St. Mary\'s June 2015 Magazine

From The Vicarage, June 2015.
It’s parade season: in Britain veterans in wheelchairs recall a war long
past and celebrate a peace which for us still, pretty much, prevails.
One chap, chest clanking with medals, shakes hands with the Prince
of Wales, an informal gesture from an old soldier to a future sovereign.
There was a very different parade, however, in Moscow last month.
Russian troops, Russian hardware, from decorative infantry to missile
launchers, marched past President Putin, standing on the Kremlin
balcony looking like a Communist era leader presiding over a society
expressly founded on the belief that all are equal.
It’s a long way from the Soviet Union to Britain, but we too have our
Great Leaders, quite a lot, until recently, with Dave and Nick and Ed
on their battlebuses, delivering carefully managed speeches to
carefully managed crowds, while a young(ish) woman lands hatless
from the air. To the victor, the spoils.
The church too sometimes seems in thrall to the cult of Leadership, with
talent-management, and accelerated promotion schemes promised
for the brightest and best coming into ministry now. Easy to knock,
especially if you’re not in it, but the church does have a distinctive
model of leadership of its own, and it’s a very different one.
We follow one who serves, who gave up his power to submit to his
enemies, who died a humiliating death, so we might live for glory. And
if that sounds like mere pieties, it seems to really work, for busted
bankers, and fired buffoons, and the deselected and unelected and
rejected, the losers of this world whose ranks, sooner or later we’ll all,
join.
Yours in Christ,
Fr Richard.
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