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It was my turn to talk in church, so I followed on from Martin last week who spoke about the Kingdom of God being the people who the church too often leaves out or marginalises. I drew on my growing “weeds through the cracks in the pavement” image, and talked about the privilege of seeing the “weeds” flourish in unexpected ways in Quebracho Herrado. This is all quite a challenge to the church here, where the concept of “the body” is virtually indistinguishable from “the institution”, and church is an activity once a week led from the front, and the people who everyone else aspires to be are the ones up there leading from the front. I think my Spanish is quite colloquial for the middle-classes of San Fran, which is hardly surprising since I learnt it on the very un-middle-class streets of Rafael Castillo in Buenos Aires. There were some moments where everyone was laughing and I’m pretty certain it wasn’t about the content of what I was saying. Maybe I should work on improving that. On the other hand, if it increases peoples’ chances of remembering anything I said, or of not being offended that I said it, then perhaps I should just count it as a blessing and leave well alone.
Here’s a bit of theology which wasn’t what I was talking about this morning, but something I’m working on in bed at night. I’m playing with an idea about God’s big grace and our tiny contribution, and what might come out of that. For example, if I look at sin offerings in Leviticus there is a list of things that I might bring as a sacrifice, ending with (5:11):

If, however, he cannot afford two doves or two young pigeons, he is to bring as an offering for his sin a tenth of an ephah of fine flour for a sin offering.

As one of our lecturers once said, anyone who can come to church with a cup of flour and go home knowing that their sins are forgiven, has experienced the grace of God. Unless we have an artificially small concept of our own sin (or possibly a lot of flour) then we are confronted with God’s big grace in the face of our tiny contribution.

Jump forward to Jesus, and another type of seed in Matthew 17.

(Jesus) replied, “Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

Now the only times I ever heard this passage being taught is in the context of being encouraged that God will move mountains through us and our tiny faith. But actually God never moved a mountain through me or my tiny faith, and as far as I know, he didn’t yet move a mountain through anybody else’s tiny faith either. So I’m thinking that the message of the passage might look less like “all you need is faith as small as a mustard seed”, and more like “whatever faith you think you have, it’s more comparable to a nano-particle than a mustard seed”. And so we are right back with the cup of flour and our tiny contribution in the face of God’s big grace.

Why does this matter? Because when we start defining the limits of “in” or “out” of the Kingdom of God, we inevitably draw our lines in terms of “who has believed in the right stuff”, and before we know it we have defined ourselves a gospel of works where faith is the new work, and ours is big enough to get us “in”, all of which would be clearly challenged by this reading of the passages above.

In a nice black and white box everyone knows where they are: Deserving people believe the right stuff and God loves them. Bad people believe the wrong stuff and God might love them but they certainly don’t deserve it. And then real life and the “what abouts” kick in. What about people who didn’t sign up to the right stuff because they were never born, or they never reached an age of understanding, or they didn’t have the capacity to understand, or they were prevented from understanding because of the other things that life dealt them? What about the people who are genuinely trying to follow God even though they might have signed up to the “wrong” team? So special pleading kicks in; “This is the model but we are sure God must have a special way of dealing with the deserving people who didn’t fit into it”. But if we go back to cups of flour and mustard seeds, we might conclude that the one and only reason why anyone might be “in” is because of God’s grace, since my nano-particle of faith isn’t enough to open a matchbox much less the gates of Heaven. All of a sudden the model defining “in” and “out” doesn’t seem to work very well any more, and the only thing that sets us apart from the unborn child and the profoundly disabled adolescent and the murderer in the prison and the church of the “less saved than we are” down the road, is our profound arrogance as we claim to draw the lines of God’s big grace.

Recognising our poverty of spirit, of faith, of understanding, of generosity, of grace has some interesting implications for mission, not least in terms of who we are prepared to accept and work with as “team”, as equals, as brothers, as the body, as partners in the Kingdom. Sensing that once again I may be on a slippery slope into hot water here, this is me deciding to wimp out of unpacking the logical conclusions of this line of inquiry for another chapter.

