Glenn Myers

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.’

The Kingdom of God as the ‘sphere of God’s goodness’

I enjoyed this quote from Ken Costa

When Jesus came to earth, he proclaimed that the kingdom of God was at hand. The language of kingdoms can sound strange to us, in that it seems to signify territoriality. In the context of work, it may therefore be helpful to see the kingdom of God as “the sphere of God’s goodness” in the world. We are called to advance God’s kingdom, sharing the “sphere of goodness” and extending it as we operate with God’s values. Our actions at work have the potential to advance the kingdom of God and his “sphere of goodness,” or to hinder it–on both a macro and a micro level. Each time we tell the truth, make decisions fairly and with respect for others, or act with integrity, we are advancing this sphere, albeit in small ways.

Ken Costa, God at Work, p 16.

6 tips for surviving hospitals

Slow healing (10)

Here’s the problem:

Take a completely healthy person. Put them in a humiliating hospital gown. Insert a cannula in each wrist, a blood-pressure cuff to their arm and a blood-oxygen monitor on their finger,
Every few hours, send someone round to hurt them, perhaps by sticking a needle in them, putting stickers on them and then ripping them off or (for maximum fun) inserting and then removing a catheter into their urinary tract.
Move them to a new bed at random times, even midnight.
Keep them near the nurses’ station so they don’t sleep.
Make sure they are in a ward with other stressed people, some who are calling out constantly, some who fight the nurses, some who are deaf, some who don’t speak English, and some who soil their bedclothes. Arrange for one or two to die if possible.
Only answer the call bell sometimes.
Give them food they don’t like at times they aren’t hungry.
Hold them for an indefinite time.
Have a consultant visit once per day for five minutes and issue contradictory messages about when they will be allowed to go home.

I suggest that after a week of this treatment, even a healthy person would be demoralized, perhaps really ill, and would need days to recover.

_________

At the moment I have some close relatives and friends in hospital and I am reminded of the awfulness of it. Despite the best efforts of dedicated staff and family and friends. Just like anyone who has spent some weeks in hospital, I have seen all of the above.

You have to learn to survive. Anyone who has managed some months in a hospital ward will be an expert in this. My tips — linked to Christian notions of healing — are these.

See Christ beyond all of this. Trust him. Lean into him. Thank him. Believe in him and never let him go. He is good, really good, and his power and purposes will prevail in my life. Say that over and over. Work it out in your mind. Never give up on it. Never.
Give him your pain, and the pain you see in your loved one’s faces. It’s too hard to hold it yourself.
Make up your mind to keep your humanity in this place. Thank the people who injure you. Smile. Ask them their name. Give them yours. Be courteous and kind. They are under pressure too. You will find other patients and medical staff who, in all the inhumanity, are trying to be human like you. Spark off each other. When your loved ones visit, thank them, appreciate them, serve them: make their visit as happy as you can. Give them your best. You may fail in all of this, often, badly, but at least try.
Understand this is a season of suffering and you need to endure it. Endure it rather than rage against it.
Find ways of being happy: a nice meal, a good film, a kind friend.
Through the night, thank God for everything you can think of and pray his blessing on everyone you can think of.

How to give to charity (3)

This can’t be right. Can it?

I once looked at a writing job with a large Christian charity.

‘It’s mostly fundraising,’ they explained, ‘and we’ve got a good system.’

Their good system was:

A fresh appeal every few weeks or months
Cheap-looking paper
Each mailshot made up of a few typed sheets, black and white photos, with “handwritten” additions and underlinings in red ink.
Sent out to a carefully refined mailing list. Single women in their 40s-70s were the favoured audience.
Guaranteed results.

I decided not to work for this charity.

Where does carefully monitoring the success of fundraising campaigns end? Where does cynical exploitation begin? I couldn’t figure that out, but I wouldn’t have felt right doing that job.

There has to be a better way, and that better way has to be us givers taking the initiative, giving regularly and generously to a set of good causes, and not letting ourselves be manipulated.

Church for those with learning disabilities

Like this: