Privilege or Protection: Which way for the Church in 2016?

Blog published on Christian Today. 

Last Minute Plea – Why not going to church this Christmas is like having a Reception without a Wedding.

Christmas Eve afternoon and the remainder of my day will be structured around the Christmas Eve service at my home church. For others Christingles, Family Carol services and Watchnights will be complemented tomorrow by a Christmas Day morning service. These times to pause, and reflect on the story behind the tinsel and glitter, give substance to what otherwise could easily become a rather superficial binge of materialism and self-indulgence.

Indeed the relentless march over recent decades of the Christ-less Christmas is, I’m sure, one reason that the December festivities are wearing increasingly thin for many in our society. You see, if Christmas is just another excuse for a party it’s fated to just feel like more of the same in our affluent Western society. Other than the present giving will the next 48 hours be that much different from any other weekend of heavy drinking and eating too much? In the West of Scotland Christmas is just one of numerous excuses throughout the year for a bit of self-indulgence.  

Without Christ and hollowed out of its spiritual truth Christmas just becomes a Reception without a Wedding. And like all celebrations without something to actually celebrate it quickly becomes jaded and even burdensome.

So this Christmas go to church and ponder – ponder the thought that in the depths of darkness a light began to shine. Ponder the thought that in a world of taking - God gave us the most precious thing He had. Ponder the thought that in the dreary succession of human failures something broke the cycle. Ponder the thought that in Bethlehem 2000 years ago something so profound happened that your life now can be different.

Then you’ll have a real reason for the lights, the gifts and the celebrations.

How silently, how silently,
The wondrous Gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still,
The dear Christ enters in.

The Long and Winding Road (into vocational Christian Ministry).

An article written for the Pathways Conference website. For more info and to book a place go to: http://www.pathwaysconference.org/home.html

I guess there are some folks who in a moment of ‘blinding light’ just know that their future should be some form of vocational Christian ministry. For most, however, certainly the great majority of people I met at Bible College, that point of clarity came at the end of a long and winding road of prayer, discussions, reflections, doubts and encouragements, followed by more prayer, discussions…etc

Personally the impulse to serve God vocationally was in my heart throughout my 20s and early 30s. I was heavily involved in Christian service to the point that my church life had almost become the equivalent of a second job. Yet despite the desire and the practical engagement I never quite felt confident enough to put myself forward. I was anxious that to do so would be presumptuous or that I might end up in a situation that God didn’t want me to be in. I had encouragements in the sense of being asked to be involved in church leadership and felt that my contributions were generally seen as positive – but there never seemed to be that ‘clincher moment’ when the doubts vanished and becoming a vocational Christian worker just became the clear-cut thing that I should do.

So what made the difference between then and now, between working for Strathclyde Passenger Transport and working for the church, between constantly hesitating and making those first concrete steps towards full-time vocational ministry?

I was challenged

If there was a key moment it came when a church pastor I knew who took me out for lunch. As he listened to my ruminations he challenged me. I remember his words clearly, ‘Andy, sorting out transport in the West of Scotland is an important and needed task but there are doubtless many able to do it – there are few, however, ready and willing to do full-time Christian ministry, the need is huge and life is short.’. It was a moment of challenge that cut through a lot of ‘the fog’ I had felt up to then about my future. 

I was confirmed

The next crucial step was getting feedback from mature and experienced church leaders. Friends will generally be nice to you and tend to say things that affirm you – so getting some objective and impartial guidance is essential. Your own church leaders must be the first ‘port of call’ for this. They know you best and are the people who will have seen your ministry work first-hand. For myself and my wife it was a meeting with our elders to tell them what was on our heart and to hear what they thought about it. This primary input of my local church leaders was also added to and helped by speaking to other Christian workers and learning from their experiences of vocational ministry. All of which combined to broaden my understanding about the realities of vocational ministry and my suitability for it.