In line with the world in general, roads in Argentina come in different grades according to their importance, and their state of repair. Since most of Argentina is frankly unpopulated, quite a lot of what people in the UK might think of as “B roads” are unsurfaced, and as for anything smaller than that, watch out for trees growing down the middle and hippos wallowing in the holes… OK I lied about the hippos but if we were in a different continent the holes would certainly be big enough.
We have discovered that unsurfaced roads come in two categories; ripio and barro. Essentially, ripio is a dirt road that has been filled with sand and gravel, and barro is a dirt road that hasn’t. Often they both look the same, particularly after a storm. However, after some hard-won practical experience in the rain, the experiment concluded that while both surfaces create a muddy pebble-dashed effect on your car, ripio is easily passable by maintaining a low gear and a constant speed, whereas barro involves skating and slithering, and the odd scientific question about how likely we are to hit that tree if we slide too far to the right, or whether this could be a good moment to try throwing it into reverse rather than have to get out and push.

Imagine a mission where we organised our conference because we had something to say rather than because the constitution said we had to have one.
Imagine a mission conference that was centred around a programme we were excited about, rather than prioritising the dates and the venue before we started wondering how we were going to waste fill peoples’ time having obliged encouraged them to be there.

Imagine a mission conference whose key agenda was furthering mission in its widest sense, rather than our own organisational minutiae.

Imagine a mission conference organised with the academic rigour normally expected in other disciplines; open invitations to submit papers, proper presentations, peer review, real debate, maybe even a publication to follow.

Imagine a mission conference where we went away thinking that if we hadn’t been there, we might have missed out on something worth contributing to.

Imagine on, because it won’t be happening this time. Having seen the agenda, I can confirm that our aspirations are safely limited to rearranging the pot-plants of our own domestic politics. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with house-keeping; heck even I clean the bathroom from time to time. The issues here are about inappropriate matching of resources to task, and a missed opportunity to do something really worth-while with our conference. The agenda we have been given is not dissimilar to the agendas of PCC meetings up and down many countries. But rather than turfing a dozen people off their sofas into a damp church hall for a couple of hours, we are flying however many (couple of hundred?) people half-way across the world to Peru with all the financial and time commitments inherent, for an agenda that wouldn’t tax the average PCC (or was the one I used to be on just particularly excellent?). How can this possibly be good stewardship of resources; people, time, or money? (even ignoring the issue of all those air-miles) In fact I took two days between writing and posting this blog in order to try and come up with a good reason why the suggested topics couldn’t have been reasonably dealt with in an email discussion or a web forum, and so far I can’t think of one. Unfortunately we have a three line whip; otherwise I would save the time and the money, both of which are in short enough supply. At least we can still dream. Another year, another life, another planet…

The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. Unlike the Cedars of Lebanon it has no intrinsic majesty to call its own, but it grows into stumpy little bushes through the cracks in the pavement and other unexpected places.
For the last month or so we have been in danger of losing our building in Quebracho Herrado, and with the project only just about air-borne anyway, I have been engaging in something like passive resistance; passing people on to talk to someone else who is never available, and not quite ever getting round to shifting my furniture. However, I was finally backed into a corner and agreed that we would vacate, in exchange for being moved to another (smaller) room and a corresponding reduction in rent.

In the end I thought it might not matter as maybe we would end up closing for the summer anyway, since most of what I have been doing is helping kids with the homework or on subjects where they are behind at school. In addition, design flaws in the school system here mean that kids don’t actually get picked up until nearly the end of the school year, when they are in danger of having to repeat the year and then everyone goes into panic mode trying to catch the child up in a couple of weeks with the stuff that they haven’t understood for the previous eight months, which means for my purposes I might not actually have any kids or their parents banging on my door until possibly next October or so. All of which made me think that maybe my future usefulness in Quebracho might need a rethink, and that the issue of the room was just a compounding discouragement.

So I shifted into the new room which is a small ex-kitchen with a door onto the road, next door to my bigger old place, which has now been turned into a corner shop. I left the door open so that the couple of kids I was expecting to show up would see where I was. However, the shop is quite a popular place, it has been in the village for several years in its old location, and plenty of people are continuing to patronise it in its new home. And several of those were curious about who I am so they came in to see. As well as the couple of kids who would have shown up anyway, I ended up running an impromptu kids’ club, distributing the drawing and colouring equipment around the juvenile bodies who had distributed themselves around the table and floor, and in the middle of it all, sat a middle aged lady, the owner of the shop in fact, who had brought some English work she needed help with. So now I’m rethinking how we might capitalise on the new location in order to run some activities for Christmas and the summer holidays.

And the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.

