John Martin's Notebook

On shoulders of giants: Max Warren

Love is a dimension of depth. We plumb the depth at very different levels. Only God has ever reached rock-bottom. One level which many have explored is that of just being a friend. A Muslim laborer working on the compound of the theological college in Nigeria was won for Christ simply by one of the students going out of his way to be a friend, first by 'showing an interest in his affairs', then by meeting his needs in sickness, then by inviting him into his own home. One day in conversation the labourer started talking about religion. “He repeatedly mentioned the word ‘love’ in connection with Christianity.” “Now,” reports that student, “the way was open for the gospel ... After careful reasoning together, my friend understood Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”

There is nothing but that is not quite commonplace in the story, any more than there is in the story of a young man in Iran who when asked what first made him want to become a Christian replied: “Because I saw love in the life of another Christian. I watched him and I saw all he did was activated by one motive, love – I too wanted to find the source of true love.”

Rather devastating that – “I watched him.” That thought ought to bring us to our knees.

On shoulders of giants: Max Warren

A purple passage from Canon Max Warren in Tell in the Wilderness (Highway Press, 1959)

It falls to my lot very frequently to travel by road from Blackheath to Blackfriars. I am quite familiar with that bit of the wilderness of South London!  In the course of various journeys I have travelled by road from Freetown to Port Loko, from Kano to Lagos, from Onitsha to Port Harcourt, from Dar-es-Salaam to Morogoro and Dodoma. I know the road from Nairobi to Kisumu over the Rift Valley. I have driven from Kampala to Gulu, from Juba to Yambio,. I know the road from Cairo to Menouf, the road from Kowloon to the border of China, and even some of the roads round Shanghai and Hangchow and Nanjing, to say nothing of the American 'throughways and the German autobahns.

I can only testify from my own experience that the people who live beside the road from Blackheath to Blackfriars are very like the people who frequent other roads. To begin with I've found them all likable, all about equally suspicious of strangers, all equally ready to join in a joke and to share a smile, all of them children of God. But I've not gone about with my eyes shut. I've seen where they lived, studied something of their problems, seen a little below the surface of their lives, and found there, in every case, the same common needs.

When we really get down below our superficial differences we know with St Paul that the truth about us is that "there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3.23). We are all in the wilderness without exception. But that isn't the last word. St Paul goes on to say that "they (that is all of us) are justified by his grace through the redemption which is in Jesus Christ" (v.24). In the wilderness is the sign of the cross.  

Dr Harold Adeney OBE

Had the honour of giving a greeting on behalf of CMS at the funeral of the Rev Dr Harold Adeney, 95. Harold was in the great tradition of doctor-missionaries that is a big part of the fabric of what was The Ruanda Mission, now part of CMS. Before doing the General Secretary job he spent many years working in Burundi together with his doctor-wife Isobel.

Harold is pictured here with my CMS colleague Paul Thaxter during a memorable visit to CMS a couple of years ago. He spoke to the staff urging on them the importance of sharing their faith and gave an interview Listen now (MP3 11MB)  At that great age he was still bright as a button. The family explain that one reason was that right up to the end he always made a point of spending time with young people, listening to them and learning from them.

I managed to raise smiles at the end of my talk with the comment: "Now I'm sure the angel hosts, who over many years have rejoiced over sinners who Harold brought to repentance and faith, are finding him to be a sheer delight." 

 

The Pope and the Foreign Office

The brouhaha about the leaked Foreign Office memo where among other things it was suggested there might be special "Benedict" condoms created for the occasion invites some reflections:

1. There's a debate presently about whether or not Christians in this country are persecuted. But make no mistake. If a memo like this had been directed to a visit by a major Muslim or Jewish dignitary there would be all hell to pay. Why the double standard?

2. It's a symbol of how despite Roman Catholic emancipation being on the statute books for many years, there remains close to the surface in British society a strong anti-Catholic reflex. It pops up quite often. It's part of the cocktail in public discourse about abusive priests.

3. The Foreign Office group assembled to work on the Papal visit didn't contain a single Roman Catholic. How in the world, then, did the FO think itself competent to handle all the nuances and sensitivities that go with a visit such as this? 

This, alas, seems to be the culture of the Civil Service. I'm told, that when DEFRA was putting together a team to tackle the Foot and Mouth outbreak it rejected people with agriculture degrees and tried to make a virtue of it. 

We get the politicians we deserve. What can we say about the civil service?

Photo: The Pope in Sydney for World Youth Day.sachman75 photo stream

A truer story 2: white man's burden

As I said earlier, truth telling is a big issue when writing about the missionary movement.It's a big temptation to indulge in hagiography, to over-blow the big personalities and edit out uncomfortable stuff. I hope one of my contributions at CMS has been to be create a culture that's hard-minded about the way we write about mission and the people involved in it.

For CMS, one of the biggest challenges has concerned mission and empire. As Diarmid McCullough's TV series, The History of Christianity, has shown, as often as not the expansion of the faith has been linked inextricably with imperial expansion. Canon Max Warren (left) the great CMS leader, once called the British Empire "the beloved enemy."  Empire created mission opportunities, but people within the missionary movement didn't always get things right.

The scramble by the European powers for empire presented a huge challenge to societies like the CMS. One side effect was that in the period up The Great War 1914-18, around half the missionaries of CMS were being repatriated with ill health.

