I seem to be getting into a habit of writing these blog posts on the bus to work - hence the lack of links or pictures - basically because it's free time with an internet connection. The fact that I don't seem to have time during the rest of the day struck me particularly this morning, because I was already thinking about Sabbath.
My Bible reading this morning was the passage in Exodus containing the 10 Commandments. Now it doesn't matter if you think that the 10 Commandments are the actual words of God, or if you think they're a Bronze Age social code with a tag saying 'And by the way God says this, so you'd better do as you're told'; the point is the same: a day of rest is not recommended, but mandated.
I don't keep this commandment. Over the years I've broken them all except for one, but right now the issue for me is that I don't have sanctioned, agreed, planned-for downtime. Instead what I have is a never-ending to-do list, and hours or days when I think 'I'm too tired, I can't be bothered, I've had enough of this,' and I then do what should be leisure activities while feeling guilty for wasting time.
Of course this isn't good, and I know I should make a change, give myself permission to chill out, even plan a deliberate Sabbath, but the truth is that even thinking about it makes me begin to panic that I have too much to do and not enough time. Planned rest may be such a good idea that ancient societies (or even God) said we should do it, but there are too many things I've got to get done.
Showing posts with label christian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label christian. Show all posts
Friday, January 28, 2011
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Epiphany
Today, 6th January, is the day when we celebrate Epiphany: the visit of the Magi to Jesus. It's also traditionally the day when we take down Christmas decorations. It's the end of Christmastide, and the beginning (depending on your tradition - if you're a Christian) either of Ordinary Time or of the season of Epiphany. It tends, however, to feel much more like an end than a beginning. The Christmas lights are turned off; the baubles put away; the tree goes either back in the attic or to be chopped up for composting. The house feels feels bigger and emptier and somehow much more bare than it did before Christmas. And Ordinary Time (which comes from the same Latin root as "ordinal" - the numbers like first, second, third) feels like just counting off the weeks and, well, ordinary. In some traditions the Christmas crib is left for a while longer, and figures of three kings with gold, frankincense and myrrh are placed next to the infant Jesus. But that's the end of the Christmas story - bar the slaughter of the innocents (which is another story that never seems to make it into children's Bibles).
Why does this feel so much like an ending? In the early years of Christianity, as it spread, it made good sense to co-opt existing festivals. As people who celebrated a mid-winter festival became Christians, it was helpful to be able to say "You already know that in the middle of winter, something amazing happens: the days begin to get longer again. You talk about this using the language of birth, of newness. The Good News is that you're right! What you've been grasping at is the truth, that Jesus was born, and that the midwinter of your sin and shame is melting away." But this was part of a cycle (you just wait until the Spring of Resurrection), whereas now I think that we tend to see our festivals as discrete parcels of time. Never mind that in consumer culture the bulk of the festival happens before the event, rather than after; too many centuries of clocks have made us not very good at thinking of continuous time. We forget that the events we celebrate: births and birthdays, achievements, victories and memorials, are milestones, not destinations. They mark where we are on a journey; they're not an end in themselves, which we then reluctantly abandon to move on to the next distant target.
So I hope that Epiphany, for you and for me, is not the start of something, but the continuation of something. The Magi brought gifts which referred to Jesus' adult roles as king, priest and sacrifice. They were, in fact, for life, not just for Christmas. I hope your Christmas has been good. But I also hope that it is the kind which leads to many days of Ordinary goodness.
Why does this feel so much like an ending? In the early years of Christianity, as it spread, it made good sense to co-opt existing festivals. As people who celebrated a mid-winter festival became Christians, it was helpful to be able to say "You already know that in the middle of winter, something amazing happens: the days begin to get longer again. You talk about this using the language of birth, of newness. The Good News is that you're right! What you've been grasping at is the truth, that Jesus was born, and that the midwinter of your sin and shame is melting away." But this was part of a cycle (you just wait until the Spring of Resurrection), whereas now I think that we tend to see our festivals as discrete parcels of time. Never mind that in consumer culture the bulk of the festival happens before the event, rather than after; too many centuries of clocks have made us not very good at thinking of continuous time. We forget that the events we celebrate: births and birthdays, achievements, victories and memorials, are milestones, not destinations. They mark where we are on a journey; they're not an end in themselves, which we then reluctantly abandon to move on to the next distant target.
