Anyone hear a trumpet?

In the aftermath of the credit crunch, Mark Greene wonders whether Christians failed in their duty to the world.

I did hear the trumpet actually.

Once. Clearly. Publicly. Winsomely.

It was 2005, in the City of London at the Guildhall.

But it is one thing to hear the trumpet it is another to respond to it. But we shall come to that.

* * *

And so it has come to pass that the world has got itself into a huge financial mess.

And it is not at all good.

And unlikely to get much better for a while.

And the commentators and the pundits have all passed judgement on the wickedness of the bankers, and the greed of the stockbrokers, and the cowardice of governments to ensure that appropriate controls were in place.

And friends in finance have lost their jobs, people who used to earn lavish salaries are now staying at home to pack the kids off to school and work on their CVs. And friends not in finance have begun to lose jobs, people whose salaries were not so lavish and who months before had already begun to worry about the rise in the cost of their food and energy.

And it has also come to pass that we have all found ourselves implicated in the biggest bail-out in the history of the world. Willingly or unwillingly, cheerfully or resentfully, taxpayers and ordinary citizens of the Western world have watched as their governments have contrived a way to rescue the banks that gambled our pensions and our savings and our holidays and our financial security on the roulette wheel of their greed - Casino Globale.

Indeed, we might reflect on how long it took us to cancel some of the debt of the poorest nations on earth, the debt of people living on less than a dollar a day. We might reflect on how slow we have been to find money for those we had often consigned to a spiral of poverty through our power to control the price of the commodities they had hoped would be used to pay us back. And then we might reflect on how quickly we have found money for ourselves.

And it has also come to pass that those who had not seen this debacle coming have become wise, as we often are after the fact. Still, better wise late, than foolish forever. Particularly if wisdom about the past is translated into wisdom for the future.

Perhaps we might begin by asking why we hadn't seen it coming. Why hadn't we seen the fragility of the whole house of financial cards? After the demise of Barings? After Enron and Worldcom? After the debacle at the French national bank? After the collapse of Northern Rock?

What were we as Christians doing all those years while the West got richer, and bonuses grew ridiculous, and it was obvious that people were being given gargantuan incentives to take humongous risks and very little incentive not to?

And for me the words of John Stott boomed in my head:

He spoke those words in response to Malcolm Muggeridge's Christ and the Media, a negative appraisal of television back in the early 1980s. Muggeridge, a brilliant TV broadcaster, had come to believe that TV could never capture the numinous, or the holy; that it was always somehow reductive. John Stott's response was not to encourage Christians to flee the media, but rather to engage in it, not just to write letters to programmers, but to write scripts for new programmes, to work to become producers and directors and actors.

There weren't that many Christians in the mainstream media back then, but today's finance sector does not suffer from a dearth of Christians. On the contrary, the City of London is more than well-salted with Christians in very senior positions in finance, in law, in property. Lunchtime services in a number of City churches have long brimmed with hundreds of worshippers and there's been a very well attended City Prayer Breakfast for years. Did they not see it? Did their pastors not see it? Did I not see it? Did no one blow the trumpet? Do we bear no responsibility at all for what has happened? After all, have we not been given Word and Spirit to guide our thinking, and impel our action?

Furthermore, the body of Christ is called to contribute to making the world a better place. Yes, in Paul's letter to the Philippians, we learn that our citizenship is in heaven; but that is not a call to disengage with society, but to transform it. Philippi, as a Roman colony, was meant to be a "Rome away from Rome", as Graham Cray puts it. As such, the people of Philippi, as citizens of Rome, were meant to create a society that accurately reflected Roman values. Paul, then, is using the analogy to call the church to live out the heavenly kingdom away from heaven, a community that reflects Christ's ways, communicates His truth and is infused with His life. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven... in London as in heaven, in financial institutions as in heaven. In the City of the 21st century, it clearly wasn't happening.

