Month: August 2009

Categories
Past

John Bunyan

John-BunyanThe author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan, died on this day 321 years ago. Born in a poor family in 1628, Bunyan had only a few years of schooling before following his father into trade as a tinker, and then at the age of 16 after his mother’s death joining the parliamentary army which was then engaged in the English civil war. When the war ended, he returned to his trade as a tinker and in 1649 he married Mary.

Mary’s dowry consisted of two books, Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven by Arthur Dent and The Practice of Piety by Lewis Bayly. These had a profound effect on him, leading to his baptism in the River Great Ouse in 1653. Mary died in 1655, but later that year he started preaching, with great success. As his popularity grew, so did the number of his enemies, and in 1660 he was imprisoned for preaching without a licence.

Bunyan’s imprisonment continued for 11 years because of his refusal to stop preaching, and during that time he devised his allegorical novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress. He was finally released in 1672 when the religious laws were relaxed, and he proceeded to plant more than 30 new congregations. He was imprisoned again for six months in 1675, but thereafter remained free until he died of a fever in 1688.

Categories
Faith

You cannot use force to make something true

force-vs-truthThe moment you lie to defend an ideology, you expose your ideology as false. The Iranian religious authorities suffered a devastating credibility blow following the recent Iranian elections when they proclaimed that their preferred candidate had received the most votes, a proclamation which was obviously untrue having regard to the evidence. If the religious authorities are prepared to lie in order to maintain their power base, are they also lying on matters relating to religion?

Chapter 4 of the Acts of the Apostles describes a group of officials, priests and religious lawyers facing an analogous dilemma. The message being proclaimed by the followers of Jesus was creating a threat to their power base. Peter and John had apparently healed in the name of Jesus a paraplegic man who was more than 40 years old, and no-one doubted the reality of the miracle. Is that something they should have just let go, or should they have tried to hush it up?

In an attempt to stop the message spreading, the religious authorities tried to hush it up, not realising that by trying to suppress the truth they were forfeiting any claim they had to be representing the truth. If a belief system or philosophy really is true, it should be able to stand up for itself, without any need for the use of falsehoods or force or suppression.

Categories
Books

Everyone is going multi-site

multiple-sitesIf the number of people attending your church is growing beyond the available seating capacity, you could build a bigger church. However, an increasingly popular alternative being adopted by many churches is to become a multi-site church, and multi-site churches of many different flavours are discussed in a helpful Leadership Network Innovation Series book, The Multi-Site Church Revolution, by Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon and Warren Bird.

There are many practical advantages to multi-site churches. It is far less expensive to have smaller buildings rather than larger buildings. It is much easier to find available real estate. With smaller congregations in each venue there are less likely to be major traffic jams. Local government zoning issues are less likely to be problematic, and relations with neighbours are likely to be better. Often existing buildings can be used without the need to build new ones.

Aside from the practical advantages of a multi-site strategy, many churches have found that a multi-site presence significantly enhances their mission. People are more likely to invite their neighbours if they can attend a venue which is near where they live. A new multi-site venue is like a church plant, but it has instant access to the reputation and resources of an established church. Any growing church should be considering the advantages of a multi-site strategy.

Categories
Poverty

Why do some countries remain poor?

textile-making-efficiencyThis post continues the weekly series discussing themes from Gregory Clark’s book A Farewell to Alms. Chapter 15 describes how technological advances from the Industrial Revolution spread to different countries around the world. Clark says that the technological, organisational and political developments in the late 18th and early 19th centuries should seemingly have resulted in all countries becoming part of the new industrialised world. However, this did not happen.

Different countries took different amounts of time to adopt the innovations, and these differences should have translated into moderate differences in the efficiency levels of economies. However, what actually happened was that many countries failed to achieve any appreciable material improvement, and the difference in material living standards between the wealthiest and the poorest countries has been increasing ever since.

By the end of the 19th century, cotton grown in India was being transported 11,000 kilometres to England to be turned into cloth, then transported 11,000 kilometres back to India to be sold. This was occurring even though the wages of workers in English mills were four to five times as high as those of workers in Indian mills. Somehow, English workers using similar machinery were able to achieve many times the productivity of Indian workers.

Categories
Future

Coming scarcities of food, water and power

food-scarcityThe UK government’s chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, has warned that by the year 2030 the world’s population will increase to 8 billion, demand for food and energy will increase by 50%, and demand for water will increase by 30%. Competition for scarce food and resources will result in rising food prices and a larger number of hungry people. There is a chance that global climate change will make this situation even worse.

According to Professor Beddington’s gloomy outlook, as more people continue to move to cities to live, depletion of the earth’s fresh water resources will be accelerated. Increasing prosperity in India and China will increase the consumption of meat and dairy products, which take more energy to produce, and people in those countries will want to use more energy to support a wealthier lifestyle. The use of more land for growing biofuels will result in less land available for growing food.

So what is the bottom line of all this? Professor Beddington says we need to invest more in science and technology to find urgent solutions to these problems. We need to pay more money to professors. Cynicism aside, the growth in worldwide wealth since the Industrial Revolution has been driven by technological advances. As a result of improved technology, the world now produces many times as much food as was produced 200 years ago.

