Painful Truths, Awkward Questions

In the last couple of days I've posted some breakdown of the Church of England attendance data for 2001-2010. Compared to the 1990s, it shows a continued, albeit slower, decline across the CofE. Only London diocese has seen its adult numbers rise from 1990-2010, every other one of the 43 dioceses has seen a decline. It's only slighly better with under-16's, with 3 Dioceses showing an increase in 1990-2010 (London, Canterbury and Southwark).

There are some truly frightening figures here. My own Diocese, Bath and Wells, is one of at least 6 which have seen a fall in adult numbers of over 30% in that 20 year period. Yes we have been sailing into some pretty strong headwinds: membership of all sorts of voluntary groups has been declining, culture is changing, Sundays have vanished as a day of leisure etc.

But, but..... we need to inspect some of those bullet wounds just below the ankle. Is it just possible that we may have got some things wrong? Like:
1. The parish communion movement. The CofE has developed a 'norm' of communion being held in every parish on every Sunday. As parishes have been amalgamated, this has put great pressure on clergy to run around dispensing holy wafers, and stood in the way of churches developing worship to reflect a changing culture. In turn it has become a totem, with many local churches fiercely protective of it. (I know vicars who bear the scars from relatively tame attempts to try somthing different) The original Lords Supper (correct me if I'm wrong) was a Passover meal. These weren't celebrated by a priest bussed in from Jerusalem, but by the head of a household. Once a year. How we got from that to where we are now is, well, too complex to go into. But we need a complete rethink, and yes I'm absolutely fine with so called 'lay presidency' at communion. It would set our clergy and our local churches free.

2. The parish system: there is more than one way for the CofE to be a mission presence in every community, and we don't need to have a building to do it. There are other ways, I think one is called 'people'. We could even (careful now) do this in partnership with other churches, rather than trying to do it all ourselves.

3. I'm afraid we have to ask questions about the quality of leadership in the church, both at local level, but nationally. What have our bishops and archbishops been doing? I applaud George Carey's 'decade of evangelism' in the 1990s (which is seen as a failure, but laid the foundations for some of the best work of the last 10 years) and Rowan Williams championing Fresh Expressions. And yes, the CofE is an impossible beast to lead. But what has our church leadership been doing whilst all this is going on, and how do we hold them to account for it? What is the point of the next General Synod holding 4 (count them) debates on women bishops, if the only decision the first female Archbishop will have to make is who will switch off the lights as they leave the building? Where is the sense of urgency?

Even from down here in Somerset I can smell the breath of fresh air which is Steve Croft, Bishop of Sheffield, making his principal focus as leader of the Diocese mission and church growth. But how many of his colleagues are doing the same? How many of our bishops and Archdeacons ever led a growing church? How many of our Dioceses make it a policy to only train curates in growing churches? And a hundred more questions.

My point is this, if we don't get our finger out on this one, there will not be much point in the church of England debating anything else. With the Ordinariate, we seem to have got more upset over a couple of dozen Papally inclined clergy following through the logic of their theology, than we have over hundreds of thousands of Christians who have lost their faith, left the church, dried out, burnt out or dropped out. And that's not to mention the millions that we've not reached at all.

If any Anglicans have got this far, next time you see your bishop, a question for him: "what are you doing to grow the church in this Diocese?" If he sticks around for a supplementary, then David Cooke has plenty more. And if you're reading this and you're on General Synod, then how about every February synod devoting a session to considering the mission stats that come out every January, and coming up with a plan of action in response?

Nintendo Wii: My Sims - Introducing your 3 year old to occult and voodoo

My Sims: it looked like a good game for our kids to play in the summer hols on the Wii. Create a character, build a town, watch a community develop, unlock various levels, etc. etc. So far so good.

Then we unlocked 'level 3', and some odd things started going on. In My Sims, the characters who move in to your town each have a main characteristic: there are 6 to choose from. Fun, Tasty (food), Cute, Studious and Geeky were fine, Spooky we just avoided. The trouble is that if you get Spooky characters living next door to each other, guess what? They hold a seance. And they invite you to join in.

That's right. This is a game which, according to the box, is suitable for 3 year olds upwards. And the characters in it are getting together around an ouija board to contact the dead - and succeeding. Following the seance, a ghost moves in. By the looks of it, you can do this in other My Sims spin-offs, like Kingdom or Agents.

