BlackPhi Webitorial Ramblings

News & Comment From A Christian's Perspective

God Is Not Double-Glazing - Posted 19th July, 2007

There is far less pressure these days for people to go to church because they 'ought to', so overall numbers of church-goers are in decline. This is hardly surprising, but does make it interesting to see which churches buck the trend, and to try to work out why. It is also interesting to see what churches are trying to do about it ... although that tends to lead me into rant mode, hence this post.

The good people over on GetReligion seem convinced that 'conservative churches' - those that are committed to historic creeds and traditions - are growing, whilst 'liberal churches' - the definition of which seems infinitely flexible - are shrinking. In the UK this is simply not true. In the US the figures are trickier, but when you leave out the extreme liberal churches who don't believe in God at all then other factors seem much more important. It doesn't help that Barna, one of the easiest sources for US church statistics, has his own axe to grind, so interpreting his data can be tricky.

The best UK data is from Christian Research, publishers of the UK Christian Handbook. From their figures it is clear that, of easily measurable criteria, the single biggest factor determining whether a church is growing or shrinking is the colour of its leadership. Black-led churches, on average, grow and white-led churches, on average, shrink (albeit more slowly over the last couple of years than previously). This is possibly due to good provision of community support for recent immigrants, but the data on that is weak. The 'on average' above is, of course, a key point. There are shrinking black-led churches and growing white-led churches a-plenty; hard data on what makes them different is not yet available.

A mix of word-of-mouth and looking at websites, though, does give a rough idea of what might be an important factor - both in the UK and the US. It looks as though a combination of two things makes a big difference to growth: a church's involvement in their local community plus a willingness on the part of individual church members to talk about God and about Jesus to non-church-members. Which brings us to evangelism and to 'witnessing'. Which (finally) brings us to God as a product, and my blood-pressure going up.

If you look at material designed to help churches with evangelism, most of it is based around a sales pitch. Often it starts off gently, sometimes it goes in hard, but sooner or later you come to closing the deal - persuading them to say the sinner's prayer, sign on the dotted line, or whatever.

I have three big problems with this. First, God is not a product. Christianity is about having a close personal relationship with God, not about buying Him. Marriage is a better metaphor than life insurance.

Second, the Christian journey is a long one: it typically starts long before any commitment is made, and it goes on after commitment (again marriage is a decent metaphor). Most of our interactions with people should be about helping them along their spiritual journey (and, hopefully, getting help along ours) not kicking them over some sort of goal line.

My third objection is about responsibility and choice. The sales model of evangelism puts pressure on the 'evangelist' to close the sale, to 'save a soul'. I believe it is an individual's responsibility to make their own choice about whether or not to follow Jesus, no-one else's. Every Christian has a responsibility to be open and willing to share what they believe, and to tell out what Jesus has done. But one person does not have responsibility for another's life-choices, that would be a cop-out. Freedom and choice are central to the Christian message.

Disclosure time: I loathe selling, so I am biased. I don't do it in my job (even though I am self-employed) and I have no wish to do it in my faith. Mind you, I am very fortunate in that I do a job where I don't need to sell my services as such: in the early days it was a matter of letting people know what I do, now most of my work comes through word-of-mouth.

There are other models for spreading the word. The original meaning of 'evangelism' was the announcement of a great victory, generally by a Roman emperor - you don't sell news of a victory, just announce it. Similarly 'witnessing' was originally about answering questions concerning your experience of Jesus and of God. More recently evangelism is being described as conversation, as a kind of dance, and as openly being yourself, by writers such as Brian McLaren.

The Good News according to Jesus was that "the Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand", and was initially announced to ordinary, not particularly religious, people. The meaning of that phrase has been well and truly scrambled by 2,000 years of intervening history. Nevertheless, if churches can't find ways of expressing the message today, in ways that are both true to Jesus' meaning and meaningful to ordinary, not particularly religious, 21st-century people, then why are we here?

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Poor Farmers? - Posted 12th July, 2007

According to Sojourners, there is a Farm Bill currently going through the US Congress which is designed to provide big subsidies to such needy people as David Letterman (the comedian), Scottie Pippen (former NBA star), and billionaires David Rockefeller and Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder). These subsidies will benefit big agribusiness and absentee landlords, at the expense of poor farmers in the US and throughout the world, they reckon.

They also say this is harmful to the health of American consumers, especially the poor:

By disproportionately subsidizing corn, wheat, and soy, the current farm bill encourages us to eat cheap, unhealthy, and fattening processed foods instead of fresh fruits and vegetables. As writer Michael Pollan puts it, "the reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow."

