The Vernacular Vicar

Watching The World Go By

2012-01-30T15:06:00.001Z

A little time ago, I was in the house alone. It was quiet, the passing planes seemed a distant memory and the sun poured through many of the windows. The house was suffused with that warm golden light that only morning sun can offer, and all was peaceful.

As I had a moment to ponder, I sat down and looked out of the window. I watched one of the many squirrels that are resident in our garden busying himself with his nuts (!), the wood pigeons flapping from branch to branch as the parakeets screeched through the relative silence.

I looked up to see the Airbus 380 ascending in the blue sky above the house (and despite its colossal size and 550 passengers, made its way in the spirit of the peace that was currently prevailing). Up it went, defying the gravity that surely should have prevented it rising! I was reveling in this scarce moment of tranquility, a magical moment when every thing seemed to freeze-frame in a concentrated breathe of perfect grace.

At the side of my garden and in my direct view is a brick wall, above which passing vans can be seen, or the heads of taller passers-by. As they drove or passed by, I pondered the purpose of their journey - to see friends, to visit the shops, to go to work, to see loved ones, to work off breakfast? I pondered the many many worlds that coincide in every moment and in every place, people passing other people, each with hopes and fears.

Then one man, as he passed by, looked round as was tall enough to see over the wall. He saw me sat there pondering, yet he looked awkward. I was minding my business and I even smiled broadly in a sort of 'howdy-doody' greeting of sorts. He looked down and scurried off. I wondered if it was the dog-collar, that by some feat of unholy power I was trying to reel him in for the Lord at thirty paces. I had only just moved into the house, so was as yet unknown to people. It's funny how some people are.

Then to my horror it occurred to me.

I was sat on the toilet and the window was in the room across the hall through the door I had forgotten to shut. New house, new rules!

Shoah

2012-01-27T09:15:00.000Z

You may remember that I visited Jerusalem about 16 months ago and spent two weeks studying at Yad Vashem, the World Centre for Holocaust Research. It is a place that serves two primary purposes - the first to give the 'memory and a name [yad vashem | ד ושם‎‎י ]' to the many millions of now nameless Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, the second to educate the world about the causes.

If you want to read a few of my thoughts from that visit, please visit an old blog of mine here.

I read, watched and listened to many hours of testimony, primary source evidence and the scars left by that tragedy. A few things stuck:

1. The Holocaust ['Shoah' (Ha Shoah, catastrophe | השואה) in Jewish circles] was unique among genocides because it was a whole-race destruction based on idealism and not on aggrandizement of land or property. Jews dies simply because they were Jews, not because the Nazis coveted the land or wealth of that population.

2. The ideology behind the Shoah has its roots in (among other places) Christianity and the first Christian tragedy of the death of Christ. Martin Luther joined many of the Early Fathers in an anti-semitism that was later nurtured in the heart of an Austrian artist and eventual Chancellor of Germany. Indeed, his book Mein Kampf cites Luther a number of times, regarding him in the light of a national hero. (I ought to note here and now, that the Jehovah Witnesses died in their thousands because they wouldn't support the Nazi ideology)

3. Three groups of people played their part - the victim, the perpetrator and the by-stander. The first two are perhaps obvious, with the third including you and me in this day when people still die in genocides.

Of the accounts that I heard all those months ago, of all the faces of children I looked at as they played mere days before their screaming agonising frightening execution in the dark, of all the piles of personal paraphernalia that now characterises that event, of all the hours of evidence given by relatively banal civil servants defending their acts of genocide as 'orders', one encounter stuck. That was of a women who sat before us in the room where we were gathered.

She was a women in her seventies, a retired nurse. She was well dressed, well presented, the happy mother of children (one of her sons was our tutor). She had lived a broadly good life, except for one thing: she didn't know her name. She knew the name that her adoptive parents gave her, a women into whose arms she was thrown (yes, thrown) while her birth-mother queued for her death. She landed in the arms of a stranger who took her in (to their own mortal risk and against vast odds of landing in supportive arms) and raised her as their own. The lady didn't know who her real family were, who she really was. In many ways she still felt anonymous, rootless, the un-murdered victim.

Rarely do we see these people with our own eyes. We read of them in our history lessons or in books that we dare to glance through. This Shoah was real and the victims real. They are still among us today as we carry on with our business. Though they are the 'lucky' ones. They didn't have to dig their own grave before being shot into it. They didn't have to experience that moment when lights dimmed and poison filled the air. They didn't have to regard the taunting eye of a gun chamber or a line of uniformed boys pointing rifles.

This happened in our lifetime. This happened in the age of television and telephone. This happened because bystanders (on all sides) stood by and watched madmen construct vile ideologies.

Which means that it could, just could, happen again (if we let it).

On this Holocaust Memorial Day, may Yahweh bless, preserve and watch over all those who died because of their heritage, and over us who can never fully comprehend their Passion.

Toning Up for God

2012-01-26T13:27:00.000Z

...you know I have been going to the gym...

Yes, I have successfully managed to squeeze my corpulent reverential bulk into a gymnasium to a sufficiency that demands the language of plurals. I run some, row some, stretch pull and lift some - then I steam and spa, shower, coffee, home. I have even lost a stone of lard since Christmas, so there.

I used to go to the gym when I was late-teenager and did, believe it or not, sport the odd formed muscle. You'd be hard pressed to discern shape under the blancmange that caresses every inch of my ontologically-changed form nowadays, but aspire I do, and sweat too.

There are many good arguments in favour of keeping fit as a sort of 'Temple preservation exercise', to maintain the mean-altar that the Lord places in our unworthy hearts. I subscribe, reluctantly, as one who finds it hard to exercise these days. I accept too that as fleshly creatures, we are a complex assortment of the circulatory, muscular, skeletal, endocrine, immune and digestive to name but a few. We make even the most complex computer look like an abacus, and we cannot endlessly neglect our bodies.

So, to the gym I go in the presumptuous hope and belief that I am doing some good as I fast approach my forties. I don't aspire to a muscularity as offered in the image, or to be able to run a marathon, but simply to live long and live the best I can.

As I look around the gymnasium, itself set within a Temple of Sport (Twickenham Rugby Ground), I see much that attends to the needs of all that makes us animals the same as lions and tigers. As humans, and as those created in God's image, we are so much more than skin, bone and sinew. We have a facet of our being that sets us apart from all other creepy crawlies and birds of the air - and that is our innate spirituality.

If I want sodding great big arms, I can sling some iron around. Big arms I gain but to what end? To pull down a steer and bite its ears off? Do big muscles and a thriving blood-system keep us feeling happy? Do they give a sense of wonder in the face of exquisite beauty? Do they help us know God even a fraction more? No, of course they don't. It would be the same as saying that a church is mighty because its roof doesn't leak, or that a bank will never fail because it has modern lifts. We focus on the the tangible and external because we can see results.

But we often neglect the intangible, immeasurable - and I believe increasingly to our peril.

I have been working on a sort of idea born of the efforts I put in at the gym, an idea that might find life in my church. I believe, quite sincerely, that many Christians privately despair because they think that can't pray or relate properly to God. Of course they can, but that reticence often provides a barrier to the experience. Also, prayer techniques are acquired and learned like so many others. We are creatures of habit, good or bad, and sometimes we just need to be shown a new way.

I will, in one form or another, be proposing the idea of a sort of a spiritual gymnasium (Pip and Gym?) where all-comers can be exposed to 'exercises' and receive a little guidance and advice (or more importantly, a time and a space). Presenting an opportunity, in a conspicuous form, to maximise on the relationship that is already there and already full will (I believe) give us all a greater ability to receive what is always there in abundance from our Lord.

Damascus or Psalm 139

2012-01-25T11:51:00.000Z

Today, in the Anglican cycle of things at least, we commemorated the conversion of one Saul of Tarsus. Flash bang wallop, one very neat letter writer, jail-bird and Mediterranean rambler.

This day, and the readings to which we were treated in Exciting Holiness this morning (fine book, get a copy), brought to mind a small anxiety I have harboured for a good number of years.

In the main, there are two types of Christian (in this schema): those termed 'cradle-Christians' and those who did all that getting-to-know the Lord stuff at a later age. Put another way, you get your Psalm 139 disciples or you get your Damascus Road disciples.

This is, of course, a statement of the blindingly obvious. I accept, too, that people drift in and out of faith as their lives peak and trough and that such elasticity is a good and healthy thing. Christianity, in the main, is not a faith of those 'inside' and those 'outside', and that it one of its most gracious qualities. Toe-dipping, running-away-screaming, coming back when the kids grow up, confessing an old faith on the death bed - all these and so many more are ways that as Christ's disciples, we make sense of that journey.

If only it were that simple. Sadly, it feels (I lean on 'feel' as it might just be me) that there is a spiritual stratification in place, surrounding this specific matter.

I have lost count of the times when I have seated myself in an Anglican Circle in a large room to dissect my 'story'. Largely throughout theological training, but quite a lot since, I found myself doing the 'going-round-the-circle' thing. How we come to faith is up there with our name and some interesting nonsense about how we lived life before we sat in that room, and spill our guts we do. Then it happens.

Person 1: God spoke to me up when I was a terrible teenager

Person 2: I gave my life to Jesus at 6.42pm on April 11th 1976 and it was raining outside

Me: I have always been a Christian since I was born
Person 4: My dad is a priest and I always went to church
Person 5: I answered God's personal call to me after three decades in the wilderness
Person 6: I was a crack addict until I let God into my heart and here I am

All good, no issues. Unless you are sat there in the room. Confessing a Psalm 139 faith is about the same as "I am only here because I can't be arsed to leave", or "Accidental Christian". Confessing a Damascus Road faith is received triumphantly like a hero returning from the field of battle, scarred and bloodied, but alive (and yes, affirming grunts from the throng are audible). I have never given my life to God simply because I didn't ever need to. There were no days before my faith, I was made like this (fearfully and wonderfully?). Sadly, it seems to be the case that you ain't no-one unless you can name the time and place.

I am no-one.

Except who God made me to be, and I am happy at that.

Playing The Numbers Game

2012-01-23T16:49:00.002Z

Last week's Church Times does as it always seems to and got me despondent and mildly vexed in equal measure (in other words, it challenges me to think afresh many things).

Tucked away on p7 was a little article by Ed Thornton covering 'church numbers', a perennial exercise in poor news made amusing by those trying hard to see the good in all things. Gawd blessem.

Church attendance numbers are, gently, going down. That is not good and news that displeases me. This year has, though, offered news that church weddings are 'up' which is alright innit. Oh, and half a dozen more people worship God in a skater-cafe ice-rink so that is good too.

I am blessed with a particular autism, and that is a fascination for statistics. I used to discover petty larceny by staring for hours at tables of number in Font 4 in my old job. Church-based numbers are no less fascinating to me, for I am one weird saddo who ought to get a life.

So, what has happened in 2011? Allow me to be uncharitable for a moment. Fifteen or sixteen disgruntled Anglo-Catholics suddenly changed their sacramental theology and became half-cast half-baked Roman catholics, which is not good. Fear of Breasts in Clerical Shirts, otherwise known as Boobincollarphobia, is a debilitating scourge on many 'traditionalists'. So go they went and went they did. But surely we are laughing in the Church of England because we have the pasta-based Gospel marketting machine reeling people in for the Lord. Yet numbers are still tumbling despite gazillions of people who have partaken of Ruarchioli, so either churches of a given flavour do not complete their registers, or something is not as rosy as we would like to pretend.

Fortunately, the good Lord doesn't worry like we worry. The good Lord probably doesn't become gussett-rotated (if the Ominpresent Omniscient Omnivorous Lord has such an article of clothing) about numbers like we humans do. God has given us faith, and would direct us to, in the words of my wise and most excellent training incumbent - 'avoid the numbers game'.

Amusingly though, at the foot of p7, my dear friend had posted a very nice advert for a gathering of WATCH folk suggesting (possibly) that they may be in the wilderness. I encourage them to take heart. Only twenty-four people go to church, so that wilderness is a very very tiny place.

Still, the good news is that I have tidied my study. There must be a liturgy for that somewhere!

500 Not Out

2012-01-20T13:37:00.000Z

Well, I am rather delighted to say that this is my 500th post in this 'ere blog. It is proof, were any needed, that this priest can not just concoct one or a dozen daft notions but many hundreds.

I think that I have been blogging for about 14 months now, and have found it to be a most satisfying way of spending a spare fifteen-odd minutes some days of the week. I have learned as much about me as you have, and I know that there are those of you out there that have read every jolly letter. That in itself is a humbling fact to absorb, and I thank all of you most sincerely.

So then - what of this blog. It is always a work in progress and this blogger a blogger in training. There are many hundreds of far better offerings than this, and I thank them too for teaching many lessons in what it is I try to do here. As I think back, I can count an incomplete Lent Course, an incomplete series of how to attract men into churches, far too many red-faced rants, a couple of experimental liturgies, some needless reactions to having had buttons pressed, many times when I have been wrong, a few when I was right, a change of name, some giggles, some good ideas (I think), and many many new acquaintances and friends. In other words, I'd do it all over again.

I still believe in the valency of blogging. I think that the world is starting to too, with people facing conviction for stuff that appears in micro-blogs, and other social media sites. I read a story of a woman fined millions because of defamatory remarks made on her own blog. This is real, the words are real, the sentiment is real, the effect intentional (mostly) and it exists through eternity. We blog carelessly at our peril, and sadly, many do.

I reach people in places I haven't even heard of, and by posts I would never have predicted. Most days, now, well over a thousand hits land here (and only 976 of them are me), and my top five posts of all time are:

#Facepalm

Blogging in Television Drama

Humuhumunukunukuapua'a

In The Cause of Good

I Just Gotta be Me

Oddly, none of these is overtly Christian, if even religious at all. It perhaps goes to show that if we God-botherers stop trying so hard, we might just get somewhere.

I am not sure how to end this post other than to say thank you to those of you read this, and to bear with me as I struggle to find time to write. Be assured I still want to, and this Vernacular Fool ain't going nowhere.

The Food of My Soul

2012-01-18T13:22:00.000Z

I was trawling through video clips so that I could update my Vernacular Video Bar, and struck (for me) gold. Today I have placed two pieces for your enjoyment - one because it is technical picking as I like it (though not hard to do if you know what you are doing), and because the other made me cry (in a nice way).

This is hard on the heels of a journey that I have made this morning where, as ever, I was plugged into my iPod.

I reflected this morning that I could live without many things physical or temporal - but not music. I can no more live without music than I can live without air, and the starvation of either makes for a poor day, I find.

The video at the top of this post is of Mark Knopfler, the only man alive who by his creativity can make me weep because I find his skill overwhelming and beautiful. His music, to me, is stunning. It is music that soars like a feather on a spring breeze, just before crashing into me like a freight-train. It is effective, lyrical, hard yet soft, winsome when needs be and technically about as good as you will find. This video is of a song that is dripping with pathos anyway, and with an orchestra, is a perfect moment. The fact is, that Mr Knopfler is a man who makes the notes that he doesn't play sound stunning too.

In general terms, music reaches us where we wish to be reached. I played a wide array of snippets of music last night at the service I lead in the Week of Prayer for Christian unity - including Maria Callas, Metallica, Eric Clapton, a kids' nursery rhyme, Alien Ant Farm and the odd Wesleyan hymn - partly to illustrate that we are all different, but to comment that despite their differences, all of that music was on my one iPod. In its breadth I am best served by music as there are Faure days as their are Chris Rea days. Unity, I said, wasn't about being the same, but about being united in our variety.

The thing with music is that we choose what we like. We don't waste a moment of our time listening to music we dislike, so it fast becomes the purest expression of ourselves. I am not sure that much else works like that so easily and so purely in our lives. Our musical tastes have their seasons too, and it fair to say that I haven't listened to Hitman Howie Tee for a few years (though I used to listen to little else when I was a sprog).

I pity the poor soul that has to arrange my funeral. I can't even do it (an exercise I have tried to do so that Mrs Acular is spared). Music in death is as evocative as music in life, and the effort to sum me up in hymnody and song will be a rocky one. Put another way, if you want to get a real idea of who this blogger really is, listen to these videos and others as they appear - for they do a far better job than I could.

Social Media and the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

2012-01-17T09:53:00.001Z

It's a funny thing. I am sitting in the coffee shop of a national chain of gymnasia, wheezing, and rather than exercising, am preparing a sermon for a service in church tonight. I am also 'riding' Twitter (as one does) following the hashtag #wpcu2012 . For those who don't speak the Masoretic language of Twitter, it is a label that connects all thoughts on the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

And it's my day off!

