PROTECT THY LOCAL CHURCH FROM INDABA, O LORD

Indaba as a philosophical approach to the unavoidable reality of human conflict is now spreading beyond the Lambeth Conference and is filtering down to dioceses and parishes with serious consequences for mission and ministry.

Indaba believes;

1). that human beings underneath it all are inherently nice people.

2). that self-awareness is the beginning of wisdom for nice people wanting to solve the relational difficulties they may be experiencing with other nice people.

3). that nice people need intellectually stimulating conversation partnerships with other nice people in order to lead a nice life.

Indaba does not believe;

1). that the fear of the Lord, as pre-critical Christians would have defined it (in the dark days before the assured results of critical biblical scholarship enlightened nice people), is the beginning of wisdom.

2). that nice people will aspire to spiritual or moral certainty.

3). that nice people will refuse to enter into conversation partnerships with other nice people.

This Indaba philosophy of niceness is obviously preferable to a punch-up at a PCC meeting, to which the police may have to be called. But as an approach to the realities of life and relationships in the local church it begs certain questions.

How can you ‘indaba’ between the church-member who acts on their belief that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the church-member who acts on their belief that it is not?

How can you ‘indaba’ between the bully and his or her victim?

How can you ‘indaba’ between the church member who is empire-building/going on an ego-trip and the church member whose genuine attempt to serve Christ and His precious people is being disrupted?

Indaba has potentially got a very nice friend in the new Clergy Discipline Measure. An Indaba-believing bishop who receives a letter of complaint from a church member to the effect that his or her vicar is not as nice as they would like him to be may be tempted to mediate between the two inherently nice people involved.

However, given the often not very nice realities of human nature, the meeting might not turn out to be as nice an experience as he had hoped.

And, in the worst-case scenario, the Indaba-believing bishop may find he gets a not very nice cold shower from the Defamation Act 1950 (the trouble of course with 1950 for those who see themselves as nice, progressive people is that it preceded 1963). The front-line clergyman involved (and, let’s face it, clergyman he is most likely to be and most likely a Conservative Evangelical or a traditional Anglo-Catholic clergyman at that) may consider that in the course of the CDM procedure leading up to the ‘Indaba’ conversation with his complainant malicious falsehoods have been both written and disseminated about him.

Under such a scenario, Cranmer's Curate would rather take the defamation on the chin than sue - for the sake of the Gospel. But if such a case were to go to court, the bishop may well find that a secular libel jury does not share his faith in Indaba. Presumably, the bishop would be banking on the fact that a clergy stipend probably wouldn't run to a libel action.