Diocesan Press Release

It's a great pleasure to deliver this year's Limborough Lecture and first I would like to take the opportunity to thank you on behalf of the wider community for the contribution that you with the other Livery Companies make to the well being of our great city. I know from experience and now from within the diocese of Southwark, that a great deal of work within local communities is enabled by the generosity of the Livery Companies - work that would be impossible to get off the ground without the level of support and funding that you're able to give. And the Weavers Company, of course was granted its Royal Charter in 1155, becoming the first de facto livery company.

Your forebears seem to have been relatively well behaved. History records fights between fishmongers and Skinners in 1341 leading to several executions whilst the Saddlers, Painter-Stainers and Joiners were involved in bloody street fights in another part of the jungle. The deepest feud, though was between the Merchant Taylors and Skinners who both fancied being number six in the pecking order of importance. In 1484 it was resolved that they would take it in turns to be numbers six and seven, hence the phrase, being at sixes and sevens, the normal condition of the Church of England. Meanwhile, however, whilst all that squabbling was going on, the Weavers were sensibly getting on with their business and working hard for the good of the community, as you do to this day.

The growth of living museums where school children can go along and see iron being smelted, wool spun, and cloth woven has introduced a new generation to traditional craft arts such as weaving. I spent quite a few years working in Africa and so have seen at first hand the skill employed by people weaving to produce all manner of goods for personal and community use. The yarn is transformed by skilled fingers into a design that is characteristic of that particular community. For weaving as a craft isn't just about producing a bolt of cloth or a length of carpet or a rug - weaving, through colour, through form, through picture, through style becomes a way of spinning the tale. To the tutored eye, the cloth communicates the story of the community.

But the web which I want to talk about in this lecture is the world wide web, and the communication I want to talk about is the world wide story. The web is electronic, the story is the story that we humans choose to tell about ourselves as go into a new millennium.

I was in at the beginning of the computer revolution. As an undergraduate reading Electronics I spent a long vacation working in the English Electric Research Laboratories at Stafford. I was working on the famous Deuce computer. It was massive, housed in a air conditioned building about half the size of this church. It rarely worked for more than an hour or two. That was in the early sixties. About ten years later I was university chaplain and lecturer in Electronics working on an IBM transistor driven machine in the University of Zambia in the heart of Africa, and having to rewrite all my Maths and Engineering lectures, because real problems could now be solved by available, reliable computers of great power. Now I carry in my pocket a Psion computer that possibly has as much power as that IBM machine, and certainly has more power than all the 1960s computers in England put together.

It's the availability of that computing power, the PC on virtually every desk that has enabled the world wide web to be created. It seems to be a sad fact about human nature that war, or the threat of war, brings out our most creative thinking. Certainly the history of the Internet, the computing hardware and the communication systems, which form the weft and warp upon which the world wide web is woven, that Internet was first developed by the US Department of Defense, back in the late sixties when the cold war was still pretty chilly. The department's scientists, together with a number of military contractors and universities began to explore a communication network which could survive a nuclear attack.

Fortunately the attack never came, but the fruits of their labours was the Internet, and as the price of computing chips fell, and the cost of personal computers began to be near what the pocket of suburban America and Europe could afford. The web ceased to be merely the way in which specialists spoke to one another by e-mail and downloaded one another's files, and became part of the everyday world. During the last five years the web has been woven at incredible speed and is transforming our world perhaps faster than many of us can imagine.

For Western nations the Web has taken off because of the availability of hardware. There are now 100 million Internet users world wide. Indeed so fast are things changing that it was recently announced that in the USA Compaq, a major manufacturer of hardware, is providing high specification computers to households free of charge. What is the catch you might ask? In order to qualify for one it seems that you have to complete a form indicating the sorts of things you are interested in, the sort of things you would buy. Then each time you switch on your computer a whole load of advertising aimed at you will come down the line and into your home. It seems that Compaq are confident that they will easily make enough money on advertising to cover the costs of the machines.

At home we've recently seen the introduction of free Internet providers. To get on the Net you have to have a provider - a master computer into which you dial which acts as your link with the wider world. Initially as the Web began to develop you had to sign up to a provider and pay a monthly fee. Now there are a dozen or so companies setting up free Internet providers - and making their money by advertising or shaving phone charges so that the costs are coming down which makes this dream of global communication more easily realizable.

