2007 Anglican Blog Award for "The Kew Continuum"

I walked into our diocesan convention the other afternoon to be greeted by one of the more exhuberant members of our diocese who wrapped her arms around me and said, "We are so proud of you."

I looked quizzically at her. I had no idea what this effusive congratulation was about. In the conversation that followed I finally was able to work out that this blog had been given an award.

That, I thought, was nice, because I am paranoid enough to think that throughout life I have received far more raps than accolades. I also wondered who on earth would even think about doing such a thing.

It's Saturday. This afternoon the convention now over, a new Bishop of Tennessee consecrated this morning, a nap having been taken, and the dog given his statutary walk around the field behind our house (in the company of the cat on this occasion), I decided to log on to see what I could find out about this miracle that had come to pass!

Sure enough, there on the Stand Firm site (www.Standfirminfaith.com) was the announcement that The Kew Continuum has been voted as having the Best Focus on Theology in the Anglican Blog Awards for 2007 -- amazing!

This got me wondering how I should respond. More thinking time was needed, so I tuned into the latest episode of This Old House while drinking my afternoon cup of tea, and I pondered. A builder's son, I have always loved houses, so watching an old East Boston home being renovated is right up my alley, and much more exciting than any serialized thriller. But it didn't help me with a response.

Well, these aren't the Oscars, so there's no red carpet to sweep down with my wife on my arm dressed in the most expensive outfit she is ever likely to buy. Neither is there a chance to strut myself before a crowded theatre, weeping profusely, and oozing "Thank you, thank you, thank you" to my peers. All I have received is a nice little logo that I guess I will find some way of putting somewhere on the blog.

So, to the folks who voted The Kew Continuum the Best Focus on Theology let me in true English fashion, quiet and restrained, to be grateful for such a vote of confidence. I will try in the coming year to keep up the standard.

It was only while trying to work out how to download the little logo that I discovered people were actually commenting on these awards, and would you believe it, someone accused me of rigging the result! What audacity! Now how does a soul answer such impugnities? I guess the only thing is to shrug, reckon that you are never going to please all the people, look at your watch and realize it might soon to time to break out the bubbly -- or at least, if there is nothing from the Champagne district of France in the house, another strong cup of well-steeped Yorkshire tea.

Obviously I am surprised that my scribblings have received such attention, but let me end on a more serious note.

I don't profess to be a great theological brain, but I have been puzzled for years now that we are in the midst of one of the biggest struggles in the church's life for generations, and there has been so little legitimate theological reflection on what is going on, and how our faith interacts with the culture that has played a part on bringing this about. While there are many reasons for this, the fact is that discussion polarizes and turns political or personal long before anyone really engages the profound theological realities that should be behind what is going on.

I guess I wish there were more sites out there that were doing a good theological job, for that would mean that the meagre gruel that I try to dish up would be put in its right perspective.

Words That Word -- A Review

Words That Work by Frank Luntz (New York: Hyperion Books, 2007, US$24.95)

Over the last couple of days my movements have been severely restricted as I have undergone one of those unpleasant medical procedures that is fast becoming a rite of passage into one's more senior years. Work has been almost impossible, and at times even reading has been difficult. However, I did manage to complete reading Frank Luntz's book, Words That Work.

Luntz is a bright spark with the kind of gifts that are valuable (and obviously profitable) in an information and knowledge-driven society. The sub-title of his book is It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear. This isn't a book that I would have even have known about, let alone picked up if I hadn't seen Dr. Luntz on C-SPAN early on Christmas morning after the cat had awoken me from heavy slumber demanding to be let out.

As Luntz says in his introduction, You can have the best message in the world, but the person on the receiving end will always understand it through the prism of his or her own emotions, preconceptions, prejudices, and preexisting beliefs. It's not enough to be correct or reasonable or even brilliant. The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener's shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. How that person perceives what you say is even more REAL, at least in a practical sense, than how you perceive yourself (Page xiii).

All this is just plain common sense. After having introduced the idea he then sets out to clarify and illustrate from his experience as a consultant and pollster to politicians and commercial interests. I am not sure that if I were to know him that Frank Luntz would be exactly my cup of tea, but he is certainly a gifted communicator who has important lessons that all other communicators need to either re-learn or learn for the first time.

Luntz, who holds an Oxford doctorate, is a master at taking someone's message and helping them put it in words that speak to the people they are trying to reach rather than not be heard, or worse, be turned off altogether. He claims to be the one who guided the Republicans away from talking about Estate Taxes to Death Taxes, thereby gaining support for their policies, and to talk of Climate Change instead of Global Warming.

He is known among those who despise him, or have absolutely no time for him as an unrepentent spin meister, but that is not how he sees himself. As he says, I do not believe there is something dishonorable about presenting a passionately held proposition in the most favorable light, while avoiding the self-sabotage of clumsy phrasing and dubious delivery (Page xix). This is a fair response on his part.

The battle, he says, is about comprehension, and that means getting over ideas in the best possible way that we can, for all human enterprises involve ideas and the communication of ideas. The truth is that if your audience does not hear (or understand) what you are saying, then you are not going to win an election, sell a product, or enable someone to get excited about Jesus Christ and his Gospel.

I have spent my whole life falling in love with words and struggling how best to use them as a servant of Christ. While there is a lot that Frank Luntz says that I have discovered myself by trial, error, or study over the last few decades, it is always good to see these spelled out clearly and put in order within the context of the present cultural challenge as he does. I would say that Luntz's lessons are extremely helpful to just about anyone who has a passion to get across the message of the Gospel as well as those who want to sell more potato chips.

He begins by outlining ten rules of effective language, which means successful communication and he begins with simplicity. You can argue all you want about the dumbing down of America, but unless you speak the language of your intended audience, you won't be heard by the people you want to reach (Page 5).

I don't know how many sermons and how much Christianspeak I have heard that fails just on this ground alone -- and some of those sermons have probably been my own! To be honest, some of the worst communicators of what are in reality dynamic ideas are to be found in pulpits on a Sunday morning.

The he talks about how essential is the credibility of the communicator. Credibility is established very simply. Tell people who you are or what you do. Then be that person and do what you have said you would do. And finally, remind people that you are what in fact you say you are (Page 11). Much Christian failure in recent decades stems from the fact that we are not who we say we are neither do we seem to mean what we say, and you can point your finger at any Christian tradition for loads of examples illustrating this.

The saddest cautionary tale I know is of the man who was beginning to show and interest in the Good News and is invited by a friend to come and share in the life of his church. "Good heavens, no," the man responds, "I've got enough problems of my own already, why would I want to be part of the church?" The tragedy is of such a cautionary tale is that it is uncomfortably true.

But the fact is, Luntz tells us, even with the best will in the world we all have a tendency to make message mistakes, and often this is by making calamitous assumptions about where our audience is coming from. While Luntz does not accept the postmodern premise that words change their meaning depending on what the receiver of them is hearing, he does warn us that if we are to persuade then we should use language to inform and enlighten rather than obscure and exclude.

Our listeners' preconceptions through which they filter what we say are influenced by their gender, their education, their political affiliations and biases (or lack of them). It also depends on ethnic background, national origins, cultural and generational conditioning. These all need to be considered when we are about the business of trying to communicate. So he tells us to ask ourselves what we want the result to be and then to use language to aim at that outcome.

And we should not forget that as culture changes so do words change their meaning. This man has a good feel of youth culture, which is shaped by the streets and hip-hop, and also invites us to remember that email and the Internet have also played a role in coarsening our language.

We may deplore such a thing, and throw up our hands in horror, but the fact is this is the reality and we are called to communicate into this reality. Because many of us within traditions with an elistist bias do deplore such things, we ignore the reality on the ground and end up by being terrible communicators.

A number of years ago, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union I was in Moscow with Orthodox friends and broached the question of the Russian Orthodox Church's use of Old Church Slavonic rather than modern Russian for their liturgies. Old Church Slavonic is the Russian ecclesiastical equivalent of Chaucerian English, but several hundred years earlier. I suggested that it would be increasingly difficult to hold onto the hoards of young people thronging the churches because they did not understand what was going on. "Ah," I was told, "If they want to be part of the church then they will be willing to learn it." Old Church Slavonic might not be our problem, but there's a lesson here that we need to learn even as the liturgical revision language of the mid-20th Century ages while we use it.

Words That Work is readable and has lots of fascinating case studies from politics and commerce. It isn't difficult to see how Luntz's lessons translate into the language of the faith. As far as I have been able to discover there is absolutely no mention of faith and spirituality even when the author talks about morals and values. This should remind us that a huge proportion of the movers and the shakers do not have much interest in who we are and what we are about, especially when the message we proclaim is one thing, and then the way we live and behave directly contradicts it.

Words That Work is a helpful tool and its lessons can be applied in all sorts of settings. For a start, preachers and speakers would benefit from reading it, giving clues as to how they should project their message. It would be good to look at the contention in the church through its grid because I am convinced that a lot of the time we determinedly use words in such a way not to communicate with "the other side" but to deliberately rile them.

