Sermon for the Admissions Eucharist from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, UK, 2019

Not surprisingly, since our first session on Tuesday, I’ve been thinking about stories. I’m sorry I missed much of yesterday, and apologise if anything I say repeats (or worse, contradicts) what was said then. But then we’re scientists, so we’re used to having to handle corroborating and conflicting data – numbers that fit nicely onto the graph and numbers that are literally way off line.

But we’re more than scientists, we are theologians too. As such we work with the two basic, but separate, building blocks – numbers and words. Our numbers we fashion into formulae and theories, designs and products. Our words we aggregate into sermons and stories, doctrinal teachings and moral imperatives.

I wonder whether that makes the members of this society particularly useful, to both church and science, on those occasions when words and numbers clash and collide.

Last week I was sent a copy of a report on diocesan safeguarding statistics that was shortly to become a press release from the Church of England. It was well set out in a familiar academic style. Each section began with a very brief introduction, leading into a series of tables and figures, and was then followed by a few lines of text analysing what the numbers might mean. I was invited to comment on it, as the nearest to a statistician among those who have to field media enquiries on behalf of the Church. They numbers made sense, the textual description fitted them, but the overall effect wasn’t quite right. Bluntly, they lacked a story, or the story came too late. By the time a journalist had glanced at a few of the statistics, they would be writing their own narrative around them, with greater regard for what made good copy than for the truth of their assertions. Better, earlier narrative would make it harder (though I’m sure not impossible) for the numbers to be pressed into the service of some hostile agenda.

The suggestions I made were little more than probably any of us here today could have done. The paper just needed someone confident enough with both numbers and words to see how the two could be assembled into a coherent message.

As I mentioned to my small group on Wednesday, I learned how easily numbers lose out to words some years ago. Well over a decade ago, at a parliamentary launch event I was given a series of credit card sized pieces of paper that statistically demolished the ten most popular myths about migration. I thought it was a great piece of research, and bound to change minds. It had no impact whatsoever. A third hand story about someone’s daughter being denied a council house, and then seeing a family assumed to be foreigners moving into such a property the next week, carries far more weight, even if it is wildly inaccurate, than any well evidenced argument that migration has very little impact on housing waiting lists.

Entire chunks of UK welfare benefits policy have been based on the power of the narrative around the tiny numbers who seriously abuse the system, even if eradicating their abuses can only be done at the cost of catching many more innocent people in a poverty trap. I suspect every single family with ten or more children reliant on state benefits, and there are only a few dozen at most in the land, has had its day on the front page of at least one tabloid paper. Stories trump numbers, especially when those stories chime well with what we want to believe to be true. Confirmation bias is alive and doing very well, thank you.

Many of us here are people who are comfortable around numbers. We calculate and calibrate with them. We see them as our friends, and we treat them with the respect that friends deserve. Yet we ourselves fall victim to confirmation bias if we assume that others share that perspective. My wife Sue, who will be ordained as a Self Supporting Priest later this month, did some of her research into maths anxiety. In Western society to be illiterate is shameful, to be functionally innumerate is almost seen as a badge to be worn with pride. Outside the scientific community, and in the church as much as anywhere else, numbers are feared, misunderstood, shunned. Within science, words are often awkward, poorly delivered. We’ve all sat in the lecture theatre whilst the wonders of nature are rendered banal and boring by the limitations of the speaker’s language. The force and delight of discovery is often diminished or deflected by the weakness of how it is expressed.

So, are there ways that we can serve the church and society as those who have had to prove ourselves in both fields? Let me offer just two examples. You can think up your own later.
Challenging narratives that twist the evidence with ones that are equally, if not better, stories, yet are grounded in reality and can, when called upon, be supported by the data. When I was asked, following a lecture given whist I was in the USA for the Society’s retreat there, to turn my PhD into a book, I knew I would have to replace the statistical tables, much though I loved hem, with example. At the publisher’s request I’ve recently turned the same theory into a series of daily devotional readings for Lent, to be published later this year. A lot of my broadcasting work is grounded in the belief that there is no such thing as effective prose, only poetry that is travelling incognito.

Explaining scientific theories and technological advances in well-crafted prose. It can be done. Few people understand the equations that underlie quantum mechanics but far more think Schrödinger had a cat. The popularity of black holes is probably 75% because they were given such an evocative name. How can we, who are required by our ordination to be wordsmiths, help science find its language more reliably?

