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The week before last saw a consultation on the future of the Child Theology Movement take place at High Leigh conference centre, Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire. This is a movement Haddon Willmer has been closely involved with from its beginnings in the late 1990s, and I was fortunate to be able to participate in last week’s consultation as a note-taker and administrator.

Child Theology is a young term, with no clearly defined subject matter, so a wide range of topics were discussed: the role of human rights’ declarations in guarding the well-being of children, theology and child activism, children and the Bible. We also heard the personal reflections of Frances Young, a Christian theologian whose work has grappled theologically with her experience of caring for her now 49 year-old son with severe learning difficulties.

Throughout all these discussions, however, there were two recurring themes which helped me to understand what Child Theology might be and who it might be for.

Firstly, it became clear that Child Theology is not a separate branch of theology, specifically for children, or for those who work with children. It is not an end in itself; it is not a particular ideology; and it is not competing with other theologies. Rather, it takes a particular starting point – the child – and asks how she might be a clue or a sign towards God as revealed in Jesus Christ. In Matthew 18, when the disciples were having an argument about who would be the greatest in the Kingdom of God, Jesus placed a child in their midst. Child Theology asks what difference this child might make for our own theological arguments today.

Secondly, it emerged for me in the consultation that Child Theology makes this challenge to all of us, because we are all theologians. Theology, the consultation showed me, is not primarily an academic field, but a way of speaking that no Christian can do without. It is, after all, talking to, of and with God. The Child Theology Movement talks serious theology with the child in the midst, but it does so with practical people—Christian practitioners, activists and ministers—as well as with academic theologians. So following the clue of the child placed in the midst by Jesus is an invitation to each one of us.

At the end of the consultation, we meditated on the Lord’s Prayer. One person wrote a prayer that I thought others may also appreciate. It is a way of ‘saying the Lord’s prayer from a different perspective’.

Saying the Lord’s Prayer from a different perspective

Deliver us from the evil – of ever giving up praying this prayer

whatever the pressure of temptation.

Deliver us from losing the ‘our’ to make the Father ‘mine’.

Deliver us from claiming the Kingdom now rather than steadily praying for it to Come.

Deliver us from seeking the Father in heaven as though he has abandoned the earth

where there is stomach hunger for missing daily bread

where there is sinning up to seventy times seven

Deliver us from escaping the Father’s house to seek our misfortune in the far country

Rather let us ever and again find our way back to our Father’s welcome feast with all the household

So let his name, Father, be credible, to all in all things for ever

Earlier this month Hilary and Haddon Willmer visited Sweden, at the invitation of Sven-Gunnar Liden, a leader in the anti-trafficking movement in Sweden and in the European Baptist Federation. Hilary told large audiences of professionals and parents why parents are crucial frontline agents when children are sexually exploited, and why agencies like police and social services should support and work with parents for the sake of the children.  The picture below shows Hilary with Sven-Gunnar Liden.

Since then, Hilary and Graham have been to Westminster, launching the latest Pace publication, Parents Speak Out, to Police and Crime Commissioners, politicians and others. The document, the cover of which you can see above, can be downloaded and saved from https://www.moortownbaptistchurch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Parents-Speak-Out-final.pdf

Here is the sermon Haddon preached in Sven-Gunnar Liden’s church.

 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BEGINNING

For 20 years, Hilary and I have been active in the charity known as Pace, Parents against Child Sexual exploitation.

I have heard many parents tell their story about how they act for their children, against sexual exploitation.

When a parent discovers one of their children is being groomed, they are surprised, horrified, distraught, confused, and feel weak in this disaster…

But being committed to their child, they are also resilient, aroused, driven to do anything they can…

They go searching, through the night, in dangerous places, sometimes in faraway towns, looking for their missing child…

When they see the child, they tell her they love her, through everything; they do everything they can think of to win her back from the insidious corrupting pull of the grooming and from the distrust and resistance it builds up in her….

They do anything they can to stop and disempower the exploiters, acting on their own and in cooperation with police and other agencies …

They do this for as long as it takes, often months, sometimes years, even when no end is in sight, and they hold on through one crisis after another….

I am deeply impressed by so many parents who respond in this way, rising to a task they are not prepared for by experience or training – they are not professionals, who deal with CSE every day.

What is so impressive about parents of this sort?   What is their secret?   Can we all share it? Will understanding them help us all to find strength and wisdom for our living?

