Counting the Cost of Planting

The FIEC have put out an episode of their podcast entitled When Church Plants Don't Work, with Dan Steel.  Dan has done a lot of work on church planting, and the ups and downs thereof, and I think has some really useful insights as a result.  For the sake of fair disclosure, it's worth pointing out that I was the pastor of the church plant from Dan's church that didn't work out - so I also have some thoughts on the subject.

One of the most useful things in the chat on the podcast is the recognition that church plants 'fail' for a variety of reasons, and whilst there are many mistakes that we can learn from and try to do better in the future, there are also situations in which - it just didn't work.  That has to be okay as an outcome.  If it isn't, we will become highly risk averse, and ultimately we won't plant churches in the places that need them most.  It would help a great deal, as the boys on the podcast point out, if we were prepared to tell the stories of 'failure' as well as those of 'success' - and let me just take a little swipe at the cheery triumphalism of much evangelicalism that makes that impossible.

There is just one supplementary point I'd add to that, which is that recognising that 'failure' is a possible outcome needs much more serious counting of the cost for all involved in church planting.

I hope we know that there is a cost involved.  If a church is remotely functioning, then it is a family, and it is the community around which life is structured.  To leave a church, then, even to go and do something potentially exciting like planting is really costly.  Relationships don't need to be completely left behind, but realistically they will be attenuated when we're no longer worshipping together on a weekly basis.  Valued programmes will be left behind - perhaps youth groups or other things that the plant is not of a size to run.  It is, and should be, a wrench to leave a church.

But then if we're going to throw ourselves into planting, we need to be all in.  We need to build relationships in the plant on the assumption that we're going to be together for the rest of our lives.  We need to build rhythms of liturgy and discipleship that are intended to bed in over decades.  We need to build outward looking relationships with people in the local area which we hope will bear fruit, perhaps in many years.  What we can't do is keep our lines of retreat open.  If you allow awareness of the fact that the plant might not make it to cause you to keep one foot in the sending church, I think you probably make the 'failure' of the plant a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You have to be all in.

But that means that if it doesn't work out, it will be hugely painful.  It will be like the wrench of leaving the sending church, but worse, because instead of being the pain of being sent out into an exciting horizon, it will be the pain of dissolving a community you loved, a return tinged with disappointment and perhaps bitterness.  There will be wounds.  We need to count the cost of those wounds before sending people out - the cost of sending, but also the potential double cost of receiving back.

News and reflections

Way back in February 2016, I shared here the news that I was taking on a part-time role as a pastor of a new church plant in Cowley.  In due course that part-time role became a full-time role, and it has been a huge privilege to minister to this little church community over the last six years.

On Monday, however, we voted together as a congregation to close our doors (so to speak; we meet in a community centre, which will no doubt continue to open its doors).  May 15th will be our last Sunday Celebration together.  This has been the culmination of a few months of discussion and prayer together, and although I'm more gutted about it than I can say, I am convinced it's the right course of action.  In due course I will reflect on what's led to this closure, but for now suffice to say that two years of covid-related restrictions and pressures have exposed and intensified our fragility, and there isn't the energy to start again.  So here we are.  Thankfully a number of other churches have started in the last six years, and Cowley certainly won't be left without a gospel witness; nor is there any shortage of churches for the remaining members of CCC to move into.  Nevertheless, it's all very sad.

For us as a family, this means an uncertain future.  I have been planning for some time to do some more study - I have a PhD plan related to writing a theology of preaching.  Where we had been assuming this would be part-time alongside ministry, we now feel that perhaps we are being providentially led to start full-time.  That carries all sorts of challenges, mainly financial.  If you want to hear more about that, let me know, and I'm sure there will be updates in the future!

One line of reflection that I've been pursuing is around God's faithfulness.  I noted on Twitter the other day that a church was marking its 40th anniversary, and celebrating this evidence of God's faithfulness.  Has God, then, not been faithful to us, as we shut up shop just after our 6th anniversary?  But then I think about how it could have gone: we are not closing because of any great scandal, or because of any declension from the faith once entrusted to the saints.  People have grown spiritually in the last six years, and will take that growth into other church fellowships and be a blessing.  The Lord has carried all of us through tough times - not only covid, but other terrible things.  He has, over and over again, demonstrated his faithfulness to us.  Celebrating the 40th anniversary of a church should indeed be an occasion to give thanks for his faithfulness; in a different way, perhaps in a minor key, closing a church could also be an occasion for thanksgiving.  He is faithful, and will surely continue to be faithful to each member of the church as we move on.

Another line of reflection has been prompted by CCC members looking around for churches to go to.  There are plenty of solid churches in Oxford; we are deeply privileged that way.  But it has made me think a lot about the wider church.  I completely understand why many church leaders have become suspicious of anyone who has an agenda for the wider church.  We've had enough of the power hungry and the controlling.  I completely understand the priority of humble service in one local congregation.  But as the people I've been commissioned by the Lord to care for move on into different churches, I find that I can't be indifferent to the state of those churches.  Yes, what we need most of all is people who will work unobserved and unpraised in their little corner of the vineyard; but we do also need people who will seek the reform of Christ's churches on a wider scale.

