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Evangelism described in a cliche – but cliches are often true

A cliche is a now unoriginal phrase that started off as something original and well enough said to be repeated often enough to become a cliche. If you see what I mean. The following brief quotation has a metaphor for evangelism that has entered the less than honoured lists of cliche – but its truth is no less important for its over-exposure:

"Evangelism is witness. It is one beggar telling another beggar where to get food. The Christian does not offer out of his bounty. He has no bounty. He is simply guest at his Master's table and , as evangelist, he calls others too."

D. T. Niles, writing thirty years ago, quoted all over the place but nobody ever footnotes it. Is it oral tradition, or displaced text, or borrowed so often it is now orphaned from the original source. So. Where was it first written? I don't know the answer but want to.

12 October 2009
Haiku, Isaiah, and cultural fatigue syndrome.

Preaching this Sunday on Isaiah 40 and on the theme of weariness. I often explore Scripture text by reframing its themes into the disciplined focus of Haiku. Sometimes it works better than others – but most times it allows a serious playfulness, and invites an alternative approach to exegesis – contemplative exegesis. The three Haiku below acknowledge the soul fatigue and body weariness we often experience in the stampede of the Gadarene swine that we call daily living, in a culture built on an unquestioned assumption of constant economic growth and now facing the realities of an eaually unqestioning recession.

Isaiah 40 is a text for a culture like ours, which bought into the worship of finance and lost heavily when it's god began to dissolve by acid of its own making – a culture that now needs to find a less exhausting deity, a different liturgy and a new vocation as stewards of a fragile creation. One way Christian's witness to the Gospel in such a culture, is by a life less driven by acquisitive competition, and more impelled by agapaic generosity. But that will mean Christians like me learning to see the world differently, because from the heightened perspective and with the precision sighting of the eagle. But such a radically different worldview only comes when we wait, and are ourselves upborne by strength beyond our own, by the one Isaiah describes with defiant confidence, as the Creator and Redeemer.

Three Haiku on Isaiah 40. 29-31

Unable to run,

weariness weighs down the soul

unwilling to wait.

…

To walk and not faint;

yet the body has limits

we cannot transcend.

…

Borne on eagles wings,

resurgent strength uplifts me,

changing my worldview.

11 October 2009
“Conformitas Christi” and a “CHICKS” Concert.

Conformitas Christi!

In response to my post of a couple of weeks ago, Angela has sent me an unlooked for gift. Thanks Angela – your gift arrived on a day when I was at the kind of meeting which I call a suit meeting, and it gave me an option for later in the day! So, I'm now the proud owner of a sport shirt with the motto "Conformitas Christi!" embroidered in red! With a hoodie carrying the College Logo, and a sport shirt making theological statements of experiential fact, I'm wondering if clothes that either say our convictions explicitly or in code, or that say who we are by advertising, are forms of brand awareness promotion. Only thing is – you wear something that says you're a Christian, there is a question of being consistent with your clothes. Which was what Paul meant when he spoke of Christian believers, having put off their old garments and being clothed with Christ – I think, maybe, as one exegetical option…

Then last night Sheila and I went to a concert in our local church, sponsored by the Arkleston Singers. Local folk who make up an amateur singing group, help raise money for local and wider based charities through public concerts. This one was on behalf of Country Holidays for Inner City Kids (CHICKS). Children and young adults who are disadvantaged, have experienced abuse or neglect, or where parents are not able to cope with them at home, are provided with a week's holiday in Devon and Cornwall. The short video was a beautiful thing to watch and hear. Most of it was the young people themselves telling what their holiday meant – the first time a 14 year old had seen the sea and wanted to know where the deep end was; the young girl who had ridden a horse, the lad who had climbed the climbing wall twice, and come down twice without falling, he said. And they canoed, had water fights, long climbs up hills, and all in the company of trained adults and volunteer carers. One youngster, who had arrived frightened and withdrawn, pointing to the CHICKS logo on a carers shirt and saying it meant being safe. At the end of the holiday they get a personal photo portfolio of them and their friends, a lasting memory of how life can be, that can become hope giving and something to hang on to.

For years I worked within the children's hearing system in Scotland, and I understand the hugely affirming and renewing impact of supported fun, the gift of freedom and friendship somewhere else, for children whose ususal living place is heart breaking – for whatever reason. Sometimes God has to dunt us in the ribs to notice something significant is happening. Standing in the middle of the Arkleston Singers was someone I'd met for the first time 6 hours earlier at the meeting of suits in the University! She too had changed clothes in order to be part of the occasion – and we agreed that the evening was the more significant event, when measured by the criteria of the Kingdom of God in which the valuing and cherishing of children is a key competence – and a sign of Conformitas Christi!

