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Just been working on the everybody welcome course (www.everybodywelcome.org.uk) and one of the things the course doesn’t really talk about is how much the stranger can be one of God’s gifts to the Christian community. This is important because if we believe God provides the gifts necessary for the future that God prefers and promises each local church, then a key question might be, if we’re not experiencing that giftedness, what are we failing to see and respond to? Over and over again the stranger is a gift to the people of God. It is Melchizedek who brings bread and wine and blesses Abraham. It is Pharoah whose “fat cows” sustain Jacob’s family in times of hardship. It is Balaam who blesses Israel in the sight of her enemy Balak. It is Ruth who demonstrates the faithfulness and imagination Israel will need under her descendent David. Likewise Jesus discovers faith and mercy and gratitude in the stranger, be it the centurion whose servant he healed, the Samaritan leper, the Canaanite woman – and in the parable of the last judgement what is implicit at several other points in the Gospel becomes explicit; Christ is the stranger.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        This is one reason why I think one has to challenge the attitude which says “People come to church to talk to God, not their neighbour”. It may well be that God is arriving for conversation in the form of the stranger! Never mind the obvious point that our inhospitality to one another is inevitably connected to our capacity for hospitality to Christ.

And I reckon it’s a lot more than just thinking as Christians that we have a responsibility for or duty to the stranger. This misses the crucial dimension, that the stranger is a gift to the Church. The stranger is not a drainer of resources but a bringer of gifts… and care for the stranger, offering friendship are to be done not just because here we have a child of God but also because we have here someone precious who will build up the life of the community in some way, even if that gift is slow to be revealed or hard to receive. Christian hospitality understands that the stranger brings gifts and this hospitality understands that generosity leads to replenishment from unexpected sources. This way move from resistance based on anxiety about defending what we’ve got, which is part of what breeds the club mentality. “These newcomers, they come in here, taking our pews, wanting to change things. I have been here 20 years. This is my church”. It’s Enoch Powell theology said Giles Fraser a few years ago, and he says its widespread in the Church of England. It needs challenging….

 The American author, CEO and teacher Max De Pree famously defined leadership as entailing three tasks; defining reality, becoming a servant and debtor and saying thank you. When I first heard these three I was a little doubtful of the idea of “defining” reality which smacked of something potentially autocratic, individualistic and so open to delusion.

But second thoughts are …. on reflection putting it this way does capture something important. We are so easily and unwittingly focused upon immediate problems that we are in danger of our reality being defined by our problems, and so are likely to be shaped by such problems. That really narrows down our field of vision. In terms of faith, one of the challenges is to be shaped by the story of death and resurrection, the life-giving narrative of Jesus Christ. But it’s easy to slip into different narratives ruling the roost, narratives of problem-solving and “when I’ve sorted out these problems it will all be sorted” approaches which bear little scrutiny.

Coming back to De Pree, whether we’re aware of it or not we are continually making choices about how we interpret and read reality. To speak of leadership “defining” reality can help remind us that what we talk about, what we give our attention to, readily and rapidly becomes our reality. In that case, I suppose leadership involves re-directing our gaze and attention, our talk and our preoccupations where necessary.

I guess one question arising is “what am I paying too much attention to?” and “what am I paying too little attention to?” in terms of defining reality, questions for us in our Christian communities too. The Road to Emmaus is a classic example of how the disciples’ reality on the road is initially defined by the perceived failure of Jesus, and resulting disappointment, broken hopes and some anger. Their refrain “we had hoped” is a refrain we easily use in different contexts, attention being paid to unrealised expectations and frustrated longings. Yet by the end of the conversation with the stranger who walks along with them reality is re-defined in terms of fulfilment not failure, bearing fruit in joy, courage and hope. The Risen Lord re-defines reality for them and they rush to do the same for others. Their attention is focused not on their unrealised expectations but what has been realised and disclosed in and through the story of Jesus’ life death and resurrection. In terms of little picture much is the same – materially, physically, economically and politically the situation of these disciples is still precarious. But everything has changed in terms of big picture, making little picture look very different to them. (Though the polar bear pic is a reminder not to ignore little picture….)

So I go with De Pree’s point  in that leadership does involve attending to big picture and that should include defining reality. I’m just a little nervous of this ‘defining’ being understood as an individualistic enterprise given the possibilities of self-delusion. Maybe it needs couching in terms of occasionally being the courage of an individual speaking out, but this defining of reality might more usually be a prayerful  enterprise emerging out of ‘generative dialogue’ together….needing discipline to stick to the resulting definition too….. 

I know, I know, in danger of death by qualification but gotta defend against a leadership mentality of knights on chargers ……

Little Picture, Big Picture

Those pictures of us in our homes that zoom out to satellite views of our house, town, country, planet, galaxy etc till our minds rather give up are handy reminders that perspective and scale can give us very different ways of looking at the same thing. Little picture, big picture. Just been reading Paula Gooder’s This Risen Existence and I was reminded of this by a neat analogy she quoted (pp.5-6) from a BBC Drama, the Second Coming made in 2003. While she reckoned this production was largely disappointing, there was one remarkable scene where the main character was recognised as the Son of God and that moment was described as like a slice of one day being displaced into another: “the event happened Thursday evening and there’s a great big chunk of Tuesday in the middle”. Paula reckoned that was one of the best ways of looking at Jesus’ resurrection – it’s a slice of the end times, happening 2000 years ago. And of course this leaves open the possibility of the event of resurrection (including our own) being experienced by us now, as a slice of the end times. I reckon it’s a helpful image, and so too is the little picture, big picture analogy. In fact the latter might be even better, the little picture being our lives in their everyday detail with the ups and downs, changes and transitions, experiences, decisions and relationships, while the big picture is this resurrection life, our life related to that of the Risen Lord. We could miss seeing this life, a life immediately accessible, but we glimpse it now and then, as for example when in our Christian discipleship we rise above petty retaliation for the sake of another, serve self-forgetfully or allow gratitude to evaporate complaint.

So maybe the challenge is to live out of the big picture a bit more, which doesn’t deny or run away from little picture, because in any case little picture is contained within big picture. But little picture looks rather different within this big picture, and on this view, what’s as important as preparing for big picture Resurrection Life (ie Lent) is getting used to seeing and  living out of big picture, which is what the days of Easter to Ascension/Pentecost or all about. Maybe we could do with more overtly complementing Lenten disciplines with the disciplines we need to cultivate in Eastertide to live resurrection life, not least joy, gratitude and peace…