Category: Hmmm

Medicinal compound

Works every time

Photo by Fulvio Ciccolo on Unsplash

Imagine a bottle of special liquid. If you drink it regularly, it reduces your visits to A&E, improves your mental health, adds years to your life and makes you more likely to do well with chronic illness or trauma.

This same stuff, taken in group drinking sessions, speeds up development goals, getting people working together to address climate change, improve health and education, and provide decent work opportunities.

If two warring sides in a conflict both drink it, the prospects of peacemaking climb.

What is it? Hope. The UN declared a recent day (July 12) as ‘international day of hope’. They came up with a way of measuring hope. Then, having measured how much hope was in a person, they came up with what they claimed were research-backed findings on the effect of hope on all the things mentioned above. Their website offers some colourful graphs. I wasn’t myself greatly convinced by the graphs, but surely the direction is clear.

Here’s a further point though that, properly, the UN isn’t able to make: no-one is better at hope than the Christians. Because Christ is King, we hope for a transformed world to come when he returns; because Christ is king we expect, believe and work for a foretaste of the transformation here and now. (Otherwise why pray ‘Thy Kingdom come?’). We hope, and act, therefore, because Christ is King. It doesn’t matter that it’s slow. It matters that it’s in the right direction.

A superpower.

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Slow mission is taking a summer break and will be back in September. Thank you so much for reading.

If I get my act together, by September I will have moved the blog to Substack. This means my blog will be in company with others of its kind, –nice for it–and also opens options for me to add extra material, perhaps behind a paywall.

Because you’re a loyal subscriber I’ll stick you for free behind the paywall, so you won’t have to pay anything and you should continue to receive the blogs by email as you do now. Most of the blog will remain free to everyone, but I may put some extra stuff, perhaps my books or new books, behind the paywall.

I’m also launching a bookshop that contains all the books I’ve reviewed and loved over the years, all available outside the Amazon empire, and delivered to your house, usually at a discount to the retail price. A slice of the selling price goes to support independent bricks-and-mortar bookshops.

You can of course cancel, or indeed tell your friends to subscribe, any time you want.

I get more feedback from the blog than I’ve ever done from my books, and I’m really pleased if you find this stuff useful.

The title of the Substack will be ‘Patient Revolution’, but nothing much else will change.

See you in September!

Living in a story

That makes things a lot simpler

Photo by Genevieve Dallaire on Unsplash

We are living in a story.

If we realize this, it takes away a weight. We aren’t writing our own story.

In a story, characters have their own motivations and they follow them. But the whole architecture of the story, where it goes, how it ends, that’s in the hands of the story-teller.

In the story of the Prodigal Son, the younger son has motivation: to get out and have fun. The father has motivation: to love his son. Neither of them knows how the story will work out. They just follow that which drives them.

What drives you? Follow that. (If it’s a good thing.) What constrains you? Let that also steer your course. Then let the Storyteller do his stuff.

It’s stable because it’s complicated and dynamic

Photo by Alvin Mahmudov on Unsplash

It shouldn’t be a surprise that things are stable most of the time because they are

  1. Free to move about to a certain extent but also
  2. Interlinked.

In this way creation reflects the Trinity, the creator. An atom isn’t an immutable particle, as originally conceived, but a complicated nucleus with a probability-governed blur of electrons around it. Stars and galaxies, the other end of the scale, don’t generally exist on their own but in whirling communities and the interdependence of the universe means today’s stars are the recycled remains of older ones.

Life develops because of interdependence as much as through survival of the fittest; without both together the engine of evolution doesn’t work.

So it is no surprise that the Creator is himself a Trinity (yes, language is strained), a whirling interdependent dance of Father, Son and Spirit. The dance, not the individuals in the dance, is the deep reality.

All of which explains the limits of humans (or perhaps, nations) going solo, going me first, striking out on one’s own. Interdependence in everything is slow but essential. Hillary Clinton (remember her) was fond of what she understood to be an African proverb: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far [or I would say, last enduringly] go together.’

The revolution in UK churchgoing

Thousands are turning to Christ. No, really.

For someone who has been quite involved in surveys about the UK Christian scene since the 1980s, here is the most extraordinary piece of research I have ever seen.

It was published by the Bible Society on the day that the Archbishop Justin Welby resigned, and that news overshadowed this news. It should have been the other way around.

Bible Society did a survey of church attendance and attitudes in 2018 and then repeated the survey in 2024. These were national surveys conducted by YouGov with more than 10,000 participants each time.

The 2018 picture was one we have grown very familiar with: 8% of UK adults were attending church at least monthly — 6% of British men, 9% of British women. Older people (14% of all the old were attending monthly) were much more likely to show up in the pews than under 35s (4% attending monthly).

