Category: people

What is confirmation?

31/03/2019

What is confirmation?

So there I was, all set to write a Big Question article about Donald Tusk’s “small corner of Hell set aside for those who backed Brexit” comment when a friend suggested I should spare us all and follow up last month’s Big Question about Baptism with a Big Question about Confirmation instead. So here goes…

What is Confirmation?

The best way to think about Confirmation is as the sequel to Baptism! When a child is baptised promises are made on their behalf by their parents and godparents. They promise to follow Christ as their Lord and master and to set an example of faith to the child by their life and practice, part of which involves raising their child as a practising Christian as part of their local church. But there comes a time when a bouncing baby becomes a big strapping lad or lass, with their own mind, vision and values, and confirmation is the time when that big strapping lad or lass stands up and owns the promises of God for themselves.

Sometimes I’m asked, ‘When is the right age for a child to be confirmed?’ The Church of England’s rules don’t state a number, instead, they wisely speak in terms of a child reaching the “years of discretion”. We know that every child is different and that they mature at different rates, so what matters isn’t how many birthdays a child has seen, but what they understand about the Christian faith, and whether they are ready and willing to take ownership of their own faith journey.

To help them do this, prior to confirmation, candidates are supposed to be able to understand and say the Catechism (an interactive summary of Christian belief) which includes the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. In practice today, confirmation preparation tends not to be quite as rigorous as that. The group of young people I’m preparing for confirmation at the moment are using a video and discussion based resource called Youth Alpha for this, as well as having lots of fun playing games and eating sweets!

So what are the benefits of confirmation? Well, the two most significant ones are about identity and Holy Communion. Making a public declaration of what you believe is a significant step in working out who you are as a person. It’s the time you step out from your parent’s spiritual shadow and go public about your own faith journey. And part of this journey is to regularly receive Holy Communion. In fact, a Confirmation ceremony sometimes includes a Holy Communion service so that the newly confirmed can immediately receive their first communion immediately.

One final thought. We’re having a Confirmation Service with one of our Bishops in June 2019, so now is a great time to inquire about confirmation. If you have a child who you think is ready to be confirmed, or if you’re an adult and haven’t been confirmed but would like to be, then please get in touch with me.

 

First published in the Bridge Magazine, March 2019

 

 

What is the purpose of my life?

03/03/2019

Is there a purpose to my life?

I was a teenager when I first thought about whether my life had a purpose. I blame the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life for that. It promised so much in its opening song:

Why are we here? What’s life all about? Is God really real, or is there some doubt? Well, tonight, we’re going to sort it all out, For, tonight, it’s ‘The Meaning of Life’.”[i]

Yet an hour and a half of sketches later, all it delivered was,

Well, it’s nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people. Avoid eating fat. Read a good book every now and then. Get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

Really? Is that all there is to it?

I had a similar feeling about The Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy, in which the ultimate super-computer Deep Thought spends 7.5 million years trying to answer the question of life the universe and everything, before concluding that the answer is “42.” The problem it seems is we hadn’t properly understood the question.

So is there a purpose for our lives? Well if there is, it would be enormously helpful to know what it is, because, as the Ancient Roman senator Seneca put it,

When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind”.

So let’s think about if there is a purpose to life, and how we might know. Certainly, experience leads many people to think they have a purpose in life. Self-help books are full of techniques to discover your purpose or “true north” as the Americans like to call it. Interestingly some of those techniques tell you that you can choose for yourself what your true purpose is. Author Justin Gesso claims this is “hugely empowering”, an “awesome revelation.”[ii]

Yet it also begs the question: if I can choose my life purpose then I can also change it, and keep changing it: so which life purpose is the right one (if there is indeed a right one)? This is especially frustrating when you then go and talk to someone who claims that rather than choosing their purpose in life, their purpose in life seems to have chosen them!

Then at the same time, the newspapers are full of tragic stories about people who have lost all hope in life, who feel like they have no purpose. So what’s going on? How do we make sense of this? Well, it might seem like I’m arguing semantics here but it seems to me that some people are calling a purpose in life what would be better called a cause or a passion.

  • A PASSION as an intense desire or enthusiasm for something. So for example, (and please forgive the gender stereotyping) Samantha is passionate about netball. John is passionate about hiking. Passions like this are internal; they’re things we can choose because we can choose the causes we invest our time in.
  • A PURPOSE, in contrast, is The Reason for which something exists, and is by definition “external”. So a purpose can never be something we choose, instead, it’s something that some agent outside of us has chosen for us, and shaped us for. So for example, the purpose of Upton Bridge[iii] is to connect two banks of the River Severn. The bridge didn’t choose this purpose, instead, it was chosen for it by the people who created it. In the same way, we would never say that the purpose of Samantha is netball or the purpose of John is hiking. That’s just something they’ve chosen to do; it’s their cause, their passion, their reason to get out of bed in the morning.

