lurchersontheedge

One of the striking moments of sabbatical has been the process of being listened to. Listening is not something I am good at. I will try harder when I return, although therein lies a point perhaps if you try hard to listen, you don’t really do it. Listening is a disposition.

So is being heard. Being heard is difficult. You have to reset the compass of how you see yourself. If you are heard, you are allowing yourself to be valued. After all, someone else, another, is making space for you. When you are in that space of being valued and heard, you begin to value yourself.

Make space to listen

Make space to be heard

During my two weeks at St Deiniol’s Library in Hawarden (www.gladstoneslibrary.org)[1], as well as writing a sample chapter and revision of the introduction of my proposed Meeting the Jewish Jesus for Grove Books[2]; I have been wrestling with the whole topic of improvising faithfully with the Christian Scriptures.

Much of the recent discussion about faithful improvisation has sprung from engagement with the work of N T Wright, the former bishop of Durham. It is worth offering a quotation of his in full to set the scene for the drama.

Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own. Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.

Consider the result. The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task in hand. That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, mentioned earlier, had not reached its proper resolution. This ‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over again. It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.[3]

Wright’s contention is that Christians engage faithfully with the biblical text and improvise with it. He links it particularly with his own five-fold interpretation of the Christian Scriptures, which are as follows:

Act 1: Creation

Act 2: Fall

Act 3: Israel

Acts 4: Jesus

Act 5: Mission of the Church

For Wright this schema or story is a way of encouraging Christian disciples to enter more fully into the great drama of God. Seeing the Bible as a big picture or a drama is an argument that is won. Church leaders of different traditions would appear to concur.

John Vincent writes for example, ‘Theology takes place as the people of God see themselves as part of the biblical story, project themselves into that story and then project that story out into their corporate and individual lives’.[4] Vincent is writing from a liberationist perspective. The early liberationists were passionate about linking the story of the written bible with the story of the bible of people’s lives.

Scott McKnight, a theologian of the emergent church, would also appear to on the importance of story. He summarises his arguments in The Blue Parakeet as follows:

‘Here’s where we are:

• The Bible is a story.
• The Story is made up of a series of wiki-stories.
• The wiki-stories are held together by the Story.
• The only way to make sense of the blue parakeets in the Bible is to set each in the context of the Bible’s story.

None of the wiki-stories is final, none of them is comprehensive; none of them is absolute; none of them is exhaustive. Each of them tells a true story of that Story’.[5]

The problem with Wright’s schema lies, I think, in two areas. One the sequence and two in what types of improvisation are allowed or not.

Sam Wells wants to readjust Wright’s schema a little, as do Craig Bartholomew and Michael Gohen. Wells wants to do to so to make the Act concerning the church the penultimate one. This works for me simply because it allows the final act to be all about God rather than human beings muddying ‘the consummation of all things’, even allowing for divine partnership with mortals J

The second problem is perhaps more pertinent and revolves around the simple question; how can people improvise if they no longer know the story? Improvisation both in music and drama require great skill. The best Jazz musicians have perhaps been classically trained.

Those who wish to improvise with the Bible need to have entered it. How we do that will be the subject of later blog.

I visited a Ghost Estate today.

The Ghost Estate is Parkwood Springs in Sheffield. Up to the age of 7, I lived there. Then the estate was violently demolished by Sheffield City Council and the people who lived there were decanted into other social housing estates around the steel city. It was demolished to make room for a Ski Village that is now closed because of repeated arson attacks.

I admit I view the Springs through rose-tinted spectacles: tin baths, shared with others; coal fires, outside loos, pigeon-men and the wreck (an overgrown play area that I from time to time pretended was a downed spitfire).

As I walked around the Springs today, the ghosts of many memories flooded back: laughter, firework displays, walking to school in community over the railway bridge. Memories came back to life in an Ezekiel 37 sort of way: Joanne Drummond and Sam the Pigeon-man, the allotment, and the white haired boy jumping from the outside loo with a tea-towel around his shoulders pretending to be superman.

As I walked in the steel city rain, I encountered others, and tried telling them that I used to live there: 113 Pickering Road. They had no interest, and actually why should they: balding middle-aged men speaking to strangers is not something usually encouraged.

It is a Ghost Estate.

Other Estates though up and down the country have ghost memories: stories of that joined people together that have disappeared: pits, factories, communities have all been vanquished and are lost from sight.

I wonder what wind is necessary to bring them back to life.

