Church in a spin

Happy Christmas, traditionally a time for giving, festive fun and the best seasonal/religious headline of Christmas competition. First prize in this year’s headline competition looks like going to the Yorkshire Evening Press for ‘Bus crash shame of ‘knicker vicar’’, the sorry story of a former vicar who lost his job, became a bus driver and then allegedly knocked a boy off a bicycle while swearing. Technically this is not a Christmas story, so may be disqualified, whereas this startling headline, ‘Jesus born in manger to Virgin Mary, affirms Archbishop of Canterbury’ is clearly seasonal - and wins the ‘dog bites man’ category.

Actually, I suspect it is also a contender for the ‘man bites dog’ prize because in the rest of the BBC Five Live interview, the Archbishop casts doubt on everything else including the wandering star, the date of Christmas, snow lying on the ground, donkeys and even oxen! Is nothing sacred!? It is this aspect of the interview on the Simon Mayo programme that is picked up in the Times headline, ‘It’s all a Christmas tall story’. However, winning the prize for the-most-oddly-written-final-sentence, Ruth Gledhill's piece concludes, “Dr Williams’s views are strictly in line with orthodox Christian teaching. The Archbishop is sticking to what the Bible actually says”.

News that the new Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg ‘does not believe in God’ made lots of headlines and vied for the prize of most-anti-Christian-headline-in-the-week-before-Christmas with news that Richard Dawkins is going to go on a speaking tour of the Bible belt. The Clegg story could I fear spell doom for Claire Kelly, the very nice (churchgoing) governor of St Aidan’s school in Harrogate who is also the Lib Dem candidate for Harrogate at the next General Election. Harrogate is, of course, a high churchgoing area and atheist politicians don’t go down well in these parts.

Midnight Mass, or Midnight Communion as we call it at St Mark’s Harrogate, was the subject of a Jonathan Petre piece in the Telegraph, 'Midnight mass at 8pm to fool drunks'. He rang up during the week to see if I could find any Anglican churches which were doing the same as some Catholic churches and making their midnight services earlier in the day to avoid drunken rowdy behaviour. I was about to say that we’d only had one or two cases of clergy who’d been drunk and disorderly during midnight mass, when I realised the gist of his question. Here, we have something called ‘Journey to Bethlehem’ earlier in the afternoon for families, but we also have the ubiquitous midnight service which caters for both party-goers and shy people. Both groups, for different reasons, want to avoid coming to church on Christmas morning, and as Christmas is a time for coming together and burying differences it seems an ideal mix. Being neither, I won’t be there at all.

Finally, the Churches Advertising Network is going all cyber this year with an island on second Life and the following little cartoon..So until 2008, Happy Christmas again.

This may not be the best blog posting I’ve ever done.. a tiring day after a tiring week so a few random and unconnected observations, though all germaine, one hopes, to the overall raison d’etre of this electronic diary..

1) Last Sunday, the Archbishop of York’s Press Officer’s phone suddenly started ringing as journalists called asking for more details about the boss's dramatic TV coup. Arun Arora told me in church that evening that the phone hadn’t stopped since John Sentamu had cut up his dog collar on the Andrew Marr show. Not only was this piece of television drama covered on bulletins and in every major newspaper throughout the following week, but clearly has caught the popular imagination too, if the conversations I’ve been having since are any indication. Apparently the Archbishop had been having trouble sleeping the night before the programme and felt God prompting him to think about the people of Zimbabwe, suffering under the Mugabe regime. He hadn’t actually warned Arun before the broadcast that he was carrying a pair of scissors in his pocket, but when he pulled them out and decimated his collar there was cheering in the Gallery, and not surprising. It was both dramatic and heartfelt and reminded me of the sort of spontaneous acts of the Old testament Prophets. He’s promised not to put the collar back on until Mugabe is deposed. Let’s hope it’s not too long.

2) So do we need press officers at all? It’s a question asked this week on Radio 4’s The Message (listen again) which wondered why politicians, for example needed spin doctors and couldn’t speak (Sentamu style) direct to the public. It was a question which was raised by Tim Livesey, the Lambeth Palace head of external communications as he told us about changes to the Press Office in the New Year, last week. A more accessible Archbishop of Canterbury, and more emphasis on direct communication with the public using new technology, less of the ‘old fashioned’ communication mediated by the middle men and women called journalists. And one less press officer! Well, let’s watch this space. My own feeling is that we need and will continue to need a mixed economy of communication methods. Just as announcements of the death of popular television could be premature (see previous posting) so too the view that press releases and press officers are ‘old fashioned’. After all, it was precisely the direct approach of the Archbishop which ruined m’ colleagues day off as he answered the phone and put out statements.