Besides parents, there are many people who respond with care and competence to young people who are sexually exploited.   Many Police and social workers, medics and politicians, journalists and theoreticians.     They bring resources to bear on the issue which parents do not have.   But parents have something they do not have.   What is that?

Let me explain it this way:

When a young person is in trouble, and sexual exploitation might be the cause, social workers and police get involved with the family, often for the first time.   So their first sight is a teenager in a bad way,   physically harmed, disturbed in mind and spirit, alienated from family and friends, unable to break free of devious controllers.

The parent sees all this, but sees more, much more, and sees it vividly and powerfully.   For what the parent sees is not just this present moment, this teenage aberration, but the whole life of this precious human being from the beginning.   They look with the eyes of the parent who has accompanied the child from birth onwards.   The parent looks at the teenager and sees her for what she is now and responds to it realistically.   But at the same time, the child is like a transparency to the parent: through the teenager the parent sees the baby they remember and the child they have lived with through the years.

So the parent sees what the professional cannot be expected to see or give weight to. And the parent sees all the yesterdays, which the teenager, eager for life today and tomorrow, may be running away from, not seeing any worth in it. The parent holds on to something about the child which the child finds it difficult to appreciate and build on. The child wants to get away from parents and family and home, which has become boring. It is right for children to grow up and away from childhood; but we all need to grow up in a healthy way, not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

We none of us remember our own birth, our own beginning. But parents were there unforgettably.   The living memory of the child, from the beginning and through all the years, is a source of the parents’ commitment, strength, hope, determination, wisdom.   The parents share in making the beginning. They experience the wonder of seeing a new person, a radical novelty, coming into the world. They find themselves committed deeply to an awesome, lifelong responsibility. This happening does something to empower them to love and they find themselves tested and enriched by loving.

Listen to the testimony of Irene Ivison, the woman who founded what is now Pace, back in 1997. Her daughter Fiona was groomed by a notorious pimp, and then murdered by a man buying sex in 1995. Irene wrote a book, Fiona’s Story, and I quote from the Introduction.   She speaks directly to the man who murdered her daughter –

Did you ever love a child, Duffy?

Seventeen years later you murdered this precious infant of mine.

Did you never love a child like that?

You can’t have or you would never have harmed her.

Can you conceive of the suffering you caused me when you unleashed your anger and frustration upon my beautiful girl?

I loved her then and for every minute of her seventeen years, no matter what she did.

She was Fiona, a special child, I had held her close, nurtured and cared for her, and you smashed her in your blind, unthinking, murderous rage.

I will never understand what you did to Fiona and my family. There are no answers.

I only know that when I held Fiona at her birth, I loved her so much that I would have died rather than see her hurt – my precious, beautiful, wonderful child.

Parents share in the making of the new. Thinking that they ‘make the child’ is a mistake to avoid,   they share actively in the making and it leaves a near indelible print.

Parents are there at the beginning.   To be involved in the beginning of anything, like being a founder member of a church,  is a deeply formative experience. It is an experience that lives on, and may grow over time.

Seeing parents as people involved in a significant beginning helps us to see God more clearly.   In a little way, being involved in the beginnings of a child helps us to understand better the witness of the Bible to God the creator of all ‘in the beginning’, the Source and sustainer and redeemer of all things.

Look again at our reading today:   Isaiah 43. 1-7

This passage is the answer to the question of Isaiah 40.27: Why do you say, God does not see, God does not care, God does nothing to help? This is the question of the exiled people, just as it is the question of trafficked and oppressed people, and of parents who wonder whether their child will ever get free of the exploitation and the damage it is doing.   Who cares? Who helps? Sometimes it seems, no one or earth or in heaven notices.   Isaiah offers an answer to this question. It is not an easy one. You may think it is no answer at all to the pressing question. In exile, we want a solution to our problem now. We want release from our oppressors now. The prophet, speaking for God, does not point us directly to the solution happening now.   Instead he asks us to look to the beginning, and to understand our present from ‘the foundations of the earth (40.21). Lift up your eyes and see all things as created by the One who is eternally the Beginning, not in time but outside it (40.26). Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth?  See this, and trust God enough to wait for God in constant undemanding readiness.

So we can read chapter 43 expansively:

Thus says the Lord, He who created you, who formed you

Your beginning is by my choice and free act, my commitment to you is rooted there

Fear not, for I have redeemed you;   I have called you by name, you are mine

You are precious in my eyes and honoured and I love you

So, when you pass through the waters, trafficked, exploited, distraught,

I will be with you.

