Hopes and fears for our churches

The WCC general secretary Samuel Kobia today gave a wide ranging report to the WCC central committee currently meeting in Geneva. He began with questions about what our hopes, fears and anxieties for our churches were. You can read the full text of the report here and a report about it here.
It particularly interested me to think about how a global organisation can position itself to be responsive at a time of such rapid change in the world. It fitted in with some of what I had been discussing and learning about during my course in Rome over the weekend.
World-wide bodies need more than ever to engage with the local, with national and regional concerns. But what is the best way to do that? Perhaps naming hopes, fears and anxieties for our churches is one way to start to find a way forwards.
I've been interested at this meeting and at other international church gatherings to notice how much people want to tell their own stories. All of us somehow want to make our own contribution, to say what we think, to get our country or point on the agenda. But how much time to we really make for listening? How much space do we actually make for the "other" in our need to tell our own story? Somehow I think the space we leave for the other in the way we tell our own story is where dialogue, ecumenism and unity might begin. And of course every generation needs to learn anew both to tell its own story with integrity and to truly listen to otherness.

From 347 to 349 member churches - a welcome with chocolate cake

Today at the WCC central committee we were able to welcome our two new member churches - they were voted in as full member churches yesterday but their representatives only got to Geneva today, thanks to delays in their flights.
The two new member churches are the Independent Presbyterian Church in Brazil and the Lao Evangelical Church, the first WCC member church from Laos.
Following their official welcome cakes were cut and shared amongst delegates, visitors and staff at the coffee break.
Given that many Christian churches still have theological issues about sharing communion or the eucharist, the cakes were a good celebratory symbolic shared meal ressembling an agape.
The word fellowship is translated either as communauté or communion into French and as Gemeinschaft into German. This can lead to problems when translating theological documents - a fellowship is not the same as a communion but they can both be rendered by the same German word - which also can mean community! Trying to work out what the author may mean is often quite a challenge.
Fortunately fellowship with chocolate or raspberry cake is easy to translate into most languages and cutures.

Cold frosty morning and sunrise over Mont Blanc

From Russia with love - via Louisville

Jerry van Marter, diretor of the Presbyterian News Service is in Geneva for central committee and writing for ENI. He's just come back from Russia where he wrote a blog as well as powerful news stories. It's interesting reading Jerry's blog about how missionaries living in Russia cope with learning the language, getting on with the challenges of church and daily life, and diaconnal work.

Listening to stories from Kenya and learning about the Luhya and Quakers

One of the things I love about working in the ecumenical centre in Geneva is how those coming through the building open us up to new perspectives and facts.
With the WCC's central committee meeting at the moment, there are even more people than usual around to tell stories from their contexts over coffee or lunch.
It's been compelling and very moving to listen to people from the churches who have been living through the recent terrible violence in Kenya. Several have lost friends and family members and had to seek refuge themselves. It's been horrifying to hear that at some points children and schools became a focus for the violence. Yesterday we heard that St Paul's Univeristy in Kenya, in particular the theology faculty, have managed to regroup all the students. I cannot imagine what it must be like to study in such difficult circumstances, but we are all hoping that things will continue to remain calm and that trust can begin to be rebuilt.
Earlier in the week over lunch with Eden Grace, a Quaker form the USA who lives in Kenya with her family, I learnt both of her own evacuation from the Quaker mission to a Mennonite guest house in Nairobi but also about the Quaker mission to the Luhya people. You can read reports on Kenya here from a Quaker perspective.
It was fascinating to listen to Eden talking about the evangelical mission of the Quakers in Kenya and the fact that more than half of the world's Quakers are Luhya. Also the form of Quaker worship practised in Kenya is very different from what European Quakers might be used to - not at all so much based on silence. So a lunchtime talk over coffee really opened my horizons and educated me.
Meanwhile the St Paul's University, the Quakers and so many other humanitarian and church organisations working in Kenya are trying to tentatively and courageously work their way back to a more peaceful normality. They need the suport of our prayers but also our generous practical and financial support.

Seven weeks for Water and the spirituality of resistance

Evidently I actually only write in different ways about the same thing. The latest post on the Ecumenical Water Network blog is also about a spirituality of resistance. Please try and visit the EWN site and do leave your comments and ideas about water issues and campaigns, water prayers etc. Remember to prepare for World Water day on March 22nd!

