We built a church out of MDF for our 24-7 prayer week and then proceeded to let our young people loose on it…
The end result is pretty awesome, don’t you think? If nothing else it epitomises what Mike Yaconelli called “messy spirituality”:
Posted by Wordmobi
I am sitting in Starbucks with a vanilla latte, listening to Ray LaMontagne. All thoughts of a spiritual realm seem a long way away; a little bit strange, honestly, and certainly not something to be talked about in polite company…
Of course, that’s not to say that it’s not there.
It was Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects who uttered the memorable statement that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”, and me, i couldn’t agree with him more. I never used to believe in spiritual warfare, not really- i thought it was just a Greek way of explaining the ways of the world, something we had to get through before we could start interpreting the Bible properly. But, whether i like it or not, the last few months have made me believe in spiritual warfare…
Because I simply can’t explain everything away rationally. I can’t explain why i, along with a lot of others, find their minds racing when they step out of Oxford station. I don’t know why men who have seen African revivals find it a challenge to pray in this city. And I can’t account for what it is that just caused me to confront one of my colleagues about a whole series of issues that didn’t actually exist. I don’t have answers for the issues that won’t get sorted, for the people who just seem like they can’t be fixed, even though we have a God who declares “behold, I am making all things new!”
You can call me crazy for saying all of this, and i wouldn’t entirely blame you, but i do know this much- if there’s a spiritual realm, and a God who speaks and works within that, then there’s damn sure a dark side to it too.
Sure, i know that, as Peter wrote, “the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world”, too, and that’s a great encouragement. But it’s also a profoundly discomforting realisation that there is something out there that does not want you to be speaking up and working out the Kingdom of God here, don’t you think? That Paul wasn’t kidding when he wrote of how “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”…
Friends, i don’t say any of this lightly, or even easily. I can’t explain it well, i don’t fully understand it, and honestly, i always thought it was for crazy people. But i know what i’ve seen and what i’ve experienced- and not just me, either- and i’m all the more prepared to pray like i’m in the midst of a battle. Rationally, it may not seem to make sense, but neglect it at your own risk.
Like i say, “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”.
It’s also the most dangerous.
Let’s not be blinded by the lies. There is more going on here than meets the eye.
Posted by Wordmobi
I find myself in a 24-7 prayer room reading the words of Paul, and specifically his statement that “I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ…”
I read it again. What Paul is saying is truly astonishing. At its heart, he is saying, there is nothing in this gospel that is of man; this is something other, the product of revelation and nothing else. It’s an entirely different way, something new. It doesn’t rest on logic or philosophy, even if, in places, it intersects with them.
This is a faith that is built upon revelation, from the very start.
And of all places, a 24-7 prayer room is the best place to be reading this, too, as this place only serves to highlight the otherness of all of this stuff. I can’t explain prayer, and I doubt you can, either. Logically, it doesn’t make sense – God knows my thoughts already, God exists outside of time, God is all-powerful, so what’s the point – and yet, indisputably, it changes things in the spiritual atmosphere…
I have been talking with a good friend of mine about where we go from here. Whether the future of the church is in the ‘emerging churches’, or in the radical, alternative models of church, and the truth is that I’m burned out. There are pros and cons on both sides, but my brain just can’t come to a logical conclusion on what to do, as there arguably isn’t one. The hundreds of books that have been written on the subject, if nothing else, are a testament to that fact.
It’s virtually impossible to imagine a different future, you know. Try it. You might think that you have a vision for the way that things should be, but when you try to articulate it in positive, concrete terms, are you able to? It’s a lot harder than you’d think.
That, surely, is the place at which prayer starts; at the place where all words fail.
When rationality or argument finishes or wears thin, and when change seems impossible.
That’s the point at which we have to seek revelation, the place where our capabilities run out and we need that something else…
Revelation allows me to make sense of the world, to see with wisdom and insight why things are the way they are, and what we can do about them. It reminds me that for all the apparent chaos and disorder in this world, that there is something out there bigger than all of them.
Nothing happens in a vacuum, and the people in this prayer room are not sitting in here for no reason. The reason? The glory of God, and the transformation of His world. We are a people who no longer live for ourselves, but who live for something bigger. We need to stop thinking like it all depends on us, or like we can do it all alone, for a start.
But revelation reminds me that God is still speaking, too; He spoke to Paul 2000 years ago on a lonely road, and He is still speaking now, challenging His people and continuing to reveal Himself to them. There’s so much truth in the claim in Proverbs that “without vision, the people perish.” In my case, for a long time I constructed a theology in which God no longer spoke to His people anymore, but that was okay, as He’d given us the tools with which to work it all out ourselves.
He is currently in the process of blowing that theology apart, and I’m grateful for that; I’m not big enough to work all this stuff out alone, and nor should I be.
We are not preaching a gospel of man. Paul speaks out strongly against those people who preach “human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ”, who come out with “hollow and deceptive philosophy”; we are preaching something other. And for all the good, valuable thought that has gone into church and church-strategy and church-planting, we need to remember this – that this whole faith is built on something more, something bigger than us…
If our vision for how to transform this world is from this world, then we’re finished. It’s never going to work – the foundations are all wrong. Even my friend, a man passionate about involvement in this world, is profoundly sceptical about politics and the institutions that we would typically use to transform things. That means that we need something new; what the prophet Isaiah proclaimed, a “new thing” entirely – streams in the desert and water in the wilderness.
Shane Claiborne talked bluntly about what he called “spiritual masturbation” – that is, “a faith that feels kind of good while you’re in the middle of it, but never really gives birth to anything.” If our faith changes nothing, then maybe it’s not faith at all. My friend tells me that he thinks “one of the greatest tricks in the devil’s arsenal is to make us concerned, but not moved.” He’s right, of course. We’re stuck. We see that things are wrong – that thousands of people will die today for lack of basic sanitation, or that churches are dying, or that people are dying, or whatever, and we’re sad about it, but we feel powerless – so we don’t do anything.
One of my favourite authors, Jim Wallis, wrote of how “most of us still believe that we think our way into new ways of living, but the truth is that we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” He talks about the Hebrew notion of ‘truth’, and about how the Hebrews believed that unless something has affected their lives in some distinct, noticeable way, then they couldn’t claim to ‘know the truth’ at all.
What about us? Do we know the truth? Has it changed anything?
We need vision and we need revelation like Paul had – because that changes everything. And then we need to start living it. “If I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor”, he writes later in his letter to the Galatians. What are we building, and what does it say about us?
Our starting point has to be God, and His revelation. That doesn’t encourage us to be passive – we are complicit in this, and we have a part in living out the way in which He has called us to live.
But what way is that?
Have we even asked?
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?
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?
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
