Church Family?

Warning!  This one's a bit Baptisty.

I find it hard to get too worked up about the wavelet of conversation about the language of church family or Baptist family currently swashing around the Baptist blogosphere.  Just worked up enough to have a bit of a blog myself.

Seems to me that family language became popular to emphasise the relational aspect of church.  This was part of the whole cuddlyfying process that was a much welcome dimension of the charismatic movement per se and the wider informalising of culture of which the movement was a manifestation.  As such it was part of the reaction against an overly formal expression of church life.  The use of family language helped to contribute to toning down the institutional feel of church that many of us encountered when getting involved for the first time in the 60's / 70's. 

Thing is though no one image can do everything.  Each metaphor runs the risk bringing unwelcome and unintended connotations to the table. That's in the very nature of metaphors, they are allusive, evocative not definitive.  

Some advocate speaking of the Baptist movement rather than family.  I can see why this might be attractive at a time when we wish to emphasise the missional nature of church and further downplay its institutional life.  But movement language might run the risk of de-emphasising the relational dimension of church life. 

We oughtn't to imagine that by switching metaphors we will somehow get it right.  I reckon that if we are to bespeak the (ideally) rich reality of church we need to deploy a range of metaphors.  By all means let's stir up the language, keep it fresh, use it to finesse our meaning and to promote our political priorities but let's not thin it out.  By all means emphasise movement but let's not stop aspiring to become family at its best.

Metaphors Meaning and God Talk

Words
Originally uploaded by livDE

I’ve been thinking about how language works. It’s David Southall’s fault. On Tuesday David came to Luther-King House to deliver the annual Whitely Lecture on Paul’s use of personification in Romans. As part of the lecture he gave a very short but very helpful summary of Paul Ricoeur’s thinking on metaphor. This set me off.

Now let me say straight away that no one in their right mind would confuse me with anything even remotely resembling an expert on Ricoeur. However, I have come across his ideas from time to over the past ten years or so, which, in my book is enough to justify a bit of pontificating! So what follows is the result of me playing around with a few ideas over the past couple of days, knocking them into a bit of shape and fly-posting them here just in case anybody might interested. That’s all. And as it’s only metaphorical fly-posting please feel free to tell me where I’ve go it wrong but there’s no need to have me prosecuted.

How metaphors work.

Creating a metaphor is one way of generating meaning. You take pre-existing words that are both like and unlike each other. Each of these words has its own field of meaning, its own connotations and associations. You then bump the two words into each other with all their own meaning trailing along behind them and you look to see what new meaning might emerge out of the collision. It’s the linguistic equivalent of experimental cooking or, if you prefer, playing with the elements of a verbal chemistry set.

The thing we sometimes forget, the thing I think we ought not to forget, is that when this coming together happens new insight is generated as meaning moves in two directions at once. Each word acts on the other. So for example when we speak of Christ as king it’s not just that all the pre-existing meaning of the word “king” spills, as it were, into our understanding of the word “Christ” modifying it accordingly. Rather, after the two words bump into each other, when we deploy the metaphor, meaning slops about all over the place, there is a bi-directional semantic flow. All that the word “Christ” means also spills into our understanding of the word “king”. That too gets modified. So, as someone who has lived in the Christian language world for the past thirty-five years, it is now impossible for me to hear the word “king” without it instantly having Christly overtones. All that I know of Jesus plays its part in colouring my picture of kingship.

So what?

But why does any of this matter? You might well ask, but bear with me. The issue of how why metaphors matter cropped up on Tuesday because the particular bit of Romans that David was looking at was chapter six which uses the metaphor of slavery to explore what it means undergo Christian conversion. We used to be slaves to sin we become slaves to righteousness. One of the audience had a problem with this, not so much with the subtleties of David’s argument about Paul using the term "righteousness" as a personification of Christ but with the very idea of slavery being used as an image at all. I think this is a fair point. Our use of language doesn’t just describe and reflect our world, it builds, creates or, at the very, least colours how we see our world. To take a crude example if you are told repeatedly from childhood that you are stupid, stupid is how you are likely to see yourself even if you are actually very smart. So it’s not unreasonable to ask us to be careful when laying our tongues to words such as “slavery”.

Certainly if all that happens when we use the metaphor of slavery is that everything that the word “slavery” means comes to shape our understanding of the Christian life then there would be good grounds for expunging such usage form our discourse once and for all. However, this is not what happens. What happens is that meaning flows both ways. All that we know of Christ and the Christian life also changes how we see slavery.

