Class

It's been awhile since I've blogged – I have to do obligatory blogging for my course which is infinitely more intellectual than my contributions here, so that tends to take away all of my blogging brainpower! However, over the past few weeks, a certain issue has cropped up a number of times – in class, and then the other the weekend, in church.

The issue at hand is that of class. For the past two weeks or so, we have what can happen when the working and middle classes come together united against a common enemy – the Ben Ali family fled unceremoniously from Tunisia to Saudi Arabia whilst Mubarak was hounded out of office by the Egyptian people. Power to the people! Inspiration for other nations in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa who had previously perhaps never considered the possibility that their corrupt and oppressive leaders could be forced out of office – or forced to mend their ways. But the crucial thing which my lecturer reminded a class of ours was that these revolutions have happened because the working and middle classes came together. Because the poor were not standing alone. That's when real change happens.

But the big problem is that, apart from these rare occasions when people across the class spectrum are so fed up with their leaders that they all have equal amounts of motivation to raise their voices in opposition, societies often remain divided by class. Each class has little understanding of the other – which is not surprising as the middle and working classes rarely come into contact. In Britain the concept of class has become rather complicated and muddied over the past few decades, with lines being nowhere near as clear as they used to be, but if we think of middle-class as representing graduate professionals and working class as those in the more traditional blue-collar jobs or jobs paid the minimum wage, there is still a pretty clear division.

Take Birmingham for example, the middle classes live in areas like Edgbaston and the working classes are in places like Weoly Castle and Handsworth. And as they live in separate areas, their children go to separate schools. So children grow up having friends who are all from similar backgrounds to themselves and with parents who do similar types of jobs. When mums take their babies and toddlers to playgroup or nursery – they meet other mums who are likely to be from their area – and a similar background. When we go to work, we are surrounded by people of similar qualifications and backgrounds to us, (apart from our bosses who are perhaps are a bit more qualified or maybe have more experience, and are therefore, earning more money).

It's quite easy to go through life now without ever having any meaningful interaction with somebody outside of our own class or background. In fact, is actually hard to cross those lines and find a way of building a meaningful relationships with somebody of a different class or background. Because the fact is – when would we meet? Under what circumstances? And how? The working class person might be paid by the middle-class person to do a job, or managed by them at work, or serve them in a shop. The middle-class person might treat a working-class person in hospital, provide legal services for them or produce the television programs they watch. But when do they sit down side-by-side, on an equal level, and share their problems and exchange ideas?

So people grow up bereft of personal experience and understanding of those from a different class – and ultimately have their perceptions shaped by stereotypes or by the media. Going by media stereotypes, all benefit claimants are scroungers and lazy. All bankers are greedy and elitist. I guess if you've never met somebody who claims benefits or is on a low-income or if you've never met a banker or somebody who is on a high income, the stereotypes are all you have to go on. And it can become quite intimidating, trying to break through that class barrier and just have a normal relationship as you would with somebody from your own kind of background.

All of this makes me a bit uneasy. A class ridden society, a society which is very divided by wealth, is not an attractive society. I grew up in a working-class area, surrounded by "blue-collar" working families, benefit claimants and people on low incomes. But I got a scholarship to go to a private, fee paying secondary school, surrounded by the children of university lecturers, international businessmen, doctors and lawyers. At the time, I didn't really feel like I belonged in either of the classes – I didn't like being in the position I was in and to be honest, high school was not a rosy period that I look back on with any amount of fondness. But I am grateful for one thing – that I got to know people from different backgrounds. That I was able to relate to and find friendship with those from different classes.

But how different things are now. Going to university, I could count on one hand the number of people I met who were from working-class backgrounds. And after university, as I joined the yuppy ranks, I found that the only connections I had with working class people were those from my childhood, the people who I visit when I go home to see my parents. There are a few friends from Kenya who are working class who I stay in touch with but other than that, that's it. How depressing! I'm officially in the middle-class bubble! And I don't know how to burst it – how to get beyond it.

