#OccupyWestminster and Common Worship

A few weeks ago I was in a room in Westminster Abbey from which a previous Archbishop of Canterbury was arrested and taken to be executed. I was there, in the company of some rather eminent theologians, to listen to American theologian William Cavanaugh give a robust defence of religion against its secularist critics, particularly addressing the charge of religious violence, by highlighting the inherent violence of the nation-state. The irony of the context was noted at the time, but none of us could imagine how much that irony could have been intensified in a matter of weeks.

For Cavanaugh, alongside other such leading lights in the theological world as Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank and Sam Wells (now Vicar of St Martin's-in-the-Fields in London, and also in the room at the Abbey that day), the worship of the Church shapes its participants in a kind of politics that is quite different to the dominant politics of the world that we live in, the politics of neoliberal capitalism, of democratically-sanctioned state violence and the all-consuming power of global corporations. More than that, the Church's worship doesn't just shape worshippers for political engagement in the world - the Church enacts a different, resistant, even revolutionary kind of politics in its worship. For Cavanaugh, "the Eucharist" is "an alternative imagining of space and time which builds up a body of resistance to violence, the body of Christ. This is a body that is wounded, broken by the powers and principalities [of the world] and poured out in blood offering upon this stricken earth. But this is also a body crossed by the resurrection, a sign of the startling irruption of the Kingdom into historical time and the disruptive presence of Christ the King to the politics of the world." (William T Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imgination, p.7)

And then I saw photos yesterday of Westminster Abbey, surrounded by a ring of police, 'protected' by the power of the State against a crowd of disabled people, protesting against the government's removal of the Independent Living Fund. Church staff had, it seems, called in the police when the protesters started setting up tents and gazebos on the lawn outside the Abbey.

The scenes were reminiscent of those outside St Paul's Cathedral a couple of years ago, when the Occupy LSX encampment was evicted by the police, at the request of the Cathedral authorities. At that time I'd felt not only embarrassed by the Church's stance, but deeply sad at an opportunity so spectacularly missed, for the Church of England, for once, to place itself on the right side of history, receiving the gift that the occupiers were offering them; offering hospitality, sanctuary, even, in the midst of London's privatised 'public squares'; but more than that too, humbly 'venturing out' into the tented city, not as host but as participants among others, engaging together in the globalizing wave of questioning and re-imagining of which the Occupy movement had been an iconic part.

This time, at Westminster Abbey, was worse - not just because the Church showed it had learnt nothing from the Occupy/St Paul's encounter, but because those who were setting up tents on the Abbey lawn could not so easily be dismissed as 'middle-class hippies' (however inaccurate that might have been of Occupy LSX), but were, very visibly, physically vulnerable disabled people, many in wheelchairs, whose access the police were able to restrict, even before the ubiquitous 'kettling' manoeuvre, simply by removing various makeshift ramps from the site in question. That was some of why I tweeted last night: "Yet again CofE’s public face is that of the oppressive, defensive neoliberal state and not the vulnerable."

The particular irony, of course, is that Westminster Abbey, like St Paul's Cathedral, is a place where Christian worship has taken place for hundreds of years, where the Eucharist - which Cavanaugh holds up as the 'resistant politics' of the Church - has been celebrated daily, tens of thousands of times over its history. Surely - at least if the logic of Cavanaugh et al is correct - these should be the places par excellence which have formed Christians in the habits of resisting the violence of the State, and of a Christlike solidarity with the vulnerable and excluded? Surely these should be the places where there is not even an 'ethical dilemma' in situations like this, where the response is instinctive, shaped by years of repeating the 'political' liturgies of the anti-Empire Church?

But of course, there are caveats from the theologians of 'liturgical politics': "All of this sounds wonderful," Cavanaugh admits, contrasting the liturgies of the Church with the blasphemous 'liturgies' of the State, "but we must confess that it is the shrivelling of this vision within the church that has allowed the flourishing of ersatz realities... [State] liturgies have succeeded in imagining communities because Christian liturgies have failed to do so in a fully public way. As the church expanded after Constantine, Christian worship was not centered on the parish but on the whole city... The church sought to replace the pagan cult of the city with the Christian liturgy. Therefore, Christian worship on the Lord's Day and other feasts generally took the form of a series of services in churches and public spaces, linked by public processions, totaling six to eight hours. Here was the church taking itself seriously as nothing less than 'the embodiment in the world of the World to come.' Much of this way of imagining the world has been lost as the liturgy has shrunken to a short semiprivate gathering." (Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, p.122)

When pressed, with concrete examples of liturgy's apparent failure to form counter-cultural Christians, Cavanaugh et al respond by telling us we're not doing the liturgy well enough, and if only we did it better, things would look very different. We're not taking it seriously enough. The church isn't taking itself seriously enough.

But yesterday's events at Westminster Abbey don't quite fit that script. If there's one thing Westminster Abbey does, it's take itself - and everything it does - seriously. It is, perhaps, the epitome of the Church of England taking itself seriously. And that, here, seems to be the problem, rather than the solution: here, cross and imperial crown nestle together, the liturgy of the Church and the liturgy of the State are indistinguishable, because they are one and the same. If there is revolutionary potential in Christian worship, it has been neutralised in Westminster Abbey.

Apart from, yet again, the pain and embarrassment of association, through the Church of England, with what 'we' did to a group of disabled protesters yesterday, what's disturbing for me, as Rector of Hodge Hill, is that since at least the 17th Century, the 'common prayer' or 'common worship' of the Church of England has decreed that what they do in Westminster Abbey, we do, in some kind of similar form, in our little Anglican church here. If Cavanaugh and friends are right, that there's something about our liturgies that profoundly shapes, if not actually constitutes, our 'political' habits and responses, then however much I might protest that here (in Hodge Hill) we're an inclusive church, here we're a politically radical church, here we're engaged in building new patterns of relationship and society as the neoliberal world crumbles around us - if we too are tied up in the 'common worship' of Church and State, then we're surely sunk.

But it's clearly not quite as simple as that. Hodge Hill Church is not Westminster Abbey (thank God!). We are not likely to host any coronations here in the near future. We are about as far from the 'centres of Empire' as you can get, demographically if not geographically. Our worship here looks, sounds, feels very different to what they do in Westminster Abbey (and, don't tell anyone, but we also sit rather loosely to the expectations of 'common worship', and that's not just because we're an Anglican-URC ecumenical partnership). But all of that is only half the story, I would suggest. Because I'm not convinced our worship is the only thing that shapes us, by any means. I think our engagements 'out there in the world' shape us just as much, if not more, than our worship in church does. And we have learnt - and are continuing to learn - here how to receive, with humility and expectation, the gifts offered to us in those encounters and engagements, even when those 'gifts' feel initially awkward, uncomfortable, or even hostile - from strangers, as well as friends.

And perhaps that's the most important difference between we Christians here in Hodge Hill and those who have been in charge of Westminster Abbey and St Paul's in their brushes with 'Occupiers' over the last few years. They, there, have had lots of practice at welcoming and honouring the rich and powerful (and, in a lesser way, anyone who is paying to come and look around their beautiful buildings). We've had lots of practice at being displaced, homeless, and dependent on the hospitality of our neighbours. And that, in turn, has shaped our worship, as much, if not more, than the other way round. Of course, we have much less 'symbolic capital' to play with in Hodge Hill - few people (even locally!) are going to notice, or care, if a few tents popped up on our church building's front lawn, and so any response we were to make, equally, would hardly make political waves. But we will, of course, continue our little, barely-noticed acts of hospitality and receptivity, solidarity and subversion, trusting in the power of tiny mustard seeds to grow, in the infectiousness of the microscopic germs of the kingdom of God. And, despite the shame of being Anglican on days like today, we will continue to hope and pray that our Christian sisters and brothers who find themselves in places of symbolic and political power, will rediscover in their own ways the subversive challenge of the gospel, and of the worship of the Christ who was crucified by the powers-that-be.

