This is a recipe that I tried last year (2010) and found that even my Christmas cake hating wife enjoyed! It only needs to be made a week before Christmas, though I suppose earlier would be fine and it keeps well – if you can stop people eating it! Shamelessly lifted from cottagesmallholder.com and minimally edited.
Today is November 30th, strike day across the UK. Universities across the country are being occupied in protest against the ‘reforms’ that are planned to come in next year, public workers are protesting against the changes to pensions that will see them paying more for longer in return for a smaller payout in many cases. As an NUT member, I joined a rally in Coventry, where I live, but the other thing I can do is blog about why this government’s actions are so regressive.
The reasons why the pensions are so important to teachers and other public sector workers have been very publicly and cogently discussed, so I want to write about education specifically, from the earliest years to university. The plans of the government do in fact make sense if you are comfortable with the ongoing comoditisation of education. If it makes you at all uncomfortable, now is the time to speak out and call for a cultural change at all levels of society.
Comoditisation is the process of industrialising education – in the way farming is industrialised, think chicken farm. All that matters in highly comoditised education is the results, the outcomes and grades that are achieved at the end. What matters in secondary education at least is the overall results that the school achieve, it is those grades that to a very large extent determine what assessment the school inspectors, OFSTED, give the school. There is an incentive for schools, in particular the leadership, to not focus on teachers or individual students, except as means to achieving their overall targets.
You might think that the commercialisation of education would bring benefits to students as they gain power as the ‘customer’ in the game. I think that’s a wrong view of things – the customer in this game is not the one you might expect.
You can see this effect at play at Facebook. You might imagine that as a user with a profile at Facebook that you are a customer. Wrong. the advertisers are the real customers who actually are sold a product: you. When Facebook makes changes the site that make life more difficult for you, or change your privacy settings to make more things public than you wanted, you have to ask why. Why are they doing things that upset users, that make it more difficult to do the things that they want? For one, very few of the users are actually going to leave the service, but secondly, the changes are made to benefit the real customers.
It’s the same in education: the real customers are not the students, it’s the big companies that sponsor universities, it’s the government targets and funding that keep schools open. The students are a means to an end, factory-farmed animals that are fed and watered, kept alive and in reasonable health because to do otherwise would undermine their production value. Teachers and lecturers have gone from skilled small-holders to farm-hands to replaceable production line workers in the minds of the DFE, despite struggling to replace the increasing turnover. They seem to believe that the business plan, the curriculum is what will change the results that they demand, they seem to think that the contribution of teachers is minimal – why else would they cut investment. If the students were seen as individuals, as actual people, if teaching staff were the key resource in transforming the lives of those human beings, why would they be cutting them?
Setting a target at the national level seems fine, even appropriate, until they filter down levels to the micro scale. Students are not numbers or points to be banked. They need to be seen as individuals, cared for and cultivated into the successful people they can be by skilled educators given the resources and support that they need. Students are not merely the future of this nation, they are present now, with needs and dreams now.
Taking on massive debt is sold as an ‘investment’ in the future to students, which underscores the production mentality of twenty-first century education. Nothing is done for the now, for the benefit of the student and the enrichment of her life. It is all so that in the future they might be productive. We are creating a generation of students for whom learning is either a luxury or a chore to be endured until they can do something actually important. Teaching is set up as different to doing, inferior and passive – a production line task. Life long learning is rhetoric, unreal and undesirable in the culture that is being created.
The US is often used as an example of the success of high-cost, ‘high-value’ education, with the Ivy League colleges regularly topping the lists of best universities in the world. Yet the high cost of education is one of the key reasons that despite the ‘American dream’, social mobility is lower in the US than in Europe – high cost education means the rich keep on being rich and it is harder for the poor to become rich.
Education is not the only public service to go down this road in the UK, many others are seeing the same process – the health service is another good example. Commoditisation is a dehumanising process, one that we must oppose and suggest practical alternatives to. The strikes and the Occupy movement are a chance to say ‘no’, but we must go on to start exploring constructive ways to change the system.
