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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The Press And Danniella Westbrook’s Conversion

Former EastEnders soap star and notorious cocaine addict Danniella Westbrook has become a Christian. Read this interview in The Mirror, which is utterly devoid of the cynicism Christians often expect from the press. Not so the Daily Mail, often the self-proclaimed defender of Christian values, from the snide title of its piece to the snarky comments about finance. Is this a class thing? Westbrook more neatly fits the Mirror’s demographic, yet that section of society generally has a lower attachment to Christianity.

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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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Sermon: The Holy Spirit And Serving

Acts 6:1-15

You are having coffee after the service, and chatting with friends. In the corner of your vision, you notice a church steward approaching you.

“I wonder if you’ve ever considered that vacancy for a Property Steward that’s been in the notice sheet for a few weeks.”

Uh-oh. Now you know why you attracted the interest.

Fortunately, you can play your spiritual ‘Get out of jail free’ card: “I’ll pray about it.”

And the steward walks away, knowing that “I’ll pray about it” is church code for “No”.

Vacancies: finding someone to take on a job is a bane of church life. The constitution says certain vacancies must be filled, or more positively a specific need is identified and we need someone to head up that new initiative. When several people turn down the opportunity, and we finally discover someone who is willing to have their arm twisted, we breathe a sigh of relief. Thus it is that we can sometimes end up with the wrong people doing things they were never suited to in the church.

There’s an urgent need in the early church. In an age devoid of social security, Greek widows are missing out on food distribution, whereas Hebrew widows aren’t. There is no question of ignoring this: caring for the poor is fundamental to the life of the church. This must be done.

But the apostles have too much on their hands. And important as feeding the widows is, you can’t take them away from their primary calling. So the hunt is on for people to do the job.

So far, so similar to us.

But from here on, their story departs from ours. Their approach to finding people to serve is not the campaign of desperation we are used to mounting. Unlike us, they don’t scratch their heads and say, “Who on earth can we approach this time?” Instead, the apostles know the criteria:

Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. (Verse 3)

‘Full of the Spirit and wisdom.’ It’s the first of three statements in this story of Stephen and these early servants, possibly the prototypes of later deacons, that references the Holy Spirit as key to Christian service. This story would tell us one important fact in a number of ways: to take on any form of service for Jesus Christ, from the most spectacular to the most humbling, we need to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

I suppose you think I could stop there? I would be happy if we all caught that message: all Christian service requires the Holy Spirit.

But I need to earn my crust, so I want to explore those three statements in the reading about the Holy Spirit’ association with serving. Each time, the work of the Spirit is associated with another spiritual quality. And it’s no accident, because each time that quality associated with the Spirit is vital for the Christian life in general and for acts of service in particular.

We’ve heard the first on already: ‘full of the Holy Spirit and … wisdom’. Wisdom, according to Isaiah, is a gift of the Spirit. But what is wisdom? Is it intellect? No. Anyone can have the spiritual gift of wisdom, regardless of their academic abilities.

Is it the experience someone accumulates at ‘the university of life’? No, not really. That can be helpful, but it can be no more than folksy and it can just be hokum and old wives’ tales.
The Spirit’s gift of wisdom is different. In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf knew what wisdom was. In the third part, The Return of the King, he said:

All you have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to you.

Wisdom, then, is a moral quality. It is not about cleverness. It is not necessarily about experience. It is about knowing the right thing to do, and the right way to use our time and resources.
And that quality will be essential when we take on acts of Christian service. It’s not just the extreme situations. Those of you with memories long enough to recall Michael Buerk’s original report on the Ethiopian famine in 1984, the report that led Bob Geldof to put together Band Aid and Live Aid, may remember it featured a nurse who had to decide which children could receive food and live, and which children would die. How do you make decisions like that?

But in the more mundane, we need the wisdom of the Spirit. We need to know the way to go that is consistent with the way of Christ. We may need to know how to use our limited resources. Where might we focus our energies, time, talents and money? Let there be no mistaking: to serve Jesus Christ, we need to be ‘full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom’.

What does this mean practically? It means soaking even the apparently obvious, routine decisions we make in prayer. A criterion of good discipleship in the Old Testament is whether a person ‘enquired of the Lord’. To be full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, we need to seek that wisdom from God. Yes, of course we can use our common sense as we dedicate it to the Lord, but we shall make serious errors if we don’t make a conscious choice to seek the wisdom of the Spirit.

In my home circuit, there was once an occasion where a person turned up a few minutes late to a church business meeting. “Have I missed anything?” he asked quietly, as he slipped in at the back.

“No,” came the reply, “we’re only on the opening devotions.”

That, I suggest to you, was an approach that betrayed a failure to understand the need to seek God’s wisdom through the Holy Spirit. Never let opening devotions or prayer for guidance shrink to a formality.

The second and third comments about the Holy Spirit are linked specifically to Stephen. The second is that he was ‘a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit’ (verse 5).

