Read a Bible story at some length, always picking something that involves a miraculous transformation. There are plenty of these available, enough for a whole year’s preaching or more.
Here’s your main point: someone in the story met Jesus, or God if it’s the Old Testament, and their life was transformed. Tell this story with as much drama as you can muster.
Salt your story with promises plucked from elsewhere in scripture, again, plenty to choose from.
Tell some stories about yourself or your children that vaguely illustrate the same point.
Repeat (that’s a sermon series). Or write down (that’s a book).
Change the theme slightly, and repeat again. So instead of ‘secrets of healing’, you could branch into ‘living a life of victory’ or ‘total financial freedom’ or ‘being a person of power and authority’.
On you go. Same talk. It’s a career.
There are consequences to this Christian populism.
You are pointing people to Jesus, perhaps the best thing you can do for anyone.
Unfortunately the Jesus you are pointing them to is a one-shot wonder worker, a stripped-down version of the real thing.
You’re missing the slow. We not finished, in both senses. We are still being patched up, and we are still pressing on in our incomplete state. Blessed are those at the end of their rope, broken, mourning, hungering, thirsting. Every day we search our minds and hearts to conform them to God’s will. Through faith and patience we inherit the promises. Suffering produces character produces hope. Not a charge to victory, methinks, a patient plod.
A final (for now…) post on the interesting shifts of culture and practice that might get state-supported health care and the church’s role at the heart of local communities finding common cause and networking together.
It could be a (quiet, slow) revolution in healthcare and it would not be the first time that church initiatives have altered the national landscape.
The probation service was started by a pair of Anglican missionaries in the early twentieth century, and eventually nationalised.
Educating the working classes was a job pioneered by the Christian churches, with both Catholic and Protestant examples. In the UK, Sunday Schools were teaching literacy and numeracy (and Bible literacy) to a quarter of the eligible British population of children by 1831. 1. (Schools until then were largely private, fee-paying and for the upper class and middle class boys.) In 1870 came the Education Act which made state education compulsory and a state responsibility.
The hospice movement which had earlier (and largely Christian) precedents but in its modern form was established by the devout Christian Dame Cicely Saunders. So far the UK’s 220 or so hospices have escaped being swallowed by the NHS but at Dame Cicely’s death in 2005 were caring for 60,000 people in hospices and 120,000 people in their homes in the UK 2. Eight thousand other hospices followed her model around the world; part of the landscape for the dying. (Interestingly, Dame Cicely was a passionate opponent of assisted dying.)
Possibly, hospitals themselves, invented early in the first millennium by St Basil and his fellow Cappadocian Fathers.
So I have to request you be patient for a little longer. Here’s a third take on the changes intended for the National Health Service and how these changes take it into the arms of the Christian church, and how they can help re-establish the church in its centuries-old role as centre-piece of the good in a local community.
A newspaper report in April 25 said this:
The NHS is attempting to ease the pressure on GPs and A&E by sending a new type of health worker door to door in deprived areas to help detect illnesses before people need urgent care.
Community health and wellbeing workers (CHWW) are already deployed in 12 areas of England, with 13 others to follow, in an attempt to improve poor and vulnerable people’s access to care.
Each worker is responsible for 120-150 households, usually on a council estate, which they visit once a month to help residents with money, isolation and housing problems, as well as their health.
Wes Streeting, the heath secretary, is examining the scheme as he pulls together ideas to help “fix” the NHS that may be included in the forthcoming 10-year health plan.3 The article points out these CHWWs ‘are not clinically trained staff, like doctors, nurses and health visitors. They are mostly recruited from the communities they work in and trained up for the role.’
It quotes the program managed of the National Association of Primary Care as follows:
‘CHWWs are supporting residents to access earlier and more appropriate forms of care, often in community settings.
‘They’re also helping to address wider determinants of health – like housing, finances and loneliness – which are frequently the root cause of escalating health issues that end up in A&E.
‘Their job is to build relationships with the people in their households and with health professionals and NHS services locally.’
Nothing in the article mentions the church. But what a nice job for someone as a CHWW, with formal or informal links to faith communities.
So last week we saw that the UK National Health Service, groping its way to being a Neighbourhood Health Service, is seeing the value of directing people from GP surgeries to community groups. Faith groups–and especially in the UK, Christian churches–are the main source of community groups, and they are everywhere.
In a report about all this, the Theos thinktank notes that some GP practices employ social prescribing link workers (SPLWs, because the world needs more acronyms) to make and maintain these connections. So far so good. But the people at Theos make these observations:
Where there’s a high turnover of SPLWs, many of the links are lost.
