On the reception of the 2014 gender stats for Christian conferences
In reviewing last year, I looked at a list of everything I had ‘delivered’: writing sent off for publication; teaching done; students submitted; talks given; … I find it helpful: it is too easy to remember the stuff I didn’t manage to do, of which there is always much, and focus on that. (For the first time I also had a heading for things I had intentionally stopped doing, which wasn’t a long list, but is something at which I intend to work harder.) One of the things that gave me most satisfaction to note was the public launch of Project 3:28, a small collective of people working towards gender justice in the church, who have come together to do some specific things. It came out of Natalie Collins‘s collation of statistics on the gender of speakers on UK conference platforms in 2013, which I blogged about here; a group of us got together to talk about whether we could do anything; Project 3:28 is the result. We’re working on several strands, but the first one went live yesterday: gender statistics for UK conference platforms in 2o14, again compiled by Natalie. The headline number was encouraging: in 2013, of the 431 speakers at conferences we counted, 24% were female; in 2014, we counted 1081 speakers, and 34% were female. Natalie tweeted from the project account (@project328) through the morning, posting award certificates for the five conferences with the best gender balance and the five with the most improved gender balance. We’ve not yet reviewed the reception as a team, but I think when we do we will be pleased. There was media coverage from Premier and Christian Today – hopefully the print sources will also notice us – and a fair amount of buzz on social media, most of it positive and encouraging. Of course there were a few negative lines, some of them rather silly. ‘Didn’t we know that already?’ some asked. No, we didn’t, not the precise numbers, or the year-on-year change, or the conferences that were doing better than most. ‘What a waste of money!’ opined several; I think it has cost us, between us, nearly £250 so far – a fair chunk of that the price of the meal where we first got together to plan, which was generously paid for by an all-male conference (via a speaker’s fee they gave to one of us…). Then we had the classic spurious alternative – ‘shouldn’t you be concentrating on … instead?’ Hey, we saw an issue that we thought we could do something about; that doesn’t mean we don’t care about other issues – and in every case I’ve so far seen mentioned, at least two of us have been actively & publicly involved in addressing the issue elsewhere (unlike, generally, the complainant). Finally – my favourite – ‘A much simpler way would have just to read [sic] any literature advertising the event and play spot the female photo & name’; What did you think our research method was? Stealth photography in green rooms? DNA testing of skin residues left on microphones? Compulsory urine samples as speakers left the platforms?! One comment keeps coming back though: ‘don’t we want the best speakers?’ Yes. Yes we do; that’s most of the point. On the assumption (and it is an assumption, but it is one I believe to be well founded in Scripture) that God gives gifts to people regardless of gender, roughly half the ‘best’ speakers should be female, where ‘best’ = ‘most gifted’; if our platforms are 75% or 66% male, then we are not getting the ‘best’ speakers. The problem is, though, that ‘best’ means more than ‘most gifted’; it means also ‘most experienced’, and so we get a vicious feedback loop: we want the same names and faces on every platform, because they have learnt through long experience how to do it well, and because they are famous names and so draw the (paying) crowds. I’ve organised conferences; I can write that list in the UK evangelical scene – and it is indeed 70% male. But I can write another list of speakers who are just as – or even more – gifted, in many cases who I would much rather hear, who are slightly rawer, for lack of experience, and much less famous – and that list is majority female. We came together in the Project 3:28 collective knowing this; round the table when we first discussed ideas were some veterans of the UK conference scene: Wendy Beech-Ward, Paula Gooder, Krish Kandiah, Rachel Jordan, me, … This is why intentional action is needed. The conference circuit operates as its own breeding ground: you get brought in to assist at a...