Again, ‘faith’ can be a gift of the Holy Spirit – not simply saving faith in Jesus, but special faith to trust God and see remarkable things happen. I think faith like that was present here, because the outcome of the decision to appoint the seven men as servants of the Greek widows was

So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith. (Verse 7)

Some might think all that is needed for Christian service is just to get on with the required task. There is an element of truth in that, in the sense that sometimes people need to get their hands dirty, rather than wait around for something super-spiritual to happen.

But we should not overlook the Spirit’s gift of faith. What happens when you take amazing risks in Christ’s name by serving people? Quite surprising and astonishing things, actually.

Take the story of one Christian initiative that I came across the other day. In 1999, a young family in Southport turned up at a church, desperate, because they were homeless. The church had spent the previous two years offering shelter to homeless people in their church building. However, they had learned that this was illegal. Two people in the church felt prompted to take a big risk in faith: they ploughed their considerable savings into the task of buying two flats. Three years later, the venture became a not-for-profit limited company. Now, with the help of churches all over the country, some two hundred and forty previously homeless people are being housed. Here is what the pastor who founded the company says:

We have seen some amazing changes in people just because we have been able to give them a key to their own home. Alcoholics are now free from their alcohol addiction; drug addicts are now free from their drug addiction; unemployed young people with life skills problems are now working. Mothers who had been brutally beaten are now housed with their children in secure accommodation; people with mental health problems are housed and cared for. But most wonderful of all is the number of people who have come to Christ, not through our preaching of the Gospel, but by our doing the Gospel.

How wonderful is that? Christians saw a social need. The willingness to take great risks in faith has made an eternal difference to needy people.

Therefore, never see the call to a servant rôle as something mundane. Ask the Holy Spirit for the gift of faith. Is the Spirit of God asking us to imagine a different future in a certain situation? What risks would it take to bring it into being? Is the Holy Spirit daring us into acts of faith as we serve the needy that will bring transformation in the name of Jesus Christ?

The third and final reference doesn’t explicitly talk about the Holy Spirit, but I believe the Spirit is to be understood as necessarily implicit in the words. It’s the description of Stephen that led to opposition and his arrest:

Now Stephen, a man full of God’s grace and power, performed great wonders and signs among the people (Verse 8)

‘Full of God’s grace and power.’ I think the word ‘power’ references the Holy Spirit, who would have empowered the ‘great wonders and signs’ Luke speaks about. If so, then here we see the power of the Spirit associated with grace. The Spirit’s work of grace takes Stephen beyond just serving the needy in the Christian community to demonstrating that grace in the wider community.

And furthermore, the Christian who is serving in the power of the Holy Spirit will demonstrate grace and speak grace, because grace is at the heart of God’s kingdom. That is why yesterday the Chertsey churches held what they called the Grace Café at the annual Chertsey Black Cherry Fair. They gave away a thousand drinks, nearly a thousand slices of cake and painted the faces of three hundred children, all free of charge. It’s why next week at the Knaphill Village Show, we as a church will have a free lucky dip on our stall. These are just small parables of the Gospel. One of my previous churches held an annual family fun day on a Saturday each summer. We always insisted it was free. Well-intentioned parents who brought their children along often asked how much it cost or where to leave a donation. We had the pleasure of replying, no, it’s on us, because this is the kind of God we believe in.

But this isn’t simply the sort of public stunt a church can do in the ways I’ve described. The Spirit leads individual Christians into acts of grace as signs of God’s love. It may be that opportunities will come to speak about that love, but the important point is that we allow the Spirit to show us where we might demonstrate grace.


Bill Hybels recounts one such example in his book ‘The Power of a Whisper’. Bev and her husband owned a property in the United States, which their daughter and her family once rented from them for a holiday. While they were there, some children were throwing mud balls. One smashed the front window. Bev’s daughter discovered the miscreant, and spoke to his mother about replacing the glass. However, she couldn’t afford to pay. She and her husband were both out of work. Bev and her husband paid for the repair.

Several months later, with no word from the young man’s mother, Bev decided to phone her, a couple of days before Thanksgiving, just as she was preparing to do the final grocery shopping for that important American holiday. However, when she got through to the mother, instead of pressurising her for the money she owed, she found herself saying, “I was just heading out to the grocery store. May I bring you a Thanksgiving meal?” Bev then went and purchased double the quantities she had planned to buy, and joyfully delivered a parcel to the unemployed mother.

That’s what grace does. How would it be if this is what Christians were known for, rather than for self-righteous judgmentalism?

Can we see now why serving is not something to do in our own strength, but in the power of the Holy Spirit? We need the Spirit’s gift of wisdom in order to serve well. We need the Spirit’s gift of faith to lead us into extraordinary adventures that will end up bringing more of God’s love to people than would otherwise have happened.

Once again, then, we find ourselves praying: Come, Holy Spirit.

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Sermon: The Fruit Of The Spirit

Galatians 5:16-25
Lately, Mark has become quite interested in the need to consume five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. He and Rebekah ask if various things count towards their ‘five a day’. Although Mark doesn’t have his sister’s obsession with sweets, he is rather more reluctant to eat things such as salad – well, apart from a few slices of cucumber. But even if his practice hasn’t caught up with his learning from school at this stage, he has at least appreciated that ‘five a day’ is important.

