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THE BAPTIST TIMES

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Not just how many, but who?

THE RETURN of immigration to the political arena was inevitable, given the very high numbers of people moving here over the last few years, particularly from Poland. The trend is set to continue. A recent Office for National Statistics report suggests the UK’s population will rise to 65 million by 2016 – an increase of 4.4 – and hit 71 million by 2031. Higher life expectancy and birth rates are part of that picture, but immigration is the major factor, accounting for some 70 per cent of the growth. This presents a huge problem for our country’s social and built environment, but also for our politicians. They are afraid of inter-communal tensions which might arise from pressure on services and clashes of cultures. They are also terrified of seeming to play the race card. Most of them, we may assume, are personally anxious to distance themselves from organisations like the British National Party, while remaining aware of the impossibility of unrestricted entry. Good border controls are essential for maintaining good community relations. But one of the pernicious effects of being aware of unsustainable levels of migration is that it leads to institutional discrimination against a very different category of incomers: namely, asylum seekers. The difficulty faced by the Home Office in weeding out genuine from false claimants (for a given value of each) is considerable. But there are too many stories of injustice for any of us to be sanguine about the workings of British justice in this respect, as David Joynes makes clear elsewhere on this page. As a first step, asylum must be detached from the broader question of immigration. But the Churches in this country have a significant task ahead of them in contributing to what is going to be a major debate. We cannot ask, ‘How many people will we allow into our country?’ without also asking, ‘What sort of people will we allow?’ The answer to this question will be determined by how we see ourselves as a nation, how far we are open to the world and prepared to be changed by it, and what values we are prepared to uphold. This requires rather more than political nous; it calls for deep reflection by our spiritual leaders as well.

Distasteful diplomacy THE PROTESTS which have greeted the arrival of Saudi King Abdullah are a heartening example of the British people’s dislike of public hypocrisy. Foreign Office minister Kim Howells, for instance, said that Britain and Saudi Arabia could unite around their ‘shared values’. Presumably these do not include the values which led Open Doors to place it so high on their World Watch list of countries where Christians face persecution, or the values to which the respected campaigning organisation Human Rights Watch referred in a report earlier this year: ‘Saudi law does not protect many basic rights and the government places strict limits on freedom of association, assembly, and expression. Arbitrary detention, mistreatment and torture of detainees, restrictions on freedom of movement, and lack of official accountability remain serious concerns. ‘Saudi women continue to face serious obstacles to their participation in society. Many foreign workers, especially women, face exploitative working conditions.’ The justifiable post-colonial reluctance to appear to impose Western values on countries which don’t share them is lent extra force when these countries are shaped so thoroughly, as Saudi Arabia is, by their religion. ‘Don’t go there,’ appears to be the default position. But there is good religion and bad, and refusing to condemn evil because it is justified in religion’s name is moral cowardice. Saudi Arabia is no negligible ally in the so-called war against terror, and it would be diplomatically unthinkable to snub His Majesty in any way. But we may at least hope that in private Her Majesty’s ministers will express their distaste for the regime’s treatment of its people.

THE BAPTIST TIMESThursday, November 1, 2007

LeTTers TO The eDITOr

Asylum Outrage

8 A team of commissioners, co-chaired by Sir John Waite and Ifath Nawaz, are conducting an independent review of the UK asylum system. After eighteen months gathering evidence, including public hearings in several British cities, they will report in 2008, making recommendations to the government. The final public hearing is in London in November. Baptist Times readers with experience of our asylum system may make a written or video submission. See www. independentasylumcommission.org. uk or write to Independent Asylum Commission,112, Cavell Street, London E1 2JA or phone 0207 375 1658. Clearly the more who make a submission the better. Christians should be ashamed of our immoral, inconsistent and inhumane asylum system. It is immoral to make poverty an instrument of policy to persuade asylumseekers to leave. Refused asylum-seekers even pursuing an appeal, depend on local charity to survive. The system is inconsistent. Two Iranian young men became Christians with an identical situation. One was accepted, the other refused. It is inhumane to return those who have converted to Christianity to Iran. The regime is barbaric. I have seen on the internet pictures of public hangings in Iran. In July this year a German court made a ruling that asylum-seekers from Iran who had converted to Christianity should not be sent back from Germany. Pray that this becomes European policy. Pray that the government acts on the report of the Independent Asylum Commission. Please pray that an Iranian family attending our Baptist Church in Hollinwood, Oldham, who have been refused asylum, may succeed on appeal to the High Court. The Revd David Joynes, Hollinwood, Oldham

