The State We're In - Faith and Politics post-Brexit and the US Election

A large group of Christian leaders came to St Stephen Walbrook today for a special breakfast with guest speaker Michael Wear, Faith Advisor to President Obama. Michael, who has been in the UK this week to talk about his book Reclaiming Hope which can be preordered here, shared insights from the White House and reflections on the changing role of faith in public life. The event was organised by the Good Faith Partnership, in conjunction with Home for Good, Premier Radio and HeartEdge.

St Martin's Voices sang to open the proceedings before Michael spoke about faith, politics, adoption and hope in US politics noting that the next four years will mark a pivotal time for the church in the Western World. He was encouraged by the elevation of women's voices in American Christianity and mentioned Tish H. Warren and the testimony of Nicole Cliffe, in this respect:

• "Hope is about God coming and crashing into the here and now,"
• "If you really care about your neighbour you'll love God."
• "Christian knowledge is for all of life and can be applied to politics."
• "Christians will be swept aside unless we grapple with the issues that people in general are talking about."
• "I am convinced that politics is damaging our spiritual lives."

In my welcome to the breakfast, I said the following:

Welcome to St Stephen Walbrook. For those who haven’t been here before this building is one of Christopher Wren’s masterpieces which was built after the Great Fire of London and is the Parish Church for Mansion House, the home of the Lord Mayor of London. In the 1950s, under Chad Varah, this church was the place where Samaritans began and from which it operated in the early part of its existence. That major social outreach programme led to the understanding that when God’s people to gather they should be in community. That understanding led to the reordering of the church so that its people could gather round a circular altar carved by Henry Moore where God would be found at the very centre of the community. Most recently, the church has developed a partnership with St Martin-in-the-Fields which had led to new mission initiatives including early morning reflections for people on their way to work and which has also revitalised the cultural offer (music and visual arts) of the church.

The partnership which St Martin’s has formed with St Stephen’s provides a model for future partnerships which St Martin’s intends to form as a way of building association, learning, development and resource together with other churches. As part of developing its support of partnership working St Martin’s is initiating and incubating a new network of churches called HeartEdge, about which you have been given an information pack among the papers you have been received this morning.

HeartEdge supports churches in blending their mission around four key areas:

1. Congregation – Inclusive approaches to liturgy, worship and day-to-day community life.
2. Community – sharing models of outreach which serve local need and address social justice. 
3. Culture – art, music and ideas to re-imagine the Christian narrative for the present moment.
4. Commerce – Commercial activities that generate finance but which also creatively extend and enhance mission and ministry through social enterprise.

So, HeartEdge intends to create opportunities for churches to:

• Learn from each other – building a community of practice.
• Celebrate achievement – validating a range of activities.
• Look to the future – evolving new forms of cultural, commercial and community-based work.

Why should you join? We can do unbelievable things together as churches if we start with one another’s assets not our deficits. In a community of fear we begin with our hurts and our stereotypes, and find a hundred reasons why we can’t do things or why certain kinds of people don’t belong. But if we take off our labels (like disabled or wealthy or migrant or evangelical or single) and instead see qualities like passion or commitment or generosity or enthusiasm or humility then there’s no limit to what a community of hope like HeartEdge can do.

By listening to and learning from each other we can build a community of practice able to evolve new forms of cultural, commercial and community based mission and ministry and find our way to becoming abundant communities that open space for generosity and cooperation.

HeartEdge will be launched here on 8 February (please come along) and will provide mentoring, workshops, conferences, mission models and project opportunities to its members as it develops. You don’t need to wait until 8 February, however, to sign up as initial members. We are beginning to get this Membership Pack out to interested churches and to sign up initial members from today’s event onwards. For more information please contact me on jonathan.evens@smitf.org.

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St Martin's Voices.

The State We're In - Faith and Politics post-Brexit and the US Election

The State We're In - Faith and Politics post-Brexit and the US Election

Leadership Breakfast with Michael Wear (Faith Advisor to Barack Obama) by The Good Faith Partnership Fri 2 December 2016 09:00 – 10:30 GMT at St Stephen Walbrook, 39 Walbrook, London
EC4N 8BN.

Join us for a special breakfast for Christian leaders with guest speaker Michael Wear, Faith Advisor to President Obama. Michael will share insights from the White House and reflections on the changing role of faith in public life.

Organised by the Good Faith Partnership, in conjunction with Home for Good, Premier Radio and the Heart Edge Network.

