Hating Haiti

While the rest of the world is waking up to the horrors of the earthquake in Haiti and sending resources to help those unfortunate people, televangelist Pat Robertson is expressing the view that it’s really all their own fault because their ancestors made a ‘pact with the devil’.  It really is amazing what contortions some people will go to so as to absolve themselves from any feeling of sympathy or responsibility to the suffering millions in today’s world.  New agers have often been castigated for explaining such things as a consequence of people ‘choosing their own karma’, and including tragedy in that as a way of working through bad influences from previous lives.  Now a so-called ‘Christian’ evangelist appears to be saying more or less the same thing – though he’s also on record as saying that the New Age is also a demonic conspiracy!  Apart from that, though, it makes you wonder how Christians like Robertson who, in another time and place, would lay so much emphasis on everybody being personally responsible for their own wrongdoings, can at the same time hold the view that today’s people are also to blame for something that allegedly happened 300 years ago.  And his interpretation of that history is by no means widely accepted anyway.  It’s all a far cry from Jesus, who when he encountered suffering people showed compassion for them and resolutely refused to even countenance silly questions about whether they or their ancestors might be responsible for their own suffering.  But then, Robertson is also a premillennial dispensationalist, so for him the teaching of Jesus will presumably be an irrelevance only suited to some hypothetical future millennial kingdom.

Tattoos and spirituality

David Beckham has a new tattoo.  To add to his already extensive collection, he now has one based on a painting by Matthew R Brooks, entitled ‘The Man Of Sorrows’ and depicting Jesus in a reflective pose.  It’s not his first Christian-inspired tattoo (he already has a cross and a guardian angel), though the religious significance is evidently not important to him.  His spokesperson is quoted as saying that he ‘has an appreciation of religious art and iconography and the new tattoo reflects that’, while adding that ‘unlike a lot of his other designs, there is no specific meaning behind it’.  Further down the same article, though, the same friend assures us that ‘Each tattoo he opts for is very carefully considered’, before adding that ‘It’s more than a hobby for him – it’s almost spiritual’.

So there you have it, direct from one of today’s style icons: Jesus has no particular [religious] meaning but just may have something to do with being spiritual.  Some Christians have been trying to convince us recently that the culture is becoming more secular than spiritual (and by implication that we are making this stuff up).  Actually, we couldn’t have said it more eloquently ourselves, and where celebrities lead others invariably follow.

Oh Mrs Robinson

Until the last few days, virtually nobody in the UK – still less the rest of the world – had ever heard of Iris Robinson, wife of the first minister of the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland.  Today, the news is full of nothing else, and the reason is not hard to find.  In most circumstances, an older woman having an affair with a youth of nineteen would probably hardly merit a mention – just another example of how our relational preferences have changed.  A politician would perhaps make the headlines for a day (and she is a member of the Westminster parliament as well as of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and apparently of a local council as well), but the fuss would soon die down.  Except that in this case, it’s also overlaid with religion – and that makes it ever so interesting not only to the media but to the wider public.  Not only is Iris Robinson an ardent Protestant, and her lover a Roman Catholic (a surprising enough liaison in itself), but this is also the woman who, just a few weeks before she started the aforementioned affair, made a public denunciation of homosexual people and their lifestyle – something for which she was named ‘UK bigot of the year’ in 2008.

You can’t help feeling some sympathy for Mrs Robinson, whose strident religious beliefs and the conflict they created apparently led her to contemplate suicide when her double standards first came to light.  As one of those Christians who like to distinguish themselves from the rest of us by saying they are ‘Bible-believing’, she and her family will be well familiar with Jesus’ advice to the Pharisees not to throw stones at others if they themselves were less than perfect (John 8:7) – a truth which always comes back to haunt those who ignore it, as some commentators are now pointing out.  ’Bible-believing’ Christians are usually less than enamoured of movies like ‘The Graduate, but the message of its iconic song might just be what this family need to hear right now: ‘here’s to you Mrs  Robinson – Jesus loves you more than you will know’.

Snowlove

Being stuck in some of the heaviest snow to hit the UK for more than thirty years is having some unusual effects on the great British public, as evidence by this headline in one of today’s newspapers: ‘Snowed-in spouses turning to adultery’.  No, we’re not actually doing it in the freezing cold, just signing up in unprecedented numbers to a website that connects people looking for others with whom to have an extra-marital relationship.  Apparently we’re so bored by being trapped in our own homes that this is the next obvious thing to do while (according to the reports) not being watched by either work colleagues or that spouse we can’t stand.  Presumably they will be in the next room also signing up!

Coming on the same day as we saw this other report, telling us that many couples who separate  are still living together in the same home, it provides an interesting insight into the state of British relationships.  Whatever else you might say, the two together paint a pretty depressing picture of a nation with more than its share of miserable people.  And others who know how to make a living out of the misery.  Why are so many of us lost when life comes to a standstill and we are stranded at home with just our own company?  You would think a culture that makes so much emphasis on the need for us to be individuals would have equipped us rather better to live with ourselves.  Or maybe we really do need community in order to be whole people, .  It all sounds horribly close to Douglas Coupland’s quip about people without lives getting together with other people without lives, in the effort to make a life.

Winter work

Rural Aberdeenshire has had a serious amount of snow for the past couple of weeks, and as we look out of the window in our rural home there is a pretty large amount of it – which, amazingly, hasn’t kept us in for even a single day yet.  But it certainly makes life go slower, planning ahead to unfreeze the car rather than just jumping into it, and taking longer to do just about everything.  You might think this would create plenty of time for reflection, but life goes on with the start yesterday of the winter quarter at Fuller Seminary – which of course is thousands of miles away in California!  But through the miracles of technology, we can continue to work there while on the other side of the world.  This quarter it’s the male mouse teaching a course on Theology and Culture, with 23 eager students signed up and already engaged with it, then next quarter the female mouse teaches one on ‘Theological and pastoral perspectives on the family’.  Online courses really do work fantastically well, if they’re properly designed with a fully interactive website.  Unfortunately, some colleges we know in the UK haven’t quite got that message yet and just post reading material onto a website, as if reading stuff on a screen makes it an online course.  