It should also be a challenge to us to keep studying language, studying the culture in which we use the language, and being prepared to make changes in order to communicate more effectively.

Blink or Think?

I had been intending to review of Michael R. LeGault's interesting book, Think!, a response to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which I drew attention to several weeks ago. However, the more I have looked at the two productions together the more I realize that what we are seeing here is the delineation of the two radically different ways of thinking that have emerged. As I have thought them over I realize that what we see here is the competing mindsets that underlie the crisis in the church today.

Michael R. LeGault challenges the increasing dominance of the intuitive way of thinking and decision-making that Gladwell highlights. Furthermore, LeGault believes this is doing untold damage in the western world, particularly North America. He argues that Gladwell's thesis that the mind possesses extraordinary power to absorb information and sensory data, correctly size up a situation, and then solve problems without ever having to lean too heavily on formal thought just does not stand up under examination.

Gladwell's book, Blink, fills "a growning market niche, a new-age, feel-good pop psychology/philosophy" that has "sprung up to bolster the view that understanding gleaned from logic and critical analysis is not all that it's cracked up to be" (Page 8). While I think that LeGault is being a little too hard on intuitivity, his rejoinder to Blink certainly stands up under careful prodding better than Gladwell's thesis. As one who has a highly intutive side I think I understand very well what Gladwell is trying to say, but having said that I am profoundly grateful that I was in my formative years equipped with a good set of critical tools that enable me to think rationally and with logicality.

LeGault's 300+ pages can be summarized in a statement to the effect that the seeds of terminal decay are to be found in taking our feelings and intuitions so seriously that we end up avoiding difficult thinking and hard reasoning. His Chapter 11 is worth the price of the book alone(US$13.00). Entitled Hearing the Harmony of Reason: Embracing Objectivity, Thinking Critically, he starts out by saying, "Both history and daily experience have confirmed time and again that critical thinking is a vastly superior method of solving problems and making decisions than an intuitive random approach. It sometimes relies on number crunching, and statistics, but the basic elements are the same for all the criticial-thinking approaches used to write a report, figure ways to improve sales, of fix a jammed garage door. These elements are the use of empirical evidence (gathering data, knowledge), logical reason, and a skeptical attitude" (Page 274).

This illustrated the manner in which the book is written because it applies solid critical, empirical thinking to the alternative approach to thinking that Malcolm Gladwell so winsomely champions in Blink. LeGault's book not only has more far substance, but his careful thinking and writing lay the axe to the roots of the edifice that Gladwell tries to construct. However, I suspect that when the sales and influence of the two books are measured against one another, Blink will have won hands down.

Part of the reason for this is that most people today are conditioned to think with their hearts and not their heads, and this is encouraged everywhere from the media to many parts of academia. They have been taught to treasure feel-good intuitiveness that does not require much in the way of intellectual heavy lifting. Gladwell's insights are certainly going to ring more bells with an instant, easy-come, easy-go generation. Logical, rational thinking is not something that is caught but needs to be taught -- and it is a long time since anyone was seriously teaching it to anything but a handful of people.

I believe that the hardest classes I took were Logic and Philosophy, but as I soldiered on with them for several years they bore fruit that I have carried with me for the rest of my life. I am not a great philosopher or logician, but what I have gained have helped me better assess what is going on inside my brain, as well as ideas others are presenting to me. I might be emotionally swayed by someone's argument when they present their case, but after the emotions have died down I know how to intellectually pick through it and work out whether it was built upon rock or sand.

The Greeks and Romans took rhetoric seriously as a subject, coaching those who will communicate in ancient society to speak wisely and well, framing their arguments rationally, yet we no longer do this and we are poorer for it. I have listened to a huge number of sermons in my time, for example, and I shudder to think how many of these productions might succeed emotionally, but then fail miserably because the case being made is built either on froth or feelings, or has no logical and rational consistency.

The way in which the churches in general, and the Episcopal Church in particular, have been shepherded along the road that they have taken is that they have followed this intuitive, feelings-driven approach to thinking and have shut out the more traditional, rational, logical way of handling facts and ideas. Having read both Gladwell and LeGault, I would say that those on the progressive side, the left, or whatever you want to call them, lean heavily in the direction of being Blink-ers.

Because of the absence of objective, empirical, critical reasoning across the board, the Blink-like mindset and approach is also displayed by those who are more conservative, yet unlike their leftward brothers and sisters the presuppositions of their positions are rooted in theological presuppositions shaped by Scripture, and the minds of the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calivin, Edwards, and a host of others -- which means that rationality takes precedence over uninformed intuition. When it comes down to it there is probably more Think than Blink on the right, but it sure lacks the intellectual rigor that it needs.

The fact is that every grouping lacks the rigor of approach that will enable us to build the case for our beliefs upon the deposit of knowledge and observation. We need to know how to think our way to sound judgments and good decisions that are rooted and grounded in an objective, revelational understanding of the Truth. We are never going to think our way constructively forward unless Logical reasoning is at the core of this process. LeGault gives us a very good summary of the principles of elementary logic that have more or less been lost and need
to be recovered.

Almost everywhere we look we see the stand-off between Blink and Think!. Several years ago on Mars Hill Audio there was a piece by a legal scholar bemoaning the demise of logic and reasoning in the courtroom. He said that takes its place is emotional manipulation and storytelling as each lawyer tries to trump the other in performance in order to psychologically win the case for their client. Here we see the Think of the old way of doing law giving way to the new approach of Blink! The same is true in marketing, and an entertainment-driven culture has more or less disconnected us from higher logical and the rational side of our minds!

Yet it is to the life of the church that I want to apply this thesis. Other than Columbus 2006 I have attended just about every General Convention in the last twenty years, and have watch the standard of debate (which was never great) spiral downward. The last so-called debate of the House of Deputies to which I listened was, quite frankly, more postmodern theatre than it was rational discussion. The same is true of the preparatory hearings.

The Think approach to reasoning and theological deduction was absent, and those who applied such an approach were hardly listened to and certainly not heard. Blink, with intuitive stories about relationships feeling good and right, ruled the roost. In such settings it was increasingly difficult even to enter into discussion with those with whom you disagreed because Blink-ers and Think-ers function so differently that they talk past each other and end up merely shouting at one another.

What is more disturbing is that words and knowledge seem to have become the victims. While language always changes and grows, in the deconstructionist world (of which Blink is at least a reflection) words are reworked then given the meaning we want them to have. A recent example of this is the blatant redefinition of the word "evangelism" by the Presiding Bishop and her entourage.

When rational objectivity is replaced by reader receptiveness, then we are set free to diddle with meanings to suit own subjectivity as well as sitting loose to fact. Taking the human sexuality debate as an example, I have sought the best I can to keep up with all sides of this conversation, and hear those on the left presenting as indisputible fact certain statements about sexuality for which there is at least at present no scientific or factual basis. Then when something has been repeated enough such a notion become accepted more and more as factual.

What I find more disturbing is the unwillingness of most people on every side of this Blink/Think debate to even consider looking at data that comes a position with which they disagree. This means that all cases end up being one-sides, and polarization that does every kind of damage is the outcome.

A traditional way of approaching ideas and circumstances is to gather as much information as you can from across the board, to analyze it with care, sifting and discarding that which does not stand up under scrutiny, and then building a case from what remains. This is hard work and it means delving deeply into positions with which we disagree or may find unpaletable. One of the benefits of having studied theology both at an undergraduate and a postgraduate level in places whose preferences were at odds with my own was the value of learning to see a question
from all sides in the process of discovering the truth.

This kind of discipline is virtually absent and needs to be recovered post haste. This is what Michael Legault advocates in Think!, and it is an approach to learning and thinking that we need to recover. Certainly, it behooves those who are concerned for the future wellbeing of the Christian faith in this land and in the West generally, to get back to the hard, hard work of the logical, rational, empirical measuring of thought.

Are we willing to live in the world of Blink, or are we willing to graduate into a world of Think!?

Meditations on a Bible Study

Yesterday evening we had a wonderful conversation at the bible study I lead each week. Since the beginning of December we have been working our way through Paul's Letter to the Romans and have just got to the tail end of Chapter One where Paul is talking about the whole raft of sins that separate us from God, with a particularly strong reference to sexual sins -- especially those of a same sex nature.

The group of thirteen or fourteen people was well-educated and made up of folks like a printer and a psychiatrist, a retired school superintendent and a college professor. This is not one of those hop, skip, and a jump studies through Paul's magnum opus, but is an attempt to take the text seriously within its original context so that we can then work out what it is saying to us today. It is a joy for me to be leading such a group as it is a long time since I have had the opportunity to work with the Greek text of Romans in this detailed way.

Within the context of studying a particular passage of Scripture must always come the business of application. Last night this happened toward the end of our study after we had worked hard at dissecting precisely what the Apostle was saying. At first the conversation was slow to develop, but after a few minutes it took on a life of its own, full of sensitivity and fluency that I had not expected.