Where’s this heading? Well, I don’t want us to end up with an anaemic form of Christian language. And this could happen if we don’t think carefully about our use of metaphor. There are those who would have us abandon entirely language that might have negative, unhelpful connotations for people. So, for instance, there are those who would rather we avoided speaking of God as "Father" because some people have very negative experiences of an abusive father, experiences which, of course, profoundly affect what the word “father” means to them. This is not an insignificant argument and those who dismiss it lightly and lazily as mere political correctness should be shot (metaphorically of course).

However, if we hit the delete button every time we come across an image with negative connotations we will end up with a discourse that is tissue-thin and Lincolnshire-flat. Out goes Christ as victor (too triumphalistic); out goes discipleship as race (too competitive); out goes minister as pastor (too demeaning to the congregational sheep). But we forget that meaning flows both ways. Christ’s victory is like no other – it happens through nonviolent surrender and defeat. All that Christ means modifies my understanding of victory. The race of discipleship is weird; discipleship and racing are both like and unlike each other – all you have to do is finish and you win. Christ is the kind of shepherd who dies for his sheep, who calls us "friend", who walks alongside as our companion, sustainer and conversation partner. Christ is indeed shepherd but he’s not mere shepherd – and therefore neither are we mere sheep. And with that I’ve already moved onto my final point.

Why metaphors are like teenagers and why this is a good thing.

Metaphors don’t come along all by themselves. They hang out with their friends. Lots of them. This too I think is more important than we normally realise. If we use a limited range of images then we can end up with an understanding of the things of God that is hopelessly and unhelpfully skewed.

Far better that we deploy a whole panoply of metaphors (if you’ll forgive the military connotations of the word “panoply”) so that we create a semantic meta-field that is rich, varied and therefore goes some of the way to approaching the impossible task of the linguistic rendering of the ineffable. The metaphors that inhabit this meta-field will work on each other, engaging in ongoing mutual, multi-directional, modification thus guarding against the tendency to construe the divine in unhelpful and misleading ways.

Our concern should not be overly focused on particular metaphors or individual instances of their use but on whether or not the field as a whole gets it right. The recipe and not just the individual ingredient. So if our God talk is saturated by militaristic images we may want to think again – but this does not mean we should never speak of God as "warrior". Similarly our reaction to the negative implications for gender justice of an exclusively male imaging of God should not be to stop calling God "Father" but also to speak of God as "Mother". What we could do with is an iPhone app that periodically sucks up all our God talk and turns into one of those word cloud things. You know like the one in my previous post or the one in my side bar, over there, to the right.

So that’s it really. That’s what I’ve been thinking. There’s nothing more. Not even a proper conclusion.

Political Correctness

Sinking in words ...
Originally uploaded by so_martinha

It’s official; we are, after all, allowed to use the expression brain-storm.

Apparently Epilepsy Action and The National Society for Epilepsy have said that it is not offensive. So all teachers, trainers, tutors and other flip-chart jockeys can breathe a sigh of relief, forget about thought-showers and just say what comes naturally.

Now, I swear I just heard some of you tittering under your breath there, or sighing and tutting, or, even worse, reaching for the address of the Daily Mail letters page. I’m not surprised. It has become the done thing to deride politically correct censorship of seemingly innocuous words. And I agree that sometimes the humourless attitudes of the p.c. militant tendency is irritating. Their eagerness publically to correct offenders seems to be set to go off with all the sensitivity of the finest of hair-triggered pistols.

But when I calm down and think about it, I have to conclude that they have a point. A big and important point. Truth is, words have power. How many of us have a had their lives blighted by things said to us years ago? Would anyone deny that words such as nigger or paki are politically explosive, socially devastating and profoundly disrespectful? (So much so that I’m curious to see if the editor will have to reach for his asterisk key.)

The power of words in this regard lies in the way they shape how we see people. And surely Christians above all others ought to be alert lest we find ourselves conceiving of fellow human beings in ways that diminish or dishonour them. This is the image of God we are talking about.

The plain, uncomfortable truth is that the way we use words has real consequences in the real world for real people. First we categorise, then we marginalise, then we diminish, then we dismiss and people bleed. Our use of words whether deliberate or unwitting can and does do damage to flesh and blood.

