Ministry mission and more... The Revd Dr Val Ogden: April 2017

It feels like a tough Good Friday - how about you? There was such terrible cruelty witnessed in the Palm Sunday attacks in Egypt, maybe this has made its presence particularly felt throughout Holy Week? Certainly a talking point on campus here. Special prayers for the Coptic Orthodox family today, and as they prepare for subdued Easter Day celebrations.

Nothing subdued at Nanuku settlement however. The Best Youth Group in the World offered a Good Friday Passion Play. Frenzied practices, bitten fingernails, a few grumpy words and emergency prayers sent up beforehand. But all was well and many who watched were stirred and moved. In contrast to children and young people in the Coptic Christian family, as mentioned above, we were able to act, worship and witness in peace and safety.

An altar call at the end of worship drew sixteen souls across the age spectrum who wanted to commit to 'higher standards of discipleship' - the invitation in the closing word. If Jesus gave all: the highest possible standard of loving obedience to God's purposes, what does that mean for us, practically, in our own small way? Can we notch it up a level?

The Passion Play was filmed by the Methodist Church's Communications Team (thank you so much, friends), so hopefully we can share more in due course. In the meantime, here's the cast.

And so it's goodnight from Good Friday, with a little recessional music. Not generated from Fiji, but still very good indeed for the soul. Be blessed, as they say...

There’s an app on my phone called ‘Guitar Tuna’. A picture of a guitar head pops up, you stab on a string, and it obediently replies with a twang of the note requested: standard pitch for E, A, D, G, B and E on an acoustic guitar. Definitely a useful tool for Church, where young people in Nanuku compound still patiently endure my inadequate guitar teaching skills. We frequently need to get ourselves tuned up and standardised, lest we should assault the neighbours’ eardrums too harshly.

I can remember going out carol singing from my childhood Church in Manchester over 40 years ago. Then, vocal standardisation was achieved, before launching into ‘Hark the Herald’ or ‘While Shepherds’, courtesy of the pling of my father’s tuning fork struck on a convenient lamppost. We mostly started together on the same note, but there were always a few nonconformists.

Which leads me to ask: who sets the ‘right’ standard for anything anyway? Using the guitar tuning example, who regulated the pitch of low E to some globalised, universal standard? Sometimes Nanuku young people come with a guitar that’s perfectly in tune with itself because Dad or Uncle (rarely Mum, but occasionally) has been strumming it at home, but it’s not conforming with the app which boasts...

Award winning audio technology
• Built on the world's most advanced audio recognition algorithm - the same technology powering Yousician
• Professional accuracy for advanced players
• Auto mode tuner (for super fast tuning, hands-free, string by string)

‘Hands free?’ My word, can standard tuning by app even guarantee no red creases and ugly corns on the fingertips anymore for guitar novices? No pain? Then very little gain.

Stringed instruments are traditionally aligned and strummed in the Pacific in a range of ways with an easy, natural harmony and a pitch that accommodates to voice. Singers and strummers listen carefully and harmonise readily: sensitive to note and nuance. But those aptitudes are being eroded it seems. I tell the guitar learners at Church constantly, ‘Listen! Let’s use our ears. Does that string on Manoa’s guitar sound like it’s the same note as the one on Jemesa’s? What do you think? Does it need to go up-up or down-down: tighten or loosen?’

I don't think the exercise is quite as scary as it looks in these pictures. Though that woman could certainly give you the creeps...

Some of us really try and tune our ears in at these sessions, but the lure of the app is irresistible. When the note is pitch perfect; truly standardised according to the great god guitar tuna, it gives a congratulatory ping and green lights flash triumphantly on an ascending scale. Ta-da! How can you beat that? So we’re ‘in tune’ if electronic lights flash, not if our ears and voices tell us so.

As a result, the issue of whether it’s useful to have a guitar tuned differently sometimes is generally suppressed. We now know what’s standard and it has to be that way. Oh yes, and if you’re interested in the wonderful world of scordatura, open, modal, drop note tuning and the like, enjoy the research.

The subject of standards in a globalised and formerly colonised world could drive a British mission partner completely round the bend. It’s like a permanent haunting. It lurks in the shadows and leaps out to grab you with an irritating neck squeeze time and again.

Gotcha!

If beautiful music is being played harmoniously and delightfully on stringed instruments that haven’t conformed to standard tuning, sometimes called American Standard Tuning, should anyone worry? Probably not. But who decides what delights and what constitutes harmony in other areas?

I was attending a seminar on Open Education resources at the University down the road the other day. The aspiration of Open Education is frequently to challenge norms. For example, a ‘standard’ textbook for academic purposes is required to be ‘in tune’ with the conventions of global, academic print publishing. The glossy results cost a fortune to buy and ship to the Pacific, excluding many learners.

Open Education says, why not more open textbooks? Make as many quality resources as possible available online, open-access. Flick a switch in the brains of academics and their publishers so they come to see that this way of functioning, along with the necessary bandwidth, should be ‘standard’, not least for the sake of those who are resource deprived through no fault of their own.

(I know you’re smiling benevolently, or turning puce and snorting, at the audacious ability of this blog to reduce phenomenally complex debates to a few snappy sentences. Mind you, the Gospel writers did an impressive bit of that).

Ah yes. Standards, don’t you know. Slipping, would you say, Brigadier? And don’t get me started about the haunting of ‘standard English’ - where that came from and what on earth it’s supposed to look and sound like now in higher education, theological or otherwise. Not to mention what we're all supposed to enforce - or not.

At the same Open Education seminar, a key presenter showed us a power-point which included this line.

There has been quiet a number of research done in this area.

Ministry mission and more... The Revd Dr Val Ogden

Saturday, 15 April 2017

Easter Day 2017

Friday, 14 April 2017

Good Friday 2017

Sunday, 2 April 2017

Standards