The web of belonging

When you have grown up with a particular framework for understanding the world and theology, it is not a simple task to listen through different ears to a different vocabulary. But, this is, in fact, what Jesus asked his friends and enemies to do – just read the gospels and this is the story: who dared to listen and look at God, the world and us through a different lens, and who could only try to shut out the heresy?

The Bradford Diocesan Clergy Conference began today at Swanwick in Derbyshire. I guess it's one of those things – like preaching – where you just have to be there to 'get it'. We began with an utterly human session with David Runcorn on 'keeping faith in a time of change'. Then we had a first session with Diarmuid O'Murchu on the developing cosmological context of human spirituality. It is in this context that we explored the implications of human belonging to the interconnected web of relationship with people, creation and the cosmos.

What struck me while listening to this was the clash of vocabulary for articulating theologically why the world is the way it is and how we are to understand it and God. If we are locked into a closed system in which theology encourages orientation towards 'other world' salvation, the talk of an open system of engagement with the created order 'now' seems odd. Or just wrong. If we have grown used to thinking in terms of particular doctrines, then all this cosmological stuff just sounds like New Age nonsense.

But the reason for having this on our programme is simply to challenge (or encourage?) us as clergy to think outside our conventional linguistic and theologically conceptual frameworks about the usual stuff: human meaning, life on the planet, spirituality that is engaged with reality and not just an escape from it, the moral claims of responsible living as beings in community in an interdependent cosmos.

It is far better to listen to stuff that challenges our preconceptions than simply to hear what confirms our assumed frameworks and makes us feel comfortable. After all, part of the role of clergy is to stir other people up into hearing the Gospel differently, listening through different ears, looking though different eyes, and catching glimpses of God's glory that would remain hidden if we only ever look through familiar lenses.

We are at the beginning. There is more to come. But, someone has to do the hard work of trying to find a vocabulary for relating the varying disciplines of science, social observation, anthropology, philosophy and theology to each other in a way that encourages intelligibility. We have to work at this; it is not easy. But, it is interesting to consider how much is to do with difference in 'content' (understanding of God and the world) as opposed to difference in 'language' for trying to express what is essentially always incomplete and mysterious.

As I discovered while working for the British Government thirty years ago (as a linguist at GCHQ), theology has to address and cope with the massive complexity of the real world – and that needs to be expanded to include the totality of the real cosmos.

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A charge

Every Church of England parish has churchwardens. They are the bishop’s officers in the parish (which sounds worse than it is). They are elected each year at the Annual Parochial Church Meetings and then have to be ‘admitted’ at a Visitation by the Archdeacon and the Registrar. However, the bishop can do it instead of the archdeacon and this year I did – in order to give me a chance to address and meet all the churchwardens in the diocese. So, we had a good gig in Skipton last week and the second in Bradford tonight (while Liverpool were exacting belated revenge on Chelsea…). My address is called a ‘charge’ and, for your interest or amusement, (and if you can’t control your excitement) here is the text (based on the wonderfully funny story in the Old Testament book of Numbers chapter 11):

The history of God’s people is a history of complaint. And that’s OK. Read the Bible and you read the story of a people for whom the grass was always greener somewhere else. I think it is in our human DNA to complain – perhaps in order to give active expression to our frustrations whilst at the same time thereby exonerating us from doing anything about them.

And, as I said, there is nothing either new or particularly disturbing about this. It is what we do. And when it comes to talking about the Church, we clearly don’t adopt a different approach.

But, I want to bring a different perspective to this phenomenon as we contemplate re-committing ourselves to serving God in and through the Church in the year – and years – ahead. We face much change and some challenge and there will be plenty of triggers for complaint, lament and moaning as there will be for optimism, hope and enjoyment. And that’s OK.

Beginning with the Old Testament reading from Numbers 11, I guess we might be put off a bit of complaint. “Now the people complained about their hardships in the hearing of the LORD, and when he heard them his anger was aroused. Then fire from the LORD burned among them and consumed them on the outskirts of the camp.” Oh dear. God seems to be a bit tetchy and to respond with a bit of overkill – literally. God, it would appear, has a thing about moaners.

Go on down the text a little way and we find the cause of the moaning becoming a little more explicable. First, they forget that the food that keeps them alive is food for which they have done no work, nor paid a shekel. Without it they would all be dead and it is pure gift: all they have to do is pick the manna from the earth and then make something edible out of it. But, they are fed up with being fed up with such a boring diet and, forgetting where it – and they – came from, start to complain. And, if that isn’t enough, they then start to romanticise the past – something every human being and every human society has done since the beginning of time itself. “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost – also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. (What a great meal that sounds like…) But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna.”

Just as well, then, that there is at least one person who ‘gets it’, keeps everything in perspective and stands firm while everyone else is wobbling in the wind of discontent. “Moses heard the people of every family wailing at the entrance to their tents.” And how did he get a grip on the matter? Read on: “He asked the LORD, ‘Why have you brought this trouble on your servant? What have I done to displease you that you put the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth?… If this is how you are going to treat me, please go ahead and kill me – if I have found favour in your eyes – and do not let me face my own ruin.”

Just how melodramatic is that, then?

Moses, the great leader, takes his own eye of the ball and resorts to self-pity. It’s all about ‘me’. (Having said that, I do sympathise with Moses and I do have times when I wonder whether I might do something else in life.)

Well, we could leave it there and have a laugh at these miserable, shortsighted, amnesiac primitives and thank God that we are not like them. But, I guess, if we are honest, that we might be getting a bit of a niggle that all of us can get a hint of a suspicion that there might be some slight reflection of our own reflexes in this story of real people in the real world.

However, what is interesting here is that God, despite his frustration with his people, does get the point, listens to the complaint behind the complaint, and comes up with a very practical solution: get some of the moaners to take some responsibility and together we’ll move things forward. Nothing airy-fairy or pious. No further castigation or resentment. Just a practical solution from which everyone might benefit.

Now, you might think this is a bit of an odd reading for this evening and for the Bishop’s first Charge to churchwardens and their colleagues in our parishes. If so, you would be mistaken. And you might be mistaken for assuming that the connection here is with moaning churches or complaining church officers or clergy. Not a bit of it. As I noted earlier, moaning is what we do and it can serve a very useful purpose – especially if we direct it at God and end up with practical solutions that bring people on board and get some mutual responsibility going, for the benefit of all. Critique of what we do, why we do it and how we do it, is essential to our conversation.

No, the pertinence of this reading is to be found in what it suggests to us about our common task as God’s people – at any time and in any context. I put to you the following points in this respect:

1. We never start from where we would like to be, but from where we are. We can romanticise all we like, but it won’t change anything and it won’t lead us forward.
2. There will always be people who can only see the dangers and threats and never spot the opportunities and creative openings. Such people are vital because they offer a check on the reflexes of the optimists. But, danger-spotting should not develop into opportunity-blocking.
3. Self-pity might be understandable, but it is never attractive and it puts the focus on the wrong place.
4. God is clearly not surprised by any of this and is interested in the practical detail of how we move on through it.
5. When we recognise the problem, we can only ever find solutions that involve people taking responsibility, sharing the load and thereby discovering the realities behind the easy rhetoric of criticism. (I heard a new diocesan bishop say recently that he now understands why all the things he used to criticise bishops for are the way they are…)

Now, I think this is where we can make the connection with where we are in the Diocese of Bradford in May 2012 (as opposed to a middle-eastern desert nearly three thousand years ago).

The Diocese of Bradford faces significant change in the next few years. Patterns that have become familiar might have to change and some comforts might have to be sacrificed. Why? In order to satisfy a balance sheet or to provide the latest bishop’s – or the bishop’s latest – panacaea for church growth or survival? Or, to cope with the (and I quote a newspaper) ‘inexorable decline’ of the church in England? No. Neither.

The Dioceses Commission has presented proposals for creating a single diocese for West Yorkshire and the Dales. Having listened to responses to the original proposals, the Commission then brought a draft Scheme in order to test out more firmly what such a diocese might look like. The consultation period for this ended on 30 April. The Commission will now decide whether to bring a final Scheme in the autumn, and, if so, what it should look like. A final Scheme cannot be amended, but will have to be accepted or rejected by the dioceses and, subsequently and if appropriate, by the General Synod in July 2013.