I will say to the north Give Up and to the south, Do not Withhold Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth Everyone who is called by my name You are precious in my eyes and honoured and I love you I am the Lord who created and formed you, I redeem you, I am committed to you

This text invites us all, whatever the trouble, worry, exile we are in, to lift up our eyes and find anew the strength that is given to those who wait for the Lord.

How do we wait for the Lord?   We watch, we wait actively, we wait engaging in life from day to day – and then we are met by the Lord, the creator, who is not a remote once upon a time starter of the world, but is present, the faithful giver and sustainer of all life and goodness.

When we watch and wait for the Lord in our parenting, we find we are close and active companions of God in the world. We are walking with the Lord who gives life, who calls and loves human beings to be his friends and companions, who struggles with us and gives us a share in his struggle.

To be a parent is not an easy ride, not a fair-weather trip. It demands our life and time, our energy and wisdom, our love and grace, and often more than we seem to have.

To be the creator of the world, committed totally to its Shalom and fulfilment, is not a fair-weather trip.   It is not easy for God.   So we see in the Bible, and most of all in Jesus Christ, that the way God takes in the world is the way of suffering with the sufferers, of holding on in hope, in trying again and again to put things right, and not giving up – this is the everlasting God, the inexhaustible God, the resilient God of resurrection.  Resurrection tells us, God is not dead. God is not giving up. We see in the life, death and raising of Jesus, God, who says an unequivocal, irreversible Yes to his creation, a God who wills good.

We are invited to live our lives with this God and no other, in the Spirit of God.   And if we are parents whose children are at risk of being sexually exploited, the steady resolve of God to see his creation blossom fully, to realise its beauty, can inspire us and challenge us to go on, even through the dark night.

The Spirit we see in God can be our spirit.

I like the way St Athanasius in the 4^th century put it in his book, On the Incarnation of the Word (6), an inspiring rational proclamation of the good news of God in Jesus Christ.

It was unworthy of the goodness of God that creatures made by Him should be brought to nothing through the deceit wrought upon human being by the devil.

It was supremely unfitting that the work of God in mankind should disappear, either through their own negligence or through the deceit of evil spirits.

As, then, the creatures whom He had created reasonable, like the Word, were in fact perishing, and such noble works were on the road to ruin, What then was God, being Good, to do? Was He to let corruption and death have their way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning?

The question that came to God, as Athanasius pictured it, is the question that comes to parents:  If you see the precious creation being ruined, what are you to do?

What then was God, being Good, to do?   Was He to let corruption and death have their way with them?

The parent cannot walk away. You cannot say, it doesn’t matter, it counts for nothing.   It is precious. So you have to get engaged, and stay engaged, looking actively for ways of doing something effective about the problem.

God does that, says Athanasius, by the incarnation of the Word, by God coming as God into human life, as human being, to redeem and rescue humanity going to ruin, in contradiction to its beginning in God.   God comes as the enlightening Word, so that we see God’s way and can walk with God in it, and not be lost in exile, wandering in darkness and waste.

That is how God answers the Question: What are you, being good, to do when you see what you made in the beginning on the road to ruin?

God’s Question is our question too. And God answers it in a way that we can walk in with God.

By Haddon Willmer.

At the art class I go to each week, we were given Christmas as a theme for our next attempt. I dislike tinsel, though like most people I get entangled in it every year. It comes in many kinds and it seems churlish to do a Scrooge on it, saying ‘Humbug’.

But how to paint a picture doing justice to Christmas as told in the Gospels? This is daunting if one is not a skilled painter; and even more daunting when one is a mere human being, twenty-first century style.

But the choice seemed to me, either to try, even if it turned out a failure, or to keep clear altogether, and paint another summer landscape, where the sunshine in unambiguous.

My try was derived from the drawing on the left which I made years ago for a Christmas card:

But since then, I have written a whole-congregation nativity play based closely on the text of Matthew, leaving nothing out, including the genealogy and, controversially as it turned out, Herod the killer, and even more shockingly, Rachel, the mother who would not be comforted. The shock was rendered powerfully by some mothers in the church. And now, in the era of IS-Daesh and our responses which are too near to being Tit for Tat, it is impossible, it seems to me, to tell the Christmas story and leave out the dark side, the murderous ambiguity of Herod.