My final line of reflection is prompted by a sermon I heard in college chapel many years ago.  The preacher was a Lutheran, and it being college chapel he was able to deliver what was basically a lecture about Dietrich Bonhoeffer rather than an exposition of Scripture.  Ordinarily that would make me grumpy, but this was useful, and I come back to it often.  I wish I could remember who the guy was!  He talked about Bonhoeffer's notion of life as fragmentary.  There is so much in life that we start but are not able to finish; so many bits that don't quite seem like finished projects.  Even the projects which do seem finished often don't seem to obviously fit into a 'whole life'.  Life is a series of fragments.  And yet the Lord is able to collect all the fragments of our lives, and make of them one whole: a really, whole person, fully integrated, and beautiful, like a mosaic.  Nothing wasted (remember the fragments of bread they gathered in Galilee!), everything properly placed.  We are closing our church in the Easter season, knowing that everything we put dead into the ground the Lord is able to raise into glorious new life.

On the use of the Creed

 Steve Kneale has published a piece entitled Five reasons reciting creeds is unhelpful - a title which surely warrants a rebuttal!  For the record, my own church background is in 1689 Baptistry, but I now pastor a small church which takes the Nicene Creed as its basis of faith, and I am a strong advocate for the use of the Creed in public worship (and I like the Apostles' Creed as well, just not quite as much).  So, here's why I think each of Steve's reasons is wrong, and sometimes dangerously so.

1. Sola Scriptura.  For Steve, it seems, the use of creeds undermines the unique authority of Scripture in the church.  "We want people to have confidence in the Word of God" - yes, absolutely!  So, why not just always go to the source?  Why not just read the Bible instead of the Creed?  Well, firstly it's not an either/or.  Read both in your services!  Recite the Creed and recite the Psalms.  Yes, a thousand times yes, to more Bible.  But why then the Creed?  Because when Steve goes on to say that "when people state what they believe, I would prefer they pointed directly to the Bible and affirmed it, rather than a statement drawn up after it" this is exactly the argument an Arian would have made in the fourth century.  It is possible to mis-read the Bible - Jesus highlights the possibility - and in so doing miss or distort the life-giving message.  Biblicism will not help us here; the heretics themselves claim the Scriptures to be on their side.  The Creed functions as a distilled statement of the essential truth, and therefore as a guide to Scripture reading.  Putting it into our worship, reciting it together, helps to ensure that we are all on the same page on such essentials as the deity of Christ.  It is not vital that we recite it, but it is helpful.

2. The creeds require explanation.  No doubt.  I preached a series on the Nicene Creed not too long ago to provide some of that explanation for our crew.  But everything, including Holy Scripture, needs explaining.  Often the hymns we sing need explaining.  Explanation is no bad thing.  But also, the creeds do some explaining of their own.  The Nicene Creed explains what we mean when we talk about the deity of Christ.  It explains, in fact, what the Scriptures mean when they talk about Jesus as the Son of God.  In explaining the Creed, I've found myself simply preaching the gospel.  And that can't be so bad.

3. Use of the creeds in worship confuses the church about authority.  Steve asks 'is the creed authoritative?' - if it is, doesn't that undermine the authority of Scripture?  If it isn't, why are we using it in worship?  Again, there is a really unhelpful biblicism here.  The Bible is, and must be seen to be, the ultimate authority in all matters of doctrine; but it is not the only authority.  We don't come to the Bible as if nobody had ever read it before.  Yes, ultimately we believe and use the Creed because we are convinced it has behind it the authority of Scripture; but we also acknowledge that others have gone ahead of us, that we are part of the catholic church which spans the centuries, within which there are subordinate authorities like creeds.  They are not ultimate, but they are not lightly put aside if we want to be sure that we stand in some continuity of faith with our spiritual forebears.  In our teenage culture, which thinks it needs to reinvent everything all the time, it is good to recognise the (subordinate) authority of our fathers and mothers in faith.

4. Alien to outsiders.  Reciting creeds feels weird to visitors.  This is weak.  Almost everything we do in worship feels weird to outsiders.  So what?  As to encouraging people to chunter along to words they don't and can't mean - presumably Steve still has songs in church, and presumably they are full of lyrics a non-Christian can't really sing?

5. Creeds are alien to the Baptist tradition.  Steve finds the recitations of creeds to be Anglican, and he suspects that behind that lurks Catholicism.  In fact, the Nicene Creed is regularly recited in worship in Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Presbyterian churches.  It is catholic, in the good old sense of basically and universally Christian - both as a statement of doctrine and as a building block of liturgy.  There is something peculiar about British non-conformity here, by the way.  I was once chatting with an American Presbyterian minister who asked whether British evangelicals would find it weird that his congregation crossed themselves during the Gloria Patri.  I had to say yes - they would find the manual action weird, and they would find the Gloria Patri weird!  The fear of 'catholicism' - perhaps caused by the proximity to Anglo-Catholicism in particular - has distorted the view of what is just 'normal church' for many British evangelicals.  If the creeds are alien to the Baptist tradition, the Baptist tradition is (at that point) alien to the universal belief and practice of the church.

So, to summarise my argument: biblicism is bad, weird is okay, Baptists should get with the programme.

Reasonable, because real

On Sunday I preached from the opening part of Acts 17, and amongst other things noted that Luke reports that the apostle Paul "reasoned", "explained", and "proved" the content of the Christian message in the synagogue.  A noble response to the message, according to Luke, was not so much to just take Paul's word for it, but to "examine the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so".  Because he was in the synagogue, Paul was able to make use of the Scriptures as an acknowledged authority, in a way that we mostly won't be able to do in our context, but the broader point I was making was this: the gospel is the sort of thing that can be discussed, argued over, reasoned.

