That experience reminded me of how important preaching is, because what happens if people really believe what we are saying and begin to order their lives around it? Imagine if they do that with sermons about money.

Clergy are often reluctant to raise the subject of money. They know it is a sensitive area and people might get upset. Good church members are hard to find. Why risk losing them by raising a provocative topic? Clergy are also sensitive to the fact that there is an element of self-serving in their talk and preaching about money. After all, the point of such sermons is usually to increase the income of the church which pays their stipends and benefits. And clergy are sensitive to the reputation of the church in many quarters that “the church is only after our money.”

For their part, the members of the congregation often have an uneasy, maybe even a love/hate relationship with their finances. They work hard for their money and sometimes find it difficult to make ends meet. Many are stretched to the point of discomfort and worry over the state of their personal finances. They are, after all, deeply influenced by a culture that encourages them to live on 120 per cent of their income. And they know they should be saving for retirement. Often they feel that they really should be giving more to the church and charities, and probably wish they could.

It’s not hard to understand why talk about money and giving might make them feel uncomfortable, and maybe even guilty and resentful.

So how do we acknowledge this reality and move to healthy ways of talking and preaching about money in our churches?

 Move away from the customary fund raising mindset in which we talk mainly about the needs of the church and how we need everyone to step up and do more to meet these needs. Such conversations do have their legitimate place of course, but they should not be given priority in our talking about church and money. We are charged with the leadership and spiritual care of congregational communities, and so our work is to help our people as individuals — and our congregations as communities — to grow to maturity as followers of Jesus who are learning to live their lives to the glory of God. This involves learning to make the connections between our faith – our commitment to follow Jesus – and all the various areas of our lives: our character, our worldview, our roles, our relationships and our responsibilities.

 Help Parishioners to make the connections as a key part of the great adventure of faith. One of the really important connections has to do with the role that money plays in our lives. Jesus knew that this connection was so important that he spent a lot of time talking about it. Not because he was looking for donations for his ministry, but because he knew that people needed a new way of thinking about money. They needed to be free of its power, in order to live the new life of the kingdom he proclaimed.

Help people understand the role that money plays in culture and the power it has in our lives. Money is about far more than purchasing power in our world.  It is closely connected to ideas about success, living a useful life, being clever and talented, security, fulfilment, satisfaction and joy to name only a few. The spirit of money, what Jesus called Mammon, is one of the most powerful idols in our culture. It is the ultimate measure of almost everything and it is behind a lot of what we do and think in life.

In helping people to follow Jesus and live the life of his kingdom we need to help them to name these issues, to understand them, to see through them, and to put them in their place. We need to acknowledge that these are also issues for clergy and the Church. None of us is immune to the power of money.

 Before we preach any sermon on money we should always ask ourselves, “What is the good news for my people in this sermon?” When we teach these things about the power of money and its place in our culture and our lives with kindness, understanding and empathy, many of our people will hear it as the good news it is intended to be. They will hear it with relief and gladness rather than discomfort and resentment. Our goal in this teaching is to help them to name and understand these things so that they might be set free from this oppressive power in their lives, and enter into the joy of freely living the life of Jesus’ kingdom.

 Empower people to see that generosity is one of the defining traits of a growing follower of Jesus. If our goal is to follow Jesus closely and represent him well, surely generosity will be an important part of that. Not a grudging agreement to give some of my money here or there when pressed or pressured, but an authentic generosity that finds joy in giving. People come to see that all the contentment and joy that they have been taught they will find by acquiring and keeping money and things, they will actually find in becoming more generous. They have been designed by God to give, not to amass. The scriptures are filled with exhortations for God’s people to be thankful, and to live lives of gratitude.  When people are encouraged to think of their lives more in terms of gratitude and contentment as they grow in this adventure of following Jesus, they are free to think more seriously about generosity.

 Offer practical suggestions. A follower of Jesus should avoid developing a life style in which he/she cannot afford to be generous. That has been my answer to questions like how large a house should a follower of Jesus live in, or how large a car should they drive. Give enough that you feel it stretch you and make you wonder if it is too much, has been my response to questions about how much to give. I suggest people try to add an additional one percent of their income each year, and see how that goes for them. Encourage people to always be growing, to never think they have arrived, and to enjoy the process!

 Harold Percy is a Congregational Coach with the Institute of Evangelism. He served at Trinity Anglican Church in Streetsville, Ont. for 19 years, helping to grow it into one of the largest congregations in the Anglican Church of Canada. Harold is the author of three books.

I recently sat through a three-hour service, with well-behaved children and a one-hour sermon in the package—and that after an hour-long Sunday School class. Only the occasional sermon is devoted to tithing, and yet 80% of the congregation tithes. But one feature in particular caught my attention: in 45 minutes of non-stop singing (worship and praise time), I heard no grand hymns of the church, only typical praise songs of the sort one might hear in any “contemporary” worship service.

Yet a customary criticism leveled at churches that sing only these “mindless” praise songs is this: how can we expect to form mature Christians when all they sing are worship songs without Scripture or “doctrinal” content. Two observations come to mind. One is that this church’s choice of worship songs “lite” does not appear to dilute the devotion and commitment of its members. And I wonder how those of us in mainline and even some traditionally evangelical churches would respond if that question were put to us. While we are wearing out our time-tested hymnals, have we in fact produced mature and knowledgeable believers? In other words, maybe the song selection has little or nothing to do with the question of spiritual maturity.

I think the problem is systemic, hidden deep within our institutions. One of the first books to attempt an explanation for why mainline churches were losing numbers in the late sixties was Dean Kelley’s 1972 sociological study, Why Conservative Churches are Growing. He argued that high commitment churches—churches that give you a reason to shuffle off to church on Sunday morning—attract more people than low commitment churches which require little of its members. Yet it is precisely this issue that continues to haunt us: we silently envy the laudable benefits of high commitment religion, but are theologically or practically ambivalent about employing the strategies necessary to achieve those effects.

I need to enter three caveats here. One is that our profile of a mature disciple of Jesus will vary along the ecclesiastical spectrum, even when we use the same words. A mature conservative evangelical, fundamentalist, pentecostal or charismatic will know their way around the Bible and can memorize numerous verses, generally attend church-related spiritual programs throughout the week, give generously to the church and mission, and place a high priority on evangelism, locally and globally.

A mature disciple in a mainline church may not differ much in theory, except that they will be expected to be more theologically nuanced (translate, less literal) in interpreting Scripture, express a greater appreciation for the church’s tradition, be more culturally sophisticated in hymnody and liturgical practice, and view mission more in terms of responding to social needs and justice in society.

The second caveat is that many pastors in low commitment churches do struggle deeply with the pressure to compromise the church’s teachings. The response was palpable following the publication of Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon’s provocative book, Resident Aliens (1989). Pastors confessed they felt like ecclesiastical prostitutes, offering religious services without requiring commitment.

Third, no church is simply culturally compromising or counter-cultural. Evangelical and pentecostal/charismatic churches are high commitment in terms of their doctrines and certain moral standards. But they are low threshold in terms of worship styles. Mainline churches, on the other hand, are theologically and ethically low threshold, more “in step” with cultural shifts in ideas and mores. But they are traditional (high threshold) in their worship, preferring pipe organ, choirs and traditional hymnody.

There is undoubtedly an important link between Christian teaching/beliefs and practices. The question is where these two intersect in a congregation. The link is seldom direct and observable, but subterranean and systemic. Where will we find doctrinal and theological “input” within the congregational system in a way that produces maturity in its members?

While this may suffer from over-generalization, let me suggest four profiles that may help us understand our own church and others better.

Profile 1: Traditional Pentecostal/Charismatic

• Participation: high commitment to the spiritual programs of the church outside of Sunday worship; e.g. involvement in Sunday School by both children and adults; greater number at weekly midweek services
• Educational curriculum: high commitment to biblical content, and earlier introduction of Christian doctrine
• Worship: low commitment to theological content in hymnody (except for those churches that continue to use a hymnal); low to medium commitment in preaching (a few pastors with a “theological bent” may preach the occasional doctrinal sermon)
• Practices that support core doctrines and values: medium to low commitment to “tarrying meetings” for Spirit baptism; high commitment to camps and regional events for children and youth to guide them in making an early commitment to Christ

Profile 2: Evangelical (including some Pentecostal/Charismatic) Seeker Churches

• Participation: medium to high commitment outside Sunday worship, including Sunday School; small groups are emphasized, but theological content is a lower commitment than building community and support; midweek activity is devoted to these cell groups
• Educational curriculum: low commitment to doctrinal and theological formation; focus is on practical living
• Worship: low commitment theologically in both hymnody and preaching; “evangelistic” focus is on connecting with the practical needs of the worshipper
• Practices that support core doctrines and values: low commitment to doctrine, though higher commitment to core values of reaching the seeker and mirroring the “needs” of the culture

Profile 3: Traditional Evangelical

• Participation: high commitment to participation outside Sunday worship, including Sunday School for all ages and mid-week Bible study and/or prayer meeting; mid-week service might include a sustained study of a book of the Bible or a doctrinal theme
• Educational curriculum: high commitment to the doctrinal beliefs of the church; Sunday School curriculum will be rigorously biblical; doctrinal teaching is designed to reinforce the theological identity of the congregation
• Worship: high commitment to doctrinal content through use of the traditional hymnal (even if mixed with “praise songs”), and emphasis on exegetical, expository and doctrinal preaching
• Practices that support core doctrines and values: high commitment to practices that support the church’s doctrinal identity such as Bible study; commitment to theological consistency throughout the life of the congregation

Profile 4: Mainline

• Participation: low commitment to participation outside Sunday worship; Sunday School for children integrated with worship time, as families are often unwilling to sacrifice the extra hour outside worship; low commitment to weekly adult study opportunities; only short-term education programs are successful (e.g. Alpha); conferences and retreats are attended by the few motivated core members
• Educational curriculum: low commitment to doctrinal beliefs; Sunday school curriculum may give priority to social ministry rather than to issues of personal discipleship; the view of Scripture may reflect a more critical approach
• Worship: the doctrinal content is located primarily in the liturgical rites (e.g. the Anglican Book of Alternative Services) and traditional hymns; low commitment to doctrinal preaching, which is possible but not necessary in lectionary preaching
• Practices that support core doctrines and values: low commitment to practices that support the church’s doctrinal identity; programs for children, youth and adults are sporadic and uneven, and mostly at the initiative of the local congregation; resources from the denomination are minimal, due to lack of finances, commitment, or interest.