I have just spent a happy couple of hours with a couple of clergy, diocesan officers and a PhD student at Chester Diocesan Church House discussing how the Bible can be used in urban areas.

I have become a fan of using the Bible as story or dramatic narrative for as Louise Lawrence writes, ‘Stories and memories, both remarkable and mundane, connect people and places in assorted and surprising ways’.[1] I could wax lyrical about how using the Bible as story opens up many possibilities for both evangelism and discipleship, as people enter into the story. Hence, I find much to agree with in Eugene Peterson’s comment: ‘The story that is Scripture, broadly conceived, is the story of following Jesus. The Christian community has always read this story as not just one story among other but as the meta-narrative that embraces, or can embrace, all stories’.[2]

I am also aware that we need to re-engage people with the Bible through a variety of different media.

As I finished sharing about my experience of using the five-act drama, a la Tom Wright, refined by Craig Bartholomew and Michael Gohen, and by Sam Wells and Scott McKnight, and offered the assembled gathering a copy of my way, there was a tentative voice.

The PhD student has been doing some qualitative work looking at the bible with working class men from non-church backgrounds. At the beginning of his research, he had asked the group (all from the same factory) what they understood by the Bible. While some said ‘a story book’ which usually meant and therefore not true; the vast majority thought of it as a ‘moral guide’ or ‘instruction book’.

As a ‘moral guide’ it had no authority when it conflicted with life, and ‘like all instruction books’ it was on the shelf but seldom read.

It is hard work making fresh connections between life and the bible; it may even be harder than those of us who are already on the way think.

Bookless Bibles[1]

I wonder whether one of the ways that we can reintroduce the biblical narrative to people on urban estates is by taking seriously a method called Remembering the Bible.[2]

Janet Lees opens her book with the following words: ‘It is quite nonsensical, unrealistic, impractical and brainless – in other words wacky – to suggest that we can do Bible studies without Bibles. Well, without written Bibles anyway. To make links between lived experience and the Bible in order to develop a more chaotic spirituality that is like the real world, we shall not use a written Bible but a remembered one’ (p. 18).

Part of Lees’ Remembered Bible initiative is quite close to the methods of the liberation theologians of Latin America and South Africa. Carlos Mesters chronicles this well with his narrative of how Christians, living in conditions of oppressive poverty, re-connected the ‘written Bible with the Bible of life’, of experience.[3] Janet Lees’ work is different having been done in the UK, and in estates in Sheffield, including Shiregreen, which I know very well indeed. Indeed, some of the cadences in the reports Janet gives are exactly how someone from a North Sheffield estate would put it.

Remembering the Bible begins with what people remember of the written Bible stories. As the remembering process is being done, no texts of scripture are present. I think I would struggle with that. Indeed around me, as I write this blog, I have several different translations including a Greek New Testament and an Action Bible. I am prepared though to accept the struggle if the process is liberative for others, because in turn it will liberate me.

An example found in Word of Mouth is the story of Jesus at the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. I am going to give you the version from the Anglicised Version of the NRSV first.

³⁸ Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. ³⁹ She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. ⁴⁰ But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ ⁴¹ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; ⁴² there is need of only one thing.^[a] Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her’ (Luke 10:38-42)

The following is what happened when the Bible was remembered:

“In Bethany, Jesus turns up at tea-time. Martha panics. There is no food and she wants to do her best. Martha wants to do what is right and Mary winds her up. Mary gets distracted and Martha gets distracted. Martha loses her temper and there’s the usual sibling rivalry stuff. Martha says to Jesus: ‘Don’t you care?’ Jesus says to Martha: ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried about many things.’ Martha said to Jesus: ‘I knew you would take her side’.[4]

I confess I like it. I like it a lot. There is interpretation going on in the remembering, but for NT exegetes like me, it does not appear to depart too much from the biblical text. I am not sure whether it would matter too much if it did, for the purpose of Remembering the Bible, like much other contextual theology, is giving power back to the participants.

Practically, Remembering the Bible is done collaboratively with everyone chipping in as they re-tell a particular biblical narrative. It gives people their voices back, and can be quite messy. Estate life can be messy. All life can be messy, and if all we have to offer is a neat and tidy Bible that tells a story of a neat and tidy Jesus then the written text and the text of people’s lives will continue to go their separate ways.

I do have some questions. Some of them will no doubt be answered when I meet Janet next week and see Remembering the Bible in action.

First, I am unsure whether such models work satisfactorily in a culture where the Biblical narrative continues to be increasingly unknown.