#Rev, broken arms & little Easters

So this series of Rev has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, to say the least. We’ve been through the twists and turns of the Church of England’s negotiation of inter-faith relations, same-sex marriage, and some of the harder safeguarding issues us vicars occasionally get confronted with. We’ve laughed – for some of us both knowingly and a little nervously – as the desperately overconfident numbers-driven machinations of the Church’s hierarchy have been laid bare with uncanny accuracy, and treated with deserved irreverence: what parish priest will not recognise a Diocesan strategy-cum-training-programme with a focus closely resembling the inspired ‘IED – Invade, Evangelise, Deliver’?!

But all of this, as the series cantered towards its all-too-early conclusion, receded into the background, became almost mere scenery, as the quite brilliant writers – with an emotional subtlety that nevertheless frequently left us viewers feeling clobbered, winded – brought to centre-stage Adam and Alex’s marriage, his drunken but not utterly unanticipated kiss with Head Teacher Ellie, the clergy disciplinary procedures prompted by jealous Reader Nigel’s formal complaint, and the closure of the ‘failing’ St Saviour’s Church. Plotlines converged, characters and relationships fell apart, in what could be seen, from many angles, as a pretty comprehensive tragedy.

But it’s not simply a tragedy. It becomes entangled, in the final two episodes, in the Church’s journey with Jesus through Holy Week and into Easter. It enacts a Passion, with Adam at its centre: a kiss – and the report to the authorities by a ‘friend’ – which betrays him, another friend who ends up denying he even knows him (with multiple cock references for good measure), a man in power washing his hands of responsibility (the kindly but institutional Bishop who ultimately finds Adam ‘innocent’, but places the burden of the church closure firmly on Adam’s shoulders: ‘if you resign, I can’t save St Saviour’s for you’), and finds Adam carrying a large, heavy, wooden cross through the streets of the city (delivering it to a colleague for a Palm Sunday procession), jostled and jeered at, spat at and wounded, stumbling and falling along the way as he presses on, through the night. As dawn breaks, on a hill overlooking the city, as he dances deliriously (singing ‘Lord of the dance’), Adam is joined by a shellsuit-wearing, tinny-holding, cliché-spouting ‘God’ (in the form of Liam Neeson), to whom Adam confesses, ‘I’m trying to keep something alive but I don’t think I can do it’. Amid the clichés, Adam’s companion reaches out his hand to touch him on the shoulder, saying, ‘We all have our crosses to bear – I understand, Adam, I’ll always be here’. And then he vanishes.

Where does the rollercoaster go from here? I settled in to watch the last episode expecting an ‘Easter’, but having no idea what that Easter would look like, or how we would get there. Adam, collarless, volunteering in the local shop while applying for management consultancy jobs, shows many of the telltale signs of going through a breakdown, while the closed St Saviour’s is boarded up and fenced off ready for the land on which it stands to be sold to the highest bidder. Colin, having made it clear to Adam that what he’s done – destroying St Saviour’s – is up there above the Holocaust on the list of worst things in the world, runs out of the shop clutching handfuls of stolen stuff, including a chocolate Easter egg which he feeds to his beloved dog, Bongo, a meal which proves fatal to his canine companion. Adam retreats to bed, engulfed in grief and God-knows-what-else, half-whispering, half-sobbing the Beatitudes (‘blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’), deaf to his daughter Katie’s crying in the room next door.

It is Alex who finally takes charge, visiting Head Teacher Ellie at school to tell her she forgives her and to enlist her in her plan; and then getting Adam out of bed at 5am in the morning – Easter morning – to take him to St Saviour’s, where all of them – the ‘crowd of lost, hopeless, annoying people’ as Alex later calls them – are waiting for him. He runs away, and Alex goes after him. He must do a ‘last Easter service, a final goodbye’ – not for him, but for them. ‘I’m not their priest any more,’ he protests. ‘You gave up being a priest for Lent,’ she responds. ‘Well done. I don’t blame you. But now we need you back. And can we please finally christen Katie?!’

And so they return to the church steps, keeping vigil around the Easter fire, passing the light to a new Paschal candle, and joining together, loudly, to the uncomprehending annoyance of the neighbours, in the Easter greeting: ‘Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!’ Archdeacon Robert hands Colin a spade to prise open the locked church door, Alex clothes Adam in his robes and dog collar, and Adam prays: ‘Dear Lord, I seem to be back in a cassock again. You won’t let me go, apparently. Is this what resurrection is?’ And they baptise little Katie, by candlelight, and her cries at the shock of the water on her head end the episode, the series, and – will we see it again? – perhaps ‘Rev’ for good.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who was in bits at that moment – and I can still feel tears welling up as I recall it now. Among the many ways in which it struck me, I was left with a strong sense that this was an immensely faithful Easter story.

In what was effectively a ‘series review’ of Rev in the Guardian on Monday, a piece rather strangely written and published before the final episode was aired (and presumably not seen by the author), James Mumford criticises the ‘pernicious’ success of Rev as ‘imposing its own outsider viewpoint’ in its representation of the church, in a way in which ‘the devout do not speak for themselves’. In ‘both a lack of creativity and a failure of representation’, he says, Rev ‘denies the rich diversity of the church in England’, operates on the assumption that faith is ‘purely personal’, ‘not something held in common’, and not ‘transformative’: ‘Perhaps the show’s most wonderful character, the drug addict Colin, is a parishioner Adam is genuinely friends with. But there’s never a question of faith freeing him from addiction.’ Mumford offers a hypothetical plotline from ‘an insider viewpoint’: a woman knocked over in the street, ‘[h]er spine damaged, comes to St Saviour’s and asks for prayer. With low expectations Adam agrees but suddenly she claims she’s been healed and runs down the aisle.’

Now apart from its lack of acknowledgment of the number of ‘insiders’ on Rev’s writing and advisory teams (there are generous handfuls of ‘Rev’s in the credits at the end of each episode!), and the point about comedy that it misses in imagining that somehow Rev’s portrayal of the Church of England should be a bit like the BBC’s policy on party political balance, what really annoyed me about James Mumford’s review is its complete inability to acknowledge faith, personal and shared, as written all over, and under, every moment of drama and comedy in Rev. It’s particularly ironic, in fact, that Mumford was so impatient to criticise the programme that he couldn’t even wait for its Easter morning to come.

My 5 year-old son broke his arm just before the Easter holidays. Well, technically, in fact, he had his arm broken. He’s had no sense of anger at the person who did it, but has been deeply sad about missing the first half of the summer term’s football training. He’s obsessed with football, and when we’re out and about, or just in the back garden, he can’t be restrained from kicking a football about, or even making ambitious sliding tackles on someone else who happens to have the ball. As concerned parents, we regularly have to remind him he’s broken his arm – but because his arm is in a plaster cast, it seems he imagines he’s invincible. Yes, something went wrong, he knows, but nothing further can go wrong now, he reckons.

Plenty of my fellow Christians seem to operate with a faith either of the ‘invincible plaster cast’ variety, or of the hypothetical healing story variety. Resurrection faith is either protection, or liberation, from the tragedies of day-to-day reality. It happens instantly, and it lasts for ever. Easter morning comes, and everything from now on is as bright as the mid-day sun.

But the Easter faith that I know doesn’t work like that. Healing, where I’ve witnessed it, seems to be mostly a life-time of ‘two steps forward, one step back’ (and that’s at the most positive end of the maths). Lots of stuff – trauma from the past, feelings of inadequacy, fears about the future – never ‘goes away’. There are lots of decisions we make, with the best possible intentions and good faith, that seem to cause as much harm as they do good. We feed our beloved dogs chocolate because we know they love it, and then they die. A plaster cast on an arm doesn’t stop us falling off a climbing frame and breaking a leg.

In Hodge Hill, we’ve got into a tradition of keeping our ‘Easter vigil’ on a patch of wasteland, at the edge of our estate, that’s been abandoned for decades. Much of it is knitted with brambles, and a dumping ground for fly-tippers. And we meet there, as the sun goes down on Easter Eve, and we light our lanterns, and we tell stories. Rarely are they stories where everyone lives happily ever after. Many of them are stories which catch tiny glimpses of healing and life and hope, but amidst fragilities and struggles and brokenness that simply don’t go away. That wilderness gathering is a place of lament, as much if not more than a place of hope.

