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Monday, 5 February 2024

Chris Beales R.I.P.

 


Chris Beales, who died on 12 January 2024, was a social entrepreneur working in housing and education and on issues of faith and economy, locally, nationally and internationally.

As Malcolm Brown writes: "Canon Chris Beales was probably the leading exponent of the partnership approach to Christian social action in the past 50 years. Always deeply committed to local ministry, his ability to connect social needs to potential solutions, and to gather resources for innovative projects, epitomised the Church’s latent convening power and commitment to social change. Chris got things done through a totally unforced charm and boundless enthusiasm, grounded in a profound affection for people and love of ordinary communities."

We met, as he explains in the video above, when he was working with Employment Focus and I was in JobCentre Plus. Employment Focus (originally known as Employment Forum UK) worked across the country with people of all faiths on employment, training and enterprise development. They held a series of major regional events, ran a Black Economic Empowerment programme, working with black majority churches, and a national Inter-Faith Action Programme. They also ran construction, ESOL and employability training programmes in London and Birmingham. During this time Chris produced "Catalytic Converters", a training programme to involve faith groups in social and economic development and service provision in their communities. Chris later ran a Catalytic Convertors course at St Margaret's Barking, while I was curate there.

Through our employment work we both met Saif Ahmad, then CEO of Faith Regen UK (later Faith Regen Foundation) and we both contributed in various ways to their work, as a multi-faith UK based regeneration charity, to reduce social exclusion. The multi-faith nature of urban Britain combined with the diversity and equalities agenda meant that those working in employment and training services needed to understand their customers and employees who were part of faith communities. This development provided an opportunity for me to work on the development of a Faith Communities Toolkit for Jobcentre Plus which provided information for staff on the nine world religions (including Christianity) represented in the UK and ideas and guidance on contacting and working with people of faith. Through Faith Regen Foundation, I was also involved in preparing similar resources for staff at Sainsbury’s, Calder UK Ltd and the learning and skills sector, more generally.

Chris and I later reconnected through HeartEdge when he participated in the above webinar which explored ways in which all churches can get involved in housing need locally and the theological basis for doing so. Chris had joined the Archbishops’ Commission on Housing when it was launched by the present Archbishop of Canterbury. Malcolm Brown writes that "His effervescent cheerfulness, mental acuity, and capacity for work, plus his genius for networking, made his contribution indispensable to the eventual report, Coming Home." He then, as a member of Executive Team following up the recommendations of "Coming Home", applied his energies to turning the recommendations into action.

In Church Times he wrote of how the church can be beneficial in bringing communities together: “Relationships have to be cultivated and trust established. In each local authority area, someone – clergy or lay – should be doing the research, meeting the planners and developers, building relationships, making friends, and feeding in ideas to be included in local plans and masterplans.

“In larger new housing developments, we have the chance to model places where housing is well-designed and caters for all ages, ethnicities, incomes, and circumstances; where facilities and services are easily accessible and to hand; and where schools and community facilities, open spaces, and sports and leisure facilities are local – creating places not of isolation, but inclusion: places where people love to live.”

His report ‘Building new communities in North East England: challenging church and society' identified significant new housing developments being built or planned in each of the 12 local authority areas across the region and explored the challenge of how to “build good community”; his aim being to lay the foundations for new strategic thinking and action by Churches and others, working with landowners, builders, planners, communities and all involved. Click here to read his report.

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Madness - Our House.

ArtWay Visual Meditation - Giampaolo Babetto: Candle Holder

ArtWay have republished my visual meditation on Giampaolo Babetto's Candle Holders for the Dick Sheppard Chapel at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

"Babetto’s process of moulding starts to develop from working a circular form, by tenths of millimetres, beating in a spiral around the surface many times before arriving at the final form. He says that in his work he is seeking to ‘find a form that you think will become a jewel.’ He says also that his work ‘is not made of appearances’ and that he would ‘like it to be something that comes from the inside, that expresses an inwardness.’ That aim has perhaps never been better realised than with these delicately material candleholders from which the light shines out through the crack of a cross."

