The Hearse At The Pub

(Continuing my series of old posts reposted.)

It was a warm evening, with drinks to match. We were relaxing in the garden of a local pub, toasting the end of a well-received musical production we’d been involved in these last few nights.

It was then that we saw it arrive. No ordinary car being driven into the pub grounds, it was a hearse.

Ribald comments flashed around our group, jokers trying to top each preceding witty remark. Until the hearse passed our table, and one of our number realised: the people in the hearse were friends of his.

“What are you doing with a hearse?” he asked his friends.

“Oh, we’ve just bought it.”

“Why?”

“We’re going to take a holiday touring Europe, and wanted a vehicle where whoever wasn’t driving at night would have room to lie down and sleep.”

Now what would you have given to have been a border guard on the European mainland, maybe Romania, somewhere near – oh, for argument’s sake, Transylvania? You go round to the back of the hearse, peer in, and someone rises from the catafalque. And what if the person who had been disturbed from sleep and was now getting up had not had American standards of dental work?

Sometimes life comes out of nowhere and grabs you. Sometimes all your preconceived ideas get thrown out of the window.

I like the story of the man who was convinced he was dead. He told his wife, his friends, his work colleagues.

So persistent was he that they became very worried about him. As you would.

Finally they clubbed together to pay for him to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist set about his work diligently. Using medical textbooks, he proved to the man one simple fact: dead men don’t bleed.

“OK, OK, I accept what you’re saying,” said the man, “Dead men don’t bleed.”

At which point the psychiatrist produced a lancet and jabbed it into the man’s flesh.

As blood throbbed out, the man looked in horror: “Maybe dead men do bleed after all.”

Got any preconceived ideas that need a decent burial? About God, for example?

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Celine Dion At The Crematorium

(For the next several days, I’m not going to be able to post any new topical material, nor shall I be able to interact with your comments. However, I am going to repost some old pieces that once appeared on my now defunct website at http://www.davefaulkner.co.uk. I hope you enjoy them.)

The curate from the Victor Meldrew School of Theology had turned down this funeral. Which was a good job. She never should have been asked. The daughter of the deceased was an occasional worshipper at one of the churches I served.

Like many people at the time, she wanted Celine Dion’s love theme from the film ‘Titanic’, ‘My heart will go on’, to be played at the service. It’s the sort of music that brings me out in a rash, but hey, it was her wish.

We were ready to begin. The congregation was seated in the crematorium chapel. I was outside with the pallbearers from the undertaker’s. I gave the nod to the crem attendant. He pressed ‘play’. Well, it was Celine Dion, it was ‘My heart will go on’ … but it was the dance remix.

As a thumping drumbeat massacred the gloopy song, one of the pallbearers turned to me and said, “So are we meant to take the coffin in at this pace?”

“No,” said one of his colleagues, “it isn’t a drum, it’s the deceased knocking on the coffin, trying to get out!”

It became one of the challenges of my ministry to maintain dignity and not burst into hysterics during the funeral.

The next day, the daughter phoned me to thank me for the service. I thought it prudent to ask her about the music.

“Did you notice the music at the beginning of the service?”

“No.”

“You didn’t notice that it was the dance version of ‘My heart will go on’?”

“No.”

“Only I just thought I should ask, in case any of your relatives were upset.”

“Nah – anyway, my mum was a bit of a goer, and she’d have loved it!”

Embarrassing moment over, I breathed a sigh of relief when I put down the phone.

Now I’ve seen a funeral or two in my time. I’ve made friends with the crem attendants. One says, “Don’t wear trousers with turn-ups, or you’ll bring your work home with you.”

I’ve seen inconsolable grief at the crem, and I can understand that. Without the hope I gain from the Resurrection of Jesus, I can see why Paul in the Bible said that people “grieve without hope”.

I’ve also seen overbearing, unnatural joy. I don’t mean the way Christians (with the hope of the Resurrection) can look forward, I mean a kind of forced joy that psychologically is a denial of bereavement’s true pain. Most grief is nothing to be guilty about, whatever our feelings tell us. It’s an expression of our love for the deceased, love we can no longer give them, because they are not with us.

Maybe then my offering is to say that the healthy thing – the Jesus thing – is the gift of grieving with hope.

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Lent Material

It’s the last Sunday before Lent. (Yes, I know it’s Valentine’s Day and I haven’t forgotten my lovely wife, but that’s not what I’m writing about here.) I thought I’d recommend a couple of Lent resources.

First off, a collaboration that would have been unthinkable some years ago. The Methodist Relief and Development Fund and the Evangelical Alliance have combined to provide Bible study notes and weekly videos. You can download notes for ‘What does the Bible say about power?‘ from the MRDF site; videos will be posted weekly from the 17th at the EA site.  The EA are using this to link social justice with the Biblefresh initiative. Years ago, official Methodism wouldn’t even have talked with the EA; what a wonderful sign of changed moods.

Secondly, just to say that Tom Wright‘s new book is out. ‘Virtue Reborn‘ addresses issues of Christian character and behaviour – a good theme for Lent.

What are you doing for Lent?

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Sermon: Jesus Of The Transfiguration

Luke 9:28-36

A neighbour of ours three doors down periodically changes her photo on Facebook. For a long time it was a snap of her with the rock singer Jon Bon Jovi. Then it became a picture of her with the Hollywood actor Johnny Depp. Michelle looks very happy and relaxed with them. They look pretty happy with her. It does rather help the matter that Michelle is quite glamorous!

Me, I’m not so sure I’d look as cool and laid back with a famous person as she does. Not that I’m terribly interested in handsome male rock stars or actors; I just have to fend off Debbie’s regular ribbing because I once commented how pretty one of the teachers at our children’s school is!

However, as I said, I don’t think I’d be as relaxed as Michelle. I think if I met a hero, or a famous beautiful woman, I think I would be a blubbering mess. How journalists keep their cool to interview well-known people, I don’t know.

All of which makes me rather like Peter at the Mount of Transfiguration. When he offers to make three dwellings – one each for Jesus, Moses and Elijah – Luke comments that he didn’t know what he was saying (verse 33). He’s overwhelmed, and he says something stupid. He’d like to preserve the moment or turn it into something he knows and can cope with – the three dwelling places he proposes are reminiscent of the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles.

But he’s missed the significance of the event as a result of his blubbering, and needs correction. That takes him into the terrifying experience in the cloud, where he hears the frightening, correcting voice of God: ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ (Verse 35) Don’t get blubbery about Moses and Elijah: listen to Jesus!

And I want to take that as an entry point into thinking about the Transfiguration today. It’s a traditional reading for the last Sunday before Lent, and I want us to look at how it shows Jesus as being superior to Moses and Elijah.

Firstly, Jesus’ superiority to Moses. So you book your dream holiday. You pay the deposit. You renew your passports. A couple of months before going, you pay the balance. A week before the off, you return to the travel agent to pick up your tickets and your currency. A day or two beforehand, you pack your luggage. Everything is ready for your departure.

And the Transfiguration is about a departure – especially in the connection with Moses. When Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus, we read

They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. (Verse 31)

His departure. Why the Moses connection? Because there’s an Old Testament book called ‘Departure’. It’s just that we know it by its Greek name: Exodus. The story of Moses leading God’s people to freedom from Egypt. When Luke writes about Jesus’ departure here, it is in the Greek his exodos. Moses’ departure was a liberation, Jesus’ forthcoming ‘departure’ from Jerusalem will be a liberation, too. But because Jesus is superior to Moses, his liberation will be superior, too.

If it’s Jesus’ departure from Jerusalem, then clearly we’re talking about his death, resurrection and ascension. That departure brings liberation. Jesus has been pointing the way to his future suffering and has said that disciples need to take up their crosses and follow him. Now we begin to understand that what is coming is a freedom event. The Cross will bring freedom. Jesus’ departure in his death is not a tragic event, as I once heard a Methodist church steward call it in the vestry before a Good Friday service. It is sacrificial love for the blessing of the world. Yes, it is agony and injustice. But it is also true heroism.

