SYZYGY MISSIONS SUPPORT NETWORK

We have mentioned a few times on this website the need for regular retreat to help manage stress. Some may wonder exactly what this means, or are a bit daunted by the prospect of five days of complete silence in a monastery.

If that’s you, then Penhurst Retreat Centre is an excellent place for you to have a retreat. One of the most charming things about Penhurst is that it doesn’t feel like a conference centre. It’s a home, in a 17th century manor house, which is tastefully furnished just like it was when it was lived in by a family. An ideal start to feeling, well, at home in a new environment.

It is situated accessibly near main roads in East Sussex, but far enough away not to hear them, and indeed it’s so rural that it’s hard to hear anything at all apart from the sounds of nature and agriculture. With lovely gardens and an orchard which is being developed into a prayer garden, it makes a very restful and relaxing place. There is also opportunity for some country walks and access to the famous Ashburnham estates nearby. One satisfied customer, Alex, commented “”My stay here was just what I needed – perfect for me! This place inspires prayer, with its sense of God’s peace and presence. It’s an easy place to listen to God, a place of blessing.”

Penhurst is also intimately small. Unlike some places where there are dozens of people so it’s hard to find a place to be alone for prayer other than in your room, Penhurst takes fewer people, so you can always find somewhere to get away, whether it’s in one of the two chapels, the lounge, the library or the church just across the garden.

If you don’t like the thought of being on your own, there is a full programme of led retreats and workshops, many aimed specifically at mission workers. In fact, there is a distinctly missional theme to the place, with its many historic connections to global mission, and each room is dedicated to a famous missionary, with photos and books in the room to inspire you.

There are friendly helpful staff who lead prayer twice a day (optional) and are available for discussion and advice whenever you want it, and the food is excellent. The cottage pie even rivalled my mum’s!

For more information visit Penhurst’s own website

Empty church, empty argument?

Last week Britain became a little more secular.  Not in a great cataclysmic way as the conservative press is proclaiming, but subtly, and in a way not unforeseen, as two court decisions  were made which in themselves may have little impact but which are indicators of a long-term trend and set a precedent.

Last August we considered the case of a couple of Christian bed-and-breakfast owners who refused to make a double room available to a gay couple.  On Friday the court of appeal ruled that they had discriminated against the gay couple despite their appeal that they weren’t specifically discriminating against gay people as their policy applied to all unmarried people irrespective of their sexual choices.  And the court was right: they did indeed break the law.  In the process of coming to this conclusion, ironically, the court is discriminating against the Christians.  It’s now official: gay rights trump Christian rights.

In another case heard on the same day, an atheist councillor took his local town council to court over their practice of holding prayers at the start of the meeting.  He argued that it infringed his human rights by forcing a religious activity on him.  Councils all over the country do this, as does the Westminster parliament, so it is not an uncommon practice.  The court ruled, interestingly (though a lot of pundits have missed this point) that his human rights weren’t infringed as he had the opportunity to absent himself during the proceedings, but that councils do not have the authority under the Local Government Act to hold prayers as part of their council meetings.  They are able to hold them outside the meeting though.

It certainly feels like these decisions, and several others like them in recent years, are undermining the traditional role of Christianity at the heart of Britain’s values, despite Prime Minister David Cameron recently asserting that Britain is a ‘Christian nation’.  Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, who has become significantly more vocal in his ‘retirement’ than he was in office, comments: There are deep forces at work in Western society, hollowing out the values of Christianity and driving them to the margins.  It does at least seem that an aggressive secularist agenda is making steady progress.

Get out there and tell them!

The knee-jerk reaction is for the church to condemn both these decisions, though why in a democracy we should want the freedom to discriminate against others, or to force our prayers on people of other or no faith, needs to be considered carefully.  It would seem that our appropriate response to this situation is not to lament the fact that a small but vocal minority are no longer able to force their views and practices on the millions of British citizens who are now generally atheistic, only nominally Christian or hold to other faiths.

A far more appropriate response would be to set about in earnest increasing the number of Christians so that our views become the dominant perspective in this country once again.  We should not be writing letters to The Times in protest.  We should be getting out into the communities around us and proclaiming Jesus.  Only when we comprise the majority will it be appropriate for us to expect legislation in this country to reflect our views.

