It's all about a Code of ConductConversion

Four years ago I started blogging. I began to write online at the second meeting of the group working on a code to conversion, you can read what I wrote over those days as I was discovering the medium of blogging here. Rather frightening that I wrote 62 posts in less than a month. I must try and get back some of that dedication. I realised taht "conversion is part of the sotry of my family and not something I had thought about a great deal before attending that meeting.
It was a fascinating and stimulating encounter in the glorious city of Toulouse. So I'm am really delighted that tomorrow Geoff Tunnicliffe of the World Evangelical Alliance and Cardinal Tauran the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Intereligious Dialogue will join with the WCC's Olav Fykse Tveit to launch the code of conduct on conversion, at the World Council's offices in Geneva.

Like back in Toulouse I shall be trying to interpret proceedings into French tomorrow. I may also try to tweet a bit on the oikoumene twitter feed. You'll be able to read the Code of Conduct in full tomorrow afternoon.

Word of the day - entonnoir à conversion

Those who follow me on twitter know that I attended a good seminar on social media last week at the university of Geneva. One of the terms I really liked was "entonnoir à conversion" - conversion funnel.
I suppose it made me smile that a term which has very clear theological overtones for me is really just a blatant way to get people to find their way more easily around websites and even spend money there.
However advocacy websites need to provide some kind of similar simple pay off. Too often we make it really complicated for people to sign a petition, upload a photo or click and say they agree or support us. In the facebook quick click "like" generation we really need to get with the programme. Too often we get obsessed with wanting information from people rather than in building the relationship and facilitating involvement.
More about the seminar in coming days - it's given me lots ot think about.
However oddly enough it was the theological topic of conversion that was the conversion funnel that got me into blogging, as this blog started with a blog about ethical conversion.

Multiple identity - the faith(s) of Felix, Abraham and Moses Mendelssohn

You may be able listen again to a fascinating programme about faith, identity, integration and music made by Sheila Hayman, a descendant of Felix Mendelssohn's sister Fanny

I’d always known about the Mendelssohn connexion, and I’d always felt the sense of not quite belonging in our family – my father has been, in his life, a Jew, a Lutheran, an Anglican, a Quaker and a Moslem - but I’d never connected the two until a family gathering four years ago, when I heard about Moses Mendelssohn for the first time.

The programme charts Felix's response to and promotion of Bach's music and also shows how his dual faith inheritance can also be traced in his music.

Hayman talks to conductor Kurt Masur, an Aryan boy in 1930s Berlin, forbidden to listen to Mendelssohn, and Claus Moser, a Jewish boy in Berlin at the same time, forbidden to listen to Beethoven and consoled by Mendelssohn. Steven Isserlis shows how Mendelssohn's own struggle between his two faiths can be heard in his music.

The Moses, Abraham and Felix Mendelsohn story is of integration, translation, language learning, of taking the path of rationalism and then of conversion when this did not fully satisfy society of the time. It is also interesting to see something of a dual perspective coming out as his work progresses, one part of "Elijah" is regularly used in Orthodox Ashkenazi synagogues as the scrolls are returned after being read. Even though it is not Jewish music as such it sounds Jewish and so is sung.
The story is of course also one of anti-semitism, Wagner and Schumann's musical anti-semitism - no doubt fuelled by not a little professional jealousy - and wider anti-semitism in German society of the 19th and 20th centuries. Despite the last practising Jew in the family having died in 1870s, Mendelssohn's descendants in the 1930s including Sheila Hayman's father, either have to flee or to distance themselves completely from their Jewish roots in order to survive.
Meanwhile it struck me that the two pieces of music most chosen for traditional weddings in Britain are by Mendelssohn and Wagner.
The programme is a moving account of the struggles of a mixed identity, bringing together philosophy, religion and the arts, well worth a listen if you get the chance to hear a repeat. There is also an interesting personal account of how part of the family escaped the death camps here.

Do you do God?

