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.
It’s striking what is, and isn’t, emphasized when St Paul decides what to write in his short letters to churches. There isn’t much about fame, achievement or celebrity; nothing about goals and milestones. Not much that I can see about strategy, or mobilisation, or changing the world.
Quite a lot about relationships, though, about families, about employers and employees (well, slaves and slave-owners). It reminds me of the story of the founder of a world-wide Christian charity. Apparently there are two biographies about him. There’s the corporate biography, country after country entered, cash-flow problems addressed, new initiatives started, new staff hired, horizons falling away as the ministry soars, as it were, into the sky.
Then there’s the second biography, written by the daughter about a father who was never home.
It’s easy to criticise someone second-hand, and to simplify a complex thing to make a point. Big parts of Christian discipleship are getting our attitudes and our close relationships right. That’s a place to put effort and is a true arena of service. It’s also super-revolutionary, overturning priorities. The big is small; the small is big.
Somerset House (part of which is now part of King’s College; and my old friend Waterloo Bridge). Photo by Sam Quek on Unsplash
I’ve been slightly ambushed by the past in the past few months.
We recently had a 40th (actually 41st for complicated reasons) anniversary reunion of my time in college. So all of us who were once fresh young graduates, world at our feet, are now the seasoned and greyed end-of-career types talking about retirement and needing reading glasses–with all our working and adult life placed between these two milestones.
I met a lot of people for the first time, former fellow students. One was a High Court Judge. One had shared a flat with Tim Berners-Lee and thought at the time that his web invention wasn’t all that good. One sold off zombie companies for a living and made hundreds redundant with a single phone call.
It was a lovely day. Wandering around beforehand (King’s College is on the river Thames in London, by Waterloo Bridge, still the most breathtaking location), I thought London was less grimy, all the shops had changed, it was a beautiful city, a wonderful place to be a student. I don’t remember it being quite so difficult to walk along the Strand without getting breathless.
We’ve also lost a close relative through death in recent months and one side effect of that has been sorting through his old things. Someone had bought him an archive of the day’s newspaper (the Daily Telegraph as it happened) that was published on his birthday every day of his life. It showed the newly minted leader of the opposition, Margaret Thatcher, receiving 51 roses for her 51st birthday from the Young Conservatives in the 1970s. Flip through the pages and you find the 80-something Margaret Thatcher, with her son and his wife. She barely seemed to know what was going on.
Reading the books on his bookshelf I found a history of the Lyons teashop family, its entrepreneurial rise, its dramatic post-war fall. The Strand in London has some relics of it still (the Strand Palace Hotel for example), and back when I was a student, a Wimpy Bar, another Lyons innovation, soon to be eaten in turn by the fast-growing McDonald’s.
Time like an ever-flowing stream bears all its sons away. Waterloo Bridge and the Strand remain for a time. Lyons Teashops and Corner Houses and hotels pass away. We all age and curl and fall. How important to live for things bigger and longer-lasting than our lives.
Just finished Louise Perry’s book The Case against the Sexual Revolution, which was so informative and eye-opening, even if it isn’t stuff that finds its way into my normal diet. Perry is a journalist and writer, raised in all the tropes of Western sexual culture, but turning away from them. I think broadly her argument is that:
Technology and culture change (easy divorce, the pill, abortion) have freed up women’s sexual choices
That freedom, in the cultural context that evolved with it, hasn’t served them at all well
The forces of evolution are much stronger in our make-up than new social constructs; men and women view and treat sex differently
It’s better to rely on structures that have worked OK in the past (monogamy) than speculate on or explore options that are theoretically possible but have not, across the whole of society, actually worked.
A former volunteer in a rape crisis centre, she’s very dismissive of the figleaf of ‘consent’, which is deployed whenever freedom to love is raised. Her problem? It doesn’t work:
[Out of ‘Me Too’ came stories of] a lot of women who described sexual encounters that were technically consensual but nevertheless left them feeling terrible because they were being asked to treat as meaningless something that they felt to be meaningful.
I’m anxious not to quote her too much, lest in my clumsy hands I make her say things she doesn’t say or (more likely) say things without her elegeance and erudition. As a writer she prefers the rapier to the halberd.
Nor does she start from an a priori conservative position (I think) ; more from observation and evidence of how much damage (to both women and men) the prevailing sexual culture is creating. The ones who suffer least are the high-status men; the ones who suffer most, young women. I wish I could quote her better and I wish even more than people would read her book.
It is, finally, a manifesto for slow too. Here’s a taster of her stuff, from near the end of the book:
Consent workshops are mostly useless…
The category of people most likely to become victims of [sexually aggressive] men are young women aged about thirteen to twenty-five. All girls and women, but particularly those in this age category, should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: it’s usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing.
Get drunk or high in private and with female friends rather than in public or in mixed company.
Don’t use dating apps. Mutual friends can vet histories and punish bad behaviour. Dating apps can’t.
Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up.
Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children – not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb
I’ve been enjoying over the summer exploring the brain of former Archbishop. and continuing New Testament scholar, Rowan Williams, not least because I can now read his books for free, ish, on my phone, thanks to the wonderful perlego.com subscription service.
Something he said got me going, though. He described how becoming a Christian made his perspective wider, broadened his view. I really like that idea But how so?
I thought of some examples:
Science is the pursuit of God’s utter ingeniousness. Science is great at ‘how’ and rubbish at ‘why’. But if the ‘why’ is settled, and especially if it’s settled in the idea of a loving God not able to keep his goodness to himself, and creating a universe, then science becomes a rather joyous romp in a playground. Wider, deeper and higher we can go, into the crannies of God’s genius.
Art is for all humanity. Christ is Lord of culture. That is really something. This does not doom us to endlessly paint Biblical scenes, nor only to write theology. So much of the Christian faith is attitudes: set yourself to love God and neighbour, pick up your paintbrush, and see what happens. Wider, deeper, funner, lovelier. And because everyone is in the image of God, everyone is capable of artistry.
The common good. We don’t need to resort to utilitarian arguments to care for the earth or humanity. We have, through the unrolling story of God-with-people, a context of individual, communal, global, and universal thriving. When we set ourselves with that perspective, we can have confidence that we are working with grain of the Universe, whatever our hands find to do. Wider, more imaginative, more creative.
Christ is the Lord of Time. The proper Time-lord. What does this mean? We don’t have to rush. Let’s do stuff well. Let’s not do other stuff. And let’s be OK with failing.
All will be summed up in Christ. So he’s taking the whole ‘completeness’ thing on his own shoulders. That frees us to be partial, incomplete, which frees us to attempt big things, because the final outcome rests just with us following our sense of his leading.
I am free to be my playful self, because I’m standing on somewhere solid and safe. And beause I’m loved. How lovely.
I’m enjoying the substack of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is a scholar of autocracy and is writing with a wide knowledge and perspective on a subject that can seem very gloomy.
But here’s an upbeat assessment from her:
A growing number of countries are not just turning back autocracy but are also making their reborn democracies more robust. V-Dem Institute’s 2023 Democracy Report, “Defiance in the Face of Autocratization,” analyzes eight cases of countries (Bolivia and Slovenia among them) that have made a “U-turn” from autocracy and now qualify as democracies. Since that report appeared we also had the big victory of democratic forces over the far right in Poland (October 2023), and the successful unity play of the French left against a National Rally victory (June 2024).
Nonviolent mass protest remains among the most important ways to show our support for democracy in situations of creeping authoritarianism; to protest injustices and advocate for policy reforms; and, in autocracies, to show the world the government does not speak for us.
She goes on:
What they all share is a validation of nonviolent protest –people coming together in public spaces to express dissent—as a way of doing politics or simply acting on an inner conviction that what is going on in their societies is wrong and they can no longer stay silent.
Depending on the country, non-violent mass protest can be dangerous. But she quotes Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law:
History in the making. We have no idea whether are in the beginning, middle or end of it. But we are sure that history will mark what you have done as something magnificent. History will treat you well. No matter what will happen, your effort is not going in vain.”
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.
Slow food is about seasonal ingredients, patiently nurtured, carefully prepared, lovingly cooked.