…those in the pulpit as well as in the pews have a shrinking biblical literacy. We know less about the Bible – its stories, its diverse forms, its presentation of anthropological and theological truths. Consequently, we are less able to engage the biblical witness and to make sense of scriptural categories in an integrated, theological way.[5]

Remembering the Bible does not require much of what McSpadden is talking about, however the decline in the amount of time allocated to the Bible in training those for authorised ministry may have a knock on effect on the ability of clergy and lay leaders being able to facilitate Remembering the Bible at a local level. It would be interesting to see how well this method might be used in schools and/indeed in residential homes with those outside the church. Theologies for liberation were not restricted to church people and places.

Second, how does remembering the Bible work the non-narrative parts of Scripture? I am aware that people whom I have worked with have been able to piece together narratives of some of the Old Testament. In an evening, we managed to tell the story of Abraham, Joseph (with a little bit of a debt to Lloyd-Webber) and Moses. In the midst of this we were able to ask what about the women and where their story was, and remembered Moses’ mother, Miriam (who is a prophetess in her own right), Huldah (who was preferred to Jeremiah) and recalled the famous tent peg incident. Remembering allows for interpretation and demonstrates the fact that when people have their voice, there is usually quite sophisticated theology going on.

People could in a different session put together the story of Jesus (what he did, said and the titles used to address him). It is my experience that the non-narrative parts of Scripture are less widely known, including the writings of Paul. It would seem to me that some of the letters might be possible to ‘re-member’, Galatians springs to mind, which has more narrative than most, for example 2:11-14

¹¹ But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; ¹² for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. ¹³ And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. ¹⁴ But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?

I will blog later in the week concerning how this might be used in remembering. It seems to be the method can work, with a little more effort needed from what Lees calls “socially engaged biblical scholars” (p. 51).

This method is something I am going to come back to and practice locally. I think it offers much in helping people engage or re-engage with the Bible. This is not to learn the Bible per se, for as John Vincent puts it succinctly: ‘Theology takes place as the people of God see themselves as part of the biblical story, project themselves into that story and then project that story out into their corporate and individual lives’.[6]

Re-engagement by Christian people with their scriptures might be one way of bringing hope and renewal to the places we call home.

Broken Lives, Healing Stories: Encounters with Bible in Urban Situations

People have asked me where I got my love for reading, and in particular wrestling with the Scriptures from. Often the question is asked because of the working class background that I come from; indeed I remember at one interview a University Vice-Chancellor looking down through her spectacles, which were perched on the end of her nose, asked, ‘were you an unusual child, Dr Ellis?’

The Vice-Chancellor had made the assumption that working class children did not read, and here was I with a New Testament doctorate challenging her assumptions. Tim Chester makes the following point: ‘many working-class people love to read. There is a long history of self-improvement through literacy among working-class people, which finds expression in workers’ libraries and organizations like the Workers’ Education Association’.[1] Specifically within the UK, there has been, (or was), a long history of education being a means of escape from a life of relatively low-aspiration.

To answer the first question about a love for reading, you will have to come with me to Hillfoot School in Sheffield, to a reception class. A rather shy white-haired boy sat on the carpet with Joanne, Craig and Glynn and 15 others. Mrs Dahlek spoke softly, and asked what she had written on the blackboard. Only two of the class knew; I never knew that Kevin was spelt that way. I did not know it probably could be captured and put down like that I did not know that I could not read. I was after all 4. But that moment did give me a real desire to learn to decipher squiggles on a page; and my love for reading began to take shape.

The second about the love for the Bible is a little more complex. I was nurtured in the Christian faith at Parkwood Springs Primitive Chapel and then at St James and St Christopher’s Shiregreen. I am not sure either place had a particular focus on the Bible; although having said that I do remember stories being told by Miss Lovell, the Sunday School Superintendent, and still remember the particular timbre in her voice as she told them. I also remember how deeply intertwined both Christian communities were in their local communities, from running Boys Brigades and Scout Troops, Walks of Witness (May Queen festivals combined with Pentecost) and Lunch Clubs, which provided food for the elderly and work experience for those with learning disabilities. Therefore if it is true that for most people the only Bible they encounter is the lived witness of a Christian community, then what these local expressions of faith taught was a story of inclusion, generosity, laughter and gritty determination. These sit cheek by jowl with petty power politics, child-like squabbles and a resolve to exclude people who did not quite fit. Churches in urban areas, like those in sub-urban, rural and inner city, are usually an accurate reflection of the communities that surround them. They are often people with broken lives attempting to live life differently. It is my experience that the overarching story of the Bible can provide some scaffolding to help people to do just that.