As I ponder this idea of Christian Unity, especially on a day when we commemorate the life of an Egyptian monk (St. Antony) and the life of an Oxford academic who was part of the Tractarian Movement (Charles Gore), it is clear that for as many Christian who have lived and breathed on this earth, there are as many variables of this living faith of ours. Yes, we conglomerate into denominations, and those denominations have some similarities, but in the end, the great joy of holding a faith in Christ is that we can all be different.

The theme for the Week of Prayer this year is that of 'change'. Let me get this straight: we are all different, seek unity, while at the same time aspiring to change. Sounds like a game of ecclesiastical Twister to me, but like all challenges to our faith, is one that commits not just our efforts but those of the God we adore in common. I wonder if the change that is called for is simply that we embrace our differences in the comfort of the overwheleming matters that we hold in common.

This brings me to social media, and a drum I bang often. Among my Twitter friends, and those whose blogs I read or who are kind enough to read mine, are Christians of every flavour and pursuasion. I am a Christian of a specific brand, and those who know me know my preferences in worship, in ecclesial attire, in hymnody, in theological nuance. In the gander scheme, none of those things are important, and simply choices that appeal to me. Social media doesn't really care for any of that, yet accommodates all of it. Twitter and Facebook care not a jot that I am a contemporary breed of Anglo Catholic, and in many ways that is good. I share thoughts and debate with many Christians (and those who have no faith) and most of the time, the labels are simply of no importance.

I don't think a week of prayer for Christian Unity is, or should be, about us all being the same. Life would be turgid and dull if we were. A week of prayer for unity is a week to celebrate what we hold in union and that we carry in hands each pair distinct from the next. I don't want to be a Roman Catholic and I am sure that my Catholic friends have no desire to be Anglican. We are who we are and we are as the Lord has called us. Imagine an orchestra if every one of the gifted musicians played the same instrument. Yes, there would be music, but the repertoire would be rather limited.

A Vicar's First Christmas

2012-01-13T17:18:00.000Z

Ss Philip & James Whitton

And so it came to pass that Christmas came to pass, and that Christmas present fast became Christmas past. The Christmas to which I refer was, as a Vicar, my first and I hope and pray will not become my last. I arrived with hopes and a few more aspirations. The truth is, dear readers, that each was amply surpassed. Of my train of thought you may inquire, and on I get with it, pretty fast.

As a curate, in many ways the show that is Christmas is laid on by others. One joins an organisation that has its routines and rituals, and it is incumbent upon the curate to slot in, pick up some of the duties, and generally crack on. That changes, subtly, as the Incumbent. Yes, we join an organisation with its routines and rituals, but not a single one would happen without our 'agreement'.

As September edges into October edges into November, as the New Vicar, it fast becomes apparent that an unspoken expectation develops. What are doing this Christmas, Farv? The response was, this year, along the lines of 'what you did last year is good this, so I can watch and learn'. A pall of relief fell over the community.

Then the great feast arrives, Advent flies past with a pace, and the services start to loom. I confess that threw a few curved balls to see what response I would get - a meditation on the penultimate Saturday before Christmas, opting to sing the Preface at Midnight Mass - things like that. The response was good, though if I am honest the lock-changes occupied people's minds more than my liturgical adaptions.

Priests will tell you that Christmas is a busy time. Poppycock. Actually, in the great scheme of things, it is about the same as the rest of the year on one level, although the burden of stress seems to increase on another level. We churn out more services, yes; but the meetings abate, the schools close and many aspects of a Vicar's day fall away. Lots of carols, lots of stress. The stress is as a result of knowing that, to a greater or lesser extent, the parish Christmas is in my hands. That is a big thing to absorb. I am blessed with brother priests and readers who were able to look after a few services, and sitting back in a pretty cope was still stressful. What if ... what if ... what if? We want Christmas to be perfect, unique and fit for use and fit for God. Anything less is, to most of us, abject failure. We worry about numbers, collections, musicians arriving on time, all that stuff.

In the end, although I would have sweated every bead whatever I knew the outcome to be, it was a wonderful Christmas. The stress implicit in the 'what ifs' is balanced in the satisfaction of a well attended service, the faces of children engaging with the content, the laughs of typically straight-laced adults, feedback, swollen collections, people coming back already, myriad myriad new faces and returned familiar ones. I didn't make it happen, because I am but one wheel in a very large cog, but that doesn't mean I didn't pat myself on the back on Boxing Day. This Vicar is blessed by a capable, committed and energetic flock, most of whom added to the celebrations in specific ways. The church was full most of the time, and with minimal stress from anyone (apart from the Vicar).

It was everything I had dreamed of and hoped for, several times over.

The Exploitation of Our Armed Forces?

2012-01-12T13:17:00.000Z

Courtesy of the Guardian newspaper

Until about two years ago, you had (among a very small number) SSAFA and the British Legion, organisations comprising veterans who devoted much time and effort to raise funds for recovered personnel and their families during times of conflict. Then came Help for Heroes, a wonderful organisation that does pretty well what it says on the tin.

This is all good stuff and a sign that the heart of the nation still beats with a care for those who defend its borders or those unable to defend themselves.

Then we started seeing the Wootton Bassett effect which started off as the outpouring of grief from the wider circles of friends of repatriated fallen servicemen and women. Eventually, the bus to Bassett became the one to board whether you knew the soldier in the hearse or not, and in many ways, is another sign that the heart of the nation still beats as it should. It perhaps took on some of the Diana Effect where people would publicly express visible grief at the death of strangers.

In recent days something has become apparent to me that forms a strange blend of encouraging and troubling. In adverts for a whole array of different products and services, most recently the mighty WeightWatchers, there has been an increase in the 'use' of the armed services (and in particular those in Afghanistan) in the advertising. The example I cite is a woman who wanted to be slim for the return of her husband from his tour of duty. In other words, it feels just a little like the men and women of our armed services are becoming commercial currency.

Part of me thinks that we have finally come to terms that we are sending people into harms way; part of me that 'heroes' is a new and very emotive and lucrative bandwagon. I am not so sure I would mind if I didn't know that some of these present day heroes, when their day is done, become very quickly forgotten when they come home and are discharged from their military units (except perhaps those who suffer horrific visible injuries, and quite rightly so).

I wonder if I am being churlish. Why shouldn't our armed forces receive some much needed publicity? I think, though, that when men and women in mortal danger become the stuff of a slimming advert, that we may have gone too far. The soldiers I have contact with, with less visible but no less life limiting injuries, do not enjoy this use of their specific risk and would value a few shekels from the profits of the companies selling their goods on the back of their sweat and toil.

My Dad Said It Was Rubbish

2012-01-06T16:31:00.001Z

With thanks to fellow blogger Gareth Saunders for bringing this to my attention. My journey with Metallica started about the same time. They celebrate 30 years making music this year. This blogger congratulates them, thanks them, and hopes they come to the UK again soon!

If you don't like Metallica, this probably isn't for you! (some language too, be warned)

Rock on

Gherkin

2012-01-04T17:55:00.000Z

As I ate fois gras with Mrs Acular and the Twins Aculae earlier today, we pondered why the gherkin always appears in certain 'culinary offerings'. Take a bite, spit it out - for a gherkin rests within. Why?

I'll tell you why.

Because the McDonalds Corporation is doing me a favour. And let me explain.

Ronald McDonald doesn't just buy a peck of pickled cucumbers, but rather an entire GDP of pickled cucumbers. They do so in order to enhance the experience of the Big Mac eater. And glad we are too. Except that I have never met a soul who doesn't be-grease his or her fingers in the extraction of the slimy green disc of gammy sludge that resides between the nasty dayglo mustard and the wangy cheese that has no more seen a cow than my gerbils. Such is the accepted architecture of the modern burger, a la McDonalds. We all loathe them, we all pick them out, but yet the Golden Arches clan continues to insinuate gherkins into the heart of the English Burger.

Better that they are though.

The thing is, if McDonalds stop putting gherkin into my burger, the great Gherkin Conglomerate in deepest Gherkinland would, in a trice, go out of business. That would generate a specific and calculated response from Christian organisations, each desiring to keep the gherkin industry afloat.

With the sweep of a dozen committees and the issuing of a dozen more edicts, we would all become Fair Gherkin Churches, members together of Fair Gherkin Dioceses.

Then, instead of the noble Sunday morning coffee, we'd all be committed to sup gherkin juice ... for God.

So, McDonalds - know now that we delight in you putting gherkins into your food. If you didn't, people like me would have coffee mornings to save the green perils.

Late, But Sincerely Meant

2011-12-28T10:11:00.000Z

or not, in this case

By the time I collapsed after the last Christmas Service, I had forgotten to do something very important. It wasn't that I had forgotten to cook the chipolatas, although I did, and it wasn't that I forgot to put out cranberry sauce, which I also did fail to do - it was to write a post on this thing (and I had turned off the computer).

So, belatedly (but not, at the same time), I would like to wish every one of you a happy and holy Christmas, and hope-filled New Year. I pray that your prayers are answered, but that in any instance 2012 is happy for you all.

I want, too, to thank you for your support and friendship here. It has been an interesting year to say the least, but that has caused me to be less present here at times. That you come back, engage, and regard this drivel as worthy of a moment of your precious time means the whole world to me.

Thank you.

'Tis The Season to Be Grumpy

2011-12-23T15:39:00.005Z

It's a funny thing, this whole Christmas pavlova. In itself it is a wonderful thing, hope-filled and hope-fuelled. We have Baybee Jeezuss, Lickel Donkay and Mairee and Joziff. We have many pies-a-mincing, much wine-a-mulling, considerable alpine trees-a-dropping, the prospect of a good number of under-cooked turkeys-a-poisoning, and much much more. I love Christmas, for all the right reasons, for how it makes me feel like a kid again, for the theological and scriptural stuff - Crimbo ticks all the boxes.

Until I step outside of my front door.

Only in December do humans turn into slavering animals. Only in December do ordinarily friendly folk turn, as if by magic, into red-eyes fire-starters. The fury in the High Street is palpable, where manners and decency are not, manifestly absent as they seem to be. Smiling folk are now grimacing folk. Oh the pressure we pile upon ourselves ...

But I am not immune, oh no. I was in a card shop in the very deliberate act of making a purchase of, well, a card, when I discovered not a single card with Baybee Jeezuss, or even a Joziff for that matter. I could have bought a ton of cards that celebrate that beast of yuletide - the Robin (not that a day throughout the year passes in my garden when I don't see them - which means that a card featuring a grey squirrel would be just as appropriate). This card shop was in the parish of this here religious blogger, Vicar, eejit. I WANT A BAYBEE JEEZUSS, FOOL! But rather than let those words slip out, I simply asked, in a wan wet English defeated way "Do you have any religious cards for Christmas?" to which the reply from a very solid looking woman was "No, mate". I left, when perhaps I should have jumped up on to her counter and mounted a protest and chained my Adonis body to her Epson till. Instead a frowned like a man retaining flatulence

I ought to say, though, that I have seen another side to Christmas this year, apart from that represented above. I have seen my little church full over and over in recent days. I have welcomed people back who had scarpered years ago. I have welcomed people who have never been before. The locals say that numbers are up, and that is great. But not as great as just sitting on my Throne and just reveling in being the Vicar for the first time at Christmas. I have hardly done a thing, the crowd have - but I am like a pig in mud at the moment. Christmas couldn't be any better than that (until I go home to be with the kids when it then improves even more).

...sigh

Being Without a Vicar

2011-12-20T17:46:00.001Z

As before, my actions are constrained by a wife who would prefer not to have her picture all over the internet, so I am going to make do, once again, with this poor substitute. My missus isn't too bad to look at either, so you are going to have to jolly well cope with this image.

My comment sort of gives away who I might be talking about. In the Parish of Ss Philip and James in Whitton, that place where I peddle my ecclesiastical wares like a be-cassocked dementer, I have (apparently) 15,000 souls in my cure. The thing is, only 14,997 of them have a Vicar. The fact oft forgot in parish circles is that Mrs Vicarage and the Baby Vicarages, by virtue of the other relationship they hold with the village dog-collar, do not have the care of the Vicar as everyone else has.

Now, I can hear those Smilers out there squaring up to tell me that I minister in my home - and to that I say this: rubbish. At home, I am someone very distinct, and it is a role I cherish. The roles of husband and father are wonderful, but I don't think that I can do those and be Vicar while wearing the same pants. Simply put, Vicarage families are the families without a Vicar.

Whilst there is not a thing I can do about that (and I find that clergy wives, male or female, are normally fairly good about making alternative arrangements), I wanted to stand up and pay my respects both to my own wife and family, and to those in their position. As I have said myriad times, it is our wives who have to cope with us parading around the place with our mini Messiah Complexes. Mrs Acular, a gifted woman with her own career, has put much on hold or aside so that I can do my work. I will be endlessly thankful to her, both for that, but also for living in a home that is semi-open to the public, above 'the shop', across the hall from my office, for providing my lightening conductor when I return seething from something or other and just understanding (most of the time) that what I do is unpredictable and vague. It is my work, and it affects her - directly. Yet she has no Vicar to talk it over with, to take pastoral support from. No, she is disenfranchised from the great Church of England 'presence in every community', together with all the 'wives'.

So I pay tribute to them all. I thank them for propping us up, for taking the hit more often than any partner should, for knowing just the right way of coping when we do not, and for taking on a public role that they didn't choose for themselves or the kids.

To you all, I wish you a Happy Christmas - we'd be lost without you.

Trolls and Blogging

2011-12-16T15:27:00.000Z

I can't speak for all bloggers, only for those who blog in a conspicuous Christian setting, those who speak of their faith and their life's experience.

As with all activities, there are the Detractors. I think that it is part of life in general, the equal and opposite force that represents the antithesis of what you are doing. One only needs to think of light and dark to know that life is often a selection of two-sided coins.

As is blogging, and all such activities.

I was reminded yesterday (by two friends) of a pernicious breed of human that hides in gloomy sweaty bedrooms, seeking here and seeking there for what in the blogosphere they might devour. In the trade we call them Trolls, and they are very often sallow-skinned, sunken-eyed, fetid Gollom-a-likes who have no appreciable life of their own. So they make themselves a nuisance in the lives of others. Have I laboured the point enough? They really are very slimy and unpleasant (and they reputedly smell of wee).

Blogging is a form of journalling where the blogger, very often, is exposing him or herself in the act of simply being honest. In our blogs, we lay down our thoughts and fully expect (and hope) that people might react in a constructive and meaningful way. We cherish disagreement where that disagreement is born of a mutual respect and it is, after all, the basis of all good dialogue.

Trolls don't do that. In the temporal world, they would be the window-licking type who hides in a doorway only to jump out and tell you that your nose is too big or your breath smells. In blogging terms, they appear in comments box of our sites and broadly insult us, deride our work and mock the honesty with which it was delivered. Religious folk are, I think, more vulnerable to these Pointless People. We speak of matters that command no tangible proof, of things that we feel over and above what we know - and when Trolls appear to muddy the waters for no appreciable reason, it becomes hurtful. Sadly, these Lumps of Goo are often outspoken and prolific, and when they find a hapless blogger, act as near-stalkers and as bullies. I met one such pratt yesterday. They are the people who will laugh in the sidelines when you tell your children that you love them, emerging like puffed up comedians to tell them that love is lie.

Many Trolls will read this post and some might even comment. You know the comment of a Troll, as they often go by the name "Anonymous". You know who you are, silly people, and so do we.

Fresh Revelation Through the Eyes of Children

2011-12-14T12:38:00.000Z

'Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la, la la la la. In the life of Mr Vicarage, it means the now regular jaunts around the schools to enjoy their Nativity plays. Regular readers of this blog (thank you) will know how deeply moved I am by each one of them, with offered by the youngest of our children moving most of all.

The added dimension this year is that my own children have just completed their first Nativity. One of the Twins Aculae was a Star, the other a Wise Man. It seems only weeks ago that they were Car-seat fodder, little bundles of indiscriminate squirming.

Now, they are modern day vehicles of the purest revelation - and let me tell you why.

In the weeks leading up to the Great Day, they have clearly been rehearsing the words to the songs that they are going to offer the world. The great joy of watching all this happening (professionally and personally) is seeing little ones learn, by-heart, the words to anything up to ten songs which they will and do warble out without a moment's coyness. The thing is, when they come home and tell us the songs they they have working on, or even when they offer a rendition, they are mortified when we join in and sing with them. "How do you know that song, Daddy?". There is the right answer and the honest answer: the right answer is that the teachers told us so that we can help them learn at home; the honest (but wrong) answer is that we did the same songs as kids and in every year since.

