Slow food is about seasonal ingredients, patiently nurtured, carefully prepared, lovingly cooked.
The ingredients of ‘slow mission’ are people and the Christian gospel; and also, seasons, brokenness, diversity, giftedness and time — things we need to keep reminding ourselves of.
Slow mission is about trying to make the world better by applying the whole gospel of Christ to the whole of life. It’s about using what gifts we have for the common good. It moves at the pace of nature. It respects seasons. It is happy with small steps but has a grand vision. It knows of only one Lord and one Church. Making disciples of ourselves is as important as making disciples of others. Diversity is embraced. Playfulness is recommended.
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Marwa Morgan ‘It’s still early for the moon to rise’ @Flickr
‘Slow mission’ is about huge ambition–all things united under Christ–and tiny steps.
I contrast it with much talk and planning about ‘goals’ and ‘strategies’ which happens in the parts of church I inhabit, and which have an appearance of spirituality, but make me sometimes feel like I am in the Christian meat-processing industry.
Here’s a summary of slow mission values, as currently figured out by me:
Devoted. Centred on Christ as Saviour and Lord. Do we say to Christ, ‘Everything I do, I do it for you.’ Do we hear Christ saying the same thing back to us?
Belonging. We sign up, take part, dive in, identify, work with others, live with the compromises. Not for us a proud independence.
Respecting vocation. Where do ‘your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger’ meet?1. Vocation is where God’s strokes of genius happen. That’s where we should focus our energies.
To do with goodness. Goodness in the world is like a tolling bell that can’t be silenced and that itself silences all arguments.
Observing seasons. ‘There’s a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.’2.The world will be OK even if we check out for a while. (Note: our families, however, won’t be.)
Into everything. We are multi-ethnic and interdependent. We like the handcrafted. We are interested in all humanity and in all that humanity is interested in. Wherever there’s truth, beauty, creativity, compassion, integrity, service, we want to be there too, investing and inventing. We don’t take to being shut out. Faith and everything mix.
Quite keen on common sense. We like to follow the evidence and stick to the facts. We like to critique opinions and prejudices. We don’t, however, argue with maths. Against our human nature, we try to listen to those we disagree with us. We’re not afraid of truth regardless of who brings it. We want to be learners rather than debaters.
Happy to write an unfinished symphony. Nothing gets completed this side of death and eternity. What we do gets undone. That’s OK. Completeness is coming in God’s sweet time. ‘Now we only see a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.’3.
Comfortable with the broken and the provisional. Happy are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger for right, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the laughed-at. This also implies a discomfort with the pat, the glib, the primped, the simplistic, the triumphalistic and the schlocky.
Refusing to be miserable. The Universe continues because of God’s zest for life, despite everything, and his insouciance that it will all probably work out somehow. In sorrows, wounds and in the inexplicable, we join God in his childlike faith.
You hate it, of course, contacting someone with the news that that thing you were going to do for them, you are no longer going to do. And yet I’ve come to believe that letting people down is a tool in our social armoury, a key to a happy life, and a secret to reducing our pace.
Illness years ago opened my eyes to it. There’s nothing like a stay in hospital for revealing that (a) you can cancel everything and the world continues to spin and (b) the really important things are loving relationships and the things you do best and you love and give you life. Other things must be fitted in around these.
You can’t be a person who never lets anyone down. The only choice you have is whom you let down; in a sense, whom or what you serve. If you stretch yourself to be at every important meeting at work, you have decided to stick the boot into your spouse and your kids. You can let them down again and again while you achieve stuff. But who or what are you serving? So–a challenge– let someone down this week, someone who isn’t as important as those you love.
PS: Hope I’m not letting you down too badly… but this blog is taking August off, while we go on holiday…
So. I just discovered Perlego.com and it is like having a subscription to a sweetshop, or an all-you-can-eat buffet, or a pizza restaurant. I think it was originally for students. It stores a million textbooks and for a simple monthly fee, you can download and read them all. (Note that it is perlego and not perlogo. The alternate spelling in my experience is a site that has been taken over by cybersquatters who intend you harm.)
