Omega course?

Here in The Six, we are in the middle of an excellent Alpha course – with 12 courageous people exploring the place of God in their lives. At our recent day together one of the participants suggested that we should also be running an Omega course – a chance to explore, not so much the meaning of life, as the meaning of death.

His suggestion has stayed with me over the last few days. Contemporary society does not encourage us to give time to preparing for our end – quite the opposite in fact, we do all we can to avoid the reality of ageing and the end that will come to all of us. And the church has played its part in that – when did you last hear a sermon talking about the reality of death? But we know God to be  Alpha and  Omega, the beginning and the end, the one who creates, and the one who welcomes us at the end of our earthly life and in Jesus, he has conquered death – as we will celebrate again on Easter Day at the end of this week – and  death should hold no fear for us.

An Omega course could give time and space for us to face our own mortality, both practically, with help in thinking about writing a will and preparing our funeral, and spiritually, in exploring what Christianity believes about death and what comes next.

I suspect it might be a difficult one to advertise -’Come and explore the meaning of death‘ doesn’t sound quite as attractive as the Alpha invitation, but it might be just as important

Would you come?

I am who I am

Things come together don’t they, sometimes in unexpected ways. As part of the E100 Bible reading challenge, which we are doing in Uplift at the moment, I am reading Exodus at the moment, including the story of Moses and the burning bush – “what is your name Lord?”, Moses asks, “I am who I am” replies God.

And at the same time I am preparing for 6@6 this Sunday, on the theme “Jesus, be the centre” and have chosen Mark 8:27 as the reading “Who do you say I am?’ asks Jesus.

That name, “I am” resounds through the Sriptures, from beginning to end.

The same God, “I am”, who was alive and at work calling Moses, is also alive and at work in Jesus. And it’s in him that the enigmatic “I am” that Moses met takes a new shape and becomes clear. No longer a mysterious burning bush that can only be approached with fear, but a human being, who longs for us to come close. No longer do we have to take off our shoes before him, now he takes our shoes off and washes our feet.

What would God do?

It isn’t often that our newspapers carry the slogan ‘What would Jesus do?’, but this year,  the protest outside St Paul’s brought the question into the media spotlight.

And, as we stand on the edge of the holiest of nights, our lips might be carrying a similar question. In the face of riots in our cities, economic meltdown and all the difficulties that we all carry in our own lives, we might want to ask ‘What will God do?‘ What will God do to sort this mess out?

And tonight, as we join Mary and Joseph, and the Shepherds and Angels, as a humble stable becomes the centre of the Universe, we see God’s response.

What would God do? This is his answer. A baby who is the Word of God. A new life that carries the life of the world.  He could have done anything – but this was what he chose. To come amongst us, to show us what he is like. To reveal the fullness of his glory in a human life.

What would God do?

Jesus is what God would do.

The Faith of the English

How do we spread the good news of the gospel in our own land?
For hundreds of years Christian missionaries have traveled across the seas to distant places, where they learnt local languages and immersed themselves in new cultures so that they could tell the story of Jesus in a way that was meaningful to the people they met. And if you are reading this as a Christian, you have some of those missionaries to thank for bringing the faith to these islands so many years ago.

The best missionaries were experts at understanding the way these cultures worked, and they often spent years observing what it was that lay at the heart of the way people did things in those places – the symbols they used, the key phrases that were said over and over again, their festivals and their habits. All of these things together helped them  to talk about good news in ways that made sense in cultures so different to their own.

But what about us here in England? With culture changing so fast, the church often appears not to understand how ordinary people think. The church seems out of touch with English culture. Has the time come for us to work harder at understanding our own culture, so that we can tell people about Jesus in ways that really make sense in 2011? Do we need to become missionaries to our own people?