This was a pretty orthodox bunch of people, some of them deeply distressed by the actions taken by the Episcopal Church in recent years, the kind often represented as hard and inflexible when it comes to dealing with such issues as these, but there was none of that. Yes, there were expressions of distress at the positions taken by the likes of the General Convention, but there was also a genuine desire to reach out in love to those who have a particular struggle with their sexuality.

Stories were told that were intensely moving. While there was no attempt to walk away from the clarity with which Paul deals with the issue of same sex relationships, there was also a yearning to work out how to be pastoral and caring without any desire to walk away from what the Scriptures say in their plainest sense.

Little has been gained as we have polarized during the last few years and at times shouted at each other until we are hoarse. Yes, theology, values, ethics, and morality are vitally important, but equally as important is the manner in which we talk with one another about such things.

As we move into 2007 I guess I find myself asking is there are ways that we can discover how to handle the crisis that has burst over us graciously and gracefully. I don't think I am even seeking agreement and I am certainly not asking that we try to find some way of finessing away what Scripture says, but to ask if there is a way beyond our present pouting polarization so that we can start demonstrating in the debate attitudes with which the Sermon on the Mount might feel at home.

We didn't get very far in our conversation last night, but the mood and the comments led me to believe that perhaps there are a goodly number of folks out there who passionately yearn to move beyond our present destructive stuck-ness.

PoMo Shopping and the Church

Those who know me realize that for many years now The Economist has been one of my favorite publications. The great thing about this particular news weekly is that it provides a huge array of background materials that help us understand the news and the culture against which the world economy is doing all sorts of things. Unlike so many of its counterparts it does not talk down to its readers, assuming that we have their capacity to digest and discuss serious issues is fearfully limited.

The Christmas-New Year edition of The Economist is always worth looking forward to because it provides what can best be called holiday reading in the shape of all sorts of op-ed style pieces. This year we have a multi-page analysis of the way the brain works, a charming piece on conversation, and a stimulating longish essay on advertising, shopping, and postmodern philosophy.

I have re-read this latter piece several times, because it seemed to have a message that we in the churches need at least to be listening to. Perhaps it could have been re-titled something like Foucault and the Demise of the Department Store, for the point it is making is that the old-fashioned way of selling goods is dead, gone, and buried, and radical new alternatives are being born out of the deconstruction of yesterday's way of retailing.

Let me confess that I rather like department stores, which makes me a less than post-modern person. Their orderly presentation of goods with lines of counters and a careful attention to understated decor always seemed somehow soothing, if an emporium dedicated to commercialism could, indeed, be such a thing. But, we are told, Selfridges, what in days gone by was the epitome of department store chic in London, almost went out of business in the 1990s, while that other British bastion of one-stop department store shopping, Marks and Spencer, is struggling to remake itself after a horrible nose dive.

If you go into a Selfridges store in England today you find that order and standard decor have given way to every brand being given its head to shout the loudest. "There is no hierarchy of goods; watches compete with perfume, luggage with high fashion, cafes with fast food. Shows, action and stunts break up the day. Selfridges calls it 'shopping entertainment.' So successful is it that two years ago a panel of style gurus voted it Britain's coolest brand."

The thesis of this article, Post-modernism is the new black, is that if you think of old-fashioned approaches to retailing as 'meta-narratives,' in today's market they have to be deconstructed, setting people free from externally imposed categories in which traditional retailers want to imprison them. The modern consumer needs to be free to choose... the mainstream has been shattered "into a zillion different cultural shards."

Mass markets are out, yet even as they are being blown apart and fragmented these fragments have wily marketers catering to them. A commentator by the name of Chris Anderson states that "When mass culture breaks apart... it doesn't re-form into a different mass. Instead, it turns into millions of microcultures which coexist and interact in a baffling array of ways." How exciting, frightening, unsettling, destablizing.

The message is that in the post-modern deconstructed environment fragmentation is not a bad thing, indeed fragments become valuable niches, and we do not have some anonymous outsider 'editing' the choices that we want to make. The secret of success in this environment is knowing which niche you are attempting to market to. The possibility of an endless array of niches into which we can all dip gives the individual the chance to become "the artist of his own life."

As I read this, and it is one of those items where you aren't quite sure whether the author is being serious or whether there is a degree of tongue in cheek, I found myself thinking about the Episcopal Church. It seemed that some of the things being drawn attention to were a bit like what is happening to us.

If you think of the Episcopal Church as an old-fashioned department store of faith with declining market share, then could it be that what we are experiencing is its shattering into a zillion different religious shards? Each one of these shards is an individual group, congregation or networks of congregations becomes a niche reaching into a particular social or cultural grouping. In such circumstances the believer is free to make choices that suit particular perceptions.

But here's the problem, right now everyone only wants to follow this particular logic part of the way.

Those who hold the power (something postmodernism knows a lot about) think that while we can be creative artists of our own individual faith journey, we don't want to apply this kind of thinking of the structures and presentation of our faith. Like the seried ranks of counters in a traditional department store, there are particular interpretations of canons that are being used to keep us all in order -- their particular take on order. The truth is that when you destroy the meta-narratives you have laid the axe not only to dogma and beliefs, but also to the very tree that contains them.

On the other hand there are those who are happy to fragment, find a bishop of choice, be global, emancipating themselves from this rather tired Enlightenment way of being church, and concentrate on presenting the faith once delivered to the saints. However, these folks have their own likes and dislikes as well as theological convictions that hardly mesh at all with those who think it is entirely right that we can develop a mix-and-match approach to theological discipline.

I'm not one of the world's great shoppers, but I find the Selfridges approach to doing things rather refreshing. There is a huge DaDa-esque Selfridges store in the center of the English Birmingham, not far from my daughter's home. While it can be incredibly confusing, with top class fudge being sold immediately alongside leather briefcases, there is a sense of non-rational order that makes you believe that you are freer to make the choices that you want to make.

Perhaps the time has come to say that we have reached a total impasse in the Episcopal Church, that rather the ripping the whole thing to shreads, let's try and find a postmodern approach to our problems that embraces a similar semi-controlled anarchy rather than fighting against it and each other. This would then allow all the other Anglican jurisdictions in North America to get in on the act like creative mom and pop operations, plugging in to those components of each other and us that they think will work for them. I could go on pursuing this line of thought, but I think readers will get the idea!

In a setting like this there would be no need for General Conventions or the bits of Enlightenment palaver that are left over from the denominational age, and we could have a total free market. Then in that free market we would see what would sink and what would swim, with like-minded networks supporting and promoting what they believe in and all of us getting on, doing our own thing, being our own faith artists.

At first blush this seems more rational than the way we are carrying on at the moment. Those who have driven the agenda for years have been steadily deconstructing the received meta-narrative from our catholic Christian heritage, but for some extraordinary reason want to hang onto the structural meta-narrative. Open up the structural meta-narrative to freedom of choice, and a market-driven economy of faith, and we have a much more inclusive approach to doing things.

Now, I wonder, am I being serious, or is this a little tongue in the cheek?

Writing Daily Devotions

Four years ago I started writing online Daily Devotions. It began for the congregation which I was then pastoring. I was discovering in the lives of parishioners what wider polling had been picking up -- that fewer and fewer Christians were spending time each day reading and studying the Scriptures. Even folks with a high commitment did not seem to understand the importance of a daily prayerful encounter with Scripture, and most did not know how to unpack what the Bible was saying to them.

I have always believed that preaching is not only for the immediate edification of the congregation, but cumulatively the preacher models how on a regularly basis Christians may feed themselves from God's rich revealed diet. A daiy devotional is merely a way of extending that approach to teaching the Scriptures. With virtually everyone online in my former congregation, I had the chance to help them meet the incarnate Word in the written Word first thing every morning when they logged on.

Over the years the readership of the Daily Devotions has grown, and now they are used all over the world. I am not quite sure how many people are receiving them each day because in several parishes they are fielded by one individual who then sends them on to a wider network. My guess is that what began for a couple of dozen folks is now reaching at least 1200-1500, and I have joked that whether I like it or not I have a job for life.

Writing Daily Devotions can be a bit of a chore. When I started doing it our bishop suggested, rightly, that such a thing is very hard to keep up, and doubted whether I would manage it! This is true, but the discipline of writing and sending the devotions is one that has fed me as much or more than those who might receive them, therefore I now do it for my own benefit as much as anything else. I am forced to dig into short passages of Scripture, see what the text is actually saying, and then apply it to the lives that we live today. Sometimes the texts that come up in the lectionary cycle are not particularly easy when trying to teach a crisp little lesson in a few well-chosen sentences!

What has also been a joy is the business of choosing an appropriate collect (short prayer) for the day. During the last few years I have gathered a self of books of prayers from all over the world, and these supplement what can be found in the various rich strands of the Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions. One observation I would make is that the relative absence of such materials in the USA suggests that Americans are not particularly adept at composing prayers in this way, although the feedback I have received suggests that they love using them.

