One my heroes, Groucho Marx used to plead with his friends "Don't tell my mother I'm a civil servant - she thinks I play the piano in a bordello", so I know how brave it is for former civil servant Dudley Coates and current Vice President of the Methodist Conference to title his book "Shades of Grey".He chose the title as it had been used by a group of Christian civil servants in the 1980s, now long disbanded.
The book is anything but grey and the subtitle "Making Choices in Uncertainty" probably better sums up its contents.
Dudley draws on his experience as a civil servant, as a father and as a life long Methodist, to take the reader through the many dilemmas that confront committed people in the modern world.
Sometimes he deals with the big issues - European Unity, defence, the media - but other times he homes in on a local problem such as the closure of a village school. In all these he picks up the common thread that decisions are not always easy, whether made at local or international level. And any book that mentions the BSE crisis will always have a reader in me - for about a week I was the 11th person in Britain to know anything about the issue, the rest were civil servants who could not speak publicly and I found my self daily slammed in the European media.
There is just one area on which I would take issue with Dudley. I accept that we should encourage one another as individuals and as churches to "get their hands dirty in the real uncertainties of business, economic and public life".
But the church is often very bad at supporting those of us who have got our hands dirty. For example in five years as an MEP, not once was I approached by the public affairs unit at Methodist headquarters. When I faced real difficulties as my political career crashed, the public affairs unit were actually making very unhelpful comments about the new regional list system for electing MEPs, without ever bothering to ask the views of those Methodists most closely involved.
Once a year we had a visit to Strasbourg of the leading lights of the non-conformist churches, the President of Conference and the Moderator of the the URC. They would always say "and what can we do the help you?" They never (perhaps with one exception) liked my reply "Go out and fill your churches, no one takes a blind bit of notice of empty churches".
Dudley is good on the "why", but I think we need to tease out the "how".
All in all this is a good read and comes with some very powerful insights
Shades of Grey by Dudley Coates, Inspire, 2006 Price 6.99
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