glenn.myers

‘For I’m building a people of power’. Fail.

We may not be cut out for it

For I’m building a people of power, I”m making a people of praise, who will move through this land by my Spirit.

Now is the time for us to march across the land.

What were we thinking of in the 1980s? When did the church ‘marching across the land’ end well? What would it even look like, the clatter of zimmer frames, the trundle of wheelchairs, the clergy in nice jumpers, overweight people looking hot and wanting to sit down, the toddlers needing the toilet?

Surely ‘marching across the land’ is not how the Kingdom of God spreads. Here’s how the experts do it:

For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.¹

A new day for churches doing mission

A friend who is missions director at a large American church sent me a copy of their latest thinking about church/mission relationships.

Two earlier phases of mission support

For 50 years or more, his church ran a typical missions policy, mainly focussed on supporting career missionaries through a missions committee.

Inadequacies in this model led them to a second phase, dating from around 2008:

They evaluated missionaries’ work as well as the missionaries themselves, learning about their impact and their standing among local partners.
They expanded involvement of the congregation through short-term teams and other partnership opportunities.
And they took over some of the traditional roles of the mission agency in pastoral care and missions advocacy.

Another new day

But after only eight or so years of this second phase, they again felt a need to refocus, to keep up with a rapidly changing world.

They are seeing a future made of ‘vocational professionals who partner with local Christians to advance missional goals’.

To get there, they suggest diverting funds from traditional missions to build a learning community of disciples within the church.

This community would learn in millennial-friendly contexts such as cross-team story-telling as well as pursuing a basic training curriculum.

Meeting every month or so, they would become a missions-focussed community within the wider congregation.

Presumably from this community would come the ‘Kingdom professionals’ as well as the members doing mission in other ways: some involved in short-term teams, some awarding grants, some in partnership/networking initiatives, some supporting the existing, traditional missions force, some doing local international ministry.

For our UK context

I found a lot of thought-provoking stuff here for our UK context.

What do we think about recruiting generalists–eg ‘church planters’–for mission to the least-reached? Is it seeing God’s blessing? Have we analysed how these generalists actually spend their time? How possible is it to send generalists for most of the places we want to send people?
Should we be recruiting ‘Kingdom professionals’ instead, people with a clear role and duties? One example cited was sending a Western doctor to an international hospital, with an understanding her role would include teaching indigenous Christian nurses who may then serve among the unreached in villages.
How good are we at networking with the global south? Does a commitment to this networking lead us towards or away from a focus on evangelism among the least reached?
What do we think of developing a missions community within our church? This community would embrace people as diverse as an old-style missions committee, short-term teams, and people with cross-cultural opportunities within their work-life or ministry. Such a community would cohere around a regular practice of mutual learning, story-telling, support, and worship.
What’s the role of the traditional mission agency in this reshaped landscape?

Challenging stuff both for traditional agencies and churches!

Tolkien on ‘shards of the true light’

Creativity is son-light, filtered

Creativity is son-light, filtered. Some delicious verse from J R R Tolkein on how our ‘creativity’ is really a derivative of the divine creativity:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.¹

For Tolkein, myth was a fragment of a truth, and a pointer to God. (The quote also shows him to be no fan of modern technology.)

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.” ²

Church for those with learning disabilities

Our church hosts a congregation for people with learning disabilities. The leader of this ministry, Chrissie Cole, wrote recently for our church bulletin. I thought it was a great story and worth reproducing.

“You mean, I can pray in the garden?” This remark was made by a young man with autism and a learning disability the first time he came to the Causeway group.

We were looking at the story of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. This young man has gone on to be a valued member of our group, who prays the most wonderful prayers which show a degree of compassion for others which is quite surprising given his autism. I hope he has also begun to pray in his garden!

But I am always being surprised by the people who come to the Causeway group; by their faith which takes Jesus at his word, and by their love and support for each other. The Causeway group, which is supported by the Christian charity Prospects, aims to provide accessible worship and teaching for people with learning disabilities such as the young man above. We have been running for 24 years and at the moment have 21 members.

Over the years I think I have had more encouragement and blessing from them than I have given back. Some people might question whether those who do not have the understanding to grasp the theological truths of Christianity are really able to be Christians. To which I would reply that Christianity at its heart is not about theological truths, but is about a relationship with a living God.

