Faith and Theology: On assisted suicide: the problem with choice

Faith and Theology: On assisted suicide: the problem with choice

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This blog post and the related letter raise an interesting question about the nature of autonomy and personal choice in the debate about assisted suicide. Is our Western notion of autonomy and choice largely illusory and socially determined (as in the Bantu word ubuntu - I am who am because of you, and vice versa, the choices we make and the lives we lead we do in relation to one another, not in isolation)?

It gives pause for thought in the mounting debate about the decriminalisation of assisted suicide in the UK, in particular when autonomy and choice are the principle arguments in favour of legalisation.

Bishop Says Church of England Won't Surivive Without Radical Change

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/9758 - nothing new here, but a public recognition from within the C of E leadership that t cannot count on being part of the Establishment much longer, that it has to rethink how it can remain a part of the life of modern Britain and how it must rethink its mission to England and to the wider world.

One wonders if the formal structures can handle the change fast enough, or like a super-tanker trying to avoid an iceberg, it takes too long to slow and change the behemoth's direction before disaster strikes.

Of course, loss of an established denominational structure no more means the death knell of the church than the sinking of a ship stops people travelling - they just change vessel or mode of transport. The church in new and unexpected forms is popping up everywhere, and long may it do so - I just hope that the formal structures of my church can change direction before one expression of faith in Jesus in this nation collapses beyond repair.

But that is in God's hands, ultimately.

Foreign aid does more harm than good

Dambisa Moyo argues that aid has actually stopped development in Africa by enforcing dependency rather than creating space for bottom up wealth creation and development.

This is a an argument that is growing in force, and seems increasingly to be coming from Africans - not politicians but economists, entrepreneurs and business leaders. It would be good to know what the African churches are thinking about this? Many are tied by aid apron strings to their Western parent denominations, but an increasing number of indigenous African churches are kicking free of Western ties (although many seem to be creating new ties, especially to the more odious ends of the American health, wealth and prosperity heresies).

I think this is a new debate that needs to be had - the old models are simply not working any more (if they ever truly did). We need new thinking if we are going to eliminate global poverty.

Spiritual Care Conference – Days 2 & 3

The second two days of the conference were primarily for student nurses and teachers. In a wide range of seminars, themes exploring spiritual care in mental health nursing, midwifery, palliative care and general nursing. There were about 22-23 nursing academics and teachers, and about forty to fifty students – mostly from Norway, but also several from Netherlands and Romania.

The first day's themes around how to train nurses in spiritual care were reiterated, but also looking at the issue of the ethics of spiritual care when nurse and patients have different belief systems. The case of Caroline Petrie, the nurse suspended (and later re-instated) after offering to pray for a patient was widely discussed (I was surprised to find how much coverage her story had garnered across Europe). Linda Ross and Wilf McSherry explored this theme together in a closing plenary session, and the debate that was generated could have gone on for the rest of the day!

It was clear from much of the discussion that one problem has been the teaching of spiritual care as a distinct module, rather than interweaving it with all other aspects of care – which reflects more how spiritual care is delivered in practice. From my own experience, it is usually while conducting a routine (though often intimate) task, such as a bed bath or dressing a wound, that a patient will ask a leading question, or make a statement that expresses a spiritual or existential concern. It is a much underrated skill in the art of nursing to read such comments and use sensitive questioning to explore further with the patient the underlying questions and needs the patient is expressing. While looking for the question behind the question is not a teachable skill - it is learnt and acquired through years of experience - the basic skills if observation and reflective questioning are readily taught. One concern I have is that the practice of nursing is moving away from the bedside and in to the office, such that it is the nursing assistant that does the "real" nursing rather than the Registered Nurse. That may explain why RNs in particular express so many anxieties about spiritual care.

Another theme that emerged was the need for evidence based practice in the field. We have long moved on from trying to define spiritual care – there are as many definitions as there are papers and text books, but we do now need to justify all areas of nursing practice in terms of outcomes – not an easy task for such a rarefied and unquantifiable area. I think nursing has less of a professional problem with fuzzy edges and ambiguity, but it is in health system that has focussed on the paradigm of the machine –with inputs, outputs, throughputs and processes at the fore, rather than the ragged complexity of human suffering and healing, which is the rality that nurses deal with routinely. But there is research being done on how best to care for people spiritually, and that is something we need to use as the basis for all training and practice, and to justify the role of spiritual care in nursing care (and indeed all healthcare).

Spiritual care in mental health is a new frontier – with research emerging only slowly. It is a contentious area, as some religious and existential issues will be exacerbated or expressed in mental illness.

Finally, the need for research and training to be multidisciplinary is also key – all aspects of the health service need to recognise human beings as complex social, psychological, relational, spiritual beings, rather than biological machines to be fed through a system. That is going to take more than a few seminars or conferences – it demands a fundamental, radical culture change in healthcare management, government health policy and applied medical science. So – the revolution starts here!

Spiritual Care Conference, Bergen, Norway

Most of this week I have been meeting with nurse leaders, academic, lecturers and students from across Europe as we once again explore what spiritual care is, and how we in practice care for the spiritual needs of our patients. In the UK this has recently become a hot topic with nurses suspended for praying with patients, and the National Secular Society has called for the NHS to stop funding all chaplaincy services.

And there is no doubt, as a recent Nursing Times survey has illustrated, that most nurses in Britain at least, find themselves poorly equipped to assess the spiritual needs of their patients and address the care needs that are subsequently identified. My father-in-law, a full time hospital chaplain, has commented on more than one occasion that most of the nurses in his hospital are actually embarrassed to even ask if a patient has a faith or belief system – even when they are also asking about bowel habits, diet and even questions about the patient's sexual health! Is religion and/or spirituality the last taboo? Have we found ourselves able to talk about sex, politics and now even death, but still "don't do God"?

One of the biggest question raised on our first day was simply how we translate research in to practice, how we train nurses to deliver effective spiritual care, and how we weave the spiritual in to all aspects of care rather than separating it out as something 'set apart'. Talking to one leading expert in the field who had just flown in from a Royal College of Nursing conference on spiritual care, it seems that there are voices emerging who are suggesting that nurses should play no role in any kind of spiritual care – and while the reasoning of the voices so far raised is clumsy and poorly thought through, there is no doubt that there will be opposition to restoring the spiritual as an aspect of nursing.

So, in bringing nurses the skills to address the spiritual needs of their patients, we have to start with nurses reflecting on their own spiritual nature and journey, whilst at the same time not forcing their beliefs on others. But that is only a start, because any practice of care must be based on good research and be held properly accountable within a professional framework, so it is more than just touchy feely stuff – it is qualitative and quantitative research, health policy and professional framework development, and training strategies. Yet, we have talked this over for two decades, and nurses still do not feel equipped in this area of practice.

Tomorrow we begin the conference proper, but out of today we are pulling together a network of researchers, practitioners and teachers who will work collaboratively on addressing some of these questions, and sharing more widely the experiences of those seeking to put good research in to good practice.

I just want a white coffee

Ordering a coffee – simple you might think, especially in the English speaking world. But even in France, Germany, Netherlands or Romania, I can just say une cafe or eine kaffe, and if I want milk in it, une cafe au lait, eine kaffe mit milch, danke. Easy.

So, when in New York last year I went in to a Starbucks and ordered a white coffee and just got a blank stare from the barista, I was somewhat taken aback. It turned out that what I should have asked for was an Americano with milk. OK, I thought, fair enough, different country, different terminology. Plus I reckon my Southeast England accent was also hard for a native Manhattanite to understand. No worries there then.

But today, when at London City Airport I asked for a white coffee and got a blank stare I knew the goal posts really had shifted. Granted, the guy serving me had a mild Dutch accent, but this was on my native turf! Surely he could understand what a 'white coffee' was?

Then it hit me. I was coming up against Globeish – a hybrid, commercial/business/tech dialect of English spoken around the globe. Shaped by global brands, global business schools, and global information technology, this is the dialect of choice for non-native English speakers and the emerging generation as they circumnavigate the globe (physically or virtually). But it is a different English to the arcane, southeast England dialect I know, where a white coffee is just coffee with milk. It is light years from the broad 'Estuary English' spoken by the kids in my neighbourhood (who neither know nor care about coffee), or to the mannered, professional English of the southeast's middle classes. This is an English where black coffee is an 'Americano' and white coffee a 'flat white', where we 'unpack' rather than explain, and 'google' rather than look up. It is the language of the inhabitants of Cyberia, a country I and my generation can only visit, but of which my children are fast becoming natives. Suddenly, I am old and on the outside.