Sermon from Stig Graham,
Warden of the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, UK, 2019

One of the joys of being Warden is that I get to share with my brothers and sisters in this Society my favourite Bible passages. Last year I was able to share with you the courage of Thomas, Thomas the Doubter, and this year it is the story of the Syrophoenician woman which, like Thomas, has been a pivotal one for me. The joy for you is that you can sit and listen to me.
Or is that just the story I tell myself. That may not be the story you tell one another in the bar or over dinner this evening.
We do like stories. As children, as adults, through all kinds of media, verbal, textual, digital, movies or theatre we flock to have the world explained to us. It really isn’t surprising that Jesus told parables, acted out his drama, drew on contextual symbols to try and communicate his Good News.
The week before last, here in the UK, the very last episode of The Big Bang Theory was televised. The essential theme was simple; over several years it followed four very geeky young men and scientists through their love lives, (which most of the time, until recent years, was defined more by its absence than its presence) and their careers. And it has to be said that young women in their lives were much more savvy than the boys were. The series concluded with a strong feel good ending with professional recognition, and the Nobel prize, but most all the recognition of the importance of friendship and the responsibilities it entails.
Sheldon (the Nobel prize winner)(in the interests of parity observing en passant that he won it with his wife with their joint paper on super asymmetry)(and yes, I know you are scientists but it’s a comedy so just go with it), Sheldon had a very clearly structured hierarchy of people in his head. Top of the pile are the theoretical physicists (just like him in fact), then come the experimental physicists followed by the lowly engineers. On being challenged that his wife is also an eminent neuroscientist he smiles condescendingly and observes that, well, yes but after all, it is only biology. And as for those who haven’t what it takes to be scientist, well… Certainly, that is the story Sheldon likes to tell himself.
And yes, it is funny – except it is a trope which has been around in science for a very long time. I am sure we have all had the experience of hearing someone joking about it, and we laugh and then think, ‘You know, you believe that, just a little bit, perhaps a little bit too much’. Have a listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast with Professor Brian Cox (and I am sorry Sharon, but somehow I can’t achieve the same level of passion in my voice as you when saying his name – perhaps it’s my lack of any kind of hair) and Robin Ince. A witty fun programme, but now and again, just a little too fervent. Or is that the story I like to tell myself?
And, by the by, in tomorrow’s Admissions Eucharist, the eucharistic prayer contains the line, ‘In the fullness of time you made us in your image, the crown of all creation’. Us, the crown of all creation? Or is that the story we like to tell ourselves?
The story of the Syrophoenician woman is a case in point. Generally, in my experience, people don’t like this story. That was true in even my youth when we were much less aware or sensitive to issues of abuse but in this age of the #metoo generation it seems even more unacceptable. ‘Why does Jesus ignore her? That’s not very Christian’ is the popular cry. Part of the problem is that the reading we have just heard is normally split over two Sundays, by which time most people have forgotten the first half, assuming they were there to hear it in the first place.
But taken together, there are only two verses between Jesus saying, ‘For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.  These are what defile a person’ and then us being told that Jesus did not respond.
As a chaplain I would call it ‘holding the silence’. Creating a sound space to afford an opportunity for it to be filled. The disciples don’t need a question, nor even an invitation; they pile on in, sharing with the world what is in their hearts. ‘Send her away she is noisy, she is foreign, she is a woman’. Technically, of course this passage only specifies that she is shouting at them but as we know elsewhere the disciples become greatly exorcised when Jesus is talking with women, children and Gentiles; all those people who are clearly beneath him, and probably unclean – the story which is in their hearts, the story they tell themselves. And, remarkably, being ritually unclean is what they have just been accused of by the Pharisees.
For the record, I don’t believe for one moment that the Jesus was rude or abusive. I believe he knew exactly what he was doing: testing the disciples. It is possible that the Canaanite woman, surrounded by equally noisy men, was a woman of such great courage, fortitude and determination, not to mention desperation, that she still pursued her claim. I find it much more likely that in Jesus she saw someone who would not abuse her but would help her, finding in herself the confidence to block his way, kneeling before him, and engaging in witty if brief dialogue. Shades of the scandalous woman at the well, and an echo of Jesus’ own mother ignoring his response, overriding him, and simply saying to the servants, ‘Just do what he says’.
But more importantly today, I want to draw out what Jesus said about it being what comes out of our mouths which defiles us.
There are many examples in life of abusive behaviour, diminishing and demeaning others, because it aggrandizes ourselves. It is the self-affirming story we like to tell ourselves, because we are the ones who know better.
But let’s stay with the women – they are at the heart this Gospel story. We may shake our heads at the disciples. What narratives were running through their heads as they sought to send her away? We may condemn movie moguls exploiting young women for sexual favours – didn’t we just mention evil intentions and fornication. ‘No, not at all,’ is their cry, ‘I was merely helping these willing young women to develop their careers’. Well, that’s the story they keep telling themselves and, if they have the chance, tell the world too.
Thank goodness that doesn’t happen in the Church or Science…
Except of course it is horribly well documented what has happened in the Church. We even have our own designated form of abuse, spiritual abuse. And sadly, it is very real. And in Science too, people with power and authority abuse the vulnerable in all kinds of ways, sometimes indistinguishably from movie moguls. And I suspect we can’t begin to imagine the story they tell themselves to justify their actions.
But at least Science, the pure institutional concept, is safe, based as it is on reason, objective thought and empirical evidence. Sadly not. At present, there is a campaign for drug doses to be recalibrated for women because of their physiological differences. The proponents aver that present dosages are predicated are experiments which were mainly conducted by men on men and very often with diseases that afflict men. They also point to how little money has been spent on research on women’s ailments. And the history of science shows how often women have been dismissed, demeaned and denigrated just because they are women – and science has been used to justify the stereotypes. Women dying after childbirth because doctors cannot believe that they are the harbingers of death, ignoring the evidence about cleanliness and the washing of hands. The science around breast feeding does not bear review, as the poor delicate wee things, that is – the mothers, clearly don’t have the strength or capacity to breast feed their babies for any length of time. And as a woman scientist observed only last week on Radio 4, ‘If men suffered from endometriosis rather than erectile dysfunction, I wonder where the money would have been spent’. Even as late as the 1950’s scientists at Harvard studying menstruation were still talking about ‘meno-toxins’, supporting the work of Bela Schick who in the 1920’s had published anecdotal evidence that contact with menstruating women caused bread to fail to rise, flowers to wilt and animals to die.
So what? What can we do? As priests and as scientists we can call out poor theology, poor science, poor ethics, especially when it impacts the vulnerable and disempowered. As Christians we are called to stand with the poor and oppressed, those in need. As scientists and priests, we have opportunities that others don’t to fulfil that call. But as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth we are also called to examine ourselves, our own motivations, to challenge the stories we tell ourselves too. To ask ourselves the question, and believe me standing here before you, I feel the irony deeply, to ask ourselves the question, ‘What is coming out my mouth that defiles me and the image of God that is within me?
Just as well I believe in a God who knows what it is to be human.
Just as well I believe in a God who knows how to forgive the unforgivable.
It may be the story I tell myself, but it is the myth and reality by which I try to live my life.

