Author: Dave Faulkner

I'm a British Methodist minister, married with two adult children. I blog from a moderate evangelical-missional-charismatic perspective. My interests include digital photography (currently using a Nikon Z8), contemporary music, and watching football (Tottenham Hotspur) and cricket. For my photography, please visit www.flickr.com/photos/davefaulkner

Names

Have you seen the World Names Profiler? It’s had a lot of publicity recently. It’s taken several days for me to get a result searching for ‘Faulkner’, due to massive demand on the site. Having finally done so, I now find there are more FPM (Frequency Per Million) in Australia than anywhere else. Cue ‘convict’ jokes from my wife …

Clicking on the UK results, the surname is most popular in Northern Ireland, followed by most parts of England. Then you get the rest of England (including East Anglia, where we currently live) and Wales. Bottom comes Scotland, which is where the surname originates.

It’s different if you profile the putative original spelling (insofar as you can assume anything of the like, given massive illiteracy affecting birth registrations in previous centuries). ‘Falconer’ is far and away most popular in Scotland in terms of UK density. (Worldwide, it’s found most commonly in New Zealand.)

All of which brings me to a story: when I was born, I was given the middle name ‘Duncan’ to mark the Scottish heritage of the family. Studies suggest that ‘Falconer’ originated in Aberdeenshire around the 1200s, and the Falconers were a sept of the Keith clan. There is a town in Aberdeenshire called Keith. Falconers were plebs who looked after the falcons on the laird’s estate, and of course ‘falconer’ is still used as the name of the associated profession.

When my father and aunt were growing up, they both clearly remember their grandfather telling them that he had been born in Scotland, but had come south of the border with his family as a boy. In those days, the name was still spelt ‘Falconer’. When he went to school in England, the teacher said to him, ‘Now you’re in England, you’ll spell your name the English way.’ And so, according to Dad’s grandfather, that is when our surname changed to ‘Faulkner’.

As a result, Dad has always supported Scotland at football and rugby. I was named David Duncan, as I said.

In recent years, however, a problem has arisen. After he retired, Dad began investigating the family tree. He discovered the part of ‘Scotland’ we come from. It’s called Lincolnshire. He got as far as the early eighteenth century, and our family was always living in Lincolnshire hamlets, where some of our ancestors were shepherds – a nice antecedent for what I do now.

I’ve never had the heart to tell Dad that I’d discovered ‘Duncan’ was originally Irish.

Still, at least they were OK with calling me ‘David’. They chose that, because they knew it meant ‘beloved’.

So what’s in a name? What’s in yours? I like to use these stories at Christmas when preaching about the naming of Jesus. You might think of other applications. Do tell.

5

Google Chrome

The blogosphere is awash with comments on Google Chrome, the new web browser. This is just a quick note to confirm that in my opinion it’s far and away the fastest browser I’ve ever used. The latest beta can be downloaded here. It’s only 474kb in size – quite remarkable. It probably won’t have the customisation possible with Firefox through add-ons, but one thing I am uninstalling is one of my other backup browsers, Apple Safari, which is based on the same Webkit open source engine. I retain Internet Explorer because I have to, and Opera because I like it. But I think Chrome will be my main alternative to Firefox now.

1

Todd Bentley

I wrote several posts a few months ago about Todd Bentley. We arrived home from holiday to discover he was leaving the Lakeland ‘Revival’ and separating from his wife. Three days later his ministry admitted he was in an unhealthy relationship with another woman. Many bloggers have waded in. Dan Edelen has a lot of wisdom borne of pain in several posts. Bill Kinnon is more fiery, especially on the backtracking by C Peter Wagner. There are numerous others.

Whatever my criticisms of Bentley, I take no pleasure in these events. Here are some thoughts.

Losers According to Bill Kinnon, C Peter Wagner has described Todd Bentley as a loser. Crudely, that seems to mean Wagner didn’t back a winner, so he inflicts this description on Bentley. Whatever I think of Bentley’s ministry, especially the violence, if you write people off as losers you dismiss the Gospel. In the words of an old Steve Taylor song, ‘Jesus is for losers’. Watch the video for the song here:

No, if Wagner talks like this, what Gospel does he believe and preach? Where does the Cross fit in? Dan Edelen talks much about charismatics needing to recover the Cross: here is a prime reason why.

