I lived for four years on the edge of Moss Side in Manchester and came to love this place and the people I got to know for whom it is home.  Granted, I was curb crawled within days of moving in, saw drug deals take place outside my front door (and shocked my middle class friends by not phoning the police - I quite like being alive!  But that is about drugs not Moss Side) and was a victim of the postcode trap that meant my household and car insurance were astronomical at a time when my dependable income was £0 pcm; at least I had the reserves to pay for them.

I have been saddened and irritated by the way national media have handled the tragic death of Jesse James - only yesterday I flicked round ceefax localnews and found numerous murders in other regions.  Of course it is a tragedy when someone is murdered, and from the comfort of middle class, middle England, easy to ask what a lad of that age was doing out in the wee small hours.  But I was annoyed at the whole portrayal of Moss Side - and maybe even Manchester - as gang-land; annoyed that a gang (or was it actaually two gangs?) in 'South Manchester' (i.e. cannot have been Moss Side) with guns brazenly flashed for the camera was presented as normative; annoyed that the reporter was a nice white woman (how brave! not) whizzing through on an arterial road.

Moss Side and Hulme are areas of Manchester that have changed dramatically in recent years, enough so that the slogan 'Moss Sides Views Have Changed, have Yours' was used by the council in 2001 to celebrate the fact that at a time when, away from media glare, violent crime decreased old through routes were openned up, older houses refurbished and new ones built.

Karline Smith's book 'Moss Side Massive' is set in Moss Side/Hulme around 1990.  It is not a happy story, but it gives a perspective on the experience of young black men caught up in the drugs/gun culture.  I guess I was attracted to it as parts of it were set literally in the street where I lived.

Page 194 says ‘Drug gangs and gang warfare.  Guns.  Extortion.  Violence.  Intimidation. Some people compare Moss Side to hell.’  Sadly, this week the news reporters seem to be saying the same thing.  Perhaps the one saving grace was an article in that lesser read publication the Baptist Times.  Here the local Baptist minister gave an honest inside impression that showed that while there is much to mourn, Moss Side is also a place of hope.  I guess it strikes me that the majority of the ministers in the Moss Side area (with the obvious exception of the Catholic Priest) are women - something not unusual in inner cities and so-called 'tough pastorates'. 

Never did know how to spell that word, maybe it doesn't matter since it is self explanatory.

Last night was the Dibley and District Churches Together meeting which I was chairing.  It had some good moments - another church has decided to think about joining in and their minister, complete with dog collar and brief case, had come to the 'Council of Churches' as he insisted on calling us.  We managed to appoint people to organise most of the activities planned in the next three months - and I only ended up with one action, hurrah!

After sharing news from the churches I opened a short time of open prayer, inviting people to pray for the other churches' needs.  One of my colleagues, from a tradition nominally highly organised, always prays pretty much the same thing, and while I think I know what he means, it always makes me simultaneously cringe and fight off the giggles.

'We put Jesus in the centre... we lift Him up... we magnify Him...'

Every time he says it, I have a mental image of a circle of people dragging Jesus into the middle of the ring and hoisting Him up onto their shoulders in some sort of gymnastic/acrobatic maneouvre.  Then as He perches precariously on human shoulders someone gets a magnifying glass to make Him seem bigger...

OK, I'm sure that is not what is intended, but there is implicit some theology I struggle with...

Whilst I'm sure my colleague's "putting Jesus in the centre" is more what the Victorians would have deemed "looking unto Jesus" the words used imply that it is us who somehow control where Jesus goes - not unlike the parody of the missionary who carries Jesus in his/her suitcase.  It is not, I would argue, we who put Jesus at the centre but instead who ask God to help us align ourselves with where He is.

'We raise Him up, we magnify Him'  Yes of course I know what these mean, but I do wonder if they make any sense to folk not schooled in religious langauge.  It is, afterall, a Baptist minister who once used as a 'children's talk' the idea that the pulpit was a magnifying machine and made it 'magnify' a match stick into a pencil, a pencil into a broom handle and a tennis ball into a football who is to blame for my desire to giggle during this prayer.

It is easy to critical of other people's attempts at prayer, which may be infinitely more sincere than my own but maybe those of us who lead public prayer have a duty of care in our choice of words?