Mission in the Bible 13: Divine Initiative Seen in the Conversion and Call of Saul/Paul (Acts 9:1-19a)

Acts 9:1-19

I don’t look forward to my eye test every two years. When they ask you how many dots you can see that have flashed up momentarily to test your peripheral vision, I’m always afraid of getting it wrong. I don’t like the sensation of the air pumped into my eye to test for glaucoma. And I’m not fond of the flashing light when they take a photo of my retina.

Last time, having gone into see the optometrist and she had completed all her tests with different lenses and reading letters on a board, and then shone her torch into my eyes, she then said to me, “Were you told last time that you are going to develop cataracts at a later date?”

“No,” I replied, while silently thinking, “Oh great, another sign of getting older.”

This famous story of Saul’s Damascus Road conversion can be organised under the theme of sight. Saul is blinded, but Ananias receives a vision. Note the contrast: blindness and vision.

When the Lord blinds Saul and later heals him, and when he speaks to Ananias in a vision, he is showing that he is in charge and he is taking a divine initiative to bring salvation not only to Saul, but also to many others.

Firstly, then, the blinding of Saul:

To all intents and purposes, Saul has a licence to kill. He is ‘still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples’ and asks the high priest in Jerusalem for letters permitting him to take prisoner any ‘followers of the Way’ in Damascus, with the help of the synagogues (verses 1-2). I think we can safely assume that even though he only has permission to arrest people, the religious authorities in Jerusalem will probably turn a blind eye if he also kills anyone. After all, they had stoned Stephen to death, and Saul had approved (Acts 7:1-8:1).

Since Stephen’s summary execution, persecution had broken out against the disciples of Jesus. Apart from the apostles, they had scattered from Jerusalem. Surely things were out of control. They feared for their lives. Some years later, Saul (by then named Paul) would tell the Galatian Christians that he was destroying the church. This is a lethal crisis for those first believers.

But God is in charge, and if his church is powerless, he is not. He takes the initiative. Jesus intervenes.

And he intervenes in a way that counters all the sentimental ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ nicey-nicey Jesus images. He acts as the holy king in blazing glory.

Of course, Jesus has wider purposes here. Not only does he save the physical lives of believers who would have been arrested and most likely tortured and probably killed, he acts here to bring Saul to him so that many more will be saved in the spiritual sense.

But to get to that point Jesus has to act in a way that the writer and friend of C S Lewis Sheldon Vanauken called ‘A Severe Mercy.’ Saul is so set in the ways of his misguided zeal that it will only take something radical to stop him, and, moreover, to humble him before his Lord.

So the Damascus Road conversion is dramatic, but for a specific reason. And those of us who worry that we might not be Christians because we have not had what is often called a ‘Damascus Road experience’ need not worry. A survey some years ago showed that little over a third of Christians can name the date or time of their conversion. I am one of that minority. For me, it felt like a sudden revelation. But for most believers, it is a gradual process.

Think of it this way: do you have to remember the moment of your birth to know you are alive? Of course not! None of us does! We know we are alive because we manifest the signs of life. Our heart beats. We breathe. We eat and drink. We think. We get signals from our senses and our nerves.

In the same way, the question for us in terms of faith is less, do you remember the day you were converted, and more, are you showing signs of life in Christ? Do you love Jesus and want to know him more? Is the fruit of the Spirit growing in you? Do you have a desire to worship him and to serve him in the world?

Saul needs to be stopped in his tracks and humbled. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for us in our prayers for some people and places to ask the Lord to do ‘whatever it takes’ to humble people before him and bring them to repentance and faith.

Secondly, the vision of Ananias:

Saul will become famous as Paul and will become probably the most influential follower of Jesus ever. He will carry the Gospel to nation after nation and write letters that reverberate down the centuries. Just one of them – Romans – transformed the lives of St Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and John Wesley, each of whom went on to have major impacts on Christianity and the world.

But Ananias? He makes this one appearance in the story and then disappears from view. Yet, by being the model disciple he leads Saul to Christ and the implications are, as I just indicated, transformative for the world for over two thousand years so far.

When the Lord calls him in a vision, he gives the exemplary response of a Jesus-follower: “Yes, Lord” (verse 10) – or “Here I am, Lord,” as other translations render it. It’s reminiscent of the boy Samuel in the Temple in the Old Testament, hearing the voice of God for the first time and learning from Eli to say the same thing: Here I am.