As I travel the world, my once proud mastery of my mother tongue is called in to question – the English of students and business people, geeks and cybernauts of all cultures is increasingly not my English. I am the outsider, the semi literate who speaks the language as a foreigner, not as a native. This is a new world, linked through social networking sites, connected physically by identikit airports on the edges of urban sprawls, where the same coffee and fast food chains are to be found, identikit cloned, whether you are in Moscow, Seoul, London or Los Angeles. Maybe this is what the adjective ballardian describes; a bleak, uniform, post industrial landscape, full of dislocated and commercially dehumanised and desensitised clones who are no longer people but merely consumers? Is it in this world that Globeish has become the main means of communication?

Or is that just my take as a fearful cultural outsider looking at an undiscovered new country that the teenagers and children of today will call home, but to which I must always be at best, just a tourist? A country that has found its own language in Globeish? I think it was ever thus between the generations, divided by taste in music, fashion and use of language; only now the pace and depth of that change is accelerating and globalising. It is not a good thing, nor is it necessarily a bad thing. Ultimately it is a very human thing, and coming to terms with it is a way of coming to terms with one's own mortality. Time to hand on the baton to the new kids in town – my Generation X gives way to Generation Y, as they in turn will give way to the Millennium Kids – my children's generation. And with each new generation the language will grow and mutate, bending old words to new uses, creating new words for novel ideas and objects. Real horrorshow.

Meanwhile, I think it is time I went off and read some Shakespeare or Milton, or maybe some J G Ballard, just to reacquaint myself with my mother tongue in all its subtle, ancient glory. With a nice cup of white coffee, of course.

Farewell J G Ballard

Science Fiction is traditionally seen as the fiction of glittering futures and humanity conquering the "final frontier". Ballard, who died on Sunday, stood in the defiantly British tradition of SF that had no truck with such naive American over-optimism, and instead explored the darker side of where technological progress might take us. His most controversial novel, "Crash" explored a near future where human emotional connections were so weak, and where the obsessions of technology so strong, that the protagonists could only achieve sexual arousal through car crashes – techno fetishism and violence taken to a logical (and nightmarish) extreme.

He also explored ecological collapse in "The Drowned World" – echoing our modern fears about global warming long before they became part of popular consciousness. In fact, many of his short stories (with which I am personally more familiar) and novels explore unexpected catastrophes that threaten complacency or illustrate our over reliance on technology or social/political control.

In our surveillance dominated, risk averse, socially atomised and culturally stagnant post-industrial societies, he will stand for a long time as a secular literary prophet who confronted us with the uncomfortable realities of our chosen way of life, and the world is poorer for his passing. One can only hope that Ballard's death will renew popular interest in his great body of work, and inspire a new generation of science fiction prophets.

A Motto for the Noughties?

Well, this could sum up, with no further comments, the message we are all being fed by our governments and the banks they now own on our behalf.

Lent Week 4

The "Though for the Day" slot on BBC Radio 4's flagship news programme "Today" has been hotly contested for some time – the presenters (especially national treasure John Humphries) make no bones about the fact that they see it as a waste of space, the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society have tried to have it either removed or get humanist/rationalist thoughts for the day included as well as religious ones, and to be honest most of us with a faith also find it impossibly bland and irrelevant a lot of the time.

But every now and again it hits the nail on the head – and the two speakers who hit that nail the most often are Britain's two best loved Rabbis – Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and Rabbi Lionel Blue.

It was the latter yesterday morning who hit a nail on the head for me. Reflecting on a comic mess up at Obama's speech on St. Patrick's Day, he reflected that life does not always go as planned:

Then it dawned on me that life is like that autocue. We think our life is scripted. We've made our plans, written our words, know what we're going to say. Then something happens: an illness, an accident, an unexpected crisis, and suddenly the words no longer fit. We're thrown off balance. We improvise. A sense of humour helps. And we stumble through.

At least that's what I used to do until I made a decision that changed my life. Instead of getting angry or sad when things didn't work out the way I'd planned, I started asking, what is God telling me through this mishap? What is he trying to teach me? What does he want me to learn?

In preparing for our staff devotional earlier in the week I was leading from Ecclesiastes 3: 12-22 . Now I love Ecclesiastes, it is the most atypical book in the Bible – it seems nihilistic, almost Taoist – the Tao te Ching (written more or less contemporaneously I believe) has similar echoes about how life is short, wealth, learning and power are fleeting and illusory, and we all share the same fate – death. Cheerful stuff, but it is refreshing to find space in the scriptures for a frank assessment of the meaningless nature of so much that we lay great store in. Verses 12-14 and 22 of that passage remind us that for all that, work and the fruits of our labour are good things to be enjoyed as gifts from God.