My children, at four years of age believe, with ever fibre of their being, that they are the first to tell the story of Jesus. It is their story to tell, not ours. They believe too that every song that they sing is an innovation just for them. That means, to me at least, that every Nativity play offered by Reception age children is as fresh and real as the Gospel account itself. It is in their hearts; they mean it; yes, they even believe it. They are telling it as they feel it, in all the glorious and beautiful chaos that only kids can bring to such a performance. Give me a little child over Luke the Evangelist any day of the week. One is impressive, the other is life changing, if you but let it.

I have said it before, and I will say it many times again: try being cynical about Christmas after you see a Nativity play offered by the young. They 'get' Christmas more than even I do, and they teach me more about the magic of the Incarnation that I could ever hope to teach them.

Malware Warning

2011-12-14T12:19:00.003Z

I was informed by a friend that a Malware Warning was posted when you tried entering this site. I have found the source of that content (another blog which was on my blog-roll) and removed it. You may now proceed in safety as the warnings seem to have ceased!

Thank you for your patience, and my apologies for any consternation this may have caused.

David

One Virgin, A Sweaty Vicar and the Pursuit of Normal

2011-12-13T09:17:00.001Z

From 'Cracked Virtue' - another closed blog

Before I start, an apology. Life and its various needs means that I am scarcely finding time to be a half decent dad, let alone an engaging blogger. I apologise for neglecting you, ever thankful as I am for your continued support.

Well, the title may have you wondering what is about to emerge before your eyes, but be assured it isn't what you think, so go and wash your minds out with soap and water.

Several things have come to pass in the last week that have given me cause to consider a line in the sand. Allow me to list those things:

- Exercise

- Heat Magazine

- A kid

There you go; rich blog fodder if there were any. The 'virgin' of the title is the new gymnasium I have joined (Virgin Active Torture Chamber, if you please). Having sold all three of my kidneys to afford to borrow their towels to wipe the sweat from my ontologically changed brow, I can now pootle down there and run a little, sling some iron about, row nowhere and contort my reverential body into to shapes that would amaze you. Do I wish to be some oiled Adonis? Am I the next Iron Man? I am a little overweight, wheezy in the cold, flabby in my cassock and fast approaching 40. What I am pursuing is not excellence - just normality. I am below that standard at the moment, and I will work hard to achieve normal weight and fitness.

Last week, I languished in a school staff room, not waiting to not be Father Christmas, and taking advantage of the reading material of choice of our educators: Heat Magazine. Scored across the cover of that edition were the semi-clad forms of three Slebs (those younglings who are the love-children of And and Dec, Bruce Forsythe and Obergruppenfuhrer Cowell). That they were half dressed (or half undressed, depending on your perspective) wasn't what drew my eyes (honest), it was that they looked, well, normal. Their 'crime' was that they had stopped dieting. Hold the press, wait a cotton-picking minute, what they are guilty of is enjoying their chow and their penalty is to look, actually, altogether more attractive than Miss Skellington on the next page. Normal shaped women are accused of crimes to femininity these days - shame (and let's face it, normal sized women do more for the feminine curve than a walking rack of ribs). Just saying ...

Then the little lad. After not being Father Christmas at a Christmas Party at the school where I now help out, and after climbing out of the outfit that I wasn't wearing when I wasn't being Father Christmas, I passed a ten year old in the corridor. "I like you", he uttered in passing. "Why is that, fella?" was my interested reply. "You're normal". His mum died a thousand deaths as only the mother of an inveterate heretic could, and apologized for her boy. "No", said I, "his words are a gift to me". And then I cartwheeled home, cock-a-hoop that I had achieved that mystical status after a single assembly.

Normality to some is to be scorned. It speaks, often, of mediocrity and the average. The Gospel, of course, is not one of 'normal', but ministry and life seem often to put some of us behind that line, not ahead of it. Normal? I'll have that!

What I Miss About Curacy

2011-12-08T14:24:00.001Z

Before I say anything else I must state, in absolute terms, that I have the best darn job in the world. Whitton, Lundun Tahn, Boeing 747s, charging Stags - love it love it love it. The parish, its people, the community, all of it - love it love it love it.

Yet it is worthy of comment that I miss my curacy and miss it considerably. I think that these two things are not mutually incompatible, so feel able to open these thoughts out - in case they are of use to other folk (professionally or voyeuristically).

Curacy (in the 'training role' sense) is a specific, once-only gift. I have often been annoyed by those who, without reason, have mumped about their training experience, the free house, the free professional on-site tuition, the willing folk of the parish who entrust some of their life's needs to the Noobie. There are, of course, those who have appalling curacies - but they are the small minority. I am not one such lad - mine was good, very good.

What I miss about curacy is the envelope that surrounded me as I ministered. Perhaps it was a cocoon but it was a nice place to be. Part of that was found in being part of a Team Benefice, but knowing that one's first ministerial steps were over a soft landing was a specific relief and joy. That ''stableiser" thing in the first weeks and months gave way to simply being able to work alongside someone else who had to do a similar job, someone with whom things could be discussed and dreams dreamt. Being the Vicar changes that, subtly, with the job of incumbent being surround more in a sort of loneliness than the old life. Yes, I miss having a Training Incumbent and all the dimensions such a person brings.

Having the buck stop with me, as it were, is a two-edged sword. I like to think I am an energetic and creative man, with a comfort for being decisive. I like having the buck stop with me, but it brings its own stresses and strains, as I am not one who is always as convinced by my own rightness as I might convey. In short, I worry, more than I used to as a curate.

Curacy is a far more pastoral ministry I find. I am blessed indeed by the presence of another priest for whom pastoralia is a clear gift. I remember, as a curate, wondering if I was 'stealing' all the priestly stuff while the Boss dealt with strategy, money and the stones in the walls. He was very graceful, and I think I now know why. Modern incumbents are less about direct pastoral work than perhaps they once were. Mine is, by default (which is to say I didn't opt for a change in focus per se) a more strategic working life, and one where I have to trust much of the pastoral to the care of others. While in hindsight it seems obvious, it has been an unexpected change in my ministry.

Whilst I am a pratt a lot of the time (or shall we say 'smiling fool'), curacy was a more appropriate platform to be the clerical clown, the funny man, the ball of slightly unhinged energy. Incumbency is marked more by the demands of being strong through changes, resilient in the face of direct criticism that is not found in training. I am the chairman of the board, promoted from marketting and entertainment! I think I look at it as having 'grown up' in ministry (although I am still a nutter from time to time).

Taking the lead is exposing and vulnerable. Hiding behind a leader is safe and comfy. That said, being in the front seat is exciting and nail-bitey and the uncertainties are compelling. People who said that the learning curve from curacy to incumbency is steeper than that from old life to curacy were right.

But I wouldn't be anywhere else in the world.

Something for the Weekend II

2011-12-02T22:09:00.001Z

Brought to my attention by a new but firm friend - the work of the wonderful Richard Stilgoe. Enjoy!!

Wrong Message Wrong Time

2011-12-01T14:41:00.001Z

You know my feelings on this stuff. I don't like or subscribe to the premis that Christians feel a shame from which they can distance themselves in this initiative. It is a campaign rooted in the negative and more than piggy-backs on the captivating 'not afraid' movement that went viral some time ago.

However, today is Not Ashamed Day - December 1st, at St. Paul's Cathedral. Were the campaign called 'Proud' I might have a sympathy, but I know no shame in my God, the Christ, or his Gospel. I am not persecuted and do not believe that any Christian in Britain is persecuted. We might be marginalised in some circumstances, but not persecuted. No. No. No.

Now it might just be me, but this wholly poorly timed. There is a community in Britain who live life knowing a shame that is projected upon them, and that is not of their making or choosing - or deserved. There are those in this country who know persecution in the real sense of the word, not in the sense that in encompassed by the slight infringements of the rights of choice that some Christians feel that they have had violated. I speak of the remarkable community of those who live with HIV. Today is World Aids Day.

I question the need to stand before a cathedral church with pamphlets and proclaim the great 'Woe is Me' when we as Christians should be laying aside our own needs and reaching out to those whose lives have been utterly changed by a disease. That I cannot wear a crucifix over my Tesco uniform will not cost me my sleep or my life. Aids would. Taking the 'shame' and 'persecution' platform on this day of all days seem like a colossal home goal.

Were we ever ashamed? No. Should we care for those who life hangs in the balance day by day? Yes.

The Vicar's Kids

2011-11-30T10:35:00.001Z

During my sojourn in this rough part of the English Cotswolds, I have been reflecting with the other priests on the Second Letter of Paul to Timothy. In the first chapter of that letter, there is mention of two ladies - Lois and Eunice. One was mum and the other was grandma to Timothy, and between them, it is claimed, they nurtured little Timmy in the faith. Excellent.

Now some of you may have picked up on the fact that Mrs Acular and I are blessed by the perfect curly gifts that are our children - otherwise known in these parts as the Twins Aculae. They are bright little buttons, able to drive with a high degree of competency the greatest of Steve Jobs' brainchildren, and also able to engage with deep and profound theologies. No, I am not referring to the poncy theologies you find in books and through which bespectacled geezers have made a living - I am talking about the mighty questions of life under God. Jurgen Moltmann has nothing on my kids.

During our considerations concerning Two Timmy, I found myself pondering again something that niggles me - an unresolved matter that I haven't even discussed with the lady of the house. I speak of the direct spiritual nurture of my own children.

Part of me has always held firm to the notion that I am called first to be a husband, next to be a dad and then to be a priest. Mixing those things up is a perilous matter, and a matter I seek to avoid. That meant that I did not evangelise my wife before she confessed faith for herself, that as her husband, that was not my job, (and that had I tried, I would have been the recipient of a swift kick in the family jewels). The kids are at an age where this is a poignant matter once again: how to raise my children as Christians all the while not being the vicar, but being dad. In that, there is a distinction.

As I write this, I have no formulated view. Some may say that it is my Christian duty, and my priestly duty, to embody at home what I expect of my punters. However, in the back of my mind, I am aware of two things. First is that my wife and kids do not have a parish priest; second is that they are not a part of my ministry, the captive audience, the litmus test, the guinea pigs. They are my family, and exposed amply to God and his Enormities. They desire and deserve a dad, not a vicar all too close. Yet there are things I should now be thinking of as the girls themselves grow into spiritual people in their own right.

I think I am exorcised over the correct balance. Suggestions?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Withdrawal

2011-11-29T15:08:00.001Z

I am currently languishing in a medieval farmhouse somewhere in the boonies. In the month before the great feast of Christmas, with a beautiful wife and two ankle-biters at home, you may question the timing. I have too, because I have, like all God-botherers, a million things that I just have to do, now. Surely January is a better month or October.

I have said it before and I will say it again - I don't find the whole stopping thing easy. I trim sleep time to do the stuff of the waking hours. It may be that I am inefficient, but it is certainly the case that I enjoy productivity and getting the job done.

The last three months since taking on this job have presented myriad myriad new experiences, new responsibilities, new pressures, new joys, new annoyances, new challenges. Like that monster whose name now escapes me, the one which grows two heads when one is lopped off - each of these new things, when 'done', offers two more new things. Exponential growth is great, and I thank God for it, but it needs a particular approach.

Somewhere in the Byble, that book we Christian folk all have, it tells of a bloke called Jesus. It tells us that he withdrew from time to time, to create a distance. I reason that if it worked for him it might just work for me. I wonder if Jesus found withdrawing easy, or rather that he just wanted to graft on into the wee small hours. But withdraw he did, often when things picked up and got busy.

So here I am, in the boonies. I have a lot of things I could be doing at home, people to meet, jobs to do. The thing is, though, that I am flagging. I have had such a wonderful few weeks but I am starting to pay the price a bit. I am tired to my bones, and that is before Crimbo really sets off properly. If I fall over through the failure to withdraw, the job will surely suffer. Worse still, my failure would be at the expense of my wife and kids.

I am here to do some work with my fellow priests from the part of London where I minister. We will study, pray and eat together. I will get a little more sleep, but most importantly of all - I am forced to stop. Kicking and screaming.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Cirencester,United Kingdom

Oak Trees and Greenhouses

2011-11-22T08:56:00.001Z

I existed in a greenhouse, and my friend existed under an oak tree. The presence of the oak tree and the greenhouse have had an effect on us, and quite possibly how we behave on a day to day basis.

The difference between oak trees and greenhouses is in the experience of those in the space closest to them. The thing is, you have no idea what I am talking about!

Since becoming the 'lead' in a parish, I have been given an opportunity to move from the curacy position of thinking about my own ministry to the incumbency position of thinking about the ministries of others. I have thought hard about this transition over the last few months, and have come to the conclusion that I can characterise ministries in two ways (among the many ways that surely exist) - as oak trees or greenhouses.

In thinking about oak trees, I think of a something mighty, deeply rooted, long lasting, visually significant. The oak is the focus, the thing that artists paint or picture. It is an iconic plant that speaks of longevity. In thinking about greenhouses, I observe that they are modest buildings that are an important part of the garden, but rarely the focus. These are not the characteristics that I (necessarily) focus on, however.

What is true to say is that under the wide arms arms of a mature oak, nothing else grows. There is no light and very little nourishment in the soil. What is true to say about greenhouses is that their sole aim is to give life to other things. In its modesty, it is the place of germination and new life. The oak tree is in centre stage; the greenhouse is not, it is the new plants and not the building itself.

I believe that ministries hold some of these characteristics. They may be individual ministries or wider concerns, but the effect upon the ministries of others is largely the same, I think. The only way you can live in proximity to the oak is in being an oak too. The greenhouse doesn't choose its seedlings, it just gives them the best start.

If you are a tree, mightiness is a favourable condition. In ministry, I fear that it is not. When a ministry is about a name, a personality - it is an oak tree ministry. If you are a greenhouse, success in the area of horticultural nurture is a favourable condition. In ministry, it is the same if that nurture is of new ministries or the enablement of other ministries within the same space.

As I reflect upon my training experience as a curate, I learn much about how I must be as a Vicar. I was afforded all the warmth and opportunity that a greenhouse grants a seedling. In other words, I was given a new life often at the expense of the silent effort of another person. It was about me, not him. My friend, sadly, experienced the opposite; it was about his trainer not about him, and so he feels under-developed and weedy in ministry. As a Vicar, I have a duty to be the same as the one who gave me my chances. I can be an oak tree and soak up all the light, or I can be a greenhouse and channel it.

Un-Holy Smoke and Brass Handbags

2011-11-21T16:41:00.001Z

It is the thing more likely to precipitate a response in church life - one way or the other! I speak not of wearing my underpants over my trousers in a family service, and I speak not of my pious red socks. Having previously mentioned vases of flowers, you can surely set them aside in favour of this red-hot potato. Nothing more than this causes either a sigh of pleasure or the tooth-gritted snarls of Beelzebub and all the Imps of Hades, normally transmitted through the bodies and expressions of good Christian men and women!

I speak of course of incense, the prayerful odours of none less than the smoking handbag - the beloved thurible.

Be it in theological college, or in parish life - if you lob some flavoured frankincense on a hot charcoal, you get a reaction. There is no middle ground here, but rather two extreme poles of feeling, passing from deep spiritual rapture through the wonderlands of allergy and asthma and all the way to irritating skin conditions. Those who love it, love it a lot. Those who hate, loathe with menaces and blame it for just about every condition known to the medical profession.

And I don't know why.

It is but one part of worship, like bells, like robes, like hymns, like readings, like flowers, like Gift Aid envelopes - just one small part of the greater whole. You may not be surprised to learn that I am fond of holy smoke, but that isn't to say that I am in mourning when it does not billow.

What confuses me more and more is the reaction of the 'against' lobby. It borders on (which is to say that it is well past border-control) the irrational. I think there is a part of some human brains that associates incense with some voodoo or child-sacrifice. The reaction is rarely slight - but bombastic and fully vehement. When I am witness to this irrational response, I challenge it - inquiring what kind of hocus-pocus they are afraid of, and the simple fact is that although they HATE it (as distinct from 'dislike', 'not fond', 'marginally irritated by ...'), they don't know why. Ten millenia old it might be; mentioned in the Bible as representing prayer it could be, but when people hate the stuff, it is a formless hatred born of nothing more than silliness, or so it seems.

Now child-sacrifice; there's a thought!

