What would Jesus do?

There's been far too much pontificating on the riots already, largely by people who don't live in the affected areas and didn't experience what was going on (like me) and I'm reluctant to join in. But following the response to my facebook status this morning, I thought I'd offer a reflection on how I'm feeling and pass on a comment or two that I've found really helpful as I've tried to process how I'm feeling.

I feel sad and pretty helpless. I feel for those who've lost their businesses and homes. I feel for the police officers bearing the brunt of an inchoate anger.  I feel for those who've been left fearful in their communities. The stock response when something like this happens is to find someone to blame. In this situation it's easy: the rioters are to blame for mindless criminality for which there's no excuse. Yes and no.

In one news report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," he replied. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?" He went on:

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you." (you'll find it here - along with some helpful reflections on events).

He has a point. And his point is not that rioting is a good thing. His point is that he comes from a community that is invisible to us, disregarded by us, not part of the big society that we all feel a sense of belonging to.

In today's Independent, Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kid's Company and long-time champion of neglected communities, offers this insight: 'Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped'. And she backs it up with stories of families at breaking point, receiving little or no help, being made to feel that they are just a problem with nothing to contribute to society and so having no stake in society. Her piece is well worth reading (it's here)

There is a need for a good tough policing response to this disorder; those who have committed crimes - and that's what they are - need to be brought to book. But what then? Will these young people, the vast majority of whom have no qualifications, come from challenging backgrounds, face a future devoid of opportunity, just fade back into invisibility (after they've served time) until the next long hot summer?

Jesus told his disciples that stumbling blocks will come our way but woe to those who put a stumbling block in the way of any of these little ones (Luke 17:1-2). To whom is he referring? Surely to those who have been the subject of his stories from 14:1 onwards - the poor, the neglected, those on the edge, invisible to the god-fearing community of his day, and yet very visible and very loved by God.

So, I think if we are followers of Jesus, we have a part to play in raising the visibility of the unseen communities in our country and working to show that they matter to us because they matter to God. This means that we will resource and run good quality youth work - and press our local authorities to join us in that (by reversing cuts to provision if necessary). For baptists in London, it means asking why our association has no regional minister responsible for youth work in post to enable churches to rise to this challenge. It means that we will dedicate resources to helping those who struggle to make ends meet, cope as parents, achieve at school through projects (which is just a short-hand for motivated, mobilised and managed individuals) offering to get alongside those in need of help. Again we will do this with all sorts of people of good will, including local authorities who need to be pressed to take their responsibilities to the poor seriously.

And first of all, it means listening to those who are rarely heard, hearing what their lives are like, what struggle they face and, most importantly, what they have to offer as a contribution to making the kind of society we all want to live in.

 What we've had enough of is hand-wringing and finger pointing. We're all to blame. But much more importantly we can all play a part of making things better. I think it's what Jesus would do. What do you think?

There's nothing wrong with 'ian' but he won't save anyone...

There's a fascinating and sobering piece on the BBC website about Dutch Christianity. You can check it out here. It has all the hallmarks of a silly season piece - though there's enough happening on the world's stock markets to have squeezed it out - if it wasn't so serious.

Robert Pigott reflects on how some Dutch churchmen are offering a version of the Christian faith without either Christ or faith - so I guess all they're offering is 'ian' (nice boy but he's hardly going to save the world!). The puzzling thing is that the congregations of Klaas Hendrikse and other ministers like him seem to lap up their 'God isn't real, Jesus is a myth, it's all over when you die' version of the faith.

Now, I'm no die hard traditionalist (as many know only too well) but it seems to me that it's a complete failure of the imagination to strip everything difficult out of the Christian faith and yet still go to church. There are plenty of places where people who are not theists, do not believe that Jesus is of anything other than passing historical interest, believe that this life is all that's on offer, can gather to chew the fat and work out the meaning of our time here on planet earth.

Jesus' teaching is not easy - unless you strip it down to a vacuous 'be nice to each other' message that these guys seem to hold to; it is not for those who are not prepared to grapple with the deep mysteries of life, not prepared to face the injustices of the world and protest that there must be a better way to live. To come to church and engage with Jesus is a bold act of the imagination that demands of every participant a willingness to lay aside our easy perceptions of the world and wrestle with what else might be going on within and around us.

Merely to gather people together to tell them that there's no God and nothing to look forward to when we die, so make the most of life here, seems to be a waste of everyone's time - not to mention the cash poured into the utility bills and upkeep of the buildings.

A thought on when it's a good time to take a holiday

The world's stock markets are going south and so, apparently, have our leaders. As economy's tank all over the world and the prospects of recession loom ever larger, the prime minister, deputy prime minister and chancellor have all gone on holiday, leaving the hapless chief secretary to the treasury to defend the UK's totally irrelevant deficit reduction plan, as if our protestations of austerity will save us from the financial tsunami brewing off-shore.

The current crisis is a political one born of our inability to reform financial markets in the wake of the credit crunch. So it is not a time for our politicians to take their eyes of the ball and head for the beach. A massive restructuring of the way money of all kinds is managed around the globe is urgently required so that the poor stop bailing out the rich every time there's a market panic.

We need a more creative approach to getting out of the mess we're in than the slash and burn policies of the IMF, EU and our own governments, cheered on by the nutters in he US tea party movement which merely lead to rising unemployment, falling output and a squeeze on the incomes of those least able to cope in the hope that the system will magically correct itself.

Now is maybe not the best time for our leaders to be on the beach.

Sharp stories of a salty alternative to tower building and war mongering

A couple of weeks ago I was preaching on the end of Luke 14. At first sight it seems to be just a general call to discipleship, wrapped up in a couple of think-about-it stories. It comes after the parables of the great banquet but seems to have little connection with them. Furthermore, Jesus speaks off his own bat rather than in response to a question or observation from the crowd. Luke reminds us that Jesus still had a big audience and that they were 'travelling' - ie Jerusalem is getting closer and we all know what will happen there.

And maybe that should alert us to the fact that there's a sharper focus to these words than just a general call to serious discipleship. It also suggests the link with what's gone before. At the end of chapter 13 we have Jesus words about Herod and his tears for Jerusalem. Now we have stories about tower builders and war-mongers. Perhaps we are in the same territory. Tom Wright helpfully suggests that Herod the great was probably the tower builder and that the tower in question was the still unfinished temple and that those plotting rebellion against Rome were the war mongers. Suddenly the story is freighted with spiritual and political urgency.

The parables of the great banquet have strongly suggested that the party God will throw at the end time is for the poor, the marginalised, the dispossessed, those with no stake in the current order who are always being pushed around by what a writer in today's Guardian wonderfully called 'the feral elite'. Followers of Jesus ought to be concerned about the poor and not the dreams of the tower builders and war mongers.

This throws light on the puzzling little saying about salt in 14:34f. God's people were supposed to be showing the world a different set of values, an alternative lifestyle. They are meant to be - in the words of  American historian and cultural critic Theodore Roszak who sadly died last week - a counter culture. The trouble is that Jesus looks around at Israel and he sees that it's anything but. That is why he weeps over the city, why he longs to be able to gather it to himself like a hen gathers her chicks. That is what lies behind his despairing comment that what should be salty is just bland and indistinguishable from the surrounding cultures; it's just another empire of tower builders and war mongers. And Jesus weeps.