St James and St Christopher’s Church, Shiregreen was a typical urban estate Parish Church. Even now, I cannot say for definite which particular tribe of English Anglicanism it fits into. During my childhood and teenage years, it oscillated between central catholic, intellectual liberal and open evangelical depending who the vicar was at the time. each incumbent introduced different things: more smells than bells, Christian Aid week that seemed to last for longer than seven days, proving the truth of the fact God’s time is different to ours and the ‘gentle’ charismatic traditions of John Wimber. For me though it all represented what Christianity was. It was the heady days before I discovered Christianity was tribal, surely all Christianity was Shiregreen shaped. Of course, I observed adults behaving squabbling apparently like petulant toddlers over what they did and did not like. Nobody seemed to quote from Scripture.

The Scriptures were read in a particular tone. Everyone flat lined as they read ‘the Lesson’. We were schooled, each one of us, by Henry Cooper (not that one), who had been Church warden as he said ‘since Noah was a lad’. Henry was the one who got the Bible out, who placed in on the reading desk, and made sure it was open at the right page. I was allowed to read as part of the Scout Parade. Those who were not good enough to read because they had not served their time in the church or could not read in Henry’s way were not allowed to do so. The Bible was the warden’s personal fiefdom.

It was however at the age of 14, discovering that I was not allowed to go to a bible study group because I did not have ‘a proper adult faith’ and ‘could not be expected to understand the Bible’ that stimulated my curiosity and desire to know more about my faith. In retrospect the vicar who said I could not join in did me a favour; teenagers, then as now, are only too willing to prove people wrong.

It was through participation in youth groups at neighbouring churches, where I encountered others of similar age, wrestling with the story of Jesus as told by Luke for A level RE, and two years with the London City Mission (LCM) that fuelled my desire to get to grips with the Christian Scriptures.

It was in the LCM base on Old Jamaica Road in Bermondsey that I encountered the idea of reading the Scriptures every day. It had, I think, never occurred to me before. There is a story of my arrival at LCM that is worth telling because it is, or was, illustrative of aspiration on a housing estate. I blew my ‘A’ levels the first time around. It was my fault; if you are up all night working for Mission Sheffield before you take them, then you will not usually be switched on for exams. The second time around was different: worked hard (extra timed essays, weekends spent in the research section of Sheffield City Library – this was a necessity, space was needed to learn) and was absolutely focused. In spite of this, I did not go straight to university. I did not think I was bright enough. The school was not particularly switched on, not even a handful of pupils went on to university. Hammond describes a ‘wall in the head’ for people living on estates. That was true for me; so I did not apply; and when I did eventually make an application, it was a hokey cokey moment, with it being put in and out of the pillar box a number of times, before the application was loaned to Her Majesty on the way to UCCA.

The desire to learn and apply Scripture was cultivated by the leaders of the Voluntary Evangelism Scheme. I went for two weeks, and stayed for over two years. They took a chance with a shy and insecure 19 year old, and my journeying with the Bible was about to take a dramatic turn.

The LCM is an evangelical organisation – not that I knew what that was and meant at the time – they were just a group of people seeking to make sense of their faith in Jesus Christ in a late 20^th Century context. We were trained in a particular form of evangelism; and encouraged to relate the Bible – and specifically what God might be saying through the Scriptures to those we came into contact with.

I was appalling naive. I was devouring the written text of the scriptures with aplomb. I had just finished reading about the various features of Solomon’s Temple when a little later, I knocked on Isaac’s door. He came sleepily to the door, and explained that he had just arrived from Nigeria, so was jet lagged; whereupon I launched into a 20 minute explanation of ‘how Solomon’s Temple worked, and how it had been superseded by the work of Jesus on the cross’. After, asking Isaac whether he had understood the importance of what I was saying, and he looking a little puzzled; I repeated everything again but a little slower; just about reaching the court of the priests when the door was politely closed before me.

However I also had the opportunity to work alongside an Irish missionary, whose whole way of life who lived and breathed a form of theology of liberation. He may never have read Mesters’ Defenseless Flower or Rowland’s Liberating Exegesis[2], but he knew the stories of the Bible set people free. His work as a London City Missionary emphasised personal salvation, but his experience of life in Ireland meant that he could echo with ease some of narratives of the liberationists who struggled to make sense of the Bible alongside broken and oppressed people.