What I can promise you in all of this is that no one will be fully satisfied by the final outcome. Life is never like that. I can further promise you that I also will not be fully satisfied by the final shape of things. After all, in real life compromises have to be made in order to get the best possible shape out of competing priorities and differing perspectives. For example, I can see the real attraction of creating smaller dioceses with bishops closer to the ground and more collegiality at local level. However, that has to be squared with matters such as (a) paying for it, (b) duplication or limitation of provision, (c) reduced ground in which to create attractive roles and provide effective development of people, and (d) limited focus on particular socio-economic environments. The area system proposed by the Dioceses Commission attempts to capitalise on the scale of a regional diocese while creating as much subsidiarity as possible along with the local collegiality we wish to preserve.

I have attended to the particular challenges and opportunities of the proposals elsewhere and don’t intend to address them point by point here tonight. But, my purpose in picking up on the Dioceses Commission process is simply because I think we face a challenge not unlike that of the early Israelites in their particular desert excursion.

Fear of change cannot and must not have the final word when we look at the challenges we face. Five or ten years down the line and our current diocesan arrangements will no longer be fit for purpose. Look at (a) the increasing burden of buildings and associated costs, (b) the projected number of clergy available across the country, (c) the age profile of those carrying responsibility in our parishes and churches and where they might be in ten years’ time, and (d) the changing profile of Christian association in England.

Now, the Church of England has a unique vocation and one that will not be fulfilled by any other church if we do not fulfil it ourselves. We operate on territory and we accept an obligation to serve and reach out with the love of God in Christ to those who happen to live in our parochial territories. However, an increasing focus on our internal challenges – a bit like getting fed up with collecting the manna in the desert every morning – quickly distracts us from the very core raison d’etre for the church’s existence in the first place. And, when we lose our focus on for what and for whom we are here, we begin to shape ourselves toward protecting what we have rather than creating what we might become.

So, without going into further detailed discussion of what might lie ahead in the next few years – and there will be no exemption from challenge, whichever way we ultimately go in relation to the Dioceses Commission proposals – let me try briefly and concisely to focus our attention on one or two practical realities:

1. Whatever might change in diocesan ‘badging’ and the way the polity of a diocese is shaped, the churches, the parishes, the clergy, the ministers and officers, the congregations, the schools, and so on, all remain. And their vocation will not change one iota… even if the support, leadership and resourcing of them does. And the unique vocation of our churches and parishes is to ‘create the space in which people can find that they have been found by God’.
2. We can romanticise the past and wish we were starting from somewhere else… or we can show the world how Christians can face change and challenge by taking responsibility for how we shape our future for the sake of the world for which the church itself exists (and not vice versa).
3. We can recognise that no outcome will be perfect and that there will always be significant challenges to overcome as we go forward into God’s future. But, we can lift our eyes and focus on God’s fundamental call as we then try to work through it all with mutual love, respect, prayer and service.
4. We can take our responsibility in shouldering the weight of it all – even if we don’t always find it conducive. After all, it isn’t about our preferences; it is about being God’s generous people for the sake of God’s world.
5. And, finally, we can learn and grow through an experience we might not have chosen, but which will test the reality of our convictions. This is where the rubber will hit the road – and we have the opportunity to do something never done before in the Church of England, setting a pattern for how such change can be handled effectively in the future.

Churchwardens will be crucial to this process. Where questions and obstacles are detected or encountered on the grounds of any parish, these need to be identified, articulated and represented in order that we constantly deal with reality and not just our assumptions. Making the church work whilst being open to changes is vital and valuable service. Vision always has to be worked out in terms of money and buildings and stuff and real people. But, the challenge is to not lose sight of the purpose and point of it all.

God is calling us to face the future with courage and vision and hope and faith. No doubt we will moan our way through it, too – constantly wishing we were somewhere else or starting from a different point or back in a romanticised past or with a different group of people. But, God calls us to be faithful where we are now and to shape our future – not to be a victim of change, but a creator of a future rooted in a vision of God’s kingdom.

Thank you for all you do. In serving your local parish and church you are setting the framework in and through which the people of our parishes can be encountered by the God who loves them. Sometimes it might seem to be tough or even inconsequential. But, the God who asked Moses to find people to share the burden of responsibility is the same God who calls us now and invites us to join together in his service with one another for the sake of his people in his world.

 

What, how, who, why?

One of the challenges of listening through the ears of a different culture is trying to work out (a) what is being said, (b) how is it being said, (c) to whom is it being said, (d) why is it being said, and (e) what is being heard from what is being said.

