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Question; What do Tony Blair, US tourists, and mission leaders have in common?Answer; “It’s Tuesday, must be Holland”.

It’s been a bit like that the last week or so. Last Sunday we were in South Darenth, followed by Welwyn. Monday we were in London. Tuesday we were at a school in Baldock, and then Potters Bar. Wednesday we were at a school in Letchworth, and then Cambridge. Thursday we were in Bristol. Friday we were in Oxford. Saturday we were in Lewes. Sunday we were taking part in the service in Baldock, and then the service in Bygrave, followed by going to Reading.

On Saturday, someone whose job-title means that he jolly well ought to know better, asked us “How is your holiday going?” Naturally we forgave him…. right after I’d dumped my pasta and sauce over his head… not really, just thought about it… Jesus says that amounts to the same thing.

Friends who we were at college with tend to have one or two big churches who provide most or all of their support, so homeleave basically involves popping in to say thank you very much, couple of weeks, job done. While part of me is envious of not spending however many hours on the M25, I also very much value the relationships that we have with our supporters. We put effort into them, we find them rich and meaningful, and we like to hope that we have a role in peoples’ lives as they have in ours.

Meanwhile, I’m also glad that this week has some blank spaces in it. That place-to-place thing is good for a few days, but it wouldn’t be my long-term choice for a life-style. Which I guess is one of many reasons why I hope never to be Tony Blair, or a US tourist, or in mission leadership.

“It is our hope that this Statement on the Global Anglican Future will be received with comfort and joy by many Anglicans around the world who have been distressed about the direction of the Communion. We believe the Anglican Communion should and will be reformed around the biblical gospel and mandate to go into all the world and present Christ to the nations.”
Gafcon Final Statement can be found in its entirety on www.gafcon.org

Rather a long way from being comforted and joyful, I sincerely hope that my continued employment never becomes conditional upon my signing this document or any other like it. Nor do I give permission for anyone else to sign it on my behalf. Dole office next week?

This is the cleverest cartoon I’ve seen in a long time, It’s had me thinking for a week about sheep and goats, and how a “non-homogenous sheep” might find themselves less welcome than a “goat” in some places. The original and a whole lot more can be found on asbojesus.wordpress.com which is a blog belonging to a Jon Birch and well worth a visit. His work reminds me of Adrian Plass in cartoon form, perhaps sailing a bit closer to the wind than AP, but often dealing with the same sort of issues from a similar perspective.

The global conference of influential evangelical anglicans is about to get under way in Jerusalem. Under the acronym of GAFCON, it ought to be good for a few jokes, but I haven’t heard any yet. I haven’t seen the agenda, but I’m confidently predicting that it will contain an item or two on homosexuality, the most high-profile issue currently facing the global anglican church. Chatting with a friend, himself a studious evangelical, I expressed surprise both that the anglican church has managed to hold itself together for so long, and then that the issue of homosexuality looks to be the one that finally rends it asunder. He said “it’s an authority of scripture issue”. Other issues, such as ethical decisions on whose regimes we endorse with our spending power, loving ones enemies, the rights of refugees, and responding to the needs of the alien, the orphan and the widow, apparently aren’t authority of scripture issues, otherwise presumably our learned colleagues would have chosen to hold their conference in an alternative location.

This is a sweet little gimmick (thanks Tia…). If you click on the graphic you can take a little quiz to find out what time you are. Apparently I’m 10.02… Funnily that’s probably quite accurate, it’s a time of day I like… late enough to be awake, and early enough still to have lots of day to have fun with.

We’ve been on the road the last few days, enjoyed staying with Viv, and visiting friends in Colchester, Mersea, Cranham, Felixstowe and Cambridge. The weather was fantastic, so we managed four walks in four days in between speaking at meetings. I saw my first cuckoo ever; I was listening to a cuckoo calling in a small clump of trees, when a cuckoo-sized, cuckoo-shaped bird flew out; and it still took the mighty brain cell five minutes to figure out what it was. Oh well. Heybridge Basin (temporary residence of said cuckoo) is a truly superb place for a walk; plethora of birdlife, and the ice-cream in the tea-shop was pretty good too.

One thing that Argentina and the UK have in common is that both countries used to have a world-class education system.
“Schooling” (I stop short of describing it as education) in Argentina has largely been reduced to a series of facts and procedures to be memorised and reproduced in response to the corresponding question, which is itself previously memorised by the student; i.e. really rather similar to the SATS system in the UK.

