The party conference season is over for another year. Love it or loathe it, the annual circus of stage managed standing ovations, policy announcements designed to grab headlines and keynote speeches lie with the litter blowing along the seafronts of Brighton, Bournemouth and Blackpool. One thing has struck me though and increasingly irritates me about our current political scene and it is the cult of the celebrity politician. It is as if the personalities have got bigger than the policies and even the parties.

In his speech to the Conservative Party the other day, Iain Duncan Smith spoke about what he was going to do. Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, often uses the same language about what he or his government is going to do. Charles Kennedy, Leader of the Liberal Democrats, doesn’t tend to get the same press coverage so I can’t say I’ve really spotted whether he does or not, but it may be he doesn’t. As I hear these leading politicians use this language of their own agenda, I know they are leading from the front and trying to inspire confidence in their leadership and in turn give local voters a national face to identify with, a celebrity to go for. But it seems to go further than this and turn party politics into personal agendas and one man fiefdoms rather than corporate decision making and true stakeholder policies - policies a wider group can hold a stake in. I don’t think this is the fault of the current batch of leaders on their own, because it has been developing over the last 20 or 30 years, but neither of them seems to challenge it, which I find a bit of a missed trick.

This makes it so much easier for the rest of us to keep our distance from the policies and therefore from the responsibility that comes with wrestling with the weighty issues that go into framing them. It also pushes us away and I am beginning to think it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy as keeping people at a distance disengages them from the political process, so voters switch off and become disenchanted. They have not been involved and the language of the leading political figures turns them into consumers who don’t really have a stake in the framing in the first place - no one seems to because it is our celebrity politician’s agenda. When we get bored with him we can always sack him and get another one and therefore avoid facing the responsibility that lay behind what happened!

I find a striking contrast with our Archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan Williams probably has the most unenviable job in the Church of England at the moment. This week could well see an epoch making meeting with the primates of the Anglican Communion meeting in London over the massive row that has erupted over gay bishops. I would not want the job of steering a course through this particular snake pit however much money was on offer, but if I’ve spotted this right Rowan Williams is going to use a very powerful weapon in his armoury, in fact he is going to use the only real weapon that he’s got. He is not going to say ‘look you miserable bunch of squabbling children, I’m Archbishop so do as I say or get out of the way, we have work to do and you lot are distracting us from the real job’, tempting as that may be and containing more than an element of truth. It is distracting from a serious challenge facing the Church, but it is also real and therefore part of that serious challenge. I think he is going to sit them down and make them talk to each other, to debate and his real giant status will come out in how he chairs and manages that debate. I think he will also focus his fellow bishops - note the language, fellow bishops, not subordinate bishops - we don’t have a pope or celebrity style leader - he will focus their attention on God and how we enable the gospel to engage with life. There are big differences there of course, but they need discussing face to face, rather than shouting from a distance behind barricades.

This is a powerful weapon because it will force those involved to share responsibility for the outcome and to reaffirm their holding in what is at stake. There will be no blaming the celebrity leader if it does not work, because what emerges is not one man’s agenda but a corporate effort and all will share blame or praise for its failure or success, or it will be very clear who remained so obstinate and out on a limb that they broke away themselves.

This all came to me in one of those blinding flashes that happen when various thoughts that have been going on inside your head collide. It was triggered by reading the beginning of our Gospel Reading this morning (Mark 10:17-31). The man runs up to Jesus and starts flattering and in the process puts his foot in it. He calls Jesus ‘Good Teacher’. We can almost see the celebrity style leader fluffing up with the adulation. Not so with Jesus who sees right through this nonsense and takes the man straight to where he should focus his attention. Not on the cult of a personality, on celebrity, but on God.

Of course the gospels have a double layer to them, where they are aiming to show that Jesus is God among us, so the challenge to the approach can also be Jesus saying, ‘do you really know what you are saying or are you just trying to butter me up? Either way you have a lot to learn - more than you have any clue about at the moment’.

It is not totally clear what the man was after as such, but he very quickly finds out that what is on offer is not for spectators. He is told to go and give himself with no barriers to God. For this man the barrier has become his possessions. He was what we would today call materialistic, obsessed with what he owned. That meant other things were getting in the way. On one level Jesus was demanding that he took real responsibility for the question that he was asking. He is saying ‘this eternal life that you seek is not just another possession that you can add to your collection and admire in a glass cabinet. It is not a hobby. This is the way of life and it either possesses you completely, rather than you possessing it, or you are a million miles away from it.’

‘Go and sell all you have’ was not so much a command for everyone but the thing that showed this man was not really prepared to commit himself wholeheartedly. It can therefore mean different things to different people. It could mean ‘are you really prepared to get involved or do you just want to keep at the edges and then wonder why the church is not as vibrant as it used to be?’ It could mean ‘make some effort to worship, to pray and read the bible, which costs because other things may need giving up’. It may mean trimming our desires for what life cannot be without… The options are myriad. It is whatever gets in the way of the ‘then come, follow me’ (v21c).’

Some of you may have spotted that the style of leadership I’ve been talking about is the kind of leadership that I try to give in this parish. I will lead, but I will not project an agenda as one man’s policies and I will not talk about what I am going to do here as if the rest of you are passive consumers. This means that responsibility for the shape and direction of the mission and ministry of the church is shared and we all become holders in what is at stake. The old styles of one man just saying what is going to happen have been proved to be bankrupt and as we see from the major political parties they alienate people from the process. So I have no desire to be a celebrity style politician vicar, which is just as well really.

As in all things the call is to commit ourselves to the God who makes himself known to us in Jesus Christ and that requires much more of us than we could ever have thought when we first asked ‘what must we do to inherit eternal life’.

© Ian Black 2003

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