To put it another way, the gospel is reasonable, because it is real.  Contemporary Western culture wants to put a hard border around a world of 'facts' which can be debated, and to put religious claims outside that border, in the world of 'opinions' and 'beliefs'.  Some people think they're doing religion a favour here - putting it outside the grubby world of argument and within a transcendent realm where you can hold your beliefs in a mystical way without being bothered.  Others think, more accurately, that they're defending the secular order against dangerous religion - it neuters religious opinion by making it the sort of thing which one can't really discuss.  Either way, the point is that religion may be a nice interpretive story that people tell themselves to find meaning in the world, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with truth (not, at least, the everyday sort of truth which concerns the way things are), and therefore can't be argued over, except in ways unrelated to truth: we can argue, for example, about whether religion is helpful or harmful, but not about whether it is real.

The whole Bible stands against this point of view.  Everything in the Christian faith stands or falls with the reality of Christ's resurrection, in history, at a particular place, in reality.  If Christ didn't rise, Christians are pitiable fools.  The book of Acts stresses again and again that the message proclaimed by the apostles has to do with public, accessible events: these things were not done in a corner.

If this is true, it is possible to argue, to reasonably engage in a demonstration of the truth of Christianity.  (I don't mean here the sort of Enlightenment reasoning, as if a person sat down with nothing but their intellect and the world around them ought to be able to arrive at Christian conclusions; I mean that given God's revelation in Christ in history, it is in principle possible to discuss the reality or otherwise of the Christian faith).

I argued on Sunday that there is one thing in particular that it is incumbent on Christians to know about: why do they believe that Jesus rose from the dead?  There are some good resources out there on this question.  N.T. Wright's big book on The Resurrection of the Son of God is the very best, in my opinion, setting the question in its historical context and showing that there really is no other plausible explanation.  Some of the arguments are summarised in the first part of his more popular level Surprised by Hope, which might be more manageable.  It doesn't seem to have got the attention it deserves, but Daniel Clark's little book Dead or Alive? is a helpful introductory presentation of the evidence for the resurrection set in the context of a gospel presentation, and would be a good one to have on hand to give away.  And of course there is still the classic Who Moved the Stone.

On the broader question of the rationality of faith, a good introductory run through many of the questions that people ask about Christianity can be found in But is it Real? and Why Trust the Bible? by Amy Orr-Ewing.  I continue to find the argument of C.S. Lewis in Miracles to be deeply convincing, though I'm aware it has its detractors.  The Reason for God by Tim Keller is excellent.  I would warn against many more philosophical works, for example those by William Lane Craig, not because there is nothing useful in them but because in my view they ultimately depend too little on God's revelation in Christ.

Have others found particular books (or other media; I'm aware that I don't really engage much with audio or video presentations, just because I like books better...) helpful in thinking through the rationality of faith?

Preaching everything

The FIEC recently published an article with an interesting look at which parts of the Bible we (meaning 'conservative' type evangelicals) typically preach - and which we typically avoid.  There is apparently not a lot of love for 1 and 2 Chronicles, or 2 and 3 John.  Jonah, on the other hand, attracts attention out of all proportion to his canonical importance.

So how do we decide what to preach, and when?  Karl Barth suggests that you can pursue three methods: you can follow a set lectionary, you can preach through whole biblical books, or you can just select passages as you go.  He doesn't recommend the latter, because it gives you - the preacher - too much control of the agenda.  Most evangelicals, of course, will go for the consecutive-through-books approach, but that raises the question: which books, and when?  It's still possible that the preacher rather than the Scripture is setting the agenda.  So what to do?

My guess is there's no perfect method.  Here's what I do.

1.  I maintain a spreadsheet which breaks down all our sermons by testament and genre (or sub-genre; it is useful to separate Paul's letters from others, for example).  That means I can tell you that in Cowley Church Community between January 2016 and August 2019 (for my spreadsheet extends into the future), we will have preached 32% of our standard sermons from the OT, and 55% from the NT.  (That leaves some others, to be explained below).  Fully 25% of our sermons have been from the gospel of Luke!  A glance at the spreadsheet helps me to see if we're preaching the balance of Scripture.

2.  The 'balance of Scripture', however, does not mean treating all books equally.  I think we have to take a theologically informed approach here, getting ourselves into that virtuous cycle of allowing our reading of Scripture to shape our theology and then allowing our theology to shape the way we approach Scripture.  So yes, the New Testament predominates.  I'm okay with that; I think it reflects the theology of revelation which is made explicit in, for example, Hebrews 1:1-2.

3.  Sharpening that up a bit, I think the understanding of revelation in the NT means that we should always have one of the four gospels on the go.  Jesus is the Word of God, to whom the OT points forward, to whom the NT points back.  The way we do it is to return regularly to our series preaching through Luke; when (if??) we finish Luke, I'd be keen to move on to another gospel.  (Incidentally, odd that the stats seem to show Mark as the least popular gospel for preaching; why on earth would that be?  Makes me want to preach it next.  Would take less time than Luke, anyway.)

4.  Having said that, it's useful to recognise that you, the preacher, like preaching some things more than others.  Perhaps you enjoy preaching an argument rather than a narrative, or vice versa.  Keeping an eye on the balance helps you not to fall into a pattern that just reflects your own preferences.  I suspect it also helps to keep preaching more interesting - preaching narrative as narrative and argument as argument, for example, makes for a much more varied approach; and that's before you even throw in the Psalms etc.

5.  At CCC, we also try to shape the preaching around seasonal celebrations; taking time in the Christmas season to preach about Christmas, taking a couple of weeks after Easter Sunday to reflect further on the resurrection.  That seasonal preaching makes up slightly less than 10% of year, and has the advantage of keeping us further focussed on the central things of the gospel.  We would also usually try to make some of our more 'standard' expository preaching fit the mood of the seasons; we're heading into Jeremiah at the start of Lent, for example.