A recently published book tries to do that by looking at 9 key characteristics of the English. the book is called ‘The Faith of the English’ by Nigel Rooms, and I am interested to know whether you recognise what he writes.
The characteristics he lists are:

1. Humour – banter, teasing, irony, wit or mockery all play a part in almost every conversation we have.
2. Moderation – we are people of the middle way. People who dislike extremes and favour the middle ground.
3. Hypocrisy – not so much a deliberate attempt to deceive others, but more a pretending that things don’t matter when we know they do and a dislike of confrontation.
4. Pragmatism – we prefer concrete, practical, common sense to philosophical reflection.
5. Eeyorishness – summed up in our tendency to complain and moan, often in a way linked with the first characteristic, humour.
6. Class-consciousness – even at a time when the differences between social class seem to have diminished, they are still there, and we all know it (even if we don’t talk about it)
7. Fair play – summed up in our love of queuing!
8. Courtesy – in an experiment, 80% of people who were deliberately bumped into on the street apologised, even when it wasn’t their fault.
9. Modesty – summed in the phrase ‘Oh, it was nothing’

Now, there is no suggestion that everyone in England has all these characteristics, rather that together they paint a clear picture of our nation, and we’re really like.

So if Nigel Rooms is right, what does that mean for mission in England today? How do we tell people about Jesus and the good news that he is yearning for them to hear if this is our culture?

Any thoughts……?

Renewing the church

Rarely, in recent years, can there have been so much theological discussion on the front pages of our newspapers, and on our TV’s and radios, as there has been in the last 2 weeks. Whatever the right and wrongs of the decisions made by the leadership of St Paul’s Cathedral, Jesus is being spoken about publicly in a way I have never seen before. And it’s not just his name that is being invoked – it’s also his message, and it is very striking that, whatever the media is saying about the church, the perception that Jesus is there for the poor and destitute is widely assumed and accepted. Jesus is seen as a positive force – a challenge to power and to those who control the financial purse strings.

And that message is widely seen as being deeply relevant for us today – even if the church is seen as irrelevant. Jesus remains a figure that people look to, and his message of change and hope is still alive in the hearts and minds of British people.

So perhaps one good thing that is emerging from this whole situation – a situation which is still changing very rapidly – is that it reminds us in the church that it is Jesus we follow, not the church. In a strange way, we might come to see that the Holy Spirit has been at work in the protest camp, in part to remind the church what it exists for – which is to follow Jesus.

Archbishop Rowan once defined the church as ‘what happens when people meet Jesus‘. Ironically, it may be that the protesters on the steps of St Paul’s are actually helping us to meet Jesus afresh, and in doing so are helping us to be church again.

Looking Ahead

It was wonderful to be together with 50 people from our six churches yesterday evening to introduce and launch our Looking Ahead process. During the evening we explored the huge changes that are taking place in our society,  those that affect the church in general, and those that affect the churches that make up The Six in particular. Every generation faces change, and every generation has to grapple with the anxiety that change brings, and we are no different today.

The difference for us however, is that the range and impact of those changes on the Church – as we have known it in this country over hundreds of years – poses a new level of challenge. A challenge which must be faced if our churches are to continue witnessing to the life and work of Jesus in our villages and communities for another 500 years. The particular combination of factors that face us today, including individualism, the primacy of personal choice, a suspicion of authority and what has been called ‘pick and mix religion’ in which anyone can assemble different elements of a wide variety of faiths and beliefs into an individualised spirituality, mean Christian communities must urgently ask questions about how to proclaim the message of our unchanging God in a changing world.

This is the challenge that is before us in The Six – but it is not a challenge that we face alone. Two thousand years of Christianity bear witness to God’s faithfulness to his people. We have not been abandoned by God. God’s unchanging nature is as much about his unchanging faithfulness and involvement as any other aspect of who he is. It was, after all, God who called the earliest disciples of Jesus to follow him; the same God who enabled small groups to come together in Ephesus, Corinth, Rome and many other cities around the Mediterranean; God who has called out new ways of being church from holy people over the centuries, and the same God who is calling out to us today.

As we start to Look Ahead in a new way, may we know the presence of our unchanging God as he calls us to follow him in our changing world.

