Available Light

(c) gostudy.co.nz I spent some of this week assisting my friend and colleague, Anne Van Gend of the Anglican Schools Office , in conducting a Special Character review of Rathkeale College , an Anglican boys school near Masterton. Rathkeale is an integrated school, which means that while the buildings and grounds  are independently  owned, in this case by the Trinity Schools Trust Board, the teaching staff is paid by the government. The partnership is embodied in an agreement between the proprietor and the state, the deed of integration, in which both parties agree that the state syllabus will be taught and all required educational standards adhered to while allowing the school to retain a distinctive character of its own; namely, that its life and work will be consistent with the teachings of the Anglican Church. The reviews Anne conducts, by invitation, provide an assessment of how well the school is adhering to this agreement. A report will be written in due course, and...

Every morning at General Synod, at about sunrise, I went for a walk, with my camera, along the beautiful Napier foreshore.  Our church, the Anglican Church, is peculiarly English, and that is a good thing, even for someone like me born as far from England as it's possible to get. England, when the Reformation came knocking at the door, had a long history of accommodating difference and combining constituent parts into a greater whole. England itself was an amalgam of many smaller kingdoms, cobbled together for pragmatism's sake. And consider, also,  the English language: that hotchpotch of Norman French, and Viking, and Germanic, and Latin, and goodness knows what else, that has been brewed together over the years, and been stirred and sifted by Cranmer and Shakespeare, to result in one of the world's great treasures, the official language of 60 different nations and the unofficial Lingua Franca of the world. So there are no surprises then that the English, faced...

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...

From Friday night until today I wore a purple cassock and sat in front of those who have entrusted me with the guidance of their diocese as we shared together in the business of our annual synod. We met in the Invercargill Working Men's club and the local parishes hosted us and made sure we were undo another notch in the belt well fed.We listened as Bronwyn Miller delivered some not very encouraging news about parish finances, the likely effects of the Christchurch earthquakes on insurances and the implications of new earthquake strengthening requirements. We are, after all, the inheritors of many historic and beautiful buildings, often made of unreinforced masonry and often with other parties (local bodies, the Historic Places Trust) wanting a say in what we do with them. Many are a struggle to maintain even now, and their future utility will exercise our imaginations considerably. For all that, the synod wasn't negative; not even a little bit. For myself, I am perfectly sec...

For most of this week I spent my nights in one of those  travel hotels in the industrial park near Auckland airport and my days on Te Manukanuka o Hoturoa Marae. The days were better. Of course this was in part becaue of the contrast in venues. On the one hand there was soulless straight edged built to a budget mediocrity and on the other the fluid graceful power of carvings, the delicate flowing of paint  and the striking, deceptively simple geometric counterpoints of woven flax, together  hinting the whakapapa of every tribe in New Zealand. As soon as I walked onto the marae, I was struck by the rich ruby red of the house, deeper, more bloody than the more customary ochre and particularly powerful when backed by a flannel gray Auckland winter sky. I didn't bring a camera, darn it, but  managed  a few shots with my iPhone. As we sat during the day I could fill in the (I hasten to assure you very rare) dull bits in the proceedings by admiring the extraordinary ...

A Scotland supporter obligingly takes a pic for some Wales fans beside the statue of Greyfriars Bobby a few hours before the Welsh walloped the Scots at Murrayfield. What can I say about Edinburgh, other than that if I was ten years younger and/or a little less anchored where I am I would move there like a shot. The weather was not much while I was there and I know from past experience and present observation that the parking wardens are feral, but I simply love this majestic, gray, quirky, noble, self assured, cultured, elegant, ancient and trendy city. It is a little disconcerting that the street names are all the ones I know from back home and that they run off each other in quite a different order than I am used to. It is disconcerting also that despite the disparity in age and size there is something of the feel of Dunedin about Edinburgh. It is not just that we colonials have aped Edinburgh in trivial details of naming and aesthetics, but rather that somehow the values wh...

The journey from London to Inverness doesn't seem so far if you sleep most of the way, which I did. I had checked my bag into the left luggage place at Victoria, had lunch with Alastair Cutting, walked to the Tate Modern, saw the artworks, got lost walking back, found a tube station and thus my way again, had dinner, got my bag again and boarded the Caledonian Sleeper, so it had been tiring afternoon. I was glad to have a wee dram in the dining car before retiring to my rocking swaying little cell to sleep. At about 2 in the morning I awoke and peered out my window at a station with an unpronounceable Gaelic name and saw that there was about a foot of snow on the platform. At about 7 I got dressed, and raised my blind to watch the gray dawn rising on countryside that seemed at once familiar and utterly other. At Inverness I was met by Bishop Mark Strange, who appeared, reassuringly large, talkative and casual, a minute or two after the train disgorged its passengers into the fro...