I was counselled

Stepping out of a secure/pensioned job, at the age of 33 with a wife, child and another on the way was a big challenge. I was convinced that if the rest of my life was going to be vocational ministry I needed to invest in some training at the outset. But where to go, how to pay for it and, especially as someone from an Independent church, where would I end up? 

For example when I first figured out how much I’d need to raise to go to Bible College – I felt sick and honestly thought that was the end of that idea! But actually, I wasn’t the first person to have faced these challenges. So with a big intake of faith and with the encouragement and advice of others, who had faced those challenges and been down that road before me, it did work out – it was possible.

So wherever you are on that ‘long and winding road’ book your space at the Pathways Conference for…

·         CHALLENGE – what needs done?

·         CONFIRMATION – should you do it?

·         COUNSEL – how you can do it?

The Lord's Prayer and NSS Hypocrisy

Why the National Secular Society and not Cinema is the real enemy of freedom.

After a week of feeling hugely tongue-tied and depressed, Christians (myself included) have at last got a news story they can get excited about. The banning of a Church of England advert in which the Lord’s Prayer is recited has got us all back hitting the keyboards.

It is a story that I confess to being conflicted about. On the one hand my initial reaction was to be outraged at this seemingly petty, draconian and highly partial censorship. If anything encapsulated the suffocating PC culture of contemporary Western society then surely this was it. However, further reflection has tempered that indignation and now I’m not so sure that either Digital Cinema Media (the agency who decided not to allow its screening) were so wrong, or that Christian’s are targeting their protest in the right place.

Firstly Christians can’t have it both ways. Some have argued that the advert is so innocuous that it’s ridiculous to ban it. After all the Lord’s Prayer is so absorbed into our culture through school assemblies, national ceremonies, and Cliff Richard records that it’s like banning an advert for including a Shakespeare quotation. Well if that is the case its prohibition is hardly a great loss for the Gospel – anaemic and toothless dittys aren’t going to change anyone. Alternatively, others argue that it’s brimming with radical punch and counter-cultural challenge (the problem of course is that without ‘a preacher’ most people just won’t get how subversive and challenging it is). But if it is such theological dynamite why are we surprised that a secular cinema chain doesn’t want it (especially just now)?

As Christians we should have some sympathy with DCM – they are in an invidious position. Could they really accept a Church of England advert and then decline one from the Church of Scientology or the Mormons (and these are the groups with the big marketing bucks). Do Christians want to take their kids to see Frozen 2 and sit through promos extolling the virtues of Islam or listening to prayers offered to Hare Krishna? 

Rather Christians should reflect on the comments from the National Secular Society President Terry Sanderson who said...

"The Church of England is arrogant to imagine it has an automatic right to foist its opinions upon a captive audience who have paid good money for a completely different experience”

"The Church does not hesitate to ban things that it deems inappropriate from its own church halls - things like yoga. The cinema chains are simply exercising the same right."

And actually he has a point – and it is exactly the point that Christians need to quote back relentlessly again the NSS and its allies in order to expose their hypocrisy in this area and to make the case for genuine equality. After all where was the NSS spokesman speaking up for the rights of the Asher’s bakery when they refused an order to make a cake with a pro-Same Sex marriage statement on it? Well surprise surprise the NSS were in the vanguard of those condemning Ashers and insisting that businesses should not have any rights to decline such orders.

Surely, to be fair, the right of one business not to promote views about prayer that some might find offensive – should be extended to another business not wanting to promote views on marriage that some others might offensive.  This isn’t after-all an issue of legality, both prayer and same-sex marriage are legal, it’s an issue about the discretion of businesses not to associate themselves with third party beliefs. Neither DCM or Ashers are refusing to provide services to Christians or Gay people – they just don’t want to promote their causes.

The fact that the NSS support DCM while condemning Ashers simply reveals that its pronouncements are not at all about equality or fairness – but about waging a vendetta against Christianity wherever its sees an opportunity.