Which brings me to a topic my pastor was speaking about last week. He made the rather controversial statement that the church in this country is a bastion of the middle classes. Sadly – I think he's right. Especially in the cities you find huge churches full of professionals with very large turnovers – with poorer, smaller churches struggling to keep going in areas of high social deprivation. And class isn't the only divider. In a city like Birmingham with a huge diversity of nationalities and cultures, you find churches which are overwhelmingly majority black or overwhelmingly majority white with very little integration. How did this happen? How did we come so far from the church in Acts 3 where…

“All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.”

I hadn’t thought about this before but when it talks about all the believers, this wasn't just 12 disciples being referred to here. This was thousands of people. Thousands of people from all over the world, sharing everything and being "one in heart and mind." That sounds like an amazing community. An absolutely radical community. It was no wonder they got a bit of a reputation as Christianity spread throughout Greece and Italy!

I don't like just writing critiques on situations. One of the things which has frustrated me about my course is that there is so much to say about what has gone wrong, about bad development practice – in comparison to the small amount of reflection on what has been done right, and what is going well. One thing that I really love about my church is its diversity…there’s so many different backgrounds there – and we literally come from all over the world. Yet we are still a little community – being in each others lives. If you look around there are some really inspiring churches, churches who love people where they’re at, breaking down barriers instead of putting them up.

The Church under the Tree is a church run by a guy who sells welding supplies during the week. The church come together in a local park…where they worship God together, learn together, grow together, and support each other. Have a closer look here… http://vimeo.com/9836915.

In the UK there’s a ton of organisations trying to help build a church which is willing to go and be light within the community – Community Mission, Love is Verb, Livability…the list goes on.

And it's so exciting!

Because I guess if we are following Jesus, following how he lived, the church should be the breaker of the class bubble. Our churches shouldn't be bastions of a certain type of class, or certain group or race of people, but a melting pot of classes and nationalities. In a country like Britain, where our Prime Minister tells us that multiculturalism has failed, the church can be a place where he is proven to be wrong. Not just in that you have different types of people turning up to a Sunday service once a week, but that you have a whole variety of people sharing their lives with each other, supporting each other, being a strength and encouragement to each other. Community like that is an awesome signpost to an even more awesome God!

Labels of Conservative, Liberal, socialist become irrelevant … if we’re Christians, it would seem logical that our actions and values be inspired primarily by Jesus, rather Karl Marx, or Adam Smith or Margaret Thatcher! Working, middle, upper class - surely we cannot be divided by some having less money than others, by some people having read more books, by people having jobs which use different skills, by having parents of different backgrounds...when we are ONE in Christ. My church is going to be taking a step beyond its building and finding ways of building bridges with the community, finding out what the challenges are that people are facing and then figuring out what we as a Christian community can do to help. I think being prepared to find out where people are at is a good first step and I’m glad the church is taking it.

But I still have questions…how, practically speaking, can the church in this country become less segregated in terms of class and wealth? How can we reflect the kind of love Jesus practised when he reached out to those on the edges of society? Do some of us middle class people need to literally move ourselves into poorer areas so we live our daily lives alongside more working class people? If I were to move to a poor country should I move into a slum or a poor area to share my life with the people of those areas? Is that radical to suggest that? Should it be considered radical to suggest that? Am I just dreaming up this whole issue? Genuine questions…if you have ideas…please put them out there!

You give and take away...my heart will choose to say...Lord blessed be your name

i struggle with blogging. I don't normally blog...i started one purely because I was doing some work abroad in Kenya and didn't have the time, money (or bandwidth!) to send lots of emails home with updates on how things were going. Then, on coming home, I tended to just write when I heard about something that really piqued my curiosity or infuriated me for some reason. It became a way of organising my thoughts...more for my own cathartic purposes than for anything else.

