The Bishop and The Prisoner for BBC Radio 4

I have enjoyed working on this series of three half-hour programmes with Rosie Dawson for BBC Radio 4.  It was an excellent series that really got behind the issues and talked to real people both victims and criminals on how the system fails so many people.

In the three-part series, he talks to prison staff, politicians and inmates, who share their ideas about effective punishment both within prison and in Community Payback schemes. In an article in the Liverpool Echo he wrote...

“In The Forgiveness Project (piloted in High Down prison) a woman who was repeatedly raped, and who was only saved from death because her attacker’s knife broke, said forgiveness is fluid, which I thought was a fascinating phrase.
“She said ‘Sometimes I can forgive, sometimes I can’t forgive, sometimes I have to will myself to forgive’.

and we hear from some inmates about how sex offenders are probably the only group of offenders that cannot be re-habilitated and forgiven.

Bishop James put himself in the shoes of a prisoner being admitted to Liverpool Prison: 

“This included the clanging of the gates, the shutting of the cell door, measuring out the cell (12 paces by nine) and listening to the noise of the prison. Although I’ve been going into prisons for years it gave me a deeper experience of what it was like. And it is punishment.”

In this second programme, the Bishop visits training schemes which offer inmates a chance to gain new skills and may even guarantee them a job. The shoe manufacturer Timpsons has training workshops in Liverpool and Forest Bank; High Down is home to the infamous Clink restaurant where prisoners cook and serve Michelin-style food to members of the public.

In the final programme, James Jones meets ex-offenders taking part in a variety of probation initiatives in Merseyside designed to cut re-offending and "pay back" the community for crimes committed. Three men on the Persistent Priority Offender scheme commend the programme for providing the supervision they found lacking on earlier probation orders. In a moving interview a mentor with the service, Lynsey, says probation saved her from prison, crime and alcoholism and her children from life in care. There are some incredibly moving stories across the three programmes in this seriesand I can thoroughly recommend listening to the series. Bishop James proved to be an excellent and caring interviewer too.


 Listen to programme 1 on iPlayer

 Listen to programme 2 on iPlayer

 Listen to programme 3 on iPlayer

Thoughts after attending Media & Digital Futures workshop at Salford University

I have just taken part in a very interesting, simulating and thought provoking workshop where as industry representatives we were asked to work through and comment on two scenarios as to how the Manchester city region might look in 2017. One had a positive slant and the other a more negative one. I was in one of two groups looking at the more negative scenario which was called the 'noise' scenario.

In a nutshell this scenario says that the UK will still be in recession, technology has advanced but businesses are struggling to make good use of it. The lack of variety of industries and decline of manufacturing has made the region unsustainable with the emphasis being on service and knowledge based.  It is difficult to generate revenue on line as consumers expect it to be free and although there are a large number of digital startups the business models are generally unsustainable.  There is a skills gap with the education system not geared up to produce students with the skills needed and so young people are not making the transition from education to employment. Digital technologies have disrupted rather than helped our everyday lives and people have become overwhelmed by the amount of information, communication and 'noise' coming at them. On top of that the city's digital infrastructure cannot handle the demand with rural areas only having limited access. Finally the region is over regulated, public transport is unreliable and expensive and although everyone is talking about the problems there are no radical strategies being put forward.

I have to say this scenario is not to far from where I feel we are now.

So to start with we were asked as a group to come up with 5 key points from the scenario to start the discussion. I came up with 4 which were..

1. There is no space for the little guy.
2. Education is not delivering equipped young people.
3. 'Free' is stifling innovation as it hard to produce a return on investment. Which is why we no longer make anything.
4. Both the transport and digital infrastructure are failing.

Others thoughts included a negative impact on families and society. We discussed how the use of computers smart phones and other devices has continued the impact on family cohesion, that eating in front of the TV, had started. Family members occupying the same space but back to back looking at screens rather than face to face round the dinner table. Another point was the lack of a 'ladder' structure where larger companies support and provide small businesses with work and then we started to explore more sustainable business models. The current funding cuts are already causing the social businesses to revisit their mix of commissions to social work proving free or subsidised services, with the need to make  a profit to replace the grant funding to support the social work.

Next we looked at placing these issues, as well as a number from a previous group, onto a matrix made up of more or less likely to happen against being harder or easier to resolve. These other issues generated some debate including one about people not able to understand the technology they were using which got us into 'digital natives' versus 'analogue grans'.