Our verdict: Lions 2, Christians 0 (see Persecution on its way)

Some of you living abroad may have heard confused rumours of cataclysm in the Eurozone, that the UK is leaving the EU, or that David Cameron has left us marginalised and out in the cold.  Certainly a meeting in Brussels last Friday will have momentous consequences, although it’s too early to tell whether Cameron is Neville Chamberlain or Margaret Thatcher.  This week we will look at the Eurozone crisis and why it has arisen.

The Eurozone consists of 17 EU member countries who share a common currency, the unimaginatively-named Euro (€).  The UK is not one of them.  The new currency was introduced in 2002 in an attempt to bind Europe even closer together.  However the inventors of this plan overlooked the obvious fact that serious stresses would appear in the system if there were a) no common fiscal policy and b) no strong central government able to implement said fiscal policy.  This left a situation where many of the Eurozone countries are able to run their economies in ways which actually result in economic divergence.  This problem was not immediately apparent as the economic growth of the last decade obscured it.

However the crisis in the finance industry has led to liquidity problems in several governments, with many having to pay increasingly impractical rates of interest to borrow money.  So they are slashing spending, which leads to domestic discontent and higher unemployment, thereby reducing government revenues and increasing the need for borrowing.  These countries include the relatively minor economies of Ireland, Portugal, and (most notoriously) Greece, though Spain and Italy are also under pressure.  In the past, these countries would have devalued their currencies, and we’d all have gone there for cheap holidays, bought their cheap exports, and everything would get right in a few years.

The Euro prevents that happening, so these governments have to be given huge handouts.  The only Europeans  with enough money to do this are the Germans and (paradoxically) the UK, which finds itself forced to help the Euro out as the Eurozone is our major trading partner and Euro-chaos affects our exports.  But Germany is picking up the bulk of the bill and is getting increasingly annoyed about it.

So the Germans are trying to fix the problem.  They argue that they are not going to keep pouring money into a bottomless pit, and are particularly aggravated about having to bail out the Greeks, who retire earlier, pay less tax, and (allegedly) don’t work as hard as the Germans.  So heads of government spent the last week in Brussels discussing a new European treaty which would enforce some Germanic discipline in governance, and resolve the problem.  Part of these deals would mean more regulation on financial institutions.  David Cameron had already made it clear that the UK will cede no more sovereign power to the EU, and insisted that an exemption for UK financial institutions was his price for agreeing to the changes.

Europe said non.  Instead they made a separate deal to strengthen the Eurozone, with only the UK left out.  Some argue that Cameron has stood up for the UK, others that he has betrayed us.  The word being used a lot is isolated – some argue that by taking no further part in the discussions, the UK will have no say on important issues that will affect us.  Others claim that we are now effectively isolated from a coming Euro-disaster.

It is too early to tell whether Cameron’s action is heroic or suicidal, but one indicator is that the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency last week threatened to downgrade the credit ratings of all the Eurozone countries.  This means that S&P thinks that they are less able to pay their debts, and their cost of borrowing will go up.  The UK however, continues to maintain its coveted AAA rating.  Which means that the UK government can borrow money at the cheapest rate for decades.  It could be a good time to invest in sterling.

Recently I came across a memorial to John Wesley which is situated near to the site in London where his heart was ‘strangely warmed’ as he gave his life to Jesus.  From there I went to visit the chapel where he once ministered, which is not too far away on City Road.  Then I discovered an old nonconformist cemetery just over the road.  Looking round, I realised how many influential people are buried there, and it set me thinking about how influential nonconformism has been on making the UK what it is today, and how nonconformists have taken the gospel to the world.

Nonconformist is a generic name given to protestants who are members of a church other than the Anglican churches, or in previous centuries it could also be used of evangelical members of the Church of England.  Historically, these churches have included Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Puritans, Quakers, Salvationists, Unitarians, and a number of other independent or free churches.  Taken en bloc they currently have more members than the Roman Catholic church and nearly as many as the combined Anglican churches of the UK (source: Operation World, 2005) yet they are often thought of as an insignificant minority because they represent so many different, and frequently small, streams.

Spiritually, most of these groups arose out of huge revival movements of the 17^th – 20^th centuries and many had a massive social impact on their communities.  Many of them campaigned for the abolition of slavery, improvement of housing and working conditions for poor people and the provision of relief for the destitute.  Their impact has been so great as to lead some secular historians to suggest that it was nonconformism that saved Britain from undergoing revolutions like those experienced on the continent in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, though of course that was not what motivated the likes of Elizabeth Fry or William Booth.  If the Anglican church is ‘the Tory party on its knees’, Labour owes more to Methodism than it does to Marxism, and it can be no coincidence that the Liberal Democrats are strong in parts of the country where nonconformism has been the most influential.  The desire to make the world a better place is strong in nonconformism and historically it has not been afraid to be politically involved.

