Divine Beauty

We wouldn’t deny that we seem to have a nose for sniffing out the unusual, but even the church mice didn’t expect to find this website with beauty tips for female clergy.  One of the more reasonably quotable bits of the blurb declares that ”if clergypeople believe that religious life is vital, relevant and beautiful, they should look the part” – you’ll have to look yourself to find the full story from PeaceBang, who describes herself as “stage mother to the clergy”.  Aimed especially at females (though we did notice a reference to shaving creams, so – unless we’re missing something else! – the male variety aren’t altogether excluded), this website offers advice on everything from the appropriate clergy lipstick to robes that can be worn in bed as well as in church.  Can they be serious?  Well, apparently yes.  Now the church mice wouldn’t wish to appear in public in a dishevelled and dirty state, and we would also recognize that the medium is indeed the message, in ministry as in everything else, and that God deserves our best …. etc etc.  But ….

It’s easy to question all this from a feminist perspective, and note that here is yet one more expectation that female clergy now have to live up to – not just being spiritual superstars, but looking like fashionistas as well.  It brings to mind all those male ministers we’ve encountered, whose robes not only hide a multitude of fashion crimes but also bear testimony to years of untreated BO.  One law for the … well, you can write the rest of that sentence yourself!  More importantly, perhaps, whatever happened to all those scriptural references to inner beauty and the importance of integrity, truthfulness, honesty, and goodness?  And do you think Jesus would be regarded as suitable material for the cover of one of today’s fashion mags?

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.

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.

From the other side of the world

While this blog has been quiet for a bit, we’ve travelled to Australia and taught a week long intensive course in Sydney – hoping that we might find an odd moment to blog here, but it’s all been so busy this is the first chance, now the course has ended.  A good week with Australian church leaders, mostly young (20- and 30-somethings) and mostly seriously engaged with the missional questions of what church might look like for the 21st century.  And the minority who weren’t quite ready to engage with all this at least kept their opinions to themselves and didn’t disrupt things for everybody else – which is probably about as good as it gets.

The questions here have a familiar ring about them.  When is a spiritual engagement ‘real church’ being one of the most prominent.  How do you tell the difference between something that’s an outreach activity designed to get people into the churches we now have, and a missional community that is itself ‘real church’?  Issues of power and control surfaced perhaps more than they might in some UK contexts, and it’s probably fair to say that some people (maybe a majority) found it hard to believe some of the creative things happening in UK mainline churches.  Just as well we have the Fresh Expressions DVDs to show them, and all the website resources connected with that, otherwise some would have thought we were making it all up.  So we have ended the week with a feeling of gratitude for all the networks we are a part of in the UK, and those of you who are reading this in that context need to know that what we are all engaged with is out in front when compared with other places around the world.  Of course one reason for that is the reality that we know our traditional churches are in bad shape.  But we’ve also learned how to read the culture in such a way as to recognize signs of God at work.  In one discussion this week, somebody commented that our emphasis on connecting with those people we have called ‘spiritual searchers’ wouldn’t work in Sydney, because there are none here.  The reality is that Sydney is host to the single largest Mind Body Spirit festival in the entire world!  How easy it is to be so insulated in our own spaces that we don’t see the bigger picture.  Yet the importance of building bridges is right there in the city centre:

And we took this ourselves.  Clearly, having something iconic helps develop your photographic skills.

Next stop is Canberra, and meetings with the Anglican diocese to help them work out how they might introduce Fresh Expressions and the Mission Shaped Ministry course there.

Intimate prayers

A regular reader of this blog sent us this link to a prayer specially written to be said before having sex.  Since getting it, we haven’t tried it (the prayer, that is), but it made for an interesting conversation piece because on the one hand all our instincts tell us that prayer and a sense of the divine presence should infuse the whole of life.  But praying like this before getting down to the business?  We’re tempted to ask, ‘is nothing sacred?’ – but that would be altogether the wrong question!

Ecumenical encouragements

This blog has been quiet for a while – a combination of some complicated family situations, intense writing to meet deadlines, summer weather and the garden needing attention, and a whole lot of preparation needing to be done for engagements in the next month or two.

One of the more encouraging events we’ve been part of recently was with a Roman Catholic group who are exploring creative forms of mission.   It reminded us (as if we needed it) of the many ways in which churches of all sorts, and in all parts of the world, are wrestling with the same things as we all try to work out what it means to be spiritual and Christian in a fast-changing culture.  We shared what we thought we know, even led worship for them, but of course there’s always an elephant in the room when Catholics and Protestants meet.  Known as the mass, eucharist, communion, whatever.  It’s not the first time we’ve been to a RC event and been unable to participate in the mass, of course, so we knew what to expect.  But there’s something very odd when you’re invited to be the main speakers at an event and still banished from the sacraments.  A bit like taking the food to a party, even setting the tables out – and then being sent to the naughty corner because some long deceased ancestor had a fight about something nobody really remembers.  Not that this would prevent us going to similar events in the future – but somebody somewhere needs to realize that this is itself a missional issue.  Paradoxically, the other place where we could regularly expect to be similarly excluded would be in Plymouth Brethren type churches, which also think (for roughly similar reasons) that they are the only ‘real’ Christians on the planet.  Two traditions united by an odd mixture of self-confidence and fear.