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Purple and yellow and green and red and blue

We're very colour conscious at the Conference - purple, red, green, yellow, white and blue are the colours we are on the look out for. And the colours (it may be thought) that influence our judgements. These are the different colours of the ribbons (or 'lanyards' is the proper word, I think) by which our photo ID cards are hung around our necks. The ID cards are critical - without them access is politely but firmly denied to all sorts of key conference venues, including all the food outlets - so one takes care never to be without one's card and its tell-tale lanyard.

Importantly, each colour has its own significance. Bishops and their spouses have purple lanyards; red signifies members of the Conference Staff (facilitators and rapporteurs, who help to record the thinking of the indaba groups, chaplains, secretariat, technical support and others); green and yellow are - resepctively - for stewards (friendly, hardworking young people from all over the Communion who guide us around in their orange tabards and count us off and on coaches and make sure not too many of us get lost) and volunteers (friendly, hardworking and mainly older people largely from the diocese of Canterbury who give of their time to make us welcome and give directions). White lanyards are for those accredited to the Conference as stallholders, part of the fascinating and varied marketplace at which one can as easily pick up a mitre - if you happen to be short - as literature from any number of diverse and contradictory lobbying groups - while blue lanyards are for the 200 or so Press officially registered with the Conference.

So blue is for danger - or that's what the journalists seem to think we think. There's a Conference myth - believed as a matter of faith among the Press, as far as I can make out - that bishops have been told to walk sharply in the opposite direction from anyone in a blue lanyard: to treat them, in fact, as their biblical predecessor so famously did the poor bloke who'd been beaten up by thieves in Jesus' story of the Good Samaritan. I have not heard that instruction at any briefing I have been at (hence my hunch that it's a Conference myth) but there's anough angst about the Press and the Media to make it a credible one.

Anglicans (like most people) really only want to be loved and understood and accepted for the kind, loving, generous and accepting people that they are. And the Media, it seems, are resolutely determined to portray us as divided, angry, judgemental of one another and obsessed with sex. It's very easy to blame it all on the Media: they want good (saleable) stories and bad news, especially bad news about religious hypocrisy and sex, sells. That' s why - this wisdom goes - they treat us as they do. That's why they're so dangerous and should be avoided. Anything you say to the Media will be taken down (or recorded), distorted and misrepresented before being used against you and the Communion more generally. So blue spells trouble - sets the alarm bells ringing. Extreme caution!

But at the same time, as we all acknowledge, we need the Media. We are in the communications business - 'We have a Gospel to proclaim', as the hymn says - and so we need a relationship with professionals in the world of public communications. (Add to that, of course, that many of us - being only human - are not free from vanity and are not unhappy to see our names, pictures and thoughts in the papers!) So we can't entirely avoid the blue lanyards and their wearers: they're part of the necessary community in which we are living. And that means not fearing them and not assuming the worst of them, either. Sure, some journalists, no doubt, are no friends of the Church of England or the Anglican Communion - or Faith or God more generally, come to that - but most, I guess, are in different degrees curious or intrigued by this funny institution the Church and the people in it and what gets them going.

And there's no doubt about it that sex and gender and power have been three pretty prevalent themes over recent years in religious circles. We can't blame the Media for noticing that. And we can't blame them if they have noticed that a lot of the time we haven't been very Christian in the way we have related to one another or to groups we disagree with. Jesus was pretty hot on the religious failing of saying one thing but doing another (called hypocrisy) and we shouldn't be outraged if journalists see it in our activities and say so.

All of this is what made Thursday and our interest in the news broadcasts on Thursday evening and today's Press reports so important. On Thursday the Conference went public big time on the message it wanted to send. Hundreds of bishops and their spouses, along with ecumenical partners and friends from other faiths as well as other supporters, took to the streets of London in a huge purple caterpillar carrying banners upholding the Millennium Developement Goals that demand justice and mercy for the world's poorest, weakest and most underprivileged. The Prime Minister - no less - joined the rally and there was a huge sense of solidarity around these Gospel themes. What could be more Gospel - Good News - than a realistic and sustained political programme to halve poverty, and promote health and education for more decent lives for the most marginalised in the world?

That's what we wanted the Press to notice - and to pass on - and it made it to page 19 of my paper, after Mr Cameron's bicycle theft, Mr Mosley's libel win, Mr Obama's speech and assorted bits about 'celebs'. So that can't all be bad - even if the writer (Joanna Sugden in The Times) couldn't resist the implication that we only did it to distract oursleves from sex and hypocrisy. Which just goes to show you can't win them all!

Posted by HumphreySouthern on 2008-07-25 18:22:29 | Rating: