And so I could go on – good vision, good (very good) interviewer etc. But suffice to say Linda and Nick Castle, CLO coffee. Gayle has been doing some work with them and been taken with the integrity of vision. Oh and at the end of the video is a possibility of investing into their future.
Category: Stories
Off the Grid: Chris Cole
I did a most enjoyable (for me at least) interview for a podcast that will come out in a few weeks time. The interview was with Martin Purnell. When that is uploaded to the ‘Off Grid Christianity’ site I will give a link. He also the day before interviewed Noel Richards – I am sure that was good but could not possibly be as good as the one with me… I am of course not into comparisons! Likewise I will give a link to that when uploaded.
This morning Martin’s interview with Chris Cole was uploaded – link following:
https://www.podash.com/podcast/5594148/
Chris is a good friend and am sure there will be some good stuff in there.
The podcasts are aimed to connect with believers who do not feel they can connect to church, and there were five questions that were starter questions I had to answer… including my most embarrasing moment. Enjoy.
The power of stories
Second discussion with Michele and Steve…
The importance of story
Stories… I have just completed two interviews with Steve Lowton and Michele Perry on the nature, power, relevance of stories. Would have loved to have gone for a few hours – fascinating responses from them both… Hopefully in this and the next video there is enough to stimulate your own thoughts.
I have come to believe
Our beliefs about God change, and change they must as we understand something fresh about the ‘mystery’ that is God. I from time to time listen to Peter Enns and his podcasts. Peter describes himself as a ‘German left-brained’ person, and he has both a serious intellect and an honesty that led him to resign from a career position. This podcast is worth listening to in its own right and in the light of the previous posts I think it carries a relevance here. I pick up on one aspect:
[John Wesley] He’s the 18th-Century founder of the Methodist movement. And the Quadrilateral is, I mean one way of putting it, it’s a way of explaining how we arrive at our beliefs about God. And quadrilateral, there are four things that sort of work together and they’re scripture, our tradition that we’re a part of, our reasoning ability, and our life experiences. So, scripture, tradition, reason, experience. And these four things, they’re always influencing each other, or better, they interpenetrate each other. None exists in isolation from the others, and none can just survive on its own.
For example, if we’re trying to understand whether, say, let’s just pick a totally hypothetical scenario, if we’re trying to understand whether one can be gay and a Christian, what are you going to do? Well, one is certainly going to engage scripture, that’s part of the church’s tradition, the church at large, you don’t ignore the Bible, you’re always dealing with it somehow. But how one engages scripture is informed by, well, the particular Christian tradition that we might be a part of. It’s also influenced by our ability to reason through things and discern. And it’s also influenced by our experiences as human beings. The life of faith involves not just reading the Bible and like getting objective truth from it, but rather, it involves our whole being, our traditions, our reasoning and our experiences. That’s why people who differ can actually enlighten each other. We bring different things to the table, different angles from which to look at something very complicated.
Another aspect that I found interesting in the podcast was his consideration that historically evangelicalism grew as a reaction to fundamentalism, and that evangelicalism has in many parts collapsed into fundamentalism, so much so that he maintains that there are numerous people on the ‘born again’ side of things who could not be described historically as evangelical.
Kath Baldock: Untangling the Mess
I have another post coming out tomorrow. This video though is worth looking at to get some idea about the history of how ‘homosexuality’ has been defined and responded to.
You Cant Co Opt This Story
Note from Martin: Latest post by Gaz below and here is a link to a guest article he wrote for “iwitnesschildmigration / Understanding the journeys of unaccompanied minors in Europe”. (Click on Image.)
I used to be really into the Church Unity stuff, the one diverse church in the locality working together and all that jazz. I guess I feel there are bigger things at stake now than our ability to get on across tribes and doctrines, so it’s slipped from view for some years now.
Part of my desire was to see stories released which could be a collective mirror for the church to look into and know that good things are happening, new things, different paradigms and approaches.
A team of us would pull together a glossy forty-page magazine and distribute 2,500 of them across our local Bournemouth churches. In truth it was naughty and subversive in that it told stories and opened up approaches to faith and action that were unlikely to be told from many of the those church platforms.
What did it accomplish? We did 4 of these, perhaps 100 stories and simply put I have no clue at all as to who or what it impacted. Perhaps the church has to many stories already, which exist for its own edification.
