Chile Miners: The 34th Man

I’ve been sharing this story on my Facebook account. A friend who works for the Church Mission Society posted it. In all the remarkable stories about the rescue of the thirty-three Chilean miners, with the mixture of testimony to the faith of some and the confrontations between wives and mistresses on the other, comes this powerful story. Biblically, it reminds me of Daniel 3:25, where Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are in the fiery furnace. As King Nebuchadnezzar watches, he gasps in astonishment that there is a fourth man in the fire.

Do click the link and read for yourself.

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RIP Solomon Burke

Solomon Burke, the ‘king of rock and soul’, has died. The preacher who took seriously the command to go forth and multiply (he had 21 children and 90 grandchildren) died in Holland today.

Many others are posting videos of his famous songs ‘Everybody needs somebody to love’ (as covered in The Blues Brothers) or ‘Cry to me’. But here is the title track of his 2003 ‘comeback’ and award-winning CD ‘Don’t give up on me’. Note the ‘preacher’ style introduction to the song.

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Niche Church?

One of the joys I have in my new appointment is the presence of an Iranian congregation. They meet on Sunday afternoons on the premises of one of my churches. I have been asked to develop closer links with them. This was already beginning under my predecessor, who worshipped with them nearly every week. The Iranian congregation’s lay pastor is in the early stages of Methodist Local Preacher training.

I go as often as I can, and it’s a fascinating experience. There are only a dozen or so who attend each week, and they are warm and friendly. Not only do I experience their warmth, I notice how they treat one other visitor. There are a number of people in our area with serious mental health issues, and some of them regularly visit our services. One chap in particular often comes to the Iranian service. They sit him down with a coffee and do their best to chat with him. Frequently, Michael will leave early during the worship, and they are not offended. They understand, and give him a quiet, but cheerful farewell.

Worshipping at their service is difficult for someone like me who cannot speak or read Farsi. (Although one or our two musicians who attend to help with the worship is learning!) The young woman who leads worship has a beautiful singing voice, and I can appreciate that. However, I haven’t the foggiest what they are singing, except on the rare occasions when they seem to be singing a translation of a worship song originally written in English. The other week, the tune was unmistakably ‘You Are Beautiful Beyond Description’.

When the pastor preaches (or when he talks in other parts of the service), his wife provides a basic translation into English for the musicians and me. The very first week I went, she was unable to come, so that was fun! However, the pastor indicated which Bible passages they were reading, and gave a one or two-sentence summary of his sermon.

My early reaction to this experience was to think, “Whom will they reach? Their likely clientele will be very small, and some of the existing congregation travels several miles to be at this service every week. So how will they grow?”

However, I then realised they were not so different from many established English-speaking congregations. Effectively, we already have thousands of ‘niche churches’ in this country. Our language, practice and culture are so beyond the understanding of many unchurched people that they would struggle to integrate into them. And some of our folk travel several miles to attend worship at the church they love.

More positively, there is a certain case for niche churches in a diverse and fragmented culture. (Thinkers like Michael Moynagh have advocated them.) They will inevitably be small, and they must still express Christian unity with disciples from other backgrounds, otherwise the human reconciliation aspect of the Gospel will not be expressed.

Moving back to the negative, one danger of a niche church is that it becomes a private chaplaincy. I have seen churches for expatriate English speakers abroad function like this. They become like little embassies – where the territory is that of home, not the disturbing country, and the congenial company is a shelter against reality. Come to think of that, plenty of regular churches are like that. It needs regular and persistent challenging.

My Iranian friends have a special opportunity to reach out into their community. We have our unique opportunities, too. Within our diversity, we need to celebrate our unity in Christ as a sign of hope to the world that reconciliation is possible.

And that last point isn’t meant to be an idle theological platitude. Our six-year-old son Mark is aware that Iran as a nation doesn’t like the UK. He was worried at first that I was going to share fellowship with Iranians, because he thought I was going to share with some enemies.  I had to explain to him that these Iranians were different from the government in their native land, and that Jesus made us one. Given the levels of racial prejudice I have sometimes found in churches as well as in our society generally, this call to express Christian unity across racial and cultural boundaries – and especially across such a boundary as this one – is vital for Gospel witness.