So I hope that Epiphany, for you and for me, is not the start of something, but the continuation of something. The Magi brought gifts which referred to Jesus' adult roles as king, priest and sacrifice. They were, in fact, for life, not just for Christmas. I hope your Christmas has been good. But I also hope that it is the kind which leads to many days of Ordinary goodness.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
A baby in a stable
Last Sunday Peter gave a talk based on John the Baptist's preaching in Matthew. He asked how we can preach the gospel, using an example of some 19th century ideas about hell and damnation - rescuing people who are "hanging over the edge of the pit". We were asked to think about whether or not that kind of language (or those kind of ideas) are right today - what would John the Baptist be saying now?
I've been thinking about this, and though I don't claim to have any well-worked out answers (and certainly not final or authoritative ones!) I can't help coming back to my previous thoughts about who church is for. Is it for people who don't necessarily feel they need to be there, but like the company or think they should show their face once in a while? Or is it for people who know they need something, but don't necessarily think that they'll find it in church? I know there are lots of other kinds of people between these two extremes, but my feeling is that the church in general has quite a lot of the former and not enough of the latter.
I'd really like to see the church being a first resort for anyone who is lonely, desperate, unhappy, friendless, addicted, ashamed or bewildered. But I don't believe that those people will seek out Jesus (especially not in the church) as long as they are lectured or talked down to by people inside the church. I don't think that they will come - even if they are invited - if the church is seen as a group of people who think they know best, telling the rest of the world just how wrong they are.
I think that the church has something of an image problem. Strangely, I believe that the wider culture is actually helping with this. Church is increasingly being seen as a refuge for the intellectually incompetent, the social misfits, the bizarre fringes of the human race. And that's a good thing. I think that we as a worshipping community should identify strongly with that. We are not the people who have got it all together. We are not the best of the best, or even the middle of the average. We are the people who are beginning to grasp just how massively we've messed up. But we come together on a Sunday morning (or a weekday evening) because we have found a hope, an answer, a love that will never give up on us - and we'd love everyone else to find it too.
Of course, as a church we don't have to do that. Nobody says we have to admit our failings in public. We can stand proud, knowing that not only are we children of God (true) but that he has revealed himself to us (also true). We can let everyone know that they need to be saved (this, I think, is referred to as "speaking the truth in love"), and then we can shut the doors of the church and sing our groovy up-to-date worship songs, with a request that the last member left will please turn out the lights. We can, in short, give the world the church it expects.
Should we? I can't say for sure, but in a couple of weeks time I'm going to be celebrating the birth of the Son of God, and he wasn't born anywhere that people expected. The King of Kings and Lord of Lords was born in a stable. We could do worse than think about what that means for us.
I've been thinking about this, and though I don't claim to have any well-worked out answers (and certainly not final or authoritative ones!) I can't help coming back to my previous thoughts about who church is for. Is it for people who don't necessarily feel they need to be there, but like the company or think they should show their face once in a while? Or is it for people who know they need something, but don't necessarily think that they'll find it in church? I know there are lots of other kinds of people between these two extremes, but my feeling is that the church in general has quite a lot of the former and not enough of the latter.
I'd really like to see the church being a first resort for anyone who is lonely, desperate, unhappy, friendless, addicted, ashamed or bewildered. But I don't believe that those people will seek out Jesus (especially not in the church) as long as they are lectured or talked down to by people inside the church. I don't think that they will come - even if they are invited - if the church is seen as a group of people who think they know best, telling the rest of the world just how wrong they are.
I think that the church has something of an image problem. Strangely, I believe that the wider culture is actually helping with this. Church is increasingly being seen as a refuge for the intellectually incompetent, the social misfits, the bizarre fringes of the human race. And that's a good thing. I think that we as a worshipping community should identify strongly with that. We are not the people who have got it all together. We are not the best of the best, or even the middle of the average. We are the people who are beginning to grasp just how massively we've messed up. But we come together on a Sunday morning (or a weekday evening) because we have found a hope, an answer, a love that will never give up on us - and we'd love everyone else to find it too.
Of course, as a church we don't have to do that. Nobody says we have to admit our failings in public. We can stand proud, knowing that not only are we children of God (true) but that he has revealed himself to us (also true). We can let everyone know that they need to be saved (this, I think, is referred to as "speaking the truth in love"), and then we can shut the doors of the church and sing our groovy up-to-date worship songs, with a request that the last member left will please turn out the lights. We can, in short, give the world the church it expects.