But the same can't be said for the developing nations. In the places where the supply of electricity is haphazard, where telephone communication is problematical and the cost of personal computers is well beyond the pockets of most people - the communication riches held by the Web are just not available to most people and it hard to imagine that they will be. To the divisions of debtor and creditor nations, work poor and work rich lands, poverty and affluence is added another division for the world - between information rich and information poor. And information as we know, information is power.

But where it is available, the world wide web is affecting every aspect of life. For example. I came back to London last year on taking up my post as Bishop of Southwark. The Diocese of Southwark covers most of London south of the river from Kingston in the west to Woolwich in the east and then down beyond the M25 deep into the Surrey heartland. I knew something of the diocese from my previous twelve years in North London, but my knowledge was swiftly and dramatically expanded when I logged onto the Diocesan web site, pages of information that are being constantly improved and updated that provide a great deal of information useful to people in South London as well as around the world. We get a huge number of visitors to the site and many of them leave messages or send us e-mails - questions, greetings, inquiries.

I was revisiting our web pages the other day and was staggered to find that in co-operation with the Borough of Southwark a site has been created that has given us arguably the finest pages for any cathedral church in this country. It is possible via your computer to take a virtual tour of Southwark Cathedral. Click on a button and video clipage of the nave or the choir is played on your screen. It is quite amazing. And of course the same is true for virtually every business and organization, for example Buckingham Palace has the most frequently visited web site in the world. The world wide web then is both giving us the opportunity to tell our story to the world and changing the way in which we tell our story, pictures speak louder than words, and a multimedia production speaks loudest of all.

Telling the story is of great significance to the Christian Church because we believe that we have the greatest story ever told, the story of God becoming human, the story of a God with tears in his eyes, the story of a compassionate God, the story of a God of energy and power. That story has been told week by week in tens of thousands of parish churches around this land for centuries. That story has been taken to every country on earth and has been told in palace and prison camp, African village and Californian crystal cathedral. That story was well know to those who first formed livery companies such as your own. Indeed it was out of that story that they formed the companies which, yes, provided a framework of self protection but also provided a vehicle of Christian service to the wider world.

Telling that story of God's love and power was relatively easy until the electronic revolution hit us. The Church had a virtual monopoly of the systems of education, social care, and entertainment. "I go to church on Sunday," the demure young lass on the old picture postcard says, "I go to church on Sunday, all smart and sweet and fair, I go to church on Sunday 'cos I like the hims what's there." And the word hims is spelt not with a Y but with an I. Well yes, the church was the place where you were educated, received social care, were entertained and where you met your friends and future partners.

That monopoly of engagement with the community broke in the early years of this century. Since then the Church has had to tell its story and live it out in a market place of competing story and sounds, a market place which is increasingly pluralistic and secular.

Pluralistic. It's not only that the great world faiths are now our near neighbours, physically through the advent of modern transport systems shrinking the world, and mentally, through the power of modern communication. People of faith have never been better informed about the great world faiths.

But frankly its not the great world faiths which disturb me. I'm ready to engage in dialogue with those of other faiths engaged in a serious religious quest. I'm ready to tell the Christian story and listen courteously to those with other great faith stories to tell.

But those following any of the great religious faiths are probably a minority, in the West in particular, many have given up any real commitment to their faith. But this doesn't mean that people today believe nothing, they believe anything - any crazy superstition, any charlatan prepared to wrap up his dogmatic message in mystical or mythical dress will get a following. And there's no better marketplace for propagating your crazy beliefs than the world wide web. The Vatican and Lambeth Palace might have impressive web sites (and they do), but they're not as enticing as those sects predicting the end of the world next Thursday afternoon, and collecting souls and cash.

It's not easy to present the thoughtful holiness of main line religion in such an atmosphere, which is both pluralistic and secular. Take the millennium dome. The church has been criticized because of the reported paucity of Christian content, although in the end, we might be pleasantly surprised. Let me tell you that it has taken a great deal of hard work to get an Christian content into the dome at all - not because people are necessary hostile to religion but because those planning the enterprise did not see any connection between the millennium and religion. It has taken a great deal of hard work to establish the connection in their minds between the millennium and the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ.

