Category: ministry

Sacred Rhythms

We’ve just started a new course at Knaphill: Sacred Rhythms is a DVD course that abbreviates the book of the same name by Ruth Haley Barton, an American retreat leader and spiritual director. I’ve been reading her regular emails from The Transforming Center for some while. I’m about half way through the original book.

Why are we doing it? Because people asked at our annual meeting in the Spring for teaching on prayer. Barton says something striking about that: it is young Christians who typically do not ask how to pray, because they get on with it. As we become more mature, we hit  more obstacles in prayer and realise we don’t know what we thought we knew. Ironically, it is the more experienced Christians who may have to come to the point of honesty, asking, “Teach us to pray.”

We had an excellent first meeting this week. The opening chapter or session locates ‘desire’ as a way into discovering why we need to develop the habits of spiritual disciplines that form a rule of life, in which we focus on Christ.

That sounds strange, even wrong, at first. However, Barton begins from the times in the Gospels when Jesus asks needy people like Bartimaeus questions such as, “What do you want me to do for you?” We could come up with selfish answers to that, or the question could expose honourable desires. Yet even if we come up with answers from sinful motives, these are exposed in the light of Christ and that is a first step to coming into a better place. Like Bartimaeus, we may need to ‘throw off our cloak’ to press towards what God has for us – we may need to let go of certain things that are not always sins in order to walk in the way of Christ.

At this early stage, I recommend the course to you.  As a taster, here are the opening three minutes of it.

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What I Wrote After 9/11

So today is the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I’ll leave learned reflections on the interim to better commentators. In particular, I’ll point you to Will Willimon’s challenging reflection.

But I remembered something I wrote at the time. 9/11 (or 11/9 in British English) was a Tuesday. At that time, I wrote a regular Christian column in the local newspaper where I lived, the Medway Messenger.  The Messenger was published on a Friday, and I had to have my copy in a couple of days ahead. That week I had written something, but the magnitude of the terrorist attacks meant I needed to write something fresh and email it in.
I’m going to reproduce below what I actually wrote. All copy for newspapers risks being edited, and mine was. Savagely. It was cut only to leave the parts about the terrorists deserving the judgement of God. I think it ended with the paragraph that concludes, ‘there is no forgiveness for the terrorists’.

Why? There are two possible explanations. One is that my piece was published in a week when the paper was celebrating a relaunch, and they were keen to devote many trees to praising their own success. Some of that appeared on the same page as my article.

The other possibility is that they didn’t like the tenor of my piece. As you will see, it concludes that every single one of us needs mercy, and that God’s mercy can scandalously extend to the most evil of human beings. They may have been offended by the Gospel.

Would I change anything now? Certainly not the emphasis on mercy! We have a scandalous gospel, and it needs celebrating. In the following fortnight, I preached two sermons to help my congregations come to terms with what had happened. In the second one, I preached from Isaiah 30, with its message of woe to those who trusted in horses and went down to Egypt. Might there be a word of judgement from God on the West in what happened? I preached that sermon twice, and in one of them a worshipper publicly argued with me in the middle of the sermon about that. She then refused to share The Peace with me.

I might say different things about President Bush, and pick up on his offensive remark at the time that the way for Americans to respond to terrorists was to go shopping.

But see what you think. My full, unedited script follows below the asterisks.

************

Where were you when you heard that JFK had been shot? That was the question of my parents’ generation. I don’t know: I was only three years old at the time, and my family would not own a television set for another two years.

Where were you when you learned that Princess Diana had died? That’s easier: I had just moved into Medway, was living in temporary accommodation in Lordswood, and was due to start work here the next day.

Now the new question for our generation is, where were you when you heard of the plane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? I was sitting here at my desk, when my wife came in from work. I had not long emailed my regular column to the paper. “Isn’t it terrible, these terrorist attacks in America?” she called out.

“What attacks?” I asked. We turned on the TV and found ourselves affixed with a morbid glue to ITN. If only it were a Bruce Willis movie.

That original column seems less important now. Maybe it will be printed one day – who knows? I just had to write something different. My thoughts are all over the shop; perhaps yours are, too. But here goes.