Read MoreThought Leaders: Coleridge, the Clerisy, and Catalyst Live
It was a privilege to be a part of the ‘Catalyst Live’ event organised and sponsored by BMS World Mission a few weeks back. The vision, the mix of speakers, and the organisation, were each simply excellent; I got asked to give a couple of talks, but also to engage personally with Jürgen Moltmann. Hearing him tell his own story, of discovering the hope that is in Christ as he read the Bible whilst a prisoner of war in a camp in Kilmarnock, was profoundly moving; talking to him at some length as we planned the interview sessions – well; I have disagreed with aspects of his theology in public, and I stand by those points; but his personal graciousness, gentleness, and humility were utterly captivating and disarming. (At one point, as we shared a sandwich, I asked him who the up-and-coming theologians in Germany were; he responded, then looked at me with a smile and asked who ‘the other rising theologians in the UK’ might be…) I am enormously grateful to David Kerrigan, Mark Craig, and the rest of the BMS team who put it together and who asked me to be involved. I have, I think, three reflections on being part of the event that might be aired publicly. The first concerns the vision of the event. It was cast as for ‘thought leaders,’ and I heard a number of people – all local pastors – express doubt as to whether the event was for them, because they were not ‘thought leaders’. On the one hand, I talked enough to those who organised the event to know that, yes, if you are a local pastor, it was for you; on the other, I understand the hesitation and concern. This collision, I think, bears reflection. In his brilliant, if deeply eccentric, text On the Constitution of the Church and the State, Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed that the ‘church’ is necessary to the proper functioning of the State, where ‘church’ is understood as ‘the body of educated people who understand and transmit the values/ethos of the nation.’ If the national church happens to be Christian, it is an inestimable boon, he believed, but he made the term ‘church’ broader than merely Christian groups. He envisaged the ‘national church’ necessarily putting in place two individuals in every locality – think ‘parish’ or – perhaps better – ‘village’: the priest and the schoolmaster. The priest’s role is to remind and instruct the adult population of/in the broad beliefs of the culture; the schoolmaster’s role is to induct the children of the community into these broad beliefs. Now, there are lots of questions to ask about this account: what, given that this is a post about an explicitly Baptist initiative, of nonconformity, of those communities that gather seriously but refuse state recognition? Where is the place for principled debate, for those whose calling is to challenge and develop the ethos of the nation? (To be fair to Coleridge, he had a place for this in his account of the national government, which is a synthesis of forces of ‘permanence’ and ‘progress’ – but it seems that at local level there only is space in his system for people who conform to national visions.) That said, he captured something important: every parish, every village, needs its clerisy, its thought leaders. Coleridge was trying to set in stone a particular moment in English history; at this distance, and given his involvement in defining Romantic aesthetics, it is tempting to see this text, although presented as a (real and serious) protest against the Catholic Emancipation Bill, as an act of resistance against the urbanisation of the industrial revolution; of course, his attempts to command the tides of history were no more successful than Canute’s attempts to command less metaphorical tides, and the perfect English village he imagined has become a community-lite shell of weekend cottages or, if it is lucky, of commuter dormitories. That said, locality still matters. Not exclusively – network society is a reality – but then locality was never exhaustive; the county set were not defined by their villages of residence in Coleridge’s ideal England, even. But locality still matters; in the community I live in, we have debates about re-siting the local secondary school, and about housing provision, and about HMO licences, about the changing use of a military base, and about a dozen other things, that in every case relate to national debates, but in evert case also have particular local contexts and shapes. If the role of Coleridge’s ‘clerisy’ – thought leaders – is to speak well into these debates, to show how they are shaped...
Read MoreOnce again: on being unapologetically charismatic
‘Are you a closet charismatic, Steve?’ I was having lunch with someone I like and respect greatly when he threw this one at me a month or two back. My response was heartfelt and immediate: ‘What do you mean, “closet”?’ On this issue, I’m out and proud – although hardly uncritical of the movement as a whole, or in its various strands. Because of this, I initially looked seriously at the first reports from the ‘Strange Fire’ conference that happened across the pond a while back; I have to admit that I quickly lost interest: there are some serious theological criticisms to be made of the charismatic movement, but there was no-one on that platform capable of making them. I picked up a farrago of unsubstantiated assertion, inaccurate history, poor exegesis, and – well, generally, it wasn’t good, and I quickly tuned out. One point stuck with me from what little I read, though. My friend Andrew Wilson, who clearly has far more patience and Christian charity than I do, engaged seriously with some of the arguments presented at the conference on the Think Theology blog here; I want to pick up just on one theme, albeit a rather central one: the definition of ‘charismatic’. Andrew quotes, and accepts, a definition offered at the SF conference by Tom Pennington: to be ‘charismatic’ is to support the continuation of the ‘miraculous gifts’. I am not convinced by this definition. My concern with this is simple, and deeply partial, in the sense that it is based only on my own experience and knowledge only, and not on any serious research. The charismatic movement which I know might formally be characterised theologically by its belief about certain spiritual gifts, but this is some distance from its lived concerns and interests. Andrew makes the point that the ‘charismatic/cessationist’ debate is not about belief in continuing miracles: conversion – God giving new life to someone dead in their trespasses and sins – remains the fundamental miracle of the church’s experience, and is believed and rejoiced in on all sides of this debate. I want to push this further, though: consider the ‘gift of healing’: on the ‘cessationist’ side, I have never met a pastor who does not pray seriously for God’s healing for his/her flock when they are ill; on the ‘charismatic’ side, I do not think I have met anyone who claims to have ‘the gift of healing’ (I know they exist; my point is that much – perhaps most – charismatic life is not narrated in these terms). I know many people – including one of my own children – who can give serious testimony to seeing instantaneous and apparently-miraculous healing happening in response to prayer; but the language of a ‘gift of healing’ is not the way these testimonies would be framed. Similarly, I think of people in congregations I have led (or been a part of) who would regularly prophesy in our worship times; none ever (in my hearing) claimed a ‘gift of prophecy’; that was not their self-understanding of how they were ministering. Again, I stress, I am reflecting on my own experience – but I have been on the speaking or leadership teams of several major charismatic conferences in the UK over the last decade; in some of these prophecy, healing, and salvation were daily realities; I never recall hearing the language of ‘gift of healing/prophecy’ in any context in any of them. When I have been present when messages in tongues have come, the request from the front has always been something like ‘Did anyone sense God speaking as that message was brought?’ not ‘Does anyone have the gift of interpretation?’ Again, I know lots of people who pray in tongues. It happens that I pray in tongues every day (that rumbling sound you can hear is the collapsing of my academic credibility). I suppose if someone asked me ‘have you received the gift of tongues’ I would say yes, but I do not recall ever being asked that question, and I do not habitually think of my spirituality in those terms; my ordinary daily discipline is to say an office, to pray in tongues, and to intercede for needs I am aware of; during the day, I will respond to events/thoughts in prayer regularly, sometimes praying in tongues, sometimes not (our family prayer time at night is obviously in English exclusively). The daily office – and the family devotional material we use – would be as much a ‘gift’ in my narration of this as the ability to pray in tongues; to speak of ‘the supernatural gift of tongues’ is just...