Anyone who can respond to another person, on whatever level, is capable of responding to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and I have seen this happen in wonderful ways over the years. It has also become clear to me that God has equipped them with gifts, as he has everyone in his church, such as being able to lead us in prayer, lead worship on the piano, or notice when someone else is feeling down and needs prayer. I believe it is important that, as with all of us, they are encouraged to use their gifts to build God’s church, both in the Causeway group, and in the wider church.

Evangelical mission: notes for the future

Potted intro to a new day

If evangelical mission was software, we are seeing the launch of version 5.0. Borrowing from other church historians (especially Ralph Winter) here’s a simplified version history.

Missions 1.0: nothing at all

Shortly after the Reformation, the Catholic mission orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits had the fields all to themselves. Through these brilliant missionaries, with their mass-baptism programmes and their culturally sensitive outreach to elites, the Catholic church gained more converts than it had lost through the European schism.

Mission 2.0: The invention of the NGO

The mission agency was invented at the end of the 18th century. It was a Swiss-army-knife-type operation that developed all the necessary skills to recruit and manage a flow of Christians from the Protestant world (mostly Europe and the US) to the non-Christian countries, and also to the Catholic and Orthodox lands.

Mission 3.0: Inland

A generation or so after NGOs got a foothold on the coasts and trading posts, a new wave of pioneers took the gospel beyond coastal cities like Shanghai or Kolkata into the inland regions. This was the era of leaders like Hudson Taylor, trusting God for missionaries in every province of China, and of a new generation of NGOs like the China Inland Mission, the Unevangelized Fields Mission and the Heart of Africa Mission (later WEC).

Mission 4.0: Unreached peoples

Fast forward to 1974 (and pass over other developments like two world wars, the liberal/conservative split and Pentecostal and charismatic renewal). An understanding of unreached peoples took hold in the missions community. Even though a church was present in every country, many people were still isolated from the gospel by cultural barriers. Missions 4.0 built networks to discover and reach every cultural group–hence NGOs like Wycliffe Bible Translators and Gospel Recordings; books like Operation World; and strategies and networks that tried to catalyze new Christian movements so that everyone could meet Christ within a language and culture in which they felt at home.

Missions 5.0 Pluralism

Just as computer software has had to adapt from life on a single PC to appearing on many interlinked devices of differing shapes and capacities, so the simplicities of Mission 2.0 have been replaced by an increasingly universal pluralism. Cultures are all shaped by the same forces. Universally, people are moving into cities, leaving poverty and its diseases behind, getting access to travel and information. And cultures are being jumbled together. Ever-more people work with, live next to, or worship alongside people from different cultures. Ever-more unreached peoples have Christian near-neighbours.

Evangelical mission is still based on its original version 2.0 coding, despite extensive tweaks at versions 3.0 and 4.0 that extended its life. It’s time for a re-write.

The need of the hour is to spread vision and skills for cross-cultural mission onto a variety of ‘devices’ such as local Christians, local churches, local specialist agencies, short-term trippers, schoolchildren, students, professionals, refugees, migrants and retirees. This is evangelical mission 5.0. Mission agencies, instead of being swiss-army-knife, we-can-do-it organizations, need to be–I would argue–like ‘the cloud’, resourcing everything everywhere, knitting networks together and in those ways making cross-cultural kingdom-spreading a realistic option for Christians in every context.

The game is up for the Christian publishing industry?

I need help.

I have just thought a terrible thought.

The single biggest obstacle to getting books into the hands of eager readers is the Christian publishing industry, an industry that I love, respect and owe much to.

Here’s the problem.

I am preparing a talk on Revelation. I would like to read a book called ‘The Theology of Revelation’ by scholar Richard Bauckham. An internet search tells me it’s on sale at Amazon for £21 or rather less on Kindle. The same search pulls up a pdf copy of the book available for free.

I am queasy about downloading the pdf because I am cheating somehow, but I am also queasy about shelling out £20, even if I did this through my local Christian bookshop. £20 is a lot of money.

What I would really like to do, it occurs to me, is email Richard Bauckham and ask if he minded me reading the free pdf. I do not think he would mind (I don’t know him). But I also think he would say he has a contract with the publishers and they would mind.

I decide to do without the book, so I neither download it nor buy it. The Christian publishing industry made the barriers too high for me.