An ecumenical spirit of perseverance

Rev Dr Walter Altmann from Brazil, the moderator of the WCC central committee, gave an interesting address encouraging member churches and individuals to persevere in ecumenical endeavours and not lose heart, even if the road seems long.
Altmann ended by saying, "The ecumenical movement most needs those who are able to persevere. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to grant us that gift of perseverance, and the willingness to move ahead". You can read the full text of his address here.
I enjoyed listening to Altmann's address because I had been so involved in thinking about my own dying denomination over the weekend. The idea of perseverance - for unity, for the gospel - made me think about how very counter-cultural this long term, slow paradigm could be today. We are so used to instant and immediate news, results, change etc. Instant unity in some kind of easily-available effervescent soluble tablet just isn't the way forwards. Yet when change happens so fast how can we nevertheless link the long term slow perseverance with a responsiveness that is both caring and prophetic?
As usual I don't have any answers to my own questions. But I do have an image from my adopted church culture. Marie Durand with a group of other women was held prisoner in the Tour de Constance in Aigues Mortes for 38 years during the wars of religion. It is said that over the years she and the others engraved into the rock of the wall "résister" - still quite visible if you visit today. Keep going, persevere, don't give up hope or faith. It's a powerful story for French Protestants even today, about how even a tiny minority can keep faith. Seems a good thought to end the day on.

Translation and interpretation at WCC central committee

Work days are long at the moment - but the frosty early-morning sunrises are quite spectacular.
I came straight back from the night train from Rome to the WCC executive and central committees. It's always hard work but quite good fun as we have a full complement of translators and interpreters working with us and it's the one time we get to actually talk with colleagues regularly about translation and language issues.
Unpicking the meaning of rather tortuously phrased English is my main contribution to the general undertaking. What's interesting is that I often find I have to read difficult to understand bits of English aloud before I can get my head around the meaning.
The real blessing in all the sorting out of documents and trying to get the right pieces of paper to the interpreters on time is the group of stewards we're working with again. Paula from the Netherlands and Andrea from Uruguay are working with the language service and they're really doing a great job and are also interested in the meeting.
More about the meeting and perhaps even some pictures once I've had time to charge the batteries in my camera!

Where will non-conformity be in 2050?

This was a question that came up several times over the weekend in Rome at the course I'm taking on management in international faith based organisations.
I've been wondering what an actuarial report about the United Reformed Church or the Eglise Réformée de France in 2050 might look like. Over lunch on Sunday I talked to one of the other participants about how hard it is to even imagine the changes underway in our societies. I noticed a catch in my voice and sadness in me as I said that I didn't think much of my denomination in England would still exist in 2050.
Many of the Roman Catholic religious congregations talk about the particular charism of their order, and I wondered about what the charism of English non-conformity is or has been. I do feel sad that generations after me in my own country may grow up without feeling its influence or even knowing what it might be.
The challenge for the churches in western Europe is learning how we might lead and bring about change rather than simply be overtaken by massive decline. Grieving is part of that process, things do need to die for new things to take their place, it still makes me sad though even if intellectually I can make sense of it.

The Archbishop of Canterbury and Sharia Law

Tom Heneghan along with others is trying to understand what the Archbishop of Canterbury was trying to say in his interview about Sharia law. You can read Tom's posts here, there's also an ENI story in the news in brief section of the website.
What strikes me reading through the reactions to Andrew Brown's comment is free article on the Guardian website, is just how tinder box dry feelings and opinions on anything to do with Islam are at the moment. Where will this heightened emotion around religious issues actually lead us?

Healthy and sick organisations

Led today by Jim Christie the course I'm attending in Rome on management and spirituality
looked at marks of healthy and unhealthy organisations. Jim based some of what he said on one of the books by Robin Skynner and John Cleese Life and How to Survive It.
He encouraged us to have a psychodynamic approach to analysing our organisations. However hard organisations try, staying still is just not possible, things are simply always changing. Treating organisations as psychological entitities and linking that to the systemic analysis and wider understanding of context and culture that we're trying to develop on the course, is a fascinating process. Applying it in small group work to some tricky situations people had encountered was really helpful.
Reading the article we received beforehand about healthy and unhealthy organisations was however a warning to all who complain about the organisation they work for. Often unhealthy organisations attract unhealthy people - so it may not be the organisation it may be you! (Of course I don't really beleive that about myself!)
I've lent the notes I've been taking in French to some of the francophone participants overnight, maybe sometime over the next few days I'll have time to give set out the seven markers of a healthy organisation.
The two that stick with me for the moment were affilliative attitude (about which more some other time) and open communication, which is personal and not just administrative. It sounds so simple and straightforward yet I know all too well just how difficult it can be - even in Parish ministry. Communication requires effort and creativity.
Anyway this evening I shall ponder all of this over some food at the wonderful Sardinian restaurant just around the corner.

