‘Disturbed by the Spirit’: Discipleship and Change
Talk to Bloxham Project Conference, Trinity College, Oxford, Wednesday 6th April 2005, by the Rt. Revd. Dr. Kenneth Stevenson.
Introduction
Whenever the word ‘disturbance’ is mentioned, three different scenarios come to mind. The first is the ‘spot of turbulence’, in a rocky aeroplane flight – which may be anything from a take-off from Atlanta airport in thunder and lightening by what seems to be a very determined pilot, to British SouthWest trains anxious to make up for lost time on the hazardous stretch of track between Haslemere and Havant. Then there is the understatement of all time, the Roman historian, Livy, who described one of the Punic Wars against Carthage as an ‘aliquid incommodi’ – a ‘spot of bother’. Here, we are not trying to make the journey, no matter what, but we are trying to fool ourselves about the past, and pretend that it wasn’t really as bad as all that. But the third scenario is perhaps my favourite of all. I was attending a conference of theological college staff thirty years ago; we were all being regaled, effectively and prophetically, by Peter Selby, the present Bishop of Worcester, who was in those days Adult Education Officer in the Southwark Diocese, and dressed in a very ethnic-looking shirt (it’s changed colour since then!), in which he drew attention to the role of disturbance in theological education. We all sat their making varying emotional responses to what he was saying, but we all knew jolly well what he meant – cartoon-figures come to mind, from the pious ordinand whose neck we could happily wring, to the self-absorbed student who seemed to be having a spiritual crisis every five minutes, and who seemed to be in constant need of emergency Myers-Briggs facilities.
Consumerism
All this is to say that, as the clown coming on at the end of your conference (professional clown, but decidedly amateur educationalist – why would the Church of England appoint anything else to chair its Education Division?), that the people doing the kinds of jobs you are doing aren’t doing it properly unless disturbance is part of the process. I don’t mean a point in the syllabus, but a prominent feature of the landscape. One of the reasons why I think it is important to recognize – and even honour – is that it can not only identify those recurring, and at times intractable, problems, but it can also serve to counter-act a tendency in contemporary culture that you will come across as much as I do: consumerism. It comes in many different forms, like those who seem only able to do what they ‘feel called’ to do, or only worship in churches where they ‘feel comfortable’: not much room for the ‘living sacrifice’ of which Paul speaks at Romans 12:1! It’s not really surprising that consumerism should be so prevalent. The twentieth century has known and experienced enough international traumas to make such notions as authority and tradition that were taken too much for granted in times past more or less negotiable. It puts a strain on those of us exercising oversight and leadership. At times it makes us scream; at others it can be incredibly amusing – because people often are amusing, especially when they don’t realize it! But it makes for a more healthy environment, where we see one another in relational terms. A ‘headteacher’ is one who teaches – in relationship to students; and is also ‘head’ – in relation to other teachers. A chaplain stands in relation both to students and staff (teaching or other), and therefore, in a way, has a unique role, less precise than others, and involving the whole institution, as pastor and also prophet – hence the ministry of disturbance. When Mandell Creighton left his rural Northumberland parish for a Professorship that was to lead on to distinguished episcopal ministry at Peterborough, then London, he said in his farewell sermon to his flock on 9th November, 1884: ‘if I have taught you anything, you have taught me much in return’ – having told them that one of the functions of a parish priest is ‘to pierce through this mist whereby the world strives to hide the truth of God.’
I cannot begin to define the forms of consumerism with which you are faced – and, doubtless, with which you face one another. Parents sometimes, just occasionally, behave as if they have ordered six star A-level results with the fees, like ordering a Christmas hamper from Harrods. The Department Head at the last minute can’t make an important meeting, having concealed a long-standing personal social engagement. The Chaplain has to child-mind, so that spouse can carry on bringing in a salary at least twice the size. And so on. And there will be contrary sides to the argument: a head that may be obsessive about driving the flock too hard: I think here of those wonderful words from the ‘Rule of St Benedict’ of the abbot, which I always try to quote at this kind of gathering: ‘he must so arrange everything that the strong have something to yearn for, and the weak nothing to run from.’ That’s a text that I have been pondering virtually every day since I became a bishop.