And then we return, the next morning. It is still a thorny, rubbish-strewn wasteland. And all we do is light a candle, and shout – with the same neighbour-annoying loudness of Adam and his friends – ‘Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!’ And then we carry the candle through the streets of our estate, and into church. It gets blown out constantly, by the slightest breath of wind, or by our movement as we walk. And we have to painstakingly re-light it at every stopping-point along our route.

Later in the morning, and on every Sunday throughout the 7 weeks of Eastertide, we pass the light from that Easter candle through our gathered congregation, from person to person – an awkward, sometimes uncomfortably slow, process, clumsily passing on the little flame of one tea-light to the next. And every Sunday morning in Eastertide too, we make a space for people to share their ‘resurrection stories’: again, often in awkward silence, waiting what sometimes seems an eternity to ‘hear to speech’ a few, often quite tentative and stumbling, testimonies to glimpses of healing, forgiveness and renewal amid life’s ongoing hurts, struggles and tragedies.

We still do a fair bit of shouting and singing, but I hope something of what we do is faithful to our reading of the gospel stories of resurrection. A sense that it doesn’t all suddenly turn out right, that fear and bewilderment accompany resurrection, that there are slow, painful journeys of ‘working through’, and that when disciples return to the city with good news, they are also returning to a place of threat, vulnerability and violence, much of which they find they themselves are implicated in. As theologian Shelly Rambo teases out at length, in her reflections on those who live with the memory of trauma, there is a sense in which, even come Easter Day, the trauma of Good Friday remains – the enduring, broken ‘middle space’ of Holy Saturday becomes the space in which we work through what it means for love to also be part of that ‘remainder’. Or, in Adam’s words, ‘you won’t let me go, apparently – is this what resurrection is?’

The Easter morning gathering of the cracked, the broken and the divided, slipping through the prised-open door of St Saviour’s with their Easter candle and a baby to baptise, embody perfectly the shared faith of the Christian church as I know it. Even the Archdeacon is there, leaving aside for the moment his preoccupation with ‘church growth’ – and his preoccupation too, in perhaps a telling parallel, with himself. We know in that moment that Adam has not left the priesthood – has not even yet left St Saviour’s, even though he will do. And although perhaps in this moment the script does not quite do justice to the faith we see – those gathered are united through their belief in Adam, we’re told, even though it is clear that’s far from the full story – we do see in Adam’s ‘grace and anger’ – which his wife Alex saw in him many years before, for which she first loved him, that which makes him a priest – not the saviour of St Saviour’s, but a visible, truthful, authentically humble, doggedly persevering, and quite infectious, resurrection faith. “Blessed are the cracked,” as a recent travelling companion of mine has written, “for they shall give light.”

On dirty blogs & messy church

I've been quiet here for a little while. Not for a lack of thinking about stuff. If anything, it might be a result of too much thinking going on - throwing loads of pieces of the jigsaw up in the air and waiting for them to land in a nice, coherent pattern. But of course, coherent patterns tend to take a long old time to form, and often the only way to find them - especially with jigsaws - is to work piece by piece.

So, inspired by the approach of a new-ish and rather wiser friend and travelling companion along the way, Laura 'Mole' Chapman, fellow blogger and faculty member of ABCD Europe, I feel the need to try what Mole calls a 'quick and dirty' blog. No time to finesse the rough edges. Little in the way of references, academic or otherwise. But an attempt, however messy and vulnerable (in all kinds of ways), to 'reflect aloud', and see what comes of it...

I want to talk about messy church.

Not 'Messy Church', that hugely infectious movement promising a 'new way of being church for families', however irrepressibly attractive its values of 'creativity, hospitality and celebration' might be. 'Messy Church' as a movement has been quite good at articulating its theology from the beginning, and last year saw the publication of 'Messy Church Theology', which not only expressed the theological significance of 'messiness' in the fallibility and unfinishedness of even 'Christ-centred' human life in the present, but kept on returning the question of how we might decide whether 'Messy Church' is really 'church'. There's something about that question that is both intriguing and troubling for me. It feels both worth asking, for the kind of issues it opens up, but also disturbing to make too prominent, as if which side of the line the answer falls, in any given context, is somehow of ultimate importance.

So, No, I'm not particularly interested in here in 'Messy Church' with capital letters. I'm wanting to explore something much more modest, much less 'brandable': something that we might be able to call church, but which is unavoidably messy - and more messy than 'Messy Church Theology' seems, as yet, to allow for.

And I don't think I'm talking about what Archbishop Justin Welby recently referred to, at a recent gathering of the Church of England's General Synod, as the 'untidy church' that lies ahead of us, particularly in the aftermath of deciding - finally! - to ordain women as bishops:

It has incoherence, inconsistency between dioceses and between different places.  It’s not a church that says we do this and we don’t do that.  It’s a church that says we do this and we do that and actually quite a lot of us don’t like that but we are still going to do it because of love.  It’s a church that speaks to the world and says that consistency and coherence is not the ultimate virtue, that is found in holy  grace. 

A church that loves those with whom the majority deeply disagree is a church that will be unpleasantly challenging to a world where disagreement is either banned within a given group or removed and expelled.  The absolute of holy grace challenges the absolutism of a world that says there are no absolutes except the statement that there are no absolutes.

Now, the part of me that is embedded in, and dependent on, the institution that is the Church of England warms to Archbishop Justin's description of 'untidiness'. But it remains an essentially introspective description, an internal conversation. The boundaries between 'church' and 'world' are still drawn sharply, and the 'rightness' of the former still very much asserted. That's still not nearly messy enough, I would suggest.

I'm attracted, too, to what theologian Nicolas Healy calls 'practical-prophetic ecclesiology': the 'grand, never-ending experiment' involving 'ongoing and self-critical evaluation of our ecclesial thought and action', of attention not to allegedly authoritative 'blueprints', but to the complex, fallible 'everyday activity' of what Healy calls the 'concrete church' in each local context in which it is embodied.

But it needs to get messier still, because even though Healy reminds us that 'church' is a messy old mixture of good and really-not-very-good stuff, there's still a working assumption that it's fairly easy to work out what counts as 'church' and what is what Healy calls 'non-church'.

And then there's a quote from Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, writer, social activist and much more. Well, it's not quite a quote, more a half-remembered paraphrase, but the gist of it is this:

"forget about defining and drawing boundaries around 'church', let's just talk about a bunch of people who love each other, doing stuff together".

That's just about messy enough for me. It may well horrify many of my colleagues and sister and brother Christians for not being remotely 'Christian' enough. But in playing with it, I'm not remotely wanting to suggest that the Christian faith has no great gifts to bring to the table, not at all. Just that the kind of spaces I'm interested in, and the human interactions that happen in those spaces, don't in any obvious way map on to an easy separation of 'church' and 'non-church'. I'm interested in spaces where there are "people who love each other, doing stuff together" - people caught up in what theologians John Reader and Chris Baker name 'entangled fidelities', some of whom might name themselves Christians (amongst other things), and others who don't; and doing things that might occasionally look recognisably 'Christian things to do', and at other times don't.

Over the last 3 or 4 years, the ongoing conversation within what we call Hodge Hill Church has thrown up a way of describing what we're about here: 'Growing Loving Community - in the love of God, with all our neighbours, across Hodge Hill'. It's a good statement, I think, because it seems to describe fairly well what people see when they see 'Hodge Hill Church'. But it's also valuable, I think, because it allows us, very explicitly, to look for, and value, and celebrate those places and moments and glimpses of 'growing loving community' in Hodge Hill that don't in any conventional way look like 'church'. Not so that we can claim them as 'ours', but so that, at the very least, we can recognise a kind of 'family resemblance'. And in that recognition, all kinds of possibilities open up.

