Short-termism

Big old churches are not really my thing but I respect those who chose to erect something worthy of the God they sought. Rowan Williams described churches and other faith groups as 'custodians of the long-term questions'. He observed that they were so because their vision of human nature was not in allegiance with political fashions and majorities. (Being Disciples)

It is hard to be popular if you are a long-term thinker. Investment in the future involves paying now for something you, or maybe somebody else, will get and enjoy then. Oak tree woods may have been planted by visionaries but they are enjoyed by the following generations, not the planters,

But today we have all grown up with credit, hire purchase, loans and mortgages. Paying then for something you get now. Investment spending is a difficult sell. 

Thus populism, as a philosophy, finds it easy to demonstrate that people may keep their freedom during a time of a pandemic. Saves thinking about that awkward business of  being dead. Short-termism wants now what may be compromised if we don't show a willingness to delay gratification. Short-termism says it won't wear a mask now but will risk the hit later. Which would be a perfectly reasonable and acceptable gamble if the person doing the betting was the person who would take the hit. Trouble is the non-mask wearers are gambling with my life, without my permission. The Darwin Awards shouldn't cause collateral damage

'History tells us what happens when economics in decline, with mounting social and economic anxiety, are captured by oversimple populist slogans which cast out those who don't agree or are deemed not to look or sound right.' (Susie Orbach, Guardian Review 26/1/19) Indeed it does. Tragically.

Short-termism is usually late to the party. Short-termism met someone interesting on the way and valued them more highly than the pre-booked appointment they were heading for. 'Running a bit late' they text as you carry on with the book you always have handy if they are in the diary. 'Lateness is a lack of respect for the structures.' (William Challis) 

Short termism will not acknowledge climate change. It sees climate change as somebody else's problem. It wants the oil and the gas and the coal out of the ground so people have jobs and money now. If it was the sort of person to ever show its working it would say that the grandchildren will be better able than us to work out how to survive floods, hurricanes and drought. Short-termism, Stefano Hatfield reminded us, means '... we are lumbered with perennial government by opinion poll, without vision.' (The ipaper 18/8/14)

But no. I'm into the huge unpopularism of the long-term. 'Instead of looking at what is and asking how to maintain it (we) should look at what ought to be and ask how to bring it about' (Mark Ashton: Christian Youth Work). We must learn to look beyond what has already been accomplished. And we must embrace dissatisfaction with the status quo wherever we find it for that will contain within it the birth throes of change.

I do not accept the obvious as the limit of the possible. Never have. If you ever get three wishes ask for more than a bottomless biscuit tin. You're not six. This generation (in the grandest terms - those on the planet now) know more than any previous one about the effect we are having on the future. Fixing it will cost us. We must pay.

I am writing this listening to the report on the US Election 2020. It seems that the US has rejected short-termism. That is good news for the world in the future. It is probably bad news for a few people now.

Thought for the Day

As delivered at BBC Radio Bristol just now on the breakfast show. The subjects in paragraph four are all stories from today's show:

Let me tell you the best way to hit a target. Find a wall with a bit of give in the plaster. Throw a dart at it. Now take a marker pen and draw a target around the point of impact. Bingo. Bulls-eye.

I've been doing ready, fire aim most of my life. It's a plausible approach as long as you are good at inventing a reason for that thing you just did.

In Christian ministry people are always looking for a way to count success. Which was more important - the 40 or so people who came to church on Sunday morning or the seven young people who came to a small discipleship group for teenagers later that day? If I miss a Christmas party for 100 homeless because I'm called to the bedside of one sick parishioner who might die, how will that look?

So what should we count to see how life in Bristol is going? We want that education, health and care plan figure to go up. It sounds like it's the only way it could go. We want more pianos in public spaces - well I do anyway. Pianos bring me joy. We want violence to go down and trees to grow up.

