2009/05/25

sometimes, you just sigh

There are whacky people out there. The linked story describes a renegade 'priest' who is offering - for a fee - 'consecrated' communion by post. (Only the bread/wafers... I guess wine would be a whole lot more complicated).

I guess we'll always have such curiosities. The man's charges are not high, so I guess he's doing it from pure motives, not to make money.

But the really weird bit is the chatter of blog responses - from apparently faithful Catholics who are discussing whether, through a series of exceptions and loopholes, the items received through the post are really transubstantiated flesh. Who needs Dan Brown when you have this stuff? Come to that, who needs role-playing games with bizarre rules, when you have an ongoing disucssion about Old Catholic Orders and the mispronounciation of the Tridentine Mass?

Now, I suspect that my own spirituality (changing as it is) would also look absurd if pressed to extremes and held up to skeptical analysis. But I'd like for it not to be (absurd, that is). The gospel is counter-intuitive (foolishness, even): the last, first; others before yourself; things that don't come easily. But that's a far cry from making up crazy, arbitrary rules, surely?

2009/05/17

Love Oxford: mixed feelings again

This year, Love Oxford moved out of the city centre to South Park (no guffaws, thank you). I confess to being fearful that the move - combined with poor weather - would leave the event a bit of a damp squib. But I'd say that around 2000 people were there (maybe a few more than that), probably a similar number to last year. And they seemed to be enjoying themselves.


As I remarked last year, the event leaves me with slightly mixed feelings. On the whole, it's pretty inclusive and positive. An event whose core organisation mixes some of the strongest charismatics in the city with some of the most vehemently reformed souls could hardly be otherwise. I didn't get there in time for the "introduce the pastors" slot, so I don't know if the Roman Catholics were well-represented, but it seems not. Nor, I think, were the more liberal-minded churches in evidence. The black-led churches certainly were - a reminder in itself that we have some way to go in developing an integrated faith community in our city.

The cost of staging the event - £30,000 - leaves me a little staggered: particularly as I've never seen any accounts published. For readers from afar, that's significantly more than the national average salary; worked out at cost-per-head, it's approaching the price of two movie tickets - or five pints of beer. Is that a lot? Well, it seems so to me - but perhaps I'm just too frugal about such things.

The sermon managed to put penal substitution in a positive light, but was a little on the vehment side. The representative of the students' Christian Union prayed against intellectualism in the University, which left me wondering slightly why he is (presumably) reading for a degree. The band was suitably loud, the dancing appropriately enthusiastic, and the offering (to cover the £15,000 budget shortfall) collected in awfully large buckets.

I probably sound rather cynical: for which I'm sorry. A while ago, I would truly have loved it: a great jamboree for all; an opportunity to share with other Christians; a chance to say that there are lots of people in our city who want to bring the kingdom in this place. And part of me still does: but part of me is awfully bothered by the detail, the language, some of the underlying assumptions of what's said from the front. Mention was made of the western European church being in rapid decline, on the point of being wiped out - or becoming a tiny rump. That's a real fear. Did I see anything today to suggest there's a real dynamic life-changing Spirit-filled life that's going to buck that trend? Not sure.

2009/05/16

where did it all go wrong?

I paid a little over £3 for a pint of beer, in Edinburgh this week.

I paid £3 for a pair of garden shears in Tesco today. I reasoned with myself that if they were not much good, they could be disposed of at the end of the season - but on reflection, for the price of a pint, they could be disposed of at the end of the day.

But I already have a pair of garden shears. They belonged to my grandfather. He almost certainly used them for several decades. Perhaps they are of better quality - but I wouldn't bank on it.

Of course, there are many other similar examples. The supermarket sells jeans for a similar price, as does Primark. And so on. T-shirts for £1 each are not unknown - even if designer T-shirts can cost £100.

Is beer too expensive? Probably! A large part of the purchase price is tax, after all. But, of course, the real issue is that the raw materials for the shears are really cheap, and they were no doubt manufactured in a country where labour is really cheap (perhaps we could go further and say "where life is cheap" - but that may be to over-simplify the economics). In principle, we could manufacture beer in those places, too, and reduce its price - but we'd struggle to make that work satisfactorily, I suspect.

I wonder if there's a "perfect" price ratio between garden shears and pints of beer: my intuition says it should be about 10:1. When we get prices out of kilter - due to over-supply, or due to exploitation of those far away - is there are moral impact? Economics will tell us that the price of anything is all a matter of market forces, but it strikes me that a globalized market has huge potential to skew our sense of values. I don't know what the eventual hazard there might be, but it seems problematic to me.

2009/05/06

vintage faith?

I'm reading An Emergent Theology for Emerging Churches (expect a review eventually). It's good so far, but the author keeps referring to "vintage" faith/theology/etc. He says he draws inspiration from Dan Kimball's Vintage Faith (as well as drawing inspiration from MacLaren ... interesting). In turn, I see that Driscoll is blogging about Vintage Church. I think maybe they're confusing "vintage" with "classic".

Maybe the problem is nascent puritanism, maybe it's living in a benighted continent where weak beer is too common; I don't know. People, "vintage" refers to the year in which a wine was produced. Average wines have a vintage every year; special wines (e.g. port --- mmmm port) only have a vintage in a year when the grapes are exceptional. Pleasant as it is to contemplate fine wines (more pleasant still, to consume them), I have absolutely no idea what these folks are trying to convey by using the word.

2009/05/03

myths?

We thought about fasting today. The speaker said that satanists were fasting and praying for the break-up of Christian marriages. I must have first heard that about 25 years ago. Is it true? I don't know what to make of this one.