Keeping us Moving Forward (3)

Jean Varnier prescribes celebration as a nourishment and resource for tired human existence.  It symbolises the unity and joy we hope for as irritations of daily life and little quarrels are swept away.  I've been doing some reflections on what makes sense to me.

5.  Fifth, we need to make up our quota of honour for each other.  The New Testament reserves expressions of thanksgiving almost exclusively for God.  But honour is a big word for the saints.  It’s a fundamental mark of the quality of life in the church.  Sadly, you can mumble thanks in just a shallow or passing expression.  But honour requires a deep and steady disposition of heart towards someone.  Of course, we’re told to honour our father and mother.  Then, in Romans, also each other (Romans 12:10), and public authorities (13:7), too).

In 1 Corinthians 12:23-26, Paul talks about the less presentable parts of the body receiving more honour.  Think just how much we work at our hair styles, faces, finger nails and other visible parts of our bodies.  When it comes down to it, our liver and kidneys are a lot more important to us than our hair (or lack of it) or a few wrinkles or bulges.  Which do you value more (the root word for honour is value or price), or would prefer to be kept working properly? 

There’s even a mention that leaders should get a spot of honour for making a good job of their responsibilities (1 Timothy 5:7).  Initiating the right sort of commendation is a vital antidote to the scourge of today’s celebrity culture.

The longer we’re together and get to know each other – warts and all – the more we need honour.  One Saturday evening I arrived back at our community home late.  I parked where I knew the car wouldn’t be in the way of the sister who regularly loaded up the catering stuff for the Sunday morning meeting.  If her car wasn’t just where she wanted it, she’d move everything round.  Sure enough, at breakfast time, there she was frantically spinning the wheel on another car – the one for the PA kit.  Can you guess what happened?  She bumped a parked-up vehicle.  And, do you know what the killer was for me?  I’d been able to predict every last detail of the whole incident.  A sister I must honour!

6.  Finally, the call to keep pioneering.  The Honeytree song haunts me: “Keep pressing onward to your own frontier…”.  I haven’t reached mine, and it irks me.  Each December, Huw calls in senior leaders for a year-end accountability and review session.  A couple of years ago I related a dream to him.  In it, I was in a car accident.  The mess and damage got progressively worse until I knew I was going to lose my life.  At this point, I exploded, “Is that it?!  Is that all it amounted to?!”  As I told Huw, he laughed.  But I was in dead earnest.  This year I confirmed with him that Pastor Shanta in Kathmandu had just led a conference of 800 Christian workers and leaders.  It’s exactly 12 months after we’d taken Multiply to Nepal.

We make a point of giving wisdom and prophecy at the Agape evening nearest to members’ birthdays.  When I was approaching sixty, Jayne encouraged me to keep on with initiatives, even though I may not live to see them come to pass.  I took this indignantly. 

Now I have little alternative to the prospect that I won’t see anything I set in motion through to completion.  This cuts against my instincts.  I’ve got no respect for “blue skies” ideas that people expect others to do the work for.  My training is to rigorously assess any initiative, and work out the process of implementation, as I will then expect to tackle it.  But equally, I’ve got no respect for folks who’ve awarded themselves premature retirement.  Celibacy is in crisis because church members in their fifties and sixties haven’t seen that they’re pioneering through their declining years how to keep the gift ablaze.  Some have become self-concerned in the most ugly and introverted way imaginable. 

My challenge is to unpack my years of experience so the following generation can take it on.  I have no higher ministry priority.  And I’m finding it massively demanding.  Much of the problem is how learning happens with people who aren’t like me.  So my final conclusion: we must press on to the unreached frontier.

Keeping us Moving Forward (2)

I've been doing some year-end stock taking.  Here's two more of the half a dozen priorities I've distilled.

