Pockets

The minister opens a Christmas bazaar, saying: 'Friends, there is good news and bad news about the money we need to mend the church roof. The good news is that we have enough to complete the job.' Applause all round. 'The bad news', he goes on, 'is that it is still in your pockets, purses, wallets and bank accounts.' As Christmas approaches,  we are being inundated with letters appealing for funds. Everything from frail old people to lost children and tired donkeys needs help. We are pensioners, and when we have given some carefully planned donations to certain funds, there is nothing left, and we inevitably feel very sorry. Do all these excellent causes depend on us? Of course not. There must be a  worthwhile response to the effort they make to send out appeals to so many people. The national exchequer, we are always being told, can do no more now with its restricted budget. So roads can hardly be mended, youth clubs must close and all the good things being done by local authorities and others to make life worth living have been curtailed. Of course, there IS money in the nation; it is just not in the right pockets. If we all put a small percentage of our total financial possessions into a pool, we would be able to do everything that health, education, social servicves etc is being prevented from doing because of 'the cuts'. We have more money than needed to rebuild the nation. It is still in our wallets and purses, though,, and taxation notwithstanding, looks likely to stay there.

growth

The answer, we are cnstantly being told, is 'growth'. It will resolve our economic problems. It will set us  on a new course to fiscal renewal. It will create jobs and put money back into the pockets of High Street spenders. So let's hear it for growth. But what, actually, is it? I am a sec mod abacus man.A succession of well-intentioned teachers failed to interest me in arithmetic, and when my school report said I had achieved seven percent in the subject I thought my father would be pleased. 'Seven out of ten is OK, dad,' I suggested. 'No, no, son,' he corrected me. 'Seven percent is seven out of a hundred.' It makes me one of the great majority who are confused about high finance, or even low finance, and I am glad to leave it to the likes of Mr Peston and Mrs Flanders, who nightly tell us about the sorry state of the financial world. In financial terms, even I can understand that if we are going to pay for the things we need we must somehow acquire money. And if we want more things, then we need to get hold of more money. Even abacus man can understand that. But what if abacus man has a philosophy grounded in the very simple idea put about by Saint Paul, who said he had 'learned in whatsoever state I am therein to be content'? It sounds, now, 'so first century', so lacking in ambition. 'Content'!!!... so retro. It flies in the face of everything we now need to take seriously if we are to rescue the world. But what if it is the basis on which we might,  au contraire, save the world?

shale

Either the people who question policies on renewable energy are wrong. Or they are right. If they are right we are all being led, for no good reason, up the most expensive path since the Garden of Eden. Christopher Booker (Global Warming Disaster, Continuum 2009) provides impressive proof for global warming being a 'scare'. requiring immense public expenditure - 'such a dramatic change in the way of life for billions of people that it is hard to imagine how modern industrial civilisation could survive'. Matt Ridley (Spectator October 2011) says: 'To persist with a policy of subsidising renewable energy... at a time when vast reserves of cheap, low-carbon gas have suddenly become available is so perverse that it borders on insanity.' He refers to fields of 'shale gas' being tapped in America and now discerned in Lancashire, which could provide reliable, green energy  for most of the next century. Apparently it is already transforming life in parts of America. Drilling near Blackpool has located 200 trillion cubic feet of gas, 'enough to keep the entire British economy going for many decades.' Objections by the big coal, gas and nuclear industries, are, says Ridley, 'almost comically fabricated and exaggerated.'  We could access this stuff, long trapped among earth's rocks, and at a stroke resolve all our foreseeable energy problems. Wow! If this is true why do we not know about it ? I took it up in a harvest sermon to 20 village chapel goers in October (small wonder it did not make international news!) I maintain that nature continues to provide the means by which life can be sustained. Shale gas and GM crops are among the 'new things' that Isaiah spoke about which are there to take over from oil, coal, and traditional farming.  Hail, shale! Vested interest, nervous reactionaries and bureaucratic inertia must not stop you!

