Sunday 30 November 2014

I will build my church

Last week (24th - 27th November) the clergy and a number of licenced lay ministers from the Diocese of Peterborough decamped from the midlands and borderland-east to take up residence in Swanwick, Derbyshire for a three-yearly residential conference.  The title was "I will build my church", taken from Matthew 16:18.  The focus was therefore on mission and growing the church.  For the conference I wrote the following prayer, which was used throughout.


Pour our your Holy Spirit, Lord,
upon your church
that it may grow in faith, hope and love.
Inspire it in service,
ignite it to action,
instil it with holiness
that all people may be drawn into your embrace
and rejoice as citizens of your Kingdom;
through Jesus Christ,
the Way, the Truth and the Life.  Amen.


It proved to capture the theme better than I could have realised when I wrote it back in January.


What follows are my highlights and reflections on what we were given by the main speakers.


Confidence and Trust in the builder

Bishop Donald's opening address reflected on the title phrase.  When we look at that phrase about the church being built upon the rock of Peter, the emphasis tends to be placed on Peter, not least when set to music.  But he preferred to look at who is building, on the 'I' of 'I will build'.  It is Christ and therefore he called for a renewed confidence that the church has a divine commission.  He asserted that it is impossible for the church to die because it is Jesus who brings it into being and sustains it.  Its existence is the fulfilment of his purpose and that will not be thwarted.  Clearly specific forms of it can die and do over the centuries, but the existence of a church is the clear intension of God in Christ.  It is through it that Jesus intends to bless the world, the gospel be preached, even in the darkest places which will not prevail against it.

Growth always involves change and so growing more like Jesus will require the church in its current form to change, as it has in each generation.  It changes as it reconnects with the 'I' of 'I will build my church'.

On 'the gates of hell', referred to in the key passage, he described these as being wherever people are trapped in fear, abuse, addition, poverty, treatable ill-health; wherever the love of Jesus is not known. There is nowhere out of reach and which cannot be transformed.  They therefore will not prevail against the church that is built by him.  Ones not built by him deserve to crumble.


Deep roots and irrigation systems

On the second day the key address was given by Robert Atwell, the new Bishop of Exeter.  He drew his title from Thomas Traherne, 'Oak trees flourishing in winter'.  In his garden he has a Lucombe oak tree which is semi-evergreen.  It sustains this by a vast root system which penetrate very deeply into the ground. This enables nutrients to be drawn even when the surface may be dry or inhospitable for a season.  His encouragement was to be deeply rooted in prayer.  This is the distinctive contribution which the church offers.  If we do not talk about God, we have no purpose beyond any other group.

He described prayer as being like digging channels in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water so that when the water comes we are ready for that grace to irrigate the heart.  This goes against the instant, consumer culture because it has to be worked at over time.  But that's what disciples, followers of Jesus, do.  And there is no other point to the church.

In a workshop before hand he spoke about the need for contemplative leaders, drawing on the Rule of St Benedict.  Bishop Robert is a former Benedictine monk.  One of the other pitfalls for modern life is its frenetic nature, over activism.  Burnt out, exhausted Christians are not a good advert for the Kingdom of God.  Contemplation is the wellspring of Christian mission.


Get real and face the challenge

The third main talk was from the National Adviser for Mission and Evangelism for the Church of England, Rachel Jordan.  Seatbelts were needed because her high octane presentation was a whirlwind of passion to get real about the challenge we face.  The statistics have been presented by many others of declining numbers, and particularly among young people who are by and large just not attracted to what they find, if they look.  Church leaders need a clear vision of where they are (the reality of the situation) and of where they are trying to get to.  She based her presentation around the story in the Old Testament of Gideon.  She declared that we have forgotten who God is and need to encounter God afresh.  She quoted Pope Francis' recent encyclical on evangelisation, "A person who is not convinced, enthusiastic, certain and in love will convince nobody".  In contrast passion convinces and draws.

Gideon had to deal with idols and one of those she identified was the church having become a bit of a club.  Changing the culture of a church often causes a rumpus and we can expect conflict.  Continuing with her biblical model, people wanted to kill Gideon.  Mission demands conflict.  She also retold the parable of 'the lost sheep' as 'the lost flock'.  The 99 have wandered off and we are left with the 1, not the other way round.  Where her talk was less convincing for me was that it was low on solutions having spent a lot of time identifying the statistical decline.  Solutions of course come from analysing a particular setting and knowing where that place needs to travel to.  It was a talk that begged an awful lot more questions.