I’ve written a post for Provokotive Magazine touching on Michel Foucault and the shift in power that the use of mobile phones and other highly portable video recorders has made in the protests this year. The all-seeing ‘panopticon’ has been inverted and state surveillance has almost been overtaken by the people providing their own view of events and the actions of the police.
It’s really exciting to have my writing published by another site, bringing my thinking to a new, mainly US based audience. I hope that it will also demonstrate my attitude and passion as I’m applying for new jobs in the next few months. I’ll have more posts published there very soon – including an advent series that will be starting today! I’ll keep linking to what I’ve written there from this blog and I’d love to see your comments on what I’ve done on either site.
Reading ‘The King Jesus Gospel‘ by Scot McKnight had moments of that bizarre experience of someone thinking your thoughts after you, then having the analytic insight to go deeper and find answers that are intuitively right but you hadn’t reached.
Though I posted a quote on the subject of ‘what is the gospel‘ just a few months ago, it was years ago (the start of 2008 to be precise) that I started an email conversation with a leader at our church on the exact question of ‘what is the gospel’ – asking (among other things) if Jesus preached the gospel. I think we concluded at the end that Luke wanted us to see the continuity between what Jesus did in the early chapters and what happened in Acts, right up to the last verse of the last chapter. But the relationship between what Jesus taught and what we find (for example) in the epistles and in Acts remained nebulous.
McKnight has thoroughly gone through each aspect of the ‘gospeling’ (yes, it is a verb, especially for Luke) of Paul, the four gospels, Jesus and Peter to make, as he puts it, a ‘four-legged chair’. He starts in 1 Corinthians 15, probably the earliest recorded gospel statement (as when 1 Corinthians was written Paul was only halfway through the missionary journeys that the second half of Acts describes and each of the gospels were written probably at least a decade later). McKnight draws out four themes that he then goes highlights in the rest of the gospeling of the New Testament. I summarised them like this for the housegroups at church:
The gospel message that the apostles preach is the story of Jesus – that’s why the early church called the first four books of the New Testament “the Gospel”. It’s the story of his life, death and resurrection, and it’s all wrapped up in the story of Israel, the Old Testament. We can’t understand the gospel without trying to understand what God had been doing since the start of human history through to the Kingdom of Israel and on towards the time that Jesus was born.
When that gospel is preached it requires a response, faith and repentance, aligning ourselves with what God is doing. Responding to the gospel means sharing in its benefits and effects – the saving and redeeming that God is doing in this world.
Now this sort of ‘narrative’ reading of the gospel works well for me, especially with some of the things that I have been reading and writing over the past year. If the gospel is Jesus as the pinnacle of God ‘s saving mission through Israel and now the Church, our response is not just to ‘accept Jesus into my heart’ (as if the gospel is all about me and that all God’s efforts from eternity have been about me!) but to start to put ourselves into the story.
We might choose to extend the story metaphor in two directions – we might be all journalistic, our response could be to report the story to others. I don’t think that goes far enough. As I’ve written before, as actors, we become part of the story, acting it out as a dramatic improvisation - and acting has to come with both words and ‘actions’. This in turn leads to the understanding that gospeling goes beyond seeking conversions, it is about making disciples and fills every part of a Christian’s life.
Trying to get this kind of idea across to church on Sunday I experimented with a different, more interactive, style of teaching. It seemed to go down well, with some very positive feedback from a wide cross-section of the church (including some who I wouldn’t have expected it from!) I’ll probably blog about the experience, but one thing to note now is that I at least have an idea where people missed the point of what I said! Anyway, the sermon audio and presentation on Prezi are available from the Canley website and you can also download the notes I wrote for the church housegroups – ‘Jesus is the good news!‘
This also adds to the post earlier in the week on discipling and mission.
An interesting article titled ‘Why the missional movement will fail‘ was posted in one of the Facebook groups I’m a part of earlier this week. While my immediate church context would not identify itself as ‘missional’, we’ve often been described as a ‘mission church’ and we’d probably often accept the label. I also have friends who would unselfconsciously describe themselves as missional and would in fact seek to be leading the conversation where they can. I’ve read a little on the subject and I feel I have some kind of a handle on the approaches that characterise the movement.