Consider for instance the widespread tendency to default to the word lady rather than woman. This never fails to grate. Most use the word without thinking. Those who do have a motive are usually seeking to express respect. But why on earth should it be disrespectful to use the word woman? What’s wrong with being a woman?

You may well object that there’s nothing wrong with being a lady either. I beg to differ. You see a lady is a certain type of woman. The word lady hangs out with other words such as genteel, delicate, refined. Its constant use predisposes us to see women in ways shaped by these terms and, by implication, to fail to see that it is equally womanly to be robust, vigorous and edgy.

And you don’t have to think too hard to realise that this is related to our denomination’s woeful, gospel-denying record on women in ministry.

My column on preaching a couple of weeks ago elicited a telling response from a friend, a friend who is a very capable minister, a fine preacher and a woman. She commented on how odd it seemed to her that throughout the piece I referred to my ideal preacher using feminine rather than masculine pronouns. She wasn’t complaining, just pointing out how unusual it sounded. And that’s the point. How can something become normal or commonplace if our use of language causes us to see it as odd, remarkable, exceptional?

To me this state of affairs is deeply irritating. To many women I know it is a cause of much pain and the prompt for many tears. We really ought to watch our language.

My turn to do a month's worth of opinion pieces for the Baptist Times' "Outside Edge" column has come round again. With the agreement of the editor I'm posting my BT article here. To check out the Baptist Times as a whole click here.

Mission and Hospitality

A few weeks ago my friend Nigel Wright described himself as one who delights in getting on the other bus. One of the reasons I like Nigel is that he often says what I am thinking before I realise that that’s quite what I’m thinking. With regard to mission I’ve been increasingly tempted recently to get on the other bus.

Along with many others in years gone by I’ve spent a lot of time pointing out connections between church and the rest of God’s world; I’ve spent a lot of time encouraging churches to journey out there; I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that we need to break down misconceptions of Christ, Church and Christianity; I’ve spent a lot of time trying to be intelligible – honest.

Just lately though I’ve stopped running quite so fast in these directions so that I can look over my shoulder. (Bang goes the bus metaphor.) One of the things I’ve seen is a glimpse of the relationship between hospitality and mission. This has captured my attention, not enough to lead to any coherent thoughts but enough to prompt the odd ponder or ten.

1. Hospitality is crucial to mission. Because mission is about being as well as saying and doing it must include a come-be-with-us dimension alongside a go-be-with-them dimension.

2. Hospitality is important in a pluralistic, decentred, fluid society. Difference is here to stay. We are all different. Difference is inherently interesting. To live in today’s world is to be an explorer … so let’s learn to welcome and let’s learn that welcome is more than shiny Sunday morning politeness.

3. Hospitality is important in a society addicted to individualism and longing for community. Let’s help the addicts within by taking the risk of being vulnerable with each other so as to generate richer connections. Let’s help the addicts beyond by embracing the vulnerability of allowing our life to be penetrated by others.

4. Hospitality is important as a response to a society that is content to believe but wary of belonging.

5. Hospitality is not about putting on a show, an anxious front, fearful of offending. It’s not about using the front room and the best china– much better to settle in the kitchen and get out the mugs.

6. Hospitality is being yourself while creating space for others to be themselves while being with you. In this regard God’s creation of the universe is the primal act of hospitality and God’s recreation of all things will be the ultimate act of hospitality.

7. Hospitality is important if people are ever to understand us. Hospitality allows people to find their ears. The more episodes of the Wire you watch the easier it is to understand the Baltimore accent. The more you listen to Charlie Parker the more Bebop becomes wonderful rather than weird. If something is worth getting it often takes time to get it. This matters because of the impossibility/undesirability of translating the language of faith into so called ordinary language. There is no such thing as ordinary, neutral language. It’s impossible for instance to translate the word sin into other words without a significant loss of meaning. Meaning is to be found by attending to usage within community, a community with its own distinct story and its own peculiar practices apart from which speech is thinned, diminished and misunderstood. Paradoxically, to cut speech free from its own communal setting in order to make it more readily understood actually makes it incomprehensible. Sometimes it’s better to exemplify and explain than it is to translate. Helping people to learn to speak Christian will take time. Hospitality helps people to be at home until they become attuned to what we have to say.

8. Hospitality requires patience. As they listen we have to let them be them – they get to decide when they become us – if ever.

9. Hospitality is a lost art in the West. It would be wise to attend to the practices of other peoples in other places.

10. Hospitality is a lost art in the 21st C church. It would be wise to attend to the practices of our ancestors – especially those we meet in the Hebrew scriptures.

