Child poverty and the voice of bishops

It’s a weird world. I posted on 21 February stuff related to the concerns that prompted 43 Church of England bishops, backed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, to sign a letter to the press. Published today in the Sunday Telegraph, it has caused a bit of noise.

Clearly, the substance is not the issue, or it would have hit the headlines some time ago. It is the fact that a pile of bishops has signed it that makes it a story. And that’s good.

Let’s get one thing straight: this letter is not anti-government or anti-Cameron; it is pro-children.

And another thing: read some of the comment threads on this story on news websites and a repeated (outraged) question has to do with the competence of bishops to dare to voice concerns in this way. Who are they to speak? Well, (a) we are people who participate in civil society, (b) we also have a voice with others in the democratic process, (c) we have people in every community in the land and are probably closer to the ground than most politicians, (d) it is our responsibility to speak truth without fear or self-regard, (e) if we can make a voice heard, then we have a responsibility to do so, and (f) such questioning is just silly and simply distracts from the issue at hand.

Thirdly, the question of priorities remains unanswered: we can bail out banks to the tune of billions of pounds, but it’s the poor who have to pay? The government’s language has become increasingly and deliberately disingenuous, lumping people on welfare benefits into the category of ‘feckless scroungers’ who lie in bed watching other people go to work. Yet, they know that most people being hit by welfare cuts and the bedroom tax are low-paid working people. Why is this being done? (See the recent report The lies we tell ourselves – another intrusion by those pesky Christians who really should be silenced…)

Here’s the letter as published:

Dear editor,

Next week, Members of the House of Lords will debate the Welfare Benefit Up-rating Bill.

The Bill will mean that for each of the next three years, most financial support for families will increase by no more than 1%, regardless of how much prices rise.

This is a change that will have a deeply disproportionate impact on families with children, pushing 200,000 children into poverty. A third of all households will be affected by the Bill, but nearly nine out of ten families with children will be hit.

These are children and families from all walks of life. The Children’s Society calculates that a single parent with two children, working on an average wage as a nurse would lose £424 a year by 2015.

A couple with three children and one earner, on an average wage as a corporal in the British Army, would lose £552 a year by 2015.

However, the change will hit the poorest the hardest. About 60% of the savings from the uprating cap will come from the poorest third of households. Only 3% will come from the wealthiest third.

If prices rise faster than expected, children and families will no longer have any protection against this. This transfers the risk of high inflation rates from the Treasury to children and families.

This is simply unacceptable.

Children and families are already being hit hard by cuts to support including to Tax Credits, maternity benefits, and help with housing costs. They cannot afford this further hardship penalty.

We are calling on Members of the House of Lords to take action to protect children from the impact of this Bill.

 

The story behind the story (Sudan 7)

This morning we met with four of the bishops of Sudan. Each explained the situation in their own diocese and we had a very fruitful conversation about how we can best build on our relationship to mutual benefit. The talk was open, honest, trustful and opened several doors to future work together.

One bishop was missing. Andudu, Bishop of Kadugli, is in Juba, Southern Sudan, as he is unable to return to his own diocese for reasons of safety. In June 2011 he was in the USA for medical treatment when Sudanese forces started their attack on the Nuba Mountains. While there he made some comments – perhaps without on-the-ground direct knowledge – and the Sudanese government took exception, making it impossible for him to return without endangering his life. His family is in Uganda. He was represented at our meeting this morning by one of his Canons who has had to flee Kadugli and is being cared for by the Diocese of Khartoum.

The situation has confused me a little – the rhetoric in the UK sometimes attributing motive and consequence where convenient, but not making complete sense. I fully accept that this might be evidence of my stupidity rather than a comment on the people doing the reporting or commentating. I could not understand why the bishop (and others could not return, especially as it is more peaceful in some areas right now than it has been). Today I began to grasp it (although what follows is not intended to be a full analysis).

The Sudanese government is attacking supporters of the SPLA. Kadugli itself is under government control, but other areas of South Kordofan are controlled by the SPLA. Thousands of people have fled and the humanitarian cost is being paid for by neighbouring states which are absorbing them. However, the government does not want a repeat of Darfur and, so, has prohibited the erection of refugee camps. This means that people escaping have to find their way to relatives in other cities – leading to families of ten or twenty living in very tight accommodation that was already overcrowded with a single family.