So Christians should leave off DCM and actually defend its rights on this matter. Instead they should be holding the NSS to account and using its own words concerning DCM and the ‘Lord’s Prayer advert’ in order to fight for genuine freedoms and equality in the UK today. 

Transgender: The New Frontier of a Changing Culture

‘Back to the Future' day has passed with lots of discussion not just about how well the film predicted 2015, but also about the changes we can look forward to in another 25 years’ time. While much was made of the technological changes the biggest surprises for Marty, fast forwarding from the 1980’s, would surely have been the social ones. For without doubt the biggest single cultural change has been the new (First) world order regarding sexuality. In just two decades homosexuality has moved from the margins of society to having mainstream cultural recognition and indeed celebration. The move to legal civil partnerships and then to same-sex marriage has been remarkable – for it to have happened in such a small space of time is really quite astonishing.

It is a reminder that culturally anything really is possible and that the societal norms of 2040 may be staggeringly removed from those we assume at the present time. So are there any clues as to where we might be heading next? I suspect that one good indicator of forthcoming cultural change would be to see what movie and television projects are currently being pitched to media companies. After all the current slew of programmes and films generating debate and shaping popular thinking must have started life, in some cases, several years ago.

Transgender the new frontier

What is clear is that with homosexuality firmly established in the mainstream the new frontier for culture re-shapers is now gender itself. Recent months have seen a succession of stories and programmes in the media concerning transgender. BBC 5-Live interviewed an 11 year old girl starting high school as a boy, Louis Theroux has been looking at transgender kids, Channel 4 have a series of documentaries running on the subject, a new transgender sitcom ‘Boy meets Girl’ has been commissioned by BBC2, transgender is now an ‘East Enders’ storyline, and Hollywood A-lister Eddie Redmayne starred in this year’s release ‘The Danish Girl’, the story of an early pioneer of transgender surgery.

The approach to the issue is the same in all these presentations – to be supportive, to show the bravery of those involved (which many of them undoubtedly are), to render churlish and ignorant any voices of opposition, to win the sympathy of the viewer and to make it mainstream. It is no surprise then that ‘transphobia’ is becoming the latest addition to popular vocabulary or that, as Germaine Greer has shown, it’s the latest flashpoint in the debate over free speech.

The New Me

Transgender feelings aren’t a new phenomenon but the advance of modern surgery and hormone treatments have made it possible to turn such desires into a reality (of sorts). However, lying behind the medical issue is a much deeper philosophical issue concerning the nature of humanness itself. It is the notion that sexuality and in this case physicality are ‘plastic’ aspects of personhood. That is, ‘I’ am not to be defined by my gender when it comes either to relationships or who ‘I’ actually am. So my physicality is arbitrary – just a random imposition of biology which may or may not suit me and, like a set of clothes that I may find hideous, ought to be changeable.

So on current trends it is entirely feasible that by 2040 many children will routinely dress and attend school in a gender different from their biology. Gender based language and pronouns may be phased out in public life. Names may increasingly be unisex as giving a child a ‘gender specific’ name will be frowned upon or seen as constraining them. Switching gender identity between certain situations or phases of life might become commonplace.

Responding to a Cultural Tsunami

For Bible-believing Christians this is another wave of the tsunami of cultural change experienced over recent decades. More and more churches are having to adjust to and work out how to interact with transgender situations. But how should we respond? A question that might, understandably, fill us with a sense of dread and/or weariness. After all we look back at the campaigns against Civil Partnerships and Same Sex Marriage and see how they were swept aside. Like the boy crying ‘wolf’ we feel our protestations have worn thin in the ears of those around us – especially as, for the time being at least, society has not collapsed into chaos despite having ignored us.

Well there are various ways we could go. One would be to demand legislation to prohibit people from making transgender changes, at the very least to lobby against any moves to accommodate transgender people in mainstream society. The two-fold problem with this approach is in trying to impose a Christian worldview on a non-Christian society. Secondly, and precisely because of the first reason, it just won’t ‘wash’ with a fragmented neo-pagan society of competing interests.