Most of them were afflicted with psychological maladies. What was happening? One theory was the impact of an ethos summed up in 'The White Man's Burden', Rudyard Kipling's poem, written in 1899.

The first stanza goes thus:

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Read it all

CMS discourse was not exempt from attitudes summed up in this awful piece of doggerel. CMS's antique book collection contains a children's' book written around the time when Kipling's poem was in vogue. In Dwarf Land and Cannibal Country by Albert B Lloyd, has a preface by the then CMS President who says: Mr Lloyd ... "has been bearing his share of 'the white man's burden' of ruling, civilising and Christianising the 'silent peoples' of whom John Bull carries no less that 350 millions on his back. The duty is not a light one, but it gives an outlet for the energies of our people, an object worthy of an imperial race, a call to put forth the highest qualities of the Anglo-Saxon character."  

Now CMS works in a post-colonial ethos and the Anglicanism in which we are rooted is struggling to work out its place in a post-colonial world. More of that soon....

Telling a truer story 1

 

Illustration: Depiction of the mass execution of rebels in British India by cannon.

There are special challenges for journalists writing about the missionary movement. The point is well illustrated by a comment made to me by Dr David Barrett, one of the most fascinating people I've met on my travels. Barrett, founder of the World Christian Encyclopedia, once told me: "Too much of the literature of the missionary movement is self-congratulatory."

It's far easier to discern the speck in the eye of people from the past than in your own. On that I need to salute the integrity of a long line of CMS archivists and librarians who have seen to it that the legacy of CMS writing and publications is preserved for posterity, with all it's 'specks'. So thanks to Margaret Acton, our CMS librarian, for help here. I'll come back to this theme from time to time.

One of the treasures of the Max Warren Collection in the CMS library is a bound volume of liturgies, speeches and sermons from events held all over Britain and India, rejoicing at the defeat of the Indian Mutiny.The first sermon in the collection is by the Bishop of Calcutta, Daniel Wilson.

Here's a great example of how easily religion can be co-opted to serve the national interest. With 20-20 hindsight we might wonder how noone questioned the right of the British to be in India or the images of the World Faiths represented on the sub continent that are perpetuated. 

Top of the table for political incorrectness, and plain bad theology, has to be a sermon by the Rev R.B. Boswell BA, a former chaplain to the Bengali establishment. His sermon title says it all: 'Hope for India in England's God'.

Of course we know better these days, don't we?

 

Gateway to the Bogan

You store up a fund of pleasant memories and they stay with you. I will never forget a sensation that often entered my mind driving back home from university. Nine miles out you cross a ridge. Ahead was a first glimpse of the lights of the village of Bogan Gate. There's no feeling quite like the sense of coming home.

I will be mentioning Bogan Gate once in a while here. In fact I already have. For now, let's just consider the name. In popular Australian and New Zealand parlance, a Bogan is a hooligan, a hoodie, a yob. Local people, however, will tell you with pride that according to indigenous tradition it means birthplace of a great man (maybe even a prince). The village got its name having having grown up at one of the gates of Burrawang Station, a 520,000 acre sheep station: the gate faced the nearby Bogan River.

Burrawang still exists in cut down form. Just before the turn of the 19th-20th centuries the Australian government began to break up the great sheep stations first settled by squatters. My great-grandfather won two square miles of ex-Burrawang land in a ballot. He later bought a third square mile and named his spread Hillview. That's where I grew up.

As I often say, I pinch myself at the thought that a boy from Bogan Gate in the middle of nowhere could have had the rich life I've enjoyed. That's a story I'll follow through here from time to time.

Photo: Flickr bl1nk

 

Australia Day 1788

Today, 26 January, is Australia Day. By now much of a celebrating Australia will have retired to nurse heads feeling the effects of a few tinnies of amber fluid.

It's not the actual anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet. That happened a while earlier. On landing at Botany Bay, the site recommended by Captain James Cook and his botanist collegue Joseph Banks, the advance landing party deemed the place unsuitable. There was added drama with a matter of seeing of a rival French landing party, a story not often told in UK history classes. The fleet headed about five miles to the north to enter what Cook and Banks surmised to be "the finest harbour in the world" but had not explored.

It was on 26 January that the entire company, having come ashore and pitched tents, gathered under a massive tree on the Sydney harbourside for the first service of worship Down Under. The idea of including a chaplain was a last-minute decision, on the urging of William Wilberforce MP, who nominated an evangelical, Richard Johnson, for the job. That day the chaplain chose as his text words from Psalm 116, "What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?"

Of course his congregation didn't necessarily take too well to this kind of advice from a parson. The majority were probably sentenced by local parson-judges and the first two churches Johnson build were destroyed by arson attacks.

There is an oblique CMS angle. Wilbeforce became one of the founders of the Church Mission Society. The second chaplain to New South Wales, a Yorkshireman, Samuel Marsden, was sent by CMS. A controversial character, Marsden, is hailed as the Apostle to New Zealand. Down Under he is hailed as one of the founders of the sheep industry and dubbed the flogging parson.

In 1813 he founded a CMS Association in Sydney which is due course formed part of the autonomous Australian CMS. On this day we greet our friends and colleagues in CMS Australia.