Review for Ministers-at-Work by Phil Aspinall October 2001

My first meeting with Michael Ranken was over a weekend at a house in Birmingham back in 1987. I kept asking loads of questions about MSE, how to do it, and how to justify it to others. All Michael did was tell stories, anecdotes, and deliver deeply enigmatic statements about the life and work of God in his working life. Over the intervening years, I have come to value Michael’s method and to realise we can only tell stories to answer the ever-present question: “but what do you do?”

In this book Michael explains why telling stories matters, and is the effective way to give a glimpse of understanding of inexplicable hidden inner meanings and truths. But, in a way I had not experienced with him before, he sets out in detail the context and background for his stories, his understanding of the Faith in which he lives. With the rigorous logic of a scientist he attempts to lead us though his own thought processes.

Firstly, he clarifies how his mind works – how he learns whether something is true by testing it against other things he knows to be true, and how belief encompasses the things held to be true. This is where the stories come in – the truth contained in the inner meaning which may not always be recognised. A story, he says, can always be taken to be true if the inner meaning is true – conversely the surface meaning of a story does not have to be believable. So for example the Creeds of the Church and Bible stories contain inner truths, even if the surface meanings can no longer be true.

He then examines how things found to be true in the world of science and technology are also found to be true in the religious domain. He arrives at three Principles of Existence, derived from science, but held to be equally true when applied to the themes of religious faith. I am never quite sure whether the rules of story can be applied to these – are they the surface meanings or do they themselves contain inner meanings?

It is when Michael moves beyond science that I felt a discontinuity – “there exist realities which science can never (my italics) comprehend or discover”. This seems to cut against the connected theory espoused up to this point, and suggests a greater separation of faith and worldly activity than runs through most of the book. But, he says, it is also a fundamental principle, that nobody can know or do everything!

The second part begins with a sudden shift to a justification for the existence of spirit, separate from body and mind. It is this spirit that enables us to discover scientific truths, which were true before we discovered them. The same spirit underlies and is involved in every activity in the universe, including all the activities of science and technology. Opening one’s own spirit to this spirit is described as the process of prayer; morning prayer, he suggests, can be a contemplation of the day’s “to do” list.

The image of God as creator follows from this – of God as a creative force. “God exists but God’s existence is not like anything we can describe as ‘real’”. Michael is careful to distinguish what God does and what God is like – and analyses the use of stories (again) to suggest the former in order to explain the latter. But he suggests the image of the Trinity, while reflecting the three-ness of things found everywhere, needs to be replaced with modern meanings. A picture of Jesus follows: as the man who believed the truth about God and lived his whole life as if it were true. Jesus who shows us The Way of true acceptance, sacrifice and reconciliation. He reveals the God-ness of all creation and humanity, expressed ultimately in Resurrection.

The book is peppered with insights from the world of Michael’s work as a food technologist. There are masterful examples of the application of food technology in demonstrating the cycle of confession, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation, and in the concept of sacrifice underpinning the cost of life in the universe. The presence of God in the food industry does come through strongly: I was particularly struck by the application of the three principles to food technology (pages 26–27). Everyone should be encouraged to examine their own field of work using this model.

At several points, Michael turns the flow of thought processes on their head. In his preface, he claims his struggle has not been to reconcile the ways of the world to a relatively confident faith. The working world is filled with things which are found trustworthy and true: “it is the things of religion which are obscure and puzzling”. He sets out the principles he observes in his work and his technology, and uses these to test the validity of the assumptions of faith. He insists that we should begin with God as Spirit (the essence of what God is) before moving on to God as Creator, which describes only those aspects of God we can encounter in the created world. I was reminded of the professor in the Tom Stoppard play “Jumpers” whose life’s work was based on the question “Is God ?”, on the grounds that to use more words to describe the question, prejudices the answer.

Part 2 ends with a true call to ‘conversion’, though this is not a term Michael uses, to make the choice of new birth from immediate, self-centred inclinations to The Way of true sacrifice. This leads to a final section drawing out the implications. Michael describes his understanding of the true God, consistent with the stories he has already told. He recognises that a belief in No God is less of a threat than the False God of enterprise for profit to be kept by the individual or the Inadequate God of people who cling to a God who represents the comfort and security of childhood. The True God is greater than either our science or our religion - and we are called to live life as if all that is said about the true God is true.

The question (as so often seems to be the case when we try to explain things from our MSE perspective) is: what others will make of it? One could guess that many committed church people would find its words and ideas rather threatening – not least in the picture painted of those who follow “the Inadequate God” and are looking for certainty and security. On the other hand, I suspect that many of those who find themselves on the fringes of the church, or stand outside it looking in, bemused, will find in this book something that will resonate, so that they could say: “yes, I can believe that”.

It is a rewarding read, which will, I believe, open the ways of an MSE to those who are not already on the wavelength, and, indeed, may open up new visions of the God who is.

Publisher’s address is PO Box 609, Sheffield, S6 2XT