Category: Blog

Churches Weekly Newsletter – No.130, 9 October 2022

Around here generous people are giving towards our local food banks (two examples being those who next Saturday will support the WI Coffee Morning at Austwick, and today will contribute to the offering at Clapham’s harvest social this weekend) and it’s valued greatly, and increasingly needed. As mentioned above, it's an awful feature of our current situation that food bank donations continue to drop just as more and more people are needing to use them. Some food banks are reporting that what they have to give out has halved in recent months whilst demand has doubled.

A further squeeze on provision is that supermarkets are striving to be more efficient and waste less, in order to keep prices for their customers low – which is in itself a good thing of course, but also means that they now have less excess to offer food charities. Food waste charity Fareshare has told the BBC it has seen a drop of around 200 tonnes in supermarket surplus donations every month; they are writing to major supermarkets, asking for an increase in contributions.

You may have seen the Six O'Clock News item this week which highlighted this challenge to the supermarkets, and featured an interview with Reverend Christine Threlfall, of St James Church in Broughton, Salford, whose Place of Welcome project offers free hot dinners as well as a £2.50 pantry for locals in need, "a real mix of people: pensioners, young families, working people and the unemployed," she says. "They all have one thing in common. Prices are skyrocketing but their income is the same.” 

Demand for help at Broughton's Place of Welcome has doubled since the pandemic. Christine and her team of volunteers have seen queues round the block. She says Fareshare food is a lifeline for desperate residents, but it needs to be "the right food": ie, ready meals and simple suppers which don’t take much costly energy to prepare, or big stew ingredients which volunteers can cook to dish out at the church.

There’s good will all round in this scenario. Volunteers are as dedicated as ever. Supporters are doing the best they can. Supermarket spokespeople say they remain committed to supporting community projects as best they can. There’s also a sharpening of perspective which was well expressed by Christine Threlfall, who said, “Supermarkets and businesses and growers are doing their very best to support our food banks and food charities but it is not their responsibility to hold up the welfare state. The government needs to address the fact that people have not got the money to buy food.”

FareShare has a plan to help tackle the cost of living crisis using England’s surplus food. “By spending £25 million a year, the government could deliver an additional 42,500 tonnes of surplus food, the equivalent of 100 million meals, to the people worst hit by the cost of living crisis.: Fareshare are asking us to write to our MP to ask them to support their Cost of Living Crisis Appeal (please click link for more details). 

 

Churches Weekly Newsletter No.127, 18 September 2022

People often remark on how the death of a parent can be a psychological watershed. Suddenly there is a sense of being on the front line, without the generation ahead of you offering some sort of protection against mortality and drastic change. It doesn’t even have to be the death of a literal physical parent; losing an older adult who has helped shape your identity and your aspirations can have a similar effect.

This surely is part of the reason for the rapidity with which royal transitions are managed. A new monarch is announced and publicly acclaimed within 36 hours or so. There is no vacuum in which to brood on loss and disorientation. But I suspect that the death of Queen Elizabeth has been, for a lot of people, an experience hard to process quite that quickly. Polly Toynbee wrote perceptively in the Guardian that mourning such a long-lived figure was going to be deeply bound up with both grieving and accepting our own histories of loss; not a matter to be rushed.

It is not sentimentality to compare the Queen’s death with the death of a parent. We spend a lot of our lives dealing with the legacy of relations with our parents, from idolising to rebelling to accepting, perhaps ultimately to understanding something about them and about ourselves.

Good parents, like good therapists and priests, will develop ways of handling this variegated emotional process, recognising projection, recognising their own complicated feelings about it, learning to carry on and not be paralysed by guilt or resentment, or seduced by adulation. The Queen’s resolutely stoical and reticent style was not always popular (remember those telling cries of “Show us you care!” at the time of Princess Diana’s death), but one thing that could never be said of her was that she basked in celebrity.

Gradually, for some even grudgingly, the realisation grew that she was not driven by the need to be adored. … Yet she also held a completely uncompromising belief that it was necessary that she be there and be who she was, a belief rooted, without apology, in her religious conviction. That conviction was nothing to do with a sense of spiritual exceptionality, let alone of infallible wisdom or unchallengeable power. It simply grounded her capacity to weather public changes or crises, private griefs, popularity and unpopularity.