We could of course do nothing, say nothing and just resign ourselves to further inexorable moral confusion. That, however, would be an abdication of our responsibility to be ‘salt and light’ in the world, to seek the lost, and to hold out the 'word of life' in a floundering and confused generation. So how do we stand for Biblical truth without presenting ourselves as being oppressive towards transgender people or anyone else? 

Let me suggest we firstly have to recognise that there are those around us who genuinely struggle with their gender. For such their gender is an issue of confusion and sometimes real pain and unhappiness. We have to accept that science and the government have given such people the option to radically alter their physicality and to live in an outwardly changed gender. However, that people have those options should not be our first point of concern.

There is an alternative

Rather than a ‘slam it and ban it’ approach we need to lovingly but also boldly make the case that there is another way someone can go in such situations. As Christians we want to say that there is an alternative to fear and self-loathing, to injections in the stomach, drastic surgery, relationship trauma, family distress, ongoing physical and mental health problems and many of the other not untypical consequences of pursuing gender change.

That alternative, of course, is the Gospel. The Gospel that reveals the God who made each person – who made them male and who made them female. The God who didn’t make a mistake when He did that. The Gospel that explains that we live in a fallen world and because of that there is no aspect of our humanness that isn’t messed up to a greater or lesser degree. The Gospel that shows that God is nonetheless committed to recovering this world and restoring men and women to being what He intended them to be – good and glorious, happy in their own skins and able to enjoy Him for ever. The Gospel that doesn’t oppress anyone, but offers men and women a way to find their true and most satisfying identity in Jesus Christ whether in 1989, 2015 or 2040.

Against Martha-ism

‘Pastors, don’t be a Martha’, was the call to pastors at the first Scottish FIEC Pastoral Retreat held in August this year.

Recognising that so often in ministry the first casualty of busyness is the pastor’s own quality time with the Lord, this new venture was a chance for pastors and ministry workers to take some time out for spiritual refreshment. For pastors constantly ‘giving out’ there is an ever present danger of becoming dry and professional in ministry. So taking time to focus on their own soul and be ‘recharged’ in their love for the Lord is not a luxury for pastors, but crucial if they are to be spiritually fruitful.

In all nine pastors gathered along with Richard Underwood (FIEC Pastoral Ministries Director) and myself for 24 hours of fellowship, Biblical encouragement and private devotional time.

After each meal the group gathered together for some devotional thoughts from Richard and me. Richard unpacked some of the lessons from the story of Mary and Martha, and encouraged the group with Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3, ‘that Christ may dwell in your hearts’. I reflected on Psalm 32 and the importance of confession and blessings of forgiveness. Each of these times included discussion and group prayer.

Otherwise the Retreat was unprogrammed in order to give the majority of the time for private prayer, reading and personal reflection. Held in the Faith Mission College in Edinburgh those attending were able to use the college facilities including the library, study rooms, the adjacent bookshop and café, along with the student lounge and private bedrooms. A nearby park also offered somewhere to go a walk and ‘smell the roses’.

Having a group together also gave the chance for pastors to chat, share wisdom and pray for each other. The opportunity to be able to share and speak privately with fellow pastors is one way ‘group Retreats’ can be a particular blessing.   

The benefit of FIEC organising a Retreat like this is in helping pastors to do something they want to do but often struggle to schedule or keep to. The reality for many pastors is that dates marked off as ‘Quiet Days’ often aren’t taken because other workload feels more pressing at the time. Further because the pastor is often the only one involved in such diary commitments it’s all too easy to cancel or postpone them. It can also be a struggle to find somewhere suitable for such times (home or church office are rarely ‘distraction free’). Hence the value of being able to book something in advance with others that is set-up especially for that purpose.

