2016

I guess across the country and across the world, church leaders will be evaluating the year that has gone by, thinking about the way ahead, and perhaps preparing for the first sermon of the New Year with a view to laying down some direction for the congregation.

We are at a crucial period for the church in the West. We find ourselves suddenly on the losing side of so many arguments, on the back foot, threatened by what is now a very foreign culture instead of feeling at least some measure of ownership of our own context. It isn't hard to see Christians beginning to enter into ´panic mode.

Within that setting, the Salvation Army has some very particular challenges: our economic links with government and public, our tradition of pragmatism, our generally low level of biblical and doctrinal training, and our openness to embrace "mainstream" theologies, at least in our colleges, which have little in common with the evangelical "blood and fire" of our past.

How should we face 2016 and onwards? What should we say to the people? How should the church be led forward?

• Don't panic and do take the big, long-term, global view. God is on the throne; Christ is building his church and the gates of hell will not win; the Spirit has been poured out and is still here. In 2000 years, all kinds of intellectual movements and isms have come and gone and the church is still here, and growing. Countries where, for instance, Communism attempted to eradicate the church now have thriving congregations. People groups, like the Kurds, who had practically no believers at all within my lifetime have now seen large-scale turning to Christ. The tide may seem to be flowing strong against us now - but that is not the whole or final story.

• Do be sanguine and realistic about the threat. The fact that Christ is building his church does not guarantee the survival of individual local congregations or even multinational movements. The Salvation Army in the UK is not at present growing across the country, (though individual corps may be) and the future is very bleak.

• Look to our great God at this time of threat. The answers are in him, not in new leadership strategies, business-driven methodologies, reorganisations and restructurings. So much of that is just rearranging the deck-chairs on the already-sinking Titanic. The solution to the world's pressure on the church is not found in adopting the world's methodology.

• Preach Jesus. Let 2016 be a year of talking about Jesus - who he is, what he said, what he did. Go back to the gospels. Look at the Psalms Messianically. Look at the big story of Scripture. Unpack the gospel as it is found in the great letters. In all of that, talk about Jesus!

• Focus on grace. Bad times make us want to redouble efforts, to put the screws on, to get harder and more brittle in our urgency. But the best redoubling of efforts comes from a fresh awakening to how greatly God has loved us.

• Love people, not structures, ministries or gifts. If you find yourself looking at the members of the church in terms of contribution - potential or realised - then look again. The professionalization of church life, the running of the "machine" of meetings and activities can well nigh kill us at times - and often we end up half killing others too.  It's all about Jesus and people - is that what comes across in your life and ministry? I think with shame of how it didn't in mine.

• Hope and pray and keep talking to others who see things the same way. You are NOT alone. Not only is the Lord with you, but there are friends out there who are also trying to talk about Jesus. You are not alone - so don't be alone!

The Word between Worlds

We were studying the ministry of John the Baptist in Mark 1 this week. I was struck again by the eschatological nature of preaching. John’s proclamation, just as the preaching of Jesus a few verses later, is not merely a flat call to repentance, to make a new start, to change simply because life might be better that way, or because it is the right thing to do. It is a call to repent in the light of the imminent action of God in judgement (Malachi's prophecy) and salvation (Isaiah). 

That action of God was, of course, in and through the arrival of Jesus himself. He came, also calling for repentance and faith, and pulling those two prophetic threads together in his own person. He brought salvation by bearing judgement. Believe it!

 

John’s ministry looked back (as did all the OT prophets) to the standards of the covenant that God had made with his people, but, more than any other prophet, he looked forward, because the Day of God was now arriving. Our ministry is no less eschatological, but we look back to God’s past work in the person of Jesus, and look forward, announcing his second coming and final judgement. He bore judgement, bringing salvation; he will return, bringing judgement and salvation that will define eternity for all of us. 

Our tendency is to lose that eschatological driving force in our preaching. Desperate for “relevance” we preach how Jesus transforms life now – which he does – but all too easily flatten out the proclamation into a mere moral appeal, which ultimately degenerates into what is little better than a self-help exhortation.