This week i've had a bit of a milestone: I have been given a diagnosis of a condition called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). It falls into the ME family which is basically a family of conditions for which there is no defining diagnostic test and for which there is no cure. On a basic level, sufferers get very fatigued and experience a lot of pain...thus impacting their lives quite significantly. I have had diagnoses before - fibromyalgia was the one which really stuck for quite some time until a consultant told me that couldn't possibly be the case. To be honest, I'm not really bothered about the label because it doesn't make any difference to my everyday life or the symptoms I experience. I guess with a thing like CFS though it will make it easier to explain things to the relevant people at university and when I get a job. It’s good that it’s also a google-able term so when I tell people I’m feeling and tired and need to go home, they’ll know I’m not just a spoil sport!

Over the past few months my health has deteriorated - at times my housemate has had to lift me out of bed in the mornings and sometimes im so tired it feels like a huge effort to even get words out in a conversation. Waking up feels like a fight to come up for air when you've been swimming. Except that someone has also hit you round the head with a sledgehammer and been punching you all over your body. And you feel hungover. And this is despite turning the lights out at 11pm and waking up at 8.30am.

I didn't understand really what the term "mental strength" meant until the past 4 months...but now I'm starting to get it. Life has become a fight. It's a fight to wake up. It's a fight to get vertical. It's a fight to get to class. It's a fight to stay awake. It's a fight to socialise. It's a fight to pray. Everything is a battle and when you're battling all day...it's pretty draining. You need a lot of stamina to keep going! And you need stamina to not let the fight consume you. I am not my illness. I am not my fatigue...there is more to me than that. But at the same time, I do feel like I've joined this community of people that I never really noticed very much before. Recently the government announced its spending cuts which included ending the mobility allowance for disabled people in residential care. Ever since my pain has progressed to the point of me having to have special equipment to do my work and the fatigue has progressed to the point where I need either my own car or a lift to get around, I've started to take more of an interest in some of the stories which hit the headlines about disabled people. I really feel for the people who won’t be able to get out now because of that cut. If you have severe physical disability it's like being a prisoner in your own body – so to be denied the chance to get out of the house must be devastating. I remember sharing a link on Facebook where a disabled person talked about that particular cut... I got to comment of “yawn!” from a friend... and I was surprised at my reaction. I was furious. It nearly made me cry. It felt like someone was mocking “my" people!

But at the same time, I have to fight to conquor the desire to wallow in my own situation. To conquor the jealousy. When I look at those who are my age and my contemporaries...they work demanding jobs with long hours and lots of pressure, they are climbing the career ladder, they are partying at weekends, they are going out and meeting people, they are leading ministries in churches and seeing lives changed. And before I know it I've turned into this big ball of green envy, salivating over the life I would like to live!

And I start to ask myself - how are you going to handle this because this is your life and like it or not, it's the only one you've got. I don't want people's pity - of that I'm sure. Once a lady I know came over to me and greeted me by saying "poor Becky, you always look so ill." I'm not sure which was worse - the pity or the you always look so ill bit! One thing I know for certain though. I'm not just going to curl up in a ball and let this take over. Yes I may not be able to stay out until 2am but I can still go out for at least a little while. Yes I may not be able to study for 10 hours solid but I can study for a little while. Yes I may not be able to go on a walk in the Dales - but at least I can take a little walk [and have a drink at a pub whilst everybody else is sweating away!] Yes I may not be able to play football but at least I can watch it and get excited when Utd stuff Chelsea! Yes I may not be able to have my dream job but I can still make a difference in peoples lives in whatever job I end up doing.

I do get worried about what people think. Colleagues, friends, family, the doctor... that I'm a flake out, a fake, a kill joy, a drain, a downer, that I'm ignoring them...But someone reminded me that the person whose opinion counts the most is God’s. I'm a member of the worship team at church and a few weeks ago we took a look at what the Bible says about who we are as Christians. Some of the things we realized we could say were that:

• belong with God. I am important to him. I benefit from his love, attention, care and protection. He is thinking of me, working in me and through me and plans for me.
• I am a child of God, his heir and co-heirs with Christ
• I am precious, honoured, glorious in Christ! I am not a mistake, but designed by God for his pleasure
• I am competent and strong in Christ, gifted for a special function and involved in God’s great purposes. We are citizens of heaven!

