"love your neighbor as yourself." (Lev 19:18)

I believe that every Christian is called to care for the lowest and the least in our societies.  More than just through a mirroring of Christ's actions, which are so often concerned with those deemed unclean by the society of his day, but through his direct commands. Luke 6 speaks so powerfully on this matter and I have just cherry picked some quotes from what is really a beautiful section describing what the heart of the Christian for the poor should look like:
 "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God."(v.20)

"Give to everyone who begs from you" (v.30)

" Judge not, and you will not be judged "(v.37)

And, most famously,  "as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them"(v.31).

It is this core based around compassion for the weak that Nietzsche found so abhorrent: "Christianity is called the religion of pity. [...] Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect"(The Antichrist. 7). A sense that we should care for the weakest members is entirely opposed to a purely evolutionary view of the world and entirely aligned with the teachings of Christ.

And yet our Churches continue to be middle class bubbles. Yes, there are many wonderful charities with fantastic Christian hearts and values working with the homeless people in our societies but I think our actual attitudes towards these people is revealed more in this anecdote I once heard.

A church was due to have their first service from a new minister who was moving there from another church. That morning there happened to be a homeless man lying across the church steps having apparently slept there the night before. As the congregation moved in every one of them simply stepped over this man as they entered the church. The homeless man was actually the new minister who subsequently stood at the front of the church having been roundly ignored by every member of the church.

Now I don't know if there is any truth to this story or where it comes from but I think that it reveals an attitude which is all too often ingrained into our attitudes towards homeless people. That they are a problem to be dealt with and not individual people in need of Christ. This man should have been invited into the church, given a cup of coffee and asked to sit in the most prestigious seat since if "you say to the poor man, “You stand over there”, or, “Sit down at my feet”, have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?"(James 2:3-4). And yet how often do we see people who have come in off the street in church? 

We set up schemes to deal with homelessness as if it is some social ill that needs to be solved. We do not look at each individual homeless person as a beloved child of God, made in His image and in need of salvation/ continued Christian fellowship.

Many times I have been chatting to a homeless guy, mentioned that I am  Christian and have wanted to invite them to come along to church on a Sunday morning but I am honestly too frightened of what my friends will think, whether they would be comfortable there and whether there would be anything relevant to them going on to invite them. Now this speaks partly of my weakness and cowardliness but equally of the atmosphere and community we find in churches which if they are to follow the model of Jesus should be going straight to those whose lives are broken and already know they need the healing power of a saviour. 

What we need to realise is that we are no better than anyone else. We mustn't become like the Pharisees and mark out the clean and unclean members of society or determine who can and cannot come to know God. We are all filthy sinners in need of God's grace, we have all left our father and if we ever hope to return to his house it must be through relying on him alone. 

All this being said, there is actually a huge place for ministering to the physical needs of the weak and poor in our society. I will hope to be doing something to help this Saturday night when I take part in a sponsored event sleeping rough to raise money for the YMCA in Exeter to raise money for schemes which help get young people off the street. If you would like to donate to this then my page is at https://www.justgiving.com/simon-eves. Thank you.

Are you sitting comfortably?

What would Jesus say if he turned up in our church this weekend? Sadly, I don't know how impressed he would be. We sit in a nice, comfortable, middle-class bubble, go to church, attend prayer meetings and avoid ever really being dependent on God.

This is something that I have been convicted of over last weekend when I read Psalm 63 in preparation for talking about quiet times and my relationship with God. The initial prayer of David "O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water."(Ps 63:1) I was struck by how that wasn't a prayer that I could echo from my heart. My perception of my need for God has never been in any way equivalent to the need for water in a desert. My relationship with God is something I love, I cherish and would never want to lose, but I don't think I could ever describe it as feeling as if it is the absolute life line, the one thing between me and death. 

And yet, that is what it is.

I have been so busy trying to rely upon my own strength, to set up my own path in life that I have forgotten to rely on God's strength.

This, I would suggest, is the danger of living in a comfortable church environment. 

