lurchersontheedge

I am delighted to be in Wales. It is an amazing place. The national anthem sung by rugby fans already makes the hairs of the back of my neck stand on end. The poetry and the passion of the people I am now living amongst give me confidence and hope; and yet I am present saddened to be English (drist i fod yn Saesneg).

I was with a local head teacher yesterday (nothing changes). That head teacher must have in their late 40s. They recounted a story of their father being caned in school for daring to speak welsh. I have experienced much silence over the last 24 hours, wondering how one culture can dare to lord it over another.

Wales is an amazing place, and the welcome has been quite wonderful. I trust in time, I will be able to be proud to be English in this amazing place, but for now I can only commit myself to honouring the resilient and proud cultures of those around me; saddened that those who came before me did not always act well.

I admit it. I love the coast. It is probably a good job having moved to Trearddur Bay, near the ancient fort of St Cybi; Holyhead (Caergybi).

I have “enjoyed” seeing the sea batter the rocks and walls over the last few days. There is something delightful for the spray of the sea to caress your face; although not necessarily with its icy fingers. I realise, of course, that the sea is not to be treated lightly, and am grateful for the volunteers that provide the lifeboat service.

Seeing, the sheer power of the sea, calls to mind the nature miracles of Jesus: the stilling of the storm and walking on water.

Both events occur on the Lake of Galilee, and result in those who witness them being shaken to the core; asking after the elements are calmed, ‘who is this that even the winds and waves obey?’

Those who witnessed the events, as well as those who heard their accounts through the words of the gospel writers would have called to mind the ancient stories found in the creation accounts in Genesis and Isaiah.

Certainly, when I have seen the sea crashing into the promenade and felt its breath, I have pondered again my own fragility and mortality.

So moved from an English urban metropolis to the North Wales coast.

So far, so good.

On Tuesday, we had no landline, broadband, cooker or TV… and the first train out of Holyhead said Birmingham New Street. The boy was not the only one who wanted to be on it. On Saturday, the cooker and the TV are fixed. Landline and Broadband are coming by late February.

I leave Birmingham with so many happy memories and a sense of many things well done, even if some of them are unfulfilled.

I am now here in Holy Island.

It is beautiful and bleak.

The boy had a fabulous time at school yesterday, which was a relief. How could anything be better than Bartley Green School?

What has impressed me most is the overwhelming hospitality and welcome.

Use the phone

Have a meal

Open doors

Even an offer to teach me the National Anthem.

The adventure is beginning.

Much more later, I imagine.

It is a beautiful and bleak area:

I care deeply about what happens in the life of our schools. I am saddened, beyond belief, when children leave unable to read, write or add up. This is true even when resources, human and emotional have been poured into these young lives. I see parents of children unable to do some of these things that I take for granted. Sometimes, families have been let down for generations. I am aware that sometimes, in rare occasions, there are those who have not helped themselves – but it really is scaremongering of outrageous proportions to argue that this is true in the vast majority of cases.

It is not Michael Gove’s fault that this happens – it would be simplistic to suggest that, nor was it the fault of Ed Balls, Estelle Morris (she was a good Education Secretary, she realised that the task was too big) or David Blunkett.

As a society, we have chosen (in a liberal democracy we do choose at the ballot box – even not voting is a choice) not to value education, to allow the morale of teachers, teaching assistants and heads to fall. We have chosen to judge staff solely on results attained. What Michael Gove is responsible for is this: he is allowing morale and standards to drop further. He has allowed OfSTED to become something to be feared, rather than creating something that would challenge schools, but also celebrate their successes. How can it be right for staff to live in fear of the call? How can it be fair for the inspection to rule out so many important things, such as nurture and pastoral care when assessing the life and vitality of a school?

Why am I so opinionated about this. For 12 years now, I have worked in brilliant schools as a governor (I know interfering busy body, Mr Gove – who you hold accountable should a school fail), vicar, parent, assembly taker, story teller and seen that oases of calm are created in which children flourish, where teachers go the extra mile and beyond. True there are some duff teachers. The best heads get rid of them, hopefully nicely. But there are dud vicars, some of us with freehold, and even dud Education Secretaries.

