I found a lost child’s toy at a bus stop in the North of England. It was a plastic cow with only one leg. I wondered what story might be behind its loss. If you like the story of the Lost Sheep maybe you’d like this one too.
When I lost it
Mum was mad.
The bus pulled up
And I was sad.
Now one legged
And all alone
Who will bring
The lost cow home?
On a walk in the Yorkshire Dales, a boy aged 14, told me ‘You can’t believe anything you read in the Bible. I don’t believe any of it’. Are you surprised by his statement or does it fulfil your stereotype of 14 year old boys?
Another 14 year old boy told me, as Advent began one year: ‘Advent is about repentance, why don’t you preach about that?’
Boys of 14 are as varied as any other section of the population.
I meet adults who tell me they stopped attending church when they were about that age. Mid teens is an interesting time for faith, for identity and pretty much everything else in life. And that’s where the church comes in or rather it doesn’t. ‘Losing heart’ was a report last year about how churches were becoming less confident in their ministry to young people. Importantly, they were failing to answer the questions young people asked. More recently the Church Army (https://churcharmy.org/Groups/295770/Church_Army/ms/Young_Adults_research/Young_Adults_research.aspx), the Church Times (https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/19-january/features/features/why-i-left-church-in-my-teens) and others have published reports and articles (https://jamesballantyneyouthworker.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/what-role-do-young-people-play-in-your-church-youth-group/amp/?__twitter_impression=true) on young people and faith, what it’s like, how to nurture it, how it goes, what hinders it (for example, http://discipleshipresearch.com/2018/02/losing-my-religion-millennials-and-faith-loss/).
As a school Chaplain they have interested me. They seem to point to the need for denominations to do a costly new thing if they are really going to encounter young people where they are. And that it seems is the problem.
Imagine if you can, a small school on the edge of a city in the north of England affiliated to a small, dwindling and ageing denomination. In that school a chaplaincy, open to all, touching the lives of more than just the students through staff, family, friends and former students. It’s there for them in the ups and downs of life, promoting good mental well being, giving, respect and how we might all ‘become peacemakers and builders of justice’, interpreting the Bible together, praying.
For five years this pioneering ministry was supported by the regional branch of that ageing and dwindling denomination, until about 4 years ago it decided that this particular expression was surplus to requirements.Upsetting and incomprehensible to those of us involved in the school and chaplaincy, we have now moved on to live and thrive in the school for the last two years.
Essentially two questions about resources and practice dominated the review of the chaplaincy four years ago. How much it cost financially and how it was taking potential ministry away from more traditional expressions of church. None of the reviewers addressed the faith development needs of the children and young people in the school, clearly indicating that, at the time they were of less value than the ageing and dwindling members in the traditional local churches. Retaining small numbers of older people, and the buildings they huddled into, was the mission of this kind of church. The prophetic voice was ignored, silenced and unwanted as it was uncomfortable.
What if we consider a different situation for a moment? Vincent Donovan, Catholic priest and missionary, tried to explain his experience of working with rural people in East Africa in the 1960s. Against the preferred way of operating advocated by his order at the time, he began to narrate the gospel in local villages. Eventually he asked those who had gathered to hear him, through the local village leaders, if they would choose baptism. When he received a positive reply, he tried to moderate the response, using his priestly eye to sort the wheat from the tares or the sheep from the goats. When he did that, he was gently but firmly reminded that he had invited everyone to be baptised.
The story illustrates both the costly and random nature of human response to the gospel. We have little if any control over the response, although the church mostly tries to do just that.
Yorkshire in 2018 is not East Africa in the 1960s but some of these observations hold true. The church still wants to regulate the gospel, who gets is and whether they have a right to it for example. Chaplaincy, which is open to everyone, is often rejected by the church: too costly and outside the church’s direct control. It includes too many people who will not have passed the church’s test for inclusion.
In the ageing and dwindling local churches faith issues will likely be different. The marks of faith in older people, the questions and resources needed to answer them are not necessarily the same as those needed for several hundred children and young people. The chaplaincy is a faith community that changes by up to 90 students every year and in which everyone moves on to new challenges and responsibilities in the same time frame. No one keeps the same role for forty years. Everyone learns something about their potential for leadership and what it means to ‘serve God and each other’ daily. In some ways it is monastic in its qualities. Daily work and regular worship side by side.
