Luke's blog

At the ballet

2012-01-23T20:19:00.000Z

Learn something new about your wife. Remember it. Act on it. “I love watching dancing, ballet,” she said as we accidentally watched Strictly in September. Happy Christmas.

So to Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre in January for my ballet-watching debut. Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, interpreted and performed by Scottish Ballet. I have a general understanding of what I’m going to see (dancing) but not much more. My ignorance must be obvious to the rest of the audience because I’m a man – there are about ten of us present and some look like they’re here because they lost an argument.

Looking through the programme I read the plot synopsis, which adds up to little more than a warning not to invite fairies of any sort to your child’s christening, and a hundred-year slumber for all the Russian royal family, which both spares them from the Bolshevik Revolution and two world wars, and allows for more costume changes. It also means that the story ends in London, 1946, which just so happens to have been when this ballet was first performed on these shores. I like intertextuality, even when I don’t understand it.

What the programme’s photos promised, the performance delivered: a constant flow of movement and rich colours. They are a vibrant, mesmerising combination, most captivating in the duets and ensembles where the complication and harmonisation of the choreography was staggering. How two people could unite so perfectly, how a crowd could move in so many different ways simultaneously without disaster. The most impressive aspect of an individual performance, except for the ongoing mysteries of how their heads moved when they spun round and how they kept moving on their toes, was that of the (mostly non) Sleeping Beauty herself. Moving through the air seemed as natural to her as treading the boards, and the transition from one to the other disappeared.

All of this led to an initial sense in my mind of separation that was greater than the orchestra pit between me and the stage. Anyone who has seen me on a dance floor or football pitch will know that I’m less balletic and more Balotelli trying to put on a bib. I’m much more comfortable with words in one form or other, which isn’t really ballet’s style. But as the performers moved across the stage and through the air, I searched for metaphors to speak about their power and grace, and the sum of what they were doing. Nature failed me again and again. Their limbs had the sinewy strength of plants, their speed of movement was like that of birds, but that wasn't enough. Maybe my imagination failed me but the ludicrous beauty of it all, how wonderfully unnecessary the whole event was, led me to the conclusion that this was too human a thing to be described and comprehended in terms of anything else on earth. I couldn't join them on stage any more than I could help Rembrandt in his studio, I might not understand them as well as I could a poem or game of football, but I could smile and applaud with unexpected affinity.

Review: Good To Grow

2012-01-12T11:30:00.000Z

This time five years ago, I moved to Catford in south-east London to spend six months on an internship with Steve Tibbert, the leader of King’s Church. I’m so grateful to Steve for investing in me (getting next to nothing in return) as this was a key moment in my life. I grew up considerably as a result of being outside of my comfort zone for the first time in years, and I learnt a lot about church and leadership – some of which I had instinctively thought before but couldn’t articulate because of my inexperience. I continue to lead and think in ways that were shaped by this time, and expect that I always will.

Many of the stories I heard and saw, and the leadership values I watched Steve live by, are now contained in a book, Good To Grow, which describes the fifteen years in which he has led King’s from a dispirited group of 200 to a church that well over a thousand attend every week, and had 2,700 at its carol services this Christmas. It is a remarkable story of a remarkable leader’s co-operation with God.

The complexity of church leadership is highlighted by the large number of issues Steve addresses as the story goes on: everything from the leader’s relationship with God and his family, to building and rebuilding teams, to financing multi-million pound property deals. It is both daunting and exciting: I really enjoyed reading the story to see what God would do next, and wondering how I would have coped with it!

Co-writer Val Taylor has managed to retain Steve’s personal style: honest, self-deprecating but confident, passionate about God and His purposes. The book is easy to read but is full of big challenges, and hard questions. Steve’s conviction that church growth is hindered primarily by wrong priorities among leaders will be unsettling to many. He repeatedly tries to demonstrate principles rather than prescribe practice, acknowledging the diversity in God’s methods, but his convictions have borne fruit. King’s Church is ‘ahead’ of many churches, experiencing God’s favour in ways that others of us long for; Good To Grow is a great encouragement and tool to help us get there.

Ten years of truth

2012-01-04T18:13:00.001Z

Of all the unlikely things to remember, I’m sure I can recall exactly where I was when it dawned on me that I needed to start reading the Bible. Really reading it, that is, as a part of my life more pronounced than the last resort. I was sitting in bed near the beginning of a year, feeling rubbish for several reasons. In that moment, I was convicted that one of my fundamental problems was the lack of God’s truth in me and that action was required to change this. On December 31st I finished the whole thing, my life having been altered, accelerated even, over the course of the year.

I’ve just realised with a shock that this happened a decade ago. Regular Bible reading has been an essential part of me for ten years. What is less surprising, given that fact, is how much God has done in me and even through me over that time. All of life has been illuminated. I have known God’s company. Truth and love reside in me in unprecedented ways, treasures to savour and share.

Being a Christian and not reading the Bible is like being hungry and not eating a feast put before you, like feeling lonely and not calling a friend. Like anything that really matters, it involves effort; like anything that’s really important there are questions and frustrations along the way, but it can change you for good like nothing else in the world.

Maybe 2012 is the year that you take hold of this great gift, the best news.

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A paper copy of the Bible is available for just £1.99, many others are also available. BibleGateway and YouVersion have plenty of resources to help you get started and keeping going, most importantly free online access to the text. I use a reading plan by Robert Murray M’Cheyne, going at half speed, which means two chapters a day – easier to digest and to catch up when I've missed a day. A printable version of that is available, and you can follow it with comments by D.A. Carson.

Trails for 2012

2011-12-28T14:57:00.001Z

There are many important things to look forward to and prepare for in the coming year, but I'm a sucker for movie trailers and I'm excited about two of 2012's blockbusters in particular...

The Dark Knight Rises

This will be the concluding part of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a series that raised the bar for what to expect in a big box office movie, though I haven't found it completely satisfying. This teaser suggests that Occupy Gotham could be one its many concerns ("There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne… when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”). Along with dizzying IMAX sequences, a strong cast of characters, a director keen to ask hard questions and a master of menace, I'm looking forward to seeing how the psychology of Bruce Wayne / Batman will be explored further. You can check out Empire Magazine's detailed breakdown of the trailer here.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Yes, children's stories are involved again, but that's an issue for a more thoughtful post. The Lord of The Rings trilogy are my favourite films, they've ruined me for most other movies, certainly anything that attempts the epic. The attention to detail, the love of story-telling, the boldness of the ambition, the beauty of the cinematography... and on and on I go. Director Peter Jackson has decided to go on with the story, stretching The Hobbit over two films, and presumably filling in a lot of the gaps that are hinted at in the book and many of Tolkien's other writings. Close-up emotional shots of Sir Ian McKellen's Gandalf gave The Fellowship of the Ring in particular much of its emotional depth and, as Aragorn doesn't seem to be involved in this production, the long story of the Grey Pilgrim's great triumph over evil looks like being key to the heart of these prequels too. Jackson continues his generosity with ongoing production videos on his Facebook page, and Empire has seen fit to explore this trailer in minute detail too. Gets the hairs on my head (and toes) tingling.

Challenging the Christmas story

2011-12-16T12:51:00.000Z

You know the story.

In the middle of night, with Mary’s contractions getting more frequent, Joseph knocks on door after door in the hope of finding somewhere to stay in Bethlehem. Door after door is slammed in his face, it’s busier than Edinburgh in August and no-one wants to help. Eventually, they find a barn full of animals where Mary gives birth to Jesus. He glows.

That’s a story, but it’s not the story. Here’s what more likely to have happened...

Luke’s gospel says that Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem. “And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth.” (2:6) That’s not quite the same as, “As they arrived”, is it?

Although Bethlehem was heaving with visitors, the idea of Joseph running around asking for help and being repeatedly refused goes completely against the Middle Eastern concept of hospitality (see Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth Bailey). A Judean’s home was not his castle, and if someone was family, or in need, you helped them: Joseph, whose ancestors came from Bethlehem, and Mary, who was very pregnant, were both! It would have brought shame on the whole community for them to be treated as we imagine they were.

One of Joseph’s relations, distant or otherwise, welcomed the two of them into their home and gave them hospitality. They were such accommodating people that they’d already invited others in, which is why their guest room, unhelpfully translated as “inn” (2:7), already had people in it. As my Maths teachers used to say: show your working. The word Luke uses in 2:7 that’s been translated “inn” is used by Jesus himself in 22:11: “Tell the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’” He also uses the more usual word for inn when telling the story of the Good Samaritan: “He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.”

So what’s with the manger, the animal feeding trough? He must have been born in a barn because that’s where you keep animals, isn’t it? Again, no: not in that culture. A family would keep the couple of animals they owned in the third part of their house at night. Separate to the main family area and the guest room, but still part of the same structure, it was the safest place to keep their most valuable property, and it even helped keep the place warm. One of their feeding troughs these filled with straw makes a pretty comfortable, warm and safe place to put a new born baby in a world without Bugaboo, so that’s what they did.

That, I think, is what happened. It wasn’t chaotic, it just wasn’t much.

Is this just me being fussy? Of course Jesus didn’t glow, but a work of art that shows Him doing so shouldn’t be criticised for being unrealistic because it’s still communicating something about Him. So why bother with the details of the story?

Well, for one thing, Christianity is rooted in historic reality, so details can matter. For another, this story needs no embellishment. The most amazing thing that has ever happened had happened: God had come to Earth as one of us. We need to stare at this story, amazed. Amazed! We should take time to think about the mind-boggling, life-changing truths in it. I recently preached about this. Doing so may even transform how we sing carols and give gifts.

P.S. Please don’t heckle nativity services for being unrealistic in light of this.

Advice for confused single Christian men, part 5

2011-12-04T13:00:00.000Z

This is the concluding part of a series offering advice to Christian men who are looking to get married. Part one, which sets the scene, is here. Part two, which considers expectation levels, is here. Part three talks about your eyes here. Part four considers God’s responsibility and ours here. This is the last part.

Let’s start with what I haven’t looked at. I haven’t directly addressed the important issue of being someone’s Mr Right, nor have I shared much that I’ve learnt about singleness since getting married (which is actually quite a lot), and of course there hasn’t been anything said about the relative merits of singleness and married life. I’ve said barely anything about being in a relationship either, and there hasn’t been much from a woman’s perspective. Those issues haven’t been the point of this series, but I’m reminding you of them so you’ll keep them in mind too.

Here are a few resources I’ve had a hand in that you might find helpful:

- A preach on loneliness, and another that I helped with on singleness, in the same post.

- Advice on long-distance relationships from a friend of mine.

- If everything I've suggested fails, maybe just try one of these great Christian chat-up lines.

I haven’t read many books on this topic, and those I have are a bit hit and miss. It is a big topic, with lots that can be said and quite a lot that shouldn’t be said because God so loves putting variety into our stories. Books that are published have to deal with that (and do so with mixed success), along with running the risk of generational or cultural anachronisms, and falling into legalism in an effort to prevent the potentially-devastating consequences of sin.

Really the best advice I can give is to be part of a good church. There you can meet and learn from married couples who have decades of experience, or are just starting out. As you get to know them, and they know you, you will get personalised advice of a quality that no book or blog could hope to offer. Hopefully this series has shown what a broad perspective God wants us to have in our thinking, holding many truths together like the chariot racer that Chesterton described. Good Christian friendships should help with this.

Let me finish, after so many pairs of truths, with one simple, single truth: you need Jesus the most. Your greatest need is not a wife, your greatest need is to be acceptable in the eyes of Almighty God, who is going to judge the world. If you have put your faith in Jesus, He has rescued you from God’s righteous anger by taking your sin on Himself and dying for you, and He has won you infinite credit by living a perfect life on your behalf. Now you are an adopted, cherished son, with a powerful and loving Father, and the Holy Spirit lives in you as a foretaste of the glorious eternity to come and enabling you to live that life now. That is the most important thing. And as you realise that, realise this too:

If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:31-32)

There are two more truths for you to hold together!

Advice for confused single Christian men, part 4

2011-12-03T13:00:00.000Z

This is the fourth part in a series offering some advice to Christian men who are looking to get married. Part one, which sets the scene, is here. Part two, which considers expectation levels, is here. Part three talks about your eyes here.

4. Seek God for guidance, make a decision

This is where I’m going to focus on God’s sovereignty and our responsibility. You think understanding that girl you’ve just met is tricky, try to get your head around this! The best way I can think of explaining how this can work is with an example from my own story...

Soon after Deb and I started going out, when we were living hundreds of miles apart, we had the opportunity to make a decision about Deb relocating to be closer to me. She did have a job lined up in Scotland, but she could have changed her plans, moved down, and looked for work. We chatted excitedly about the possibility of this but after we’d reflected and prayed for a little longer we both concluded that the right thing to do was for her to take the job as she’d planned to, and for us to continue to maintain a long-distance relationship. Although we knew that would be hard, we both had peace about the decision. The next day I visited a church in London and during the service someone read from Isaiah 43, which is all about God’s amazing protection, even in tough times. I didn’t really take much notice of this, until someone else shared a story about to secret believers in a Muslim-majority nation who were arranged to be married, without either of them or anyone else knowing that they were Christians! The preacher then began his message by mentioning how he and his wife had spent most of the first year of their relationship living on different continents. At this third attempt, I realised that God was speaking to me: whatever difficulties came, He would get us through. I suddenly had faith, and from them on would not countenance quitting on our relationship. God had guided, that led to my decision-making.

Other people have even more remarkable stories of God speaking, and some have nothing so dramatic. I believe that God wants to be closely involved with you and your love life, so asking Him to intervene is the key first step that you can take to make this happen. I prayed for Deb long before I met her, and have kept on praying for her ever since. This isn’t to suggest that I’m some sort of prayer warrior – many of those prayers were brief and confused – but as a single man I was determined to trust God, to believe that He would guide me and bless me if I asked Him. I really wanted Him involved in this, I knew how helpless and hopeless I would be without Him. Are you asking Him for all this?

Prayer is not the enemy or opposite of action, it is its best friend. As you seek God for guidance, you should expect to be involved in the answering of your prayers. The five sources of guidance that Nicky Gumbel suggests on The Alpha Course seem comprehensive to me, even if the mnemonic gets a bit forced by 4 and 5:

1. Commanding Scripture
2. Compelling Spirit
3. Common sense
4. Counsel of the saints
5. Circumstantial signs

Of these five, you can make 1, 3 and 4 happen by reading your Bible, thinking, and asking wise Christians for advice. And you can pray that God makes 2 and 5 happen, then refer them back to 1, 3 and 4, to check it’s not just your wishful thinking. The infinite variety God’s ways with His people are found within this. Then you’ve got to make some decisions and take appropriate action.

At last we’ve reached the moment when you ask someone out. When you do, you will be vulnerable, exposed, possibly wrong, and at the mercy of another – the kind of things that most men hate! And yet this is the life of faith, and this taking of initiative, of responsibility, is a man’s work. God loves it when we go with the best that we can know and take action, whether it’s asking a girl out, praying for someone to be healed, or standing up for integrity in our workplace. And do you know what? A godly woman loves that too. Even if it doesn’t work out, if you’ve stepped up humbly and with faith, you will have done the right thing, let no one mock you for that.

Next: conclusion.

Advice for confused single Christian men, part 3

2011-12-02T13:00:00.000Z

This is the third part in a series offering advice to Christian men who are looking to get married. Part one, which sets the scene, is here, and part two, which considers expectation levels, is here.

3. Keep your eyes open but don’t let them wander

Having suggested that you should have high expectations without creating an impossible fantasy in your head, the advice that follows is: be on the look-out! Part of a man’s general call in life is to lead, to initiate, so it’s not surprising that God wants you to be the one who makes things happen. This isn’t always the case, and it does of course take two to tango, but someone has to get things started and I suggest that it’s you, so get looking.

Am I really saying that your eyes can wander during a worship service? Your enemy wants to distract you from God, and this can be an easy way for him to do that. But if you are in a situation where you have a chance to get to know someone, make the most of the opportunity. I met Deb at a church weekend away where I was the visiting speaker: there were loads of great people to chat with but I knew from my first conversation with Deb that I wanted to speak with her as much as possible and that I had less than 48 hours to get to know her and make a good impression! The opportunity was there, I took it. So did she, of course!

However, there’s another thing you need to know about your eyes. If you think that once your eyes have settled on your wife, you will never want to look at another woman, I’ve got some disappointing news for you:

Death and destruction are never satisfied, and neither are the eyes of a man. (Proverbs 27:20)

Your wife should be the most beautiful person in the world to you: you should delight in her, fill your memory with images of her, concentrate on her only. This will take effort on your part. If this sounds unromantic to you, have you been fooled into thinking that emotional stimulus are the only criteria for commitment? That is a recipe for disaster, Proverbs warns us against such naivety.

The godly husband Job determined, “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl.” (Job 31:1) Most guys struggle with this as we are highly visually-stimulated but it’s not simply a matter of training your eyes not to stare – that’s a legalistic quick-fix that doesn’t get to the heart of your problem: your heart. If your heart isn’t right, your eyes will wander. The great news is that God is at work in our hearts, Jesus has freed us from the power of sin and sends His Holy Spirit to make us more like Him, with His wonderful characteristics of “love... patience... self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23).

Godly habits back this up. If a woman who catches your eye is not a realistic contender (she’s said she’s not interested, she’s with someone else, you’ve never actually met her because she’s a film star) then you need to relate to her like you do with anyone else who isn’t your wife. I tried to learn this way before I met Deb: I would think to myself, How would my wife want me to treat this woman? The Bible sets the challenge this way: treat “older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, in all purity” (1 Timothy 5:2). How about that for a metaphor to make you uncomfortable?

If you haven’t resolved to live this way, if you aren’t co-operating with the Spirit to change your heart, not only are you grieving God now, you are at high risk of disaster later on in life. If you never stop looking at 18-year-old girls, what kind of mess could you get into when you’re 40? A restless heart and eyes are the start of a terrible slippery slope, as King David could tell you (2 Samuel 11).

So here we are again: two true things to understand and hold together. As a single man who wants to get married, it is legitimate for you to be on the lookout for the answer to your prayers. Once you’ve found her, stop looking anywhere else and fix your eyes on her. You need the Holy Spirit’s help. Remember, there’s only going to be one woman for you: the rest do not belong to you and your wife is all you will need. That is great news, believe it.

Next: making a decision.

Advice for confused single Christian men, part 2

2011-12-01T13:00:00.000Z

This is the second part in a series offering some advice to Christian men who are looking to get married. Part one, which sets the scene, is here.