Enough With The Written Prayers Already

Power prayer (332/365)
Originally uploaded by labspics

I rarely seethe my way through meetings with colleagues and friends, but every now and then ….

Take last month for example. I spent a big chunk of two weeks in meetings with other Baptist ministers. First of all it was our turn at Luther-King House to host the biennial conference for Baptists doing theological research. The week after it was the annual meeting of staff from the British Baptist colleges.

While I recognise that not everyone would queue to attend such events, both gatherings had much about them that I enjoy: meeting old friends, getting my brain stretched and talking more than is good for me. But this time round I spent too much time chuntering under my breath. You see the whole thing was somewhat spoiled by prayer.

It goes with out saying that meetings devoted to theological reflection or to discussing ministerial formation should be punctuated regularly by prayer. Amen to that. What I found so frustrating was the extent to which those times of prayer were dominated by written prayers, responsive readings and the like.

Don’t get me wrong, ever since I discovered the value of a daily office when I was a student here in Manchester back in the eighties I’ve appreciated and enjoyed using written liturgies along with the best of them. Carefully crafted prayers with nicely turned phrases and a thoughtful structure definitely have their place. It’s just that too much of the written stuff leaves no room for good old-fashioned extemporary prayer.

Similarly there are times when having a candle to focus on, an aria to listen to or pebble to hold really does it for me. But last month I found myself longing for someone, at least once, to open up the time set aside for prayer by simply saying, “Ok let’s talk to God – off you go, let the free-for-all begin.” I began to wonder if it is still possible to pray without first handing stuff out.

I reckon there’s a lot to be said for making it up on the spot with everyone chipping in when they fancy. I like the notion of prayer as a jam session rather than a carefully rehearsed recital. What’s wrong with the liturgical equivalent of skiffle or punk; no need to be highly skilled or self-consciously careful – just have a go, let rip. Ill-formed but heartfelt prayers do the job just fine.

I realise, of course, that sometimes open prayer can be an awkward, forced, thin and routine. But it needn’t be. It can also be relaxed, spontaneous, honest, natural, stimulating.

In the rush to enrich our prayer times with a range of approaches from a variety of traditions, we should be careful lest we lose the knack of prayer as the equivalent of banter around the kitchen table. I would hate to be left with nothing other than prayer as the polite conversation of the parlour.

I also realise that the meetings to which I refer are hardly typical of most Baptist gatherings. But if the way in which we prayed time and again at those events has become the default mode for those of us studying and teaching theology and if we’ve lost the art of shared, extempore prayer or, God forbid, if we are tempted to regard it as somehow less worthy, then there’s a serious problem. Not only are we missing what can be prayer at its best but we are also badly disconnected from the way that many in our churches are inclined to conduct their prayer meetings.

Having got that off my chest I thought I’d feel lot better. I don’t. Instead I’m worried that the next time I see my colleagues they might beat me to death with copies of Gathering for Worship or Celtic Daily Prayer. Perhaps, dear reader, you would pray for me, free-form, you know, the good, old-fashioned, Baptist way.

My turn to do a month's worth of comment pieces for the Baptist Times' "Outside Edge" column has come round again. With the agreement of the editor I'm going to post my BT article here for the next four weeks. To check out the Baptist times as a whole click here

Bad Language

This one has nothing to do with mission or ministry. It's a mind leak. In particular it's an oozing from my anterior pedantry lobe. Be warned. Even as I type I am my donning my sleeveless black academic gown over my leather-elbow-patched tweed jacket and reaching for the dustless chalk.

I am getting more and more narked by the inability of those who should know better to distinguish between the words less and fewer. More specifically I'm worried that we are in danger of losing fewer altogether. Consider these real life examples from recent radio or TV broadcasts: "There are now less cars on this stretch of road than last year"; "Less new musicians are waiting to be signed by a major label"; "Less and less people are using the village post office." Aaargh!

When speaking of discrete, distinguishable or, if you like, countable units the correct word to use is fewer. When referring to an undifferentiated mass or an abstract concept, then it's less. So that's less rain but fewer rain drops; less time but fewer minutes; less pedantry but fewer pedants. If you're still not clear try this online questionnaire.

OK so this is hardly a life or death issue. And yes, I know that language evolves, but not all change is good. If the word fewer disappears our language will be diminished, we will have lost one more subtle distinction and we will be the poorer for it.

