Dishonesty On The Increase In The UK

Academic research has found that Britons are less honest than ten years ago. (Also reported in The Independent and the Daily Telegraph.) Here are some of the headline findings:

* Younger people are more likely to be dishonest than older people. Under 25s scored only 47 on an ‘integrity scale’, whereas over 65s averaged 54. The mean for all ages was 50.

* Ten years ago, 70% of people said having an affair was never justified. Now only 50% say that. The Faithfulness Matters campaign is timely, not only in highlighting the foul practices of a company like Global Personals in setting up sites that encourage affairs, but in standing against a worrying trend in our society (which doubtless Global Personals is exploiting).

* Women are slightly more honest than men. (Is this because women encourage a greater culture of openness?)

* Yet whereas ten years ago 78% of people disapproved of benefit fraud, now 85% do.

The Daily Mail has a graph showing the differences for ten different indicators.
It’s interesting to see why the academics are concerned. Professor Paul Whiteley said:

“If social capital is low and people are suspicious and don’t work together, those communities have worse health, worse educational performance, they are less happy and they are less economically developed and entrepreneurial. It really does have a profound effect,” he said.

“If integrity continues to decline in the future, then it will be very difficult to mobilise volunteers to support the Big Society initiative,” he added.

He went on to say that a major reason behind dishonesty in younger generations was poor rôle models. Most of the examples he cites are those known from the media:

“If you think about it, you know, footballers that cheat on their wives; some journalists that hack into phones; behaviour in the City, where people are selling financial instruments they think are no good but do not say so. These kind of things,” he said.

So what do we make of this?

First of all, let’s leave aside whether we ideologically agree with the Big Society or not, the more important question Professor Whiteley brings out is about social capital. Effectively, individualism is destroying society. So I’ll pick up someone else’s money, I’ll have an affair, but woe betide people who cheat on social security, because that means I have to pay more tax and National Insurance. Margaret Thatcher said there was no such thing as society, and the rampant individualism of the 1980s when she was in power is now taking its vicious toll on society.

So given the fragmentation of society, it’s now everyone for themselves. There are honourable exceptions and good examples in places of people coming together for the common good, but the social forces (or should I perhaps say, anti-social forces) are against this. Instead of being with one another, we are more in competition with one another, and so – as some commenters on the BBC story noted – we will lie to gain a competitive advantage. If the only way to get a doctor’s appointment soon is to tell the receptionist it’s urgent when it isn’t, we’ll do that.

Second, one commenter asked where the church was in the debate. Several replied angrily that the church had lost all credibility in the honesty stakes due to child abuse cover-ups. While I think some people are likely to raise that case because they want the church excluded from public debate, it is clear that this issue is still substantially harming our witness in the civic arena.

How the church will recover credibility is a big question. We are as distrusted as other institutions. The child abuse scandal means that the postmodern suspicion of power has been applied to us. People think we are only ‘in it for ourselves’ – the same spirit that creates a lying culture.

It will take a long, sustained period to recover a public acceptance of our integrity. By the time it happens, many more churches will be gone. But I think it starts with a humble church, rather than a hectoring, lecturing church.

January 25, 2012 2

Hope For ‘Failing’ Pastors

All sorts of jobs have particular pressures today. My work as a minister certainly has. There is all sorts of pressure against whatever might be regarded as failure:

* In the light of numerical church decline, many churches are looking for a hero to ride over the horizon and come to their rescue. I have seen Methodist profiles where circuits explicitly seek a minister ‘with a proven record of church growth’.

* In a culture where we are increasingly regarded as employees in principle, even if not (yet?) legally – appraisals and reviews, ‘letters of understanding’ about new appointments – people think they can have their say, and if they don’t think ministers are meeting their expectations – whether they are reasonable or not – they turn the screw.

* It is seen in other professions. Politicians think they can harvest extra votes by more quickly dismissing ‘failing’ teachers.