Discipleship
Consumerism has, therefore, a good side: it expresses something about expectations and identifies them, even if they may be warped (at best) or plain selfish (at worst). But consumerism cannot be a Christian virtue, because it is about demand, without affection; it is about action, not reflection; and it is about human nature at its most assertive, without the necessary dimension of the ‘other’. Discipleship, on the other hand, is a Christian virtue – because it puts us all together, in relation to one another, as fellow-learners, about each other, and about the mysteries of life, about God, ourselves, and the world. When we were planning a commemoration service after the tsunami disaster at Portsmouth Cathedral, great care was taken to find out about the students at Portsmouth Grammar School who came back from a winter holiday trip out there: the signal came back straight away (forgive the tendency towards navy jargon!) that many of them found it difficult even to come to school, because the building was very near the water-front, and their experience of water had not been, shall we say, particularly easy. Here was disturbance on a huge scale, leaving behind a memory that would take time to heal, but never go away. It’s disturbing just to face out the implications of discipleship, but somehow we have to try. I’m aware in my job that people have different needs and aptitudes, and in working out policy with my colleagues we have to be very observant that people aren’t pushed too hard, and that they don’t suffer in silence; but there is always the skiver, delightful as they can be, and there is, more dangerously, the profoundly sincere, deeply articulate ‘consumer’ – who needs to be challenged, and encouraged to take some risks, and try something new. When people come to me saying that they want to ‘feel affirmed’, I am always a little suspicious: to ‘feel affirmed’ might be one more item in the list of consumer goods, so that they are left where they are, in a world of spiritual make-believe autonomy. To be ‘encouraged’, which is the abbatial role in the ‘Rule of St Benedict’, and by extension that of the headteacher, and the bishop, means instead to give people the space (sometimes, literally standing aside to make way for them) so that a new path can be trodden. Words come to mind that were a favourite of Bishop Kenneth Riches, who ordained me over thirty years ago, from Rudi Nureyev: ‘Far from being fixed, I am striving as hard as I can to find new possibilities to develop new sides of my nature – even to discover what that nature is – this is what I mean by freedom.’
Change
But the purpose of this, the last day of your conference, is to try to put the theme of ‘disturbed by the Spirit’ into some kind of school-as-church context. What I have given you so far is a rather sketchy series of observations, a thick description of some of the bits of a messy world that we may share. I know there are others: and next to consumerism, in my hierarchy of contemporary potential cancers, comes constant change. I have worked alongside teachers in every job I’ve had. There were Church Schools in both my Lincolnshire curacies; then there was the Manchester University chaplaincy, at the time of the Thatcher Government cuts, randomly chosen and brutally carried out, followed by nine years in Guildford, where we had a Church Middle School, and I was also on the governing body of the Royal Grammar School, and on the Girls High School local committee. Those latter three experiences certainly alerted me to the different levels of power involved. At the Church Middle School, we managed to survive – just – through the welter of governmental legislation and deluges of paperwork coming down from on high. At the High School, we could make recommendations, but the real power lay with the Central Council in London. However, at the Grammar School, if the Academic Committee wanted something done, and the Finance and General Purposes Committee said we could have the money, then it all happened. The results, consequently, varied a bit! And at a time of constant change, it was salutary to go from one school to another and compare how that sometimes destabilizing process operated – from successful survival in one case, through recommendation and (often) acceptance on high in another, to decisive action (usually) in another.
Education as Commodity
The same world hasn’t changed all that much in terms of its thrust and focus in the nine years I’ve been in Portsmouth, where we have just short of fifty Church Schools in different locations in South-East Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, a number of independent schools (some with Church links), as well as seven F.E. Colleges, and a large, bustling modern University. The same issues keep recurring, mainly expressed in consumerism’s principal secular brainchild – education as a commodity. Like consumerism, the word ‘commodity’ is easy to scorn. There is a good side to it: the syllabus needs precision and purpose, and if I’m in the business of theological education, I want to be sure that these new clergy have had some training in preaching, by which I mean several different styles, each with their own disciplines (discipleship again!), from the four minute ‘thought for the day’, to the more focused discourse of a length people will reasonably expect. I don’t want clergy who in their heart of hearts have given up on preaching, aided and abetted by a culture that instinctively mistrusts words when publicly spoken by anyone – especially if they are politicians. But a commodity-driven view of education can only end up by describing in one dimension only, ignoring the heart of what the whole exercise is about. When we were debating the Higher Education in the House of Lords last year, I made a strong (but in the end unsuccessful) attempt to include an amendment about the values of H.E.. This was partly to try to rescue a government milestone that was likely to be labeled as an exclusively ‘nuts and bolts’ enterprise (funding). But it was also to put down a marker about what it was all really for. Our Church lawyers told us it was going to be very difficult, and one of the reasons was that if such an amendment were included in the Bill, it would enable disgruntled consumers to take Universities to court for not having ‘delivered’ certain ‘goods’. As Margot Leadbetter used to say in ‘The Good Life’ all those years ago, ‘I rest my case.’
How can the commodity approach be addressed? I have already suggested its good points: people have a right to know where they are supposed to be going. But it does raise the question of the three-dimensional aspects of education, which I would describe as the ‘what’, the ‘how’, and the ‘why’. The ‘what’ is about content. The ‘how’ is about practice. Most successful modern educational programmes manage to combine these. They (roughly) correspond to ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ disciplines. If I can use an example in theological education, the ‘what’ of biblical theology is a basic familiarity with the texts of scripture, and the ‘how’ concerns different ways of interpreting – and using – scripture. But the ‘why’ question is the most vulnerable, because it is usually the least comfortable to deal with, and it also raises questions about religious identity, in which polite, English culture can take over, in order to ensure that they are ignored – sometimes under the guise of wanting to be ecumenical; I’m very much in favour of being truly ecumenical. As soon as we learnt that the Pope had died, my Roman Catholic colleague, Bishop Crispian Hollis and I were on the phone together, and he told me about the commemorative ecumenical service that’s being held in his Cathedral on this coming Sunday afternoon, to which I greatly look forward to going. Then, as a University Chaplain, I enjoyed taking students through the Methodist Covenant Service at the start of the calendar year, rather than try to forget about it, because the last thing we wanted was to be distinctively anything!