Before anything else, let me plead with you not to assume that your Muslim neighbours are all secret terrorists. Whatever my own (quite fundamental) disagreements with the Muslim faith, I know enough to realise that many Muslims share the same abhorrence of terrorism. Do not stereotype them, do not stigmatise them, and do not take out your anger on them.

But then let me move on to the questions I am often asked as a Christian about justice, punishment, and forgiveness. In the Church we are often caricatured as being weak and namby-pamby when we speak up for forgiveness. The Bible speaks of justice as well as forgiveness. Criminals must be brought to book. But it is for justice, not revenge.

President Bush was right to say in one of his early addresses to the American people that there should be no distinction between the actual terrorists and those who harboured them. To the Christian, motive and attitude of heart are just as crucial as outward action. Jesus said that those who harbour anger are as liable to judgement as murderers, and those who lust in their hearts are as much sinners as adulterers.

But one distinction can be drawn between the terrorists and others involved in the planning of these unspeakably evil acts. Let me put it in a provocative way for a Christian: there is no forgiveness for the terrorists.

Why do I say that? We presume that the terrorists all perished on the hijacked planes. Unless there was a last-minute repentance, they will face the judgement of God. The Bible teaches that ‘it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgement’.

But their co-conspirators are still alive, we assume. They still have opportunity for repentance and forgiveness. Whether they do so is another matter, but there have been some remarkable precedents in history.

Take the end of World War Two. Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide, and as far as we know there was not an ounce of repentance from the evil man himself. I may be wrong, but I do not expect to see him in Heaven.

But at the Nuremberg war trials, something remarkable happened. An American Army padre named Henry Gerrick was appointed to be a chaplain to those accused of war crimes. The Nazis had killed his only two sons: imagine how he felt in having to minister to them.

Of the twenty-one prisoners, sixteen requested his services. He gathered them together and told them of a God of mercy, whose Son Jesus Christ had died for their sins. Some, like Goering, sneered, despite the pleas of his own daughter. But others, including von Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Frick, went to the gallows, accepting their earthly punishment but saying their confidence was placed in the mercy of God and the death of Christ.

It is in that mercy that we all find our only hope in eternity.

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Masculinity, The Church And Christian Faith

Oh, good grief:

And worse?

(HT: Matthew Paul Turner)
Has Mark Driscoll been out-Driscolled by Pastor Ed Young? Maybe Harry Hill should get Young and Driscoll together. Because, in the words of his catchphrase, there’s only one way to settle this – fight!

Only a couple of days ago, The Guardian reported on ‘muscular Christianity’, complete with art of a tattooed, muscle-rippling Jesus, who sadly doesn’t look remotely Semitic. (And conveniently overlooking, as one commenter noted, the Jewish prohibition on tattoos.)
That article is at least slightly serious but sadly a little short. It ends by quoting Eric Delve, the vicar of St Luke’s, Maidstone, saying,

Men are looking for action figures. That’s why they follow footballers.

This is a theme Eric has had for many years.  In the midst of how easy it is to laugh or to throw up our hands in horror at the Young/Driscoll approach (how dangerous is it when combined with hard-line complementarianism?), it’s also important to remember that while this is a deeply defective and distorted image of Christ and faith, these guys are knowingly tapping into a well-known perception by men of Christianity. Faith is a lifeboat affair: women and children first.

An acquaintance at college did some research into the different ways in which women and men came to faith. While all this must be seen on a spectrum rather than expecting everyone of a particular sex to behave in the same way, he noted that women responded more to a message of forgiveness and men more when the message was couched in terms of giving a purpose for life. This would make some sense of Delve’s quotation, although it still leaves no room for the Young video that sees nothing wrong with people punching the lights out of each other. It’s an irony, perhaps, that the forgiveness message is usually preached by … men.

So however crude and ugly some of the he-man Christianity is, there is still a fair point. We’ve known for a while that church is thought to portray a wishy-washy image of Jesus. But the he-man approach gets the notion of strength all wrong. It isn’t strength to inflict pain on someone: the strength of Jesus is in the courage to suffer.

