The Irreverend
Writing on matters sacred and secular.
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Thursday, May 1, 2025
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
Why I am Not a Christian (with apologies to Bertrand Russell)
Let's be charitable and say that Jesus was indeed a real person and that he really did say the things the gospels report him to have said. Or at least, let's say that the gist of what he said is more or less accurately reflected in these texts.
He said many things that have resounded through the ages as praiseworthy and have become part of the normative ethics of western culture.
Let's then take all that he said as seriously as he intended it to be in his short ministry--his aim was to put us into a correct relationship with the will of the almighty creator of space, time, and dimension.
So: who's up for selling all your worldly possessions and giving the proceeds to the poor? (Matthew 19)
(Silence)
He's not saying give your second hand clothes and toasters to the Salvos, or throw a bum a coin, or donate to your favourite charity. He's requiring a radical redistribution of goods, putting the last first, as he says. So: all that private wealth and property you acquired? Let's be having it then...(Matthew 4, Mark 1, Luke 5)
(They do not move)
Okay, then: who's up for walking off your job right this minute, leaving all your tools and unfinished work behind, and following Him?
(Silence)
Oh, and leave your families too. Familial relations don't matter. The world is coming to and end, and soon, so ditch the lot and get yourself right with the almighty. Let's go! (Luke 14)
(They do not move)
What's wrong with you? Don't you know there is no way to the Father but through me? (John 14)
(A lone, nervous voice): "You mean all those billions of Buddhists and Hindus are wrong?"
Yes, that's the only thing that can mean.
(Silence)
***
Are these injunctions about becoming His follower (i.e. a Christ-ian) to be taken seriously or not? Can these even be considered moral?
Even if we are liberal-minded, and sympathize with radically privileging the poor and dispossessed, we certainly haven't voted that way. Ever. Anywhere.
But yes, he did lots of comforting, put snobs and hypocrites in their place, and opposed the brutal Roman empire. Cool. But if we cherry-pick that sort of thing only, then we want the message to be what we want it to be, and not something else.
The real question with cherry-picking is: why do I want it to mean only this? What is the longing I am expressing? And what meaning am I avoiding, and why?
Whatever our longings, they are not and have never aligned with the tough, exclusive injunctions cited above. If we really thought the world was ending soon, there would indeed be the breakdown of all social order, and maybe we too would cut and run from our piles of stuff, our work, our families to seek our own personal salvation.
And if we did that, we'd be moral cowards.
This is why I'm not a Christian, not because Christianity is difficult, but because much of it is simply wicked, perverse, and manipulative.
In his famous essay of the same name, Bertrand Russell says:
"A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create."
Monday, August 28, 2023
Odd Job Man
Whether in Church or in Chapel, whether Minister or Chaplain, there is no disguising the fact--this is an odd job.
Wherefore odd? For some I do too much, for others far too little. The same preaching that inspires and consoles someone, angers another to furious rage, and another to casual indifference. The same material that was boring to one was massively impactful to another. You get praised for being caring and gracious, and also condemned for being aloof and detached.
Whither odd? Grudgingly paid a professional wage, and yet expected to project humble poverty. Have some nice things and you're materialistic. If you don't have nice things, you must be some kind of self-defeated schlub. People expect your personal time, money, and resources, but set healthy boundaries to care for your mental health and your families, and you're selfish.
Whence odd? Everything you say and do can be used against you by anyone disgruntled, annoyed, petty, or even just plain bored. Every mistake proves you're unqualified, but victories are taken in stride because they're expected, and hey--that's what you're paid for. Your personal life, hobbies, interests, friendships, relationships, and family are continually monitored for moral lapses. After all, you're paid to model virtue!
Why so odd? Amateurs are fully confident they could do a better job and kibbutz from the sidelines. Everyone has an opinion about religion, no matter how little they've thought about it, let alone studied it. I'd never assume I knew better than, say, my dentist, how to do his job.
It's ODD... and yet there's so much fulfillment in precious moments to which nothing in the rest of my life can compare. It's challenging, heartbreaking, and can be discouraging, but it's also fulfilling, inspiring, and awesomely life-changing. It can be brutal, but it can also be beautiful.
