Check out this short radio interview I did recently on Premier Radio, regarding what we’re doing in mission in the High St. I think it came across OK. What do you think?
Click here and scroll to the bottom of the page, and then click on the St Mary’s Walthamstow link.
As part of our ongoing engagement with the story of the early church as reported in Acts we recently looked at chapters 25 & 26. Paul is once again hauled before the authorities, this time the Roman governor Festus and the local king Agrippa. Once again, the charge laid against him is that he is stirring up trouble amongst the Jews, challenging the authority of the Romans, and generally making a nuisance of himself. Paul doesn’t help his case by not directly denying the charges – although he does state that he has done “nothing wrong against the law of the Jews, or the Temple, or against Caesar” (25:8).
Much of chapter 26 is a re-telling by Paul of his zealous pursuit of God – firstly by seeking to defend Him against these dangerous heretics who claimed Jesus as Messiah, and then by seeking to tell the story of the very same Jesus. We have heard this before, of course. Paul has already been recorded telling this tale in various forms in a number of previous chapters. Each time he tells the story, you would forgive him for sounding a little frustrated (“come on, how many times do I have to tell you people!?!”) or creative (“let me tell you something I’ve told no-one else…”); but he sticks to the task.
This repetition is a common feature in Acts. Paul’s repeated story of his dramatic conversion; his retelling of the story and significance of the Cross; the Apostles being incarcerated; dramatic healing and other supernatural interventions; persecution and martyrdom – along with surprising church numerical growth.
We have spent a long time looking at the story of Acts now, taking a few chapters a week, often asking the same questions of the text: what themes do we see? What has impacted us about the reading? How does this apply to our own context? For many of us, these relatively few, often repeated themes were a source of some frustration. It was not always easy to be enthusiastic when the initial answers to the questions felt the same week after week. But over time, we began to think of the repetition from a different angle. Perhaps the themes are repeated because they are important. I know, it’s obvious really.
It occurred to us that our own stories should become familiar to us, repeated often (appropriately), and boldly. We are around 2 years old as an expression of church now, and have generated stories of God’s grace in difficult times, His provision in sparse times, and His generosity at all times.
We still have some way to grow with respect to the above. We are not as familiar with our own stories as we should be. We do not look for, or take, the opportunities to tell the stories as often as we could. But the story of God moving in Walthamstow High Street is being told. He walks with us as we make drinks and serve cake at the Farmers’ Market; He sits with us in the Pop-In Café; He speaks to us as we gather together at other times; and He whispers to us and through us the love He has for all His creation.
We are coming to the end of our engagement with the ‘Exilio’ course now. There has been much to think about on the way, and no doubt much we will need to revisit and grapple with in the months to come. One key part of the course is the challenges set by Mike Frost. We have listed them below (titles in bold refer to chapters in Frost’s book “Exiles“) – feel free to take up any you want to (let us know how you get on). At least one of us from St Luke’s will be attempting each of the challenges, and we hope to blog in the future about how we got on.
Exiled from a Hyper-real World
Keep a notepad on you at all times and for one week write down all the lies your culture tells you via TV commercials, TV shows, shopping malls, etc. Next to each lie from culture make a note of what the Bible says about these things.
The Exile’s Esprit de Corps
Interview 5 people (Christian and/or non-Christian), explaining firstly to them what the term ‘communitas‘ means. Then ask them to identify any experiences they have had that could be described as communitas.
Fashioning Collectives of Exiles
Make a commitment to bless at least one person each day for one week (both Christian and non-Christian) and Journal your reaction to the responses you get – see page 150 for examples.
Exiles at the Table
Watch one of the following movies: Babette’s Feast; Big Night; or Chocolat. Design a communal feast for Christians that takes Paul’s words in 1 Cor 11:23-26 seriously, but includes the elements of joy, hospitality, and feasting shown in those films. Include a menu.
Working for the Host Empire
Keep a Journal for one week, identifying all the ways in a typical week that your work and your lifestyle reflects your role as an apprentice to God’s work in the world.
Restless with Injustice
Enlist a group of friends to agitate on behalf of the poor. Choose a local or global organisation that is working for the good of the poor and oppressed and take part in one of their campaigns with your group of friends.
Exiles and the Earth
Watch the film: An Inconvenient Truth, and then go online at www.myfootprint.org and take the ecological footprint quiz to determine how much productive land and water is required to support what you use and what you discard.