Church and The Value of Time

2011-11-17T15:39:00.001Z

I have been thinking about, and talking about the whole 'giving' thing. It is something that I have to take seriously as a Vicar, as a broke church is a fairly closed one.

When we talk about 'giving' in church life, we are more often than not talking about dosh / wonga / cash. Entire campaigns are planned and orchestrated so that we may pursue the Mighty Dollar, at times (in my opinion) with a sense that God is a coin-operated fairground ride. In other words, you pop your coin in the slot and God will whir into action like a celestial automaton.

This said, bankruptcy is a sure blanket to mission - just so you know that I can be balanced!

The goal, often, is to secure financial resource. In doing this, I believe very strongly that we massively de-value a resource that we already have - the time and talents of our people.

If we think about church life, in many cases we have the wheezy cleric somewhere there, surrounded by a panoply of willing volunteers. Stewardship drives often centre around paying the bills, central to which (in the Church of England) is Parish Share / Common Fund. It is in many ways our mortgage payment. It is the means that we pay people like me and house people like me, so I have to defend it! But I cannot, do not and should not run a church alone.

Taking but one example in a church where I used to be, there was a lady who helped do the flowers. She was a qualified woman and could (and did) demand hourly rates in three figures. She worked hard and then then spent four or five hours a months doing floral displays for the glory of the worship. Her efforts may have been recognised once in a while with a passing thanks, before she returned to the world of work to be paid hundreds of pounds an hour for her time. In actual terms, the 'value' she brings to the parish could be (and should be) valued in thousands of pounds per months. If she stopped doing the flowers but gave an extra twenty a month, we would regard it as a win.

I use this example to illustrate a point, that in church life we de-value or undervalue the time given to us. If I priced up the time given freely in my present community, and were caused to buy it in, it would generate a bill of hundreds of thousands of pounds per year.

When someone commits to giving us a hundred pounds a months, we celebrate and we play fanfares. When someone offers to mow the church lawn twice a month, it might generate a grateful grunt. Some church communities are hard-pressed for cash. I would argue that the value of the gift of time that they count on daily makes them rich beyond measure, but that when we don't see or smell the cash, we forget its value. We could usefully learn from the commercial world that appreciates skills and values them. We could usefully learn that lesson.

Retailer Gets Christmas

2011-11-14T08:53:00.001Z

I am not normally fussed by the pre-Christmas advertising campaigns of the big retailers - too many memories, most difficult (about retail Christmases being a hard slog and wholly devoid of religion for the most part).

Until last night...

An ad appeared between the many bouts of Gladiator TV that knocked me and Mrs Acular sideways - and it was courtesy of John Lewis. [Link to You Tube courtesy of Martin]

In summary, we were treated to a tale of a boy who is wishing and willing for Christmas to come. He tries to play magic tricks with time, willfully move the hands of the clock faster, and so on. On Christmas Eve, we saw the little lad bolt down his peas, and sprint to bed, clamping shut his eyes in an effort to bring Christmas into view with greater speed than time will allow. I think at this point we could all relate, though in the first viewing did not realise that we were misjudging the motivations of this rather enchanting kid.

Christmas morning dawned and the boy jumped out of bed, paused to regard his mountain of gifts, but darted past them for a parcel secreted in his own cupboard. He retrieved a poorly wrapped (but wrapped none the less) gift and ran in to his parents' bedroom.

His joy was in giving, not in receiving. If ever a perfectly wonderful unexpected heart-warming tears-inducing story-end to a two-minute advert ever existed, I can't remember it. Mrs Acular wept, I swallowed tears back!

Well done, John Lewis - nail on head!

Perhaps hope really does spring eternal!

Remembering Tomorrow

2011-11-11T08:46:00.001Z

Today is Armistice Day, one of a number of opportunities to do something vitally important to preserving a hopeful tomorrow - remembering yesterday.

This is one of the days when I hope that the entire blogosphere will write about the same thing, because to me, this is so important.

Anamnesis, that whole notion of memory, is one of the fundamental heartbeats of sacramental Christianity. It is that moment, during the Prayer of Consecration when we remember the great act of sacrifice made by Jesus Christ for us. Christian Anamnesis shares much with the Jewish notion of Yad Vashem, and is placed before us in our thoughts today, and this week.

Remembering, that means by which we re-assemble [re-member] something from our past is perhaps the best way of learning how to live in the future. Today, of course, we remember a specific historical event, that being the end of the Great War in 1918. Sunday sees the broader Remembrance Sunday, when we are called as a nation, to re-member those young men and women whose lives were taken from them in the worst of circumstances, and for a cause not of their choosing. Last week, we had the spiritual component to all of this when we remembered the faithful departed on All Souls Day.

I once heard it said that all this remembering should reach a natural conclusion and that we should perhaps draw an end to the practice. It was suggested that we should do that when the last survivor of the Second World War succumbs to death. It is easy to forget that our "war dead" is a community that almost daily increases. Last Sunday, among the list of those who had died in our community, I read out the considerable list of more young men and women who have died for their country during 2011. A new name has been added even since Sunday.

The simple fact behind all of this is that the names we remember are those who did not choose death. They did not choose war. They just agreed to serve. Added to the list of our war heroes, we must also remember the people who died away from the front-line - those at home bombed in their beds, the countless millions of the Shoah genocide (Jews, Roma, Jehovah Witnesses, those with learning difficulties and physical disablements and so many others), those who died servicing the machines of war, those who patrolled our streets at home, those women who died in the factories that supplied the front-line, those who died of war-related symptoms many years after the ceasefire, family members who died of heartbreak in the wake of losing their life's love - countless myriad millions of people who did not choose death.

Half of today is about remembering those who died on our behalf. They died for you. They died for me. They died for our children. The other half is to remember tomorrow - that fateful day when we can stop choosing war over compassion and generosity, when we give instead of take, when we can dream of waking to a day where no-one will die violently at the hands of another human being.

They shall grow not old as wethat are left grow old; ageshall not weary them, nor the years condemn. Atthe going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

When you go home tell them of us, and say for your tomorrow we gaveour today

When Two Worlds Collide

2011-11-10T16:16:00.001Z

May the Lord bless social media, for this day it reunited two old friends.

I have just enjoyed a good chat with a former colleague, catching up on news and changes that affected both of us. Our families have found their life, and it is also fair to say that we are both fuller in the face than we were.

We worked together in my former life in flooring. I met him in west London when he was fairly fresh into Britain (he is from Ghana) and looking for work, and I was the one who gave him a job. We worked together for several years in different places, me as his manager and he as my very gifted principal sales-person. I think we both helped one another pay the bills, if we are honest, and it was one of the sadnesses of a change of circumstances which meant that we went our separate ways a few years ago.

He has gone onto bigger and better things, and so have I. He was always going to excel in marketting and his currently role reflects his seniority in that world. I am a vicar. Poles apart ...

... or so you may think.

We have been chatting half of the afternoon about how much our jobs are the same. He is a marketting executive in the world of dentistry, and yet we have both had almost identical conversations in our work-places of late. I have written about this stuff before, the quality of the "shop front" experience for those who visit our churches, as well as the 'business needs' of the church as organisation. Much of our work, in the distinct worlds that we move, is really very similar. Alarmingly similar!

So, this is a hasty post about the joys of social media. It is also one that observes a refreshing reminder that church and parish life is really rather similar to other aspects of 'normal' life. All in all a good afternoon!

Incumbency and Vases of Flowers

2011-11-09T13:53:00.000Z

A wise man once told me to be careful when moving vases of flowers. It is not that vases of flowers shouldn't be moved from time to time, or even removed and refreshed. Of course they should, when the time is right and the need apparent.

For "vase of flowers" read "what we have always done", and for "always" read "more than three times". I speak, of course, about change, and more particularly those changes that take place within a church. The unique factor of church vases of church flowers, is that beneath each one is a trip switch which causes an explosion upon the removal of it, like a landmine. Boom.

I am fast discovering that curates are broadly immune to the effects of the explosion (largely through the protective layer provided by the training incumbent). The Vicar is not similarly protected, and so it is that the vicar's giblets and gizzards are at perpetual risk from all movements of the proverbial Meissen Monster.

It endlessly fascinates me, and troubles me, the effect that change has (in large or very small measure) on some people. Some Christians, it seems, are pathologically afraid of change in many ways, and I have never fully come to terms with why. Even change born of a careful process of thought, prayer and consultation (and to make something safe and available for all) seems to cause an adverse reaction, often aggressively delivered. And so it is that I am learning to toughen my already world-hardened hide to cope with the fall-out from the Floral Relocation.

Part of the job of Vicar, as leader in many ways, is to articulate the present. Once the present is seen and acknowledged (not as easy as that may sound), it is needful to make changes from time to time. As seasons change in all walks of life, things change - and in church life at least, the Vicar (or equivalent) is often the one who 'represents' the change tothe wider community, whoever may have been involved in the process leading to it. This is not always easy, as I am fast learning.

Change is part of living, I believe. If I didn't change, Mrs Acular would be wiping my bottom and blowing my nose for me. If churches didn't change, they would still be convening solely in mud huts in the Middle East. I wonder sometimes if change is not viewed through the same lens as death - as wholly inevitable, but an unsavoury truth best hidden from thought.

I have many vases in the church where I work. The church is beautified by them all and they are receptacles for some stunning blooms. Yet I cannot say, hand on heart, that they will all stay where they are! Someone pass me my Flack Jacket ...

Social Media and Fainting by Numbers

2011-11-08T16:37:00.000Z

Once upon a time, before even the Baby Jesus was a twinkle in the Father's eye, people first grunted and then spun out loquacious and erudite conversation with one another. Then, as the human capacity for invention increased, we started faxing papyri to one another and making use of the telephone. In the mano-a-monkey interaction, we learned how to pucker and wave our arms about to convey greater meaning to our grunts and tics. And so, dear readers, communication was born.

Evening and morning. The first social-media.

The measure of 'success' in that world was a reciprocal response, a reaction, a new friendship. That said, the moment was had and it vanished for ever. A word was whispered then never to be heard again. A smile stopped a heart-beat but was forgotten. The communication was transient, the effect lasting.

And so it came to pass that there came the Wise Men (and Ladies) who, by their efforts, gave rise to the Dawn of the Gadget. God saw and knew that it was good. Evening and morning - the second social-media. During the geeky revelry, there came a serpent - its name was Wikio, and it was hell-bent on wreaking unholy havoc in the Eden of the Gadget world of Parlay. The doe-eyes gadgeteers installed the widget unto their bloggies and partook of the Forbidden Fruit - the age of innocence collapsed and so it happened that those caught in the new world of social media could quantify their activity.

In other words, social media in the present age can give you numbers and reports. I get emails telling me who I have 'spoken' to, with what effect, under what level of reach and to which extent of influence. The serpent Wikio was quickly joined by the demons Klout and Feedjit, then the arch Leviathan Empire Avenue. All these things are, in one form or another, measuring devices. They chastise you when you have said too little, and reward you when you have been busy. For competitive men like me, it is like having an aggressive Mistress (not that I have the first idea how that would feel, you understand). I sometimes find myself making inane comments on Twitter because my Klout number fell, or posting some drivel on here because my Wikio number was lower than a snake's belly.

This is dangerous. I know I am not alone, but it is very compelling to those of us who care how we are perceived and received. Being social, in all its facets, is vulnerable under the auspices of self-measure. The much lamented Church Mouse used to post monthly the Wikio blog rankings, and the comments confirm that we bloggers and Tweeters really do care if we are successful in what we do. Gain is great; slump or decline is mortal tragedy. I regard this is a problem, and one I am trying to resolve. My rankings buttons will start to go as I try to be sure in my mind (and allow you the same) that I am doing what I do online for right reason, not simply for numerical success!

Is Church Planting a One-Sided Game?

2011-11-03T16:15:00.000Z

In the natural world of nature, beasts grow by dropping seeds or sprogs, or by sending roots through the dark earth. I am not sure that I believe in magical storks or pink pudgy babies falling from stars, so I am left with this clumsy biological fact. And it works. Just look out of the window - life everywhere, all born of an older life elsewhere.

Now that I have earned a PhD in the natural sciences, I can make a pronouncement or two about the life of the church.

I live in the heartlands of what is affectionately known as Aitchteebee - a super-church in the City that gave birth to that rarely seen thing, the Alpha Course. You speak to Christians around here, you fast discover that a great number of churches in this part of the world are Aitchteebee Plants. Frankly, they are almost without exception successful, growing and thriving places - and good for them. Someone has to be.

Sometimes, I lose heart. I lose heart because as a catholic kind of Christian, it feels (even if it only a feeling) that our 'end' of things is well into terminal decline, with half our people leaving to be what they would now term as 'proper Catholics'. This means that there are precisely eight Anglo-Catholic priests in the whole of Britain, and so I lose heart when I see my brothers and sisters of the evangelical wing having it away with new churches, world-famous nurture courses and growth beyond all measure.

In trying to work out why this is, I have to ask what might be going on. Is evangelicalism the only expression of faith supported by God? Nope. Is it about money? Possibly. Is the whole world evangelical except for the eight of us who like to faun over thuribles for a living? Nope. So what is it then?

It has to be a heart to church plant. Like every organic being in the whole of God's creation (and we could argue that a perfect model exists for us right there), big things emit little baby things that grow into the next big things. Yet we Anglo-Catholics just don't seem to want to bother. The sad thing is, we are easy transplants - all we need is a Mass Set, and a Bible and we are a liturgical body. I do not believe that my friends in the evangelical wing of the church have the only successful plant-model - they simply have the only plant-model (and cash, which helps, of course).

I know that there are successful catholic communities that could plant a church (and if any of us simply waited for enough cash then we would get nowhere fast). I am not advocating a fight-back on the part of the catholics, because I believe that the world needs all of us. But it needs us by balance. For this to happen, people like me could learn a lesson from those who seem to know better, to look beyond the stylistic issues (or even celebrate the differences) and get on and grow as nature intended.

Absolute Moments of Clarity

2011-11-02T17:42:00.001Z

With thanks to the Highlands of Scotland's answer to holiness and goodness personified - Facebook's very own Andrew Swift - a diagram that replaces '42' as the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Social Networking explained ...

If you cared!

From One Extreme to Another

2011-11-02T13:48:00.000Z

It is only a few weeks since Ricky Gervais mocked the image of Christ on a magazine cover in order to make a further payment on his mortgage. Apart from a few bloggers, myself included, not a peep was heard from any sensible Christian anywhere.

This morning brought with it a news story of a French satirist whose offices were rendered to charcoal because he made a mocking representation of the Prophet Mohammed in his own magazine.

In essence, the same action by two 'funny' men caused diametrically opposing responses from faith organisations. One of those responses was conspicuous by its absence, the other conspicuous by its excess.

Surely there is some middle ground. It seems, at times, that Christians are only satisfied when attacking their own (the archbish, for example). The other lot are busy weeping into their crocheted hankies about how we are "Christians of the persecution" in Britain - and you all know what I think of that preposterous agenda. Oddly, we seem incapable or unwilling to step up and speak out about those who would seek to mock our own Saviour, which makes us the focus and butt of much comedy and insult. Equally, I am a blogger who avoids any and all talk of the Prophet Mohammed. Why? Because I fear the response by some of the more extreme of my Muslim brothers (and sisters). It is a considerable imbalance between the faiths that to my mind is difficult to swallow.

I would love to see more Christians become gusset-rotated about some of the christocentric humour that permeates our media. I would love to see Christians stand up for their faith not in the flaccid way we see in the hands of those who simply want to impose their personal theologies. We can't even blame being British, because the world of football and rugby engenders so much loyalty and self-defensiveness. By the same token, I would call upon my Muslim brothers and sisters to not be so easily compelled to violence by the foolishness of comedians. No-one prevails in the wake of an over-reaction, any more than they do in the silent wake of passivity.

This is a place where many people of different faiths can learn from one another. To those of us who hold it, faith is important enough to cherish and seek to protect. I am sure that every Christian parent would turn rabid in the defense of their children, just not their family in faith. Equally, I doubt that a single member of any other faith group would burn the house of the headteacher following a difficult report about their little ones. Let us all work out the middle ground, and maybe even (just maybe) find a way of defending faith in all its expressions.

The Wrong Victims

2011-11-01T09:07:00.000Z

The situation that surrounds the cathedral church of my new diocese is now an international story. It is a tale that is dividing a church in many regards, and one that is leaving a trail of destruction in its wake which seems to bear no resemblance to the purported cause at the heart of the matter.