Having told the story of the banquet, he calls people to join his revolution, his counter culture, his way of being that embodies the values of the God who reigns. Hence he ends by asking those with ears to hear what he's saying.I don't think it's an accident that this is immediately followed in Luke's account by the parables of lost things (sheep, coins, sons) that are kicked off by the Pharisees grumbling that Jesus models these values in who he offers his hospitality to; nor that the apparently mystifying parable of the unjust steward (the subject of another post to come) follows immediately on with no change of audience or pause for breath.

I was thinking all this when the postman arrived with my copy of Kavin Rowe's World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age. I've been looking forward to reading this for ages, having read a couple of Rowe's papers on Acts, because he argues a political reading of acts that is based on God's apocalypse in Jesus and treads the fine line between being a counter culture that turns the world upside down and fermenting a revolution that seeks to replace one tyranny with another. I'll keep you posted on how it shapes up.

It's lovely to be noticed

I came across the first review of my recent book, the World of the Early Church, yesterday. It's in the Theological Book Review, a twice-yearly publication from Liverpool Hope University - indeed it's one of the four books highlighted on the cover! It's written by Daniel Jeyaraj, the professor of World Christianity at the university and director of the Andrew Walls Centre for the study of African and Asian Christianity.And I think it's true to say that he liked it.

It's particularly gratifying to have one's work reviewed in places where a key target market for the book will be found. As professor Jeyaraj says: 'Every reader of this book, whether an expert or a beginner or a student, who wishes to better understand the socio-cultural world of the persons mentioned in the New Testament better, will gain new insights.' Well, that's precisely why I wrote it. I hope lots of people read and benefit from it in the way the reviewer suggests.

Here's hoping it gets reviewed elsewhere...

Remembering John Stott

I never met John Stott but I heard him preach a few times in the 1970s and early 1980s. He was always clear and gracious and my dim memory of it is that he always pointed people to Jesus rather than to the Bible. So I am really pleased to see in an interview with Tim Stafford in Christianity Today (available here) that he says: 'the really distinctive emphasis is on Christ. I want to shift conviction from a book, if you like, to a person. As Jesus himself said, the Scriptures bear witness to me. Their main function is to witness to Christ.' That's well said.

Stott's greatest contribution to evangelicalism, I reckon, was that in the 1970s he was one of the key evangelical leaders who put us back in touch with the world and social action as a key part of the mission of the church. Through the first Lausanne Conference in 1974 - which he was instrumental in making happen - evangelicals rediscovered the core gospel truth that God loves the world and that his people are called to be active in that world bringing good news to all, especially the poor, the marginalised, the excluded, the suffering.

Stott wrote a seminal book (Issues Facing Christians Today) on the Christian response to social issues that informed a growing number of eager evangelicals that there was more to proclaiming Christ than just calling people to faith. It was a book that shaped my early thinking on social action and encouraged me to integrate my faith and my working life, my love of Jesus with my involvement in seeking justice for all and engaging in social and even political activity to further the coming of the Kingdom.

So, he was a towering figure who lived a good and fruitful life and has now - at a ripe old age - gone to his reward. The best memorial for him is that a new generation of Jesus followers will rise up to bring good news to the poor in our villages, towns and cities and create vibrant communities that embody the life and values of our Lord and his.

The passing of a great saint

News has come through that the great John Stott died this afternoon. He was a stalwart defender of the faith and an all round lovely Christian man. There are tributes here; I'm sure lots more will follow.

Reading scripture together

A while back I mused on how we communicate to our churches the developments happening in the world of theology, in my case New Testament studies.The issue came up again last night at our church Bible study when someone asked how they were supposed to keep up when the interpretations of the bible - we were looking at Romans 7-8 - keep changing. I've been troubled by this question most of the day.

Baptists have always believed that the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his word. It is a key plank in baptist hermeneutics. But when it happens it can be unsettling. Are interpretations changing - meaning we have to forget old readings - or is our understanding deepening and broadening - meaning that we are grasping more of God's big picture?

I hope that the latter is happening. In relation to Romans I'd like to think that we are moving from a reading - popular among evangelicals for a long time - that the letter is just about justification by faith. Even more bluntly, many Christians have read the letter as being all about them, how God loves me and sent Jesus to die for my sins so I could be saved and go to heaven when I die.Now, of course, Romans has always been about more than that - even Luther, who stressed justification by faith, saw that - but that has been the central reading of it since the birth of evangelicalism.

I'd like to think that as we deepen our appreciation of the context in which Romans was written, the language used, the themes developed in what is a highly complex and magnificently written letter, so our understanding of the themes of the letter deepen and broaden. It seems to me that at the very least Romans is about God and Israel, about how God acts in covenant faithfulness to his people and through them to the rest of the world. Within that, of course, is an explanation of how I can be part of all that.

The issue that arose last night is two fold. The first has to do with the scope of scripture and the second is about the tools we need to understand an ancient text. They are closely related.

One of the great strengths of evangelicalism is that it has sought to put the Bible into the hands of ordinary Christians and encourage them to hear God speaking directly to them through it. It has always been a faith of the literate. This is a problem in contexts where rates of literacy are not high but that's an issue for a different post.

The trouble is that this has led to a focus in our reading of scripture that means we are always looking for what it is saying to me about me. We risk missing all the important things that scripture is telling us about God, the world around us and other people; worse, we see all those things only in relation in to me; I become the centre of attention. This is not helpful.

But this is allied to the second issue: namely, can anyone pick up an ancient text and expect to understand it without help? As we get further and further away from the work shops in Rome's back streets where this letter was first heard by a motley collection of craft workers and others, is it not the role of teachers in the church to help Christians understand the context in which this letter would have been heard and what the language would have meant to those first hearers?

Of course, to many this sounds elitist (maybe it is); worse, it sounds like an attempt to take the scriptures away from the ordinary believer and put them in the hands of an educated minority, indeed back into the hands of the 'priests' that the Reformation fought so hard to wrest them from all those years ago. The trouble is that this reading of the reformation misses the extent to which the movement across Europe in the sixteenth emptied the churches and appealed only to a literate minority of Christians, the very people who pored over books, discussed new ideas, listened to erudite sermons and asked searching questions of the preacher in a desire to greater understand the text under discussion (but that's a subject for a different post).

My fear is that the church like the rest of the culture has dumbed down somewhat, settled for a lowest common denominator equality that means anyone can read an ancient text and instruct others on its meaning. we only have to look at some churches to see where that leads us!

Thoughts about Amy

I was was going to post some thoughts on the death of Amy Winehouse but Jim Gordon over at Living Wittily has said it so much better than I ever could. So go and check it out.

When the news drives you to your knees

Words cannot do justice to the horror that visited Norway yesterday. Let's pray for the country, especially those caught up in this ghastly event. It is heart-breaking that the perpetrator is associated with the Christian faith. His action is in no way motivated by Jesus of Nazareth and his followers need to stress this in the days to come as we pray for him and his victims.