Comforting the Oppressed
Visit the websites listed on p332 of exiles under the heading ‘on religious persecution’. Write a list of 10 things you could personally do to support your brothers and sisters who suffer persecution. Pray through the list and choose some to act upon.
Exiles at the Alter / The Songs of Revolution
Write a song or poem to help convey the radical truth about the parallel world of the Kingdom in opposition to the host empire.
As part of our reading of Exilio, we are expected to take a few of the challenges Frost sets out in each section of the book. In Part 3 of the book, there’s a section on how we could live differentlyto the host culture. A good part of our host culture is based upon consumerism – indeed, we are most often referred to in the media as ‘consumers’. I hate that term! I am not primarily a consumer; I am a citizen. And if I want to buy something, then I am a ‘customer’ who will choose to purchase a product, or not. There is absolutely no a priori compulsion for me to comsume what someone else has produced (I’m ranting…)
Anyhoo, the challenge I’ve just completed is to measure my ecological fooprint. That’s part 2 of the challenge, as the first part was to watch the movie, An Incovenient Truth. I’ve already watched that about 18 months ago, so did the online ecological footprint test here. My result is this, which means that to sustain my ecological footprint, there would need to be 1.75 earths. That surprised me, as I know that I live very frugally, and the result table shows that when compared with the rest of the UK averages, I am frugal, especially with the things I can make real choices about. The carbon footprint could be reduced I guess, and I think it comes from driving about 10,000 kms per year. But most of that mileage is done on long distance, so fuel is being used as efficiently as possible. And the housing footprint is mostly beyond my control, as a good deal of it is related to how the house was built.
So, perhaps I’m more a creature of my culture than I would like to be – in fact, I know I am. But I take some comfort from Bono’s words when he said, “We can’t do everything, but the things we can, we must.” I know that I make conscious choices to do the things I can. What about you?
We have been introduced to the idea of 3rd places through the book Exiles. Put simply, it is the idea that most people behave or present themselves differently – depending on where they are and with whom.
The phrase was coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place, and Frost sums up the concept this way:
“In Oldenburg’s thinking, our first place is the home and the people with whom we live. Our second place is the workplace, the place where we spend most of our waking life. But the third places in our society are the bedrock of community life and all the benefits that come from such interaction. It might be a restaurant or a bar. It might be a social group such as a Rotary or Elks club or a quilting circle or a water-skiing community. It might be a physical location such as a coffee shop or a beach or a mall. Your third place is the place where you like to just relax and be you.(Michael Frost: Exiles, p.57)
We have flirted with 3rd place concept in different ways in St Luke’s recent history, notably with respect to our activities at the Pop-In Café.
One of our church members had also come across the concept of 1st and 2nd Souls. Although certainly not an orthodox belief – or one we necessarily subscribe to – the idea is an interesting one. According to this theory, the 1st Soul is that of God – always within us, although we are often unaware of it. The 2nd soul is our individual passions – our hobbies and other things that energise us in a positive way. This draws a little on Plato and modernity’s love affair with the concept of a sacred/secular split that we may not subscribe to, but our often-compartmentalised lives appear to demonstrate!
Although the 2nd Soul may be a little ‘out there’ for many of us, we liked the idea of being aware of our individual passions, and linking them somehow to the various missional activities that we are involved in.
We wondered whether a 3rd place might be where we could connect these ‘two souls’ or concepts. If this is the case, then the bigger question for our church might be: “do we then attempt to create some form of 3rd place, or do we join one or more existing ones?” If the answer is the former option, then what would it look like? If the latter, what are the appropriate places for us?
It was interesting to note, as we discussed around these ideas, that we were a very diverse group in terms of our passions and preferences. If you know any of our group, see if you can match the stated passion to the individual:
It seems clear that there is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ 3rd place that will suit all of us. The sensible option may be for us to find one or two others with whom we share some interest or passion, and invest into it in a way that enables us to become part of a 3rd place. This could mean joining or creating such a place, depending on the interest in question. The important thing is to find something that is natural for us – that gives us life – and into which we can, naturally, shine a little of God’s colours and flavours into the world
Dirt and weeds and grass
And rain,
And sun and warmth,
You dreamed them up
And called them forth
From nothing long ago,
And still they last.
And we, the seed of
Divine dreams
Who walk and talk,
Lay plans and scheme to build and break,
And sometimes think to look
To you, for heaven’s sake.
A whisper slips from parted lips….
Thank you.