So, we have a gang of protesters who have an issue with the bankers and capitalists. Fine - it's a viewpoint that is open to lengthy debate. They want to make a protest within the context of the capitalist heartland but were 'moved on' by a worried establishment. I can understand that too, in the wake of demonstrations, riots and the visible and well documented assaults upon our Royal Family in our recent history. So, the protesters seek a venue, and through an act of hospitality from a priest, found themselves an oasis from which to express their views. It is their right to protest, and whatever my views are on the matter at hand, support their view to make their protest.

Then the needs of modern life kick in - the need that all society has in the present day to maintain safety and not be exposed to needless harm. I too would have closed the cathedral, but hold to the view that any of us who were not in that room at the time that that difficult decision was made have no real right to judge the decision of those pressed into that position. It is very easy to judge that decision with the happy fact of hindsight (which, of course, is an exact science).

In the midst of decisions and hard choices, the protesters were, I assume, still protesting about bankers and capitalists - but one could be forgiven for forgetting that. Very quickly they started capitalising on the situation that the hospitality to them created - and using the name of Our Lord as a tool of protest. This very quickly stopped being about bankers and capitalists, but about biting the very hand that feeds (or in this case, judging the very hospitality offered by a church that didn't have to).

And then priestly ministries started to fall. Why? Because those who exercise their right to protest seem ill equipped to know when to stop, to know when the day is done or indeed when their protest has claimed unforeseen causalities. The disagreements that ensued have claimed the ministries of fine priests who were gifted by God to undertake the ministries that they had at St. Paul's. What now for them? I doubt that the protesters give a monkey's about the priests who have lost their livelihoods, if I am honest (and I can assure them that on stipends, none of us are poster-children for the capitalist ideal).

When (or if) the dust settles, the story won't be about bankers and capitalists. The silence from the political world is deafening, but that won't be the story either. The story will be about the wrong victims, ministries ended (which has a cost to the families of the priests involved too, lest we forget). The story will be about a pragmatic decision to close a building, not about those who precipitation that decision.

My experience of Death

2011-10-31T12:43:00.000Z

What is manifestly the case is that I am not dead (though readers of this blog may have the right to question that assertion). Through my work as a priest I am granted an almost unique place in the moment of the bereaved relatives' lives who have only just lost loved ones, or in the last moments of life for those who have gone before us. It is part of my job to listen as they describe the last moments, and part of my duty, as I see it, is to know how the 'end' was for the one now gone.

These encounters now number many dozen (and in many circumstances and under the auspices of many 'causes'), so I feel qualified to write this, and also in a position to make some observations about some of the frequent consistencies in the accounts that I hear. I place them here because these accounts, in their overwhelming similarity, are interesting - and I think that these words may even give comfort in future times.

1. Seeing the dead - now this may seem like an account taken from a film, but I am struck how often those who are within hours of their own death seem to see, hear and communicate with long-dead relatives (at times, the 'other' is presumed, and in other cases, conversations between the person dying with "mother" etc are overheard). Very often, this is 'end of the bed' encounters where the dying person engages with those in proximity when the room seems otherwise empty. I am convinced that people do not pass into death alone, and it is through this particular phenomenon that I find my 'evidence'.

2. Choosing - I have listened to the stories of many deaths and a common thread seems to me that we choose when we go, even when we seem beyond consciousness. Accounts of people dying in the scarce moments when loved-ones leave the bedside; accounts of people finishing unfinished business with relatives - these and so many more tell me that whilst we may not choose the year or the month, we can choose the hour and the day. An aspect of this that surprised me was the need that some have had for specific permission to die. I have known people live out of duty when their bodies are struggling on, and in cases where death is the best outcome, not more life. I have had to 'grant permission' on a number of occasions, enabling that person to go with a sense that they are not being a nuisance or failing even.

3. Being alone - in addition to the above, the overwhelming majority of those who have died have done so when they were alone (and in some cases when vigils of many days length is suspended for a quick visit for the loo or to get food). This often causes great anxiety for relatives who chastise themselves for abandoning someone at precisely the wrong moment.

4. Peace - I have sat and listened to many people who are confronting their own imminent death. In most cases, a fear of the transition from life to death has been a source of fear and anxiety, with the inevitable questions about what may follow life. Even in cases where this has been most acute and the fears most pronounced, I have noticed that a sense of calm and peace descend upon those who are drawing to their end, before they lose consciousness. In short, the vast majority of the recently departed found a sense that 'everything will be alright' before their end.

These observations are from my own perspective, based on accounts of many families. I accept, freely, that there are many painful, difficult and tortuous deaths, and that I have been fortunate not to have witnessed or ministered to such situations. However, I also believe that the moment of death is, on the whole, gentle. I offer this for those who may be confronting their own death or that of someone close.

An Eye for An Eye?

2011-10-21T12:29:00.000+01:00

I was walking with my wife this morning, visiting a couple of shops when we happened past a news stand. One newspaper was emblazoned with the blood-covered face of a man whose eyes told the reader exactly what was to befall him. Another paper was emblazoned with his lifeless corpse. Those papers were two feet from the ground, being pondered by a passing child who was trying to fathom what the pictures meant.

Needless to say, the man in the pictures was one Mr. Gadaffi, the now dead former dictator of Libya.

I am not a man given to fits of naivety or idealism, so I recognise that the man in those pictures was murderer, a slayer of children, a destroyer of families and a tyrant. He deserved justice in the face of the world and was answerable for the deaths of so many people around our world, including those who perished on our own shores.

Except that he didn't face justice.

The events of the last few months seem to me to have made killers of ordinary men (and women?). Plumbers and accountants have taken up arms (supplied by the enlightened West) and killed other people. It seems (even if the truth is not this simplistic) that we in the enlightened West let ordinary people do our dirty work for us while we stood on the sidelines and taunted (and threw a few jet fighters in for good measure). That is how it seems.

The newspapers that I saw this morning, and that were seen by a small child, tell us much about our own deepest instincts. We see injustice and we seek blood. We are delighting in a murder, an execution without hearing. That the man who was killed yesterday didn't' afford his victims that right does not mean that we are free of the responsibility to ensure that justice is done in a civilised way, that even Saddam Hussein received. Actually, it could easily be argued that Gaddafi got off lightly in his drain pipe.

But I wonder what that child learned this morning? Why was that man covered in blood? Why is he dead? What happened? The man did wrong, very wrong and very often, so we let him get killed. We in the West, with our law and our justice systems, we stood back and let one more man die - we became bystanders in an act of murder.

And then we sold our newspapers with the money shot of his corpse.

I don't feel very civilised at all this morning.

Blind Faith Can Kill You

2011-10-20T08:55:00.001+01:00

As I half-watched the news the other evening, a piece caught my attention that woke me up and gave me cause to become angry. That news story can be found here.

I am a priest, and as a priest I believe in a God who is made known in the created order, the miraculous and the unexpected. My eyes are open and so is my mind, but neither am I foolish about it. As part of this I believe in a God who pours his healing spirit into those in great need, and I am willing to believe that there are cases of cure from disease that are directly from God. The definition if miracles, however, is that they are not daily occurrences.

Someone very close to me has an expression: God will provide, but you have to do your own hustling. Put another way, God's healing spirit is poured into us by the gifts and skills of other humans more often than not - the talents of the pharmacologists, the vocation and gifts of those in the caring and medical professions, and sometimes simple time and faith by all concerned. I do not, in any way shape or form, believe in a God who, when some barmy cleric directs him, kills all known germs dead. Were this the God we were talking about, we would surely be living in a utopia where babies do not die of cancer at two years old and wars never happen.

Faith is the heart of all that Christians do. We proceed in faith through our every journey of life - be they good or the worst of journeys. What angers me is when a barmy cleric tells those whose faith is at breaking point in the context of a life limiting disease that God will reach down from a cloud and cure them. What that barmy cleric is saying is, with breathtaking arrogance, that he can cure people (perhaps he is his messiah). Then those poor people have died of the disease, and one barmy cleric has caused them to regard God as failed.

To me this is the worst of spiritual abuse. Strong words yes, but when you tell a dying person to say a prayer, or to cavort with the signs of the Spirit, that they will not be dying - that actually, so much will they be healed that they can stop taking their tablets - that is the worst of abuses. People look to clerics for support and whether we like it or not, and whether we ourselves believe what we say or not - many people take our words as absolute.

I pray for those who have succumbed to their symptoms because a cleric told them to stop taking medication. I pray for their families who are left to wonder where the lie or failure lay. I pray for the barmy cleric who is so devastatingly wrong that he is killing people with their love and with their faith.

A Fool on Tape

2011-10-18T21:19:00.001+01:00

Last Saturday, eminent theologian and all-round good chappesse (Dr Bex Lewis) collared me and placed a recording device under my nose. I am not that spontaneous, sadly - and the following minute of giggle-resisting press-worthy gold is the resultant product.

Press to Listen

I am not sure whose tongue was more firmly in cheek - hers or mine (and not like that, you smutty person)!

Is Social Media a Prawn Cocktail?

2011-10-18T12:46:00.003+01:00

This last weekend saw my inaugural voyage in the great ship The Christian New Media Conference.

Now, you will either fall into two camps: those who went or would have been interested in so doing, or else those who have no idea what sort of conference that may be. If you are of the latter disposition, then think prayers and know that we were described as "geeks" with alarming frequency, added to which we were all sporting a dozen gadgets apiece, and you will get the idea. It was, basically, a gathering of bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers and those who aspire to such levity.

One of my own concerns with social media as a 'world' is that it connects with tangible reality in the way that Kermit the Frog's legs and arms do - which is to say, they are never in the same shot at the same time. It is, without doubt, a part of reality as real people have real interactions. The matter and the fruits of social media are very real and for that I love it, embrace it and do all I can to compel others to come in.

Then we went and had our "Geeks Gathering" where I met three people (among many others), and to whom this post is warmly dedicated. They are three Christian ministers, who, alarmingly, seemed to be on the wavelength that I seem to exist on. It was the first time I had met them in my life, and I am glad that I did. Through social media, they are gentlemen with whom I had had various quantities of interaction through the gadget-mitigated world - but Saturday was the first time that I had ever actually met them.

And it was good. I venture to say that it was better. We had lunch together and a couple of beers apiece and we sorted out the world. It was a truly wonderful time - so it begs a question. In the great meal of life, is social media a good hearty starter? Nothing beats that 'face to face' stuff for me, the main course - and I doubt I could have engaged with those people from Saturday over a month of Sundays on Twitter and cover the ground that we did in an hour behind a pint!

Social Media is one tool among many, in the various modes it exists, to bring people into contact with others. To be fair, I may not have been sat anywhere with anyone on Saturday without it, so from that point of view, I am endlessly grateful to my social-media life. I will always wonder though, if in the end, we are always called to move on to the main course and be with people, in proximity, like wot we used to.

I want to thank the wonderful people with whom I spent time of Saturday, the lads and others who didn't bother joining us for lunch and everyone else who tolerated my tomfoolery, modest rages and all those other little facets of 'me' that emerge in lecture theatres. I was delighted to have met you!

Couldn't Have Put it Better

2011-10-14T10:05:00.000+01:00

This has been doing the rounds, and as a thing to behold is remarkable. So much so, in fact, that it warrants greater airing - so here it is.

With thanks to Facebook's very own Clive Hillman, from whom I pilfered it! (And with apologies to the ladies over at Watch for the exclusive language, unless of course Mr. Lama really did only mean the male of the species)

Children and Theological Whittling

2011-10-13T14:05:00.001+01:00

The difficult events of the last twenty-four hours (and no, I am not referring to last night's PCC meeting, which was good) have left a pall of awkwardness over la Famille d'Aculaire. Me and the missus are feeling sad, and the very visible grief response from the girls is now turning into something altogether more tricky.

As a priest, some would call me a theologian. Certainly, it was the excuse I used for being rubbish at practical things like decorating, but as for the truth of the matter, the jury is still out.

Then the loss of the Blessed Stimpy (the Vatican beatified her this morning) precipitated the questions that children ask. They are the questions are that, without any doubt, are deeper than any I have seen or read or have been asked by any adult. They are the questions that expose me not as a theologian, but as something of a fraudulent, clumsy heretic.

Daddy, how did Stimpy go to Heaven? Did she have to go in a plane?
No love, God took that special part of her that made her Stimpy and took it and is looking after it

What does it look like?
You can't see it, but you know it is there. It's a bit like the wind, sweetheart. You can't see it but you know it there because the leaves move about.

Will Stimpy see Dante (our old bunny) in Heaven?
I am not sure. What do you think? I think that they will be playing together with Charlie (Mavis's dog who died a year ago). I hope so too.

But who will feed Stimpy in Heaven?
Stimpy won't need food like we need food, because she won't be hungry - just really happy all of the time.

Why did Stimpy have to die?
We all have to die, baby. It is part of being alive, and in the end we go to Heaven.

Will I see Stimpy when I go to Heaven?
Of course. I think she might be waiting for you like she does when you come home from school.

...and so it goes. This happens in schools too (the 'what you mean that God calls you to be a Vicar?' type of questions). They are deep and insightful questions, whose answers are important and will be meaningful to those who ask them. It also tells me more about the quality of spirituality that children have - and to be honest, it is breathtakingly deep. It also presses in me the niggling suspicion that we as adults do not receive the spirituality and implicit theology of children half as much as we should. I would go so far as to say that in an ideal world, it should not be the priest or minister who preaches, but a young child who is given the chance to say what they think. How much more would we learn as disciples.

It is not that adults are incapable of asking those sort of questions - more that they have lost the ability to express themselves so purely and wonderfully (and fearfully at times).

Goodbye Little Mate

2011-10-12T12:07:00.000+01:00

Highs and lows; peaks and troughs - that is life.

Our little cat Stimpy died this morning. She had been flagging since the house move and never recovered from the upheaval of yet another new home. We acquired her from the Cat's Protection League fourteen years ago, a manky scrat of a thing with a lump missing from her ear and a nasty mouth infection that gave her grim breath. She had been feral, spayed too young and remained a timid small thing. She fled in fear of anyone except Mrs Acular and I (she never fully warmed to the Twins). She had next to no voice so her 'meows' were a little less than you might expect. Never a crossed claw and never once angry or aggressive, she was a cat who loved the garden and being outside. Well, I say that - we have witnessed her seeing off huge tomcats who dared to stray too close. Then she was a lunatic, and violent too.

But she was our cat. She was part of our family. She was loved and she loved back, in her own way. I tend to spend my free evenings horizontal on my settee, and the normal place for Stimpson T. Catte was on my chest with her quiet purr that was barely audible. She liked to head-butt me into submission, so I had no real choice about my chest passenger. Only my chest - no-one else's, ever.

And now she is gone, our little cat. And it is horrible.

The Flight of the Haggis

2011-10-12T09:02:00.000+01:00

With thanks to Laura Sykes for prodding me in the ribs with this erstwhile project, I am delighted to feature a blog written by one of my longest standing online muckers...

Winsome, Lose Some

The work of Fr Richard Haggis, this blog is in the hands of a lyrical writer who has a very clear grasp of the realities of the world and the church. Put another way, he is a cynic, but does is in a most beautifully crafted way.

Seriously though, Richard is a joy to read (even in those encounters on social media) and I advocate his thoughtful work to the rest of you. He knows a little of the vagueries of the Church of England, but has never lost his pastoral heart. I have neglected our association for far too long, so I am glad to have an opportunity to do something to mend that!

The Jewels of Ministry

2011-10-11T18:07:00.001+01:00

A Note to God

Every once in a while, in good times and in bad, the Good Lord presents moments that shine brighter than any light. I am delighted that today provided one such moment for me.

Just as I started preparing lunch for the family, I received a call from a lady who had taken the number from the church notice-board by the road (that she managed to read it was a miracle in and of itself). She and her husband were celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary, and as they had been married in Ss Philip & James, could they pop by and visit the church as they were in the area?

Yes, of course, said I. When? This afternoon is fine. See ya then!

They were with me in the church for the first time since they were married, took some pictures, commented on the changes (of which there were few apparently), and reminisced about their wedding day and the guests. Then Vicar Boy had an idea, one that I presented to them tentatively. They agreed

... and so we had a spontaneous Service for the Renewal of Marriage Vows (as I had the right book to hand). Irrespective of whose idea it was, it was a truly magical moment that made a couple older than my own birth parents newly weds all over again, and acted that way too. If this is parish ministry, then it is the best of things.

Baptism - Freely Given or Undervalued?

2011-10-11T14:38:00.000+01:00

There is a debate raging, in my head at least, concerning the administration of Baptism. It is a debate that has murmured under the surface of a few conversations that I have been part of or privy too in recent years, and never with any sort of resolution.