I've never scrutinised the purpose driven ministry of Jesus against his goals but it seems to me he kept planning to go to Jerusalem and was constantly distracted by people needing food, healing and advice. His ministry development review would probably have been disappointing. Jesus of Nazareth - stick to your mission action plan.

So here's a prayer for statisticians everywhere. At election time we need you to tell us how we are doing. And if we've improved. But that isn't everything.

Training Exercise on Pursuing a Vision

Here's a little exercise I used yesterday, an amalgam of several other games. The bigger the group the better it works:

1. Invite people, alone and quietly, to think of one favourite food they would order if going out for a one course meal.

2. Invite them to think of a couple more things (second favourite, third favourite).

3. Tell people that the aim of the game is for the whole party to go out for a meal and order the same thing. Do not repeat this, ever. Now invite them to find a partner. The two of you have to go out for a meal and order the same thing. What will you order?

4. Twos get into fours and agree.

5. Fours get into eights.

6. Continue for as long as it is fun.

When it becomes obvious that the room has polarised into non-negotiating groups, sit everyone back again, especially the group of sixteen who, with their backs to the wall, are shouting lasagna at the rest of the room in a football chant (yesterday's experience). Take a calming moment or two, then the best bit of this is the debrief. Questions to discuss:

A) At one point did you stop looking for compromise and become intransigent?

B) How can an organisation pursue its vision unless everyone buys in?

C) How do you avoid a 'lowest common denominator' vision where you all go out for gluten-free, non-dairy cheese sandwiches or suchlike?

D) Who can remember the aim of the game?

Feel free to select and adapt as you wish. If any user finds a room that can come to agreement treat them like gold and praise them as such

Advent Thought 12 and Number 3 (again)

I have a soft spot for 3. For some reason it was decreed at some time or other that the best evangelical sermons should have three points. The best vision statements seem to wind up focusing on three targets and strategies.

It is a tradition rather than a rule. A bit like knowing the conventions in order to occasionally break them. I have preached a 26 point sermon. The congregation's faces when I announced that (possibly a mistake) still live with me. That said it was a good sermon and was well received. Each point lasted but a few seconds.

My church currently has three priorities. The danger, as we planned that out, was of stopping when we reached three rather than allowing our minds to think if there might be a fourth, and greater, call on our time.

My deanery has three priorities but we were very clear from the beginning that we had scope to prioritise four streams of ministry. It's just that the first three came easily and we couldn't agree on a fourth. We have left a gap in the fourth box so that we have time and energy to add something.

Then there are the initialisms, acronyms and tautograms (what you call it when all three points begin with the same letter) which often follow these phenomena around. Another danger - I can only make a fourth point if it begins with, say, C.

That said I am rather pleased with my four point approach to incoming correspondence:

Do it
Delegate it
Diary it
Dump it

A few years back I offered feedback to a group. I said 'I have three things to say. I don't know what they are yet because I can't think until I start talking.'

An audience member interjected; 'Why not hedge your bets and go for five?' Thanks Bob. Happy birthday.

Good point. I love three points but always carry at least a four point strategy planner around in my head and a willingness to go to five. Douglas Adams' increasingly improbably titled fifth volume of the Hitch-Hiker's trilogy refers. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit will be proud.

Westward leading, still proceeding
Guide us to your perfect light

As you wait, hope and rest today consider what limitations numbers from the past place on your thinking about the future.

Sights Part 1

What is the greatest sight you have ever seen? It's a somewhat strange question and if, like me, you hate those questions that require making comparisons between qualitatively different things then you are allowed to make a list in no particular order.

As a very wordy person it is good for me, from time to time, to meditate on sights. What comes to mind? Replaced into roughly chronological order it is these images:

My family went to the seaside on holiday. So I managed not to experience the English Lake District until a youth group holiday in 1977. It was a hot summer and we lodged in a cabin on the edge of Derwentwater. It is hard to imagine the shimmering perfection of green right down to the water's edge and then overhanging, enclosing a perfect lake, small enough to look lovely and to see it all, large enough to be impressive and have islands. If I ever visit the area and don't get to experience looking along the lake from the shore, Cat Bells to the right, I feel cheated. You can walk to this viewpoint from the centre of Keswick in ten minutes. If you see me do not disturb.

