Chilaism. Yes, I bet you haven’t heard that in church in a month of Sundays. Chiliaism has nothing to do with a popular American meat based meal, but is in fact a theory held in early Christianity that there would be a 1,000 year reign of Jesus Christ before the end of the world. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty here of what a ‘1,000 year reign’ might involve, but the upshot is that this theory was rejected in a Church Council in AD325 but the Church Council that is going on at the moment in Crete seems to have raised that problem again, or so some would want you to think.
The accusation of chialism was put by an internet blogger yesterday in one of a dozen or more forums that I have been monitoring. The gist of the argument is that the document that was discussed and approved on the first day of the Council, the ‘Mission of the Church in Today’s World’ (which I commented on here) is essentially chiliastic because of its social mission. Bear with me here, because it took me a while to figure out the link too. Chialism is primarily an idea that there will be a thousand years before the end of time where all evil has been conquered and good Christians will live in peace and harmony before the second coming of Jesus Christ. This notion seems to have been conflated with what theologians call the ‘social gospel’, in other words, the efforts of Christians to promote social justice, improve the social conditions of all humans, to tackle hatred and division, to improve and safeguard God’s creation. This is the basic topic of the ‘Mission of the Church in Today’s World’ document- that all humans have personal dignity before God and that no-one should be judged or discriminated against with respect to their status or because of their gender, race etc. The blogger who accuses this document of chiliasm is presuming one of two things; that the promotion of social justice is somehow an attempt to create a ‘kingdom of God’ before the end times, and (even worse in his eyes) an attempt to create such a regime of kindness and generosity, of compassion and love, without God. Chiliasm is associated in the minds of some with dirty words like ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’, that the social gospel is being propagated by godless communists under the guise of Christianity. Now, there may be some like that, but there are plenty of Christians who have no sense of ‘building’ a society without God, or thinking that such a society is even possible outside a deep communion with Jesus Christ. Chiliasm does not automatically equate to any discussion of social justice. The critics even try to suggest that words such as ‘discrimination’ have no place in a Christian document like the ‘Mission of the Church in Today’s World’. If this is the case, then pagan words like ‘homoousios’ have no place either, and therefore we cannot speak accurately about the divine human nature of Christ. Furthermore, ‘discrimination’, even if it is derived from so-called ‘socialist’ thinking, is a well understood and specific term, and does not mean that we can no longer, as Christians, discriminate or make judgements, that ‘anything goes’. What the rejection of discrimination means that that Christians should not make decisions about another person on the basis of features that are not relevant to the decision or judgement in hand. It is not legitimate to prevent a person from exercising a Christian ministry because of their sex, where the sex of that person is not relevant or a legitimate consideration. A person may not be judged as a second class Christian because they were not born of Greek or Russian families. A person may not consider themselves to be inherently Orthodox Christian because of their nationality (this is also known as the heresy of ethno-phyletism). This brings me to the second document discussed by the Council in Crete this week, that of the ‘Church in the diaspora’. Again, this is a desperately complicated business, but ultimately a facile debate that betrays our egos and sinful weaknesses more than it proclaims the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ. Since the end of the soviet union, and with the onset of globalisation- an era of history where ordinary people (not just church elites) are moving in vast numbers around the world, and who are in instant communication around the world, and whose identity is no longer limited to a dozen or so miles around the village in which they were born, more and more Christians have moved outside the old territories of the Orthodox Churches, from the Greek speaking part of the Mediterranean, from the Balkans, from the Middle East under persecution, from Russia and the former Soviet Union territories. These Orthodox Christians in new lands (like the Americas) or in old Christian territories (like western Europe) have not been allowed to set up their own self-governing church structures, but instead are still connected back to ‘the old countries’. For some this is a good thing, because Christianity is a living community and we in the west should not be artificially cut off from the traditional structures and norms of those societies but on the other hand it does play into geopolitics of continuing to control the people who have left their homelands. On one hand, this arrangement whereby a parish founded by Russians outside Russia is still governed by a senior church leader back in Russia is at the same time a connection to the source of one’s Christianity, and a cultural enclave to remain and remember being Russian in a strange land, and also an extension of a greater (and for some imperialist) Russia. The