Last night was our 'spring term' cluster meeting.  Whilst it is great that our cluster functions - at least for four of our churches - they are always slightly odd affairs.  Once we have reviewed the diary - one year a joint cluster service, next a cluster pulpit swap - we move onto sharing and praying for each other.  This is good, it is, honestly.  It is just also (a) very predictable and (b) that weird combination of funny and infuriating.

Here is the cream of last night's little gems...

Church No 1 proudly reported the new decoration of "the minister's vestry, school room and toilets" which do indeed look very attractive now they've been refurbished.  Just a shame that the floor in the school room is rotten and the walls are riddled with damp.  With a slightly more pastoral hat on, I guess it is always easier to do the things we feel we can manage, that lift our spirits, than to face the slog of largely unseen foundational work.  It just reminds me of how shocked my own folk were when our building - which had on the whole been kept well decorated - had to be closed because behind the paint was a century of neglect.

Church No 2 spoke of their interregnum and even said thay had appointed a moderator because they didn't have a minister.... oops, didn't have a full time minister.  I felt a moment of anger on behalf of their half-time, specialist Associate Minister who was sitting in the meeting being somewhat denigrated by the remark.  To appoint a moderator to relieve her of the additional burden of overseeing the calling of the person who will effectively become her superior is fine, to say thay don't have a minister isn't.   They then spoke of the process, and how it was exciting to think that somewhere was a minister sensing this and saying to his wife "do you know what, darling, I think the Lord is calling us to move."  At this point I had to bite my tongue hard, though did say 'or she.'  In our little cluster female ministers are it at the moment - there are three of us, all 'four year olds', and all working hard.  So why do our folk still think ministers are automatically married men? Grrrr.

There is a lot of good stuff happening in our area - lots of mission in many modes.  There is also a lot of change afoot - from an LEP review to an interregnum to looking at the long term future.  Of the four churches, three of us are dealing with big pastoral issues affecting our younger members and wondering how to resource the work to which are committed.  And this is where our cluster becomes so good - it is when eight or nine women (there were no men, ministers or otherwise at the meeting) share, listen and pray together that the dream of Assocation begins to come true, and where two or three (churches) gather the Shekina is present.

Tomorrow I have to go and take an RE lesson on Baptism at our local primary school.  Part of this will be to debunk the rubbish the teachers have told the children - did you know Baptists are followers of John the Baptist and baptise because he did?  No, neither did I!

However, I did find a useful schools website at www.request.org.uk and if you go to www.request.org.uk/main/dowhat/dowhat.html there is some decent stuff on baptism in different traditions, including videoclips (in Real Player), photos and activities.  There is an infant school version too with a mildly annoying little squirrel character!  (No Andy J, I don't mean a mildly annoying little Jesus character!!).

I also found some nickable short clips of dunkings on a Taunton Baptist Church's website, so a few of them will be used tomorrow too.

Thanks to ASBO Jesus (see side bar link)

Equal opportunities, inclusion, level playing fields - all great phrases but what do they actually mean?  Can opportunities really be equal?  Is there really such a thing as a level playing field?  How does diversity and individuality fit with all of this?

These are big questions, but they are questions that I find popping into my head when I have a sense that things are not adequately equal, that things are not sufficiently fair, that somehow there is an injustice being done which I, by simply doing as I'm told, become the victim of.  I am trying hard not to be 'Angry of Leicestershire' but I do get more than a tad irritated to be told the requirements of 'x' are 'y' only to discover that the same is not true for someone else.  I have pondered long and hard putting this into words, let alone putting it on the web where all and sundry can read it, but I do think I need to 'dump' it.

Just what is appropriate to level a playing field, to make opportunities adequately equal for all participants?  I recall that for the Manchester Commonwealth Games a local bike shop supplied good quality cycles to one of the African(?) cycling teams who had arrived with little more than standard roadsters.  The level of inequality was, they judged, too great, and even had these athletes been the finest in the world, they were not able to compete on equal terms with the UK or antipodean teams.  (There was also the lovely story of the overseas team who cycled up the hard shoulder of the M61 not realising this was illegal!).  Giving them these commercial cycles did not give them the same opportuities as the western cyclists but it closed the gap a bit - it made the race more fair.  That seems to me a good thing.

More recently there was the decision not to allow the 'blade runner' to compete alongside 'able bodied' atheletes because he had the potential to engineer his blades to give him unfair advantage.  The logic being that you can't tinker with the human body (or can you? - Western atheletes use dietary supplements and blood exchanges to boost their performances quite legally).  Even single and double amputees cannot race against each other for this reason - if you have one artificial leg the length is dictated by that of your remaining leg; if you have two you can choose to be taller by choosing longer proththeses!

Of course, I'm not really talking about athletics here, but my own experiences in a very different sphere where I find myself questioning not only justice and fairness, but actually whether some of the attempts at inclusion and ensuring everyone ends up a winner are helpful.  I would never enter myself to run a marathon - I simply cannot run that far, my ankles would not survive even if the rest of me did.  It would be a total nonsense if I entered, ran about a mile, which I could probably just about manage on a good day, and was either told it didn't matter, I could have the medal anyway, or if someone carried me the rest of the way.  The medal would be meaningless, I would not be a marathon runner no matter what it said on the certificate.

We seem to live in an age in which failure is just not accepted, where if you can't clear the bar, well we'll just lower it until you can.  Partly, I fear, this is driven by the very requirement for success - to show more people doing better year on year no matter what.  Universities and colleges need to show that students are succeeding in greater numbers to higher levels - which is just not going to happen unless we change the rules as we go along.

I do know and appreciate that circumstances change and people do need to be treated as individuals, and I do know that life is inherently unfair.  I am just left wondering whether the drive for inclusion and success mean that rather than making the playing fields more level they are just skewed differently.  Certainly, and this is as blunt as I am going to be, I am not convinced that playing by the rules or actually being fit enough to enter the 'race' actually count for very much when everyone is going to win anyway.  Of course, I will carry on playing by the rules, cos that's the kind of girl I am, and I will succeed or fail on my own merits - but right now I'm not so sure what the value of the medal will be if and when I get it.

I was reading a collection of essays on the legacy of H Richard Neibuhr - in an attempt to acquaint myself a little better with his theology of history, something that was only marginally successful.  Nonetheless, the book has a few useful quotes and this one that made me smile...

"We shall in any case need to rely, from time to time, on the more tedious textbooks.  But we prefer vision, or even a little magic.  Teachers as well as students will continue to gravitate towards works that embody those qualities."

R F Thieman, (ed) The Legacy of H Richard Neibuhr, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1991

 

It is one of those little quotations that makes me smile because it is true - and it makes me dare to dream that just maybe it might be possible to inject a little 'magic' into the writing of Baptist history.  Which probably means one of the sections in my current paper may end up with the word 'magic' in its title...