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ISR puts faith to work in the community and in the workplace. We do this by expressing Christian values at work and in economic life and working for social justice with church communities in the South West.

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Flu Pandemic?

Putting faith to work: Swindon churches respond to the recession.

Marriage Week - Celebrating Commitment

Crying out for a Polycentric Church

Who is my Neighbour?

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Church of England
  • Church House Publishing - agreement signed
    The Archbishops’ Council has signed an agreement with Anglican charity Hymns Ancient & Modern to publish liturgy, key reference titles and other resources for the Church.
  • Update published on Clergy Pensions Scheme
    The Church of England has today published a second and more detailed report on the impact of the credit crunch and recession on the financial position of the Funded Clergy Pension Scheme. The report puts forward various options relating to the future of the scheme.
  • Protecting life is the most important thing, Church says, on easy-to-read website
    The Church of England website has today published a new section called ‘Protecting Life - Opposing Assisted Suicide’. It summarises quickly and simply the Church’s position in the sometimes confusing assisted suicide debate.
  • Appointment to Chair of Church Buildings Council announced
    Anne Sloman has been appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to chair the Church Buildings Council, the new statutory body created last year to succeed the Council for the Care of Churches and the Advisory Board for Redundant Churches. The CBC supports dioceses and parishes in their stewardship of more than 16,000 church buildings.
  • College inspection report published
    The Church of England today publishes the inspection report on one of its ministerial training colleges: St Mellitus College and Chelmsford and London Reader training.
Guardian Religion
  • Face to faith | Jane Shaw on eating round the altar in San Francisco

    At St Gregory's church there is no difference between being spiritually fed and literally fed, says Jane Shaw

    Lots of churches have soup kitchens or food pantries, but the one at St Gregory of Nyssa, an Episcopal church in San Francisco, is different. For a start, its food pantry is in the church - not the parish hall or basement - and food is distributed from the sanctuary, around the altar, to 800 families every week. Just as striking is the fact that the volunteers who work at the pantry are people who came for food and kept coming back - to participate in running it. This is not about "social services to the poor" but the formation of a vital community.

    The inspiration for this community came from Sara Miles, an energetic Anglican laywoman who, 10 years ago, while still a dedicated atheist, walked in off the street and received the bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ - at St Gregory's everyone is welcome to God's table to receive communion. She was converted there and then. As she puts it: "Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all expectations to a faith I'd scorned and work I'd never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer but actual food - indeed, the bread of life." She wrote about that experience in her book Take this Bread, a compelling read for its raw honesty, spiritual and emotional intelligence, and gripping conversion story: a Pilgrim's Progress for the postmodern age.

    Her experience of being fed led her to feed others. She took two engravings on the church's recently installed altar at face value. The first, from the Gospel of Luke, records an insult to Jesus: "This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them." The second, from the seventh-century mystic Isaac of Nineveh, says: "Did not our Lord share his table with tax collectors and harlots? So do not distinguish between worthy and unworthy. All must be equal for you to love and serve."

    The food pantry was to be set up inside the church, and based around the altar. There was initial resistance. As one of the rectors said to Miles later: "The altar was extravagant - six thousand dollars or something - and then you came and said, fine, let's use the Table to do what it says. And I thought, wow, this will be interesting. We just spent all this money on an altar and now we are gonna bring in people who will scuff it?" But she succeeded in winning the parish over to her idea, and worked with the San Francisco food bank to get tons of groceries every week, cheaply and efficiently.

    The food pantry is a Eucharistic community. On a Sunday, the congregation sings and dances around the altar; on a Friday, hundreds of people walk around it collecting fresh vegetables, fruit and basic staples like rice and bread. Liturgy shapes social practice. Here there is no difference between being spiritually fed and literally fed, no difference between the spiritual hunger that leads many to St Gregory's on a Sunday and the physical hunger of the people who come for their weekly groceries on a Friday.

    Volunteering at the food pantry is a joyful experience. Visiting the pantry, I was struck by the ways in which strangers quickly became friends, and conservative Pentecostal Christians happily worked alongside drag queens and Russian grandmothers. After all the food has been delivered and set out in the church, a delicious meal is served to all the volunteers, and then the doors are opened to the crowds lining up around the block. It is, as Miles said to me, "kind of like heaven, no?" This is the diversity of God's human community in reality, not a committee discussion about diversity, which is what we Anglicans usually tend towards.