The ignorance of modern man and woman concerning the faith cannot be overestimated. No worship appeared on BBC television on Christmas Day last year. A bishop complained about this and a programme planner appeared on Radio 4's Today programme to explain the situation. "Well", this educated thoroughly modern lady said, "Well, there was no service on Christmas Day because it didn't take place this year on a Sunday, it was on a Friday and we don't have worship on television on Fridays." She just hadn't made any connection between Christmas Day and religion. Well if Christmas isn't connected in the modern mind with Christianity, it's not surprising that we're having a hard time connecting the millennium with the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ.

Telling and living our Christian story is the church's greatest challenge today. Well continue to tell it in every parish church every Sunday, and in millions of congregations around the world, but if we don't also weave our story on the global web, then we mustn't complain if the sum total of human ignorance about ultimate matters of life and death increases and not decreases by the electronic weft and warp which tells and distorts our human story.

But if the business of religion is being transformed by the world wide web, then so is the business of business. It's estimated that at present some thirteen billion dollars worth of trade is being transacted on the web, and by the year 2002 it's predicted that this will rise to 14 trillion dollars.

Take a seemingly low-fi occupation like farming. In fact the farmyard is fast becoming one of the biggest net users with approximately nine thousand British farmers using the Net at present and being joined by others at the rate of forty a day. A beef farmer from Morton-in-Marsh propagates the life-line of Grove-Charlemagne the fifth, his prize south Devon bull, by selling the bulls semen around the world though the web. A farmer in Fakenham was surfing the Chicago Board of Trade web pages one night when he discovered that American wheat futures had tumbled. He quickly sold 250 tonnes of his own wheat before the British market fell and saved himself £600. Meanwhile a Scottish dairy farmer is scanning the personal ads for a bride.

So it's not just a question of trade in finance, its a question of trade in information. Instantaneous news, updated second by second, is now available to anyone anywhere in the world with a PC.

It's difficult now for any government to keep its people in total ignorance. As the Home Secretary has discovered, you can place injunctions on local papers, but once information is available anywhere in the world, its available everywhere through the power of the web. Once the cat is out of the bag there's no getting it back in again. For example the details of Monica Lewinsky's relationship with President bill Clinton, which the American newspapers had sat on, were first published on the internet where national frontiers are meaningless.

But it's not only political news which can fly around the world at the touch of a button, financial news, news of markets is equally instantaneously available to anyone anywhere. What might that mean to the city of London, the greatest financial market on earth trading not only in finance but in financial information. Two years, five years downs the line will we still see the square mile packed with financial wizards or will they be dispersed around the country, communicating electronically , weaving their wealth via the web.

It's not only the square mile of the city which could be transformed. Some suburbs in south London have been developed around their fast rail service to London Bridge, Canon Street, Victoria. What happens to commuter land when people are not commuting every day. Why live in Caterham or Northwood when you could transact your business just as effectively and efficiently from Dorset or the Scottish Isles?

As I go about my diocese I'm already coming across new ways in which the World Wide Web is changing lives. Only last week I was visiting the churches in the Dulwich area of South London. That is seen by many to be a leafy prosperous area of the metropolis - but it's not without its communities with extreme needs. In one such area the libraries are being closed no doubt to save public money, and the community information services go with them. The local church people have decided to do something about it. They've been given a Church Urban Fund grant to convert their church entrance into a Community Information Centre. Computers will be installed with local information and advice and Internet access and local people will be able to come in and use these to get the information they require. It seemed to me to be an imaginative way of using the churches facilities to enhance the life of community and to open up communication and growth.

Earlier in the year I was in the very south of the diocese - close to Lingfield racecourse. Here the local community have established a Cyber Cottage in a village school, closed some years ago. Now that school is serving its community in a new way. A number of computers and specialized equipment have been installed. People can learn to use them and hire their use by the hour for business or pleasure.

In the morning young mums learn new skills whilst their children are cared for in an adjoining crèche. In the afternoon businessmen and women are the main users. In the evening teenagers flock to the cyber cottage to do their homework and meet one another.