Listening to a keynote speaker at a conference is always a welcome experience. For one thing, it means I am not having to do it. But, it offers an opportunity to think, to hear afresh and to learn. But, listening this morning, I realise that being the outsider makes me listen differently. I don’t know how people are hearing Angela Ifill’s address or whether she is scratching where the people are itching. I think she is. But, if she is, then the context, the audience and the challenges are not the same as those we face at home.

Inevitably I listen through my own ears and my point of reference is the context of the Church of England in the Diocese of Bradford. The issue of ‘welcome’ is pertinent everywhere, of course, as hospitality and generosity are key signs of God’s kingdom. But, I realised this morning that, despite the fact that I understand every word that was spoken and am familiar with every element of the presentation, I don’t know how this has been heard, understood and appropriated by the local audience for whom it was intended. I don’t know what ‘welcome’ might look like on the ground in the particular churches of this diocese.

So, nothing deep here. Just another fresh experience of how some questions have to be asked of any communication prior to knowing what the words mean – and what response they are intended to provoke.

 

Alternative prophetic

Back in 2007 I took a group of twenty to Central Zimbabwe for two weeks. The day after we arrived we walked to a farm and saw with our own eyes the desert that had once been a thriving and fertile farm. It has to be remembered that this was a time when the Zimbabwean economy was in free-fall and inflation at a mere 10,000%. We experienced constant power cuts, water stoppages and harassment from Zanu PF’s dodgy police.

While walking around the arid farm, and wondering how on earth a future might be shaped out of this disaster – the breadbasket of Africa become the basket case of Africa – my misery was interrupted by something easily missed and apparently trivial. It was a single rose, about twelve inches high, planted and watered in a small hole in the dry soil. It looked feeble and misplaced – almost futile. But, as everything else seemed to be closing down and smelling of death, here was a prophetic symbol of hope. It seemed to be saying that the is a future – that there is more to reality than what appears as the immediate evidence of your eyes. It was placing a question mark over the dominant gloom, whispering a new melody over the grinding music of doom.

In my presidential address to the Bradford Diocesan Synod this morning I called for our diocese to be ambitious and prophetic and I said it like this:

We should be ambitious. We should be confident about our vocation and the God who gives us it.
In all these matters we are being invited to be prophetic. I know the word is over-used. (I remember the Archbishop of Canterbury saying that when people ask him to be prophetic, what they really mean is: ‘Say loudly what I want to hear you say!’) But, to be prophetic in the biblical tradition is to catch a glimpse behind the curtain of our time and place – a glimpse of the glory of the God who, in the face of our pessimism and gloom, always whispers words such as ‘resurrection’, ‘renewal, or (in Walter Brueggemann’s memorable phrase) ‘newness after loss’. Being prophetic is to plant a seed when everyone else tells us the ground is dried up. It is to build a house when everybody else is demolishing and leaving. It is to sing a song when everybody else has gone silent. It is to build a boat when there isn’t any water… yet.
It is to be a sign of hope – assuming a future. As Rowan Williams says of Dostoyevsky, there is never a final word in the conversation; there is always more to be said. Just as there is nothing new under the sun, there is never an ‘end’ in the economy of a God for whom even death doesn’t finish everything off.

The Occupy movement does not have a monopoly on prophetic action. Every action, word or symbol that defies ‘endings’ by holding out even a tiny promise of a new beginning – a future beyond the loss – is prophetic. And hopeful.

 

From a distance

The Archbishop of York preached at an ecumenical service in the Frauenkirche in Dresden this morning. This service marked the conclusion of the German celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Meissen Agreement in 1991 (obviously). It also marked the end of the Delegation Visit. We were in Meissen yesterday.

However, it wasn’t all about partying. We also had work to do and this time the theme was ‘visitation’ – which sounds unbelievably dull until you get into it. The basic question is: how do our churches provide for effective pastoral supervision and support of clergy and parishes? In both the Landeskirchen of the EKD and the dioceses of the Church of England part of the bishop’s role is to find a way of encouraging and challenging clergy and local parishes. The genius is in getting the balance right between the encouragement and the challenge.

The Germans contributing to this visit described a very thoroughly worked out approach to visitation, instigated by the bishop, but involving a team of people. Lots of paperwork is required before the team visits and meets with people involved in church and local life. Reports are written afterwards, with an emphasis on the local church identifying it’s priorities for the next five or ten years. It clearly involves a huge amount of time and resource.