In very brief summary, Mike Breen says that the missional movement is bound to fail because it focusses on the wrong thing: mission should come as the natural response to discipling. He uses a couple of colourful metaphors – a car that’s all wheels and no engine and the Red Army in WW2 – which have drawn mixed opinions, but should not mislead us from the key issue here. For me, the key issue is not ‘will the missional movement fail’ – it is just a part of a movement to reinvigorate Christianity and Evangelicalism in particular. No, the far more concerning thing to me is the false dichotomy that has been drawn between mission and discipling.
Drawing clever distinctions is an easy way to write an impressive blog post (or even a thesis!) but does not necessarily draw us closer to understanding the problem. But this contrast is not newly drawn up for this one blog post – it is one that is common among many Christians, but one that I think is dangerous and un-biblical.
Now it goes without saying that the church structures that we’re used to were not present in the New Testament church. There were no youth programmes, no ministerial training, no women’s meetings or fellowship for older people – and these are all important, even necessary, in the contexts of today. Still, there is absolutely no distinction that I can tell in the New Testament between discipling and mission. I suggest that they are both aspects of one action: gospeling.
Gospeling is not to be identified solely with mission. It is the declaration that Jesus is Lord of all, the climax of all God’s redeeming action in the world and an invitation to get involved. The response that is called for is not simply a moment of decision, not ‘asking Jesus into my heart’ but an ongoing quest to engage in. And at least part of that quest must be the telling and acting out of the story itself. So gospeling includes both what we call ‘mission’ and ‘discipling’, for each is really about making Christians who are truly engaged in the plans of God.
Perhaps the problem can be seen as a definition of ‘mission’ that is far too short sighted and small scoped. ‘Mission’ has been reduced to a stripped down, sound-bite message that aims for the bare minimum response that will switch the hearer from one camp to the other. While salvation is a part of the gospel message, it is certainly not the whole thing. Modern Christianity, especially Evangelicalism, has relegated the bigger picture to another category, implicitly reducing its importance and so has shrunk the gospel. I’ll be back with more this week on what gospel really is (following up on something I did at church on Sunday).
Maybe I’ve missed the bigger picture of what Mike Breen is trying to say. Perhaps his real suggestion in his book is the same as I’m trying to say but framed in different language. I certainly agree with him that any movement that focuses merely on conversions and not on growing fully developed Christians will struggle to make a lasting impression. However, I don’t think the answer is to perpetuate this small gospel, but to call people to a big, astonishing life that is a real mission.
It was an interesting experience to go along to a new church housegroup, discussing the notes I’d written. A good experience, it can certainly help me reflect on what I write and what I leave out. That’s for another day, however, as I’ve been set off by a thought that was shared by someone in the group.
The image of God as a master craftsman, shaping and forming our lives and identity was raised, especially of God as a sculptor, carving a statue out of a block of wood or stone. As he chips away at the block, bits are removed and lost, there is the idea that it might seem painful, but the end result is beautiful. But there is also an idea that I dislike mixed up in it, that of a ‘perfect version’ of me that God can see beneath the surface of what I currently am.
I think I react poorly to the sense that this ‘perfect version’ in a stone statue is a fixed, completed state, that no more change can happen when it is reached and that it is singular and must be frozen in time. I don’t have that kind of image of being – I want to image that the person God wants me to be will still be developing and growing. When I think of heaven, it is a place of activity and life – a place where I do and learn – it is somewhere that there is still development.
The image of topiary or bonsai came to me as I was thinking about it. There is still the exact same sense of bits being removed to make a better and healthier sculpture – in fact the image of pruning is thoroughly scriptural. There is also the sense that only a master artisan can see the potentiality contained in a rough form and shape it to what it could become, but it comes with a recognition that when the tree achieves its maturity it is still not finished. It will continue to be shaped, pruned and guided into more perfection. It can even be shaped into new forms if the gardener wants that. It is organic, alive, always growing and changing.