A little while ago, a couple of us here were exploring a new course offered nationally by Livability (what used to be the Shaftesbury Society) called 'The Happiness Course'. It's good stuff - drawing on the relatively new field of 'positive psychology' and also on the deep wells of the Christian tradition, but aimed to be accessible both for people 'with faith' and those 'without', and if it seeks to persuade, then it's seeking to persuade people of the value of intentional practices to develop their sense of wellbeing, rather than seeking to persuade people of the 'rightness' of the Christian faith. But there was one interesting divergence between those of us working here and the person we were exploring the course with: for him, there was a deep longing for participants to 'journey towards home' (a 'home' that, implicitly, those running the course had already found); for those of us based here in Hodge Hill, we couldn't get away from the sense that, if there was a 'journey towards home', we are all on it together - indeed, to push it a bit further, we are journeying towards 'the home we build together' (to use Jonathan Sacks' resonant phrase).

Friends and colleagues here, and further afield, rightly want to push me on this. Where is the place for what we traditionally call 'Christian discipleship'? Don't we, as Christians, long to see our neighbours growing deeper into their true humanity, 'in Christ'? Where is the space for 'we Christians' sharing our faith - one of our treasured gifts, perhaps our most treasured gift - with our friends, neighbours and travelling companions?

But in 'messy church', as I'm exploring it, I'm not so sure who the 'we Christians' refers to. Yes, there are some of us that seem to come to conversations with fairly hefty chunks of a faith that we have inherited and explored for ourselves, that might quite straightforwardly call ourselves 'Christians'. But there are others who come with at least fragments of something that looks and sounds very similar, whether 'Christian' is a label that they choose to use, or something they're very clearly 'not', or something that is just much more ambiguous and ambivalent than either of those. And in fact, in messy reality, none of us make complete sense, free of incoherence and contradictions and ambiguities. And those of us who intentionally and reflectively wrestle with this stuff have a sense that there is an ambiguity and a mystery that goes close to the heart of what 'faith' is anyway. So we work hard at working together to create spaces, environments, conversations where the sharing and the exploring and the wrestling can happen, and where we can all learn and grow - individually and together - and where relationships between us can deepen, and where we might more truly embody something of the 'home' that we sense we are journeying towards, and that others might glimpse it too, and that our journeys might join more intimately together.

So bring on the conversation about 'messy church' - whatever it is. It clearly needs a lot more thinking through...

[thanks to Gary Hall of the Queen's Foundation for the Merton 'quote' - he's working on digging out the actual quote, which will hopefully turn up in a future blog!]

Open doors, inevitable disappointments, and the stable in the world

We've found a great re-telling of the Christmas story for this year's Christmas Eve All-age Nativity Service. Called 'Knock Knock - Who's There?', it revolves around a door, through which enters each character from the story, finding their way into the stable. It ends with a reflection on Holman Hunt's famous painting, 'The Light of the World'...

Jesus is knocking at our door, the reflection suggests - the door of our home, our life, our heart - and he is waiting for us to open up, invite him in, to be our friend. It's a simple - and, to many of us, familiar - message. The trouble is, I'm not sure I know what it means any more - if I ever did. Maybe the childlike simplicity of a 'Yes' is enough, at least as a beginning, or even as a repeated practice over the years.

But 'what happens next?' is my 'wondering' question. What is it that then makes a difference to our lives, to make it 'good news' worth sharing, in neighbourhoods like mine, among friends and neighbours who are struggling to make ends meet and put food on the table; who are out of work or in insecure, zero-hours, low-paid work; on whose doormats the latest ATOS work capability assessment has landed; whose sense of pride or self-esteem is constantly battered by media labelling, stereotyping and demonising; or who rarely encounter the friendly face of another human being, other than the occasional professional, dealing with their 'problems' (or dealing with them as a 'problem')?

In Hodge Hill, we (Hodge Hill Church) have been running 'Open Door' for almost a year and a half now. A drop-in, now twice a week, for a couple of hours on Tuesday and Saturday mornings. A place where you will always find a warm welcome, the offer of a cuppa and some toast, some friendly people to talk with, and some practical support using computers and accessing the internet, putting together a CV and searching for jobs, finding advice on benefits entitlements, and more. It's run by volunteers, on a shoestring, and one of the most important things about it is that we're interested in the people who come through the door not as 'clients', but as people who come with gifts, passions, knowledge, and skills (even if they might not be the kind that would instantly find their way onto a CV or job application), and that Open Door is a place where such strangers can become friends, where such gifted people can find ways of saying 'I can', among their neighbours, and within the wider community.

Open Door has been an early example of the Birmingham-wide network of 'Places of Welcome' which has begun to emerge from the Social Inclusion process in the city, and at times has been hailed, even in the upper echelons of Birmingham City Council, as a great example of an innovative, sustainable approach to supporting local people - at a time when Neighbourhood Offices and advice centres run by paid staff are being stripped to the bone by wave upon wave of funding cuts rolled down from central government. We're certainly quite proud of it - never more so than when someone who began as a 'visitor' ends up not only with a satisfying (enough) paid job, but also as an Open Door volunteer, welcoming and supporting fresh visitors through the door; or when another Open Door 'visitor' finds herself gradually more and more embedded in all kinds of other neighbourhood activities, from Women's Group to community lunches. At its best, it encapsulates so much of our proclaimed vision as a church here, of 'Growing Loving Community - in the love of God, with all our neighbours, across Hodge Hill'.

But...

There is, inevitably, a 'but...'

There are times when the open door has to close. There have been times where we've had to say, politely but firmly, 'I'm afraid that's not what we're here for', and had to ask people to leave. There have been times when the door, then locked, has been hammered and kicked repeatedly, out of anger and frustration.

And there have been plenty more times when people have gone away disappointed. Because they have been seeking something, and not found it. Because they have needed a particular kind of help, but we've not been able to give it. Or because life has simply been shit, and actually, short of a cup of tea and a listening ear, there has been nothing any of us have been able to do, in two hours one morning, to make it any less shit.

We will probably disappoint - if we haven't already - those senior Council officers who hailed our boldness and innovation. Apart from anything else, the numbers through our Open Door are pretty small. The numbers 'into work' (one of those ever-present, all-demanding statistics of 21st Century Britain) are even smaller. Our 'volunteer base' is committed, but fragile, and although we have pretty much managed to open the door every week of the year, with a week off each for Christmas and Easter, our rota is always vulnerable to one or two people being struck down with flu, or having to attend to a family crisis.

One of the dangers, when you call something 'Open Door', or when you stick up a strapline about 'Growing Loving Community', is that you will inevitably disappoint. Not everybody, all of the time. But probably most people, sometimes. Because such phrases describe our highest aspirations, our best intentions. And as limited, fragile, complex and entangled human beings, we are rarely able to reach our highest aspirations, or consistently carry out our best intentions. We certainly can't - and don't pretend to - meet the 'targets', solve the 'problems', or provide the 'models' that the world of spreadsheets would like to demand of us. But even by our own measures, our door cannot always be open, and we are not always as loving (or as growing) as we would like to be.

Instead, we offer something more modest. While it is rarely possible to be clear at the outset what we can do and what we can't, we try to do what we can. We try to prop the door open as wide as we can. We try to let 'growing loving community' shape as much of who we are and what we do, as we can. And when we fail, or find our limits, or just get it wrong, we try to be as honest as we can, and seek out ways of mending and reconciling, rather than attempting to cover up or run away.

The liberation, in it all, is that we are not, ultimately, the Innkeepers of the stable, 'keeping the door', issuing the invitations in, and deciding when there is 'no room'. We too are invited guests, having to bend our heads low, just like everyone else, to get through the door, and finding our places amidst the hay bales and stench of animal faeces. The door, in fact, has been flung open, never to be shut. We are all, already in the stable. Our job is to let our eyes adjust to its shadows and, by the strange light that seems to come from the newborn child in the manger, to recognise around us all those strangers who are in fact our neighbours.

