Are You Playing Follow-The-Leader?

Several years ago I went on a 3-hour bicycling tour of the back streets of Budapest. Traffic in Budapest is frenetic at its best. But on bicycles we had to deal with hordes of people, conflicting traffic signs and vehicles that I’d swear were intentionally aiming for us. But the most challenging part of the tour was our guide.

I was certain his full-time job was as one of Budapest’s infamous taxi drivers. He led us the wrong way along one-way streets, through red traffic lights, in and out of fast moving traffic, and up pedestrian-packed passages, sending people flying in all directions. Although I knew the centre of the city quite well, I was completely lost in where he had taken us. So we tried to stick to him like glue, fearful of losing the one person who professed to know the way.

It was some time before we finally switched our brains, as well as our bikes, into gear and began to cycle more intelligently, ever more confidently distancing ourselves from what our guide was doing. But I must admit, the sense of constantly being lost and misguided was, at best, uncomfortable.

I suspect that it's a similar sense of ‘lost-ness’ in a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world that motivates many people to follow unintelligent dogmatic ideologies - religious, political or otherwise - that profess to know ‘the way.’

As the schism continues to grow within the Anglican Communion, we see numerous splinter groups developing, professing to hold true to the Gospels, as well as to the recommendations of the Windsor Report. Some are indeed adhering to the canons of The Church. Others, however, possibly enticed by the opportunity to vest themselves and to build their own fiefdom, appear to have little or no understanding of canonical law and in some instances the very fundamentals of theology.

The irony of it all is that these newly forming ‘Anglican’ communities promulgate the very division that the Windsor report sought to repair.

In St Matthew’s Gospel Jesus teaches that the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and that those who follow the hard way are few. In the light of my experience in Budapest, I suspect that’s because few of us are prepared to live with the insecurity, questions, and possibility of getting utterly lost that marks the narrow gate and hard way of wisdom.

Easier by far to follow someone else who claims to know the way, even if it is potentially destructive to ourselves and to those whose paths we cross without warning.

Intent on following our leader we may never get our own bearings, and when, as we did in Budapest, we finally discover that the guide in whom we’d placed so much faith doesn't know the way either, the shock can be severe and lasting.


Oh God of Wisdom, help us to hold to the narrow path, to think for ourselves, to feel compassion for others, to be aware of what happens around us, and to move with grace as we unwind the way before us. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen

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Dodging Salvos

Anglican Prayers