Truth, Unity, Humility & Grace

There are two big lessons to learn from church history. The first is that people never learn from church history. The second is that living in unity has been a problem all the way from the New Testament to the 21st Century.

I've been working with Paul's letter to the Galatians a lot over the past few months and a major issue raising its head as soon as Gentiles started joining churches in significant numbers was that Jewish Law blocked Jews and non-Jews from eating together. Basically it would have meant two separate churches: one containing Jewish Christians, one containing non-Jewish Christians, plus a few people who made sacrifices to break the boundaries. Paul hated that: there is one Jesus, there is one body, one people of God, undivided.

It has been particularly abhorrent to me therefore that there are 21st Century churchgoers who will refuse to receive communion with other churchgoers because of their views on particular hot-button issues - often claiming adherence to 'Biblical values' as their justification. Do they not read those Bibles?

The challenge is to combine unity with truth. If I sincerely believe the person next to me at the altar rail is living an immoral life, shouldn't I be making a stand? Actually I'm not sure 'sincerity' has a lot to do with truth: I can sincerely believe that the world is flat but that doesn't make it true. If it comes to that, the sincerity of my belief that the world is round (more or less) doesn't make a lot of odds to whether that belief is true either.

As I write it's only a couple of days since the atrocity in Orlando, so I'll skip that particular issue and go with something else which bugs me.

I believe that when God made man out of the dust of the ground he used evolution to do it. For me God's word and God's handiwork are in clear agreement.

However, I have no problem with those who say that God created the world exactly as described by a mechanistic reading of Genesis 1; that he created dinosaur bones because, let's face it, dinosaurs are cool and God wanted the best for us; and that the mechanical inconsistencies between chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis are down to our limited understanding and we just have to trust God. I'm all in favour of trusting God, that's what faith is all about.

Where I do have a problem is with people like the 'Creation Science Movement' and 'Answers in Genesis' who go way beyond that, raising towering edifices of intellectual speculation which not only go far beyond either science or Scripture, but actually end up contradicting both. They really wind me up. But what pushes me to the edge is when they follow up by saying that anyone who believes in anything different is not a Bible-believing Christian and that disbelieving their particular interpretation of the opening chapters of Genesis is tantamount to disbelieving the Gospel.

Some years back a couple came along to a housegroup I was leading pushing this view hard. I was fine so long as they simply stated their opinion, but as soon as they started rubbishing other views I had to point out that many faithful Bible believing Christians had different approaches to understanding what the Bible says on this topic, and that the mainstream orthodox Christian view on the matter is, and generally has been throughout history, considerably more nuanced than the approach they were pushing so determinedly.

Truth matters and they were moving beyond legitimate (if irritating) opinion and interpretation into downright falsehood. The Gospel is about God's love shown through Jesus, crucified and raised. Anyone can put their faith in that, irrespective of their beliefs, or lack of, in evolution, special creation, Noah's flood, or pretty much anything else in the Old Testament. Not that I don't think the Old Testament is important - I do -but Jesus and his amazing news is where new life is at.

They didn't come back, but if they had they would have been welcomed (possibly with an internal wince); I'd happily have eaten with them at the next housegroup social; and I did share communion with them next time it came around. Truth matters, and sometimes (but not always) needs to be stated, but disagreements don't have to break community.

Part of that is about humility and God's grace. I know I get things wrong, both in belief (my beliefs on some issues have moved a fair way over the past twenty years) and in terms of moral behaviour (try reading the Sermon on the Mount openly and honestly), but I come to the communion table acknowledging my failure and depending on the Grace of God, through Jesus. If I do that for myself, surely I have to allow the same Grace for the person next to me. If I think they have faults which I don't happen to share that makes no difference, I doubtless fail in areas where they succeed.

Mealy-mouthed Pharisaisms about my sin being repented and theirs not are just poor and arrogant excuses - Jesus paid the price, not me.