I think my health is something I very much took for granted. Before I broke my ankle, I took for granted the fact that I could take free kicks in football, smash a backhand in tennis and doodle on the guitar for three hours at a time. Even when those things went, I still took it for granted that I could go out with friends every night of the week and go after the career I wanted to do.

But the fact is that my health is a gift -- like every good thing, good health is a gift from God. There's a song which says “you give and take away, you give and take away, my heart will choose to say, Lord blessed be your name.” Every day I pray for healing. I did give up for while, but a friend of mine who has had a bit of experience in the area of ill health himself, encouraged me to keep praying. So every day I pray for healing and ask God to restore my physical strength. But at the same time, my heart has to make a choice – am I going to praise God in the meantime or am I going to resent him and push him away? It is a conscious choice that you have to make I think. And a choice that you have to keep on making on a daily basis. To be honest, I feel much happier when I am praising God -- when I delight in him, I feel at my strongest. I'm a Christian hedonist! But despite this, there is such a temptation to wallow in the pain, in the fatigue, in the loneliness, in the self-pity. So I think it has to be a daily choice, a daily decision, daily vow to love and serve him... which is renewed consciously. The fact is there are lots of people in the world who are a lot worse off than me. I work in a sector which reminds me of that every day. Loving God means loving others...which means I’m not focussing on my own situation 24/7...which is actually good for my health!

I know the choices I should be making. All the same...its not always easy to make the right choices.

Passion

I have been mulling something over which I read in the Old Testament and thought I’d share.

I know you’re not supposed to bring your work home...but this week I was actually pretty glad to have had a chance to do something at work which really hit home – and stuck in my head. I’ve been preparing a talk on the theme of legacy and was listening to a sermon about Nehemiah. Nehemiah was a Jew who was serving in the court of Artaxerxes, the Persian King, as his cupbearer. The Jews were in exile, apart from a select few who had made the 900 mile, 4 month trek back to Jerusalem and started building their houses there. But the temple remained destroyed and the wall of Jerusalem in ruins. When Nehemiah was told this by someone who’d just got back from Jerusalem he reacted pretty strongly to the news – he was very upset and mourned and fasted and prayed. For 4 months! Then he went to ask the King if he could go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple – and he asked for help to get the materials to do it! And as you read on through the book, the rest is history. A legacy of a city rebuilt, even in the face of opposition and intimidation.

I was thinking of my reactions to bad news and comparing them to Nehemiah’s. We’re similar in that he mourned and I often cry or feel like crying when I hear bad news. But actually, we’re not the same when it comes to mourning. Because when I cry, I more often than not cry for myself – whilst he was crying for others, for Jerusalem. The preacher speaking said in his sermon that if we had two bottles – one for the tears we cry for ourselves, and the other for the tears that we cry for others – the former would likely be to the fullest bottle by the ends of our lives. But praying and fasting as an automatic reaction? I’m more likely to be trying to find ways of making the situation better, thinking about what I can do to solve things and getting stressed about it all. But his knee jerk reaction was – turn to God. Acknowledge his greatness and goodness, plead with him...and for quite some time. 4 months in fact. As it wasn’t until 4 months later that he asked the King if he could go back to Jerusalem.

One thing was clear though. Nehemiah was a passionate man. No one reacts in that way if they don’t feel strongly about something. I have gotten frustrated with myself in the past for feeling strongly about things, for being passionate, for caring about things and people until it seems to hurt. It’s very inconvenient as you end up getting caught up in issues and with people when it would have been so much easier to bury your head in the sand and keep quiet! But I guess there is a good side to passion...it isn’t just a feeling. If it’s for the right thing or person – then it’s an action...and eventually...a legacy. No one will have a legacy if they don’t have a passion. And the nature of that legacy will depend on the object of that passion.