3.  Third, things aren’t as simple as they were, (or as effective?).  Thirty-five years ago we’d launch into a Jesus March with just a push chair and bottle of squash.  We’d do double runs on the always-inadequate transport, and be fortunate to have anywhere to shelter if the weather turned foul.  We’d sing out by heart our repertoire of popular choruses, until we reached some Town Hall steps.  Here, a speaker addressed us, read from the bible, called up testimonies, and invited a response.  A singing group clustered Peter, Paul and Mary style round one microphone, accompanied by a twelve-string guitar.  We sang our dozen choruses over again, and grinned a blessing at all the passers-by.  Then it was back home for tea.

Today, a simple outreach picnic involves a 7.5 tonne truck loaded with staging; a camping shop of gazebos, cool boxes and Thermos jugs; and enough cabling and electronic kit to equip a small hospital.  The organisers eventually announce they haven’t actually planned anything, but they’re sure we’re going to have a great time.  A full-on band belts through lyrics you can’t follow (let alone sing to).  If we’re really lucky, there’ll be an in-house stage item.  And a prayer over the bread and wine, “Father, thank You for Your body; bless this blood.”  We’ll tell ourselves we made an impact. 

I mustn’t let impressions or assumption – held with conviction - overtake the reality of engagement with life now.  I’ve already made the biggest pastoral and church-planting mistakes of my life that way!  Teaching stuff that went over people’s heads, and advising them for situations that were exactly where they weren’t at!  Hebrews (3:7,13) tells us we only have today in which to experience salvation.  I just need to engage with life where it’s at, not where I wish it would be.

4.  It gets harder to expect a revival on the fifteenth time round.  The saying goes, ‘the ultimate insanity is to keep repeating an action and hope it will produce a different result from last time’.  But, I declare, the Christian life is entirely built up of keeping doing things because that’s what’s right.  Because, when God’s with you, you can’t predict the outcome, and you have to keep on attempting.  For 38 years Israel wandered round the wilderness.  One morning Moses announced they’d had the last day they would do it! (Deuteronomy 1:6-8). 

I once heard Philip Mohabair explain how the ministry he headed up collapsed when he had a major heart operation.  Returning to office afterwards, he had to rebuild everything.  He quoted from 1 Samuel 16:1, taking in the sense of failure and dismay Samuel felt over Saul.  He pointed out that God said: “Get on, and anoint another king!”  Picture the challenge of hope over disappointment this command represented.

Then, Jesus had to ask the man who had been sick for 38 years if he really wanted to get healed now (John 5:6).  None of us likes to admit we’ve been cheated in life.  It’s bad enough when we’re young and naïve.  But when we’ve grown on in years it can be next to impossible.  So we deflect or rationalise – to our own cost.  We cheat ourselves.  We need to face the reality, and believe we can move on as Jesus touches us.

Paul was a man with a dream to change the world.  We have his final words, after 25 years of ministry, recorded in 2 Timothy 4:1-8.  I tell my rising generation brothers that they’re in no position to exegete this passage.  Equally, I tell my contemporaries, it’s spot-on.  Paul sums up the state of the world, as “bad, and only going to get worse”.  Yet, in those very last recorded verses he calls Timothy, his lieutenant, to get stuck in and keep at it.  There’s no other option (and no retirement).  We must defy conventional wisdom, embrace the hard work, and keep faithful to the task we know is right.

Keeping us Moving Forward (1)

When I was seventeen, the Methodist Mission church I was attending celebrated its 25th Anniversary.  My grandmother, at 72, was the oldest active member.  She gave a speech and cut the celebratory cake.  I’d been a converted Christian less than a year.  Frankly, I wasn’t impressed by what I’d seen of her faith.  I’d witnessed all the petty fussing about what to wear and what to say when going to church.  We teenagers had a phrase for it: “lost her joy”.

My grandparents had been founder members of the church, and my grandfather a trustee.  I never knew him.  He died before I was born, having earned the rare distinction of being our city’s first casualty of the World War Two.  He got knocked down by a slow-moving bus on the third night of the blackout.  That tells you something about our family’s road sense.  My mother’s account of his poor handling of money and weakness for drinking made me doubtful of his faith and character also.