As to the concert – well Mozart's 'Ave Verum', the spiritual 'When I go down to the river to pray', Abba's 'I have a dream', the more contemporary 'You lift me up', Howard Goodall's soul touching arrangement of 'Love Divine', John Rutter's 'Gaelic Benediction' – and Billy Joel, Lloyd Weber. The singing was polished and passionate, the accompanist more than icing on the cake.

Yesterday was one of those days when you live through it and don't realise how much living was in it till you think about it and even blog about it. Hard work verging on tedium in the morning and afternoon, and enjoyment verging on tears in the evening – and in both places folk trying to do their best to make the world work better. In different ways, for different reasons, but the seed often grows secretly, and the Kingdom mindset is to believe in the life potential of seeds. Whether one growing secretly, or countless scattered on rock, among thorns, hard worn paths and good soil – whenever and wherever, seeds grow. The birds, thorns, the trampling feet take their toll, but with life bursting force, seeds grow.

10 October 2009
Crowded trains, scowling train drivers and exuberant passengers.

On the train going into Glasgow to meet Sheila around 4 o'clock Thursday.

Stop at Corkerhill and it seems the entire student cohort of Cardonald College want to get on this train.

Three loud talking and laughing female teenagers threw themselves into the seats opposite and beside me.

The one on my side dunted me as she landed, turned and smiled which I think was an apology.

In front of me on the table a glossy Now Magazine, and the girls across from me picked it up and looked at me. No I said, it isn't mine! One smiles, laughs at her pals, and then they flick through it using the various pictured celebs for slagging off target practice.

As we draw into Glasgow Central another train drew alongside and the driver with a permafix unsmile was within four feet of our window. All three girls waved and smiled and he looked across – but his mouth didn't flinch one millimetre towards that place where life might look half tolerable for him.

Which sent all three of them into near hysteria mixed with incredulity at their failure to coax him back to the world where it isn't all so grim.

Embarrassed by this virtuoso facial performance of negative emotional equity I muttered to the three of them, 'Apologies on behalf of my generation'. The one holding the magazine looked at me and said one word 'Awthatsawrightyourcool'

By the time I met Sheila at Queen Street I'd stopped floating, buoyed up by such proximity to fun, energy and young possibilities of life, grinning in defiant goodwill at those daft enough to make a career out of joylessness.

Oh, and while we're on the daft stuff. While waiting for Sheila's train to arrive, I noticed a woman eating chips while texting a friend, and managing both with considerable dexterity. Presumably, despite the fact that the phone keypad must have been getting a bit slippery……multi-tasking develops in ever stranger combinations, huh?

9 October 2009
“Fellowship” according to Bonhoeffer – “to kindle the flame of the true fire of Christ.”

One of my problems with the word 'fellowship', and an increasing diifculty with the word 'community', is the cosy, soft, non-angularity of the words. These are words with a marshmallow softness, a painted-with-a-pastel-palette look that's more impressionist than real, a squishy shapelessness under pressure that gives no confidence we know what their real shape is or would look like. I also worry that both words are more about feelings than actions, and that their overuse makes them sound like sacred alternatives to secular expletives, which tend to be the unthinking blanks inserted to sentences to convey emotional engagement or just as often as a vain repetition by habit.

Which is why now and then it matters to have someone say something about 'fellowship' and 'community' that unsettles us, and dissipates the devotional haze that obscures what fellowship and community at their demanding uncomfortable Christlikeness might actually look like, feel like and be like. And one of the people who regularly does that for me is one of my best theological friends, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A theological friend is one who isn't interested in reinforcing my conceptual comfort zones, or ignoring my bad intellectual and theological habits, and whom I trust enough to listen when he tells me I'm talking or thinking nonsense.

So. To the popular notion that fellowship and community are directly tied to intimacy, like-mindedness, mutual knowledge of each other's story, sharing of personal needs and problems, and current place in the world, Bonhoeffer enters a disconcerting disclaimer. Like the good theological friend he is he confirms his trustworthiness as a friend not by agreeing with us but by telling us why we are wrong. In Sanctorum Communio,in a discussion of the Lord's Supper Bonhoeffer compares the experience of those who know each other well with those who break bread as strangers:

It has been deplored that urban congregations celebrating the Lord's Supper are faced with the unfortunate fact that participants do not know one another; this situation allegedly diminishes the weight placed on the Christian Community and takes away from the personal warmth of the ceremony.