2. Have high expectations, but don’t create a fantasy.

Some people seem so desperate to have a partner that ‘any dream will do’. That’s a bad song lyric and an unhelpful perspective: it’s inviting dodgy decision-making and unromantic sentiments such as, ‘Well, I chose you because I really wanted to be married.’ That is not wedding speech material, nor is it a good foundation for a joyful marriage. If God is your heavenly Father who has repeatedly promised good things for you, you can expect good things from Him. Having positive expectations of your future wife is therefore not only acceptable, it’s recommended.

Now we swing over to the other side of this discussion: expecting too much.

One of the reasons the influence of pornography in our culture makes me so angry is that it is a ridiculous lie about women, destroying their intelligence and will – their humanity, in fact. You’ve seen the Lynx adverts where the girls can’t help themselves, they do whatever the man wants – that’s the kind of crap I’m talking about. This way of thinking creates a pathetic level of expectation in men: that his woman will be whatever he wants, and do whatever he wants. C.S. Lewis wrote about these fantasy women, who are “always accessible, always subservient, call for no sacrifices or adjustments, and [are given] erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival.” The man, furthermore is “always adored, always the perfect love, no demand is made of his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself.” (cited in Leanne Payne, The Broken Image)

You’re hopefully aware that basing your choice simply on what Hollywood thinks a woman should look like is risky (after all, “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.” Proverbs 31:30), but have you considered that you could be creating a seemingly-sacred fantasy bride? You might avoid the trap of physical beauty but instead create an impossible expectation in every other way: of a wife who does exactly what you want at home, at church, with the children, etc. You imagine that her calling will fit perfectly with yours, that she’ll be the one playing the dutiful supporting role... because you’re still thinking solely of yourself. Marriage cannot work like that. Nor does Christian life, for that matter. There are loads of things you will need to work out - but that's a plural “you”, not a list of conditions that must be met before anything can happen.

So how do we manage our expectations, resisting fantasy and desperation?

When I was single, I intentionally studied other peoples’ marriages to learn all I could. The conclusion I came to in what to look for in a wife was similar to this advice from Mark Driscoll: “1. She loves Jesus, 2. She’ll put up with you. Everything else is detail.” That might not sound much better than ‘any dream will do’ but it does tally with what I’d observed because so many different kinds of people with different kinds of connections have happy marriages. So the long shopping list of attributes in your potential wife is not only selfish, it’s naive. I do want to add to Driscoll’s advice, however:

3. You can run together the race God has marked out for you. Whilst going out with Deb I discovered that although we have different abilities and preferences, we make a great team and we wanted to serve God together. Marriage is teamwork, not simply putting up with each other.

4. You think each other are great! I cannot say that the previous three statements are sufficient to explain my love for Deb. In fact, that would be an insult to her.

Find out what kind of beauty the Bible celebrates. Do your research: read about the women celebrated in the Bible and Church history, ask men whose marriages you admire what they love about their wives. These things were in my mind when I was single: I simply wasn’t going to allow myself to ‘fall’ for someone. Despite what movies tell us, we do have a choice in love. This is especially true about making a wrong decision, as Christians are explicitly told:

“No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation He will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” (1 Corinthians 10:13)

So hold on to these two truths: it’s good to have high expectations, it's bad to create an impossible fantasy. This should help you see a good woman when God puts her in front of you. The fact is, Deb is far better than I could ever have imagined, I simply don’t have the brilliance to have imagined her – only God could do that. But when I met her, I knew I’d found who I’d been looking and praying for.

Next: what to do with your eyes.

Advice for confused single Christian men, part 1

2011-11-30T14:09:00.001Z

This is the first part of a series offering some advice to Christian men who are looking to get married. It hopes not to be too patronising, and it certainly isn’t a complete guide because that’s an impossible undertaking. With those disclaimers, here goes...

There are a number of ways to confuse a single Christian man who wants to get married but perhaps none is more effective than giving them at least one of these two pieces of advice:

1. Aside from deciding to follow Jesus, who you marry is the most important decision you ever make, so don’t mess it up.

2. Just get on with it: find a girl, ask her to marry you, live happily ever after.

I’ve heard both comments made repeatedly by (married) church leaders and whilst I understand the sentiments, I can appreciate why single guys say to me, ‘Well, which of those two is right?’ I puzzled over this when I was single and I still don’t have a definitive answer because I don’t think there is one. But I do think it’s helpful to wrestle with what seem to be contradictory assertions, for more than just romantic reasons.

The first thing to say is that those two statements are obviously addressed to different guys. Guy 1 doesn’t think very much and is therefore in danger of heading for mismatched disaster. Guy 2 thinks far too much and risks getting caught in the paralysis of analysis. But before we look at this any further, I want us to think much deeper than you might consider necessary, in order that we understand something important about God and truth.

Here are some of the great truths of Christianity:

- God is three persons, each is fully God, there is one God.

- Jesus is fully God and fully man.

- God is sovereign over all things; human beings are responsible for their actions.

Now these are very different propositions to the pair we started with, but they seem to share that sense of wilful contradiction. They’re illogical, some would say. When you reach that point of frustration with any of them and ask, ‘Which is it?’ I believe God would reply, ‘Wrong question.’ We need to stop thinking in such a limited way if we’re to appreciate the full extent of God’s truth.

Christian thinkers have always had to wrestle with this. John Calvin, according to Alister E. McGrath in A Life of John Calvin, saw the incarnation of Jesus as a way to understand how massive, seemingly contradictory truths could be held together. Just as Jesus is fully God and fully man, distinct but not separate, so two ideas can be distinguished from each other without cancelling each other out. G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy wrote about how Christianity combines “furious opposites by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” He also used the image of someone riding a chariot with skill and precision, “seeming to stoop this way and to sway that” to retain their balance as they race along with enemies attacking them from both sides. These are thrilling metaphors for how we should behold and believe truth, so much better than merely talking about being careful to get the balance right, which seems far too small a thing when eternal truth, and our hearts, are at stake.

The posts that follow in this series will continue to use seemingly paradoxical statements, like pairs of mighty horses pulling a chariot. You will need skill and discipline to handle them, wisdom to know yourself and the terrain you are in, and grace to realise that however lonely you may feel you are not alone.

So now we’ve started. A convoluted start, admittedly, and it’s seemingly a long way off from asking a girl out on a date, but I wanted to begin here to remind you that God loves teaching us loads of different things at the same time. Furthermore, the sooner you realise that you can’t always set the agenda and that your understanding of truth may be imperfect, the better prepared for Christian discipleship and married life you will be.

Next: expectations.

On news of a death

2011-11-27T21:32:00.001Z

It doesn't take long, having switched the radio on in ignorance, to know that something is wrong, that someone has died. The slightly unrealistic claims of character being made, then the realisation of the use of the past tense, then, today, the stunning mention of a name that you don't expect to hear. Gary Speed.

Gary Speed? Does the photo above look like the final act approaches? The mind swirls with How? and Why? and the terrible dread suddenness and finality of death.

Men were called upon to repeat the same tributes, and did so in dull, choked tones, all defeated.

I had been visiting a church to preach, challenging those of us who love what we believe to love people more, to feel the devastation of personal loss rather than coldly remark on the logical conclusion of one's values being ignored. It's harder, which is why some of us shrink behind walls of impersonal certainties. Jesus didn't.

The radio continued as the day's programme of sport did. Out of respect, the games should go on. One of his friends was due to play but realised that he could not. The match was at Anfield, a place too well-acquainted with the grief of untimely death. As the stadium announcer introduced the minute's silence, applause rolled round the ground. Then the awful non-sound, the absence of a thing which should be there. Then the whistle, and the roar, and the commentator admitted that football was a glorious irrelevance.

I continued to drive, as men spoke and shouted and ran and kicked, and the sun set. I went home, to love and life, blessed with hope.

When bankers were good

2011-11-23T13:47:00.001Z

Yes, there was a time when this was so, as Ian Hislop's fascinating documentary about Victorian philanthropy demonstrates. It's available on BBC iPlayer until Thursday 1st December and it's an hour well spent, particularly if you're working in business and wanting to do good.

The 'moral compass' that existed in the Victorian era is ridiculed now, in part is for good reason, but Hislop's concluding statement should shake us out of the complacency with which we blame the bankers, the 'other' who assuage our guilt:

"Maybe societies get the bankers they deserve. Somehow, we accepted that greed was good and that probity, conscience, philanthropy, do-gooding were boring, old fashioned Victorian values. Perhaps we were wrong."

Holiday photos

2011-11-14T21:31:00.001Z

Sunny weather in the north east of England in November? True story. Also some clouds, which look moodier...

What should matter most at St Paul's

2011-10-31T00:25:00.000Z

There’s a good chance that God has been receiving a few irreverent prayers of thanks from journalists this week as the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest camp and St Paul’s Cathedral have continued their uneasy coexistence. Media spotlights tend to illuminate briefly things that are falling apart*, so when the Church is in the news it’s unlikely to be for reasons that will bring cheer to any of us who are part of it. With so many different voices coming from within the Church, the caricature being created is that of an old man trying to ‘boogie’ with a bright young thing, to the general embarrassment of all but himself, before his sour-faced wife storms across the dance floor and tries to break it up, replacing one awkward scene with another.

At its bare bones, it seems to me hardly fair that a protest against one institution prevents another going about its work. As has been noted, it doesn’t bear thinking what the press response would be if it was their work being hampered by campers.

From the Church’s perspective, it does have a call to honour authority, which includes questioning and subverting it – no wonder it struggles to give a coherent opinion. The episode has provoked a lot of ‘What would Jesus do?’ chat, which is no bad thing if you can hear the truth among the noise. The most prevalent attitude seems to be an ahistorical romanticism of Jesus as everyone’s hero: He’s great but Christians, from St Paul himself onwards, have hijacked His message for their own nefarious ends - such as, presumably, Paul’s famous definition of love.

To make your mind up, you need to read the accounts of Jesus for yourself: the magnificence of His character and the cataclysmic nature of His message will not be reduced to a sound bite or two. You can do this online and on electronic reading devices for free; if you come along to my church we’ll give you a paper copy of the New Testament with our compliments. It just so happens that I’ve preached about Jesus a couple of times recently: on His certainty of Himself, and the call He makes to all of us to follow Him. There’s enough there to unsettle bankers, priests and protesters.

*The Church can often be found putting things back together, unheralded.

Review: Raqad

2011-10-25T11:14:00.000+01:00

The quest for fascinating, thrilling Christian worship music can be bittersweet. Beams of dazzling light from Thomas Tallis to David Crowder Band pierce through some rather cloudy skies. The less hopeful might have a level of expectation not much higher than some well-expressed truth and a stirring riff. So it’s a joy to discover Raqad by Tim Kwant, with a dynamic focus on God, layer upon layer of ideas, and songs that deserve repeated listening in the knowledge that more often than not something new will be found in them to appreciate.

There songs here have been crafted, decisions have been made about tone and arrangement motivated by the song’s agenda and no lesser reason (i.e. experimentation for its own sake). Opener You Make All Things Right puts familiar theological statements in an unfamiliar setting: chords, clicks and bleeps buzz in languid loops then leap into loud celebration before blissfully returning to earlier themes: the worshipper’s journey from sleepy reaffirmation to realised joy and satisfied love? Oh! Worship the King is sung before God’s glorious throne and is thus suitably noisy and busy – soaring guitars and prancing harpsichords vie for attention – whilst preserving the worshipper’s awed perspective. At the album’s heart is the title track (raqad means to skip about, leaping and dancing), a puzzling then dazzling twelve-minute electronic expedition that surges joyfully from one direction to the next with countless ideas, each fully though briefly realised. What follows will seem like relief to those who prefer their music unplugged: three tracks stripped of computer-generated noises and built around a guitar and voice. Reflective, relieved even, after the raqad, with a sudden yearning ending that stirs the heart and mind.

Listeners will draw on their own references. I was reminded of more recent Radiohead (without the whining), and Sigur Rós atmospherics (without the cooing). Kwant himself cites Sufjan Stevens, Glasser, Four Tet and Ratatat.

A typical response to monocultural worship is to smash two styles together in the hope that they work, Raqad instead plumbs depths and explores possibilities within a genre. That’s probably harder, and certainly better. In his sleeve notes, Kwant confesses his ambition:

I often find that worship music has its own genre, you know it’s a worship after that first shimmering electric guitar note. I wanted to make music people would enjoy and that would maybe aid them in their personal worship to God.

Mission accomplished.

-

The album is only available in physical form at present: a limited run of 100, each in a hand-printed cover designed by Luke Fletcher, is being sold to help Tim pay his way through a year’s internship for Hope Church Glasgow. Contacting him to get hold of a copy could be the best thing you do today.

Ethical energy

2011-10-18T18:16:00.000+01:00

If you noticed the news yesterday about the government trying to get energy firms to be fairer and you thought to yourself that your company probably isn't that fair, can I recommend Ebico to you?

Ebico is the UK's only not-for-profit energy supplier. In their own words:

[We are] aiming to offer a better, fairer deal for domestic energy to British households. We are also an expanding enterprise committed to working both for social justice and the wise use of the earth’s resources, in a variety of ways.

These ways include offering "you the chance to be part of a wider community; by choosing our Equigas and Equipower tariffs you will be helping us help those who find heating and lighting their homes adequately a real challenge."

It was formed by Christians wanting to make a difference in this vital area of public life. Managing Director Phil Levermore explained to The Guardian in 2005 how it began:

"I was working in the energy sector around the time the market was liberalised and realised that all the power companies were very keen to get their hands on the wealthier customers (paying by direct debit) at the expense of those on pre-payment or quarterly plans.

"We considered setting up a lobby group to campaign for this group, but decided it was better to set up a company to directly address the issue,"

I love that attitude, and how they've gone about their business, so for me it's a no-brainer to use them. Check out their website for even more enthusiasm (if that were possible).

Writing to my Iranian Ambassador

2011-10-05T13:07:00.000+01:00

The case of Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani remains unresolved and the British media remains less than concerned than it might be if he were, say, a photogenic young woman. The reasons for one foreign court case attracting more attention than another say as much about the consumers of media as the producers, so why not set aside cynicism and indignation and just try to help?

According to news reports collated by Wikipedia, these are the facts:

"Nadarkhani pastors a network of Christian house churches. He is married to Fatemah Pasindedih, and they have two sons, ages 9 and 7

"In 2009, Nadarkhani discovered a recent change in Iranian educational policy that forced all students, including his children, to read from the Qur'an. After he heard about this change, he went to the school and protested, based on the fact that the Iranian constitution guarantees freedom to practice religion. His protest was reported to the police, who arrested him and placed him before a tribunal on October 12, 2009, on charges of protesting.

"After conviction, Nadarkhani was transferred to a prison for political prisoners, and denied all access to his family and attorney.

"On November 13, 2010, the verdict for the trial of September 21–22 was finally delivered in writing, indicating that Nadarkhani would be executed by hanging.

"On October 1st, 2011 the Iran state media put out a report claiming Nadarkhani is facing the death sentence for rape and extortion, not for apostasy and refusing to renounce his religion, as his lawyer, human rights groups and Western news media have reported... Jordan Sekulow, Executive Director of the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ) said 'We're trying to determine if this is the state-controlled media throwing it out there. There's been no mention of any other charges than apostasy in trial documents.'"

Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) are encouraging people to contact their Iranian Ambassador to express their concerns about how Pastor Nadarkhani is being treated via this site. My day is really busy, and I was feeling slightly concerned about giving my contact details to the Iranian Embassy, and then I realised what a poor effort at compassion that made for, so I sent them an email constructed along the lines of CSW's suggestions:

Your Excellency, the Ambassador of Iran,

I would be extremely grateful if you would pass on my concerns to the Iranian Government about the case of Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, who I believe has been charged with adopting Christianity and faces execution for having done so.

As I'm sure you have been told by many others, the prosecution of Pastor Nadarkhani is a violation of Iran's constitution, as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Furthermore, it does nothing to help Iran's image as a great nation, and everything to encourage those who have a negative opinion of Iran.

It is my hope, along with many others around the world who wish Iran no harm, that the Iranian judiciary would cease to pursue their current course of action against Pastor Nadarkhani and will acquit him of all charges.

Once again may I thank you for passing on my request,

With the greatest of respect,

If you want to do the same, feel free to copy my letter or write your own via the campaign site. If you're a Christian, here's someone who really needs your prayers.

Success = second?

2011-10-04T21:52:00.003+01:00

Two knights of the realm with nine Olympic gold medals between them must know a thing or two about success. In his recent interview with Chris Hoy, Steve Redgrave wrote this:

He reminds me of my old self when he vows to "leave no stone unturned in my preparations so that if I end up standing on a podium with a silver medal, it won't be with a glum face but with a smile of delight knowing you did everything you possibly could and have nothing to reproach yourself for."

Seemed like a great definition of success to me.

Tinkering

2011-10-03T23:25:00.001+01:00

Always a fun title for Charades, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy now adds film to its list of categories, alongside TV and the original book. I first encountered it when I was less than a teenager, as a BBC radio adaptation, which I don’t know the Charades action for. Subsequently the whodunit nature of the plot has not mattered to me as much as everything else that le Carré wrote about. As such, this review does not contain spoilers.

What constitutes the thriller element of the book clearly motivated le Carré, as it echoes the circumstances of the great betrayal of the British secret service whilst he was working for it by the Cambridge Five. When the fictional traitor is asked to explain his motivation for pulling Britain down, his answer is that Britain has already sunk so low:

“For a while, after [nineteen] forty-five, he said, he had remained content with Britain’s part in the world, till gradually it dawned on him just how trivial this was... he knew that if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered one farthing.” (chapter 38)

The same ideas were expressed by Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five:

“He said he regarded himself as ‘wholly and irreversibly English and England as having been perhaps the most fertile patch of earth in the whole history of human ideas’. Asked why he had betrayed this wonderful country, he said that he held a ‘humane contempt’ for ‘certain temporary phenomena that prevented England from being herself’.”

This is the Britain le Carré writes about, trudging through a slough of post-imperial despond. It is a faded world, barely lit and frayed at the edges. The always-available second hand paperbacks do much to assure the reader of this, as does the text. Mentioned among early plot preparations and characterisations, one of the characters laments over the men of le Carré’s generation:

“Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away.” (chapter 13)

This seems to me to be the great concern of the 1979 BBC television adaptation. The blurred shapes of pre-HD TV suggest and depict a fallen England, ashamed and fumbling in the shadows. In the film too many of the characters’ suits are brand new and the sense of decay is given by mortuary lighting and colour: it is a pristine recreation, in contrast to the near-documentary feel of its predecessor.