So for the sake of our glorious tongue; in the name of William Shakespeare and Ian McMillan, embrace your inner pedant, join the resistance, together we can save fewer for future generations. Imagine how grateful they will be.

Dentistry and God Talk

Taking photos distracts me from my mild dentist-phobia.
Originally uploaded by Mollissima!

Found myself talking about God at the dentist’s yesterday. Both the dentist herself and the dental nurse had their questions. Getting caught reading books on evangelism after christendom can lead to some interesting conversations.

The dentist, a practising Catholic, wanted to know the difference between being an evangelical and being evangelistic, “They are not the same are they? Because Catholics can do evangelism but I don’t think they are evangelical.” And, “At the freshers’ fair at uni I was talking to the Christian Union but when they found out I was Catholic they said, ‘Oh no, this is not for you; the Catholic Society is over there’.” Thinks: Catholics doing evangelism? – please God. Thinks 2: When oh when will evangelicals learn to be generous and hospitable?

The nurse told me how she had initially taken atheism for granted but was now developing an interest in God. “People always gave me the impression that God was like a man up in the sky but I reckon God’s everything that’s all around us. What do you think?”

As the novacaine took effect I found myself thinking about David Hay’s research into the spirituality of those who don’t go to church. Apparently there’s a growing readiness out there to speak about things spiritual but a groping after a language with which to do so. It seems that people are uncomfortable with transcendent, anthropomorphic God-talk finding it much easier to conceive of the divine as an immanent presence. Not sure if the nurse was groping towards pantheism or panentheism but I do know it’s hard to give a coherent answer with your mouth full of fingers, cotton wool, vacuum cleaners and instruments of torture.

Progressive Evangelicals

clipped from www.prodigalsheep.com

That's another label to add to your list!. Hadn't intended devoting so much space to this issue but Jodie's challenge that I should explain how I label myself reminded me of the generous orthodoxy site. It's an American based resource centre cum network cum think tank that tries to chart a way beyond old dichotomies. Check out the link in the sidebar.

(As an aside it's interesting that the two issues which seem to have generated most reaction on this site so far have both been to do with identity.)

This Week's Poll 4/1/08

If you want to do more than just click comment on this post.

Last week's poll: When describing Christians the labels conservative, evangelical, radical and liberal are completely past their sell by date. 14 votes, 7 agree, 7 disagree. One more vote, I vote "disagree".

If The Label Sticks, Wear It!

clipped from www.flickr.com

Not sure that any of those who responded to my earlier post on evangelism, liberals and conservatives were quite making this point, but many people do seem to have an almost seething resentment of labels.

Certainly a young friend of mine recently insisted that his mates just didn’t like labels and would prefer not to be labeled by others or to apply them to themselves. Guess that makes them anti-labelists!

Whatever the pros and cons of labels I’m not sure we can or indeed should live without them. I do however sympathise with my friend to a certain extent. Labels can be used in ways that are very unhelpful.

It’s not good to fly labels like colours behind which we ride into battle against others with different labels.

It’s not good to use labels to limit, tie down and dismiss others.

It’s not good to use labels flatten difference, obscure the peculiar and oversimplify reality.

Antipathy towards labeling is part of the postmodern turn. According to Zygmunt Baumann’s excellent Modernity and Ambilvelance a certain approach to labeling is deeply characteristic of modernity's obsession with classifying all of reality and its deep unease with the ambivalent. The postmodern critique is to be welcomed, reality is not susceptible to neat, Dewi-decimal-type classification and we do violence to reality, including the reality of people and their bodies, when we insist on fitting everything into our predetermined categories. But we needn’t use labels in such a way and I reckon we can’t and shouldn’t live without labels at all.

We need labels to denote collectives who share common characteristics, commitments, convictions and associations.

They also come in handy to locate people.

And those who would deny our need for labels are surely also in denial of the inescapable and indeed immensely valuable corporate dimension of human identity.

So I vote for labels, I thank God for labels, labels help give clarity to my identity. As long that is you don’t use my labels for the negative purposes outlined above and as long you recognise that labels are not fixed but fluid and living, with meanings on the move, then I really don’t mind, go ahead, label me.

ENOUGH WITH THE PASSION ALREADY!

Cram in the clichés
Originally uploaded by Mike of Surrey

This post is not about mission or ministry. It’s one of those miscellaneous mind leeks mentioned up there in the top right hand corner. In fact, to be honest, it’s not so much a post as whinge.