This isn’t a time for casting stones, it’s a time for prayer and grace as well as church discipline (which after all according to Jesus was meant to be restorative).

Accountability Bill Kinnon links to Phoenix Preacher, who said on August 26th,

Scott and I knew about Bentley’s immorality two months ago, but couldn’t find anyone willing to go on the record.

It’s in the nature of wrongly relating to someone other than yourself that there will be deceit, but this implies that appropriate accountability structures were abused. Yes, it’s good that Bentley stepped down, but that seems to have been for the sin of having been found out. Why were others culpable in the cover-up? Was it conspiracy or fear? We may never know.

But there is not only the accountability to his organisation Fresh Fire and the wider church, there is also the question of accountability in marriage. In what I am about to write I am aware that ‘there but for the grace of God go I’, but – it seems one of the problems seemed to be Bentley’s protracted absence in Lakeland. Like many ministry marriages, Debbie and I have it built into our relationship that if a question arises of my being absent overnight or longer, we discuss it before agreeing. We have done so with respect to my forthcoming sabbatical early next year.

It must have been very tempting (and yes, I probably do mean ‘tempting’) for Bentley to stay in Florida rather than Canada, given what was happening. It must have been exciting for him. The emotional pressure on Shonnah to agree must have been huge. But the fatal flaw in the logic is the idea that the revival depended on him. I suspect that when I take my sabbatical next year, my churches (which have never had a minister on study leave before) will discover just how unnecessary I am! It is a salutary lesson.

Prophecy Clearly, Wagner’s ‘prophecy’ in June that Bentley would increase in this, that and everything looks pretty sorry now. While I am not one of those who believes modern-day prophecies have to be 100% accurate (as per Old Testament standards) because they’re not adding to Scripture, it does strike me that the prophecy concerned is just altogether too typical of the prophetic drivel that sometimes infects charismatic Christianity. It is the sort once characterised by a friend of mine as ‘Thus says the Lord, I love you O my children’. It’s all about how wonderful the recipient is. While I’m neither for the sort of word that reduces everyone to worm status, I thought the only person we were meant to big up like this was Christ. This stuff needs serious questioning. It’s linked to my next observation.

Personality Whatever happened to all those prophecies around the 1990s that ‘the coming revival’ would be ‘a nameless, faceless’ one? Rather than that, we still promote our personalities, and then (like the secular press) exclaim with horror when they fall. The personality cult is one of the most insidiously worldly aspects of evangelical and charismatic Christianity. Bentley often said on the stage at Lakeland that it wasn’t about him but Jesus. Nevertheless, others promoted him and he allowed it. He could have stepped out of the way more for his associates or others. He rarely did. This may have been a tactical error rather than malicious, but any of us called to a public rôle in Christianity need to learn and accept the hard lesson that it’s not about us, it’s about Christ, and our actions need to match up. That’s not easy, and it requires some holy ruthlessness on our part. Often we’re not willing. The attention or acclaim is too attractive.

So may God have mercy on Todd and Shonnah Bentley and the anonymous female staff member. May God have mercy on C Peter Wagner. May God have mercy on us all. We who are without exception sinners need grace – the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.

11

Back

We arrived home at the weekend from a fortnight on the Isle of Wight. I thought I’d type up a few highlights. No, please keep reading: this is meant to be more than those boring ‘let me show you my holiday pics’ conversations. I’ve tried to offer some reflections in what follows. If any of my stories or observations are helpful, feel free to pinch them. You might also smile or laugh – I hope.

Friday 15th August A wild fox entered the garden of the bungalow we were renting. The children (and we) were full of wonder. We are used to direct encounters with tame animals. Meetings with wild animals are usually managed or mediated, such as at the zoo. A direct encounter with the wild is not encouraged in our society – nor in our church. Was it Brennan Manning who called Jesus ‘wild’?