Here’s my usage over the past two months.
Our church has a teaching series on the biblical book of Nehemiah, which I’m speaking on in August. Want a commentary on Nehemiah? Perlego offers 94 of them across the range of Biblical scholarship. I tucked into Derek Kidner’s 2015 Tyndale commentary for starters.
I helped myself to Tom Wright’s biography of Paul, which I just read in hardback and wanted to review.
I was able to hunt down all John Walton’s books, which are revolutionizing studies of Genesis and read in detail The Lost World of the Flood, very much enjoying his blend of Biblical scholarship, from a conservative perspective no less, and his receptivity to God’s other book, the book of nature as opened and read by modern science. His secret sauce that blends these two ingredients is a renewed study of the ancient literature and an awareness of the cultural flow of the times. If we know what they meant then, today’s science isn’t a problem.
I chewed without finishing Joshua Swamidass’ book The Genealogical Adam and Eve, which I have blogged about in a previous year. It claims that you can have a historic literal Adam and Eve and they can be ancestors of everyone, provided they weren’t the only humans on earth at the time. I haven’t eaten my crusts so far as this book is concerned because (a) it’s quite dense and my eyes glazed over and (b) I’m not wedded to a literal Adam and Eve,especially after reading Walton. But still.
Fancying something a little more spiritually improving, I looked to see what the scholar-archbishop (and Cambridge resident) Rowan Williams had on offer and dug out probably the most difficult of the alternatives, his book Passions of the Soul which is, broadly, a study of what the Greek-speaking Desert Fathers did all day in terms of scrutinizing the human psyche’s response to God. One wonders if the Desert Fathers rather pushed to the background the Second Great Commandment, love your neighbour, but it’s nevertheless interesting.
Then I’ve been listening to Justin Brierley’s excellent podcast series The Surprising Rebirth of Faith in God which is also a book and isn’t yet available on the sainted Perlego, but his previous title Why I’m Still a Christian is. The podcast had an episode on a woman called Louise Perry, who, starting with impeccable feminist credentials, has come to conclude that the best way for most people and for societies as a whole to thrive is to aim at a life not incompatible with many of the Christian values. (I don’t think she herself is at the moment a Christian believer, saying she stumbles on the metaphysics.) She was so eloquent, gracious, honest and deeply, deeply smart in the interview that I put her in Perlego and lo! There her book appeared, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and I can read that too. I can read them all. For my £12 or so monthly subscription.
Cue the rumble of the earth moving around me. I have written about how sad it is that thousands of pieces of excellent writing (in my particular world, Christian academic writing) are hidden inaccessible behind mighty paywalls. Woe to you if you are Nigerian youth leader or a Filipina pastor or, frankly, an ordinary Joe in the West whose budget doesn’t stretch to this literary feasting. The seven titles I’ve mentioned here would empty your wallet of the best part of £100 to buy, even assuming you could find them.
The Internet was always supposed to give us access to every film ever made, every piece of music ever recorded, and every book ever written. Big tech has muscled in mostly, so the films are divided between different streamers, and the music is being buried under a weight of AI generated elevator sound. Amateur films, books and music are everywhere, creators far outstripping the capacity of consumers.
But Perlego is, I think, where publishers’ backlists go, a far superior place to the literary Hades which is the nether end of the Amazon bestseller lists, where books crowd in semi-darkness, waiting usually in vain to be called up higher by an Order. (This is where my books reside, incidentally, at least until I get my move to Substack sorted out, of which more sometime.)
Enjoy it while it lasts.
My challenge now is to find le temps juste when I can moot to my wife the idea of an annual Perlego subscription (£100 or so, so a saving really) and perhaps a compact little Android e-reader like this to read it on.
I write this after voting in our General Election but it will be published after the results are known. As any faithful readers will know, I love voting, and I love General Elections. I’ve bought some snacks to sustain me when I start watching the results in the middle of the night.