Last week ended with a friend sending me news that someone with the same name as a local journalist has said he's a Christian. This is part of a campaign being run to counter the National Secular Society's campaign to get yourself de-baptised. There's a similar campaign in France that I've mentioned before.
Meanwhile today an issue of the New Statesman arrived and it's all about God. A N Wilson has written an interesting article rather against the trend charting his return to faith. About 20 years ago Wilson "converted" to become a born again atheist. In the article he charts how his return to faith has been "slow, hesitant and doubting". I think my favourite line in the article is "My doubting temperament made me a very unconvincing atheist."
There's also a question and answer with Wilson.

Hans Ruedi Weber and my understanding of mission

I gave a 10 minute presentation on my understanding of mission this week. My basic idea was that mission is about vision, conviction and two-way story telling.

I decided not to do a power point presentation but to use props instead - I'm still not sure that this was quite the right thing to do, but I wanted to make the point that we already have all the tools and technology for mission - and those tools are the people of God reading God's word, interpreting and acting on it together. When Hans Ruedi Weber explains a particular method in his book Experiments with Bible Study - which requires people to remember together images of the church in the new testament and then make a sketch of each them - he says that of course you can do this with an overhead projector, paper and markers but also says that he also used it in Indonesia where the mains tools to hand were sand and sticks and this worked just as well. The great thing about the method is that it uses the Bible people have within them and that this is triggered by the remembered Bible others have - it's the coming together of these versions that can create our picture of the whole - it's also clear that this is not about having a mission but about "being" mission.
Anyway my three props for my presentation were a pair of glasses, a pair of sandals and a stone.
The glasses were about mission needing vision, about seeing things afresh, about how perspectives change depending on your viewpoint. But I think vision is also about advocacy about trying to change the way people see things, as well as perhaps seeing things from their point of view.
The sandals were about the process and pilgrimmage aspects to mission. Sandals may seem a bit hackneyed but I chose them for the images of setting out, of walking to follow Christ who walked - there's something quite important about speed there, going forwards but at a speed where others can still keep up with you. The sandals also speak about trying to walk in other people's shoes, about how uncomfortable that can be, about how shoes rub our feet. Sometimes we want everything to be comfortable, yet perhaps we are more in mission when we are up against the rub.
The rock was about content and conviction, about the reason for mission, about the gospel, the good news, the word. But that content is complex - it's about Christ as both cornerstone and stumbling block; it's also about the people being called and encouraged to see that they are living stones.

I'm still not really sure that this presentation worked - particularly not in this reduced blog format - but I want an evolving and becoming understanding of mission not a beautifully framed and perfect definition.
Then of course after I've given my presentation I got sent this international poll in a computer-generated translation from the Danish. Between the mis-translations the poll seems to suggest that a majority of people in the survey do not support the idea of people trying to convert others to their religious beliefs.
Perhaps in the end all that we can do in our post-modern world is throw down stories and experiences next to one another. Parables are what Jesus told, perhaps we just have to dare to walk with folk and do the same.

Kristallnacht

In the night between the 9 and 10 November 1938 the Gestapo arrived at my grandparents' flat in the working class secular Jewish suburb of Berlin Weissensee. My grandfather, a lawyer, was arrested and taken away to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He had become a Christian several decades earlier. My father and his sister had both not been allowed to attend school for some time. My grandparents had been on a voyage of discovery over the summer to the USA to see whether it would be possible for the family to move and settle there.
With the November Pogromm - or Kristallnacht - it became very clear to the family that they needed to leave but not without my grandfather.
Among the organisations my grandmother tried to get help from was what became known as the "Büro Grüber" - pastor Heinrich Grüber freely confesses in his memoirs both that he voted for Hitler because he felt Germany needed a "strong man" to get them out of the chaos of successive Weimar administrations and that he quickly realised what a wrong choice this had been. Grüber became part of the Confessing Church and the Büro Grüber helped Jewish families to emigrate, but only really those who were baptised - it was known in English as the Church Aid Office for Protestant Non-Aryans. Although this way of bearing witness now seems very partial, it nevertheless landed Grüber and others in prison.
A little more than six weeks after his arrest my grandfather was released, perhaps in part as a result of pressure from the Büro Grüber, particularly around Christmas and New Year. Many others were also released, Kristallnacht was a prelude to the so-called Final Solution, systematic genocide was not yet underway. Three months later in early April 1939 the family emigrated to Britain.
They got visas for Britain in part thanks to the work of my wonderfully feisty great aunt whose story I'm only now beginning to learn about. More in memory of Helene Stranz-Hurwitz soon.