It is a sadly neglected fact that there are literally millions of my Christian brothers and sisters who are living under the threat of daily persecution. They rely upon God because they have no one else. I like to pretend I rely on God while I lean back on my friends and family. 

If we sit in a comfortable Christianity then I think the church becomes irrelevant and entirely fails to do what it is called to do because if the church is working effectively then we are to expect persecution. As Jesus himself says, if they took him and killed him, what can we, his followers, expect? The Gospel is powerful and wherever it is preached it should be shaking things up because it is, at its very core, counter cultural. Jesus didn't come to say 'carry on living how you are, you're doing a great job. It would be nice if you came and said hi on Sunday every so often.' No, Jesus came to demand a radical change of heart from His people that would inspire them to go out and just do what he did and lavish love upon the poor and the broken in society. Churches in this country have sadly become, in far too many cases, middle class bubbles where we meet with our friends. All too rarely are they seen as places where a cross section of the community can forget the things which divide them and simply unite around the God who loved every person enough to die for them regardless of class, race, gender or whatever other human category we try to split people up into.

I am challenging myself to get to that point where I am holding nothing back, where I feel like I need Jesus as much as I need water. When I can truly understand what Jesus meant when he says "whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14). 

I am doing this because I have become (in only the two years I have been a Christian) far too comfortable. I want my life to count for the kingdom so I am going to take a lesson from the persecuted church (which happens to be a place where the church is also always growing) and try to rely on God more and me less. I want my life to matter, to be exciting and make a difference. I don't want it to be dull but comfortable. I don't want to stay in my comfy pew. I want to take up my cross and follow my Lord and Saviour wherever He would have me go. 

Writing about Jesus

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"(John 1:1)








What do the words we use say about the society we live in?

This is the question I have been pondering since I found out about Google's new tool Ngrams. It is a great little thing that uses the huge corpus of writings in the English language which has been digitized on Google books and compares how often any given word, as a percentage, is used. 

For example, if we look how the words war and peace were used in the 20th Century we see a direct correlation with the events of history with spikes around the two world wars:

Similarly we can see trends in phraseology so if we compare the usage of Rhodesia and Zimbabwe we can see the relationship you would expect with the latter overtaking the former in recognition of the change in name:

Now, whilst I am tentative about using these data and assuming any form of causation  (I am grateful to Mrs Stone, my A-level stats teacher who taught me well) we can, at the very least, view some interesting trends in the words used around Christianity.

If we look at this three way plot between Jesus, Christianity and religion there are some interesting trends beginning to emerge.

 

Whilst it appears that Christianity and religion are terms used less often now than they were in 1900 what excites me is the recent explosion in the usage of 'Jesus'. I fervently hope that this indicates that the Church has realised that its purpose is to proclaim "Jesus Christ, and him crucified"(1Cor 2:2). If it does and it means that Christians are beginning to refocus upon the gospel and moving past the trappings of tradition and religion to a greater understanding of faith (a word which is also enjoying a renaissance in usage in the 21st Century) then surely that is nothing but exciting! For anyone who, like me, is passionate about the gospel and sees Jesus as the central figure therein upon whose resurrection the entirety of the faith stands or falls then this (hopefully) indicates that this message is getting out!


It might, of course, be for a completely different reason but it is at least interesting to see such a pronounced increase in talking about Jesus in our culture and whether this increase is explicitly linked to a growing movement of evangelism (yet another word enjoying an upwards usage trend) but in any case it shows us that the figure of Jesus is enjoying increased prominence and attention from our society which can only be a good thing. Nothing yet has accounted for his continued relevance more than the concept that what Jesus says is true. As Christian's we should welcome any sort of investigation into Jesus' authenticity because either He is the Christ, the eternal son of the living God and we are right to worship Him and the evidence will continue to support this or, if the converse was to occur we should equally rejoice to have had our mistake realised because: "If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied."(1Cor 15:19). We must hold to the literal truth of the Gospel and its promise of eternal life, if we don't then we are merely deluding ourselves. Thankfully, though, the account of the New Testament, in my mind at least, resounds with a unique truth about a unique God who came to find us while we were still sinners and to whom we will one day be united!