Meanwhile, some of us feel we don’t fit into either the wishy-washy camp or the muscular lot. Me, I like sport but I wasn’t born with the build to get into all the heavy physical stuff. I was born with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, so I’m probably disqualified from Young or Driscoll’s churches like some defective animal that wouldn’t be sacrificed in the Old Testament.

What, then, is a healthy attitude to maleness and Christian faith? Thoughts?

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The Purpose Of The Church

From a testimony reproduced at the Church And Culture Blog:

CS Lewis writes, “The church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.  If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply, a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.”

What do you think? How does this compare with John Wesley‘s statement,

You have one business on earth – to save souls

and what are the implications of ‘drawing men to Christ’, ‘making them little Christs’ and ‘saving souls’?

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How To Nurture Hope

Jason Clark posts an email on leadership by Steve Bagi, ‘Hope … where can I get some?’ Bagi lists ten ways to build hope, and they’re good.

I’d like to see him reflect more on the problem ministers have of being surrounded by people with little hope – not necessarily the naysayers in the congregation but also those facing various pastoral crises and difficulties. I’d also like him to take personality traits and perhaps medical predispositions to depressive tendencies into account. (And while writing this post, WordPress suggested Trait Theory as a tag: I’ve not looked into that.)

Nevertheless, I like the thought of surrounding yourself with people of hope (#3). It reminds me of the effect of having fellowship with Christians of strong faith.

I have hope in the face of a problem when it is in an area of my competence. I may not know the solution immediately, but I feel sure we shall discover it.

Prayer needs conversion to the mode of hope, too, at times. When we do not know what to do and we pray, an important component is the attitude we bring to prayer. Do we have hope that in coming before God in prayer, we shall eventually be led to the right decisions or actions?

What nurtures hope for you?

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More Shame From Televangelist Hell

The Independent reports on OFCOM sanctions against a Christian TV channel for showing programmes where pastors have claimed to heal diseases such as cancer with the likes of olive oil and Ribena (i.e., blackcurrant squash), which was supposed to represent the blood of Christ.

For someone like me who does believe in the healing ministry, this is particularly sickening, because this irresponsible behaviour masks the quiet, humble and gentle ministry of many.

I did a quick investigation online into one of the pastors named, a certain Paul Lewis. Was it just bad English that said he had not a BA or an MA but an MBA in Theology? (If you doubt me, read it here.) I guess ministry is big business.

Oh, funnily enough it is: you can buy his Anointed Prosperity Kit, which includes the ‘miracle olive oil soap’, by the way, along with the ‘divine prosperity cross necklace’ (because that is what the Cross is all about). It would be hilarious were it not so horrific.

But not to worry, he’s a real Mother Teresa type at heart. Back to that ‘About’ page:

Only once in a life- time does some-one come along with such a gifting yet humble and caring spirit to share on missions, orphanages, crisis care intervention and more to the brothers and sisters in the World.

So nothing to worry about there, then, after all. I must have it all wrong.

The trouble is, how does the Christian Church guard against these situations? We can’t do anything to stop individuals setting themselves up like this. Does anyone have any bright ideas?

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I Have Come That They Might Have Meetings

While on holiday, we met an old friend. She had been one of my church members in the circuit before last. I had trained her as a Methodist Local Preacher, and then supported her as she candidated for the ministry. Now she was the local minister in the town where we were staying.
It was a wonderfully happy reunion, and it was interesting to talk with her as a colleague in the ministry. We had so much more than ever before to talk about, and even more in common. She loved so much about being in the ministry, but one thing drove her mad. It does me, too. Meetings. For all the emphasis on the call to preach, care, lead, envision, pray and so on, the institutional side of church life often takes over. Those who hope to cast big picture visions find themselves weighed down by the minutiae of detail and micro-management. Well can I understand why the ‘new church’ leader Gerald Coates once parodied Jesus’ words, “I have come that they might have life and have it more abundantly” by saying, “I have come that they might have meetings and have them more abundantly.”
My conversation with my friend reminded me of an article I had found just before going away. Well known British businessman John Timpson wrote a response to a question, and he called it ‘Our meetings get in the way of any work being done‘.  Timpson says,

I have a theory that the fewer meetings you have the better you do.