It is still 1977. Although time and vocation have played a few tricks since, I was able to take out a mortgage on a property aged 21. Shortly after moving in, and surrounded by furnishings and decor that had yet to do justice to my taste and represented only my available cash, I sat in an old armchair and looked up at the ceiling. I was overwhelmed briefly by a sense of gratitude that it was now my ceiling. This feeling recurred some years later when, after eight years of living in clergy property, we found ourselves in our own house once more. The shower had a leak. I enjoyed, briefly, the feeling of not having to phone a diocesan property department to ask if it could be fixed. It may have been a leak, but it was my leak. With that I think I have strayed from visual memory to emotional so I must claw my way back.

1978, and in our early days of marriage we had an unreliable, but delightful, green 850cc Mini. We part-exchanged it for a new VW Polo (red). UOF 247S, I clearly recall. It was our first new car and the most, apart from the mortgage, we had ever spent on anything. I can see it sitting on the drive now.

In the demarcation exercise of setting up a home and family I have rarely been in charge of the gardening. Some of the heavy lifting has been delegated to me but otherwise my work has been indoors. However whilst at college, between 1981 and 1984, I was given charge of one small bed to grow alpines, which I love. Over the three years I tended that bed like a favourite child. As the plants grew to maturity and all merged into each other, we moved out. I can still remember it with fondness though.

Alex the black labrador, is asleep by an open fire. I have never seen a more beautiful creature. Alex was raised in kennels as a show dog and then fell at the last (wonky tooth). He was trained to go to sleep at 8.30 p.m. Crazy for many other reasons he would be exploring the house and joining in (usually by sitting and looking hungry) family activities. At 8.30 p.m., often it seemed whilst in mid air, he would collapse in a heap by the warmest thing he could find. It was adorable. Occasionally two boys and a dog would be lying in a row, apparently all watching TV. This would be about 1986.

In passing 1990/91 I notice the interior of St Mary and St Cuthbert, Chester-le-Street. It is Christmas morning and packed. There is a sense of awe and fun. The children are allowed to sit on the Lumley Warriors around the outside of the nave when it is full. Alan the verger is spilling an over-full cup of wine. Being on a spot where Christians had worshipped since 883CE on this of all days. Great sight.

I find myself on the towpath of the Shropshire Union Canal in the mid 1990s. Looking along the bargeless grey-green water I see a flash of blue. I trace it coming towards me and, pivoting, follow it into the distance. It is kind enough to fly over the nearby bridge rather than under the tunnel and, against the brick background, I am able to confirm I have seen my first kingfisher.

Transported to 2009 I am in Japan and sitting looking at a caramel coloured wall in a perfect Zen garden. There are thin streaks, like contours, of black running through the mix. My guide explains that the builders would pour oil into the middle of the wall as they built it so that, over the next two hundred years or so, it would leach out and stain the outer surface.

Say it slowly. Two. Hundred. Years. The trouble with the planters of oak woodland around Fountains Abbey or Rievaulx, leaving surprise views to appear as the trees matured? Their vision, achieved within a generation, was too short-term, I now know.

Obviously, if you live with the one you love, it is likely that there is something visually attractive about the holder of that office. Might I suggest that this be a test question (not to be answered aloud) for those taking stock of a partnership. The one I live with? I like looking at her. Always have. There are some days when I actually just watch and prefer it to touching. Do you mind if we don't cuddle and I stand back to get a better view? Why? Because I can. The promise of the curves? Mixing matrimony and Eucharist I am able to say 'This is my body.' All my favourite pictures of her are in my head and can be accessed at any time.

