It strikes me that it’s worth asking whether the following claim can also be applied to our own cultural context:
…the greatest missiological challenge the American church faces is not, say, the Islamic world but rather the lack of critical contextualization of the gospel in much of American cultural and political life.
Vinoth Ramachandra, Globalization, Nationalism and Religious Resurgence, in Globalizing Theology: Belief and Practice in an Era of World Christianity (ed Ott & Netland)
Commenting on Jesus’ lack of interaction with Herod and his ways, Eugene Peterson notes that,
Jesus ignored the world of power and accomplishment that was brilliantly on display all around him. He chose to work on the margins of society, with unimportant people, giving particular attention to the weak, the disturbed, the powerless. (The Jesus Way, p.204)
There’s something to chew on.
It’s only been a day and a night but I thought it might be worthwhile jotting a few thoughts down on some of the things I’ve noticed and can learn from for ministry and for life:
i. People have not just been professional (which they have, and that’s important) but kind and caring too.
ii. I have been carefully listened to, with deliberate attention. And that gives a real sense of dignity and worth
iii. People have smiled, even when my oddball sense of humour has left them slightly perplexed. We’re human beings together and that feels good.
iv. My needle phobia has been treated sympathetically and without any sense of ‘you big baby’ (which may well be true!). I’ve been handled simply as the person I am, and to be taken seriously as such.
v. A simple cup of tea matters a great deal!
Of course there have been variations to the above, very insignificantly, but the positives have been very noticeable and I’m thankful not just to benefit from them but, I hope, to learn from them too.
In Mark 11:25, Jesus says that if you are praying, and you realise that you have something against someone, you must forgive him or her right there. Does that mean you should not confront the person? No, you should, since Jesus in Matthew 18 - as well as Paul in Galatians 6 and elsewhere - tells Christians that if someone wrongs them, they should go to the person and discuss their sin. Wait, we say. The Bible says we are supposed to forgive people and then go and confront them? Yes! The reason we are surprised by this is almost always because we confront people who have wronged us as a way of paying them back. By telling them off, we are actually getting revenge. They made us feel bad and now we are going to make them feel bad, too. But this is absolutely deadly. The person you are confronting knows you are doing payback, and he or she will either be devastated or infuriated - or both. You are not really telling the truth for their sake; you are telling it for your sake, and the fruit of that will be grief, bitterness, and despair.
Jesus gives us the solution. He says that Christians, knowing that they live only by the forgiving grace of God, must do the work of forgiving wrongdoers in their hearts and then go to confront them. If you do that, the confrontation will be so different.
Tim & Kathy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, p.164
This would make a great alternative discussion-starter about preaching/ministry at your next team/fraternal meeting…
Why do traditional paper books remain so popular, especially for deep, immersive reading? Are some people simply too stubborn and nostalgic to adapt to new technologies? Perhaps it’s because paper books are themselves a highly sophisticated technology, one that’s uniquely good at stimulating focus and concentration.
But…if that other world is once admitted, how can it, except by sensual or bustling pre-occupations, be kept in the background of our minds? How can the “rest of Christianity” - what is this “rest”? - be disentangled from it? How can we untwine this idea, if once admitted, from our present experience, in which, even before we believed, so many things at least looked like “bright shoots of everlastingness”?
Letters to Malcolm (Chiefly on Prayer), page 120
Seth Godin has written a stirring piece, The short game, the long game and the infinite game. It’s worth a read and then thinking about how it might apply to church life and ministry:
The short game: characterised by an events-driven mentality, solely focussed on getting people in through the turnstiles. Apply inordinate pressure for quick responses. Sees unchurched people simply as fodder.
The long game: more focussed on building meaningful relationships, gaining trust and establishing credibility. Living visibly good lives in the community and creating/taking opportunities to tell the gospel, with a view to reaching others for Christ.
The infinite game: much like the long game, in essence, but without any sense that all this is simply to impress unbelievers with the gospel and a gospel-changed life. Doing good because good is…good. Establishing trust because trust is foundational for stability. Sharing the gospel because it is loving to do so, not because gospel success is everything.
The interface of the long and infinite games is intriguing. The differences between them might seem slight but, although subtle, they go deep. In the infinite game, holiness is an end in itself, not the means to one. Joy in the Lord is simply a fruit of the Spirit, not a requisite for evangelism. Loving community is reflective of the life of God himself, not just another strategy to authenticate verbal witness.
What game is your church playing?
Some people’s experience of Jesus is very striking. A woman by a well is told everything about her life by a stranger who is Jesus. On account of that, others in her town then also believe in him (John 4:39). It’s a wonderful outcome, but it isn’t ideal.
Far better if their faith is located more directly and personally in Jesus; far more secure. And that is, in fact, what happens:
he stayed two more days. And because of his words many more became believers. The said to the woman, ‘We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Saviour of the world.’ (John 4:40,41)
Your story of Jesus’ way in your life may indeed be memorable. Tell it to others, but always urge them to go beyond your story to the great Author himself. Your testimony may encourage them to believe but it cannot sustain their faith. They need Jesus.