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Sermon: Qualities For Mission

As my current frantic schedule continues, we have moved onto a new sermon series where we use the biblical book of Daniel to look for models of Christian witness when we are a minority in a non-Christian culture. This Sunday’s sermon will be the only one I get to preach in the series, due to the fact that we’re only looking at the first six chapters of the book and other ‘special’ services arise that I need to take, such as Remembrance Sunday, where it will not be appropriate to follow the theme. So here goes …

Daniel 2

Anyone who thinks we are in a Christian country is in for a shock today. We may still have an Established Church, but that is about all that remains of the notion. Don’t expect in forthcoming media coverage of Hallowe’en that the church will be quoted, despite our concern about the occult: rather, expect Age Concern to have spokespeople available to warn about Trick Or Treat. Don’t expect that I will get extra respect in the community because I am a minister: on the contrary, some sections of our society will assume that I am either fleecing the flock or fiddling with the children.

The fact is, Christians are now a minority in our culture, and we have to live and witness from that perspective, whatever memories some of us have of when Christianity enjoyed a privileged status. Although the Gospel doesn’t change, our application of it alters, because our situation has changed.

All of which is why I chose a sermon series on the first half of Daniel. Because Daniel is in that situation. He is part of a minority, living in a different culture, where he seeks to be a faithful witness to the one true God. He is a young Jew who has been forcibly deported to Babylon by the forces of King Nebuchadnezzar. Babylon’s values are different from Israel’s, as our society’s are increasingly different from ours.

So last week in chapter one, Rob Gill will have shared with you the story where Daniel and his young friends decide which battles are worth fighting and which aren’t. They accept Babylonian names, despite the association with Babylonian gods, but they don’t accept the rich food from the palace and go vegetarian instead. Many of you will know that same dilemma of pondering where you need to take a Christian stand, perhaps at work.

Now in chapter two Daniel is presented with an opportunity for witness. It comes right out of the paganism that dominated Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar has a distressing dream – so unnerving that he forgets it. And just as today when people turn not to Jesus but to clairvoyants and astrologers for guidance in confusion, so the king turns to ‘the magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and astrologers’ (verse 2) at hand. What could be less surprising in a place like Babylon, the probable origin of occult practices such as horoscopes?

In those circumstances, what is a faithful Jew like Daniel to do? As the Jews pondered their place as a minority in Babylon, the Holy Spirit led them to see that practices such as astrology were contrary to their faith. We see that played out in the section of Isaiah that refers to this period of exile (chapters 40 to 55).

A young man like Daniel might well have considered that the prophetic thing to do would be to condemn the wickedness of relying on occult sources of spiritual guidance. Certainly that is what I did as a young Christian. On my first day of work at my office in the Civil Service, the training officer suddenly said to me, “So what’s your star sign?” I replied in quite a huff that I didn’t believe in such nonsense.

I still believe horoscopes are completely out of bounds for Christians. I remain disturbed by the number of churchgoers who read their stars more than they read their Bibles. But what we see in Daniel is something quite different. We see someone who displays the first quality for mission when we are a minority in an alien culture. And that first quality is compassion.

Nebuchadnezzar makes an unreasonable demand: tell me my dream and interpret it, otherwise I will have you and all the wise men in Babylon executed. And that included Daniel and his friends (verses 8-13). At first when they pray, it is so that they will not be killed, along with all the other wise men (verse 18). However, by the time he has the interpretation, his concern is for all the wise men:

“Do not execute the wise men of Babylon. Take me to the king, and I will interpret his dream for him.” (Verse 24)

Ultimately, he’s not just out for a personal escape while thinking “Serves them right if they suffer” about the native Babylonian occult experts. His desire to know the king’s dream and interpret it is driven by more than a desire for personal survival: he has compassion for those others who will suffer, however much he thinks they are wrong and might deserve a fate like this.

Surely we can translate Daniel’s example to our lives. When we mix with people outside our circle of faith, some of those are bound to be folk whose moral values and practices are different from ours, in some cases plain contradictory. If we are not careful, we might end up like Jonah, who we were thinking about recently, and become infected with self-righteousness. We might long for the day when they get what’s coming to them.