Is he right? I certainly smile at his illustration of the supermarket chain Asda having a meeting room with no chairs, to keep chat to a minimum. While I imagine there are echoes there of Privy Council meetings, I also have mischievous thoughts about our Church Councils being conducted that way.

What do you think? Is Timpson right?

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My Memory Of John Stott

Yesterday evening, reports appeared on the web that John Stott had passed away yesterday afternoon at the age of 90. (This search will take you to about two hundred stories in Google News at the time of typing.) Obituaries cover his evangelism, his leadership of All Souls, Langham Place, his key place with Billy Graham in the Lausanne Movement, his commitment to social action as core to evangelical understandings of mission, his clear Bible teaching, his concern for the Majority World, his love of birdwatching and much more. I particularly recommend Christianity Today’s obituary.
More concisely, Maggi Dawn has described him this morning on Twitter as

 The most compassionate, sane evangelical Christian I ever met.

I have read many of his books. Favourites of mine include his expositions of Acts and Ephesians (the latter is particularly worn and battered). However, I only heard him preach once. I was training for the ministry in Manchester at the time, and he came to preach one evening at the local Anglican church, which had a large student ministry. Dr Stott agreed to stay behind afterwards and field questions.
I attended that meeting. I was engaged in my postgraduate research in Theology, specialising in ecclesiology, the doctrine of the Church. I asked him a question. Why did he think Archbishop Robert Runcie had chided evangelical Anglicans at the third National Evangelical Anglican Congress in 1987 that

‘If the current evangelical renewal in the Church of England is to have a lasting impact, then there must be more explicit attention given to the doctrine of the church’?

Dr Stott gently batted the question back at me, with quiet grace and a faintly sparkling smile. “Why do you think he did?”
I had no sense that he was trying to dodge the question. Rather, like Jesus, he knew that questions could be more deeply explored by asking further questions. He wasn’t short of answers himself, and for those who want to know, it is worth reading his book The Living Church.

Farewell, then, in this life, to one of the most gracious, compassionate  and hard-thinking evangelical Christians to have come to prominence in the last century. May more of us in that tradition seek to emulate his example.

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Funerals: The Initial Contact And Visit

Blogging has been light here recently, with only sermons posted for a few weeks. Even then there wasn’t even a sermon last week, due to taking an all age service, and for the same reason there isn’t one this week, either. I’ve been under huge pressure workwise, much of it involving tragedies, and to be honest I’m exhausted.

Since one of the major things I’ve been involved with in recent weeks is funerals,  I thought I might post some advice regarding them from a minister’s perspective. Here are some of the things I have learned in nineteen years as a minister, much of it by trial and error.

Often a call from a funeral director comes out of the blue, but occasionally you are expecting it, because you know someone from the church has died. In most cases, I find the date and time for the cremation has already been set. Try to fit in with this if at all possible. Only decline or ask for a rearrangement if there is no alternative. A death is a priority. If you get the chance to negotiate the date, though, all the better.

Here is the information you should obtain from the undertaker:

Full name of deceased
Date and location of death
Cause of death
Any church connections (in my case, Methodist) – and is there any particular reason the family wants a Christian minister to take the service?
Name, address and phone number of contact person (who is usually but not always the next of kin and/or chief mourner)
Any music requests made by the family, such as hymns or entry and exit music
Does the family want gifts to go to a particular good cause in their loved one’s memory? (You may be announcing this at the funeral.)
Anything else the undertaker thinks is relevant

The funeral director may well ask you about your fee. My working policy is never to charge where there is a church family connection, because people have been contributing towards my stipend through the offering. If I am being called in as an outsider, though, I generally don’t mind taking a fee. My stock response to the undertaker in those circumstances is, ‘Pay me the same as you would pay an Anglican.’ That saves me the embarrassment of setting a fee. And if I were to set my own fee and out of charity make it lower than the C of E’s standard fee, it can cause bad ecumenical feeling, because the Anglicans can then think you are undercutting them in order to gain more business. We’re not in competition, even if they are in the dominant position.