(This feeds into a larger discussion about ‘signs’ in John’s Gospel but that discussion is for another time)
Some days you come across interesting articles from pretty disparate sources that cover similar ground but from different starting points. Here’s a couple of pieces that showed up in my Feedly feed today:
i. Phil Monroe talking about if/when/how counsellors should talk about themselves to those they’re looking to help. Citing some recent research, he concludes (with appropriate caveats) that "when a client perceives great affinity/similarity with a counselor, they rate that counselor higher. Also, when a counselor reveals something difficult or painful (a vulnerability?), it makes them more human to their clients."
ii. Michael Simmons writing on the HBR blog about how expressed vulnerability creates connection, has this takeaway: "if we share the ups and downs of our human experience in the right way in the right context, we build deeper connections."
(nb: don’t pass-over the early part of Michael’s article, where he speaks of the challenge when someone close to us outperforms us in a task that is relevant to us. Worth thinking about it in the light of Barnabas encouraging Saul in Acts)
…we are greatly indebted to [the Freudians]. The did expose the cowardly evasions of really useful self-knowledge which we had all been practising from the beginning of the world. But there is also a merely morbid and fidgety curiosity about one’s self - the slop-over from modern psychology - which surely does no good? The unfinished picture would so like to jump off the easel and have a look at itself! And analysis doesn’t cure that. we all know people who have undergone it and seem to have made themselves a lifelong subject of research ever since.
CS Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, p.34
Eugene Peterson has this to say about Abraham’s life of faith that led into the test/call to sacrifice his son. They are among the most searching, most solemn and most compelling paragraphs I have read in a long while:
But “faith” is not commonly used in that hard-travelling way. More often it is cliched into a feeling or fantasy or disposition - a kind of wish upwards, an inclination indistinguishable from a whim and easily dissipated by a gust of wind or the distraction of a pretty face.
And so the way of faith requires repeated testing so that we can discern whether we are dealing with the living God or some fantasy or illusion we have cooked up in a mulligan stew of lust and anger, envy and sloth, pride and greed. The testing of faith involves continuous honing, re-orienting, re-adjustment, timely rescues from self-deceit, gracious deliverances from the devil’s illusions. The test is conducted by means of sacrifice, sacrifice that in Abraham’s life of faith has its fullest exposition in the Binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah
Sacrifice exposes spiritual fantasy as a masquerade of faith. Sacrifice scraps any illusion, no matter how pious, that is spun by the devil. Sacrifice plucks out the avaricious eye. Sacrifice lops off the grasping hand. Sacrifice is a readiness to interrupt whatever we are doing and build an altar, bind whatever we happen to be carrying with us at the moment, place it on the altar, and see what God wills to do with it.
Abraham was a veteran in the sacrifice business. After leaving Ur and Haran his first named activity consisted in building altars at which sacrifices were made. Shechem, Bethel and Hebron are named. Each altar became a place of prayer: “Is this the way God commanded and promised, or is this a version of the command and promise that I have customised to my convenience?” At each altar he learned a little more, acquired a deeper discernment, a sharper insight into God’s command and promise in contrast to his innate wilfulness and indulgence but also in contrast to the anti-faith world of Ur with its imposing ziggurat. Altars built at many a crossroads, a life of repeated sacrifices, each sacrifice an act of discernment, separating the chaff of illusion from the wheat of promise.
The spare reticence of the narration invites a participating imagination - all that leaving, over and over. Habits of relinquishment became deeply ingrained in Abraham. They become deeply ingrained by in us as we read. Leaving Ur and Haran, leaving Shechem and Bethel, leaving Egypt and Gerar, leaving Beersheba. Leaving, leaving, leaving. But every leaving was also a lightening of self, a futher cleansing of the toxins of acquisition. A life of getting was slowly but surely replaced by a life of receiving - receiving the promises, receiving the covenants, receiving the three strangers, receiving Isaac, receiving circumcision, receiving a ram in the thicket - being transformed into a life that abandons self-sovereignty and embraces God-sovereignty. Abraham did that for a hundred years: “sacrifice/Is slow as a funeral procession/In rush-hour traffic, the sort of word/Other words pass, honking..”
In the process of leaving behind, Abraham became more, gradually but certainly realising that relinquishment is prerequisite to fulfilment, that letting go of a cramped self-will opened up to an expansive God-willed life. Faith.
When we travel the way of Abraham this happens: the word “sacrifice” is gradually transformed from a sour whine of resentment to a robust embrace of affirmation. Every time Abraham left one place, the road lengthened and the landscape widened. Mount Moriah would provide him his largest experience of God. On Mount Moriah Abraham was empty enough of Abraham to take in salvation whole. Faith.
Just: wow. From The Jesus Way, pages 49.50.