I went through a paradigm shift of my own in the following years in terms of how stories could be told to my own housing estate. I had managed to secure some funding for a local community group to create a simple magazine for the immediate community of 5,000 in our split private and council home estate.
The local church were involved, the pastor got to do a preach on the inside cover and then there were an uncomfortable amount of articles about things which took place in the church, and almost zero about what took place in the large community centre the opposite side of the same car park.
I found myself becoming resentful of the church co-opting a community resource to place its own story as centre stage. The conversation I had with myself was triggered when I heard a pastor I knew talking about his model for community, a story of having people come to live with him, for some close proximity invasive mentoring and other ideas.
What went through my mind was, ‘that’s another bloody church story’, as though we have the monopoly on stories of life and light, believing these are the key to transforming and loving our localities. In reality, I knew two women in my own street who lived in extended family situations, they took in other peoples kids, housed waifs and strays, not as a model, not for the next self aggrandising talk… just because.
I never did create a vehicle for my own communities stories, but every opportunity I had where I heard of a Christian group telling its own stories back to the community at large, I bullied them as best I could to allow the community to tell its own stories of life and light, back to itself.
Why? Because they are there, those stories exist, they need affirming and perhaps the community has a more significant role in healing itself than we understand.
During this time of inner processing, I was helping Barry, the neighbour two doors down from me. I was doing some welding for his fair ground rides, games and other attractions. He took me in for a cup of tea and I was shocked to see all these pictures around the lounge, him with celebrities, him getting awards and medals from newsreaders and others. I was amazed that his quiet life just two doors down was actually one of raising hundreds of thousands to provide electric wheelchairs to those who could not afford them.
I think it was around 3 years before his death that he got a letter from the Queen to come and receive an OBE (order of the British empire) at the Palace, in recognition of his years of service to the disabled community.
The crazy thing is, there are magnificent layers of goodness you can find if you simply look and listen to those we often pass on our way to work or on our way to church. I was already screaming inside ‘these are the stories of life and light that must be told, of the ordinary extraordinary people around us. Stories, which will help a community view itself as ‘well’ and ‘living’ and inspire courage’.
Then he drops this bit of news on me, as my dunked rich tea biscuit breaks off and floats too quickly out of sight for me to grab it, “That’s two of us in town now, that have OBE’s, the other one is Janet, she was doing really great stuff, we grew up together in the same orphanage…”!
I was undone; I lived next to this guy for 15 years and knew little of the redemptive life that was taking place in and through this formerly abandoned son.
We do not have a monopoly on hope, life and self-sacrifice. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, it is not the story of the ‘separated off from life’ church that will bring a community to transformative beauty; it is the stories that it can tell back to itself.
I’m not looking to diminish our own stories, but ours are one of many. It is my sincerest hope, that we do have stories to tell, which are of life and light.
Remember this though, I think we are in trouble if the best stories we ‘do’ tell, are someone else’s, or just plain old. That’s something I’m saying back to myself as I write this ☺
Tight Rope Decisions
The post below is reproduced by permission. It is posted anonymously and was published in an internal privately publication. It speaks deeply beyond the situation concerning decisions that have huge ramifications, and as it relates to the current pandemic speaks right into now. Knowing people who have lost loved ones to the virus, others who are still struggling with symptoms months after being tested positive, as well as those who have had the virus and recovered, all underlines how difficult an epoch we are living in. In difficult and easier times decisions that have ramifications remain.
The young girl in the back seat of our car stares out of the window. Her long hair frames a petit face that is almost completely covered by a large, surgical mask. A sad and strange silhouette in the encroaching darkness. This morning she was in lock down with her mother. Now she is being driven miles away from her home town by my husband and I. To the girl, we are surgically masked strangers, labelled foster carers. A Covid 19 related cardiac arrest has changed this 12 year old’s world in seconds.
Arriving home we view our small house and single bathroom. Protection from the virus is going to be impossible. We cannot wear PPE equipment 24/7. We cannot wear it in the bathroom.
We take our masks off and the action becomes a symbolic moment for me. Our exposed faces and the threat of the virus shows me, more clearly, that we have never been wholly in control of our lives. I also wonder how free we ever are from the false, ego masks we choose to wear. Masks that hide our truer selves from others.
The girl says, “I think it is my fault my mother died… If only I had called the ambulance earlier.”
Her self accusation and extreme loss, alongside our agony of not being able to physically touch her, is heart breaking.