Saturday 16th We’re doing our little bit to make our break as eco-friendly as possible. Although we had to drive here and take the ferry, Southern Vectis Buses do a great ‘freedom ticket‘: £40 for two adults and up to three children for a week. I know friends would advise cycling, but I have a poor sense of balance and can’t ride a bike.

Sunday 17th A return trip from last year to one of the most family-friendly churches we’ve ever come across: Shanklin URC.

Meanwhile (not during the service!) I’m finally reading Tom Wright‘s ‘Surprised By Hope‘. Great quote on page 87, recounting part of Oscar Wilde‘s play ‘Salome‘. Herod the tyrant wants to forbid Jesus from raising the dead. He asks his courtier, ‘Where is this man?’ The courtier replies, ‘He is in every place, my lord, but it is hard to find him.’ Jesus is elusive in so many ways – not just the sense of his absence since the ascension but yet present by his Spirit, also the way that we no more than Herod can control him.

Monday 18th Two newspaper articles over the weekend bring out the dark side of the Olympics. Matthew Syed in The Times points out that the modern Olympics were founded with an elitist bias and they remain so, especially in favour of western sports and the privately educated. Ian Gallagher in the Mail On Sunday tells an awful story of how one Chinese pistol shooter managed his best ever score. He won bronze, only to be humiliated on national TV for not winning gold. And before we get too snooty about the Chinese (who clearly used the Games rather like Soviet Russia and the USA before the Berlin Wall fell), let’s remember the ritual humiliation the British press has handed out to sports stars like Tim Henman in the past.

Tuesday 19th We’re waiting at Ryde bus station to catch either the number 2 or 3 back to Shanklin. Rebekah and Mark have been frustrated that only Mum and Dad have had a bus timetable. They find a box of them on the ground. A customer assistant walks over to take one for a passenger who has made an enquiry. Beautifully, she asks our children if she may take one from the box. ‘Yes,’ replies Mark, ‘but you must put it back!’

Wednesday 20th A trip to Amazon World: not only a chance to see some animals, but the opportunity (if the kids let us read the displays, ha ha) to learn more about conservation projects and the plight of the world’s rain forests. In the gift shop, Rebekah’s eye is taken – as always – by bright and sparkly things. In this case, they are small chunks of rocks and minerals. Since they are only £1.50, I agree she can choose one. She selects Pyrite, a.k.a. ‘Fool’s Gold’. She spends the rest of the holiday desperate to take her Fool’s Gold everywhere. I’m sure you can find your own parallels …

Thursday 21st Fired Art Ceramics Café in Ryde is our venue to decorate a bowl ready for my parents’ golden wedding anniversary in October. We didn’t notice the café bit, but the proprietor was warm and welcoming. She struck the right balance between needing to protect delicate and hot items, yet children feeling safe and happy. Now there’s a challenge for our churches.

Friday 22nd If you’re ever in Shanklin Old Village, you have to buy an ice cream at Pearly Boise. An unbelievable huge range of home made flavours. It’s three months to the next dental check-up. More on ice cream in the next few days’ entries: you’ll see why.

In the afternoon, we take the children for their (and my!) first ever experience of live circus. Jay Miller’s Circus does not use animals, so we are happy. It’s not the biggest one you’ll ever see, but there were some astonishing acrobats, and we were ringside – which meant that Debbie and Rebekah got covered in spaghetti and custard pie from Peppi the clown. They weren’t distressed: Mark was.

Saturday 23rd Rebekah has an invitation next month to a ten-pin bowling birthday party, so we thought we’d better introduce her to its delights. At least it proves to be a delight to her when she wins, but not when she is second or lower. It turns out that on Ryde Esplanade there is a branch of LA Bowl ten-pin. Finding details before we went to the Isle of Wight had been frustrating. Tourist information sites listed the bowling alley, and it’s mentioned on LA Bowl’s home page, but not when you click ‘locations‘! They have a visibility and communication problem – not unlike the church.

Sunday 24th My sister and her boys come over from Hampshire for the day and meet us at Dinosaur Isle. (I’m a theistic evolutionist, not a creationist or Intelligent Design guy.) The Isle of Wight is rich in fossil history. It was over the heads of our kids, who still haven’t grasped that dinos are extinct, unlike my ten-year-old nephew, who fancies a career as a paleantologist. One section of the exhibition invites you to put your hand inside slots in a box and guess what you are feeling. Unfortunately, the first thing Mark feels is dino poo! We hear for the rest of the holiday about how it should have been flushed away.