Should we? I can't say for sure, but in a couple of weeks time I'm going to be celebrating the birth of the Son of God, and he wasn't born anywhere that people expected. The King of Kings and Lord of Lords was born in a stable. We could do worse than think about what that means for us.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Joy
I got too little sleep last night; I've recently both been bereaved and become unemployed; the car has broken down and I don't have enough money to repair it, and yet when I was walking up to Tesco in the freezing cold this morning because we had no bread, I was so happy I felt like singing.
Recently I've been waking up in the morning feeling happy, with an overwhelming feeling of thankfulness for all the good things I have. I am amazingly blessed. And more than that, I have an incredible source of joy, deep down inside me, that is far better than any transient feelings of happiness.
For anyone who says "I want some of whatever he's on," I'm afraid that you might not like the answer, because corny as it sounds in this superficial and cynical age, I'm fairly sure that this is down to Jesus. My joy is linked to knowing that I am loved, with an overwhelming, unbelievable, astonishing, world-saving, death-conquering love, and that nothing, not unemployment or bereavement or malfunctioning Renaults or cold morning walks to Tesco can ever separate me from that love.
Recently I've been waking up in the morning feeling happy, with an overwhelming feeling of thankfulness for all the good things I have. I am amazingly blessed. And more than that, I have an incredible source of joy, deep down inside me, that is far better than any transient feelings of happiness.
For anyone who says "I want some of whatever he's on," I'm afraid that you might not like the answer, because corny as it sounds in this superficial and cynical age, I'm fairly sure that this is down to Jesus. My joy is linked to knowing that I am loved, with an overwhelming, unbelievable, astonishing, world-saving, death-conquering love, and that nothing, not unemployment or bereavement or malfunctioning Renaults or cold morning walks to Tesco can ever separate me from that love.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Consumerist Christmas
I know that retailers make a lot of money from Christmas (though I have my own opinions about that) and I understand that they want to start selling Christmas-themed goods as early as possible to maximise profits, but it just seems bizarre to sell things in Christmas packaging that won't even make it into November.
Friday, October 08, 2010
I have been robbed
Rather annoyingly, I had several emails today from PayPal, the last one of which said they they had limited access to my account while they made further checks. It turns out that someone calling themselves Arthur Waller has somehow taken two payments out of my current account via PayPal, the first for $163 and the second for £178. It's not fun being stolen from - oddly enough, being a Christian, it's not hard to forgive "Arthur Waller", but it's difficult to see how we'll make it through to the end of the month if we don't get our money back pretty promptly. Do I believe that living as a Christian means forgiving people? Yes, certainly. Do I genuinely believe that God will help us get by with a lot less money than we'd planned on having? Erm...
Update 00:40: just got an email from PayPal to say that the investigation has completed and the funds will be returned to my account within five working days.
Monday, October 05, 2009
Education for atheists
One of the atheist arguments against bringing up your children in any kind of faith is that it's abusive, forcing children to accept fairy stories (like the Bible) as fact, before their minds can learn to think critically. I've always had a couple of reservations about this, not least that I think it's better for the parent-child relationship if parents are truthful, as far as possible, and congruent: that what they think, do, say and believe should all fit together. It's bad for children if parents say "I really love you" and then punch them: obviously punching them is bad for them, but longer-lasting harm is done by the lack of congruence: how does that child learn to trust someone else who says "I love you"? So no matter whether or not you think that telling children about God is a terrible thing to do, I'm sure that believing in God but not telling your children about him will cause harm to a child. What will a child make of an adult who lives their life by certain rules but doesn't talk about them - or talks about them as if they are matters of little consequence? Besides which, if we shouldn't talk to children about religion before they have learned to think critically, should we talk to them about rational humanism? Do we teach them to think before we give them anything to think about?
As an aside, I'm always a little perturbed by the use of words like "brainwashing" and "indoctrination" which get applied to how believers bring up their children. I have to say that if we were seriously carrying out the kind of mind-control techniques that the caricature Christian is supposed to do, we'd be a bit better at it. Thousands and thousands of young people leave the church every year. Either our brainwashing is, frankly, a bit rubbish, or (shock!) they haven't been brainwashed at all, just brought up by their parents and chosen (like millions of other young people) to seek out alternatives. Of course, as a Christian, I strongly believe that one of the things the church should do with teenagers is to teach them to think for themselves, to ask hard questions and to be dissatisfied with facile answers. That way there is a chance that they won't get to 18 and suddenly discover that a simple Sunday-school faith doesn't really help to make sense of a complex adult world.