I know I am far from perfect or reaching maturity, but it gives me a glimmer of hope to know that being alive is the only way to reach it. A dead tree is no longer shaped or pruned, it’s thrown out. So when I feel I’ve gone backwards, not made progress, I am still growing, and though the resultant pruning stings, it is essential.
I may not recognise maturity when (if) I reach it, but that’s OK, so long as I keep growing and I let the master continue to shape me as he wants to
I’ve now written or spoken about four of the churches in Revelation 2-3 and you might be interested to hear and read it.
First, the churches of Pergamum and Thyatira: you can hear my sermon and see the presentation on the Canley website.
Second, my notes for the Canley housegroups on the next two churches, Sardis and Philadelphia.
Review: We’ve looked at the letters to four churches, each with good points and most with some kind of problem. We’ve been using the letters to help us pray for God’s guidance as to how CCC should be moving forward.
What you need to know about names
In both these letters, Jesus talks about ‘names’. If you didn’t spot it in the letters to Sardis and Philadelphia, go back and read it again! (For bonus points, which other letter(s) in Rev 2-3 talk about names?)
In the first century names were very important, they were supposed to give an idea of who the person was, what he or she was like. Roman Emperors took a new name when they became the supreme ruler – Caesar. Other Romans changed their names as they progressed politically or in the military, adding titles and dropping family names that were less important.
However, if someone went out of favour with the Emperor or local rulers, their name would be removed from books or monuments so it was as if they had never existed. In the 20th century, the Soviets did something similar, removing people from photos so that no trace of them remained.
It could be that the things you have discussed need a personal response – perhaps to the idea that your identity should be shaped by God, or needing the confidence that you can be secure in your identity as a Christian. It would be great if other members of the house group could pray for you as you explore these things.
One way of reading the promises in the letters to the seven churches is that they are not far off rewards for a distant future in heaven, but a hint of the type of church God is going to make them into. Pray, asking what kind of church is God calling CCC to be if we are to be ‘conquerors’? What promises does he have for us?
Some of the criticisms I have heard of the Occupy protesters have been utterly ridiculous. I’ll lay them out (and take them down a bit too) below the video, but you might like to see I’m not making them up – they are that obviously facile!
Number 1: “Protests are pointless, they achieve nothing”. Polly Toynbee’s response is spot on: protests work if their aim is raising the profile of the issues they are protesting – the conversation about the economy and the role of the bankers would be very different were it not for people in tents with hand made signs.
Two: “Go and get a job, that would help the economy more than protesting”. Some protesters clearly do have jobs, while others are part of the ‘forgotten generation’ of unemployed young people, saddled with debt from university and with no jobs to take. This is the generation who take un-paid interning jobs endlessly because there are no paid roles that actually use the education that they dedicated their entire lives so far to. Isn’t it right for them to stand up and say that this is not OK? How can you say to anyone in an economy like this “go and get a job” – it is the epitome of callousness and lack of heart.
Three: “Those kids with their designer clothes and iPhones…” I think this one irks me even more than the others. It comes from an oversimplification of the platform of the Occupy protesters – that they think capitalism as an entire system is fatally flawed. Perhaps some of them do, most certainly do not. They are consumers, they distinguish intelligently between what is good and right in the market economy and what is corrupt and corrupting – “it’s not about anti-capitalism, it’s about bad capitalism.” Insiders have the most right to blow the whistle and say that this is enough.
Who would have a right to critique contemporary society if not designer-clothed, technology-wielding young people? Only an Elijah-style prophet, living in the wilderness, kept separate from the taint of technology, or debt, or mass-manufactured clothing – a twenty-first century Gandhi. But even one of Gandhi’s aides, Sarojini Naidu, recognised that it took a lot of money to keep Gandhi poor. It is unthinkable to exist outside the bubble of capitalism in 2011 while remaining in contact with it and having a voice to criticise it. Get over the idea that it is wrong for the protesters to be identifiably part of the capitalist system.