Later, watching the BBC Ten O’Clock News, James Reynolds reports on the closing ceremony of the Olympics. He opens by saying, ‘In a state which has no god, the Olympics have been a religion.’ He closes with the words, ‘Now these people will have to find something else to believe in.’ Perhaps G K Chesterton was right all those decades ago when he said that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Or as Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody.

Monday 25th Rain makes us reverse our plans. An afternoon visit to The Old Smithy at Godshill becomes a morning visit. Instead of gorging ourselves on the finest cakes we’ve ever found in four holidays on the island, we settle for morning scones. Still stunning.

Then we make a return visit to Robin Hill. We’d been the previous Monday, and if you return within seven days, you get in free. Bad news: no longer do they sell New Forest Ice Cream, they’ve gone over to Minghella’s. The latter has apparently won forty-four awards, and was described in the Sunday Times as the best tasting ice cream ever. Could have fooled us. It melts in seconds, is indistinguishable in taste from ordinary stuff, and costs £1.70 per cone instead of £1.40 for New Forest. The biggest taste in Minghella’s is the hype.

Tuesday 26th We’re in Newport when Debbie suddenly sees a bus for Alum Bay. Now I’ve wanted to go there all holiday, I just can’t take her sudden and impulsive plan-changing approach to life. We won’t have time for everything there in a couple of hours. But we do get to the spectacular chairlift. Debbie and Rebekah, the family daredevils, love it. I have to restrain my intermittent vertigo to be safe person for little Mark, who is frightened at first. Sometimes that’s what I’m called to do in other ways as a minister. Churches don’t like looking down at the drop sometimes, but rather than staying on terra firma, I have to encourage them to get out on the chairlift, even if I too am frightened at the thought of looking down.

Wednesday 27th The Isle Of Wight Zoo And Tiger Sanctuary (‘Home Of ITV’s Tiger Island‘, we are repeatedly told) is much smaller than our much-loved Colchester Zoo. Enclosures are overgrown, with some plants even growing up the sides, making it difficult to see some animals. We have overgrowth in the church, making it hard for people to see Jesus.

More light-heartedly, we were watching some lemurs when one spontaneously urinated in front of everyone. Rebekah launched into an instant chant or rap: ‘Do some wee! Do some wee! We want you to do some wee!’ Thank goodness they didn’t know I was a ‘vicar’.

Thursday 28th On an X40 Island Coaster, returning to Alum Bay. The bus is crammed with people most of the journey. We stop en route at Ventnor. The bus driver calls out, ‘Anyone for Ventnor?’ Not thinking everyone has heard he even climbs out of his cockpit and comes upstairs where we are. He repeats, ‘Anyone for Ventnor?’ ‘No!’ cries back Rebekah, obviously thinking she has the right to speak for everyone. Do you know people like that.

Well, I think that will have to do. Hopefully this has raised a few smiles and given the odd pause for thought.

6

Leave

Well, having set up the new blog here on WordPress, I now have two weeks without a computer, so updating may not happen for a little while. I’ll be back soon.

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Sermon For 31st August: Spiritual Health

I won’t be preaching for the next three Sundays, so here is one I’ve prepared for the end of the month.

Matthew 16:21-28

Introduction
Doctors told an American named Craig Boyden, who was just thirty-two, that he was suffering from Crohn’s disease and had three months to live. Perhaps understandably, he decided that if he only had three months, he’d better make the most of them. He went back to his job as a credit manager at a carpet company in Elliott City in Maryland, and embezzled $30,000. He the used the money to live it up – dining in the best restaurants, throwing parties for his friends, buying drinks for everyone in every bar he went into.

But the funny thing was that as the weeks went by, instead of feeling worse and worse he just felt fine, if anything, even better than he had done. So he went to a different doctor for a second opinion. There he discovered that he wasn’t suffering from Crohn’s disease at all, but just a hernia. He’d suffered an allergic reaction to the gloves that the surgeon was wearing during exploratory surgery, and that had led to the misdiagnosis.

