FOUR HUNDRED pink and blue umbrellas have been suspended from the ceiling of St Margaret’s, Rainham, in Kent, to mark Baby Loss Awareness Week.A “wave of light” service for bereaved parents is planned for 6.30 p.m. on Friday, and a concert on Wednesday raised money for the charity Making Miracles.The Vicar, the Revd Nathan Ward (see photo), said: “It’s estimated that one in four pregnancies will end in miscarriage, with some experiencing consecutive miscarriages; the trauma and grief is more than often invisible and it can be incredibly difficult to come to terms with it.“What’s worse is that for the most part this is something that families go through on their own. Lost babies are never forgotten, even decades later families still feel the pain. Some of the dates on the hearts in church go back to the 1950s.”
The group reviewed a set of resources for leading groups with young people which have now been published on the LLF Learning Hub. The importance of encouraging all participants to share their experience and learning through the LLF online questionnaire and by means of creative responses was stressed. LLF Advocates were encouraged to continue to share good practice across dioceses.The group noted the need to get three key messages across: the LLF resources are for and about everyone; it is a genuinely open-ended opportunity for the whole church to contribute to the Church’s discernment about questions relating to identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage; the resources are flexible and should be adapted to different contexts at a time and in a way that is appropriate for them. The gathering of feedback will close on 30th April 2022.It was agreed to reschedule publication of the resource, ‘The Gift of the Church’ to September 2022, when it will sit alongside the findings of the listening process as the process of discernment begins. The Next Steps Group will work together with the Faith and Order Commission on this task, and involve others as discussed at previous meetings.The Group agreed that it would be important to introduce new members of General Synod to the LLF journey as part of their induction in November 2021.The meeting ended in prayer.
Disrespectful and often deeply offensive, headlines in <em>The Sun</em> have long been a feature of our national conversation. There was the unforgettable “Gotcha!” after the sinking of the Belgrano with the loss of hundreds of lives (judgment: utterly disgraceful); or “Up Yours Delors!” as the President of the European Union was pressing for a single currency (judgment: well done my Sun; or even “Freddie Starr ate my Hamster” (judgment: actually, he didn’t). With such attention-grabbing openers, Rupert Murdoch won his ratings war with competing tabloids. Brash and unashamedly populist, The Sun targeted a younger less reverential, less establishment audience.Sometimes, I can’t help but chuckle at their irreverence. And so it was last week with their “Taking the Michael” headline. St Michael’s Church in Bournemouth had renamed itself St Mike’s “in a trendy rebrand to entice young people”. Grumpy conservatives online — like me — pointed out that the “el” bit at the end of the word “Michael” is of one of the words for God in the Hebrew Bible. Michael — roughly translated — means something like, “One who is like God.” Given this, taking the “el” bit off the end seems rather unfortunate, especially for a church.But like most headlines in The Sun, there is a streak of cruelty about it. St Mike’s is a huge barn of a Victorian church designed to seat 1,000 people, but now with a congregation of 20. Bournemouth has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the South West. The Vicar there, Sarah Yetman, has a tough gig and all power to her elbow for trying to turn things around. “We aren’t trying to alienate anyone by changing the name” she explains, “But I do feel that if we don’t take steps now to draw people in from those younger generations we will be lamenting what we have missed in the years to come.” “A bid to become more trendy” was the Daily Mail take.So why did this tiny story attract such attention from the national press? Well, I suspect because it does say something rather important about the changing nature of the Church of England. “Taking the Michael” is just the latest in a broad transformation whereby formality of worship is being dropped because it is seen as a barrier to new younger worshippers. The big idea is that we should all get more chummy with the divine. The austere, intimidating God of fire and thunder, the God of the mountain top, the God whom we approach in awe and wonder, is being replaced with the friendly face of Jesus, more mate than majesty. St Michael was the angel of battle who defeated Satan in the ultimate celestial firefight of good vs evil. I don’t think he’s a Mike.For the Daily Mail and The Sun, what is going on here is of a piece with the cheapening of our national life — which may seem a bit rich coming from them, but there you are. Trendy vicars are the new trendy teachers trying to relate to the kids with permanent (draining to watch) smiles, over the top, unrelenting enthusiasm, and awkward references to popular culture. Yes, I get it. I too want my children’s teachers to look more like Hector from the History Boys (without the fondling) than the Nineties era Tony Blair leaning casually against the photocopier in his stonewashed jeans. And the comparison is not just with trendy vicars. Our new Bishops want to be known as Ric or Pete or Rod. Names are all about relatability. And Christianity is about our relatability to God.But here, of course, we stumble very quickly into some deep theological waters of the sort Christians have been arguing about since the first few centuries of its existence. It is a cliché — and indeed an antisemitic trope (See Richard Dawkins) — to compare the violent austere God of the Old Testament to the loving warm and cuddly God of the New Testament as captured in the person of Jesus. Old Testament bad, New Testament good — that’s not Christianity btw.
