Rev

Last night I caught up with the second showing of the second episode of  'Rev', portraying the life and times of a new inner city London Vicar with a tiny congregation in a giant decaying Georgian building. The setting is Shoreditch Parish church. Early audience ratings were high, and despite some lukewarm preview opinions, it has also met with critical approval. It's not the Vicar of Dibley, that's for sure, but it's funny, painfully well observed and true to life, from my experience of inner city parish work, with its regular assaults and challenges to a pastor's faith, and invasions of personal life.

The episode I watched saw the Rev's Parish church being visited by an evangelical cleric with a large and lively young congregation, scoping the set-up for a potential takeover, promising regenerative financial support, backed by the earnest conviction of the incomers (or invaders) that it was what Jesus wanted. It had me squirming as I remnisced the days when the faltering St James' congregation offered hospitality to a large and vigorous pentecostal congregation, 'Cardiff Christian Life Centre'. The fiction ran fairly true to life from my experience of the 'cross cultural' encounter between two radically different ideas and approaches to mission rooted in the Gospel. 

It also reminded me of the period when I looked after S Paul's Portland Square in Bristol, another huge church like St James', also with a congregation of just over a dozen regulars, who looked askance at my proposition to offer free hospitality to a small West Indian pentecostal congregation, so different in character from the big successful white evangelical church counterparts with (theoretically) the same fundamentalist theology. In practice they were more tolerant to people of other faiths, races and those in same sex relationships - accepting those they didn't presume to understand or analyse.

Fundamentalist theory and practice never had any appeal for me, although I have encountered many such believers of great faith and sincerity. The fault line that marks divergence in ways of relating to people whose beliefs or lifestyles seem to contradict mine has rarely arisen, or perhaps escaped me so far. I wonder if that will change now I'm retired, no longer an offical representative of the 'middle way'? Will I become more susceptible to hear people say what they really think or feel, rather than what they think they ought to say in front of a man of the cloth? Will I be as passionate in disagreeing with them, as they are in condemning those unable to comply with their 'biblical' benchmarks?

'Rev' is indeed a promising sit-com series, with more depth and cutting edge than 'Dibley', which had its occasional finer moments, but was more a lightweight parody of rural church life. 'Rev' may seem like parody at first, but hits the nerve of moral perplexity, and the really serious challenge of living with difference which urban situations throw up. It may raise some laughs, but it also has the potential to stimulate some serious thinking about the way we live and what makes it worthwhile.