I’m very happy to confirm that we (as a church) are moving home at the end of September! Our new venue will be London Nautical School. We have shared little snippets of this with you at Upper Room, but we were not sure if it would all work out. Now, at last, we have signed the contract and set the wheels in motion.
Very often a Christian will approach doubt quite differently from a sceptic. A sceptic – particularly one who is new to the Christian faith – will often engage primarily at the level of the intellect. They will adopt a thinking posture in which they want to look at the arguments, read the Bible for themselves, weigh up the evidence. Of course, they will care about experience also, but experience is usually secondary. A Christian who is struggling in their faith very often struggles in a more intuitive, gut-level way…
The front page of yesterday’s Times declared, “TV’s golden age is closing the chapter on novels”. This year has seen a sharp decline in the sales of physical fiction books, partly attributed to the rise of the global monolith that is Netflix. I won’t deny that I enjoy an episode of Suits as much as the next man. But reading (particularly Christian) books has had a profound influence on my life in a way that Netflix never (ever) could.
Living in London distorts our view of this inter-generational flow. For many of us, we live in a single-generation millennial island, cut off from any meaningful interaction with grey-headed wisdom and the joy of little people. We walk, work, and worship with people who born within a narrow date range.
I’m looking forward to my first Father’s Day card this Sunday (although Caleb may need some help writing the card this year!).
I suspect the day will be greeted with a mixture of emotions. Some of you will have very positive memories of growing up with your father and will welcome the opportunity to express your appreciation. For others, the day will feel difficult. Perhaps because you didn’t know your biological father, or because he was neglectful or abusive. This is the painful reality for many.
In 2013, the Centre for Social Justice produced a report that estimated one million children were growing up without any meaningful relationship with their fathers. Christian Guy, then the director of the CSJ described the crisis, “For children growing up in some of the poorest parts of the country, men are rarely encountered in the home or in the classroom. This is an ignored form of deprivation that can have profoundly damaging consequences on social and mental development.”
As well as being a national tragedy (and part of the pervasive impact of human sin on family life), there is often an added difficulty for Christians, who, as a consequence, can struggle with the idea of God the Father. It leaves them feeling cold or confused. Sometimes Christians project the flaws of their own biological father onto God. God feels absent because their father was absent.
And yet, I think that is precisely the opposite place God wants us to end up. Of course, it’s absolutely right to recognise the limitations of your biological father and to go through the necessary business of forgiving him for the very real sins of failing to care for and love his family. However, this feeling of frustration and sense of lack should also drive us to our knees to approach the only perfect father who ever lived, asking that, by his Spirit, we might grasp the fullness of what it means to be children of the living God and to experience the joy, affirmation and security that comes with that.
No earthly parent will be perfect but we have a perfect father who is redefining for us what good parenting looks like. He has outrageous love and strong discipline. He comes with tenderness but is willing to rebuke us in love. He’s persistently faithful and wonderfully sacrificial (giving up his own son for us). Whatever our experience of biological fathers, we have a heavenly Father who is the answer to the deepest longings of our souls.
I am as prone to it as you are. When people ask me how things are going, I often respond by saying, ‘Busy!’ But I was provoked this week to stop using this word.
I went to a day conference in honour of the late Eugene Peterson. Various pastors were sharing the impact Peterson had had upon them, and a strong theme was Peterson’s opposition to busyness in pastoral ministry.
As we enter into what can euphemistically be described as the British summer, we will soon start to see the city beginning to slow down. Students are already finishing their exams and preparing to return home (we’ll miss you!). For those of us still in the city, life begins to take a slower pace. Work starts to be a bit quieter. Evenings are spent relaxing in the park with friends. And many of us will leave the city at some point for a short break. This is good news for our weary bodies!
There is a real sweetness and relief in being able to acknowledge your weakness before God. But the aim of the Christian life is to develop strength, to muscle up (spiritually speaking), and to grow mighty in God. We are wrong to think that aspiring to spiritual strength is somehow proud or unrealistic and unattainable. God has gifted us his Holy Spirit for the very purpose of strengthening us.
Our university campuses and social media feeds are increasingly full of accusations of injustice. From Germaine Greer to Peter Tatchell, Richard Dawkins to Brian Cox, no one is safe from contemporary society’s obsession with victimhood. So many of us are asking, how can we find peace in a world where everyone feels like a victim?
