Well House Consultants have a refreshingly non-conformist approach to web design. They’ve eschewed the convention that hyperlinks are coloured blue and underlined, and decided that they should be marked with italics. This frees them to use underlines for emphasising text, and blue for dates and code samples.

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A good thing to teach engineers early in their careers is that when you hand in a report describing a problem and several proposed designs that might solve it, it is best not to refer to the one you eventually recommend as your “Final Solution”.

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I couldn’t get 85% Cocoa Lindt chocolate at the supermarket yesterday, and had to settle for 70%. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

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This continues what is liable to be quite a long series of catch-up posts. My aim is to fill in the background details of my various exploits in a quixotic bid to be more comprehensible whenever I report on more recent events.

When last I left off, due to the untimely intervention of bedtime, I had volunteered to be on a working group to form an Inter-Faith Council for Christchurch. The basic brief for this group was to write a draft constitution, find out what legal arrangements should be made, and organise a big public meeting to create the Council. And to arrange tea and biscuits, which is really the most important part. If I had to summarise the very essence of inter-faith activities, it would be “Let’s all have tea and biscuits, but together!” Also to act as role models of tolerance and respect for people who prefer coffee or small cakes.

The working group included a reasonably good first approximation of the religious diversity of Christchurch. The membership turned out to be somewhat fluid, but at rough count there were three Muslims, three Christians (including, notably, the Anglican Bishop of Christchurch), a Buddhist, a Unitarian-Universalist, a Quaker and myself a Bahá’í. It has always been my observation that religious people seldom have any problem working with people from other religions, but tend to be unnecessarily concerned about the sensitivities of others. If, for example, you put a Jew, a Hindu and a Muslim together in a room, the Jew will be worried that the Muslim and the Hindu won’t get along. The Hindu will be worried that the Jew and the Muslim won’t get along, and the Muslim will come up with some issue over which the Jew and the Hindu will disagree. None of this ever takes very long to sort out.
I’ll grant that this observation might not apply perfectly to randomly-selected religious believers, but it seems to fit pretty well for inter-faith activities, where people have generally self-selected for tolerance and open-mindedness.

I am now going to reveal a little trick I have found useful on many committee-related occasions. I find that committees I am on usually work best when I am the secretary. This is due more to a number of crucial flaws in my character than any special secretarial skills: I am poor at remembering names, inclined to wander off the point, inclined to be loquacious, and capable of making grandiose ill-formed plans in the company of others that I forget to carry out properly after I have left the meeting. Being secretary helps with all of these things: I have to write down people’s names, listen carefully to what other people are saying, and summarise decisions clearly. In addition, I already have an obvious job to do in taking the minutes, so people tend not to mind if I don’t take on too much other homework.
Usually people don’t mind too much if I want to be secretary, but just to make sure I make a point of arriving early to the first meeting of any new committee I have joined, getting out my laptop and starting to type the minutes before anybody has time to think about whether they might like to be secretary. In my defense, I can type pretty fast, and I usually manage to have the minutes finished and ready to email before I leave the room.

At our second meeting, some issues of scope arose. We had gathered in a meeting room at the Anglican Centre, and started the meeting only to discover more and more people turning up. In addition to the actual members of the Working Group, there were three or four times as many people who weren’t members but had turned up anyway. Eventually it emerged that somebody (we never did find out who) had invited them to the inter-faith meeting, apparently under the misapprehension that it was a discussion group rather than a committee with a specific task to perform and an agenda to get through. It took about three quarters of an hour for everybody in the room to become clear on what was going on, not least because more people kept arriving while we were trying to sort it out. It is surprising how many people will turn up to a meeting with no clear idea of its purpose beyond it being an “inter-faith thing”, unable to say precisely why they came or what religion they belong to. They were very nice about it once they understood what had happened though, and we all agreed they could sit in for the rest of the meeting if they liked, which apparently they did.
Afterwards, one of the visitors told me that she hoped the inter-faith council would have room for atheists and agnostics in its membership, which struck me as rather like asking the National Council of Women whether men could be members. I did my best to explain that I expected the organisation wouldn’t require members to be theists (there are, for example, plenty of atheist Buddhists involved in inter-faith work), but that it probably wouldn’t be of great interest to people who don’t identify with some kind of religious tradition. Still, you never know.

Matters proceeded apace over subsequent months, and I found myself delegated to prepare a constitution for the Interfaith Council. I learnt that, when reading a draft constitution, different people focus on very different aspects. The members of the working group, being all cuddly do-gooding religious types, focused most of our attention on the statements of principle at the beginning of the document, concerning how we would be nice to each other, and not use the Council for polemics or proselytising. John, a friendly lawyer who helped us out free of charge, spent a good deal more time on the committee structure we would require in order to be recognised as an incorporated society. Then I was invited to discuss the constitution with Tim Barnett, MP, who conducted a thorough and very valuable critique focusing to a large degree on what might go wrong if an organised group of people (or “party”) with a malevolent (or “oppositional”) disposition set about deliberately undermining the Council’s purpose (or “policy platform”)¹.
It would have been an interesting experiment to run the constitution past a trapeze artist, a scuba diver and a bee-keeper to see how they might have helped refine the gymnastic, aquatic and apiaristic qualities of the document, but sadly I lacked the necessary time.

In the interests of drawing this long and I suspect less than completely gripping post towards a conclusion, I shall skip further details of our committee adventures and speaking engagements and proceed directly to the big night, which was last Thursday.

About a hundred people gathered in the Caledonian Hall for the Great Big Meeting to approve the constitution and thereby form the Council. In order to ensure the smooth conduct of the meeting, we arranged an ample supply of tea and biscuits, and introductory speeches by the Human Rights Commissioner and the Anglican Bishop of Christchurch (who was, as it happened, also the chair of the Working Group). We were also pleasantly surprised to receive a last-minute letter from the Prime Minister, and it turned out that she was broadly in favour of the endeavour, which was good news. There were a series of motions from the the general “We ought to have some sort of Interfaith Council affair” one to the more specific “We trust these people most of us have only met this evening to be the interim Executive until the first AGM” one, and every one of them passed unanimously. Therefore, we have a Council. It won’t be saying much in public until after the first AGM, sometime in August, but it exists. There was much back-slapping and everyone left the Hall in high spirits.

And there the saga of the Interfaith Council and me would end, except for the fact that my name ended up on the list of people to form the interim Executive. Thus I am now on another committee, much like the previous one except more formally constituted. I’m still taking the minutes and writing the constitution, armed with an extensive set of amendments proposed at the meeting. The only major change so far is that I’m also fielding questions from newspapers. There’s no lack of work still to do, but I’m rather proud of how far we’ve come in the last few years.

Technorati Tags: baha’i, catch-up, christchurch, religion