The preacher’s task

I get asked sometimes if I enjoy preaching. I find it a hard question. I know I can’t not preach. And often, when actually preaching, I know that intoxicating experience of utter single-mindedness and control – ‘flow’ as they call it – which is dangerously exhilarating and addictive. Every worthwhile sermon I have ever preached, however, has hurt to write, as I have found that in the text that I wanted so much to avoid, and have been forced to face up to it. And Sangster’s old line, that every preacher sits down every time with disappointment and the hope that ‘next time I shall preach!’ rings true for me. These words probably reflect those two moments of pain more than the ecstatic moment of preaching that comes between. Read Revere Relish Reflect Research Receive Realise React Recoil Resist Repress Reject Rebel Retreat Reassess Repent Reform Return Recall Rephrase Reclothe Redact Rehearse Refresh Rewrite Reveal Recount Release Rejoice Reap Regret Rest Regroup...

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‘Show, don’t tell’: bad preaching and mock reality TV for kids

Our seven year old daughter is presently obsessed by a CBBC show called ‘The Next Step’. I stand up and leave the room when the show comes on. Recently I finally worked out why. It’s because it is far too like bad preaching. And I hate bad preaching (particularly when I am the preacher).

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’Shadows and Broken Images’: thinking theologically about femaleness and maleness

I’ve been reading Megan DeFranza’s new book, Sex Difference in Christian Theology: Male, Female and Intersex in the Image of God (Eerdmans, 2015). In response, I want to argue that our best way of thinking through an adequately postmodern account of human sex-difference might come from reflecting on medieval commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences.

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An all-age communion liturgy/drama

I had to lead an all-age communion service at LPO. (Well, when I say ‘lead’ … Cath and Rach planned and led the worship, including a wonderful, if somewhat destructive, spoken word piece by Cath’s husband Dai; my role was a very brief preach and to celebrate at the table.) I believe in communion liturgy – not that we should use the BCP or the Roman Missal, but that, whatever words we use, there are things that matter, and must find a place: the recollection of the Lord’s institution of the meal; the eucharistic prayer of thanksgiving; the epiklesis, invoking the Spirit ; … In a very informal, and all-age, context, then, thinking about how to celebrate exercised me a little. The tradition of LPO was clearly very inclusive: all would be invited to the table. (Is this my tradition? I’m actually not sure at the moment, but I celebrate communion in many contexts, and simple politeness demands that I conform to the practice of the community I have been invited to share with and lead on that day.) I wanted an invitation that would make it clear to children what we were doing and why. And I had about three minutes in a very informal holiday camp setting. My mind went to reports I’d heard of all-age communions at the BUGB-BMS Assembly in recent years. Children asking questions, as happens at an Orthodox Jewish Passover meal. I emailed a couple of folks asking if anyone had the liturgy. Andy Goodliff was very helpful with other options, but no-one did. I discovered from a passing comment from Lynn Green on FB that much of that part of the service had been improvised. So I wrote a script. Enough people asked me for copies that I promised to make it available. I should explain that this was written for our three girls. Judith is 14, Philippa 12, and Elspeth 7, so the pattern of Elspeth asking questions and her two elder sisters offering answers seemed natural. Steve: On the night he was betrayed Jesus ate a passover meal with his closest friends. But he changed it. The passover meal was a great celebration of everything the Jewish people knew about the way God saves us – but Jesus knew so much more about the way God saves us. And Jesus knew that we would know more. And so he changed the meal. In Jewish tradition, the links between the meal and God saving us are explained when the youngest child in the family asks four questions about why this meal is different from every other meal. As we are together, young and old, to celebrate the communion meal, we thought it would be good to tell the story borrowing this tradition. So, let me introduce you to my daughters…   E: Why have we got bits of bread and drinks in church?   P: Because Jesus told us to eat bread and drink juice to remember him. So we do. Because he told us to.   J: The Bible says, ‘On the night that he was betrayed, Jesus took bread. He said grace, and then gave it to his friends. And he told them to take it and eat it, to remember him. Then he took a glass of wine and gave it to them, and told all of them to drink it to remember him. So we take bread and wine, or grape juice, to remember him, like he told us to.’   E: But why do bread and juice help us to remember Jesus?   J: Well, Jesus said the bread was his body, and we break the bread into pieces like his body was broken on the cross when he died to save us. And he said the red wine was his blood, and his blood poured out of his body from his wounds on the cross when he died to save us. So bread and wine help us to remember that Jesus died on the cross to save us.   P: And when we eat and drink the bread and juice we are very close to Jesus.   E: So what do we do?   P: Jesus said grace first, prayed to God to say thank you for the food. So we pray and say thank you to God for the bread and the juice.   J: Then everyone who loves Jesus takes a bit of the bread, just a little bit, and eats it. And everyone who loves Jesus has a little drink of the wine.   E: And will we always do this?   J: No. Jesus said we had...

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Holy-daying, Kingdom Living, and Secular Space

We are recently back from holiday; we spent two weeks at Le Pas Opton, a Christian holiday camp in France owned and run by Spring Harvest. We were there because I was speaking one week; I don’t suppose we would have thought to book an explicitly Christian holiday otherwise. I thoroughly enjoyed working with two wonderful people, Cath and Rach, from Sound of Wales, who led worship powerfully and sensitively the week I spoke, and getting to know some of the guests. A few days before we went, I found myself in London with a meeting cancelled, and so met up with an old friend, Lincoln Harvey, who teaches doctrine at St Melitus College (and, incidentally, is the one person you simply must follow on Twitter if you have any theological interest at all). We talked about many things, including Lincoln’s excellent book, A Brief Theology of Sport. The argument of the book is, to me, recognisably Augustinian: sport, for Lincoln, is the paradigmatic (he suggests the only, which I resist) wholly secular pursuit, and as such is a profound mark of the graciousness of God’s creative activity. That is, in playing sport, we are not serving any higher end; the game ends with winners and losers, but nothing further results; the playing of the game has no purpose beyond itself. Sport is, fundamentally, gratuitous. This makes sport fundamentally secular (in the Augustinian sense): it serves no purpose beyond itself; it also makes sport gratuitous in another sense: sport is an indicator of God’s grace in creation. That we can spend time playing/watching sport, engaging in activity that is purposeless, is a demonstration that in creation we have, and can trust that we have, all that we need and more. I had not thought about what might make a holiday ‘Christian’ before arriving at LPO. (On arrival, we, and all the other guests, were presented with a bottle of local fizzy wine, which quickly disposed of one, dystopian, picture…) There was a full programme: morning activities for everyone; an early evening celebration for adults – although a number of teenagers also came to it the week I was speaking at least; a wide range of optional afternoon and evening events. The programme was all very optional, and geared to the fun: wine-tasting; pool parties; sports and crafts. The emphasis was on the gratuitous nature of holidaying: we were there, essentially, to do those things which had no purpose beyond rest and enjoyment. I had prepared some talks on prayer and had planned to run a catchphrase: ‘no guilt trips – we’re on holiday!’ through them; this, it turned out, fitted the context perfectly. Tim and his team worked to create a place for people to come and rest and enjoy – and if they wanted to take in a bit of bible teaching or join in a worship session, they were welcome to, but it was neither expected nor required. Arriving with Lincoln’s reflections on sport in my head, I quickly realised that this fitted my unformed idea of what a ‘Christian holiday’ should be perfectly. God is good, and so there is time and space to rest and enjoy. There is no need to connect holiday with purpose; trusting in God, we can dare to take time and space to relax, to rest, to enjoy. Kingdom living includes space for recreation, as well as its more fundamental space for re-creation. To make tasting wine the end of life is to miss God’s great purposes, of course; but to construct an account of life which has no space for tasting wine (or football, or photography, or …) is to miss God’s great goodness just as thoroughly. The event on the programme that stood out to me when I glanced through it was an afternoon session: supervised play for toddlers, with parents given a voucher for cheap drinks in the bar; it instantiated this vision perfectly. The role of the site, and the role of the site team, was to do whatever was necessary to make space for rest and enjoyment for the guests, because when it comes to holidaying, that is what Kingdom living looks like. Three things struck me about the guests I met, each testimony to how well Tim and his team had worked to make this vision live and sing: first, the number of guests who came back year after year: clearly, people found something at LPO that worked for them as holiday. Second, the number of guests who were in Christian leadership of one form or another (this surprised me; if we should be invited back at some point in the...

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