Categories
Present

Looking for God in all the wrong places

looking-for-godAn opinion piece by Okello Lucima in Uganda’s Sunday Monitor illustrates a contemporary African nationalist approach towards religion. The author suggests that God or the gods created different people with different spiritual practices, and, like roads and airline routes, you have to choose the right one to get you to your destination.  He says that Africans and other colonised people who abandoned their traditional spiritual practices have lost their way.

The author argues that the gods do not hear the prayers of Africans who go to mosques and churches and “other foreign places of worship” because they are not using the dedicated routes and verbal signals which were designed for them. He goes on to say that the mistaken asking for blessings using Christian and other foreign practices is the very reason why Africans and other colonised people are suffering the lion’s share of all worldly afflictions.

Mr Lucima seems to have encountered only a very distorted version of Christianity. He seems to be unaware that Christianity was an African faith in New Testament times and the following centuries, long before it became an English faith. Christianity is spoken in more than 2,400 languages including 680 African languages into which the Bible has been translated. The Christian faith has never been about getting blessings in exchange for prayers and religious devotions.

Categories
Past

Horrors from the 1980s

torture-chamberA new book published by Friedrich Evert Stiftung, entitled We Lived to Tell: The Nyayo House Story, describes the ways in which political prisoners were tortured in Kenya during the presidency of Daniel arap Moi. Moi’s grip on power was somewhat tenuous when he succeeded to the presidency after the death of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, and his political philosophy was Nyayo, meaning “footsteps”, indicating that he would follow in the footsteps of the great man, without any radical change in direction.

One of the ways in which Moi followed the practices of his predecessor was in brutal treatment of political enemies. Nyayo House is a multi-storey building in Nairobi which is the headquarters of Nairobi province, but it is most famous for the torture chambers in its basement. In 1981 there was widespread political dissatisfaction in Kenya, with protests by university students and numerous strikes and sit-ins, and in 1982 there was an attempted coup led by Air Force officers, so there were plenty of political enemies for Moi to torture.

The book contains numerous first-person accounts of arbitrary and indefinite detention, interrogation, torture, sexual and emotional abuse, and other forms of degrading treatment suffered by inmates of the Nyayo House dungeons. The facts of what occurred are widely known and essentially uncontested, but as is the case with nearly all major crimes in Kenya over the past 30 years, no-one has ever been brought to justice or made to pay for the offences committed.

Categories
Faith

Why are you surprised?

walking-againChapter 3 of the book of Acts describes an afternoon when Peter and John were walking to the temple to pray. A man with paralysed legs was at the temple gate begging, and he asked Peter and John for money. Instead of giving him money, Peter told him to get up and walk, in the name of Jesus Christ. The man was immediately cured, and he got up and started walking and jumping. Everyone was amazed, but Peter asked them why they were surprised.

In a society where disabled people were just nameless beggars, perhaps it was surprising that God cared enough to heal someone. In a society where people believed in God more in an intellectual and ceremonial way than as a living reality, perhaps it was surprising that God would do anything at all. But if God had really acted throughout the history of the people of Israel in the way people said he had, it should have come as no surprise that he was still active.

Today, many people claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, but live much of their lives as if God does not exist. We find it hard to believe that the miracles described in the Bible actually happened. Some try to explain them away, and separate the “mythical” elements from the “real” elements. However, if God was really powerful enough to create the world and everything in it, why should we be surprised when he does something as simple as curing a paralysed man?

Categories
Books

Strategy for imperfect organisations

fat-smokerThere are plenty of business books which contain inspiring and valuable ideas about excellent customer service, highly engaged employees, and strategies for creating remarkable success. The problem is that you almost never encounter organisations run the way recommended in such books. That is because it is easy to come up with a good strategy, but implementing a strategy is as hard as losing weight or giving up smoking, according to David Maister in his latest book Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What’s Obvious but not Easy.

Maister shows particular insight into the difficulty of implementing strategy within a professional services firm such as a law firm. Lawyers are paid by their clients to be suspicious about the motives of other people and to consider the possible downsides to any transaction; it is therefore unsurprising that law firms have trouble in cultivating a climate of trust between managers and lawyers. Often this ends in failure to make any decisions, or at least a very slow and painful decision process.

I have read all of Maister’s books, and in my view this one is the most useful to date. It is highly accurate in its identification of the range of strategy implementation problems encountered by professional services firms, and is filled with useful tactics for dealing with them. It is possible to have a highly profitable firm composed of competing warlords, but Maister’s advice shows how to build a firm for the long term with engaged employees and happy clients.

Categories
Poverty

Reducing Inequality

inequalityThis post is a continuation of a weekly series discussing themes of poverty and economic growth raised in Gregory Clark’s book A Farewell to Alms. Chapter 14 relates to the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Although the Industrial Revolution, and the attendant increase in wealth, was driven by the expansion of knowledge, unskilled workers have benefitted more than any other category of worker.

Adjusted for inflation, wages in England increased more rapidly between 1760 and 1860 than did output per person. Modern economic growth has reduced inequalities within Western countries, and the most disadvantaged groups have been among the biggest beneficiaries. By way of example, in the thirteenth century, skilled building workers were paid 100% more than unskilled building workers. Today, the difference is closer to 25%.

The inequality between rich and poor has also been narrowed on many non-financial aspects of quality of life, including life expectancy, health, numbers of surviving children and literacy. According to Clark, almost all of the benefits of technological advance brought about during the Industrial Revolution were reaped by consumers in the form of lower prices, rather than by firms in the form of excessive profits.