And I've just heard that Amy Winehouse has been found dead. What a shame! Such a talented singer, such a troubled soul. The former prime minister's wife Sarah Brown speaks for us all when she tweeted "Sad sad news of Amy Winehouse - great talent, extraordinary voice, and tragic death, condolences to her family." 

So much to pray about

Hacking is not just the province of newspapers

There's a good piece by my friend Steve in today's Society section of the Guardian. He's a bit of an expert on keeping young people safe on line and has some important things to say about how young people without good literacy skills and supportive adults are at some risk of finding themselves 'hacked' and their futures left in threads.

I particularly liked his image of the social web created by new mobile media as an incubator rather than merely a platform. 'It is a place where communication is captured, aggregated, added to, morphed, changed and rehatched as a new broadcast or "ping"'. His article is based on an extensive report he's written on the subject for the government's training and development agency.

Check it out here. And you can download the full report here.

It is a reminder that information is currency, often highly sought-after, not just for those seeking to grab better headlines than their rivals. Perhaps it's yet another reason why what's happened at News International over the past years has affected the environment in which all of us live.

Riding the roller coaster

It's been a busy, roller coaster of a week. On Friday I took the funeral of my sister-in-law, Trish, who finally succumbed to cancer after a five year battle. On Sunday, my youngest daughter, Olivia, got engaged to Joe. So the Jones household has run the gamut of emotions!

Trish's funeral went as well as these things can. the chapel was full to hear moving tributes from both her boys and a poem/prayer from one of her oldest friends. What struck me was that there were people from all aspects of her life present in good numbers to mark her passing. It is testament to her ability to make friends and keep them. She'll be missed.

Olivia's news was not unexpected as Joe had given us a heads-up ahead of popping the question and we are thrilled and delighted for them both. They are a great couple and wonderful parents to Sophia. 

While all this was going on, we had the biggest Messy Church of the year (when we were expecting people to be away). We had first-timers and returners who've not been for a while. Messy Talk also went really well - the final instalment of how we experience God. In the autumn we're trialling another Ugly Duckling Company tool which includes DVD material. We're looking forward to it.

Maybe this week will give me chance to pause and catch my breath.

The place of faith in public life

Two great pieces in today's papers about religion in public life. There's a superb interview with Rowan Williams in the guardian magazine conducted by David Hare which is online here and there's a great piece on Maurice Glassman, the man behind Blue Labour in the Times. It is on-line but behind the Murdoch pay wall.

Both make a strong case for the involvement of Christians - and religion more generally - in public life. Williams is very moving on his recent visit to Congo and Kenya and the vital role that the church plays in creating civil society and safe places for those caught up in the horrors of violence in those countries.

In his speech to General Synod last week, reflecting on that trip, he said: ‘If it wasn’t for the Church, no-one, absolutely no-one, would have cared, and they would be lost still.  It was almost a fierce sense, almost an angry feeling, this knowledge that the Church mattered so intensely.' (you can read the whole speech here).

Glassman is an orthodox Jew and stresses in the interview in the Times how important religion is in shaping his life and in shaping the labour party. We all knew the latter but he goes on to say that religion is vital for reshaping and renewing the Labour Party now. It's a bold thing for a man of the left (even the centre left where he is) to say but it's really good to hear it being said. More power to his elbow, I say

Lancing the boil?

So, the Murdochs have decided that the solution to the News of the World phone hacking horror is to close the newspaper. So, lots of people are going to lose their jobs while the people responsible for the culture at the paper make the announcement in sackcloth and ashes, assuming that sweeping away the title gets rid of the problem.

Astonishingly, the Government thinks it's the right decision. Hopefully, it won't dissuade the government from holding the enquiries that David Cameron promised yesterday.

What we've seen today is the combined effect of advertisers, figures from public life and even outraged readers attacking Murdoch's bottom line. His response is to remove the running sore. But it doesn't do anything to deal with the infection at the heart of this company. The boil is still waiting to be lanced.

At the very least all those who have had editorial control of the paper in the last decade should be sacked - whatever job they currently hold - and investigated by the police as part of their wide-ranging enquiry. After all, it is they, not the News of the World's current staff, who bear responsibility for dragging the paper into the sewer and beyond.

And surely no one can now think Murdoch is fit and proper person to run yet more of Britain's media. The company's desire to control all of BSkyB must be thwarted. It's turnover makes that of the News of the World look like petty cash. Over to you Jeremy Hunt; try to do the right thing; seek help if you're not sure what that is.

Refreshed, relaxed and returned

Gramping's quite good fun, all things considered. We had a great time with the grandchildren, children and partners in Hope Cove. The best thing about it was that we no internet access (unless we went to the nearby hotel for cream teas - tough!) and no mobile phone signal. So we had to talk to each other and make our own entertainment. Fab.

We swam in the sea and walked on the beach. Hope Cove is one of my most favourite places on planet earth. I've had some good times there with God and at least one blazing row with him on a damp October morning. This time, in the sunshine and warmth, it was good to soak up the wonder of his creation and the company of my family.

Tomorrow it's back to work with a church meeting and a service saying farewell to our GB captain. Should be a good day - not as good as swimming in sea and going back to the house for a barbie - ah well!

We're off gramping

We're off to Hope Cove tomorrow with our whole family - daughters, grand-daughters and partners. The weather forecast is good and we have a four bed-roomed house 150 yards from the beach for a week; can't be bad.

Apparently what we're doing is called 'gramping' - where grandparents provide the basis for a holiday for the whole family. We're really looking forward it: Hope Cove is gorgeous and it'll be great to be away from the study and the landline for a week! Best of all, we'll have lots of opportunity for inter-generational bonding.

So postings will be in short supply for the next few days.

The choppy waters coming from Greece

The ever prescient Jon Snow has some sobering words on the Greek crisis over on his Channel 4 News blog. You can read it here.

It might be at the alarmist end of the spectrum but it does highlight a salient point in all this: the city of London is still at the centre of the spider's web of international finance. In particular, we are the hub of the world's insurance and reinsurance business and there'll be a hefty bill when the Greek's go belly up. But that bill will be dwarfed by the one coming our way when Ireland and Portugal hit the buffers.

Instead of tinkering at the edges of serious banking reform, perhaps the EU leaders gathering in Brussels today might sink their teeth into the issue of how we can make the sector more accountable and transparent so that we can see the scale of the waves heading our way before they break over us.

I wondered about the consequences about Greek default yesterday. I still think it's inevitable; whether it's desirable is in the hands of our leaders: it could just be the wake up call we all need and failed to heed when Lehman's and Iceland went down.

I am pondering the parable of the rich fool from Luke 12. It's not an exact parallel to our situation but I am always chastened by the fact that Jesus introduced the sobering tale with the words: 'watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions' (v15).

We're good at applying this verse and the parable that follows to us as individuals (well, to other individuals), but it clearly also applies to us as a culture. We live in a system that says 'greed is good' and rewards that greed with all the stuff that we think is essential for the good life. Unfortunately, as in the parable, such a way of life is not sustainable; eventually God comes calling.

