Victorian Prophets

This morning at Christchurch, Hitchin, Philip (Christchurch’s minister) shared a story that gives me great hope for what our denomination could achieve.  As he discussed prophecy, he began to talk about some Victorian prophets.  These prophets would probably not have seen themselves as prophets: they were businessman, doing only what they thought was right.  They started well-known banks like Barclays and Lloyds, shoemakers like Clarks, and detergent makers like Rickitt.  And they became purveyors of chocolate like Frys, Terrys, Rowntrees and Cadburys.

They were Quakers, and through these companies, they seemed to exercise an enormous influence, not just in the business world but in the whole country. Their desire was not just to provide a good product, but to do things in a good way.  They lifted their workers from Victorian slums and put them in new communities with new facilities – from football pitches to night schools.  Company profits weren’t used to line pockets, but to fight slavery, alcohol addiction, child labour, animal cruelty and appalling prison conditions.

But what is most striking is not what they achieved, but how few of them there were that made this extraordinary difference.  One might be forgiven for thinking that the Quakers were this huge movement, a massive Victorian denomination that people went in droves to worship at.  Yet in 1851, Quakers were just 0.1% of the population.

Yes, 0.1% of the population!

To put that in context, the Quakers were a smaller part of the population than the United Reformed Church is today.

Just imagine then what the URC could achieve… and that’s even before we consider the potential impact of our ecumenical brothers and sisters.

Perhaps it’s time we regained our confidence? Perhaps it’s time we started asking God what he is calling us to do…

 

Preaching 2 (apologies for the unoriginal title!)

Here’s a slightly different tack on the College of Preachers research into preaching from the URC’s website. Why doesn’t preaching actually change attitudes?  What can we preachers do about it?

 

Preaching

There’s a really interesting article on Preaching in today’s Times, which can be found here.  According to research by the College of Preachers, 96.6% of Christians look forward to the Sunday sermon.

 

The Meaning of Life… and what it means

The sermon I preached yesterday at Christchurch, Hitchin can be found here.

 

A Holistic Gospel

I’m currently reading Brian McLaren’s “Everything Must Change“.  Like many of Brian McLaren’s books, I’m enjoying the read, and Brian makes some good points. Jesus didn’t just come so we could go to heaven when we die; he came to inaugurate a kingdom that aims to change the world now.

However, I can’t help but feel that Brian goes too far in criticising the “traditional evangelical” view of faith.  Do/have many evangelicals actually believe(d) what he claims they believe(d)?  A few American fundamentalists might have, but I’m not convinced wider evangelicalism has been engulfed entirely by the view that Jesus was/is only interested in the afterlife, and not this life.  Were nineteenth century evangelical missionaries really not interested in the social implications of the gospel as they set up schools and hospitals?  Are modern day Christians who hold what might be considered traditional evangelical theologies, but involved in homeless ministries and poverty alleviation (think of Christian charities like Tearfund and Compassion), only interested in getting people to heaven?  I don’t think so.

There is a risk that in the dash for a postmodern faith we throw the baby out with the bath water.  There is a risk that we don’t just throw out modern cultural aspects of faith, but integral, biblical aspects of the gospel.  There is a risk that we use postmodernity as an excuse to get rid of the bits of Christian faith we don’t like (or don’t understand), and shape our faith to suit our own opinions and ideas.  Brian, for example, uses postmodernity as an excuse to declare that hell isn’t a reality in “The Last Word and the Word After That“, or to imply (albeit loosely) that God is only loving, not wrathful in “Everything Must Change”.  Whilst I might not like the idea of hell or the fact God is, at times, angry, I’m not convinced that the Bible allows us to disregard either (the Old Testament testifies to God getting angry when his people persistently turn away from him, and Jesus talks about ‘hell’ more than the rest of Scripture combined).

What we need is a faith that is holistic: a faith that talks about Jesus saving us from our sinful desires, and about heaven, but also one that emphasises that this wonderful news has implications for how we live now.  We need a faith of orthodoxy and orthopraxis – a faith that embraces biblical truths, hand-in-hand with a care for the least, the last and the lost.  We need a faith that reminds us that Jesus came to bring in a kingdom that is both temporal (i.e. it affects the world now as it breaks in) and eternal.  We need a faith that isn’t affected by popular whimsical notions of God and culture, but one that is rooted in the person of Jesus, who came “to preach good news to the poor…proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, [and] to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” (Lk. 4.18b-19), as well as “to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk. 10.45).