She believed she needed to be there. Not everyone would agree, as she well knew. Her being there, as some have observed, could sometimes shield the nation from noticing just how dysfunctional the rest of society was becoming. But the idea that societies and individuals alike still need images of stable anchorage, of fidelity, that aren’t subject to any kind of glamour contest is not a stupid or reactionary one. Imagining and valuing human solidarity as such is nourished by institutions that do not depend on the glamour of compelling public personalities and their success in making (some) people feel good. Sometimes the Queen made us feel good and sometimes she didn’t, or didn’t do so immediately (Diana again). That was never the point. The point was a relationship as prosaically taken-for-granted as parenthood.

Thinking about this strange quasi-parental role, which the Queen understood in such unfashionably religious terms, just might help us think about our need for communities, practices and institutions in society – voluntary societies and charities, faith groups, the arts, the academy – that have a capacity to keep our eyes on something more enduring than the popularity vote. As politics and entertainment seem to coalesce in the shallows of populism, our perhaps reluctant recognition of what the Queen represented may offer a lesson about what is needed for political – not to mention personal – maturity.

—- Rowan Williams, The Queen had an unwavering belief in the necessity of her strange, parent-like role. New Statesman, 14 September 2022

Churches Weekly Newsletter, 11 September 2022

The Leeds Diocesan Clergy Conference took place this week at Liverpool Hope University. This was the first gathering of all Leeds clergy in six years; we were accommodated in student rooms on the Hope Park Campus. Contributiors included The Archbishop of York Rt Revd Stephen Cottrell, historian Tom Holland, hymn writer, liturgist and broadcaster Revd John Bell, journalist Samira Ahmed and broadcaster and social entrepreneur Ngunan Adamu. Their varied presentations were each remarkable in their own way and each added a good deal to the overriding theme – one of hope. 

The narrative of hope spills out from our scriptures, not least The Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise to a God who turns around the expectations of all society’s lowly outsiders in the truest act of levelling-up imaginable. The Archbishop based his talk on this text (Luke 1:44-56) and over the course of the conference it re-emerged in various forms in our worship and in discussions with other guest speakers. 

One of these was Ngunan Adamu, a remarkable ‘Nigerian Scouser’ who, following the promptings of the divine spirit has overcome many societal barriers to become a successful radio presenter and producer and an award winning entrepreneur  as founder of the iWoman Academy, which uses radio training to empower and build confidence in women. 

Another, quite different, speaker was the historian Tom Holland, whose epic 2019 book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind makes the strong case that “Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history; that Christianity's enduring impact upon the West can be seen in the emergence of much that has traditionally been cast as its nemesis: in science, in secularism, and even in atheism.” For an agnostic Holland is an astonishingly enthusiastic evangelist for the Christian faith and he encouraged his clergy audience to celebrate the wonderful strangeness of Christianity and the many positive effects it continues to have as its influence plays out in the life of the world.

Through these rich exchanges and many others we were left convinced that despite the pressures to consume and conform, hope is present in the lives of so many faithful people, and that, to paraphrase Archbishop Stephen, God couldn't be more bored by our society’s empty rituals or glowing self assessments; rather His joy is in creating a new community, a new humanity who see ourselves as God sees us: valued and loved, and full of hope.

On arriving home from the conference the news emerged of the death of Queen Elizabeth II; news which provokes great sadness at the loss of one whose steadying, uniting, caring presence has enriched all our lives. But with all the subsequent reflections on Her late Majesty's life and character, the theme of hope continued: the firm hope of eternal life for Elizabeth with all the saints in the faith she held so dearly; and as King Charles succeeds his mother, hope emerges in that she has clearly prepared him very well for the role of monarch. As we worship God together this weekend and give thanks for Queen Elizabeth's life and pray for King Charles and the Royal Family, we do so holding fast to that hope, through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Churches Weekly Newsletter, 28 August 2022