And so it is in the Christian life, too. Except you could say it’s nine a day. Three with one syllable – love, joy, peace. Three with two syllables – patience, kindness, goodness. And three with three syllables – faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Well, what decent person wouldn’t want to aspire to these qualities? And if you took them as a pen portrait of Jesus’ character, they make complete sense. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control – yes, they all sound like Jesus.

Don’t we want to be like this? More like this? Like Jesus? Then Paul’s description of the fruit of the Spirit is for us. It’s certainly challenging, but maybe not in the ways we might immediately assume. As we explore this theme, we shall not only found challenge, we shall also find encouragement.

So come with me as we look at the fruit of the Spirit using the images of soil, fruit and growth.

Firstly, we need to examine the soil. When we moved to Chelmsford, we noticed that a number of people who moved there suffered from an increased amount of coughs or chest infections. A popular explanation for this was that Chelmsford was built on London clay. If the theory were true, then the contents of the soil had an adverse effect on people’s health.

Something like that is going on in Galatia. Paul is addressing a problem of bad soil. There are problems with the Galatian Christians’ spiritual growth, because their soil is bad. Instead of being bedded in with the soil of the Holy Spirit, full of nutrients, they have got bedded in with unhealthy soil, the spiritual equivalent of London clay. Good fruit won’t grow in the soil they are intent on using.

What was this soil? It was a reliance upon keeping religious rules. Specifically, the Jewish Law. Yet they had found Christ not through the Law but through faith. They had seen miracles wrought not by keeping that Law but by the power of the Holy Spirit. Yet they had believed some false teachers who said they needed to keep the rules in order to be right with God, and to be part of the in-crowd. The Cross, God’s grace and the miracle of faith are all in danger of being discarded.

Now you might think that is just an academic lecture from history, but it is very relevant to us. We might not be tempted to follow the ancient Jewish ritual law, but we can slip into a similar attitude. When we say that someone will go to heaven because they are good, then we are saying that it’s rule-keeping that gets you in with God. However, Paul points out in Galatians that no-one can keep all the rules, and that makes all of us rule-breakers. We are all sinners, in other words. The moment we start talking about someone going to heaven because they are good, we are saying to God, we don’t need your grace. We are saying to Jesus, you didn’t need to die on the Cross. We are like the passers-by at Calvary who spat at Jesus and told him to get himself down from the Cross.

Or what about the times when we think that certain people aren’t really acceptable in church? Their etiquette doesn’t fit in. There’s something odd or eccentric about them. They haven’t got it all together. They don’t look right. They don’t know our way of doing things. In other words, the soil we live in is one we’ve created that is made up of our unwritten rules.

But God’s soil, the soil in which the spiritual life grows, is made of his grace and mercy, his unconditional sacrificial love as seen at the Cross. It is made of his Holy Spirit. That is a soil that gives life. When we create a soil of human rules, all we do is choke the life out of people. If we want to grow more Christlike – if we want the fruit of the Spirit – we need to choose the right soil, soil filled with grace and Cross-centred love.

Secondly, let us think about the kind of fruit we want to grow. Let me ask you a question: how many fruit in the fruit of the Spirit? Listen again:

the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (verses 22-23a)

Nine? Are you sure? Did you count ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control’ and make nine? I’m saying you’re wrong.

But there are nine, you insist. However, if you say that, you missed one important piece of evidence. It comes immediately before the list of nine qualities. Paul says, ‘the fruit of the Spirit is’. One fruit! Fruit, not fruits, is, not are. It’s a myth to talk about ‘the fruits of the Spirit’. If you’ve listened closely, I’ve consistently talked about ‘the fruit of the Spirit’. It’s all one fruit!
If you remember a fruit juice drink called Five Alive you’ll get the idea. It was one drink, made up of five different flavours. So it is with the fruit of the Spirit. There is one fruit, but there are nine flavours.

And that means the Holy Spirit wants to develop all nine qualities in every one of us. It is not that the Spirit wants to give love to one person, joy to a second and peace to a third. There is no picking and choosing. The nine qualities indicate the amount of transformation the Holy Spirit wants to grow in all of us. I can’t choose to say that I’d rather continue to indulge my grumpiness, rather than learning patience. I can’t say I’ll just keep on keeping on with my favourite sins, rather than allowing self-control to grow in my life.

This one fruit with nine flavours shows us that the Holy Spirit has a big agenda for our lives. Salvation goes way beyond a ticket to heaven. It goes miles past the idea of just being ‘nice’. No: when the Holy Spirit’s work of revealing Christ to us gets to the point where we say ‘yes’ to Jesus, put our trust in him and commit to following him, then at that stage the Spirit of God sets up camp in our lives and gets ready for the long haul. The work has only just begun. It will continue on until glory.

When I trained for the ministry in Manchester, the city centre always seemed to be full of roadworks. For all three of my years there, something was going on somewhere in the centre that involved cones, bollards and men wearing hard hats and ear defenders. A friend of mine who was a bit of a wag commented, “Manchester will be a nice place when it’s finished.”
What was it about? Mainly, they were reintroducing trams to the city. The first ones came into service just before I left. But it was a long haul to get to that point.

