Expressive English

We are in the process of changing from the night congregation at St Ebbes to the 10:00am congregation, in the lead up to Tiny’s arrival. The thought of taking a newborn out into the English winter at night being something we’d probably hold off on until we’re ready for slightly more advanced parenting challenges. Sunday just gone was a small interruption into that process, however. St Ebbes was holding a kids’ Christmas event in the late afternoon. Over here in England it is generally expected that if you have someone’s kids about that time (say over to play with yours) that you’ll feed them around then—afternoon tea is sort of that, the afternoon night meal. Possibly has something to do with the moon being visible at 4:30pm in winter.

And so St Ebbes was providing afternoon tea for a few hundred children. Each child got their own Christmas box packed meal—a specially made cardboard box with a Christmas design on top (all made by a parishioner), two very small sandwiches, and (separate) sausages, one mandarin, a cupcake, and a lindt ball (!). They also got a small popper—orange or apple. These were all made or provided for by parishioners. Jennie and I helped out with the packing of these goodies into the boxes, which meant that we then went to the 11:30am congregation.

It was interesting to go to the third congregation. It was, even more than the night congregation, for uni students. If we’d been feeling old in the night service (which we had…ridiculous at the grand old age of mid 30’s) then it was even worse at 11:30am. Unusually in my experience, this congregation only exists when term is on—it’s so for uni students, that it shuts down between terms. So the week we went was the last one for 2007.

The thing that struck us when we went to the service yesterday was how expressive the English are in the public arena. Not the preaching so much—while that has been of a very high quality in exegetical rigour, theological reflection, drawing out the implications, and as a piece of communication—St Ebbes is sort of known as a preaching church, so, while appreciative, we haven’t been surprised by that.

No, what we’ve been constantly struck by has been the unbelievable quality of the English public Bible reading and praying.

The praying has been reverent, meaningful, theologically rich, and substantial without being either stodgy or overblown. And the people praying have ‘gotten’ what it means to pray publicly—they are neither just speaking to God as though they were on their own, nor are they speaking to the congregation. They are praying prayers that lead the congregation into praying with them. And so far, it has happened 100% of the time at St Ebbes.

The Bible reading has been everything I have ever looked for when preaching on a passage to be read. It has been read to us, by people who are confident with language and its use. It is paced, inflected, and there is no stumbling over the words. Most of all, it is read out with meaning—every sentence and phrase sounds like actual speech, and is easy to pick up on things that are being said. And again, it’s happened 100% of the time here, through a multitude of styles.

Cut back to Australia. In my experience, often the best one can hope for in a church that values the Bible is for the Bible to be read without too much stumbling over words. It is rare (not unheard of, but definitely rare) for the Bible to be read in such a way that the reading itself is sensitive to the literary and linguistic clues as to the meaning of the whole and reads the passage in such a way as to help the hearer ‘get it’ (without being hamfisted in over reading those clues, or over emoting the passage). It is rare even in Moore chapel, where the people doing it are both gifted and training for a lifetime of doing it. And the story is similar, but not quite as bad, when it comes to public praying.

Yet here at Ebbes, the readers and prayers have spanned the chronological spectrum from early twenties to sixtyish. And it has all been edifying in the best sense of the word. I wish we could bottle it and send it home.

It could be argued that Ebbes is an unusual sample—a university church in Oxford. No doubt there’s some truth to that. I doubt all English are this articulate in public. But I’ve been to university churches in Australia. And I’ve never seen anything like this, and it happens every week here. There’s something bigger going on.

It suggests to me that one of Australia’s distinctive cultural features is being inarticulate and hamfisted with language. I think this is why the Sydney Diocese’s ‘plain style’ of preaching works so well in Australia. The average Australian listener doesn’t ‘get’ anything other than the most prosaic and stripped back kind of style. We trust a Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s stammering or a Pauline Hanson strine or a Bob Hawke ‘common man talk’ far more than anything that might suggest that the person is comfortable with speaking publicly. We like our leaders to be as bad at public speaking as we are. I suspect it’s one of the reasons why our politicians have pretty much given up on doing anything other than speak to us in sound bites. One sentence to capture a complex issue in as stripped down a form as possible.

I’ve always noted how much easier Americans seem to find speaking in public. There’s minimal self-consciousness or nerves, just a confident expression of whatever they think or feel. Like the Romans of old, they seem to get how important public speaking is for a country of world rulers. But it’s clear the English have their version of it. Not so much the American sense of speaking in public, as an interest in language and how it works to enable them to express it well in a public setting. (Interestingly, the English also had a world-spanning empire, and still think of themselves a bit that way). In their own ways, both countries seem to get the value of communication.

What do we have in Australia? We are good at sport. And the quintessential Aussie bloke way of communicating is to punch his mate on the arm. When it comes to Australia, it really is the case that we say it best when we say nothing at all.

You see it in the movie Cosi. The protagonist has managed to pull off a performance of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte in a mental hospital, with no training in diversion therapy or the like (it’s an Australian comedy, as you’ll gather). It has been, as is the wont with such movies, a transforming experience for many of the characters. We come to the great final scene, the dénouement, when something of the experience is to be captured for us. We don’t get any great speeches as per West Wing. We don’t get any witty statements that capture the issues as per Yes Minister. We get a long period of silence as the core characters look at each other. Then the head of security, who’d been as close to a nemesis as you get throughout the movie, says to the hero, in as matter of fact tones as possible, “You did good.” And the hero walks off in silence. Cue credits.

I suggest that if we’re looking for ‘Australia values’ for these citizenship tests, we could start by putting down something like ‘I swear to always be mildly inarticulate in a public setting.’ It’s as Aussie as…(silence). MDB