Over half of clergy battle depression and 85% of seminary graduates to enter ministry will leave ministry within the first 5 years. Who'd stick with this?
So here's my hypothesis: the only reason I wanted to do this odd job, and keep doing this odd job, is that it must a perfect fit--I must be odd too.
I don't have to do this., I GET to do it. My pathology is also my profession.
Monday, April 10, 2023
Easter: not suitable for children (violence, torture, horror, partial nudity, adult content)
This past Easter Saturday was our friend Jim's 70th birthday party, and a helluva party it was.
70s themed costumes for all, disco ball, coloured lights, dancing to funky disco music--and food and drink of course.
To top it all off, Jim and several friends did 3 choreographed numbers with changes of drag and fetish costumes. A ball gown, an Abba get-up, and assless leather chaps for the inevitable Village People number. It was like a mini Mardi Gras: there was lots of love in the room, and everyone had a fab time.
Contrary to the current taste for protecting children from drag queens, I would rather my kids go to something like this every week than rehearse annually the grim passiontide story of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Think about it. A man is stripped to his loins--beaten, whipped until his flesh is flayed, forced to carry a heavy object to public ridicule. All of which causes him to faint again and again. A woman takes pity and uses her veil to wipe his face, only to have it come away with his tortured visage printed in blood, sweat, and do doubt tears, on the cloth. Extreme close-up on the horrid image.
Then, if that's not enough to put you off your chocolate eggs, this guy is nailed to a piece of wood by his extremities--hands and feet. (Well, we're told, hands are technically impossible, because the weight of his body would have torn the nails out between his fingers joints. His wrists, then. So much better.)
His torturers are not done yet. They gleefully force a spiked ringlet of thorns into onto his head in mockery of a crown, and stab him in the side with a spear because they're getting bored now. Blood and water flow from the gash. Water? Is he not fully dehydrated by now? This is Palestine, after all.
Of course, after lingering in excruciating pain for a while, he dies, his alluringly fit yet savaged body hanging like meat from a hook. His friends put what's left of him in a rock tomb.
And then after a few days baking in the Middle East, he becomes, one assumes, a zombie, rising from his grave to walk the earth again. Unrotted, somehow.
If there is a more gruesome movie on Netflix without the recommended use of the parental lock, I'd like to know.
As a young Catholic kid going to 'Stations of the Cross' every year, this 14-part mini series is on permanent repeat, and at Good Friday and Easter Sunday services the story is exhumed annually. And we were reminded all this unimaginable suffering was endured for us because we're born bad. He suffered and died thus for our sins. (Substitutional atonement--don't get me started...)
Hope, it was supposed to give us. Hope. Rot.
My hope is that this grisly story--hardly more ennobling than Mayan human sacrifice--is consigned to the curiosity cabinet of humanity's dark bestial past, a morality tale of how very sick our imaginations were only a couple millennia ago.
Give me the cheap redemption of the Village People and disco balls and music and drag acts and dancing and fabulous fashion.
Keep the death cult, thanks. I'm eating: the canapes are delicious.
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
The Case for Secular Liturgies: A Shared Spiritual Language
Since 2019, I’ve been the chaplain of a high-fee independent school which has historically been ‘non-denominational’. But what does that even mean in 21st century practice, especially when the school community is reflective of the wider culture’s religious affiliations? 2/3 of the school’s enrolments claim no religious affiliation, and 1/3 claim nearly every religious affiliation on earth.
So what should its chapel services look like? How do you
create cohesive spiritual experiences in this context? My answer has been to
offer secular liturgies. That is--language, texts, and music that are not
explicitly of any particular religious tradition. This approach to spiritual
development creates a truly inclusive spiritual awareness, and has become a key
point of difference from other independent schools.
To clarify this, think of a how a hospital works:
Imagine doctor going into a hospital to operate. Let’s say
this doctor is religious, specifically Jewish, say—an observant Jew who has
been raised that in that faith, reads the sacred texts, and regularly goes to
temple. While he is operating on a patient, a particularly apt prayer for
divine healing from, say, the Talmud, comes to his mind. Now should he, as an
observant Jew, pause the operation to offer that prayer to the God he worships?
