Alison Morgan, St John’s Keynsham, November 2008
Readings
Isaiah 40.28-31, 1 Peter 2.4-5
Introduction
Personal introduction…
Our passion at ReSource is to see individuals and churches renewed for mission, and that’s what I want to talk about this morning. A lot of our vision comes out of a book I wrote a couple of years ago, called The Wild Gospel. I didn’t actually think of the title, my publisher did – but I think it captures what it is that I’m excited about rather well, as does the reading we heard from Isaiah. This, I think, is a time to wait on the Lord, to renew our strength, to rise up with wings like eagles and change the way we think and do things.
So let me start by asking you, what sort of gospel is your gospel? Because I think often we settle for something that’s rather less dynamic than Jesus intended. Is the gospel we live and share a wild gospel? Because often it’s easy, I think, to find ourselves settling for a safe gospel. A predictable gospel. A packaged gospel. And then, before we know where we are, a yesterday’s gospel, an irrelevant gospel, a boring gospel. And if Jesus was one thing, he wasn’t boring. So how can we make sure we aren’t either?
Jesus and culture
Let’s start by thinking about Jesus, and how he related to the world he was born into. How do you imagine Jesus? Let’s just think about it:
² He broke all the social conventions
§ spoke to wrong people (women, children, outcasts, foreigners, sinners);
§ in wrong places (parties, ordinary peoples’ houses);
§ in wrong way (without involvement of priests)
² He was totally subversive in his attitude to the religious structures.
² He was so dangerous politically that they thought he was planning to instigate a rebellion.
² He didn’t even stick to the rules of nature – he walked on water, healed the sick and cast out demons.
No one had ever done this kind of thing before. It was as if he came from a different world and operated according to different rules.
Think about how he related to individuals. In almost every encounter, he completely overturned the assumptions of the person he was talking to. To each one he said, you think this is the way to make sense of life – but let me tell you it’s not.
Ø Woman at well : Get your act together, it’s not men you need, it’s the Holy Spirit
Ø Paralysed man : your main problem is not your legs it’s your sins – your sins are forgiven
Ø Rich young ruler : it’s not money you need, it’s God
Jesus wanted to turn their whole world and the way they thought about it inside out. He did it for person after person after person.
Jesus’ teaching
It was the same with his teaching. What would you do if you met the Son of God? Well, there’d be a lot of things you wanted to know, so you’d probably ask him a lot of questions. And that’s what people did. But the problem was, he never gave a straight answer. You’d think it was the ideal opportunity, wouldn’t you, to pin God down, get him to explain things properly. But f you asked Jesus a question, chances were he’d just ask you one back. In the gospel of Mark there are 67 episodes with conversation. In 50 of them, it’s Jesus who is asking the questions.
· Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Why do you call me good? [Mk 10]
· Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me. Who set me to be a judge over you? [Lk 12]
· Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? I will also ask you a question, and you tell me – did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?
Other times he didn’t reply to a question with a question, but with a story or a metaphor instead.
· Why don’t your disciples fast? No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it on an old garment; otherwise the new will be torn, and the piece from the new will not match the old. [Lk 5]
· How should we pray? Suppose one of you has a friend… [Lk 11]
· What’s the kingdom of God like? ‘It’s like a grain of mustard seed which a man sowed in his garden, and the birds came and built nests in the branches… [Lk 13]
Now that’s not the way we do things. We explain the world to ourselves by building up a picture of the way we think things are. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle, and our job is to get all the bits into a manageable picture. But it never quite works, and so we are left with questions. But Jesus wasn’t interested in this kind of approach to life. It’s as if he was saying, look, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way you are doing this - you need to start all over again. Why did he do this: because he wanted to help them see that reality wasn’t as they thought. Reality isn’t neat and tidy, and it can’t be boxed into what you can see.
The lessons of history
So that was how Jesus related to the world he was born into. He didn’t just overturn tables, he overturned a whole way of thinking.
So then I wondered, how’s it been since then? How have we got on in our own attempts to live and speak this wild, unpredictable gospel? Have we been as surprising and as revolutionary as Jesus was, or have we been tamer than that, more cautious, conforming, predictable? And if we have, does it matter? Jesus may have turned everything upside down, but does it follow that we need to do that too?
Well, I decided the best thing to do was to look back through history, and see how the church had done things, how the Christians had got on in the past relating to the world in which they lived. And I found a really interesting pattern.
The pattern is this. Human history seems to go in phases. Phases when things stay pretty much the same alternate with phases when everything changes. When things are staying the same, as they do for hundreds of years at the time, the church’s task is to be faithful, to keep going, in the same way it always has. But when the world out there is changing, then the church has to change too, or it gets left behind and no longer connects with people’s lives. And the problem is that at the moment the world isn’t staying the same, it’s changing. Fast.
Luther summarised the principle: If you preach the gospel in all its aspects with the exception of the issues which deal specifically with your time, you are not preaching the gospel at all. We need to connect with where people are at.
What are the issues of our time?
So what are the new issues people face today, in our changing world? Jesus said he came to seek and to save the lost. What are the ways in which people today are lost?
I travel a lot to Africa, working there to train priests and evangelists to teach discipleship using a course we’ve developed called Rooted in Jesus. And I think of you asked an African Christian what are the tough things about Western society, he would come up with three things:
i) Spiritual emptiness.
Firstly, we
live in a world which is spiritually extremely impoverished. We are the children
of a rational, scientific age. We’ve made fantastic advances in understanding
the world we live in, but only now are we beginning to find out that’s not the
whole story. We have inner needs too, and people are trying to meet them in all
sorts of dangerous ways. 
