Best song title ever?

"I started out with nothing and I've still got most of it left." by Seasick Steve.

Any other entries?

Massaging the Truth.

There is a story being bandied around christian evangelical circles about a train drawbridge operator who takes his son to work. The story goes that he puts the bridge up to show his son the machinery, the son climbs into it, train comes along, Father has to decide to lower the drawbridge thereby killing his son or leave it up killing the people on the oncoming train. He chooses the former. It is clearly an allegory of the sacrifice by God the Father of his son Jesus in order to save many. There is a movie called Most (Czech for Bridge), although told in a secular sense, and you can read the full story and a discussion on it here.

I see several problems with telling the story:

• Firstly, it is told as if it were true, which it is not, making the emotional tug at the heart that much stronger. In any other context this is pure manipulation. Why are Christians prone to being manipulative and/or gullible?
  
• Secondly, what are we supposed to take from the story? That Jesus made a sacrifice by accident? That God the Father is stupid or negligent? If an atonement allegory is the point it gets buried under the other stuff.
• Some Christians think it is OK to exaggerate, even fabricate, stories in order to bring out a 'higher' truth. Why? The story of Jesus should be enough. On the blog referred to, one guy says his son came to faith as an 8 year old on hearing the story so it doesn't matter if the story is true or not. Mmm.

Massaging the Truth will set you free?

Lessons from The Tuesday Kitchen - Lesson 2

Know your agenda.

There is a common phrase around mission thinking that we should serve as Christ would serve - without an agenda. This is not true, or at least it is not a true representation of Christ-centred mission. The message of being agenda-less is made in response to those who live with an agenda but do not make it explicit.

In the days when IBM was the most important conglomoration in the world a friend of mine, who worked in a company who was an important customer of theirs, saw the diary entries for his visit to an IBM establishment. This was highly confidential information and he should not have seen it but on the computer screen he saw two entries: one was entitled 'Reason for Visit' and the other was entitled 'IBM Reason for visit'. In other words, my friend wanted to discuss something but IBM had their own, hidden agenda, which was usually about selling something.

The church is often guilty of the same thing. We offer a service to people in order to get them into church. That is fine if people know the purpose is made explicit but it cannot be truthful if hidden. An example - running a kids club labelled 'Fun Club', you tell parents and children that there will be songs, games, etc but then you eventually sneak in prayers, Christian messages and invitations to Sunday school. The proper thing would be to advertise it as 'Fun Club run on Christian principles' and be up front with what you are going to do. Or keep it Fun and omit the evangelistic element. Or "yes you can come to our soup kitchen if you come to our meetings"!

I used to be in that camp. Go back over 5 years and I would say that the purpose of a feeding programme would be to get people to have an encounter with Christ. If it did not meet that objective after, say, 5 years it should be closed as unproductive. But I don't think like that any more because I have looked at the life and teaching of Jesus afresh.

Luke 14: 11- 14. Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a loud voice, "Jesus, Master, have pity on us!" When he saw them, he said, "Go, show yourselves to the priests." And as they went, they were cleansed.

What is clear is that Jesus did not look at the 10 and say "If I heal these people maybe some of them will become my followers." He healed them because they were sick. Therefore we feed, or clothe or heal people because they are hungry or naked or sick - not because we want to get them into church. It is not that we have no agenda but that our agenda is to follow Jesus and do what he would do. Actually it becomes a bit more compelling for us...

Matthew 26: 34-36. "Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

To follow Jesus is to take his agenda into our lives. I am not saying that I don't think that those who we minister to will not come into the knowledge of Christ. During the months that we have been we have not been short of conversations about God with our friends. Some have come to church, others have listened to what we believe about Jesus, others have simply enjoyed a bit of peace and friendship that a Christian community can give.

Salvation is on the agenda. It is not about their salvation but about ours.

The Salvation Army at Christmas

The SA seems to have had quite a bit of PR this year in various forms:

• Fund raising ads on TV for the first time, certainly I have never seen any outside London.
• Appearances on Eastenders. Where we saw carol singers marching through the square, singing door-to-door and a band accompanying Stop the Cavalry. I did like the fact that they were not all uniformed up to the hilt.
  
• We were on Emerdale too and, I assume, Blue Peter, although I saw neither.
• Then there is the Together cd by the ISB which has had adverts and other tv placements. Where we are taken back the backs of four uniformed men, each standing a yard apart, overlooking a person-less landscape saying that they are Together before taking us back into the Hovis advert!
  

Now some of these I have no problem with. But if you are a neutral much of it would confirm that the Army is old fashioned and out of touch, taken out its box at Christmas and put on display to remind us of the the way that things were. We could be in danger of becoming like a Christmas card of a Dickensian picture. The thing is, its easier to do it this way but it doesn't help some of us who have to establish the Army/church in places where that kind of image is so negative. You would think that the high-ups would be steering things a bit more.

Nicely said, Stephen.

Fellow officer-blogger Stephen Oliver writes about Christmas Day at his corps of Failsworth on his blog Mission Latte. As he often does, Stephen has a nice turn of phrase and he concludes his description of a day of a Christmas service and meals being served to the community in this way:

…And realising, too, that our day yesterday was not remarkable. Days like ours took place all over the country yesterday - in churches and community centres, in places of faith and places of none. Because of the Christ child for whom there was no room in Bethlehem, room was made for lots of people in lots of places.