But if we are to be a serious missional presence in the world, then Jesus calls us to show compassion. Who knows what fears they have? What if the Christian at the office is known as the person who cares for those facing trouble? What if the Christian home in the street is known as the house where people can ring the doorbell, because there are people who will listen and care?

What does it take? It takes a heart like that of Jesus. Do you remember in Matthew’s Gospel when he looked at the people of Israel all ‘harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’? What does Matthew tell us of Jesus’ attitude? ‘He had compassion on them’ (Matthew 9:36).

So we ask to see people as Jesus sees them. If we do, then like Daniel we shall have compassion for them. We shall be motivated to undertake acts of love and concern for them. We may speak up on their behalf. We shall offer to pray for them.

This is why Debbie and I deliberately lingered in the school community during the last appointment. This is why one of the things I later did at my office after I’d got over some of my early youthful confrontational attitudes was to be the secretary of my union there. You could say it’s where I got my first experiences in pastoral care. Like the young woman whose job was under threat, because her standard of work had dropped. She came and talked to me. It turned out that she had been dating a man at the office. They had gone away on holiday to Majorca, where she had discovered he was bisexual. When she faced him with this, he beat her senseless and she woke up to find herself in a Spanish hospital where she spoke no Spanish and the staff spoke no English.

Friends, let us be known for our compassion in the circles we move in. It’s important for Christian mission. We won’t have to sacrifice our belief in what’s right and what’s wrong, not if we pray to have a heart for people like Jesus did.

Daniel also displays a second quality for mission. It comes in the context of events suddenly being upon him. How will he react? To illustrate what I will label as Daniel’s second quality for mission, I am going to retell a story that Tom Wright tells in his book Virtue Reborn:

On Thursday 15th January 2009, an Airbus A320 plane took off from LaGuardia Airport, New York, bound for Charlotte, North Carolina. Captain Chesley Sullenberger III, known as ‘Sully’, completed all the standard pre-flight checks. Then, two minutes after take-off, while flying over the Bronx in New York, the aircraft ran into a flock of Canada geese. Both engines were severely damaged. The plane plummeted towards this densely populated area.

What would Captain Sully and his crew do? There was little time in which they had to make decisions that would either save or lose many lives. There were one or two small airports nearby, but they would not reach them in time. They could land on a major roadway, the New Jersey Turnpike, but that would create huge dangers for cars and drivers as well as their own passengers. There was only one realistic option: the Hudson River. Except pilots cannot make tiny errors when crash-landing on a river, or the aircraft would break up and sink.

In the space of two or three minutes they had to shut down the engines, set exactly the right speed for gliding without power, and get the nose down to maintain speed. They had to override all the automatic systems, make the plane as waterproof as possible and glide the plane on a tight path that would bring it in going with the flow of the river. They could only do this with battery power and the emergency generator. Then they had to straighten up the plane so it was exactly level on impact and bring the nose up again to land straight and flat on the water.

So … did they do it? Yes. Every life was saved.

But how did Sully and his crew manage to do all their precise tasks in that short period of time? The truth is that not only had they been highly trained, they had repeatedly practised emergency drills, so that when the time came, everything came naturally to them as by habit.

Now I want to suggest to you that Daniel’s second quality for mission is that he was practised in spiritual habits. We see one obvious spiritual discipline in this chapter: he resorts to prayer. But in Daniel’s case, he was not a man who simply turned to prayer when there was a crisis. For him, prayer was a habit. We see that elsewhere in the book, such as in chapter six, where his regular practice of praying three times a day is used against him by his enemies to get him thrown into the lions’ den (6:10).

So if you wonder how Daniel is so tuned in to God as to hear the content of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and its interpretation, consider this possibility. He had so made prayer a spiritual discipline, that over time his attention to this habit made him more naturally tuned in to the voice of God. Because of this, he is able to bring the word to the king that – like Captain Sully and his plane crew – saves many lives.

Mission, in other words, is not all about doing. It is underpinned by taking the time to be tuned into God. That means spiritual disciplines such as prayer and regular Bible reading. There is no short cut.

