// madness and civilisation

I used to think there were two types of Christians, ‘sane’ ones and ‘mad’ ones. That doesn’t come down to a stable ‘conservative vs. charismatic’ division, either; I’ve met plenty of mad conservatives too, and not just the obvious ones (ie. the people who bomb abortion clinics, or the people who thought that the dinosaurs were planted there by Satan to confuse Christians). ‘Sane’ ones, in my eyes, were those people who managed to integrate faith with normal life, whereas the ‘mad’ ones were the people who seemed to have lost all touch with reality, taken things to an excessively high level, and become, in all honesty, slightly frightening.

Only I’m not sure about that distinction anymore. The past few weeks I’ve heard a whole range of teaching from people from both charismatic and conservative backgrounds, and I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that all true Christianity is a kind of madness. That is to say, if you’re really serious about this then it ends up affecting everything about your life, from your priorities to your expenses to your politics; and that kind of follow-through is intimidating, not to mention extremely rare. And if it’s not doing that, then what is it doing?

Very little in this world demands all of you; sure, you can give yourself wholly to fighting climate change or protecting those trafficked across the world, but there’s always a point where you switch off from those causes and you have time that is wholly for you, no matter how dedicated you are. Christianity, at least in theory, asks for it all – work time, rest time, play time – it’s all His. And we’re bad at accepting that here in England – people who are really on fire for God tend to look earnest or pious or idealistic or just plain embarrassing when we view them with our ironic detachment. This is a hard place to be a Christian some days.

Recently, though, I find myself looking pragmatically and looking at the followers instead. Try it. If you look at your community of faith, at your Christian community, try answering this: how (if all) is this helping the world?

See, I was all in favour of that kind of ‘sane’ Christianity until I looked around and asked myself, has my Christianity changed anything, altered anything, impacted anything? Does it look any different to anything else? The answer, mostly, is no; it’s culturally sidelined – culturally acceptable, yes, but equally seen in a lot of spheres as culturally irrelevant, something that’s just there because it always has been.

What about you? You don’t have to be Mother Theresa, but in your school, in your university, your workplace. has Christianity been a positive force, if you’re really honest?

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, speaking about the African concept of ubuntu, described the phrase (taken from the Bantu language) as relating to “the essence of being a person. It means that we are people through other people. We cannot be fully human alone. We are made for interdependence, we are made for family. When you have ubuntu, you embrace others…”

He also claimed that “the solitary human being is a contradiction in terms and therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in belonging.” Too often our culture of Christianity has sought to create a new humanity all on its own, relating only to itself, existing only in its little cliques – and that way madness lies. What good is that? Like it or not, we are members of this world, and whether we ask the question or not, the world outside is watching and asking, ‘what good is this Christian thing anyway?”

Is our Christianity culturally irrelevant or culturally isolated? Because the great dream of this world isn’t empire, it’s redemption. At the moment, at least, it looks like it’s the other way round. Christianity looks like it wants to be a conquering force, and it’s not that good at it, in all honesty. It sets up churches that go out trying to spread across the world, and it seeks to expand in order to increase its influence, and in doing so it hopes to communicate the gospel.

That may look ‘sane’, but that’s arguably also because it’s the world’s way of doing things. It’s a capitalist, colonialist model that we understand because our businesses (and in the past, our country) have used it. But at the end of the day it looks out for itself rather than for the good of this world… and that’s scary in itself. That sees Christianity as the only valuable thing in this world, and that’s just plain dangerous.

Sometimes it feels like we sold out, doesn’t it? We compromised on all the dangerous, costly stuff in order to fit in better, we adjusted our politics and our expenditure and our worship so that we could find a place in this world.

“My kingdom is not from this world”, Jesus declared, and it’s never, ever run along the world’s lines. That’s because the world’s foundations are all wrong. But what are our foundations? You may not be praying out the demons over cities or praying into the battles in the spiritual realms but the question still remains as to whether you have any belief in change, any hope that a changed world is possible, or whether you’re just resigned to the way the world works…

I’ll tell you what, a lot of the time I fall into the latter category, and that mentality comes from a desire to survive more than anything else; feeling like our religion is just a solitary group of survivors who are clinging onto each other for dear life.