This process was described at one point as ‘pulling the cupboard away from the wall and seeing where the spiders are hiding. The process leads to some clergy deciding their future ministry lies elsewhere; some parishes decide they need a change of minister. Most, however, find the whole process constructive, helpful, encouraging and challenging because it compels them to examine their corporate life and ‘own’ its future shape and direction.

In the Church of England ‘visitation’ is driven by the bishop and archdeacon. We try to minimise the bureaucracy and maximise the impact, but there is no single, simple way of doing it across the country.

The interesting point here, however, is not the specifics of how visitation is done in a particular Landeskirche or diocese, but, rather, how the exercise of thinking about it away from home – and seeing it through the eyes and experience of another culture – is immensely helpful. I might have been away from Bradford for four days, but the benefit for the Diocese of Bradford comes from the bishop thinking through how to shape the pastoral care, support, encouragement of and challenge to clergy and parishes from 2012 onwards. Amid the sheer busyness of normal life in Bradford it is hard to take a step back and think clearly; thinking with others in Dresden has been very useful and stimulating.

Basically, it looks like this. I have so far visited six out of the eight Deaneries in the Diocese of Bradford – the last two will follow before Christmas. Having by then met all the clergy and seen many of the churches and parishes, how do I best ensure from 2012 that I and my colleagues know the clergy and the contexts in which they work? What sort of achievable and manageable structure of regular visitation will help the clergy and parishes best whilst also keeping me up to speed with developments? How do I best support what is going on in the parishes?

Some see any such thinking about visitation as threatening. Indeed, we asked the Germans how these visitations are regarded by their clergy and churches: most welcome it because (a) it means they are being taken seriously, (b) it means they will get a reality check with the help of people who see from a different perspective, (c) it will force some strategic thinking, (d) it will raise confidence in the ability of the bishop to understand the realities of the particular parish’s life, and (e) it will ensure that accountability is taken seriously on all fronts.

But, some will see it as some sort of Ofsted inspection from hierarchy.

It seems to me that good management and supervision equals good pastoral care. Such visitations – however they are shaped – brings the benefit of an outside eye and must be essentially supportive. Which is the same principle as coming away and looking through the eyes of another group in order to better see and understand what is going on at home.

 

Sudan – the hidden war

Isn’t it awful that when a crisis leaves the front pages of the newspapers we quickly forget the horrors that continue?

I have posted on Sudan and the dreadful persecution in South Kordofan. Today one of my clergy in Bradford got an email from a Christian leader in Northern Sudan and this is what he wrote:

Thanks so much for your deep love to us and your great concern for the suffering people in the those war zones. We are sorry for the loss of our brother Bishop Yusif of Port Sudan diocese: we went to Egypt for the mission consultation, he died on the second day of our meeting…

About the fighting in Blue Nile, you might not get enough information of what is really taking place there - many people losing their lives daily. In our Diocese, we have a list of 490 families, a total of 12996 people  from Blue Nile and many are coming while many are wandering in the bushes. We tried to pass information to all the humanitarian consortium NGOs, to alert them on the urgent situation in which there is clear evidence that an event of war in Blue Nile has occurred which causes human sufferings. We urge them for the emergency relief of basic needs; food, medical care, shelters, clothing, water. But not any respond to this. Its seems many do not know much of Blue Nile,
people know more of South Kordofan. There is not any help to people of Blue Nile.

Sorry for this long letter but I know your deep love to these people.

In the Diocese of Bradford we haven’t forgotten them. We are praying for them and have raised substantial funds for relief work. But, by way of such posts as this, we need to keep their plight in the public eye – and before the politicians and the media.

 

Imitation

Being a disciple means – put simply – imitating someone else. I guess there must be disciples of Wayne Rooney. – in the sense that they look to him as some sort of a role model and justify their own behaviour according to his. Which is an interesting notion the morning after he was sent off against Montenegro for a pointless attack on a player.

Being a disciple of Jesus means imitating the Jesus we read about in the Gospels. The only measure the church has for its own faithfulness to its vocation is whether or not it looks like an imitation of the Jesus we read about in the Gospels. Not a hard idea, is it?