Are there limits? What about Westboro Baptist 'Church', obscenely gloating after the Orlando shooting? If I reckon (as I do) that WBC has nothing at all to do with Jesus, or with the body of Christ, how is that different from the person I recently spoke to who thought the same about the Roman Catholic Church? To be fair, he did make a distinction, which I would tend to agree with, between the organisation and some of its members.

There certainly are limits to my tolerance and willingness to associate with those who so strongly deny and oppose in all they do Jesus and his Gospel. Are there similar limits to God's forgivess and Grace? I doubt it, but God's God and I'm not.

In the end we all have to wonder in humility at the grace shown by God, through Jesus, and do all we can to live in the tension of truth and unity, recognising that we fail but trusting the God who loves us anyway.

Galatians: Service Not Status

From Paul, an apostle (not from men, nor by human agency, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead) and all the brothers with me, to the churches of Galatia.

It is a sad commentary on church history that most books on Galatians treat this opening of Paul's letter as being about him emphasising his own status and authority.

In the days before Skype, emails, or even telephones a ruler often couldn’t speak directly to someone far away, so he’d send a trusted apostolos as his envoy or messenger to carry his words to them.  But an apostle was not just any old messenger, he was someone especially tasked and trusted to relay the message precisely and faithfully, in the name of his master, without distortion or elaboration. It was an honourable role, but also a servant role.

So Paul begins his letter not by emphasising his own authority, but by de-emphasising it. As he goes on to say, his own history of persecuting Jesus' followers leaves him no right to expect any status on his own account. But he does have a message to give.

It's a message he has passed on faithfully once, and he is duty-bound to pass it on again in the face of confusion, distortion and misunderstanding. He cannot vary it nor can he reverse it, because he is an apostle - the message is not his but comes from Jesus.

For Paul had already given this message of the glorious news of Jesus to the people he had met in the towns of Southern Galatia, and they had responded. They had trusted in God’s message, they had responded to Jesus, and they had received his Spirit.

But now they were becoming confused. It looks as though the same people who had been stirring up trouble in Antioch (see this post from early in the year) had carried on to Galatia, spreading their different message to the new non-Jewish converts that, having been accepted into God’s people, through Jesus, they now needed to follow Jewish ways: being circumcised and obeying Jewish Law.

So Paul is writing to repeat his message, the one he received personally from Jesus. He will use this letter to expand on its meaning and emphasise its importance, but the message remains the same. Jesus has changed everything, everyone is welcomed into his community, and his Spirit is the true mark of his people. Jesus has given himself to set us free, and that is sufficient.

Galatians: God's Grace & Saul of Tarsus

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Paul, or Saul of Tarsus as he had previously been known, had been a ‘zealous Jew’ of the party of the Pharisees, we are told here in Galatians and elsewhere. To us maybe that sounds harmless: a religious sort of chap, maybe wearing odd clothes, or spending his days in dusty libraries discussing obscure points of theology, perhaps? Nothing could be further from the truth!

In today’s terms, think of a Jewish version of ‘militant Islamist of the Wahabi sect’. A zealous Pharisee believed in purity: purity achieved by purifying the land of Israel from foreigners and by purifying the people of Israel from collaborators, backsliders and heretics.

The Pharisees’ roots lay in the days of the Maccabees with their violent rebellion against the occupying Seleucids and against the Hellenised Jews who worked with them. Later the fruit of such zeal was seen in the murderous results of zealous Judaism in Jerusalem during the later stages of the First Jewish-Roman War in 69-70 AD (as told by Josephus) when Jewish factions slaughtered one another as the Roman armies waited outside. This is the background to Paul’s mission against the followers of Jesus.

Then Jesus came to meet Paul on the road to Damascus, and gave him a message. Think about that; if God chose Paul of all people to carry his message – that zealous persecutor of Jesus’ followers – how much more can he choose you, even me, to do wonderful and unexpected things?