Sure, survival is one thing, but it’s not the end aim, and it’s certainly not worth compromising for. There’s more planned, and a bigger dream out there. The next step is seeing whether we’re mad enough to pray it into being, mad enough to believe that it could actually happen, and even that we might be able to be a part of it. But that’s going to take risk. Even now it sounds kind of mad. and the safe, sane world seems easy and kind of appealing, if I’m honest.

Unfortunately for me, and for you, that’s no kind of life at all. And it’s not the life we were called to, either.

So what do we do now?

// translating angst into action

Have you ever found yourself looking on – or maybe in the middle of – one of those situations that appear so desperate as to demand some kind of divine intervention, and yet when you cry out to God there is none, and not even an answer? Where the more you pray the more your anger grows, or the more your questions grow, until you reach the moment when you realise that this is not just about your own circumstances but about something much, much bigger?

That’s arguably the moment when you start asking questions about who this God who you worship is, about His character and His nature and His power, and about what it is that this life He called you to really looks like. It’s the place of brokenness and of trust and, eventually, of answers, even if those answers don’t necessarily come in the form in which you imagined they would.

That’s the moment where a lot of people stop, too. It’s not hard to see why. Those questions are hard, and huge, and intimidating, and it’s easier most of the time to just shut down or walk away rather than face up to them. Take Psalm 74, for example, which opens with the cry “O God, why have you rejected us forever?” and then laments, “we are given no signs from God, no prophets are left, and none of us knows how long this will be”…

What do you do with something like that? Where do you go?

There is faith, sure; the remembrance that “God is my king from long ago; He brings salvation on the earth” stands stark in the middle of that text. But it is a song of suffering first and foremost, and it is in the midst of that suffering that the remembrance that God is a God of covenants comes; that He is a God who stands up for the oppressed, a God who will not be mocked. It’s like their oppression is valuable because it reminds them that things are not the way that they are supposed to be – but they only realise that as they’re lamenting.

The same goes for 2 Corinthians 1, which I’ve talked about before, and its talk of the “God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” It’s in that we get engaged, in that we start to build compassion – when we stand alongside those crying out for justice with a holy fire growing in our bellies. Of course, what we do with that fire is a different matter, but if you have any compassion at all then you will not be able to stand impassive in the face of those sufferings… Something inside you will cry out for change, whether you like it or not.

It might seem crazy, but there’s something in this; this God, He might just withdraw in order to stir us into action. For a glimpse of that, just check out the Song of Songs, the lover in which spends most of the poem pursuing a shadowy, elusive beloved, chasing the haunting and beautiful presence of God and longing for that time when “the day breaks and the shadows flee”. In fact, she even seems to go as far as crying out for Him to keep leading her on, keep letting her chase, not letting her stand still…

We too are people waiting for that time when “the day breaks and the shadows flee”, but that time is not yet; this is still the time of shadows. We are still chasing the presence of God, and He will keep leading us for as long as we are listening to Him – wherever that may take us. And so when stuff goes wrong or we are faced with situations that are, for want of a better word, just evil, we can either pray for a God to draw near and deliver us, or we can accept that, just maybe, He may already be in the middle of those situations, drawing us closer to Him even if that means stepping closer into the pain.

What passions are stirred up in you in the silences, in the moments when God seems to go inexplicably quiet when all that you know of Him screams that He should act otherwise? Is He calling you to the outcasts, to the people mocked or ignored? Is your heart breaking for children robbed of their innocence? What are the things that you have most desperately cried to God for – and, when you listen, what was His answer?

You may not think that you have those passions, but if not, then that is cause to be scared. Because that’s the beginning of numbness, of isolation, and of quiet despair. If your heart breaks or burns for nothing, then what then?

I have spent too long having the same conversations with a whole range of people recently; talking about the same things that are wrong and that desperately need fixing in this world, or about our lack of passion and drive as Christians.

Maybe the time for talk is over.

Maybe the time for listening is here.