    The church's "work with the poor" can so often be paternalistic - all about "helping". The food pantry at St Gregory of Nyssa witnesses to a transformational faith, love in practice and true communion. It's all about welcoming the stranger as one of us, and getting them straight away involved, part of the body.

    • Rev Canon Dr Jane Shaw is dean of divinity and a fellow of New College, Oxford

    guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

  • Ruling brands Judaism racist – Chief Rabbi

    The Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, issued a rallying cry for Jews today to defend their schools from English law after the court of appeal decided that admission on the basis of a parent's Jewish status was discriminatory. Writing in this week's Jewish Chronicle, he condemned the ruling, saying it branded Judaism "racist".

    His comments follow last month's judgment by the court of appeal that a Jewish school that prioritised applications from children with Jewish mothers discriminated on grounds of race. Seen as a landmark decision on the admissions criteria used by faith schools, the case centred on a boy known as M, 12, who was refused admission to JFS, in Brent, London.

    M, a Jew who regularly attends a progressive synagogue, was told he could not be admitted because his mother had converted to Judaism in a procedure not recognised by the Chief Rabbi.

    Overturning a previous judgment in favour of the school, the court said a policy determining eligibility based on a person's descent, rather than religious practice, amounted to racial discrimination.

    Sacks wrote that Jewish education was extended to Jews, "that is, those born of Jewish mothers" or those who had converted according to the standards of the religious authority to which the school belonged. It was a religious, not a racial, test and it applied to all Jewish schools, "Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike".

    "An English court has declared this rule racist, and since this is an essential element of Jewish law, it is in effect declaring Judaism racist," Sacks wrote. "To be told now that Judaism is racist is distressing. To confuse religion and race is a mistake."Faith schools are exempted from the law prohibiting discrimination on grounds of religion or belief, to enable them to provide education in line with their beliefs."Once [a faith school] is oversubscribed, it can restrict entry to children whom – or whose parents – it regards as sharing the school's faith," the court said. "No school, however, is permitted to discriminate in its admissions policy on racial grounds."

    guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

  • Sudan's extremes close in | Nesrine Malik

    Ruling parties that do not practise the strict forms of Islam that they preach will end up hoist by their own petard

    The murderers of John Granville, an American who was working for USAID in Sudan, were sentenced to death in Khartoum earlier this week. Granville was gunned down along with his driver in 2008 in the wake of UN troop introduction in Darfur and his bearded assassins received the verdict with jubilation and cries of "God is Greatest".

    This was the second of two incidents that have shocked the Sudanese capital in the past few years. In a gruesome episode in 2006, Mohammed Taha, a journalist who had made remarks perceived to be insulting towards Islam was abducted and beheaded.

    This score-settling by religious free agents is one sign of change in a city that historically has been one of the safest in Africa. Khartoum had managed to avoid the fate of other vulnerable African cities despite the long-running civil war in the south and the conflict in Darfur, a nonchalant police force, an unsophisticated security network and a deluge of disenfranchised migrants from impoverished provinces.

    While Sudan is predominantly Sunni Muslim, its political culture and the nature of religious practice have traditionally been a symbiotic blend of Arab and African influences with a preference for a more peaceful spiritual Sufi-based form of observance.

    Throughout the several mutations of government, military ones established after coups and civil ones on the back of civil uprisings, the National Islamic Front (NIF), headed by Hassan al Turabi, strove to gain power. The NIF-sponsored military coup in 1989 saw the religious vision brought to life, and the government embarked on an intense propaganda campaign demonising the west and injecting an alien strain of Islam, one that "othered" non-Muslims, into the political culture of the country.

    In the 1990s, a popular television show called The Fields of Sacrifice updated the nation on those north Sudanese felled in the war with the south, profiled pious "martyrs" and generally employed Qur'anic recitation and moving images to illustrate the war in the non-Muslim south and naturally, with the west, as some grand Islamic crusade against infidels. The terms "jihad" and "martyrdom" were introduced into Sudan's political lexicon.

    The hijab was enforced in all public areas and male youths were enlisted in mandatory military training which focused heavily on religious themes. Apart from Jaafar Nimeiri's brief fickle fling with sharia in the 1980s, this was the first time since independence that the country had fallen under a heavy shroud of arbitrary Islamic law. This approach served as a proxy agenda and identity for a government that had to establish itself at all costs. With a vacuum of support for a fledgling regime, religion was a convenient galvanising agent and a siege mentality was fostered.

