to étrangère

Thank you! I think it's nice too, even special. I'm praying that we will get to where we are going.

If you ever go across the sea to Ulster

Our group of churches (EPCEW) has been talking to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Ireland (EPs) about coming together in a synodical relationship. Last Saturday, May 9th, we had a day conference (pictured) to listen to each other and try to figure out where to go next. Everyone is convinced about the Biblical mandate but as usual, the practicalities loom large. I was encouraged (have been all along) because both groups are singing off the same sheet (have been all along). The backgrounds and ethos are different and we don't have a history like theirs but I'm encouraged to believe that the spirit of grace, so evident among us at Cambridge, will enable us to surmount peculiar habits of thought and practice and unite on the things that matter. I also think we can do each other a lot of good and present a better witness to the world.

No, No?

As a small group of churches we were recently asked whether multiple worship-leaders and guitar amplifiers were a 'no, no' among us? The question comes from the fringe but manages to persuade us that it belongs to the centre - such is the heat it always manages to generate! When it actually becomes centre-stage, we find that lots of other things have moved to the fringe. Worse still, so has Christ!

Does anyone ever ask who may and may not lead worship? The OPC did in the 1990s and came up with 'only those properly authorized' among whom they included missionaries and approved students for the ministry. Pretty conservative - but that's what they are - me too. There was nothing about music, even though the worship wars had by then begun to affect some of their congregations. What's with the music thing anyway - we are about worship not music and certainly not performance. But there must surely be some regulation.

Our freedom is to worship God, what a privilege! Poor old regulative principle! - we show such disrespect by charging it with bondage. It really is about freedom, like the freedom of Adam and Eve before the Fall - freedom on God's terms not ours. Remember Cain and Abel. There is such a thing as true worship - it must be in spirit and truth. It means at the very least doing it God's way not ours. Make me a captive, Lord and then I shall be free!

Concrete examples

doggiesbreakfast said...
Interesting. I have had one of Blamires' books (on the post-christian mind) on my Amazon wishlist for while but not got round to getting it. You are right it is a pressure! Have you any more concrete examples of the phenomenon?

Well I suppose we must look in the context of church practice at the fall of the sermon and rise of 'chat' as a prime example. Associated with it is the emergemce of 'counselling' and the widespread expectation that ministers should be community workers.

More generally, many assume that 'helping people' is so essentially Christian and 'witness-ful' that the 'how' doesn't matter. I spent four years (long ago) as a family case worker before fully realizing how humanistic social philosophy and social work practice are. Should have known better - there is no room for God because there is none for sin either. I'm not sure that we have really grasped what a minefield 'contextualizing' the gosel is.

Thank you Harry Blamires.

I had to prepare an end of year sermon for our congregation and chose the subject of Our Spiritual Warfare. I decided to rework an existing sermon based on Ephesians 6:10-12 in the hope of improving it (I don't think it happened - too many thoughts came). It occurred to me, however, that Paul's reminder that we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers points to the inwardness and essential spiritual nature of the conflict. I also thought about the important role of deception in the enemy's strategy.

It occurred to me that we do not think about these things as we ought. If we catch ourselves thinking about Christian things, we are easily fooled into believing that we are thinking about them Christianly. In a moment of 'theological flashback' I thought of two older books, Lloyd-Jones' Conversions: Psychological and Spiritual, a critique of Willam Sargent's Battle For The Mind and Harry Blamires' The Christian Mind. The second of these, written in the early 1960s has always had a prophetic flavour for me; a kind of primitive precursor of Wells' God In The Wasteland.

Blamires wrote from an Anglican perspective about the abandonment of the Christian mind and exposed what he called the 'schizophrenic type', especially in the church hierarchy, who hops in and out of his Christian mentality. Blamires believed that British Christians had sold out to the secularists and that they were incapable of thinking Christianly even about Christian things.

We are a good deal further up the creek now and there's still no sign of a paddle. A couple of weeks ago a Dutch Ph.D. student told me that he was researching ways in which psychotherapy could improve the pastoral ministry. In his mind it did not savour of a sell-out to the secularists. He felt that too much pastoral counselling was intuitive and unscientific. I wanted to believe that 'unscientific' meant unbiblical or untheological but it was too much to hope for.

Back to Blamires ! He thought the sell-out to the secularists was partly the result of reluctance by Christians to stand up and be counted. Perhaps we have reached that bend in the creek where reticence has given way to enthusiasm - not for objective truth or anything like that but for cultural relevance and the felt need to communicate. It puts us under such huge pressure doesn't it?

Children of the Covenant

I preached at our Church in Bury St. Edmunds last Sunday. Seven young people were received into communciant membership. In addition to their commitment to some weighty obligations, what impressed me most was their simple profession of faith and the simplicity of their understanding. Their grasp of obligation was inferior to their undestanding of indebtedness but I'm hopeful that the two will equalise in due course. Among those who confirmed their baptism as infants, thereby passing from being heirs to inheritors, was one young lady from a non-church home whose friendship with one of the covenant children and consistent discipleship led her into the body of Christ. 'Oh to grace how great a debtor!

Boundaries!
An experienced pastor came to talk about outreach. The question came up, 'what about the church?' He had given sound advice about what to do and what not do when 'playing away' and contacting 'outsiders' but what about 'at home'? What sort of a church ought we to be at home? The answer was that we should preserve the distinctives and make sure the members know where the boundaries are. We don't want suspect professions of faith or people coming in with the wrong expectations. I understood what he was getting at - be honest and avoid compromising the gospel. For me at least, he was pressing the 'right buttons'.

However, the boundaries-word left me trifle uneasy. Having spent time in a highly controlled, well defined, church situation, where the boundaries were always clear and mobility from the inside out and the outside in correspondingly difficult, I wondered how this would marry up to the the notion of outreach. My recollection is that it required almost superhuman strength of will to cross in either direction. I also remembered something in the Bible about people who were unwilling either to enter the kingdom themselves or permit others to do so.

How the church continues to be the church while reaching out to the lost seems to be linked to the dialectic of being passionate for truth and passionate for the lost. Does either require the surrender of anything to the other? I don't think so, for if it did, we would not be able to rely on Christ's work for our salvation. Mercy and truth meet together in him.