Here in Europe, we have our own problems with agricultural subsidies - although they do seem to be at least a little better targeted than the situation Sojourners describes. An explicit aim of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy is to support traditional small farmers, in order to allow them to stay on the land. To some extent it works, but there is still far too much money ends up in the pockets of the rich and the criminal.

The big problem with such enormous subsidies in the West is that they massively distort the world market in agriculture, forcing small farmers out of business all over the world and so, contrarily, increasing world hunger and malnutrition.

If you are interested, and a US citizen, Sojourners have a campaign link here. If you are an EU citizen you could contact your MP, MEP,  or your appropriate government minister.  A group calling themselves 'Food & Water Watch' have an interesting FAQ on European agriculture here. They also have a page highlighting another issue with the Farm Bill: that it bans state and local governments from having stronger food safety laws than the federal government. Bit of a giveaway that, when agribusiness profits are so clearly put before food safety.

Note: The picture above is a thumbnail of a picture from Kevin Lamb's superb photography website - click on it to see the proper version.

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Baptism, New A/V, Even Sun - Posted 8th July, 2007

Wow! Quite a service in church this morning. We had Isabel being baptised, in a service organised and run by our young people; we had a new audio-visual system that Martyn must have been working on for a good two or three years; we had some great songs with everyone really singing their hearts out; we even had sunshine after a fortnight of what seemed like continual rain. To add icing to the cake, we had a visit from Stuart, escapee from the flatlands of Peterborough. Brilliant service: congratulations to all involved!

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Climate Change In Australia - Posted 7th July, 2007

A couple of weeks ago, New Scientist ran an editorial by Tim Flannery, professor of earth and life sciences at Macquarie University, chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council, and the 2007 Australian of the Year. He pulled no punches; the first and last paragraphs of that editorial were as follows:-

Over the past 50 years southern Australia has lost about 20 per cent of its rainfall, and one cause is almost certainly global warming. Similar losses have been experienced in eastern Australia, and although the science is less certain it is probable that global warming is behind these losses too. But by far the most dangerous trend is the decline in the flow of Australian rivers: it has fallen by around 70 per cent in recent decades, so dams no longer fill even when it does rain. Growing evidence suggests that hotter soils, caused directly by global warming, have increased evaporation and transpiration and that the change is permanent. I believe the first thing Australians need to do is to stop worrying about "the drought" - which is transient - and start talking about the new climate. ...

Last, but by no means least, Australia must ratify the Kyoto protocol and agitate globally for a swift and decisive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Our best theories show that Australia is suffering early and disproportionately from climate change. As one of the two renegade developed nations not to have ratified the treaty (the other is the US), and as the world's worst per capita emitter of CO2, some may say that Australia deserves its fate. If it is to save itself from even more severe climate impacts the country needs to change its ways, and fast.

You won't get a reputable meteorologist to say that Hurricane Katrina or recent floods in Northern England were caused by global warming - although they may well point out that global warming does increase the likelihood of such extreme events. But the long Australian drought is a different matter - part of its cause is probably just random variation in weather cycles, yet there is no serious doubt that it has been made much, much worse by global warming.

Rainfall patterns have changed and average temperatures have risen. Water shortages don't just affect water - food production is down, and last month energy supplies were threatened. Australia's rapidly increasing population and its growing per-capita water consumption suggest things are going to get worse rather than better over the coming decades.

There is an irony, highlighted by Tim Flannery, that one of the countries most vulnerable to the effects of global warming has also been one of those most opposed to doing anything to prevent it. But the fear is that where Australia goes today, the rest of the world could follow tomorrow. Global warming is going to hit our children and our grandchildren, the only question is: how bad will it be?

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Highdown School Hall - Posted 28th June, 2007

After 20 years of trying, Highdown School finally has a school hall. I know it does 'cause I sat in it this very evening - the seats arrived yesterday lunchtime. The stage hasn't turned up yet, and the sound system still needs tweaking, but basically it's done.

I've just returned from the Welcome Evening for parents of next term's year 7 intake. It felt very different in many ways from four years ago when we attended the equivalent evening for BlackMatt, our son. Back then there were a lot less parents attending, but we still ended up packed into a room that was far too small. In those days Highdown still had a slightly iffy reputation, although it was beginning to fade, but there was a real feeling that this was a school where a corner had been turned and things were happening. This time round the head expressed sorrow that they had had to turn so many students away. They had added an extra class to the year, but they still couldn't satisfy the demand.

Highdown's latest inspection report is very good (unlike that of a nearby school which has traditionally looked down on its Emmer Green neighbour), and its exam results are on a clear upward trend. I think it's a very good school, and finally getting a proper school hall can only help.