CS Lewis on 3 dangers when agreeing that religion is not just a department of life:
the truth that religion as a department has really no right to exist can be misunderstood. Some will conclude that this illegitimate department ought to be abolished. Others will think, coming nearer to the truth, that it ought to cease to be departmental by being extended to the whole of life, but will misinterpret this. They will think it means that more and more of our secular transactions should be “opened with prayer”, that a wearisomely explicit pietism should infect our talk, that there should be no more cakes and ale. A third sort, well aware that God still rules a very small part of their lives, and that “a departmental religion” is no good, may despair. It would have to be carefully explained to them that to be “still only a part” is not the same as being a permanent department. In all of us God “still” holds only a part. (Letters to Malcolm, p.31)
The second danger is, it seems to me, a very present one as we enter what some have called post-Christendom. And dangerous it is, since it rests content with a nominal faith, baptised through accommodation, that deflects suffering with Jesus, outside the camp.
The third is seldom far away for those with over-sensitive consciences, of which there seem to be significant numbers within reformed churches. That fact in itself ought to give us pause for thought.
Bullets do not save time. Memos save time. Presentations aren’t about the most concise exposition of facts, they are about changing minds.
Some really wise advice from CS Lewis on wanting to re-live the blessings of your earlier Christian experience:
Many religious people lament that the first fervours of their conversion have died away. They think - sometimes rightly, but not, I believe, always - that their sins account for this. They may even try by pitiful efforts of will to revive what now seem to have been the golden days. But were those fervours - the operative word is those - ever intended to last?
It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore. And how should the Infinite repeat Himself? All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them once.
And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing. “Unless a seed die…”
(Letters to Malcolm - Chiefly on Prayer; p.26f)
What is genuine progress? CS Lewis offers an answer…
Dust off your notebooks and pens. A new study finds laptops make note-taking so easy it’s actually ineffective.
My parents and younger sister were coming to visit me during my first term at college. A friend asked if I would be taking them into lunch with me. When I said ‘no’ he asked me, with a grin, “What’s the matter? Are you ashamed of your family?”
Maybe I was, a little. And perhaps I was slightly defensive of them. Either way, my friend had a point. And I still remember it all these years later (over 32 years later, to be exact).
Tony Morgan suggests in his article, 10 symptoms of an inwardly-focussed Church, that one reason Christians might not invite others to church is that, "your services and ministries are not designed to reach people outside the church". Allow me to be a little more blunt than Tony: some of us probably feel somewhat embarrassed by the church. After all, the singing is often flat, the music group sometimes malfunctions, the sermons don’t always hit the spot, some of our ways seem quaint, the building is old and, not to put too fine a point on it, some of our folks are ever so slightly …. odd. The pastor included.
And, so, we maintain that we’d be much more likely to invite our friends and colleagues along if we could be confident that, every week, the sermon would be powerful and engaging, the singing inspiring and the whole atmosphere welcoming and affirming. Since we don’t have that confidence, we’re reluctant to invite others. We would - honest - if the church was different.
Out of our family context, I probably was rather embarrassed by my family. After all, Dad could be over-friendly and Mam could (in her insecurity) say the most alarming things. But in their own home, their idiosyncrasies were lessened, simply because my friends would know without a shadow of a doubt that Dad was warm and funny and that Mam was caring and deeply interested in them. We didn’t live in a fashionable house; Mam aspired to more but had to make do with what we had. But what we had, and what friends discovered, was a caring home, in which Mam would gladly feed them - her cooking wan’t cordon bleu but we were well-fed all the same. And that’s what they remembered longest; the idiosyncrasies faded, the warmth remained.
The ever-helpful Emma Scrivener wrote recently of the church, encouraging us to ‘love the one you’re with’. Her article concluded with these challenging words:
If Jesus wasn’t too good for ‘local church’ then we’re not either. Of course there are things that can be improved: and it’s good to talk these through. But there’s a big difference between running something down and strengthening it from within. Our churches don’t need our wishlists, they need our willingness to plug in and serve.
The church will always have a slightly odd feel to it - how could it be otherwise when it is make-up of such a disparate group of needy people? It will struggle to feel cutting-edge. But what we can offer is genuine warmth for others and the steady, if unspectacular, ministry of God’s Word - the Word that can nourish and bring to salvation.
At the end of the day, there’s nothing embarrassing in that.
The perspective of Joseph on his sufferings at the hands of his brothers is quite stunning. When he reveals himself to them they are (to paraphrase slightly) gobsmacked. And terrified. But Joseph immediately says to them,
"Do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you." (Gen. 45:5)
And, again, a moment or two later, he affirms,
"God sent me ahead of you to preserve a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So, then, it was not you who sent me here, but God." (Gen. 45:7-8)
Long years of suffering had the power to foster a bitterness that would make his heart an acrid, barren place, Instead, Joseph displays a breathtaking grasp of God’s sovereign ways and demonstrates a humble willingness to embrace God’s purposes through his suffering and, so, to embrace his brothers in forgiving grace. It is his readiness to forgive that carves out for his brothers an opportunity to demonstrate repentance and so to receive that forgiveness.
There are real lessons here for all who have suffered at the hands of others (and who hasn’t?). Lessons learned not in a moment but forged over long years in the crucible.
And this whole scene leads us, of course and with great power, to see afresh the glory of the submission and humility of our Lord Jesus on the cross. How deeply and joyously glad we can be for his words, "Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing." And then to pray, ‘Make me, too, O Lord, a channel of your peace.’