Sadly, unlike in the parable, it is not the paragons of greed who suffer when the wheels come off but the ordinary people, struggling to grab a bit of the action for themselves, who get a kicking; and the poor of the planet who see the little they have swept away in the flood.

So let's pray for the people of Greece, the ordinary people who, like us, have tried to grab the most they can, often in the least sustainable way, and who now face ruin. And let's pray for the leaders gathered in Brussels that they will own responsibility for the mess we're in and actually do something to sort it out in the interests of the poorest rather than the richest.

And let's pray that we all realise that 'life does not consist in an abundance of possessions'

Giving credit where credit is due

Excellent to see Amartya Sen taking a pop at the rating agencies in today's Guardian. He argues that despite their abysmal track record on rating financial instruments, they are calling the shots over the fate of nations that is genuinely harmful for the future of democracy.

Sen points out that UK policy makers feel themselves beholden to the credit agencies and so have taken decisions on deficit reduction and austerity to placate them. But, he points out, at least in the UK we can debate the wisdom of the policy and the government can claim that part at least of its programme was put to the people in an election.

This is not the case in Greece. Economic policy and the fate of the government is in the hands of the IMF and credit ratings agencies, not the Greek people. Now we could say that the Greeks have had their chance and blown it. But if the generals return as a result of this crisis, part of the blame should be laid at the door of the international, unelected, undemocratic financial institutions.

It's really sad that Congress backed off from suing the ratings agencies over the collapse of Lehman's and the financial meltdown that occurred in its wake. After all, these organisations had given triple A ratings to all the dodgy financial instruments - including the bundles of sub-prime mortgages at the heart of the system's toxicity - being traded around the globe before the crash, instruments that had precipitated the mega-crisis in confidence that led to collapsing banks and bloating deficits across the western world.

I wonder where we'd end up if Greece called the credit ratings agencies' bluff, gave the IMF a couple of suggestions about what it could do with its austerity package and carried on as before. If nothing else it would wipe the Cheshire cat grins off the faces of the men in suits no one voted for. Maybe it would be the first step in a genuine reform of the world's financial system in favour of one that gave a damn about the people at the bottom of the pile.

At the end of  the day, Bruce Cockburn had the IMF well and truly summed up in his song Call it Democracy - you can check it out here and see what I mean...

Sensing a move of the Spirit

We finished our series on the gifts of the Spirit last night and good things happened at the later service with people beginning to have the confidence to share possibly prophetic words with one another as we shared food around our tables. This is a good development. Notes and audio files are on the church website now - you can access them here.

I've discovered some more great new and free music! American singer Josh Garrels has made an 18 track album called Love & War & the sea in between. It's a glorious mixture of folk, electronica, Americana, even acoustic rap. His blog said that he sensed the Lord saying to him that he should make this album free; so it is - and I, for one, am very grateful.

You can download it here and I recommend that you do because it's not only wonderfully played and produced but it boasts lyrics that have real depth and breadth. He also has a lovely voice. Garrels is the latest US Christian artist I've discovered through Noisetrade (you really must sign up for its alerts if you haven't already - it offers a ton of free and really cheap, excellent quality new music). Others include Justin McRoberts, whose album Deconstruction is great, Sandra McCracken, Sleeping at Last and Jenny & Tyler.

The Spirit seems to be at work in Christian music from across the pond in slightly hidden and out-of-the-way places - but then, that's always the way with the Spirit, avoiding the mainstream, side-stepping the crowd, stirring up a storm on the margins. Put yourself in the way of it; let it wash over you and refresh your soul...

So Beautiful or So What

I'm listening to the new Paul Simon album. So Beautiful or So What confirms Simon's place at the top of the pile of lyricists. Building on Surprise - one of my favourite albums of all time - So Beautiful or So What contains reflections and ruminations on mortality, the meaning of life and what happens when we die.

The lyrics ride on wonderful tunes, played by some great musicians and are shot through with a fierce and playful wit, making the album a delight to listen to.

Simon has been quoted as saying that he's not much interested in religion. But he's certainly interested in God and what God might have do with us. It opens with Getting Ready for Christmas Day (not exactly seasonal for an album released in June - but that's part of the playfulness!) which contains the line: 'Getting ready, oh we’re getting ready/For the power and the glory and the story of the Christmas Day' intercut with samples from a black preacher and poignant reflections on family as the song's narrator has a nephew in Iraq.

And in many ways this playful, witty, scatter-gun opener sets the scene for the rest of the album. It's a roller coaster of tuneful intelligence and rhythm. Check it out

Being good neighbours in a blandified world

I've just finished an excellent book on cities. Anna Minton's Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the twenty-first century city (Penguin 2009) is an examination of how there's been a major shift in ownership of our city spaces from the public to the private. She tells the story of how the redevelopment of London's docklands provided governments with a template of how urban regeneration could be privatised and hence, in the eye of its proponents, delivered more quickly and efficiently.

The upshot, Minton argues, is that public space is being increasingly privatised and blandified. we see it in mammoth shopping centre developments where streets are glassed over and ownership shifts to the property company whose uniformed security people rule the roost and have the right to refuse entry to people they think are undesirable - young people in hoodies, groups of pensioners killing time but not buying.

Maybe this is the reason why all retail parks seem the same, boasting the same rosta of shops and cafes, lacking in local flavour or identity. And it isn't just covered centres that are privately owned. Liverpool One, the redeveloped heart of that great city, is also privately owned and policed by people other than the boys in blue.

Apart from leading to bland and soulless spaces at the heart of our cities, these trends have coincided with the rise of gated communities and the previous government's desire to secure even social housing developments by design that makes the areas difficult to access or pass through. More and more land is fenced off and gated, rendered inaccessible to the general public despite the fact that it seems to be 'public' land.

It has also coincided with the rise of CCTV - the UK has more cameras than the whole of western Europe put together and yet fear of crime in our country is vastly higher than in any of our EU partners. Minton's argument is that the more we separate ourselves from one another, the more fearful we become of 'the stranger' and 'the outsider'.

I think that theologically she is on to something here; something that feeds into what I was blogging about recently in relation to neighbourhood mission. It's simply this: do we have a role, as people who believe in communities comprised of a rich mix of people of all types (since that is what the church is or ought to be), in helping to create neighbourhoods that reflect that where we live?

Minton is iffy about the notion of social capital (for interesting reasons that I  can't go into here) but I wonder if Christians have a role in balancing financial capital with the creation of social capital (which I understand to be simply to be the creation of connections and relationships between people in society); and in so doing, helping to create neighbourhoods where there are just collections of houses and flats.

A final word on my MA

I thought I'd share a link to the Church of England website detailing my graduation on Monday. You can find it here. And here some more pictures. I thought I'd post these as I don't get pictured with Rowan Williams very often!

 

And there's a group shot with all three recipients of awards with Maureen Palmer (third from the left) and Martin Kitchen (on the far right but only in this picture!) who run the programme.

And a final word on Rowan, do check out this week's New Statesman, which he has guest edited, and in which he says some trenchant but sensible things about the government as well as a range of other issues that affect our culture at this time.