As Pete Greig once put it,

silence may be presence

muted

silence may not be nothing but

something

to explore defy accuse

engage

and this is

prayer

and where there is prayer there may yet be

miracles

Do your actions, our actions, reveal that we worship a God who isn’t acting, who isn’t answering our prayers or even listening to them?

Or is it just the case that we’re not listening to the answers that He’s giving us?

There are a million reasons not to listen. Busyness, weariness, bitterness, fear. None of them are good enough reasons. It’s not stupid to have them, but they can’t control us.

We are not left in the silences alone; we stand in the place where all words fail alongside an awesome God. But at the end of the day, that leads to a question.

When all else falls away, and when there is only silence, what is it that you hear?

// on free lunches and the kingdom of God

(you can actually buy these for your fridge)

What does the voice of God sound like to you? I realise that’s a fairly daunting question to start any piece of writing with, but it’s something that’s been on my mind for the past couple of weeks, ever since starting an internship at St. Aldates church in Oxford, and, honestly, I’m curious about what you think. You see, ever since I started here I’ve been overwhelmed by the sheer generosity of people here – the amount of people who have offered their houses or their ovens or their Xboxes to me, and others, is huge, and a real blessing, especially at the start of a year like this. But it’s also got me wondering if there’s something else going on here. It’s very hard to accept that kind of hospitality without being challenged about your own generosity and hospitality and servanthood, and sooner or later you start asking yourself whether or not you would act in the same way.

It starts to feel like God might be prodding you, not to put you to shame, but in order that you might bless others with all that you’ve been given. Which is a great thing, but it’s also noticeable just how easy it is to avoid that prodding when the pressure is on; to assume that because your life is busy or you don’t have the money, or the time, or whatever it is, that different rules apply. I say that because at the moment I’m acutely aware of how easy it would be to fall into bad habits; because, if I don’t write it down, in a couple of weeks I may not even notice that it’s there. They say that it takes twenty-one days to form a habit. What habits are there in you that have been there so long that you don’t even notice them any more?

They say that your character tells a story about who you truly are, too, and I have to wonder if the way I act would ever really challenge anyone (well, maybe it would challenge them to have patience…). The people who offer me free dinners or ovens or Xboxes, they have all made sacrifices so that can happen. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”, remember; someone always has to incur some kind of cost somewhere down the line, whatever that may be. I’m grateful for those people, as they model what love looks like, but the thing is, if I’m not getting into the same habits of sacrifice and service then, ultimately, that model of sacrifice is going to die out, and the day that happens will be a sad day.

I write this from a Starbucks where I came to reflect on today’s teaching – which was, incidentally, about “hearing God’s voice”. But when I sat down today and switched off all the things on my mind, what I realised my thoughts were brought back to, time and again, were those people who have modelled God’s character to me over the past few weeks, not to mention the past few years. Maybe you realised it and maybe not, but if you look at the big picture you can see a God who is writing His story in each of us; and the way in which He is at work in His people even now is a testament to the fact that He is as active and as relevant now as He was 4000 years ago.

This is what a community of people who are seeking God and seeking to serve looks like, and that’s an overwhelmingly positive thing, full of grace and creativity and selfless love. And it’s something that makes me want to live similarly, too. I am still positive about the church, in spite of all its flaws, its bitching, infighting and pettiness. I am still convinced that it is an incredibly positive force, something worth fighting for and worth sticking with, and I’m convinced of that because I’ve met the people that make it up.

I didn’t sit down to write a post that praised the church – actually, I sat down to write one about the innate cynicism of Christians, how sceptical we are of any acts of generosity, always worrying about motives and perception. But the thing is, while that’s true in so many ways, it also forgets the fact that if you spend any time at all around the church then you WILL meet amazing people, passionate and vibrant and visionary and, even if they don’t initially appear that way, exciting, too. That’s not always true, but in so many cases that’s plain to see…

And today, honestly, I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for people who model God’s love and tell of God’s goodness, whether they do it verbally or otherwise. I want to be a part of their community, and I want to contribute to it too.

I have an embarrassing confession to make, I think.

I love the church.

But I don’t love the church out of duty, or obligation, or because Christ told us to.