The message of the angels, Glory to God and peace on earth, must indeed be sounded in the picture, for it is joy to the world. But the frustration of the message in the world cannot be denied. On the nether side of Herod’s sword, there is death for the little ones, while on the other side, in the light from heaven, there is the Saviour born in a manger, all set for his flight into Egypt and his eventual deathly collision with the powers of the world who had taken over from Herod.

The Christmas story does not take us out of the real world. The picture tries to set up a blunt collision between the grace of God in the coming of Jesus the Saviour and the rule of Herod, the dark and the light.

So this is what I have painted, in my rough way:Besides this, I wanted to trace the journey of the Wise Men, from their seeing the star, to their meeting with Herod in Jerusalem, their finding the Baby King and giving him what they had to give, and then returning to their own country, ‘by another way’. Tracing the line of the journey helps to give the painting a more interesting structure than a mere dark-light confrontation would achieve. But as I have been doing it, I have thought about the Wise Men. Customarily they are portrayed as wise because they came to Jesus and, from that point, we extrapolate positive outcomes for them. Naturally then, many are mystified by the gloomy downbeat way T.S.Eliot ends his poem, ‘The Journey of the Magi’ (http://allpoetry.com/The-Journey-Of-The-Magi ). I wouldn’t put it quite as he did, perhaps because my thinking is so much in Herod’s shadow. The Wise Men saw what they came to see, and then could do nothing but return to their own country by another way. They could do nothing about Herod. They could not take the good news back to Jerusalem and persuade the scribes to sing ‘Joy to the world’ with them. They fled for their lives. Their trajectory ends in weakness and frustration. Is that a parable for how we are in the world, a parable too uncomfortable to be entertained?

One last thing. The light of the glory from heaven fades out in Herod’s darkness, but all the same it is a dynamic pressure, like rays streaming from the sun, driving on to the last spark. I haven’t shown that well though I have tried it. And Herod’s terrible sword is deliberately drawn so that Rachel is mostly on the dark side – understandably – but not entirely: her back is in the light, the mercy from on high is upon her, although she in her darkness does not, cannot know it.

The Christmas story is full of hard sad challenging mysteries. Why do we celebrate it with such superficial frivolity?

I have just read a deeply moving, illuminating book, The Drama of Living: Becoming Wise in the Spirit (Canterbury Press, 2014). It is so good I would like to persuade all my friends to read it.

The author is David Ford (left) until recently Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, not only a learned, influential theologian, but also an adventurous pilgrim of faith.

This is not a book directed at other theologians, but at anyone who is engaged in the drama of living. It is written in a plain, attractive style. It does not talk in academic code, and explains any technicalities simply and effectively.

All the same, it is a challenge worth rising to. I don’t pretend it is a doddle: it is not for reading on the beach, when you are sleepy in the sun. Give yourself the best possible conditions to hear it.

I presume to offer two helps to reading this book well, with enjoyment and benefit.

The first is to read chapter 5, on ‘Loving: Intimate, Dramatic, Ultimate’, as a taster. It begins with the unusual love poems of Siadhail, celebrating married love, then considers ‘the larger life of love’ in the world, where we all live with ‘the vocation to love’, and ends with more from the Gospel of John which centres on God’s loving and our living in that love.

The second help is to read it in a group of friends. This book has been made out of the many and varied conversations and joint projects David Ford has engaged in throughout his life –with friends and colleagues and in communities, such as L’Arche. They have been thinking and growing together. So it is in the spirit of the book for us to read it together, to help each other get the most out of it, and to share the drama of living together.

A group could read it in under three months ( a chapter at a time, every two weeks). I would not minimise the commitment of time and attention that would require, but I am sure it would be well worth the effort.

I would be glad to convene a group if it is wanted. Please get in touch by email: willmerhaddon@gmail.com

You can view a video of David Ford talking about the book at Westminster Abbey here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNIAlvxtZh8

 

“Rediscovering what it is to be human and that every human being matters.” 

Poor Alexamenos

Guy Dammann opens his review of Donizetti’s opera Polituo (in the TLS, 5 June 2015) with this startling paragraph:

In an age in which the greatest threat to Christianity comes, not from competing religions, but from apathetic acceptance of its basic values, it is interesting to reflect on how astonishing the beliefs of early Christians must have seemed to their sceptical contemporaries. How bizarre it must have seemed to the citizens of the Roman Empire, no less than to the Vikings nearly a century later, that these people chose to worship a god who allowed himself to be reviled, tortured and executed by his enemies. How profoundly different must have appeared the believers’ desire to supplant the martial and heroic modes so crucial to the extant order of society, with a world view based on the idea of self-sacrifice and universal forgiveness.