The dance between doctrine and practice is tricky. Separating the two can be lethal for

discipling believers, as neither dry doctrinal treatises nor pietistic platitudes will be effective. My interest here has been to take notice of our conventional criticism of one practice, “superficial” praise songs. This sliver in our brother’s eye belies the log in our own, because many of us in the mainline tradition have little cause to boast of the spiritual maturity of our own members.

I do not say this to disparage the riches in my own mainline tradition. But being a low commitment church, with its distinctive European heritage, is the hand we have been dealt. Nevertheless, we are not helpless. Lyle Schaller, patriarch of the church growth movement, once observed that those churches that are most successful in growing do two things: they are committed to proclaiming with confidence what Scripture teaches, and they are consistent in communicating those teachings at every level of the congregation’s life.

That may not be a magic wand. But is it a good place to start.

.

• Enthusiastic beginner
• Disillusioned learner
• Capable but cautious contributor
• Self-reliant achiever

A few other soundbites:

• Jesus wants to give us a heart attack
• Who would have put their money on a Jewish rabbi and his 12 inexperienced followers?
• Servant first, leader second
• Jesus first, others second, you third
• If you mention Jesus, he does all the marketing/work
• Eternal life as not real attractive to those whose lives aren’t working right now.
• 5 habits of leading like Jesus
  • Solitude
  • Prayer
  • Study of scripture
  • Small vulnerability group
  • Remember God’s love
  • Go to an ego-anonymous meeting and get over it.

Chan shared his upcoming transition as a response to Jesus’ call to deny himself and simply trust in the Lord again.  He looks forward to “serving in obscurity” and “being a human” again.  He says Sunday’s announcement made for a rough day, but was so thrilled with his wife’s part of the announcement that he played it on video.  She described feeling a “gravitational pull to safety” for her and her family, but will push against it in order to follow Jesus out of the suburbs, and into the inner city.  Chan suspects his resignation will lead him to inner city Los Angeles, but plans to do prayer walks in other major cities first, as well as spending time in Thailand to fight human trafficking.

He describes this as a return to following Jesus as the Bible describes.  He laments the contemporary Christian ability to take Jesus’ commands metaphorically, particularly the Great Commission.  He illustrated this beautifully describing a scenario where, if he told his daughter to clear her room, she might respond by saying “Dad, I’ve memorized your command” or “I’m having friends over to discuss how making disciples might look in my life.”  Chan wants to move on from this disobedience, so that he and every Christian can identify whom they’ve discipled in response to Jesus’ command.

He describes the church as a “system that makes it okay to disobey” commands like the Great Commission.  He says he instead feels called to “humble myself to give a picture of Christ”.  He goes on, “I’m not called to be an awesome megachurch pastor, but am called to be a picture of Christ.”  He takes inspiration from the story of Vaughan, a youth pastor whose trips to impoverished villages are described by youth as “the closest thing I’ve every experienced to walking with Jesus”.  He realized, “my life does not look like Jesus.  I can rationalize and justify it, but…”

Chan was a convicting speaker, not least because he was actively living out his message.  He is sacrificing the fame, fortune and safety of suburban megachurch ministry to follow Jesus.  He “wants to go back” to a childlike faith.  “If I read the Bible for the first time, I would never conclude I needed to pray some prayer, but I would conclude I need to follow Jesus.  If I read the Bible on a desert island, I’d never decide I needed to start a Sunday service, my priority would be discipleship.

We then watched the first public screening of the new BASIC video series, watching the session on the “fear of the Lord.”  Chan convincingly recaptured the fear of the Lord as the beginning of faith, and the responsibility that “teachers” of faith have to model this, and all Jesus’ way of life, to our congregations.  “We can’t get mad at the people, we’re the leaders.”

Lots to ponder, hearing Chan’s teaching, and seeing him live it.

He began with a warning that much of what passes for Christianity today is actually a Moralistic Deism.  He says this has occurred because the gospel was simply assumed, and church culture focused on teaching about sanctification at the expense of justification.  He defines the former as a process, where we join with God to become more and more like him, and less like us.  He countered this by preaching through the book of Ephesians when he first arrived at The Village Church, at the time a church of 160 people, and now numbers in the thousands.

Matt then shared two ways of telling the gospel in four points, both true, but often portrayed as if they are mutually exclusive.  One is the gospel “on the ground” – beginning with the action of God, then humanity, then Christ, then response.  The other is the gospel “in the air” – beginning with creation, then the fall, redemption and consummation.  He skilfully reconciled these two as one gospel, both fully dependent on the atoning work of Christ.  His entire talk was driven and connected by scripture passages, particularly here as he illustrated the fullness of the gospel with scripture about what we are saved “to” and “from”.  I think this air-ground distinction will be helpful in teaching the gospel in Christianity 101.

In a later Q&A – he was asked about transformation of legacy churches.  He shared a few principles from his arrival at the Village Church, particularly that elder saints be asked to help in transformation.  He then told the story of an older church member who he enlisted to disciple and teach life skills to young men.  After some time in this ministry, the man said, “as long as young men keep coming to Christ, I don’t mind the music.”

All around, best talk of the day, thanks to both the content and the man.  They are clearly one and the same.

Some soundbites:

• Thanksgiving (the day his cancer symptoms began) did not surprise God.  God controls our cells, even the mitosis, everything that happens inside the cells.
• Even on your best day you are a stench to God!
• Justification – Saved by Christ, and Sanctification – Submit to Christ
• The Discovery Channel tries to explain the resurrection every Easter, because there is something there that needs to be explained.
• So many people can say Jesus died for their sins, but can’t say what happens next.
• We are not building a ladder to heaven
• We were created for glory, not fellowship.  Fellowship is one part of glory, but not all.

A question for commenters: Is Moralistic Deism the prevailing religion in Canada?  Or something else.  Perhaps just deism?

Harold Percy was recently the speaker at the annual Institute of Evangelism dinner at Wycliffe College. This is the text of the talk he gave that evening.

It is no secret that our churches across this country are generally having a difficult time connecting with people and attracting them into the lives of their worshipping communities.  It seems to be mystifying and bewildering to many that forms of worship, church life, and governance that worked effectively for generations no longer do so.

George Hunter, in one of his books on church life and North American culture, offers the picture of a corn farmer whose family has been successfully raising and marketing corn for generations.  He ask us to imagine that one morning, as this farmer and his crew wake up to go into the fields to harvest the corn, they discover to their amazement that overnight the cornfields have turned to vineyards.  Instead of acres and acres of rich, ripe corn waiting to be harvested, instead there are vines dropping with juicy grapes waiting to be picked.  A preposterous picture to be sure, but go with it for a minute.  Hunter says that in this situation there are a number of options open to the farmer.  Of all these options, surely the most disastrous would be to think, “There can’t be that much of a difference between corn and grapes, so let’s just start up these corn pickers and drive into the fields and harvest the grapes.”  This could not possibly end well!  In fact, the harder they worked at this, the more damage they would be likely to cause.

Hunter says this is the situation facing churches (for our purposes, particularly mainline churches and especially the Anglican Church) in North America.  For generations we had a way of “doing and being” church that fit perfectly into the surrounding culture and so was very effective.  But in recent years the changes in the culture have been rapid and significant.  The result is that the churches are much like the corn farmer, surrounded no longer by corn but by grapes.  The harvest has changed, and changed dramatically. And, if we as the church are going to be effective in what we are called to do, we must change as well.  To insist that we can continue to do just exactly what we have always done, and hope that our results will eventually change, is folly.  Corn pickers can’t harvest grapes.  We need to rethink what we are doing and how we are doing it.

Dallas Willard wrote, concerning church life in America, that “your church is perfectly designed to get the results you are presently getting.”  If we want to get different results we need to do some serious thinking about what needs to be changed, and what we need to be paying attention to.  The following acrostic on the word VITAL provides a convenient framework for me to make a few observations about some of the things I think we need to be paying attention to if we are going to revitalize our congregations and carry on effective ministries.

Visionary Leadership

The “V” stands for visionary leadership. We need visionary leadership at every level because the nature and scope of the changes required go far beyond simply tinkering a little bit with what we already have. It is clear that the traditional parish model which is organized around liturgy and pastoral care simply doesn’t work anymore.  No matter how good we get at these, it won’t help.  What we need is new DNA, and leaders who get this, and can model and communicate it.

The number one job of leadership is to explain why the organization exists and to communicate this clearly and effectively.  We have congregations all across this country who don’t know why they exist, with leaders who are unable to tell them.

I read somewhere that the two most radical questions any organization can ever ask itself are these:  Why are we doing what we are doing?  And why are we doing it the way we are doing it?  These are questions that have to be asked on a regular basis in every congregation, parish, and diocese across the country.  It is hard to know just what to do if you aren’t clear on precisely what it is that you are trying to do.  What should be the result of all this work and effort we are putting into church life?

For my money the answer to the first of these questions would be something like, “The church exists (or this parish exists) to let the whole world (or this particular community) know that Jesus is Lord;  to explain what this means, to live what it looks like, and to invite everyone within our sphere of influence to become an intentional follower of Jesus and learn to live the new life of his Kingdom.

Again, for my money, the worst possible answer to the second question (why are we doing it this way?) is “Because we have always done it this way.”  A better answer is “because we have tried and experimented in all kinds of ways and currently this is what seems to be most effective, but we are always looking for ways to get better at this.”

The leadership in a vital congregation needs to be able to inspire the people of that congregation with a vision of who they can become as they work this out, to dream of what such a community of people might look like in their particular context, and to nurture such a community into being.  That is always an exciting journey for everyone involved.

