the big question i have been pondering over the last few weeks is about hospitality. at Christ Church we get loads of visitors and give away loads of our welcome packs, but not many stay and i think that the reason is because we are not a very hospitable church. Those wonderful people going through our belonging course tell me that they feel that they come to the church because the teaching is good, God is present, and the worship rocks. But they stay in the church because they feel God wants them here and not because they feel welcome. we need to do something about this. hospitality should be a value of the church and we need to deliberately do it well.

for many years we had a social committee, but i was interested to speak to one of the older and more established members of the church who said that they felt that the social committee covered the lack of hospitality with activity that was only really for those who were like the members of the social committee. we have welcomed people like us, but not if they are not like us. so how do we do it?

How do we become a hospitable church that is not just welcoming to a few, but too many? some say that we don’t want to overwhelm people, but i do not agree. i would rather scare people off with love than lose them without noticing. anyway, the chance would be a fine thing. i think we need to get uncomfortable so that we can welcome others.

so thoughts please…

I know for a fact that Chris and i were very different theologically (he too was a minister in the URC and i have no idea how we both ended up in the same place and yet so different). Chris was very open to social action and was old school 1960′s liberal where Jesus was the best socialist who ever lived. He never had the hypocrisy that so many of my fellow Evangelicals have because Chris was always up to he elbows in helping others and was so driven to love and care. i praise God that the theological atmosphere i have grown up in does not put such work in the liberal camp, but rather says rightly that working for social equality is a Christian thing to do. (i know what i mean).

I am only sorry i never got to know Chris properly as an adult. For whatever reason i was always the nephew and our faith differences put up barriers. i remember having a conversation over a beer (good beer too) where Chris could not accept my premise that God is nice and he likes us (stolen phrase from Adian Plass). he said that for him God had always been a God of justice. i was so frustrated as i tried to make clear that God is love and that justice and niceness are both sub categories of love and are in no way mutually exclusive. So much we didn’t talk about though because of history and prejudice (at least partly on my part as a child of evangelical parents).

Last year when i came up for my 7 year refresher and Chris his 21 or 28 we were both at the same get together in Cambridge. it is the only time we had been together at a ‘church’ thing where we were able to enjoy being members of the same church. What was interesting was how similar we were. we grew in faith in different places, with different theological backgrounds, seemingly it was totally coincidental that we were in the same denomination, yet we were so alike in style and passion. driven reformers. genetics ran true it seems.

During the last months it has been nice to spend time with him and pray with him. Anyway, i will miss Chris and i hope and pray that i will see him again in God’s presence. I pray for Kath and the boys, and hope i can be a good witness to them.

Does one follow another’s lead, no matter who that person might be, if it is against one’s conscience? No! If a person believes that something that their leader is telling them to do is wrong and their action is contrary to scripture then they should not do it. It is their responsibility if they sin against their conscience, not the leader leading them. The leader is answerable before God for leading the ignorant into sin, and for manipulating the faithful away from righteousness, but if a person is not ignorant and not fooled then surely under scripture they are answerable for their own sin.

My experience is that people become all legalistic over things like this whilst missing the glaring issues that they themselves have. specks and planks come to mind.

As for me, another battle with guilt that stems from an overdeveloped sense of responsibility for those who are in the flock that i shepherd. I place it at the foot of the cross and pray for the blessing and assurance of the accuser. The devil is called the accuser of the brethren, and how true that is. the accusations are seeded in truth, but founded on pride and insecurity.

Come Lord Jesus!

I have grown to love the story of Nehemiah. The way that the news of the plight of the people of Jerusalem moves him to weep and pray. the movement of the Spirit in him that causes the discontent with their plight to be a vision of their restoration. But mostly i love the courage that Nehemiah displays as he follows through in making the vision a reality. He faces so much opposition from inside and outside the camp. He is accused of arrogance and idiocy, plotted againts and invited to spring traps. All of this and he perseveres. He achieves his vision on a mind blowing scale, in just 52 days they rebuild miles of wall and mostly it is down to the strength, faith, and commitment of the vision carrier.

One of the reasons that i admire Nehemiah is because i see my own situation in his (although on a much smaller scale). God has given me a vision for the transformation of lives through discipleship to Jesus and the church i lead has grown that vision to be the transformation of Braintree to the glory of God and i love it. It is a vision worth living and dying for. Transforming Community by nurture and healing through faith in Jesus.  I thank God for putting me here and allowing me to be a part of such a worthwhile vision for His church. (Please God never let me be the leader of a church that only has a vision for a social club for their own benefit). But do I have the courage to see it through?

You see, the vision grows and develops through prayer and study, discussion and faith. it is now not simply a desire to transform, but a plan of how that transformation will take place according to God’s plan. Do i have the courage and the faith to go through with it? The vision that God is growing, in the leaders of the church as well as me as their minister, is not what was expected by many or called logical by those lacking in faith. it is a plan about the reformation of the church so that the people can can be equiped to serve the vision and to grow in their faith and discipleship in Jesus. It is not a plan with lots of ‘projects’ for the church to do on top of their current structure, but a plan that transforms the structure of the church so that the organic growth of the church will lead to huge impact in the power of the Holy Spirit through the transformed lives of the people. And needless to say, it is not popular with some.