I went to St. John's College in 1977, a few weeks after Clemency and I married. The college gave us an allowance, a minuscule flat in Abraham Place, and I settled in to study for an Otago BD . The other students mostly pursued an LTh , so I did my degree alone, with participation in the occasional lecture which happened to fit the Otago syllabus. I attended the communal worship and meals. I acted in the plays and played on the sports teams, drank the coffee, did my share of tidying the grounds and played a daily (at least) game of snooker. For the first time in my life I was happy. I learned the value of learning for it's own sake and I met some inspirational teachers and leaders. I made friends and have continued those friendships for the the 30 something years since. St. John's College was one of the high points of my life and consequently it is a place very dear to me. But I'm a part of this church and receive the same scuttlebutt as everyone else. I know that th...

The Anglican church is full of extraordinary people. I sat with some of them today, and ate with others and and dined with still others of them in the evening. I could mention them by name but the inspirational ones probably wouldn't speak to me afterwards and neither would the ones who for one reason or another I left off the list, so you'll just have to take my word for it. But all around me in the General Synod are intelligent, reflective people; people who have had amazing encounters with God; people who have lived out interesting and complicated life stories and who now give of themselves in Anglican parishes and chaplaincies and offices and commissions from one end of the country to the other. So it might be a reasonable thing to expect that when these extraordinary people gather together to pray and to act, extraordinary things would happen, right? Yeah, right. Any organisation is more than the sum of its parts. All groupings, large and small, take on a sort of person...

For a long time, I have used the role renegotiation model as a way of analysing relationships. This model acknowledges that all committed relationships - marriages, churches, tribes, families, clubs, whatever - have boundaries: there is a limited set of participants in the relationship and there are rules about who these participants are. If there are no boundaries then there is no relationship. People who participate in the relationship have expectations about how others in the relationship will behave and expectations about how they themselves will behave. In a sense, a relationship is an agreement -made formally or informally, consciously or unconsciously- about what these expectations are. Relationships break apart when expectations are not met, so it is important to know what the expectations are, and how breaches in expectations can be repaired. Now I'm telling you all this because much of today's 14 hours of General Synod was spent dealing with issues of membership The ...

Today began with a synod opening service. Somehow I hadn't quite cottoned on to the fact that us bishops were expected to attend in drag, so I left my frock back at the hotel room. Lenore, the wife of Bishop Kito Pikaahu kindly ferried me back and forth between Holy Trinity and my hotel in a rather nice Ford SUV, and I managed to find a place in line and walk into the church on time, in a dignified fashion and decked out in the approved manner. Blake Ramage, the very young vicar of Holy Trinity led the service with panache and the right sort of charisma, but it was another young man who set up my day. The preacher was the Rev Don Tamihere and he preached on a Maori proverb, Kaua e mate wheke , me mate ururoa ( Don’t die like an octopus;Die like a hammerhead shark). The proverb means, approximately: don't give up. Take faith. Keep on going even if the odds look hopeless. It was one of the best sermons I have heard in a long while, and there is a good account of it her...

I used to be a member of General Synod some years ago but not for long. The Church has to administer itself, and I was happy that somebody should spend a week every two years doing that, just so long as that somebody wasn't me. But now I have been admitted to the order of the purple shirt and attendance at General Synod comes with the job, so here I am, sitting in a hotel room in Gisborne having spent the day in Holy Trinity Church hall listening and, occasionally, talking. Today was the opening day of the interdiocesan conference. This is the gathering of the 7 Pakeha dioceses who meet together briefly before joining the Maori and Pasifika dioceses in the General Synod which begins tomorrow afternoon. The venue of the synod changes from year to year, and for 2010 it is in this laid back little East Coast city where I have not been since our family spent holidays on the beaches just north of here about 14 or 15 years ago. Gisborne reminds me of Invercargill. The hotel here has a s...

I mentioned last post the three young people from YWAM who visited us during their Faith Week . Watching them bustle around the house so full of youthful Christian energy made me think, with a pang, of myself at their age, the age when this photo was taken. I was converted to the faith of Christ at 21 and in 1975, a couple of years afterward, went to work for a fellow Christian who ran a window cleaning business in Christchurch. My fellow employees, both about my age, were Graeme Carle , who is now senior pastor of Hillside Church in Auckland, and Marcus Arden who was then, is now and perhaps forever shall be a travelling e vangelist . We cleaned the windows in Noah's Hotel in Christchurch, and the days were spent in long and earnest and inventive and hilarious discussions of the Bible, life, the Bible, the universe, the Bible, and everything. And the Bible. A month or so into the job two things happened simultaneously. Firstly we three employees developed the growing convictio...

