Wells and Angels

The water problem is resolved!  We blogged before Christmas about angels, who come in all shapes, sizes and genders.  Today’s angel came in the form of a friend in a baseball cap.  He was with us for dinner last night while we were waterless, and there had been a long conversation about angels while we sat round the table.  It has to be said he’s also a plumber, but he had never dealt with wells and pumps before so there was absolutely no dinner conversation dropping hints about what needed to be done.  But after a fruitless day calling plumbers who were either still on holiday or didn’t want to know, the church mice decided to take a look at the offending pump themselves.  It took a bit of huffing and puffing to get the concrete slab off the top of the well, but when we saw that the pump had just two water connections (in and out) and a single electrical connection, it looked easier than we had thought.  A quick inspection by our friend confirmed that in principle it was no more complicated than putting a new tap in a basin, so we went and bought a new pump, and then the aforementioned friend and one church mouse (guess which one!) spent a pleasant two hours in freezing cold darkness down a damp hole five feet deep but wide enough to easily accommodate two modestly sized individuals.  Actually, the cold didn’t matter for long as we soon generated our own body heat down the hole!  Unfortunately with it being dark and across an exceedingly muddy field we didn’t get a photo.

The scary bit was doing the big switch on and waiting to see what happened.  A pleasant hum announced that it was all working, and sure enough the kitchen tap had water in it again for the first time in three days.  So now the church mouse from down the hole is going off to have a nice jacuzzi bath, though the other mouse will probably get to share it as that one made nice cups of tea as the workers’ reward.

Now we know we can sort out water wells, where is our next ministry going to be?  What is our well telling us?  Not such a daft question as there is no shortage of Bible characters for whom wells were transformational spaces

Ho-Ho-Hum?

After a great family Christmas, this is what we did next.

One of the perks of having a handy son-in-law: this shed roof needed some repair, and he not only volunteered to help but actually suggested we should do it.  How cool is that?   And just in case you’re wondering, that is actually one of the church mice in the picture nailing the stuff down on the side you can’t see obviously a whole lot more flexible than you might imagine at such a great age!

Today was to be a big blog day, but after all that exertion yesterday our water supply dried up just as we were going to bed – nothing to do with the work, just one of the hazards of living in the middle of nowhere miles from the nearest public water supply.  Living for half a day without any on tap, and having to haul it from a neighbour’s place gives you a different perspective on the stuff (and being in the middle of nowhere, the neighbour’s house isn’t exactly right next door).  Still, something to think about while we wait to see if we can get a new pump in the next day or two, or whether it’ll take a week or two (this being Scotland, where New Year is also a seriously big occasion for taking time out).

Thinking about the water business brought to mind all those millions of people who do this every day – and also those millions currently suffering from cholera as a consequence of not having clean water available to them.  A different sort of prayer than we anticipated in the post-Christmas activities, but probably a reminder we needed to have.  We also recalled a service we led at Fuller Seminary last year, on the theme of water, which highlighted many of the same issues.

Loving God, creator and sustainer of all living things, help us always to be thankful for the daily gift of clean water.  We hold before you now those whose lives are fully occupied with the tasks of drawing and carrying water, and those who suffer from the lack of it.  In your mercy, hear our prayer.  Through Jesus Christ our Lord, the living water.  Amen. 

Angels

We’ve been thinking about angels recently.  Not too surprising given that it’s Christmas, and even breakfast television had a slot this morning retracing the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, in which the presenter talked about angels in the same matter-of-fact way you might talk about traffic jams or the weather.

 

But it’s not really Christmas angels that got us going on this.  In fact, it all started just over a month ago when John was guest preacher at a church in the north-east of Scotland.  The title of his sermon was ‘Holy Ground’, based around the story in Exodus 3 of Moses’ encounter with the burning bush.  At the time, it seemed as conventional a sermon as you could imagine, but in the course of it John shared some of his own experiences of holy ground, including a story of angels.  Not just any angels, but a very personal story which was one of the pivotal points in his own spiritual journey, when during a trip to Manila in the Philippines he had an experience that could only be comprehended as an encounter with angels.

 

So far, so good.  The congregation went home, said the usual platitudes as they left (‘loved your sermon today’, ‘deeply moving’, ‘hope you’ll be back’ – you know the sort of thing).  Actually, some of them really did seem to have been deeply moved.  Until they started thinking about it later that week, and realised that they were supposed to be Dispensationalists and therefore by definition shouldn’t be believing in angels – or at least, not unless they were in the Bible, because the whole point of Dispensationalism is that we now live in some sort of interim stage of God’s relating to this world and what happened in the past can’t be experienced today.  So if John was telling the truth and he really had encountered angels, where had they come from?  There could be only one possible explanation: he must be in touch with the dark side, inspired not by the divine but by new age hocus-pocus, and therefore to be denounced and certainly not invited back again.

