The Diocese of Bradford is currently hosting the Bishop of Khartoum, Sudan, as we celebrate 30 years of a diocesan link. Talking with the bishop over the last few days about the situation facing Christians in Sudan, I keep asking myself the question why a red line has been drawn in Syria, but not in Darfur? President Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, yet the West has not threatened to carry out surgical strikes against those Sudanese military installations that continue to commit murder on a massive scale.
Why not? What is the moral difference between Syria and Darfur/Sudan?
These questions arose not just from conversations with the Bishop of Khartoum, but also from a service in a Bradford parish church this morning.
Church – particularly the Church of England – frequently gets a bad press, yet where else can you find a community of people who consciously belong together, deliberately question their own way of life, dig deep into the stuff of their souls, wrestle with how personal commitment (discipleship of Jesus) connects with (or leads to or derives from) stuff like Syria, Darfur, and so on? Where else do you get this corporate soul-searching in a context of music, silence and attentive listening? What other group brings together (by choice) people of different social strata in one place where attention is paid to looking at the self and beyond the self, encouraging commitment and perseverance, challenging complacency and hypocrisy?
I think we easily overlook just how remarkable this phenomenon is. A congregation thinks of today's routines in the light of the eternal and the global. It hangs on and lives with uncertainty and unresolved questions. Yet, it does so with hope – not wishful thinking, but the hope that derives from “hearing amid the cacophanies of the present the music of the future”.
Anyway, the point I was musing on with the congregation this morning was that when Jesus invited people to follow him, he insisted that they did so with their eyes open. This journey would be no walk in the park, but would throw them together with people they wouldn't choose and might not like – but by following him they would deny themselves the option of choosing company that was convenient to them. Pulling together a passage from Jeremiah (18:1-11) and Luke (14:25-33), we noted that Christians are to be people who, having received the generosity of God, are bound to live generously. However, they must also live out the habit of recognising failure and choosing to change – personally and by feeding the hungry, caring for the destitute, and so on.
And when it seems that, in Jeremiah's language, the potter's clay gets messed up and has to be broken and re-thrown, this is not the end of the story. According to the biblical narrative, (and in the words of Amercian Fransiscan, Richard Rohr) “everything belongs”. Nothing of our life is wasted. The broken bits get collected up and re-worked into something both beautiful and useful. Yet, this should not be easily romanticised: it is painful and hard, and impacts on the emotions, the psyche, lifestyle and self-esteem.
This is what church does. It creates a space in which deep examination and questioning can go on – both of the self and of the world we live in. And it opens up the possibility of motivating a community of people who seek to see the world changed, but starting with themselves. This is the humility of repentance.
And it compels us not to lose hold on the hard questions about self and Syria, the local and the global, the temporal and the eternal.
It is also hugely enjoyable.
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Nick Baines's Blog 
September 8, 2013 at 10:27 pm
love it! – church and blog, Anna
September 9, 2013 at 12:01 am
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I’m sure there’s truth in this, but it also looks like a case of rose coloured specs: it would be more fair to say that half the time the church ‘challenges complacency and hypocrisy’ and the other half of the time, it’s a sink hole of the stuff.
I admit they don’t so frequently run to music, but secular networks, like, for instance this one: http://fairsay.com/networks/ecampaigning-forum have many of these components, and are strong on thoughtfulness. self-questioning and mutual help. They also have an international membership and talk across boundaries of place and class. And if the church really does ‘challenge complacency and hypocrisy’ better than such groups, it’s been very, very good at keeping very, very quiet about it.
September 9, 2013 at 1:36 am
Reblogged this on the elves are heading west.
September 9, 2013 at 8:00 am
Kate, it is hardly possible to be a working bishop and have rose-coloured specs about the reality of the church. We also have to distinguish between the institutional representation (national, etc.) and the local. I was writing here about my experience of the local. And the comparison with the forum you refer to does not work – for several reasons… which is not to devalue it, but to recognise that the church is different in make-up and ethos and who it is there for.
Every Anglican service begins with corporate confession of our weakness and failure. It is primarily in this context that complacency and hypocrisy are challenged. Of course I am not saying that there is no complacency or hypocrisy – see my first sentence – but it is all too easy to level the charge without digging through to the deeper reality.
September 9, 2013 at 8:51 am
And I am also rather carefully not saying that the church is all bad – that would be daft – but I am exasperated often enough by its blindness to itself and assumptions about what’s going on elsewhere. I admit you can’t see very far inside the link I posted (it was late at night I couldve found a better eg) but the third sector is lousy with volunteers, employees and activists who show and incredible commitment to improving things and form powerful networks on and offline. As a watcher from the sidelines, I’m awed by the sacrifices very young people are prepared to make, and in organisations like, for instance, Greenpeace where many people take turns on the ship or in actions that risk arrest, it builds communities. Your relationship with Sudan sounds typical of the sector on a good day – but not a stand out example unlike anything else going on in the world.