And here's the interesting fact. It's not only people without the computing equipment themselves who come to hire the hi-tech machinery. They may have it at home, but solitary working can be a soul destroying business, particularly for ex-commuters, and people come to the cyber cottage for companionship as much as for the technical equipment on hand.

This, I believe is good news for village life and for the rural church. We're beginning to see villages humming with activity all day round, instead of being mere dormitories where commuters sleep at night.

The weft and warp of the Internet then, gives us new opportunities to weave our story, do our business and entertain ourselves on the world wide web, growing, changing pulsating by the minute. So where's the shadow, for the bad news is that there always is a shadow. One piece of bad news is of course that computers have a mind of their own, a mind that is so logical, that the machine seems to do unpredictable things. There's a whole new industry in haikus, Japanese verses cast in 17 syllables to respond to such system crashes.

I like this one. Yesterday it worked. Today it is not working. Windows is like that. Or, how about this one from someone who had just lost the file she'd been working on all morning - A file that big? It might have been useful. But now it is gone.

But overall the shadow doesn't lie with the hardware, it lies somewhere else. A few months ago I was asked to give an after dinner speech at a conference of Sonic Engineers. My ignorance of sonic engineering is almost total and so I used a search engine to find references on the net to sonic engineering. It came up with over seventeen thousand references. I couldn't make head or tail of the first three. The fourth simply said, "In sonic engineering, the constraint is not the equipment, it is the human operator." That gave me my theme. I was able to say, "It's the same in my business - the constraint is the human operator."

I have to tell you that it's been the same in all businesses since the start of time. The constraint is always the human operator. Human beings can dream like angels and act like devils often in the same moment. We have a great capacity for corrupting anything. Traditionally Christians call this, original sin.

So where does sin find its way into the world wide web. Well of course anyone who has surfed the web for more than a few minutes will realize that there are some pretty dubious sites around. An estimated nine million people are now on-line in the UK. One large company who did an internal audit estimated that non-related work activities accounted for a third of computer use in their organization with on-line gambling and pornography being the main offenders. Overall its estimated that some 40% of people using the net are visiting sites specializing in hard or soft porn.

This of course raises all sorts of ethical questions about freedom, censorship, copyright, restriction on trade and the rest, and that's just for adults, what of our children? It's hardly worth getting excited about bad language and sexual activity on television before the 9 o'clock threshold, when our children, at any hour of the day or night, in the privacy of their bedroom, can visit sites which would make our own hair stand on end. There are, of course software companies specializing in producing software for parents or schools wishing to restrict the surfing activities of their offspring, but never underestimate the ingenuity of the average teenager, particularly when it comes to computers. I would back their ability to get around any restrictions created by adult society.

Pornography on the web is a problem, but I believe that fantasy is even a greater problem. Fantastic and fantastical virtual worlds are being created which for some vulnerable youngsters can have more reality than the world of home and school. It's one thing to take a tour of a virtual cathedral or virtual palace via its web site, it's another thing to live in virtual world of magic and monsters, violence and sex, where the archetypes of horror from the occasional nightmare which we perhaps had as children, are engaged with hour after hour, in multidimensional, full colour, sound blasted energy. How do you engage with the real world after inhabiting that world for hours on end, indeed which is the more real world, the mundane world of home or school or the cyber world of magic, fear and fascination.

One of the village churches in my diocese (Chaldon) has its west wall covered with a mediaeval wall painting illustrating heaven and hell. I have to admit that it makes my blood run cold because hell is portrayed with a great deal more imagination and realism that heaven, which frankly appears rather dull consisting, it seemed, of endless hymn singing. Hell is a wild activity of agony, torture, burning flesh and sadistic cruelty. No village worshipper could have left the church without feeling that on the whole they would prefer to avoid the embrace of hell, and no doubt the good parson of the time in the sermon instructed them how to do so, by living a good life in the power of the Holy Spirit and in the truth we know in Jesus.

Well if that west wall is vivid in its portrayal, it doesn't begin to compare with some of the horrendous imagery available in cyber-space and I'm pretty sure that there's little salvation to be found in most of the fantastical fantasy worlds being spun on the world wide web. Some of the most creative minds in the world are creating these sights, but they are truly amoral and I'm not sure that they're equipping our youngsters to engage in any way with the world which needs their energy, commitment, and love.