Anyway, this post was sparked by a piece on the Theos site, with research that suggests that converts to atheism appear to be less well-educated than converts to theism. If true, this would seem to run counter to the New Atheist proposition that if only everyone learned to think for themselves, religion would die out. In fact, it seems that if you come out of school with few or no qualifications, you may stop believing in God, but if you go to university and can write a dissertation, you may start believing in God, even if you weren'tindoctrinated brought up that way.
As an aside, I'm always a little perturbed by the use of words like "brainwashing" and "indoctrination" which get applied to how believers bring up their children. I have to say that if we were seriously carrying out the kind of mind-control techniques that the caricature Christian is supposed to do, we'd be a bit better at it. Thousands and thousands of young people leave the church every year. Either our brainwashing is, frankly, a bit rubbish, or (shock!) they haven't been brainwashed at all, just brought up by their parents and chosen (like millions of other young people) to seek out alternatives. Of course, as a Christian, I strongly believe that one of the things the church should do with teenagers is to teach them to think for themselves, to ask hard questions and to be dissatisfied with facile answers. That way there is a chance that they won't get to 18 and suddenly discover that a simple Sunday-school faith doesn't really help to make sense of a complex adult world.
Anyway, this post was sparked by a piece on the Theos site, with research that suggests that converts to atheism appear to be less well-educated than converts to theism. If true, this would seem to run counter to the New Atheist proposition that if only everyone learned to think for themselves, religion would die out. In fact, it seems that if you come out of school with few or no qualifications, you may stop believing in God, but if you go to university and can write a dissertation, you may start believing in God, even if you weren't
Friday, October 02, 2009
Armageddon, popularity of
Don't ask me why, but I was looking on Google Trends and I did a search for "Armageddon". I'd love to know the reason for this: there's a spike in searches for Armageddon just before the end of every year. It's not right at the end of the year, when people might change the calendar and be reminded of the eventual end of time, and it doesn't seem to bear much relation to related news stories.
The sermon for Advent Sunday usually looks forward not only to the coming of Christ at Christmas, but also to his coming again. Either the eschaton is being preached so widely during Advent that lots of people are going home and using Google to find out what to expect (it is, after all, easier to understand than Revelation), or the Church's traditional seasonal liturgy fits with the zeitgeist rather better than I might have expected.
The sermon for Advent Sunday usually looks forward not only to the coming of Christ at Christmas, but also to his coming again. Either the eschaton is being preached so widely during Advent that lots of people are going home and using Google to find out what to expect (it is, after all, easier to understand than Revelation), or the Church's traditional seasonal liturgy fits with the zeitgeist rather better than I might have expected.
Engaging with "new atheism"
I'm interested in how we as Christians can engage with the kind of anti-Christian, pro-rationalism outlook that gets referred to as "new atheism". I think that the study of apologetics should be a top priority for Christians, so that we can explain our beliefs as we should. Today I found a superb example of this. In Australia there is a campaign called Jesus - All About Life. The campaign didn't buy the .com version of their website, only the .com.au one, and now there is an atheist rebuttal site on jesusallaboutlife.com. However, it's there, on this post, that there's a wonderful discussion in the comments. The Christian commenter, John Bartik, whose strangely-named website is here, is patient, tenacious and knowledgable. I think he does a great job of ignoring all the bits of the other commenter's argument that are repetitive or recycled Dawkinisms, which would make me throw up my hands in dismay or chew my own arm off in frustration, and focuses on areas for taking the conversation forward. This is what being a Christian should look like!
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Post-Lent reflection
It's rather more than six and a half weeks since my last blog post, though my Twitter feed has been busy, and I've even ventured into the confusion of another revamp to Facebook. Apart from being glad that Digsby plus Twitter integration means that I don't really need to go on the actual Facebook site, what have I learned?
- Giving up telling people about me was easier than I thought it would be
- Not knowing what was going on with other people was harder than I expected. I have got used to knowing what's happening with people since I joined Facebook, but because I never maintained friendships before that, I had no fallback methods (calling round to see someone, phoning them) of finding out what was going on for people.
- Using Twitter and Facebook is self-reinforcing. Having "I'm not using Facebook for Lent" as a status is OK, but in most cases I don't want the last thing I said to be the last thing I say, so I keep wanting to make sure my status is up to date. One tweet leads to another.
- Living online is pervasive; it encroaches steadily on real-world life, so that it's possible to spend increasing amounts of time reporting and reflecting on real-world life online, and then spending even more time reporting and reflecting on online life.