Stability
Commodity-driven education does run the risk of side-stepping deeper questions, and here I want to refer to another aspect of the Benedictine tradition – stability. By this I do not mean everything staying the same, and an excuse for burying our heads in the sand. To take an example from my own Church at the moment, some of the best opponents of the ordination of women to the priesthood are not those who are inwardly planning for a Third Province; they are those who remain very much part of the rest of the Church, cordially inviting women-ordaining bishops to their liturgical knees-ups, and they converse about the development of tradition in a calm and recollected way that reflects an inner spiritual self-confidence. Stability is about being able to cope with change, but in such a way that discerns when and where it will involve continuity, on the one hand, and discontinuity, on the other. Is that part of the syllabus, frankly, in need of change, if only because the member of staff has gone a bit stale? Will that particular A-level option be particularly appropriate next year because the field-trip – or the experiment in the laboratory – fits what is going on somewhere else? Stability is often what parents who have little to do with the Church and yet who want to get their children into a Church School really want to use as their description of what that school has which others don’t. Stability is about character, atmosphere, and the capacity to learn from mistakes. I once had to address a conference in Portsmouth to do with education. It was a highly secular gathering, so I had to tread carefully. But one of the hallmarks, as I saw it, of a good school, was a place where forgiveness could be known and shared. Not a quality that commodity-driven education will have a great deal of time for.
School as place of Mission
I want, now, finally, to make one or two specific observations about school as church, about which I both feel and think strongly. (Feeling and thinking are not always the same – in spite of the tendency of the spoof essay that explores all the options, but whose final paragraph begins with words invested with the authority of Moses with the tablets of stone – ‘however, I feel.’) You will probably have gathered by now that one of my hobbies is to debunk clichés, so here is another: ‘new ways of being church.’ As an historian, I find it hard to stomach, as it smacks of a kind of post-modern arrogance, which suggests that here are we at the start of the third millennium, so different from everything else, and the tradition of which we are a part – whether we like it or not – can all be discarded. There have been ‘new ways of being church’ for getting on for two thousand years, and the whole process will keep going on for as long as time lasts. The tools we have are precedent, in all their tantalizing and sometimes contradictory variations. However, they are not enough on their own – because we always have new opportunities. At their best, they occur when there is an imperceptible shift in the culture in which we are set. For my money, schools are going to figure more and more in the coming years, especially when new communities are being built, as I know from experience when discussion begins to centre around building a new Church School in an area of new development. Similarly, in down-town Portsmouth, our Church Secondary School, St Luke’s, has been pulled up from a difficult past, and is now the seventh most improved school in the country; and part of that process (but only a part) has been the way the diocese has taken its responsibility for the school with renewed vigour.
In the world of today, fragmented, crazy, speedy, superficial, and spiritually bleeding, the work of the gospel requires access points that are different from those wonderful narthexes that can be seen in the old Roman basilica churches of antiquity. Part of my job as a bishop is to be a kind of mobile narthex, pushing at doors in order to make life a bit easier for the local clergy, and encouraging the education enterprise in the diocese, and the church at large, as the focus of mission. This year, because of the early Easter, some of my clergy were unable to get to the Maundy Thursday Chrism Eucharist, because they were leading Holy Week courses in their local schools. Good for them, I say! We have become far too narrow in our definition of church in recent years, concentrating far too quickly and specifically on the Sunday morning congregation, as a kind of holy ghetto of the like-minded. I always look forward to ‘Year C’ in the new Sunday Lectionary (it will start again in Advent 2006) when we concentrate on Luke’s Gospel, rather than Matthew (as this year) or Mark (next year), because the Lucan view of the Church is so messy, so full of boundary-pushing: Luke the evangelist who is more likely than the others to bring in women, the poor, the lost – and at the cross, Jesus is portrayed as innocent in a way that is unique, and yet that innocence does not lead him into playing the victim (so often the game played nowadays in so many circumstances!), but rather the one who prays for the forgiveness of those who are crucifying him, and then soon takes care to welcome the penitent thief into his kingdom.
Conclusion
I cannot tell you the ‘how’ to be school as church, nor the ‘what’ to be school as church, but I can tell you the ‘why’. It is to do with access, and you have a golden opportunity, even if it is only to honour and notice with more spiritual clarity what many of you are doing already. As St Augustine said many centuries ago: ‘God seeks you rather than your gift.’
So I suppose one could say that being disturbed by the Spirit is the calling of the questing disciple – in any age.