Along with the plot (whose spider’s web intricacies are necessarily compressed), the main focus is on the men involved. Is this a spy film or a film which happens to involve spies? Certainly the metaphorical opportunities of espionage are prominent in the film-maker’s mind. Its intrusive nature is repeatedly emphasised by scenes being shot through windows, giving the audience a sense of empathy with the life of a spy, an outsider looking in. The performances of Colin Firth and Mark Strong are the most successful at translating this metaphor to the reality of the story, forcing the question of how far are they letting us in.

But what of Smiley? Alec Guinness’s portrayal of him for the BBC is mesmeric, effortlessly handling his many layers of personality and professionalism. His seeming ordinariness is a key element of le Carré’s writing, and Gary Oldman attempts something similar in his own way. His steel is closer to the surface, in contrast with the long periods of silence he also embarks upon. Unlike the many occasions we view through windows, the light often reflects off Oldman’s glasses rather than showing us what is happening in his eyes. Perhaps this is one window we can’t see through? It’s an acceptable alternative angle, but what marks the novel out for me is the many quiet tragedies it touches on, including Smiley’s. Moreover, the film finishes with Smiley victorious, hinting at a triumphalism that is familiar to mainstream movie-making and alien to the book.

Perhaps I wasn’t in a good mood when I watched it, maybe I’m too influenced by previous incarnations of a great story, but I left the cinema disappointed. It is an intelligent piece of film-making, which is reason enough to be grateful, but not sufficient to tear me away from books more often (mea culpa).

About students but not for students

2011-09-22T20:57:00.001+01:00

As a bit of research for my job as Student Pastor (that's what the contract says), I thought I'd check out Fresh Meat to see if anything has changed in the world of students since my day, aside from the well-publicised fees.

Turns out it wasn't much help. Of course it's a comedy not a documentary, with a couple of funny lines and a lot of awfulness, but underneath all that was the fact that it was clearly written by and for people who were students long ago. The adverts were for toothpaste and efficient petrol - the kind of things that people in their 30's care about, and it ended with the blissful sadness of Elliott Smith's Waltz #2, known and loved by those who remember a time when hashtags were weird American things and nothing more. The only evidence that it was intended for an undergrad demographic were the performances of two of the actors who channelled Rik Mayall and Jessica Hynes in the vain hope that no-one watching had ever seen the originals at work.

With slightly shamefaced wistfulness, it recalled the awkwardness of it all, life in a world dominated by the gravitational forces of sex and drink and popularity. And we all grew out of that, didn't we?

The week's retweets

2011-09-19T09:40:00.000+01:00

Not much from Twitter this week, possibly because the amount I read there is inversely proportional to how busy I am, or maybe it was just a quiet week. Nevertheless (although somewhat less)...

God is doing amazing things in China, even the BBC is talking about it.

Rick Warren found some cutting-edge advertising. I have since bought an accordion.

A great piece of skill by Leandro Damiao got me in the mood for football on the Meadows.

The Guardian is offering the unabridged audiobook of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for free. I'm struggling to make it download at the moment, however.

The week's retweets

2011-09-12T11:41:00.000+01:00

More good stuff via Twitter:

Sounds Good To Me celebrated a year of fancying new music with a mixtape, simultaneously looking to the future and recalling the golden days when music had a Side A and a Side B.

A fellow English graduate described the life we lead.

Terry Virgo found another puritan who wasn't miserable. The opposite, in fact.

Edinburgh City Council offered prizes for recycling (whilst continuing to give me barely-deserved parking tickets).

The end of Festival fireworks display was amazing, as these photos by Chris and the Edinburgh Reporter show. I didn't take photos but some people around me tried to film the whole thing on their phones, which was surely a double waste of time: you don't enjoy the moment, and you won't enjoy it later either because your technology isn't good enough. I kept these thoughts to myself at the time.

PJ Smyth suggested five ways to affair-proof your marriage.

The Newfrontiers Theology website continued to deliver the kind of goods I love to read: Andrew Wilson writing about how interpreting the Bible is far more complex than most of us give it credit for but still hopeful, and Matthew Hosier exploring whether it's possible to love God and His gifts at the same time.

The Edinburgh University Students Association offered a helpful map for Freshers. It missed at least one key place, however, King's Church.

Lastly, another C.S. Lewis quote, this one about how Christians shouldn't just be writing books about Christianity, they should be just writing books.

Emotional entanglements

2011-09-02T13:29:00.002+01:00

Do you remember when Ryan Giggs was the biggest story of the summer? Yes, that really was this year. We seem to be living at a time when a decade’s worth of news happens every week, but the start of the new football season has brought Giggs’ misdemeanours back to my attention.

I love football: I enjoy playing it, watching it, and talking about it far more than any other sport. But much more importantly, I’m a Christian who by definition loves goodness and hates sin. So what do I do when the team I ‘support’ celebrates men who have committed adultery, and is intent on getting as much money as possible from as many people as possible?

This is the emotional entanglement of football spectating: as much as people talk about a separation between life on the pitch and off it, the devotion that football-related businesses crave is predicated on a level of commitment that is out of all proportion to a kick-about. So-called ‘real fans’, those who subjugate everything else in their life to football, are fetishished because that’s football’s business model. They could also be described as those who give massive companies loads of time, money and emotion at the expense of their family and the poor, but that’s not going to encourage anyone to buy a new shirt or subscribe to a TV channel. Millions do buy in, can I in good conscience be associated with all of that?

I considered a comparison with alcohol: though many sadly are trapped by it, I can still enjoy an occasional drink. I thought this was a smart point until it was pointed out to me that alcohol itself is not a person and it was the people involved in football that started this whole train of concerned thought.

How about the question of whether the sins of Giggs, Rooney, and the rest should be able to veto my enjoyment of something? The gospel has set me free, after all. But do the moments of joy that a piece of skill or show of teamwork bring justify the general murk in which they are found?

I made the partial definition above of a Christian as someone who loves goodness and hates sin, could that contain a clue for how to resolve this? “Hate what is evil; cling to what is good... be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil” (Romans 12:9, 16:19). Maybe I can make my own highlights show along this principle.

I hope I can genuinely find this distinction, but it will hardly be the end of the world if I do not. Here’s another definition, of the Puritan form of Christianity that this post might seem to resemble: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” That’s not my problem at all, nor was it the problem of the original Puritans. I’m not worried that people are happy, I just don’t think they’re anywhere near happy enough because they're putting their hopes in the wrong places. As C.S. Lewis put it:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition [and football] when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

20/20

2011-08-30T18:23:00.000+01:00

Arriving home after a couple of weeks away on holiday, we went through our post, which included The Week, dated 6th August. Its concluding article was written by Andrew Sullivan, whose 25-year absence from the UK had recently ended, prompting him to write something of a eulogy to the modern Britain he had discovered on his return:

The Great in Britain remains – right in front of you... Everyone is grumbling, but, if you will forgive a generalisation based purely on personal impressions, it seems a country that has come to terms with itself... like someone emerging from a midlife crisis into a rather comfortable second wind, one in which the illusions of grandeur have morphed into the modest pride of simply being who you are.

The events that began in London on the same date as that article's publication rather contradicted this.

As Deb and I continued to sort out our new flat, we found that a previous tenant had left a copy of The Guardian, dated 3rd September 2007. In the Arts Comment section, Mark Ravenhill had written about Amy Winehouse. After declaring his own teetotalism, he went on:

I’m rather delighted she’s taking the drugs. Every culture needs a totemic figure who is prepared to go into the wilder terrain of substance usage, a place where the rest of us don’t want to or need to go... You do it, Amy, we need you to go there so we never have to do it ourselves.

All of which made me think that what seems clear at the time may not be, and you should always be careful when choosing who to believe.

A basic conception of the church

2011-08-15T14:06:00.000+01:00

"Here, then, is a basic conception of the Church. Its existence lies in its relationship to the Father, a relationship established by personal response to and confession of Christ. Provision for its community is not in an organizational structure, but in the abiding of the Holy Spirit, while the relations of its members to each other are the paradoxical reverse of institutional. Its rites emphasize not office, but fellowship and identification. It is the fulfilment of the ideal of the old covenant, and yet a new thing. Its nature is essentially eschatalogical: it is the anticipatory fulfilment of God's final act, in the present world the holder of the keys of the Kingdom, but, like the Kingdom, the seed springing up in token of the reaping to come. For this reason it is in perpetual tension with its environment: it is in the world, but it is of the world to come."

- F. Roy Coad, The Apostolic Church, p. 103 in A New Testament Commentary, Pickering & Inglis, 1969

The week's retweets

2011-08-11T18:58:00.000+01:00

Rioters and looters were outnumbered by commentators online, if not police on the streets. Here were some I found interesting:

How budget cuts to youth services may have contributed, one written a few days before the trouble 'began', and another describing how deep-rooted it is.
Churches have been at the forefront of the response, online and on the streets. Tope Koleoso of Jubilee Church Enfield was simple and clear, Phil Moore of Queens Road Church in Wimbledon reminded Christians of the cosmic perspective, Lex Loizides recalled the service of the Salvation Army to an earlier generation in similarly dark times, and Nicholas Ferguson of King's Church London highlighted the contrast between what happened in the riots and what happened at Newday (which itself made it on to the local news), along with making suggestions in his usual careful and helpful manner.

In other news:

There was quite a bit of chat about the death penalty before the riots even began, so George Orwell's classic account of a hanging was worth reading.
The Guardian recommended the top ten literary haunts in Edinburgh, complete with identikit photos of the middle classes looking eager.
The New Statesmen allowed plenty of believers and non-believers to make their cases for why they think God exists, or not.
Abigail Malortie wrote a nice piece about the Latitude festival.
Matt Blick contested the notion that Christians should be the most creative people around.
Martin Charlesworth started a series challenging how we live with 'stuff', the summary of which I include here because it's great and seems even more relevant after the complexities of the past week:

Simplicity is more about an attitude of heart.
Simplicity is the willingness to ask the hard questions about what we own.
Simplicity is the willingness to be thankful for what we have, rather than restless for what we hope to acquire.
Simplicity is about choosing not to define ourselves by what we own.
Simplicity is about staring out materialism.
Simplicity is about the exciting risk of faith in giving away as much as possible.
Simplicity is about being deeply thankful for the things we possess and then finding joy in living for people.
Simplicity is about remembering the poor every day and thinking about the rich only about once a month.
Simplicity is about travelling lightly through this world.
Simplicity is about following Jesus – the master of simplicity.

Fires everywhere

2011-08-09T10:26:00.000+01:00

Describing the early years of the nation of Israel, the book of Judges ends with this chilling line: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” We saw this last night and it happens in more subtle ways all the time as people entice and trample each other for their own ends, with knives on estates, with special offers on the high street, and policies in parliament. There are fires in every city and in every heart.

As we watched the burning of London in the news last night, my ex-firefighter friend commented on the strategy of his former colleagues. Some blazes were too far gone, he said, you just had to let them burn out and try to stop the flames from spreading. Churches don’t have that option because a King has come and charged us with spreading the influence of a Kingdom characterised by grace, mercy, justice, peace and reconciliation. That we have this in some small measure already – that for some of us what happened last night is considered unusual – is a reason to be thankful. That much more remains to be done is obvious and should motivate us to pray and work harder than ever before.

“As Christians, our response is never to stand by and watch and complain, but to awaken ourselves to the appropriate Godly action.”
- Tope Koleoso

“We are not sent to minister to a congregation and be content if we keep things going. We are sent to make war...and to stop short of nothing but the subjugation of the world to the sway of the Lord Jesus.”

– William Booth

Not at Newday

2011-08-05T12:14:00.000+01:00

I’m not at Newday this year, but part of me is. The event is now in its eighth year, the first six of which I was heavily involved in, taking my youth group and serving in various ways. I always dreaded the preparation but never regretted it once we were there. It was always wonderful, and amidst the madness it felt like how life should really be. I go to a few conferences but the Newday distinctive is the feeling in the air of what might happen, what is happening right now. We don’t just talk about the Kingdom: it comes, as hundreds put their trust in Jesus for the first time, He heals hundreds more, thousands praise Him, many hear Him speak or direct their lives, and on and on it goes.

Where have I been? Elsewhere, reading Tweets and Facebook status updates from those who are there describing flash floods (again), great preaching, and amazing demonstrations of God’s power, whilst I pack boxes and move flat. The contrast made what I was doing seem less real, the Norfolk Showground is where God’s Kingdom – true reality – has been in abundant evidence this week. Moving boxes is slightly less tiring but considerably less exciting.

A bit of careful thought gets my perspective adjusted. Great stories are full of miracles, but they also contain less-than-headline moments: meals, moves, conversations. They last a long time, ebb and flow, require ongoing obedience to what was said when their course was set. Deb and I are getting ready for a new season and God has been at work in and through us too: we have a great new flat, new jobs, and have been blessed with loads of help in making all this happen. Now we’re spending time with family and friends, and quietly getting ready for September, when the action starts again as Edinburgh receives another influx of students, and we’ll be there waiting for them. I hope some of them will have been at Newday, or any of the other events this summer where God has been at work, because then they’ll know what we’re hoping the rest of the year will be about. On and on it goes.

The week's retweets

2011-07-29T13:00:00.000+01:00

Here's some of the stuff I've looked at and shared via Twitter recently:

Terence Blacker wondered if cars make us nastier. Perhaps the only place we are ruder to others than behind the wheel is in front of the computer screen, as Tim Adams noted.
I thought this year's 'Everything Conference' was an excellent provocation to the church to do much more in and for the world we're in, so I'm excited that it's happening again next year: 17th March.
The phone-hacking scandal's big day in front of the Commons Select Committee was a good time to bury other controversial news, and that's what the Health Department seemed to do. Max Pemberton was particularly scathing.
Certain pubs in Scotland have strict entry policies.
In other Scottish news, the re-opening of the Nation Museum was heralded by The Edinburgh Reporter and Jonathan Glancey, Telegraph readers shared their favourite beaches up here and advised visitors to take up smoking, and David Mach's new exhibition looks interesting.
My best source for new music went hyperbolic about SBTRKT.
John Piper listed eight incredible reasons Jesus gives for Christians not to be anxious in Matthew 6:

Life is more than food and the body more than clothing (verse 25)
God feeds the birds and you are more valuable than they are (26)
It's pointless. It adds not one hour to your life. (27)
If God clothes ephemeral grass, he will clothe eternal you (28-30)
Unbelievers are anxious about stuff. And you are not an unbeliever (32a)
Your father (!) knows that you need all these things you're anxious about. (32b)
When you seek first God's kingdom and righteousness, what you need is added to you. (33)
Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Tomorrow's trouble stays there (34)

And finally, Blackburn Rovers have just claimed the title of most embarrassing club in the Premiership - a feat slightly more difficult than winning the league itself...

Some advice

2011-07-28T13:47:00.000+01:00

This is the kind of thing I desperately need to bear in mind when blogging, Tweeting, etc.

"Seek for such a state of heart, through prayer and meditation on the Holy Scriptures, as that you are willing to let God have all the honour, if any good is accomplished by your service. If you desire for yourself the honour, yea, though it were in part only, you oblige the Lord, so to speak, to put you as yet aside as a vessel not meet for the Master’s use."
- George Müller, The Life of Trust

I also found this post by John Piper really helpful in seeing the brevity of Twitter as an opportunity to think more deeply rather than less. For example:

"The constraint of 125 characters (I always leave 15 free for retweeting) is wonderful. It forces conciseness. It is a very fruitful discipline. It requires a good deal of thought to make it work. It brings out some surprisingly creative ways of saying what needs to be said."

Müller-ed

2011-07-27T16:47:00.001+01:00

If you find the heavy-handed word-plays I use in my titles annoying, perhaps you’d prefer something rather more straightforward, such as The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller. I’ve just finished reading this autobiographical account of Müller’s first 55 years and whilst the writing style is as earnest (and longwinded) as the title, what it reveals of the man himself and the God he served is thrilling.

Müller is famous for establishing orphanages in Nineteenth Century Bristol and his writings give fascinating and challenging insight into what motivated him to do what he did, and how it was achieved.

His motivation
Though he was of course motivated by compassion for the plight of the thousands of orphaned children, this was not the ultimate reason for the work he began. Finding himself in a land where most Christians seemed to act as if God did not really exist, Müller determined to show them the reality of God’s desire and ability to work on the earth now:

“The first and primary object of the work was, and still is, that God might be magnified by the fact that the orphans under my care are provided with all they need, only by prayer and faith, without any one being asked by me or my fellow-labourers, whereby it may be seen that God is faithful still, and hears prayers still.”

His method
As the above quote shows, Müller never asked anyone for anything. He took no salary, held no fundraises – he just prayed a lot, and let people know what was happening. Over the course of his life he received millions of pounds given in donations that led to the construction of several large orphan houses, as well as supporting many other evangelistic enterprises around the world. The only explanation possible was that God was real and answered His people’s prayers.

His trust
Catchy or not, A Life of Trust perfectly describes Müller’s way. He took seriously what the Bible says about God’s ability to provide for His children, which is to say that he put it to the test. Again and again he was faced with not knowing where provision was going to come from, and every time he responded by trusting God. When his prayers weren’t answered as he expected, he was not downhearted but curious as to how God would prove Himself yet again, grateful to have his faith tried, and as determined as ever to seek God in prayer:

“The less [in donations] there comes in, the more earnestly I pray, the more I look out for answers, and the more assured I am that the Lord, in His own time, after He has tried my faith, will send me larger sums, and, at last, all I need.”

His strength

“I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was, to have my soul happy in the Lord.”

His faithfulness, and God’s
Müller’s steadfastness seems all the remarkable in our transitory times. He refused to distrust God or act contrary to how he believed God has called him to live. He moved to Bristol in 1832, and the book ends around 1860 with him still there, but the last thing you could accuse him of was getting stuck in a rut. “Nothing but positive inability to go forward ought to keep me standing still,” he declared, and his Narrative testifies to this repeatedly. One example, his first great building project, concludes:

"The work of the building commenced on July 5, 1847. Six hundred and seven days I sought the help of God day by day, before we came so far as to be able to commence the building; yet at last He gave me the desire of my heart."

Faithful with small things, he was given more and more and more, which creates a striking sense of continuity and contrast as the years go on: from praying for the next meal to arrive, to receiving donations worth millions of pounds today for massive building projects. This is what God can do with a life that is surrendered fully to Him. Later biographies might be easier to read, but to get close to the man himself was inspiring and has forced me to think deeply again about my trust in God.

Google Pluses and Minuses

2011-07-22T17:06:00.000+01:00

With 700 million people on Facebook, and 200 million using Twitter, what the world really needs is another social networking tool, yes? Well, maybe. As it did with search engines, email, and mobile phones, Google has a pretty good record of looking at someone else’s successful product and thinking, ‘It can be done better than that.’ Hence Google+.

Is it worth a look? Probably. Ultimately, the issue is numbers: at the moment, it feels like the start of training day when only a few people have turned up, no-one quite knows exactly what to do, and it’s all a bit awkward. If a bunch of my closest friends all start using Google+ then it will probably win me over, as Facebook did from MySpace years ago, because in a number of ways it is better, particularly for those of us who still hold on to the concept of some friends being closer than others.

However inaccurate the portrayal of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network was, the fact that Facebook still doesn’t allow me to differentiate between my wife and someone I went to school with 20 years ago and haven’t spoken to since suggests a lack of understanding of the nuances of social interaction. Whatever Facebook says, I do not have 758 friends. Zuckerberg may argue that this ‘one size fits all’ designation encourages us to be more open and consistent with everyone, the Silicon Valley utopia, but it actually leads to a devaluing of true friendship.

This is where ‘Circles’ comes in on Google+. The principle is that you can categorise people however you wish: as close friends, work colleagues, family members, etc. and choose what you share within those different circles. It’s not actually unique to Google+, The City works in the same way, but like all Google’s most successful products, it makes you think, ‘This is the most obvious thing in the world, why doesn’t everyone else do this?’

The other main features – group video chats and instant messaging – are also designed to help you ‘hang out’ online with your friends more easily and add Skype, MSN Messenger and BBN to the list of products under attack. There are a few others benefits hanging around, my friend Katie has written in depth about the photo editing software that seems to have been built in, and you can share anything with the '+1' button, which you'll find at the bottom of this article and all over the web soon enough.

The only thing that’s really annoyed me so far (apart from the fact that I’m considering yet another social networking tool) is trying to use it on a mobile device. This is impossible without letting Google know where I am, which it probably does anyway but when I’ve got the choice about disclosing my location, I don’t want to give it up so lightly. I find ‘checking in’ on Facebook very weird but at least I can opt out of it.

Which to choose? For now, Facebook will continue to be the best way to connect to people I meet, as many of them are students and the question, ‘Are you on Facebook?’ became redundant a couple of years ago. It’s where I expect to find out a lot of my friend’s news because it’s the grapevine. Having said that, my Facebook newsfeed seems full of information I don’t care about, and I spend much less time on there than I do on Twitter. As to the difference between Google+ and Twitter, Caitlin Moran encapsulates it: “Twitter is like a pub full of people shouting. Google+ is more like withdrawing to the smoking room with friends.” Its great strength is that it seems set up to remain that way, however many people are in the pub. If more do come in, could we be about to recover the value of friendship?

Disclaimer: I only chat with a couple of my best friends through social networking anyway, most of them I email, text or call (using Google products).

Tension: a clue to reality

2011-07-20T18:29:00.000+01:00

Using your blog to promote your preaches seems like a pretty needy thing to do but I’m going to do it anyway – this site does, after all, involve me saying things.

Are you feeling tense today? Not just about the annoyances of everyday life, I mean a profound sense that life is not what it should be. Here are just some of the things that make me feel this:

As I wrote this post, I wandered into my kitchen and had a snack, because I was feeling a bit peckish. This is not an option for the 400,000 who made it to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya.
The English and Scottish football seasons just gone were more memorable for the behaviour of players and fans off the pitch than the matches that were played.
Despite being one of wealthiest cities in the UK, Edinburgh is also the loneliest, and the life expectancy of a man living in some parts of it is 86, whilst in others it’s 61 – a gap comparable with the difference between the UK and Togo!

A lot of our popular culture seems designed to inoculate us against these disturbing feelings, but some artists, philosophers and activists refuse to have their senses dimmed and rage against it: the furious and fractured music of Radiohead, and the surreal horror of Francis Bacon’s paintings, for example. I talked about how this tension is actually a clue to understanding the world and our lives.

You can listen to it here, or watch this classic Radiohead video and feel a bit more tense.

This week's retweets

2011-07-10T21:28:00.000+01:00

One of the things about Twitter that I'm grateful for is how much good stuff it can put before you. This can be an overwhelming experience, similar for me to visiting a well-stocked charity bookshop (each to their own), but at least it's easy to share the goodness by retweeting. For those who stay out of the maddening cave, here's what I've liked this week:

Exploring the Murdoch-related muck in Scotland and in journalism in general.
Playwright David Hare has a good time interviewing 'God's boxer' Rowan Williams.
A talk on the Kingdom of God by Dallas Willard that felt beautiful, which isn't a word I'd usually (expect to) use about a preach.
Manchester City's owners have used one of their other businesses to pay a lot of money to rename their ground the United Stadium, kind of.
This happened near where I'm about to live!
MP's have attacked the government's focus on phonics: "The active encouragement of reading for pleasure should be a core part of every child's curriculum entitlement." Weird that we have to reminded of that.

All sources can be found on my Twitter account. I might use shorter links in the future.

On the move again

2011-06-30T11:51:00.000+01:00

We are moving – and staying. Moving from where we currently live, Glasgow, to stay where I’ve been working: Edinburgh. The most beautiful place I’ve ever lived, a city with an inspiring heritage, huge influence, and a great church with so many wonderful people and so much potential.

The journey we’ve been on to get to this decision was markedly different to how God called me up to Scotland in the first place. That was a story dominated by prophetic and ‘coincidental’ moments, this was less spectacular. We prayed loads, talked even more, looked and listened for God as best we knew how but the moment of decision was ultimately very low-key: there wasn’t much that made for an exciting story, we just know that this is where we’re meant to be for the foreseeable future – and that’s the really exciting part.

The elders at King’s Church have offered to pay me for three days’ work a week, so I’ll be continuing and developing the things that I’ve been doing voluntarily for the past year: working with students, preaching and teaching, as well as taking on a few more leadership responsibilities.

When I’m asked about how I’m feeling about all of this, my immediate response is relief. For the first time since I started going out with Debbie, nearly two and half years ago, the main parts of my life are all going to be in the same place. I’m really looking forward to the coherence of that, to the opportunity to give myself fully to one place because that’s where I fully am. Now that we’re married, and I know what I’m going to be doing next, and we’ve found a flat that suits us in just about the perfect location, the tensions of change and dislocation that I’ve felt for a long time are starting to ease, and a sense of adventure is stirring again.

Frustration at 50mm

2011-06-20T21:34:00.000+01:00

I’ve had a fairly tense relationship with my 50mm lens ever since I bought it last year. It’s a super-simple set-up without a motor for auto-focus so I’ve been having to focus it manually, which I have been awful at. This was feeling like yet another instance in which I'd reached a level of competence and then not bothered to move on: I can frame a nice shot (probably because I've looked at so many of my dad's) but don't really know what any of the buttons on my camera do. The frustration I experienced almost every time I used this lens at last motivated me to work a bit harder and, with a little advice from Ken Rockwell, I got my settings right and had a great time wandering around Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens with it...

Remembering how things changed

2011-06-17T22:41:00.000+01:00

I’m preparing a talk for some young people about telling their friends about Jesus. The best way I can think of doing this is explaining how this happened to me, which leads me down old memory lanes of places, feelings and people.

I can remember where in the school lobby I sat with my mum, form tutor, and head of year to discuss how I wasn’t really enjoying my new school. The next day I was introduced to two boys in my class, Jonny and Tom, in the hope that we’d become friends. I remember how we would hang out in our classroom before school, arguing about sitting on the radiator, with me wishing that I had Doc Marten boots like they did, and wondering what this band Nirvana that they kept talking about actually sounded like. It was 1993, they lent me tapes. I don’t remember much about how their behaviour was different to other people, just that I knew that it was.

I remember being invited round after school to the home of one of them, and going along to a youth group event at their church where people put their hands on the shoulders of the people they were praying with, speaking in a language I didn’t understand but assumed was Hebrew. I know I was wearing one of my two ‘cool’ T-shirts underneath a German army shirt and that I chatted for a long part of the evening with one of the youth group leaders. I remember coming home more than a little freaked out, and watching Dino Baggio score for Italy in the World Cup. I didn’t go back for another year but they persevered with me. I’m not sure if it felt like that to them because we were friends.

I remember, when they managed to persuade me to come back to the youth group, feeling so welcomed by people I’d never met. I remember being at a weekend away at Letton Hall a few months later and having a picture in my mind of God inviting me to step closer to Him after He’d come over a chasm of distance to get close to me. I remember writing in an A5 notebook with a grey cover that Jesus had changed my life, whilst not being sure that He had.

Years later, after much more friendship and perseverance, I was leading the youth group on weekends away at Letton Hall. This year, they were two of the ushers at my wedding. It is not an exaggeration to say that God used Jon and Tom to change the course of my life, and that I’ll thank Him and them forever for that.

X-men: First Class - review

2011-06-04T13:51:00.000+01:00

Having watched X-men: First Class last night, and driven home between two and three in the morning, with the eastern sky already turning light blue, I fell asleep and dreamt of being a superhero. Clearly it had got inside my head, which is more than can be said for Thor. Is that what summer blockbusters are for? Not really, but some of them would like to be, and this feels like one of those.

Its central emotional story - how Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto came to be an enemy of the human race - has huge tragic potential. That we know that he is going to become the bad guy gives a dramatic sense of fate that, along with a great performance by Michael Fassbender, nearly creates something really memorable. We see his early career as a lone avenging angel consuming and defining him, he is already lost. Later he will be warned, “Killing will not bring you peace.” to which he replies, “Peace was never an option.” This is the kind of clunky dialogue that is only just saved by several other decent acting performances, including James McAvoy as the altruistic, placatory Charles Xavier who brings a hope of hope to Lensherr. He shows him that rage alone is not the source of his power, but rather it comes from a place “between anger and serenity”. Ignoring yet another piece of grating dialogue, this leads to a powerful scene in which Xavier uses his telepathy to recall a memory Lehnsherr had lost: of his murderer mother stroking his face and looking proudly at him in the light of a hanukiah. This unleashes unprecedented strength, Fassbender shows him ravaged yet victorious, and we are with him.

But the swelling of darker undercurrents and his final decision to fight the world rather than save it don’t match this. Several times he suddenly appears in a scene, walking across the shot, pausing to deliver a pithy / scathing line, and then walking on again. It’s the same forced technique that this franchise used to make Wolverine seem like a brooding presence, which makes it a doubly annoying failure. The other problem is Kevin Bacon’s decision to play the arch-nemesis as if he was in Austin Powers, (which perhaps he thought he was given the kitsch 1960s setting and the confusingly semi-playful tone). The result is an important relationship that feels emotionally one-sided; if there had been chemistry as strong as that between Fassbender and McAvoy it could have contributed to a really memorable film.

This leaves a disappointing sense of an opportunity missed. It’s not as glaring as the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader in the Star Wars prequels, but it’s still unsatisfying. As often in the X-men movies, really interesting questions begin to be asked only to be interrupted by an explosion or something similarly crowd-pleasing. The mutant motif provides a great opportunity to discuss identity and responsibility but these are not allowed to dominate the film’s agenda. It’s not as mindless as Transformers, which really is just about things exploding, but it could be much closer to Christopher Nolan’s Batman series, which it in part aspires to. I was left wanting more, but not in the form of the sequel that was so obviously being set up.

Ten things to know and do in your 20s and 30s

2011-06-02T13:15:00.001+01:00

If you're in your 20s and 30s* and want to consider what you're doing with your life, you should start by listening to a talk by Matthew Hosier (and guests) about exactly that topic. It's available here, about half-way down the page and it's called LT06/1 Faithful & Fruitful. The context is a Christian leadership conference but the principles are good for anyone.

Matthew starts by expanding on some advice given by John Maxwell about getting started: ten things you should know and do before you are 40. If you don't think you've got time to listen to the talk (more fool you), here are the ten things, with a few of my own comments:

1. Know yourself.
One of the biggest deals for many young guys is to realise they can’t do anything they want. I really struggled with this a couple of years ago, haunted by a missed penalty.

2. Settle your family life.
After God, nothing is more important.

3. Determine your priorities.
Knowing what matters to you will help you decide what to give your time to.

4. Develop your life philosophy.
Not as wishy-washy as it sounds: it's how you live your life. You already have one, you maybe just don’t realise it.

5. Get physically fit.
I scored a hat-trick at football on Tuesday, just saying.

6. Learn your trade.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell claims that you need to spend 10,000 hours on something to become world-class at it, i.e. three hours a day for ten years. Just to be good at something takes ages of discipline and humility too. Thanks for your patience.

7. Pay the price.
Maxwell: “There is no success without sacrifice. If we succeed without sacrifice, it is because someone who went before us paid the price. If you sacrifice and don’t see success, then someone who follows will reap success.”

8. Develop solid relationships.
You need good friends, new and old. I accidentally almost cried during my wedding speech when I thanked my ushers for being such brilliant mates: we’re spread out across the country but still have the ties that bind. Literally, I gave them ties.

9. Prepare for the future.
Don’t worry, just be as ready as you can be. Maxwell says this means having options.

10. Find purpose in your life.
There is one.

So there they are: loads to be getting with, a lifetime still ahead of us.

* Or is it 20's and 30's?

Cynicism

2011-06-01T17:49:00.000+01:00

Despite my ongoing protests to myself about making the most of my time, I read quite a lot of opinion pieces about the recent Royal Wedding. Only one thing has stuck in my head, something that Mike Betts wrote:

“Cynicism is unbecoming in a Christian. So is naivety, but if I have to choose, I go for naive every time.”

Is he right?

A couple of quotes to explain cynicism:

“Idealism is what precedes experience. Cynicism is what follows.” (David T. Wolf)

“A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” (H.L. Mencken)

It’s a sense of disillusionment, betrayal even, which affects how a person sees the world. Temptations abound:

When a politician says, ‘Trust me.’
When we get an email that begins, ‘Congratulations, you’re a lucky winner!’
When we discover that a colleague said one thing to us and another behind our back.
When we see a footballer kissing the badge on their shirt, or their wife.
When a newspaper tells us that it is printing the story ‘in the public interest’.

There’s actually a book in the Bible which seems full of cynicism. Ecclesiastes is the observations of a man at the end of his life. He lays it on so thick that some scholars think that he’s actually the Bible’s Frankie Boyle.

“I said in my heart, ‘What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?’ And I said in my heart that this also is vanity. For of the wise as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise dies just like the fool! So I hated life.” (2:15-17)

“If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness, do not be amazed...” (5:8)

“Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.” (9:11)

If the world is as messed-up and unfair as Ecclesiastes suggests, why shouldn’t we be cynical? Well, how attractive is the life of a cynic?

The cynic
In an old episode of The Simpsons, Homer tells his kids, “You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: never try.” If you expect everything to go wrong, why try anything? Cynicism keeps you in your chair, tells you to sit on the sidelines watching fools try, with a wry smile on your face and the grim satisfaction of knowing that at some point you’ll be able to say, ‘Told you so.’

If we look in this couch potato’s heart we see even more to concern us: Homer’s advice is that of one who was hurt but never addressed their pain, and now the wound has become gangrenous. The cynic is stuck in their chair and poison is spreading through their soul – they can’t enjoy anything.

And finally, they can’t see properly. Cynics think they see the world clearly but in fact they’re short-sighted. Hidden in Ecclesiastes but loudly declared elsewhere in the Bible is the antidote to cynicism, a veto against it: hope. For the cynic, the final word is disappointment, they are blind to anything beyond the present evil; for the Christian, the final word is Christ, and that means hope.

Is God cynical?
God, who knows more about perfection than any of us, and more about sin than we do, is not cynical. In the Gospels we see that while Jesus was under no illusions about the state of mankind, the only sneering cynics on the scene were His enemies.

Why isn’t He cynical? Because He knows how history is going to end, He has seen the Day when every wrong deed will be judged and punished, and a staggering number of people will be rescued to spend forever with Him in joy. Just as every moment of hope and joy in Romeo and Juliet is tinged with sadness because we already know the tragic ending, so everything that happens in this world must be illuminated with future hope. It’s not that everything is great, it’s that what is coming is greater. Ultimately, the wide-eyed naïf is closer to reality than the hard-hearted cynic because tomorrow will be better than today. Christ knows this, it is unbecoming in Christians to live otherwise.

Resisting cynicism
So what can we do to avoid becoming cynical? Choose what can stay in your heart and what can’t.

“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” (Proverbs 4:23)

Examine the character of the company you keep: The people you spend your time with, the entertainment you consume, and cultures you move in, will have an effect on you, for good or bad, so be careful how much time you spend with cynics.

When we’re hurt or see wrongdoing, poison seeps into us. We must take action against this, injecting hope again and again.

“Rejoice in the Lord always [the prisoner Paul says]; again I will say, Rejoice... Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:4,8)

I’m willing to bet that most of us aren’t doing this to the extent that the Bible encourages. It’s not ignoring the evil, foolishness or cynicism of a world full of people sinning; it’s right to be careful and discerning and angry – but ultimately it’s choosing a way of thinking that is Christlike, that doesn’t let wrong have the final word.

This must lead to Christlike actions: bringing His hope-filled Kingdom to earth right now. Faced with the injustices of the world’s financial systems, what can I do? The temptation is to cynically damn them all and refuse to care. Instead, I make sure my money is invested in organisations with trustworthy ethical policies. And some of you may be in a position make changes on a much larger scale. And God will hold everyone to account for what they did with what He gave them.

Finally, come to God. He is not cynical, He gives us good things, He has made incredible promises, and He is the guarantee that they will happen. As we see Him, we are changed: “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace...” (Galatians 5:22)

An Englishman abroad?

2011-05-18T18:09:00.000+01:00

When the British government designed the system for electing members to the new Scottish parliament in the late 1990’s, they set it up to ensure it was virtually impossible for one party to gain an outright majority. When Donald Dewar became the first First Minister, at the head of a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition in 1999, did they ever imagine such a collapse in their support that Alex Salmond and his Scottish National Party (SNP) would defy the maths and win 69 of the 129 seats? That’s what has just happened. It raises a few questions for me. Will I be allowed to stay? Will I need to take my passport with me when I travel south of the border? Will I have to get a new passport, one that no longer declares me to be a citizen of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? Southern-based writers such as David Mitchell in The Guardian are already preparing themselves for the divorce.