When SPLWs merely ‘signpost’ people to things a lot of the potency of social prescribing is lost. (This is true generally with the dread word ‘signposting’. People are often refused help by one agency or another and ‘signposted’ elsewhere. This is fine for the people who are turning people away, but not so good for the people who are being turned away). It’s much better when SPLWs get to know groups personally and also take people along to them. The personal relationships matter much more than a listing of providers.
As the report said:
..We found a number of challenges … There are communication challenges because faith and health communities use different language to talk about very similar things. It is challenging for faith groups to connect and maintain relationships with the ever-changing social prescribing system. Similarly, link workers and local health practicioners don’t kow where to go to connect with local faith groups. Furthermore, there are administrative challenges that slow processes down and a lack of funding to keep activities running. (p15)
Further, ‘one explanation for poor integration between faith groups and healthcare workers … is stretched capacity in the NHS’ (p61).
But social prescribing is a ‘thing’ and the NHS has a long term plan for every person in England to access social prescribing through their GP eventually. 4
3. While there are relatively many hospital chaplains, there are relatively few ‘GP chaplains’ and this is a missed opportunity. N0t only so, but a qualification in social prescribing takes about 5 months’ study 5. No doubt lots of people have thought of this, but a GP chaplain who was also a trained social prescriber could make themselves very useful; if they were funded by a collaboration of churches, they would be less dependent on the vicissitudes of government provision.
Sometimes you read something and it feels like you’ve swallowed a lit firework.
This happened to me recently, when I was reading a report from those good people at the Theos thinktank. I found myself catching myself to hold back the tears.
And I recommend you waste half an hour of your working day to read it. It’ll be time much better spent than doomscrolling.
The idea is simple and one that I’ve touched on before in this blog. Here I found myself lifting the curtain and seeing a whole landscape of people who have not just already thought of this but are integrating into their practice, and researching the problems, and finding ways forward, actual doers doing it. In other words, a bandwaggon, and this is me jumping on.
Health care providers see the need for ‘social prescribing’ (involving people in caring communities) as a necessary supplement to their medical work. Indeed many people visit their doctors because their sickness is actually a mask for other ills, like grief or loneliness.
Churches have been working for the common good for centuries.
Why not put them together?
Here’s what our current Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, said about the report:
Faith groups are continuing a beautiful, centuries–old tradition of caring for your neighbour. They are delivering front line activities that will play a key role in shifting the focus of our health service from hospital to community, and sickness to prevention in the coming years. I welcome this report from Theos, which asks the right questions about how we can link faith groups into the system to provide partnership and support.” – Wes Streeting MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care of the United Kingdom
Or or a past president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Clare Gerada:
I wholeheartedly endorse the invaluable role of faith groups in the social prescribing framework, as outlined in this report. By fostering trusted relationships and providing holistic support, faith communities are uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between healthcare and wellbeing, offering a preventative approach that prioritizes connection, care and community.
From the foreword:
Social prescribing utilises community offerings as non-clinical remedies in recognition that some things can be treated both more effectively and more cheaply this way. The particular genius of this is that in doing so, people know each other better; relationships between statutory and community groups are formed and become well-trodden; and when moments of crisis arrive, not only are communities healthier at local level, but more resilient.
In one sense, none of this is new; in another it is a confluence of trends in medicine, society and church that suddenly opens a vast horizon of opportunity.
Health care people know how vital is the social stuff surrounding a person’s health. We have an epidemic of mental ill-health (or possibly an epidemic of mental ill-health diagnoses) and we have another cluster of people with the too-much-stress illnesses caused by their bodies running hot with anxiety.
Many people are lonely and isolated, propped up by benefits.
Churches are caring for the common good in practically every community.
It seems there is within the NHS a job role called a Social Prescribing Link Worker whose job is to connect patients at GP practices to local community groups. It can be that on a single street, next door even, a GP practice can exist in one silo and a church with its community cafe or craft group in another silo. The SPLW’s role, paid for by the taxpayer, is to link people across silos.
Imagine if this were common: every GP practice, every faith community, personally linked together and held together by a network of relationships. Imagine the creativity, the imagination, the good and the healing that could flow.
Finally, though this is a branching-out for the NHS, they are branching out into something churches are already doing. My own little church has basically missed every trend that has passed through the Christian community in the past 40 years, with the possible exceptions of minor brushes with charismatic Christianity, the Alpha course, and worship songs that were contemporary twenty years ago.