I love the church because it’s amazing, and because it keeps reflecting the glory of God, and if you’re a part of that then, screwed-up as you may be, you do too.

Thank you for that.

// broken church

I have been telling people for a while now that I have a passion for ‘broken church’ – church in the model of 2 Corinthians, made up of people who are aware of their own brokenness and need for God and who are subsequently passionate about honesty, integrity, support and love even in the presence of failure (see Rehab). All of which is fortunate, really, because on Sunday I start a ten-month internship at St. Aldate’s church in Oxford, living and working alongside thirteen others in a range of aspects of church life, and if anything models ‘broken church’, I am sad to say that it’s me…

Ever since I got accepted onto this internship it seems like i’ve been becoming more and more acutely aware of my flaws and the effect that those flaws have on wider church culture, as well as on my relationships with the people who surround me. That realisation feels like waking up, in some ways, but waking up from a warm and fuzzy dream world into the cold light of day. It forces me to remember that my actions have consequences, that, rather than being as independent as I claim to be, I am utterly reliant on others, and my character directly and unavoidably affects those people. On Sunday, I am walking back into a close community where it is going to be increasingly hard to hide those flaws – and, like it or not, they are going to come out sooner or later.

So this is me taking ownership of that fact.

For far too long I have been guilty of trying to be cool, trying to meet the right people (and impress them, of course) and to appear relevant and passionate and, I suppose, important – and in all honesty, it’s a sham. I have told people I am interested in justice and done nothing about justice issues; I have insisted on the importance of grace while I have had no grace at all in so many situations in my family and my church; I have claimed to be interested in service while serving only myself. I have used Christianity to make myself look good and to give myself an identity, and I am a hypocrite (and in case this sounds like self-pity, it’s okay; in all likelihood, there are areas where you are, too.)

I am loved in spite of it, covered by grace even in light of my many failings, but that’s no excuse.

Something has to change, and I have a distinct feeling that something has to be me.

I don’t say all of this lightly. I have written and re-written this post to try and make myself look better, or to try and make my situation more universal, to the extent that I nearly didn’t publish it at all. I don’t come out well from this. I know that. But I have spent years on the sidelines of churches, analysing and (in a lot of cases) criticising, and now i’ve ended up as a part of it and the question is whether I am any different…

In my heart, I am not. Every frustration I have with the churches I have attended I can fully understand, as, were I in the same situation, I would almost certainly do the same thing. Culture is built in the small, subtle things; in the attitudes that are in place when no-one is watching and in the way we act when silence falls. This applies as much to you as it does to me. Nobody changes the world overnight; changed culture and changed nations start with transformed character, at the absolute base level. It is, of course, God who who will have to do that, as I am not capable of doing it on my own…

But this is my acknowledgement of that fact. Like they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step is admitting that you have a problem. I am an addict. I am addicted to looking good, addicted to control, and to comfort, and, above all, I am addicted to the thought that God is not good.

On Sunday I am going back into a church community, and those attitudes and ideas are going to affect people and culture, whether I like it or not. But I am aware of them now, and so are you; and I am aware that I need your help, along with God’s, to deal with them – otherwise I could walk out in ten months having made a mess not just of myself, but also of the lives of others. If I can possibly help it, I’d really rather try and avoid doing that.

But I suppose, if the worst comes to the worst, I could always wash dishes for the next ten months.

I’m fairly sure that even I couldn’t make a mess of that.

// new ‘about’ post

I’ve updated the ‘about’ section on this blog to give a slightly clearer picture of what it’s about – it’s changed a bit since i started. Check it out by clicking the arrow in the top right of this page and let me know what you think.

// “irony, charity and humility”

You’d be hard pressed to deny that Christianity has gotten a pretty bad rep recently – whether that’s from Dawkins, Hitchens et al., who have asserted the harm that religion has done over the years, or from the reviewers who have dealt with the Christian responses to that debate, some of which have been polemical, confusing or just badly thought-out. And let’s face it, although there have been those who have stood out as voices of sanity amongst it all, it’s also been easy to see the Christian response as evidence that Christians are, variously, intolerant, ignorant, or, in some cases, insane. So if there were any place that you’d expect to find all the worst characteristics of Christianity in evidence, then, you’d imagine it would be at a festival where large numbers of them are gathered in one place, right?