Now if this is the case, then we have to see the Transfiguration as more than we have often interpreted it. We know that the disciples come back down from the mountain to the challenges of everyday life. Hence we say that you can’t live on ‘mountain-top experiences’ all the time, you have to get on with ordinary living again. But if the Transfiguration points to Jesus’ departure at the Cross, it isn’t about coming down from a ‘high’ to face the mundane and the routine again. Rather, it’s about Jesus being strengthened to face his coming trial.

So if Jesus is being strengthened to face the trial of the Cross here, perhaps this event is similar to one or two others in the Gospels. It might be like the powerful spiritual experience he had at his baptism with the Holy Spirit coming down on him like a dove and – again – a voice from heaven affirming him, immediately before the Spirit leads him to the wilderness to fast and conquer temptation. It might be like the way he was mysteriously strengthened in the Garden of Gethsemane as he wrestled with his forthcoming betrayal and suffering. No wonder we read this on the last Sunday before Lent.

Isn’t it wonderful, then, that Jesus needed to be strengthened before he faced trials, including the greatest of all? And if that’s the case, then perhaps we might interpret our own ‘mountain-top experiences’ differently. They may not simply  be a boost before we get back to the grind; they may be God’s way of equipping us for whatever difficulties are coming our way, particularly those where we end up in a painful place because of our faith. Perhaps God has a blessing for us in Christ that will give us the fortitude to face our trials, or perhaps we can look back at problematic times in our lives and see that before then God prepared us with a blessing. He may have given us our own mini-transfigurations. Not in the sense of exalting who we are – he only does that for Jesus – but in empowering and encouraging us.

Secondly, Jesus’ superiority to Elijah. How does Elijah connect with Jesus’ departure? The Moses connection is quite easy to see when you think of the word ‘exodus’, but it’s less easy to see why Elijah should be hanging out with Jesus now, and the particular way in which Jesus is superior to him.

However, there is a link between Jesus’ departure at Jerusalem and Elijah, and it goes like this. For Jews, Elijah was the great prophet of the end-time deliverance. He was the one who was expected to appear before God’s Messiah. You may recall there was a hoo-hah in the Gospels as to whether John the Baptist was Elijah come back from the dead to precede the Messiah. All this means that Elijah was the figure of hope. He signified to Jewish minds that God would make all things right, just and whole in his kingdom. Hence the theme of hope.

That may well have been why Peter almost thoughtlessly suggested the building of three booths, like the Feast of Tabernacles, as I said, because that festival was also known as the Feast of Ingathering, and looked forward to the fullness of God’s kingdom on earth. Peter’s mistake was just to see Jesus as an equal with Moses and Elijah.

But the voice from heaven says, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ (verse 35), because Jesus is superior even to Elijah. So we must infer that Jesus brings a superior hope at his departure.

I suggest we find that in his resurrection and ascension. Jesus will be raised physically from the dead. His body will be restored to him in a new way. Jesus’ resurrection body is the beginning of God’s new creation. God will make all things new, and he begins with his own Son. Elijah might be a sign or symbol of hope, but Jesus is more than that: his own resurrection body embodies our hope, even guarantees our hope of a new heaven and a new earth.

So death may and will come, but it doesn’t get the last laugh. God does. We wait in heaven, in what looks from earth like the sleep of death, but one day the Great Surprise will happen when God raises us from the dead and renews his creation. Elijah can teach us much, but only the Son of God can teach us all this. The Christian who dies trusting in Christ does so in peace, because Jesus fills her with hope in ways no-one else can.

And then there’s the ascension, Jesus’ final bodily departure from Jerusalem, reminiscent of the way Elijah left this world yet – again – superior to it. He ascends to the Father’s right hand, where he will reign until everything has been put under his feet. This is the part of hope that sustains us until God makes all things new, when the new Jerusalem descends and all creation is renewed.

It’s easy to lose hope and think that God is not reigning in heaven when we see evil in the world, in the church and in ourselves. No wonder I read yesterday that John Stott apparently once said,

The Christian’s chief occupational hazards are depression and discouragement.

But the Ascension reminds us that Jesus is reigning, even while rebellion takes place against his rule. Battles may be won or lost, but in the final analysis Christ is on the throne. To say that Christ is not reigning because there is still sin in the world would be like saying there cannot be a government in power because crime is still being committed.