    It was during this time that Sudan hosted Osama bin Laden, who took up residence in Khartoum and reportedly even married one of the locals. As the Salvation Front established itself in power and the military junta purged Islamic elements from its ranks, the hardline approach was diluted and tempered as foreign investments and oil exports flourished, but the extremism of those years is now resurfacing.

    This is not an unfamiliar story. Governments elsewhere have also employed religion cynically to imbue their dictatorships with some gravitas – but have then become haunted by the very conditions they sought to create.

    In Saudi Arabia, local terrorists who are a thorn in the side of the authorities are referred to as "the misguided" by newscasters and officials. No link is made between the very specific permutation of Wahhabi Islamic culture imposed and encouraged by the authorities and the phobia and intolerance inculcated by years of indoctrination via state school curriculums and media messaging.

    While "foreign hands" and influences are conveniently blamed for most terrorist incidents, the fact that government policies may have made youths susceptible to the approach of fundamentalist organisations is never confronted. Most Arab ruling parties do not in fact remotely practise what they preach (whether it's their co-operation with western governments or the corruption and irreverent lifestyles of those in power) and so it is often not long before the potency of an almost infinitely exclusive Salafi interpretation of Islam is turned against those who used it to garner public support. As with western governments that promote an unapologetic commitment to democracy and human rights, and then betray them for political exigency, they end up hoist by their own petard.

    With the uncharacteristically harsh and relatively swift justice meted out to Granville's killers, the Sudanese government is perhaps hoping to put the genie of extremism it reared back in the bottle. It may prove to be too little, too late.

    guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

  • British cardinal edges closer to sainthood

    Pope approves beatification of John Newman, which would mean first British saint since 1976

    Cardinal John Henry Newman has moved closer to sainthood after Pope Benedict XVI approved his beatification, saying that the healing of a man's serious back condition was down to his intercession.

    Newman, who was England's most famous convert to Catholicism until Tony Blair turned to Rome in 2007, would become Britain's first saint since St John Ogilvie, a Scottish martyr, was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1976 and the first Englishman who lived after the 17th century to be canonised.

    For someone to be proclaimed "blessed", his or her heavenly intercession must be judged responsible for a miracle of physical healing. A panel of doctors has to rule that the healing is scientifically inexplicable, while theologians examine whether it occurred as the result of the intercession of the person whose beatification is being considered.

    If the doctors and theologians judge the case positively, it is then examined by the cardinals and bishops of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. The results of those discussions are communicated to the Pope, who alone has the power to declare a healing to be a true miracle. Only when all these stages have been successfully completed does the Pope authenticate the miracle.

    A second miracle has to be recognised for a person to be declared to be a saint.

    The news was welcomed in the UK and beyond. Jack Sullivan, a cleric in the US who claimed he was healed through Newman's intercession, said he was left with an "intense sense of gratitude and thanksgiving to God".

    In the archdiocese of Birmingham, where Newman lived for more than 40 years, Bishop William Kenney said he was "delighted" to hear of the development.

    "This is an opportunity for a real renewal of spirit among Catholics and many others, not least here in the city of Birmingham."

    The steps to sainthood can take years or centuries and the process can only start after a person has died. The first stage involves an examination of a person's life and writings. During this examination he or she is called a "servant of God" – as Pope John Paul II is at present.

    At the end of this scrutiny, the Pope may make a proclamation of "heroic virtue" – that the person lived to a heroic degree the "theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, and the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude".

    With this proclamation, he or she is declared "venerable", a status Newman has held since 1991.

    guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

  • Darwin's doubters | Nick Spencer

    Belief in evolutionary varies around the world, but there's some evidence that Darwin-scepticism may have an Islamic flavour

    When the public theology think tank Theos published its study into evolution and theism in the UK earlier this year, it found that people in London were consistently more ignorant of and hostile towards Darwinism than those who lived elsewhere.

    Although Londoners were more likely to know that 2009 was Darwin's big anniversary (28% vs. 21% nationally), they were less likely to know what he was famous for (63% said evolution vs 70% nationally), more likely to believe that humans had been created by God at some point in the last 10,000 years (20% vs 17%), and less likely to agree that "evolution is a theory so well established that it's beyond reasonable doubt" (28% vs 37%).

    These findings have been supported by a recent British Council/Ipsos-MORI (pdf) study which reports that "nearly a quarter of those who live in London believe in creationism … compared to a nationwide average of 16%." Similarly, a fifth of Londoners said they had never heard of Darwin and his theory of evolution and less than a half (48%) "agreed that there was enough scientific evidence to support his evolutionary theory."

