Today has been training for being a Bible Study Group leader.  So we did a ‘dry run’ with a group of bishops all trying hard not to say the obvious thing about the passage we were studying.  The contacts are fascinating.
Bible Study is 75 minutes most mornings for the next two weeks – so this is a big slice of the way in which we hope to get to know one another.  I got a quick look at the composition of the group that I am expected to facilitate.  It confirmed my worst fears. No – my worst fears would be a bunch of academics.  Just my second-worst fears.

Anyway, I fell to thinking about the compostion of my ideal Bible Study Group.  Martin Luther King, I think.  St Patrick, of course, Tutu, Bonhoeffer ..

They’ve announced a friendly meeting for episcopal bloggers tomorrow.  Maybe ‘they’ have something to say to us.  But it will be good to meet.

Kimberly of course wants too much information.  But since she asks … the obvious answer to this single room stuff is a discreet rearrangement of the furniture.  So we now have a sitting/IT room and a bedroom.  Anglican Connubial Bliss is safe for now.

The news hounds who are sniffing around here won’t find much to excite.  I’ve been here today for pre-Conference training as a Bible Study Group leader.  It’s great news that each group will work in three languages with interpreters.  It gives the group leader time to think.

Initial impressions?  I wandered around today and talked to all sorts of people.  Two impressions.  First that this is not a gathering of extremists.  No doubt there are passionate convictions around.  But people who deal with people in all their variety and complexity have a sort of innate moderation about them.  And many of the people I met today are priests who spent long years in pastoral  ministry before becoming bishops.  It makes a difference.

We’re packing.  How many Bibles does one bring – or is the one on my Palm enough?  Slight feel of school about it all.  Will I be bullied in the playground?  Have I packed enough socks?  And the more the blogosphere works itself up, the less motivated I become about blogging or anything else.  I suppose I am just gathering myself for the greatest blogfest of all.

Meanwhile a quick trip to Dublin tomorrow for the consecration of my old friend, Trevor Williams, as Bishop of Limerick and everywhere else in the south west of Ireland.  It’s a good choice – Trevor is a former leader of the Corrymeela Community of Reconciliation.  So he’ll be at Lambeth and, if I remember right, his link diocese is New Hampshire.  The only problem now is the failure of the radar which controls landings at Dublin Airport ..

Poppy’s admirers will be interested to know that she has now arrived in Belfast for the pre-Lambeth hospitality programme.  Having just been to Donegal, she’s a bit jet-lagged and noisy.  But she gets a lot of attention from Anna and her friends and will settle down here comfortably until August.

The pre-Lambeth publicity – and the reports of the Church of England Synod – mean that friends I have met these past few days want to know more about what lies behind the reports.  They work in situations where any kind of discrimination in the workplace on grounds of gender, sexuality or anything else would be regarded as unthinkable.  They want to know why the church is different and why it finds these issues so difficult.

Welcome to the other Latin tag I remember from my Classics degree.  So is £26800 enough and more than enough – pre-tax – for a couple to live on, not including a car?

Dominic Lawson explored this in yesterday’s Independent – commenting on a report from the Rowntree Foundation, ‘A Minimum Income Standard for Britain.’  What is interesting about this approach to defining poverty is that it does not express it as a proportion of a median – such as the national average wage.  Rather it attempts to set a ‘minimum standard’ as ‘having what you need to have the opportunities and choices necessary to participate in society.’  Which, of course, brings it closer to the concept of a stipend – the amount which one is given in order to live while carrying out the work of ministry.  At that, a £26800 stipend would sound generous to our clergy.

The caveats?  Well let’s dispose of the nonsense one first.  Housing is included in the £26800 and clergy are provided with housing?  Yes they are – during their working lives.  This means that, unless they are fortunate enough to ‘marry well’ or be otherwise endowed, they have to deal with their housing needs at the end of their working lives rather than at the beginning.  Just in case you were asking, I think we need a more subtle answer to that question than ‘Sell the rectories and let the clergy .. ‘  And the car – which isn’t covered by the £26800?   Well – set aside the fact that fuel costs have increased by 50% and the mileage rates have remained the same.  Most clergy cover fewer miles per year than I do in the faithful Passat.  They also travel uphill now and again whereas I, as a bishop, travel downhill only.  So the amount they are able to claim in expenses will help to run the car but will never be enough to replace it.

Satis superque?  Interesting.

Quick pre-Lambeth visit to Blogstead Na Mara – just to make sure that I know who I am before I plunge in.  So we’re weeding and hacking surrounded by the empty houses of the speculative building boom.

I was reminded of my years as  Hospital Chaplain yesterday when the cleaner came by while I was sitting outside the toilets in Belfast City Hospital – don’t ask.  Two words from the staff defined chaplaincy for me.  The expectations of the patient would be raised by the introduction, ‘Here’stheministercometohaveaweechatwithyou’   And when you were sitting on the edge of the bed wrestling with the search for meaning in difficult times, the cleaner would arrive and say, ‘Justliftyourweefeetdear’

On weightier Lambeth matters, I was interested to read Deborah Orr in the Independent writing about Rowan Williams as ‘A man of God we should all be supporting.’  Describing herself variously as a secularist and an atheist, she bewails the fact that ‘there is a tendency among secularists .. to believe that no belief that is held by a religious group – even a progressive one – is worthy of support.  She sees sexuality questions as almost entirely a rights issue.  So this comes in the area of ‘placeswherewesharemediumtermobjectiveseveniflongtermaimsdiverge.’