Not that we are to live for these things either. Jesus had another take on it – Matthew 6:34 – live in the present, live now. It is not enough to be always looking to the future or harking on about how good things were in the past – here and now is where God is, and it is in the moment that we must live, because we cannot alter or bring back the past, and we cannot know or fully plan for the future. Of course, we have confidence in the fact that God is at work in our past and future too, and we have hope for that future coming of His Kingdom, but as the rest of that passage in Matthew's Gospel reminds us, don't worry about all that stuff – food, clothes, money, status, etc. Focus on God and His Kingdom, the rest is in His hands alone.

One of the lessons I am learning is to live in the present and to ask what God wants of me in my circumstances here, now and today – whether things are going to plan or otherwise. As I reflected earlier in the week, sometimes the most unwelcome turn of events is God's doorway. But we cannot second guess Him, we need to learn to walk with him each step, however unexpected.

Lent – Week 3-4

I heard a most useful sermon today, based on Acts 27:1-26, on how the path God has for us is less a straight line than a winding mountain path, full of digressions, resting places, and places where the path divides in different directions, yet still leading to the summit. God does not put us on rail tracks, he lets us find our own way, even when we wander off the path, get lost, double back or stop too long somewhere that was meant only to be a resting place.

God also sometimes sends us on other, unexpected routes, maybe placing obstacles in our paths, maybe using our own mistakes to take is in new directions.

My own Lenten journey has gone through an unexpected digression this last week. I had set out with my own idea of the journey, with a plan of prayer, fasting and study. Maybe I was a bit arrogant, too confident in myself, thinking I could self-discipline my way into God's presence, maybe feeling a couple of fasts and some prayer time each week would bring me in to a right relationship with God. Such attitudes can afflict us all when seeking to draw closer to God in times of self-examination and self-denial, and they leave little room for God's grace.

But barely two weeks in I was thrown an unexpected curve ball – a diagnosis of diabetes! Having been well and showing none of the usual symptom of diabetes this was a surprise (to put it mildly). My fasting plan went out of the window as I sought to make sure I was eating properly (interesting how fasting and following a strict diet can affect ones relationship to food in similar ways – it is no longer a simple pleasure and rapidly can become a focus of obsession). My cycle of prayers was disrupted by appointments with my GP and at the hospital, and my inner confidence that I could seek out God on my own terms went way out of the window. My sense of self control, of my body being under my will, was completely shattered.

I also felt a sense of shame and embarrassment – I knew the risks (family history of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, carrying 2-3 stone more weight than I should, fat stomach, sedentary job, etc, etc.) yet had not taken them seriously enough to make lifestyle changes before the damage was done. I had had no warning shots across the bow – from feeling fine and well, I suddenly found that my body had gone wrong, and that youthful sense of immortality finally got shattered.

God is loving and works the best for His people, but Scripture and everyday experience gives us scant reason to expect that this will always be worked out in happy, cuddly and safe ways.

On Sunday evening, still mulling over the sermon I had heard that morning, I read the story of Jacob wrestling the Angel of God at the ford of Jabbok in Genesis 32:22-32. Jacob, the swindler and scoundrel, charismatic, living of his wits, self reliant. Here he was about to confront the brother he had swindled of his birthright, about to confront all the demons of his past, and once again was using his wit and charm to try and get out of a potentially lethal confrontation. Then a stranger turns up, wrestles with him all night, and finally, as dawn breaks, dislocates Jacob's hip to end the fight and get away. Only Jacob realising this is no ordinary mortal he has been fighting so long and hard, demands a blessing before he will release him from his wrestler's embrace, and so gets the name by which he and his descendants will be known – Israel – "wrestles with God". Jacob would forever be marked by that encounter, limping the rest of his life from a damaged hip. But more deeply he learnt that all his struggles had ultimately been with God, not men, and through them God was turning this supremely self reliant and flawed man into a leader who relied on God first and foremost, and on his native wit only secondarily.

The lesson for me has been similar. As Paul was given a thorn in the flesh, and Jacob a dislocated hip, God has given me more than a reminder of my own mortality – this diagnosis has been an opportunity to stop being so self reliant, and rely on God, and other people (my family, my doctor, and friends, have all been a huge source of support and encouragement already).

