Experience suggests that most parish notices announced in services are almost forgotten by the time the worship is over – or even sooner. An exception for me will be the one I heard last sunday in a rural village church in the north.
Himself, the rector no less, announced that the parish chicken coop had arrived and as this had occurred during the Queen’s visit to Northern Ireland, it would be known as the Jubilee chicken coop.
Furthermore its occupants had also arrived. There was a Lilibet amongst the six feathered new-comers, one of whom had already laid her first egg. And being a parish hen coop, of course there was now a rota sheet available for those who would like to commit themselves to feeding and caring for the poultry. At that point ‘yer man’ was on stoney ground for the poultry rota as far as I was concerned. In my youth my meagre pocket money had been supplemented by rearing day old chicks from the local hatchery to sell about twenty weeks later as “point of lay” pullets. Poultry – been there and done that for a decade.
However, in what may be the only poultry owning parish in the C of I, this development has not happened in isolation. It follows the creation of a number of allotments for vegetables which have been developed by parishioners on land adjacent to the graveyard surrounding the church. The parish is a lead partner in the village’s endeavour to become a self-sustaining community in various forms of food.
There may be some who would write off these activities, such as gardening and poultry keeping, as being far removed from what the church should be on about. Please exclude me out of that mindset. I felt resonance in these basic activities with the writings and practice of a Japanese theologian, Kosuke Koyama. He was born in Tokyo. In 1945, as American bombs rained down on that city, he was baptized as a Christian at the age of 15. He was struck by the courageous words of the presiding pastor, who told him that God called on him to love everybody, “even the Americans.”
His 1974 book, “Water Buffalo Theology,” was in the words of Donald Shriver, president emeritus of Union Seminary, “one of the first books truly to do theology out of the setting of Asian villages.” The book has been described as, “one of the classic works of contemporary Asian theology.” Directed at the concerns of peasants, the book points out that Christianity and Buddhism do not communicate; rather, Christians and Buddhists do. Dr. Koyama advocated seeing God “in the faces of people” to achieve good neighbourliness among religions.
Dr. Koyama made the book’s case in poetic, not academic, language. As a missionary in northern Thailand, he said, he was inspired to write it as he listened to the “fugue of the bullfrogs” while watching farmers working with buffaloes in the rice fields.
“The water buffaloes tell me that I must preach to these farmers in the simplest sentence structure,” he wrote. “They remind me to discard all the abstract ideas and to use exclusively objects that are immediately tangible. ‘Sticky rice,’ ‘banana,’ ‘pepper,’ ‘dog,’ ‘cat,’ ‘bicycle,’ ‘rainy season,’ ‘leaking house,’ ‘fishing,’ ‘cockfighting,’ ‘lottery,’ ‘stomachache’ — these are meaningful words for them.”
Another of his famous books was “Three Mile an Hour God” (1980), which reflects Dr. Koyama’s thought that God moves at walking speed through the countryside.
The Irish poultry-keeping parish prompted me to recall this wonderful international and ecumenical Bible scholar. Like him they are witnessing to the fact that the gospel is not proclaimed or lived in a cultural vacuum. The poultry and the plots send ripples of connection and communication to an entire community which includes both Roman Catholic and Protestant – and people of no effective denominational allegiance.
In the same parish church there is a strong sense of community and a consistent effectively expressed community welcome. Not only is there coffee and tea after the main Sunday morning service and the mid-week eucharist… but there is an Ulster fry cooked mainly by the rector between the early Sunday eucharist and the later service. Now there’s indigenous cuisine – real water buffalo theology – for you!
Koyama realised that patterns of communication could not be super-imposed on individuals or communities from above. They had to be discerned within the weave of daily living. Evangelism is not necessarily about campaigns or programmes. Rather it can be incarnate in allotments, poultry, Ulster fries, and a welcoming community with a rector who has a deft touch and can let things happen as the Spirit moves amongst the people of God in that particular parochial location. There is no way this energy and direction can be delivered from an external source, such as the diocese or even the diocesan. And it points to a home truth which can too readily be ignored – and I write as one who for twenty years was a so-called specialist – that the most specialist ordained ministry of them all is that of the parish ministry. Don’t have any doubt about it – Them chickens are evangelicals!
Houston McKelvey