When the word of Christ is ministered, in whatever context, setting or style, our minds and hearts are brought into sharp confrontation with three “moments”.  As we proclaim Christ, we take people back to the moment of God's mighty working in the coming of his Son, and especially the complex of cross-resurrection-ascension-Pentecost which form the focus of that work. We take people forward to the return of this same man Jesus: history is not wandering aimlessly, but is moving, or is being moved, inexorably towards that moment, the End. There will be glory, ultimate justice, complete resolution to the whole story – and to your story and mine. 

And in between those Moments, we have the moment in which the word is being ministered. The preacher is conscious of his or her position in the Now, this moment that hangs suspended in the vast universe of space and time, held by invisible threads between the Victory and the Coming. The preacher’s job is to bring those who hear into consciousness of those other Moments and their bearing on the present; it is to make clear that this moment called Now is the time to act, to repent and believe in the light of the only two other Moments that really matter. This day when we preach has an official name - it is called Today, and is the day God has appointed for all of us, preachers included, to repent and believe the Good News.  

... by any means possible...

All preaching, in one way or another, needs to occur in the consciousness of those three Moments, and to bring hearers into that consciousness. Preaching that disconnects from Christ’s Past and Christ’s Future ceases to be preaching. Preaching is, in fact, eschatological activity in and of itself. It is the most important thing happening in the world today. When Christ word is preached, we hear the voice that said “Father forgive them” from the cross, and we hear the voice that will divide sheep and goats on the last day.

To preach Christ’s word is terrifying; not to preach is far worse.

The not so mysterious case of the disappearing Jesus

The other morning we listened to a testimony in bed. I have to say that this isn't a daily occurrence... but we did then because someone Sarah knew from the Salvation Army had told their story in a well-known London church and the recording was now available online.

It wasn't short, though it wasn't always very detailed either. But what struck us both was the fact that throughout, the testimony was about coming to rely more and more on God with no mention of Jesus at all. God wasn't described further either - not Father, nor any other name or title - just the rather vague, generic, "God". 

I think this is part of a pattern. Fewer and fewer people seem to focus on Jesus when they tell the story of their spiritual journey. "God" is not identified, and sometimes seems almost impersonal. You might think that "Knowing God" was less a matter of a love relationship and more a question of "Use the force, Luke." 

Why is this? 

I don't think the answer is too difficult. Two things. 

Jesus has disappeared because we don't sing about him. For British Christians - certainly for all Protestants outside the Anglican scene - our hymn book was our liturgy. We have abandoned the hymn book in favour of the projector, and, perhaps oddly, one effect of this has been a massive reduction in the range of songs sung. Critics often focus on problems with particular songs, the "me-focussed-ness", the doctrinal howlers etc. What is not so often noted is how whole meetings can now occur with no sung mention of the name of Jesus. It is frequent these days for times of "worship" to not mention Jesus by name at all, let alone focus on his cross-work or the person of the Son within the Trinity. If our worship has degenerated into "I trust in you because you are so amazing" it isn't surprising that our testimonies are similarly vague and me-centred. 

And Jesus has disappeared because we no longer talk about him. Good sermons in the gospels are rare. Many talks in church are moralistic rather than kerygmatic - they tell people what to do rather than announcing the good news of what God has done. Preaching is no longer placarding Jesus before the people. 

For some Christians, including a substantial number in the Salvation Army, the Bible is no longer seen as one "Word of God" anyway; it is not a unified book with a divine author, but a collection of human writings. A love letter from our wronged Creator has been replaced in the mindset by a fundamentally incoherent, self-contradictory bundle of stories of personal journeys. Of course, the Bible is not less than the account of the faith-journeys of a number of more or less flawed people, but we lose at our peril the notion that it is the one book of God.  Above all we lose out when the idea of the Bible as the word of Christ is effectively abandoned. 

And I think it is that abandonment that is evidenced by the disappearance of Jesus from testimonies. If we preach Christ at all, it is more as "one of us", with his own faith and fragility to the fore (and those elements I am not denying) than it is as the Mighty to Save of whom all the scriptures speak. As a result, who runs to him? And who tells the story of how he saved them? 

I'm praying for a revival - a revival of Jesus in our stories because he is there in our worship and, at its heart, in the ministry of the word. 

A whole library of books?

"The Bible is not a book, but a whole library of books."

