what they are in later columns – but one way is to be involved with, and supportive of, the West Mersea Mayor and Council, and the work that they do. In an ideal world the local council would have much more authority within Mersea than they presently enjoy – and Colchester Borough, and Essex County, and, indeed, Whitehall and Westminster would all have much less – but it will take some time for rationality to break through the entrenched bureaucracy. In the meantime we need to work with what we’ve got and work as constructively and co-operatively as we can. If we don’t hang together, we will most assuredly hang separately.

Our common future will only be reached collaboratively. That is, our happiness is a team sport, and if we look after each other, and work for the common good, then everyone benefits.

Submitting to the material

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I came back from a trip to the physiotherapist this morning – I have torn part of my achilles tendon on my left ankle – and the physio astutely enquired whether I had recently injured my right ankle. That occurred on January 6 this year, when I rather stupidly took the bike out in the snow and duly came off it, spraining my right ankle. It turns out that I have been compensating for a remaining weakness in the right ankle by using the left ankle more – and have now damaged that one. As the physio kindly pointed out to me, ‘this happens as we get older…’

I’m also currently recovering from a chest infection. In my usual way I resisted going to the doctor for as long as possible, but I find that I simply can’t get away with it any more. If I don’t get my maladies sorted out in a timely fashion, they now get worse, not better. No longer can I just amp up the willpower, adrenaline and caffeine, and power on through whatever is getting in the way. The body simply isn’t as resilient as it was, and I need to take more time and care in looking after it. ‘This happens as we get older…’

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I was told recently that a phrase used in teaching art is ‘submitting to the material’. What this means is that in any medium certain things are possible, certain things are impossible. The materials that are being worked with dictate limits. What is possible for some blocks of marble are not possible for others; what is possible for an oil painting is not possible for a water-colour, and vice versa. For an artist to make any progress in their craft there is an essential humility that needs cultivating. It is no good having a wonderful vision for an artistic creation if the materials being employed are inadequate to the task. Actually, ‘inadequate’ is the wrong word – there is nothing wrong with the materials – ‘inappropriate’ is more precise. The inappropriateness lies in the judgement of the artist, in seeking to dictate to the material rather than cooperate with it. In a sense, what is needed in the artist is a spirit of service to the material, in order to enable the creation to emerge. Midwifery, not parenthood.

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I’ve been pondering a similar lesson with regard to my ministry on Mersea, where I feel that I have been colliding with limits. I recently led an awayday for one of the PCCs here to talk about two things – how do we actually ‘speak truth in love’, and, how to discern the right way forward for differerent congregations, especially how they are to relate to each other. The most significant conclusion that I came away with was that I needed to abandon my vision for the congregations. I had seen the new congregation as being a bridge to the old one, which meant that the new service couldn’t get too complicated, and also meant that I had been pushing the more traditional service a little closer in spirit to the new. (Actually, I abandoned the latter some time ago – and that abandonment led to other developments – but there was probably still some remaining tension in the congregation.) Thing is, after more than five years, the people simply didn’t want to fit in with the vision – they were quite happy where they were, thank you very much – and my pushing the vision was simply amplifying friction. Letting go of it seems to be universally approved of.

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I’ve been very struck by the nakedpastor’s posts on vision, especially this most recent one when he says “The greatest danger to the church is vision. Agenda. It is an idea for the church that certain people entertain that is the greatest danger to it. It is when different people have designs for the church, where they want it to be something other than what it is, that it destroys the fabric of the community. Even the most well-meaning people, believing that they want what’s best for the church, in actuality introduce what is worst for it.”

~~

I have found letting go of the vision quite liberating, even though I don’t understand what is going on. My theology hasn’t changed – I still see the Eucharist as “’the richest and fullest expression of Christian faith” – but I’m realising that my view is largely irrelevant. What I want – even, what is most true – isn’t the most important factor here. I’m very fond of what Eugene Peterson teaches – work out what God is doing and then get out of the way – I just hadn’t applied it in this area fully (or, perhaps, I came here knowing it and then forgot). There is something kenotic in this, an emptying out, and also something very incarnational – a valuing of the local and specific. I am becoming more aware of the need to put my own desires to one side, ease off the willpower and drive, and take more care and time in simply maintaining the body. I need to learn to submit to the material.

West Mersea church, c.1900

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Some colleagues were clearing out a room in the church and came across this picture of St Peter and St Paul’s. It is undated, but has to predate 1905 as the East Window was re-ordered, and a stained glass window put in, at that time. This is (roughly) what it looks like at the moment:

It just proves that things which seem to have ‘been there for ever’ haven’t at all. The c.1900 picture shows a fairly Anglo-Catholic sensibility, which I’m quite certain wouldn’t have been there a hundred years earlier, maybe not even fifty years earlier.