I’ve been looking around at options for further study, haven’t made any decisions yet, slightly hampered by certain institutions who don’t appear to want my money enough to reply to my emails.
So far I have discovered that no-where in the UK is financially accessible (apart from possibly the place that doesn’t respond to their emails; would I want to be dealing with a non-communicative institution even if it were financially feasible?) So I have turned my sights abroad. USA out of the questions. Australia not inspired by the options. South Africa maybe a possibility. Of course with distance learning it doesn’t actually matter where it is, apart from maybe a cultural flavour to the course. So where a UK college offers a module called “theology of the poor” (yuk!) a course in a South African context might take a more integrated approach (one might hope at least).

The other thing I have discovered is that “my” area (theology and disability) is categorised as “Practical Theology”. “Practical Theology” strikes me as being something of a tautology; Theology is a practical subject. Think about it for a minute; what would the alternatives look like? Academic Theology? Theoretical theology? Miles removed from the real world theology? Not to be lived theology? Or maybe just Impractical Theology? Who dreams this stuff up?

I’m not a great shoe-shopper. In fact I’m not a great anything shopper. I do hit and run shopping; know what I’m going to buy, go and buy it, and leave again. But in this land where it took three trips to try and persuade the electricity company to send me a bill, I guess it just would take three trips to town to buy a pair of sandals.
I was looking for a pair of outdoor activity kind of sandals; chunky soles with a decent tread, adjustable upper bits, rugged feel…. something that you might buy from an outdoor pursuits shop in the UK, think Merrell, and no they’re not paying for the product placement (actually my last pair of Merrells were rubbish which is why I need new sandals at all, which was a disappointment since my previous Merrells were the best shoes I’ve ever bought, but we digress…)

Outdoor shops aren’t big round here, and having scoured the available range of shoe-shops and sports-shops, the first conclusion is that there isn’t a great deal of choice in the first place, which is kind of odd given that San Francisco has pretty well anything else that is available in the west. I wonder if it is something to do with the fact that in Argentina poor people walk and rich people drive, so people who could afford to buy quality shoes to walk in will never actually need them.

Anyway, having tracked down the modest selection, the next issue is size.

– Do you have these available in a 35? (that’s my size in Argentinean)
– No, these only go down to 37
– Do you have anything in a 35?
– No, these are all mens. The ladies’ are over here.

She leads me to the display of flimsy strappy sling-backed, smooth soled, pointy toed creations worn by those whose notion of an appropriately feminine activity starts and finishes by mincing from the carpark to coffee with possibly a little light shopping to follow; clearly not built for the race against the clock to do six errands on the bike before picking up the kid from nursery, much less walking the dogs or visiting families on muddy small-holdings in the back of beyond. Hence I try a different approach; the childrens’ section:

– Do you have these available in a 35? (that’s still my size in Argentinean)
– No, these only go up to 33
– Do you have anything in a 35?
– No, these are all children’s sizes.

But hang on… what’s a kid supposed to do in the bit where they grow out of the children’s section at size 33 and grow into the adult section at size 37? A bored smile and a shrug of the shoulders from the shop assistant who looks like she’s only just about old enough to have children and almost certainly isn’t paid enough to care.

Repeat the above four paragraphs in three different establishments.

Having tried on all the 37’s to find the smallest and then adjusting all the straps down, I’ve finally come away with something that might just about be a 35 if you squint a bit. But I’m left wondering this; supposing we were still in Argentina in another decade or so, what on earth will my, by then, twelve year old be wearing on his feet?

Soya is big business in Argentina. Argentineans themselves aren’t great consumers of soya, you’d probably have to go hunting in the larger supermarkets if you actually wanted to eat the stuff. Domestic consumption is mainly in the form of animal feed, but world soya prices went through the roof a couple of years back and Argentina is one of the largest producers of it. We live in the heart of one of the most productive growing areas where soya has taken over from the more traditional forms of land-use; cows, maize, sunflowers, barley.
Argentina is also one of the countries where genetic modification is permitted, so our soya is modified to withstand being sprayed by toxic chemicals (e.g. Roundup) to stop the weeds from coming through. Our bit of Argentina is extremely fertile, the saying goes that if you throw a seed at the ground a crop will appear. In the short fallow period between one crop being harvested and the next one being planted a field quickly becomes a jungle;

I’m not actually sure what the field above had in it previously. Sunflowers? Maybe sweetcorn. However, also harvested a couple of months ago, just on the other side of the track, the field below had been planted with soya. Notice anything different?