The challenge is that our systems of formation and oversight do not produce and nurture such leaders.  In fact, they probably weed them out more often than not in the early stages.  We send clergy out into the field, full of passion and dreams and hope, but without the necessary training and ongoing coaching in the transformational leadership skills required to take hold of a parish and lead it through a process of transformation to vitality.  So, as they try or suggest various things, they get beaten up, discouraged, tamed, even skittish, and often end up simply trying to hang on and survive.  This is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Inspirational Worship

The key here is simply to remember that people mostly prefer parties to funerals.  Over the years I have come to the conclusion that we put far too much emphasis on the set texts and forms of our liturgical worship and expect far too much of the liturgy in return.  We need to get over our obsession with “doing liturgy properly”—not that we should strive to do it badly, but because there are more important things to be thinking about.  We simply overplay this in terms of its importance and what it can do.

One of the problems with the way we think about liturgy is that it is rationally driven.  It is explained by means of logic and reason: “this piece goes here, because we have just done so and so, and this is what should follow.”

I don’t have a problem with this, except to say that of much greater importance is the tone and pace and feeling of what is happening, no matter how the pieces are linked together.  It simply is a fact that the majority of our churches bore the pants off people with the tone and pace of the service.  It is just quiet, somber, and weary.  I have often marveled at how Anglicans can be such jolly, life loving, vibrant people on the parking lot or in the coffee hour, but so totally dull and dreary at worship.  There is nothing in scripture to suggest that worship needs to be a funeral march.  So much of what we do and how we do it is just lacking in imagination and energy.

When the people we are hoping to connect with do eventually come to church to check things out, most of them aren’t asking whether the pieces of the service fit together theologically, nor even, “What did I learn?” The first and most important question for them is usually, “How did I feel?”  Did I feel that I was in a community that is life-filled and loving?  Did I feel welcome?  Did I sense that in some way I was actually in God’s presence, and that God and I were connecting?  Did God speak a word into my life in that service?  Was I touched? Was I challenged? Did I get excited? Did I leave with a new or renewed sense of purpose or hope; a new or renewed perspective on my life and its possibilities?  Was I convicted of things in my life that need changing?  Do I feel that I have been forgiven?

They aren’t asking if the priest adopted the proper postures or stood in the right places or if the hymns were proper hymns, or if their grandmother would have been pleased with the way the service was conducted.

Training In Discipleship

This has to do with the teaching and coaching that enables people to make an intentional commitment to be followers of Jesus and to learn to live the new life of his kingdom.  I believe that this is at the very heart of the life of a vital congregation, but for various reasons we have let this slip badly.  In fact, in many of the churches I have visited across this country most of the members have never even heard that this shot is on the board.

This work has been badly neglected.  We have life long parishioners who don’t know how to pray with their families or in their churches, and life long parishioners who are functionally biblically illiterate.  And these are just the basics.

I think this might be the result of thinking that this work is done by the liturgy, or that it  is done as we breathe in the air of a Christian culture, or that people have just learned these things somewhere else.

But most parishes make the mistake of starting in the middle: simply assuming the people in the pews are already mature, well formed, holistic followers of Jesus, and know how to make the connections between faith and life on a daily basis.  This is not a good assumption. We need to get back to the absolute basics of the faith, and take it from there, helping people to grow through a deliberate process of personal transformation.

Again, for my money, my hunch is that we put far too much effort into what we call pastoral care and not nearly enough into discipleship training.  I believe that our clergy need to be delegating most of the pastoral care to gifted and trained care givers in the congregation who are longing for ways to make a difference, and to spend their own time working at developing the processes by which disciples are formed and nurtured in their congregation.  “Pastoral care” should be changed to “congregational care”, and in the seminaries I believe that the departments of Pastoral Care should be changed to Departments of Congregational Leadership.

Authentic Community

I am not talking here about churches that seem more like comfortable Christian clubs, but about communities of growing disciples who are meeting together to encourage each other in their journeys of discipleship, caring for each other deeply and tenderly, and learning what it means to “love one another, to weep with those who weep, and to rejoice with those who rejoice.”

Loving Outreach and Evangelism.

All of this brings us to point where we are prepared to begin seriously thinking about how we will reach out in the name of Jesus to serve our communities and to invite others to join us in the adventure of learning to follow Jesus.  The means and ways to this are limited only by our imaginations.  I believe that Jesus would still say today, in our parish neighbourhoods, “the harvest is plentiful”.

But in order to be effective in this, we require visionary leadership, inspirational worship, training in discipleship, and authentic community.  When we have these, we will be able to do this, as an authentic expression of who we are; ministering out of vibrant, life filled, dynamic congregations in which the message of Jesus is modeled and shared:  “Come and see, join us in Christ’s mission, learn to follow Jesus with us.”  Such congregations, and only such congregations, are ready for sustainable evangelism, whether “attractional” or “fresh expressions” or whatever.  Without these, all our efforts will be hit and miss—like playing pin the tail on the donkey, with the tail ending up all over the place.

I love the thought of communities of Christ followers meeting together for prayer, bible reading, holy communion, and then going out to walk through their neighbourhoods asking “how can we help”—and thinking seriously about what it would mean to share Jesus in that place.

My friend Tom Bandy said it well, I think:  “Love your church, of course: but love Jesus more.”

I’m not a big video-gamer.  With that said, I need to make a confession: it’s not because I’m anti-video game but because my parents knew full well that my addictive personality would have attached itself to video games and would never have let go.  So, I was never allowed to own a game system growing up; although my brother and I were allowed to rent them over a weekend once in a while which would turn into sleep-starved days of video game binging that only served to underscore my parents’ point!

I went through university and graduate studies never owning one, but I was really too busy to notice.  Either that, or I was too poor to buy one, I’m not sure which.  Now, I’ve got my own family and life is much too hectic to even find the time to sit down and play video games.  This is all to say that video game culture has never become a part of my life, until now.

My father-in-law recently purchased a PS3 (that’s a “Sony PlayStation 3”, for those of you who are not down with the lingo) to go with his new High Definition TV.  We visited a few weeks ago and our four year old son was quickly introduced to this culture.  Watching him clutch the game controller was like watching a smuggler holding onto his cherished contraband as a smile of wild hilarity mixed with mischievousness gripped his face.   A racing game with intense graphics and pounding music promptly became his favourite.  I should admit, partly because my wife reads this column and partly because I’m honest, that I got hooked too (now, two in the morning isn’t that crazy a time to be sitting alone giddily driving a rally car across the desert is it?).

What really took me by surprise was how proficient my son became at this game.  After only a few tries, he was keeping his vehicle on course, passing other cars and making good time around the track.  Not only that, driving home down the highway he was giving me lessons from the back seat on exactly how to pass other cars at high rates of speed!

Regardless, what I took from this little foray into the alternative reality of “Video Game Land” was how quickly and thoroughly our children are shaped and formed by what we put in front of them.  Not only that, I’m amazed at how skilled and adept, at how well versed a four year old can become in the habits and skills of this culture.

While I’m aware and convinced of the potential dangers of video-game addiction and the abhorrent nature of some of these games that make Quentin Tarantino look like a younger, edgier Walt Disney, I’m not overly interested in weighing in on this.  What I am interested in is the simply fact that these ‘alternative’ realities so deeply and completely capture the imagination of our children and young people (and sometimes even a husband or two!).

Our imaginations, especially those of children, are apprehended and formed by what’s around us.  What the church often forgets and neglects is that it is in the imagination business, as deeply and completely as something like the video game industry is.  We don’t often think of the church in this way, but it’s imperative that we re-capture this sense of ecclesial imagination if we are to be, in any way, a witness to God’s action in our world.

At a very basic level, the church imagines a different world, not because it’s in the business of making stuff up, but because it follows Jesus who, in himself, brings God’s imagination to bear on all things.  When the church gathers as followers of this Jesus, it can’t help but imagine that everything is different because this Jesus showed up on the stage of history and imagined God’s very kingdom into existence.

Much as our imagination is trained and shaped by what we spend time with—be it videogames, movies, television, the internet, or the ever-beloved IPod (a word which, by the way, my spellchecker recognizes!)—the church’s imagination is shaped and trained in its worship and in its life together.  It’s in this life together, in our liturgy, where we learn to inhabit and act out this kingdom among us.  Our communal reading of Scripture, our prayers, our table fellowship, and our peace-sharing are some of the habits that shape us; they are some of the spiritual disciplines that form us and ought to form our children.

But our church has often failed children and young people at the fundamental level of capturing their imaginations and worlds with the amazing and exhilarating adventure of the kingdom of God.  We continually make the same mistake the disciples did—we assume that this kingdom of God stuff is grown-up and important business.

I’m fully conscious that it’s not easy for the church to keep the attention of children and young people these days.  Maybe it’s because we live in a world where there is so much sheer competition vying for the attention of our children that the church is fatally doomed from the start, or maybe, just maybe, it’s because we ourselves aren’t sufficiently hooked.

On Monday nights in Toronto’s Bloor West Village, the Yellow Griffin Pub’s upstairs room hosts “God at the Pub”.  A ministry of Runnymede Community Church for seven years, “God at the Pub” is the result of the church leadership’s fervent prayer and missional impulse to lower the “barriers to entry” posed by their traditional church building.  By bringing the Alpha course, and a homegrown curriculum called “Jesus Who?” to this non-traditional environment, the church and its pastor, Mike Wilkins, hoped to share the gospel with the unchurched in their community.  Has it worked?  Is this a fresh expression of church, of evangelism, or something else?

All the textbook prerequisites for reaching the unchurched seem to be present.  A welcoming, neutral venue, good food and community, and accessible, biblical content that presents the great news of Jesus Christ.  On opening night in September, there were 18 participants, 2 leaders, 3 visiting pastors (guilty as charged) and 1 bartender in attendance.  Drink orders were taken immediately, nametags distributed, and participants struggled in their first small group exercise, deciding among the pub’s vast selection of burgers.  The first night is free, but the $150 course fee, payable if you decide to stay for the ten week session, covers all the food and drink expenses.  Yes, people are paying and committing up front to learn about Jesus, and to enjoy some great food and drink!