The other dioceses are caring for the refugees who exited by the gateway of El Obeid en route to places like Khartoum. These people have nothing and the people looking to help them have little. More could be said, but suffice it to say here that the courage, tenacity and quiet commitment of the bishops and their people to care for these displaced people is admirable. Last year I launched a 'Kadugli Appeal' in Bradford and so far we have raised £100,000 to enable these people to feed and assist those displaced. Of course, the need goes further – for example, children being absorbed into church schools in Khartoum – but at least something useful is being done.

Each diocese in Sudan faces this need for care of displaced and often traumatised people at the same time as losing some of their leading people to the South. This is another matter to which I will attend when I return to Bradford next week. But, the challenge is enormous… and is being tackled by good people with quiet determination and a shed load of love. It is very humbling.

It is also clear that government attacks in South Kordofan cannot be reduced to simple categories of political allegiance, race or religion, but is shaped by various mixtures of all three. Any analysis that seems simple… is probably wrong.

Our conversation went beyond the diocesan situations to wider issues such as the influence of Saudi Arabia in Sudan and other parts of the region. I was reminded of the need for people like me (who are involved in global interfaith dialogue) sometimes to check the western liberal perspective and look through the lens of Christians in places like Sudan where Islamic rejection of conversion from Islam to Christianity is more than an academic matter. Enough said… for now.

It is salutary that I have just started reading Walter Brueggemann's 2012 book The Practice of Prophetic Imagination. His starting point is that Christians operate in the real world with a 'narrative' that refuses to accept the 'dominant narrative' of the world in which we live. Without ducking the challenges of this, he maintains that Christians must constantly rehearse their own narrative, with God at the centre… even though this God is rejected in the world's dominant narrative (which he later describes as 'self-invention, competitive productivity and self-sufficiency' resulting in 'military consumerism'). Against this, the Christian narrative has to do with 'wonder (instead of self-invention), emancipation (instead of the rat-race of production), nourishment (instead of labour for that which does not satisfy), covenantal dialogue instead of tyrannical monopoly or autonomous anxiety), a quid pro quo of accountability (instead of either abdicating submissiveness or autonomous self-assertion), waiting (instead of having or despair about not having)'.

His point – which (a) he draws out from both Old and New Testaments and (b) reflects the call to responsibility as the heart of freedom that Joachim Gauck speaks about in his little book Freiheit: Ein Plädoyer – is that the world's narrative does not prove adequate (see how an obsession with security leads to massive insecurity, for example), but that this is too often not recognised or appreciated… even by Christians who are supposed to sing from a different hymn sheet. You'll have to read the book to get the point, but Brueggemann bangs the drum he has been beating in almost all his writing and preaching: that Christians must refuse narratives of defeat, ending, destruction and loss by holding to one that affirms perseverance, newness, creation and hope. “Choose life,” is the challenge of the Deuteronomist – which assumes that choices must be made and responsibility taken for those choices. In other words, Christians cannot be escapists from the challenges of power in the world, but, rather, challenge that world's assumptions (and exertions of power) by choosing to live differently in it.

It is perhaps not surprising that this reads with particular power here in Sudan as the day draws towards its close and the Muezzin calls the people to prayer.

 

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Sunshine (Sudan 1)

We arrived in Khartoum an hour late and got to the guesthouse where we are staying at 5am. So Sunday was spent asleep until we were collected and taken to the Cathedral where I was preaching at the 6pm Communion service.

There were probably 40 people in the Cathedral. Over dinner with the Bishop of Khartoum later, he explained how, following the separation of Southern Sudan from Sudan in 2011, the expulsion of people of Southern Sudanese origin has impacted not only on the church, but also on the country as a whole. I was a little surprised to discover that even people in their fifties and sixties, born and bred in the north, have also been expelled because their parents or grandparents originally came from the South.

The decision to push southerners out seems to have arisen from pique that they voted for separation and declined unity with the North. “You have your own country now” might be an understandable emotional response, but it won't help an economy thrive. The displacement is huge and the longer-term consequences as yet unknown.

First impressions of Sudan are limited. It is hot – not a bad thing to get some sun a couple of days after my doctor told me my vitamin D count is very low – and the pace is slow. The only other African country I can claim any familiarity with is Zimbabwe – so, now I understand the superficial difference between African Africa and Arabic Africa.

Today we will be visiting a Christian training institute and having lunch with the Principal. The temperature is due to reach 31C today and 38C later in the week. And we are missing the snow in England!

And below is the view from where I am sitting. Yes, I should have sat somewhere else…

 

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Silence is golden?