* Alongside the above reasons, there are cases where a minister has behaved in a manner unbecoming of their calling, and the church authorities have glossed it over.

* The opposite has happened: a congregation has been allowed to get away with bullying its minister, and the church hierarchy has been more interested in preserving a fictional facade of niceness that a wounded minister limps off elsewhere, or maybe is lost to the ministry.

* As implied in the last point, there is a culture of ‘pretend’, if not of outright dishonesty, that pervades too many churches, which makes it difficult for people, ministers especially, to be open and vulnerable about their fears.

In the light of all this and more, an American pastor called J R Briggs organised a conference last year called the Epic Fail Pastors’ Conference, and he’s doing the same again this year. It’s in the USA, so my expenses won’t quite stretch, so I won’t be there (although apparently last year one delegate flew from Australia). They are deliberately not meeting in a flash convention centre in a fashionable city. They aren’t announcing any big names. Much of the schedule is taken up with ‘time together’.

I nearly typed that I wished them a ‘successful’ conference, but that would open up an interesting conversation about what truly constitutes success. But I do wish all the participants healing, hope and peace.

January 21, 2012 8

Etta James, R.I.P.

Soul and blues singer Etta James has died at the age of 73. She was rarely in the pop charts, although her biggest success – her cover of Muddy Waters‘ ‘I just want to make love to you’ – reached number 5 in Britain in 1996, but that was on the back of its inclusion in a Diet Coke advertisement:

Various reports around the web (including the BBC one to which I link above) give accounts of her life and music, so I won’t repeat that here. Suffice to say that she was born into disadvantage, like many early soul stars she began singing in church, she was only intermittently successful in her career and she had to conquer a long addiction to heroin. Not all her music was as brassy, bold and lustful as ‘I just want to make love to you.’ The song that became a wedding favourite, ‘At last’, was lush and gentle, with supper club overtones:

‘I’d rather go blind’ was poignant and melancholy, in the Southern Soul tradition:

Etta James was one who never reached superstardom. She flew just under the radar for much of her career. Occasionally she was recognised. In the last few years that happened in the wake of Beyoncé‘s portrayal of her in the 2008 film ‘Cadillac Records‘.

Most of us spend our lives flying under the radar, barely or fleetingly recognised. Fame and fortune are no ways to sustain life and self-esteem, but lack of affirmation can destroy it, too. I guess when Etta James was singing in her grandparents’ Baptist church, she heard a message about a God who loved her dearly. In the end, there is nothing better to sustain any of us than the knowledge that we are loved with an everlasting love. Even Jesus evidently needed to hear that message at his baptism.

So rest in peace, Ms James. You had soul. We heard it. You were loved. We all are.

January 20, 2012 0

The Long, Slow Lingering Death Of Eastman Kodak

On a day when Eastman Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection from its creditors, this seems like a poignant (if rather obvious) song:

Like Paul Simon, ‘I got a Nikon camera.’ But it doesn’t shoot Kodachrome. It’s digital.

I used to have a 35 mm Canon camera. Sometimes I shot Kodachrome, especially when I visited the Holy Land in 1989. I got through twenty-nine rolls of Kodachrome 25. The slow ISO was fine in the bright heat, and its pale to neutral colour bias was right for a dusty land. Back in the UK, I used to prefer the bold, green colours of Fuji Velvia, though.

But not any more. It’s SD cards and Adobe Photoshop Elements for me now.

Kodak was slow to adapt to the culture. It was there at the invention of digital photography, but they refused to bring out what would have been the first digital camera, for fear of damaging their income from roll film. Rather like the church not wanting to offend longstanding worshippers by finding new ways of reaching out to the unchurched, Kodak held back – and is now withering on the vine. The parallels are disturbing.

Today’s news reminds me of a story I read in the newsletter of the (ironically now defunct) organisation MARC in December 1990. On page 3 of that issue, Bryant Myers told this story:

There is a story of a company that manufactured drill bits for over forty years. It had been very successful, but the industry was maturing and profit margins were getting thin.