Because a death is a priority, do not wait long before phoning the contact person given to you by the funeral director. It may well be they were with the funeral arranger when you took the original phone call, so sometimes you can allow them time to get home, but do not waste time. You need to see them as soon as possible, because you may not get everything about the service tied up in one visit. They may need to ask questions of other family members before resolving some details.

When you phone the contact person, explain who you are (they may well already have your name, though) and say you are sorry these are the circumstances in which your paths cross. Then simply say that you think it would be helpful if you could visit to discuss their loved one’s life and to plan the service. Let them have your phone number, just in case the arrangement needs to be changed.

At the meeting, after a preliminary conversation where you may be asking about the circumstances that led to the deceased passing away, offer to take them through an outline of a typical funeral service as a guide. I tell them I am not imposing a formula on them, because I want it to be personal for them. At the same time, experience tells me I need to be sure of certain minimum standards. Very occasionally a family will get pushy and think that I am simply there to follow their commands. However, you don’t pay a car mechanic and tell them what to do: if you are wise, you normally take the mecahnic’s advice.

In running through the service, I explain that I will be at the crematorium before they arrive to check that everything is ready in the chapel. When they arrive and we are ready to begin the service, we need to know whether they wish to follow the coffin into the chapel or be seated first. I don’t mind which they do, but I strongly advise they should make up their minds before the day, rather than be faced with that question just as they are trying to compose themselves for the service.

If they are going to use music on CD for any part of the service, a crem will typically appreciate having that music two working days beforehand, in order to check it will play on their system. Not all will gurantee to play computer-burned CDs. If you do have to have that, the best advice is to stick to CD-Rs, not CD-RWs, and to ensure that the music is in a standard lossless format such as WAV, not in a compressed format such as MP3, WMA or M4A/AAC, let alone more obscure formats like Ogg Vorbis, Apple Lossless or FLAC.

After running through the service, we discuss the deceased’s life. Over the years, I have developed a short series of questions or categories that help to put together the material for a eulogy:

Birth, siblings, school and early life
Working life
Marriage, relationships and family (take note of children’s and grandchildren’s names)
Hobbies, interests and pastimes
Character and personality

I find it important to end with that last one. It’s the area of the deceased’s life that will unite everyone who gathers to mourn their passing. Whether they knew the person as a family member, a friend, a neighbour or a colleague, all will recognise certain personality traits.

If family members are going to participate, either by giving the eulogy, reading a poem or in some other way, ask to have a copy of what they are going to say. This is not in order to be censorious, but so you can be ready to step in, should their emotions overcome them on the day.

In all the planning, be aware of the particular time limits at the crem. Twenty-five minutes is typical. Some expect you to be done and dusted in twenty. Some even impose financial penalties for over-running. So two hymns maximum; eulogy, five minutes.

Before I close the visit, I explain that I shall not write the eulogy until the day before the service. Why? Because occasionally I find that people think of other stories or facets of their loved one’s life that need to be included. And very occasionally they tell me that something they have mentioned needs to be omitted, because Aunt Bertha is coming, and if I talk about that particular incident, it will cause upset. You may tell the contact person that other family members can get in touch with you, if they want to add their own thoughts.

My other parting comment is to invite them to ring me or email me with any questions they have about the service. No question is too silly or trivial. If it makes them anxious, I can put their minds at rest.

Increasingly, families ask for a printed order of service. Funeral directors often provide or facilitate a printer to do this. Try to be involved in the proofing and approval process. More and more printers put PDF drafts on a secure website. It can be invaluable if you are allowed to be one of the reviewers who comments on a draft. Elements of the service can be accidentally omitted. Words of hymns can be wrong. And I have had a few occasions where the family has changed the content of the service without consulting me.

I hope someone will find these thoughts helpful. I am sure too that the moment I click ‘publish’ I will think of other tips and reflections! But if these limited thoughts are useful, I will be pleased. Feel free to add your own thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

I will try in the next few days to add a further post or posts about preparing for the service, and the conduct of the service itself.

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