There have been a couple of high-profile scandals involving Christians in leadership at such gatherings recently, most notably in the cases of Todd Bentley’s healing ministry in Lakeland, Florida and Mike Gugglielmuchi’s faking of serious illness whilst involved with the Planetshakers movement (check them out on Google, if you can handle the tone of the coverage), both of which look pretty bad to the world outside, and with good reason. With those in mind it’s easy to look at the Christian festivals as places of hype or manipulation, where the combined energy of such large numbers helps create an atmosphere that can make the non-spiritual appear miraculous, ‘healing’ people through little more than a combination of adrenaline and force of belief. Yet, for all of that, I just got back from Momentum, the student and 20-something wing of the Soul Survivor movement, and what actually struck me, in contrast to all that New Atheism, Secularism and Conservative Evangelicalism might throw at it, was the sheer, overwhelming sanity of it all.

Ultimately, that comes down to the people, who are not just ‘not insane’, but also not otherworldly, either. It’s fine to label a week of high-energy church services as unreal – nobody does that on a weekly basis, and of course it stands apart from day-to-day life. But the people who I met there didn’t exude triumphalism, arrogance or church strategies – they were frank and broken, in many cases, facing up to their issues without any real answers to them. In a festival culture that seems to privilege pushing yourself to the extreme – seeing as many bands as possible in three days, drinking as much lager as possible in an hour, lasting 90-plus hours drinking only red bull, the usual story – it’s refreshing, not to mention surprising, to find that the Christian end of the spectrum doesn’t tend towards a similar brand of ‘extreme Christianity’. It’s not about creating a ‘one-size-fits-all’ festival experience, more about providing the space to think, talk, pray and listen, whatever that means to you.

There is a lot that has been done in the name of Christianity, even recently, that deserves the title of ‘insane’, or even just plain wrong. The stories of bogus healing ministries that aim to trick people into belief through magic tricks still horrify me, and sadly, there are plenty more stories along those lines. But, and perhaps surprisingly to some, Soul Survivor is not part of that; it’s a testament to the fact that you can get 12,000 Christians together in a field and they’ll prove that Christianity doesn’t create mad people, but people who are reassuringly real. Against the odds, it shows that Christianity has a place in reasoned debate; that, far from being the sole preserve of lunatics, Christians are reasonable people, worth having around and not simply inhabiting another world but actively seeking to engage with the one in which they find themselves.

It’s hard to work out where to stand on that for some people, who hear Biblical claims that we are supposed to be “aliens and strangers in this world” and assert that we are supposed to alienate, supposed to stand apart, and so should actively expect trouble and persecution. It would also be crazy to assert that this is not true, on some level; Jesus’s life, not to mention his words, repeatedly testify that the Christian way of looking at the world is one that is opposed, at the very ground level, to the world’s way of looking at things. But arguably what I saw at Soul Survivor was that kind of counter-cultural attitude put into practice in a completely different way to what I expected.

There is a type of counter-culture that is really just another facet of culture itself. It’s defined in absences and rejections. Culture goes right; counter-culture goes left. Culture turns cool; counter-culture becomes violently uncool. It’s fine unless you’re trying to stand apart from the whole thing, in which case you need something to stand for. The people I met at Soul Survivor, they model that ideal kind of counter-culture – not angry, not cynical or hiding in their isolated pockets of safety, but standing in the tension, seeking to engage but also stand apart, to help but not control, and to love truly, even if that means giving people the space to get it wrong. It stands apart from culture quietly, but visibly nonetheless, marked out, in the words of Tim Keller, by “irony, charity and humility”.

Now that is an exciting place to start.

Christianity needs rehabilitating, and not just because it has some vocal enemies that are attacking it from outside. It needs rehabilitating for its own sake, too, if only so that its members remember that what they do, they do because it is sane, because it is the best way to live, and that it has use and value to the rest of the world. And it needs rehabilitating so that the friends of its members start seeing them not just as crazy people, but rather as people with a different outlook on life, who occasionally do crazy things.