As the pioneer minister in the post it has been a difficult time. Challenging personally, in my own relationships, to my sense of call and identity and to my own adult faith development. Fortunately, outside the ageing and dwindling denomination, the Holy Spirit moves quite freely and there has been much evidence of energy transfer between disciples of all ages through the chaplaincy in this time, as we have ministered to each other.
Four years later, we begin to emerge differently. Like most of the young people, as far as I can tell, I no longer feel owned or obligated to the denomination that set me there and then abandoned us. So is this still part of the church? Again, as far as I can tell, it has the marks of a faith community. It experiences success and failure, people grow in their faith, worship appears relevant and reverent, God inspired, Spirit filled and Christ and focused.
In a school Chaplaincy everyone gets to hear if they wish to listen. And they do: needs are responded to, people are valued. Nearly a dozen people of all ages from 6 to 55 have asked to be baptised in the last 8 years of the chaplaincy. Did they pass the test? There was no test.
In our life and our believing
The love of God
JAL 01.03.2018
The feast of St David, missionary, preacher.
Jesus is coming back. Pass it on.
A children’s game perhaps?
What about this one? At the Christmas Fair a child of 6 came to the stall of Palestinian handicrafts and looked at a set of beads made from Olive Wood. This item was a beautiful rosary. He took it out of the box and examined it carefully, enjoying the look and the feel of it. He wanted to buy it. So the stall holder promised to look after it for him until he came back. Just as the Fair was coming to an end the child returned with his father and showed him the set of beads that he’d like to buy. The father bought the rosary for his son. He told me, ‘When I was his age I had one, possibly still have somewhere. I know his grandmother will have one.’
The father’s experience of moving away from the faith of his parents and taking just a residual sense of it with him is not uncommon. I meet many people who tell me ‘I used to…’ something or another to do with faith. Sometimes it is their children who bring them back. Quite a few children bought olive wood items from the stall exclaiming in happiness when they discovered where they came from and saying it was for a parent or family member.
Jesus is coming back, and meets us as we meet our children coming towards us with faith to share.
In our coming and our going
The peace of God.
I met a grandmother who told me she loved her grandson but she was concerned that he didn’t have faith. I asked her if she’d give me a tenner if I could prove he did. She was surprised and asked what I meant. So I told her various stories of Silcoates Chapel and of the leadership role the young man played there and how he had grown in so many ways in the eight years I’d known him. ‘But he doesn’t come to church with me’ she said. I enquired if there were any other teenagers at the church she attended. ‘None’ she confirmed.
Maybe you know a church like that. Often mono-generational, or at least dominated by the generation passed retirement age, there is a pattern of practice and attitude in such places that says ‘This is proper church: one hour on Sundays, all committees and rotas up to date’. Moreover it disregards those who come on Tuesday morning to ‘Toddlers’ or Friday evening to ‘Scouts’, seeing these of lesser value and even ‘They’re not our Brownies’.
Well I know another pattern and that’s just as ‘proper’. It’s a place where young people have opportunity to find their own voice about faith and how to practice it, where they grow as leaders and theologians. After what may be five to ten years, they leave, as some will do this summer, but for the time they were part of it Silcoates Chapel is rightly church to them, on any day of the week and whatever we are doing.
The multi-generational church of my childhood was dwindling even then, over forty years ago, so the challenge is not a new one. Neither is it a competition: Sunday church and weekday church may be different expressions of the same urge to engage with faith in community. To engage with children and young people and share faith with them in this way is exciting and demanding. There have been some wonderful moments, like the stories I shared with the grandmother. ‘Did I win the tenner?’ I asked her.
In our life and and our believing
The Love of God
The Church has become a house of pain because our Church is sick with deep forgetfulness of our deepest identity: that we are missionary, that we are a Church “called to come out of itself” …the biblical tradition of lamentation teaches us that denial of our pain and sorrow is not an option. Every biblical lamentation ends in hope: hope for rebirth, hope that the Lord’s love has not been exhausted.
From Divine Renovation by Fr James Mallon
Calling One, has your love been exhausted?
Mine has, in so many ways and places.
