Study

Last Thursday was the Bishop's Study Day, an opportunity for clergy from across the diocese to gather at a big church in a location with good transport links and marvel anew at how weird their colleagues are. Our previous bishop used to source a variety of speakers for these events, some of whom were more insightful and/or interesting than others. Our new bishop clearly feels it's part of his responsibilities to tell us what he thinks instead, so we got a couple of hours of him talking about 'Leadership styles' (what else do evangelical commentators ever think about?) 'in the ministry of Jesus', interspersed with the usual 'breaking into small groups' to talk about whatever it was he'd been discoursing on in the previous half hour. Thankfully I was sat next to Marion our curate so that wasn't painful. The bishop occasionally digressed into discussing some of his own experiences which was actually rather engaging, but for the most part it was the kind of thing any secular management guru could, and would, have told us. Christians so often dupe themselves into thinking they're saying anything very distinctive.

Marion had just bought the bishop's book on David and Goliath, and showed it to me with something of a wince. I have not, but it makes me reflect whether this phenomenon is a typically and perhaps exclusively evangelical habit - to take Bible stories and try to draw little moral lessons from them, or indeed big lessons, in areas of life to which they have strictly very little relevance. I did bad-temperedly fulminate about this tendency as 'building Jewish folk stories into vast structures to guide our behaviour, a bit like basing your life on Hansel & Gretl', which was only slightly an exaggeration. It hardly ever results in anything very startling, because, it occurs to me, the radical nature of what God has done in his relations with human beings is only visible in the vast sweep of the Biblical narrative and in the context of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, not this kind of infants-school assembly approach to the spiritual life. 

The great mercy of the Study Day is that it isn't a Day any longer, but now just a morning, which, even if it's going to be repeated later on in the year, makes it much more palatable!