That's the point of Paul telling his own story early in his letter to the Galatian churches: although by background he is a Pharisee, he now knows that he stands before God as worse than the tax collector in Jesus' story.

It’s the queen’s official 90th birthday this weekend. She’s a little over ninety years old and has been on the throne, and therefore head of the Church of England, for more than 64 years.

Aristocracy is about as ‘us & them’ as you can get, and royalty the peak of that, so Elizabeth Windsor, like Saul of Tarsus before her, might seem an unlikely messenger of Jesus, in whom “all are one”. Nevertheless, the queen’s graciousness and stability in both her royal capacity and as head of the CofE, leave her well-regarded in the country as a whole, and her Christmas messages often have a Christian theme.

This is the first Sunday for our new Transition Minister, Penny Cuthbert, here in Caversham; it seems a fair bet she’ll be talking about Grace at St John’s today, and that she'll have messages for other churches in the parish as she settles in.

Whether it’s Paul, or the queen, or Penny, or you, or I, or even that tax collector in the Gospel reading, we all have a history, a story to tell. And within that story there is a witness to God at work - maybe even to Jesus turning things upside down - and a message from God for us to share. The challenge for us is to notice what God has been doing and to share our experience of God in our lives with those around us, humbly and compassionately.

Be Proud To Be Humble

Humility and humiliation are pretty much opposites, even though they sound so similar.

As are self-respect and arrogance. Pride, confusingly, can cover both of the latter, so one needs to be careful when talking about it.

One of the traumas of the Thatcherite eighties came about because her government destroyed much of the, traditionally male, industrial sector of the British economy, replacing it with service jobs, many of them taken by women. So whole swathes of British society, where the men had taken pride in their role as breadwinners, were turned upside-down, and many of the men felt deeply humiliated.

I used to know (slightly) a female rower. She was physically stronger than any of the men around, yet some of them still spoke about men and women having different roles in life, because "women are the weaker sex".

Back in the day I was, I reckoned, a pretty good team leader at work. I was lucky enough to have some good people in my teams, who went on to become team leaders themselves. My aim and hope was that they would be at least as good as me, in their own ways, preferably better. That's part of how I saw the team leader's role, and I took pride in it - pride in seeing my pupils become greater than their teacher, if you want a slightly up-ended Biblical reference.

These days I take a certain amount of pride in having a decent working knowledge of the Bible, especially in terms of its contexts and how it fits together. A while back I went to a quiet day led by David Winter and was struck by how much greater his knowledge was. I was humbled, even slightly envious perhaps, but not humiliated. Why would I be? One encouragement was that maybe there is some purpose in the otherwise unpleasant process of getting older after all (David Winter must be well into his eighties, I reckon).

One final example: long ago, when my wife and I were young, we both used to play our guitar for young people's groups and for a monthly evening service. I worked very hard indeed on developing some basic competence on the guitar - I am not by any means a natural musician - whilst my wife was held back by a certain lack of confidence, in spite of being naturally far more musical . Over the years her guitar playing inevitably far outstripped mine, and she regularly uses it to lead worship. I take pride in feeling that I was part of the process of her developing her talent.

Marriage has enough challenges and pitfalls, it seems to me, without getting hung up over who is best at what, and which are men's and women's 'natural' roles.

Marriage is about partnership: if one is better at child-rearing and the other at paid work that is a blessing, whichever way around these skills fall (which has relevance, incidentally, to the arguments about gay marriage). If the skills are more ambiguous then it is necessary to work together to find the best way forward. But no-one should be humiliated by the role they find themselves in - challenged and stretched maybe, but never demeaned.

I'm not sure this ramble has quite gone the way I intended when I started ... that sometimes happens when I take physical rambles too, especially if I try a 'short cut'. But I think the picture at the top highlights something of what I wanted to say.