So it is with the fruit of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit has a big picture of where our lives are heading – it involves love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. It’s a big job. It will take all our lives. We are not to rest on our laurels. Because the Spirit won’t.

Well – we’ve talked about the importance of the right kind of soil: grace, cross-shaped love and faith, and the work of the Holy Spirit, in contrast to the wrong kind of soil, namely living by respectable rules. We’ve talked about how the fruit itself indicates what a big, long-term project the Holy Spirit has for our lives. Thirdly and finally, we need to talk about the growth itself.
In my late teens, a woman in my home circuit who showed a special interest in the young Christians recommended to us a book by an Argentinean pastor called Juan Carlos Ortiz. It was called ‘Disciple’. There are a number of striking stories in it, but to this day there is one I find particularly memorable.

When he was eight years old, Ortiz was impressed by the fact that all the best visiting preachers to his family’s church had beards. If this was what a good Christian had, then he wanted a beard, too. So, at the age of eight, he started praying that God would give him a beard. God didn’t answer his prayer. So not only did he pray for a beard, he fasted for a beard. However, even his earnest fasting did not provide a spiritual breakthrough. Despite great faith at the age of eight, God did not give Juan Carlos a beard.

When he was sixteen, it was all different. Thus he realised that beards do not come instantly and miraculously, they come as a result of human growth and maturing.

I want to say that the fruit of the Spirit is rather like that. We may want those qualities to appear almost instantly, even to the point of being unwittingly comical about it – “Lord, give me patience, and I want it now!” However, it is fruit we are talking about, and fruit takes a long time to grow. Some things may come instantly, even sometimes in the spiritual life, but fruit doesn’t. Seeds have to be planted, shoots have to be tended and eventually the fruit appears and matures.
You get a feel for this in some other translations of the Bible. The New English Bible refers not to the fruit of the Spirit, but to the harvest of the Spirit. We know a harvest doesn’t come overnight. It’s an idea that the hymn writer Fred Pratt Green picked up on when he wrote his harvest festival hymn, ‘For the fruits of his creation’. The final verse gives thanks ‘For the harvests of the Spirit’.

Expect these qualities to take time to grow, then. That isn’t a reason for complacency, because the way the growth happens is by our active co-operation with the Holy Spirit. As we hear the gentle voice of God leading us and do what he says, so in the process he changes us. It’s not a matter of slavishly following rules: there is no joy and life in that. But when we appreciate and wonder at the marvel of God’s loving grace to us sinners, then we are motivated to respond in ways that please him, and the Holy Spirit gives us the strength to walk in ways we previously thought impossible. We shall stumble and fall at times, of course, but we shall be on a journey of growth.

So a good, if daring, thing to do is this. Talk to someone who has known you for a number of years. Ask them whether they have seen changes in your life, and if so, what. Because over a sustained period we should expect to see signs of change. If you’re anything like me, you will be a long way from perfection, but how can we not be optimistic about what the grace of God can accomplish in us by the power of the Holy Spirit?

It’s why we hear slogans bandied about such as, ‘God loves us just as we are, but loves us too much to leave us as we are.’ Or, ‘I am not what I could be or I should be, but I am not what I used to be, and by the grace of God I shall not be what I am now.’

In other words, one slogan it isn’t is ‘Let go and let God.’ God gives us his grace in Christ, and he dwells within us by his Spirit. He continues to take the initiative in our lives, and we gratefully respond in love, because of what he has done and in the power he has given us. Thus he forms us more like Jesus. The Holy Spirit makes us more holy.

And what does that holiness look like? It looks like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

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Methodists Working With New Frontiers

When I was training for the ministry, I remember bridling in one lecture at the assertion that when we chaired meetings, we had to stay neutral. Weren’t we there to give a lead? But rules of meetings took precedence over leadership, apparently.

I found myself in this position last week. I had to chair a complex discussion at my Addlestone church about some proposals to develop our relationship with the local New Frontiers congregation, Beacon Church.  They had recently taken over from some Salvation Army people the running of a toy library that hires our hall. They also wanted to run their debt counselling service from our hall, and they suggested starting a post-Alpha course Bible study group on our premises.

This situation would be a problem for some Methodists. While Methodism and New Frontiers agree on core gospel issues,  there are some areas of Christian belief where we are at opposite ends of the spectrum. We are Arminian, New Frontiers have big Calvinist influences. We are egalitarian when it comes to gender relationships, they are complementarian. My friend Dave Warnock regularly documents these differences, especially the latter one, with some passion.

But despite the potential pitfalls, the story of last week (and the negotiations leading up to our Church Council) is one of grace on both sides. There had been a gap of several months between the old toy library finishing and it restarting, but during that time the rent to us had mistakenly still been paid. There were errors on both sides, and the new manager suggested that each party took a 50% hit. Our Church Council would have none of it. It decided to refund 100% of the overpayment, and calculated there had been a further overpayment which it wished to give back. We knew that although we were not rolling in money, the toy library needed not to be short of funds.