Couldn't have said it better, Stephen.

To Facebook or not to Facebook...

...that was the question. I had opened a Facebook account some time ago and closed it after 2 days because (a) I couldn't face the thought of keeping up to date with everything going on with my "friends" and (b) I was asked if I wanted to join the Darren Bartlett Fan Club. Now I have nothing against Darren Bartlett, and he has nothing to do with this Fan Club apart from being its subject, but I thought that was too much.

However, in recent days many of my real friends have asked me to join up again, particularly as I have started blogging again. Also, the thought of gate-crashing some of my son Robbie's friends appealed greatly. I was also curious about what I could do on there. So I reactivated my account and took a look around. 10 minutes later I deactivated it again, curiously for the same reason that I left in the first place.

At the end of the day, I feel that it is a truer mark of friends that they come to a page dedicated to me and me alone. If you would like to join the Ian Haylett Fan Club please click here.

Christmas 2008....Done!

As it does every year the day has come and gone with undue haste. Presents, known and surprises, were given and received with varying degrees of delight and stoicism. For myself I only wanted an end to poverty, disease and wars throughout the world. I didn't get it but will console myself with tickets for Coldplay next September, courtesy of my wonderful wife Paula.

Happy Christmas!

Nativity by He Qi. Link here.

Cooligraphy

I came across the work of Tess Cooling some time ago. She is a calligraphist and specialises in beautiful presentations of scripture. I contacted her to see if she had done anything on Psalm 23 which had a profound affect on my wife and myself in being called into full time ministry in the Salvation Army. She hadn't at the time but I received an email a few weeks ago to tell me that she has completed the work. Her website says this:

These much loved words come from the 23rd Psalm of the Geneva Bible of 1560. Around the pictures the words are from the 14th Century Wyclif Bible in which they appear as Psalm 22. The illustrations aim to convey the peace and comfort we seek from nature, the sky and the still waters.

I think it is quite beautiful. The whole Psalm 23 thing is another story which I will tell at some point. Please visit her website here.

The Bible Illuminated: The New Testament

Have a look at this new version of the New testament put together in a magazine style. Good News translation, glossy, quality pictures, no chapter/verse structure but headers for paragraphs.

I have found it nice to handle and makes it makes the bible easier to pick up, less formal. Might be suitable for a teen or someone who might be on the edge of church life. Link here to see inside.

Lessons from the Tuesday Kitchen - Lesson 1

Provide it out of love.

There are many reasons why someone would want to help those who are less advantaged. One of those could be guilt, compassion, compulsion, to get people into church, etc. But the best motivation is love. When it is done out of love you serve with the intention of profiting the individual. Love motivates you to give time, to give your best, to listen and to be patient. It helps you to put up with the rudeness, the smells, the ingratitude. When you love it brings out the best in you.

Matt came to us and we made a note of his name as we do with all of our friends. (We call them friends because they are not clients or sub-human). We fed him and give him some socks and he responded with words of thanks and then said "I've got some spare clothes at home I can donate them to you." I had to explain that we didn't want anything back but to accept what we gave him as a gift. Matt didn't get it but left this note for us.

"I just wanted to thank you for all the kindness that you showed to us today. I felt welcome from the moment that I walked in. Thank you so much."

I once heard of a place where meals were dispensed with in a style like Oliver Twist, the organiser sternly summoning each table to receive their gruel like he was guiding in a Boeing 747 to an arrival gate. It was a chore, a task, done with duty and not love.

Love brings out the best in you and passes it onto others.

Lessons from The Tuesday Kitchen

One of the best things we have started here in Selby is the Tuesday Kitchen, a soup kitchen for the homeless. In the litigious society that we live in I do have to point out that we don't serve soup, that some of our friends have homes but it does happen on a Tuesday!

I know why Jesus made such a fuss of the poor. They teach us so much about life when you strip away the trappings of wealth. We know that our lives would be much the poorer for not having met some of our friends. Tuesday Kitchen is my school and I hope that I can share some lessons I have learned.

Pure Mini One

Just bought this gadget - a Pure One Mini DAB radio. Lots of stations, clear sound, portable, works as speaker for MP3 player. No longer am I left without being able to listen to England losing test matches in all corners of the world.

Brian McLaren

Went to see Mr McLaren in Harrogate recently, having learned so much from his writing.

There had been talk of a protest and I was beginning to imagine myself battling through placcard carrying fundamentalists but in the end it only mounted to an A4 flyer put on car windscreens. (That would have been odd to the North Yorkshire playgroup forum members who were sharing the same venue). The protest was entitled "A Scriptural response to the Emergent Church" and was feeble and predictable.

McLaren was very good, particularly the first two sessions. One of the points he made was that much of our doctrine uses the writing of Paul as the main text and the story, life and teachings of Jesus as a footnote to that. Whereas we need to ensure that the story, life and teachings of Jesus is the main text and Paul is adding footnotes to it. This is not to downplay the importance of Paul but when we take this perspective we can read him in a different light.

Another good thing was his point about sin. Challenged by a questionnaire who was concerned that the Emergent Church was "doing away" with sin and the need for repentance, he made the point that we need to take sin more seriously by including global issues and not solely the recital of the sinners prayer.

More from McLaren here.

Great video

I always like to be reminded that god works in all sorts of ways. Playing for Change is a group which tries to unite the world through music.