Graduating in historic splendour

Yesterday, I had the great joy of receiving my MA from the Archbishop of Canterbury in a service at Lambeth Palace. The ceremony was full of fabulously arcane language, involved me swearing an oath of allegiance and resulted in me being created 'an actual Master of Arts' and being admitted 'into the number of Masters of Arts of this Realm.' But I don't get my certificate until the Queen's approved it which could take some time!

It was a lovely day, shared with Linda and her mum and dad (as in the picture) and good friends Anne and Alan from church. The highlight was a long conversation with Rowan Williams. It was good to get an insight into the pressures that he's under and hear his enthusiasm for sharing the good news of Jesus with ordinary people. We also discussed the detail of my thesis, in particular, the levels of literacy among first century craft workers that the light this throws on how we approach group hermeneutics in today's world. He is a warm and wise man.

Jesus' mission to his neighbours

The theme of the mission conference in the Canaries was taken from Matthew 4:19: ‘come, follow me and I will send you out to fish for people’ (TNIV). As I reflected on that verse and my experience in the Canaries, I noticed something that I’d not really spotted or appreciated before. What follows is a rough outworking of that thought.

It centres on Jesus’ relationship with Capernaum as the centre for his mission activity. And what we see is that Jesus is a model for us: what he does is what he sends us to do Luke 10:1-11 (see previous post here).

So, what do we learn from this

Firstly, Jesus calls people to follow him, to be with him. In Mark’s account of the gathering of the Twelve, he tells us that Jesus ‘appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out’ (Mk 3:14a). In other words, discipleship is about being with Jesus and learning his lifestyle. So, what in particular stands out?

Jesus chose a base. Capernaum was a border town of 10,000 people; a trading and garrison town, a centre for tax gathering. It worth noting that Jesus lived there for long enough to get to know his neighbours and be known by them. So he mingles with fishermen (4:18); a soldier (8:5); tax collectors (17:24ff). It seems that he was based in Capernaum, while making forays out into other places.

Then he picked a team. Jesus is an outsider (he moved north east from Nazareth to Capernaum) and he picks a mixed bag of people to work with: Peter & Andrew are economic migrants from Bethsaida who’ve come over the border into Galilee because the fishing’s good and there are mouths to feed; Matthew, a local tax collector (9:9), local and probably unloved; James and John appear to have been locals working in their family business.

The church always works best when it makes use of those who are insiders, born and bred locally, bringing an insider’s sensitivity to the community’s needs; and outsiders who bring a different eye to the situation, a different set of experiences. It is when we blend these two perspectives that we stand most chance of hearing God and seeing how he wants us to fulfil the mission he’s given us.

And then he shared his story. I wonder whether Jesus made things in Capernaum as well as preached; is there anything that precludes us thinking that he was a carpenter in that town as well as a preacher of the Kingdom? I have never seen that question discussed in the commentaries and I’d quite like someone to weigh the evidence. After all, Paul remained a tent maker for his whole ministry and while Jesus clearly devoted his whole life to preaching towards the end of his time, what about the early stages of his ministry in Capernaum. Certainly he lived and ate with his neighbours and shared his story with them. And what he shared was two-fold:

revolution: the Kingdom of God is a revolution in our lives, a new allegiance and a new set of values live by; it’s results in a lifestyle of light for our neighbours (v10; cf 5:14);

repent: this is not a feeling but an action: we look at Jesus and say ‘that’s how I want to live’ and Jesus says to us ‘if you agree with what I’m saying, join my band.’ We repent, not when we feel bad about our behaviour, but when we change our minds about how we are living and what we are living for.

Secondly, Jesus tells his new friends that they will be fishing for people. Now this is an ironic play on the previous jobs of Andrew and Peter, James and John. He probably didn’t invite tax collectors to fish for people! His call is also an ironic reversal of the prophetic tradition – where fishing was an image of judgement: Jer 16:16; Hab 1:14f. As ever Jesus turns a well-known image on its head. How does Jesus want us to go about this task? Three thoughts come to mind.
The first is that we can only do this as we follow in his footsteps. Discipleship is key to doing mission. We cannot share what we do not know and live; mission grows out of knowing Jesus, knowing his word and living his life. It is not a technique that we learn or campaigns that we run for short periods.

The second is that we do this in his power. As we follow, he fishes through us. How can we do what Jesus asks us to do in Luke 10? By living our lives and allowing Jesus to draw people to us for those life-changing conversations & encounters and trusting him to speak through our words and our lives in such a way that they begin to change their minds about how they should be living their lives.

And finally, all this happens in his time. This means that we can be both confident and relaxed about all this, knowing that if we’re living as his disciples, he’ll be fishing through us. We also need to recognise that the response will be mixed: Peter, Andrew, James and John responded pretty quickly, though 4:18-20 was probably not the first time they had met. The centurion that we read about in chapter 8 had been Jesus’ neighbour for a while, he’d seen who he was and what he stood for and, when he had a particular need that he couldn’t get addressed any other way, he came to Jesus. The collectors of the temple tax who engaged Jesus in discussion in17:24ff – possibly friends of Matthew – knew enough about Jesus to know that he had interesting views on the payment of taxes! Some rejected it, apparently (11:23f).

I saw this way of working as I visited churches and communities in the Canary Islands. I was struck by the mixture of insider and outsider, those born and bred on the islands and those who have come as missionaries. All the churches are a rich mixture of nationalities, each of which are bringing their own perspectives on life and discipleship.

Picking up the threads after my travels

Back safe and sound, sitting at my desk, sifting through the emails I didn't answer while I was away and opening the post. But most importantly, catching up with Linda and home. I love travelling, meeting new people and being involved in ministry in different cultures. But I also love coming home.

Among the goodies awaiting my return were two books. Richard Longenecker's Introducing Romans: Critical Issues in Paul's Most Famous Letter looks to be an essential addition to the bibliography for my Romans course at Spurgeons. It's a 500 page compendium of all the issues a reader of Romans has to consider and has been published ahead of his forthcoming commentary.

The other is The Blackwell Companion to Paul edited by Stephen Westerholm which I've been asked to review. I'm excited to see this for a couple of reasons. The first is that, not only does it deal with Paul and his letters against their first century cultural and historical background, but it also looks at how Paul has been read through the ages and a little bit across the cultures. The second is the sheer quality of scholars, established and rising, who have contributed to this volume - Rainer Riesner, Beverley Gaventa, Ross Wagner, Gerd Theissen, Tony Lane, Robin Jensen. I hope it lives up to its billing.

Attempting ministry amidst a spectacle

My 24 hours in La Palma was great. I spent just over half of it with a wonderful missionary couple from Germany who lead a single baptist church that meets in three places around this small island. The reason for this is obvious as soon as you get in a car.

La Palma is the greenest, most mountainous and, I think, most beautiful of the islands in the group, Dominated by a rangle of mountains in the centre of the island, reaching heights of 2,500 metres (just shy of 10,000 feet), the people live in towns and villages dotted around the coastline and just inland (but even these are at the top of steep inclines. The towns tend to be separated by both hills and deep gorges, meaning that journeys of a few kilometres take an hour or more on windy roads. Even recent investment in bridges and tunnels has only cut journey times a little.