That’s the first instinct but the numbers don’t really add up and nor does the theory, yet. Polls typically indicate that only a third of Scots want independence. But what does independence mean? The lack of clarity here renders all the polling data rather irrelevant. Now that there’s no longer any question that a question will be asked in a referendum, the issue is: what will the question be? In Scotland on Sunday this week, Eddie Barnes described some of the perspectives in this debate. Will Scotland be as separate from the rest of the UK as Ireland, or America, or will it actually stay closer than those? The likelihood is that one person’s progression will be another’s compromise.

A couple of months ago I walked past a banner that had been put up on the railings outside my local park which bore the slogan, “304 years – wake up, Scotland!” I don't think that expresses popular sentiment, the SNP won the election because people liked how they’d been governed for the past four years and/or they didn’t like the other parties. Any hatred to be found is in the sectarian districts of the west, which is typically where it stays. There are a few places where my accent could get me in trouble but even writing that feels unrealistically dramatic. Violence and hatred flow from fear and perceived injustice; modern Scotland as a whole has little to cause it to think this way. With a most English of governments in Westminster implementing deep public sector cuts (where 24% of Scots are employed) there is still a chance of a Braveheart-scale rebellion but it seems unlikely.

When the American writer Naomi Wolf returned to Scotland in 2009, she declared that in the 20 years since her last visit, “a whole new Scotland had emerged.” Economic and social depression had been replaced by “an energetic entrepreneurship, a creative engagement with Scotland’s history and beauty, and an atmosphere of rich good humour.” She attributed this to devolution: “To the nation: well done. Autonomy becomes you.” Autonomy may be enough to undermine independence. Either way, I hope I’m allowed to stay.

Obliged to think about... Love Wins

2011-05-14T09:56:00.000+01:00

Why is it that no-one wants (or gives) lots of opinions about great books: books that we can all agree on as being well-crafted, helpful, inspiring, true? Why is only the (potentially) controversial ones that seem to require a response? Is it just that we're better at being against things than for something?

Christians are no better at this than anyone else, maybe even worse. Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins, has caused such a stir that we don't just have blog posts about it, we have blog posts about those blog posts. If you want to know what all the fuss is about, and what the fuss was like, Matthew Hosier and Andrew Wilson have written a helpful summary here.

I was going to write something myself, not because I think I have anything new to add but in order to share my opinion with those who wanted it. Then I found that someone had already written the kind of thing I wanted to say, but better. So, if you care, please read what Cameron McAllister wrote.

Then, read something that is profound and challenging in all the right ways, with a reputation earned over time rather than through frenzied publicity. I've just finished The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. It's been around for 60 or 70 years and is acknowledged as a modern Christian classic. Tozer writes with clarity rather than speculation, as one who knows God and has been shaped by Him. It will confront and encourage any Christian longing to know God better. You can get it for free, really cheap, or just better value than much else you're likely to spend less than a fiver on.

Obliged to think about... another wedding

2011-05-09T13:18:00.000+01:00

My main emotion on watching the Royal Wedding was relief that Deb and I hadn’t had to plan our Big Day in the knowledge that billions would watch it and millions would comment. No wonder they looked so tense when we had been able to laugh. It was also a relief to have got ours done before theirs, graduating from the not-yet-married couples’ anxieties, ‘Should we do that instead?’ to happily-married couples’ reminisces, ‘Wasn’t it great when this/that/the other happened at ours?’ As I watched a ceremony that often felt bizarrely rigid, I was grateful we were given the freedom by family, friends and state to arrange the day as we wanted it to be.

There was a lot of talk about what this all meant for the nation, and it seemed to me that the phrase ‘proud to be British’ didn’t quite make sense of what people were experiencing. Tim de Lisle was among many who noticed that this was ultimately a fun event. Free to watch or not, to care or not, able to laugh at it or at each other without fear over a long weekend, we were enjoying being British. That seems to me a much more open and happy attitude to have, though whether it will last longer than a warm spring is unclear.

As someone who attends a church which doesn’t require its ministers to wear capes on big occasions, the service felt strange. More annoying was how close the Bishop of London came to explaining Christianity’s great news before reverting to a kind of moralism that wants the grace of God without God. “As the reality of God has faded from so many lives in the West, there has been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life. This is to load our partner with too great a burden.” Absolutely right, so we need to look beyond ourselves and our partner to Christ, the great Satisfier of souls, yes? Well, maybe. In his address, Jesus was an example rather than Lord and Saviour, which was infuriatingly insufficient twice over.

There were other signs of the Kingdom of God though. So many watching, cheering, caring – why? Even if you didn’t want to gather with others to watch or talk about this, there’s probably something that you are drawn to, outside of yourself, which also draws you to others. “We don’t know why we do anything”, Howard Jacobson was happy to conclude. Whether he was proposing a subconscious level below instinct, I think this does suggest something innate, something that has been built in to us. The Bible’s story of human history ends with crowds cheering and waving, their focus not on themselves but Another, God. This is the source of all the other, lesser gatherings: we were made to worship together.

I hope to tell our grandchildren that we got married the same year as the King and Queen did, and for that to seem an unimaginably long time ago to them. I hope we’ll be able to show them how good God’s ideas are. And I’m looking forward to telling them, for the mind-numbingly umpteenth time, that unlike William, I watched my bride walk up the aisle to me, our faces fit to bursting with happiness that was just a glimpse of the joy to come.

Obliged (kind of) to vote

2011-05-05T14:20:00.000+01:00

It seems fitting that on the day when the last surviving combat veteran from World War One died, people in Britain have the opportunity to vote. The freedom that was won in that and other conflicts allows me to not vote just as gratefully but participation seems the more appropriate response, even if it requires a two-hour round trip because I didn’t get round to updating my voter registration information before moving cities.

The nature of the debate surrounding how votes are counted has been unsurprisingly uninvolving. Nick Clegg’s infamous description of the alternative vote method as “a miserable little compromise” still seems the most accurate contribution: ‘first past the post’ makes most sense when there are only two candidates with anything like popular support, and proportional representation fits the multi-party democracy that Britain increasingly has. So for me the issue is more whether to vote for some change now with the possibility of more later, or vote for no change now or later. The BBC outlines our choices here, or you can search #yes2av and #no2av on Twitter and despair.

This is my first opportunity to vote in the Scottish parliamentary elections. Scotland’s relationship to the United Kingdom remains high on the agenda and it’s slightly ironic that the voters here desire some autonomy but don’t have an appetite for full independence, a typically British compromise.

However facile this sounds, I enjoy voting regardless of the politics. Whatever the method of counting, my vote will be counted. I may have to put up with the reality that more people hold different views to me. Put those two things together and you have a democratic society. The many struggles that brought us to this state of affairs may not always have been intended to benefit the likes of me but when I step into that rickety wooden polling booth with its stub of pencil held secure by fraying string, given directions by smiling volunteers in a hall where children are taught and allowed to paint pictures, I’m privileged to be part of a great story.

Obliged to think about... Osama

2011-05-04T17:45:00.000+01:00

Big events should make us think, and as someone said, “I think as I write and I write as I think.” So this week I’m going to try to think and right about three seemingly big things that lots of Christians are writing about and some are thinking about: the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Royal Wedding, and Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins.

Despite globalisation, despite Britain’s past and present involvement in the Middle East, despite even the attacks of 7/7 and other attempts in the UK, Osama bin Laden has always felt like America’s scourge, not ours. This was his rhetoric, and became theirs, with Britain no more than the Great Satan’s Mini-me. This assessment of our adjusted status in the world is mirrored by what is now considered a quintessentially British attitude of coolly ironic detachment. It comes from losing history’s largest Empire whilst watching our errant offspring take the mantle of world leader, and leads us to regard the chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” with patronising outrage whilst forgetting that our own era of global hegemony brought forth such humble anthems as:

When Britain first, at Heaven's command
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
“Britons never will be slaves.”

From a Christian perspective, the potent brew of personified evil, death, judgement and God’s sovereignty has led to a battle of the Bible verses on Twitter and elsewhere. This is what happens when the truth is found somewhere between two popular extremes. John Piper spells this out: “God approves and disapproves the death of Osama bin Laden.” You can fit that in a Tweet, but not the explanation it requires. You certainly can’t fit it into a careless thought and you shouldn’t try.

The Lead Article writer for The Times on Tuesday made an interesting choice in their opening statement: “When evil goes unpunished, justice, peace and reconciliation remain blighted in its shadow.” The sense of justice that seems to exist naturally within us, that wrong acts cannot be allowed to exist without response, comes throbbing to the fore at moments such as 9/11, or whenever you suffer loss at the hands of another. This is not the extrapolation of instinctive self-preservation within a society, I believe we know this because we bear the likeness of a just Maker. God has appointed two places where His ultimate justice is reckoned: the cross on which Jesus died, and Hell. (I’ll probably write more about this when discussing Love Wins.) So Christians must promote justice as one of the many ways in which we herald the coming of Jesus’ Kingdom. That’s a more complicated task than coming up with a quote or a Bible verse to post on the Internet so let’s see how many of us rise to that challenge.

Good Friday evening

2011-04-22T18:49:00.000+01:00

I spent some time this week thinking and writing about how some of the people involved in the original Good Friday may have felt that evening...

Though a posting in Germania or northern Britannia might have been colder and more dangerous, there couldn’t be many worse places to be a Roman soldier than here in Judea. As the sun slowly set, Antonius wandered round the barracks catching up with the complaints and the banter from the day. A few of the men were still talking about the executions, particularly the lad who’d won the game of dice for the robe that one of the dead Jews had worn. If he talked much more about it he might end up losing it.

Antonius was still thinking about it too. Not the robe, the guy. You thought you knew where you were when you put someone on a cross, and two of the three they’d done today had been bog standard, all the usual stuff you got used to and learnt to ignore. But the other one... The lads who were there agreed they’d never seen anyone go like him.

It was supposed to be that Barabbas who got it. He’d attacked a patrol last week so the news that Pilate had let him go because of some stupid local tradition had not gone down well at all. Instead it was this guy no-one had ever heard of, who a few of them had had to stay up all night with, marching him from one part of the city to another whilst Herod and the Jews tried to decide what to do with him. No surprise there were a few in the legion that morning who weren’t happy with the hassle he’d caused. So they’d had their fun with him, and when that hadn’t got a response, they’d really gone to work on him, so bad he nearly didn’t make it to the actual crucifixion. But he didn’t say anything. No spitting, cursing, promises of revenge; no crying for his mummy either. He’d just taken it.

He had said a few things eventually, they always do – last words and that. Most of the men didn’t understand because they were new and hadn’t learnt the language, but those who did said he’d asked his God to forgive them! Could you believe it? Antonius was a soldier man and boy, he would swear he’d never heard anyone on a cross say anything like that, and who would? The captain even said he reckoned the guy was innocent. But what did that matter now? It was over.

Simon had got back to the guesthouse as quickly as he could, but not before the sharp-eyed wife of the owner had seen the blood on his clothing. He answered her questions with the only explanation he could think of: the truth that the Romans had grabbed him when one of the poor souls they were executing had collapsed. The memory of it turned his stomach again, there had been so much blood. The cross-beam they’d made him carry was coated in it.

And no wonder, the condemned man had been ravaged by whips. Simon could see he’d been strong once but there was barely a shred of skin left on his back – flies were already feasting on him and the exposed muscles were quivering with shock. His face had been beaten and his beard pulled out; He seemed barely human. Once, he had looked Simon in the eyes, though his were so bruised they were barely half-open. Strangely, Simon felt it was the moment of the whole ordeal he would remember most clearly, though when he tried to describe it to his inquisitive host he couldn’t find the words.

Her satisfaction that there was one less trouble-maker in the city annoyed him but he kept his counsel whilst she gave him water to rinse his cloak. At last it was clean enough, and he could go to his room and try to sleep. It had been a terrible day but it was over.

Caiaphas sat down with a sigh, still wearing his High Priest’s robes. It hadn’t really turned out how he’d hoped, this day he’d been planning for so long. He should have felt triumphant, exultant: the fool was dead and he had done it. All that so-called wisdom, all those rumours of miracles, they would die with him. But even now, even when they had got him nailed to a cross, it still felt like they had never really been able to lay a finger on him. He hadn’t broken like the other pretenders before him. He had even – curse his blasphemy – still called God his father while he hung there. Well, God had cursed him.

On top of the frustration of finding that the fulfilment of your ambitions has not fulfilled you, there was strange news from the Temple. Something had happened to the great curtain that separated the presence of God from the rest of the world. The men on duty had heard a tearing sound within the sanctuary. They had, they said, crept in to see if there had been any damage and there it was, the glorious 60-foot high curtain torn down the middle, thrust open. There were worried faces and fearful mutterings but Caiaphas soon put a stop to them. That was his job. He gave orders for repairs to be made as soon as Passover was finished, swiftly and silently. The people mustn’t hear about it: he wanted no more trouble, there would be no more after today. It was over.

The silence in the room made every sound from outside louder. Every footstep could be soldiers coming to arrest them, every shout was an echo of the murderous crowds. All that remained in the room from the night before was the table where the Twelve had eaten with Him; it was enough to haunt those who had been there. Usually when Jesus spent time with just a select few, the rest would interrogate them at the earliest opportunity: what had He said, what had He done, what did it mean? Though some longed to do so now they knew they couldn’t. John’s tears, Peter’s empty stare forbade it.

It still didn’t feel real, though there was nothing on earth as real as crucifixion. It was like the horrible opposite of when He’d done a miracle – those wonderful moments of astonished excitement that couldn’t be true except the lame man was leaping around or the parents were crying tears of joy over their once-sick child. They were like glimpses of a new reality, when you could dare to believe what your heart most desired. What did all that mean now? Grief and despair held them.

They had always been a strange group, nothing really in common except Him, when you thought about it. No wonder those with Him last night had scattered so quickly. They were together again now, in the house because nowhere else seemed safe. Peter had been the last to arrive, who knew where he had been? He still hadn’t said a word.

In the morning, some of them had gone to Pilate’s palace in the hope that Jesus would be freed, or at least let off after a violent warning, but the tide of mob rule had swept over them, and Him. It had happened so fast but lasted so long. His mother had insisted that she go to be with Him. Of all of them, she seemed the most prepared. But how must it feel to see the son you brought naked and crying into the world go out of it in the same way? To see the body you cared for when it was seemingly at its most fragile, desperately breathing its last? The sound of nails being hammered into wood had once meant Joseph, and later Jesus Himself learning His trade. Now she would never be able to hear it without being taken back to that horrible hill.

Most of His followers had watched what happened from as far away as possible; it was outside the city walls and happened on a peak, so there was little to obstruct their view from a safe distance. John was the only one of the men who had dared to stay close; against his better judgement Mary had taken them right up to where Jesus was being killed. She had dug her nails into John’s hand as they hammered theirs into Him. She almost fell faint when they lifted Him up on it and He screamed before the breath was forced out of Him. The crowd around them laughed and swore, and left. The priests looked coldly on. Somehow, He still thought of others. He was still making offers of life to those around Him, even one of the men being crucified with Him. Then He told John to look after Mary as he would his own mother. Then everything went dark.

He suddenly seemed unaware of anything around Him, and the physical agony in His face was transformed into something far worse. If you’d ever seen Him pray to God you would have never have expected this look from Him, of one who had been abandoned by their closest love. Now even Mary couldn’t bear to watch as He hung between heaven and earth, held in a place no-one could comprehend.

The knock on the door shook them out of their memories and present fear filled them once more but it was just some of the women. They said they couldn’t bear to leave Him but He was already dead and His body had been taken down and carried to a tomb. ‘Where?’ Joseph of Arimathea had a tomb in a garden nearby and had let Him be put there, Mary Magdalene explained. ‘He’s one of the council!’ someone cried out. ‘But he told me he hadn’t wanted this to happen,’ she said. ‘Then why didn’t he say something last night? Why...?’ The anger trailed off in exhaustion: what difference did it make now? They returned to their own thoughts, all thinking the same thing: it was over.

But in the darkest depths of Hell, Satan saw, and heard, and knew that defeat terrible and total had come. The fear of death, the power of sin – in an instant his weapons had been taken from him. There would be nothing to stop the Creator rescuing billions and billions of His creatures now, nothing that he could do would prevent that, or his own destruction. It was over!

Had Heaven ever heard a greater roar? Not when He’d made stars, not when He’d been born on earth, not even when person after person after person had put their trust in Him. The cry went up again, and again, of joy and awe as He stood before them: scarred man, mighty God, victorious.

As they bowed down, one of the angels dared to ask, ‘So, is it over then?’ ‘No,’ Jesus replied, ‘It has only just begun.’

Shocking news from Scotland

2011-04-12T12:12:00.001+01:00

... The weather was really nice for the whole weekend! Really. All of it.

Of course it's still Scotland. When Deb and I went for a paddle in the stream pictured above, the nerves in our feet started screaming at us after about ten seconds. We had a similar experience in the sea the next day when we went to the beach with loads of people from church, below. Others, who could be described as braver or more foolish, actually went swimming; some of us were content simply to be outdoors and warm all day long.

After the winter we had, this feels like the start of repayments for a debt. Greedy for more, thoughts turn to the gloriously endless days of June when the sun will set forty minutes after it has left London (take that, southerners!) and the sky won't seem to get any darker than inky blue.

Many true Scots declare their independence from the climate by wearing next to nothing until late November and after February, and at any point in between when the sun has been spotted. I've felt conspicuous without even opening my English mouth by wearing a coat, hat, gloves and scarf as a guy in jeans and a T-shirt walks alongside me.

It's fascinating to sense the psychological effects of the weather. When it's cold, dark and wet, you naturally wrap up, hunch into yourself to preserve what heat you have, and try to get from one dry place to the next as quickly as possible. Social interaction is a hindrance to this and so in a culture of private home lives, community freezes. In summer days and evenings, we could stay out here together forever. Clearly more warmth is required, wherever it comes from.

Whatever the weather, Debbie and I are loving married life. To clarify from my previous post, I am not at all bored! My head is clearer than it has been for months, giving me long-desired space to think. As I fit my life around her crazy shift patterns, I'm keen to do lots of reading, studying, and many other things. Not much outdoor activity today, though, it's raining.

Get bored now (if not here)

2011-04-06T17:20:00.000+01:00

To say it was to invite the inevitable but I would say it anyway. “I’m bored.” Tim’s reply would be instant: “Only boring people get bored.” Not wishing to be so labelled, I argued about this with equal inevitability, until we came to a conclusion along the lines of, “Curious people don’t get bored.” A more helpful sentiment, if not a more memorable phrase.