When I committed my life to Christ on August 5, 1959, one of the earliest things I was taught was the importance of regular devotional reading of the Scriptures, and I was started out with simple bible reading notes. Like a pair of training wheels these got me going, and although I was less than regular at first, little by little the discipline entrenched itself in my life so that today there are no parts of the Bible that I have not read several dozen times, and there are few biblical books that I have not studied in significant depth. By the way, I do believe that constructive biblical scholarship should enrich and feed the devotional use of the Word.

As the years have passed my appetite has grown (and changed). The sweet tangy diet of those teenage years has given way to a palate that, like that of someone who has discovered fine wines, gives great pleasure, edification, and satisfaction. In dark moments as well as in the joys of life, the Lord who sustains my life has met, comforted, nurtured, and challenged me. This, in the Daily Devotions, is what I have wanted to pass on to others, and I know from the correspondence I have received that it is doing just that in the lives of some.

One of the problems of writing Daily Devotions is to keep them from becoming sentimental or overly individualized. In one of my former parishes we had a woman who had made little butterflies and smiley faces her personal trademark whenever she wrote a long-hand note or letter. Much devotional writing is, as it were, flavored in this way. While there might be an occasional place for such a thing, a regular diet is cloying. Over the years I have had to tussle to prevent myself from sliding down this slope.

I believe that the Daily Devotions are meant to be a place where the meaty doctrines that are embedded in the narrative and text of the Bible are brought out and presented in such a way that readers are building a base of solid knowledge of what the Scriptures say, and what they actually mean so they can live them out. They are meant to be mini-works of exegesis, that is extracting from the flow of words what God was saying then, and then how he is addressing us with these words now.

I confess that there have been times when I have shied away from something difficult in the particular paragraph. Sometimes that has been because it is impossible to explain what the writer is actually saying in the space needed, but at times it has been because, perhaps, of a loss of nerve. Scripture can be comforting and nurturing, but it also calls us to account, and asks us to deal with difficult questions from which many of us might withdraw in discomfort or horror.
So, the Daily Devotions are entering their fifth year in January. I hope and pray that those using them will be enriched in their faith. I also hope and pray that the one who writes them week by week will find his mind and heart kept open to all the huge possibilities that God has in store.

The Theology of the Cross and the Church's Crisis

Ever-changing circumstances force us to revisit theological convictions, for it is within the fluidities of our lives that we find ourselves find it necessary to confront blind spots or inadequates in our believing.

Following General Convention 2003, for example, I spent much timereconsidering human sexuality. I wondering if perhaps I had missed something or was so stuck in a personal and theological rut that maybe the convention had actually been correct and in my obtuseness I had not picked up on it. Could it be, I thought, that they are being faithful to God's revelation but my preconceptions are preventing me from seeing it?

After several months spent praying, immersed in Scripture and reading all that I could lay my hands on, on both sides of the argument,and weighing the evidence, the conclusion seemed inescapable. While there were areas upon which I needed to tighten up my thinking, what is taught in Scripture and how Scripture has historically been interpreted are closer to God's standards than the direction the Episcopal Church had decided to take. Not only did alternative epistomologies not stand up under critical examination, but neither was the use of evidence outside Scripture being used particularly appropriately by those who would have us think and act differently.

We have now moved on and are watching the wholesale de-construction of the Episcopal Church, as I had expected would happen. The biggest agony of times like these is the parting of friends. Seldom does a week go by without congregations peeling away from the Episcopal Church, often amidst angry accusations, counter-accusations, and often, vituperation. I have dear friends in many of those parishes. The question with which I now struggle is how such behavior by Christians can in any way be considered acceptable, especially in light of the teaching in God's revelation about the restorative power of the Cross and the healing efficacy of the Holy Spirit.

Having spent my entire adult life in the ordained ministry of either the Episcopal Church or the Church of England, and having seen more of the dark underside of church life than I would have wished, I have few illusions about people who call themselves Christians. As well as being steeped in the generosity of our Anglican heritage, my own personality gives me a profound distaste for division and schism, while at the same time as an evangelical believer I am convinced we must take with utmost seriously what God has revealed to us and is recorded in Holy Scripture.

So I set off on this exploratory journey several months ago, and now with Christmas upon us I find myself attempting tentatively to draw a first batch of conclusions. The path I have taken has been anything but direct, but the place where I now find myself is digging afresh into the implications and meaning of the Cross of Christ. I rather expected this was where I would end up, for it is in the hardest of work that Christ wrought on Calvary that we discover the hard work and hard things that he would have us do.

If my studies several years ago regarding human sexuality gave me a much richer understanding of what it means to be humans made in the image of the triune God, my more recent pondering has resulted in a more robust understanding of Christ's nature as the second person of the Godhead, and the significance of Good Friday. It is all very well to effusively assert the glories of the nature of Christ's finished work for year after year of one's life, but new vistas seem to be opened up when one asks certain questions of that work and the manner in which it relates to our immediate struggles.

The conclusion I have found myself reaching has been that while neither "side" in our present unhappiness actually denies the work of Christ upon the Cross, all of us seem to be functioning with a less than adequate theology of what the Lord Jesus Christ has actually done, and how his work applies within our context of contemporary discipleship.

If the Cross is the source of our redemption and was the ultimate purpose for the Lord's coming, then Christ did not fail in what he did when he died, but it is we who are failing now in our ability to apply its tincture to our lives and the life of the Church.

Now I realize that there is much more going on in our crisis than merely imperfect theologies of the Cross, and that we are now seeing the outworking of generations of error, hostility, exclusion, inclusion, etc., etc., but if the Cross is the heart of God's action on human behalf, then we are not even starting to interpret adequately all that is going on unless we bring the Cross into play, seeking to see how its power addresses our circumstances.

A major part of our problem is that all of us, I believe, are working out of a distorted or curtailed understanding of Christ's work in redemption. Indeed, our inadequate grasp of this most significant action of God in the affair of humankind puts us in danger of becoming what Paul called "the enemies of the Cross." We may not hate the Cross and the love which eminates from it, but for most of us ours is hardly an adequate response to such a supreme act of grace for we have cut it down to what we consider to be a manageable size.

A clue to understanding our dilemma is to recognize the divergent courses that have been taken by differing groups within the same faith community for a considerable time. The outcome of this is alienation, the pursuit of mutually exclusive paths, endless finger-pointing which asserts the other side is wrong, the failure to listen to one another or God, and now separation complete with self-righteousness from all quarters, lawyers, courts, winners, losers, pain, agony, and for some, glee. Did we so learn Christ, and where in the midst of all this is the Lord of the Church and the pitilessness he received on a spring day in Jerusalem two thousand years ago?

It is easy to set ourselves up as being right and the other side as being wrong if we can demonstrate that those who stand against us have missed the point altogether. However, what if as we apply the rich doctrine of the Cross to what is going on now, both sides are amiss (or partial) in their grasp of this most cardinal of truths?

While I don't wish to go into the differing perceptions of the Cross in depth, let it be suggested that those on the left have tended to see God's atoning work more in terms of Jesus our great example whose selflessness we must seek to emulate, while those on the right tend to think more of Jesus as the one who shed his blood to cleanse me from my sins. I know this is a parody, but it is close enough to the facts for us to be able to recognize that a more accurate theology of the Cross is so much more than these.

P. T. Forsyth writing just before World War One said that when we speak of the atonement "we are speaking of that which is the centre, not of thought, but of actual life, conscience, history, and destiny. We speak of what is the life power of the moral world and its historic crisis, the ground of the Church's existence, and the sole meaning of Christ himself. Christ is to us just what his Cross is... You do not understand Christ till you understand his Cross." (From his book The Cruciality of the Cross).

Martin Luther, after many years spent in mature reflection upon the Cross, tells us that it speaks of God's solidarity with the downtrodden and suffering, and with all those who the world rejects as weak, foolish, and irrelevant. By its very nature Christ's crucifixion challenges each of our standards of judgment. Jurgen Moltmann, borrowing a phrase from Luther, described Jesus in his magnum opus as the work of "The Crucified God."

The truth is that when we truly allow ourselves to be confronted by the Cross we discover there is absolutely no room for a self-indulgent, self-actualizing mindset. "Many modern spiritualities are very human-centered, stressing their advanges for human mental health and wholeness," (Alister McGrath) or the notion that in our time we know better than our forebears did. Being the people of the Cross turns upon its head many of the attitudes that seem to prevail in much of our thinking these days -- especially when we look at church battles. We have heard too much of the I'm-going-to-get-my-own-way mindset, regardless of the costs and consequences.

But neither does a fair theology of the Cross allow us necessarily to pursue our own agendas, our own ambitions, or to lift high our own desires and expectations. Just as the "health and wealth" Gospel trivializes precisely what Christ taught and did on our behalf on the conservative side of the spectrum, the same can be said to be true of the more subjective attitude toward moral, ethical, and other questions on the progressive side. As Alister McGrath puts it, "To be, or to become, a Christian is to do yourself no favors... To be an authentic Christian is to pass under the shadow of the Cross, not to avoid that shadow" (Roots that Refresh, page 86).

