Spiritual Life: Blessing laptops & mobiles

This is my Spiritual Life column for today's 'Ilford Recorder':

"A VICAR has launched a bizarre bid to attract city workers to his church — by offering to BLESS their mobile phones and laptops." That was how 'The Sun' responded to a service in the City of London where laptops and mobile phones were blessed as part of a service for workers in the financial district of London. David Parrott, the Vicar concerned, said that he hoped his blessing had made worship "lively and relevant to the people who work nearby in the financial district". Mobile phones and laptops, he suggested, are our daily working tools and therefore are forms of technology that we should bless.

What David did generated lots of press coverage but only seems bizarre if you think there are no connections between work and faith. In a speech given in 2009, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, said "Many Christians are living out their lives as the church dispersed in the world of business and commerce every day. They ... have the daily challenge of living by a set of values that the world thinks are mad. Their counter-cultural work and calling needs to be recognised, affirmed and supported." The counter-cultural perspective of which he spoke is "the vision of justice and righteousness that comes from a creative and generous God."

He added: "All of life is religious and there is a desperate need to reconnect the sacred and the secular. There is no more urgent time than now to break down the compartmentalised thinking that separates trust in God from the world of work. There needn't be a separation between what goes on in church and in our prayers – and what goes on in the office or in the boardroom or on the shop floor."

That is what David Parrott was doing by blessing laptops and mobile phone as daily work tools. Interestingly there is research which has suggested that as many as three-quarters of workers may be interested in ‘learning to live the spiritual side of their values.’ So what David has done may not be so bizarre after all. It may even be that, were the mad values of Christianity (that vision of justice and righteousness, of which the Archbishop spoke) to be adopted and lived out in the world of work, we might see a restructuring of the economy based on a broader understanding of wealth than simply monetary gain and economic growth alone.

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Blondie - Hanging On The Telephone.