Argument 1 - We want all people to be disciples of Christ, so of course we must baptize all those who seek it

Argument 2 - If someone asks for their child to be baptized, it would be bad form, rude even, to deny them that which they seek

Argument 3 - Seeds sown now may yield fruit later

... and so on! These are the arguments given by those who think that baptism should be freely granted to all who ask, and fair enough. They are valid views.

I have always wrestled with a sense that baptism seems too readily granted. Someone pops by the Vicarage or church, asks for baptism, gets it and then more often than not they vanish from whence they came. That might be as a result of poor follow-up pastoral care; it might be because that is the very nature of the beast; it might be that people seek baptism (and this debate is more to do with children presented as candidates by their parents and guardians) because it is "what you do". The simple fact is that baptism is less to do with initiation into the worshipping life of the church than other factors.

My instinct is to ask enquirers "and why so you want your child to be baptized?". Part of me fears the answer, but if I administer baptism without a concern for that, what implicit message am I delivering? That baptism doesn't really matter so go ahead, let's book a date. Indeed, the liturgists in their zeal to offer choice have created the Great Euphemism - the Thanksgiving for the Birth of a Child order of service which, although never intended to be, has become 'Baptism Lite' so that we don't frighten people away with all the religious hocus-pocus.

Part of me thinks that if our faith is of life changing and affirming value to us as believers, we should administer its initiation scrupulously. Part of me still thinks that if faith is like that we should cast it far and wide (and hope some of it sticks?). Where does giving something freely become the administration of something that has no value? One is generous, one is insulting (to God, to believers and to those who really do value baptism). If I am honest, part of me thinks that baptism should be first step of a renewed pattern of behaviour that revolves around the community of which the baptized have just become member. Part of me thinks that if I took that view I might struggle for baptisms!

Thoughts, please ...

Se also Baptism Boosters

Exit Strategy

2011-10-10T09:13:00.001+01:00

In church life, or more specifically in that eight minute slot of time after the main Sunday Service before we fall behind the next cup of Fairly Traded Tepid brown fluid, many transactions take place. Sometimes those transactions are about the sale of the Parish Staple - the raffle ticket (where you are apt to win some Parish Lavender Smellies). Other times those transactions revolve around the Post Mortem of The Parish Microphone and Its Vagueries.

Early spring sees a new, intense, purposeful transaction: it is the 'Will You Stand for Election at the next APCMPCPMCPM [the big annual church meeting] - there is a vacancy for X, Y or Z'.

When I was younger (hard to imagine that I was younger than I am now, but it is a fact that mother didn't give birth to a 6' hard man of God), I used to be on a PCC, and when I approached that momentous time, had to go through (wait for it, I am not going to lie here) an election. The first time I sought a place on a PCC, in excess of thirty people put themselves forward for election, submitted little biographies (I had no idea so many people in church life could claim time as Sidespeople), and the tension was amazing at Results Time. Sod X Factor - PCC elections were far more tense. I digress.

Among those elections, from time time, were those for Officer Roles in the Parish (warden, secretary, treasurer - that sort of thing). To be there they had either worked a long time to impress the right people, were there through merit, or simply weren't as fast as the Vicar when he came calling (let it not go un-noticed that pre-APMCMMPDMPMCCMP Vicars are like the rutting stags in Bushy Park that are currently hounding the tourists at the moment - "we must find our next Officers for the circle-of-life to keep turning"). Candidates are pursued, persuaded, elected, enthroned, sworn in before Archdeacons and set to work running the show while the Vicar takes the ~~glory~~ services. Oh yes, it is true! And so the Tenure begins.

But all good things come to an end, and here we have a problem in the church. Eventually the need arises for the once-hunted willing volunteer to lay down the chattels of their Office and withdraw from it and its appurtenances. Personal experience (professionally and non-professionally speaking) has taught me two things:

1. That it is or can be very painful to make that withdrawal if you have assumed significant authority2. "Church" and "Succession Planning" are rarely things that you will ever see in the same sentence (barring the ironic or negative)

I know people who have felt a great pain, or anticipate it, when they stop or are about to stop doing what they do. I am not sure that Mother Church has ever cottoned on to that fact, simply because that pain is lost or obscured by the next season of the Vicar Rut. I think it revolves around personal validation and all that - that once someone was 'Somebody', but then after elections, feel like 'Nobody'.

Then we have the great Vicar Rut. Mother Church rarely thinks ahead because we tend towards the Great Lurch (from one circumstance to the next). I am already guilty because I have no earthly idea who my next Treasurer or Warden is going to be (I could blame the 'being new' thing, but it won't cut it for long). I should know, and in the next cycle, should know at least a year in advance and have that candidate working towards the role in some other constructive way (yes I know they are elected, but I am in the real world here).

I will ponder the solutions to these perennial problems, together with every cleric who has a duty to a PCC. However, what we need to learn very quickly is that those who held the keys once, don't automatically sign with joyous relief when we wrest them from their reluctant clasp!

On Not Letting Blogging Eclipse my Faith

2011-10-08T17:03:00.001+01:00

I was looking down the list of esteemed bloggers that grace the side of my own posts. I am glad that they are there, and they are there because I chose them deliberately.

In the same twenty-four hour period, two things happened. The first was that it dawned on me that I hadn't added to that number (or subtracted as it is right to do from time to time when blogs fall fallow). The second was the discovery of a blog that made a considerable impact on me, and caused me to notice something that has been been missing (save for a couple of salient exceptions) from the "notes" that comprise the "chord" of my blogroll!

The very nature of blogging in the present is that it tends to err towards response to issues and situations that come up in the world. Some are more adversarial or didactic than others, while some lean in the direction of self-counselling. That is a very nature of the beast. What seems to be lacking more and more, in my opinion, is a blog that attends to the spiritual dimension in a more conspicuous way. When discovering such a blog, only then do I realise what I am missing.

The blog in question is iBenedictines. I found my way to this site after its author, Digitalnun, "followed" me on Twitter. I read it and found peace. Simple. I realised very quickly that an instinct that I once had (and caused me to start the now fallow and wholly spiritual Flight Diaries) is that blogging is an increasingly un-spiritual affair (save for the motivation of its writers, of which I offer no criticism in that regard). My own blog is a case in point - and if you trawl for overtly spiritual posts, you would be hard pressed to find many.

Accepting that I am what I am, and I write as I write, I am not proposing a substantive change in the style or content of this (nearly) award winning act of near perfection. Rather, like all good journals and magazines, I am going to add a few more blogs whose eyes are altogether more fixed on the face of Christ rather than the outpourings of the world's media. We need all of it, but we need all of it! Well, I certainly need a valuable boost to my Spiritual Blog Quotient, even if you don't!

Thank you to Digitalnun and the Sisters in West Oxfordshire for teaching me a lesson about need. To the rest of you (who may not have found iBenedictines) - follow and read earnestly. You will be glad you did.

One Less Innovator

2011-10-06T07:55:00.000+01:00

It is with considerable sadness that I learned of the death of Steve Jobs, the former head of Apple - and the mind behind iPods, iPhones, iPads and other things.

It is fair to say that the world didn't need any of them, but sometimes the work of a true inventor is a joy to behold. A company that didn't make phones stole an entire market from those that did. He invented a breed of computer that no-one thought they needed and now can't live without. How rarely do we see a person, a leader, a dreamer, such as this.

For me, my own lifestyle owes much to this man. For over a decade I have held one of his products close to me. Yes, just gadgets, but gadgets that add to my personal experience of life - by adding music that I love so much, imagery, and so much else.

Yes, people starve and people die at the hands of others - and so this man's products are essentially toys for people with money, but that doesn't diminish his impact on so many of us who use his ideas to form our world in some small part. I am not mourning the Godfather of the Gadget, but I am mourning am innovator, and any true innovator is a wonderful example of the God given potential that humankind has at its fingertips. One need only think of the King James Bible ...

May he rest in peace. It is fair to say he probably has an App for that too.

Taking the Hit

2011-10-05T11:16:00.000+01:00

Sometimes life, The Universe and Everything conspires to make a point. This week started with a difficult few moments for me, which in turn have been informed by two very helpful blogs posts.

The first I read was from the wonderful Ray "I am not a Man" Barnes about 'turning the other cheek', which in turn was born of a post by Jonathan Haggar along similar lines. Both posts are worth a read - one from a lay person, one from a priest who has a very clear interest in this particular thought process!

I had a difficult experience on Sunday. It wasn't difficult because some faithful people were rude to me (alright, perhaps in part). It was difficult because I felt unable to 'fight-back'.

By style, I am not one who takes poor behaviour directed at me well. I am apt to fire back with both barrels, and in the past, I have employed a cruel streak that I have in cutting retorts and the like. I learned all this in retailing, and rarely did customers get away with being rude to me (less so if they stated that the customer is always right, which of course they are not). I developed an armory of the sort of come-backs that stand-up comedians might use more, and coupled with a fairly pronounced frown and a 'look' that can whither, meant that I fought back adequately in those situations.

Then I got myself ordained. Now let me tell you - it doesn't change our emotional make-up. We are who were were before, only more so. What moderates our behaviour is the projections of others of how a minister should behave. Vicars are 'not meant to be rude', so we try not to be. Sometimes, it feels like having our arms tied behind our backs, and it is hard at times. However, I also recognise that by projection or not, the Vicar really can't say "so piss off then". Naughty.

So we take the hit. Sunday was my first hit, and it was horrid (and saying "well, it wasn't my fault" isn't acceptable either, I believe - mostly because a gracious Vicar should not enter into buck-passing). Curates are blessed because we are not placed in that position (if we have a good trainer, as I did). Incumbents really do become un-defended by virtue of their role, because as leader-members of God is Love Plc, we have to lead by example. I am now thirty years before retirement. A lot of hits will wing their way in my general direction in that time - because I am human and I am flawed and do get things wrong, because people have a funny view that they have a right to be more direct with the clergy than others it seems, because we must rise above it, because in part it is our job.

Let it not pass by our attention, however, that my post now makes three that talk of aggression and needless rudeness by Christians to other Christians - just saying.

Father Shylock: Vicar

2011-10-04T21:58:00.000+01:00

No, I am not a Mafia cash collector - but I am no less a pain to have on your Fundraising Committee.

Actually, I am harder nosed than a Mafia cash collector.

Like or not, churches need cash like I need haemoglobin. I wish I didn't need it, but I would not get far without it and its benefits. Churches are, I am given to understand, temples of prayer and devotion to God who no more wish to have to chase shekels than I do to eat my greens and keep my red stuff red.

"God will provide" will not keep a church open - sadly.

In a number of parishes where I have been involved, I have found myself as the Shylock character. I am from a background in sales, and know how turn over cash. More often than not, it is no harder than simply making a case and asking.

And here I am in a new place who have done remarkably well at raising no small amounts of wonga, and actually seemed to have been more successful by dint of a lack of Vicar. It is to the credit of a modest team of those who simply agreed to help. The reason why this is something of a revelation to me is that it is the first of the parishes that I have worked with for some time that have taken an even remotely commercial view to raising funds. That I will ask them to be greedier and altogether more demanding may come as a shock to some, maybe not.

There are probably two ways of fundraising. The first is to send an annual invoice for a thousand quid to the willing people of the congregation, shut the doors, and get a poor turnover. The other is to give value to that donation and spread it over a period of time. This is before you shake the tin at grant makers and the filthy rich. There is a danger, when in the mindset of purely fundraising (in times of major projects etc), that we under-sell the need to get hard cash. There can be a confusion with 'social event' and 'fundraiser' - both are vital in churches, and that you over price social activity or under price fundraising events. Equally, under selling the value of an event can easily undervalue the event, if you know what I mean.

What I think I am saying, is that churches that don't have international nurture courses need to think creatively and greedily about filling the coffers. Euphemism, diffidence, coyness or simple blindness to need - they all hamper the bank-balance.

Ask, and ye shall receive!

What About The Rest of the Week

2011-10-03T12:12:00.001+01:00

It is a known fact that God only works on Sundays. This is the reason why most churches only open on Sundays and why most attendees to those places of worship only do their religion on a Sunday.

It is also a known fact that a life of faith only really needs an hour a week as a booster, and that for the other days of the week, worshipping folk need not concern themselves with the God of Sundays. To best work around this, churches are closed from noon on Sundays until 7.48am on the following Sunday - time enough for the God of Sundays to be looked at, prodded and poked, sung about, and prayed to. This is also the reason why the sallow-eyed Dog-Collar folk only come out on one day of the week, in line with a carefully prepared rota to lead the prodding and the poking of the God of Sundays.

That today is Monday need not worry you. The God of Sundays is on his day off, playing golf and attending to a little decorating. In any case, we are unlikely to visit the church, so that its doors are closed is of little consequence. Why would you open a church on a Monday anyway? What has the week-day life of those who worship the God of Sundays have to do with anything?

Parody or not, this is how it is in many places I think. Some of you will find this harsh or uncharitable, but I think in the end you will accept that I am right! In my own edifice, through no fault of anyone, and with a care to protect the goods and chattels of the parish and spare the organisation needless heating bills, it has fallen into a habit of closure or a habit of using 'secular' rooms instead of the church itself. I estimate that the church here is open no more than three hours a week - which is quite a lot more than most. It is an unfortunate symbol of the mindset of church life, that it is open for you on Sundays, but closed when you are not being religious.

We have two issues, that can both help the other. If we are Christians all week, why don't we pop into the church and visit it on other days of the week, be it the one we normally attend or the one near where we work. There might not be a service on, but in most cases God can be found in the perfect beauty of the silence in a still church. The other issue is in the opening of our church buildings. Yes, it costs money to heat and light, and you may even need people to be there to look after the place when scallywags come knocking - but I firmly believe that a church has a duty to be open for as many hours of the days as it can possibly manage. Those who value our sacred spaces on weekdays may even help towards the cost of keeping them open, if we but asked them. Also, an open church is a church that takes people seriously on days other than Sundays - acknowledging their need for sustenance in the course of a working week.

Push hard enough, and you may even find an ordained person in there sometimes, when they are not on the Rota!

Ricky Gervais Finds Religion

2011-10-01T20:48:00.000+01:00

I would like to thank my Honourable Friend from Husborne Crawley for bringing this to my attention. It is a matter of considerable celebration for me and should be for all men and women of faith.

Ricky Gervais has found religion (and I don't refer to the long observed Messiah Complex of his).

And he is also guilty of an infraction of the Trades Description Act.

Why? Let me explain. Were he an atheist, as his chest proclaims, he would have no business on the cover of The New Humanist magazine. Furthermore, were he still amusing (like the old days of the Eleven O'Clock Show when he was still funny) he wouldn't need to resort to a poor impersonation act. Had he researched in a professional manner, he would have discovered that denim emerged in around 1853, nearly two thousand years after the man he is impersonating. Also, I think that is re-working of Jesus of Nazareth is wholly too camp, and nowhere in the Bible does it suggest that the Palestinian carpenter had a collection of Scissor Sister albums. So, given that he has fallen on hard times and has to busk as a poor impressionist, I shall light a candle and pray earnestly for him and those who depend on him for their daily needs.

Back to my contention about his place as an atheist on the cover of New Humanist (what happened to the old humanists, did they die of boredom - I wonder what they said when they got to heaven?) Look at the cover. Look at it. These people claim to have no belief in a god and have no time for religious faith - or so you would think. This cover is obsessed with it. In fact, it is a little known fact that Humanists are more concerned about God and Jesus than I am, and I am professional God botherer. Were he an atheist as he claims, he would be no more interested in Jesus than I in Ben 10. I have never appeared on a cover looking like a homoerotic Ben 10.

The thing is, as a Christian, my time is devoted to God and all that proceeds from that encounter. Same for the Humanists - if only they were honest enough to say so. True atheists, like the ones I know, are generous hearted, open minded people who have made a choice. Then they got on with their lives.

Yes, Mr Gervais, you have the right to offend us. Only you failed. I haven't laughed at you this much in twenty years. No, I am wrong - now am I laughing at you; I used to laugh with you quite a lot.

Disingenuous Church?

2011-10-01T11:31:00.001+01:00

I once read a story about a businessman who, down on his luck decided to do something pro-active to save his business. He was in particular danger of losing his business, then his home, and very probably his wife and family if all went as he had foreseen. He owned a company that supplied car tyres.