My visual meditations for ArtWay include work by María Inés Aguirre, Giampaolo Babetto, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Alexander de Cadenet, Christopher Clack, Marlene Dumas, Terry Ffyffe, Jake Flood, Antoni Gaudi, Nicola Green, Maciej Hoffman, Gwen John, Lakwena Maciver, S. Billie Mandle, Giacomo Manzù, Sidney Nolan, Michael Pendry, Maurice Novarina, Regan O'Callaghan, Ana Maria Pacheco, John Piper, Nicola Ravenscroft, Albert Servaes, Henry Shelton, Anna Sikorska, Alan Stewart, Jan Toorop, Andrew Vessey, Edmund de Waal and Sane Wadu.

My Church of the Month reports include: All Saints Parish Church, Tudeley, Aylesford Priory, Canterbury Cathedral, Chapel of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, Hem, Chelmsford Cathedral, Churches in Little Walsingham, Coventry Cathedral, Église de Saint-Paul à Grange-Canal, Eton College Chapel, Lumen, Metz Cathedral, Notre Dame du Léman, Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, Plateau d’Assy,Romont, Sint Martinuskerk Latem, St Aidan of Lindisfarne, St Alban Romford, St. Andrew Bobola Polish RC Church, St. Margaret’s Church, Ditchling, and Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, St Mary the Virgin, Downe, St Michael and All Angels Berwick and St Paul Goodmayes, as well as earlier reports of visits to sites associated with Marian Bohusz-Szyszko, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Antoni Gaudi and Henri Matisse.

Blogs for ArtWay include: Congruity and controversy: exploring issues for contemporary commissions; Ervin Bossanyi: A vision for unity and harmony; Georges Rouault and André Girard: Crucifixion and Resurrection, Penitence and Life Anew; Photographing Religious Practice; Spirituality and/in Modern Art; and The Spirituality of the Artist-Clown.

Interviews for ArtWay include: Sophie Hacker, Peter Koenig, David Miller and Belinda Scarlett. I also interviewed ArtWay founder Marleen Hengelaar Rookmaaker for Artlyst.

I have also reviewed: Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace, Kempe: The Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe and Jazz, Blues, and Spirituals.

Other of my writings for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Church Times can be found here. Those for Artlyst are here and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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The Waterboys - Spirit.

Sunday, 4 February 2024

The creative, defining, loving Word of God


Today was the second ecumenical exchange that has been organised recently between St Andrew's Wickford and Christ Church Wickford with Revd Moses Agyam and I taking each others services. Revd Moses led the All-age Eucharist at St Andrew's I led the 10.30 am service at Christ Church (see below).

Here's the sermon that I preached at Christ Church:

Abracadabra, Open Sesame. If you’ve hired a children’s entertainer who did magic then you’re likely to have heard those words recently. They’ve been reduced to fun phrases for children but they represent our long-term belief in the power of words. If you’ve watched the climax of the BBC TV drama Merlin, then you’ll have seen Merlin, Morgana and Mordred muttering spells in an ancient tongue before their eyes flash and magic occurs.

Words have power. That’s what human beings believed in the past. We tend now to associate that thought with fantasy and yet it is an indication of the huge power that words actually carry. Each of us each day of our lives use words to make things happen and, while it may not be magic, it is powerful nonetheless.

The Bible teaches us much about the power of speech. Words are creative. In the beginning, God spoke the universe into being. God said, ‘Let there be …’ and life itself came into existence. Words also describe and define what has been made. In the Genesis account of creation, God divides light from dark and names light as ‘Day’ and dark as ‘Night’. Similarly he separates land from water and names the land as ‘Earth’ and the water as ‘Sea’. One of the first things he teaches human beings to do is to name what they see around them.

The creative, defining speech of God is wise. In Proverbs 8 we are told that God created Wisdom as the first of his works and that Wisdom speaks excellent words. God’s words, we are told, always accomplish what he purposes. When he sends them out into the world they never return to him void.