We’re no less crazy that the people who stood in fields in Reading or Leeds or Glastonbury this summer.

We would do well as Christians, I think, to remember that too.

// guest contributors

I mentioned yesterday that i’m not blogging for the next month or so, for a variety of reasons, and so i’m opening it up to anyone who fancies writing about music, books, films, God, culture and their points of intersection in the next few weeks. If you’ve read the blog you’ll know the format, so drop me an email via the site and i can let you know any further details…

The next few updates will not be by me, then, which is exciting for everyone – they will also be through this wordpress site only.

Also, if you’re around the Festival scene this summer, i’ll be at Momentum, probably in the Soul Action cafe; if you know me already, drop me a line, and we’ll have coffee; if you don’t, send me a message, and i’ll introduce myself (and then, naturally, we’ll have coffee). Hopefully i’ll see some of you there!

And that’s all for the moment, i think…

// mustard seeds and new conspirators

This is just a quick one to flag up the community that Tom and Christine Sine have got going on over at Mustard Seed Associates, with particular reference to this month’s community post entitled “Writing as Spiritual Discipline“. If you’re looking for a range of new blogs, picking up on the links here is a great place to start, and Tom and Christine are real, original visionaries.

I’m especially keen on Tim Mathis’s excellent article “Surprised by Community“, written about the culture of blogging, which is well worth a look if you’ve got a spare five minutes, regardless of your theological viewpoint.

On another note, sorry that i’ve gone quiet recently; life is busy, especially with holiday jobs, but i’m trying to round up some guest contributors for the next few weeks and normal service will resume in September, i promise…

// the reason we sing (part 5)

THE STORY SO FAR

So if this is all about God’s glory dwelling within us in order that He is eventually given glory by all people, then what exactly are we doing when we worship? Yesterday we were talking about the conditions for worship; what our worship should look and sound like, and how it should be structured…

Asking what, in short, is the reason we sing…

DAY FIVE

Except, as we well know, worship doesn’t just come down to singing. It can’t. And God’s glory doesn’t just show itself in our collective gatherings. That’s a visible fact. And if you look closely at the line that divides the reason we live and the reason we sing you realise that the two overlap and keep overlapping, blurring into each other whether you like it or not, until it eventually becomes clear that the two are, in fact, inseparable…

Because it turns out that the reason we live is the reason we sing, and vice-versa…

All of this comes down to God’s glory, and I’m neither the first person to notice that nor the first person who said it.

Which means, at the end of all of this, that our singing is just the outward expression of a life dedicated to giving glory to God.

That is to say (deep breath…)

If God’s glory dwells within us, and God’s glory is the emblem of His presence with His people…

And you are one of those people, who acknowledges their need for Christ’s sacrifice and seeks God’s glory…

Then God’s glory is going to be outworked in you. In you personally. In the passions that you have been given. In the way that you pray. In the way that your mind works, And in the way that you worship – whether that’s with organ or with acoustic guitar or with electric guitar or with DJ booth.

You are an integral feature in the glory of God. Not because He needs you, but because He chose you. He chose to have His glory dwell in you, and He made a way for that to happen, because you are important in all of this.

And in a strange way that brings us full circle; back to a woman sitting at a well talking about history and theology with Jesus himself.

A woman talking about a mountain, and a temple, and the glory of God.

“Sir… I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem” (John 4:19-20).

Jesus’s answer? “Believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem… a time is coming and has now come when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers that the Father seeks…” (v21, 23)

Worship just walked into that situation. Worship is implicit in this moment. And that’s the truth of worship, too, the truth of our lives; you just walk into these situations into which you have been called and you worship in the midst of them, you give glory back to God. Standing at that well is the same as standing on that mountain where we began all of this. It’s still an experience of the life-changing, awesomely powerful glory of God. That glory is still being declared for all the world to see. And this is still a meeting with God.

Because the glory of God is in the face of Jesus Christ. Right here.

Everything changed, even as nothing changed.