Read More‘Hate something? Change something!’ On gender bias in conferences
I have a recurrent experience with car ads, which I think is their fault not mine: I can often, years later, remember every detail of the ad except which particular car it was advertising. I suspect this is a result of the mismatch between the grandiose claims made by marketeers and the tiny differences between actual cars. One ad, years back, ran under the slogan ‘hate something? change something!’ – as best I recall one manufacturer or another had improved their diesel engine slightly in some particular, and the marketing department decided to make this an example of world-transformation up there with the American Civil Rights movement or the ending of apartheid… I love the slogan, though. For myself I translate it as ‘don’t moan; transform!’ There are a few things I care about enough to really not like; it would be easy to talk a lot about them; the challenge instead is to do something that will actually make some difference (which may involve some intentional talking, of course). One of the things I try occasionally to do something about is gender balance in those bits of the church I can get my hands on – mostly UK Baptist and evangelical life. So I became interested when Helen (@helen_a13, aka ‘the tweeter formerly known as @fragmentz’) and @God_Loves_Women started asking questions on Twitter about gender representation on UK Christian conference platforms (based on Rachel Held Evans twitter comments about the gender (im)balance at something called ‘The Nines’ in the USA, and an American journalist offering an analysis of the ‘biggest Christian conferences in the evangelical world’ – he used ‘world’ in that odd US English sense of ‘North America’; cf. ‘World Series Baseball’). I tweeted a few names and lists of conferences to include, and looked forward to seeing the results sometime next month… …I should know GLW better than that. Her analysis went live the next morning, and makes sobering reading for anyone involved, as I have been, in organising and running conferences. It suffers the problems of any statistical analysis (you know the old one about a statistician being someone who can lie with her head in the freezer and her feet in the oven, and claim that on the whole, she is feeling completely normal?). But these stats are too skewed to enable any excuses, and I suspect that we all know that if we did the more granular stuff it would just look worse. There’s something here to moan about – or to transform. How might we do the latter? First, there are already some brilliant blogs on the subject: Hannah Swithinbank asks conference organisers to front up and be honest. If you failed to get a decent (which means representative, as well as skilled) speaking team, tell us – publicly – how hard you tried, and what you are going to do different to do better next time. Martin Saunders talks about the effort the UK Youthwork Summit put in to achieve gender balance, and so gives a model for others to follow Jenny Baker points helpfully to some of the underlying structural issues that need to be named and changed. Jonny Baker is typically direct about how easy it should be. Second – guess what? The church is not the only community that faces this particular problem. People have talked very practically about increasing female representation at science conferences; at game developer conferences; at conferences on writing JavaScript – and probably lots of other places. There are great ideas here we could happily borrow… What else could we do? Here are some ideas, thrown out at random: 1. Picking up on Hannah’s points: if your gender ratio is rubbish, commit – publicly – to do something about it at the conference. Create one bursary for every excess male speaker, to be awarded to a gifted young woman; have your top speakers meet with them day by day through the conference to help and encourage them into using their gifts; next year, give them a slot on the programme; … 2. People say they can’t find female speakers – so is there space for a directory, listing great women, their particular gifts and expertise? 3. On twitter, Jenny Baker said she and others had tried the directory idea, and people had been reluctant to put themselves forward. So build a group through intentional mentoring, training sessions, and safe practice spaces; meet people, and encourage them to get involved; … (I know Jenny and Wendy Beech-Ward are doing this already; I wonder how much support they are getting from conference organisers who complain about their inability to find women to speak?) 4. Or, instead or as...
Read MoreRutherford House Blog Competition
An announcement from the Research Committee of Rutherford House: The 2013 Rutherford House Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference will take place on September 2-5 (details here); the subject will be ‘The Doctrine of Scripture’. To promote engagement with the topic around and beyond the conference, we are pleased to announce a competition for the best blog post on the topic of the doctrine of Scripture published between now and 31st August; the prize will be six books from Rutherford House, likely to be proceedings of previous conferences, which feature essays by Bruce McCormack, N.T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, John Webster, and others (but we’ll negotiate with anyone who already has a complete set!) Rutherford House will feature links to some entries on its Facebook page to promote discussion and interest in the theme. The winning entry will be chosen by the Rutherford House Research Committee. To enter, simply post on the topic on your blog, and email a link to the post to Steve Holmes (sh80@st-andrews.ac.uk) and Bethany Turner (BTurner@rutherfordhouse.org.uk), making clear it is an entry for the blog...
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