it was a joy celebrating with pioneer students at cms the completion of various durham university degrees and awards through their training. this photo shows the first graduates from the african christianity route through the masters programme with harvey and joseph who lead it. congratulations to everyone who completed an award - it's no mean feat. cathy has written up a blog post on the graduation old, new and unexpected treasure graduation 2024
yesterday was the first day of the first acts 11 project conference. at it's heart it is a centre focused on human migration and global witness. we took a moment to celebrate the launch by cutting a cake. it was an exciting moment. more to follow...
i was delighted to hear harvey kwiyani sharing his story on the comb bbc world service podcast and being described as
the go to guy for african church leaders looking to reach out to communities around them
i have been friends with harvey for several years now and learned loads from him. it's a delight to have him leading the african diaspora route through the ma at cms. we are half way through the first year and it couldn't have gone better really. one of the issues he discusses is that in terms of revitalising the church in post christian britain, africans bring a wonderful gift of faith. but the challenge is that very often the churches they grow replicate the culture of the leaders so become largely nigerian or ghanaian say. it is then harder for others to join and feel at home and can be hard to engage well in the community. there is such a great connection with pioneer training because pioneers are asking a similar question. they are on their own adventure of the imagination to see how faith can connect with all sorts of people and communities where they are without those people having to cross the threshold of church which can seem very strange or foreign.
the pioneer training at cms is wonderful and we are so privileged to get such creative people who join us. if you are interested in the diaspora ma or the pioneer training we do we have an open day coming up on february 28 - actually that's a misnomer it is an hour and a half online! love to see you there.
[see part 1 kiwi and proud and part 2 am i in england?]
getting stuck in christchurch in new zealand longer than planned meant i had time to wander the streets a bit with camera in hand. i really don't do that enough - linger in a place with time on my hands and get lost on the streets. it's such a great way to see a place.
one of the immediate things in christchurch that you see is that it is still very much post earthquake and i'll come back to that in a later post. but the other thing i began to notice was street art. i subsquently discovered that post-quake christchurch has become a hub for street art with various festivals and artists commissioned to paint huge murals.
i began to reflect on the contrast between the more fixed statues in the city and the newer street art. lots of cities have pompous statues - london has plenty! look at this guy john robert godley who was the founder of the canterbury settlement ariving in 1850. i really don't like this statue which is in front of christchurch cathedral! he has a sort of english colonialist swagger about him towering over you. it may be totally unfair and i don't know much about him. but i am not naive about english colonial behaviour either. reading up on him, the canterbury settlement (which is the wider area christchurch is in) was particularly tied up with the church of england and he worked to set up the canterbury association with edward wakefield securing 300 000 acres of land. that involved dealing with the new zealand company. when you read artilces in wikipedia or in encylopedias they are very matter of fact about it all. i am not a historian but i am pretty suspicious about this sort of story - so sure enough a bit of digging and it turns out that the wakefield brothers and the new zealand company were a very shady land grabbing company hustling all sorts of property and land from maori by whatever means legal or illegal or inbetween. they lobbied hard to get the treaty of waitangi dismissed. i'll come back to the treaty in a later post but it is the treaty between maori and the british that gives equal rights to maori and settlers. the new zealand company also hated the missionaries with a vengeance because they advocated for the maori. so even if he was a good guy there were some other shameful things going on.
here's another statue in the road below hagley park - james edward fitzgerald. i read up what i could find on him and to be honest they made him sound a really incredible man. it must have been so challenging to work to build a settlement. but he too worked with the wakefields on the settlement. i was giving him the benefit of the doubt. but then his name cropped up in bible and treaty by keith newman which i was reading which said "when the national assembly first met in 1854 the the colonial office had already agreed that native affairs would be the sole preserve of the governor. premier james edward fitzgerald also used the occasion to to announce his plan to acquire 12 million acres - about forty percent of the north island - for settlement. while some maori would resist, the balance should be acquired." wow! according to this article he was an advocate for maori rights, and for self government for new zealand and wanted maori to take part in government and tried to develop policies to improve relations. but at the same time he was securing as much land for settlement as he could. clearly not straightforward and certainly more swagger in the christchurch landscape.
i got slightly obsessed with street art and have added an album of photos - street art in christchurch. i photographed things that caught my attention rather than everything i saw. but two things immediately grabbed me. the first is that the iconography of street saints inc hcristchurch is so different to the statues. the predominant figure celebrated in the landscape is a woman and by and large those women are indigenous. i love the mural above for example. this is whero o te rangi bailey painted by kevin ledo. she was a local elder who the artist painted from a photograph. she was a teacher, counsellor, and "a humble woman who radiated a peaceful and loving energy which was felt by all" according to her daughter.