Argentina is different to the UK in that internal auditing reveals that state schools have both the highest and the lowest results, with the private schools occupying a nicely-dressed block of mediocrity in the middle. This seems rather strange to me as an English person, but it was confirmed by a friend who teaches at an expensive private school in Argentina, who explains that many parents appear to prefer a “creche service matching their social class” as a priority over educational content.

In the few weeks that we have been back in the UK, we have witnessed something of a genteel back-lash over the SATS tests. The non-stampede has been led by the Head Teachers Association, followed up by a less than complimentary report from a few education advisors. What I find most surprising is that parents are virtually nowhere to be seen; they’re certainly not leading the revolt, and they’re not even coming out to support the efforts of the head-teachers et al. When parents are prepared to move house, lie about their address, send kiddo to live with Auntie Jemima, give sizeable “donations”, or change their religion to secure those elusive places in a prime school for six years, it seems very odd indeed that the same parents apparently don’t mind very much if two of those six years are frankly wasted.

Could it be that the SATS have survived this long because they actually hook into some parents’ need for competition between themselves? Witness a place where I used to shop for books. Today in a space previously housing “books of fun activities for kids”, I find racks of “books of exam papers, poorly disguised as fun activities for kids”. Who buys them? I wonder. A head teacher friend confirmed “Oh the parents love SATS, it’s all about your child getting a higher score than someone else’s child”. My sister came across a magazine article on “packed lunches to help your child get ahead”. Among the recipes for alfalfa and apricot on ciabatta, the article included the advice that although a parent might relapse and include the odd chocolate bar, this should not be done on days when child goes to play at friends’ houses after school, lest lax parent be looked down upon by parents of friends. Key learning outcomes:
Image is everything
Lie if it helps to preserve image
Never give anyone a chance to accept you as you are
The old adage said that “education is wasted on the young”. I suspect the real issue may not be entirely the fault of the young.

It’s been a whirlwind tour. Sunday, friend Jo came to see us. Monday, we went to Oxfordshire to see friend Tania and her two little girls aged 3 and 5. Tuesday, we went to Berkshire to see friend John. Tuesday evening, we went to another bit of Berkshire to see friends Sarah, Richard and their twin boys aged 5. Wednesday we went to Colchester to see friend Faith and her prayer group, and Wednesday evening we went to Dovercourt to see friends at Kingsway Evangelical church.
Joni of course loves all the attention. It’s a good job he still needs his parents to drive him places, otherwise we’d probably be superfluous to requirements. We have also enjoyed ourselves catching up with lots of friends, and we were also encouraged by the warm response we received at the two meetings that we took. I was thinking last night that giving presentations to groups is a bit like crowd-surfing (you can tell the kind of gigs I used to go to as a student); person throws themselves onto the mercy and the upstretched arms of the crowd, who bear said surfer aloft, passing them to the back of the arena and safely restoring them to earth. Sometimes it went wrong and people got hurt, but that was part of the risk, and I never actually saw it happen in all my gig-going experience. So, we threw ourselves on the mercy and the upstretched arms of our supporting groups.

The church at Dovercourt have gone technical since we were last there, but unfortunately we couldn’t make our laptop talk properly to their beamer. So after a lot of fiddling by us, and patience from the church, we had to set up our (borrowed) beamer and use that instead. Having finally begun the meeting, I was disconcerted to see Martin exit with Joni and the nappy bag just at the end of my talk, when Martin was supposed to come to the front and do his bit. I swiftly moved into a time of “any questions?” but there are limits to the stringing along that one can produce, so I made my excuses, and leaving the stage empty, went to swop with Martin who was located changing the baby on a window sill.

Three days; three curries. By long-standing tradition we had a curry with Tania on Monday. On Tuesday we thought we’d go for Chinese, but Sarah and family live in a small village where the Chinese doesn’t open on Tuesdays, so we had another curry. On Wednesday, Faith had been reading our blog entries about curry, and made us one. Only another dozen or so and we’ll have stocked up enough to see us through the next couple of years of curry-famine.

A friend of ours died this week, I have known Jon since I was 19, he’s a top bloke, we share a reputation for asking the difficult questions. We feel sad for us that he’s not around, but he also knew very starkly the likely progression of his illness, and we’re grateful that he was spared the worst of the potential end-scenarios. Most importantly of all, he knew where he was headed, and I reckon his welcome party is just getting going. “I have run the race, I have kept the faith”.