Yesterday morning I went to the 7:00 am Eucharist in St. Mary's New Plymouth. With all that old stone re- radiating the February sunshine the church felt warm . The military hatchments are still there, and I knew 8 or so of the dozen people gathered to worship in the soon to be cathedral, so, even after an absence of more than a decade, it all seemed very familiar. Appearances can be deceptive.: it wasn't actually very familiar at all. In the time I have been away the Taranaki Bishopric has undergone a change; use whatever nifty theological word you like: resurrection, redemption, revival, they all seem to fit. It's not the place it used to be and I mean that in the nicest possible way. When I left it was the bottom bit of the Diocese of Waikato , newly cobbled together from the leftovers of two dioceses, with not many parishes, not many clergy and not much money. There was a lot of history, some great church buildings and some even greater people, but what with ru...

A little more than a year ago I planned a study leave. With a completely open and free choice about what I might want to spend the time on, I planned to address one or two of those pesky little questions that have been bothering me for a while: what and who am I and why am I here ? There was also the side issue of what on earth the Anglican Church had to do with those questions. I had a plan of action: visit the Holy Land, make a tour of New Zealand Anglican churches and read some fairly heavy duty books by people like Emmanuel Levinas and Jaques Lacan. I suspected that the Medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart might be useful in providing a Christian framework in which to work out the philosophy of Being described by the French philosophers. Of course, as those of you who have read this blog for a while know, the best laid plans of mice and men etc etc. In the week after I had taken leave of my parish to do all this thinking, my doctor told me I had dry rot and it might be rather a g...

The parish church of St. Gregory and St. Martin, Wye, Kent. About 5 years ago our diocese had an electoral synod in which I was a candidate. The events leading up to the synod and the synod itself were particularly grueling for me, and it took me fully two years to recover from them. One of the very unfortunate side effects, for me, of the events surrounding the synod was a sense of alientation from much of my own diocese and a sense of deep disillusionment with the national Anglican church. I remember one of the members of the synod using a metaphor which has stuck with me since that day. She said our diocese was on a roundabout, going round and round looking for the right street to exit into. I had a sense, on that day, and one which has grown every day since, that I got off on one street and the Diocese of Dunedin got off on another. Following the synod, I remained as Vicar General of the diocese, a position I deeply did not want to hold but which I could not quite find a way to re...

Today we caught the tube across the city to Walthamstow to attend church in the parish where my friend Tony Cant ministers. Walthamstow, deep in the East end of London is a parish with four centres, and St. Luke's in the High street is one of them. Sort of. There is no real centre at St. Lukes if you make the mistake of thinking of church centres as buildings. There is a congregation, which meets in a house on Wednesday evenings for worship, instruction and Holy Communion. On Sundays they have a stall in the local farmers' market selling cheap but excellent fair trade coffee and cake. Tony manages the market and spends his Sunday morning helping people erect tents, minding the shop while stall holders nip out for a quick smoke, and making sure the whole thing runs smoothly. For an hour, while the market is running, a dozen or so people gather in a nearby cafe to read the Bible and eat a leisurely brunch and chat. It's church, Jim, but not as we know it. There is a public pa...

My grandfather, who I think had never been out of the South Island, always called England "home". Certainly it is home for Clemency and for nostalgic reasons, we entered it as she had left, 47 years ago, by ship. There was a fast train to Lille and then a slow one to Calais. After a bit of trouble finding the wharf - it was a public holiday in France and nothing, but nothing was working - we sat on the windy deck of a roll on roll off ferry, talking to a nice couple who were camino veterans and scanning the horizon for any sign of white cliffs. And there they were. White, and, no doubt about it, cliffs. For Clemency it was a powerful moment. She cried and sang Land of Hope and Glory. I thought of the reason she had never been back: that she had given most of her adult life to working for the Anglican Church on a stipend that made overseas travel utterly impossible. I thought of the fate and state of the wider church, and by comparison, of the wonderful support of our own par...

On August 5 1973, when I was 21 years old, I gave my life to the Lord Jesus Christ and became a Christian. I was led through the sinners prayer by a glittery eyed young man in the back room of the Assembly of God in Lower Hutt despite my great intellectual doubts about the whole exercise. My intellectual doubts have, in some senses, continued unabated ever since, but one thing I can't deny. Whatever happened on that Sunday night worked. I was ushered into a personal relationship with God which has also continued unabated ever since. The persistent lived, felt experience of another - not a something but a someone - began at that moment. We Christians proclaim and live a paradox. We claim that Almighty God has lived amongst us in the person of Jesus and that through his life, death and resurrection we can enter a knowing, experiential relationship with God. Yet, even the briefest reflection on who and what God is should convince us that God is unknowable.This paradox accounts for muc...