6.  One problem with the setup of churches nowadays is that the preaching has to do quite a lot.  When I were a lad, everyone went to a 'bible study', which was in reality a biblical or theological lecture, every Wednesday night.  That was a place to do some catechesis.  Nowadays, most of the teaching has to happen on a Sunday if it's going to hit a decent proportion of the church.  So sometimes we feel the need to interrupt our expository preaching to preach some doctrine - still sticking very close to Scripture, but taking a more theological tack.  We did a series on sacraments recently.

7.  There are some issues with our approach.  A series tends to be broken up, with only 6-8 weeks or so given to each part.  That can make it easy to lose the thread of a big book (like Luke!) - but to be honest, patterns of attendance mean you have to regularly recap anyway.  We don't always go in for preaching through a book consecutively; we did I think five weeks in Leviticus, for example, getting an overview of the big themes; I think it was good, but obviously there is stuff you've missed.  I wonder, as well, whether we always help people to read the Bible for themselves, or whether we give the impression that you need to get it all cleared up for you by a professional.

I dare say it's not perfect, but overall that's my approach.

So, how do you do it?

So, that was 2018 then

Just a brief retrospective from me this morning.

Personally, 2018 has held a number of challenges.  Many of these have been related to my position at Cowley Church Community (although on balance this continues to be a joy!), on which see below.  The year ended with a bit of a shock, as I had a curious episode which has been diagnosed as a probable transient ischemic attack (TIA) - essentially, a mini-stroke.  The episode was very brief, and no harm done, but it's certainly a shot across the bows from my own mortality.  So, roll on the statins, roll on the low-dose aspirin, roll on the 'lifestyle changes'.  I can report, having been forced to take a closer interest in such things, that all the food you like eating is poisonous, and that it is a sad business to have to moderate one's cheese intake over Christmastide.  Most fundamentally, I'm happily surprised to find that I really do look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come; one never knows, it seems to me, how much one really believes something until pressed a little to put some practical weight on the belief.  I am reassured.  However, I hope and intend to be with you all for a long while yet.

In terms of ministry, 2018 has been a mixed bag.  I continue to feel the fragility of our little church in Cowley - we are too small to be sustainable, and that comes with a degree of financial uncertainty - but on the other hand I see spiritual growth in so many of those who gather with us regularly.  The year has hit many of our church members with really hard things, and in the midst of them it's been a privilege to minister the gospel and see the Lord supplying faith, and with faith comfort and the ability to endure.  But whilst genuinely rejoicing at God's work amongst his people, can I be honest and express frustration with the slowness and difficulty of our evangelistic efforts?  Where now is the LORD, the God of Elijah?

In wider culture, I think one of the most important currents of 2018 surrounds the transgender debate.  It is striking that the elimination of the Christian doctrine of creation, having wreaked havoc in the sphere of human sexuality, now seems to be eroding something more basic: the idea of gender as a given, and thus human 'nature' at its most foundational level.  David Robertson at the FIEC Leaders' Conference opined that Satan may have over-reached here; certainly the reaction is interesting, and places biblically-oriented Christians in odd alliances with radical feminists and others.  One thing to note about the wider cultural debate is the effort to create an ideological space for those (particularly feminists) who disagree with the transgender agenda (so to speak) but do not see themselves as 'transphobic'; one wonders whether a similar space might not have been created in the sexuality debate, except that it was not politically expedient at the time for anyone to allow it.  We will see whether there is greater success here.  For the church, it is important to distinguish the wider debate - into which we must be free to speak boldly - from the pastoral response to gender difficulties which will inevitably crop up in a fallen world.  The church needs to learn to speak at two levels, but with one essential message.

Politically, 2018 has been a depressing time to be a British subject.  It is hard not to feel that the Lord gives us the leaders we deserve.  The interminable negotiations around Brexit seem to have reached a conclusion which is designed to aggravate all parties, and meanwhile much bigger issues (like domestic poverty, or the need to respond to a changing balance of global power) are ignored.  Personally, I've gone and joined a political party, for the first time since my teens.  (I think I recall then briefly being a member of the Conservative party, although I may be mis-remembering).  The SDP is looking to push its way back onto the political scene, and I felt inspired to join up.  The reasoning?  Well, it seems to me that when everything in politics is going to pot the responsible thing for concerned folk to do is not to disengage but to lean in, to put a shoulder to the wheel.  I don't think it's appropriate for a Christian minster to make too much of party politics, but I'll just take this opportunity to suggest you read through the SDP's New Declaration and see what you make of it; for me, the explicit rejection of intersectionality/victim discourse, coupled to the effort to find a sensible and pragmatic economic model, is compelling despite my doubts about some other elements (I remain, for example, unconvinced about PR).  But if not this party, could there be a party that you might join, and seek therein to have an active influence?

One thought I have going into 2019 is the importance of relating the passage of time to eschatology.  That is to say, to explicitly recognise that the sands of time are sinking; whether we're talking about personal endings or the grand ending of all history, each passing year (and month, week, day, hour...) is another step towards the breaking in of that dawn of heaven.  It is not in the past, nor the present, nor even the conceivable human future that we find our hope, or solutions to the great problems and issues of our times; but our hope is in the "fair sweet morn" of Christ's appearing.

Dark, dark hath been the midnight, but dayspring is at hand;
And glory, glory dwelleth in Emmanuel's land.

The Significance of Sacraments

I've been doing lots of reading in preparation for preaching a series at CCC on the subject of sacraments.  You can get the first sermon of three here, which is sort of introductory; the other two will deal with Baptism and Holy Communion in more detail.