On our 'Journey to the Stable' this year, we have welcomed more than 200 local school children into this awe-filled place, and moved a few of them to tears in the process. On Christmas Eve, that stable, of cardboard and straw, will occupy the centre of the worship space at church, and we will all, defying the laws of physics (but perhaps just within the laws of Doctor Who), be invited into it. And as we hear, and join in, the words of the beautiful song of John Bell's that I've copied just below, I hope we will discover afresh that the doorway into the stable is, in fact, the doorway into our neighbourhoods, and into our world.

1.         The love of God comes close

            Where stands an open door

            To let the stranger in,

            To mingle rich and poor:

            The love of God is here to stay

            Embracing those who walk his way.

2.         The peace of God comes close

            To those caught in a storm,

            Forgoing lives of ease

            To ease the lives forlorn:

            The peace of God is here to stay

            Embracing those who walk his way.

3.         The joy of God comes close

            Where faith encounters fears,

            Where heights and depths of life

            Are found through smiles and tears:

            The joy of God is here to stay

            Embracing those who walk his way.

4.         The grace of God comes close

            To those whose grace is spent,

            When hearts are tired and sore

            And hope is bruised and bent:

            The grace of God is here to stay

            Embracing those who walk his way.

5.         The Son of God comes close
To those who wait tonight.
To those who sit in darkness,
He comes to shine his light.
The Son of God is here to stay
Embracing those who walk his way.

                      John L. Bell  © 1988, 1997 WGRG, (v.5 altd.)
Iona Community, Glasgow G2 3DH, Scotland

We had a dream: on hope deferred, and the connecting power of lament

We had a dream. Timely words, in the wake of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous speech. Timely perhaps, but the mood is one not of energised hope, but of crushing disappointment.

We had a dream: a dream of a 'community house' on our estate in east Birmingham; a place of community-within-community, where people would commit to 'doing community' in the deepest sense - living together, sharing the work of keeping the house going, pooling their income (vulnerable stuff!), and even more vulnerable, sharing their lives with each other with a level of intimacy that only comes when you regularly have to share a kitchen, a bathroom, a living space, and a generous dose of your soul, with all its ups and downs and rough edges, with other living, breathing, fragile, messy, human beings. And then 'doing community' in the wider sense too - getting to know and making friends with the neighbours around them, and opening their home outwards as a place of hospitality - with a really decent kitchen and an even bigger living/eating room, a place where big and small conversations could happen, and a place where people could, if they wanted or needed to, pause and pray.

That was our dream.

And we'd find the perfect place. It had been empty for the last 3 or 4 years. Before that, it had been the local clinic for families to come and meet with midwives and health visitors. A house that, with some work and investment, could accommodate 6 bedrooms upstairs, and a big kitchen, a huge living space, and one or two smaller rooms downstairs.

And even better, our bold and imaginative church council had found the money. From the sale of our old church site, with all the shock and loss and grief that had gone with that - but which has also released a great deal of vision, and energy, and passion for becoming again a church truly rooted in, and connected across, its local neighbourhoods - a vision of 'growing loving community, in the love of God, with all our neighbours, across Hodge Hill'. From that loss, possibilities have emerged and been grasped, and our church council had committed a really substantial amount of that sale money to this new venture.

And so yesterday morning, with dreams and visions, hopes and possibilities bubbling up inside us and bursting to come out, seven of us went to the auction. It had been a journey at least three years in the making. We'd waited a year and a bit for Birmingham City Council to do an 'options appraisal' on the old clinic building. We'd come within a hair's breadth of the Council agreeing to do a 'community asset transfer' on the building, in recognition of the potentially huge social impact of the plans we'd put to them. But money concerns had won the day, and they'd decided to auction it off to the highest bidder instead. We'd done our sums. It seemed pretty clear to us that a property developer wouldn't make any money on it, buying to convert into houses or flats to sell on again. We went with a lot of hope, and a banker's draft.

The auction was a bit like having your team get to the cup final, but the match only lasting 2 minutes. Our hearts were in our throats. We got into the bidding... but very quickly, the price went way beyond what we could afford, or justify for the building. It was sold to a property developer, for almost twice the auctioneers' guide price - a crazy price, that left even our agent lost for words.

In the blow of a hammer, our dreams and visions, our hopes and possibilities, were shattered. We left quickly, nothing to wait around for, and went away to drown our sorrows together in mugs of tea.

I was absolutely exhausted, drained. I still am today, 24 hours later. It feels in many ways like a bereavement. Echoes return to me of those two disciples of Jesus heading wearily back home to Emmaus after the events of Good Friday - "we had hoped..." they say, sharing with a stranger their shattered dreams, with the melancholy confusion of those who can't see any way ahead, any future worth contemplating. I suspect many of my companions at the auction felt similarly, and many more who had been waiting at the end of a phone for some news from us.

I still feel deeply sad. There's some anger bubbling away too, linked to some 'if only's... If only Birmingham City Council had stuck with their glimpse of a community-centred vision, held on to the possibilities of a building they owned as a real community asset, and not given in to the all-too-obvious pressure to raise money wherever they can - at the expense, ironically, of the communities they are meant to be serving. Because the money the Council gets from the sale, they will use to pay off debts from compensation claims, claims that have arisen because of the Council's discriminatory pay policy for many years - another 'if only'... And even bigger than particular decisions, by particular councillors or officers, I find myself with that big 'if only', knowing that yesterday, in that auction, money won - that all-consuming systemic lie that only money has the power to do and decide and determine the stories we live, that it is only in money's terms that we know what (and who) is valuable and what (and who) isn't, and that those with the most, win, and those with the least, lose. If only things were different...

I am transported back to what we Anglicans call 'Holy Saturday' - the day before Easter Day. Except in so many ways it's not 'the day before' - it's simply 'the day after'. The day after the crucifixion, the death. A day not of hope and anticipation - because in that first Holy Saturday there was nothing to anticipate or hope for. A day simply of nothingness. Of nothing to do. Nothing to hope for. No future to glimpse, no possibilities to reach out for. I've written before about what we did on Holy Saturday evening this year - simply sitting together in our local patch of 'wasteland', as the sun went down, sharing not so much 'stories of hope', as I think I'd initially intended, but stories of 'hope deferred', of hope longed-for. Sharing, perhaps more accurately, our laments, our deep, heart-breaking 'if only's. A lot of what one of my very good friends and co-workers here described himself doing yesterday:

Walking home found myself praying (As sometimes happens) about the days events and as I was naming situations, issues, people etc. I found myself shouting out: 'Bloody hell God there's a lot of shit going on!!!' Some might say that's disrespectful but it's what was on my heart #Lamenting #Faith

And I realise that there's something immensely significant in those moments. Over the past 18 months or so here in Hodge Hill, we've come to live and breathe the language of 'asset-based community development'. It's implicit or explicit in a lot of my blog reflections here. At its simplest, it's often said to be about putting relationships between neighbours - mutual, reciprocal relationships - at the heart of all we do, and "starting with what's strong, not what's wrong", with the 'assets', the 'gifts' of a neighbourhood and its people, rather than its 'problems' - approaching with a "glass half full" attitude rather than the more dominant "glass half empty" mindset. But however much truth there is in those sound-bites, there's an 'underside' that also needs articulating: the best kind of 'asset-based community development' is also, inevitably, 'vulnerability-based community development'. I was reminded of that in a powerful conversation with my good friend Cormac Russell just earlier this week. It is perhaps not irrelevant that the beginnings of 'ABCD' terminology emerged in a conversation between a community-builder and a powerful economist, and the 'assets' language was the economist wanting to translate the messy work of community building into the 'respectable' language of the academy. The language of 'gifts' is, I think, a much better 'fit' in the real world of neighbourhoods - and while our gifts may often be "what's strong" by our normal judgements, so often the most precious gifts we can share are our gifts of vulnerability, of fragility, of weakness. It can often be our vulnerabilities that drive us to connect with our neighbours, and it is almost always in our vulnerabilities, our 'daring to expose' something of ourselves that feels a little fragile, that we allow our more distanced relationships with strangers turn into the mutual, reciprocal relationships of passion and care that we call 'friendships'.