Banned by law from investing in property during the 18^th century, many nonconformists went into trade and finance, and many well-known companies owe their origin to them, including Barclays, Cadburys, GKN, Lloyds TSB, Rowntrees and Wedgwood.  Pioneers of steam power Thomas Newcomen and James Watt were both nonconformists.  Others, finding their way into education barred by the entry requirement of being an Anglican, went on to found their own educational establishments.  Some expressed their views through their writing, most notably John Bunyan and the poet/artist William Blake.  Joseph Priestly, a nonconformist minister, was also an influential scientist.  Many others were notable scientists, theologians politicians and rights activists.

One reason for nonconformism being so popular in the UK is that its egalitarian philosophy and lack of ecclesiastical hierarchy had a great appeal among the English working class and struck a chord with the fundamentally democratic  spirit of the Anglo-Saxons.  Paradoxically, it attracted popular support in the celtic areas of the UK for precisely the same reason: it was not associated with the English establishment.  This egalitarianism expressed itself in congregational or presbyterian forms of government rather than Episcopalian, and gave rise to a sense of solidarity with the poor, leading to social action, and with the lost, leading to mission both at home and abroad.  Famous nonconformist missionaries include John Birch, Amy Carmichael, William Carey, David Livingstone, Mary Slessor, C T Studd, and Hudson Taylor, and many modern mission societies have their roots in nonconformism.

Today, the number of closed or near-empty nonconformist places of worship across the country are a testimony to the great revivals of the past, as nearly every village had its 18^th century chapel building as well as its church.  Many of those believing communities are now too small to maintain their rural buildings, and often congregate in the large town centre churches, which in turn are planting out small churches into homes and community centres throughout the country.  21^st century nonconformism may look different in many ways but the spirit is still the same.  The heritage of nonconformism is one we would do well to live up to, in expressing our compassion for the poor, or concern for the lost, and our desire to make the world a better place for all.

Early autumn can be a beautiful time in England.  It’s often warm, and the golden sunshine lights the reds, russets and browns of turning leaves.  Fruit ripens, seedheads pop and dewdrops diamond the spiders’ webs.  In a tradition going back millennia before the start of their own religion, Christians take some of the harvest into their places of worship to honour the God who gives them food.  Yet in the midst of the rejoicing, there is hard work organising sheafs of wheat, displays of elaborately plaited bread, and vases of chrysanthemums.  One lady commented cheerfully to me, ‘I’m glad we only have to do this once a year!’

The feast of Passover is in essence a similar event.  Although six months removed from the English harvest, Passover is a celebration of the barley harvest as well as of the Exodus.  Joyful pilgrims went up to Jerusalem from all over ancient Israel to celebrate together.  The third day after Passover is called the Feast of  First Fruits, when they took their tithe of barley to the temple.  One Sunday nearly two thousand years ago, such a band centred on a rabbi from Nazareth.  With his twelve lieutenants, assorted women who funded his work, and possibly dozens of hangers on, he would have found difficulty staying in the crowded city, so they all stayed at the home of some friends in Bethany.

Martha and Mary remind me of Marilla and Anne in the book Anne of Green Gables. I can imagine Martha fussed with the responsibility of catering for so many: ‘Well, Anne, we’ll need to wash all the best crockery, and get some of my pickles out of the larder, and for goodness’ sake let’s have none of your daydreaming today!’

‘Oh but Marilla, isn’t is SO exciting that Jesus is coming to our home!  I’m so happy that I could die perfectly contented even if the rest of my life were misery and squalor.’

It’s not surprising that Martha got stressed with the catering.  It would be a massive task hosting such a crowd.  Yet Jesus, who presumably ate the supper she cooked, said that Mary, distracted from her responsibilities by the joy of being with Jesus, had made the better choice.  It seems that Jesus is not looking for servants – he already has plenty of those.  Jesus is looking for kindred spirits.