After rushing to eat, Mike stood at the front of the room under a small projector screen to introduce the course.  “Jesus Who?” is an exploration of Jesus’ identity, what Mike described to me as a “Pre-Alpha” course, to introduce the “who” of salvation history before the theology of salvation covered in Alpha.  It’s designed to connect with those who are open to Jesus, but have little interest in organized religion.  The course begins with some of the most universally accepted ideas about Jesus, as a teacher, rabbi, guru, friend and revolutionary, before dealing with more challenging aspects, like Jesus as master, Christ, Saviour and Son of God.  The first week’s content was shorter than usual, and meant to get people thinking about how Jesus is portrayed in culture and media, and in their own minds.  Normally there would be a half hour talk, followed by a half hour of small group discussion, but not the first week.

Instead of small group discussion in the first week,  Mike asked each participant to introduce themselves, and tell the group why they’ve come.  Person after person introduced themselves, and nearly every person said they attended Runnymede Community Church, or were visiting from another church.  Many of them were new members, and could be described as “de-churched” people exploring their faith once again.  What was missing, however, was the demographic we could call “unchurched” – those with no past or present involvement in Christian faith and/or the church.

Is “God at the Pub” a fresh expression of church?  That is defined as “a form of church for our changing culture, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church.  It will come into being through principles of listening, service, incarnational mission and making disciples.   It will have the potential to become a mature expression of church shaped by the gospel and the enduring marks of the church and for its cultural context.”

The first part applies – it was established to reach those who are not yet members of any church.  However, those it was intended to reach (the unchurched) are no longer present.  Past sessions have included unchurched people, and hopefully future courses will also, but none were present this time.  Perhaps we can call “God at the Pub” a fresh expression of evangelism, since it explains the faith to new attendees at the church, and then feeds them back to the established congregation, with no intentional plan for a mature expression of church to arise in this context.

“God at the Pub” is a creative, fun way to teach Christian basics.  However, even with the barriers presented by traditional church buildings removed, it appears that there still exist other barriers to entry for the truly unchurched.  It’s possible that the content, explaining the identity of Jesus, is still too advanced for the truly unchurched, and that a more general introduction to the “unknown God” of Acts 17 is in order.  It’s possible that the icon of Christ used as the course’s logo and on posters turns people off, and they ignore the advertising.  Another possibility is that “God at the Pub” has even more barriers to remove to truly reach an unchurched audience.  It still relies on participants intentionally coming to a space set apart (the pub’s upstairs room), to commit to any pay for a complete session, and to join an unfamiliar group of people.  A truly incarnational approach to pub ministry might arise downstairs, in the pub itself, with Christians sharing the content of “Jesus Who?” one on one, where people truly gather.

The formative journey of fresh expressions describes a movement from loving service to community to discipleship to worship.  “God at the Pub” jumps right in with community and discipleship.  Loving service exists, but in the form of basic Christian education or discipleship, which likely meets the needs of those consciously wishing to explore Christianity.  They are tapping into the needs of church members, those on the fringes of church, but not the dechurched (those with a history of Christian faith, but who have drifted away) or even unchurched (those with no such history).  This reinforces the importance of “listening” to and knowing our communities before responding with any form of church, fresh or not, and that this listening must continue throughout the life of the ministry, as the community’s needs change and the church adapts its response.

My congratulations go to Runnymede Community Church, Mike Wilkins and God at the Pub.  This is a creative and fun extension of the church’s ministry, and has reached countless unchurched and dechurched people for Christ in the last seven years, and continues to engage and disciple newchurch members.  As with every church, their challenge is to keep the gospel and the principles of incarnational ministry before them, and to constantly proclaim the gospel afresh in a rapidly changing world.  “God at the Pub” is lightweight and nimble enough that I won’t be at all surprised to hear how God uses and adapts it transform lives for many years to come.

Link: This article from the local community paper from the same evening.

While there is undoubtedly a sense in which a life with God is better than one without God, it’s not a simple path of magic. Here, ‘better’ has nothing to do with false ‘prosperity gospel’ promises, and it most certainly doesn’t mean that life is easier. It can, in fact, get more complicated and difficult. Jesus also said that following him involved taking up a cross. In one famous phrase, Dietrich Bonhöffer said that when Jesus calls us to follow him he bids us come and die. One biblical writer said that ‘it is a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’

I recall one of my youth ministry heroes, Mike Yaconelli, once responding to a parent who asked for help with her wayward child: ‘Yes, I can help ruin his life.’ He meant, of course, that when someone gets involved with Jesus there is no telling where it will lead, only that it will sometimes lead in unknown paths and difficult directions. In the process, it will lead to wrestling with God.

This reality of the spiritual life is clearly pictured in several biblical passages, but perhaps most clearly in the story of Jacob wrestling with the ‘angel of the Lord’ (who in fact turns out to be none other than a manifestation of God). Jacob wrestles with God, is injured in the process, but in the end receives God’s blessing and a new name: ‘Israel’, meaning ‘God-wrestler.’ Eventually not just this one person but all God’s people in the Hebrew scriptures are called Israel—a nation of ‘God-wrestlers.’

Sadly, many young people are unprepared to meet a living God who refuses to dwell in religious boxes, no matter how pretty we try to make them—a God who is a respecter neither of ‘personal space’ nor ‘comfort zones.’ When you expect God always to lead gently like a shepherd, as God most certainly does sometimes, what do you do when this God turns dangerous and wants to wrestle?

To be sure, much of what passes for wrestling with God is not really so much about God as it is with things we think or believe or have heard about God. Sometimes all of us, young or not, confuse things we’ve been told about God with God.  Sadly, too often young people are subjected to attempts at ‘discipleship by indoctrination’ and are not taught how to wrestle through issues and beliefs. As Anne Lamott puts it, in a slightly different context: ‘God forbid that you should have your own opinions or perceptions—better to have head lice.’ [Bird by Bird, 110-111]. A theology professor I had one time told me in class that ‘You will find it much easier to live with yourself if you would just stop asking questions and believe what I say.’ What he really meant was that he would find it much easier to live with me if I stopped asking questions.

The unhappy truth is that this approach to discipleship doesn’t stand young people in good stead when beliefs are challenged, either from within or without. Through years of experience working with youth, I have witnessed far too often how it sets them on a course for disillusionment and disaster. It may seem like hard work, but it is far easier to teach basic navigational skills than to rescue those who have shipwrecked.

Many youth leaders and pastors, however, find themselves ill equipped to deal with the real-life questions, fears, doubts and struggles that young people face. In part, the church is to blame for this situation because we just have not invested the time, treasure and talent we talk so much about in either our young people or those who minister most directly among them.

In another way, we have simply not awakened to the illusion that we have to have the answers—that we have to somehow ‘fix’ the beliefs and ‘counter’ the doubts and ‘reassure’ the fears of young wrestlers. As we learned the true nature of spiritual mentoring as ‘walking with someone,’ we realise that integrity means refusing to ‘play-act religion’; it means admitting that we don’t have all the answers, letting them know that we, too, are wrestlers and committing ourselves to discerning together. Wrestling with our beliefs, struggles and faith can be a lonely experience when we are left feeling like we wrestle alone. How much better to know that we are part of a community of wrestling people!

This is even more important when we are not just wrestling with things about God but actually with God. God is just not some Big Idea out there somewhere. God is not just some Star Wars Force. God is the living God, and the living God engages us in living relationships. Living relationships are not just joyful and full of easy blessing. They’re messy, sometimes difficult, and often involve wrestling with the beloved—even the Beloved. I don’t suppose it’s coincidental that the biblical writers use metaphors of friendship, family, romance and marriage to describe our relationships with God.

Many biblical heroes from Moses and Lot through the prophets wrestled with God in different ways. Even Jesus wrestled with God in prayer to the point of sweating blood. The post-biblical saints frequently describe their relationship with God in terms of a phrase I’ve chosen for my tombstone: ‘I had a lovers’ quarrel with God.’

Young people simply cannot be abandoned in their wrestling with God. Even though we can’t spare them the risk of injury in the process, what better than for them to engage our dangerous God—or to wrestle with the sense of God’s absence—in the community of other God-wrestlers?

Is it worth it? Yes, of course, because, as Mr and Mrs Beaver said of Aslan, of course God’s not safe—but God is good.

We all know what Jesus did to the herd of swine in the gospel story when he allowed the demons who were harassing the demoniac to enter into the herd grazing nearby. Not a PETA poster moment, for sure.

Three weeks ago in Egypt, the government there began a pig slaughter on a slightly bigger scale: some 350,000 pigs were led to the slaughter for fear of the dreaded “swine” flu. Countries all over the world began to ban pork imports from North America and we saw news clips of well-intentioned people (usually in the grocery store, mid-shopping) telling the reporters that they were eliminating pork from their diet, “just in case.”

What these stories intimately share is the fact of possession, of being possessed. In the gospel story, the demonic possession of the pigs leads to their plunging death off the cliff. In our more recent dealings with swine (which extends far beyond Egypt’s rash reaction), it is us, as a culture that is possessed. We are a society that is possessed by fear and being possessed by fear always ends in death.

The days following the swine flu outbreak from Mexico were a newsmaker’s dream and an opportunity for our culture of fear to kick it into high gear. A new, hybrid flu that was unheard of with a catchy name, and an increasing death count—what more could the networks ask for? We were then all witnesses and participants in a quickly escalating panic.

Why did alarm spread so fast even though this flu turned out to be nowhere near as fatal as a regular seasonal flu? Why were we so quick to panic? I think Frank Furedi, in his book Culture of Fear, hints at why when he reminds us that “the risks that kill you are not necessarily the ones that provoke and frighten you.” What does he mean by that? He simply means that while we are afraid of what statistically usually kills us (cancer, heart disease, and stroke) we are, as a culture, more pointedly afraid of terrorism, school shootings, pedophiles, serial killers and these new killer viruses (which, statistically, come nowhere near to the risk of the big three above).