But that left him with another problem: the firm had found out that $30,000 was missing. Fortunately for Boyden, when he explained everything, the court was understanding, and gave him a suspended sentence, on condition that he paid the money back at the rate of $5,000 a year.[1]

With sickness, it’s important to recognise and interpret the symptoms, make a diagnosis and from that basis prescribe the appropriate treatment. In our reading today, I want to suggest that Peter is suffering from a sickness of the spirit, even if he doesn’t realise it (at least at first). It’s a spiritual sickness that leads him to misunderstand the will of God. We need a healthy approach to discerning the will of God. Today’s sermon attempts to explore what a healthy approach to finding and following God’s will might look like, based on Peter’s symptoms, Jesus’ diagnosis and his prescription.

1. Symptoms
We find the symptoms of Peter’s sickness in his rebuke to Jesus:

‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ (Verse 22)

We can examine the symptoms by looking at the language Peter uses here.

‘God forbid it, Lord’ is an abbreviated version of a Jewish expression: ‘May God be gracious to you.’ It means, ‘May God mercifully spare you this,’ hence why Peter says, ‘This must never happen to you.’ It’s very emphatic, containing a double negative.

It sounds like Peter thinks he’s being kind to Jesus. In the previous few verses, Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah. Now he seems to say, ‘We can’t let this happen to the Messiah! That isn’t what’s supposed to happen to the Messiah! He’s meant to triumph over the enemies of God’s people, not suffer!’

On this reading, Peter is kind and well-intentioned. He is sincere. We like sincerity. The alternative is hypocrisy, and who wants that? It is common to say in our society, ‘It doesn’t matter what you believe, so long as you are sincere.’ I once talked to the son of a deceased church member who said he was sure his mum had gone to heaven, because that was what she sincerely believed would happen after death. If you believed something else, then that was what would happen to you. He didn’t pause to consider how illogical this was.

But in any case, sincerity is not enough. Many years ago, there was an inquest held when a person died in a hospital operating theatre after the wrong anaesthetic was administered. The coroner told the anaesthetist, ‘ I believe you sincerely thought you were giving the correct anaesthetic. But you were sincerely wrong, and it cost a life.’

We can be sincerely wrong. Peter was. He had a faulty concept of the Messiah’s mission. Sincerity on its own made him sick. He missed God’s will for Jesus.

And he missed God’s will for himself. Because he could not or would not see that the true destiny of the Messiah would shape his own. If Jesus were to go to the Cross, then the cross shapes the destiny of all disciples.

Now if that’s the case, then Peter’s symptoms may be more than sincerity detached from truth; they may also be about letting personal ambition get in the way of hearing God’s voice. He wouldn’t have been alone among the disciples: in just four chapters’ time, James and John will want preferential seating at the Messiah’s banquet in the kingdom of God. How easy it is for us, too, to baptise our own preferences and ambitions as the will of God.

Our son will keep asking for something, even when we say ‘no.’ When we get to the point of saying to him, ‘It doesn’t matter how many times you ask, the answer will always be no,’ he often replies, ‘But I want you to say yes.’ That can be like our ambitions trying to distort the will of God. We are desperate for the answer that suits us. But God won’t give it – unless he chooses to give us up to our desires, and that’s a worrying development.

Peter, then, displays possibly two dangerous symptoms of spiritual sickness. One is sincerity divorced from truth, the other is the baptism of personal ambition. Do either of these ring bells for us?

2. Diagnosis
When I was a child, we once had a family doctor who was writing the prescription on his pad almost within seconds of a patient entering his surgery. You wouldn’t really say he had a bedside manner.

And neither did Jesus. Peter might have expected affirmation or encouragement in the wake of his statement, but what happens next is this:

But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ (Verse 23)

So much for ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’! Let’s take a moment to think through this devastating diagnosis, that will have crushed Peter by asserting so aggressively that he is against the will of God.

We start with ‘Satan’. It couldn’t be worse, could it? The very least this means is ‘adversary’. Peter, you are not my supporter, you are my opponent, my enemy.