The thing is I’m utterly fed up with all this talk about passion.

It was the CCLI website that finally made me snap. “At CCLI we have a passion for serving the church in worship”. I know it’s a perfectly innocent site. I know, it’s entirely admirable that people should want to serve the church. I know I ought to show more self control but I’m sick to the back teeth of everyone being passionate about everything.

“I’m absolutely passionate about working with young people.”
“Oh no, gardening’s not my hobby … it’s my passion.”
“Please don’t vote me off tonight, cooking/dancing/singing/playing the flugel horn/appearing on T.V. even though I’m utterly talentless is my passion.”
“You see Jeremy I’ve always been passionate about collecting beermats.”

Don’ get me wrong. I’m not against passion. In fact quite like a bit myself now and again. My problem is word inflation.

We are wearing out one of our precious words by giving it too much work to do when there are lots of other perfectly good words lying around more suited to the task. If we are perpetually passionate and never keen or enthusiastic or interested we cheapen the very notion of passion. If we use the word to cover everything from passing curiosity to a long term hobby it will end up being utterly useless. Then what will we do when we actually need it? When we actually are passionate, in blazingly obsessive, “let me at now or I die”, sort of way the word just won’t be up to the job. It’ll be tired, floppy, sitting in a corner wheezing, knackered by over use.

So PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, CAN WE STOP TALKING SO MUCH ABOUT PASSION?

Yours .... in a really quite miffed sort of a way.

Glen

Mother God?

Mother and Child
Originally uploaded by tomswift46

THE other day while setting up for a lecture I came across copies of a prayer by Desmond Tutu left over from a prayer meeting. It addressed God as Father and Mother. This raised again for me the issue of whether we should be calling God 'Mother'. I decided we probably should.

Our language goes a long way to constructing the world we inhabit in our heads. If our talk is dominated by the masculine, our worldview becomes definitively male. This is the norm, the mainstream, the proper, and by implication the feminine is secondary, derivative, deviant. If this logic holds good for the way we speak about people, why not apply it also to the way we speak about God?

True, some attempts to address this issue don't quite work. Many prefer to use gender-neutral language, 'Creator, redeemer, sustainer' for example, or the increasingly common, 'loving God' or 'gracious God' and other variants.

Trouble is, if we become too thoroughly gender-neutral we will end up neutering God. While God is neither a man nor a woman God is personal and indeed more than personal - but certainly not less.

Also, while using such descriptive forms of address certainly allows for a rich and varied focus on different aspects of God's character, they are less intimate, more distant and formal. Family language has a lot going for it when it comes to expressing relationship.

So I'm not entirely comfortable with going too far down the gender-neutral road. It makes more sense to call God 'Mother'. However, such a proposal causes strong feelings. Why is that?

Some are suspicious that others are merely being trendy, following the latest fashion in an unthinking way. I have to say that talking to those who use such language more readily than I do, the last thing they are is unthinking.

For others the issue is different. Because it has tended to be the less orthodox among us who have been quickest to adopt feminine language for the divine, the practice is seen as tainted. This is silly. I've never been a big fan of guilt by association.

Some believe that we are only allowed to do, think and say that which the Bible explicitly sanctions. And of course while there is some feminine imagery for God in the scriptures, nowhere is God addressed as 'Mother'. But this is far too restrictive a way to use the Bible. Surely we are meant to be consistent with God's Word rather than slavishly copying the details of its speech forms?

Other reservations include a reluctance to abandon classic language that has become a part of who we are. Formulations such as 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit' and 'the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ' help tie us to other Christians in other places and other times. But there is absolutely no reason such language shouldn't be enriched by also using feminine forms.

A significant part of my own hesitation has been a matter of instinct rather than theology. It just feels odd. It's unusual. I'm uncomfortable. Mind you, I used to feel that way about women preachers, drums in church and, if I'm honest, meeting black people. In other words, discomfort is no reason for not doing the right thing.

A final reason for this being such a hot potato is the fear of offending others. This ought not to be ignored, but neither should we keep silent for fear of causing upset. What we need is an open, charitable conversation. Aren't we Baptists supposed to be good at that kind of thing?

So while I think I understand people's reasons for being opposed to calling God 'Mother' I'm not convinced those reasons stack up.
I reckon we ought to include feminine forms of address in our God-talk as part of a varied language to help us speak more effectively of our wonderful and fascinating God. Time, I think, for some of us to get over our discomfort.