There is an excellent interview by Tim Stafford, brother of the Dean of the School of Theology, Sewanee, with Tom Wright in the January 2007 issue of "Christianity Today." In it Bishop Wright critiques the contemporary appeal of Gnosticism, whose tentacles have reached deeply into the life of the churches, compromising our message (Right and Left) with this particular flavor of neo-paganism.

Wright tells Stafford, "Because the great emphasis in the New Testament is that the gospel is not how to escape the world; the gospel is that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. And that his death and Resurrection transform the world, and that transformation can happen to you. You, in turn can be part of that transforming work. That draws together what we traditionally called evangelism, bringing people to the point where they come to know God in Christ for themselves, with withing for God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven... Our Western culture since the 18th Century has made a virtue of separating out religion from real life, or faith from politics."

What does this have to do with our present ecclesiastical unhappiness? An enormous amount, for it is clear that the Cross in all its stark and bloody glory calls into question the very basis from which all of us have approached these circumstances. Selfishness, power plays, intemperate language, exclusion of those we believe to be in error or don't like, judgmentalism, and so forth, have all been part of the mix. The awe-inspiring attractiveness of Christ's self-sacrifice has been lost beneath the barrage, the Gospel is made to appear ugly, and the mission of the church is being damaged for generations to come.

The other evening I did a little meditation to a small group of people on the woman taken in adultery in John 8. I was impressed again by Jesus's words to the accusers: "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her" (John 8:7). So it is with us in the situation in which we are, we all most slope away because none of us is without sin.

I don't know the way forward or out of the crisis. I do not see anyone backing down, and it may now be that we are so polarized that whether we like it or not are destination may be the bottom of the abyss for both sides of this state of affairs. But the truth is that it is the Cross that puts each one of us, each group among us, to the test. If we are to rediscover, reclaim and regain our mission, then this sign of strength made perfect in weakenss is the one that we should embrace with all our heart, pursuing as if our life depended upon it every implication of it -- for the fact is our life does depend on it.

Perhaps the starting point should be for those of us at odds with one another to gather together at the foot of the Cross, leaving at the door our reservations and dislike of "the other side" or their agenda. God's glory is revealed at the Cross in Christ's powerlessness and weakness, and the Cross gives new meaning to the sufferings we experience. It is out of this that a healthy theology and lifestyle of hope might come.

Miroslav Volf began his extraordinary journey into the theology of reconciliation when, during the midst of the worst troubles in the Balkans in the 1990s, he was asked at a conference if he could embrace a cetnik. The Serbians fighters who were then ravaging his native Croatia, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, killing men, and worse, were known as cetniks.

Volf had been arguing that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ, but now as a Croat he was being asked to give his theology real legs. He shook his head after a long pause and said, "No, I cannot -- but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to." Volf was brought face to face with himself, his faith was challenged, and at its heart was the Cross and how he responded to it. Theologizing was not empty moralizing, it was a spiritual journey, and so it should be for us.

He tells us in his preface to Exclusion and Embrace that the book is about whether we "assign the demands of the Crucified to the murky regions of unreason," or whether we allow ourselves also to be nailed to the Cross in seeking the reconciliatory dimension of redemption. I believe that is the challenge before all of us who call ourselves Episcopalians or Anglicans.

We are not physically killing each other, it is true, but in some ways we are doing the next best thing because we are involved in the process of tearing a church beloved to tens of thousands limb from limb. Our pain may not match that of Christ upon the Cross, but it was on our behalf that the Savior shed his blood, and it is in that blood that we must bathe if we are find any way of being whole again. In fear and trembling, sackcloth and ashes, this ought to be the agenda of us all.

The Theology of "Blink"

During the last couple of weeks I have been reading (actually listening on my longish commute each day) to Malcolm Gladwell's best seller, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. Gladwell's thesis is that intuition and first impressions should be taken more seriously than most of us do. Steering us through a number of events and circumstances, he builds a substantial case.

In the Myers-Briggs I am literally off the graph when it comes to being intuitive so I listened with glee to Gladwell's catalogue of notions, but there was also something else going on at the back of my mind. This was because I received a pretty traditional, reason-based education, and that got me asking some substantial questions of the data he was coming up with and the manner in which he was using it.

For example, he launches his book with the example of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles which bought a Greek statue for a phenomenal sum of money after months of painstaking research into its provinence, only to discover that art experts from all over when wheeled in to admire the acquisition had first reactions that were not what the museum wanted. The experts' instincts and intuitions told them that there was something amiss about this piece of sculpture.

Eventually, it was discovered that this item for which they had paid millions was actually created in the 1980s in a workshop in Italy and the aging done had just been enough to bamboozle the examiners who the Getty made use of. Yet even as I listened to this entertaining tale I found myself asking questions. At the heart of them was why was it that only the intuitions of experts immediately questioned whether this was a wise purchase?

The answer is simple -- only experts had spent years and years immersing themselves in the disciplines necessary to recognize the genuine from the fake. These so called intuitive reactions were the product of education, training, experience, the examination of thousands of artifacts, and so forth. There was a lot of sweat, discipline, categorizing, and hard work that led them to make these kind of decisions. We should not minimize the importance of the discipline of such training in the assessments that they made, and were proved to be right.

There is, one of Gladwell's detractor's comments, a kind of New Age attractiveness about saying intuition enables us to by-pass disciplined thinking and training, and this reflects the backing away from disciplined thinking and problem-solving that have become normative in our culture. American children are some of the worst in the developed world when it comes to rationally and constructively handling information and solving issues that are presented to them, and this seems to be becuase school spend little time teaching such disciplines.

Not only do we see it is schools, but we see it in every facet of our lives. Certainly this is true in the battles that we have been having in the church, and in this the church reflects the culture. Stances are taken and statements are made that are based more upon culturally-biased instinct and intuition than upon the basis of disciplined thinking.

Words, for example, are used in such a manner that they are subtly (or not so subtly) redefined in order to make a point. Recently Presiding Bishop Schori has started talking about affirming the Millennium Development Goals as an example of "deed-based evangelism." She does this on the basis of the much-vaunted Baptismal Covenant that we proclaim "by word and example the good news of God in Christ." This, quite honestly, is sloppy use of the word and notion of evangelism, a stretching of the essence of this less than adequate Covenant to its limits, and then putting two and two together so that we come up with the five of "deed-based evangelism."

Evangelism has to do with the proclamation of Jesus Christ by word and action, the Crucified One, who brings in his Kingdom, and a fundamental component of this is surrendering of our lives to his risen Lordship. While it might be admirable and right as disciples for Christians to invest time, treasure, and talent in activities that come under the various headings of the MDGs, to call them evangelism is to be sloppy with language, or not to understand what evangelism is.

It is also an attempt to divert our attention from the fact that the direction being taken by the Episcopal Church has been disasterous when it comes to the multiplication of disciples and followers of Jesus Christ. Evangelism by word and action is about living Christ and talking Christ is such a way that lives are transformed and brought under the reign of Christ. While it might compassionate and right to enable an infected woman in India to have medication to help treat HIV-AIDS, we kid ourselves if we think this is evangelism, for we have not shared Christ with them in a personal mannerv at all.

What the Presiding Bishop says sounds nice, but when we dig under the surface it is obvious that her understanding of the revealed faith (and evangelism) is limited, to say the least. What is baffling is that Bishop Schori was trained as a scientist, and one of the components of the scientific methods is clarity of definition -- but when it comes to theology and the response to the fundamentals of belief, she does not seem able to bring her scientific disciplines to play in her theological reasoning. One of the things this reflects, of course, is the total inadequacy of her theological education.

We have in the mainline churches much too much theology of Blink and far too little that is based upon the systematic and disciplined principles of the believing. Carefully developed dogmas are blithely abandoned in favor of notions that are grabbed out of the progressive atmosphere of our times, notions that under examination either stagger or do not stand up, yet they are presented as givens, sometimes givens that are not under any circumstances to be questioned.

The fact is that we have gone on like this for too long. I would pray and hope that those who shape the lives and ministries of future leaders would make sure that they are formed to think and use information in a reasonable, logical, consistent manner.

First Person Singular, First Person Plural

During the last several months I have been studying the book of Nehemiah, as well as attempting to place it within post-exile Israel. It has yielded much that has been helping me deal with the difficult our circumstances in the Episcopal Church. There is little doubt that we, like the Jews in Nehemiah's time, are living among the ruins, and part of the task that God has set us is, like the faithful in that day, to find our way through thew confusion.

While there is much that has grabbed at me from this fascinating glimpse into God's guidance of his people through distressing times, it has been the prayers that Nehemiah prayed that have become a highlight. Not only is there an honest vivacity about them sprinkled throughout the thirteen chapters, but they are a healthy mixture of first person singular and first person plural.