If by ‘Satan’ Jesus doesn’t simply mean ‘adversary’ but the Devil, then we link back to chapter four of Matthew’s Gospel, where the Devil tempts Jesus in the wilderness in order to sidetrack him from the Father’s will. This is what Peter is doing. Rather than correcting Jesus, he is sidetracking him.

And he is a ‘stumbling block’: Peter, the ‘rock’, becomes a ‘rock of stumbling’. It’s the same word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 1:23 to describe general Jewish offence at the idea of preaching Christ crucified. The Cross is a stumbling block to people finding faith, and Peter is a stumbling block in the way of Jesus going there for the salvation of the world.

Summing Peter up, then, Jesus diagnoses him not as a friend and disciple but as an opponent who wants to sidetrack him from the will of God. He is a serious obstacle to Jesus’ progress in bringing salvation.

Do we ever become the opponents of Christ? Do we get in the way of him fulfilling his purposes? I do. There are times when I don’t like his will. It might be something general from Scripture, like his insistence that the way to glory is through suffering and rejection. I’d rather it came through ease and popularity.

Or it might be that he wants me to do something in particular that isn’t congenial to me. I have been dragged kicking and screaming into his will on some occasions. I have heard him say ‘Yes’ and I have tried to persuade him that he really meant ‘No’. It is by his grace and mercy that he has faced me down as he did Peter, in order to put me in places where I might be fruitful for him.

Being healthy in the life of the Spirit entails saying ‘yes’ to Jesus.

3. Prescription
So how does Jesus set about making a sick Peter healthy? His prescription starts with the words, ‘Get behind me.’ The first thing Peter has to do is clear away the obstacles. Rather than standing in front of Jesus as a rock of stumbling, he should get behind him. How is he to remove the obstacle? By dropping his objection to the Cross. We have to stop seeing the Cross as an offence and embrace it. The path to spiritual health is like the words of the hymn, ‘In the cross of Christ I glory’. Yes, the Cross may lead us to weep for our sins that put Christ there, but we cannot stop with such emotions. Healthy spirituality rejoices in what Christ has done for us.

But ‘Get behind me’ may mean something else, too. ‘Behind’ is the proper place for a disciple. Disciples followed teachers: logically, that meant standing behind them. Jesus is telling Peter that the key to spiritual health and participating in the will of God is in following him – not in debating his words, but in doing them. John’s Gospel records Jesus saying something that sheds light on this:

‘Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.’ (John 7:17)

It’s no good treating the words of Jesus as theory, or just praising them as the greatest wisdom ever given to the human race. We can’t be bystanders. We need to be what James in his epistle called ‘doers of the word’ (James 1:22). We shall only have spiritual health when we commit ourselves to walking in the footsteps of Jesus.

We see another part of the prescription implied when Jesus tells Peter, ‘you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’ (verse 23). Surely the implication is that we need to set our minds on the things of God. It’s similar to what Paul tells the Colossians:

‘Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.’ (Colossians 3:2-3)

If we want spiritual health, we focus on God’s ways and God’s agenda. When we set our minds on human things or ‘things that are on earth’, we lower our vision and we tend to become self-centred. That is the way of the world, and it is the way of death. It is the approach that says your well-being is defined by your money and possessions.

Jesus is quite explicit in what follows about what constitutes setting our minds on divine things: it means denying ourselves, taking up our cross and following him (verses 24-28). We let the Cross shape our minds, hearts and actions.

When we set our minds on divine things, we are committed to spiritually healthy minds. But it cannot remain theoretical: if the brain doesn’t send signals to the rest of the body, there is something wrong with us. So too in the spiritual life: setting our minds on divine things is accompanied by the signals travelling to our hands and feet so that our cross-shaped thinking is complemented by cross-shaped acting.

Jesus’ prescription for spiritually healthy people who embrace the will of God, then, is to glory in the Cross and put his teaching into practice. This means letting our thoughts and deeds be shaped by a discipleship that is willing to suffer for following Jesus.

Just one last thing to say: I am on two repeat prescriptions from my doctor. We fall into a trap if we think that Jesus’ prescription is a one-off. It’s a repeat prescription. Spiritual health means we keep taking the tablets.