3) However…. The issue of more direct communication with the public, via new technology and the internet is something I recognise I need to spend more time on , especially as we start work on a new Ripon and Leeds website and look at the potential for generating video news, podcasts, and effectively TV and Radio on the web. Are we starting our own Christian broadcasting? Across the CofE communicators network, it has long been the strategy not to try and develop religious tv and radio but get the message across through the existing secular channels. But as the communications landscape rapidly shifts, that position is looking increasingly anachronistic – and when is a Christian video podcast not a broadcast? It’s an attractive thought to believe that we no longer need to rely on the hit and miss approach of relying on the vagaries of the newsroom to mediate our message – but is it realistic? Lots of questions and plenty to think about..

4) I managed to get together a programme of Communications training for Spring of 2008 at last – phew! Working with Bradford and Wakefield dioceses we’ll be making use of Trinity and All Saints College as well as an evening session with TV producer Andrew Graystone who is also Director of the Churches’ Media Council. Senior clergy will hopefully be learning how to handle television interviews, using the excellent facilities at the Horsforth college, as well as Geoff Druett, the genial Yorkshire TV presenter. So, hopefully if we do need to continue relying on journalists (of the TV variety), at least we’ll hopefully not make too much of a mess of it. (Geoff Druett pictured right)

It’s all go here, as it is in Cranford where the body count mounts. Poor Matty. Last week her sister, and now her on-off gentleman friend. Who said TV was dead? Well, the chappy from Apple who was at our DC Conference for one. Good article on the subject in last week’s Media Guardian. Has the death of mainstream TV been exaggerated? http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/nov/26/mondaymediasection.television11

Big news of the week – I’ve joined Facebook! It had to happen. I resisted My Space, I’ve got an Avatar on Second Life who is in hibernation – if you’re ever there say hello. (His name is Carter Thursday). But Facebook was the one area I’d not got into, partly because all three of my grown up children have been on it for ages and will probably be a bit cross/embarrassed/ or worried that I am now their ‘friends’ and can check up on them. Amazed and mortified to discover that four diocesan colleagues are already there ahead of me. Ah well. Can’t always be cutting edge.

Last week, the big event was the bishop’s Advent Address, a now traditional feature in the Ripon and Leeds calendar. When he gave me a preview I was quite excited. Topical – bishop speaks out about the Lambeth conference; Controversial – bishop says those who refuse to come are misguided; Popular, as it turned out – everyone I’ve subsequently met has said wasn’t it a good, could we have a copy. Well the answer is yes. Its at http://www.riponleeds.anglican.org/documentstore/ADVENTLECTURE2007.pdf.

But if you don’t want to read it here’s my synopsis:

Bishop John told clergy and lay leaders from throughout the diocese that it was precisely the need to air disagreements that led to his predecessor, Charles Longley, the first Bishop of Ripon (who went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury), to call the first Lambeth Conference in 1867. In his Address, Bishop Packer states unequivocally that both he and the suffragan (or deputy) Bishop of Knaresborough, James Bell, will be attending the Lambeth Conference - where he said it was important that divergent views were listened to.

Good stuff. Hope it’s read by my colleague Tina Evangelides Donavan in New York. Mark Sisk, her bishop, would I think approve and be encouraged.

This week it’s still all go. Ripon Cathedral have just been awarded more than half a million pounds by the Heritage Lottery Fund. A bit much for changing a light bulb you might think, but I understand the new lighting scheme is a bit bigger than that. Then I’m in London, doing a presentation on my study leave in Rome and New York to the quarterly DC Network Day and possibly eliciting support for a Conference in Rome in 2009. We’ll see. I’ve been doing my research though and it all looks feasible. I will report back!

It’s been a busy week.. so one or two things I’ve been writing. In this post an article for Unity Post which is a newspaper for West Yorkshire which goes out, as its name suggests, during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

Rome, City of Surprises

John Carter, Press and Communications Officer for the Diocese of Ripon and Leeds, found his assumptions challenged and ecumenical barriers broken down when he spent six weeks in Rome on study leave.

Let me put my cards on the table immediately. I’ve always been an Anglican, and although the family lapsed a bit and I ran away from Sunday School, never to return, I ended up as a teenager at an evangelical C of E church on the Wirral, where the Pope and Roman Catholicism in general were treated with deep suspicion. Membership of a university Christian Union probably didn’t help and even though I later worked closely with a genial Irish Catholic priest on Radio Merseyside, and was glad to be a reporter when Pope John Paul II came to Liverpool in the early 80’s, I still retained a suspicion for all things Roman well into my time as an Anglican ‘minister’ (definitely not a ‘priest’!).

