A few pointless thoughts about Hodgson’s squad

– I’m glad he’s not taking Ferdinand; and I’m sure Sir Alex is too.
– I wouldn’t have taken Terry either; it’s been a long time building but this Chelsea fan would actually be quite happy for the club to sell him off to the Middle East in the summer. I deeply hope that CFC will win on Saturday night, but if that happens, the sight of him lifting the cup…
– I would have made Lampard captain – experience and form, proven performer when it counts.
– Not sure about Gerrard being captain – look at stats for his performances for Liverpool, he seems to intimidate the others – but that might not be a factor for England. Depends entirely on what Hodgson’s plan is (see below).
– Downing? I’d rather have taken Joe Cole, who has had a good season playing on the left in France and has tournament experience (or Adam Johnson – presumably this isn’t a first choice pick so we’re looking at an impact player?)
– Forwards, hmm. I was minded not to take Rooney at all, but the reduction of the ban to 2 matches did change that calculation. Yes to Carroll, but Defoe? – the thing is, Hodgson clearly has a plan – and we don’t yet know what that is. For what it’s worth (not much) I’m glad Hodgson is the manager and most of the criticism of him is unmerited. Let’s see where we are after Brazil 2014; he’ll have my backing until then. Unless he sets us out in a 4-4-2.
– Given the squad, my choice for a starting XI in the first match (4-2-3-1): Hart; Cole, Cahill, Lescott, Johnson; Parker, Lampard; Young, Gerrard, Walcott; Carroll. That would be quite a decent side – but if we get to the quarter finals, I think it’ll count as a successful start for the manager.

Two stories

We all have voices in our heads. I think, though, that all the different voices resolve down to two – and they each have a story to tell.

The first story is ‘you are not good enough’ – you are a failure, an impostor, you do not belong here, go away, destroy yourself, cease to be a burden to the world.

This first story is the one that leads to depression and despair, to hatred and vengeance, to strife and division. The story teller is the enemy, the accuser, the voice of despite.

The second story is ‘you are my beloved, with you I am well pleased’ – I made you and I love you and behold it is good – come and enter into your inheritance as my child.

This second story leads to the fruits of the spirit – love, joy, peace, gentleness, self-control and all the rest. The story teller is the maker of heaven and earth.

When we hear our voices, we need to decide who it is that is speaking, and which story they are telling. Most of all, when we realise that it is the first voice, we need to rebuke it and say ‘Get behind me Satan, you do not have in mind the things of God but the things of men’. Actually, the best way to get rid of the first voice isn’t the formal and stern rebuke, it’s ridicule – the enemy really can’t stand being made fun of, because it is the one thing that brings home to him just how ridiculously powerless he is. It is by continuously refreshing our memory and consciousness of the second story – and the second story teller – that we become infected with laughter and joy, and the enemy is sent scurrying back beneath his rock. We need to have the attitude ‘was that your auntie?’

This is for someone particular in the parish, for other friends, for Dave Walker who did the wonderful cartoon at the top, and, of course, it’s for me too.

Reviews of ‘Let us be Human’

Hopefully this list will continue to get longer. I’ll update it as necessary.

At the Energy Bulletin review by Roy Smith“I would highly recommend this book to anybody seeking to explore the spiritual ramifications of the crises our industrial civilization faces. It is concise and well-written, and possesses the unique strength of being written by one of the few people I am aware of who has an equally solid grounding in Christianity and theology on the one hand and in the issues of resource depletion and the limits to growth on the other.”

Jeremy Williams at Make Wealth History“If you move in mainstream Christian circles at all, you’ll know that Norton is swimming against the current here. In my experience at least, the church is no more aware of the growth dilemma than the general culture is. That’s a shame, because churches should be natural hubs for imagining an alternative lifestyle together – that’s pretty much what they’re for. Churches don’t build community, they are community. There’s a vital opportunity there if we can learn to see it, and Let us be Human deserves a bigger audience.”

At Amazon.co.uk“In this brilliantly insighful book Sam takes us on a broad brush journey. He highlights the failings of our current culture and the failings of the Church to really engage with it… A definite ‘Must Read’ for anyone who wishes to be part of the emerging discussion surrounding what it means to be human and Christian in our time.”

A comparison between my book and Tarkovsky’s ‘Sculpting Time’ by Jonathan Evens at Between “both have been addressing the same issue; that only by becoming more distinctively Christian can we engage constructively with the crises of our times.”

Mad Priest is nice to me“THE BOOK on the Peak Oil crisis and what Christianity’s response to it should be. It’s a serious book but it is perfectly intelligible to non-experts like me. In fact, that is the point of the book. It is designed to get us all up to speed on this major issue of our times.”

It’s available here, and it’s very cheap on Kindle.