It is not clear what the Occupy Together protests will achieve. It is even unclear how cohesive the movement will be, or how cogently their demands for change will be framed (though the London group have created a good summary of what they want). What is clear to me is that there is a desire for change and that this is in no way the same as the ‘rioting’ of this summer.
I made the mistake of confusing Tim Ferriss with Timothy Ferriss, so I was surprised to be disappointed with an article on Wired, “Timothy Ferriss: The World of the Intellectual vs. The World of the Engineer”. I often read Tim’s blog, I’m fascinated by his approach to self-experimentation. So the over-simplification and scientism of the article surprised me.
The comments of other people on the article itself are interesting – both supporting and criticising Ferriss.
The title sets up the binary that Ferriss pursues through the article: intellectual bad, engineer good. Taking a rather unique definition of intellectual (“Being an intellectual had more to do with fashioning fresh ideas than with finding fresh facts.”) in order to contrast it with scientists and engineers who dealt only with hypotheses that they could check with lab tests. Ferriss goes on to intellectuals sought only to create ideologies that were based on imagined utopian dreams rather than any real experience and that they were all failures. He takes a slightly different route to the standard critique of modernity but ends at a similar place: modern ideologies are empty and we must leave them all behind. The have (without exception, apparently) only caused damage to humanity, while technology and science have exclusively benefited us.
There’s plenty to critique in his argument (which my summary has probably not perfectly represented – which, as you’ll see, will be deeply ironic!) Some commenters have been upset with people saying there are straw men to be found in the article. A straw man is a weak or misrepresented summary of someone else’s argument or work, which then makes your argument look strong. It’s an analogy from somehting like martial arts, where knocking down a straw man is easier than taking on a real opponent.
An example (one of many) is Ferriss’ treatment of Marx. “Karl Marx studiously ignored the improving living standards of working-class Londoners — he visited no factories and interviewed not a single worker — while writing Das Kapital, which declared it an “iron law” that the lot of the proletariat must be getting worse.” Now I’ve not studied Das Kapital, but to suggest that Marx was anti-fact and did not research seems a very unfair accusation. Imperial Russia allowed the publication of Das Kapital because it was not just ideology, but a ‘scientific’ work of political economics. Marx should be seen as one who straddled the binary of this article – mixing ideology and scientific technique, as many scientists do, especially those who are pioneering new fields. And Marx cannot be blamed (as Ferriss later suggests) for the failure of communism in the Soviet bloc – commenter Jon Munger says that’s like blaming Darwin for eugenics.
The article is even more flawed than just containing straw men. Ferriss’ style of argument and his shallow treatment of sources puts him firmly in the camp of idealogues (which he conflates with intellectuals), ironicaly arguing that this approach (the one he is practising) is fatally flawed. He is constructing a new ideology, not based on verifiable hypotheses that can be falsified by experimentation, but constructed from a few opinions and comments of hearsay. Scientism (the ideology that science and technology provide unrelenting progress and benefit for humanity) has been in doubt for decades. The ultimate demonstration of the power of science to affect people are the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of the early and middle part of the last century. Scientism is just as dangerous as any ideology in the hands of people who will do absolutely anything to defend or advance their way of life.
When we talk about the end of ideologies, the lack of resonance there is now with the big ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries, we need to be careful how we do it to avoid creating new (or re-stating old) ideologies that are just as flawed. We choose the direction we take our world in, science is just one tool (one particularly effective tool) to move us in that direction. Science is not morally superior to other approaches, nor is it the only tool we should use, as Ferriss proves. As a writer I am sure he knows that his rhetoric is not scientific. It is a tool, we must choose how we use all the tools available to us to do good, rather than harm.
[These are the notes prepared for the housegroups at Canley Community Church - the first in a series on the letters to the seven churches.]
”We’ll be reading the book of Revelation for the next few weeks.”
That’s a scary thought for lots of Christians – not just because of the scary things that are written about in the book, but also because it’s so different from the other books in the New Testament, which makes it difficult to read and understand.
