Five Marks of Mission course

 

Five Marks of Mission
Thursday evenings, 7.30pm - 9pm, St Andrew’s Wickford

This autumn in the Wickford and Runwell Team Ministry we have organised an informative short course on the Five Marks of Mission with some excellent contributors to which there is an open invition for folk from other churches.

The course enables us to explore the fundamentals of mission - outreach, nurture, service, justice, and creationcare - with input on Kintsugi Hope and Being With alongside the Beyond The Walls Leader for New Life Church, the Diocesan Racial Justice Officer and the Diocesan Environment Officer.

• October 5th - Proclaiming the Good News of God’s Kingdom - Rob Purnell
• October 12th - Responding in Loving Service - Joel Harris, Kintsugi Hope
• October 19th - Nurturing new believers - Revd Jonathan Evens
• October 26th - Challenging injustice - Revd Sharon Quilter
• November 2nd - Caring for God’s Earth - Revd Sandra Eldridge

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Delirious? - Now Is The Time.

Five Marks of Mission

Five Marks of Mission
Thursday evenings 7.30pm - 9pm St Andrew’s Wickford

This autumn in the Wickford and Runwell Team Ministry we have organised an informative short course on the Five Marks of Mission with some excellent contributors to which there is an open invition for folk from other churches.

The course enables us to explore the fundamentals of mission - outreach, nurture, service, justice, and creationcare - with input on Kintsugi Hope and Being With alongside the Beyond The Walls Leader for New Life Church, the Diocesan Racial Justice Officer and the Diocesan Environment Officer.

• October 5th - Proclaiming the Good News of God’s Kingdom - Rob Purnell
• October 12th - Responding in Loving Service - Joel Harris, Kintsugi Hope
• October 19th - Nurturing new believers - Revd Jonathan Evens
• October 26th - Challenging injustice - Revd Sharon Quilter
• November 2nd - Caring for God’s Earth - Revd Sandra Eldridge

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Delirious? - Find Me In The River.

Statements on the EU Referendum result

On the St Martin-in-the-Fields website, Sam Wells states:

'We now face a new future grateful to be in a democracy where the people’s voice speaks – even when it says what many experience as horrifying. The decision means the nation will leave the EU; it doesn’t automatically mean a war on immigration or economic catastrophe; it must not be allowed to bring about a rise in intolerance and exclusion. It’s up to the whole country now to show that what we have in common is greater than what divides us.'

Angus Ritchie asks some apposite questions of those of us who voted to remain and view the prospect of Brexit as horrifying:

'By far the best piece I have read on the referendum is John Harris's extended essay in The Guardian. Harris, who voted to Remain, warns at the "deep anger and seething worry" which has gripped so much of the country, outside the economic powerhouse of London ...

Harris demands that we listen to a world beyond the metropolitan and middle-class. It is easy to denounce the "bigotry" of the Leave campaign without acknowledging one's own social and economic location. Remainers need to be careful not to fall into our own Pharasaism, for we have sins which require repentance. We speak of social solidarity now, but how much has it inspired us to action on behalf of those in our own land who have been left behind by capitalism? And, when we have acted, have we been motivated by a genuine desire for change or by a shallow self-righteousness - more interested in signalling our virtue than in achieving genuine change?

It is tempting to respond to this week's vote with shrill denunciations, flattering ourselves that this counts as a "prophetic" response. But Harris's essay suggests a more appropriate reaction. We need, first of all, to listen - and to listen in particular from the Nazareths of England and Wales; the unglamorous, left-behind places, which modern capitalism does not value.

For, as these areas will soon discover, the triumph of the Leave campaign is unlikely to address their plight. The challenge for Christians (however we voted in the referendum) is to listen to their genuine and justified grievances, and to help them organise for justice - making common cause with the migrant communities which the worst of the Leave campaign encouraged them to scapegoat.'

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Beth Rowley - Nobody's Fault But Mine.

Exhibiting spirituality

It has been interesting to see the number of exhibitions recently which have explored some aspect of spirituality. Both the numbers and differing styles of exhibition would seem to indicate a renewed engagement within the art world with the force and mystery of spirituality.

Blood Tears Faith Doubt was an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery curated by students which "confronted historic Christian art with contemporary art that continues to address the same visual tradition." The contemporary works selected allude to or depict religious imagery or practices but are ambiguous or ironic in their response therefore providing a strong contrast with works of devotion from a earlier age.

A similar questioning of received traditions can be found in Newspeak: British Art Now at the Saatchi Gallery and particularly in the stunning work of Ged Quinn. Quinn reproduces with great technical virtuosity works from the golden ages of classical, romantic and genre paintings but inserts within these compositions jarring contemporary images which undercut the arcadian images. Cake in the Wilderness depicts a cherry cake cut into a crucifix which is also the shape of the infamous Spandau prison while True Peace Will Prevail Under The Rule juxtaposes Claude Lorrain's depiction of Jacob, Rachel and Leah at the well with Mount Carmel, home of David Koresh's dissident religious community. By these means Quinn questions idealist images of faith and tradition in a way that challenges the honesty and veracity of religious image making.

Mark Wallinger's recent show at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery also questioned the substance of religion with the second of two sculptures meditating on the nature of selfhood. Richard Dorment described I Am Innocent as consisting:

"of two bigger-than-life-size reproductions of Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X shown back-to-back and revolving slowly from a cable attached to a motor in the ceiling. On one side, we see the portrait as Velázquez painted it, with the Pope on the left hand side; on the other, the portrait is reversed, so that he sits on the right."

Here we see, Dorment suggests, "a human being whose “I” is subsumed in the trappings of power."

However, despite the prevalence of ironic juxtaposition in a exhibition such as Newspeak, there have also been more positive responses to spirituality on show. The photographs of Leah Gordon at Riflemaker have much in common with those of Markéta Luskačová in Blood Tears Faith Doubt, in that both depict the poignant integrity with which those they photograph practice their faith and, through this, capture a sense of the sacred in the everyday.

Gordon writes that: "Photography has rarely been embraced as a form of representation by religions. It is as if photography with it's indelible relationship to the material could only serve to disprove the divine. Although when one reflects on its alchemical past it seems rooted in magical process." The work of both suggests that such attitudes should change.

Gordon's exhibition is called The Invisibles, a title which tallies with several of the abstract works on show in this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition such as The Unseen by Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings. In the same room is Jane Harris’s Divine which combines a golden comb-like oval framing a white void. The still harmonious parallels of this composition hide an infinite variety of brushstrokes when seen close-up; suggestive of the permanence and change contained within the divine.

Finally, the Summer Exhibition includes a commemorative display by the late Craigie Aitchison including several of his luminous Crucifixions while the Kings Place Gallery has a wonderful selection of landscape and religious works by the late Norman Adams (see above). With this latter exhibition, for once, a gallery's exhibition description seems entirely accurate:

"When Norman Adams died in March 2005, Britain lost one of the most significant artists to have emerged over the last half century. Spanning a career of almost sixty years, Adams’ art was essentially ecstatic and life affirming in its approach to nature and man’s place within it.
Drawn from the artist’s estate, the paintings and watercolours in this exhibition explore five decades of prolific output during the course of which Adams evolved an intensely original and personal style in which the poetical and Romantic landscape traditions of Blake and Turner are infused with the broader currents of European Modernism – Van Gogh and Ensor, Nolde and Picasso among others - to create one of the most deeply felt and emotionally intense expressions of the Northern Expressionist sensibility in late 20th Century British art."

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King Crimson - Starless And Bible Black.