As to the debt counselling, my small and to some extent quite elderly congregation rejoiced that our friends wanted to use our premises. (Beacon don’t have any of their own, and we are located in a prime position in the town.) So yes, have the church hall free of charge for an experimental three-month period. Don’t start until you’ve publicised it properly, but this is a serious social need and if we were younger and fitter it is what we would have wanted to have done. If you can do it on our premises, then God bless you.

And the Bible study? We’re not there yet, because the exact proposals are not firm yet. However, Tom, the senior pastor, has assured us that he will run any study material past us first to ensure we are happy doctrinally with it, and is only too happy if the Methodist deacon and I participate in the group.

Neither side has changed its core convictions. If we debated them, neither of us would convince the other. We would both passionately cling onto what we believe, and to why we think the other party’s views are seriously wrong. However, grace and love can make a way. I hope that is what will continue to characterise the relationship, and will make for a positive witness to the community.

So I was sitting in that meeting straining at the requirement to be neutral. It had some advantages: it made me ensure I was as scrupulously fair as possible to all sides of the debate. But inside? I rejoiced when the Church Council voted as it did.

Being a good (neutral) Christian, though, I had to  be sure I didn’t smile.

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The Imagination Of God: An Address For Addlestone Arts Festival

Luke 14:15-24[1]


Yann Martel is the Canadian author who won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for his novel ‘The Life of Pi’. In 2007, he was invited, along with forty-nine other distinguished Canadian contributors to the arts, to the Visitors’ Gallery of the House of Commons in Canada, where they would celebrate fifty years of the Canada Council for the Arts, the equivalent to our Arts Council. One artist for each of the fifty years that this body had been making grants to aspiring artists. Martel himself had received a grant from them when he was beginning as a novelist.
The Arts Minister, Bev Oda, stood up and gave a speech of less than five minutes. The Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, spent the time shuffling his papers and did not even acknowledge the artists with eye contact. After the speech, it was all over. There had been a reception the day before, when only twenty-five of the 306 MPs had attended.

Martel was devastated. What could he do? Doubtless these people, the Prime Minister, especially, were busy people. But they still needed stillness, and they needed something to stimulate their imaginations in that stillness.

He made a plan. He would send the Prime Minister a book, every other Monday, in the hope that he might read it. During an election period, he even sent an audio book instead, so Mr Harper could hear the book while travelling.

After sending the hundredth book, he gave up. Never had Harper acknowledged him. Only five times did he receive a three-line reply from the Prime Minister’s staff. In an interview with The Independent newspaper in February, Martel said,

“I can’t understand how a man who seems never to read imaginative writing of any kind (novels, poetry, short stories, high-brow, middle-brow, low-brow, anything) can understand life, people, the world,” … “I don’t care if ordinary people read or not. It’s not for me to say how people should live. But people who have power over me? I want them to read because their limited, impoverished dreams may become my nightmares.”[2]

We are celebrating the end of Addlestone Arts Festival. We have enjoyed music, crafts, poetry and even valuation of antiques – although I confess I’m at something of a loss to understand how Bingo fits into an arts week! I imagine that many of our contributors have seen their art as more than entertainment. They have been glad to entertain us, I am sure. But I suspect many had a bigger vision than merely entertainment.

For example – we’ve had two Disney events. Don’t the Disney films try to take you into a particular world, and see life a certain way? Poetry – don’t poets want to engage our imagination to hear the world with fresh ears? The music about royalty encourages a certain understanding of national life. And so on.

So what does a Christian minister like me have to do with this? I had a failed attempt to learn the guitar some years ago. I can’t sing – although a friend of mine swears he could teach me. My art doesn’t get much beyond matchstick men, and I am embarrassed into inferiority by my eight-year-old daughter. I used to write the odd bit of poetry and song lyrics, but they tended to head in the pretentious/Sixth Form direction.

Where does that leave me? To advocate the historical position the Christian churches had as patrons of the arts? No – because we don’t have the money any more! Although when we did so, it reflected our belief in a good Creator.

It leaves me offering you something that I believe is rich beyond measure. In this year when we mark the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible, think about the Bible as a work of art. It’s a compendium of sixty-six books, representing a wide range of literary styles, not only history and poetry but also some literary forms rarely seen any more. It tells of a God who not only speaks, but who sings, dances and tells stories. All these things combine to tell one great story, spread over centuries, if not aeons, that invites our imaginations to see the world differently from the culture in which we live.

So whereas Richard Dawkins urges us to see a universe that is pitiless, indifferent and lacking any basis for morality, the biblical story invites us to see a creation rooted in the work of a good, loving and purposeful God.

Or take the way our culture thinks that the leopard can’t change its spots. We see broken people causing damage and pain to others, and we say they can’t change. Yet the biblical story invites us into a kingdom where people are forgiven and transformed.

We live in a society where dreadful things happen to people and they say, “That’s unforgivable. I could never forgive them.” Yet the Bible invites us into a story where the one who was on the receiving end of the greatest injustice of all prayed, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Or how do we view the future? As ending in death? As the chaos of environmental destruction? As something that science will solve, despite the fact that for all the advances it gives us, it also hands us other gifts such as the ability to cause mass destruction? Or do we think all our troubles will be alleviated by the next hot consumer product? The Bible invites us to imagine something much bigger, with a universe made new and freed from suffering.

