Launching Groundwork

Having been some months in preparation, I'm pleased to announce that we're launching Groundwork. It's a training network that helps churches to ground their members in the gospel and equip them for the work of the ordinary Christian life. This 'ordinary Christian life' is distinctive: we make the teaching about our God and Saviour attractive as we lead lives of love for Jesus, his people, and his world.

So it's doing something very different from the Bible colleges. Whereas they're trying to train leaders to work for churches, we're trying to train everyone in the churches to live more like Jesus. That is, we want to help the churches do what they're already doing.

Anyway, if you're interested, you can check out the website and download the prospectus from there.

Justice, equality, and grace (Part 2)

I said before that fairness doesn't equal sameness. We treat people differently according to their needs, and according to circumstances.

That is, as circumstances change, so do the possible ways we can concretely love people. For example, a first child will inevitably get more attention at the outset than any subsequent children, but the subsequent children will benefit from better parenting. We might not be in a financial position to pay for music lessons for one child, but later on we are and so that possibility opens up.

And this leads me to my second observation: we are culturally addicted to the notion of entitlement, rather than grace. If as parents we insist on doing exactly the same thing for each child (the same baby book, the same birthday parties, the same number of new outfits, the same hours of help with long division), then we have confused entitlement and grace, and we will train our children to stand for their 'rights' which are no rights at all.

That is, we have a responsibility to move our children from being completely dependent on us to being responsible for themselves over a period of twenty-odd years. This will include things like clothing, feeding, housing, cuddling, and educating. But along the way, there are many things which we will do not out of obligation, but out of grace. Birthday parties, for example, are not needs that we fulfil out of obligation; they are gifts we give out of grace.

Let's say that one morning I take Jack to the park while his sister stays home reading. An ice-cream van pulls up at the park, and Jack and I get an ice-cream. I don't get anything for Lucy or her mum — they're not there.

Now, we can imagine Lucy hearing about the ice-cream and saying, "That's not fair! I want an ice-cream!" Obviously she has something to learn about rejoicing in the joy of others, but more than that, her argument is flawed. Fairness does not mean sameness, and in any case, getting an ice-cream is not a question of justice. Jack and I had no right to our ice-cream — it was not a need to be met — but we received it by grace, with great joy and thanksgiving.

If we are to learn to enjoy grace, then we need to see it for what it is. We need to welcome good things we don't deserve, and not demand them as if we were deserving. When it comes to extending grace to children, this may well mean doing different unmerited things for different children at different times. We should not be keeping some kind of mental tally, such that when our children move out, we can be sure that they have each had exactly the same number of treats.

Of course, it would be wrong to extend grace only to one favoured child. But equally it would be wrong to twist good gifts into entitlements.

Why I am at least my body

I hate it when people ignore the fact that humans are embodied creatures. We have bodies; they are good things; we will have bodies in the new creation. We are not merely 'rational' minds!

I heard a wonderful illustration of this on Radio National's The Science Show this week. Robyn Williams interviewed Charles Spence, a psychologist who (among other things) works with Heston Blumenthal to come up with the right look and names for his dishes. Spence had some amazing things to say about our senses and our perception. Here's a, er, taste:

Ask anyone — wine experts or wine novices — to judge the aroma of a white wine, and they'll come up with things such as citrus, lychee, straw, lemon. Give them a glass of red wine, and they'll come up with terms like tobacco and chocolate and berries — dark fruit and food colours. Give people a third glass, this time of white wine, but now just coloured artificially so it looks the same as the red wine. And people, both experts and novices, say, "I smell the tobacco, chocolate, and berries."

The wine tastes exactly the same, exactly the same odours are coming off it, but our eyes have such a powerful effect that they're completely changing what we think is going in our nose, and you cannot overcome that effect.

You can listen to or read the whole interview here.

Justice, equality, and grace (Part 1)

"Don't get too carried away making a baby book," my friend said, "Because whatever you do for the first one, you have to do for the others."