If your child were the patient, and you knew the doctor paused operating on
them to be prayerfully observant, would you appreciate that? And if your
child’s surgery went wrong, would you applaud the doctor’s piety? Or sue him?
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Regardless of his religion, this doctor operates in a secular context |
Of course, that imaginary hospital scenario never happens.
Because any religious doctor--Jewish or Hindu or Muslim—knows it’s for them to treat
the patient in that context. The doctor operates for that hour etsi Deus non
daretur, ‘as if God were not a given’. Does that make the doctor a religious
hypocrite? Does it make the doctor a bad Jew if he suspends his Jewish practices
for the time he operates? No, it does no such thing. The world we live in is
not as simple as that.
It’s complex: the world is becoming BOTH more religious or
less so. In some parts of the world, religious sects and their followers are increasing
in numbers. In places like Australia though, religious affiliation is in steady
decline overall. Both things are true—the world is getting both more religious
in total numbers, and also less religious in certain places like ours. So
there’s this big split, and institutions like hospitals have to accommodate
that split. Hospitals have BOTH doctors AND chaplains. They have BOTH operating
rooms AND prayer rooms. The institution of the Hospital operates in BOTH
‘secular’ terms AND in religious terms. BOTH. Which means the reality is not
‘either you’re one or the other’; the reality is you can be both—folks can and
do ‘operate’ in both religious and secular terms interchangeably. But for the
time he operates, the good doctor suspends his religion and makes his religious
beliefs and practices strictly irrelevant for that time. However, in his life more
generally, the doctor operates in both frameworks, switching depending on
whether he’s at temple or at hospital.
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Modernity means choice |
Like a hospital, an independent school is an institution
that must serve the needs of all who come there. Our school, our country, and
indeed the whole world is increasingly religiously plural—meaning there are
many different religious flavours to choose from. At the same time, secular
developments in science and technology are discovering and creating realities
that religions never dreamt of, things like biomechanics, quantum physics, and
artificial intelligence. A world containing both religious pluralism and
non-religious secularism is how things are, and have been for some time. Embracing that reality and learning how to
work with it in schools, is only just beginning. In effect, I have placed the
school at the vanguard of this emerging awareness.
2020’s attempts to offer chapel via Zoom have reminded us
that we humans crave live gatherings where we seriously consider meaning and
purpose together. And if we see the benefit of such gatherings, HOW should they
be expressed in a multicultural, multifaith community? What language can we all
share in them, when we meet as one institution to worship together?
Well, our students have been living in the answer for the
past couple years. They will have noticed that chapels have not exactly
Bible-bashed, nor indeed bashed any particular book. Nor have chapels used
especially churchy language. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that,
particularly, in its place. After all, religion is the most continuous human
experience, secular society is young by comparison. We could just pick one or
two religions and unpack them. But once you focus on a select few, you
automatically exclude other stories which also have great truth, beauty, and
goodness. And we can’t do justice to them all. We could just have focussed on
Christianity, say, since it’s dominant in our colonial culture, and our mid-century
chapel already fairly bristles with Cx crosses. But to submit to what’s
dominant because it’s dominant, is not about theology or meaning, but about
power. ‘Cultural might makes right’ is the ethic of slaves and the mark of
fascism. Besides, since when has dominance guaranteed worth? No, choosing
what’s dominant because it’s dominant is a choice based on fear. To make a
choice based on the opposite of fear, a religious choice, a choice based on
love, would be to use language that can bring all together on equal terms, and
exclude no one.
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Love includes, fear divides |
So our chapel worship services are, in effect, secular
liturgies, using secular language and music, the same language which BOTH
doctors and chaplains (whatever their religion) use to function together in their
institution day to day. Secular language alone is the shared language through
which all in our institution can connect TOGETHER as a School community. If this
were a church community, we’d probably be using different language. Using this
secular language common to people of all faiths and none, is thus an
intentional and loving act of inclusion, rather than an act of division, of
privileging one faith over others. Doesn’t the hospital include all patients in
treatment, not just the religious ones? Shouldn’t we as a school, try to
include all our students in worship, not just a few?