Yes, Lord. Jesus appears and speaks to one who says yes to him. But if the thought of saying yes to Jesus makes us nervous, note that it did to Ananias, too. When he hears that Jesus wants him to go and lay hands on Saul (verses 11-12), he responds with an understandably anxious question:

¹³‘Lord,’ Ananias answered, ‘I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your holy people in Jerusalem. ¹⁴And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.’

I think he is somewhat like Mary when the Archangel Gabriel appears to her and tells her she is going to conceive the Messiah, despite being a virgin. She certainly had her questions.

And it’s OK for a ‘Yes, Lord’ to be accompanied by questions, because Jesus is patient to explain to Ananias why it is important that he obeys:

¹⁵But the Lord said to Ananias, ‘Go! This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. ¹⁶I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.’

Ananias has questions, but they are not a reason for him to turn ‘Yes, Lord’ into ‘No, Lord’ (which is a contradiction in terms, anyway).

Jesus gives us no guarantees of whether we will be well-known believers like Saul/Paul, or obscure ones like Ananias. What he requires of each of us is, ‘Yes, Lord,’ even if it is accompanied by questions.

Thirdly and finally, the scales drop from Saul’s eyes:

Blind Saul has nevertheless received a vision of Ananias coming to lay hands on him to restore his sight (verse 12), and now it happens. As Ananias prays, scales fall from Saul’s eyes (verses 17-18).

In a sense, scales have fallen spiritually, too, from both Saul and Ananias. Saul receives the Holy Spirit (verse 17), and he will now be able to redirect his zeal in the holy cause of Jesus and his kingdom. His baptism (verse 18) confirms this radical change of direction. Moreover, he will now have the spiritual strength to endure the suffering that will come his way as he sets out on this mission (verses 15-16).

And in Ananias’ case, he addresses Saul as ‘Brother’ (verse 17). They are not biological family, and nor is this about shared ethnic identity. They are family in Christ. Saul takes food (verse 19), which likely means that he and Ananias share table fellowship[1]. Yes, the persecutor and one who was possibly a fugitive from him[2] are one. This is the miracle of the Gospel. It is similar to Jesus bringing both Matthew the tax-collecting Roman collaborator and Simon the Zealot freedom-fighter together in his twelve disciples. Faith in Jesus does this – even, dare I say, making Spurs and Arsenal supporters one!

There is a lot of talk in the world about how there is only one race, the human race, and that there is more that brings us together than keeps us apart. Unfortunately, that well-meaning talk overlooks the way in which sin has broken relationships. But here, Saul and Ananias’ eyes are opened to see that it is Jesus who restores this unity. That human unity is now found in him.

This is what Saul, later as Paul, will say to the Galatians:

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

This is Jesus opening our eyes to the fact that the Gospel is not just personal, individual reconciliation with God – the forgiveness of our sins. It is also the healing and reconciliation of our relationships with one another.

And that’s why it’s important that the church demonstrates this if we are to be a sign of the Gospel. It’s why I love going to my church at Lindford, where the worshipping congregation goes right across the generations, across races, across social and educational backgrounds, and we hang together as one body in Christ. The politicians should be envious! Because they can’t create something like that! But Jesus can!

What will we do so that our church life is not just fellowship with people who are just like us? Do we believe at this election time that we can hold unity in Christ with Christians of differing political convictions, for example? In a deeply divided nation, this is the sort of thing that can become a powerful witness. We need to ‘see’ this so that the world will see Christ.

Conclusion

In using this metaphor of sight and blindness for this sermon, the old chorus popped into my head:

Open our eyes, Lord,
We want to see Jesus,
To reach out and touch him
And say that we love him.
Open our ears, Lord,
And help us to listen,
Open our eyes, Lord,
We want to see Jesus.[3]

But open our eyes, Lord, that we may walk with you and not resist you and need blinding and humbling to find you. Open our eyes, Lord, that we may say yes to you, even when we have questions. Open our eyes, Lord, to see that your Gospel brings reconciliation both with you and with others and help us to practise that to your glory before the eyes of the world.

[1] Craig Keener, Acts, p282.

[2] Keener, p281.

June 30, 2024 0

Putting One Over Jesus, Luke 20:27-40 (Ordinary 32 Year C)

I first preached this sermon six years ago at Weybridge Methodist Church. I’ve dusted it down again for this Sunday following a heavy and fraught week.

