Getting to grips with holiness

Giles Fraser is at his mouth-watering best in today's Guardian, reflecting on where the church should be and whether we've understood holiness properly.

It reminded me why it matters what we think and say about Jesus. I have been putting the finishing touches to a session on Christology for Spurgeon's next week which has been a little like herding cats with material refusing to fit neatly in my pre-planned scheme. Ah well.

But Fraser's piece brought to mind some words of Richard Bauckham that I will be sharing with my students. Reflecting on Philippians 2:5-11, he says: 'the passage amounts to a Christological statement of the identity of God. The exaltation of Christ to participation in the unique divine sovereignty shows him to be included in the unique divine identity. But since the exalted Christ is first the humiliated Christ, since indeed it is because of his self-abnegation that he is exalted, his humiliation belongs to the identity of God as truly as his exaltation does…The God who is high can also be low, because God is God not in seeking his own advantage but in self-giving.'

The question is what does the self-abasement and cross of Christ tell us about God? The answer is eloquently given by Bauckham. But it begs another question what does it mean for us to have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus? The very question Paul asks as the introduction to this amazing portrait of our servant God.

And it seems to me that Giles Fraser has put in finger on where an answer begins.

An arresting case for Christian faithfulness

I caught last Friday's repeat of Desert Island Disc's which featured Martin Sheen and cam across the most intriguing definition of Christian faithfulness I've heard for a while. It was a very moving programme as Sheen spoke of his struggles with alcohol - and the pain of seeing his son, Charlie, succumb in a similar but more spectacular way - and his forty+ year marriage to a woman that he describes as the love of his life.

But the most moving section was where he spoke about re-embracing his catholic faith in the early 1980s. It is that more than anything that has given his life strength and focus. And it was here that he offered an intriguing view of christian faithfulness: how many times have you been arrested because of what your faith has led you into? Sheen has been arrested a load of times on demonstrations about a variety of causes that his faith has compelled him to embrace. And he speaks of it as a consequence of following Jesus that he is prepared to put up with.

I was moved and set thinking about what my faith has cost me...

Lent with Stanley

I am reading Stanley Hauerwas' A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching for lent. I started this morning (slightly late...)

Hauerwas is one of the premier theologians of our age who says here about his craft and its practitioners, 'modern theology tends to be an extended exercise in throat clearing,' adding that 'even after the theologians have cleared their throats it often turns out they have nothing to say.'

I think he's an exception to this rule. He laments that modern theology has become less and less scriptural, suggesting that theologians have tried to see themselves as philosophers. 'Theologians are not "thinkers",' he says. 'We are servants of a tradition in which the creative challenge is how to be faithful to what we have received.'

And he thinks that the best form through which this is expressed is the sermon. 'I am convinced that the recovery of the sermon as the context for theological reflection is crucial if Christians are to negotiate the world in which we find ourselves,' he says

This is a challenge to those of us who find the sermon an inefficient tool for disciple formation in our churches. But perhaps the problem is less with the model than our execution of it(!), though I do feel that preaching is only part of the issue; listening and hearing is the other part and even the best speaking needs good listeners. As C S Lewis once said in a different context, there are no bad books, only bad readers.

As Hauerwas says: 'I hope the reader will discover that the problem is not that they do not understand what I say. Rather the primary challenge is how what I say challenges the way our lives are put together.'

All this magic and I'm only on p14!

More salvoes in the election campaign

There's an interesting page in today's Times that says something about the forthcoming election and how Christians will be challenged by it.

At the top of the page the ever-sensible Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, expresses concern that God is being squeezed out of politics by the way the current government does business - though he does reckon this process started under Mrs Thatcher.

At the foot of the page is a report of a David Cameron interview in the gay magazine Arena where he says that churches have got to accept gay people into their ranks as equals.

For some Christians this could well leave no party worthy of consideration when it comes to casting their vote!

Clearly that's not a sensible position, so there's going to be a need for some really careful thinking to take place between now and 3 May. Deeply held opinions need to be challenged and fresh reflection on what scripture and Christian tradition says about crucial issues will have to take place.