Even more, it was a reminder that God meets us on His terms, not ours. We cannot twist His arm; rather we can but receive His Grace as it is poured out in unexpected, and sometimes unasked for ways. And this diagnosis is but the start of a new and unexpected journey for me – not one I fear (although it would be a lie to say I have no anxieties), nor one that I would have sought out, but one I am learning to embrace.

I reflected earlier in Lent how we find God at the most unexpected junctures. Little did I realise how this was to work out. But then, none of us ever do.

Taking Action on the G20 Summit

As we near the G20, the Micah Challenge campaign is urging people to pray and lobby for real decisions that will genuinely benefit the poor.

The UK Government evidently sees this as an opportunity to make an impact - civil society and the churches in particular both here in Britain and around the world need to keep up the pressure to make sure that some genuine decisions are not only made, but put in to practice.

And so the Grass Gets Trampled. Again.

From today's Guardian

The credit crunch is hitting the income of the world's poorest people the most and will make the UN's Millennium Development Goals more difficult to achieve than ever, according to research released today. The Global Monitoring Report from Unesco estimates the 390 million poorest Africans will see their income drop by around 20% - far more than in the developed world.

There is an old African saying that I have heard - "when elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled". The wealthy nations caused this economic collapse, but the poor, who had least to do with creating the boom or its subsequent bust, suffer the worst.

History repeats itself.
Has to.
No-one listens

Steve Turner

I have said more on this elsewhere, and for now no more needs to be said.

One Week in to Lent

I always find lent an austere and difficult time. In part that is a conscious choice on my part – to deny self by some kind of regular fast to focus the time on praying rather than eating. In part it is because it usually falls in the still, dying throes of winter, before spring's new life has had a chance to break out. But mostly it is because I inevitably find that trying to focus on God, and set aside time to pray invariably means other things try to crowd in on my time. And when I do finally get to pray, my mind cannot focus, I pray in meaningless clichés, or my mind wanders butterfly like on to a host of random irrelevancies.

Prayer is work, work is prayer, so goes the old saying. While the latter deserves a whole season of blog posts (OK, I can hear the groans – not seriously), the former is very true. If we are going to do business with God we will face opposition – whether that is from external, demonic forces or the simple stubbornness of the human heart that refuses both true repentance and grace, it is a sign that we are drawing closer to God when it gets harder to find Him. The paradox of God's grace is that the more we need it, the less we believe we can receive it, the more we seek God's face, the further He can seem to be. But then He breaks in, like those rays of light on a dark cloudy day where the sun shines through, illuminating the shadowed ground. Always when we least expect it, always when we least feel we've done anything to earn it. That, in the end, is the maddening, paradoxically delightful nature of grace.

So, it has been a dry, hard Lent so far, and past experience teaches me to roll with it – not to expect sudden revelations, sudden clarity, even while I hope for them. But I also suspect, in the words of Bruce Cockburn, that

"nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight/got to kick at the darkness 'till it bleeds day light."

this is part of a group Lenten blog orgnaised by Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates. Their Lenten Guide is available online

Persectued Church? II

Following on from yesterday's post on the confusion about the interface of Christianity & secular society in modern Britain, I came across this quote from Jenny Taylor that sums up in a sentence what took me a small essay to write:

"Rather than litigating against the nation's confusion, and adopting the victim pose that demeans our faith in a Lord who rejoiced in martyrdom, we should use our strength trying to model real Christianity – chastity, hope, poverty, stability and love."

With thanks to the guys and gals at Ekklesia

Persecuted Church?

It seems you can barely pick up a newspaper at the moment without reading that such and such a Christian has been suspended or sacked for speaking about their faith or praying, or that a Christian organisation has been denied funding or told to take down a cross or other religious symbol, etc, etc. These stories are being seized upon to suggest that Christians in the UK are becoming a persecuted minority.

I have three issues with this. The first is that Christians in the UK seem all too readily to be buying in to the cult of the victim that has overtaken Western culture in the last two or three decades. It seems unless you are from a persecuted minority, you have nothing of value to say about life, so everyone seeks to be a victimised minority – including now white heterosexual males and Christians. In fact, the result of this is to trivialise the genuine suffering of minority groups that are excluded by wider society, and leads to a negative mentality that looks for signs of offence or exclusion when there may not be any.