I've had quite a few thoughts, but one that I keep coming back to is that I suspect we often ask the wrong questions about sacraments.  A key question we tend to ask is 'how does it work?' - how does baptism work?  How does the Supper work?  That tends to reduce the sacraments to mechanisms.  Or, perhaps to avoid the sacrament-as-mechanism, we insist that the sacrament doesn't work - it doesn't do anything, it is merely an illustration of the gospel.  It doesn't add anything to the sermon except a bit of a visual reminder for those of you who appreciate that sort of thing.

I wonder if a better question might be 'what does it mean?'  What does it mean for the whole of creation that the Son of God entered into the cosmos and took on flesh?  What does it mean for this bread and wine that the minister will speak over it the words which the Son of God himself spoke, in space and time, over similar bread and wine?  What does it mean that we together will eat that bread and drink that wine?  What does it mean for our ordinary meals that they occur in proximity to this holy meal?  What does it mean for the ordinary stuff of our existence that this particular stuff has been set apart by God's promise and command to be more than 'just stuff'?  Can anything be 'just stuff' anymore?

For me, at least, that has been a much more fruitful line of enquiry, and in particular has led to wonder and worship at the sacraments and by implication the presence and power of Christ in creation.  And that seems like a good thing.

Though the earth gives way

I preached Psalm 46 at CCC this past Sunday.  It opens with this great picture of the security of God's people:

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble at its swelling.

Even if everything falls apart - and it is the very destruction of creation that is envisaged here, the undoing of God's good ordering of things through the division of the seas and creation of dry land - even if it all collapses, we will not fear.  Why not?  Because God is our hiding place.  God is our firm foundation.  He is a very present help in trouble.

As an aside, what a great phrase that is!  We can talk about the omnipresence of God if we want to, and certainly the Bible does sometimes talk that way, but the perspective of this Psalm on the question of God's presence is: are you in trouble?  Then God will be there to help you.  This is not a piece of philosophy; it is gospel gospel gospel, all the way down.

One of the things that the rest of the Psalm makes clear is that this uncreation is directly related to human action, human war and destruction.  It is not about 'natural disasters' so much as it is about the ruining of everything through the chaos of a humanity which has 'liberated' itself from God's wise and righteous ways.

And the response to this chaos of humanity is two-fold.  In the present, the Psalmist says, God's people remain secure no matter what.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.

Notice the water!  Outside, the foaming of the terrible seas and the tidal waves which sink the mountains; inside, the quiet river bubbling gently over its stony bed and refreshing the people of God.  "Whoever believes in me," Jesus said, "out of his heart will flow rivers of living water."  The Holy Spirit with God's people is their refreshment and their security.

And then in the future, God will put an end to the destructive ways of humanity.

He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the chariots with fire.

When God calls the nations to be still, and know that he is God, it is because he has ended their chaos once and for all.  The security of God's people in the present is like an outpost of the future, a glimpse into the final security of all creation when God has made it impossible for the earth to fall into the sea or for human beings to rise up against him and one another.

So here's the thing: there are a variety of things that make us feel like the earth is falling into the sea.  The political turmoil in the UK makes me feel that way.  I imagine I will also feel that way (and I realise with rather less justification) when England crash out of the World Cup.  (I am just putting this here as a hypothetical example, I know it's not really going to happen.  It's coming home, right?)

The point is that pretty much all our hopes, whether they are in people, institutions, or processes, are insecure.  Our only solid hope is that in all the trouble that comes our way, and through all the turmoil that shakes the earth, God is our very present help through his Son the Lord Jesus Christ, who supplies to us the glorious sustenance and refreshment of his Holy Spirit.

1 Corinthians 14:34-35

At Cowley Church Community, we've just finished a little series in 1 Corinthians 12-14.  I wrapped up yesterday with 14:26-40, which is mostly about orderly worship.  But there are a couple of verses there (34-35), really quite detached from the main flow of the argument, which express the fairly controversial (!) suggestion that women should remain silent in church.  As if in mockery of my previous post, I found it impossible to preach these verses with precision.  So, here is an attempt to write up what I should have said yesterday, with apologies to the congregation which had to put up with my verbal faffing around the point.

Firstly, it's worth saying that part of the difficulty comes from the almost unique textual problems around these verses.  Many commentators have concluded that they aren't original, and there are strong arguments for their rejection: in one manuscript family they appear after our verse 40, which is hard to explain if they're original; read at face value, they flatly contradict what Paul has already said in chapter 11; and the subject matter interrupts Paul's discussion of prophecy and tongues, to which he returns in v36.  I feel that on balance these arguments are not conclusive.  Although the idea that these verses were added later would make sense of the way they move about in the manuscripts, it doesn't explain their universal presence (i.e., although some manuscripts have the verses after v40, no manuscripts omit the verses altogether).  I find Daniel Wallace's suggestion that Paul may have added the verses in the margin of the manuscript himself to be very interesting.  It would explain the manuscript evidence, and it makes sense of the topic: it's related to orderly worship, but not directly related to the aspect of orderly worship that Paul is mainly talking about here.

However - as a preacher, I dislike standing up to expound a text which I feel so unsure about.  I like to be able to say 'this is the word of the Lord' when Scripture is read, and I dislike having to say 'I think this is probably the word of the Lord'.  For your reassurance, I can't think of any other passage that would cause the same difficulty.  For now, let's assume Paul wrote these verses and that we have to deal with them as Scripture.  What do we do with them?