As for the ‘corporate confession of weakness at the start of every Anglican service’ – language is slippery – its both possible to be transformed by what you speak and utter it a thousand times without making a dent in underlying assumptions. Linda Woodhead’s fascinating research into what religious people are actually like suggests attitudes to the people stuck at the bottom of society that is really quite conservative – the Tory Party at prayer might not be the whole story, but is still alive and well. Please don’t think I’m saying to you ‘yah boo, your engagement with the world is awful’ – I’m really not – but it’s not as unique as you imply: I see it all over the place in the sector where I work.
September 9, 2013 at 12:56 pm
Kate, I agree with a lot of what you are saying too and I certanly think that we often utter a lot of things in liturgy that we carefully and unconciously stop from really impinging on our lives.We need to listen more to what we are already saying.
I also agree that it is not necessary to be a Chrstian to challenge injustice to make sacrifces and to build community – it is an inaccurate arrogance to say that this is so.- and I don’t think it is what Bishop Nick is saying- more that church provides a really good context in which to rise to these challenges. If I were not a Christian I hope that I would still want to make a difference in the world – but it is also true for me that my faith inspires and challenges me to try and keep going and do it joyfully – and sometimes ‘church’ does too!! I can get very frustrated and angry with church sometimes – by rules that say gay partnerships can’t be blessed in church for example. But I have seen too many good things and it is too much part of me for me to give up on it., and for me framing things self conciously in corporate prayer and ritual feeds my humanity. Like Bshop Nick – I have had a good experence of church recently – I went to the Greenbelt festival where there were loads of talks and exhibts about all manner of socal justice issues – homelessness, world poverty, conflict, gay and trans issues, people trafficking etc etc. I think around 20000 people went to green belt this year – they have a webste with talks available to download – check it out. I will certainly try and check out the Linda Woodhead stuff – sounds interesting and a challenge that we need to honestly face up to.
I need to be reminded that there are so many good things about church – and this is why I liked Bshop Nick’s piece. It has taken me a while in life not to have a default ‘down on myself attitude to my own life it , took me a while to realise that it wasn’t humility but an indulgance and that sometimes it is harder to face up to what is good. I think this may be true of attitudes to church as well .. .
September 10, 2013 at 10:43 am
Thanks for this corrective Anna – of course you are right too, and I’m a bit conscious of not wanting to turn into the sort of troll who prowls round forums dumping their negativity wherever they can get away with it. But because of a few encounters recently I have quite seriously been asking myself ‘what is it about Christianity that makes people so scared to speak up?’ (a feeling backed up by also just having read about the congregation reaction described by Antonia Honeywell here: http://antoniahoneywell.com/2013/09/06/a-cautionary-tale-for-justin-welby/). Working in a sector where everyone shoots their mouths off at the drop of the hat because they think it’s right, I think the people in many pews could do with a stiff infusion of that gobbiness. Easy to do cultural relations with someone whose life and beliefs are very far from your own (I’ve done plenty of that in my career too) – maybe harder to deal with the things closer to home.
The one thing I’d concede, is that the more tightly knit a community is, the harder it is to have a row: and the older you get, the harder it is to have a row. There may be elements of strength in the way people bottle things up. But I do feel very certain that that bottling is happening.
September 10, 2013 at 4:26 pm
Personally, I think Bishop Nick’s section on church is brilliant (and worth a wider audience than somewhat buried inside a blog also about Sudan). I also note that, interestingly (disturbingly?), it’s consistent with the sort of thing Don Cupitt and Sea of Faith might say about the worth of church. I don’t think that makes it less valid, though.
As for the other comments, yes, I’m sure there is hypocrisy in the church and at times we don’t get there, but we are directed to humility, soul searching and the discussion of the big things in a way that not many other groups are.
September 21, 2013 at 11:55 am
Well I liked it and I am copying it into my church magazine. It is easy to have a pop but better to target these at those who are not making their best efforts to engage for good Charlie – Bedford
September 23, 2013 at 8:52 pm
And I am also rather carefully not saying that the church is all bad – that would be daft
That rather depends…
One answer, if you hit problems, is that it is generally not too difficult to move on and find somewhere nearby that isn’t tainted by (for want of a better expression) corruption. By that I mean a situation where the prevailing culture, far from being transformed into the likeness of God, effectively distorts the likeness of God into its own form – for example, the sort of place where no-one is permitted to mention the cleansing of the temple because three-quarters of the congregation are hedge fund managers.
England is a place where the strategy of moving on generally works. But not all of the Church of England is in England. There are places (certain islands I could mention) where the culture through all of the local churches is to a greater or lesser extent corrupted, and where the only way to move on is, in effect, exile – either off the island, or out of the church.