- In a consumer society, there's a strong drive to be interesting or appear important, because that turns me into more of a saleable commodity. If you don't think this is true, consider Facebook not telling you (and everyone else) how many friends you have, or Twitter without the number of your followers in the sidebar.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Lenten discipline (more silence)
I've decided to fast from online life for Lent, and as a start I'm going to stop using Twitter and Facebook, and have changed my browser from Flock back to Firefox (and uninstalled the Facebook and Twitter add-ons). I'm also going to try and cut down on the surfing that is purely for distraction, though that may be difficult - how much time spent on BBC News is for keeping up to date and how much is avoiding doing anything else? I also want to try and keep up with writing, which will mean using Helium and Google Docs (as well as research). I will simply have to make sure I draw the line between what's necessary and what's not; I guess that's where the discipline comes in.
Hopefully in about six and a half weeks I'll let people know how it went.
Hopefully in about six and a half weeks I'll let people know how it went.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Legalism
For a while now I’ve been working through “Celebration of Discipline” with a friend, and I have to say that it’s extremely challenging as well as helpful. The premise of the book is that, for all our efforts to change ourselves, there are some things that we just can’t do by our own efforts, and that living a Christian life (in the fullest sense of being like Jesus) is one of those things. So instead we need to ask God to change us, and we engage with this through the practice of the Disciplines. There’s a lot more than that, including ideas like Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace”, but basically the idea is that the disciplines help to put us in a place where God can work in and through us.
One of the other themes of the book is the temptation to legalism, and it's that I've been thinking about recently. Richard Foster describes a narrow path with a precipice each side. On one side of the path is the temptation to believe that there's nothing we can do to change ourselves, and just have to sit back and wait for God to do things to us. On the other is the belief that we can earn salvation by keeping lots of rules. It's this legalism to which I am tempted to stray at the moment: I'm discovering what a delicate balance it is between wanting to do more of something positive and using my failure to do those things as a stick with which to beat myself.
I wonder how many things there are that change from "should" to "ought". I should lose some weight - I'd be healthier and likely to live longer if I did - but the guilt after eating pizza and ice cream definitely comes from the (slightly, but vitally) different "I ought to lose weight". I think there's something here about our willingness to do what's right: if the things we should do are in fact going to be good for us, whether that's getting enough sleep, being honest or recycling plastic bottles, then surely we should want to do them. Of course, we don't; we do things that are bad for us and those around us. So we surround ourselves with rules and laws to keep us in line, which we then break. I remember reading about Foucault's use of the panopticon as part of an argument of how we internalise control and keep ourselves under surveillance, and I think that there's some truth in that, but more than that I think that there's a human tendency to keep moving between two ideas: that I am rational and given freedom to make choices I will make the right choices for me and society, or that I am flawed and likely to make poor choices, and therefore need guidance, correction and discipline from others. Oversimplifying massively, I think the first leads to free market economics, laissez-faire, humanism, religion that emphasises grace, equality and education-as-improvement; the second leads to education-as-instruction, protectionism, an increased role for the State and religion that emphasises guilt.
So here's my question for myself today: what am I doing that is a choice based on knowing what will be best, that I can feel satisfied with after doing it, or can freely choose not to do if I so wish, and what am I doing that is based on feeling that I really ought to be doing it whether I want to or not, that I might feel miserable about having to do or will feel guilty about not doing?
One of the other themes of the book is the temptation to legalism, and it's that I've been thinking about recently. Richard Foster describes a narrow path with a precipice each side. On one side of the path is the temptation to believe that there's nothing we can do to change ourselves, and just have to sit back and wait for God to do things to us. On the other is the belief that we can earn salvation by keeping lots of rules. It's this legalism to which I am tempted to stray at the moment: I'm discovering what a delicate balance it is between wanting to do more of something positive and using my failure to do those things as a stick with which to beat myself.
I wonder how many things there are that change from "should" to "ought". I should lose some weight - I'd be healthier and likely to live longer if I did - but the guilt after eating pizza and ice cream definitely comes from the (slightly, but vitally) different "I ought to lose weight". I think there's something here about our willingness to do what's right: if the things we should do are in fact going to be good for us, whether that's getting enough sleep, being honest or recycling plastic bottles, then surely we should want to do them. Of course, we don't; we do things that are bad for us and those around us. So we surround ourselves with rules and laws to keep us in line, which we then break. I remember reading about Foucault's use of the panopticon as part of an argument of how we internalise control and keep ourselves under surveillance, and I think that there's some truth in that, but more than that I think that there's a human tendency to keep moving between two ideas: that I am rational and given freedom to make choices I will make the right choices for me and society, or that I am flawed and likely to make poor choices, and therefore need guidance, correction and discipline from others. Oversimplifying massively, I think the first leads to free market economics, laissez-faire, humanism, religion that emphasises grace, equality and education-as-improvement; the second leads to education-as-instruction, protectionism, an increased role for the State and religion that emphasises guilt.
