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You can tell a culture by the stories it tells.

So here’s a question: what can we tell about a culture that has suddenly developed a penchant for books and books and books of true stories about awful childhoods, physical, sexual and psychological abuse, serial rape, and criminal neglect?

What kind of sign of our times is it that there is now a section in Waterstones called ‘Painful Lives’. Borders, incidentally, are a mite more restrained and have dubbed their ‘Painful Lives’ section ‘Real Lives’, perhaps to distinguish it from Celebrity Biographies which they presumably consider to be about ‘Unreal Lives’. You may not be surprised to learn that there is no section called ‘Joyful Lives’ or ‘Worthwhile Lives’ or ‘Broadly Speaking, Quite Contented Lives’. No, the latest model on the bookshop catwalk, close, if not fast on the heels of Chick-lit and Lad-lit and no doubt Twit-lit, is Mis-lit, hobbling but still moving, bloody but unbowed.

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The trouble with the word ‘mission’ is that it sounds too grand for ordinary life. Fine for high elves and kings in ranger’s clothing but for ordinary hobbits of the shire, ah, well, no, not for us. We know we’re meant to be involved in it, we know we’re meant to support it but it’s oh so associated with special events, special people and special places.

Still, not so long ago I found myself on the platform at Bond Street tube station. I don’t mean to imply by the phrase ‘I found myself’ that I had no consciousness of how I got there, or that, just a nano-second before, I had actually been on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza talking to an Ethiopian eunuch reading Isaiah and then was suddenly taken up by the Spirit of the Lord and deposited in Azotus. No, the first thing I mean to say by the phrase ‘I found myself’ is that I was there, as indeed I am wont to be four or five days a week. The second thing I mean to say about the phrase ‘I found myself’ needs to wait for its moment.

Anyway, there I am standing on the platform with a colleague and listening to the London Transport employee in her blue and orange uniform telling us about the next train. And I’m thinking, “She’s got a good voice and she’s using it well.” The announcement is clear, beautifully enunciated without officiousness, pretension or embarrassment. I’m impressed. As the train starts to trundle in, I walk up to her and say, “You’ve got a great voice.” In case you’re worried for me, I have, I think, got to the age where such actions are unlikely to be viewed as the tactics of a predator.

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As the school year begins Mark Greene offers a vision for mission in education

A couple of years ago they let me into Yorkshire.

It was only a tourist visa and it was only for a few days, but, hey, some things mark you for life. I was visiting a community called New Life Baptist Church and discovered that their teenagers were engaged in forty days of prayer and fasting, some from food, some from texting, some from TV. They were doing it for the salvation of their non-Christian school friends. It struck me as remarkable, inspiring, and, at the same time, entirely natural. Why not seek God’s face for the salvation of the people you spend 40 hours a week with?

Indeed, for that group of teenagers and their leaders, the key people to engage in mission in the local secondary schools were not youthworkers and schoolsworkers but Christian pupils. After all, this was where they ‘worked’. This was where they had relationships. This was the primary arena for their discipleship and cultural engagement. And they were taking it seriously. Shouldn’t we all?

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Mark Greene reflects on the role of business

Every age has a dominant institution – the one that drives all the others. In the Middle Ages it was the Church. In the nineteenth century it was government and in the 21st century it’s business. As Anita Roddick, founder of the Bodyshop put it:

 “I don’t think that anyone would argue that business now dominates the world’s centre stage. It is faster, more creative, adaptable, efficient and wealthier than many governments … So in terms of power and influence you can forget the Church and forget politics, too. There is no more powerful institution in society than business. It is more important than ever before for business to assume a moral leadership in society.”

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Mark Greene finds Hollywood calling us to make a stand.

Last week, a friend of mine resigned from their job. They’d been there over four years.

They didn’t have another job to go to, they don’t have a lot of money in the bank and they aren’t prone to self-destructive, melodramatic gestures. However, the organisation was putting them in a position where they couldn’t do the work in a way that appropriately protected the people they were there to serve. Warnings had been given about falling standards. The warnings had been ignored. So, regretfully, painfully, the resignation letter was written – short, gracious, clear, legally careful.

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Despite the data, Mark Greene finds reasons to be cheerful

“Woe, woe, three times, woe”, so beat the drums of doom on almost any measure of the social, emotional, physical or mental health of contemporary Britain… overworked, overtired, overspent, overweight, overdrugged … Is there hope for our muddled education system, careening from new initiative to new initiative, desperately trying to claw its way up the EU league tables? Is there hope for our children, the most miserable in the ‘developed’ world? Is there hope for our slave new world of work where the rich do indeed get richer and the rest of us get wearier? Is there hope for our community relations as the mounting fear of Islam builds an ever higher wall, razor-wired with suspicion and resentment on both sides? Is there hope when terrible events like the Bridgend teenage suicides no longer seem to be ghastly anomalies but harbingers of deepening darkness?

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Mark Greene explores why society in Britain is so miserable.

Oliver James’ new book The Selfish Capitalist, published in January, may prove to be one of the most important books of the year. It explores one of the most pressing problems facing British society in particular, and English-speaking nations in general: why are Britons and Americans and English-speaking nations so much more miserable, indebted, divorce-prone, drug-addicted and obese than our Western European counterparts? And what might we begin to do about it?

But first I need to tell you something: I’m a ‘Tigger’.