Many of us active in ministry are so busy with the work we do for God, that we often don’t have the time to sit down and be with him.  We run around Marthaing away, and seldom sit and Mary.  In order to combat the stress and busyness in our lives, we need to make time listen to what Jesus has to say to us.  One friend of mine has it in his job description to spend one whole morning in prayer each week.  We may think that’s a luxury we cannot afford with so much responsibility to carry, but if we asked Jesus whether he’d prefer us to be busy, what do you think he would answer?

A north London carpet warehouse in flames

London was most spectacularly on fire in early August and it was not a Christian revival.  Many of you may have seen pictures of serious rioting and looting and wondered what was going on.  So too did many people living in Britain, as this conflagration seemed to burst from nowhere.

The rioting began a few days after police shot dead a man in north London, in circumstances that still have to be adequately explained, and then failed to give a full account of the event to his family and wider community, who accused the police of operating a shoot-to-kill policy.  A community protest march to the local police station became violent, and outbreaks of rioting rapidly spread to other parts of the city, and then to Birmingham and Manchester.

It is tempting to compare these riots to the disturbances of 1981.  Then there was a fairly new Conservative government making huge spending cuts leading to high unemployment.  There was a tough-talking Prime Minister threatening to be strong on law-and-order and there was a lot of deep-seated unrest in urban centres.  Many racial minorities and working-class people felt marginalised, leading to a sense of despair.  They felt the government didn’t really care about their problems.

So was this an action replay?  While this situation seems on the surface familiar, the roots of the past summer’s problems are different.  We must remember that Britain has changed significantly in 30 years and has different problems now.

The cause of the widespread rioting becomes clearer when the statistics are examined.  According to the Home Office there were 2,800 arrests, with 1300 people being charged.  It later transpired that three quarters of the 1000 people who have already appeared in court have a previous conviction or caution, the average number of previous convictions being 15.  One third of them had already spent time in prison for another conviction.  So it would appear that many of the participants were career criminals taking the opportunity to cause some havoc and enrich themselves with some free consumer goods.

A further 20% of the 1000 were juveniles, with estimates that as many as half the people taking part in the riots were school age.  The irony of this is that many of the activities for young people which normally take place during the school holidays have been scrapped this year due to government spending cuts.  Many of the looters used social media to alert their friends and to publish photos of cars they had burned or goods they had looted.  This may well be Britain’s first instance of ‘recreational rioting’.  Millions of pounds worth of property was burned, including shops, pubs, buses and cars, and a lot of goods were looted not only from large stores but also small family-owned businesses.  One man in Birmingham was killed trying to defend his shop.

A clean-up event in south London

This situation gives us a good opportunity to reflect that Britain is not a happy place at the moment.  Government cuts are holding wage rises below inflation, pensions reforms are triggering industrial dispute and unemployment has risen to 2.51m.  Nearly a million 16-24 year olds are unemployed.  Despite the fact that the UK is the world’s 6^th largest economy, there is a general feeling that we are not as well-off as we should be, and things are only going to get worse.  Against this background, one can understand why people might feel like rioting.

One ray of hope though: in the aftermath of the riots thousands of ordinary Londoners turned up with brooms and bin bags to help clear up the mess.  Someone even set up a website to link volunteer cleaners with clean-up events.  The spirit of the Blitz lives on.

The legal situation of Christianity in the UK is something that has been slowly giving cause for concern over the past few years, and has become more serious in recent months.  Although our religious freedom is obvious to the many millions of Christians worldwide who can be oppressed, imprisoned, or even lynched with impunity because they lack any form of legal protection, an aggressive secularist agenda has been building up momentum, prompting well-known Christian apologist Michael Ramsden to observe recently that whenever Christian rights come into conflict with rights based on sexual preferences, they will be trumped.

Much of this situation has resulted from the Equality Act 2006, which (quite rightly) made it illegal to discriminate against anyone on the grounds of their religion or sexuality.   However this left an area of uncertainty over what happens when rights collide, resulting in a number of court cases as pressure groups (and their lawyers) endeavour to get more clarity.  We report on a number of cases so that you are informed about the issues.

Cross – For many years the wearing of a cross has been a issue which emerges occasionally in the popular press.  It is not unusual for employers to ban the wearing of jewellery in the workplace and wearing a cross is not deemed to be essential to Christianity (unlike a Sikh Kara bracelet).   A BA employee was banned from wearing a cross and in a high profile case BA was found not to have discriminated against her.  A Christian taxi driver was ordered by York City Council to remove a palm cross from his cab in case it caused offence to passengers, though the council subsequently relented.

