Nigel Rooms - The Faith of the English

Nigel Rooms is Director of Ministry and Mission in the Anglican Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, Associate Priest at Bestwood Park with Rise Park LEP and honorary Canon of Christchurch Cathedral in the Diocese of Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. He worked as a Mission Partner in Tanzania from 1994 until 2001, developing an innovative Theological Education by Extension course in Swahili, running an international congregation and building a new church. He holds an MA in Mission and Ministry from Nottingham University and a ThD in Missiology from Birmingham University, and has research and other interests in contextual theology, adult theological education, leadership and ministerial formation and emerging church. He is the editor of the Journal of Adult Theological Education published by Equinox. He is married to Karen, also a priest, and they have two teenage sons. They live in inner-city Nottingham where he enjoys working on his allotment and agonizing over the fluctuating fortunes of his beloved Tigers Hull City AFC.

First published in Great Britain in 2011

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Copyright Nigel Rooms 2011

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are translated by the author.

Quotations marked CEV are taken from the Contemporary English Version New Testament American Bible Society 1991, 1992, 1995; Anglicizations copyright The British and Foreign Bible Society 1995. Used with permission. For more information about the Contemporary English Version, please visit .

Quotations marked KJV are from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, and are reproduced by permission of the Crowns Patentee, Cambridge University Press.

Quotations marked NIV are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, a member of the Hachette UK Group. All rights reserved. NIV is a registered trademark of International Bible Society. UK trademark number 1448790.

Quotations marked REB are taken from the Revised English Bible, copyright Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press 1989.

Quotations marked RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952 and 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Extracts from The Book of Common Prayer, the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crowns Patentee, Cambridge University Press.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780281061112

e Book ISBN 9780281067046

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Graphicraft Ltd, Hong Kong

Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group

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I would like to dedicate this book in memory of my grandparents, Nora and Reg Soar, who unwittingly and in very different ways rooted me in home and place

The Word became flesh; he made his home among us, and we saw his glory full of grace and truth

The Gospel of John (REB)

And did those feet in ancient time

walk upon Englands mountains green?

William Blake

Appendix: How can we be English and Christian?
An imaginative and reflective course integrating Englishness and Christian faith

A story is told of the days of apartheid in South Africa when the white English Fathers of the Community of the Resurrection worked in a black township outside Johannesburg. No one is quite sure whether it concerns the more famous Trevor Huddleston or one of his contemporaries, but for our purposes it doesnt really matter the story is about a white English priest (Allen, 2006, p. 26). Every day the priest had to walk from home to the church to say Mass and every day he passed the house of a woman who took in washing to make her meagre living. Most days she would be pegging out clothes on the line in the African sun as the priest made his way along the road by her house. It being Africa and the priest being white, he naturally had a big black hat and a flowing white cassock to protect him from that sun. And every time he passed the woman at her work with the washing he would doff his hat to her. A normal and everyday sign of respect and even reverence in English culture, a thing he probably didnt even notice he was doing. One day the womans teenage son was present and noticed this event, and was shocked to his core that a white man would show respect to a poor black woman in the days of apartheid. It moved him and he never forgot it especially since he too, in time, joined the ranks of the Community of the Resurrection as a priest. His name was and still is Desmond.

This is a story of ordinary English courtesy and politeness in the service of the gospel. The gospel that proclaims the good news to everyone regardless of their colour. It is a story I wanted to begin this book with because it signposts what we shall be exploring throughout the forthcoming chapters.

The story illustrates the hiddenness of culture to those within it. We do not notice our own culture because we are brought up simply to assume it it slips under the surface of our lives in our early years to do its hidden work. So, in order to see what drives us, we shall want to find ways of digging down into behaviour like the doffing of a hat. The story shows us that our culture only really becomes visible when placed alongside another culture, and the question that raises, for those of us who do not live and work outside England, is: how can we become more aware of our own culture if it is so hidden down below? We cannot start any kind of integration with our faith if we dont recognize our culture when it manifests itself.

The question of faith is therefore raised it mattered in the story that the priest was a man of faith on his way to his daily devotion. There seems to be a natural, self-deprecating, unhurried beauty about his behaviour that might only come from a Christian Englishman. As the title of this book suggests, therefore, there could be a real and deep connection between the kind of hidden English culture that we naturally and unconsciously display and the Christian faith which has been part of our national life for over 1,500 years. But is this right? We know that not all the things that white English missionaries did in their work in the colonies served the gospel in quite the same way as the priest in our story. Indeed, getting excited about being English has been more associated with right-wing racist groups in recent years. So we are going to put English culture and the Christian faith into dialogue such that we hope both might emerge transformed. Our aim will be to see if there is a proper, good and true integration of English culture and the Christian faith to be found, and if so, what it might look like.