We light a candle and pray together. The flickering flame mirrors our vulnerability and seems to connect us a little. For me, this quiet togetherness is both honouring and humbling.
The girl has a slight temperature and we offer her paracetamol and a hot drink before bed. I ask her if she has anything belonging to her mother with her. Something she can take to bed. Something of her mother’s she can hold. She says she has her mother’s rosary and then she climbs the stairs to her new bedroom.
I clear the kitchen, the death of the girl’s mother and the possibility of one of us falling ill or even dying is on my mind.
My teenage son looks into the kitchen and says, quite cheerfully, “You realise there are different forms of this virus and the one we’re exposing ourselves to killed someone? Just saying. Good night.”
Sometimes decisions are made on a tight rope between our responsibilities. Without hindsight to guide us we balance precariously on the rope, fearful of the consequences of our choices and, also, the judgements of ourselves and others. Self-forgiveness is difficult.
I blow the candle out and knock quietly on the girl’s door to say good night.
Over the next fourteen days we remain well and people commend us for our courage but if one of us had died, what then? What would people have said then?
Shepherding the Field
This is the Field
Here is the first post from Gaz Kishere. I have known Gaz n Vic (Gaz is the rather tall gentleman in the photo… and Vic – come on you can work it out!) for some 20 or so years, back when they lived in Bournemouth, and in recent years have heard bits and pieces about what they are up to in Athens. I asked Gaz if he would stick a few posts up here this month. Enjoy!
By way of an introduction my name is Gaz Kishere, dunked a Baptist at 18, Anglicanised because they let me play drums at 22, then a decade exploring the 90’s phenomenon of youth church in club culture and all things church unity.
Somewhere in there we managed to have 4 children and now have 4 grand children.
What I write below are really glimpses of my journey which I hope will provoke interest and folks will push me to draw down my learning. Till now, in terms of speaking back to the body, I am largely silent.
It was 1993, I was told that I had a face like a slapped arse when Roger and Sue Mitchel prayed a Pastoral anointing over me. To me it seemed that during the secret Santa hand out i’d been given a Mrs Miggins Pie Shop embossed tea towel. Nothing of that title spoke of daring adventure or dynamism.
The last three years of my life in organised Christianity was spent as pastor of our ragamuffin crew of co-workers and people we had helped navigate a way from institutionalism to find, for me, we had only travelled a few feet from such ideas.
It was a beautiful human being from YWAM called Jeff Pratt showing up in town which was the final nail in the coffin. He was one of those troubling empathic Jesus types who asks actual questions, ones where everything in you rushes to your mouth to share the truth. ‘Hows things with you guys’? he asked ‘Awful’ I replied , ‘we are burned out and feel total fakers, do we wait to be found out or just confess that we don’t really do people’.
We had considered stepping back for a few months now, doing it all properly, a smiling face handover masking the trauma. Jeff asked how long do you have left in you… my answer ‘Two Weeks !’
It was unfair of me as an extreme introvert who has learned to engage for the sake of others, to suggest I don’t enjoy being around people. I would not discover for another decade that it was simply the wrong context, the fold. We had overstayed beyond our shelf life and my memory of it is that we left with our hair on fire, running.
After 6 years working in community development and counter human trafficking (sex exploited children), my wife and I felt compelled to work in Athens where we have been engaged in the refugee crisis for the last 4 years.
I would like to suggest that this dislodging from the known and the inherited was prophetic and at no point was born out of a desire to leave church, but to pursue it. It was and continues to be a revelation to me what constraints I have had to cast off along the way. I would though have to confess that as one who organised the body to gather in prayer and seek prophetic pathways, I could no longer pray for God to make a space for us, the saints, and for nobody to walk in and occupy it. This was a conflicted time for me trying to live more holistically, move forwards and at the same time not wanting to cause more wounds in the land or to the body.
My first formal meeting in Athens to discuss Child Protection from exploitation would set the scene for most of our time here. I met a young lady in a coffee shop to discuss doing a workshop with unaccompanied Iranian and Afghan minors.
15 minutes into conversation she broke down in tears, talking about burn out and dysfunctions in team and the project.
Have you ever felt made for a moment? I felt like the accumulation of everything I had done, every season I had walked through, my dislodging from inherited thinking and structures was for now.
I simply said ‘I can help with that, I can help with all of that if you let me’.
Since that moment I have been working with grass roots projects, workers, leaders, founders in what I can only refer to as helping them come to fullness.
