Real Life versus...?

In the whirl of modern social media, I find it all too easy to forget one particular arena or tool as I focus on others.  The lure of www.blipfoto.com, an Edinburgh based social media initiative, based around posting a single photo each day with (if one wishes) some reflection or sharing, has rather distracted me from Facebook and blogging, and even taken me away from Twitter unless I make a special effort to interact.  But why bother I (maybe) hear you ask?  The whole social media thing is fraught with potential for problems and miscommunication and wasting time, isn't it?

I disagree, of course.  There are times that following the holiday antics of friends of friends on Facebook or choosing one of the many rants to trend with on Twitter can seem to melt productive time away like the spring sun melts the snow on the Argyll hills. But the connections, the deep conversations, the long distance immediacy of interaction is breath taking.  I tend to tether this iPad to my smartphone when I am sat on a ferry or waiting for a few moments between meetings or visits, and catch up with the whirl of hundreds of people that I know or am connected to.  I see their joy, their pain, the excitement, their frustration, their questioning, their certainty, their doubt: the list stretches on and on and on.  Occasionally the connection becomes very intense, through a direct message because the pain is too much for public consumption, or a text because other avenues have dried up. People, their minds and souls, are out their in this virtual community.

I have always been convinced that God wants people to minister in this place, that is not a real place. Some people do, and I have met and worked with some of them. Some transmit encouragement and challenge, some manage and care for online communities.  But the social media and web presence of a real life Christian community is a vital part of that community's mission.  This is nothing new to say, and I, and the churches and organisations that I represent are far from perfect at this virtual presence business. But we try. We tweet. We try and promote our Facebook presence. We try and keep our websites fresh and appealing.  This is proclaiming the gospel, just as much as living our real lives in our RL community.

A footnote and final reflection on social media.  I have tended to avoid some social media tools, mainly for reasons of time constraint, but this evening I fell off my LinkedIn wagon and actually sent some network requests out to people from a suggested list. Why? Well, why not.  The faces from, in some cases the distant past, brought back memories of the past 25 years in quite a startling way.  I was quite nervous about sending some of them - work colleagues from pressured projects in the past may not be that excited about the automated pestering that linkedIn will give them to connect with this random Episcopalian from their past.  But I look forward to making some of those connections and sharing just a little of where our divergent lives have taken us.

Sofa so good...

I find myself reflecting on the experience of encounter.  We try to think about this in church a lot: what does it feel like for a person to encounter church/faith/Christians.  We write books about it, do courses on it, work with congregations to try and develop it. And sometimes the outcome is good, and a person has a positive experience of the encounter, and sometimes the experience is bad and the person is not made welcome or does not find what they are looking for.  Why do we care? Because we want people to hear the gospel/join our churches? Those are not entirely the same thing. You can measure the latter.  Some people think the latter will produce viable, lively, financially working churches.  Personal thought: the former actually does that.  But where am I coming from with this today?

Well, yesterday, I engaged with the true religion of 21st century Scotland/Britain: buying a new sofa.

The furniture companies are not ones that I have ever worked for, but I have bought a few sofas over the years.  The work that firms put into selling this high value and very personalised product is massive.   Interest free credit for years and years, hundreds of pounds off, images of happy, smiling people leaping onto vividly coloured sofas and clearly having a much better life after buying the sofa: these are advertising images to get us to walk into the store.  The message is clear. Come into *insert three letter abbreviated firm name here* and you will get something, cheaply, that will make your life better. OK. 

But walk into the store and it got fascinating. We popped into three of them, side by side, and each of them had clearly been on the same training courses/company manual/congregational development model.  A friendly person came up to say "hi" in a relaxed way, and we were told to have fun and take our time and what wonderful sofas awaited us.  Every time we showed interest in a particular sofa, the friendly face would appear and make some pleasant comments. We were asked about our children.  We were asked about where we lived. We were told that where we lived was a wonderful place. We were offered coffee.  It felt unobtrusive (although Mary felt she would rather have been left alone more). The whole emphasis was "we like you and want you to spend time with us and we care about what you care about."  The motivation is "we want you to buy a sofa" but it is well concealed below the layers of friendly personable sales work.