His solution was, during the night, to slash the tyres of some cars in his neighbourhood. The car owners would make a claim with their insurers and the man's tyre-replacing business would become the nominated repairer. In short, he enhanced the need for his services. In the end, he got greedy, got caught and got himself slung in Stir for seven hundred million years, lost his business, his home, his wife and kids, his freedom and his dignity. It is naughty, so the Judge proclaimed, to create a need that only you can meet.

That is an extreme example of something that troubles me in my Christian life. I read something during the week that triggered this in my mind:

It's the power of the love of Jesus Christ, the love that conquers sin and wipes out shame ... [Hybels, 2002]

Bill Hybels is right, of course. But then I think of the Church and how we are in terms of the lives of those around us. We scamper about 'saving' people, after having judged them ourselves as 'unsaved'. We forgive the sins of people whom we judge to be sinful. The "shame" that we are called to wipe away is the "shame" that we identify - and there are times when the Church can appear like the scrawny little kid who sneers from behind the school-bully.

The church is, in many ways, a very judgmental organisation (with never fully sits right with God is Love Plc). I remember, in my undergraduate days, being told by some Smiler in the Christian Union that sex before marriage was a sin and that I (and the assembled throng) should feel jolly wretched if we had submitted to that urge. Maybe we had and maybe we hadn't, but I think all of us felt lower than a snake's belly. Do this, you are bad. Do that, you are wrong. Do the other and you are wretched. Do something else and you will, my dear friend, burn for an eternity with the fiery Imps of Hades. Why, cos we say so (or at least that is what we interpret the Bible as saying). But don't worry, meagre sinful worm - we can wipe your shame away; you know, the shame we just gave you.

If only those who are without sin cast the first stone (those are Jesus' words), then why are we a church so hell-bent on labelling the world as sinful and providing the nominated cure? Are not sinful ourselves? If we are not careful, a pragmatic world will cotton on to the fact that if they bypass faith altogether, the measure of their sinfulness vanishes and they will never need darken our doorsteps again. I seem to remember Jesus distancing himself from the judgmental attitudes of his Disciples.

Maybe we should stop saving a world that God saved already - and worry about how we might be worthy of that life-changing Grace. Charity, after all, begins at home.

Being in A New Diocese

2011-09-30T20:53:00.000+01:00

As many of you may have gathered, I am now working in a new Diocese. I was formerly in the Diocese of Oxford, an organisation that sponsored my vocation, trained me, ordained me and gave me my Title - and for all of that I will hold the Diocese, and its people, close to my heart.

Sadly, for priests of my particular breed (more especially those of us at an earlier stage in priestly ministry or those of us with no sense of calling to rural ministry - or both) there are few/no incumbent's jobs to speak of. That is the way of things, whatever my thoughts and feelings - and I was required to make my own luck.

So here I am, happily in place in a new Diocese. It is a strange transition, mostly because it is unexpected. In the context of parochial ministry, one learns the lay of the land, the names of the right people to talk to. This happens by osmosis rather than deliberately, and so it is that a new set of people and processes needs to be learned.

Yesterday proved to me what a wonderful diverse diocese London is. Within the one working day, I was sat at one point next to a (very amusing and entirely decent) priest from the Cathedral Church of The Holy Trinity in the Archdiocese of Brompton; later the same day I was seated next to the (equally amusing and entirely decent) Incumbent of All Saints Margaret Street, a liturgical Mecca to those of my disposition. Both were normal things to do in a normal day in the Diocese of London. Furthermore, at one end of the day I was sharing a room with a man whose voice I have heard on Pause for Thought for years; the other end of the day I was exchanging pleasantries with another man whose voice is heard on television and radio (and who has an interest in media, including blogs I was delighted to learn). Just a normal day.

In every sense - be that ministerially, personally, emotionally, socially, geographically and also through the lens of my children's eyes and those of the fragrant Mrs Acular, I am daily reminded of the rightness of moving here to west London. I am surrounded by priests and Christians of such breadth and of all shades of tradition. Frankly, it is breathtaking what a difference it makes to life. The price was paid mostly by my amazing and supportive wife who had to suspend her career, and perhaps in a few decibels of aircraft noise.

One of my greatest fears for the Church is that it becomes the same - that the monied organisations feed off of the cadavers of the dead (broke) churches and make them all the same. Breadth, variety, difference, dialogue, less corporate image, more quirkiness - all of those things will see the Church live on. A few months ago, I feared becoming a marginal Christian of a bygone age. Now, I am still a marginal Christian of a bygone age, but now I am but one of the necessary shades of priestly expression that makes up the remarkable tapestry that is the Diocese of London.

Funerals

2011-09-28T11:52:00.002+01:00

Before I embarked upon this marvellous ministry of mine, I would have told you that the happy bits would have been found in the planning of weddings and baptisms, with the sad times confined to the planning and delivery of funerals.

During my House-Move-Sojourn, the thing I missed a lot was delivering funerals. I am something of a fan of the pastime - not because I am morbid, and not because it suits my dark attire. I gain no particular pleasure from witnessing the agonies of the grieving relatives - although at all times it is a treasured privilege to be trusted with it.

The simple fact, quite unexpectedly, is that in the planning of funerals, I do most of my laughing (in the work arena).

Typically, my means of bring such a service together is to visit the home of the nearest and dearest. The framework of the conversation is set by the need to formulate an order of service, confirm choices of music and 'performers' plus the most important - and often unsaid - thing: that I render the deceased no longer a complete stranger to me. I have to be a sponge for every little anecdote, sentiment (expressed or implied), biographical tidbit. In many ways, I need to get a feel for the person if I am to do justice to their final journey.

The plain and simple fact is that these meetings are more often than not permeated by much laughter. I have been trying to think why this may be, as I am in all senses very respectful of the family's bereavement at all times. That is to say, I don't walk in and launch into a Stand-Up routine. The laughter comes quite spontaneously, and think it is born of several factors: relief (that the service is now organised), permission (to think about the person who has died without coyness, as that is what I have to ask them to do), the joy born of love (people tend to remember the joyful and the amusing, not the dark and painful), that humans are generally perverse creatures and this is manifest in our testimonials, and most importantly - when we talk about someone who has died (and I mean really talk about them), we re-enliven them. It might be all of those things, or none.

So Your Church Wants Social Media ...

2011-09-27T17:18:00.000+01:00

My firm belief is that every church needs to engage with social media and start to use it. To not engage with social media is about the same as not making use of email, telephones or the combustion-engine motor-car simply because they seem to be modern irrelevances. The simple fact is that more and more people in the West are engaging in dialogue moderated and delivered through social media.

I also acknowledge that it isn't as simple as just wanting to engage with and harness the benefits of social media, because our congregations and parish councils are often populated by those unaccustomed to the electronic, regard their advent as suspect at best and who may in turn become isolated by its introduction. This said, if we took the same view over history, people wouldn't have Bibles in their personal possession and the art of reading would remain the province of the landed gentry. Progress is necessary and indeed vital, so long as it is tailored to bring with it those who are vulnerable to its effects (usually by immediate isolation).

With this in mind, and following on from conversations already had on the subject, I though I would jot down my thoughts as to the process that parishes could use to bring this development to life. I am mindful that parishes already have varying degrees of involvement with social media, though they may not use that label!

What Is It? Social Media is the overarching title for direct communication by way of the internet. Any parish with a website of any capacity or capability is already engaged with social media, albeit passively. The current understanding of social media is more specifically concerned with actions of communication, often in real-time and often solely over the internet - be those actions in the form of 'chat', instant message, blogging or micro-blogging. A parish community unfamiliar with this mode of communicating would need to appreciate the subtleties and drawbacks (as well as the great opportunities) of this form of faceless communication.

Who? This may seem an odd consideration for a parish, but this is a decision not to be taken lightly. The one doing the communicating is placed in a position of considerable power, often speaking on behalf of the entire community to a very wide and unpredictable audience. Someone with some experience of social media (and its nuances and its vernacular), supported and moderated by at least one other person would be advisable. This ensures that the 'output' is broad and balanced, and not rooted in the aspirations and 'hobby-horses' of the operator. Needless to day, the person concerned should always hold in their mind that they always speak for their community, and anything that emerges in the social media is hard to remove.

Planning - If a parish is to engage in social media, it would make all sorts of sense to have the agreement of the parish council (or its equivalent). To do something positive and new can be a risk-laden proposition and it is easy for the operator to be left high-and-dry if any problems arise later. The organisation as a whole should take ownership of the initiative, even if at the hands of one or two specific individuals (operators). They should also be familiar with the output as a matter of course.

Planning 2 - Boundary setting is very important. What is off-limits to the wider world? What is the core message? How does the community preserve the operator? What happens if things go wrong? Do you discuss services or acts of worship? Do you comment on sermons or talks? What about images? Recordings and audio capture? How is orthodoxy maintained?These are all clear decisions that need to be made and probably a myriad more.

Accountability - who is accountable - The operator? The council or leadership team? Someone needs to be, after all. If accountability is given, can it be taken back later? Who hold passwords and where? With accountability comes responsibility and the same questions need to be settled.

Document - to my mind, a document stating who does what and under what terms, on what media forum and to what purpose - all need to be documented. I would go so far as to state that they need to be filed with official papers like Minutes and votes taken. They are all layers of protection either for the operator or the organisation.

Review - the leadership team/council should review the output in conjunction with the appointed operator, and on a regular basis. When someone speaks on their behalf in front of possibly millions of people (in the case of Twitter and blogs), the community needs to be aware of the essence of that commentary and respond accordingly.

If there are substantial doubts - then don't do it until those doubts are assuaged or gone. Engines such as Facebook has caused concerns for many people, regarding secrecy and the dissemination of information to third parties. Because things cannot be unsaid or easily un-published, it is better to be positive about such a venture before launching forth on it, rather than stepping tentatively into a perceived minefield. One is a pleasure, the other a constant source of stress.

These are my own thoughts. There is nothing to stop anyone doing anything, but 'in whose name' makes a considerable difference. In simple terms, the greater number of people who are involved in the evolution of such a development the better - given that in the early days, its outworking is in the hands of a small minority.

Lastly, let social media not become the first word and the last. There are always people in our communities for whom this activity is exclusive and into which they could ever venture. Make social media but one means of communicating with the wider world, and certainly never at the expense of inter-personal or tangible means which grant access to all.

Why I Watch Downton Abbey

2011-09-26T19:56:00.000+01:00

The Dowager Duchess of Grantham

...and it is not because of the pious sounding name! I was not looking for a prayer based sojourn with the likes of Sister Wendy and Roger Royle, so there has be another reason.

Those nearest and dearest to me know how I feel about costume dramas. I typically find them prissy, self-important and performed by a breed of actor that normally irritates me no end (I am aware that some would have similar opinions of the costume-drama of Anglo-Catholic liturgy, ironically). With the exception of dramas based on historical events (The Tudors, Charles II with Rufus Sewell, Henry VIII with Ray Winstone, Blackadder) and anything with Natalie Dormer in it, I just don't like period dramas. No!

The thing is, I have rather taken to Downton Abbey, a story about the current residents of a very nice pile in Berkshire - the jolly decent but wholly benign Lord Grantham, the malevolent crone played excellently by Dame Maggie Smith and the whole "upstairs, downstairs" thing. I rather like it. I even look forward to it. Yes.

How has this happened?

I'll tell you how. Gladiator TV.

With the exception of Downton Abbey, Soap Operas, the News, Top Gear and Adam's flippin Farm - the only other television available to the British public falls under the heading I like to call "Gladiator TV". The format is very simple:

- Take a group of unknown but zany people/all-but-forgotten former celebrities

- Give them a task [singing, dancing, ice-skating, bug-eating, self-flagellation, a time in a camera decked glass domicile]

- Let us, the willing public, weed them out week by week for a measly £1.03 per call (mobile tariffs may vary) as they compete against one another and outrageous fortune

- Observe their breakdowns and gel-underwritten hairdos

- Note, with alarming frequency, how much it 'means everything' to them, or is 'the most important thing in the world' to them (forgetting of course the fruits of their loins who must once have been important)

- Subsidise Simon Cowell's personal ownership of Earth

- Forget who won after a fortnight (mostly because the next spectacle has begun or because the individual/group that Lord Cowell favoured got the Golden Goose anyway, sod the winner)

Are you not entertained? Are you NOT entertained!

After a hard day working the land, a man needs to relax in front of his television - I should know! (I have only the right to speak for men, and I am sure that ladies work hard too). The thing is, if you find an overwhelming distaste for Gladiator TV the only avenue open to you is simple: you have to like Downton Abbey or simply burn the TV in a fit of commercialist sacrificing on ones primped lawn. It's a simple fact that for people like me, it is adapt or die!

Authority

2011-09-25T14:01:00.005+01:00

Today we were thinking about 'authority' (which is to say that I was thinking about 'authority' and hoping that others were listening!) as a result of the Gospel passage given to us today - Matt 21: 23ff.

The episode of South Park which gave us the clip I have placed here always made me laugh. It also reminded me of much authority exercised in churchy circles. I am not here to talk about what authority is and its sources, but I wonder sometimes if we don't use it in odd ways or even wrong ways. The "it has been like this years so we will do it like that for ever" is one such way that the authority of time and tradition is used. Needless to say, it is the axiom of all anti-women dogma in church life.

Then you get the Cartman style of authority (see above) - exerted by coercion. It is the "I have authority because I say so and you can't stop me". We see this in church life in the hands of the passive-aggressives who rather than being overtly strong, are self-weakened so that we can keep our distance. This is a very significant source of much authority wielded in churches.

The thing about authority is that it is in larger part granted us by others. Be can't really take authority upon ourselves, but rather receive affirmation from others that authorises us to act or behave in given ways. Even us vicars are in danger when we start the "we are the boss so you will respect my authoritah" and it long since not been the case that Father is Always Right. So often mistaken for power, authority is granted not taken [apologies for the typo that inverted that statement]

Just saying ...

The Thing That Excites Clergy

2011-09-24T13:37:00.002+01:00

I grant you that it is the only day in the week that we work, and I grant you that in normal circumstances the work that we do fills only some of the day. It is properly hard being a cleric - such arduous lives.

Some of you who are reading this and are ordained, or indeed any of you might know what I am referring to. It is that sense of excitement as Sunday approaches. Whether we are leading worship, partaking in it or just observing (itself a useful pastime) - Sundays approach withe a sense of happy anticipation for many of us.

Perhaps it is just me!

It is often that time when our whole (or a larger part of) community gathers together. Yes, it is a time for gossip and that can often permeate the first verse of the first hymn, but it is a time when we gather as the faithful children of Christ to worship and adore. Some of us, if we are of that tradition, may find renewed sustenance in the Holy Matter of the Eucharist, or simply the release of happy chemicals in the blood when we sing for all we are worth. Compelling times, mostly always happy, with friends and those of a like mind - so why wouldn't we look forward to it.

Enjoy your Saturday wherever you are reading this - tomorrow is our day once more.

Beautiful Day

2011-09-23T12:51:00.000+01:00

There is one thing more likely to erode than a chalk cliff face in Sussex. It is more flexible than the spine of a liturgical dancer (you know, the ones who fling ribbons around). It is often more displaced than a farm full of travellers ...

...the Vicar's day off.

Today is my first ever Vicar's Day off, which to be sure is manifestly different to Curate's Days Off and only begins to aspire to becoming a Rector's Days Off. Today is that day, ladies and gentlemen, and it is a truly beautiful day. The picture that you see is of my to-be-tamed back yard, soon to be in the full adornment of autumn russets and burnished golds. The Sun she shines in motes of light that dance in the soft-swaying leaves, the planes they fly like planes, the birds they squawk (they are parakeets after all) and the light breeze sends the leaves in little eddies around my to-be-mown grass (as distinct from Paul Eddys - he is a very different animal, and a nice bloke too). Do you get the idea? Can you hear the sound of Dvorak's New World Symphony in the background? Good, me too.

Well, The Twins Aculae are at school, the wife occupied with the things that Vicar's Wives do (don't ask, or I would have to tell you, then kill you) and the doors and windows have been cast wide to let the scene flood in. Today was the day I was going to do what I had promised myself for the last couple of weeks. So do it I did. I flopped on the settee, and watched You Tube clips on my new very large (very very large) TV. I will be tending the Glebe this afternoon, before you cast aspersions about my wasting a beautiful day.

I didn't feel guilty about frittering a couple of hours knocking back coffee and surfing through Rock Metal clips on the Large Telly. I work hard, I do all (read 'most') of the cooking, I deserved it. I thought I might feel bad, and indeed I can name ten things that I could usefully do today, but they would be 'work' and I am trying to start as I mean to go on. Every once in a while, a lazy morning is OK. I appear not to have shuffled off my mortal coil, and there have been no calls from the Court of Arches asking me to atone for my sin. I haven't even brushed my hair - that is how slovenly I have been today.