Don’t misunderstand: this is not anti-religion. Religious
language can be rich and moving and wise. Religious texts can be models of
beauty, clarity, and insight. But religious language does not have a monopoly
on such things. Secular language has poetry with deeply felt and timeless
spiritual wisdom–English teachers could provide abundant examples. Secular
language has moral power—read the Uluhru Statement from the Heart or, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. And your CD collection has secular music that lifts
your spirit just as sacred music can.
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Both are real; one offers a common language |
Secular language, secular texts, and secular music is the
language we all CAN share in chapel, because it’s the language we all DO share in
school every day anyway, whatever our flavour of religion and whatever our
flavour of no religion. And if we happen to put a family’s chosen faith
aside—like the doctor puts his--for the time school is ‘operating’, we don’t
deny their religion, nor do we make religious hypocrites of their students by
worshipping in a language that brings us all together as one school. What
religion does not seek the fullest possible bringing together of all God’s
children?
If you get sick, you can certainly pray for healing and use whichever of the many religious languages you choose. But I hope you will ALSO go to a hospital. If you seek an education, you may choose a single book of wisdom as a foundation. But you’ll ALSO go to an institution called a school, where students read and draw wisdom from many books. Like a doctor going to operate in a hospital, a teacher going into a school may believe with all their heart that there is an invisible world beyond this one, a world populated with intelligent beings we can communicate with, if we use a special language of words, behaviours, rituals. But that invisible world is not on the school curriculum. Learning about this one is challenging enough. During the hours the teacher is operating, their professionalism bids them operate, like the doctor, ‘etsi Deus non daretur’. And like the doctor, they do not betray their own religion by using our common language, rather than the language of their faith alone.
Now, more than ever, in our shrinking world of many faiths
and many of none, we need to find ways to come together, rather than endlessly
split into ever-multiplying factions, we need to seek meaning and purpose
together, to celebrate living together. If we want our world to come together
in mutual respect and tolerance, small worlds like schools have to come
together in mutual respect and tolerance. In a world of endless choices and
great uncertainties, our chapel services aim to bring together all our students,
that they may feel the spiritual power that comes from connectedness rather
than division. May they feel there is indeed strength in such unity.
Thursday, June 17, 2021
Is Chaplaincy sustainable?
- Claiming 'affiliation' is a weak stat. (e.g. can be family history vs. actual practice)
- Most claiming affiliation are not active
- Gen-X to millennials low affiliation numbers indicate continued decline (so, even less in future of what's currently low)
- Religion ranks last place in influencing personal identity (71% claim not important)
- Even for birth-death-marriage rituals, 80% prefer civil to religious celebrants
- Religious metaphysics (God, heaven, hell, etc.), even among the committed, are no longer seen to offer validity to moral/ethical debates
- Most reject religious authority as the ultimate interpretation of law.
- Religious households most likely to have low incomes (i.e. not my wealthy school's target demographic anyway)
- However, there is a disconnect between this new reality and Australian government policy, which favors minority religious policy at the expense of the emerging non-religious majority
- Schools are at the frontline of this struggle between public policy and the social change in actual religious behavior (e.g., most Australians oppose religious schools' legal right to expel students or sack staff on the basis of sexual orientation)
Our chaplaincy model (and its attendant chapel facilities, etc.) is still quite traditional. But given this emerging reality, is it really sustainable?
Any serious quest for the meaning and purpose of what I do demands that question at least be asked.
The traditional role expectations of chaplaincy are almost fully secularized or outsourced at my school already. Even school leaders muddle the terms "Assembly" and "Chapel" as though they fulfill the same timetable function. Assemblies trot out a list of desirable character values--decontextualized, random, perfunctory, and numerous, though they are.
Though I've taken pains to clarify that I am NOT a counsellor (even distributing a report that distinguishes Spiritual Direction from clinical counselling) I am still regarded as one by both students and staff, and I am woefully under-skilled to be that for them. I listen and care, but lack the tools to strategize a fix or a management of their issues.
Student and Old Scholar rites of passage do not default to my keeping--in three years I have performed one staff wedding, but as a private gig, off-campus. That's it. There have been births and deaths, and I've not been called to officiate, nor do I expect or even want to be.