I suggested on Sunday that there are two approaches to these verses which in the end are just too simplistic.  On the one hand, we can just write them off as hopelessly outdated, a product of an earlier sexist age which we have now transcended.  Then we can just ignore them.  The problem is, it's not just these verses.  I know there are people, including some outstanding theologians, who disagree, but speaking for myself I cannot see any way to make the Bible's presentation of gender anything other than sexist in the eyes of our culture.  We'd have to be prepared to edit Scripture from front to back to get a version of gender that was acceptable - and the way things are going, we might have to re-edit every couple of years to keep up with the changing zeitgeist.  Nor would this be tinkering around the edges.  Obviously in some places (e.g. Ephesians 5), but implicitly throughout, gender is tied to the creation design of God for humanity and ultimately to the gospel.  We need to be careful that our reaction to the apparently unacceptable sayings of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 isn't to throw off the whole of God's revelation.

On the other hand, we could just insist that women be silent in church.  That is to say, we could take the command at face value and enforce it.  This is also easy, in its way.  Of course it will make us unpopular in the surrounding culture, but there is a certain ease to being an odd sect: strong identity markers, confident in the knowledge that we know what is right and everyone else is on the outside.  This would be, in its own way, easy, but I think it would be wrong.  We need to think about what the apostle Paul is doing when he writes his letters.  He isn't handing down isolated and arbitrary commands, but is thinking through the implications of the gospel for his readers.  He is doing theology.  So if Paul wrote this, it is reasonable to ask why, and to seek out his logic.  The difficulty here is that the logic is not obvious.  Nor is it obvious how we can reconcile it with chapter 11.

So what is to be done?

I think we have to take a step back and recognise a number of things. 

We have to recognise that we want these verses to go away, and that there are several different reasons for that.  We want them to go away because they are embarrassing in the face of our culture.  We want them to go away because we fear (rightly) that they can be used in oppressive ways, and indeed we suspect they may have been written to be used in those ways!  We want them to go away because they seem to contradict other passages of Scripture.  We want them to go away because, in our experience, there are women who appear to be gifted to speak in church.  Recognising that we have many motives, some noble and some not so much, to get rid of these verses, we should probably be cautious about actually doing so.  If they cause us difficulty, we should probably wrestle with that rather than just dispose of the difficulty.

We have to recognise that whilst we may not be able to easily make sense of these verses, they are not the only verses on the subject.  There is a whole Biblical exploration of the concept of gender, starting in Genesis 1 and proceeding to the marriage supper of the Lamb.  I am convinced that the overall picture is of difference and complementarity between men and women, and I am convinced that the various restrictions on the roles of women in the churches in the writings of Paul are part of that picture.  Recognising that doesn't make it straightforward to work out what our practice ought to be, but it does give the appropriate context for thinking these things through.

For what it's worth, I'm a sort of 'soft complementarian'.  That is to say, I think Scripture does teach that men and women are different and that this should be reflected in family life and church family life - but I don't think Scripture provides hard and fast rules for how those differences should show up.  I think in the Bible itself the expression of complementarity changes over time.  I think it's a mistake to try to draw up lists of essentially 'male' and 'female' attributes or roles; rather, I think complementarity is a dynamic thing, expressed differently in different cultures.  Having said that, I think the suppression or denial of these differences and their expression is part and parcel of a culture in flight from reality and subject to serious decline.  All in all, I'm happy with the line we've adopted at CCC: elders are all male, because of their role in the church family, but under that headship we want to encourage women to be involved in all aspects of ministry.

Finally, we have to recognise that unless we go for one of the easy answers, we are going to have to do a lot of bearing with one another in love.  On Sunday I used the language of 'fudge' - that was a mistake.  We're not fudging anything.  We're seeking to be faithful to God's word as we understand it, and we need to recognise that in this area as in many others that is not as straightforward as 'read and obey'.  In our seeking to be faithful, we need to recognise that we could be wrong in some of our applications of God's truth - or indeed, that there might be multiple ways of being faithful in a given context.  We should, of course, try to show each other from Scripture where we think we're going wrong - but primarily we should be loving one another.  I think the recognition that it is complicated helps here!  We can give one another more leeway where interpretation and application are difficult.

Where does that leave us on 1 Corinthians 14:34-35?  Let's be frank: we're not going to silence women in the church, and for some that will look like disobedience.  If they're right, God have mercy on us.  I don't think they are right.  But I hope we will receive verses like this - even if we can't see how they should be applied to us directly - as brakes to prevent us from easily accepting our own culture's view of things.  Because they are hard, and at first glance offensive, they make us stop and think about the broader Biblical picture, and about our own practice.  And in that way they serve us, they open us up with their sharp jagged edges to the full spectrum of Scriptural critique and teaching.  In that sense, I hope we can get something from them.

He will be King

Preparing for yesterday's sermon at CCC on Daniel 2, I was struck by how important it is that we talk in the future tense, especially when we're talking about God's reign over the earth.

In chapter 1 of Daniel, the author has established that God is certainly still King, despite the catastrophic events of the exile.  It was Yahweh who gave Jehoiakim into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, and it was also Yahweh who enabled Daniel and his friends to flourish without touching the king's food, and Yahweh who gave these young men wisdom and skill.  The God of Israel is King in Babylon, King in spite of Nebuchadnezzar in all his pomp and strength, and perhaps most strikingly King in spite of his people's sin and fall.

So we can and should say: our God reigns!  He is King, in the midst of the muddle and mess and confusion of history.  He is King over the nations.  Remove the surface froth, the churning of human endeavour and wickedness, and underneath is the deep, clear water of God's sovereignty.  This is a comfort, and can surely be applied not only to the affairs of nations but also to the turmoil of our personal lives.  In spite of it all, God reigns.