What, though, does this renewed interest of the central figure of Christianity mean for the make up of our society overall? It has been suggested that we are now in a post-secular society where conceptions of a wholly secular state have been dissolved and that historical theorists have realised that religion (and especially Christianity), will not go away. It is an observation often made that the Church thrives under persecution: Christianity cannot be stamped out because all the arguments which have ever been placed before it crumble in the face of our glorious Saviour and the amazing personal relationship he has invited us into. I have no idea if we are in a post-secular world or not but I am excited by the apparent resurgence of interest in Jesus. And I do know that, one day, "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth"(Phil 2:10).

The cost of a broken Church?

What is wrong with women bishops? That, I imagine, is the question the world is asking (or at least the half dozen people outside of the Christian community who are aware and care that there is a synod taking place are asking).


 The actions of the Church this week have demonstrated a far deeper issue than what women are allowed to do, it has revealed that the Anglican church is an organisation which has forgotten its bodyhood. The discussion of church splits, Anglo-Catholic priests leaving for Rome and Evangelical Anglicans refusing to let their ministers train in England  shows, frankly, that we have forgotten Romans 12:5's lesson that "in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others". We are a united body of believers, a brotherhood in Christ and just as we can't pick our families and yet we love them anyway, so it must be with the church. Similarly, if we think of how Christ said we would be recognised, how people outside of the church would come to realise the salvation offered by Jesus, it is not by our outstandingly correct doctrines but, in our Saviour's own words : "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”(John13:35).  If the Anglican Church wants to be recognised as a body of Christ's disciples then a drastic change of heart is required.


Why, then, is women Bishops such a contentious issue? I am certain that the general reaction of those looking in from the outside is that this debate only goes to prove that the church in this country is irrelevant, outdated and, at least in part, misogynistic. That is not the message that we want to proclaim, the article I read on the BBC made no meaningful reference to the debated passages of scripture, the only concern was to outline which groups lie in which camps. 


This is not, however, a reason why we should be swayed towards those who desire female Bishops in the CoE. To conform to the world's expectation of us is, again, not what we were called to do. If we support female headship then it should be because of the excellent reasoning put forward by Rev Stephen Kuhrt that it is scriptural. Sadly, this does not appear to be the motivation for the change which is, rather, motivated by liberalism and a desire to keep up with what society defines as normal. Romans 16, and the many prominent women in the Church, to my mind, clearly demonstrates that not only is female teaching permissible but actually harmonises with the Biblical model handed down to us.


This entry is not intended, however, to examine that issue but, rather, to consider the heart of the Anglican Church. If we have a heart for Jesus then the only question we should have when ordaining any person or placing someone in a position of authority is "Will this appointment further the preaching and mission of Christ's kingdom?". Any other question requires placing a matter of secondary importance ahead of the sole purpose of the Church's existence. The church is not a club that exists for its members to sit around and debate theology but an army with one mission: fighting a war to save lost souls for Christ. 


This may indeed mean we fail to have a perfect theology. But, actually, I'm ok with that. We will never achieve a perfect understanding of God and His will on earth and we would be foolish to maintain that every element of our own theology is perfectly flawless and unquestionable. There is room in the message of Jesus for mistakes. If we seek him honestly and fail to understand or interpret his word correctly then that is covered by God's grace. What may be lost in these debates, however, is of far greater significance. If we lose our unity in Christ, we have failed to act as the Church is supposed to. but, more importantly still, is that all this effort and the combined minds of all these ministers could have been put towards saving lives for Christ.


 I believe that to waste time around the debating table, arguing with our own side, is counter productive whilst the spiritual battle rages on. If the time wasted arguing about petty doctrinal issues could have been spent saving lives then the Church has truly lost sight of its purpose. I hope and pray that this will not happen.