Afghanistan: first country on the UN list!

Predictably, what I know about Afghanistan is summed up in headlines like France24’s Christmas 2018 item: Gunmen storm government building in Afghan capital, dozens dead. It’s very difficult to get past such news, and it would be offensive to ignore the endless violence of the ongoing civil war. Even here, it’s difficult, because it’s about much more than radical Islam. It takes time to dig deeper, and headline news reading is just the thing in our instant society.

Even the local news agencies like Pajhwok Afghan News strike a similar note, but at least they take us past the two-dimensional reporting that consigns certain countries and societies to the refuse heap of history. As I pray for this country, here are some of the alternative narratives that I would like to embrace:

Alongside the ongoing discrimination against girls in Afghan education, there are stories of a shifting centre of gravity:

• Training on HR, gender to benefit 7,600 future teachers
• First-ever Girls’ Hygiene Guidelines launched in Afghanistan
• Violence against women 38% down

Now of course I could provide an alternative list, of schools torched, of teachers threatened, of girls excluded and of scholarship programmes which further the ends of male-dominated education. But doing this has made me wonder whether where I focus my attention might constitute an element of hope, and faith. Certainly, it changes the tenor of my prayer.

I could go on with a load of other categories, but 'reconstruction' was another fruitful field, with the Italian entry being unexpected (and revealing my prejudice about the current state of Italian governance!)

• 49 irrigation projects worth 138m afs completed in Herat
• Italy pledges €13m in aid for Bamyan projects
• The UK's DFID programme (though it has a pathetically small budget) has the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust at the top of its list, and small amounts of money make a difference in a country that struggles as badly as Afghanistan does. Go Britain go!!

The other sobering thought that occurred to me, and does regularly, is how much the current state of Afghanistan has been caused by imperial pretensions, British, Russian, Pakistani, and now Far Eastern. We play games with weak and struggling countries, and then shake our heads and tut when the politics explodes in our faces. So my final prayer for Afghanistan is that those who invest in it might do so out of humility, compassion, and a desire for peace. Happy Christmas!

The Slave Bible of 1807

At the heart of the Demerara slave rebellion of 1823 is the story of the Congregationalist missionary John Smith.  Smith arrived at Le Resouvenir Estate in what  is now Guyana in 1817, and was warmly welcomed there. The authorities, however, warned him not to teach the local people, i.e. the slaves, to read. Otherwise, he would be banished. In the event, his preaching of the freedom that comes from knowing Christ was taken rather more literally than he perhaps intended, leading to an insurrection in August of 1823. The story of Smith’s arrest and trial, and his death in prison are well known, and caused outrage in the British Parliament. Some might think that the outrage was caused not so much by a new high moral ground as the Colonial Office’s increasing attempts to tame local legislatures! Two things are notable here.

The first is that the Christian gospel (and the Biblical narrative) is a revolutionary text, which governments have sought unsuccessfully to tame over the centuries. Three hundred years before, Martin Luther had written The Freedom of a Christian, which led disaffected German peasants in economic difficulty to rise up in the so-called Peasants’ War of 1524. Luther, strikingly, then retaliated by telling the peasants that they didn't really count, in his virulent treatise ‘Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants.’ The text may be revolutionary, but even its prime interpreters regularly spiritualize what is a holistic message of release from all forms of bondage, physical and spiritual.

The second notable fact is that teaching people to read (which Christian missionaries have done for centuries) is a subversive act, and the authorities in slave-owning territories understood this well. At first, the Bible was controlled in the West by being kept in the increasingly academic medium of Latin. Translation was forbidden, and when John Wycliffe and others illegally produced an English text, the proof of the pudding was the rise of popular Christianity that despised the authorities (ecclesiastical and political). They quickly applied the message of Jesus to their own straitened circumstances. Paulo Freire’s conscientization programme applied the same liberative principle in Brazil in the 20^th century to great effect. There is a sense in which it doesn't much matter what people read as long as they can read for themselves. But when those who learn to read are given the most revolutionary text of all, trouble tends to break out.

This brings us to the headline document , the so-called Slave Bible of 1807. It is worth noting first of all that it is not presented as a Bible but as a compendium of Bible texts, and we need to be careful how we describe it. The actual title is Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands. It does not attempt to present a truncated Bible in the way that Marcion did in the 2^nd century CE, adapting it to his theological views. That said, it does give us a ‘canon within a canon’, a selection of the parts of the Bible that are deemed fitting for the audience. All Christians do this (as do all people of the Book). It is instructive to ask why certain parts of the Bible never get preached on in our churches. The editor of this volume is giving us a lectionary. So far, so good.