Key messages

For me the key messages I will take away are in the subheadings above: a renewed confidence in the one who builds the church and who calls it into being (the 'I' of "I will build"), the call to develop deep roots through prayer and remember that we have a gospel to proclaim, to be contemplative, and the challenge to get real and face the challenge - when it brings conflict not to be surprised (though like Gideon part of me would like to hide in a hole in the ground).  To aid those we were given three outstanding Bible Studies on the Gospel of Mark by Paul Foster from Edinburgh University.  Passion rekindled and confidence renewed.




Wednesday 19 November 2014

Just War: exercise in damage limitation

A few years ago I marked GCSE Religious Education examination papers.  This was part of a philosophy and ethics paper.  One of the questions was on Just War Theory.  One candidate was minimalist in his answer.  He simply wrote: “Just War is just war, nothing else”.  As an exam answer it did not attract many marks because he didn’t demonstrate his grasp of the topic or the ethical issues.  As a philosophical statement he may have been making a valid point.  Can war ever be just or is it just war?  Is war always by definition the departure of justice and morals?  To a pacifist, the answer is clearly one of agreement.  War is never justified and you don’t solve one wrong by inflicting further wrongs and destruction. Nonaggressive resistance and the power of love are the answer.  If we search the gospels, this view can clearly find backup from Jesus about turning the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), if your brother wrongs you forgive not 7 times but 70 x 7 times (Matthew 18:21), his comment to Peter at his arrest to put away his sword (John 18:11).  He did not call down legions of angels to defend himself from the death that was sure to come.  Jesus did not lead an army in rebellion to liberate Israel from the Roman occupying power, and in this way he did not match the expected job description for the Messiah.  In fact when it came to the cross he submitted to it.  So there is a powerful argument for the minimalist exam candidate’s philosophical answer: Just War is just war.

However the trouble with proof texts for Jesus is that when we think we have him cornered he pops up somewhere else with a qualifying statement.  So he drew on the image of a king going to war with another king and first calculating his chances of success.  If he doesn’t think he’ll win with the resources he has he will sue for peace and see what terms the other brings.  If he thinks he can knock out the opposition then off he marches (Luke 14:31).  Jesus doesn’t include in this passage any hint that the king who goes to war was wrong or evil.  He is pragmatic and reflects here how it is.  He tells his hearers that he comes not to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34) and close family members will be set against one another in violent combat (Mark 13:12).  He predicts the destruction of Jerusalem which came about in AD70 (Matthew 24:2) and tells his followers that there will be war and rumours of wars (Mark 13:7).  He did not expect them to end.  He took direct action by driving out the moneychangers from the Temple (John 2:15).

So a fundamental in assessing whether or not war can be considered to have justice and right on its side, which is what Just War theory is about, is whether or not war is ever justified.  And as we have just seen if we are selective with our texts we can line Jesus up on either side, though it is arguable that he biases towards reconciling, building bonds and not going to war, while recognizing that it happens.  There is a difference between a whip of cords to drive out corrupt traders and gunning them down.  This relatively short talk is concerned with how we navigate a moral course when war happens, indeed is it ever actually right to initiate it.  There is an ancient tradition which has taken the view that it can be.  The Book of Revelation uses violent imagery, which it takes for granted, not least of war breaking out in heaven with the beast being slain.  Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo in the 4th and 5th centuries drew on the Old Testament images of God requiring conflicts and battles, using them to bring about his change and justice.  Augustine went on to say that war can be used in a limited way to protect the innocent under attack.  This later extends to protecting the state, and therefore the population, from invading Germanic armies when the Roman Empire crumbled.  It is the use of violence and force to protect and defend.  Later battles between pagan and Christian kings realize that there will be battle and struggle because the violent are on the rampage.  A Saxon king had to be a warrior.  The abbey community here was wiped out by Viking raiders.

Around the beginning of the second millennium the problem arose about how to restrain the worst excesses of warfare among neighbouring kingdoms.  The Council of Narbonne in 1054 set limits on when war could be waged – an open-season and closed-season approach reflecting the Old Testament passages such as ‘in the months when kings go to war’ (2 Samuel 11:1).  Further approaches sought to protect noncombatants, so that the ancient accounts of slaughtering everyone in sight would be restricted to the battlefield.  The Second Lateran Council in 1139 aimed to limit arms proliferation by banning crossbows, bows and arrows, and siege machines.  We don’t need to know much history to know these attempts had limited affect.  There was though a growing movement to codify a doctrine of restraint and limitation on just what the affect of warfare would be.