Secondly, this trivialises the genuine persecution that fellow Christians do experience in many parts of the world. It is a widely quoted statistic that there have been more Christian martyrs in the twentieth century than in all the history of Christianity in the previous 19 centuries. If that is true then the reality of persecution is not trivial. It involves people being imprisoned, tortured and murdered or executed for their faith – and there is plenty of documentary evidence that this is happening in many countries of the world even as I write (see the Persecuted Church Blog as one example). To suggest what Christians are experiencing in this country goes anywhere near that is, frankly, arrant nonsense.

Finally, labelling this as persecution misses the point. What is happening is a complex readjustment from a culture where the Christian church was seen as mainstream and privileged, to one where it is but one of a plurality of religious and secular voices. It is a confused time, and a confused process – neither Christians nor secular culture really know how it works any more – the rule books are not only ripped up, but are being re-written by different people in different places in different ways. As a result some silly cases do occur, and people genuinely fall foul of the system.

There are genuine cases of discrimination, based on Christians stepping outside the boundaries, or by secular authorities not being sure what the boundaries are and tightening them unnecessarily. There is no doubt that some of the cases cited show examples of genuine discrimination and prejudice against Christians. What they do not add up to is a systematic persecution of the church in modern Britain.

The example that I am closest to is that of the nurse suspended for offering to pray for a patient. The story is reported in detail here, and what emerges is less persecution of a nurse offering care to her patient than a misunderstanding over the role of spirituality in nursing care. Nursing has deep roots in the Christian faith, and unlike medicine has always tended to see people as whole human beings rather than isolated systems. Nurses are required to assess and care for the spiritual needs of their patients in the same way as their physical, social and psychological care. But they are not well taught in how to do this. When a nurse asks a patient if they want prayer, it should be in the context of an assessment of the wider spiritual needs of that individual – but only once it is clear that the patient has a faith and/or would appreciate some support in that area. To suspend a nurse for making such an enquiry was based on a misunderstanding what was going on. Her reinstatement was with explicit guidelines about the context within which that enquiry into a patient's needs was made, and the misunderstanding has been cleared up in this instance. That I know of other cases where this is still happening shows that there is a long way to go!

A lack of training in spiritual care means that hospital chaplains do not get asked to see patients who want to see them, because the nursing staff do not want to explore that issue, either through a lack of personal understanding or a lack of training and awareness. A recent Nursing Times survey highlights this problem – with a majority of nurses seeing prayer as a appropriate care in the right context, but expressing a concern that they are not well enough trained nor do they have adequate guidelines in which to conduct spiritual care.

As we have become a more secular and pluralist society, we have not become any less human and spiritual, but it has become more complex to address those needs. We need a new engagement by our healthcare system, and by all levels of society, with the spiritual reality of our human nature.

We need not be fearful or apologetic about this. A recent poll suggests that the majority of the population would like to see faith at the centre of our ethical and legal frameworks as a nation - indeed even amongst members of Britain's non-Christian faith communities there seems to be a support for a Christian framework to remain central. It is interesting that secular India keeps a religious framework at the centre of its national identity, and does so as a one of the most culturally and religiously plural nations on Earth. Maybe we have lessons to learn about holding the tension between secular and spiritual from the developing world?

As Christians we should not be sitting on the sidelines in all of this, pointing to all the injustices we are apparently suffering, but rather we should be using these cases as opportunities to show grace and engage with the secular systems, helping them to see that there are gaps in their understanding and provision that we, among others, can help them bridge.

Ash Wednesday - Pray, Fast & Give to Zimbabwe

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7909133.stm - This is a link to BBC video of John Sentamu & Rowan Williams calling on the world to fast, pray and give to save lives and stand in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe.

It is a simple message - pray, fast, give - for the start of Lent it is a reminder that true worship, true prayer, true fasting, lead to true justice [Isaiah 58:5-10] -

with acknowldegements to Christine Sine and the God Space Blog.

God Bus Wars III

Now it looks as if we are going to get "Atheist Unions" on UK University Campuses and atheist bus campaigns across Europe.

Ah well, all power to them - I doubt either initiative will sway people one way or the other. Faith or its loss are usually grown in the context of family, friends and community, not bus ads or little University cliques. Having been part of a couple of Christian Unions in my student days, I have seen several of my contemporaries lose faith once outside of the comfy clique of CU life, and several others find faith once they were out in the "real world".