If silence is golden, then this blog is wonderfully radiant. So much happening in church and world and simply no time or imagination to record it. What a bummer (for me, at least).

But, today the suitcases are packed, the anti-malarials started, the books-for-the-journey chosen. We leave early tomorrow morning for a nine-day visit to Sudan. The Diocese of Bradford has been linked with the dioceses in Sudan for the last thirty years and the relationships have become ever more important as the religious and ethnic situation in the country has changed. The challenges faced by Sudan in the run up to division a year or two ago are immense – we are simply going to go and see and learn and try to encourage the Christians among whom we will be staying.

I hope to post while out there, but no promises. If not, then silence can continue to radiate.

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Memories are made of this…

OK, it’s a tacky title from a tacky song. But, I was reminded of it during a fascinating cross-cultural session at the College of Bishops meeting in Oxford today.

Bishop Wolfgang Huber had made some great observations about the need for the church in an ‘aesthetic post-modern culture’ to find new ways of engaging people with Christian faith. In Peru all those being confirmed are required to memorise passages of the Bible, creeds and other texts. The Bishop’s point was that memorising might not be exactly trendy, but it is very effective.

It is the memorising that grabbed my attention.

Charles Wesley (or his brother…) once said that we learn our theology not from what we hear from the pulpit, but from what we sing. His point was that if you put a good tune to something, it is easier to remember. Then he got on and wrote hundreds of hymns to memorable and easily singable tunes.

(This once led me to observe in a different context that if you sing rubbish, you believe rubbish. It caused me endless grief when taken out of context.)

Wolfgang Huber suggested that we ought to agree on a selection of texts that all Christians should be required to remember – to commit to memory. I agree with him.

We no longer require children to learn poetry or songs. After all, anything can be looked up immediately on the phone; so, why go to the effort of memorising songs or poetry?

Well, I am useless at it. The only poetry I can remember in full is from the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band (Neil Innes) and it helpfully reads:

“I am such a pedant,
I’ve got the brain of a dead ant,
All the imagination of a caravan site…
But I still love you…”

Not exactly Shakespeare, but it stuck.

I need to think further about the power of memorising texts that become part of you. Many people have experienced the power of repeated liturgy: prayer that eventually becomes so much part of you that it prays you.

Requiring candidates for Confirmation to memorise a creed or the Decalogue or the Beatitudes might seem demanding. But, the question is whether we are demanding enough of young Christians and whether or not the memorising of texts would be helpful in maturing them in the faith.

This is not the same thing as indoctrination. It is about creating the space in which people can reflect on what has become part of their ‘vocabulary’ – their mental and spiritual language.

I will take this to the Meissen Commission at the end of this week – of which more anon.

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Location:Oxford

 

Minority matters matter

Following a report in the Daily Telegraph last week, I posted an explanatory blog here in which I tried to clarify matters. Judging by the rather eclectic responses, it obviously didn’t work. Several responses – apart from being somewhat patronising – seem still to be responding to the Telegraph headline which was not only wrong, but bore no relation to what I actually said and believe. However, it seems to suit some people to assume the headline is accurate and not to bother going further. (I have given up complaining about sub-editors not reading the articles for which they provide – often arresting but misleading – headlines.) So, here goes with a number of responses to the responses.

First, the Telegraph headline was not only wrong, but it could not be derived from the article that followed. (The article itself elided two completely separate General Synod debates that were not linked at all – as anyone there will tell you.) I did not say that Christians can learn from Muslims how to be a minority. (And why did the headline put the word ‘minority’ in inverted commas? What was that about?) I said that, just as Muslims are having to learn what it is to be a minority in the West, so Christians who find themselves in a minority here in England have to ask serious questions about what it means to be a church in this context. It is the phenomenon of learning afresh that was the point – which I thought was obvious.

Second, I was not implying and did not make any comparison with Christian minorities in Muslim countries. I was specifically speaking about the challenge of being a Christian church in Bradford (and one or two other English cities), not Iraq, Iran, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. I am not responsible for a dodgy headline on an odd newspaper article that then gets re-shaped as it gets transmitted around the internet, ending up as a story almost totally unrelated to the original fact. Those who rather uncritically told me to wise up might just take a moment to consider this: in the global interfaith work I do (representing the Archbishop of Canterbury) I consistently raise the question of these Christian minorities. I neither fear nor favour, and have never hesitated to ask these questions. Occasionally I have met resistance, but often it has given an opportunity for forthright conversation. The plight of Christian minorities in Muslim countries is serious and one to whcih I give serious attention. To suggest that I am ignorant, fearful or stupid is itself absurd.

