Poverty and Wealth

It was only a matter of time before we commented on the ‘credit crunch’ and general financial meltdown that seems to be afflicting       countries all around the world.  And appropriate that we should do so in the week when the 44th president of the USA was inaugurated.  It must be a long time since the hopes of so many were resting on one man – and that seems to be just the rest of the world who are not Americans!

 

The events of the inauguration sent out some challenging messages, quite apart from any words that were spoken.  There was an interesting choice of church leaders who were invited to pray, with three characters who might be regarded as controversial, but for different reasons.  On account of his sexual orientation, Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson is no stranger to negative publicity , some of it stirred up by the likes of Rick Warren who, in spite of his nod in the direction of environmental concerns, is still very firmly positioned on the religious right.  Then there was Joseph Lowery, a United Methodist with a fiery past as a leading light in the civil rights movement.  No doubt others did as we did and put these prayers and their pray-ers in order of preference – which, if we told you what it was, would tell you more about us than them.  Some commentators have been scandalized by one or other of them, but many more people are seeing this as a no-nonsense masterstroke by the new president – telling them all that the partisan bickering of the past is now firmly in the past, and these different strands of belief need to learn to work together and respect one another.

If they manage to live up to that expectation, it can only be good news.  The questions that people around the world are now pondering in their financial and family lives are not going to be addressed by in-house arguments among Christians (or the followers of other faiths, for that matter).  President Obama argued that the questions we face today need entirely new thinking, because not only is the old thinking incapable of resolving them, but in most ways it is what created them in the first place.  When all the dust has settled, these are essentially spiritual questions.  Those faced with unemployment, or diminished pensions, or just uncertainty, are trying to figure out what it means to live a life that is at least worthy, if not wealthy.  And we are all wondering who and what we can now trust in, and why?  Not to mention how we can personally respond to the laying waste of social and individual life, to take us forward into a better place.  The spiritual traditions that engage honestly and openly with the big questions of our age are the only ones that will be part of the new future that so many of us now seem to be searching for.  It’s enough to send you back to the stories of Jesus, another one who called for a radical rethink of how we live and who we are becoming.  History repeating itself?

How long is a week?

A former British Prime Minister once observed that a week is a long time in politics … well, this week feels like it’s been longer than we might have hoped, which is why this blog has been silent for a whole seven days.  We always knew it was going to be busy: Olive teaching in Durham, and then John teaching in London as well as keeping an eye on his online course, which has people from all parts of the US and even one person from the south of England.

There have been good things about it.  The Fuller online course has just taken off like nothing we’ve seen before in that environment, with all the students engaging with real energy and a lot of mutual challenge going on about culture and theology.  Which is really encouraging, though the downside is that the more they write the more there is to keep track of!  And with 25 of them that’s a lot of words.  Our other two teaching assignments have also been encouraging.  But the trains ……….. you don’t want to know about any of that.  It all seems so simple in advance: it’s less damaging to the environment, as well as being theoretically less stressful and tiring, to travel by train.  Except, that is, when it’s not.  Olive’s train to Durham got stuck and she was late in arriving (another train had allegedly broken down – which, you might have thought, has happened since the invention of railways, so somebody might just have worked out a way to deal with it: they’ve had almost a century to think about it).  Then John got stuck in London unable to catch a suburban train when the power supply was turned off because somebody had walked onto the line and killed himself.  More understandable, you might think, till Olive recalled an identical episode when she was in a London train a couple of years ago.  It’s one thing to do nothing about trains breaking down and blocking the lines, but wouldn’t you think somebody would be doing something a bit more proactive to save people from themselves by making it really hard to (as in this case) just walk off the end of a station platform and onto the electrified track.

Meanwhile, we both encountered a couple of old faith arguments: in Olive’s case, whether a story can be meaningful if it is not ‘really’ true, and in John’s case a discussion about whether Jesus really should be the lens through which we read the Bible, or whether Paul (or some other) is a better guide to belief.  The two are connected, of course, because Jesus spent much of his time telling fictional stories.  But at least our respective conversations were about the Bible.  John’s title for his seminar (with DMin students) was ‘The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Practical Theology’, which when he agreed to do it seemed like a simple task.  Until he started digging into it, and the question soon came to be ‘Use of the Bible in PT?  Who are you kidding?’  The word doesn’t even feature in the indexes of most ‘practical theology’ books, and it is never used in any significant fashion.  Still, if you don’t use it, at least you can’t abuse it.  Or can you?