Luke 20:27-38

Did you ever like putting one over on your teachers? I wondered at the chutzpah of a fellow student at theological college, who wrote at the top of one of his exam essays the verse from the Psalms which reads, ‘I have more wisdom than all my teachers.’ I hope he wrote some good answers!

Or perhaps you liked to prove the clever kid in the class wrong, or you rejoiced when they had a bad day? I have to say that I saw that one from the other side. I’m afraid I was the clever kid in the class, especially when it came to Maths. One year in an exam at secondary school I so rushed my answers because I thought it was all too easy that I found myself plummeting from first out of two hundred students in my year to fourteenth, Oh, the shame! And I am sure that many other teenagers enjoyed my temporary downfall.

That’s a little like what the Sadducees were attempting in our reading today. How they would love to smear egg on Jesus’ face! How they would love to bring him down a peg or two and reduce his credibility and authority with the crowds.

But why would they want to do that?

The Sadducees were historically connected to the Jerusalem priesthood, and they were generally a wealthy lot, who ensured they kept themselves comfortable by keeping in with the powerful. So they were very pally with the Roman forces that were occupying the Promised Land. People like that didn’t want to acknowledge the authority of Jesus, because following his teaching would undermine their addiction to power and wealth. If they could only discredit this pesky popular working-class preacher, then maybe his words wouldn’t keep them awake at night anymore.

Now what on earth does that have to do with us? We don’t want to undermine Jesus, surely? We love him. Jesus is our friend and our Saviour. We owe everything to him.

But sometimes we don’t want to hear what he says, either. His teaching is too uncomfortable for us at times. We don’t want to make him look foolish, still less look to carry out a character assassination, but we have our ways of making his awkward teaching irrelevant. So when he says challenging things about money and possessions, we argue that those sayings were only for those particular people at that specific time, and they don’t have universal application – at least, not in that form. Or when we find that Jesus believed in the existence of demons and this apparently offends our scientific minds, we say that Jesus was just a man of his time and he wouldn’t have known about the existence of mental illness. You can add your own examples to this list.

The trouble, though, is this. As the late John Stott used to say, you can’t accept Jesus as Saviour without also confessing him as Lord. It’s not possible just to have the benefits of salvation without all that follows in the commitment of discipleship to the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the first challenge in our reading this morning is a challenge to our wills: will we bow the knee and truly acknowledge Jesus Christ not only as Saviour, but also as Lord?

Let’s move on. The second challenge is a challenge to our minds. What on earth is all this strange stuff about seven brothers each in turn marrying the same woman as one after another, they die?

It’s a Jewish custom, taken from the Old Testament, known as ‘Levirate Marriage’. A man had to have children to inherit from him. It’s rather like the concern many men have in our society to pass on the family surname to a son. Hence if in ancient Israel a man died without fathering children, it became the task of the next brother to marry the widow and father children that would count as the first man’s heirs.

Hence the Sadducees can build up their ludicrous story in an attempt to ridicule Jesus and his belief in the resurrection. For the Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection. They predominantly only read the first five books of the Bible rather than the later ones, which the Pharisees read. And as they saw it, there was nothing about resurrection in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy. To be fair, there’s very little in other Old Testament Scriptures, either: the resurrection of the righteous is taught in Daniel, and it may be hinted at in Job, but there’s precious little.

So they tell their imaginary story. You can almost hear the smug self-satisfaction as they think they have proved to Jesus that his belief in the resurrection is laughable. If you want a similar example in our society, then think about the way some militant atheists laugh when they think they have dismissed what you and I believe as ignorant superstition.

But Jesus takes the Sadducees to task for a failure of logic. They just haven’t thought this through. Passing on the family name assumes that generations are going to die and need replacing; how is that going to happen with the resurrection, in which there will be no more death?

Friends, not all of those who oppose Christianity have thought through their objections carefully. Richard Dawkins in particular is one who recycles and rehashes old, tired arguments that have long been refuted by Christians. If we can get a hearing for our convictions (and I grant you that isn’t always easy) then it can be quite simple to refute what people like him say.

But if the opponents of Jesus are shown up for not using their minds well, then it behoves Christians to use their thinking to the glory of God. Remember that Jesus said we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.

And I say that knowing how reluctant some Christians are to think hard about their faith and about life. Many years ago, someone suggested that the church carries on as if the old Sunday School chorus wasn’t ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam’ so much as ‘Jesus wants me for a zombie’. Ministers see congregations glaze over corporately when they ask them to think hard.