Are religious organisations just like any others?

The Stranzblog is currently in Rome attending a course on management and spirituality. Travel was via the night train - it's now 18 months since I took a plane and I'm trying to do all my European travel by train. Acommodation in Rome is courtesy of Giorgio and Luca - who are wonderfully hospitable.
Today we've been looking at systemic analyses of organisations - it's been quite a discipline to go deep enough to see what is going on in the various systems that make up our organisations. Trying to know everthing about a situation and gather ever more information is not the only thing analysis requires. Looking at the issues from new angles, depersonalising them and seeing issues and crises that occur as the product of of the systems that produce them was what we were trying to do today.
As I look back on the day I can see how liberating a systemic approach is. It helps to stand back from the need to firefight the human psychodramas what sometimes rage within any organisation. I thought particularly about how this approach could be helpful in getting churches going through crises to stand back and better understand what is happening to them and causing tensions run so high. So often we find it easier to "blame" human beings rather than looking at the systems which have produced situations.
It's helpful too for religious organisations to use a tool which comes from another discipline. Of course no organisation is exactly like any other, but looking at religious organisations in this way helps to desacralise them, but there's quite a bit of resistance to doing that too!
Anyway, more about this in days to come - if the upcoming central committee of WCC allows any time for blogging.

Are you wise or are you foolish? Feminist Theology and Vicky Balabanski

And I won't even ask the question about are you a virgin.
I chose the parable of the wise and foolish virgins for my session leading the feminist theology group. It's quite interesting reading commentaries in English or in German and then speaking in French. There is relatively little indigenous European francophone feminist theology - there is a good francophone section of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians however. There's been relatively little feminist exegesis on the wise and foolish virgins. Interesting.
One thing that struck me following our group's discussion was how together we came up with many of the key critical remarks about the parable that erudite commentators have sweated over - why is the bridegroom so late; where do they wait out in the street late at night like that; what oil sellers would be open at midnight; the harshness or lack of solidarity of the "wise" virgins and the neither generous nor merciful "kyriarch" or bridegroom.
I shared both my own feelings about the text and then some insights gleaned from Vicky Balabanski's very interesting article on the parable, called Opening the Closed Door. It's in a book of articles by Mary Ann Beavis called The Lost Coin, Parables of Women Work and Wisdom.
I'll just mention two things from Balabanski's article that I really hadn't thought about before. the first is that the story can really be read as a story told by men to men. "Well there were these ten virgins and five were wise and five were foolish..." She points out though that despite promising beginnings as a rather good stag night story, the bridegroom locking the door to the foolish virgins does rather put paid to any fun. (To be fair she puts this rather more elegantly and subtly than I just have but then I can always be relied upon to lower the tone.)
The other thing I appreciated was her insistence that the word phronomos, which is the Greek word used to describe the wise virgins, does not have the same meaning as sophia the word used for the wider biblical form of wisdom. I found it quite liberating to think that clever and well-prepared as they may have been, the wise virgins were not acting particularly ethically. Anyway, if you get a chance to read Balabanski's paper then do, I'm not sure I agree with all of it but it certainly gives you something to think about.
At some point I shall post my notes in French from the evening to the documents section of the blog but knowing me that won't be for a while yet!

Seven Weeks for Water

The Ecumenical Water Network is encouraging people to use Lent to focus on water as a human right. Each week during Lent a biblical meditation will be posted on a Seven Weeks for Water blog here, (depending on how your screen displays things you may have to scroll down to find the meditation). There will also be some campaigning links on different issues linked to water each week.

The water network would also really like to know about local and naitonal campaigns so leave information and links in the comments section of the Seven Weeks for Water blog.

Photo by my colleague Maike Gorsboth who is the coordinator of the EWN.

Through Lent with Bonhoeffer ... and Max Josef Metzger

A guest blogger writes:

Today (4 February) is the 102 anniversary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The anniversary of his death is on 9 April. Lent often falls between these two dates, and the recently published, "A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writings, and Sermons", offers one way to use Bonhoeffer's words to move through Lent. Since his death, many hundreds of books, dissertations, and articles have been published on this German theologian whose life and death for many people reflect the "cost of discipleship" about which he wrote.