[1] Simon Coupland, Spicing Up Your Speaking, p 221 # 213, adapting Bill Bryson, Bizarre World, p 13f.

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Self-Centred Nerds

In February, I said I would be writing an article for Ministry Today under the title, ‘Is Blogging For Self-Centred Nerds?’ Finally, over the last two evenings, I’ve written it. I’ve taken responses from the original article, plus those given when Richard Hall broadcast my appeal. I’ve also quoted from a recent Tall Skinny Kiwi post and taken extensive material from a United Methodist Reporter article written two years ago.

I know, two years ago. So long in webland, and longer in the blogosphere.

I don’t know when the article will be published in hard copy or appear on the Ministry Today website. I’ll let you know.

Thanks to everyone who contributed, either here, at Richard’s blog, or in the other articles without knowing. I’ve linked to just about every blogger I’ve quoted, so if you commented, you’re almost certainly in the piece and hopefully you’ll receive a bit more traffic.

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Boring

In recent months, two lads from an unchurched family have been coming to church. One is eleven, the other eight. It started through our weekly craft club and occasional Messy Church events.

We haven’t seen the older brother for some weeks. Yesterday, the eight-year-old told us that big brother wouldn’t be coming to church any more, or to holiday club this week, because he thought church was boring.

He wouldn’t be the first child to think so. Did we fail him when he said he wanted a job doing something at the church on his first Sunday and we said he needed to come for a while before that? I doubt it. Even if we had given him a responsibility, I still think he would have found it all rather boring.

I did at eleven years old, too. I quit Sunday School, because I found it patronising. Mum and Dad let me go over the park and watch Sunday football games, but insisted I came to the evening service – during which time I used to scribble and doodle when it came to the sermon.

I had a worse problem than this in my first appointment. It involved highly unsuitable children’s workers. One problem among many was the way they kept children in Sunday School rather than going in with the adults for the first part of worship, or for all-age services. ‘Don’t go into church,’ the leader told the kids, ‘It’s boring.’ Not the best advert for your church.

However – without justifying any of the actions that leader and two others engaged in – I have to say that I told that story to a fellow minister who for a short while was my confidante. When I told him the ‘Don’t go into church, it’s boring’ line, his reaction was, ‘Well – is it?’ And it probably was.

So what do we do about boring church? Do we look for all sorts of gimmicks in order to make it exciting? Experienced Christians know it isn’t as simple as that. You can’t have excitement every week. You end up with consumer church, where people are attracted or kept by yet more spectacular thrills, as some critics of North American megachurches have pointed out. Doing so makes worship not God-centred but human-centred.

If the Church is the Bride of Christ, then an analogy from marriage may help here. Whatever the joys in the early weeks and months of romance, those feelings come and go, and they cannot be the barometer of a good marriage. (That may be part of what is wrong with what many commentators have called the ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ approach to worship songs.) A permanent high is unsustainable. Life has to be lived, in all its mess. Sometimes, as I recently heard Adrian Plass put it, life is a choice between what you don’t want to do and what you really don’t want to do. That doesn’t make for a thrill-a-minute lifestyle.

So should I look at more creative and stimulating approaches to worship? I’m sure that would be good, but I don’t find that easy. I happen to believe I’m a preacher who gets stuck also with leading worship. Worship leading isn’t really my gift. In any case, good creative worship requires a team of people with different gifts, and it wouldn’t be possible to do that every week. Even if we had the personnel in order to depend on such an approach, it would leave us dependent upon human skills rather than an encounter with the living God.

Am I trying to find some spiritual justification for boredom in church? No. More often than I care to admit, I’m bored myself – not least when I’m conducting the worship! It feels like a problem, because it is a problem.

And the reason I think it’s a problem is this. I just have to read the four Gospels to know the issue. There was something compelling about Jesus when he walked the earth. Either people came to him like filings to a magnet, or they were repulsed by what he said and did. You couldn’t be bored with Jesus two thousand years ago, and if we claim that worship and discipleship constitute an engagement with him today, then church should not equal boredom.

