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Jesus and his miracles Remembering the victims of Kenya’s Mau Mau yearsAnn Widdecombe in interview

Contents

Columns14 Bible Study Susan Durber ponders Titus'

words on slaves and women

21 Starting Out Matt Stone wants more feedback on his sermons

23 Pilgrim Way Sheila Maxey looks forward to unpacking some burdens

37 Eco-mum Sonia Christie interferes with Ollie's school project

39 Stephen Brown remembers a dispute about a knee

41 Notes from America Ron Buford laments the demise of the US auto industry

45 Juggling Act Lucy Brierley enjoys a child-friendly wedding

Regulars 4 Editorial 5 Letters 8 News31 Reviews36 Green page38 Reform subscriptions43 Classifieds44 Local Life46 Onreflection/Poem Cover image: Aerial view of the

braided Rakaia River at sunset by

Jason Hosking

10

Features10 The enemy now is secularism An interview

with Ann Widdecombe

15 Was Jesus a miracle worker? The stories must be based on something, says Eric Eve

18 Jumping the barriers Why the URC needs to share the stories of women in the Church

19 Living deliberately Rosemary Lain-Priestly suggests how to shake off prejudices and explore relationships with courage

22 In sure and certain hope John Hick considers possibilities for our destiny at the end of earthly life

24 When history comes back to haunt us Why veterans of Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising are seeking reparations

26 A politician you can trust Could Westminster learn a thing or two from southern Philippines mayor Romy Tiongco?

27 Ministry of reconciliation Anne and Murdoch Mackenzie reflect on a memorable peace-building encounter

29 John Calvin's true Church Hymn writer Alan Gaunt marks the reformer's 500th birthday

34 Sisters of Sinai Janet Soskice tells the story of two remarkable women

• July/August 2009 • REFORM2

be gaining momentum.This would have been the final political career

move of Britain’s best known, most colourful and most outspoken Christian MP, who famously converted to Catholicism in 1993 following the decision of the Church of England to ordain women priests – something she saw as being “theologically impossible” and for her, the last straw in a catalogue of liberal compromises. She will stand down at the general election, which is now expected to come at the last possible moment of Labour’s current term, in June 2010.

Her uncompromising views and sometimes strident tone mean she is not everyone’s cup of tea, but she managed to garner support from both sides of the House of Commons. Her parallel careers as TV personality and best-selling novelist have made her a household name. But more importantly, as she was keen to reminds us, “The Telegraph proclaimed me a saint” in the midst of the parliamentary expenses scandal.

Some potential supporters ruled her out because she was only willing to perform the Speaker’s role as an interim measure until the next election, but others found this a positively attractive prospect – a high profile, trusted figure coming in to clean up the mess and hand over a morally restored Commons in time for polling day and a fresh, new government.

Why did someone so close to retirement even want to take on such a major challenge? Because supporters asked her to, appears to be the answer.

Motivation comes naturally to a woman whose driving desire to be part of the action at the heart of political life first developed, alongside her devotion to the Conservative Party, before she left school. That desire has remained with her during 22 years in Parliament, lasting, it seems, right up to her final months as an MP.

There is only one thing outside of her family that has been more important to Ann Widdecombe than politics. It inspired her to make a programme on the Reformation, screened as part of Channel 4’s Christianity – a History series earlier this year, and even in the midst of a campaign whirlwind of a week, she found time to talk to Reform about it – her faith.

The vote that was to deny Ann Widdecombe her last-minute pre-retirement ambition of winning the speaker’s chair was just under a week away when we arrived at her

Westminster offices. Huddled over desks with her staff she was planning a frantic day of signature-gathering to support a campaign that appeared to

Her approaching retirement has done little to dim Ann widdecombe’s appetite for new challenges or to soften her religious views. Kay Parris met the veteran Tory MP, TV personality, bestselling novelist and high profile Catholic convert a few days before her bid to be Speaker of the House of Commons ended in defeat

‘The enemy now issecularism’

REFORM • July/August 2009 • 3

https://subscribeme.to/reform/default.asp

john hick explores possibilities for our destiny at the end of earthly life

In sure and

Phot

o: Ju

lien

Bast

ide/

Foto

lia

In an interview with Reform in March, the theologian and physicist John Polkinghorne explained his belief not only that Jesus rose from the dead in a physical sense, but that we will also

be resurrected in bodily form. He suggested that: “In some way the soul might

have, in an extraordinary, elaborate sense, doors into the information bearing patterns of the body, which of course dissolve at death. But God remembers it all and God will re-embody it when I am resurrected. That will be the continuity between life in this world and life in the world to come.”

