This is England

I’ve just been watching a flim on TV, This is England.

It was made a couple of years ago, but was set in England in about 1982, during the Falklands War. It’s about a boy who is bullied at school and befriended by a gang of skinheads, and begins to hang out with them, and enjoys their friendship, but then an older former leader of the gang is released from prison, and a darker side emerges, as he is an English nationalist, and the gang splits as racism and xenophobia intrude.

I won’t say more about the plot in case anyone reading this hasn’t seen it, and don’t want to add plot spoilers.

But I was very conscious of it being an England I had missed entirely.

I visited England twice. Once in the mid-sixties, when I spent two and a half years there, mostly studying in Durham, but also driving buses in London, described, in part, in another blog post on Swinging London in retrospect. The second visit was about three years ago, much shorter, a three week holiday visiting old friends and relations.

After nearly 40 years there were many changes. One of the most noticable was that in the 1960s there had been an industrial working class. There were factory workers, coal miners and others. Forty years later most people seemed to be employed in service industries.

Nowadays the transition seems to be marked by the jokes on motoring programmes on TV — about the Japanese failure to make proper motorbikes that leaked oil, or proper cars that broke down.

But the film showed something I had missed, that marked the transition — the Thatcher years.

I’m sure that the film does not tell the full story of those years, and that there were lots of other things that happened. But during both my visits to Britain there was a Labour government, and it seemed a little bit more sunny and cheerful and optimistic.

I’d be interested in knowing if people who lived through the Thatcher years and saw the film think it is true to life.

Tim’s Blog: "Better than Church?"

Tim Norwood (a Church of England vicar) asks if blogging is better than church.

Tim’s Blog: “Better than Church?”:

A friend of mine (who is probably reading this) also commented that reading the blog was ‘better than going to church’ – which I do take as a compliment, but it does raise some interesting questions. To what extent can the blogsphere provide opportunities to ‘be’ church?

A few years ago, I was quite interested in the idea of on-line church and a few of us began to think about how to do it. We started with cell church methodology and looked at ways to do this. I even bought the ‘cybercell’ url (and still own it). When the diocese put money into cutting edge ministries and launched iChurch I was seriously tempted to apply for the job (which unfortunatley was part-time). It’s been interesting to watch iChurch develop in similar directions to CyberCell – which never got off the ground because I didn’t have enough time to invest in it…

And he has some quite interesting thoughts on the topic.

Some of his comments made sense to me. Among other things he said that reading his bishop’s blog made him feel closer to his bishop. And yes, blogging is a way of sharing thoughts with people one doesn’t see every day, and allows one to communicate with people who are geographically out of reach.

But there are also limitations in blogging. Comments allow some interaction, but it is not inherently an interactive medium. It is basically a one to many medium. Some have tried to overcome the limitations by having synchroblogs — many people blogging on the same topic at the same time, but it is still a collection of individual viewpoints. Blogging remains communication without community, and therefore cannot be regarded as a form of church, or “fresh expressions” of church, much less a substitute for church. Though I suppose a lot depends on what you regard as church. If your model of church is the Protestant “preacher-congregation” one, then yes, blogging can be much the same thing. If you go to church primarily to hear sermons, then yes, you can just as easily read them on blogs — but is that all that church is about?

Online worship and prayer, however, seem to me to be an impossibility. But again, that may depend on your understanding of worship. It seems to me that some people regard worship as a kind of holy sing song, and “worship leader” means someone who leads singing — a kind of combination of a choir director and a cheer leader. But even if that were one’s understanding of worship, could you do it online?

The computer on which I am writing this has no speakers connected. I don’t listen to podcasts or watch videos, partly because I’m often surfing the web at 3 am and don’t want to wake the family, and partly because I can’t afford the bandwidth. But if I were to join in singing hymns at 3:00 am the family would soon be very annoyed.

It’s just not cricket

Justice triumphed when England lost a one-day cricket match to New Zealand because of a fielding error on the last ball. An overthrow enabled New Zealand to get the crucial last run.

BBC SPORT | Cricket | England | Last-ball error hands NZ victory:

New Zealand won a remarkable one-day international when England somehow allowed last man Mark Gillespie to hit two from the final ball of the match.

He scampered a single and came back for the overthrow when Graeme Swann’s shy at the stumps was not backed up.

