The ravings of Sindy

The Independent on Sunday (aka the 'Sindy') cused quite a stir yesterday by running a front page article on the 'Evangelical conspiracy' to influence parliament.

It turns out that their gripe is with CARE, the Christian campaigning group who (amongst other things) have about a dozen young people working as interns in MP's offices in and around Westminster.

I know a number of the CARE interns, who must have been surprised (to say the least) to find their names splashed across the front page of a national newspaper yesterday. On the face of it, it is difficult to work out why they have been singled out for such harsh treatment. There are well over a thousand interns working in and around Westminster. Labour MPs frequently have staff members provided by trade unions, Conservatives get their assistants funded by private industry, campaign groups provide researchers, and so on. This is simply how the system works; MPs get resources to represent effectively on their issues of interest, and groups get a chance to participate in the democratic process and ensure their views are heard in the debate. Far from roaming the corridors of power seeking to manipulate unsuspecting MPs (even if such a thing existed), most interns work hard on the mundane aspects of an MP's role: administration, correspondence, and trying to assist ordinary constituents like you and I.

The only question of any substance in the Sindy's rant is that of charitable status. The Charities Commission are already looking at this as part of their review of religeous charities and public benefit. It would be deeply concerning if they concluded that engaging via democratic institutions is no longer deemed to be 'in the public interest'. This is the exactly the kind of social exclusion that extremists of all shades thrive on. However, the impact on CARE would be negligible. The £70K they spend on the intern programme is less than 4% of their budget, and moving it into the 'non-charitable activities' category would be a purely technical adjustment with no real-world effect.

The only explanation for why such a non-issue could make it to the front page of a national newspaper is that the secularist lobby are getting nervous. It is already clear that, far from being a spent force, religeous thinking will be one of the key influences shaping global politics in the 21st century. Despite the best efforts of militant atheist Evan Harris MP to nobble the committee stage, Gordon Brown has already had to make unprecedented concessions in allowing a free vote on the morally controversial Human Fertilisation & Embryology bill.

As Mahatma Ghandi said: 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win'. For those of us who are used to having our faith ignored or laughed at, the Sindy have just declared that stage 3 is about to begin. It's going to be a rough and uncomfortable ride, but we can at least take comfort that there is only one more stage to go.

Moses and the credit crunch

14th March 08: today I got a 'phone call from my bank asking if I could lend them some money. They didn't quite put it that way, of course. The actual offer was 'would you like to pay less interest each month?', which it turned out would require me to agree a new, lower borrowing limit on our (partly paid off) flexible mortgage. Evidence (if any more were needed) that the banks are feeling the chill winds of a global credit crisis, and are resorting to ingenious ways to escape from their existing lending commitments in order to release precious cash for use elsewhere.

Moses (circa 1500BC) affirmed that to 'lend to many and borrow from none' would be a sign of God's blessing on a nation. The opposite (becoming an indebted borrower with nothing to lend to others) was bluntly described as a curse. In modern Britain, we seemed to believe that we had managed to reverse this biblical wisdom, with unrestrained consumer spending regarded as a sign of economic health. The resultant 'have whatever you want and have it now' culture has led us to run up an incomprehensible trillion pounds of household debt. Now I am forced to watch people I care about starting to suffer the consequences of their ill-advised spending sprees. Whether you blame cynical commercial organisations or complicitly naive individuals, the result is going to be real hardship for some and financial stress for many.

I declined the bank's kind offer to halve my credit facility in return for saving me a couple of quid a month. This doesn't mean that we are 'safe' as a family; in our interconnected global economy, when one group suffers the pain gets widely distributed. Our best protection is probably to return to some of the oldest economic principles of all. No one individual can solve our economic woes on their own, but with courageous and visionary leadership it is still possible that we can all do so by acting together.

Psychotically Godly Bad-Ass Dude

Feb 08: In the space of a week, I just got paid what I am taking to be a pair of back-handed compliments.

First off, and to the great amusement of our church, Pete Greig described us as a 'psychotically godly family'. While psychosis is not normally regarded as a good thing, there is a one definition which runs along the line of 'perceiving reality in different ways and acting accordingly'. And on that definition, I guess that we are probably guilty as diagnosed.

Then on the Thursday, Lise and I were doing our weekly evening shift on the bar'n'bus, a mobile youth centre run by local Christian volunteers. One of the things that the kids struggle to get their heads around is that we all give up our evenings without being paid, just so that they can have somewhere safe to hang out. On explaining (again) that we do it because Jesus cares about them and therefore so do we, one teenage girl came back with the direct challenge: "so are you a Christian then?" I confirmed that I was. "You don't look like a Christian", she retorted. "You look like some kind of bad-ass dude" (I guess it must have been the leather jacket). Unlike Pete, she then expressed concern that this observation might have offended me, to which I was able to reassure her that it was possibly the nicest thing anyone had said to me all week.

On the bus team we are priviliged to have several kind, gentle, deeply spiritual older ladies. They represent beautifully one aspect of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. But wilder examples like the Celtic Church, the early apostles, and the 18th century missionaries prove that this is not the only aspect. And in the challenging, exposing, often confrontational world of political life, maybe what we need right now is band of psychotically godly bad-ass dudes...