But against this we must ask is this very kind of a church-community not itself a compelling sermon about the significance and reality of the community of saints, which surpasses all human community? Isn't the commitment to the church, to Christian love, most unmistakable where it is protected in principle from being confused in any way with any kind of human community based onb mutual affection? Is it not precisely such a community that much better safeguards the serious realism of the sanctorum communio – a community in which the Jew remains a Jew, Greek Greek, worker worker, and capitalist capitalist, and where all are nevertheless the Body of Christ – than one in which these hard facts are quietly glossed over?

Wherever there is a real profession of faith in the community of saints, there strangeness and seeming coldness only serve to kindle the flame of the true fire of Christ; but where the idea of the sanctorum communio is neither understood nor professed , there personal warmth merely conceals the absence of the crucial element but cannot replace it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio. A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 245-6

8 October 2009
Of the making of many books, and the pricing upwards of many books, there is no limit.

When it comes to possessing a book, like most bibliophiles I prefer a substantial stitched hardback. Especially if it is an important book. And because I just so enjoy handling a well bound book, printed on quality paper, where font and layout and editing and production standards each contribute to a book that is a joy to hold and behold, to handle and read. And if the price is halfway reasonable then here's my money. The book below is the hardback edition of George Herbert at £90 – I got it for half the price from a sensible bookseller in Cambridge. "A thing of beauty and a joy forever".

But I also want to write in praise of the well intentioned paperback. Sometimes the hardback is ridiculously expensive and impossible to justify – and there's no paperback edition. Take for example Susan Gillingham's Psalms Through the Centuries volume 1 – £57 and the second volume will be even more expensive. And no chance of a paperback version, despite the fact that this is a series of commentaries aimed at students! So either you borrow it from a library (if it has it), or from inter-library loan – but what if it's a book you want to read and refer to often, huh? Writing to the publisher of Gillingham's book to point out the unattainability of these prices for all but institutional libraries I received a courteous negative response, essentially the same as one I first encountered and learned to live with when I was twenty one and at University.

I still have an essay I did all those years ago on the hard to make case for the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy. I began with the disclaimer that much as I would like to establish the case for Mosaic authorship, the historical and textual evidence did not point that way. One of the most illuminating feedback comments I've ever had was pencilled in the margin, "Tough!" It was a hard response for a fragile young Evangelical, but one that has served me well – and I still have the essay. The lecturer was himself an agnostic who sympathised deeply with people of faith trying to re-negotiate the foundations of that faith by intellectual dialogue and critical thinking in what could seem a hostile environment.

The point is, the publisher's response for all its courteous explanations of why they couldn't afford to make the book affordable for individual purchasers, came down to that one word I learned to live with decades ago – "Tough!" Now there aren't many books I want to own that I'm not prepared to pay for, and do without other things to buy them. Choices about disposable income are real giveaway clues to our ethics, stewardship, taste, and peculiar but likeable daftness. But even I can't bring myself to spend £115 on, for example, the second volume of Michael Watts The Dissenters, a magisterial history that is simply unmatched in the subject field. The first volume was issued in both hardback and paperback – but not the second. Tough!

And likewise Carol Newsom's The Book of Job A Contest of Moral Imaginations at £66 – but a book of great originality, penetrative in its insight into how this magnificent text interprets us and our world, and our human brokenness and longing for wholeness, before we ever get near an interpretation of it. So at £66, "Tough!" But it has just been published at £13.99 in an Oxford Paperback. The lesson being, sometimes you can't get all you want – I'm still waiting for Gillingham on the Psalms to be affordable, and Watts Dissenters to not need a mortgage preceded by a credit check – so, "tough". But now and again life has unlooked for blessing – and something you want is not only affordable, but a bargain at twice the price – as is Newsom's work on Job, in paperback.

For those interested, Newsom's commentary on Job in the New Interpreter's Bible represents along with Sam Balentine's Smyth and Helwys volume on Job, the finest exegetical conversation on Job I know. And with Newsom bound in the same volume as Clinton McCann's commentary on Psalms, that NIB volume costing around £40 is simply gold at the price of lead. I exaggerate – but only very slightly.