I have been thinking about this while preparing for and being present at the Bradford Diocesan Day – over 400 people of all ages and from all sorts of places coming together to think about ‘discipleship’ for a whole wet Saturday in Bradford. I did the keynote address (video here) this morning and this was followed by seminars and workshops aimed at exploring what it means to be a follower/imitator of Jesus in everyday life.

In my address, after an introductory ramble through the Bible, I tried to say that the usual (discipleship) suspects are not always helpful to us. The giants who find their halo-ed faces in stained-glass windows are often the exception rather than the rule. What I mean by this is that people like Peter or Paul or Dietrich Bonhoeffer are examples of discipleship in extremis – but not always easy to relate to for ordinary Christians in our ordinary world.

Which is why I commended Zebedee as my icon of discipleship. Zebedee (not the one who goes ‘boing’ in The Magic Roundabout) was the father of James and John, the so-called ‘Sons of Thunder’ in the Gospels. When Jesus invited his sons to go walkabout with him, they could not have left without their father’s permission. Zebedee would also have had to replace them with extra hired workers in the family fishing business. In other words, the special discipleship of James and John was only possible because Zebedee paid the price and kept the ordinary graft of everyday routine going.

More of us are like Zebedee than his offspring.

OK, there is clearly more to it than that, and we can learn from the lot of them. I went on to describe discipleship in terms of (sorry for this) (a) Curiosity, (b) Commitment and (c) Company. Christians need, like the first disciples, to be curious enough to follow Jesus and see where the journey takes us. We need to commit ourselves – body, mind and spirit – to the one we follow/imitate. We don’t do it alone, but we also don’t get to choose who goes with us.

According to this simple way of putting it, the Christian Church should be characterised by people who are curious enough to leave the comfort zones, committed enough to re-shape the way they see God, the world and us, and brave enough to be thrown together with a company of people they wouldn’t necessarily normally choose for themselves.

Actually, that is what the church on the ground is doing all the time. This gets forgotten when the ‘high level’ arguments are dominating the headline agenda. The reality is that Christians are imitating Jesus every day in the ordinary spaces and places of life – even when the ‘noise’ suggests otherwise.

And that is the best bit of being a bishop in the Church of England: you get to see where God is at work, where Christians are imitating Jesus, and where the miracle of company is being exercised in the strangest places.

Imitating Wayne Rooney might well get us into trouble. Imitating Jesus has a habit of definitely getting us into trouble. But it’s never boring.

 

Creative space

Slaughter in Norway. The sad, sad death of Amy Winehouse at only 27. Reports of continuing slaughter in Sudan. It’s a grim week.

Add to this the abuse that has come my way following the Telegraph headline a couple of weeks ago. What I have learned from this is that those who write or email me should (a) check the facts, (b) expand their vocabulary, and (c) try to use adjectives other than those based on or around ‘f**king’. I thought of keeping them and sending them to the Telegraph, but just deleted them.

So, today is a day off. Having spent two days up in the Yorkshire Dales and on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border (visiting parishes and clergy) I have begun to ask myself questions about what Anglican ministry might look like in the next five or ten years. What is clear is that most church advice on such questions assumes the social circumstances of urban or suburban parishes. The rural context is incomparable and, clearly, a different language is needed for interpreting and encouraging rural ministry.

For example (and simplistically – leaving out factors of the ethnic mix of a parish, etc.), a ‘large’ congregation of 200 in a parish of 20,000 people might appear ‘successful’. A congregation of 60 in a parish of 600 is stunning in terms of proportion. However, both congregations have to maintain buildings, ministry and outreach. So, what works for the urban or suburban will not be appropriate to the rural, and vice versa. My job as bishop is to work out (along with others) how we staff and support the variety of parishes in such widely differing contexts where ministry has to be exercised differently and numbers don’t tell an obvious story of success or failure, strength or weakness.

Anyway, next week sees a three-day visit to an urban/suburban deanery and my questions and perceptions will continue to develop. Before then, however, a day off allowed a visit with visiting Swiss friends to the Industrial Museum in Bradford and then Salt’s Mill in Saltaire. The former is great (and I can’t wait for my grandson to grow up a bit so we can take him there). The latter must surely be visited by anyone with imagination. I expect all our friends in the south of England to now book in to stay in Bradford and visit Saltaire.