So the weather outside says, ’slow down’, while the students keep things moving on fast.  Just one of the paradoxes of contemporary culture!  Another one came in a posting from one of the students, based in Arkansas, who said that his community find it really hard to believe that Christendom is over, because reinventing and reviving the church there is so easy and is happening all the time.  That’s probably also true, reminding us that it depends where you’re looking from as to what you will see.  But that observation will be simple compared with the likely comments that will come up in the course on family.  Last time around that enrolled students from China, Korea, Rwanda, and Mexico as well as several US states – so even getting them to agree on what they thought a family might be was an enlightening experience!  One of the things we enjoy most about teaching these courses is that we always learn something new ourselves.  Long may it continue.

End of year accounting

As we end the year, the big credit crunch of 2009 has brought megachurch leader Rick Warren into the news again.  He’s had a very up-and-down year, starting with the inauguration of a new US president and ending with this impassioned appeal for $900,000 before the clock strikes midnight today.  The more you have to start with, the more you have to lose, but most of the world’s Christians won’t be shedding too many tears, and the idea that (as the article in today’s Orange County Register suggests) the faithful of Saddleback will come up with that kind of cash by the deadline maybe just suggests that they’re not as hard up as they seem.  Or is it all a publicity stunt to get themselves noticed?

More interesting to the church mice is this sign we saw recently in Hong Kong:

Of course, that metropolis is a bit of a consumerist paradise itself – but don’t you just love this as a statement about life, love, community, gospel,  God. This one picture expresses our own prayerful aspirations for 2010  better than any number of words (or dollars, euros, pounds …).  May all our readers experience the same sense of simple yet deep connections in the coming year.

A Conference worth Considering

We don’t normally draw attention here to events in which we are participating, but this one seems to have escaped the radar of a lot of people in the UK who would find it useful.  Sponsored by the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and taking place at the end of January, the theme is ‘Church and Mission in a Multireligious Third Millennium’.  As well as church mice it includes a line up of missiological stars including Stanley Hauerwas, Brian Stanley, Darrell Guder, Bryan Stone, Heidi Campbell, Pauline Cheong, and Andrew Walls – to name just a few.  Further details are here.

Christmas in Hong Kong

Spending a few days in Hong Kong, we could not have failed to notice all the signs wishing us ‘A Happy Christmas’, and the Christmas carols being played in hotels, streets, and tourist attractions – not to mention some serious Christmas trees.  It all makes a change from the endless wrangles back home about whether we should celebrate Christmas (this being too Christian for the UK), or some other sort of ‘winter festival’ (this being secular and therefore assumed to be religiously neutral).  Paradoxically, by comparison with Britain, HK is actually multicultural rather than just claiming to be – and seems to have no difficulty at all recognizing a Christian festival with Christian symbols and the recounting of traditional stories.  It generated some conversation between us as to whether it is easier to be Christian in a post-Christendom culture or in a globalized culture such as Hong Kong, and we concluded that on the basis of what we have seen the genuinely globalized is probably a more open and honest space in which to have faith conversations.  We certainly haven’t needed to apologize about being Christians – and yes, casual people in streets and shops have asked us that question.  Maybe instead of lecturing the rest of the world about freedom, our politicians should listen a bit more and see what they can learn about tolerance and all those other virtues they talk a lot about but seem to find hard to put into practice.

Notes from the bottom of the world

Great excitement in Adelaide all this week, as we’ve been teaching at Tabor College.  Lots of engagement with themes that, to be honest, we’ve become so familiar with that we’re surprised how much excitement we’ve stirred up.  New forms of church, Fresh Expressions, Mission Shaped Ministry – all stuff that we take for granted in the UK, but which is news (and very good news, it seems) to Christians in this city.  Meetings with the archbishop as well as students (all of whom are also church leaders – and from a wide variety of traditions and types of church).  Some of them have found it a bit challenging hearing from a female church mouse, but that’s not especially new in the grand scheme of things.  Overall, the experience has made us quite proud of all that has been accomplished in UK churches in recent years, and also makes a trip to the other side of the world worthwhile as we realize we have been bringing totally new thinking into this situation.  Whoever would have imagined that tired mainline churches in the UK would have so much to share with others worldwide.  Something to do with the missio Dei, probably.

And this koala came down from the tree to greet us.  Reminded us of a certain story in the gospels!

Emerging Elders

Walking round the Australian National Gallery in Canberra, we came across this exhibition:

People are often telling us we need to ‘grow up’ and ‘act our [supposedly very old] age’, yet in terms of how we see the world, its potential and possibilities, we often feel we’re still teenagers.  How can people who are not in their 20s or 30s possibly qualify as ’emerging’?  Well, this theme may be the answer.  The notion of being ’emerging elders’ appealed to us as soon as we saw it.   And of course we are not alone, by a long way.  Emergence doesn’t automatically correlate with age.  Meeting with Robert Banks in Sydney the other day, he commented that for some of the people he meets, it looks like ‘25 is the new 70′ in terms of young people’s outlooks (specifically, some Christian young people), which for him (now at 70) looks like they’re going backwards.  We recall Lesslie Newbigin saying something along the same lines twenty years ago, which shows how old we really are – and gives us something to live up to as well.  Growing old and staying young is a great adventure.