My family were fortunate to be able to become refugees. So many throughout history were not.
Deirdre Good has also written about Kristallnacht quoting a good article from the New Statesman. You can also read the joint statement by the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches in Germany on the 70th anniversary.

Call from India to pray for Orissa

The National Council of Churches in India has released this:
As a symbolic expression of solidarity with the suffering people, NCCI is inviting all its constituents, including Churches to dedicate 7th September 2008 Sunday Service to the people of Orissa. The WCC has encouraged the global ecumenical community to join in this prayer. The General Secretary of LWF and the General Secretary of WCC have appealed to the Prime Minister of India for effective intervention to address this serious concern.

You can find the prayer service here (scroll down). This is an extract from the confession of faith:

We experience and witness the Call of Christ amidst the pluralistic tradition and situation of our country. We are called out to be a People, who will be instrumental for the creation of a new world order. A world order, where Justice and Peace will be the corner stones.
We are drawn from innumerable diverse situations of caste, class, gender and race - into the liberative vision for a new Humanity - as shown by Christ. In this journey of ours, adversity has crossed our path. Each encounter with such adversity, is a test for the resilience of our Faith. A test for our love and commitment to Christ’s teaching.

Earlier in the week ENI also reported:

The Global Council of Indian Christians in an appeal to India's National Human Rights Commission on 2 September urged it "to take steps to see that the Christian institutions [in Karnataka] are not penalised for this action of solidarity and peaceful prayer for the victims of violence in Orissa [state]".

More than 30 000 Christian schools and colleges across the country had remained shut on 29 August to protest at what they said was orchestrated violence against Christians in Orissa that has claimed more than 20 lives and left more than 50 000 Christians refugees fleeing their homes to escape attacks by Hindu extremists.

Ask to be "debaptised" or leave the church to pay less tax?