Finally it is time for my holidays. Since 2000 we have been regular visitors to Gozo, the smaller island next to Malta. It has become a special place although it is not packed with special sights or sites. When I find myself needing a time out I take myself there mentally and have a coffee and a sparkling water in a little cafe. It is hot, dusty, smells a bit and we get it. The island, not the coffee.

I expect when I re-read this in a few months time I will need to do another list. Thus the title.

Aims and Goals

I came across this tree on a walk in Arnside and Silverdale recently. It's a lovely part of the country; highly commended. The tree reminded me of many of the small trees I used to be allowed to climb when visiting the Lickey Hills near Birmingham as a child.

I struggled to make sense of it at first. Branches seemed to splay in every direction and it had uprooted a few years back. The first image here shows that the uprooting had been such a powerful trauma that bits of concrete, through which the root system had developed at some stage in its life, had been lifted as the tree fell.

Sometimes outside forces are so strong you have no choice but to go with them even if they take you in a direction not a part of your original plan.

But, as the second image shows, this tree was a stubborn so and so.

Since the roots had not been completely er, uprooted, they continued to provide sustenance and a branch, once pointing proudly southwards towards the sun, became the trunk and grew upwards towards the light. New roots developed over the trunk of the old tree.

And in so doing the original fallen trunk is beginning to be pulled inexorably back towards its first goal. One fell. Now two are striding on.

A bit anthropomorphic that, but if you can't make a training session about vision and priorities from the material you need to go back to college.

Deanery Synod

Asked how he felt sitting atop a rocket and about to become the first American in space, astronaut John Glenn once commented that he felt the same way anyone would feel sitting on top of $2m worth of equipment all of which had been supplied by the lowest bidder in the US space system's procurement process.

The average age of our Deanery Synod has got to be in its late fifties. Some new lay members who look suspiciously forty have joined but it still feels pretty old.

The clergy are also getting on a bit. The Synod consists of all the clergy of the Deanery plus elected lay members.

On Wednesday night we discussed vision.

Now I am an old cynic, which at least means I may be a bit wiser than when I was a young cynic, but I suspect that the churches in the Deanery have not provided their finest people as part of the procurement process (or elections, as we call them). Indeed I wonder how many people who stood for election to Deanery Synod were elected unopposed. The parish I spend most of my time in could not fill its vacancies. The go-getters feel they have better things to go get.

So we have a collection of reluctant, or self-appointed, reps trying to shape the direction of a group of churches.

The people I shared with around the table were lovely. But they had to be constantly redirected to the actual question we were discussing and when that happened there were blank looks and silences. What could we do together? How could we co-operate? Dunno. One comment was that things were better in the contributor's non-conformist church which she left forty years ago but they had monthly church meetings in which everyone could share.

This is my fault. I have often felt Deanery Synod a waste of space - definition is sometimes 'a group of people waiting to go home'. I should get the room full of the best, youngest, most visionary folk from the churches where I have some influence. Then some of the ideas I wrote about a few days ago might have some champions in the room.

Now. Who will take the challenge?

Quote Book Index 161-170

The best quote from the next ten. How about this to think about vision?

'I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.
'I only wish I had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at such a distance too! Why, it is as much as I can do to see real people by this light.'
(Alice in Wonderland)

Quote Book Index 101-110

105. How pathetic I have been. I am, like someone God has given three wishes to and all I have asked for is ice-cream. (Peter Carey, Illywhacker)

The Vision Thing

You know what I really want? This is just between you and me right? What I really, really want is to (and tempting as it would be to now say zig a zig aah, I'll resist) be the minister of the best church for miles and miles. A church where people drop in (parties of 50 or more needing to book) to observe examples of good practice and get a fine cup of free coffee (much improved since Costa got the Diocesan post-church contract, thanks Mike for the original idea).

A church where the outstanding teaching (not by me, obviously, see comment on this post from recently deceased person), heart-lifting worship, dramatic supernatural interventions and free food have made Trendlewood a place where to not belong to the Jesus-following community is slightly odd.