About three weeks ago, as we were going on holiday, I began to feel a strong sense of my own weakness. I was feeling very tired after a busy term. I was struggling with a cold and bruised ribs and was particularly aware of my battle against specific sins (impatience, selfishness etc.).
As the holiday went on, I began to reflect on this weakness…
The past couple of weeks, we’ve been thinking a lot about how we all respond differently to God speaking to us. A lot of the time when preaching, it’s hard to tell what’s going on in the people who are listening.
There are quite a lot of reactions you get to observe when preaching: Someone is yawning because they stayed up late the night before. Someone is looking intently, hanging on every word…
Christianity has moved from being near the centre to the very periphery of cultural influence, and nothing is more obviously distinct about Christians than their views on sex. We are simply speaking a different language when we try and articulate an ethic of sex that slams headfirst into so much of what is believed and practiced today.
We live in an age which has witnessed an explosion in the levels of anxiety. What’s causing this? How do we solve the anxiety epidemic? Join us for a thought-provoking evening as we seek to understand the sources of our discontent and consider whether Christianity has anything to say to this modern phenomenon.
7.30pm - Starting Wednesday 17th October
If you’ve been around Grace for a while, you will have heard of Salt, our online evangelistic publication, and our Salt Live events. Both are aimed at engaging curious Londoners on matters of life and faith.
Over the past year, we’ve had thousands of people read our articles, hundreds of people attend these events and a number have gone on to explore faith with us.
This autumn we’re adding a Salt Course into the mix.
It will be a six evening course for those who are curious to explore life's big questions in a non-judgemental environment. See more dates below.
We’re going to spend the first three evenings dealing with the biggest objections or questions that Londoners have about the Christian faith.
Pleasure: Isn’t Christianity repressive?
Proof: Isn’t faith irrational?
Pain: Why is the world so broken?
And then we’ll spend three weeks looking at the intrinsic desires that we all have and asking how much does Christianity speak to these desires?
Love: How can I find what I’m looking for?
Peace: How can I be free from anxiety?
Satisfaction: How can I experience lasting fulfilment?
We’ll have some good food together, courtesy of the folks at Costa, a short talk unpacking the question for us, then we’ll have discussion around tables in groups along with a Q&A at the end of the evening.
All dates:
17th October
24th October
31st October
7th November
14th November
21st November
Sign-up here. Feel free to email info@salt.london if you have any questions.
We look forward to seeing you then!
On the 6th October, we will be going as a church to the Advance Conference and would encourage you to come too. You can book directly with us on ChurchSuite. For more information, please keep reading!
Advance is the partnership of churches that Grace belongs to, a global movement joining together to advance the gospel through planting and strengthening churches.
Advance is a practical way of describing our partnership, and expresses our primary purpose of taking new ground for the gospel in small towns, suburbs, cities and nations. We are fully committed to this movement, and see this conference as a fantastic opportunity to be encouraged by one another and get to know the churches we work with better.
This year, the UK conference is entitled ‘Leaders That Last’ and will be two days of cultivating sustainable and joyful leadership in the church. The Saturday is a day of celebration for all church members and will consist of seminars, sung worship, prayer, and updates on how we are continuing to advance together. PJ Smyth, who is the leader of Advance, will be teaching us on the Saturday. There will also be children’s work provided.
We would encourage you to come by coach with us, the cost of which is included when you book through our event page. All transportation timings can be found on the event page.
King’s Community Church Southampton have invited us to use their building, and we will travel there together via coach.
To find out more about who makes up Advance, and the shared values of the churches in the movement, you can visit the website.
If you do plan on travelling alone, you can book through the Advance website.
Somehow we have come to attach the idea of ‘freedom’, and particularly freedom of thought, to atheism. Religious people are shackled to ideas that exert power of them, almost as though they are helpless victims. But the atheist is free because nobody’s gonna tell him what to believe or do.
Well, sort of. But no.
One of the greatest myths we live with in day-to-day life is the illusion of freethinking. For one thing, there’s the fact that most atheists do not arrive at that conclusion independently, but rather through a sequence of influences, books, ideas, often imbibed unconsciously; which is not all that different from how we arrive at religious conclusions. In other words, the so-called freethinking atheist would likely hold to some other belief system if raised in some other age or in some other place. You’re not as free as you think. You’re just as much a product of your time and circumstance as any religious devotee.