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Burkhard Heim - Posted 25th June, 2007

I came across a fascinating entry on FatherCrow's Words of Fire, Ink of Blood blog today, about a German physicist called Burkhard Heim:

There in Göttinggen, amonst the test tubes, bunsen burners, endless iterations of theories and algorythems, Burhard found his calling which nurtured his need for escape, then Burhard slowly and painfully as was the compass of his life, began to devlop his theory of the Hyperspace Drive. He willfully ignored General relativity, throwing Newton broken and bewildered to the side. He decided to harness the potentially far more powerfull Quantum forces. Forces which, he dreamed, would take him from the burnt and desolate surface of the earth to the distant stars.

A more sober account of his life can be found on Wikipedia:

Burkhard Heim (February 9, 1925 in Potsdam – January 14, 2001 in Northeim) was a German theoretical physicist. He devoted a large portion of his life to the pursuit of his unified field theory, Heim theory. One of his childhood ambitions was to develop a method of space travel, which contributed to his motivation to find such a theory.

During World War II, Heim was recruited as a soldier in the air force. However, a previous essay about explosives led to his working briefly in a chemical laboratory as an explosives technician, instead. An explosion in the laboratory caused by the mishandling of unstable compounds left him with debilitating handicaps. The accident left him without hands and mostly deaf and blind when he was 19. His behaviour subsequently became progressively eccentric and reclusive.

The trouble is, although it is clear that Heim was a genius, it's not at all clear whether he actually succeeded in pointing the way to a true unified field theory - something Einstein tried and failed to achieve. And there is still little prospect that necessary development work will be done to see if the predicted 'anti-gravity' effects are real. The problem is that a lot of his work wasn't written down (partly because of his handicaps, but mostly because he became increasingly paranoid after attempts were made to kidnap him); what was written was in German, and he used a mathematical approach completely out of step with modern approaches to theoretical physics.

Except that those modern approaches to theoretical physics are in crisis. They can't even describe the properties of empty space, and Heim's theory is the only one that even comes close to predicting the masses of fundamental particles. Modern physics can't even explain why the world appears to be basically solid and predictable, whereas the theoretical descriptions are diffuse and indefinite. The infamous Schrodinger's Cat is a well-known illustration of the paradoxes.

Heim came (posthumously) into the limelight at the beginning of last year, after a design for a hyperdrive motor based on his work won an award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. According to New Scientist:

Last year's winner in the nuclear and future flight category went to a paper calling for experimental tests of an astonishing new type of engine. According to the paper, this hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics. Can they possibly be serious? ...

In the four dimensions we know, you cannot change the strength of gravity simply by cranking up the electromagnetic field. In Heim's view of space and time, this limitation disappears. He claimed it is possible to convert electromagnetic energy into gravitational and back again, and speculated that a rotating magnetic field could reduce the influence of gravity on a spacecraft enough for it to take off.

There is revolution in the air of the theoretical physics community today, a little more than a century after Einstein's Annus Mirabilis, but nobody knows where, or who, the breakthroughs will come from. Just possibly, somewhere in the world there is a young scientist quietly beavering away at Heim's old papers who will change our world in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.

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Police Chiefs In Political Whitewash - Why?
- Written 10th June, Posted 25th June, 2007

This one slipped through the net - I wrote it but forgot to transfer it to live. I think that the politicisation of the police is a very bad thing, so I'll post it anyway.

The ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) announced yesterday that after an 18 month investigation it could find no evidence that UK airports had been used by CIA 'extraordinary rendition' flights. This came hours after a Council of Europe report confirmed that the CIA had been running secret detention and 'enhanced interrogation' centres in Poland and Romania, to which captured suspects were being taken, with support from NATO members, including Britain.

Strangely, ACPO had also sent a letter to Liberty, the organisation that had requested an investigation, telling them that they didn't have the resources to investigate the claims. Which version is correct? According to Channel 4 News:

The Association of Chief Police Officers didn't request any flight plan information - and there's no suggestion that they interviewed anyone from the security services.

In the UK, police chiefs are meant to be politically independent. They are certainly not meant to get sucked into a government whitewash. If government ministers lean on them they should resist. It seems that the chief constable of Greater Manchester, Michael Todd (pictured), isn't so good at resisting, but I wonder how his ACPO colleagues feel about this?

Slightly off-topic, the Council of Europe report mentioned above, which is available as a PDF file here, is absolutely fascinating in the picture it paints of the CIA's HVD program and the support given to it by NATO's European members and prospective members. Of particular interest (and horror) is the story of German citizen Khaled El-Masri, who, in an apparent case of mistaken identity (his name is similar to that of an Al Qaeda member Khaled Al-Masri), was kidnapped by the CIA, drugged, flown to Afghanistan, tortured, and finally released in Albania. The CIA learnt he was the wrong man in April 2004, but didn't release him until the end of May, even then only after being ordered to (twice) by Condoleezza Rice. The report contrasts the responses of US and European governments to cases such as this - avoiding accountability by hiding behind state secrecy - with the response from the Canadians to the case of Maher Arar.

