For goodness sake stop it

It's probably a Jewish joke, but here's the vicars version:

an Anglican is stranded on a desert island, and after 5 years he's discovered and rescued. To their surprise, the rescuers find that he's built 2 churches on the island. When they ask why, the man replies "That's the one I go to every Sunday, and that's the one you wouldn't see me dead in."

I'm reminded of that by a number of spats going on in the evangelical world at the moment. They have 2 implications for mission: one is that people see Christians fighting each other, which, unless you're an aspiring member of Fight Club, isn't really that attractive. The other is that the nature of the fights relates directly to the nature of the church's mission.

Round 1: a month or so ago, Spring Harvest (we like it, our kids like it) split from 'Word Alive'. Word Alive was a joint initiative between Spring Harvest and the more theologically conservative UCCF and Keswick Convention organisations. A dispute over the teaching of one speaker, and whether he should be allowed to teach from the main platform, led to Word Alive setting up on its own for next year. In a bid to out-Spring Harvest Spring Harvest, it's gone for an even more remote location than Skegness or Minehead, and will be held in Wales. There was some debate via blogs and websites over how the split had happened, and whose fault it was.

Round 2: Wycliffe Hall theological college has been in the news following an anonymous document circulating a couple of weeks ago. The dispute is, again, put down to a division between those who want to be more theologically conservative, and those who have a broader conception of Christian doctrine, and how we go about the process of thinking about God and His world.

These debates are echoed in the wider Anglican communion - an international dispute over what the Anglican church believes about sexuality, which itself is indicative of how the Bible and Christian tradition are viewed - and within the Church of England.

Temperamentally, I don't like conflict. Upsetting people and being the cause of disagreement or upset is one of my internal no-go areas, though I still manage it quite regularly (!). Maybe that's why all this stuff makes me feel uncomfortable. In a few weeks time church leaders from 5 denominations and various Christian traditions are getting together here in Yeovil to pray and agree together on how we go about Christian mission to a number of new housing estates planned in the town. We will have to agree on what we think mission is, and we may start getting into some of the areas in the disputes above. So you can't avoid debates about truth, about what we believe, about how we handle the Bible and what the church is all about. But somehow the desire for common mission seems to be more important than ticking every doctrinal box.

At the same time, we do need to know what the doctrinal boxes are. It's clear that the first couple of generations of Christians were in constant danger of trading in their faith for a plausible sounding pack of lies, peddled by convincing charlatans. Without keeping one eye on truth, we can lose track of who God is, who we are, and how we should live, because plausible lies will always seem more comfortable to live with than the challenge of the gospel. Anyone who is entirely comfortable with their Christian faith clearly doesn't understand Christian faith. It stretches us; it challenges sin, ignorance, selfishness, pride, laziness, fear, injustice, indiscipline, and everything else that is wrong with us or with the world. Taken seriously, following Jesus is more demanding than training to win gold in an Olympic Decathlon. It requires the mastery (or at least the best attempts at mastery) of a variety of disciplines, and the bending of every desire and appetite and habit to a single goal, that of pleasing Jesus. So Christian faith is never comfortable, and it needs the sharpness of truth as opposed to falsehood to keep prodding us with this fact.

However, truth is not everything. This picture of the Christian life is as much about living right, as it is about believing right. I'm preparing a sermon for Sunday and am already niggled by the thought that our usual 'declaration of faith' won't be an adequate response to the message of the scriptures about healing and the Kingdom of God. Ticking the doctrinal boxes won't be enough.

It's very easy, in the hothouse that is a theological college, or the cliques and in-crowds which (sadly) mark out the different theological groupings in the church, to lose perspective. It's easy to lose perspective in local church life too - when you see things from the same viewpoint for long enough, it's easy to forget that there are other places to stand and look. Where does Jesus stand? What does Jesus see? What is he looking for from his people, and is he smiling right now or beating on the golden pavements of paradise in frustration?

Persecution of Christians

There was an in-depth article on the persecution of Christians worldwide in the latest Sunday Times, it begins like this:

Praying for a miracle
It’s not just Muslims and Jews who have faced persecution in recent years. An estimated 200m Christians in 60 countries are now suffering increasing victimisation. So why isn’t the West doing anything to protect them?

and you can find it here.

The countries named in the article where there is overt persecution of Christians are
North Korea
China
Bhutan
India
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan
Tajikistan
Kenya
Ethiopia
Sudan
Nigeria
Israel
Palestine
Somalia
Egypt
Eritrea
Turkey
Iraq
Iran
Saudi Arabia
Pakistan
Indonesia

In many of these places it is state policy, with Saudi Arabia and China among the worst offenders, though the West is timid in condemning them because of their oil and economic power. And there are plenty of other countries that could be added to this list: Malaysia, Laos, Algeria, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and so on. Open Doors publishes a 'World Watch List' with an analysis of how bad it is for Christians in various countries.