Third, my argument would have stood without reference to Muslims. The reality here in Bradford is that entire communities are now Asian. That is fact. Those who don’t like that fact can moan all they like about Muslim threats, but that doesn’t help one iota address the challenge of what it means to be a church right here. Outsiders can scream all they like about ‘segregation’, but they often do so from a distance and never venture to offer a strategy for addressing it. So far, not one respondent has offered anything constructive. Which leads me to the fourth (linked) point…

Fourth, what I said in my Synod speech was that the challenge this provokes is one the church should grasp and not simply cower away in fear. I was precisely encouraging the church to stand firm, maintain Christian witness, not abandon these areas; but, they have to engage with being Christian churches in these areas in new ways. They are admirable because they bring committed Christians into these areas precisely in order to be present and engaged. Or would the respondents prefer us to run away and hide?

Fifth, I would love to know how many of these respondents have the first idea about Bradford. Which of them lives here? Or has even visited the place? Andrew Carey in the Church of England Newspaper admonishes me for my encouragement of Christians to rise to the challenge – yet I wonder what he knows of Bradford. When was he last here? Before I came to Bradford as bishop I refrained from commenting on interfaith matters here (despite having read alot and heard alot) on the grounds that the grassroots reality is always different. I thought it would be arrogant to comment on what I didn’t know from experience, and had only read about. I am amazed at how people who don’t live here are kind enough to offer me their patronising advice. (A charge I am not aiming at Andrew Carey, but some of the commenters on the blog.)

Finally, Bradford is probably unique in some elements of its population make-up and this presents real challenges. Shouting about Islamism isn’t likely to help anyone address these. Seeing ourselves as victims isn’t likely to do much either. I want to encourage our Christian churches to stay stuck into all our parishes – regardless of their ethnic complexions – and being confident, resourceful and joyful. My job is to support them in doing so and to put my back (as well as my prayers) into developing Chistian presence and witness in all these areas. No fear. No favour. No running away. And no wasting time pandering to the ignorance of those who shout advice from outside a place they do not know.

That’s it. From now I will turn to blogging about other things of interest.

 

Joy and the unbelievable church

I was struck bythe great Sir Terry Pratchett‘s comment in today’s Guardian when speaking of the impact of Alzheimer’s on his sense of self:

I think I’m open to moments of joy… But then I think it’s also made me more… cynical.

The debilitation of such a creative and generous person as Pratchett is a tragedy equalled only by the dignity and eloquence with which he is handling it. He wouldn’t thank me for it, but I thank God for him and his huge creative output – even though I disagree with his views on assisted suicide.

However, I did also think that most of us combine joy with cynicism in one way or another. That’s how most of us experience life: bursts of joy at moments of light and the disbelieving protection against disappointment that cynicism – born of experience – shadows over us. It reminds me of Bret Easton-Ellis’s sad observation quoted in Guardian G2 on 26 July 2010:

Pain’s interesting. Depravity’s interesting. All of my books come from pain. What’s ever been interesting about joy?

Well, actually, most people would settle for joy – however uninteresting for Bret Easton-Ellis – over misery. Terry Eagleton recently mocked ‘exciting’ perceptions of evil, claiming that evil is usually banal, boring and lifeless. Joy is what fires the imagination, engenders hope and shines new light on what had previously looked ordinary.

Here in Hannover I was wondering what this might look like in a community rather than as an individual experience or an abstract concept. Unexpectedly, I caught a glimpse of an answer in a very unusual church.

My friend Silke collected me from the airport and drove me to my hotel. She then took me to visit a church on the site of the Expo 2000 on the outskirts of Hannover. This church was built to last the year of Expo and is shaped like a whale. It is known as the Expowal. Run by the Landesverein für Innere Mission, it is an exploratory community of Christians who want to offer a new way for people to encounter God. Silke and I were given a history and explanation of the ethos and vision of the church before having a look round the building itself.