The 13th century saw this codifying being brought together and systematized under theologians like Peter of Paris and Thomas Aquinas.  This focused on defining the right intention and the just cause for the war.  Out of their work came 6 tests which need to be met if a war is going to be regarded as just or justifiable:

1.   It needs to be legitimate, there needs to be right authority to wage the war;
2.   There must be a just cause and right intention for waging war;
3.   The use of force should be a last resort;
4.   It should be proportionate to the evil to be remedied (the attempts to regulate weapons having disappeared);
5.   There should be a reasonable expectation of success and it should contribute to a new state of peace;
6.   and noncombatants should be protected from harm.

Legal, good reason, last resort, proportionate, expectation of success and protect the innocent; these six are the backbone of classic Just War theory.

The assumption behind these is a world where standing armies will form up, set a date, time and place where the battle will take place and then slug it out until one side lies dead or runs for their lives.  The situation becomes very different as we enter the 20th century.  The First World War was the last one to include mounted cavalry and these didn’t last long when confronted by machine guns.  You can see that in the film War Horse, which was on BBC1 on Sunday night.  Machine guns led to trench warfare.  You need a bunker when the other guy can fire more bullets in a minute that the regiment can fire together.  There is no let up because it just keeps going until it runs out of ammunition.  Proportionate becomes what you need to meet the challenge.  And then when we have airborne munitions with fighter planes and bombers and now guided missiles fired from miles away we enter a new scenario.  What does it mean to protect noncombatants when we have indiscriminate bombing?

It is for this reason that George Bell, Bishop of Chichester during the Second World War, condemned the allied bombing of Dresden and the deaths of thousands of civilians.  Noncombatants were clearly being endangered.  However we enter another question as to what it means to be a noncombatant when the munitions are not produced by camp followers – arrowmakers and blacksmiths, carpenters and lead shot workers – but by a war effort with munitions factories on the Kent marshes and in Scotland as in WW1 and in the WW2 factories in Coventry making planes and weapons.    Where do we place nuclear weapons which by definition are disproportionate to the war?  Rowan Williams argued that it was morally questionable that we could ever justify using Trident and other weapons of mass destruction.  The force involved is grossly disproportionate.

It complicates further when we ask about a world of international terrorism.  Terrorists from Northern Ireland to 9/11, 7/7 and others argue that they are bringing the fight to our doorsteps.  No longer can we sit protected at home supporting our boys (and girls) as they fight on foreign shores because the fight is brought to the corner of the street, to buses and trains.  No one in the eyes of terrorists is a noncombatant because support for the bullet-makers, as well as being the bullet-makers makes us all equal to the bullet-firers.  Indeed we are part of the political system which they see as being the problem.  However the aim of Just War theory is to restrict the scope of the battle and bring restraint where passions might run uncontrolled.  Terrorists often fail the legitimate authority test, though that is a political judgment itself questioned by them.  But classic Just War theory becomes more complex when it is not clear where the battleground is or who the combatants are and when we try to consider what an appropriate response might look like.   It is even more confused when the aggressor is not from outside but from inside, homegrown and our neighbour.  There was deep shock in Leeds when a classroom assistant, respected and liked, turned out to be someone with a dark secret that he was one of the 7/7 bombers.    Who can you trust when people you have trusted turn out to be against you?

These questions mean that we need to assess the principles of Just War in a new light.  But the principles still have relevance.

The idea that there needs to be a proper authority for an invasion or action against another is seen in the United Nations security resolutions.  The UN is a body which brings nations together and by having a resolution it implies that a higher good than just one nation’s expansionism is being advanced.  Nations have the right to defend themselves against an aggressor and treaty agreements mean that other nations may come to their aid, thus risking a far greater conflict.  Proper authority means a group needs to have legitimacy, speak for the people.  That raises questions about legitimacy itself.

This has led us into another area, that of there being a moral cause to be advanced.  War for war’s sake is immoral.  War to invade and seize territory for megalomaniac purposes is immoral.  However, land is grabbed for strategic reasons and if we apply this retrospectively then Gibraltar is only held because it commands the entrance to the Mediterranean.  We have territory abroad which is not really ours to hold.  Hong Kong was returned to China when the lease ran out and there was no way we could justify its continuance as a British territory.  Where do we place securing oil and commodities we rely on so heavily on the scale of moral causes and goals?