So here's my question for myself today: what am I doing that is a choice based on knowing what will be best, that I can feel satisfied with after doing it, or can freely choose not to do if I so wish, and what am I doing that is based on feeling that I really ought to be doing it whether I want to or not, that I might feel miserable about having to do or will feel guilty about not doing?
Friday, October 31, 2008
Reuben's Confirmation
I'm really looking forward to Reuben being confirmed tonight, partly because it's a good thing in itself, partly because it's a (biological and church) family celebration - I don't have enough parties - and partly because it's a parenting thing.
A while ago when I was looking at the atheist bus stuff I browsed to the justgiving page for Alpha Course bus ads. Someone there had written "£2 to encourage you to target your indoctrination at consenting adults instead of undiscriminating children. It's good to talk." Having grown up with a faith that worked really well until I started asking questions in my late teens, then given up on faith entirely and gone away from God, and having had to think hard about what I believe and why, and needing a faith of which I can ask searching questions, I sincerely hope that we've been able to bring up our children to know about God, but also to have a faith that is flexible enough to grow with them. I think that the fact that Daniel has rejected Christianity altogether is at least encouraging that we've not just "indoctrinated" our children. Unless, of course, we're really not very good at indoctrination.
I probably feel just as frustrated with non-Christians who reject Christianity because it's "organized religion" or "just a myth" as I do with Christians who have a "simple faith", by which they mean they never ask questions. I know that I'm guilty of deciding that I'm not going to be a Muslim or a Buddhist without fully investigating the claims that Islam or Buddhism make, but at least I make that decision because I've made a thought-through decision for Christ, and it would be hypocritical to then consider other religions. (This doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to learn about other religions and belief systems, so that I can understand and respect those who practice them.) I also know that there are a lot of Christians who put people off Christianity through bigotry and intolerance or answering every honest question with a quotation from the (King James) Bible. But I remain convinced that Jesus is who he says he is and that an adult Christian faith, which Reuben will be confirming he has tonight, should be both flexible and robust enough to stand up to whatever questions and doubts and objections are thrown at it.
So I'll be very proud of Reuben tonight, not only because he has chosen to confirm publicly that he is a Christian, but also because he is a young man who knows how to think, and and has made an individual and thoughtful choice.
Which is pretty much all you could ask in a son.
A while ago when I was looking at the atheist bus stuff I browsed to the justgiving page for Alpha Course bus ads. Someone there had written "£2 to encourage you to target your indoctrination at consenting adults instead of undiscriminating children. It's good to talk." Having grown up with a faith that worked really well until I started asking questions in my late teens, then given up on faith entirely and gone away from God, and having had to think hard about what I believe and why, and needing a faith of which I can ask searching questions, I sincerely hope that we've been able to bring up our children to know about God, but also to have a faith that is flexible enough to grow with them. I think that the fact that Daniel has rejected Christianity altogether is at least encouraging that we've not just "indoctrinated" our children. Unless, of course, we're really not very good at indoctrination.
I probably feel just as frustrated with non-Christians who reject Christianity because it's "organized religion" or "just a myth" as I do with Christians who have a "simple faith", by which they mean they never ask questions. I know that I'm guilty of deciding that I'm not going to be a Muslim or a Buddhist without fully investigating the claims that Islam or Buddhism make, but at least I make that decision because I've made a thought-through decision for Christ, and it would be hypocritical to then consider other religions. (This doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to learn about other religions and belief systems, so that I can understand and respect those who practice them.) I also know that there are a lot of Christians who put people off Christianity through bigotry and intolerance or answering every honest question with a quotation from the (King James) Bible. But I remain convinced that Jesus is who he says he is and that an adult Christian faith, which Reuben will be confirming he has tonight, should be both flexible and robust enough to stand up to whatever questions and doubts and objections are thrown at it.
So I'll be very proud of Reuben tonight, not only because he has chosen to confirm publicly that he is a Christian, but also because he is a young man who knows how to think, and and has made an individual and thoughtful choice.