Le Monde 2 has an article this week cleverly titled "Une croix sur leur baptême" - (this is a play on words faire une croix means to give up on or to stop, and when you are baptised this often takes place with the sign of the cross being made in water on the baptisee's forehead). The article is all about people who have asked to have their baptism in the Catholic Church revoked. All those interviewed who have taken this step were baptised when infants, often more for reasons of social conformism than because their parents were particularly religious. No Protestants were quoted as having taken such a step, but that says alot about France's religious landscape.
What struck me reading the article is how strongly anchored a certain rage against the perceived power of the church is. These are people asking to leave the church for reasons of personal conviciton. Amongst the reasons they give are public pronouncements on contraception and abortion, and scandals about sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. Quite a number asking to have the words "baptised against their will" written into the baptismal register next to their names are converting to another religion - Islam or Buddhism, but most are taking this step so that they no longer be counted amongst the church's believers.
Father Angelo Sommacal the French Catholic Church's head of pastoral and sacramental affairs says that these people are "Asking to renounce their baptism" and adds, "Baptism is an act of God, it can't be undone, at best it can be renounced. But that's as if you refused to be considered to be the child of your parents."
It really is an article for the French context, where even committed Christians can be anti-clerical and where enormous value is placed on "laicité" (the supposed secularity of the state). The numbers mentioned in the article are really very low. An anarchist site has apparently created a "débaptisator" which about 3,500 people have used over three years. That's hardly a huge wave of convicted atheists but it makes a good story in Catholic France.
One interesting aspect is that according to some French diocesan sources quite a high proportion of the requests come from French people now living in Germany. In Germany leaving the Church - either Protestant or Catholic - is financially advantageous as you no longer have to pay church tax or "Kirchensteuer" on your salary. There can be a financial advantage but if you are not a member of the church you cannot usually be employed in church run institutions - and in Germany the churches are the second employer after the state. Statistics available here show that there are high numbers of people officially leaving both the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany.
So what is the importance and meaning of baptism in secularised western societies and the churches in them? Is our theology of baptism completely outdated? When I was training for the ministry I can remember one of our lecturers (Rev. Dr Jonathan Draper who is now a Canon of the chapter at York Minister) saying that he felt the mainstream church had got its theology back to front on baptism and the eucharist - we tend to baptise all comers often as children but then tend to set conditions for access to the eucharist. Perhaps we should set higher criteria for baptism and invite all to Christ's table for the holy meal?
In the French Reformed Church local churches often live with the reality that the most committed families don't baptise their children as infants but the social Protestants do. Sometimes it's hard to hold the very small confessing, believing congregation together with the "visiting" hatch, match and dispatch congregation. You baptise trusting that God's grace abounds and hoping that the parents will actually give the children the opportunity to learn about and experience the faith they have asked they be part of.
I believe in radical openness as a congregational model; in somehow imperfectly trying to bear witness to the welcome I believe God wants to give to each and every person - so many people have internalised centuries of feeling judged by religious institutions and by God. Yet how does integrity of belief and conviction still speak through that kind of openness? I'm left thinking about the one marriage and the one baptism I said no to in 12 years of local ministry - did my attitude mean that those people felt closer or further away from God? After three meetings with the couple about the marriage I encouraged them to write their own secular wedding service and find a beautiful place to celebrate it; The baptism I said no to ended up becoming a marriage and presentation of the child. Did I bear witness to Christ through that or through saying yes so many other times? I wonder.
I also reflected on the deeper meaning of Christian baptism this week when interpretting for a Presbyterian sister from Rwanda who spoke about the deep questioning of the existence of a God of love which has been part of the aftermath to the 1994 genocide. What does it mean to be baptised if you go out and kill your brother or sister baptised into the same faith? Through religious, national, civil and other wars Christians have been doing that for centuries.

Headlines I wish I'd written

Tom Heneghan has as usual been writing lots of interesting things on his Faithworld blog. But the headline to the most recent post made me smile. I would love to write a headline saying "baptism makes waves". It makes me think of my friend Janet baptising people off the island of Iona and having to have ropes attached to them all because the sea was quite rough.
However the stormy waters Tom refers to have more to do with the inter faith aftermath of Magdi Allam's conversion and baptism at the Easter vigil.
Tom offers a really useful review of reactions and reflections to Allam's conversion including this:
"Rev. Samir Khalil Samir, the Egyptian Jesuit who is one of the Catholic Church’s leading experts on Islam, has a long analysis on Asianews.it of Allam’s conversion. In it, he notes that both Christianity and Islam are missionary religions and adds: “The pope’s baptism of Magdi Allam is not an act of aggression, but an exigency of reciprocity. It is a calm provocation that serves to make us sit up and think. Each one of us must live as a missionary, attempting to offer to the other the best of what one has encountered and understood.”

Meanwhile the WCC has recently responded to the letter from 138 Muslim intellectuals received last October. It encourages Christians and churches to engage in profound dialogue and says:
"The testimony of past and present writings by Muslims and Christians about and against the other serves as a clear reminder that misunderstanding can easily arise when followers of each faith try to explore the other’s beliefs without proper care and attention. Therefore, it must be stated unequivocally that Christians should be ready to learn about Islam by listening closely to what Muslims themselves teach, and that Muslims should be ready to learn about Christianity by listening closely to what Christians themselves teach. Presuppositions are to be put aside, and followers of both faiths must be ready to seek the learning and wisdom of the other as the other imparts it according to their own unique insights."