Jesus stands at a well and a woman’s life is changed; by the glory of God, and for the glory of God.

And he has called us to be like him, to do as he did. His glory dwells within us, and we’ve been given that gift, we’ve met that same figure, the risen Christ, in order that God will be brought glory in all of this world.

That means our Sunday gatherings become the final expression of what God has been doing in the week leading up to them. They’re places of involvement, where we are made aware of what God is doing and we are stirred towards engaging with it. They’re places for reflection, where we can look back on the past week, let God’s spirit stir our hearts and direct us to where it is that His glory needs to be seen. They’re places for celebration, where we can celebrate God’s glory with us, celebrate what He is doing and what He has done. But they’re not an endpoint in themselves, just a continuation…

To acknowledge that, that might mean more worship songs written into direct contexts – think of Bluetree’s “God of this City”, written among Thai sex districts, or David Crowder Band’s “Here is Our King”, a reaction to the Boxing Day Tsunami, or John Mark McMillan’s “How He Loves”, written in the aftermath of the death of a youth pastor. That may mean restructuring our gatherings so that they are not so self-contained, so consciously *complete*, but instead acknowledge that there is work to be done outside, and church is not the culmination of that work, but just the beginning…

The glory of God is in our midst. It is walking amongst a dying world and it is meeting women at wells and it is modelling God’s love, God’s nature and God’s character to the people it meets.

Or, at least, it should be…

***

But this is not the end of this discussion, because this discussion ends with you and God. If there are questions that you need to ask Him; like, ‘have I really sacrificed anything?’; like, ‘am I living a life for Your glory?’; like, ‘where are you calling me – where, or who, need to see You the most?’; then this is the time to ask those questions. The answers may not be instantaneous. This may be a process. But I assure you, the end point will be worth it.

I am not you, and I don’t know what your endpoint will be, or even what it will look like. We have to work this one out in community and with God, work out how this all works in practice, what bringing glory to God in our lives and in our worship looks like. But hopefully as a starting point (as that is what this is, and nothing more), this got you excited.

As I’ll tell you this: it got me excited. I can’t wait to hear what God is doing in you. I can’t wait to hear what comes next. I really can’t.

Something is coming, and it’s for His glory.

And I want to be a part of that, even though at the moment its conclusion is terrifyingly unknown.

What about you?

// the reason we sing (part 4)

THE STORY SO FAR

Asking God to be glorified in us is an act of sacrifice; a statement that we are no longer our own, and that we are willing to go wherever He is calling us. That moment is a moment in which we lay down our own pretensions at worth, our own efforts, in order to let His glory dwell in us; it is about coming to Him in honesty and vulnerability, in awareness of our own faults and the sacrifice that He made for us. And in praying that God will be glorified through us, that His glory will dwell within us, we remind ourselves that all of this is about bringing glory to His name. First and foremost, before all else, it is that end to which all of this points.

This is all about Him…

DAY FOUR

All of which brings us back to a drug rehab community in Madrid, and the starting point of this whole discussion: the reason we sing. All those people who feel a sense of discomfort in worship gatherings, who don’t know entirely what to do with it, or how singing forty minutes’ worth of songs once a week relates in any way to the rest of our lives, this is for you, and I’m glad that you exist, as these are questions that need to be asked…

If you’re anything like me, you’ve read passages like Psalm 50 or Isaiah 58 or Amos 5:21-27 (by the way, if you’ve not read them, go do so now – I’ll be here when you get back – but be warned, as they may just make you very uncomfortable indeed…) and wondered where you stand in all this. Are you one of the good guys, or are you one of those people who Isaiah is calling up?

I don’t know, as I don’t know you as well as God does. But I do know that those passages make me very, very uncomfortable, and they also get me thinking about the whole point of worship, and its relation to God’s glory, and what it is that we’re supposed to be doing in our gatherings…

With the past few days in mind, then, here’s some thoughts on how our worship gatherings need to relate to God’s glory:

First, I’d argue that our worship gatherings need to be places of consecration; that is to say, places where we come to be made holy again. The person who does that is Jesus, the man who the author of the letter to the Hebrews describes as “our great High Priest” (Hebrews 7-8), and so that means that our worship must provide the space for us to come before God honestly, individually as well as collectively, and admit our faults.