In the late-medieval days of yore– say 1989–the only way to get material from a fine mind like Richard Bauckham into my lesser head was to have a Christian publishing industry. And it was fantastic. It shaped the Protestant world. The book cost £20. That was relatively expensive, but we paid it sometimes because we knew that although some money went to the author, most went to maintaining a world-spanning chain that edited, printed, marketed, warehoused, and displayed this and thousands of other wonderful books and made them available everywhere. In an analogue world, this was a modest cost for unimagineably vast benefits.

But everything has changed. Getting Prof Bauckman’s book direct from his head to mine now costs almost nothing, probably less than a penny.

So why can’t the book be available for 99p, most of which would go to Prof Bauckham? Why not? Because the publishers and the booksellers can’t live with that price, and through their contractual arrangements they stand in the way of it being available at that price. Christian publishers and booksellers, once the friend of Christians who wish to learn, have become their enemy. This is my terrible thought. Committed to an archaic ante-deluvian distribution model, they make books needlessly, ruinously expensive and thus drastically reduce their circulation and usefulness. Bauckham should be read by his tens of thousands; but thanks to the Christian publishing industry, he only has his thousands, or indeed his hundreds. What a terrible waste!

But, say the industry, it’s not so simple. They will tell me I am underplaying their contribution: talent-spotting, editing, marketing, gate-keeping; that magical work of taking an MS and making it fluent, coherent, available, and hallmarked as theologically solid and well-written.

I will return and say that may have been true once but is so no longer. Editing? You jest. Developing authors? Dream on. Marketing? Authors have to do it themselves. Typesetting and cover design? Free or cheap alternatives will do just as well for this kind of book. (See what CUP did with Bauckham’s book, below: this is intern stuff.) Gatekeeping? Proper reader reviews are worth much more than the fluff that goes on the cover. What is left? The prestige of being published by a respected house. This is true. But it ain’t worth £19, not when these very respected names are being taken over by accountants and falling off the perch like the rest of the rust-belt.

Publishing once was a world-changing industry; so was coal-mining.

Please someone help me, save me from my sins!

I edited this blog after first writing it, to try to simplify the arguments. I changed the title from ‘Christian bookshops’ to ‘Christian publishing industry’. I also added the Amazon ref to Prof Bauckham’s book, which I would like to warmly recommend–but of course I haven’t read it.

Not sulking, just thinking hard

That’s our story anyway.

What brought this post on was hearing a lecture from Catholic historian Eamonn Duffy.

In its pre-reformation days, we were told, the Church happily contained many strands of thinking under its ample skirts. Later Reformation criticism (against dubious fundraising through selling indulgences for example) were openly discussed and campaigned against by people such as Erasmus, within the Catholic fold.

After the split, however, the Church of Rome convened the Council of Trent, better known perhaps as the Almighty Catholic Sulk ¹ and made a perverse point of adopting all the dodgy stuff as it had been central all along. The split hardened what once was fluid.

Nothing new here of course. The estranged halves of a split each get busy digging trenches. But it’s everywhere.

Is this what faces our Brexiteers as they try to negotiate Tessa May’s beloved Deep and Special Partnersnip with the EU? Will we, instead, find our former partners in full Council of Trent mode? Hope not.

Doesn’t it explain our own country a bit as well? In our church context, some nationalities, like the Chinese, approach the Christian faith in a rational manner: they turn up at church to learn what it is about. This keeps happening in our church.

Many of my fellow Brits, however, seem to reject even a mention of the gospel in what seems to me like an irrationally unfriendly way, like divorcees, like the bruised survivors of a split. The West, someone said, is haunted by the Christian faith.

What is the answer? It took hundreds of years for Catholics and Protestants to resume friendly relations. Let’s hope history really is moving quicker than that.

Inconvenient truth (again)

Uncool but changing things: Evangelicals in Catholic countries

Few things on earth are as deeply uncool, as heroically off-trend, as sending Evangelical Christian missionaries to Catholic Europe.

If your son or daughter has taken up this career, you probably do not boast about it at the golf club.

So what. For one thing, if a Catholic nation like Spain can embrace gays and scientologists and people with blue hair, a dash of evangelical missionaries surely only adds to the joyous mix. As soon as we evangelicals stop trying to be respectable, we can take our natural place.

