An update on what I'm doing

 An excerpt from the newsletter I've sent today - if you'd like to get regular updates, please let me know and I can add you to the distribution list.

At the beginning of February, I officially started a full-time PhD with Union School of Theology. The project I am undertaking looks at a systematic theology of preaching.  There are lots of books out there about how to preach, but I want to look more carefully at the why and the what of preaching, starting from the doctrine of the Trinity and the Word of God as the second Person of the Godhead, and working through the earthly ministry of Christ as the supreme Prophet of Israel, the Scriptures and their role as God’s word written, and finally the situation of the preacher in the local church today.  I want to think carefully about how God communicates himself to his world and particularly his assembled people, and how preaching fits into that.

I’m excited about the project; it’s something that has come out of my experience of preaching weekly, and feeling the need to understand more deeply just what it was I was doing, or trying to do.  I’ve also had a chance to run my ideas past some people who really know what they’re talking about on preaching and on theology, and it’s been encouraging to hear that they also think this is a worthwhile piece of research.  There is certainly a gap in the market, so to speak, and it seems like one worth filling.

In the evangelical church generally there is, it seems to me, a need to recover a vision for preaching which clearly links it to God’s activity and communication.  We need preachers with confidence and authority.  The New Testament calls those who speak to do so as if speaking God’s own words (the very oracles of God!) - but how do we do that when we know our weakness as preachers?  We also need preachers who step up into the pulpit with fear and trembling, understanding the awesome weight of their task, knowing that they are called to speak from and for God.  No method or formula can bring God’s word to God’s people, and if our confidence rests in those things perhaps we need shaking up!

I hope this project might be a small contribution to a deeper understanding of what preaching is, and therefore to a greater expectation of what God is able and willing to do through the preaching of the gospel.  At some point I hope the research will turn into a book, but even before then I am looking for opportunities to share what I’m learning, particularly with pastors.

Right now, day to day study looks like trying to read everything I can get my hands on to do with preaching, especially anything that approaches it from a systematic theology perspective.  It is important to get a solid understanding of the current state of research in the field, and this will form part of the literature review at the beginning of the study.  So far I have been confirmed in my initial impression that there isn’t that much material out there which tackles preaching in a systematic way from a theological point of view.

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.

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...

Obscenity

The thing I struggle with - the thing that today is hard to take - is that life just goes on.  Last night I mowed the lawn, and watched the Bake Off, and children died crossing the sea.  Today I will sit in the office, and sort out my spreadsheets, and children will die.  Isn't it obscene that we all just carry on?  Isn't it appalling that we get on with our lives?

I mean, what is that about?

Of course it has to be that way.  Of course it does.  The show must go on.  But maybe, just maybe, every now and again, the show can just stop.  Stop and acknowledge that everything is really, seriously messed up.

There are practical things we can do - and goodness knows I need to do more.  I genuinely worry that one day I will hear a voice say 'son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while this little boy washed up dead on the beach'.  Yes, there is stuff I need to do.

But what I really want to do is just make everyone stop.  Because the juxtaposition of ordinary life and horrific suffering is more than I can bear.  Please, can't we just stop?  Can't we all see the obscenity of it all?

So here is one thing I will do.  On this coming Monday, I will fast and mourn and pray - because we should, shouldn't we?  Of course, life will go on, but I will do something to mark what is happening, and I will repent of my part in it, and pray for change.  I will fast, because enjoying good things right now seems obscene to me.  Ordinarily that's something I would do in private, but maybe - perhaps - you feel the need to stop as well, and you'd like to join me.

Now, as a final thought, imagine this post liberally scattered with expletives.  That's how I wrote it, and how I read it back to myself now in my head.  But I deleted them all so as not to offend sensitive readers.  And isn't that just obscene as well?

400

Blogger tells me this is my 400th shiny ginger thought. It's nice that they keep track of these things. I'm moderately surprised that I've kept at it, especially during the years when I barely mentioned a couple of posts a month (I'm looking at you, 2013). But here we are: 101 months after we started. 400 posts. Reading back, I'm pleased to see that there's not ever so much I would un-write, given the chance, although there is plenty that I would write in a different way if I were doing it now. Glancing over the reading stats, I'm always surprised to find that posts which I think are both well written and profound, tackling important issues, often attract much less attention than things I rushed off one morning with very little reflection at all. Perhaps I just don't know what is really important. Perhaps I just haven't communicated it very well.

Anyway, by way of a review, here is a sort of summary of some of the big themes of the last 400 posts.

1. Karl Barth. I was just getting going with Barth, really, back in the day, but he made his first appearance on the blog in April 2007. Over the last 8 years he has gradually edged out John Owen as my go-to theologian - not that I don't still love a bit of Owen. It is just that Barth seems to speak into today with much more power. I explained the main reason I love him back in 2013 - "For Barth, God is not so much the One who is there as the One who comes. God comes to us in Christ, moves toward us in his Spirit, encounters us in the Scriptural witness. Barth's God is on the prowl..."