Here are two paragraphs from the report's introduction:

14. We are fully aware of the seriousness of the terrorist threat and the danger it poses to our societies. However, we believe that the end does not justify the means in this area either. The fight against terrorism must not serve as an excuse for systematic recourse to illegal acts, massive violation of fundamental human rights and contempt for the rule of law. I hold this view not only because methods of this nature conflict with the constitutional order of all civilised countries and are ethically unacceptable, but also because they are not effective from the perspective of a genuine long-term response to terrorism.

15. We have said it before and others have said it much more forcefully, but we must repeat it here: having recourse to abuse and illegal acts actually amounts to a resounding failure of our system and plays right into the hands of the criminals who seek to destroy our societies through terror. Moreover, in the process, we give these criminals a degree of legitimacy – that of fighting an unfair system – and also generate sympathy for their cause, which cannot but serve as an encouragement to them and their supporters.

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Me, I'm Just A Lawnmower - Posted 6th June, 2007

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), a.k.a. Chronic Fatigue & Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS), a.k.a. myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), can be a right pain in the neck (PIA) - metaphorically as well as literally.

One of it's major effects is to mess up the immune system, causing flu-like symptoms - aching joints & muscles, swollen glands, dodgy internal temperature control, and general malaise (which seems to be the medical term for feeling like death-warmed-over). It appears that one of the antiviral pathways goes out of control (due to a truncated version of a vital protein called RNase L), which means your body reacts in an out-of-balance way to infections. In practice, for me, this means that January and February, when there are millions of viruses circulating, especially in schools, are not my favourite months.

Then there is the fatigue - a nice innocuous sounding term. What it actually means in CFS is exhaustion: both a tendency to become exhausted unusually quickly during physical and/or mental effort, and a tendency to remain exhausted for days afterwards. It's a bit like having a small balance at the bank, with a very low overdraft limit, and spending £25/week whilst receiving £20/week. (Or like trying to flush a toilet several times in succession when the cistern inlet is badly scaled up - but that analogy isn't nearly so literary).

Most years I gradually recover during March, and by around Easter I'm feeling really quite fit, the weather is good and the grass in my garden is starting to grow. So I get out my lawnmower and mow the flat bits of my garden. Then I give it a couple of days, or so, and mow the lower slopes - up to the soft fruit bushes. Then a few days later I go for the upper slopes, get carried away by the sight of the weeds and general mess in the soft fruit and start to tidy that up. After a while I realise that I really don't feel good, hurriedly get myself into a hot bath, and then spend the next few weeks getting over it. It's probably worth it though, because from then on it's mostly just a matter of maintenance to keep the main bits of the garden going. This year isn't going so well: we've reached June and I'm only half-way up the lower slopes; I think I'll need a machete for the rest. It was a real push even getting that far: it's really not been a good year health-wise.

Muscle pain, a third main symptom, is not that big a deal for me, unless I've really overdone things. There is generally a localised set of muscles that hurts without any apparent cause for a few weeks - forearm, lower-leg, lower back, upper back or neck generally - then it fades away and another group takes over. It worried me the first time it happened to my right forearm, because I work with computers and I wondered if I had RSI. Then there are odd muscles and joints that hurt rather more for about five or ten minutes then quickly recover. A lot of people with CFS, or the related Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS) have to put up with a lot worse.

Sleep and cognitive problems are deeply irritating - poor concentration, short-term memory loss, general fuzziness, sensory overload if too much comes at me at once, twitchy insomnia, ... One way I know that I am worse this year than last, is that last year I could play the game of Go at least vaguely competently. Roughly every other Monday, if I was feeling fairly fit, I'd walk into Reading, where the Reading Go club meets at the Brewery Tap in Castle Street, play a couple of games, drink a couple of pints, walk back home, then raid the larder to assuage a serious attack of the munchies. Since the really hot spell last summer (a) that's been too far to walk, and (b) I can't get my head around the Go board anyway. Go is a very strategic game - if you can't see the big picture and focus on individual areas you're stuck.

So, that's CFS. I reckon the trick is to remain positive, and to stay in control.

Before I got this, I used to like a verse in the Bible that seemed comforting to someone like me, who isn't really that good at churchey things: 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.' I've rather gone off that these days: now I prefer a verse from the prophet Isaiah, which I've got up on my workshop wall:-

Those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength;
They will mount up with wings like eagles,
They will run and not get tired,
They will walk and not become weary.

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