Epiphany ThoughtsAs a preacher I’ve always sensed that reading the occasional modern novel helps me more than many of the devotional paperbacks lining the shelves of the Christian bookshop (when such places existed). The latest Ian McEwan or Rose Tremaine is likely to offer plenty to reflect on what it means to be human, even if the God word is never encountered, and the Church plays no part in the action.
Richard Kelly’s debut novel Crusaders, published early in 2008, might never get a mention in any of my sermons (only time will tell), but it’s a good read and one that will have particular attractions for many of us. For first of all, it’s a regional novel: the action is set here in the North East, mainly in a run down lightly-disguised corner of the west end of Newcastle, though Durham and even the Penshaw Monument get a look in too. And the broad sweep in time through the seventies up to the advent of New Labour brings into focus both events like the Miners’ Gala and also some of the landmarks of urban regeneration of recent decades.
But there is another kind of regeneration central to the plot, which may particularly tempt the Christian reader to give this book a try. There aren’t many paperbacks of this size (it’s nearly airport blockbuster in thickness) with a 3-for-the-price-of-2 sticker on the cover that have a clergyman as the main character, and the planting of a new church as the ostensibly central feature of the plot.
However, since this is very much a state-of-the-nation kind of novel, it may be that the church plant is also there to parallel the New Labour project and the possibility of institutional change. Certainly John Gore’s motivation seems to be political as well as religious; and in what is only his second appointment he brings a certain naïveté both about human nature and the messiness of the political process. (Forty years ago theological students were still reading Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society: I don’t know what has replaced it since, but I hope something has.) The picture of the bemused man of the cloth surrounded by politicians who are desperate for the Church’s support for their latest schemes may serve as warning against some of today’s “partnership” enterprises.
Ill-prepared and with little support from his own Church, Gore blunders into a community that has no more sense than he has of what he may be able to do among them. The networking and hanging around in pubs that are perhaps the classic tools of this kind of ministry quickly lead to compromising liaisons with gangland figures who in almost comic fashion double up on Sunday as sidesmen at the service in the church school hall.
Kelly seems not to know that clergy are nowadays well-trained in what is “appropriate behaviour” – or is it the desperation of his situation that leads the unfortunate Gore to forget all that he was ever taught? Ignoring today’s standard advice of not dating in the parish, he quickly beds the bright single mother who’s been calling for the church plant to provide crèche facilities, and then rather late in the day discovers that the father of her child is the gangland boss. But by now the focus has moved away from the school hall and the slowly diminishing congregation. I wasn’t sure how credible that scene was anyway; but I suspect that the last couple hundred pages with the gangland killing and the under cover cops is even more fanciful – but who am I to know?
However, having read this novel over Christmas, I find more of it staying with me than I might have expected as I start thinking about Epiphany. What is Matthew saying to us in the old familiar story of the magi? Surely it is that if the Church is to be true to itself, then it has to open the door to some very different people from those who seem most at home there. Bouncers who carry in a pool table to serve as an altar are surely valued by God both for themselves and for their gift. When there are certain types and categories of people whom we don’t expect to see in church (even when “church” is just an hour in the school hall), then haven’t we missed the point of what Church is really all about?
Kelly’s brisk and lively style doesn’t leave much time for that kind of reflection as you’re reading through. This book is quite a page-turner, and the pace slackens only when it comes to John Gore’s excruciating sermons, where suddenly it’s agony to read to the bottom of the page.
I think I’d better check again what I was planning to say next Sunday.
John Durell