Taking hold of God’s willingness

I heard a wonderful quote yesterday. Martin Luther, the man who started the Protestant Reformation, once said “Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance, it is taking hold of his willingness”. What a brilliant insight and important reminder that is.
How many of us pray as if we are trying to persuade God to do something, something we suspect he would prefer not to do. How often do we pray as if we are a teenager trying desperately to persuade our reluctant parents to let us have something they don’t want us to have?
But Luther reminds us that that is not how God works and that prayer isn’t about persuasion at all – it’s about allowing God to be God in our lives and in the life of the world. When we pray, we don’t need to come up with arguments or reasons why we should have what we want, and we shouldn’t feel guilty about asking – we should place our needs and desires before God and ask that our prayer be caught up in his generous, loved filled engagement with his creation.
God, we know, loves it when we pray – just think how often Jesus prayed and taught about prayer. He wants us to place ourselves in the stream of goodness which is always flowing from him to the world, and in doing so to find ourselves caught up in the flow of divine love which is his constant willingness to bring resurrection, hope and new life to each one of us and to all things.

Rev Hugh

6@6

If you are interested in issues that connect faith and all the new technology around us, come along to our 6@6 service on Sunday 23 October at St Mary’s, Upchurch, where Technology will be the theme of the service.

God’s game?

Have you ever played a computer game? If you have you are one of 100 million people in Europe who use a computer or a Playstatation or an i-phone, or some other kind of electronic device, to shoot aliens, speed round race tracks, build a civilisation or score in the Cup Final. This week, people around the world will spend 3 billion hours playing computer games. For what? Well, in part for fun (and I write as one who enjoys a good game every now and then), but perhaps there are other, less obvious, reasons.
An article in Third Way magazine suggests that it is more than fun that we find when lost in the increasingly sophisticated world of computer games – these games offer us something that the world doesn’t. They offer a world with clear boundaries, iwith clear rules and with immediate feedback. So when you play a computer game, you know what’s going on, what the rules are, and most importantly, you know how you’re doing straight away. If you shoot the right alien, or drive fast enough, you will win. If not, you lose. However sophisticated the game, the world of a computer game is understandable and reliable.
And how that contrasts with the real world – where things are rarely reliable and often seem beyond understanding. So many different people playing by different rules, for different goals. And how can we possibly know how we’re doing in life? It would be nice to be able to check our score every now and then – just to see if we’re on the right track, but we can’t. Whether it’s at work, in our family life or in our contribution to society, there is no way of really knowing whether we’re doing well or not.
So my question is, do we ever want our faith to be more like a computer game? Do we look to Christianity, or the church, or God himself, to give us an enclosed world, with clear boundaries, clear rules and immediate feedback about how we’re doing? Do we sometimes wish that our faith would make life easier, simpler and neater? Do we believe so that we can be part of a world which is separate from the messiness of our lives, where there are easy answers to difficult questions, where we can always start again when our energy runs out? Because that’s sometimes how Christianity comes across- as a safe place in a crazy world, where nothing can touch us, and where playing by the rules will give you a clear reward.
But that’s not the life that Jesus lived. He gave very few neat answers – instead he told stories. He never promised an easy life – instead he offered his followers a life of persecution and self-sacrifice. And he never said it would be easy – instead he invited us into an upside down world in which the poor were rich and the foolish wise. 
But, he did promise to be with us until the end of time, to share the Holy Spirit with us and to carry our burdens on his broad and holy shoulders.

So, are we ready to allow our faith in Jesus to lead us more fully into the messiness of life. Can we live, wholeheartedly and vulnerably, in the complexity and difficulty of our family life, our work life, our social life? Can we trust that God is alongside us as we walk into situations that have no easy answers, no obvious endings and no final score? Can we live as disciples, not gamers?

Talking about God

There are lots of ways to think about faith – as a relationship, a journey, a set of beliefs or a way of life. Another way is to see it as a conversation -as being part of a conversation with and about God. Being a Christian means joining a 2,000 year old (and even older in some ways) conversation about how God is involved in our lives and in the life of his whole creation.

John’s gospel opens with the haunting words “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God”, and through the life brought by the Word of God, we are able to join our words with The Word, and to join the conversation brought into being by God. It is Jesus, the Word of God, who makes it possible for us to know  God and to speak about him, and we are all called to join in.

This new blog is a new way for us to be part of that conversation – 4 people from our six churches, each writing from a different perspective – will share their thoughts and reflections on faith, church and God. As they do so, anyone is invited to join in with a comment, response or further thought. Christians have been talking about how God is at work in our midst for 2,000 years now. Do join in.