The son of the founder attended his first senior staff meeting after his father died.

“What business are we in?” he asked the older men, who had served alongside his father for many years.

“We make drill bits!” came the exasperated answer. “Our customers need drill bits.”

“No. Our customers need holes,” the young man quietly replied. Today the company is again successful. In addition to drill bits, it manufactures lasers that make very precise holes.

Kodak’s business was not film but images. We might not want to talk about the church’s business, because economic and consumerist metaphors can be dangerous for us. But we do need to ensure that we are concentrating on our core Gospel calling in a way that can speak to people today, and that almost certainly won’t be in the way it spoke to some of our senior remaining generations.

January 19, 2012 1

Why The American SOPA Controversy Affects Us All

Did you join in yesterday’s protests against SOPA? I didn’t, because I thought I couldn’t legitimately protest against proposals in American law, but the more I think about it, the more I consider I should in some way have joined the voices rising up against it. As this BBC article puts it, we are talking about something that would mean the USA deploying similar tactics to those used by China and Iran.

If anyone understands the effect of the Internet and social media on our society and the world, it’s Clay Shirky. Watch this video to hear why the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation in the USA is dangerous for us all:

Here are the problems. There is a media industry that only wants us all to be passive consumers (how bad is that, anyway?). It does not want mere mortals to produce and to share content. This isn’t merely about copyright piracy, this is about enthusiastically saying to our friends, “Look what I’ve found” – something you would think they would be keen to promote. Already we are in a situation where bakeries cannot reproduce children’s drawings of cartoon characters onto cakes, because it’s illegal to copy an image of Mickey Mouse.

Thus, the industry wants to obliterate all established distinctions between legal and illegal sharing. It wants to make ordinary citizens criminals, alongside the pirates.

Furthermore, the proposed legislation reverses the historic burden of proof so that we are guilty until proved innocent, and if that’s not dangerous, I don’t know what is.

None of this is to condone piracy. As a Christian, I do not support theft of items for profit any more than I support burglars who raid a house and sell the items in the pub. But most of what ordinary people share on the Internet is not comparable to that. There is no financial motive.

In any case, there is ample legislation already on copyright piracy. The original Napster was brought to trial. So too was Limewire. What’s the problem? Shirky says the problem is effort. The media companies don’t want to bother with tedious matters like gathering evidence.

Neither am I completely against censorship. I am not a libertarian. As a parent, I have concerns about material my children could accidentally find on the Internet. But these bills are not about that.

And this affects us all, because the Internet by definition cannot be confined to one nation. If this legislation were to pass, the US Congress would be further codifying that terrifying concept of American exceptionalism, effectively allowing a digital American invasion anywhere and at any time.

I ask my American friends if they would lobby their elected representatives. For the rest of us, we need to find ways of legitimate and ethical protest, raising our voices in opposition to legislation that only has the interests of wealthy corporations at its heart.

You are welcome to try persuading me otherwise, but this sounds like laws bought by the millions of dollars of corporate lobbying, to favour its clients against ordinary people. Surely that’s wrong?

January 19, 2012 1

Mark Driscoll: The Christianity Magazine Interview Is Published

I received my subscription copy of Christianity magazine yesterday, complete with the now infamous interview with Mark Driscoll, about which I wrote on Friday. In addition to the well-publicised insults to British Christian ministers, a couple more things took my breath away.

Justin Brierley pushes Driscoll about some of his more controversial statements, including the one where he said he couldn’t worship a Jesus he could beat up. Brierley points out that Jesus was beaten up – namely his suffering and death on the Cross. But that’s actually OK and manly for Driscoll, because that was like the valour of a soldier. (He forgets that a soldier would have been trying to dish out pain and suffering on his enemies, which I guess he might like, but there’s not exactly any evidence for Jesus doing that.)