What all this means is that once we define purpose as the reason something exists, then any attempt to talk about the purpose of our lives is, whether we realise it or not, a god claim. We’re implicitly stating that something bigger than us (god, fate, the universe, whatever) has a plan for our lives!

This, of course, means an atheist can never really claim their life has a purpose. They may well have passions and causes that motivate them to do extraordinary things, but to claim that an external force they don’t believe in, has a purpose for them, is bad atheism!

So where does this leave us?

First, it means that for all the same reasons you can’t prove the existence or otherwise of god using empirical means, you can’t prove you have a purpose in life.

Second, it means that if we are comfortable with the idea of god, we should also be comfortable with the idea of a purpose for our lives. At which point the question becomes which god, which purpose, and how we can know. More on that another time.

Finally, it leaves us with the problem of experience. Even though many people deny the existence of a god, they still feel a deep sense that they have a purpose in life. It gets labelled in various ways: fate, karma, destiny, providence, kismet, but I’d argue it’s something more. St Paul says,

we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10).

If that’s true, then our yearning for a purpose is really God’s way of getting us to re-examine our presumption that he doesn’t exist! Our longing for meaning implies that there is a giver of meaning, and should cause us to seek him out!

First published in the Bridge Magazine October 2018

 

[i] Cited from http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Meaning_of_Life/intro.htm

[ii] Cited from https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/7-ways-create-your-life-purpose.html

[iii] I’ve intentionally chosen an inanimate object here, as it’s a lot easier to be certain about it’s purpose. Had I chosen a human example, I could not have spoken with any certainty about his/her purpose as I’m not their creator!

There’s a new vicar in town…

09/10/2016

This article was originally published in the Bridge Magazine, October issue.

 

Where are you from?

I grew up in the North-East of England, the son of a journalist, moved to Sheffield when I was 18 to go to university (studied Economics) and after graduating spent the next ten years or so working for Rotherham Training and Enterprise Council in various capacities – before training to be a vicar in 2002.

Ordained in 2005, I spent four years working with a church on South Tyneside, and then seven years in New Barnet, on the north edge of London.

While I was in Sheffield I met Carol (who hails from Malvern and was training to be a Landscape Architect). Marriage and six kids followed, along with lots of trips back to Malvern – and now we’re back in Worcestershire for good.

Six kids – are you mad?

No – They play together, pray together and do life together. It’s wonderful – on a good day. Other days its hard work, and requires some pretty big lifestyle sacrifices. I remember thinking when we had our fourth child was born that I’d blown my final hope of ever having a fancy car. So now you’ll see me driving a battered 10-year old Renault minibus around. It’s not a car I’d ever imagined driving – but God is like that – he gives us what we need not what we want.

What are your hopes for your time as Priest in Charge of the Benefice of Hanley Castle, Hanley Swan and Welland; and the Benefice of Upton on Severn, Ripple, Earl’s Croome & Hill Croome with Strensham?

Broadly speaking I’ve got three priorities for our time here.

First of all – to encourage discipleship.

Being a disciple of Jesus isn’t just a one-time decision to pick a side in the religious free-for-all, it’s an ongoing commitment to actively living out the values Jesus taught and demonstrated in his own life, underwritten by a growing dependence upon prayer and the Holy Spirit.

Second – is what I call “getting the shop-window right.”

When we’re out shopping, there’s nothing catches our eye more than a well laid-out shop window. The goods look inviting, the colours and lighting entice. First impressions really matter.

Sad to say, many people’s first impression of church services isn’t as captivating – so one of my challenges over the coming years is to listen to the experiences of those outside our church communities to learn how our churches can do better.

One thing we’ve started straight away is getting rid of that awful name that our family of churches goes by – “the benefice of Hanley etc etc. “ It’s so long you probably didn’t even read the whole thing the first time!

I’m proposing we call our family of churches the “Hope Church Family” and our new website (www.hopechurchfamily.org) is a great place to visit to find out all about the various things going on in the individual churches. Do give it a visit – when you see it all together there’s a lot going on. And while you’re on the website, do sign up for our monthly newsletter which will tell you more of what’s going on.

My third priority is planning for the future.

Sad to say, some of the churches have only a very limited provision for children. Over time I hope to see that change – because without children our church congregations will never know a long-term future.

At my last church God blessed us with considerable growth in our children’s work – and I believe it can happen here too. But it does mean we might have to change a few things along the way so that children and young families can more easily participate.

It sounds like you’re going to be busy then!

Yes! But I also know I need to get to know our communities better and understand more of the rhythm of rural life. That will take time – Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it was built – so if you’re the sort of person who likes to build things and make a difference – please get in touch – we’d love to get you involved!

 

 

Barry Unwin

Vicar, Hope Church Family

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