Politics and Sport: a Bristol Tale

Today has been a day of politics and sport in my home city of Bristol.

I started the day by listening to a talk by Tim Dobson from Woodlands Church on Reaching your City. Tim argued that for the church to reach its city, it had to be actively involved across all the spheres of city life, a dynamic presence in the heart of politics, sport, the arts, education, rather than acting as a separate entity alongside them.

Later that day, having failed to get tickets for the sell-out match, I was listening on the radio to the last Bristol Rovers game of the season. If other results went their way, and if Rovers won the match (against already relegated Dagenham and Redbridge), then the Bristol side would win automatic promotion to League One of the Football League. Glorious as that would be, even more magnificent was the prospect of securing promotion for the second season in a row - a feat never before achieved by Bristol Rovers. 

Meanwhile, in the minutes before kick-off, as Rovers made their final preparations for their vital end-of-season encounter, the results of Bristol's mayoral election were trickling through. Second-choice votes were being counted, but it looked to informed observers as if Labour Party candidate Marvin Rees had won the contest, replacing incumbent Independent Mayor George Ferguson who had been elected in 2012. As Lee Brown tapped in the 92nd-minute goal which secured Rovers' promotion,  the results of the Mayoral election had been confirmed. The Gas were going up; Marvin Rees was Bristol's new elected mayor.  

After Marvin's unsuccessful attempt at becoming elected Mayor in 2012, he was interviewed by Andy Flannagan of Christians on the Left about the intersection between his Christian faith and his political vocation. Rees cites the biblical idea of the Year of Jubilee - the releasing of debts and the proclaiming of liberty - as the overarching narrative that defines his understanding of his own politics. 

Meanwhile, wandering down the Gloucester Road after the match, which was heaving with the blue and white shirts of thousands of Rovers fans, I saw some of the uglier side of our city's life. A Muslim women, fully veiled in a Niqab and with a young daughter and a baby in a pushchair, was waiting at a bus stop as hundreds of the fans streamed past, many spilling onto the busy road, cheering and shouting. Several white men, middle-aged, bald headed, flashed Nazi salutes as they marched past the family. The sight of such hostility and prejudice was shocking, but gave me an insight into what may be a semi-regular feature of life for some of our Muslim neighbours in a society where racism and Islamophobia seem to be on the rise.    

In the pre-match build up, I saw this clip about Bristol Rovers chaplain Dave Jeal. His story of transformation from football hooligan to football chaplain is an inspiring tale of restoration. He now serves as the chaplain at the stadium from which he was once banned. 

#Pray4TheGas @alidurdenBBC meets @DaveJeal the man who's praying more than most for @Official_BRFC's promotionhttps://t.co/CWTZMkGopI

— BBC Points West (@bbcpointswest) May 6, 2016

I think Tim Dobson was correct. The church has much still to do to be be present, prayerful and authentic in our witness to God's kingdom, a reality which still has the answers to the real issues in our city. 

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Getting What We Don't Deserve

Image via Wikipedia

There I was sitting in a former theatrical storage building in Bristol this evening, part of a crowd of around 300 people, when up gets John.

Here's what John had to say, paraphrased:

He is a recovering alcoholic who fell off the wagon two weeks ago and was walking home drunk. 

In his anger, frustration and shame, his emotions poured out  and, clenching his fist, he smashed his hand into a glass bus shelter. Despite modern shelters being made of safety glass, the impact resulted in John breaking three fingers in his hand.

Later in hospital, John's hand was put into a hard plaster and he was sent home. 

The following Saturday (last week), John went to church. Actually, he went to a meeting called urban healing, where Christians will pray for anyone who is sick or injured and needs to be healed.

Two guys prayed for John and, as they were doing so, the fingers on his hand started to move rapidly and involuntarily. John believed that his hand was being healed.

Back at the hospital, John asked the orthopedic surgeon to cut off the plaster on his hand. The doctor, quite understandably, told John that it was against his professional judgement to comply with the request. When John announced that he would cut the plaster off himself if the hospital would not do so, the doctor reluctantly agreed. Having removed the cast, the surgeon bound John's three fingers together and told him to leave the binding in place for several weeks.

Ever compliant, John removed the binding at home the next day. He experienced complete freedom of movement, and an absence of any pain. At a follow-up appointment this week, the examining doctor performed a number of tests on John's hand. The doctor's conclusion, as John recounts it, was that the bones in the hand had been "healed." He also said that he would normally have expected the hand to take about eight weeks before the bones were properly fused together again, with a cast on. The doctor pronounced this all-clear at the follow-up examination two weeks after the initial break.

What struck me as I was listening to John's story, and watching him freely move, bend and stretch his fingers, was not so much the evidence that a healing had occurred in response to prayer.

