Tag: Methodism

Osteopath

When I was eighteen, my life changed unexpectedly. Since the age of five, I had been identified as a university prospect. I had a place (subject to A-Level grades) to read Computer Science at Imperial College, London. One month before the A-Levels, though, a sudden searing pain in my neck put paid to them. Although a consultant rheumatologist prescribed some physiotherapy that regained the movement in my neck and the pain reduced, it never completely subsided. I took a clerical job in the Civil Service and decided to review my long-term future. Ultimately that led to theological colleges and the ministry, but that’s another story.

Fast-forward to six years ago. My wife was pregnant with our first child, but I was still suffering from neck pain and frequent headaches. I didn’t want to be regularly out of action when a baby was around. My GP recommended the osteopath attached to the practice, and I began seeing Jamie regularly. One of the first things he explained to me was that my neck problems began with my feet. I could begin to teach my body a healthier posture if I based my sitting positions on how I placed my feet. Then the spine would start to move into a better position.

When we moved here three years ago, Jamie recommended a practice, and I now see Tom every six weeks. This morning I saw him. He is always full of helpful advice. I explained today that on my daily power walk that I take for fitness and blood pressure reduction, I regularly end up with a stiff neck. I had noticed that I tighten up my shoulders involuntarily. He showed me how I could help that by tightening my abdominal muscles in order to take some strain off my spine.

Afterwards, I went to a local Christian bookshop. There I bumped into a vicar friend. In exchanging the usual pleasantries, he said of his parish, ‘I’ve been here three years and I’ve only just learned the questions I need to ask. I don’t know the answers, but I do at last know the questions.’

Later, it struck me that metaphorically there was a connection with osteopathy. What I have learned from osteopathy is the general life lesson that the presenting problem is not necessarily the source of the problem, nor is it necessarily the place where the solution must begin. Healing my neck involves my feet and abdominal muscles, amongst other places. Likewise, it has taken my friend three years to get to the roots of parish issues. Clearly, the questions weren’t what he first conceived them to be. A good proportion of ministry is about people wanting us to ‘take the pain away’, but the best ways of doing so may not be what people want.

Richard Foster famously said that superficiality is the curse of our age. We go for surface solutions, for style over substance. It is especially tempting in the ministry if your long-term future in an appointment is not secure. In order to make an impact, you may find yourself leaning in the direction of doing something spectacular that does not have roots, in the hope that you might be able to stay longer. However, if you knew you were staying longer, you might take the healthier course of action – of exploring what the real questions and issues were, rather than leaping on the obvious.

While I am not sure I like the Anglican system where the incumbent is granted the ‘freehold’ of the parish and can stay as long as they like, provided they are not naughty, I do wonder whether the Methodist system should have further longevity built into it. Our present system allows for an initial invitation of five years. This is reviewed just under four years in – that is the real length of time in which a minister has to have an impact in order to win the vote. It used to be worse: the initial appointment when I was younger was three years. We do seem to have learned from other traditions that longer ministries are generally better, but I wonder whether we should increase that initial five to, say, seven.

We need to resist the crash-bang-wallop nature of our culture, where everything has to be instant. (Blogging and twenty-four-hour news channels only exacerbate the instant coffee and microwave food society.) Might it be counter-cultural to be slow, so that we might trace the root causes of problems and begin to apply treatment?

UPDATE: When I wrote this post yesterday, there was another aspect of osteopathy I meant to include. As I understand it, osteopathy is a therapy that doesn’t so much heal the body itself as put the body into a place where it self-heals. That, it seems to me, makes for an interesting pastoral analogy. Pastors don’t heal people, they equip them to find healing. In Psalm 23, the Lord as shepherd leads the sheep to green pastures and still waters – but there they presumably feed and water themselves. A pastor’s ministry includes showing people how they may access spiritual food and water, rather than simply putting it on a plate for them all the time.

10

Fresh Expressions: Emerging Church And The Historic Denominations

Going off at a tangent from a post by Pete Phillips, Fresh Expressions is a joint initiative of the Church of England and the Methodist Church to support ‘new ways of being church’. In a strangely modernist way they have identified twelve categories of new expressions of church!

But the thing is this: the historic denominations are increasingly interested in new forms of church. Is it for creative reasons? Is it desperate? Is it the Holy Spirit? What seems to be being swept under the carpet is the huge potential for clashes of values.

For example, won’t we have to start facing some sacred cows such as entrenched doctrines of ordination? Don’t existing ones play the power card in a way that postmoderns and Jesus-followers should be highly suspicious of? You don’t need to go the whole ontological way that the Anglicans do, just take the Methodist view that although ordination confers no separate priesthood, nevertheless it is ‘representative’ (which is pretty close to specialised priesthood) and it confers presidency at the sacraments on the grounds of ‘good order’. That may have been a pragmatic way of restricting presidency to the presbyters in years gone by without officially conceding a sacerdotal approach, but how does it read now? Let’s play reader-response in the 21st century with it. Who can keep good order? Normally only presbyters? What does that say about everybody else?

