Catching Up

The Chelmsford Christian Festiva l finished on Sunday. While we didn’t achieve anything like the hoped-for level of ticket sales, there were many wonderful memories.

On the first night, local band Electralyte supported YFriday, the Geordie rock worship band. Highlights included the way YFriday generously praised Electralyte, publicly wishing them well with their new album. No competitiveness. Also, the way Ken Riley of YFriday explained the background to the writing of their song Everlasting God with Brenton Brown. No triumphalism, but a story of God drawing near in desperate suffering.

Another night was devoted to a more ‘urban’ theme, reaching out to people from rougher backgrounds. Support act was the south London hip hop artist Jahaziel, who has a remarkable testimony. Teenage lads walking through the park where we had our marquee were drawn in to hear him. Some would have got up on stage and rapped with him, given the chance. The event managers let them in for a bargain price.

Jahaziel was followed on stage by two guys from Tough Talk. One guy, an East Ender (goes down well in Essex) and ex-bouncer told his dramatic story of deliverance from violence and drugs. He did so in episodes, punctuated by feats of power lifting by his colleague, who progressed from two hundred to five hundred pounds. Then we learned this guy was the British power lifting champion. He told his story of being brought out of a lifestyle dedicated to drugs and the occult while working in the city.

Tough Talk trailed the fact that they were going to invite volunteers from the audience up on stage to try a spot of bench pressing. Nine people volunteered. Two were from the lads who’d drifted in. Every participant won a prize. They were given books of Tough Talk testimonies. I hope and pray the lads from the park will read those books and be impacted by the stories.

The other night I’d like to write about was totally different again. We had asked our guest speaker Steve Chalke to use his television skills to interview five Christian ‘celebrities’ around the theme of ‘success’. All told stories that blew conventional notions of success into pieces. Cameron Stout, winner of Big Brother in 2003, came across as very much the ordinary unpretentious guy who follows Jesus.

Anne Atkins, the author, commentator and agony aunt got way beyond her media image of the right wing moralist. There is so much more to her. She talked of her family: one daughter has battled mental illness, a son has Asperger Syndrome and for a year they were split up and homeless as a family, despite her husband being an Anglican vicar. Success for her was keeping the family together.

Then we met Yazz, famous for hit singles in the late eighties like ‘Doctorin The House’. But she can’t bring herself to perform her massive hit ‘The Only Way Is Up’, because it reminds her of a painful period in her life. She discovered the dark aspects of the music industry, and her marriage dissolved. Only in the last ten years is she finding healing through faith in Christ. (And by the way, her debut ‘Christian’ CD is astonishing – see the review here. You might just recognise the reviewer’s name.)

In the second half of that evening, Steve interviewed Jo Gambi, the first woman to climb the ‘seven summits’, with her husband Rob, the first Australian. They were the first and fastest married couple to do so. But their adventures only began when Rob had his second bout of cancer.

Finally, we met Henry Olonga, the former Zimbabwean Test cricketer who was courageous enough to oppose Robert Mugabe publicly. His story linked personal faith and social justice. Certainly, the whole evening busted any fairy story notion that ‘since I became a Christian, all my troubles ceased’.

More on what I’ve been catching up with over the next day or two.

July 23, 2008 2

Winning

On Monday morning, it was our daughter’s school sports day. Being owed time for working some days off, I took the morning out to watch her with Debbie.

The school had been split into sixteen teams, each representing a country and taking an Olympics theme. Rebekah had been allocated to Portugal.

Wearing her red and green, she was lined up to run in the very first race. We thought she was quite quick. Certainly she is when she runs to school. Off they set. Except that Rebekah didn’t realise what the starting signal was. She didn’t begin running until everyone else was ten yards down the track.

Then it got worse. Her plimsoll fell off. She has very narrow feet. She stumbled to the line, comfortably last. We wondered how she would take this.

We saw the answer in her next race. In the spirit of an egg and spoon race, the children had to balance something on their heads. If it fell off, they had to stop and replace it before continuing. Well, Rebekah was determined that the object wouldn’t fall off. So she ambled down the track, talking happily with her friend Sam. They were oblivious to where they came in the race. They just took in the sunny weather and enjoyed each other’s company.

And so she continued all morning. Whether running, jumping or throwing, she did what she did and didn’t worry whether she was the fastest, highest or strongest. She just enjoyed herself. Her only real distress was that she misplaced her water bottle.

We waited for the head teacher to announce the results. We stood near the Portugal team. China came sixteenth. More countries were announced, until we realised that Portugal was in the top eight. The top five. The top three. Portugal became visibly more excited. ‘They’re going to be so disappointed when they hear they’re second,’ I said.