A couple of minutes ago, I disparaged my artistic abilities. In truth, there are one or two artistic pursuits I enjoy. One – when I have the time – is photography. Another is writing. I belong to a group of writers who are Christians. Like most novelists, we know the truth of one telling approach about getting our message over:

Show, don’t tell.

In other words, don’t in your story tell people the message you want them to hear. Show it instead, by the nature of the tale. Now the Bible has its ‘tell’ moments, to be sure, but a surprising amount of it is more like ‘showing’ than ‘telling’. Jesus tells stories, like the parable we heard Ben read, and he invites us to see where we fit in the story. Who are we? Are we those who are ludicrously self-obsessed that the invitation to a banquet – yes, a banquet – means nothing? Or are we the people on the margins, not the folk you’d normally expect to be associated with God and religion, but to whom Jesus throws open the doors? Might there even be jazz musicians in the kingdom of God?

So at the end of this year’s festival, I thank God for the artists of all types who have both entertained us and also given us an illuminated commentary on life.

And I also commend to you the greatest Artist of them all, the One who invites us to improvise within his general script, the One who invites each of us to take a rôle in his story.

[2] I found this story and quotation through Tools For Talks (subscription required).

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Does God Play Jazz?

I don’t know whether he does, but we had jazz in church this week. My little church at Addlestone is used to hosting concerts in the annual Addlestone Arts Festival, but on Wednesday night we not only hosted a concert, we organised it as well – complete with a pre-gig supper for anyone who also booked that.

One of our church members, Phil Brown, is a jazz trombonist, who leads a band called the Phil Brown Swingtet. Jazz musicians don’t always feel comfortable in church, but we were glad to have Phil and his crew with us. Footage I shot with our Flip Mino can be found below.

I was asked to introduce the band with a short talk. I didn’t want to sermonise (and besides, I’m speaking on Sunday night at the thanksgiving service at the end of the festival – text to follow in the next day or so). That meant doing some research.

Firstly, I found a piece by a Christian jazz musician called David Arivett. He quotes some of the prejudice launched against jazzers. From the Women’s Home Journal of 1921 comes this tirade called ‘Does Jazz Put The Sin In Syncopation?’:

“Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds. The weird chant, accompanied by the syncopated rhythm of the voodoo invokers, has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality. That it has a demoralizing effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by many scientists.”

And – perhaps even more worryingly because it comes from as recently as 2007 on an extreme fundamentalist website:

“Like the blues, boogie-woogie, and ragtime, jazz was born in the unwholesome and sensual environment of sleazy bars, honkytonks, juke joints, and whorehouses. The very name “jazz” refers to immorality.” This website goes on to list just about every negative quote on jazz that has ever been written and their main purpose for posting this is to “provide information to assist preachers in the protection of the churches in this apostate hour”!!!! Are you shocked yet? Read on, “the world’s music, in any era, has never enhanced the Lord’s message. The devil was not able to be as blatant in the jazz era as he is in the rock generation, but the same raunchy fellow is behind both styles. Both mediums represent classic worldliness.”

Worse is the thoughtless criticism that he quotes British Christian jazzer Mike Brett as having received:

“I feel that in many Christian’s minds Jazz is a dirty word, so I think for many years now it is music that has been ignored in the church. I have been taken to task for playing jazz as a Christian, the reason given is because of the unsavory and sinful places it has come from in past years. I have been told to get away from it and ‘Touch not the unclean thing.’ Yet the same people who have told me this might have an interest in things like photography which could be used for much more unsavory and sinful purposes like pornography…”

(Oh, and I cite that as one who enjoys photography.)

Well, yes, I know many jazzers have lived deeply broken lives. I recall the line in Steely Dan‘s song ‘Parker’s Band’ (about hearing Charlie Parker):

We will spend a dizzy weekend, smacked into a trance

However, Arivett develops some thoughts about a spirituality of being fully, physically alive that enables us to see things rather differently from these blinkered comments.

Elsewhere, in a sermon I found by Michael P Brown from Canada, we have an argument from history that effectively the roots of jazz are in the church. He refers to two groups of people that moved continent to the USA. One group willingly did so: they were Gaelic-speaking Scots, who brought with them their Presbyterian tradition of ‘line Psalm singing’. One person would sing a line of a Psalm, and others would respond and improvise.

These Scots, to their shame, were slave owners, and that is where the second people group comes in: Ghanaians, who were forcibly transported from their homeland to be slaves to the Scots in North and South Carolina. When the Scottish slave owners took their Ghanaian slaves to church, the Africans heard this call-and-response-plus-improvisation style of singing. They added their own rhythms. Out of that came spirituals, gospel music and eventually jazz.

So we took jazz back to its church roots on Wednesday night (without the slavery, of course). Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome the Phil Brown Swingtet:

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Sermon: The Holy Spirit And Mission

Acts 2:14-41

You may remember the 1984 film Amadeus, about the life of Mozart and his rival Salieri. There is a famous scene where Mozart receives a backhanded compliment. The Emperor Joseph II says to him,

My dear young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.