But we haven’t missed community groups for the common good because it’s what we do: a community cafe, food supplies, separate men’s and women’s breakfasts, a carpet-bowling club, a craft cafe. We do this all the time for the common good and also because, further in, people may find the glowing Rock at our centre and a framework, indeed a Person, around whom to construct a good life and a good death. They may find worship. They may find they can step back from the daily routine and glimpse eternity. We’ve done these community things, as have so many churches, because that is what we do, because it fits the grain of who we are.
I was gob-smacked and jaw-dropped, if you can be both, when I watched this this week:
As well as a few side-benefits – a second revolution, saving the NHS, that sort of thing – it was a glimpse into what the future could be like for all of us. And what a happy, healing place it looked like.
At root it what’s being described is, I think, an NHS GP practice in one of the most deprived areas of London, that has realized doctors only get to a fraction of illness. The rest is caused, or cured, by things like employment, education, environment and creativity.
With that realization taken seriously, what has evolved is a thriving community with an NHS medical practice (and, as it happens, a church) at its heart.
I do recommend you put this on next time you are cooking or driving or working out or something. (You don’t need to see the video and the pictures anyway add little to the story.) Instead of a clinical setting, think cafe, community, art, creativity, fun … it’s just really something.
We have had a lot of politics in recent years, or maybe it’s just me, but I found Keir Starmer’s first words outside Downing St on July 5th 2024 refreshing:
To restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives
I am not missing (in the UK scene at least) the burlesque, the cries of ‘look at me!’ and the fighting over who gets to drive the clown car.
Even if the UK has temporarily rounded up the pub-bores who were roving wild and swinging like apes on the levers of power, unworthy people remain in charge in many other places around the world. You can feel depressed and powerless in the face of it.
Really keen readers of this blog will know that I have wanted to read this volume for some time, and I have finally managed to do at a decent price via my subscription to the wonderful Perlego. Prof Bauckham wades into the Book of Revelation, disdaining the many authors and preachers who treat it as their own clown car. He is Scots-Presbyterian sober, theologically focussed, academically on top of things, devotionally hearted, and every dry paragraph can be mined for the good stuff.
It’s political. The rest of the New Testament, in my reading, isn’t really. The Roman Empire is a given. Luke, in particular, is keen to show the reasonableness of Roman rulers when he can. But all that political tiptoeing gets shoved out of the way in Revelation. Rome is a harlot, Babylon, wiping her mouth between lovers. The cultural discourse that accepts all this is a false prophet. They won’t be reformed. They are heading for the lake of fire. They will be entirely replaced with the City of God: a city still, but one not wormy with exploitation and injustice.
Prof Baukham notes a fascinating thing. What gets us to that happy place is not ‘politics’ but faithfulness. Not politics but ‘unpolitics’ perhaps.
In Bauckham’s telling, Revelation’s visions teach theological truth. Seals are broken on the scroll of history, and along come disasters on a quarter of the earth. But nothing shifts. Trumpets blow, and along come disasters on a third of the earth. And nothing shifts. Seven thunders roar (perhaps heralding disasters for half the earth) but they are held off. Why? Disasters don’t lead to lasting change, to repentance. What does make a difference? When you add to the disasters the faithful witness of the Church. That’s the picture in Revelation 11 of two prophets (you need two witnesses to establish a matter) who are martyred. Everyone parties initially. The ‘world’ has won. But then…
But after the three and a half days the breath[b] of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them. 12 Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here.” And they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on.
13 At that very hour there was a severe earthquake and a tenth of the city collapsed. Seven thousand people were killed in the earthquake, and the survivors were terrified and gave glory to the God of heaven. (Revelation 11:11-13)
A great universal repentance follows the martyrdoms. In a reversal of Elijah’s day (when a remnant of seven thousand was preserved) a remnant of seven thousand is lost but the rest give ‘glory to the God of heaven’.
This theme recurs in Revelation 14 when there are two harvests, one, ‘the harvest of the earth’ for gathering the good grain into the barn; another for grapes for the ‘winepress of God’s wrath’.
And it recurs again in Revelation 15 where the faithful witnesses re-write the Song of Moses (sung after the Exodus) for a new and better deliverance:
Who will not fear you, Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.” (Revelation 15:4)
What brings the monumental change? What makes ‘all nations’ come? The faithful witness of God’s people. I absolutely love this.
Of course there is a calling and obligation for some people to serve in politics. But for the rest of us, deep, lasting change at the national level is brought about by what? By living faithfully for Jesus and bearing testimony to him. This is the mountain-moving act. Slow, steady, patient … this is the mountain-moving act.