What seems to remain is an occasional, highly specialized performance art--a live mass speech event that shares frontiers with sage-on-the-stage teaching, but without the teacherly validation of evaluations to see what they're getting from it. All you get are sort of google reviews that say more about the person than the event. Those that are susceptible to this form of rhetoric approve, those that aren't, don't. What a surprise.
As my boss reminded me, the decline in religiosity doesn't mean a decline in the need and desire to search for meaning and purpose. But do you need a chaplain for that? Someone in religious orders with all the cultural baggage that comes with that--the tradition of epistemic authority, the psychological pressure of that perceived authority, the emotional manipulation people are still susceptible to by anyone 'of the cloth'.
It seems more like a case of the right person for the job, ordained or not.
Monday, May 31, 2021
A {Redacted} Epistle to a Fellow-Traveller, on moving on
Dear XXX,
First, please forgive the less-than-personal feel of this
word-processed reply. My handwriting is reputedly (and admittedly) deplorable,
even to those used to my crabbed scrawl. I really enjoyed getting a handwritten
letter for a change. During my church tenure, handwritten notes were generally
a red flag. But it was SUCH a pleasure to read what is essentially an epistle, the
only aim of which is deepening and broadening relationship between fellow
travellers.
Quite without meaning to, I seemed to develop an M.O. as I
read it—circling parts that jumped out at me that I felt I wanted particularly
to respond to or reflect on. Inevitably, that will say more about where I’m at
than some forlorn pretence of ‘objectivity’. Some were things I could relate
to, others were an ingrained pastoral-care reflex, a deformation
professionelle from years of teaching and Ministry and now chaplaincy.
Anyway, I’ll plunge into some of these circled bits in order over the next few
days, and see where my reflections take me. May they be ‘dulce et
utile’—pleasing and useful.
First, though, I want to reiterate that you’re one of the best XXXX I’ve seen on three continents. Measured, strategic,
persistent, inclusive, knowledgeable, analytical, deeply moral and
heartfelt—the conclusions to which you led even the most ideologically
resistant in my church were inescapable. That said, you are allowed to stop, to
have boundaries that are no one’s business but your own, and which require zero
justification from a free, self-directed adult. That UU 1st
principle of the ‘inherent worth and dignity of every person’ applies even to
the politically non-engaged. You’re no good to anyone if you’re broken, least
of all to yourself. Your energies have been outward-directed for a long time.
Give yourself a break. If you don’t, who will?
“I contain multitudes” Walt Whitman said. I don’t know about
you, but as a fellow neurotic, I have always had this voice in my head as long
as I can remember who tells me I’m not good enough, that I’m a fraud, that I will
struggle to deserve comfort or happiness. You experience this as the
gaslighting imposter syndrome. Only quite recently, I have become better at
telling myself that this voice inside me has never done anything in life
other than be mean to me. One of us is sad and sick and useless, and it ain’t
me. Becoming best friends with yourself, as you say, is telling that voice
regularly to go XXXX himself, whenever it pops up. That is absolutely required
to be able to grab your oxygen mask, don it with a clear conscience, breathe
deeply, and enjoy the benefits of not suffocating. Our self-flagellation serves
no one.
![]() |
Talk about unproductive... |
Leaving things you’ve built behind, and letting attachment to them go. Yeah, that’s a tough one! It’s hard because it puts us in mind of our mortality and the ultimate, cosmic futility of individual human endeavour. The power-brokers at XXXXXXX are probably claiming what they liked of my work as their own, and burying what they didn’t. C’est la vie. Though I can’t any longer influence what they do, the clean, sharp break still seems the wisest course, not merely because doing so was a centuries-old protocol of free churches, but because it embodies and fulfills the self-effacement inherent in true service. The Ministry of the church is what matters, the particular Minister does not. Facing what I knew to be the end of an important and intentional identity felt like the most grown-up thing I’d ever done, and I hope I face my final oblivion with half such certainty.