This has a lot of truth and a weighty punch. It is worth reflection. Even when you don’t fully agree with it, does it not open our eyes and alert us afresh to reality?

In comfortable Britain, are we living in an age where there is an ‘apathetic acceptance of the basic values’ of Christianity? Is that where the greatest threat comes from?

Could it even be that the unexamined substratum of the Church is ‘apathetic acceptance’?

Do we, in the church, or in this age, have any sense of Christianity as ‘bizarre’? Is our age as different as Dammann suggests from the Roman Empire and the Vikings? Aren’t the ‘modes’ that are now counted as ‘crucial to the extant order of society’ still martial and heroic? We still fight for security and success with weapons, and even more with money and propaganda and celebrity. Power and prestige go to the victors in various kinds of competition. The survival of the fittest not only explains how the world is as it is but forms our moral sense and drives us with fear and ambition.

So many people who are at home in this present age still find Christianity bizarre and impractical and laugh it away. Christianity won’t work in the ‘real world’.

To some, these hard-headed atheists seem too crude and strident. They don’t want to go so far. They are gentle friendly people, insulated from the martial and heroic world, so they have a sense that the ‘basic values’ of Christianity merge with common decency and with easy agnostic spirituality. The world they are can’t avoid in the working week is characterised by cut-throat skulduggery, profiteering and harsh inhumanity, but they can escape to find their own life in home and friends and leisure, where a different spirit reigns. And there, if they want, they can think themselves Christian in an imprecise and undemanding way.

‘Sceptical contemporaries’ look at this sort of people, and never see anything bizarre. There is nothing for them to make savage fun of, nothing like what an anonymous satirist found in poor Alexamenos, whom we know about because a cartoon (above left) dating from around 200 AD, was excavated in 1857 on a plastered wall, on the Palatine Hill, Rome.

The writing says: Alexamenos worships his god. Who is his god? A crucified man with an ass’s head. The sceptical contemporary quickly concludes: Alexamenos is a pathetic idiot.

Paul talked of ‘the foolishness of Christ crucified’ (I Cor. 1.23). He gloried in it, not ashamed of it. His was a paradoxically, counter-cultural, joyous faith in a strange power and wisdom of God played out in the life and death and raising of Jesus.

Does what we do and are in Church suggest that we choose ‘to worship a god who allowed himself to be reviled, tortured and executed by his enemies’?

How far does the age we live in base itself on ‘the idea of self-sacrifice’? Even Christians, who may give the idea a bit more than an apathetic, acceptance, try to keep self-sacrifice within reasonable limits. Or we find we are unable to rise to its challenge. And the idea of ‘universal forgiveness’ has seemed and still seems to many Christians, as well as to others, to go too far. Are there not some wrongs which are unforgivable? Wrongs which we find ourselves unable to forgive? We fear for morality if there is universal forgiveness. What do we really think about how far the love of God reaches? Will the God who went through the Cross get blocked by anything?

Are we called to have a world view based on the idea of self-sacrifice and universal forgiveness?

Three weeks ago we reported on a conference that Haddon and Hilary Willmer had attended the title of which was Faith in Dark Places. The conference focussed on the question of poverty in Leeds. However, one comment made by Anglican Clergyman/writer David Rhodes namely  “Why the rich …rich ?. Why does a rich always wants to be richer. If you are a billionaire, why is it you always want more money ? And I think this is something like some people on the street and its addiction.wealth is something to be ashamed of” forms the basis of an eight minute video shot at the meeting and available here http://www.emaan.tv/poverty-wealth-is-something-to-be-ashamed-of/

David Rhodes, the author of Finding Mr Goldman was one of the speakers at a recent conference at St Edmunds Church, Rounday which examined Faith In Dark Places: Myths and Lies about Poverty. Here Haddon Wilmer who was among the 130 people who attended the day of talks and workshops reviews Rhodes’ book describing it as “very unusual, mysteriously Christian, just the sort of thing Alpha and the rest of us could do with.”

Finding Mr Goldman: A Parable by David Rhodes (172 pages, SPCK, 2015).