But you’ve guessed. They were first. The older children were delirious. Rebekah and the smaller ones had to have it explained to them. They were called up to the head teacher to receive their medals. Rebekah was still more concerned about her lost water bottle than her medal. But later the significance dawned on her. When we collected her from school that afternoon, she came out of her class with it around her neck. She hung it on the door handle of her bedroom. Last night I found her sleeping with her medal. Rebekah, who seemed to be a loser, was a winner.

God’s ideas of winners are different from the world’s, as I shared in a school assembly on Wednesday. Not the fast, strong, powerful or wealthy. The Beatitudes make apparent losers into winners. Those who love, sacrifice and put God and others ahead of themselves are winners, in Jesus’ estimation.

I thought the boys might find all this kind of talk of caring a bit girly. So I told them a story. I asked who used Internet Explorer to browse the web, and who was cool enough to use Firefox. Just a few, sadly. But I talked about one of the Firefox developers with Mozilla. I read an interview with him a couple of years ago in .net magazine. He explained his reason for involvement with open source software. It was so that the poor and disadvantaged could have access to the same kind of things as those who shell out huge sums for proprietary software. That was an expression of his Christian faith. I suggested that developer was a winner in Jesus’ eyes.

Let’s reinvent winning. Too often in the church we are tied to secular concepts of victory.

July 19, 2008 7

Tough

That’s how ministry is at present. We are bang in the middle of our Chelmsford Christian Festival, my responsibility being to oversee the prayer ministry. In the run-up and since it has started, an avalanche of pastoral problems has hit, like no sequence since coming here. Without being hyper-spiritual, I shouldn’t be surprised. I can’t go into detail here, but it has involved people being hurt, people falling out, people imagining hurt, people facing enormous crises, all in quick succession. I am no demon hunter, but I believe in the reality of the demonic, and believe that at present there is a concerted effort to move my focus away from the festival.

July 15, 2008 8

Gobsmacked

Yes, I know, I should be ‘holy’ and call it ‘Godsmacked’, but that it is what it is. Anyway … I have a sabbatical early next year. (Can’t wait.) The Methodist Church is excellent in insisting her ministers take sabbaticals, but doesn’t provide massive funding for them. I had booked two courses: one at Lee Abbey on photography and creation, another back at Trinity College, Bristol, where they now teach the ordinands something about the relationship between personality type and ministry style. Both great courses.

But I had hoped to take another one. I wanted to sit in on a week’s residential at Cliff College to study alongside some of their MA students. I knew that would overstretch the official budget. When I have talked about the sabbatical, I have said that going to Cliff would depend on whether my accountant obtained a juicy tax rebate for me this year. On Friday, I received an email from Theresa Phillips, the postgraduate administrator at Cliff. Someone has paid for me to do the week. I am stunned by this sign of love. I am grateful to God, and to the person. I think I know who it is, but clearly s/he wants to remain officially anonymous, so i’ll keep it that way, with a letter for Theresa to forward onto the person.

I won’t get into all that ‘restores your faith in human nature’ nonsense, but the kindness of God through his people is a wonderful thing to behold and experience.

July 13, 2008 9

Silver Wedding Anniversary Address

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1 Corinthians
13

The happy couple had just been married in the church. They
were posing outside for photographs. Happy couple with the best man. Happy
couple with bridesmaids. Happy couple with his parents. Happy couple with her
parents. With his friends. With her friends. With hangers-on and people who
didn’t fit any other category.

The photographer rushed back to the evening reception,
hoping to sell some photos there. But there was one problem. Behind the bride
and groom in every picture was the church notice board. It had a Bible verse on
it: ‘Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.’

I’m sure that twenty-five years ago, Jim and Joan did know
what they were doing! Although if they didn’t, they’ve managed to bluff the
rest of us pretty well! And as we’ve heard those famous words from 1
Corinthians 13 about love, the first thing I want us to think about is that
lasting love requires forgiveness. Love ‘bears all things’, says Paul (verse
7).

The old film Love
Story had the tag line, ‘Love means not having to say you’re sorry’. What
rubbish. Love lives and dies by whether we say sorry, and whether the injured
party says, ‘I forgive you.’

True forgiveness, however, never says, ‘I forgive you, it was nothing.’ We need to forgive
because it was something, not nothing. We forgive by absorbing pain and
suffering ourselves that we do not deserve to. Like when we forgive a debt, we
absorb a cost that is not rightly ours. Like Jesus forgiving the sins of the
world, dying a death on a Cross that he did not deserve.