• we've recently moved to the West Country. We went to visit Glastonbury. It's a fascinating place - you only have to walk down the high street to see the vast number of wacky ways in which people are exploring the spiritual dimension of life. My favourite shop is this one - the Psychic Piglet. It’s been said that the mantra of our age is ‘I still haven’t found what I am looking for’ (Kelly)
• There are now more registered witches in UK than Christian ministers! I pray with people who have tried more isms than I’ve heard of… The result is that people get themselves into spiritual and psychological trouble. 6 out of 48 recent prayer ministry times I’ve done had deliverance issues. We need to face the facts that people are searching, and mostly in dangerous places.
ii) Myth of materialism and consumerism
Then secondly, there’s the myth that ‘stuff’ will make you happy. We have a society founded on materialism and consumerism. We believe that we can buy our way to happiness, define ourselves through spending. I went to the new Cabot Circus shopping centre in Bristol last week – giant versions of every shop you’ve ever heard of, mostly empty because of the credit crunch. Does spending make people happy?
• In the period leading up to Christmas 2001 UK consumers spent £35 billion (equivalent to 9 times the domestic product of Zambia in same year); and the following year doctors issued 22m prescriptions for antidepressants. As someone said, money doesn’t buy happiness – it just enables you to look for it in more places.
iii) Community
Then thirdly, there’s the whole issue of community. A third of people in the UK have never spoken to their next door neighbours. One church which did some door to door visiting asking people how they could pray for them found that in one particular street 90% of people asked them to pray about their loneliness. Mother Teresa said that loneliness is ‘the leprosy of modern society’. We know loads of people – and yet most people don’t have that many real relationships. The Kenyan communion liturgy includes the words ‘I am, because we are’. To us that’s a totally foreign concept. And yet community is fundamental to the gospel. ‘God is building for himself a people’, said one of the Church Fathers in the 3rd century. Christianity is about relationship.
What can we do about it?
So what do we do about it? Our task is to create ways of being Christian which work in our culture. This is the apostle Peter:
Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God's sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2.4-5
So we have to help individuals find a relationship with God which works, which helps them make sense of life as they experience it. We have to build a Christ-centred community, which is the church. And we have to express our faith outside that community in ways which connect with people’s real needs.
The individual
I’d like to tell you about my cleaner. Lisa was brought up by her mother, who was heavily into satanic, occult stuff – films, ouija, games. Lisa used to have nightmares and nocturnal visits from evil spirits. When she was 8 she was sexually abused. When she was 13 she saw her brother knocked down by a car outside school; she rang her mother who said she’d have to put her makeup on before she came, and by the time Lisa got back the ambulance had come and taken him to hospital. He died a few days later. Lisa became difficult. She got into drugs, left home when her mother remarried, had a series of men, some violent, and 5 abortions. Now has 3 children by 3 men. Lisa carried on taking drugs. She moved to a village outside Leicester, and was horrible to her Christian neighbours. Leaflets came through her door about Jesus. She did the correspondence course on them. Walked past the church one day, spoke to the woman cleaning, ‘managed to get an invitation’, did Alpha, became a Christian. Now off drugs, new life. Wanted prayer ministry, wanted to confess her whole past, as never has before. Very nervous. Ashamed. Talked for an hour, non stop, poured it all out. As we prayed, she felt a sudden sense of freedom. She forgave all who had hurt her – immense peace, the anxiety all disappeared. We waited on God, praying she would feel his arms around her. When we opened our eyes Lisa was stayed still; smiling, arms round herself. Said she didn’t want to come out of it – such a wonderful feeling, as if God were hugging her. Lisa is sharing her story with everyone she knows – and wrote it down for our magazine (copies at the back!)… I was looking in all the wrong places and with the wrong people for a thing called love.. I have been made pure in Christ and God has given me a vision of a future full of hope and glory.
The church
What about the church? Well, for several hundred years now church has meant coming to this kind of building once a week to do and say and sing the same kinds of things as people in all the other church buildings. And to a large extent that’s still true. We live in a branded world and go to a branded church. But Jesus didn’t do brands, he did mustard seeds, things which grew so that all sorts of birds could come and nest in their branches. He didn’t offer a production line model, he offered an organic one. Trees are not all the same – so why should churches be? How do you think about church and what it means?
Sometimes it’s helpful just to think about the word. The English word church comes from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘circle’. Are we a circle? The Greek word ecclesia means ‘those who are called out’. What are we called out of, and how called out do we feel? Church isn’t to do with an event which takes place in a building. It’s about being a people, being living stones built together into a spiritual house.
The community
Finally there’s the community. Peter says we are living stones built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood. We look beyond ourselves, to God and to the people for whom Jesus died. How do we minister the gospel to those who have not heard it? How do we make connection with them? It’s different in each place – there are no blueprints. In Germany I have friends whose church puts on wacky pantomimes. In Nepal and China, most of those who have become Christians have done so because they first experienced physical healing. In Leicester we tried things as varied as litter picking in the local school grounds, clubs for the homeless, and running multimedia events on topics of common concern like stress, money, sex, conflict, and Richard Dawkins… Here you have an exciting programme of community events in your More to Life programme. I do hope you feel encouraged by the results? Is it leading to an increase in people’s wilingness to explore faith?
Conclusion: confidence and courage
We live in a changing world. But I think that gives us an immense opportunity. What’s my dream for the church? I’d like to encourage us to rise up and soar on the wings of an eagle, to renew our strength, to run and not be weary, to walk and not faint. In a word, to be wild about our faith. And in particular I’d like us to embrace just two things:
1. Confidence : that we have a relevant message
2. Courage : to be creative in the ways we live it and share it
Why should we do that now? Well, because we live in a world where people still haven’t found what they are looking for.
For more about the Wild Gospel click here
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