When Nehemiah confesses his sins he also confesses the sins of Israel going back generations to the great disobediences of Israel which have led to this pretty pass in which they now found themselves, and then having confessed he prays, "Lord, what do you want me to do about it" (Nehemiah 1:4-11). That pattern of personal prayer is later taken up at a corporate level by Israel gathered in Jerusalem, and as they humble themselves before God making confession for the sins of their fathers and mothers in whose footsteps they tread, and then re-affirming their covenant with the Almighty (chapters 9-10).

I have been working on this at a time when I have become aware of the rumblings of debate in Britain as the country moves toward the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire next year. The Church of England has already voted in synod to apologize to descendants of those who endured the horrors of the Middle Passage and were enslaved in America and the Caribbean, but the pot has been stirred by recent comments by Tony Blair labeling the trade as "profoundly shameful" while stopping short of a full apology (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6185176.stm).

Last week there were pages and pages of short responses to this story on the BBC website, very few of which were willing to accept that those of us living today have any responsibility in these dastardly things that our forebears did (http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=4800&&edition=2&ttl=20061206152052).

Putting these two situations alongside one another, we are confronted with two different approaches toward sin, evil, personal and corporate responsibility. Nehemiah and the people of his time felt it incumbent upon themselves to confess sins they did not personally commit, but of which they were the heirs. Men and women in our time say what matters is the here and now, and there is no way that two centuries removed we can ameliorate the blame of those who went before us, even if we have been the beneficiaries of what they actually did.

A subject like this is so big that it is easy to lose the substance amidst sweeping generalizations so I will personalize it. I was born and raised in Britain, and it is very likely that my forebears have been in those islands since at 1066. Over the generations they intermarried with the Saxon people who were there before them, who in turn had intermarried with the Romans, Celts, etc., who they found there when they arrived. This means that t he soil of Britain and the blood flowing through my veins are hopelessly intermingled.

Our family have never been famous or influential people, and given the part of England from which we hail I doubt whether any of my forebears were actually involved in the business of enslaving people. However, despite being of humble origin, I am sure some of my ancestors smoked the tobacco imported in those slave ships, and also benefited from some of the advantages that ensued for English folks as a result of that huge segment of the "export" economy.

Furthermore, although the British Empire altered its stance toward slavery before it really started to boom in the 19th Century, I suspect the huge economic benefits of slavery did much to shape the nation's prosperity, from whose fruits I have obviously benefited. This means that in some way or other I am implicated in what happened and need to work out a faithful and biblical response to this reality. An apology seems a fitting starting point, but so also should I seek forgiveness before the living God for what happened, and then work to make sure that men, women, children, are not dehumanized in the same way in today's world.

But what bearing does this have on the situation in the Episcopal Church? As I seek to answer this question this is where I am likely to have brickbats hurled at me -- and probably from all sides.

Like everyone else I read the to-ing and fro-ing of charge and counter-charge, accusation and counter-accusation, and I during these last three or four years have being filled with such rage at times at the church's willingness to continually shift further and further from the anchorage of God's self-revelation that it has seemed to eat me alive. Like so many who share my theological perceptions of the wrongness of the direction we are taking, I have lashed out and blamed others for all that is befalling us in the process of wallowing in my misery.

Yet my reading of Nehemiah is forcing me to rethink if I am to be faithful to Scripture. Together with the men and women of his time, Nehemiah was prepared to accept responsibility for something that was patently beyond his influence. It had been a century and a half since the sins of Israel had resulted in the razing of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, and the carrying of the people into exile, what part did he have to play in all that? Yet he prayed, "We have acted very corruptly against you..." (Nehemiah 1:7), bringing all these failures and shortcomings to the gracious, heavenly Lord.

All of us who are part of the Episcopal Church have, I believe, to accept some responsibility for the mess in which we find ourselves and to contribute more than fury or self-righteousness to find a way through this long dark valley. There has been a lot of "them" and "us" language used, illustrating just how deeply we are riven, and I have been as guilty as others in using words in this way. But thinking and speaking like this does nothing to bring any kind of resolution -- "we" is, perhaps, a far better word to use as we the shape our prayers, which in turn reflect our attitudes.

Yet I find myself being pushed further because Nehemiah's praying and the circumstances that emerged from his faithfulness suggest to me that we are unlikely to find a constructive and God-honoring way through these challenges until we can together start taking responsibility for all that has happened: all of us in the here and now, as well as the previous generations who set up this mess by action or inaction, belief and misbelief. The implications of being willing to think in such a way are huge, and I am certain that I have not even started to unwrap them, but what I am increasingly certain is that we are wrestling with the consequence of corporate, institutional, and multi-generational sins and evils, much as the Jews of Nehemiah's time were.

The circumstances with which we are wrestling are the product of, as well as advancing the cause of, the radical individualism that now reigns supreme and virtually unchallenged in our culture. Perhaps the time has come for us to be prepared to be much more critical of such individualism and where it might lead us.

I am constantly being asked how all this is going to end and I have virtually no answers. Like so many who share my convictions I have been marginalized by the denomination and have little leverage or influence. Which means that the only option left to me is to stand amidst the ruins and to pray; but not prayers of fulmination against "those of have done this," rather prayers of confession that "we" have failed the living God and all we can do is throw ourselves at his feet in sackcloth and ashes and ask for a crumb of his grace to be measured out to us, the least deserving of his people.

The question must be, is anyone prepared to join me?

Mission and the Millennium Development Goals

The following piece is taken from my listserv, Toward2015, which can be joined through Listserv.Episcopalian.org

This is an attempt to respond to Tony Seel's question, "Would you like to comment on what it means for ECUSA to name the MDGs as our top mission priority? Personally, I thought that Jesus had given us our top mission priority in the Great Commission."

It is a question that requires much more time and thought that I have, but I will try my best.

For starters I want to say that the MDGs are generally a pretty good set of priorities when looking at the major challenges that face us in the world today. Most of them focus on areas that each of us, if we were to take them seriously, would be able to impact in some small way. For example, my wife and I have for a long time now sought to be as environmentally responsible as we can, because whatever we are doing to the environment we certainly aren't doing it a lot of good. I would encourage all Christians to try to see how the goals might help shape their own life and lifestyle as citizens of God's Kingdom.

Yet however valuable the MDGs might be they are not the Gospel of Jesus Christ, although taking them seriously might be part of our response as those transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. One of the things that I have noticed time without number is that we have this fabulous ability of putting the cart before the horse -- which is what the Episcopal Church is doing on this issue, I think.

If you look back over the last several decades of the church's life each General Convention gets hot under the collar about something new and we play with that until the next Convention comes along, then drop it and go onto something new. In 1988, for example, it was the challenge of urban America, in 2000 we got anxious about evangelism and monkeyed with the whole 20/20 notion of doubling the church before 2020, then in 2003 it was sex, and now in 2006 in an attempt to take our minds off sex we are into the MDGs.

The truth is that the denomination functions a little like my 18-month-old granddaughter who has an attention span of about 45 seconds when it comes to toys, books, television programs, etc. The result is that the Episcopal Church seems to be on a permanent search for the illusive silver bullet rather than getting on with the serious business of being the People of God in a fallen world.

The rub is in the last sentence I wrote because the reality is that the tendency in most of the mainline traditions today is not to be sure that there is such a thing as a fallen world. This is where the theological rubber hits the road. If our understanding of the nature of God and the nature of God's creation is inadequate, then so will our response be. Certainly in the thirty years I have been a priest of this church few of the voices within the denominational structures have had what I would describe as a full-blooded Anglican theology shaped by commitment to the substance of Scripture and the values of the church catholic. The wind was sown and now we are reaping the whirlwind.

The truth is that what we believe is going to shape the ministry that we and the church have. During the last few days, in preparation for what we are going to be doing in our parish from Advent to Easter, I have been giving John Stott's The Cross of Christ a more careful reading than I have given it in the past. Both directly and indirectly John makes the point that what we believe about the Cross is going to give structure to how we minister within a needy world.

A huge proportion of the Episcopal Church, including many who claim renewal or biblical credentials, for my money do not take the Cross seriously enough as satisfaction for our sins -- partly because we do not believe that sin is as ghastly as it actually is. We do not take sin seriously enough because we do not have a clear enough grasp of the holiness of God and how impossibly wide is the gulf that needs to be bridged -- and is the reason for the death of Jesus, the God-Man.

I have in that last paragraph probably raised a huge number of hackles because if there is anything over which Episcopalians wriggle and feel uncomfortable it is that the Second Person of the Trinity voluntarily sacrificed himself, becoming sin that I might be freed from the bondage of sin (Galatians 3:10-14). This great and wonderful truth is considered offensive, and there have been occasions in the past when I have literally been shouted down asserting such a "primitive" notion although it is rooted and grounded in God's revelation.

Yet, primitive or otherwise, this notion is behind a wholehearted willingness to take into all the world the Good News of what Christ has done on our behalf. It is because Christ died as he did that we believe that no one comes to the Father except through him. That is a profound message and is one of the driving forces behind obedience to the Great Commission as presented in Matthew 28 and Acts 1. Jesus called us to be witnesses, and by every word and action we show forth whether or not the Cross is important to us, and what we believe about the Cross.

Now, it is because I am a person of the Cross that love for my fellow humans should be shown in the things that I do, like helping to promote universal primary education, helping to feed the hungry and ease the lot of the excessively poor, working to eradicate diseases like AIDS and malaria, and so forth. My wife and I actually in our own small way give time, treasure, or talent to all these areas, but we do it (and have done it for a long time) not because the Episcopal Church thinks it a great idea, or merely because all humans are made in God's image and should be honored and respected as such, but because the Son died for them and we want them to meet him just as we have.

In ECUSA it is my observation that there seems to be little real desire for those who are in need (physical, emotional, or spiritual) to meet Christ and have their lives transformed by him. Until I was excluded from life in the wider denomination in the latter part of 2001 I had been involved in National Church life in one way or another for a quarter century. I have to say that although in that time I met many wonderful people, few in those circles were comfortable with a forthright affirmation that Jesus Christ is Lord. Far be it from me to make judgments about their relationship with the Lord, but those relationship seldom bubbled over with the evangelistic enthusiasm that I have always discovered comes from finding out exactly who Jesus is and what he has done for me (and you).

When I served on the 20/20 Task Force there was often hovering in the background this notion that if we could find some technique or mechanism to enable evangelism to take place other than a forthright proclamation of the richness of the Gospel, then we would heartily embrace it. That inadequacy was there in the report that we produced, although its theology was richer than that. I suspect it was the richness of the theology and the audacity of the vision which means it has virtually disappeared from the agenda of the Episcopal Church as we have gone shooting off and redefined what it means to be male and female, and now fallen into the arms of the MDGs.

Quite honestly, regardless of which Anglican jurisdiction you happen to belong to, I have come to the conclusion that connexional structures do little or nothing to enable mission in the red-blooded biblical sense of the word -- indeed, most of the time they are a hindrance. Frankly, I do not expect the Episcopal Church as a denominational entity to have much of a clue what the Great Commission is all about.

The place where the Great Commission hits the ground is in congregations. God didn't call us to be dioceses or denominations, but to be local fellowships of Christian people called together by the Lord to go out into our Jerusalems, our Judeas, our Samarias, and then onward to the ends of the earth, proclaiming by word and action the Good News that is recorded for our guidance and edification in Scripture. When it comes down to it the local church is the basic unit of mission.

I had hoped a few years ago that ECUSA might be giving itself a chance to at least change the climate in the church regarding mission and evangelism, but it has rejected that course and instead has bought into the values and priorities of a fallen culture, and is thereby missing the point. I suppose in some ways this makes it less a church than a mission field into which some of us have been sent to proclaim the Good News that the Jesus who is Lord died in our stead upon the Cross that we might witness to the fulness of life that is ours through his love.

The Future Means Mission, Mission, Mission, Mission

It is now nearly a month since we finally managed to elect a new bishop in Tennessee. The result is that for the first time in thirty-eight years of ministry I now look forward to being led pastorally by an ordinary who is younger than myself. Indeed, we go from having a bishop who is a great-grandfather to one who still has a kid in elementary school!

The other day I was in a business meeting with Bishop-Elect John Bauerschmidt, and laughingly he casually pointed out that at forty-seven and if the canons remain unchanged, he could be bishop for the next quarter century -- leaving office somewhere around 2030-2031. As one of the youngest potential members of the House of Bishops it is possible that he could have quite an impact on Anglicanism as it works out its future in North America.

This got me thinking about what things might look like if Dr. Bauerschmidt remains here, like his predecessor, until he reaches the maximum canonical age for retirement.

For starters, the world will be a very different kind of place, global warming or not. If present trends continue then the USA is likely to be the declining superpower while China could possibly be the rising superpower -- and with their huge populations, it is difficult to tell what sort of influence in human affairs China and India will wield.

And what will the Christian scene be like in China? Will their present growth in both numbers and influence mean that they will be in a position to shape the policies and strategies of their government and nation, or will they still be the harassed and sometimes persecuted body that they presently are? There are many Chinese Christians whose vision is to evangelize westward toward Jerusalem, and if this starts happening in some kind of significant way, what will it mean for relationships between China and the Islamic nations that sit in the Chinese Christian path?

By that time Islam will have changed as well? Whatever the state of Islam in its traditional heartland, it will certainly be an increasingly important player in Europe where the Muslim population continues to proliferate. I have seen statistics that suggest there will be more active Muslim worshipers in Britain by 2028 than there are Christians...

While all this is going on, what will be happening in North America, for these things are bound to influence the American churches? It is hard to say what the implications are, but the shallowness of much Christianity on this continent today does not auger well as the future comes to meet us. Whether we are talking the mainline churches and Roman Catholicism, or the conservative churches and evangelicalism, in too many quarters depth is strangely lacking. This suggests that as postmodernity and whatever comes after it charges ahead, there will be little in the way of a strong Judeo-Christian response to its self-centered, radically individualistic tendency toward destructive and unbridled hedonism.

Neither do Christian demographics look particularly encouraging for almost anyone, because as we move from older age groups to younger, a smaller and smaller proportion of each generation has any Christian involvement. In the Episcopal Church we might be worrying about the lack of youngsters, but quite a few others are not far behind us.

Which brings me back to the challenges facing the Bishop-Elect of Tennessee. The first, obviously, is to work out how to steer the diocese through the mess created by the actions of the last couple of General Conventions. Having stuck together more or less until now, we are beginning to see the first cracks. What is very clear is that the Diocese of Tennessee, as most other dioceses will not look anything like it does now by 2030-2031 if it still exists.

I suspect that during the next few years we will see just how unworkable in today's world geographical dioceses are. The future shape of dioceses is tied to fundamental questions that have yet to be answered about what exactly it means to be part of the Episcopal Church, whether the Episcopal Church is a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, and what the consequences at the grassroots all the way up the food chain will be if the Episcopal Church is not.

Besides, the Episcopal Church is going blithely on, totally ignoring the demographic realities that are rapidly catching up with it. It is an aging entity, and in many parts of the country seems incapable of adding new members by transfer, bringing in new converts to Christ, or where there are younger people increasing numbers by biological growth. Even without the defections that result from the actions of the General Conventions, this is a biggy that is being blatantly ignored despite statistics that scream out and plead for radical evangelistic and church growth action.

When I was on the 20/20 Task Force in 2000-2001, as we looked at the evidence in front of us it seemed that this attempt to create a mission-driven movement was the last great hope of the Episcopal Church of the USA. Our goal was to double the church by 2020. First, our proposals were pulled apart by the Executive Council, and then got lost beneath the sexuality agenda; right now ECUSA will be doing well if it has only shrunk in half by 2020. When the Episcopal Church effectively abandoned the 20/20 vision I realized even if it took a while, a huge question mark now hung over the future existence of this denomination.

I draw attention to this because if I was to be bishop of a diocese for the next twenty-five years in the midst of the present storm, I would concentrate every resource I had on mission, mission, mission -- and not and endless succession of social action projects, but working in every way to equip lay Christians to share their faith, to raise up young leaders who will work to guarantee a tomorrow, and to develop congregations with spiritual depth and theological integrity. If we did that the other stuff would follow.

Quite frankly, this is the only way any of us have any future. We can play church games but they don't bring people to faith in Christ and help them grow as pilgrims on the Christian way. Given what he is about to have thrust upon his plate, I do not envy our bishop-elect, although I pray for him every day. One thing I do envy, however, is that he has a quarter century in which he can make a difference for Jesus Christ, and a by-product of that will be the building up of a mission-driven and very different kind of diocese than the one he has inherited. If he does not do this, then he could have the sad task of being the one who puts the lights out.

Paranoia and Straws in the Wind

My whole Christian experience has been within the Anglican expression of evangelical conviction. Very early on I discovered that there is a paranoid streak among most flavors of evangelical, and I plead guilty for sometimes living into this characteristic that is often displayed by biblical Christians.

Sometimes, however, there has been good reason for evangelical paranoia, but often opposition has been either imagined or exaggerated. Meanwhile, it is not beyond the ability of evangelicals, like so many other orthodox Christians, to set themselves up for exclusion, harrassment, or worse, by their own inappropriate behaviors or attitudes.

Over the years I have increasingly been in the habit when I sense the urge to paranoia welling up within me, to try to get to the bottom of what is happening internally before blaming others for the problems I might be facing, or the difficulties into which I have fallen. When I do this I find that what might be happening to me has little to do with my affirmation of faith, and much more to do with the way in which I have handled myself. I sometimes think we like to believe we are being persecuted when in reality we are getting the just desserts for our own stupidity, bad manners, or the like.