Even after we had bought the sofas we needed (/wanted) and the store manager had to come to check some technical aspect of the credit agreement, it was still done in a friendly, likeable, light-hearted way.  

So can one learn anything about how to make a church encounter positive from this experience? Of course we can, although with caution.  The church is motivated to draw people in and make them want to stay.  You won't do this, in my opinion, if you are not friendly and welcoming and genuinely interested in people. But what is the product that we offer? Sofa shops offer sofas. We offer... Maybe a warm community that is genuinely welcoming? Yes, OK.  An encounter with the living God. That sounds a bit scary.  How about a warm welcoming community that, in time, draws you into a saving relationship with the living God.  Sounds like we are getting there.  

A sofa shop doesn't expect you to come back every week, but they would like you to come back each time you want a sofa.  They want you to leave with a warm feeling so you return.  Same with a church: your quest for community/healing/divine encounter/justice/etc. is packaged in an environment that leaves you feeling warm. So you will want to come back, again and again.  In sofa shops they obviously try and teach this.  In churches we try and teach this.  But there are clearly some sofa salespeople that are genuinely interested in their customers and are genuinely friendly.  This maybe gives them an edge in how effective they are at being sofa salespeople.  I would suggest there are church leaders, lay and ordained, who are also gifted in having a genuine interest and even love for the people of God, and this makes them more effective at growing the church because of the texture and shared behaviours of the communities that they gather around them.  Maybe this is where the discussions from recent times on the Archbishop of Canterbury's 'good vicars mean growing churches' will end up because this is where they have come from.

The sofa companies work hard to tell people that coming to them will make your life better, and they welcome people with enjoyment and friendship in the hope that they will come back again and again. Maybe we could have quite a lot in common after all...

Holding on to sand...

Trying as hard as possible to hold onto a handful of dry sand is an activity that is guaranteed to end in frustration and gritty failure. But what has that got to do with anything, I hear you ask?

In Advent we are encouraged to prepare for the coming of God and to explore and reflect on that time of preparation and waiting. Christian discipleship: is it something that can be bettered by trying harder, by holding on tighter, by gripping it as hard as we can?

That is like holding onto dry sand, as hard as we can. Holding on tighter, it runs out just as fast. Try to hold harder: it's still gone. Is failure guaranteed?

But there is a pleasure in letting dry sand run through our fingers. The cool particles run like a liquid across our skin. The weight shifts and rustles back down to the beach or sandpit.  And there are more handfuls waiting to be picked up and let go, millions upon millions, a literally infinite repetition of taking up and gently running back the soft sand. The journey, the action, the practice of flowing sand is a delight.

Our Christian life and journey has that same flow, on so many levels. It flows over a lifetime, from birth, realization of who we are, maturity, death. Our spiritual life also flows across our life. It can also flow day by day, with a pattern of prayer, study, worship. A Christian community's life also flows: sometimes taking up the sand, growth, new ventures. Always letting it go: change, moving on, letting go.  There is the same delight is seeing the flow and pattern of God's grace in individual or community life as we see in childlike playfulness and dry sand.

So my Advent thought today, as a pressured, busy church leader? Let go, relax, and enjoy the flow of the sand. Again and again and again.

Global grace and connection

This is an image of the 'Peary Spirit,' an oil tanker, as she rounds Strone point and moves up Loch Long, towards (I assume) the Finnart Oil Terminal.  Apparently there are pipes that connect Finnart to Grangemouth Oil Refinery, built in the 1950s to allow crude to be imported via the west.

Why am I blogging this today? I spotted the vessel as she came up the Clyde after I paused for my usual 'in-car-office' on the sea front, prayers said from my phone.  She progressed from a (quite large) blur down near Arran and passed by where I was.