There seem to be two different types of response to reading Revelation. Some people seem to understand it all – “those people will be left behind, this means that person, here it’s talking about the government…” The rest just think that the whole book is impossible and just ignore it, going back to a nice story from the gospels, or a good meaty chunk of Romans.
My starting point when thinking about Revelation is that neither gets it quite right. If we understand the Bible to be a bit like a library with different types of books in it, what kind of book is it? The people who study these things call it ‘Apocalyptic writing’. It’s very different to the stories or biography of the gospels and Acts, or the pastoral and theological letters that make up the rest of the New Testament. It’s a style of writing that was popular with Jews in the first century, when the books of the New Testament were written, but one that you don’t find in contemporary Britain. It’s a type of writing that was supposed to be understood, but it was also meant to be a bit secret. It was supposed to be just a wild story to anyone who wasn’t an insider, especially the Romans. So for us to understand apocalyptic writing we need to do some decoding – and some of the codes might be so old that it’s tough to fully crack them.
Revelation is supposed to be tough to understand, it’s supposed to baffle, but it definitely has meaning that we can and should look for. But let’s not make the mistake of thinking that Revelation was written so that only you can understand it now, with the benefit of two thousand years of history. Revelation was written down for a specific audience in the late first century, an audience who were supposed to understand and be encouraged by the message in it.
Have you been scared of reading Revelation because you think you’ll never understand any of it? Have you heard people who seem to think they understand every word and verse of the book? What’s your response now – still scared, maybe you could try, still sure you’ve got it all sorted?
Revelation starts with the vision of John as he’s in exile, under arrest, away from the churches he is a pastor to. John is old, he’s been captured, he’s not able to do the job he loves. As he prays, he is shown the most incredible vision that he’d never have seen if he wasn’t on Patmos.
John writes down what he saw in the vision and sends it as a letter to the churches in what is now Turkey – not far by today’s standards, but a very long way away for John.
The whole of chapter 1 is shot through with worship, you can feel the reverence and love in the tone that John writes in as well as the description of how he sees Jesus.
Is that your response when you’ve got difficult times?
Read through the description of Jesus in v9-20. What images stand out to you? Why? Is this the kind of picture of Jesus that you have in your mind?
The description of Jesus uses lots of symbols and metaphors, each one full of meaning to the audience John is writing to. They build up together to be very ‘out of this world’ and strange – this is Jesus in glory, not just raised back to life, but ascended to the highest place in heaven.
Yet there’s something else about this Jesus. He’s personal. He names the seven churches one by one, and as we’ll see in the coming weeks, he has a specific message to each one. The messages are as strange and cryptic as this first chapter (and all the rest of the Revelation), but they all hint at things about the cities that have been confirmed by archaeology. Jesus knows the details of life in each city – not just the general kind of ‘this is what it’s like to be a human being’, but ‘I know what it’s like for you in your location and context’.
Sometimes these two aspects of Jesus character are put as an ‘either or’ – he’s either huge and ‘out there’ or in my heart and just about the little things. I think we need to take both – even if they are in tension and difficult to fit together neatly. Jesus is God of all creation, God of every galaxy and the furthest reaches of the Universe, but he’s also right here next to us, in our street, in our living room, no matter what it feels like.
Have you sometimes picked one or the other – a little Jesus just in my heart, or a huge Jesus who’s too far away for us to relate to? What might it mean to ‘hold both in tension’ in your life?
As we read the letters in the next two chapters, we find the descriptions of Jesus in this chapter echoed. Just a little bit from v9-20 is used to describe Jesus as he speaks to each church individually, a different bit for each one. That aspect of Jesus is just what the church needs to hear, to encourage or convict them.
What aspect of Jesus’ character do you need to see? How would Jesus introduce himself to Canley Community Church?
As we go through this series on the first four chapters of Revelation, we want to encourage a response of prayer to what we’ve read and discussed. In your housegroup, briefly discuss what you think you should pray about based on Revelation 1. Here are some ideas as a starter for you – please come up with more ideas.