Ancient wisdom for today’s living

It’s a while now since we first came across Jay Jeffries, an Australian who has a passion for connecting with those millions of spiritual searchers who never come across the teachings of Jesus simply because Christians are rarely in the sort of spaces they inhabit.  She was thinking especially of the sort of people who might go to Mind, Body, Spirit fairs simply because they look like the only places where you can easily access spiritual wisdom for living your daily life. 

We heard from Jay because she was wanting to create a Christian resource that would connect with such people, and it was something that resonated right off with us, not least because Olive’s book Spirituality to Go is aimed at exactly the same readership.  So we each agreed to contribute to her enterprise, and it’s now all completed.  Some of our friends are also contributors (notably Barry Taylor and Steve Hollinghurst), and it’s looking great.  The title is Awaken the Spirit: the sacred texts of Jesus.   For more information, see Jay’s website here.  Take time to explore: among other things, there’s some stunning artwork on the website.

Computers

The first full working day after the holidays – so why did we have to start by wrestling with one of our computers?  We’re not looking for an answer to that, so don’t send one.  It started with something simple (anti-virus program subscription renewal), and one thing led to another to take up the biggest part of two hours.  Still, we survived, and we’re still talking to each other at the end of it!

Today is actually a big computer-based day for us, as it’s the first day of Fuller Seminary’s winter quarter classes and therefore the first day of a new online course that John is teaching on Theology and Culture.  It’s been taught in class in Pasadena quite a few times now, and the last time around was filmed so that the online students can have the benefit of all the lectures and powerpoints that were used in the classroom.  The Fuller online technical folks have done a great job in making all this user friendly, and the course website is looking great.  There are 25 eager students who will introduce themselves to each other in the next 24 hours or so, and then begin their exploration of contemporary culture through a theological lens.

Online teaching has turned out to be one of life’s big surprises for us.  It must be three or four years since Fuller first asked us to do it, and it would be fair to say that we were a bit cynical, wondering how a subject like practical theology, that is intrinsically relational, could possibly work online.  The very first course we offered was one that we teach together (Theological and Pastoral Perspectives on the contemporary family), which regularly raises big issues for students in relation to their own personal history and family experience.  So we were ready for a few pastorally complicated situations online, and probably thought they would be much harder to handle than face-to-face.  What we discovered was that they are just handled differently.  Certainly, the level of interaction and personal openness in the online context is no less than it would be in a classroom.  In fact, one of the big advantages is that in an online course every student has a voice, and their voice is heard – which doesn’t often happen in a classroom, where the noisiest, most confident (and often most self-opinionated) voices crowd out the others.  Watch this space to see if these expectations are fulfilled over the next few weeks for this new course.

For more information about Fuller’s online courses, go here.

McDonald on McDonald’s

This newspaper article is one of the first we read in 2009: the UK marketing director of McDonald’s (who is actually called McDonald!) says that if fast food wasn’t full of salt and fat nobody would buy it.  Those who’ve followed our lives and thinking in the last few years will not be surprised to know that it generated some interesting conversations around the holiday table.  And not about restaurants, but (what else?) about McDonaldization and the church.

Only time will tell if Jill McDonald is right in claiming that if they changed the recipe too much they would never attract people to her restaurants.  But there can be little doubt that churches certainly don’t have the luxury of doing nothing in order to ensure their future flourishing.  When you think about it, sticking to the old recipes is actually the exact opposite of the teaching of Jesus, which is all about change and new life, looking to the future rather than to the past.  He was so attractive to people precisely because he offered them a vision of who they could become, and never left anyone feeling they had to be trapped by their past, however negative it might have been. 

Mind you, we would not want to rubbish the past, because we recognize that our forebears in faith created the sort of churches that were able to faithfully embody the good news within their own cultural context.  But slavishly sticking to their recipe is not only strategically unhelpful in today’s rapidly changing world, but can actually be seen as a denial of the very things they stood for.  Both of us love tradition, not as ancient history but as living reality.  Seeing the past through the challenges of the present not only opens up fresh angles on ancient wisdom, but can equip us to be agents in creating a new future.   Aiming to explore that for ourselves, and empowering others in their own quest for personal wholeness, seems like quite a reasonable aspiration for a new year.