Now I’m not an agriculturalist, but I suspect that the only thing that might grow in this barren land would be some more modified soya, which will be sprayed with some more heavy chemicals. Am I spotting a cycle?

There is a rumour that unless the land is left to rest for at least a year between soya crops then within five to seven years the land is wasted. Another rumour says that the land-owners who are currently making their money from soya are now rushing to invest it in blocks of luxury flats in the up and coming areas of Cordoba. With such commitments to diversifying and long-term planning we won’t need to worry about Argentina putting all their eggs in one basket when the land becomes a desert. So that’s all OK then.

It might look like an abandoned barn in an overgrown field, but this is in fact the metropolitan centre small hamlet of Luis Sauces. It has five houses and a little primary school which also caters for the surrounding rural community, and one dirt road in and out where roaming sheep and cows are more plentiful than motorised traffic. Most Monday mornings find me in Luis Sauces. After tentatively setting out yesterday I was relieved to discover that the dirt road is still passable after a heavy rain.

The little boy who I am visiting is a lot of fun to be with. Responsive and relational, I find myself wondering how much more we could achive if I was seeing him every day, or even three times a week. But, it is a drive into the back of beyond, and I’d have to drop a few other things to make it happen. And then I remember how for kids in special school (or any school) in England (and Argentina) an hour of a teacher’s whole and undivided was (still is?) a rare luxury. I remember days when I used to deliberately volunteer for toiletting duty just so that I could spend one-to-one time with the kids who I barely spoke to the rest of the day. And that was in an expensive, supposedly specialised environment. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but at the moment the little I’m giving this guy is probably the best chance he’s going to get.

So we play. I bring games and ideas, and he responds, and I respond to his responses, and we laugh, and take turns to fish the ball out of the chicken poo again. In rural Argentina play isn’t a big concept. Kids are kids until they are old enough to help on the land, in the house, with the animals. I asked the family who plays with him, and they responded “no-one; there aren’t any other children here”. Only children play. And even that isn’t the whole story, because there are a few teens around, but these teens have long since become working adults, having finished primary school at 11. I’m saying “rural Argentina”, but actually it was only a couple of years ago, that in a magazine from Buenos Aires I read an article proclaiming that “play is good for children’s education”: that which I take for granted is still newsworthy stuff even in the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan of urban environments here.

So we play. I’m sure the family have no idea what I think I’m playing at (in every sense). Some of them make themselves scarce. The braver ones stay and watch. No-one has dared join in yet. But I think they appreciate that I’m trying to do something good for their kid because they have started “paying” me in eggs. More eggs than the three of us here could possibly get through. So from building community in Luis Sauces, we are building community back in San Francisco by re-distributing egg parcels to our friends and neighbours here.

Quote from the neighbour’s kid who had taken Joni to play in the plaza the other day:

“We’d picked you a flower, only Joni ate it on the way home”.

When not chewing on the flowers in the plaza, he’s taken to sitting in the washing basket staring out of the window like some imprisoned little waif.

Trips to Cordoba tend to be exercises in revising expectations in a downwards direction, at least as far as the logistics are concerned.
Plan A: We will leave at x o’clock, looking neat and presentable, and arrive at x-plus-3 o’clock still looking neat and presentable, and we will achieve the following to-do list while we are there.

Plans B to F: We will leave at x-plus a bit-o’clock after the child has refused to get dressed, the dogs have refused to come in from the plaza, we have lost and found the relevant bits of paper, and remembered that the car only just has enough petrol to limp to the nearest filling station. We will look neat and presentable, until we have been stuck behind fifteen slow moving lorries and been stopped at three police check points and losing the will to keep going, have pulled off for coffee and cookies in Arroyito, and foolishly bought a supply of chocolate to keep the boy happy, or at least quiet, on the next leg of the trip. We will arrive at x-plus-3 o’clock, or x-plus a bit- plus three plus a bit more and the rest….. We will arrive sometime, hopefully on the same day as we set off. Neat and presentable long since disappeared under a layer of chocolate and biscuit finger-prints. We will achieve the list… some of the list… the most essential items from the list… We will achieve whatever we manage to achieve before everything shuts for the day anyway.

Thus we left at nine this morning and arrived home at eleven this evening.

The meeting. Needs some further discussion. First impression; huge disappointment but with potential to become stupendous if we can get it together.