That shows itself in more than just the speaking of a confession. It’s reflected in the choice of songs, bringing us back to an awareness of God’s power, God’s character, God’s purposes. It’s reflected in the space provided to meditate on these things, too. This isn’t something to be hurried past to get to the ‘real purpose’ of the service; this is a vital part of preparing ourselves to meet with God.

None of this is meant to be about putting ourselves down or dwelling unnecessarily on what is past – on how flawed we are, how inadequate or sinful (although we need to remember that) – rather it’s about refocussing our perspective towards God, and away from ourselves; as this is all about Him, after all. If God’s glory is going to dwell among us, we need to come to the place of worship aware of the purpose that lies behind His revealing it, aware of what it is that this whole experience points towards.

Secondly, our worship gatherings need to provide the space for intimacy. God’s glory directed the Israelites, and it was the emblem of His presence among them; our gatherings, too, need to provide the space to listen to God, and to discern where He is calling us, both individually and collectively. If we are to be a people who will declare His presence and power where it needs to be declared; if we are truly seeking His glory; then first we must listen.

Our God is not simply a concept, an abstract, invented figure; He is a relational God, a God who speaks even now, a God who has chosen to come and dwell in human hearts. I would argue, too, that our response to this requires some measure of emotion – requires us to be stirred with passion at the injustice of what goes on in this world, to be overwhelmed with love for the God who saved us, to be broken-hearted at the thought of those who do not know Him. John Piper puts it like this:

If God’s reality is displayed to us in His word or His world and we do not feel in our hearts any grief or longing or hope or fear or awe or joy or gratitude or confidence, then we may dutifully sing and pray and recite and gesture as much as we like, but it will not be real worship. We cannot honour God if “our hearts are far from Him”.

Worship is a way of gladly reflecting back to God the radiance of His worth. This cannot be done by mere acts of duty.

In our intimacy with Him, we will find ourselves asking, ‘Lord, for Your glory, what do You require of me?’

And we need the space to ask those questions and to see His answers, rather than simply having the answers told to us from the front…

And thirdly, our worship gatherings need to be the space in which we declare God’s glory to a world that needs to hear it. If this life, this world, is all about His glory, that means our worship needs to engage with this life and this world, in some cases directly. Not just in abstract pleas that God will change our world, but speaking His truth and His word over the things that are profoundly wrong in it – over human trafficking; over devastating poverty; over genocides and persecutions; over loneliness, hopelessness, despair.

Over these situations we declare “our God reigns”, that these situations are not the way that they should be, but that our God will be glorified in putting them right.

And we pray that in willingness to go if we are called to.

As Switchfoot’s Jon Foreman put it brilliantly, “the shadow proves the sunshine”; things may be dark, and they may be broken, but the fact that we recognise that means that we can envision something different – and in declaring that different world in our prayers, we can become those whom the theologian Walter Wink said could “believe the future into being”. In our gatherings we are the ones praying that God’s glory will dwell in those situations. And if God’s glory dwells in us…

Well, that might just mean booking a plane ticket out there.

And finally, our worship gatherings need to be places in which we are transformed. And that can’t be forced. That will happen when we pursue God, individually and collectively. It will come in order that He is brought glory in the places where His glory needs to be seen the most; it will come as we learn holiness, and obedience, and worship…

But our worship is not abstract. As John Piper puts it, talking about Jesus’s meeting with a Samaritan woman at a well, “worship has to do with real life. It is not a mythical interlude in a week of reality. Worship has to do with adultery and hunger and racial conflict”.

It’s not optional. It’s vital. It’s part of your existence in this world. It’s a vital expression of God’s glory and a vital part of the outworking of His purposes. It’s the extension of our prayers and our pleas and we need to learn to worship, to learn just how inseparable it is from His glory, and to learn that both things are about laying down our lives in front of an awesome God and saying, ‘this is all about You’…

That is what our prayers add up to. That is what true worship points towards.

And that is a story for tomorrow…

[TO BE CONTINUED]