But this is what we must do, prayerfully, as an act of worship. I don’t mean that everyone has to be an intellectual – that isn’t everybody’s gift – but we do all need to think to the glory of God about our faith. I hear church members complain about the public success of the new atheists in recent years, but when it comes to it they don’t want to make an effort with their minds themselves. They would rather bury their brains in the sand. Yet if we want to counter them and show that the Christian vision has more power to explain life than theirs, then we have to dedicate our thinking to God, pray that the Holy Spirit will help us in the life of the mind, and seek to express what Paul calls in 2 Corinthians ‘the mind of Christ’.

Thirdly and finally, the reading contains a challenge to our vision. Who or what controls our vision and imagination? I suggest to you that in a lot of areas – and certainly when we consider life after death – Christians have surrendered their vision and imagination to non-Christian sources. Our account of faith becomes seriously sub-biblical, if not downright unbiblical.

What do I mean? Listen to the average Christian talking about death and the hereafter and you hear a range of convictions that have nothing to do with historic Christianity. When someone dies, we hear people say that it doesn’t matter, because the body is just a shell for the real person, for the soul. Friends, that isn’t biblical thinking, that’s pagan Greek philosophy.

The life of the world to come doesn’t consist in us being disembodied souls floating on clouds. The vision of Jesus and the apostles is of resurrection. That’s bodily. In fact, you might say it’s bodily plus, given the additional powers that the resurrection body of Jesus seemed to have. You can’t even use Jesus’ reference to being ‘like the angels’ (verse 36) as anything other than bodily: in the Bible, angels manifestly have bodies.

The vision Jesus gives us here is of the bodily and the physical in a new existence – souped-up, if you like. You might say that something physical is missing here: if there is to be no marrying and no childbirth in the new creation, then presumably there is no more sex after death. Here is the reason why our marriage vows are ‘till death do us part’: marriage doesn’t figure in the new world.

But then we have already said that there is no more need for procreation, because generations will not need to be replaced. And surely the intimacy and ecstasy possible between a husband and a wife will be superseded by even closer, deeper, and more intense relationship with our God. Not only will we now see face to face rather than through a glass darkly (according to 1 Corinthians 13), we can also expect – according to Augustine of Hippo – for everything in the new creation to mediate the presence of God to us.

Our Christian vision of relationships, then, in the new heavens and the new earth, is not one that can be reduced to being reunited with our loved ones, however comforting that may be. It is about being together in the undiluted presence of God.

And because this is not about disembodied souls, let alone harp players on clouds, it sets before us a vision of a healed creation and restored relationships with God and one another.

Once you state it in those terms, you can see that we have something we can anticipate in this life, albeit not perfectly. We can work for the healing of people and of our planet. We can work for reconciliation with God through the Cross of Christ, and for peace-making between people. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can pray for healing, work for justice, evangelise, and reconcile in the name of Jesus. When we do so, we are pointing the world towards God’s great future and witnessing to Jesus Christ by sharing that vision.

Indeed, we witness to him as well when we are willing – like Jesus – to use our minds for his glory, to think through difficult issues of faith in the light of Scripture and in listening to hard questions.

We also witness to our Lord and Saviour when we acknowledge that our will comes to an end of itself and must bow to his superior will. We are not just believers, we are disciples.

All of this is possible in the marriage and family life context of our reading, but also in all of our relationships, our networks, neighbourhoods, places of work, and our leisure environments.

November 6, 2022 0

The Long, Slow Lingering Death Of Eastman Kodak

On a day when Eastman Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection from its creditors, this seems like a poignant (if rather obvious) song:

Like Paul Simon, ‘I got a Nikon camera.’ But it doesn’t shoot Kodachrome. It’s digital.

I used to have a 35 mm Canon camera. Sometimes I shot Kodachrome, especially when I visited the Holy Land in 1989. I got through twenty-nine rolls of Kodachrome 25. The slow ISO was fine in the bright heat, and its pale to neutral colour bias was right for a dusty land. Back in the UK, I used to prefer the bold, green colours of Fuji Velvia, though.

But not any more. It’s SD cards and Adobe Photoshop Elements for me now.

Kodak was slow to adapt to the culture. It was there at the invention of digital photography, but they refused to bring out what would have been the first digital camera, for fear of damaging their income from roll film. Rather like the church not wanting to offend longstanding worshippers by finding new ways of reaching out to the unchurched, Kodak held back – and is now withering on the vine. The parallels are disturbing.