Or as he has put it elsewhere, the body has a code or formula expressing its entire nature and structure, and this formula is re-embodied as a resurrection body in the resurrection world.

This is a fascinating idea. It goes beyond the belief of the “process theologians” that we all exist eternally after death in the divine memory, by adding that God uses that memory to re-embody us – a view actually much closer to traditional Christian belief. It is not unlike the “replica” theory that I myself once proposed.

There does however seem to me to be a problem in it. Some people die in infancy, some as the result of an accident or war in early adulthood, some in middle age, most in old age. Whatever the age, the information, or code, or formula, is that of the person at that age and in that condition. So a resurrected woman in her eighties dying of cancer will be the same woman in her eighties dying of cancer. And likewise with everyone else.

But this cannot be what Polkinghorne intends. Are we, then, in our resurrected state suddenly miraculously to be cured of all diseases, and do we suddenly grow younger or older to some ideal age? All this is no doubt possible, but it complicates the theory to a point at which it ceases, to my mind, to be attractive or even plausible.

The older idea that at death we go either to heaven or hell is even more implausible. For at the end of this life few if any are good enough for heaven or bad enough for hell. We almost all need to develop and change, which means that we must live longer. And this must be in an embodied state in which we interact with one another, making moral choices and thus becoming better (or worse) people. This in turn seems to require another finite life, also bounded by birth and death, for it is these boundaries that make life serious and urgent. Because of life’s finitude we must get on with whatever we are going to do – we are not going to live for ever.

But one more such life will not be enough for most of us. Is it that we need a series of finite lives, each beginning, morally and spiritually, where the last left off? In other words, some form of reincarnation, or re-embodiment, or indeed multiple resurrection?

At this point I find wisdom in the Buddhist distinction between, on the one hand, the empirical self, which is the conscious surface ego and, on the

’I find wisdom in the Buddhist distinction between the conscious surface ego and a deeper reality within us, which we can call the soul’

certain hope?

RESuRRECTION

REFORM • July/August 2009 • 5

slogan – “Fraserburgh, we’re just round the bend!”). The sea, the sea – where the North Sea bends into the Moray Firth – there was nature’s font: fit for any full-immersion.

Armed with tidal information, I checked out the beach at New Aberdour and found the most amazing spot where, at the time the service was scheduled, a perfect-depth pool, surrounded on three sides by rocks fit for any onlooking congregation, would be formed by the receding waters. All was set. And on the most perfect of June evenings, 40 from my own congregation, together with the family and friends of the baptismal party, gathered on the beach. A fire had been lit for the barbecue that would follow. We sang and we prayed on the sands and then moved down onto the rocks. And in front of many who had never before witnessed baptism done as full-immersion (let alone in perishingly cold water) Kevin was born into God’s family and household.

The beach feast that followed was a perfect form of communion. And, hours later, as the dying embers of the fire still glowed, while the sky was performing its sunset dance, it was just the family and I left. We chatted on until what passes for summer darkness this far north suggested home might be an idea.

But his right knee, it turns out, never made it below the waves. Photographic evidence proves the point. And my priest pal was adamant it invalidated the baptism. Still, he had a delightful twinkle in his eye. And there is no hint that Kevin is limping like latter-day Jacob after wrestling with God.

I have a fridge-magnet that declares: “I no longer skinny-dip, I chunky-dunk!” It’s a saying that became baptismally significant two summers

ago; complete with a church dispute about a knee that never quite made it.

