Archive for April, 2011

John Stott

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

 Today is the 90th birthday of John Stott. A new book on the impact of his life has been released to celebrate the occasion. John Stott: A portrait by his friends, edited by Chris Wright, Inter-Varsity Press, contains remarks by 35 of his close acquaintances, including myself. They are characteristically very personal, and appreciative of the influence he has been on our lives and those of many, many others who could have contributed more.

 I will always be grateful to John for choosing me to be his assistant minister at All Souls Langham Place in London in 1967. I was fresh out of theological graduate school and he offered me the opportunity of a lifetime to join his staff, the first, non-English person to do so. My qualification was my non-Englishness since his congregation had grown increasingly international and he wanted to diversify his team.

It was at his side that I cut my teeth on the craft of pastoral ministry. I spent three years living with him, my bedroom being next to his. My last year as a married man was spent living in a flat in the church building itself. I could not have been closer to him if I tried. Surprisingly, I find myself the only staff minister who served under him, to have contributed to this book!

 The old model for learning your ministry by serving under and with a senior pastor is rare these days. Many newly minted clergy go straight to a small, mission congregation, or begin one themselves. They are on their own and have to learn the ropes by trial and error. It can be a lonely experience. Mine was quite different. John set me at tasks and gave me the tools to do them.

 I started out working with several very different groups of people. There was the Wednesday Club of young (under 35) business and professional people working in central London, who gathered every Wednesday night for supper and a program at our hall in Mayfair, a very swish part of the West End of London.

 In contrast to this there was the Good Companions’ Club of elderly, working class people who gathered every Monday for afternoon tea and a program at our clubhouse in the poorer part of the parish just north of Soho.

 I also was responsible for the Old Peoples’ Welfare Visitors, who visited shut-ins once a week. I helped supervise their visiting and acted as their chaplain. I also visited a small nursing home we ran for the indigent elderly.

 John asked me to be Chaplain to Students in the congregation. We had many of them attending the many schools and universities in London: nurses, medical students, law students, engineers, and so on. In time I became Chaplain to, what is now, the University of Westminster, whose buildings were near the church. This was at a time of student riots when Maoists were active in student circles. I had to counter the claims of Mao’s little red book with the claims of Christ! 

 In addition, I helped lead Sunday worship, gradually was allowed to preach, and followed up visitors, and those who showed an interest in becoming part of the congregation. That is how I met my wife. She was visiting her sister, who had been attending with her husband, who was stationed in London with the U.S. Navy.

 Those four years I spent with John Stott, at All Souls Church, formed my own ministry. He influenced how I prayed, preached, related to others, administered the congregation, thought strategically, and valued the life of the mind. I can never repay the debt I owe him for placing such confidence in me and inviting me to join him on his staff.

 I have known him now for nearly fifty years, for I met him and visited with him while I was at seminary before I worked alongside him. He has never disappointed me. Whenever Antoinette and I were in London we would get together for a meal. Whenever he was in our vicinity in the USA he would preach and teach for me, in Massachusetts, Florida and Texas. His subject was always the same: Jesus Christ. His source was always the Holy Scriptures. His attitude was always, “God be merciful to me a sinner!” His goal was always to proclaim the Gospel of the Cross of Christ. He was devoid of gimmicks. While wanting to relate relevantly to the culture he was in, he never embraced passing fads.

 He is still teaching me: how to grow old, how to be content, how to endure physical infirmity. May I be such an example and mentor to others as he has been to me. He is ready to leave this world and go to the Father. Thank you John for all that you have meant to me and so many others. Well done, good and faithful servant.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Church, Ministry | No Comments »

Holy Saturday

Saturday, April 23rd, 2011

On Holy Saturday, April 23, 2011, I gave this homily at the memorial service of Ed Gamber.