I thought about this when reading Alain de Botton’s review of Boredom: a lively history by Peter Toohey (available behind The Times paywall). De Botton quoted the old adage and showed how Toohey gently savages it with evidence from the arts and sciences. According to psychoanalysis, times when we’re bored are “when valuable pre-conscious is being churned up, ready to rise to the surface and propel us to truly valuable achievements.” We should be warned by the desperation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to have an exciting life as this leads to her death. We can be encouraged by Dutch painters such as Vermeer (right), whose subjects are so mundane yet so skilfully rendered that they force us to consider the ordinariness of life and discover magic that we might otherwise miss.

One of the reasons that I joined Twitter with trepidation was my awareness that I was giving my mind yet another escape route from itself during periods of silence. I've worried about this before. Despite what some might say, and the novelty of some of the escape routes, this is not a new phenomenon. The old always think the young move too fast and think too little but they're probably always at least partly right.

Toohey’s solution to the fear of boredom seems to be the same as that which Tim and I came to, though I’m sure he puts it better. De Botton’s conclusion is that, “The achievement of proper maturity is to be more and more interested by more and more things, because a place is made for them in the imagination.” If we take the opportunity afforded by boredom to think and ask questions, and have teachers who can show us the applicability of their subject to our lives, the world is an infinitely interesting place. Presumably we become more interesting people as result, though not necessarily...

Twit?

2011-04-01T18:01:00.000+01:00

I’ve started using Twitter, which makes this post both an apologia and an ad.

First impressions are a bit mixed. It feels a bit like calling into a cave full of noise, in the hope that you’ll get an echo sometime. People with thousands of followers probably don’t feel that way. It seems far less elegant than Facebook, which is saying something, and it’s taken me a while to find a good application for it.

Its success seems to have come from its immediacy and brevity (not my specialist subjects), and the ease with which you can connect other people. Maybe, like Facebook and anything else, it really works for you if lots of people you connect with are using it.

As is often the case, John Piper sees through and into a thing in a more profound way than anyone else I read; hopefully I can follow his lead and use it somehow, rather than be used by it.

What with the premium on space, I’m going by the name lukedvd and I’ve added a link to my page on the ‘Other things I do’ gadget so you can see what I’m saying there whenever you want. You’re welcome.

Scottish hero: Thomas Chalmers

2011-03-31T18:25:00.001+01:00

Aged 64, Thomas Chalmers had fitted several lifetimes into his own. He was a university lecturer whose appointment at St Andrews was (successfully) calculated to lead to a rush of new students applying to study there, such was his reputation. He was a church leader who pioneered ways to care for the urban poor, a new social phenomenon. He took on David Hume’s philosophical challenges to Christianity. He led a breakaway movement within the Church of Scotland that rejected political and liberal influence at the cost of financial security. He organised the planting of hundreds of churches. He was married and had six daughters.

So what did he do at the end of a career that had lasted over 40 years? According to Blackie & Sons’ Popular Encyclopaedia:

Towards the end of 1844 he set on foot a scheme for reclaiming the inhabitants of the West Port district in Edinburgh, a locality notorious alike for physical squalor and moral degradation. A staff of visitors was organized for the purpose of visiting the different families in this quarter; a school was opened in the close which had earned an unenvied fame as the scene of Burke and Hare's murders; and lastly, an old tannery loft was opened for worship on Sundays, Dr. Chalmers himself conducting the services. Ultimately a territorial church was erected in the West Port, and opened on 19th February, 1847.

He died three months later, thousands attended his funeral.

This was a good day

2011-03-29T15:05:00.001+01:00

Pretty good reason not to have written for a while, yes?

Lost in translation

2011-03-03T17:42:00.001Z

Apparently this is for charity donations and not anything, you know, else.

What you don't really need

2011-03-02T20:44:00.001Z

“My brethren, the reason why you have not got contentment in the things of the world is not because you have not got enough of them. That is not the reason. But the reason is because they are not things proportionable to that immortal soul of yours that is capable of God himself. Many men think that when they are troubled and have not got contentment, it is because they have but a little in the world, and if they had more then they would be content. That is just as if a man were hungry, and to satisfy his craving stomach he should gape and hold open his mouth to take in the wind, and then should think that the reason why he is not satisfied is because he has not got enough of the wind. No, the reason is because the thing is not suitable to a craving stomach.”

- Jeremiah Burroughs

HT: Ray Ortlund who adds a great promise from God: "Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it." (Psalm 81:10)

Being filled with the Holy Spirit

2011-02-27T10:00:00.005Z

This Sunday at King's Church I preached about being filled by the Holy Spirit, a guaranteed part of the deal that God has made with every Christian.

I grew up going to church where you stood up and sat down when you were told to, and certainly no-one ever shook or fell over. When I first visited a church where those kind of weird things happen I was fairly freaked out and stayed away from there for about a year. Over time, thanks to the patience of God, I've come to understand and experience the work of the Spirit in my life.

I've been helped so much in this by the teaching of Terry Virgo, whose position is summarised in the videos below and in the talk "Baptism in the Holy Spirit" which you can download from here.

Terry talks about the teachings of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, whose amazing book on this subject, Joy unspeakable, is summarised here. I expect that Francis Chan's Forgotten God and Terry's own forthcoming The Spirit-filled church will be helpful too, and I hope to get round to reading them soon.

Julian Adams is another guy whose wisdom and relationship with God provoke and help me. In this post he talks about some of the tensions between people who love the Bible and don't expect the Spirit to show up as He did in the New Testament, and those of us who do. He includes this provocative quote from Bill Johnson: "We sometimes value a book the early church did not have over a Person (the Holy Spirit) they did have." A couple of Julian's own comments to finish this off:

I was once rebuked by a pastor, who said "Julian my problem with your ministry is that you place too much emphasis on the Holy Spirit," to which I replied, "That’s because He is God."

A casual reading of both Luke and Acts record the activity of the Spirit dramatically. He is all over it. In fact He is all over the Bible! He wrote it after all. Contrary to what many people think, the Holy Spirit is not in direct opposition to the Bible. He moved men to write the Bible. There really is no difference between Word and Spirit. They were always meant to be together.

Cycling in Edinburgh made slightly less dangerous?

2011-02-25T13:11:00.002Z

Edinburgh's Bike Station has just launched a Tube-style map of all the cycle routes in the city that it promises are "uninterrupted, car-free". Here's the design rationale:

Edinburgh is pretty unique in the UK in having a network of off-street, totally traffic-free cycle and footpaths spanning the city. Given that many of these routes were once railway lines, we have taken inspiration from the London Underground to chart Edinburgh's cycleways in a clear, easy-to use map.

It's a work in progress but it looks pretty cool and might give me a safer alternative to life-in-your-own-hands Lothian Road. You can download it as a pdf file here.

He cannot wrong me

2011-02-20T19:03:00.000Z

Imprisoned in 1680 on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh because of his faith, Allan Cameron was brought the decapitated head and severed hands of his son, Richard, who had shared his father's convictions and fought to preserve them. The soldiers taunted him, asking if he knew whose remains they were. Taking the his son's head in his hands, he tried to tidy up the battered face, saying, "I know them, I know them; they are my son's. Good is the will of the Lord, who cannot wrong me or mine."

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Thanks to Colin Symes of Community Church Edinburgh for the anecdote.

Gift list guilt?

2011-02-17T23:23:00.000Z

“If we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.” (1 Tim 6:8) So said the apostle Paul, speaking for himself and not many western Christians. In our defence, in a later letter he asked for reading and writing materials.

There was another round of this familiar tussle when Deb and I worked out what to put on our wedding gift list. Regardless of your perspective on big fat gypsy weddings, to get married is to invite rampant capitalism into your life. I’m surprised the government hasn’t done more to promote marriage as a means of kick-starting the economy because there is clearly so much money to be made from it. Even breathing the word ‘wedding’ in some shops makes them double all their prices. We’ve done fairly well (we think) in avoiding many of the cash-splash traps by spending a lot of our budget on food and entertainment for our guests, and ignoring enticements that begin ‘Don’t forget to treat yourself...’. But the gift list is about things for us, so how could we escape materialism here?

Before we went to the department store, we took stock of the things we already have and tried to keep as many of them as we could. We like the plates I got from Ikea when I moved in to my own place, so we haven’t asked for new ones. We’ll keep using the 15-year-old TV my parents passed on to me until someone makes us a better offer. Here we felt free from the claws of consumerism and looked with pity on those spending their time in agonising in the glassware. If we have something that holds our drinks, we will be content.

But then suddenly I stumbled into my blind spot, where luxury became necessity and the logic of my arguments was obvious only to myself. The freedom from stuff I supposed I have is perhaps just a facade: having laughed at the credulity of others I was now doing the same thing. For me it’s kitchen tools. My Sainsbury’s saucepans lasted ten years, an excellent effort; I’d like the next set to last thirty so I’ve asked for some that are a little pricier. The best kitchen knife I’ve ever used cost as much as a whole range of its ‘value’ equivalent but it does the job so much better than they could. Here’s the sneaking angle I take: I try never to waste money but here it feels like spending less would be wasteful! ‘Buy cheap, buy twice.’ Unchecked, this attitude creeps elsewhere, though I remain confident that the glassware sales team will never celebrate the day I came to the store.

I can see the traps so easily when they are a designer label on clothes, why can’t I when they’re on baking trays? Deb is more clear-sighted here than I am, so embarrassment and materialism has largely been avoided, I hope. If we have food, clothing, books, a roof over our heads, and each other, we will be content. Usually.

All of which sounds pathetically trivial in comparison to the immense things that Christians are supposed to wrestle with. Except that the Bible is very concerned with wealth and what we do with what we’ve been given. The quote I started with is from one of the many discussions about money – Jesus has more to say on this issue than He does about sex, not that you’d know it from the amount of attention those two topics are given by many of His followers. What we do with money is an indicator of what we’re really like, that’s why it’s important. If lavishing money on myself is normal and giving to others is abnormal, then there must be a fault somewhere inside. The desperate tactics used by companies to persuade me to give them money must either have fooled me or more likely pandered to a tendency that was already there.

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Phil Whittall is graciously relentless on this subject, as his blog and this article demonstrate.
Much less gracious or hopeful, and with much more swearing, Charlie Brooker’s How TV ruined your life: Aspiration is one of the best and most awful things I’ve watched in ages. (Only available until 19th February.)

Boxers on backwards

2011-02-13T17:39:00.001Z

Sometime after breakfast on Friday I discovered that I had put my boxer shorts on back-to-front. That’s what happens when you get dressed at 2.54am. And that’s what happens when your church is praying 24 hours a day for four days and there’s a slot at 3am that no-one else has taken.

In the run-up to the first King’s Church Edinburgh Sunday morning service at our new building we have been praying, which seems only right given our gratitude to God for this amazing new venue and our desperation for Him to use it for His glory. One of the many rooms in the new place was set up full of information and inspiration to pray, and people took it in turns to spend an hour or two in there praying.

Prayer is hard work, otherwise Jesus wouldn’t have to warn us not to give up but it is one of God’s ways of bringing us closer to Him, prioritising his priorities, realising the reality of our dependence on Him, and seeing the world changed. Call it coincidence if you like but praying with a bunch of guys for peace in Egypt on Friday morning (two hours after my first shift ended) and hearing that the president resigned that afternoon made me feel like I was connected to Someone very powerful.

I’m so proud of our students for having taken over a third of the slots and praying with passion, joy and a sense of privilege. I can’t imagine there are too many around who end a night out with an hour’s prayer at four in the morning but I’m glad we’ve got some like that.

Church history helps

2011-02-09T13:30:00.000Z

Much later than promised, here are some of the resources I used to help me prepare for 'The Fire of God: the first 600 years of the church' at King's Church.

Books
The early church, Henry Chadwick. Good for overview and balanced perspective.
The New Lion Handbook: the history of Christianity, Jonathan Hill. It's got colour pictures! Particularly helpful on non-European Christianity but frustratingly sceptical at times.
A History of Christianity, Diarmaid MacCulloch. Absolutely massive. Not quite as generous to the church as he was in his excellent TV series (which you can watch here) but really helpful for considering non-mainstream Christianity and forcing you to think hard and charitably to those who came before us.
Church history in plain language, Bruce L. Shelley. Good for Christian perspective, to stir faith as well as inform.
A new Eusebius, J. Stevenson, rev. W.H.C. Frend. Once you know what's going on in history this is amazing: a collection of documents from the first Christians and their contemporaries. Brings you into closer contact with the people involved.

Audio
Ancient and medieval church history seminary course, David Calhoun at Covenant Theological Seminary (also available on iTunes). I couldn't help being reminded of Reverend Lovejoy by the lecturer's accent but he loves the grace of God and is committed to finding it in history.

Websites
Church history blog, Lex Loizides. Passionate about the glory of God, Lex's blog is full of exciting stories and great quotes.
Christian History Magazine. Lots of articles exploring many aspects of the early church, so you can dig around for what interests you.
New Advent. Huge amounts of original source materials. Not brilliantly laid out but helpful if you're looking for a particular article or person.

Ashes nights

2011-01-07T00:31:00.000Z

And so for the last time this Ashes I have Test Match Special on the radio as I go to bed. It’s been a great series to listen to and not just because England have been so cathartically superior. The TMS commentary team are a class apart but the most fun has been the disrupted nights: staying up later than usual and then waking up at various times to turn the radio on and listen for the first name mentioned to judge how things are going. That more often than not it was Cook or Trott, whose names I’d heard before going to sleep a few hours earlier, made it a routine I’m going to miss.

What do you call an Australian with a century?
A bowler.

Darkness and light

2011-01-04T22:01:00.000Z

Two very different stories about what is happening in Christianity at the moment:

In The Independent there is a warning that a new age of persecution may be about to begin.
On BBC Radio 4, Phillip Dodd recently presented a programme on the rise and rise of Pentecostalism (500 million and counting). Some of the quotes he and others came out with were amazing, noting how this move of God has outlasted fascism and communism to become, historically, the most successful ideology of the previous century.

As I once heard John Hosier say, "The dark will get darker but the light will get brighter."

Happy Birthday Tolkien

2011-01-03T18:20:00.001Z

Today is J.R.R. Tolkien's 118th birthday, which is as good an excuse as any to praise The Lord of the Rings.

Before I go any further, let me make some things clear. I do not go to woods at weekends with like-minded souls, dress up in Middle Earth clothing and fight pretend battles. I don't speak or understand Elvish. I don't laugh patronisingly at people who don't 'get it'. I didn't go crazy when I saw three hobbits in my local supermarket on New Year's Eve. I have a fiancée. So I'm not a true geek, but I do love The Lord of the Rings. In fact, I've read it pretty much every year since 2003 and am doing so again now. Why? Setting aside where I may be located on the autistic spectrum, I think it's because Tolkien created a world so complete and satisfying that it welcomes repeated visits. As I reread the journeys it describes, my imagination goes back to familiar places, which is really enjoyable. How did this come about?

In his grandly-titled book about Tolkien's writings, Author of the Century, Professor Tom Shippey shows how Middle Earth's history, geography and societies were created by Tolkien from his expert knowledge of ancient English and Norse history and language. He didn't simply make up Middle Earth, rather by filtering these true sources through imagination he created/discovered an authentic fantasy.

Two other important thematic ingredients are related: bravery despite foreboding - which Tolkien himself had experienced as a soldier in the First World War - and the transformative power of unlikely victory, which he believed in as the Christian gospel. The presence of these in a time of evil is always applicable to readers.

The story and the characters aren't complex but its setting is and its themes are, so we can relate to it and be consoled by it. Or at least I will continue to be as I munch my way through my Christmas chocolate.

Thanks to Justin Taylor for the Tolkein tape, and to my sister Zoë for Cor Blok's wonderful representative artwork.

Read the Bible this year

2011-01-02T18:49:00.000Z

Seriously, do it.

Probably the best tool you can use to help you with this is a YouVersion reading plan. You can choose one online and/or download an app for almost any mobile which you can follow day by day. The team who have made this happen are incredible.

Last year I went with a chronological reading plan which, as the name suggests, got me reading according to when the events happened, rather than the (occasionally random) order of the books in the Bible. It was interesting to read David's psalms at the same time as his life story, and to see how the different Old Testament prophets and New Testament letters fit in the history of God and His people. However it also meant that I didn't get to the gospels until Autumn by which time I found myself gasping for them.

This year Deb and I are going to use the M'Cheyne plan at half speed, so we'll be reading two chapters a day, one from the Old and one from the New, which means we'll read the whole Bible over the next two years. This pace gives a bit more time for meditation, we hope.

Whatever you believe, read the Bible this year - it is God speaking to you.

Cessation of festivities?

2010-12-29T12:26:00.000Z

I thought the BBC's The Nativity was absolutely brilliant. It asked many of the questions that the gaps in the Bible's narratives invite us to think about, most of all: 'What on earth did they think about that?!' The whole thing felt very real, which is a no mean feat when there are 2,000 years' worth of distance, tradition and supposition to cut through. This sense of normality made the extraordinary things that happened all the more real, and made a familiar story gripping and, for me, worship-inspiring. If you missed it, you've got until 30th December to watch the first episode on the iPlayer. We're often very good at complaining and less quick to say thanks, so if you liked this series then let the BBC know by emailing pov@bbc.co.uk

On a related note, I listened to a radio programme the other day in which astronomer Mark Kidger shared his evidence (documented in this book) that there really was a star that rose in the east - even the Chinese saw it!

Final moment of festive cheer: I watched It's a Wonderful Life in Glasgow's Grosvenor cinema. Soft leather seats, cider, and a hot girl sitting next to me: it really was wonderful.

Christmas treats

2010-12-23T00:51:00.001Z

A bunch of festive stuff for you to enjoy...

Christmas is happening is an online advent adventure with some great art (below) and beautiful arrangements of popular and obscure carols. Day 11's God rest ye merry gentlemen is particularly excellent and the whole month is well worth exploring.

I've watched the first two episodes of the BBC's The Nativity and it's been excellent. Neither cynical or mystical, it feels much more real than most things like this usually do. If you live in the UK you can catch up on iPlayer.

Less authentic but quite funny is this suggestion of how the Christmas story might have been told if Facebook had been around 2,000 years ago...

Two years on, these are still my favourite Christmas tunes.