When I begin to kick myself about it, I remind myself of the
way I respond to those who belabour me about the importance of the person
of Christ. If the ideas/values/principles he’s meant to have espoused were inherently
good in themselves, then his historicity (the particulars of the magical birth,
miracles, and resurrection) need never have happened, nor require my belief that they did. When I think of exemplary self-sacrifice at all (talk about a
sharp, clean break!), I imagine his death to be the ultimate faith that the
ideas will live in some form after him. The alternative to self-effacement is the
personality cult, a species of idolatry, a flat denial of the transience of all
material forms.
Unitarian churches, having a few central principles but no single
text or narrative, necessarily tend toward personality cults, especially if
Ministers don’t know when to leave, when enough of you is enough. This was
happening in the latter stages at XXXXXXX Never trust anyone that puts you on a pedestal, no
matter how flattering, because the pedestal itself always belongs to those who
put you on it. Had I stayed, my contract would not have run out until 2023, and
I’m not sure a graceful, emotionally intelligent exit could have been managed
by then. Maybe this is the case in all intentional communities, XXXincluded.
It’s not false humility if you genuinely humble yourself to a greater good. This means sacrifice, and thus suffering, but also offers a
way through suffering to equanimity. While it would be false to say I’ve
achieved that state, I’m further along than I was a few months ago, so maybe it’s
a process that will continue. I did some good things there, and one of the
things that truly became my Ministry was the leaving of it. It was a hard thing
to do well, given the ample ‘friendly fire’ and the enormity of the task, so I am
allowed to be proud of all that and find something new that’s worth doing.
To venture into new lives, you have to leave old ones,
knowing you can’t go back, not really. You can visit, but it’s never the same
because the observer (you) will have changed (this is the Heisenberg principle
at work in our own personal histories). Doing the kind of work you’ve done is a
young man’s game, best done in the vigour of one’s flowering season. But flower
is meant to become fruit, and fruit is meant to ripen. If that’s where you are headed
now, that’s only natural: the bright promise of the spring becoming the hard
realities of the harvest—what you’re damn well left with, what the scope of it really
is, what you might usefully do with it for those who come after in the time
remaining to you. Time to pick the fruit before it falls--and it must fall, if
we don’t pick it.
![]() |
How nature says "pick the fruit" |
The Tolkien quote reminded me of Voltaire’s Candide, the eponymous character having finally settled down at the end of his wide-ranging, bizarre adventures to a quiet, domestic life. His teacher, Dr. Pangloss, still insists that since everything has worked out in the end, we still live in the best of all possible worlds. “Yes,” Candide says, “but we must still tend our garden.” The scope of his stewardship has shrunk, but it’s manageable, and needs his agency to yield what it can. He drinks the wine of the country, praises the God of all things, and lets the world be the world. There’s nowt wrong with that.
That we resist this, well, maturing, is a way of
clinging to youth, and as much as I love Tolkien too, he wrote in, and never really
left, the sheltered workshop of a school. Now that I’m back in an academic
environment, I can see that even for the adults there’s something infantilizing
about that culture. Plus he was writing the Rings as the British Empire was
summoning up all its will and resources to conquer the great existential threat
of its day, and the Judeo-Christian trope of glorious sacrifice was understandably
at the heart of his work and that of many other of his peers (like C. S. Lewis).
It always reminds me of their debt to William Blake and the promise that a new
Jerusalem was at hand if only we took up our bow of burning gold, its arrows of
desire, and mounted our chariot of fire. All that heat and light in the sacrificial
fire of youth (no culture ever used the elderly for burnt offerings!). But
fire is a temporal phenomenon. Stories that deal with what happens after
this fire expends itself, as it must, don’t make exciting reading or viewing.
After the forward thrust of one story expends itself, it is
always possible to begin a new one—having the learned the lessons of the old, and
taken a break long enough to answer the question: “Well, what now?” I have complete
faith that however you answer that, it will be well, and all manner of things
for you shall be well.
Obviously this all comes through a tired old man’s filter,
whose next story can only be how to face age, and then the only end of age. Naturally,
it says more truth about where I’m at than where you are, but I hope these
reflections are of use.
Thanks for prompting this epistolary. It’s done me a power
of good to reflect deeply on issues that are alive in you. I hope we can
continue. Say, do you mind if I blog this, if I keep your name and the
organisation’s name out of it? Maybe others will find it useful too. No problem
if not.
Yours in faith,
Rob