But freethinking is still more illusive than that. Scratch beneath the surface of ordinary life and you discover a surprising truth, which is that we’re all driven by religious impulses all of the time, especially the impulse to worship. This was never more aptly put than by the late David Foster Wallace in his famous speech, This Is Water:
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship… is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. [1]
Most of us won’t accept this on the basis that we have a pretty narrow view of what worship means – perhaps singing, definitely involving a higher power, and probably some elaborate rituals. But really, worship is much more basic and ordinary than that: it’s allowing something in your life to become in some way ultimate. When something becomes the underlying driver, motivation, goal, passion of your life, then that’s what you worship. That’s what Wallace meant, anyway, and that’s why most of the stuff we worship will ‘eat you alive’.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough… Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you… Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
All of this rings true. Whatever you want so much in life that to have it would be heaven, and to not have it would be hell – that is your god, and that god exerts control over you. If worship can be directed at all these ordinary pursuits and passions – money, the body, power, intellect – then it doesn’t take much thought before you start to see a place like London through new eyes. There are temples of worship everywhere, and devout worshippers scurry through life offering their sacrifices on the altars to their particular gods. And, yes, these gods eat us up. Every one of us has tales of the damage we have caused ourselves through our uncontrollable desires and ambitions.
The most sobering aspect of all this is that so little of it is voluntary:
But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
This means you did not choose to worship, and you did not choose what to worship. Instead, worship arises from inside us as something unconscious, instinctive, irrepressible.
So, even if we like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, led by logic and evidence, most of the time the very opposite is true: we are led by the hidden drivers of the heart. [2] We are compelled by motives we can’t fully understand, in search of goals we can’t fully articulate, in hope of dreams we can’t fully express.
Nobody is a freethinker. Nobody is a free agent.
Our humanity does not flourish in a spiritual vacuum when worship of something is so deeply hardwired into us. Without a sense of the greatness of the God who is over us we end up worshipping the material world under us. And that experience of being consumed and ruled by those lesser idols can awaken an awareness that running from God does not lead to freedom.
When you realise this you can begin to make sense of the impulse toward faith. Those who grow sick and tired of the endless pursuit of meaningless desires – who find that they are actually enslaved by their worship of money and intellect and sex and power – may at some point yearn for a different kind of worship, and may instead turn to God. To do so is not to surrender your reason, or engage in an act of mindless obeyance to some form of empty tradition, but rather to begin to be honest with yourself in recognizing that you are not as free as you think you are.
This post originally appeared at Salt.
[1] This Is Water, by David Foster Wallace, accessible all over the internet
[2] See The Righteous Mind,by Jonathan Haidt
Most people I talk with who are not Christians have a lot of deep misconceptions about this religion. In a way, this is odd, given our rich Christian heritage in this country. But it also provides some great talking points in this otherwise (often) awkward subject of conversation. So, here’s my list of fourteen things you probably didn’t know about the Christian faith, but really should.
1. Churches are not buildings, and the buildings are (almost) unnecessary. A church is the people; a particular group that has come together to form a family despite often having zero things in common. This means that you could knock down all those old church buildings in Britain and the actual church (the group of people) would not be wiped out; arguably, it would flourish.
2. Not all (male) Christian ministers wear dresses. This might strike you as a slightly silly point, but here’s why it matters to me. The early Christians were a rag-tag bunch of men and women, with a very flat leadership structure, and very little in the way of special outfits or elaborate rituals. Today we call this style of Christianity ‘low church’ (as opposed to ‘high church’). It’s important because it means that Christianity is designed for the ordinary guy in the street, and Christian ministers should look pretty normal too.
3. There are more Christians in China than the population of Britain. There is simply no way you can describe Christianity as a ‘Western religion’ any more (nor was there ever!). Christianity is exploding in secret in China, as well as in underground, hidden churches in places like Iran and Nepal. The Christian faith in general is growing fastest on the continent of Africa. We may be a post-Christian country here in Britain, but that says very little about the fortunes of this faith.
4. You will never encounter deeper diversity than you do in the global church. You may be able to think of some community that is more diverse than the church, but I doubt it. The reason is that Christianity advances by the power of its message, and that the message itself is one of radical unity regardless of natural divisions. The earliest Christians managed to bridge some impossible divides, with slaves and masters worshipping alongside one another, as well as Jews and Gentiles, and every other societal division that existed in the first century Roman Empire. That makes sense when you understand the core message of Christianity: it tells us that we’re all broken (so there’s no room for pride) and that we can all be forgiven and brought into God’s family (so there’s deep unity). In reality, that means that on any given Sunday I could be sat next to a Nigerian, a Malaysian, or a Ukrainian at church, and that would be pretty normal.