Yet, as Simon Small reminds us in his book ‘From the Bottom of the Pond’: “Thoughts and words are merely descriptions of reality. They can be wonderful, beautiful pointers to truth; they can evoke the experience of truth; and they can mirror the light of truth. Thoughts and words are necessary to help us open to the experience of truth. But they can never be truth itself. Thoughts and words, at best, can only be alarm clocks that wake us up to what was always present.” Words can be helpful or unhelpful, but they are not ultimately the reality or truth which they describe.

In the Prologue to John’s Gospel (John 1. 1 – 14), Jesus is described as being God’s Word to human beings; he is in himself the message that God wants to communicate to us. This Word is a real person, not simply a description of God or a statement of the truth about God. What this means is that the truth about God is found in a relationship with Jesus and not in a set of statements or beliefs about him. Truth is not a prescription that we can swallow but a relationship in which we live.

When Jesus is described to us in the Prologue to John’s Gospel as being the Word of God, we can see then that John is bringing all these thoughts about speech and words into play. When he writes that Jesus is God’s Word, he means that Jesus is the creativity, the definition and the wisdom of God; all wrapped up and revealed in human form and flesh.

Jesus’ creativity is seen in the new way of being human that he reveals to us. In him, the divine and the human come together enabling us to see all that human beings can potentially be; all that we can potentially become. In him we see the best of humanity because in him we see God fully expressed. The Prologue to John’s Gospel says that: “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is the same as God and is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.”

God is love and, in Jesus, we see pure love expressed without reserve and without self-seeking: the way of compassion instead of the way of domination; the way of self-sacrifice instead of the way of selfishness; the way of powerlessness instead of the way of power; and the way of giving instead of the way of grasping.

Therefore to follow in his way is to experience divinity in our lives; to move towards the divine. When we see him call his disciples to follow him that is what occurs; they leave their old way of life behind in order to begin to experience a new and divine way of being human. As the Prologue to John’s Gospel puts it, God himself becomes their Father.

In doing so, he is also the Word of God which describes and defines us. The Prologue to John’s Gospel explains Jesus’ ability to define us in terms of light and darkness. Elsewhere 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. 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. God sees 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.

In 1 John 5. 20 we read that “the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we know the true God.” He is, therefore, also the wise Word of God because, through him, we understand and know the true God as he truly is. Not only that but we see and know ourselves realistically as well.

Ultimately, the Word that God speaks to us in and through Jesus is ‘Love’. In 1 John 4. 9 – 10 we read, “God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.”

Jesus came into our world as the Word of God to live a life of self-sacrificial love as a human being. He shows us what true love looks like and he shows us that human beings are capable of true love even when most of the evidence around us seems to point towards the opposite conclusion. But he did not come solely as an example or a description of love. He is love itself, the reality of love, and, therefore, as we come into relationship with him we come into a true relationship with love. This why he came, that we might receive him; that we might receive love. He is then in us and in him. Love in us and we in love.

In the beginning Love already existed; Love was with God, and Love was God. From the very beginning Love was with God. Through him God made all things; not one thing in all creation was made without him. Love was the source of life, and this life brought light to people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.

“God is love. And God showed his love for us by sending his only Son into the world, so that we might have life through him. This is what love is: it is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.

Dear friends, if this is how God loved us, then we should love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in union with us, and his love is made perfect in us. (1 John 4. 8 – 12).




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Parchment - Son Of God.

Saturday, 3 February 2024

Windows on the world (462)


 London, 2024

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The Westies - Still.

Friday, 2 February 2024

Southend-on-Sea: Steve Whittle and John Paul Barrett



There is a marvellous opportunity currently in Southend to see traditional religious imagery in a new light.

Steve Whittle ‘Retrospective : 1973-2023’
Beecroft Art Gallery
Saturday, 13 January - Sunday, 31 March 2024

The primary subject matter in Steve Whittle's work is colour, which has been the major theme. The work is often produced in series and is unified by the similar images and combinations of colours that are used. Each picture can therefore be viewed as a component of a group or seen as an individual piece.

The medium Whittle uses is collage and over many years he has developed the technique which can be seen in many of the pictures in this retrospective. Firstly the paper, which is acid free, is prepared with several coats of acrylic paint in the appropriate colour and the torn paper collage is applied to this surface with acrylic glue in as many layers as necessary to get the correct colour combinations. When the picture is complete it is then coated with UVS varnish.