In love, it is true that often we hurt those we love the
most. So forgiveness is essential. Jim and Joan will not have come to a silver
wedding without having forgiven each other a lot, and receiving that
forgiveness.

On to a second aspect of love. It has been said that the
bride has a three-part plan for her wedding day and her marriage:
aisle-altar-hymn. Yes, it’s a triple pun. I’ll alter him. But love that depends
on people changing is no love at all. Love is unconditional. Love doesn’t
attach strings. Married love is about two imperfect people coming together and
accepting one another’s frailties. If our giving of love is dependent upon our
loved one changing, then it changes love from a relationship to a performance.
Love becomes unattainable, because only perfection will do. Conditional love is
love without forgiveness. That’s why it’s no love at all.

Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t want to
change for the sake of the one who loves us. We should. But the motive is not
to do it in order that our spouse
will love us; we seek to change because
our spouse loves us. When we know we are loved, we want to change. Love is the
greatest motivation for transformation. It is far more effective than
condemnation.

A third and final point about Christian love. When I prepare
couples for marriage, I sometimes ask them what they think they are going to
say in their vows. Often, they reply, ‘I do.’ I then explain – to their
surprise – that only one person in our marriage service says, ‘I do’, and that’s
the father of the bride. Even he might really be saying, ‘Take her – please!’

However, the bride and groom don’t say ‘I do.’ Maybe in
other traditions, but not in ours. They say, ‘I will.’ And they say ‘I will’ for an important reason. They are
making a promise.

Sometimes, loving someone will be a case of ‘I will’ rather
than ‘I do’. It’s great when love is measured in emotions and hormones. In those
circumstances, keeping our promise of commitment is easy. But the feelings and
chemicals are not reliable barometers of love. They ebb and flow. Real love
requires a commitment that remains, whether we feel like it or not. We say, ‘I
will’ in a marriage, because sometimes it requires an act of will to love
someone. I will love you even when I do not feel like it.

Again, it’s the kind of love Jesus demonstrated. In the Garden
of Gethsemane, he asked if it were possible to be spared the cup of suffering. It
wasn’t. He went to the suffering of the Cross out of committed love to the
human race.

I’ve heard it said that it isn’t love that keeps your
marriage together, it’s marriage that keeps your love together. It’s the
commitment, the ‘I will’ approach to the relationship.

Today, Jim and Joan, we celebrate your committed love
through smooth passages and choppy seas. At the heart of it, we thank God for
the love of your Saviour and ours, whose commitment we seek to emulate, whose
unconditional love is our pattern for life and whose forgiveness is the pathway
to life.

July 12, 2008 0

Frantic

There will be no new sermon posted on the blog this week or next, due to the upcoming Chelmsford Christian Festival,which begins this Saturday and runs until Sunday week. I’m dusting down an old sermon on the Parable of the Sowe r for this week. The following week, I won’t be preaching. There will be a big united service for the end of the festival in the morning, then in the evening we’ll be saying farewell to our superintendent minister, who is retiring. We shall miss him greatly.

In the meantime, I thought you might like to know the main programme of events for the festival. Listed below is what’s happening each night in our one thousand seater marquee in Central Park. Please pray for us – and especially for me, as I am organising the ministry of prayer and listening for those who have a spiritual need.

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Saturday, 12^th:
YFriday and Electralyte – indie rock gig for young
adults

Sunday, 13^th:
Paul
Jones and Fiona Hendley Jones – concert for the Radio 2 and jazz/blues
crowds

Monday, 14^th:
Godspell (Trinity Methodist Church
drama group reprises its well-received production)

Tuesday, 15^th:
Local school choirs

Wednesday, 16^th:
Tough Talk give their testimonies and Jahaziel, the acclaimed hip hop act,
supports

Thursday, 17^th:
Steve Chalke interviews
Henry Olonga, Yazz, Jo Gambi, Cameron Stout and Anne Atkins

Friday, 18^th:
‘Amplify’ youth worship event – Steve Chalke speaks and Noel Robinson leads worship

Saturday, 19^th:
Steve Chalke speaks
and LCGC performs

July 10, 2008 0

Ban Cluster Bombs

Ban Cluster Bombs:

A meeting is happening in Dublin about this terrible problem. When these fall but don’t explode, small children look at them and think they are attractive. They play with them. Innocent children are killed by them. And the British Government is one of the administrations dragging its feet in the negotiating. Please sign this petition.

(Thanks to Mike Bossingham for the email.)

UPDATE: Richard Hall and PamBG have joined in, too. How about you?

UPDATE #2, Wednesday morning: Good news! It looks like our Government has been persuaded, according to today’s Guardian.

May 27, 2008 0