So, again, why did panic spread so quickly over a flu that we now know was overblown? I think the answer is that, as a culture, we’ve transformed fear, like everything else, into a commodity that is bought and sold and we’ve become proficient peddlers and consumers of fear. In other words, just like sex, fear sells. And just like selling sex, marketers, advertisers and producers hold a vested interest in shaping our collective imagination and influencing our desires to line up with what they’re selling—and we’re buying.

In his book, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear, Scott-Bader Saye makes the observation that in Scripture when we meet an angel from God, they begin their message with “fear not”. Why is that? He says he always thought that it was because angels must be such imposing and frightening figures. But there’s more to it than that. He thinks the reason they tell us to not be afraid is that the quieting of fear is required in order to hear and do what God asks of us. And I think he’s right.

Thomas Aquinas taught, eons ago, that disordered fear is a result of disordered desire. Simply put, we fear in deformed and distorted ways because our imaginations, and consequently, our desires are screwed up—which is another way of saying that we are a sinful people who can’t imagine a world of quieted fear and so we act, think, and speak accordingly.

You see, this culture of fear is all about shaping our imaginations through the various rituals that make up this culture from the ways and forms our news is disseminated to the methods with which producers market their products as the ‘safe’ alternative to their competitor’s. This is an embodied cultural reality that is practiced over and over again in order to intentionally form us to be a certain kind of people—in this case, scared.

As followers of Jesus in this culture, we are called to be a living alternative to it. Jesus, like God’s angels, told his disciples over and over again, “fear not”. As the church, our liturgy is all about shaping our imaginations through the rituals that make up this alternative culture of the church. Nowhere is this more clearly, visibly and physically true than in our practice of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is an embodied reality that is practiced over and over again in order to intentionally form us to be a certain kind of people. It is the act of the church whereby it remembers who she is as follower of a crucified and risen Lord. So, it is in the ritual practice of the Eucharist that we learn that death is not the worst thing that can happen to us—which puts us deeply at odds with this predominant culture of fear which feeds off this fear of death.

As Bader-Saye notes, this isn’t about telling ourselves not to fear. Our fears are primal, overwhelming and overpowering. We can’t just tell ourselves to feel less fear—that would be disingenuous. What we need is for our desires and our fears to be re-ordered, or rather, rightly ordered. In other words, our overwhelming fears need themselves to be overwhelmed by something bigger and better. That is what we recognize and practice in the Eucharist. In consuming Jesus we are consumed into the body of Christ; we are consumed into a wonderful adventure where our fears are rightly ordered because we know this story to be ultimately hopeful and not tragic.

So what, in the end, of the pigs? It is our task, as those people whose imaginations are shaped and formed in the Eucharist to embody that imagination in our world through practices that upend the culture of fear. Being a people that don’t buy into the consumerism of fear is a good first step and is part and parcel of our commission as followers of Jesus in our world. We ought to be God’s disciplined people in a scared world—a people who practice hospitality to strangers, who love enemies, who bring gentleness to violence, a people who, in our day to day lives, are dispossessed of the demons of fear and filled with God’s Spirit of peace.

IKEA North York presents…SENSTATIONAL SUNDAY MORNINGS!!

Sunday Mornings are a great time for family, big breakfasts and coming to IKEA! Starting on February 22nd and running on

March 1st, 8th and 15th. IKEA North York will have another great reason to come to IKEA. We will have 2 crazy offers on great products.

From 10am-12pm the Sales team will reduce 2 good products at 50% off!

There will also be a great reason to bring the kids…

From 10:30am to 11:30am kids can enjoy a fun activity in the restaurant!

This advertisement was flanked by a picture of a happy nuclear family full of joy, optimism and looking so über-cool with their new IKEA gear. So there it was: “Sunday mornings at IKEA”-what every family is looking for! Drop the kids off at the activity center, eat good, inexpensive food and funkify (please excuse my creative vocabulary) your life at unbeatable prices all in one Sunday morning!

Now the reason that IKEA (bless its soul for where else could I find a lint roller for that price?) represents a challenge to the church is because it’s out-narrating the church; it’s beating the church at its own game of narrating and embodying a story about what life is all about. It’s not IKEA alone that’s successful here but it’s a good representative of the whole culture of commerce and consumption and its ideals. In fact, the whole industry of advertising is based on successfully narrating a way of life-a way of life that you can’t help but want to be a part of.

Do you know why IKEA is so successful? I mean, we’re in the middle of a recession and the place was packed with people with their carts full of stuff (ours included). The reason IKEA is thriving is because it knows its story, it knows how to tell and embody its story of consumption at fair prices. It knows its end goal, its reason for being. In other words, IKEA knows how to do its IKEA thing, and it performs it well. In fact, walking the halls, you can read the narrative about how IKEA came into being. They sure know how to tell a story.

“Church” names a story, it names a people, it names a certain performance; simply put, it names a way of life. Being a part of the church means being a part of this performance, embodying this way of life. The church tells and lives out a story about what life is all about. In doing so, it narrates an alternative story to the one our culture, so effectively told by IKEA, does. What does this mean? It means, simply, that the church tells a different story than our world does. This ought not to come as a surprise, since the Jesus we follow embodied an immeasurably different story than did the world of his day.

But it’s when the church forgets who she is-when she forgets what her story is-that the church misses the whole point of this following Jesus thing. It’s then that the church starts to listen and buy into the stories that are told around it; stories like the myth of redemptive violence, or the story of unlimited consumption of resources, or the story of homeland safety and security at all costs, or the story of self-concern over the concern of those on the edge of society. Maybe it’s as simple as the story of “the best bang for your buck”-a story told without narrating anything about the condition of the production or the producers of our goods. The stories told around us are legion and often very attractive. When the church forgets to do its church thing, it loses its way.

Remember what happened to Israel when Israel forgot to do its Israel thing? Babylonian captivity, period. So, when we bemoan the state of the church, or when we contemplate the nature of cultural shifts and what role the church should play in them, we need, above all things, to remember that the malaise the church finds itself in (call it whatever you like, “ecclesial recession” is one of my favourites!) is first of all a loss of identity, which is a long way of saying that we find ourselves in our own Babylonian captivity.

Answers? Well, I get asked a lot, probably because I’m a young priest, about how the church is going to move forward into the future. And right now many Dioceses in our church are working with strategic plans as they look to that future. Let me add something that’s seemingly obvious but that gets lost ‘on the ground’ as it were: no amount of strategic planning, no number of core values, no measure of problem solving will secure the future of the Anglican Church in Canada if we are not willing to radically re-think what it means to be a church in a culture that has by-and-large forgotten about the church! Before we crunch the numbers, before we throw solutions at our problems, what this Babylonian captivity ought to engender and create is a penitential community-a community that can acknowledge our collective failure to embody the gospel call to live out the Kingdom of God in our world.

Answers?  I only have one.  Only God rescues. Only God takes unfaithful Israel back. Only God can rescue his people. I’m writing this on the tail end of Lent as we approach the celebration of resurrection. At Easter we tell and embody the story in our services, in our pageants, and in our choir choruses, of a God who rescues, and in the resurrection rescue of love that raised our Lord from the grave, rescues us as well. That’s good news; and, it’s incomparably better news-and a much better story!-than Sensational Sunday Mornings at IKEA.

The first part of this article was about in-house distinctions of spirituality: what are the different branches of the Christian tree, if you like. In this second part, I want to think about—well, I guess the opposite of in-house is out-house—what distinguishes Christian spirituality, this Christian tree (whichever of the five types we’re taking about) from other forms of spirituality?

Before we get to that, a couple of things by way of introduction:

1. You have probably noticed that the word spirituality is used in our culture as though it is just one thing, the same the world over. But in fact this is not the case. Different religions and traditions actually have different definitions of what it means to be spiritual, and indeed of the idea of spirit. This is one reason the word is notoriously difficult to define!

Some time ago, my friend Faun Harriman drew my attention to an article in Chateleine magazine (that well-known authority on spirituality) which was quoting researchers at the U of T, who defined spirituality as “the beliefs we hold concerning our place in the universe and our connection to a higher power. Spirituality (they say) reduces stress, promotes healthy lifestyle choices and increases a sense of belonging.”

Is that right? Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Are those characteristics of Christians? Does Christian spirituality have to do with knowing our place in the universe? Yes, I suppose that’s part of it. Does it have to do with connection to a higher power? Sure, though it makes a big difference whether the name of your higher power is Jesus Christ or The Force of Star Wars!

Does it reduce stress and promote healthy lifestyle choices? Well, that depends. Faun commented that spirituality “didn’t exactly boost Jesus’ longevity.” Did it reduce his stress when he set his face to go to the cross? Was it a healthy lifestyle choice to oppose the Pharisees? What did the families of his disciples say when they went home and said the master had called them to take up their crosses and follow him? “Wow, that’s great. What a healthy lifestyle choice you are making! That’ll really increase your sense of belonging.” Probably not.

Those researchers are not describing Christian spirituality. They’re not making allowances for the diversities of spiritualities in our world.

If there could be a common definition, it would have to be a very minimal one, something like, “those things that connect a person to a bigger reality than the material.” As soon as we move beyond that, we start getting into differences.

2. The second thing is this: how many of us were using the word spirituality twenty years ago? Probably only one or two of us. So why has it become almost universal in recent years, as in the phrase, “I’m a spiritual person, but I’m not . . . religious”? There are at least a couple of reasons to do with changes in our culture:

(a) One change is that people have come to realise that there is more to the world than simply the material. We have realised that there are other parts of us, which for convenience we call our spirits, that also need tending and nurturing. It seems to me that that in itself is a good thing.

But the other reason it’s gained in popularity I don’t find so encouraging:

(b) In western countries thirty years ago, if we wanted to take care of our spirits, where would you go? We would probably have checked out some churches. But now we don’t want to do that, because we are “spiritual but not . . . religious.”