ShipAIS is a useful tool for the marine aficionados of Argyll: click to the right map and there's a live feed of whatever is passing you at that minute. So I, an Anglican priest, sat on the sea front in Argyll, saying my prayers, was being passed by a vessel built in Korea (by the chaebol Samsung, who also made the phone I was looking her up on), owned by a Canadian company, flying the flag of Barbados and quite probably crewed by Filipinos. Taking oil (from Shetland, according to her ShipAIS history) to the west of Scotland, to be made into petrochemical products in the east of Scotland. For example, the diesel that my car was burning to keep me warm and keep my phone charged as I did all this stuff.

The interconnectedness of it all occasionally smacks us between the eyes and shows us the invisible connections that hold the human world together. One can go down a route of Anglicanism: the Scottish Episcopal Church as the local manifestation of a church that also exists in all those places, nearly 80 million followers, as diverse as the culture and countries that it tries to align. Or one can go down a route of globalisation through technology (culminating in the chaebol created, lawsuit protected smartphone that allowed the prayers/knowledge/research to take place and reveal the connected lines...). Or one could just thank God for his gracious gifts in all that we see and all that we know.

And finish with the grace.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, evermore 

Social media and the gospel... #thatoldchestnut

I wonder how many times those words have been typed as people submit their topic for a MPhil/PhD/thesis/magazine article etc. etc. etc.

We seem to feel that social media and getting the Christian message over must be important in some way or other.  I share that view. I tweet. I blip. I (occasionally) update my Facebook status. I blog.

Twitter is probably the most fertile area for this sort of thing. I'm convinced the power of the 140 character message will grow and grow.  It is punchy, wide reaching, linkable and effective. It can challenge regimes, point out tasteless products and gather and influence public opinion. It's great. It's not coincidence that eveyr product, every TV programme, every magazine has a #hashtag and a @username

How do Christians tweet?

There are 'vicarbots' who post snippets of scripture to uplift and challenge.  They are usually unfollowed pretty fast.  There are trendy/sharp Christian tweeters, always making witty asides and observations.  There are tired and faithful Christians sharing their journey.  And many, many more.

Does any of it proclaim the gospel? I suppose (vicarbots aside, despite what they think) is does.  There are men, women and children sharing their journeys, mutually supporting each other and generally trying to work out what it means to be a person of faith in the 21st century.  Life goes on in Twitter, just as it does in RL: and Christian life is just the same.

I'm off for some corporate church comms meetings in Edinburgh next week.  I've only been to one so far, and the overriding concern at that one about Twitter was how to prevent the (corporate) church being taken to court for something this is tweeted by a clergyperson.  That is a rather underwhelming take on engaging with the world of social media: pre-emptive damage limitation. Oh well.

So I will go on tweeting (I try, usually vainly, to be amusing and show that stuff is happening). But I will also visit, I will meet, I will drink cups of tea and try to live a sustainable and balanced life as a human being, a priest and a person who follows and has been transformed by Jesus Christ...

@midgedancer

Branding, products and facing the celestial CEO

My Very Reverend colleague at Glasgow St Mary's Cathedral has blogged on some religious identity data from the 2011 census: read it here.

This is fascinating stuff, especially on the overall trends in Christian/religious identity and in the specifics of identifcation (or rather non-identification) with the Scottish Episcopal Church.  The six different lines (you made up your own category here) that seem to contain the Anglicans resident in Scotland are (in numerical order):

Church of England            66717

Episcopalian                     21289

Scottish Episcopal Church  8048

Anglican                             4490

Church of Ireland               2020

Church in Wales                  453

By far the largest of these was Church of England: which does not exist in a separate form in Scotland and has not since 1986 when St Silas in Glasgow joined the Scottish Episcopal Church.  The 'Episcopalian' and 'Scottish Episcopal Church' lines probably add up to something like the 'actual' SEC church membership, give or take a few thousand. Kelvin has a much better researched take on it, but essentially the English Anglicans in Scotland don't stampede into the pews of the Anglican province in Scotland.