I have been acting senselessly this week. "What, even more than usual?" you might ask. Yes, inasmuch as I've joined the many who have discovered that having Covid means losing all sense of smell and taste. These are two senses which I have undervalued until this recent experience of losing them. It's disconcerting and frustrating having to postpone the pleasures of sampling those Mugicha cold barley teas and Yamagata peach candies I brought back from Sendai, and also having to postpone the delight of breathing in the Yorkshire air again: even on those days when (I'm told) the less pleasant odours are emanating from the fields. 
This - hopefully only temporary - loss helps me appreciate all the more those senses we have and the way they each add layers to our experience of life; it gives me more insight into the challenges daily addressed by  those who have permanently lost a sense, the feeling of exclusion they must face.
We all know people who, having lost the use of one sense, have remarkably compensated by developing another sense in unforseen ways. Whenever such people tell their redemptive stories, they share good news, says Jesus: "Go and tell John that the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor preach the gospel", he says.
An old Scottish prayer at the start of the day begins with these words:
"Bless to me, O God, each thing mine eye sees;
Bless to me, O God, each sound mine ear hears;
Bless to me, O God, each odour that goes to my nostrils; 
Bless to me, O God, each taste that goes to my lips…" (Alexander Carmichael, ed, Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations from the Gaelic).
I always take inspiration from these words, even whilst questioning how it can be possible that some particularly bad sights, sounds, tastes, smells, can bring blessing. But it ispossible.
The wonderful writer Frederick Buechner, who died on August 15 aged 96, always managed to find heaven in the ordinary things of life, the spiritual in the physical. In Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation, he offers the following sage advice which you'll notice embraces all the senses. It's an encouragement to us to always cherish the sensual – as fully as you are able to: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” 

Clapham Village Newsletter, August / September 2022

I am writing this during a record heatwave. Which makes it likely, given our weather, that you’ll be reading this during a snowstorm. But the reality is unquenchable: whilst temperatures always  fluctuate, overall, heat is steadily rising. Increasingly our weather maps show a blistering bright red. We have been playing with fire for too long to be good for the earth.

There has always been fire, writes scientific historian Stephen J. Pyne. But, “Over the past two million years … one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet.”

Professor Pyne shows how the ancient, balanced, relationships between humans and fire “broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass – lithic landscapes – and humanity's firepower became unbounded.” He proposes that “fire-catalysed climate change” created a new geologic epoch. “The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene.” ¹

It’s no fantasy that the ‘lithic landscapes’ of the fossil fuel age are finite: we are at or near ‘peak oil’. What may yet prove to be infinite are the practical values of the ‘old ways’. I’m encouraged by those neighbourhood groups across the world who are working out practical methods to help their communities become self-sufficient for a cooler future without oil. ‘Transitioning’ means rekindling the old ways of any particular locale help to reignite a gentler economy of life. 

In his inveterate farmer’s wisdom Wendell Berry encourages us not to be consumed by the insoluble abstractions of “global thinking”, of “how to care for the planet”. “Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence,” he says, and he invokes this set of modest actions as ways to begin turning the temperature down:

“Learn to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made. Put the interest of the community first. Love your neighbours – not the neighbours you pick out, but the ones you have. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighbourhood, and household – which thrive by care and generosity – and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.” ²

 

Notes

¹ Stephen J. Pyne, Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next. University of California Press 2021. 

² Wendell Berry, ‘Word and Flesh’ in The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. Penguin: Allen Lane 2017.

Churches Weekly Newsletter, 17 July 2022

God, Covid and the airlines all being willing, Diana and I shall be spending time with family in Japan over the coming weeks, and also by invitation speaking at Christ Church Ayashi-chuo, Sendai (with our daughter-in-law Naoko providing translation). As you may know, Naoko and our son Gary are Christian missionaries there, and they attend this Japanese Lutheran church.
The theme of that talk owes itself to what many people here in the Dales say is their favourite piece of scripture: Psalm 121, 'I lift up my eyes to the hills, where shall my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth…..' Like us in upland England, the people of Ayashi-chuo live in the foothills of some of Japan's high places. A difference is that whilst we daily lift up our eyes to see our hillsides peppered with sheep, every day when the residents of Ayashi-chuo lift up their eyes they see a massive golden Buddha shining from a hillside shrine above them.
It is not an unusual sight there. Christianity is a tiny minority religion in Japan, whose peoples have forever sought help from the heaven and the earth themselves, from nature and its gods and from the inner enlightenment they may bring, so for them the idea of a Creator moving behind these mountains is hard to grasp, let alone a God who walked the earth and died to save it.
Where might our worldviews meet? Maybe over food: Naoko and her fellow missionary Janet are currently setting up a food truck business. "As restaurants and shops continue to suffer due to Covid restrictions, food trucks have become more and more popular in Japan as a new business model," Naoko explained. "This is a tangible way we could do ministry as a team to make connections and advertise our presence in the local area. While foreigners need to have a huge amount of money to start a business, Japanese nationals have much lower bars to do so." Taiwanese Janet has had a vision for a 'kitchen car' for a long time, and now circumstances (and Naoko's practical support) are helping this vision take shape. Can Christ be shared over Beef Noodles and Soup Dumplings under Honshu's holy hills?