Finally, a big apology to anyone who has the right to expect a Christmas card from me. For some reason I seem to send cards on a biannual basis and this is one of the "I must get round to that..." years. In no way does this make up for their absence (unless you put your computer on your mantelpiece) but here's my Christmas collection for this year.

Hope those of you travelling over the next few days get where you're headed to, and that all of you have a great Christmas.

Got a spare two and a half hours?

2010-12-15T17:56:00.000Z

... then why not spend it watching the version of Macbeth currently available on the BBC iPlayer?

Sir Patrick Stewart is full of the wild strength and will to dominate that makes the ‘hero’ such a fascinating and destructive personality. The ‘age of dictators’ setting works well with the paranoid tyranny of Macbeth’s reign, and the utilitarian backdrop of Welbeck Abbey’s tunnels adds to this atmosphere. Thankfully this doesn’t feel like innovation for its own sake, and the text is clear and virtually unaltered throughout. Shakespeare’s use of language is so incredible, it’s a beautiful thing just to listen to even if you don’t understand every word. When you do, it can sometimes seem like a stream of clichés but that’s because he’s is responsible for so many turns of phrase that we still use today. We heard them here first.

There are a few weak spots: fate’s mastery over all is hard to communicate in a modern context to a modern audience, and Lady Macbeth is played better when she is being crushed by her husband’s megalomania and her own guilt than when she is a decisive co-conspirator. That said, it’s a really good production and a rare enough taste of the finer arts on TV.

It’s only available until Sunday 19th December so you’ve got to move fast. As the man himself says, “If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.”

This is how you lose an argument

2010-12-10T14:16:00.000Z

Whoever throws stones loses the argument. The nuances and urgency of your demands are immediately overshadowed by your actions, which the government can condemn, knowing that public opinion has now swung decisively against you.

What sympathy you still have evaporates when you say that damaging property and attacking police and royalty needs to be seen in the context of the financial difficulties future students face, i.e. that one person is worth more than another. You also remind people of babies who throw toys out of their prams. As The Daily Mash put it when reporting on the first wave of riots last month:

Britain today threw its weight behind middle class children who deserve everything handed to them on a plate because they're all so very special… In central London, more than 50,000 lazy, pretentious, self-absorbed protesters said it was vital for Britain's future that the cost of their education should not be allowed to eat into their handsome, white collar salaries and their capacity to pay for new world music and holidays in the less touristy parts of Italy.

So what to do? Get constructively involved. We live in parliamentary democracy, which is not the same thing as direct democracy, where everyone gets to decide everything. We vote for someone to represent us and make decisions for us, most of which we never think about. We get to choose who they are but over a third of eligible voters didn’t bother last time. If you voted for someone who found themselves confronted with the reality of government and reneged on a promise they made, vote for someone else next time, that’s how it works. It doesn’t sound very exciting but a letter written to an MP or MSP is considered to represent 1,000 constituents, so they are incredibly significant. Lobbying is possible through advocacy groups and protests that don’t involve throwing things. Many people do this, and tried to do so this week. It's harder than setting fire to things.

This kind of thing didn't happen in Bedford

2010-12-10T14:07:00.000Z

A bit of perspective from one older Facebook user: "Growing up we only had a back boiler in the kitchen and an open fire in the sitting room - [ice was inside] all windows every day when freezing outside! Order of the day - more clothes and hot drinks!"

Me against the music?

2010-12-09T13:11:00.000Z

My mates at Sounds Good To Me Too recently invited me to do some writing for them, which has highlighted how little music, especially new music, I listen to these days. Instead, I find myself tuning in to Radio 4, which at my age makes me like David Mitchell without the Cambridge degree and obligatory comedy career.

It was not always so. I used to live in my local music venue / dive which boasted before-they-were-famous performances from the cream of BritPop. When I arrived at university I swiftly got on the right side of the music editor of the student newspaper, eventually taking over from him. My CD collection expanded exponentially, I went to gigs for free, and I got to tell everyone (kind of) what I thought about music. I was pretty abrasive in print, which is to say ridiculously arrogant. I concluded one review with the line “If you like this, you’re a f***wit.” I had my headphones on everywhere I went, turned up as loud as possible to bar all other sounds from entering my consciousness. Which is probably why I have tinnitus now.

What happened? There was more to it than getting a mortgage. For one thing, there’s only so many times you can listen to A&R men telling you that their new band is going to change the world before you stop believing them.

Then there’s what happens if a band ‘grows up’. Not many get the chance to do so, even fewer do it without disgracing themselves. Last week I was channel-hopping and came across the Manic Street Preachers performing on Strictly Come Dancing. The Manics. With Bruce Forsyth. No irony. Does this invalidate their youthful fury or merely reveal it to have been posturing all along? Either way, hope in youth seems like a path to disappointment. The promise is rarely fulfilled, merely passed on to another group of scruffy urchins who have figured out how to play a chord or three. I can’t be bothered with that.

Andrea: “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.”

Galileo: “No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo

Music at its best does so many wonderful things. There’s a visceral thrill of listening to something great: the spine is chilled, the mouth grins involuntarily, the imagination is liberated. Crowds don’t just share a vicarious experience of listening, we can sing along too. Our emotions are magnified and explained empathetically. Ideas can be expressed in challenging ways. It makes us smile and dance. Missing out on all this would be foolish.

FIFarce

2010-12-03T22:50:00.000Z

What was worse, listening to the feeble preambles of the mighty Sepp Blatter or hearing him eventually say “Russia” as he announced who would host the 2018 football world cup? Sorry, the FIFA World Cup TM, as it should be called.

If that’s where Blatter, and therefore his executive committee, want to host it, fine. But if so, don’t waste everyone’s time and money by inviting others to tender bids, conducting security assessments (Russia is more dangerous) and preparing technical bids (Russia’s was the worst). Don’t tell us what our journalists should investigate and what they shouldn’t (Russia is ranked 140th in the world for press freedom). Don’t invite representatives of nations from around the world to abase themselves before you, promise to vote for them, and then go off with someone else. However foolish the England bid’s representatives were to cosy up to men of such dubious character, this is a pathetic game of FIFA’s creation. Much as I generally hate isolationism, perhaps the shred of footballing dignity England can still cling to would be best served by our simply focusing on playing the sport, and not the game. We’re clearly no good at it, and it stinks.

Football is just too brilliant, I think that’s its problem. A beautifully simple game, loved nearly everywhere it is introduced, the same principles at work on a makeshift pitch in Bedford Park as at the Bernabéu. Exploiting it is like shooting fish in a barrel. Enter FIFA, Sky, the Glazer family, et. al. Exit dignity and joy.

In the bleak start of winter

2010-12-01T15:30:00.001Z

A winter's day
In a deep and dark December;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.*

As the summer, such as it was, began to fade, locals took great delight in telling me how much colder the weather was going to get. After a brief Indian summer they’ve been proved right. I don’t think I’ve ever been in such deep snow, and it looks like it will last for quite a while too.

After having a foot or so of the stuff dumped on us over the weekend, we now receive top-ups periodically throughout the day, whilst winds from Siberia ensure that the sound of melting is yet to be heard. The sound you can hear is absence, less traffic and everything muffled in a subdued silence that I enjoy. It does make Edinburgh look pretty but so do clear skies and sunlight.

The question I’m skirting around is whether the snow is friend or foe – by implication am I young at heart, or old before my time? As someone who works from home (no snow days for me) and lives an hour’s drive in normal conditions from his fiancée, who herself is having to commute to work, I’m ambivalent at best. I have taken photos, been in a snowball fight/wrestle, and helped build an igloo. All of which made the cup of tea that followed feel wonderful.

As plans have to be altered or cancelled, the opportunity to be humbled presents itself:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13-16)

Is this climate change, or just weather? As yet the Thames has not frozen over so the pre-industrial age still has something to say for itself. Will I have to explain to my grandchildren that there was such a thing as snow in Britain, or that there was a time when we were not covered by it for six months of the year?! If so, we’ll have to start learning from these guys.

* Unlike the loner of Simon and Garfunkel’s song, my isolation is purely meteorological in origin.

No harder for God to cope with!

2010-11-23T09:52:00.001Z

"I believe God both can and will bring good out of evil. For that purpose He needs men who make the best use of everything. I believe God will give us all the power we need to resist in all time of distress. But He never gives it in advance, lest we should rely upon ourselves and not on Him alone. A faith as strong as this should allay all our fears for the future. I believe that even our errors and mistakes are turned to good account. It is no harder for God to cope with them than with what we imagine to be our good deeds. I believe God is not just timeless fate, but that He waits upon and answers sincere prayer and responsible action."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and papers from prison

Obedient / Opposed

2010-11-22T11:43:00.000Z

This Sunday I preached at King's about the contrasts between those who obey God and those who oppose Him, as illustrated by Acts 5:12-42. I even had time to make what I thought was a cool-looking PowerPoint:

A couple of interesting things that I didn't have time to mention:

There’s great liberty in being freed from caring about your own glory, but it also means that we live by a much higher standard: Christ’s reputation is at stake in our lives. So we must work hard to make sure everyone thinks much of Him because of how we live. No-one could bring an accusation against the apostles except a lie or distortion – if only that was true of the church today. In his book Crazy love, Francis Chan writes, “We need to stop giving people excuses not to believe in God. You’ve probably heard the expression ‘I believe in God, just not organised religion.’ I don’t think people would say that if the church truly lived like we are called to live. The expression would change to ‘I can’t deny what the church does, but I don’t believe in their God.’ At least then they’d address their rejection of God rather than use the church as a scapegoat.”

The issue of being peaceful leads to questions such as ‘Would you ever fight in a war?’ and ‘Is it legitimate for Christians to protest about things?’ As I thought about this, my conclusion is that the gospel can never be accompanied with violence: Jesus is the Prince of peace, He did not come with the forces of heaven behind Him but in weakness. The gospel is hope for our weakness, and it is the triumph of God’s strength, not ours. Can violence be justified in other contexts? Against a militarily aggressive evil like Nazism, I think so. In reaction to an increase in tuition fees, I don’t think so. How we respond to injustice – which we must do – takes careful thought, and I hope preaches like this help give us a framework for considering our response to different circumstances.

High roads and low roads

2010-11-15T16:13:00.000Z

Another weekend, another tank of petrol. This time the destinations were Glenmore and Perth. First to the Caingorms to speak at Hope Church Glasgow’s students and twenties weekend away. I did two talks about Christian identity from Ephesians 1. They’re a really passionate crowd and it was great to be able to celebrate with them some of the incredible things God has done, is doing, can do and will do. It was also great to be able to reminisce with Deb about life-changing moments, as we were staying in the hostel where we first met.

Then we got up early on Sunday morning and headed down to Perth where I spoke to the church about perseverance, and to the youth group about relationships!

Eventually we made it back to Glasgow – me to have a day’s rest before getting ready to preach again this Sunday at King’s, Deb to start twelve consecutive days of work. It all adds up to a pretty busy time but I’m really enjoying myself and feeling like I’m making the most of my time up here: hanging out loads with Deb, serving churches, and growing a lot.

Reports that I am launching a Tartan Ministries Tour should be regarded as false.

Weekend away brilliance

2010-11-09T22:15:00.003Z

The King’s Church weekend away for students and twenties was absolutely brilliant, as these Facebook status updates testify...

Wow. :)

Back from the weekend away! BRING ON THE WORLD! And PLEASE let that world involve more impromptu ceilidhs ?

Best weekend ever

"Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” “Come,” He said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. Matt 14:28-30. King's students and twenties – awesome. God - he is holy and he is here BRING IT ON GOD!!

Weekend away with King's peeps = bombtasticness!

Awesome weekend. :D Now for actual work...

If there's a better way to spend a Saturday night than with an extended worship session turned improv funk session turned impromptu ceilidh then I haven't found it. Weekend away = pretty awesome.

God - He's Holy and He's Here. What a weekend!

The Scottish dance and the Canadian dance were awesome at the camp. thank you King's church

Had a most brilliant weekend. Amazing music, banter and impromptu dance/ceilidh session. Now that she is home, however, she may struggle to stay awake until bedtime

**That was an INCREDIBLE weekend**

Pizza... ahhh bliss.... general mutterings of contentment.... [from one of our incredible cooks]

Huge thanks to Kate Alty, Sandy Deans and Lauren McLean for being the organisation heart of it all, to Tom Shaw for his brilliant teaching, to Chris and Rachel Fleming (three course meal on the Saturday night? Oh yes!), to Matt and Ann Clifton-Brown for their wisdom and help, to all the musicians, and to everyone who came and gave the whole thing such a great feeling.

Two years ago I came to the King’s weekend away as a single visitor, this time I was there with my fiancée, helping to lead it! That’s God doing more than we ask or imagine.

I was reading Psalm 27 this morning and it seemed to sum up much of what God said to us over the weekend...

The LORD is my light and my salvation;

whom shall I fear?

The LORD is the stronghold of my life;

of whom shall I be afraid?

When evildoers assail me

to eat up my flesh,

my adversaries and foes,

it is they who stumble and fall.

Though an army encamp against me,

my heart shall not fear;

though war arise against me,

yet I will be confident.

One thing have I asked of the LORD,

that will I seek after:

that I may dwell in the house of the LORD

all the days of my life,

to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD

and to inquire in his temple.

For he will hide me in his shelter

in the day of trouble;

he will conceal me under the cover of his tent;

he will lift me high upon a rock.

And now my head shall be lifted up

above my enemies all around me,

and I will offer in his tent

sacrifices with shouts of joy;

I will sing and make melody to the LORD.

Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud;

be gracious to me and answer me!

You have said, “Seek my face.”

My heart says to you,

“Your face, LORD, do I seek.”

Hide not your face from me.

Turn not your servant away in anger,

O you who have been my help.

Cast me not off; forsake me not,

O God of my salvation!

For my father and my mother have forsaken me,

but the LORD will take me in.

Teach me your way, O LORD,

and lead me on a level path

because of my enemies.

Give me not up to the will of my adversaries;

for false witnesses have risen against me,

and they breathe out violence.

I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the LORD

in the land of the living!

Wait for the LORD;

be strong, and let your heart take courage;

wait for the LORD!

Peace

2010-11-01T22:52:00.000Z

Last night I spoke at King’s Church about peace. Here’s a summary of what I said.

Peace = ?
What is peace? It’s not simply the absence of conflict. At the end of the Second World War, the governments could say ‘There is peace’ but in reality there was covert tension between east and west Europe, the economic burdens of desperate warfare, and the psychological hangovers of all that had been done and endured.

Is today much better? Even before 9/11 and the current economic crisis, things were hardly peaceful. We crave what we don’t have, our jobs are more stressful and less secure, relationships come and go, we’re always worrying. Above and beyond and within this is the fact that the world that is out of sync with God. Mankind in general, consciously or not, is at war with God, and that means strife for all societies and cultures because God is the source of all peace.

God = peace
One of the titles for God in the Bible is “The Lord is Peace” (Judges 6:24). The Father, Son, and Spirit – God in three Persons - exist forever in perfection and unity, they have no need of anyone or anything else. God is content in Himself. Moreover, no-one knows better than God how in control of everything He is, and so no-one is as peaceful as He is. Contentment in God and confidence in God: that’s why God is peaceful and that’s what we need.

Jesus owns the title, ‘Prince of Peace’, it was promised of Him that “Of the increase of His government and of peace there will be no end...” (Isaiah 9:6-7) So when He came to earth, He brought peace to those who wanted it: healing bodies and minds. He made ultimate peace possible for us by dying rising again so that we could be reconciled to God. “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you.” (John 14:27)

Receiving peace = tricky
Even those of us who accept the wonderful rescue that Jesus has made possible struggle to experience peace. We live in a world full of conflict, and our lives are often damaged: peace is not our default. Moreover, God has not promised Christians an easy life any more than Jesus’ time on earth was easy, which confuses us as we wrongly equate peace with ease.

We need to ask for peace, and then make an effort to receive it. In the same way that you can’t ask God for a long healthy life and then sit on a sofa all day eating pies, we have to take steps to receive the peace God has for us. The Bible explains:

“The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6-7)

Remember, Paul was in prison when he wrote this!

I think there are two things here. Firstly there’s the applied logic of reminding ourselves that God is in control: we have to do the mental exercise of telling ourselves the truth about who God is and what He is doing right now because we forget so easily.

Paul goes on to promise that we’ll experience something that doesn’t make sense to us: a peace “which surpasses all understanding”. This peace is not simply an automatic consequence of reading about Him being in control, it’s a gift. When this happens to me (after I’ve panicked and then realised that I need to pray) I experience a feeling, almost of relaxation, that God will work everything for good. Sometimes I notice this, sometimes I only realise later that it has happened.

It’s like suddenly being warm on a freezing cold day. Like standing still whilst the world around you shakes.

The Bible calls peace a fruit of the Spirit: something supernatural that grows in Christians. We have to make sure the plant is well fed and watered with truth – but it’s God who makes it grow by His Spirit.

Our peace = good for others
Having this peace is an amazing demonstration of God. Anxiety is common at any time, all the more so with what’s happening in our country at the moment. The world needs people of peace to help it recognise true hope. Not because their jobs are secure, or their relationships are perfect, but because they know Jesus and have His peace: they’re content and confident in God.

As an example of this peace in action, the story of Horatio Spafford in the video below takes some beating. Don’t see it and think, ‘Oh I couldn’t do that’ – Spafford was given peace by grace, the same can be true for us.

i and me

2010-10-27T11:58:00.001+01:00

Yesterday The Independent launched a new newspaper, i. The easiest thing to say about i is that it’s Metro for people who don’t like Metro: words like ‘intelligent’ are scattered throughout its publicity. The front page headlines illustrate the balancing act the editorial team are taking on: ‘Is [Sesame Street’s] Bert gay?’ and ‘Mel [Gibson’s] Hell’ sandwich the main image about the UK’s housing crisis.

The layout is very busy: lots of images (dominated by celebrities but with a couple of unexpected and interesting pictures) and crucially lots of words as well. Big news stories are covered, perhaps it would be better to say ‘introduced’, in single paragraphs on ‘matrix’ pages for news, opinion, business, and sport. Other ways of digesting what’s going on include ‘Around the world in ten stories’ and ‘The news in 140 characters’. The TV section arranges shows by genre, which I like, and the crossword was manageable. It was concise, of course, but there was also a five-clue cryptic.

What matters more to me are the page-long opinion pieces: personal analysis and axe-grinding that you won’t find in Metro or the BBC News website, another potential rival. These are predictably centre-left: Johann Hari bemoaned the culture of corporate sponsorship in American politics that has neutered Barack Obama, and James Lawton cast his eye wistfully back to the days of the minimum wage football hero. Agree or disagree, at least there was something to make you think a bit more deeply.