 

Since that happened, we’ve had lots of reflections on all this.  A missional one was first: how can people who so readily dismiss anything mystical or numinous possibly expect to connect with a culture that is desperately searching for help from beyond ourselves?  And a theological one: what sort of God do these people believe in, if God can only act according to some theological theory that was only dreamed up in the 19^th century?  Maybe the answer to that lies in the fact that the individual who stirred up all this strife in the first place is a scientist, and there is a certain sort of scientist who thinks that their PhD makes them higher than God (just think Richard Dawkins – though it has to be said that not all scientists are like him).  When you think about it, mixing a materialist science that sees everything in terms of unchangeable laws of nature with a Dispensationalism that says God is no longer active in the world is a pretty strong humanistic brew that puts you in control of most things.

 

Believing in angels seems remarkably straightforward compared with that sort of contortion.  Not to mention the fact that the very first pages of the Bible have quite a lot to say about people thinking they know better than God.  Whatever else you might think about the circumstances of the first Christmas, you could never accuse God of doing things our way!

Church, charity, faith and culture

A couple of years ago the UK government decided to tighten up the rules by which organizations could claim charitable status (and therefore tax advantages).  As a result all sorts of bodies, including churches and other religious groups, have been under scrutiny to determine whether their activities contribute to the wider public good – and if they don’t, then their ongoing charitable status is in doubt.  So the questions were about the purpose of the church, and a fair number of church people – at least at local level – seem to have assumed that this would be the end of church as we know it, with congregations having to redefine themselves as social service agencies if they wanted to maintain their status as charities  Now the report is out, it looks as if the Charity Commission has more confidence in the transformational power of the Gospel than some Christians, as they clearly state that ‘Charities whose aims include advancing religion do not have to undertake secular activities in addition to their religious activities in order to meet the public-benefit requirement’.

More interesting still is the fact that missional activities are specifically singled out as a key way in which Christians might demonstrate their care for their fellow citizens – by reaching out to others and sharing the good news.  

Why are we commenting on all this?  Three reasons really.

For one thing, it has highlighted a certain lack of confidence among some Christians whose paranoia about the whole thing presumably grew out of their own uncertainty as to whether their spiritual activities were of any benefit to the wider community!  That’s a bit of a wake-up call for mission, because if we aren’t sure about the benefit of faith to ourselves then how and why do we expect anyone else to be the slightest bit interested?  What’s more, the sort of mission that is affirmed is what the two of us have been speaking and writing about for 20 years or more: journeying alongside people, being open to our own vulnerabilities, and creating safe spaces for people to engage with God for themselves.  The evangelists who bully or bribe people into faith are specifically excluded from charitable status – as are groups whose meetings are only open to their own members.

This is also a good time for churches to address themselves to the fundamental questions of purpose and vision that have been raised by this whole business.  What exactly is a church for, and what is its contribution to the wider good of society?  Is this opportunity yet another manifestation of the reality that God is way out in front of us all, when a government agency is encouraging us to share our faith with the wider public, because this is a thoroughly good thing?  People often ask us in seminars what exactly we mean when we talk about the missio Dei, God being at work in the world beyond the church.  Well, this is one example of the reality of it in practice!  And the onus is now on us to organize ourselves so as to match both the challenge and the confidence that has been placed in us.

Then there is also the fact that spirituality has been identified as a good thing for human formation and flourishing.  That tells you something about where we’ve got to in the culture.  Part of the reason why so many Christians feared questions being asked about their purpose probably has something to do with the fact that a lot of churches are still living in the past, when belief was scorned and spirituality was something you wouldn’t do even to your worst enemy.  The reality today is quite different, and the search for spiritual dimensions to our existence and experience is more or less on centre stage wherever you look.

So there’s a bit of a challenge in there for us all: do we not only practice what we preach, but actually believe it in the first place?  And an opportunity for those who will engage with sensitivity and creativity the big questions of today’s culture.

 

A Re-Freshing Expression of Church

We were at this church for a meeting a few weeks ago and at that time the minister (Scott Burton) had just negotiated with the hotel next door to hold their main Christmas eve carol service there.  He never imagined the brewery that owns the place would do this!
Sadly, Perth is too far for us to travel or we’d definitely be there, but if there’s any refreshment left, we’d always be open to receiving some after the event   Please take note, Scott!