Churches Weekly Newsletter, 10 July 2022

"I want you to know how sad I am to give up the best job in the world." If there's a point for reflection to draw from the feverish events of the past week maybe it's that giving up is very hard to do. Boris Johnson has reflected on this himself:

“Long after it is obvious to everyone that we are goners we continue to believe in our ‘duty’ to hang on, with cuticle-wrenching tenacity, to the perks and privileges of our posts. We kid ourselves that we must stay because we would be ‘letting people down’ or that there is a ‘job to be finished’. In reality, we are just terrified of the come-down.” 

Johnson wrote this in 2006, about Tony Blair, who had let it be known he would be stepping aside the following spring. He didn't believe that Blair would stand by his words, but the then-PM left on a schedule.

Giving up is very hard to do: but we all have to face the truth at times that the moment has come. "Openness to truth will be an experience of dispossession and impoverishment. We give up our desire to possess the truth, the People, their money," Benjamin Myers recently wrote.

As I've often said in church, we are driven by our desires, and that's not necessarily a negative thing for it is rooted in God creating us 'in his image', ie, desiring that we desire to be like him. The faithful life consists of often stopping to question whether the desires shaping us are of that sort, or whether we've embraced what St Paul would call 'worldly' desires. 

Away from politics, in the world of art this week Nick Cave released a small spoken word collection called Seven Psalms. Cave's work has always been 'Christ-haunted', powerfully drawing on the imagery of scripture, and since the accidental death of his son Arthur in 2015 it seems to have taken a deeper devotional turn. Seven Psalms is a series of profound responses to loss, or having to give up. In I come alone and to you Cave says,

I come alone and to you, Lord, in sorrow
Thirsty for your refuge, I cannot breathe
I kneel among your stars and in the morrow
I have nothing more to offer but to leave

Deep calls to deep, the silver waters flow
Winding through the gardens damp with dew
Deep calls to deep, I have nowhere left to go
But to you, Lord, breathless, but to you

At the heart of the faithful life is the practice of permitting ourselves to be dispossessed and impoverished – before the gaze of a loving God. Another poet of grim, joyous truthfulness, R. S. Thomas, celebrated that insight with these words:

The Kingdom

It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured 
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get 
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945-1990, p.233

Churches Weekly Newsletter, 3 July 2022

It might seem surprising to you to find the Foreword to the Church of England book How Village Churches Thrive being written by the entertainer Hugh Dennis. “If I am honest, I probably find it as surprising as you do,” he begins, “but let me give you a little context.”

Hugh Dennis calculates that for nearly half his life he has lived next door to churches of various shapes and sizes. Born in the Rectory of Kettering Parish Church where his father was the curate, “when I was a mere three months old, my father became the rather cool, pipe-smoking vicar of Christ Church, on the Isle of Dogs, in the East End of London.” Later, Mill Hill in North London was followed by a stint in Yorkshire where his father John served as the Bishop of Knaresborough, and then a move to Suffolk when he became Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich.

“You might think, quite reasonably, that a childhood of such proximity to churches would mean that I would step away from the habit in adult life, but not a bit of it. Instead, I bought a house next to a small church in the South Downs, one of eight churches in a team parish in the Diocese of Chichester. In other words, when it comes to churches and parishes, I am something of an insider with a particular love for rural churches, and a great sympathy for those who toil to keep them going in what are often very difficult circumstances.”

Hugh Dennis knows church life well enough to be able to state that “It would be folly to make the mistake of thinking that these buildings are simply historic monuments, facing inevitable decline. In my experience. they are often well loved, well used buildings that stand at the centre of the communities they serve, with halls and facilities that could be used or indeed are already used. to bring the community together, be they churchgoers or non-churchgoers. During the pandemic, for example, many such churches have led the way in organising networks of support. The same pandemic, in one of its rather unexpected consequences, has changed the outlook for rural areas as, helped by the move homeworking, families increasingly look to leave larger towns to and cities to experience the peace and quiet of the countryside. So, if anything, I think many rural churches are rather like spring bulbs, ready for the right conditions to release all the potential they hold, and to thrive. Some are already growing and blossoming, and many others will follow.”