same goes for Greek Orthodox, Romanian Orthodox, even Serbs, Poles and Bulgarians over here because of the open movement of people as part of the European Union. You see, even the UK Referendum on the EU being voted on today (23rd June) is still relevant! The Council in Crete comprises the representatives of 10 of the 14 independent churches from around the whole world. Some of these churches are closely associated with a particular national or cultural ‘ethne’ (Greek for people). The Church of Alexandria is a complex example- populated almost entirely by parishes from across Africa but, until recently, almost entirely staffed by Greek priests and bishops. The Moscow Patriarchate, on the other hand, is almost entirely Russian, oh and Ukrainian, because this church first started in Kiev in what is now Ukraine. It also claims China, Japan, and other post-Soviet states excluding Armenia and Georgia. On top of that, it also claims authority over any Orthodox Christian of Russian, Ukrainian, Japanese descent in places like Bentham in Gloucester and Las Vegas. This approach to church governance also applies very strongly to Romanian Orthodox Christians living in Boston, UK or Chicago, Illinois. Whilst this is wonderfully post-nationalist, and represents a global Christian community, what tends to happen is that Russians stick with Russians, and Romanians shun Greeks in these new lands, known in church circles as ‘diaspora’. We also end up having several bishops looking after their own people, all living in the same city. You get eight different bishops in Paris, all looking after their own ethnic groups. This ethnic division leads to suspicion, ethno-phyletism, racism and discrimination, and leads to some groups claiming that the Council will be abolishing the traditions of fasting for Lent, with no evidence whatsoever of this being the case. Indeed, the representatives at the Council yesterday confirmed that local differences would be considered legitimate, but that fasting is not going to be banned. This is problem of the diaspora and lots of bishops in one city considered to be a breach of church norms and traditions. More importantly for me, it means that we do not speak as one church. We are not represented in the NHS or prison service as a single Christian body, but are related to according to national divisions, and dismissed because we considered too small to be of interest. Our mission in the world today is limited, stifled, because we talk over and around each other in different languages, replicating the tower of Babel. Everyone in the Church agrees that this is a problem, but nobody is willing to step forward first to solve the problem. Bishops don’t want to stop being a bishop in preference of another from a different country. Nationalists and patriots don’t want to sever links with the old countries. Bishops in the old countries don’t want to lose the income from donations of their faithful overseas, especially the Churches of Constantinople-New Rome and Antioch, who have very few faithful left in their original countries, Turkey and Syria . An interim arrangement was put in place in 2009 where the different bishops in each area or city would actually begin to meet with each other regularly. This has resulted in closer relationships and exchanges of experience. It is refreshing for church leaders to meet and agree that the tiny differences in practices between the different ethnic groups are perfectly legitimate and part of the rich diversity in unity that makes up a 2,000year old global community. The Council in Crete hasn’t yet added to the existing interim arrangement of just meeting and being nice to each other, it has been quite timid in reinforcing the current temporary arrangement, but which one of them is going to be ready to vote himself out of a job? The document has been discussed, but not finalised. In the words of Rev John Chryssavigis, the spokesperson of the Council, the Council delegates are in “agreement about the establishment of canonical normality in Churches of the diaspora, but there is no unanimity among them about exactly how this should be achieved”. Coming back to ‘chiliaism’, whilst we must be careful to ensure that social justice is not pursued for its own sake (we can leave that to the rest of society) but it must be a part of our lives as individual Christians. In the words of one of the greatest Church leaders of all time, Saint Basil the Great, “What, after all, is this hard, heavy, burdensome word which the Teacher has put forward? “Sell what you have, and give to the poor”. This clear instruction sounds like socialism, but is Christianity. Those who protest against paying taxes (state mandated theft, I hear them cry) tend not to take the words of Jesus Christ as God-mandated social justice. The message of the document ‘The Mission of the Church in Today’s World’ is not about establishing new sins where they don’t exist, but it is about recognising where our old sins have new impacts, where our selfishness and greed impacts on the environment and in global climate change, where we take advantage of modern slavery with our 99p t-shirts, where we judge people according to the colour of their skin rather because of their intentions. New problems, new contexts, new worlds , but the same old sins. Jesus Christ is the same, now and to the end of time, His Kingdom shall have no end, but we are too busy trying to build our own religions and utopias to notice.
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The Mission of the Orthodox Christian Church in the world: a great and holy proclamation or a humble starting point?