In recent years it has become more and more common to say that the Bible is not a single book, but a whole library of books. This assertion is sometimes put as if it were a new insight, and it is put strongly, combatively, as if it were very important, crucial to the battle for Christianity in the post modern world. 

At the heart of the assertion is the idea that the Bible speaks with many voices that are to some degree in disagreement with each other.  Human authorship in its diversity leads inevitably to discordant voices, especially given the cultural, linguistic, chronological and geographical spread involved. 

The immediate effect of this is that the authority of any part of the scriptures can be waved away relatively easily. Not long ago, in a paper aimed at showing, say, that Romans 1 had nothing to say regarding modern homosexual relationships, attention was paid to the exact Greek words used and their interpretation. Now, with an acceptance that Jesus and Paul have essentially different messages, it is sufficient to classify the latter as the author of some "letters from 2000 years ago" and ditch him without further debate. If this is true of the Pauline corpus, how much more so of the older Testament...

The first thing that can be said about all this is that an awareness of diversity within Scripture isn't actually new at all. All careful students of the Bible, from Chrysostom to Calvin and up to the present, have observed that diversity of genre, cultural background and theological emphasis of the various writings. Indeed, good exegesis has been in large part precisely the struggle to interpret scripture in a way that does justice to its historical and diverse nature. It was understood that God had spoken through history in a progressive way and in diversified forms - a conviction that perhaps had its roots in Heb 1:1? - and that respect for that diversity was an essential key to hearing his voice. 

If there was a sea change in the thinking about the nature of scripture, it wasn't particularly recent. It was in the 19th century that scholars began to teach the human authorship of the Bible  in a way which downplayed or denied the divine element. It was in that period that the idea of incompatible theologies, of discordant voices, of irreconcilable differences between texts began to come in. Although lone voices had said some of these things before, the 19th century saw a new acceptability and broader consensus, at least in the universities, that scripture must be read in a way that effectively ruled out looking for a common thread of truth from a self-consistent God. Human authorship, not divine, became the sole principle governing interpretation. 

The recent development has been that such thinking has started to come into parts of the church which have been regarded as evangelical, and some of which still wish to regard themselves and be regarded as evangelical. That is new. It is part of a trend that has been going on for a while, with the goalposts continuously on the move, but this element represents a further stage of the outcropping of 19th century liberalism into mainstream, evangelical church life.  

This is a disaster. It would be hard to overstate the corrosive, poisonous effects of such a line of thought. It is destructive of Christian Faith at its very heart, makes preaching all but impossible, and leaves the church adrift on the chaotic cross-currents of postmodernity. Or, to put it another way, it is the intellectual leaders' desire to appease and to live happily with the postmodern world that is stealing the bread of heaven from the mouth of the congregations of believers. 

It doesn't square with Jesus' attitude to Scripture. 

If we allow that the gospel narratives paint in any way a coherent and authoritative picture of Jesus, then we have to take on board his attitude to the OT scriptures if we want to be his disciples.  (I am aware that there is a school of thought which denies any such coherence or historical authenticity to the gospels, but if we can't believe in that Jesus, then there is no Jesus who we can believe in and Christianity slips through our fingers completely.) 

One repeated motif of the gospels is Jesus' self-awareness as both being and achieving the fulfilment of the scriptures. Although at times it is the gospel narrator who sees an event happening "in fulfilment", at others the idea is put on Jesus' own lips. Perhaps the classic passage is Luke 24, where the resurrection is explained as being the fulfilment of Jesus' own words (6-8) but also as fulfilment of the OT scriptures. These are classically, Jewishly, classified into their three great divisions - Moses/Torah, Prophets and Psalms/Writings.  

Jesus sees those divisions as speaking with a united voice, and he sees himself as the subject of their message. He does not give a hint that Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms have different voices, or that they are of unequal value, or that one part speaks of him but others don't. He affirms that all the sections - indeed, "all the Scriptures" v27 cf. 45 - speak of him. In fact, in the light of v45 we can arguably go further - for Jesus and then for his disciples, to understand the scriptures is precisely to understand how, with one voice, they speak of him. 