  • The 2024 picture, post-Brexit and post-covid, is a different story.
  • 12% of British adults are attending church at least monthly.
  • 33% of British churchgoers are aged 18-34
  • and the revival is led by men: 21% of British men aged 18-24 are regular churchgoers.
  • Church attendance in Britain has increased by half in six years. The increase is led by younger people and more by men than by women. Male churchgoers (13% of the population) now outnumber female churchgoers (10% of the population).

Allow me, if you would, an extended quote from the Baptist Times1:

The report’s co-author Dr Rhiannon McAleer said, ‘These are striking findings that completely reverse the widely held assumption that the Church in England and Wales is in terminal decline.

‘While some traditional denominations continue to face challenges, we’ve seen significant, broad-based growth among most expressions of Church – particularly in Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism.

‘There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago.’

There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago.

Some of the increase in churchgoing has been driven by an increase in the ethnic minority population across England and Wales – among whom churchgoing rates tend to be higher – resulting in greater ethnic diversity in the Church. Today, around one in five churchgoers (19 per cent) are from an ethnic minority. Among 18–54-year-olds that figure rises to one in three (32 per cent), pointing to a Church which is increasingly diverse, and more so than the general population. However, there has also been a significant increase in churchgoing among the white population.

Dr McAleer said: ‘The stereotype of churchgoers is that they are predominantly old, white and female. Increasingly, that is no longer the case. We’re seeing increasing ethnic diversity, but also large numbers of younger people from all ethnicities and many more men attending church.’

Alongside this significant demographic change within churches, the report highlights evidence of ‘an active and vibrant Church’, said Bible Society. Both Bible reading and confidence in the Bible have increased among churchgoers compared to 2018, ‘indicating that new attenders are even more engaged in Christian belief and practice’.

Furthermore, the report identifies both a greater openness to faith and spirituality, and to churchgoing in general, even among non-churchgoers. Younger people are particularly warm to spirituality, with 40 per cent of 18–24-year-olds saying they pray at least monthly and 51 per cent saying they’ve undertaken a spiritual practice in the last six months – the highest of any age group.

Among non-churchgoing 18–24-year-olds curiosity about Christianity is also typically higher than average, with 34 per cent saying they would attend church if invited by a friend or family member and a quarter (25 per cent) saying they would be interested in discovering more about the Bible – again, the highest of any age group.

The report also shows how churchgoing affects both individual wellbeing and the local community.

The report’s co-author, Dr Rob Barward-Symmons, added: ‘With much of the population struggling with mental health, loneliness and a loss of meaning in life, in particular young people, church appears to be offering an answer. We found that churchgoers are more likely than non-churchgoers to report higher life satisfaction and a greater feeling of connection to their community than non-churchgoers. They are also less likely to report frequently feeling anxious or depressed – particularly young women.’

Communities are also impacted, as churchgoers are more likely to participate in activities that benefit their neighbourhoods than either other religious groups or the general population. The report found that churchgoers are more likely to volunteer, donate to foodbanks and give to charitable causes. For instance, 18–34-year-old churchgoers are almost twice as likely to donate to a food bank as their non-churchgoing peers.

Dr McAleer said: ‘Our report does not challenge the well-established fact that fewer people in England and Wales are choosing to identify as Christian.

‘However, it is the first large-scale study to concentrate not on self-declared Christian identity but on actual Christian practice. By this measurement, the Church is in an exciting period of growth and change.

‘The findings of the report should change how we think about faith in England and Wales, and particularly about Christianity. It should encourage church leaders and decision-makers to plan for growth rather than decline, and it should challenge the media and civic society to engage with and represent this significant and growing section of the population.’

Bible Society’s chief executive Paul Williams said,‘This is a highly significant report which should transform the perception of Christianity and churchgoing in England and Wales. Far from being on a slippery slope to extinction, the Church is alive and growing and making a positive difference to individuals and society.’

The one-size-fits-all guaranteed easy to use popular Christian talk

Coming to a church near you

Here’s what you do.

  1. Read a Bible story at some length, always picking something that involves a miraculous transformation. There are plenty of these available, enough for a whole year’s preaching or more.
  2. Here’s your main point: someone in the story met Jesus, or God if it’s the Old Testament, and their life was transformed. Tell this story with as much drama as you can muster.
  3. Salt your story with promises plucked from elsewhere in scripture, again, plenty to choose from.
  4. Tell some stories about yourself or your children that vaguely illustrate the same point.
  5. Repeat (that’s a sermon series). Or write down (that’s a book).
  6. Change the theme slightly, and repeat again. So instead of ‘secrets of healing’, you could branch into ‘living a life of victory’ or ‘total financial freedom’ or ‘being a person of power and authority’.
  7. On you go. Same talk. It’s a career.