For another thing, whatever the spiritual vitality or otherwise of the Catholic church, masses of people in Catholic countries are finding spiritual renewal through movements started by evangelicals and Pentecostals. They are more than 10% of the population in Argentina, for example, more than 20% in the Philippines.

And for a third, Christ’s evident habit of championing the outcast, the laughed-at and the dispossessed has turned builders’ rubble into cornerstone and capstone.

The people who listened

The mission I work for, WEC International, was sending missionaries to Spain from the 1960s onward. They had a difficult time of it. When they did presentations of the gospel in the public parks, hardly anyone listened except the drug addicts.

After much soul-searching, and probably trying every other alternative, in 1985 one or two single male WEC missionaries starting opening their apartments to these same addicts.

Somehow all the ducks lined up and something wonderful happened. This small start evolved, through God’s blessing, into a movement called Betel that now runs 60 homes for recovering heroinistas in 23 Spanish provinces and has spread to 25 other countries.

More than 200,000 of the neediest and most despised people of the earth have passed through Betel’s doors in the past 30 years and of those who stayed, many have turned their lives around. Awards and accolades have followed.

I’ve met graduates of these schools. When I stand praying next to these big, beautiful, scarred, tattooed people my watery Anglican spirituality feels like some distant relative of authentic Christianity — genetically a bit similar but lacking in sap or blood.

Betel, this child of evangelical mission to Spain, has rediscovered the gospel. From the most obscure of beginnings, the authenticity and power of what they have achieved has altered the landscape. Wonderful.

‘Science’ and ‘religion’ were originally names for good personal habits

‘Science’ was originally a name for virtue, or a good habit–like making your bed or not doing that thing with your nose in public.

According to the thoughtful book The Territories of Science and Religion by Peter Harrison, when thirteenth-century Doctor-of-the-Church Thomas Aquinas filtered newly-recovered Greek philosophy through a Christian net, — which was more or less what Aquinas did with his life — he came to understood ‘science’ as ‘working out conclusions from first principles.’ It was one of a trio of virtues: intellectus (grasping the first principles in the first place) scientia (deriving conclusions from them) and sapientia (coming to terms with the highest and ultimate cause, namely God.)

Good people possessed scientia. It was a fine habit. They were able to arrive at conclusions from principles and evidence, unswayed by prejudice, rage, timidity or Fox News (Vulpes Fabulae).

Religion –religio–was also a virtue. I am oversimplifying Peter Harrison’s careful historical inquiry here, but perhaps religio could be ‘a disposition to worship the true God and live out a life of goodness.’ Insofar as this sense was true, it potentially transcended any one expression (Catholicism, say), by focussing on the timeless essence of the thing, namely the heart-to-God encounter that leads to a good life.

The opposite of religion could be ritual or idolatry–investing in spiritual scratchcards, as it were–or the equally empty pursuit of money, pleasure and stuff; or again the worship and pampering of Self; or even the slavish and fearful preoccupation with the Material Only.

Back in the early modern day, good people were defined by a kindly God-centred life and by applying logic to facts and arriving at conclusions. Scientia and Religio. Could perhaps do with a comeback.

Peter Harrison’s book is available on Kindle, and his first chapter, which arguably contains all the really good bits, is free to download.

Horrible hype

‘I’m getting old,’ I complained to my wife. Old enough to see some much hyped Christian things crumble and fall. So sad. Today I was reminded of two.

Years ago I’d visited my publishers for a day of interviews and publicity shots. They’d shown me an exciting book they were hyping: Taming the Tiger. A few years on, large parts of it were revealed as sham- after its author scooped prestigious awards, spoke widely, and distributed 1.5m copies.

After the original publisher withdrew it (and also went into administration, though that was probably from publishing me rather than publishing Taming the Tiger) another took it on, reluctant to waste a good bestseller.

Second, in a few days time from today, a pastor called Kong Hee, whom I spent an hour interviewing back in the 1990s in Singapore when he was pastor of ‘City Harvest Church’, starts a three-year prison sentence. He is guilty of misdirecting some $35m of church funds, largely in an attempt to launch his wife as a crossover Christian-maintream singer. I liked him when I met him.

Yesterday I read in my beloved Psalm 45 the prayer to the Messiah-King: ‘ride out on behalf of truth, humility and justice.’

Author: glenn.myers

‘For I’m building a people of power’. Fail.

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