Today’s news reminds me of a story I read in the newsletter of the (ironically now defunct) organisation MARC in December 1990. On page 3 of that issue, Bryant Myers told this story:

There is a story of a company that manufactured drill bits for over forty years. It had been very successful, but the industry was maturing and profit margins were getting thin.

The son of the founder attended his first senior staff meeting after his father died.

“What business are we in?” he asked the older men, who had served alongside his father for many years.

“We make drill bits!” came the exasperated answer. “Our customers need drill bits.”

“No. Our customers need holes,” the young man quietly replied. Today the company is again successful. In addition to drill bits, it manufactures lasers that make very precise holes.

Kodak’s business was not film but images. We might not want to talk about the church’s business, because economic and consumerist metaphors can be dangerous for us. But we do need to ensure that we are concentrating on our core Gospel calling in a way that can speak to people today, and that almost certainly won’t be in the way it spoke to some of our senior remaining generations.

January 19, 2012 1

Epiphany And The Recession

Today is Epiphany, the day millions of Christians have traditionally celebrated as the appearing of the Christ. It is particularly associated with the visit of the Magi.

Yet in the UK today marks less an appearing than a disappearing. The last Woolworths shops have closed their doors tonight. That is especially poignant in our house. They were my wife’s first employer, initially when she did a ‘Saturday job’ while at school. Then, when she left school, they took her on full time.

A couple of weeks ago, we walked through the Chelmsford store and tried to explain to our small children that it would be closing forever. This place where they had enjoyed getting a tub of ‘Pick and Mix’ sweets,and where we had bought toys and cheap Ladybird clothes for them, would be no more. Rebekah cried inconsolable tears. How do you explain ‘recession’ to a five-year-old? I’m no economist (which is partly why I’ve been loath to say too much on the subject), and I find it hard to understand.

Looking on as an adult consumer, it’s easy to see where Woolies fell down. They fell betwixt and between, a Jack of all trades, master of none, with no clear vision. What kind of a shop was it? Something of a hotch-potch in recent years, doing several things reasonably but none of them well.

And that makes them sound like many churches. They try to do this, that and everything, because X, Y and Z are all things that a church should supposedly do, but they overstretch themselves and do few of them well. I received a good piece of advice early on from a minister friend called Paul Ashby. He said, “No church is the complete Body of Christ.” We don’t need to do it all. I don’t see anything wrong in an individual congregation specialising. It happens to an extent, even when we don’t acknowledge it, simply through the kind of people in a said church and its location.

Yes, there are shops that want to do a bit of everything, notably the major supermarkets, which have gone way beyond groceries. However, they have done so from positions of economic strength and market dominance, much in the way a large church can cover a lot of bases. But we aren’t all large supermarkets or megachurches.

Likewise, we’ve had the news in the last twenty-four hours that Waterford Wedgwood has gone into administration. Who’s buying bone china tea services any more? Not us. When we moved from our six-bedroom manse in the last circuit to our small three-bedroom house here, we had to downsize considerably. Not without cause did we call ourselves Mr and Mrs eBay. Among the possessions to go were our cups and saucers. We decided to rely entirely on mugs. They are far more acceptable today than the day when it seemed like only builders drank from one. Moreover, when we hear about the need to take in sufficient fluid, who wants a small cup? Even some churches are dispensing with the hideous green crockery! Besides, I need a pint mug of tea to get me going first thing in the morning.

All of which implies for me that a company like Wedgwood has had too narrow a vision. I can best illustrate what I mean by reproducing a story I found in the December 1990 edition of the now defunct MARC Newsletter. It came from an article entitled ‘Doing research with eyes to see’ by Bryant Myers:

There is a story of a company that manufactured drill bits for over forty years. It had been very successful, but the industry was maturing and profit margins were getting thin.

The son of the founder attended his first senior staff meeting after his father died.

“What business are we in?” he asked the older men, who had served alongside his father for many years.

“We make drill bits!” came the exasperated answer. “Our customers need drill bits.”

“No. Our customers need holes,” the young man quietly replied. Today the company is again successful. In addition to drill bits, it manufactures lasers that make very precise holes.

And maybe that too has been a problem in many churches. We have made drill bits instead of holes. I’m not arguing for some corporate-style approach to vision and mission statements, but I am saying that a time of crisis is one that should make us remember the basics of why we exist.