Two things struck me (apart from the infectious curiosity of the guy who administers the place and engages with the businesses that rent the building when it is not being used as a church):

1. Rather than point the congregation towards a wall in order to minimise distraction, here they look past the pastor and can see through the windows to the outside world. There are no walls, just windows. The congregation cannot hide within the safe confines of their secure ecclesiastical space because they are visible from the outside. Conversely, outsiders can look in and be curious about what is going on and why.
2. The leaders are very focused on whom they are there for. If ‘insiders’ don’t like the music or how things are done, then that’s tough. It isn’t for them. Everything is designed to be accessible for and encouraging to those who are outside ‘normal’ church or who feel alienated by their experience of church elsewhere. Church is the means to a greater end: people encountering God in a community context.

The church’s strapline is: “Eine unglaubliche Kirche” (“An unbelievable church”). Given that 5-600 people drive out there each Sunday (two services) or on a Wednesday evening, it seems to be scratching where these people are itching. They simply want to enable people to find, in a  community with others, that God can be encountered and life enjoyed. The realities of life are faced and people of all sorts welcomed. And nothing happens without food, drink and hospitality.

I haven’t the time to translate all their stuff on the website, but it is simple, clear… and joyful. “Auftauchen ins Leben” (“Emerge into life”) is their invitation and it is not a bland religious or merely ‘spiritual’ sentiment; rather, it is a welcome into a community that faces real life – with all its joy and cynicism – and starts where people are.

This church is run by one employee and dozens of committed volunteers. Their vision (from which they do not wish to be deflected) is simply:

We strive to be a New Testament-style community filled with the love of God and serving one another with joy; a community that expects everything from God and infects people who are distant from God with this hope.

Refreshing, encouraging and interesting – and surprising to find behind Ikea on the site of a trade fair miles from the town centre.

 

Pentecostal spirit

I once heard academic and journalist Timothy Garton Ash on BBC Radio 4 offering a mischievous definition of a nation:

A group of people united by a shared hatred of their neighbours and a common misunderstanding of their own past.

Original? Or did he nick it from someone else? I have no idea, nor do I care. But what he describes is the opposite of what happened to the beleaguered and frightened friends of the crucified and raised Jesus of Nazareth on the Day of Pentecost.

Instead of being united by a shared hatred of those who had put Jesus to death and now threatened them, they were empowered to go into the heart of the ‘neighbourhood’ and tell the story of Jesus in ways that could be heard and understood by all-comers. Fear of the neighbour (and what he might do to them) was transformed into a rather reckless and fearless openness about God loving even the crucifiers and opening to them a new door to freedom.

But, rather than simply obliterate the past and start a ‘new’ future, the Holy Spirit seems to have taken seriously what Jesus said about new wine and refreshed wineskins: you don’t dump the past, but renew and refresh it. So, the Spirit who moved on the waters of the world’s first day, who breathed new life into the dead bones of Ezekiel’s vision, who inspired the prophets to recall their original vocation (to give up their life in order to be a blessing to the world), and who anointed Jesus to fulfil what had always been the calling of Israel, now reminds the bereaved and surprised disciples that their story makes sense after all. Instead of being the aberration or even denial of God’s intentions, Jesus has made sense of them.

So, Pentecost isn’t about something necessarily new. It is about God’s people being reminded of their story and vocation and being empowered to live it out in a still-hostile world. Thrown together as a ragbag of saints and sinners, this new community re-members its past and unites in shared love for its neighbours.

Revolutionary.

 

Beer, oil and desert (Israel 4)

After Yad Vashem yesterday we drove to the last Christian village on the West Bank, Taybeh. I last visited this remarkable village two or three years ago and was pleased to have the opportunity to come back.

Fr Raed has been the Roman Catholic priest here for the last seven years. The huge problem for Palestinian Christians is that there is little or no work, little housing, few prospects and not a lot of hope. So, they are leaving in droves. Taybeh used to have a population of 3,400; now there are 1,300.

How, then, to encourage local young men (particularly) to stay and maintain this Christian presence here? So far the priests (three of them) have:

• bought an olive press and market olive oil in French supermarkets – this year they will make a profit for the first time;
• brew and market beer (a bit girly to the taste, but does the business!)
• provide employment in all sorts of services
• built and run a home for elderly people (a new phenomenon in a culture of extended family relationships and responsibilities).

In addition Fr Raed has established a youth choir of 50 young people and they ahve joined with youth choirs from the Muslim and Jewish communities elsewhere to record a CD. Along with the other preists in Taybeh, they now celebrate Easter together (on the Orthodox date) in order to present a united witness to Muslims who cannot understand why Christians celebrate several staggered crucifixions/resurrections.