If i is well distributed and stays at 20p I think I might become a regular customer. Will it eventually replace its full-sized parent, or serve as an introduction to a larger website? It will interesting to see. My main concern now is that I get so much of my news digested: can I still read a 2,000 word article unless I’ve written it myself? That would not be a good way to end up.

Jesus = alive. Now!

2010-10-24T11:59:00.017+01:00

Today I preached at King's Church about the fact that Jesus is alive today. He walked the earth 2,000 years ago and used to be dead, so this is important news.

If you want to explore this remarkable claim in a bit more detail, there are bunch of interesting articles available on bethinking.org which show why Christians are so confident about this.

If you want to think more about what this means, then I think Adrian Warnock's book Raised with Christ: how the resurrection changes everything looks well worth your investment. And in this preach, John Piper summarises six of the great things that come from the resurrection.

UPDATE: Audio available here.

'Did you receive the Holy Spirit?'

2010-10-21T11:06:00.002+01:00

These are some resources for a talk I did to students at King's Church about receiving the Holy Spirit.

At Newday 2009 I spoke about the weirdness that can happen when the Holy Spirit comes, so if you get freaked out that could be a useful listen.
To hear a clear presentation about receiving the Holy Spirit you can find a talk on it by Terry Virgo here.

If you want to dig a bit deeper, I've found the following books very helpful. They're all by guys who really love the Bible and who teach that we can experience the Holy Spirit today because that's what the Bible says:

Surprised by the power of the Spirit and Surprised by the voice of God by Jack Deere
Joy unspeakable by D. Martyn Lloyd Jones. I enjoyed this book so much I wrote a summary of it here, and posted a load of the amazing stories of people being filled with the Spirit here.

Bloody foreigners

2010-10-16T18:33:00.001+01:00

Neither of my grandfathers were born in the country they died in, the country I was born in. One of them fled from the second totalitarian regime to invade his country in a decade, never to see his parents again. The other came here for work, and was once arrested and briefly imprisoned because of his accent and the political ideals of some people he knew. Both married women who lived here (each of whom had mixed ancestry of their own), got jobs, and brought up their families.

They are two typical stories of emigration, the kind recorded and celebrated by Robert Winder in his book, ironically titled Bloody foreigners. In impressive – sometimes exhausting – detail, Winder charts the history of immigration to Britain, from the tribes who first came to this island to those who arrived just a few years ago. In doing so he undermines claims of English racial purity, be they subtle or not, observing, ‘Our roots are neither clean nor straight, they are impossibly tangled.’

Books like these are often treasure-troves of eyebrow raising facts and this one is no exception: Those classic English shops Tesco and Marks and Spencer were both founded by immigrants. Nearly one third of the British Army in World War One – three million men – came from the Empire. Jews were first forced to wear yellow identification badges by an English ruler 650 years before Hitler revisited the idea.

With an array of statistics and anecdotes Winder shows how each new arrival to these shores has been greeted, challenged, and thrived. It is a long story to tell because it has been happening throughout history. It is by turns encouraging and depressing: people have always come here in hope and often those hopes are proved well-founded – but not before much bitterness has been endured.

These mixed feelings continue with the realisation that the national conversation about this important and emotive subject is barely ever as carefully considered as this book. Winder resists simplistic arguments that portray all immigrants as fundamentally good or bad: they/we are all people, teeming with vices, virtues, and ambiguities. Elements of his conclusions are frustratingly ambiguous but that is part of his point: borders may be simple to draw but they neither contain nor confront ideas any more successfully than they do people.

With the reality of globalisation, the short- and long-term economic challenges Britain faces, and with the rise of far-right parties across Europe (predictable enough in times of economic hardship but exacerbated by the argument about immigration having been so poorly handled by governments), books like this are essential reading and the stories they tell need to known by our schoolchildren. We are currently relying on The X-factor for this which, by showing a human face instead of an angry headline, is remarkably in tune with Winder’s ambition.

Newfrontiers fashion update

2010-10-15T11:21:00.001+01:00

It was so good to be at Newfrontiers Prayer & Fasting this week, both to pray for myself and for people and churches around the world. It was also really nice to catch up with loads of friends from across the country, which feels even more valuable now that I'm located in what was termed an "extremity".

On the leaders' fashion front, there was the expected abundance of checked shirts, which I have no complaint about because a. they look fine on middle-aged men, and b. I have three myself. Those two comments are unrelated.

More unusual was the presence of another item. There weren't lots of them but a number of people who led parts of the meetings were wearing them, and where they lead others are likely to follow. They were wearing... bodywarmers. Some people might prefer the term gilet but at my Primary School we called them bodywarmers. I can't imagine that I'll be hitching a ride on this bandwagon as it would likely give me the silhouette of a Purple Ronnie drawing. The only explanation I can think of is that this is some kind of celebration of the 25th anniversary of Back to the Future.

I recently went to see the rerelease of Marty McFly's first adventure, with a bunch of people who weren't born when it first came out. That uncomfortable fact aside, it was a fun evening: ridiculous story, brilliant soundtrack, great quotes, nostalgia, and Christopher Lloyd stealing every scene he's in. But it didn't make me want to start wearing a bodywarmer.

How I nearly had lunch with the Pope

2010-10-07T14:31:00.005+01:00

Well of course I didn’t but he was just round the corner from me. A hundred yards or so down the road from my flat, he had a lunch that started with haggis, neeps and tatties, then progressed to roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding. If I’d known that was on the table I would have been pretty keen to get an invite, although apple pie for pudding would have made for a disappointing ending.

In the same way, there are some things I agree with him on, and some very important things on which we'd disagree strongly. If that sounds like classic Christian bickering, it kind of is – because it matters more when it’s about Jesus.

What I thought was most interesting was the opportunity he took to define faith in Britain, and particularly what is known as ‘new’ atheism (Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al.). He used the phrase “aggressive forms of secularism” and variations on that theme. This seems to have helped people realise what is happening in the UK at the moment, as articles like this in The Independent testify:

In their perceived role as guardians of European secular liberalism against the growth of Muslim communities across Europe, it seems that many New Atheists are now compromising the very principles of religious tolerance fundamental this tradition. Secularism should be about allowing individuals and communities to live by their own values without official interference. However what we are now seeing is the bizarre rise of illiberal liberals.

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In other ‘what’s going on’ news, Tim Keller has written another helpful article about ‘late’ modernism and Christianity:

The root idea of modernity (even more fundamental than confidence in rationality, etc.) is the overturning of all authority outside of the self. In the 18th century, European Enlightenment thinkers insisted that the modern person must question all tradition, revelation, and external authority by subjecting them to the supreme court of his or her own reason and intuition. We are our own moral authority…

I conclude that an over-emphasis on the post-ness of our situation can lead us to celebrate the greater tolerance, the end of "Christendom," the fall of Reason-capital-R, and the openness to the spiritual, without seeing that it is based on a kind of hyper-modernity that is perhaps more antithetical to Christianity than ever.

Will ‘late modern’ replace ‘post-modern’ as the most overused shorthand description of The World in evangelicalism? Time will tell.

Fresher

2010-10-01T11:25:00.001+01:00

“Where do you get nice men giving out flip flops outside a club from?!”

“The church” I replied.

“THE CHURCH!” she agreed, before heading towards a taxi, walking rather more easily than she had been.

We were outside Edinburgh nightclub City as it hosted its first student event of the term. For the third time that Freshers’ Week a bunch of us from King’s had gone out with 100 bags of helpful goodies for people who were heading home after a long night: flip flops, bottles of water, sweets, even a tea bag to help with the morning after. And a flier for King’s, of course. It was a way of loving our city and doing it some good. With such an enthusiastic team and so many grateful punters (and club staff), it was difficult to think of a better place to be at two in the morning.

At more civilised hours we set up an outdoor living room in the middle of studentland offering free tea, coffee, cakes and chat, and we've been grabbing as many Christian students as we can to help them have a great degree by getting them into church.

All this whilst processing the fact that it's twelve years since I was a clueless Fresher: that I should now be doing this is yet more evidence of amazing grace.

Work

2010-09-28T13:10:00.000+01:00

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore. When you wake filled with dread at the day that lies ahead, that’s probably because you’ve got to go to work. I’ve recently finished six weeks of teaching English as a foreign language and this account will form part of my therapy for that.

It’s been a strange time that I haven’t really enjoyed, and yet throughout it God has been so good to me. For starters, when the time came to start looking for work, I emailed my CV to a few companies on Wednesday, I got a phone call and job offer on Thursday and started work on Monday. After that four-week contract ended I got another two weeks’ work which took me right up to Freshers’ Week, which I had already planned to spend fully doing student stuff for King’s Church. The timing, in other words, was perfect. That is blessing.

I had to keep telling myself that (and 2 Thessalonians 3:10) because I spent much of those six weeks feeling nervous and incompetent, and, without sounding arrogant, it’s been a long time since I’d experienced that so consistently. Blank looks from students, poor explanations from me (especially re. grammar: it is possible to be able to know something without being able to explain it), lessons that took far longer to plan than I’d expected, class activities that took much less time to complete than I’d hoped, regretting going to bed because it brought the next day closer… The contrast with when I started working for Brickhill in 2002 was striking (though that may have been because I was too arrogant to notice all my mistakes back then).

So the shadow of my previous employment hung heavy over each day. I don’t regret leaving Brickhill and Bedford because I'm closer to Deb and I know that this is God’s plan, but church leadership and preaching are what I love doing. To have been paid to do them was an incredible privilege and for it to cease takes some getting used to. A church leader I know often speaks of the goldfish-bowl effect of working for a church: your work life, social life, and church life are all the same thing. That brings unique pressure but so does trying to leap from one bowl to another several times a day, especially when you’re not used to it. I was trying to plan lessons, write talks, see Deb, prepare for Freshers’ Week, eat, sleep, etc. For someone who likes to concentrate on one thing at a time so he can give his all to it, this was hard.

To just complain about all of this, however, would be ridiculous: there have been loads of blessings. Deb has been incredibly brilliant the whole time, patiently encouraging and challenging and lovely, whist doing a ridiculously hard job and revising for a huge exam. I am still getting lots of new opportunities to preach and lead which are really exciting. I was able to cycle to work, which I really enjoy doing. I’ve been humbled again by being rubbish at something. I’ve been reminded of the misery of unhappy employment. I must have grown somehow or other because hard times are usually more formative than good ones and I’m outside a long-established comfort zone. My preference for ‘one thing at a time’ doesn’t go well with normal life so I need practice at multiple plate-spinning and I’ve certainly been getting that. And, of course, there’s the simple fact that in a time of economic strife I walked into a couple of jobs, and even when I’m not working I have financial support to help keep me going. I’m hoping that the realisation of all this will help me to have the right attitude when the next job comes along.

Maybe you shouldn't burn those Korans

2010-09-10T20:48:00.000+01:00

I know it’s not good to speak ill of family but Reverend Terry Jones is getting me down. His proposed publicity stunt of a public burning of copies of the Koran is now an international incident and, once again, Jesus is made to look stupid by someone He loves.

America is still deeply wounded by 9/11, and some Christians are pretty weird, so these kind of things are bound to happen but it still drives me mad when they do. Aside from the damage to Jesus’ reputation, which is the most important aspect in all of this, if he thinks that Islam is a danger and Muslims are his enemy then he shouldn’t be treating them in this way. Surely he should be aware of what Romans 12:17-21 says, it even talks about burning:

Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honourable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

It’s probably a sign of how divinely-inspired this wisdom is that Christians are almost as crap at following it as everyone else.

When smart guys argue

2010-09-04T15:19:00.000+01:00

Professor Stephen Hawking says God isn't necessary to account for the start of the Universe, Professor John Lennox disagrees, Luke Davydaitis, B.A. English Literature (with honours) gives links.

Why you shouldn't read this blog

2010-08-30T11:25:00.000+01:00

A thought that had been quietly shuffling around near the back of my mind recently decided to clear its throat and ask me to address it. Its quietness was part of the problem. ‘There’s too much coming in to your head and running around it, shouting’ was the essence of the complaint. And it was right.

It’s now possible, if you want, to never truly ‘switch off’. You can have your phone (which you carry around with you at all times) ‘push’ your emails to you the moment they arrive, along with calls and messages, and if there’s ever a pause you can go online and check out the blogs you subscribe to, the websites you read, your Facebook profile, what people are Tweeting, etc. etc. ETC. This can be useful but it can also be really unhelpful: a brain that is always being stimulated externally will surely lose the essential virtue of self-stimulation. Moreover, with so much being said so quickly, our ability to consider and meditate, to form an opinion after deep consideration rather than a catchy headline, must also be under threat. Use of the Internet is just one aspect of this.

Much as it galls me to quote Ferris Bueller, he was right about this: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” There are profound truths in this world which cannot be discovered in a sound bite. Perhaps they can be described, but not understood.

My review of Carl Honore’s In praise of slow has reminded me that this idea has been kicking around for a while, so I’ve now made a few changes where I can.

I’m reading much less about football! As I mentioned recently, sport loves to present itself out of all proportion in order to claim our hearts and our wallets. It doesn’t get much out of either of those from me, and I want it to get less time too.

I still want to know what’s going on in the world, and what other people think about it. The BBC, an occasional newspaper, The Week, and Bryan Appleyard’s blog all help with this. Along with, you know, talking to people.

I decided I needed to apply this to Christian material as well. Above all the other forms of Christianity, Evangelicalism loves the preached word and, therefore, the imperative. Which can make blog-reading seem like 17 people urgently telling you to address 170 areas of your life at once. I realised that I was reading so many (perfectly well-motivated) suggestions that I didn’t know what to focus on. The virtue of reading a book, or a blog series perhaps, is that I get time with a subject, and this gives me space to think about it and, I believe, gives God more opportunity to speak to me. Of the bloggers I still read, Ray Ortlund is the closest I’ve found to something that is helpfully brief and thoughtful. Alongside him I’m glad to have my spiritual grandfather, Terry Virgo, leadership challenges from Steve Tibbert and Timothy Keller, and a few friends. They’re enough.

I think this will actually make me better at working and responding quickly when I have to, because my brain will have had downtime, and my thoughts and attitudes will be more considered and consistent. My brain is still itching to be stimulated all the time but I’m going to try to train it differently. Reading fewer blogs will help and if you stop reading mine to do the same then I wouldn’t blame you.

Review (kind of): Home

2010-08-24T22:11:00.000+01:00

I don’t really know where to start, or what to say. That’s probably the best evidence of having encountered great art.

I have read Gilead again, Marilynne Robinson’s masterpiece that first confronted me with its gentle wisdom a year ago. (I’m giving ‘gentle’ the Biblical/Greek meaning of great power under control.) Then I read its sequel/accompaniment, Home, which stood similarly before me without in any way seeming to need me. Making me a spectator, showing me life’s desperate need for faith, hope and love, and the pain which they, by their presence or absence, will cause.

They are two very different novels, though their timescale and cast of characters are essentially the same. The focus moves from the narrator/hero(?) of Gilead to the family of his friend, principally a daughter and a son. The house of the title is quiet and awkward, echoing the lives gathered within. Little happens, and nothing that would matter beyond the building’s walls, but it means the world inside them. So your patience is required, and will be rewarded.

The theme of prodigals runs deep through both, Job’s suffering too. Robinson’s Christianity informs every line without ever seeming to preach, in the worst sense of the word. It’s a gift I wish I had. To the frustration of those who want answers to everything, this is not a meditation on why things happen that we wish didn’t, it is a description of such things and attempts to live through them. That makes it profoundly sad and real. If it seems to lack the perfection of Gilead, that is perhaps because its perspective is so different. Different but indissolubly related, like the other side of a coin.

“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13) If you have any interest in those words, you should read these books. And there I go preaching again.

Preparing for a new football season

2010-08-03T17:39:00.000+01:00

It's great fun but it's not really that important, is it? No.

Turning to God from idols

2010-07-13T13:54:00.002+01:00

Last Sunday I preached about Jesus and idols from 1 Thessalonians 1. As promised (but a day late, sorry) here are some resources I've found really helpful on this subject.

Counterfeit gods by Timothy Keller. Short and easy to read, more helpful on diagnosis than cure. Available from Amazon, etc.
Idols of the heart and 'Vanity Fair' by David Powlinson. A really interesting article from the Christian counselling perspective.
Exposing idols by Tom Shaw. Excellent talk on idols and how Jesus smashes them.

World Cup day 25

2010-07-11T23:15:00.006+01:00

Spain 1 - 0 Netherlands (AET)
Peerless Iniesta vanquishes dirty Dutch.

World Cup day 24

2010-07-11T23:15:00.002+01:00

Germany 3 - 2 Uruguay
Fitting ending for tournament's entertainers.

World Cup day 23

2010-07-10T14:58:00.000+01:00

Germany 0 - 1 Spain
Midfield masterminds draw German sting.

World Cup day 22

2010-07-10T14:51:00.000+01:00

Uruguay 2 - 3 Netherlands
Bronckhorst screamer helps justice prevail.

World Cup day 21

2010-07-04T21:39:00.001+01:00

Germany 4 - 0 Argentina
Another dodgy defence taken apart.

Spain 1 - 0 Paraguay
More missed penalties, more Villa.

World Cup day 20

2010-07-03T09:45:00.000+01:00

Brazil 1 - 2 Netherlands
Sneijder double turns game around.

Uruguay 1 (p4) - 1 (p2) Ghana
Double penalty heartbreak and injustice.

World Cup day 19

2010-06-29T23:46:00.002+01:00

Paraguay 0 (p5) - 0 (p3) Japan
Looked like penalties early on.

Spain 1 - 0 Portugal
Villa again, confounds Portugal's conservatism.

World Cup day 18

2010-06-28T22:12:00.000+01:00

Netherlands 2 - 1 Slovakia
Still not flying, except Robben.

Brazil 3 - 0 Chile
Brazil blend pragmatics and magic.

World Cup day 17

2010-06-28T15:20:00.000+01:00

Germany 4 - 1 England
Shambolic defence competently, simply, destroyed.

Argentina 3 - 1 Mexico
Offside 'goal' gave unnecessary advantage.

World Cup day 16

2010-06-28T15:16:00.000+01:00

Uruguay 2 - 1 South Korea
Uruguay's strikers keep on scoring.

USA 1 - 2 Ghana (AET)
African joy extended by Gyan.