There are consequences to this Christian populism.

  1. You are pointing people to Jesus, perhaps the best thing you can do for anyone.
  2. Unfortunately the Jesus you are pointing them to is a one-shot wonder worker, a stripped-down version of the real thing.
  3. You’re missing the slow. We not finished, in both senses. We are still being patched up, and we are still pressing on in our incomplete state. Blessed are those at the end of their rope, broken, mourning, hungering, thirsting. Every day we search our minds and hearts to conform them to God’s will. Through faith and patience we inherit the promises. Suffering produces character produces hope. Not a charge to victory, methinks, a patient plod.

Ambition, its evolution and fulfilment

Still the great prize

Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash

Recently the church calendar shone its spotlight on the Presentation of Christ at the temple, and our attention was drawn to those two old codgers, Simeon and Anna, who had been separately hanging around the temple, for, like forever, waiting for the Consolation of Israel.

Then one day along come Mary and Joseph with the early-childhood Jewish routine of presenting the child at the temple. Surely Mary was a little anxious about her eight-day-old being circumcised, like nowadays when your kids have their first jabs. What if he cried? What if he didn’t stop bleeding? What if they got it wrong with the knife?

Anyhow, presumably before any knives are wielded, up jumps Simeon, followed closely by Anna, and starts prophesying. All my life I’ve been waiting for this, says Simeon. Indeed that was my life. And now I’ve seen this baby. He’s the one. I’m done here.

Which raised the question, what am I waiting for? What am I hoping for? What is yet unfulfilled? This is a question you can ask periodically through your life, with, perhaps, different answers along the way. In my case: I’ve worked as a writer all my life. I fell in love with a girl and thirty and more years later she still brightens and fills my days. We raised two wonderful children. We paid for our house and saved up, some, for our retirement. I didn’t die along the way. What more could I want?

It turns out that the more that I want is craftsmanship. I think that, and not dying yet, are my remaining ambitions. OK, those and loving people and hanging out with my wife and family and continuing to be a disciple of Jesus.

Craftsmanship: doing things beautifully and well. For better or worse, I live behind a keyboard. I inhabit a world of books and words and ideas and images. I don’t smell, like some men do, of engine oil or rural pursuits. Flakes of sawdust don’t fall from my hair. Craftsmanship for me is writing beautifully and well. And it’s still a bright shining, guiding (and maybe distant) light.

What, I wonder, about you?

Appealing against the Second Law

I’d like to protest the passing of time.

Photo by Elena Koycheva on Unsplash

It’s a humane feature of earthly laws that you can appeal.

The law I’d really like to appeal against, though, is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is roughly, everything gets old, wears out dies.

I’ve had it with seeing what Time and the Second Law do to people. What is this force that takes good people, drains them into a wizened hulk, then tosses them aside? How can that be right? I wish to appeal on behalf of the spry 85-year-olds I know who any time soon will hardly be able to climb onto their perch, and a little later, will have fallen completely off it. Good, strong people. Old age so isn’t fair.

Can you appeal? A lot of people, most of us, try to defy the Second Law or hold it back. It doesn’t really work, of course. But can you actually appeal? Since we are dealing with the created order here, we would have to appeal directly to the Creator. And we have a clue in our favour, namely the life, death and resurrection of God the Son, Jesus Christ.

So our appeal. Best to bring the issue to the One God and ask him to think about it in the light of his total Godness. That is, just be God, God. In all your total love, justice and mercy, faced with these things that you created, namely (1) the Second Law, and (2) people made in your image, made in your love, just be totally yourself.

If one can so speak.

And when you do that, what results? I don’t think we really can know. But I’m thinking, if the appeal is granted, and I can see how it might be, the eternal state that results isn’t just about halting time’s flow. I would quite to have my twenty-three year-old body back (halting time in that sense) but I’d quite like to hang onto my much older head, please. And when I think about it, the pattern of childhood, youth, midlife, old age, each with their attendant joys, are all lovely and I wouldn’t like to miss any of them. I wonder if Eternity will be still be roiled by the slowly passing seasons? I kinda hope so.

But it that’s the case, and if you appeal to God against the Second Law, asking God to be totally God in all of this, what does a successful appeal look like? I think it looks like hope, new birth, regeneration.

The really bitter thing about the Second Law is not really the ageing, or the weakening, or the becoming erratic and vulnerable. All that can be covered by love, at the end of life, just as it is covered by love at the beginning of life. No, the really bitter thing is when people fall away into a dark pit of hopelessness. So that I will never see them again. I will never know them again. I will never enjoy them again. We will never talk together again. Never again.