Public witness – two Christians were warned by police that they were committing hate crime by handing out tracts in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham.  A university CU was reported to police for handing out gospels to students.

Homosexuality – A Christian couple running a B&B in Cornwall refused to let a homosexual couple share a double bed.  They argued that they were not picking on homosexuals, but because of their beliefs only supply double rooms to heterosexual married couples.  The court found them guilty of breaking the law, but reduced the fine out of respect for their religious beliefs. This couple subsequently admitted that they knew they were breaking the law but felt they had a right to set their own standards for their own business.

Faith in the workplace – A Christian doctor with an unblemished record may be struck off after discussing his faith with an adult patient who agreed to the discussion.  A Christian nurse was suspended for offering to pray for a patient.  A Christian registrar lost her job for refusing to officiate at same-sex civil partnerships.  It is now illegal to advertise for a Christian to fill a job in a Christian organisation if when the job could be done just as well by a non-Christian.

Gay marriage – Earlier this year the Government announced plans to create same-sex marriages on the same basis as heterosexual ones.  At the moment homosexual partnerships are recognised on a different basis to a marriage and there is no requirement to carry them out in churches.  There are significant concerns that once gay marriages are legalised, it will be a discriminatory offence for a church minister to refuse to perform one.

After centuries of Christendom in Britain, Christianity is now actively being relegated to an obscure private viewpoint which is not allowed to have any impact on how Christians behave or speak in public.  Christians are not actively persecuted yet, but it is clear that attempts are being made to disempower Christians so that they have no legal defence for traditional Christian activities and opinions.

While each of the above cases is worrying in itself for Christians, it is clear that the purpose of the law is good: that Christians can no longer discriminate against others because of their beliefs.  The result however is bad: that others can discriminate against Christians because of their beliefs.  Lions: 1 – Christians: 0

For further information visit The Christian Institute‘s website.

For an update on the current situations see A little more secular?  The Lions have scored again.

This week’s guest blogger is Rev Dr Martin Robinson, Principal of Springdale College: Together in Mission.  This article first appeared on www.eurochurch.net in September 2010.

Tom Wright, the recently-retired Bishop of Durham and leading New Testament scholar, marked his retirement bygiving a significant interview to the BBC in which he reflected on the situation of the Church of England.  During that wide ranging interview he picked on the theme that we are not becoming more secular, in fact if anything we are becoming more religious.

What he described applies to Europe more widely.  In a world of ‘posts’ – post-empire, post-modern, and post-Christian – we can now add post-secular.  A number of European commentators have picked up on this theme.  Europe is increasingly post-secular.

How do we make sense of such a situation?  How can we have lost touch with the founding roots of Europe and become post-Christian and yet now be rejecting the root of that criticism, secularism itself?

The clue lies in the contrast between being ‘religious people’ and ‘spiritual people’.  The people of Europe don’t think of themselves as ‘religious’, by which they mean to identify with a particular religious organization or institution but they can think of themselves as ‘spiritual’ by which they mean interested in God, in prayer, in a sense of wonder and mystery about life.

No more empty church buildings?

The root of this rejection of religion lies partly in the ancient European worry about religion as embodying conflict combined with a more recent rejection of institutions of all kinds  - whether they be political, social, or even educational.  We are now radically individualistic with all the angst that such a choice produces.  More worryingly there is also a gradual severing of the relationship between the idea of spirituality and the idea of morality.  You can be a ‘spiritual’ person without having to think too deeply about a particular moral code beyond the requirement to do no harm.

The depth of this shift of sentiment helps to illustrate the painful lesson that the church has learnt these last 20 years: the answer to the question of the decline of the church does not lie in a particular programme or model of the church.   Instead we have to learn how to do mission – in our cultural context – deeply contextualized and profoundly local.

In a recent interview with a church leader in Wales, I learnt that most of the historic churches in Wales are still declining but that a few  congregations in their midst were seeing good growth.  One or two of the smaller historic denominations are beginning to turn the corner and that some of the newer and independent churches are seeing remarkable growth.  The single factor that connects these very different expressions of church is the willingness to connect with and to serve at a deep level the communities in which they are located.

One of my students who is exploring the growth of some ‘traditional’ congregations in Scotland is making the same kind of discoveries in that very different context.  The exploration of this kind of mission is precisely what Eurochurch.net as a network of practitioners and thinkers is committed to locate and debate.

Martin Robinson