Masculine matters 8 With reference to Glen Marshall’s article of October 25, this is the kind of theologically mushy thinking I have become disappointed with from within the Baptist Union. I cannot believe the muddled nonscriptural logic used to try and be trendy in justifying calling God ‘mother’, as well as implying that the Bible’s masculinity is in question. What does the Revd Marshall make of the Lord Jesus calling God Father? Sounds pretty specifically masculine and non-feminine to me. Would he class this as ‘some believing that we are only allowed to do, think and say what the Bible explicitly sanctions...but this is far too restrictive a way to use the Bible’? Is Jesus being too narrow? Unable to think outside of the box? So is the SON of God (sorry, more masculinity) not relevant or ecumenical enough for our Glen? Oh for more clear evangelical Biblical theology, and a lot less woolly thinking! Peter Millist, Walton on the Naze,

Increasing membership

8 We are a large Baptist Church suffering a low turnout percentage of church members at membership meetings. (Ring any bells!?)

As a result we are re-examining the definition of what it means to be a church member. Are there any churches out there who are exploring alternative models of membership (such as ‘partnership’, or ‘covenant’ etc)? We would love to hear from you, to save us re-inventing the wheel. Please e-mail me direct at davidplumridge@waitrose.com or write to Fishponds Baptist Church, Downend Road, Fishponds, Bristol BS16 5AS. Thank you. The Revd David Plumridge, Fishponds

Drugs should be banned

8 How dare Jonathan Langley call for the legalisation of drugs (Newsweek, October 18). It’s akin to legalising murder and such a move would make taking drugs more acceptable to society. We already have enough problems thanks to drugs without encouraging people to buy them from their local chemist. And think of the increased security chemists would need if they were to sell drugs. They’d become targets for armed robbers, having to choose between their lives and their stock. Of course, if we did legalise drugs, particularly the dangerously addictive ones such as cocaine, then I’m sure it wouldn’t be too long before the drug barons started peddling some other drug of choice on the streets. Langley is wrong to even contemplate that drugs should be legalised. Jonathan Wakefield, Sheffield

The real work is around us 8 With regard to the recent important correspondence about church and community matters, together with appropriate calling and training of ministers – some useful points have been made. However, it is all too easy to over-simplify the complex interaction and relationship between church and community. I have known churches with social programmes, community activities and events to rival the local social services or local authority community centres which unfortunately have hardly any worshipping congregation and dwindling resources. I have also known large churches with substantial congregations whose weekly

Peter Millist disagrees with Glen Marshall about whether we should call God ‘mother’.

activities may be quite economic and slim and yet whose many Christians are extremely influential within their local communities and surroundings. I am quite certain that modern ministers are being trained to see their communities as the cutting edge of mission and evangelism. However, the reality is that for many ministers working in challenging and discouraging circumstances means that a great deal of time and effort is necessarily consumed in maintaining the life of the local church. We all know that the real work is out there in the world around us. The real need is to build and encourage congregations until they are strong enough and confident enough to commit more time to their communities, thus moving from maintenance to mission. Something which incidentally cannot be done by a minister on their own. This would also indicate that church growth and evangelism are as vital as ever. Otherwise we ask fewer and fewer people to do more and more which is hardly practical. The Revd Phillip Fearn, Wirksworth Baptist Church, Derbyshire

