Church growth and decline in the UK 1: Are UK denominations headed for extinction?
John Hayward has recently attracted a lot of attention with a couple of blog posts claiming extinction for many UK denominations, and that church decline followed an embrace of progressive ideology. This post addresses the extinction point.
Read MoreA ‘Larbert Statement’ (memoirs of a gift of grace)
Yesterday morning I left home early, apologising to a neighbour for the state of one of the children I was leaving with her, and drove to a nondescript dormitory community in central Scotland called Larbert. I had agreed to spend a couple of days there in a confidential meeting with a group of church leaders helping them to talk about sexuality. I traveled with a heavy heart. My ears and mind were full of deadening words and shrill responses that had echoed across the Atlantic the day before. I knew just one of the people I was going to meet—liked and respected him, to be sure—but wondered if I was going into another blue-on-blue battle that would leave us all exhausted, wounded, and discouraged. I prayed as I drove, parked, pushed open a dark wooden door, and walked in. It was an impressive group of people—more than half, I think, were national leaders in one network or another—and an impressive group of contributors—At least four have a significantly higher profile in this space than me. But impressive people can still, perhaps can especially, wound and kill. We disagreed amongst ourselves. Over biblical interpretation, and patterns of leadership, and mission strategy. We told honest stories, questioned each other sharply, defended our convictions stoutly, worshipped, prayed, openly acknowledged how we each had been challenged by what we had shared, and then broke bread. We failed to agree. We succeeded in rekindling each other’s hope. We succeeded in helping each other to increased commitment to Jesus even when we understood his call in different ways. We succeeded in making mission more possible, more imaginable, even when we found the goal of mission less clear. We succeeded in respecting each other’s commitment to Scripture, even when we disagreed about how to read or apply it. I drove home this evening with a lightened heart. I wondered if I could capture what we had shared in some poor pastiche or parody of a position statement; this is my best attempt (it is entirely inadequate): — 1. Orientation Jesus. The first word we need to say. Jesus. The only word we want to say. Jesus. You are the centre. The centre of everything. Of our lives. Of our ministries. Of our mission. Of our communities. Jesus. You are the centre. The centre around which everything else must orbit, endlessly pulled by the gravity of your love. Lord Jesus, we who know your love cannot but love every person we meet with love that flows from yours. We do not say you ‘call’ us to do this; it is as inevitable as a stone falling. Gravity does not ‘call’ the stone. But falling is easy. Loving is hard. In this broken world, Lord Jesus, falling is very easy, and loving well is very hard. — 2. Context Lord Jesus, we few leaders have gathered to talk with and about our LGBT+ sisters, brothers, friends, neighbours, strangers. People you have died for. People you now live for. People you have always loved. People you now love. We assert (we confess, we believe) that the gravity of your love holds them at least as strongly as it hold us. (And we pray: increase the gravity, Lord—pull them (and us) out of orbit to spiral into you.) We confess (we admit, we bewail) that we have failed and struggled to love adequately, to love as you love. (And we pray: enlarge our imaginations, Lord—expand us until our hearts can embrace them (and the rest of us).) We bewail (we contemn, we abjure) any and every suggestion that they are less worthy of your love or our love than we are. (And we pray: increase our contempt—let those who despise or denigrate the least of these always be hateful to us (every one of us).) — 3. Scripture Lord Jesus, we are wrestling with your law revealed in Scripture, and with each other. We love you so much that we cannot, we dare not, step away from your Word. We love you so much that we cannot, we dare not, pretend that we have mastered Your Word. Wrestle with us until the Day breaks, Lord, we pray. Let us never be satisfied with partial or provisional truths. Wound us as we read so that every step we take is shaped by our wrestling with you. Never let us agree, Lord Jesus, because then we might feel safe substituting our agreement for your Scriptures. Keep us wrestling, keep us fighting, keep us focused on your Word (and on you, the Word). But forgive us, Lord Jesus, when we love Scripture so much that we wound each other,...
Read MoreAmy Winehouse and breaking the Golden Rule
Maybe my mind is just less well ordered than most people’s, but for me some the moments of real intellectual breakthrough come when I find myself thinking something that surprises me, and so am forced to analyse that surprising thing to work out why I was thinking it. Whether the thing turns out to be right or wrong, or just complicated, I understand better my own instincts and assumptions as a result. One such happened last week, in an ETS panel session in Atlanta. One of the other panelists, David Gushee, closed an impressive impromptu peroration with an appeal to ‘the golden rule’ – ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you.’ I realised that I was thinking that this principle was wrong. Doubting the golden rule, of course, is one of those ethical positions that you are really not supposed to entertain. If there is a universal ethic, it is this. And Jesus says it, identifying it with the core teaching of the Mosaic law: ‘Do to others what you want them to do to you. This is the meaning of the law of Moses and the teaching of the prophets.’ (Mt 7:12) So I thought a bit about why I was doubting it, or at least David’s application of it. My analysis goes something like this: so stated, the ‘golden rule’ assumes a level of moral awareness that I am sure is not universal, and am not sure is at all common. If our instincts about what we would like others to do to us are bad instincts, the golden rule offers bad advice. More commonly, I suspect, our desires are extremely conflicted, and so the golden rule offers no meaningful guidance at all. I rarely watch movies on planes, but I had watched one on the way to Atlanta. It was the recent biopic about Amy Winehouse, which intersperses clips of her – astonishing – musical performances with the story of her life spiralling out of control, finally to her tragic death. The film portrays her essentially as a victim, thrown into impossible contexts by decisions made by her partner, her manager, or her father. The sympathetic characters were female friends from childhood, who tried to help her. In the middle of a drugs binge they would come and try to encourage her to get clean, whereas her partner would be encouraging her to try something even stronger. Who was doing the thing she wanted to be done to her? The answer is profoundly ambiguous: straightforwardly, she wanted to be high; no doubt there was a part of her that wanted to be clean. According to the portrayal in the film, what she actually needed – whether she ever wanted it or not – was to get out of the celebrity spotlight, because she was unable to cope with it and was using drugs to deal with that inability. ‘Do to others what you want them to do to you’ is not a straightforward piece of advice here… (This is, after all, the woman whose biggest hit was built around the lyric ‘They tried to make me go to rehab; I said no, no, no’…) Now, it would be possible to suggest that, because of her relative youth and her addiction issues, Amy Winehouse was considerably less rational than is normal for human beings; I suspect, however, that this is false. I reflect on my own pastoral experience, and supremely on my own life: there are questions I desperately don’t want people to ask me, whilst at the same time I know that it would do me good to face those same questions. What do I want them to do to me? I don’t know, so I don’t know what I should do to others, if I am following the golden rule. More, I remember moments of genuine intervention, such as when my fellow leaders at a previous church banned me from preaching for several months because they had decided I was neglecting family relationships too much in my desire to serve that fellowship. (We had been going through some tough times; I still don’t regret stepping up to do what I did, but in hindsight I accept that it was unsustainable, and I had reached, or gone someway past, the point where I needed to stop and pass the baton.) Did I want them to step into my life like that? No. Am I now grateful they did? Yes. Do I hope I would have the courage – and love – to do what they did to someone like me in future, despite her not wanting the...
Read MoreThe 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...
Read More‘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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