I only seem to have a little left
and in itself that is painful to me,
when I remember all the love filled times and places
and compare them with this pitiful situation.
I am sad, and have been for some time:
Sad enough to be sick, and sick of sadness,
But unable to leave sadness behind.
I have left the church of my youth behind me:
I opened the doors and stepped outside.
Although I was called ‘a breath of fresh air’
I heard the door bang shut behind me.
I am exhausted from lamenting all of this:
My love has poured out onto hard ground,
Soaked into the parched cracks and is gone.
It is not just my eyes that weep,
but every part of me feels heavy;
my guts twist and turn, my back aches from the load.
How I wish I could put down this sorrow and leave this pain behind.
As I go out each morning, ready for each new encounter
I know I am fortunate to meet those who yearn to know you.
A child comes running towards me,
A youth begins a conversation
And each time my heart takes a joyful jump.
When we sing together or remember the stories,
Then my heart glows warm again.
Calling One, your love has not been exhausted;
I rejoice that it is new every morning.
In our life and our believing
The Love of God
(The initial quote is one of the daily quotes I receive as a Seeker in the Lay Community of St Benedict)
JAL:17.05.2017
Opening prayer
Gathering God,
Gather us in, embrace us all
Bring us together
To remember and celebrate
A life lived and a life loved.
Guiding God,
Guide us onwards,
That together we may forge new directions
In love and service.
Generous God
Equip us all
By your Holy Spirit
That the Gifts we have by your Grace
be released to bring new life and hope here and everywhere.
Prayers of intercession
We pray for the courage and imagination to pursue complex research projects, the empathy and understanding to support the children and families who use our services, the openness and respect to encourage our colleagues in the days ahead and for increased awareness among ordinary people of these needs of children with epilepsy and their families.
In your mercy, hear our prayer
Bible reading: Mark 9:14-29
Sermon: At the bottom of the mountain
I first met Brian Neville in a lift in Guys hospital in 1984. He said ‘I hear you are interested in language and the brain’ and I replied ‘I’m interested in much more than that’. One of the things I was interested in was a collection of texts about 2000 years old about the life and ministry, death and resurrection of one Jesus of Nazareth, a portion of which we heard read.
Here are some of my sermon notes about that text:
1. A 2000 year old text, epilepsy is an ancient condition, a word from the Greek, meaning ‘seized with surprise’, and some see the origins of stigma associated with epilepsy today to be found in these ancient sources.
People with disabilities have found marginalisation and discrimination in texts like these, texts the church has often used to preach restrictive and confining theologies and impose views of faith and healing, rather than liberating theologies based on the lived experiences of disabled people.
So can such texts be redeemed? Let’s see shall we.
2. Doing RB (remembering the Bible), interpreting with those on the margins, children and those with communication difficulties. Another way of interpreting that is contextual. Can children interpret the Bible? They do it everyday. Some Stories of interpretation
A young man with cerebral palsy told me how he imagined it would have been to be a disabled person in the crowd on Palm Sunday ;
A teenager with dyslexia summarised the Easter story in three words: Jesus is back;
A 7 year old carrying the processional cross in a strong wind, declares carrying the Cross makes your arms hurt.
A boy, aged 16, says my favourite part of the gospel is…..
So pause for a moment and think, what is your favourite part of the gospel? That’s your remembered Bible.
His favourite part of the gospel: when Jesus was baptised by John and he got the Holy Spirit and God said ‘this is my son, I am well pleased with him’
3. Our interpretations today take us to the heart of the life of this family. I don’t just read this text, I live it. So do you, you know this child and this family even if, in the words of one boy with epilepsy, ‘He Don’t Talk’.
In some encounters not talking is a problem:How to proceed? How we started in the old Newcomen Centre, or the shed as we called it, with bubbles and bowls of water and progressed to the Wolfson centre, just another shed, and the Aristocats video via the patella hammer and ophthalmoscope.
Some professionals would say:
‘You just tell them what they want to hear’, which used to puzzle me.
The aim of any encounter is to listen so that understanding develops.
The cry of the father in the story was ‘I believe, help my unbelief’: a cry not just for help but for partnership. So what is faith like in the second decade of the 21st century? Certainly not uniform or one dimensional.