The mill (and the town) was built by Sir Titus Salt during the textile revolution. More recently it has been developed into offices, apartments and the most wonderful bookshop in the world. (OK, I’m a fan.) Down near the railway, river and canal you climb the stairs at the corner of the mill building and enter the art gallery full of David Hockney paintings and arty books and stuff. Go up two floors and there is the bookshop, a cafe and a kitchen shop (not that I have bothered with that one). The length of the mill floor is preserved and brought to new expansive life with fantastic use of space and light. It has to be seen and walked through to be appreciated. I can say no more.

Yet, all this was the genius of a guy who saw the potential no one else even glimpsed: Jonathan Silver. He died young. There is a statue to Sir Titus Salt, but there is as yet no memorial to the man who risked everything and breathed new life into these buildings. An industrial site that saw human suffering (look at the life of children in the Victorian mills) is now a place of creative space, light and community life. When will he get his statue?

 

Present and engaged

One of the myths that flies around about the church is that church schools are divisive. Actually, to be precise, the myth is that ‘faith schools’ are divisive and ‘church schools’ get uncritically and illegitimately subsumed into this category. Church schools have a different remit.

This afternoon the General Synod discussed ‘Presence and Engagement’ – a term that describes the Church of England’s whole approach to its ministry and mission. We aim to be present in every community and engaged in and for the good of that community. This means – as we heard in the debate – that we do not walk away from areas of great deprivation and challenge or places where Christians are a tiny minority.

In relation to church schools this means that in Bradford alone we have over 40 church schools that are between 80-100% Muslim. We have committed clergy and lay people serving in parishes which are predominantly (some up to 95%) Muslim. Driven by a theology of God’s generous love for all, they maintain a Christian presence and serve the local people – whoever they are and whatever their need.

In the debate this afternoon we heard stories of creative engagement and stubbornly committed presence. I noted the statement by a Muslim leader in Bradford in which he said something like: “Our problem is that we don’t have a bishop. So, the bishop is our bishop and we need him to bring us all together.” Which illustrates how we bring together not only people from different faiths, but also different members of those other faiths.

It is a serious vocation and a huge responsibility. But, as I said in the debate, this is all dependent on strong and effective leadership at every level. In Bradford, in the short time I have been there, I have been massively impressed by the work and place of the Dean and the Cathedral, the Bishop’s Officer for Church in the World, clergy and lay people for whom I have huge respect.

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Location:York

 

Getting wet

Blogging has to take second place to endless work at the moment. But the work is brilliant. Meetings with different groups of people, committees, services, rural briefings, etc. are all great. I am loving it.

However, in what seemed like a good idea a couple of months ago, I and some hardy colleagues used the longest day (sunrise to sunset on Tuesday 21 June) to work our way through the Diocese of Bradford. The aim was threefold: (a) to help me orientate myself geographically and culturally, (b) enable me to meet people from across the urban/rural spread in quick time, and (c) allow those who wished to to meet me briefly en route. It also offered a great photo opportunity at every stage.

Unbelievably, this was questioned by one or two people who thought it gave out the wrong messages. I make no comment.

I got up at 3.30am after four hours sleep and set off with my Chaplain and the Archdeacon of Craven for the drive to one of Yorkshire’s three peaks, Pen-Y Ghent. Despite the forecast, the weather just got worse as we went north. We were met by 14 others at Horton in Ribblesdale and set off up the mountain. Within a hundred metres we were soaked through – and quickly reached the point where there was no point trying to stay dry. Anywhere. I’ve never had so much fun with my clothes on.

We got down three hours later with the rain still fluctuating between ‘lashing down’ and ‘hammering down’. Visibility was very limited and views non-existent. But it was a brilliant start to a great day with some wonderful people – especially the ones who met us at the top with coffee and cakes!

We went from there to a farm cafe (to get changed and have breakfast), then visited a farm to meet a great farmer and some surprisingly ugly sheep (with the greenest snot I have ever witnessed) and try dry-stone walling. We visited schools, tea shops, churches (Bolton Priory), traders in Haworth (Bronte country), an English language class for Asian women in Bradford (run through a church), a youth project on a large urban estate (inspiring), a seminar with theological students from Durham on interfaith matters, then a curry in Bradford.

Stimulating, enlightening, hilarious, inspiring and … er … wet.

I am now wondering whether I should do something similar on midsummer’s day every year. The suggestion that we should do this year’s itinerary in reverse is just silly: start at 4am with a curry and end on top of Pen-Y Ghent in the dark rain?