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Take 6 - If We Ever Needed the Lord Before (We Sure Do Need Him Now).

The whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances

Last Sunday The Observer published an interview with Neil MacGregor in which he made what seem to me to be some of the most pertinent observations that I have heard to date on the issues surrounding the EU referendum and the possibility of Brexit. In the interview he talks about acts of memory as a defining difference within Europe:

'In Germany, he says, “the thing I continue to find striking is that in the centre of Berlin you keep coming across monuments to national shame. I think that is unique in the world.”

Did they really have an option but to confront what had happened though?

“Well,” he says. “Austria hasn’t done it. Post-Soviet Russia hasn’t done it. Japan hasn’t done it.”

And, he would suggest, Britain and France have never really done it. “If you compare the way we remember, the perfect example was the opening ceremony of the Olympics, that selective national memory: all true but not looking at any of the difficult bits.”

Two things, he says, in the past couple of months have highlighted that complacency. The Cecil Rhodes statue debate “shows that we still cannot look at the past dispassionately, even a hundred years on”. Likewise, the centenary of the Easter Rising. “There is still no appetite to look hard at British behaviour in Ireland. What I find so painfully admirable about the German experience is that they are determined to find the historical truth and acknowledge it however painful it is. You can’t be an informed adult – or an artist – in Germany without doing that.”

The great thing a museum can do is allow us to look at the world as if through other eyes

That reflexive act of memory also colours the great political schisms of our times. Much has changed in Europe in the 18 months since the British Museum’s Germany show and the first publication of his book. It contains many chapters of forensic storytelling, but the one that stands out reading it now is MacGregor’s analysis of a simple refugee cart. That cart was representative of one of the most forgotten events of the last century: the forced “repatriation” of German speakers from eastern Europe after the war. About 30 million people were “ethnically cleansed” and 12-14 million returned to a devastated homeland they didn’t know, and became absorbed into a society that was rebuilt and reordered within a decade.

“If you try to explain why Germany has taken its unique stance on Syrian refugees in Europe you can’t ignore this,” MacGregor says. “Some argue the policy is another way of atoning for the Nazi era. But another absolutely central motivation, rarely mentioned, is that almost everybody now in Germany in their 20s or 30s has a grandparent or great-grandparent who has been a refugee. Pretty well every German has direct family experience of knowing what it means to be welcomed.”

The other debate that has become more charged since the book first appeared is the notion of sovereignty. MacGregor believes that the British and Germans mean completely different things when they use that word. Partly because of its own traumatic experience of nationalism and partly because of the history of shifting borders and alliances during the Holy Roman Empire, in Germany, he says, sovereignty always means an appetite for coalition and compromise. “Any German knows that as well as the Bundestag there are 16 other parliaments making laws within its borders. In Britain we don’t have the language for that.”

The European debate in Britain looks so strange if you are a German for precisely this reason, he suggests. “German people see the whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances. The proper use of sovereignty is all about pooling it to achieve your aims. The British idea that you should entirely do these things on your own and try to assume total control over your environment is unthinkable.”'

This, it seems to me, explains, in part, the shortcomings of the argument currently being made by anti-EU campaigners that Barack Obama is guilty of double standards when he encourages the UK to remain part of the EU. What those campaigners fail to acknowledge is that the USA is, as it says on the tin, a Union of States. Obama recognises the importance of cooperation rather than isolation and interdependence rather than independence because that is built in to the existence of America, part of its raison d'être. By contrast, the anti-EU campaigners believe, as McGregor notes, that we should entirely do these things on our own and try to assume total control over our environment. In my view it is this refusal to recognise the value of cooperation and interdependence that causes the shallowness in the arguments made in favour of Brexit.

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Woody Guthrie - This Land Is Your Land.

Advent: Time for change

“It’s time for change” was Barak Obama’s slogan in his 2008 Presidential campaign. When we heard in our Bible readings (Malachi 3. 1 - 4; Luke 3. 1 - 6) , “Get the road ready!” “Turn away from your sins!” “Bring the right kind of offerings!” we are being told the same; Advent is a time for change!

These are cries and readings about the need for change because of dissatisfaction with the present. God’s coming does not involve comfort for the complacent but instead is a challenge to change.

Malachi sets out a timetable or schedule for change; first a messenger will come to prepare the way for God himself to come, then the Lord himself will suddenly come to his Temple. Neither coming though will be easy or comfortable.