I think everyone is very passionate about at least one thing. Ourselves. I am passionate about ME! We love ourselves very much and are very passionate about the way we look, the careers we secure for ourselves, the way other people think about us and the image we project. The problem is if the only passion is me then that’s a misdirected passion. Nehemiah’s passion was God - as his knee jerk reaction was to pray and fast. God was the first person he turned to. I think that says a lot for how much he loved and trusted God. If something really great happens or if something really bad happens – the person we feel like turning to first, I would have thought, is one of the people whom we love the most. It’s like it’s something out of our control – it’s a gut reaction. My mum, my best friend or my sisters are my knee jerk reaction I think. But what if I were to reach for God first, rather than reach for a person?

Nehemiah’s passion was also others as he was really moved by the situation in Jerusalem. I was trying to think of the last times I’d been deeply moved, when my emotions had been in upheaval, when I’d felt very sad. Again, most of the situations were rather me-orientated, with my own personal experience dominating in the immediate past. However, I know the earthquake in Haiti definitely moved me, particularly as I had to read through updates and stories at work a lot during January so I was prepared to speak to the media – but I don’t think I shed any actual tears over the hundreds of thousands of people, the hundreds of thousands of souls that were lost on that awful day. I know I can be moved – I’m an emotional person. But I need to be moved, to be passionate about more than just myself. God needs to be my passion, he needs to be the one that stirs something inside of me, and stirs me to feel more for those around me – and those beyond the borders of my own immediate world. I wish God was my passion more because if he were, I wouldn’t get so unnecessarily passionate about all the things that don’t really matter. And believe me, its easy to get upset about things which don’t matter. Phone companies who leave you on hold for ages, someone taking a long time in the queue at Tesco, someone having continuous phone conversations on the train, crying children on public transport...just some of the things I have been unnecessarily annoyed about in the last 5 days alone! Imagine being more passionate about these things than I am about the need to sort out my own sin?!

Nehemiah prayed, mourned and fasted. And he waited on God for four months. But then he actually did something. He went to the King and asked for permission to go to Jerusalem – and then went and rebuilt the wall. So his passion turned into action. So if I’m going to say I’m passionate about Christ and then have a life that is completely unreflective of that, who am I trying to kid?! If we think God’s given us a passion for something or some people – for kids work, for the poor, for music, for mission, for social justice, for hospitality...what ever it is that really gets you...then that means you actually go and do that thing. You pray for that thing, for that person, for those people. Otherwise its just words. It’s just a pointless feeling of no benefit to anyone else. So if you’re passionate about doing something – then do it..and if you’re physically can’t do...pray! If you’re passionate about a group of people – then be amongst them, serve them, pray for them.

And don’t be scared of showing it. Having a passion for others means taking a risk. It will probably mean hurt and disappointment at some point along the road. But that passion for others is made possible by a passion for Christ. As there’s no risk there.

Big churches and little churches

When I was growing up, I used to go to a small church. The church meets in a school and its made up of around 20 people, maybe more if they're at absolute capacity. Every couple of months they'd do a special event and people used to get excited when more than the average 20 would turn up for the service. "We had 50 show up" was a typical comment reflecting the feeling that the event had been a success because it had been well attended. At the time I used to really wonder whether there was any point in them continuing with such a small number of people - they may as well pack up and join a church of a decent size, with decent music, and more young people.

But on recent reflection, I think I was wrong to have considered smallness a bad thing. And I think the church leaders were wrong to be measuring the "success" of their church by the numbers of seats filled on Sundays or at special events. Because looking at the Christian communities in the New Testament, I think my old church's small "togetherness" which has been nurtured over years of a small group of people meeting together to worship God and support each other is pretty close to the types of things the Bible teaches about a church community.

I was listening to a talk on small group togetherness - so many things came out of it which made me think..and some of the things I really don't want to forget so I'm going to write them down. One of them was that church is so much more than a Sunday worship service and a mid week meeting. There are some churches which attract thousands of people - Hillsong in London, Assemblies of God in Bradford, Renewal Christian Centre in Solihull, Hope City in Sheffield...they literally have thousands of people streaming through the doors every Sunday. Young people, people who you normally wouldn't expect to see in church. At these churches you can expect a service which has the same level of production as a well produced West End show -they have all the components...a theatre like venue with a large stage at the front, a highly professional band with amazingly talented and inspiring singers and musicians playing songs which are easy to pick up and sing along to and have lyrics which move you, a Pastor or group of Pastors who are famous for their teaching or for their inspirational example or presence, a large congregation. But the thing is - a church can have all these things and still be in terrible shape. Because Church is more than having a brilliant and uplifting experience once a week.