Most people in the UK will have no idea about the events in Crete this week. The UK press is so full of debates and opinions about the EU and the referendum to remain or leave, or stories of rioting football fans that the high politics of international church relations gains barely a blip of notice. The second largest Christian community in the world is convening one of its most important meetings in over 300years and the UK is blissfully unaware. This is partly because one of the very problems of that this ‘second-largest community’, the Orthodox Christian Church, is facing in its meetings this week in Crete, is that it rarely speaks with one voice, and not often in a coherent and understandable manner. I am a member of that community, I am a parish priest, but also involved in a number of international forums that discuss the issues facing the Orthodox Christian communities around the world. I am also an academic whose teaching involves the interface between faith, community and society. The meeting in Crete, called a ‘Great and Holy Council’, is going on right now and is being covered in the social media, despite a tightly controlled press office. I am not there, and I could do with a bit of the hot Cretan sunshine, and so have to work out what is going on through opinions and leaks voiced in Greek, Russian, English and French across the global media. I cannot speak with authority, but the British press have never really let the facts get in the way of a good story, and this is a good story. The first document to be approved at this ‘great and holy Council’ is important to me. It begins to map out a way in which I might speak about the relationship between this Christian community whose history is over 2,000 years old and events and social changes that are going on right now. It’s too early to know which of these social changes, mass migration, global refugees, sexual and gender identity politics, human rights, the rise of fascism are going to still important in 300 years’ time, but parishioners and students want to know, now, how to think, speak and act on these ethical and social challenges. But the road to that conversation with a parishioner or a student is a long and rocky one. The last of these great meetings of the Orthodox Church occurred before the rise of the philosophical and social movement of modernism that sets the context for our lives today, and the church since then has been shackled by military invasions of its spiritual heartlands in the middle east, by militant state atheism in the Soviet Union and forces of capitalism and globalisation in places like Greece. These social forces have kept the fiercely independent churches from collaborating and developing a single voice to understand the massive social changes that have occurred in that period. Let’s face it, in that time, the motorcar has been invented, digital technology has taken over everyone’s lives, the wealth of a small minority of the population has grown exponentially and new countries have emerged, and old countries have disappeared. To speak sensibly, sensitively but in truth about any one of these massive social changes is almost impossible, and to help an individual parishioner or to teach an individual student of community and social work how to navigate the ethical challenges she faces everyday is even harder, and yet the Orthodox Christian church is proposing to speak to these issues authoritatively, in just over 4,000 words is insanely ambitious. It is also trying to do this in the context of a viciously contested process of decision-making. Bringing together a family of 14 very different Churches, whose people have very different perspectives and life experiences, especially if they are not used to meeting and working together is an unenviable task, which is why it has taken over 50 years to get them to actually meet. The agenda for the meeting was agreed in the 1930s, but the briefing notes for the agenda (the ‘preconciliar documents’) weren’t finalised until a few months ago. Even the procedure for the meeting was argued over, who gets to sit where and how to interpret the term ‘consensus decisions’ were all fought over, and are still being debated. Most of the documents were agreed by all of the 14 Churches involved, but a few documents remained unresolved. And then, within days of the meeting, different churches dropped out. One Church had fallen out with another Church over parishes in a part of Quatar, others didn’t think that their views were going to be upheld by the consensus decision-making process and so didn’t want to attend, and another decided that because some of the others were not attending, that there was no point them going. It’s a bit like students trying to organise a pizza party. OK, so I’m being flippant, but the absentee Churches will be important for the document that I am about to discuss. The ‘Mission of the Church in Today’s World’ document was approved, we are told by a leaky press contingent in Crete, by the heads of 10 of the 14 Orthodox Churches, unanimously on the 20th of June 2016. Some amendments had been proposed and some approved and others rejected by the gathered leaders of the churches. I am sure that by the time this article is published the situation will have changed. The document itself, written in Greek, translated officially into Russian and with a working copy in English, was approved by all of the delegates to the pre-Council meetings. Signatures of all 14 Patriarchs (heads of the churches) appear on the document, on every page. Even though only 10 churches have turned up for the actual Council meeting in Crete, the document has the stamp of formal approval from everyone, although commentaries have appeared in the press picking important holes in some of the ideas and expressions in the document. An example is the phrase ‘there is neither male nor female’ taken from a text in the bible known as Galatians 3:28. The paragraph in the bible is about the fact that all Christians are one before God- that our race, our sex, our gender or our civil status doesn’t matter. But those who are deeply worried that the Orthodox Christian church is about to throw out thousands of years of experience and prayer about what it is to be human think that this means that this will result in a rejection of the binary man/woman approach to gender. Another document being presented to the Council is primarily focused on marriage and gender identity; and this document about the mission of the church in the world isn’t about gender politics, but the fact this phrase is included in this text without clear qualification means the downfall of Christianity to some. One fragment of text is being torn from its context, twisted around to mean something different and thrown back at the community of faith. The