But Daniel 2 says something a bit different.  In Nebuchadnezzar's dream, we certainly see the froth and the churn: one kingdom follows another, splendour comes and goes, strength and unity are mingled with weakness and division.  Nothing human lasts, and what, in the end does it all mean?  And of course the fact that God can reveal to Nebuchadnezzar, through his dream and through Daniel's interpretation, that this is the future state of his kingdom shows once again that God reigns.  But there is more.

In the dream, a rock - something fairly unspectacular to look at, compared to the glories of the statue representing the human kingdoms of the earth - appears.  It was not cut out by human hands; in other words, the origins of this rock are divine.  And it is flung at the statue, utterly destroying it, pulverising it.  The rock itself becomes a mountain, growing until it fills the whole earth.  Because God will be King.  He is not merely King-in-the-background, the undercover Sovereign, in control despite it all.  He is the King-who-is-coming, the King who will reign over all the earth, the King who will be acknowledged by every tongue and every heart.

So we must say: our God will reign!  Though the visible beginning of his Kingdom is just a little rock - the stone rejected by men, but in the sight of God chosen and precious - it will fill the earth.  And this matters.  We are not saying to the world, or to our own troubled hearts, merely that God is in control of all the mess and evil that we see (and commit!); we are also saying that he will end it, and will himself be all in all through his Christ whom he has installed on his holy hill.  It is not just that God's sovereignty limits evil; God in his coming sovereignty will overcome evil.

He will be King.

Demons and Disease

Some notes I pulled together whilst preparing to preach Luke 8:26-56 at CCC yesterday. The bottom line I arrived at was that, in our theological circles, an undisciplined supernaturalism is probably not the main problem; an incipient rationalism is more threatening. We (I!) need to ask for and expect more from God.

The whole Bible gives us a picture of (usually) unseen spiritual powers at work throughout the world, some representing God and working to advance his will, others opposing God. The ‘good’ spirits are generally referred to as angels, and the ‘evil’ spirits are demons. A development through the Bible is that Satan or the Devil is increasingly regarded as the ‘leader’ of the demons. Sometimes pagan gods are called demons in the Old Testament, and the New Testament picks this up in its assumption that demons stand behind the idols of the ancient world.

In the twenty-first century West, there is a tendency not to talk about angels or demons very much, even within the church. That is mainly because our culture is materialistic and naturalistic – that is, what we can see is all there is, and what happens can be fully explained by natural causes. In Christian circles, of course, there is at least a theoretical knowledge that this isn’t so – God is a spiritual being who interacts with the world! But we have absorbed enough from our culture to feel uncomfortable with the idea of angels and demons active around us. It all sounds a bit fairy-tale, and we worry that we won’t be taken seriously.

There’s another reason to feel awkward about talking about demons especially. Increasingly we are becoming aware that in different cultures – and in segments of our own – people who are accused of being demon possessed are abused and mistreated. There have been several horrific stories involving children. Certainly we don’t want to be implicated in things like that.

A few things to say about the Bible’s teaching on demons:

1. Demons are real and powerful. You can’t read the Bible and avoid the reality of evil spiritual forces.

2. Demons are fallen creatures. The spiritual forces of evil – and even Satan himself – are God’s creatures, albeit fallen and horribly twisted. We must say that they were created good, because God does not create anything evil. We can also say that because they are creatures they are not in any sense equal with God.

3. Demons are against humanity. When we see demonic activity in the Bible, it is always geared towards enslaving and dehumanising God’s human creations. The Bible says nothing about human beings colluding with demons; when Jesus casts out demons from people, the people themselves are always seen as victims.

4. Demons are powerless before Jesus. In the storyline of the Bible, by far the most demonic activity is clustered around Jesus. It makes sense that the evil spirits would want to oppose Jesus. But in story after story, Jesus drives out demons with just a word. They can’t stand up to him. Nor can they stand up to his disciples, when they are acting in dependence and faith.

Practically, there are a few helpful things we can say:

1. When we see evil in the world, we should acknowledge that there is a spiritual dimension to that evil. We don’t need to leap too quickly to demons (human beings have a spiritual dimension, and are quite capable of doing plenty of their own evil), but nor do we need to rule them out. They are part of reality.

2. We don’t need to become too interested in demons, either to fear them or to hunt them down. We are not encouraged to engage with demons, but to preach the good news of Jesus – and it is that good news which defeats the demons anyway.

3. If we do suspect we have encountered demonic activity, the thing to do is trust and pray. Jesus is victorious.

The reasons we avoid talking about angels and demons are broadly the same as the reasons we don’t talk much about miraculous healing: we have taken in a big dose of materialism and naturalism from the surrounding culture, and we have seen Christian talk about miraculous healing being horribly abused (for example, by faith healers who make a great deal of money out of sick people, or in churches where people’s expectations of healing have been cruelly raised only to be dashed). But the New Testament is full of healings. What do we do with that?

A few thoughts:

1. Even in the NT, not everyone is healed. In a sense, that’s obvious: Jesus was only in one place, and for every person in Galilee who got healed, there were thousands in the world who stayed sick or died. But even around Jesus, not everyone was healed. And even the Apostle Paul was not healed of bodily ailments.

2. Although sometimes in the NT healing is a response to faith, sometimes there is no mention at all of faith, and the initiative seems to come completely from Jesus or the apostles. It is true that Jesus could not do many miracles where he met with determined unbelief, but it is also true that genuine faith does not always receive healing in the Bible.

3. The best way to see the healings in the Bible – and sometimes this is made explicit – is that they are signs. When Jesus heals someone from physical illness, it is a sign of the resurrection. Even when people like Lazarus were raised from the dead, they would die again; but their raising was a sign of the raising up at the last day which Jesus would bring about through the power of his own resurrection.