So, getting from place to place for ministry means that folk spend hours in their cars. Those without cars are dependent on buses that take an hour or more to get to the neighbouring town and are not that frequent. None of this matters when you come here as a tourist and take advantage of the black sandy beaches or the breath-taking mountain scenery. But it does if you are trying to plant and nurture churches.

However, Pedro and Dorles are doing a fantastic job. They are full of creative ideas and after 17 years are firm fixtures in the community in Los Llanos where they live (this is a lovely town with wide streets, varied architecture and art of all kinds dotted around). Their colleague in Santa Cruz is more traditional in his approach but still has a significant ministry - especially in the local prison.

The churches here - as well as elsewhere on the islands - are very buildings focused and their buildings tend to be quite traditional. My feeling is that they need to think about how they can make better use of their homes backed up by the internet for teaching. But I'd need to reflect more on this.

Yesterday morning we drove up to the highest point on La Palma. The winding road leads up through dense forest into the clouds and then, beyond the cloud cover, into a sparse landscape of volcanic peaks up to the string of observatories built to take advantage of the clear skies. Standing on the peak you look down a thousand feet to the clouds lying like a fluffy blanket over the landscape. It's like the view from an aircraft window when at cruising height. It's truly spectacular.

Back for a day chilling in Lanzarote before my flight home this evening.

Seeing God at work in the sun

Greetings from Gran Canaria - Las Palmas, to be precise. The contrast with Lanzarote couldn't be more pronounced. Whereas Lanzarote is relatively sparsley populated with uniformly white houses collected in small and medium sized hamlets, Las Palmas is a sprawling city of multi-coloured high rises and bustling streets. Las Palmas is the commercial centre and political capital of the group of islands but I'm not sure how it sustains its population of half a million people.

Today I have been in two contrasting but wonderfully vibrant churches. This morning I was in a suburb in a church that was built about twenty years ago and is at the moment in the throes of creating a basement about the same size as the church containing a lounge, accommodation for both sexes, bathrooms and a kitchen capable of catering for large numbers. They hope to use it for conferences - especially of young people - but more importantly, as a base for social outreach. They are planning a food bank and already have the local Spar lined up to supply some food, clothes distribution and possibly a medical work of some kind as they have family doctors and nurses in the church keen to do something.

This evening I was in a city centre church in Las Palmas, squeezed into a rented hall used by two other churches and a host of other groups. But they took me to their new building, a shop front, round the corner from their hall at the foot of an apartment block. They have just secured the bank loan needed to complete the job and hope to have it done in three months, but this being Spain, a month is a flexible measure of time.

Both churches are not short of faith and energy, vision and a desire to reach out to their immediate neighbourhoods. It is heartening to see God at work in a context that we Brits usually only see as a holiday destination, not a place where locals live. I've been blessed to share a little of the lives of the people who live here all the time.

So tomorrow I'm off to La Palma (not to be confused with Las Palmas), the Westerly-most island, the greenest and most difficult to navigate, to link up with a German/Spanish church planting couple who are working in three centres across the island. Their daughter has been one of my translators at the conference and this morning, and probably the best. The translators have each done a great job for me; I'm grateful to them and to God for the skills and gifts they've put at my and his disposal.

And so to bed...

A good congress

The congress is over., Yesterday went really well with about 20 people responding at the end of the evening session on Luke 10. Tomorrow, I fly to Gran Canaria to preach in two churches, stay overnight nd then on to La Palma to meet the team there, led by a wonderful German/Spanish couple, and then back to Lanzarote on Tuesday evening. Should be fun.

It's been great to meet so many wonderful people over the past couple of days and intriguing that so many are from places other than the Canaries - quite a few from Argentina, some from Chile and Columbia. Indeed many have commented on how transnational the churches are here, often to the extent that there are very few Canary Islanders among them!

I've had a number iof invitations to return, so it might not be my last visit here. Next time, I'll combine with a holiday and bring Linda, however.

Celebrating the God who's with us all the days

Greeings from the Canary Islands. It's been lovely walking in the sunshine, sharing conversation with new friends here on Lanzarote. Now I am pondering what to say to the ministers this evening at their gathering ahead of the conference starting properly tomorrow. I think I'm going to reflect a little on Matthew 28 as tomorrow I am going to focus on Luke 10 in the two sessions I am doing.

There are so many things I could say in the light of today's conversions but I have to stick to something manageable which I can deliver with confidence in about 20 minutes because with translation that will make a forty minute session - plenty long enough in this heat, I think (it's about 25 degrees).

I shall reflect on how Matthew 28 offers us resources for a missional lifestyle, supported by the promise that Jesus is with us 'all the days' - the good ones and the grotty ones, the ones when everything goes well and our minsitries are flying and the ones when everything comes apart and our ministries feel like so much hot air and the majority of them when things are pottering along, and it's all ok but we're not sure what it amounts to.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Sharing missional thoughts in the Canaries

Tomorrow I'm off to Lanzarote to speak at the Canary Islands Baptist Mission Conference (it's a tough job but someone really has to do it!). I shall be delivering four sessions - one to ministers, the other three to the conference as a whole.

I'm sure that Roxburgh's thinking will feature heavily in what I share from Luke 10. It will be interesting to see how churches in a very context to mine respond to these ideas.

One of the challenges for us in what Roxburgh says about mission is how we see the people who live next door and across the street as 'neighbours'. It's a challenge because lots of them live in networks rather than neighbourhoods; they mix with the people they know and like from their leisure pursuits or workplaces, from the links that have been made via their children.

Now some of these network links look suspiciously like neighbourly relations. But others aren't because interaction will take place miles from home. The challenge of Roxburgh's thinking is whether we can model the life of faith where we live with those among whom we live. But I think there's another challenge here that has to do with how we can contribute to making the streets we live in into neighbourhoods where people interact with one another, look out for each other, laugh and cry with each other.

Sociologists talk of this in terms of social capital. Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone argued that the growing individualism and consumerism of our culture was leading to a decline in social capital. Does the Christian community have a role in reversing this decline? Is this part of being a missional people? I think the answer to this is probably 'yes'. But I am not sure how.

I'll be reflecting on this as I sip sangria watching the sun set over the sea with new friends in the coming week and as I share coffee and glasses of wine with various friends through this coming summer in gardens, cafes and pubs around here. Perhaps, I'll stumble on an insight or two. I'd be interested to know your thoughts...

Joining God in the neighbourhood

Having finished Alan Roxburgh's book, I thought I'd reflect on how I feel his analysis of our situation and Luke's writings is shaping how I think about my task in Bromley.

The first thing to note is that I agree absolutely with the thrust of his argument. 'The road onto which we are being called is counter-intuitive; it calls us to leave behind our bags filled with methods and models of how to make the church work by creating programmes that will attract and catch people. The way of the Spirit involves going on the road as a stranger, needing to receive hospitality from the other. This is a strange inversion of categories and actions - it does not fit with the way of life we have developed as middle-class individualists living in a "make yourself" capitalist culture.' (p130 - that last sentence certainly describes the church I lead!)