What’s the problem? Why do we make that distinction? I suspect that too is to do with changes in society in general. Church is too restrictive. After all, most churches/synagogues/temples/ mosques tend to have definite ideas about spirituality, and people now are more inclined to want to do their own thing, not accept someone else’s ideas. You’ve heard the kind of statement: “Nobody can tell me what to believe; nobody can tell me how to behave; I’ll decide what’s right and wrong for me.” It’s not rocket science to realise that that kind of attitude is hardly likely to drive people into the arms of organised religion (can you imagine someone saying, “I’m creating my own spirituality, so I’m thinking of becoming an Anglican”?). (It has to be said, however, that those who talk about organised religion obviously don’t have much experience of the average parish council.)

So the concern with spirituality actually comes out of the individualism of our world, it comes out of the idea that spiritual stuff is private and personal, and that if it’s for real it’s unlikely to have anything to do with an institution. (As someone pointed out recently, in our world, formal has come to signal hypocritical, while informal has come to mean genuine and authentic.)

These things should alert us to the fact that what Christian tradition has to say about spirituality may sound quite different, and not necessarily appealing to the average person who is “exploring their spirituality.”

One more thing: you know, don’t you, that the world divides into those who divide things into two categories and those who don’t? I do, so it won’t surprise you to know there are two ways of thinking about Christian belief and practice.

One is that it is like a tightrope—narrow and straight, and if you step even slightly to left or right, you’ll fall off. I know Christians who regard their spirituality that way, and maybe you do too. That’s not at all what I’m trying to do here: to define a tightrope for you.

The other way of thinking about it is that Christian belief and practice are like a field with a fence around it. It’s a big field, it’s a beautiful field, and there’s lots of space in the field for Colin and Astrid and Eddie and Chris and Samantha to run and jump and dance and explore and pick flowers. But the fence is there to say, This is the territory marked out for us by God: there are dangers outside.

So what I’m going to do is list some of what I would say are the fence posts that define the field of Christian spirituality.

Fence post 1: Christian spirituality centres around a relationship with God.

Now, you may ask, isn’t this stating the obvious? No, because this is not true for all spiritualities. Others might say the goal is to be one with the universe. (You know what the Buddhist said to the hotdog vendor? “Make me one with everything.” Buddhists tell that joke, so I think it’s OK.) Others might say the goal of my spirituality is self-fulfilment.

For someone like Shirley Maclaine, it is something else again:

I am God, you are God. God is not something or someone separate from the world or from me. . . . If one says audibly ‘I am God’ the sound vibrations literally align the energies of the body to a higher atunement. You can use – ‘I am God’ or ‘I am that I am’ as Christ often did . . . Each soul is its own God. You must never worship anyone or anything other than self. For YOU are God. To love self is to love God. (Dancing in the Light)

Now it’s her right and privilege to believe whatever she likes. But as a simple observation of fact, her understanding of God and hence her spirituality is not one shared by Jews, Christians or Muslims And all the streams of Christian faith we looked at in Part I say the same: God is in some mysterious sense has a quality we can only call personhood, and God is a “person” who is other than us.

C.S.Lewis describes a young woman whose parents were very concerned that she should not think of God as a person: as a result, when she was asked as an adult what her picture of God was, she replied, God is like an infinitely-extended tapioca pudding. No, as Christians understand God, it’s not like that. Think of the opening scene of the movie Contact, where the camera moves out from the earth, back and back and back, into the infinite vastness of the universe. The Christian claim is that behind all that, through it, in it, above it, is a vast, mysterious, wonderful, awesome Being who loves me and invites me into a face-to-face, I-Thou relationship.

And when we speak of the Incarnation, God being revealed in our world, it is as a person that God is known.

Suppose that Bill Watterson, the cartoonist who created Calvin and Hobbes, wants to communicate with his creations, Calvin and Hobbes. So he creates a new cartoon character, and draws him into the strip. His name is Bill Watterson. In character, he is very like the “real-life” Bill Watterson, but, of course, he exists in two dimensions, and he communicates through speech-bubbles. In the strip, this character shows what the “real” Bill Watterson is like: his ideas, his values, his attitude towards his creation are all consistent with those of the cartoonist. Thus Calvin and Hobbes can know their creator in a way that’s real authentic but of course it’s limited. They are faced with the possibility of a relationship with their Creator.

But this whole idea of incarnation only works because we believe God has this quality we can only inadequately describe as personhood.

Sometimes, you know, we may take it for granted, and talk flippantly about “my relationship with God”, or (to quote the movie Dogma) my “buddy Jesus” but actually it is radical and overwhelming thing to claim what Christians claim.

So this is our first fencepost: for followers of Jesus, the heart of our spiritual life is nothing more not less than to know God, this God, and to be known by this God. This is primary: everything else is secondary.

Here’s fencepost #2: Christian spirituality is not a do-it-yourself faith.

This too goes against the spirit of our age. We tend to say things like, “Do whatever feels good”; “Find whatever works for you”; “My beliefs are true for me but it doesn’t mean they’re true for you”; “Nobody can tell you what to believe.”

And so much current interest in spirituality takes a kind of mix and match approach: a bit of Buddhist meditation, a bit of Gregorian chant, and a weekly Catholic mass. In other words, take whatever practices you want from wherever you find them, and put them together in whatever way works for you (though what it means to say a spirituality “works” is not very clear). After all, who’s to tell you you’re wrong?

But in Christian tradition, the way we express the life of the spirit, the way we nurture our spirits, is not in the first place something we work out for ourselves. In this sense, Christianity is not a grass-roots faith: we don’t arrive at it by personal investigation or voting on it to find a consensus: it’s a top-down faith–by which (trust me) I don’t mean through bishops and synods particularly, but from God. Christian spirituality is, or at least claims to be, a gift from God, and our job is to receive it with gratitude. Now this is not to say there’s no freedom or diversity in Christian spirituality. Of course not—that’s what I wrote about in Part I.

This blend of a form given by God (on the one hand) and yet freedom that is up to us (on the other hand) is explained I think brilliantly by New Testament scholar Tom Wright. He suggests the Bible lets us in on the story God is writing about the world. (He says it’s a play in five acts. Following Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh in Truth is Stranger than  it Used to Be, I think it works better with six.)

• In Act 1, God creates an incredibly beautiful world. At the heart of it are human beings who live in a dance of perfect harmony with the Creator, with one another and with the environment.
• In Act 2, things go horribly wrong. Human beings try to play God. They step out of the choreography of God’s dance. They get out of step with one another, and with the environment, and, most importantly, out of step with God.
• In Act 3, God begins to restore his work of art to even more than its original glory by calling one elderly couple, Abraham and Sarah, to be the ancestors of a nation through whom this restoration will come.
• In Act 4, God writes himself into the script of human life, to model for us what human life should really look like, to die for our sins and to rise again.
• Act 5 is the period between Jesus’ return to heaven and his return; and:
• Act 6 is the end of our world, when Jesus returns and restores the world to more than its original beauty.

Now, says Tom Wright, suppose a previously unknown play of Shakespeare’s were found today. He suggests that it’s all there except Act 5, which is missing. What could you do about the missing act? He suggests the best thing would be to get together the world’s top Shakespearian actors, tell them to immerse themselves in the play as we have it, and then let them loose on the stage. They would perform acts 1, 2, 3 and 4 as Shakespeare wrote them, but then they would ad lib act 5! All they know is that their characters have to behave in a way that is consistent with the play up to this point, and (if there are six acts) it has to connect convincingly with the events of the final act.

Now, says Tom Wright: that’s where we are. God has given us a framework for our lives, to understand the story as it was before we came on the scene, and as it will be after we are gone. And it’s as though God says to us: This is my story: do you want to be a part of it? This is the way your spirit will come to life and flourish. It will stretch you, there will be adventures you could never have imagined. Sometimes it will be hard, but it will bring you joy. And it will be the right part for you, the part I dreamed for you before time began and for which you were made.

Fence post #3 really follows from this: Christian spirituality affects every aspect of life

Christianity, you know, is a horribly practical religion. Sometimes it would be nice if it were only a matter of candles and incense and prayers. (I think it was Chesterton who said that Judaism was the first religion in the world to link spirituality and ethics: if you follow this religion, you have to act in a certain ethical fashion. When you think about it, there is no obvious reason why you shouldn’t keep your worship life and the rest of your life separate: it depends on the kind of God you worship.) Christianity, the child of Judaism, is the same.

As a result, our spirituality will invade every corner of our lives, from our work lives to our sex lives, from our reading habits to our shopping habits.

And, if we ask why the Creator of the Universe would care about such everyday things, the answer is simple: because God made the whole of life, not just the religious bits of it, and because God loves us and wants us to enjoy life to the full in this amazing world. You know what the greatest privilege is for any human being? It’s to able to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way 24 hours a day. It’s the most beautiful thing in God’s world. It gives God great joy. That’s why it’s so important for our spirituality.

So:

• If you’re an artist, your art will be different because you love God. Not that it will all be realistic paintings of Bible scenes (heaven forbid! those are not necessarily Christian!). But as you paint a landscape (say), it will be with the knowledge that God made that landscape, and that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” If you paint a portrait, it will be with the knowledge that it is the image of God you are representing. And so on.

• If you are a store-keeper, you will be aware that your calling is to be the channel through which God’s material blessings come to those who need them. So you will sell products that honour the creator—that are well-made, that didn’t exploit those who made them, that are beautiful as well as useful—and you will treat your customers not as your source of income, but as amazing creatures who reflect the majesty of their Creator.

• If you are a teacher, you will teach with the consciousness that you are teaching children how to live in God’s world, how to treasure it, steward it, make responsible use of it. And you will treat your students equally because each is in the image of God, and because Christ died for each one.

We could go on, but you get the idea. This is part of spirituality? Absolutely. Because in Christian spirituality, there is no secular/sacred distinction, as Samantha tried to get through to us in Part I. Our spirituality filters into every corner of our lives, and brings light and beauty, meaning and joy.

After that, #4 may seem rather jarring:

Fence post #4 Christian spirituality is tough

Those researchers at U of T seem to have missed this one. But it is crucial. Think of Christians who are killed for their faith—more, we are told, in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen put together—had they made a healthy lifestyle choice to follow Jesus? Yet Jesus made it very clear that anyone wanting to nurture their spirituality in the Christian tradition needs to know that it will mean some costly and uncomfortable choices, if it hasn’t already done so.