But just in case your kids aren't having nightmares by this stage, or learning what fun it is to try to contact the dead, they can go prospecting in the 'desert' area. There, they'll find among other things voodoo dolls (scroll down to the 'scary' essences). Now these may have had a makeover since I last heard of them, but the basic idea of a voodoo doll is that through torturing the doll, the person it represents is themselves tortured in a way which mirrors what you've done to the doll. Again, a lovely idea for a 3 year old to take on board.

Once I've got over the outrage, shock and sheer disbelief at this idiocy, I'll be writing to Nintendo, though I'm sure (I hope!!) that I won't be the first. It's pretty sick to have a major global brand aiming games at toddlers which normalise playing with the occult, and activities which can lead to all sorts of spiritual messes. Woe to those who cause one of these little ones to stumble.

The Most Unchristian Marketing in the World, Ever?

'the Best Hymns Album in the World, Ever' proclaims the label. Yes the track listing looks good, but the title fails at several points:

- what place has any Christian individual or group in claiming that what it has produced is 'the best in the world, ever'? Pride. Fail.

- the title sets the production company as judge and jury over what constitutes 'best'. Presumption. Fail

- Sure we're supposed to commend the good, but there's a difference between commending and hype. It's a vast difference if you've a financial interest in one over the other. Greed. Fail.

- On what basis is this 'the best ever'? Best collection? Best production quality? Best lyrics? 'there is a green hill' is factually pretty loose as there isn't much greenery around Jerusalem at the best of times. There is a very good chance that the claim of the title simply isn't true, and without reasonable evidence/proof, this is either misleading, manipulation, or downright deceit. It's a long way from 'let your yes be yes and your no be no'. In fact, Jesus went on to say 'any more than this comes from the evil one.'

We know that church marketing sucks, but perhaps it's worse. Is marketing satanic?

Facebook and the Bishop: never mind the content, feel the headlines.

Here's a puzzle. How does this:

"I think there's a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we're losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that's necessary for living together and building a community.

We're losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person's mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point.

Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together.

Facebook and MySpace might contribute towards communities, but I'm wary about it. It's not rounded communication so it won't build a rounded community...If we mean by community a genuine growing together and a mutual sharing in an interest that is of some significance then it needs more than Facebook." (Archbishop Vincent Nichols)

result in a headline like "Archbishop slams online friendships"? That's such a pathetic and lazy piece of journalism. Who needs a thoughtful debate about the interaction between real and virtual community when you've got such nice big fat pigeonholes to put people in?

The Times is even worse than Yahoo "Facebook drives teens to suicide, says Vincent Nichols". No it flipping well doesn't. Read what he says!!! Sure the headline may get more people reading the article, but it also makes them less likely to actually listen to Nichols actual words. However, just for balance, Ruth Gledhills blog is worth reading on this, where she makes the valid point that bullying on Facebook tends to be an extension of bullying in 'real life', so social networking sites are just one of many mediums which can be used for good or ill.

On a personal note, with a few exceptions all of my Facebook 'friends' are people I've met face to face and would consider to be friends anyway. I'm happier with the Twitter idea of 'followers' - the use of 'friend' to describe the relationship you have with someone through Facebook devalues friendship. As a way of keeping in touch with people who are already friends, social networking sites can be very helpful. But as Nichols says, if they become a substitute for face to face relationships (rather than an extension of them), then that's not good.

Update: excellent piece from Bishop Alan, who, as always, puts it much better than me.

It's the Economy, Stupid, not Rowan Williams

At least one blogger has laid into Rowan Williams for being a 'Marxist', in the light of his critique of the crisis in the banking sector. Williams, and John Sentamu, are both singing from the same hymn sheet in condemning some City practices and calling for better scrutiny of the financial markets.

It turns out that Rowan Williams cites Karl Marx only once, and this is what he says:
"Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else." (emphasis mine)
(Ht Ruth Gledhill, Times main story here, and more quotes on her blog here)

So Williams says that Marx got just 1 thing right, and now he's a Marxist? That must make me a member of Al Qaeda, since I agree with Osama bin Laden on the existence of God. I must admit that Times headline really doesn't help "Archbishop of Canterbury speaks in support of Karl Marx" - that's not quite what Williams is getting at! But hey, now an army of the usual suspects will pile in, misquote Rowan without reading what he's actually saying, and the focus will switch.