context of the document, reflecting a lot of the long term thinking and writing of Bishop John Zizoulas, a very high profile theologian who spent more than 15 years teaching in Scotland is the dignity and freedom of every human being and a commitment to promoting peace and justice to ensure that every human can flourish without discrimination. Globalisation, the increasing gap between rich and poor, the ecological degradation caused by consumerism and the loss of the sense of God in homes and communities around the world because of that secularising commitment to constant and unlimited economic growth prevent the human being from flourishing freely in the knowledge and experience of God who has created all things. For many Europeans, and certainly for sociologists like myself, this is unremarkable stuff but for Americans mired in the politics of gender-neutral toilets and public shower rooms and same-sex marriages, the dignity of the human being entails an acceptance of all of the gender identity politics of the last couple of decades. Topics such as unlimited economic growth or global climate change are either hugely contested in the USA or totally ignored in Russia. The Christians in the Middle East don’t have time to worry about consumerism or same-sex toilets when they are being bombed out of their houses or subjected to atrocities. Speaking to a globalised Christian community requires being able to accept all of the Christians where they are, in the political and social environment within which they live, and the social and ethical considerations of a Christian in Turkey is very different from one in the UK, or the middle of the USA. But beginning to develop a sense of those universal principles that unite all the Orthodox Christians in a globalised world is vitally important. There is a long way to go. Apparently simple phrases like ‘the human person’ are to some, and I quote, “taken from the Communist Manifesto or the book "rules for Radicals" of crypto-Marxist Alinsky”. For some, discrimination and inhuman treatment of women by ignorant and ill-informed Muslim and Christian men is an everyday occurrence, for others a ‘muslim invasion’ or a communist take-over is a remote but theoretical possibility. Bridging the gap between the two, between the different experiences is going to take a lot more work than a few hundred words in a text. The text however, begins to set the context within which, in the final words of the document, Orthodox Christians can begin to reaffirm in this world today, not the worlds of ancient history, “the sacrificial love of the Crucified Lord, the only way to a world of peace, justice, freedom, and love among peoples and between nations”. I thought I was going to be blogging diligently every evening throughout the AshokaU Social Innovation Exchange. Each evening I would sit down and explain my thoughts about the meetings, the workshops and the people I have met. I didn’t. Instead, I was at dinners and also overwhelmed by the detail of the conference that my brain just couldn’t keep up. So now is the time to make amends. The best thing about the Exchange, for someone who has been in the field of social innovation education for a long time, was the lunch-time ‘curated’ meetings. AshokaU staff are very careful to notice connections or challenges that different campuses share and to connect us up in different configurations to enable us to move forward on those issues. One of the key ‘issues’ we have, as a UK campus, is the quite different ethos and strategic visions between the UK and America. Most US universities in the AshokaU campus network are liberal arts or research intensive universities. Liberal arts universities are usually training grounds for very privileged young people who have a lot of time on their hands and are not entirely focussed on getting a job, just yet. Research intensive universities are also not as focussed on the student experience as we might be. This leads to a certain disconnect for US campuses as they focus on service learning- students going out and helping people less privileged than themselves (often overseas) and on researching and inventing solutions. At UN our primary focus is to constantly innovate around the student experience, working on the primary issues of retention of students through to second year and on graduate employability. AshokaU has noticed this and connected us to universities like Miami Dade College and Arizona State University and who have 165,000 and 83,000 (respectively) students like ours, or Central Queensland University with 22 campuses all over Australia to look after- all with students like ours. This opened up a very interesting conversation around the role and contribution of social innovation and Changemaker skills for students who are the less privileged ones, who are the first generation to go to university, who work throughout their studies in order to live, who have to cope with complex family lives and responsibilities throughout their time at university and still are expected to contribute positively to society. No tidy solutions were presented at the lunch-time, but at least there is now a group of similar universities collaborating to tackle these challenges. The other thing AshokaU do at the Exchange is mix their networks up. The Exchange isn’t just about educators- founders of huge philanthropic ventures rub shoulders with students, and academics from all round the world bump into senior leaders of universities. Our own Student Union leader David Lewis was introduced to David Bornstein, New York Times columnist and author, and in the meantime Phyllis Taylor was quietly sitting at the back of a workshop on design thinking in the very same building that she donated $15million to Tulane University to build. When asked who she was, she just said ‘oh, I’m just a community member’. Serendipity only works if you are there, and open to it. All the people at the Exchange are really friendly and open to new contacts. I met with colleagues from Poland, Italy and Ireland, all open to developing a European centre for social innovation in education, that’s if we remain part of the EU! I have just sat on the selection panel for two prospective members of the Changemaker consortium. Just to be clear, some universities that are presented to the selection panels don’t get selected, but the process of getting to this point is rigorous. The universities that want to be members have to complete a self-evaluation that is then verified by AshokaU staff and other members of the Changemaker consortium through a site visit. Letters outlining the strength and weaknesses of the proposals are sent to the senior leadership teams, who have the opportunity to check any mistakes, and to implement any of the recommendations before the interview stage.