That thinking will undoubtedly be helped by the lecture that Tom Wright is due to deliver at the synod next week and a book co-authored by Nick Spencer and Jonathan Chaplin that's coming out this week.

Resources are one thing, but I also think we need to be serious in prayer for our civic society. There are fault lines that can become fractures; there are deep differences of opinion even within congregations that need to be prayed about and talked out.

So, let the conversations begin - and those that have already started (and there are lots, I know), spill over into the public domain so we can all benefit from them.

Boats that rescue in one way or another

I watched The Boat That Rocked last night. It's Richard Curtis' film about pirate radio and it's great fun - well acted, with some pretty wonderful music. It also, in passing, makes a bold claim for the importance of rock n' roll and the place of the pirates in ensuring we all got to hear it in the 1960s.

I am slightly too young to have had my love of pop and rock formed by the pirates, though I did listen to Luxembourg and Caroline. Curtis' film lovingly recreates the clash between the establishment and the pirates and reminds us just how different the world was in 1966.

Perhaps ministers-in-training should be watching it alongside reading Callum Brown's book on the church in that decade as well as other assessments of how significant the 1960s were in creating the world in which we now live.

And talking about significant boats in history, Friedman reminds us of one in his chapter on biodiversity. As he movingly tells the story of the last breeding pair of giant soft-shelled turtles, the language he uses, because no other language is good enough, is that of Noah and the flood. Indeed the whole chapter is littered with biblical allusions.

Take this as an example: 'we may be the first generation in human history that literally has to act like Noah - to save the last pairs of a wide range of species....Unlike Noah, though, we - our generation and our civilization - are responsible for the flood, and we have responsibility to build the ark...The beginning of wisdom is to understand that it is our challenge and our responsibility to act like Noah - to create arks, not floods.' (p181).

I wonder how many parties in the forthcoming election will be putting up posters of Noah leading the animals into the ark as they promise to get serious about climate change?

Global weirding

As I sit and watch people struggle past in the couple of centimetres of snow that have fallen over night, I'm reflecting on Thomas Friedman's description of climate change as 'global weirding'.

In a very good chapter on climate change, in particular the way the science is treated by those who are politically sceptical about the need to change our way of life, Friedman offers an excellent guide to what is happening, what the science is actually saying and how policy makers ought to be reacting to this.

one sentence jumped out and stopped me in my tracks. In a section detailing recent climate events, including hurricane Katrina, Friedman noted: 'Katrina wasn't so much an example of global warming as it was an example of the long-term infrastructure decisions society needs to make in order to survive. The weather is so much more than "do I need an umbrella?" It's also "should I buy a condo on the coast?" and "did we build those levees high enough?"'

These are profoundly theological questions that I'm not sure we're asking in our churches even if we've started asking them in our theological colleges.

For me, this whole issue raises questions about how we are training ministers for mission for today's world. Courses in ministry formation should engage with the likes of Friedman. But such engagement would mean that ministers-in-training need to be engaging with economics as much as Calvin, the principles of scientific enquiry as much as Karl Barth, public policy as much as pastoral theology.

But I'm not sure there's room in the curriculum. More pressingly, I'm not sure there's the will to make it. And the reason for this is that churches still want ministers who will fulfill the traditional roles of preaching and leading worship and reassuring our folk that God's on the case and all will be well in the end. Is it any wonder our churches are still emptying? And, in particular, that thinking people under 35 do not consider the Christian Faith has anything intelligent or effectual to say about the world or to the world as it teeters on the brink of the consequences of global weirding.

The core fact of our faith

Some good responses to the last post - check out the comments. I agree with a lot of what's there.

I guess I'd say one of the facts that convinces me to take the message of Jesus seriously is this one: the existence across the Roman empire by the end of the first century of small communities of people who believed that Jesus was exclusively the way to experience God.

This is a hard, uncontested fact that demands an explanation for the following reasons

There were lots of cults and religions, philosophies and ways of understanding life in the Roman world. By and large, it was a tolerant culture. providing you bowed the head to the cult of the emperor two or three times a year, you could believe pretty much whatever you liked. And the social expectation was that you'd honour the local gods, the deities of whatever trade you pursued and anything else you chose to.