Undergirding this understanding is the awareness that behind the human authors, in all their diversity of content, culture, genre and style, is a single Author, who reveals himself in a coherent, self-consistent and progressive way through the writings of many human authors. When Jesus speaks of the "Word of God" in Luke 11:28, whatever Christological resonances we may be tempted to find, our primary understanding must be that, like any Jew of his time, he is referring to the scriptures and to the  the Torah specifically. 

Such an attitude continues through from Jesus into the rest of the NT. For Jesus, "what Scripture says, God says" and his followers show the same attitude. To take just one example: the interplay of "authorship awareness" in Hebrews 3 and 4 is well-known. Here "it is said", "David said", "the Holy Spirit says" and "God spoke" swirl around one another in reference to the same texts. There is no felt clash between human authorship, in its historically conditioned singularity, and divine authorship, in its overarching coherence. 

The point is that Christian faith, being the faith that is centred on the person, words and work of Jesus, includes at its heart his own attitude to the OT scriptures. For Jesus to describe the OT as "a library of books" with a denial of a singular, overarching Authorship is simply impossible to imagine. This view parts company with Christian Faith because it parts company with Jesus himself. 

This "library of books" attitude to the Bible is more pervasive now than at any time I can remember. Its effects are all around us, even in the lips and in the behaviour of believers who might hesitate to articulate it directly. The impact can be seen in various, interlinked ways. 

1) With regard to the Bible itself, we are distanced from the weight of the text. 

The authority of scripture may still be affirmed in our Doctrines, but in practice it is now wholly absent. This is a direct outworking of this view - if the Bible has no one voice, no one message, then it really has nothing to say to us that we have to hear and heed, trust and obey. Any part can be set off against any other part, and we have become the final arbiters, ruling over the text and deciding what we want to obey. 

2) With regard to God, we have never been freer to shift our understanding of who he is.

I remember a young woman in Brazil telling me that her God was "fofinho" - fluffy and cuddly. That kind of view of God now pervades the church and even its candidates for ministry. The God who is "consuming fire" can be marginalised and then lost completely, for the texts that speak in that way are surely contradicted somewhere else! With a multi-voiced Bible we have a voiceless Bible, and we are free to redefine God in whatever way we like. Not for nothing did Don Carson title his great book on postmodernism in the church, "The Gagging of God" - a self-contradictory, multi-voiced book gives no voice to the Lord at all. Suddenly "God" is sounding strikingly similar to the rest of the flood of politically corrected, social-media-ready material. The God of scripture has been silenced, to be replaced by the filtered, sickly-sweet quotes from meme-gurus. 

3) With regard to ourselves, it makes us arrogant and intellectually lazy

The traditional task of the Christian teacher/preacher was a challenging one. The Bible is a complex book, and its interpretation is hard work. Our calling to that hard work began in faith, as we receive Christ and receive his understanding of the way the Scriptures speak of him. Believing that all Scripture is God-breathed and that it is able to make us wise for salvation in Jesus is a matter of faith, of course, but having taken that step of faith, hard, humble work lies ahead as we attempt to sit under the text and work out how it is speaking of him. Down through the centuries preachers and believing scholars can testify to the sweat and satisfaction of toiling at the Bible, and finding, in fellowship with great exegetes who have gone before, that there really is one message, one coherent Voice, one Subject, one Speaker.  

But now, we don't need to do that any more. We are at liberty to ignore - simply never read or refer to - whole swathes of the Bible that are deemed sub-christian. Our work is now easy, for all we have to do is regurgitate the attitudes of the politically corrected gospel week on week and never be disturbed or disturb anyone with tougher or more uncomfortable passages. 

What claims to be a movement driven by intellectual honesty ends up being the exact reverse. It is the excuse for not grappling with the book of God. And it is far more honest to say, "I don't fully understand this section" than to take on the lofty tones of the "scholar" and tell your congregation that a passage has nothing to say to us for it has nothing to do with Jesus or his message. The former way is humble ignorance; the latter is the height of arrogance. 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  

We need a return to the Bible. To the Bible as a book that - yes - is complex and historically, culturally, geographically and humanly diverse, but which is also One Book for it comes from One God and speaks of One Saviour. And we need to rediscover that united text not as an intellectual curiosity but as the unique bearer of the Message which calls us to faith and obedience to Jesus Christ. May God help us!