In the United States, at the moment, the New Apostolic Movement is busy ‘mapping spiritual strongholds’ and seeking to overthrow them. (As described in a fine piece of journalism in The Atlantic.) They are hungry and zealous for God and for reform. I unfortunately believe they are being played by the current President Elect, who has co-opted them. I studied under Pete Wagner, the first and most influential academic to write about this stuff, and I appreciated Pete Wagner, but I do not agree with him here. It isn’t revolutionary holy struggle that gets us Christians where we want to be. It isn’t ‘spiritual mapping’. It isn’t politics as such–politics follows the path others have beaten down.
It is faithfulness.
We know this from the psalms:
Do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong; 2 for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away.
3 Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. 4 Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:1-4)
My own lovely home town, just outside King’s College. Photo by Chris Boland on Unsplash. Chris Boland’s beautiful wedding photography site is here.
I sometimes wonder: is this year 1913?
I think of an Edwardian summer, and I think of moustaches, straw hats and stripy blazers. The moustaches played cricket and took girls on boats. They picknicked. Elsewhere, British moustaches quivered over a quarter of the earth, ruling it for good or ill. Seen back through that summer’s haze, the world looked (quite) ordered, prosperous, globalized, heading in a good direction. (At least it probably did from one perspective.) Injustice, was, of course, flowing underneath, undermining this white male imperial old world. But few knew or suspected what was coming.
What was coming was Europe’s own slaughter of the firstborn. Every street lost a son. Every village sprouted a war memorial. This was followed by a pandemic, by a long Depression, by a second spasm of world war. Empires fell; the world changed. I often think my grandad, born 1899, gassed 1918, had a rough 50 years till peace and prosperity started to grow again.
Plenty of parts of the world are suffering their own 1914 already of course: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan just to start with. Theologians who viewed Russia’s early massacres in Ukraine wondered if they had a working theology any more, so senseless and terrible it was.
The Economist newspaper offered a few possibilities for 2025 including:
A new global pandemic
The seizing up of the North Atlantic Ocean Circulation
A solar mass ejection (in this year of solar maximum) destroying satellites and fusing transformers across half the world
A volcano or supervolcano
And these come on top of the worries about the world that we might already have, just reading the news.
You possibly know where this is heading. Thank goodness for Mary’s Son. Who both deserves to be world king and actually is; unrolling the scroll of history with a voracious love and desire for the human race. Even if evil and time erases our theology, our sense of good, it doesn’t extinguish his.
A guest post from my friend Colin Bearup, who has spent much of his Christian life serving among Muslim people.
I have noticed that most of us involved in Christian mission tend to hold one of three attitudes to rest. Some of us see rest is necessary for survival. If you don’t rest you can’t keep going, so you just have to stop sometimes. Some of us are more positive; rest is necessary for success. You cannot flourish, prosper, accomplish or triumph if you don’t get a break. And – more rarely – I come across those who see rest as a calling, a delight and a gift from God.
God decreed rest for his people in the Old Testament. One day a week, no work for man, woman or child, whether slave or free. Even the donkeys could put their hooves up. And consider this: there was no internet, no smart phone, no TV, no sport to watch, no books to read, no synagogue to go to. It was a day of quiet. Scary or what? Not working is one thing; doing nothing, that is another. Rest wasn’t just a different way of being busy, which is what I tended to make it.
We all know the Pharisees made it miserable and Christians have been known to do the same, and we are not supposed to live today by the OT law. But God’s intention was and is that we enjoy rest. Call it a delight, said Isaiah (58:13-14). For the ancient people of God, rest was an expression of faith. They could stop because God was in charge and they were relieved of responsibility. Rest for them was an act of worship; intentionally stopping was a way of honouring God. Doing nothing, trusting him and being grateful. Why would we settle for less?
It’s striking what is, and isn’t, emphasized when St Paul decides what to write in his short letters to churches. There isn’t much about fame, achievement or celebrity; nothing about goals and milestones. Not much that I can see about strategy, or mobilisation, or changing the world.
Quite a lot about relationships, though, about families, about employers and employees (well, slaves and slave-owners). It reminds me of the story of the founder of a world-wide Christian charity. Apparently there are two biographies about him. There’s the corporate biography, country after country entered, cash-flow problems addressed, new initiatives started, new staff hired, horizons falling away as the ministry soars, as it were, into the sky.
Then there’s the second biography, written by the daughter about a father who was never home.
It’s easy to criticise someone second-hand, and to simplify a complex thing to make a point. Big parts of Christian discipleship are getting our attitudes and our close relationships right. That’s a place to put effort and is a true arena of service. It’s also super-revolutionary, overturning priorities. The big is small; the small is big.
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