Holy Saturday, or Easter Eve, in the Christian calendar, is the commemoration of the transition between Christ’s death and resurrection. It is an appropriate time for us to mark the transition between Ed’s death and resurrection also. It is the day on which traditionally Holy Baptism is celebrated for those candidates who have been prepared through Lent, so that they may receive Holy Communion on Easter Day. Baptism is the symbolic dying to sin and the rising to new life. Ed was baptized and has died to sin and is rising to a new life. He goes before us to enter into the life of heaven. He knows by sight, what we only know by faith, the reality of the promises of Hebrews 12:22-23.
“You have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect.”

How do we know that? The common lectionary reading selected for Holy Saturday is 1 Peter 4:1-8. Verse 6 reads: “This is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they may be judged according to men in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.” (NIV) “Why was the Gospel preached to those who are dead? In order that, although in the body they received the sentence [of death] common to men, they might in the spirit be alive with the life of God.” (NEB) “For that is why the dead also had the gospel preached to them – that it might judge the lives they lived as men and give them also the opportunity to share the eternal life of God in the spirit.” (JBP)

In other words: the preaching of the gospel of God’s grace in Jesus, which Ed received and believed upon, enables him to go through death to share the eternal life of God in the spirit. This life is only a prelude to life after death. The gospel is preached to all, including to those now dead, because ultimately this life is only a prelude to a greater and endless world beyond. We affirm in the words of the Apostles’ Creed, that Jesus descended to the dead, and on the third day he rose again. We believe that for Ed as well, because Jesus has pioneered the way for us.

I was born and raised in a town that was established in a gold rush. Opposite my bedroom window was a statue of a gold prospector with his pick and shovel, pointing towards the hills where the gold was found. It is called the Pioneer Memorial, commemorating all those who came to the area in the 1860’s looking for gold. The inscription on the base of the memorial reads like this: “Where the vanguard rests today, the rearguard will rest tomorrow.”

Jesus is the “pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:2, RSV) He has gone before us to blaze the trail for us to follow. Ed has gone ahead of us to join him. We will follow in our turn. He is the vanguard. We are the rearguard. Where he rests today, we will rest tomorrow. This promise is pure gold.

When Jesus said goodbye to his disciples at the Last Supper in the upper room, St. John records that he “knew that the time had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father.” (John 13:1) That is what Ed has done: left this world to go to the Father. And the Father will welcome him with open arms. Ed will share God’s eternal life in the spirit. Thanks be to God for this wonderful prospect.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Death | 1 Comment »

True Worship and Community

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

 

Eugene Peterson, in his memoir, The Pastor, resolved on a double focus for keeping his vocation on track: worship and community. He maintains that the religious culture of America dismayed him on both counts. Here are his remarks.

“Worship had been degraded into entertainment. And community had been depersonalized into programs.”

“By the time I arrived on the scene as a pastor, the American church had reinterpreted the worship of God as an activity for religious consumers. Entertainment, cheerleading, and manipulation were conspicuous in high places. American worship was conceived as a public-relations campaign for Jesus and the angels. Worship had been cheapened into a commodity marketed by using tried-and-true advertising techniques. If so-called worshippers didn’t get ‘anything out of it,’ there had been no worship worth coming back for. Instead of calling people to worship God, pastors all over the country we inviting people to ‘have a worship experience.’ Worship was evaluated on the ‘consumer satisfaction scale’ of one to ten.”

“And community. The church as a community of faith formed by the Holy Spirit. Church in America was mostly understood by Christians and their pastors in terms of its function – what it did: build buildings, become ‘successful,’ change the neighborhood, launch mission projects, and create programs that would organize and motivate people to do these things. Programs, mostly programs. Programs had developed into the dominant methodology of ‘doing church.’ Far more attention was given to organizing and giving leadership to programs than anything else. But there is a problem here: a program is an abstraction and inherently nonpersonal. A program defines people in terms of what they do, not who they are. The more program, the less person. Church was understood not in terms of personal relationships and a personal God but in terms of ‘getting things done.’