The interviews are conducted by Change Leaders from existing AshokaU campuses and people closely associated with AshokaU like social entrepreneurs involved in higher education or charitable foundations with an interest in higher education. Two or three panels are convened, and the applicant campus change leaders are asked dozens of questions about the leadership, the curriculum and the community aspects of their institution. The panels independently score the quality of the institutions’ commitment to ‘everyone a Changemaker world’. All the panellists gather together without the applicants and *under the silent scrutiny of the AshokaU observers, the panellists debate whether they agree, with ‘80% confidence, that the institution will make a unique and substantial contribution to the aims of AshokaU’. Even those universities that are obvious candidates get a substantial debate because every campus is so different. In the selection process I have just contributed to (and no, I’m not going to tell you who the universities are and what the outcome was!) had two very different universities. One is a small university with many privileged but highly engaged students working in some very inspiring innovation spaces with the support of talented and experienced adjunct faculty who are creating some very compelling initiatives. The other was a huge institution with dozens of campuses serving many very poor communities, with a wide range of study options- from skills based vocational courses through to PhDs. These students are predominantly working as well as studying or studying to get a job, and don’t have ‘changing the world’ as a personal ambition. Many students are studying from prison, very few have time for high levels of volunteering even though they are probably making significant contributions to their neighbourhoods. One university is focussed on students doing great things for other people and the other is focussed on those less well off in the first place. One is highly resourced with talent and funding to encourage degree programmes to invest in Changemaker initiatives, the other is working primarily from direct involvement in the communities themselves, raising ambition and showing alternatives that can work. One Changemaker group is working around the existing university structures to effect change, as an internal change consultancy whereas the other is helping the university rediscover its original social purpose in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods of its country. Such is the diversity of the Changemaker campuses, community based colleges serving some of the most deprived people in the world alongside small, elite or specialist universities creating leaders and shapers of future society. This diversity of institutional model creates the problem of comparing apples and oranges. How do you judge between a group that has all the advantages of talent and resource that a well-funded university has, with highly motivated students with lots of free time and a group that are trying to achieve the same with no additional resource, with students whose ambitions are focussed on themselves and their families and have no time to contribute to someone else’s welfare? The comparison is not really between the type or quality of students, or between the quality or resources that the lecturers and staff bring to each university. It isn’t even really about the level of commitment of the president or vice chancellor. The comparison is to be made between the extent to which the Changemaker team intend to change the rules of the university, to shift from providing more experiences in and around the classroom to changing the way in which degree programmes are designed in the first place, and changing the basis on which a student is evaluated. There has been a period in AshokaU’s development where minor or elective modules, or even whole courses in a relevant subject were the fashion, then a shift to cross-campus co-curriculum offerings. Having an opt in module on social entrepreneurship is very common now, and so attention shifted to making sure that the influence of the Changemaker team was across all faculties, often bolstered by design workshops, incubators and inspiring innovation spaces. Student-led programming is also a favourite strategy. But, when it comes down to it, changing the way the university makes decisions is the only way to make sure that the critical mass of Changemaker type activities is grafted into the very skeleton of the university. Whereas all the initiatives and projects might be the visible flesh of a Changemaker campus, the viscera are the institutional strategies and written plans, but the skeleton is the committees, the processes of designing and validating the degree programmes, they are the day-to-day activity of the university- the core business. Building 'Changemakerness' into the very essence of the University is the next biggest challenge. I’ve just picked up my travel pack for the AshokaU. Wow, it’s a tome. Over 85 different sessions over 3 days. Some serious cloning is required to tackle even a small proportion of the lectures, events, masterclasses and visits that have been prepared for over 800 delegates from around the world. The agenda is so diverse that I ran a word cloud generator to make sense of the breadth and diversity of the programme. Naturally, Social Innovation and Best Practice are the most common words- this is, after all, the world’s largest gathering of academics and students involved in social innovation education. Education and community are the next most frequent. These illustrate a concern with the education community itself- asking questions about what we are doing as educationalists to address the skills gap of the 21st century. But it also reflects a concern with education in the community- how streets, districts, neighbourhoods and urban areas reflect their educational backgrounds. It is interesting to note that incubators and investing is beginning to recede in importance, as the social innovation offerings across campuses move out of the business school terminology. Emerging terms this year seem to be ‘aligned’ (as in learning outcomes), ‘bricolage’, ‘commons’ and even ceremony and meditation heralding a shift of the discourse into wellbeing, and more community-based initiatives. The newest word, which is totally a reflection on the venue, is ‘jazz’. I have spoken before about there needing to be more punk in social entrepreneurship, but perhaps jazz will be more to the taste of the delegates.