Well, this was only ever going to be a post about how beautiful today is. Sometimes it really does pay to talk about the weather because in about eight or nine metric seconds it will be Christmas Eve and a foot deep in snow, like every Christmas. Mark my words.

I hope that having read this (and good luck to you, a Counselling Pack is in the post), that you will have as nice a day as I am having so far. What a beautiful world we inhabit.

...and for your edification (Paul Eddyfication? Is a theme developing? Should I have gone out today to seek the unchurched testosterone carriers?), a wonderful fusion of two of my favourite songs. It is a remarkable thing ...

When Family is not Family but is Still Family

2011-09-22T14:30:00.001+01:00

A Typical English Family

It might be a British thing, or it might just be a Christian thing. It might even just be a British Christian thing, and possibly even a Christian British thing, but a thing it is and I intend fully to speak about it now.

Liturgies, Services, Acts of Worship, Praise Sessions - or whatever label you may wish to apply, have different stylings and those stylings tell the trained observer a great deal about what to expect.

They are also a euphemism.

A High Mass will be one of sacrament, music, vestments and choreographed ceremonial. Mattins is a non-sacramental service of hymns, readings and prayers, as distinct from Morning Prayer that is more rooted in reading and prayer (with the odd spoken song [canticle] interspersed). Evensong is likely to be in language older than your grandmother, a little singing and hymn-based mirth. Compline is not a slimming product but one of the Hours (that array of liturgies that those in the religious life did or still do throughout the day and night), typically observed in the late evening - a short and gentle act of worship rooted in Psalmody and Responsory. Get the idea? If you know the name, you know what to expect.

Then you get the Family Service. We who provide such things want them to be regarded as accessible, family friendly (read 'not boring to kids') that is perhaps a little shorter than the normal offering. We would want you be know that the music might be a little less 'specialist' (which is to say short, punchy and not according to the four-part harmony structure so loved by church choirs). With any luck, that is the message received bu the passer-by, the seeker, the enquirer. It is a liturgical styling not without its issues, however.

If the Family Service is for the young, the un-initiated perhaps, then the Sung Eucharist must surely deserve the title 'The Grown Up Child-free Specialist Not for Beginners Service for those Who Pay Their Subs and Are on The Electoral Roll Service'. No, of course not. To my mind, every act of worship in the church's life deserves the title 'Family Service'. We are, after all, family in Christ. This is partly the reason why in many churches (though not where I have worked or worshipped, gladly), on the other Sundays when there isn't a Family Service, children are little higher that vermin - a noise curse to be chased out of the building. No dear, you belong at the Family Service. This is partly the reason why in many churches (though not where I have worked or worshipped, gladly) the "main service" is a specialist affair where strangers fear to tread, or if they do they are gathered up, hidden in a darkened room and converted to within an inch of their lives (before they get a chance to escape). 'Family Services' have become Eucharist-Lite, theologically and qualitatively, or they have become Praise Service Dumbed Down, musically and spiritually. They are shorter in duration, because only true proper Christians can cope with a full-length service, surely.

The thing is, children are pure theologians. As early-speaking toddlers they are wrestling with the deepest truths of life and existence. As young school-age kids they are working out what life is in the context of death. They grasp the facts and the meaning of Good Friday all the while us adults euphemise and fret. They, like us all, want to be enlivened, not patronized and condescended to. Half of me wants to ban Family Services as a curse to all liturgy. The other half wants to ban all other liturgy and work on getting Family Services right for all people.

An Atheist and an Anglo-Catholic at Greenbelt

2011-09-21T14:07:00.001+01:00

I was at Greenbelt this year, for a day - to be helpful. That I was nearly refused entry is a tale for another day, but I have to confess to having enjoyed the whole experience. I was able to draw some conclusions about how Christians ought to look, and I have resolved to think about buying a hoody in due course. The tie-dye patchwork dungaree things won't trouble my inner-monologue, but they too were much in evidence.

But this, kids, is not what I sat here to write about. A mate of mine, known to many of you as Gurdur (on Twitter and other places), known to me as Tim - a finer antipodean resident of the German state you will not find, was also there. The thing is, he is an atheist. He styles himself as 'extremely' atheistic, which is to say that he not only doesn't believe in God, but that he really seriously doesn't believe in God. Hold in your thoughts that I do, of course.

We spent a good amount of time on that day wandering together talking about many things, approaching stall-holders and taking interest in their 'product'. This followed one of those embarrassing social-media moments when, thinking you know someone really well because you have 'chatted' many times, meant that upon seeing him in the flesh for the first time, I greeted him as an old friend, embrace and all. He thanked me very sincerely and then asked who the hell I was. How we laughed ...

Tim is a remarkable man. He, like I, had experienced painful times at such gatherings in our pasts (though not Greenbelt, I should state). Be both felt like fish out of water, for similar yet wholly dissimilar reasons. In fact that sense galvanised us in our encounter, Christian to Atheist, as we moved about the place looking and watching. It generated, I thought, some rather helpful discussions - and I think helpful for us both. What aided us in this endeavour was a the fact that he is about the most open-minded man I have ever encountered, and I wasn't remotely interested in converting him. We were simply two humans, talking about levels of existence within our frameworks of reference.

My day at Greenbelt was a source of much pleasure. Helping people work forwards in their vision to engage with Social Media was a particular honour for me. Time spent walking with my friend the atheist just about capped it off perfectly.

The beer wasn't bad either...

Can't Stop Won't Stop

2011-09-20T09:03:00.001+01:00

The wider world may perceive priests and/or ministers as those engage in prayerful knee crunching contortion for many long hours of the day and night. In some cases that may well be true. Some may think that professional religious people hide away in book be-decked aeries where we hover in a God-adoring effervescence of self-hypnosis. In some cases that may well be true.

Then there are priests like me.

With the intra-ministerial sojourn behind me, I must confess a behaviour that surprised me, although not others when I spoke with them about it.

The issue at the heart of this is simple - priests can't stop. I spoke with my good mate and former boss about this, and he stated in alarmingly simple terms - we aren't equipped to stop. Upon pondering this and my inability to stop fidgeting when ensconced in a work-free vacuum, I deduced the following: we are built to to occupy an ungoverned and un-bordered working life where we have to be self-disciplined to the highest degree to get 'the job' done. Our work is vague, ever-changing, always wonderful, intoxicating, rewarding, never-ending and our efforts never see this 'job' done. This means that we keep chipping away, day after day. Stopping does not form a helpful habit for those of us for whom the work ethic is set to Level 10.

I can hear your cries from here. Yes, I know we must replenish. Yes, I know we must devote time to be with God (but we get around that one by believing quite sincerely that we are with God in all that we do, so stopping makes no difference). Yes, this is surely the path to burn-out (but apply faith to that and we have us a God who surely won't let us fail, surely). Even family life is another form of keeping going which is why the rapturous mix of priestly potterings and familial forays (in my case) are great.

As I say, many of us priests are not equipped to stop. Perhaps we are like sharks who, if we stop, succumb to mortality. Perhaps we have learned to rest and sleep on the move (you only need hear my sermonising). Perhaps we are on a path to an early grave.

Brave or Hospitable?

2011-09-19T14:56:00.000+01:00

It was my joy to be asked to officiate at the Royal Airforce Association Battle of Britain Day service here in Whitton yesterday. In the early days of my engagement with the parish, just after my appointment, the kind and generous people who had a care for my mortal being expressed concern that such a service might be too much of an ask on what would be my first Sunday in post. Fortunately, services for the Armed Services, their veterans and cadets featured a great deal in my last role, so no worries!

The church was full, and although the RAFA is largely a membership by association (only a very small handful are Airforce veterans), we were able to welcome well over a hundred air cadets who gave up time to show their commitment to the uniform and organisation of which they are members. They did themselves proud, as did the band, as did the talented young bugler who played the Last Post and Reveille in front of us all (including the Mayor of Richmond).

What was distinct this time from others that I have had a part in is that the cadets numbered those conspicuously from other faiths. There were Sikh, Jewish and Muslim cadets (and Veterans), all together in the church. I didn't want to ignore their presence and so made a very quick decision about how to proceed.

First, the welcome. I made a point of welcoming my brothers and sisters of other faiths along with the dignitaries, veterans, members etc. I wanted to acknowledge them formally. Secondly, at the point when we reached the time for prayer, I further acknowledged that I would be (obviously) using Christian prayers [the Lord's Prayer, for example], and that those who followed a different guiding light (the use of the word 'god' excludes some) may take the opportunity to pray in their own way. To be honest, it seemed like the only polite thing to do.

Afterwards, a veteran approached me and said how grateful he was for that 'permission'. He is an observant Jew and appreciated that a time for prayer was made available for him as a member of a sibling faith. He also commented that he thought it a very brave thing for me to have done!

I have thought about this over and over. Why 'brave'? I am comfortable in my faith sufficiently that I am happy to acknowledge that of others. They were there to celebrate an affiliation to an ideal that is human and not purely Christian, and that is the ideal of defending the poor and weak and their freedom. He was a former pilot who knew what that ideal looked like in practice, so rather than 'brave', it now seems to me that it was the only truly right thing to do!

Seasonality

2011-09-18T13:46:00.000+01:00

The notion of 'season' has been writ large on much on my inner thought of late. It formed part of the language of the appointment process for this new job I have, and is implicit in the first Gospel of my vicarly ministry.

For those of you who didn't get to a church today, the story was about a bloke who owned a vineyard, needed some muscle to bring in the grapes, and the transaction therein given. Some geezers worked all day, others some - all were paid the same, a hoo-ha was had and Jesus wrapped it all up as he does.

I had been pondering the very nature of being the 'new vicar'. This is, by very nature, a place that has had other vicars. They have done their thing and I will in deed do mine. That said, it feels strange as there is always the expectation of progress and development and I was not comfortable with any sense that I was or would be better than my predecessor.

Seasonality speaks of succession not supercession. Seasons are mitigated by what goes before them. Spring is not an improvement on winter, summer over spring or autumn over summer. They are different and form parts of a whole that expends beyond any of them. This is surely the same with parishes. As for the landowner in the Gospel story this morning, his grapes were those born of labour in earlier months and without which there simply wouldn't be any grapes at all. A fruitful autumn depends on a diligently planted and nurtured spring, the warmth and hopefulness of summer and the labour of the harvest.

So, we enter a new season where I am now called to serve. I think we will have some good fun, face some substantial challenges (some we will prevail over, others not). This season will bring its own fruitfulness all the while we will be planting the seeds for future seasons, and whose fruit we may never see in our time or even life. Vicars come and go, and I have no aspiration to immortality, but the vine needs tending - the same vine.

More Good News

2011-09-16T19:05:00.002+01:00

I was delighted and humbled to open an email that told me that I am one of the Finalists in the 'Best Christian Blogs' category in the Christian New Media Awards 2011. Who'd have thought that this drivel would get so far in a competition graced by some remarkable good entries (for the full list, follow this link)?

I do this because I enjoy it and because I am supported by reader, commenters and other friends. Without you there really isn't any point. So I thank you most sincerely.

What a week!

A Curate in Vicar's Clothes

2011-09-16T14:00:00.000+01:00

As the title change of this blog might suggest, I am now across the line that divides one ministry from another. The line itself was a wonderful and emotional Service, attended by so many friends and friends-to-be, family and well-wishers, filled with (I think, because I chose it all) rousing music that all could sing at the top of their voices.

Across the line I am now in a new Diocese, working with new people and for a new Bishop. I have a different job with different expectations, facing a different future in a different house and with loved ones who themselves are doing different things in different places.

I am sort of wondering when the penny will drop and I will have map routed out in front of me. It was in my curacy. I know what I was doing and when, for whom and why. As you know, mine was a richly blessed curacy but one that was crammed full. Each day was full-on - and that in a training role too. Instinct told me that when I crossed the line to the next ministry, it would be even more that way: crammed to capacity.

A few of my friends have recently walked across this line. We were curates and now we are incumbents or the like. Their eyes were once cast towards a mentor for the direction and the plan. All eyes are on us now. It is a very funny feeling, not unpleasant - and so far, all is quiet. Today I prayed in the church alone (and did some nosing around). Today I pootled up the High Street and had some useful chats with people. Today I will complete sermons for the four services that I will be part of. I am secretly hoping that the Guide Book for Incumbents is in the drawer somewhere so I can tick off 'Jobs for the First Week', confident as I am that I have surely forgotten something.

Ministry is, I suppose, not set in stones (paradoxically). We are rooted in a parish that has a church. Sometimes that church has services that I will have some control of. But that is about it. How I spend the next decade is, broadly, in my own hands and that has the potential to be an alarming thought if laboured too much. For me, I want to be furiously active saving the world for God (often forgetting that God has a part, not just me). For now, I have no specific work-load and I wonder if I am just meant to be wondering. What am I called to do in this parish? What and where are the signs? What do I represent to these hope filled people? What needs changing, if anything? Where are we called to go, together?

If this post feels a little strange, that is because I am still a Curate in Vicar's clothes. I still yearn to be spoon-fed like before, but know that there is no longer a spoon. I am happy and fearful, overjoyed and worried - all in equal measure. The only thing I know with absolute certainty is that I am meant to be here. The rest will become clearer in the days and weeks ahead.

... I hope!

Risk Averse

2011-09-15T16:49:00.001+01:00

If Jesus walked the Earth today ...

Mark 1: 16ff

As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea - for they were ocean-fruits collection operatives. (They were were not bending at the waist, but at the knee as prescribed by the Regulations.)

And Jesus said to them, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." And immediately they consulted their diaries and their work-place mentors, left their nets and told Jesus that due to the increasing demands of business rates, the needs of the family and lack of formal written notice, that they must decline. Added to this, their nets were not built to EC Net v1.068 standards and therefore not properly constructed to fish for people, or indeed any creature weighing more than 10 kilos. Subject to agreement with their trade union, a ballot and the obligatory thirteen week notice period (and after a full consultation period), they felt that they may be able to agree, but only if the pay rates were above the Minimum National Wage, their pension rights were preserved and their full golf schedule may not be impeded. Jesus sighed and wished he hadn't asked.

As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending their nets. Immediately he called them but because he was not wearing a high-viz jacket he was ignored. Following a committee meeting, a vote and a further inquiry, they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men (feeling sure that under new Ageism regulations and gender discrimination rules they would lose their business anyway), and followed him.

Here I am Lord; Neon Sign Lord

2011-09-13T16:11:00.002+01:00

The next twenty-four hours will be, for my family, as significant as they can be. Tomorrow will be the Twins Aculae's first day at school, and also my Institution as the next Vicar of Ss Philip & James here in Whitton.

As I write this, I am a former Assistant Curate and kids pre-schoolers. Mrs Acular is a 'between jobs lawyer'. Tomorrow, we will all acquire new places in the world in which we live. I mention the missus because she, without any choice or say-so, takes on the mantle of "Vicar's Wife" - which brings with it expectations and projections not of her making and for which she received no training. Please remember her in your thoughts and prayers.

To date, I have done all the stuff you have already known about in the months prior to now. Then I moved house and have been largely hidden away with the family as we come to terms with a new home. A few meetings have happened to give me a briefing of what may lay ahead - and then there is the Big Day (tomorrow 7.30pm).

Now you might imagine that I favour being in the spot-light. Being a gob-on-a-stick might lead you to conclude that so being makes me fond of being the centre of attention. You'd be mistaken. I am happy getting on with getting on, and although I like to bask in whatever success I might precipitate, I prefer to do so from the sidelines, not in the middle where everyone can see me. I've surprised you, haven't I. The thing is, and my fragrant wife likes to remind me in song: "Here I Am Lord, Neon Sign Lord". We laugh and I inwardly shudder a little.

Anyway, there is not a thing I can do about any of that except be grateful glad and thankful for every bit of it. Some much loved people are travelling great distances to share the moment with me tomorrow, and I can't wait to see them. I am blessed by some very faithful loving and wonderful friends. I shall miss the ones who can't be there, knowing that they would be had they not been tied up on a prior engagement.

Then Thursday morning. That dear friends, is a very big matter which you will have to read about then.

Please pray for this unworthy servant as he begins a new ministry. Pray too for my remarkable family who make all that I do possible. Pray for the people of the parish where I will serve, and those in the wider community. These are exciting times, and I just cannot wait to get going.