To which Mozart replies,

Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

A sermon topic like today’s runs that risk – too many notes. When we think about the Holy Spirit and mission, there is so much to say. Hence if I don’t cover your favourite theme within this strand today, I’m sorry. But don’t worry, I’m sure it will pop up elsewhere, either in this sermon series or at other times.

So if you wanted to hear about the way the Holy Spirit goes ahead of us and prepares the way in mission – fear not, you’ll hear me talk about that on various occasions. If you wanted me to cover the use of spiritual gifts – well, they get their own billing later in the series.

Excuse me, then, if I limit myself to the big themes here in Peter’s sermon on the Day of Pentecost. They will give us an outline, and on other occasions we can fill in some detail. After all, you wouldn’t want a preacher with ‘too many notes’, would you?
Here’s the first strand. At college, one of my friends had a well-worn T-shirt which reflected another 1980s film with a musical theme: The Blues Brothers. Ian’s T-shirt had the slogan from the film: ‘We’re on a mission from God.’ These days, Ian is respectable in the church, with a PhD and a job as a theological college principal!

But the story of the film is of a man being released from prison, only to find that the Catholic home where he and his brother were raised by nuns is under threat of closure if it cannot pay a tax bill. They reform their old band and seek to raise the funds. Hence, ‘We’re on a mission from God.’

And the first part of Peter’s sermon shows that we all are on a mission from God when the Spirit comes. This is about the universal nature of the Spirit’s work in mission. The Spirit makes mission from all to all – from all in the church, to all in the world.

All that talk about blood and fire, billows of smoke, the sun going dark and the moon like blood (verses 19-20)? It’s not a weather forecast! It’s dramatic language, underpinning the basic point that this work of the Spirit to use all God’s people to reach all people with God’s love in Christ is an earth-shattering, game-changing moment. This is a great ‘day of the Lord’ (verse 20) when ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’ (verse 21), because God has poured out his Spirit on all people (verse 17), to the extent male and female, young and old, slaves as well as free will dream, have visions and prophesy (verses 17-18).

Yes, all of God’s people are equipped to prophesy, to speak God’s message boldly. Well did one preacher say that the Bible doesn’t just teach the famous Reformation slogan of the priesthood of all believers, it teaches the prophethood of al believers. When you say that only certain ranks of people in the church are ‘good enough’ for certain tasks, you forget that God has poured out the Spirit on all his people for his mission. Granted, we each have distinct gifts, but the Spirit comes on all who profess faith in Christ, and one reason for that is we are all ordained. God ordains all of us into the work of his mission.

Or, put it this way: we are not all evangelists, but we are all witnesses. We may not be able to explain and answer everything, but like a witness in a court case, we can all say what we have seen and what has happened to us. We can all talk about what Jesus has done for us. The Holy Spirit has come into our lives, and equipped us to do that.

This is not a threat or a demand, it is a promise. It fulfils the promise Jesus made about the coming of the Spirit before his Ascension: ‘You will be my witnesses.’ That isn’t an order, it’s a promise. When the Spirit comes, we are all ordained into the universal mission of God’s saving love: from all, to all.

The second strand in the Holy Spirit’s mission work here is this: it’s all about Jesus. For the rest of Peter’s sermon, he goes on and on about Jesus (verses 22-36). This is who he is. This is what he has done. This is how you have reacted to him so far. This is what you need to do about him. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

This amplifies what I’ve just said about us all being witnesses. Some of you may be familiar with a Christian website called Ship of Fools, a site which includes humorous sections such as Gadgets for God, featuring the latest in tacky Christian memorabilia, a Caption Competition, Signs and Blunders, through Mystery Worshipper reports on church service around the world, to serious discussion of pressing issues.

Ship of Fools started life as a print magazine in the early 1980s. I know, because I was one of the subscribers. In one of those issues, they carried a cartoon strip article called ‘Born Again Testimonies’. ‘You may be – but has your testimony been born again?’ the article asked. It depicted Christians who were discouraged that the story of their spiritual experience was not as dramatic and exciting as that commonly portrayed in Christian testimony books. It offered a rewriting of your story by Hollywood scriptwriters, plastic surgery, dental and gymnastic care, all to make you ready for the platform of an evangelist at a crusade.

I suspect it touched a raw nerve, because it hit on a feeling I’ve noticed among regular churchgoers. “I don’t have a Damascus Road experience to talk about, so my testimony will count for nothing.” If you haven’t been a drug dealer, a bank robber or a celebrity, no-one will be interested in your story.
However, as the great John Stott once put it, ‘Testimony is not autobiography.’ In other words, testimony is not my story, it’s not ‘me, me, me’, it’s the story of what Jesus has done in my life. Now again, you may think that unless what Jesus has done in your life is the religious equivalent of a fireworks spectacular, it may not be worth talking about.