Voting in my world involves a short walk to our 12th century church, through the sunny graveyard where an old friend or two are buried, saying hello to the people at the polling station (at the back of the church), voting, checking I voted for the right person, and slotting my ballot in the box. Every part is wonderful. As the American Senator Raphael Warnock said (and wouldn’t he make a good president, methinks):
‘Democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea, the sacred worth of all human beings.’
‘A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire.’
Such a privilege, and so simple. Not an idea, sadly, that has caught in China or North Korea, nor in a whole bunch of other countries, too many to number, where the current leaders fix things beforehand; or whine and worse after the event.
A couple of further things.
The most effective prime ministers since the war, I would argue, are those who’ve led their party to replace the former lot as the governing party (think Atlee, Thatcher, Blair, Cameron; not so sure about Wilson and Heath though). This is quite rare, and so today’s vote is worth cherishing perhaps.
‘Righteouness exalts a nation’. I’m not too excited by culture-war stuff. But wouldn’t it be good to be good with poor, the broken, the left-behind? Wouldn’t it be good to fix the environment? Wouldn’t it be good to have basic common good things in place so that everyone can thrive, everyone under his own vine and fig tree? Let justice flow like rivers.
The new lot will fade and die. Mrs Thatcher had the poll tax; Mr Blair, Iraq; Mr Cameron, Brexit. Let’s hope someone good is ready to replace them.
The world is ageing fast. Every day, 10,000 American baby boomers turn 65. Figuring out what to do with them (/us 1) is something we need to think about. Better yet if it can increase well-being across the world.
A recent Economist article described how some university campuses in the United States are building retirement homes. I hope they will forgive me quoting large parts of their article.
Most residents are having a ball. They get a university pass, which allows them to attend the same classes and cultural events as students, but with the distinct benefit of not having to take exams. Golf buggies can drive them around the sprawling campus, though many are still fit enough to mountain bike.
In their dorms, four restaurants serve better food than college grub and amenities include an art studio, a pool and gym, and a games room. Only the second floor feels institutional, with a memory-care centre and rooms for residents who need round-the-clock attention …
This is part of a wider trend. An estimated 85 colleges in America are affiliated with some form of senior living. The idea sprang from two college presidents who wanted to retire on campus in the 1980s. Today, universities from Central Florida to Iowa State to Stanford offer senior-living arrangements. Andrew Carle, at Georgetown University, estimates that as many as 20,000 older Americans live like this …
Bill Gates—not that one, but an 80-year-old former newspaper editor—moved to [one of these communities] with his wife, who has a PhD in chemistry, two years ago. They have made friends with residents but also, to their surprise, with younger students. “Being among young people is really invigorating,” says Mr Gates. At “pizza and a slice of future”, a discussion group about AI with pizza served halfway through, one of the topics was whether a lifespan of 200 or 250 years would be desirable. “The 20-year-olds were enthusiastic,” he reflects, but those in their 70s and 80s “had some reservations”, he chuckles.
When I saw this, I thought it was a downpayment on heaven. Being in community, attending lectures and discussion groups, surrounded by young people … oh man … what a fantastic way to spend your life’s teatime.
I heard another example from the UK. Our church used to run a day centre for the elderly. I heard of a similar day centre that had combined with a toddler group. So instead of the elderly looking at each across a circle of high-backed chairs, the elderly were looking at each other across a circle of high-backed chairs over a space filled with toddlers doing toddlery things. I can’t imagine how this wouldn’t be fun, perhaps even for all concerned.
Old people are changing. But the picture I have had of them so far in the UK is people on the edge of things, and unbelievably lonely, and deprived of the things that really matter, namely purpose and people. How astonishing and lovely it could be if they were folded back into new forms of extended families and communities; such healing, such wholeness.
Patient revolution needs an intellectual framework and for those of us who are Christians, our understanding of the Christian picture of God and the world can give us one.