In conclusion, then, Jesus at the Transfiguration offers us awesome hope. The liberation of the Cross, the hope in the Resurrection of God’s new creation and the assurance of his reign through the Ascension. Moses and Elijah may have been good, but Jesus outranks them everywhere.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, ‘Any study of Christ must begin in silence.’ No wonder we read that

When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen. (Verse 36)

Sometimes I’m all for the response to a sermon being in words and deeds after the service. Today, maybe like Peter, James and John, our best response might just be awed silence at the majesty of Christ.

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Is The Methodist Church About To Die?

The Methoblogosphere (at least here in the UK) is buzzing after David Gamble and Richard Vautrey, the President and Vice-President of the Methodist Conference, addressed the Church of England General Synod yesterday and declared that Methodism was ready to die if it furthered the mission of God. They challenged the C of E to consider whether they would say the same. Good sources on this story come from Ekklesia, the President and Vice-President’s blog, Dave Warnock and various posts by Pete Phillips. Less kudos for Ruth Gledhill’s blogs in the Times, I’m afraid.

Here are a few thoughts that have been going through my mind.

The critical point is we should be willing to die for the sake of mission. Amen to that. Would that every Methodist signed up to that. ‘Unless a grain of wheat …’ etc. David Gamble said:

We are prepared to go out of existence not because we  are declining or failing in mission, but for the sake of mission.

Indeed. However, the problem is we might cease to exist without making the choice freely because in many places we are failing in mission. The ‘mission first’ theme (as Dave Warnock calls it) has to be top priority. And not so we can save our chapels so they continue to exist; rather, because people need the love of God in Christ.

On the mission theme I found one of the most telling quotes to come from Ken Howcroft, the Assistant Secretary of Conference and Ecumenical Officer (in one of Pete’s blogs linked above):

Methodism began as a discipleship movement within the wider church, a society of people seeking holiness and engaging in mission. It’s calling was expressed as “spreading scriptural holiness throughout the land”. The modern expression of that is the programme Our Calling. We have over time gradually become a church.  We cherish our traditions and history as a church. We cherish our institutions and structures. But we still have the DNA of a  movement.

Exactly. It is my understanding as one whose postgrad research was in ecclesiology that so much of Methodism is still structured like a para-church movement rather than a church. The circuit system is the most obvious example. It was created by Wesley as a way of getting preachers to go round servicing the midweek renewal groups that he established during the eighteenth century revival, but those groups were meant to worship at the parish church on Sundays. We translated that structure into a denomination, where preachers still move – but from congregation to congregation – and not midweek but on Sundays. (For anyone who wants to explore more of this academically, the late missiologist Ralph Winter wrote about it using the terms ‘modalities’ and ‘sodalities‘.)

I don’t accept the way in which the Anglo-Catholics argue we aren’t truly a church (bishops, the ‘historic succession’ and all that nonsense), but there is a real argument that we never stopped being structured as a renewal movement. The problem is, that isn’t how we’re viewed on the ground. Our members see us as a church; the world sees us as a church. And of course the church should be about mission. However, we have imported into our renewal structures other aspects that come direct from the Christendom centuries of the church (notably ordination to a ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral care) that bias us in a direction of being concerned for internal matters first. I applaud what David Gamble has said enthusiastically, for all my reservations about union with the Church of England (I don’t believe in a threefold order of ministry, I think what is claimed for the historic succession is bunk and is also pastorally damaging, I don’t believe in an established church). However, we have a lot to do to convince our people that he is working from the correct premises (which I think he is).

And then there is his challenge to the Church of England. Well said! I hope it will be heard and taken seriously. The difficulty comes in the fact that they are the majority party and this could be taken as Methodism going into submissive mode – ‘OK, we’ll accept your terms’. (Not that the President meant that for a moment!) Like it or not, power comes into these discussions. It was there from 1946, when Archbishop Fisher invited the Free Churches to ‘take episcopacy into their system‘. In other words, unity is on our terms, folks. It’s been explicit in Anglican unity thinking since the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886 to 1888. There was provision for episcopacy to be ‘locally adapted’, but episcopacy was still a non-negotiable.