The retrospective includes a series of Stations of the Cross, plus other crucifixion and resurrection images. Additionally, there are images of churches including St Peter's Chapel at Bradwell. M.L. Banting writes:

"Asking what had drawn him to this ancient Chapel, Whittle says it’s almost impossible to put into words, he’d felt a primal and immediate connection on his first visit and had to return again and again. That powerful pull has resulted in a number of works, including charcoals, pastels, paintings and collages, all of which portray the extraordinary sense, or spirit, of place – remote, lonely; glorious and powerful – the austere silhouette of the Chapel monumental against the sea and sky."


Trials and Tribulations: Modern Impressions of Iconography
Friday 2 - Thursday 29 February 2024

This is a new exhibition by local artist John Paul Barrett at the Forum. This collection is inspired by Eastern European iconography. Visitors will experience traditional religious imagery in a new light, and (re)connect with the spiritual aspect and values symbolised by pivotal Biblical events.

You can meet the artist at the following times:
  • Friday 2 February, 5-6.30pm
  • Saturday 3 February, 3-4.30pm
  • Saturday 10 February, 11am-2pm
  • Saturday 17 February, 3-5pm
  • Saturday 24 February, 11am-2pm
Also worth checking out is: 

on the Focal Point Gallery website, which features St Peter-on-the-Wall:

Richard Baxter is interested in how traces from previous lives of places describe time passing. When visiting a site, he collects photographic evidence and takes squeezes: sheets of porcelain pressed onto surfaces, peeled away to reveal exact negatives of specific details. He is currently exploring the site of St Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell in Essex. Built by Cedd in 654 it is England’s oldest church, but it uses far older materials from the Roman fort Othona that stood there for over 400 years. The stones came from Kent and the red bricks from the clay found under the fields. Many centuries have left their marks, making a complex story of building and rebuilding. It is a place of utmost simplicity requiring a simple response. The prints are enhanced with a cobalt wash, a blue associated with porcelain. This is a different kind of printmaking, and goes hand in hand with making cyanotypes, which use similar blue dye tones and give a timeless feel. This film is a collage of inputs and outcomes so far. Next steps will see Baxter combine the photographic images onto squeezes for the first time. The images will sit on top of their own texture.

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Lent Course 2024: Exploring the Stations of the Cross



This year the Ministry Team in the Wickford and Runwell Team Ministry have once again written our own Lent Course, which looks more deeply into the Stations of the Cross which we use during Holy Week, including images, readings, reflection and prayer. 

These sessions will be offered on Tuesday evening and Thursday afternoon and evening, depending on numbers, starting the week of 19th February. We also have the opportunity to share these sessions with Christ Church, giving additional days and times (Tuesday mornings and Wednesday evenings). 

Please think about whether you would like to join or even host a group. The sign up sheet below is available at all our churches now. All are most welcome to join a Lent group.

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Ewan McColl - Ballad of the Carpenter.

Thursday, 1 February 2024

Artlyst: The Art Diary February 2024

My February Art Diary for Artlyst looks at the Pre-Raphaelites, the works of Alison Lapper, Monia Sjöö and various group exhibitions, including shows at Cross Lane Projects, Drawing Room and The William Morris Gallery:

"‘Landscapes of the Gods’ at Cross Lane Projects brings together the work of nine artists to explore an interconnection with the landscape, the ceremonial, the mythical, the man-made, the dystopian, the inhabited and the emotive. The idea of the exhibition, curated by painter Rebecca Scott, initially developed from a conversation with the artist Michael Petry, in which they discussed Petry’s ongoing visual investigation into the places of the Gods and Scott’s own emotive exploration of the Cumbrian landscape, which surrounds her. Through his paintings, Michael Petry celebrates the ceremonial, memorialises the mythical, and acknowledges, honours, and explores the deeper spirits within us whom we all feel and hear yet have found hard to name. For Petry, our belief (or disbelief) in the Gods is of no importance to them, for we are mortal, whereas they are divine."

Interviews -
Monthly diary articles -
Articles/Reviews -
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Fickle Pickle - Jesus Christo.