Sermon from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, UK, 2018

I’m very much in “proud dad” mode at the moment. A few days ago, my daughter got the final results from her university exams; she will shortly graduate from Exeter with a First in Biology. Within hours she had started job hunting for research based work. Half my age, she now uses statistical modelling techniques that blow my own achievements completely out of the water. What fascinates her, and where she hopes to make a career in scientific research, is how species and their Ecosystems respond to changes in the wider environment. She’s come a long way from simply protesting about the dangers of climate change, to wanting to understand where the risks lie, and what opportunities we have to do something about them. Her science, like much of the scientific task, is about how, where and why things change.
Theology can present itself as almost the very opposite discipline. It can be characterised as being primarily about delving deeper into the unchanging truths that lie at the heart of faith. The previous Bishop of London famously, but jokingly, said, ” You want change? Don’t you think things are bad enough already?” So I believe, that one of the gifts those with both a scientific and theological training can bring to the latter, is a willingness to engage with change creatively and positively. A generation or two ago, the Process Theology championed by the likes of Whitehead and Norman Pittenger (who I knew in my Cambridge undergraduate days) sought to do just that. By I suspect there’s a new task, for a current generation of thinkers, which may build on different foundations. Indeed, it would be wonderfully ironic if the only way to think about change was the way that earlier generations had developed.
So let me suggest three areas where a scientist’s willingness to engage with change might impact for good on our theology.

Liturgy and Change

Leading a church that contained charismatics and traditional Anglicans. It’s not whether you have both change and stability, it’s about where you locate them, eg hymns or liturgy. Most of us find other people’s preferred places of change and stability at best odd, at worst disturbing.
How far can we do change in our liturgy so that it helps us cope with change in wider life rather than being an impediment? Can change done well in liturgy help. Or is it better to make liturgy the locus of the deeply fixed?
Division 2 performances in a Premier League world.
How do new arrivals in our churches cope with the fact we do some things not that well? What can we change in order not to look like we don’t really care very much about our God?

Evangelism and Change

What does commitment to Christ mean in a society where the notion of commitment has changed hugely in a lifespan?
A society where for most there is no permanent career, life partners are changed, and we love in communities that don’t look like what we joined.
What do we do when a gospel rooted in God’s face to face engagement with humanity in Christ, confronts a society where proximity and presence is overtaken by social media?
What does salvation mean in a world that has lost a sense of sin? And where church pronouncements about morals are seen as toxic to our brand?

Pastoral Care and change

Has the home become a place of privacy not of gathering and welcoming? Can home visits still work beyond the Elderly?
Can home groups survive?
Can pastoral care still be an appealing prospect in a society struggling with the safeguarding agenda?
What is the role of the vicar or lay visitor in a context of highly professionalised interventions for our wellbeing?

Concluding Remarks

I don’t believe that change is ultimately a threat to the propagation and practice of the Christian Faith. I do believe that failing to grapple with the nature of change is the real threat.
I also believe that we inhabit church structures that were built more to sustain stability than to engage creatively with change. A church more Benedictine than Franciscan.
But I am an inveterate Franciscan. And I believe those of us with scientific know how can help the church to find the right responses to the big questions around change that face us.
Amen.