But more, he then goes on to the Second Coming and says that the purpose of Jesus coming again is precisely so that he can ‘give a beating’. Well – yes, Jesus will judge and condemn sin, there will be eternal punishment for the unrepentant (although I disagree with him that it is an eternal, conscious torment – that doesn’t take apocalyptic language seriously). But to frame it in terms of Jesus coming to give people a beating is not going to put the right kind of fear of God into people, is it?

The second observation I had is where Driscoll refers to those who do not believe in penal substitution. Now let me make it clear that I believe in substitutionary atonement, but I am aware of the dangers in how it is framed and explained. I want nothing to do with those in the ‘Young, Restless and Reformed’ camp who explicitly talk of the Cross as a place where God killed Jesus. That says it all about the worst of this teaching.

However, what made my jaw head for the Southern Hemisphere was Driscoll’s supposed reason for why people reject penal substitution. Is it about concepts of justice or love? No! People reject it because – wait for it – it’s too … masculine.

So now you know.

Unbelievable.

January 17, 2012 4

The Adventures Of Tim Tebow: Christianity And The Famous Sportsman

Lately, my American friends on Facebook have been rather exercised by the adventures of one Tim Tebow. “Who he?” thought I, but quickly realised he plays that staged impersonation of rugby that our friends west of the Pond call football. (No ‘American’ to prefix it for the same reason that their baseball has a World Series.)

Furthermore, young Mr Tebow is rather good at the sport, having engineered some remarkable comebacks for his team the Denver Broncos – although they came unstuck against the New England Patriots 45-10 and won’t make the Super Bowl as a result.

Not only that, my American friends are excited because he is a Christian. Born to Baptist missionaries in the Philippines, he has appeared in an advertisement for Focus on the Family, and is overt in owning his faith.

Given some of the hysteria generated by Tebow Time, perhaps it’s actually time to nail some of the Christian myths about famous believing sporting heroes.

Number one (in no particular order) is about prayer. My American Football loving friend Will Grady retweeted the comedian Paula Poundstone, who said,

If football players on opposing teams each pray to win does God choose who wins or does he just watch the game?

Prayer doesn’t make a Christian win, or even a better athlete. There is no spiritual gift of sporting ability, and Christians have the same mix of natural talents that the rest of the population has. The place of prayer for the sporting Christian is in the request to glorify God in the way they participate. Winning isn’t guaranteed, nor is performance.

Number two, and very dangerous, is the whole notion of celebrity. Tebow is in the public eye, and I hope his Christian supporters are praying for him. But there is nothing of intrinsically greater worth about the testimony of a famous Christian than that of you or me. It plays into the hands of all the unhealthy contemporary obsession with celebrity. And isn’t that a matter of idolatry, and broken idols at that? We build up these people in some kind of false worship, then watch their images smash.

What’s more, your non-Christian friends who like American Football may well watch Tim Tebow with interest. But they will be watching your life more closely and more regularly. Rather than trumpeting a famous Christian, we should be considering our own witness, however quiet and humble it is.

Number three is about priorities. British sport fans thinking about this kind of issue will probably remember the words of Bill Shankly, the late great manager of Liverpool FC, who once remarked,

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.

In a way, this ties into the idolatry issue. Were Shankly being serious, his words would be appalling. I like to think they were satirical. I love it when my team wins. I hate it when they lose. My son is worse. But what matters in the end?

Thankfully, Tebow has a sense of real priorities, and what his fame can and cannot achieve. The Boston Globe reported his reaction to yesterday’s defeat:

“It still wasn’t a bad day,” Tebow said after the game. “It still was a good day, because I got to spend some time before the game with Zack McLeod [a 20-year-old Cambridge native who suffered a traumatic brain injury playing football] and make him smile, and overall when you get to do that, it’s still a positive day. Sometimes that’s hard to see, but it depends what lens you’re looking through. I choose to look through those lenses, and I got to make a kid’s day, that’s more important than winning the game. So, I am proud of that.”

Tebow was asked if the glare of the spotlight this season ever became too much.