4. Because the message of the resurrection is true, and because the Lord Jesus still graciously gives us signs of that truth in the present age, we should not hesitate to pray for healing, with faith that God is able to do this, and the knowledge that it is ‘the sort of thing’ that God does.

5. When people are healed miraculously, we should praise God – this is all his grace – and we should receive the mercy of healing as a sign of God’s greater mercy in offering eternal life through his Son. When people are not healed miraculously, we should still look to the greater mercy: God offers eternal life with him, next to which physical healing is a small thing.

Who is a God like you?

I preached the last two chapters of Micah at Cowley Church Community yesterday.  A lot of the material was familiar to us from the last couple of weeks - Judah's sin, God's judgement.  But there were two main new things.  One is in Micah 6:6-8:

With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

This passage follows on from a plea from God, who recounts his history with Israel, and asks plaintively how he has burdened them that they should turn against him?  Judah's response should not be read as a genuine groping after some way to atone for sin and restore relationship with God.  It is rather an attempt to buy God off.  What can I give you so that you will leave me alone?  But God will not leave Judah alone; not for anything.  There is no offering they could give that would divert his attention from them, precisely because they are loved.  God will have their hearts and lives, entire and complete.  He will have them walk with him.  His determination to bestow his love on his people is what leads to his judgement on their sin!

Question: how do I try to buy God off?  What activities or things do I offer him, whilst still really desiring to maintain some little sphere of my own, independent of his love?

 The second really new thing is in Micah 7:8-9.  The previous chapters have shown that after judgement Judah will be restored.  But here is the dramatic revelation that God himself will turn from being their judge to being their advocate:

Do not gloat over me, my enemy!
Though I have fallen, I will rise.
Though I sit in darkness,
the Lord will be my light.
Because I have sinned against him,
I will bear the Lord’s wrath,
until he pleads my case
and upholds my cause.

Micah does not minimise either the horror of the judgement on Judah, or the extent to which it is well deserved.  But he looks beyond it, to the mercy of God which is sure to come.  And that leads to praise!

Who is a God like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry for ever
but delight to show mercy.
You will again have compassion on us;
you will tread our sins underfoot
and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.

Who is a God like this?  Who turns in mercy to his sinful, rebellious people?  A God who delights, not in judgement, but in mercy?

And then from the perspective of the New Testament: who is a God like this, who not only lifts us when we have fallen, not only gives us light when we sit in darkness, not only pleads for us after we have borne the wrath of the Lord - but actually comes down to us in our fallen state, actually sits in the darkness of the fallen world and finally the darkness of the tomb, actually bears the weight of his own wrath against sin in our place?  Who is a God like this?  Is there any but Jesus?

Question: does the God I worship and live for and preach look like this?  If so, why don't I worship him more joyfully, live for him more wholeheartedly, preach him more passionately?

Preaching Eucharistwards

One of the things about Cowley Church Community that I'm really pleased about is the commitment to regularly celebrating Communion together.  For us, that means about every other week - which I realise may not seem that regular to folk from some other church traditions!  It's also important that our celebrations of Communion are an integral part of our worship - not just an add-on, and not a separate service.

I've found it particularly beneficial in terms of preaching.  We don't have an elaborate Communion liturgy, so the transition between the end of the sermon and the distribution of the elements is often not that protracted.  So the sermon has to lead naturally into the celebration.  That context really brings it home for me whether what I'm preaching is the gospel or not: if it is, the transition will feel smooth and natural and right; if I'm not preaching the gospel, the transition into Communion will feel like a gear change without the clutch.  So my sermon prep changes - I'm preaching towards the celebration, towards the commemoration of the cross.

I genuinely can't think of a better way to keep the gospel central in preaching and worship.

Sort of news

This won't be news to all of you, but by way of an explanation for the slow rate of blogging (which is likely to persist for the next couple of months), I have tidings of life, and broadly the tidings are that there is change afoot.

Most of you will know that I have been serving as a lay elder in Magdalen Road Church for some time.  What you may or may not know is that for the last few years MRC has been working on establishing a church plant in the Cowley area of Oxford.  That plant is Cowley Church Community, and since the beginning of January I and the family have been members - and I have been serving as one of two part-time pastors.  At the moment I'm doing that alongside my full-time job at the University, but that job will be coming to an end at the end of March.  CCC currently meets every other week on a Sunday, and in two mid-week groups.  We're not yet independent of MRC, but we're working up to it, and part of that plan is that we'll be meeting every Sunday from Easter - hence my stepping away from the day job.  I'm looking forward to being able to preach more regularly, and to having the time to put into getting to know people within the little church better - as well as getting to know the Cowley area and its residents better than I currently do.  Although we live very near to Cowley, in some ways it is a very different part of Oxford, and there is definitely going to be some adjusting to do.

Alongside helping to lead CCC, I am back at school!  Specifically, I have begun studying for an MA in Contemporary Church Leadership at WEST (or at least, it was called WEST when I enrolled; now it's part of the Union School of Theology - and what's more, the course I am doing has been dropped from the offerings of the new School, so if you thought you might also like to do that sort of course I'm afraid you're too late).  The hope is that the combination of study and practical ministry will mean theory informing practice and practice being subjected to critical reflection - and therefore hopefully growth.

This feels like a huge, and yet decidedly daunting, opportunity.  If you're the praying sort, we'd very much appreciate your prayers.  We will be sending out proper 'prayer letters' shortly, so if you'd like one and you haven't already asked for one, do get in touch.  In the meantime, the blog will be updated as and when there is time and energy...