This is an encouragingly positive perspective from a supportive friend of the churches and church people. It serves well as an introduction to the equally positive workbook How Village Churches Thrive which I hope you'll not tire of hearing about in the coming months as I'll be using it to help us engage together with practical questions about our future, starting with a morning on Saturday 10 September devoted to discussing positive approaches to stewardship and fundraising: please do come along and get involved.

Churches Weekly Newsletter, 26 June 2022

As increasing research is being done on the transatlantic slave trade, it’s becoming ever clearer just how much of our cultural, social and physical landscape has been impacted by it: including ours here in The Dales.

Last week the Church Commissioners acknowledged that their £10.1-billion fund has early links with the transatlantic slave trade through Queen Anne's Bounty, a fund established in 1704 by Queen Anne using ecclesiastical revenues originally confiscated by Henry VIII. The fund was later augmented by donations from wealthier clergy, and also derived in part from the proceeds of investments in the transatlantic slave trade.

Ken Pearce tells me that ‘Clapham’s most recent vicarage was built by the Farrers in return for the original vicarage which was demolished and the land absorbed into the garden of Ingleborough Hall. One of the subsequent clerical occupants felt that the accommodation which the building provided was not adequate, he wanted improvements and extensions. He arranged with the Church Commissioners that the funds to pay for this work should come from Queen Anne's Bounty.’

What we do now with such information is a ‘live’ question of our day, around which public debate sadly tends to generate more heat than light. Ken writes, ‘Clapham vicarage was sold to a private buyer in 1984 (it is now Arbutus House), fortunately severing whatever link there was between awful events on high seas and the church in tranquil Clapham.’ Some might say leave it there then, let bygones be bygones; others might demand an apology such as that  given by The Bishop of Birmingham, the Rt Revd David Urquhart, a member of the Church Commissioners’ board and chair of the group that had oversight of their recent research.

We cannot change the past, nor deny its uncomfortable truths, but we can, as Bishop Urquhart says, ‘consider’ it, with the intention of using this knowledge to advocate ‘respect for people’, to ‘aim to create a fairer world today in which all of God’s children can flourish.’

In the Commissioners’ case this means ‘ensuring we are at the forefront of responsible investment globally’, lobbying for change in calling for companies to champion human rights within their supply chains. In our case this might mean – what? Acknowledging our historical connections with the enslaved people of Africa, the Caribbean and North America and seeking ways to develop healing and reconciling relationships with their descendants? Listening with humility to voices from the wider world Church telling their stories in their own words and ways, however discomforting these may be to us? Supporting campaigns to end contemporary slavery (Anti-Slavery International report that bonded labour affects at least 20 million people around the world. The UN estimates that the worst forms of child labour affect an estimated 179 million children around the world.)? A visit to the excellent International Slavery Museum in Liverpool to help our understanding of enslavement, its impact and legacies?

We cannot change the past – but we might permit our knowledge of the past, its impact and its legacies, to change us, for the better.

Churches Weekly Newsletter, 5 June 2022

If there's a common theme which draws together our current festivals – of Pentecost, Trinity and Jubilee – then it might be in the area of connectedness. Pentecost is a celebration of God connecting with us at the deepest level of our beings through The Holy Spirit. Trinity is about the intimacy between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And in her Jubilee messages Queen Elizabeth reinforces her firm belief that we are a family, the peoples and nations of the Commonwealth.

This message of human connectedness may seem counter to prevailing attitudes of rampant individualism. But many of us sense, with Kae Tempest, that “We are empathic beings who feel for each other. Our very success as a species is rooted in our ability to be aware of each other's needs, to notice each other's pain and to experience deeply felt physiological and emotional empathy.” (Kae Tempest, On Connection). 

Empathy can also come at times of celebration, as we share in mutual enjoyment of our place, our culture, our appreciation of each other's stories. So let's enjoy this festival season, as we celebrate what we do share with those we know well, and discover what we can share with those we newly connect with.