Surely it is a group of people passionately engaged with Jesus Christ whose worship will repudiate boredom without falling into the dangers of sensationalist tricks. Something about that relationship has to be nurtured in our midst.

Three years ago, Christianity Today carried a powerful interview with Eugene Peterson. It was entitled, ‘Spirituality For All The Wrong Reasons‘. Like an eminent consultant surgeon, Peterson showed in the conversation where many others had gone wrong and where instead one should cut for a successful operation. Spirituality isn’t about emotional intimacy with Jesus, but the ordinary stuff of following him. The Gospel shouldn’t primarily be conceived in terms of the benefits we receive, he says: that’s consumerism. Moreover, he says, don’t idealise the church. All our great goals are laudable, but they are slow work. Our impatience leads to manipulating or bullying people, even in the cause of something good.

Towards the end of the interview, he says this:

I think relevance is a crock. I don’t think people care
a whole lot about what kind of music you have or how you shape the
service. They want a place where God is taken seriously, where they’re
taken seriously, where there is no manipulation of their emotions or
their consumer needs.

Why did we get captured by this advertising, publicity mindset? I think it’s destroying our church.

He substitutes reverence for relevance. Is this an excuse for more misery? I heard the call for reverence when I was a young Christian from older Christians whod didn’t like the frivolity, as they saw it, of our lives. True reverence is surely about awe, rather than putting distance and barriers between ourselves and God.

And if we are about engaging with the real Jesus, then reverence of the ‘awe’ kind will be part of the mix. People were awed by what he said and did. So should we be, though truly our familiarity has bred contempt.

But it will also include joy. In yesterday’s sermon I quoted a description of Jesus as a ‘party animal’. Jesus gives us reason for celebration, every bit as much as for reverence.

Maybe both frothy churches and boring churches haven’t engaged that much with the Gospels and their depiction of Jesus. I’m making as much a point as I can of preaching each week from the Lectionary Gospel reading, so that our vision of Jesus can determine everything. (Not that I don’t believe all the Scriptures point to Christ, but perhaps it’s fair to say that the Gospels give us the clearest portrait.) I wonder whether our responsibility is to do all we can to focus on Jesus. That involves our preaching, prayer, Bible study, personal devotions and the spiritual disciplines generally. And when I say the spiritual disciplines, I don’t merely mean a list of devotional habits. They have to translate into the actions of practical piety, or they are worse than useless.

Not that I wish to suggest it’s all down to us. Ultimately, a real encounter with the living God is not about all the good works we do – I’m simply advocating those things that I believe best tune us into him, when done in co-operation with the Holy Spirit. The God of love will in his grace and mercy make himself known on his own terms. But we can stand ready to encounter him.

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Fighting Fires

Today, we took the kids to Chelmsford Fire Station’s open day. We had a wonderful couple of hours. There were engines to climb on, platforms to watch as they rose into the sky, fund-raising stalls – not just for their own benevolent fund but for a local cancer charity and Guide Dogs for the Blind. Children could hold a hose with one of the firefighters and put out an imaginary blaze.

But there was also education. A powerful demonstration about dangers associated with leaving a chip pan untended, let alone dousing the fire with water, scared our two as flames suddenly and loudly shot into the air. They also wanted people’s names and addresses if they didn’t have smoke alarms, because they would visit and fit alarms free of charge.

Oh, and I forgot the very reasonably priced hot dogs.

After we left, a metaphor of ministry struck me. Although the fire service is becoming better known for its educational work, such as with smoke alarms, they are better known and more glamorised for fighting fires. Yet the education is just as needed, albeit less spectacular.

Can you see where I’m going? Ministers are often most appreciated for fighting the fires of personal pastoral crises. The ongoing education is less glamorous, and less appreciated for its importance. Tomorrow morning, as many of us preach the Word – for the nth time – we shall be engaging in the unglamorous work that is less often appreciated. I know we shall hear some ‘Lovely sermon, dear’ comments and that one or two will make specific comments. However, some of the best preaching and leadership of Bible Study will be fire prevention work. Some of the crises need not happen if the preventative work is done well and heeded.

Just my thoughts tonight. Have a good Sunday.

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