And why would they?

The Church of England is a much, much broader church than the SEC, with a strong evangelical wing, a catholic wing, a large progressive/moderate rump and all the rest of it.  Why would an English evangelical go along to a service which looks like a catholic mass? Or why would a moderate, middle-of-the-road Anglican travel an extra 15 or 20 country miles to find an SEC church when a good welcome and an active Christian community might be there on their doorstep, in one of the Churches of Scotland? (although their stats are alarming in the census - from scientific observation it would appear that the Church of Scotland is in danger of creating a religion-free Scotland!)  The same issue applies to anyone who might wonder about wandering in and meeting us.

The issue of branding really, really matters. But so does the issue of what the product is like, once the brand has brought someone in through the door.  And that is where we will find ourselves working hard to understand what we are today.  A snapshot, from a recent-ish conversation with a person (who goes to no church) in my patch.

Her: "What does 'Scottish Episcopal Church' mean?

Me: 'Well, 'Episcopal' means that we have bishops, and are one of historical churches in Scotland, dating back to...'

Her: *glazes over*

Me: 'We are a church that thinks all people are valued by God, regardless of gender, race, sexuality.'

Her: 'I might come to that.'

Me: 'You would be welcome.'

She's been a couple of times, to a midweek: She looked like she found it all rather odd. But I wonder what she really found...

On a hill far away...

The cross from the small empty bell flèche on the west end of Holy Trinity church in Dunoon.  The scaffolding required for repointing and roof repairs gave us unique access, and the serendipity of the day, the angle and snapping with the iPad gave the image above.  I feel it symbolises a lot of useful stuff about this church community.

It was made by a now unknown man in 1850 or so, and fitted to the original church.  The lines, back when Queen Victoria was still pretty young, would have been fine and ornate. He took his time to create the fine cross, even though it would always be high, high above the heads of anyone who would ever see it.  It was made with care, and left to the elements.

Just over 40 years later it moved, when the church was extended.  The west wall was moved further west by maybe 30 feet or so to make more room for worshippers.  The flèche and the cross moved with the wall.  It will have been pretty much still as good as new, I suspect, after 40 summers and winters in Argyll.  Maybe the edges were starting to blunt a little, but still recognisable.

Now, another 120 years or so later, we are back up to have a look.  Others have been up in the meantime, roofers and masons, leaving their initials or names carved in mortar or the softer stone of the flèche itself.  But the 160 years haven't been kind to our nameless mason's labour of love. The wind, rain and salty spray have eroded the stone, changing the fine details to blurred, irregular lines.  The overall shape is still there, it is still a finial cross on a gothic revival building, and from the ground probably still looks pretty much the same as it always has. But up close...

But the backdrop to the cross is striking.  The town of Dunoon, ever changing, the 'capital of Cowal' lies below and far from the cross: but still visible.  The blue sky and clouds behind the cross capture the beauty of Argyll, the land and seascape.  And the green of the lime trees, planted about the same time as the cross was carved, that has grown and deepened, just as the cross has faded and eroded.

Are our church communities faded and eroded like the finial cross?  The intentions of the founders of churches and their communities were based on strong views about worship and history and the place of Christianity (in their preferred style) in the life of the nation.  Decades of capitalism, consumerism and apathy have attacked the certainty of the Victorian church revivalists.  Secularism (which I don't see as a rival to faith or Christianity, just a context for it) have blunted the certainty of the edges of the beliefs that our forebears carried with them.  

But the shape of the cross is still there.  In fact, it has probably been nudged closer to the sort of shape that a rough wooden cross beam, on a tree or beam of some sort, would have had.  The blurry lines of the worn stone are moving towards a better image of a Roman instrument of execution.  The sharp edged, ornate institution is long gone.  The worn image of the cross seems attractive, we are drawn towards its solidity and the memories that it holds.  And an image of a cross, rooted in history, created in care and accepted by new generation after new generation: that still sits far above the bustle of ordinary life, looking down on God's beloved people in the world.