Bitter disappointments, losses, and pain can too often isolate us from other people, seal us off in our own private world of grief. Our Western so-called-'developed' society has crystallised and cemented technologies and expertise that do, and encourage, exactly that. We are pushed into ways of coping that are about creating and reinforcing securities, walls, defences around our vulnerabilities that allow us to project an external strength that enables us to 'keep fitting in' to socially acceptable patterns of behaviour.

But the 'empty half' of our glass can also, in some environments (or cultures, or conditions of hospitality, let's say), be precisely the thing that enables us to connect with others. What we call lament - grief and disappointment expressed, made public, shared - can clear a space, a breathing space, a waiting space, a listening space, which can enable genuine, deep, authentic community to grow.

In the waiting space that I find myself, with other good friends and travelling companions, currently inhabiting, I am wondering about that dream that felt so shattered in that auction room yesterday. I find myself wondering about the relationship between, on the one hand, the very obvious value of 'having a place' where 'we' can offer hospitality to others, and on the other hand, the deep-rooted longing for bricks and mortar that 'we' can call 'ours', at its most human a longing for home, but at its worst an 'edifice complex' that is more about security, control, and a kind of public power. I find myself wondering whether, and how, that intimacy of community, that vulnerable exposure to each other, that is found when you share a house, might yet be discovered and practised within a neighbourhood, even if we are, at times, divided by our bricks and mortar. I find myself wondering how much we, the church in Hodge Hill, are still being called to live out of our 'homelessness', our 'exile', our dependence on the hospitality of our neighbours - because in that experience and practice is something that profoundly connects us to many of our neighbours (near and far), and to the roots of our own faith - to our incarnate, homeless God. I find myself wondering whether there are times and seasons for these different ways of living - and whether this particular season is turning, or simply deepening. And I find myself wondering what strangers we might encounter, as we continue walking along this road, today, or tomorrow, or next week, or beyond, who might give to us a glimpse of a new future, a new possibility, springing up in the cracked earth of our current lament.

We had a dream.

Dreams are fragile, and we are invited to 'tread softly' on them. They can also, sometimes, be stubbornly persistent.

We have a dream. We are still here. We are waiting, lamenting, longing, looking, listening, wondering.

One great Irishman shared a treasure or two from another this week. Cormac Russell, echoing Seamus Heaney, invited us to "walk on air against your better judgement".

We continue walking here.

The Good Samaritan & the FoodBank: it's not about 'do', it's about 'who'

I was recently privileged, along with my sister and brother clergy from Birmingham Diocese, to listen to the Director of Christian Aid, Loretta Minghella, talk to us on 'Grace and Justice', on the very morning that the G8 leaders were drafting their communique on global tax justice. It was a privilege, particularly, to hear someone in such a vital public role 'think in public' through the complexity of responding to a political agreement which would always, inevitably, be a compromise between global justice and vested interests, an 'attempt' which would always also be a 'falling short'. How to respond with 'grace', but also with an undiminished longing for justice?

But Loretta's talk begin in much more intimate territory - with the death of her brother. Anthony Minghella is known to many as an accomplished film director - 'The English Patient' among his most well-known works. But for Loretta, Anthony was first and foremost her brother. His death, 'premature' if that word means anything, left her, as the death of a loved one leaves any of us, with a deep sense of the loss of a unique, irreplaceable human being. But in that realisation, for Loretta, emerged the more universal insight that each person, whoever and wherever they are in the world, is similarly unique, irreplaceable. And it was in that insight, borne out of intimate love and loss, that her passionate commitment to global justice came to life.

This morning, we heard one of the most over-familiar stories of the Christian Scriptures: the Good Samaritan. Its familiarity has bred in us something even worse than contempt: indifference. But we should try to return to it with fresh eyes, to rediscover its shock value, to let it challenge us afresh. The lawyer comes to Jesus to 'test' him: "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" he asks. He knows the law, and he knows it well: "Love the Lord your God with everything that you are, and Love your neighbour as yourself." Simple to say, demanding, impossible even, to achieve. So he asks a supplementary question: "Ah yes," we hear him saying, "but who is my neighbour?" He is after clarification, definition, boundaries, limits.

And Jesus tells him that story. The one about the priest and the Levite, the good, holy Jews - who pass by on the other side of the road from the man dying in the ditch. And the Samaritan who stops and helps. The 'good Samaritan', we call him - a synonym for kindness, neighbourliness, responsible, active citizenship - the epitome, perhaps, of the 'Big Society'.

The perennial danger with the story is that we take from it only Jesus' final words: "Go, and do likewise." The trouble is, of course, that that's really not the most important thing. The story's not about 'do' - it's about 'who?' It's about a Samaritan: the outsider, the foreigner, the deviant, the enemy, the one 'we' (putting ourselves in the shoes of the good Jews hearing the story for the first time) are most suspicious of, most despise, most go out of our way to avoid. This is 'my neighbour' for that good Jewish lawyer: the one he can't even bring himself to name.

There is renewed excitement, in some quarters, at the moment, about the possibilities for "the Church" (which is often unquestioningly translated as "the Church of England", and that in itself is an issue) to take on the 'provision' of some vital 'services' from the State, as the State withdraws under the cover of 'austerity', or 'localism', or some other guise of neoliberal ideology. One of the latest sparks of excitement came with the launch, at Lambeth Palace last week, of a new report from ResPublica, 'Holistic Mission: Social Action and the Church of England'. The good old CofE, the report argues, with its army of (largely middle-class) volunteers, can provide services and meet needs in ways more holistic, more local, and more personal, than any institution of the State.

This is dangerous, seductive stuff. The seduction is in the possibility not just of being 'useful', but of being 'special', being 'effective', being 'needed'. Many in the CofE mourn the loss of such epithets, and would jump at the chance to recover them. It is much of the attraction (as I've argued here before) of the FoodBank franchise, celebrated by David Cameron as 'the Big Society in action'. We can be society's 'Good Samaritans' once again.

But that is to completely misread the story. Because it's not about 'do', it's about 'who'. It is a challenge to recognise the outsider, the foreigner, the deviant, the enemy, the one 'we' are most suspicious of, most despise, most go out of our way to avoid... as our neighbour. And not just as one who presents to us with 'needs' to be met - but as one who we need, because it is us, it turns out, who are lying half-dead in the ditch.

And that is the truly dangerous message of the gospel. Because it destroys all our carefully-constructed 'professional boundaries', class divisions, 'meritocratic hierarchies', gated communities and financially-entangled 'securities'. It reveals for the dehumanising heresy it is the project of creating our society as a 'hostile environment' for outsiders, and for insiders too who don't fit the current economic model of the 'good' (meaning financially productive) citizen. It refuses our attempts at putting 'pragmatic' limits on who we count as our neighbours, and instead throws us into the limitless ocean of impossible neighbour-love, in which every single unique, irreplaceable human being is swimming. This truly dangerous message is the real 'holistic mission' of the church, if only it would dare to embrace it. And it's not going to make any government happy if it does.



[I'm indebted to Ivan Illich's reading of the Good Samaritan for much of the thinking behind this piece. You can hear him talking about it here, and there's also an excellent introduction to it here. I'm grateful, as ever, to Cormac Russell of ABCD Europe for pointing me in the direction of Illich.]

Re-imagining & insurrection: starting from the local

Many of the pieces of 'grit' that for me challenge, nurture and inspire the pearls of bright ideas begin in conversation with my great friend Tim. He's a CEO of a great little charity called Worth Unlimited, that works with some of the most marginalised young people in some of the most marginalised communities around the country, 'building hope, unlocking potential, realising worth' as their strapline puts it. He also happens to be a member of my congregation, and one of my local Labour councillors. We're both enmeshed in national, historical 'institutions', and although we might place ourselves somewhere in the uncomfortable edges, borderlands, of each other's, neither of us can quite get away from them entirely.