‘David Rhodes pulls no punches in offering a vivid parable of false riches and ultimate redemption.  This sparkingly well-written fiction entertains unerringly at the front door while the truth slips in through a side window.’ (Adrian Plass)

So let yourself be entertained, as I have. Like a parable it nudges and hints, alerting and inviting us to human possibilities.  Read it, let yourself be nudged, don’t try to tie down the meaning, walk with Mr Goldman.

I won’t spoil the fun by telling even a bit of the story. Some things it points to are:

The reality of the person apart from possessions, power, pretension – Mr Goldman is dependent on his money and power, and on his own achievement in making a great empire, so he is nothing to himself without it. He cannot imagine another way of being apart from his wealth-laden self, nor does he want to, nor can he risk it.

What is done to persons warps them, turning them away from and against themselves. And what people do to themselves, as they try to escape or revenge themselves for what they have suffered, makes everything worse than ever.

Is there grace and opportunity to undo what we have become? Can I unlearn the way of being me I have built up so arduously through living in my way for so long? Can there be release?

How does release come from encounter with those who are poor, weak, and despised, and yet are generous? From those who suffer harm and yet go on loving?

Can those who have been made inhuman by what they have suffered and done recover their humanity?

Is there a grace in and through death?  From where we are now in this life we find it hard to think there could be. In (often unadmitted) fear of death, we hold on to this life, pretending it is more satisfactory than it is because it seems to be all we’ve got.

Entering life through death has to come to us through parable. Is it not always parable?  Truth here is not a simple fact. No matter how much we believe or think we  know, we can relate to it only  by letting it stand as parable, teasing us with its ‘now you see me, now you don’t’, so that we have to be always searching, sometimes finding, but never holding fast. As Sheppard says, at the very end of the book, ‘Don’t ask. Just keep walking’. This is even after Mr Goldman has seen God.

Entering into life through death is not accomplished in a moment. Mr Goldman walks into many encounters with strange people and surprisingly with God in disguise, resulting in disconcerting self-discovery. His possessions are prised from his obstinate grasp, and his pretensions exposed. It appears in the end that this devastating judgement comes from the love which is the beginning and end of God’s creation. And so there is forgiveness for Mr Goldman. And as he comes into its light, he is able to forgive those who hurt him and set him on his evil road.

This parable gets us to think about who we are and how we are living in the realities of the world today. And who God is and what God is doing, in roundabout obscure ways and in encounters that can shake us to the roots. And it leaves us with the question, who really is Sheppard?

In his article,  Stepping Out – Community and Social Action  (Moortown Baptist News 13 February 2015) Graham says that one of several things we need to do as a Church is ‘to develop the level of support, prayer and recognition for the individual witness, work and service of people at Moortown Baptist Church. These expressions are a vital calling in themselves.’

How could this be done?  

First, we need to recognise that the primary and constant form of Church engagement in society is what the members of the church community do every day of the week.

That amounts to far more time than can ever be given to activities run directly by the church.

It involves everybody in the church whether they choose it or not. We are all deeply, intimately, involved in ‘society’ in many different ways.

To recognise it we need to look into it – to ask questions together about it.

The first step would be to  take note of where the Church is in society through its members as dispersed during the week.

That could be done through a fun ‘getting to know one another in a new way’  exercise –  even by a bit of a party.

Here are some questions we could ask ourselves, and each other:

Where do you work? What are you responsible for in the world outside Church? From where you are,  how do you see society, its blessings, its potential and problems? Do you think you are useful  to God and to people through your daily work, or are you an ineffective bystander or just a victim of a society that doesn’t work well for the common good? Are you part of a team, doing something good or useful?

Don’t  say, I am a pensioner, I don’t work.   Pensioners don’t get paid, but like the stay-at home Mum, they work voluntarily and often very hard at humanly constructive and essential jobs.   And they have a distinctive and valuable understanding of ‘society’ coming from their experience.

Where do you live? Who are your  neighbours? What do you do for and with them? What do you care about in your small and larger neighbourhoods? What good do you do? What good do you receive?  What do you learn about living socially in our world as it is today?

What family do you live with or see often? How do different family members experience living in their corner of society? What does the experience of your spouse, your children, your parents show you about the potential and the problems of society?

By asking questions like this, we could build up a picture and a map of  the church we are, in this society now.  And, once we have the facts, we could move on to evaluation.

What do we see and understand about society because of our involvement in it? What is sad, frustrating, a challenge for change?   What good is already being done, and how could more be done?

