Education Sunday Sung Eucharist at Bury St Edmunds Cathedral
Sunday 23rd January 2005
Readings: I Cor 1:10-18/Mt 4:12-23
When I was first ordained, the town in which I served was full of Church Schools. Every member of staff on the Team had a school assigned to them. In my case, it was an Infant School not far from where we lived. Every Wednesday morning, I would walk along there, and lead an assembly, after which I took a class of the older children, and then had coffee with the teachers. It was the expected thing to do, and I was but one of a succession of young clergy who went there. The trouble is that I had no preparation for the experience at all – barring one assembly on a College placement; and I certainly had no prior knowledge of how to look after a class. All I was given was a work-book called ‘Peter’s Two Families’ (the Peter in question had an earthly family, but he also had a heavenly one as well); and for each of the three years I was in that post, I went through the book. On the surface, it was all pre-programmed. But I woke up every Wednesday terrified, not just of the head-teacher and staff, but of the children as well. Gradually both sides managed to calm me down and tame me. Instead of being given an assembly-theme each time I went, I began to use my own material. I gained some confidence in what I was doing, so much so that by the time I moved on, I really looked forward to my visits. Whenever I go to an Infant School in the Portsmouth diocese, the old techniques begin to come back.
What I’ve just accurately described to you is a kind of off-beat example of the historic partnership between Church and Education that has existed in one form or another for centuries. For all the difficulties that continue, whether over finance, personnel, or even ideology, we can be justly proud of the specific contribution the Church of England and the Church in Wales have made to the founding of schools up and down the country since the National Society was set up in 1811 – at a time when the Government had, shall we say, other priorities. And in what has since then become the Cathedral of Bury St Edmunds, all can be profoundly thankful that the tradition of pilgrimage which made the medieval Abbey here so famous lives on in the number of visitors from schools, not just Church Schools, from all over Suffolk who regularly come here to glimpse, to watch, to sense, to learn and to pray – helped on by the Discovery Centre. Never underestimate the longterm benefits of this seed-sowing work: the churches I visited in my childhood and youth were always most enjoyable when I felt welcome, where I thought there was something for me, and if there was some colour and movement telling me how it was used – which created an impression that I was in a building that was not a monument to truths discarded long ago.
All this makes me ask the question: what does the partnership between Education and Church mean in real terms in a much-changed world? A world of budgets, of politics, of a Government keen to build more Church Schools not out of any historic deference, but because of our track-record: we attract and we deliver. This is, after all, why when new legislation is under discussion, the Churches (and, where appropriate, the other faith leaders) are nearly always brought in on the scene at an early stage. Against the weight of history, there are real opportunities, but how do we do it?
The answer, curiously, comes from this morning two readings – which, I hasten to add, were not specifically chosen for today. We have, instead, bumped into them! In the epistle, Paul has just started getting going on the awkward, cliquey and muddled congregation at Corinth: he is drawing attention to an important ingredient for the running of any effective organization. Don’t get distracted into personality cults, whether it is Paul, Apollos, Cephas, or anyone else. If we are going to get hung up on who has done what, rather than why and how it has been done, or should be done in the future, we are not going to get very far. Then in the gospel-passage, we are just beginning to get going on Jesus’ adult ministry: two pairs of brothers, each pair a firm of fishermen, he calls to follow him. But note what they are getting up to as Jesus walks by: Peter and Andrew are casting their nets (in other words, they are doing the actual job of fishing), whereas James and John are repairing their nets (in other words, they are doing the preparation, the equivalent nowadays in other walks of life of some kind of training course).
Those two scenarios together take us further. Who are we to trust, Paul, Apollos, Cephas – or Estelle Morris, Charles Clarke, Ruth Kelly, for that matter? Trust – public trust – is not in great supply. Perhaps too many publicly spoken words (clergy, teachers and politicians are all very good at talking, bishops too, because we haven’t stopped being clergy) have made most people instinctively disbelieve any new idea that is articulated, until it is worked out in practice. The Christian faith lays great claims to truth – not in all the actions of human beings, and certainly not from its adherents, but in the sheer fact of God, and the experience of Christ, and how those two realities fit together. Perhaps we would be prepared to trust more if we were prepared to recognize the provisionality of this life, and that life’s givens are few and far between.