A church where the outstanding minds from a number of agencies, who happen to live here, get together over a drink regularly and put the world to right, not just with words but with reality. Their conversation becomes action; lives are changed around the world because of the influence of this brainstorming community.

A church where the recent outpouring of generosity led to twice as much money as was necessary being promised towards the new building project as a result of which two new churches were also built on less fortunate estates.

A church which provides the finances to improve local surgeries, attract new businesses to town and sponsor a football team now rising rapidly towards the higher leagues the players with smaller chests proudly boasting they are aided by endlewood chur.

A church whose ordinands are wooed by theological colleges, whose curates are expected to take substantial responsibility immediately they leave and whose missionaries only have to set foot elsewhere to start major outpourings of grace and mercy.

I know, I know. Carlsberg don't run churches. But if they did...

Big Hairy Audacious Goals

A consultant, who visited our church whilst I was on sabbatical leave, made the suggestion that we ought to have some goals so big, so audacious, (so hairy?) that the achievement of them could only be put down to the activity of God.

Some examples of BHAGS were given, such as the goal of Henry Ford, to make a motor car available to every man in the United States at a price he could afford on his pay packet, to make the horse redundant from the carriageway and provide thousands of jobs for ordinary Americans. I think Ford achieved this goal although it helped wreck the planet in the process.

The goal of Sony was to change the way people thought of Japanese goods. Once upon a time 'made in Japan' meant 'shoddy.' I don't recall that, but people only slightly older than me do. They achieved their goal. The goal of Sony was to make 'made in Japan' a symbol of quality and Sony a world-recognised brand. Achieved.

This latter goal was slightly better in terms of altruism. It had the interests of the whole of Japan at heart rather than one company but today it has contributed to the death of manufacturing in this country - on the Now Show on Friday Midge Benn referred to us again as 'Service Centre Britain.'

It is so difficult to pitch a manufacturing goal that will not, albeit accidentally, cause one set of people to suffer whilst another gains.

Today on Radio 4 the motoring correspondent of the Today Programme, Quentin Quinn suggested that it was madness to assume that anyone would buy a green car unless they were given an incentive.

Recently this blog has seen some traffic about whether people are fundamentally bad or good. I wonder what conclusions we should draw from the above? I would like to suggest that although we might say we mean well, are not selfish and do look out for the needs of others, when it comes to the big picture - making sacrifices for the needs of more global neighbours, we are nowhere.

Back to the BHAGS. If any attempt at setting a goal will fall short of something that is of genuine good to the whole community (global and local) however well-intentioned it is then why not let the God we believe in set the goal. 'Hey Lord', we shout. 'Your call'.

We say that we want things, or want to imagine things, that couldn't happen without the intervention of God. The thing is we then try to make these things happen so that there is no difference between the way a church implements its vision and Sony, or Ford.

An example of something that might happen that couldn't have happened without God would be a growth in numbers of 100 a week without any change to our activity. If we want something to happen that we didn't make happen we shouldn't make it a target.

How about if we try to keep the church more secret apart from those who want to come? Take down the signs. Stop leafleting the neighbourhood. Don't invite people to anything unless they ask. If in these circumstances we grew, it couldn't have been down to us. Could it?

Thought for Yesterday

With grateful thanks to Matt for his meditation in yesterday's St Paul's staff meeting:

How do you understand history? No-one ever agrees about history. Was that a foul? They're still arguing after five slow-motion replays. And they're the experts. Whose fault was the accident? Who struck the first blow? Did the holocaust happen? Was Jesus real? Still arguing.

Maybe we should worry less about history and more about the future. At least we can be certain about that. Enter the experts. Global warming. The sun burns away. Our sun. Terrorism. Conflict. Famine. Step back from the edge. Don't think about tomorrow. It's a long drop.

The past's over. The future's uncertain. Live for today. What's wrong with that?

You have maybe another 10,000 todays. What you gonna do with them? Get them right and people will maybe notice your take on the past and bright hope for tomorrow. Get them wrong and...

What's next?