Population or congregation – where the ghost of establishment resides

I’ve been doing a bit of research on the Sheffield formula, and thinking about the implications of it (and I’m aware of coming late to the party so if people know of good discussions of this elsewhere, I’d be grateful for pointers in the comments). For those in a blissful state of non-initiation into the arcane mysteries, the Sheffield formula is a way of calculating how clergy should be deployed. It was developed by the eponymous Bishop in a report published in the mid-1970s and takes four factors into account: local population, area, church buildings and church membership. To quote Gordon Kuhrt, “The greatest emphasis was given to population and reflected the priority given to the idea of the Church ministering to the whole nation, not just to its members.”

I’m coming to see that decision as possibly the prime disaster of the post-war church, principally in terms of mission. A few bullet points on the dimensions of that disaster:

– Where population is given that strong weight, there is no direct link between staffing and growth (or diminishment) of the congregation.

– There isn’t even a direct link between population and workload, for the missing link between them is culture – a smaller population of more traditional culture will likely generate a larger workload for clergy than a larger population that is completely secular.

– It can cosset comfortable churches and set ceilings to growth, making it very difficult to reinforce success.

– It entrenches centralised management of resources rather than enabling local initiative.

– It confuses the mission of the church with maintenance of the status quo (that is, it equates the former with the latter) – and the status quo that was assumed in the mid-1970s is very far from being a healthy assumption to make about the church in the 2010s.

In my view the central diocese should step back from making such determinations, and hand over the responsibility for funding clergy to the parishes themselves, supplemented by a mission fund to support churches in more vulnerable areas. Failing that, we could at least shift to a system that excluded population from consideration, and tied the deployment of clergy directly to the size of congregations.

However, there is one aspect of population that I think would make a useful measure. There is, presumably, an average figure for how many from a local population are likely to become part of an Anglican church – let’s say that it’s 2.5% for ease – so for every 1,000 population we might expect a congregation of 25 people. We might then set up a system whereby any church which has a congregation of between 2% and 3% of the local population is considered ‘average’; those with a congregation of less than 2% are less than average, those with more than 3% are more than average. This would give a rough and ready guide to how churches are doing (and obviously, other factors would need to be taken into account, along the same lines of the ‘culture’ mentioned earlier. Mission posts would not be expected to be ‘average’!)

At the moment, a town of 20,000 people with a single church might have one that seemed to be thriving, with a church membership of 300 and all sorts of activities and services, whereas a small village with a population of less than 500 might seem to be failing, with a church membership of 16 – yet the latter would be ‘above average’ and the former quite significantly below. A formula for deploying clergy that places emphasis upon population will never challenge the former to grow, and will continue to reduce the resources available to the latter despite their progress in advancing the cause of the Kingdom.

When will I ever learn?

Whatever it takes to fulfil his mission
That is the way we must go
But you’ve got to do it in your own way
Tear down the old, bring up the new

And up on the hillside it’s quiet
Where the shepherd is tending his sheep
And over the mountains and valleys
The countryside is so green
Standing on the highest hill with a sense of wonder
You can see everything is made in God
Head back down the roadside and give thanks for it all

When will I ever learn to live in God?
When will I ever learn?
He gives me everything I need and more.
When will I ever learn?

What does the Bible say about…?

After my article about gay marriage a number of people asked me to explain my understanding of certain biblical texts that applied to that topic. This I am happy to do, but I felt it would also be helpful if before doing so I took a step back and explained how to understand ‘what the Bible says about’ anything, as it is often the case that a disagreement about what the Bible says about a particular topic actually stems from a difference in how to understand the Bible as such.

The first thing that I would point out is that the question seems to assume that there is one single answer to the enquiry ‘what does the Bible say about…?’ This is a mistake, and it is a mistake with very particular Modern origins, which I’ll explain below. One of the most important things to understand about the Bible is that it is a library of Holy Scripture – that is, there are many different voices within the Bible (even within particular books of the Bible) – and this is of God. That is, it is in recognising both what different books have in common, and where they disagree, that an individual Christian is enabled to come to a mature understanding of the text.

Let me give an example, which will hopefully not be too controversial. In the Old Testament there is a long-running tension between the priests and the prophets. The priests are those responsible for the correct administration of the cult (ie the sacrifices in the Temple) which were ordained by God in great detail in books like Exodus and Leviticus. The prophets are those who speak the word of God against the priests and people, and who criticise the administration of the cult in great depth. This is the tradition that has striking texts like this from Amos chapter 5: “I can’t stand your religious meetings. I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions. I want nothing to do with your religion projects, your pretentious slogans and goals. I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes, your public relations and image making. I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music. When was the last time you sang to me? Do you know what I want? I want justice—oceans of it. I want fairness—rivers of it. That’s what I want. That’s all I want.”