You know the sort of thing Jesus says: “Anyone who comes to me but refuses to let go of father, mother, spouse, child, brothers, sisters—yes, even one’s very self—can’t be my disciple. Anyone who won’t shoulder his own cross and follow behind me can’t be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26-27)

Jesus, frankly, is not a nice person who only wants us to be happy and comfortable, and his spirituality is probably not a kind of spirituality we would choose, left to our own devices: “Hmm, I’ve got some ceremony here, I’ve got some mystery and some meditation. I think what I’m missing is a little suffering, and I guess I’d better be open to the possibility of martyrdom. Sure: why not?”

It’s unlikely we would do that. But if we begin to explore Christian spirituality, we will quite quickly discover that this is inescapable. After all, the cross of Jesus Christ is the central symbol for Christian faith. And we are told that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” so in the crucifixion God has also suffered. C.S.Lewis even wonders whether the act of creation itself may have been a kind of crucifixion for God: “Perhaps there is an anguish, an alienation, a crucifixion involved in the creative act.” (Letters to Malcolm) In other words, difficulty, suffering, hardship are inseparable from the heart of Christian faith.

But let’s notice this too: Jesus is not being a sadist when he says such things, though it can look like that at first sight; in fact, there can be days when it feels like it. No: actually the opposite: he’s being kind. He has understood something very profound about the way God has built the world. Listen again: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23-25). Did you get it? God’s ultimate goal is not that we should lose our lives: he wants us to save our lives and he’s telling us the way to do that.

Now, this death and resurrection can happen in any one of a million ways. It’s about ten years now since I decided I was meant to be an evangelist (I’m still embarrassed by the word), and, as you might expect, it wasn’t an easy choice. I was doing good ministry, working with students, directing an area and supervising staff. But then there came a crisis: one of my staff burned out and I felt I was responsible and that I should resign. IVCF kindly said, We don’t want you to resign, but maybe there is a different job you should be doing with IVCF.

Well, as I thought about it, two options came to mind: one was that maybe I could be a teacher of the Bible available to students across the country; the other was to offer myself as an evangelistic speaker for students across the country. I had recently read Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled, and as a result I was thinking about the importance of taking risks. That would mean the evangelism option—certainly a road less travelled. Bible teaching would have meant appreciative audiences; evangelism could mean the opposite! And what if it didn’t work out? What would I do with my life then? What if no-one wanted an itinerant evangelist (specially an Anglican one!)? Did I even want to be known as an evangelist? What if no-one became a Christian through my ministry? What if there was opposition to the Gospel? Would there be the financial support to do it? It felt a lot like a choice to “give up my life”.

But it was one of those times when I knew Jesus was saying, “Take up your cross . . . If you give up your life you will find it.” To my amazement, within a couple of months, I had received invitations for the following two years. I was involved in that ministry of evangelism for almost ten years, and I have to tell you I have seldom found such joy in serving God. To my faithless surprise, I found that Jesus was right: when I gave up my life, I found my life.

Well, no two stories are identical, and I don’t know how Jesus has called you to give up your life or where he will call you to give up your life. But this I know: if you are a follower of Jesus, it will happen if it hasn’t happened already. It feels like cruelty, but in fact it’s kindness, and it’s central to Christian spirituality.

The next fence post can also feel like a death.

Fence post #5 Christian spirituality thrives in community

Again, there are many spiritualities which are individual and private. You can just figure it out for yourself, you can practice by yourself. There may be no-one else in the world who shares your spirituality, and that may not be important for you. But Christian spirituality is inescapably corporate.

I suspect for most of us this community thing happens on different levels. For myself, it works like this. My wife Deborah is my closest source of Christian community, with whom I read the Bible and pray and share life every day. But then I also have a prayer partner, a male, with whom I meet every three weeks or so, and we share different kinds of things and pray for one another. I have a men’s Bible study group called “Saturday Stuff for Guys” which meets every other Saturday morning, which I wouldn’t miss for the world because it brings me great encouragement. And then there is the larger, Sunday congregation, some of whom I know and love well, some of whom I hardly know at all, and some of whom (if I’m honest) I find a bit difficult.

But if Christian community feeds our spirituality, it can also be a real pain in the anatomy and very destructive. I bought a second hand car recently, and it turned out that the dealer was a Christian. I asked him what church he attended, and he said, “I’m not involved in church right now. I go to my Promise Keepers group, but that’s it. You know, I’d heard the saying that the church is the only army that shoots its own wounded. Now I know what that means.” And he wouldn’t tell me any more, so I didn’t pry.

If it’s any consolation, it’s never been easy. Even when Jesus hung out with the twelve, more than once they were divided over who was the most important among them. And the reason we have much of the New Testament is because letters had to be written to churches that were divided!

The easiest response to problems in the church, I know, is to say, Oh, I’m going to leave this church and go over to the next one. Eugene Peterson in his book Under the Unpredictable Plant says this is why the Benedictine Order added to the traditional three monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience the vow of stability. What does that mean? It means you can’t switch monasteries. Deborah discovered this not long ago, when she happened to be visiting a Benedictine monastery, and learned that not only can monks never leave their monastery, they will sit between the same two people every mealtime of their lives until they die and someone takes their place. (You just hope they have good table manners.)

Does it sound extreme? Maybe, but it’s saying something important. Christian spirituality is not nurtured in a community consisting of all the people we like best in the world. It grows by learning to live and work and worship with all God’s people, the difficult ones as well as the easy going ones, the ones who are like us and the ones who are different from us.

This isn’t just something God dreamed up to make life difficult for us. Rather, it’s God saying, This is how you function best. If you work at this, this is how you reflect who I am. After all, if God is a community of three, and we are in God’s image, then it is only in community that we will grow into the likeness of our Creator.

Conclusion

So . . . five fence posts around the field of Christian spirituality. Christians don’t need to be ashamed of their spirituality or apologise for it or water it down. It makes sense, it’s resilient, and, in spite of the abuses, it has produced the fruit of beautiful lives for two thousand years.

But, you know, I have to confess I don’t really like talking about Christian spirituality. It seems to me one of the good things about political correctness is that we call people what they want to be called. So we don’t call the Inuit Eskimo any more, because that’s not what they call themselves; we don’t call First Nations people Indians any more because it’s inaccurate and it’s not how they think of themselves. (I would like to think that one day this principle will be applied to the Welsh, since Welsh is an Old English word meaning foreigner.)

But what of Christians? Even “Christian” isn’t a word that Christians chose for themselves: it was a label stuck on them by other people. And I for one don’t particularly want to be thought of as an adherent of Christian spirituality! Sounds so dry, doesn’t it?

The way I want to think of myself is the way the first Christians thought of themselves, simply as disciples of Jesus, followers of Jesus, students of Jesus. The focus is not on us and our spirituality but on the journey and on him, our Teacher and Friend, our Lord and Guide, the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Your Church Can Thrive

Percy helps congregations answer tough, critical, and strategic questions about their ministry and mission. How do we serve the member in the pew, the casual visitor, family and friends of the congregants, and the neighbourhood beyond? These are where connections that build healthy congregations are make and nurtured.

This book can be purchased at your local Christian bookseller or online here

Before going into ministry, Wendy worked in the areas of sales, sales management and marketing. Her background has now translated itself into “gentle evangelism” which she loves to share with others. This theme of “gentle evangelism” is common to all her workshops.

 Wendy has served in 2 rural parishes and is currently serving in the rural yet slightly urban thinking parish of St. James in Caledon East. By instilling her strong belief in the power of the hospitality of the kingdom of God into the hearts and minds of the people in the congregations, and the power of God working in them and through them, churches have grown significantly. 

 Workshops offered by Wendy

• Hospitality of the Kingdom of God Today: in this workshop we take an in-depth look at hospitality as it is presented to us in Holy Scripture and then we establish ways in which this hospitality may become a part of the DNA of our congregations. Hospitality of the Kingdom is absolutely essential, it defines who we are as Christians, therefore we must ensure that we do it very well. (5 hours)
• Mobilizing Laity: sometimes it seems that it is always the same people doing all the work in our churches, yet we know how important it is to encourage one another in the work of our Lord. This workshop will allow us to explore a variety of ways in which to encourage, equip and enable others to become involved. (5 hours)
• Your Community and the Sending Out? This workshop gives us an opportunity to think about what it means to be a community in Christ. Even though we may be a perfectly good community it is always good and healthy to check in and make sure that we are on track with God’s plan for us and for who we are as His community. The sending out section allows us to look at the humbling reality that we are all sent out in Jesus’ name.  What does that mean, and how does that work in your community? (can be done in 3 hours)
• Rural Realities:  Church life within a rural setting presents some unique opportunities and challenges. In this workshop we consider all aspects of the rural church. We look to scripture for insight and revelation. Jesus did most of his ministry in rural settings and small towns. We develop a base of ideas with which to move forward. (can be done in 3 hours) 

This Article is from the Fall 2005 edition of good idea!, also available here in a fully formatted PDF file.

One of the crucial needs for a congregation wishing to grow in the area of evangelism is to offer a course where the “basics” of the Christian faith are taught in a way that is accessible, winsome and challenging. For many churches, Alpha has filled this niche; for others, Harold Percy’s Christianity 101 series has been very helpful.  Yet there is evidence that churches which offer their own homegrown courses of this kind see very similar levels of response to those offering the better known programs.

Tim Chesterton has been teaching Christian Basics courses since 1997. Currently, St. Margaret’s runs three Christian Basics courses a year, two on weeknights and one on a Friday night and Saturday; the courses are four sessions long, and are designed for inquirers, for new Christians, for new church members, for long-time members who need a refresher course in the basics, and for baptismal candidates or parents bringing children for baptism.St. Margaret’s also runs a six-session follow-up course, Growing and Living as a Christian, designed to help people who have accepted the invitation to become followers of Jesus and who want help on the next step in their journey.