On Sunday we celebrated Pentecost in Yeovil with several churches getting together, and remembering the day when all the people of the known world heard the gospel in their own languages. Today there are languages where the gospel is rarely spoken, the Christian voice is being suppressed or driven out.

So do something: pray, write to your MP or to Gordon Brown citing the Sunday Times article or the Open Doors research. Speak up for your brothers and sisters.

u2charist video

here's the BBC report into the U2charist held in Lincoln yesterday. See if you can guess which of the 2 folk interviewed are members of my family. And no, it wasn't this lady on the right, though she was clearly enjoying herself......

(PS if the link doesn't work then do a search on the BBC site for U2charist and click the video link in the top right hand corner of the search results. )

Image and Reality

Thinking about the 'Spirit of Life' item on tomorrows Songs of Praise, I was struck by the contrast between the presenter you see on screen, and the way people are when they aren't in the public eye. Diane Louise Jordan always comes across as smiley, warm, enthusiastic and full of life. Seeing her getting ready for filming in the Cathedral she seemed quite serious, obviously getting mentally ready for the shoot, rehearsing lines, or whatever presenters do when they aren't presenting. But the contrast between the public and non-public person was quite marked.

This came across a couple of days later with an item on the news about Gordon Brown. The camera followed him as he waited outside the door of a press conference for his entry to be announced. Prior to entry he was serious, unsmiling, focused. Once his name was announced he strode in smiling, head up, confident, energetic.

With the omnipresence of the media, I guess our politicians know that if they don't manage their public image, the media will do it for them. How much is this necessary, or even right, for ministers, worship leaders and preachers? There's all sorts of conflicting motivations at work here:

- The call to be ourselves: God doesn't churn out robot church leaders, the people he calls he calls for a reason, because their combination of personality, gifts, experience and passions is something He can work with in church leadership. Just as the personality of the prophets comes through in their writings, so the personality of the 'public figures' in church shouldn't be suppressed either.

- But: there's also a need to rein yourself in. A preacher probably shouldn't be airing every doubt they have to the congregation, and there are bits of our personality which get in the way when leading worship. The aim of a worship leader is that people focus on God, not on themselves, so projecting your personality too strongly isn't a great idea. Also, leading worship, preaching etc. requires injections of energy: if you're trying to encourage people to offer thanks to God and celebrate his love, it's probably not going to work if you do it in a dull monotone with a solemn face.

- Part of being a leader is servanthood, which involves putting yourself last and others first. That must include personality: though I want to talk, the needs of others require that I listen; though I want to have a particular type of music, the needs of others require that we have something different, and so on. That requires, again, reining in your personal preferences in order to minister better to others.

- There is a danger that in all of this we get lost. We spend so long leading others in worship, reading the Bible for what we can teach others, etc., that our own walk with God gets lost. If our regular practice of worship is one which involves, to some degree, not being ourselves, then what does that do to us spiritually in the long term?

And that's to say nothing of folk who gather to worship week by week. I think the idea of 'Sunday best' is on the way out, and together with getting dressed up in your best clothes goes the idea of putting on your best appearance for the sake of others. But if we come before God with a fake self, again, what does that do to us?

A few months ago I was really struck by a quote in a book: a person saying he would have achieved holiness if he could be the same person in every setting. There's great wisdom in that - how to be truly ourselves, with God and others. To be a person where image and reality are one. Just like Jesus, the icon (image) of the invisible God (reality).

Spirit of Life on Songs of Praise

The Spirit of Life event at Coventry Cathedral (see previous posts) is featured on Songs of Praise this week. For the factsheet on the programme see here. It's on at 5.10pm on Sunday, so provided the Yeovil-Blackpool playoff doesn't go into extra time.....

U2 leading worship

In anticipation of the U2charist this Sunday, I know the band themselves aren't going to be there, but here's a clip of Bono as worship leader. Worth watching to the end for what he says in the last minute or so.

mission conferences

It must be that time of year, lots of mission conferences coming up:

11th National Anglican Church Planting Conference, 4th Oct in London or 10th Oct in Sheffield, click here for details and a link to a booking leaflet (warning - will take ages to download on dialup)

'A New Vision for Catholic Mission' at Westcott College, Cambridge, 17-19th September. Click here for details

A couple of conferences on Urban mission, one hosted by the Eden Project in Manchester, which has been one of the major mission projects in the UK in the last 10 years. Link here.

I've also got a flier about a Rural Fresh Expressions conference near Leicester on September 13-14th, the website referred to on the flier is http://www.ruralmissions.org.uk/ but I can't find any reference to the conference on the website.... I've emailed them to ask about this and will post an update here when I get it. Meanwhile their resources section has some interesting looking stuff.

All the goals from Yeovils win against Forest

The picture quality is not great, but who cares? Come on Glovers! Prayers before the play off final at 8pm on Friday at Huish Park, led by my good friend Rev. Jim Pearce.