It's the same logic which governs a lot of parenting choices. Should I speak French to Eloïse (because I probably won't with any future children)? How many children can we have and still afford private-school fees? If I bought Jack an ice-cream while we were at the shops, should I bring some other treat home for Lucy?

If such questions make us anxious, it might be because of two common ethical misunderstandings: (1) that fairness means sameness, and (2) that everyone has a right to the best things. I'll explore these briefly over a couple of blog posts, with examples largely drawn from parenting. (Always best to talk about these things in an area where I have no track record and hence can't be shown to be hypocritical ;)

Firstly, justice and equality are not the same. People have different needs, and treating them fairly means treating them differently, not the same. This is obvious when we take an extreme example: let's say one of my children is physically disabled, so we spend a few thousand dollars equipping the bathroom so they can use it easily. We don't immediately think we have to spend a few thousand dollars on something specifically for each of our other children.

If we think treating people justly or fairly will mean treating them according to their needs, then we will feel free to do different things for different people. 'Loving others' does not call for a one-size-fits-all response; it requires us to know people well and think about how to love them.

For example, we know a family in Sheffield with four children. They all went to government schools for most of their education. But according to the children's needs, one went to a non-government school for a time, and one was briefly home-schooled. This seems like a more loving thing to me than saying, "Whatever we did for your sister, we're going to do for you — no more, no less, no variation."

It leaves open the question, though, of which differences we can legitimately use to distinguish between people: gender? age? class? ethnicity? personality?

Of lenses and leaves in the wind*

The other day, we saw a man creating a mound of yellow, brown, and auburn mulch as he moved the shed foliage around with his leaf-blower. There was something enchanting about it, hypnotic even. So as leaves whirled about, goaded periodically into a desultory Lindy Hop before resettling into their autumnal carpet, Suzanne started to take some photos.

And suddenly I was struck by the disjunction of it. I wondered if the leaf-blowing man was mesmerized by his occupation. It seemed unlikely — thankless, unending undertaking that it is this time of year. I imagined him tranquillized, rather, his mind left to wander over the other gardening jobs that faced him that day; his concerns, perhaps, for his friends' marriage; a dozen daydreams of what he might rather be doing. For him, I suppose the cascading leaves represented not captivating art, but a toilsome obstacle preventing his progress towards more interesting tasks.

It was an illustration for me of how we never have immediate access to the world. Between the world and my senses, there is always me. I inevitably interpret what my senses detect. (Indeed, as I hinted here, I even shape what my senses detect.) Who we are, then, changes how we view the world; our relationship to the world changes how we can act in it.

Imagine a group of people standing on the seashore — a surfer, a fisherman, a developer, a child with a bucket and spade, a 16th-century explorer, a marine biologist. In one sense, the physical world they inhabit is the same. But that world presents itself to them very differently, according to their personal and cultural lens. And so the possible actions they might perform are also very different.

This is one reason we must work hard at observing and interpreting the world properly, ever attentive to the possibility that we're seeing things awry and missing the good to be done.

*or, Of Weltbild and zephyr-borne fronds. Incidentally, I'm projecting my own feelings onto the leaf-blowing man — that is, I think I would very quickly become jaded doing such a task. Perhaps he, however, is more able to revel in the present, which I think is the right response. Listen to Kirk's magnificent talks on Ecclesiastes to hear why.

Welcome, Eloïse

We're happy to announce the arrival of Eloïse Rose. She was delivered around 1.15pm on Wednesday 21/10/09, weighing 7lb (3180g).

We are very thankful for the safe delivery, for the friendly staff at the hospital, and for the National Health Service.

After some treatment for jaundice, Eloïse has come home and is feeding well. Suzanne is recovering well and we are enjoying our little girl very much.

Suzanne has made a slideshow which you can see on YouTube, and we have put some more photos up at Picasa.

Summer ends now

Suzanne's aunt and uncle came up for the weekend from Gloucestershire, and we went to the Peak District and Chatsworth House with them. We're also really enjoying the Autumn — might be last time we have one for a while!

We've put up some pictures, and we'll add some more as the season continues.