He argues for a resolutely neighbourhood-based approach to living our Christian story. He suggests that the way we have done church over the past 100+ years in the west has alienated us from our neighbours. This combined with the rise of the network society that has led to mission theologies putting network and connections ahead of where we live, has led to a chronic level of disconnection between Christians and their neighbours and, tragically, our neighbours and the Christian life.

Roxburgh ruefully asks: 'can we grasp the implications of what we've become when we have to train people how to have conversations with neighbours or set times aside to talk with another human being? What kind of inhuman world have we created for ourselves, and how has the church managed to accept it and develop the marketing skills to manage it? Can we be that far away from the gospel of our Lord that we don't see what we have become?' (p146) Ouch!

I confess to having waxed lyrical in the past about our need to capitalise on our networks, how our neighbours really no longer understand themselves to be neighbourhood people but rather people who live in a world of connections that arise through work, shared interests, etc. I don't doubt that this is true. But I agree with Roxburgh that we have allowed ourselves to be shaped by a world that judges relationships this way rather than fashioned by a gospel that asks us to look for and act as 'a neighbour' (Luke 10:36).

Clearly we need to relate to those we work with, people who often live miles from where we do. But equally clearly, Roxburgh seems to be on to something when he says that the focus of our living should be local. In particular, it means that the focus of what the church does should be local, centred on the places where church people live, shop, find entertainment and education for their children. Instead of inviting people to join our programme in our building, is God saying to us 'see what's going in your street, among your neighbours; look at what I'm doing there and come and join me'?

This, of course, involves big changes in the way we disciple people and the way we organise church. It also raises questions about our role in generating neighbourhood-based social captial in the communities where we live, seeing the church, Christians, as a key means of bringing people together and creating a sense of neighbourhood identity. I'll reflect on that later.

Apocalypse postponed

So the apocalypse is postponed and the after rapture parties are still in full swing across the US. And it's all a good laugh and we can roll our eyes in disbelief and mutter 'only in America'.

Harold Camping should, of course, take the Bible more seriously and see that when Jesus says that about that day or hour no one knows, not even angels or Jesus himself (Mark 13:32), he means that no one knows, not even clever people using dubious maths to find underlying patterns in the text.

Perhaps the lesson from all this is two-fold. First let's learn to listen to and trust what Jesus actually said. And second let's be careful spouting nonsense in his name that brings the gospel into disrepute

Sharing the story with our neighbours

 As promised, here's my church magazine musings on uke 10. I haven't edited it, so you'll have to forgive the one or details that are specific to my situtation. Just read it as contextual theology!

At the church meeting in early May, the leaders gave some details of what they’d talked about at their awayday in March. Part of our focus then was on how the church needed to look for new ways to engage in mission.

We did not return from Southend with a blueprint for the future (churches should always be sceptical of leaders with blueprints!). But we did come back pretty convinced that we needed to look for ways to give opportunities for groups to form that are committed sharing the good news of Jesus with people who don’t and won’t come to church as we currently do it.

Looking at Luke 10 recently on Sunday morning, I suggested that Luke was telling us something profound about our mission. Clearly Luke told this story – a very specific one about a detail of Jesus’ journey south from Galilee to Jerusalem – because it offered an insight for his original audience – mainly small Gentile churches scattered across the Roman empire – into how they should approach mission.

A summary of the story is that mission is simply about living our lives where our neighbours live theirs. Simple though this summary is, it has profound implications for the way we organise ourselves as a church. It seems to me that there are six key things we need to learn from Luke 10:1-11 (a fuller version of this is posted on the church website along with the recording of the sermon on which it’s based).

1) pray: all our living starts in prayer. We are who we are because we pray; we discover our identity in God through praying on our own and with others. Here in verse 2, Jesus tells his followers to see the problem they faced – that the harvest is ready, but there are few workers to bring it in – and to pray. They can do nothing to solve this problem unless they pray. Likewise, we will not discern the way forward as a church unless we pray. All effective mission begins in prayer. But we also need to remember that as we pray, God will almost certainly invite us to be the answer to that prayer.

2) go: Jesus sends us to share story we live by with those who do not know it. People no longer come to church because they simply have no idea what church is for. So Jesus gives his followers two instructions as he sends them to their neighbours. The first is that we need to travel light. For us this means that we shouldn’t see mission as being about programmes and strategies. Jesus invites us to ‘leave all that at door, go empty handed and see what I’m already doing in your neighbourhood.’ It was the way he himself did mission as he tells us in John 5:17.

Secondly, he says that we should accept hospitality from our neighbours. Of course, in our society this is not always easy and often we will create spaces and occasions where we can interact with our neighbours. But the important principle here is that we need to let our neighbours set the agenda for this and not us. We often want to tell people information they are not seeking and answer questions they’re not asking – and hence we don’t connect with them.

3) eat: real connection between people happens at the dinner table: people open up to each other’s stories in the shared conviviality of sharing a meal. In this regard, all meals are a bit like communion.

4) work: why does Jesus tell these missionaries that ‘ a worker is worth is worth their hire?’ (v7b). It’s not to make a case for paid ministry but merely to recognise that in the culture in which Luke is writing, when people stayed with other people, they mucked in with the household tasks.

This suggests something really important about our mission: we will work alongside people who don’t share our view of life in order to create public good. We do this in the workplace with our work colleagues; we also do it in joint projects that seek to address a social need; and we’ll do it in organising events that bring neighbours together round a BBQ or street party or a gardening project that enables the able bodied to help those less able to look after their gardens because of age or infirmity.

5) stay: (v7): mission is not really about doing events, one-offs. Rather, it’s about going and staying, about making relationships over the long haul, sharing the ups and downs of our neighbours’ lives, being there with and for them. In short, mission is about being the Kingdom of God in the streets where we live.

6) share our story: finally mission is about sharing the story of our lives as they have been transformed and shaped by the story of Jesus – but this is the final part of engaging in mission. Mission is not about learning a whole load of techniques – how to answer certain tricky questions, steer the conversation round to the four spiritual laws. Mission is always about relationship: tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine.

Inevitably my story grows from my relationship with Jesus fed by the Word, prayer and fellowship (this is why we gather on Sundays!). And we believe that our story can bring peace and healing to our neighbours, most of whom are not looking for answers to difficult philosophical questions. Most people want to know they’re loved by us and possibly by God; that they are not alone; that their lives can make sense…            

This is why mission is about living our lives where our neighbours live theirs. Doing this could lead to people hearing the story that is making our lives what they are.

Living in the story that shapes our lives

Well, what a week! interviewing for a youth worker, teaching Romans 9-11 at Spurgeon's, reflecting on a spirituality of ageing for church on Sunday and in between all that finishing Roxburgh's excellent book. In fact, I got through the major sections on Luke 10 in time to reflect on this passage as a 'great commission' for the times we live in at church last Sunday morning. I was able to condense those thoughts into my piece for next month's church magazine. I will post that shortly.