Then, to turn to the gospel once more, are we too engrossed in doing the job (casting the nets), or going on some kind of course (repairing them)? Here again the sheer grind of running a school, or an educational course in lay development, or a training scheme, can sometimes distract us from what it is all really for, namely the spiritual growth, the heightening of awareness, the creative imagining of the truth of God and the work of Christ in us now. No artificial wedge can be driven between the grind and the vision: that wedge only begins to appear when we ourselves become aware that something is missing. It’s like some of the debates we keep having about worship, whether in school or parish: a new libretto won’t change things overnight, but what might be a good start is a deeper waiting upon God, with silence, fewer words, and perhaps fewer hymns and songs that say very little and challenge or evoke even less.
Who can we trust, and how can we be less burdened by the daily slog of keeping going? These are questions that are pertinent not just to teachers. You will find them on the lips of many others as well. I am not arguing for an inbuilt cynicism: scepticism in any case is a more respectable variant in my book! Nor am I suggesting that some upper world of unreality should supersede the needful task of, say, ensuring that the supply-teacher knows where to go, or the lollypop lady has been told when the INSET days are to be. But in what is in all likelihood going to be a General Election year, questions of public trust and whether the latest new initiative is going to deliver what needs to be delivered have to be asked. Remember: Jesus did not take on the whole world at once, with a programme for universal change in every aspect of life. Instead, like a good teacher, he used stories, and he asked questions, some of which are so pertinent that they have not gone away, because we ourselves have failed to answer them.
Let me illustrate these two issues through a meeting that took place in Portsmouth a few years ago. Various schools were asked to speak about their identity, and what was important to them. As you can imagine, given the makeup of the city, and the relatively small number of Church Schools, the responses were interesting and varied. I was wheeled on as the local bish, not to provide all the answers – Portsmouth is not like that anyway. What they wanted was a gentle but firm statement of what Christianity might be able to provide for the identity of education. It was one of those occasions when I really was scratching my head; if I come down heavy, I thought, they won’t like it, and if I’m too light, they’ll think me superficial. Contributions were proceeding apace, with some moving (and show-stealing) presentations from some of the students. In the end when I got up to speak, I said that for me, Christianity told me how important it was to recognize that when things go wrong, we shouldn’t be too surprised, and it was how we picked up the pieces afterwards that was the biggest challenge; and if a school were a place of forgiveness, then there was real hope for the future.
So perhaps the foundation of real trust is when it can survive being strained; and the really lasting way in which we can handle drudgery is to practise the complementary skill of awareness that there is, indeed, a bigger picture, of which we ourselves are a part, which some of call the Church. Every aspect of contemporary life struggles with these, and it is one of the reasons why, for example, the new RE Framework was dreamt up: not to tell everyone what to do, but to provide some kind of pattern for when people move from one part of the country to another, as well as the need to increase the seriousness of the subject, and thereby build a strategy that may in turn provide more teachers in the future.
At the end of the day, none of us is a finished product, and nor is the planet which we inhabit – as the Tsunami tragedy has brought home to us. We can’t put earthquakes and volcanoes into the filofax. There is an unpredictability about life that suddenly makes us aware that attitudes are changing – and religion, whatever the secularists may say, is back on the world agenda. Religion, yes, though not a do-it-yourself self-help exercise, which is all about me, me, me. That is the reason why I suggested at that Portsmouth gathering that forgiveness, and coping with failure, were necessary parts of being a good school, a strong faith, a mature humanity. That may be why our epistle reading ends with Paul speaking of the cross as sheer folly to this world, and inexplicable to it; and why our gospel passage began with Jesus preaching the good news, not of a success-culture, at all costs, but of repentance, and a kingdom not of this world, but of heaven.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