Yet during the last several years there have been straws in the wind that unpleasant things are being done to orthodox believers that go beyond their own pugnaciousness or folly. There have been two in the last couple of days that point to the deepening reality that Christian orthodoxy is now so much on the outs in our secular culture and in the secularized churches that it is being seen as a threat to the postmodern world being born.

Now I know that it is not appropriate to argue from the specific to the general, but in many respects there seems to be a pattern developing. I suspect the two items to which I am about to draw attention are but the forerunners of many more, for our culture, as it drifts further from its Judeo-Christian moorings, is finding itself increasingly irritated by many of the stances and values of the revealed faith upon which Christian orthodoxy stands.

I became aware of the first of these at 5.00 a.m. yesterday (Sunday) morning when the clock radio clicked on and I lay there in the dark listening to a summary of the news. The last item of the bulletin drew attention to the plight of several Christian Unions in British universities.

The Christian Unions are hardly extremist organizations and have been part of the British university scene for generations. The UCCF is their umbrella organization, and they have incubated many lay and ordained Christian leaders, tons of them Anglicans. Both my wife and I came up through what was then known as the InterVarsity Fellowship, which was the setting in which we learned to think and live like Christians (http://www.uccf.org.uk) .

However, at Exeter, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, and Birmingham (where my daughter happens to be on the staff), the CUs have experienced various kinds of ostracism. In Edinburgh they have ceased to be a recognized organization of the university because they had the audacity to sponsor an event that promoted the traditional and biblical understanding of marriage and personal relationships, while in Exeter they have been banned from university facilities and had their Student Union bank account frozen.

Behind these attacks is an aggressive political correctness that in the name of tolerance refuses to tolerate what it believes to be the intolerant attitudes of these young Christians -- especially regarding human sexuality. "The 150-strong Christian Union in Birmingham was suspended this year after refusing to alter its constitution to allow non-Christians to address meetings and to amend its literature to include references to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and those of transgender sexuality." (http://www.christiantoday.com/article/christian.union.under.threat.students.prepare.for.legal.action/8379.htm). I find it hard to believe that the Trotsky or Islam Societies would themselves do what is expected of the CU.

While it is entirely likely that some of these Christian undergraduates in their youthful zeal for the Lord have become perhaps a little too strident, such a draconian response to their convictions, ideas that were the mainstream a couple of generations ago, has been harsh and a denial of their right of free speech, free assembly, and free expression.

It seems that if the secularizers had their own way they would drive orthodox believers to the very periphery of society, stripping them of their rights and privileges as citizens of a democracy, rights and privileges that find their roots in the very faith that they are marginalizing. Could it be that orthodox Christians will soon be considered as dangerous as Islamic extremists who fulminate violent acts of terror?

The other straw in the wind is much closer to home and comes in the form of a letter sent by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to Bishop John-David Schofield of the Diocese of San Joaquin. This letter has all the delicacy and finesse of a velvet fist in an iron glove, with Schori, in effect, accusing Bishop Schofield of abandoning his ordination vows to defend the "doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church."

Here is a diocesan bishop, faithful to the rich mainstream of Anglican Christianity, and who is seeking to defend his diocese in the midst of the maelstrom which was unleashed upon the Episcopal Church by the actions of the 2003 General Convention, being threatened by a woman whose every pronouncement suggests she would theological be more comfortable in some variety of unitarianism. I recently broke bread with a colleague who is well to the left of myself, and he was shaking his head in disbelief over the lady's opening gambits.

Schori threatens Schofield with litigation, says that the people of his diocese will suffer, and suggests that the time has come for Schofield "to renounce your orders in this Church and seek a home elsewhere." What audacious arrogance! Katharine Schori does not seem to realize is that Bishop Schofield is actually being faithful to the vows he made when ordained to the priesthood, for like me he affirmed that he would “with all faithful diligence… banish and drive away all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God’s word.”

In the era Schofield and I were ordained, the 1979 Book of Common Prayer had yet to be dreamed up. He was ordained using the American 1928 Book and I was ordained using the English 1662 Prayer Book, each of which has some pretty far-reaching vows that priests are called upon to make to defend the church from error. Now error is, for the moment, ensconced in the heart of the church, and is is persecuting those who are faithful to revealed Christianity and the core of historic Anglicanism, so we are being utterly obedient to our vows by countering it.

This error that is imbedded in the church shares a lot with the aggressive secularism that is forcing orthodox believers to the peripheries of society, and might enjoy stripping us of many of our civil rights. There is little generosity and no grace in secularism's vision, and the same can be said for the vision of the faith held by the woman who the House of Bishop misguidedly elected at Presiding Bishop.

What should our response be? It certainly should not be to play the victim card, although I suspect that the politically correct, many of whom glory in their own 'victimhood,' would not allow us to do so. Nor should it be to return kind with kind -- besides, most of us have little power to do such a thing.

It is my conviction that we are being asked to stand at the foot of the Cross, being constant in our preaching and living, "in season and out of season" (2 Timothy 4:2). We are called to honor the Savior, and as we do so, in his own good time, he will honor us. This is only what Bonhoeffer would have described as the cost of discipleship.

To say that we stand beside the suffering church that has been and is being persecuted all around the world is to trivialize what our sisters and brothers are going through in Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, North Korea, and elsewhere. On the scale of their sufferings, we do not yet know what suffering and persecution is. However, could it be that the first steps have been taken down a path which will lead in this direction?

One Night With The King -- A Movie Review

"One Night With The King" -- Movie Review

A little while ago I wrote in my online Daily Devotions, while we were looking at the book of Esther, that this book would make a great movie. I had no idea that such a movie had been made and was soon to be released, something which one of the users of the devotions immediately told me.

Now in the theatres we went to see it a few days ago. I wish I could rave about the film and tell you that it is a must-see, but I cannot. There are bits and pieces of it that I appreciated, but in many respects it felt like a poor remake of an aging religious blockbuster like "The Ten Commandments" or "Ben-Hur."

Set in Susa, the capital of the Persian Empire, which is a place on the western edge of modern-day Iran, the city that the moviemakers conjured up using contemporary computer magic, was dominated by a palace that looked more like a merger between New York's Plaza Hotel and Niagara Falls! How much more meaningful it would have been if they could have put together something that was more period appropriate. The setting was more a tribute to the film-makers determination to exaggerate than to represent the beautiful story that tells itself so well in the Old Testament in the right scale.

The set from the very start had me on my guard: if they would take liberties with the environment of the story, then what was to prevent them taking liberties with the story itself?
In some ways they followed the basic drift of the book of Esther, but in other ways they embroidered in a manner that left me feeling antsy. For example, Esther is given a necklace that sparkles in a particular way to show us that she is of true Jewish heritage. Then one of her young male chums is hauled away and made a eunuch in the palace so that later he becomes a convenient go-between. Little touches like this might seem cute to a Hollywooder, but don't do a lot for someone who believes this is an extraordinary story that does not need such props in order to make its impact.

I imagine Esther to have been an extraordinary woman -- intelligent, charming, characterful. What we got instead was a delightful Esther, but one who would have been better cast as a member of the Susa High School cheerleading squad. Joyfully played by Tiffany Dupont, we got a more of a frothy (and sometimes thoughtful) middle American woman than the person of courage, depth, and integrity, who was prepared to put her all on the line in order to save her people from the wrath that Haman the Agagite was stirring up against them. I want to give Ms Dupont the benefit of the doubt and say that she didn't have much of a script to work with.

The story of Esther in the Bible is exquisite, one of the greatest tales of human literature as well as Holy Writ, but although it was not Disney that was behind this movie, there was a Disnification that softened the edges and missed the subtleties. (It is, in fact, distributed by 20th Century Fox). Perhaps it is dangerous when someone who has tried for much of his life to be a faithful Bible student to go to a representation of Scripture in a medium that works best when it trivializes.

Having said these unkind things about the movie, however, let me say some nice things, too. Although there is a lot of embroidery and some dumbing-down, "One Night with the King" does not stray too far from the original storyline. We get a watered down touch of the flavor of what Esther is about even if in the process we are robbed of the deeper dimensions.

For my money the star of the film was John Rhys-Davies, the Welsh actor who played Gimli in "The Lord of the Rings" and in this movie plays Mordecai, Esther's uncle and Haman's nemesis. Rhys-Davies captures the character who is there on the pages of Scripture perfectly. While I have already forgotten the Ahasuerus, the Esther, and the Haman, from the movie, as I scanned the Book of Esther this afternoon I was seeing in my mind's eye the face of Rhys-Davies's Mordecai, hearing his voice, and catching the twinkle in his eye.

I hope that now Esther has been presented in this rather inadequate way on the big screen someone else will pick the book up and do a far better job with it. It is a piece of biblical writing for times like these, when faithful people find their backs increasingly against the wall both in the wider culture and often, as for those of us who are Episcopalians, in the churches. It is a paeon of praise to the courage of ordinary people who are put in extraordinary positions at times when more than their own safety hangs in the balance.

Read the book... But if you do go and see the film, take a pinch or two of salt with you.