A Christian friend of mine is an acclaimed guitarist. As well as being highly respected on the Christian scene, he has played with many well-known musicians, such as Gerry Rafferty and Joan Armatrading. I was once with him and another friend over lunch. The other friend was a Christian singer and guitarist who mainly led the worship group at her home church, and occasionally at inter-church events. She asked him the secret of his skills.

“There’s no secret,” he said, “I still practise for two hours every day.”

It’s the same for us. If we want to be effective in mission as a minority group in our vastly different culture, we need to be practised in prayer. Then we shall have something special and unique to offer that can only have come from one source – the living God himself.

I am fond of drawing attention to something Steve Chalke has said on this subject. He has said that for effective Christian engagement in the world, we need two things: intimacy and involvement. We need both the involvement with the world, but at the same time we need the intimacy of spiritual life with God.

And I’m not far off saying that something like that is at the heart of Daniel chapter two. In advocating that first quality for mission of compassion, I am asking that we invite Jesus to transform our hearts that involvement with people who are currently lost from his love becomes a natural and radical part of our lives. In advocating the second quality for mission of developing spiritual habits, I am arguing that there is no sustained fruitful mission except when we commit ourselves to listen carefully and regularly for the voice of God.

In other words, anyone looking for the quick fix for Christian outreach in our deeply non-Christian culture had better look elsewhere. Instant results are only offered by hucksters and charlatans.

What I’m inviting – no, urging – you to take up is a long term approach to Christian mission. Isn’t it fitting as we prepare to celebrate seventy-five years of this building that we commit to the long term, too? So yes – long term involvement with non-Christians, as we open our hearts to be softened with the love of Jesus for them. And long term involvement with our God, as we take the time to get used to the sound of his voice and learn more closely what he is saying and doing, so we can share that with people for the blessing of the world.

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Biblefresh, The Church And Outreach

Next year marks four hundred years since the Authorised Version (King James Version for my North American friends) was published. In the UK, churches are planning to celebrate 2011 as The Year Of The Bible. A major project to support this is called Biblefresh, which seeks to help the church regain confidence in reading the Bible.

That’s a great idea. However, I’ve run into a problem. Last Monday evening, I was at a meeting of representatives from the four churches in this village (not counting the fifth church that thinks it contains the only true Christians), where we discussed how we were going to mark next year’s big anniversary. Some of them had met a few months ago to start thinking and planning. And our difficulty is this: it seems only natural to us to take our celebrations public. However, the Biblefresh focus on renewing the church’s confidence in Bible reading, important as it is, means that an outreach focus isn’t within its purview. You won’t really find much mention of anything like that on their website, except for the odd comment from Elaine Lindridge, a Methodist Evangelism Enabler in the Newcastle District.

So … I’m posting here, there and everywhere in the social media parts of the Internet to see whether other people have ideas. (These include the Facebook pages for BigBible and Biblefresh.) We’d love to be stimulated by creative sparks elsewhere that might inspire our thinking and praying. If you have any ideas, I’d love you to shre them here.

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links for 2010-09-27

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Sermon: Overcoming Barriers To Spiritual Harvest

Jonah 4

Recently, for her bedtime stories, Rebekah has asked me to read some episodes from a children’s Bible that was written by the well-known Christian author Jennifer Rees Larcombe. We have been going through some Old Testament stories, and in particular she couldn’t wait to hear how Queen Jezebel came to a grisly end. For Rebekah, there was a real sense of justice in seeing a wicked person get her comeuppance.

However, when we got to Jonah and the part of the story where the Ninevites repented and God withdrew his threat of judgment, my beloved daughter was outraged. It just wasn’t right that God loved wicked people, in her estimation.

Just like Jonah himself in chapter 4.

So we come to this chapter today at the end of this short series, and we do so on Harvest Festival weekend. That is quite deliberate, because the Book of Jonah is about God’s desire for a spiritual harvest – for many more people to know his love and follow Jesus. That is, of course, often the theme of the Gospels where Jesus uses a harvest story in his parables.

This chapter could be conceived as being about the barriers to the spiritual harvest, and our first barrier is at hand here, in the way Rebekah echoed Jonah’s self-righteous anger.