Furthermore, we should never lose sight of the dangers of organic union. If we delude ourselves that a formal union is a great witness, we should think again. Did Jesus have merely institutional unity in mind when he prayed for the unity of his disciples, as recorded in John 17? Of course not! As the current debate underlines, it was about mission. But it isn’t simply that an institutional union provides credibility to the world: rather, mission is a spiritual activity, and must be empowered spiritually. There are too many examples littering our globe of organic unions and plummeting membership. Therefore this welcome debate has to be fuelled by a powerful renewal in the Holy Spirit or the fruits will not match the fine aspirations.

Come, Holy Spirit.


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Women With Strong Personalities

Dave Warnock has recently written two storming posts on the problems of ‘complementarianism’, the view that takes the New Testament scriptures about ‘male headship’ in a highly literal (and I would argue, wooden and out-of-context) way. Read ‘The forgotten victims of male headship‘ and ‘My wife …‘. Both these posts talk about the demeaning of people (of wives who are only valued for their beauty, and of all sections of society). His writing made me think about a recent conversation with a friend. I found it quite startling.

“Dave,” said my friend, “thank you for modelling the fact that it’s OK for a Christian man to marry a woman with a strong personality.”

Huh? I mean, I just fell in love with her? And no-one who meets my wife can miss the fact that she calls a spade a shovel.

“I wish  more Christian men would model this,” said my friend. “I wonder if it’s why I’m still single.” For my friend is a gently outspoken single woman.

How much more damage must we let complementarianism do?

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Guy Chevreau On Ministry And Leadership

In preparation for our forthcoming move to a new appointment in six months’ time, I decided to buy one or two books that might help freshen up my vision or challenge me afresh on some ministry basics. One was ‘Vital Signs of a Healthy Church‘ by Guy Chevreau. I thought I’d share a couple of quotes from his chapter on leadership:

is the senior leader raising up for himself devoted followers or empowered leaders? (p 44f)

Leaving aside what I as an egalitarian see as an unfortunate ‘himself’ in that quote (and I don’t know Chevreau’s views on that subject), I think this is a good plumbline for our motives and vision. A page or two later, he gives a beautiful example of this in practice:

Our Sunday School superintendent was a woman named Fay. At one of our monthly meetings I asked her, “If you could do anything you wanted for the kingdom of God, what would it be and what would it take?” She had an immediate answer: “I’d put together a summer tutoring program for my kids.” (p 46)

It transpires that Fay taught special needs children at a local school. As a result of her vision, the church began an outreach and involved older members of the congregation in nurturing children with a difficult background. What a great question Chevreau asked, and what a wonderful result, because it empowered the vision of a church member, rather than everything just coming down from the top of a leadership pyramid.

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Unless You Become Like Children

Isn’t that one of Jesus’ hardest sayings? Here is a wonderful prayer called ‘The Grow Down Prayer’ that takes up that theme and helps us to pray this through. It is available from the link I have given in PowerPoint format. With the supplied pictures, it could be a useful worship resource.

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Sunday’s Sermon: Qualities Of Discipleship

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Luke 5:1-11

‘It was like the preacher was speaking just to me.’

Have you ever had that experience? A sermon is preached to a congregation, but somehow you feel singled out. The message is for you.

I think Simon Peter is a little like that in this reading. In the midst of Jesus teaching the crowds, he has a separate, personal conversation with him. This is not his first encounter with Jesus, he has already been tagging along. But now Jesus clarifies why he has called him.

Again, isn’t that like us? We may have been ‘tagging along’ with Jesus for years before our purpose becomes clear. That has certainly been my experience.

Hence, I agree with the writer who says this is not the story of calling the fishermen, but rather an occasion where Jesus announces to Simon what he has had in mind for him all along. So perhaps we can read this famous story to hear more about the qualities Jesus seeks in his disciples.