4. Some ask me: Did Brian speak of faith? My answer is Yes and No.
For example, he asked me about my understanding of Communion: ‘Isn’t it just sharing bread, feeding people?’ His was a down to earth faith.
But also No, he just got on with it, because that was faith to him. Don’t need to talk about it, do it, wear it like a coat everyday, not to hide behind but so that it wears thin at the elbows, becomes a series of patches.
5. The Faith we live by everyday, it’s full of questions, doubt, uncertainty as much as anything else. Prayer, also mentioned in the text, is a breathing space that gives faith time to activate, like yeast. So what about prayer? Did we pray? I never stopped doing it everyday, bringing time and space for reflection and silence onto the clinic room.
But I’ve stood beside him in the chapel at Guys and GOSH, in both formal and informal worship, and we’ve sat in silence together, like the morning after my daughter Hannah when a toddler was admitted to GOSH with a spinal abcess. Prayer is not a placebo, but a piece of genuine work, of holding and listening.
6. Living life at the bottom of the mountain, is also the turn in the route that takes Jesus downhill to Jerusalem.
Understanding epilepsy is like being at the bottom of a mountain.
But we are not alone there.
After his mountain top experience, with Moses and Elijah, the two greats of the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus came back to the bottom of the mountain, to the everyday lives of ordinary people like this child with epilepsy and his family.
Depends which voices we listen to, what we hear. Whatever our clinical or research work or theology it must amplify the voices of those silenced by their condition, or service limitations, or discrimination they encounter.
When others were speaking of Brian’s hopeful outlook this morning, to me that was the living Gospel in him.
How did this child and his family remember and retell the story afterwards? That brings me to making the Bible up, with which I’m sometimes charged and which I often do.
(there’s an example in Word of Mouth page 109).
And to Brian I would say, ‘It’s like Communion, real bread, living on scraps, enough to feed everyone’.
Jesus went onto Jerusalem, you know the rest of the story: passion, suffering and new life. And the family, what happened to them? You meet them everyday. Listen then if you have ears.
In the chapel at GOSH, there’s a sculpture shaped like an eye, in the centre of which there’s a small family. This image inspired the words of this blessing.
Blessing
In God’s eye, today and everyday;
In Christ’s footsteps, today and everyday;
Blessed by the Holy Spirit, now and forever;
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
These words were from the service to celebrate the life and work of Professor Brian Neville held on 3rd May 2017 at St George’s Church, Queen’s Square. They are notes only, not a complete script but hopefully make sufficient sense.
What are those for? This has been a recurring question since I left home to take part in the Easter weekend in Wales with the Lay Community of St Benedict. No, not what are Lay Benedictines for, but what are these wooden trays full of holes for, that I am carrying?
It seems that Communion trays, which is what they are, are not a common sight on public transport in these parts. But they are an interesting talking point, both in the Lay Community and beyond.
I brought the Communion trays from school for the Easter Sunday service which was described on the leaflet as Ecumenical.
I was cheerfully told that the Sunday morning service on these occasions was usually chaotic. And that was before I started.
We did some RB, remembered Bible. We made a table into a tomb with a black cloth. We talked to each other about what it might have been like to go to the tomb early in the morning. Some of the things mentioned were
It was women that went first and we were not surprised;
When the men followed, they had a race;
It was warming up outside but it was cold inside the tomb – this was a physical thing we’d notice;
When we saw the tomb was empty we were surprised, fearful, confused and had ‘other feelings difficult to put into words ‘
We all came to look in the tomb. I’d noticed that LCStB liked to move around in worship so I shouldn’t have been surprised when most got up to look. A little girl called Mary went inside and reported that the cloths she found there folded up were very soft.
Later we had a second bite at RB when we thought about left overs. Could we remember any stories from Jesus’ ministry about left overs? If course we could – loads.
The most common one was feeding the five thousand and the baskets of left overs.
One person suggested the catch of fish. First there were no fish and then the second time there were more fish.
The syrophonecian woman was remembered for her remark about the crumbs under the table; a remark showing the faith of an outsider, or one left over.
Turning the water into wine reminded us that the best had been ‘kept until last’.