My first session will be the designation ceremony, welcoming Florida First, Miami Dade, Northeastern, Singapore Management and UPAEP universities into membership of AshokaU. Then Michael Fitts, President of Tulane University of New Orleans will talk about story-telling. This is a sociological shift, but also a deeper way of expressing ‘social impact’. Much has been debated about measures of social impact, but there also needs to be humans behind these statistics, data points and correlations. Social innovation is essentially about affecting humans, not impact- a term which strikes me as being more akin to a meteorite impact than effecting social change. Then I will be meeting with all the other Change Leaders from the different universities, exchanging news and ideas. We will also hear from Erin and Kim, founders of AshokaU, about the details of their forthcoming book on inspiring university and school campuses to transform lives. The first day ends in the French Quarter of New Orleans with some jazz. Day two seems to start with two best practice sessions- how the relatively neutral term of ‘social innovation’ is advancing social justice in higher education. My own experience in universities has shown that talking bluntly about social justice can be rejected as liberal socialism, merely ‘left wing thinking’ whereas ‘social innovation’ sounds more macho, more ‘solid’. Is this going to be a session about making campuses more socially and environmentally just without ‘scaring the horses’? The second session is about incorporating Changemaker skills into the curriculum, something I have been working on for a while. The challenge here is student oriented- I have had feedback from students asking why they are being ‘forced’ to do volunteering or the Changemaker module. The limited experience of many students suggests that a little mandatory voluntary action widens their experience and deepens their thinking at a level well beyond those without similar experience. The challenge still remains- how do you inspire students to do things they wouldn’t otherwise choose? The two other sessions I will be attending are about ‘design thinking’ and ‘solutions journalism’. Not enough is done to think about social and environmental problems as existing within systems that make the problems worse. Too often, in public policy, politics and in the innovations world, complex social problems are reduced to a few key factors and simplistic solutions invented. I’m hoping that we see more about systems thinking and design thinking across all university curricula. Solutions journalism is accessing news that is about solutions that work, rather than just raising awareness of problems. I’ve probably missed better sessions, and I hope my fellow attendees have made different choices- we will be sharing notes in the hotel to get as good coverage of all the events as possible. I haven’t even had a chance to look at the site visits yet. I may be too busy leading one of the many contemplation and prayer sessions in the wellbeing lounge.
In a first year class today, the idea of a 'taking off' paragraph at the start of an essay was floated. This is often a feature of an undergraduate essay, and looks as about as elegant as a swan trying to take off, as shown in the KLM advert above. There is a lot of flapping about, some unsteadiness and a huge amount of water splashed around as the swan flounders into the air. And then suddenly, bird and water part company and the graceful flight begins.
Take off paragraphs are the sort of essay introduction that starts with a very general statement about a topic, something like '"It has always been known that..." or "It is obvious that" without any proof that the assertion is true, or obvious to anyone except the writer. Then there is a feeling that the writer is flapping around creating a lot of noise and splashing the water as a 'stream of consciousness' emerges on the page without any clear direction or purpose. Usually by the second paragraph this settles down as the writer finds the thread of their argument, the flight path is set and the essay is underway. I find that the simplest thing to do is finish writing the essay, and delete the first paragraph. A little editing, and you have lost perhaps the most embarrassing sentences of the whole work. At the end of Feb, I will be attending the AshokaU 2016 Exchange, for the third year running. It will probably be my last year for a while, so that other colleagues from the University of Northampton can attend. My first Exchange was in San Diego in 2013, during which Wray Irwin and I was grilled for three hours in the final stages of the selection of the University the first (and at the time) only UK university in the AshokaU consortium. Since then the Exchange has been to Brown University in Rhode Island and the University of Maryland (during which I was sick with flu in a freezing cold Washington DC). I couldn't pass up the opportunity to visit New Orleans' Tulane University!
Having been a few times, its probably helpful to explain what the Exchange is and how it works. It's high octane American enthusiasm for social change, that's what it is. Let's be clear here- the north american experience and context of social justice, the state and social innovation is VERY different to that of Europe, so some adjustment is required. The voluntarism of the American way of life and the suspicion of state, especially federal (i.e.ad covering the whole of the USA) social services means that there are huge gaps in the provision of state and social services, and the need for self-sustaining approaches to addressing these problems is acute. There is also a crisis of identity and purpose in many liberal arts Universities in the US (even the top Ivy League ones) that means that 'to be relevant' is top of the agenda. This lends an urgency and enthusiasm to those 100s of people attending the Exchange to learn about models of education that go beyond 'voluntary experience' and 'service learning' into 21st Century skills and the ability of the graduating student to solve problems- in their workplace and in their communities. It's a big event, with over 100 universities around the world attending and probably over 500 people. There are three full days of workshops, lectures, fringe events, dinners and meetings, including a 'Presidents' Track' where the Vice Chancellors, Governors and Trustees of Universities meet confidentially to support each other. There is also a massive student presence, as each AshokaU campus that hosts the events takes a day to present students and lecturers' work. It's a