I wasn’t attracted by an event looking backward to a remotely distant time, it seemed to me, when Wesley himself might turn up on the preaching rota.  I was a child of the white hot technological revolution: contemporary was the in word, and the future ours.

Last month, my friend John told me that his Northampton church-household had clocked up 25 years.  He was ruminating that he’d never expected it would be the last planting pioneering he’d do.  He wasn’t in a celebratory frame.  I think he’s done well, but I also knew what he was feeling.  In 2014, Jesus Fellowship could celebrate its 45th Anniversary (as an event, such is unlikely).  I’ll have been a member, and leader, for almost 40 years.  The memory of my teenage boredom sits uncomfortably with my reaction to this relentless advance of time.  What do the two generation younger than mine make of this church?  I’ve found a few personal reactions.

1. First, we need to ungum the flow of relationships - which also means the flow of the Spirit in relationships - by prompt and full forgiveness.  My Methodist background defined holy communion basically as communion with God, not brethren.  Read the full order of service.  It was written in a time when general society was stable and cohesive.  There was barely need to mention the neighbourliness dynamic of one’s faith.  Wesley affirmed that “faith that works by love” was the evidence of its authenticity. 

Our bread and wine tradition embraces reconciliation after the pattern of 1 Corinthians 11:23-26.  In my Methodist beginnings I heard comments about which minister various members had preferred (Mr. Henderson, Mr. Lawson, and Mr. Mitchell), but it never amounted to discerning the body!  As for discipleship, we read the gospels as theological works.  We sifted out and systematised the moral and “sound” teaching.  We never appreciated the amazing significance of Jesus interacting with all kinds of people and creating many levels of relationships.  I’m glad I have come to do so since.  Yes, I knew the verse (Matthew 5:24) about leaving your gift at the altar if you were out of sorts with a brother.  But I’d never witnessed this in practice.

A formative Jesus Fellowship wisdom picture was a river, smooth on the surface, but with ridges, boulders and fractures in its bed.  When you looked deeper, the flow was obstructed.  The river plunged over a high waterfall.  From there on, it flowed on a clear unhindered course.  This depicted the Holy Spirit’s work among us.  So, God would break and unite us.  And He did!  Out of this time of being under His discipline, community was born.  We must tackle offences that build up as a legacy of the years.  One day the time will be right for Jesus to come again.  Our attention to our relationship with our brothers and sisters is part of the necessary conditions.  Keep relationships priority; and keep them open.

2.  Now, there seems to be more to reflect on than to dream about.  I go to a wedding or event in our chapel.  From the balcony or platform, the scene haunts me. I recollect families who once sat just there, or leaders who gathered their cluster of bright young followers on this row.  In fact, they’re more real than the vague faces that I really feel I should know better, or make an effort with, today.  Was it really that long ago that they left us?  My memories are etched clearer than reality. 

It’s the same when I visit a community house, or a public hall where we’ve held our national events.  So many intense and significant memories are burned in my mind.  It’s difficult to throw my focus forward and embrace the future.  Yes, even when that future promises to be equally eventful and gripping. 

The children of Israel were taught rituals and precepts, and erected monuments to preserve an accurate remembrance of their past.  We all need reminders: accurate ones, not subjective impressions.  Perhaps that was the benefit of the 25th anniversary event.  But Paul, in 2 Corinthians 3:3, asserts that we are not like Moses, people of fading revelation from one defining point in history.  We are “all are being transformed” (verse 18) with a future of expanding expectation and glorious manifestation.  Jesus didn’t award any points to the would-be disciples steering their lives through the rear-view mirror (Luke 9:62). 

Experience was the name given to one of the four shepherds that Christian meets in Pilgrim’s Progress.  But, as a church, we got where we are though the power of anointing, too.  I’m dismayed by members who always want the “good old brothers” as Pastors or event leaders.  We were better when we had little that amounted to tradition, and waited for the Holy Spirit.  It’s a massive discipline of mind renewal to keep all the channels of imagination open when the memory takes up most of your capacity, but it must be done.