Last night we were wrestling with the challenge and possibility of 'reimagining' our society, something I began to explore in my last blog post. Tim suggested that where the Occupy movement fell down was that they were asking exactly the right question at exactly the right time, but weren't able to clearly and coherently articulate an alternative to the neoliberal capitalist system that seemed - at least for a moment - to be crumbling around us. And then, it seemed, the moment passed, and the system continued on its merrily ruthless way, sustaining the wealth-amassing of the richest and slashing the incomes, the opportunities, the resources and the safety nets for the poorest. By contrast, Tim pointed out, the Amish communities in North America have, we suspect, sustained their simple way of life, barely touched by the global financial crises of the last few years. There are alternatives to the apparently all-consuming system - we just need to look for them, and have the imaginative courage to contemplate them.

'We need a new kind of Opposition', I argued in my last blog post. And Community Organising and widespread Time Banking, I suggested, are two key ways of finding it, and bridging the 'empathy deficit' which so poisons 'professional' and 'mass media' politics today. But there is more...

Before 'organising', there needs to be 'community'.

As a Christian theologian, I am reminded of the work of Stanley Hauerwas and those who have associated closely with him. Hauerwas, in a simplistic nutshell, argues long and hard that the Christian community - 'the church' in its local form - should be the location of an 'alternative society', where human beings are formed (from birth upwards) in a different way, with a different kind of imagination, speaking a different kind of language, and acting in a different kind of way, to that of those 'outside'. Hauerwas writes persuasively - and he could never be labelled 'conservative' in any conventional sense: he warmly embraces same-sex relationships, for example, he is unambiguously anti-capitalist, and he would give his life in non-violent resistance to the militarist violence of the world.

But there is more. As important as Hauerwas' 'turn to community' is, highlighting as it does the kind of 'ideal' that the Amish communities we've already mentioned might almost embody, the danger of Hauerwas' rhetoric is that encourages Christians to retreat into their enclaves, away from 'engagement' with their non-Christian neighbours. And also, in fact, it simply doesn't do justice to the way Christians are shaped both by their participation in church communities and also by their participation in neighbourly relationships, in other (non-'Christian') organisations, in economic exchange, democratic politics, and so on. What one of Hauerwas' friends and critics Romand Coles calls the 'radical insufficiency' of each of our traditions, organisations and communities, Hauerwas will never quite acknowledge about the church.

From 'church' to 'neighbourhood'

What we're trying to do in Hodge Hill is a bit different. Shaped and driven by the values of compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope we Christians have learnt within our faith tradition, we are committed to being present and active in our local neighbourhood, seeking out and celebrating those values in our neighbours and other local organisations, of other faiths and of none, and finding common ground in those values to work together to re-imagine and experiment with 'growing loving community' in this place. It's untidy, messy even. It's often fragile. It's certainly not always 'successful', in any conventional sense. It relies both on using the power we have (sometimes), and just as often - if not more - on giving it away, or simply letting it go. It sometimes involves taking the initiative, but often involves waiting for others to do so, or responding creatively ('overaccepting', I have called it) to those things that are already underway or just beginning.

We have a long way to go here before we could even begin to claim to be comprehensively re-imagining what 'community', let alone 'society', might look like. The 'Transition Towns' network is an inspiration to me, and I know other friends and neighbours round here, as to the kind of direction we might find we're heading in: a holistic approach to community that includes, centres itself on, the earth itself, that seeks a high level of self-sufficiency - not as individuals, but as a neighbourhood - and that dares to say, loud and clear, 'enough is enough'. But even 'transition towns' are on a journey, rather than 'got there' - and are far from a comprehensive, or clearly-heard, voice in national political conversations. They are good on 'green issues' - but what are 'transition towns' doing about welfare, or adult social care, for example? It would be good to hear, and see, what the possibilities might be, when you start the journey from somewhere radically different.

Insurrection: 'change the system by ignoring it'

With all these thoughts buzzing around my head from last night to this morning, my much-longed-for Saturday morning lie-in didn't really happen. Instead, I reached for one of the books on the 'to read' pile beside my bed, and dipped into Peter Rollins' challenging, provocative Insurrection: To Believe is Human; To Doubt, Divine. In the chapter entitled 'I Believe in the Insurrection', he reminds us, via readings of Batman (The Dark Knight) and The Matrix trilogy, why 'trying to change the system' (the 'token gesture') and 'attacking the system' (the 'perverse protest') both ensure that the system never changes. The 'token gesture' (giving to someone in need, volunteering at a homeless shelter, channelling millions of pounds from Wayne Industries into fighting Gotham City's baddies) might give us a sense of meaning, but can simply mask the oppressive structures and systems that create the needs. Our 'direct and passionate protests' against the system, however, can be just as 'perverse', enabling us to feel like rebels for a while, but often simply turning out to be 'release valves in the system, opportunities for people to resist in a way that [is] ultimately authorized by those in control'.

Rollins suggests a different way, a way with echoes of Hauerwas, but pushing further than Hauerwas would want to go. 'The way of Resurrection life', says Rollins, is 'a way of living that is able to short-circuit the present social, spiritual, or political order' - that is able to 'change the system by ignoring it'. He cites Mother Teresa as an embodiment of this different way: 'who no more protested against the caste system in Calcutta than she affirmed it. She simply lived a different reality.' For Rollins, in fact, Mother Teresa embodies the bigger argument of his book: in committing to her work with passion, while holding a 'deep inner agony and emptiness', Rollins sees her as someone who undertakes a journey, shaped by the story of Jesus, on which all Christians are called to embark: beginning with 'giving up everything for God (Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane), through the act of giving up everything including God (Christ on the Cross) to the point at which we become the very site of God (Resurrection life).'

In the UK today, and perhaps in the world more widely, we urgently need to find a way beyond the 'token gesture' and the 'perverse protest' which allow the system to 'go on' as if there really is no serious alternative. While Rollins helpfully calls me back to my faith, and my faith community, in 'changing the system by ignoring it', he doesn't immediately seem to allow for the messy experimentation within a neighbourhood, to which we're passionately committed in Hodge Hill, and in which we are glimpsing real signs of hope, and alternative possibility. But the kind of 'a/theistic' journey that Rollins sees embodied in the life of Mother Teresa is, I suspect, the kind of journey on which we all need to embark in our neighbourhoods, and our country, for the world to really be changed. We need to come face to face with the impossibility of community: with its inherent brokenness, because of the fragile, broken human beings that make it up - and we need to be able to lament this, with anger and deep sorrow, without clinging to a facade of innocence, but in a way that goes beyond 'perverse protest' or violent scapegoating - in a way rooted in what theologian Andrew Shanks calls the 'solidarity of the shaken'.

This might, if people like me are very lucky, turn out to be a valuable contribution that the Christian church could make to wider society - a witness to that brokenness and impossibility, held together with a witness to hope and possibility; a witness to the possibility of facing up to the brokenness in ways that don't do violence, and don't fall into despair or cynicism. It should, both locally and nationally, be a cause for the Christian church to engage in tactics - opportunistic openings - rather than strategies - those 'grand visions' so beloved of politicians, managers and - at times - bishops and priests (as I have, boringly often, suggested here before).

But ultimately, it is the calling for all of us, as human beings together. To embark on a journey where we find ourselves 'giving up everything for community', through the shock of 'giving up everything including community', to discovering a radically new way of life in which everything has changed, our human brokenness has not been eradicated, and yet love and justice reign. On that journey of re-imagining, of resurrection, of insurrection, we are best of starting the only place we can: exactly where we are - on our street, in our neighbourhood. But it will lead us to the ends of the earth.

Our Community Passion Play

Phil Howkins is one of those people who’s very hard to say No to. His enthusiasm (and he’s got bucket-loads of it) is infectious, and you very easily find yourself getting drawn into his latest big idea. Phil was one of our ‘Unsung Heroes’ at the awards ceremony we organised a year ago. When we asked him at the time ‘if you could find 2 or 3 neighbours to join you, what would you start in your neighbourhood?’, Phil talked about his passion to start a Theatre Group on the Firs & Bromford estates. Not black tie trips into Birmingham to see Shakespeare at The Rep, but local people getting together to put on theatrical productions here, on the estate, for local people to enjoy.