Which is pretty much all you could ask in a son.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Atheist bus advert
I shared this the other day, and I was going to write something about it at the time, but you know how it is, busy, busy, busy, lazy, etc; anyway I've still been thinking about it and wondering what it is about this that particularly made me pause. I suspect that it's because although I'm a Christian, I absolutely sympathize with Ariane Sherine: I think that bus adverts that threaten eternal damnation are bad news, not Good News. I was initially all for starting a campaign to have bus adverts saying "There is a God: he wants you to stop worrying and enjoy your life (Luke 12:22, John 16:24) - actually I still think that this might be a good idea - but more importantly I think that we Christians need to think carefully about the way that we present Jesus to the world. Despite Richard Dawkins - whose work I used to quite like - saying idiotic things like "thinking is anathema to religion" (ah yes, Professor Dawkins, the complete lack of Christian and other religious writers and academics for the last 1000 years is convincing evidence for this statement), I'm sure that there is a good case for engaging people with the Good News that Jesus makes a positive difference, here and now in this life, rather than suggesting that he's waiting around until the end of time to get you back for every little thing you ever did wrong. The British Humanist Association wants people to ask questions, to think for themselves and to enjoy life. If the Church doesn't want the same things, we're all in trouble.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Conversation
I have kind of mixed feelings about last night's Conversation. On the one hand, having Celia provide a focus for it - and giving notices about this - meant we had a lot more people come than have attended recently. On the other hand, those who attended were also quite a bit older than our usual demographic, which meant that we had to lose the background music, which I guess I always saw as part of the "cafe-style" atmosphere we were trying for.
But... people were very willing to move around, there was a lot of very animated conversation going on, including (from what I observed) some really thoughtful stuff about how we as a church may appear to others who are different in some way from us. I suppose we'll have to see what kind of feedback we get over the next week or so. I can't even really pin down what I imagined Conversation would look like if it really took off, but I know last night was different from whatever that mental picture might be.
The other interesting thing, from my point of view, was that I invited in a couple of lads who were playing football outside when I arrived. They didn't last long in the main room with everyone else - though it did make me wonder if that might have been different with the usual smaller and younger crowd - but did stay and chat for a bit with me and James in the Welcome Area. It made me realise that I've missed that kind of conversation, where you can be talking about the Atonement and someone else just talks over you with some violent/gross anecdote, so you stop and then backtrack again. It also reminded me that actually I'm quite happy to talk to people about Jesus/Christianity/the Bible (why doesn't it have a blurb on the back, wondered one of the girls who came in), and I feel quite happy talking about that and answering questions like "Are you a Jew? You been circumcised?", "Why do good things happen to bad people?" or "When God wanted to kill everyone, why didn't he just snap his fingers and kill them straightaway instead of sending a flood so that they died slowly and horribly?" Hmmm. Slightly sad that I can't do talking to young people about Jesus for a job, but glad that I had a chance to do it last night.
But... people were very willing to move around, there was a lot of very animated conversation going on, including (from what I observed) some really thoughtful stuff about how we as a church may appear to others who are different in some way from us. I suppose we'll have to see what kind of feedback we get over the next week or so. I can't even really pin down what I imagined Conversation would look like if it really took off, but I know last night was different from whatever that mental picture might be.
The other interesting thing, from my point of view, was that I invited in a couple of lads who were playing football outside when I arrived. They didn't last long in the main room with everyone else - though it did make me wonder if that might have been different with the usual smaller and younger crowd - but did stay and chat for a bit with me and James in the Welcome Area. It made me realise that I've missed that kind of conversation, where you can be talking about the Atonement and someone else just talks over you with some violent/gross anecdote, so you stop and then backtrack again. It also reminded me that actually I'm quite happy to talk to people about Jesus/Christianity/the Bible (why doesn't it have a blurb on the back, wondered one of the girls who came in), and I feel quite happy talking about that and answering questions like "Are you a Jew? You been circumcised?", "Why do good things happen to bad people?" or "When God wanted to kill everyone, why didn't he just snap his fingers and kill them straightaway instead of sending a flood so that they died slowly and horribly?" Hmmm. Slightly sad that I can't do talking to young people about Jesus for a job, but glad that I had a chance to do it last night.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Verse of the day
I have no idea how Bible Gateway generate their 'verse of the day', which I get as an RSS feed, and I am cautious of taking single out-of-context verses and saying "That is just meant for me", in the same way as any random newspaper horoscope can seem meaningful, but I was both amused and moved to find that yesterday's verse was Titus 2:2 and then today's is Isaiah 46:4.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Because I need reminding
I was feeling a bit rubbish earlier so I walked over to the Central Library in my lunchbreak, wandered around the novels and then went upstairs and picked up a copy of Angels on the Walls, which I'd read several years before. I sat down in the nearest seat and started reading. After a while I wanted to move to a seat with a table to rest the book on so I wandered across and picked one on the grounds that it was as far as possible from other people. I'd been sitting concentrating on the book, until a point where the author was talking about Jesus loving everyone, and my mind drifted off into thinking about John 3:16 and explaining that God so loved the world - not just the nice people or the people who are going to follow him - when I looked away from the book to the graffiti on the bit of wall in front of me. This is the first thing that I saw:
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Sunshine superprophet
I had Donovan's Sunshine Superman stuck in my head, and I actually thought about this, but then I thought "No, God's not speaking through a Donovan song. The lyrics are just hippy nonsense."