The last resort test means that everything else has been tried.  War is not to be rushed into.  Sue for peace; try to resolve by other means.  It is only to be used when everything else has failed.  And for this reason Robert Runcie used to refer to war as always being a sign of human failure.

Proportionate is a challenge.  What does it mean when technology makes possible what was previously impossible?  Is it proportionate to refer to some people’s deaths as being ‘collateral damage’ – in other words they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and their deaths are regrettable but inevitable in the greater good of defeating the enemy?  Such deaths often serve as a recruiting sergeant which becomes counter productive in itself.  That said a surgical strike is better than carpet-bombing which will catch anyone without any look at efficiency.  Given the costs involved it makes economic sense to target the firepower.  And the costs, which run into £billions, are a whole new challenge to the proportionate use of resources being expended.  One missile costs £millions and it doesn’t take much imagination to ask about how else that money could be spent.  There is a clear obscenity involved here.  Kings in the past have been crippled by financing expensive wars.

War always needs an exit strategy.  That means there needs to be not just a sense of being able to achieve the goal, to win, but also we have to work out what comes after.  The fifth test, that there is a reasonable chance of success, means that we think through what removing Sadam Hussein means before we topple him, and it is arguable that we didn’t.  Who will come after Assad and who follows Gadhafi?  The rise of ISIS is partly the consequence of removing vicious dictators who kept the lid on some very violent places.  Is the world better without them?  To my mind the jury is still out.

Finally noncombatants need to be protected.  The trouble here is that who is and who is not a combatant has become blurred when the battlefield is not clearly defined nor the day of the fight.  But the principle of restraint and not assuming everyone is a target has benefits for building peace and minimizing death, and preventing building resentment which makes building peace more difficult, even stirs up future conflict.  There is a pragmatic side to the moral case.

So, this has been brief and much more could have been said, but we are back to my year 11-student exam candidate.  Is there such a thing as a Just War or is war just war?  War is always a sign of failure and never a good to be celebrated.  If it comes it is to be regretted because it brings us into a morally compromised place and one where the smoke of the battle makes right and wrong hard to distinguish at times, certainly it brings us into a place where we find we are deciding between scales of wrong rather than clear good vs evil.  But decide we must in the hope that a moral good will be advanced and Just War theory still provides some clear principles which can help prepare for the peace that must follow: legal, good reason, last resort, proportionate, expectation of success and protect the innocent.


Talk given to Wedensday at One, Peterborough Cathedral, 19th November 2014

Thursday 6 November 2014

Prayer for 100th Anniversary of WW1

The poppies at the Tower of London have caught the imagination of millions of people as well as being an impressive work of art.  The 888,246 ceramic sculptures each represents a British fatality in the Great War, what we now call the First World War.  As a way of depicting the loss of life it is evocative.  I find the poppy crosses at war memorials around the country with their personal messages and individual names on them poignant for the personal touch.

These are of course only part of the picture because there are many others who died too.  When I was vicar of a village in Kent there was a memorial in the church to those who died in a munitions explosion in the works on the Oare and Uplees marshes and these included women, none of them combatants as such.  Also excluded from this image are those who fought on the other side, conscripted German soldiers, those who volunteered and those just too frightened not to do any other.  War pits people who might otherwise be friends against one another in a brutal fight.  It is always a sign of sin and division and that is never the place we want to stay in.

One hundred years on we are no longer at war with Germany.  They are our partners in trade, in NATO and while there may be some differences of opinion between their government and ours on the shape of Europe and immigration, we are working together to build a brighter future.  This set me thinking about the purpose of remembrance and a longing for those we are in conflict with now that the day will come when they too will be partners with us in building a new tomorrow for mutual flourishing.  War always needs to have an end game in sight and it should not be the annihilation of the other.

In the following prayer written for the 100th Anniversary of the Beginning of the First World War I have aimed to bring together some of these thoughts.

God, who in Christ,
came to reconcile the world to yourself
redeeming all that had been lost in sin and division;
hear our prayer for all who fought,
from this nation and the Commonwealth,
and also from nations once our enemies
but now our friends and partners,
that those with whom we are in conflict now
may likewise come to share with us in a new tomorrow
where peace and concord reign
and all may flourish in the freedom and purpose of your love
through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.


See also 'Lest we forget: The month that led to WW1'