Earlier, Grant Elliott, guiding the tourists home, was controversially run out as he was injured in a collision with England’s Ryan Sidebottom.

The wicket could have been crucial, but England’s modest 245 was not enough.

I think most people who watched the match thought that it was supremely unfair that Elliot should have been given out after what looked like a rugby tackle by Sidebottom, and rejoiced greatly that the English fielding bungle enabled New Zealand to win.

Perhaps the rules should be changed to say that a batsman cannot be given out in a run out if physically obstructed by a member of the fielding team, otherwise cricket could turn into a variant of Red Rover.

Bishop Alan’s Blog: Vicarage Allsorts: Clergy Supply

Bishop Alan’s Blog: Vicarage Allsorts: Clergy Supply:

After 30 years of designer angst about clergy shortages I am amazed that this should be so, but the simple fact is that there are actually more active C of E collars on the streets of England in 2005 than in 1959. I don’t know about you, but this surprised me. It also strikes me as the kind of raw figure that won’t be of any interest to Fleet Street, because it neither provokes fear and anguish, nor validates their prejudices and fantasies about the C of E.

The distribution, however has entirely changed. The preponderance is distributed more, I would guess, according to population. The bad story then was rural/urban. Now I would anticipate it to be North/West as against South/East. There are far fewer full time collars of the conventional sort, but far more retired active and self supporting. Looking ahead this means their shelf life and deployability is far lower. People in the 1960’s complained that vicars were too young and inexperienced about the rest of life. Now they complain that they’re all on second careers. You can’t have it both ways! Or can you? Training needs, however are radically different.

The report Bishop Alan was quoting was picked up by a journalist of the Sunday Telegraph to produce an alarmist report quoted by Fr David MacGregor, and prompted Bishop Alan to take the mickey Bishop Alan’s Blog:

The most important person in a business is always, in a way, the person on the front desk. The wellbeing of clergy is, in that obvious sense among others, vital to the wellbeing of the Church. Since Chaucer’s time there’s been public anxiety about this subject. 200 years ago Sidney Smith lamented the decline in the quality of clergy since the enforcement of residence was preventing gentlemen from desiring ordination. In the roaring 20’s, Hensley Henson bemoaned the decline in the quality of ordinands since the first world war. The document quoted in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, however, is barking up a very different tree. A more accurate headline than “poor quality of vicars alarms church leaders” would probably be “desperation to dramatize drab HR questionnaire twits journalist.”

I find this interesting because though it was a different time and a different place, 30 years ago I was responsible for training self-supporting clergy in the Anglican Diocese of Zululand, and I thought most people in the diocese had the wrong idea of the role of self-supporting vis a vis church supported clergy.

Many parishes had anything between 5 and 30 “outstations”, and the clergy would itinerate to celebrate the Eucharist. I thought each outstation should have, if possible, 2 or more self-supporting priests and 2 or more deacons. The “rector” (who need not necessarily be ordained) should be a pastor/teacher (a somewhat different kind of ministry) equipped to train and support the clergy at the outstations, and itinerate for training and teaching, not sacraments.

That was the sort of thing advocated by Roland Allen in his book Missionary methods, St Paul’s or ours? nearly 100 years ago, but never really put into practice anywhere. I still think it should be applied, mutatis mutandis, in Orthodox mission, though in practice it would need to be modified. It is difficult to have self-supporting clergy, since most of them would be among the urban unemployed.

Among Anglicans in South Africa there may have been similar patterns. In 1971 a book was published. The vanishing clergyman : a sociological study of the priestly role in South Africa by Trevor Verryn. He noted a marked decline in the number of Anglican ordinands in training. Within a year or two of the publication of his book, the trend was dramatically reversed, as a result of the spread of the charimatic renewal movement, and at least one of the Anglican theological colleges in South Africa had to be enlarged to cope with the influx of new students, most of them married and entering second careers.

There was a similar study to Verryn’s in the Church of England, The fate of the Anglican clergy: a sociological study by Robert Towler (London, Macmillan, 1979). Though it was published eight years later, the period of study was similar to Verryn’s; Bob Towler followed the 1966 intake of five Anglican theological colleges in England over the next 10 years. I was one of them.

It was quite an interesting period, and I suspect one of great change in outlook for many — the time of hippies, of student power. Now most of those in Towler’s study will be approaching retirement, and it might be interesting to see what has happened to them and how their views have changed. How did they change the church, and how did the church change them?