The material from these two courses has recently been published as Starting at the Beginning (Anglican Book Centre, 2004).  Bishop Victoria Matthews says, “I especially recommend this book for seekers and those wondering what becoming more serious about the Christian faith would mean.”

Harold Percy adds, “The time has long since come for the church to reclaim its primary ministry of making disciples—intentional followers of Jesus who are learning to live to the glory of God. For congregational leaders who want to help people grow into spiritual maturity, this book will be a helpful tool.”

Tim is excited to make the material in Starting at the Beginning available to a wider audience through the Institute of Evangelism, so that more congregations can begin to create and teach their own Christian Basics program. He is able to offer two slightly different weekend workshops.The first workshop simply presents the Christian Basics course within that time frame. This leaves participants to work out how they might create a similar course for their own context. Some prefer this approach.

The second presents the Christian Basics workshop but also gives guidance about how to run Christian Basics courses in a parish setting. Tim’s parish experience has been in small congregations in the ‘Family’ and ‘Pastoral’ size categories, but the principles are applicable to all sizes of congregations.

Tim is no longer available as an Associate of the Institute.  Please contact the Director, John Bowen for help teaching Christian Basics.

This video is available for sale in DVD format.
Purchase a copy for $15 Plus HST and $1 Shipping:

A 25-minute video talk by John Bowen showing how the process of evangelism requires the involvement of a whole conregational and all their gifts.  Sponsored by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.  A user-friendly introduction to the idea of congregational evangelism.

We start with discipleship. Christians are called primarily to discipleship, not to evangelism. But if we work on being disciples, I won’t say evangelism will happen spontaneously, but it will at least be within our grasp.  Consider how this works in John 1:35-36. John the Baptist says to John and Andrew, “Behold the lamb of God!” and they follow—in other words they begin to be disciples. The very next thing is that Andrew goes to fetch Peter. But in telling him to come to Jesus, he is in fact evangelizing him. What is it that has made that possible? Simply that Andrew has become a disciple himself, so now he can invite someone else to be a disciple—which is the heart of evangelism. The same pattern happens just a few verses later. Jesus evangelizes Philip, that is, he invites him to be a disciple. Now, because Philip is a disciple he can go off and evangelize Nathaniel—that is, invite him to be a disciple too. You see the pattern? So evangelism begins with discipleship. Once we have started on the road of discipleship, we can help others become disciples too—that is, we can evangelize them. But only disciples can make disciples. Only those who are following can help others follow. Only those who have experienced good news can share good news. 

So let’s think about discipleship. Christians are Disciples Interestingly enough, the name by which the first Christians called themselves most often was “disciple.”  And the literal meaning of the word “disciple” is “learner” or “student.”  For them, it seems, when they thought of Christian faith, the thing that came to their mind first was not church or services or the Ten Commandments or being a good citizen, but learning. This suggests that for them the Christian community was first and foremost a school, and the Christian life a process of learning. 

This raises some interesting questions. Where is this school? What is it for? What do you learn there? What are the teaching methods? Who are the teachers? And where are classes held? How do you graduate? Is it true that the graduate programs are out of this world? The easiest question to answer is: who is the teacher? The answer is Jesus. Many times in the pages of the earliest biographies of Jesus he is called “Teacher”, and a couple of times he calls himself by the same title. But what is it that he teaches? What is the curriculum in this school Jesus is running?  In the 1940s, Dorothy Sayers wrote a series of plays for radio based on the life of Jesus and called The Man Born to be King. In one of those plays she puts into the mouth of Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’ first followers, the sort of thing Mary might have said to Jesus as she recalled the first time she met him: “Did you know? My friends and I came there that day to mock you. We thought you would be sour and grim, hating all beauty and treating life as an enemy. But when I saw you, I was amazed. You were the only person there who was really alive. The rest of us were going about half-dead—making the gestures of life, pretending to be real people. The life was not with us but with you—intense and shining, like the strong sun when it rises and turns the flames of our candles to pale smoke. And I wept and was ashamed, seeing myself such a thing of trash and tawdry. But when you spoke to me, I felt the flame of the sun in my heart. I came alive for the first time. And I love life all the more since I have learnt its meaning.” [1] 

Sayers explains elsewhere: “What she sees in Jesus is the Life–the blazing light of living intensely.”   What did Jesus come to teach? He said on one occasion, “I have come so that people might have life and have it in all its fullness!”[2] Jesus is a teacher of life: he teaches us how to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way—and in the friendship of God. That is what people saw in Jesus. It is what gave him that unique quality of being fully alive; it is what attracted people like Mary to be his followers. They wanted to learn the life that they saw in Jesus. Then I want to ask: how do you learn this kind of life? Some time ago I received in the mail a Bible study guide with a picture of a very formal classroom on the cover: big desk, blackboard, books neatly arranged in the desk, clock on the wall. To be honest, I didn’t spend a lot of time with it, because it seemed to me the whole image was so deeply wrong. Jesus’ kind of learning never took place in a classroom with a blackboard and a big desk. The

That then raises the question of how we learn? Jesus has a specially vivid image for this:  

“Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am humble and gentle in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30) 

There in the centre of this saying of Jesus is his offer to be our teacher: “Come . . . Learn of me.”   Then he gives us a powerful image to explain how we learn. He says, “Take my yoke upon you.”  Before we came to

Well, we learn theory through such things as Scripture, sermons, small group discussions, and books. We learn by watching models of the Christian life—Jesus first and foremost, then models in Scripture and church history, but then too people we have known who have showed us what it means to live a life of Christian faith. Experimenting generally means risking something new. I don’t know what that will be for you. Jesus tailors the learning to the particular disciple. it may well involve such things as:

 o       learning to be generous with what we have—perhaps more generous than we feel comfortable with at first;o       learning to express our anger in more constructive ways;o       learning how to forgive;o       learning to come alongside someone at work or at school who is a bit of a misfit;o       Jesus the Teacher may also want to alter our career plans, or our retirement plans, or our holiday plans.  Then there is evaluation: going over what we are learning with a friend or a mentor or a spiritual director. And all of this of course in an environment of Love: the safety of Jesus and the community of his followers.   If this sounds daunting, it is important to note that there are encouragements here. For example, Jesus says he is a teacher who is gentle and humble. Many of us have had teachers who are not like that: they delighted in showing how clever they were, and in putting down their students’ mistakes. Jesus is the opposite: encouraging, nurturing, patient with our mistakes, taking time and trouble with us individually, to help us learn. Then too he says his yoke is “easy.”  For anyone who has been a follower of Jesus more than about twenty-four hours, that sounds a little strange because being a Christian is often demanding. The original biographies of Jesus, from which this saying is taken, were written in Greek, the main language of Jesus’ world, and I am told that the Greek word for “easy” can be better translated “well-fitting.”  Actually, we still use the word “easy” this way. If you are looking for a pair of new shoes, you might try a couple of pairs that really do not fit and then you find one that is just right, and you say, “That’s a really easy fit.” You mean the shoes are  comfortable, they are right for you. This is the sense in which Jesus’ yoke is “easy”: it is well-fitting. After all, in those days, yokes were made one by one for individual oxen—there was no mass production. Jesus is saying, in effect, My yoke is made specially for you. There will be work and there will sometimes be difficulty—but the yoke will still be the one I made for you. When Jesus originally said these words, he was issuing an invitation. He begins this saying with the words, “Come to me!” That wasn’t a theoretical statement, and his hearers knew it. In my imagination, when he had finished, and the crowds were going home for supper, there were some who did not leave straight away. They pushed through the crowd and came up to Jesus, maybe a little hesitantly, and said something like this: “Jesus, you know what you said about being your student and sharing your yoke? I really think I’d like to do that. Is there some kind of application form? Do I have to get transcripts?” And whoever that person was, whatever they had done, wherever they had been in their spiritual journey, Jesus said (and in my imagination it’s with a big smile and outstretched arms), “That’s great. You’re welcome. We’re just going to have supper. Come eat with us and I’ll introduce you to the others.”   In one sense, nothing has changed since that first day, if it is indeed true that Jesus has returned from death and is alive forever. So we can speak to him just as if he were present here in the flesh. The offer of becoming his student, learning to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way, still stands. And his invitation, “Come to me”, is just as real today as it was 2,000 years ago. And now just as then he waits to see what we will say. Let me offer you the sort of thing you may wish to say to Jesus in response to his invitation. If it makes sense to you, you may wish to echo these words silently in your heart to him. 

Jesus –

Thank you for inviting me to join your school.  Thank you for offering yourself as my Teacher, and for shaping a yoke just for me. I do want to learn what it means to live as God’s person in God’s world in God’s way.  Please enroll me as a student in your school. Teach me to share your yoke and to be your faithful student day by day. Amen I want to end by connecting back to evangelism. (I don’t want you going home, saying, He was supposed to talk about evangelism but all he did was talk about discipleship!) 

How Does Discipleship Connect to Evangelism?  A)    One of the things on Jesus’ curriculum for his disciples is that they should “Go, make disciples.”  B)    If we are ourselves disciples, that is the first, most essential step towards helping others become disciples too. (I recall an Anglican Bishop in

“As time went by, I started to notice that Sarah and the other Christians in the residence seemed to live by some kind of code which was different from everyone else. They seemed to have a lot of fun, but . . . They were different, and I noticed the difference and was impressed by it. As I continued to think and learn I scrutinized those around me to see if they really were living a life that was true to what they believed. I discovered that indeed they failed from time to time, but I was more impressed by their readiness to own up to their failure and to start again with new enthusiasm.” 

These people were living as disciples . . . and someone was attracted to become a disciple too.

Tomorrow we’ll think more about how this works out in the life of a congregation. I will have good news and I will have, well, difficult news. But my hope is that like me you will come to the conclusion that this journey to evangelism is worthwhile, perhaps the most worthwhile thing we will ever do. Diocese of

[1] Dorothy L. Sayers The Man Born To Be King (London: Victor Gollancz 1943), 186-187.

[2] The Gospel According to John, chapter 10, verse 10.