7 October 2009
The Erskine Bridge, tragedy and praying light into darkness

The Erskine Bridge is less than five miles from where we live. And on Sunday night two girls aged 14 and 15, whose names are Neve and Georgia, jumped to their deaths, holding hands. The tragedy that spreads out from such an act of despairing self-surrender will leave many people themselves bereft, those who knew them well and those who know only the end of their story as told on the news. The girls were resident in supported and secure accommodation. Their families, those who shared their lives at Bishopton, staff and other girls, social workers and other caring and support professionals, now live with the nightmare aftermath. The complexity of emotions and self-questioning that the tragedy of suicide triggers will be hard to endure, interpret and eventually work through. Seldom worked through to resolution, usually to resignation and a lingering sadness, and the often unjust yet inescapable sense of guilt, personal responsibility and that nagging barbed hypothesis, "what if I had…? Because we can always think of what we could have, might have, should have, done.

There will be an enquiry. Lessons will be learned, and each person within significant radius of their two young lives will have to account for their actions, decisions and professionalism. In the meantime grief is compounded by the demand to know why, and how. Already explanation is assumed to be failed systems and procedures; but the fact remains two young adults chose, together, to turn from life to final ending, and planned and shared the enacting of that so sad decision.

And all I feel I can do, last night and this morning, is light a candle, think of two young lives now ended, lift them in compassion to a merciful God, and pray for them and those they leave behind them.

And pray too that those whose lives are now touched by this act of life defying immolation, will in time find again a sense of the preciousness of life, and therefore the treasure that is each human being, which in the world of social and professional care is too easily overlooked by those of us outside, quick to blame and slow to understand human limitations.

And to pray to the God of whom the poet-psalmist wrote, who knitted each person together in their mother's womb – and so to pray that those young lives which seem so finally to have unravelled, will be gathered into the creative life of God into whose hands we all hope to fall and be held, and formed into the true self God made us to be.

This isn't wishful thinking or sentiment lacking theology. Whatever else the cross declares, it signals the span of divine love reaching outwards and downwards to those deep places we all fear most, where but for the grace of God we might all fall, and if we do, God is there before us, beneath us, and for us.

Lord have mercy.

Christ have mercy.

Lord have mercy.

6 October 2009
Stanley Hauerwas on the gentleness of listening and why he finds it so hard

I was in Aberdeen a couple of years ago when Jean Vanier and Stanley Hauerwas were jointly leading a conference exploring contrasting ways of caring for each other gently in a violent world. (The photo is its own contrast in the gentle listener and the passionate talker!) Hauerwas can sometimes be hard to read – not only because of what he says, but at times he is obtuse, hard to follow, and seems to be pursuing an iniosyncratic bee in his bonnet rather than saying plainly what is so, what needs fixing and why. But most of the time I recognise the angry prophet, the angular debater on philosophy, ethics and theology, getting stuck in to those who live heedless of others, their competitive ways raising issues of human vulnerability, social justice, power-mongering and the idolatry of the bottom line in hard cash terms. Both aspects of Hauerwasian theology were on show at Aberdeen – parts of the lecture that were frustratingly blurred, and times when his meaning was unambiguous. The following two quotations about how hard it is to listen, I heard him say, and they show why Hauerwas remains an important voice himself worth listening to:

"I am an academic, and academics are notoriously bad listeners. We always think we know what people are going to say before they say it, and we have a response to what we thought they would say in spite of what they may actually have said. To learn to listen well, it turns out, may require learning to be a gentle person."

"I want to remain the academic who can pretend to defend those with mental disabilities by being more articulate than those I am criticizing. I want to be a warrior on behalf of L'Arche,* doing battle against the politics that threaten to destroy these gentle communities. Jean of course, is no less a warrior. But where I see an enemy to be defeated, he sees a wound that needs to be healed. That's a deep difference."

Hauerwas and Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World, (IVP, 2008), 79, 80.

* L'Arche is a netwrok of communities for supported and shared living, that began in the 1960s in Troisly, France and is now a global network providing living space in community for those of different abilities. The work of Jean Vanier is in my view a singular expression of Christlike accompaniment and care that values the human person in radically compassionate terms. Sometime soon I am going to do a Jean Vanier week.

5 October 2009
Induction, covenant and celebration – Catriona has arrived in Scotland!

Every induction of a minister to a pastorate is an event to be celebrated, a covenant to be sealed by promises, a confirmation yet again of the surprising call of God to all too human people to serve the Body of Christ, the Church. As Baptists we gladly hold to the practice of making covenant. A church is a gathering of believers who in their membership of the local church, embody the promise to walk together, faithfully, after Christ. And the call of God is to do so together, and to persevere and work at it even if at times it exhausts patience and breaks the heart. And to do this while also knowing that in the shared fellowship of the journey, they have discovered joy, the understanding of others, the generosity that humbles, and that one surprise, repeated so mercifully often, that one surprise of being loved.