“This struck me as violation of the inherent personal dignity of souls. The abstraction of a programmatic approach to men and women, however well-meaning, atrophied the relational and replaced it with the pragmatic. Treating souls for whom Christ died as numbers or projects or resources seemed to me something like a sin against the Holy Spirit. I wanted to develop a congregation in which relationships were primary, a household of hospitality. A community in which men and women would be know primarily by name, not by function. I knew this wouldn’t be easy, and it wasn’t. The programmatic methodology was epidemic in the American church.”

Peterson puts his finger on tendencies that I have seen active in so many churches. The church is seen to be successful if the calendar gets filled up with all sorts of activities. The problem is that is wears people out and the focus of the church shifts from loving the Lord and loving one another. The first and great commandments, as Jesus identified them, is to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. However, too many church leaders, including pastors, become obsessed with activities. You are measured by how many activities you show up for, or sign up for. Some of the most active church members are so busy doing that they lack being in Christ. They judge others on whether they support their activities. They are more interested in what you can do for them and their program than in you. They always have an agenda for you, but never take an interest in you as a person. No wonder some people avoid involvement. They don’t want to be used and not valued for themselves.

Let us get back to worship and true Christian fellowship – sharing our lives with one another and not demanding that others dance to our tune. It is enough that we worship and love one another, by being there for one another when we are needed. I value genuine loving friendship not just an organizer of activities. Too many churches are staffed with directors of programs rather than spiritual directors, and prayer counselors.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Church, Community | No Comments »

The Nature of Long-Term Ministry

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

Eugene Peterson, in his memoir, The Pastor, writes about being at the congregation for which he was the founding pastor for the long haul. He stayed there for 29 years! In his reflections on the nature of his ministry he writes:

“Early on in my reading I came upon this sentence: ‘The essential thing in heaven and earth is… that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; that thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something that has made life worth living.” [Nietzsche] That struck me as a text I could live with. I saw myself assigned to give witness to the sheer livability of the Christian life, that everything in scripture and Jesus was here to be lived. In the mess of work and sin, of families and neighborhoods, my task was to pray and give direction and encourage that lived quality of the gospel – patient, locally, and personally.

Patiently: I would stay with these people; there are no quick or easy ways to do this.

Locally: I would embrace the conditions of this place – economics, weather, culture, schools, whatever – so that there would be nothing abstract or piously idealized about what I was doing.

Personally: I would know them, know their names, know their homes, know their families, know their work – but I would not pry. I would not treat them as a cause or a project, I would treat them with dignity…..the overall context of my particular assignment in the pastoral vocation, as much as I am able to do it, is to see that these men and women in my congregation become aware of the possibilities and the promise of living out in personal and local detail what is involved in following Jesus, and be a companion to them as we do it together.”

There is a satisfaction in staying in one place for a good period of time so that you get to know all the people, their personal history, their challenges, their aspirations, their gifts, and the different stages of their lives. You grow close to people whose loved ones you have buried, prayed for, baptized, educated, visited in hospital, and married. You know those who struggled with addictions, who have fallen from grace, and picked themselves up and tried again. The shortest pastorate I had was my first – four years – when I was being trained in ministry. The longest was fourteen years. I am now in my eleventh here at the Chapel.

While you know that you are not indispensable, and the time will come when you have to move on, you also know that continuity and stability is valued by a congregation who get to know and trust you despite your failings. Like a family, we have to take one another in when in trouble, we experience misunderstandings, we work at communication, we forgive one another, and we grow in Christian love for one another. That is what long-term ministry is about. It is being the church.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Church, Ministry | No Comments »

Pastoral Ministry and American Values

Saturday, April 9th, 2011

I have just finished reading Eugene Peterson’s, The Pastor: A Memoir. It is bracing and consoling reading for anyone who is, or aspires to be a pastor, and it is a reality check for anyone who has a pastor. He takes aim at the American consumer culture and what it has done to our conception of church. The American values of being competitive, impersonal, and functional bothers him. One of his peers had informed their ministerial group that he was moving to a larger congregation. Peterson felt that his reasons were suspect, fueled by adrenaline, ego and size. He wrote him the following letter.

