Diocesan Synod Address: 25th June 2005
How some things have changed
Ten years ago this June, a letter arrived at the Rectory in Guildford which set in chain the events that have resulted in me being here addressing you now. It’s tempting to start mentally writing one’s memoirs but my experience of other people’s memoirs is that they can be as uninteresting as some of their holiday snapshots! I want instead to make a few observations on three major areas of change over the past ten years, where, it seems to me, the Christian task is so to interpret them that we are able to see spiritual realities at work.
The first is about 9/11, as we keep being told it should be called. (Americans like to put the month first, then the year – we would describe it as 11/9 given half the chance, but I’ll leave it at that.) No one will forget where they were when they first knew about this awful disaster. If you’ve been to New York since, you’ll see the gaping hole where the World Trade Center buildings once existed, and the almost shrine-like aura that surrounds it. What the event symbolizes in a tragic and macabre way is the fact that religion is back on the world agenda. The old, tired secularist view has gone which says that as we all got richer and richer, we would become freer and freer of ancient fairy tales, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. Even on a purely functional basis, religion is now a reality about which every serious, intelligent person in the world needs to have some kind of education – if only to understand why other people believe and do things radically different from ourselves. This is what lay behind the initiative of Charles Clarke (a self-professed humanist) when as Education Secretary he launched plans that move away from the local syllabus towards a National Framework – which some of us hope will in time become a National Syllabus.
In the post-9/11 world, there is a potential pitfall which is about equating three quite distinct entities: ‘multi-faith’, which is about belief (Christian, Jew, Muslim), ‘multi-ethnic’, which is about ethnicity (English, Irish, Italian, Armenian), and ‘multi-cultural’, which is about much wider concerns (almonds in rice pudding before Christmas dinner in Denmark, or crispy noodles at a Chinese meal). The process then goes one step further and puts all of that into what is sometimes called ‘the faith blob.’ But the statistics when applied specifically to ‘faith’ (as distinct from ethnicity or culture) point in a slightly different direction. From the 2002 census, 71.7 % of the population claims to be Christian, with the Muslim community a far from close second at 3.1%. This is hardly the ‘multi-faith’ picture often painted in our newspapers, especially when their agenda sometimes appears to be about getting us off the scene altogether. And it’s all the more surprising when we consider that on the ground it is usually the Churches, and in particular the Church of England, that takes the initiatives to promote good relationships between different religious and ethnic groups. For myself, I’m glad that the ‘faith blob’ now exists, but I am a little uneasy about it. It’s good to see new developments over R.E., the ‘golden hello’ that will encourage more trainee teachers to specialize in this subject, and the seriousness with which employers are now taking this area as well. But we need to take care that the prophetic voice is able to sound, which is ready to challenge both the ‘purely functional’ view of religion, and a ‘commodity-driven’ view of education as a whole.
The second is about a shift away from short-termism. However we may view the result of the General Election, one of the recurring issues in political life and in many other areas as well is a growing scepticism about the short-term solution. In many ways the nation asked for it in the almost messianic welcome given to the Prime Minister after the 1997 Election, and now it all looks a bit tarnished a few years on. As a bit of an enthusiast myself, I’m aware of the danger of opening my mouth one moment, and then realizing that the matter in question is a bit more complicated and requires further thought and strategy – not that I’ve never encountered the ‘Sir Humphrey Appleby factor’ (nothing must ever be done for the first time), either in parish or diocesan life! I became wearied of being told about the supposed world of ‘real life’ in Guildford just because my previous job had been working in a University; and I have sat in the House of Lords and watched politicians jump into new course of action without thinking ahead.
It is at this stage that the Christian Church has to draw on the resources of Scripture, the teaching about the Kingdom of God, what St Augustine taught about what we may call the ‘long game’ when the Vandals were at the gates of his city in the early fifth century. Time and again I’ve pondered these truths and watched Christians opt for the attractive solutions: either retreat into a ghetto and scream at the rest of the world, or go with the flow and hope for the best. The most profoundly Christian alternative, however, is to hang in there, holding onto a belief in the redeemability not only of what surrounds us but of ourselves as well. As we ponder the (perhaps overpublicised) difficulties of the Anglican Communion, we can be sure that similar tensions exist in other world-wide Christians groups, including the Church of Pope Benedict XVI. But we need to go one step further with this ‘long-game’ perspective: as Rowan Williams keeps telling us, there’s not much lasting good that can be achieved from trying to purify Christianity by systematic exclusion, even though boundaries are – at the end of the day – necessary. History is too full of horrendous short-termist examples of the pure persecuting the impure. I live with the tension of the short-term and the long-term all the time, because there are always some things which need to be said and done now, or tomorrow or the day after. But in a world that both wants the short-term solution and is at the same time deeply mistrustful of it, I find myself trying to point to the long-term: that here we have no abiding city, but that we are stewards of the mysteries of God, and stewards have to hand things on to the next generation. We can perhaps be too ready to judge the past, while being tragically unaware of the fact that a coming generation may well judge us, with our mistrust of each other, and our tight bureaucratic structures that so often inhibit growth.
‘And finally’, as they say, there is the third change – focus…..which brings us to the K-word, KAIROS. Over recent weeks, Bishop’s Council has been giving a lot of time and thought to the Deanery KAIROS plans. It will be for another occasion to report more fully on these fruitful encounters. But I want to say, from the bottom of my heart, how grateful I am, and many, many others are, for the hard work – and thought and prayer - that this has involved. What I have been trying to get across in this process really stems from what I have just said about the post 9/11 world, where religion is increasingly an issue, and about the need to get the short-term things set in perspective from the long-term. KAIROS has, is, and will continue to be about working out manageable priorities – together, and not in isolation - for the practical work of Christian mission in our communities in all their variety. It is obvious that some parishes were there already, while others discovered facets of their communities they knew nothing about, whereas a very few – understandably – kicked against the process, because they thought they were being talked down to, or they found reasons to exclude themselves! What KAIROS is helping us as a diocese to do is keep alive a vision of the Kingdom of God, while at the same time matching it to local initiatives in a practical way, that relates to surrounding parishes, without every single Christian community thinking that it has to be a kind of GP that can and must do everything.
Focus is a much-used word. It is about concentration, in our case spiritual concentration, seeing detail that is often overlooked, and also having the courage and humility to stop doing some things – an exercise which the Church often finds quite hard. We’re not in the business of the Gospel if all we’re about is desperately seeking the world’s attention for our worthy deeds, with religion as a function or a commodity in society and no more. Nor are we here simply and solely to find attractive solutions to what can appear superficially as exclusively organizational problems. We are here to provide, with God’s grace, far more than a religious echo to the social changes that surround us, to which we ourselves contribute, sometimes unconsciously, every single day – important as these clearly are. Our business is fundamentally the Good News of Christ, our presenting symbol is the Cross, and our goal is the Kingdom of Heaven.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