chance to meet people, to grab ideas, curriculum models, networks and links. It's a chance to showcase the University of Northampton on a global platform. Someone from Northampton has presented at every Exchange since we became a member, and the Vice Chancellor Prof Nick Petford made the first international announcement of the new campus in Rhode Island. Boston, by the way, is great! A small city, and it still has the Cheers bar open for a pint!. The Change leaders from all the Universities involved (that's Wray and I) also meet with other Universities interested in becoming a member- we mentor them and make connections with them. We also get to be on the panel that interviews prospective new members of the AshokaU consortium. We (as a group of Universities) get to decide what a great Changemaker Campus looks like. We are looking to grow the network but maintain the high quality of the activities, curriculum offers and events that Changemaker Campuses create. We are looking for more than a passing interest, or a marketing ploy. We are looking for genuinely socially engaged University campuses. It is my privilege to sit on the selection panel this year. The Exchange is about exchanging (cough) ideas and experience about the whole range of University activities, from HR to new modules, enhancement activities to research, that can be uinfluenced by the Changemaker ethos. What is the Changemaker ethos? It rejects the idea that only a few heroic special individuals can change the world. It also rejects that social improvement can only happen through governmental or bureaucratic processes. It also rejects unlimited and rampant enthusiasm for the ability of business to fix the problems it creates. The Changemaker ethos is the idea that everyone can change the world. Everyone has to be part of the process of eliminating poverty, hunger, oppression and injustice. Everyone is involved in improving the global environment. Everyone means local action and systemic structural change. It is the 'structuration' of the field of social justice and development. The object of Changemaker Campuses is to offer everyone the opportunity to develop their skills in contributing to a better world, and become more attractive as employees in the meantime. The Exchange is hard work, because there are always more workshops and meetings, and field visits that you want to attend at the same time, BUT, in New Orleans, the nightlife in the French Quarter will be great!! I'll be blogging as much as I can over the event. Next post will be a look at the Schedule. The social media world has between alight with news this week of a woman in the USA marrying God. Thirty-eight year old Jessica Hayes of Indiana USA became a consecrated virgin but the way in which this has been reported has caused much confusion. In one piece, she has been married to God (Mirror) and in other places, she has married Jesus (Daily Mail). Even the respectable press reported in this manner (Independent). In the context of the recent debates and shrill outcry about same sex marriages destroying civilisation and that people would be free to marry anything, including animals and your own sister, it seems to be pretty unbelievable that someone would be allowed to marry someone who doesn’t exist for many people. So how does someone get married to God?
Really, no-one can get married to anyone other than another human, let alone marry God. No marriage has happened at all. It’s a shame that the Catholic Church that undertook this service allowed it to be reported as such. God can’t marry any human because He exists outside space and time, and is totally unknowable to human beings. No one can marry Jesus either. Jesus exists as God who became human, but he didn’t marry whilst he lived in human form, despite the fictitious claims of Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. After Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, He no longer exists in human form, so He still can’t get married. Indeed, in the symbolic theology of Christianity, the Church is the Bride of Christ, (the Bible, in the books called Ephesians Chapter 5 and Revelation, Chapter 21) as well as representing the Body of Christ (Romans 12; 1 Corinthians 10, 12; Colossians 1), not an individual human (Danielou, 1964[1]). But the Church has been quiet confused about marriage, because the Roman Catholic church and the Church of England have often spoken about single, celibate priests being married to the church, and even wear wedding rings as a sign of that. Jessica Hayes attended the church service wearing a white wedding dress, although it wasn’t clear whether her father was there to give her away. So in what sense is Jessica Hayes a ‘bride of Christ’, which the rite of consecration mentions? She isn’t becoming a nun, because nuns don’t have to be virgins- some nuns are widows, for example. Indeed, nuns can also become consecrated virgins if they have never been married or had sex. Nuns are also specifically called to a life in a community and of constant prayer, and yet Jessica intends to continue her work as a teacher. More confusingly, nuns are also active in the world, and are not constantly engaged in prayer. The nun and saint Elizabeth, the New Martyr of the Russian royal family, niece of Queen Victoria, was a widow and also deeply engaged in creating and running hospices and care homes. Another example is St Maria of Paris, who was criticised by her fellow nuns because she was always late for, or skipped, prayers because she was busy caring for the sick and homeless. So, Jessica could be a nun, but she has decided not to be. Instead, she has decided to be a consecrated virgin. She has not been married, and by becoming a consecrated virgin has indicated that this is a permanent situation. She doesn’t hope to get married one day, if the opportunity comes along. Because, for Christians, marriage is a permanent state, Jessica is indicating that her status as a virgin and unmarried is permanent. She will wear a ring on her finger to indicate to the world that she is no longer available, and never will be available to begin a relationship with another human. In this way, like monks and nuns, like single priests, she will be at the service of all the people of the church, without the additional duties of family life. She will be an example to the world that sex, despite what most people seem to think, is not the most important thing in the world. She will have friendships, perhaps be very close to a few people, but sex will not be a part of her life, fulfilling and rich in love that it most certainly will