Then we looked at how some of the 'easier' & 'likely' issues might be resolved with the suggestion that the tech one would get resolved without too much intervention because more and more of the population will be digital natives. I made the point that although more and more people have access to the technology they don't necessarily have the skills to use them creatively.  However it was interesting to note that most of the points we placed in the 'likely' and 'hard' quadrant of the matrix and we didn't really have an opportunity to discuss how some of those could be resolved other than a consensus that education is key. One comment was our education system is still based on victorian principles and when you consider Carole Vorderman's report on Maths recently and the need for two different maths qualifications,  if you extend that out to all the other subjects we have a major issue with not preparing our young people for a life in a 'post modern' society, our education system at best is still turning out 'moderns'. With my apprenticeship assessors hat on I am only too aware that most of the graduates from the mountain of 'medja' degrees aren't ready to work in our industry, their degrees haven't given them the skills to work as new entrants but has generated the expectation that they can come straight in as directors or producers. So the industry has set up an apprenticeship scheme to take on 16 to 22 year old and give the training and experience to become valuable team players in the industry.

I then brought up the whole collaboration issue and coined the phrase 'collaborate or die". One of the repeating threads in all my research into how our industry is changing is the mantra of 'you must collaborate'. Unfortunately although we encourage our children to collaborate at an early age, once they hit primary school the concept of collaboration is pushed out and so we now have several generations that just aren't interested in collaborating on creative or business projects which is a real shame.

Then we were given the opportunity to identify 5 issues for our own business, again I came up with 4...

1. 'Free' on the internet makes developing viable business models more challenging!
2. How do I get above the 'noise'?
3. I need to create links with other businesses and collaborate.
4. The challenge is to persuade potential clients to buy my skills, as they feel more and more that they can do it themselves or they just don't value them. Just look at most corporate videos, the sound is rubbish!

Finally we all came back together and we shared the findings of all 4 groups and although we had been looking at two different scenarios the findings were remarkably similar.  One comment that struck me was we live in a 'greed economy' where the aim is to make as much money as possible so I can have the latest this that or the other, instead of the motivation being, doing what is best for the community whilst making enough money to be OK with my lot, going from a 'me based culture to an 'us' based one. In the light of the recent riots etc this really hit home with me.

I found the whole morning a very enlightening experience and I look forward to the outcomes of this research and hope that Salford University can take it further.

Integrated household survey reveals how religious your area is

Simon Rogers in The Guardian has just published a report from the Office for National Statistics

With typical timing, the report has come out the week after the Pope's visit to the UK. But nevertheless, it's an enormous survey: some 450,000 respondents asked questions about their beliefs, sexual identity and health. Besides the findings which show that 1.5% of the population is gay, it includes lots of other details:

• 71% their religion is Christianity
• 4% say their religion is Muslim
• 21% have no religious affiliation
• Slough has the highest level of religious belief in England - 93% - whilst Brighton and Hove has the lowest at 58%
• Inverclyde has the highest level of religious affiliation in Scotland at 92%
• Flintshire has the highest level of religious affiliation in Wales at 81%

It also provides an interesting breakdown of ethnicity and health. Are there any links between any of the datasets - between good health and religious belief, or high ethnicity and high religious belief? Here are some completely unscientific findings:

• 33% of Blaenau Gwent is in poor health, the highest percentage of people in the UK. Only 67% have a religious affiliation, one of the lowest rates in the country
• Slough, besides having the highest religious percentage in the country also has a very high number of people in good health - 81%

Do those two figures tell us anything meaningful?
Although the report is published as a PDF (of course), the ONS has given us the spreadsheet of results and you can download them below. What can you do with the data?

DATA: download the full spreadsheet

It was interesting that one of the early comments on The Guardian page says...

Given that the question asked by the ONS was "What is your religion, even if you are not currently practising?", it's not really possible to work out how religious an area is - just that loads of people still lazily tick the 'Christian' box without thinking about it. It's a shame that the ONS couldn't have chosen a question that actually asked about religious belief.

I look forward to seeing what people can do with this data and whether it can be used to identify needs in a community.

Thought provoking post from Dave Perry on his Visual Theology blog

Dave wrote.....