here is another. it is painted by erika pearce and is of harlem-croz atarangi ihaia. this brings me on to the second thing i noticed - birds. the bird in this picture is the huia which is extinct - sadly the only place i saw one was in canterbury museum stuffed. in this image the woman is wearing kawakawa leaves which would be worn in mourning so it's an image that speaks of sadness and loss. othe birds that feature are largely indigenous birds - the tui, bellbird and kiwi for example.
there were others too such as this image kaitaki by fin dac with an owl and kingfisher - i'd love to read the iconography of that image if someone has any ideas. i have read up that it is about protection and a warning but the image is so interesting. what do the birds represent? the feathers? the eye mask? the kiwi is obviously a national icon but it seemed to me that the birds in so many murals both mourn something that has been lost and express a longing for something too. the loss is real - through settlement the population of birds has been decimated both through the felling of forests but also through the introduction of predators as this mural bunnies vs birds articulates. it's also a loss of deeper and wider things i suspect. but i wonder if they also represent a deep longing, a longing for a recovery of something, to be at home in the land in an environment where the indigenous bird and people are free to be at home. perhaps the longing is not just for recovery but for a new future?
there is a new mural that went up this year on welles street which is really bright and zingy. i didn't photograph the whole thing but you can see an image of the full mural here. it is called cassandra's dream and painted by yoobee design students caitlin booth, sarah dickie, caleb harris, victoria marshall, kayla salt, and phillipa suckling. it is very celebratory and includes all sorts of aspects of christchurch life - creativity, innovation, nature, food, design, dancing, heritage. cassandra in greek mythology uttered true prophecies that no one believed. i can't believe the name is a coincidence or random though i couldn't find anything about it online (cassandra's dream is also the name of a woody allen film). here is a vision that a new christchurch, a new new zealand is possible but will anyone believe it could be so?!
[see part 1: kiwi and proud which ended i hadn't expected to be confronted with england...]
in lent, the community i am part of grace is encouraging practices of soil, soul and society. for soil i am taking note of trees in my road and on ealing common which is my local park. it will be ongoing but i realised a while back that i had walked past trees for years and had no idea what they were so i thought i'd find out as a way of getting to know the place i am in. i won't share the whole list now but of course it includes classics such as lime, plane, oak, horse chestnut, hazel, poplar, beech, hornbeam, birch.
i don't know what i expected in new zealand but after a few days in christchurch i realised i was confused because these were the trees i could see there. in fact i was running through the lovely hagley park and realised the reason i hadn't taken any photos was because it looked like i was in any park in ealing or cambridge or wherever in england. so in the end i did take photographs because the thing that became of interest was the similarity not the difference! what was even stranger was that in the botanical gardens there was a section entitled new zealand. that was a small area with native trees and plants. i began thinking why isn't there a small section labelled england in the botanical gardens with the rest of the park and country being made up of indigenous or native trees? this was further compounded when visiting orokonui which is a lovely ecosanctuary near dunedin. steve taylor took me there and it is fenced off like a rewilding or wilding project and it's beautiful in its trees and plants and birds. in fact the sounds of the birds are amazing - tui, bellbird and the like. i was in canterbury which is an area that it seems the settlers determined to make like england. and i did not visit the west coast which i understand is more like rainforest or the north which is hotter and no doubt more exotic. so this is a very limited view. but it piqued my interest and got me wondering about the process of colonisation and in particular what was the mindset of those who settled.
i found out that there are whole books on the subject of plants and animals being taken to other countries - they have a range of ways of describing the process - naturalisation, accilmatisation, intrusion, invasion (which of course are interesting words for the whole process of colonisation). the book exotic intruders is online here. and this article on acclimatisation is a pretty good summary. there were acclimatisation societies that were set up as there was a sort of fervour around the idea of introducing plants and animals that could be of use. for settlers the first motivation was survival and sustainability - in other words food! there were apparently not a lot of vegetables and fruit that was easy to access. polynesian islanders had introduced some plants like sweet potato and europeans quickly introduced potatoes, vegetables and all sorts of other plants and fruit trees along with pigs so they could eat. a lot of it acclimatised well. rabbits were introduced and then stoats, ferrets and weasels to keep the population down. of course you do something like that and it has consequences - the native bird population which was not used to these predators struggled through that and the decimation of the native bush cleared for farming. the kiwi is now endangered for example. darwin when he visited said that he thought many of the native plants would not survive the onslaught of the new competitors. it sounds very much like his 'survival of the fittest'. he said
If all the animals and plants of Great Britain were set free in New Zealand ... in the course of time a multitude of British forms would become thoroughly acclimatised there, and would exterminate many of the natives.