I have received a letter a year or so ago from someone called Jake. He was from a family where nothing much happened. He soared because of the active involvement of a member of staff, going the extra mile, working sometimes late into the evenign with the family.

Dear Rev. Kev

Regards, Jake

Schools do a brilliant job. We should be cheering them on.

I just want for one day to celebrate the brilliance of 95%+ of what goes on in schools; and I hope you do too.

This picture was drawn of a church by my son, when he was 5. It has wheels on because the church is always moving. The squiggles at the back are the trailer to carry those who want to come to church, but cannot fit it. I like the fact he thinks churches should be growing and moving. There is lots of theological truth in his picture.

I always listen to Justin Welby with interest. I actually always listened to Rowan Williams with attentive interest too. I was surprised when listening to the Today Programme on Radio 4 (31 December 2013) that the Archbishop said (and I may paraphrase): ‘where the vicar is good, local churches grow’. He then went on to talk about the intentionality of churches growing numerically. It was a snippet in a wider conversation about restoring trust and leadership.

I agree with the Archbishop that church growth has an intentionality about it. I have had an allotment for the last couple of years (it is one of the things I will miss about leaving Bartley Green). I plant the spuds and other veggies intentionally, I even create the right environment, ensuring the correct fertiliser (ash from the fire usually) and then I wait. I have no idea about why some seed spuds grow and others seem to fail. I am intentional, but am not sure whether or not working out why something works in one instance does not work in another.

I believe that the common sense approach of conferences like Leading your Church into Growth have offered hope for hard pressed church leaders – both lay and ordained – across many traditions.

Sometimes however the intention is there, the preparation is brilliant, and nothing happens. I have tried many different ways to grow carrots, but they always fail. Likewise, some people respond to the gospel and others do not seem to.

I do try to be a good vicar.

I do try to be intentional

But growth does not happen in the way I expect; but usually does in ways that make me smile.

Then as I look round the congregation I help lead, many who have joined, although not all, have nothing whatsoever to do with me.

God gives the growth, not me.

I am never one for New Year’s Resolutions. Well, I am for about 20 days. Like most of us, I want world peace, an end to injustice in all its forms and people to see themselves as wonderfully and creatively made in the image of God who loves us.

Perhaps, as profoundly, I want to take more time to be me.

To breathe a little more slowly

To read without feeling even the slightest bit guilty

To laugh more heartily

To be less inhibited by what I think others think

But for now, I think a dog walk is in order – Pippin and Samwise have no such concerns for their order in things.

Happy 2014

The baby in the manger threatens no one at all

At first sight this seems obvious: you can for example have a room full of the grumpiest adults, wallowing knee deep in themselves, and place a baby in their midst, and, mostly each one will begin to coo and melt at the baby’s smiles, gurgles and expressions. Babies are not really a threat.

The appearance of a baby in a family does change everything though, doesn’t it? It changes relationship at all sorts of levels.

The baby, or toddler, who was presented with the magi’s gifts, is a threat. Jesus’ very existence threatens Herod the Great. Matthew jolts the Christmas season back into reality with his story of the despot massacring the innocents.

We know that Herod was a tyrant. He had murdered members of his own family who he perceived to be rivals to his power base. The list of his atrocities would suggest that Matthew’s account is accurate: all boys under the age of two to be slaughtered. History is full of such accounts of despots becoming more and more paranoid as their grip on power tightens.

There are some who seek to defend Herod. How can someone who is so concerned with the reconstruction of the Temple to its Solomonic glories have stooped so low. High culture though does not disbar someone from becoming a tyrant.

The threatening nature of Jesus is seen in the gifts that are presented to him: gold, frankincense and myrrh

Gold for kingship. No wonder Herod was afraid. Jesus birth was a threat. I am reminded of Tom Wright’s now famous dictum: the confession Jesus is Lord had a flipside: Caesar is not.

Incense would not have stuck well in Herod’s nostrils. Used much in the Jerusalem Temple, yet there were many who challenged the legitimacy of the king. He was an Idumaen rather than a Jew
priest

Myrrh – a reminder of death. Incarnation is wonderful, but for Christians, Jesus is the one born to both die in our place as well as to offer a pattern for life. It is this notion rather than kingship that threatens our postmodern sensibilities.