You have to work a bit, though. The Bible isn’t an easy book and plenty of it sits uncomfortably with our 21st century cultures. Not the least of the problems is the book of Genesis, which sets up the whole story but definitely does not sit all that well for those of us brought up on the kind of reporting that checks facts, balances opinions, and prizes cool-headed objectivity.
Which is where Biblical scholarship can, at least in theory, help. And perhaps the most refreshing set of studies I’ve come across were written by John H Walton, now emeritus professor at Wheaton College.
Walton comes from the conservative and evangelical wing of things — twenty years at Moody Bible Institute for example –but his take on the ancient literature is refreshing and helpful.
I’ve just read a book co-authored by him about Noah’s flood. Which is a topic frequently avoided in polite company, but he is arguably rehabilitating it. A few points:
It is, in someone’s poignant words, ‘before theology.’ This is how people in that cultural flow learnt who they were and who God was. Abstract, propositional theology had yet to be invented.
It was written in a different cultural flow than the one we inhabit, and written to different conventions.
The author is not ‘describing an event’ but ‘authoritatively interpreting what God was doing’. Genesis’ flood account is ‘a rhetorically shaped account of an ancient flood tradition’. You can’t reconstruct what actually happened from it in the same way you can’t write the story of Guernica from Picasso’s painting of it.
It uses hyperbole. As the authors point out, if I say ‘this suitcase weighs a ton’, I am using hyperbole. People of a literalist cast of mind would wonder if I am lying. But I am not lying. They just haven’t grasped the idiom I’m using. Similarly with cataclysmic events in the Bible. To show their cosmic significance, hyperbole is deployed. If the flood really happened, it was not universal, but in the Genesis interpretation, it is described in universal terms so that we see its cosmic significance.
The big picture it paints is of
God bringing order to chaos, so that the whole of creation becomes his dwelling-place
Death as God’s judgement on sin, sometimes through catastrophe, sometimes through old age, but always and everywhere, ‘death reigns’, with sorrow and sadness always following.
But that’s the backing music. The melody is that God reigns even more supremely through kindness and mercy, in and through his care for his people, who are themselves (or are supposed to be) order-bringers and enjoyers of his company.
So, we can see a picture of God that one day involves
God’s whole creation re-formed as his dwelling place
Humans, in relationship with him, working towards that final destination
Not, it is true, walking a straight line.
Us happy to be slow in that work, not seeing its beginning or forcing its end, but fulfilling our bit of the story.
Looking at the news, you have to close your eyes and ears a bit at the moment. But there’s a longer view. As I write it is almost a quarter of a century since 1990. Here’s some of what I came across this week. In that quarter-century:
Measured poverty in the two largest countries in the world has declined from 60% of the population in India and 50% of the population in China to 2% in India and O.something % in China 1
Solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy have (from almost nothing) joined with hydro (which is much older) to make a third of the world’s electricity generation and a seventh of the world’s total energy use. 2
The UK economy has grown by 80% and its carbon dioxide output has halved.3
This year (2024) of elections has seen setbacks for those with autocratic instincts in India and Poland, for example, and the ANC in South Africa has been given a good shake and told to swap its self-enrichment and go back to the national enrichment project in the days of Mandela — democracy working.
A local charity, the Romsey Mill here in Cambridge, has altered the lives of single mums, autistic teenagers, pre-schoolers, and teens, giving them self-confidence and better life choices and incidentally saving the government a fortune.
It isn’t hard to imagine in the next 25 years, in the UK for example, the mixture of rooftop solar, batteries and electric cars spreading through the nation like double glazing did in the last generation. And just as our forebears build reservoirs in the 1930s that still supply our water today, so we’ll have energy and transport powered by the sun that generations ahead of us, as far down the future as we can see, will no longer have to worry about.
These streams of patient revolution are streams in an ocean full of all kinds of currents. But imagine a Romsey Mill in every town! Imagine the Mill as just one of a swarm, or a hive, of Christian-inspired social transformation initiatives, buzzing through the whole country! Imagine having to go to nowhere and to no-one for the energy to power our lives! Imagine poverty driven back in every place! Imagine reversing the growth of CO2! Patient revolution!