First, however, I want to comment on something Roxburgh does a lot which I have found really helpful. He suggests that we seek to dwell in the story we are reading - in this case Luke 10. It seems to me to be a great way of ensuring that we don't rush to judgement on a passage, find what our excitement has told us we will obviously find there. Dwelling is about slowing down, reading the passage carefully, reading it again in a different version, pondering the language.

Roxburgh recommends reading the passage until it starts to live inside us and we in it. It is only then that we begin to hear the Spirit speaking to us in and through the text. This way of reading saves us from using scripture as a kind of marketing manual, getting away from seeing this missional approach that Roxburgh is recommending as just another technique that is going to save the church. It isn't and it won't.

The other key thing to bear in mind as we come to Luke 10 is that this story is told in the context of Luke using the story of Jesus' relationship with his followers to teach us about discipleship. Mission flows out of discipleship. It is not a technique learned by people who want to keep themselves busy in a religious way.

I am writing this on my new laptop, by the way.It's a rather nice Acer Aspire, fast with excellent graphics.

My thoughts on Luke 10 follow shortly.

Exhilarating reading

So I am continuing to read Alan Roxburgh's Missional: Joining God in the Neighbourhood with a smile on my face and sense of anticipation in my spirit. It's not that I agree with everything he says but that he provides a way of thinking about the mission God calls us to that is rich and plausible and rooted in scripture in a way that so much missional thinking isn't.

He argues - as I've already noted - that we need to base our call to mission in texts other than Matthew 28. It's not that Matthew's account of the Great commission should be ditched, just that it should be heard alongside other texts that similarly call Jesus' followers to mission. Roxburgh chooses Luke 10 (the subject of my next post on the book and, coincidentally, the subject of next Sunday morning's sermon) and seeks to place Luke's writing in a plausible historical context to answer the question why he recounts this story of the mission of the 70 at all.

Following Bosch and Green, Roxburgh dates Luke to the second Christian generation, a time when the first wave of apostolic leaders have quit the scene. He also notes that Luke isn't just interested in recounting history; he is writing to help his first audience of small, scattered gentile churches see what God is up to in their world as well as the world of Jesus and the first apostles. Luke chose to tell his story in a way that would resonate with and offer help to his first hearers. He is also right to highlight the sense of disillusion some of these churches would be feeling. Many would have expected the second coming to have happened by now, instead of which, the power of Rome is growing and the claims of Caesar for quasi-religious allegiance ever stronger. With the first generation of eye witnesses now dead and gone, the small gentile communities of Jesus followers were asking questions about what God was really up to. I certainly agree with him on Rome, I'm not sure about expectations of the second coming being so strong in the late first century - but it's a minor quibble.

Roxburgh argues that Luke attempts to address these concerns by compiling a two-volume story that aims to locate his first hearers in a new narrative understanding of God's actions in the world. Luke shows that God took a Jewish renewal movement and grew it into a vehicle for bringing his reign to the whole world. Roxburgh uses this insight - commonly held among scholars - to question our western (he's writing for a North American audience) reliance on the Euro-centric Reformation reading of our faith. This is a vital insight. It comes at a time when New Testament scholars are questioning some of the Reformation's emphases in its reading of Paul and the nature of the gospel; in particular the intense, almost exclusive, focus on justification by faith being the be-all-and-end-all of it.

So Roxburgh retells the narrative of Acts as the story of how God breaks boundaries between peoples so that everyone can share in the good news of Jesus. He points out that this involved the conversion of the earliest Christians as they came face-to-face with the Spirit of God pushing them into mission among people they thought were not included in God's plans. This otherwise excellent chapter contains an uncharacteristic clanger referring to James, the Lord's brother, being killed in Acts 12 when it is James, the brother of John, who is executed by Herod (p111). But that doesn't in any way detract from the force of Roxburgh's argument.

Drawing a parallel between the situation of Luke's first hearers and we who live in a Reformation settlement, Roxbugh articulates the question many church leaders think, even if they don't ask out loud: what's gone wrong? How come when we are faithfully proclaiming the gospel that has come down to us from our European forefathers, is the church declining like there's no tomorrow? Roxburgh's answer is that nothing's gone wrong, the Spirit is breaking out the box in which we have confined him for countless generations and that is both scary and exhilarating.

Passing another milestone

Last week I heard from Lambeth Palace that I had been awarded the Archbishop's Degree of Master of Arts (MA) by Thesis for my dissertation A Church in Every Workshop? The Economic, Physical and Social Location of the Early Pauline Communities. I will be graduating on Monday 6 June at Lambeth Palace at an event hosted by the Archbishop himself (very exciting!)

I am naturally delighted that the 50,000 words I produced was deemed worthy of the award, delighted too that I do not need to make any major revisions to the dissertation ahead of getting bound and lodged in the Lambeth Palace library! It will, however, be interesting to see what my examiners have made of the argument.

In many ways, it is the academic underpinning of the book that came out last month, The World of the Early Church (Lion Hudson), though it takes a slightly more definite line on the presence of wealthier members of Roman society (they were few and far between) and argues that the typical Pauline community - probably the overwhelming majority of the groups he planted around the empire - met in workshops or the living spaces behind or above them.

Rooting mission in the right texts

Alan Roxburgh's challenge to our missional thinking goes deep. As he introduces his reflections on Luke's gospel, he paints a picture of churches in the west in thrall to a reformation settlement that has placed Matthew 28:18-20 in the driving seat as the key missional text. These are the verses people think of when we speak of the 'great commission'; these are the verses that jump-started the western missionary expansion in the late eighteenth century, that continued to fire delegates at the Edinburgh conference in 1910.

But as Roxburgh points out - as many have done before him - this text is also associated with empire (something Matthew would find richly ironic!). The missionary movement associated with this text was one that went to the world with a package of answers framed in western thought forms, geared to answer the questions western culture had been asking and assuming that this package would suit everyone; it was the classic one-size-fits-all approach to Christian mission.

Roxburgh's discussion of all this is compelling and challenging. His remedy is not to ditch to Matthew 28 but to recognise that there are other powerful mission texts within the gospels that need to be heard. He favours letting Luke 10 shape the way we approach the task God has given the followers of Jesus for reasons we'll explore after we've reflected on Roxburgh's overall approach to the setting of Luke-Acts (that's for the next post).

For now, I want to reflect on another comment he makes about how we as church leaders think about missional texts - indeed many biblical passages. He argues that 'Just as Luke does not offer the gentile Christians forms of adjustment, so our crisis of meaning as Christians will not be addressed with one more set of tactics.' This is sentence well worth pausing at and pondering long and hard. There are so many 'tactics' on offer to help churches in the UK turn the corner and step into growth again. Some are good short-term fixes - like Alpha, cafe church, even Messy Church. But the danger of them is that they assume rearranging the furniture on the Titanic will stop us hitting the iceberg.

Rather, 'we need to allow the story of what God is doing in the world to reform us all over again in a different way. Asking questions and developing new "missional" church tactics will not address this.' (p89). I argued this case in Building a Better Body (chapter 7) but not at such depth as Roxburgh does here.