I wonder in what way does the baby Jesus threaten you today?

I have really enjoyed – am enjoying this Christmas. Samantha Cosgrove, the head of my local Church of England Primary School has in the past accused me of being a Christmas grump. There is some truth in that. This year has been different on all sorts of levels. Most importantly it is because I have enjoyed celebrating the birth of Jesus again, and in that I have forgotten about the tinsel, turkey and trimmings, although Christmas dinner was exceedingly good. I am after all a brilliant cook.

This Christmas time – get off the merry go round and worship the new born king, for Jesus to coin an old phrase really is the reason for the season.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

For John the Evangelist and Theologian, the good news of the Gospel is that God steps into time and space as a human being. For Christians, Christmas is uniquely God stepping into time and space as a human being; and showing us, at one and the same time, what God is like and how we might live as human beings.
When the image of the baby in the donkey’s feeding trough is laid bare before us what we have is a picture which is at the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ: God becomes vulnerable so that by following him we might learn how to be human.

For John’s earliest hearers, the phrase, in the beginning would have conjured memories of the opening of the Hebrew Scriptures: ‘In the beginning, God created’, and with the birth of Jesus there is once again an opportunity to be part of the recreation of the world. Key components of the new world are Light and Life. For Christians, Light and Life are found supremely in Jesus Christ.

Both light and life are at times vulnerable.

Light appears at its weakest just before dawn, when the first pin-pricks of sunlight shatter, yet are seemingly dwarfed by, the darkness. It is at that moment though the darkness is driven back and night begins to end. With, the first gasps of the new-born: incarnation begins to envelope the world.

Life is vulnerable and fragile – it was no more or no less so before the first Christmas, but God’s coming amongst us in the person of Jesus Christ reminds us that life is hallowed and sacred from first to final breath.

The importance of Christmas does not solely revolve around God stepping into our fragile and broken world, but that in the coming of Jesus, a new way of living is offered to us. John had seen this new way of living with his own eyes, from his calling on the banks of the Galilee to being entrusted with the care of Jesus’ mother through to the long years of exile of the isle of Patmos.

This way of living held together an acknowledging of human fragility and recognition that life is to be hallowed. God stepped into a world that knew more than its share of conflict and unrest, where those who ruled put ideology and self-interest before the people they were meant to serve. With a succession of food shortages caused by failure of crops and the lack of political will to anything about it, in Herod the Great’s Palestine, the phrase Palestine isn’t eating would strike long and hard.

And yet God comes, Jesus Christ makes his home amongst those who are the poorest. He was born to a family who would struggle and on least one occasion have cause to flee for their lives to another country, becoming refugees. His birth was not announced on the railings of David’s citadel in Jerusalem, but to shepherds on a hillside; people whose working lives cut them off from usually dealing with polite society.

It was also discovered by those who studied the stars. People who were not Jewish; those whom God had apparently not chosen.

For those who were supposed to be in the know, his birth passed by almost unnoticed; probably quite like yours and, indeed, mine.

Christmas can sometimes be a little too glitzy for what is supposed to celebrate: the hallowing – making holy – of ordinary everyday life.

Christmas calls us look again at what is important.

Christmas reminds us that to be fully human we need to learn to be vulnerable.

For it is by becoming vulnerable that we become more like Jesus, and discover once again that we can become like the divine.

I am going to be Vicar of Holy Island and Team Leader of the Bro Cybi Ministry Area on the Isle of Anglesey in the Diocese of Bangor. It is undoubtedly a thin place with a rich history of Celtic Christianity. I am sure I will blog on such things as I get to know them.

For now, let me say that Bartley Green is a sacred place. It is not as ancient as Holy Island, but it is nevertheless a special place. It is a place where people are on the edge and struggle at times. It is a place of grit, grace and determination.

I am moving on simply because I feel called to do so.

There are places and people I have come to love deeply, and those people and this place have come to love me.

For it is in such relationships – relationships on the edge – that we are forged and flourish as human beings.