The art of understanding the Bible properly is to realise that in the interplay between different points of view lies the truth. Imagine that you come across a group of people having an intense conversation about a subject you know very little about – let’s say it’s about football tactics and whether the new England manager should use a 4-4-2 or a 4-2-3-1 in the forthcoming European championships (I favour the latter – but you don’t need to understand why in order to get my point!). As you listen to the different voices you start to get a sense of what the different viewpoints are and then, as time goes on and you learn more and more, you start to develop your own perspective. However, unless through this conversation you also realise that there is a game called ‘football’, and that the purpose of the game is to win football matches (either through playing or coaching) then the point of the discussion is being missed. Someone might become a wonderful expert in the language of tactics, and be able to hold forth with great knowledge about the importance of the ‘false nine’ to modern football (eg Lionel Messi of Barcelona) – but this is just abstract unless there is a link to an actual game being played.

In other words, the Bible points beyond itself. The point of the Bible is not that we become experts about what the Bible says, but rather that we recognise what it is that is being talked about – and then get on with pursuing that (which is, for a Christian, all about getting to know Jesus and becoming more like Him). Buddhists would call this distinguishing between the pointing finger and the moon which is being pointed to, but the Christian tradition has its own way of describing the difference. In one of his many angry confrontations with the Pharisees, Jesus says “You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!” – in other words, the Pharisees, despite their very great knowledge of Scripture, didn’t realise what the ultimate point was. They were like football fans whose only knowledge of the game came from reading reports in the newspapers, and who had never actually seen a match played, let alone kicked a football for themselves.

This is why the Bible can’t be assumed to have one single unequivocal thing to say about a topic. Sometimes God actually wants us to use our own judgement about a question – and a good example of that comes with the Council of Jerusalem, described in the Acts of the Apostles, which shows the early church deciding to dispense with some clear Scriptural commands about circumcision, because ‘it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to them’. Do we take this as simply an amending of an existing legal process – which can then not be amended again – or do we take this as a worked example of the authority that Jesus has given to the church, and which therefore allows the church to amend what is acceptable over time? The answer given to that question will, of course, largely shape the answers to many other questions that arise in our common life.

I said earlier on that the idea that the Bible does have a single and unequivocal meaning is a particular Modern idea. Whilst it has some earlier roots, it really came to a head with the influence of something called ‘Scottish Common Sense Philosophy’, which was a philosophical school that initially flourished in the eighteenth century, and which had a major impact especially in the United States. This philosophical perspective taught that, with respect to the Bible, there was a clear and simple meaning associated with a particular passage that was open to any reader. There was therefore no need for a community to have any specified authority to determine the sense of any particular passage, all that was needed was the reader and their own Bible.

Now there are lots of things wrong with this perspective philosophically, which I won’t go into, but there are also problems with it from a Christian perspective. The major problem is that it privileges a particular technology, in that it is only possible within a society that has invented printing. For the first 1500 years or so of Christian thinking, the Bible was something that was primarily read and interpreted by a community, not by individuals (indeed, the ‘individual’ is itself a post-Biblical concept!). The Bible was read out loud when the community gathered together (out loud because ‘faith comes by hearing’) and it was the community as a whole which then interpreted the meaning of what has been read. Furthermore, it is the community which decides what books (ie what Holy Scriptures) are included within the Bible in the first place. In other words, the long history of understanding the Bible in Christian practice has been primarily communal. The idea that it can be done on an individualistic basis is simply part and parcel of post-Enlightenment thought in Western society (which is why Fundamentalism – which is what Scottish Common Sense philosophy leads to – is also, rather ironically, entirely a product of the Enlightenment).

For myself, as an Anglican, I accept the Bible as having supreme authority, but the Anglican view is that such authority is necessarily mediated by a worshipping community (what we call tradition and reason). Whilst any individual thinker can have their own views and beliefs about what the Bible says, it takes the endorsement of the worshipping community to say whether those views and beliefs are correct or not. In what I write in further articles, I will be writing very consciously from an Anglican perspective – and next time, I’ll talk about the texts which reference homosexuality in Scripture.

When will I ever learn?

Whatever it takes to fulfil his mission
That is the way we must go
But you’ve got to do it in your own way
Tear down the old, bring up the new

And up on the hillside it’s quiet
Where the shepherd is tending his sheep
And over the mountains and valleys
The countryside is so green
Standing on the highest hill with a sense of wonder
You can see everything is made in God
Head back down the roadside and give thanks for it all

When will I ever learn to live in God?
When will I ever learn?
He gives me everything I need and more.
When will I ever learn?

Brief thought about Southwark Ministry Trust

I have no sympathy with Gafcon and schism at all – but I think that what is being proposed on the ground in Southwark is actually the way of the future. That is, I think the present system of parish share is impossible to make work well, and an essential precondition for the prospering of the Church of England is the abolition of parish share. (I’ve said a bit more here)

An alternative system could be very simple: parishes pay for their own ministers; they tithe to the centre; missionary appointments are then paid either from the tithe or from direct giving. Clear, simple, transparent, biblical – what’s not to like?