5. If Christians were less involved in social issues, chaos would ensue. It’s estimated that the volunteerism of Christians in Britain is worth about £315 million every year [1]. At the same time, there are a lot of people who think Christians are dangerous and don’t fit in modern society. I wish these people would understand the selfless kindness and generosity of so many Christians, and the reasons they do all this. Believing in Jesus changes you in a very basic way, and I have never encountered any form of belief as potent or effective in changing individuals and helping them to become more loving and kind.
6. Nobody gets to heaven by being good or moral. These good works are a result of being a Christian, not the means of becoming one. In fact, if you think you’re a ‘good person’ then you are totally unqualified to be a Christian. It’s counter-intuitive, and that’s why so few people understand something so fundamental. But Christians do not believe in being good, nor do they think that being good will get you any points. The only thing that matters is being forgiven.
7. Being christened as a baby is quite likely totally meaningless. Too many people think that if you’re splashed with ‘holy water’ as a baby, you’re all good. But of course, if it were that simple then we’d walk through the streets spraying the general population with specially blessed holy water from fire hoses. Far fewer would call themselves Christians if they realised how meaningless this ceremony is unless you also have some kind of genuine faith.
8. There are lots of other practices that don’t make you a Christian.Being British. Eating fish on Fridays. Going to church. Praying. None of these things make you a Christian. The only thing that makes a person a Christian is whether or not they have faith.
9. Faith is not a blind leap. While some of the New Atheists like to claim that faith is some kind of wish upon a star, the word ‘faith’ has a lot more to do with (1) being persuaded of the truth of something, and (2) placing trust in those beliefs. You exercise this kind of faith all the time in ordinary life. It’s much more like the experience of being persuaded that a 150,000 ton lump of metal can safely float on water, and exercising trust the moment you step on board. For Christians, the faith you need is faith in Jesus to save you. It’s nothing more, and nothing less, than that.
10. There’s much more evidence than you think. A lot of people assume that Christianity was debunked at some point by someone. But that has never happened. On the contrary, one of the most unique things about the Christian faith is that it is based on historical events, rather than teaching that can be separated from events. What I mean is this: you could take the teachings of just about any other religious founder and scrub out the historical story, and the teachings still stand. That isn’t the case with Jesus. If the events didn’t happen (especially his death and resurrection) then there’s no Christianity. Thankfully, there are heaps of evidence that attest to it being true.
11. The reason we’re not progressive on some issues is not because of any phobias. It’s true that we continue to draw certain lines in the sand on issues of morality, but it’s not because we’re afraid of change, nor is it coming from judgmentalism. The most basic belief all Christians share is that we’re all sinners in need of God’s kindness, and that precludes any allowance of self-righteousness or judgment. But we also believe that God has the best plan for our flourishing, and we don’t get to simply make up the rules (since that road inevitably leads to tragedy and oppression).
12. Most of your deepest moral instincts come from the Bible. The instincts we think are either common sense, or part of the very fabric of nature, such as equality, human rights, justice – all of these (and many more) have been embedded in our culture from centuries of exposure to the Bible. Now that we Westerners have largely abandoned our Christian heritage, we are like a jumbo jet suffering engine failure: we continue to glide, but it’s not long before this thing will plummet to the ground. Morality without a Moral Lawgiver is arbitrary and vulnerable.
13. Jesus was not a good teacher. CS Lewis put it best:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to [2].
14. We really do believe you’ll live for eternity, the only question is where. Some people think that if Christianity is to survive, it must accommodate itself to modern sensibilities. That would mean no more talk of an afterlife, and definitely no hell. Besides the fact that this strategy doesn’t actually work (the more liberal a church becomes, the more empty it gets), we have some pretty formidable reasons to believe that eternity is real. The most important reason of all is the fact that Jesus came back from the dead, a fact attested to by hundreds of witnesses. That is the reason it’s worth listening to the only person in history who spoke with anything like authority on the subject.
This post originally appeared at Salt.
[1] Cinnamon Faith Action Audit 2016
[2] CS Lewis, Mere Christianity