More worship reflections

The last two days have been pretty busy.  Not just the usual advance preparations for Christmas, but we’re entertaining our first guests of the holiday season, and yesterday John spent a whole 4 hours at the dentist (which is an improvement on his last visit, which lasted 5 hours).  An interesting conversation with the dentist though, who asked what was new and was very interested in this blog – seems like he’d connected with an emerging church in Long Beach, but is having a hard time finding a spiritual community in the north-east of Scotland.  Since he’ll likely be reading this post now we’ve had that conversation, it needs to be said that he’s a seriously good dentist!  Watch this space for eventual ‘before and after’ pix.

Worship obviously stirs up a lot of emotions though it’s interesting that nobody who’s commented is up for defending the sort of thing we complained about (and you have to trust us that we haven’t deleted any comments!).  Here’s an article Olive wrote for a church magazine a couple of months ago: Mission and Worship

More worship reflections

The last two days have been pretty busy.  Not just the usual advance preparations for Christmas, but we’re entertaining our first guests of the holiday season, and yesterday John spent a whole 4 hours at the dentist (which is an improvement on his last visit, which lasted 5 hours).  An interesting conversation with the dentist though, who asked what was new and was very interested in this blog – seems like he’d connected with an emerging church in Long Beach, but is having a hard time finding a spiritual community in the north-east of Scotland.  Since he’ll likely be reading this post now we’ve had that conversation, it needs to be said that he’s a seriously good dentist!  Watch this space for eventual ‘before and after’ pix.

Worship obviously stirs up a lot of emotions though it’s interesting that nobody who’s commented is up for defending the sort of thing we complained about (and you have to trust us that we haven’t deleted any comments!).  Here’s an article Olive wrote for a church magazine a couple of months ago: Mission and Worship

Worship

For the first time in a while, we have a weekend with no engagements!  So why are we talking to each other about worship?  Some people just can’t stop.  But we started talking about it because we’ve been at a fair number of events lately where Christians have been talking about the need to move on from militaristic, chauvinistic, triumphalist, Christendom-inspired ways of being – and then have sung the most outrageously militaristic, chauvinistic, triumphalist, Christendom-inspired songs.  Sometimes you can almost feel the testosterone as men (in particular) punch the air and generally adopt aggressive postures.  What is that about?  And why don’t we see the disconnect between talking about new ways of being while all our body language (not to mention the way we order the space around us) contradicts what we say we are searching for?

Or is this a really daft set of questions that nobody else notices, or if they do they’re not bothered about?

This week so far

It’s been a pretty hectic week for us.  We went straight from Brian McLaren’s meetings in Perth to London, and just back a couple of hours ago.  One of the highlights of that trip was eating here.  A really cool experience for arts types, as it’s a restaurant inside an installation at the Royal Academy.  So not only was the food truly excellent, but the ambience was something else – with great service as well!

While in London, we had plenty of time to unpack the Brian McLaren conference (which, incidentally, was an overnight thing that included the public meeting in Perth but also a couple of sessions within the conference, not to mention staying up half the night for personal conversations).  Nobody reading this will be surprised to learn that Constantine got a really hard time (again).  That poor guy must be not just turning, but churning in his grave, what with all the attention he’s getting from Christians these days.  And alongside that, of course, was much critique of the Christendom narrative (so nothing new there either!).  But we did ask each other a couple of questions.  First up, supposing we’d been Constantine (or for that matter, any of his pals, either inside or outside the church), what would we have done?  Almost certainly the same as he did.  So when does the stone throwing stop?  Has he become a convenient historical fall guy to divert us from addressing some of our own issues?  It’s a genuine question – not like we have a definitive answer to it. 

And then on the narrative of Christendom.  There was a fair amount of discussion among the group about whether we should just ditch that story altogether as being too controlling, exploitational, manipulative, etc – and start all over again by telling a completely different Christian story for our generation.  We are in no doubt that we need a new Christian story if we are to communicate the core of Jesus’ person and teaching to 21st century post-Christian cultures, but there is still a question about what to do with the historically inherited narrative.  To put an explicitly theological spin on it: are we saying that the Christendom story cannot be redeemed?  And if we are, then what other things or people are beyond redemption?  And if there are things that can’t be redeemed, what does that say about our understandings of redemption, or indeed of the grace and love of God?  Well, we’re thinking about it …

One other thing we’ve been thinking about is the way Brian focused the atonement debate, with this question: what or who do we need to be saved from – from God (who is angry with us), or from evil, which is against both us and God?  We’ll tease that one out a bit more later on.  But it’s a good way of putting the question.

A picture tells its own story

Well, we’re just back from 24 hours with Brian McLaren and a bunch of Scottish church leaders talking about … all the things that Brian’s loved and hated for   We have to be up and out early tomorrow morning to catch a flight to London, where we’ll be till mid-week, so blogging our thoughts about it all will come then.  But they say a picture speaks a thousand words, so here’s one.  Make your own minds up what it says ….