John the Baptist is the promised messenger and he comes preaching repentance and change as the necessary preparation for the coming of God himself. Turning away from sins and being baptized is the way to get the road ready along which God will come. He calls on the people of Israel to do this, so that the whole human race – all peoples everywhere – will be able to see God’s salvation when it comes in the person of Jesus.

But, as Malachi emphasises, the coming of Jesus is also about challenge and change: “He will be like strong soap, like a fire that refines metal. He will come to judge like one who refines and purifies silver.”

How was this aspect of Jesus expressed when he came? In John’s Gospel Jesus says to Nicodemus (John 3. 19 - 21): “This is how the judgement works: the light has come into the world, but people love the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds are evil. Those who do evil things hate the light and will not come to the light, because they do not want their evil deeds to be shown up. But those who do what is true come to the light in order that the light may show that what they did was in obedience to God.”

In other words, the light of Christ is all about comparisons and transparency. Generally, when we compare ourselves with others we compare ourselves with those we think are worse than or similar to ourselves. On the basis of these comparisons we think we are ok; at least no better or worse than others, at best, better than many others around us. On the basis of these comparisons we are comfortable with who we are and see no need to change. But Jesus, through his life and death, shows us the depth of love of which human beings are really capable and, on the basis of that comparison, we come up well short and are in real need of change. In the light of Jesus’ self-sacrifice, we see our inherent selfishness and recognise our need for change.

The light of Christ is also about transparency. When we think others cannot see what we are doing, our tendency is to try to get away with things we know are wrong and of which we would be ashamed were they public knowledge. We can see this tendency at work in all the recent major public scandals such as phone hacking, libor-rate fixing, MPs expenses, and so on. When we think no one can see what we are doing, we try to get away with murder but when those things become public that we are then contrite. This is why campaigners call for transparency in business and politics and why their calls are often resisted.

Yet God does see all and Jesus, in his ministry, was able to shine a light on the deepest recesses of the human heart. The Samaritan woman said of him: “Come see the man who told me everything I have ever done” (John 4. 29). With Jesus, nothing is hidden, everything is transparent; therefore we need to change if we are to truly live in the light of his presence.

The book I have published was written with Peter Banks, the keyboard player in the rock band After The Fire. One of the best songs by After The Fire is called ‘Laser Love’ and it contains these lines:

“Your love is like a laser burning right into my life

You know my weaknesses, you cut me like a knife

You’re separating all the wrong things from the right

It’s like a laser, laser love.

Your love is like an X-ray there is nothing that can hide

You hold me to the light, you see what is inside

It’s all so clear when it’s there in black and white

Just like a laser, laser love.”

We might wonder what this kind of exposure has to do with love but it is a love which refuses to leave us in the dark and which does everything possible to bring light into our lives. As Malachi states it is a refining love which wants us to become clean and pure.

As the hymn How Firm a Foundation, Ye Saints of the Lord puts it:

"When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply.
The flames shall not hurt thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.”

This is the light and love that we celebrate as coming into the world at Christmas. It is tough love and a searching light. When we light our Advent candles or our Christingles or sing carols by candlelight it is easy to think that what we are celebrating is traditional, pretty, unchanging and sweet. But the reality of Christ’s love and light is tough and searching because it is challenging and because it calls us to change.

At Christmas we often ask the question what will we give but before we can answer that question we need to respond to the question posed by Advent which is, ‘How are we going to change?’ It is once we have been changed by God that we then have something good to give.

So how will you respond to these Advent challenges to ‘Get the road ready!’ ‘Turn away from your sins!’ and ‘Bring the right kind of offerings!’ What will you change about yourself this Advent as you prepare to welcome to Christ who comes at Christmas?

One starting point in thinking this through might be to think of what you would want to change in others and then, as the saying goes, to realise that “When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back at you.” Alternatively, you could think of what you would like to see changed within the world and then take on board the challenge of Mahatma Gandhi to “Be the change you want to see in the world”

An inherent danger in thinking about change is our tendency to assume that change begins with someone else.  It is so easy to believe that “we” are doing the right things and that it is “them” that need to change but, as Eric Jensen has said, “The reason things stay the same is because we stay the same.  For things to change, we must change” or, as U2 once sang, “I can’t change the world but I can change the world in me.”

So this year, instead of focusing on Christmas Cheer, let us think of Christmas Change. What will you change about yourself this Advent as you prepare to welcome to Christ who comes at Christmas?

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After the Fire - Laser Love.