But we would be wrong. All that Peter describes about Jesus in this sermon – his ministry, his death, his resurrection, his Ascension and his sending of the Holy Spirit – all these things impact us. So what if in our lives it doesn’t come all-singing and all-dancing, complete with a laser light show? What matters is that we know Jesus has changed us – and is changing us. The majority of people live ordinary, unflashy lives, and so an ordinary, unflashy story of what Jesus means to us is every bit as likely, if not more so, to have an effect upon them.

So – why not give it some thought? What has Jesus done for you? Reflect on it. There will be material from your life that you can share about the work of Jesus. that’s where the Holy Spirit wants to focus: on Jesus. We can co-operate with the Spirit by being willing to talk about Jesus and his work in our lives.

The third and final strand of the Spirit’s work in mission that I want to draw out here has to do with the effect upon the listeners.

What happens at the end of the sermon?

When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” (Verse 37)

What has the Holy Spirit done here? It’s what Jesus (as recorded in John’s Gospel) called ‘conviction of sin’. Conviction of sin is the third element in this passage of the Holy Spirit’s work in mission.

Conviction of sin is when the Holy Spirit shows people how they are in the wrong before God – either generally or specifically – and calls them to change. In that respect, it’s different from that work of the enemy we call ‘condemnation’, which just says, “You’re a terrible person, you’re useless.” Condemnation leaves someone without hope. Conviction of sin is different, because it is specific, and there is a remedy that draws us to God, namely repentance.

So we see in the story today that when the crowd asks Peter and the apostles what they should do, he gives a specific reply:

Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Verse 38)

We know that coming to faith involves repentance in some form. Faith in Jesus Christ and following him entails changing our way of life. In all sorts of areas, we shall need to perform the spiritual version of a U-turn, to go Christ’s way. The Holy Spirit shows us what we need to change and renounce.

By way of an aside, of course this is not something that happens just once at the beginning of the Christian life: it happens throughout, as the Holy Spirit patiently works to make us more Christlike.

But let us note that it truly is the Holy Spirit who does the convicting. Peter has described the situation, and yes he has told the people that they and others were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus (verses 23, 36), but it’s still the Spirit who cuts them to the heart. We have to be careful not to do the Holy Spirit’s work ourselves, but faithfully to share God’s love and truth and leave the Spirit to do the convicting.

I once had the privilege of registering a wedding  for someone who had begun worshipping at another church in the area, but one which did
not own its own building. She had come to faith through an Alpha Course that church had run, and wanted to be baptised. However, she was living with her partner without being married to him. The church had not harangued her for this, even though they believed (and I do, too) that living together falls short of God’s vision for relationships. However, she felt it was not right for her to be baptised until her relationship was regularised. So I registered the wedding, and her pastor conducted the service. I believe it was the Holy Spirit who convicted her, and who led her to marriage before baptism. In fact, the wedding was at 11 o’clock, and she then went to another church building to be baptised at 12 o’clock!
And we also might remember that the Spirit’s timetable and agenda for sorting out people’s lives might not be quite the same as ours. I once heard the preacher Clive Calver tell a story at Spring Harvest about how he kept praying, “Lord, please take away my pride.”

When it didn’t happen, he continued to pray, asking, “Lord, why aren’t you taking away my pride?”

“Because then there would be nothing left,” was what he believed God replied.

We don’t always know why the Spirit highlights certain issues in a person’s life but delays attending to others. What we do know is that coming to Christ involves the Spirit showing us where we need to change our ways in repentance, and that that begins a process that lasts the whole of our lives.

In conclusion, then, the Holy Spirit enlists us for God’s mission in Jesus. The mission is for all people, and needs all God’s people, empowered by the Spirit, for it to flourish. That mission will focus not on us, but on Jesus. Our rôle is to tell the story of Jesus’ activity in our lives. And the Spirit draws people to follow Jesus through conviction of sin.

All in all, then, the mission of God will not function without the primary work of the Holy Spirit. Never mind our plans, our campaigns, our techniques or what the latest book or conference speaker says. No Holy Spirit, no mission worthy of the name.

Come, Holy Spirit.

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The Church And The Scarecrow Festival

“You’ve got to go to the Pirbright Scarecrow Festival, it’s amazing,” said one of the mums at school. It was on yesterday, and, well, Sally was right.

Over fifty scarecrows scattered around the village green and the church, the latter forming a tableau of the recent royal wedding. I think my favourite, even if not the most sophisticated scarecrow, was the ‘cartwheeling verger’:

And here he is at Pirbright:

Yes, complete with odd socks.

It was a great day. Lots of stalls, amazing sausages and burgers from Fulks the local butcher, music, ice cream, fun for children and adults.

The royal wedding was the theme – or, perhaps more accurately, the theme was ‘William and Kate’. Hence you also saw scarecrows of William Shatner, Willy Wonka, and my favourite, a bush with a speech balloon containing the lyrics to ‘Wuthering Heights’. Yes, the bush was called Kate.

And you know what: the church was the driving force behind it.

Evidently, the event has been going some years, but the way the programme was worded, you couldn’t miss the theme that this had begun from the parish church. They had corralled local businesses into supporting it in various ways, and many local families had made the scarecrows.

No, it wasn’t remotely an overtly religious event, but I wonder what goodwill they build up in the village by doing this.

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