Who are we, not as private persons, but as social beings and citizens? What am I, not in and for myself, but in the eyes and experience of others, (family members, neighbours, employers, clients, strangers,  even organisations)?    Am I valued for worthwhile service, or am I seen as a nuisance, a parasite, even a menace?

What allies and helpers do we find in doing good, and what blockages and negative neighbours?   How can we make better alliances and turn negatives into positives?  How do we keep going even when negatives persist powerfully?

Recognising ourselves as persons and as Christians who are inevitably socially involved, and evaluating our involvement is not an individual private exercise. It is not introspective narcissism. It is something we can and should do as Church together.  

We can and should  both appreciate and encourage one another in our present engagements. We can learn more about the reality of society  by finding out how others see and experience it. (I have a comfortable individual existence; through people around me, I know life is hard, and society a cruel, clumsy, unhelpful thing. It is other people  who give me an agenda for social engagement, who tell me there is something more to live for than my own personal fulfilment.) If we talk honestly, we can help one another to evaluate whether what we are doing in life in society  is right and worthwhile, or whether it would be better to change to doing something else. We can help each other through times of weakness, discouragement, perplexity and even disastrous mistakes and failures (which are quite likely for people living in the real world and trying to make a good difference).

So we can practise Hebrews 10.24,25: Consider how to stir  up one another  to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together…’     We will do more than encourage each other to do good works as individuals, as though we live in isolation. We meet together to do the stirring, and in our meeting together we discover good works to do together. And  it will go further: when we meet each other in church, as Christians who are citizens, responsible to God for the welfare of the city (the global world) where God has placed us, we will stir each other up politically.   For if we hear the cry of the needy world and want to do something to help, we will want to recruit all available resources, including the government, the economy, culture. There will be no cordon sanitaire, no fire-break, between our being Christian and our being citizens. That means, we won’t as Church, live through this election season as though there is nothing in it which should concern us.

If  we, as Church, work like this, we will learn from the inside  how our faith and obedience to God in Christ really works out in everyday life. We will have a realistic faith, which gets a degree of living visibility in society because it is rooted in practice, and is not just words (which is what we necessarily deal in in our meetings in church). We will be discovering faith in ways that can be communicated to other people more adequately, because we are doing things in the same world as other people, and doing them in such a way that the faith and life of Christ has body, as well as spirit. So it becomes accessible to people who want that kind of practical everyday reality. Our life of faith will not be an individual cultivation of spirituality, but a social life, where the society which is other people and Jesus Christ, the first-born amongst many brethren.

So we learn and deepen our faith in Christ through our engagement in society rather than trying to intensify our spiritual life in Church and occasionally have a bit of a social add-on. We get going, not by sitting in church asking ourselves how we can engage more in society, but by recognising seriously that we are already engaged in society. We are with God in Christ in the world, which is where God’s love takes him.

 

 

 

The play was fun: clownish, witty, satiric by turns. But we did not laugh much, because it had us working out where the play was going, what was being said, and how we should respond to its challenge.

The play is a funny way of reading Acts – could we take it as a model for our groups? Three people on holiday…  Julia the assistant minister in a Church, busy and keen, but frustrated with it all; Chris her younger brother, an actor, cynical about Church and faith, not least because he has been reacting for years against his bossy sister, with her ‘saintly’ status’; he does not like being called ‘gofer’; and Tony, an historian, an enthusiastic reader of Acts, and guide books about historical places, and distraught because his wife has got fed up and left him.

They do the usual things, sun too much, drink too much, argue and apologise – and for the whole week, they do a very unusual thing. They dip into the book of Acts, and they act it out – it is not only Chris who can improvise.

They don’t act it to make the past present, as in a historical costume drama; they let the story tell itself in the idioms of contemporary living. So the disciples don’t walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus (Luke 24), they ride in a car, with a Frisbee as the steering wheel, and Jesus is an unknown hitchhiker they pick up. They lend themselves as a medium for the story to tell itself again. Does the story do that, or does it get lost in the fun?

The play states the problem:  Our Church today is not like the first century Church we hear about in the book of Acts in the New Testament. A lame man lay helplessly begging at the Temple gate every day. Peter said to him: I don’t have any silver and gold, but what I have, I give: In the name of Jesus, rise and walk (Acts 3). The man started dancing. In the play, the lame man holds out his hand, croaking his request:  ‘Miracle’. He asks for what he really wants, the restoration of capacity for a full, free life. Julia says to him: ‘I can’t do miracles but what I have, I give you’. She puts some coins in his hand; he throws them back at her.