It necessitates a mindset change from church as people centred social gathering and pastoral care as chaplaincy to church as God centred worshippers and pastoral care as formation for service. This is hard for some as all they have known is the kind of church where the congregation are the centre of the purpose of the church. Where the church is set up to serve them and meet their needs and they have not been taught or even imagined that the church could be for anything else. I want to see a church where the needs of the lost who do not know Jesus can become the found who know Jesus as Lord. Where their needs and transformation are the central purpose of the community of faith as Jesus said they should be in the great commission.

Of course, this means that the church ceases to be a place of comfortable belonging and becomes a place of a different sort of comfort. Comfort that is rightness. rightness that comes from doing what we are supposed to do in the way we are supposed to do. the comfort of satisfaction and purpose fulfilled. It is this comfort that is talked about in Isaiah 40. the comfort of rightness in the eyes of God rather than the comfortableness that comes from the armchair of safe selfsatisfaction.

so much more to say… i will try to add to this and would be interested to hear other’s views.

It dawned on me that people are afraid of the light. Where the light of Jesus shines then the truth is revealed and all is laid bare. Chistians are fearful of the light, probably for different reasons.

“What if God shines the light on me and sees what i am really like?” – Fear that God will reject us is a lie. First, it assumes that God does not already know who we really are. This is God we are talking about. Second, it assumes that good people will get better treatment and more ready acceptance from God. There is no-one who is good but God alone and there is nothing we can do to persuade God to save us. We are saved by grace, not because we are good but because God is good. Third, the enemy wants us to believe this lie since when Christians come to understand the truth they begin to move into the full potential of their place as adopted children of God and ambassadors of His power and love.

“It would be better to leave good enough alone” – The idea that it is better to leave things in the dark where they cannot do any harm is also a lie. I have notices that it is in the dark that totally innocent things can appear to be greatly sinister (such as the coat rack appearing as a monster) and evil things can appear to be more harmless than they really are. It is in the dark that danger lurks. a car that is speeding towards a person on a dark night without lights can be deadly, but in daylight it can be seen with plenty of time. It is for good reasons that the Bible says that God shines the light into dark places. it is when there is light that we see the truth and can deal with what we find accordingly.

“What if I don’t like what I find” – all of us hide our darkest aspects of ourselves in the darkness of our hearts. The murderous, lustful, and hateful thoughts about others as well as any number of other unedifying truths and acts. And do you know something, they are not nice and if we are at all affected by our encounter with the Spirit of God we are repulsed to think that such thoughts and actions reside in us. Yet, if we do not allow the light of Jesus and to show them in their true form we will be unable to gain healing and rescue from them. they will fester and continue to stand in the way of our relationship with God.

The truth is, as the Bible says, as the people of God we are called out of the darkness into the wonderful light of Jesus (1 Peter 2:9). God calls us out of darkness into light and that we might be arrogant enough to believe that the place where God calls us to live out our lives (in the light) is not as good for us as the place where we believe things should remain hidden (the darkness) is just plain wrong. God loves us passionately and our growth into the image and life of Jesus is His wonderful intention for us. Through submission to His plan for us (which includes bringing our very selves into the light of Jesus where we will see what is really there) and obedience to Him (as he works the process of healing that sees broken lives made whole and warped spirits made true) we are remade into the image of the very living God, which is Jesus.

So many Christians measure the ‘love content’ of words and actions according to the way it makes them feel. If one feels rejected or hurt or ‘got at’ then what the other person is saying or doing is not loving. yet this seems to me to be a wholly spurious line of thinking. Love does not begin and end in feelings, rather it serves the truth. the truth is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and that through Jesus Christ we have a way back into relationship with God. if, however, we are to walk that path back to God and then to live in a continued relationship with God we have to face the truth that there are many things in us that need to be healed or changed. It feels bloomin’ awful to be faced with the truth when that truth is our own shortcomings, but the truth sets us free because the truth reconnects us with God.

As a church leader i am not the most gentle, tea drinking, head patting man. If i believe there is an issue that is disrupting a person’s relationship with God then i will speak it out… and that is not always very popular. Many people would much rather live in the bliss of feigned ignorance (I say feigned because most often people choose not to properly address those issues and habits that stop them knowing God), rather than face the painful truth.

Yet God loves us with an everlasting love. the Bible says God is love. At the same time God is the judge of all things. There is no tension between these 2 things. God judges because he is just and he is just because he loves. His desire is not to condemn us, but through judgement to redeem us. when we are inevitably found guilty of sin we can either go down or we can accept his offer to pay the price for us so that we are made innocent by Jesus.

It is the process of gaining the awareness of sin and addressing the results of sin in our life that the disciple goes through, and it hurts. We take responsibility, and it hurts. and then we allow Jesus to put it to death on the cross. As a real Pastor i am called to lead people into a closer relationship with God for the Glory of God, and to do that i must sometimes upset them even as i am myself upset by the same process of healing and wholeness in my own life as God continues to grow me as his child and Jesus’ disciple.

The truth sets us free, and the truth hurts. we cannot measure the content of love by the lack of pain. rather we measure the content of love by whether it calls us to a closer and deeper relationship with God who is by nature love.

God is certainly doing something in this little town of ours and we seem to be right at the heart of it all. There are many challenges from people (inside the church almost more than outside). We are trying to grow a Bible believing, Spirit filled, community transforming body of Christ. Please give us your power Lord God and go before us!