2.  Politics.  I've written more about politics than I originally envisaged.  One of the interesting things for me, reading back, is that I've definitely shifted - fairly recently - from a thorough-going conservatism to something more of a middling liberalism.  I am still basically an old-school Tory in my heart, but increasingly I feel that conservatism really requires a society with a shared value system and a common story, and we don't have either; moreover, the clumsy attempts to create and enforce a shared value system have terrified me.  For the society we are, rather than the society I would love us to be, I think liberalism is probably the only way we can avoid imploding.

3.  Anthropology and ethics.  Perhaps slightly less dominant themes, but still taking up more space than I would have predicted back in 2007.  Back then I imagined I was more 'into' theology proper.  Now I tend to think that the point at which Christian doctrine is most challenged - and most ill-equipped and poorly-prepared to meet the challenge - is at the point of discussing what a human being is and what they ought to do.  Sexuality is of course one big arena, but it's actually much wider than that.  I wonder if one of the big themes of gospel proclamation in the near future will need to be that the gospel, and only the gospel, makes us really and truly human - and therefore safeguards all our genuine human concerns.

4.  Church and worship.  I guess largely driven by my move away from parachurch being my primary sphere of ministry as I finished working with UCCF in 2009, and then by involvement as an elder in the church, I've been thinking a lot about what church is and how it ought to do the things it ought to do.  This is ongoing work in a big way, and I'm aware that less of it has gone into practice than I would like.

And there have been lots more.  I was trying to pick some favourite posts, but struggled.  The most read and most commented on post remains my review of a friend's book on Zionism - boy, that was a fun couple of days!  That's a post I would have written differently today - I think I would have been stronger and yet softer, if possible.

So anyway, 400.  At this rate it will be 2023 before we get 400 more...

Ebenezer

Last weekend I turned 30.  For reasons which I can't quite put my finger on, that feels like a significant age.  Perhaps it is just because my biological age is starting to catch up with my internal age - as one friend put it, I've always been old, but at least now I (am beginning to) have an excuse.  Whatever the reason, it feels like completing three decades of life is a good time to stop and reflect a little, and also to look back and express some gratitude; a good time to raise an Ebenezer.  So, for the record, here are some things for which I am thankful.

I am thankful that I grew up in a family where love and forgiveness were on display.  Sometimes it might be tempting to think that it would be nice if less forgiveness were called for; but I would rather have imperfection and forgiveness.  Human love and human forgiveness are a pale reflection of God's love and forgiveness, but a reflection nevertheless, and should be valued and loved for that.  Most of all, I am thankful that I grew up in a family where the gospel of Jesus was not just true but real - not just professed, but lived.  I learnt priorities there, and they have stood me in good stead.

I am thankful that God allowed me to wander from him for some years as a younger teenager.  That might seem strange, but at some point I needed to see what life on the run from him was like.  I wouldn't go back to it now.

I am enormously thankful that at the end of that period, in my later teens, God called me to himself.  I am astonished at his persistence with me.  I remember the breaking point, where I was had to surrender to him, and then the realisation that this brokenness was healing.

I am thankful that as a teenager I met the girl I would marry; I am grateful that she worked out that we should be married, because I knew it almost straight away.

I am thankful for my time at University, for the education I got there, for the friends I made, and also for the opportunities I had to get involved in ministry.

I am thankful for a hard year as a Relay worker, and for the tears that God pressed out of me in ministry.  I am grateful for the mistakes that I made there, which taught me so much for the future.  I am grateful for surviving and growing, and I am grateful for the friends who helped me.

I am thankful for my time working with Christian Unions in Oxford and High Wycombe.  What a joy to be involved in the lives of God's people at such a critical time, and what a privilege to be with them doing his work.  Sometimes I bump into people I know from the CUs I worked with, and it is always fantastic to see them going on.

I am thankful for the four Relay workers I supervised during those years.  I feel something akin to parental pride - illegitimate, considering how small a part in played in their lives, but there nevertheless - when I think of all of them and the things they are doing and will go on to do.

I am thankful for God's provision since I left UCCF.  We have never known in advance that we would have enough, but we have always been covered.  God is dependable.  We have had the money we needed, and now I have the job we need to enable us to stay in Oxford and serve the Lord Jesus here.

I am thankful for seven years of blessed marriage, and the arrival of Rufus six months ago.  God has entrusted precious things to me; I pray he makes me faithful in caring for them.

I am thankful that the future is in God's hands, and that he will walk with me into it, standing always between me and danger, and leading me into my eternal home.

Here I raise my Ebenezer; here by thy great help I've come.

It's not you, it's me

One of the things I've been discovering about myself, and that having this blog has really helped me to clarify, is that my creativity comes in spurts.  I am fitfully and sporadically creative.  Hence there being weeks when I write every day, and months when I write almost nothing at all.  I could go into lots of analysis of how creativity fits with my mood cycle (I write at the highest and lowest points - odd, huh?) or the effect that work and other commitments have on my ability to write.  But I'll spare you.  My main question is:

I wonder what that means for future ministry?