Perhaps it was to do with the protestor being a Roman priest. Clearly knees count to Catholics. That most stress-laden of joints in the human body is key to them for prayer-posture as well as their genuflecting mark of respect on both entering and leaving worship. No wonder my priest pal was concerned that the knee had not been baptised!

All this is, of course, partly the fault of that small but significant denomination – the Reformed Churches of Christ – that became part of a renewed United Reformed Church at the beginning of the 1980s. What had previously been an England and Wales only church then had some earnest and worthy outposts in the north of England, spilling over the border into southern

Scotland. They were a kind of advanced party for the swathe of Scottish churches that would grace the greater body in 2000.

The Churches of Christ were, by conviction, not infant baptisers. An important part of the URC being reborn to include their congregations was that all ministers were obliged to make available both forms of baptism: the sprinkling most associated with infants and the full-immersion, so-called “believers’” baptism. I have sprinkled adults without any great difficulty but I was glad to get a request from a young man in his twenties for the “real deal”.

A chunky dunk! But where to do it? My church has no baptistery. Attempts to cosy up to a local congregation that does fell on ecumenically deaf ears. The solution, though, was obvious. My church is in a geographical area known, poetically, as “the land at the bend of the ocean”. (Strangely, the local tourist group rejected my suggestion for a new town

‘His right knee, it turns out, never made it below the waves’

Stephen Brown is minister of Fraserburgh uRC in Aberdeenshire

A knee at the bendStephen Brown

Illus

trat

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STEPhEN BROWN

• July/August 2009 • REFORM6

The reparations lawsuit currently being pursued by veterans of Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising draws on evidence presented in the last few years by new accounts of violent suppression by the British. Graham hellier examines one such account, which received the Pulitzer prize in 2006

Get

ty Im

ages

I remember as a teenager in the 1950s – when Churchill had sent troops to crush the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya – reading lurid reports in our press about jungle clearings, secret savagery and

blood oaths. Here were the dark demons of Africa unleashed against innocent white families who were killed and mutilated.

More recent historical accounts shedding a very different light on the events of these years have now helped the Kenya Human Rights Commission support a reparations claim for five elderly Kenyans alleging

unlawful detention and torture during this era, which could open the way for thousands of other cases.

One such account, Imperial Reckoning: the Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, by Harvard professor Caroline Elkins, won the Pulitzer prize in 2006. Some of her findings, which focus on the white settlement of land owned by the Kikuyu (Kenya’s largest ethnic group), have been challenged. However, campaigners allege a conspiracy of silence between the British and various Kenyan governments.

Elkins charts how, during the suppression of the Mau Mau, thousands of Africans were moved off their land, a pass system was introduced, native taxes were increased and a system of compliant chiefs was imposed. For a time, some Kikuyu remained as squatters on the white farms, as the settlers could not use the land productively, but then with mechanisation, these too were driven away.

A resistance movement spread like wildfire, while Christianity was deserted by many, who returned to traditional Kikuyu teachings. Nderi Kagombe, a Kikuyu bookshop owner who spent five years in detention, explained:

“We abandoned Christianity... and began praying in the traditional Kikuyu way. We had taken an oath because we had realised that the leadership of the white man was only oppressing us more and more.”

Many of the resistance leaders were ex-soldiers who had fought for Britain in the second world war and returned, believing that Kenya would become independent. Anti-colonialist campaigner Jomo

Kenyatta, who remained a Christian and believed in non-violence, was arrested and imprisoned for seven years and subsequently sent to a remote area of Kenya. In 1963 he would return to become the independent Kenya’s first president. But during his exile there was no-one to hold back extremists from attacks on the more isolated settlers. It didn’t take many extremist atrocities to cause fear to spread like wildfire through the settler communities.

The British response took little account of local grievances. The aim was to crush the Mau Mau and

When history comes back to haunt us

Pictured: Members of the Kikuyu tribe are detained in a prison cell, suspected of involvement with the Mau Mau uprising

REFORM • July/August 2009 • 7