be. Jessica hasn’t married a non-existent being, instead she has used the ideas that we understand about marriage to indicate that there is more to life than sex and marriage, and divorce. This does not denigrate marriage in the slightest. In the Orthodox Christian Church and the Anglican Church, priests can, and mostly are, married and have families. They serve the church alongside monks and nuns, as well as caring for their spouses and families. Monks and nuns have also used the imagery of marriage as part of their life to demonstrate that both the married life and monasticism are equally valued in the church. The church cares for those who choose to be single and celibate, and the Roman Catholic church calls them consecrated virgins. Unfortunately, Christianity does really know what to do with those people who are single through no choice of their own. Over 40% of the adult population of the USA lives alone[2] and 29% of UK households are solitary [3]. This seems to be growing. Divorce rates seem to be part of this story, but increasingly people are just not getting married- recently marriage rates have risen from a low point of 2008[4]. Very few of these single people are Christian and wish to become monks and nuns, and even fewer are virgins or wish to live entirely celibate lives for the rest of their lives. Singlehood is not always what some well-meaning Christians call ‘a gift’. It is often a burden in communities where marriage is considered to be the most important life goal, and something that marks entry to adulthood. The focus of the resources and discipleship in most churches is focussed on marriage and the family ‘blessed’ with children. Very little attention is given to those who are single by choice- very few churches these days promote monasticism as a viable and enriching choice, and no attention is given to those who, through no fault of their own, find themselves single. They are not given help, advice, discipleship or even receive any form of blessing or prayers for their situation. The church has more work to do to understand this new feature of modern life and respond positively. [1] Daniélou, J. (1964) A History of Early Christian Doctrine Before the Council of Nicaea: The theology of Jewish Christianity. Darton, Longman & Todd [2] http://www.unmarried.org/statistics/ [3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9650120/Increase-in-number-of-middle-aged-people-living-alone.html [4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7314435.stm Proposal for a journal paper
Much parish life is lived in fragments of time, little slips of moments grabbed before or after church services. Whilst the content and the spirituality of the church services form the greatest part of spiritual direction in a parish, the other key moments are in the homilies and confession offered by the clergy in the parish- homilies as a one-to-many broadcast of ideas and exhortation, and confession as a one-to-one listening and offering of advice and healing words. Nevertheless, parish priests are mostly taken aside to one corner and asked ‘to give a word’, a tiny fragment of time in which to discern the spirits and respond. The demands of such fragmentary moments of spiritual direction bear heavily on clergy and elders, and can result in simple, robust and direct answers to a specific question. Such ‘answers’, stripped of context and theological reflection can, however, become idols in their own right as parishioners place these ‘pearls of wisdom’ in the contexts of their own lives and turn those intended pearls into grit that chafe with the rest of their worldview. These pearls of wisdom are turned in on themselves and become instruments of spiritual oppression and alienation. The opportunity to open up a spiritual question for a parishioner, and free them in Christ has been lost and the parishioner goes away hurt, confused and bereft. Often the spiritual enquirer wishes to change their lives, to become ‘less sinful’, more holy. Clumsy responses in these fragments of time dramatically halt spiritual progress, entrenching superstitions and fear of church authority. The challenge for the spiritual director is to avoid providing blunt and simplistic answers to questions and to allow the spiritual enquirer to develop their own means of answering the questions, in the context of church teaching, and develop their own motivations for change. This paper explores links between Orthodox Christian spiritual direction and the principles of motivational interviewing developed by, amongst others, Miller and Rollnick (2002)[i]. Motivational interviewing (MI) as a set of principles starts with the assumption that change (progress or improvement) is expected of the interviewee but such change is elicited from within, rather than imposed from without. It is proposed that the principles of motivational interviewing used in the context of spiritual direction can strengthen the parishioner’s own motivation and capacities for spiritual development thereby avoiding the use of prescription and proscription and other external motivators. The paper will explore the principles of MI in the context of the actions of Jesus Christ in the Bible and develop the theological basis for employing MI. Evidence of MI principles will be identified in the Philokalia, a primary source for the history of spiritual direction in Orthodox Christianity. Very little work has been undertaken with respect to the application of MI principles in the Christian context (Martin[ii]Miller & Martin 1988[iii] and Tan[iv]), so this paper seeks to develop the themes of initial work in this area. [i] Rollnick, S, and W R Miller. “What is motivational interviewing?” Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy 23.04 (1995) : 325-334. [ii] Martin, John E (2009) "Motivational Interviewing: Applications to Christian Therapy and Church Ministry". Journal of Psychology and Christianity. Vol. 28, No. 1, 71-77 [iii] Miller, W. R., & Martin, J. E. (Eds.) (1988). Behavior therapy and religion: Integrating spiritual and behavioral approaches to change. Woodland Hills, CA: Sage Press [iv] Tan, S. Y (2007). Use of prayer and scripture in cognitive-behavioral therapy. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 26, 101-111. Tan, S. Y, & Johnson, W. B. (2005). Spiritually oriented cognitive-behavioral therapy. In L. Sperry, & E. P Shafranske (Eds.), Spiritually oriented psychotherapy (pp. 77-103). Washington, D. C: American Psychological Association. |
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October 2023
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