Listen

More than anything, we need somebody to listen. Really  listen, that is, not just cock half an ear while they think of the next thing to say. Today's paper says than doctors are being treated like priests; and for sure the most popular medicos are those who make time to listen to their patients. A man I know found his surgery closed and only a cleaner on the premises. He sat on a wall outside and told her his problem, and afterwards he had no need of the doctor. A pub landlord tells me that lonely and troubled individuals are more and more turning up in the hope that he will have time for a chat, or that there will be other customers willing to listen to them. 'They want sympathy more than drinkl,' he says. 'Running a pub is hard enough without being a mixture of priest, doctor, social worker and psychiatrist.' Is this a role for the under-occupied clergy? Lots of them pretend to be 'busy' but when you analyse their day much of what they do is self-indulgent. Ministry can be a sinecure. Clergy set their own agendsas so that they appear to be immensely busy, or more or less idle. Most have not been trained in time mangement so never achieve much. A church could 'adopt' a pub or a surgery to provide willing listeners (not preachers!) to over-burdened landlords and doctors. Chaplaincy is a more useful activity than parish ministry... perhaps also for motorways and pub chains aetc,etc. Too many clergy are wasting their time and training. Discuss...

Belief

Apparently several hundred applications have been received recently from people keen to join the Progressive Christianity Network. As fewer Britons turn away from traditional Christian belief (Daily Telegraph September 29 2011)  they may not be abandoning every form of spirituality, but interested in it via other faiths systems, or no system at all. PCN doesn't ask newcomers to spell out their beliefs, which is as well, because chairman John Churcher says  every member will probably have a different understanding of what Christianity is about and  which bit of it really matters. My experience of churches is that very few of the people who attend could give you a coherent statement of personal belief. And those who are most certain are not necessarily the ones you might like to spend eternity with. A review of the BBC One programme (Sept 28) 'What's the point of Religion' suggested that 'Belonging matters more than believing'. That  is certainly true of most churchgoers, who like to see familiar faces in familiar surroundings, and enjoy routine forms of worship. They do not like change! Does 'belief' matter? Of course it does. Come right down to it, faith needs a reasonably firm foundation and PCN suggests ditching a lot of inherited medieval beliefs in favour of serious commitment to the life and teaching of Jesus, sans virgin birth, miracles and bodily resurrecvtion. It may never be popular in a culture than demands b&w certainties.  But certainty - about anything - is a mirage. Ask the Hydron Collider scientists!

Wonder

How about a new theme for harvest festivals? There is some embarrassment now in churches wondering how to dispose usefully of the fruit, veg and groceries presented for traditionl displays. My former church always had a very large loaf, designed like a sheaf of corn, as the centre-piece. We never quite knew what to do with it; come to that we didn't know what to do with baskets of fruit and veg which old people did not want; they thought it was charity! We sang with gusto the harvest hymns whose theological content is dubious. 'Give his angels charge at last in the fire the tares to cast....' Thank you Henry Alford (1810-71)  The theme of thanksgiving is always going to be central, but the more we learn abut the world of nature, and our own mysterious bodies, the more we shoud be filled with a sense of wonder. Augustine wrote: 'Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge wastes of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.' James Le Fanu has written a fine book called 'Why Us?'* in which he describes the quite unaided progression of the human embryo into adult life, and the so far unexplained functions of the human brain, eye, memory, etc etc. A service with the theme of wonder at what we see around us, and how we see it, would be better than chanting about being 'gathered in, free from sorrow, free from sing...' Harvest planning committees - use you loaf - it's amazing.

*WHY US?  2009 HARPER COLLINS £18.99

theology

The media is so preoccupied with conflict, trivia and greed that it rarely takes God seriously. It tends to sneer at those who have something thoughtful to say about eternity, clashing as it may with the here, now, sexy and fiscal. So how a letter from Mr  Brian Wilson of Bristol, slipped through the massed defences of The Times letters police on September 13 is hard to guess. But good for him. He wanted to press the need for a 'new theology...to win the assent of thinking people who have abandoned traditional churches and their outdated mythologies...' Mr Wilson is so right. Amazingly, educated people are still standing up in churches reciting middle-ages creeds when belief has become much more credible and science compatible, in our time. What Mr Wilson may not know, and the media has not recognised, is that new Christian-based theology is up, running and gathering speed around the world. It is known by various names, notably Progressive Christianity, and sustained by exceptional theologians saying things that should meet the intellectual and spiritual needs of the most cynical seeker. Try info@pcnbritain.org.uk or the website at http://www.pcnbritain.org.uk/ Believable, universal, inclusive faith is on offer, and it is not the mock belief system which may have served our forefathers and rightly derided by Dawkins and co. It is somehting firt for this century.