A couple of Extracts from          

         SAVAGE SHEPHERDS                            

ADAM HARBINSON

(see a video short)

'How Many Sugars?'

As a family, we were frequently asked to offer hospitality to visiting guests because of our perceived social standing and the practical advantage of owning a big house. This gave us a rare opportunity to meet informally with leaders and their families from various parts of the UK, Ireland and beyond, which added further to our status in the Fellowship. But it also increased my perplexity, for paradoxically while our relationships with influential people in the network of international fellowships more deeply embedded us into the community, the experiences also made me feel increasingly uneasy. I could see that the aspects of Fellowship life that most grated on me were endemic at every level and in every place.

While we were serving our visiting guests by offering them hospitality, they weren't grateful to us – they simply took our generosity for granted. They showed no gratitude because it was expected of us, something we had to do. As they saw it, we were privileged to have them in our home.

I was unaware of a hierarchy in those early days, with the result that my practical jokes tended to backfire. There was a party of Germans in my home one Saturday evening, and as we were dishing out the teas and coffees, I asked one: ‘Do you take sugar?’ to which he answered ‘Nine.’

Now it was obvious that he meant ‘No’; nevertheless, he got nine teaspoons of sugar. It was one of those things I had always wanted to do, but he wasn’t even slightly amused. In fact, he was rude, not necessarily because he lacked a sense of humour, which he probably did, but because it wasn’t the done thing for people such as me – at the bottom of the pile – to play pranks on the senior leadership, people I was serving because of their elevated position. I had a lot to learn about what was expected of me in regard to the hierarchies and submission to authority.

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