This is a post is about ‘Christian problems’ so it may not be relevant to you, but it is relevant to the theme of ‘slow mission’ or ‘patient revolution’, because the Christian faith is the very essence of a slow-burning, profound revolution in thought and life. (Even allowing for Christianity’s zany twists and turns throught its long history.)
I can’t count how many times I have been encouraged from talks in churches to do the following:
Pray more
Read my Bible more
Introduce others to Jesus and church.
Occasionally there’s a radical addition like
4. Volunteer for things in church
While this is at one level right, at another level it is completely wrong. The really big deal about the Christian faith is the transformed relationships. That is what the letters in the New Testament are mostly concerned with. That’s what the Beatitudes are about, and when Jesus is asked to summarize the law and the prophets, he comes up with love the Lord your God with everything you have and love your neighbour with the same vehemence that you defend, justify and serve yourself.
In other words, if you had a highlights reel of the New Testament, it’s about transforming our relationships.
Marriage ceases to be a power struggle (well, ideally) and become, s a place where each partner denies their natural power-seeking instincts in order to lovingly to make the other partner thrive.
Child rearing becomes a matter of unconditional love rather than performance-related benefits
Employees’ work becomes devotion to Jesus.
Employers have to recognize we’re all the same before God and treat their employees as fellow humans rather than machinery.
This sense of love and equality then spreads out to the poor and sick
In the story of how the Church has got on with this task over the 50 generations since the apostles, you have to edit out quite a lot of stuff, but (I argue) you are still left with a basic framework which is that this happened. The parts of the world tainted by the Christian faith are seriously different from the (diminishing) parts that aren’t. Even a nation like India (less than 5% Christian officially) has been seriously changed by an encounter with Christian thinking. Despite thousands of years of history and an evanescence of philosophical systems, it was only after a brush with Christianity that Dalits were treated as human beings rather than animals, I believe, for example.
And we wouldn’t have modern-sounding and secular-sounding things like human rights without the virus of Christianity having becoming endemic among us. (That is still why some nations see ‘human rights’ as just another way the West is trying to get one over them; they recognize how alien it is.)
So all the more impoverishing, if that’s a word, when Christian devotion is reduced to a few performance-management variables like how much Bible you read each day. I suppose it’s true that Bible reading gets you exposed to the important stuff, but we mustn’t miss the inportant stuff itself. In a world of spin and hype, and a coming world perhaps of AI-fakery, transformed relationships sound through the Universe like a great bell.
The team I am part of took time out this week to talk about rest, stopping, putting work aside–and silence.
One of the things to come out of this for me was that there is a silence where God isn’t–like you are battering on the door but as (C S Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed) all you hear is the further sound of doors beyond being shut and locked. (If you even hear that.)
But there’s also a silence where God is. You might be wanting him to speak. You may have lots of questions. And there’s silence. But it’s a silence where God is, just is, just is here with you. Here with you.
You can jump off from this into further thoughts, all helpful for the patient revolutionary. Perhaps the main one is this: the world doesn’t stop when I stop. Even, my world doesn’t stop when I stop. I can go do something else, or I can do nothing, or whatever I want. I can take delight in things. I can spend time in companiable silence.
For those of us with a Christian bent, this is an expression of faith. The voices that call us to activity, to taking responsibility, are so strident. It’s a statement of faith to say to them, bad luck, I’m not responsible for the Universe, it’s in good hands. I’m checking out, I’m delighting in what I already have. And if just now that’s companiable silence, good.
I saw this article in the current Economist, and I liked it so much that I wanted to share part of it. It was written by an African author called Chigozie Obioma.
I BECAME CURIOUS at a young age, radically so as I grew older. In keeping with Albert Einstein’s dictum that “the important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing,” I exposed myself to every possible idea.
I have studied religious texts from the Bible to the Koran to the Book of Mormon to the tenets of Odinani, the pantheistic religion of Nigeria’s Igbo people. I have read political philosophies from Winston Churchill’s “The River War” to Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”. I have read books considered to be standard-bearers of leftist thinking and those seen as right-wing intellectual staples.