I can’t tell from the article who made the selection, but I would imagine that it comes out of the Church of England stable, the stable that was always most in cahoots with the slave-owning classes, and so perpetuated the status quo. It is not an innocent text! And here we can continue the story with the foundation of the Anglican diocese of Jamaica with Honduras in 1824 and its first bishop, Christopher Lipscomb. We are told that he did not think that he could encourage the education of slaves until public opinion paved the way, the classic case of the Christian trapped in his own cultural convenience. One cannot imagine that Lipscomb was blind the significance of his opinions.

One of the chief aims of the foundation of the Diocese was to prepare the slaves for eventual emancipation, and the Jamaican Legislative Council could not be counted on to do this. The Nonconformists were suspect and their missionary societies financially limited. And here’s the real point. The Church of England was more acceptable to the planters because it taught the principles of ‘obedience’ alongside the gospel message of ‘freedom’. In other words, your soul may be free but your body is still in hock to your owner. And even though education was being grudgingly promoted, the Jamaican slave code of 12/1826 prohibited dissenting preachers from holding meetings from sunset to sunrise, or receive pay from slaves for religious instruction.

In sum, this extraordinary text on display in the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC highlights the power of the biblical narrative, when read by oppressed people, to create a new redeemed imagination in which freedom is a divinely offered right. Recognizing this, those who seek to oppress tend to tame the Biblical text by the withdrawal of the rights of education, though it was no longer possible  by the 19^th century to put the Biblical cat back in the bag. The 16^th Reformations had put paid to that possibility. My final observation is that at stake here is who holds the right of interpretation: the theologians, the church authorities, or the readers. The Bible is not in and of itself an oppressive text, but it is up to us to ensure that it is read as a message of freedom, not of continued abuse and servitude.

Adrian Chatfield

16^th December 2018

Jill and Adrian Chatfield's Christmas letter 2018

2018 has been a reminder for us that though life has its routines, life itself is rarely routine. It began predictably enough with a final trip in our old caravan to the banks of the Thames at Chertsey, in freezing temperatures. Though we miss it, it's lovely to have central heating and a toilet in the (nearly) new Lunar Ariva, and so far we've taken it to Anglesey, to Dorset and to Derbyshire.

At the end of July, we flew to the Alps for a long-awaited week with Adrian's sister Clare and her husband Didier. We got in two days excellent walking, and then all hired electric mountain bikes to do some off-roading. It was exhilarating until Jill came off on a corner, and the bike landed on her leg. It seemed to be a very bad sprain, and she managed to cycle the 20 km. or so back with her poorly ankle. Plan B then was for the three to continue walking while Jill explored the local town. That evening, we had a phone call to say that Jill's dad had fallen again, and was not expected to live long.

So we sadly left and flew back, missing our connection in Düsseldorf in the process. In the event, Jill's dad lived until August 22nd, and died peacefully that evening. Meanwhile, Jill was walking with crutches fairly well, but it twinged badly if she turned. An X-ray showed a clean break, so Fracture Clinic put her in an airboot. By the time the funeral came, Jill was able to conduct the service using only an arm crutch, but it was a stressy time. We are glad that Ray is no longer struggling: he had grown very tired of life, and conversation had more or less dried up by the time he died at the good old age of 91.

Since then, it's been strange to have so much time for ourselves, with no driving in and out of Nottingham to his care home. As always, bereavement is a funny mix of emotions, but life is beginning to take a new shape.

All of this has curtailed Jill's hospital ministry. She has been volunteering at the Nottingham Hospitals for some time, and is now on the bank of chaplains. On Christmas Day she will be back on the wards taking communion to those who have not been discharged, and hopes to pick up the pieces in 2019. Adrian continues to offer spiritual direction and lead weekends and retreats, three of which Jill was involved in: the Church of Ireland Curates' retreat in April (County Laois); Linby and Papplewick parish weekend in July (Dovedale) and the annual Launde Abbey Advent retreat, which we led together at the end of November.

So the end of the year looms. We're looking forward very much to catching up with Michael, Helen, Hannah and Naomi, with whom we were supposed to spend a holiday in August. The ankle put paid to that, though we were able to see them briefly at the Royal Albert Hall when Michael was singing with his choir, the wonderfully named London Welsh Male Voice Choir. Rachel, Dave, Charlotte and Lucy live seven miles away, so we do see them with some regularity! Then in January we go to County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland for two and a half weeks looking after the most north-westerly parish in Ireland.

In the midst of the political turmoil, bleak news and economic uncertainty, we are very grateful for the grace of God made known to us in Jesus Christ, and the quiet peace and assurance that this gives us. We've been glad to pray for many of you over the year, and if you'd like us to continue doing so, you only need ask! In the meantime, we wish you all a holy Christmas, and an approaching new year of hope and peace.

Adrian and Jill
63 Wesley St
Ilkeston
DE7 8QW

adrian.chatfield@btinternet.com
jill.chatfield@btinternet.com