boats came out with blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows, partridges and so on most of which died on the way! i can't get my head round why you would take a sparrow!!! two thirds of new zealand was covered with native bush when settlers arrived and now maybe one fifth is. huge amounts of forest were cleared, swamps drained and so on and the landscape gradually changed. whose to say what is good or bad about this process? i certainly don't have any idea of the wisdom or not of introducing plants, trees and animals. and hindsight is something you only have after the event. in london we have a mix of native and introduced trees such as the plane tree. we know a lot more now than we did then. new zealand is a very fertile country exporting all kinds of things so at some level it worked well. but the cost in terms of creatures and plants has been high too such that some species are now extinct such as the huia (more on that later). new zealand today is a very different prospect and tight on bio security aware of the risks of introducing unwanted plants and creatures that might attack a particular tree for example.
the thing i hadn't quite appreciated is that colonialism at least in canterbury in new zealand did not just export people and culture. they sought to recreate home, to recreate england almost as a total environment and landscape down to the sort of birdsong they could hear. it is quite a scary imaginary. i have found it quite hard to think myself into it. it doesn't take much of a leap to see how if native species were valued so little then native indigenous peoples and their way of life and culture could be seen in similar fashion. rework darwin's quote above changing 'animals and plants' to 'people' and right there is the colonial mindset i fear.
i like to think i would have done it differently. listened, taken time, worked with the local culture, been careful about the introduction of plants, trees and anaimals and their impact on the environment and so on. but i am pretty sure that if i had been alive then i would have done the same thing and thought it was great. so i am not standing on a high horse in judgement. but it's surprising where noticing a few trees takes you in your thinking.
christchurch has a reputation for being very english and that englishness is really a particular kind too - oxford or cambridge - perhaps this is epitomised by this photo of punting on the river.
i was in christchurch longer than expected due to coronavirus - the rest of my trip was cancelled and i had to rearrange flights. this meant i had a bit more time to wander the streets and see what else i could see...
a couple of weeks back i was invited to lead the opening worship/reflection/prayer at the fresh expressions gathering at southwark cathedral. (the last time i led anything there was with grace at the time of our lives festival in 2000!) the title of the conference was from margins to mainstream which i think is provocative - i am certainly trying to get the gravity flowing in the other direction in most of what i do. anyway i posted something in facebook about what those at the margins might say by way of blessing to the mainstream and vice versa. of course lots of people refused to play the game and deconstruct the whole thing which i get. but anyway i asked harry baker to take what had been said and weave the comments into a blessing which he did. several people have asked for it so it's posted below.
the worship pieces for those who asked were
but in silence by flock (chris and harry) which led into silence
before the silence i shared that the reading for the day was one phrase 'christ with us' inspired by sam wells latest book (which is amazing btw) a nazereth manifesto in which he says the word 'with' is the most important theological word. during the silence i shared some images of christ to reflect on that notion of christ with those at the margins and those at the mainstream - christ the king which i suggested was a mainstream image, and christ the migrant a more marginal representation (i like this take of the holy family as boat people).
we then prayed by writing prayers on luggage labels with the word hope on one side and grief on the other - and placed them in a suitcase to offer prayers for the journey in whichever direction of travel we were heading (margins to mainstream, mainstream to margins).
and then harry concluded with this blessing
Margins to Mainstream, Mainstream to Margins
Mainstream to Margins, Margins to Mainstream
Can you hear me?
Lean a little closer.
Let’s talk!
Would you like a cup of tea?
We need you and we want you.
Wish you were here!
Margins to Mainstream, Mainstream to Margins
Mainstream to Margins, Margins to Mainstream
I Inhabit both and I don't feel at home in either
One persons margin is another persons mainstream
One person's edge is another person's centre.
Some of us were made to be edge-dwellers
We are all on the margins of something
Let us do our thing
We are so very much more than a label.
There's enough God for everyone
Come inside and learn from previous mistakes.
Come outside and learn from something new.
Margins to Mainstream, Mainstream to Margins
Mainstream to Margins, Margins to Mainstream
May we be open to embrace other people’s margins
May we be open to embrace them into our mainstream
Some of us were made to be edge-dwellers
Some of us are at home in the centre.
Margins to Mainstream, Mainstream to Margins
May we be open to conversation between the two
i am making it all a worship trick - no 60 in the very sporadic series 4!
an advocate for pioneers, lover of all things creative and an explorer of faith in relation to contemporary culture
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