With some support from our ‘Unsung Heroes’ fund, as well as some funding from Star People (which helps local entrepreneurs try out, set up and build their own businesses), Phil got a group together to put on a panto, Aladdin, in the Bromford Community Centre, just before Christmas. Our very own Paul Wright from The Hub was a very colourful genie, and Tim Evans (variously known as local Councillor and Iona’s Dad) was the sinister Abanazer. It was a great show, loads of fun, and you could tell how much many of those taking part had grown in confidence in the process.

But before the panto had even happened, Phil had started thinking about the next project. A number of us from church were in a meeting one day when Phil came out with it: ‘I want to put on a Community Passion Play’. Brilliant idea, we all said. ‘Will you join me?’ he asked. Of course we would, we said. And so just before Christmas, Phil was round my house one evening, asking me to tell him the Passion story as I saw it – and went away laden with books from my shelves, different translations and re-tellings of the gospel stories.

He did his homework over Christmas, and in January we set down again, he dictated the script, and I typed it up on my laptop. We got some funding through Near Neighbours, which has helped us pay for a real donkey, some publicity, and a film crew who will capture it on the day and turn it into a DVD to give to local schools. We began to recruit a cast (local residents from the estate, people from church, and many of us who are both). We asked the Firs & Bromford Women’s Group (mostly Muslim women, who were delighted to be asked) if they would provide food for ‘the crowd’ at ‘the Last Supper’. And we walked through the estate to find good scenes for the drama: the Jerusalem Temple (St Wilfrid’s RC Church steps), the Last Supper (a green ‘square’ just at the bottom of Berrandale Road), the Garden of Gethsemane (into the ‘wasteland’ that once had tower blocks, between Newport Road and the M6), Pilate’s Palace (a disused substation), and finally Golgotha, the place of crucifixion (just under the towering pillars of the M6 itself). 

When it all comes together on Palm Sunday afternoon, Sunday 24^th March, 3pm, it will probably be a bit chaotic, a bit ‘unfinished’ – but it will be full of passion, and it will be ‘earthed’ in the day-to-day reality of the place in which many of us live. It will, in other words, be ‘the Gospel according to Us’ (as a recent passion play in Port Talbot, starring Martin Sheen, was titled).

If we as a church had decided to do ‘a Community Passion Play’, we would no doubt have thrown ourselves into it, and might well have been able to persuade some of our neighbours to come along and watch. The fact that we have been invited, by one of our neighbours and friends, to become part of his ‘big idea’, to journey with him as he explores and unfolds and re-tells the story, is a gift beyond measure. With ‘Unsung Heroes’ – when we were seeking out people of compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope – we were deliberately trying to ‘look for what God was doing in our neighbourhood, and joining in with it’. With the Firs & Bromford Community Passion Play, we are being invited to step into our most treasured story, afresh, and to discover it living and breathing at the heart of our local community, as strangers and neighbours become friends, and God’s footsteps are followed down our street.

Making sense of 'mission', Hodge Hill style

On a recent training day for a colleague I'm currently supervising, we were presented with the following model for the 'journey of discipleship'...

And it set me thinking. Actually, first it set me seething, and then I started thinking. Now, I could spend paragraphs detailing every detail of what's wrong with it, but that would be pretty unedifying stuff. Much more interesting, I think, is to begin to articulate constructive alternatives. But to do so, a little bit of critique is probably a prior necessity...

Firstly, there's the implied - actually, fairly explicit - hierarchy. The goal of discipleship, apparently, is to become part of an 'army' of 'leaders'. Now, my reading of the gospels can sometimes be a bit eccentric, but I'm really not sure where the descriptions of Jesus' calls to his disciples might suggest such a thing. Peter on the beach, post-crucifixion-resurrection, might be invited to 'feed my sheep' - but he's still called to 'follow me', and there ain't much evidence of him joining an 'army'.

Secondly, there's what it assumes about church. That somehow it's a body of concentric circles, the 'leaders' being in the middle. In real life, of course, church is a collection of overlapping groups and contexts, and where we might find ourselves 'leading' in one context, we would do well to realise in a different context that we come as 'visitor'.

Which leads me on to a more critical flaw. The suggestion that when you're 'outside' it's all about 'receiving', and when you're 'inside' you make a shift to 'giving'. What assumptions is this making?

For a start, pretty obviously it's working with a 'deficit' model of faith: people 'outside' the faith community (the 'dry bones', no less!) are 'lacking' something, which they then 'receive', and are then equipped to 'give' to others. Biblical scholars might point us to the 'handing over' of which Paul talks (with reference to the beginnings of the practice of sharing bread and wine in remembrance of Jesus) - but it should also be noted in that context that the same word for 'handing over' is used of Judas' betrayal of Jesus. We would do well to remember that what we imagine we are 'passing on' in faithfulness, we may well also be 'betraying' in the process. The implication also that those of us 'inside' somehow stop 'receiving' seems to suggest that, in actual fact, 'discipleship', the art of following Jesus, really stops once you're 'in'.

What it says about human beings, then, I find more than a little scary. Prayer, conversation, social action, even parties, are merely the 'preparatory' stuff for Christian faith. Once you've 'got it', it's all about the hard work of 'training', 'giving', 'specialising' and 'leading'. 'The glory of God,' to misquote Irenaeus, is not 'humanity fully alive,' but 'individuals trained up to lead.'

So much for the critique (and don't even get me started on 'slipping God in' covertly somewhere between the first benign 'social event' and the full-on 'enquirers' course'...). What about the reconstruction for our context here in Hodge Hill?

Well, I'm not sure whether to begin at the 'beginning' or the 'end'. And that's perhaps the first constructive point. I don't think discipleship is a neat, linear journey. As a journey into a mystery - the Mystery - there's a hell of a lot of 'one step forwards, two steps back', of circling around, and of going off on tangents that turn out to be heading straight into the open arms of God.

Which means, secondly, that those we might class as apparently 'outside' the furthest fringes of 'church' (and even the boundaries between 'inside' and 'outside' are so much more fuzzy than we're sometimes led to believe) might well often be closer to God than we are ourselves. So let's ditch the deficit model. It stinks. Especially in neighbourhoods like ours here in Hodge Hill, where people are all-too-used to being told, and treated as if, they are 'lacking', 'needy', 'deprived' and 'dependent'. Let's start working on the 'asset' - or 'giftedness' - model of human beings - that each woman, man or child we encounter has within them passions, gifts and skills, knowledge and wisdom, faith, that are integral to them bearing God's image and impress, and which they breathe with the breath of the Spirit.

So thirdly, our idea of mission here is to discover the places of common ground that turn out to be holy ground. Looking, as we do here, for evidence of compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope, as signs of God's kingdom springing up around us, we find ourselves as much guests as hosts, as much invited as inviters. The holy ground is by no means within our control, our familiarity, or even our understanding - we discover it as seekers, visitors, disciples - and in it, on it, we discover our neighbours and their giftedness.

Of course, we may have a role, sometimes, in co-creating spaces where the gifts and skills and faith of others are drawn out and enabled to flourish - what I've labelled 'over-accepting' in other blog posts here - but funnily enough, those co-created spaces are also the places where our own gifts and skills and faith are drawn out and enabled to flourish. And those spaces, where trust has been built sufficiently, might be spaces where we can share our 'whys?' and the stories of our roots and our longings - but we have found here that we have got to know our own stories better, more fully, through working, being, waiting, talking, listening alongside others very different to us.

Oh, and in case it's not obvious, prayer and conversation, parties and social action (let's rephrase that as 'action in solidarity', or 'making change happen together') happen in those first encounters, but also just happen to be hallmarks of what we sometimes call 'the kingdom of God'. They're what being a disciple, being human, being fully alive, are all about.

Want an example? I'll post a blog in just a moment on the amazing, evolving, Firs & Bromford Community Passion Play. As examples go, it's about as good as it gets.