The man is a fast-talking, over-energetic ball of enthusiasm. But he laces his talk with theology and economics, casting fresh and refreshing light on all sorts of issues. He even has a PhD in ‘Violence and non-violence in Islamic Tradition and Thought’.

What was most remarkable about this encounter, however, was his insistence that we should not be afraid for him or his people. They will stay and be a Christian presence and witness in land that is being abandoned by many because of the difficulty of living there with any hope for bringing up children and forging a future. He said:

We will stay here in a small community and under the shadow of the cross.

This echoes the stance of my friends in Zimbabwe.

But, interestingly, he turns on its head the notion that those who suffer are somehow ‘weak’. No, he says:

We are not weak people – we are strong people because we choose to stay here. Let the weak leave or stay at their new home in front of the television: the strong stay here.

This would sound like bravado in the mouth of some; but, it is spoken with both humility and determined confidence by Fr Raed. He is adamant that visitors like us should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but support those who seek a third way, the way of peace and coexistence on the basis of a common humanity.

Interestingly, this plea echoes the similar one we heard in Bethlehem a few days ago – a plea we have heard only from Palestinian Christians and nobody else.

Well, that powerful experience left us with much to discuss last night before we left Jerusalem to head off – via Wadi Qelt, Jericho and the wonderful Bet She’an (all further reminders that empires come and go, but empires never listen to their prophets) - to Galilee where we will spend the next few days before returning to London.

On the way out of Jerusalem we passed a ‘restaurant’ which dared to call itself ‘Doggy Style’ – its subheader was ‘Hot Dog Heaven’. That was a relief…

 

Getting physical

In my last post (as it were) I offered a brief suggestion of what question it is that the Bible is answering. I did so in relation to an incarnational representation of political argument by giving that argument a character and placing it/him/her in a story. This is what, in a form of shorthand, I wrote:

Hence the simple (simplistic?) formula I have stated elsewhere for handling the Bible whose fundamental question is ‘What is God like?’: “If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. If you want to know what Jesus is like, read the Gospels … and then look at us (the Christian Church).”

I was provoked into thinking about this by a number of factors, one of which was an observation by Andrew Marr about newspaper columnists in his excellent book, My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism. Writing about the art of writing a good column, he says:

Every column is … an argument, a case, a piece of logic. In general, it needs to be about something that can be expressed in a single headline-sized phrase or sentence. If the columnist cannot say [it] concisely, … then it is likely that the column will be confused, and therefore dull. If it isn’t a statement, it’s a waste of time. (p.371)

What Marr says of good writing is also true of any good communication. The purpose of good communication is not to reveal how clever or well-informed the writer/speaker is, but to enable the reader/hearer to grasp simply and clearly the essential thrust of the argument. It isn’t about making complex matters simplistic, but making complex matters simply comprehensible. Which brings us back to the Bible and communicating what it and Christian faith are about in ways that can be understood without needing a dictionary, a degree or a thick book.

It seems to me that whenever we pick up any sort of book, we do so with an unspoken question at the back of our mind: whodunnit? who is this character? why did these events happen the way they did? When we come to the Bible, the basic question we should be asking of the text(s) is: who is this God and what is he like? At least, that is, I think, the fundamental question being addressed by the text. The answer given is: God looks like the Jesus we read about in the Gospels. Look at Jesus of Nazareth and you see who and how God is in the world.

But – and here is the sticky bit – that same Jesus called his followers and friends to be like him, to look and sound and feel like him. The New Testament writers – particularly Paul – grasped this and called the body of Christians the ‘Body of Christ’. The logic is that the Christian body should reflect the Jesus we read about in the Gospels (that is, incarnate him) in the ways we live, the ways we speak, the ways we listen and hear, the priorities we set, the habits we cultivate and so on. Hence the ‘formula’ I offered in my last post.

I cannot see any other way of understanding what the church exists for.

Yet, in saying this, I will probably be criticised for being selective. Yes, there may well be other ways of describing the role and purpose of the church in the world; but no single pithy phrasing will be all-encompassing. The fallibility of any ‘headline’ or metaphor should not, however, prevent us from trying to communicate who and why we are in ways that can be grasped simply and quickly by most people. After all, that is why Jesus spoke in parables and with images and stories. And it is why Paul used the picture of a human body.

The pithiest ‘headline’ I have come up with is: ‘the task of the church is to create the space in which people can find that they have been found by God.’ And that is the beginning of the matter, not the end. I fear that too often in the church we go to the complicated end and forget that most people haven’t yet got as far as the beginning.