I'm not saying that all large churches are little more than the producers of great shows - it is a great thing to have a gifted worship team who can really lead people into the presence of God, a Pastor who can teach what God is saying in the Bible clearly and in a way that hits home...and to be honest that kind of service can be an incredible boost once in a while...but these aren't the sole marks of a healthy, thriving church. If you dig a bit deeper into the lives of these large churches, the real mark of their health and their pursuing God's heart can be seen in the way they equip their members to live out their Christian lives 24/7, in their neighbourhoods, families and communities and how much people meet together in smaller groups to encourage each other, to allow the Holy Spirit to work through them and learn more from each other. Hebrews 3 talks about encouraging each other daily, Ephesians 4 talks about bearing with one another in love, about being joined and held together by every supporting ligament and the way Pastors and teachers prepare us for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up (so its the body of Christ which builds itself up - with some equipping from the pastors.) And this is the just the start...there's loads of stuff about how churches which live out community that comes from Christ look in practical, real life.

In a church of 20, the church is a small group in itself! Everybody knows everyone - it's pretty hard to sneak out of the back of the church when you make up 5 or 10% of the congregation! Anonymity isn't really an option! The thing is, if you see the same small group of people in your church often enough, if you pray together and wait on the Holy Spirit together, if you put yourself in a setting where you end up talking to them about life, about God, about the world, your experiences, problems...that kind of bearing with each other in love and supporting each other like ligaments starts to become a feature of your relationships with those people - and therefore of your church.

It's pretty impossible to nurture relationships like this with loads of people - there isn't the time nor the energy for it...but is it better to have lots of superficial "hi hi" relationships with loads of people who you see on a Sunday morning, or to spend some time working on a few deep ones where "hi" won't really cut it, where you check in with that person if you don't hear from them in a week, where you can enquire after the health of their soul and not feel like you're being intrusive, where you can be a support and allow yourself to be supported. To be honest, the idea of having vulnerable "talk", conversations of depth with a small group of people from my church on a regular basis has a lot of things which would put me off - I'd need to invest time and energy and commitment, I'd need to give up some Facebook time to make time for the people, I'd have to open up about my weaknesses and the things that make me angry, my faith would start to take on a corporate as well as an individual characteristic, people might tell me to my face when I do bad things or criticise some of my decisions or behaviour!...and I'd have to get over my judgemental, proud self and deal with people who are different to me. Who I perhaps would not normally choose to spend time with.

But then I think this kind of talk, this kind of support network is needed. We actually pay people (professional counsellors) to listen to us and talk to us. With a counsellor its great as you know you have their undivided attention for at least an hour, that they are totally focussed on you, that they won't answer their phone half way through the conversation and ditch you, that they won't just wait for their turn to speak, that they won't judge you for telling them the truth about what you are thinking or what you've done. There are some problems which most definately need counsellors...need therapy specific techniques...some deep rooted, long lasting hurts and issues which need a specialised "talker" to have some quality conversation to bring them out and help healing. But maybe also, us as small groups of Christians in our churches, could improve the nature of our talk - so that we don't have to turn to a stranger for support.

I guess the founding principle of all this would be the love and acceptance and strength we have in Christ. With him as a foundation, making us whole...it enables us then to seek him out in the context of a group of Christian friends...and to allow them to speak into our lives...and into our faith. In Ephesians 4 it says that "from him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work."

I guess there's a place for Big Churches and Little churches. But I think if the big churches want to be more than an impressive worship service and a mid week prayer meeting or bible study, there needs to be lots of little churches amongst them, building each other up and growing in love.