Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: kinder trespass, Kingdom of God, socialism, walking
This week marks the 80th anniversary of the 1932 Mass Trespass on Kinder Scout which paved the way for working people to be able to enjoy their free time roaming in the open countryside near the industrial cities. There is a wealth of information about the Trespass and how it is being commemorated here.
Such struggles in the past are vitally important for us now. I know how much being able to spend my day off walking in the countryside means to me. How I am re-shaped, re-made, re-created. That I return home feeling better than I did at the start of the day, that I am able to appreciate and savour my life and my work all the more. It is a vital thing that everyone has the chance to flourish in this way, that it is not dependent on birth or luck. I recommit myself to the struggle to bring fullness of life, laughter and joy to all. Will you join me?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Holy Week, justice, Kingdom of God, Lent, lenten journey, passion
Some questions for Holy Week and life beyond it:
Facing up to
the time of difficulty
the time of pain
the time of suffering
Is it really the witness of our lives
that love is stronger than hate
life is stronger than death?
that the world can be remade?
Do we have the capacity
to live generously, humbly
and with the imagination required of us?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: jane williams, justice, Kingdom of God, Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, prayer
As we enter Lent today, I would like to share this excellent piece from today’s Guardian newspaper by Jane Williams. If we want to know what Lent is and how it involves us, this is a very good place to start.
Lent begins with a man in a desert. This man has extraordinary powers and knows himself to be of special importance to his God. In the desert, he is facing choices about what that means for the rest of his life. He is alone, and in a semi-starved, almost hallucinatory condition, but the choices he makes here will not be dismissed when he returns to “normal” life. He chooses not to use his power for his own gratification. Instead, he chooses to put himself and his power at the disposal of God, for the use of others.
He faces three temptations, like in all the best stories. The first is to turn stones into bread, to satisfy his gnawing hunger. The second is to get power over people, and the third is to make himself invulnerable. All of these things, he rejects. Later on in life, we see the consequences of these choices. Jesus can produce miraculous food – but for others, not himself. He can influence people, but only if they choose to believe in him; and he accepts the death on the cross that brings the presence of God into all those situations of unavoidable human vulnerability.
This is how the New Testament tells it, and that’s why Jesus’s followers “do” Lent. For a few weeks, we try to see that the world doesn’t crumble if we don’t have everything we want; we try to make ourselves and our resources that little bit more available for ends other than our own.
Whether you’re a Christian or not, this choice that Jesus makes in the desert has to be made. Are we going to live our lives simply trying to get as much of what we want as we possibly can, whatever the cost to others, or are we going to imagine a different way? It’s a particularly apposite question at the moment, when we hear daily about people who are “giving things up” because they have no choice: parents giving up meals so that their children can eat, for example.
These hard times are going to last much longer than Lent, but this is a chance to take stock and imagine a changed world, in which, perhaps, the rich can actually manage with far less than they thought they needed; in which, perhaps, poverty is not treated as a misdemeanour on the part of the poor, but as a failure of society, to be remedied by all of us.
Jesus’s decision in the desert led him into several years of working with and speaking out for the people his society – and ours – thought unimportant: sick people, foreigners, poor people, women, children. The people in power didn’t like to be challenged in Jesus’s day, any more than they do now, and so Jesus faced scorn, derision and, ultimately, death, for his choice to live by different rules.
That’s a far cry from giving up chocolate or coffee for Lent, but there is really no point at all in a Lenten discipline that isn’t about reimagining the world so that it revolves less about our own desires and more about the good of all. When Lent ends, that vision of the world doesn’t. It’s a world that is less about what I want, and more about what we all need, in which the good life for me is unimaginable unless it is also the good life for you
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Kingdom of God, poetry, RS Thomas, strengthening estates ministry, urban ministry
One of the real pleasures of my work is spending some time convening Strengthening Estates Ministry, the group for clergy and church workers in the Diocese of Birmingham who minister in outer housing estates (you can find more details and explanation of this here). I’m just back from a wonderful 24 hour conference of SEM where 24 of us gathered for a structured conversation based around stories of ministry in these wonderful and tough areas of multiple deprivation. This was excellent theological reflection and comradeship, really grounded, inspiring, humbling, challenging and tiring. It will be fascinating to try to catch the difference this makes to me and the other participants and to see what effects this has on our ministry and parishes.
My mind is full of a huge wodge of stuff that I need to spend time examining and to let sink in and to sift, but two things shine out for me, things I had not really noticed before or which have been brought much more to the fore. One of these is that in amongst the darkness and difficulty we see glimpses of God which we must pay attention to and which can give us the strength to keep going. The other is that sense of call that many of us felt to our particular churches and communities, something else that makes it possible to stay and flourish when things are against us.
This brought to my mind RS Thomas’s poem The Bright Field:
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Plenty here for me to reflect on about how it applies to the difficult and complex life of the city and to the deep, quiet joy of ministry here.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Christmas, howard thurman, justice, Kingdom of God
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
Howard Thurman
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: church action on poverty, close the gap, close the gap prayer community, justice, Kingdom of God, poverty, together with elderly people in weoley castle and bartley green
I was asked to write this piece by Church Action on Poverty for their excellent Close the Gap Campaign. You can also read it in the Close the Gap Prayer Community. I hope it offers some good reflection and a springboard into acting this Epiphany.
In these days around Christmas
we can be struck by a number of gaps.
This year, there is one that is very much on my heart.
This is the gap in life expectancy.