The first is this. Every Friday morning, on my day off, I go into our children’s school and spend twenty minutes helping a group of pupils in Rebekah’s class with their reading. This means being in there for registration, and as I check over the book and notes assigned to the group, I observe how the teacher goes about her job. I wonder how she would feel if I – as someone with no training in teaching and who wouldn’t fancy the job in the slightest – proceeded to tell her how she could do her work better? Much as teachers are probably used to getting flak from parents, I don’t think she’d be impressed. Thankfully, Rebekah’s teacher is a marvel and usually I sit there astonished at her ability!

However, look at what happens here. A carpenter tells a group of fishermen how to do their job!

“Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” (Verse 4)

At first, you can hear the frustration in Simon’s voice:

“Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.” (Verse 5a)

And that makes sense of Simon’s occupation. Galilean fishermen knew their best results came at night. This carpenter is so ignorant he’s telling them to go fishing in daylight hours! What does he know? If they can’t catch any fish at night, they have even less chance in the day.

Yet Simon doesn’t stop there. He says,

“Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” (Verse 5b)

This first quality, then, is obedience. It makes no sense, but Simon will follow Jesus’ instructions. Just as for us, many of the things Jesus calls his followers to do make no sense, because they clash with the received wisdom of the world – yet he calls for obedience. His commands contradict the way we’ve always done things – but the call is still to obedience. No-one can be a disciple without a commitment to obedience, because that’s what a disciple does.

So if there is something challenging, or outside our experience that Jesus is talking to us about, we know that sooner or later – preferably sooner – we need to heed his voice. Like Simon, our attitude must be founded on those words, ‘Yet if you say so.’

Not only that, Simon doesn’t even know Jesus’ full identity at this stage. So far as he is concerned, he is a rabbi. He doesn’t yet know he is the Messiah, let alone the Son of God, but he still obeys. Therefore, obedience to Jesus cannot be delayed by saying we don’t know enough about him yet.  It’s no good saying, “I don’t know as much as other people about my faith,” because Simon shows us that even a minimal knowledge of Jesus is enough to get on with some basic obedience. Maybe the real issue is that some of us don’t want to commit to those words, ‘Yet if you say so.’

Let us remember that without the obedience of Simon and his friends, they would not have had the blessing of the bulging nets full of fish.

The second quality revolves around Simon’s reaction to the miraculous catch of fish:

But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Verse 8 )

One moment Simon is on his knees in a posture of worship, and you would therefore expect him to be drawing near to God. But in the same breath he asks Jesus to depart from him, because he is a sinner.

What’s common to this apparently contradictory reaction? It’s all about the holiness of God – that explains both the move towards worship and the recognition of personal sinfulness. And if we recognise the presence of God’s holiness, then we see that the second quality exhibited in Simon here is humility.

When I came back from sabbatical last year, I shared at my presentation the work of George Bullard on ‘The Life Cycle of a Congregation’. He compared the birth, growth, decline and death of some churches with the stages of a human life cycle (not that this should suggest a sense of inevitability). The point at which a church starts to decline, he said, is the stage of ‘maturity’. And that is characterised by an attitude of saying, ‘We know what we’re doing.’ The moment we think we know what we’re doing is the time when we no longer need humble dependence upon God. We can get on with the life of faith all very easily, thank you very much. Remove the need for humble dependence and we cut ourselves off from the power of God. No wonder many of our churches are so lifeless.

However, Simon doesn’t look at the miraculous catch of fish, start a backslapping session with his colleagues and say, ‘I knew it would all work out. After all, we are professional fishermen, and our expertise would win out in the end.’ He can’t say that, because he knows that the amazing result of the surprise expedition is down to trusting what Jesus has said and living in the light of that.

So what if – like the disciples – we’ve failed to catch any ‘fish’? It seems to me that rather than shopping around for some technique we can employ, Jesus calls us to something simpler, yet more demanding. It’s to match the obedience we’ve already spoken about with humble trust. Never mind new programmes or good management – they both feature on the ‘decline’ side of the ‘Life Cycle’ model – it’s about vision and relationships with God and one another. And all that means humble trust. It means saying, ‘We don’t know what we’re doing’ and looking to Christ to give us a challenging way forward.