Sometimes I find myself holding several conflicting, incommensurable beliefs, but most often I arrive at a centre—a rich ground that enables me to fully appreciate the complexity of the human condition, to understand the substance of different ideas and why others might hold them. I am forever open to the possibility of changing my mind.
That is why I got such a shock in my first few weeks in America. At an event at the University of Michigan an African-American speaker was hectored and shouted down by a mob. I could not understand; why wouldn’t the audience hear him out? The response I received—that the speaker’s view was “problematic”—would reverberate through the next few months and years. Speakers across various platforms in America were drowned out, attacked and silenced …
…
These conflicting actions and reactions, I think, are a result of a societal malaise that has been developing in the past decade or so: radical incuriosity. It is, in essence, the fear of ideas.
Obioma then goes on to describe the importance of what he calls ‘provisional thinking’: a capacious open-mindedness, encompassing both the moral and the political, in which one’s assumptions can constantly shift, unattached to ideology or dogma. And arrives at a natural resting place for him, namely agnosticism.
This is logical and I warmed so much to what he wrote. But I wonder if agnocisim itself is also a little flimsy as a resting-place for your soul. I may be wrong. But if you are open to everything, on what do you base any judgements you make? What values can you hold that are not themselves potentially valueless? I struggle to understand how being agnostic about everything (if that is what is being argued) can enable you to form judgements about anything? Presumably, better minds than mine, not hard to find, have views on this.
But that is why I like the position of Christ as truth, as he claimed to be. Perhaps with him (and what he said) as the foundation, we are able better to judge the value and utility of multiple different political and moral viewpoints? At least we have somewhere to start.
And that starting point, Christ himself, was and is iconoclastic, turning some truths upside down, reshaping others, fulfilling others, just like Truth would if ever, like some icebreaker, it started ploughing through the frigid accumulation of our reasonings. Hmmm..
Just read a fascinating book called ‘Dopamine Nation’ by Dr Anna Lembke: ‘Why our addiction to pleasure is causing us pain’. It’s not clear what faith Dr Lembke has, if any, but I was struck by how Christiany, how committed to patient revolution, were some of her remedies. (Some other reviewers really hate the book for this.)
First, the problem. Dopamine, a happy hormone, is what we give ourselves when we reward ourselves, and evolved to keep us doing good things that make us healthy.
The problem is that our society is awash with unhealthy ways of giving ourselves a squirt of dopamine– rewarding us for unhealthy behaviours. So, for example, sugary and fat-laden foods; swiping on your phone; recreational drugs; shopping; opening a bottle; a long list of things we compulsively do but which aren’t that good for us.
Worse, our body adjusts to its squirts of dopamine. We come to need more reward to get the same feeling. We feel scratchy and irritated if we’re not doing whatever gives us our dopamine rush, and so we go back to it to get some more. So we spiral into addiction. Among the most compelling parts of the book are stories of her own addiction (she mentions an obsession with vampire romances) that are sobering because they show any of us can go there — if not with vampire romances, with something else.
The people who make it to Dr Lembke’s office are seriously addicted to lots of things. But her solutions are fascinating. They include:
Making it difficult to do the thing you’ve been doing. She got rid of her Kindle, by which she’d been loading up on free books with no-one watching. A person troubled with sex-addiction had to root out all the triggers from his life, some of which were not triggers for other people. This is strikingly like the Bible’s command to ‘flee’ sexual immorality; get out of there.
Quit, and endure the deep unpleasantness that comes from quitting. It will pass.
Develop a habit of radical honesty. Again, this echoes scripture, ‘confess your sins to one another’.
What do you get back out of this? A happy life, untroubled by shame or secrets, not plagued with anxiety, back among the humans.
Plenty of people have issues with this book, but as someone starting from no-where, I enjoyed it.
Slow food is about seasonal ingredients, patiently nurtured, carefully prepared, lovingly cooked.