But if the wizened elderly were in fact seeds ready for a new planting, ready for a new life, still the essential them, but re-made for a new dawning world, all the losses on this side of things would be OK.

Slowness and labour-saving devices

There is an argument that commitment to going about things slowly means should shouldn’t surround yourself with timesaving kit. I mostly don’t agree. As well as the standard stuff that everyone has had for years, we’ve also introduced a breadmaker and then a robot vaccuum cleaner to our managerie.

They mean you can choose your slowness. Making bread with a breadmaker is huge fun, a world away from the chore of having to make it like my grandparents knew.

I was thinking the other day about pre-dishwasher days. They mostly coincided with my not-being-married days, and quite often with being invited for Sunday lunch. As a young guy and recent Christian I ate a lot of other people’s Sunday lunches, usually a roast, and typically followed up by a walk or a chat and then a tea. Along with others, I have gratefully tackled piles of washing-up, enjoying the conversation and the shared work. I found various species of washers-up over the years, all now sadly ghosts of history.

  • The perfectionist. This was someone who basically took charge of the sink and made sure every dish came out spotless and gleaming. They were not quick, and their fellows on the cleanup crew had to stand and wait.
  • The drier-up who gleefully, even maliciously, returned washing up to the sink, requiring it to be redone.
  • The drier-up who assumed if you pick it off with tea-towel, that’s just fine.
  • The enthusiast who splashed around like a toddler in a bath, soaking everything, washing up with speed but not always with the highest quality.
  • The mono-tasker who, if you asked him a question, would stop even drying up a plate while he thought about the answer.
  • The contrarian, who washed the dirtiest things first, using prodigious amounts of water and time.

On that spectrum I was definitely, as a washer-up, the enthusiast, and as a drier, the picker-off-with-the-teatowel, unless I really didn’t like the person washing up, in which case I returned every plate I could find.

So much is lost with the demise of the Sunday wash up. Psychological assessment. Control. Submission. Dominance. Mentoring. Shared endeavour. Friendship.

Still, though.

Community can heal

I was gob-smacked and jaw-dropped, if you can be both, when I watched this this week:

As well as a few side-benefits – a second revolution, saving the NHS, that sort of thing – it was a glimpse into what the future could be like for all of us. And what a happy, healing place it looked like.

At root it what’s being described is, I think, an NHS GP practice in one of the most deprived areas of London, that has realized doctors only get to a fraction of illness. The rest is caused, or cured, by things like employment, education, environment and creativity.

With that realization taken seriously, what has evolved is a thriving community with an NHS medical practice (and, as it happens, a church) at its heart.

I do recommend you put this on next time you are cooking or driving or working out or something. (You don’t need to see the video and the pictures anyway add little to the story.) Instead of a clinical setting, think cafe, community, art, creativity, fun … it’s just really something.

‘The cultural mood might just be shifting’

A few thoughts from Oxford

Token photo of Oxford University. Oxford may be a car factory with a university attached, but you can still capture nice shots. Thanks to Nikita Ti on Unsplash.

In a super piece published in the Gospel Coalition website, journalist Carolyn Morris-Collier wrote about her surprising experiences while studying for a master’s at Oxford University. Even if if you edit out and allow for the way US Christians’ eyes go all misty when things Oxford are mentioned, it’s an interesting piece. A Christian, she expected ‘aggressive antagnonism’. What she found was ‘unexpected spiritual openness’.

She gave some reasons:

  • Nobody, of her generation, trusts institutions any more. ‘Maybe people are hungry to be guided by more transcendent principles instead of man-made institutions vulnerable to cultural conditions and corruption.’
  • Community: ‘The church’s concrete invitation into communal life … answers a culture-wide longing sharpened by the individualism of modern society.’
  • The transcendent: ‘Many people in my generation have grown up in atheist households without exposure to religious communities or spiritual teachings … In my conversations, even staunch skeptics light up when asked if they’ve ever experienced one of these unexplainable moments of wonder.’
  • The anxiety of wandering in an ethical wilderness: ‘Having a religious faith, some sort of trellis on which to build your emotional and moral life, sounds less tiring than conjuring your own beliefs and ethical systems … Suddenly, a moral system like Christianity, meant to produce virtuous, wise, and respectful individuals, may not seem so stifling or oppressive anymore.’

All super stuff, and chiming with what the major UK-based student Christian Christian movement, UCCF, is saying about students across the country. They are re-writing some of their study material less around the theme of ‘is it true?’ and more concerned with’show me that it works.’