For how does the sense of self develop? Throughout human history human beings growing up have developed their sense of self by engaging with other people, talking face to face with family, friends, school mates and the rest. Indeed such social interaction is one of the main benefits of a livery company such as the Weavers. Through this social interaction we come to have some idea of who and how we are. A socially impoverished environment leads often to a socially impoverished person; just as an abused child often becomes an abusing adult.

Now we might think the world wide web can be of help here, for there can be no shortage of social interaction when millions of fellow surfers are anxious to engage in endless user groups. Indeed I put one of my scholarly elderly vicars, in touch, via the Internet with the dozen or so other scholars in the world who share his passion for St. Anselm.

So far so good. But who are we when we weave the net? We can literally be anyone. We can call ourselves by whatever name we like; we can develop dozens of different personalities. We can chop and change six, age, opinions, values, beliefs. It's the ultimate in pick and mix personality changing - all from the privacy of our own room. But is it going to strengthen or weaken a sense of self-hood and social engagement? When we can be literally anyone in cyberspace, who actually are we in the world of the here and now?

Some years ago, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn wrote a prophetic novel called, "A Very Private Life." It told the story of what we might regard as a very modern young girl. She hardly ever went out of her room because everything she could possibly need was provided in that room. Entertainment and education came through a battery of TV screens, computers and Hi Fi systems. Delicious food was provided, airport style just to her taste and palate. There were other members of the family but she hardly ever met with them for they were living equally fulfilling very private lives in their own rooms.

Then one day something astonishing happened, there was a technical breakdown. The screens went blank. The girl knew she needn't worry, technical maintenance would be part of the seamless system and before long the machinery would either mend itself or someone or something would take care of the problem. But temporarily she was bored, and so she went behind the screen, behind the mirror on the world, and found in fact, a very different world. A world of what might be called the underclass, the socially excluded, partly being used to service the privileged world which she had taken as the norm, and partly shut out, because the privileged world had no use for its basic resources of uneducated brawn. The young girl had gone through the looking glass into a very different world indeed.

We meet tonight in glowing surroundings. Most of us are privileged to have work which stretches our intellect and imagination to the limit. We're grateful for the technology which fills our offices and homes, and through which we're spared having to entertain our children or grandchildren for every minute of their waking life. And yet, and yet, a privileged life can become a very private life, and we are simply not built to live solitary lives. We humans are social animals.

We meet in glowing surroundings, and there's nothing wrong with that, we work hard and it's good to enjoy good companionship, conversation, food and drink. Yet we don't have to travel more than a mile or two East or South to inhabit a very different world of dreary poverty, social exclusion and powerlessness. Somehow our human web of connection must connect with those shadow parts of our city even if what's mirrored seems sometimes like the frightening distorted images seen in the hall of mirrors of an old fashioned fun-fair. Our challenge is to use the wealth of finance and intelligence to be found in abundance in this greatest city on earth for the common good of all its citizens. And what better time to meet that challenge than now as the world goes into a new millennium and Greater London appoints a mayor to compliment the Lord Mayor of the city.

The world wide web communicates and mirrors a virtual world. The world on our doorstep is no virtual world, its the real stuff of prospering, hurting humanity, and the real challenge is not to mirror a virtual world, but to weave the human web which will help create a virtuous world.

Have we the competence, commitment, wit and wealth to do it? Not really, but let us take heart. I have an image in my mind of the Berber master carpet weaver. He sits on one side of the new carpet been woven, whilst the his apprentices sit on the other side. They push their needles and threads through to him, and he returns them. And in this way the carpet takes shape. The apprentices are sitting on the right side of the carpet and can see the pattern they're trying to create. The master sits on the wrong side, yet such is his skill and vision that he can take the efforts of all his apprentices, and create something beautiful. Even their mistakes become of value, because in the hands and vision of the master, those mistakes when transformed make this particular carpet unique, special, priceless.

I believe that we are in the hands of a master weaver, who knows our world intimately because he's been part of its waft and warp - on the cross, in the tomb he's hung on the wrong side, the dark side of our world, yet out of that mess and pain, something beautiful was woven - a world transformed.