What can we learn from these recent years? Might it be that our preaching and teaching has not engaged with the core ideologies of our time, and has not given Christians the kind of theological tools necessary to begin to critique the system they find themselves part of. After all, you can be a lawyer, never overcharge your client, never fiddle your expenses; but, through your agility with tax laws, on behalf of a multi-national mining corporation, be involved in the systematic empoverishment of the nation whose ore the company has extracted, but to whom almost no tax has been paid. In sum, you may do nothing dishonest but still be involved in something that withholds basic healthcare from hundreds of thousands of children. Perhaps our discipleship helped people operate honestly within the system, but failed to help them think critically about the system.

Furthermore, we might learn that if we are not to be "conformed to this world" (Romans 12:2 ), theologians and practitioners need to spend much more time listening to one another and to God's word in a planned, deliberate and disciplined way. After all, economics is too important to be left to the economists, and too complex to be left to the theologians.

Perhaps we might learn that we are often in too much of a hurry, that perhaps we are not prepared to invest the time, and therefore the money, in developing wisdom. We want our pastors wise, but many hardly have a book budget, never mind study leave. We want our archbishops to be able to speak credibly to the issues of the age, but without the research support a junior MP would enjoy.

At the same time, you can't always wait til you understand everything before you speak. Sometimes you have to go with your spiritual instinct. We might learn that it's better to question the morality of a system you don't fully understand, and be written off as a meddling, ignorant idiot, than to remain silent and wait til disaster proves your suspicions were all too well-founded.

And for myself, I need to remember that I heard the trumpet, but didn't think it blew for me.

It was 2005 in the City. In the Guildhall. And the man that blew the trumpet was James Featherby, the Chair of the City Prayer Breakfast, and the main speaker that year. James is a solicitor with one of the big five law firms. He loves the City in the best sense of the word 'love' and, after making that clear, he asked how the Beatitudes might apply in the City and wondered whether "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done" had any meaning there. Then he went on to imagine what might happen if the City was permeated by the fragrance of Christ. Here's some of what he said (the full text can be found at www.licc.org.uk/featherby):

• We'd see a City that's increasingly influenced by self sacrifice not defensiveness, by love rather than grudges, by peacemaking not office politics, by transparency not manipulation.
• We'd see a City where the upside down, frustratingly impractical tools of the Kingdom are increasingly used instead of the weapons of empire - freedom of choice, not pressure; servant-heartedness, not domination; fairness, not duress.
• We'd see a City that takes responsibility for the money it raises, a City that doesn't pretend moral choices are not its responsibility. A City based on relationships, not just on loan covenants.
• We wouldn't live under a banner that says "Success demands more". We'd have learnt the meaning of words like "sufficiency", "restraint", "enough".
• We'd trust God for our old age more than our pension adviser.
• We'd work in places where it was natural to share the Gospel, and people would be falling, not being pushed, in to his Kingdom.
• We wouldn't be overawed by the invincibility that seems to emanate even from the very architecture of this place. We wouldn't be subdued or intimidated. No, we would celebrate the invisible power of God to shake the hill tops, and to move mountains.
• And we would celebrate small and humble beginnings, knowing that it's from a mustard seed that God builds his Kingdom.
• We'd be part of a system with an increasing bias towards the poor, the disadvantaged, the oppressed and the marginalised. We'd be making money that gives opportunity as much as it does riches. We'd be working in a City of hope, not cynicism.
• And we, together, as the body of Christ in this place, with all of our faults and shortcomings, but with all of our faith and prayer and diversity and witness, we would literally be the gospel of Christ.
• We would, as a community of God's people, by our love and our commitment to each other, model a better way of being.

Of course, it's a dream. Such dreams need work and God to become a reality. And they need other people. James sounded the trumpet but, to put it bluntly, though its notes were appreciated, few, it seemed, chose to walk to its radical melody. It's hard to change. Very hard. Still, the reality is that the values that led to the crash that we are now experiencing were not robustly challenged by the Christian community. And surely we bear some responsibility for that.

In sum, it is not just the bankers and the stockbrokers and the politician who have reason to repent. So do we. For ourselves and for them. Just as Nehemiah brought the devastation of Jerusalem before the Lord and acknowledged his own and the nation's culpability for the damage caused (Nehemiah 1:5-7), so now perhaps we too need to bring the state of our nation before the Lord and acknowledge our own and the people's sin. "Forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us."

And then we must begin to rebuild. With the trumpet and the trowel.

Mark Greene

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