(Of course Methodism now allows ‘extended communion’ where authorised people can take communion into homes. It started out as something for the sick, but the Big Bad Rule Book can be interpreted to allow this for home groups. Nevertheless it’s only seen as delegated from the presiding minister at a Sunday service, and the people still need to be authorised.)

How far we have come from a Last Supper modelled on the Jewish Passover that was celebrated in the family. And how far we have come from a Saviour who took a towel and a bowl of water.

Although you can’t say the emerging church is all of one mind on every issue (it’s a ‘conversation’, it likes to think) nevertheless it’s pretty clear that it embraces an understandable postmodern suspicion of the link between truth and power, and it is deeply attracted to the radical picture of Jesus in the Gospels.

So this post is really to ask whether the emerging churches and the historic denominations can fully embrace each other. Either there will be compromise of principles on one side or the other (you can bet that those who still perceive themselves as powerful will expect the others to conform to them). Or there will be persistent conflict: the romance will break up. Or the new wine will break the old wineskins.

Someone please tell me I’ve got it wrong, and why. But my spiritual gift of pessimism comes into play on this issue.

3

Methodism and Same-Sex Unions

If you believe the Daily Telegraph and others, “Methodists are to become the first mainstream Church in Britain to offer blessing services to same sex couples.”

But this does not appear to be what the Methodist Conference decided at all. It accepted the Pilgrimage In Faith report, which notes the continued diversity of opinion (disagreement) in the church on homosexuality. Guidelines would be needed before the civil partnership law becomes effective in December, but this is not the same as saying the church will definitely bless same-sex unions. David Deeks, the General Secretary of the Conference, made it clear that the national press had gone beyond what was actually said either in the Conference or by spokespersons in a statement.

Is it too much to hope for more accuracy rather than sensationalism that will falsely alarm and excite people?

0

You Can Never Go Back Home

Well, it’s been a full six days since I’ve blogged. Life has been manic. We are busy selling possessions bit by bit on eBay (if you want to see what we’re currently selling, I pasted some code into the home page of my main website). Then there is all the protracted negotiations over work to the manse where we shall be moving in August. I might do some real minister’s work some day soon.

But last Sunday was a highlight. I had been invited back to the church where I grew up to take their Church Anniversary. It has changed so much, and for the better. Only the ‘old guard’ remember me from thirteen years ago. It was great to catch up with them, embarrassing when I’d forgotten someone’s name or didn’t recognise them, of course, but also thrilling that there were so many people there who didn’t know me from Adam. A church that had between sixty and eighty adults on a Sunday morning when I left now has about one hundred and seventy, plus fifty to sixty children and teenagers.

The most heartening change was this, though: even by the time I left the majority of the congregation had become majority African-Caribbean (and woe betide you if you mixed up the Ghanaians with the Nigerians, or assumed that somebody from Montserrat was Jamaican!). However it was still in many ways a ‘white’ church. I remember when the first West Indian became a church steward. All the usual comments came out about not understanding what he said when he gave out the notices in a service. But now all the stewards are black and it was apparent that the lady on duty on Sunday morning could comfortably do her duties in the vestry and in the worship gathering in a way appropriate to her culture, and it was now the norm. Her greeting was very West Indian in style, the choir sang a few pieces before the service that would have been known back home in the islands, and so on. No longer were they marginalised, now their culture was at last central to the way the church functioned.

So you can never go back home and find it just as you remembered it, and my sermon took up that theme, with reference to postmodern culture. Too many churches behave like that: a yearning for ‘how it used to be’ when we actually have to live in a different world. Even the West Indians and Africans at my old church, although they bring their customs into worship now and do not suffer the stigma of the past, cannot simply recreate how it once was back home. And for the younger generations, ‘back home’ never was their home: this place is.

It would be interesting to see what shape that church takes if Methodism ever sends them a black minister. That hasn’t happened yet, although I’d hate that to be read in any way as casting an aspersion on the current minister, because he was wonderful in facilitating things for me, and he seems to be regarded very warmly. I just hope he isn’t treated with the old colonial-style deference.

0

Planning V Spontaneity

Maggi Dawn has a good post on this subject. Here are the thoughts I posted in response:

Coming from Methodism, which ostensibly holds together both those of a ‘written liturgy’ approach and those who claim to be non-liturgical, and being someone who finds strength in both approaches, I am often reminded of the early twentieth century Congregationalist leader who said that extempore prayer is ‘preaching with eyes closed’. Or I recall visiting friends who in the 1980s were students at Moorlands Bible College. They were on placement with a Brethren Assembly. My friends were Anglican and FIEC by their roots. They were both cynical about the issue of when in the morning service one of the men (and yes, sorry, it was men) would feel led to move into the breaking of the bread. “You watch,” they said, “the Spirit always moves at 11:45.” Sure enough …

0

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