The amazing thing was that the followers of Jesus were prepared to drop every other faith and worship Jesus exclusively. Only the Jews were similar - but they were a special case because for the most part they were an ethnic group and therefore born that way. The gentile followers of Jesus chose to believe what they did.

And the reason why these early followers of Jesus were prepared to drop all other allegiances - sometimes at great cost to themselves - was because they believed that not only had Jesus lived and died but he had also risen from the dead. More than that, he was alive now and able to bring each believer an experience of God the like of which they'd never had before.

And these people were prepared to die for what they believed - and by the early decades of the second century, this was a relatively common occurrence.

How did a tiny, rural Jewish pressure group, whose leader was executed by the Romans for subverting the state, gain a gentile following in many major cities across the empire? How did it persuade sophisticated gentile people in Corinth and Ephesus, Antioch and even Rome itself, that it held the key to the meaning of life, a key worth surrendering one's life to hang onto?

Because of the resurrection. On the first Easter, the tomb where Jesus had been laid was empty; his disciples saw him, ate with him, listened to him and realised that he was the incarnation of God.

That's the only plausible explanation for the presence of the church in the second quarter of the first century - barely a generation after Jesus' death. And if the resurrection happened, then everything the New Testament says about Jesus is true and worth trusting one's life to.

Unsettled in a good way

As part of my preparation for part four of our series, Why Follow Jesus? which is exploring why the world's in such a mess if there's a loving God, I have started reading Christopher Southgate's new book - which I first came across late last year on Robin Parry's always-readable blog.

Called The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), it is an attempt to create a thorough-going evolutionary theodicy. It is extraordinarily well-written and clearly argued (speaking as one who often finds systematic theology thoroughly opaque and unreadable) and it does what all good theology should do: it's making me think afresh about some pretty basic positions I hold.

For example, in accepting Darwin's theory of evolution as the best explanation for how life arose on earth, Southgate questions whether it's really realistic or plausible for a doctrine of 'the Fall' to be used to account for all the bad things that happen. After all, dinosaurs walked the earth tearing each other to shreds long before people arrived on the scene. And parasites are among the earliest life forms and they live by devouring other forms of life. in other words, predation is part of creation. I'm not sure what I make of this yet... It has big implications for how we read Paul and understand the cross (Southgate, however, believes the cross and redemption to be at the heart of his theology - but I haven't got there yet; his title is taken straight out of Romans 8, of course).

This is challenging, unsettling theology of the very best kind. I have found myself excited and anxious in equal measure as I've read it. But having said that, I will not have time to process this by Sunday so it's unlikely to appear much in my 25 minute reflection on how we speak about God and suffering.

The challenges of the New Year

It's snowing! Looking out on my street pavements are white and snow flakes are sticking to the branches of trees. it's lovely.

Finished my Ministry Today article - it should be in the next issue (which is nice) and launched our first new series of 2009 - a six month journey through Mark's Gospel. Our other new series kicks off next Sunday.

I've reached the first working Monday in January - apparently the worst day of the year (but then BBC Breakfast was in hyper-panic mode this morning!) - feeling in need of a holiday!

I think 2009 is going to prove challenging in a number of ways. Over the weekend I had my first conversation with a church member who is beginning to struggle as a result of the economic downturn. I'm sure there will be many more as January unfolds.

Our family service yesterday asked us to get into groups and talk about the kind of church we think God wants us to be this year. it was interesting talking to people afterwards to hear how many groups talked about pooling resources to help people through difficult times. We need to find ways of not only keeping such ideas alive, but also making them a reality in practical ways.

Recession, singing and being church

It's been good to have anonymous as a dialogue partner. Really got the grey matter going. And hopefully, the thinking will lead to action.

The recession adds a whole new dimension to this discussion, as anonymous suggests by way of a tangent (the whole comment on the last post repays careful reading). I do have all sorts of fears that cash will drain away from much of the good work that is being supported by Christians as they tighten their belts and that Christians might become more self-absorbed as they see their incomes falling.

