17 November 2011

Well, what would Jesus do? That is the Question. I was fascinated to see the slogan draped across the front of St Paul’s — not an attack on the Cathedral, but precisely the question I have long fondly believed it exists to raise in the midst of the City.

St Paul’s is not my Church, not my diocese, but many of our people work in the square mile. One of the joys of this job has been many opportunities to share their concerns and hopes. I find that most city types I meet (excuse the stereotype) are fair minded and decent people who know that our current routines are not perfect, and would love to see the questions that strike them at work addressed more openly and honestly, for the common good.

Many of them are bemused by a Church that seems almost entirely absorbed in its own office piety and politics. It has made itself largely irrelevant, sometimes a laughing stock, by pouring energy into questions about which the historic Jesus shows no sign of having had any concern whatsoever, like issues of homosexuality and female bishops. Meanwhile money, daily life, how to read the future, hypocrisy, subjects which filled his teaching, bubble on the back burner.

The protestors, albeit untidily, have done the Church the favour of getting Jesus’s big issues onto our front pages — not so much city bonuses as whether money is to be our servant or our master. They don’t believe the people who led us into this mess can be trusted to get us out of it. Many of them would like the Church to take its eyes off its own navel and grow up. So they are raising, acutely, a question that should be of more than passing interest to us who follow Christ — “what would Jesus do?”