“There are pros and cons with everything,” Tebow said. “Sometimes, you don’t want it all. You just like to be able to go to dinner, hang out with friends, be a normal 24-year-old. So that makes it sometimes hard. But I wouldn’t change it for the world, because by having that, I have the platform to walk into a hospital to walk into the hospital and share with kids, I have the opportunity to hang out with Zack before a game, I have the opportunity to go build a hospital in the Philippines or to do a lot more important things than football.”

That sounds like a guy who has got his head screwed on. The rest of us need to do the same.

January 15, 2012 3

Over-35s And ‘The Green Thing’

A blog post entitled ‘Anyone over the age of 35 should read this, as I copied this from a friends status..‘ is trending on Facebook. (Ignore the grammatical error, it appears to be a Scandinavian writing in the foreign tongue of English.)
The gist is this: the author fails to bring some reusable shopping bags to the supermarket and is told off for this by the checkout cashier. The author apologises, not having had ‘the green thing’ when younger. The article then goes on to recount practices from past generations that are actually greener than today’s habits: bottles were recycled for the deposit, they walked up stairs rather than took escalators, they washed and reused cotton nappies, a house had but one small television, they used more public transport for journeys and homes had fewer electrical sockets. Ergo, why should younger generations have a go at older ones on environmental issues?

All the examples quoted are true, and yes, they are greener. The problem is this: things were that way due to lesser economic wealth and greater thrift. Once more prosperity came along, then it carried with it technologies that created more convenient and allegedly labour-saving approaches and devices. When these appeared, they were – ahem – hoovered up.

Economics and technology create these opportunities and more. One of the major issues about sin is opportunity and availability. Moving beyond green issues, are more people prone to slip into pornography because it is more readily available on the Internet and with web browsers that offer ‘private’ or ‘incognito’ browsing modes?

And perhaps another observation worth making about this post is that is true but simplistic. Isn’t that something that many of us have to watch? We want to keep things simple, which is laudable on one level, but we also don’t want to think too hard – or we don’t want others to make us think hard.

January 14, 2012 1

Can We Love Jesus And Hate Religion?

You may have seen this video doing the rounds in certain circles:

Is it a fair distinction? The broad sweep of someone who wants to affirm the grace of God and the idea of faith as a relationship with Christ, as opposed to the idea of emphasising an institution with a dubious track record is commendable. Coming out of certain contexts – say, The Troubles in Ireland, such a sentiment is powerful, for example in this song by the Belfast Christian singer Brian Houston:

And as someone who finds being a ‘professional Christian’ who is expected to uphold and serve the institution frustrating and tiresome at times, I certainly sympathise, too. Sometimes it feels as if I am being asked to be a flag-waver for Methodism or worse, an enforcer, rather than a witness to God’s redeeming love. I want a faith that emphasises grace, mercy, love and faith rather than dull rule-keeping. I too am embarrassed by the history of the Church. That’s not difficult.

But the poem, laudable as it is, needs probing. To me, it is framed as if I’m on the side of grace and ‘they’ are on the side of wrong. That’s always dangerous. It risks lapsing into self-righteousness, ironically, the very thing the author finds distasteful (and rightly so).

Rather than just using ‘religion’ as the label for all the bad stuff associated with belief in God, wouldn’t it be better to join in the confession of the Church’s sin? Remember Daniel, exiled in Babylon, praying, “We have sinned?” It wasn’t his personal sin that had carried Israel into exile, but he identified with God’s people. Humility like that is necessary. It is more likely to touch and transform the ‘religious’ than shouting at them at a distance.

And is it honest just to use ‘religion’ as the label in the way I’ve just suggested? It’s too convenient. Instead of saying that the Church should feed the poor and criticising her for not doing so, let’s do it ourselves! I’m delighted that one of my churches will be hosting a food bank, with personnel provided by another church that had the vision for it, from next month.

Let’s get our hands dirty. That’s one of the best witnesses to grace.

January 14, 2012 5

Big Circumstance