But I think the recession - we can use that word now as the governor of the Bank of England used it last night(!) - does afford us an opportunity to assess our values as individuals and communities. We will suffer mild discomfort as bills rise - though already food and fuel costs are coming off the peaks they hit in the summer - but the poor around the world will suffer greatly.

The difficulty with recessions is that they are so uneven in their impact on people. Some sail through them relatively unscathed and others find their lives shattered by them. And often those people can live on the same streets, exercise in the same gym, shop in the same malls. My prayer is that our eyes are opened to see how people are being affected.

One of the interesting features of this recession, however, is that it could affect the middle class in the south much more severely than others - unlike the downturns in the early 1980s and 1990s. It is people working in financial services - and those trades dependent on them in London - and those who've relied on debt, especially tied up in property, to fuel their lifestyle who are at the eye of this storm. And these people are my neighbours.

Inevitably, as they are affected, there will be knock-ons in the wider economy affecting other sectors. But we have such a tiny manufacturing sector these days that it's unlikely we'll be seeing factory closures on the scale we saw in the 1980s.

So it's maybe not a time to focus on singing but on sharing, on being honest about how we're doing and how we can support one another and those who could well be in need around us. In short, we have an opportunity to be church in a significantly deeper, more Christ-focused way.

Of course, some would say that a sing-song in a crisis is just the medicine we need, but I'm not sure I want to go there...

Why, O why do we sing in church?

I think Richard has a valid point (comment on the last post) that the aim of modern forms of worship was to help people who weren't connecting with God in traditional services an opportunity to make some connection with him. And I would say that there have been times when I have connected with God using a mix of vehicles including modern worship songs.

But I also think that anonymous (comment to same post) has touched an issue at the heart of the contemporary church's struggle to connect with people. Put baldy, it is that we are generally frothy and irrelevant, inward looking and a wee bit smug about our relatedness to God.

Now, I wouldn't want to go overboard here. I've met loads of Christians who are getting their hands very dirty in some places where people need help and only Christians are there to do anything. I've been to estates in inner cities in the UK where the only 'welfare' provision of any kind is that offered by Christians who sacrificially give of themselves, their time and their resources to make a difference and bless their neighbours.

And I'm writing this the day after a British Christian aid worker was shot dead in Kabul for doing exactly that as a Christian. So I don't think we can tar the entire church as self-obsessed. It dishonours those who are worshipping God with their bodies laid on the line day, day out.

But sadly, the contemporary worship scene is part of a wider malaise in the western church that sees offering people what we think they want is the way to attract people. And while there might be some superficial appeal for some in the entertaining mix we serve up, the longer term danger of the whole approach is that we are only offering an hour's mildly spiritual diversion.

Now some will protest that worship songs are not entertainment; they are a means of lifting up the name of God in a way that draws people to him and therefore are the essential component of what we do as churches. Sadly, as anonymous' posts so eloquently attest, such an approach repels rather than attracts some, perhaps many people.

We do seem to be afraid of thinking, of asking the hard questions about our faith that would stretch our faith both intellectually and emotionally. As an author, I am frequently asked to remember my audience doesn't want to be too taxed. I need to write in a way that will be accessible to people who don't read books - tricky when I write books!

I had some interesting conversations as I was putting the finishing touches to my recent short commentary on Galatians that I was possibly entering into discussions and debates about the text that were not appropriate for the general Christian public. The idea seems to be that the average church person can only cope with a pre-digested, entertainingly served up gobbet of something to believe rather than a range of possibilities to think about.

This could indeed be why the church in the UK is losing people. But it also highlights a real problem that churches have and it's this: who is our audience and at what level do they wish to be engaged? I have said for a number of years now that I do not believe there is a one-size fits all way of being and doing church. I am neither original nor alone in this view, but it is depressing how few of us there still are who really believe it and are prepared to practice it.

There are a load of people who think seriously about the world and their place in it and who might well find that the Christian faith has something intelligent and helpful to say that would help them engage with and think through these deep questions. At the same time, that process might well help them to meet and engage with God with every fibre of their beings - body, soul and, equally importantly, mind.

Sadly, songs like I can only imagine will only repel those with an ounce of intellect and musicality. I am sorry for anonymous' poor experience of church so far. Keep in touch. I'll return to this theme.