    The British Council survey interviewed 973 respondents, the Theos one 2,060 – neither, sadly, large enough to allow for statistically significant analysis by region. The British Council did, however, conduct their study internationally (pdf), interviewing around 1,000 people in each of Argentina, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Spain, the US and Great Britain. The full results are not yet published but topline findings show that South Africans were most ignorant about Darwin (only 27% had heard of him) and his theory (8% said they knew a good/fair amount), whilst Americans were most antagonistic (24% said they did not think there was scientific evidence for evolution). The reasons for American antagonism are well known but why is South Africa so disproportionately ignorant?

    Interestingly, Egypt followed closely behind in both instances, 38% having heard about Darwin, 14% knowing a lot/fair amount about his theory, and 19% rejecting its scientific validity. Egyptians were also most likely to say that they thought belief in God and evolution were incompatible.

    As Egypt was the only Islamic country studied it is not possible to say whether its level of hostility reflects a general antagonism to Darwinism across the Muslim world. But the odds are that it does. According to the Theos survey, UK Muslims were twice as likely to be young earth creationists as the general public (35% vs 17%) – although, again, the sub-sample was small.

    If there proves to be clear correlation between Islamic belief and evolution rejection, it is likely to be for its own distinct reasons. A forthcoming Theos/ESRO qualitative research report analyses a series of one-to-one interviews with anti-evolutionary opinion-formers in the UK in order to understand in greater detail why they reject Darwinism. The majority were Christians but a number were Muslims, and the report, to be published this autumn, recognised that there were subtly different reasons for their respective reactions.

    For the Christians, the position and significance of the Genesis creation stories presented origins as a defining, theological issue. Muslim respondents, on the other hand, argued that the fact that the account of creation in the Qur'an was not as significant or prescriptive as the biblical account had implications for their theology of creation. Accordingly, they did not propose new kinds of science based on the Qur'an (after the fashion of "creation science") and many sought to distance themselves from Christian creationism.

    A more significant problem for them was the supposed degradation of human nature intrinsic to a theory of chance and purposelessness. The issue was not so much the science or even the hermeneutics (respondents were open to a flexible reading of the relevant verses). Rather it was "the perceived amorality of the evolutionary narrative as compared with the Islamic understanding of the accountability of man to God". For those Muslims who rejected evolution, it was the way the theory had become tangled up with anthropological (and social) suppositions that was the problem.

    It is early days in the study of Muslim attitudes to evolution and it is certainly false to say, as someone said to me recently, that the majority of "creationists" in Britain were Muslims. But both the British Council and the Theos studies suggest there is the potential for the evolution-scepticism of the 21st century to be marked with distinctively Islamic concerns, and these must be understood and not simply dismissed or ridiculed if we are to avoid having this debate on the next big Darwin anniversary.

    guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Diocese of Bristol
  • Are you looking for funding for your organisation?
    To assist local organisations in their search for funding, The Diocese of Bristol has taken out a subscription to GRANTnet – a straightforward free to use service from GRANTfinder, which can help you to identify suitable funding for your activity or project. Whether you are a Parish Church, School or a community or voluntary [...]
  • Bishop’s letter: Where losers can be winners…
    Susan Boyle, favourite to win Britain’s Got Talent, couldn’t in the end cope with the pressure and had to be admitted to a private psychiatric clinic for help. Ten year old finalist in the same programme, Hollie, burst into tears in the semi -inal and had to start again (very brave young lady). The English cricket team [...]
  • Personal stories: why we were ordained
    What drives someone to become ordained, or licensed as a Lay Minister? Read personal accounts of peoples journeys in this new section of the Diocesan website (links below). Those being ordained for Christian leadership are not ‘perfect’ or ‘superhuman’. They are ordinary people who have said ‘Yes’ to God’s call and are seeking to live their [...]
  • Cycle of Prayer: Q3 now available
    We have a regularly updated Cycle of Prayer to help direct your quiet times. The Cycle of Prayer is put together by John Bradley and Colin Lunt, and will be published quarterly on this site. It is available for download as both text and PDF files from our ‘Cycle of prayer’ page, in the Ministry resources [...]
  • Global Leadership Summit returns to Bristol this October
    The Global Leadership Summit (GLS) is once again coming to Bristol this autumn and leaders from churches in the Diocese of Bristol can make use of discounted rates. ‘This is an opportunity not to be passed by,’ says Bishop Mike who is hosting the GLS at elim@bristol in central Bristol on 2 and 3 October. [...]
Ecumenical News International