SEPTEMBER 2008 - THE DEAN WRITES
Two articles which were written recently for the Belfast Newsletter: Family life - the real challenge for Ulster, and Lambeth - a distant view.
Written for the Belfast Newsletter and published on July 5, 2008
For the past thirty years violence dominated so much of the headlines, the thinking and the preoccupation of our society, that other developments did not get due recognition of the challenges they present to the quality of personal and community life. I believe that the problems which threaten our society today are much greater than any paramilitary threat of the past, and they are not sectarian in that they encompass all of our society.
Foremost in my concern are our children and young people. No part of Ireland has any physical resource which will sustain an economy which can provide a quality of life and care for all its citizens. The only natural resource God has provided us with are our children. They are his gift of a unique renewable source of vibrancy, energy and life itself. Our people are our only natural asset.
I don’t wish to be pessimistic, or to set aside my experience of many of the wonderful young people I meet in the voluntary sector who work hard for charities which their schools support or in periods of unpaid service for their Duke of Edinburgh Award. But as the violence recedes, I see a society which is fractured more so than ever before upon income. In both Unionist and Nationalist areas, people have bought their way out, distancing themselves from the old heartlands. The gated private estate is becoming increasingly common, as are security gates on individual homes. We are catching up on America where ‘successful’ people flee from the city and town cores to live in fenced-in homes.
The location of these homes affect the schools the children attend, and if the family worships, the churches they attend. Gone in many areas is the concept of local congregations or parishes. Parents ride in their chariots of success around cities and towns, and countryside, so that they and their children can worship alongside people who are very much in their own image.
I can understand the desire to flee from the hard men, to keep your children free from drugs, to live the good life, and to have just reward for your labours. But it comes at a price. Nursery and child care is subcontracted out, and at the weekend young parents can be under stress as they cope with the small strangers in their lives. And that's presuming that both parents are available as a couple, as separation rather than commitment seems to be a readily preferred option if a relationship becomes stressed.
The challenge of young people who have no effective parenting either through affluence, or deprivation leads to mega-problems. The speech reported this week by a female chief constable in Wales highlighted her concern that in areas of extreme deprivation there are “almost feral groups of very angry young people”. From my experience daily in Belfast, I know exactly what she is describing. She commented, “Many have experienced family breakdown, and in place of parental and family role models, the gang culture is now established. Tribal loyalty has replaced family loyalty and gang culture based on violence and drugs us a way of life”.
Like the chief constable, we too have seen in this age of cost-benefit analysis, millions of pounds being poured by governments into quick fix situations - in education under the guise of literacy and numeracy schemes and other initiatives. I agree with the chief constable’s view that, “There is no appetite for solutions that have no visible return and no patience for any which will not bear immediate political fruit”. As we know here, discontented youngsters are the prime targets of terrorist recruiters, and other leaders of evil.
The challenge is to strengthen all those agencies - voluntary and government, faith proclaiming and secular, which in any way are involved in the strengthening of marriage and family life. Many children are not failed by the 11 plus or their schools. They have been failed long before that by having no real parents - even though they may live in the same house as one or two biological parents. They have been failed by lack of relationship, of love and any concept of self-worth being communicated to them. Too many of them are “genetic accidents” and they are born in situations where basically they are unwanted and sadly that is shown in their daily treatment.
This to me is the biggest challenge to the Christian churches and others concerned about the future of our society. If I could have one aim for the Northern Ireland Assembly, it is that every policy would be assessed for its impact on upholding family life, and the education of our young people for responsible parenting. Yes it is a long haul policy with no immediate political fruit.
But it will save on ill-conceived educational solutions. It will stop dumping all of our society’s problems on teachers and schools. It will save immense expenditure in our health services and the provision of social housing. This major breakdown in family life is something we cannot afford financially or morally. How about a working party of all faiths, and organisations, and government departments, headed by our First and Deputy First Ministers themselves? What else would take priority over the promotion of responsible parenting and the quality of family life?
The marriage service in the old Church of Ireland Prayer Book begins with highlighting the fact that the first miracle Jesus performed was at a marriage in Galilee. We need such a miracle today and its enablement needs leadership and resourcing by our political and religious leaders as never before. God sometimes wants us to help being the answer to our prayers.
LAMBETH AT A DISTANCE
Written for the Belfast Newsletter of August 2nd.
Not surprisingly I have been trying to keep abreast of the discussions at the Anglican Communion's Lambeth Conference - the ten yearly meeting of bishops invited from around the globe by the Archbishop of Canterbury. My wife spent most of last week staffing a Mothers’ Union area in the exhibition at the conference. The conference programme which she brought me back did not leave me in the least envious of the bishops. It looked a bit too much like a hard-work conference for my liking, and I speak from the experience of surviving for over twenty years as a professional educational conference attendee.
From reading the blogs of two bishops I know - David Chillingworth and Paul Colton, of St Andrew’s and Cork - there has been some excellent listening and discussion in the Bible studies as well as the Indaba groups. Whoever pulled that title out for the discussion groups must have known a bit about the Scout movement.
But there isn’t much mileage for the media in the fact that bishops are reading their bibles. Marching through London and meeting the Prime Minister to express concern that the Millennium Development Goals be met did get some media mileage. For the rest of the time the headlines in the media have been centred on the conflict over sexuality and holy orders.
From my monitoring of the conference however, three stories impacted upon me. Since my wife’s visit to a Mothers’ Union Literacy Development Programme in the Sudan seven years ago, we tend to look out for news from there. Whilst one Sudanese bishop’s stance on sexuality got the headlines, even in the church press there was little coverage of the Archbishop of Sudan’s plea from Lambeth. This was to his own country’s government to do all in its power to make the current peace initiative in his country work. The statistics he quoted were stark. In this conflict 2 million people have been killed, and 4 million people have been displaced. The south of the country is still being adversely affected by armed militias from neighbouring states. He didn’t say that the government which has used its own army against its own people is supplied with those arms by China in return for oil.
In the media reports on Lambeth there has been talk of a world-wide north-south divide. There has been tremendous growth in the church in the southern hemisphere. But I don't buy into those who simply say this is due solely to evangelisation and that the secular west could and should learn from the south. Some of this message to me smacked of racism against the churches of the west.
Rather, I came across an account from the Assistant Secretary of the Anglican Consultative Council in which he challenged us to come to terms with our world view of Anglicanism - and I think this would hold good for other christian churches too. He said that the typical Anglican of today is African, black, female, earning about 2 dollars a week, has two to three children, has had two members of her family die from AIDS, and that she walks about two hours to church where the service lasts for about three hours.
These are the sort of stories from real-life situations which I believe the churches in Ireland should be encountering and, inspired by the Holy Spirit, tackling in Christ’s name and in partnership with our fellow church members elsewhere. That to me is the real agenda of Christianity and against such a background as the conflict in the Sudan and its impact on my fellow Christians there, I am willing to pass on the luxury and vexation of biblical interpretation, or in attempting to determine who is in and who is out of the Kingdom of God, or heaven forbid - seeing the setting up of a council of prelates as another tier of church government.