Dear Phillip,

I’ve been thinking about our conversation last week and want to respond to what you anticipate in your new congregation. You mentioned its prominence in the town, a center, a kind of cathedral church that would be able to provide influence for the Christian message far beyond its walls. Did I hear you right?

I certainly understand its appeal and feel it myself frequently. But I am also suspicious of the appeal and believe that gratifying it is destructive both to the gospel and the pastoral vocation. It is the kind of thing America specializes in, and one of the consequences is that American religion and the pastoral vocation are in a shabby state.

It is also the kind of thing for which we have abundant documentation through twenty centuries now, of debilitating both congregation and pastor. In general terms it is the devil’s temptation to Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple. Every time the church’s leaders depersonalize, even a little, the worshipping/loving community, the gospel is weakened. And size is the great depersonalizer. Kierkegaard’s criticism is still cogent: “the more people, the less truth.”

The only way the Christian life is brought to maturity is through intimacy, renunciation, and personal deepening. And the pastor is in a key position to nurture such maturity. It is true that these things can take place in the context of large congregations, but only by strenuously going against the grain. Largeness is an impediment, not a help.”

Peterson is suspicious of the ego benefit of crowds. He thinks that it is a false goal to pursue, and destructive of pastoral ministry. The larger the church the more complex the role of the pastor. He ends up being responsible for running the church on a business model. Peterson writes that he didn’t “want to be a pastor whose sense of worth derived from whether people affirmed or ignored me. In short, I didn’t want to be a pastor in the ways that were most in evidence and most rewarded in the American consumerist and celebrity culture.”

I know of which he speaks. Having pastored a large, multi-staff, city-wide congregation, I remember the days full of administrative duties, of having to fund the budget from year to year, of having to watch the numbers of attendees, and of having to improve results from year to year. It is soul-destroying of pastoral work. It depersonalizes the ministry. Down-sizing my responsibilities eleven years ago probably saved my health and my vocation. I can remember John Stott having to do the same thing at All Souls, Langham Place, London, when he stepped down from being Senior Pastor/Rector, and reorganized the staff to allow himself more time for the exercise of his gifts. Peterson challenges us to look again at ministry with his fresh eyes to make sure that we are not chasing after false goals.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Ministry | No Comments »

Going Home

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

 

I first met Corrie ten Boom when she spoke at my home church in 1955. I was 14 years old and she challenged me to accept Jesus as my Savior and Lord. I did, and the rest is history. I am rereading her book, Jesus Is Victor, and was blessed by these words, entitled, “Are You Going Home?”

 Are you going Home to be with the Lord?

You are not afraid, are you?

Afraid of what?

To feel the Spirit’s glad release,

to pass from pain to perfect peace,

the strife and strain of life to cease?

Afraid of that?

Afraid of what?

Afraid to see the Savior’s face?

To hear his welcome and to trace

the glory gleam from wounds of grace?

Afraid of that?

Afraid of what?

To enter into heaven’s rest

and yet, to serve the Master blessed,

from service good to service best?

Afraid of that?

Think of stepping on shore and finding it heaven, or taking hold of a hand and finding it God’s, or breathing new air and finding it celestial, or feeling invigorated and finding it immortality; of passing through a tempest to a new and unknown ground; of waking up well and  happy and finding it home.”

At Easter time we need to be reminded of our final destination – that we are saved by the resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Peter 3:22). It puts everything else, all the troubles of the world, and our own doubts, into perspective.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Death | No Comments »

The Presence of God in Earthquakes

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

Chris Trotter is a political commentator associated with the Labour Party in New Zealand. He is also a Christian. The following are his reflections on the recent earthquake in Christchurch.