The play encounters the mystery in Acts: the surprise of Holy Spirit, the free God beyond our management. Here, we cannot describe or control: we must wait for the Spirit, let ourselves be contradicted and converted and carried by the Spirit.

Philip in Samaria was like Julia, busy running a big and lively church, and then the Holy Spirit told him to get on the road in the desert where there was nobody (Acts 8). He obeyed, though it seemed a stupid career move.  And there he met the eunuch, travelling back to Queen Candace’s court in Ethiopia, reading the prophet Isaiah but not understanding it. When Philip explained it, he believed in Jesus and was baptised, and went on his way rejoicing. And so Christian faith very early was taken to Africa – the Spirit gets unlikely things done.

Acts tells how the first Christians came to see that the God who came to them in Jesus is the God of all peoples of the earth; and so Christians must be able to break through all the high walls that divide people from each other. So the play tells the story of the ‘second most significant meal’ in the Bible (the first is, of course, the Lord’s Supper). Christians are not different from other people: we love our own high walls, treasuring our identity and security. And Christian leaders may have a special investment in keeping the walls high. Conversion is necessary; and conversion is hard to come by.

So it was for Peter, the faithful Jew (Acts 10). Peter is hungry, sleeping on the roof in the heat of the day, and in his dream, he sees a sheet comes down from heaven – and, horror! – it is full of unclean creatures (according to the rules in Leviticus 11, including for example, the horse, the pig and the ostrich). Yet the chef says: Come, Peter, kill and eat. Peter will not: I have never eaten anything unclean. The chef is angry as chefs can be: No one calls my food unclean. Eventually Peter does what he is told. He crosses the boundary and eats, and thus is made ready to go to Cornelius when that Gentile soldier wants Peter the Jew to share the way of Jesus with him and his people.

As the play comes towards its end, the theme of reconciling welcome across the deepest divides is expressed in two ways. In Acts, Paul comes to Rome, where he lives in his hired house for two years, welcoming all who come to him, Jew and Gentile, ‘preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ, quite openly and unhindered’ (Acts 28. 31). Acts is an artful literary work, deliberately given an ending which is open, wrapping nothing up. It leaves its readers to carry on the story. And in the play, there is a movement of reconciliation for the three people, as they break bread and drink wine on the beach. Chris is still sceptical, but he will not be left out when the bread is given, he will eat with the others knowing what he is doing. Tony has a message on his phone from his wife, asking if he is open to having a conversation, since she has been having second thoughts about breaking up; and Julia, in an extraordinary crisis of penitence, breaks down and cannot drink the wine, because she does not respect and love her companions on holiday and so does not help them to be respectful to her  (I would like to have the script – I cannot remember the actual words here, and they are vital, as the play is so sensitively and precisely phrased throughout).

There are too many good things in the play than I can mention here. The puppet jailer in Philippi is fun (Acts 16). Cutting is the scene where the Christians pray for Peter in prison; they are so pious, unbelieving, unexpectant, engrossed in their religious exercises that they don’t have the free intelligence to hear Peter banging at their door, but are rather annoyed at their useless prayers being disturbed.

I can’t omit the remarkable conflation of Acts 2 and Acts 28. Near the end of the evening we are taken back to the beginning of Acts, the day of Pentecost, not mentioned before. The secluded frightened disciples in the upper room are shaken with earthquake, wind blowing, and tongues of flame descending; and then it morphs into the storm which broke the ship Paul and Luke with 274 others and cast them up on the island of Malta, where they were welcomed by the people.

The picture above shows the cast of Fantastic Acts (left to right) John Holden-White, Edith Kirkwood and Daniel Starkie who are accompanied on this seven week tour by Technical expert Dave Robinson.

The Riding Lights Theatre Company is based at the Friargate Theatre in York. Each year it tours extensively giving over 500 performances, runs a Summer School, publishes books, sketches and plays and runs workshops in schools, theatres, village halls and even prisons.

There are many ways we can support the Riding Lights Theatre Company but probably the most effective is to become a member. “Members” it says in the Fantastic Acts programme,”are our lifeblood, making possible the work we do, across the UK, every year”.  To see a full list of tour venues or to find out more about Membership you can call 01904 655317, email info@rltc.org or visit the Company’s website at www.ridinglights.org

To view a larger version of any of our gallery pictures simply click on the image.