So lets stick with the real story here. The Archbishop of York said to a group of bankers (you've got to love his guts - talk about Daniel in the lions den):

"To a bystander like me, those who made £190million deliberately underselling the shares of HBOS, in spite of its very strong capital base, and drove it into the bosom of Lloyds TSB Bank, are clearly bank robbers and asset strippers.

"We find ourselves in a market system which seems to have taken its rules of trade from Alice in Wonderland, where the share value of a bank is no longer dependent on the strength of its performance but rather on the willingness of the Government to bail it out, or rather on whether the Government has announced its intentions so to do."

and the real bomb:
"the President of the United States recently announced a $700 billion bailout plans for banks and financial institutions. One of the ironies about this financial crisis is that it makes action on poverty look utterly achievable. It would cost $5 billion to save six million children's lives. World leaders could find 140 times that amount for the banking system in a week. How can they now tell us that action for the poorest on the planet is too expensive?"

If you were planning to get enraged about Rowan Williams, don't. If you were planning to get enraged about media reporting, don't. If you were planning to get enraged about bloggers not getting their facts right don't. Get enraged about this. Bush can find hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banking sector, but not even 1% of this to stop people dying of starvation or for lack of clean water. If this doesn't show that capitalism is sick to the heart, then I'm Karl Marx.

Update: Thinking Anglicans has a good round up of links for this one.

If it's broke, dont fix it

A bizarre piece in Tuesdays Guardian on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and why it's bad for the soul. CBT is a form of therapy which focuses on symptoms: e.g. someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder is exposed repeatedly to something which makes them anxious (the symptom), with the result that anxiety is reduced, and the obsession/compulsion comes under control.

The article argued against CBT, in favour of 'traditional therapy' where patient and therapist form a relationship to go deeply into the patients past and psyche.

So the basic argument is:
1. CBT works better than traditional therapy
2. It does so more quickly
3. It does so without going into a whole load of personal issues that may have nothing to do with it.
4. So we should avoid CBT.

Houston, we have a problem. The authors main issue seemed to be with the style of CBT, rather than its results. But if I were seeking treatment for a mental problem, I'd want the thing that worked and worked quickly. So what if it's 'mechanical'? So is injecting yourself with insulin every day, or taking a blood pressure pill. Mental illness often isn't that difficult from physical illness, there is chemical stuff going on in the brain - i.e. a physical component to the mental problem - so why insist on treating it differently?

I do have some sympathy with what he's getting at:

CBT promises change just as swiftly. Unwanted character traits or symptoms are no longer seen as a clue to some inner truth, but simply as disturbances to our
ideal image that can be excised. Instead of seeing a bout of depression or an
anxiety attack as a sign of unconscious processes that need to be carefully
elicited and voiced, they become aspects of behaviour to be removed

- reducing all mental illness merely to 'symptoms' can just mean you're avoiding deeper stuff. But I know people who've done all the deeper stuff and the symptoms have remained, and CBT has been the only thing which has worked. Not everything has some deep Freudian root.

The other thing which bugged me was the complete lack of evidence for his argument. Though the article covers several pages in the G2 section, the only piece of evidence he brings in, oddly, counted for CBT rather than against it:

Lord Layard stunned therapists earlier this year with the following vignette:
"The most striking experience I've had in the last few years was when the chief
executive of a mental health trust ... said his life had been saved by CBT ...
He said he is a fully fledged bipolar case but he has not had a day off work for
the last 15 years. He has a little book, which he carries around and whenever he
has funny thoughts coming into his mind, he turns to the relevant page,
according to what kind of thought it is or if he has a mood attack, and he does
exactly what it says on the page. Now, you could say that's mechanical. I say
that it's brilliant and not so different, you know, from what Jesus or any other
great healer did for people."

Yes we should pay attention to the soul, but that goes for everyone, not just people who are mentally distressed. And for someone suffering with a crippling mental disorder, is it better to give them what works, or be purists and prolong their suffering?