All attending have been hugely positive about the Retreat and have expressed their hope that it could be become a regular event in the Scottish FIEC calendar.  

So please give thanks for the blessing and encouragement experienced by all those attending. Pray that its positive effects will be ongoing in the lives of the pastors and their churches. Pray that personal devotional time will be a regular and kept part of pastor’s schedules in all our fellowships.

PERGAMUM - A REAL CHURCH

Introduction to sermon on Pergamum (Revelation 2:12-17). These were real churches - not mythical. In another time they could have been any of our churches....

It’s fair to say that Pergamum Evangelical Church, or PEC as its members refer to it, has had a bit of a rollercoaster ride since it was founded back in the 60’s. It began during the first great church planting movement which saw churches established in all the surrounding provinces. There had been a lot of talk at the time concerning how strategically important PEC would be – being in the regional capital and on the doorstep of government offices and the political ‘movers & shakers’.

Since then it has kept going – solid and stable. Not a household name like Ephesus with its reputation for strong Biblical training, it doesn't have the dynamism of Sardis with its endless ministry initiatives, and certainly doesn’t have the resources of Laodicea which was now planning its fifth extension in 20 years.

PEC’s building is just on the edge of the city centre but in comparison with the Diana Shrines and the glitzy Zeusian Temple it was always going to struggle to be noticed. The city feast days were always awkward – the congregation feeling as if they were only people in the whole city not joining the celebrations at the ‘Temple of Rome & Augustus’. Indeed it was over that very issue that PEC faced its toughest challenge.

Although not a large fellowship enough money had been pledged to employ one of the founding members as a Community Worker. Antipas gave up his job as an Administrator in the Pro-counsel’s office and started building up relationships with local groups. Over a few years he became well known and his work helping in local schools was gladly accepted. Not everyone was a fan though and maliciously, although it was never proved, Antipas was publically asked to take part in one of ceremonies pledging allegiance to Caesar as Lord.

Well of course Antipas made his apologies and declined. But that wasn’t enough, next thing there were calls for an enquiry: What is this man doing in schools, what is he telling folks in the town, who do these Christians think they are in snubbing Caesar and not complying with our ‘Roman values’?

Things started to get really nasty. Letters in the papers, questions raised in the city council. Antipas was pulled in for questioning. After several weeks an ultimatum was delivered – come to the Pledge Ceremony, tone down your ‘Jesus propaganda’ (as they now called it), and we’ll all move on. Of course, Antipas couldn’t agree to that, it would have totally undermined his Gospel convictions and ministry.

Things then went from bad to worse, the church building vandalised and its members harassed in the streets. More accusations were made against Antipas: he was an intolerant fanatic, he was radicalising young people in the city against Rome, and furthermore Christians were clearly a threat to the very stability and security of society. Antipas was advised to leave - but he had always hated bullies so refused.

Nobody is quite sure what happened, or least nobody will admit to knowing, but Antipas’ body was found hanged in a local park. Friends said they thought he’d been beaten – but the Coroner’s report made no mention of that. The authorities immediately called it suicide and closed the case. Those who knew Antipas - knew taking his own life would have been totally against everything he believed.

An uneasy peace descended – the fuss about PEC fizzled out. PEC continued to meet as it had always done, although the numbers dropped considerably for a period.

Of late though things feel different in PEC and not everyone is comfortable with some of the changes. Copies of a new book by T.R. Nicolas have been circulating and a few folks have been reading it together in their Small Group. Well produced, with bite sized chapters and heart-warming anecdotes the book: ‘Change or Die - Getting Ready for Church in the Second Century’, is having quite an impact.  Indeed there are increasing calls for a more relaxed and open line to be taken with local Temples and there are moves to start having an inter-faith prayer forum for the city. 

The elders don’t seem quite sure how to respond, especially as they face an increasing number of pastoral issues – there seems to be a big increase in the number of members visiting the Temple prostitutes.

I wonder what Jesus would make of it all?