I ended last Sunday morning’s sermon on Jonah 3 with these words:

I mean, you wouldn’t resent other people coming to share in the same privileges of the Gospel as you know, would you? It would be absurd.

Wouldn’t it?

I could tell from many people’s body language that they agreed. It would be absurd to resent other people finding the love of God. But I ended that sermon that way deliberately, so that we could build up to the shock of finding that Jonah actually is a resentful, angry, self-righteous man. (Apart from that, he’s quite nice!) In the first three verses of chapter 4, he complains to God about his mercy towards the heathen sinners of Nineveh.

But self-righteousness is dangerously common among religious people, and Jonah is a warning to us. It’s amazing and heartbreaking to see the way the concern for a righteous life loses its bearings and becomes judgmental. Jonah forgot that he was a sinner who had been rescued by the grace of God through the merciful sending of the big fish who saved him from drowning. He forgets he is a rescued sinner. He reverts to type. He says to himself, “I am one of the chosen ones. I am righteous. These Ninevites are wicked sinners. I enjoy the love of God. They should not.”

I’ve seen it time and again in Christian circles. You will know if you read my life story in the church magazine that when my life went awry due to a neck problem at 18, I took a job in the Civil Service. I worked in Social Security. (No, please come back! Please talk to me!) I recall being on holiday one year where a Christian woman asked me what my work was. On replying that I worked in Social Security, she said: “At least you’re the right side of the counter.” Clearly to her, every benefit claimant in the country was a despicable scrounger. Hardly the attitude of heart needed for reaching out with the Gospel of God’s love in Christ.

Or I think of a church coffee morning Debbie and I attended once. The doors were open in the hope that passers-by would drop in and meet the church members, in the hope that eventually they would come to church. But as we listened to the ordinary conversation, with its routine criticism of anything young people liked, or – and this was the deal-breaker for me – their disdain for gadgets (!), we knew that church would need a lot of prayer for it to connect meaningfully with the world.

Contrast that with the man I met once when he and I were both in-patients on a hospital ward together for several days. Before we were discharged, he gave me his business card so that we could stay in touch. After his name were the initials ‘SSBG’. I couldn’t fathom what academic or professional qualification that might be, so I asked him. SSBG, he told me, stood for ‘Sinner Saved By Grace’.

That is where we all have to begin if we desire a spiritual harvest. Unlike Jonah, we need to remember that we have been rescued by God. That needs to engender humility in our lives. The great Sri Lankan Christian D T Niles once said that evangelism was ‘one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread’. In the economy of God, it is the spiritual beggars who see the harvest. He calls us to humility.

We can notice the second barrier to a spiritual harvest in Jonah when we come to verse 5. After God asks him in verse 4, “Is it right for you to be angry?” we read,

Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city.

In other words, Jonah left the city. The harvest had come when he had been in the city. Now he was outside, whingeing.  Often the religious believer stays outside the places that need the Gospel and fires darts of criticism from a safe distance. Isn’t it better to be cocooned warmly with other Christians, enjoying fellowship?

Well, OK, there’s not much fellowship in Jonah chapter 4, but I hope you take my point. We do all our relating to people who do not share our faith, whether positive or negative in tone, from the outside. We even see that in the typical language we use about wanting more people in our congregations. We say things like, ‘How can we attract more people to come to us?’ Yet note those words ‘attract’ and ‘come’: our assumption is that we are here, and people need to move in order to be part of us.

In one previous circuit, I knew a group of Christians who left the United Reformed Church in the town, because they said they believed God was calling them to reach out with the Gospel to a needy housing estate in what was otherwise a generally prosperous town. They hired the St John Ambulance hall, and began weekly Sunday afternoon meetings. They also ran the Alpha Course. There was only one problem. None of them ever moved onto the estate.

We cannot expect a spiritual harvest if we ‘leave the city’, if we don’t get involved in the middle of people’s lives rather than staying at arm’s length and expecting them to come running gratefully to us. Those of you who were at the welcome service three weeks ago may recall I made reference in my short speech to John’s Gospel. In John 20, the risen Jesus says to the disciples, ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you.’ Therefore, I said, to know how Jesus sends us, we have to know how the Father sent him. And for that we go back to John 1, where we read, ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.’ Jesus’ approach to mission was very largely ‘go’. It was to live among the people he wanted to reach.