And so to Hillhead Baptist Church on Saturday October 3rd, and Catriona's induction. Most people who visit this blog will know Catriona as the skinny fair trade latte blogger (see sidebar), minister till recently of Hugglescote Baptist Church (aka Dibley). I met her the year before she went to Hugglescote, and then several times more recently as she came up to Scotland to meet those who will now be the congregation amongst whom her ministry will be. The Induction service was built around the theme and the experience of making covenant. Catriona told her story, the Church told theirs, and we sensed how these stories coincided. And of course the church from which Catriona came, Hugglescote Baptist Church, they too are part of the story and they were there too. Then Catriona and the Church made promises, and in our prayers we laid hands not only on the new minister, but on representatives of the congregation, so that they set out together on their journey, in covenant with each other, and looking to God to lead, accompany and hold them true to themselves and each other. All of this gathered together by Ruth Gouldbourne, preacher for the day, under the deceptively simple command, "Be kind to one another". Except that kindness is patterned after the kindnes of God, who in Christ chooses to be kind, to come close, to empathise, to walk the way of human life.

Then there was the biblically mandated buffet meal. This is one of my favourite icons, depicting an early buffet meal, complete with angels unawares. The fact that the icon images the Trinity and the Triune communion of love and perichoretic purpose, enriches further the idea of hospitality. Food, good talk, laughter, the shared satisfaction of being together, the courteous recognition of the other, the welcome that makes the presence of another both wanted and felt to be wanted, – and all expressed with good food, the mutuality of serving, and the fun of not knowing everyone who is there, providing opportunities to reach out with the offer of our name and the gift of their name.

So the day closed around 8.pm and we made our way home. But only after taking time to acknowledge the spiritual potency of those occasions when you know you stand on the brink of new possibility. And however hard we try, and no matter how much we think we ourselves achieve, we know that those possibilities come to be, not merely or mainly through our energy, but because when it comes to kindness, God takes the lead. He is there long before us; his generosity has no inbuilt limitations, and time and again we discover to our embarrasment, his grace second-guesses our needs.

.

4 October 2009
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity. A five star volume *****

Diarmaid MacCulloch is one of the finest ecclesiastical historians on the planet. Some years ago I placed his magnificent biography of Thomas Cranmer on my desk and slowly paced my way through one of the most accomplished biographies in print. The reviewers used words like massive, definitive, exhaustive, detailed, sympathetic, balanced – they're all true enough. But it was also hugely enjoyable, and written by someone who knows that however scholarly the research, and however secure the overall thesis, what makes a book persuasive is the quality of the writing and the shaping of the story. Macculloch is brilliant at the large scale literary masterpiece – and his portrayal of Cranmer the "hesitant hero" is simply that.

So three years ago the only book I took on a walking holiday in the Tyrol was the paperback version of Reformation. Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700. I don't know a better survey of that century of revolutionary religion, radical politics, national re-alignments, political alliances and collisions, of superstition and faith, of lethal wars and fragile peace. I remember, for example, reading MacCulloch's account of Luther's oscillating relationships with the power brokers of his day, whether the Pope, Frederick of Saxony, Zwingli, the peasants, even God – and learning so much about a subject I thought I knew quite a lot about! The whole book is an education in historical nuance, depth of cultural awareness and imaginative analysis, helping us understand how the church has come to be what and where and who it is – and why it din't need to be like this.

So now his new book has landed on my desk with an almighty thump. Twelve hundred pages (well, I exaggerate – 1161), 160 of them notes and further reading. But 1000 pages of carefully organised story, the facts, the dates, the people, but also the movements, the social and cultural trends, the large patterns, the ebb and flow of power and influence as the church has evolved in a changing continuity. Starting from Galilean sect, to Jewish splinter group, to Mediterranean religion, and Roman state sponsored faith under Constantine. Moving on to medieval cultural hegemony in western europe, with alternative versions in the East, the Reformation split, the religious wars, and the European expansion to the new worlds. Followed by the destabilising and disruoptive intellectual energies of the Enlightenment, giving impetus to further reinvention, reaction and accomodation to the modern and now the postmodern and globalised world. And all of this in only 1000 pages. I have a friend who loves thin books – so do I. But everyone needs balance, and just now and again, it's important to pick up a book that requires careful handling to avoid later back problems.

So – there's probably a month's worth of early reading in this big beautiful book, sitting at my desk, a large mug of tea, just before 6.00 a.m., and with only Gizmo the cat for company. If it takes longer it won't matter – I'll be dead erudite when I've read it so I will.

2 October 2009