Books abroad

8 I wonder how many people around our churches have heard of the Baptist Missionaries Literature Association? I hadn’t till earlier this summer and now we have been able to support our missionaries, Les and Fiona Allan out in Bangladesh, with magazines and literature from ‘home’. I believe even comics are supplied when there are children out on the mission field with their parents. Brian Martin is the adminstrator for the project which is operated, I believe, by the Baptist men. Locally, the link up group raises the money and Brian then arranges the ordering and posting of the requested literature. Not only do Les and Fiona enjoy reading their magazines, but other missionaries in the area read them and then they are used in English classes. It’s a wonder there is any print left on the pages! Now maybe more people will know about this great ministry and want to help their missionaries out too. Marilyn Dearden, via email

send your letter on-line: www.baptisttimes.co.uk/letters

Moving home WE ARE, says the hymn, a travelling wandering race. Moses led the Israelites in the wilderness for 40 years, and they carried the tabernacle with them and pitched it afresh wherever they went. Once churches started to be built of bricks and mortar, you’d think that those wandering days were over, except metaphorically. Not so for one German congregation, however. The inhabitants of the village of Heuersdorf, near Leipzig, are being relocated to make way for a lignite mine, and they decided to take their 750-year-old church with them. It will have taken about a week to make the journey, but the church – uprooted from its

BeATTIe’s Diary

foundations and placed onto a rolling wooden base (pictured right) – was expected to arrive at its new home yesterday. It might seem like an odd way to do things, but it only cost around £2 million. That sounds like a lot, but presumably no more than a new one. What a delightful thought! All these wonderful redundant chapels in the Welsh valleys could be put onto low-loaders and transported to new housing estates. Hey presto! Instant architecture.

Godly Gould BEATTIE has been amused by the brouhaha that has surrounded a Disney-run radio station’s apparent decision to ban the phrase ‘chosen by God’ from the trailer for upcoming film The Ten Commandments . Radio Disney has denied having any anti-Christian agenda and has claimed it made the demand due to ambiguity over who the line ‘chosen by God’ referred to. Read the transcript and you can see what they mean: ‘With Ben Kingsley, Christian Slater, Alfred Molina and Elliott Gould. ... chosen by God,’ it says. Now Beattie doesn’t want to denigrate the acting of Mr Gould but comparing him to Moses would be a tad unfortunate.
THE BAPTIST TIMES Thursday, November 1, 2007

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Can’t I just call myself a ‘follower of Christ’? outside edge

michael docker

ISOAKED the jamjar in the sink overnight, but it didn’t make any difference: the label still wouldn’t come off. That’s what comes of treating yourself to a premium brand instead of the cheap stuff from the supermarket - they clearly use superior quality glue. But the effort was worth making: recycling is good for the environment, my wife makes excellent jam, and anyway you can’t buy empty jars in the shops. So in the end my wife scraped off the soggy label with her fingers. Who needs labels? When you are riffling through clothes in Marks and Spencer, they usually manage to hide in a place where you can only see them by getting down on your knees, or else they tangle themselves with each another. When you bring home ‘three books for the price of two’ from Waterstones, you break your fingernails trying to pick them off the covers. And we’ve all bought a cook-chill meal from Sainsbury’s only to find the instruction ‘Keep Upright’ written on the bottom. What a nuisance! Of course, labels are necessary. You need to know the size of the trousers you are about to try on: small (I should be so lucky!) or extra large. You need to find out if they are made of natural fibres or polyester, or whether they can be safely washed in the machine. You may want to make sure that they were not made in a country which tolerates sweated labour or has an oppressive regime. Labels can even be a matter of life and death, not only to make sure you don’t drink weedkiller instead of lemonade, but to inform you if the bread you are buying is gluten or peanut free. Most churches put labels up outside, so everyone knows what brand they are. But the implications can be rather curious. Here is the Church of England (so has the congregation down the road declared itself to be an independent republic?) There are the Baptists (does no-one else use water, then?) Down the street is a Free Church (that’s good: presumably they won’t take up offerings in their services). And at the other end of town are the Independent Evangelicals (the what?) and the Strict and