[My turn to do a month's worth of comment pieces for the Baptist Times' "Outside Edge" column has come round again. I don't reckon I'm up to both a weekly newspaper article and a weekly blog post so I'm copping out. With the agreement of the editor I'm going double up and post my BT article. This means that the blog will have a slightly different feel. To chek out the Baptist times as a whole click here

The weekly poll will continue as usual.]

Sex in the pulpit?

'What do you think about sex on the telly?'
'Well I don't mind, but my wife keeps knocking the set top box on the floor.'
Boom boom.

Would you be happy to tell a joke like that? Are you comfortable reading such a joke in The Baptist Times? (1) I do hope so. Although I must confess that the first time I heard it I was a bit taken aback. The reason it got to me is that it was told from the pulpit by a visiting preacher at my church. Those sitting around me clearly found it funny. Some were equally clearly embarrassed and not at all sure that they should have found it funny. The noise that went round the congregation was half-laugh and half-splutter. But what got under my skin was the fact that I felt uncomfortable. I was annoyed that I felt awkward.

Thinking about it later I was convinced that there was nothing wrong with the joke - it wasn't gratuitous, it fitted in with what the preacher was saying and I could think of no reason why we shouldn't be able to tell such jokes from the pulpit. After all, sex for many (though not all) of us is an important part of life and, let's face it, sex can be really funny. So why not have a laugh about it in church?

I have long been convinced that there needs to be a third way (nearly said position ... snigger) when it comes sex, one that avoids the false alternatives of the voyeuristic obsession which is shot through so much of our culture and the uptight embarrassment which is still far too common in our churches. But we will never be able to find that third way until we learn to talk about sex, and laugh about sex in an open, frank and, yes, far more earthy way. The alternative to prurience and prissiness is not a buttoned-down, matter-of-fact, coldly clinical approach to sex talk. (The last thing that sex should be is cold and clinical.) No, the alternative is being real, being honest, being human. And that, at least in part, means having a laugh.

I suspect that, as with many of our attitudes in church, when we think we are being Christian by avoiding talking and laughing about sex we are in fact conforming to certain middle-class conventions which often have very little to do with holiness. This confusion of the holy with what is 'proper' can leave us with some skewed values. We end up being more concerned if someone swears than if they are greedy; we are more vigilant about dress codes than about the abuse of power; we are offended by the depiction of sex in film and on TV, but we are blasŽ about the portrayal of violence. Odd.

And we also end up being far too tentative about sex being on the agenda of our sermons, our Bible studies, our prayer meetings and our fellowship with Christian friends. Sex is far too potent a force - both to damage and to delight - for us not to be talking about it. The commodification of bodies, the promotion of sex as mere recreation and the sexualisation of children are all serious causes for concern. It is far too important for us not to be modelling a much healthier and holier approach than we often have to date. But that alternative is not conventional middle class morality with a supposedly Christian veneer.

So despite my initial discomfort I'm glad the preacher told the joke. So glad that I've nicked it and told it myself from a couple of carefully chosen pulpits. Not to get a cheap laugh and not for the sake of causing offence, but in the hope breaking what seems to me to be a decidedly unhelpful and unjustified taboo.

(1) My turn to do a month's worth of comment pieces for the Baptist Times' "Outside Edge" column has come round again. I don't reckon I'm up to both a weekly newspaper article and a weekly blog post so I'm copping out. With the agreement of the editor I'm going double up and post my BT article. This means that the blog will have a slightly different feel. To chek out the Baptist times as a whole click here

Preaching rhetoric and poetry

I am at Northern Light, a Bible week come holiday week in North Yorkshire. I’m here to do some preaching and to lead a couple of seminars on what it means to be prophetic. I’ve done stuff at Northern Light a couple of times before but not for about five or six years. It’s good to be back. The main thing I like about the week is its relaxed, down to earth feel.

The preach is at the evening celebration and I’m tackling Isaiah six. Preparing has reminded me again about why I like this kind of passage. It’s a text that positively demands that you let your imagination run wild – the hem of his robe filled the temple! I will be spending a fair bit of the sermon trying to get people to picture the scene with its blazing seraphs flying and shouting, smoke filling the temple (which is already filled, don’t forget, with God’s turn ups) and the very foundations trembling and indeed melting away. What was Isaiah on?