It is not really the tasks and roles we carry out which are humiliating; it is our attitude to them. If we take pride in our work and in our lives; if we recognise in ourselves that we are God's dearly beloved children, for all our perceived flaws; if we look at others and see past the stereotypes to the individuals, each with their own unique combination of giftings; if we live as followers of Jesus, who humbled himself to save us ... then we can learn to be truly humble without being humilated.

It is our arrogance, really, which ends up humiliating us. If we avoid hubris and prejudice, and truly value our neighbours as ourselves, then it is good to be proud to be humble.

Rob Beardsley Leaves Caversham Baptist Church

After two and a half years as pastor, Rob Beardsley is leaving Caversham Baptist Church. As I understand it, the termination agreement includes some sort of 'gagging clause', so church members are tight-lipped. In fact their church website, in its news section, doesn't even mention that he has gone ... there is just a gap in the Meet The Team page.

I'm not a fan of secrecy myself: when authorities use 'confidentiality' as a justification for being secretive, then I tend to assume they are avoiding accountability. Typically secrecy has the exact opposite effect from confidentiality: the information vacuum creates gossip and speculation to fill it.

We never did find out what had gone wrong at Rob Beardsley's previous church, Oakham Baptist Church, just that there was not a single person from Oakham who came to his induction at CBC - unheard of in my experience.

My take on what has happened at Caversham Baptist over the last two and a half years is as follows:

• The church has been haemorrhaging members;
• The church has been haemorrhaging money;
• Their outreach worker was moved to internal work and later laid off;
• Disciplinary action was taken against Rob Beardsley;
• The church has become deeply divided;
• It was clear that the situation was unsustainable so the parties agreed to Rob Beardsley leaving.

A year into this process I left the church, so I am not a neutral observer, but I hope the above is suitably objective anyway.

There is a less-obvious issue in all this: that of listening to God as a church.

Baptist churches, when recruiting pastors, don't seem to do the things that would normally be considered 'due diligence', like taking references. They just say that pastors are 'called' by God, so that sort of thing is inappropriate. Actually, my reading of the Bible is that things heard from God should always be checked out ('tested').

Nevertheless, the basic point stands that pastors are called under God's guidance, and a church knows who to call because they listen to God:

"[Jesus] calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice." (John 10:3b-4)

In Caversham Baptist's case, we clearly did not listen to Jesus. That, in my view, should be their priority now as they attempt to move on from this traumatic time: focusing on Jesus and following him.

Meanwhile all should acknowledge that, whoever might have been at fault for the things that happened whilst Rob Beardsley was pastor, the basic problem lay further back, with the church as a whole. We all messed up, so playing the blame game would be a singularly futile exercise.

It is time for Caversham Baptist Church to learn from the past, constructively; but, more importantly, to step out into the future: doing what is right, always showing compassion, and - most importantly - walking humbly with their God.

EDIT 26/07/14

It strikes me that the bullet point list above is solidly negative. This is simply because I wanted to only list changes which were objective and demonstrable, and the list of such things that I am aware of is solidly negative. However, it does seem implausible that there was nothing objectively positive happened at CBC during that thirty month period. If you are aware of any such, please use the comments section to share it.

One thing I would add is that I am aware of individuals who went above and beyond the call of duty just to keep things going in particular areas of the church's ministry. 'Keeping things going' doesn't really fit into 'objective and demonstrable' changes, but it does represent a significant and costly contribution to God's Kingdom, I think.

EDIT 29/10/14

I've had a letter claiming the above is defamatory: I've taken legal advice and it is clearly not (see the Defamation Act 2013). Nevertheless, for the avoidance of doubt, I wish to explicitly state that there is nothing in the above attempting to suggest that Rob Beardsley was in some way personally responsible for the heavy financial losses suffered by CBC during that period. This was a whole-church problem and CBC is a church with congregational government: all church members are responsible for decisions made, and Rob Beardsley was just one amongst many such members.

Sadly, in the kerfuffle I have disconnected the original comments on this post. I am recreating them below, but the links to commenters are lost. Sorry.