 

WAS GOD PRESENT in Christchurch on 22 February 2011? It’s a question many New Zealanders have wrestled with over the past month, and the tragedy which engulfed Japan on 11 March has given it added urgency.

Officially, we’re a secular nation, yet Census data confirms that more than half of New Zealanders retain a belief in God. That belief is sorely tested by natural disasters. If God was present in Christchurch on 22 February, why didn’t He prevent the earthquake?

But, in posing this question aren’t we separating God from the natural world? Seating Him on a divine throne beyond this earthly realm? Requiring Him to demonstrate his mastery over his own creation by, in this case, countermanding the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates?

Yes, we are. But we can hardly be blamed for doing so. Because, when all is said and done, this is the view of God we have inherited from the Bible. He is the maker of heaven and earth and if it pleases him to command the sun to stand still, or the oceans to o’ertop the world, then it will be so. He is Jehovah, “I am that I am”, the God Charlton Heston (in the role of Moses) invokes when Pharaoh’s army traps the Israelites against the margins of the Red Sea.

“Behold His mighty hand!”, Charlton cries, and low, the waters of the sea are parted.

There are, of course, plusses and minuses to the Jehovan conception of divinity, as the celebrated author, C.S. Lewis, well understood.

In The Horse and His Boy, one of his Chronicles of Narnia, he makes it clear that his own rendering of the Jehovan God – the golden lion Aslan – is not a pet to be called for and dismissed at our convenience. On the contrary, he is an altogether dangerous being. As one of Lewis’s characters indignantly observes: “He’s not a tame lion!”

And, yet, it was to a rather tame deity that the Dean of Christchurch Cathedral, Peter Beck, appeared to be appealing in the aftermath of the earthquake. In answer to the question: “Where was God on 22 February?” he responded:

“God is in all these people. God is in the midst of all this. God is weeping with those who weep. God is alongside those who are finding the energy to just keep going. God is in the people who are reaching out and seeking to sustain one another. God is about building community, about empowering people.”

And, when a journalist demanded: ‘Yes, but where was God was when offices pancaked and burned and hundreds died?’

He replied:

“Well, we live on a dynamic, creating planet that’s doing its thing. For whatever reason, our forebears chose to build this city on this place. They didn’t know we were on this fault line. God doesn’t make bad things happen to good people. We make our own choices about what we do.”

Doing its thing?! What exactly is the Dean trying to say? That the natural world is a conscious entity? That it has its own volition and (God save us!) its own agenda? And did Cantabrians, thanks to the poor choices of their “forebears” simply find themselves in this “dynamic, creating planet’s” way? And was Jehovah, in fulfilment of some hitherto undisclosed self-denying ordinance, required to turn his face from the imminent suffering of Cantabrians and keep his mighty hands in his pockets?

If so, then God has a rival – a divine competitor in the omnipotence business. And the Dean is in flagrant breach of the Nicene Creed, the first article of which states, unequivocally: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth”.

Perhaps the Dean should return to his Bible and ponder the God that spoke to Moses from the burning bush. The God that gave man counsel from the whirlwind, and moved before the Children of Israel in a pillar of fire. Perhaps he should consider the God that laid Jericho low and sent fire from heaven to consume Sodom and Gomorrah. A red God, a wrathful God, a jealous God. The God that was ready to drown the whole world. The God who, when his son, nailed to a cross, cried out “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, remained silent.

Shock and awe. These words have been sullied by the Pentagon’s bloody hands. Yet it is only in those moments when all our human conceits are battered down and laid to waste that we, shocked and awestruck, come close to understanding Jehovah as the authors of both the Old and New Testaments understood Him.

Was God present in Christchurch on 22 February? Oh yes, He was there. And He is with us always. Beyond our questions; beyond our understanding; beyond our judgement.

Not a tame lion.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 22 March 2011

Tags:
Posted in Suffering | No Comments »