Thankfully, twenty years on, and with ten years as the Press and Communications Officer at Ripon and Leeds Diocese, I’d mellowed a wee bit. Just as well, since I was planning to spend six weeks of my long-awaited sabbatical break last summer in Rome, meeting with Roman Catholic communications professionals, seeing how the Italian church was using the latest technology, and studying at the renowned and unique Centre for Social Communication at the Pontifical Gregorian University. I’d even prepared by learning ‘un poco italiano’.

Even so, I carried in my suitcase plenty of stereotypes, myths and suspicions - which began to take a knock within a few hours of arriving, on a sweltering Sunday in May, at my destination. First surprise was my hotel, Domus Aurelia, a little Catholic hostel near the Vatican with both a chapel and a bar boasting free Wi-Fi which seemed to welcome a continuous stream of visitors from every destination and every denomination. As I arrived, the hotel was organising and hosting a course for young Roman Catholics on evangelisation, with practical sessions sharing their faith on the city streets. Street evangelism? Whatever next? Next, in fact, was my meeting at the Gregorian University with Jacob Srampickal, the genial, lively Indian priest in charge of the Media and Communications Centre who’s first language was English and who wasn’t afraid to offer both praise and criticism of the way the church in Italy did things. Widely read and widely travelled he reeled off a list of friends and colleagues in Leeds where he’d studied, while typing out a list of classes I could attend and introducing me to passing lecturers. They couldn’t have been more welcoming - despite being an Anglican I was given all the help I wanted and even invited to contribute to one or two seminars. More than that, I was discovering committed communication professionals who were keen to use the latest technology to share their faith in Christ. Another misconception bit the dust.

Then there was the Anglican Centre in Rome – a haven from all this ecumenism, or so I thought. How wrong I was. We stood in a semi-circle to receive the bread and wine in a light, airy and simple chapel - four Anglicans, three Roman Catholics, two Lutherans and a Presbyterian. In fact, the centre wasn’t just a world meeting point for Anglicans from around the globe, but a place of welcome for people of all denominations staying in the city. Based on the third floor of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, a beautiful palace right in the city centre, the Centre was the gift of a family which has, as its goal, better ecumenical relations. So it seemed appropriate and very natural that over lunch I met Tony, Benjamin, Daniel, Sarah and several others, all hailing from different countries and different denominations.

Back at the University the same afternoon I meet Professor Andreu Scarpetta, leading a two hour class on Media and Ecumenism. It was a fascinating seminar using the latest Power Point technology to trace the development of Protestantism. Despite the lecture being in Italian, I learned more about my own background in those two hours than I’d ever learned back home. Yet Andreu’s treatment was surprisingly sympathetic and later he told me that he worried most when ‘fundamentalists’ from his own church refuse to entertain ecumenism.

The same evening I’m invited by some of those I’d met to a prayer service in the Trastevere region of Rome. The St. Egidio community has a worldwide reputation for peace making and, here was another surprise: the service at their home in the Basilica of Santa Maria is almost entirely led by lay people. It’s very unliturgical, very inclusive and the readings have a simultaneous translation into half a dozen languages using little portable headsets. Afterwards, over a beer and pizza, I meet Leonardo, a member of the community, who chats in a mix of Italian and English about the work of the community before giving me a lift back to my hotel on his Vespa. I hang on for grim death as we wind through the narrow streets at top speed and my life flashes before me.

But perhaps the biggest myth that’s blown away is that somehow the Roman Catholic church is a bit traditional and behind the times. At the Gregorian University students are learning to build websites, make radio and TV programmes, write press releases and apply rigorously apply theology to media and communications. I meet with professionals working on Catholic newspapers, Catholic websites, I visit Catholic press agencies and most interesting of the lot, SAT 2000. This is a satellite television station started ten years ago by the Italian bishops, which now broadcasts everyday from big studios in Milan and Rome, is always in the top ten of Italian TV stations and includes drama, documentaries, news on the hour, chat shows, debates, comedy and satire, and is creating something new and fresh. It was another eye-opener.

Rome is unique – not just a city but the cradle of the church. So you’ll still see nuns and priests everywhere, there’s lots of Catholic tradition, and, of course, the tacky trinkets and religious knick- knacks being sold on every street corner. But dig a bit deeper and you find a church which is pushing back technological boundaries, members who are reaching out in evangelism, and many who want to break down the denominational barriers. If sabbaticals are designed to refresh and challenge, then Rome was an excellent choice. I’ve made friends there ranging from Roman Catholic priests to Lutheran academics, and discovered in Rome a worldwide church of many denominations which is varied, diverse, global, and exciting.