I invest in them, and I work with them to challenge and uproot ‘life and outcomes limiting structures and organisational cultures’.
I view all of these people, none of them Christian, to be about the work of the Kingdom. All of whom fight for justice, stand between the oppressor and the oppressed, people who break themselves at the feet of the least and the disinherited.
It is in this field, I can finally accept the words ‘shepherd’, and I have.
Everything that is both right and wrong about organised Christianity has prepared me to arrive here and be useful. Having said this, it is my current opinion that very little of organised Christianity can help me stand here. It is not the well that I drink from, nor the context of my learning.
I have deeply imbedded myself amongst those who have not needed to re enter the land nor come from no such alternative universe as the church. They have only, always dwelled fully in the creation, responding to its groans.
I have undergone an immersion, a re baptism back into culture, back into society alongside Kingdom people. The reality of those I see, and what they do, it screams to me that these were their works, prepared in advance for them to do at their conception. I know there is no kingless kingdom, but I cannot ever say they do not flow from the same king as I.
I stand with ordinary extraordinary people who are getting on with it.
This is the field.
Our Fears…
If you are European a great weekly resource is Jeff Fountain’s weekly newsletter from The Schuman Centre for European Studies. In my inbox this morning came False Expectations Appearing Real. At a recent summit Dr Katrine Camilleri gave a blistering talk. She works in Malta right at the centre of the migration route from Lybia. She said:
For a country the size of a rock these arrivals strain not only our logistical capacities but also our longstanding tradition of hospitality. It is a little ironic that the country that prides itself on having welcomed St. Paul with unusual kindness, as the Acts of the Apostles tells us, welcomes these arrivals by locking them up in detention centres.
Migrants were held in detention in some cases up to 18 months. The conditions were completely substandard. The centres were overcrowded. People didn’t have access to basic services, which we knew were desperately needed.
Walls
Many, she said, were fleeing war and massive violation of human rights. The journey itself made many of them pass through hardships difficult to imagine. Many were legally entitled to international protection. Katrine couldn’t but ask if receiving these people who turned up at our doors asking for help was not completely out of sync, completely incongruent with our self-perception and with our European values?
The response of the EU to the asylum seekers who came through Greece in 2015 was much the same, she continued. Although we are part of a Union founded on the core values of solidarity and respect of human rights and human dignity, we saw states acting alone, refusing to see this as a European challenge and refusing to develop a common and effective response.
‘European states are still responding by putting up walls,’ Katrine said. ‘We put up these walls to protect ourselves from real or perceived threats to our culture, to our Christian values and heritage, to our stability, to our comfort and possibly to our security. Walls in many shapes and forms: border walls, ever more sophisticated and militarized border control measures, agreements with third countries such as Turkey, and Libya, countries where asylum seekers can’t find effective protection. The list is endless.
‘These walls are, in part, the result of indifference. Pope Francis talks repeatedly about the culture of indifference, which doesn’t allow us to see the needs of the other, much less to empathize with them. Fear makes you completely unable to think of anything else except your own protection. Everything looks like a threat and you respond accordingly. You put up walls to protect yourself.
Less human
‘On the individual as well as on the national level, fear leads us to build walls and makes us incapable of looking beyond our own self-preservation, to the needs of the people who are going to be affected by those walls.
‘I don’t want to minimise the challenges posed by large numbers of arrivals. The challenges are real. People worry that it will change Europe, and I say they are probably right. But I believe that what will change us is how we choose to react to this challenge. We can choose to put up walls, to react out of fear, out of an instinct for self-preservation or we can choose to welcome, to receive the people who are arriving at our shores, who are fleeing as we ourselves would want to be treated.
‘Reacting out of fear is also very problematic for what it does to us. Fear prevents us from seeing refugees arriving at our borders as people, as individuals with needs and with rights. Dead people at the border, arbitrary detention and miserable conditions, ill-treatment, abuse: what to do? Fear allows us to assume that the violation of human rights is in certain circumstances necessary and justified. Fear allows us to dehumanize the refugees and close our eyes to their needs and suffering, which we are obliged by law to respond to. We are obliged by law to protect and assist refugees.
‘Not only the face of Europe is changed but our soul. We become less human. We turn to the opposite of what we profess as individuals and as a Union, which is supposedly founded on solidarity and respect for human rights. We respond in a way that is anything but Christian even if we do it ironically to protect our Christian heritage.’