Hope I can pull it off. It will take careful, creative use of words and a fair bit of imagination from me and the congregation. These are two of the skills of preaching that we don’t make nearly enough of: imagination and the creative use of words. In the recent past we’ve tended to flatten preaching down to doctrinal point making. We have valued being clear over being evocative. We’ve forgotten that preaching at its best is not just the craft of getting ideas across it’s also the art of opening people’s eyes; opening them to the reality of God and helping them to picture what life in this world would be like if we took this God seriously.

So here’s my suggestion: preaching should be much less prosaic much more evocative. Instead of spending all our time learning how to use PowerPoint let’s put some effort into learning how to use the spoken word. I vote for more poetry and more rhetoric from our pulpits. Otherwise we’ll never ever do justice to passages like Isaiah chapter six.

Wedding Rites

One of the challenges of putting this particular wedding together must have been the different stances that the bride and groom take towards Jesus. She is a dedicated follower of Christ, the kind that gives Christians a good name; he is a number of steps removed from the mainstream of Christian orthodoxy but the kind of bloke who contributes far more to the richness and rightness of life than many a full blown true believer. The service had to reflect this difference. Clearly a lot of thought went into this and I think it worked really well … but I’m not sure.

Take the songs for instance. They were neither the all-stops-out, full-blooded organ type nor the worship-band, isn’t-Jesus-lovely type. Alongside the overtly Christian Day by Day and Go Peaceful we had Carole King’s You’ve Got A Friend (listen to the soloist and all join in on the chorus) and Bill Withers’ Lean On Me (again cantor and congregational participation). At one level all of this made perfect sense. The groom is a pretty nifty musician, in fact he accompanied the singing on what, from where I was standing, looked like a ukulele, which is also why, alongside the Bible readings, we had snippets of lyrics from classic pop songs.

As I say this made sense but it also felt a bit weird. I’m not used to belting out folk/rock anthems together with a congregation of people in two piece suits or fancy hats. No doubt though it would have been just as weird and slightly less honest for some of the guests to have had to sing full on Songs of Fellowship love songs to Jesus. I’m still trying to get my head and my gut to line upon this one. It does raise an some interesting questions though, questions that many engaged in missional thinking, doing and being would do well to address.

How far do we go in making the Christian faith accessible and amenable to those whom we would like to step inside? How many of the things we do can we strip away while still being true to ourselves? Is this approach genuinely hospitable or does it smack of trying just a bit too hard? Is there a sense in which if we translate our ways of addressing and speaking about God into another language we will no longer be able to speak authentically about God – or at least about our God?

The momentum behind much contemporary mission thinking is undoubtedly towards translating the faith and making it accessible. There are good reasons why this is right and proper, not least the incarnation. But there is a problem with this kind of move: Christian truth is not just distinctively true it is also a distinctive kind of truth and as such depends for its articulation and appropriation on a distinctive kind of language and a peculiar set of practices. To translate is to change and while such change can enrich our appreciation of truth it also runs the risk of irretrievable loss. No doubt unnecessary jargon can get in the way but we just can’t do without our own technical, insider-language.

While it behoves us to reflect on what we mean by terms such as redemption, salvation, sin, discipleship and church but I think we would be wise not to ditch them entirely. Explaining what we mean when we speak and why we do what we do is important but abandoning our native tongue and ditching practices that have always shaped us is not a smart move. We will end up with an accessible but drearily thin form of the faith that may well be instantly palatable but ultimately not very nourishing. Perhaps we ought to give more attention to teaching those who are interested how to speak our language and carefully initiating them into our distinctive ways. But, I hear you say, all this is a long way from the wedding, so to conclude, ladies and gentlemen, I give you … the best man.

On this occasion the groom’s side-kick performed his major part in the British wedding rite with great aplomb. The speech was a cracker - definitely one of the top five I’ve ever heard. (There’s an idea for my side bar.) What made it interesting was that he was - I think - from the none-church going bunch. I don’t know if the bride was at all nervous about the tone of the speech. Some best man speeches I’ve heard would definitely make a vicar blush. This guy got away with it though (at least this particular “vicar” didn’t blush). No doubt some were offended by one of the gags – the funniest of all. He might have got away with even this joke if he’d used the word Onanism instead. But then only the Bible readers in the audience would have got it – and it wouldn't have been nearly as funny. Thing is he was careful enough with his language but not so careful that it became flat or inauthentic.