Challenging Times

The May ‘Seize the Day’ podcast is now online.

In it we’re talking again to Bryan Knell from Global Connections. This month he’s making some suggestions about how churches can change their approach to mission.

I’m also joined on this programme by John Ayrton, the pastor of Portswood Church in Southampton. I hope John is going to be co-hosting the podcast in future. (I’ll declare an interest: John and I were school friends, and he was my best man, so I have a slight bias here.)

We’re talking about contemporary spirituality and the idea that a spiritual orientation is ‘hard-wired’ into us biologically.

Go here to listen.

Somehow I don’t think he would vote BNP.

Some things are pretty clear: Jesus cared about the poor, the disadvantaged, the foreigner and the marginalised.

But other than these obvious things, I don’t find much in the Gospels that helps me to answer the question ‘What would Jesus do?’ Perhaps because it’s the wrong question.

Although the Gospels tell us what Jesus did, they don’t tell us much about why he did it – they don’t tell us much about what he was thinking. (If it was important for us to know what Jesus was thinking, surely there would be more about it in the Gospels.)

So I don’t know why Jesus did what he did. And his actions are so unexpected and unpredictable that it’s really difficult to make any kind of transition from what he did to what I should do.

We’re called to be committed followers of Jesus. God is determined to make us like him. We need to soak ourselves in the Gospels. But just reading the Gospels more won’t – on its own – necessarily help us to grow more like him, because that isn’t the main reason why they were written.

If I’m to learn what it means to follow Jesus today, I need other parts of the Bible as much as I need the Gospels: I need Galatians to tell me what the fruit of the Spirit is. I need 1 Corinthians 13 to tell me what genuine love looks like. I even need Daniel, to help me understand something about how to live for God in the middle of a hostile culture, and Jonah to help me separate God’s agenda from my own nation’s well-being.

So while it’s absolutely right that we need to ReJesus our lives and our churches, I’m not totally sold on the idea that the Gospels are the only part of the Bible we need to help us do this.

So what’s my question about ‘ReJesus‘?

Mike Frost and Al Hirsch suggest that if we want to put Jesus back at the centre of our lives – to become Christ-followers, not just believers – we need to focus again on the story of Jesus in the Gospels.

We certainly need to put Jesus in the centre, and we need to immerse ourselves in the Gospels more than we do. Jesus is our example as well as our saviour. (See, for example, 1 Peter 2:21).

But…

I’ve just started re-reading Mark’s Gospel, and there isn’t much in it that helps me to answer the question ‘what would Jesus do?’ Partly because this is the wrong question – or at least, it isn’t the main question that the Gospels were written to answer.

There’s a much greater emphasis in the Gospels on who Jesus is, and on why he died. So, for example, Mark’s Gospel begins with the words:

This is the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.

… and the hinge of the whole Gospel comes in chapter 8, when Jesus asks his followers ‘Who do you say I am?’ (verse 29). And as soon as they ‘get it,’ (‘You are the Messiah…’) he starts telling them that he is going to suffer many terrible things and be rejected and killed. (v. 31).

Similarly, in Luke’s introduction (Luke 1:1-4) he makes it clear that he wants his readers to know the historical reliability of the message they’ve heard about Jesus, while John says explicitly that he wrote his gospel so that people would believe in Jesus (John 20:30-31).

So the Gospels aren’t about me – not even about me following Jesus: they’re about Jesus – who he is and why he came. The question about who Jesus is isn’t just an issue for theologians in later centuries. It was at the heart of the Good News right from the word go.

I’m still thinking this through – keep watching this space.

Recently I’ve been reading ReJesus, by Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch. It’s a great book, and I warmly recommend it. (There’s a review coming up in the Slipstream podcast for May. There’s also a written review here.)

If you know me, you’ll know that I have a huge amount of respect for Al Hirsch and Mike Frost, and think that they are saying something vital for the Church in the western world to take on board.

In ‘ReJesus,’ the heart of their message is that we need to become followers of Jesus, not just believers in Jesus. We need to learn from him and become like him. This seems to me to be completely right and biblical:

‘For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the first-born among many brothers and sisters.’ (Romans 8:29, NLT).

Frost and Hirsch quote – presumably with approval – some words of C S Lewis:

‘In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful… whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose. It says in the Bible that the whole universe was made for Christ and that everything is to be gathered together in Him’

Right on the nail. Preach it, Jack.

But… (you knew there had to be a ‘but’, right?) At one key point, I’m really not convinced that what Hirsch and Frost are saying is right. Watch this space.

The other day, I had to go into our city-centre church building fairly late on a midweek evening. The only on-street parking near the church is about a dozen disabled bays.

At that time of the night, most of the bays are empty, and the restrictions don’t apply anyway, right?

Wrong! There were a couple of traffic wardens writing tickets for the two or three hapless drivers who were parked in the disabled bays. I engaged them in conversation, and found that, sure enough, the restrictions still applied, and they were busy applying them. A prime example of a mindless bureaucratic system in operation.

When I talked to them, the traffic wardens weren’t unpleasant people. For all I know, they love their children and pay their taxes like anyone else. And I fully accept that traffic wardens perform a necessary role in society.

But not at 9.30 in the evening on an almost deserted street.

The mission of a traffic warden is to keep the roads clear for legitimate traffic. In no sense were they fulfilling that mission. They were just mindlessly fulfilling a task that they had been given, without ever asking what the purpose of the task was. For all I know, someone had given them a quota, and they were just making up the numbers.

The structure that had been put in place to support the mission had taken over from the mission, and become an end in itself.

Of course, this kind of thing is always happening in government bureaucracies. It could never happen in churches, could it?

Three videos which, in different ways, capture what Easter is all about:

HT Eddie

HT John Ayrton

HT Barney Barron

 
The April Slipstream podcast is now online. It’s an Easter Special, featuring Tim Keller talking about his book ‘The Reason for God,’ and Gary Habermas talking about the evidence for the resurrection. We also have a Slipstream extra of a keynote presentation by Gary Habermas.
Go here to listen.