Posted in Noticing God, Worship | Tags: Worship
We moved into perhaps more challenging territory for our 3rd session on the Exilio course… thus far, we have looked at the ideas of ‘dangerous memories’ and ‘dangerous stories’.
These have been relatively easy concepts to grapple with, and even to put into practice:
The 3rd section of Mike Frost’s book Exiles is entitled ‘dangerous criticism’, and highlights the role of the Christian community with respect of challenging those things of the culture which operate against the values of the Kingdom.
In the DVD that accompanies the course, Mike Frost admits that the church has “not been backward in this area in the past”, and that this has sometimes (understandably) given the church a bad name. But Frost reminds us that we can only legitimately critique our culture if we have made both the effort to understand it, and – perhaps more importantly – have been prepared to bless it also.
There are plenty of examples of how God’s people have managed to successfully walk this particular tightrope.
In Genesis 41 we read the account of how the captive Joseph served the Egyptian Empire well – interpreting the Pharaoh’s prophetic dreams of future famine, and even managing the empire’s pre-emptive disaster relief response system as a result.
Later, we see Daniel (politely) refusing to eat the food offered to false gods, and flourishing on a vegetarian diet instead – and later illegally praying to his God despite the threat of becoming Lion fodder.
Then some of Daniel’s friends get lobbed into a furnace for refusing to bow down to a statue of the earthly king. As they are thrown in they boldly declare that their God will save them (which He duly did) – but that “even if he doesn’t…”
Joseph, Daniel and the three friends all serve their captive culture as faithfully as they are able, blessing it when they can, seeking the best for those around them. But they also are able to clearly see the line that they must not cross, and resist it accordingly.
Jesus too, naturally, is able to critique the culture he finds himself in – embracing some aspects of it (famously at a rather boozy wedding), and standing up to be counted against others (the hypocrisy of many religious elite, the god-complex seen in the Roman leadership). Often we see him tearing down the man-made barriers that separate the ‘acceptable’ from the ‘unacceptable’ – witness his interaction with the ‘unclean’, the diseased, the poor, the unloved: the sinners and aliens of his time.
For too many people, the historic church is synonymous with the very systems that promote some people above and then preserve their position. Just recently there was an article published about who was selected for leadership within the Church of England entitled: “the churches bias against the poor” – what would Jesus be saying to us about this?
Dangerous Criticism involves being able to “stick a finger in the chest” of anything that creates or sustains such injustice and inequality – to say: “this is not on”…and to do something about it.
Perhaps the most important word here is word in the sentence above is ‘anything’. Christians have perhaps been guilty of being very selective in the causes we have chosen to invest in. It should come as no surprise that some outside of the church have issues with our community, and therefore our God, if we appear to only stand up when our comfort or freedom is challenged, but remain silent on the plight of others unlike us. It reminds us of the famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller “they came for me”.
There is too much injustice in this world, it is overwhelming – but we cannot stand back and despair or stick our heads in the sand and hope for the best. Christians serve a God who is generous, and who can redeem good from even the darkest place – but one who often represents the antithesis of the values of our host empire.
As Frost reminds us: “no one will congratulate us for standing up for Kingdom values against the values of the Empire… there is an imperial furnace out there somewhere”. Despite this, perhaps because if this – and if we wish to live as God’s people within a culture that is not yet fully redeemed – we simply must bless what we can (including all people), and stand up against what we cannot bless (systems that create injustice and favouritism).
Stories have always been important. Since the earliest times, whenever a family or community gathered, stories we told and retold. They formed and informed our cultures and languages. They gave us our personal and corporate identities. They told us where we belonged, how things worked, why things happened the way they did, what the future may hold for us.
Christians – despite occasionally appearances to the contrary – are not defined by our buildings, liturgies, or even by our statements of faith. We are defined purely by the ‘Grand Stories’ of the Christian faith: the life and work of Jesus, the work of God through the ages, the action of the Holy Spirit.
As exiles in culture that is not fully ours, we need these dangerous stories to give us the courage we need to carry on in tough or confusing times, and strategies for how such progress may be made. Exiles need to re and re-read the Gospels in particular. We need to make them ‘our story’, so that – for all our failings – we can emulate Christ as boldly as we can.
As a church, we recently spent some time reflecting on the nature and power of stories. It occurred to us that these God-stories are inherently dangerous to all who engage with them:
To an extent, the art of creative story telling seems to be dying within the Christian community – many of us rely on others telling us what we should believe and why, rather than hearing the story and mulling over the possible teaching behind it. How do we re-engage with stories in this way? Should we worry that the art is dying? What are the stories that we should be telling and how?