Rather, in a week in which the Prime Minister has called for absent fathers to be "shamed" by society,  the contrast of a man doing something foolish (smashing his hand into thick glass) who then received a healing from God, made me realise that at the heart of the faith of these Christians is the idea of mercy: people getting what they don't deserve.

If we're honest, I guess many people find mercy an unsettling idea, turning on its head some of our cherished notions of justice and accountability.

But there is is anyway.

John's happy about it.

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Publishing Projects

I have started 2011 with the intention of creating a number of self-published written works, to supplement this blog and others that I maintain.

My two main publishing projects for this year are:

1. A series of essays under the working title of Understanding the Times: Essays in Christian Engagement

2. A book examining the radical Christian history of Bristol, my home town.

The series of essays arise from the same root motivation as this blog - namely to relate the Christian faith to the real world of politics, economics and culture.  They will hopefully be of interest to people of all faiths and none. 

The essays will  be published once a month on the You Publish site and will be available to download as PDF documents.

In fact, the first essay, setting the scene and introducing the theme, has been uploaded already and can be read here.

Comments welcome, as always. 

The image is Ship of Fools by Hieronymus Bosch, and forms the front cover of the first essay.

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Jeff Koons in London

How disappointing.

The Serpentine Gallery in London has decided to delight us all with a major exhibition by American artist Jeff Koons - his first (and hopefully last) "major exhibition in a public gallery in England."

Koons' kitsch and banal creations represent all that was wrong about the culturally dishonest decade when the former Wall Street commodities broker first set himself up as a full-time artist. Like his art, the 1980's was a crass and selfish era during which the seeds of the current economic collapse were sown in the Anglo-American economies through the affirmation of unrestrained greed as a social good.

Koons has weathered the economic storms, creating such vulgar works as Michael Jackson and Bubbles, and continues to create works of factory art as shallow as the philosophy he espouses.







An hour and a half by train from central London, by contrast, lies the fair city of Bristol where, free of charge, members of the public can see an alternative exhibition to that offered by the Serpentine. Banksy Versus Bristol Museum offers a different vision of life and is well reviewed here.

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Stephen Fry, Pre-Columbian Art and Bristol's Bookbarn

Two unrelated threads came together this week as I was rummaging through the leftovers of Bristol's Bookbarn, which is closing its vast doors and giving away its remaining stock free of charge to anyone who turns up to take it.

One of my interests is early American history, so I was pleased to pick up from the musty warehouse two titles on pre-Columbian civilisations of America.

Meanwhile, right on cue, Twitter celebrity Stephen Fry (he's also a writer, actor and broadcaster, I believe), who has been tweeting this week about his current trip to Baja California to film Last Chance to See for the BBC, uploaded the following photo of pre-Columbian cave art from his travels.

Astonishing coincidences.

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Imagining Greener Cities

Reading James Joyce's Dubliners at the moment, I am struck by his descriptions of the city. In particular, his anecdotes about the relationship between buildings and green spaces is of interest.

Examples abound. The tall trees that line the mall with the sunlight slanting through them onto the water; crossing the Liffy in a ferryboat; a wide field in Ringsend (all in An Encounter).

In Araby, we are introduced to houses with apples trees in their back gardens, muddy lanes, cottages and stables

"where a coachman smoothed or combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness."

Eveline is set against the backdrop of residential development:

"One time there used to be a field in which they used to play every evening....Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it."

Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century had missed out on much of the industrial development enjoyed further north in Belfast, and had therefore suffered economically. This was one factor in explaining the unique way that the city's infrastructure developed during the period before the Easter Rising of 1916.

Am reminded while reading of the stories told by an old local resident (in his 90's) who remembers my current neighbourhood in north Bristol when much of it was an English meadow in which he and his friends had riverside picnics. He also recalls that the three mile journey to the city centre was by tram or bicycle, partly through open fields.

On a tangential note, I remember talking with an old Finnish missionary several years ago while visiting Bangkok. Arriving in the city just after the Second World War, he remembers elephants working inside the city limits and only three bridges crossing the Chao Phrya River in a city which he described as essentially a collection of villages linked by boats.

Of course, none of this romanticising of the past means that these cities were necessarily healthier places to live than are cities today. However, in an age "addicted to oil" (to quote President Bush) it is often difficult to imagine cities without vast numbers of cars and building developments that dwarf and sometimes replace residential communities which have evolved over centuries. Drawing on the experiences of older people, and reading stories of urban life in a previous age, can be a means of fuelling the imagination and helping us to think creatively about the way that urbanisation in the C21 could work for us with reduced car use and oil dependency.

At least, that's what these people think.

Incidentally, in 2003, a BBC poll voted Dublin as the best European capital city to live in.

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