andrew kleissner

open line

our labels have stopped us appreciating the good points of a different tradition

Particulars (you’d better wear a very oldfashioned suit, then). There is a church in West London which declares itself to be Ukrainian Autocephalic Orthodox - which is fine if you know what that means, but totally mystifying to everyone else. A fairly traditional Christian friend of mine (and yes, I know that’s a label, too) went on holiday to another part of Britain and, on Sunday, sought out the local United Reformed Church. Although, as he told me later, ‘they were very nice people,’ he was horrified to see guitars, amplifiers and all the accoutrements of charismatic worship at the front of the church - and he couldn’t very well run away. Leaving the church after the service, he examined the notice board very carefully to see if there were any indications of the kind of worship practised within. When he found none, his conclusion was that some kind of ecclesiastical health warning would have been very useful. The point I’m trying to make is that labels lead to certain expectations and stereotypes. They may contain elements of truth but they are usually very simplistic. And most of us are rather good at labelling churches and fellow-Christians: we call them ‘evangelical’ or ‘charismatic’ or ‘traditional’ or even ‘postmodern,’ names that may be

complimentary or pejorative depending on our own particular views. Without ever finding out what these churches are really like or how these people understand the faith, we have neatly categorised and determined our attitude to them. Our labels have stopped us appreciating the good points of a different tradition. I have not yet said what label I would stick onto myself. I still - hesitantly - call myself an evangelical, although my wife says, ‘You’re much more liberal than you think you are’ - and who am I to argue with her? I suppose that I would really like to adopt the tag that Brian McLaren gives himself in his book, A Generous Orthodoxy: a ‘missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamental/ calvinist, anabaptist/anglican, methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yethopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian’. But a label like that is probably far too large to be useful. Can’t I just call myself a ‘follower of Christ’?

The Revd Andrew Kleissner is Minister of Christ Church (URC/ Baptist), Ipswich

KIDS these days, eh? In my day, soldiers in Vietnam would get stoned on marijuana, listen to the Doors or Jimi Hendrix and draw peace-signs on their helmets (I may be relying somewhat on Hollywood for that picture). Today, our squaddies are hyped up on cocaine, listening to Britney Spears and James Blunt. It’s enough to break a parent’s heart. Primarily because everyone knows (particularly former hippies) that nice people don’t do coke. To someone unfamiliar with drugs and drug users, the distinction may not be clear, but to give an illustration: the music of the 60s and early 70s (The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, everyone who played at Woodstock and hundreds more great artists), was fuelled by marijuana (hereinafter referred to as ‘dope’ for the sake of both brevity and not sounding like an old man) and to a certain extent LSD. The first cocaine generation of the 80s, however, gave us Phil Collins and MC Hammer. I’m not going to get into a discussion of the relative merits of various illicit drugs. Long-term use of dope, in my

JonaThan lanGleY

newsweek

The coke side of life

experience, makes you lazy and stupid. Coke makes you loud, arrogant, unjustifiably overconfident and, well, a bit of a @#!*%. Neither is a good idea, but I think the fact that last week’s news revealed that 18 British servicemen in Iraq are testing positive for illicit drugs every week, with cocaine topping the list, should trouble us. It should trouble us for several reasons. First, it’s obviously a bit unnerving to know that there are stoned people running around with guns (though I guess better there than here, eh?). That’s probably not going to help our reputation in the country we’ve liberated anyway, but the fact that it’s coke that tops the list, a drug that tends to make one cocky and

aggressive, rather than dope, which makes you passive and indolent, must be particularly troubling in an already volatile situation. More than all that, as Christians (who have very specific tastes when it comes to getting involved in global issues and prefer not to get ‘too political’), there is something we should all be worrying about. Are these drugs FairTrade? Sure, the MoD tells us that the drug is cheaper these days, but, as we’re told again and again, someone is paying for it. How can we be sure that the coke our soldiers are using comes from farmers who were paid a decent wage to grow it? For that matter, is it organic? Is this yet another crop that we learned about last week,