It seems to us that the answer may be found in the telling and re-telling of these stories – both to others and ourselves. In particular, we found ourselves challenged with respect to the level of understanding that those outside the Christian community have of these powerful and dangerous God-stories. Our temptation can be to say to ourselves: “isn’t it terrible that people don’t know the story anymore”. Our calling must be, instead, to say: “let’s tell them the story – they don’t know it!”
During one of our discussions about the book Exiles, we thought about the impressions we had of Jesus, both from a re-reading of the Gospel accounts and some of the thoughts that the book itself threw into the mix.
One of the things that had struck a few of us was just how ‘ordinary’ Jesus was, how human. This is not to challenge His divinity – church leaders and theologians of the past have spent much time wrestling with the ‘fully human, fully divine’ mix – and this blog will not examine this here.
Mike Frost notes how it is easy for us to think about Jesus as if he was one of the aliens in the Cocoon series of films.
If you haven’t seen them, the aliens look just like you and me – until, that is, they begin to remove their outer skin to reveal themselves to actually be beings of almost blinding light. There is a great scene in the first film where one of the aliens adjusts his ‘face’, and momentarily we see a glimpse of the bright light – hidden beneath a somewhat mundane exterior.
Jesus was ordinary in so many ways. He was ‘in the world’ so much that the religious leaders of his day described him as “a glutton and a drunkard” [Luke 7:34], so offended were they by the people he hung around with and the tables he ate at. He was interested in apparently mundane parts of human existence, and often acted in these very areas. He did take risks though, appropriate ones. He spoke about difficult things, made enemies of many in the establishment, befriended those who were otherwise friendless, often made it harder to follow him than we would think.
There is a challenge here for those of us who believe that Jesus is in some way ‘within us’ who have accepted Him as Lord over our lives. We cannot peel back our eyes in order to blind people with God’s light; but we can, perhaps, live lives of glorious mundaneness that draw others through us to the source of life itself.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: Exilio, Mission, Values
As a community, we tried out a spiritual exercise one recent Wednesday. A fairly simple idea: we were asked to imagine a garden. No suggestions were given as to what kind of garden it was: instead, we spent around 10 minutes allowing and encouraging our imaginations to work. After a while, we were then invited to share a description of the different gardens we ‘found’ ourselves in; and to see if, as a group, we might discern anything God may be saying to us through this method. Obviously, this was an exercise suited better to some than others, but a few interesting things emerged for us.
Three ‘pictures’ were shared: Firstly, there was a hilly garden of daffodils. The flowers were occasionally buffeted by 
the wind, or drenched by the rain; some were eventually picked, while others were mown ‘back’ into the soil. Secondly, the image of a child’s drawing of a garden. This was packed with things to see and do – not neat and tidy at all, but a place of blessing none the less. Thirdly, a summer garden: bright, sunny & colourful. It was noted that behind the obvious walls of flowers, there were significant parts of the garden that appeared to be overgrown and uncared for.
As we collected our thoughts, a few themes emerged. One significant theme was of the relationship between order and chaos, of judgement and blessing.
There were two possible conclusions we considered:
1) We wondered if God was saying we should deal with the chaos of our lives, confess our sins and failures; repent of the unkempt wild flowers, childish disorder, and daffodils gone to waste.
2) Or could God be calling us to enjoy the very same chaos? There was a surprising and disarming peace to be found in the messiness of the child’s picture; there was a feeling of freedom and appropriateness to the wild flowers growing behind the neat, order flowerbeds; and it occurred to us that, even when their heads were mown down, the daffodil bulbs remain.
Our ‘gut instinct’ was that God was saying the latter – that the wildness can be of equal beauty to the carefully cultivated, that He is at work in the chaos, working through it, and (of course) sometimes against it.
We have seen, or felt, elements of this as we have explored what it means to be a community of God, perhaps particularly as we meet together in the café each week. We feel challenged to learn better how to ‘enjoy the ride’ with God (see the entry on ‘cycling with God’), rather than to exert our energies on wrestling the controls from Him. Time will no doubt tell if there is anything in this, or if we have completely misunderstood what God may have been telling us.
But the important thing remains the same regardless: that we need to trust God above our own understanding.
After all, in all of this, we must believe and remember that ultimately it is His time, his garden, his perspective, and his tactics… that is perhaps just as well.
Posted in Mission, Noticing God, Uncategorized | Tags: Guidance, Life, Mission, Values, Worship