On Thursday I got into a fascinating conversation with the chatty young stylist who was cutting my hair, my regular guy being off sick. She asked what I do and so I said that I was a Methodist Minister. As someone who never goes to church herself my answer lead her to ask a series of great questions about weddings and churchgoing. She was genuinely interested in what the experience would entail and why anyone would choose it. "Isn't it hypocritical getting married in church if you don't go?" she asked. I found myself turning the question around and saying that perhaps the reason people don't go is that we have made the experience unattractive and irrelevant to her generation. In other words it isn't their fault but ours. This unexpected lack of blame and acceptance of responsibility seemed to get good traction with her and I went on to say just a little bit about faith as love which changes the world, shifting the focus away from church going as such to a more engaged kingdom-centric view of discipleship, but without any of the jargon. 

To read the rest of what Dave had to say please go to his excellent blog.

Does our image of God always have to be male?

We read in the first book of the bible - Genesis that "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created him".

All the way through the bible there are descriptions of God as compassionate. Reading the bible in the language it was written in - Hebrew; the word used for compassionate is 'raham' which is also the word for 'womb'. So when the writers of the bible refer to God as compassionate thy are describing God as womb-like, which is a completely feminine image of God.

With all the discussions going on about women in leadership, surely if God created us in his image both male and female then if we don't have her leadership, if we don't have her wisdom, her voice, her perspective; we are not just missing her, but so much of what is central to the very core of who God is.

The prophet Isaiah wrote in chapter 66 and verse 13 "As a mother comforts her child so will I comfort you". When Isaiah spoke these words, his people didn't know if they had a future, they were full of despair and had little hope. Sound familiar in these times of recession, cuts and job losses? Isaiah was saying, and I believe God is still saying today 'You have seen a mother comfort her child, and this is what God is going to do for you.

God is so much bigger than the language we use; so if then limit his diversity, by saying than some people are second class citizens, then surely it's like cutting off parts of our body?

So my prayer is that you may be able to embrace the God who is way bigger than anything we can say.



This was inspired by one of Rob Bell's Nooma videos called "She". For more information on this and others go to the Nooma web site.

Social Trends 2010 - an article from LICC

This is an article from the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity......

Middle age is always a good time to take stock, to analyse where we have come from and think through where we are going.

Social Trends, the Office for National Statistics' annual survey into British life, is 40-years-old this week. It is now, officially, middle-aged and its latest publication offers much material with which we can take stock.

Some of the signs are good. Britons are living longer. We smoke less (surely not a disconnected fact). We are much richer, earning two-and-a-half times more today than forty years ago, and we holiday abroad much more often.

Some of the signs are ambiguous. There are five million more of us than in 1971, living in seven million more homes, spending less on necessities like food and non-alcoholic drink, and more on recreation and housing.

Some are negative. We are financially more unequal than we have been for generations. The prison population has more than doubled. We save less than we have for decades. We are choosing not to have children. And we are living unprecedentedly more fluid and isolated lives, the number of first marriages falling precipitously, while the number of single person households, divorces, and children born outside marriage rising.

Explaining this spaghetti junction of trends is not easy. Societies rarely undergo uniform or predictable change and are never amenable to single, simple explanations. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to tell stories that encompass and enlighten what is going on.

Listen to any funeral sermon and you will soon realise that what we value is not how rich or how independent we are, how far we travelled or how much we hoarded. It is how much we gave, how much we loved, how much we were loved.

Life is better for me today. I can expect to live longer, earn more and travel further. But it is worse for us. We are less likely to live together, stay together or maintain some measure of genuine equality. Our obsession with autonomy and choice may make us richer and more independent, but it is slowly eroding the bonds of trust, responsibility and perseverance that make loving relationships possible.

Are we so preoccupied with our desire to gain the whole world that we are in danger of losing our soul?

Nick Spencer

Visual Theology - Exchange

Dave Perry who has an excellent blog "Visual Theology" has recently added an excellent post about a disused rural telephone exchange...

At the very time that this little rural telephone exchange was in its heyday the seeds of its demise had already been sown. In the minds of a few courageous digital explorers working off the edge of the map, where the dragons of outrageous newness roam and roar, this place was redundant even before the cement had dried, the last copper wire had been screwed down in place, and the first analogue call connected. Today it sits in the field as a curio of a bygone age, as far removed from the latest iPhone 4 as a fossilised dinosaur footprint is from world record breaking sprinter Usain Bolt.

I won't spoil the rest of what Dave has to say. I commend you go and read it together with the glorious images for yourself.