In my context of outer estate urban Birmingham
we have found that the life expectancy in the poorest parts of my parishes
is ten years less than in the most affluent parts of the city.
This, more than anything, for me forms the basis of
‘Together with Elderly People in Weoley Castle and Bartley Green’.
As a number of Churches come together to explore and plan for
the Birmingham Winter Night Shelter
I am reminded that life expectancy for homeless people
is around 30 years less than for the general population
and, if we look further, that there is a gap of around 30 years
in life expectancy
between people in western countries
and those in the poorest countries.
This gap is, literally, a matter of life and death.
Let’s pledge ourselves to close it.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Advent, hope, justice, Kingdom of God, percy dearmer
O God,
Who set before us the great hope
That your Kingdom shall come on earth
And taught us to pray for its coming:
Give us grace to discern the signs of its dawning
And to work for the perfect day
When the whole world shall reflect your glory;
Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen.
- Percy Dearmer
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Kingdom of God, justice, hope, sin, shusaku endo, child poverty
Sin is for one person to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds they have left behind.
Article on how the new social contract in the UK is sending huge numbers of children into poverty here. This is not inevitable people, let’s gird our loins and work against this.
The Editorial in this week’s The Tablet is worth pondering:
The problem with the Government’s spending cuts, which
are now beginning to bite, is not just that they go “too
far, too fast”, to use Labour’s favourite mantra. The
Government has fundamentally failed to grasp the com-
plex web of relationships by which the public services are woven
into society, affecting the lives of almost everyone in the UK.
Together with the economy itself, these elements constitute
an ecology, a finely balanced dynamic where disturbance of one
can disturb all the others. Three articles in this week’s Tablet,
by Chris Blackhurst, Terry Philpot and William Keegan, take
the analysis of government policy into territory which Labour
needs urgently to explore, but has so far failed to. There is a
great opportunity here for others too to subject government
policy to rigorous scrutiny, as the Catholic bishops could as part
of their Common Endeavour project, which they are promot-
ing at a conference in London this coming week.
The key to the Government’s misunderstanding is in a frank
remark by Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, that David
Cameron’s Big Society project is aimed at “breaking the
monopolies of the public services” and the “monolithic state
providers”. Yet as Terry Philpot points out, the bulk of social
services are no longer run by local councils but by voluntary
organisations. So Mr Maude is guilty of a factual error that is
bound to send government policy off in the wrong direction.
It is also wrong in theory. Its flawed premise –as in Mr
Cameron’s claim to believe in “the big society, not big
Government” –is that Government and the voluntary sector
are part of a zero-sum equation, in which society gets bigger
as Government gets smaller. If civil society is a good thing,
Government is therefore bad –a dangerous conclusion.
The Government also misunderstands the nature of philan-
thropy as a motive behind civil society. It believes that if the
public sector contracts, people will plug the gaps with their own
time and money. But the wellsprings of altruism lie elsewhere
and have little to do with the size of the public sector. As Chris
Blackhurst explains, poorer people are the best givers. Those
few who have become much richer in the last two decades have
failed to increase their charitable donations proportionately
(or at all).
There is also an assumption that the voluntary sector is run
by amateurs. In fact, each major charity will have a profes-
sional (and reasonably well-paid) chief executive and will employ
qualified full-time staff at the going rate. They will probably
rely on the taxpayer, in one form or another, for half or more
of their charity’s income. If the charity reins back its activi-
ties because of falling income, those who rely on them most
will suffer most.
Is there light at the end of the tunnel, to make all the hard-
ship worthwhile? Could a society focused on the common good
eventually emerge, despite these policy flaws? The Government’s
one hope of economic recovery, as William Keegan writes, is
through growth in manufacturing. That requires rising
demand for the goods manufactured. Yet everything else the
Government has done ensures people have less money to spend.
“Too far, too fast” hardly does justice to what is happening, which
is a threat to the very fabric of society.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cuts, justice, Kingdom of God, Lent, prayer, st gabriel's weoley castle, the Cross, the guardian, weoley castle
This has been a long hard Lent, although today is only the third Sunday. The cuts are arriving. Weoley Castle Community Projects, of which I am Chair, was in The Guardian on Friday:
Weoley Castle Community Projects, Birmingham
Cut: £5,000 (15%)
Weoley Castle offers a support service for up to 30 local elderly people every day in a church hall. It provides company, conversation, a proper meal, entertainment and care. Many of those using the service would otherwise be alone during the day.
But a 15% cut – from £33,000 to £28,000 – means the project has had to make two part-time staff redundant and reduce the amount of day care offered, from five days to four days a week. It has had a significant impact on those who have nowhere to go on the fifth day and have little extra care at home.
The project has also had to send out first stage redundancy letters to all its day care staff as there is no word of future funding from 1 April.
Kate Pearson, a trustee of the Weoley Castle project, says: “It doesn’t make any sense at all. We provide value for money. What happens to clients when we’re not there? We’re being honest about the pressures facing us, but the majority of our clients will find it hard to understand because they are in the early stages of dementia. But they have noticed the redundancies and a few are extremely anxious.”
It is going to be a hard and difficult week. Prayers please for the Project, those who use its services, the staff and volunteers, the trustees, and hard pressed Council Officers.
Thanks to the half a million people who Marched for an Alternative in London yesterday. Now is a critical time for working for a creative and just future.
As we journey through Lent, it is a time also for faith, for walking in the Way of the Cross, for hope in the Resurrection and in the Kingdom of God – on earth as it is in heaven.