The parable of the barns, suggested that rather than keeping lots for ourselves we should give more away in the first place.
In the Passover story we remembered that there were to be no left overs, and in the wilderness the people were not to keep the left over Manna. This was interesting as Jesus’ last supper was about making a new story from the left overs of the old, using the left overs from the Passover meal to make a new meaning of his body and blood.
All this and more came out from our shared RB.
Towards the end we heard that the rejected and left over stone became the new cornerstone: Christ himself. At his Ascension we became the left over people charged with the mission of taking the message to all people. For this the left over people received the left over Holy Spirit: my Spirit I give you.
Our task to be left overs, is to be scattered in our communities where it seems, Jesus thinks left overs are enough to feed the world.
During our sharing many members of the community, young and old, women and men, found their voice and became theologians. Someone asked Is it the homily? Call it what you like, we did it together.
After that we shared the bread we’d made and the small cups from the communion trays. For some this was the first time of celebrating Communion in this way.
The whole thing was fairly chaotic and certainly full of holes, but it seemed to feed us all and send us out with more to share.
In our life and our believing
The love of God
Getting started with the Lay Community of St Benedict (LCStB) couldn’t be easier. You pitch up and say you’re new and folks introduce themselves. There are lots of roles which are shared about amongst the participants women and men, young and old. I walked around a bit with Father Ian to take in the countryside and learn about the liturgy.
At the Maundy Thursday service, Ellen received her medal as an Altar Server. She made some promises: ‘with God’s help, I will’ she replied to each question. And so say all of us. ‘She was like a Bishop’ said one priest about Zoe, one of the servers, who clearly knew what she was doing.
Feet were washed and the Eucharist was celebrated and shared. Later Tom spoke to the young people about adoration. ‘It’s just like Jesus was sitting beside you’ he explained. So that’s like every day at Silcoates School then.
In our life and our believing
The Love of God
‘The fig tree you cursed has died’
I don’t know about you but this bit of Holy Week is something of a muddled daze. I take my remembered bible along with me and bits pop out of it from time to time: widows with mites, parables and questions from all comers and the whiff of heavy perfume following us everywhere.
I once used the Kenning ‘fig tree curser’ in an RB session, to describe Jesus in Holy Week. The recipient of the card, a computer user, was baffled as it was not a curser he’d heard of. Such can be the fun and chaos of RB that makes it ideal for muddled daze.
Anxious days make me muddled.
Searching for peace neath vine and fig tree
I find the one you cursed has died;
one of the most puzzling events of this whole week.
Setting out on another ordinary day,
not whole, but quite weak,
I can only listen to the stories,
keep time with the footsteps,
and breathe in the wasted scent.
Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy
Walking back……
On my way back from the village (now there’s a fruitful word of RB for you) a child waved to me from the doorway of a house. ‘Hello’, he said: ‘This is my Tigger.’ He held up a faded stuffed orange creature which might once have had stripes. ‘That’s a lovely Tigger,’ I replied and waved back.
And then I realised I’d misplaced my Tigger. If anyone comes across it in these muddled days, please do send it back. ‘Let the children come to me. The kindom of God belongs to them’.
What sort of Friday did you have?
I wonder if we are becoming obsessed with days of the week, especially ones we have chosen to designate as something particular. Feel good Friday is one of these. It refers to that historical thing the weekend which used to occur at the end of the working week. After working five days we’d get a weekend off, preceeded by, of course, Feel Good Friday.
But in these days of the gig economy and so many other euphemisms for dodgy work practices, many people don’t get a weekend off and there’s nothing feel good about Friday.
We’re now at the end of week 11 of our Spring term and this year we will break up for Easter holidays at the end of next week. So we’re in the market for that well known Spring argument, who decides when its Easter?
Not me. This year we miss out on being at school during Holy Week, so we have to do Holy Week early if we’re going to have it at all.
As a result, this week we’ve celebrated both Palm Wednesday and Palm Friday with two palm processions, one for Preschool and one for years 1 and 2.
During the Palm Friday procession, the ultimate piece of remembered Bible for the term, the last word in Feel Good Friday, came from our young cross carrier. Trying hard to keep the processional cross upright in the wind, he said: ‘This cross is making my arms hurt’. That really made today Good Enough Friday.