Much less well known in the English-speaking world, however, is the Catholic priest Max Josef Metzger, whose life and death at the hands of the National Socialists has many parallels with Bonhoeffer. Metzger was born on 3 February (the day before Bonhoeffer, albeit 19 years earlier, in 1887). He was executed on 17 April 1944, just under a year before Bonhoeffer was executed. As a result, as for Bonhoeffer, Lent often falls between the dates marking Metzger's birth and his death.

Max Josef Metzger worked as a military chaplain during the First World War, where he became convinced that “future wars have lost their meaning, since they no longer give anybody the prospect of winning more than he loses”. After the war, he established the Peace League of German Catholics and sought links to the international pacifist movement, and began to work with Protestant Christians, particularly in his peace work. He was especially involved in the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. He attended the first World Conference on Faith and Order in 1927 as an unofficial observer. In 1938, he founded the "Una Sancta Brotherhood," a group devoted to Christian unity. He was arrested several times by the Gestapo. In 1943, Metzger wrote a memorandum on the reorganization of the German state and its integration into a future system of world peace. He tried to have this memorandum delivered to the Swedish Archbishop of Uppsala, Erling Eidem, but was denounced by the courier, a Gestapo agent, and arrested on 29 June 1943 (Bonhoeffer had been arrested two and a half months earlier). He was executed the following year.

Bonhoeffer, saw in the nascent ecumenical movement an "ecumenical council [Konzil] of evangelical Christendom" called to "bear witness to the truth and the unity of the church of Christ with authority" and to "speak a word of judgment about war, race hatred and social exploitation". Metzger, for his part, while in prison in 1939 wrote to the Pope urging him to convene an ecumenical council to which Protestants would be invited. He thought an ecumenical council would not be possible without extensive preparation, but that on the other hand it ought not be postponed. Twelve outstanding theologians drawn from countries where divisions exist most strongly could be commissioned to contact a similar number of outstanding persons in the other Christian churches to arrange a series of confidential conversations. A report would then be submitted to a pontifical commission to be studied with a view to preparing for a general council.

Like Bonhoeffer, only in the mid-1990s was Metzger officially exonerated posthumously by the Berlin high court.

It is said that while in prison, Metzger used every scrap of paper he could lay his hands on to write poems and meditations. In 1952, a small book of Metzger's letters and poems from prison was published in English. One of the poems is called, "In the Condemned Cell":

Already in the dusk I see Death with his scythe,
Reaping his harvest of bloody, human sheaves.
My heart, craving for life, cries out but not alone;
A million hearts protest with me but in vain,
For Death mows ruthlessly and still the war is raging ....
Lord God Almighty, doth thou see our cruel fate?

The earliest Mardigras and Easter since 1913

Easter is really early this year, you can read some of the history and background to why the date of Easter changes in an article by Jay Scott Newman here.
I should really have started by saying Easter is early in the western church, because this year as most years Christians will celebrate Easter on two different days. So the western date this year is March 23rd but the date in many Orthodox churches is April 27th. You'll need to understand things about the Gregorian and Julian calendars, the vernal equinox and the Jewish feast of Passover and also about how the moon and planets move.
Confusingly the western and eastern calendars sometimes work in such a way that Easter does fall at the same time, like last year and then again in 2010 and 2011.
My colleague Dagmar Heller from Germany has written a good background piece about the challenges and issues involved in trying to agree a common date for Easter you can it read it here.

Pray for us to prevent genocide say Kenyan church leaders

The WCC is currently involved in a solidarity visit to Kenya. My colleague Juan Michel has written an article you can find here about how churches are trying to respond in the current crisis. In the article Canon Peter Karanja, general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) describes the the country as "on the verge of genocide". The Anglican Archbishop of Kenya Benjamin Nzimbi is quoted as saying that even though religious leaders "are being pulled so much by their tribal feelings ... they have been working hard together before, during and after the election asking people to choose peace and prevent chaos". Nzimbi also says "We need your prayers for people to come back to their senses ... We must bring Kenya back where it ought to be."

You can find photos of the visit here.

Laughter gets rid of the wrinkles

"Dans le rire, l'humanité nivelle ses différences et efface ses rides" Monique Proulx.

~ "Through laughter, humanity irons out its differences and rubs out its wrinkles."

I came across this wonderful quote on the Terre d'échange series of cards by Belgian firm Claire-Vision. I'm always on the lookout for quotes for sermons or calligraphy and they put great words together with wonderful photos.
Then of course I struggled as always with the translation. Should it be in or through laughter, should it be equals out or irons out its differences ... translation is all about making decisions and learning to live with making the wrong ones sometimes.