which the government has given chemical giant BASF permission to genetically modify? Discovering that ministers have secretly been funding research into GM food crops while claiming neutrality is bad enough. But mess with our drugs? Just say no. Luckily, cocaine’s raw materials are mainly grown in South America, rather than Afghanistan (where the heroin comes from), so we don’t yet have to deal with the moral quagmire so bedevilling diamond buyers and wonder if our military are snorting ‘conflict coke’. These things, rather than the larger, ‘overly political’ questions, are important, after all. In seriousness, though, the fact that troops representing this country, risking their lives to make us safe, need to resort to drugs as a form of selfmedication, a way of dealing with the stress and trauma of the fear and violence they are having to deal with on a daily basis, should make us think. It’s a small indicator of what we are putting these brave young people through, and another thing that should give us pause, the next time someone cries ‘War!’ when we are frightened.

let’s hear it for the middle classes

AFTER the recent highlighting of the low numbers of ministers prepared to work in difficult urban situations, and after the initial guilt-pangs had subsided, I got to thinking that the time has come to stand up for middle class churches, and their ministries. Some years ago, ministers anywhere other than in innercity locations were accused of being ‘chaplains to suburbia’. Well, nothing wrong with that, I say. But first I must ask you to suspend your prejudices if you’re not part of a wellresourced suburban church, and lay aside your feelings of guilt if you are. Right, now let’s call a spade a spade. Baptist Christians in this country are – many of them - rich. Largely because of rising house prices there are many members of suburban Baptist churches whose assets place them within striking distance of ‘millionaire’ status, even if that status is not quite what it was in the days when a million pounds was a lot of money. So by most standards still, and in the view, surely, of anyone living in the global south, that makes such people rich indeed. Well, I say, let’s acknowledge it, and move on. Now, to suburbia itself. Baptist churches there are wellresourced. The buildings are in good condition and used throughout the week. The services are likely to be enhanced by high quality sound systems, and, increasingly, projection equipment, and, likely, the church supports not just a minister, but an associate, and probably a full-time youth worker as well. It is very easy to pour scorn on such places, and much guilt can be stirred up by contrasting this abundance with the paucity of resources available to struggling congregations on nearby run-down housing estates. But the Gospel is not about guilt, it’s about freedom from it. So to the other side of the coin. Baptists in suburbia are, in my experience, intelligent, energetic, and generous. Their churches are likely to be major supporters of Home Mission and BMS World Mission, Tearfund and so on. They themselves not only run their own churches while carrying on busy careers in business or the professions, but also provide vital expert support for local charities, Baptist Associations and Colleges, mission organisations, the BUGB, and much else. We all know this. Yet there is, to my mind, a lack of realism not only about this world, but about what the Gospel challenge in this world amounts to. All too often we settle for singing ‘God of the poor’ as often as we can, wringing our hands at continued world poverty, and pretending that ‘poor in spirit’ is the same thing as being, actually, grindingly, unrelentingly, poor. And being a ‘chaplain’ to this world? It’s a calling at least as challenging as the call to work amongst the actual poor. At least there it’s easy to see what the Gospel amounts to; real poverty needs really relieving, and really poor people seem the most ready to acknowledge their need of God in Christ. The Christians of suburbia have to live with a greater challenge– communicating a gospel to people who have few obvious needs, and are in any case quite capable of meeting their own needs from their own resources. Then the question is, ‘What does the Gospel actually mean for human beings who, demonstrably, have no need of the church as a crutch or a comfort or a challenge?’ Reputedly the Countess of Huntingdon in the 18th century said, in response to the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians, that she was grateful for one letter of the alphabet – ‘Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many of you were powerful, not many were of noble birth.’ I think we should continue to be grateful, not guilty, and not content ourselves with thinking that we know what being poor means, just because we sing about the poor and send them money. Only then will the people of suburbia be set free to work on the real Gospel challenge.

‘ The Gospel is not about guilt, it’s about freedom from it’

Michael Docker is the minister of Tyndale Baptist Church, Bristol

8 Send your comments to: Letters to the editor, The Baptist Times , PO Box 54, 129 Broadway, Didcot, OX11 8XB, or e-mail: editor@baptisttimes.co.uk.