And like my most people, I only read adverts to laugh or scoff at their absurdity.

The New Localism?

I'm not given to party politics, but I am detecting some interesting new noises coming from the Tory party, noises that chime with my thinking and concerns about how we live today from a Biblical worldview.

I should qualify that of course – I am a Thatcher Child – I came of age under a Tory Government, I was out there as a young man protesting against the Poll Tax. I grew up mistrusting the Tories as the party of the rich and the powerful, of self-interest. Thatcher's famous "there is no such thing as Society" quote was the death knell for my sense that the Tories were a party that had anything for me or ordinary people of my generation. For most people of my generation, the idea of even engaging with Tory policy, let alone voting for them sticks in the craw and makes the flesh creep with horror!

And the legacy of Thatcher era Toryism is with us still, in the collapse of families, the atomisation of society, fear and mistrust of strangers, etc. It is also with us in the legacy of Reaganomics and the New Right, with the increasing monopolisation of financial systems and markets by a hard right, neo-liberal consensus that encouraged the sort of cavalier risk taking that helped stoke our current financial meltdown.

In short, Thatcher era Toryism, and it's bastard spawn, New Labour, have promoted a system that is, frankly, Godless, self focussed, and ultimately as ethically and financially bankrupt as communism and fascism were before it, albeit with a thin veneer of liberal democracy instead of brutal totalitarianism (although Labour's control & command approach to social policy is creeping in the direction of the totalitarian).

Globalisation was the proudest achievement of this way of doing things, but with it came an increasing impoverishment of marginal and developing world communities, reactionary religious and then secular fundamentalism, and ultimately exposed the economies of nations little involved in US or European financial systems to the catastrophic collapse of US, Japanese and EU markets and economies.

But there are signs of something changing. Two articles in this month's Prospect Magazine illustrate an interesting take on the way local communities are beginning to rest political, financial, and cultural control from the old centres of power. Phillip Blond argues in "The Rise of the Red Tories" that the Conservatives need to rest the discourse away from the consensus that they and Labour have built up, and move towards recognising local communities as the political, cultural and economic power bases of society. In the same edition, Peter Bazzlegate argues something similar with respect to Public Service Broadcasting – getting local, web based PSB publicly funded and moving away from the monolithic structures of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

The Tories have just launched a series of policy initiatives that is moving in that direction as well (see below)

Now, I am not jumping on board and saying this is it, wow, let's all vote Tory. I am still waiting to see the fine print and how this might work in practice. But I am excited, because we need to build community again in this country, and every political, economic and social trend over the last four or five decades has systematically eroded this. Anything that seeks to reverse that trend, and move us towards a more healthy and human way of functioning as a society is worthy of serious consideration.

The Biblical model is useful to consider – because it emphasises relationships. Justice is relational, compassion is relational, faith is relational – we work these things out through communities, congregations, shared stories of what God has done, what He has asked of us, what He has promised us. We grow in all ways together, not in isolation, and our salvation, while not a result of birth or group membership but born of a one-to-one relationship with God, is mediated and outworked in practice in the context of a congregation, a family, and a community.

The impersonal, the money driven, the self centred are all condemned throughout Old and New Testaments, time and again. But what is lauded in scripture is not community for its own sake, but a community that is in right relationship first and foremost with God, and then with one another, with neighbouring communities, and with the environment. All relationships are contingent upon one another, all start and end in our relationship with God The Hebrew word for this is Shalom, which we often translate as "peace".

Will the churches engage with this new localism? Is it just another fad that will pass, or is it the start of a new, dramatic paradigm shift in British society and politics? Time will tell, but I for one do not want to see this opportunity to see a profound change slip past.

God Bus Wars II

Just for fun, discovered this random generator for new atheist (or other) bus ads - http://is.gd/iQp3

God Bus Wars

While the atheist adverts doing the rounds on London buses stirred up a bit of a buzz a few weeks back (quote: "There Probably is no God: so stop worrying and enjoy your life"), they would probably be largely forgotten about now. But rather than letting the ads lie and treating them with the humour and disdain they richly deserved, some rather sad (and humourless) Christian groups have launched their own versions, and they are as ever embarrassingly bad.

I preferred this one myself, more topical and more inclined to raise a smile on a snow & fog bound London on a Friday morning

(with acknowledgements to St. Aidan to Abbey Manor blog and Kouya Chronicle)