That’s where I get into my usual points about the fundamental orientation of the church being missional. Too often, if you ask church members what the purpose of the church is, they will answer ‘worship’. And while if you push them they will accept that worship is more than the Sunday service, it is everyday lifestyle, really the heart of the answer betrays an assumption that the Sunday morning gathering is the main event.

I don’t wish to disparage Sunday worship at all. But defining ourselves by worship has ironically turned us in on ourselves instead of focussing on God, who is the object of our worship. When the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit at the first Pentecost in Acts 2, it is hard to know where you draw the line between worship and mission that day.

What I’m saying, then, is that the pressure of the recession has exposed problems of confused vision in companies. The confused vision on its own hasn’t taken them under, but it has left them vulnerable at a time when the economy stopped swinging. Sadly too it is often only a crisis that makes us notice the confused vision in our churches.

There is much more to be said about the moral dimension of the recession itself. I particularly commend a blog post from Sunday by Dave Perry, in which he notes the remarks of a secular journalist who wonders whether the recession will make us a better country. ‘Can we spend our way out of emptiness?’ asks Dave, implying of course a ‘no’.

Similarly, I commend a podcast of a sermon by Ken Costa entitled ‘Surviving The Financial Tsunami‘. Costa is a church warden at Holy Trinity Brompton and chair of Lazard International. As well as some gentle pastoral advice for those facing financial woes at present, he identifies the current crisis as a ‘shaking’ from God, yet eschewing any easy claims to it being divine judgment. Having said that, the sermon carries a clear call to a fundamental change of the values by which we live – as individuals, as commerce and as nations. There is a useful comparison with the downfall of Tyre in Ezekiel 27.

January 6, 2009 6

Don’t Stuff The Dog

Angie Ward has an excellent piece at Leadership Journal entitled Don’t Stuff The Dog. She talks of how pet owners have deceased animals stuffed and left in the house as a sign of denial and also sometimes to scare off strangers. She makes this telling comparison:

Churches seem to have a special proclivity toward “stuffing the dog,” maintaining programs, buildings, and even members in an attempt to forestall necessary change. In the short term, it’s sometimes much easier to stuff a church’s pets than to acknowledge their death, grieve their loss, and give them an appropriate burial.

These pets may take the form of programs that are tied more to history than to current effectiveness; they may be personal favorites, the “pet projects” and ministries of influential leaders who don’t want to let go of them; or they may just be familiar mutts that everyone agrees have passed their prime, but are more familiar (or maybe just cheaper!) than a new animal.

… stuffed animals might bring temporary comfort to those inside the organization, but they may actually turn off or even frighten newcomers who aren’t familiar with the history and meaning behind them. Whether it’s a particular worship style, a ritual, an outdated program, or even a powerful clique within the church, visitors will usually be quick to notice that something’s not quite right. They may not stick around to find out what, or why.

It’s so hauntingly familiar. How often as church leaders we are called to exercise spiritual terminal care over a church group that does not realise or want to contemplate that it is dying. For all my interest in contemporary ministry, the classic meeting that fits this idea wherever I go is the Women’s Fellowship. The formula is predictable. They meet on a midweek afternoon for an hour. There are always three hymns taken from a long-superseded hymn book, an opening prayer that remembers the sick who cannot be present, and a speaker who may be religious in theme or not. It meets a genuine need mostly for elderly widows who would not otherwise see many people from week to week apart from Sunday morning.

However they often cannot understand why the women in the congregation who have more recently reached retirement age don’t want to join them. There has been a culture change, and these women generally prefer the home group. It’s more informal and in the best ones more opportunity for vulnerable openness and mutual support.

But while it’s easy to look down on outmoded Women’s Fellowships, we may miss the likelihood that the home groups may themselves soon need terminal care. A Bible study where the challenge of the material is dissipated by a quick closing prayer and the opportunity over tea and coffee afterwards to move onto less uncomfortable topics of conversation, anyone?

In truth, all such new formulations are prone to this danger before too long. It isn’t just about culture change, it’s about losing the vision and the passion. What am I doing, both to give outmoded activities terminal care and a decent funeral, but also to help ensure that our whole focus remains on life and discipleship? Jut introducing something new as if ‘cell’ or ‘base communities’ or whatever were the answer is to miss the point. To change the metaphor, what am I doing to promote new wine and new wineskins?

November 3, 2005 0

Tag: vision