So if we desire to see a spiritual harvest of people finding faith in Christ and following him, we need to abandon the ideas that a church needs to put together an attractive programme so that we can invite people to enticing events. It is less important to build programmes than to build people.

You will hear more from me on this particular theme as we get to know each other. Do not ‘leave the city’. Be part of the city. Bless the people who do not yet know the love of Christ. Make your lives the kind that provoke questions. And then be ready to answer them.

The third barrier to a spiritual harvest that Jonah demonstrates comes in his attitude to the mysterious Jack and the Beanstalk-type plant (maybe a gourd, maybe a castor-oil plant) that God causes to grow and then wither (verses 6-8). Jonah enjoys the shade it provides, but starts moaning again when it has gone. God brings him up short in the final three verses of the story:

But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the gourd?”
“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”

But the LORD said, “You have been concerned about this gourd, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”

In other words, the barrier here is that Jonah has a consumer’s attitude to God. Jonah is happy when God does something for him. But when God doesn’t, or when he requires him to do something unappealing, he wants out.

It’s the same attitude we see in Christians who frequently move church, because no church ever satisfies them. Their assumption is that they are consumers, and they should be satisfied by what is provided. So you hear Christians saying, “We left that church because we weren’t being fed.” Well, what happened to feeding yourselves? Mature Christians should have cultivated ways in which they take on board spiritual nurture for themselves! Any idea that it should all be spoon-fed to them is quite outrageous! The job of the pastor – the shepherd – is not to feed the sheep, but to show them where they can feed themselves.

Faith is not simply about what we can get out of God. If you remember the famous words of John F Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country” could be translated into spiritual terms. “Ask not what your God can do for you – ask what you can do for your God.”

Now don’t misunderstand me. Of course we should rejoice and seek the many things God does for us and wants to do for us. But when we simply turn the spiritual life into ‘what I can get out of it’, we have missed the demands of discipleship, and especially the call for discipleship to be practised in a missional way in the world. Those who think that Jesus and the church are here simply to provide for their spiritual preferences are the very people who are usually a barrier to church growth. They so absorb the time of others and distract good Christians from better purposes that they wring the life out of Christ’s church.

All of which rolls us round quite neatly to the theme of harvest. Today, we celebrate what – by the grace of God – we can give, so that others may flourish. Commonly, we think of that in physical and material terms. We give food, money or other items so that the needy may receive what they need.

But there is a spiritual parallel. As we seek not be spiritual consumers but spiritual givers, people who are keen to see what we can do in the service of God’s mission, then other people will receive their spiritual needs. They will find the love of God in Christ for the first time and commit their lives to being disciples of Jesus. They will ‘grow in grace and in the knowledge and love of God’. They too will become missional disciples.

And if too we have been people who have chosen the path of humility, not self-righteous anger; and if we have been people who have not ‘left the city’ for the Christian ghetto but dwelt in the midst of humankind in all its needs; then might we not indeed begin to see a spiritual harvest, and – unlike Jonah – rejoice in it?

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The UK Citizenship Test

An American friend pointed me to The Official Practice Citizenship Test. Try taking it: it’s barking. Tell me if the most important tests of potential citizens are to know the percentage of Muslims in the UK to one decimal place, or the number of minors in the country to the nearest million? Exactly how does such knowledge make a candidate a better or more loyal citizen? Or do we just want a nation of civil service statisticians?

But then look at the kind of questions we ask of foreign nationals in other circumstances. A minister friend of mine used to represent Christian converts from Muslim states who had fled here and sought asylum on the very reasonable grounds that they feared persecution, even death, if they returned to their homelands. Understandably, the authorities wanted some kind of evidence that they had truly become Christians and were not using this as an excuse to live here.

So what questions would you ask someone in order to discern whether they were a Christian? Try this one: what is the traditional dinner Christians eat on Christmas Day?

And on their answer to that and similar questions, the Home Office decided the life and death fate of many people.

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