Then I realised (after two days of having the tune coming back into my head, even when I've been listening to other stuff), that in fact I only had one line that was going through my head, over and over again.
The line?
"When you've made your mind up forever to be mine"
Then I realised (after two days of having the tune coming back into my head, even when I've been listening to other stuff), that in fact I only had one line that was going through my head, over and over again.
The line?
"When you've made your mind up forever to be mine"
Monday, July 14, 2008
Preaching School
Image via Wikipedia Reflecting on last night's preaching school, I have to say that although James has put a fantastic amount of work into it, and Jon, Karen and Matt are great and very supportive, I feel less sure that I would want to carry on to the point where I was preaching in front of the church. This is partly because of my generic laziness - the positively-phrased feedback last night included the word "underprepared" - but, more seriously, because I can see two major problems. Firstly, I am too busy to be able to do this properly and take it as seriously as it should be. I can't even manage to do basic housework, let alone put in the amount of time and effort that preaching in public needs. I wouldn't put myself forward to lead a small group or do children's work, precisely because I know I couldn't give the commitment, and even allowing for preaching not being very frequent, I'm not sure I should say I'll do it if I don't think I'll be able to do it properly. Secondly, I am chronically depressed, with acute phases of misery and despair. This means that when I preach from the heart, I will not actually be giving a very good impression of giving Good News. Last night I really thought I'd given a sober but balanced exposition of the passage, and it wasn't until it was pointed out to me that I realised that I had missed out on the positive element of it and basically said "Life is shit, and that's the way it is". Now, I may think that about my life, but I cannot generalise from my point of view, and I certainly can't do it in front of church, where people will give more weight to what I say precisely because I am at the front of church, and I dare not risk generalising from my experience of life and doing it in a way that has a major impact on someone else if I don't even realise I'm doing it. I don't have anyone (other preaching school members aside) who I would go to for feedback and support, and I know that if I was asked to preach and was feeling down and miserable, I'd say "Yes, of course, that will be fine."The only thing in favour of me carrying on is the feeling that this is something God wants me to do. On the other hand, I have previously thought that God wanted me to go into ordained ministry ("Thanks but no thanks" said the Church of England) or that God had called me to do youth work (managed to mess that one up myself), so a vague feeling that this may be how I'm supposed to use my ability to stand up and talk in public might not in itself be a good enough reason; certainly not good enough to risk doing something very important very badly.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Isaiah 6
Image via WikipediaI was a bit despondent during and after last night's Celebration, so rather than going to the quiz, I went home to have a bit of a read of my Bible and try and think and pray a bit. As usual, the plan got a bit derailed, but I did eventually go upstairs and opened up the Bible here. The thing that really struck me from this was that Isaiah didn't hear God asking who He should send until after he'd had the coal touched to his lips. Often I think that I want to do whatever God wants me to do, but I'm just too sinful/lazy/messed up. What struck me was that Isaiah didn't hear a request from God, and then say "Oh no, I'm too sinful." His cry of "Woe is me! I am ruined!" is just from being in the presence of God, and at that point the angel basically says "It's OK, don't worry, we've got that sorted" (note that Isaiah didn't have to DO anything - apart from possibly saying "Don't put that glowing coal in my face"), and it's then that Isaiah hears God saying "Whom shall I send?" and he can volunteer.Maybe it's obvious, but rather than moaning "I just wish I knew what God wanted me to do", I could (a) acknowledge that I'm not worthy even to come into His presence and (b) accept - really accept - that all my sinfulness and guilt has been taken away, then maybe I'd be able to hear more clearly what He wants me to do.
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