The third quality is one we are used to observing in this story – discipleship means mission. Just as the holy Jesus won’t depart from sinful Simon, so the disciples of holy Jesus must not stay away from sinners. In fact, quite the opposite:

Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” (Verse 10b)

It’s the famous ‘fishers of men’ line from older translations, of course. But familiar as it is, I learned something about it this week that I don’t ever recall coming across before. It’s to do with the expression ‘catching people’. The word translated ‘catching’ is a compound of two Greek words. One has the general meaning of ‘catching’ or ‘hunting’, and so that describes the basic outlook Jesus expects of Simon and all his disciples: he always intends us to be on the lookout for people who need the Gospel of his love. Mission isn’t an add-on for the enthusiasts in the church, it’s the responsibility of every Christian. We may not all be evangelists, but we are all witnesses. A community of Christians is meant to be fundamentally outward-looking by design. If it is not, there is a serious flaw.

But here’s the other thing I discovered this week, and it tells us something about the way in which we participate in mission. I said the word for ‘catching’ was a compound word, and that one half meant ‘hunting’ or ‘catching’. The other half means ‘alive’. When we put the two halves together it doesn’t so much  mean that we ‘capture people alive’ (as opposed to dead), it probably more likely means that we captivate people with life. In catching people for the kingdom of God, we are doing so in order to restore them to life and strength.

Our attempts to catch people for Christ are not attempts to bolster our numbers in order to keep our church going. We do this because people need the life of Christ in them. Therefore our relationships with people we are in contact with must reflect the life of Christ. It’s no good condemning people who have no idea of our ways and our etiquette: if we are to minister life, our dealings with people must be saturated in grace. Anything less is contrary to the Gospel and therefore counter-productive. What I am sure about is this: no church can be complacent about this. Almost any church believes it is welcoming, but not every visitor supports that belief. We need to remember that grace and life are our currency. With them we are rich; without them, we are bankrupt.

There is a fourth and final quality of discipleship I want to highlight. Let me approach it this way. When I was at my Anglican theological college, one student who overlapped with me was a well-known evangelist who had felt called into parish ministry. His name was Eric Delve. He had been a travelling evangelist for nearly twenty years. One thing he told us about those times was that the Christians in every town he visited to conduct a mission always told him the same thing: “This is the hardest place in the country for the Gospel.” Over the years, Eric got tired of that attitude. He felt it said more about the Christians than the non-Christians.

What has this got to do with our passage? And isn’t it true that it’s difficult to bring people to faith today? Jesus’ approach seems so different. He sends his disciples to ‘catch people’. For them to do so, they ‘[leave] everything and [follow] him’ (verse 11). Catching people doesn’t require crying a tale of woe about how hard it is for the Gospel today. Rather, it requires ‘leaving everything’. Not, that is, always leaving ‘secular’ employment: ‘left everything’ has a particular nuance here, and it’s about being released or set free. It may be a release from work or from family obligations or possessions or some other personal priorities, but it may also be the need to be released from an attitude of heart: bitterness, pride or a superiority complex.

This fourth quality, then, is one of spiritual health. Rick Warren, the American megachurch pastor, says in his book ‘The Purpose Driven Church’,

“The wrong question: What will make our church grow? The right question: What is keeping our church from growing?”

He goes onto say,

“All living things grow — you don’t have to make them grow. It’s the natural thing for living organisms to do if they are healthy. For example, I don’t have to command my three children to grow. They naturally grow. As long as I remove hindrances such as poor nutrition or an unsafe environment, their growth will be automatic. If my kids don’t grow, something has gone terribly wrong. Lack of growth usually indicates an unhealthy situation, possibly a disease.

“In the same way, since the church is a living organism, it is natural for it to grow if it is healthy. The church is a body, not a business. It is an organism, not an organization. It is alive. If a church is not growing, it is dying.” (p 16)

Now while that might be a bit simplistic – there are all sorts of reasons why churches don’t always grow – nevertheless it behoves us to examine our spiritual health. What is holding us back? What do we need to be released from? It’s a critical question, because we bring a Gospel that claims to set people free in Christ – in the forgiveness of sins, in enabling them to forgive others, in freedom from sinful habits and ultimately the eradication of all sin from God’s creation. If that is our message, it will only make sense if we too are on a journey into greater freedom ourselves.

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